Pluralism and the new immigrants

Abstract

w e do not know as much as we should about the extent of bilingual or bicultural programs in American public education. Legally, they are now required for any student who has some difficulty learning in English. These requirements do not stem from federal legislat i on -which only provides funds to assist in bilingual or bicultural education--but from two other sources. First, many states now require such education. Second, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare made bilingual education a requirement by interpreting the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of national origin by recipients of federal funds in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to cover children raised speaking another language. School districts must provide some program of bilingual education to be in compliance with the law. This requirement has been upheld in rather ambiguous language by the Supreme Court, which thereby enabled the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to go further and require more definitely some action by school districts. There are other legal bases for such programs, such as consent judgments stemming from court cases under which such programs are mandated. The Aspira case in New York City is the chief example. In addition to the facilitating legislation, providing funds for such education, that has been passed at the federal level, other federal legislation provides funds for research and development of curriculum materials for education in one's ethnic heritage. The reality is much more difficult to describe than the law. Whether provided under Office of Civil Rights requirements, or under a consent judgment, such as the one under which bilingual education is offered to the Spanish-speaking children of New York City, or under state law, an initial problem in bilingual education is, to whom must it be provided? The " w h o m " is generally defined as someone having difficulty in English, but how much difficulty, and how is it to be measured? Those pressing for bilingual education want it to reach the largest possible numbers; those who provide it (school districts) want to provide it to the smallest possible numbers. It is expensive, it is special education, and all school districts are strapped for money. Thus we find arguments over what tests should be used; what the cut-off point for those defined as requiring bilingual education should be; whether if these children do poorly in English they may not be doing equally poorly in a foreign language, thus leaving moot the question of which language of instruction (or induction) should be used, and the like. Equally difficult to define with any clarity in regulation or court decision is what kind of program must be provided to these children. Indeed, my difficulty in forming an opinion on these developments is caused by the fact that it is unclear to me just what goes on in such education--how many children, taught in how many classrooms, by teachers of what background and what training, for how many years?---and I do not know whether anyone has such figures. But there is no question that legally any child who has a problem with facility in English owing to foreign-language background has a fight to something--and that something involves some degree of teaching in the language that child has been raised speaking. There is also a strong bias among those administering these requirements in favor of more than that. Responsive as they are to interest groups pressing for a broader measure of bilingual and bicultural education, they are also sympathetic to teaching the ethnic heritage and background, as well as to simple instrumental use of the foreign language for a brief period to facilitate educational achievement. It would be interesting to get some sense of the extent of bilingual and bicultural education now. It would be even more interesting--though no simple census or survey can tell us this--to get some sense of what actually goes on in these classrooms. We lack good ethnographic descriptions of bilingual-bicultural classrooms. Undoubtedly they range from classes of solid academic content conducted in a foreign language by well-trained and competent teachers, to -as one anecdotal account puts i t -a class in contemporary history that is supposed to be conducted in Spanish in which neither the teacher nor the students knew the Spanish for key terms they were discussing. We have institutionalized, through law and practice, bilingual and bicultural education; to what extent and