School bus not the place to enforce English-only rules

I finally agree with something that University of Nevada Prof. Emma Sepulveda wrote in the Reno Gazette-Journal. Last Sunday she wrote a column titled "Speak Only English on the School Bus?" and I liked what she had to say about that issue.

Although I admire Prof. Sepulveda as a LEGAL immigration success story, our views rarely coincide on the hot button political issue of ILLEGAL immigration. That's because she usually approaches the issue from an "us" (Hispanics) vs. "them" (everyone else) point of view, and usually makes no distinction between legal and illegal immigration.

But on the question of whether kids should be required to speak English at all times, we agree that Esmeralda County (Goldfield) School Superintendent Robert Aumaugher created a needless tempest in a teapot when he banned the Spanish language on county school buses. "He sent out a letter informing parents ... that their children wouldn't be allowed to speak Spanish on the school bus anymore," Sepulveda wrote. "(But) as a longtime educator I would suggest that a bus full of teenagers coming home after a day at school may not be the ideal place for doing any serious learning."

I have often written about how important it is that immigrants learn English if they are to live and work successfully in the United States, and I have labeled so-called "bilingual education" as a failure because it traps schoolchildren between two languages, and produces "Spanglish" speakers. English is the unifying language of this country - as Hillary Clinton noted in a recent debate with Barack Obama - and U.S. naturalization laws require that immigrants seeking to become American citizens must have "a working knowledge of English." So why do we print ballots in multiple languages? That's something I've never understood, but I digress.

Prof. Sepulveda quoted Superintendent Aumaugher as follows: "Since they (Spanish-speaking students) obviously aren't learning English in school, what better place is there to pick it up than on the bus, where they won't be exposed to stuffy academic English or be expected to conjugate verbs?" Unfortunately, this school official hoisted himself on his own petard (excuse the stuffy academic English) by admitting that his students weren't learning English in the schools that he supervises. A few days later, Aumaugher realized the error of his ways and revoked his English-only bus policy.

Based on my own bilingual family's experiences, I'm a strong believer in English immersion courses in our public schools, which is the preferred approach here in Carson City and elsewhere in Nevada. When my kids were growing up in Spanish-speaking countries and attending overseas American schools, my Mexican-born wife and I spoke English at home. But when we returned to the States, we usually spoke Spanish so that our kids would remain bilingual. And today, both of my children use Spanish in their chosen professions.

PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY

To clarify my thinking, it was our parental responsibility to teach our children a second language; we never expected the schools they attended to ensure that they were bilingual. While I believe it's important to teach foreign languages in public schools, English proficiency should always be the top priority, which is why I support rigorous English language testing as part of President Bush's No Child Left Behind education policy. I question NCLB, however, when English as a second language students are forced to compete with native English-speakers, which is an unfair apples-and-oranges comparison because schools with high percentages of foreign language-speakers shouldn't be penalized because of demographics.

A corollary to this proposition is the urgent need for highly qualified teachers in our public schools. A recent Time cover story on this subject praised the Milken Foundation's Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), which bases teachers' pay on their performance as measured by a combination of structured professional observations and student test scores.

I thought Prof. Sepulveda got it right when she observed that Hispanics "have made sacrifices, and although the dropout rate (45 percent) is still unacceptable, we are becoming ... engineers, architects, lawyers, doctors and even school superintendents (although) we've spoken another language on the school bus for many, many years." Score one for Emma.

In the end, this cautionary tale taught a painful lesson to a county school superintendent and forced him to back down from a misguided English-only policy. In my view, Nevada school districts should insist on English in the classroom and allow kids to speak other languages on the bus on the way to and from school.

• Guy W. Farmer, a semi-retired journalist and former U.S. diplomat, resides in Carson City.