My response as a hispanic and very republican conservative is don’t judge people on their language of choice. As someone very interested in languages and linguistics, I can tell you that most people lose the ability to learn a new language early in life (try it yourself, and try to get the accent right, too). But it doesn’t make them any less intelligent (which I hope none of yall were implying)–perhaps the woman felt more comfortable expressing herself in the language she knew best. I’m bilingual myself, english effectively having taken over as “native language”, so I find it harder to express myself in spanish. But because I can’t as easily express in spanish what I am expressing here in english does not denote any lack of intelligence, drive, etc.

English will continue to evolve just like it had when it was Old English. Our brand of the language would be unrecognizable to the Old English. I don’t see this influx of immigrants as a bad thing some people try to make it out to be. It’s the natural course of the world, the way God wanted it. I wonder if the Native Americans should reform their nations to kick us all out for immigrating into their land “illegally”, especially since us naturalized offspring don’t want to leave. No, they shouldn’t. Let’s live together as a loving people and show the rest of the world we live under God’s principles, not man’s ideas of “my land! go away unless you wanna get shot”

As a son of immigrants, I know that we are indeed motivated to succeed as any of you are. That’s why we came here in the first place, and why we take jobs other people just won’t take (like factories, pest control, sanitation–are these the jobs being taken away from “americans”? If so, you can have them back, b/c they’re not fun, let me tell you!), because we have a hard work ethic put into us by our culture, in spite of the lazy mexican stereotype. Once here, we’re trying to learn a new language on the fly because we haven’t the time nor money for classes which can be spent working to feed a family and pay bills. It’s a luxury natives of this country have in not having to worry about language much at all, but uproot yourself to a brand new country with only 50 dollars in your pocket and see how many night classes you can attend.

Should immigrants in the US be forced to learn english? I find that the english spoken by many hispanics is just fine, but native speakers are snobbish and insist on not being able to understand it. This is what causes an unwillingness for people to speak it (you would too if, say, a frenchman patronized your speech everytime you spoke). Besides, language is living and evolving; how do you suppose the Romance languages evolved out of Latin? They started out as non-standard Latin dialects mutated by the speakers of a region.

But should immigrants be forced to learn english? Nah. You can live in Miami all your life and not have to deal with english, actually. I think immigrants should be helped and given the resources (it’s not “socialism”, it’s called being kind to your neighbor) to learn if needed. Perhaps if we cut out things like income tax, it wouldn’t be such a big deal to provide these programs. The whole “legal” vs. “illegal” thing is inconsequential–they’re here, so deal with it like the Christians we are and show them love, not throw them back to the place they’re trying to escape.

I speak spanish everyday. I was in the gifted program, and then I went through the whole bussing thing for a magnet high school in downtown Baton Rouge, LA. I’m now a senior at LSU studying biology. Did english make me smart? Nope, God did. and some work, too. But because my hard-working immigrant parents came out of a communist nation looking for a place where the people are supposed to be kind to each other because they were mostly Christian.

I still believe this country can be that, but the Right needs to stop marginalizing a hefty portion of the country that has most of their same moral ideals on abortion, faith, same-sex unions, etc. And this group is the immigrants. Wake up before the Left takes them all it (and they’re doing a good job of that, too!)

The great debate on public education can be traced back to the early 20th century when the advent of social-ism and communist in the far corners of the world engaged the liberal mindset in America and changed the political thinking of the liberal party forever.

Here surely was the answer to everything unfair and stupid about America. At last a shining path had opened to free the worker slaves from their capitalist masters and provide true equality in our time.

Sounded great I’m sure. The Democratic Party sure did go for it (hook, line, sinker and boat). This political “earthquake” in the world not only led to terrible wars and suffering for millions, it also led to long-term suffering for Americans that is being carried on to this day even though we now know these economic constructions don’t and can’t work as long as 1 dang person believes that someone who sits on their duff should have the same economic opportunity as someone who works like a dog and creates jobs.

The reality today is that we have found that it is (from a practical standpoint) impossible to “layer” a federally mandated quasi-command/social-istic economic structure on top of an economy that operates within the context of a free market system because the federally mandated structure is deprived of the “good” benefits of competition that can only be found in the free market economic context.

I humbly offer proof of my claims as follows:

a) Ask yourself this question: If you polled 100 reasonable Americans and asked them whether a public school education was a better quality educational experience than a private school educational experience, I’d imagine nearly all of them would pick the private school.

That must mean that private schools cost more, huh?

Sorry, you’d be wrong.

According to the US Department of Education, in 2003 the per pupil per annum spending worked out as follows:

i) Public schools: $6,600 average cost.
ii) Non-parochial private schools: $3,200 average cost.
iii) Parochial private schools: $1,500 average cost.

Now ask yourself the question, when was the last time you thought our kids and education workers in the public school systems were getting enough money?

