Bilingual Education and the Success of Boston’s Latino Youth

The success of Latino students in the Boston Public School system is undoubtedly and inextricably linked to the success of the district, in partnership with state government, combining both proven and innovative strategies in delivering English language instruction to the city’s students. At 43% of total enrollment, Latino students are the largest and fastest-growing demographic in Boston Public Schools (Handy). And while a majority of Latino students speak English proficiently, census records show that in the City of Boston half of all Latinos were born outside of the United States; 30% of Latinos in the Boston Public School system are English Language Learners (Uriarte, Chen, and Kala 9), and, not surprisingly, the majority (57% in 2012) of Boston’s students classified as Limited English Proficient, speak Spanish (Uriarte). Simply put, there is no way to ensure that schools are working to the best capacity for the district’s largest ethnic group without also ensuring that proper systems are in place to educate English Language Learners, who are disproportionately Latino. Unfortunately, this has not always been the easiest of tasks, and a ballot initiative of over a decade ago would come to undermine much of the needed progress in the Boston Public Schools. November 5, 2002 may seem like a distant memory for some, but on that day, the result of that year’s election would come to have a resounding impact on Massachusetts’ schools, tens of thousands of students and their families at the time, and countless thousands more in the eleven and a half years since. By over a two-thirds margin, the Commonwealth’s voters ousted the Bay State’s 31 year old Bilingual Education program, the first in the nation. This decision made it illegal for public school teachers to, for any considerable amount of time, speak a language other than English in the classroom, and required that English Language Learners be enrolled in English language immersion courses instead. While this decision would eventually impact families of many backgrounds, ethnic minorities in urban districts, particularly Latinos (at the time, and today, Massachusetts’ largest ethnic minority group), would be disproportionately affected. The result, which still stands, was fueled in part by a xenophobic impulse at Massachusetts’ extraordinary growth of Latino immigrants, and partially by legitimate social and educational concerns that bilingual education was at best, demonstrating, no empirical proof of improving a student’s educational outcomes, and, at worst, was proving detrimental to English Language Learning students. Xenophobia aside, while the decision has some merit, and while it was obvious that reform was critically needed, the last decade has proven that elimination of bilingual education has been detrimental to Boston’s English Language Learners, particularly Latinos, as well as other Massachusetts students classified as Limited English Proficient. As it came to be defined and practiced in the United States, bilingual education involved teaching English Language Learners how to read and write in their native language, teaching academic content in their native language, and an incremental transition into English instruction (Rossell and Baker 7). At the federal level, aligning with the cause of civil rights in the 1960s, Congress and President Johnson saw a critical need for improving the quality of education of the United States’ Latino students. Specific figures surrounding the matter are difficult to ascertain given the fact that Latino/Hispanic is not a race but an ethnicity, the fluid nature of how Latinos have historically been designated and classified in the United States, and the fact that specific classification in and of itself is a relatively new phenomenon in American history. That being said, by any measurement, Latinos in the 1960s had deplorable graduation rates compared to their non-Hispanic white peers, and to a lesser extent their non-Hispanic black peers as well. As a result, the federal government passed the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, a tepid solution to the problem dispersing to various school districts that wanted it (districts could opt out) $40 million ($242 million by 2014 standards) to promote research and experimentation in bilingual education, the first endorsement of bilingual education in US history (Rossell 216-217). The ten years in between 1960 and 1970 saw a massive 1500% increase in Boston’s Latino population, from 2,500 residents to 40,000; by this time, the Boston Public Schools (then the Boston School Department) had established the Department of Bilingual Education, and popular opinion on reform brought education leaders to believe that because Massachusetts’ Spanish speaking population was notably smaller than in states like California, Texas, and New York, such a program would be feasible (Hailer 5). Today, Massachusetts is home to hundreds of thousands of Latino men, women, and children throughout the Commonwealth. Cities such as Boston, Chelsea, Lynn, Lawrence, Holyoke, Springfield, and others are particularly well represented in this diversity. In Boston today, neighborhoods like Roslindale, Roxbury, the South End, and especially East Boston and Jamaica Plain are homes to thousands of Latino families, both anchored for generations in the United States as well as first generation newcomers from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, El Salvador, et al. But the picture of Boston’s Latino community today is far different than that of nearly five decades into the past. The history of the Latino community in Boston truly begins in the aftermath of World War II. Four decades after the 1917 Jones-Shafroth Act conferred upon Puerto Ricans United States citizenship, economic hardship brought massive amounts of Puerto Ricans from the island to the contiguous United States. The twenty years from 1950 to 1970 netted 684,000 Puerto Ricans leaving the island and relocating to the United States; and while the vast majority moved to New York City, cities such as Tampa, Philadelphia, and Boston became home to many thousands (Whalen 2). During this time, no neighborhood in Boston would see more growth of Puerto Ricans, in a sense Boston’s first Latinos, than the South End. Here, approximately 2000 Puerto Rican migrants, mostly from rural backgrounds and without formal education, lived