This quotation seems a bit odd coming from the first Puerto Rican-born Congressman in U.S. history. While Herman Badillo’s new book is all about self-reliance and how the Latino/a community should pull itself up by its own bootstraps, he obviously believes in the role of government in shaping public policy. He himself asserts, "Education was and is my crusade" (p.55). Rudolph Giuliani notes in the book’s foreword, "I think Herman even deserves some of the credit for the federal No Child Left Behind Act…" (p.ix). So here’s a politician who is against big government—hence the "ex-liberal" subtitle, and yet he supports NCLB, a hitherto unheard of and unconstitutional transfer of power to the federal government in which most school administrators, parents, organized labor, and communities are stripped of any substantive influence over the educational process. Meanwhile NCLB is so corrupt and under-funded (see EPRU at http://epsl.asu.edu/epru/) that states around the nation are jumping ship as millions of kids from all walks of life are getting left behind.

Badillo’s book is replete with this kind of contradiction. For example, in his anti-government diatribe he describes overcoming his impoverished childhood through self-reliance. It’s no wonder that the Manhattan Institute, a powerful conservative think tank, has him on board as a senior fellow—he wields every social policy sound byte of the conservative party. But the real story is that a government program at City College in New York provided free education to students like Herman and this was a crucial stepping-stone to his success. However, it’s luck, not a government program that he attributes to his achievements: "Were it not for a lucky break, I might never have escaped the usual dead-end path and never advanced to the middle class" (p.50).

Promoting the idea that "Full participation in American society requires a genuine high-school diploma and a real college education" (p.51), the author argues: "To be blunt, educating Hispanic children is not the duty of the governmental school system. This is their duty, as parents, family members, neighbors, and citizens. Whenever a child is left behind, it is not the fault of the teachers, or the principals, or the school chancellor, or the mayor, or the president. It is their fault" (p.51). In this view, there is no reason to look at government policies that shape public education, let alone at how racism and the structures of social class affect this institution and students’ lives. For Badillo, the simple answer is to just have the right attitude and the isms will miraculously disappear. He makes a number of comments in which he apparently believes that discrimination exists, and he blames PC liberals for neglecting to take on racism, but his own head-in-the-sand response to this problem is to adopt a color-blind approach to identity—as he states, "Self-identifying as ‘Hispanic’ or ‘white’ or ‘black’ undermines achievement…" (p.21).

Badillo’s failure to apply class analysis to understanding the plight of Latino/as is equally troubling. Even after he states that "Upper-middle-class white children, when they enter the first grade, have already received the equivalent of twenty-five hundred hours of public-school instruction…" (p.31), he fails to acknowledge the economic factors involved. His response to Latino/as not being able to provide the same kinds of cultural capital to their children is that "The whole Hispanic community needs a total attitude adjustment regarding the importance of education" (p.31). Instead of understanding how racism and poverty limit access to education, he argues the very opposite: that not interacting with your kids, not working hard to get a good education, and holding on to one’s roots creates poverty. In Badillo’s world, "Bilingualism and multiculturalist identity politics have produced an ingrained resistance to acculturation…Hispanics (and U.S. policy makers) must understand that the failure to enter the mainstream is due more to self-segregation within the Hispanic community than to discrimination against Hispanics from without" (pp.6-7). However, the real issue at hand, that he neglects to engage, is that 75% of all linguistic-minority students are forced to live in low-income, segregated urban areas that have schools that are in rough shape—in part due to the property tax structure.

What’s particularly troubling about this book is that it has virtually no citations to back such claims as "bilingualism is only one of the harmful practices in America’s school systems that create almost insurmountable obstacles to Hispanic progress" (p.71). Besides the fact that all elite private schools are multilingual schools (so bilingualism is somehow good for rich kids, but bad for the working class and poor), there are over one hundred and fifty studies, including a Congressionally-sanctioned report, that show how when properly implemented, including the native tongue is beneficial for linguistic, psychological, cognitive, and academic development. Disregarding these studies and supporting California’s English-only education policy, Badillo adds, "Bilingual education requires an average of four to seven years before students master English, but immersion programs [Ron Unz’s Structured English Immersion program as part of the English-only mandate] accelerate that to as little as one year" (p.67). There is no research to defend the claim that a child can become fluent, literate, able to learn abstract knowledge in a second language, and be ready to pass a high-stakes exam in one school year. Much to the contrary, millions of kids are getting lost in this conservative trap that is now in place in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts (see http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JWCrawford/).

The most bizarre claim of the book is that the reason Latino/as have a bad value system is because of the history of Spanish colonialism in what he calls a "five-century political siesta" that has "not only caused the mass migration of Hispanics but has put them at a disadvantage when they get here" (p.3). The disadvantage as he describes it is a "disregard for the rule of law, an indifference to participatory democracy…and a lack of enthusiasm for education" (p.3). Putting aside the absurdity of these claims for a moment, as well as his twisted interpretation of colonial oppression, what’s particularly interesting here is that this new-born conservative fails to implicate U.S. foreign policy—in particular the Reagan years, in the mass disruption in most every country south of the border. On the contrary, without acknowledging the bloody turmoil in the region—which the word "siesta" does not allude to, he argues: "Education and crime-control programs created by the Manhattan Institute’s Latin American Initiative and the Caribbean Basin Initiative implemented by President Ronald Reagan but, alas, applied only in Grenada should serve as models for U.S. development efforts in Latin America" (p.7).

One can only imagine what history lessons would look like in the "one standard" world of Herman Badillo’s "crusade" to save public education.

Suggested Readings:

Allington, R. (2002). Big Brother and the National Reading Curriculum: How Ideology Trumped Evidence. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Gluckman, A. (2002). Testing…Testing…One, Two, Three: The Commercial Side of the Standardized-Testing Boom. Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice, January/February. Available at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2002/0102gluckman.html

Metcalf, S. (2002). Reading between the Lines. The Nation, January 28. Available at:

http://www.fairtest.org/nattest/Nation%20piece%20bush%20links.html

Miner, B. (2005). Keeping Public Schools Public: Testing Companies Mine for Gold. Rethinking Schools, Winter, Vol. 19, No 2. Available at: http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/19_02/test192.shtml

Suchak, B. (2006). Standardized Testing: High-Stakes for Students and for Corporate Bottom Lines. Available at: http://www.nomoretests.com/insider.htm