Big Lie #5
Prop. 227 would violate no civil rights laws

"A successful legal challenge [to Prop. 227] is improbable; the Clinton administration admits the measure is constitutional and in accordance with federal law." — Ron Unz, San Jose Mercury News, 10 May 1998

Here's what U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley actually said on April 27, 1998: "The Unz Initiative will in all likelihood result in problems under federal civil rights laws. ... Limiting special language development instruction to one year and preventing a school from providing bilingual instruction to students, despite the judgment of teachers and the school principal that children in that school need bilingual instruction to progress, are likely to result in violations under these laws."

Secretary Riley referred in particular to

• Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination on the basis of national origin in programs supported by federal funds;
• Lau v. Nichols, the 1974 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that requires school districts to take "affirmative steps" to help students overcome language barriers obstructing their access to the curriculum; and
• the Equal Educational Opportunity Act of 1974, which codified Lau as a federal statute.

While bilingual education is not specifically mandated under these laws, it is widely used by school districts as a tool for meeting their obligations to English language learners. These obligations include providing programs that are educationally sound, adequately staffed and financed, evaluated for effectiveness and (if necessary) improved to correct inadequacies – according to criteria used by the U.S. Office for Civil Rights. On several occasions, federal courts have required bilingual programs as the most appropriate way of teaching particular groups of students (e.g., Keyes v. School District No. 1, 576 F.Supp. 1503 [D. Colo. 1983]).

Prop. 227 is thus open to legal challenge on several grounds:

• Arbitrary denial of native-language instruction to students who, in the judgment of educators, need such assistance to do schoolwork appropriate to their age and grade.
• Arbitrary limitation of language assistance to one year, regardless of students' English proficiency.
• Arbitrary exclusion of limited-English-proficient children from programs designed to cultivate fluent bilingualism, such as "dual immersion," which would remain open only to English-speaking children.

As the U.S. Department of Education explains, "The one size fits all approach [of Prop. 227] is inconsistent with educational practice and research that tells us that children learn in different ways and at different rates."