Ingles, si: Hispanic parents want what's best for their children - and the country.

Hispanic parents want what's best for their children -- and the country.

AS the new school year gets under way, over one million Hispanic children are beginning their classroom experience in the United States in Spanish rather than English. For nearly thirty years professional Hispanic activists and bilingual-education proponents have been telling us that this is what Hispanic parents want, and that it is in the best interests of Hispanic children.

But every poll conducted of language-minority parents has shown that what they want for their children is English. The Center for Equal Opportunity recently commissioned a national survey of six hundred Hispanic parents -- the first of its kind in more than eight years. This survey found that more than 80 per cent of Hispanic parents want their children taught in English and not in Spanish. And 63 per cent want their children to be taught English as quickly as possible -- whereas bilingual-education theory calls for children to be taught academic content courses in their native language for five to seven years.

WHILE the education establishment is resisting the deconstruction of bilingual education, some progress is being made. In response to parents' protests, New York City is ending the automatic testing of children with Spanish names for placement in bilingual programs. The main problem with this approach was that students were being misidentified as needing bilingual education when their problem was that they had not been taught to read in any language. Hispanic children who scored below the 40th percentile in a standardized English exam, which by definition is 40 per cent of all the students taking the test, were automatically placed in Spanish-language programs, even if they did not speak Spanish.

In Los Angeles, over 100 Latino parents picketed their local school for almost two weeks to protest the lack of English instruction. These parents had a legal right to request all-English instruction for their children, but their rights were nullified by the hurdles placed before them by school administrators.

The boycott ended only when the school promised to provide classes in English. The school also promised to halt the practice of requiring parents to attend parent - teacher conferences before allowing children out of the bilingual program. Parent-teacher conferences are often used to bully, intimidate, and shame parents into leaving their children in bilingual programs they know don't work.

Indeed, bilingual education is working so poorly in California that the State Board of Education is backing off from forcing school districts to use native-language instruction. The California Teachers Association has also joined the stampede away from bilingual education. Its newsletter states that the emphasis on using children's native language has "crippled the Spanish-speaking child's educational development."

Despite the mounting evidence, there are researchers and organizations, like Virginia Collier of George Mason University and the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE), that continue to praise this failed educational technique. Professor Collier's study is often cited as proof that bilingual education works. However, her study has yet to be completed, let alone subjected to peer review.

In a monograph published by the New Jersey Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages - Bilingual Education (NJTESOL - BE), Professor Collier shares some of her less publicized insights. "We must encourage language-minority parents to speak the first language at home, not to speak English. The worst advice [teachers] can give parents is to speak only English at home," she writes. She even suggests that teaching children only in English is child abuse. She writes: "To deny a child the only means of communicating with his parents or to denigrate an adolescent for expressing her emotions through first language is tantamount to physical violence toward that student."

NABE readily admits that bilingual education is failing at least some students, calling these cases "abhorrent aberration[s]." However, NABE ignores the fact that the few bilingual-education programs that work do so only because they are more English-intensive than what NABE advocates.

In fact, the vast majority of the research in favor of bilingual education is desperately flawed. Professor Christine Rossell of Boston University has conducted an extensive review of over 300 bilingual-education studies. She found that only 60 measured reading ability in a methodologically acceptable way; of these, 78 per cent found bilingual education to be no better or actually worse than doing nothing. For math scores, 91 per cent of the 34 scientifically valid studies showed bilingual education to be no better than doing nothing.

In spite of this evidence, Latino parents who oppose bilingual education often find themselves fighting a lonely battle. In fact, in both Los Angeles and New York City anti-bilingual-education parents' groups are being assisted by the religious organizations, not by traditional Hispanic advocacy groups. The reason is that traditional Hispanic organizations long ago sold out the interests of Latino parents to the bilingual education establishment. Now, whenever parents complain about a system that fails to teach their children English, their representatives not only ignore their pleas for help, but actually oppose them.

Some Members of Congress as well as many state legislators are seeking far-reaching reforms of bilingual education. Unfortunately, because Congress ignored an opportunity to reform federal bilingual-education policy as part of the Official English legislation passed recently by the House, Hispanic children and parents will have to suffer through another year of bilingual education.