Age of Enlightenment: A Rebuttal

In an article published in Educational Leadership (1999/2000) titled "The Benefits of English Immersion", Rosalie Pedalino Porter of the Institute for Research in English Acquisition and Development (READ) declares that with passage of Proposition 227 in California, we have now entered the "Age of Enlightenment" in educating language minority students. Let us reason together to examine the theories and principles on which Ms. Porter bases her claims. This exercise is worthwhile, since many educators do not share Ms. Porter's optimistic view of the future of language minority education under Proposition 227 and other movements to ban bilingual education. Educators, researchers and civil rights organizations who advocate for students whose first language is not English see the movement to restrict bilingual education as movement in the wrong direction. Here I undertake a point by point analysis and rebuttal of Porter's arguments in support of English immersion.

In her arguments for the benefits of English immersion, Porter presents a blanket indictment of bilingual education. She describes the failures of bilingual education to meet the expectations placed on it by a public anxious for equitable and effective education:

Porter then outlines the "benefits of English immersion" which she claims are not provided through bilingual education, as follows:

Let us examine each of these allegedly unfulfilled goals to gain insight into whether English immersion offers greater promise than bilingual education toward their fulfillment. I have included electronic links to more in-depth treatment of these topics in light of claims made by proponents of Proposition 227 regarding SAT-9 test scores in California. I provide this analysis because Porter touts the results of the first year of implementation of Proposition 227 as promising, mainly because "[T]he dire predictions that bilingual children in English-language classrooms would fall behind have not come true." (p. 56).

According to the Language Census Data published by the California Department of Education, during the 1998-99 school year 170,000 students were enrolled in bilingual education, down from 400,000 in 1997-98. This number of students represents 12% of the total of 1.4 million LEP classified students. Prior to passage of Proposition 227, 30% were enrolled in bilingual programs. Consequently, 88% of California's language minority students are now enrolled in classrooms where instruction is "overwhelmingly in English" (and no doubt many of them are overwhelmed). The proponents of English immersion would like us to be convinced that by terminating services in their primary language for 18% of the language minority population, education for 88% has magically improved. Dire predictions allegedly made by unnamed opponents of Proposition 227 may not have come true in the first year of enforcement. However, neither has English immersion lived up to its grandiose promises.

After a brief description of the pendulum swings of policy for educating language minorities, from "sink or swim" which she titles the Early Stone Age, Porter takes us to the "Iron Age" of "bureaucratic heavy-handedness" and a "one-size-fits-all experiment" in the form of Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE). Her complaint appears to be that state-mandated TBE created "separate and largely segregated schooling" for 4 million students who could not function in English language classrooms. She then characterizes bilingual education as a program where limited English proficient (LEP) are taught all their subjects in their primary language, usually Spanish, and provided "English lessons over several years."

To those of us who were just beginning our careers in bilingual education in the era of the "Lau Remedies", Porter's assessment appears to be highly revisionist and disingenuous. First of all, Title VII and the Bilingual Education Act defined bilingual education quite differently. The model that Porter portrays of TBE does not fit the federal law, which of course never required bilingual education, nor the types of programs mandated by states. The fact is that state laws regarding bilingual education deal largely with identification, assessment and program placement/exit procedures designed to ensure the entitlements of LM students to fair and equitable programs. The mandate for primary language instruction has never translated into a "one-size-fits-all" program model in California due to the shortage of bilingual teachers, the wide number of children from various linguistic backgrounds within a given school district, and a number of other factors. To imply that 4 million LEP students around the nation suddenly ended up in bilingual classrooms is a gross exaggeration. In California in 1997 only 30% of the total number of LEP students were in bilingual programs. Since California is home to 43% of the total U.S. population of LEP students, this is most likely the largest percentage of students in bilingual education in the nation.

Furthermore, Porter leads us to believe that now that the "Age of Enlightenment" has dawned and we are freed from "bureaucratic heavy-handedness" to allow California to lead the way with "innovations" in language minority education that will serve as a model for the nation. Consider what Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley said about Proposition 227 (the Unz Initiative) before its passage in an official statement in May 1998.

