In those twilight days of the Great Society, the Bilingual Education Amendment passed easily, triggering no alarms. Yarborough always said he didn't know and didn't much care what method was used to teach the kids. The concept of TBE didn't exist, and it would be another decade before facilitation theory came slithering out of the primordial linguistic ooze.
Yet, in retrospect, the warning signs were there. Hispanic activists flocked to testify for the bill, and very few of them said anything about learning English. Instead, they argued that the high dropout rate was due to the fact that Hispanic kids had low self-esteem because they weren't being taught in their native language ("or their parents' native language," as NYU historian Diane Ravitch acidly noted later).
And one witness, after suggesting that children might get some
of their lessons in Spanish, admitted: "The Spanish-
speaking parent is going to be opposed to this in many cases. Just
last night at a little barbecue, we were talking about this
bill...and one fellow said, `Well, my wife doesn't want any of this
for her children.' I should explain that this was a group of--all
of us were Spanish-speaking, and we were speaking Spanish at the
time...These people were afraid of the bill or what it might do
because they felt it would slow their children down in learning
English. I want to say to them that there is nothing to fear."
But there was. Militant Chicano activists immediately began demanding that the money from Yarborough's bill bankroll Spanish-language instruction. Within three years, what was then the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was issuing guidelines making bilingual programs compulsory for school districts. In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled in Lau v. Nichols that non-English-speaking children (in this case, a Chinese student in San Francisco) had the right to special language programs. The next year HEW said that meant bilingual programs, period--and not just for kids who couldn't speak English. Now bilingual education was expanded to include any child from a home where English wasn't the primary language. Even a kid who spoke like an Oxford don was headed for bilingual classes if his parents preferred Spanish or Chinese. By 1980, HEW had bludgeoned 500 school districts nationwide into creating bilingual programs, with more on the way.
All this had happened without a scrap of evidence that bilingual education worked at all, much less that it was the best way to teach language. Then, in the late 1970s, facilitation theory was born. Its foundation was a 1976 study of two groups of children who migrated from Finland to Sweden, one before entering the third grade, one after. The study found that the children who emigrated after the third grade--whose Finnish language skills would presumably be more developed--performed better in Swedish than the children who came earlier.
But there are two major problems with the study. One is that its statistics have come under ferocious attack from other researchers. The second is that the study neglected to mention that Swedish is the second official language of Finland and is taught in Finnish schools beginning in the third grade. So the older students had already been studying their "new" language when they arrived in Sweden, in some cases for several years.
"I visited Finland a few years ago and talked to linguists there, and nobody could believe we take that study seriously in the United States," says Rosalie Pedalino Porter. "They thought it was comical--the study has been discredited there for years."
No matter. Here, it gave rise to facilitation theory, which in turn gave a patina of intellectual respectability not only to bilingual education but to gringo bashing. The writings of Canadian linguist Jim Cummins, one of the big academic guns of facilitation theory, are studded with denunciations of "coercive relations of power" created by a "curriculum that reflects only the experience and values of white middle-class English-speaking students." If you doubt him, you surely are among the ranks of the "intellectual xenophobes" or "cultural hegemonists."
What Cummins and other TBE advocates don't like to admit is that they turn a blind eye to a multitude of acts of intellectual xenophobia and cultural hegemony every day in schools with bilingual curriculums. Here's one of the dirty little secrets of TBE: It's just for Spanish speakers.
"When you talk about bilingual education, people will get absolutely hysterical over how kids will be cognitively deprived if they're not taught in their native tongue," says Christine Rossell, a political science professor at Boston University who has observed hundreds of classrooms in her research on bilingual education. "And yet, thousands and thousands of children are not taught in their native tongue every day, and no one cares. Polish kids don't get taught in their native tongue. Vietnamese kids don't get taught in their native tongue. Russian kids don't, and Greek kids don't. Even though all these principles of bilingual education are supposedly universal, bilingual education is basically just Spanish, and no one seems to notice. I figure it's some kind of mass delusion. That's the only way you can explain it."
There are some true TBE classes in other languages. More often, though, a class labeled TBE in anything but Spanish will include at most a token nod to the native language. Doug Lasken, who teaches at Ramona Elementary School in Los Angeles, for a time presided over what was supposedly a TBE class for second- and third-grade Armenian-speaking children. "I certainly don't speak a word of Armenian, and never told anyone I did," Lasken remembers. "It was mysterious. I wondered what I was doing there sometimes. But it was a fun class, with great kids, and we spoke English. They had learned it all by themselves, without any special help at all." About the only hint of TBE in the classroom was some battered turn-of-the-century Armenian textbooks that were rarely opened.
One reason other languages have been discreetly pitched overboard is that any attempt to supply TBE for everyone who theoretically needs it would bankrupt the country before lunch. Schools in the state of New York include kids who speak 121 different languages. In the city of Seattle, 76. In Alexandria Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles, 19--including Tagalog, Lao, Twi, Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Bengali, and Sinhalese. For each of these languages, a full curriculum would have to be planned, textbooks would have to be purchased, and certified teachers would have to be hired. It is a prospect that daunts even the most madcap tax-and-spend liberal.
But even if we invaded Saudi Arabia and seized all its oil to fund full-service TBE, we couldn't provide it. The teachers simply don't exist. When California's Little Hoover Commission, Sacramento's version of the General Accounting Office, investigated bilingual education in 1993, it discovered a statewide shortage of 20,000 teachers. Even among Spanish-speaking teachers, in by far the most plentiful supply, there was a 60 percent shortfall. When it came to Romanian, Farsi, Pashto, and Lahu, forget it. Of course, if anyone had applied for all those empty jobs, there was no way for California to evaluate their competence; the state had teacher certification tests for only nine of the dozens of languages spoken by its schoolchildren.
Some languages simply can't be taught at all in TBE, because they have no written forms. (Remember, the whole point is that students must not merely speak their native language but read and write it well before they move on to English.) That has not stopped the educrats from trying. In Massachusetts, school officials actually created an alphabet so that Kriolu--an obscure spoken-only dialect of Portuguese used in parts of the Cape Verde Islands--could be written for the first time. Textbooks and a curriculum followed, and now Massachusetts boasts the only schools in the entire world where classes are taught in Kriolu. (The unenlightened schools of the Cape Verde Islands continue to teach in Portuguese.) Massachusetts even sends home report cards and school bulletins in Kriolu. The parents have no idea whatsoever what this stuff says--none of them can read Kriolu--but their opinion hardly matters, does it? We know better, we're the teachers.
It is tempting to label the Kriolu classrooms as the all-time most hare-brained product of bilingual education, but in considering TBE, caution is always advised; this is a field lush with opportunities for stupidity. A better choice may be experiments during the 1970s in New York City and Laredo, Texas, where teachers were trained to speak "Spanglish" ("Hey, Maria, vamanos por el cine Orpheum, they're having a festival de peliculas de directores de Cuba tonight"), supposedly the native language of local schoolchildren. Furious Puerto Rican parents snuffed the idea before it got anywhere in New York, but the Laredo program is still cited in bilingual literature as "the concurrent approach."
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