Americans have recently shown an antagonism to bilingual education programs which with the recent vote in California on Proposition 226 has resulted in the beginning of the abandonment of bilingual programs. The vote represents a common way of dealing with problems not by fixing them but by throwing out the whole program without having a real alternative. Immersion has been tried before and did not produce the desired results. If bilingual education has not been working, it may need to be reshaped rather than eliminated. At some level, a bilingual approach is simply essential because otherwise the non-English-speaking student population will simply be further behind than it already is.
The public perception concerning bilingual education is bound with two related but different issues, one concerning illegal immigration, and the other concerning welfare. The public has expressed dissatisfaction with these policies as well and has demanded reform. Many of those who require bilingual education programs are indeed immigrants--not necessarily illegal immigrants, though many fail to make a distinction between legal and illegal immigration when raising concerns about how tax dollars are spent. Similarly, there is a perception that many of the immigrant children are also beneficiaries of welfare, though this also is not necessarily the case. Thus, anger about these other issues has been directed at the schools, and children are being made scapegoats by many critics of immigration policy and welfare.
Murray considers the question of welfare in the larger context of American social policy over a thirty year period. He has more in mind than welfare policy, though welfare is at the heart of what American social policy during this era wanted to achieve and also at the heart of how the system has failed to achieve those goals. Murray settles on the term "social policy" to describe what he is talking about and defines this as a loo...