English Allowed in Private Schools?
by Renny Hartmann
Issue 118 - October 22, 2008

Finally, the judiciary, specifically Federal Judge Thomas Marten, in Kansas (isn’t that where Candidate Obama says he learned his middle class values?), ruled requiring English in a school is not undemocratic (according to Nancy Pelosi, our esteemed majority leader of the House) or racist (from Senator Reid, the more venerable Senate majority leader).

“St. Anne’s is fully within its rights as an educational institution to curb bullying, profanity, and exclusionary behavior among its students by requiring that English be spoken,…” said Pro English director K.C. McAlpin, concerning the Wichita case. It was filed by a bilingual student who already spoke English. So, this was evidently one of those test cases, like the San Francisco father’s suit to stop “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, except he brought his case on behalf of his daughter who was not in his custodial care; ergo, the US Supreme Court ruled he had no standing to file.

Unfortunately, this particular lawsuit is only one of the few supporting the traditional and customary values of middle class America. Recently, in California, naturally, verdicts have supported teachers’ unions over home-schooling parents and denied parents any right to knowledge of or influence on the content of their child’s public education. New Jersey, and other states, already had the anti-parent non-notification of abortion for girls as young as twelve. Sometimes, it would seem that even as far as minors are concerned, and/or their parents, that the entire US is out to end thousands of years of practice and accepted wisdom in favor of untested and often unaccepted social theories promoted mostly by leftist or radical elements in sociology and psychology.

Unfortunately, in this particular instance, St. Anne’s is a private and not public school. In so-called public education, bi-lingual education (a boondoggle that has sucked billions of precious tax dollars) has lumbered on for nearly forty years with almost no research support and even opposition among Hispanic parents. But it has been pushed relentlessly by ethnic special interest groups and teachers’ unions. (Some bi-lingual teachers receive extra pay and even “bounties” from desperate schools.) The method with the most academic backing is immersion, allowing students to be “immersed” in English in schools as they would be in water in a pool. Studies among French-speaking students in Canada support such an idea as being successful.

However, the so-called compassionate among the educalese crowd have suppressed achievement among Hispanics for decades by stalling them in bilingual classes that are sometimes not even taught well in any language, let alone Spanish.

Students from Mexico and elsewhere who come to the US from Spanish-related ancestry should not be treated like outsiders too dumb to learn English and too inept to see the advantages speaking and writing in English. Special interests like La Raza do not have students’ best interests at heart. They have their organization’s bottom line, which is to return California and the Southwest to Mexico (and Spain?) and otherwise to increase funding for their agenda of keeping a separate Hispanic community in the US.

In the late 1970s in a neighboring town, a girl whose parents were refugees from the fall of Saigon was valedictorian in Brick High School. English was her third language, after her Vietnamese and French. I doubt students who arrive speaking Spanish are any less able to overcome language obstacles. All over Europe, small children speak German, French, English, Italian, and even some Japanese and Arabic, merely to sell postcards and maps to tourists.

Surely, young Spanish-speakers are as bright as the average child cab-hailer in Greece.

Renny Hartmann is an adjunct college professor in New Jersey and was formerly a high school teacher.