Last week Samuel Freedman had an interesing article in the New York Times (yes, that New York Times) arguing that “Latino Parents Decry Bilingual Programs.” And he quoted a number of them, and their children, who decried it eloquently:
“I’m very angry,” Ms. Salsedo said in Spanish through an interpreter. “The school is supposed to do what’s best for the kids. The school puts my kids’ education in danger, because everything is in English here.”
And the children had no trouble expressing their own frustration lucidly enough in English. “I ask the teacher all the time if I can be in English class,” said Alberto, a 9-year-old who will enter sixth grade in the fall. “The teacher just says no.” For the time being, Alberto added, he learns English by watching the Cartoon Network.
Freedman comments:
For years, bilingual education coasted along on its perception as a virtual civil right for Hispanics. Maybe such a reputation was deserved 30 years ago, when the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund sued and won a consent decree requiring that New York City offer bilingual education. But as the innovation hardened into an orthodoxy, and as a sort of employment niche grew for bilingual educators and bureaucrats, the idealistic veneer began to wear away.
The grievances of Bushwick’s parents point at an overlooked truth. The foes of bilingual education, at least as practiced in New York, are not Eurocentric nativists but Spanish-speaking immigrants who struggled to reach the United States and struggle still at low-wage jobs to stay here so that their children can acquire and rise with an American education, very much including fluency in English.
In part, Freedman writes, the lack of responsiveness to these parents can, perhaps ironically, be traced to the “community control” that prevailed until 2002.
What “community control” meant then in Bushwick was a school district dominated by the neighborhood’s City Council member, Victor Robles ( now the city clerk). School jobs, including those in bilingual education, were patronage plums.
In many respects bilingual education programs track the trajectory of affirmative action programs: they began as a civil rights demand and have hardened into entitlement programs for their actual beneficiaries, the large bureaucracy that now maintains, defends, and staffs them.
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Sometmes it appears that New York Times reporters don’t read the work of … other New York Times reporters. Thus, in a generally interesting article about the, for lack of a better term, diversity of Hispanics in New Mexico, reporter Rick Lyman writes:
Issues like immigration or bilingual education, which candidates can use to appeal broadly to Hispanic voters in other states, do not always hit the mark so neatly here. Voters in New Mexico from old-line Hispanic families can share a cultural identification with newcomers, but have very different views on such touchstone issues.
In what the Democratic National Committee called a Democratic Hispanic radio address, Teresa Heinz Kerry announced that “My husband stood with Hispanic leaders in Massachusetts to protect bilingual education programs.” Let’s hope he campaigns in Brooklyn and tells those parents interviewed by Samuel Freedman of his support for bilingual education.
California tests all the public schools in the state and grades each school on a scale of 1 to 1000. Each year, the two highest scoring schools are in Cupertino, CA, with the top school getting a score of 996 last year. What do those schools have in common? It’s 90% minority. More than that, a third of the students don’t even have English as a first language. Why don’t you hear about this amazing school and the success of the minorities? Because it’s not minorities to Liberals, it’s only Asians.
Needless to say, the schools teach the children in English.
This reminds me that, for years, I could not get a post as an English teacher in NYC public schools. They just weren’t hiring plain old English teachers. They wanted bilingual ed people. I might have stood a chance if I spoke Kreyol, Spanish, Dutch even, but English? Pish tosh! We don’t need no stinkin’ English teachers!