|
 t
is, alas, hard to measure the collapse of the Bush administration
in the matter of education. The bill that is making its way through
Congress has good points in it, even as it can be said, with Christian
resolution, that Sen. Kennedy has good points in him — indeed, it
is mostly a Kennedy bill. The national despair over bad education
is as dogged as the administration's refusal to do anything substantive
about it. Concern for education is almost always listed as the first
concern of the citizenry. Well, there are two ways to better education
in those parts of the country where education languishes. One is
to encourage competitive schooling; another is to mercy-kill bilingual
education.
On the matter
of vouchers, millions have been spent and very little progress recorded.
The teachers unions, the most disciplined in the country — setting
aside the inchoate union of trial lawyers — has obstructed private
schooling as if it were the enemy, rather than the friend, of public
schooling. The voucher can be said to have run into a stone wall,
political and constitutional. But the persistence of bilingual education
is very difficult to understand, and millions, under the present
system, will find it difficult to understand why as mature "Americans"
they will feel estranged from the American mainstream. And it isn't
the fault of the immigrants. It is the fault of the professionals
whose stake, very simply, is in federal bilingual money. They are
the equivalent of the class of Americans who made horse carriages
in 1910, averring the right to continue in their profession athwart
the advent of the automobile.
There is much
seething on this subject, with a column by Ruben Navarrette Jr.
in the Chicago Tribune, another by John O'Sullivan in National
Review, both deeply informed. But the great presence onstage
in this struggle has been Ron Unz, a California software millionaire
who has made the cause his own.
He did this
by sponsoring plebiscites on the subject, first in California, then
in Arizona. Now get this figure: In California, the unions outspent
him 25-1. Yet Proposition 227 prevailed with a 22-point margin.
Flash forward to Arizona, 2000. There the bilingualists outspent
him again, but this time by a mere 10-1. The anti-bilingual cause
nevertheless won by a 26-point margin. Contrast the presidential
contest in Arizona that same year: W. won by a 6-point margin.
Mr. Unz is
going to carry on the fight in Colorado, but he is wondering: What
does it take to get the government of the United States to cut out
this subsidy of anti-Hispanic education?
The case for
language reform isn't the personal project of Ron Unz. The need
for that reform is something on the order of a pulsating national
consensus. The founder of the California Association of Bilingual
Education has admitted he was wrong in the 30 years he supported
bilingualism, becoming now a convert to the English cause. Then
came the New York Times, with a front-page story hailing
the dramatic success of education when done by English immersion.
Soon after, others called for reform: USA Today, the Washington
Post, the CBS Evening News, Jim Lehrer. Ron Unz wrote analyses
and hectored his point in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street
Journal and the New York Times. In Colorado the leader
of his campaign is one of the state's most prominent Hispanic leftists,
finally converted, and an enthusiastic convert.
The bilingualists
hold out for their patronage by recapitulating old horror stories
about the taunting of Mexican students by ethnocentric grammar-school
children. But their resistance is sustained by the misdirected enthusiasm
of President Bush. Speaking in Miami a year ago he said, "We're
now one of the largest Spanish- speaking nations in the world. .
. . Go to Miami or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago, or West New
York, New Jersey, and close your eyes and listen. You could just
as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago or San Miguel de Allende."
Yes, but you're not. You're in Miami and San Antonio and
Los Angles and Chicago and New Jersey. Mr. Bush seems to be discovering
the joys of bilingualism. Is Canada his model?
It is an entirely
different matter to encourage Hispanics to continue to know Spanish,
and indeed to encourage Americans to learn Spanish. But the ground
of education needs to be in the national idiom and the demonstrations
by Mr. Unz and others tell us one thing very directly: To the extent
education in America in grammar schools and high schools is conducted
other than in English, the students are suffering, and their disabilities
will diminish their success in life — and will encourage, in the
republic, a cultural schism of benefit to no one. President Bush's
advisers may think they are currying favor with the Hispanic community,
but that community prospers to the extent it exposes its children
to the national language.
|
