Word: barbarae
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Four California school districts had already asked the state to waive its requirement that a student be taught core subjects in his native language while he is learning English. But no request had sparked a protest as vitriolic as the one in Santa Barbara. The city's move last week served as an early warning for the fate of bilingual teaching throughout the state--and for the rise of a potent political issue nationwide...
...native-language instruction (mainly because of a shortage of bilingual teachers), making it difficult to blame Latinos' scholastic failures on that approach. Does bilingual education affect the 30% dropout rate of Hispanics nationwide--more than double the rate for blacks or whites? Is it related to Santa Barbara's finding that only 11% of its Latino elementary students read English at grade level and only 18% read Spanish at grade level...
Alan Ebenstein, 38, an economist and member of the Santa Barbara school board, answers both questions with a qualified yes. "As we emphasize English more at the elementary level," he predicts, "we'll have more success at the secondary level." Armando Vallejo, director of the Casa de la Raza, the community center that housed the alternative academy set up by the boycotters, retorts that abolishing bilingual classes amounts to "cultural genocide...Kids sit in the back of the classroom for a couple of years without understanding, and they get disillusioned. That's when they join gangs...
...Santa Barbara last week, defenders of bilingualism considered their next move. A lawsuit against the school board? A general strike? A boycott of Anglo businesses? Mirna Nunez, a principal organizer of the protest, vowed, "We're going to fight this to the end!" Meanwhile, though, the boycott of the schools dissolved, and the kids made their way back to class...
...what might have been an effort to blunt charges of both favoritism and publicity seeking, NASA used the same occasion to announce that Idaho schoolteacher Barbara Morgan, a backup for Christa McAuliffe on the doomed Challenger mission, would be assigned to a flight as well. That did not satisfy all naysayers, however, and their criticism was not completely unfounded. Glenn is hardly the only older pilot the agency had on hand. Story Musgrave, a six-time shuttle astronaut, retired from the astronaut corps in 1996 at age 61 when NASA told him he was too old to fly. John Young...