BILINGUAL ED: IS IT A FLOP?; TOO FEW ARE MAKING TRANSITION.

Byline: Paul Hefner Daily News Staff Writer

For Elizabeth Chavez, four years of bilingual education meant taking a seat at the back of the classroom with other children who couldn't keep up with the work.

Now a high school senior, she recalls how she knew little English as a fourth-grader at Ninth Street School in downtown Los Angeles - and how lost she felt as she struggled to understand her first English-speaking teacher.

The 17-year-old needs just four words to sum up her bilingual education - one for each year spent learning to read and write in Spanish rather than English.

``It was lost time,'' she said. ``I could have been learning English.''

Today, many parents of children at Ninth Street agree with Chavez. They staged a boycott last year to demonstrate opposition to bilingual education and have joined in an unlikely alliance with conservatives statewide to abolish such programs.

Many cite figures for the Los Angeles Unified School District to prove that bilingual education is a flop.

LAUSD has the state's largest share of non-English speaking students, with nearly half of its 309,802 students speaking little or no English. Fewer than 1 in 10 made the transition to an English program last year.

A campaign is under way to place an initiative on the June ballot that would impose English-only instruction in all public schools. It would cap long-simmering opposition to the state's 25-year preference for teaching non-English speakers in their native languages.

Defenders of bilingual education contend that parent opposition is small and isolated. Despite difficulties of carrying out the program, they argue that dismantling it would be a huge step backward for the 1.3 million California children whose first language isn't English.

``Anyone who has looked into it feels that bilingual education needs to be improved. But it's not as simple as changing a tire, it really isn't,'' said Assemblyman Tony Cardenas, D-Panorama City. ``We have to figure out why it isn't working very well, but we can't abandon it.''

A disservice 

Initiative supporters say bilingual education has been a failure kept alive by bureaucrats and politicians unable or unwilling to acknowledge their mistake.

``What they're doing is, they're relegating a generation of poor Latino children to careers of nothing but working in sweatshops, cleaning offices or selling tamales on the corner,'' said the Rev. Alice Callaghan, director of a community center near Ninth Street School.

Callaghan is in the eye of the new storm brewing over the issue. An Episcopalian priest, she runs nonprofit Las Familias del Pueblo community center on the edge of Skid Row, providing after-school care for children whose parents work in the garment factories nearby.

Years of watching the children fail to progress convinced her and others the program at Ninth Street wasn't working. Parents pressed school officials for changes, only to be ignored.

``They never took us seriously,'' she said. ``They never took the parents seriously. I probably would have had better satisfaction talking to the tires in my car.''

Crippling effect

That changed with the February 1996 boycott. District officials softened their stance, making it easier for parents to opt out of Spanish instruction. News coverage attracted the attention of Bay Area computer executive Ron Unz, who had once tried to challenge Pete Wilson for the Republican nomination for governor.

Unz crafted his ``English for the Children'' initiative in the wake of the Ninth Street boycott. He claims he has already collected two-thirds of the signatures needed to put the measure on the June 1998 ballot.

And last weekend, the proposal won the endorsement of the state's Republican Party, at the urging of Assemblyman Tom McClintock, R-Granada Hills, despite opposition from party leaders.

``In a nutshell, bilingual education is a racially segregated program which now traps more than one-fifth of California's children,'' McClintock said. ``It has a 95 percent failure rate. It cripples Hispanic children.''

Few transitions

Even supporters concede that too few children make the transition from bilingual to mainstream programs each year. Statewide, the number of children exiting bilingual programs has remained all but unchanged, even as the number of non-English speaking children has skyrocketed.

Callaghan claims the slow turnover rate shows statistically what she's seen for years among children in the program: They're staying in the program a long time, and leaving with very little knowledge of English.

``There is nothing bilingual about this program, and there never has been,'' she said. ``They're teaching them to read and write in Spanish.''

But because there are too few Spanish-speaking teachers, the district tries to fill the gap with classroom aides or instructors with emergency credentials. In many cases, they're not up to the task, which means the children fall further behind academically, Callaghan said.

Spanish programs tend to be weaker in higher grades, leaving children trapped in a Catch-22 - desperate for English instruction but unable to meet the academic qualifications to leave the bilingual program.

``We're speaking from the trenches, and we can tell them it doesn't work,'' she said. ``Our parents know it doesn't work.''

Overhaul urged

The state's Little Hoover Commission reached much the same conclusion in a 1993 report that called for a shift away from the state's emphasis on primary language instruction and an overhaul of bilingual programs statewide.

``The effectiveness of California's efforts to teach English learners can be gauged by the low numbers of students who are reclassified as fluent English speakers, the high dropout rates, the lack of college applications and the dissatisfaction often expressed by parents, teachers and administrators,'' the commission's report said.

``All point to a system that has failed to meet the needs of these at-risk students.''

But pinning down the problems with the program is difficult because it comes in so many forms.

Alternative education

The state Department of Education estimates that a third of non-English speaking students are receiving instruction in their native language. Another third are in specialized English programs for students not fluent in English. The rest are in a hybrid of the two, a mix of specialized and mainstream programs, or nothing at all.

