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 Editorials | Issues | April 2007 
Fighting Words
 Alex Eichler - The College Hill Independent
| | (Janelle Sing) |
Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, possible contender for the Republican presidential ticket and one of the country’s most prominent conservative personalities, has a problem with Spanish. This according to comments he made before the National Federation of Republican Women last week about the need for stronger English instruction in public schools. “The American people believe English should be the official language of the government,” Gingrich told a crowd in Washington, DC, after denouncing indulgent government officials who print ballots and other documents “in any one of 700 languages, depending on who randomly shows up.”
The former Speaker declared that it was time to “replace bilingual education with immersion in English, so people learn ... the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.” Gingrich didn’t specifically name Spanish as the “ghetto” language of concern, but Spanish is the ‘other language’ in which an overwhelming majority of bilingual education is conducted, and Latino anti-defamation groups were quick to register their outrage.
The advance of American multilingualism has long been a source of concern for Gingrich. In his 1995 book To Renew America, he warned that the prevalence of non-English language communities could undermine “the very fabric of American society”; a year later, he argued before Congress that unchecked multilingualism in secondary schools “would literally lead...to the decay of the core parts of our civilization.”
At times, Gingrich’s mistrust of other languages has seemed symptomatic of his general hard-line stance against illegal immigration; at other moments it has appeared to loom as a pet issue in its own right.
what Its emergence this week may not have been as tangential as it seems. Many policy analysts believe that Gingrich is sounding out wedge issues for the upcoming political season, looking for some polarizing chord that will mobilize the base and distract from more substantive concerns. To a certain way of thinking, the multiplication tables in Spanish could do for the Republican Party in 2008 what gay marriage did for it in 2004.
SAY IT RIGHT
Much of the available evidence suggests that voters will find bilingual education neither as offensive nor as divisive as Gingrich may hope. While antipathy toward partially assimilated immigrants, particularly those from Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries, certainly exists, a recent trend in education, business and nearly every other sphere has been to recognize the practical and commercial advantages of multilingualism.
Verizon issued a press release this week trumpeting its own aggressive courtship of the Latino market, noting that Spanish-speaking employees at its Irvine, CA call center “earn $1,500 more a year because of their bilingual skills.” Meanwhile, the Providence-based Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation has advertised its seminars this year on Spanish-language radio stations and will soon launch a newsletter and website in Spanish.
It’s not only private corporations that have reason to surmount the language barrier. A study released this week by Johns Hopkins University researchers found that only 40 percent of pediatricians use professional interpreters to communicate with patients who speak little or no English; the rest rely on the patient’s family members for translation, a habit that not only violates the law but often leads to misdiagnosis and ineffective care. “Language services have gotten a fair amount of publicity,” said Dr. Dennis Kuo, the head author of the study, “but not enough that primary care physicians understand the importance of using them.”
Shortly before Gingrich made his comments last week, the Texas Association for Bilingual Education (TABE) issued a statement about the need for dual language programs in the state’s largest school districts.
San Antonio and other municipalities have recently cut back on funding for English-as-second-language education, although statewide data indicates that bilingual curricula at the grade school level have done much to reduce the achievement gap between native and non-native English speakers in the last decade.
Though Gingrich believes that bilingual education contributes to fragmentation and the slowdown of American progress, often the reality is nearly the opposite. Students who seldom hear English at home and then hear nothing but English at school, authorities say, are unlikely to find the classroom to be of much use; as bilingual programs disappear from schools, so do the kids. “Those individuals, if you don’t get to them by fifth, sixth or seventh grade, they become dropouts,” said Jesse Romero, legislative consultant for TABE. “It’s really an economic development issue for the viability of Texas.”
ME GUSTAS CUANDO CALLAS
Gingrich was in damage control mode this week, insisting on Fox News’s Hannity & Colmes that his use of the word “ghetto” was meant to evoke not American working-class neighborhoods but the Jewish slums of fascist Germany. It’s unclear how this squares with his remark about ballots, and too early to say what the odds are now of Gingrich picking up the Republican nomination for president. Gingrich’s stock with his own party was already middling, and his latest comments may render him too much of a liability; many conservative strategists consider the Latino vote more valuable than the ambitions of an irascible former Speaker whose politics are still informed largely by Clinton-era isolationism.
As Gingrich’s remarks were being circulated, a report ran in the Los Angeles Times about David Bender, a retired advertising executive who founded an English-language school in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, five years ago. The school, Colegio Mexico-Americano, is now the largest in Puerto Vallarta, and the somber dedication of its students seems to contravene Gingrich’s fears that affirming other languages in the classroom will erode children’s desire to learn English. “That’s how you get a good job,” said one student, who helps supplement his partial scholarship to CMA by collecting cans for recycling money. As native speakers of both English and Spanish continue to reach out to each other, bilingualism may prove to be not the wedge issue of 2008 but the subject on which key voting blocs can come together—if politicians know how to speak the language.
ALEX EICHLER B’08 es tan cansado como la montaña. |
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