Opinion:
No Comprende Bilingual Education

By Izzy Lyman
September 2002 Print Edition

In liberal Massachusetts, the bilingual education reform debate is turning out to be very caliente topic.

A ballot question in November will ask whether we will do away with bilingual programs which presently enroll about 45,000 students. The initiative's sponsor, English for the Children, favors helping immigrant students learn to speak, read, and write in English as rapidly as possible - a goal that is not achieved when these children are marooned in native-language teaching classes for several years. If the initiative passes, bilingual education would be replaced with a special English-language teaching program for one year or longer.

Supporters cite sobering statistics to make their case. A study was done of the MCAS test scores for children in bilingual programs for the first two years that the test was administered. The first thing they discovered was that, as a group, bilingual children scored the lowest in the state, lower than kids in special education. Bilingual education students, noted Lincoln Tamayo in a Boston Globe opinion piece, have "the highest drop-out rates of all major groups."

Ironically, in some parts of the country that have a large population of Hispanics, reciting those type of statistics would be a meaningless endeavor. My former hometown of Miami, Florida is deeply mired in the quagmire. In the late '90s, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools - largely pushed by the business community - expanded their bilingual education programs for all students in grades K-12. The lesson in this metropolis is that you have to read and write in English and Spanish to achieve the American dream. Measures to reform bilingual education won't appear on punch-card ballots in Dade County anytime soon - unlike Massachusetts, California and Arizona,

It's pretty easy to predict the long-term results of Miami's taxpayer-funded adventures in multiculturalism: Scores of foreigners won't achieve a high degree of literacy in the national language of the United States. The social commentator, Camille Paglia has observed, "English is a very difficult language, with a huge vocabulary and many subtleties of diction, which is learned only through total immersion." In that same vein, Attorney Ed Pawlick, the publisher of Massachusetts News, has argued that "one of the greatest gifts you can give a child is a very high vocabulary so he or she can express him or herself very clearly."

After World War I and well into the late 1960s, immigrant schoolchildren typically learned English via the so-called 'sink or swim' method.

Back then it was understood that mama and papa would speak German; that dinner might be frijoles and arroz; and that Grandpa Wen Hu's tales about the Manchu Dynasty would be encouraged - at home. Meanwhile, American educators would teach little Hans, Carmencita, or Ying Ying that Yankee is spelled with two e's, that a hot dog can be eaten, and that George Washington was a grand leader - in plain English.

No civil rights crusader complained that this approach was "anti-immigrant." No parent railed that school administrators were "racist" for not offering science classes in Italian. No student whined about having a "low self-esteem" for having to read about those white-bread kids known as Dick and Jane.

In exchange, millions of youthful newcomers, like myself, received a tremendous gift for being tossed into this linguistic swimming pool. We quickly learned to speak English without sounding like graduates of the Ricky Ricardo Institute of Language. We did not 'splain, we explained.

The Lexington Institute of Virginia has scrutinized federal bilingual education programs in Massachusetts. Among their findings is that, "One program in the Boston Public Schools graduated only 9 percent of its English learners into mainstream classes in 3 years." It reported that Boston educators, however, have plenty of energy to promote goofy projects like translating the Hampton Brown Picture Dictionary into Cape Verdean Creole and offering Chinese yo-yo and palm reading clubs.

One does not need to resort to palm reading to conclude that bilingual "education" in Massachusetts is a failure. Conversely, students enrolled in English immersion classes, like those offered in California public schools, score astronomically higher on standardized tests than those in bilingual ed.

But bilingual education is a billion-dollar, tax-funded gravy train for teachers, attorneys, bureaucrats, publishers, and advocates. And its supporters know how to play political hardball. At a hearing in Boston, Senator Marc Pacheco (D-Taunton) said that the ballot question proponents put forth a proposal "with evident prejudice, bigotry and complete misunderstanding of what bilingual education has done here in Massachusetts."

Hysterical critics aside, the English for the Children campaign deserves the full support of Bay State voters who are concerned about the increasing Balkanization of the United States. Or, think of it this way: Helping an immigrant child learn English well may save him/her from a lifetime of being exploited for cheap labor by unscrupulous employers. Vote si in November for the "English Language Education in Public Schools" ballot question.

Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Harvard University graduate Ron Unz and Massachusetts educators Rosalie Pedalino Porter, Lincoln Tamayo, and Christine Rossell have been spearheading the campaign to challenge the state bilingual law, the oldest one in the nation. It was established in 1971 and requires school districts in every city or town in the Commonwealth, that have twenty children who speak the same non-English language, to create a full bilingual program.

Izzy Lyman is the daughter of Central American immigrants. To read the ballot question, visit: http://www.onenation.org/article.cfm?ID=7844.