VDARE.com: 03/02/10 – Rosa Pedalino Porter’s American Story: Her Life In Three Languages, But Only One Country
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March 02, 2010
By Athena Kerry
After arriving in the US at the age of 6, one of a
large Italian family
in which no English was spoken, little
“Rosa Pedalino di
Littleton Avenue”
went from
“painfully” experiencing public school as
“a haze of
incomprehensible sounds” to becoming fellow at
Harvard, an English as a Second Language Program
Director—and an outspoken critic of
“bilingual education”.
But this isn’t your run-of-the-mill
New York Times-style
enterprising-immigrant story.
Rosa Pedalino Porter
took her assimilation experience and put it to good use.
In American Immigrant: My Life in Three Languages,
lays out her no-nonsense approach to the helping new
immigrant children become new Americans: immersion in
the English language—a cause which eventually caused her
to
enlist
in
Ron Unz’s
remarkable anti-bilingual education initiative campaigns
The book chronicles Porter’s
Sisyphean
struggle against the cowards and educrats who blocked
her every step and attempted to undermine her very
tangible successes. It’s a familiar story for those of
us involved in the immigration reform movement: if you
criticize the status quo, you are a racist; if your
changes improve any environment, they must be blocked by
red tape; if you
deserve promotion
you’d better be a
favored minority.
Porter writes that in 1970, after five years of
classroom teaching, she began after-school and evening
classes to complete a master’s degree at the University
of Massachusetts, the last few courses she needed were
in socio-linguistics, statistics and measurement of
cognitive development. They left her increasingly
disillusioned with bilingual education. Not one of the
theories she was taught had been borne out in her
classroom experience. But although the problems were now
obvious to her and to many of her colleagues, there was
no public complaint. The UMass teacher training in
bilingual education was firmly entrenched and
politically unassailable. In fact, it expanded, adding
“the requirement to call our field
Bilingual/Bicultural
Education, mandating the teaching of each child’s
‘culture’—opening the door to another
time-wasting
piece of foolishness.”
In
opposition to what she was being taught, Porter reached
five conclusions:
-
“Teaching Spanish-speaking children in Spanish most of
the school day for three years does not help them learn
English well enough to do their schoolwork in English. -
“Hiring
Puerto Rican
teachers, many of whom could not speak English, as
‘bilingual’ teachers in
Massachusetts
does not promote the learning of English. -
“Segregating
limited-English students
by language and
ethnicity
most of the school day for several years does not
promote higher self-esteem and may reinforce feelings of
inferiority by being kept out of the mainstream of
school life. -
“Taking time out of the
school day to teach the
‘culture’ of Puerto Rico
to a Puerto Rican child defies reason and deprives those
student of time better spent on
math,
science,
U.S. history,
art, music, or more English-language lessons. Families
maintain traditions distinctive to their ethnicity at
home—this should not be a responsibility of our public
schools. -
“No educational
initiative should be above critical review, but this
program was above reproach, with even constructive
criticism viewed as racist or
nativist,
thus frightening off anyone who might dare to voice an
alternate plan.”
Porter notes that the Puerto Rican parents whom she
interviewed when they arrived to enroll their students
in school had no interest in the idea of
la educacion bilingue.
She was
required by law to describe the program to the parents
(which she did in Spanish) and obtain their signature on
a consent form, thus locking their children into three
years or more of
“bilingual”—a.k.a. mostly
Spanish-language—instruction. The parents would almost
always say in effect:
“Okay, teacher, that’s nice. But I want my Jose to
learn English.
I want him to do good in school and grow up to have a
better life than me.”
In a familiar paradox,
it was not the parents who wanted two-language education
for their children, but the
Latino “leaders”,
who were ramming through laws to mandate an untested
experiment that had no research evidence to support its
value.
Porter proceeded to design her own
supposedly
“bilingual” schedule of instructions, with the
approval (“tacit
but wary”)
of her school principal. With her older students,
fifth and sixth graders ages ten to fourteen, she used
the two-hour block every morning (designated
“Language Arts”)
as the time for intensive teaching of English
language—speaking, reading, writing—to advance their
ability to use the language as quickly as possible to
learn school subjects in English. She reports that they
made remarkable progress—“but
this was in defiance of state law, which would have had
me teaching in language arts only in Spanish.”
She found the same in an afternoon block devoted to
“math/science/social studies…it is
amazing how soon student understood enough vocabulary to
do science experiments, math problems and history
lessons in English…I began my private rebellion against
the
state bureaucracy.”
