The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Bilingual Education

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. Of the many controversies bubbling in the cauldron of American education, few have provided as much argument as bilingual education. There are some 3 1/2 million American school children with limited ability to speak, read and write English because they have a different native language. Many of that number are the result of immigration from Latin America and Southeast Asia. In recent years it's been the nation's official policy to teach these children subjects like math and history at least part of the time in their own native language. In theory, when their English grew fluent enough, they switched over. A lot of people didn't like the policy, including the Reagan administration, which wants to cut federal spending on bilingual education. This month the critics got prestigious support when a prominent research group, the 20th Century Fund, urged Washington to shift its support away from bilingual ed and back to teaching in English. But supporters of the bilingual approach strongly defend it, as they did in congressional hearings yesterday. Tonight, should bilingual education be jettisoned? Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, a Supreme Court decision was the major trigger behind the government's emphasis on bilingual education. It came in 1974 and involved Chinese-speaking students in the San Francisco schools. The Court said they were being denied equal education opportunities because of their language handicap, and ordered the situation remedied. Out of that decision came a federal task force to look for the best remedy for all non-English-speaking students, and from that came a new set of guidelines from the Carter administration's new Department of Education. Those regulations pretty much made the bilingual approach -- teaching in their native language until they became English proficient -- the only accepted approach, and federal funds were tied to it. Then in came the Reagan administration. One of Secretary of Education Terrel Bell's first official acts was to scrap those regulations on the grounds they were harsh, inflexible, burdensome, unworkable and incredibly costly. He said it should be up to individual schools to decide the best way to cope with the problem. The administration also went for less money to spend on it. Three years ago $161 million was earmarked for so-called English-deficient education. It was down to $133 million this year, the proposed budget for next year drops it to $94 million. Robin?

MacNEIL: The 20th Century Fund report criticizing bilingual education said in part that children are being cheated. If English remains unfamiliar to them, they will never swim in the American mainstream unless they are fluent in English. A key member of the task force that wrote the report was Diane Ravitch, an educator whose forthcoming book. The Troubled Crusade, deals in part with the bilingual debate. Professor Ravitch, why should the the federal government stop funding bilingual education as the report recommends?

DIANE RAVITCH: I think I should explain first what the report does recommend.It does not call for scrapping bilingual education. What it calls for is a federal policy that stresses the primacy of the English language and makes very clear -- because our task force was a task force on specifically the feferal role in education. And we asked ourselves, what is the federal obligation? It is to see that all children have equal educational opportunity. And we feel that unless children can speak and read and write in English, they won't have dqual educational opportunity.

MacNEIL: May I interrupt just for a moment?

Prof. RAVITCH: Yes.

MacNEIL: But it is accurate to say that the report called for moving the federal funding of the bilingual education program into alternative ways of insuring primacy of English.

Prof. RAVITCH: The report recommended no method. In other words, if a district like New York City could prove that bilingual education was the most effective way to learn English and that the best way to learn English was to study Spanish or some other language, then I suppose that would be acceptable. We recommended no pedagogy. We didn't say how to teach English. We simply said all children in this society, in order to have equal opportunity, must learn English. I should mention, the Lau decision, which was referred to earlier, was brought by Chinese-speaking students who wanted to be taught English. They were not -- they were being denied the opportunity to learn English.They were simply plunked into English-speaking classrooms without special English language instruction. So that one of the ways that the Supreme Court recommended to meet the constitutional requirement was teach these children English or teach them in their native language or do something else. It didn't say how to do it. The federal government made requirements that said only bilingual education will do. Our task froce, which included the Carter administration's director of the National Institute of Education, who is a Democrat, the California state superintendent of education. Wilson Riles, also a Democrat, and a number of others who were of both parties recommended that the federal government should not require a pedagogy, but should have as its object the teaching of the English language through whatever method is most effective.

MacNEIL: All right. Now, what are the task force's problems, and if you share them, with bilingual education, the emphasis on the bilingual solution?

Prof. RAVITCH: Well, I don't think, and I don't think that the task force believed that it was correct for the federal government to require a method. That's never happened in the history of federal-school relationships. It simply never happened. There's no other area where the federal government tells local districts exactly how it's to teach, but simply says, "This is what the federal requirement is in terms of the outcome, and you find the best way to reach that outcome."

