PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "Does Bilingual Education Make the Grade?"

« Back to Does Bilingual Education Make the Grade? main page

Transcript for:

Does Bilingual Education Make the Grade?

THINK TANK

SATURDAY, APRIL 15, 2000

ANNOUNCER: Funding for Think Tank is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.

(Musical break.)

MR. WATTENBERG: Hi, I'm Ben Wattenberg. We are in California at the beautiful campus of Claremont McKenna College which is just about 35 miles away from Los Angeles, the metroplex that has become the locus of what some have called the language wars. We have a report from the front.

Think Tank is joined by Ron Unz, architect of California's Proposition 227, the English for the Children Initiative, and the author of a recent piece in Commentary Magazine entitled California and the End of White America. Stephen Krashen, professor of education at the University of Southern California, and author of Condemned Without A Trial: Bogus Arguments Against Bilingual Education. And Mark Lopez, visiting fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, and assistant professor at the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs. The topic before the house, the battle about bilingualism, this week on Think Tank.

(Musical break.)

MR. WATTENBERG: Teachers, parents and government officials in America have long struggled with how to teach English to non-English speaking children. In recent decades, California has been at the center of the argument. Latinos currently make up about 30 percent of California's population, projected to grow to plurality status in the decades to come. How public schools can best serve a growing number of Spanish speaking children is on the national front burner as well.

SECRETARY RILEY (From video): In some places, even the idea of bilingual education is controversial. It should not be. Today, I want to spotlight the dual language approach, which is also sometimes referred to as two-way bilingual or dual emersion.

MR. WATTENBERG: The latest turn in California's struggle to get it right occurred in 1998 when voters solidly passed Proposition 227, which dismantled the state's bilingual education system.

Peter Skerry, author of Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority, has thought about it.

MR. SKERRY (From video): Those who are upset with bilingual education, those many Americans who are upset with it, who think that bilingual education is an effort by immigrants or immigrant leaders to forestall or put off assimilation, or even a push for some sort of separatism are simply misconstruing this. Immigrants, immigrant parents want their children to become part of American society, want them to learn English. It's a question of how they go about it, and what kind of help they get.

MR. WATTENBERG: Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us on Think Tank. Mark Lopez, let's begin with you, and we'll go around the room quickly. What is the status of the language tension in Southern California today?

MR. LOPEZ: Well, there is a large number of students in Los Angeles County in the Los Angeles schools who do not speak English, and that number continues to grow. So, clearly these students are going to need some sort of assistance. And they speak many languages, upwards of 50-60 languages in Los Angeles unified alone, and that's a tremendous task that needs to be addressed, a tremendous service that needs to be offered.

MR. WATTENBERG: Steve?

MR. KRASHEN: The situation now, it's very difficult to know what the situation now is. We have a large population of limited English proficient children, it's not getting any less. It will probably continue to grow. It's difficult to say what the impact has been of the changes of the laws, because we haven't had controlled studies to show it. Nevertheless, my impression is that with SAT9 (sp) testing, et cetera --

MR. WATTENBERG: With what testing?

MR. KRASHEN: The Stanford Testing that has gone on through the state, that it is not the case that Proposition 227 has helped anyone. I still am a believer in bilingual education.

MR. WATTENBERG: We're going to come to that.

Where are we just generally, Ron?

MR. UNZ: I think in general we're where we've always been in that the vast majority of Americans want children who don't know English to be taught English in school. The vast majority of those children's parents, their immigrant parents want them taught English. The difference now in California is that they are being taught English, where before they weren't.

MR. WATTENBERG: Mark, maybe you can just give us a feel on some background, and please both feel free to join in. Let's just do some history.

MR. LOPEZ: Well, bilingual education has been around in the United States since about 1968. The federal government provided some sort of assistance, federal money assistance, for programs, but various states followed through the course of the '70s. California, in particular, passed a law, I think it was in 1976, that required school districts to provide bilingual education assistance for students who are non-English speaking. Subsequently, that particular program has existed in California for quite some time, up until just recently, where in 1998, voters in California passed Proposition 227.

MR. WATTENBERG: And what did that require of the schools to do for the students, if a child didn't speak English, what happened in a bilingual class?

