Start of a speakeasy experiment

Bilingual education at Washington's Oyster Elementary School<

WASHINGTON—Though they are noisily unaware of it the children of Oyster Elementary School in one of Washington’s more cosmopolitan neighbourhoods are challenging the Reagan administration every day of the school week. They do so by virtue of the fact that Oyster Elementary is the US capital’s showcase school for supporters of bilingual education – a concept which President Reagan’s education secretary, the iconoclastic rightwinger, William Bennett, has declared to be an expensive failure – moreover one that threatens the homogeneity of America’s famous ‘melting pot’ which supposedly binds newcomers to English and the flag.

But at Oyster six-year-old first graders are being taught in Spanish while the second grade next door is doing a science lesson (‘will the plastic ruler float or sink in the water children?’) in English and third grade is discussing the United Nations in Spanish – though another day it might be English. The pattern is repeated up this old red-brick school to sixth grade where the pupils are composing essays on a bank of computers in both languages.

‘Here no child is an exception,’ explains the principal, Mrs Paquita Holland, herself a native Spanish speaker from Puerto Rico, albeit of Basque, Swedish, Irish as well as Spanish stock. Thus all the school’s 316 pupils, whether they are Hispanic (189), white (73), black (39) or Asian (15 including one Indian , are taught equally in English or Spanish, sometimes in the one, sometimes in the other but always with two teachers present, one ‘English dominant’ one ‘Spanish dominant’ there to amplify or explain to the hesitant.

The result is a school where everything is bilingual from the wall charts to the school magazine and where the waiting list in a catchment area which embraces very poor through to the Washington professions of law and government is larger than the school roll.

Oyster is not typical of bilingual education in America or even Washington, a city where 60 per cent of the citizens are black (and a much higher percentage of the state school rolls). In most places the term means some variation upon a system whereby some lessons are taught in a student’s mother tongue, usually the harder ones as they get older – like maths – while ‘easier’ ones – art or music – are taught in English and the newcomers are pulled out of the curriculum for special ‘English as a second language’ (ESOL) classes until they are proficient in it.

But Oyster too is part of the legacy of the turbulent sixties which threw up racial conflict in the cities and black political power in many of them, just at a time when the ‘fourth wave’ of immigrants – Cubans in Florida, Mexicans in California, central Americans in Washington (because Latins always go to the capital) – was reaching the United States.

When the Hispanics sought their share of the minority educational programmes what they got was bilingualism, backed by Federal funds. Hence the fury which has just erupted following Mr Bennett’s assertion that after two decades and 1.7 billion tax dollars the US has little to show for it. Behind the Bennett critique are assorted academic studies which have suggested that pupils taught in their native tongue have performed no better than they would have if thrown straight into English. In other words the situation which prevailed after the surge of Xenophobia which followed World War I drove bilingualism from most schools until the Supreme Court ruled in 1974 that some help must be given to those 4 million students (three quarters Hispanic) out of 40 million deficient in English.

Experienced teachers like Mrs Holland, a veteran of national educational administration at the Department of Education downtown, acknowledge there is room for criticism. They stress that bilingualism is not only good in its own right in a culturally plural world, but that its benefits for minority groups is recognised by most studies done by psychologists, if not all educators. As one California professor of education recently put it: ‘What keeps students from learning English is flunking them out or making them feel inferior by thrusting them into classes where they don’t understand the language.’

The respectable case for stressing English is exemplified by those Hispanic-Americans who say ‘we made it’ and by the awesome academic performance of ‘fourth wave’ Asian-Americans who suffer all the disadvantages of culture, language and even traumas of war which dog central American newcomers. And few doubt the sincerity of former California Senator and university administrator, SI Hayakawa, who has been campaigning since 1981 to make English the official language of the USA. He combines a denunciation of bilingualism as a threat to America’s ‘social glue’ with a passionate advocacy of more foreign language teaching in America’s schools.

But Mr Bennett’s critics detect in his recent attack both an attempt to save money by pledging the Reagan Administration to give local school boards more autonomy over their bilingual programmes (a euphemism for benign neglect?) and of trying to turn the clock back on liberal reforms in yet another field – and in the name of a mythical past. ‘Flag, family and faith’ as one suspicious teacher puts it. In short to pander anew to xenophobic anxiety.

Ironically a retreat by the federal Government would not affect the Oyster school directly since it survives without federal aid on the goodwill of the black administration in City Hall, the support of parents and its international reputation. In most Washington schools, as in the once all-white suburbs, now facing growing Asian and Hispanic presence the norm will remain the ESOL ‘transitional’ English approach. In nearby Montgomery County, Maryland, the schools boast students from 90 countries speaking 60 languages.

Paquita Holland dismisses the perceived threat to English seen in Spanish TV stations and Chinese road signs as ‘ludicrous. English is the language of this country and no Hispanic person says ‘I don’t want my child to speak English.’ What bothers her, as it does many others, is America’s reluctance to learn languages other than its own.



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