Bilingual Education for the Mexican Americans - A Way out of the Vicious Circle?

University of Potsdam

Bilingual Education for the Mexican Americans
- A Way out of the Vicious Circle?

by

 Julia Hansens

Content

Introductory Remarks 3

Introduction 3

Bilingual Education for the Mexican Americans
- A Way out of the Vicious Circle? 4

Conclusion 19

Works Cited 21

Introductory Remarks

This paper on the Mexican Americans in the south-western states in the United States aims at examining whether bilingual education of this ethnic group could be a means to help the Mexican Americans escape the vicious circle they live in.

The introduction will give a short historical overview over the Mexican Americans′ schooling.

In the main part, the description of what is referred to as vicious circle will be followed by the depiction of the Mexican Americans′ situation in school in the south-western states of the United States. As this situation cannot be considered as good, the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 which marked a first step towards an improvement will be introduced. Apart from that, two models of bilingual education will mainly find reconsideration and will be compared with each other regarding their usefulness to give the Mexican Americans an equal educational opportunity as the Anglo Americans have. Towards the end of the main part, the attempt will be made to answer the topic question of this paper. Several obstacles on the way to ′good′ bilingual schooling and possible alternatives will be mentioned then.
The concluding remarks will sum up the result of this paper and will shortly focus on the contemporary situation of the Mexican Americans in the American school system.

Introduction

The Mexican Americans are native to the United States for hundreds of years before the Anglo Americans′ arrival (Duran 1973, 14). For that reason, the cultural exclusion is not only difficult but also immoral and there is no reason for sending them away and oppressing them.

However, the educational system has always been chaste-like with the Mexican Americans building the lowest chaste and the Anglo Americans on the highest rung (Cordasco 11). In the 1930s the existing unwillingness of mixing in school can be seen from two sides: First of all the Anglo Americans did not want to be taught together with the Mexican Americans because they considered them to be lousy, filthy, lazy, disinterested, unconcerned about education and to be part of an inferior race (Johnson 98). Moreover, they were blamed to slow down the Anglo Americans′ process of education (Cordasco 12). Secondly, apart from this stereotypical viewpoint, the Anglo Americans were of the opinion that the Mexican Americans benefit when being taught in Mexican-only schools and could more quickly overcome their "English language handicap" and, with that, become "americanized". Other reasons that were said to justify the Mexican American segregation were their poor attendance and health and their different social background (Cordasco 12).

But after the Second World War the Mexican Americans demanded better education and a couple of parents stood up for the integration of their children who they saw where being segregated just because of their descent (Cordasco 13). This case of 1945 marked the beginning of the illegality of segregation in schools.

Despite this first success, segregation has not even stopped until today.

According to bilingual education of the Mexican Americans in the south-western states, programs and debates about it only came up in the 1960s.

Bilingual Education for the Mexican Americans - A Way out of the Vicious Circle? 

The statistics reveal that Mexican American pupils as compared to Anglo American pupils generally lag behind in schoolwork by at least three years (Duran 347). They can be considered the most retarded ethnic group in the United States. The Negroes are one year in advance. The Mexican Americans even have a lower educational attainment than the Puerto Ricans and the Cubans (McKnee 112).

There are many different factors playing an important role with regard to the Mexican Americans‘ high amount of retardation. First of all, they have different social advantages: Many of the Mexican American families are poor as they have a low income. They do mainly do manual labour such as fruit picking and farming. For that reason, these families need their children to work on the fields and to do the harvest which makes these children miss a great amount of time in school. As Thomas and Taylor found out in their research on children of migrant families (Duran 1982, 348), most of the children have to work over a period of seven months annually, a fact that leaves only five months of school per year. But this is not the only reason for their retardation. Secondly, the American school system has to be made responsible as well as it is said to “function[s] best when conforming middle-class administrators and teachers professing middle-class values, address themselves to middle-class students who possess the same value orientation or are in the process of acquiring it. Lower class and minority students who do not fit in the mold are less likely to be educated [...]” (Johnson 88).

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