ore than 10 percent of the limited-English students enrolled in Los Angeles public schools were reclassified as English proficient last year, up from less than 9 percent during the final year of bilingual education in California, according to a front-page story in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Daily News. That’s not a huge improvement, and more meaningful test-score results are due for release in a few weeks. But it’s nonetheless an interesting indicator, because this was the bilingual-education establishment’s most beloved measure during the fight over Proposition 227. And now, with bilingual ed wiped out, it’s going up.

Going To School
In the current issue of Washington City Paper, Kevin Diaz writes an excellent article on the fight to preserve the vintage-1882 Daniel Webster School in downtown D.C. (located at 10th & H Streets, NW). He tracks down an elderly woman, now living in a senior-citizen home in Rockville, Md., who attended Americanization classes at Webster in the 1930s. Naomi Litoff, an 87-year-old immigrant, fondly remembers her school days there: “You had to learn about how Congress is run, how many states there are, the Constitution, the Pledge of Allegiance, the Gettysburg Address, and Abraham Lincoln,” she tells Diaz. “I don’t know if they teach that anymore.”

They apparently don’t teach about the Americanization Movement. Diaz later quotes Peter Smith, “an architectural historian” who has urged demolishing the Webster School to make way for modern offices. His argument? The Americanization Movement “was not necessarily benign” and was full of “xenophobia and paternalism.” It didn’t teach immigrants, it sought to “indoctrinate” them. To the Webster School, he says: Good riddance.

This is a 21st-century multiculturalist talking. The Americanization Movement was actually a national effort to help the Ellis Island generation of immigrants assimilate. It helped them learn English, find jobs, and obtain citizenship. Parts of its message were co-opted and perverted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, but its primary legacy was remembered by the late Barbara Jordan in 1995: “The United States has united immigrants and their descendants around a commitment to democratic ideals and constitutional principles. People from an extraordinary range of ethnic and religious backgrounds have embraced these ideals.

There is a word for this process: Americanization.” There’s a drive underway to preserve and restore the Webster School. Whatever the building’s fate, it would be a sad legacy indeed if Naomi Litoff’s experiences there vanished like the unwanted detritus of an urban renewal project sponsored by modern-day Know Nothings.