It's Time to Abandon Bilingual Education

LOS ANGELES– The national battle over bilingual education is finally being put to a popular test. If Californians pass an initiative on the June ballot called English for the Children, the state’s longstanding bilingual programs will become illegal.

Accustomed to fruitless legislative attempts to reform the current system, which teaches non-English-speaking children in their native language, voters are ready for a clearly stated initiative. Though opinion polls in California and across the country show that most Americans have deep reservations about bilingual education as now practiced, politicians and officials have ignored them. Congress last year doubled the amount of Federal money for such programs, to $354 million.

If those politicians saw bilingual education at work the way I do every day, they might be less generous. My experience comes from 14 years of teaching nonnative English speakers in Los Angeles.

I have watched hundreds of Spanish-speaking children, fully capable of mastering English within a year, denied meaningful English instruction. What we call “bilingual education” is actually “native language instruction.” Everything is taught in Spanish. (Languages with smaller populations of speakers, like Tagalog and Thai, are not covered by the program.)

Though programs vary among school districts in the state, a mere 90 minutes a day is allocated for English in Los Angeles schools. The instruction must not employ phonics, spelling, grammar or any academic material in English, in accordance with the district’s “master plan.” It consists of informal conversation, and it does not teach much English.

If you don’t believe me, walk into any school in Los Angeles and ask to see English-language essays, picked at random, written by graduates of the bilingual program. If a typical sampling of such essays were published, the debate would be over. These kids cannot write in English.

Is it any wonder, then, that opinion polls in California have consistently shown overwhelming support — including up to 84 percent of Hispanics — for the initiative that would do away with bilingual education? Last year, Hispanic parents at one Los Angeles elementary school became so frustrated that they marched against their school’s refusal to remove their children from the bilingual program.

There is dissension even among Los Angeles teachers, who might be expected to support a program that has delivered so much money and employed so many of them over the years. With the help of other teachers, I gathered enough signatures on a petition to force a vote within our teachers’ union on bilingual education. The union fought back, staging largely one-sided debates.

When the representatives of the union chapters came to pick up ballot materials, they were also given “vote no” fliers, printed at union expense. The most vocal lobbyists within the union were the bilingual teachers, who would lose extra pay of $5,000 a year if the program were ended.

Despite this heavy pressure, out of 15,000 votes cast, the referendum lost by only 700 votes. It is fair to say that roughly half of Los Angeles teachers now support the English for the Children initiative.

If the state initiative passes later this year, it will not only cause a revolution in California, but likely fuel a national movement as well. The question then becomes, What replaces bilingual education?

The California initiative provides for one year of “sheltered English immersion” for non-English-speaking children. This simply means that English is taught the way native speakers learn it, from the ground up. No one disagrees with the effectiveness of the technique. The debate begins when we ask how much of the school day should be devoted to English usage. The answer is simple: English learners need as much English as possible. They need it all day.

The United States is the only country in the world with the idea that our national language is taught best if it is withheld and administered in small doses. How much would anyone pay Berlitz if it taught French that way?

No one wants to return to the abuses of the past, when children were punished for using their native languages. But it’s time to put aside our guilt-inspired notion that English instruction is a continuation of that abuse. English is, after all, the language that binds us together.

Douglas Lasken is a fifth-grade teacher in Los Angeles.



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