Massachusetts 'English Only' referendum
Slick right-wing campaign defeats bilingual education
By Bryan G. Pfeifer
Amherst, Mass.
"English Only" is now the law in Massachusetts.
After a slick, well-publicized, xenophobic campaign, Silicon
Valley multi-millionaire Ron Unz and his organization, English
for the Children, managed to get 68 percent of the vote to
abolish bilingual education.
Flush with victories in California in 1998 and Arizona in
2000, Unz managed to get Question 2, known as the "Unz
Initiative," on the Massachusetts ballot and Amendment 31 on
the ballot in Colorado for the Nov. 5 election. In Colorado,
however, "English only" was voted down.
A virtual replica of California's Proposition 227, the
provisions in Question 2 will replace the state's existing
bilingual education law in September 2003 with a one-year
English "immersion" program, thereby wiping out successful
bilingual education in Massachusetts' public schools.
Furthermore, the measure contains a provision that those
educators who continue teaching students in their native
language can be held liable. Anyone sued under the provision
must pay damages out of their own funds that cannot be covered
by insurance or a union. Teachers could be fired and banned
from teaching for five years for "defying" the measure.
A counter campaign, led by scores of Massachusetts unions,
civil rights organizations, students, parents and anti-racist
community organizations, among others, fought to the end for
Question 2's defeat. Their arguments are many, but all agree
that English "immersion" initiatives have been a complete
failure in California and elsewhere and that the majority of
"English only" supporters like Unz have never been in an
educator's seat. Because of this, many bilingual supporters
suspect Unz is just a Trojan horse for more conservative
forces.
They are correct. Unz--like Ward Connerly, Linda Chavez and
David Horowitz--is an anointed spokesperson of the far
right-wing neo-conservative movement disseminating its policies
worldwide.
Unz and the right-wing
Who is Ronald Unz?
According to a May 8, 1994, Los Angeles Times profile
published a month before Unz opposed incumbent Pete Wilson in
the 1994 Republican primary for governor of California, Unz was
a top student who received a Ph.D. from Harvard and moved on to
a Wall Street firm. He left there to start his own business
writing computer code for major corporations. He eventually
made enough money to start giving donations to conservative
foundations like the Manhattan Institute.
By the late 1980s Unz had made enough connections and money
to be courted by the neo-conservative movement, eventually
being named to the Board of Directors at the misnamed Center
for Equal Opportunity (CEO).
The CEO is directed by Linda Chavez, a former Reagan/Bush
Sr. appointee for various posts, an author, a syndicated
columnist and political analyst for Fox News. Chavez's most
recent book is "An unlikely conservative, the transformation of
an ex liberal: Or how I became the most hated Hispanic in
America."
According to its website, the CEO's mission is to "counter
the divisive impact of race-conscious public policies,"
focusing on "three areas in particular: racial preferences,
immigration and assimilation and multicultural education."
Mediatransparency.org, a watchdog website that tracks
right-wing funding, documents that the CEO received 39 grants
totaling over $2.4 million in the period 1988 to 2000 from
right-wing foundations including those of Lynde and Harry
Bradley, Earhart, John M. Olin and Sarah Scaife. In 1997 the
CEO received $15,000 from the Earhart Foundation for its
publication, "The New Paternalism: How Uncle Sam Replaces Mr.
Right in Women's Lives." The CEO has also published a Parents
Guide to Bilingual Education that educates parents to "learn
how to remove their children from harmful [bilingual education]
programs."
Unz's own organization, One Nation/One California Research
and Education fund, which runs the "English for Children"
program that conducted the California Prop 227 campaign,
received six grants from 1998 to 2000 totaling $330,000 from
the Carthage, Sarah Scaife and Bradley foundations. English for
the Children is also conducting the Massachusetts Question 2
campaign--it has contributed $123,000 towards this effort.
By far the majority of contributions for CEO and One Nation
have come from the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley
Foundation in Wisconsin, which has over $800 million in assets.
This premier, most influential right-wing foundation in the
U.S. gives away over $30 million annually to conservative
individuals and organizations as well as cultural, educational
and faith-based entities.
Bradley is perhaps best known for giving over $1 million to
Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein to write the racist book,
"The Bell Curve," which tried to show that African Americans
and other people of color are genetically inferior to
whites.
Bradley has also given millions to David Horowitz' Center
for the Study of Popular Culture, Ward Connerly's American
Civil Rights Institute, the Institute for Justice--a legal firm
responsible for helping abolish affirmative action in various
states and universities, the National Association of Scholars
and the Hudson Institute, which created the initial plans to
abolish the federal entitlement program Aid to Families with
Dependent Children.
Journalist Phil Wilayto, who has written extensively on
Bradley and the neo-conservative movement, says that to further
its objectives, "Bradley supports the organizations and
individuals that promote the abolishment of affirmative action,
deregulation of business, the rollback of virtually all social
welfare programs, school vouchers, and the privatization of
government services."
"The overall objective of the Bradley Foundation, however,"
adds Wilayto, "is to return the U.S.--and the world--to the
days before governments began to regulate big business, before
corporations were forced to make concessions to an organized
labor force. In other words, laissez-faire capitalism:
capitalism with the gloves off."
School under-funding gets forgotten
In using willing shock troopers like Unz, the
neo-conservative movement hopes to follow previously
"successful" conservative blueprints like school vouchers and
workfare to pit white workers against workers of oppressed
nationalities. By focusing on Latino people in the "English
Only" campaigns, the neo-conservatives even hope to divide the
African American community and other nationally oppressed
peoples from their allies. Furthermore, by abolishing bilingual
education, the neo-conservative movement hopes to erase the
culture that leads to national identity, because this in turn
leads to political struggle and unity against a common
oppressor.
The racist and privatization schemes manufactured and
propagated by the neo-conservative movement divert the debate
from where it needs to be: the under-funding of public
education from the federal level on down, which has resulted in
a growing chasm in educational opportunities. In light of
severe budget cuts in this state and across the nation that are
gutting social service spending, and an impending U.S. war on
Iraq that will cost from $50 billion to $200 billion, the
neo-conservatives' motives become clear.
Although Question 2 won in Massachusetts, Colorado voters
weren't, for the most part, diverted into Unz's and the
neo-conservative movement's racist, fear-mongering
campaign.
Taking this lead, the working class and oppressed can defeat
other "Unz Initiatives" being cooked up for other states by
focusing on the real issues and struggling for solutions to the
economic, social and political crisis bearing down on
millions.
Reprinted from the Nov. 28, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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