Porter does not mention the draconian enforcement provision of Proposition 227 that allows teachers to be sued for personal financial liabilities for non-compliance. Nor does she mention the grand juries that have been formed to intimidate school district administrators in Los Angeles and San Francisco who are struggling to make sense of the law's contradictory language and unsound pedagogical premises. Nor does she attempt to account for the lack of successes of the 70% of California's programs for LEP students prior to 1998 in furthering the goals espoused by English-only proponents. Instead, the READ Institute continues to engage in what Jim Cummins aptly calls "info-pollution" to obscure and distort the truth about bilingual education's many successes and the way in which it has helped many language minority children beat the odds against them.

Porter focuses her attention on supposed "disadvantages" of bilingual learners to be addressed through "educational innovations" that "drop the emphasis on process" and focus on measures of program effective and "learning the common language, English." She proposes that English immersion will help overcome the "more serious lack of background knowledge for school learning" that plagues these children and that has a "negative effect" of their learning. She then recommends "extra help so that they can fully benefit from their school experience." What we are presented is the deficit model of language minority education warmed over and repackaged as an "innovation."

Porter cites the 1998-99 SAT-9 scores in California for second graders as an example of the "promise" of rapid acquisition of English for LEP students under Proposition 227. She reports how LEP students on average rose four points in their national percentile ranking (NPR) from 19 to 23 NPR. I have done a thorough analysis of these claims, but let me summarize here what these test scores tell us about "rapid acquisition of English" and English literacy. If these second graders continue to increase their standardized test scores by an average of 4 NPR per year (representing one year's academic growth plus 4 points), it will take them 3.25 years to reach the program exit criteria. At this point, they will have had 5 years of English immersion, unless of course the bar is lowered and they are mainstreamed before reaching the criteria established previously under the Chacone-Mascone Bilingual Education Act. It will take them another 1.75 years to reach the 43rd percentile to be on a par with their average native English speaking peers.

Compare this scenario with a school district like Calexico Unified School District that exits 80% of its LEP student population between fourth and sixth grade. These students, who are fully literate in Spanish, are reaching the exit criteria of 36% NPR in English reading after five years in bilingual programs. The positive results in both English language and content-area achievement from the late-exit model used in Calexico schools confirm the findings in the Ramírez Report (Ramírez, Yuen, & Ramey, 1991). The researchers drew the following conclusions:

In addition, children who are reading in Spanish are less likely to be retained since they can demonstrate performance in reading and content areas when tested on the SABE/2 or Aprenda used to evaluate the program and monitor students' progress. English immersion students, however, may not be able to demonstrate whatever academic competency they have because of their low reading levels and gaps in their content-area knowledge in English. They are highly likely to be retained under the existing policies in California. The conclusion must be that English immersion will have to make a much better showing in future years than it did in its first year to stay even with, let alone surpass, well implemented bilingual programs. There is evidence based on comparison of SAT-9 and SABE/2 scores from school districts who have maintained their bilingual programs with school districts that have embraced English-only. An example is Vista USD versus Oceanside USD, where bilingual readers are scoring better in English reading than their peers who are not being taught to read in Spanish.

Once again, I must point out the spurious nature of arguments that bilingual education has failed to cure the problems of the whole of the Latino student population when at most 30% of that population could have been enrolled in bilingual programs during their school career. In fact, 49.6% of an identified 2.1 million Latino K-12 students in California were designated LEP in 1996, as were less than 34% of Asian students (Attinasi, 1999). This is because many LEP students experience a number of different programs during their school careers, mainly English immersion (70% in California in 1998). Consequently, prior to passage of Proposition 227, only 15% of the total number of Latino students were likely to have been enrolled in bilingual education at some point in their educational careers. It is ludicrous to expect a program that serves such a small number of any given student population to be held accountable for remedying the ills of the totality. The greatest likelihood is that any participation in a bilingual program would have been of short duration (3-5 years). If we are in search of what programs to blame for the high level of Latino dropouts which are calculated from between 20-50%, surely the English-only programs that serve 85% of these students for the majority of their years in the public schools are responsible, not bilingual education.

Proponents of English immersion in the "new era" of language minority education assume that early proficiency in English will ensure academic success and therefore reduce dropout rates to lower levels than when English immersion and bilingual education were 70% versus 30% of Latinos' school programs. There is the implication contained in this theory that bilingual education may have in fact aggravated the high dropout rates, although Porter only blames bilingual programs for not reducing the rate. The reality is that bilingual education appears to be part of the cure for dropping out, not the cause. Researchers at the University of Oklahoma (Curiel, Rosenthal, & Richek, 1986) found that students in bilingual education actually dropped out less than similar students in all-English programs.

