.
English
Immersion Initiative Controversial in Any
Language
by
Judah Ken Freed
Ballot
proposal aims to end bilingual education
in Colorado. Supporters and opponents
clashing.
.
Backers
of the English Language Initiative in
Colorado intend to frustrate growing
opposition by the supporters of bilingual
education programs, which the initiative
would effectively dismantle.
The immersion
program proposed for Colorado would make
it "difficult" for parents to obtain
waivers and then would threaten educators
granting waivers with lawsuits.
Already implemented
in California and Arizona with less
restrictive opt-out provisions than
proposed for Colorado, the Unz ballot
initiative here has a 2002 counterpart in
Massachusetts, which aims to abolish
bilingual education programs there as
well.
Behind all four
initiatives is "English For the Children"
chair Ron Unz, a software millionaire and
English-only advocate who ran
unsuccessfully for California Governor in
1994 as a conservative Republican.
Unz failed to get a
similar English immersion initiative on
the 2000 ballot in Colorado. A unanimous
ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court nixed
the plan because of deceptive and
misleading language regarding parental
choice in the immersion program.
That 2000 initiative
was sponsored by U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo,
R-CD6, with One Nation Indivisible, a
group based in Washington, D.C., led by
Linda Chavez.
The 2000 state court
challenge was brought by a bilingual
education coalition under the banner
Common Sense Colorado.
Opposing the measure
in 2002 is an ad-hoc statewide coalition
headed by the English Plus Information
Clearinghouse (EPIC), based in DC, which
also is active in the Massachusetts "No"
vote campaign.
Again this year the
Colorado Supreme Court became involved, in
June invalidating Unz' initiative for the
ballot title and summary language being
"misleading" because it did not explain
the measure's severe restrictions on
parental choice.
Unz' team quickly
redrafted the initiative's petition title
and summary to gain court approval for
petition circulators to hit the streets.
(Please see related story about the
petitioning campaign in this edition.) To
qualify for the November ballot, the
Colorado Secretary of State needs to
certify a minimum of 80,571 valid
signatures by the close of business on
Monday, August 5.
Initiative
Origins
Fronting the 2002
Colorado proposal is former Denver Public
Schools board member Rita Montero with
professional translator Jeanine Chavez.
Both say bilingual education is a failed
concept that after 30 years is beyond all
repair.
With Unz and others,
Montero and Chavez claim bilingual
education does not effectively teach
English to public school students, but
instead maintains them in their native
tongues, depriving them of economic
opportunities in English-speaking America
Montero was elected
in 1995 to the DPS board with an agenda of
reforming bilingual education, which she'd
advocated in her more radical youth. She
caused adoption by DPS of the English
Language Acquisition (ELA) program, since
1999 under federal court
supervision. Complaining that her
reforms since gutted her failed bid for a
second term, she now wishes to scrap
bilingual education programs throughout
Colorado.
"Right now teaching
English as a second language is dominated
by the school district making decisions
for the child about what they think is the
best approach," said Montero.
Her opposition to
bilingual education began, she explained,
when her own English-speaking but
Spanish-surnamed child was assigned to
bilingual education classes in Denver
Public Schools. She said DPS teachers and
administrators refused, rebuffed or
ignored all requests to transfer her child
into a mainstream English
classroom.
Her experiences help
answer why the 2002 English initiative
lets parents to get a waiver from the
immersion program only by going to the
school in person, only if the school
officials write a 250 word essay about why
the student should not be in the program,
and then only if the parents of 20
students minimum likewise request waivers.
Nineteen requests do not count. Then and
only then can a school offer a bilingual
program for those waived students.
This is essentially
the same as Proposition 227 in California
and Proposition 203 in Arizona, but the
proposed Amendment to the Colorado
Constitution has an extra
kicker.
To counter numerous
opt-out waivers granted in California, all
Colorado school teachers and
administrators who grant waivers may be
the targets of lawsuits by parents or
students for up to ten years, in effect
making it too dangerous to grant any
waivers at all.
Montero took credit
for adding the lawsuits provision to the
initiative. "I wanted to make it hard for
school districts to impose their views on
parents by making it difficult for parents
to waive out of the program."
Asked if her
approach also would curtail parental
choice, she replied, "It's been extremely
easy historically in California for the
bilingual educators to waive out students
just to keep all their old programs
running, so here the waiver would have to
be triggered by a parent and not the
school district."
Montero said she
first met campaign financier Ron Unz in
2000 as a fellow-panelist at a national
conference on teaching English. Unz then
courted her by phone once or twice a
quarter, inviting her to join his English
immersion campaign.
"I kept putting him
off," she said, hoping to see her reforms
take root at DPS. Frustrated the district
apparently had abandoned her ideas, she
said, "I finally called Ron and said,
'Let's go!'"
Backup
Support?
Also listed as an
initiative sponsor at the Colorado
Secretary of State's office is Jeanine
Chavez, a professional translator who said
she got involved after helping the parents
of bilingual education students who were
having problems communicating with DPS
administrators.
As she became
acquainted with bilingual education
classroom instruction and materials, she
said, what stunned her was less that the
native Spanish speakers were not being
taught proper English, "but they were not
being taught proper Spanish either. I
can't believe we are turning kids out of
schools who are so unprepared to make a
decent life for themselves in either
language."
Chavez made news on
a KBDI-TV talk show appearance with Jorge
Garcia, director of literacy and language
support service for Boulder Valley Schools
as well as president of the National
Association of Bilingual Education. During
the broadcast, Garcia asked Chavez for
details about implementing the Unz-Montero
plan, like implementation costs, and
Chavez was unable to provide answers about
the mechanics of the proposal.
