Lupe Martinez wanted her son in English class. But the Denver public school system “violated my rights,” herding her son into “bilingual education,” she told Fox News. Now Martinez and other Hispanic parents are fighting back.

They seek to place on the Colorado ballot next year a measure to curb heavy-handed bilingual education in the state. It is a “program with great intentions that went far astray,” said Rita Montero, who once backed bilingual education but is now leading the campaign to end it.

“Kids come back all the time and say they have really been hurt by this program,” Montero said. “We want our kids to be successful. We’re tired of people holding them back.”

Joseph C’de Baca, a longtime Denver public school teacher, said the bilingual education “keeps kids bi-illiterate.”

The drive to end bilingual education is not unique to Colorado. It is a national movement with recent successes in California and Arizona.

Where bilingual education is aggressively ended, test scores rise rapidly. Test scores rose over 40% for children in several California school districts after they moved from bilingual education to English immersion.

Such success turned Ken Noonan, the superintendent of schools in heavily Hispanic Oceanside, Calif., into a believer.

“For 30 years, I worked hard to promote bilingual education,” he wrote in The Washington Post last year. “I was certain that students would be confused in English-only instruction and would be lost in the shuffle. I now realize I was wrong.

“Two years ago, limited-English second-graders in Oceanside scored at the 13th percentile on a scale of 100. This year, at the same grade, limited-English students scored at the 32nd percentile. . The test results of Spanish-speaking students in other districts have risen as well.

“Now I am convinced that English immersion does work and that it should begin on a student’s first day of school. . Now I believe that using all of the resources of public education to move these students into the English-speaking mainstream early and quickly is far more important than my former romantic notions that preserving the child’s home language should be the ultimate goal of our schools.”

Of course, the usual foes will appear. Teachers unions like the program because it means more teacher members.

Hispanic activist groups like it because it confirms the separateness of Latinos. And that strengthens activists’ claims that Latinos need special treatment.

But ordinary Latinos like Martinez see it differently. And they hope that Colorado’s public school system undergoes a similar conversion.



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