Recently, the Santa Barbara School Board voted not to choose bilingual education. I respect educational choice, so if the Santa Barbara School Board wants a waiver to the state policy mandating bilingual education, then I must respect that.
However, if the Unz initiative passes, all the rest of the school districts in this state will be forced to do away with their bilingual programs, even if they’ve worked for them. They would then be mandated to put on an educational straitjacket and use only the one method chosen for them, whether they like it or not. A state mandate (and a lousy one at that) is the last thing that school districts need.
The Unz initiative states that all students shall learn English by having their lessons taught to them in English, the primary method to be used being sheltered English (simplified English that uses a lot of visual aids). As a bilingual teacher, I love sheltered English, and I use it whenever I can. But there are times when you just can’t communicate a concept without using a language the students can understand.
Try using simplified English and pure visuals to teach seventh-graders how to write a well-punctuated, five-paragraph essay (written in English, no less!) and you’ll see what a challenge it is. Every teacher with non-English-speaking students has experienced it in one way or another.
The Unz initiative states that if I then try to communicate these concepts to them in a language that both they and I understand, I will be out of compliance and, therefore, be held personally liable. Even Gloria Matta Tuchman, one of the proponents of the Unz initiative, has admitted to using Spanish with her students when she could find no other way to communicate with them. Do you think she should be sued for that? I don’t.
The Unz initiative states that students shall be placed in a sheltered-English class for a period “not normally to exceed” one year, after which time they will be placed in regular all-English classes. At least Ron Unz said something to that effect when he stood before a state Senate committee on the issue a month or two ago.
If he was trying to put some flexibility into the initiative, it didn’t convince me. Very few non-English-speaking adolescents that I’ve known have learned to speak or understand English fluently in the period of one year, let alone read literary classics or write coherent essays. Normally, it takes longer. For me, three to five years is more like it.
Looking at things in reverse, I’m a case in point: I started taking Spanish classes my sophomore year in high school. The students in my class were basically all white and middle-class, with a good educational background. Although the teachers taught us Spanish, they communicated to us a lot in English. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to communicate to us many of the concepts.
I (like most of my family) picked up Spanish very easily, like some people pick up lint on their clothes. Three years later, I graduated from high school being able to speak, read and write Spanish quite well, albeit at a very basic level. I owe a lot of my success in Spanish to my own extensive literary background in English. I can’t say that the rest of my classmates fared so well during that three-year period. Some failed, while many others struggled along, barely able to speak Spanish, and that with a very heavy accent. I couldn’t even imagine them trying to write a five-paragraph essay! And yet, if the Unz initiative passes, my junior-high-school students will be basically expected to do just that, all within a one-year period.
I sure hope that the Santa Barbara School Board didn’t have that in mind as an alternative to bilingual education for its non-English-speaking students. If they did, they’d better train their teachers really well and prepare them for what’s coming, or those faltering SAT scores they’re talking about will look stellar compared to what comes after (as if training teachers for bilingual education wasn’t hard enough).
One of the reasons the school board president says he voted against bilingual education was that for every study supporting bilingual education, another debunks it. That might be a reason to re-evaluate how bilingual education is being implemented in Santa Barbara, but it’s definitely not a good reason to scrap bilingual education altogether. Nor is it a good reason to pass a statewide mandate that all school districts have to conform to, regardless of whether they’ve succeeded with bilingual education or not.
I teach in the Santa Paula Elementary School District. While I can’t speak for all the schools in my district, I feel that I can safely say that we have a well-implemented bilingual education program. By the time most of the non-English-speaking students get to where I teach (Isbell Middle School), they’ve transitioned into all-English classes. Somebody in the lower grades must be doing their job.
The students I do get normally are recent arrivals from Mexico who know absolutely no English. What they lack in English skills, however, they make up for in their desire to learn whatever I teach them.
My goal, and that of my colleagues, is to help them transition into English as quickly as possible, but without getting behind in other classes. That’s quite a tall order. But it’s one that I and my colleagues are up to, and that we feel we are doing quite well at given the circumstances. The last thing we need at our school is a state mandate telling us how to do a job that we’re already doing quite well, thank you.
I have learned in my short career that, to be a good teacher, you have to be eclectic and use what works for you. I don’t need someone telling me that bilingual education doesn’t work when it has been working in my classroom quite well.
As far as I’m concerned, as long as I have lessons to teach and students who need to learn them, and as long as I can speak Spanish and they can understand it, I will use whatever methods it takes to transition my students into English and to keep them up to grade-level in other subjects. If that means using sheltered English, great. If that means communicating to my students in a way that both they and I understand, so much the better.
— John E. Moffitt is a bilingual teacher at Isbell Middle School in Santa Paula.
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