In trench warfare, the first ones to poke their heads up can expect to draw fire.??So it is with Riverside Unified School District, the first district in this inland region to declare how it will teach in English under terms of Prop. 227.

The incident should be instructive to all districts hereabouts. Ron Unz, the software tycoon who led the initiative crusade against the old standards of bilingual education, doesn’t think the Riverside plan goes far enough.??It would teach first-graders with 60 percent English instruction, setting the children on a glide path to full English instruction during fourth grade.??Prop. 227 was not specific about such things, saying only that “nearly all” instruction??should be in English (it also called for English’s use “overwhelmingly”).

Mr. Unz says that, to his mind, “nearly all” means 95 to 98 percent, not 60 percent at the start of a sliding scale.??Riverside officials feel 60 percent a perfectly reasonable starting point (the LA County Office of Education is contending that 51 percent English ought to be enough).??Riverside also points out that it is following State Board of Education guidelines, which are likewise non-specific.??Like the state’s students, we seem to be speaking different languages.

If this is going to be argued out in these terms, a lot of people are going to agree with Mr. Unz.??Most (maybe even an overwhelming majority) are likely to know that 60 percent of something isn’t nearly all of it.??We make these distinctions every day, at the market, at the mall.

But here’s something else most people are likely to recognize. Trying to meter the learning experience as if it were an even flow of electrical current is folly.??We think it ought to be acknowledged all around that the issue cannot be productively discussed in terms that imply precise calibration.

If we’re on the verge of having regulators sitting in on classes to monitor them for percentage of English content, of having standards written and studies designed to quantify a proper scaling back of second languages, then heaven help us.??There go the resources.

Riverside Unified’s plan should rise or fall on whether it is a good-faith effort to make this transition as quickly and well as can be done.??There are big complications.??We have teachers dependent on aides, on volunteers; Spanish is not the only other language involved.??Practical problems differ from school to school, classroom to classroom, grade to grade, kid to kid.??The teachers hired for their Spanish language skills, and those hired with provisional credentials for class size reduction, reflect two sharp course-changes for public education policy in the ’90s.??Now here’s another new course.

Of the 26,138 Riverside Unified students who took the STAR test last spring, 12 percent, or 3,144, had limited English proficiency. They routinely finished behind 75 to 80 percent of students in national comparisons.??Prop. 227 essentially demands their instruction in English to remedy that.??Riverside Unified proposes to engineer a transition between first and fourth grade, rather than the current, nominal first-to-sixth.??The important question about this has nothing to do with whether 60 percent English lesson content is a good start.??It’s whether this plan represents a best effort, under the law and practical conditions, to get the job done.



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