Honig Says Situation Will Be ‘Very Chaotic at the Local Level’ : Veto May Cause Confusion, Uncertainty in September

Gov. George Deukmejian’s veto of the bill that would have extended California’s bilingual education law will cause considerable uncertainty in the schools in September, advocates of bilingual instruction predicted Friday.

“What happens now is going to be very chaotic at the local level,” said state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig. “We’re going to have different groups arguing for different points of view . . . and some districts will go through a tortuous process.”

Others, such as Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, president of the California Assn. for Bilingual Education, said they fear that budget pressures may encourage some districts to cut corners on bilingual programs.

But officials in districts with large numbers of students who do not speak fluent English said they plan no radical shifts in policy or practice.

Keep Bilingual Teachers

“Nothing is going to change here,” Ramon Cortines, superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District, said Friday. Although a $6-million deficit has forced the layoff or reassignment of 700 teachers, clerical workers and administrators, the district spared its bilingual teachers, he said.

In Los Angeles, school board President Rita Walters expressed strong support for continuing bilingual programs in their present form. “We still have all these children with all these needs . . . and that’s not going to change because the governor vetoes a bill. California is really the wrong place for there to be any retreat at all from the provision of bilingual instruction.”

Honig said Friday that the state Department of Education will send a memo to local districts soon that will offer guidance on “what programs to follow.” The memo, he said, will incorporate some of the relaxed requirements contained in the bill passed by the Legislature, even though the governor vetoed it.

Some teacher leaders and district officials suggested, however, that the lapse of the law may allow strong challenges of certain aspects of the bilingual program.

Taught in Native Tongue

In bilingual classrooms, students receive much of their basic instruction in their native language. Teachers assigned to those classrooms ideally are fluent in the primary language spoken by the students.

Most districts also use an approach known as English as a Second Language (ESL), which differs from standard bilingual instruction in that lessons are delivered primarily in English, with the teacher or an aide translating as necessary.

In some areas, opponents of bilingual instruction would prefer to see an immersion approach prevail, in which only English is spoken.

Advocates of bilingual education said they fear the spread of the ESL and the immersion approaches, neither of which, they argued, is the most effective way to teach children who lack a sound base in speaking or writing English.

Law Set Methods

The expired state law strictly prescribed the manner in which districts should teach students lacking English fluency. It required districts to conduct a “language census” to identify which students needed bilingual instruction, and stipulated that a district had to provide bilingual instruction whenever there were at least 10 children on a grade level speaking the same primary language other than English. In addition, it required that at least one-third of the students in a bilingual classroom be fluent English speakers to avoid segregation of pupils who do not speak English.

The law also provided that districts had to staff every bilingual classroom with a fully trained bilingual teacher or with a teacher who agreed to learn the language within a few years. In the latter case, such teachers were required to sign a waiver, which allowed the district to comply with the state law.

“Now it is unclear whether teachers would be required to take the language training,” said Barbara Nelson, an assistant superintendent in charge of elementary school instruction for the Santa Ana Unified School District. “That rule might be . . . relaxed.”

Many teachers balked at learning a second language, however. In the Los Angeles school district, about 200 teachers refused to sign a bilingual waiver, and 109 were notified that they would be reassigned to other classrooms in the fall.

Questions Arise

“There has been great opposition to waivers,” said Marvin L. Katz, vice president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, the teachers’ union. “But that law is not operative now. That brings up questions as to whether the district has the right to move those teachers.”

Peter Roos, an attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance, a group that has been involved in litigation involving the rights of students who speak little English, said districts remain obligated to provide bilingual instruction under federal mandates resulting from three federal court cases that established the rights of students who speak limited English to equal educational opportunities. Many districts, including Los Angeles, agree that the federal mandates require them to supply the same level and quality of instruction to such students as the state law did.

The crucial difference, however, is that “the sort of detail we had in the state law will be missing,” Roos said. Consequently, districts “may find themselves wallowing in a vast gray area and making a lot of errors.”