Publish or Perish: Bilingual By The Book

How have textbook publishers responded to the changing political climates and raging debates over bilingual education?
Pretty much as you would expect. As capitalist organs, they don't really have political axes to grind or ideologies to promulgate. Basically, they follow the money.

And where does that money come from? Surprise! It comes from you and me in the form of federal, state, or local funding of public school bilingual education programs. The overwhelming majority of these programs are at the K-5 level, as are most of the published materials for bilingual education. Everyone is concerned about the youngest kids, and rightly so since the easiest and best way to promote bilingual success for kids is to teach them as early as possible.

Bilingual enrollments drop dramatically at middle school and high school levels. Bilingual college programs are almost nonexistent (though there are a few, such as Holyoke Community College in Massachusetts Hostos Community College, in New York, and the University of Mexico branch in San Antonio.)

The two most significant events that shaped the course of publishing in bilingual education were the passage of Title VII in the late 60's (which authorized federal spending for bilingual education), and the Supreme Court Decision, Lau v. Nichols, in the early 70's. This ruling mandated bilingual instruction and materials for any group of 20 or more children enrolled in a school district (regardless of grade) to be paid for by state and local funding.

What was the reaction of U.S. textbook publishers when these twin opportunities of funding and profit potential appeared? Well, not much at first–probably because the potential wasn’t felt to be great enough. As a result, after Title VII was passed, schools used federal moneys to buy imported texts. Unfort-unately, some of these were inappropriate because they reflected the curricular needs of countries other than the U.S. Also, the language levels tended to be too sophisticated for American students.
Three of the bigger Spanish language publishers who began selling into the U.S. market in the late 60's and early 70's were Santillana and Anaya las Americas from Spain and Voluntad from Colombia. One small U.S. company – Laidlaw – published in Puerto Rico before tackling the burgeoning bilingual market in the States. Two other outfits also began publishing: Economy, based in Oklahoma, and Crane who got its start from a grant made by the state of New Jersey to create bilingual materials in Spanish. The company never became huge, but was adopted in Miami. Even-tually, Economy and Laidlaw were both acquired by McGrawHill, and Doubleday, respectively.

Santillana set up operation in the U.S. to publish Spanish bilingual materials specifically for the elementary school market. Voluntad and Anaya did not follow suit, but continued selling imported books. From the mid 70's to the mid 80's, the U.S. division of Santillana ruled the bilingual market place.

But change was in the air: Mexican and other Spanish speaking immigration had reached record levels in Texas and California. Something needed to be done about educating the children of legal and illegal immigrants. Both states decided to compel publishers vying for the English reading adoptions that they had to also submit a Spanish bilingual reading program for adoption. If publishers did not comply, they would not even be considered. Although the Spanish bilingual population was growing, it was still only about 1/10th of the English speaking population. This meant that the publishers theoretically had to spend as much money on a reading series for Spanish as they would for English and make only 1/10th as much money. By the way, it costs nearly $20 million to develop a full color, hard cover basal series with all the bells and whistles. As you can imagine, the publishers were not happy campers.

Manolo Rodriguez, who has worked for three of the major players in the US bilingual publishing world and is currently editorial director of Scholastic’s Bilingual Publishing Program, recalls those days. "In 1985 I started working as a freelance editor at Scott, Foresman in one of their first attempts to develop a basal Spanish reading program. I did not realize it at the time, but that was the beginning for all Spanish educational programs designed to compete in states like Texas and California, where equity with English programs would be an issue. Prior to that, companies were only offering supplemental programs or Spanish materials that did not offer the scope of basal programs."

The Spanish reading programs submitted in the 1986 Texas adoption came up short when compared to the English reading programs. Sure, publishers had produced materials that could be adopted, but it was apparent that they were lacking equity (in fact they were mostly direct translations of their English counterparts and pedagogically not appropriate since leaning to read in Spanish is hardly identical to learning to read in English. Also the materials were shorter, produced on poorer quality paper and lacked ancillariessuch as readers, workbooks, video, and software.)

By now, the development and production of Spanish programs was beginning to become a headache for publishers. The equity issue was making it even harder to foresee an improvement in the profit forecast, and the production and development problems were being compounded, since there were more products to be created. Spanish programs were being perceived within the publishing companies as "the fly in the ointment," but they had to be produced because they were the "ticket" to enter the adoption races in some states.

In the 1993 Texas reading adoption, publishers improved the equity between Spanish reading programs and English reading programs. They started calling their Spanish programs "parallel editions." The quality of these materials improved and, at about the same time, supplemental Spanish materials published by companies including Hampton Brown, Scholastic, and Modern Curriculum Press were being gobbled up by both adoption and non-adoption states. As the population of limited English proficient students kept on growing, publishers began to realize that Spanish language programs could be profitable.

And then came the Negative Nineties: English Only, Prop 227, and uniform tests for English and non-English speakers. Okay, so bilingual education wasn’t perfect and the whole-language approach did produce some pretty low reading scores. There was corruption and incompetence in some, though certainly not all, of these programs. Many were actually successful. But there was a huge backlash, fueled, in large part by racism. As always, there were plenty of politicians ready to jump on the bandwagon.
Genaro Bastos, president of Bastos Book Company and former professor of language education at William Paterson University and New Jersey City University, lays the blame for the bilingual backlash at the feet of politicians, judges and mainstream school administrators who basically set these programs up for failure. It was the ‘everybody’s an expert in education’ syndrome. The courts and school administrations did not rely on existing expert advice, opinion and research. Many programs were designed more for economic and political expediency, that is, to keep the voters quiet and happy. In fact, many bilingual programs became the dumping ground for children that monolingual teachers couldn’t handle, much in the same way as some states have used special ed. as a similar dumping ground.

Bastos feels that bilingual administrators were never given power by monolingual (English) administrators to implement "true" bilingual education programs. Most bilingual programs were primarily devoted to teaching language rather than the full curriculum. Also, in many cases, instructors with no concept of or training in bilingual education were hired, only because they happened to speak Spanish. In some cases, they didn’t even speak English. Bastos claims that this may even have been done deliberately in some cases to ensure that the programs would have minimum success or be outright failures. Bilingual programs use nationally recognized tests to both place students in bilingual programs and to eventually mainstream them. The LAB Test Language Assessment battery) and the LAS (Language Assessment system) are the two most widely used.
Amazingly, most school districts will mainstream students when they have reached the 40th percentile in language proficiency! If there was ever a formula for failure, this is it.

As we enter the new millennium, U.S. textbook publishers have finally got it almost right, in part because they have responded to the national crisis in education and are creating materials that meet the new state standards in Spanish. Prop 227 may still be the law in California, and many states are restricting the number of years a student may be in bilingual or ESL programs ESL, but Texas and Florida are still in favor of bilingual education. People like Manolo Rodriguez and Genaro Bastos are confident that bilingual education is here to stay. As Bastos says, "The U.S. is already a bilingual nation and those without bilingual skills tomorrow will be like those without computer skills today. Any publisher and school system that does not recognize this will be left behind." Textbook publishers will respond as the demand for bilingual education materials increases. And it will.