An e-mail from Boston: Unz is Coming to Town

Problem-Based Unit #7

You go home after a very long day -- a full day of teaching, followed by a Stanford University class that leads to your CLAD certificate. As you sit down at your home computer with a warm beverage and pore over your e-mail, you open the following from your good friend Albert, who now teaches in Cambridge, Massachussetts:

Help! Ron Unz, your fellow Californian who gave you Proposition 227 and brought it to Arizona, is coming to Beantown! He is everywhere. I turn on the TV news, and there he is, touting the failures of bilingual education, the craziness of our educational theories, and above all, beaming over the success of Proposition 227 in California. I recorded some of the news on my VCR, which I'm sending to you (NOTE: THIS FILE CAN BE FOUND ON CD#2). I checked out his website, at http://www.onenation.org/, and it's full of newspaper stories on the success of 227. A friend also forwarded me an e-mail from Unz to his supporters proudly advancing his campaign here -- click here for the e-mail. I'm even starting to believe some of the things they say, in spite of the fact that many of my friends here are real supporters of bilingual ed. Also, my gut just tells me things just can't be that simple. I'm getting pretty stressed out about his getting on the ballot iniative here in Mass.

Then the other shoe drops. You probably know that I've been pretty active in MATSOL, our local affiliate of TESOL, and the other day, I was asked by the Board to represent MATSOL on a panel discussion on bilingual education at Lesley College. They told me that there would be a local representative of Unz's organization on the panel, as would a representative of the community that supports bilingual education. So, my dear friend, I NEED HELP! Specifically:

  • As a California teacher, can you tell me what you have seen and heard about the impact of Proposition 227 at the level of the schoolhouse? I need some good stories to tell about what it's been like for a teacher.
  • Was there indeed a miracle turnaround at Oceanside? What about those SAT-9 scores?
  • It seems to me that this whole thing of battling ESL against bilingual is a dead horse we don't need to keep flogging! Can you suggest something constructive that we can be doing as a policy?
By the way, this debate is the day after tomorrow!

Well, you know the resources to turn to... the reading materials from Education 375, Kenji Hakuta's website, especially what he has written about SAT-9 scores in California (click here for link), you can also be rsourceful and take a look at other websites that stand on different sides of the bilingual education debate -- check out the links at the bottom of the course syllabus. Send an e-mail back to your friend addressing these questions. You can also raise other issues, but please make sure to address these questions.