It's too bad that Ron Unz was unable to make it today to participate on this panel as scheduled. I had hoped to continue our debate over Proposition 227, to get his answers to the many practical questions about how his anti-bilingual-education initiative will be implemented in California schools, and to hear his response to the legal challenge brought by civil rights advocates.

It would also be interesting to know whether Mr. Unz plans to stay involved with the education of limited-English-proficient students. Or whether he's going to move on to other items on his political agenda, leaving it to others to sort out the chaos that 227 has created.

This process is likely to take some time. A few school districts, such as San Francisco and Oakland, are planning resistance. A few others are bending over backward to comply, already throwing out their Spanish-language materials. Some are looking for loopholes in the English-only mandate as they formulate their implementation plans. And many districts seem to be in denial, waiting for a court injunction or at least some direction from the state. The State Board of Education is fighting with Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin over who will interpret the new law.

Parents, especially those who have English-speaking kids in those popular two-way bilingual (or "dual immersion") programs, are petitioning the state for waivers of 227. Nobody knows whether they will be granted, even though these programs are widely acknowledged to be successful.

Meanwhile, teachers and administrators remain in limbo, not knowing whether to order books for the fall and in what language. They are wondering whether they will have to cobble together entirely new programs in a couple of weeks' time, using a legally mandated English-only approach that has no track record of success. And if teachers resist, if they persist in using another language to help a child, they can be sued and held personally liable for damages – a chilling precedent.

Educators are mainly worried, however, about the impact on limited-English-proficient children. They see 227 as a disaster in the making. A straitjacket that prevents them from dealing effectively with students' needs. A blatant denial of equal opportunity.

So what is Ron Unz's response to all this? Recently he told the New York Times that he may now move on to other issues: "It's nice to be able to fix broken things. And there are a lot of broken things in California. I certainly fixed bilingual education. I fixed it but good."⁽¹⁾

This is the Ron Unz that we came to know up close and personal during the campaign – cocky, mean-spirited, ideological.... I could go on, but the poor guy isn't here to defend himself. I will say, though, that it has been frustrating to see Ron Unz portrayed in the press as a sincere advocate for children. A multimillionaire who cared about helping poor immigrants learn English. A guy whose claims were taken largely at face value, whose motives were rarely questioned, and whose conservative political agenda received very limited attention.

Meanwhile, the motives of bilingual educators – people who have actually dedicated their careers to serving children – were constantly under attack as corrupt and self-serving. Their field was portrayed as an entrenched bureaucracy, an "industry" seeking to protect its financial stake rather than to improve schools, as an obstacle to reform, as a lobby for "failed" programs versus the "white knight" Ron Unz.

This lack of balance in reporting is just one of several problems in the way the 227 campaign was covered by the news media. Which is our focus today.

As a former journalist myself, I am quite aware that attacks on the press are not unheard of by losers following an election. So they are not always taken seriously by reporters and editors, often for good reason. But I would urge you to pay close attention to the criticisms in this case. Free media, as opposed to paid advertising, played a key role in this race. It defined the terms of the debate and informed voters on a complex issue that few had any direct knowledge of. In fact, it was so effective in shaping opinions that the Yes on 227 campaign saw little need to resort to paid media – those 30-second TV spots – in the late stages of the campaign.

Certainly, press coverage alone did not determine the outcome on Election Day. Several other factors were involved in the victory of 227 and they deserve mention.

1. There was, and is, a substantial number of Californians who are troubled by immigration and demographic change: Voters who especially fear the growth of a Latino underclass that fails or refuses to learn English. Voters who resent programs that confer legitimacy on other languages – Spanish in particular – believing that they discourage assimilation and award "special privileges" to "undeserving" minorities. Voters who are drawn to anti-immigrant measures like Proposition 187 (1994), anti-civil rights initiatives like Proposition 209 (1996), and language-restrictionist legislation like Proposition 63 (1986).

