Muddying the waters

Bilingual choice will be made clear in November

A November ballot initiative to scrap the state’s bilingual education law has drawn fire from many educators and advocates for students whose first language is something other than English.

Their defense of the status quo- consisting largely of a series of legal maneuvers to cloud the language that will appear on the ballot- is less spirited than the invective they regularly hurl at the initiative’s prime backer, California businessman Ron Unz.

Mr. Unz, we hear, is anti-immigrant. He’s narrow-minded. His name is usually preceded by ”wealthy,” as if economic success disqualified one from engaging in politics. One wonders why the defenders of the status quo seem so reluctant to focus on the facts.

Since 1998, when California voters overwhelmingly approved the Unz-backed Proposition 227, reading and math scores among the state’s ”limited English” second-graders have increased by 9 and 14 percentage points, respectively. High-schoolers also have posted gains.

The improvements went hand-in-hand with strict standards. In the 5,000-student Oceanside school district, for example, officials granted just 12 waivers. Nearby Vista district, similar in size and demographics, granted 2,500 waivers.

Bottom line? Oceanside students posted gains nearly double those of Vista students in every grade.

That sounds like progress to us.

Critics are quick to say the rising scores can’t necessarily be linked to the new law. But they are silent on the question of whether 30 years of bilingual education has any role to play in the Golden State’s not-so-golden dropout rate for Hispanics- twice that of non-Hispanic white students, Asians, or Filipinos.

Of course, opposition to the Unz initiative is really about jobs. What began in the 1960s as a modest plan to help non-English speakers gain a foothold has grown into a multi-billion dollar educational bureaucracy, replete with special teachers and curricula, and a jargon that ensures the average taxpayer will just tune out and pay up.

Some proponents of bilingual education went further. According to a recent essay by the Hoover Institution’s Peter Duignan, many academicians linked bilingual education with bicultural education, ”a far-reaching critique of traditional American values” that would reform the very structure of the nation and express wide discontent with the institutions created by a largely white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant majority.

We suspect that most Americans- whether born in Budapest, Boston or Bogota- are content to add their spices to the ever-richer American melting pot and go to work alongside their fellow citizens. As Mr. Duignan puts it, ”For all practical purposes, the ethnic revival was apt to end where the irregular verbs began.”

None of that will matter to those intent on keeping as many as possible in the barrios of bilingual bureaucracy, but the message is clear enough for those who want change in November.



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