PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "One Nation, One Standard"

« Back to One Nation, One Standard main page

Transcript for:

One Nation, One Standard

Mr. Wattenberg: At the beginning of the 20th century, after waves of immigration from Europe many Americans feared that the new arrivals would not be able to assimilate. Today’s debate about recent immigration from Latin America echoes those concerns. How will these immigrants, both legal and illegal, become part of the American mainstream? What are the obstacles that impede the assimilation of Latinos today? A critical aspect of immigrant ascension is education. Critics say that America’s public education system is failing immigrant groups, particularly Latinos. They claim that the policies of social promotion, tracking and bilingual education diminish educational standards and prevent minorities from achieving success. Today Latinos are America’s fastest growing minority group. Their successful assimilation is a national concern.

Mr. Wattenberg: Hello I’m Ben Wattenberg. “The Hispanic community doesn’t care about education as much as other minority groups.” This is the controversial claim of Herman Badillo’s immigrant education reform manifesto, One Nation One Standard. Badillo himself embodies the idea of immigrant ascension. Orphaned as a young boy in Puerto Rico, he surmounted the hurdles of the New York public education system to become the first ever Puerto Rican member of the House of Representatives. Originally a champion of bilingual education, Badillo now believes it prevents immigrant children from engaging in American society. Today Think Tank sits down with Herman Badillo to discuss his journey, how to fix public education and what the Hispanic community can do to succeed in America. The topic before the house: One Nation One Standard, this week on Think Tank.

Mr. Wattenberg: Herman Badillo, welcome to Think Tank, the first of what I hope will be a number of visits. Let us begin in our normal way. Let me ask you something about your childhood and your background.

Mr. Badillo: I was born in Puerto Rico in 1929, and in those days there was an epidemic of tuberculosis in Puerto Rico, and my father, who was a schoolteacher, died of tuberculosis when I was one. My mother died when I was five of tuberculosis. My grandmother and practically the whole family died of tuberculosis, so I spent most of my childhood going from one relative to another, and we were very poor, because in those days, we had a worse depression in Puerto Rico than we did in the United States. And eventually, when I was about 11 ½, my aunt got enough money to bring us to New York City. That’s why I came to the city of New York, to live in East Harlem. Then I spent some time moving around with different relatives in the United States. I went to Chicago, to California, then back to New York.

Mr. Wattenberg: So how did you find your New York City high school education? Was that good or not so good?

Mr. Badillo: It was terrible. I went to Haron High School on 59th Street and 10th Avenue in Manhattan, and I found that I was studying airplane mechanics, and I learned how to take apart internal combustion engines and how to make model airplanes and mechanical drawing. But I thought it was very boring, so I saw that there was a school newspaper, and I joined the school newspaper and I began writing articles for the paper. I interviewed Peggy Lee, for example, who had just started her singing career. And I had a lot of front page stories, and finally one of the students on the newspaper said to me, “Are you a student in this school? Because we never see you in any of our classes.” I said, “Yes, I am. I’m studying airplane mechanics.” She said, “What are you doing that for? If you stay in airplane mechanics, you never will be able to get a good education. If you switch to academic course, you can go on to college.” I said, “Well, I don’t have any money for college.” She said, “Well, the City College is for the poor.” And that’s how I got to City College. So my mentor really was a fellow student in high school. It wasn’t any educator. It wasn’t anyone else, and it certainly was not anyone in the family, because my aunt didn’t have an education and she couldn’t speak English at all. So that’s one of the reasons that I am so much against the educational system as it exists, because a lot of kids don’t get the opportunity to be properly oriented, and they’re not as lucky as I was to have a student who helped me out.

Mr. Wattenberg: You really can’t get ahead in America, or now, in the world, without English. I know some Latinos who say, rather inelegantly, but I think with some merit, “Spanish is the language of busboys.” Now, that’s not true, because there is a great cultural and literature, but unless you know English, or American English, you just can’t make it in America or around the world now. It’s become sort of the first universal language.

Mr. Badillo: I believed, when I was very young, that government was going to solve the problems. I remember Lyndon Johnson, when he was president...

Mr. Wattenberg: I worked for him.

Mr. Badillo: Well, remember, Lyndon talked about ending poverty, but that didn’t work. And then in those days, we all believed that government could end poverty, that government could provide housing for all, and jobs for all, and healthcare for all.

