Bilingual Schooling is the Next Fight

CALIFORNIA has a history of setting national trends with bad ballot measures. First it was the anti-immigrant Proposition 187. Then it was the anti-affirmative-action Proposition 209. Now it’s the “English for the Children” initiative, which will probably appear on the ballot in 1998.

The proposed measure’s objective is to abolish bilingual education. A multimillionaire software entrepreneur, Ron Unz, is funding the effort. He says bilingual education must go because it does not successfully teach children English and is too costly. He calls bilingual education “a bizarre government program.”

Unz and his fellow conservatives have successfully recruited a group of Latino immigrant parents to support their initiative. The parents are not conservative Republicans. They are simply upset that their children’s school bilingual program is not teaching them English fast enough.

It’s understandable that some parents may be disenchanted if the bilingual program their children are enrolled in is not doing its job. But abolishing bilingual education will not solve the problem. It will only make it more difficult for their children to learn English.

Without bilingual education, non-English speaking children will be immersed in strictly English-speaking classrooms. In effect, the state will throw these kids into the swimming pool before they’ve learned to swim.

Instead of ending bilingual education, California should get better-qualified teachers and provide the resources necessary to make the program viable.

But proponents of the initiative will hear nothing of it. Though Unz has said the initiative should not be interpreted as yet another ballot measure against immigrants, it’s hard to take it any other way. The new initiative, much like Proposition 187, will mostly affect immigrant children and U.S.-born children of immigrants.

And proponents of the measure to end bilingual education have more than classrooms in mind. Their agenda is directly connected to the English-only movement that started in the 1970s in California and has spread nationwide since then. In 1986, that movement succeeded in passing an initiative making English California’s official language. English-only proponents have fought a similar, but so far unsuccessful, battle in the U.S. Congress to make English the nation’s official language.

Backers of the proposed “English for the Children” initiative and other English-only efforts are sadly out of touch. The economic realities here in the United States make it imperative that bilingual education in our public schools expand into multilingual education, and that multicultural curriculum expand as well.

Our public schools have the responsibility to prepare all our youth — both immigrant and U.S. born — with the language skills necessary to meet the challenges of the 21st century.


Letters in response:

By Fernando Vega

By Thomas J. Mucha



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