The English Wars After Twenty-Five Years: Dismantling Bilingual Education in American Public Schools by RON UNZ
California and the English Wars
The English Wars began twenty-five years ago.
..On a May 1997 morning I stood in the Las Familias del Pueblo daycare center in downtown Los Angeles and announced that I had filed an initiative to dismantle California’s decades-old system of “bilingual education” for Latino immigrant children, a curriculum that amounted to Spanish-almost-only instruction. Although the press conference was quite well-attended, including seven television cameras, most media outlets were probably drawn more by the scent of extreme political controversy with a sharp ethnic tinge than from any realistic expectations that a program so enormous and so deeply entrenched was facing any serious threat to its survival.
Over the next six years, the “English” issue roiled the political landscape in California and several other states, while also emerging upon the national stage. Thousands of news stories reported the battles that resulted, and these regularly reached the headlines of our major newspapers. The lives and futures of many millions of immigrant students were drastically transformed by the results of that educational struggle, and the subsequent trajectory of our entire nation may have been changed.
And the ultimate outcome of that long and bitter conflict? Just consider the blank stares of so many current readers of these sentences. I suspect that many younger Americans are today only very vaguely familiar with the term “bilingual education,” and in their traditional form the programs themselves seem to have vanished almost as thoroughly as did the name that was once given them. As far back as a dozen years ago, veteran teachers would occasionally mention to me that when they described their old instructional method to new hires at their school, the latter were totally disbelieving, convinced that they were being made the butt of some practical joke. America has changed.
I had selected Las Familias as the site of my 1997 announcement for more than merely symbolic reasons. For over a dozen years that somewhat shabby facility located near LA’s Skid Row had cared for the young children of impoverished immigrant sweatshop workers in the nearby Garment District, but the previous year it had been the center of a protest that ultimately changed the course of American society.
The notion of teaching young Latino children in Spanish rather than in English when they entered school had never made any sense to me when I’d first heard of it while in junior high or high school, and all of my friends had been just as skeptical. According to the occasional news stories, the programs seemed a total failure, and for decades denunciations of bilingual education had been a regular talking-point among conservative Republicans, with President Ronald Reagan joining in the public attacks. Such attitudes were hardly confined to one side of the ideological aisle and Albert Shanker, the legendary founder of the modern teachers’ union movement, had become one of the most trenchant foes. Yet despite all that endless criticism and the bitter opposition of such powerful figures, the programs themselves had survived unscathed and instead greatly expanded over thirty years, seeming to demonstrate the adage that although political leaders may come and go, governmental programs themselves are immortal.
But then in 1996 I’d read a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times that greatly surprised me. A group of poor Latino garment workers in Downtown Los Angeles had become so outraged at the refusal of their local Ninth Street elementary school to teach their children English that they had organized a public boycott. I’d long regarded bilingual education as an apparent failure, but when parents had to carry picket signs outside their school because it refused to allow their children to learn English, the system seemed to have crossed over into total insanity. Las Familias had been the organizing center of that successful protest, with the parents assisted by Alice Callaghan, the media-savvy immigrant-rights activist and leftist Episcopal nun who ran it.
As I began carefully investigating the issue, I gradually discovered that “bilingual education” was a program seemingly plucked straight from the pages of Alice in Wonderland, with the facts being so bizarre that neither I nor almost anyone else who initially encountered them could possibly believe that they were real.
- 1.3 million California public school students, a quarter of the entire total, were classified as not knowing English, and of these, each year only 5% or 6% successfully learned English. According to the official government statistics, almost 95% of all the students who started a school year not knowing English were still classified as not having learned the language by the end of that year.
- Over half of all the students who didn’t know English were born in America, and most of the rest came here when they were very young. So the overwhelming majority of the students not knowing English had entered American public schools at the age of 5 or 6.
- One reason so many Latino students failed to learn English was that in the early grades a large majority were enrolled in so-called “bilingual” programs, which actually amounted to Spanish-almost-only instruction, often providing just thirty minutes a day of English and five hours and thirty minutes of Spanish.
- Another major problem was the absurdly perverse incentive structure, under which schools were paid more money for every child who failed to learn English and financially penalized for those who did. This encouraged schools either not to teach their students English or pretend that they hadn’t learned it.
- The leading academic theorists behind bilingual education insisted that the older you were, the easier it was to learn another language. According to them, adults learned new languages much quicker and easier than teenagers, and teenagers much easier than young children.
