Washington Academy of Languages

ARIZONA

Originally uploaded by MikeJonesPhoto

On April 20, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court began to hear arguments in a case testing what states might do to comply with the federal law requiring state public schools to teach children to speak English. What is the law and how does it work? The major court decision was Lau v. Nichols. That case began in 1970 when a San Francisco poverty lawyer learned a client’s child was failing because he could not understand the language of instruction. The lawyer filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Kenny Lau and 1,789 Chinese-background students that he found in the same predicament. The lawyer’s claim was “that these children were being denied education on equal terms.” The lawyer intentionally used the same language as the famous 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which upset the separate-but-equal Jim Crowe Laws. The San Francisco Federal court ruled that there was no disparate treatment and the School District was not to blame that the children only spoke Chinese. Unlike the Brown case, the State does not cause children to start school speaking Chinese. In the Brown case, the State forced children to be segregated.

In 1974, the United States Supreme Court unanimously overruled the lower courts. The court ruled in Justice Douglas’s words: “There is no equality of treatment merely by providing them with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education.” So the district was declared in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. However, unlike Brown, there was no mention of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (that is, there were no constitutional guarantees). Title VI was considered strong enough and is the law of the land, while not quite rising to a constitutional mandate. The decision stopped short of mandating Bilingual Education, a decision politicians said showed “flexibility.” In fact, no specific “remedy” was urged.
In Brown, busing, charter schools, and other possible remedies were suggested, and the schools were to integrate “with all deliberate speed” (i.e. slowly). However, what were later called the “Lau Remedies” included variations of Bilingual Education (there are several types of bilingual programs), and English as a Second Language training. Mostly these remedies were left up to the communities to comply with federal, state and district requirements.

The present case before the U.S. Supreme Court has the following legal and political aspects about it. It involves the school district in Nogales, Arizona. Nogales is right on the Mexican border. The population is heavily Latino. Most students who go to school in the District speak Spanish at home and throughout the day, other than in school. Even in school they speak Spanish on the playground with their friends. Parents and others who are the plaintiffs know their children will not get very far in school without English and, in effect, would be condemned to second class citizenship. Some politicians maintain that the courts do not have the right to tell the taxpayers how to spend their money on funding public schools. The case split along Democratic and Republican lines as well on the issue of spending.

Here is the brief history of the current case: In 2000, a federal judge declared that the state of Arizona is in violation of Lau. The ruling was that the teacher failed to put into place any trained teachers and a program reasonably calculated to teach English. The court even found teacher aides who didn’t speak English or didn’t speak it very well. The state had spent less than $150 a year to help each student.

Since then, the state claims to have built more schools, hired more teachers, shrunk classroom sizes, and doubled the expenditure on each student who needs to learn English. The state and courts have remained in opposition. The courts said that Nogales’s new school buildings did not excuse it from its obligation to develop English Language programs for the students of Nogales who required English instruction. The state Democratic Party decided not to appeal the case. The Republican Party, including Tom Horne, the state’s Republican Superintendent of Education, went and hired their own attorneys and to everyone’s surprise the Supreme Court decided to hear the case. Tom Horne said he sees the case as “the judiciary run amok.” The argument he and his lawyers have taken is that the judiciary has no constitutional right to tell the taxpayers how to spend their money and if the citizens of Arizona do not wish to spend money on education for second-language learners, they should not be forced to do so. So it has become rather a state’s right issue. In a sense, that is reminiscent of George Wallace’s State’s Rights argument against desegregation of the schools in Alabama. The plaintiffs say that the defense offers a caricature as for years they have neglected to follow the federal law governing these children’s civil rights. And now the battle has been joined before the court.

The case is now before the Supreme Court, more or less as I presented the issues, I believe. To me a more interesting issue, since I have no doubt this case is about civil rights (it only awaits how broad the Court wishes to make its decision or how narrow), is to present an English as a Second Language program that can deal with a population which speaks the target language, in this case English, only during some of the school hours. Most contemporary thought on Second Language Acquisition really does not have this sort of very difficult population and teaching situation in mind. This kind of program, that assumes an entire population will not speak the target language outside of school, actually makes sheltered teaching, co-operative learning, and other modern techniques in teaching a little difficult to execute. For my next blog, I will take a stab at developing a program for this sort of population that we find in Nogales and elsewhere.

–Dr. Paul Schneider, Director of Teacher Education Programs, WAL

This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Language Thoughts, English Language Learning, Teaching English as a Second Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.