Places I Never Thought I’d Be: Question 2 is wrong and racist

Election Day is less than a week away. Democrat Shannon O’Brien and Republican Mitt Romney are still debating the fine lines of issues like whether she actually raised her salary or he actually laid off workers and denied health care benefits.

At the same time, the future of Question 2 literally looms over the candidates on the ballot and the question of keeping bilingual education in schools is far from answered.

Question 2 proposes that students spend a year in an English immersion program before they are placed in an English-only classroom.

On Monday, Oct. 14, Mayor Thomas Menino said he did not support abolishing bilingual education. Before he made his announcement, both the Boston Teachers’ Union and the Boston public schools said they wanted to keep bilingual education in schools.

California millionaire Ron Unz, who partially funded the ballot question in Massachusetts, is for the abolition of bilingual education. Behind him, he’s gathered a collection of supporters who want to force children into English immersion programs like the ones in California.

According to The Boston Globe, children in California are not doing any better than they were before abolishing bilingual education. Educators in California said children are speaking more English now but they are still unclear as to whether students actually understand what they are learning in English.

California teachers told The Boston Globe that the program has had some benefits, but children are having trouble learning concepts because they are being taught entirely in English. When the concept is explained in their native language, they can begin to grasp it, but it’s hard to learn these concepts when the teacher is speaking in a language not spoken in your home.

While teachers in California have been struggling to keep up with the proposition, Unz has been free to partially finance measures in other states such as Massachusetts and Colorado to abolish bilingual education. Unz told The Boston Globe that the concerns of teachers in Massachusetts are similar to those teachers voiced in Arizona, where a similar measure also passed, and California.

But why is there is even a question on the ballot for schools that teachers oppose? Aren’t they the people who will have to enact the legislation? Aren’t they the people who could, under the proposed law, lose their licenses for up to five years for teaching in a language other than English?

I’m actually going to repeat that last fact because I didn’t believe it the first time I read it: teachers can be sued for using a language other than English in their classrooms and can lose their licenses for up to five years. That’s right, teachers can lose their licenses for helping children understand a concept by explaining in their native language.

Teachers are the people who will have to respond to this bill, yet people with no history in education are supporting the Unz referendum and claiming they know the best way to teach children. Unz himself has never been a teacher and has never worked in any classes with children. According to the website for his policy, English for the Children, he is a chairman of a Palo Alto-based financial services company.

Knowing how to write well is an important resource for people in all professions. If children are forced into classes where they can barely speak, they will not be able to learn to write well. Their main focus will be on learning English, not learning to write. How will they learn to write if they don’t speak the language they have to write in?

The whole concept of the Unz referendum makes little sense to me. Children need to learn how to read and write and how to add. Those tasks are pretty hard even for fluent English speakers. I’ve tutored a girl in the third grade in multiplication, which was pretty frustrating for both of us. She had so much trouble with these concepts that I couldn’t imagine having to teach her if she didn’t even know the language well enough.

Abolishing bilingual education will not help children learn anything. Kids are already learning English, just not as fast as some people wish they would. The heart of the bilingual education debate lies in the nationalistic American superiority complex, where children in American schools have to learn English immediately and forgo all their other learning.

In fact, according to The Boston Globe, a high turnout for white voters is what supported the proposition in California. Exit polls showed 67 percent of voters were white people, whose children are probably the least likely to be affected by bilingual education in schools. An almost equal number of Latino voters opposed the measure, but Latino voters only make up 14 percent of registered voters. White Americans who believe their culture is superior are in support of teaching children in a language they barely understand.

The entire idea behind the Unz referendum is the racist belief that everything in the United States is, or needs to be, conducted in English. Children need to learn English, and only English, to live in this country. But children deserve better than this referendum is giving them credit for. Just because they don’t speak English is not a reason to deny them the chance to learn other fundamental concepts.

One of the girls at the day care camp where I worked this summer, Lucy, was an American living in Japan and vacationing in New York for the summer. I had Lucy in my group three years a row. In those three years, she was able to speak about five words of Japanese and sing a lullaby. She’s six years old now, attends an American school in Japan and will most likely stay there for years, never learning any Japanese. No one ever suggests she be immersed in Japanese because she’s an American living in Japan, not the other way around. Immersion education only applies to foreign-born children living in the United States, not American children living abroad.

The Unz referendum apparently doesn’t apply to Lucy.

Millionaire Ron Unz is wrong and his ballot initiative is wrong. Children deserve to be learning the same things, no matter what language they speak. They don’t need to be sent to English-only classrooms to learn concepts they haven’t mastered in their own language. Massachusetts voters need to vote down this referendum and its racist origins on Election Day.