- The official dogma behind bilingual education held that a young immigrant child required five to seven years to learn English, or perhaps even ten years according to some cutting-edge researchers. So a child who began learning English in kindergarten might finally have mastered the language by junior high or high school.
Bilingual education had originally been established in the late 1960s as an element of Latino empowerment and ethnic activism, then gradually been absorbed into the framework of avant-garde pedagogy, eventually becoming closely associated with Whole Language reading, Fuzzy Math, and other theoretical doctrines much beloved by the academic theorists who staffed our Schools of Education. Over the years, several books by educators and political activists such as Rosalie Pedalino Porter, Linda Chavez, and Christine Rossell had described the origins, history, and obvious failure of such programs, and I read all of these works once I began my investigation.
During the course of my campaign, I gradually discovered that virtually none of the political supporters of bilingual programs were actually aware of the theoretical basis of the system that they were defending, and when those tenets were explained to them, they would usually react with disbelief or sometimes even say “But that’s crazy!”
Although California schools constituted a veritable Tower of Babel, with up to 140 different languages being spoken, only one language was actually at issue. Some 80% of the state’s Limited English students came from Spanish-speaking backgrounds, with Vietnamese and Chinese being the next most widespread at 1-2% each. Under the existing pedagogical framework, “bilingual” classes meant Spanish-language instruction for Latino students, but English-language instruction for all other immigrant groups, a contradictory nomenclature as irrational as every other aspect of the system.
By a wide margin, California was America’s largest state, nearly as populous as Texas and New York combined, and had also traditionally been among our whitest, as exemplified by the Leave it to Beaver suburbs of the 1950s. But beginning in the 1970s, massive waves of immigration, both legal and illegal, had drastically changed the state’s demography, so that by the early 1990s whites had suddenly become a minority, and even a small and shrinking minority in the urban school systems.
Hispanics, most of them impoverished recent arrivals, had reached some 30% of the total population and seemed likely to outnumber whites within another decade or two. Such rapid demographic change had sparked a couple of exceptionally bitter and divisive racially-charged initiative campaigns, Prop. 187 (Illegal Immigration) and Prop. 209 (Affirmative Action) in the 1994 and 1996 election cycles respectively, which became crude tests of political strength between the state’s long-dominant Anglos and its minority groups, especially the rising population of Latinos.
Both these measures had won by wide or even landslide majorities, but they had created bitter racial strains between whites and non-whites in the state’s social fabric. There seemed a serious risk that California would become a sharply-divided society fractured along ethnic lines, a recipe for potential future disaster.
Although our racially-obsessed intelligentsia seemingly regards differences in ancestry as the most serious in any society, I do not believe this is correct. From my historical reading, I think that divisions based upon language differences have usually been far more severe and more likely to produce long-term political conflict or even violence. And our disastrously misguided educational policies now seemed to be creating exactly this sort of permanent linguistic chasm in California, transforming it into a state split between English speakers and Spanish speakers.
Some popular concerns were greatly exaggerated. Spanish-language instruction or not, the overwhelming presence of English in the larger society and media ensured that all students eventually learned that language even if the schools often failed to teach it to them. But large numbers of Latino students were given little exposure to written English until the age of nine or ten, so that they might eventually leave high school with weak English literacy skills, having little chance of attending college or getting a good job. The future of an entire generation of immigrant schoolchildren was being destroyed, laying the basis for disastrous political and social trends in California’s future.
In 1999, I published a cover-story in Commentary providing a detailed discussion of the racially-charged political campaigns that had swept across California during the 1990s, and this narrative included a lengthy account of the strategy and course of my own successful “English” campaign, Proposition 227:
Ending this failed and legally dubious program, which was now even forcing some parents to picket their own children’s schools, seemed the ideal target of a voter initiative, and I decided to make such an effort. In broad terms, my goal was to provide for the assimilationist approach to American ethnic diversity the same opportunity to demonstrate its appeal and popular support that Proposition 187 had provided, disastrously, for ethnic nationalists on all sides.
Nothing could be more obvious than that immigrants themselves assigned enormous importance to learning English and to ensuring that their children learned English. Yet because of bilingual education, the completely opposite impression had been created, namely, that immigrants were ardently demanding that America’s public schools help maintain their family’s native language and culture. If executed properly, I believed, a campaign to eliminate these programs could attract substantial, perhaps overwhelming, support from immigrants themselves, thereby helping to puncture the mistaken anxieties of California’s white middle class.
