The U.S. Office of Civil Rights’ claim that Denver Public Schools has failed to implement its bilingual education program is ill-founded. The office was especially unwise Thursday when it threatened to cut off federal funds and imposed a fire-drill timetable to resolve the dispute.

The office is arriving very late in the game. Denver Superintendent Irv Moskowitz and attorneys for the district have been trying for a very long time to revise a program that for more than a decade operated under a federal court order with little input or oversight from parents, administrators or the elected school board. In trying to make such revisions, the district has had to contend with the Congress of Hispanic Educators – a group whose members, in most cases, are dependent upon the program.

The district has also been offered plenty of advice from parents – many of whom welcome the proposed revisions and some of whom oppose them.

So now, on the eve of implementing the revised program, which includes a higher degree of parental choice, the Office of Civil Rights has announced the program is “insufficient.”

What appears to be “insufficient” is the Office of Civil Rights itself: It is operating from sometimes outdated information.

For example, its study in Denver was started a couple of years ago and part of the written proposal the office has been evaluating has been significantly modified.

Moskowitz has said he will give the office the updated plan so it can catch up. But he acknowledges that some of the federal office’s objections cannot be met without seriously harming DPS’s goals. For example, Moskowitz notes that the Office of Civil Rights would force the enrollment in the bilingual program of “any student who lives in a home where a language other than English is used.” That is an absurd demand, no less absurd because it was uttered by the Office of Civil Rights. Does the proficiency of the student not matter? Does it not matter who it is (a grandparent, perhaps) who speaks the foreign language in the home?

Moskowitz has correctly characterized this and other federal demands as “out of step with reality” and likely “to create a burdensome level of administration that we cannot accept.”

The welfare of 13,600 students of limited English skills in the Denver Public School system is too important to leave to some formula devised in Washington.

Reliance on such formulas will almost always kill local initiative and assure the perpetuation of programs that are both expensive and inefficient.

Moskowitz has pledged to get the district refocused on the original purpose of these programs: to teach students English. The community, which after all includes students with 80 native languages, can judge whether the programs are working.



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