anguage, Congress hereby declares it to be the policy of the United States to provide financial assistance to local educational agencies to develop and carry out new and imaginative elementary and secondary school programs designed to meet these special educational needs ("Bilingual Education," 1998).
This was in part a recognition of the increase in the number of non-English-speaking people in America. California is home to 45 percent of the nation's non English speaking students, and the magnitude of demographic change there has been breathtaking. Thirty years ago, California's schools were more than
three quarters non Latino white. while today the proportion has
dropped to 44 percent. A quarter of the state's five million public school students more than one million children "do not speak English well enough to understand what is going on in a classroom," according to the 1993 report of a state watchdog agency, and that agency further charged that California's bilingual bureaucracy had "calcified into a self serving machine . . . an ideologically based program more concerned with the intrinsic virtues of bilingualism and biculturalism" than with teaching English (Hornblower, 1995, 40). During this same period, public dissatisfaction with bilingual education programs has been evident, as in the following survey from 1995:
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