Bilingual Education Question Looms for Local School Programs

Members of Fuerza Latina will spend Sunday working the phones.

The Harvard Latino student group is trying to persuade voters in Jamaica Plain to vote “no” on a ballot question that would mandate English-only education for public school students who need to learn the language.

Many of these students currently attend bilingual programs that teach them English and other subjects in their native languages.

“A lot of people have had experience with bilingual education in the group and from their experience they’ve either seen why it’s important or why it’s necessary,” says Eileen Plaza ’03, who runs Fuerza’s community outreach. “This is something that really affects immigrants.”

They join an impassioned group across the state that has taken up arms against Question 2, which they say deny students the benefits of bilingual classrooms.

A recent statewide poll by the Boston Herald found that 63 percent of voters support the measure. But Cambridge has been a center of the opposition.

Debate on the question has long raged in the city. A year ago this month, Harvard hosted a debate between a Graduate School of Education professor and Silicon Valley millionaire Ron Unz, who proposed Question 2.

Unz launched similar initiatives that were passed in California and Arizona, arguing that it would more effectively make immigrants learn English.

“In about a year’s time, the people of Massachusetts will have a chance to junk this failed theory of bilingual education, which has never worked anywhere on a large scale in the United States of America, and switch to something that does work: intensive English immersion,” he said.

But critics counter that students who do not speak any English would have difficulty learning other subjects in an English-immersion situation and would be segregated from other students in their schools.

Unz’ opponent in the debate, Shattuck Professor of Education Catherine E. Snow, questioned the educational value of this approach.

“Learning English faster does not equal learning English better,” she said.

Educators in Cambridge have joined the opposition to Question 2, saying schools would have to be restructured if it passed. And that, they say, would have potentially disastrous effects in a system already in turmoil over drastic elementary school mergers planned for next year.

In total, the Cambridge Public Schools have six bilingual programs in five different languages—Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian, Mandarin Chinese and Korean—including the popular Amigos program for elementary students.

Currently 12 percent of the district’s high school students are enrolled in bilingual programs. Most of these students would not be affected by Question 2, because they already are proficient in English. But if the measure passes, no new students could enter these programs until they undergo at least one year of English immersion.

Even if Question 2 does pass, there are ways around its restrictions. Parents could request waivers if they want their children to attend bilingual classes—and Cambridge school officials say the district will actively encourage parents to obtain these waivers if Question 2 passes.

But in the meantime Director of Bilingual Education Mary T. Cazabon says the city has joined the opposition to Unz’ ballot initiative.

“We’ve been part of the movement and done the phone calling,” she says. “Just about everything that one could do, we’ve done it.”

Arnold Clayton, who oversees international students at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, says Question 2 could hurt students who enter the high school with very little previous education.

“The great bulk of our students are students who’ve come here as teens with skills that are much more on the elementary school level,” he says. “Very often at the beginning level, the native language helps.”

Cambridge educators also say that English immersion classes will isolate students, posing further challenges to their acclamation to the country.

“I am totally against separating children,” Cazabon says. “To me, this is a form of segregation. It’s like a quarantine.”

As polls have shown the initiative gaining in popularity, Cambridge officials have already taken steps to scale back bilingual programs and offer more English immersion.

Already, plans are underway for a modification of the bilingual program at a new school that, according to a current district plan, would open next year and consolidate three of the district’s elementary programs.

But as school officials plan for restructuring, residents continue to fight the measure that would mandate these cuts.

For months, Cambridge parent Marla Erlien has gone door to door and approached shoppers in malls, urging them to vote no on Question 2.

She says many Boston-area residents have been surprised to hear that the Unz initiative even existed, while others were ignorant as to what its implications would be.

“Four months ago, hardly anybody knew about it,” she says.

More recently, Erlien says she has faced opposition from people who say immigrants who do not speak English have no business in the country.

Harvard students and faculty have joined the anti-Question 2 crowd, attending rallies and debates across the Boston area and advocating against the measure.

The Harvard Political Union, a political discussion group, has taken up the issue, agreeing on the importance of learning English but finding itself divided on how it should be taught, according to Joseph K. Green ’05, the group’s president.

Maria Luisa Parra de Leroux, a teaching assistant in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures who herself emigrated from Mexico and entered bilingual education programs, says she attended a rally to protest the Unz petition.

She says English immersion programs will alienate parents as well as students.

At a recent parent teacher association meeting at her son’s school in Somerville, Parra de Leroux gave a presentation in Spanish at an otherwise English-dominated forum.

That identified her as a Spanish speaker, and afterwards one mother approached her, begging her to translate the rest of the meeting and then cried, saying she hadn’t understood what had gone on.

Parra de Leroux says the educational system will let down students who do not speak English if it bars them from bilingual programs.

“They’re going to get behind and behind and behind and won’t have equal chances to succeed,” she says. “They’re going to get stigmatized.”

—Staff writer Claire A. Pasternack can be reached at cpastern@fas.harvard.edu.