Gap Analysis

Although English-only policies surfaced early in American history, this country was founded on principles of pluralism. The United States has always had a multi-linguistic heritage, owing to its history of settlement by immigrants. The Founders of the United States had a generally tolerant view of language. In 1780, John Adams suggested the founding of a national language academy. Congress did not debate the merits of this proposal, believing such an academy was unnecessary. Years later, Noah Webster proposed the establishment of English as the national language. Webster sought endorsement from the Supreme Court, which also rejected this proposal in 1831.

The Constitution does not contain a provision declaring English, or any other language for that matter, to be the official language of the United States. Several early government documents were in fact written in languages such as, German, French, English, and later, Spanish as well.

Restrictive language policies gathered little public support until the mid-nineteenth century, when a surge of Chinese immigration led white laborers to lobby for legislation making certain rights contingent on English proficiency.

One government function is education, which is administered through the public school system by the department of education. The states, therefore, have a primary responsibility for the maintenance and operation of public schools. The Federal Government also has an interest in education. The National Institute of Education was created to improve education in the United States.

Each state is required by its state constitution to provide a school system where children may receive an education. State legislatures exercise power over schools in any manner consistent with the state's constitution. Many state legislatures delegate power over the school system to a state board of education.

Arons, S. and Lawrence C. (fall, 1980) found the following:

American schooling may be structured in a way that undercuts the most basic freedoms of democracy. For at the heart of American school ideology is the belief that schooling decisions, like most government decisions, are the proper province of the political majority. The Supreme Court has eliminated religious indoctrination in public schools, but; the imposition of secular values may constitute as significant an interference with first amendment values as the imposition of religious beliefs. Alienation from the dominant value structure may generate disciplinary problems or cause poor performance on standardized tests. In a case several years ago, the school demanded that they walk and talk and wear their clothes in a way that made their white teachers comfortable. In class, they were ignored or ridiculed because, unlike their upper-middle-class white classmates, they did not sound like their teachers when they spoke. While the most obvious form of bias in the standardized tests that permeate our education system is the bias of language, there is often a cultural and ideological bias as well. (pp. 324-333)

There is a strong concern with equality in education. Within states this leads to efforts to assure that each child no matter where he or she is situated receives an adequate education. The Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 provides that no state shall deny equal educational opportunity to an individual on the basis of race, color, sex, or national origin.

While there are other cases that can be discussed about the development of legal bases to defend the rights of language minority students, Castaneda v. Pickard has a special relevance, since it provided, and still provides important criteria for determining a school's degree of compliance with the Equal Educational Opportunity Act of 1974.

"The case was tried in June 1978; on August 17, 1978 the district court entered judgment in favor of the defendants based upon its determination that the policies and practices of the Raymondville Independent School District, Texas, in the areas of hiring and promotion of faculty and administrators, ability grouping of students, and bilingual education did not violate any constitutional or statutory rights of the plaintiff class. From that judgment, the plaintiffs brought an appeal in which they claimed the district court erred in numerous matters of fact and law" (Catandeda v. Pickard, 1981).

Following is an excerpt from court documents interpreted by K. Hakuta, & D. Witt (1999): In this case, the plaintiffs' challenge to the appropriateness of the RISD's efforts to overcome the language barriers of its students does not rest on an argument over the soundness of the educational policy being pursued by the district, [**62] but rather on the alleged inadequacy of the program actually implemented by the district. n10 Plaintiffs contend that in three areas essential to the adequacy of a bilingual program curriculum, staff and testing Raymondville falls short. Plaintiffs contend that although RISD purports to offer a bilingual education program in grades K-3, the district's curriculum actually overemphasizes the development of reading and writing skills in English to the detriment of education in other areas such as mathematics and science, and that, as a result, children whose first language was Spanish emerge from the bilingual education program behind their classmates in these other areas. The record in this case does not support plaintiffs' allegation that the educational program for predominantly Spanish speaking students in grades K-3 provides significantly less attention to these other areas than does the curriculum used in the English language dominant classrooms. The bilingual education manual developed by the district outlines the basic classroom schedules [*1011] for both Spanish dominant classrooms and English dominant classrooms. These schedules indicate that students in the Spanish[**63] language dominant classrooms spend almost exactly the same amount of classroom time on math, science and social studies as do their counterparts in the predominantly English speaking classrooms. The extra time that Spanish language dominant children spend on language development is drawn almost entirely from what might fairly be deemed the "extras" rather than the basic skills components of the elementary school curriculum, e.g., naps, music, creative writing, and physical education.

Most courts follow the guidelines of the Equal Educational Opportunities Act in bilingual education litigation. However, the language of the Equal Educational Opportunities Act is relatively lenient, and the appropriate action requirement has been interpreted by some courts to be broad enough to include English-only programs, as decided in the case of Castaneda v. Pickard.

In the Castaneda suit, parents of Mexican-American