Friday, January 16, 1998
‘Bilingual education’ ineffective
Initiative Schools harm Spanish-speaking kids
by not teaching English
By Ron K. Unz
As each new microchip and fiber-optic cable shrinks the
circumference of our world, more and more Americans recognize the
practical importance of bilingualism. Even today, entrepreneurs or
employees fluent in Chinese, Japanese or Spanish have a distinct
edge over their English-only peers.
But if other languages such as Chinese or Spanish are of growing
world importance, English ranks in a class by itself. Although
English is not and never has been America’s official national
language, over the past twenty years it has rapidly become the
entire world’s unofficial international language, utterly
dominating the spheres of science, technology and international
business. Fluency in Spanish may provide a significant advantage,
but lack of literacy in English represents a crippling, almost
fatal disadvantage in our global economy. For this reason, the
better public and private schools in Europe, Asia and Latin America
all provide as much English as early as possible to young
children.
During this same period, many of America’s own public schools
have stopped teaching English to young children from
non-English-speaking backgrounds. Influenced by avant-garde
pedagogy and multiculturalist ideology, educational administrators
have adopted a system of bilingual education that is usually
"bilingual" in name only.
Too often, young immigrant children are taught little or no
English – in Los Angeles, only thirty minutes a day, according to
the school district’s long-standing bilingual master plan. This is
based on the ridiculous notion that too much English too early will
damage a child’s self-esteem and learning ability. Hundreds of
thousands of these American schoolchildren spend years being taught
grammar, reading, writing and all other academic subjects in their
own "native" language–almost always Spanish – while receiving just
tiny doses of instruction in English which is taught as a foreign
language.
As one might expect, the results of such an approach to English
instruction are utterly dismal. Of the 1.3 million California
schoolchildren (a quarter of our state’s total public school
enrollment) who begin each year classified as not knowing English,
only about five percent learn English by year’s end, implying an
annual failure rate of 95 percent for existing programs.
Defenders of the status quo argue away these devastating
statistics by claiming that 5-year-old children normally require
about seven years to learn a new language and actually have much
more difficulty learning second languages than teenagers or adults;
these are academic dogmas with absolutely no basis in reality.
On the other hand, the dreadful flaws in the current
classification methodology are kept well hidden. In California,
children from immigrant or Latino backgrounds are categorized as
not knowing English if they merely score below average on English
tests, meaning that unknown numbers of children whose first and
only language is English spend their elementary school years
trapped in Spanish-only "bilingual" programs.
The real dynamic driving this bizarre system is special
government funding. School districts are provided with extra
dollars for each child who doesn’t know English. This generates the
worst sort of perverse incentive in which administrators are
financially rewarded for not teaching English to young children or
pretending that they haven’t learned the language; schools are
annually penalized for each child who becomes fluent in
English.
Under such a scheme, the widespread educational myth that young
children require seven years to learn English suddenly becomes
understandable as a necessary, enabling myth. And although no one
has been able to properly document the total amount of supplemental
spending on children limited in English, the annual total for
California certainly exceeds $400 million and probably exceeds $1
billion, sums that can buy a tremendous amount of silence or
complicity.
Unfortunately for its profiteers, "bilingual education" is
completely unworkable as well as unsuccessful. Even after twenty or
thirty years of effort, California has had absolutely no luck in
finding the enormous supply of properly certified bilingual
teachers to match the 140 languages spoken by California
schoolchildren. All sides in the debate agree that the
old-fashioned "sink or swim" method of learning English is the
worst alternative.
However, today more California schoolchildren are submerged into
this approach than are placed in properly structured bilingual
programs, although courts have ruled the former unconstitutional
and the latter legally mandatory. "Bilingual or nothing" in
practice often means "nothing."
These facts may only now be coming to the attention of
California’s affluent white elite, but they have been well-known to
the current system’s primary victims, powerless Latino immigrants
and their children.
Over recent years, there have been a series of spontaneous
protests against "bilingual education" by angry parents, most
notably the 1996 Latino boycott at Los Angeles’ 9th Street
Elementary School which directly inspired our "English for the
Children" initiative campaign. Similarly, Jaime Escalante, the
nationally-renowned Latino calculus teacher and longtime foe of
"bilingual education" has joined our initiative campaign as
Honorary Chairman.
Our initiative, which has now gathered some 800,000 signatures
and qualified for the June 1998 ballot, would end bilingual
education in California by making it truly voluntary.
Parents could still have their children placed or kept in a
bilingual program, but only if they took the affirmative step of
seeking a waiver. Since public opinion surveys, including a recent
Los Angeles Times poll, have consistently shown 80 percent to 85
percent dislike for the current program among its supposed
beneficiaries, voluntary bilingual programs will become very few
and far between. And those programs that do survive our initiative
by attracting genuine parental support are probably worth
preserving. In a state as large and diverse as California, even the
most unlikely program may occasionally succeed due to specific
local conditions or unique individuals.
But either way, all of California’s immigrant school children
finally will be granted the right to be taught English, the
universal language of advancement and opportunity, supplementing
their own family languages. Only by ending our failed system of
bilingual education can we foster the true growth of bilingualism
and the unity and prosperity of our multi-ethnic society.