Controversy Over Bilingual Education in L.A. Schools

Sad to say, it has become commonplace to scan the morning paper and steel oneself to read the day’s account of what could be described as “the irrational act of the day” and then lament its harmful repercussions. Perpetrators of these acts, if known, are usually associated with a disadvantaged social, health, or educational background, a circumstance which somehow “explains” their irrational or irresponsible behavior.

No such circumstance, however, is applicable to the group of teachers who, as declared opponents of bilingual education, reportedly “forced the Los Angeles teacher’s union to schedule a vote on a proposal that the union reject a school district offer to pay bonuses of up to $5,000 a year to 4,000 bilingual teachers” (Metro, Feb. 24). Yet, by their action, these teachers apparently refuse to acknowledge the reality of the special educational needs of over 170,000 youngsters in the elementary and secondary schools of the Los Angeles Unified School District, whose best chance for scholastic, social, and economic success now and in the technically demanding world of work and higher education of the 21st Century depends on the special training and teaching skills of bilingual teachers.

These students, many of them recent immigrants, speak little or no English, and school districts are under federal and state mandates to afford them access to the academic program equal to that provided English-speaking students. Therefore, districts are required to recruit bilingual teachers, as well as to train current and future teachers in the bilingual and English-as-a-second-language skills necessary to educate this rapidly growing segment of our student population and to do so in the language the students best comprehend, while also teaching them to understand, speak, read, and write the English language. The need for bilingual and ESL teachers is obvious, but not, apparently, to the teachers opposed to bilingual education who now propose that their union reject the school district offer to pay bonuses to bilingual and ESL teachers holding language development specialist certificates.

The teachers opposing what would be the school district’s most effective strategy for recruiting and retaining bilingual teachers are, in effect, taking the position that the provision of a meaningful education to the 170,000 limited-English-proficient students in Los Angeles schools is of little or no importance.

In view of the forgoing, one can only conclude that these teachers have lost touch with reality in terms of contemporary urban education or have developed an irrational fear of professional obsolescence.

RAMIRO GARCIA

Assistant Superintendent

Office of Bilingual-ESL Instruction

LAUSD