Mr. Wattenberg: Some of those Great Society liberal programs, I mean, they doubled the Social Security from $50.00 to $100.00. Lyndon Johnson, working with your colleague Wilbur Mills – you have Medicare, you have Medicaid, you have rent supplements. I mean, some of that did a great deal of good.

Mr. Badillo: Well, I’ve come to the conclusion over the years that the main way in which we solve the problems of poverty is through education. If you get a good education, you’ll be able to get a good job, and your own housing, and your own healthcare, and provide for your family’s needs. The reason I wrote this book –

Mr. Wattenberg: It’s a beautiful book. I gotta tell you...

Mr. Badillo: ...is because of the fact that too many people in the Hispanic community fail to graduate even from high school, and that is a national tragedy, because the Hispanic community is now the largest ethnic group in America. We are now 42 million citizens – sorry, 42 million people. Not all citizens. Some legal, many illegal. But we make up 15% of the American population, and within the next 50 years –

Mr. Wattenberg: 15?

Mr. Badillo: one-five. Yes.

Mr. Wattenberg: More than the African-Americans.

Mr. Badillo: More than the African-Americans or any other group. And within the next 50 years, we are going to go up to 25% of the population.

Mr. Wattenberg: Well, the Hispanic birthrate, like all other birthrates, is coming way down. I mean, there are a lot of...

Mr. Badillo: Yes, but we also have continuing immigration. So therefore, the numbers continue to go way up, and if we have a group that makes up between 15 and 25% of the population, and they are not getting a good education, that is a national crisis. And that’s why I wrote the book, to indicate that there has to be recognition of this problem, and that we have to deal with it. Not just with the problems of immigration, which Congress is trying to settle now, and I doubt that they will be able to, but also with the problems of education within the Hispanic community. It’s a national problem, not just a problem of the Hispanic community.

Mr. Wattenberg: What is it that needs to be changed in American public schools?

Mr. Badillo: We need to have standards in the school system; the primary and secondary system is not working. We still have what I consider a very racist practice of social promotion.

Mr. Wattenberg: Exactly what does social promotion mean?

Mr. Badillo: Very simple. It means you’re promoted whether you learn or you don’t learn. You’re promoted because you get to be a year older, not because you learned anything. And the kids are promoted from one grade to the other...

Mr. Wattenberg: So it’s in effect, hurting blacks and Latinos by not forcing them to learn English –

Mr. Badillo: By not giving them the opportunity to learn. These things like social promotion were invented because there was no confidence on the part of the educators that blacks and Latinos can learn like everybody else. And that’s why in my book, I say to the parents, especially the Hispanic parents, that they have to get involved with the school system. They have to go into parent-teacher conferences. They have to meet the principals and the teachers, and they have to verify that the kids are learning when they come back home. Make sure they’re getting homework. Have the kids write down essays, to be sure they’re learning how to read and write. Not to depend on the educators to do the teaching, because I don’t have any confidence that they will be able to do it.

Mr. Wattenberg: And you were originally a champion of what is called bilingual education. I wonder if you could explain to us what that means, and why you were first in favor of it, and why you came out against it.

Mr. Badillo: Well, I was in favor of bilingual education because of my history. When I came here from Puerto Rico, I could barely speak English, and I found that it was a problem because it was hard to understand what was going on in the classroom because the teachers couldn’t speak Spanish and I couldn’t speak English. Gradually, I was able to work it out, but I saw a lot of other Puerto Rican kids who dropped out. So I came to the conclusion that we had to do something to help the other kids move along, and when I went to Congress I was the – I joined the Committee on Education and Labor, and I sponsored the Bilingual Education Act in the House of Representatives. And my theory was that the idea of bilingual education is to help the kids to learn to speak English. But while they’re learning to speak English, in order to make sure they don’t fall back in course content, they get the course content of the grade in Spanish. But the whole purpose was that bilingual education would continue for about a year and a half in order to help the kids learn to speak English, to stay in tandem with course content, so that when they finally learned, they could join the regular kids. But what’s going on, and I oppose bilingual education now, the way that it’s practiced, is that bilingual education today in New York City and throughout the country, goes on for four years, six years, eight years, and instead of helping the kids move into the normal educational system, they go off on a tangent where they don’t learn either English or Spanish. That is not what I intended in Congress or what Congress approved.

