Friday, January 16, 1998
MEChA campaigns against ballot proposal
ACTIVISM ‘English for the Children’ seeks end of bilingual
education
By Barbara Ortutay
Daily Bruin Contributor
Like Proposition 187 and Proposition 209 before it, the Unz
initiative, otherwise known as "English for the Children" ballot
proposal, is on its way to becoming California’s next political hot
topic dealing with ethnicity and nationality.
Written by Silicon Valley software entrepreneur Ron Unz, the
initiative would put an end to bilingual education in California
schools.
Unz, along with anti-bilingual education lobby One Nation/One
California, is campaigning to place the proposal on the June 1998
ballot.
MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana y Chicano de Aztlan) is
currently campaigning against the proposal. The group has collected
over 700 signatures from UCLA students opposing the initiative. The
petition was presented to Los Angeles Unified School District, who
a week later voted to oppose the legislation.
"This issue is going to affect students emotionally and
academically; it is also going to affect parents, teachers and
school boards," said Lina Velasco, the high school outreach
coordinator of MEChA
MEChA held a forum educating community members about bilingual
education and the "English for the Children" initiative on Dec. 1,
1997, on the UCLA campus.
In addition to MEChA, members of the Raza Youth Education
Project, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and
the California Association for Bilingual Education were also among
the participants.
Organizers hoped to educate the UCLA community about bilingual
education and to encourage students to critically analyze the
proposed legislation.
USAC supported the organizers, stating in a MEChA press release
that "well designed and implemented bilingual education programs
are the most effective in ensuring that limited English proficiency
students become literate in the English language."
Supporters of the proposal say that bilingual eduction is
failing – according to Unz, only about 5 percent of the children in
California schools who are not proficient in English gain
proficiency each year under the current system.
"Bilingual education is completely unworkable as well as
unsuccessful," said Unz.
"Even after 20 or 30 years of effort, California has had
absolutely no luck in finding properly certified bilingual teachers
to match the 140 languages spoken by California schoolchildren," he
continued.
Velasco believes that the pro-initiative lobby has been
misleading citizens in its quest for English immersion
education.
"The ‘English for the Children’ initiative uses misleading
statistics and language," she said.
"It tries to combat a complex problem by giving a simple
solution, which can prove to be detrimental and costly to our
students," she continued.
A study done by the Linguistic Minority Research Institute
Education Policy Center at UC Davis found that the number of
schoolchildren in California who don’t speak English is estimated
to be 1.3 million; a quarter of all students enrolled in California
public schools. Only 30 percent of these students are enrolled in
bilingual programs. The study also found that instruction in a
child’s primary language is beneficial to students and "does not
impede the acquisition of oral English."
MEChA is planning to organize more forums in the future,
reaching not only UCLA students but teachers, parents and other
community members as well.
Velasco says that this issue is about more than just
education.
"If it was just an education issue, they would try to reform it,
not abolish it altogether." she said.