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Plissner's "Learning
to Love Language in a Bilingual School" (New York Times,
June 23, 2001), swiftly jumps from the indisputable — Oyster
Bilingual School attempts to teach every child a second language--to
the questionable — every school in the nation should go and
do likewise. The argument works only if a reader is unaware of certain
basic facts about Oyster in particular and bilingual education in
general.
Plissner boasts that "Oyster Bilingual Elementary is a public school"
But as a Bilingual Research Journal article by Veronica Fern,
"Oyster
School Stands the Test of Time" reports, Oyster is not just
any Washington, D.C public school:
Oyster's attendance area includes the region bounded to the north
by Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. and the National Cathedral, where
many foreign embassies are found. This area of the city is home
to upper class diplomats, politicians and other powerful professionals.
…[T]he majority of Oyster's students continues to be Latino;
approximately eighty percent (80%) were Hispanic in 1992-93. Interestingly,
although the majority of D.C.'s population is African American,
only twelve percent (12%) of the school's 321 students was [sic]
African American.
(That 12% figure merits some attention. Oyster is a school located
in a community in which a minimum of six out of every ten residents
is black. In most other contexts of civil-rights law, this would
be seen as proof of discrimination.)
Interestingly, Fern complained that:
Many of the Spanish teachers have been with Oyster since the school
opened, and were educated abroad, where the skills-based/traditional
approaches are the usual [sic] norm. Their belief in the skills-based
approaches (a.k.a. "the basics") is often supported by parents.
Perhaps this emphasis on the basics, not the bilingual program per
se, explains the reason for Oyster's relatively high test scores
and why D.C. parents "camped out for several nights last spring
to get their children in."
Limited-English-Proficient (LEP) students at Oyster hear considerable
more English on any given day than all too many kids do in allegedly
"bilingual" education programs elsewhere: Plissner notes: "Not only
do reading and writing in English and Spanish get equal class time,
but math, history, geography and beginning science are taught half
the time in Spanish and half in English."
A typical "bilingual" program all too often means that LEP children
are immersed in their ancestral tongue all day every day with as
little as two classes per week of English instruction--taught from
the perspective of the other language.
Plissner states: "The school does not see being born to Spanish
as a disadvantage. It is one step on the road toward knowing two
languages." He avoids the essential question for any national bilingual
education policy: when is the next step actually taken? There are
bilingual education advocates, like Kenji Hakuta, in his 1986 book,
Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism, who actually
suggest these programs should not be expected to teach English at
all,
The most significant thing about bilingual education is not that
it promotes bilingualism — it does not, as we shall soon see
— but rather that it gives some measure of official public
status to the political struggle of language minorities, primarily
Hispanics.
Oyster Bilingual School occupies a famous place in pro-bilingual
education literature. Supporters of bilingual education tend to
use the same handful of examples, of which Oyster is one. A few
such "successful" programs are treated as proof that every bilingual
education program everywhere is destined to succeed.
However, any education program is likely to work somewhere
so long as that school and the parents of the children involved
are entirely in support of the program. But one robin does not make
a Spring.
Unfortunately, so long as federal bilingual-education policy treats
the acquisition of English fluency as an afterthought, graduates
of such "successful" programs may still be stumped by a job-application
form written only in English.
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