An unlikely coalition of Republicans, left-wing activists and Latino parents is amassing support for a 1998 ballot initiative that effectively would do away with bilingual education and replace it with English-immersion classes. The initiative radically would change education in California, which has the largest non-English-speaking student population in the country.

The English for the Children initiative, sponsored by Silicon Valley Republican Ron Unz — who was bested by Pete Wilson in the 1994 GOP primary for governor — already is emerging as a breakaway issue in the Golden State where 1.3 million students — 23 percent of all enrolled — are classified as not proficient in English.

Bilingual-education classes cost more than $300 million annually. Yet in any given year fewer than 7 percent of students enrolled in such programs are deemed proficient in English. "These programs are a complete failure," says Unz. "The money is being wasted."

Early polls show overwhelming numbers of Latino voters backing elimination of these programs that initially were designed to help their children. A Los Angeles Times poll on Oct. 15 showed overall support for the initiative already at 75 to 80 percent. Latino voters favored the initiative by 84 percent.

The campaign got another additional boost when Jaime Escalante, whose successes were depicted in the 1987 film Stand and Deliver starring Edward James Olmos, announced that he was joining the campaign as honorary chairman. Escalante, who long has worked to eliminate bilingual education and who rose to national prominence when he set out to prove that students from the East Los Angeles barrio could pass college-level advanced-placement examinations for calculus, is the highest-profile Latino educator in California, if not the country.

"It seems a real tragedy that in many cases our public schools are not teaching English to 5- or 6-year-old immigrant children, who are at an age when they can so easily learn the language," Escalante said.

Unz says he hopes that Escalante’s support of the campaign will help shake loose support for the initiative from California’s GOP leaders, who have been leery from the get-go. At the state GOP’s semiannual convention in September, party chairman Michael Schroeder and other leaders vowed to withhold support for the initiative, even though that opposition to "bilingual education" has been part of state and national Republican Party platforms for two decades. The party rank and file voted to support the initiative, which received overwhelming backing from the convention floor.

Insiders say GOP leaders feared that the initiative could end up alienating even more Latino voters from the Republican Party than they lost to Democrats in the 1996 elections. Many also remember the early days of Proposition 187, which received initial support from Latino voters in the polls but ended up largely being viewed as anti-Latino by the time Election Day rolled around. Dispute about the vote aside, Democrat Loretta Sanchez defeated Republican Rep. Bob Dornan largely on a wave of anti-Proposition 187 Latino sentiment. With a rapidly growing Latino voter population moving to support Democrats, the GOP can ill-afford to lose any more support.

"The GOP leadership was been very cowardly on this," says Unz, "despite the fact that the abolition of bilingual education has been supported by the party for years." He points to the work of Alice Callaghan, an Episcopal priest and director of the Las Familias del Pueblo community center, as being the person who galvanized him to take the initiative before the voters. Callaghan helped organize Mexican parents to demand English classrooms for their , a recent ruling by Federal District Judge William B. Shubb lifted a state-court injunction blocking the Orange Unified School District’s move to English-immersion classes. School districts around the state are watching the situation carefully.

The California Legislature also killed a bill that would have made it easier for school districts to interpret who is eligible for, and what constitutes, bilingual education. Supporters of the bill had hoped it would free up money for the support of "ebonics" programs targeted at black children who speak substandard English at home.

In the troubled school district of Oakland, which has one of the Golden State’s most miserable bilingual-education records, a controversial community leader has charged that hundreds and maybe thousands of English-speaking black students are being used to fill out classroom quotas in bilingual-education classes.

Isaac Taggart, cochairman of the Coalition for the Defense of the American Child, has filed a formal grievance with the California Department of Education alleging that the Oakland schools are violating federal law by placing English-speaking children in classrooms in which much of the instruction is in a foreign language.

"We feel our babies’ civil rights are being violated," claims Taggart, who has urged that parents keep their children home from the start of school in protest. "Twelve million dollars annually is going to assist limited English speakers in the Oakland schools. And they want to give African-Americans $2 million over five years. But they are putting our babies in classrooms where the teachers and materials are for students who speak Cantonese, Spanish or Vietnamese."

During a public forum, Steve Stevens, the executive assistant to Oakland School Superintendent Carole Quan, said Oakland merely was fulfilling its legal requirement and that the district wasn’t forcing bilingual education on unwilling families. "Parents have an opportunity to ask that their children not be in these classes," he said.

Taggart pooh-poohs Stevens’ explanation, claiming that Oakland parents were duped by the school district. "The district deliberately misled parents into thinking our children would come out of these classes with a second language. This is not happening. What they are doing is taking advantage of our ignorance," he says.

The Oakland School District has a lousy record in moving students from bilingual classrooms into English-speaking classrooms. Almost 17,000 students, one-third of the entire student population in Oakland, are formally classified as being limited speakers of English. Of those, only 1.2 percent of bilingual students later were deemed proficient in English — far, far below the state average of 6.7 percent.

"It’s not just happening in Oakland," says Unz. "There are English-speaking black children in bilingual-education classes throughout the state of California." How many? No one seems to have an answer. There are English-speaking children in classrooms where there is bilingual instruction all over California, according to Norman Gold, manager of complaints and bilingual compliance for the state education department. But the reality is, he claims, that of the 1.3 million California students deemed not to have English proficiency, 70 percent will receive no bilingual instruction of any kind.

But when Gold tries to paint a positive image of the 89,000 California students who become English-proficient in any given year, he admits the numbers aren’t particularly exhilarating >from a success standpoint. "It’s hard to pinpoint what the ideal number would be," he says, when asked what would constitute a successful percentage of non-English-speaking students becoming proficient in English.

For an increasing number of California parents the only good answer is 100 percent, and the only way they believe their children are going to get it is in an English-speaking classroom.

In the meantime, Unz, who claimed that the passage of Proposition 187 was the greatest moral disaster to hit California since the internment of the Japanese after Pearl Harbor and who once referred to Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein as "Big Sister" when she proposed a national identity card, is creating a tremor that very well could keep his name in the headlines long enough to give him the name recognition he didn’t have in the last GOP primary. That is, if he should he decide to run for governor or senator.

As for the Oakland School District, the board of supervisors recently spent $100,000 on a new logo after one school-board member complained that the old logo, which featured a graceful oak tree, looked like broccoli.



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