Qualified Public Support for Bilingual Education: Some Policy Implications

Abstract

Bilingual education has become politicized. It is surrounded by controversy, the outcome of which may play a greater role in deciding its future as an educational program than its educational successes. To better understand this political debate and its possible outcome, the present article examines attitudes toward bilingual education among the Anglo majority, in terms of general support levels, the origins of support, and its future trajectory. We find that currently the majority feels moderately positive toward bilingual education. Opposition is greatest among those who have generally negative attitudes toward minority groups and immigrants and who oppose special favors for them and among those who oppose increased government spending and spending on foreign-language instruction. Anglos' actual personal experience with bilingual education plays only a minor role. Opposition is greater among the well informed, suggesting that opposition may increase further as the issue attains greater national visibility. Opposition is also likely to increase if bilingual education is presented as promoting linguistic and cultural maintenance among language-minority students rather than as a mechanism for teaching English.

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12. The screening question used was, “What do you consider your main ethnic group or nationality to be?” This national sample was a proportionate-to-size household sample based on the 1980 U.S. Census. Market Opinion Research conducted all interviews by telephone. We refer to our sample, throughout, as Anglos, but, of course, this includes a mix of English-speaking majority and minority group members. Of the sample, 12 percent were black.

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13. Note that these areas do not contain Hispanics of exactly the same background, with those of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Mexican origins dominating in the four areas, respectively. For more information on the survey, sample characteristics, and scale construction, see Desdemona Cardoza, Leonie Huddy, and David O. Sears, The Symbolic Attitudes Study: Public Attitudes toward Bilingual Education (Los Alamitos, CA: National Center for Bilingual Research, 1984). For more information on the distinction between symbolic politics and realistic interest theory as it applies to the case of bilingual education, see Leonie Huddy and David O. Sears, “Opposition to Bilingual Education: Symbolic Racism or Group Conflict” (Unpublished manuscript, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989). For more information on the effects of symbolic predispositions and symbolic meaning on attitudes toward bilingual education, see David O. Sears and Leonie Huddy , “Linguistic Conflict as Symbolic Politics: The Role of Symbolic Meaning” (Unpublished manuscript, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989).

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