California’s crowded Nov. 8 ballot is leading the media to perform a kind of triage and focus on only a handful of the measures deemed most crucial. This has lead to a spotlight on proposals to make it easier for some prison inmates to gain parole (Proposition 57), to legalize adults’ recreational use of marijuana (Proposition 64) and to either scrap the death penalty (Proposition 62) or streamline death penalty appeals (Proposition 64).

This approach may make sense in a year with 17 state ballot measures. But it is a source of great frustration for advocates or opponents of other measures involving important issues.

A prime example is Proposition 58, which would return bilingual education to California schools 18 years after it was scrapped by Proposition 227. The measure was put on the ballot by the Legislature at the behest of state Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Garden. It would allow schools to enroll students in Spanish-only or other language classes without parental consent. Presently, parents must sign a waiver for students to receive such instruction.

With the strong support of teachers unions and the state Democratic Party, Lara has framed the measure as being about creating a cosmopolitan bilingual workforce. He notes the measure allows the Legislature to modify or eliminate it if it isn’t working well. And he cites provisions in the measure that would ensure it avoids the biggest problem of the previous version of bilingual education in California: students never learning English, spending their school days hearing only Spanish.

“All kids should learn English. What we’re questioning is the method we use to get there,” he told the Bay Area News Group.

Ballot rebuttal knocks claim 227 was successful

The ballot argument for Proposition 58 frames the measure as being about improving the instruction of English. The pro-58 side’s rebuttal argument also questions claims that Proposition 227 was broadly successful, citing a survey showing test scores didn’t improve in a five-year span after 227’s approval.

This deeply frustrates Ken Noonan, the former Oceanside Unified superintendent who co-signed the ballot argument against Proposition 58 along with Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who sponsored Proposition 227 in 1998. Noonan was a skeptic of 227 until he saw how quickly Spanish-speaking students made gains in English-immersion classes.

“Why screw up a good thing?” Noonan told the Sacramento Bee in August. “This is working. This is working so well.”

While test scores may not present a clear picture of failure or success, some other metrics support the idea that Proposition 227 has been successful, starting with the sharp decline in the number of Latinos who quit high school before graduation.

In 1999, according to methodology developed by the Urban Institute, the graduation rate for California Hispanics was 58 percent. (Official state records from before 2005 are considered unreliable. A sweeping study released that year by the UCLA Civil Rights Project concluded that state metrics sharply exaggerated the percentage of students graduating, leading to major reforms.)

According to the statistics released by the state Department of Education earlier this year, the rate of Hispanic graduation reached 78.5 percent in 2015, an all-time high.

Nonetheless, Lara and the well-funded yes on Prop. 57 campaign appear to be coasting to victory in polls. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, he depicted his measure as a triumph of common sense.

The senator said California should not have “non-educators dictating how we teach, in a one-size-fits-all approach. We should give that right back to the teachers, who are the experts.”

Escalating pension debt may rest on CA Supreme Court ruling

Good morning. Happy Hump Day. While it seems everyone is trying to get footage of Trump speaking candidly in recordings of “The Apprentice,” which we’ll call the “Trump tapes,” we start this morning with some pension news.

A decision by four Marin County public-employee associations to appeal a pension-related case to the California Supreme Court could ultimately determine whether localities have the tools needed to rein in escalating pension debt.

At issue is how far officials can go to reduce some benefits for current employees after a state appeals court has chipped away at a legal “rule” long favored by the state’s unions.

In August, a California appeals court ruled against the Marin County Employees’ Association in its case challenging a 2012 state law reining in pension-spiking abuses – i.e., those various end-of-career enhancements (unused leave, bonuses, etc.) that public employees use to gin up their final salary and their lifetime retirement pay. …

Even though the dollars at issue are relatively minimal, the case has become a major flashpoint. California courts have long abided by something known as the “California Rule.” It’s not a law or even a rule, actually. It refers to a series of court rulings concluding that once a pension benefit is granted to public employees by a legislative body (board of supervisors, city council, state Legislature), it can never be reduced – even going forward. 

