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 Editorials | Issues | April 2007 
Father of Bilingualism: It Has Failed
 Lowell Ponte - NewsMax
| Herman Badillo: Bilingual education is getting an F
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One of the fathers of bilingual education in the U.S. says the program is failing immigrant students – and actually preventing their integration into American society.
For millions of youngsters, bilingual education has been a bridge to nowhere, producing shockingly high dropout rates, social Balkanization, and shattered American dreams.
Frustrated parents and voters have begun to fight back against bilingual education approaches that put kids last.
When bilingual education became federal law in 1974, "We expected students to be in bilingual classes for only a year or so," former New York Congressman Herman Badillo, chief author of the 1974 legislation, tells NewsMax.
"But we put no limit in the bill. We never suspected that a bilingual lobby would emerge that would keep students in bilingual classes for two, four, six, or eight years!"
By teaching newcomers math, history, and other subjects in their native language, bilingual education was supposed to prevent students from falling behind in those subjects while they learned English.
When Badillo moved to the U.S. from Puerto Rico at age 12, he spoke little English. He learned firsthand the difficulties youngsters face when plunged into speaking English, a difficult languages to master. But more painful for Badillo was learning bitter lessons later as an idealistic Democratic politician, and as the first Puerto Rican elected to Congress, about the selfish ways of progressive special interests.
That's one reason why Badillo, 77, has become a Republican. Now a senior fellow at the libertarian-conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, he shares his hard-won insights in an eye-opening new book, One Nation, One Standard: An Ex-Liberal on How Hispanics Can Succeed Just Like Other Immigrant Groups.
"Instead of helping students learn English, bilingual education became monolingual education in Spanish," Badillo says.
He also discovered that 30 New York City teachers were recruited in Spain to teach bilingual classes, but the city had to provide translators for them because these teachers spoke no English. Students sidetracked for years into Spanish-only "bilingual" classes, Badillo found, were usually directed away from college preparatory classes and into vocational training, limiting their future opportunities.
And because school policies of "social promotion" advanced students without regard to their mastery of curriculum, "many graduated high school barely able to read or write in any language," he says. "Bilingual education often produced bi-illiteracy."
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich voiced sentiments similar to Badillo's in a recent speech. He told the National Federation of Republican Women: "We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and prosperity, not the language of living in the ghetto."
A February 2007 study by the Pacific Research Institute found that in California – where more than a third of the population is Hispanic – 47 percent of students classified as English Language Learners (ELs) scored high enough on the California English Language Development Test to be reclassified as fluent in English. But most local school districts adopt additional standards to prevent such reclassification.
"More than half of 10th-grade EL students are kept in the EL category for 10 years or more," according to Lance T. Izumi and the co-authors of the PRI study.
The reason for this, wrote Izumi and his co-authors, is "that school districts simply want more money … [and] have a financial incentive for keeping students classified as EL because federal Title III funds are distributed on a per-EL basis, and the state Economic Impact Aid program ... is based in part on EL student counts."
At its peak nationwide, bilingual and English as a Second Language education programs cost taxpayers more than $12 billion each year, according to one estimate.
What Badillo labels the "bilingual lobby" includes the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE). One aim of NABE is to keep students speaking their native language instead of switching, as most of our ancestors did, entirely into the English language and its culture.
When Linda Chavez, former chairwoman of the National Commission on Migrant Education, enrolled one of her sons in a Washington, D.C., public school, she received a letter notifying her that the boy would be placed in a bilingual program.
But her son "didn't speak a word of Spanish," wrote Chavez. "American-born Hispanics, who now make up more than half of all bilingual students, should be taught in English."
Voter initiatives backed by Silicon Valley software millionaire Ron Unz to restrict public school bilingual education programs passed in California in 1998 by 61 percent, in Arizona in 2000 by 65 percent, and in Massachusetts in 2002 by 68 percent.
The bilingual lobby responded with legal challenges and efforts to circumvent, undermine, or delay the will of voters. In Colorado, heavily funded bilingual activists spent millions of dollars in 2002 to defeat a similar ballot measure.
"The organized anti-bilingual campaign ran out of steam about that time," wrote NABE's then-executive director, James Crawford, in August 2006. "No English-only initiative measures have reached the ballot since 2002 -- but bilingual enrollments have continued to drop." The biggest reason for this drop, wrote Crawford, has been President Bush's No Child Left Behind program, which took effect in the 2002-03 school year.
Because Bush's federal mandate requires every school to meet targets of "adequate yearly progress" for specific groups, including English Learners, it puts pressure on schools to rapidly improve EL scores on English-language achievement tests. Bush's general approach has won widespread support from Hispanic parents and even, concedes Crawford, "from Hispanic organizations such as the National Council of La Raza."
As bilingual enrollments have declined, student test scores and English fluency have generally improved nationwide. If the goal is to learn English – and not to advance other agendas – then total immersion that forces students to learn only in the new language apparently works at least as well as today's bilingual education.
"The recent decline in bilingual enrollments," wrote Crawford, "may be only the beginning of a long-term trend." |
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