10/31/00 10:30 a.m.
The Times, Bilingual Ed, & Hillary
Why is the Times ignoring its own reporting?

By Jim Boulet Jr., executive director, English First

o the New York Times editorial-page writers bother to read the rest of their newspaper? The Times lead editorial on October 30th, entitled "Improving Bilingual Education," suggests the answer is no.

Over the years, the Times news pages have identified many real problems with bilingual education. On October 22nd of this year, the paper carried a story entitled "Answers to an English Question" which stated:

It is not that critics of New York City's entrenched bilingual education program — a virtual system within a system that educates one in six public school students — lack ammunition. Though such programs were intended to be transitional, nearly half of all students enrolled in bilingual education or the more intensive English-as-a-second-language classes fail to master English well enough to leave the program after three years, according to a study released last month by the City Board of Education.

That same story told of a Sudanese girl who was forced into bilingual education for 14 months even though she had previously attended a British school.

The Times told a similar tale in a January 4, 1993 front-page story entitled "School Programs Assailed as Bilingual Bureaucracy." We learned of Vanessa Correa, who was assigned to bilingual education even though she had been born in the United States and "her first and only language was English."

The New York Times editorial board has now decided that the many problems associated with bilingual education can be traced to "a lack of qualified teachers. By junior high school, nearly one in three bilingual teachers is uncertified… Imagine being a foreign-born child struggling to learn English from a teacher who does not speak it fluently."

There are two problems with this line of argument. First, the notion that greater teacher certification could help children achieve more in school has been tried and found wanting in a 1989 case, Teresa P. v. Berkeley Unified School District.

The Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) was sued by the Multiculture Education Training and Advocacy Project and the Legal Aid Society of Alameda County because the school district dared to offer an intensive English alternative to bilingual education.

The plaintiffs insisted the school district had failed to hire enough qualified teachers for the English program. By qualified they meant teachers "with a language development specialist credential, a bilingual-crosscultural certificate of proficiency or a bilingual-crosscultural specialist credential."

Yet after listening to expert testimony, the judge stated: "there is no difference in achievement success of LEP [Limited English Proficient] students in the BUSD between students with credentialed teachers and students who do not have credentialed teachers."

Second, bilingual-education programs have never been all that concerned about English fluency for either students or teachers. When Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act in 1974, it was specific on the teacher being fluent in the student's language — while English fluency was never mentioned by Congress until 1994.

New York City's bilingual programs contain teachers mystified by the English language — as reported by the New York Times. We have read about Christina Reyes, who was born in New York and spoke fluent English. Yet she was assigned to a bilingual kindergarten. Her mother complained that her daughter's "bilingual" teacher spoke little English herself.

Ada Jimenez noticed the same problem and stated, in a 1996 op-ed for the Times, "I realized that some of the instructors could barely carry on a conversation in English."

New York City is required to provide bilingual education and Spanish-speaking teachers, thanks to a 1974 federal consent decree. Other regions of the country are under similar constraints because of "voluntary compliance agreements" forced on them during the 1970's and 1990's by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights.

All of these government mandates collide with an unavoidable fact: There simply aren't enough teachers to go around. Kaye Stripling, an assistant school superintendent in Houston, Texas, told Education Week: "If we could hire every bilingual teacher graduate this year in the state of Texas, we still wouldn't have enough.

Places like Allentown, Pennsylvania, end up sending recruiters to Puerto Rico. Houston, Texas, tried a more aggressive approach. As first reported by a local television station, school-district employees "helped elementary [school] bilingual teachers in the program cheat on teaching exams, cover up false or deficient credentials, and smuggle illegal aliens into the country."

Some of these "bilingual" teachers were given a Spanish translation of a required basic-skills test that was supposed to be taken in English. According to Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Della May Moore, some of the district's bilingual teachers had "very limited use of English."

Now if your interest is in preserving Spanish, a teacher's fluency in English is irrelevant. Consider the remarks of a principal of New York City Spanish-English bilingual school, Sidney Morison, who argues that "English, as a majority language, is acquired naturally by children living in the United States. Spanish, on the other hand, has to be nurtured, developed and protected."

In this man's opinion Spanish speakers were akin to redwood trees. And other people deserved to be paid to "protect" them.

It is essential to understand that bilingual education is much more about jobs for teachers, than it ever was about children learning English. Bilingual-education mandates mean not only preserving jobs, but making those jobs pay more, and increasing the number of teacher's union members.

This may suggest why the Times' editorial declared that "critics of the system are touting a radical program in which students would receive all instruction in English only." (Never mind that this "radical" notion has successfully integrated immigrant children into mainstream America for generations.)

This "radical program" of English immersion means eliminating bilingual-education mandates. That would mean possibly putting bilingual educators and administrators out of work, something the National Education Association would strongly object to.

Bilingual educators themselves are well aware of their risky perch at the public trough. An unhappy District of Columbia bilingual-education director made this point at a 1983 congressional hearing:

One of the problems we find in school systems right now is that language teachers live a very precarious existence. They do not want to get more courses to get recertified because they don't know if next year they will have a job. Sure enough, they will have a job, but outside of the classroom, someone will use the resources of these teachers in working private (sic).

There is a further benefit to the Times's position on bilingual education: It does nothing to undermine its endorsed candidate for the U.S. Senate, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In 1998, Hillary was given an opportunity to address the 20th anniversary conference of the National Council of La Raza. The National Council of La Raza is a big booster of bilingual education. Hillary did not disappoint them. The Detroit Free Press quoted her as saying, "We need to be sure we make the public school system work for every child, no matter where that child comes from." She added "We want every child to speak English. Now does that mean they should give up their native tongue? Of course not."

In Hillary land, "it takes a village" to ensure a child maintains the language of his ancestors. Yet a good number of the residents of her village would far prefer to take care of language training at home and allow the public schools concentrate on English.

As Ernesto Ortiz, a foreman on a South Texas ranch, told an interviewer, "My children learn Spanish in school so they can grow up to be busboys and waiters. I teach them English at home so they can grow up to be doctors and lawyers."