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• “(Secure Choice) has several provisions protecting the state (and employers, which are required to enroll employees into Secure Choice) against liability. … To protect against losses, the state plans to invest in low-risk securities, like treasury bonds or the federal MyRA program, while another section in the law allows for the state to adopt recommendations that address “risk-sharing and smoothing of market losses and gains.” CalWatchdog has more. 

• “Feminist attorney Gloria Allred, who has represented an army of women in legal actions against rich and powerful men — Bill Cosby, Tiger Woods, Anthony Weiner and ex-Clippers owner Donald Sterling among them — is demanding the release of footage from Donald Trump’s reality show, ‘The Apprentice,'” reports Politico. 

• “When Palo Alto software entrepreneur Ron Unz led a campaign to ban bilingual education 18 years ago, California erupted in an acrimonious debate that drew national attention, with proponents expressing fears about the decline of English and opponents charging racism and predicting an educational Armageddon. But today, in a sign of the Golden State’s dramatically changing demographics and politics, the campaign to roll back the “English-only” Proposition 227 seems low-key and uncontroversial, overshadowed by a bevy of hot-button ballot initiatives and the emotionally charged presidential race,” writes The San Jose Mercury News. 

• “Opponents of Donald Trump have launched a crowdfunding effort to raise cash that could cover the legal costs of unveiling more lewd video featuring the GOP presidential candidate,” reports LA Weekly. 

Legislature:

• Gone ’til December.

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @THEMMEXCHANGE

New bill rekindles old human egg fight

Good morning! Happy Monday. Our top story is about a new bill rekindling the old human egg fight.

California women interested in profiting from their eggs — often handsomely — have long availed themselves of private opportunities to do just that. Now, they could have another chance to do so on the medical research market under a new bill.

CalWatchdog has more.

In other news:

• “In wake of Stanford sexual assault case, lawmakers once again pitch mandatory prison time,” writes the Los Angeles Times. 
• “A surge in Democratic voter registration has cut Republicans’ advantage in Orange County to less than 6 percentage points and has doubled the number of Democratic cities over the past year,” writes The Orange County Register.
• Fight over a campaign-funded slate mailer posing as a newspaper heads to federal court. OC Weekly has more. 
• “Bilingual education back on the ballot 18 years after voters rejected it,” writes The Sacramento Bee.

Assembly:

• In at 1 p.m. 

Senate:

• In at 1 p.m. Packed Appropriations agenda starting at 10 a.m.

Gov. Brown: 

• No public events scheduled.

Tips: matt@calwatchog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New followers: @APLaurieKellman

He jointed majority Democrats in a  vote of the California Senate Education Committee to recommended adding an initiative to the 2016 ballot that would restore bilingual education to the state public school system.

Though unable to dictate the votes of Sacramento’s Republican lawmakers, Huff is the Senate Republican Leader.

Bilingual education has been a point of contention in California politics for decades. A GOP switch on the issue would reflect perceived electoral and demographic pressure to woo more Hispanic votes.

But, ironically, one of the Republican Party’s most powerful unofficial leaders on Hispanic-friendly issues is the leading voice opposed to bilingual education.

Prop. 227

In 1998, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz succeeded in getting Proposition 227, an English-only education measure, voted into law.

Prop. 227 triggered several key changes. First, all public school instruction had to be conducted in English. However, parents or guardians could get an exemption by showing their child knew English, had special needs, or “would learn English faster through [an] alternate instructional technique.”

Second, children not fluent in English would be placed in “intensive sheltered English immersion programs” for about a year.

The changes drew California education into a long, drawn-out controversy over what “the science” proved about Prop. 227’s effectiveness. Ten years into the new regime, Unz trumpeted studies that showed students affected by English-only education had doubled their test scores.

