Forked Tongue

The Politics of Bilingual Education

Rosalie Pedalino Porter, Rosalie Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138523654
• eBook ISBN: 9781351519519
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Today children who are not fluent in English—legal and illegal immigrants, refugees, and native born—are the fastest growing portion of our population, accounting for more than half the children in classrooms in many city schools. Bilingual education programs established by federal and state laws have required that such students be taught basic subjects in their native languages rather than in English. Judged by most applicable measures—such as achievement scores and dropout rates—these programs have not been successful.

This edition includes new material on recent efforts to reform bilingual education, on the growing trend across the country toward English language programs, on the latest national research studies, and on the movement to make English the official language of the United States. Forked Tongue is a devastating inside account of how the twenty-eight-year experiment in bilingual education has failed our language-minority children—and why. Rosalie Porter draws on local, state, and international experience to provide us with the first authoritative account of which policies, programs, and practices actually succeed with the children they are intended to serve. Forked Tongue will be of interest to educators, sociologists, and scholars interested in second language acquisition.

1
Firsthand Experience in Educating Language Minorities

My introduction to the American school system began when I entered a first-grade classroom not long after arriving in the United States at the age of six. Feelings of fearfulness at being separated from my family were heightened when I lost my way home on the first day of school. I wandered for what seemed miles in central Newark, New Jersey, crying, until I was brought home by a policeman who lived in our neighborhood.

During those first few months, the hours I spent in the classroom were a haze of incomprehensible sounds. I copied what the other children seemed to be doing, scribbling on paper as though I were writing; otherwise, I silently watched the behavior of teachers and students. Although I cannot recall the process of learning English and beginning to participate in the verbal life of the classroom, I know it was painful. I can remember, however, that within two years I felt completely comfortable with English and with the school community—how it happened I do not know. I suspect that a combination of factors worked in my favor: a close-knit family, personal motivation, good health, sympathetic teachers, peer acceptance, and who knows what other intangibles of time and place. When it finally began to happen, I remember the intense joy of understanding and being understood, even at a simple level, by those around me.

Reading Richard Rodriguez’s moving account of his experience as an underprivileged Mexican-American child, I am surprised that it affects me so deeply now. He said,

One day in school I raised my hand to volunteer an answer. I spoke out in a loud voice. And I did not think it remarkable when the entire class understood. That day, I moved very far from the disadvantaged child I had been only days earlier. The belief, the calming assurance that I belonged in public, had at last taken hold. ... It would have pleased me to have my teachers speak to me in Spanish but I would have delayed having to learn the language of public society. I would have evaded learning the great lesson of school, that I had a public identity. . . . Only later when I was able to think of myself as an American, no longer an alien in gringo society, could I seek the rights and opportunities necessary for full public individuality. . . . Those middle class ethnics who scorn assimilation romanticize public separateness and they trivialize the dilemma of the socially disadvantaged.¹

Changing Educational Expectations

In my generation, many immigrant children did not succeed either in learning English or in mastering academic subjects. It was this common immigrant experience of failure, the widespread dropping out of school, that gave rise in the 1960s to the demand for effective, humane language programs. The expectation among educators of those earlier times was that immigrant children would either “sink or swim.” This cruel experience forced many to leave school early, prepared only for unskilled labor. This aborted schooling was not as serious a drawback then, however, because of the easy access to jobs in industry and agriculture. The current growth of a service/technological economy requires a much higher level of education for even entry-level jobs.

Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, tells the story of the enormous change he has seen in the average years of education completed by Americans. As a young boy growing up on New York’s East Side in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in the 1930s, he often heard his elders speak with pride of someone who “has a grammar school diploma.” Until World War II only 20 percent of Americans had completed high school. Now 70 percent have a high school diploma, and 40 percent have pursued higher education. Dropping out of school is an almost certain predictor of a lifetime of below-poverty-level earnings, at best.²

The Push for Transitional Bilingual Education

The start of the civil rights push on behalf of language minority children coincided, happily, with the years when I, like other women with career interests, was able to return to my university studies to complete an undergraduate degree. My children were all in school, and it was an ideal time to resume my study of Spanish literature. The college of education began transmitting such a sense of excitement about their new program to train Spanish bilingual teachers that I eagerly changed my direction. The new method, designated Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) but usually referred to simply as “bilingual education” or TBE, requires the teaching of all school subjects in the native language for several years, so that the students learn subject matter while making, with gradually increased English-language lessons, the transition from native language to English.

The call was out for anyone with strong skills in Spanish to join the new wave. Chicano activists from California and the Southwest, as well as Puerto Rican professors from New York and Chicago, taught us about the history and literature of the Caribbean, the phonetics of Spanish and English, psycholinguistics, multicultural sensitivity, and many other skills to prepare us to be bilingual teachers in urban schools. I entered the field of bilingual education at its very beginning and have, therefore, a direct understanding of the way it has developed. My firsthand experience provides a vivid representation of the issues in educating language minority children, a topic too often discussed abstractly by the theoreticians and ideologues.

The institution I attended granted credit to university students willing to tutor bilingual children in the schools of Holyoke, Massachusetts, an impoverished mill town with a large Puerto Rican population. As luck would have it, all the classroom tutoring placements were filled, and a few of us were invited to tutor families in their homes. This proved to be a rich experience for me. I worked with the Santiago family for a whole year, giving the mother, Toñita, and her two youngest children English lessons three times a week. A few of my classmates at the university declined the opportunity because they felt unsafe in the housing project where these families lived. For me it was not frightening but familiar, not unlike the original apartment in which my family lived for our first seven years in the United States.

In the course of these lessons I became very well acquainted not only with the daily struggles of Manuel and Toñita to create a stable life but also with their hopes for their three children. The English lessons were not about grammar rules but about understanding and making oneself understood in daily encounters—in the grocery store, at the doctor’s office, or with service workers. In the process we discussed nutrition, schools, family planning, and job training opportunities for Toñita when her youngest child reached school age. Clearly, I went beyond what was expected in a tutorial sponsored by the university. Because I was a mature woman with a family who had lived the experience of being in an alien culture, I found an easy rapport with the Santiago family, and they visited occasionally with my family before returning to Puerto Rico a few years ago.

New Experiences and New Lessons

In 1974, with a bachelor’s degree and a view of myself, at age forty-three, as the oldest “new” teacher in the world, I began teaching in Springfield, Massachusetts. Here began, first, my excitement in being part of a new experiment in education and, later, the evolution of my thinking on the impractical aspects of bilingual education in the classroom. The Armory Street School had just been desegregated in a citywide master plan that reassigned fifth- and sixth-grade students to different schools to achieve racial balance. Among the 500 students at Armory 49 percent were blacks, 10 percent were Spanish-speakers, and the rest were white students from predominantly low-income families of Irish background in the “Hungry Hill” neighborhood. Kindergarten children living in the vicinity, more than half of whom were from Puerto Rican families, also attended the school.

My prescribed teaching duties were dauntingly varied. First, I was to teach the kindergarten children in Spanish for about an hour daily, developing the basic concepts of size, shape, colors, numbers, and letters—in short, those things typically taught to American kindergarteners. I also was to provide twenty to thirty minutes of English for these children, usually through stories, songs, and games. The rest of the day I was to teach fifth- and sixth-grade students their subject matter—mathematics, science, and social studies—in Spanish and give them intensive lessons in English as a Second Language (ESL), the generic label for the teaching of English speaking, reading, and writing skills to speakers of other languages.

