Bilingual education and the melting pot: getting burned

For Hispanic children going to school can be frightening when people are speaking a language they can't understand. Will learning subjects in Spanish help or hinder them in adapting to an English-speaking country? In this essay in our humanities series, Isidro Lucas defends bilingual education in our schools

IN 1970, I was introduced for the first lime to the wonderful world of research grantsmanship. I wanted to explore the retention power of schools with Puerto Rican children in Chicago. I wanted to determine the number and motivations of "dropouts." In search of a gimmick that would make my proposal unique, I decided to prepare my questionnaires for dropouts in Spanish, something obviously never heard of before. I got the grant, and prepared the instruments, but I never had to use the Spanish version. All my dropout respondents spoke good, understandable English. They hadn't learned math, or social sciences, or natural sciences, unfortunately. But they had learned English.

I do not know what the grantmakers thought of the research results. But I certainly was in for some surprises. No dropout mentioned lack of English as the reason for quitting. As it evolved through questionnaires and interviews, theirs was a more subtle story — of alienation, of not belonging, of being "push-outs."

Nor was that all: I had asked the respondents how good they thought they were in English, how good in Spanish. To my surprise, dropouts expressed more confidence in their ability to speak English than did the stay-ins (seniors in high school). For their part, stay-ins showed more confidence in their Spanish than did dropouts. (In no case was the real knowledge of languages tested.) I had to conclude that identity, expressed in one's confidence and acceptance of the native culture, was more a determinant of school stay-in power than the mere acquisition of the coding-decoding skills involved in a different language, English.

And think of what happens to that identity when it confronts a strange and unreceptive school room. Think of being five years old, and walking into a classroom where the teacher cannot understand you when you talk. Where your tests show you scoring in ranges of mental retardation. Where teachers penalize you for speaking Spanish, the language that your parents and your close friends in the barrio speak all the time. Imagine what it takes not to be pushed out by such an array of hostile forces.

And yet that is what nearly all of the 14-odd million Hispanics in the United States face when they enter our educational systems. Bilingual education has made but paltry progress, touching very few of these, the largest group of non-English speaking children in the U.S. schools. The straitjacket of monolingual education in English prevents schools from leading Hispanic children to competence in mathematics, the natural sciences, and other basic disciplines essential to any meaningful education. Schools are thus bound to failure, stifling the potential of countless students who know the language they've learned in their homes and neighborhoods, but who are punished because the schools have not yet discovered that language.

In May 1980, the National Center for Educational Statistics published its summary book, The Condition of Education for Hispanic Americans. The figures are appalling, but they only hint at the human wreckage created by an unbending monolingual system. Among white students between 8 and 13 years of age, 5 percent are enrolled two or more years below their expected grade levels. The figure is 9 percent for Hispanics. Among whites between 14

This is the fifth of six essays made possible in part by a grant from the Illinois HUMANITIES Council, in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities. Reprints of these essays are available at no cost from the Illinois Humanities Council, 201 W. Springfield, Champaign, Illinois 61820. Continuing this month and in alternate months in 1981, Illinois Issues will publish a four-page supplement containing an original essay by an Illinois humanist. No restrictions in regard to style, form or perspective have been placed on the authors. They have been encouraged to use any of a number of approaches including exposition, analysis, satire and parody. An essay by Doris Graber, professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, on the concentration of media ownership and freedom of expression will appear in November.

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and 20.9 percent are two years behind. The figure is 24 percent for Hispanics. In 1978, the drop-out rate among white high school students was 8.8 percent. For Hispanics, the figure was 18.8 percent. Among the 18-34 age population, 83.9 percent of the whites had completed high school. For Hispanics, the figure was only 55.5 percent.

The failure of elementary and secondary schools in educating Hispanics carries over to higher education. While Hispanics comprise about 6 percent of the nation's population, for example, only 2.4 percent of college undergraduates are Hispanic. The causes of these dismal statistics are many and complex, but the fact that only 2.9 percent of those employed as teachers and school staff in this country are Hispanic is a telling clue to the state of Hispanics in the educational system.

And this costly imbalance carries over into the labor market, where unemployment rates for Hispanics are consistently about 50 percent above those for whites; 7.4 percent of the white population was unemployed in 1976, and 6.3 percent were out of work in 1980. The figures for Hispanics were 11.4 percent and 10.1 percent, respectively. Little wonder, then, that the Supreme Court of the United States, unanimous in its 1974 landmark decision of Lau v. Nichols, called this English-only schooling approach "a mockery of public education."

It is a funny country, this America of ours, full of mixed signals and contradictions. When Italian-speaking children come to the classroom, we force them to forget Italian and learn English. When we have accomplished this — and it is not easy since it means teaching the child that Italian is bad, even if Papa talks in it all the time — we take these students to high school, even to college, where they see foreign languages as one of the subjects offered. Yes, even Italian.

