NEW YORK — A couple of years ago, a coalition of 150 Hispanic families in Bushwick led a little-noticed fight against bilingual education. Furious that their children were being forced to stay in bilingual classes where they were learning neither Spanish nor English, they banded together and sued the state of New York. It was, as legal battles go, not much of a legal battle. The case was dismissed by a State Supreme Court judge, whose decision was subsequently upheld on appeal.

The Bushwick Parents Organization may yet get the last laugh, however. In his recent State of the City address, Mayor Giuliani pledged to restore — or, more accurately, limit — bilingual programs to their original purpose, which is helping new immigrants make the transition into regular classes.

This week, Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with deep pockets and a weakness for public policy, came through town beaming over the latest polls on his “English for the Children” ballot initiative, which would place non-English-speaking children in transitional “immersion” classes rather than long-term bilingual education programs. Polls show close to 70% of California’s population supporting the June initiative; moreover, a recent Los Angeles Times survey found that 84% of the state’s Hispanic voters are behind it.

“California is the reductio ad absurdum of bilingual education in the United States,” Mr. Unz said this week at a luncheon sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. “Ninety-five percent of the children in these programs fail to learn English each year.”

For America’s public schools the dilemma is simple though vexing: How to accommodate incoming immigrants without losing sight of the schools’ primary purpose — preparing students for life in an English-speaking society.

No less an eminence than the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., has warned against the attendant dangers. “Bilingualism shuts doors,” he wrote in “The Disuniting of America” in 1992. “It nourishes self-ghettoization, and ghettoization nourishes racial antagonism.”

Yet ever since the Supreme Court’s 1974 holding (Lau v. Nichols) that placing non-English-speaking students in English-speaking classes violates the equal protection clause of the Civil Rights Act, the debate over bilingual education has moved steadily away from the question of bilingual education and into the arena of cultural politics.

Many supporters of bilingual education programs have argued that they enable students to stay in touch with their ethnic and linguistic roots. Certain opponents, by contrast, have exploited the dismal results of bilingual education programs to buttress their own case against immigration.

In California, however, these ideological boundaries seem to be fading fast. Not only are the vast majority of local Hispanics enthusiastic about the “English for Children” ballot initiative that will be voted on in June, but Governor Wilson and the state’s Republican leadership are cool — at best — toward it. In the words of Mr. Unz, a supporter of open immigration who fought against Proposition 187 (the 1994 measure that took medical and educational benefits away from illegal immigrants), “The Republican Party has become incredibly cowardly and cautious on this issue.”

One of his allies is Fernando Vega, the son of Mexican immigrants who spearheaded an early bilingual program in Redwood City, Calif., back in the 1970s. Some 15 years later, Mr. Vega learned that his grandson had, by virtue of his last name, been placed in a first grade class taught in Spanish. Mr. Vega’s son, the boy’s father, was subsequently unable to transfer him into an English classroom.

Ironically, the GOP’s attitude toward “English for the Children” is working to the advantage of Mr. Unz, who has made a calculated effort to win backing from across the ethnic and ideological spectrum. He says he has never really been worried about losing in June; his only concern was how he would win. In other words, if he could sell the initiative as nonpartisan and unifying rather than divisive, “the message that sends will be the death knell of this failed system.”

Heartened by recent polls, education mavens like Diane Ravitch, the former assistant secretary of education, are predicting that the Unz initiative will trigger a national backlash against bilingual education.

Which brings us back to New York. Here, more than 160,000 public school children are eligible for bilingual instruction in their native tongue (mainly Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Haitian-Creole). A state statute decrees that new immigrants be placed in bilingual classes for a maximum of three years, after which they must take an English proficiency test. If they score below the 40th percentile (against the general population), they are automatically exempted from the three-year rule and sent back into bilingual classrooms.

The parents of Bushwick argued that the bilingual programs were fostering illiteracy, albeit illiteracy in two languages. Ada Jimenez, for instance, testified in a written affidavit that her grandson was placed in a bilingual kindergarten class because of his last name, even though he spoke no Spanish. He remained in bilingual classes until 5th grade. He is now in 7th grade and cannot read in either language, Ms. Jimenez testified.

Of course, not all immigrants are so focused on learning English. The American Association of Jews From the Former Soviet Union is currently lobbying to exempt immigrants who are older than 65 and have been in the country for more than five years from an English-language citizenship test. No doubt, many of these elderly immigrants deserve the benefits of full citizenship.

Still, it’s worth considering the words of the soft-spoken Mexican-American writer Richard Rodriguez: “Those who have the most to lose in a bilingual America are the foreign-speaking poor…Only when I was able to think of myself as an American, no longer an alien in a gringo society, could I seek the rights and opportunities necessary for full public individuality.”



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