Chavez since has
distanced herself from the Unz campaign as
a spokesperson. "I've told Rita that's not
the best way I can help," she said,
inferring she's better talk about the
problem than the solution.
Garcia, on the other
hand, questions why Montero and Chavez are
backing Unz' statewide Constitutional
initiative when their real problems are
with Denver Public Schools.
He observed that DPS
is still under the jurisdiction of US
District Court Judge Richard Matsch when
it comes to bilingual education and
English as a Second Language (ESL), plus
the court-ordered ELA implementation
monitoring. (The latest court report out
in June reports major administrative
overhauls ahead.)
"Even if their
immersion initiative passes in Colorado,"
Garcia said, "Denver will be largely
unaffected by it for years to come."
Learning
the Lingo
Responding to
charges that bilingual education maintains
students in native tongues without
teaching them English, Garcia said,
"That's an urban legend. There are many
hundreds of scientific studies showing
that bilingual education is effective
teaching English to non-English-speaking
students." He offers as an example
southeast Asian Hmong in Boulder
Country.
Garcia further cites
studies that for all but the most gifted
and talented students, even most
accelerated ESL programs cannot teach
proper English speaking, reading, writing
in less than three years.
"The English
immersion program that dumps kids into
English-only classrooms after only one
year effectively dooms these kids to
failure forever after." Unz' English
immersion proposal will relegate English
learners to the same disadvantaged life
the proposal promises to prevent.
Garcia instead
points to several programs in Colorado
teaching genuine bi-literacy, a dual
ability in both English and Spanish. Worth
noting, the initiative to deconstruct
bilingual education programs in
Massachusetts is co-sponsored by Boston
University political scientist Christine
Rossell, known as a moderate who in the
past supported dual immersion or "two-way
bilingual" education.
Denise Walter of
Fort Collins has a daughter at the
bilingual Harris School in the Poudre
School District. She said the k-6
dual-language immersion program has a
student body of about 300 minds evenly
divided between native Spanish speakers
and native English speakers, Class sizes
average 25 students with one or two
teachers.
Calling herself
fluent in English and French with
"improving" Spanish because of her
daughter, Walter said she is impressed by
the quality of her daughter's general
education along with her daughter's
exacting syntax and grammar in both
tongues.
What she wants to
know is, why all the rush to dismantle
single-immersion bilingual education
programs? In the emerging global economy
where multi-lingualism translates into
hard income, if money is going to be spent
overhauling the system, why not convert
more schools into dual-immersion programs?
"Then our kids would really be ready to
compete in the 21st Century."
On the ground in the
Onterio-Montclair school district on San
Bernardino, Ca., assistant superintendent
for instructional services Dorothy Leveque
said she had not seen any major difference
in English learning achievement in her
district between those in bilingual
schools and those in immersion
schools.
"The only good thing
I can see coming from Prop 227 is that
its; brought a bit more certainty to what
before was random hodgepodge of ESL,
bilingual and other programs."
The efficacy of
English-only or 90 percent English
immersion programs are being questioned in
California, where Unz' Proposition 227 won
at the polls in 1998. Just completed is a
state-commissioned second-year study of
Prop. 227 implementation conducted by a
major educational R&D consultancy,
WestEd (wested.org).
Senior research
associate Robert Linquanti helped direct
the WestEd research and report, part of a
five-year study mandated by the state
legislature. He said they looked at all
the available student achievement data in
the state, including the ninth version of
the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT9) though
2001 for reading, language arts, and
mathematics.
They compared
student results by successive grades with
an emphasis on English learners under one
of six instructional models active in the
state, "like a snapshot of the English
learners in the second grade, then the
next grade, and so on."
Across all six
learning models, he said, which range from
English immersion to Spanish immersion
approaches, "English proficiency improved
slightly overall, but there is no way to
distinguish what is due to Proposition 227
and what is due to other state education
initiatives," such as more money for
teachers, smaller class sizes and
increasing parental
involvement.
"What may be
significant," he added, "is that in the
majority of schools districts, at each
grade level we tested, 227 seemed to make
no measurable difference in the
designation of the students English
proficiency status in terms of the
requirements needed to graduate."
Linquanti wonders if
all the bother has been worth the effort
educationally.
Clout
Will Out?
If the English
immersion program is not producing better
results in the classroom than the old
system it seeks to displace, argues the
"no" vote campaign, why would anyone back
the initiative?
The point man in the
opposition is Colorado Board of Education
member Gully Stanford, separately the PR
exec for the Denver Center for the
Performing Arts. He became the target of a
personal attack when Unz sniped at the
man's British accent. Actually, Stanford a
native son of Ireland who grew up speaking
Gaelic and is now bi-literate in English
and French with some German beside a
little Spanish and Italian.
Stanford opposes the
English-only campaigns on principle, he
said, for school districts should graduate
students conversant in more than one
language. "We live in a global society, so
we need the global tools for doing
business, which means more than one
language."
Contending the goal
of Unz' immersion initiative is really to
abolish all native languages in America
but English, Stanford seems unconcerned
about being disliked by Unz, whom he calls
"possibly xenophobic."
What bothers
Stanford most about the 2002 initiative is
the decade of legal threats to educators
who let any children waive out of the
immersion program, a policy he labels as
"monstrous."
"We believe that
provision is the fatal flaw in the
initiative," he said. If the measure makes
it onto the November ballot, he promised,
"the likely devastation for teachers and
their families will be among the many
problems for students we'll bring to the
public's attention."
Against Unz'
millions, the Colorado Hispanic Bar
Association on June 27 gathered on the
eastern steps of West High School in
Denver and contributed $10,000 to the
Colorado English Plus campaign.
Orginally
published in The Colorado
Statesman
July 2002
(c) 2002-03 by Judah Ken Freed
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