Bilingual Failures
The Government and Hispanic Youth
By Daniel Muniz
At the convention of the National Council of
La Raza, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York challenged attendee
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and the Bush
Administration to do more to help Hispanic youth. Although Secretary
Spellings insisted that the "achievement gap is beginning to close"
due to recent findings, Clinton told La Raza:
"you are doing your
part, but I don't know that your government is doing its part right
now."
The federal government has done its part for
Hispanic youth and so far that part has been terrible.
And more government intervention, no matter
how good the intentions are, is not the solution. Unfortunately,
school administrators love the idea of using more federal money even
though many of those programs are counter productive with some even
assisting people who only “look” or “sound” Hispanic but aren’t.
Good parenting instead of more government is
the best solution for lifting up more Hispanic children.
As a Hispanic who lived his early childhood in the barrio of a
small town (the railroad tracks literally separated the white part
of town from the Mexican-American part) I am so fortunate that I was
not involved in the government’s attempt to personally help me. Many
of my neighbors were not so lucky.
Growing up I was never placed in any bilingual
classes.
Almost all of my classes were the ones that had the white
kids in it. To this day, I am not sure how I avoided the fate of a
bilingual curriculum but it sure made a huge difference in growing up.
In my household, my parents mostly
spoke Spanish, which they continue do to this day. They were always
fluent in English (my mother has a bachelor's degree in English) but they tended to use it only when
circumstances warranted it. And living in the barrio, my parents
had always felt that education, especially college would be about
one of the few ways of lifting a
family out of poverty.
When I started junior high there was an
additional music class that I really wanted to take. It took a while
for the schedule change to be made but once it was done, I was in
for quite a shock. During my English class, my teacher was notified
of the change to my class schedule and she became rather upset. She
even walked me to my new English class and told me to ask my parents
to immediately talk to the principal to get me out of this.
To my amazement, I was placed in a bilingual
class. I had never been in one in the elementary or intermediate
schools and I was wondering why this happened to me in junior high
although I assumed it must have been because of that music class.
The course was taught partly in Spanish and
the assignments were ridiculously easy compared to what I had been
through in all the grades of my life. Consequently, the entire
coursework was a joke. The standards were so extremely low that I
wondered even at my young age, how the school could even consider
this a real education since it was such a sham.
In fact, many of my classmates copied all of
my work because I was able to get it done fairly quickly without much
effort. And I really didn’t mind because I figured that it wouldn't
be long before I got
out of this class.
After a few days, I finally told my dad. He
set up an appointment with the principal although I was a bit
apprehensive about the outcome. The principal apologized
to my father about the bilingual class and explained
that it was a mistake. I was immediately given another schedule
change and placed in different English class (a class that had white
kids in it).
That was my only brief flirtation with the
government’s attempt to "help" me because of my ethnicity.
And I was really grateful that it was brief because of how woeful of
an education that it could have been.
The bilingual class surprised me mostly
because many of the kids in those classes were also my neighbors. It was a small town and we all lived in the same barrio.
And growing up, I knew that they had different classes than the ones I
attended but I never thought much of it. Now I realized that they
had missed out on the type of structured and comprehensive learning
that the white kids in town got all because the government wanted to
“help” Hispanics.
And this “white” education that I enjoyed
tremendously helped me with the bigger transitions in my life.
I began high school in a large city where my
parents moved to a suburban, "pre-dominantly white", area of a town.
The abrupt change was seamless in education. I was on the same
academic level of many of my peers in the new school and overall, I
felt that I did all right there. College was challenging but I still
got my degree as did my sister and brother.
And looking back, I am glad that I got the
"real" education without the type of "good intentions" that Hillary
Clinton has in mind for the next generation of poor Hispanics.
Unfortunately, plenty of school administrators
will continue to pull all sorts of shenanigans so they can get more federal money,
like bilingual education.
And once a school is hooked on such fruits, it is very difficult to
pull them away from it. As a result, some school districts go to
great lengths to stick anybody into those shoddy programs. I was
fortunate that my experience only lasted for a few days instead of a
lifetime.
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