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The politics of bilingual education San Diego Union-Tribune, September 11, I992
I just attended the First Latino Preschool Education Conference at UCSD, where keynoter Professor Lily Wong Fillmore opened the show with the words: "We need to get more political." I'm Hispanic. I've been a HeadStart and a first-grade teacher for 28 years. Not in the ivory towers of the University of California, Berkeley, like Fillmore, but within the real-life, crumbling walls of Califorriia's elementary schools, and I can tell you this: The last thing the HeadStart program or our children need is more politics involved in education - bilingual or otherwise. HeadStart was begun nearly three decades ago. My mother, Mary Lydia Garza, helped found it in Arizona. My stepfather, George Garza, was national president of the League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and created the "Little School of 400" that was the model for what we know to be "Project HeadStart." Its original intent was to promote better school adjustment, better academic performance, less truancy and fewer referrals to special education for disadvantaged children. Fillmore, who introduces herself as a "rad, fib chick," wants to change all that, by first segregating language-minority children, then by postponing indefinitely their English assimilation. At the conference, Fillmore planted her hypothesis for the changes in HeadStart on the unstable ground of the crumbling family structure, saying, "Language-minority children who attend preschool where English is spoken - even as part of bilingual program are far more likely to abandon their primary language, will have difficulty communicating with their families, and put their family values at risk. "The likelihood of children forfeiting and losing their primary languages as they learn English poses a major problem in the school and society whose policies and practices created the problem in the first place." The message was clear: more politics in education, less English-learning for our children; protect the failed bilingual education system and the jobs that go with it, with your lives. The California Postsecondary Education Commission, in a study on high school graduates eligible for the University of California by race and ethnicity, reveals the folly of Fillmore's hypothesis. In 1990, only 3.9 percent of Latino high school graduates were qualified to enter the UC system, as compared with 32.2 percent of the Asians and 12.7 of the whites. Among those graduates who took the Scholastic Aptitude Test, when broken down by race and ethnicity, Latino students again came in dead-last, at 30 percent, compared with Asians at 70 percent. Fillmore's answer? More politics in bilingual education and an expansion of an already failed bureaucracy. Well, I can tell you from firsthand experience: It won't work. More politics isn't the answer. Teaching language-minority children English at the 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old range, when they're best prepared to be taught, is the answer. What's more, segregation didn't work in the South. It was a morally and economically bankrupt notion. Segregating language-minority children, as Fillmore has suggested, children just starting out, searching for self-identity and hungry for challenge and knowledge, is a living contradiction to what education and learning are all about. If ever adults were putting handcuffs. on kids - limited in their English or not - curbing their expectations, when educational freedom is what they're young minds beckon for, then Fillmore's HeadStart proposal is a tragic example of that. No one is asking parents to force their children to abandon their native language, but rather to help them build upon a foundation they already possess. I fear for the future of California's kids. Cuts in education due to politics and runaway spending must not stand. But a cut in the amount of English that children are required to learn is a design for Califomia's economic doom. The National Association of Bilingual Education (NABE) is an accomplice in Fillmore's camp. Together, they have called for less English instruction for language-minority children. NABE states, "Children have to learn English, but they should not be required to do so until their native languages are stable enough to handle the inevitable encounter with English and all it means." Can you feel the rumble of a new government bureaucracy coming California's way. Sticking its nose further into your life to determine when a child actually will be deemed "stable" enough to proceed onto English? Can you hear the politicians bickering over the rules and regulations and fighting for the right to make what should be a parent's decision Can you see this innocent child, who wants only to learn, stuck in the eye of this political hurricane? Can you see these children succeeding without an opportunity to learn English? How can they? Especially while the noose of politics continues to strangle the life out of their dreams? It is for them that I challenge the irresponsible and seriously misguided proposals of NABE and Fillrnore. I vow to fight their proposed changes in HeadStart before they begin to influence policy, before they act to deny English-language programs to a single Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese or any limited-English speaking child. Tuchman is a first-grade teacher. She also is a two-term member of the Tustin Board of Education and has served on three national educational boards, including the National Advisory Coordinating Council for Bilingual Education. |