What is going on in Colorado?
I had been following the battle over bilingual eduation in Colorado only tangientially (click on the archives link at the bottom, then on the 10/4 link, to read about it), but the mailing list that I'm on sent around a very interesting letter today from Ron Unz, the chair of English for the Children, a group combating the bilingual-only educators. Here are selected quotes:
As I have mentioned previously, the wide lead that this measure, Amendment 31 [to end bilingual education for most of Colorado's non-English-speaking students], had long enjoyed in public opinion polls has now been largely reduced to a dead-heat by a massive opposition advertising campaign, funded entirely by a somewhat eccentric white billionaire heiress named Pat Stryker, whose political contribution of $3M is far and away the largest in Colorado history.
As was also mentioned, the massive advertising campaign funded by that white billionaire seems intended to play on the unsubtle fears of white conservative voters, running visually-gripping ads featuring throbbing doomsday music while an announcer claims “We know that Amendment 31 will knowingly force children who can barely speak English into regular classrooms, creating chaos and disrupting learning”...
Now massive advertising campaigns intended to provoke fearful and base reactions among white voters may have obvious consequences, even if some of those particular consequences are not entirely intended by the billionaires funding the campaigns. Given these facts, we should not be wholly astonished at the breaking news stories now starting to appear in the Colorado media.
On Friday night, for example, [leader of the ballot initiative to scrap bilingual education] Rita Montero’s car was fire-bombed outside her modest home in Denver, and the police have confirmed arson as the cause of the nine-foot-high flames. Added to the pattern of late-night menacing phone calls, garbage thrown into the yards of Amendment 31 supporters, signs torn down, and jobs threatened, Colorado seems almost to be bizarrely heading down the path of reenacting some television documentary of the desegregation struggles of 1965 Mississippi.
Even more troubling is the report that just days after a young Latina immigrant girl was shown on the local television news expressing her desire to be moved from segregated Spanish-only classes to regular classes with white students, the embarrassed Denver school in question did exactly that, but the white teacher in her new white classroom immediately burned her hand with the open flames of a Bunsen Burner, allegedly as part of a science lesson intended to teach her “how molecules expand.”
What a truly bizarre story. An oddball billionairess donating wads of cash and running incendiary ads in order to keep non-English-speaking students out of English-only classes, a firebombing against a proponent of English-only education, and an alleged assault by a teacher.
Do I have any readers in Colorado? Is anyone out there following this story? I usually only mention the bilingual-ed educational programs in order to point out that, for example, they don't seem to work very well, if you define "work" as "teaching kids to be literate in English". Now it appears the multiculturalist educators and rich benefactors have unwillingly aligned themselves with the racists in their attempts to keep Colorado's kids from learning English. What a mess.