Kindergarten teacher Sally Peterson was taken aback when the mini-vans started arriving at her school, unloading protesters whose signs demanded that she be fired.

But when Peterson realized the pickets were emblazoned with swastikas and Ku Klux Klan symbols – implying that’s where she stood politically – the teacher finally began to comprehend the white-hot fury she’d unleashed by an act she says was “public-spirited.”

The founder and president of Learning English Advocates Drive, or LEAD, Peterson has spent six years as the main spokeswoman for a group that’s challenging the national emphasis on bilingual education for Hispanic children. She’s done the Jane Pauley circuit. She’s done congressional committees. And she defended herself mightily when the pickets converged on her heavily Hispanic school here.

“But even though they were shouting in my face, I responded like a lady,” Peterson proudly reports. A volunteer for the National Charity League who sent her kids to Catholic schools, she says her activism springs from concern about children.

“I’d been trying to teach in one of these so-called bilingual programs for seven years, and the kids just weren’t learning English. What’s more, at every teacher meeting I went to, I kept hearing over and over, ‘It doesn’t work!’ . . . Finally, I decided to put a note on the board in the teachers room at our school saying, ‘Anyone who wants to reform bilingual education, sign below.’ ” The next morning, 30 out of 33 teachers at Glenwood Elementary had signed, she remembers.

Now the group, run out of her home, has about 20,000 members from Dade County, Fla., to New York and San Francisco, Peterson says.

A LEAD priority will be congressional hearings this fall to reauthorize the 25-year-old Bilingual Education Act. Federal law now states that students with limited English skills should get most academic instruction in their native language. LEAD wants that changed: “We think this should be flexible. Districts should be able to use whatever methods work for them.”

Another sore point is coercion of immigrant parents, who, LEAD argues, are pressured into signing consent forms so their children can be taught in the family’s language. “We want federal law to enforce true informed consent, so the manipulation and badgering we’ve seen doesn’t go on.”

Peterson expects lots of research to be trotted out for Congress’ benefit. But most of it is hogwash, contends the 53-year-old Wisconsin native. “The same people who run these programs and work in them – and stand to benefit economically – are measuring how well they work,” she says.

“What’s lost in all this is the child,” she fervently argues. “If you want them to learn English, you have to teach them English. If they learn most of the time in Spanish, how are they ever going to learn English? If our goal is to have them learn English and be successful, we aren’t doing it.”



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