Mr. Wattenberg: You know, the very distinguished American social scientist Michael Barone has sort of examined the American immigration experience, and he said, for example, the early generations of Italians did not value study, and that the Koreans and the Chinese resemble the Jews. But all of a sudden, up comes Mario Cuomo, who you can agree with or disagree with politically, but is a brilliant orator and a brilliant mind. And the Poles, who people said, oh, well, you know, they’re just working in the coal mines, all of a sudden, there’s Ed Muskie. So it’s a remarkable experience, the American melting pot.

Mr. Badillo: Yes, well, I read Mr. Barone’s books, but the problem is that we are now facing a situation where we have in the Latino community Latinos who have been here three and four generations, and they’re not learning to speak English, and they are maintaining themselves segregated, and they are not getting an education. And that’s why what I tried to address in this book, One Nation, One Standard, that we have to break away from that mold and go back to the idea of every other group, when we had one nation with one standard. You come in and you learn to speak the language and you become assimilated, and become part of this society. But that requires, especially today, that you get a good education, because when many of the older groups came here, education was not as important as it is today.

Mr. Wattenberg: Herman, you write in your very absorbing book, One Nation, One Standard, that you say, “A unified culture is possible without a loss of identity.” Exactly what does that mean?

Mr. Badillo: Well, it’s very simple. Every group that has come here before the Hispanic community, the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Greeks, have maintained their own culture while belonging to a unified culture. And what I say is, there’s no reason why the Hispanic community has to give up its identity. But we do have to learn to speak English. We have to get an education so we learn about the traditions of the United States, and we have to oppose a new system that is being developed called multiculturalism, which is another way of diluting education so that kids are not learning the classics.

Mr. Wattenberg: Can assimilation and multiculturalism exist together?

Mr. Badillo: Not the way it’s being taught, because multiculturalism, as I mentioned earlier, is an excuse for the educational system to water down the standards so that the kids do not get the difficult classics, which enable them to really understand ideas. They get a watered-down curriculum, supposedly based on their own cultural experience, but a watered-down curriculum that does not prepare them to understand the ideas that are required, and doesn’t prepare them to go on to college.

Mr. Wattenberg: Yet it is a beautiful thing for people to have an American cultural background, to know English, to know Shakespeare, and also to know Spanish, and the works of Cervantes or the works of Sholom Aleichem, or...

Mr. Badillo: Well, that is a good education. That is a good education. Not what goes on where they are promoted automatically. I support a great education, which is what I got.

Mr. Wattenberg: At City College, but not in the elementary school.

Mr. Badillo: Not in the elementary school.

Mr. Wattenberg: Now, how about the elementary schools, not in New York City but in the big schools, and the secondary schools and some of the suburban schools? How do they do?

Mr. Badillo: They’re much better, and look, I point out in my book it depends on the percentage of blacks and Latinos in the school system. That’s where the racism starts. That’s where the social promotion starts, because teachers and educators are afraid to flunk black and Latino kids because they’re afraid of being called racist. So because of that fear, they do something that’s even more racist, and that is to pass them along, even if they’re not learning, because they’re dooming them for the rest of their lives.

Mr. Wattenberg: And we do find that when blacks and Latinos and Italians and Poles are pushed, they do quite well.

Mr. Badillo: Of course they do. Well, we find that now, at the City University. Blacks and Latinos are becoming part of the Honors Colleges. And they’re learning and meeting the highest standards. There never was any reason to lower the standards. And we see that now that the standards have been put back, and there never was any reason for lowering the standards in elementary and secondary education, because blacks and Latinos can learn like anybody else.

Mr. Wattenberg: On balance, when you sort of look at your world view, do you regard yourself as an optimist or a pessimist?

Mr. Badillo: Well, I’m personally an optimist, but I’m pessimistic about the lack of progress over the centuries in the Hispanic community, and the reason we have got to face up to that is because the result of the failure to improve conditions in Latin America is the immigration that has been taking place in the last 50 years and will continue to take place in the next 50 years unless we move to take action. We cannot depend on those leaders to improve conditions by themselves. That’s essentially the point that I make in my book.

Mr. Wattenberg: How do immigrants in America these days stack up against the Mayflower English or the old elites? Are they right up there in – I mean, I think the Jews are, the Taiwanese are, the Japanese are.

