Instead, bilingual education has remained firmly entrenched nearly everywhere. Unz next went to Massachusetts, the most liberal state this side of Pluto, to prove again that bilingual education has no popular constituency. The initiative passed by 36 points.
It was the same as California's, with the exception of slightly stronger language calling for fluency in English from former bilingual teachers. "The places where you heard the most anecdotal stories of teachers not knowing English were in Massachusetts and New York City," says Unz.
The stories have borne out. Massachusetts teachers who will be shifted from bilingual ed to English immersion have been flunking an oral examination in which they are asked to do things like describe their jobs (apparently they don't even know how to say foreign languages"). "They have got to come up to par," says Rosalie Porter, a former bilingual teacher in Massachusetts who was a leader of the anti-bilingual initiative.
She became a bilingual teacher in the 1970s, when the program first began in Massachusetts, hoping to help immigrant children. She became convinced that bilingual ed was a catastrophe. "I saw that it absolutely didn't work," she says. "If we taught the kids in Spanish it would delay their learning of English, and delay it so much that it would be hard for them to catch up."
The California experience has proven what Porter has maintained for years. "Kids," she says, "will master the language quickly, maybe in a year, maybe two." If, that is, they are taught in English. Whether their former bilingual teachers will pick up the language as quickly, on the other hand, is very much in doubt.