Chavez Calls for End To Bilingual Teaching

The federal government should not require bilingual education, a former cabinet member said yesterday at an Education School conference on provisions for children raised to speak languages other than English.

Speaking at a panel discussion. Linda Chavez, former staff director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, said decisions concerning education in minority culture and the preservation of students' first language should be left to parents and individual school districts.

Chavez now serves as executive director of United States English, a group lobbying for a Constitutional amendment to make English the nation's official language.

"It isn't a federal responsibility," Chavez said. "There are at least 60 different language groups in the United States. Should the federal government fund programs for all of them?"

While she did not condemn bilingual education--instruction in both English and the speaker's first language--Chavez said it should not be the most important federal program for children who are not comfortable with English.

"Bilingual education should be measured by its results and whether it helps English acquisition and student achievement," the former Reagan Administration official said. Because bilingual education fails to focus on these areas, she said alternatives should be explored.

But other panel members disagreed, saying that funding for bilingual education is essential.

Bilingual education allows students to preserve their heritage and keep pace with native speakers of English, according to James Lyons, legislative and policy council for the National Associationfor Bilingual Education.

James Crawford, a former writer for EducationWeek and author of a book on bilingual education,said research has proven that bilingual educationis more effective than simply teaching English asa second language. He also said English-onlyteaching "has a lot of potential fordiscrimination."

Blaming Chavez and U.S. English for "reducingbilingual education to a narrow political issue,"Crawford said the federal government must use itseducation policy to preserve the culture of ethnicminorities. He said that scrapping federalrequirements for bilingual education would hurtthe students' education as a whole because it"would produce exactly what [bilingual education]has tried to avoid"--the problem of losing ethnicidentity.

But Chavez said many other methods of teachingEnglish have proved to be effective, and thegovernment should not require bilingual educationby federal law