Politics is surely making some very odd bedfellows in response to the latest California ballot proposal, which would mandate education in English for Hispanic students. The state’s leading Republican legislators, as well as the Republican governor and at least one potential Republican gubernatorial candidate, find themselves aligned with the 5,000 member California Association of Bilingual Educators in opposition to the “English for the Children” initiative.

Now, the Bilingual Educators have the most obvious reasons for being against the idea that learning in English is the best way for Spanish-speaking students to attain that prerequisite of success in America, English literacy. Clearly, if the view that these students achieve more in English speaking classrooms takes hold, many of those 5,000 bilingual educators – who earn as much as $5,000 a year more than their non-bilingual colleagues – will find themselves out of a job. Put that together with the unquestionable fact that the unions that represent teachers – bilingual and not – have shown themselves to be profoundly reform-averse in general, and the opposition from that group seems simply predictable.

The reaction from Republican movers and shakers, on the other hand, is more than puzzling. After all, it has been a long-held tenet of most Republicans that bilingual education will hold students back by retarding their assimilation into American culture and hamper their ability to become successful participants in democratic society. There is no question, furthermore, that that is a tenet that has been proved out.

The truth is that the story of bilingual education is a story of bureaucratic ineptitude and pedagogic failure. Students with Hispanic, or Hispanic-sounding, surnames have been forced into bilingual classes, regardless of their English proficiency; and the promise of greater academic success, which was the basis for the imposition of bilingual education in the first place, has never been fulfilled.

No one, it turns out, is more aware of the cruel trick bilingual education plays on Hispanic children than their parents. Support for the initiative is particularly high in parts of the state with large Hispanic populations – as well as among prominent Hispanic Democrats. As one of them whose grandchildren were placed in bilingual classes, despite their parents requests that they be schooled in English, recently put it to The Washington Times’ K.L. Billingsley, “Bilingual education is a way of immigrant-bashing. It is used to deny them an education, and that is wrong.”

Republicans, meanwhile, are showing a political yellow streak a mile wide. The state Republican chairman worries that enemies of the party will use the initiative to accuse the party of Hispanic-bashing; the only Republican in the state Assembly calls the proposal a “meat cleaver”; Attorney General Dan Lungren objects to the proposal’s “one-size-fits-all” approach; and even Gov. Pete Wilson, who boldly supported the California Civil Rights Initiative banning race and sex preference in California, is sitting on the fence on this one. To be blunt about it, rejecting an initiative to do away with a policy that has been a Republican bugbear since it was first established is political dimness of the most egregious kind.

In fact, this is a win-win situation. Getting rid of an educational policy that has been a dismal failure and is recognized as such by the very constituents who were supposed to be its chief beneficiaries makes moral, economic and political sense. Republicans in California (and in other states where this issue is bound to arrive sooner or later) ought to open their eyes and do the right thing.



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