[Dryerase] The Alarm!--Bilingual Education

[The Alarm!Newswire]

Bilingual Education in Santa Cruz
Schools lack resources for English-learning students

By Rachel Showstack
The Alarm! Newspaper Contributor

“There was a general feeling of gloom among teachers at Starlight 
School when California passed Proposition 227,” said Eric Gross, a 
bilingual teacher at Starlight Elementary School in Watsonville. 
“Nobody knew what the measure would actually do to bilingual 
education.” Approved in 1998, Proposition 227 makes it illegal for 
public schools to teach classes on the basic state subject curriculum 
in Spanish unless all of the students in the class have waivers signed 
by their parents and the school.

Before the vote, teachers and students across the state of California 
organized large demonstrations to protest against the proposed 
legislation. Many teachers were very worried about how the law would 
affect children’s education. They were afraid that students who did not 
speak English would not be able to keep up with the curriculum if they 
were assigned to classes taught exclusively in English.

Palo Alto businessman Ron Unz, who proposed the measure, argued that 
students who enter bilingual programs with minimal English skills learn 
to read and write in their native language and not in English. Unz, 
along with his advocacy group “English for the Children,” maintains 
that the only way to teach kids English is with total English immersion.

But according to Bilingual Teacher Betsy Hamilton of Santa Cruz City 
Schools, Unz’s interpretation of bilingual education is flawed. “The 
goal of all bilingual education is the academic achievement in 
English,” she said. “Ineffective programs have produced students that 
don’t acquire English skills, but effective programs ensure that they 
do.”

Four years after the implementation of Prop. 227, teachers in Santa 
Cruz County are still trying to figure out the best way to teach the 
State’s base curriculum to students who are learning English. But some 
say the debate about “English-only” programs does not focus on the 
worst problems facing English-learners. Regardless of the teaching 
method, minority students, who often come from poor areas, lack general 
educational resources and receive little community support.

Parent-teacher Communication
The first year that Prop. 227 was implemented, teachers didn’t know how 
to interpret it. A rumor even circulated among the bilingual teachers 
at Starlight that they would loose their jobs if they were to talk with 
the parents about the new legislation. The waivers were not available 
in the district office when the school year began, according to Gross. 
On the second day, there were some waivers, but only in English. The 
waivers in Spanish finally arrived on the third day, but by the fourth 
day, the parents were no longer accompanying their kids to school. Thus 
many parents never got waivers.

Gross, who was the Bilingual Resource Teacher at Starlight that year, 
took great pains to contact parents and explain the students’ 
educational options. But he said it was difficult to include parents in 
the decisions about their children’s education. “The parents, 
especially the undocumented, were afraid of bureaucracy,” Gross said.

Since there was no system of parent-teacher communication in the 
district, the teachers had to create a new one. Some teachers stayed at 
school until the evening so they could talk with the parents after they 
finished working in the fields. Others even went to the families’ homes 
on the weekends.

This year, Santa Cruz classroom teachers are still trying to inform 
parents about the options for students learning English. According to 
Darlene Wilcox, the Bilingual Resource Teacher at Salsipuedes 
Elementary School in Watsonville, some parents still don’t understand 
the options. “If there were more money in the schools, we could hire a 
full-time social worker,” she said. She also suggested the possibility 
of hiring an interpreter. But with the schools’ limited resources it’s 
only possible to make baby steps. “We should keep inviting parents to 
participate in informational meetings, school site council meetings and 
also individual meetings with teachers,” Wilcox added.

The Programs
Alianza (a private school) and Starlight are the only schools in 
Watsonville that still offer “dual-language immersion” programs. In 
these programs, the kids who speak Spanish start with classes only in 
Spanish, and later they move to bilingual classes. The goal of 
dual-language immersion is that the students speak, read, write and 
learn well in both languages. These programs are what some teachers 
call “true bilingual education,” because both languages are valued 
equally.

Bilingual Teacher Hamilton pointed out that dual-language immersion 
programs present a message of cultural equality between 
English-learners and native English speakers, in addition to allowing 
the English-learners equal access to the general subject curriculum. 
“The development of bilingual education has its roots in issues of 
equality and access,” she said. “It was developed for students who did 
not have equality and access in public schools, based on [their] 
language.” Hamilton argued that Prop. 227 makes it difficult to provide 
English-learners with equality and access in education.

Alianza and Starlight are located about two blocks apart from each 
other, and they are in a relatively affluent part of Watsonville. 
Wilcox says that although Prop. 227 indicates that the students have 
the right to go to another school in order to participate in a certain 
alternative program, many students don’t have the option of studying so 
far from home. Thus, the dual language immersion program is not 
available for most Watsonville students.

