Why would a billionaire heiress spend millions of dollars to
keep immigrant children in Colorado from learning English? Pat Stryker, who
ranks 234 on the Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest Americans,
announced last week that she is giving $3 million to help defeat a Colorado
ballot initiative that would replace bilingual programs with English
immersion for the state's Spanish-speaking students. Surely Stryker isn't
trying to guarantee cheap labor down the road by denying Latino youngsters
the single most important skill they will need to succeed in America. No,
her motives are far more benign -- but the effect is every bit as
pernicious.
Stryker wants her daughter to learn Spanish. She thinks it would
be nifty if her daughter became bilingual. Of course, the best way for her
child to learn Spanish is to expose her to native Spanish speakers. If the
child hears Spanish spoken for several hours each day and is able to
practice speaking Spanish with her schoolmates, she stands a good chance of
actually learning the language.
In other words, Stryker wants to immerse her child in Spanish
because she knows that's the best way to learn a new language, so she's
enrolled her daughter in a dual Spanish/English immersion program in a local
public school. Now Stryker is afraid that the English immersion ballot
initiative might deprive her daughter of her classmate-tutors. It just won't
be the same without all those cute little brown classmates helping her
daughter trill her R's properly or teaching her when to use "tu" instead of
"usted."
But these are exactly the same reasons most immigrant parents
want their children immersed in English. They know -- even without the
benefit of Ms. Stryker's college education -- that children don't learn to
speak a new language without being constantly exposed to it.
No doubt Stryker's daughter is learning enough Spanish in her
three or four hours a day to get by when the family vacations on the beaches
of the Costa del Sol or Acapulco. And think how handy it will be when she
has to explain to the maid not to throw the cashmere sweater into the
washing machine.
But the benefits to the Spanish speakers in the classroom are
not nearly so clear. These children will have to learn English well enough
to function in it permanently. They have to learn English well enough to
study history in English, to take college entrance exams in English, to find
jobs when they complete school. Wouldn't it be better to give them an entire
day's instruction in English? And wouldn't they be better off being
encouraged to speak English to their classmates all the time, so they could
have maximum practice in pronouncing the language and learning its syntax
and grammar?
Stryker's $3 million donation is the largest political
contribution in Colorado history. The group receiving the money -- the
misnamed "English Plus" campaign -- promises to use every penny in attack
ads to defeat the English immersion initiative. If truth-in-advertising laws
applied, English Plus, made up mostly of bilingual teachers and Anglo
liberals, would be renamed Spanish First. Their aim is to keep Hispanic
youngsters in Spanish-dominant classrooms for a minimum of six to eight
years.
Similar efforts to defeat English immersion ballot initiatives
failed in California and Arizona. In California, the head of a
Spanish-language television network gave $1.5 million to defeat Proposition
227 in 1998, but failed to do anything more than scare Latino parents into
opposing the measure, which they initially supported. Nonetheless, the
California initiative won by nearly two-thirds of the vote. And the result
has been a whopping success. Latino youngsters are not only learning English
more quickly, their test scores in other subjects have improved as well,
going up -- by double digits in some cases -- each year since English
immersion replaced bilingual education.
Ms. Stryker's millions could be better spent helping poor
Hispanic children learn English. There'd still be plenty left over to set up
her own Spanish immersion school for the benefit of the children of wealthy
liberals.
Notebook