Oakland Boy Gets English-Only Class

Cantonese kindergarten led to lawsuit

An Oakland boy who fought the school district to get out of a classroom of Cantonese-speaking students is now in a mainstream English class at the same school — and his lawsuit has been settled.

“It’s much cooler,” said Travell Louie, 7, a second-grader at Lincoln Elementary. “I can understand everything. We are learning about bugs. This girl brought a tarantula!”

As a kindergartner, Travell and his case became national news and launched a two-year legal fight for his disabled father, who rejected school district offers for Travell to take free buses to classes taught in English in another school, which was located in a high- crime neighborhood.

National organizations used the case in their fight to end bilingual education through California’s Proposition 227, approved by state voters in June 1998.

Last week, the two sides settled in Alameda County Superior Court. George Louie, Travell’s father, said he got what he wanted — his American-born, English-speaking son placed in an English-speaking class.

And the lawyer for the school district, Laura Schulkind, said the district found a way out of a costly legal battle with the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, which had appealed an earlier court ruling that the school didn’t have to make special arrangements for Travell.

The settlement came as both sides were preparing written arguments for the state Court of Appeal in San Francisco.

“We won this case because the district wasn’t doing anything wrong,” Schulkind said. “Travell was in a class that taught English kids in English and Cantonese kids in Cantonese. The only reason he’s in a mainstream English class now is because there is one for second- graders, and he would have gone there anyway.”

The settlement doesn’t pin any wrong-doing on the district, and doesn’t say anything about Louie’s future class placements. Schulkind said Louie would most likely stay in English classes though, because there are enough of them at the higher grades in Lincoln.

George Louie says that’s double-talk, and what really happened is that he embarrassed the Chinatown area school for ignoring the needs of the few enrolled English speakers.

“I walked into my son’s kindergarten class, and he was in the back with a couple other kids, while the rest of the class was having a conversation in Cantonese,” he said.

The Pacific Legal Foundation provided five lawyers to the Louie family, and the Center for Equal Opportunity in Washington, D.C. paid for tutoring lessons for Travell during his kindergarten and first- grade years. The Center is one of the major players in the effort to dismantle bilingual education.

“I didn’t ask for a dime in this case, and I didn’t set out to make it a big fight against affirmative action,” said Louie, who depends on disability checks to pay the rent.

But he didn’t see the larger picture, according to school lawyers. School districts need to be able to make decisions about transferring children out of their neighborhood schools to ensure all sorts of benefits, such as diversity, program cost savings, and language- appropriate learning, Schulkind said.

“And we can still do that, nothing has changed with this settlement,” she said.

For Travell, though, a lot has changed.

“The teacher would start out in English and then talk to the class in Cantonese,” said Travell, recalling his kindergarten class. “I would just cover my ears and take a little nappy-nap.”



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