Getting The Message Across

The publication earlier this year of ESL Standards for pre- K-12 Students by TESOL is a welcome move by educators to set guidelines in teaching English to limited English proficient (LEP) students.

The need for standards has never been greater: between 1985 and 1995, the number of LEP students in American schools rose by 109%. These students need to develop the English language skills that will enable them to go to college and participate fully in American society. As the debate rages over the efficacy of bilingual education, the media would do well to examine the TESOL publication in order to understand that teachers are committed to achieving results in English language teaching and are implementing practical measure to achieve this goal.

Unfortunately, the real debate over bilingual education is lost in a sea of rhetoric and sensationalism. Coverage of the recent poll in Orange County, CA, which endorsed the dismantling of the bilingual education system there is just one example of the hysteria that can be whipped up over such issues. At Berkeley, students chanted "Racists out, students in! Bilingual's gonna win!" when Ron Unz, author of "English for the Children" cam to speak there.

Very little is heard about Boston Public Schools, who have developed standards in teaching ESL which are based on the TESOL model. The Boston standards stress the advantages of the bilingual classroom, stating "The most effective education environments are those which promote the continued development of learners' primary language for both academic an social purposes as they develop academic and social language in English." Georgette Gonsalves, director of the district's bilingual education program said that the standards are a "definite asset for both mainstream and bilingual teachers. We've been hobbling along, from school to school, with bits and pieces of an ESL curriculum. Now we'll have a coherent approach system-wide."

MOre good news for supporters of bilingual education came recently when the preliminary findings of a George Mason University study of 42,000 bilingual education students over 10 years indicated that students equaled or surpassed native English speakers after four to seven years in a quality binlingual program.

But serious problems remain for proponents of bilingual education. One of the most important stumbling blocks is getting their message across to the parents of the children that they teach. In October, a poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times revealed that eighty percent of Californians supported a proposed measure to end bilingual education in the state's schools. Surprisingly, 84% of Hispanics surveyed agreed with the proposal. "It's split almost down the middle from the feedback we get," said Lavonne Luquis, president of LatinoLink, an online Latino interest magazine based in California. "My personal experience with bilingual education was good, but I have heard all kinds of stories."

Even supporters of bilingual programs say their success varies widely among schools. "When you have good teachers and support staffs, it works," said Donna Christian of the National Center for Applied Linguistics, a Washington think tank that supoorts bilingual education. But bilingual educators like Lisa Dilles, a Santa Cruz based teacher with twenty years' classroom experience, question this attitude. "Even if bilingual education works in an ideal setting, with highly trained, truly bilingual teachers and excellent ESL teachers, can many schools duplicate that? Class size reduction (which is wonderful) has made the 25 year shortage of bilingual teachers even more acute. If the conditions required for bilingual education to be effective are so hard to achieve, is it a realistic policy?"

Dilles has experienced at first hand the disillusion that many Hispanic parents have expressed over bilingual education. "Parents heard the theory at a meeting I attended last year. Then a mother stood up and said (in Spanish), 'You are talking about philosophy by my family is living it.' She said that she was not going to let happen to Juanito what had happened to big borother Jorge. Jorge had left elementary school reading adequately in Spanish but with only one year of English reading. He was three years below grade level. When he saw the level of writing middle school teachers expected, he almost dropped out. She wanted her second son to start reading in English as soon as possible to avoid the same near catastrophe."

If bilingual programs are to survive, their advocates are going to have to do a better job of getting their message across to voters who are, it appears, not swayed by reports which point to the successes of bilingual education. What is required is real debate over the issues as stake. As Joanne Jacobs, writing in the San Jose Mercury News, sums up, "Let's talk about whether it's smart for the majority of state voters to pick the best way to teach. Let's hear why pretend bilingual is better for Spanish speaking elementary students than sheltered English, and why mainstreaming will fail for them but works for kids who speak Vietnamese, Chinese, Farsi or Russian. Let's ask why the state hasn't tracked the achievement of English learners, leaving us with virtually no useful data. Let's stop shouting worn out slogans."