[Reposted from FlashReport, March 7, 2013. This piece makes clear why my party affiliation today is "decline to state."]
CA GOP NEEDS SENSIBLE HISPANIC OUTREACH
By Doug Lasken
In its current soul-searching, the state and national GOP is finding that it must reach out to blacks and Hispanics, whom the party has lost to Democrats. The problem, as conceived by some, is that the GOP has become the de facto “white” party, with “white” interests often defined in xenophobic terms that appeal to few Blacks and Hispanics, and in fact repel many whites, resulting in a white/minority party.
The advice for outreach is timely. Certainly in California the state GOP needs to regain a share of the Hispanic vote. But how will it do this? Should the party adopt liberal positions about solving everything with money, perhaps praising the Los Angeles Unified School District for recently showering thousands of I-Pads on inner-city Black and Hispanic kids in furtherance of Bill Gates' theory that technology = learning? As a 25-year veteran of LAUSD, I can guarantee that a third of those I-Pads will be sold or lost before the end of the year. Reading scores will be unaffected. The Gates foundation will not object to replacement orders of I-Pads. Blacks and Hispanics will continue to vote Democratic in spite of ill-considered policy promoted by party allies. The state GOP would gain nothing by copying such liberal policy.
Then how will the GOP change its “message” to include Hispanics? I suggest that, for a change, GOP leaders do their homework and actually study policy and history.
For starters, party leaders need to understand the difference between Proposition 187 in 1994, and Proposition 227 in 1997. The first decimated membership in the state GOP; the second should have grown Hispanic membership in the party, but didn’t.
Prop. 187 passed but was thrown out by the courts. It would have prohibited illegal aliens from using health care, public education, and other social services in California. The financial logic was acceptable to a majority of Californians. LAUSD, although it refuses to disclose the figures of undocumented students, has, per public estimates, several hundred thousand. How is their education paid for? No one knows, or if they know, they do not say. The same for the county health-care system. The problem with 187 was not the financial logic, but the social reality. I taught inner city Hispanic kids at the time 187 passed, and I could readily see the chaos it would have promoted. Without figures it’s hard to know, but I anticipated that a third or more of the students at my school would have been denied enrollment and health services. Los Angeles would have been a dangerous and dark place, with thousand of primary and secondary kids roaming the streets and getting sick without care.
It was not a pretty picture, but the state GOP, lead by Pete Wilson, pushed hard for 187 passage, alienating most of the Hispanic electorate in the process. The party has perhaps learned the lesson of 187. Now it has to learn the lesson of 227.
Prop. 227 eliminated bilingual education in California, mandating that non-English speaking children be taught English upon enrolling in a California public school. It passed by a healthy margin, which included many Hispanic votes, and was upheld by the courts. Many Republicans supported 227, and it should have been a boost to the state GOP. As noted, however, it did the party no good at all. That’s because the party leaders did not understand 227- why it existed, why it was upheld- just as they had not understood 187.
It’s hard to believe now, 16 years after 227 passed, that for decades California enforced something called “bilingual education.” I put “bilingual education” in quotes because it is a misnomer, purposely devised by bilingual supporters to cloud the issue. “Bilingual” denotes two languages, and a bilingual person is a person who speaks two languages. However “bilingual education,” as practiced in California (with supporting regulations from the Department of Education in Washington) mandated that an immigrant child study a single language: his or her native language. When a kindergarten student entered LAUSD, if the native language at home was determined to be Spanish, the student was designated Limited English Proficient (LEP) and put into classes that spoke only Spanish (the "bilingual" system was offered almost entirely to Spanish speakers, not, for instance, for Armenian or Korean speakers, per the theory that Hispanic kids cannot learn a new language as well as other ethnicities, a theory stated explicitly by leading "bilingual" theorists. The LAUSD Bilingual Master Plan permitted English to be spoken thirty minutes a day- the English as a Second Language (ESL) component- but ESL could only be conversational English. No academic English was permitted at any time. All textbooks and academic instruction had to be in Spanish. Parents were told not to speak English at home, lest they confuse their children. An extremely difficult English exam was required to “re-designate” into English, and most kids could not pass this test until middle or high school, so that entire generations of Hispanic kids in California got no English instruction at all. Needless to say, English literacy skills plummeted and the Hispanic community is still recovering.
The real-life differences between 187 and 227 are clear. 187 would have thrown thousand of children out of school and into the streets. 227 gave immigrant children an important civil right: the right to learn the common language of their adopted country.
Why did the state GOP not get behind the very popular 227 and the struggle against bilingual education? One problem was that no party leaders understood the issue, and leadership did not know it could effectively rebut the inevitable charges of "racism," "discrimination," etc.
Most Hispanic parents supported 227. Every Hispanic parent I talked to over 25 years in LAUSD was opposed to bilingual education. Parents wondered why their children could not start English instruction right away. Hispanic students as well did not understand the policy. After I became a high school teacher in 1999, many Hispanic high school students asked me why they hadn’t been able to study English before 9th grade. 227 had come too late for them.
The state Democrats opposed 227, and the GOP should have moved in as an advocate for Hispanic education, but the party, which had been scorched by 187, was not up to the creative act of learning about an education policy (from anyone other than a publisher's rep) and acting accordingly. Today, even after 227's passage, millions of dollars are spent on classifying Spanish speakers, with special efforts to promote waivers to 227 so that students can be put back into Spanish only instruction. None of this is on GOP radar.
The same know-nothing (or know-it-all) approach to policy doomed George Romney’s presidential campaign. Romney’s advisors saw no need to understand Obama’s signature education initiative, the Common Core Standards- a $10 billion piece of pork that will do nothing for schools outside the South (where academic standards were low and needed to be replaced)- so Romney never attacked Common Core, except to claim, incorrectly, that it is bad because the federal government will pay for it (the states pay). Even now in California, no GOP figure will criticize Governor Brown for supporting Common Core, which will cost the state $2 billion, paid by Brown's Proposition 30 (in other words, by us). Common Core offers the perfect formula for a GOP issue: Big Publishing sets the agenda for public education, a conflict of interest of epic proportions. But it is not on the GOP's radar.
No one should be surprised that a party with no intellectual leadership, no ability or desire to understand a changing political and cultural environment, has fallen on hard times. My message to Mr. Brulte and others who have challenged themselves to bring back the state party, is that they should start by promoting a culture in which policies are evaluated, not for their emotional impact, or the baggage attached to them by liberals, but by their real-life merit.
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Doug Lasken is a retired Los Angeles Unified teacher, freelancer and consultant. Write to him at doug.lasken@gmail.com.
Postscript, May 8, 2018: In September, 2016, the implementation of Common Core in California and the replacement of the state's previous standardized tests with new tests aligned with Common Core - rushed for political and financial reasons- resulted in a meltdown of testing and instruction from which California school districts are still recovering. Yet the state GOP remains mute on the subject. They don't want to win, it seems, which is why Donald Trump was able to pick-up the party for a bargain basement price.