in substandard conditions in a region known as Parcel 19; the threat of the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) to displace these residents in order to gentrify the community in 1967 lead to social organization of Puerto Ricans at the time to resist this, and by 1969 their campaign was successful, culminating in the creation of a housing project known as Villa Victoria (Small 8). Naturally, lack of formal education, high unemployment, and massive rates of poverty prevalent among Puerto Rican and other Latinos in Boston at the time would come to impact Boston’s Puerto Rican children as well. In December 1968, social workers, community leaders, and mental healthcare professionals from 35 organizations in the city convened with the goal of addressing and rectifying the problem of segregation, both internal and external, in the Boston Public Schools; the next conference the following month representatives of the Boston Public Schools, the State Education Department, and the State Department of Mental Health Task Force on Children Out of School were present, and the result was the establishment of the Task Force on Children Out of School, created to address all facets of scholastic exclusion: Numerical, geographical, and with respect to delivery of services (The Way We Go to School: the Exclusion of Children in Boston 3). The Task Force on Children Out of School immediately begun research on the amount of Puerto Rican and other Latino students who were consistently not attending school despite being of proper age to have been enrolled. They analyzed studies from Harvard University, the Boston Housing Authority (BHA), the Massachusetts Department of Education, and other organizations in order to gauge an accurate number of how many Latino students should have been in school but were not, either because they left without finishing or simply had never attended in the first place; they reached out to community members in the South End who attested to seeing hundreds of Puerto Rican children outside in the neighborhood during days and hours where children should have been in school. After analyzing official figures and contacting principals in both public and parochial schools, the evidence showed that during the 1968-1969 school year, nearly half, 49%, of school aged Latino children were simply not enrolled (The Way We Go to School: the Exclusion of Children in Boston 19). This shocking figure clearly necessitated not only action, but understanding. Why was it that Boston’s Latino children were not in school, and that those that were often left without completing? The reasons would come to have critical implications for the way Massachusetts would later begin to educate a large segment of its students. Cultural differences played an important role in this problem. As stated earlier, the majority of Puerto Ricans in Boston at the time came from rural areas of Puerto Rico, where an agricultural lifestyle and lack of schools made it very difficult, if not impossible, for people to receive formal education. It is likely that not having the experience of schooling, these families didn’t understand the important value behind free public education in the United States, and thus didn’t feel it important to enroll their children in Boston’s schools. Another reason was simply prejudice. Racial and ethnic animus often turned into violence as many of Boston’s Latino students reported having been physically harmed by non-Latino students. But the most important reason for the disproportionate number of Latinos out of school in Boston in the late 1960s stemmed from a very clear but complicated reason: Language. This problem was seen by community members and school officials alike. In a report to the federal government, the Boston Public Schools wrote: “The Spanish-speaking child finds himself in a classroom where the total curricula, methods, and medium of language are geared toward the native English speaker…It is unrealistic for us to suppose that if we then place a number of non-English speakers in this urban classroom, the teachers can meet the special needs of these children. At present the children within these areas are unable to cope with the subject content being taught because of their lack of proficiency in English, and almost immediately encounter failure in the classroom. For many this failure pattern continues for a number of years until the child has gained the needed proficiency in English. By this time the initiative and positive self-image of many of these children has been thoroughly thwarted (The Way We Go to School: the Exclusion of Children in Boston 17-19).”
Put in the clearest terms possible, the Boston Public Schools was failing Latino students and families, horribly. While Massachusetts wasn’t alone in their lack of adequate bilingual education services provided to English Language Learners at the time, the particular contexts of the issue here made the problems unique. Historically, Massachusetts had never had a large population of non-English speaking immigrants relative to other states in the union. As a result, the Boston Public Schools were unprepared for the large Latino population growth that occurred in the 1960s, and didn’t have the necessary resources to educate students who disproportionately were considered English non-proficient. This fact had been recognized at the local, state, and federal levels. As a catalyst, the perfect storm of recognition of these problems and activism on behalf of the community and school alike validated Massachusetts’ passage of its own more robust version of the federal bilingual education program, the first such state-level legislation in the country. In 1971 the Massachusetts legislature passed the Transitional Bilingual Education Bill, requiring schools to educate English Language Learners in their own language for a period of three years in their core classes prior to a transition into a mainstream classroom in which instruction would later be conducted in English (De Jong, Gort, and Cobb 596-597). The law specifically applied to Massachusetts school districts with twenty or more students of a particular language, effectively requiring districts to group these students together in cases even prior to dissolution of neighborhood schools and the bussing crisis of the later years of the 1970s (Greenberger). Early into this era this posed no problem, but in later years this would create issues of transportation.
