Dear Readers:
The morning after Election Day. Many of you are people who cared very deeply about the fate of bilingual education and Proposition 227 and this morning you are dealing with the disappointment of a lopsided loss. Others of you are journalists who will be writing in the next few days about the campaign and its aftermath. In either case, one of the tasks at hand is to try to understand what happened and why. What I write here won't make everyone happy, in fact I expect it will make some people angry. I have great respect for the time, dollars and commitment that so many people brought to the NO on 227 effort. I offer the following analysis in that spirit but also with a view that there are some hard lessons to be learned here.
Jim Shultz The Democracy Center
By any measure it is a stunning victory -- 61% Yes, 39% No. It won in every county in California but San Francisco and Alameda. Exit poll reports indicate that the measure even won among the key litmus test, Latino voters. The day-after headlines, in California and around the nation, have discarded all the subtleties debated during the campaign and have stamped the results with one simple message -- "Californians vote to end bilingual education". What happened, why, what lessons are there to be learned and what should we do next?
WHEN AN ISSUE IS HOT DEAL WITH IT -- THE ECHO OF PROPOSITION 13
The outcome of Proposition 227 was not decided this June 2nd, it was decided more than a year ago when bilingual education's chief advocates took a no-compromise stand on the issue in the Legislature. It was a mistake and easy to see why it happened. In the wake of Proposition 187 and Proposition 209 (immigration and affirmative action) all issues with an racial slant have become so politically charged that bilingual education was turned into a civil rights issue instead of an educational issue. The problem is that bilingual education was in fact a legitimate educational issue as well. Anyone who wasn't hearing complaints from Latino parents wasn't listening. The challenge for bilingual education's champions was to devise a strategy to address its weaknesses, protect its successes and steal the wind out of the anti-bilingual education movement's sails. Instead they convinced Latino lawmakers to keep reform stalled in the Assembly.
Bilingual's advocates aren't the first ones to make this strategic mistake.
In 1978 the political wind was about providing property tax relief. When state lawmakers failed over and over again to give voters what they wanted, with a reasonable tax relief program, the issue was captured by Jarvis and Gann and Proposition 13. The result (approved by almost the same margin as 227 exactly 20 years ago this week) was a law that tacked on to homeowner tax relief a tax break twice that size for owners of corporate property. In 1988 the insurance industry also made the same mistake, bottling up insurance reform in the Legislature for so long that they got stuck with Ralph Nader-backed Proposition 103.
What's the lesson? If you've taken responsibility to lead on an issue where there are legitimate beefs, don't pretend those beefs aren't there. Deal with them before someone else comes along (like Ron Unz) and deals with them for you in a destructive way.
DUELING MESSAGES -- JARGON AND SIDE ISSUES VS. "PARENTS WITH PICKET SIGNS"
A second lesson to be learned from the campaign is about message. Like all effective initiative campaigners Ron Unz crafted a strong story line. It went like this. "Bilingual education is an experiment of the 1960s that was tried and has failed. 95% of all English learners in California fail every year to learn English. Parents feel so trapped by the 'bilingual bureaucracy' that in one Los Angeles school they had to carry picket signs to get the school to teach their children English". I heard Unz deliver the tale calmly and robotically over and over again. No matter that it was at least half fiction. It was a story that sold well to both the media and the public.
In response, the NO on 227 campaign crafted messages, largely driven by polling and focus groups, that were too general, too laced with education jargon and so often focused on tangential issues that it strained credibility. The first official campaign theme was about a provision in the initiative that allows teachers to be sued. Later a new theme would be selected -- this one focusing on 227's appropriation of $50 million per year for adult literacy programs (dubbed "the $500 million taxpayer giveaway"). While these messages may have worked in theory in the sterile simulation of a focus group, they were no match for Ron Unz's dramatic rhetoric about Latino parents with picket signs.
