Campaign Launched To End Bilingual Education Programs In California

The creator of an initiative to end California’s bilingual education system won the support of local conservatives last week as he continued his statewide campaign drive.

Former gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz is seeking to end the placement of Spanish-speaking children in bilingual classes, a policy he says keeps some students from ever learning to speak or read English. He spoke to members of the Adam Smith Institute Friday at a breakfast meeting.

About one-fourth of public school students in the state are eligible to enroll in bilingual classes, but only about 5 percent learn enough English each year to transition into regular school classes, Unz said.

“The end result is that hundreds of thousands of these children leave the schools not knowing how to read English, not knowing how to write English and in some cases not knowing how to speak English,” he said.

Unz is promoting a school system, called “sheltered English immersion,” that would place Spanish-speaking children in an English-only class unless a parent demands and can justify the use of the bilingual program. Right now, native Spanish speakers are initially placed in bilingual classes unless their parents demand an English-only education.

California spends $320 million a year on educational programs for limited-English children, Unz said. The money is something that school administrators don’t want to give up, and some have even reprimanded teachers for using too much English with bilingual students, he added.

“If children don’t know math, you teach them math,” Unz said. “If children don’t know English, you teach them English. That’s what the school system is all about.”

Unz is president and chief executive officer of Wall Street Analytics Inc., a financial services software company based in Palo Alto. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard, Cambridge and Stanford universities.

The “English for the Children” campaign has collected more than 200,000 signatures but needs 433,000 by November to get an initiative on the statewide ballot next year, he said. The goal is to collect about 600,000 in all.

Unz has contributed more than $100,000 of his own money to the campaign, but wants the initiative to require less campaign money than any other in recent memory.

Audience members threw in their support for the initiative, and some volunteered to circulate petitions and spread the word in San Diego County.

It’s harder for teachers to find jobs in California unless they’re bilingual, said Barbara Carpenter of the County Board of Education, and that school administrators may not support Unz’ initiative.

“They will fight this to the nth degree to maintain the status quo,” she added.

The county has seen a large influx of native Spanish speakers recently, said Del Mar Councilman Andy Schooler, who supports the initiative.

“It makes perfect sense,” he said. “It’s very important that they integrate and become a part of the homogenous melting pot that the United States is.”

Members of the audience included City Attorney Casey Gwinn and Libertarian activist Richard Rider.

“I’m very supportive of what he’s doing,” Rider said. “I don’t see any particular libertarian position per se, it’s just a remarkable exercise in common sense.”

Bilingual education programs still have merit, but the question is finding the right balance of the two languages, said Ernesto Grijalva, an attorney and vice president of public policy at the San Diego Chamber of Commerce. The chamber has not taken a position on the initiative.

Grijalva grew up in an Arizona border town where the majority of the population was Hispanic. He said his English was poor in the first grade and his school banned any use of the Spanish language, even on the playground. “I had a very, very hard time in the first grade,” he said.

He transferred in second grade to a school where he was allowed to speak Spanish only on the playground, and was able to ask his friends in Spanish what he didn’t understand in English. His English improved to the point where he transferred back to the original school a year later.

“My view is that the intent of the bilingual education program was a good intent,” he said. “But that in practice has left some, and I stress some, schools and students with the perception that they didn’t need to focus as much attention on learning English.”



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