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Mass Legislature Votes For English Dilution
By Matt Margolis | July 16, 2003
Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t talk about Massachusetts State politics here because most of the people who visit and/or comment this site actually live outside of Massachusetts. However, today I’ve decided to write about a particular issue in my liberal state that has me absolutely pissed off.
Last November, myself and all other Massachusetts residents who voted in the election got to vote on the issue of bilingual education. 68% percent of us voted to kill bilingual education and support English immersion, a successful program that forces non-English speaking students to actually learn English as opposed never really needing to learn English under bilingual education.
Yesterday, however, the Massachusetts Legislature voted for the diluting of the referendum passed by an overwhelming majority of their constituents.
A divided Massachusetts Legislature voted yesterday to water down the state’s tough new English immersion law, narrowly overriding Governor Mitt Romney’s vetoes of five bilingual education measures attached to the 2004 budget.
The most controversial measure, approved by both the House and the Senate, will allow schools to continue and even expand so-called two-way bilingual programs for elementary school students, defying a voter-backed mandate intended to restrict such courses to older children.
For those of you unfamiliar with Massachusetts’s politics, this state is essentially a one-party state. While a Republican is currently the governor, there is no balance whatsoever in the state legislature. Meaning that if Governor Romney vetoes a bill, he has no influence to prevent a veto override. The Democrats just shoved their middle fingers at the voters and said “Screw you guys, we don’t care what you think.”
Two-way courses, which are offered in about a dozen schools, allow English- and non-English-speaking children to learn each other’s languages simultaneously. The programs, though popular, serve only a small fraction of the state’s 51,000 limited-English speakers.
Two-way courses really are a one-way ticket to increased taxpayer money being spent on printing of ballots in multiple languages, drivers’ license exams in multiple language, hospital room interpreters, courtroom interpreters, and the hiring of bilingual teachers and such…
But the overrides present the first significant change to the immersion law, something bilingual proponents had vowed to do, even as the ballot initiative swept to passage last November.
What’s with these bilingual advocates? They’re lazy bums. They have this distorted view that bilingual education actually helps people when all it does is keep the immigrants down by not forcing them to learn English. Not knowing English will prevent these people from getting jobs that essentially need people to know English merely for the sake of communicating! It’s lack of speaking English that keeps immigrants at low paying jobs as janitors, moping, vacuuming floors, and cleaning toilets.
Yesterday, parents of students in some of the local two-way programs applauded the Legislature’s action.
”You cannot eliminate the strength of foreign nationals that come with a certain language and say: `Forget what you are. Forget who you are. You have to be English only,’ ” said Diego Matho, whose 10-year-old son Felipe attends the Amigos School in Cambridge, a two-way program for students in kindergarten through eighth grade.
No one is saying, “Forget what you are!!!” We’re saying, “You want to succeed in life? Learn English or clean toilets for the rest of your life.”
You think I’m being insensitive, or stereotypical? Who cleans your office building? Who cleans the buildings on your campus? Who serves you at Dunkin Donuts and McDonald’s these days? More and more it’s those people who speak a slow broken English who have to settle for those crappy jobs – and they sit around wondering why?
Matho, who was born in Uruguay and moved with his family to the United States 10 years ago, has sent two other children to Amigos to help them retain their native Spanish while they learn English.
I work with a girl who immigrated from Russia when she was about 7 years old (if my memory serves) she didn’t have the option then of bilingual education and thus learned English the successfully way. She speaks English just the same as me or anyone else, and still speaks Russian! The idea that English immersion prevents immigrants and other non-English speaking people from retaining their native language is a big lie meant to distort the issue.
In Framingham, the Toledo family had also hoped that the district’s two-way program would be salvaged.
“I think that is wonderful,” said Adrian Toledo, 9, who has attended the two-way program at the Brophy School. “I really want to continue the Spanish program.”
Note how this little kid (who will probably be cleaning toilets at my kids’ elementary school one day) did not say he wanted to continue to learn English at the same time.
He doesn’t care. These immigrants who are happy about this don’t care about learning English. They have no drive to completely enter our society. They just want to take the easy route now, and then bitch and moan later when they can’t get a better job than serving me a sub at Subway or fries at a McDonald’s.
Last November, voters passed Question 2 on the state ballot with a 68 percent majority. The new law ended three decades of bilingual education by placing immigrant students in one-year, all-English classes before moving them into mainstream courses.
And I take pride in my vote. I was part of the 68 percent who told non-English speaking immigrants to get their act together and enter American society. And the Democrats in the State Legislature didn’t give a damn about what the people voted for!
Also, the legislative overrides of Romney’s vetoes will allow kindergartners with limited English to be educated in mainstream classrooms, possibly with the assistance of an aide who speaks the students’ native tongue.
And who has to pay for these aides? Me, my neighbors and fellow Massachusetts state residents/taxpayers. Gee what a deal.
