LOS ANGELES—For both major party candidates, the polarizing issue of bilingual education is conspicuously absent as school bells toll across the United States, sharing the autumn season with the presidential horserace that is heading into the home stretch.
An issue that hews close to the major theme of Republican Gov. George W. Bush’s campaign — education — and two voting blocs from whom both Bush and Democratic Vice President Al Gore seek approbation — Hispanics and Asians — would at first glance appear to be a hot-button item in the race, particularly since bilingual education has been clashing with the philosophy of English immersion.
It has, however, proven to be an issue that runs fathoms deep — and apparently neither candidate feels adequate to address despite the developing wave of evidence that promptly teaching the children of immigrants the language of their new home has produced solid results. They have taken a largely laissez faire approach to the matter, although Bush has made learning to read (in English) at an early age a top priority of his education plank.
Bush, whose state of Texas has a bilingual program, uses the progress of Hispanic students as a bragging point on his Web site, although he takes the stand that the ends are more important than the means.
“If a good (English) immersion program works, I say fine,” Bush said in one of his first major speeches on education in 1999. “If a good bilingual program works to teach children English, we should applaud it. What matters is not the varying methods, but the common standards and goals. The standard is English literacy.”
Gore’s education plank supports bilingual programs as part of an overall effort to bring the children of immigrants up to speed in school, although he has not been publicly championing the preservation of such programs and appears content to leave such decisions at the state and local levels.
The bilingual education debate received a national boost last month when the state of California released results of its Standardized Testing and Reporting tests for last spring showing that students with limited English skills — known in education parlance as Limited English Proficiency kids — had shown marked improvement just two years after Proposition 227, a ballot measure that scrapped bilingual education in favor of English immersion in a state with a sizable Spanish-speaking population.
“The good news is that results for our English learners, although lower than results for English proficient students, increased in almost all subjects and grade levels,” State Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin said at the time. “As these gains show, our English language learners are holding their own — this is indeed a positive sign.”
There was some good news for opponents of bilingual education, or the supporters of English immersion. They struck pay dirt when a write-up the STAR results appeared in The New York Times.
“I thought it (Prop 227) would hurt kids,” Ken Noonan, superintendent of schools in Oceanside, Calif., told The Times. “The exact reverse occurred, totally unexpected by me. The kids began to learn — not pick up, but learn — formal English, oral and written, far more quickly than I ever thought they would.”
Much like rave reviews for a Broadway play opening, the notice in The Times created a buzz among national pundits. They saw in the development as both a happy ending for the Hispanic children of California and a repudiation of what they considered a burdensome, bureaucratic program that coddled non-English speaking children, to their long-term detriment.
“Bilingual education is a tax-paid multibillion-dollar bureaucracy whose real purpose is to provide jobs for an army of Spanish-speaking payrollers,” read a broadside from columnist Phyliss Schafley. “There never was any research that proved it is the way to teach English to immigrants, and now the proof of its failure is obvious.”
Doubts about bilingual education, however, tend to stop at end of the editorial page since teachers, education analysts and candidates Bush and Gore are well aware that one set of test scores doesn’t necessarily tell the entire story.
“I don’t think it is Prop. 227 that is causing scores to go up,” said Audrey Wolfe Taylor, a Spanish-speaking San Diego teacher who presides over a first grade “structured English” classroom in a midtown elementary school named after Rosa Parks.
Taylor, whose young charges are primarily Spanish and Vietnamese native speakers (there are 83 different languages spoken at Rosa Parks Elementary, she said), told United Press International that a daily 3-hour block of “literacy” instruction has been moving the children forward in a situation that is far from sink-or-swim. For example, a lesson on vegetables won’t begin without a basket of onions, carrots and cabbage on the teacher’s desk.
“It is not a lecture,” she explained. “You support everything you do with visual aids.”
And Spanish is hardly banned in classrooms such as Taylor’s.
“If a child comes to me and doesn’t understand what is going on, I’ll say it to them in Spanish,” Taylor said. “It takes me about 5 seconds.
The education of kids doesn’t take place under laboratory conditions and the traditional degree of autonomy that teachers enjoy in the classroom indeed puts student progress on complicated terrain.
Some teachers have complained that parents speak only Spanish at home; that they have not bothered to learn English and thus hamper teachers’ efforts to teach their children English during the day.
Linda Lownes, a consultant with the Standards and Assessment Division of the California Department of Education, said that the results of the STAR tests reflected what had been learned and not so much how it was learned.
“One of the areas of data that we didn’t collect was, what was the youngster’s specific instructional program,” Lownes said. “What are the teaching processes? Was there a need to first do the complete lesson plan in the primary language (such as Spanish)?”
A fluent bilingual teacher, Lownes said, likely would be able to help limited-English students along more in an English immersion program than a teacher who is not as proficient in the primary language of the students.
There are also state mandates reducing class size and boosting reading education that went into effect at the same time as Prop. 227, which may make it tougher to dope out the effectiveness of English immersion programs, but also seems to be having the desired effect.
“All of those things are impacting the scores,” Lownes said. “We can’t simply say it is the result of putting everyone into English immersion programs.”
The numbers may not be perfect, however they don’t lie and progress through English immersion is clearly being made and appears to validate Bush’s insistence that learning to read English is a key in U.S. schools to grasping other subjects at an early age.
There is also a sharper awareness on the part of educators that scores on standardized tests are becoming the key statistic used by lawmakers and the media in measuring the effectiveness of teachers, principals and administrators in educating students of all ethnic and language groups — which raises the importance of tests such as STAR and the Standardized Aptitude Test as political leaders demand greater “accountability” in public education.
“We can do better,” Diane Dobrenen, principal of Jones Jr. High in Baldwin Park, told the Los Angeles Times. “The bottom line is that our test scores are not good enough.”
Lownes also added the no-small caveat that the STAR test results that made national headlines will be revised in the fall. Computer coding that incorrectly categorized the language levels of about 10 percent of the students still has to be adjusted.
“We don’t know what, if any, impact this will have on the data,” Lownes proclaimed. “We have no doubt, however, that there have been gains.”
The revised scores will be ready for publication around Nov. 15, eight days after either Bush or Gore has been elected to the White House. However bilingual education, while a rousingly visceral subject for some, likely won’t be turned into much of a political issue between now and the election.
In the meantime, dedicated teachers such as Audrey Wolfe Taylor will continue to gently coax the children of immigrants into the mainstream.
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