MR. LOPEZ: Well, generally speaking, what happens is that the student receives instruction in English, they learn to speak English. But in addition to that, their course work in other subject areas is in their primary language, or in their native language. So the idea behind bilingual education is to teach children to speak English, but at the same time to prevent that student from falling behind. We don't want the student to become academically deficient in any way. So, all of their course work, which they don't speak English so why would you want to teach them mathematics in English if they don't understand English, perhaps it's better to teach it in their native language so they can progress through mathematics.

MR. WATTENBERG: Which in California what caused all the brouhaha was essentially Spanish. I mean, that's what we're talking about, is that right?

MR. LOPEZ: In fact, the majority of students in California who do not speak English are Spanish speakers, 75 percent.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Steve, so that was the deal. What happened, is that how it developed, or did English sort of get shoved out a little bit?

MR. KRASHEN: Let me supplement what Mark said, it was pretty much right on, I think.

MR. WATTENBERG: That's why we have experts here.

MR. KRASHEN: Gosh, thanks. Anyway, what happens when you give a child good education in the primary language, in addition to good English as a second language, you give the child knowledge. That knowledge makes the English they hear in class later on more comprehensible and helps English development. If a child knows history, knows where Afghanistan is, knows when World War II was, and then gets a history class in English, it's going to be more comprehensible, which is going to accelerate English language development.

Number two, when you give a child literacy in the primary language, it's a shortcut to English. Now, if a child is English dominant, born in the United States and speaks English better than he speaks Spanish, I do not recommend bilingual education. I recommend English language education with perhaps Spanish enrichment. So, this has to do with the idea of misplacement. There have been a few very well publicized cases in the media where children who do not belong in bilingual programs were misplaced in bilingual programs. Linda Chavez's son, for example. These were errors, they shouldn't have happened. They've bene publicized far out of proportion to the frequency with which they occur. But those children should not be in bilingual education.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. You want to pick up the history?

MR. UNZ: I think what Professor Krashen said is exactly what it was designed to do in theory, and that was the justification for bilingual education theory. The problem is, it never worked in practice in 30 years, either in California or anywhere else in the country. In practice, the vast majority of the students in California public schools sort of classified as not knowing English were born in the United States, or came to school when they were five or six years old. At that young age, it's very quick and easy to learn another language. And the bottom line is, under the existing system, they were in the so-called bilingual programs for three years, five years, generally seven years. In fact, the theory behind bilingual education is that it takes seven years to learn English, which is complete nonsense.

The problem is that they were put in these programs, and even though in theory they were being taught English, most of these programs, apparently, at least the Spanish language ones, involve as little as 30 minutes a day of English. And if a child comes from a language family where they're mostly talking Spanish at home, and they go to school and they get five hours and 30 minutes a day of Spanish, and only 30 minutes a day of English, you can see why it takes them seven years to learn English.

MR. KRASHEN: That's a distortion, practically nothing of what you said is true. And you should know better because we've been debating this again and again. First of all, the programs where they don't give children English, five to seven years to learn a language, this is completely false. In the good bilingual programs we have children are exposed to English from the very first day, in very beginning levels they may not have English all day, they're getting their course stuff in Spanish. But as soon as subject matter can be made comprehensible, it is taught in English as rapidly as possible.

MR. WATTENBERG: Mark, would you care to adjudicate, you have some polar opposites.

MR. LOPEZ: I would like to add something that I don't think has quite come out yet, and I want to make it clear that bilingual education has not and continues to not be the primary program that California has used. It's one of the couple of different programs. If you look at the population of LEP kids, kids who do not speak English, not all of them --

MR. WATTENBERG: What is that called?

MR. LOPEZ: LEP, which stands for Limited English Proficient. The large majority of them are getting something other than bilingual education. Prior to Prop. 227, only about 35 percent of students --

MR. WATTENBERG: What would they get, what was the other?

MR. LOPEZ: Sometimes just an ESL class, and the rest of their classes are in --

MR. WATTENBERG: ESL is English as a second language.

MR. LOPEZ: I'm sorry. ESL stands for English as a second language. I apologize.

MR. WATTENBERG: It's all right. I know. All right, go ahead.

MR. LOPEZ: ESL was one of the alternatives. And some students who speak languages for which there are no teachers or services really available basically get mainstreamed into an English classroom, or sometimes placed into a classroom that's a bilingual classroom for Spanish, but then they speak another language. So, not everybody in California was receiving bilingual education, even prior to Prop. 227.

