Dear Readers:
You may remember that a couple of months ago in "The Democracy Center On-Line" I published a brief essay called, "Does the Truth Matter" which challenged the claims being made by the Unz anti-bilingual education initiative (now Proposition 227) about 95% of the students in bilingual classes failing to learn English. I then gave Ron Unz, the initiative's sponsor a chance to respond. Well, the exchange in out e-mail newsletter prompted quite a reaction, including calls and email from several reporters covering the story. The Sacramento Bee then asked if I would turn the exchange into an opinion article for their Sunday Forum section. The article ran in the Bee on February 22nd and I thought I would pass it along. I heard later that it was also run in the Oakland Tribune. If anyone would like a copy as it appeared in the paper (with quite a nice drawing of Mr. Unz that the Bee added) just reply to this newsletter with your mailing address or fax # and we'll send it along.
Happy reading!
Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center
As the old adage goes, "there are three kinds of lies - lies, damn lies,and statistics." Nowhere is this more true than in the wild world of California initiative politics. Spinning "official data" to make a campaign claim seem credible has become high art in initiative campaigns. Sometimes however, that spin is downright misleading.
Consider the case of the now famous "95% failure" claim being spun by backers of the anti-bilingual education initiative sponsored by GOP millionaire Ron Unz. Here are two media bytes typical of those being spun every day out of the Unz campaign:
"As one might expect, the results of such an approach to
English instruction are utterly dismal. Of the 1.3 million
California schoolchildren--a quarter of our state's total
public school enrollment--who begin each year classified
as not knowing English, only about 5% learn English by year's
end, implying an annual failure rate of 95% for existing
programs."
- Ron Unz writing in the Los Angeles Times
"Only 5 percent of the children in these bilingual programs
are mainstreamed every year -- a 95 percent failure rate."
- Assemblyman Tom McClintock writing in the Long
Beach Press-Telegram
The inference here is clear - bilingual classes are failing 95% of the students who are in them, putting kids in English-only classrooms is the only way to go, and anyone who thinks otherwise must be crazy. As campaign sound bytes go the Unz "95% failure" attack is a strong one. It is clear, it is emotional and it has been repeated over and over again daily for months. Respected publications including the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Economist, the Washington Post have all dutifully repeated the claim without examination. There is one big problem though - the charge just isn?t true.
The original source of the Unz/McClintock claim is the Spring 1997 Language Census conducted by the Educational Demographics Unit of the California Department of Education. The Census measured the number of Limited-English-Proficient (LEP) students officially reclassified by their school districts as fluent in English. According to the Department?s statistics there are just under 1.4 million students officially classified as LEP in California. Last year, according to the Department, 6.5% of all LEP students were reclassified as being Full English Proficient.
What do all these numbers mean? It means that the Unz/McClintock claim of "95% failure" is extremely misleading in at least two different ways. First, the Unz campaign uses these statistics as though they refer to just children in bilingual classes. Actually, only a third of these LEP students are in bilingual classrooms. Two thirds are in English language classrooms, where Mr. Unz thinks we should put all kids. If we are being asked to eliminate one way of teaching children (bilingual) in favor of moving almost all kids into another (English-only) isn?t the real question which approach works better? The numbers Unz cites don't tell us anything about the correct answer to that question.
Second, counting the number of LEP students who are reclassified as fluent is a lousy measure of how many kids have actually learned English. Lots of children who are classified as LEP speak English. My kids Elly and Miguel, who came here from Bolivia speaking no English, have been fluent for years and they are both still classified as LEP. Why? A lot of school principals never get around to filling out the bureaucratic paperwork to officially reclassify kids. Is this really the kind of evidence on which we should base a massive change in policy that will effect hundreds of thousands of kids every year?
Even Mr. Unz agrees that his 95% failure claim is based on goofy data. In a public e-mail exchange posted in-full on The Democracy Center?s Web site (www.democracyctr.org) Unz writes, "the classification methodology used to decide whether children know English or not (i.e. are LEP) is ridiculously stupid and inaccurateáperhaps children in ëbilingual? programs are reclassified more quickly than children in non-bilingual programs, perhaps not---nobody knows!"
So, here is the obvious question. If Mr. Unz agrees that the source of his claim is so "ridiculously stupid and inaccurate", why are he and his campaign still using it everyday? Either the Unz campaign doesn?t understand the facts or it is deliberately misleading the public because it makes a great campaign spin. In either case it is a classic example of how we should not be making important state policy.
As parents, figuring out how best to help our children learn English was one of the most complicated decisions my wife and I have had to make. We certainly don?t need Mr. Unz making that challenge more difficult by limiting our choices on the basis of fake facts. And all of us as voters can do without campaign tactics that use those same fake facts to push our emotional buttons. People who would hold themselves out as our leaders owe us better than that.
THE DEMOCRACY CENTER ON-LINE is an electronic publication of The Democracy Center, distributed on an occasional basis to more than 700 nonprofit organizations, policy makers, journalists and others.
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