Bilingual education in California’s public schools is coming to an end, and the only wonder is that it took the voters there all these years to realize that the so-called bilingual process has been hardly more than a charade.

The state’s 30-year-old system was junked earlier this month by a vote of nearly 2 to 1. Proposition 227 was heavily supported by Hispanic voters; an earlier Los Angeles Times poll showed that 84 percent of California Hispanics favored the end of bilingual instruction.

This becomes the first time that those most affected by bilingual programs have had opportunity to say they don’t like them.

Proponents of bilingual eduction, however, already are gearing up for challenges in the courts in order to salvage it. One of their arguments is that the defeat of bilingual instruction has more to do with politics than education. Actually, it was almost nothing but politics 30 years ago when activist judges, touchy-feely educators and power-hungry bureaucrats all were seeking to pacify and curry favor with Hispanic families, in California, Arizona and elsewhere around the country.

The decision in California means that English-deficient students – predominantly Hispanic – hereafter will be put into a one-year English immersion program, but fortunately with parents also having a say in this matter. Naturally, English has to be taught by teachers who presumably have a command of both languages. After a year, students would join regular classes.

Is it “sink or swim”? Yes. Is this bad? No.

Some educators are arguing that it takes as long as seven years to learn a language, which to me hardly is more than an admission that instruction is deficient, if not just plain lousy.

Contrary to the views of those folks involved in bilingual instruction, here for example in Tucson Unified School District, the truth is that even after several years of such instruction the youngsters – in any , by school administrators after more dollars, and then by that whole panoply of university researchers, attorneys and book publishers who have only their own futures and financial stakes in mind.

President Clinton made a strong pitch for the defeat of California’s Proposition 227. But his intervention was suspect; isn’t this sort of thing just politics with him? Clinton’s opinion is that a student’s experience in a bilingual program should not go beyond three years. Yet, his education secretary, William Riley, says there should be no “artificial or arbitrary time frame.” So much for the usual “clarity” out of the Clinton administration.

One of the problems I’ve always had with bilingual education is that by its very nature it tends to isolate young ethnic minorities, a situation that minorities constantly, and rightly, decry.

Public schools have been a major force both for and against assimilation, and in the latter instance, there has been (as with bilingual education) an unfortunate trend away from the process of Americanization – if that concept doesn’t strike “progressive educators” as too “trite” or “outdated.”

Californians were correct in finally deciding to begin freeing children from the bilingual bureaucracy.

Richard Salvatierra is a Tucsonan and a retired career U.S. foreign service officer.



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