Spirited Debate On Prop. 227

Unz late for huge turnout

TURLOCK—More than 700 people crammed the gymnasium at Turlock Junior High School Monday night hoping for an emotionally charged debate on Proposition 227.

The audience wasn’t disappointed despite a delay. The team in favor of it, Fernando Vega and proposition author Ron Unz, arrived 75 minutes late.

Proposition 227 is a June ballot initiative the would limit bilingual education to one year for non-English-speaking students.

“We are up against a huge bilingual education machine,” Unz said a few minutes after he arrived. “They spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to not teach English.”

The people who are against Proposition 227 are those who make money from teaching bilingual education, he said. That includes bilingual aides, English-as-a-second-language specialists, bilingual education book publishers and “teachers who earn thousands of dollars extra each year simply for being bilingual.”

The latter statement was greeted with a wave of laughter from teachers in the audience.

“Well, some school districts don’t pay as much as others,” Unz joked.

Bilingual education has been around for 30 years and has failed, he said while answering one of 14 questions submitted by audience members.

“The Los Angeles Unified School District did a study that concluded that two-thirds of the children who started in bilingual education in kindergarten did not know how to speak English after six years,” Unz said. “The Catholic schools, the parochial schools, teach English from day one and it works.”

Unz said schools in other countries are teaching English because that’s the international language needed to be successful in business.

But the opposition offered a different take on that: “Unz said schools in China and Europe are teaching English, but that’s because they want their students to be bilingual,” said Holli Thier, spokeswoman for Citizens for an Educated America: No on 227.

She said English is an international language, but it takes more than a year of school to teach the language well.

All the initiative will do, Thier contended, is spend $50 million more a year for a new state program while taking away parents’ right to decide what’s best for their children. Current state law gives parents the right to either put their children in or have them removed from a bilingual program.

If Proposition 227 passes, a parent’s only recourse to pull a child from a bilingual education program is to prove the child is suffering emotionally, mentally or physically. And then, permission from the school principal and the district superintendent is necessary, said Shelly Spiegel- Coleman, an English-as-a-second-language consultant for the Los Angeles Unified School District and Thier’s debate teammate.

“I want the right to make the choices that affect what’s most important to me: my child,” Spiegel-Coleman said. “This is just another large government program that takes parents’ rights away from them.”

Thier said Proposition 227 also would result in more lawsuits because it would give parents the right to sue teachers if students are taught any language other than English.

Unz countered that the initiative says a lawsuit would only be allowed after repeated warnings to an instructor to not teach other languages.

“If they repeatedly violate the law, they can be sued and should be sued,” Unz said.

At the end of the debate, Unz reiterated that bilingual education is a 30-year-old failure in California. He said countries like Israel don’t have bilingual education.

Spiegel-Coleman said the reason bilingual education has failed in California is because 70 percent of the students who need it are not in bilingual classes. She said bilingual education can be improved, “but this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

Audience members said they were impressed with the debate.

“Both sides presented convincing arguments, although both equally presented weaknesses,” Merced resident Alexander Brittain said. “I’ve read the initiative and support the concept, but it is poorly written.”

People began arriving for the 7 p.m. debate at 6 p.m. By 6:30 p.m., all 450 seats in the junior high school auditorium were filled. At 7 p.m., the back wall was obscured by people standing up to hear the arguments and there were nearly 100 people outside, hoping to catch at least part of the debate.

But Vega and Unz, driving to Turlock from San Jose International Airport, were stuck in traffic.



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