-Caveat Lector- On the Matter of Bilingual Education William Buckley, National Review Wednesday, July 18, 2001 It is, alas, hard to measure the collapse of the Bush administration in the matter of education. The bill that is making its way through Congress has good points in it, even as it can be said, with Christian resolution, that Sen. Kennedy has good points in him - indeed, it is mostly a Kennedy bill. The national despair over bad education is as dogged as the administration's refusal to do anything substantive about it. Concern for education is almost always listed as the first concern of the citizenry. Well, there are two ways to better education in those parts of the country where education languishes. One is to encourage competitive schooling; another is to mercy-kill bilingual education. On the matter of vouchers, millions have been spent and very little progress recorded. The teachers unions, the most disciplined in the country - setting aside the inchoate union of trial lawyers - has obstructed private schooling as if it were the enemy, rather than the friend, of public schooling. The voucher can be said to have run into a stone wall, political and constitutional. But the persistence of bilingual education is very difficult to understand, and millions, under the present system, will find it difficult to understand why as mature "Americans" they will feel estranged from the American mainstream. And it isn't the fault of the immigrants. It is the fault of the professionals whose stake, very simply, is in federal bilingual money. They are the equivalent of the class of Americans who made horse carriages in 1910, averring the right to continue in their profession athwart the advent of the automobile. There is much seething on this subject, with a column by Ruben Navarrette Jr. in the Chicago Tribune, another by John O'Sullivan in National Review, both deeply informed. But the great presence onstage in this struggle has been Ron Unz, a California software millionaire who has made the cause his own. He did this by sponsoring plebiscites on the subject, first in California, then in Arizona. Now get this figure: In California, the unions outspent him 25-1. Yet Proposition 227 prevailed with a 22-point margin. Flash forward to Arizona, 2000. There the bilingualists outspent him again, but this time by a mere 10-1. The anti-bilingual cause nevertheless won by a 27-point margin. Contrast the presidential contest in Arizona that same year: W. won by a mere 1-point margin. Mr. Unz is going to carry on the fight in Colorado, but he is wondering: What does it take to get the government of the United States to cut out this subsidy of anti-Hispanic education? The case for language reform isn't the personal project of Ron Unz. The need for that reform is something on the order of a pulsating national consensus. The founder of the California Association of Bilingual Education has admitted he was wrong in the 30 years he supported bilingualism, becoming now a convert to the English cause. Then came the New York Times, with a front-page story hailing the dramatic success of education when done by English immersion. Soon after, others called for reform: USA Today, the Washington Post, the CBS Evening News, Jim Lehrer. Ron Unz wrote analyses and hectored his point in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. In Colorado the leader of his campaign is one of the state's most prominent Hispanic leftists, finally converted, and an enthusiastic convert. The bilingualists hold out for their patronage by recapitulating old horror stories about the taunting of Mexican students by ethnocentric grammar-school children. But their resistance is sustained by the misdirected enthusiasm of President Bush. Speaking in Miami a year ago he said, "We're now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. . . . Go to Miami or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago, or West New York, New Jersey, and close your eyes and listen. You could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago or San Miguel de Allende." Yes, but you're not. You're in Miami and San Antonio and Los Angles and Chicago and New Jersey. Mr. Bush seems to be discovering the joys of bilingualism. Is Canada his model? It is an entirely different matter to encourage Hispanics to continue to know Spanish, and indeed to encourage Americans to learn Spanish. But the ground of education needs to be in the national idiom and the demonstrations by Mr. Unz and others tell us one thing very directly: To the extent education in America in grammar schools and high schools is conducted other than in English, the students are suffering, and their disabilities will diminish their success in life - and will encourage, in the republic, a cultural schism of benefit to no one. President Bush's advisers may think they are currying favor with the Hispanic community, but that community prospers to the extent it exposes its children to the national language. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ron Unz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, July 23, 2001 12:22 PM Subject: We Will Never Declare Victory! Dear Friends, Unlike business, the world of politics and public policy is governed not by profits and losses, but by perceptions. A leader or a policy is successful primarily if perceived as successful, regardless of the underlying reality. For a few recent years, portions of the business world edged into this same dangerous territory of illusion, perhaps with devastating results for our economy. Much-hyped Internet companies such as Webvan.com were touted as pillars of the New Economy, despite mounting oceans of losses and a business plan verging on the insane. But in business, the gullible investors eventually stopped gullibly investing, and Webvan.com recently shuttered its doors and its website, having burned through well over a billion dollars of other peoples money. Hordes of other dotcoms died earlier, and hordes more are still following the same doomed path to the technology graveyard.. Headlines of massive failures now dominate our business pages. But in politics, the money never necessarily runs out since profits are a meaningless concept, allowing failures either to last forever, or perhaps to gradually fade from view, with no need for recriminations. Ardent devotees of a doomed movement can simply claim that the future will eventually be theirs, and this cannot be absolutely ruled out, since the future never arrives. Thus, thirty years of unbroken and extraordinary failure of bilingual education scarcely dimmed the enthusiasm of the bilingual academics and teachers employed in that industrial-complex, whose continued livelihood and self-esteem depended on their seeing or predicting success, all evidence to the contrary. Since public notice of the success or failure of an effort often depends on the number and intensity of those directly invested in finding such success or failure, much of this non-existent success was widely reported for decades, just as worthless Webvan.com peaked at a market value of over $7 billion. Similarly, during the hotly contested 1998 campaign for California's Prop. 227, the opposition constituted the entire political and media establishment of that state, including---with important exceptions---nearly every prominent political figure, educational expert, and major newspaper, the voters being the only important supporters, passing "English" in a landslide. Thus, the ranks of those whose prophecies of doom had led themselves to become invested in finding subsequent failure dwarfed those whose support meant that they would hope to see success. And when rapid and dramatic educational success occurred, silence rather than jubilation reigned, as columnist Joanne Jacobs has aptly noted. http://www.onenation.org/9912/123099.html Similarly, various major speeches by Presidential candidate George W. Bush touting the benefits of bilingual education came just weeks before the liberal New York Times broke the front-page story on the enormous educational benefits of dismantling that program. Needless to say, the embarrassed Bush Administration has since hardly emphasized this topic, firmly refusing to declare an educational triumph, much like the elder Bush's administration stubbornly refused to ever declare victory in the Cold War with Russian communism. But if conservatives may crow over the folly of the bilingual establishment and carp at the public cowardice of their own Republican President, they too have educational skeletons rattling in their own political closets. Over the past decade, school voucher enthusiasts have spent many hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps as much as a billion or more, promoting their favored solution to our educational ills, sums that probably dwarf those spent on every other conservative educational reform combined. I have often expressed my own deep skepticism of vouchers as public policy. http://www.onenation.org/9901/010399a.html But whether or not vouchers would be sound policy, they are undoubtedly disastrously bad politics, losing an endless series of political campaigns across the length and breath of America, often by 40-point margins, until today the number of voucher-recipients remains still stuck in the mid-tens of thousands, perhaps one-tenth of one percent of American students, a ratio of marketing expense to market penetration that would make Webvan.com shine by comparison. Perhaps school vouchers are yet the wave of the future; perhaps Webvan.com would have become successful with the infusion of another billion of venture capital. But the burden of proof lies with the advocates, those denizens of the voucher-industrial-complex whose enthusiasm outweighs their realism. William Buckley, dean of America's conservative movement and longtime voucher supporter, effectively makes these points in the column above. Sincerely, Ron Unz, Chairman English for the Children <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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