Bilingual Education May Finally Die
May it Rest in Peace!
Bilingual education has had it’s
evil grip on the City of Lawrence and the entire country for
decades. Young children are put into classrooms with teachers who
can not or will not speak English to their students. As a result,
generations of children have graduated with meaningless diplomas,
unable to full out a job application, attend a community college
or become financially self sufficient later in life. They sit on
the welfare rolls or resort to criminal activity to earn a living
just to survive, and most of them become a tax burden on the
community for their entire lives.
Lawrence School Superintendent Wilfredo Laboy has reportedly
taken all science, history, and math books out of the schools if
they are printed in Spanish, saying that these are not language
related subjects. Good for him, he is right! Boy what I
wouldn’t give to be on the School Committee now! Finally,
after years and years of shoveling against the tide we have
someone in a position of power who wants to help the bilingual
kids become proficient in English. And because he an Hispanic
himself, nobody can call him a racist as they did when I proposed
dismantling this bilingual tragedy in 1996 and 1997. It’s a
great day in the City of Lawrence.
There is not one college in the United States of America that
allows entrance to a student who is not proficient in reading,
writing and speaking the English language. Not one! Yet the
defenders of bilingual continue to pour billions of our tax money
into a system which produces ignorant children, who become stupid
adults, and ultimately become uneducated prisoners or permanently
dependent on government. (as with everything else, there are some
small exceptions.)
In California, the architect of bilingual education has now said
that he was wrong twenty years ago and bilingual education slows
down a child’s progress. Now he says it destroys their
chances for intellectual advancement in the United States. Well,
duh! It took this genius 25 years to figure out what some of us
in the trenches have been saying all along. The only difference
between then and now is that we now have living examples of the
result of bilingual education. With proposition 227 now in place,
California is placing immigrant student in English immersion
classes and, what a revelation! more Hispanic kids are getting
into college. More minority children are passing the SAT exams.
More minority children are advancing five times faster than their
bilingual counter parts in other states (like Massachusetts).
Those of us who have been fighting against this money monster
called bilingual education have been called racist and
anti-immigrant by the political whores and those who make their
living off the ignorance of their own people. But the real racism
is a system which takes children, based on ethnicity, and places
them in a program which has a proven failure rate of over 80%.
The real racism is that bilingual education places Hispanic
children far behind their classmates in reading, writing,
speaking and social skills. The real racism does not lie with
those of us who want children to advance and learn the English
language, it lies with the Pedro Peyanos and Modesto Maldonados
of this world who need their own people to be dependent, so that
they will always be relevant!
But why? Why do Hispanic and other so called minority
‘leaders’ fight against English immersion and defend
bilingual? The answer is and has always been simple; money and
power! The more minorities that are dependent upon a government
system, the more important and relevant the so called Hispanic
leaders are to their own people. The more self sufficient and
self supporting the Hispanics in Lawrence become, the less they
need to depend on the so called leadership of people like Modesto
Maldonado and the Latino Agenda. Just imagine, as a perfect
example, if there were no more racism in America. Jesse Jackson
would have to go out and get a real job, wouldn’t he? His
political base and all the money that comes with it would be
gone. To him, racism is thriving business without which he would
be irrelevant! Bilingual education works much the same way.
Administrators and politicians pretend that native language
instruction in subjects like history, math and science are
helping non English speaking students. They do so because the
federal and state government reimbursement system gives our
schools more money for bilingual children than they do for
regular education students. The also do it because it allows them
to control jobs for minorities who are employed as bilingual
educators and administrators. It gives them a built in political
constituency. These are the people who cry racism the loudest
when guys like me start to convince the public that bilingual
destroys a child’s future instead of enriching it.
And their argument among minorities is a powerful one. They cry
and complain that we need bilingual education so that immigrant
children will retain their native culture, asking the parents the
rhetorical question "Don’t you want your children to
remember the mother country?" The Carreros and Peyanos say
that we must help children to preserve their heritage. Well,
excuse me! Teaching foreign immigrants the culture, or food, or
language of the country they fled is not my responsibility as a
tax payer. It is not the job of the school system and it never
should be. Human beings who flee their own country and come to
this one do so with the knowledge and understanding that they are
no longer going to BE in their own culture. If they wish to
retain their heritage, they are free to do so at home, while our
schools are giving your children the tools they need to succeed
in the United state of America. Those tools start and finish with
proficiency in the English Language!
This bilingual money making scheme at the expense of our children
has gone on long enough. Not only must bilingual education be
dismantled across the country, those who forced this intellectual
devastation on generations of minority children must be held
accountable. The traitors to their own people, individuals like
Ralph Carrero, Jose Balbuena, and the Pedro Payanos of this
community, those who sat by and watched the devastation of their
own people in silence for fear of losing their political clout or
power in the community, must atone for their inaction.
The scores are in, and the proof is in the pudding. Bilingual
education does not work and it really never has. The only purpose
it serves, is to line the pockets of political minded minorities
who want to climb the ladder of success on the backs of their own
people, who, due to the efforts of these so called leaders, are
now ill educated and poorly prepared for life in the United
States. You want to cry racism over something? Cry racism over
the lack of education your children are getting in the schools.
And hold your Hispanic ‘leaders’ accountable for a
failed system that victimizes your children!
