[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1598-E1599]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

ONE NATION, ONE COMMON LANGUAGE

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HON. TOBY ROTH

of wisconsin

in the house of representatives

Wednesday, August 2, 1995
Mr. ROTH. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to call the attention of my
colleagues to the August issue of Reader's Digest and the article,
``One Nation, One Common Language.'' The author, Linda Chavez, makes a
compelling case against bilingual education and for preserving our our
common bond, the English language.
Ms. Chavez points out that immigrants oppose bilingual education for
their children and teachers oppose it for their students. Listen to the
commonsense observation on bilingual education's shortcomings that
elementary school teacher Gail Fiber makes: ``How can anyone learn
English in school when they speak Spanish 4\1/2\ hours a day?''
A recent survey showed that in just 5 years, there will be 40 million
Americans who can't speak English. Those Americans will be isolated,
cut off from realizing the American dream, if they don't have the one
skill that is required for success in America: Fluency in English.
Linda Chavez in her article calls for an end to mandatory bilingual
education at the State and Federal level, and she's absolutely right.
My bill, H.R. 739, would do just that. I hope you all join me in my
effort to make English our official language and keep America one
Nation, one people. Cosponsor H.R. 739, the Declaration of Official
Language Act. I ask that the full text of her article appear in the
Record at this point.
One Nation, One Common Language

(By Linda Chavez)

Lusi Granados was a bright five-year-old who could read
simple words before he entered kindergarten in Sun Valley,
Calif. But soon after the school year began, his mother was
told that he couldn't keep up. Yolanda Granados was
bewildered. ``He knows his alphabet,'' she assured the
teacher.
``You don't understand,'' the teacher explained. ``The use
of both Spanish and English in the classroom is confusing to
him.''
Yolanda Granados was born in Mexico but speaks excellent
English. Simply because Spanish is sometimes spoken in her
household, however, the school district--without consulting
her--put her son in bilingual classes. ``I sent Luis to
school to learn English,'' she declares.
When she tried to put her boy into regular classes, she was
given the runaround. ``Every time I went to the school,'' she
says, ``the principal gave me some excuse.'' Finally,
Granados figured out a way to get around the principal, who
has since left the school.
Each school year, she had to meet with Luis's teachers to
say she wanted her son taught solely in English. They
cooperated with her, but Luis was still officially classified
as a bilingual student until he entered the sixth grade.
Immigrant parents want their kids to learn English. Why,
then, do we have a multibillion-dollar bureaucracy to promote
bilingual education?
Unfortunately, the Granados family's experience has become
common around the country. When bilingual education was being
considered by Congress, it had a limited mission: to teach
children of Mexican descent in Spanish while they learned
English. Instead, it has become an expensive behemoth, often
with a far-reaching political agenda: to promote Spanish
among Hispanic children--regardless of whether they speak
English or not, regardless of their parents' wishes and even
with-out their knowledge. For instance:
In New Jersey last year, Hispanic children were being
assigned to Spanish-speaking classrooms, the result of a
state law that mandated bilingual instruction. Angry parents
demanded freedom of choice. But when a bill to end the
mandate was introduced in the legislature, a group of 50
bilingual advocates testified against it at a state board of
education meeting.
``Why would we require parents unfamiliar with our
educational system to make such a monumental decision when we
are trained to make those decisions?'' asked Joseph Ramos,
then co-chairman of the North Jersey Bilingual Council.
The Los Angeles Unified School District educates some
265,000 Spanish-speaking children, more than any other in the
nation. It advises teachers, in the words of the district's
Bilingual Methodology Study Guide, ``not to encourage
minority parents to switch to English in the home, but to
encourage them to strongly promote development of the primary
language.'' Incredibly, the guide also declares that
``excessive use of English in bilingual classrooms tends to
lower students' achievement in English.''
In Denver, 2500 students from countries such as Russia and
Vietnam learn grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation in ESL
(English as a Second Language). An English ``immersion''
program, ESL is the principal alternative to bilingual
education. Within a few months, most ESL kids are taking
mathematics, science and social-studies classes in English.
But the 11,000 Hispanic children in Denver public schools
don't have the choice to participate in ESl full time.
Instead, for their first few years they are taught most of
the day in Spanish and are introduced only gradually to
English. Jo Thomas, head of the bilingual/ESL education
program for the Denver public schools, estimates these kids
will ultimately spend on average five to seven years in its
bilingual program.

activist takeover.

