Posted by: Sister Toldjah on October 8, 2005 at 9:42 pm
I hate to beat this dead horse, but it seems like something new pops up in the news everyday about government officials making things easier for those who cross our borders to live here who refuse to learn to speak English. Occasionally, you’ll have one who takes a stand, as was the case in this story:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill yesterday by a South County legislator that would have allowed California to test students in Spanish to measure whether schools are meeting federal education goals.
[...]
The legislation by state Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego, cites a clause in the federal No Child Left Behind Act that allows students to be tested “in the language and form most likely to yield accurate data on what such students know.”
State tests to measure whether schools are meeting federal goals for students’ proficiency in math and reading are administered in English. Ducheny’s bill proposed developing Spanish-language tests and allowing students who have attended schools in the United States for less than three years to take those tests instead of English-language exams.
“Forcing newly arrived students to test in English measures their language ability, not knowledge of school subjects,” Ducheny said in a statement released by her office. “The bill didn’t exempt students from taking the tests and wouldn’t keep us from our goal of teaching them English; it simply would have given us a better tool to test what they know in science, math and other subject areas.”
The Chula Vista Elementary School District, San Ysidro School District and Sweetwater Union High School District are among 11 in California suing the state to stop English-only testing.
I went into a Wendy’s fast food restuarant a couple of weeks ago to have lunch with a friend, and while standing in line I noticed a plastic document holder that had been nailed to the wall that contained job applications . One set was in English. The other in Spanish. I sighed and shook my head. We’ve all encountered things like this in our daily lives: for example, when we call a customer service number, you often hear “if you’d like instructions in English, press 1″ and then it gives the Spanish translation to that for those who need instructions in Spanish, or when you go to an ATM machine and you have the option to get instructions on how to use the machine in English or Spanish.
My personal thought is this: if I moved to France, or Germany or any other non-English speaking country to live and/or work, I would take the time to learn their language. I certainly would not expect them to offer school books in English for my kids (if I had any at the time I moved) and I certainly would not expect them to offer me an English menu in a French restaurant (for example). Some of the blame can obviously be left at the feet of the people who come here who don’t even know how to say “hola” (hello) in English, but a big part of the blame rests with our politicians on both sides of the aisle, who don’t want to risk offending even a tiny minority of a big voting group by taking a stand that may offend those who are here legally and who can vote. Arnie is obviously an exception to this rule.
What can we do, if anything?
Hat tip: Flopping Aces
(Cross-posted at California Conservative)
Big Government
I don’t think it is unreasonable to allow a student from a foreign country three years to become fluent in English. I don’t see anything wrong with students being taught and taking tests in their native language in school, as long as there is a strong emphasis on learning English.
I can’t stand this kind of thing!! We really need to start doing something, I love my country and spent 4 years of my life defending it but I am seriously thinking about loading my family up and getting the hell out b/c I’m quickly becoming the minority in my own country!! We can’t continue to play “Mr. Nice Guy”…we’re getting over run.
The one bulwark we have is that testing for minimal competence in English is a requirement for naturalized citizenship. I’m an immigration attorney, and I have seen applicants fail. Unfortunately, this isn’t going to stop the USA from becomming a de facto bi-lingual nation. And THAT is a disaster. Think Canada.
To me, there is a whole issue here that’s lengthy and best saved for a post, but the gist of it is that a void has been created by several factors, one the immigrants fill, and this has been happening since our early history.
There’s a pattern: Immigrants come and take the low paying jobs Americans don’t want, break their backs and struggle while they raise a generation that gets educated and moves ahead, then more immigrants from other countries come and replace them.
The wild card here is the retired and retiring Baby Boomers vs the continuously shrinking American family.
I’ll concur that we need to reform the system, as we’re definitely being overrun, as Sean pointed out, but this isn’t an altogether easy problem to solve, as we’ve become somehow stuck between a rock and a hard place: With American families having less children than will be needed to support the next couple of generations of retirees, how else will we have enough people working and paying taxes unless we import them? The phenomenon James Taranto calls the “Roe” Effect is about to overtake us, big time.
It shouldn’t be this way, we once got along just fine when we had real immigration quotas that more or less corresponded with the needs of the marketplace, but somewhere in the interval between the influx of refugees from southeast Asia and the early 1990s, a floodgate seems to have opened, immigrants pouring in. The problem is that we’ve successfully absorbed them, for the most part, due to the “demand” in certain markets for cheap labor, as we always have before.
“For English, press 1” always makes me angry.
You can see from our readiness even to address this matter that we’ve forgotten what the function of the government-run schools is supposed to be: to equip the student with the proficiencies he’ll need to function in American society.
If English-language competence isn’t one of those proficiencies, then excuse me please; I woke up in the wrong country.
In this Curmudgeon’s opinion, the inability to express oneself in spoken or written English, at least well enough to describe to a Chevrolet dealer the exact steering wheel, tires, and gas-filled shocks one wants on one’s low-rider Caprice, should be grounds for expulsion from this country. Or, to put it as Ted Nugent once did:
“If you want to sell me a Big Mac, you’d better do it in English.”
For english, press 1. For spanish, move to Latin America or Spain.
This seems so painfully clear to me. If you want to move to America, you have to become and American. Americans speak english. If you don’t, you aren’t.
Somehow, this opinion has been labeled ‘racist’. What is racist about wanting to understand and be understood by other Americans? Freedom of speech becomes worth less if half of your brethren can’t understand what you are saying.
You said ‘If I moved to France or Germany to live/work I would take the the time to learn the language of that country’. Would you say that this should also be the case for American GI’s stationed in nations like Germany and Japan?