The Three Rs in 70 Tongues

Imagine a school with 2,617 students culled from 57 different countries and cultures. In one classroom, the teacher copies the word farming on a blackboard --first in English, from left to right, and then in Assyrian, from right to left. A susurrus of Chinese rises from a history class. Soft Spanish vowels punctuate a science lesson. A model international academy? Hardly. It is Chicago's Nicholas Senn High School on the city's ethnically mixed North Side, where foreign-born students enroll in special bilingual programs that allow them to study a regular curriculum in their native languages as well as in English.

Scarcely a decade ago, such a welter of tongues would have been unspeakable in an American public school. For more than a century, the great melting-pot theory decreed that foreign-speaking children be taught solely in English to speed their assimilation into the mainstream. The children of 50 million immigrants were forced to master English that way. Some 22 states even outlawed teaching in foreign languages.

But in the 1960s a spectacular popularization of ethnic pride took place, and cultural heterogeneity emerged as the new ideal. Bilingual-education legislation, passed by Congress in 1974, declared that non-English-speaking children should be given the chance to study in their own language in order to smooth the transition into U.S. life. Going a step further, the act also set up a number of bicultural programs, so that children could reinforce, rather than shed, their primary cultural heritage. Going even further than that, neighboring Canada has been officially bilingual since 1969 --although the separatist provincial government in Quebec has decreed French as the province's only official language and restricted the use of English in its schools.

Now 287,000 foreign-born students in America--76% of them Hispanic--are taught at least some of their schoolwork in 70 dialects and languages. The federal Office of Bilingual Education alone sponsors 700 programs in 41 states and five territories, at a cost of $135 million; the spectrum of languages sweeps from Aleut in Alaska to Yiddish in New York. Meanwhile, at least ten states have passed legislation mandating bilingual instruction in those school districts with a minimum number of children--usually ten to 20--who speak a foreign language and are seriously deficient in English.

The official purpose of the federal bilingual programs is to help foreign-speaking children use their native tongue to learn English rapidly, then switch to a regular school program. Yet the degree of emphasis on English differs markedly from program to program.

So-called transitional programs shoot their students into regular English-speaking classrooms as quickly as possible. Under a second technique, called the maintenance method, rapid mastery of English is still the goal. But students continue studying their own culture and language. A third approach, being tried in areas with large Hispanic enclaves, such as New York, Florida and Southern California, is bilingual and bicultural: the programs encourage native-born Americans to achieve fluency in a foreign language even as their counterparts are learning English. In Miami's Coral Way Elementary School, which inaugurated the bicultural method to cope with the huge influx of refugees from Cuba in 1963, all students study for half a day in Spanish and for the other half in English.

Critics of the bilingual experiment contend that the movement is often more political than educational, with Spanish-surnamed children segregated in separate classes long after they can handle lessons conducted in English. "We fully recognize the benefits of cultural pluralism," says James Ward of the American Federation of Teachers. "But we must be sure that the central effort is to bring students into the mainstream of American life." Some foreign-born parents share his concern. Manuel Llera, principal of a junior high school in California's Sweetwater Union school district, near the Mexican border, has been forced by parental pressure to remove some Chicano children from the bilingual program. Parents, he says, "are afraid that their kids are going to get a second-class education and that they won't learn English."

Advocates of bilingualism contend that the programs make foreign-born students feel welcome in American society and decrease staggering dropout rates. (For Puerto Rican students in Chicago, the dropout rate runs about 70% a year, compared with 35% overall.) Moreover, they argue, students learn better through a gradual transition into English. That argument, however, has not been proved. A 1977 nationwide study of 150 schools and 11,500 students, conducted by the American Institute for Research in Palo Alto, Calif., found that bilingual programs helped children learn such subjects as math.

But Spanish-speaking children in bilingual programs generally did not improve in English any faster than did foreign speakers in monolingual classrooms.

Bilingual programs, still experimental, are plagued by problems. There is an acute shortage of qualified teachers. Textbooks are scarce. One Arabic teacher in Chicago finally telephoned Jordan's King Hussein personally for help; Hussein donated a planeload of textbooks. In an age of tight school budgets, bilingual programs tend to cost about twice as much as regular classes because of special teachers and materials.

Meanwhile, in Miami, Spanish is threatening to swamp English completely. Bilingual educators warn that if English-speaking high school graduates want jobs in the area, they will need Spanish as much as immigrants from Cuba will need English. Native-born Americans, reacting against the Spanish tide, are abandoning Dade County. That has led even advocates of bilingual teaching to wonder if old-fashioned assimilation was not a better policy after all. "Does bilingualism lead to separatism?" muses Von Nieda Beebe, a bilingual specialist in Miami. "Is Dade County going to secede from the U.S. when all the English have moved out?"

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