Aim At the Core

When supporters of bilingual education communicate with the public, I think it is important to focus on the core message: What bilingual education is, how it works, and how successful it is. Only a few important links need to be made: The public is already sympathetic to the underlying principles, as Shin and others have noted.

The Unz campaigns were a wonderful chance to do this, a potential platform to explain bilingual education, but supporters blew their big chance. The anti-Unz initiative organizations aimed at the periphery and not the core, with disastrous results. In the campaigns, the focus was only on issues such as not suing teachers and allowing only one year of special help, while actually refusing to discuss bilingual education itself.

Such a strategy, even if it had helped turn back the initiatives, puts bilingual education in long-term danger: At a minimum, we failed to educate the public about bilingual education, which gives us less protection against the next attack. Even worse, it is an implicit concession that we do not believe in bilingual education. Unz quickly discovered that opponents of Prop. 227 in California were refusing to defend bilingual education in California (this advice was even posted on the No on 227 website) and took advantage of it, pointing out that even the professional bilingual education organizations would not defend bilingual education. All Unz and his allies have to do now is propose anti-bilingual initiatives that do not impose a one year limit on special help and do not sue teachers. Bilingual education would be defenseless.

This is not to say that these issues should be ignored. What I am saying is that we must emphasize the core.

The official advocacy groups were persuaded to follow this path because of advice from professional PR firms, advisors who told them that the public would never understand our abstract, intellectual arguments. But polls showed modest support for bilingual education already, and the Shin studies showed that many people understood the underlying principles. All that needed to be done was make the missing connections: Bilingual education is based on these reasonable principles, and the research supports it. Instead, the advocacy groups didn't try. The campaigns lost, as Crawford (2003) has pointed out, without firing a shot.

We should also bear in mind the possibility that some PR firms are interested in only the short-term, in winning the one campaign they are hired to help win, and do not consider the potential long-term damage their tactics might cause.

The failure to explain bilingual education and the failure to respond to attacks on bilingual education has, undoubtedly, been the cause of the decline in attitudes. Unz' mantra of failed programs became received wisdom.

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