2. There was the wise decision by Ron Unz not to appeal directly to such people with the kind of nativist rhetoric associated with the traditional English-only movement – e.g., denouncing bilingualism as un-American, unpatriotic, divisive, and so forth. Of course, Unz didn't have to do this to win over such voters, who already had their minds made up about bilingual education. So, by keeping the focus on the educational issues rather than inflammatory symbolism, he was able to reach out to broader constituencies, even within Latino and other language-minority communities. He was able to win substantial numbers of fair-minded voters who really did care about kids – but who were uninformed about bilingual education and thus were vulnerable to his campaign of Big Lies.

3. This was a classic populist campaign, with minimal participation by elected officials on either side. Which suited Ron Unz just fine – he crafted the issue as the people versus the "education establishment." Yet he did recruit some prominent personalities to his side, such as Jaime Escalante, the legendary math teacher of Stand and Deliver fame. Whereas the opposition had no celebrity spokespersons whatsoever. While most Democratic and Latino politicians took positions against 227 at the 11th hour, virtually none of them campaigned actively against it.

4. Finally, the No on 227 campaign adopted a disastrous strategy. It refused to defend bilingual education. I am not making this up. To the amazement of many journalists, the campaign actually announced the policy in its press packet and on its Web site. The thinking was that there was too little time to win over many voters on a complicated issue, especially an issue so racially charged, and so we should simply try to change the subject. So the No campaign focused instead on peripheral issues intended to appeal to swing voters (defined as "Republican women over 50"). But these never grabbed the attention of the public or the press. Had our side been more helpful to journalists, no doubt their coverage would have been more balanced.

Many of us who worked actively against Unz were critical of this strategy. We thought it was suicidal to concede Unz's arguments without a fight. But we were unable to influence the leadership of the No campaign and so we worked independently. Along with Dr. Stephen Krashen of the University of Southern California and other colleagues, I helped to organize an effort called UnzWatch. We put out issue briefs and press releases, ran a web site, did speaking tours throughout the state, developed a network of activists who were engaged in get-out-the-vote drives, phone banks, demos, and so forth – things that No on 227 generally declined to organize.

Our biggest mistake was starting too late, in mid-April, after trying to work with our official campaign. It did not welcome outside help, except of the financial variety. And it actively discouraged bilingual educators and others from defending the field. So UnzWatch and similar efforts by individuals tended to speak with many voices, communicating a variety of messages, and we failed to have much impact on press coverage. Indeed, by that point in the campaign, we found that reporters had pretty much lost interest in the substantive issues we were trying to raise.⁽²⁾

Several confided that they were bored with the story, in part because 227 was so far ahead in the polls. This was true as early as October 1997, when the first Los Angeles Times Poll reported 80% of likely voters and 84% of Latinos were favoring 227.⁽³⁾ And these numbers held up in the 60-70% range until the week before the election on June 2. So instead of substantive coverage – e.g., What does the educational research say: is it realistic to restrict kids to a one-year English program? – we had lots of coverage about how far ahead Unz was. And how – wasn't it amazing! – Latinos were heavily in favor of 227. This is a good place to start my pointed criticisms.

Criticism #1
Too many horse-race stories, those dramatic accounts about who's up, who's down, who's ahead, who's behind, and why. While many journalists find these exciting, such stories provide little service to the public in deciding how to vote. This is a problem that's obviously not unique to coverage of this campaign. We hear about it during every election. But I'd argue that the stakes are higher when an initiative is involved. We're not talking here about murky position papers that candidates are likely to ignore after they get elected. We're talking about the text of legislation that everyone must now live with – a law that cannot be repealed or even amended without a two-thirds vote of the legislature, another ballot initiative, or a federal court ruling.

What's more, many of these stories were false in a way that was quite helpful to Ron Unz's campaign. Latinos did not favor the initiative by 2-1. In fact, according to the LA Times's own exit polls on June 2, they voted against it by nearly 2-1 (63%-37%). But the widespread reports of Latino support no doubt encouraged many people who had no knowledge of bilingual education to say: "Who am I to second-guess the parents of kids in these programs? If they support 227, why shouldn't I?"

Now some might argue that Latinos changed their minds at the last minute. So perhaps the Times Poll, the Field Poll, and others were accurate when they were taken. Yet, throughout the campaign, the poll findings about Latinos were criticized as statistically flawed. They were based on samples as small as 175 registered voters, yielding an enormous margin of error, and they used methods that tended to discourage participation by limited-English speakers. Their findings were also contradicted by more sophisticated surveys conducted by Spanish-language media. For example, in February La Opinión and Telemundo found that 88% of Spanish-speaking parents in Los Angeles with kids in bilingual programs believed the programs were beneficial.

