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The Democracy Center works globally to advance social justice through investigation and reporting, training citizens in public advocacy, and leading international citizen campaigns.
A Newsletter Of The Democracy Center
Fall 1997
The Anti-Bilingual Education Initiative
A Father's View
by Jim Shultz
Executive Director of The Democracy Center
I will always remember Elly's first day of kindergarten. She skipped and sang as we walked the last block to her new school. Just weeks earlier my wife and I returned to San Francisco from Bolivia. We served there as volunteers in an orphanage and Elly was the surprise daughter we had fallen in love with and adopted. A big part of our getting resettled was finding a public school with a strong Spanish bilingual program to help Elly make a smooth transition to English. As she sat with all the other squirmy kindergartners her teacher, Ms. Blair, greeted them with a warm "Buenos Dias, Good Morning".
Our choice of bilingual education was a careful one and for us the right one. Elly (a fifth grader now) mastered English quickly, helped along in classrooms where she could understand and be understood in her native Spanish. Two years later we brought home Miguel and made the same choice, putting him in a bilingual class as well. Now a new ballot initiative proposes to take that parent choice and tear it to shreds. It would have forced us, against our wishes, to put our kids into classrooms where they wouldn't have understand a word.
ONE MILLIONAIRE, ONE BAD IDEA
Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley millionaire and aspiring GOP politician, is bankrolling this June's anti-bilingual initiative. If it was about improving bilingual education I'd support it. But the initiative isn't about with what happens inside a bilingual classroom. What it's about is eliminating the ability of parents to choose bilingual classes. It also sets the stage for a nightmare of bureaucracy and chaos for all children when they return to school next fall.
Behind the lofty rhetoric of its backers, take a look at what the Unz initiative would actually do. The initiative targets children who are younger than 10 and not already completely fluent in English. Unz would force these children into classrooms where all the materials and instruction are in English. Parents would have no choice, it would be the law. The only way that parents would be able to transfer their children into a bilingual class would be through a cruel and foolish "lab test".
GOOD BYE PARENT CHOICE
The Unz "lab test" works like this. Only after children have been forced to spend a full thirty days in these English-only classrooms could parents seek a transfer into a bilingual class. To get a transfer parents would have to get the teacher, the principal, and the district superintendent of schools to all agree. Imagine the chaos of thousands of parents trying to get the school bureaucracy to change their child's classroom, assuming of course that is even a space left. Children would have to repeat this "lab test" every school year. This is not exaggeration. It is in the law Unz wrote.
Starting off the school year on the wrong foot is every parent's September nightmare. The Unz initiative would make it the law, by forcing thousands of children to start the year unsettled and alienated. The initiative's sponsors claim they're for parent choice, but as a parent this doesn't look much like choice to me. When you look at the actual law Unz wrote it becomes clear that he didn't think very hard about how it would actually work.
The initiative is about one man with a large checkbook seeking to impose his own rigid "one size fits all" ideology on thousands of children and families who want no part of it. In the end it should be a child's parents, not Mr. Unz, who decide how best to help their child learn English. With all due respect, if I want Mr. Unz's guidance about what to make my kids for lunch, what time to put them to bed, or how to educate them - I'll give him a call.
This article was originally broadcast as an a commentary on The California Report on KQED radio in October 1997.