The End Coming for Bilingual Education

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 25, 2000 | by Woody West

There is hardly a reform that does not contain the seeds of its own absurdity. This is especially so in education, where novelty is embraced with an enthusiasm that often overwhelms experience and good sense.

The shriller the complaints about inadequate schools, outdated methodology and semiliterate students sluiced out of the broad channel of public education, the greater the eagerness is for, well, something different. Shortly, in response, comes a fresh panacea. Reformists include not only the educrats and pedagogical theorists, but politicians and frazzled parents.

Occasionally, experience and common sense finally will root out the faddish weeds. Take bilingual education -- or, to invoke the late Henny Youngman, please take bilingual education. In California, home of one in 10 of the nation's public-school students, a reversal of that reform did happen.

Bilingualism loudly has been hailed as an aid to youngsters whose primary tongue is not English and who flounder in school because they are deficient in the language. The technique had its modern origin in a federal court decision more than a quarter-century ago and became educational gospel with dense doctrine and stern dogma. As also occurs in such cases, bilingualism quickly became encrusted with federal and state bureaucracies, a passionate political and ethnic lobby and, of course, ever thicker layers of tax dollars.

Advocates contended from the start it would be vastly superior to traditional language instruction, such as programs for teaching English as a second language. Bilingualism would teach youngsters academic subjects in their native tongues as they also studied English, and in a couple of years (so the theory went) they would be capable of making the transition to English-language instruction. It didn't work that way. Bilingual students were taking longer and longer to acquire English proficiency -- five, six, seven years -- and it increasingly was evident that bilingualism was impeding intellectual gains by those it presumably was to assist. But, as invariably happens in such a situation, the sparser the benefits the more partisans demand additional money and more government and legal support.

Eventually Californians rose in disgust and in a ballot initiative, Proposition 227, dumped mandatory bilingual teaching. A substantial portion of the state's large Hispanic population, with a million of its sons and daughters bearing the brunt of the educational gimmickry, supported the referendum -- to the horror of the bilingual true believers, who incline to label opponents as racist. Predictions of disaster rocked the heavens.

Now, two years later, the first statewide tests since Proposition 227 have recorded stunning improvements in reading, math and other subjects by youngsters whose native tongue is Spanish. Gains as high as 19 percentage points were recorded among some elementary-school students classified as language deficient. Only in the 10th and 11th grades were the improvements below 4 percent -- a reflection of entrenched language problems of teen-age Spanish speakers statewide.

This could be the start of something big. In November, voters in Arizona will be asked whether to junk bilingualism. A similar measure just missed getting on the ballot in Colorado, and opposition to the technique is growing in other states.

But in California the dramatic test results are being portrayed by bilingualists as not definitive or perhaps not even principally due to ending bilingualism. It is pointed out that the state has shrunk class sizes over these two years -- another reform that is accepted generally as a surefire means to improve education, though evidence is scant that this is so. Supporters of bilingualism also note that the state has abandoned its progressive style of reading instruction: The increasingly suspect whole-word technique is being replaced by traditional phonics instruction ("old-fashioned" phonics, the New York Times labels it, unable to resist a liberal melody).

A Stanford University professor sniffs at the test results by contending that, with the class-size and reading-method variables, about all that can be said for the student improvements is that the numbers didn't turn negative. And, oh, yes, he supposes that teachers are clearly teaching to the exams -- that is, concentrating on how to ace the tests rather than on the substance of academic subjects.

The bilingual battalions will not leave the field quietly, to be sure. There are too many teaching and administrative jobs at stake, as well as the ideological passion that has underwritten the technique.

There may be, too, a further element, one that seldom is mentioned in so delicate a context: As immigrant children are more efficaciously moved into mainstream classes and quickly equipped with fluency in English, assimilation into the wider culture thus is facilitated. Assimilation, however, has become a dirty word to those who espouse a radical notion of multiculturalism and diversity. And there are more of those radicals than are healthy in a society whose common bonds are fraying at the edges.