It's time to take a closer look at the performance of bilingual education

As the ‘English for the Children’ initiative moves toward the ballot, a welcome debate on language instruction deepens Today’s Commentary section symposium on bilingual schooling is a reminder of how strongly the different views in this debate are held. Also, it signals how intensely the issue is likely to be contested in coming months if a proposed initiative promoting instruction in English qualifies for the statewide ballot.

Although that measure would allow for exceptions where parents petitioned local school officials, its general mandate would be to immerse students of all backgrounds in the English language from the start of their schooling.

Echoes of today’s symposium are likely to reverberate as the debate goes forward. Anaheim bilingual teacher Jackie Rojas, for instance, offers a rationale for the policy of first helping Latino children to be more fluent in Spanish. This approach “helps children learn by building upon their prior knowledge. [Their]… primary language, Spanish, is raised to advanced fluency by using it to develop all of their [scholastic and critical] skills … Taking advantage of this background information enables students to create essential mental ‘hooks’ with which the new language, English, attaches.”

A less optimistic analysis is offered by retired public-school teacher B.D.L. Weide, who suggests the result has been “all too many of our Latino students” speaking a sloppy amalgam of the language of Mexico and the language of America sometimes called “Spanglish.”

Michael Verrengia, president of the Westminster School District’s board, reports that his district faced “constant hurdles” from the state Department of Education as it fought for the waiver from bilingual mandates that it eventually achieved. This will not surprise anyone familiar with the administrative history of the bilingual program in California. A study by the state Little Hoover Commission in 1993 revealed a seemingly willful failure to apply standards of accountability to bilingual instruction, suggesting state education bureaucrats had an investment in the system that they were not going to allow to be challenged by facts.

It was inevitable that such an uncritical approach to a major instructional component would trigger a backlash. The proposed statewide “English for the Children” initiative represents the most formidable popular response to date. The initiative’s supporters claim that it has touched on a widespread discontent with the status quo among average Latinos. An endorsement, for instance, has come from Fernando Vega, a long-time leader among Latino Democrats in the San Francisco Peninsula area. “I fought for better educational programs while I was on the Redwood City school board,” he has written in a promotional letter for the initiative. “I helped create our local ‘bilingual education’ program because I believed that it would be best for Hispanic children. But now, after many years of trying, it is obvious that bilingual education just doesn’t work and we must end it.”

Expressing agreement, in today’s symposium, is Santa Ana teacher Gloria Matta Tuchman, herself a Latina and one of the two principal co-sponsors of the initiative. “I can tell you, from firsthand experience since 1964 teaching English learners, that bilingual education is not the solution,” she writes.

Her initiative is valuable not least because it offers an opportunity to test her claims, and weigh them against those of Jackie Rojas and others in the bilingual-schooling establishment. Reliable data about bilingual’s performance in California is sketchy; the debate over the “English for the Children” initiative has already exposed that deficiency and is likely to create pressure for formal scrutiny of a system that has for too long been allowed to evade it.



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