Oakland's Bilingual-Classroom Battle

Parents of English-speaking kids divided over issue

Five-year-old Travell Louie, an English-speaking child in a bilingual class in Oakland’s Chinatown, is bored when his classmates speak Cantonese. “I tell the kids, ‘My name is Travell, and I don’t understand.’ They say things like, ‘ya-see-um,’ and I can’t say that,” said Travell, who is African American.

English speaker Shingo Brann is in another bilingual kindergarten class at the same school in which most of the children speak Cantonese — but he loves it. “I know how to say ‘Oh, no’ in Chinese,” said Shingo, 5, whose father is white and whose mother is Japanese American. “And I can count to 10 in Chinese,” he added with a big smile.

Travell and Shingo are at opposite ends of a polarizing cultural dispute raging at little Lincoln Elementary School that symbolizes the statewide struggle over Proposition 227. The initiative on the June 2 ballot would eliminate instruction in languages other than English. In a case that has attracted national attention since The Chronicle reported it last month, Travell’s father is suing the Oakland Unified School District to demand an English-only classroom in his neighborhood school, where 80 percent of the children are classified as not fluent in English.

Proposition 227 proponents have cited Travell Louie’s experience as an example of how bilingual programs don’t work. But there is no agreement among English-speaking parents whose children are in such classes that they are any worse off. “I want him to be exposed to as many languages as possible,” said Shingo’s father, Scott Brann. “I’ve worked in the restaurant industry for 20-plus years, and I found the education I had in Spanish to be very beneficial.”

The lawsuit filed by Travell’s father, George Louie, has given a new voice to resentments long evident among many blacks in Oakland, where African Americans still make up a majority of students but where the proportion of Latinos and Asian Americans is growing. African American families in neighborhood schools long filled with black children now find themselves attending PTA meetings conducted largely in Spanish.

Such tensions also have surfaced in other California cities, including Los Angeles, East Palo Alto and Inglewood, where the number of minorities not fluent in English has skyrocketed as black enrollment has declined. “You saw the same thing in South Central Los Angeles,” said a state official.

In the state as a whole, 1.4 million children — almost one-fourth of all students — speak limited English. In Oakland, one-third of students cannot speak the language fluently.

Teachers in most bilingual programs are supposed to instruct mainly in English, so educators contend that the small number of English-fluent students such as Travell do not suffer. School officials say they put some English- speaking children into bilingual classes to avoid segregating foreign language students.

Some parents don’t buy the logic.

“Our babies are being misplaced into these bilingual classes,” said Isaac Taggart, a leader in the Coalition of Parents for the Defense of African Children. He became aware of the issue when he discovered that his son and niece both were in a bilingual class at Lockwood Elementary School in Oakland.

Frustration about bilingual education helped spur the ebonics debate in Oakland in 1996-97, when Taggart and others demanded that the district devote as much attention and resources to the language development of black children as for children whose primary language is not English.

Taggart also has filed a complaint with the state Department of Education alleging that African American children in Oakland are discriminated against by being placed in bilingual classes and by being overly represented in special education. The state is investigating and has not yet issued an opinion.

“Their language development is being sacrificed,” Taggart said. “You don’t see white children, wealthier children in this city being placed in those classes.” Louie and Taggart have raised similar issues, but they are not allies. Taggart stresses that he is not against bilingual education and that he opposes Proposition 227.

“I think they (non-English speakers) should have what they need for their language development, but our babies should have what they need,” Taggart said.

Louie supports Proposition 227, saying bilingual programs don’t emphasize English enough.

“I am not knocking it (bilingual education). I am just saying I don’t want my kid in it. They have rights, but I have rights, too,” he said.

Louie has a prosthetic leg and walks his son to and from school every day, so he needs to stay in his neighborhood. Oakland does not provide buses for students.

“I don’t think that’s unreasonable, to ask for the (English-only) program in my neighborhood,” Louie said.

The Oakland school district believes that the request is unreasonable, given Lincoln’s demographics. Eighty percent of the school’s students are classified as speaking limited English, and 91 percent of its children are Asian American. All four of its kindergartens are bilingual. The school district told Louie he would have to transfer to another school to find an English-only environment.

Principal Wendy Lee said that when Louie raised his concerns to her, she polled other English- speaking parents in the four kindergartens, and they did not want to move their children.

The school did agree to transfer Travell from a class where the teacher was fluent in Cantonese to a classroom where the teacher spoke limited Cantonese. An instructional assistant who speaks Cantonese is available in Travell’s new classroom.

During a recent two-hour visit, a Chronicle reporter found Travell’s class reading stories, singing songs and working on numbers in English. Teacher Elaine Mo spoke Cantonese just once, when she told a boy to sit down.

At one point, the children broke into small groups and the Cantonese-speaking instructional assistant read to a table of children in Chinese. The students also worked on drawing the Chinese character for the number five.

While the Chinese instruction was going on, Travell was at a table with an English-speaking teacher working on his numbers in English.

“That was all for show because they had a visitor,” Louie said. “Since I have been complaining, they cleaned it up.”

He said that when he visited Travell’s original classroom last fall, his son and three other English-speaking children were in the back, doing nothing, while the teacher spoke in Cantonese to the rest of the students. Taggart said he has reports of similar situations at other Oakland schools.

Stephen McCutcheon, attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents Louie, said the legal issue doesn’t center on how much Cantonese is spoken in the class. The foundation has led a number of key court challenges to bilingual education across the state.

“This is about a parent’s ability to direct their child’s education as they see fit,” McCutcheon said. “The law, the Constitution in California, is clear that parents have a right to an education in English. There is no corresponding right to an education in a foreign language.”

Lee said the focus should be on whether the children are achieving, not on the label of the classroom as bilingual or English-only.

“Travell is learning. That should be the focus of the discussion,” she said. “I think we need to spend less time worrying about the labels, if it’s a bilingual class or an English-only class. The questions a parent needs to ask are, ‘Is my child happy? Is my child doing well? Is my child safe?’ “

By those measures, a number of other English-speaking parents at Lincoln think their children are doing fine in bilingual classes.

“I don’t see this as hurting Shingo at all,” Brann said. “He’s doing first-grade work in English. He knows his letters and numbers (in English).”

Rhonda McGhee also is pleased with the program. Her African American son went through kindergarten in a bilingual class at Lincoln and now is in a bilingual first grade.

“He’s doing fine. He does better here than in his old school (where he was in an English-only class),” McGhee said of her 7-year-old son, Javier Willingham.

McGhee, who is deaf, said through a sign-language interpreter: “My son is happy. That’s all.”

Eugene Garcia, dean of the School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley, said his research has found that English speakers are not harmed academically by being placed in bilingual programs.

Garcia, who was director of the Office of Bilingual Education in the U.S. Department of Education from 1993 to 1995, said the study involved a sample of school districts in five states in 1993.

“We didn’t see the students doing positively better. And it didn’t produce any deficits,” Garcia said of the English speakers in bilingual classes.



Comments are closed.