Proposition 227: Background:
So what precisely happened to California education in the first half of 1998? The Unz Initiative, labeled Proposition 227 by the State of California, initially led in the polls by a very large margin, and never gave up that margin, eventually winning in the polls by a 61%-39% margin, and writing Proposition 227 into the State Education Code. According to many of the press releases archived on James Crawford's Web page, the campaign against Proposition 227 was lost because the official No on 227, highly connected as it was to large organizations, failed to defend bilingual education. Apparently special interest negotiation between the various anti-227 interests prompted these people, who outspent the Yes on 227 campaign by a 6 to 1 margin, to try to run a campaign to preserve bilingual education in the state of California, without defending bilingual education.

Proposition 227, as currently written into California law, requires all classrooms in California to be taught "overwhelmingly" in English, for the first 30 days of the school year. After the first 30 days, parents are allowed to choose bilingual education for their children, if there is a perceived "special reason" for such children to need bilingual education in their acquisition of English. For there to be bilingual education that a parent can choose for his or her child, there must firstly be a Proposition 227 waiver system in the child's district, approved by the superintendent, the principal, and the teacher, and the parent must sign such a waiver, if allowed to do so by the District, allowing his or her child to attend a bilingual classroom. Furthermore, if bilingual classrooms cannot be formed in the student's school, the district can choose to bus the student to a school where a bilingual classroom can be formed. The Los Angeles Unified School District reportedly used this last requirement to intimidate parents who would otherwise choose bilingual education for their children; the result was that only 10% of LAUSD parents of limited-English-ability children chose bilingual education.

The real debate: education per se
It may be argued that behaviorist and constructivist philosophies of education, despite their considerable philosophical differences, have much in common in their common opposition to what Paulo Freire calls the "banking model" of education. An endemic misunderstanding that prevents education from becoming learning, in school situations, is that education is to be limited to a collection of facts to be regarded as a "curriculum" and to be deposited into the minds of students as if such minds were banks and as if the teacher were "making a deposit" in her daily routine of imparting knowledge.

The "banking model" of education, although not being enshrined as an official principle of American schooling (although doing this is itself the goal of educational philosophers such as E.D. Hirsch, who wishes to stipulate in his books exactly what specific facts must be mastered by students in each grade), is an implicit and pervasive part of many American schooling practices. These practices, as I've observed in my own role as substitute teacher, have extended to bilingual education itself. What I see and label "banking model" are practices such as: the teaching of grammar, spelling, and phonics as separate from the acts of reading and writing themselves, as objects for memorization rather than for application in the culturally-applied tasks of literacy; the teaching of writing as the writing of specific answers to specific questions, rather than as the intentional creation of individual students; the teaching of reading as the reading of specific texts rather than of texts chosen by the students themselves.

The "banking model" of education serves in actual practice as a tool for teachers to deprive students of the power to choose the methods by which they themselves are to be empowered by education. The observation of banking model practices in education is crucial; "at-risk" populations of students will sink to the bottom of any "bell curve" of the total population of students whether the language they are taught in school is their native language, or whether they are immersed in English. If there is any special virtue to bilingual education, or immersion education for that matter, such virtue lies in the openness of the specific form of education to alternatives to the "banking model," alternatives that transform the behavioral propensities or the constructed worlds of the students in question.

In opposition to the misunderstanding of the tasks of schooling generated by the pervasive application of the "banking model" of education in schools, the behaviorists have argued that circumstances, not knowledge, compel behavior, and that "learned behavior" is instilled in students not by "pouring knowledge into their heads," but by controlling the circumstances of learning so that learners can become flexible in their responses to situations, and by creating mechanisms for counter-control, so that teacher and student can engage mutually-beneficial learning processes. Instead, say behaviorists, the act of education has been perverted by a cognitive philosophy that doesn't really explain what is going on with student behavior in the classroom, where the "curriculum" does not necessarily count as a reinforcing stimulus. In other words, students may resist or accept curriculum under such conditions, and if they resist, the cognitivists blame this resistance on the students, and not on the conditions of education, which is the real subject of study and control for the behaviorist.

