When President Clinton and Vice-President Gore talk about the need to reinvent government, there is a tendency to dismiss this as a catch phrase. That's a mistake; it's an effort to deal with a serious problem that can and should be dealt with. Most people agree there are problems that federal, state or local government should be handling. However, they have doubts that government can handle them sensibly and effectively. Their doubts are well-founded.
Over 20 years ago, a judge decided it was not fair that a young Chinese boy named Kinney Lau who didn't understand English had to get his education in classes where only English was spoken. The Supreme Court agreed in a decision called Lau v. Nichols, It said that providing Kinney Lau with instruction only in English was the same thing as denying him an education.
This decision stimulated the establishment of a variety of programs, including bilingual education, all over the country. The idea of bilingual education-- teaching kids in a language they could understand while they were making the transition between their native language and English--was a good one. The sink-or-swim approach to learning English that we once employed with immigrant children was very rough. Almost all children are frightened when they first leave the familiar atmosphere of home to go to school, but for the child who does not speak English, the experience can be terrifying and lead to a permanent dislike of school and learning. Bilingual programs can help by allowing these kids to learn some of their subjects in their native language while they are learning English. Also, while insisting that they do learn English, bilingual programs can get across the idea that these youngsters should be proud of their origins rather than ashamed of being different, as many youngsters used to be.
But the rules and regulations used to administer bilingual education programs can create the same kind of obstacles to educational opportunity that the law intended to remove. For example, the New York Times recently told the story of how a Hispanic-surnamed child who spoke only English was assigned to a class that was taught almost entirely in Spanish ("School Programs Assailed as Bilingual Bureaucracy" by Joseph Berger, January 4, 1993). Vanessa Correa was put in exactly the same spot as Kinney Lau, the young Chinese boy-- she was stuck in a class where she could not understand what was going on.
Was Vanessa the victim of some sort of snafu? As a matter of fact, assigning the English-speaking child to a class where she would be taught in Spanish was entirely in accordance with the rules of the bilingual program. The child had a Hispanic surname and a test showed her to be below average in English, and that was enough. That she was born in this country and spoke no Spanish didn't matter. And it wouldn't have mattered if she had been equally poor in English and Spanish or if her Spanish had been much poorer than her English. The rule would still have placed her in a Spanish-language class.
When Vanessa's parents, fluent speakers of English, complained about the placement, the bureaucratic machine groaned into action and put the child into a class for students who had English as a second language. Given the rules, there was no way of getting her into a regular class where she could learn her native language-- English-- along with other youngsters who were native speakers. The way the bilingual education law was administered recreated the problem the law was intended to solve. So much for the spirit of the Lau decision.
This story happened to take place in New York City, but it is not a New York story. The same thing happens in bilingual education everywhere. And the same thing happens with many other well-intentioned government programs.
In recent years, conservatives have taken advantage of stories like Vanessa's to attack the value of all government social programs. They say that any time the government-- federal, state or local-- undertakes a program, it turns the program into a mess. The public generally recognizes that matters like day care or health care are best handled by government, but when they look at some of the disasters, they have second thoughts.
The solution is not to do away with the government's role in solving social problems but to do away with the stupid rules that govern many programs. Not only do these rules create incentives to lose sight of the individuals they are supposed to help; they also undermine good programs and can ultimately destroy them. It has been a year since Vanessa Correa's story made the front page of the New York Times. Has the rule that landed her in a class where she could not understand what was going on been changed? I doubt it.