But I also recognized that in many respects the political climate was extraordinarily inopportune for such an effort. The ethnic wounds inflicted by 187 had been reopened by the destructive handling of 209, and for a Republican like myself to jump in with a proposal to dismantle the bilingual cornerstone of Latino public education was to risk a terrible explosion. In order to mitigate the risk, it was absolutely crucial that the ballot measure be properly perceived as being both pro-immigrant and politically nonpartisan.
With regard to the former, my own pro-immigrant credentials provided some credibility, but not enough. So I began recruiting a cadre of key supporters: Alice Callaghan, with decades of unswerving left-wing activism on behalf of immigrants and their children; Gloria Matta Tuchman, a Latina and California’s most prominent anti-bilingual activist; and Jaime Escalante, of Stand and Deliver fame, perhaps America’s most renowned public-school teacher and himself a Latino immigrant long opposed to bilingual programs.
But no less crucial was to avoid the deadly embrace of California’s numerous anti-immigrant activists, who were likely to jump immediately aboard such a campaign. Since their touchstone had become the elimination of public spending on immigrants, I drafted my own “English for the Children” measure to save no money but rather to appropriate an additional, if rather modest, $50 million a year for English-literacy programs aimed at adult immigrants. The maneuver succeeded, provoking the strong opposition of 187 activists to our entire initiative.
THIS LEFT the various political establishments. For different reasons, both leading Latino and leading Republican figures maintained a stunned silence throughout most of the campaign. My meetings with the former were cordial; many Latino leaders seemed privately as skeptical of bilingual programs as I, but concerns about a revolt by their activist base prevented them from considering an endorsement, even after public polls consistently showed Latino support for the measure running in the 70- to 80-percent range. As for Republican leaders, they were terrified by the prospect of a minority-voter backlash of the sort their own ham-fisted campaign for 209 had provoked; despite nearly 90-percent Republican support in polls, they, too, mostly distanced themselves from the measure.
Teachers’ unions were similarly conflicted. The late Albert Shanker, founder of the American Federation of Teachers, had for years been among the most vocal national critics of bilingual programs, but his successors had generally made their peace with the program. Most rank-and-file teachers, however, continued to view the system as a scandalous failure, and resented the extra pay and perks that went to bilingual instructors. In October 1997, over the strong opposition of union leadership, a grassroots referendum campaign in the gigantic Los Angeles local garnered 48 percent of the vote for a proposal making support for Proposition 227 official union policy.
All these splits, so surprising to journalists, were extremely helpful to our campaign. When Proposition 227 first appeared on the scene, it seemed almost certain to be perceived as “Son of Proposition 187”–another test of raw political power between California whites and Latinos. Instead, the story we emphasized was one that pitted the common sense of ordinary people–white and Latino, Democrat and Republican–against the timid political elites of all these groups, unwilling to challenge the special interests that benefited from a failed system. Our message to the media was populism without xenophobia, and it resonated widely. Every poll or news story highlighting the widespread Latino dislike of bilingual programs helped reassure moderate and liberal whites that our measure was not anti-minority, while simultaneously persuading conservatives that Latinos and other immigrants shared their own basic values and assimilationist goals.
But there was also a countercampaign, which in resources and funding could hardly have been more dissimilar to our own. Our statewide effort consisted of just three full-time workers, myself included, together with a handful of volunteers whose main role was to participate in public debates and respond to media inquiries. By contrast, “No on 227” was a traditional, well-funded operation led by ace Democratic political consultant Richie Ross and a veteran campaign staff, backed by a field operation of thousands of local activists. It counted the public support of President Clinton, the chairmen of both the state Republican and Democratic parties, all four candidates for governor, every educational organization, every public and private union, and nearly every newspaper. Our opposition was to spend millions on a coordinated barrage of radio, television, and print advertisements; our own campaign was forced to rely almost entirely upon stories in the free media.
Still, despite this monumental imbalance, our foes faced challenges of their own. From the start, public opinion had overwhelmingly and consistently favored “English for the Children” across all ethnic and ideological lines. Although “No on 227” boasted the support of a coalition of pro-bilingual partners, any direct defense of bilingual education was out of the question: nearly everyone knew that the existing system was a failure. No more feasible, given the pro-immigrant credentials of Proposition 227’s main backers and strong immigrant support in the polls, was any attack on the measure as mean-spirited or 187-like. Indeed, such a tactic, by creating an ethnic divide over the measure, might actually backfire by solidifying white support for it.