The next three decades would see this policy both sharply criticized and lauded both in Boston and throughout Massachusetts’ more urban school districts such as Chelsea, Lawrence, Salem, et al, where its usage was the strongest. On its face, it would seem inevitable that such a major social change in the education system would be met with opposition and resistance. It is unsurprising that, both intellectually and socially, a deviation from a system in which students would be taught explicitly in English and instead in their native language (in this case Spanish) would cause controversy, no matter how small the group. Of course popular support did exist for the new law. In addition to a growing Latino community, Massachusetts had long had immigrants and communities of non-English proficient speakers of Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, and Greek decent, for example. The Transition to Bilingual Education Bill saw broad based support in these communities the year after is passage (Kobrick). The 1970s was a period of experimentation and trial and error for the Transition to Bilingual Education Bill in Massachusetts, and as such the level of more severe opposition to its implementation had not yet been felt in Boston and throughout the Commonwealth. There were some who had long supported bilingual education, and yet were not fully satisfied with the Transition to Bilingual Education Bill, they felt that it didn’t go far enough. These proponents argued that the state law should have required local school boards to offer maintenance and/or late-exit bilingual education programs in Massachusetts’ schools (Lam 58). Educators saw these formats as critical, and viewed them as far different in nature than the more transitional programs which Massachusetts passed. Certainly school districts could have implemented maintenance or late-exit bilingual programs, but nothing in the law explicitly required it. Professor Jim Cummins of the University of Toronto explains the clear difference between maintenance and transitional programs: According to Professor Cummins, in transitional programs there is an expectation of cultural and linguistic assimilation into English as opposed to maintenance programs which more explicitly seek to improve a student’s literacy in both languages, viewing both as an asset associated with demonstrable cognitive benefits (Cummins 3-49). By contrast a late exit program allows English Language Learning students to receive language instruction in their native languages for many years longer than a transitional program usually allows (Jacobson and Faltis 73). The initial transition also was incredibly problematic because of the rushed nature of the law and the systemic problems that emanated from this being a new venture. Recognizing the need to provide services to Puerto Rican students who were not yet proficient in English, the Boston Public Schools created the Department of Bilingual Education. This department had only existed for one year prior to the legislature’s passage of the new state law. On an operating budget of $2 million ($12 million in 2014, adjusted for inflation), Boston Public School’s Department of Bilingual Education vastly expanded in three years, increasing staff to 167 with the goal of hiring 35 teachers and implementing a proper training program for these educators. Bilingual guidance counselors, consultant teachers, and community liaisons who even visited homes in Boston’s Puerto Rican communities assisting parents with health, housing, and other issues of human services (Goodale 6-7). The Boston Department of Bilingual Education saw to it that extensive cultural training programs were available for teachers at schools that had implemented Bilingual Education. These training programs included teaching students in addition to strategies for cultural competency and bridging the gap between white, black, and Latino students, particularly necessary as teachers in the district had seen high profile instances of tensions between these groups of students. Problematic however was the fact that the effectiveness of these programs and trainings truly varied from school to school and even teacher to teacher, as some non-bilingual teachers alleged that their bilingual counterparts (and students) were receiving special treatment because of class size exemptions, supports offered, and not part of the school community (Goodale 7, 11-18, 20). The 1980s would usher in the beginning of more popular and severe opposition to bilingual education throughout the United States. In fact because of the broad based cultural attacks on all forms of bilingualism that came from this era, one might refer to this time period as the nadir of bilingual education in America. In collaboration with the National Archives and Records Administration and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library, the University of Texas at Austin has made available online thousands of archives of Reagan’s presidency otherwise only available in Washington DC or Simi Valley, California. Less than two months into his presidency, while speaking to the Mid-Winter Congressional City Conference of the National League of Cities. Addressing what he saw as federal encroachment upon local boards of education, Reagan told his audience:
“Not only are the funds not available to meet all these mandates, often the mandates themselves are impossible to fulfill. In Fairfax County, Virginia, for example, students come from 50 different language backgrounds, 15 of which are spoken by more than 20 students. Were it able to follow the former HHS guidelines, the county would incur the expense of sponsoring bilingual programs in 15 different languages, including Urdu, Hindi, and Laotian. Now, bilingual education -- there is a need, but there is also a purpose that has been distorted… it is absolutely wrong and against the American concept to have a bilingual education program that is now openly, admittedly dedicated to preserving their native language and never getting them adequate [sic] in English so they can go out into the job market and participate. Today, I renew a pledge I made to your conference in Atlanta in December. I will examine the mandates issued by the Federal Government and take action to remove any undue burden placed upon local governments throughout this country” (Reagan).
