By Holly Ocasio Rizzo Summer was good to Ron Unz, the California crusader against bilingual education. But lack of agreement about statistics didn't stop approval of Proposition 227 by California voters grappling with a soft economy, a tide of immigrants and a call to hold teachers accountable for students' poor academic performance . Unz's law replaced the state's bilingual education program with a one-year English immersion program, except for those students whose parents request a waiver. If Proposition 203 succeeds in Arizona, Unz expects to march east with similar plans, to states such as Massachusetts and New York with especially vocal debates over the merits of bilingual education. I don't think politicians are going to do anything about it.
Politicians are extraordinarily cowardly.
We're concerned with these initiatives that we feel are not related to the best interests of the education of children, but have more to do with external issues. The Arizona law would replace bilingual education with one year of English immersion, unless parents could prove a child's social and psychological need for dual-language classes. Some Arizonans particularly fear a provision in the law that would give schools the power to refuse, without explanation, a parent's request for bilingual classes. Modern bilingual education traces its roots to South Florida. Cuban refugees arriving in 1960, awaiting what they foresaw as Fidel Castro's quick fall and their return to the island, pushed Dade County school officials to teach their children not only in English, but also in their native Spanish.