The LA Times was especially resistant to these criticisms, which never made its news columns (although some other papers did carry comments by skeptical experts). My suspicion is that the Times has become enamored of these counterintuitive, man-bites-dog stories: "Latinos oppose bilingual education. Isn't that amazing?"

We've seen the same pattern over the last two elections, when the Times claimed Latinos supported Propositions 187 and 209, but exit polls showed they voted overwhelmingly against these measures. I found another interesting example in my files, a Times clip bearing the headline: "Latino Backing of English Only a Puzzle." It reported nearly 2-1 support for a constitutional English language amendment. The story is dated October 25, 1986. So this problem of sampling Latino opinion has been evident for quite some time and yet the Times pollsters never figure out how to get it right. Maybe they're worried that reporting that Latinos strongly oppose anti-Latino legislation would make for a dull story.

In fairness, there were some credible findings in these polls. Findings that cast public opinion in a more nuanced way – and also reflect serious failings of the media coverage. If you looked closely at the Times Poll in mid-April,⁽⁴⁾ it turned out that:

• A majority of voters who favored 227 also favored greater flexibility for school districts in teaching English learners. Yet 227 outlaws flexibility.
• Only 32% believed that kids should be taught only in English; the rest favored various forms of bilingual instruction. Yet 227 outlaws bilingual instruction.

Obviously, the voters had never read the fine print of Unz's initiative. And the press had done too little to explain what was in it. Or what the impact would be. Or what problems could arise from its various provisions.

Criticism #2
The news media framed the debate as Unz framed it: as a referendum on bilingual education. In a rational world, I believe that this would have been a referendum on Proposition 227 – the specific proposal that was being voted on, the measure that has now been written into the state code of California. After all, it contains several extreme provisions that a reasonable voter might oppose even while opposing bilingual education. For example, did Californians really want to impose an arbitrary cutoff of English instruction after 180 days? Did they believe that putting teachers in financial jeopardy for good faith acts to serve kids sets a good precedent in a state that's desperate to recruit teachers? Did they feel it was appropriate to use the political process to impose teaching methods on the schools?

Generally speaking, though, the question framed by journalists was: Should bilingual education – a "program that needs reform" – be replaced with an approach that promises to teach English more quickly and efficiently? In many voters's minds, this boiled down to: Bilingual education or "English for the children"?⁽⁵⁾ With the issue framed in this way, who would have chosen the former? Not many. In April, when the Times Poll asked Proposition 227 supporters why they planned to vote Yes, 73% responded: "If you live in America, you need to speak English."⁽⁶⁾

Apparently, it never occurred to many of these likely voters that bilingual education is a means to that end. Should the press investigate how well it's working in that regard? Of course. Should it therefore assume that English is the only subject these students need to master? Of course not. Yet that's what tended to happen.

There was a more reasonable way to frame the debate over 227 that was largely ignored: Should parents, teachers, and local school boards continue to have the option of bilingual education? Or should this choice be severely restricted in favor of a one-size-fits-all, English-only approach limited to one year? I would argue that this question gives a much better picture of the initiative. A much better explanation of the practical consequences of a Yes or No vote.

Nevertheless, the choice issue was highlighted only briefly, when the California legislature passed a bill giving local districts the flexibility to choose whatever program they wanted for English learners. The measure was soon vetoed by Gov. Pete Wilson. Even then, the focus of news coverage tended to be on the horse-race – "Legislature Tries Last-Minute Ploy to Head Off Ron Unz" – and on the personal animosity between Wilson and Unz (rivals for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1994).

Amazingly little attention was devoted to the hypocrisy of conservatives like Wilson, who jumped on the 227 bandwagon when they saw the poll numbers – despite its assault on the main principles they claim to stand for in education: local control and parental choice. To his credit, Dan Lungren⁽⁷⁾ did oppose 227 precisely for this reason, despite his opposition to bilingual education. It was a one-day story, however, as far as most print media were concerned. No doubt related to the phenomenon of poll-driven coverage. And that's part of a larger problem.

