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.”

“[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.