By Jennifer Medina, The New York Times ~ October 17th, 2016
LOS ANGELES — The students gathered around the tables at Cahuenga Elementary School in Koreatown and exchanged descriptions of their mothers in Korean. She works hard, one student offered: yeol shim hee. She is funny: woo kin dah. The teacher walked around offering help as they began to compose essays. In the Korean portion of this dual-language class, not a word of English could be heard. Teachers and parents here speak of trilingual aspirations, and the sounds of Spanish, Korean and English can be heard throughout the playground.
In 1998, voters in California passed a law that severely restrictedbilingual education in public schools, arguing that students were languishing in their native language and that requiring English-only instruction would speed up the time it took children to learn English.
Now, voters are being asked to overturn the measure in November, allowing school districts to implement more programs like those at Cahuenga, where students often learn in their native language. In a state where immigrants now make up roughly 25 percent of the population, the initiative is yet another test of how California’s attitude toward immigrants has changed over the past two decades.
“This is long overdue in a place as global as California, where we really need a multilingual society,” said Ricardo Lara, a state senator who sponsored the legislation to put the measure on the ballot. “We have waiting lists at the small fraction of schools that offer dual language. Why would we not want to give them the chance to expand that? What we know now about teaching and learning language is vastly different than it was a generation ago.”
Wonnie Pak, a teacher, working with third graders in a Korean dual-language program at Cahuenga Elementary School in Los Angeles. CreditIvan Kashinsky for The New York Times
The Los Angeles Unified School District, the state’s largest school system, has already begun expanding dual-language programs in an effort to shore up its flagging enrollment. For the first time this year, the district is offering an Armenian dual-language program in Tujunga, a neighborhood near the San Gabriel Mountains intended to attract students who would otherwise attend private religious schools, where learning the language is part of the curriculum.
The ballot measure, known as Learn — Language Education, Acquisition and Readiness Now — has attracted the support of the state’s teachers’ union and school boards association in addition to the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and a host of Democratic elected officials, including Gov. Jerry Brown.
Under the current law, students who do not speak English must spend one year in an English-only class before moving to mainstream classes in English at their grade level. Parents seeking other options, including the programs at Cahuenga, must sign a waiver to allow their children to participate in programs that also use instruction in their native language.
At Cahuenga, Spanish speakers can enroll in what is known as a transitional bilingual education program, in which students learn all subjects in their native language beginning in kindergarten, with the goal of transferring to mainstream English classes by fourth grade. Korean-speaking students have a similar option, or they can enroll in the school’s dual-language program, in which teachers spend half the day teaching in Korean, including in subjects like math and science. In lower grades, some teachers wear shirts of different colors depending on the language they are using, to help students differentiate between the two.
Cahuenga is just one of a few dozen schools that offer such programs in the district — roughly 400 schools statewide offer a dual-language program. And the vast majority of the state’s 1.4 million English language learners spend their days in classrooms that use only English.
More than 200 languages are spoken in the state, and roughly 40 percent of residents older than 5 speak a language other than English. While Spanish is the most common, there are sizable populations of Tagalog, Chinese and Vietnamese speakers. And more Koreans live in Los Angeles than any other city in the country.
“There was no question for us we wanted them to learn Korean and English,” said Ju Kim, who has sent three children to Cahuenga’s dual-language program, where students sing in a Korean choir and spend their day switching between languages. When her son transferred out of the school to an English-only honors program, he quickly lost his ability to write and speak in Korean and urged his mother keep the family’s youngest child enrolled at Cahuenga. “He went through a phase of ‘you’re American, speak English,’ but now he tells me people expect him to speak Korean.”
Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, the executive director of Californians Together, a group that favors the ballot measure, said the waiver required for parents to enroll their children in bilingual programs had had a chilling effect and that more parents would be inclined to have their children in bilingual programs if they were more widely available.
“The type of education we offer now is a one-size-fits-all program for all kids learning English,” Ms. Spiegel-Coleman said. “What we want is for individual schools to be able to decide what they think is best for the students, whether that’s dual language or some other way. A student’s native language does not have to be sacrificed for learning English. Our whole perspective has changed.”
In one sign of the changed approach already unfolding, the state now offers a seal of biliteracy for high school graduates who can prove through exams that they are fluent in two languages. But just a tiny fraction of the state’s students receive the seal, with most not beginning to learn a foreign language until high school.
Fourth graders in the Korean dual-language program at Cahuenga. CreditIvan Kashinsky for The New York Times
A generation ago the ballot measure restricting bilingual education proved divisive, drawing roughly $6 million in political ads and generating scores of newspaper editorials. This year’s measure has attracted far less attention, with proponents spending roughly $1 million.
The leading opposition has come from Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur behind the 1998 measure. Mr. Unz and his supporters said at the time that Spanish speakers were not fully integrating into society and were being failed by an education system that allowed them to spend years in the classroom without learning English. More than 60 percent of voters backed the measure, entrenching the notion that English was the language of the state and that speaking it was the best way to assimilate.
“It would be a tremendous symbolic step backwards because the whole issue had been dead and forgotten by everyone but the few activists,” Mr. Unz said. “We have an entire generation of students who learned English now entering college and the work force. There is not going to be any appetite to return to days of students languishing.”
Much of the interest in dual-language programs comes from white parents who want their children to learn Spanish, Mr. Unz said, arguing that native Spanish speakers are unlikely to want to enroll in classes that do not rapidly teach their children English. “There is a tremendous amount of enthusiasm from a small portion of parents, but I am very skeptical that will translate into a wholesale increase of these programs,” Mr. Unz said.
While it is impossible to predict parent demand if the measure passes, Hilda Maldonado, the executive director of multilingual and multicultural education in the Los Angeles school district, said she would expect many more students to enroll in dual-language classes and other programs that allowed them to retain their native language. She points to job postings in the region that routinely require Spanish or some other foreign language.
“The world is a lot smaller, and we have parents who come in wanting their children to be able to talk with their cousins and grandparents,” Ms. Maldonado said. “We see that the entire world is a lot more accessible to our kids. The way we do business has changed, and the way we communicate with the world requires more of us to know more, not less.”