Criticism #3
Because bilingual education is controversial, it tends to get covered as a purely political story, not as an education story or a science story or a story about changing demographics. Of course, in a political story it's assumed that all sides are biased and self-serving. So a lot of reporters feel they've done their jobs if they present the charges and counter-charges, quote people accurately, and let the best sound-bite win. They see no need to spend time looking for the objective truth – as one would do in a science story, for example – because it's assumed not to exist.

So when Ron Unz made the outrageous charge that bilingual education had a "95 % failure rate" – based (loosely) on the percentage of English learners who were not redesignated as fluent in English each year – this was repeated verbatim. Rarely was it mentioned that only 30% of these kids were in bilingual classrooms and only 20% had certified bilingual teachers. So from this statistic, it would be more reasonable to conclude that the problem was too little, not too much bilingual instruction. In fact, the conservative Orange County districts that preferred English-only approaches in recent years were significantly slower to teach English than districts in neighboring Los Angeles County, where bilingual programs have predominated. Yet this fact went largely unremarked by the press.

Now my point here is hardly rocket science. The "95 % failure rate" was a thoroughly dishonest claim – a fraud. All the journalists I encountered during the campaign were sharp enough to see this. Yet few did much to challenge it, and none saw it as their job to point out that Unz was deliberately misleading the voters. Here's just one example of how they let him get away with his Big Lie technique, repeating unsupported claims so often that they became part of the conventional wisdom – or perhaps more accurately, the conventional cynicism. By the end of the campaign, even politicians and editorial writers who opposed 227 were saying, "Well, even though this isn't the solution, of course bilingual education is failing." Where was the factual basis for this conclusion?

Here is where the press largely failed to do its job of independently investigating the truth:

A. It failed to put the academic problems and dropout rates of Latino students in context: to explain, for example, that many of the same problems affect kids who speak English, just as much as they affect those who don't. It failed, with only a few exceptions, to mention to impact of poverty and parental illiteracy on student achievement. It failed to question the assumption that if English learners weren't doing well, that bilingual education must be to blame.

B. On the rare occasions when journalists did examine the evidence for themselves, they tended to do so as amateurs, without seeking expert advice. This meant they applied the same "common sense" standards that Unz did – e.g., to the issue of how long it should take children to learn a second language. Analyzing California Department of Education figures, the Los Angeles Times gave a grade of "complete futility" to schools where no children were redesignated as fluent in English in a given year.⁽⁸⁾ Had they spoken to knowledgeable officials or researchers, they might have learned that quick redesignation was not the goal of these schools (some of which were spanned only kindergarten and grades 1 or 2). They might also have learned that redesignation standards – which vary by school district – are based on children's acquisition of academic English, a process that takes several years, unlike oral playground English, which most pick up rapidly. Typically in California, students must score at or above the 36th percentile in reading and language to be reassigned mainstream classrooms. That's a high standard in high-poverty schools, where numerous other factors hold students back. By failing to provide such background information, the Times reinforced the false impression Unz wanted to convey: that children languish for years in Spanish-language classrooms and never learn to speak English.

C. There was limited attention given to the state of scientific knowledge in this field. Only a couple of journalists covered a San Francisco study that appeared during the campaign. It reported that children who were redesignated in English – after an average of 4.8 years in bilingual and ESL classrooms – outperformed all other groups in the school district, including native English speakers.⁽⁹⁾ Certainly, they were not harmed by their enrollment in "special" programs. Meanwhile, a significant new review of research, conducted by Jay Greene of the University of Texas,⁽¹⁰⁾ reported favorable findings about bilingual education. But it was virtually ignored by the English-language media. (By contrast, the Los Angeles affiliate of Telemundo gave it considerable attention.) What little play the Greene study received came in the LA Times – in the second half of a story blasting the Los Angeles Unified School District for releasing flawed test scores. Moreover, the Times gave equal time to Ron Unz, who insisted that the studies under review were "too old" to be meaningful.⁽¹¹⁾

Criticism #4
Political opponents of bilingual education were routinely treated as expert sources. This was another consequence of viewing Proposition 227 as a purely political story. In this type of coverage, nobody's opinion is supposed to outweigh anyone else's. The idea of fairness is to give all the major players their best shot and let the readers sort it out.