One way of using behaviorism to criticize today's schools is that, because "education" has been defined as the act of pouring knowledge into the heads of students, the actual results of learning have been defined as "failure," i.e. from the cognitivist perspective of the "banking model," the student failed to retain the knowledge that was poured into her head. This blame can be transferred to the school, the district, the State, or the program (the Yes on 227 forces, of course, blamed the program for the student, arguing that "bilingual education has failed," while ignoring the statistic that only 30% of LEP students in California actually received bilingual education), but when one reasons according to the banking model of education, there is always the problem of "blame" whenever "failure" is perceived. "Failure to retain," a behaviorist would argue, is perceived because the "failing" students are not exposed to appropriate learning conditions.

This matter of appropriate learning conditions, therefore, would the "acid test" for behaviorists wishing to uphold or criticize Proposition 227. 227, for its part, is based on a "banking model" assumption about education. The assumption that 227's authors shared about the educational process was that teachers facing classrooms of non-English speaking students could simply "pour English into heads" in such a way that every student could become competent English-language users in one year of "sheltered English immersion". A behaviorist understanding of "sheltered English immersion" would be (as many critics have pointed out, though such critics do not necessarily identify themselves with behaviorism) that it isn't appropriate for students in neighborhoods where the environment for learning English isn't sufficient to compel students to learn "English only" in the classroom, at a rate need to maintain academic progress within the system of progressive learning established by the State of California. The advocates of bilingual education, on the other hand, have consistently assumed that students need several years to master academic English, that instruction in the student's primary language acts as an aid, not a hindrance, to acquisition of English-language skills.

Constructivists, on the other hand, argue that the "banking model" of education is mere "teacher-centered education," education constructed mainly for the benefit of teachers, whereas real education is "learner-centered education," education constructed for the benefit of learners. "Learner-centered education" is characterized by a concern with the way a student "constructs knowledge". The constructivist objection to immersion education is noted well in a passage from Joan Wink's book Critical Pedagogy, in the confession of a teacher friend of hers:

For the next year, I read, reflected, mused, read, reflected, mused, before I came to terms with my feelings. (The professor) was not saying that I was a bad teacher, only the fact that I was not meeting the academic needs of multilingual students in their primary language.

Yes, I could teach them in English, I could give them live and build their self-esteem. I could not, however, give them what they really needed to succeed in an English-speaking world: literacy and cognitive development. (Wink 73)

My bias, within this essay, will of course be in favor of a concept of education that is something other than a "banking model" concept. It hardly makes a difference to me whether one is a behaviorist or a constructivist, or even a believer in Paulo Freire's concept of "liberatory pedagogy" (although I would argue that Freire's ideals are hard to place in the environment of American public schooling) -- the important thing to see is that the "banking model" of education serves as an apology for failure, by transferring the school's failure to teach the student X numbers of facts in Y amount of time, as a perceived student failure to learn. Before we can open ourselves to the multiplicity of methods for improving school as it is, we need to end our dependence upon the banking-model concept.

So, in the following analysis of Proposition 227, I will try to ask the question of what schools can do for students in real life. I don't get very far in the short period covered by the analysis given below -- my ongoing experience of life in schools is dominated by the day-to-day business of teaching children little things, like how to value their own perspectives on life. I have concluded, however, that the common reasoning about students that blames them for the failure of school needs to end, and that real learning processes involve an open-ended opening of self to world, which amounts to more than transmission of a prepackaged set of data.

Personal opinion: My perspective as a substitute teacher in a bilingual /immersion district
In the district where I teach, a large and rather significantly-Spanish-speaking (70% Latino) district in southern California, meetings were held around the district (for the first time, in September of 1998) to explain to parents their options under Proposition 227. These meetings were arranged by each school with the assistance of the district, and held regularly in the first 30 days of the school year. (I should report that the decision to hold meetings was made because this was a district that supported bilingual education, and that in many districts in California after 227, no such meetings were held, nor was bilingual education offered.) In these meetings, which were conducted almost entirely in Spanish, the parents were told about the necessity of involvement in their children's educational processes in a short filmstrip produced by a corporation, and then, in a slideshow demonstration, the options for parents were described. Parents of LEP (limited-English-proficient) children could, after the mandatory 30-day period when all instruction was to be given in English, choose one of three options: 1) immediately mainstream their children in a program of English-language instruction, 2) place their children in an English-immersion classroom, after which they would be mainstreamed if an evaluation determined their readiness for a mainstream classroom (parents WEREN'T told in this meeting about the possibility that their children could be "retained," that is, forced to repeat the grade, if they failed to learn academic English within one year), and 3) allow their children to complete the "alternative" program, the bilingual program the district had previously employed. My district used what the linguists call an "early-exit" program: non-English-speaking students coming into the program in Kindergarten were to be mainstreamed into English-language instruction after completion of the 3rd grade. (It will be important to remember, therefore, that the proceeding discussion of bilingual and immersion schooling will be limited to grades K-3). After the slideshow presentation, which was made not by the principal of the particular school I was visiting, but rather by a representative of the District itself, there was a question and answer session by parents.

