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Immigration in US History Proposition 227 The Law: California voter initiative to abolish bilingual education in public schools Date: Voted on June 2, 1998 Place: California Immigration Issues: Civil rights and liberties; Education; Language; Latino immigrants; Laws and treaties; Mexican immigrants Significance: After thirty years of experimentation with bilingual education in California's public schools, voters decided it did not work and voted overwhelmingly to end it in a ballot initiative. Beginning the early education of schoolchildren in their own languages became a goal of California's bilingual education policy during the 1970's, when educators hoped that by giving children a strong educational start in their own languages, they would be better prepared to succeed after shifting over to English-language education. However, as time passed, that goal seemed impossible to achieve. California's schoolchildren speak an estimated 140 different languages in their homes. To teach each group of them in their own languages before teaching them in English was beyond the resources of California's massive education system. In June, 1998 the issue of bilingualism was placed before the voters of California in a referendum. Their response was strong: "No Mas"--no more bilingual education in their public schools. The liberal California of the 1960's appeared to have reprogrammed itself in latter years with regards to social issues. In 1994, for example, Californians voted against providing government benefits to undocumented immigrants. Next, they voted against affirmative action. Finally, in November, 1997, voter groups filed petitions for a movement called English for the Children--a ballot measure sponsored by Silicon Valley millionaire Ron Unz, whose mother was an immigrant from Russia. In 1994, the Republican Unz had unsuccessfully challenged Republican incumbent Pete Wilson in the primary election for governor. California's bilingual education controversy was also developing around the same time that the board of the Oakland Unified School District made its widely ridiculed pronouncement that Ebonics--black English--should be regarded as a language separate from English. Ironically, just as African Americans were split on the Ebonics debate, California's Hispanic population was also splintered on the need for bilingual education. The Unz Initiative In 1987, just over 500,000 California children attended some type of bilingual classes. By 1997, the number had risen to nearly 1.4 million. According to a 1997 U.S. News & World Report story, California, with its burgeoning immigrant population, led the nation in proportion of its students who were not proficient in English, with a figure of 25 percent, compared with 6.7 percent of students nationally. By definition, these are students who cannot understand English well enough to keep up in school. Eighty-eight percent of California's public schools had at least one LEP student, and 71 percent had at least twenty limited English proficient (LEP) students. (In 1997 the acronym LEP was changed to EL, for English learners.) Traditionally immigrants to the United States, speaking an assortment of languages, regard English as the language of upward mobility and want their children to learn it as quickly as possible. This attitude was still held by many immigrant families in California during the late 1990's, and some of them were among the opponents to bilingual education. The largest non-English speaking groups in California were Latinos, especially Mexican Americans, 84 percent of whom indicated in late 1997 that they would support the Unz bilingual education initiative, according to a Los Angeles Times poll. That figure compared impressively with the 80 percent of white voters who indicated that they would back the initiative. The Unz measure was cochaired by Gloria Matta Tuchman, a Mexican American teacher who had used English immersion to teach students for about fifteen years. The measure also benefited from a strong endorsement from Jaime Escalante, the Bolivian immigrant who taught calculus to urban Latino youths and became California's most famous schoolteacher--thanks, in part, to the 1988 film Stand and Deliver. The Unz initiative called for a one-year English immersion program, which many educators said wouldn't prepare students for academic work in English, although it would allow them to speak more easily to their friends on the playground. Initially many state Republicans avoided the bilingual education debate, fearing that the Democrats would label supporters "racists." They also recalled that while many Latinos had earlier begun by supporting Proposition 187, the ballot initiative to deny benefits to undocumented aliens, only to turn against it later and vote against the measure's Republican supporters during the 1996 elections. Critics of the Unz measure argued that it ignored important research data that demonstrated successes in bilingual education programs. Supporters of the measure countered that bilingual education created an educational ghetto by isolating non-English speaking students and preventing them from becoming successful members of society. They also accused politicians and educators of profiting from bilingual education. For example, they noted that some bilingual teachers were paid up to five thousand dollars a year extra, while school districts were receiving hundreds of millions of extra dollars simply for placing students in bilingual classes. Opposition to the referendum was led primarily by major African American organizations, Democrats, the ethnic news media, several Asian American groups, bilingual education teachers, Latino activists, and organizations such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the California PTA, the California School Boards Association, the California Teachers Association, and the California federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO. Several of these organizations publicly denounced the Unz measure and viewed it to be the third in a chain of anti-immigrant proposals that emerged during the mid-1990's. In March, 1998, three months before the state measure actually passed, California state board of education voted unanimously to discard its thirty-year-old bilingual education policy. Although California's basic bilingual education law had expired in 1987, state law still required native-language instruction when necessary to provide immigrant children with an equal chance for academic success. Consequences In June, 1998, Californians voted, by a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent, for Proposition 227, which placed major restrictions on bilingual education, limiting parent choice on the education programs for their children. Proposition 227 mandated a one-size-fits-all approach to instruction of English learners. Afterward, Californians Together, a round table of education and civil rights groups and organizations, analyzed selected schools still providing bilingual instruction to substantial numbers of students and determined that their students could equal or exceed the performances of students in English-immersion classes. Additional discussions and findings on California's and the nation's bilingual education future will likely come from education organizations and think tanks such as the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education located at George Washington University, and the National Association for Bilingual Education, also headquartered in the nation's capital. Keith Orlando Hilton Further ReadingAnderson, Jim, et al. ed. Portraits of Literacy Across Families, Communities, and Schools: Intersections and Tensions. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2005. Brittain, Carmina. Transnational Messages: Experiences of Chinese and Mexican Immigrants in American Schools. New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2002. Hones, Donald F., and Cher Shou Cha. Educating New Americans: Immigrants Lives and Learning. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1999. Jonas, Susanne, and Suzanne Dod Thomas, eds. Immigration: A Civil Rights Issue for the Americas. Wilmington, Del: Scholarly Resources, 1999. Kenner, Charmian. Becoming Biliterate: Young Children Learning Different Writing Systems. Sterling, Va.: Trentham Books, 2004. López, David, and Andrés Jiménez, ed. Latinos and Public Policy in California: An Agenda for Opportunity. Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Public Policy Press, 2003. Osborn, Terry A., ed. Language and Cultural Diversity in U.S. Schools: Democratic Principles in Action. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Wiley, Terrence G. Literacy and Language Diversity in the United States. 2d ed. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 2005. See Also Anglo-conformity; Asian American Legal Defense Fund; Bilingual Education Act of 1968; Cultural pluralism; English-only and official English movements; Generational acculturation; Lau v. Nichols; Proposition 187. |
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