As a result, Ron Unz's views on bilingual education were given great credence – despite his lack of any background in education; his refusal to visit a bilingual program or even discuss the educational research, which he rejected as "utter and complete garbage";⁽¹²⁾ and the fact that his extreme proposal was opposed by virtually every teacher, administrator, school board member, applied linguist, and civil rights advocate in the state.

These other voices were heard in the debate, of course. They got some coverage – usually in reaction to what Ron Unz had said. But their messages were diverse, complex, and often confusing when they tried to explain to outsiders what actually goes on inside schools and how children actually learn languages. This was a story that cried out for some explanatory journalism – not just a war of sound-bites, which is what the news media mostly provided.

In practice, the views of Ron Unz were presented in a far more coherent way – and in far greater volume – than those of any educator or researcher. So his message, fallacious as it was, got through quite effectively. Then, when the real experts, the applied linguists who have studied these questions for many years, said you can't expect kids to learn a second language for academic purposes in one year, their message was treated as just another opinion. And a controversial one at that. Naturally, their responses were more complicated than the demagogic arguments of Ron Unz. They didn't claim that native-language instruction was a magic wand capable of solving all problems in the schools. They tried to argue on the basis of research evidence, which is rarely as clear and unambiguous as one might like. In short, they tried to tell the truth, as they understood it. Meanwhile, Ron Unz made dramatic charges about "failure rates" and "vested interests." Guess whose sound-bites were more effective.

Criticism #5
Despite all the press skepticism about the effectiveness of bilingual education, a similar standard was never applied to Unz's 180-day miracle cure for limited English proficiency. This program was pure snake oil. No educator had ever heard of "sheltered English immersion" – a term that Unz coined himself – much less of such an approach that was working. Where were students learning a second language in that period of time and succeeding academically? Unz issued vague reassurances that this was "the way it's done in every other country" except the U.S.A. Yet he could never point to a single real-world success story. And he asked the voters to impose this speculative "method" by law on California's public schools.

Amazingly, hardly a single journalist made an issue of the glaring lack of evidence.⁽¹³⁾ Those of us working against Unz tried to make this point with the press repeatedly. When I debated him in Santa Rosa this spring, I practically chanted a mantra of "No evidence. No evidence. No evidence." Yet to no avail. None of the local journalists covering the event mentioned that, or much else I had to say during this 2 ½ hour session. Instead, the focus was "Ron Unz faces down hostile crowd."⁽¹⁴⁾ They preferred cheap dramatics over substance.

Many reporters obviously saw Unz as good copy, a personality who was always available with an incendiary quote when they needed one. They seemed to find his extreme statements more interesting than all those dry statistics about program effectiveness. Perhaps that's why they let themselves be used to recycle his charges and rarely asked for any proof. Whatever the reason, however, Ron Unz got a free ride. And readers got short-changed.

Criticism #6
Meanwhile, there was a striking double standard when it came to examining the motives of each side. Ron Unz was constantly slandering bilingual teachers, administrators, and researchers as an entrenched "bureaucracy" that acted out of economic self-interest rather than out of a concern for kids. He insisted that you couldn't believe anything they said because they owed their jobs to the field. Of course, one could make such ad hominem charges against any profession trying to defend itself against external attacks. This is invariably an unfair tactic designed to divert attention away from substantive issues. Unfortunately, in this case journalists didn't seem to care because Unz's charges made for sensational stories.

The Los Angeles Times, for example, speculated that school districts may try to keep students classified as limited in English as long as possible, so they could continue receiving state aid for LEP students.⁽¹⁵⁾ It also suggested that bilingual programs serve the interests of "support industries" that, in turn, promote the field. As proof, it cited the book publishers who exhibited their Spanish-language wares at the California Association for Bilingual Education conference.⁽¹⁶⁾ Can you imagine – book publishers making money off the schools? What a scandal.