Some 12 percent of non-English speaking students statewide get no special services, including 1 percent whose parents have opted out of bilingual education entirely, state officials said.

To Cardenas, those numbers suggest that if any program has failed, it's those that emphasize English.

``Two-thirds are already in the setting the Unz initiative demands,'' he said. ``It's `English only' that's not working.''

Some proponents of bilingual instruction contend that there's too little hard data to know how best to fix the system - or whether it's broken at all.

``I don't know what exactly is fundamentally wrong. Until we know that, are we in search of a solution where there's no problem?'' asked Dolores Sanchez, a representative of the California Federation of Teachers. ``There are some districts doing some really wonderful things. Some districts are having wonderful successes. Why throw the baby out with the bathwater?''

Too few teachers

Critics and advocates agree there are too few qualified teachers capable of conducting class in any language but English. Even after a major recruiting drive, only about 8,100 of the 31,000 teachers at Los Angeles Unified have either a bilingual credential or have reached the district's highest fluency standard.

That means the district is short more than 700 bilingual teachers - even after paying teachers a $5,000 annual bonus for speaking a second language.

Bilingual advocates contend the state needs to do more to train teachers to use a second language in their classrooms. But critics claim it's time to try another approach.

``If we still have a shortage 25 years after instituting the program, when do we think that's going to get any better?'' Callaghan said. ``They give emergency credentials to people who can't teach at all, but because they can speak Spanish they are in a classroom teaching children - in poor schools that desperately need to hire experienced teachers.''

Others are equally adamant that curtailing instruction in other languages will only leave more students lost.

``We believe the pedagogical premise that a child cannot learn the content of any curriculum when it is taught in a language he cannot understand,'' Sanchez said.

That premise - that a new language is learned best when a child already has a base of knowledge in their native language - has driven bilingual programs across the state for years.

``You build on what you already know,'' said Carmen Schroeder, assistant superintendent for language acquisition at L.A. Unified. ``If I speak to you in French, you're just going to hear French noise. When you know a primary language, you're able to transfer those skills to another language.''

Deemed a failure

Critics say those theories have little value in the real-world experience of Los Angeles, where the dropout rate for Latino students is disturbingly high.

``It has failed,'' Callaghan said. ``Everybody knows it has failed. Are we going to tinker on the edges and sacrifice another generation of kids?''

In Sacramento, a complex political dynamic has created a virtual paralysis over the issue. The state's law governing bilingual education technically expired in 1987, though officials have largely kept the regulations governing the programs in force.

But repeated attempts to enact a new bilingual education statute have been sidelined in the Legislature under pressure from bilingual advocates. Assembly Speaker Cruz Bustamante kept the issue bottled up in committee this year, though he has agreed to allow the issue to come to a vote in January.

It's been a particularly difficult issue for Latino lawmakers, some of whom see bilingual education as a hard-won victory. As a result, they're reluctant to see such programs weakened.

Callaghan found that out during the parent boycott at Ninth Street.

``The only negative phone calls we got came from Latino politicians,'' she said. ``They said, `You shouldn't be talking publicly about it. It took so long to win this. If we lose this, we lose everything.' ''

Unz said some of the intransigence is an attempt to save face.

``Human beings hate to admit that they're wrong, and politicians are more prone to that than anyone,'' he said. ``It's tough to admit that you were wrong for 20 years.''

But Cardenas claims the failure has been to give bilingual programs the resources they need to succeed.

``When we still have teacher shortages after 20 years, that tells you people have dropped the ball at every level,'' he said.

He and others contend that Unz's initiative isn't the answer. The initiative calls for most non-English speaking children to be placed in a short-term program to build English fluency and then transferred into a regular classroom. Parents could request native-language instruction under certain conditions, but they would need the approval of school officials.

``Mr. Unz has thrown all pedagogy aside,'' Schroeder said.

Racial undertones?

With the initiative coming on the heels of voter-approved ballot measures to limit services to illegal immigrants and to eliminate affirmative action, some fear that the Unz initiative merely sets up California for another racially charged election season.

``We have to get beyond these battles,'' Schroeder said. ``It's a shame that we're fighting with each other over things that should be common sense.''

Unz, who opposed Proposition 187, wants to keep debate focused away from racial politics.

``I want to make it clear that this is not `son of 187' '' he said. ``It simply says that little children should be taught English when they go to school.''

That sounds good to Chavez, who despite her strong grades at Jefferson High School scored just 650 out of a possible 1600 on her last attempt at the Scholastic Aptitude Test. She plans to attend community college after graduating.

``I have to start small,'' she said.

Meanwhile, her 7-year-old brother is learning English this year at Ninth Street. He's already speaking some English at home, and prefers English television to the Spanish shows his mother watches.

``If you start teaching them English in kindergarten, they pick it up quick,'' she said.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

PHOTO (1 -- color) Elizabeth Chavez, an aide at Las Familias Del Pueblo Community Center, says her four years of bilingual education was ``lost time.''

(2) The Rev. Alice Callaghan, director of Las Familias Del Pueblo Community Center, opposes bilingual education.

Myung J. Chun/Daily News