By Thomas Ultican / Tultican
The tragedy of modern school “reform” is that it stopped education improvement.
Politicians from the Democratic and Republican Parties agreed that government-run organizations were inferior to privatized ones and market forces were the path for lifting all boats.
Their economic theories led to charter schools and vouchers for private, mostly religion sponsored schools.
Moguls and legislators, with no education training or knowledge decided that standards, modeled on business practices were, required. It has become a tool for privatizing public schools, controlling classrooms by politicians in capital cities, and is making learning dreary.
It is wonderful to learn of professional educators standing up to this folly and implementing practices promising to undo some of the damage.
In Orange County, California, Alison Dover and Fernando Rodríguez-Valls, associate professors in the Department of Secondary Education at California State University, Fullerton, have been developing the Language Explorers program since 2015.
The methods they used can be adapted to any classroom or discipline. Their newly published book by Teachers College Press is Radically Inclusive Teaching with Newcomer and Emergent Plurilingual Students Braving Up. With this book, when combined with the supplemental materials at Professor Dover’s web site, any teacher’s practice can be advanced.
Cultural Destructiveness
In 2001, I began teaching in a California school, often being the only White guy in classrooms where the bullring in Las Playas de Tijuana was in sight. Naturally many many of the students were native Spanish speakers and some of them had almost no English abilities. Surprisingly a student’s multilingual abilities were not prized. In fact a state law pushed by software developer, Ron Unz, mandated English only instruction.
Around the change of the millennium, Unz financed legislative initiatives in California and Arizona, replacing bilingual education with English immersion programs, also known as the “Unz initiatives.” They were detested by many teachers, administrators and parents alike and eventually challenged in Arizona. In 2015, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the state rejecting the plaintiffs’ argument that the approach violated the federal Equal Educational Opportunities Act.
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