MacNEIL: But presumably, if the task force had found that the bilingual education emphasis was working brilliantly, you would have urged it to continue, whould you not? I mean, the report was not uncritical of bilingual education.

Prof. RAVITCH: I think that the feeling -- that there were many who felt that bilingual education had -- that there were many programs that work very well; there are many programs that are deficient. Our main feeling was that the federal government should not have any pedagogical requirements -- should not tell districts how to teach, but should simply set forward, what are the requirements for equal educational opportunity. And the first requirement is, in this society, if you can't speak English you cannot, for instance, participate in this program because you don't have non-English-speaking people on the report here.

MacNEIL: As an educator yourself, what is your belief? What do you believe is the best method?

Prof. RAVITCH: My personal view is that the best method is the one that my own son used when he wanted to learn to speak Russian, and he is a major in Russian studies; he's in college. He went to the Middlebury Language Program, which has a celebrated program, and for nine weeks spoke nothing but Russian.He wasn't permitted to read an English-language publication.After nine weeks there he learned to speak Russian, and then he spent a semester in Russia, where he was again in a Russian-speaking environment. He is now fluent in Russian. I think that's the best method. I wouldn't say that it should be mandated for all children because it was best for him. Other children may learn differently. That's my own view. It was not the panel's view. The panel recommended no pedagogy.

MacNEIL: And what to you think personally about teaching children who, say, speak Spanish or one of the Southeast Asian languages normal curriculum subjects in their own language for several years until their English is good enough for them to switch over? What is your personal view of that?

Prof. RAVITCH: My personal view and my hunch is that it maintains their dependency on the language that they have had in the past, and if the want to learn English it probably slows down their learning of English. I know that for some districts, for instance in Hawaii, I was told by educators there that they have 42 different language groups and it's impossible for them to mount 42 different bilingual programs. So that the federal requirement was impossible to meet.

MacNEIL: And all over this country I think federal funds now fund something like 150 different languages, do they not?

Prof. RAVITCH: Oh, the last I saw was 68, but it could be more than that.

MacNEIL: To those who might say that your own personal preference is the old sink-or-swim method, how do you -- what do you do for those who sink?

Prof. RAVITCH: I don't believe that anyone should sink, and I think that wise teachers and wise administrators find the best methods and find the most effective methods, and they may differ for different children, and that's why our task force felt that it was wrong for the federal government to say that only one method should be funded.

MacNEIL: Doesn't removing the federal funding for the bilingual education emphasis, with all the controversy it's carried in its wake these last few years, send a signal to certain states or certain school districts that they don't have to bother with the child who speaks another language?

Prof. RAVITCH: Well, not necessarily so, because for instance, 13 states now mandate bilingual education. There are many judges that have mandated bilingual education. So that there are many local and state requirements, and if local districts want to have bilingual education they should. It was the view of the task force that we don't know what the best method is and that it's wrong to impose a single method, which may not be the right method for all children.

MacNEIL: Well, thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Not everyone agrees with Dr. Ravitch and her panel's views of bilingual education. A dissenter is Awilda Orta, director of bilingual education for the New York City school system. You believe bilingual education is worth continuing and worth the support by the federal government?

AWILDA ORTA: Oh, definitely. I think through the efforts of the federal government and the funding under Title VII we've been able to develop innovative programs which will have allowed children of limited English proficiency to develop English language skills, develop their skills in their other content areas, and be successful within the New York City public school system.

LEHRER: Professor Ravitch suggests that bilingual education slows down the learning of English. Is that true?

Ms. ORTA: Not necessarily. What happens is that a child begins to develop English language skills immediately, and at the same time that child is developing or continuing to develop competency in math and science and so forth. And let me give you a typical math class, for example. The child begins math in, let's say, Greek. We have Greek bilingual programs. And initially maybe some of the vocabulary in math and English is taught, and then we have -- we move on to what's called a linguistic summary where the class is summarized in English, and then parts or units of the class are taught in English, and then the entire math class is taught in English so that it's a gradual movement from dealing with mathematics in Greek to dealing with mathematics entirely in English. So that it's a gradual process.

