With schools becoming towers of Babel, California stumbles along without a state bilingual education program

California schools are a modern-day Tower of Babel, with as many as 100 languages spoken by its student population.

California has been a melting pot for more than a century, a place where immigrants have come from all over the world in the hope of improving their and their children’s lives. While the influx of immigrants has improved the state’s cultural diversity, educating immigrant children has posed unique problems for state educators. Los Angeles’ sprawling unified school district is a virtual Tower of Babel, with more than 100 native languages spoken by the student population.

Incredibly, in the face of this growing lingual soup, California has been without a state bilingual education program for nearly six years. Whatever is done in this state to address the problem has been done on the federal dole. The reasons for this lapse are varied and complex.

Many of the difficulties schools face today with non-English-speaking students were the same decades ago: Students lag behind native-English-speakers in their studies until they master English; teachers have trouble communicating with them; and the children become caught between the two worlds of school and home. But decades ago, the problem didn’t involve nearly so many children, and the variety of languages wasn’t so pronounced. Those numbers have escalated dramatically in recent years, including a growing number from smaller countries.

While the number of Hispanic students who cannot speak English well has escalated over the past five years from 449,308 to 828,036 — an 84 percent increase — teaching English to these native-Spanish speakers is relatively easy. It’s the increase of students who speak other languages that has proven to be particularly troublesome. For example, statistics from the Department of Education show that the number of Armenian-speaking students has increased 417 percent; Hmong students, 118 percent in the past five years. The number of Korean-, Vietnamese- and Filipino-speaking students has increased also, as have many other nationalities. As these multi-cultural and multi-lingual populations have increased, problems caused by their influx have intruded into state politics. The debate over bilingual education has become more pronounced as a result.

The number of non-native-English speaking students in public education is staggering. According to the Little Hoover Commission, nearly one-third of the state’s five million students speak a primary language other than English. “Almost one million students — about one of every five students — need help either because they do not speak English at all or they speak it very poorly,” said Nathan Shapell, longtime chairman of the commission and himself an immigrant who came to the United States following World War II.

The diversity of languages spoken by these children complicates the problem. True, 75 percent speak Spanish, but the remaining 25 percent speak dozens of different languages, from Hmong to Russian to Hindi to Cambodian to Arabic to Mandarin to Filipino — and beyond.

And the number of students keeps increasing. Over the last five years, non-English-speaking student enrollment has increased 65 percent. For some languages, especially Asian languages, there are few instructors who can translate for students. Hmongs, originally from Indochina, speak a simplistic language that is difficult for Westerners to understand. “And the difference between some Chinese dialects is like the difference between English and Japanese, I am told,” said Cathie Douglas, an aide with Democratic state Senator Henry Mello of Watsonville.

The problem is especially pronounced in the state’s urban areas. “In San Francisco, where I’m from, there is probably more than 50 percent non-native English speakers,” said Ella Tom Miyamoto, a legislative advocate for the state PTA.

Current programs are not helping students learn English any faster, said Shapell. “California has a bilingual education system that pays schools more the longer they can keep students in bilingual classes, rather than rewarding schools that move children into the regular classroom.”

But there are no easy answers on the best way to educate these kids. “What we do know is that after 16 years of bilingual education, … no one knows how much it costs, no one can point to any single program that works best, and no one has measured the performance of students in any meaningful way,” said Shapell.

Despite the apparent urgency, California has been without a program to teach non-English-speaking children for more than six years. The state bilingual education act sunsetted in 1987, and every attempt by the Legislature to enact another program — mostly from Democrats — has been met with vetoes by Governor Pete Wilson or former Governor George Deukmejian, both Republicans. Bilingual educational programs do continue, largely due to federal law and funding. But the need for a state program is growing as the number of limited-English-proficient students — now called “English learners” — grows in both size and diversity of languages.

Exacerbating the problem is a hot debate over whether bilingual educational programs really work. Many critics, including angry parents of both native-English speakers and English learners, believe that the methods developed by educational theorists don’t apply to the classroom. Instead, they claim, the classes hinder native-English speakers in their general classes and slow the English learners’ progress.

“The program that was promised to be a two- to three-year transitional program was seriously flawed,” stated Sally Peterson, a Los Angeles-area teacher in a brief published by the English First Foundation — a group that opposes bilingual education. “In reality, it became a long-term, monolingual, Spanish-language development program.”

Some parents of children who speak only English are angry with current programs as well because, to qualify for federal funding, a certain percentage of native-English speakers must also attend bilingual classrooms. These parents claim that their children are being cheated by the system and are having trouble learning as a result.

Schools in San Francisco were accused of using an unusually large number of African-American students as part of the native-English speakers portion of bilingual education programs in 1991. And the Orange County Register noted a Cambodian student who told his parents he had learned some English words. “He proceeded to speak them in Spanish,” the Register reported.

In response to the problems some parents have with current bilingual programs, GOP Assemblyman Bill Morrow of Oceanside introduced a bill to allow English-speaking students to be removed from bilingual programs at the request of their parents. The bill is awaiting final amendments and then will be heard in Assembly Education.

While the bill may seem to be relatively harmless, critics say that Morrow has another agenda: to restrict bilingual education. These critics also claim that his legislation purports to fix what they see as a minor problem. To back their claim that Morrow really wants to torpedo bilingual education, some note that when he sends out copies of his bill’s outline, he also includes other material that call attention to faults in today’s bilingual programs.

Legislators who support bilingual education would like to get a set policy on the books rather than work from federal statutes. Mello, for instance, has been trying to get a bill passed for several years. His current effort, SB 33, mandates that schools provide alternative classes to non-English-speaking students, with the type of program dependent upon the number of students in the school who need additional instruction. If there are more than 100 students who speak a particular foreign language in a school, a full bilingual program is required. Schools with fewer English learners would have to implement modified programs. He introduced an nearly identical bill last year only to have it vetoed by Wilson.

Organizations like the PTA support Mello’s bill, claiming that it would build flexible programs for the kids and encourage parents to participate. Schools have little guidance from the state, said Mello staffer Douglas.

“There are a hodgepodge of programs out there,” Douglas said. And studies have shown that Hispanic first graders who are English learners and taught 80 percent of the time in Spanish, combined with a strong English-as-a-second-language program, have made great strides. “By third grade, those percentages have totally switched — 20 percent in Spanish and 80 percent in English,” said Douglas.

Mello’s SB 33 has passed out of the Senate Education Committee. If SB 33 remains in its current form — which is almost identical to the bill vetoed last year — California could be without a bilingual educational program for yet another year.



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