After the first year of groping for teaching materials and searching for good ways of getting ideas and facts across to the students, I began to feel somewhat less shaky about what we were accomplishing together in the classroom. As the only bilingual teacher in the school, I was also called on to be the interpreter for families arriving with new students to be enrolled, to make emergency telephone calls to non-English-speaking parents, to act as interpreter for parentteacher conferences in various classrooms, and occasionally to visit the home of one of our students with the principal when some unusual situation arose.

I learned invaluable lessons from Jim Moriarty, the principal at the Armory Street School. By example he disproved the notion that children can only be inspired if taught or supervised by someone from their own racial group or ethnic culture. Jim’s first concern was for the students—their physical safety and their opportunity for real learning. How did he communicate this to the students and to everyone on his staff? Not by his words, since he is not a particularly expressive or articulate person, but by his daily actions. He got to know each child and something about each family in his district early in the school year, and he certainly knew his school staff. There was no mistaking his priorities when he said to us one day when we were complaining about some onerous duty at school, “This school is not being run for the convenience of the teachers but for the benefit of the students—let’s always remember that.” Although he was paternalistic and authoritarian to some degree, we respected Jim for his fairness and his consistent advocacy for all students. In the years since desegregation, Armory, under his leadership, has established a reputation in Springfield for high student achievement. The school often ranks in first place or close to it on citywide test scores in reading and mathematics.

Such contacts, coupled with the generalized euphoria of starting a new career in a new field that was being created daily, carried me through the first year or two of teaching. Idealism, the sense of mission, and the satisfying knowledge that I was helping students in ways that I had never been helped kept me from analyzing too closely what was going on in my classes. But the time for reflection arrived, and the questioning of my early assumptions about the value of bilingual education became a preoccupation.

Awakening to the Realities of Bilingualism

As I began to know my students and their families, I saw that very few were new to the United States and totally non-English-speaking. The small number who were came predominantly from Italy, Greece, or Central America. The large majority were Puerto Rican children who either were born on the mainland or had arrived as very young children. The languages of their homes were Spanish and English. Older brothers and sisters spoke mostly English; parents spoke mostly Spanish. Years of shuttling between San Juan and New York or Holyoke and Springfield, and perhaps moving three times in one year within the city of Springfield, produced the expected outcome of languages in transition: Spanish became stronger when the family spent some time in Puerto Rico; English became stronger when the family returned to the mainland. And there was the mixing of the two, with the words or expressions in so-called Spanglish creating a neighborhood argot for informal communication.

I soon realized that teaching in Spanish to the kindergarten children required much preliminary work in vocabulary enrichment in standard Spanish. These children, like other children in our society from disadvantaged homes, need more language development, no matter what the language, just to help them begin academic learning. Often I found that as I spoke Spanish, they answered in English. “Juan, que color es este?” I would ask, as I pointed to a green box. “Green” (pronounced “grin”) would be Juan’s reply. So, I would correct him, “Verde,” and he would again say, “Green.” In the early years I followed the curriculum and taught all subjects in Spanish, but I came to feel that I was going about things the wrong way around, as if I were deliberately holding back the learning of English.

When I gave the required thirty minutes of English-language lessons in the kindergarten, scrupulously separate from the Spanish teaching and of much shorter duration, the students responded with equal enthusiasm. They sang the songs in English, shouted the rhymes and number games, and play-acted with me “Three Billy Goats Gruff” and “Jack and the Beanstalk.” I do not know how they felt about the patchwork use of two languages in the classroom, but I know how I felt: odd at first, and then very doubtful about the efficacy of what I was doing.

Today, fourteen years later, I open my hometown newspaper in Amherst, Massachusetts, and read a regrettably comparable story about the new bilingual classroom established in one of our elementary schools. The reporter quotes this bit of dialogue between a nine-year-old girl from Spain and her teacher: “Pointing to a picture illustrating the text, the child asks, ‘Is this a fuego?' and the teacher replies, ‘Si, por favor hable en Español.' The teacher explains to the reporter, ‘It’s very simple. We learn easiest in the language we know best. Most of these children can speak English but their academic skills are very weak. The goal is to build up a foundation of skills in their native language and then transfer those skills to a second language.’ ”³ But that child from Spain is obviously ready and eager to continue her learning in English! She is capable of thinking and speaking in grammatical English and only needs the one word fire in English. Why is the teacher not following the obvious course of teaching academic subjects in English since her students can already speak the language?