The same problem exists in Santa Cruz, but the options for bilingual 
classes are fewer and farther between, according to Hamilton. Prop. 227 
reduced the number of bilingual classes in Santa Cruz City Schools from 
twelve to five. In order to get a new bilingual class, the measure 
requires that the parents of twenty students sign waivers to request a 
class for a given grade level at a given site. But in areas like the 
city of Santa Cruz, where English-learners are a minority, many schools 
have only a few English-learners per grade level and it is impossible 
to provide the option of a bilingual program.

At Salsipuedes Elementary in Watsonville, where most of the students 
speak Spanish as their first language, parents can choose between an 
“English immersion” program or a “transitional program.” In the 
transitional program, students are taught primarily in Spanish until 
they are prepared to follow classes in English. Parents of more than 
half of the kindergarteners at Salsipuedes have signed waivers so that 
their children would be assigned to a transitional program.

Twenty of the students with waivers are in Geneva Garcia’s bilingual 
class. Garcia teaches the reading and writing lessons in Spanish every 
day, but with the other subjects she alternates between Spanish and 
English. She instructs the class primarily in Spanish for a few days, 
and then she teaches mainly in English for a few days.

On a day that she teaches primarily in English, after doing the reading 
and writing lesson in Spanish, Garcia changes the sign on the wall that 
says “Español” to the other side that reads “English.” “Now I am going 
to ask you to put on your English hat,” she says very slowly in 
English. “In my hands I have a book that we already read in Spanish. 
Now we’re going to read it in English.”

According to Eugene Bush, the Bilingual Resource Teacher for Santa Cruz 
City Schools, the opportunity to learn to read and write in the first 
language helps many students. “[For the children that are learning how 
to read], it is difficult to get the relationship between the symbols 
and sounds and words,” he said. “If the kids are learning how to read 
in their own language, the relationship between sounds and meaning is 
direct. If they are learning in a second language, maybe it isn’t so 
clear.”

All of the kindergarten students at Salsipuedes whose parents did not 
request an alternative program are in classes instructed primarily in 
English. Linda Pate, who speaks very little Spanish, teaches one of the 
English immersion kindergarten classes. Some of her students speak very 
little English. “The kids that speak both [languages] help me a lot; 
they translate what I say to Spanish all the time,” she said.

The teaching method that Pate uses is called Specially Designed 
Academic Instruction in English; she is careful to present the lesson 
in a way that English-learners would understand. Pate speaks slowly and 
clearly, avoids the use of idiomatic expressions and uses props like 
pictures and words written in big letters.

The other method for teaching classes in English for students who are 
learning the language is called Sheltered English Immersion (SEI). In 
SEI classes, the primary instruction has to be in English, while the 
teacher can explain as much as s/he needs to in Spanish so that the 
students will understand the lesson. The lessons are often introduced 
in the students’ primary language and then reviewed in the same 
language at the end.

According to Kindergarten Teacher Diana Dugan of Natural Bridges 
Elementary School in Santa Cruz, the pitfall of English-only programs 
is that they encourage racism among students. Bilingual programs create 
a venue for multi-cultural education that English-only programs don’t, 
she said. “The [bilingual] system encouraged English speakers to learn 
Spanish, and helped them value the Spanish-speakers and see them as 
equals,” she explained. Dugan noticed a sharp change in her students’ 
attitudes toward minorities in the first two years of 227’s 
implementation. “Now many English-speakers say the Spanish-speakers are 
dumb. The new system breeds that kind of contempt,” Dugan said.

Educational Resources
When the family of a student requests a waiver to be in a bilingual 
program, the school can approve it or deny it. Almost all the waivers 
requested for kindergarten students at Salsipuedes have been approved. 
But according to Wilcox, there wasn’t enough space in the bilingual 
classes for all of the children with waivers. Therefore some students 
with waivers marked as approved are still in the SEI classes and have 
to go to special reading and writing classes based on their reading 
level in Spanish. “Now I ask myself why we say these waivers were 
approved,” Wilcox said. “Its another example of our lack of resources.”

According to Wilcox, the statistics don’t show that one program works 
better than the other. “Prop. 227 didn’t change much,” she said. “The 
big problem is that the schools that have a lot of students who are 
learning English don’t have the resources they need to provide a 
satisfactory education.” The textbook that Wilcox uses in her reading 
class includes mostly fictional stories. “How are they going to have 
time to learn the themes of science and social studies if they don’t 
learn them while they study reading and writing?” she asked. “We need 
better materials to be able to teach everything with so little time.”

Wilcox explained that the reading and writing materials should follow 
the state-required base curriculum for the students’ grade level. This 
ends up being especially difficult in Salsipuedes and other schools 
with students whose first language is not English, because there are 
students in third, fourth and fifth grade who read and write at a 
second grade level. “We don’t have a program that assures us that we 
will meet the state standards,” she said. “I, as a teacher in a little 
school, should not be developing the program; this is the work of the 
State.”

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