This attitude gave rise to a two pronged strategy for attacking Bilingual education in the 1980s. One prong was to claim that it was ineffective, and the other was to attack it for political and cultural purposes, including multiple proposed amendments to the United States Constitution to make English the Official Language (San Miguel 55 and 87). In 1984 changes were made to the Bilingual Education Act which scaled back federal mandates and allowed local boards more independence in decision making, and allowing local school districts to compete for funding for certain bilingual education projects (Wiley 45). Schools across the country had begun an ideological move away from instruction in English Language Leaners native Language in place of emphasis on English, and the aforementioned federal funding through competitive bilingual education projects was undermined by an overall federal decrease to bilingual education programs (Diaz 54). It is difficult to objectively assess the impact of this political and cultural opposition here in Boston. What can be inferred however, is that despite Massachusetts’ more notably progressive traditions, neither the state nor the city of Boston is totally immune to waves of populist sentiment, despite whatever end of the political spectrum they may fall. By the 1990s Massachusetts’ Transitional Bilingual Education Program was beginning to be looked at more and more critically and negatively. Opponents argued that the program simply wasn’t yielding results, and those arguments were not necessarily without merit. True enough, anyone convinced that bilingual education is the best method for educating English Language Learning students can find statistics and studies to corroborate this theory. On the other hand, the same is true for those who oppose bilingual education. But in sustaining a program like this amid rising opposition to the idea of its existence, not to mention results, statistics and evidence on both sides is clearly not enough as it was easy for opponents to emphasize its ineffectiveness. In 1994, only 5% of Massachusetts’ students were English Language Learners. By contrast, in the Boston Public Schools that figure was 17%. The same year, the Massachusetts Bilingual Education Commission reported that they found no conclusive evidence one way or another whether or not Transitional Bilingual Education was yielding positive or negative results for student performance, a blow to opponents of the system (Rossell and Baker 9). More unavoidable and disappointing facts here in Boston were troubling for how well the city was educating English Language Learners, and disproportionately Latino students. Spanish speaking students were and are still the largest language group receiving language services in the Boston Public Schools. In 1990, however, Latino students had the highest dropout rate of any ethnic/racial group in the system, and the lowest achievement test scores, particularly in the area of reading (Rivera and Nieto 128). The Lexington Institute, a Washington DC area think tank, had found that in 2001, of the Boston Public Schools with Bilingual Education programs, nearly all had failed to meet their own objectives, with one school having only successfully educated (by the standards needed for students to be placed in mainstream classes) 9% of its English Language Learners in the required three year period (Soifer). Criticism rose that the system, as it had been implemented, was too bureaucratic, managed too strongly from the top down, and inflexible to the needs of local community school districts. There is merit in these arguments, and few advocates of bilingual education at the time would claim that the Transitional Bilingual Education program was perfect. But arguments from some local school districts were quite different from arguments made in others. While some school district leaders in Massachusetts had openly expressed frustration with the mandate, others, Boston included, hadn’t opposed it by the 1990s and early 2000s. The distinction here seems to be that certain districts welcomed the program, and, as a result of structural problems that nearly all urban school districts face, needed more support/reform. All of these controversies and debates seemed to meet a perfect storm in the early 2000s in Massachusetts. After successfully spearheading public battles in California and Arizona to severely hobble bilingual education programs in those states, a young Los Angeles millionaire, Ron Unz, founder of “English for the Children,” decided to take his fight to the East Coast, pushing an agenda to end the state’s Bilingual Education Program (Kurtz). Gathering a coalition of “English Only” supporters along with those frustrated with the current system of bilingual education, the narrative on and against bilingual education in Massachusetts clearly seemed to favor Mr. Unz’ campaign. By November 2002, with the support of a then relatively popular Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mitt Romney, having made it a central theme in his campaign, Bay State voters would go to the polls in wide support of Question Two, effectively killing bilingual education in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It is key that historical analysis of the results of implementation and abolition of bilingual education in Massachusetts and thus Boston Public Schools identify the impacts of this decision for the city’s Latino students and families, and what, if any, changes should occur moving forward. A few years following the death of bilingual education in Massachusetts, a group of concerned citizens and community activists convened in order to address some of the structural problems that they saw in the Boston Public Schools. The Citizen Commission on Academic Success for Boston Children included diverse members from many aspects