Bilingual Education Perseveres Despite Heated Debate

GUESTS: LINDA CHAVEZ, Pres., Center for Equal Opportunity; JAIME ZAPATA, Nat’l. Association of Bilingual Education; JIM LYONS, Dir., Nat’l. Assoc. of Bilingual Education;

BYLINE: CLAUDIO SANCHEZ

HIGHLIGHT: The debate over the effectiveness of bilingual education remains unresolved almost 30 years after its initial implementation. Critics point to its incomplete success rate, while supporters laud that success.

BODY:

NOAH ADAMS, Host: It’s All Things Considered. I’m Noah Adams.

ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: And I’m Robert Siegel.

There are nearly three million school children in America today who do not speak English. That’s about 7 percent of kids kindergarten through 12th grade. The majority of them speak Spanish, even though they were born in the United States.

For 28 years now, public schools have been mandated by law to educate and help these youngsters learn English. But getting people to agree on the best way to do that has been almost impossible. Invariably, the discussion focuses on bilingual education and the question of whether students are likely to become fluent in English if they are also taught in their native language. As NPR’s Claudio Sanchez reports, the debate has never been more strident.

CLAUDIO SANCHEZ, Reporter: A lot of people today criticize bilingual education, but no one works at it harder and been at it longer than Linda Chavez.

LINDA CHAVEZ, Pres., Center for Equal Opportunity: Native language instruction either has harmed children or it has been a total wash. We have spent literally billions of dollars funding this program. Why would we want to continue spending billions of dollars on a program that either does nothing or hurts kids? Why not begin to look at other programs that work more effectively?

CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: Chavez is president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Reagan administration appointee on civil rights, and author of Out of the Barrio, a book about Hispanic assimilation. In her latest book, titled The Failure of Bilingual Education, Chavez – citing recent studies – contends that teaching kids in their native language has turned out to be more harmful than doing nothing, and no one knows this better, says Chavez, than Mexican immigrants.

LINDA CHAVEZ: I don’t believe that immigrants want to stay speaking their native language and that they’re intent on recreating Mexico in the United States. They didn’t come here to do that. They came here to take advantage of America, and I think they overwhelmingly want their kids to learn English. Unfortunately, I think they’ve been sold a bill of goods by bilingual educators who say if you put Jose in the classroom and teach him in Spanish seven-and-a-half hours a day out of the eight hours, he’s going to learn to speak English.

CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: ‘Why has this been allowed to happen?’, Chavez asks rhetorically.

LINDA CHAVEZ: Because there’s been a bilingual lobby.

CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: A lobby made up of people like Jaime Zapata [sp], who actually spends a lot of his time tracking Linda Chavez’s own lobbying efforts to get Congress to repeal bilingual education. That, says Zapata, would be a mistake.

JAIME ZAPATA, Nat’l. Assoc. of Bilingual Education: We see it, frankly as a real loss, as a real disservice to the kids in this country and in this society in general to lose that first language, and that’s what you’re doing if you’re advocating getting rid of bilingual education. I am a product of bilingual education. I mean, I take this stuff very personally. You know, I speak two, three languages – four almost now.

CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: Zapata works for the National Association of Bilingual Education, NABE, one of the largest, most powerful advocacy groups for native language instruction. NABE’s director, Jim Lyons [sp], wrote much of the legislation that created bilingual education back in 1968. He says it’s unreasonable for Chavez or anyone else to suggest that schools should now abandon it, just because it hasn’t worked for everyone, everywhere, all the time.

JIM LYONS, Dir., Nat’l Assoc. of Bilingual Educators: We don’t call for the abolition of programs because some fail. You call for their improvement. And that’s where Linda is off-base, because she has made a career out of calling for the elimination of native language instruction, saying bilingual education is failing America’s school children when it’s helping.

CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: But is it helping? And how do people really know when you consider that school officials themselves often don’t know? School districts don’t compare the academic performance of limited-English-proficient students with that of the general student population, leaving parents with no choice other than to rely on surveys and studies commissioned by pro- or anti-bilingual education groups.

One thing is certain – most children who enter school not knowing English will drop out if they’re not fluent in English by the time they get to high school. So, one important question is, how much time is devoted to English in a bilingual program? According to the U.S. Department of Education, at least two-thirds of all instructional time in the early grades is in English, and by the fourth grade, not more than 3 percent of the time is spent in the student’s native language. So, the allegation that bilingual programs use little or no English, researchers concluded, was unfounded.

In the mid- to late-1980s, one major study found that second, third and fourth graders in bilingual programs experienced some delays in reading and writing in English. But they eventually equaled or surpassed monolingual students in these areas. The big deficiency, the report cited, was the preparation and training of bilingual teachers. Linda Chavez says many of these studies were biased, but concedes that some bilingual programs do work well.

LINDA CHAVEZ: Having dual language learning is perfectly acceptable, but the first goal of a child not speaking English is to help that child acquire English. That has got to be the public policy of our government.

CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: Should public policy, then, encourage people to forsake their first language? Should that be the price to pay for being a good American? Says Jim Lyons-

JIM LYONS: No, I don’t think it’s about identity. I think it’s about opportunity, an opportunity to have the chance to succeed in this country, to get a good education. If children are instructed in a language they don’t understand, they are not going to learn as much or as well as they could.

CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: Chavez says she just wants to help immigrant kids move into the mainstream.

LINDA CHAVEZ: I don’t want them segregated, I don’t want them in classrooms where they’re never going to learn to speak English well, where they’re not going to become fluent writers and readers of English. And what I’m hoping is that by allowing parents to make the decision and by putting the educational choice back at the local level that you’ll have more opportunity for those children to learn English.

CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: The United States Congress and state legislatures are not about to shut down bilingual education, at least not just yet. But local and parental control of bilingual education programs have become huge issues. It’s already happened in California, which enrolls 45 percent of the nation’s non-English-speaking students; that’s 1.2 million kids.

Last summer, the state board of education voted unanimously to shut down the state’s office of bilingual education. Then, it gave local school officials the freedom to abandon native language instruction programs long-favored by the state. Before the shift in policy, 20 of the state’s 1,000 school districts wanted out of bilingual education. Today, 21 want out.

I’m Claudio Sanchez reporting.

The preceding text has been professionally transcribed. However, although the text has been checked against an audio track, in order to meet rigid distribution and transmission deadlines, it may not have been proofread against tape.



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