Bilingual education began in the late 1960s as a small,
$75-million federal program primarily for Mexican-American
children, half

[[Page E1599]]
of whom could not speak English when they entered first grade. The idea
was to teach them in Spanish for a short period, until they
got up to speed in their new language.
Sen. Ralph Yarborough (D., Texas), a leading sponsor of the
first federal bilingual law in 1968, explained that its
intent was ``to make children fully literate in English.''
Yarborough assured Congress that the purpose was ``not to
make the mother tongue dominant.''
Unfortunately, bilingual-education policy soon fell under
the sway of political activists demanding recognition of the
``group rights'' of cultural and linguistic minorities. By
the late 1970s the federal civil-rights office was insisting
that school districts offer bilingual education to Hispanic
and other ``language minority'' students or face a cutoff of
federal funds.
Most states followed suit, adopting bilingual mandates
either by law or by bureaucratic edict. The result is that,
nationally, most first-grade students from Spanish-speaking
homes are taught to read and write in Spanish.
The purpose in many cases is no longer to bring immigrant
children into the mainstream of American life. Some advocates
see bilingual education as the first step in a radical
transformation of the United States into a nation without one
common language or fixed borders.
Spanish ``should no longer be regarded as a `foreign'
language,'' according to Josue Gonzalez, director of
bilingual education in the Carter Administration and now a
professor at Columbia University Teachers College. Instead,
he writes in Reinventing Urban Education, Spanish should be
``a second national language.''
Others have even more extreme views. At last February's
annual conference of the National Association for Bilingual
Education (a leading lobbying group for supporters of
bilingual education) in Phoenix, several speakers challenged
the idea of U.S. sovereignty and promoted the notion that the
Southwest and northern Mexico form one cultural region, which
they dub La Frontera.
Eugene Garcia, head of bilingual education at the U.S.
Department of Education, declared to thunderous applause that
``the border for many is nonexistent. For me, for
intellectual reasons, that border shall be nonexistent.'' His
statement might surprise President Clinton, who appointed
Garcia and has vowed to beef up border protection to stem the
flow of illegal aliens into the United States.
i was furious

Bilingual education has grown tremendously from its modest
start. Currently, some 2.4 million children are eligible for
bilingual or ESL classes, with bilingual education alone
costing over $5.5 billion. New York City, for instance,
spends $400 million annually on its 147,500 bilingual
students--$2712 per pupil.
A great deal of this money is being wasted. ``We don't even
speak Spanish at home,'' says Miguel Alvarado of Sun Valley,
Calif., yet his eight-year-old daughter, Emily, was put in a
bilingual class. Alvarado concludes that this was done simply
because he is bilingual.
When my son Pablo entered school in the District of
Columbia, I received a letter notifying me that he would be
placed in a bilingual program--even though Pablo didn't speak
a word of Spanish, since I grew up not speaking it either.
(My family has lived in what is now New Mexico since 1609). I
was able to decline the program without much trouble, but
other Hispanic parents aren't always so fortunate.
When Rita Montero's son, Camilo, grew bored by the slow
academic pace of his first-grade bilingual class in Denver,
she requested a transfer. ``The kids were doing work way
below the regular grade level,'' says Montero. ``I was
furious.'' Officials argued they were under court order to
place him in a bilingual class.
In fact, she was entitled to sign a waiver, but no one she
met at school informed her of this. Ultimately she enrolled
Camilo in a magnet school across town. Says Montero, ``Only
through a lot of determination and anger did I get my son in
the classroom where he belonged.'' Most parents--especially
immigrants--aren't so lucky. They're intimidated by the
system, and their kids are stuck.
Most school districts with large Hispanic populations
require parents with Spanish surnames to fill out a ``home-
language survey.'' If parents report that Spanish is used in
the home, even occasionally, the school may place the child
in bilingual classes. Unbeknown to parents, a Spanish-
speaking grandparent living with the family may be enough to
trigger placement, even if the grandchild speaks little or no
Spanish.
Though parents are supposed to be able to opt out,
bureaucrats have vested interest in discouraging them, since
the school will lose government funds. In some districts,
funding for bilingual education exceeds that for mainstream
classes by 20 percent or more. New York State, for example,
doesn't allow Hispanic students to exist the bilingual
program until they score above the 40th percentile on a
standardized English test.
``There's a Catch-22 operating here,'' says Christine
Rossell, a professor of political science at Boston
University. She explains that such testing guarantees
enrollment in the program, for ``by definition, 40 percent of
all students who take any standardized test will score at or
below the 40th percentile.''

