Here Comes Nueva California

He was a nice-looking man, trim, middle-aged, in clothes that hinted he spent a lot of time chipping balls on a golf course. He was sitting behind a card table stacked with clipboards and hung with an unevenly hand-lettered sign: End Bilingual Education; Support English-only in Our Schools.

“Excuse me, miss,” he called politely, “are you a registered voter in the state of California?” I told him I was, but that I wasn’t sure about signing his initiative. He wished me a good day. I hurried on, my arms full of groceries, wondering. I’d always associated the desire to end bilingual instruction with right-wing politics, but lately I’ve been reassessing.

Bilingual education seemed like an logical idea when it was first proposed in 1974. The aim was to get children in primary grades eventually fluent in English by using their primary language to help them understand the concepts behind math, English, history and social studies. That way, they could learn English without falling behind in their other studies. It should have worked. But things that sound fabulous in theory have a way of getting botched up when they’re applied to real life. For one thing, there never have been enough genuinely bilingual teachers to go around. For another, some of the teachers classified as bilingual were less-than-proficient in English. Which meant that a Spanish-speaking third-grader might be learning math todo en Espanol, instead of the envisioned mixture of the two languages that would ease him into full English fluency.

The other big assumption was that the English that ESL children were learning at school would be reinforced outside school. That assumption, too, became a casualty of real life. Due to Los Angeles’ patterns of residential segregation, many children leave for school from concentrated immigrant enclaves where English is spoken infrequently if at all. Many non-English-speaking adults cling to their original language. Perhaps from a sense of national pride and an ambivalence about becoming “too American.” Perhaps because English, with its silent letters and unending grammatical exceptions, is a hard language to learn, especially as an adult.

The numbers say that 68% of all students in the Los Angeles Unified School District are Latino. And contrary to popular assumption, most are native-born, although their parents may not be. As a result, many grow up in Los Angeles using English only if they have to. Which brings me back to the gentleman in the golf sweater.

He was African American and apparently felt strongly that the unifying language of L.A. Unified should be English. According to a Times poll released last week, he’s pretty typical of registered voters in California. Interestingly, the numbers of voters who approved the initiative to end bilingual education did not vary much by race. The biggest surprise was that Latino voters, too, felt that it was time to drop bilingual. According to the pollsters, Latino voters saw English fluency as a ticket to their children’s future success.

But there’s a significant difference between all-English instruction and the wish to return to monolingualism, which is tainted with more than a little bit of xenophobia. I suspect that part of the support for this initiative, which could appear on the ballot next June, doesn’t come from people who care about ESL children’s English proficiency but from those who assume that if the world is incomprehensible to people different from them, those people will pack up and return home.

Don’t bet on it. Whether you subscribe to the Chicano militants’ insistence that the numbers mean California is being “taken back” by the people who owned it in the first place or whether you believe demographers’ more neutral vision that population shifts are inevitable and sometimes cyclical, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of students in the district’s public schools are Latino. They are on the frontier of a new world. Our ability to help them succeed in the current mainstream may have a direct impact on their inclination to bring us into la Nueva California’s mainstream later.