SACRAMENTO, CA - In war, it’s common for field commanders to ignore orders issued by central headquarters. So, too, in education, changes in policy approved by voters or their elected representatives are routinely, if surreptitiously, flouted by educators in the field. The failure of many schools to implement Proposition 227, the successful 1998 California anti-bilingual-education initiative, is a case in point.

In a recent University of California study, researchers surveyed public schools in 16 California school districts with large limited-English-proficient (LEP) student populations. Although some schools have made honest efforts to eliminate bilingual-education classes where LEP students were previously taught in their primary language, many schools have maintained the bilingual-education status quo. According to the study: "If a district had a strong commitment to primary language instruction before Proposition 227, a well-developed bilingual program with substantial instruction in both languages, and a critical mass of credentialed bilingual teachers, then it was likely to have made a serious effort to maintain the existing program in district schools." How did they do this?

By aggressively employing a loophole in Prop. 227 which allows parents to request waivers to keep their children in bilingual-education classes. The UC study found that "Some of these districts were able to secure nearly 100 percent waivers from parents."

Comments by local school officials were revealing. A district bilingual-education coordinator said: "We’ve continued the bilingual programs that existed prior and have had about 99 percent waiver requests. So those programs have continued. It hasn’t altered that in any way." A school principal explained: "Basically, we followed the directives of the district. We informed parents of their rights and got informed consent -- consent forms for all of the children whose parents were choosing bilingual programs. We’re really close to 100 percent."

Even where bilingual programs were changed to honor 227’s requirement that instruction be "overwhelmingly in English," these changes were often cosmetic. The study notes that although the percentage of students in bilingual programs supposedly dropped by 60 percent after 227’s passage, "some schools and districts have complied with Proposition 227 by creating their own definitions of terms such as ‘overwhelmingly in English.’" In these schools, observes the study, "students assigned to a structured English immersion classroom might have been provided with 52 percent of their instruction in English, meeting their own definition of ‘overwhelming’."

In essence, then, many school districts are engaging in only token compliance with Prop. 227. Mr. Eugene Garcia, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education and a staunch partisan of bilingual education, last year boasted to a national conference that, "There’s a lot of surface compliance," with the voter-approved measure, but if one looks deeper and asks principals if they’re really complying with 227, "They’re not." Such brazen flouting of the law is an offense against voters and a tragedy for LEP students.

Studies by the San Jose Mercury News, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, and the READ Institute have shown that LEP students score higher on tests in schools that honestly implement 227. The reactionaries in the public-education establishment, though, are motivated not by what works for kids, but by narrow ideology. Their sabotaging of 227 is yet another argument for school-choice vouchers.

- Lance T. Izumi