Opponents railed against the overrides, saying that the action thwarted the will of Bay State voters.
“No one has proved that the plan voted on is a failure,” said Representative Philip Travis of Rehoboth, one of more than a dozen Democrats who voted consistently with the Republican minority yesterday in an attempt to block the bills’ passage. “It hasn’t even left the blocks.”
Thankfully, some Democrats see the light on this issue. And Travis has a point, the program hasn’t proven itself to fail in Massachusetts, and it’s been killed already. How is that right?
Shawn Feddeman, a spokeswoman for Romney, criticized the Legislature’s actions as the handiwork of elected officials who ‘’seem confused about the way democracy works.”
“The people dictate to them, not the other way around,” Feddeman said.
Well said. When the politicians we elect stop being accountable for their actions and disregard the will of the people, we cease to be a democracy. If bilingual education is left intact, we’ll cease to have an identifiable American culture, and we’ll have no identity, we’ll have nothing to unite us. The so-called melting pot will be forever broken, for there will be nothing holding us together.
Boston School Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant said he would be happy to continue two-way courses, even though the city’s school system is prepared to implement the larger English immersion program this fall. ”I believe that keeping two-way bilingual education makes sense, because it works, it gets results, it’s cost-neutral, and it only affects a small amount of students,” said a written statement Payzant issued
It works? Since when? Is that why ballots have to be printed up in multiple languages for elections, and immigrants can choose to take their drivers’ exam at the RMV in their native language? Is that the product of a system that works?
And what this cost-neutral crap? Is it cost neutral to pay for interpreters at hospitals and courthouses?
Despite the defeat, critics of bilingual education said they were unlikely to mount a new ballot referendum campaign to undo the Legislature’s votes, which will automatically become law.
Why bother investing money in a new campaign? The state legislature doesn’t care what we say.
Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who helped finance last year’s referendum effort, said he was not so concerned with two-way courses, but with courses taught solely in Spanish or other non-English languages that he said masquerade as two-way. He said the same about kindergarten courses that would allow classroom aides who speak non-English languages. ”So long as students in that category are placed in classes where they are conducting lessons in English, it doesn’t sound that serious, [but] bilingual advocates tend to call things by the wrong names,” he said. ”I would think they might be trying the same game in Massachusetts.
It’s a game all right; it’s the Massachusetts Democrats vs. 68% of their constituency. It’s part of the Democrats’ plan to keep immigrants down. To keep stuck at low-income jobs or even on welfare because they chose not to learn the language of opportunity.
I am done. This is a sad time for Massachusetts. The Democrats have taken Democracy hostage, and American identity.
Topics: Thoughts |
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July 16th, 2003 at 9:06 pm
When Americans move to places like Italy or Germany they are expected to learn the language. Besides US Military installations and schools taught by American teachers, no one gets to go through Deutsche Gymnasium (their high school) or Universitaet on English alone. There are things that go along with the choices you make. Things like learning the language of the land. Learning to succeed.
July 16th, 2003 at 10:57 pm
¡Exactamente! No habría podido decirlo mejor mismo. Pueble la necesidad de adaptarse a sus alrededores, no la otra manera alrededor. ¿Cuándo terminará? Rechazo aprender un idioma extranjero para realizar tareas misteriosas del día en los Estados Unidos de América.
In American, that means:
Exactly! Couldn’t have said it better myself. People need to adapt to their surroundings, not the other way around. When will it end? I refuse to learn a foreign language to perform eery day tasks in the United States of America.
[size=11]Translation provided by Google Language Tools.[/size]
July 16th, 2003 at 10:59 pm
[size=16][color=red][b]Pardon my ENGLISH![/b][/color][/size]
July 17th, 2003 at 5:36 pm
You were right Matt, no one is telling them “youre banned from speaking Spanish! Forget where you came from! Stop eating beans and tortillas! I am in total support of preserving your culture and heritage. But there are choices people make and with those choices come realities. I feel like they are holding those children back down the road from success.
July 18th, 2003 at 1:08 pm
illegals today…all a bunch of lazy shmucks who don’t want to be in America except to leech off of the opprtunity provided here. they can all go home. If they wanna stay, then pay taxes and learn english like the rest of us.
July 20th, 2003 at 1:30 pm
In the wise words of my father: “If you can’t wrap the natch, you best be bustin’ a move.”
Who knew my dad was black?!
July 21st, 2003 at 9:39 pm
Actually, Matt, the saddest part of the Bilingual Education problem is that it perpetuates the ghetto-ization of non-English speaking immigrant communities. We need only look at our own past to see what happens when we balkanize within the larger community.
It goes beyond providing educational and ecconomic opportunities, and enters into segregationism, albeit self-imposed. What starts as persons living in communities where they are familiar with the language develops into situations where either by peer pressure or pressure from the outside majority they become segregated by decree.
In all fairness to the children of immigrant parents, English Only schools will be the liberating factor for them and their own children in future years.