of civic and activist life in Boston including City Councilor Chuck Turner, Hubie Jones, Mel King, Mirien Uriarte, and Mariama White-Hammond. Their report recognized that Boston Public Schools’ Two Way Bilingual program prior to 2002 was problematic, but they also revealed other more disappointing figures: 43% of English Language Learners aren’t receiving any level of language services at all, a sharp reduction since the referendum; teachers not having received adequate training and professional development needed for teaching English Language Learners due to funding problems; the mainstreaming of students who are not yet English proficient; lack of general accountability; and BPS not informing parents of English Language Learners of their rights to waivers for their children’s placement in SEI (Sheltered English Immersion) in place of a more supportive language program (Transforming the Boston Public Schools). Boston schools who receive high numbers of waivers from parents have the ability to create stronger language programs in partnership with BPS. Despite hobbling many students’ ability to transition to English and receive a proper education, there is some reason to be optimistic moving forward. The policy changes that resulted out of the 2002 ballot initiative that eliminated Massachusetts’ Transitional Bilingual Education program would, half a year later, meet an important challenge to its goal. In the summer of 2003, over the objection and veto attempt of then Governor Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts legislature exempted K-12 two-way bilingual programs from the law, largely because of the belief that these programs differed in instruction and socialization of students (Howard, Sugarman, and Christian). This waiver had been granted on the basis of effective instruction and demonstrable results of three Massachusetts schools, including Boston Public’s own Rafael Hernández K-8 School in Roxbury, a two-way bilingual demonstration school where instruction and learning happens in both English and Spanish for all students, regardless of “language minority” status (Diez and Karp 1). This is a system that has been touted with pride by former Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, former School Superintendent Carol Johnson, and others. Proposals to create other dual language schools have since been initiated, particularly as results often show that students in these dual language schools are outperforming peers in other schools without the two way bilingual program. While it would be inaccurate to classify these two-way bilingual programs as being the same as the now abolished Transitional Bilingual Education programs, the implementation of a curriculum that includes both English and Spanish, in many ways mirrors the former program. Opponents of bilingual education would be intellectually dishonest to neglect to recognize the successes of some form of bilingual education as they are panning out in Boston’s three dual language schools. As such, it is key for policy makers to understand the successes of the current model, work to rectify structural difficulties in creating two way immersion schools, and to implement them where possible. Only time will tell if more will be constructed. And while the Hurley, Muniz, and Hernandez offer terrific advantages to Latino students to transition to English (as well as non-Spanish speakers to learn another language), three schools in a district where the plurality of students are Latinos is not enough, and the BPS should work to expand these models. Activists in contemporary education circles today here in Boston have pushed for expansion of these programs in other languages in communities with high numbers of particular immigrant groups, such as Cape Verdean Creole in the Bowdoin-Geneva community, or Haitian Creole in Mattapan. The success of Boston’s Latino students is inextricably linked to the success of the district. As the city becomes more diverse and the Latino population continues to increase, it is the social responsibility of educators, administrators, and policy makers throughout Boston to ensure that the Latino community is receiving the full blessing of a promise of public education like all other ethnic groups. The current statistics are not only a moral failure, but they call into question the very competency of urban public school systems to educate one of our fastest growing groups. The disproportionate number of Latino students who are English Language Learners in the school system means that this success will be seen when the city becomes more innovative in creating solutions to properly educate all of our English Language Learners that take from the best of solutions today and in years past, and allow all students the opportunities to succeed, not just a handful who are selected by the basis of a school lottery. Finally, because of the high number of Latino students who are immigrants, it is critical that Boston Public Schools improve upon cultural competency training among teachers for the service of the city’s students and their families. Despite many of the problems with the early bilingual education program as implemented in Boston, this was one of the earliest examples of success. Certainly the end of Transitional Bilingual Education in Massachusetts had a harmful impact on Boston Public Schools, but over a decade since that decision, there is no reason why the city cannot begin to create its own solutions that have been proven effective. These solutions won’t be “easy”, nor will they solve all of the social inequities present that impact Boston’s Latino students, but with hard choices, creative minds, and an appetite for reform, they are possible, and in the nation’s first public education system, anything less is unacceptable.

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