After having been to the above particular District/ school meeting about Proposition 227, I thought of the following analogy, between literacy education as conceived in my district under Proposition 227, and auto repair: Imagine going to a meeting at an auto repair shop, where you discuss with your mechanic the best way of repairing your car. Your mechanic offers you a choice between three possible mechanical operations, with no guarantees that any of these operations will fix your car, and asks you to choose between 1),. 2), and 3), without the slightest hint as to which operation will actually address the problem you perceived when you took the car into the shop.

Well, if the government decided to regulate auto repair the same way it regulated education with Proposition 227, this would be the fate of your car. What has happened, in short, is that the people, through the initiative process, has directed the government to implement a procedure for teaching English to limited-English-proficient students ("sheltered English immersion"), not because such a procedure has any proven record as actually SUCCEEDING in teaching English to such students, but because it ("sheltered English immersion") is ostensibly more POPULAR than a bilingual program that was successfully scapegoated by the voting public during the first part of the year 1998. Imagine a society, if you will, where the public took liberties to choose the most popular methods of car repair, or for that matter the most popular methods of dentistry, skyscraper construction, or brain surgery, without reference to the empirical data surrounding such methods. Such a society received its educational dawn with the passage of Proposition 227.

The empirical data receives admirable treatment in the web page of James Crawford. Crawford's page clearly shows, at least, enough to cast doubt on the notion that hard-to-overturn initiative laws (and they are hard to overturn; one would probably need another initiative, or a judicial decision, to overturn 227, and neither of these things appears to be forthcoming at present), laws that restrict access to bilingual education as a vital service needed by some students, are something that deserve to be put before the whole public in a one-shot vote. Crawford's page includes plenty of data on the claims of proponents of Proposition 227 and the English Only movement in general in the United States. Of especial interest is an e-mail exchange between James Crawford and Ron Unz, who is of course the author of Proposition 227.

One of the most important pieces of information about the efficacy of bilingual education is the graph illustrating Thomas and Collier's research, a long-term study of various types of education as it addressed the needs of limited-English-ability students. Interestingly enough, the study showed that students learned progressively more, and achieved more in school, in forms of education that were more bilingual.

Another important source of information supporting the efficacy of bilingual education is Stephen Krashen, a linguist currently teaching at USC, whose book Under Attack: The Case Against Bilingual Education makes the case for bilingual education concisely and completely. Krashen's argument rests upon a simple thesis: literacy in one language transfers to other language. Simply put; when one lears to read in one language, reading in the other languages opens up as a possibility. So, therefore, when dealing with students who come to Kindergarten speaking only Spanish and living in neighborhoods where Spanish is the primary language, it is be more efficient in many cases to teach children to learn to read in Spanish and then to teach such children to transfer their Spanish literacy abilities to the task of reading English. The anti-bilingual researchers, whose number seems to be limited (the only text Krashen cites is Rossell and Baker's (1996) "The educational effectiveness of bilingual education," Research in the Teaching of English 30: 7-74, and the OneNation web site is relatively poor as a source of academic research) do not have a substantiated answer to Krashen's thesis.

Indeed, a tell-tale sign of the paucity of data surrounding the proclaimed "success" of the program described in Proposition 227 is the treatment of bilingual education given in the OneNation web page, the official Yes on 227 Web page.

The reasoning given in favor of immersion education is ostensibly based on a book by Charles L. Glenn, Educating Immigrant Children, which surveys the various ways in which children in Europe have been immersed in classrooms. Apparently the strongest argument the anti-bilingual forces can find in the literature about immersion education is that "they do it that way elsewhere, why don't we do it that way here?" One can see in their FAQ the argument "disproving" the notion that sheltered English immersion is "risky and untested":

Language research has shown that sheltered immersion is the most effective means to teach children another language. Co-Chair Gloria Matta Tuchman has been using sheltered English immersion for 15 years in her first-grade class with tremendous success, and her entire school has followed her approach. Every other nation uses some form of immersion to teach language to immigrant children; bilingual education is used nowhere else in the world. Immersion is tried-and-tested; bilingual education is an experiment which has failed. (From a site within the OneNation web page's FAQ.

