Last week I noted in a column that the California Republicans in the Education Committee of the State Senate had joined an 8-to-0 vote to repeal Proposition 227 and restore Spanish-almost-only “bilingual education� in our schools. The academic performance of over a million immigrant student had doubled in the four years following the implementation of... Read More

Yesterday morning's San Jose Mercury News (Sharon Noguchi, March 20, 2009) carried a very rare report on the topic of "bilingual education." Apparently, a decision has been made to reduce and perhaps eventually close one of the last remaining "bilingual" public school programs in Northern California, provoking sufficient public controversy as to reach the newspapers.... Read More

A couple of weeks ago, the San Jose Mercury News carried a large, photo-filled front-page "community interest" story, which caught my eye (Latino Baby Boom Changing Demographics in California, Mike Swift, July 29, 2007, Front Page). The focus was on the local aspects of California's burgeoning Latino immigrant population. Now I'd suspect that most anti-immigrationists... Read More

Here's our latest presentation of the California student test scores, based on the official numbers released by the State Department of Education. For convenience, we've provided a graph of the results, broken down between Limited English students in bilingual and those not in bilingual. As you can see, there's almost a factor of three difference.

Within political circles, it is widely recognized that the perception of political power is the largest component of political power itself. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of leaders claiming to speak on behalf of large ethnic minority or immigrant groups, whose true views on many issues are often opaque or even... Read More

Although Wednesday’s headlines were mostly dominated by the unfolding debate surrounding our likely war with Iraq, papers in a large swath of Southern California newspapers carried front-page reports of the conclusion to an equally lopsided contest, a Santa Ana vote on the fate of Nativo Lopez, the leading political figure of that city. If November’s... Read More

Although Massachusetts and Colorado may not quite be exact ideological polar opposites among American states, they do come pretty close. As one of the few states in which Republicans enjoy a distinct advantage in registration, Colorado forms an important piece of the Rocky Mountain wing of the national Republican base, voting in 1996 to put... Read More

This morning’s Boston Globe poll showed our “English� measure in Massachusetts still enjoying a very comfortable lead of some 27 points among voters, virtually unchanged from its 28 point lead a month earlier in the same poll. To date, we have not spent a single dollar on advertising, while our opponents have deluged the airwaves... Read More

One of the rarest characteristics of any prominent individual, especially in the fields of politics, education, or the media, is the willingness to admit a mistake. To read the speeches or media commentary of our national leaders is to be presented with an unbroken chain of far-seeing, even brilliant decisions, unerringly correct and endlessly successful.... Read More

In his defense of bilingual education programs ("The Voters' Prerogatives and Bilingual Education," Lessons column, Oct. 23), Richard Rothstein implies that previous generations of European immigrants would have greatly benefited by spending the first five to seven years of their schooling in classes taught mostly in Italian, Yiddish or Greek, as is called for under... Read More

Given the abysmal standards of modern political campaigning, it is certainly quite rare for major newspapers to bother devoting their lead editorials to stinging denunciations of a particular advertising campaign, using words like "lies," "ugly distortions," "reprehensible," "false and inflammatory charges," and "ethnic prejudice." Now consider the implications if that major newspaper is directing those... Read More

As Stalin, a leading authority on such matters, once observed, “A single death is a tragedy, million deaths is a statistic.� This important but subtle distinction between major tragedies and mere statistics certainly arises during any examination of our decade-long discussion of “hate crimes,� especially those involving race or ethnicity. As is well known, whenever... Read More

An otherwise rather bland and boring---though hard-fought---election season has now been enlivened by a rather unusual spectacle. A billionaire heiress from Fort Collins, Colorado has decided to spend millions from her personal fortune funding the most intense political advertising campaign in her state’s history, an advertising campaign focused on the terrible threat that racial desegregation... Read More

Divisive American initiative measures, especially those touching on controversial ethnic issues, almost inevitably follow a consistent pattern. First, for a year or more, the two sides wage a ferociously contested political campaign, frequently with massive funding and the political establishment on one side and overwhelming popular sentiment on the other. Harsh television ads and influential... Read More