Giuliani announces formation of task force on bilingual education

Giuliani announces formation of task force on bilingual education

With critics of bilingual programs in schools growing in number in the city and nationally, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani appointed a task force lastweek to review the city’s programs and consider whether to limit the time students spend in them.

Giuliani said that he wants to return bilingual programs to their original intent – teaching students English. “We have an obligation to give students a better chance to succeed and bilingual education reform provides us with an opportunity to do that,” the mayor said in a statement.

When asked about the task force at a press conference, Giuliani said bilingual education too often “retards” the acquisition of English and ends up “in a really very cruel way hurting children.”

During the 1997-98 school year, 80,000 students were enrolled in bilingual education programs in city schools, including some 391 students taught in either Bengali, Urdu or Punjabi. There is no formal Hindi bilingual program, although Hindi-speaking students at a Jackson Heights middle school receive extra English instruction.

Giuliani and Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew – a member of the task force – declined to say whether they wanted to reduce the overall number of students in bilingual education.

The task force comes at a time when the number of bilingual programs directed at South Asian students is growing dramatically.

Last year, for example, the first Punjabi-language program in the state began at PS 226 in Richmond Hill, Queens. After opening with 12 students and one teacher, the program has now grown to 76 students and two teachers. Other schools in the district, including Richmond Hill High School, are also looking to start similar Punjabi-language programs.

Several schools in Queens, Manhattan and – starting this year – the Bronx have started Bengali-language programs and Bengali-speaking students, at 339, make up most of the enrollment in South Asian-language programs.

In bilingual programs, students are taught academic subjects in their native languages, in addition to receiving English instruction. Most students stay in bilingual classes for only two or three years, but, increasingly, critics say immigrant students are being exiled to these classes, similar the way low-performing students are shipped off to special education, never to return. But many South Asian parents and students expressed support for bilingual programs and said that, despite some problems, they are helpful and should be strengthened, not cut back.

“To my knowledge, this is the best thing if (the students) are going to go to the mainstream,” said Yogi Vohra, who was recruited to start the Punjabi-language program at PS 226. “And I agree with the chancellor. They must learn English and go to the mainstream.

“What the mayor and the chancellor are saying is that we are spending so much money and they are not learning English.”

Vohra says that his program has made a noticeable difference for his students, most from the nearby Sikh community. The school created the program after teachers notices that a growing number of Indian students were failing tests, not participating in class and only speaking Punjabi to their friends.

“They were told,” by either friends or family, “that all they had to do was sit and be quiet and don’t cause problems and they would make it through,” said Rhia Warren, principal at PS 226. “And they did – before we started this program.”

Vohra, a slight man with a booming voice, said he makes it a priority to teach students in English. In class, he frequently exhorts his students, “Speak in English, you know it.”

“Once they come here, they have to be part and parcel of this society and so they have to learn English,” he said.

But he says that if he didn’t use Punjabi, his students would be lost, a sentiment shared by his students.

“When we were in the other class, they would just talk and we wouldn’t know what they were saying,” said Jaspreet Kaur, 13, a 13-year-old who is a top student in the Punjabi class. She spoke no English when she arrived three years ago with her family from Punjab.

“They would just talk and we wouldn’t know what the teachers were saying,” she said. “But here, the teacher explains to us in Punjabi if we don’t understand. They go slower with us and that is better.”

“In our other classes, they are just prejudiced,” said Sandeep Singh, 13. “They say, ‘Go back to your country, immigrant.’ But here people don’t make fun of us because we are all the same.”

“They feel more secure and comfortable here,” said Vohra, who taught for 10 years in New Delhi before coming to New York,

Richmond Hill is not the only area with a growing number of South Asian students unable to speak English. In eastern Queens – neighborhoods like Floral Park and Little Neck – the South Asian student population has grown dramatically during the last decade and there is now an elementary school, PS 115, that is majority South Asian, with a large proportion of Malayalee-speaking students.

Although teachers at PS 115 say they are getting more students who do not understand English, the district does not believe in bilingual education and prefers to use English as a second language classes (ESL) instead.

Sachi Dastidar, a professor and a member of the school board in the area, said there is class divide among South Asians in New York that prevents many South Asian students who need bilingual education from getting it.

South Asian organizations that might advocate these programs, he said, are run by professionals who learned English at private schools in India. They don’t see a need for bilingual education for South Asians because all their friends here speak English.

But working-class immigrants are usually products for government schools in India, where English is not taught until later years, usually around sixth grade. They arrive here with little command of the language, Dastidar said.

“One group of folks here is very opposed to bilingual education and they parallel the ‘English-only’ folks,” he said. “They think you should either sink or swim.”

Although he supports some form of bilingual education, Dastidar says that it must be limited in scope and should not be for students born here to immigrant parents.

Critics of bilingual education say that students often get trapped in the classes longer than their parents wish and that it has become a self-perpetuating industry that keeps students in order to survive.

Warren, the principal at PS 226 and a supporter of bilingual education, recommended that the task force look into giving school officials more discretion to decide when a student should return to general education classes. Both the parents and children get comfortable with the bilingual classes, she said, and are sometimes reluctant to leave. “Basically, we are at the mercy of the parent,” she said. “If they want to kids to stay, they do.”

A mayoral spokeswoman, Samantha Lugo, said the mayor’s task force will be soliciting the input of parent and community organizations at public meetings. Right now, it has only three members and no representative of an immigrant organization.

“The purpose of the task force,” she said, “is to find an effective way to enable students with limited English to be integrated into the general student body.”



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