« Patrick Kennedy Crashes Without Burning | Main | Tuesday »

May 9, 2006

Laura Ingraham - Bad Times at California High

by Ferdinand T Cat

On today's Laura Ingraham show she railed against a California judge who struck down a high school graduation test. The ruling is preliminary, and we will not know the final decision until Friday, but Laura felt the fact a judge is ruling on a state-wide high school graduation requirement is more evidence of an out-of-control judiciary. As it happens, 44% of the students unable to pass the exam are not fluent in English, so the discussion veered off into the general topic of the resources sucked up by the need to teach English as a second language.

The judge's ruling is based on the theory that a state-wide exam violates the Equal Protection Clause, because of the existence of substandard schools in some communities. The test has three parts-- English, Math, and Algebra-- and requires 10th-grade skills in each subject. Laura talked about the story of Liliana Valenzuela, who is the primary plaintiff in the suit. Liliana is ranked 12th in her class, but cannot pass the English portion of the exit exam because she speaks primarily Spanish.

Now, regardless of equal protection and rogue judges, the truth is that Liliana would have a much rosier future if she learned the English language. Prior to yesterday's ruling, Liliana would have had to stay one more year and learn to speak English, giving her a shot at college and a middle-class job. Fortunately, a judge has intervened, and now there's a good chance Liliana will be able to spend the rest of her life watching stupider people achieving the American dream while she stays mired in low-wage jobs.

Bruce thinks we should present the problem as a choice between (A) teaching Liliana to speak English or (B) teaching every other person in the entire country to speak Spanish. The thing is, I suspect that given such a choice, an awful lot of politicians would go for plan (B). So, here's MY argument for requiring English:

A study from the Foundation for the Advancement of Knowledge and Education shows that Spanish-speaking high-school graduates are much more likely to work for Wal-Mart than English-speaking graduates.

That's right, I'm invoking the name of the Great Satan: W-A-L M-A-R-T.

Spanish = Wal-Mart
English = Starbucks

I'll be mailing this study to Nancy Pelosi tomorrow. Start buying stock in Spanish-to-English dictionaries tonight.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Trackposted to Wal-Mart Cove, Wal-Mart Watch, Those Wal-Marts!, The Business of America is Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart Mike's Musings, Wal-Mart Folk Using Common Sense, The Wal-Mart Sib, Stingray: A Blog for Wal-Mart Christians, Planck's Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart Kitty, Jo's Wal-Mart, and Basil's National Chain of Stores With Suspicious Ties to Conservative Causes.

# At Tue 9:01 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (2) | More Laura Ingraham

Trackback Pings

» A Terrible Problem that Affects Spanish-Speaking Teenage Girls from Conservative Cat
Yesterday the Senate debated an amendment declaring that English was the national language of the United States. While speaking against the amendment, Minority Leader Harry Reid told the following story about one of his employees (excerpted from the Co... [Read More]

Tracked on May 19, 2006 1:48 PM

Comments

Yeh. Saw the process of creating a permanent underclass in the last pubschool teaching gig I had. ESL curricula are usually simply a way to keeping Spanish-speaking kids from learning English... insuring a permanent underclass.

Was once different. I once taught in a barrio school in a Texas border town. ALL classes were in English, which was the way the parents wanted it. A large part of the reason these folks had for being IN the U.S. (Green Carders, for the most part) was so their children could have a real shot at The American Dream, and that meant learning to speak and read and write English fluently. Sure, many of the kids in the classes I taught struggled, cos many of them had little or no English at the beginning of the school year. But classes were in English (except for two very CHRISTIAN carols in Spanish for the Christmas program).

But that was thirty+ years ago...

Irony? During the last teaching gig I had (in a district three states away from the earlier one), I met one of the students from that school. She was working in the ESL program, crippling Spanish speaking kids so they would be less likely to be able in the future to get work with the level of pay SHE had.


Posted by: David at May 12, 2006 8:40 AM

You live here you speak the language. That's the only possible policy.


Posted by: Dave at June 3, 2006 5:38 AM

HTML is not allowed in comments; however, if you put in a raw URL (http://www.somewhere.com/page.html) it will automatically be converted to a link.. Also, it is likely your comment will not appear unless you refresh the page manually after posting it.

Post a comment