Letter From The Southwest: On Bilingualism Vera J o h n

ive years ago, Congress enacted Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary

F Education Act and thereby empowered the development of bilingual educa-

Vera John is professor o f psychology and educational foundations at the University o f N e w Mexico and works with teachers and students in Chicano and Indian communities.

tion programs throughout the country. It occurred at a time when many minority communities, particularly the Spanish-speaking, had come to recognize that American schools had failed non-English speaking students even more severely than low.income children in general whose native language is English. Recognition of that fact, along with some serious political spadework and a resurgence of interest in developing their own native languages, created in these communities not only the conditions for the bill's enactment but the framework in which bilingual schooling was first implemented. And so there arose almost immediately with the bill's passage the very strong hope (stronger possibly than any generated by other recent pieces of innovative education based on the needs of low income communities) that this one new form of education was going to yield such a dramatic increase in pupil achievement that that every accomplishment would sustain and develop this promising beginning. Now, according to many observers of the state of bilingual education in this country, those hopes have been dashed and replaced with disillusion and suspicion; community partisans who placed their energy in support of bilingual education now have taken it elsewhere. Federally sponsored evaluations brought back conflicting reports leaning to the negative; the programs didn't appreciably cut into the failure rate. How much of that is true? If it is true, where do those of us interested in bilingualism, those of us who are convinced of its importance for the learning of millions of young children, go from here? Before the questions can be answered, the questions need a context. In order to see that what has happened is no major repudiation of bilingual education, but only a lessened commitment, a justifiably more cautious approach, particularly in regard to the kind Of evaluations that are acceptable (see James Macdonald's article in this issue), and a new context for real accomplishment, and in order to understand the many conflicting evaluations that now exist, I think it is essential to know that the seeds of doubt, the problems, and possibly the likelihood of failure were built into the program from its beginning. First, being a new program, and in particular one that needed Congressional appropriation, the Office of Education felt impelled to keep it under constant evaluation, the very fact of which programmed it for partial failure. The community never had the freedom to develop a program that was indeed based on the needs and experiences of the community, as the legislation suggested. All that the community was free to do was accede to the development of, say, Spanish or Navajo equivalents to existing educational values and practices. This alone undercut the very promise on which such a program was to be based. And all that, say, the Puerto Pdcan community in New York could legitimately hope to accomplish through this kind of bilingual education

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The Urban Review

was to increase the number of its people who could get jobs in the classrooms, at a time when the economy had started to turn down. In the first couple of years, there wasn't too much anxiety about how effective the programs were going to be. Parents and others in the non-Englishspeaking communities were still celebrating the semi-miracle of breaking a policy that held such dreadful memories for them. But on the other hand they wanted these programs to work, and so the ever present concern with evaluation started to create deep insecurities, which became full-blown when the reaction set in. Teachers' organizations, which have long been threatened by the possibility of having large numbers of non-English speaking individuals eventually fill the job slots that their members hold, were able to create political and court conditions that made the status of nonlicensed bilingual teachers more difficult to uphold. In the general backlash against public policy favoring lowincome people during the first few years of the Nixon administration, courts handed down decisions eliminating preferential hiring. The strong, continuous, extraordinarily skilled political support that bilingual programs enjoyed initially began to erode. The backlash intensified the anxiety of many of the bilingual parents and community leaders. On an emotional, political, ideological and even educational level, they desperately wished bilingual education success. But on the practical, everyday level of dealing with the way school systems function, they felt as if they were on trial, a feeling that the negative evaluations did nothing to dissipate. This is the general context for a number of developments that are now taking place in support of or against bilingual education. Left with no breathing space to truly develop their own experimentation and their own approach to it, insecure about the continuation of federal funding, wondering whether state or local authorities will fill the breach, parents and community supporters of bilingualism are now vacillating between choosing very structured programs on the one hand, or looking at ways in which bilingual education can be combined with a very energetic "teaching English as a second language" approach. They want to make sure their children don't lose any time (as the evaluation reports implied) in the final competition with native speakers of English. Recent developments are more hopeful. A number of states have indicated that they can be counted on for support. The funds that have been committed are relatively small but still important, particularly in California and New Mexico. There the Spanish-speaking communities no longer look towards the schools alone to maintain and further develop their native tongues. The burden has been shifted to other community-based bilingual institutions and situations of recent development, including community museums, community theatre, community newspapers, activites surrounding local political issues, radio and television programming geared to local concerns, values, and language, a general resurgence of artistic activity - painting, writing, poetry, sculpture, weaving - based on deep-rooted ethnic themes. The effect of all this has been to relieve the schools of the enormous pressure they had been under to guarantee the survival of the native language. More, by spreading out that responsibility it has made for much healthier relations between school and community. Now those classroom teachers, who by themselves in the highly charged and pressured environoment of the school really couldn't do the job expected of them, have others to turn to for support. It is in these

John: On Bilingualism

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first lonely developing relationships between the language and culture of the community on the one hand, and the resources of the school on the other, that a new chance for bilingual education has been created; it is here that the fundamental meaning of bilingual education - the attempt to realize a pluralistic America - can be seen. The model for this approach that I am most familiar with is the Rough Rock (Ariz.) Demonstration School. Bilingual education developed there as part of an effort to shift control of educational policy to traditional members of the Navajo community. In implementing that change, the school began by increasing the role given to the Navajo language, and then discovered that "bilingual/bicultural education" needed continuous examination if it was to be more than a mere slogan. The school needed to continually test its policy assumptions about language in the same way educators generally need to test the limits of what they know about the process of learning. Otherwise the curriculum would never have felt the full weight of the Navajo language. That it has accomplished this now is clear. But it couldn't have been done - and this is the point I made earlier - were it not for the fact, for example, that the high school graduates who were becoming aides in the classrooms at the Rough Rock School were in a position to study and become literate in Navajo at the nearby Navajo Community College, which also was involved in a broad exploration of Navajo culture. Responsibility for developing educational methods in Navajo no longer falls solely to the classroom teacher. That teacher can now rely on a network of individuals who in their own right are exploring language and culturallyrelated activities. They can offer each other mutual support. There is greater and greater involvement of people from the school in the current traditional activities on the reservation, like rodeos and fairs, where again the Navajo language is a living instrument of communication, not just part of a schoolbased, somewhat rarified process. These people now have experienced, outside as well as inside of school, how language and activity are interwoven in the process of change and innovation; it has been made part of their lives. Therefore, when the Demonstration School came under attack, suffering funding cutbacks and criticism, the experience of individuals and their own deepening conviction about the development of their language served as a counterforce. That, of course, brought upon the school even more serious attacks and questions because the more the school was able to integrate community activities and school activities the more visible it became as a model for a new form of education. In a setting where traditional education had held forth unchallenged for so very long, such a model is a heresy, and is treated accordingly. In New York, the Puerto Rican community is being exposed to the same kind of cultural explosion: bilingual theatre, Spanish-language poets coming out of the relative obscurity of workshops and being more widely published and read, Puerto Rican political leaders finding their voices and speaking out, the celebration of Puerto Rican Day. These are all examples of the kind of strength - cultural strength and strength in the language of most of the island and mainland Puerto Ricans - that is the potential source and basis for exciting bilingual programs in New York City; these are the bases, as I remarked earlier, from which to touch the depths of the language.