In fact, if the Times writers had been inclined to do a little reporting, they might have learned that Spanish-language textbooks are a loss leader for publishers. The state of California requires them to offer these editions if they want to sell their lines of English-language books. As a result, none of the big publishers gave money to the No on 227 campaign.⁽¹⁷⁾ Most were quietly pleased when the initiative passed, because it was good for their bottom line.

These Times reporters were regulars on the education beat. So one would think they could have uncovered another relevant fact about their local school district: administrators' performance evaluations and promotions are based in part on how rapidly they redesignate kids as English proficient. Thus, in Los Angeles at least, the incentive is exactly the opposite from what the journalists speculated.

On the other side of the ledger, the motives of Ron Unz aroused limited press attention. Why was this multi-millionaire with no kids of his own, and no background in education, pushing his ideas on the schools? A few profiles appeared, several months before the vote.⁽¹⁸⁾ But after it was established that Unz was no Klansman, with no skeletons in his closet as a racist or xenophobe, the press basically lost interest in probing further. Had it done so, it would have discovered a detailed neoconservative agenda, which had everything to do with repositioning the Republican Party as "pro-immigrant, but pro-assimilation" – and nothing to do with improving schools. It would have discovered that politics, not pedagogy, was driving Proposition 227. Instead, the news media tended to take Unz at face value and portray him as a selfless "reformer" up against the big, bad bureaucracy.

Criticism #7
Throughout the campaign there was great reliance on anecdotes rather than objective evidence. Now obviously journalists need human narratives to make their stories compelling. But policymaking by anecdote can be dangerous. Certainly it's unreliable unless (1) the anecdote is true and (2) it is also representative of a larger truth. Both of these can be hard to determine.

To illustrate, I want to mention a story that I'm sure many of you will recall. It involves the Ninth Street School in downtown Los Angeles, where in 1996 a group of recently arrived Mexican immigrants pulled their kids out to protest bilingual education and the alleged refusal of the school to provide them an alternative, English-only program. Ron Unz has cited this incident as the inspiration for Proposition 227, saying parents shouldn't have to carry picket signs to get English instruction. Another of his effective sound-bites.

This story was repeated everywhere. It became a central myth of the 227 campaign. And that's just what it was: a tale that was substantially untrue. Yet the vast majority of the journalists who wrote about it relied on the LA Times clips and never went to ask the school's side of the story. If they had, they would have learned that the Ninth Street boycott was entirely unnecessary. It was an event that was orchestrated for political purposes: a setup calculated to produce bad press for bilingual education.

As I learned when I visited the school last winter, the parents could easily have had their kids reassigned to the school's alternate, English-intensive program. That's their legal right, after all, in California and every other state. All they would have had to do was go to the principal and ask for a transfer.⁽¹⁹⁾ But the parents were advised not to do this by Alice Callaghan, the anti-bilingual activist who led the protest and went on to become a leader of the Proposition 227 campaign. Of course, resolving their concerns without a confrontation would not have produced the headline she was seeking: that Latino parents no longer wanted bilingual education. Another Big Lie.

One might ask how an outsider to the community, a non-Spanish speaker, could wield so much influence over a group of Spanish-speaking parents. It turns out that Callaghan runs a nearby social service center that provides free day care, before and after school, on which these low-paid garment workers heavily depend. No doubt some of them were convinced by her claim that bilingual education was the source of their kids' academic problems. Others told school officials that they felt they had no choice but to go along or they would lose the free daycare for their kids. If any such threat was issued – and that has yet to be confirmed – it would be seen as a serious matter by federal civil rights officials, one that could lead to litigation.

Whatever the case, however, the group that boycotted at Ninth Street represented about one-quarter of the parents in a single school out of nearly 8,000 schools in the state. How can they be considered representative of parent attitudes? And how often do Spanish-speaking parents face resistance when they seek nonbilingual classrooms for their kids? School districts are bureaucratic institutions, so it wouldn't surprise me if that happened on occasion. But it's hardly commonplace if you check with the California Department of Education – which no reporter on this story did, to my knowledge. Over the past decade, state officials told me, they have received numerous formal complaints from parents unable to get their kids into bilingual education. But not a single complaint from those unable to get their kids out.