The reader is directed to note that none of the arguments in the above response is supported by any reference to hard evidence from the research record.

By contrast, the proponents of bilingual education appear to have an answer, a well-documented answer supported by the great bulk of the research record on language learning, for every argument thrown at them by the proponents of "English Only". The pattern established by bilingual education researchers is that "the research clearly indicates that immersion programs are effective for learners from dominant language groups whose L1 (their native language) is valued and supported both at home and in the broader society, whereas bilingual instruction is more effective for language minority students who do not fit this profile (Auerbach 1995; Cummins 1981)". Bilingual researchers also report that students who are allowed to use their primary language in the classroom learn English faster than students who were in English-only classrooms.

During the 30-day period at the beginning of the school year, it was my perception as a substitute teacher that many of the students were confused by the English-only curriculum. I taught in one classroom where a group of 20 first-grade students were supposed to write the names of the months in order, and the only way such students could perform such an act was to copy such names off of the wall. I've also found other assignments in other bilingual classrooms, given AFTER the 30-day period, to be rather super-simplistic as well. I'm not sure this is a reflection of anything, however; I have also been in bilingual education classrooms where the substitute teacher was directed to teach students according to a simplistic, baby-talk, handout-driven curriculum. So far, however, my observations only extend to a portion of a year (much of the time I was teaching in English-language classrooms with students who were not limited-English-proficient), the 1998-1999 school year, from September of 1998 to the present moment.

The handout-driven nature of the lesson plans that are commonly given to substitute teachers, marks an important similarity to note between bilingual classrooms and immersion classrooms. I should also note that many of the classrooms, bilingual and immersion, that I saw in my district, had the same materials, both because of a district policy of giving the English immersion supplies to every classroom in the district, but also because many of the immersion classrooms had Spanish-language supplies that were carried over from the previous school year, when bilingual education was the normal method of educating limited-English-proficient students.

Many of the observations about bilingual and immersion education in this essay conform in principle to the observations outlined in Elsa Roberts Auerbach's piece, "The politics of the ESL classroom: issues of power in pedagogical choices," pp. 9-33 of Power and Inequality in Language Education, ed. James W. Tollefson. It will be important, as I proceed, to note observations that are not part of the above essay.

It has been explained elsewhere that field research in schools is nearly impossible unless the researcher develops a subjectivity about the observed data. Of particular interest is Mary Haywood Metz's discussion of her ethnographic work in "What Can Be Learned from Educational Ethnography?" (Urban Education 17 (4)(1983), 391-418). Metz concludes, after weeks of pondering her "bias" as a classroom observer, that her bias is a source of classroom data, because when she is in the classroom she can "biasedly" empathize with the students when she is observing them react to the teacher, and this empathy helps her understand student reaction to pedagogy. It is also commonly observed that one needs to "take sides" in order to be permitted to observe a classroom at all, since classrooms are social environments ostensibly carefully guarded by teachers.

Since it must be regarded as necessary for the classroom observer to have a "biased" perspective, an active subjectivity (in more euphemistic terms), data that does not fit one's perspective is worthy of note. When I started teaching in immersion/bilingual classrooms, I was surprised by the superficial level at which bilingual and immersion classrooms appeared to be similar. Sometimes, it appeared, the immersion teachers were allowing their students to read in Spanish; at other times, the bilingual teachers were doing lots of work in English. And, given the fact that the bilingual program in my district was an "early-exit" program, there was a certain emphasis upon hurrying students into English-language use by the time they reached 4th grade, apparently whether these students were ready for English-only classrooms or not.

Observations from my work situation:
During the year, there were many bilingual classrooms, as well as many immersion classrooms, set up throughout the district where I work, a rather large district in southern California. I would guess at this point (March of 1999) that a bit less than half of the classrooms in my district that have been set up for limited-English-proficient students are bilingual classrooms, and a bit more than half of such classrooms are immersion classrooms. Almost all of these classrooms are in grades K-3. The mixture varies a bit, some schools having almost all bilingual classrooms and some schools having almost all immersion classrooms. The presence of bilingual or immersion students in any particular school, I was told by one teacher, probably had something to do with the strength of the bilingual program as it existed before Proposition 227.

