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Jewish World Review/Nov. 4, 1998/ 14 Mar-Cheshvan, 5759
Linda Chavez
Shame on those who don't vote!
MAYBE ALL THOSE FOLKS who didn't vote in Tuesday's election know something
the rest of us would rather not believe: Elections don't matter, so long as
unelected government bureaucrats still make the important decisions that
affect our everyday lives.
Take the decision by California voters to eliminate bilingual education
programs in that state, which 61 percent of voters endorsed in a statewide
election last June. Most Californians who bothered to go to the polls
thought they were voting to change a system that badly served non-English
kids by keeping them in native language classes for years on end. Under the
new system, all children who entered school unable to speak English would be
put into special "sheltered immersion" classes, where they would spend an
intensive year learning English.
But that's not what has happened in many places around the state, where
clever school officials have teamed up with ethnic activists to preserve
Spanish as the primary language of instruction.
In San Francisco, the school board decided that city schools were exempt
from the provisions of the new law because of an earlier court decision,
which the board insists mandates native language instruction for non-English
speakers. As a result, nearly all of the 8,000 students who had been in
bilingual classes before the vote still remain there. But other school
districts have had to be more artful in defying the election results.
Nowhere have administrators been more cunning than in Los Angeles.
First, some Los Angeles Unified school officials simply decided that the
new law allowed as much as 49.9 percent of instruction to be offered in
Spanish, since the wording of the ballot measure says only that instruction
shall be "nearly all" in English. Second, district officials joined with the
local teachers union to set up special sessions to train teachers in how to
"encourage" parents to opt out of English classes. Under the law, parents
who want bilingual classes for their children can seek a waiver from the
school district exempting them from the English immersion classes.
But union and bilingual education officials are taking no chances that
parents will seek out bilingual classes on their own, so the United Teachers
of Los Angeles launched a special program over the summer to ensure parents
would make the 'right' decision. Doug Lasken, a fifth-grade teacher and
union rep, attended one such meeting and wrote about it for the Los Angeles
Times. At the meeting, district officials told teachers they should inform
parents of kindergarten and first-grade students that if they wanted their
children to learn to read, they'd better put them in bilingual classes,
since no reading or phonics would be taught in the English immersion
program. That's right, the school district has banned phonics from English
immersion classes.
The top bilingual official for the Los Angeles Unified School District,
Forrest Ross, explained to the group that under "proven bilingual theory"
children should be taught to read and sound out letters only after they can
already speak and understand a language. In other words, immigrant parents
must choose: Do you want your children to learn English or do you want them
to learn to read? LAUSD won't let your children learn both skills during the
same school year.
Just in case parents still don't get the message, LAUSD has come up with
another good reason for putting kids in bilingual classes: There aren't
enough English textbooks to go around, so students in English immersion
classes will just have to do without. It seems the school district spent $5
million last year on Spanish texts, leaving about 150 schools with
insufficient books for classroom use. The district claims it didn't know how
many English language texts would be needed, since the law required school
districts to wait 30 days after the start of the school year to permit
parents to seek waivers.
Despite the efforts of bilingual advocates and the complicity of the school
district, only about 11 percent of parents have chosen bilingual over
English immersion classes for their children. But those results aren't
likely to discourage school officials who want to thwart the public policies
enacted by the citizens of the state. Give unelected bureaucrats enough time
and resources, and they'll figure out a way to circumvent any law that tries
to restrict their
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