THE ULTIMATE strategy chosen by the anti-Proposition 227 forces was breathtakingly cynical. This coalition of Latino activists, Democratic operatives, and educational organizations attempted, 187-style, to provoke a white taxpayer backlash by portraying the measure as a huge government “giveaway” to immigrants because of the extra money earmarked to assist adults in learning English. (The entire sum of $50 million amounted to an annual $1.50 per Californian.) Simultaneously, a completely different advertising message, aimed at California’s Latino audience, claimed that the problems with bilingual programs had recently been fixed and that Proposition 227 would actually prevent children from learning English in school.
These nakedly dishonest tactics shredded the credibility of the anti-227 campaign, which received a further blow when its major financial backer was discovered to be A. Jerrold Perenchio, a Republican billionaire and close ally of Governor Wilson. Not himself Latino or Spanish-speaking, Perenchio derived his fortune from his ownership of Univision, the Spanish-language television network, and thus had an obvious economic motive in preventing Latino children from learning English in school. Not only did Univision blanket California with anti-227 “advertorials,” broadcast free of charge, but the leading Democratic and Republican candidates for governor counted Perenchio as their largest financial donor, and all of them starred in Perenchio-funded anti-227 commercials.
When voting day finally arrived, Proposition 227 passed in a landslide, gaining 61 percent of the vote across ethnic and ideological lines. True, the “No” advertising campaign, which outspent our “Yes” campaign by about 25 to 1, took its toll, reducing by over a third the 62-percent Latino support the initiative had enjoyed before the start of the television barrage. But since advertising campaigns merely rent support rather than buy it, Latino backing for Proposition 227 in post-election polls soon returned to its earlier levels. More importantly, the actual dismantling of bilingual-education programs in the wake of 227 proceeded with minimal Latino opposition anywhere in California.
Under the measure, parents who wish to place or keep their children in a bilingual program can apply for a waiver, but few have done so. Within months of the vote, the number of students in bilingual education had fallen to about a tenth of its previous levels, and numerous follow-up stories in the press have featured glowing accounts of parents thrilled that schools are finally teaching their children to read, write, and speak English. There have been almost no signs of the immigrant unhappiness or resistance to English-language classrooms that had been confidently predicted by ethnic activists and anti-immigrant ideologues alike. Proposition 227 had tested the case for a return to assimilationist policies in public education and had proved it both popular and workable.
- California and the End of White America
The unprecedented racial transformation of California and its political consequences
Ron Unz • Commentary Magazine, October 1999 • 8,600 Words
Even after a quarter-century, I still recall some of the memorable vignettes from that first California campaign.
For years I had been moving in conservative policy circles, and although those friends commended me on my new project, they believed that I faced insurmountable odds. They warned me that the powerful teachers’ unions would fight tooth-and-nail to protect their bilingual programs, as would the Latino political leaders, who obviously embraced the ethnic-separatist agenda promoted by Spanish-language instruction. I was very skeptical about both of these points, and several ironic early encounters soon convinced me that my analysis had been correct.
Not long after my campaign first began to get media coverage, the top leaders of California’s largest teachers’ union invited me to lunch, and their attitude was quite friendly. They angrily complained about the disastrous nature of bilingual programs, saying that nearly all their teachers hated the system, and explaining that their powerful union had been trying for many years to get rid of it but with absolutely no success. So although they wished me the best of luck in my quixotic political crusade, they felt sure that I would need it, since bilingual education was invincible and my goal completely hopeless.
A couple of weeks later, I was similarly contacted by the head of the Latino Caucus in the State Legislature, who invited me to Sacramento for a private meeting. A few years earlier, he had shared a podium with me when I was a top featured speaker at California’s largest anti-Prop. 187 rally, so he and his top aides received me in a very friendly manner. As he began examining the text of my initiative, he repeatedly expressed his enthusiasm for many of the provisions, saying that his own legislative caucus had been moving in the same direction but much more slowly.
He offered to arrange a meeting with the full Latino Caucus, and I naively hoped that I might gain their endorsement, but whether because of too much controversy or too little interest, only about one-third of the members bothered attending, and most scarcely said a word. The main exception was a certain Diane Martinez, herself a third-generation American and supposedly a former bilingual education teacher, regularly described as the most obstreperous and widely disliked member of the Legislature, sometimes on the short end of 119-to-1 votes. As I began making my presentation, she quickly jumped in, and probably spoke as much as everyone else in the room combined, fiercely defending the bilingual programs against my criticism.
