The California state board of education has retreated halfway in its aggressive attempt to undermine the anti-bilingual education initiative passed by voters four years ago – but only halfway.

At its March meeting, the board abandoned a move to strip parents of their exclusive right to remove children from English-speaking classrooms. Responding to pressure from the bilingual-education lobby, the board, which is controlled by appointees of Democratic governor Gray Davis, had conferred upon teachers and administrators the ability to enroll kids in native-language maintenance programs. This would have destroyed Proposition 227’s commonsense goal of placing children who need to learn English in classrooms where English is spoken all day long. Left in place, however, is a proposal to gut another aspect of Prop. 227 – its requirement that all children spend the first 30 days of each school year in English-immersion settings. The board will consider this measure at its next meeting, in April.

Intense public pressure is what caused the first retreat; the board had apparently hoped it could simply regulate Prop. 227 out of existence, and the public wouldn’t notice. But the public did notice, thanks in large part to then-GOP gubernatorial candidate Richard Riordan, who ripped into bilingual education: “It’s downright evil,” he said.

And it’s even worse than Riordan imagined. A new state-sponsored test of English proficiency has found that fully one-quarter of California children deemed unable to speak English are in fact fluent in English. If these results are correct, it means that 25 percent of the kids given special language assistance actually don’t need it. “Imagine if a prison were to learn that a quarter of its inmate population was found not guilty of the crimes it had been charged with,” says Ron K. Unz, the author and driving force behind Prop. 227. “That’s essentially what just happened to the bilingual-education establishment out here.”

It remains unclear how California will respond to this latest revelation, or what the state board will do at its next meeting. Unz, for his part, is trying to take his campaign on behalf of English to other states. He’s already succeeded in Arizona, and this fall is almost certain to have an initiative on the ballot in Massachusetts and possibly will place a similar measure before voters in Colorado.



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