Battle Over Bilingualism

As schools reopen, debate rages over the program's usefulness

"Let's go, " the little boy urges, tugging impatiently at his mother's blouse. "Un momenta," she replies, searching the bustling hallway for the bright red T shirt of her other son. "?Donde esta Miguel?" A moment later, Miguel bursts through the throng of chattering children and appears at his mother's side. "?Que vamos supper, Mom ?" he asks. "What's for supper?"

For Miguel, 8, a student at the 91% Mexican American Briscoe Elementary School on Houston's sweltering east side, such easy leaps from language to language are an everyday matter. In his bilingual third-grade class, Miguel takes science, math and language arts in both English and Spanish, his native tongue. Typically, a one-hour science lesson is taught one day in English. The next day the teacher covers the same material, but in Spanish. Ideally, after two or three years of this bilingual barrage, Miguel will master enough English to do all his classwork in that language.

If the program worked just that way, there would be no problem. But Miguel's curriculum is a tiny part of a crazy quilt of local, state and national attempts to cope with the growing number of U.S. schoolchildren, some 3.5 million of them, for whom English is a second language. Now lumped under the heading of bilingual education, these efforts began with special ESL (English as a second language) classes. Later came attempts to teach children in their native tongue for a few years so they would not fall behind while they learned English. In 1968 Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act giving non-English-speaking children the option to study in their native tongue as a means of easing their way into U.S. life. To educators, that process is known as "transition." But over the years, with the help of the Federal Government, the Supreme Court and demands for aid from large Hispanic groups, the program expanded to include biculturalism. And more and more it seems to be headed toward what educators call "maintenance," which means encouraging children to stay in special native-language courses for years.

Supporters see bilingual ed as a vast improvement over the sink-or-swim school techniques that Americanized earlier immigrants. Says Awilda Orta, director of New York City's office of bilingual education: "People who feel good about their past heritage will be more productive citizens." But critics regard bilingual education as expensive, inefficient and above all unAmerican. Says Diane Ravitch of Columbia University's Teachers College: "There are cases of third-generation Puerto Ricans in bilingual classes. That just doesn't make sense."

In 1969 the whole program affected 25,000 children. This year the federal program alone will handle an estimated 500,000. Begun as a local option available to poor children who are weak in English, bilingual ed is now a federally enforceable right for children speaking any one of 70 native tongues, from Yupik to Yapese, from Vietnamese to Russian. Collectively it costs Americans $700 million a year. It will soon cost more. With schools reopening next week, the Department of Education will launch public hearings in six cities (Chicago, Denver, New York, New Orleans, San Antonio and San Francisco) about Government proposals for regulating and reinforcing the program.

The difficulty of evaluating or enforcing rules for bilingual education is evident from even a brief look at the areas where much of the money and effort for the program are concentrated:

>Chicago now has about 500,000 Spanish-speaking citizens--Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans--totaling well over 10% of the population. One-third of the Hispanic students need some kind of bilingual education, and the cost of providing it has soared by more than 800% in the past eight years. Illinois law requires that when 20 or more English-deficient students of the same language background are enrolled in the same class, a bilingual program must be provided. Because the Spanish programs have been taught longer, Hispanics do reasonably well. Programs for newer ethnic groups--among them some 10,000 Japanese, 10,000 Chinese and 10,000 Filipinos--have been less effective. Last June an amendment calling for a total cutoff of bilingual funding passed the Illinois house but was rejected by the state senate.

>In Texas, where Mexican children used to be shamed, spanked--and sometimes expelled--for speaking Spanish in school, 160,000 youngsters like Miguel are being taught in Spanish. To counteract "the Alamo mentality" and reinforce long bruised ethnic pride, the children sing Mexican songs and do Mexican dances. "Children need to know that not everyone came over on the Mayflower," says State Senator Carlos Truan. Bilingual ed students also take tests every year in English skills to see if they can be "exited" into mainstream classes. Critics point out that unlike earlier waves of U.S. immigrants from Europe, Mexican Americans in Texas move back and forth over the border to their former homeland and so are unlikely to be fully assimilated. As to learning English, Bilingual Teacher Faye Brown of Houston notes that children learn fastest when driven by need and desire. They learn in sports, for instance, when instructions and rules are given only in English. Television also serves to spur the children. Says another teacher: "They're just dying to understand what's going on in The Incredible Hulk."

>The city of Los Angeles has more than 2 million Spanish-speaking residents. But Mexican Americans are spread all over the state, placing a bilingual burden on small school systems too. Of California's 3.9 million schoolchildren, nearly 10% so far have been defined as limited, or non-English-speaking. The bilingual program suffers from a lack of adequate teachers. Says State Board of Education President Michael Kirst: "We need 9,000 teachers. We only have 5,000, and the demand is growing faster than the supply."

>In Dade County, Fla., Spanish was legally considered a second language even before the latest wave of Cuban refugees. There are 54,000 Spanish-speaking students now in Dade County's bilingual programs. But, says Lavona Zuckerman, a member of the citizens advisory committee, "in Miami we have leaned over backward for 20 years to accommodate the refugees. Learning in Spanish has made children feel comfortable in Spanish. Our compassion is making us a nation of ethnic minorities first, rather than Americans first." Proponents of the program insist, however, that bilingual children are doing nearly as well academically as English-speaking children.

>New York City, by tradition the largest and most famous immigrant gateway to the New World, now has 80,000 children in bilingual classes. About 60,000 are Spanish. Among the nine other languages: Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Korean and Russian. Naturally, in the shadow of Ellis Island, there are many nostalgic references to the melting pot and the role of the American high school in giving incoming foreigners their first shared experience of the American way of life. Proponents argue that what was best for grandfather is not good enough for immigrant children today. For one thing, grandfather often never really learned English in the melting-pot school. For another, he could get a job right out of elementary school. The local political struggle over bilingual schools is fiercest in New York too. A black critic recently described the program as "a Puerto Rican employment program."

One reason discussion of bilingual education generates more partisan heat than pragmatic light is that its academic effectiveness is hard to measure. Shockingly, very little hard effort thus far has even been made to measure it. Critics and proponents alike have few real facts to go on. Both seem to agree that in the hands of a good teacher, bilingual programs reduce the high dropout rate among non-English-speaking students. They also agree that there is a terrible shortage of good bilingual teachers.

Secretary of Education Shirley Hufstedler admits the program needs improvement. The Federal Government's aim, under law, she notes, has always been transition. Where maintenance occurs, it is the result of local or state initiatives. One of the subjects at next week's public hearings is just what sort of federal limit should be set on the number of years a child can stay in the program.

The only national study of bilingual ed was completed in 1977 by the California-based American Institutes for Research. After studying 11,500 students over two years, researchers found that children in bilingual programs did no better at learning English or anything else than non-English-speaking students thrust into regular classes--except for a slight edge in elementary math. Proponents of bilingualism, including Hufstedler, regard the report not only as inadequate but out of date. Says Rudolph Troike, director of the office of multicultural bilingual education at the University of Illinois: "The payoff of bilingual education doesn't show up until the fifth or sixth year of instruction." Most critics wonder if the educational system and the taxpayers can wait that long for an answer.

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