LEHRER: How gradual? In other words, how long does the average student in the New York City school stay in a bilingual approach before he or she is able to move into an all-English class?

Ms. ORTA: The average amount of time in New York City is approximately three years. Now, some students are in a bilingual program for fewer than three years, and others are for more than three years.It really depends on the age of the child, the educational background of the child and some of the individual needs of the child.

LEHRER: Do you agree with the 20th Century Fund panel's basic thesis, that the number-one requirement must be the knowledge of English?

Ms. ORTA: Oh, definitely. That's the prime objective of bilingual education programs.I don't think that anyone in bilingual education in the United States would support anything else, but in addition we have to be able to have children to develop skills in other areas because this society -- it's changing. The economic base is changing so rapidly that we need to have citizens who are literate and who are skilled. Let me give you an example. We have a high school student who just gave a workshop for some administrators the other day on computer literacy. That student has been in the country only five years. He went into a bilingual program in his junior high school and when he went into high school he entered a bilingual program.Because we had the federal funds, that student went into a computer course, a bilingual computer course. That student now is a senior, he's perfectly bilingual; he's teaching teachers. As a matter of fact, he's been hired by the New York public schools to develop some software for computers.Without that training, that bilingual course in computers, that student would not have had that kind of opportunity.

LEHRER: Is it your position, Ms. Orta, contrary to Professor Ravitch's, that the federal government was right to put the requirement on bilingual education?

Ms. ORTA: See, we have to differentiate between the requirement and the Title VII funding law. The federal guidelines not only provided bilingual education as the main source -- and we believe that it's the best method -- but it also allowed for other kinds of programs. In New York City we have a variety of programs.We have in some districts students who come from maybe 30 or 40 different countries. It's impossible for us to have a bilingual program in those districts. In other districts we have students who come perhaps from one or two different countries, and it's easier for us to provide bilingual education programs. I think the federal role in bilingual education remains to be really an important role.

LEHRER: But it shouldn't be -- it should have flexibility, in other words? You agree that each school district ought to make its own decision as to what's the best way?

Ms. ORTA: Well, I'm not so sure that each school district should have complete leeway because very often they don't look to the needs of the students; they don't have input from the community, and they don't look towards the future. I think that there has to be some sort of federal refulation that looks for the interest of the individual students.

LEHRER: Finally, let me ask you a personal question. When you first started in the schools here, you couldn't speak English. What happened to you? How did you get to learn it, not only English, but all your other subjects as well?

Ms. ORTA: Well, I was in a group of students, and we had a sink-or-swin method. I remember my first grade class. My image -- mymental image was that I was on the side of the classroom that was always very, very dark. And when I visited my first grade class as an adult, I noticed there was nothing wrong with the lighting. It was just an emotional image that I had. But an interesting point was that I was one of the very few who was able to swim. Too many of my peers were not able to make it through the educational system, and that has to change.

LEHRER: Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: What do you think, Professor Ravitch, of the New York system? You live here; you probably know it fairly well, the one that was just outlined.

Prof. RAVITCH: Well, I wrote a history of the New York City schools so I have a little familiarity with it. I think that the problem is not with what New York is doing; the problem is what happens at the federal level. And there was a regulation put forward in the last year of the Carter administration to make bilingual education mandatory in every school system in the country and to remove any flexibility from the local district. And I think it was that drift beyond the Lau decision that we talked about before towards mandatory bilingual education.

MacNEIL: Now, you say there should be some flexibility.

Ms. ORTA: There has to be some flexibility, especially when you have many language groups involved.

MacNEIL: Sure, but if I understand you correctly, you're saying that unless there is some strong federal regulation, it won't work and it is because the individual's rights or opportunities won't be well-enough regarded if you simply leave it to each school district.

Ms. ORTA: That's right. That's the reason why we had to go to the courts and we had to go to the federal government. I don't think that the environment has changed.

MacNEIL: What do you say to that?

