English for the Children Campaign

State education agencies reported that the number of limited-English-proficient students in the nation's schools rose from 2.1 million in the 1990–1991 academic year to more than 3.7 million in 1999–2000. A con-gressionally mandated study found that these students received lower grades, were judged by their teachers to have lower academic abilities, and scored below their classmates on standardized tests of reading and math. Subsequent responses to these problems have run the gamut. Some policymakers have advocated bilingual education as a remedy, while others have taken the opposite view and blamed bilingual education for the inequities. The latter argue that bilingual education programs are responsible for retarding the acquisition of English by children who need desperately to have an age-appropriate command of that language. Beginning in the 1980s, sentiments against bilingual education became increasingly critical as more and more communities adopted bilingual education programs. Shortly after taking office, President Ronald Reagan announced that it was erroneous and unaligned with American concepts to have bilingual programs in order to preserve students' native languages and that such programs would not allow students to achieve enough English proficiency to participate in the job market. Many people listened. By feeding on the frustration of policymakers and the increasingly harsh rhetoric surrounding debates over these programs, proponents of [Page 257]English-only instruction were able to gain support for more restrictionist language policies in the schools. By the late 1990s, many states had contributed substantial amounts of money to resolve these problems, but the number of English language learners (ELLs) did not diminish. Opposition to bilingual education became more organized and determined to curtail or eliminate these programs.

Nowhere were these issues more evident than in California. During the 1990s, California had approximately one third of the bilingual education programs in the country. With antibilingual education sentiments at an all-time high, Ron Unz started the “English for the Children” campaign, designed to dismantle bilingual education in the state.

Educated as a theoretical physicist, Unz had run unsuccessfully as a Republican candidate for governor of California in 1994. With the support of anti-bilingual activists, Unz collected more than 510,000 signed petitions from registered voters to launch a voter initiative that would end bilingual education in the public school system. The initiative went on the ballot in California in 1998. Unz, a multimillionaire software developer, vowed to dig deep into his own pockets and spend whatever it took to get the measure passed.

Benefiting from the swell of xenophobia that dominated the state's politics during that time, Unz and the English for the Children campaign constructed a platform from which to promote California's Proposition 227. According to this proposition, the bilingual education services offered in California inhibited students' English acquisition and overall educational progress. Proposition 227 was promoted as an elixir for language minority students' ailments and an alternative to bilingual education, promoting a 1-year English immersion course to prepare non-English-speaking students for mainstream classes. According to the Unz initiative, language minority students were to be placed in sheltered English immersion (a term coined by the English for the Children movement) for a period usually not to exceed 1 year, before being mainstreamed into the regular education classroom. As originally stated in Article 2, Section 305, of the

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