SPEAKING IN TONGUES

By Doug Lasken

L.A. Unified unwraps its new plan for bilingual education

from Los Angeles Magazine, April 1997

Without any fanfare, the L.A. Unified School District has unveiled its new Master Plan for bilingual education, which lays out the mandatory rules and standards for teaching the city's 300,000 kids in bilingual programs. The new plan will be implemented in July, 1997, but anyone expecting the district to be placing more emphasis on teaching English from then on may be disappointed. Public school teacher Douglas Lasken filed this report:

In my role as UTLA chapter chair at Ramona Elementary in Hollywood, I recently joined a delegation of administrators and parents at a session to discuss the new "Master Plan for English Learners," a 300 page document that will replace the original plan introduced in 1988. The event was held at the Women's Club of Hollywood, a cozy old place around the corner from the Grauman's Chinese Theater.

Carmen Shroeder, Assistant Superintendent for the Language Acquisition and Bilingual Development Branch, opened the meeting with a brief historical review. The previous master plan, she explained, had mandated that native Spanish speakers (the main participants in the program), receive all their academic instruction in Spanish until such time as they are deemed proficient in Spanish, when they can be "re-designated" into an English program. According to the old method, English was only permitted for 30 minutes a day during the English as a Second Language period.

"Why change the master plan?" Shroeder asked. For one thing, she said, the new document was partly a response to critics' complaints that L.A.'s bilingual program does not actually teach much English. The new plan, she assured us, makes clear that the true purpose of bilingual education is to teach kids to be fluent in English; accordingly, the new plan's authors, largely an assortment of principals and downtown administrators, have stopped referring to bilingual students as "Limited English Proficient," as they are known in the prior plan, and now call them "English Learners."

In addition to the half hour of English as a Second Language permitted under the old plan, Schroder revealed that teachers will now be permitted to spend up to 90 additional minutes using English in the classroom. But there's a catch. You may use English for that additional hour and a half, Shroeder warned, but only as long as you don't teach "phonics, spelling, formal English reading, or any academic material in English."

What's left, then, for teachers to teach during that period? A document that accompanies the new plan, called the "Language Strategies and Skills Matrix," defines a series of acceptable strategies that include "pointing, touching, standing, sitting, clapping, finding, and giving", along with "role playing, dramatizing and group discussions". The distinction between "academic material in English," which is forbidden, and "sitting, clapping, finding and giving" is not spelled out, but the Orwellian purpose seems clear: You can teach English as long as you don't actually teach English.

Additionally, there is a new section called "Mainstream English Acquisition for speakers of Nonmainstream Languages", which refers primarily to speakers of "Ebonics," or Black English. In this section, learning problems associated with Ebonics speakers are blamed on teachers' "adverse attitudes." And "instructional intervention" is advised to bring the teachers around. This bureaucratic fiat may come as a surprise to those Angelenos who thought the issue was still undecided. Ebonics is already part of the program.

Apart from these "innovations," there are no other substantive changes or improvements in the new Master Plan. The new district plan calls for "English learners" to continue in the bilingual program for up to 5 years, though it will accept 7 years before releasing a student who makes no progress.

After five hours the meeting broke up. Teachers, administrators and parents gathered in the lobby, all lugging their 250 pages of new rules and guidelines. Some were impressed, but the consensus among many others ( maybe it was just our "adverse attitudes") was that the new plan barely deserved a passing grade.