Prof. RAVITCH: My concern is that the basic right is the right to learn to read and write and speak English, because that is the right that opens up equal educational opportunity. And the right to speak a different language is not a constitutional right.The reason that there was a Lau decision is because 1,800 Chinese-speaking children were not permitted to have English-language instruction -- not because they weren't permitted to have Chinese-language instruction. They were denied the right to understand what was going on in their classroom because other children were getting English-language instruction and they were not.And that's what the Supreme Court was about, and I think that the regulations just went off on a tangent. And our task force, which as I said was fully bipartisan -- was not in any way connected with the Reagan administration, was reasserting that the basic constitutional right here is what we're concerned about, and that's the right to participate fully in this society by whatever method.

MacNEIL: What do you think is going to happen if the federal funding is taken away from a mandatory application to the bilingual education regulation and devoted to whatever alternative systems there are? What do you think is going to happen?

Ms. ORTA: Right now the federal funding supports fewer than one in 10 students nation-wide. I think that school districts who have half-heartedly participated in this kind of a program, their efforts will become disipated and we're going to go back to what we had in the '50s and '60s, where students sat in classrooms and were taught math and science and so forth in English and they had to wait two or three years until they learned English before they understood what was going on in class.

MacNEIL: Do you agree with that?

Prof. RAVITCH: Well, there's only been one national study that I'm aware of, and that was conducted by the American Institutes for Research, which was an Office of Education study which studied every Spanish-English program in the country. And according to their report, which was a comprehensive study of the effects of bilingual education, there was no difference in terms of ability to master math as between Hispanic children, whether they were in bilingual or not in bilingual. The outcome was the same. It did not make any difference. What the bilingual children could do better was Spanish, and what the non-bilingual Hispanic children could do better was English.

MacNEIL: What's your experience in the classroom -- what's your experience?

Ms. ORTA: That study has been withdrawn. It has a lot of --

Prof. RAVITCH: Not by the people who did it, though.

Ms. ORTA: By the Office of Education. If you seek to find out, they have realized that the research was very poor research. I've found out that -- let's take a math class and a student who comes in and is Spanish-speaking and speaks no English. The teacher is teaching fractions. Fractions are difficult enough as it is; to learn them in a language you don't understand will take forever. But if you're learning English and you're learning your fractions in Spanish, and when you're developing your English vocabulary, by the time you can really function in English you already have mastered the fractions. And the concepts are different in any language. The thing is that what we don't want the student to do is to fall back in their content areas while they're learning English.

MacNEIL: We'll move on. Jim?

LEHRER: There are other alternatives being tried in this area of educating non-English-speaking students. The Fairfax County, Virginia schools in the Washington suburbs have their own system, one that is now being copied by other schools in the country. The program's creator and director is Esther Eisenhower. Dr. Eisenhower, first, explain how your program works.

ESTHER EISENHOWER: Well, we are a multi-ethnic community of students. We have 50 different languages identified among a group of about 4,000 students who are scattered over 404 square miles. So we have a very scattered population that speaks a variety of languages. When we started really studying what the federal government was asking us to do, we were faced with a problem of one, where do we find the curriculum that is compatible with what is being taught in the regular first, second, third and fourth and fifth grade in Fairfax County in those languages? Number two is --

LEHRER: In 50 languages.

Dr. EISENHOWER: Yes. At that time the Lau remedy said that you have to deal with those rights only if you have 20 children who speak a specific.Well, because of our proximity to Washington, we have a very, very mobile population. It's very possible we start the year with 23 children who speak Urdu and 19 children who speak Turkish, for example. We were under no obligation to provide bilingual education for the Turks, but if one family left, we were left with 11 Urdu; two families came in, and we had 46 Turks. So there was the mobility, trying to find the curriculum to teach those children. But the most important thing is, where do we find certified, qualified teachers?

LEHRER: In each one of these -- like math and all those subjects.

Dr. EISENHOWER: Yes.

LEHRER: All right, what did you do?

Dr. EISENHOWER: And not only that; in the language.

LEHRER: Sure.Sure.

Dr. EISENHOWER:We decided there was no possibility that we could do the job well, and I can assure you that decision was not capricious. As a matter of fact, we had representatives from the federal government, the same ones who paid the visit to 500 other school systems. "We are from the federal government and we are here to help you." Well, fortunately, maybe because we follow the tradition of Jefferson, we decided that there must have been a reason there is no national school board, and deep down we were convinced that we knew better what our children really needed. So we set up to build up a program built around qualified, certified teachers. And don't forget to please ask me when I'm finished about why I am leary about bilingual education.

