Of all the legislative issues affecting education, none is more important than Californias policies on bilingual instruction. There is universal agreement that what we are now doing is not working.

Currently, approximately 23 percent of Californias pupils are limited-English-proficient (LEP), and our policies simply fail to provide the vast majority of children with the tools they need to succeed.

Senate Bill 6, authored by state Sen. Dede Alpert, D-Coronado, is a reasonable and productive reform that will improve the quality of education we provide to our states 1.3 million LEP children. I am proud to be a coauthor of this bill. It is the product of two years of extensive negotiations and now represents an effective compromise that will improve the way in which we enable immigrant children to overcome the barriers imposed by language.

California has now been without a law governing bilingual education since 1987, when the Chacon-Moscone Bilingual-Bicultural Education Act became inoperative. Nevertheless, the Department of Education has continued to enforce the general purposes of this law. Absent has been a system that recognizes the states diversity and an effective tool to assess our progress in helping these young people.

And, as the statistics show, we must make progress. In 1996, only 6.5 percent of the 1.3 million children designated as LEP were redesignated as being fluent in English. Worse, notwithstanding federal law, more than 20 percent of the LEP students received no special services whatsoever.

Most LEP children almost four in five speak Spanish as their primary language, and the statistics regarding the educational progress of Latino students are particularly troubling. In the 1994-95 academic year, more than 32,000 Hispanic students dropped out of grades 9-12 before receiving their high school diploma. Enrollment in higher education among Latinos is also a concern.

While the number of Latino students approximates the number of Anglo students in kindergarten through 12th grade, Latinos are only half as likely as Anglos to enroll at the University of California, California State University or at one of Californias community colleges. SAT scores are also troubling. In 1996, Latino students are scored, on average, about 90 points lower than Anglo students on the verbal portion of the Scholastic Aptitude test.

The public is rightfully asking that the Legislature address this issue. The debate over bilingual education is principally an argument over methodology. Some favor immersing a child into English at an early age. Others argue that teaching children in their native primary language results in superior academic performance in later years. Unfortunately, the scientific research on the efficacy of bilingual programs is inconclusive and contradictory.

The conclusion that I have reached is that, with the concern over the correct methodology, we have lost our way. It is less important how a child learns English, just as long as he or she does learn English as efficiently as possible. Simply stated, we need to focus on results, and not methods.

SB 6 recognizes the variety of legitimate approaches to teaching immigrant children with an emphasis, instead, on outcomes. The legislation would provide each school district with the flexibility to design and implement the instructional program best-suited to the needs of the children in that school district.

SB 6 also provides for the development of an English-language development test to assess the English-language development of all children over time and also provides for the development of tools that will test students knowledge of the core curriculum in the major primary languages spoken by English learners.

Californians are rightly frustrated with the Department of Education and the Legislatures inability to address the needs of LEP children. As in other instances of legislative deadlock, the people are resorting to the initiative process, even though the results may be less productive than carefully crafted legislation. Indeed, the English for the Children initiative will be on the ballot in June. It would drastically curtail the instructional methodologies available. It would generally limit an immigrant child to one year of structured English immersion, allowing primary-language instruction only under certain limited circumstances. Not only would this measure fail to provide the kind of flexibility that is so desperately needed by our schools, it also lacks any of the assessment tools that would hold school districts accountable for their pupils performance.

This initiative may or may not be an improvement on the very real problem we have with the distressing academic performance of LEP children. Certainly, it would be better to pass this Alpert-Firestone legislation and give school districts the opportunity to design and implement the instructional program best-suited to the needs of the children in that district. Local control of education should again prove to be the most effective policy. The one-size-fits-all approach of the Unz initiative could well turn out to be as big a problem as the situation we now have.



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