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SACRAMENTO, March 25 -- Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz, who turned the school
establishment on its head with his successful drive to ban bilingual education, is taking aim
at California's political movers and shakers with a sweeping campaign reform initiative.
Called the "voters bill of rights," his catch-all ballot measure would restrict political
contributions and spending, ban corporate donations, provide limited public matching funds
for campaigns, boost disclosure requirements, limit legislators' salaries and turn the task
of redrawing district lines over to an independent commission. Unz, an unsuccessful
Republican candidate for governor in 1994, has joined with Democrat Tony Miller, a
former acting secretary of state and twice unsuccessful candidate for statewide office, to
launch the drive to place the measure on the March 2000 ballot. (Los Angeles Times)
IRVINE, Calif. March 9 -- UCI graduate Virginia Mosqueda had to acquire a new skill after
voters passed Prop. 227, the law that abruptly halted bilingual education. She had to learn
to say no. No to the parents who worry that their children are falling behind in English
immersion classes. No to their requests for after-school tutoring to help with homework
that the parents can't read, much less understand. Mosqueda, 25, runs a homework center in
Delhi, an old Latino neighborhood in Santa Ana. She and a small staff tutor about 50 Latino
kids from this crowded, blue-collar barrio known for its strong Catholic parish and its
street gang. The program was launched by a nonprofit neighborhood group last summer, just
after Mosqueda emerged from UC Irvine with a degree in political science. Almost
simultaneously, Prop. 227 became law, forcing schools to suddenly switch to English
instruction. By fall, there was a waiting list for the Delhi tutors, who work out of a portable
classroom with hand-me-down tables. Today, 54 children are still waiting for room to
enroll. There's just one big problem. The school year's already half over. This rash
initiative tries to address the needs of immigrant parents who can't help their children with
classwork in English. The law makes available $50 million per year to help prepare parents
and others to be tutors. Santa Ana Unified got $1.4 million. L.A. got $11.8 million. (Los
Angeles Times)
ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. March 9 -- Maria Rosales usually cleans two houses a day. But on
Mondays and Wednesdays, the Spanish speaker cleans only one home so she can get to her
English class at Gates Elementary School. "I couldn't speak in complete sentences," Rosales
said. "But more than that, I couldn't help my kids with their English homework." The mother
of three is among a growing number of Spanish-speaking parents who are tired of turning to
their bilingual children to translate everything from newspapers to report cards. The state
is accommodating parents like Rosales. While schools cannot offer bilingual education in the
classroom, they are opening up more ESL classes geared toward parents. Proposition 227,
which mandates that virtually all instruction for children be in English, also allocated about
$50 million for schools statewide to create more adult language courses. One catch ‹
parents and others who take the free classes have to pledge to tutor one limited English
student. (Orange County Register)
TUCSON, March 7 -- Three decades ago, this desert city was the birthplace of the national
bilingual education movement, a point of pride among many Latinos here. For them,
Spanish-language classrooms are as much a part of the local landscape as the saguaro cactus.
This year, Ron Unz came to Tucson launching a voter initiative that would do away with
bilingual education in Arizona, a plan nearly identical to the one he wrote and California
voters approved last year. But what really riles the bilingual faithful is that Unz has the
support of a small group of disaffected Latino residents: teachers, parents and grandparents,
some of them natives of Mexico. They invited the Silicon Valley millionaire here to help
jump-start their pro-English cause. (Los Angeles Times)
