In the Internet age, story placement on “Page One” of a newspaper is less important than it used to be, but it does at least signal that editors (as defective as they are) believe the news is particularly significant or “man bites dog” interesting.
In a sneaky way, that’s why Banker & Tradesman never puts the Cohen column on page one – knowing that it belongs on the front page, but also knowing that readers will go tearing through the rest of the paper, looking for it.
Occasionally, there is no credible explanation for page-one placement. Consider the front page of the Boston Globe one day last month, which featured a four-column-wide headline revealing that the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating Boston’s “failure” to provide adequate language instruction to students who speak limited English.
That’s about as interesting or unexpected as a story explaining that Cohen has won yet another award for his outstanding business journalism. No surprise. Both stories belong on p. 38.
Lingua Franca
The feds and state and local governments have been engaged in a death march for decades now, attempting to explain, define and enforce some sort of standards for kids who walk through the front door of school with limited, or in some cases, no English-language skills.
The dominant, although in no way universal, premise for teaching these kids today is the “bilingual” approach: teaching them English, but allowing them to learn certain skill subjects in their native tongue, so they don’t grow up to be liberal arts majors; that is, smooth talkers who can’t actually do anything except, perhaps, write newspaper columns.
In decades past, when the notion of teaching multiplication tables in Creole to those who needed it, was beginning to catch on, there was a quiet but angry battle between the “bilingual” crowd and those professional educators who preferred the “English as a Second Language” philosophy, which tilted heavily toward English, spoken loudly if necessary, to wean the kids from their native tongues as quickly as possible.
In the current rounds of befuddlement about how to teach these kids, the border states in particular have been the last bastions of hostility to “bilingual” – often establishing timetables and deadlines to get the kids reading “Moby Dick” in English or a corporate annual report in whatever language that is.
In discussing why the Justice Department was sniffing around Boston, looking for language laggards, poor Boston School Superintendent Carol Johnson sounded like a bank CEO explaining mark-to-market accounting to a poetry seminar.
The schools want all “these students” (you know who they are) to be “well served,” she mumbled, without elaborating on the urban mess of thousands of limited-English students, speaking God-only-knows how many different languages, with varying degrees of intellect and educational background in any language.
Johnson did hint at one of the dirty little secrets of the bilingual quagmire: Many of the middle-class-striving immigrants resist, and run away from, bilingual programs – a combination of snobbish dislike for other “immigrants;” and a personal philosophy that tilts towards learning English as a dominant priority.
In the good-old-days, when the targeted students were called “LEP” (Limited-English Proficient), the federal Equal Education Opportunity Act was wielded like the Mighty Hand of God, demanding that school districts do everything, or anything, or, at least, something, credible to bring the immigrant kids up to speed.
The courts are littered with bewildering cases attempting to determine what passes muster, what isn’t good enough, and whether Castilian Spanish is appropriate to use, if your student body is Puerto Rican.
The investigation of the Boston schools will keep untold numbers of young Justice Department lawyers and various local, state and U.S. Department of Education bureaucrats occupied for months, except when they go home at night and kick their dogs and drink a stiff Scotch or two.
At the end, you won’t need a front-page story. The recommendation will be to spend much more money on bilingual programs, spend much more money hiring bilingual teachers, and if all else fails, hire a tired, old, retired federal judge to “monitor” the situation.
As they say in the Boston schools, “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.”