family's business

Bilingual programs are also wasted on children who do need
help learning English. Studies confirm what common sense
would tell you: the less time you spend speaking a new
language, the more slowly you'll learn it.
Last year, bilingual and ESL programs in New York City were
compared. Results: 92 percent of Korean, 87 percent of
Russian, and 83 percent of Chinese children who started
intensive ESL classes in kindergarten had made it into
mainstream classes in three years or less. Of the Hispanic
students in bilingual classes, only half made it to
mainstream classes within three years. ``How can anyone learn
English in school when they speak Spanish 4\1/2\ hours a
day?'' asks Gail Fiber, an elementary-school teacher in
Southern California. ``In more than seven years' experience
with bilingual education, I've never seen it done
successfully.''
Rosalie Pedalino Porter, former director of bilingual
education in Newton, Mass, and now with the Institute for
Research in English Acquisition and Development, reached a
similar conclusion. ``I felt that I was deliberately holding
back the learning of English,'' she writes in her eloquent
critique, Forked Tongue: The Politics of Bilingual Education.
Native-language instruction is not even necessary to
academic performance, according to Boston University's
Rossell. ``Ninety-one percent of scientifically valid studies
show bilingual education to be no better--or actually worse--
than doing nothing.'' In other words, students who are
allowed to sink or swim in all-English classes are actually
better off than bilingual students.
The overwhelming majority of immigrants believe that it is
a family's duty--not the school's--to help children maintain
the native language. ``If parents had an option,'' says Lila
Ramirez, vice president of the Burbank, Calif., Human
Relations Council, ``they'd prefer all-English to all-
Spanish.'' When a U.S. Department of Education survey asked
Mexican and Cuban parents what they wanted, four-fifths
declared their opposition to teaching children in their
native language if it meant less time devoted to English.

sense of unity

It's time for federal and state legislators to overhaul
this misbegotten program. The best policy for children--and
for the country--is to teach English to immigrant children as
quickly as possible. American-born Hispanics, who now make up
more than half of all bilingual students, should be taught in
English.
Bilingual education probably would end swiftly if more
people knew about last November's meeting of the Texas
Association for Bilingual Education, in Austin. Both the
Mexican and U.S. flags adorned the stage at this gathering,
and the attendees--mainly Texas teachers and administrators--
stood as the national anthems of both countries were sung.
At least one educator present found the episode dismaying.
``I stood, out of respect, when the Mexican anthem was
played,'' says Odilia Leal, bilingual coordinator for the
Temple Independent School District. ``But I think we should
just sing the U.S. anthem. My father, who was born in Mexico,
taught me that the United States, not Mexico, is my
country.''
With 20 million immigrants now living in our country, it's
more important than ever to teach newcomers to think of
themselves as Americans if we hope to remain one people, not
simply a conglomeration of different groups. And one of the
most effective ways of forging that sense of unity is through
a common language.

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