Even the campaign's general message, "one size fits all doesn't work", was too general. Voters are moved by what they can conjure up as pictures in their minds -- little old ladies taxed out of their homes (Prop. 13), immigrants streaming over the border (Prop. 187). When NO on 227 backers tossed out terms like "untested methods" and "academic achievement" it didn't resonate. When they warned that the initiative would spend $50 million a year on adult literacy, reporters and the public said, "yeah right, that's why you oppose it."
There were other ways to persuade people. The key was to use real examples about real kids and real families (not general characterizations) to show how authentically goofy 227 really is, especially on the issue of parent choice. When I confronted Unz in public about his "try it you'll like it" provision -- the one that requires parents to put their kids in an English-only classroom for the first 30 days of each school year whether they like it or not -- both Unz and his initiative just looked half-baked. The campaign also made a mistake, I think, by having its messages carried almost exclusively by advocates, public relations people and educators and rarely by actual parents with children directly affected. The professionals and their jargon played right into Unz's portrait of a self-protecting bilingual bureaucracy.
WHAT NEXT?
Now the campaign is over and Proposition 227 is the law. What should supporters of bilingual education do next? In the next day or so lawyers for MALDEF and others will go to court to challenge the initiative on Constitutional grounds. Maybe they will succeed, maybe they won't but I don't think that bilingual education supporters should just stand aside and hope that the lawyers bail the issue out in court. I think that parents, educators and others who genuinely care about bilingual education should proceed based on two essential principles. First, protect the ability of parents to select bilingual education for their children. Second, work to make bilingual education programs stronger and better so that they are worth choosing.
To protect parent choice we need to help parents understand their rights under the law, need to sure that districts honor those rights and need to help parents get the information they need to make their own best decisions. To make bilingual education programs stronger we need to take seriously the criticisms leveled during the campaign, many of which resonated deeply in the Latino and Asian communities.
Finally this -- I spent much of Election Day on a school
field trip with my daughter Elly's fifth grade class. Tomorrow
they will graduate elementary school. These children are
the bilingual education products of our public school and
I've watched them closely as a classroom volunteer almost
every week for six years. Most are brilliantly bilingual,
much more than I am, but several others (who came to the
U.S. in later grades) have not learned English well and
are falling farther and farther behind. Bilingual education
-- it works well for some and not for others. That was the
issue we needed to deal with before Proposition 227 and
it is still the issue we need to deal with.
Dear Readers,
In any public discourse accuracy is critical and I want to quickly correct one item of misinformation in my note yesterday about Proposition 227. At least one radio news program yesterday morning in the Bay Area suggested that exit polling showed Latino voters in support of Proposition 227. In fact, according to an LA Times/CNN exit poll published this morning, the reverse is true -- Latinos opposed 227 by a vote of almost 2 to 1.
Below is a chart I put together comparing the ethnic vote on Prop. 227 and on Prop. 187, the anti-immigrant initiative approved by voters in 1994. What it shows is this, that despite all the hype from Ron Unz (and some of the pre-election polls) that Latinos supported 227, in the end the vote looks a lot like the vote four years ago on 187. Latinos voted heavily against it, blacks opposed it narrowly, and Asians did go from No on 187 to Yes on 227, but not by much.
But the real bottom line is this -- 227, just like 187 before it, was carried by a 2 to 1 vote among whites, in an electorate in which whites are represented in far larger numbers than they are in the population as a whole. On election night Ron Unz proclaimed that 227 was a victory for California immigrants. In fact, for California Latinos, it was a victory imposed on immigrants over their opposition, just like Proposition 187.
Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center
| 227 | 187 | |
| Yes/No | Yes/No | |
| White | 67/33 | 63/37 |
| Latino | 37/63 | 23/77 |
| Asian | 57/43 | 47/53 |
| Black | 48/52 | 47/53 |
227 data - LA Times/CNN exit poll
187 data - California Field Institute/LA Times exit poll
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