[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 127 (Wednesday, August 2, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1598-E1599]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                    ONE NATION, ONE COMMON LANGUAGE

                                 ______


                             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.
     

                          ____________________