MR. WATTENBERG: But you're still talking about hundreds of thousands, if not millions of kids who were in this program which you described in very different ways.

Now, let's move ahead. This was a controversial and contentious issue.

MR. KRASHEN: As you can see.

MR. WATTENBERG: As we can see. But certainly back then, and normally on Think Tank we have scholarly observers. Here we have a participant. I guess you've both been participants, exactly, but Ron Unz played a lead role in the middle of this controversy to bringing a uniquely California referendum, which was called Proposition 227, and give us the short form of what happened, and we'll see if you can phrase it in a way that your opposite member would agree with that factually.

MR. UNZ: I don't think he will. But just a bit of the history. I was always very skeptical of bilingual education. My mother was born in Los Angeles, but didn't grow up speaking any English. And since she learned English very --

MR. WATTENBERG: What did she speak?

MR. UNZ: Yiddish, she spoke Yiddish. And so, at a young age, she learned English very easily. I never thought it made any sense not to teach children English when they went to school. But then in 1996, I read a series of articles in the LA Times about a group of immigrant Latino parents in downtown Los Angeles who got so angry that the schools were refusing to teach their children English that they started a public boycott of their local elementary school. And it seemed to me when a program has reached the point where parents have to carry picket signs because a school refuses to teach their children English, something has to be done about it.

I found out that the law governing bilingual education in California had expired years before, but the program remained in place because of the force of its supporters, and the commitment to a failed program. And, therefore, I put the measure on the ballot, Prop. 227, which essentially would require the schools under normal circumstances that when a child entered the school who didn't know English, they would teach that child English as quickly as possible, and generally after a few months, or a year, once the child learned a reasonable amount of English, they were supposed to mainstream that child.

MR. WATTENBERG: And how did that proposition do?

MR. UNZ: It really did quite well. We were opposed by the chairman of the state Republican Party, and the chairman of the state Democratic Party, all four candidates for governor, nearly every newspaper, every political slate. We were outspent on advertising by 25 to 1, and we still won the biggest landslide of any initiative in 20 years in California.

MR. KRASHEN: Ron says his measure, his belief is to teach English as rapidly as possible. Let me say this firmly, on national television, our belief is also to teach English as quickly as possible. If there were a better way to teach English other than bilingual education, I would support it. The data from controlled research studies is on our side. Our effort is to get English to the children as rapidly as we can.

MR. WATTENBERG: Mark, our neutral observer, that is not what you have written that the evidence is on Steve's side.

MR. LOPEZ: The evidence is mixed. The work that I have done has certainly found that participation in bilingual education program appears to have negative effects in the long-run. But there is other research that has been done, some of it which has been done in a controlled environment, some of which is pretty much scientifically sound, and that shows modest gains associated in terms of reading in English proficiency for students participating in bilingual education, but it's modest.

MR. WATTENBERG: What is the distinction between the two studies, I'm sorry?

MR. LOPEZ: My studies have looked at the long-run.

MR. WATTENBERG: Long-run that says it's negative?

MR. LOPEZ: Negative, meaning labor market outcomes, going to college, those sorts of things.

MR. WATTENBERG: And what are the other one?

MR. LOPEZ: The other ones are looking at more immediate returns right after the student has gone through the program, such as reading exam score, English proficiency, and so forth. So the student goes through a program, and then the student is assessed immediately after the program.

MR. WATTENBERG: And does better in English having gone through bilingual education than kids who did English only?

MR. LOPEZ: That's right. But it's modest. The gains are modest. They're not huge gains. We're not talking about very large effects here. We're talking about relatively small.

MR. UNZ: Talking a bit of reality here, again, there's a ton of research on both sides. All the pro-bilingual academics have done a lot of research, but let's look at the facts. In California, children enter the public schools speaking 140 different languages. The only group of children who have a significant amount of bilingual education, or did until Prop. 227, were Spanish speaking children. Of all the immigrant groups, the Spanish speaking children did the worst in school with the highest dropout rates and the lowest test scores, and the lowest rate of college admission. If bilingual education benefits you, why is it that all the groups that get no bilingual education in California do so much better.

