In 2006, Indian Country united in an extraordinary way and successfully secured passage of the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of 2006. In 2007, the challenge will be in securing adequate funding for the new programs authorized by this legislation to truly make a difference in assuring the vitality of Native languages. There is serious opposition to our efforts. Set forth below is an article in opposition to Native language programs, along with the response of the National Indian Education Association as well as the actual language of the Act.
|
Bad in Any Language
H.R. 4766 needs to be blocked.
By Jim Boulet Jr.
|
H.R. 4766, the “Native American Languages Preservation Act,” is scheduled to be considered by the U.S. House of Representatives under a suspension of the rules as early as today. This expedited procedure is generally reserved for legislation naming federal buildings, honoring champion sports teams, and other such uncontroversial items.
The purpose of the bill is to fund the teaching of Native American languages. The original version of H.R. 4766, introduced by Republican Heather Wilson of New Mexico on February 15, has been somewhat toned down by Education Committee staff for its presentation on the House floor. Unfortunately, the revisions are mostly cosmetic.
If the aim is to learn a language, both the private and the public sector use the proven immersion method. All you hear is the new language. All you speak is the new language. Fluency soon follows. For bilingual advocates, learning English is at best a secondary goal — something made all too clear by H.R. 4766. This disordering of priorities does a great disservice to the students who need to learn English.
Bilingual-education advocates apply the immersion approach to the wrong language. The best way to teach English, they claim, is to have students sit in a classroom hearing and speaking nothing but the non-English language of their ancestors. As a result, “graduates” of bilingual-education programs remain mystified by English.
H.R. 4766 specifically applies the bilingual-education approach to children aged seven or younger. These kids are to be immersed in a Native American language for “an average” of 500 hours per year per student. Five hundred hours is a goodly chunk of the average September through May school year (40 weeks times 30 hours of instruction per week equals 1,200 hours).
For this reason alone, Section 2 of the revised bill is aptly entitled, “Expansion of Program to Ensure the Survival and Continuing Vitality of Native American Languages.” At a time in life when children of Limited English Proficient parents need to hear the most English in order to develop fluency, H.R. 4766 seeks to ensure they will hear far less.
H.R. 4766 utterly fails to mention the word “English.” What it does require is that grant recipients “work toward the goal of all students achieving fluency in a Native American language and academic proficiency in mathematics, reading (or language arts) and science.” Legislative silence of this sort invites suspicion.
Advocates of H.R. 4766 are apparently unaware of how difficult it is to learn to read an unwritten language. Many Native American languages remain unwritten, yet this legislation urges government grants for “the development of Native American language materials, such as books.”
This is not as stupefying as it may appear to be. Bilingual-education advocates deem nothing impossible; a solution can always be found — and funded by taxpayers.
The Carter administration’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the then-new Department of Education ordered an Alaska school district to give Eskimo children bilingual-reading instruction, despite the undisputed fact that no written version of the children’s language existed.
OCR’s solution? The school district was required to pay for the creation of a written language for these children and then teach them to read it. (This stunning exhibition of mindless bureaucracy is recounted in the Fall, 1986 Journal of Law and Education article, “The Social Science Evidence on Bilingual Education,” by Christine H. Rossell and J. Michael Ross.)
The issue of Alaskan native-language instruction leads to another curious aspect of the revised version of H.R. 4766: neither the term “Native American” nor “Native American Languages” is legally defined anywhere amidst seven pages of text devoted to various minutiae (e.g., “Native American language and culture camps”; a “master-apprentice model of learning languages” and “interactive media”).
By contrast, the earlier version of H.R. 4766 was not nearly so coy. It contained specific definitions of both “Native American” (“The term ‘Native American’ means — (A) an Indian; (B) a Native American Pacific Islander, (C) a Native Hawaiian; and (D) an Alaska Native”) as well as “Native American Language” (“The term ‘Native American language’ means a historical, traditional language spoken by Native Americans”).
Both House and Senate Republicans have demonstrated their disinterest in creating still more special treatment for Native Hawaiians, in thanks largely to both National Review and now-House Majority Leader John Boehner. Accordingly, stealth is now necessary. A review of the existing definitions section of current law, referenced on page six of the “sanitized” version of H.R. 4766, finds all the needed terms already in place: “Native Hawaiians” (42 U.S.C. 2992 (c) (3)), “Alaskan Native villages,” and “Native American Pacific Islander.”
Should H.R. 4766 ever be signed into law, Department of Education bureaucrats can simply say that since Congress did not amend these preexisting categories, Congress must have intended to fund native language instruction programs for every single one of them. Earmarks by Senators Stevens (R., Ala.) and Akaka (D., Hawaii) can be relied upon to fill in any gaps.
— Jim Boulet Jr. is Executive Director of English First.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
Response to Talking Points and Article “Bad in Any Language” by Jim Boulet on H.R. 4766
- Contrary to Mr. Boulet’s claims, H.R. 4766 does not create a new program. It would simply allow three additional uses for grant funding in a currently authorized (42 USC 2991.B.3) Native language preservation grant program at the Administration for Native Americans (ANA) in the Department of Health and Human Services(the Department of Education does not manage this program).
- This program at ANA is a discretionary grant program. It does not contain any mandates that schools must follow. Rather, the provisions in H.R. 4766 simply provide criteria to determine eligibility for grants. Also, there are no new funding mandates or requests. This currently appropriated (42 USC 2992.D.(e)) program would be subject to the same procedure that other appropriated funds require.
- Contrary to Mr. Boulet’s claims, schools receiving grants under H.R. 4766 would still be subject to NCLB and its requirement of English proficiency. When H.R. 4766 was going through the House, the House Education and Workforce Committee deleted an English proficiency requirement on the advice of the Department of Education because the Department determined that it was redundant under NCLB.
- Mr. Boulet inaccurately claims that students in schools that would receive these grants will never learn English. In the current programs in Indian Country that provide over 500 hours of Native language instruction, the children receive instruction in their Native language for only part of the day and receive instruction in English for the remainder of the day. These children take their standardized tests to meet Annual Yearly Progress in English. Data shows that the children who are in programs that receive over 500 hours of instruction through the Native language actually perform better academically as measured by state standardized tests than their peers who are not in these programs.
- Mr. Boulet claims that S. 2674 and H.R. 4766 are similar bills. However, H.R. 4766 is a very different bill from S. 2674. Unlike H.R. 4766, S. 2674 creates a brand new program with a new authorization for appropriations at the Department of Education. S. 2674 also amends the No Child Left Behind Act in the areas of paraprofessional qualifications as well as performance assessment requirements. In September, Senators Akaka and Inouye put holds on H.R. 4766 because they believed it was a “do nothing bill” and that it did not satisfy their Native Hawaiian constituents who seek to enact S. 2674. We are talking about a very different bill.
- Mr. Boulet asserts that Native American languages are somehow new languages for these children. Native languages are not new to these children because they are already embedded in their culture. Further, Native American parents are not unskilled at English as claimed by Mr. Boulet. Rather, Native Americans live in a dual society where they speak both English and their Native language but it is the Native language that is threatened, not English.
- Groups like U.S. English support preservation of Native languages because they understand that these languages are not spoken anywhere else in the world; and, if they are not preserved, then they will disappear forever.
- Mr. Boulet claims that H.R. 4766 is a “bridge to a lifetime of unemployment.” Mr. Boulet should meet the Navajo Native Code Talkers who used their languages to save thousands of soldiers and who have led successful and rich lives.
_____________________________________________________
Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of 2006 (Enrolled as Agreed to or Passed by Both House and Senate)
--H.R.4766--
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/thomas
|