At one point, I began suggesting that many Latinos didn’t like bilingual education, and she immediately interrupted and cut me off. “I know that!” she said, “Every election I walk door-to-door in my district, and everyone is always complaining to me about the bilingual programs. They all say that the system is no good, the classes don’t work, and their children aren’t learning any English. But they’re all stupid, ignorant immigrant parents, who don’t know anything about education. I’ve talked with the academic experts, and all the experts agree that the bilingual programs are successful.” At her insulting characterization of her own Latino immigrant constituents, some of the other members of the Latino Caucus seemed to shrink down into their chairs in embarrassment, but none of them dared to challenge her harangue, and the meeting eventually ended without any positive results, let alone the endorsement I had foolishly been seeking.
Both these examples fully supported my impression of the underlying political dynamics. Although the bilingual advocates were relatively few in number, they were fiercely committed to their programs and intensely focused upon that sole, overriding issue, expressing the sort of fanaticism that persuaded far larger organizations to steer clear of any direct conflict.
California had a population of around 30 million and probably no more than a few thousand hard-core bilingual supporters if even that, but the intensity of their lobbying had blocked any change. According to all the public polls, our initiative possessed absolutely overwhelming popular support, but anyone who attended the scores of public debates during our campaign would have had the impression that opposition was running at 95% based upon the sentiments of the audiences. For decades, a tiny but extremely vocal minority had successfully trumped the views of a huge but apathetic majority, whether among Latinos, teachers, or the general public.
Many political campaigns amount to short-term quasi-business enterprises, focused heavily upon raising money for paid advertising, which generates the lucrative commissions for the political consultants that control the operation. However, I was acting as my own unpaid consultant, and my overriding goal was shaping the media coverage that would determine the broader impact of such a racially-charged and potentially explosive issue.
Mainstream journalists, then as now, heavily leaned left on racial and cultural issues, and those covering the educational beat were naturally influenced by the educational establishment that had spent decades administering these bilingual programs. Moreover, the Schools of Education were fervent supporters of the system, lending their academic credibility to the programs. For these reasons, we obviously began with the media overwhelmingly aligned against us.
But as the individual journalists gradually became more familiar with the issue and heard our side of the story, their perspectives usually changed. They investigated the facts and became aware of the actual reality of the bizarre educational programs that for a full generation had been so severely miseducating Latino immigrant students. Their initial suspicions towards our initiative campaign soon dissipated and they became increasingly friendly, to such an extent that one of our main activities was merely redistributing mainstream news coverage. This media reaction crossed all ideological lines and astounded my disbelieving conservative friends.
One of the earliest examples of this reaction came in a piece by an eager young journalist named Gregory Rodriguez that appeared in the leftist-alternative LA Weekly, and emphasized the ironies of the campaign:
When “English for the Children” first surfaced, this proposed ballot initiative against bilingual education looked like the logical political descendant of California’s recent campaigns against undocumented immigrants and affirmative action. Bilingual education would be the latest target for the state’s disproportionately large and cranky Anglo electorate. Presumably, much of the white electorate, led by conservatives and anti-immigrant activists, would line up to support the initiative, while liberals and Latinos would amass forces on the other side.
But so far, an entirely different political dynamic has emerged, according to political consultants and senior officials from both major parties. Neither the Latino political leadership nor that of the state Republican Party wants anything to do with this initiative. Many Republicans are reluctant to be identified with an issue that could expose them to further charges of being immigrant bashers or anti-Latino. The Latino political establishment, on the other hand, is reluctant to defend bilingual education, a program whose success many privately question. Nor do some want to condemn openly an initiative sponsored by Ron Unz, one of the rare Republicans who have stood strong with immigrants in the past.
Six months later, Rodriguez published a much longer and more extensive piece covering the same ground in The Nation, America’s flagship left-liberal opinion magazine, and within a few years he had established himself as one of our most insightful and sophisticated writers on issues of race and ethnicity, authoring a series of long pieces for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
In mid-October, we had gotten a lucky break as the Los Angeles Times released the results of their statewide poll on our measure, indicating absolutely overwhelming support across ideological and ethnic lines for our proposal that all public school instruction be conducted in English, with the 84% backing by Latinos being even greater than the 80% support among Anglos. During the eight months prior to Election Day, a dozen other statewide polls by third-party organizations all continued to show massive support for “English in the Schools.” And around the same time as that first poll, I had managed to recruit renowned Calculus teacher Jaime Escalante of Stand and Deliver fame to join our campaign as Honorary Chairman, providing a further boost.