What I observed, as a substitute teacher in the district in question, was largely focused upon the behavior of the students in each day's classroom. It would be unfair to judge such classrooms by the curriculum I was given in each day's lesson plan; often lesson plans make a "low" assumption about the abilities of the substitute teacher, whose identity is often not known by the regular teacher beforehand, and the lesson plan is thus often "dumbed down". But I could often see a lot of bewilderment in the immersion students, even in the middle of the year, confirming Auerbach's illustration that "monolingual teachers report enormous frustration at their inability to make breakthroughs and at being forced to reduce lesson content to the most elementary, childlike uses of language" (Auerbach, p. 26). It was, however, very hard for me to assess the abilities of students while performing my as a substitute teacher.

In the District I was in, the substitutes at the elementary level had a certain leeway to deviate from the lesson plans provided by teachers. What I felt, however, was that it was more difficult to instruct students in immersion classrooms, because I didn't feel safe in diverging from the lesson plan in the same way I would feel safe doing so in a bilingual program. When I diverged from a bilingual program, it was often when language-arts activities were scheduled to be taught during a school day. I would usually do so in favor of teaching "whole language" activities, such as reading children a story and then asking them to write, on their own, an original story somehow loosely based on the story I read to them. When I teach in an immersion classroom, I feel I am incurring a risk in asking students to write on subjects of their own choice; what if they choose to write in their own language?

After all, the theoretical point of my assigning such an exercise is that, as a class, each classroom of students is necessarily involved in the task of "creating its own world," and that in granting students individual power to "create their own worlds" through free-writing, I am opening them to a possible manner of self-control and self-expression in situations when the regular teacher is not there, when I am their substitute. Proposition 227 does not change my above theoretical perspective on the task of substitute-teaching.

My confusion about whether it's "OK" to proceed with such "whole language" activities is compounded by the lack of a record, available to me, on what sort of writing the students in any particular classroom have done, on the literate "world" created so far in any particular classroom. News will get out, of course, that I am "breaking the rules" of the immersion classroom, speaking to the students in Spanish when they don't understand the English I use, and conceivably, I feared, I could be removed from the substitute's list as a result. Fortunately, however, my district cares very little about what substitutes do (as long as they don't do anything that inflames the sensibilities of the parents of the students), and so I still work another day.

Conclusion
Bilingual education may, for many limited-English-ability students, be "better" than immerson education. But any judgment of quality in education needs to be made against a background of teaching methods that do not respond equally to students whose backgrounds and social needs for education are themselves not equal. My own opinion on this matter has already been well-stated in this essay draft; bilingual Spanish students in the lower-class district where I teach need to have the support of an education that is not only bilingual, but supportive of their efforts to explain (to themselves) and improve (for themselves) their social situation as well. In satisfying that need, teachers will need to avoid reducing their limited-English ability students to a permanent state of silence while the ability to learn English is supposedly poured into their heads. If bilingual education is to appear as an alternative to immersion education, bilingual educators will have to do more than trot their students through a banking-model curriculum.

From this perspective, it is unclear whether bilingual and immersion classrooms, as they stand today in the state of California, are drastically different things, if neither classroom provides the above support. Further observation, including data on end-of-the-year assessment and the results of standardized tests, will be necessary to show that the difference in education before, and after, Proposition 227, will in fact amount to anything in terms of the success of limited-English-ability students in the world of school as it is currently constructed.

Works Cited
Auerbach, Elsa Roberts. The Politics of the ESL classroom: Issues of power in pedagogical choices. Power and Inequality in Language Education (Ed. James W. Tollefson) Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 9-33.

Crawford, James. Language Policy Web Site. http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JWCRAWFORD/

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos). New York: Continuum, 1970.

Glenn, Charles L., with Ester J. De Jong. Educating Immigrant Children. New York : Garland Pub., 1996.

Krashen, Stephen D. Under Attack: The Case Against Bilingual Education. Language Education Associates: Culver City CA, 1996.

Metz, Mary Haywood. "What Can Be Learned from Educational Ethnography?" Urban Education (17:4) (1993), 391-418.

OneNation. Proposition 227: English for the Children (Web page). http://www.onenation.org/

Wink, Joan. Critical Pedagogy: Notes from the Real World. White Plains, NY: Longman, 1997.

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