Bilingual Bedlam

Massachusetts and California have scrapped their bilingual education programs while in the state that President Bush governed not so long ago school officials cling tenaciously to their two-languages-for-the-price-of-one policy. “Gov. Romney is one of the few well-known political leaders in the country to back English immersion instead of politically correct ‘bilingual education’ programs that have failed to teach English to non-English speaking students for more than thirty years,” the ProEnglish Advocate reports. “The Republican Governor, who is leaving office this Jan., was elected in 2002, the same year Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot initiative to scrap the nation’s oldest bilingual education program in favor of immersion.”

“That initiative campaign was led by Dr. Rosalie Pedalino Porter, a member of ProEnglish’s board, and Lincoln Tamayo, a prominent educator and high school principal.” California voters made a similar switch in 1998 and are now finding that doing so helped the children of immigrants.

“Since California voters passed a 1998 initiative replacing bilingual education programs with English immersion teaching techniques in their public schools, statewide tests have shown dramatic improvements in the English speaking skills of students from Spanish-speaking homes,” the editors of the Advocate report. “Now, an analysis of data from the U. S. Census Bureau confirms the good news in another way.”

“According to the 2005 American Community Survey, 71 percent of California children in homes where the primary language is Spanish now speak English ‘very well,’” up from 60 percent five years ago. It bears noting that these are two of the bluest of blue states that consistently vote Democratic.

Meanwhile, in the lone star state that has produced two of the last three Republican presidents, Dallas public officials stubbornly cling to Bilingual Education despite all logic and evidence. “Dallas Independent School District (DISD) officials came under fire in Oct. after School Board Trustee Ron Price said that some of the district’s bilingual education teachers cannot speak English,” The Advocate reveals. But wouldn’t that make the program unilingual?

“DISD officials hired 300 teachers specifically to teach Spanish-speaking students in the district’s bilingual education program last summer, including teachers from Spain,” The Advocate reports.

But to really get a glimpse of bilingual education gone wild, you need to look across the drink to see what can happen here. “A teenage schoolgirl was arrested by police for racism after refusing to sit with a group of Asian students because some of them did not speak English,” according to the London Daily Mail. “Codie Stott’s family claim she was forced to spend three-and-a-half hours in a police cell after she was reported by her teachers.”

“The 14-year-old who— was released without charge—said it had been a simple matter of commonsense and accused the school and police of an over-the-top reaction.” The English teenager’s classmates only spoke Urdu, not a widely understood language in Great Britain.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.