Ethnic Politics Fails Our Schoolchildren

Latino parents have complained bitterly for some time that all day long their children are exposed to Spanish in school and only for a few minutes to English. Efforts to get their children transferred are resisted. “We know best,” the teacher or principal says. In some cases, it has taken a year to remove a child from bilingual education even if the child speaks no Spanish.

Why is bilingual education able to continue this way, against the wishes of many parents and its almost total failure in most schools in the U.S.?

Bilingual education began decades ago as an effort to help immigrants, mostly Spanish speakers, learn English. It has since become “a multibillion-dollar hog trough that feeds arrogant education bureaucrats and militant Hispanic separatists,” according to Glen Garvin, a journalist writing in Reason magazine.

While Latino parents have been protesting for some time, only in recent years have they been occasionally successful. The most impressive opposition to date is the “English for the Children” ballot initiative in California to be voted on June 2.

Misunderstandings abound over bilingual education: It is not about learning and speaking two languages at the same time.

The ideal was transitional bilingual education (TBE), in which most of the instruction was in students’ native languages while they learned English. This way they would not fall behind in academic courses. But TBE fell victim to theorists of language education--”facilitation theorists”--who claim that children cannot learn a second language until they are fully literate in their first. This process supposedly takes six or seven years, during which the students are supposed to be taught their native language. Slowly, English is worked into the curriculum until the “threshold” is crossed, and then the student can go into English classes. In other words, children are to learn English by being taught in Spanish. As the principal of a Los Angeles school said in Garvin’s article, “Loco, completamente loco.”

TBE has been a failure; it has kept many students too long in the program and has retarded students’ ability to learn in either Spanish or English. Immersion programs do much better--80% who enter in kindergarten are mainstreamed after three years, whereas only 22% in TBE are moved out of the program after second grade.

Even though poll after poll in Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, Miami and New York shows that parents want their children taught in English, not Spanish, activists keep insisting on bilingualism, as do academic supporters of bilingualism.

The debate has overtones of ethnic politics; it is about Latino power and culture, about ethnic pride, so-called victimhood and preferential treatment through affirmative action. Money and grants are involved, and to trigger funds a minimum number of students is required. There is a huge bureaucracy of administrators, bilingual teachers, psychologists and textbook publishers at the funding trough. In California, 1.3 million students attend bilingual classes at a cost of more than $300 million a year.

A proposal to do away with bilingual education will be on the California ballot in June as Proposition 227, sponsored by entrepreneur Ron Unz. Since most Latino parents prefer their children to learn English as soon as possible, the measure should pass. They believe, correctly, that English literacy is the key to success in the U.S. But most students in bilingual programs never really learn to read or write English well, and Spanish-speakers leave school at the highest rate of any ethnic group. Bilingual education also defeats efforts to assimilate children into U.S. society and keeps Spanish-speakers from getting better-paying jobs.

The solution that Unz and others insist on: one year of sheltered English immersion, then placement in regular classrooms. Most people seem to agree--except bilingual teachers, administrators and multiculturists who want not only language training but also cultural maintenance, or in other words, little Quebecs in states like California, New York, Texas and Florida.