Calif. election & bilingual education

[Rakesh Bhandari]

Though my mother's English was spotty, she taught me how to read before
kindergarten (which I attended in California).  We spoke Hindi in the home.
I tested as gifted, but was not allowed into the gifted classes when we
lived in Torrance, and Concord, CA--my years of elementary education. In
third grade, I was sentenced in humiliating fashion to a remedial class due
to my accent and supposed cursive problems along with problem white kids
and "other" Mexican kids--this was before the myth of the Asian model
minority had been invented. I was called a beaner--which my parents thought
was a reference to our vegetarian diet--and socially isolated.   At that
point, my parents never spoke another word of Hindi to me.

Yes, "foreign" parents may want their children out of bilingual education
but only because simply accented or idiomatically scewy speech often
registers as backward speech in the mind of racists. Yes,parents often want
their children's English to be purged of their own accent and affect
(unfortunately I don't have Bourdieu's Language and Symbolic Power with
me). Of course, the only sensible thing in California and the Southwest
generally would be to require everyone to be bilingual in Spanish and
English.

It is also true that bilingual education can be a cover for tracking.
Where black children are put in special education (I believe over 50% in
Oakland!) Mexican kids are put in bilingual education--a separate and
unequal school within a school.  But the abolition of bilingual education
will only have the effect of channeling working class immigrant kids into
special ed or already overcrowded classrooms or simply inducing them to
drop out. There is no reason to believe that the abolition of bilingual ed
will create integrated classrooms.

 Unz's campaign is predicated on the idea that poverty can only be
explained by the characteristics of the poor: if not their genes, then
their language skills must be the problem.

But why the attempt to bring Chicano kids into standard (i.e, Anglo)
English, presumably integrated classrooms, and the reverse attempt to take
Black kids out of standard English classrooms into special  black only
Ebonics sessions taught by jive ass Fruit of the Loony Islam maniacs?

For all of you still in California, please give my kind regards to Gov. Peter.
Thanks, Rakesh