It is a challenging task to link Latino LEP drop-out rates to students' enrollment in bilingual education, but when this has been done reliably through well-designed quantitative and qualitative research, the results show the positive impact of bilingual education on dropout reduction among Latino youth. In order to examine the effects of bilingual education on Latino dropouts, we must look at particular programs, preferably model programs, that provide a complete scenario in order to draw inferences about cause and effect. We have such a case in Calexico, California. In his article "Reducing Hispanic Dropout: A Case of Success (1996), my colleague Richard Neumann details how the Calexico Unified School District reduced dropouts to the extent that their 11%-17% rate over a five year period was less than the 29% for Latino students statewide for the same period. Twenty percent of Calexico High School graduates go on to four year universities, while another 58% continue their education at a community college. Of students statewide who are admitted to the University of California system, Latinos include 3.8%. Among Latino students from Calexico, the admissions rate to the UC system is almost double the predicted rate, at seven percent of graduates (Mora, et al, 1999). A well-implemented bilingual program with a coherent K-12 plan to ensure students' overall academic achievement was a major factor in lowering the dropout rate, which otherwise would have been considerably higher for a population with these characteristics (Moll & González, 1994).

Another study that supports the importance of appropriate and effective educational programs that address Latino students language proficiency in reducing dropout rates was conducted by Rumberger and Larson (1998). These researchers conducted comparisons of rates of school retention among across three groups of Latino students: LEP students; bilingual students either identified as fluent English proficient upon entering school and those redesignated from LEP to FEP; and Latino English-only speakers. They found that the FEP group students were the least likely to drop out of high school. The language proficiency factor in their statistical model accounted for 29% of the variance in dropout rates across groups.

Similar findings are reported by Rumbaut (1995) in his study of Latino high school students in schools throughout California and in San Diego in particular. Rumbaut reports that the most academically successful group of Latinos were the "Mexican-oriented students" who were bilingual, with varying levels of English proficiency, generally classified as Fluent English Proficient (FEP) by the schools. Most of them were born in Mexico but had lived in the U.S. for more than 5 years and had strong bicultural ties with both Mexico and the United States.

The Rumberger and Larson (1998) study did not classify these students by types of instruction, probably for the reasons cited above. However, their comparisons of factors of academic engagement, study skills, social support structures and stable school enrollment. They concluded the following:

The goal of bilingual education to reduce dropout rates and enhance the self-esteem of Latino students has been realized in well-implemented bilingual programs and documented by respected researchers. Consequently, it is unfortunate that Porter and her fellow researchers choose to ignore not only the research evidence but also the very real experiences of many communities who have overcome tremendous odds against their youth. Of course, such cases do not grab her attention because they would contradict her sweeping condemnation of bilingual education for not solving the problems of educational neglect of language minority students in our public schools, to which English only instruction has been a major contributor. Clearly, to the extent that programs either prevent or contribute to Latinos' dropping out of school, the blame for the status quo must be placed at the feet of English-only education.

Porter implies that bilingual education contributes to "largely segregated schooling." There is no mention in Porter's article of the defacto segregation of Latino students throughout the southwestern United States and of the concentrated poverty in these schools. Instead, we are offered a rosy picture of how English immersion will accelerate LM students' entry into the "mainstream" where they will be integrated with their native English speaking peers. This supposed benefit of English immersion does not stand the test of reality. Orfield, Buchmeier, James and Eitle (1997) found that in 1994-95 74% of Latinos in the U.S. were enrolled in schools that were 50-100% minority while 34.8% were enrolled in schools that are 90-100% minority (Table 4, p. 8). Furthermore, among segregated white schools only 5% face conditions of concentrated poverty, while 80% of the segregated black and Latino schools do. Since these conditions of segregation are unlikely to have changed appreciably since 1995, we must conclude that the promises of rapid integration with native-English speaking populations through English-only instruction are an illusion for 35% of Latino students and a vague promise for the vast majority.

Porter wishes us to believe that the type of segregation of students according to English language proficiency levels mandated by Proposition 227 into heterogeneous native-language separate from any English speaking peers in their school as well as their more proficient LEP classmates is preferable to segregated classrooms for bilingual instruction. Furthermore, the segregation of LEP students is mandatory under Proposition 227 unless parents secure a waiver for an alternative type of instruction. We must challenge this insidious form of tracking students mandated under the guise of producing a more rapid acquisition of English, especially since research indicates that English acquisition takes about the same amount of time, regardless of the type of program in which LM students are enrolled (Collier, 1987; Hakuta, Butler & Witt, 2000). Certainly, parents are deceived if promises are made that English acquisition will take only one year (Wong Fillmore, 1998) before their child can be assured of "integration" through mainstreaming after supposedly acquiring "a good working knowledge of English." In segregated schools where non-English speaking students are predominate, "mainstreaming" may mean no more than the cessation of funding for special language services and remedial education programs.

