AAS205 Mar - Lau v Nichols Perspective – 11/1/02

 

 

LAU =

-        Struggle to change the educational system

-        4 yrs courts and appeals process & long post decision struggle to fashion what the Supreme Court asked for

-        an appropriate remedy acceptable to both an

-        Insensitive/racist/anti-immigrant?  school administration and school board united in opposition to bilingual education

 

KEY LESSONS?

Ling-Chi Wang –  -

-        parents and communities important not to burn out and give up hope

-        final Lau decision was the result of an unyielding and sustained push by a broad coalition of formerly powerless community groups and parent organizations.

-        mobilizing the Chinese American community, take control over fashioning the remedy following Lau,

-        build a broad multi-racial coalition and

-        persuade the entire school board to approve a master plan that mandated a maintenance program for bilingual/ bicultural education.

 

POLITICAL CONTEXT –

-        APPROACH – Legal arena as avenue of last resort after all others had been tried and exhausted

 

-         3 yrs! - Chinese- American community held meetings with school administrators at all levels, conducted numerous studies that demonstrated the needs of non-English speaking children, proposed different approaches to solve the problem, staged demonstrations to protest school indifference and inaction, packed school board meetings to demand bilingual education programs, and developed community alternative programs to rectify the rapidly deteriorating situation. Nevertheless, they found themselves to be totally powerless and fighting an uphill battle.

 

 

DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES - number of new immigrant students entering the school system escalated each year. More and more Chinese American children were dropping out of school and forming street gangs that engaged in the violent activities for which Chinatown became very well known. This was a time of mounting anger and frustration with a bureaucracy mired in inertia and indifference. Community members picketed the school district and attended community meetings, one of which was terminated when frustrated students and parents began throwing eggs and cherry bombs at the superintendent who provided no answers to the problem. They also set a car on fire and one principal was injured.

 

SFUSD/POLITICIANS & BUREAUCRATS’ RESPONSE –

-token gestures and band-aid solutions.

1 hr/day in an English as a Second Language (ESL) class like ‘one-a-day vitamins dispensed by the school administration’.

SCHOOL BOARD – early on – had only one vote on a board that was so divided and preoccupied with issues like integration, bussing which they viewed as more important. We were just ‘another pain in the neck’ while they were trying to deal with another court mandate. The school-bussing program started in 1971, so there was concurrent discussion and debate around that controversial issue.

 

Lawsuit strategy

May 28, 1970, the facts were stipulated by plaintiffs and defendants:

1. 2,856 Chinese-speaking students in San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) needed special instruction in English.

2. 1,790 received no help or special instruction at all, not even the 40 minutes of ESL a day.

3. Of the remaining 1,066 Chinese-speaking students who did receive some help, 623 received such help on a part-time basis and 433 on a full-time basis.

4. Only 260 of the 1,066 Chinese-speaking students receiving special instruction in English were taught by bilingual Chinese speaking teachers. [role of TACT – Association of Chinese Teachers today in sfusd?]

 

Outside of these special English classes, most Chinese students needing help in English were placed in regular classes and taught solely in English where they could not adequately compete with their peers.

 

Psychological/academic/social impact? –

 

Students and parents and community –

tremendous frustration, discouragement, resentment, truancy, delinquency, and dropping out, [hidden – shame and often not discussed openly because Chinese American children were considered to be model minority students.

 

Teachers and counselors were equally frustrated and helpless. Their preparation and training did not include techniques for teaching and counseling Chinese-speaking students.

 

Jan. 1974

Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a very favorable decision.

 

Afterwards –

immigrant communities formed a

-         multi-lingual language rights and education coalition

of community leaders and parents and

demanded that the school board to

-         appoint a multi-lingual citizens' task force

-         to develop a master plan for bilingual education.

 

Superintendent’s role - tried everything possible to prevent that from happening, the coalition was eventually able to prevail upon the school district.

 

POWER – not at the school board level – so only way to influence the plan was to form a citizens' task force to do a study in response to the Lau decision. After intensive lobbying, the school board reluctantly agreed that we should form a task force to respond, and find the best way, to meet the Supreme Court's requirement.

 

KEY POINTS – multiracial organizing/advocacy

1st time in the history of San Francisco, Latino, Asian, black and white parents united.

1st time - school board actually appointed a committee made up of community members (other than the multi-lingual, multi-racial integration advisory committee) to deal with the issue of how to respond to the Lau decision.

 

It took quite a while to get to that stage. We knew if we were to allow the board to formulate its own response to the Lau decision, we would probably end up with another type of one-a-day ESL class. We also knew that the District Court judge, to whom the case was remanded by the Supreme Court, was not about to support any kind of bilingual education as a remedy to the decision.

 

ACADEMIC INSTs. = the school board also agreed to retain the Center for Applied Linguistics to help us formulate this plan. After a lengthy period of study, we submitted a 700 page report, The Master Plan for Bilingual Education, to the board.

 

Superintendent immediately rejected by the superintendent as ‘too extreme’. He did everything possible to prevent the board from adopting the master plan. Once again we mobilized the community. As a result of the multi-lingual, multi-racial task force work, we were able to involve a broad segment of the San Francisco community who had previously been disenfranchised and powerless. Using the Supreme Court decision as a rallying point, they formed a broad coalition for the first time and focused on this issue.

 

We attended school board meetings with 400 to 500 people, and worked to advance this plan requiring bilingual/bicultural education as the only legitimate way to fulfill the mandate of the U.S. Supreme Court.

BOARD - After several months of intensive lobbying, the board finally and reluctantly approved the master plan. Although we had to make some modifications to the original plan, the master plan, as adopted, required bilingual/bicultural education of the maintenance type.


 

 

KEY LESSONS –

 

-        important it is for immigrant and language minority groups to unite and work together for change in the school district and at the school board level

-        Develop a vision & don’t accept band-aids--

-        Demand hard money fully integrated into the school budget vs. discretionary funds to support bilingual education.

-        Organizing parents and community and bldg power key in forcing unanimous approval by the board, even though we started with only one vote.

-        Long – ongoing struggle to integrate bilingual education, step-by-step, into the school system.

-        $ and other constraints - hard time implementing the plan due to the shortage of teachers, materials, and other problems

-        key – linking immigrant rights to educational justice and other community concerns

-        students and parents make history and impact own lives but also national impact