But American education has proven much better at making its students forget their native languages than at teaching them Italian or French. So Americans have become tongue-tied away from English, incapable of communicating with or understanding cultures different from their own. That was the reflection made last year by U.S. Rep. Paul Simon (D., Carbon-dale), after the Commisison for the Study of Foreign Languages published its report to the president and Congress.

Nation of either/ors

We have, contrary to the myth of the melting-pot, become a nation of "eithers" and "ors." You either learn English or you don't learn math. You unlearn your heritage or you get pushed out of school.

It's a pity. I prefer to think of America as a land of "ands." Protestant and Catholic. Irish and Germans. Blacks and Whites (it took some time to accept this one, but we are making progress). Why not English and Spanish?

Yet Sen. S.I. Hayakawa (R., Calif.) has come up with a proposal for a constitutional amendment that would blast away that and. He proposed the establishment of English as the American national language. William F. Buckley predictably wanted to be "counted in," and even Bill Raspberry chimed in with complaints about the "bilingual Babel." Yet a semanticist like Hayakawa should not so easily ignore the meaning of that prefix "bi." It means two: Spanish — if that is the native language. And English. Two.

What is bilingual education? Federal law, the Bilingual Education Act, defines it thus:

The terms "program of bilingual education" means a program of instruction, designed for children of limited English proficiency in elementary or secondary schools, in which, with respect to the years of study to which such a program is applicable—
(i) there is instruction given in, and study of, English and, to the extent necessary to allow a child to achieve competence in the English language, the native language of the children of limited English proficiency, and such instruction is given with appreciation for the cultural heritage of such children, and of other children in American society, and, with respect to elementary and secondary school instruction, such instruction shall, to the extent necessary, be in all courses or subjects of study which will allow a child to progress effectively through the educational system. . .

There it is: a marvel of legislatese. But even through the undergrowth of language, a clear program: teaching English to non-English speaking children and, at the same time, preventing their falling behind in other subjects by teaching those in their native language.

Bilingual education as we know it today started in America with the passage of the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 (Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965; amended in 1974 and 1978). It had been two years in the making, proposed by Sen. Ralph Yarborough of Texas at the urging of Mexican-American educators. Those were glory days for social programs in the Great Society, and still bilingual education legislation was bottled up in Congress for two years. The final impulse for passage came from the plight of newly arrived Cubans in Miami, the first major wave of exiles from the Castro regime.

At the state level, Massachusetts pioneered with their Transitional Bilingual Education Law of 1971, adopted almost verbatim by Illinois in 1973. Illinois had, however, blazed its own trail by appropriating funds for bilingual education programs — even without explicit legislation — as early as 1969. The Illinois Bilingual Education Law is also transitional, and mandates bilingual education programs where 20 or more children are defined as in need of them. The state reimburses the school district for the added expenses. And the yearly appropriation of state funds for bilingual education repeats the battle, rehashes the rationale and generally provides a fun forum for all opponents of this innovative program.

But did bilingual education in America

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really begin in 1968? It is hard to tell. Many years before, German was the language spoken in a great number of American public school classrooms, from Ohio to Minnesota, through Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.

History of bilingualism

In Chicago there was a German public school in 1893. In the second half of the 19th century, cities throughout the Midwest passed ordinances making the knowledge of foreign languages from Europe mandatory for the classroom teacher applicants. School boards passed resolutions mandating the purchase of German-language books for at least two-thirds of the school library budget.

And then there are the parish schools. As recently as 1956, Holy Trinity High School in Chicago used English and Polish as the languages of instruction in the classroom. Italian schools were common in Italian parishes in Chicago. When the parents of Budlong Elementary School in Chicago objected strenuously in the early 70s to a bilingual program there, their main objection was that there existed a Greek Orthodox school nearby where Greek was used; a public school Greek-English program might interfere with that parish school.

Historically and by law, in other words, bilingual education intends as one of its main purposes to teach English to the children. In fact, it teaches English formally, explicitly and aggressively. It does not rely on osmosis, on how much English the student picks up by chance in classrooms or streets.

What else could be expected? Proponents of bilingual education are no fools. Who can make it in America without English? By all means, we should make the learning of English a paramount subject. And we should remember that all bilingual programs legislated to date — at federal and state levels — are transitional. They are meant to continue only as long as this explicit teaching of English is appropriate for the entering Hispanic and other minority students.

In fact, for some nationalistic Hispanic groups, bilingual education teaches English too well. Denouncing these programs as an effort to "angloize" our kids, nationalist radicals fear that through bilingual education Hispanics may lose their identity and get truly melted into the American pot. So bilingual education gets attacked from both sides: from flag-waving "America first" patriots and also from some militant Hispanics who cherish cultural pluralism.

What is one to do? Most of the opposition to those programs comes from those who forget the meaning of "bi," and want only English as they reject Spanish. This view was put most emphatically by one downstate Illinois legislator who said, "Why should the schools teach English as a second language? They should teach the kids English as a first language."