Regardless of what happened at Ninth Street, does it justify eliminating parents' right to choose bilingual programs if that's what they want? Why wasn't this issue highlighted? Why was virtually no press attention focused on more recent boycotts by Latino parents in Orange County and Santa Barbara, involving hundreds of parents in favor of preserving bilingual education? Why weren't reporters interested to see what had happened to the 80 or so kids pulled out of bilingual education at Ninth Street? When it was announced this spring, two years later, that less than 3 % of these kids had been redesignated as fluent in English and that they were scoring well below their peers in bilingual classrooms, why did the LA Times give this story only a few inches in the back of the Metro section?⁽²⁰⁾

I believe the answers to all these questions have to do with the poll-driven, politicized coverage of bilingual education that merely recycled the conventional cynicism. There were exceptions, of course. I can think of perhaps a dozen excellent reports, which actually looked beneath the surface of Ron Unz's rhetoric or examined exemplary bilingual programs, out of literally hundreds of stories that appeared during the Proposition 227 campaign.

My conclusion is simple: overall, journalists did not serve the voters – or the schoolchildren – of California very well.

Notes

1. Frank Bruni, "The Ideologue Who 'Fixed' Bilingual Education," New York Times, June 14, 1998.

2. My criticisms in this paper apply primarily to the English-language newspapers I was able to monitor consistently during the campaign. Other media, especially Spanish-language newspapers and broadcasters, appear to have avoided at least some of these pitfalls.

3. Mark Z. Barabak, "Bilingual Education Gets Little Support," Los Angeles Times, Oct. 15, 1997.

4. Cathleen Decker, "Bilingual Education Ban Widely Supported," Los Angeles Times, April 13, 1998.

5. English for the Children was the clever name that Unz chose for his initiative – hard to oppose on its face.

6. This finding was available only to readers who dug deep into the Times web site: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/POLLS/PDF/410pa2da.pdf

7. Lungren, California's attorney general, was the Republican nominee for governor in 1998, defeted by Democrat Gray Davis in the November election.

8. Nick Anderson and Amy Pyle, "Bilingual Classes a Knotty Issue," Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1998.

9. This pattern was also evident in the results of state-mandated achievement tests, released after the vote on Proposition 227.

10. It's worth noting that Greene is an expert in social science research but an outsider to the field of bilingual education. He has a record of supporting conservative educational ideas such as school vouchers.

11. Amy Pyle, "Opinions Vary on Studies That Back Bilingual Classes," Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1998. This was a thoroughly spurious claim by Unz. In fact, Greene re-analyzed a group of studies cited by English-immersion proponents Christine Rossell and Keith Baker. Using a sophisticated statistical tool called "meta-analysis," he came out with different results.

12. John Wildermuth, "Diverse Voices Heard on Race at Stanford Forum," San Francisco Chronicle, January 31, 1998.

13. The one exception I can think of was Andrea Lampros, a young reporter for the Contra Costa Times (e.g., "An Incomplete Translation," April 6, 1998). Unlike many of her bored colleagues on larger papers, she consistently found creative angles on the 227 story.

14. Robert Digitale and Chris Coursey, "Prop. 227 Defended by Unz in Santa Rosa Debate," Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, April 1, 1998.

15. This formula provided $241 for each LEP child in 1995-96, or less than 5 percent of the $4,927 California schools spent per pupil in grades K-12.

16. Nick Anderson and Amy Pyle, "Bilingual Classes a Knotty Issue," Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1998.

17. Hampton-Brown, the one publisher that showed up on the No on 227 contribution rolls, is a small operator that specializes in Spanish-language materials.

18. The most thorough of these was "Unz Keeps Focus on Bilingual Issue," by Phil Garcia, Sacramento Bee, January 19, 1998.

19. This point becomes clear on close reading of the original Times stories by reporter Amy Pyle (e.g., "Boycotting Latino Parents Gather Letters Urging All-English Teaching," Feb. 17, 1996). These indicate that parents' requests for English-only instruction were submitted several days after the boycott began. Yet the Times chose to highlight the fact that Latino parents were protesting bilingual education – and failed to question their need to pull children out of school – leaving a misleading impression that the boycott was necessary to exercise their rights.

20. Jean Merl, "Prop. 227 Critics Cite School Data to Make Case," Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1998.