Really? I had heard that initial polls indicated that a slight majority of hispanics favored the initiative. I was interested in seeing how that would change as more people read and thought though the terms of the law (not that you would expect the pollers to actually poll people who speak spanish or other languages, or don't have a phone). If students are spending 8 years learning english as a second language, there is obviously something wrong with the program and I could understand how immigrant parents would want to really change the education going on at their schools. But it is super hypocritical for conservatives who always trumpet local control of schools to create a mandate from up-high on the specifics of classroom pedagogical style - ditto for these mandated phonics instruction proposals. In my area, they have special 'charter' international schools that yuppie parents can send their kids to where they will learn french or spanish as a 2nd language. I think there is ample evidence that bilingual and ESL programs are failing largely due to economic reasons. Upper class students send for a year abroad to participate in an immersion program, and people put through the 6 month army programs can usually come away with pretty good conversational fluency, but my mother has been here since '58 and she still sometimes has language problems with the drivers' license exams where she can't understand the double negatives, and I have several ESL friends who still need me for proofreading and notetaking help after quite a few years here.
On the other hand, in public schools (and particularly california which fell from #1 to #47 in education within a short period of time due to underfunding), teachers are given dozens of children and end up just trying to control them rather than facilitate education. In my high school german class I sat between a boy sharing all the characteristics of Kip Kinkel, and a pseudogangmember, and the teacher would come in and stick the Simpsons or Saturday Night live in the VCR and then leave so she wouldn't have to deal with us. Not surprisingly, most of them couldn't conjugate a verb after 3 years. Most middle class people couldn't understand how non-retarded kids could exit public schools as functional illiterates, so they completely don't understand the pressures on the 45 kid/classroom schools in poor areas.
christine