Loco, Completamente Loco

The many failures of "bilingual education"

Glenn Garvin from the January 1998 issue

(Page 5 of 9)

Here's another crazy aunt locked away in the bilingual attic: TBE administrators ruthlessly and routinely shanghai English-speaking kids into the program. What happened to Rosa Torres's daughter Angelica is by no means uncommon, and it is far from the most extreme example. Nor is it something that only happens to the children of easy-to-bully new immigrants.

Exhibit A: 7-year-old Tony, a third-generation American who speaks English like a kid who grew up in Ames, Iowa, or Manhattan, Kansas. Favorite TV show: Sesame Street. A member of the Children's Book of the Month Club. And here's the acid test: A recent visitor to Tony's home heard him playing by himself in his bedroom, barking English commands to his GI Joes. In other words, there's no earthly reason for Tony to be in a TBE class.

But Tony doesn't live in Iowa or Kansas. And to the officials in his school district in the Southern California city of Hawthorne, there was only one relevant factor: his last name, Velasquez. When he started first grade in 1995, they put him in TBE. The school did notify his mother Ericka, who offered no objection. She heard the word bilingual and figured it meant he was in a class where he would study both Spanish and English. Ericka and her husband speak both languages and wanted to make sure Tony did, too. But after a few weeks, she began to have doubts.

"All his spelling words, every day, were in Spanish," Ericka recalls. "I began to wonder, is this really bilingual? Or is it just Spanish?" Finally she paid a visit to the school, where she discovered Tony's class spent just a few minutes a day on English. "I want him out of here," she told the teacher. Nonetheless, it took an entire year of skirmishing before he moved to an English classroom. "I was so mad," Ericka says, brow knitting as she thinks about it. "All that time wasted! He was so confused--why was he in Spanish classes when he knew English? He wants to be in English like the other kids...Now, for the first time, he likes doing his schoolwork."

What still makes her sad is remembering the immigrant children from El Salvador and Nicaragua who stayed behind when Tony left his TBE classroom. "These kids come from other countries, and I don't know how they're going to learn English if they keep feeding them the language of their native countries," Ericka says. "But they're stuck there. I'm an American, I know the ropes, and it still took me a year to get Tony out. Those kids' parents will never be able to do it."

The idea that those children must be taught in Spanish is ludicrous to Ericka. The daughter of a Nicaraguan immigrant, as a child she never heard English in her own home and spoke none at all when she started school. Yet she speaks it perfectly now, in the stop-and-go cadences (though not the loopy vocabulary) of the Valley Girls who shared her all-English classroom. "If children can't learn English without a special program," she wonders, "how do you explain me?"

School systems shunt kids into TBE all the time strictly on the basis of a Hispanic name. When Linda Chavez was director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, she was amazed to discover that the Washington, D.C., schools had placed her son Pablo in a TBE class--despite the fact that he didn't speak a word of Spanish.

But even school systems that pretend to use more sophisticated techniques for evaluating students often misroute English speakers into foreign-tongue classrooms. Typically, the district conducts a "home language survey" of new students to determine which ones come from a non-English-speaking background, then uses a standardized achievement test to zero in on kids who will be placed in TBE.

Home language surveys, however, are hopelessly broad. They typically ask if anyone in the home speaks another language, a fatal flaw when dealing with immigrant households that often include three generations with widely varying language patterns. If Grandma was already 60 when she came to the United States from Saigon or Havana and never learned to speak English, little Tuyen or Rodrigo has to take the test, regardless of the fact that he speaks nothing but English.

Nor will the tests necessarily save them. Most school districts will designate any child who scores below a certain percentile--generally somewhere between the 30th and 40th--as "limited-English proficient" and whisk them off to TBE classes. The godawful fallacies in such an approach are obvious to anyone without an advanced degree in education:

* The achievement test shows only the student's attainment in English, not in the other language. So a kid who scores 29 goes into TBE even if he doesn't speak a word of Spanish.

* The achievement test does nothing to identify the reason for the low score. A child who scores 25 may indeed need help with his English; or he may just need remedial education, period. There's no way to tell from the test score itself.

* Last and certainly not least, 40 percent of the children taking an achievement test will always, by definition, score in the lowest 40th percentile. And it doesn't necessarily say anything about whether they know enough English to understand history or math lessons.

"These tests are designed to break the students who take them into 100 categories and rank them," says Boston University's Rossell, who has written extensively on the testing issue. "They don't include anything at all about basic English communication skills, because they're designed for English-speaking students who for the most part have those skills." As critical as she is of the achievement tests, which are given to older children, Rossell actually shudders when she talks about the oral tests given to incoming kindergarten and first-grade students.

"I have a professor friend whose kid was given an English oral proficiency test because he had a Hispanic name," she said. "The kid tested as limited-English proficient even though he didn't know any language besides English. But he's kind of an odd kid, just wouldn't answer some of the questions, and acted bored. That's not exactly uncommon with 5-year-olds. They may not feel confident enough to answer questions asked by a stranger, or they may just not feel like talking at all at that moment."

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