Our efforts began attracting some favorable national attention in the elite media, including early coverage in the New York Times and the Economist, as well as in the Los Angeles Times, which in those days still ranked as one of America’s most influential newspapers.
In January 1998, Reason magazine published an outstanding 8,500 word cover story on bilingual education, one of the very first times a national audience had been exposed to the utterly bizarre aspects of that long-standing program. Some described this piece as a “category killer” on the topic and we ordered thousands of offprints, which were widely distributed.
Unlike most political campaigns, which amount to uninteresting partisan slugfests relying upon poll-tested slogans and political advertising, the complexities and ironies of the “English” issue were ideal grist for long-form investigative journalism, and a great deal of such written analysis soon appeared, a body of work that steadily reshaped the perspectives of the more thoughtful segments of the reading public. During the twelve months of our campaign, those longstanding programs probably received many, many times more public scrutiny and media coverage than they had accumulated during the previous thirty years combined, including numerous excellent magazine articles in weeklies and monthlies, as well as thousands of articles in the major daily newspapers.
- Bilingual Barrio (PDF) by Glenn Garvin
Reason Magazine • January 1998, Cover Story • 8,500 Words - English Spoken Here (PDF) by David Hill
Teacher Magazine • January 1998 • 4,200 Words - English Lessons in California (PDF) by Gregory Rodriguez
The Nation • April 20, 1998 • 2,400 Words - The Case Against Bilingual Education by Rosalie Pedalino Porter
The Atlantic • May 1998 • 3,300 Words - The Making of an Initiative (PDF) by Michael J. Fitzgerald
California Lawyer • May 1998 • 3,600 Words - KrashenBurn (PDF) by Jill Stewart
New Times Los Angeles • May 28, 1998, Cover Story • 5,600 Words - Squeeze Play (PDF) by Howard Blume and Ben Ehrenreich
LA Weekly • May 29, 1998, Cover Story • 5,400 Words
As already mentioned, most national political observers had initially assumed that this campaign would follow the trajectory of Prop. 187 and Prop. 209, the racially-charged California initiatives of the previous two election cycles, both strongly backed by Republican operatives but later seen as longterm political disasters for the GOP. Despite the initial unpopularity of Affirmative Action, President Bill Clinton had rallied his base by defending those programs, and partly as a consequence won an easy reelection victory in 1996. Therefore, many expected that he would similarly seek to consolidate his Latino support by quickly taking a leading role in defending a threatened social program that had always been identified with that constituency.
In early March 1998, Harvard University’s Institute of Politics organized a public debate on our initiative, inviting me as one of the participants, with the moderator being Prof. Christopher Edley of the Law School, Clinton’s top advisor on racial matters. Just the previous week, that same forum had hosted a bitter, rancorous debate on Affirmative Action, and I am sure that Edley had expected the bilingual controversy to play out along similar racially-divisive fault lines.
Instead, he encountered something entirely different. All participants agreed about the tremendous importance of having Latino immigrant children learn English, with the dispute being the pedagogical question of whether this was best accomplished by teaching everything in Spanish, a notion that surely must have puzzled the law professor. Perhaps partly as a consequence of this unexpected turn, President Clinton chose to avoid the issue during nearly the entire campaign, only coming out against our measure shortly before the vote. The introduction and most relevant portions of this important early Harvard debate are hosted on our Youtube channel, while the entire video is also available online.
Comprehensive collections of the major print and television media clips of the California campaign are also available:
The Aftermath of California’s Proposition 227
The huge quantity and overwhelmingly favorable skew of mainstream and elite media coverage had crucial consequences for our campaign, far beyond merely stiffening our Yes vote against the opposition’s 25-to-1 advantage in paid advertising. Controversial, racially-charged California initiatives had a long history of winning landslide victories at the polls only to be thrown out by the courts or at least delayed for years by legal challenges, and almost everyone had assumed that our measure would suffer exactly that fate. But the enormously positive atmospherics generated by our excellent media coverage helped ensure that within just a few weeks of our victory, four federal judges had ruled in our favor. Prop. 227 passed in early June and by the beginning of the next school year in early August, California’s thousand-odd school districts had begun changing their language of instruction to English, an outcome that completely astonished nearly all political observers.
