Forked Tongue: The politics of Bilingual Education.

* Rosalie Pedalino Porter recalls how, as a young child, she entered the American public-school system speaking not a word of English. With the help of patient teachers-and out of sheer necessity-she became fluent in her second language. Within a few years she was fully assimilated with her English-speaking classmates.

The experience was not lost on Mrs. Porter, who has since spent twenty years involved in the education of non-English-speaking children, both as a teacher and as an administrator. Forked Tongue: The Polities of Bilingual Education (Basic Books, 283 pp., 22.95) is her "inside account" of the failure of American multicultural education programs to meet their very basic goal of teaching "lan age-minority" children the English-language skills necessary to fit into their new environment.

Mrs. Porter blames this failure on "middle-class, advantaged individuals indulging in a nostalgic, romantic ethnicity," whose "impassioned rhetoric for cultural maintenance through biling-ual/bicultural education" has doomed the immigrant poor to linguistic ghettos. This book refutes the notion that children's abilities to learn are somehow enhanced by being taught first in their native languages to develop self-esteem and pride in their native culture.

Among the problems with this approach are its segregation of language-minority students from their classmates; the absence of effective teachers for the many different languages represented in public schools; and the failure of immigrant children to develop the English skills necessary to compete for non-manual labor jobs.

Once politicized, bilingual education programs become goals in themselves, as this book demonstrates. Providing language-minority children with the basic skills needed to compete in the marketplace becomes of secondary concern. In one bilingual program, for instance, English was the dominant language for 60 per cent of the children in a Spanish speaking classroom. But after fighting interest groups and school boards for twenty years, Mrs. Porter is doubtful about the possibilities of working around them.

She describes, in detail, several different programs used to teach language-minority children in the U.S. and abroad. Too often, she notes, the success or failure of these programs is measured without regard to practical consequences. Results are measured instead by their conformity to the demands of local administrators, educators, and unions.

Mrs. Porter is strongest when she sticks to her topic, which she does for the first three-quarters of the book. By the end, however, she is mulling over the general crisis in America's public schools. Her opinions are sound. But she would do better providing expert testimony to pols and pundits than diluting her thesis with broad reflections.

Forked Tongue exposes us to the tragi-comic results of bureaucratic logic applied to a specific aspect of the education system. It is a fearless work, as evidenced by its straightforward way of dealing with the looming question: "Is the maintenance of family cultures to be a mandated responsibility of the public schools?" The author's refreshingly simple answer: No.