This is the second in a series of articles examining the ballot questions in this year’s state elections. See today’s Opinion section for perspectives on Question 2.
They risk their lives to cross borders into this country. They leave behind family and friends. Pushed by war-torn nations, corrupt governments and the search for a better life, they come to America, the wonder of opportunity.
With this opportunity, however, comes a plethora of new struggles: the struggle to assimilate, the struggle to adapt and foremost, the struggle to learn English. In recent years, this language struggle has been at the heart of an increasingly heated national debate over the continuance of state-administered bilingual education programs. And here in Massachusetts, where bilingual programs affect roughly 39,000 students for whom English is a second language, Election Day marks the day their future will be determined once and for all.
Question 2 on the upcoming ballot attempts to replace Massachusetts’ current bilingual programs with English-immersion courses that place students into mainstream classrooms after just one year. Emulating a 1998 California law (Proposition 227), the proposal would undo legislation passed just a few months ago to improve existing bilingual programs by requiring higher teacher standards and closely monitoring students’ progress.
Funded by California-proposition writer Ron Unz, Question 2 has drawn criticism from experts across Massachusetts and admonition from specialists in California.
“In this global economy, it’s obvious you need to know English in order to compete, but it takes longer than one year,” said Boston Public Schools Bilingual Specialist Kevin Moy, a Chinese immigrant. “I just can’t see how a student can survive without a transitional period of time [between immersion and mainstream classes].”
Moy, who emphasized he needed more than seven years of immersion to become fluent in English, argued that the proposed plan is a “sink or swim” teaching method that could potentially leave many students behind.
“Question 2 presents a teaching method that is restrictive to teachers and restrictive to the school district,” he said.
While the initiative would allow parents who wish to keep their children in bilingual classrooms to request a waiver from immersion programs, the most controversial part of the proposal holds educators personally liable if parents were able to prove that being kept out of English-speaking classrooms damaged their child’s education — a provision that isn’t present in the California law.
“We want to make teachers understand that they will be held legally responsible if they continually and willfully violate the law [by speaking languages other than English in the classroom],” said Boston University political science professor Christine Rossell, co-chairman of the Massachusetts chapter of English for the Children, the organization created by Unz. She argues bilingual education slows the learning process by segregating students into classrooms where they can speak in their native language. Immersion, she says, provides the foundation for assimilation.
“The research unequivocally shows that sheltered English immersion is the most efficient way to teach children English,” she said. “Children are kept in [bilingual] classrooms longer than they need because teachers want to protect them. You would be amazed how many parents find out, to their horror, that their child is being taught almost entirely in Spanish.”
Georgina Franco, a kindergarten teacher in her 23rd year of bilingual education at Lincoln Elementary School in Richmond, Calif., argues there are more productive ways of improving English-acquisition programs than imposing new mandates. At Lincoln, almost 70 percent of students are Spanish speaking.
“At our school, bilingual education began because students weren’t grasping the material,” she said. “Bilingual programs can definitely be improved, but we should try to deal with their weaknesses rather than just dumping them altogether. I think you have to look at the population you’re serving and then determine how best to educate.”
According to the California Department of Education, less than 10 percent of California students in immersion programs were mainstreamed into regular classrooms after one year since the law was passed in 1998. A recent U.S. Department of Education report found that one in eight schools in California are failing to meet national standards.
Because Latino children make up more than 70 percent of the population in these failing schools, bilingual proponents argue that the failure of California’s program should be a warning to Massachusetts voters.
“Ron Unz is trying to bring his issue here to Massachusetts, where our programs are already working better than his,” said Daniel Navisky, press secretary for the Committee for Fairness to Children and Teachers, a Boston-based group battling the ballot question. “Under the current system in Massachusetts, roughly 22 percent of students are mainstreamed into regular classrooms after one year.”
Republican gubernatorial candidate Mitt Romney, however, disagrees. He supports the measure, calling the state’s current bilingual education system a “failed experiment.” Shannon O’Brien, on the Democratic side, is against Question 2. She said she would like to see the new legislation get a chance to work before it is replaced with English immersion for all children.
As Peruvian-immigrant Claudia Sibila, 43, put it, “The entire system is flawed.” A former teacher in Peru who worked for a bilingual intervention program within the Los Angeles Unified School District, she said the California law has neither been implemented nor enforced.
“The way bilingual education is carried out right now, the kids end up having little knowledge of English or Spanish,” she said. “If bilingual education means to preserve the language while learning English at the same time, it’s more than welcome, but the problem is that children aren’t learning. Many of the students I worked with go to the eighth-grade with second-grade-level reading, thanks to the so-called ‘bilingual education’ they’d been subjected to.”
As for Harvard-graduate Unz, who lost the 1994 Republican gubernatorial primary in California, Sibila argued his position is politically motivated, targeting the votes of white people who are unaffected by the law.
“Massachusetts has to be careful,” she said. “This law is not for education, it’s for political reasons. In California, the people who voted were not the people for whom the difference was going to count.”
Franco agrees, contending that the California proposition had a racist undertone.
“The campaign [for Proposition 227] sent a message that our government was wasting all this money on bilingual programs for people who ‘shouldn’t be here’ and haven’t assimilated,” she said. “It played on a lot a lot of racist feelings.”
Question 2 opponents also argue the proposed immersion programs allow for a loss of culture. As Dr. Reynaldo Baca, Co-Director of the Center for Multilingual Multicultural Research at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles explained it, bilingual programs “honor the background, family and culture of a student,” while immersion programs take away from it.
“[Bilingual programs] unite cultures rather than disrupt them,” he said.
Rosell, however, views this loss of language as a natural part of the assimilation process.
“You don’t have to keep the language to keep the culture,” she said. “Immigrants assimilate and become Americanized. The notion that you can stop this is an interesting but unfounded one.”
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