L.A. Teachers Union Favors Policy of English Immersion

In the first stirring of professional discontent with the state’s bilingual education program, United Teachers-Los Angeles, the state’s largest local teacher union, has approved a policy favoring an English immersion approach to teaching students who do not speak English.

The vote on a referendum urging the policy shift also placed the union on record supporting the elimination of a critical component of the bilingual program, the requirement that teachers in bilingual classrooms learn a second language.

The referendum was sponsored by a group of Los Angeles teachers who said they are disillusioned with bilingual education, in part because the Los Angeles school district has threatened to reassign them to non-bilingual classes because they have refused to learn a second language.

About 100 district teachers have refused to sign a waiver agreement that requires them to take language instruction in return for keeping their bilingual classroom assignments.

The vote, conducted by mail last week and tabulated Tuesday night, will have no direct effect on the district, union and district officials said. Because the state’s bilingual education law has been allowed to lapse, however, some bilingual advocates fear that teachers frustrated with the program will begin to exert pressure on school boards to ease requirements and bolster drives to dismantle the programs statewide.

With about a third of the union’s 21,000 members voting, 78% cast ballots in favor of the referendum on immersion, an approach in which limited-English students would be taught primarily or exclusively in English.

Los Angeles elementary school teacher Sally Peterson, president of Learning English Advocates Drive, the group that sponsored the referendum, said she hopes that the vote will send a message to the public “that a great many educators have concerns about the (bilingual) approach.”

The group has supported legislation by Assemblyman Frank Hill (R-Whittier) that would force school districts to more quickly “immerse” non-English-speaking students in English-only classes.

Hill led a drive in the Legislature to greatly relax the state bilingual education law, which expired in June and was not extended. He was also the Southern California chairman of the controversial Proposition 63 campaign to make English the state’s official language. One of the main targets of the initiative, overwhelmingly approved by voters last year, was bilingual education.

Union President Wayne Johnson said he is sorry that the immersion issue was raised in the union and fears that the vote will be misinterpreted. He said he views the vote as an indictment, not of the theory of bilingual education, but of the “punitive” way it has been implemented.

Bilingual teachers in Los Angeles receive an extra $2,000 a year and are required to work an extra 2 1/2 hours a week after school. Teachers who are on bilingual waivers because they have not completed the necessary courses in culture, methodology and language must take those courses on their own time and at their own expense to become fully certified.

Of the 6,400 teachers assigned to bilingual classrooms, 2,100 are fully certified bilingual instructors. The shortage of qualified instructors, particularly Spanish bilingual teachers, led the district to recruit in Mexico City and in Madrid this year. The district requires new teachers to agree to meet bilingual certificate requirements.

Peterson said the shortage of bilingual teachers has meant that a significant number of students whose primary language is not English have received instruction almost exclusively from bilingual aides who are not credentialed teachers. She said her group believes that bilingual education has handicapped such students by preventing them from making a quick transition into mainstream classes taught in English.

She said she is not advocating “simple immersion” in English but would approve of limited translation help provided by either a bilingual aide or the instructor.

Under the bilingual approach, instruction in basic academic subjects is delivered in the primary language of the students. Although research findings are sharply divided over the merits of bilingual education, advocates of the approach contend that it is the best way to help students who lack English fluency learn English while keeping up with other school work.