Unz anti-bilingual ed crusade goes nationwide

PALO ALTO — Ron Unz was tired. He was nursing a sore throat. He was trying to be discreet. But he couldn’t help himself. He was talking so loud, and so forcefully, that the people at the next table had to move to escape the cascade of words. The couple sitting behind us sheepishly admitted that they, too, couldn’t help eavesdropping, and they just wanted to say how interesting they thought the whole thing was.

Get Unz talking about his crusade to end bilingual education and it seems there’s no stopping him.

When we met for Chinese food on a recent night near his alma mater, Stanford University, Unz was just back from a trip to New York, where he hopes the 2001 mayor’s race will become a referendum on bilingual ed. It was a month after his landslide victory in Arizona, where 63 percent voted to stop teaching children in their native language until they learn English.

Unz, the brainy and wealthy software writer who began his English immersion campaign with California’s Proposition 227 two years ago, was disappointed in the Arizona result. He’s certain he was on his way to a 70 percent win until opponents convinced the state’s Indians that the initiative would stop them from passing on their native language to their children. Unz insisted it wasn’t true, but he thinks the damage was done: a few Native Americans and a lot of sympathetic whites changed their minds at the last minute.

“I was hoping it would do better,” he said.

It did well enough, however, to add fuel to his campaign. Since the election, he’s been shopping his measure to potential allies in Massachusetts and Colorado. But New York is the prize he’s after.

“I really want to nationalize this issue,” Unz, 39, said between bites of Kung Pao chicken and sips of green tea. “I’m sick of going state by state. New York is the media center of the country. It’s the immigrant center of the country. It’s also a very liberal, Democratic city.”

If he can make it there, in other words, he can make it anywhere.

Unz came to dinner equipped with a canvas briefcase stuffed with clippings, test scores and polling data that he believes show the political saliency of his ideas.

His favorite is a New York poll taken a little over a year ago, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani was still in the race for U.S. Senate against Hillary Rodham Clinton. The pollsters asked likely voters who they favored in the race, and Giuliani was narrowly ahead, 48 percent to 44 percent. Then they asked what pollsters call a “push question” — telling voters about a proposal to require all public school instruction to be conducted in English. Giuliani, voters were told, favors the change; Clinton opposes it. Now who are you for? The result: 68 percent to 25 percent, for Giuliani.

The remarkable swing crossed all party, gender and most ethnic lines, including Latinos. Unz concluded, naturally, that his issue alone could all but assure a Giuliani victory. The mayor’s advisers felt otherwise and declined to embrace the cause. Later, of course, Giuliani faced health and personal problems and bowed out of the race.

But Unz’s basic problem remains: He can’t convince leading Republicans to join his cause. One reason might be that he’s really just trying to replace one mandate with another. The status quo requires bilingual education. His proposals prohibit it. Either way you’re focusing on process instead of results.

There’s a political factor as well, of course. Many Republicans, including President-elect George W. Bush, remain spooked by the California party’s near self-immolation over immigrant issues in the mid-1990s. They don’t want to do anything that smacks of racism or anti-immigrant behavior.

That fear remains a source of great frustration to Unz. He opposed California’s Proposition 187 in 1994 and has been a leading voice for rebuilding the Republican Party as the party of immigrants and opportunity. And there is nothing in his record to question the sincerity of his belief that ending bilingual education is pro-immigrant, not the reverse.

The man is nothing if not confident. Yet his confidence can border on arrogance. Unz assails bilingual supporters for worshipping the program as if it were a “religious cult.” He says his opponents are Pavlovian — that they can be provoked into predictable reactions by certain statements he makes. Republican leaders who have been slow to support him must have “negative IQs,” he says, because they fail to see that the issue will attract, not repel, minority voters.

Unz can also be careless with the test scores he insists validate his theory. He says scores have “doubled” when a district’s national ranking moves from the 10th percentile to the 20th — a gain of 10 percentage points. In a more reflective moment, he concedes that after just two years of experience with English immersion in California “no one can really prove anything.” But he says the trends favor his claim that English-only instruction is helping immigrant kids.

That may well be true. It also may not matter. Because the election results and the polling numbers are now driving this debate as much as the test scores.

And no matter what your language, they all say the same thing: Unz is on a roll.

Daniel Weintraub appears on this page Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. He can be reached at (916) 321-1914 or at [email protected]



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