This research examines issue fronts of bilingual education, particularly the background and development of such programs in Southern California. The research will set forth the context in which bilingual education has emerged in the American political and educational culture in recent years and then discuss the scope and limit of issues and problems associated with the phenomenon with a view toward forecasting possible lines of future advocacy and development.
The passage of California's Proposition 227 in 1998, which was meant to dismantle and block bilingual education in public schools, was (or more exactly was intended to be) the culmination of a years-long controversy over whether children whose first language is not English should be taught in their native language in classrooms, particularly at the elementary-school level. The voter initiative provided bilingual programs would be replaced either by intensive "immersion" classes for California students (about 1.4 million) of limited English proficiency, or LEP (Bronner, 1998), or by what is known as "Model B," which provides that students be taught "primarily" in English with native-language "support" from bilingual teachers (Sahagan & Anderson, 1998).
The controversy was not over, however, as proponents of Proposition 227 found when bilingual-education advocates, including various civil rights groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, filed suit in federal court aiming to block implementation of 227. Many bilingual-education proponents frame their advocacy as a civil rights issue and accuse opponents of such programs of racism. But the record of anti-bilingual-education advocacy does not support that view. London's Economist, for example, pointed out during the debate leading up to Proposition 227's election, that its sponsor, Ron Unz, was not a racist "Buchananite" but a Libertarian, by political inclination (Separate, 1997, p. 16).
To be sure, in Nor...