We’ve heard quite a bit from City Hall and the media the past few months about the “failure” of bilingual education in the public schools.

Well, Mayor Giuliani’s own task force finally issued its report on how the school system should be teaching English to immigrant children.

And that report, it turns out, is far more conciliatory and less radical than many people expected.

The task force urged the Board of Education to adopt a more intensive form of English as a Second Language classes, with a goal of moving students into mainstream classes within one year.

But Randy Mastro, the panel’s chairman and a former deputy mayor, could not get the rest of the task force to support dismantling bilingual education.

So he took the unusual step of issuing his own sharply worded minority opinion. In that opinion, Mastro urged the city and the Board of Education to go to court to challenge the 26-year-old federal consent decree that established and still governs much of the city’s bilingual programs.

A federal judge brokered the decree after years of failure by the school system to educate Hispanic children.

Mastro, supported by Giuliani, had to resort to the dissenting opinion after Schools Chancellor Harold Levy, a member of the task force, refused to support a challenge to the consent decree. And sources said the only Hispanic member of the task force, Amalia Betanzos, threatened to resign rather than oppose the decree.

Betanzos is a veteran community leader who has worked for several mayors, going back to the days of John Lindsay. She is also chairwoman of the National Puerto Rican Coalition, which includes among its member organizations Aspira, the group that won the consent decree against the city in 1974.

The final report, Mastro said yesterday, reflected how his task force listened to all sides in the bilingual education debate.

“It is a win-win for everybody,” he said.

Parents who want intensive English instruction for their children will have an opportunity to get it, and those who want “traditional bilingual programs” will still have it, Mastro said.

“Government by consent decree is a generally bad model,” he said, “[but] as chair of the mayor’s task force, I aim to achieve consensus.”

Levy, however, will unveil his own proposal for reforming bilingual education and ESL programs today, and those proposals are expected to differ somewhat from the mayor’s task force.

Like Mastro, Levy will recommend greater choices for parents, including opting out of bilingual classes and placing their children in intensive ESL classes that include English instruction after school, on weekends and during the summer. He will, however, not propose a one-year-and-out goal for those classes. Instead, he will stick to the three-year goal that is part of state law.

Of course, nothing during the past quarter-century has prevented the Board of Education from offering extra after-school English instruction to immigrant children.

Why offer that extra instruction only to those children who enroll in new programs, supporters of bilingual education are asking. In fact, the state Education Department has been urging for several years that local school districts do just that. The state has even set aside extra funding for such programs.

Another way Levy’s proposal differs from the mayor’s task force is in offering expanded dual-language programs as an option for immigrant parents. In such a program, all students, whether foreign-born or native English speakers, are taught in two languages.

As this column reported recently, numerous studies have shown that children who are taught in two languages from an early age regularly outperform monolingual students in achievement tests in all subjects.

Levy will propose expanding the city’s 55 dual-language programs in part with funds the federal government has earmarked to create 1,000 dual-language schools nationwide.

“I’m a big fan of dual-language programs,” said board President William Thompson.

In many other areas, such as improving teacher training, creating smaller classes for bilingual and ESL students and reforming language-assessment tests, the Mastro task force and Levy agree.

That’s a good thing.

But the reason we have a schools chancellor and a Board of Education is to set educational policy. They don’t need ad hoc mayoral committees telling them how to do their job.

Some reason seems likely to prevail here. Those things that are wrong with bilingual education will be fixed. And educators, not politicians, will remain in charge of our schools.

Original Publication Date: 12/19/00



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