Shocking Language Barrier

People who try to make a case that immigrants to California don’t want to bother learning English the way earlier generations of immigrants did need only visit a school district anywhere in the state. Schools are swamped by the enormous demand for adult-education classes in English and, to the state’s great shame, they are turning away applicants by the thousands because the budget for classes in English as a second language (ESL) is too small.

Times Education Writer Elaine Woo found, for example, that this fall the Los Angeles Unified School District will turn away 40,000 applicantswho want to enroll in English classes that are already filled to capacity. State education officials report the same long waiting lists in school districts as far away as Fresno. Chancellor Leslie Koltai of the Los Angeles Community College District says local junior colleges could have enrolled another 40,000 students in English classes this year if they could have found money to pay for them.

At the very least, these statistics should once and for all dispel the myth that underlies Proposition 63 on November’s general-election ballot, the initiative that would declare that English is California’s official language. The proponents of this measure have been getting political mileage out of the notion that the predominance of English in this state is in someway threatened--that recent immigrants, especially Latinos and Asians, are creating enclaves where only Spanish or Chinese is used. Poppycock, to use a fine old English colloquialism.

The people trying to protect English could do the state some real good by lobbying for Gov. George Deukmejian to put more money into adult English classes and by urging the Legislature to rescind the state regulations that put an arbitrary 2% ceiling on the rate at which they can grow. Whatever the original intent of that rule, it has no place in the California of the 1980s.

It is shocking that Sacramento officials failed to see this coming, despite efforts by Bill Honig, state superintendent of public instruction, to warn them. All that can be done in the near future, apparently, is for Gov. Deukmejian to sign, without delay, a bill, SB 2109, that would provide an additional $600,000 in state money for English courses this year. That would barely make barely a dent in the problem; Honig originally asked for another $6 million for adult English classes and plans to request another $21 million next year. He should get whatever it takes to help California schools meet this formidable, but exciting, challenge. California taxpayers can make no better investment in the future than in trying to help energetic and eager new arrivals learn the language that they know full well is the surest route to success in America.