Inside American Education (13 page)

Given this vision, the agenda of the ethnic activists is not one of transitional programs to acquire English-language skills, but rather a promotion of the foreign language as a medium of instruction throughout the curriculum, promotion of the study and praise of other aspects of the foreign culture in the schools, and (whether openly avowed or not) promotion of a sense of historic grievances against American society, both on their own behalf and on behalf of other presumed victims of American and Western civilization, at home and around the world. In short, the activist agenda goes well beyond language education, or even education in general, to encompass political and ideological issues to be addressed in the public schools at taxpayer expense—and at the expense of time available for academic subjects. This activist agenda has provoked counter-responses by various individuals and groups, including school teachers, parents, and such civic organizations as “U.S. English” and “LEAD” (Learning English Advocates Drive). The resulting clashes have ranged from shouting matches in school meetings to legal battles in the federal courts. Bilingual education has been characterized by the
Washington Post
as “the single most controversial area in public education.”
¹³

Studies of the educational effectiveness of bilingualism and of alternative approaches have been as much shrouded in controversy as every other aspect of this issue. Yet the preponderant weight of the political system and the educational system has been solidly behind bilingualism, just as if it were a proven success, and its advocates have kept bilingual programs well-supplied with school children, through methods which often circumvent the parents of both foreign and native-born children.

In San Francisco, for example, thousands of English-speaking children with educational deficiencies were assigned to bilingual classes, blacks being twice as likely to be so assigned as whites. Hundreds of other youngsters, who in fact had a foreign language as their mother tongue, were assigned to bilingual
classes in a
different
foreign language.
¹⁴
Thus a Chinese immigrant child could be assigned to a bilingual program because of speaking a foreign language—but then be put into a Spanish language class. Similarly, a Spanish-speaking child might be put into a Chinese language class—all this being based on where space happened to be available, rather than on the actual educational needs of the particular child. “Bilingual-education classes,” according to the leader of a Chinese American organization, have also been “used as a ‘dumping ground’ for educationally disadvantaged students or students with behavior problems.”
¹⁵

In short, maintaining or expanding enrollment in bilingual programs has clearly taken priority over educating children. Moreover, the deception common in other programs promoted by zealots has also been common in bilingual programs. District administrators interviewed by the
San Francisco Examiner
“downplayed the number of black students assigned to bilingual classes, first estimating the number at three”—an estimate subsequently raised to about a hundred, though the real figure turned out to be more than 750. A civil rights attorney representing minority children characterized the whole approach as a “mindless” practice of “assigning kids to wherever there is space.” It is not wholly mindless, however. Children whose parents are poorer, less educated, and less sophisticated are more likely to be assigned, or to remain, in bilingual programs. “More vocal white parents manage to maneuver their kids out of bilingual classes,” as the civil rights attorney noted.
¹⁶

The San Francisco situation is by no means unique. A national study of bilingual programs found large numbers of English-speaking minority students in programs taught in foreign languages and ostensibly designed for youngsters unable to speak Enlish. Only 16 percent of all the students in such programs were students who spoke only Spanish—the kind of student envisioned when bilingual programs were instituted. A study in Texas found that most school districts automatically categorized as “limited English proficiency” students—eligible for bilingual programs—even those Hispanic children who spoke
only
English and whose parents only occasionally spoke Spanish at home. The study concluded that English was “the dominant language” of most of the students participating in
the bilingual programs surveyed.
¹⁷
Again, the whole thrust of the policy was toward maximizing enrolments.

Hispanic youngsters are not spared in the ruthless sacrifices of school children to the interests of the bilingual lobby. American-born, English-speaking students with Spanish surnames have often been targeted for inclusion in bilingual programs. Forced to speak Spanish during so-called bilingual classes, such youngsters have been observed speaking English among themselves during recess.
¹⁸
A bilingual education teacher in Massachusetts reported speaking to Puerto Rican children in Spanish and having them reply in English.
¹⁹
Research in several California school districts showed that children classified as “limited English proficient” ranged from being predominantly better in Spanish than English in districts closer to the Mexican border to being predominantly better in English than in Spanish in districts farther north, with about two-thirds being equally proficient (or deficient) in the two languages in the intermediate city of Santa Barbara.
²⁰
A large-scale national study of bilingual programs found that two-thirds of the Hispanic children enrolled in such programs were already fluent in English, and more than four-fifths of the directors of such programs admitted that they retained students in their programs after the students had mastered English.
²¹

While the rationale for so-called bilingual programs has been presented to the public in terms of the educational needs of children whose native language is not English, what actually happens in such programs bears little relationship to that rationale. It bears much more relationship to the careers and ideologies of bilingual activists. A study of Hispanic middle-school students in Boston, for example, found that 45 percent had been kept in bilingual programs for six years or more.
²²
The criteria for being taken out of such programs are often based on achieving a given proficiency in English, so that students are retained in bilingual programs even when their English is better than their Spanish. A bilingual education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts, reported her frustration in trying for years to get such students transferred into regular classrooms:

