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California state board of education has retreated halfway in its
aggressive attempt to undermine the anti-bilingual education initiative
passed by voters four years ago — but only halfway.
At its March
meeting, the board abandoned a move to strip parents of their exclusive
right to remove children from English-speaking classrooms. Responding
to pressure from the bilingual-education lobby, the board, which
is controlled by appointees of Democratic governor Gray Davis, had
conferred upon teachers and administrators the ability to enroll
kids in native-language maintenance programs. This would have destroyed
Proposition 227's commonsense goal
of placing children who need to learn English in classrooms where
English is spoken all day long.
Left in place,
however, is a proposal to gut another aspect of Prop. 227 —
its requirement that all children spend the first 30 days of each
school year in English-immersion settings. The board will consider
this measure at its next meeting, in April.
Intense public
pressure is what caused the first retreat; the board had apparently
hoped it could simply regulate Prop. 227 out of existence, and the
public wouldn't notice. But the public did notice, thanks in large
part to then-GOP gubernatorial candidate Richard
Riordan, who ripped into bilingual education: "It's downright
evil," he said.
And it's even
worse than Riordan imagined. A new state-sponsored test of English
proficiency has found that fully one-quarter of California children
deemed unable to speak English are in fact fluent in English. If
these results are correct, it means that 25 percent of the kids
given special language assistance actually don't need it. "Imagine
if a prison were to learn that a quarter of its inmate population
was found not guilty of the crimes it had been charged with,"
says Ron K. Unz, the author and driving force behind Prop. 227.
"That's essentially what just happened to the bilingual-education
establishment out here."
It remains
unclear how California will respond to this latest revelation, or
what the state board will do at its next meeting. Unz, for his part,
is trying to take his campaign on behalf of English to other states.
He's already succeeded in Arizona, and this fall is almost certain
to have an initiative on the ballot in Massachusetts and possibly
will place a similar measure before voters in Colorado.
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