California elections: more

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

At 10:33 AM 6/3/98 -0700, Tom Condit wrote:
>Proposition 227, the anti-bilingual education measure, won in every county
>except San Francisco and Alameda (Oakland, Berkeley). It got huge margins in
>counties with overwhelmingly white populations, but the real clincher was
>the 56% of the vote in Los Angeles, which is the 800-pound gorilla of
>California politics.
>
>I think the victory represents two things. One is the strength of nativism,
>opposition to public schools, and other conservative tendencies. The other,
>far more important, is the difficulty in explaining things like children's
>cognitive development in a political atmosphere of sound bites.

In the April 20, 1998 issue of The Nation there is an article ('English
Lesson in California 'by Gregory Rodriguez) arguing that opposition to the
bilingual programs in CA stems largely for the fact that these programs are
lousy and ineffective by all imaginable measures.

Regards,

Wojtek Sokolowski