LEHRER: Okay.

Dr. EISENHOWER: We got certified teachers because the school board, the administration and myself --

LEHRER: But in English?

Dr. EISENHOWER: Yes.

LEHRER: All right, and then how -- they taught in English the students from -- in these 50 languages?

Dr. EISENHOWER: All our curriculum is built exclusively -- delivered in the English language. However, we do use, to the extent possible, the native language when we are trying to place the children initially in programs. We have done a lot of provision of native-language curriculum and media and tapes that the children could use as reinforcement of their instruction.

LEHRER: But the basic instruction, however, was in English, and you scaled down the difficulty of the English to accommodate the learning problems that the statudents had. Is that correct?

Dr. EISENHOWER: Well, scaling down maybe is not the right word. We say we provided a curriculum that provides a comprehensible instruction. What we have done is taken our curriculum for first grade -- for first grade or third grade -- and then worked a controlled vocabulary by which we can deliver that curriculum to these children.

LEHRER: But these children are in separate classes? They're not in the big classes where the English-proficient are, correct?

Dr. EISENHOWER: No, they are in separate classes, and initially they are with us, probably for a week or two, a whole day. Then they are mainstreamed out to lunch. Very shortly they'll be going out with a peer to go to P.E. and then music and then social studies and math, and eventually they stay with us only for reading and language arts.

LEHRER: Does it work?

Dr. EISENHOWER: Well, I will let your viewers and our record stand for its own.We have statistics to prove that 48% of our elementary students are able to be completely mainstreamed in Fairfax County, which is considered to be one of the highest achieving school systems in this country -- 48% of them within one year, an additional 44% within two years. And only 8% of our children remain in our program for two or more years.

LEHRER: In your opinion, is it a better way to do it than bilingual education?

Dr. EISENHOWER: There is no such a thing as a better way, and here I find myself wholeheartedly agreeing with Professor Ravitch. School systems -- we have 16,000 school systems in this country. We do not teach the same way the regular instruction program. We do not teach the same way the gifted and talented students.We do not teach the same way special education. That particular model can work whenever you have a multi-ethnic population where you cannot find curriculum that is a viable curriculm. Exporting or importing curriculum from other countries that have nothing to do with the realities of every-day fourth grade can be just as harmful as none at all. But the most important ingredient of what we have done in Fairfax County, is we do not believe that the mere fact that a person speaks Korean, whether that person is a truck driver, a pediatrician or a lawyer, entitles them to be a bilingual teacher, to try to work with the children to give them the reading readiness and the basic skills. That is rare. Bilingual education has gone astray, in my opinion.

LEHRER: Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Ms. Orta, 48% able to be mainstreamed in a competitive environment after a year. Does that sound like success to you?

Ms. ORTA: Well, you have to look at what mainstreaming means. Are they able to keep up with their peers? If you look at statistics of these children in Fairfax County, you see that they are below their peers in terms of being able to compete. In New York, for example, we have our promotional gates program, and we found that in testing the children in English, students who had been here for one year in the bilingual program, 26% were able to pass the gates. Children who had been here four years, 47% had been able to pass the gates.

MacNEIL: Okay. We're almost out of time. Do you think that a faexible approach like that sounds like a good idea?

Ms. ORTA: Yes. They're using bilingual personnel; they have bilingual materials. For 4,000 children it doesn't sound like a bad idea.

MacNEIL: Is that a system you would approve of?

Prof. RAVITCH: I think the important thing to realize is that with all of these methods there is a tremendous overlap. You can't -- we're not talking about punking kids into an English-speaking environment without any assistance. All of these methods sharesome use of native language moving towards English, and that was the opint of the 20th Century Fund report.

MacNEIL: Well, we have to leave it there. Dr. Eisenhower, thank you for joining us in Washington; Professor Ravitch, Ms. Orta, in New York.Godd night, Jim.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: That's all for tonight.We will be back tomorrow nght. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.