Porter took these observations and ran with them—getting
both her masters and her Ed.D. in the field of language
education and being hired to run the bilingual program
in Newton, MA. Her rebellious program saw remarkable
success: students overcame their lack of English in an
average of one to two years, and the dropout rate for
students entering the high school
without knowledge of
English
dropped to less than one percent.
On
the other hand, Newton was constantly harassed by state
education bureaucrats claiming immigrant
“civil rights”
violations. They even attempted to have Porter’s
doctoral thesis dismissed on the grounds that it would
be “damaging for
bilingual education”.
Porter’s work and travel often
overlapped.
American Immigrant is half a chronicle of Porter’s
advancement into the field of bilingual education and
half travelogue. At one point in the 1980s, Porter was
able to spend a day with at a Japanese elementary
school, she came to compelling conclusions:
“Professionally, my day at the
Saho Elementary School
in the lovely city of
Nara
reversed many of my stereotypical ideas about Japanese
education. Among public educators in the United States
it is widely believed that
Japanese schools
are too regimented, that students spend long days in
rote learning, doing boring, repetitive lessons—nothing
to compare with the child-centered, innovative, creative
days enjoyed by American school children. For shame,
that we should be so provincial. My colleagues in Newton
blithely dismissed the fact that on comparable measures
of math and science learning, for example, Japanese
students at eighth-grade level are generally among the
top performers, while U.S. students score near the
bottom, year after year. However, on the accompanying
survey of student evaluations of their own achievement,
U.S. students
score highest in
self-esteem
while Japanese are modestly near the bottom. Need I say
it? Our children, in the decades since the explosive
1960s, have been
brought up
to feel
very good about
themselves,
even if they
do not actually learn very much!
“My
colleagues excuse poor U.S. performance by proclaiming
that in other countries only elite students take the
eighth-grade tests, while here all the students are
tested. Not true! By the very strict guidelines of the
International Math and Science achievement tests, all
the student at that grade level take the tests. I
reported back to Newton the following elements in Japan
that lead to high student achievement: a long school day
(eight hours to our six) and long school year (240
versus our 180 days), deep societal respect for
schoolteachers, a predominant ratio of mothers at home
and available to help children with homework, and
a
homogeneous population with almost no influx of
immigrants.
[VDARE.COM
emphasis] Like or
not, these conditions produce highly educated citizenry.
“
Despite Porter’s title, this is just about her only
reference to immigration policy. But without it, the
problem of foreign language students would simply not
exist.
Of course, Ron Unz combined his heroic financial support
of the anti-bilingual education initiatives with
fanatical immigration
enthusiasm.
Although his position is uniquely eccentric, there is no
doubt that many opponents of bilingual education prefer
not to think about the problem’s root cause. In an email
to me, Porter writes:
“Immigrant
students as a group need extra help to be able to
benefit from the opportunities in our education system
for upward mobility, active participation as
contributing citizens of this country. That extra help
costs money and when the non-English speaking group
grows as fast as it has in recent decades, the drain on
public schools takes resources from the mainstream
students.”
A personal note: I have traditionalist
qualms about Porter’s decision to live away from her
family in order to make a difference in the sphere of
bilingual education. A liberal Democrat and adamant
feminist, Porter worked away from her husband and son
for about half of every week for several years, driving
back and forth between Amherst and Newton, Mass. She was
thrilled by the opportunity to flex her muscles and
glosses over the more unpleasant implications of her
ambitions. Porter’s son did report that he was quite
comfortable with her absence, saying
“Some of my
friends don’t see their parents who are divorced as much
as I see you”. Somehow, I don’t find that very
comforting.
But I can’t deny that Porter’s impressive energy has had
an important impact. Although her book says little about
enforcement in the years since the
last Unz anti-bilingual education initiative in 2002,
or about the current situation in non-initiative states
(the great majority, alas), she continues to work
against this
ineffective, expensive
and ultimately
nation-breaking policy.
As
recently as 2009
Porter was an expert witness on the winning side of
Flores v. Arizona,
a
bilingual education case
that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Alito,
writing the majority opinion,
cited Porter’s research.
But, as Porter herself
notes
sadly, the case was returned to the district court, not
dismissed outright. [Porter:
A victory for students still learning English,
GateHouse News Service, August 9, 2009]The struggle
continues. It will never end, until America’s ongoing
post-1965 immigration disaster
is halted by an
immigration moratorium.
Athena Kerry (email
her)
recently graduated from a Catholic university somewhere in
America.