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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
What about the rejection of bilingual education in Arizona?
I've always found Arizona a peculiarly mean-spirited state. It's the only state in which I was actually stopped on a state highway by a state trooper late at night. I had spoken in a Catholic church in favor of the United Farm Workers. That was many years ago, but I've never forgotten it. I was stopped by a state trooper and a helicopter with a voice in it. A talking helicopter. It came down on top of me, with a voice -- like God's voice. The only reason I got out of that was because I happened to be in the car with an investigative reporter from the Arizona Star. She protected me. This frail, young reporter protected me.
Anyway, it doesn't surprise me that they passed the same measure there that they passed in California requiring that all public education be conducted in English. I happen to think that is an unfortunate decision. I think it's unfortunate because I've seen wonderful bilingual education, and I do not agree with the opinion that many conservatives have that bilingual education is a dead end for kids.
When it's done right, when it's truly transitional, as it is in New York City, for example, it can be very effective. For seven years, I've been visiting a school in the South Bronx where there is excellent bilingual instruction in elementary school. The kids come in not knowing any English and by second or third grade they are usually doing all their work in English.
But in the case of the Arizona referendum, I'm not sure how much it tells us about public opinion. I think it does tell us that if one very rich man with a fierce xenophobic ideology like Ron Unz puts up a huge amount of money, you can probably talk people into anything, temporarily. But I hope people in Arizona will rethink that in the next few years.
And I do notice they left some loopholes, even in Arizona. Parents can still petition their school boards for bilingual education, if they think their kids need it. It's not as severe as it could have been.
How does our attitude toward public education during this election compare with our attitudes in other election years?
I think that has gotten much worse over the past five or 10 years. It started in the Reagan years, but there was not a substantial change of heart during the Clinton years. I get the sense that since Governor [Gray] Davis has been in, there has been some rethinking in California.
There was a real seismic shift in the last 15 years -- you could feel the earth moving away from the idealism we identified with Dr. King, but more than that, away from the most generous educational theories -- away from the tradition of John Dewey, Erik Erikson, that whole tradition of treating children with enormous respect, always looking for their potential and treating them as though we treasure them.
That has been replaced by a rhetoric that is almost adversarial towards children. We don't have the Communists to fear anymore, so we fear our children. We don't fear our own kids, to be honest, but we fear children who don't look like our kids, we fear those other people's children -- inner-city children.
Listen to the language: "We are going to demand accountability, we are going to hold them accountable, these little kids." We don't give them preschool, we don't give them attractive buildings to go to, we don't pay their teachers enough for them to stay in their schools before they slip out to the suburbs for better pay, we don't give them any of the things we give rich kids in schools like Andover.
We don't give the inner-city kids any of that stuff. In New York City, the parents I know give their kids three years of developmental preschool, starting when they are 2 and a half. They spend $15,000 a year on those schools. And yet 80 percent of the inner-city kids still don't have Head Start, even for one year.
So we rig the game against these kids, but what have we heard in the last 15 years? Nothing that even hinted at the generosity of a society that would give poor children even a hint of equal opportunity.
Instead, we're going to hold them accountable for their performance on exams. Not just exams, but high stakes exams. George W. Bush even says that we're going to give them to them every single year, so they can have an annual anxiety attack.
We use phrases like "personal responsibility" and "zero tolerance." A vocabulary of Dickensian schoolmasters has replaced the American vocabulary of generosity towards children. Zero tolerance is the fitting cap on all of that.
