MacEachern Article

Doug MacEachern
Arizona Repubic

Bilingual education - a subject not unfamiliar to Arizonans, who thought they placed it in a dustbin a couple years ago - is making headlines again in California .
They are not the sort of headlines bilingualists like.

"English-only students do better on state test" - San Francisco Chronicle, March 26.

"Gains posted by Limited-English schoolchildren" - Los Angeles Times, March 26.

"Students learning English see huge gains on state tests" - Associated Press, March 26.

March 25, the California Department of Education released the results of the 2002-03 California English Language Development Test, a k a CELDT. The test is designed to track the progress of students with limited-English skills, predominantly Spanish speakers, at learning the common language. As the headlines suggest, the results have been astonishing.

According to the CELDT results, a third of students taking the test - more than 275,000 students out of 860,000 - now meet the minimum standards of English grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension and other skills. Those results constitute a tripling of the number of students who met the test's minimum standards just one year ago.
"Give us a child and let us teach them English from day one, and we'll have them for life," crowed the principal of a Los Angeles elementary school to the Los Angeles Times.
In the head-bangingly complicated world of education, however, these amazing changes are not universally deemed good news.

The small but highly influential core of bilingual theorists and idealists dispute that California 's English-immersion programs - mandated by the passage in 1998 of Proposition 227 - have anything to do with the impressive test results.
But of course. Given the ideological baggage they've tied to their catastrophic academic failure, bilingual ed, you can't expect any less of them. Think of Saddam Hussein's reality-denying minister of information at those delightful Baghdad press conferences. No imperialist American tanks at the airport. No special magic about English "immersion."

No, it's not disappointing that the true believers refuse to rejoice at the academic success of minority kids. But it is disappointing that people who know better - people who really do recognize that English immersion has been a whopping success for California - refuse even to say so.

When Jack O'Connell, California superintendent of public instruction, announced the spectacular improvements of non-English-speaking students, he credited all sorts of reasons for the improvement. Teachers have been working really hard, he said. State academic standards and curricula have been improved, he said.

Not once did the super even mention the single-most dramatic change: the common-sense one that says if you want to teach a language, you have your students use it.
Arizona , of course, has its own version of Proposition 227, passed in 2000. And many education types here have tread around this state's law just as nervously as they do in California .

Arizona 's academic hierarchy is every bit as hostile to the bilingual-ed changes foisted on them by voters as the California education elite is. The people who teach our teachers - the colleges of education at the state universities - are contemptuous of the mandate for English immersion.
On the other hand, Arizona's new education super, Tom Horne, contends the kid-gloves treatment for school districts (and college of ed professors) flouting the state law will end. That would be nice.

A solid assessment test, a la CELDT, would be nicer.