Mendoza hoped the California test scores would give her more ammunition in her push toward 2000. Now, she feels that her wish has been granted. If they did not understand the English instruction, their test scores would have been worse. Even bilingual proponents fear that test gains in California, particularly among children who are not native English speakers, will fuel anti-bilingual pressures around the country, especially in Colorado, New York, and Massachusetts, and in cities such as Houston, all of which have growing Hispanic populations. There's going to be, and there already is . . .
Recent polls point to strong public sentiment in favor of English-only education.
Pollsters at Arizona Opinion in Tucson found support among 72 percent of voters in that state. But, in truth, it is hard to draw too many absolute conclusions from California's new scores on the Stanford 9 test, which is given, in English, to students in grades 2 to 11. In this, the second year that students statewide have taken the test, average reading scores are up from a 39.6 percentile last year to a 42.2 percentile this year for students in grades 2 to 6. For children not fluent in English, the scores are up from a 15.6 percentile to an 18.4 percentile. A score of 50 is the national mean out of a maximum of 99 points.