Posted on 07/15/2004 4:44:07 PM PDT by Akira
On a sultry night in late June, when the school term was nearly over, two dozen parents gathered in a church basement in Brooklyn to talk about what a waste the year had been. Immigrants from Mexico and the Dominican Republic, raising their children in the battered neighborhood of Bushwick, they were the people bilingual education supposedly serves. Instead, one after the other, they condemned a system that consigned their children to a linguistic ghetto, cut off from the United States of integration and upward mobility.
These parents were not gadflies and chronic complainers. Patient and quiet, the women clad in faded shifts, the men shod in oil-stained work boots, they exuded the aura of people reluctant to challenge authority, perhaps because they ascribed wisdom to people with titles, or perhaps because they feared retribution.
With the ballast of one another's company, however, they spoke. Gregorio Ortega spoke about how his son Geraldo, born right here in New York, had been abruptly transferred into a bilingual class at P.S. 123 after spending his first four school years learning in English. Irene De Leon spoke of her daughter being placed in a bilingual section at P.S. 123 despite having done her first year and a half of school in English when the family lived in Queens. Benerita Salsedo wondered aloud why, after four years in the bilingual track at P.S. 145 in Bushwick, her son Alberto still had not moved into English classes. Her two other children were also stuck in bilingual limbo.
"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.
Listening to this litany, I experienced the sensation that Yogi Berra memorably called "déjà vu all over again." Five years earlier, in the rectory of another church only a few blocks away, another group of immigrant parents voiced the identical complaints about bilingual education - that the public schools shunted Latino children into it even if those pupils had been born in the United States and previously educated in English, and that once the child was in the bilingual track it was almost impossible to get out. An association of Bushwick parents, virtually all of them Hispanic immigrants, had gone as far as suing in State Supreme Court in a futile attempt to reform the bilingual program in local schools.
Back then, the school system's many critics ascribed the bilingual fiasco in Bushwick largely to the failed policy of decentralization. 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.
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.
As a candidate for mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg assailed the status quo in bilingual education and called for its replacement with English-immersion classes. His pledge rested on firm ground. Reports commissioned by Chancellor Ramon Cortines in 1994 and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in 2000 concluded that children qualified for mainstream classes more rapidly coming from English as a Second Language programs than from bilingual ones. E.S.L. classes take place largely in English; bilingual education in the students' native language.
With decentralization dismantled in 2002 and a hand-picked school chancellor installed the next year, Mayor Bloomberg seemingly backed away. Diana Lam, the top aide to Chancellor Joel I. Klein until her ouster, was both a product and proponent of traditional bilingualism. The mayor now emphasizes improving the existing bilingual program, despite its demonstrable shortcomings.
WITH Ms. Lam gone, perhaps the mayor and Mr. Klein can fulfill their erstwhile pledges. Carmen Fariña, the new deputy chancellor, yesterday promised large-scale reforms beginning next September. What she means by that is not junking bilingual education or even curtailing its use as much as improving teacher training and incorporating clear performance standards and oversight. Yet the Department of Education already has a highly successful model of E.S.L. instruction in two existing high schools, Bronx International and La Guardia International.
"Bushwick is a test case of how bilingual programs are actually being implemented," said Michael Gecan, a national organizer for the Industrial Areas Foundation, which has worked closely with parents there for more than a decade. "We have great confidence in Klein. We've found him to be very responsive and very aggressive. But we've been concerned about the bilingual effort. This is a large vestige of the old school culture. It remains in the system. And it's intensively guarded by the local politicians and the teachers' union."
In one respect, though, the bilingual program in Bushwick did subscribe to the English-immersion approach. Parent after parent in the church basement last month remembered receiving, and then naively signing, a letter from school that apparently constituted their agreement to having a child put into bilingual classes. The letter, recalled these Spanish-speaking parents, was written only in English.
This is not the American Way. But hey, liberals need their low cost maids, toilet cleaners and landscapers.
Educrats in NY have been accused of removing English-speaking children (who had indicated on some form that Spanish was spoken in their home) from regular classes and casting them into Spanish classes...
Not to mention they need their permanent underclass that's totally dependent on government handouts, so they can buy votes by promising to keep the checks coming.
Yes it is and yet we have a society that is making it possible to do everything from bank to vote without speaking or reading English. It sickens me, not because I care what language people are speaking but because we are creating a parallel culture and destroying the formula that led to the melting pot, one of the great achievements of this country.
Wow, smart kid! The average for sixth grade is 11. Best wishes to these parents ... moving the education bureaucracy, especially in New York, seems near to impossible.
Liberals are forever trying to enslave populations into a captive underclass, cannon fodder in the war to maintain the power of the utterly amoral and corrupt democrat party.
Bilingual education and the NAACP exist only to completely degrade and betray latino and black Americans.
This is all about the teachers' unions. Bilingual education programs create thousands of teaching jobs nationwide that would not exist if students from Spanish-speaking homes were allowed to learn English in school. And, as usual, the teachers' unions care more about their benefits than about what is best for the children.
I can't exactly explain why a 9 year old is going into 6th grade, but on another note - these schools likely aren't allowed to fail kids or hold them back, regardless of their performance or abilities.
It is pathetic how low the evil rat party has sunk, that it seeks to destroy the Melting Pot.
ping
Was this in the editorial section of the New York Times? Probably, as it seems to be putting forward an opinion. I'm glad to see it.
How utterly sad for these kids.
I have a friend who is Dutch and is raising her boy to be bilingual. She talks to him only in Dutch at home. He's now almost 4 and can barely speak in English to the rest of the Americans he has to deal with. (She likes to use a lot of babysitters. Especially free ones). He struggles and has such a difficult time my hubby and I feel sorry for him.
I've noticed, however, another couple in my church who have one spouse Dutch and one English. Their grown-up kids speak English (they were raised in the States) but with a definite accent. I don't know if their Dutch is perfect, either. It almost seems like a handicap to not speak one language perfectly. I wonder if anyone else has experience with this.
FMCDH(BITS)
"Bilingual Education is one of the most efficient means of enslaving an entire population into permanent failure and poverty."
You get an A+ for the day.
Right, and the teachers often seem intent on indoctrinating the kids to think of themselves as victums.
Its going to be a shock when the illegals and legal immigrants learn how really stupid the people are who run American schools.
I've read articles that say if one parent always talks to the child in Dutch and the other parent only speaks to the child in English, then the kid will be fine. The child can readily sort out the two languages as long as each parent sticks to one language.
There, ya got my 2-cents worth. :)
Duh.
If they don't learn proper English in school, they will always be dependent on Government largesse.
Haven't people figured out by now that left wing policies are in fact designed to keep people dependent on them?
I would trade the glory of that gold star you gave me, if I could save one innocent kid from the horror of the NEA's bingual education enslavement.
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