Loco, Completamente Loco

The many failures of "bilingual education"

Glenn Garvin from the January 1998 issue

(Page 3 of 9)

"Immigrant parents always understood how damaging this was to their children," he says, "but it was hard for them to make their voices heard." Unz, a one-time Republican gubernatorial candidate, had the political and financial clout to turn up the volume. And as a longtime supporter of immigration--he was one of a tiny handful of Republican politicians to publicly oppose California's anti-immigrant Proposition 187 three years ago--he was immune to the inevitable charges of racism from bilingual advocates. Assembling a campaign around a nucleus of anti-bilingual Hispanic teachers (including Jaime Escalante, the math teacher whose success in East Los Angeles inspired the film Stand and Deliver), Unz has turned bilingual education into California's top political issue.

But the bilingual forces won't yield without a fight, certainly not to mere parents. When those buttinsky parents in Princeton were demanding the right to put their kids in English-speaking classrooms, Joseph Ramos, the co-chairman of the New Jersey Bilingual Council, advised the school board to tell them to mind their own business. "Why would we require parents unfamiliar with our educational system to make such monumental decisions," he asked, "when we as bilingual educators...are trained to make those decisions?" We know better, we're the teachers.

Some years ago, a newspaper sent me to interview S.I. Hayakawa, by then a retired senator from California. Hayakawa was legendarily combative: Asked once during a campaign stop what he thought about a local referendum on legalizing greyhound tracks, he snapped: "I'm running for the U.S. Senate. I don't give a good goddamn about dog racing." When I spoke with him, he had recently lashed out at bilingual education. It seemed paradoxical, to say the very least: Hayakawa was a native of Canada whose parents were born in Japan; he grew up speaking Japanese. He had authored a widely used book on linguistics. "Senator," I began the interview, "why are you against people learning to speak two languages?" He looked at me as though I were daft. "Who said anything about that?" he demanded. "Only an idiot would be against speaking two languages. I'm against bilingual education."

That's still the biggest misconception among people who've never had a personal brush with bilingual education. It is not a program where two sets of children learn one another's language at the same time. That's called dual, or two-way, immersion. Only a few well-heeled school districts can afford to offer it, always as an elective, and the only complaint about it is that there usually aren't enough slots to go around. Another thing bilingual education is not is a program conducted mostly in English, where the teacher occasionally translates a particularly difficult concept, or offers extra language help to children with limited English skills. Known variously as English as a Second Language, sheltered English, or structured English immersion, these are all wrinkles in a technique that educators call immersion, because the students are expected to wade into English quickly.

As Hayakawa explained to me that day, when educators use the term bilingual education, it's shorthand for "transitional bilingual education," which is the other major technique for teaching languages. TBE, as it is often called, was originally structured around the idea that students would take the main curriculum in their native language while they learned English, so that they wouldn't fall behind in other subjects. But over the past two decades or so, most school districts have reshaped their TBE programs to reflect the ideas of the so-called "facilitation" theorists of language education. The facilitation theorists believe that children cannot effectively learn a second language until they are fully literate in the first one, a process that can take four to seven years. (A new study from TBE advocates at the University of California at Riverside ups the ante to 10 years.)

During that time, a TBE student is supposed to be taught almost entirely in his native language, by a teacher fluent in that language, using books and films and tapes in that language. Gradually increasing bits of English are worked into the mix. At some point--bingo!--the child hits his "threshold" in the first language. Now he's ready to suck up English like a human vacuum cleaner.

The idea that a kid will learn English by being taught in Spanish does not usually strike people outside the education field as very plausible--"loco, completamente loco" was the reaction of Luisa Hernandez when the principal at 9th Street Elementary in Los Angeles explained it to her--but the theory is so inculcated in many teachers that they rarely question it. When they do, it can be a shattering experience. Rosalie Pedalino Porter, director of the Research in English Acquisition and Development Institute, taught Spanish bilingual classes in kindergarten and elementary school for five years in Springfield, Massachusetts. As a 6-year-old kid right off the boat from Sicily, Porter had done just fine without TBE, but education school had filled her with missionary zeal for the theory. She vividly remembers the day that she began to wonder if the bilingual god had failed.

It was a lesson in colors. "Juan, que color es este?" Porter asked one little boy, waving a box in her hand.

"Green," he replied.

"Verde," she corrected with the Spanish word.

"Green," Juan repeated.

"Verde," Porter corrected him again.

"Green," Juan answered again.

What in the hell am I doing? Porter wondered to herself. Why am I telling him not to speak English? Pretty soon, once her classroom door was closed, Porter was giving lessons in English. "I wasn't the only one, either," she says.

It seems certain that, on the day in 1967 that he introduced the first piece of bilingual-education legislation, Ralph Yarborough had no idea his handiwork would one day lead to the concept of English teacher as guerrilla warrior. Yarborough was a liberal senator from Texas who was disturbed about the high dropout rate among Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, which by some accounts ran as high as 40 percent. Yarborough asked for a paltry $7.5 million to set up some programs "not to stamp out the mother tongue and not to try to make their mother tongue the dominant language, but just to try to make those children fully literate in English."