Given the magnitude of the change and its speed, the 1998 shift of California public schooling from Spanish to English probably constituted the largest controlled educational experiment in the history of the world, and as the new school year began every newspaper naturally assigned its local reporters to investigate the consequences. The result was an avalanche of stories about the unexpected success of the transformation, with former bilingual teachers shocked at how easily their students were absorbing the new language “like little sponges,” while also describing the tremendous gratitude of their parents.
During our campaign, the evidence of the failure of the bilingual programs had been so manifest that none of our opponents had dared to defend the existing system, instead merely arguing that the sweeping changes we proposed would be even more disastrous and destroy the education of over a million immigrant students. But instead of these predictions of doom, the newspapers began reporting stories of tremendous success.
Indeed, these early results were so favorable that they helped prompt the influential New Republic to run a cover story on my California political achievements, which represented the all-time high-water mark of my personal media coverage.
Some school districts including gigantic LA Unified had dragged their heels and resisted the changes, but most seemed to reasonably comply, and after the first year, statewide immigrant test scores showed a very noticeable improvement, giving the lie to the many predictions of disaster. Moreover, a detailed quantitative analysis by the San Jose Mercury News demonstrated a clear pattern of results, with immigrant students in districts that had eliminated their bilingual programs showing much better gains than those districts that had retained them, a contrast that prodded LA and most other holdouts to begin fully implementing the law. But the diehard bilingual supporters argued that a single year of testing was insufficient evidence and they stubbornly stood their ground.
Then the second year’s test scores were released in August 2000, and the world changed.
Although the New York Times had covered the original Prop. 227 campaign and the initial implementation of classroom English throughout the state, its interest had then waned and almost two years had passed since its last article. But when I provided the new test score information to the Times educational reporters, they were very impressed, and their resulting coverage was greatly magnified by an ironic twist to the story worthy of a Hollywood script.
California contained a thousand-odd school districts, and mid-size Oceanside USD near San Diego had never attracted much attention, with its students mostly being the children of impoverished Latino immigrant families. Despite his Irish name, Oceanside Superintendent Ken Noonan was Mexican-American and many years earlier he had begun his career as a bilingual education teacher, even serving as the first president of the California Association of Bilingual Educators when he and three colleagues had originally founded the organization. Over the years, he had gradually become more and more doubtful about whether the bilingual programs actually worked, though he had still strongly opposed our initiative when it was on the ballot.
But after the measure passed, he decided that the new law needed to be obeyed, and he switched all his classes over to English, following the instructional requirements more strictly than almost any other California school district. This naturally aroused the tremendous hostility of organized bilingual groups, who denounced and attacked him, claiming his schools were violating Latino civil rights, and prompting a campaign of harassment by the militantly pro-bilingual State Department of Education. Meanwhile, those same activists greatly praised neighboring Vista USD, a district of similar size and demographics, which they claimed had some of the state’s best bilingual programs, and had largely retained them by ignoring the provisions of our initiative.
However, the newly released state test scores revealed that while Oceanside’s academic performance had risen dramatically, Vista’s had not. The national ranking of Oceanside’s Limited English second graders had jumped from 19th percentile to the 28th in reading and from 27th to 41st in math, representing nearly a 50% rise in just two years, with the other grades also showed very large gains. Such rapid academic improvement was almost unprecedented in the annals of American educational reform.
For years, educational theorists had worked to convince the Times that young immigrant children required 5-7 years to learn English, but when the reporter visited the Oceanside schools, he was astonished to encounter six- or seven-year-olds who had learned to read, write, and speak English within just a few months. As a consequence, his account of the remarkable success of “English” in Oceanside and the rest of California ran as a front-page lead story in the Sunday edition of our national newspaper of record, and this quickly produced a wave of follow-on media coverage from CBS News, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek.
Noonan himself deservedly became a national educational hero, discussing his remarkable results on the PBS Newshour and in a long Washington Post opinion piece. For many years, the bilingual activists had been widely feared in educational circles, and Noonan’s California colleagues recognized his tremendous courage in standing up to them, voting him Superintendent of the Year. Arnold Schwarzenegger later appointed him to the California State Board of Education, where he was soon chosen as its president. So the story of “English” became an educational fairy tale with a happy ending.
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