The READ Institute has been aggressive in its attacks on the Office of Civil Rights for enforcement of language minority education provisions and has objected loudly to many of the identification and placement procedures that have been the hallmark of civil rights guarantees for LEP students. The most disturbing aspect of READ Institute's arguments is the assumption that students are harmed by instruction in their native language and the conversion of the language and intent of civil rights laws to attack bilingual education. Many of the premises on which English-only education policy is based are in contrast to the positive and inclusive assumptions underlying bilingual education.

What do parents of bilingual children want? This is the question Porter poses and purports to answer in the Educational Leadership article. She reports the supposed English-only activism of parents at the famous Ninth Street School and in Arizona. This is designed to perpetuate the convenient political myth that the law to ban bilingual education through Proposition 227 stems from a grass-roots movement among Latino parents. However, she fails to mention that a Los Angeles Times/CNN exit poll on June 3, 1998 reported that 63% of California's Latino voters were opposed to the ballot initiative. Nor does she mention a recent poll by Los Angeles' Spanish-language media found that 88 percent of the city's Latino parents with children in bilingual programs believe the programs are beneficial (Crawford, 1998).

Porter is of course critical of bilingual educators for their warnings about the long-term effects of Proposition 227. She joins in what has become a popular media strategy--to portray bilingual educators as "gloom-and-doom" prognosticators who attempted to frighten parents and the general public about the damaging effects of Proposition 227's sweeping mandate. The implication is that now we bilingual educators are just pouting or worse, as one reporter from the San Jose Mercury News (Jacobs, 1999) suggests, are "doomsayers robbed of their disaster who now refuse to join in the victory celebration. Porter cites three scenarios that she claims bilingual educators created that have not come true, thereby implying that all is well with Proposition 227. Porter describes the alleged predictions as 1) bilingual students would be devastated academically, 2) native-language teaching would be forbidden, and 3) parents would lose their right to choose.

Perhaps these three scenarios have not occurred on a large scale but each has in fact occurred. A group of parents in Oceanside Unified School District, the Coalición Unidos por la Educación de Nuestros Nińos filed a 15 count complaint on July 9, 1999 with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR). Oceanside USD has become the "poster district" for proponents of Proposition 227 when school administrators denied all but five of 154 waiver requests for bilingual education. In a letter addressed to Stefan M. Rosenzweig, Director of the Office for Civil Rights, Region IX in San Francisco, attorneys for the Coalición (Deborah Escobedo of META and Cynthia Rice of California Rural Legal Assistance) state the following:

The parents of the language minority students who were denied waivers express their reasons for filing the OCR complaint in these words:

There has been nothing short of a media blitz touting the alleged accomplishments of Oceanside USD, attributing these singularly to administrator's "strict enforcement" of Proposition 227. In addition, READ Institute (Clark, 1999) reports in a glowingly supportive manner the highly restrictive "language use policies" implemented by five California school districts. Click here for an analysis of the READ-Clark report.

The predictions of bilingual educators, unfortunately have come true to a limited extent and they would have been fulfilled to a greater degree if the more extreme advocates of Proposition 227's "strict enforcement" had gotten their way. For example, a CDE report released in March, 2000 censured the Pittsburg school district, located near Oakland, for violating various state and federal laws by neglecting their LEP student populations. The report was highlighted in an article by Mary Ann Zehr in Education Week (March 29, 2000). We have yet to see the results of the OCR complaint in Oceanside, which was visited in December 1999 by monitors from OCR and the California Department of Education who will complete their investigation in January 2000 (Escobedo, December 1999, personal communication). A complaint has also been filed against the Carlsbad schools north of San Diego. Whatever the outcome of OCR's investigation, which was provoked by school officials' disregard of the concerns of Latino parents about their children's educational opportunities and well-being in classrooms, we have examples of the results of Proposition 227's enforcement in Porter's "Age of Enlightenment."