MR. KRASHEN: It's true Hispanics have a high drop out rate. You cannot blame bilingual education for this in California. As was pointed out something like 15 percent of Hispanics were in bilingual education in those years. So if there's a high drop out rate, you have to look to see what the 85 percent are doing. Number two, controlled studies show that children in bilingual programs have a lower drop out rate than similar children not in bilingual programs. Number three, when you look at background factors, such as family factors, recency of immigration, study after study shows that drop out rates among different groups, ethnic and racial groups is much, much smaller, and most studies find absolutely no difference. Bilingual education is not the cause of drop outs, it's one of the cures for drop outs. And that goes for the other factors you've discussed, as well.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. What has happened, and then I want to get onto a broader topic, if I might, which is what I think this whole argument is really about, but I want to set the ground rules here. What has happened in these two years since bilingual education has been, as we knew it, like Bill Clinton is saying end welfare as we knew it, end bilingual education as we knew it.

MR. KRASHEN: Six months after Prop 227 was passed the Los Angeles Times had a headline that said Students Succeed Under 227. Unfortunately, the headline writer didn't read the article that came after it. And if found that children were developing verbal fluency in English, which they had been doing the year before, they didn't do a comparison, this was based on 13 interviews, and the 13 people who responded consistently said they're having trouble in reading, they're having trouble in subject matter, our children won't develop reading as quickly as they did last year. The talk show hosts, et cetera, only saw the headline, the word spread, Proposition 227 is a great success.

MR. UNZ: Let's first talk about how students are participating in programs. Bilingual education has been totally eliminated. There was an opportunity for parents to sign waivers. Some school districts had good programs, obviously, and parents wanted their students to continue to stay in those programs. Approximately 15 percent, I think it is, stayed in bilingual education.

MR. WATTENBERG: The way it as taught before for seven years, and so on and so forth.

MR. UNZ: Structured English immersion, which is what Prop 277 has asked --

MR. WATTENBERG: Structured English immersion, that's sort of total language as fast as you can go?

MR. UNZ: Yes.

MR. WATTENBERG: Throw them in the water, let them swim, but we'll help them.

MR. UNZ: With a lifeguard, yes. That has not been universal around the state. Approximately 45 to 50 percent of the students, depending on the calculations you look at, are in that program. The rest of the students are in no program at all. So it's not a universal change.

MR. KRASHEN: The bottom line right now is that right now, for example, Oceanside, which is one district that went sharpest and strictest in implementing 227, their test scores for all their immigrant students went up by 50 percent in seven months. In other districts we're seeing rises of 30 percent or 40 percent. And in the San Jose Mercury News story which studied the analysis and showed how students who stayed in the bilingual program were doing, as opposed to those who stayed in the English program or rapid mainstreaming, which is really what 227 proposed, a huge increase in 7 months, all across the board.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let me see how many people I can get how angry. I have heard a statement that allegedly Latino mothers use to their children, and it's not because they don't like the Spanish language, which is Spanish is the language of bus boys. Have you all heard that statement? You know what I'm talking about?

Mark, what am I talking about, even though you hadn't heard it?

MR. LOPEZ: I think what you're getting at is something that economists have found regularly with regard to why Hispanics earn less, in comparable, why it's in comparable blacks. What we know is the following, Hispanics are earning less because they don't speak English and because they're not getting an education. So the importance of English, learning English, you can't underrate it, it's extremely important. And something like Prop 227 hopefully can get us to something where we've got more fluency in English at the very first for Hispanics, and hopefully greater educational attainment later on.

MR. WATTENBERG: Is this argument about assimilationism versus multiculturalism? Is that what we're talking about?

MR. UNZ: It sometimes is, it depends. In other words, these programs originally came in the 1960s, towards the end of the '60s and the early '70s. They were tied in with Latino activism, and with ethnic activism. It was a mixture of people sincerely believing that these programs would help children learn English and do better in school, along with ethnic activists. Once the programs were there people rapidly found out that they didn't work. But, by that time they developed a huge entrenched bureaucracy, an industry whose living depended on maintaining those programs. There are far fewer ethnic activists around today than there were in the '60s. In other words, most Latino politicians want Latinos to learn English.

MR. WATTENBERG: Well then, are you beating a dead horse?

MR. UNZ: Well no, because the fear of being perceived as attacking Latino culture is one reason none of the politicians never focus on this issue. In other words, look right now, George W. Bush, and Al Gore, and all the presidential candidates refuse to attack bilingual education, even though it doesn't work. The reason they refuse to attack it is they would perceive it to be an ethnically charged issue that would hurt them, even though the overwhelming majority of Latino immigrant parents, and other immigrant parents want their children taught English immediately in school.