The legislator should have said "the only language" and then he would have been in the muddled mainstream of American educational philosophy of the recent past. Prior to bilingual education, Spanish-speaking children when tested were considered behind in language development. Knowing Spanish was not considered part of the child's language progress. Thus the diagnoses of mental deficiencies, arrived at through English-only tests.

This simple recognition that Antonio and Maria are not slow in language development (meaning they do not know English yet), but that they have developed nicely in their Spanish language, is perhaps one of the most profound contributions of the bilingual

Bilingual education is attacked by both America-first patriots and militant Hispanics who believe one language should dominate

education movement to American applied educational philosophy. But that recognition has been slow to come. In the official jargon of some educators, Antonio and Maria are still labeled as "limited English proficient" pupils.

Teaching in two languages

Once you have discovered that the Spanish-speaking child can communicate very well, thank you, then you have a choice. Either you stop teaching the child anything until English is mastered, or you respond to the eager appetite for learning that only five-year-olds can show, by teaching math, sciences, social studies, whatever, in the language that the child knows. Even if it is Spanish. Bilingual education chooses the second option. As it pushes English, it uses both languages as needed in the classroom.

Bilingual education means that the teacher, about to teach the children English, must also know their native language. It's no big deal, nor is it even a new idea. In previous migrations, children and teachers often spoke the same language anyway. Nobody needed to use the fancy words bilingual education. A German teacher could always reach a German child, even as she taught him English.

Wouldn't one say that being able to communicate with the children is a mandatory requisite for a teacher? What is the role of an English monolingual teacher in a classroom where all pupils speak Chinese? One could say that such a teacher is not qualified for that classroom — no matter how high the academic degrees. And yet we have a great number of monolingual English teachers in our classrooms where the kids speak other languages. And, we're told, we cannot change the teachers. Some people would say that under these conditions, bilingual education is just a fancy alternative to a more effective change in the system.

Language is an expression of culture. There is in America a profound, underground culture, that of the unmeltable populations. Blacks have proven unmeltable over the years. The only place allowed them near the melting pot was underneath it. Getting burned. Hispanics also were left out of

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the melting pot. Spanish has been historically preserved more among them than other languages in non-English speaking populations. It was a shelter, a defense. The days when Texas establishments would post a sign at the door, "No niggers, no dogs, no Mexicans" are not too far in the past.

If, as a Hispanic, in spite of all this, you make it into the mainstream, how do you rationalize? Recently, a successful Mexican-American attacked bilingual education in a warm, reminiscent article published in a prominent national journal. His line of thought went something like this: Spanish does not belong in the classroom. Spanish is the language of the home, of the things intimate, of prayer and of telling mamá that you love her. English is the language of the outer, cold world of school, competition and making a living. Let there be no interference. . . . (And it was significant that a teachers' union publication reprinted a version of the article, implicitly endorsing the attack on bilingual education.)

It is again an "either/or" situation, rather than "and." Why cannot the school accept, value and use the children's family language, and thus make them feel welcome? After all, these kids will spend most of their waking hours in school. It is the school that will open wonderful new doors to the inquiring, almost brand new mind. Why should Antonio and Maria deny that personal language even if they learn another and make it into an outside world?

There now seems to be an ugly national mood, the old "let them pull themselves by their bootstraps" routine, even if "they" have no boots, and barely shoes on their feet. When relating to bilingual education, the common statement is "my parents did it. We knew no English when we went to school. Let them sink or swim like we did." (Once again it's either/or, you see. Has someone outlawed life jackets?)

It sounds like Army reasoning: let them do what we did. Even if we hated it. In fact, because we hated it. Army ways are useful for war, but nobody can think that the Army is the best and only method to teach children. A good education teaches ands and buts and its and alsos. It can't just stop with simplistic either/ors.

Isidro Lucas is a lecturer at the School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago, and has written several papers on American Hispanics.

Opponents of bilingual education, of course, cite the case of Canada, where the Quebecois speak French while the rest of the country speaks English. Isn't this kind of split a potential danger here, the critics say. Couldn't bilingual education have a divisive impact here?

One must remember that the struggle in Canada is again an "either/or" proposition where French and English vie for primacy. America is different. We already have a group — rather, a series of groups — isolated from the mainstream, dispersed, unlike the Quebecois, all over the U.S. geography: in New York, in Los Angeles, in Miami, in Chicago, in San Antonio. Without access to better jobs, better education, elective office, political process. As bilingual education emphasizes intensive learning of English, this isolation will break down. Hispanics, newly proficient in English, can make it into the mainstream. And they will do so, freed from the rejection bondage inherent in decades of monolingual, English-only schools.

Bilingual education proponents can wave flags with the best. They appeal to a larger sense of America. The States united on the basis of common democratic beliefs, the best of which is the reliance on the primacy of individuals and respect of their rights. And among those rights is the right to one's own culture. I submit that this picture of America is richer than one limited and restricted by the exclusive use of a single language, beautiful as English can be.

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