Each year we had the same disagreement. I argued that the students, according to test scores and classroom performance,
had made enough progress in English to be able to work in a regular classroom, with some further attention to their reading and writing skills. The department head argued that they must remain in the bilingual program as long as they were not yet reading at grade level. It did not matter when I countered that many American students who speak only English do not read at grade level, or that after six or seven years of heavy instruction in Spanish without achieving good results it was probably time to try a different approach.
²³

Students retained in bilingual programs for years, without mastering either English or Spanish, have sometimes been characterized as “semi-lingual,” rather than bilingual. The bilingual label is often grossly misleading also in terms of the token amount of time spent on English—perhaps a couple of hours a week—in programs which are predominantly foreign language programs, where students may spend years before taking a single subject taught in English.
²⁴

The great majority of Hispanic parents—more than three-fourths of Mexican American parents and more than four-fifths of Cuban American parents—are opposed to the teaching of Spanish in the schools at the expense of English.
²⁵
Many Asian refugee parents in Lowell, Massachusetts, likewise declared their opposition to bilingual education for their children.
²⁶
In Springfield, Massachusetts, the Spanish-speaking bilingual teachers themselves put their own children in private schools, so that they would not be subjected to bilingual education.
²⁷
Parents in Los Angeles who did not want their children enrolled in bilingual programs have been pressured, deceived, or tricked into agreement or seeming agreement. By and large, ethnic activists oppose giving parents an option.
²⁸

That the wishes of both majority and minority parents have been over-ridden or circumvented suggests something of the power and the ruthlessness of the bilingual lobby. Much of this power comes from the U.S. Department of Education, where ethnic activists have been prominent among those writing federal guidelines, which go much further than the courts or the Congress in forcing bilingual programs into schools and forcing out alternative ways of dealing with the language problems of non-English-speaking children.
²⁹
However, bilingual activists have also been active in state and local agencies, and have been
ruthless in smearing or harassing those who do not go along with their agenda.
³⁰

More than ideological zealotry is involved in the relentless drive to maintain and expand enrollment in bilingual programs, at all costs. Federal and local subsidies add up to hundreds of dollars per child for students enrolled in bilingual programs, and teachers proficient in Spanish receive bonuses amounting to thousands of dollars each annually. Bilingualism has been aptly described as “a jobs program for Spanish-speaking teachers.”
³¹

Teachers from foreign countries who speak one of the languages used in bilingual programs can be hired in California without passing the test of basic skills required of other teachers, even if they lack a college degree and are not fluent in English.
³²
At the University of Massachusetts, candidates for their bilingual teacher program were, for a number of years, not even tested in English—all testing being done in Spanish. Moreover, a non-Hispanic woman who was fluent in Spanish, and who had taught for years in Mexico, was rejected on grounds that she was not sufficiently familiar with Puerto Rico. Among the questions she was asked was the name of three small rivers in the interior of the island
³³
—a tactic reminiscent of the questions once asked by Southern voter registrars to keep blacks from being eligible to vote.

The costs of bilingualism add up. In Dade County, Florida, it cost 50 percent more to educate an immigrant child than the cost of educating a non-immigrant child. Oakland, California, found that it was spending $7 million annually to provide native-language instruction.
³⁴
Nationally, expenditures on bilingual education have tripled in a decade.
³⁵
The largest costs, however, are paid by the students who go through programs which claim to teach them two languages but often fail to teach them mastery of one. Among adults, Hispanics fluent in English earn incomes comparable to other Americans of the same age and education level.
³⁶
To deny them that fluency is to create a life-long economic handicap.

The virtually unanimous support of bilingualism among Hispanic activists, “leaders” and “spokesmen”—in contrast to Hispanic parents—is understandable only in terms of the self-interest of those activists, “leaders” and “spokesmen,” who
benefit from the preservation of a separate ethnic enclave, preferably alienated from the larger society. This is not peculiar to Hispanics. Similar patterns can be found around the world. Activists, “leaders” and “spokesmen” for Australian aborigines promote the teaching of aboriginal languages to aborigines who already speak English, just as Maori activists in New Zealand push the teaching of the Maori language to Maoris who have grown up speaking English. In these and other countries, separate language maintenance has been part of a larger program of separatism and alienation in general. In all these disparate settings, the education of school children has been sacrificed to the financial and ideological interests of activists.

Promoters of so-called bilingual education, like the promoters of other forms of separatism, often claim that they are promoting intergroup harmony and mutual respect. “Language diversity within a society reduces ethnocentrism,” one such promoter claims,
³⁷
but it would be hard to find concrete examples of this anywhere on this planet, while there are all too many counter-examples of nations torn apart by ethnic polarization in Malaysia, murderous riots in India, and outright civil war in Sri Lanka, to name just a few. Sri Lanka is an especially poignant example, for it was at one time justly held up to the world as a model of intergroup harmony—
before
language politics became a major issue.
³⁸

One of the most widely used, and most tendentious, arguments in favor of the foreign-language and foreign-culture programs operating under the bilingual label is that a changing racial and cutural mix in the United States requires such programs, in order for American society to accommodate the newcomers. “People of color will make up one-third of the net additions to the U.S. labor force between 1985 and 2000,” according to one bilingual advocate, who has urged “second-language competencies by all students,” because otherwise a merely transitional bilingual program for minorities will lead to “the erosion, rather than the maintenance of, the minority languages.”
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