FEATURES:
Adios, Bilingual Ed

By Jorge Amselle

Hispanic parents in California demand serious English instruction for their children

California’s Hispanic
parents are demanding real
English instruction for their children.

When American public schools first adopted "bilingual" instruction nearly 30 years ago, its purpose was to ease thousands of non-English-speaking children into the educational system and prepare them for instruction in regular, English-language classrooms. Since then, however, we know that these programs have trapped students in segregated classes, denying them the opportunity to learn English and hampering their educational and career prospects. In California, Hispanic parents have recently begun to protest a system that steers their children into classes taught largely in their native language. A small but crucial skirmish in this growing revolt occurred last year in a small elementary school in downtown Los Angeles.

The Ninth Street School, in the city’s garment district, is almost entirely Latino; it is surrounded by the sweatshops and factories where many of the students’ parents work. Nearly all the students were being taught according to orthodox bilingual methods. Under this policy, children take all of their academic courses in Spanish, receiving very little instruction in English. When parents demanded more English instruction for their children--their right under the law--school officials ignored them.

In desperation, parents turned to Alice Callaghan, an Episcopal minister who runs Las Familias Del Pueblo, the nearby community center. With her help, about 70 Latino families organized a boycott of the school, keeping their 100 or so children (a quarter of the school) out of class for nearly two weeks. The boycott generated unwelcome publicity every night on the TV news, forcing the school to provide the children with English-language classes.

Monica Garcia, a parent in Anaheim, had a similar experience. "The school placed my son in a bilingual program and only taught him in Spanish," she says. "I want my son to learn English, but the school refused to put him in the English program. I really had to fight before I could get him out." Like many parents, Garcia had not even been notified that her son had been placed in the bilingual program. "I only found out he was in the program because I saw his homework was all in Spanish," she says.

The Bad Old Days

Before the advent of bilingual education, parents like Monica Garcia had no choice at all. Public-school children who needed help with English were traditionally immersed in regular classrooms--essentially a sink-or-swim approach. Some children who struggled with the language were placed in programs for the mentally retarded; Latino kids were sometimes spanked for speaking Spanish at school. Bilingual education was supposed to be their salvation, but instead it subordinated English proficiency to the preservation of Hispanic culture and language.

Bilingual-education theory dictates five to seven years of instruction in the native language before children are taught English. Since three-quarters of all LEP students are Spanish speakers, bilingual programs in practice stress Spanish-language teaching. Today nearly a dozen states with large numbers of "limited English-proficient" (LEP) students force schools to teach children in this manner.

In these states, Hispanic children spend up to 80 percent of their day being taught exclusively in Spanish in a segregated classroom. They hear English only during recess, lunch, P.E., and music periods. Because they spend their entire grade-school career in these programs, Hispanic children generally do not achieve the solid grounding in English they need to excel in high school. Neither advanced college prep courses nor those courses required for graduation are geared to students not proficient in English. The "graduates" of bilingual education are generally stuck in remedial classes with no hope of ever graduating.

Not surprisingly, many of these students simply drop out. The drop-out rate today for all Hispanic LEP students in the United States is 50 percent, much higher than for any other group. Clearly the program that was designed to educate these students has failed, yet it is supported by a surprising number of educators and politicians. After three decades of state and federal funding, bilingual education has built its own constituency. California pays its 15,000 bilingual teachers a $5,000 stipend, and is seeking to hire thousands more. The state spends more than $300 million on what has effectively become a jobs program for Spanish-speaking teachers.

A Parents’ Revolt

Sylvia Martinez, a school parent from Salinas, has soured on bilingual education. Her son, Roberto, was placed in an all-Spanish bilingual program. "I was never told this program was voluntary or that it was a special program," she says. "I didn’t even know English was an option for my son. When I complained to his teacher, I was told that bilingual is the best program for my son, but I want him to learn English, not more Spanish." Angelina Morfin, another Salinas parent, says, "The Hispanic children are being segregated in these programs and not being taught English. I had a hard time getting my son, Fernando, out of the program, and he is still behind in school because of the time he spent in bilingual education."

These judgments are not rare among Hispanic parents. Last year the Center for Equal Opportunity commissioned a nationwide poll on the specifics of bilingual education. According to the survey, almost two-thirds of Hispanic parents wanted their children taught English as quickly as possible, and more than 80 percent preferred that their children’s academic courses be taught in English if it meant more time spent learning English.

Yet schools remain unwilling to listen to them. I have spoken with parents all over California whose school officials never notified them that their children were placed in a bilingual program, or never told them that the program uses mostly Spanish, or never admitted that the program is voluntary, or harassed and intimidated them when they tried to remove their children from the program.

Hispanic parents want what all parents want: quality educational programs that produce results. Many parents I have spoken with expressed support for alternative programs like ESL (English as a Second Language). In this program, LEP children receive a few hours of intensive English instruction each day, and join the other students in regular English-language classes the rest of the time. Unlike bilingual education, this program assists all students who need help with English, without segregating them according to their native languages. More importantly, they learn English faster.

Parents’ efforts to organize against bilingual education have been thwarted in the past because most Hispanic leaders, including lawyers for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), support it. Now Latino parents are beginning to circumvent professional Hispanic activists and the education bureaucracy by forming their own coalitions and seeking the assistance of religious and other organizations.