MR. WATTENBERG: Is that right, Mark, the overwhelming proportion of Latino parents want their children to learn English immediately?

MR. LOPEZ: Yes, I believe so.

MR. WATTENBERG: Do you believe so?

MR. UNZ: Absolutely true, but that does not mean they're against bilingual education.

MR. WATTENBERG: I understand that.

MR. UNZ: Again, what we see supporting bilingual education is a mixture of the bilingual education industry, all the bilingual teachers, and bilingual academics, and bilingual administrators, a few ethnic activists, who are very loud and frighten the politicians from doing anything about it, and a certain number of what I would call hair brained academics, that come up with all these bizarre research studies that claim that the best way to learn English is not to be taught English in school, and to be in a program which according to official bilingual theory takes five to seven years to teach a child English, which is just nonsense. So a combination of those three groups kept the program in place even though it didn't work.

On the other hand, during the 227 campaign there was one Latino parent who said he very much supported getting rid of bilingual education, because his two daughters who had been born in the United States, by the time they were 10 and 11, they knew less English, since they had been taught no English in school, than children who had just come from Mexico, because the Mexican schools taught English and the California schools didn't.

MR. WATTENBERG: Gentlemen, I sense here particularly between Steve and Ron --

MR. UNZ: There are some things we don't agree on. And I have some responses.

MR. WATTENBERG: Good thinking. Okay.

MR. UNZ: In terms of public opinion, not only does the public support English, which we all do, when you ask the question correctly the public is pretty supportive of bilingual education. A poll was done by the Los Angeles Times in the middle of the Prop 227 campaign, it was repeated in the Dallas Morning News after the campaign, people were allowed to choose, asked to choose among three options, do you want full bilingual education, as long as teachers and parents think it's a good idea, would you like use of the first language for a year or more, that's bilingual ed light, or all English. Both polls, it was one third, one third, one third, only one third supported English only options.

MR. WATTENBERG: Two thirds supported that within a year --

MR. UNZ: No, no, no, no, they said a year or so of bilingual education, primary language support.

MR. WATTENBERG: But, if you took that data I could write a sentence that two-thirds of Americans believe there shouldn't be more than one year of bilingual education. And that's not --

MR. UNZ: It's a year or so, a year or two.

MR. KRASHEN: Not five to seven years.

MR. WATTENBERG: Not five to seven.

MR. KRASHEN: And I must once again repeat that what Mr. Unz said is not true. It is not true that the programs don't work. Controlled scientific studies say they do work. They are not all in Spanish, they are not five to seven years, this is absolutely false, there is a good deal of very respectable scientific evidence behind this.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. My sense is, surprise, that we have a disagreement, and we are not going to be able to resolve it even on a program like Think Tank. So what I am going to suggest is sort of an out question. And we're going to go this time the other way around. Ron, Steve, and Mark, and the question is, the year is 2010, where are we going to be, and the answer has to be brief. Where are we going to be in Southern California on this issue.

MR. UNZ: I think bilingual education will be viewed as witchcraft, something which a few people supported, but never worked, and it will be simply just a memory at that point.

MR. KRASHEN: I'm hoping by this time we'll have enough books in our libraries, we'll have full literacy, because all students will have access to print. And our problems of poverty will be largely eliminated. I think where we do agree is that poverty, access to print are the main factors and swamp even factors such as bilingual education. I hope these are the things we address.

MR. LOPEZ: I think you're going to continue to see the schools encounter a huge number, influx of limited English proficient students. And whatever policy or program is pursued it's going to be a function of how many students actually speak those languages. Generally speaking, I think we're going to continue to have this debate. I don't think it's going to be over by 2010.

MR. WATTENBERG: I'm going to ask only you one more question, Mark, which is generally speaking in California, among all these disparate language groups, is this next generation is English going to be the lingua-Franca of this next generation?

MR. LOPEZ: Yes, I believe so. It has to be, because California, people not only deal with Californians, but they're also going to be dealing with people from outside of California, and English will continue to be the dominant language.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. I hope you're right. Thank you Mark Lopez, Steve Krashen, Ron Unz.

And thank you. Please remember to email us at

ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20036, or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS Online at pbs.org. And please let us know where you watch Think Tank.

This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, in association with New River Media, which are solely responsible for its content.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.

(End of program.)

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.