Never, right?

The reason is that there is no competition for capital investment or revenues under the federally-mandated public education system we have today.

Here’s what you get as a result of that approach:

a) Education workers have no direct economic incentive to work harder – so most don’t.

b) Schools know they will be funded whether the school does the job or not, so most don’t.

c) The relative quality of our kids educational experience keeps declining (compared to other industrialized nations) because they aren’t engaged by the schools, so they don’t show or bother with the work – they’ll get passed thru anyway so why bother?

If you love irony, then you’ll love this.

If we ALLOWED our government to completely privatize education and sell off the government controlled assets, the federal government’s resulting one-time gain could be reinvested back into the newly privatized industry in the form of bankruptcy proof investment constructions that earn 12 to 18 times what the current Social Secutiy Trust Fund investments earn without the risk exposure that accompanies those current investment practices, then we could pay off the current $11 trillion Social Security Fund shortfall within 10 years – in its entirety.

If you have a thinking cap maybe you should put it on and look beyond the busing and fussing.

The first experience was fine, I have to say. The academics were on par with my suburban school, and I made a lot of friends from all over the city, including several black kids.
I learned a lesson about people that looked different from me and my neighbors that I wouldn’t have learned from watching “Sanford and Son” or “Fat Albert”.

The second experience was not fine. For 6th grade I was bussed to an urban “Magnet School” for gifted students. The school was actually a normal inner city school with a gifted program. I reconnected with exactly one of my old friends, a black girl who shared some of my classes. The other friends that I made in 2nd grade, all black boys, made a fine show of ignoring me, especially on the playground.
I learned another lesson.

Despite the program I was bussed for being designated “gifted”, my studies were now behind the grade level that I was taught at in the suburbs. I lost a year of math and science instruction and never really caught back up. The only real extra was a superficial introduction to computers (Apple II-E’s). Somehow the talismanic presence of a computer was supposed to make up for the extra 40-minute commute and the lack of challenging instruction in the real world. I think of this whenever I hear new and expensive computer or internet initiatives for failing school systems.

Bussing at 2nd grade seemed to be fine as long as the curriculum and teachers were of decent quality. We were young enough, all of us, to be relatively untouched by preconceived notions of race. By 6th grade, though, the bloom was definitely off of the rose! The race lines were really beginning to be firmly drawn and the learning curve was only getting steeper. At that point bussing was more about satisfying federal quotas in order to qualify for school funding (or to meet court orders) than benefiting school children by way of social engineering.

Which is really what this is all about.

Let me be the “Devil’s advocate” here for a moment. You could say this is a problem of our own making, in that we continually make accomodations for non-english speakers. Why should they bother to take the time to learn english when schools will teach their kids in their native language, TV stations/radio stations/newspapers are available, heck even product containers now have directions in English, Spanish and French!

Our church sponsered Vietnamese family and they were all speaking adequate English within a few months and within a year had an excellent grasp of the language. It was because they wanted to be part of the American Dream and didn’t want language to hold them back.

The current influx of llegal Spanish-speaking immigrants don’t seem to have the same motivation, even when they stay a long time. For that woman, after fifteen years, to be answering the question in Spanish, instead of English is unconscionable, but clearly illustrates the problem in the schools of both parents and children who are ill-equipped to handle the scholastic setting, yet at the same time apparently ill-motivated to what should be done to deal with the situation.

It makes you feel like this isn’t immigration, but rather an invasion.

Chris…is this a California state law…or something else? I am not aware of it. In fact during the wave of immigrants from Vietnam in the ’70’s those students (at least in PA) were put in english immersion classes to get them up to speed with basic english before they were put in math, science or other classes. In Massachusetts (2003), a law was passed requiring one-year of english immersion classes for immigrants who are not adequately fluent in english.

As an educator, I’m sure you work hard at what you do, but that is not entirely the case with some of your compatriots. In Montgomery, there have been teachers who were asked to help setup additional learning curriculums and tracks. They refused, not because of the law, but because they simply didn’t want the burden of doing it. I happen to call that laziness. Admittedly the unions play a role in this too, but those union officials are elected by those same teachers.

Chris: I have a friend who is a public High School teacher, and semnds his son elsewhere. Seems to be a lot of that going around.

Mark: Yeah, this is the age in inhuman educational behemoths, even in rural America. Personally, I thing the whole gov’t school system ought to be scrapped in favor of a market-based system.

I think that mainstreaming has some benefits, but as far as learning is concerned, students would learn much more in smaller communities where they can get the help they need and those that are on pace can continue to thrive.

Dennis Prager has a book out about this stuff. Isn’t it titled something like Hard America vs. Soft America??? I really can’t remember.

Fourteen years in the U.S. with her kids going to that school and she can’t speak English in response to a question. I guess that says it all… Sad, sad, sad.