On November 6, 1984, California voters approved a ballot measure which states: "We the People of the State of California do hereby find and declare that: "The United States has been and will continue to be enriched by the cultural contributions of immigrants from many countries with many different traditions. "A common language, English, unites our immigrant residents, fosters harmony among our people, promotes political stability, permits interchange of ideas at many levels and encourages societal integration. "The United States Government should foster similari- "Multilingual ballots are divisive, costly and often delay or prevent our immigrant citizens from moving into the economic, political, educational and social mainstream of our country. "Multilingual ballots are unnecessary since immigrants seeking citizenship must pass an examination for literacy and proficiency in English." The measure further directs me to send the following message to the President of the United States: "The People of the State of California recognizing the importance of a common language in unifying our diverse nation hereby urge that Federal law be amended so that ballots, voters' pamphlets and all other official voting materials shall be printed in English only." Most cordially, Senge Deukmejian George Deukmejian BILINGUAL EDUCATION IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR by Denis P. Doyle Director, Education Policy Studies November 1983 The work upon which this publication is based was performed pursuant to a contract entered into between E. H. White and the author, under the terms of an NIE contract with E.H. White. Nothing in this paper should be construed as representing the position of anyone other than the author. Deciding whether the goal of federal education programs The purpose of this essay is to examine the policy implications of bilingual education in the private sector. What does it mean to the public sector that private sector bilingual education exists at all? And what aspects of private sector bilingual education are important to public sector policy makers? Drawing on the research commissioned as a part of the Significant Instructional Features studies of the National Institute of Education, the essay was originally designed to address a set of research questions that appeared to be important as the study got under way. In interviews with members of Congress, Congressional staff, association executives with an interest in bilingual education, and other interested parties, it became clear that a number of issues were of importance to the Washington policy community. By way of illustration, examine the list of questions originally posed for the private school portion of the SIF study: Why have bilingual programs developed in the private Are there significant differences in instructional features between programs in private and public schools? Are private schools able to mount programs that are more Is the quality of bilingual education in the private Do some LEP children learn more effectively in the These questions, and questions like them, are important, but they are technical and instrumental. They assume that bilingual education is a desirable public policy objective. Insofar as they point to the larger question of what public schools have to learn from private schools, they bring that fundamental premise into question. They do so because of the findings developed by George Elford of the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey. Elford's work, under contract to NIE, was to form the point of departure for this essay. As it turns out, the answers to the SIF questions are negative. Bilingual programs have not developed in the private sector in any consequential way. In sum, On balance, there are по significant differences in Private-public cost-effectiveness turns out not to be an issue. The "quality" of bilingual education in the private the private sector offers little of interest to the public sector when the questions are phrased in instrumental terms. But what happens if the questions are normative? That, after all, is the essence of policy analysis. It is up to the bureaucracy to deal with instrumental questions, policy makers with policy questions. The reason for confusing instrumental and normative questions is not so obvious as it might at first appear. Today, bilingual educa tion has become an important policy issue because of the marked increase in the number of Spanish speakers throughout the country. According to one scholar, Iris Rotberg, there are approximately "3.6 million school-age children in the United States with limited ability in English. About 73 percent of these children are Hispanic. There are other large concentrations of non-English-speaking children, most notably Asians and American Indians."2 The number of children. involved only begins to given an idea of how important the issue of bilingual education is--the human dimension is powerfully revealed in a brilliant essay by Steven Schlossman. : 3 But To most of us in the 1980s, bilingual education seems a selfobvious remedy to the problem confronted by the child raised in a home in which English, if it is spoken at all, is a second language. Schlossman raises the right question: "Given the euphoria that suffused the bilingual education movement, it seems reasonable to ask why earlier generations of educators ignored, failed to recognize, or disapproved of the purportedly pedagogical miracle-worker. seemingly self-evident remedy take so long to discover?" Why did a It took so long to "discover" because there is a long tradition of indifference and hostility toward bilingual education in this country. According to Schlossman, some observers advance the view that in America there is a sort of "babelophobia."5 Another argument advanced by observers is that only recently have we discovered the special "difficulties faced by Hispanic children in public schools." But as Schlossman points out, George I. Sanchez (1906-1972) "spent most of his career puzzling over the effects of 'language handicap' on Hispanic children on school policies in the Southwest."6 The most pervasive reason for a failure to adopt Spanish bilingual education strategies, however, was well established patterns of invidious discrimination against Americans of Mexican descent. Forcing large numbers, even majority Hispanic school districts, into English immersion programs, with no sensitivity to their special language needs, condemned many of them to failure. 7 But at the same time that Hispanic children were being systematically denied access to bilingual Spanish-English programs, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century there was a well-developed system of German-English schools. Found principally in population centers with large concentrations of Americans of German descent, the schools were in the public sector. Some, in fact, were schools in which the first language of instruction was German, the second English. The wave of patriotism and jingoism that swept the country during the First World War spelled the end of German-English schools, an example of a bilingual issue being settled as a case of "civil rights" in reverse. We are left, then, with an enigma. The public at large has historically been indifferent to or hostile to bilingual education. Its importance as a pedagogical device is not new knowledge; its importance as a source of community and cultural identify has long been known. The capacity of a reasonably well organized and skillful community--German-Americans, for example--to launch, support, and maintain bilingual programs is well known. Why, then, is bilingual education so weakly developed in the American public school? As Schlossman observes, "the heyday of the modern bilingual education 1,8 movement in America appears to be over. But the enthusiasm that fueled bilingual education programs was not pedagogical. instrumental questions would be appro If it were, priate. A growing language minority population does not in itself provide sufficient explanatory power for interest in bilingual education. To the contrary, an increasing number of non-English speakers could have precisely the opposite effect--an increased desire on the part of policy makers to make English acquisition the centerpiece of education policy. Indeed, for most immigrants, that is precisely what happened historically. The more compelling and interesting reason for the emergence of interest in bilingual education is the emergence of politically interested and politically active voters, or constituents who themselves are convinced that language maintenance is important. politically active organizers, what more important force for social and cultural cohesion than language? To And in America an equally compelling reason for political action is the interest of political figures in creating a constituency, the political analogue of supply side economics. It is no secret that President Johnson was a master at this, and it is no accident that Title VII emerged from his passionate commitment to education as the way to solve the nation's social and economic ills. As Title I was |