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Bush Appointee Takes Sides Against English Immersion
Bushie Gives Bilingual Ed a Si. Bush Administration Education Secretary Rod Paige announced over the weekend his opposition to a proposal that would create a state constitutional amendment obliging Colorado schools to place non-English speaking students in one-year immersion courses rather than bilingual education courses favored by the education establishment. The Denver Post’s reporting paints this as a struggle between local control and centralization, with Paige and his bilingualist allies defending local control while the pro-immersion lobby responds by saying that bilingual education amounts to “segregation.” Do we have a dog in this fight? Isn’t our dog is the one the Denver Post manages not to hear barking: reforming immigration? Posted by at July 16, 2002 04:02 PM | Send Comments
Some paleos argue that when possible, the managerial state can be used to enforced public civility. So therefore one would side with the immersion program, since it puts more pressure on the side of the English language and all that it represents. Can that dog hunt? Posted by: Jim Carver on July 16, 2002 6:16 PMA constitutional amendment certainly seems the wrong way to go. I don’t see the issue though as local control vs. centralization so much as the autonomy of the education profession (which necessarily aligns itself with experts and the managerial therapeutic state) vs. popular political control. Posted by: Jim Kalb on July 17, 2002 9:17 AM |