These descriptors pit the goals of bilingual communities for self-determination and preservation of their cultural values and heritage against the supposed goals of a good education--an either/or choice for immigrant parents. Porter would have us accept this dichotomy as logical and inevitable. In fact, Porter's own "horse race" research in which she analyses various studies and compares "bilingual education" to "immersion education" actually confirm the benefits of additive models of BILINGUAL education, not monolingual education. In a recent article published by the AERA journal Educational Researcher, Cummins (1999) points out that Porter's READ Institute, produced a much touted and frequently referenced critique of transitional bilingual education that says something quite different. Cummins says:

Cummins points out that this type of winner-loser analysis of research provides very little information for policymakers since it is without a solid foundation in coherent theory. The program called "structured English immersion" mandated in California lacks any research base or coherent theory. Yet Porter contends that demonstrably beneficial additive bilingual education programs are too costly and too complicated for public schools to provide to our most disadvantages students. Instead, she hocks subtractive English monolingual education as the "enlightened" program of the new age of immigrant education.

Porter titles her concluding section in the article "Back to the Future." What future do English immersion and the English-only movement promise language minority students? Choices have been made through a political process that inevitably favors the majority, which can successfully coalesce against a minority that appears to threaten its hegemony. Porter portrays the genuine concerns of bilingual educators about the long range academic advancement of language minority students now consigned to English immersion as mere "sour grapes" rhetoric. Those with the highest levels of expertise in implementing effective programs for language minority students have been marginalized and maligned in order to further the purposes of the English-only movement. Tragically, in California the majority has chosen to sacrifice the future of language minority children by limiting the options for empowering them through programs that recognize and enrich the linguistic and cultural resources of the minority community. Calderón and Carreón (2000: 175) eloquently describe the alternatives:

The pre-civil rights movement prospects for language minority students in our public schools were grim. With broad stroke revisions of the history of our struggle for educational equity and social justice in the hands of English-only movement, the so-called "Age of Enlightenment" will only prove to be the precursor to a new version of the Dark Ages.

Attinasi, J.J. (1998). English only for California children and the aftermath of Proposition 227. Education, 119, 2, 263-283.

Calderón, M. & Carreón, A. (2000). In search of a new border pedagogy: Sociocultural conflicts facing bilingual teachers and students along the U.S.-Mexico border. In C.J. Ovando & P. McLaren (Eds.). The Politics of Multiculturalism and Bilingual Education (pp. 167-187). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Cummins, J. (1999). Alternative paradigms in bilingual education research: Does theory have a place? Educational Researcher, 28 (7), 26-34.

Crawford, J. (1998, February). Proposition 227 and the future of bilingual education in California. Paper presented at California State University, Long Beach.

Curiel, H., Rosenthal, J., and Richek, H. (1986). Impacts of bilingual
education on secondary school grades, attendance, retentions and
drop-outs. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences , 8 (4), 357-367.

Moll, L.C., & González, N. (1994). Lessons from research with language-minority children. Journal of Reading Behavior, 26 (4), 349-355.

Mora, J.K., Jones, E.B., & Palacio, E.J. (1999). The Calexico Success Story: Identifying variables in the literacy achievement of Hispanic students. National Association for Bilingual Education Conference, Denver, CO, January 26-30.

Neumann, R.A. (1996). Reducing Hispanic dropout: A case of success. Educational Policy, 10 (1), 22-45.

Orfield, G., Bachmeieir, M.D., James, D.R., & Eitle, T. (1997). Deepening segregation in American public schools: A special report from the Harvard Project on School Desegregation. Equity and Excellence in Education, 30 (2), 5-21.

Porter, R.P. (1999/2000). The benefits of English Immersion. Educational Leadership 57 (4), 52-56.

Ramírez, J.D., Yuen, J.D., & Ramey, D.R. (1991). Longitudinal study of structured English immersion strategy, early-exit and late-exit transitional bilingual education programs for language-minority children. [Available on-line: http://www.ncbe.gwu.edu/miscpubs/ramirez/longitudinal.htm]

Rumbaut, R. G. (1995). The new Californians: Comparative research findings on the education progress of immigrant children. In R. G. Rumbaut & W.A. Cornelius, California's immigrant children: Theory, research, and implications for educational policy, (p. 17-70). San Diego, CA: University of California, San Diego Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies.

Rumberger, R.W., & Larson, K.A. (1998). Toward explaining differences in educational achievement among Mexican American language-minority students. Sociology of Education, 71, 69-93.

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