Xavier Becerra: “Some of the speakers on the other side of the aisle have said that this bill will not void current consent agreements…”

“Some of the speakers on the other side of the aisle have said that this bill will not void current consent agreements, compliance agreements we have with about 288 different school districts, voluntarily agreed to. You may want to say they were coerced, but they still took a vote and voluntarily agreed to do this. Section 7404 reads Any compliance agreement entered into between a state, locality or local education agency and the Department of Education is void. ``Is void.'' It does void our compliance agreements that try to help these districts make sure that we are educating all of our children properly. It is a cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all, because it tells those local districts how they must do things. It is an effort to undermine the ability of children to learn English because it does not take the best practices that we have seen from all the research and say this is the way that you can do it, but you do it how you see fit. In San Francisco and San Jose they just finished taking, along with every other school district in the State of California, a standardized test to find out where California's kids are. The kids in San Jose and San Francisco who were graduates of bilingual education programs in those districts, guess what, scored higher than native English speaking children; higher.”