Some educators argued that Prop. 227 was more motivated by ideology than facts. But that claim ran contrary to a revealing fact about Unz himself, who does not at all fit the profile of the stereotypical English-only California Republican.

Rather than a hard-liner on immigration, Unz takes a much softer view. An unorthodox thinker who once published the American Conservative magazine, Unz wrote a feature of his own which proposed to debunk the myth of Hispanic immigrant lawlessness. What’s more, Unz recently sought to raise California’s minimum wage to $12 an hour.

In an impassioned broadside against the state Senators, Unz has restated the political case for English-only education. “We were opposed by every California union, every political slate, and almost every newspaper editorial board,” he wrote, “and were outspent on advertising by a ratio of 25-to-1. But despite this daunting array of influential opponents, our initiative still passed with one of the largest political landslides of any contested measure in state history, winning over 61 percent of the vote.”

Unz is not shying away from warning Republicans that returning to bilingual education will damage their already dire electoral fortunes. For Unz, the “disastrous political choices made by California Republicans during the 1990s” sent “the most powerful Republican state party in America” to “the very edge of irrelevance.”

Restoring “failed” bilingual education, he concluded “would probably mark the final nail” in the state party’s coffin, “and rightfully so.”

In the wake of Huff’s play to change California Republicans’ brand, Unz has thrown down a gauntlet.

Although a single activist can rarely determine the course of a state party’s platform, Unz’s nontraditional views on Hispanics, education, and economics give cover to Republicans eager not to be smeared as racists by Democrats sensing a political opportunity to charge up their listless base for November.

(Editor’s note. This article has been corrected. The original said Sen. Mark Wyland also backed the legislation. I fact, he abstained.)

“[State policies give] many school districts a perverse incentive to keep immigrant kids in bilingual programs rather than moving them into English-language instruction.

“It should be remembered that a rapid but successful transition to English was the aim of bilingual education when it was begun in the 1970s. But like other noble experiments, it was taken over — and distorted — by education bureaucrats who care more about money and numbers than individual children.”

Claims that bilingual ed was crucial to help first-generation Latino immigrants assimilate were simply false. Here’s what Santa Barbara school board member Alan Ebenstein had to say in March 1998:

“One of the great misunderstandings regarding bilingual education is that it is a program intended mostly or even largely for students who are not born in the United States. This school year, 8.5% of Latino kindergarteners in Santa Barbara schools were not born in the United States, yet approximately 85% of Latino kindergarteners are receiving most of their instruction in Spanish. Bilingual education in California is predominantly a program to teach American children of Latino descent in Spanish for most of their elementary school years.”

Myths about bilingual ed revived

But this history has been forgotten or ignored by state Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, who has introduced a bill to have a public revote on allowing and encouraging bilingual education. Check out the whoppers Lara offers in defense of his proposal:

“’English will always remain the official language of California, but we cannot ignore the growing need to have a multilingual workforce,’ Lara said.

“He said the global economy requires those who graduate from school to be able to communicate in multiple languages. ‘Employers seek multilingual employees and all students — English and non-English learners alike — deserve access to this invaluable skill,’ Lara added.”

That’s from a short L.A. Times’ web account of Lara’s bill. Here’s hoping subsequent reporting points out that California’s history with bilingual education hardly shows it was an efficient way of producing a multilingual workforce. Instead, it produced hundreds of thousands of high school dropouts who never mastered any language.

But there’s a larger and more sweeping context here. This could be the first sign of what eventually could be a powerful movement in which Latinos seek to make California akin to Quebec, where French is treated with at least as much official deference and respect as English, the language of the rest of Canada.

California as a Spanish-language version of Quebec

Why might something like this happen in the Golden State? Because it’s a dramatic display of power by a group slowly but surely on its way to control of the state’s largest political party. Emerging political juggernauts like such displays. And as del Olmo wrote in 1998 …

“A small but vocal cadre of Latino activists support [bilingual education] in the misguided assumption that bilingual programs promote cultural pride in Latino kids … .”