Mr. Badillo: Well, it depends on the group. Let me talk about Hispanics, which is the area I know best. Eighty percent of the immigrants are Hispanics. The so-called 12 million illegal immigrants who are in the nation today, maybe more. Maybe up to 20 million. And they are poor people, who don’t have much of an education, and who come here from countries like Mexico and the Dominican Republic, and Central American and South American countries. And they come here, not because they want to, but because the conditions in those countries are so bad that they can’t make a living.

Mr. Wattenberg: So what is it in the Hispanic culture that is preventing this democratic capitalism from progressing? I mean, you have seen it everywhere else.

Mr. Badillo: It is an acceptance of dictatorships. I mean, look, Castro – there is nothing unusual about Castro. He’s in power 48 years, and people accept it as if this was normal. There is no democracy there, and there is no democracy in many countries where you have Army colonels who stage coups and take over the country and start the process all over. That essential requirement of stability does not exist. But that is tied in with the failure to have educational accomplishment. The educational achievement in the Latin American countries is quite low.

Mr. Wattenberg: But you have had countries around the world, I mean the United States itself, in Africa, in Asia, in Eastern Europe, that have gotten rid of those sort of socialist bureaucratic regulatory states. What is it that is in particular the characteristic within the Hispanic culture that seems to hold that back?

Mr. Badillo: Well, that’s what I talk about in “The 500 Year Siesta.” The 300 years of Spain – Spain was our mother country, but as I mentioned, they were never interested in either democracy or an education. After all, democracy in Spain today is only about 35 years old. When Franco died, and you still have democracy in Spain because the king, Juan Carlos, prevented a coup from taking place, but the tradition of democracy that Adam Smith talked about, has not existed in the mother country, and certainly has never percolated into the colonies.

Mr. Wattenberg: You before used the phrase, “so-called illegal immigration.” Why so-called?

Mr. Badillo: No, it’s not so-called. It’s illegal immigration. The point is, we don’t know how much or what the percentage is, and the idea that somehow we are going to deport them is unrealistic, because we can’t deport 12 to 15 or 20 million people. And we also cannot prevent them from continuing to come, because you can’t build a wall around the entire United States. So we have a huge illegal immigration problem which we have not faced up to in Congress, and we really have not identified the proper causes of it. I seek to do that in my book as well.

Mr. Wattenberg: Yet, many of these illegal immigrants, and certainly their children and their grandchildren, end up doing very well. Now, the Wall Street Journal has taken the position that they are for unlimited immigration. I’m not quite for that, but I think the immigrants’ experience has been so vastly successful in the United States.

Mr. Badillo: Not of the Hispanic immigrants, because many of them don’t come here with the attitude of staying. They come here illegally, and they work at very meaningless jobs because they don’t have an education, and they’re thinking of going back to their countries. That’s why they keep sending money back, so they can build a house or they can sustain their families over there. That is different from what existed with the immigrants who came through Ellis Island, who understood they were going to learn English because they were coming here to stay. That’s a different problem that we have today.

Mr. Wattenberg: But yet, you do have in the second and third generation, and in your own personal case, in the first generation, vast success stories. I mean, I know the children, and even illegal, so-called illegal Hispanic immigrants that have started construction companies.

Mr. Badillo: Of course, yes, yes, in construction, in supermarkets – I point that out in my book as well. But I’m not talking about that. What I’m talking about is the percentage of people who are getting a good education. The drop-out rate from high school is 50%, up to 50%. That is – of course, there are people who go on from high school and into college, but it’s no comparison with the percentage in the rest of the society. By that standard, the Hispanic community is falling behind. That’s what I’m addressing.

Mr. Wattenberg: What do you think the Latino-American community ought to do as a group to advance and persevere?

Mr. Badillo: I think they should get more involved with the country to become a larger part of the society, to make sure that the kids and they learn to speak English and that they get a good education, so that they can rise to the same level of the rest of the country, as all the other groups did. And I’m confident that it can be done. That’s why my book is called, “One Nation, One Standard.” But what I’m trying to do is to send out a wake-up call that we need to do this now, not waste more generations in the process.

Mr. Wattenberg: Well, sir, let me commend you for delivering a most worthwhile wake-up call. It is a wonderful book. It’s a wonderful story, and it’s a message that needs to go out in America and around the world. So thank you very much for joining us on Think Tank and please come back again.

Mr. Badillo: Thank you for inviting me. Invite me back anytime.

Mr. Wattenberg: And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via email, we think it makes our program better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg.

Back to top

Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc.

©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved.

Web development by Bean Creative.