As California voters consider the eight initiatives and 13 total
ballot propositions before them this fall, many wonder whether the
promises offered by any of them will be kept.
As California voters consider the eight initiatives and 13 total ballot propositions before them this fall, many wonder whether the promises offered by any of them will be kept.
They’ve watched as the state delayed issuing billions of dollars worth of bonds they approved for school construction, parks and other projects. They look on helplessly as lax enforcement thwarts the goals of measures like the 1986 Clean Water Act, passed as Proposition 65, and they spent more than 18 years wondering when car insurance rates would finally be governed by something other than ZIP codes. Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi finally acted on that one last summer, as required by the 1988 Proposition 103. And on and on through a long litany of frustrated measures.
But new evidence offered by the federal Census Bureau indicates that at least one past initiative is not only working, but working better and better as time goes by.
Data released in late summer from the bureau’s 2005 American Community Survey showed that in California households where Spanish is the primary language, more children than ever aged 5 to 17 also speak fluent English.
The Census found the number of English-speaking children of Spanish-speaking parents rose from 60 percent in 2000 to 71 percent in 2005, an average increase of 2 percent per year. This was true even though the number of Spanish-speaking households rose by about 200,000 during the same time period due to the torrid pace of immigration.
Something obviously is causing children of Latino immigrants to learn English faster and better than before. And only one public policy affecting language has changed during the past 20 years: That would be the 1998 Proposition 227, which eliminated most bilingual education programs in public schools, replacing them with English immersion.
Plainly, English immersion is working better than bilingualism, in which students are taught primarily in their native language until teachers believe they can speak English well enough to switch to regular classes.
No, it can’t be proven that English immersion is the reason for this very significant progress. But there are no other evident reasons.
“This certainly is encouraging,” says Ron Unz, the Palo Alto software entrepreneur who bankrolled and led the Proposition 227 campaign and later helped similar efforts in several other states.
Unz speculates that massive media coverage of his campaign at the time it was on the ballot, plus news coverage of the way 227 was carried out, may have contributed almost as much as the classroom changes.
“All the coverage stressed the importance of learning English, even if there were debates about the best way to do it,” he said. “That helped alter behavior patterns. A lot of families, for instance, switched from watching all Spanish-language television programs to at least some English ones, which would help a great deal in boosting English proficiency among children.”
The new numbers on children are especially impressive when compared with the regression the Census found among older immigrants. Where about 48 percent of senior citizens in Spanish-speaking households also spoke fluent English in 1990, the number last year had dropped to 35 percent. The elderly, of course, are not often immersed in English.
One question arises that begs for an answer: Why, when the Census found 71 percent of Spanish-speaking children also to be proficient in English, progress reported by public schools has not been nearly as good?
Some speculate the reason is that keeping students classified as English learners after they’ve become proficient allows schools to keep receiving extra state and federal money. Another possible reason is that new immigrant children are arriving in numbers sufficient to keep the English learner numbers constant even as larger and larger numbers learn the language well.
Debates over all this are sure to continue, despite the obvious implications of the new Census figures. But voters can feel sure about one thing: For whatever reason, at least one proposition they passed is steadily achieving its desired effect.
Tom Elias is author of the book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His e-mail address is
td*****@ao*.com