Is it nativist to worry about this possibility? If you’re one of those people who grouse about Spanish-language signs over stores, sure. If you’re someone who is annoyed to hear Spanish spoken by fast-food workers, damn right. If you’re someone who watches “Leave It To Beaver” or “My Three Sons” and pines for the America of the 1950s, absolutely.

But if you’re someone who knows bilingual education was a giant flop last time around — something that produced students who didn’t speak either English or Spanish well — then it’s not nativist to worry about its resurrection and the motives behind it.

Latinos have enough problems with a California school system that worries more about the interests of adult employees than students. They don’t need to be subject to a risky education experiment that history shows is likely to fail.

For now, these larger questions can wait until we see where Ricardo Lara’s legislation goes. In the short term, I look forward to Sen. Lara offering any proof of his claims for what bilingual education will accomplish in California.

He won’t, because he can’t. The evidence doesn’t exist.

By JOHN SEILER

Bilingual education may be creeping back in California. Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times included an op-ed by Ruben Martinez, a professor of literature and writing at Loyola Marymount University, about a new bilingual ed program at the public school his children will attend.

He wants his twins to grow up bilingual. So he spoke to them in Spanish, while his wife spoke to them in English. Most of the other people in his kids’ lives also spoke to them in English. He was advised on this method by “my colleague Rebeca Acevedo, a linguist and professor of Spanish at Loyola Marymount University.” Martinez writes:

These thoughts weren’t much on our minds when we moved to Mount Washington, a neighborhood with a top-ranked elementary school at the top of the hill. But then we heard that Aldama Elementary School in neighboring Highland Park had recently inaugurated a dual-language immersion program. Maybe I’d finally get some backup for Spanish — and in a public school classroom, no less.

Programs like Aldama’s combine “English learners” with “English proficient” students. Half the day’s lessons are in English, and the other half in the so-called target language. The Los Angeles Unified School District has dual-language programs in Spanish, Korean and Mandarin, and they are increasingly popular; the average growth rate of four or five new programs each year has doubled this year.

But Prop. 227 bans such programs at public schools, Lance Izumi told me; he’s Koret Senior Fellow in Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute, CalWatchDog.com’s parent think tank. “I see people who are trying to skirt Prop. 227 all the time,” he said. “They’ve been trying to do it since the initiative passed, bringing in bilingual education under the cover of ‘dual immersion’.” That’s the phrase Martinez write is used of Aldama Elementary’s program.

Izumi pointed to a 2008 study of his, “Bilingual Ed Not Dead,” which found pockets of resistance across the state to Prop. 227’s implementation.

I’m all for parents teaching their children however they wish. That’s why there are private and parochial schools, as well as home schools. But public schools, which are funded by taxpayers, are supposed to follow the law, in this case Prop. 227.

As a professor at a major university, Martinez is in the upper-middle class. His children are growing up in an environment that encourages learning. They probably will attend major universities themselves.

Izumi pointed out that bilingual ed — or dual immersion — was allowed for Prop. 227 with a parental waver, but only for one year. “Even dual immersion is supposed to be overwhelmingly in English,” he said. “Even then, it’s a transition. Under Prop. 227, kids who are English-language learners are supposed to become English-only after a year.”

Prop. 227 Raised Test Scores

A genuine improvement in California politics in recent decades was the demise — mostly — of bilingual education becuase of Ron Unz’s Proposition 227 in 1998. It was called the English for the Children initiative. According to Ballotpedia, Prop. 227:

Requires California public schools to teach [Limited English Proficient] students in special classes that are taught nearly all in English. This provision had the effect of eliminating “bilingual” classes in most cases.

According to a 2009 report in City Journal:

Hispanic test scores on a range of subjects have risen since Prop. 227 became law….

Two broad observations about the aftermath of Prop. 227 are incontestable. First: despite desperate efforts at stonewalling by bilingual diehards within school bureaucracies, the incidence of bilingual education in California has dropped precipitously—from enrolling 30 percent of the state’s English learners to enrolling 4 percent….