Refocusing on English-Language Skills

At the Armory Street School I also was teaching fifth- and sixth-grade students, who spent three hours or more with me daily. These students came to my room from their various homerooms for special instruction because the school did not have a large enough group of limited-English students to organize an entire bilingual classroom of fifth graders or sixth graders. Those whose English was sufficient to the tasks studied their subjects in their homeroom and came to me for English-language reading and writing; those whose English was very limited spent more time in my class, receiving instruction in the fifth- and sixth-grade math, science, and social studies curriculum in Spanish, in addition to an intensive English program.

We bilingual teachers were told by the citywide director of the program to teach spoken English but not to teach reading in English until the students could read at grade level in Spanish. Supposedly, the reading skills in Spanish would easily be transferred to English. This is, indeed, the common practice in bilingual programs across the country. Working with students who were ten to fourteen years old and who were not reading above the first- or second-grade level in Spanish, I doubted that this magic transfer of reading skills from Spanish to English would happen before they finished high school—if they stayed in school that long.

Instead, I decided, quite on my own, and based on this firsthand experience, to devote most of the teaching time to intensive work on English-language skills—speaking, reading, and writing. I reasoned that my students needed a rapid infusion of English if they were to cope with their junior high school classes and succeed. Two hours a day we moved from one activity to another to broaden their English vocabulary and focus on specific concepts related to the curriculum of the school. We did science experiments to understand the water cycle, grew plants, and demonstrated simple machines by rolling toy cars down inclined planes. We set up a classroom “grocery store” to learn hands-on about nutrition, money, and classification of objects. We wrote our own dramatic version of a children’s classic, “Clever Gretel,” in the students’ own English and performed it for other classrooms. We had a weekly cooking lesson, and the students produced a recipe book in English with artwork, binding, and all. Everything we did in some way advanced the use of the English language for academic, as well as social, situations. I did, of course, continue to provide some native-language help to the students who needed it, relying on my judgment of their abilities. But out of this highly representative classroom experience came my determination to create the most direct means for my students to reach English proficiency and academic achievement.

We did not, however, neglect the cultural background of the students! We read folktales and learned songs of their island, looked at Caribbean art, and studied the history of Puerto Rico and the mainland United States. I made the culture of my students familiar to the other students in the school through various activities. An annual event at Christmas time was the serenading of each classroom by the bilingual group. We presented typical Puerto Rican songs, accompanied by maracas and bongos—sounds and rhythms unfamiliar in English Christmas carols but joyful and appreciated by the students! We gave weekly mini-lessons in Spanish for interested classes, with the bilingual students acting as expert assistants.

The Clear-cut Need for Change

Where did all this lead me in my anxieties over the best ways to help these students after a third and fourth year went by? My conviction was strengthened that both at the youngest school age and in the higher grades in the elementary school we were not following the most natural course of concentrating on the English language and on helping students learn their subjects in English—and these are, indeed, the two stated goals of the bilingual education law and of all bilingual programs. As I visited other schools and talked with teachers at professional meetings about their experiences, I bega...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Bilingual Controversy
• 1 Firsthand Experience in Educating Language Minorities
• 2 Confronting the Political Power of the Bilingual Bureaucracy
• 3 Reassessing the Assumptions Underlying Twenty Years of Bilingual Education
• 4 Learning from Other Multilingual Societies
• 6 Beyond Bilingual Education: Language Policy, CulturalPluralism, and Nationhood
• 7 Political Extremes Intensify the Language Debate
• 8 Decisions for the Future
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index