Fact No. 1: Arizona does a poor job of educating children who speak little or no English.
Fact No. 2: Bilingual education is one of several techniques used in Arizona to educate these children.
The mistaken premise born of an uncritical look at these two facts: Bilingual education is to blame for poor student achievement.
Prop. 203, the so-called English for the Children initiative, takes that erroneous assumption to a ridiculous extreme by proposing to improve education in Arizona by eliminating bilingual programs.
It is the wrong answer.
Voters should reject this measure.
Only about a third of the students in Arizona who have limited proficiency in English are in bilingual programs. It is one of a variety of educational options available to parents and school districts. It cannot possibly be the sole reason for the success or failure of the entire population of students with limited English skills.
Ironically, statistics from the Arizona Department of Education suggest that bilingual education is the most successful of the methods in use with these students, according to an analysis of three years worth of achievement test scores by the Arizona Language Education Council.
It needs to be improved and expanded, not eliminated.
Replacing bilingual education with one-year English-only “immersion” classes would be a tragic return to a system that failed generations of Mexican-Americans and Native Americans.
When such immersion programs were used at Tucson Unified School District from 1919 to 1967, graduation rates for Latinos never rose above 40 percent.
Today, that school district’s comprehensive bilingual program is credited with a Latino dropout rate of less than 8 percent, says Alejandra Sotomayor, curriculum specialist at TUSD and co-chair of the Arizona Language Education Council. That compares favorably with a statewide dropout rate for Latino students of 17 percent.
Districts such as TUSD that support good bilingual programs do so with little help from the Legislature.
The state currently spends far less to educate students who don’t speak English than a 1988 study said was necessary. In January, a federal judge said that miserly funding amounts to discrimination against non-English speaking students.
Inadequate funding, not bilingual education, should be the target of those who want to improve education for children who do not speak English.
Supporters of Prop. 203, a clone of a California measure that passed two years ago, point to recent test-score gains by California students to justify importing their poison proposition to Arizona. But the crowing is as mistaken as their premise.
The improved scores in California were across the board, not limited to students who had formerly been in bilingual programs. In addition, those improved scores came after California mandated smaller class sizes and launched a reading program that stressed phonics.
Supporters of the proposed ban on bilingual education are also fond of saying that Arizona is home to children who speak 72 different languages. Teachers can’t be found to offer bilingual instruction in all those languages, they say.
This time they are right. In fact, there aren’t enough bilingual teachers to offer instruction in Spanish, Navajo, Apache or Hopi.
But when teachers can be found, good bilingual programs can help students succeed. It is a valuable educational tool that should remain an option for parents and schools.
It should not be banned.
Prop. 203 should not become law.
Comments are closed.