Second: California’s English learners have made steady progress on a range of tests since 1998. That progress is all the more impressive since school districts can no longer keep their lowest-performing English learners out of the testing process. In 1998, 29 percent of school districts submitted under half of their English learners to the statewide reading and writing test; today, close to 100 percent of the state’s English learners participate. Despite this, the performance of English learners has improved significantly, from 10 percent scoring “proficient” or “advanced” (the top two categories) in 2003 to 20 percent in 2009. Similarly, on the English proficiency test given to nonnative speakers, the fraction of English learners scoring as “early advanced” or “advanced” (the top two categories) has increased from 25 percent in 2001, when the test was first administered, to 39 percent this year.

(This City Journal article also includes a concise history of the bilingual ed boondoggle, as well as reasons why obtaining more exact data on student achievement is difficult.)

Trendy Yuppies

Here’s Martinez describing how the upscale parents pushed for the program:

The initial push didn’t come from working-class immigrant parents but from middle-class newcomers. Courtney Mykytyn, a local mother with a new doctorate in medical anthropology, led the charge for Aldama’s dual-language program. Mykytyn refers to herself and other middle-class, professional parents at the school as the “hummus people,” because that is what they bring to parent potlucks — in contrast to the Doritos or tamales others would bring….

Establishing the program at Aldama took a lot of time and political effort, the kind of time that hummus people tend to have more of. But, Mykytyn says, eventually there was also buy-in from working-class families attracted by promises of higher achievement and cultural pride.

Except, as noted above, bilingual ed does not bring “higher achievement.” It likely doesn’t affect the upscale kids who take it. It’s the “working-class families” who suffer, as always, from schemes like this. Remember the “Whole Language” and “New New math” fads of two decades ago that decimated educations across California until they were jettisoned?

My fear is that these programs will grow into a resurgence of bilingual ed for all students for whom English is not the first language. Bilingual ed teachers get extra training and extra pay, encouraging school districts to advance bilingual ed to get more money.

The programs also enjoy the promotion of groups such as the California Association for Bilingual Education. Here’s how it describes itself:

The California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE) is a non-profit organization incorporated in 1976 to promote bilingual education and quality educational experiences for all students in California. CABE has 5,000 members with over 60 chapters/affiliates, all working to promote equity and student achievement for students with diverse cultural, racial, and linguistic backgrounds. CABE recognizes and honors the fact that we live in a rich multicultural, global society and that respect for diversity makes us a stronger state and nation.

CABE’s vision: “Biliteracy and Educational Equity for All”

The problem is that bilingual ed, after decades in use, failed to deliver the educational achievement that was promised.

Certainly, learning a second or even third language is to be encouraged. But the traditional way of teaching each language by itself, which is followed everywhere else in the world, is the proper method, not bilingual ed.

Poor Kids

Most kids in California schools, of course, do not have a professor as a parent. Many often come from poor backgrounds. Their best hope of making it in American society is learning English, by far the main business language both of the United States and the global economy. When German and Southern Korean business executives get together, they speak English.

That was the reasoning behind Prop. 227: At least get the kids to learn English at a decent level of proficiency. That’ll be a good start. A second language can be taught on top of that.

Another problem is that of funding. As I reported last year, the L.A. Unified School District spends an incredible $30,000 a year per student. Yet the district’s high-school graduation rate is just 40.6 percent, the second lowest in the country after Detroit’s rate. There’s a strong disconnect between cost and performance.

As usual, a government system — in this case, the public schools — doesn’t perform well and costs too much. If the bilingual ed program Martinez is touting spreads to other schools, performance will drop even further.

Kids at the lowest rung of the educational ladder will suffer as a result. Their one chance at making it in America, learning English, will have been taken from them.

“We need to constantly keep an eye on this stuff,” Izumi warned. “It’s amazing how much slips through the cracks.”