José E. Serrano: “Mr. Chairman, one of the problems with this amendment, the Roth amendment, is that it is an amendment that speaks to the…”

“Mr. Chairman, one of the problems with this amendment, the Roth amendment, is that it is an amendment that speaks to the language issue during an education debate, and while the language issue may, for some people, be a legitimate issue, it certainly does not belong in this kind of a debate, because this debate should be about education. The fact of life is that if we take it as an education issue, bilingual education has been proven to help. The National Academy of Sciences found in 1992, in its assessment of two major evaluations, that bilingual education was helping and not hindering young people so they could acquire English as their main language. Much has been said here today about parents somehow desiring their children not to speak English. We cannot really believe that. The fact of life is that most polls taken of parents newly arrived from any community, indicates that parents want for their children as quickly as possible to learn to speak English. Bilingual education is a tool to allow people to learn subject matter while at the same time they learn to speak English. I can tell the Members from personal experience the difficulty of being placed in a mainstream program without knowledge of the language. When I arrived in New York from Puerto Rico, I arrived as a migrant, not as an immigrant, speaking Spanish only.”