Bilingual education needs renovation, not removal

Thursday, January 22, 1998

Bilingual education needs renovation, not removal

LEARNING: Program’s success hinges on more support from
schools

By Jessica Goldberg

I would like to respond to Ron Unz’s letter in the Jan. 16
edition of the Daily Bruin. Unz, a successful businessman having
virtually no background in education (especially the teaching of
English to limited English proficient learners), gives only one
side of the bilingual education story. There can be no doubt that
bilingual education, in its current form and its limited use, must
be improved and restructured. The solution to the problem, however,
is not abolishing bilingual education as Unz describes it, but to
give the second language learners, and the bilingual education
program in general, the attention they deserve.

Unz states that "many of America’s own public schools have
stopped teaching English to young children from
non-English-speaking backgrounds." This should be our first clue
that Unz has no idea what bilingual education is or what it hopes
to accomplish. According to Stephen Krashen, a well-known author of
more than 160 articles and books and professor of education at USC,
"We acquire language by understanding messages, by obtaining
comprehensible input." Bilingual education does not entail the
cessation of English instruction, as Unz claims; rather, it demands
comprehensible input for the students involved. "The knowledge that
children get through their first language helps make the English
they hear and read more comprehensible," Krashen tells us. For this
reason, it may seem to people like Unz that English is not being
taught in our "bilingual" classrooms. This so-called lack of
English is really just the attempt to not confuse the children with
input or language that is too far above their comprehension, an
undesirable part of education which may become a reality if Unz’s
initiative passes.

There are many other parts of Unz’s argument that do not ring
true, but to me the most important fact is that if the bilingual
education program is not working, we should work to fix it instead
of eliminating it. The Mexican-American Legal Defense and
Educational Fund released "Questions & Answers on the Unz
Initiative," and they state that, "In some cases, bilingual
education has not worked as intended. However, this is true of many
programs in our public schools, due largely to inadequate
resources, untrained teachers, inadequate parent involvement or
poor management by the principal or district. However, in cases
where school districts use their resources properly and educate
English learners with trained, credentialed and committed teachers,
bilingual education is the most successful approach both to
teaching students English and to giving them the tools to succeed
academically. When bilingual education is done right, it has a
proven track record of success." Perhaps instead of taking the most
drastic and possibly ineffective solution, we can attempt to temper
our fear of second language students running around who cannot
speak English with a small amount of tolerance and the certainty
that, with the right program, these children can learn English
successfully and quickly.