Battle of the Ballot Box

Recently, discontented parents have picked up a useful ally: Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz. When he first learned of the Los Angeles parents’ boycott, he decided to introduce a statewide ballot initiative to end bilingual programs. "The statutes mandating bilingual education expired in 1987," says Unz, "but the program continues to be required by regulations. Yet instead of helping children and dealing with this issue, the state legislature has been deadlocked for the last 10 years. I felt that something had to be done." Unz, who ran unsuccessfully against Pete Wilson in the Republican gubernatorial primary in 1994, has committed his personal resources to the "English for the Children".

To push his initiative, Unz has been targeting Hispanics. "I hope to get over 70 percent of the Latino vote and have really been focusing my efforts on outreach into that community," he says. In fact, he has been seeking signatures in Latino-heavy East Los Angeles. "Over 90 percent of the people I talk to end up signing the petition for the initiative. We have been very outgoing in terms of the Latino media and have had tremendous positive feedback from Spanish-language talk radio."

Fernando Vega, a long-time Democratic activist and advocate for the education of Hispanic children, has also decided that a change is needed. "When my son Oscar was in high school," Vega says, "I wanted him to take advanced math and science courses to prepare him for college, but his counselor changed his class assignments and tried to put him in shop and cooking classes. I complained, and soon other parents called me with the same problem. I found out that Hispanic kids were being tracked and routed to noncollege classes. The school had only the lowest expectations of Hispanic kids. This is what motivated me to run for school board."

Vega was elected in 1972 to the school board in Redwood City, a suburb of San Francisco, and immediately challenged this discriminatory policy. "A lot of the kids had problems with English, so I pushed to establish a bilingual education program to help them, " he says. "A few years ago, my grandson was placed in one of these bilingual programs even though he doesn’t speak Spanish. The school would not allow his parents to remove him from the program, so I told his father, Oscar, that he should run for school board and change the program." Oscar Vega was elected in 1990 to the Redwood City School Board on a promise to reform the bilingual program that he and his father had come to view as a failure.

Today Fernando Vega believes that bilingual education perpetuates the same low expectations of Hispanic children as did the old tracking system. "They force the kids with Hispanic names into these programs and segregate them. We are labeled as incapable of learning English," he says. "I expect we will get 80 to 90 percent of the Latino vote in California. MALDEF and the [Latino state] assemblymen who oppose the initiative are out of touch with the people in the barrio and they are going to have to accept the results of this election."

Gloria Matta Tuchman, a Mexican-American teacher in Santa Ana, has also become an activist against bilingual education. Tuchman first began teaching English to "language minority" children back in 1964.

"I was told in 1987 to start using the bilingual education system and teach Hispanic children in Spanish," she says. "I refused because I knew the parents of the children I taught wanted English. I was reprimanded and forbidden from speaking to parents. I was told by my school that state law required us to teach Hispanic children in Spanish. That’s when I became an activist."

Tuchman has found that teaching children in their native language leads to frustration and confusion, "especially since many pupils are often as handicapped in their native language as they are in English," she says. "The more time we spend teaching children in Spanish, the less time there is to teach them English, causing them to fall further and further behind." Tuchman attributes the persistence of the program to money and politics. "Bilingual education has become a cash cow for special interests seeking financial reward and employment. Textbook companies, researchers, universities, and attorneys all have a financial stake in maintaining the current system," she says.

Alice Callaghan, Gloria Matta Tuchman, and Fernando Vega are all actively supporting the initiative drive as cochairmen. With their help, it seems likely that Unz will collect the nearly 500,000 signatures he needs to qualify the initiative for the June 1998 ballot.

The Establishment Fights Back

Bilingual-education activists, however, have been aggressively confronting school districts that have already attempted reform. Two years ago, California’s state board of education began allowing school districts to request waivers from state-mandated bilingual education. Since then fewer than a dozen districts have applied. The Orange Unified School District, with nearly 30,000 students, is the largest so far to seek a waiver. Rick Ledesma, the only Hispanic on the Orange school board, led the waiver effort. "I want all of our children to be successful students and successful adults," Ledesma says, "but the bilingual program is an impediment which is driven by money and power and not what is best for children."

The waiver allows Orange to implement a specially designed "English intensive" program to help students learn English. The new program includes some native-language support and after-school tutoring. But bilingual activists have done everything they can to keep Orange from succeeding, including petitioning the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education to intervene. When Orange received its waiver, these activists filed a lawsuit, claiming that teaching LEP students in any program other than bilingual education is a violation of their civil rights. In fact, they also challenged the authority of the state board of education to issue waivers at all.

These activists certainly aren’t observing the wishes of parents like Emerita Carrillo, who has two daughters in Orange schools. "My children were not learning English in the bilingual program and were falling behind, she says. "The school kept telling me that bilingual was the best program, but I want Orange to be able to try the alternative program."

Emerita Carrillo wants above all else a program that will teach her children English. Between the "English for the Children" initiative and the parents’ revolt, California may yet raise awareness among Hispanic parents nationwide about the failure of bilingual education. For this affliction will not be cured until Hispanic parents organize and withdraw their children from programs that fail to teach English--a right they already have in almost every state.