Why can’t the New York Times get simple facts right? In an article on the California Senate race, the last two paragraphs discuss briefly the candidacy of Republican Ron Unz and manages to get his most important contribution to public policy wrong. To wit: “Mr. Unz rose to prominence here more than a decade ago when he backed a ballot initiative opposing bilingual education.”
What’s wrong with this sentence? Start with the fact that Unz “rose to prominence” most visibly when he ran in the Republican primary for governor of California and won 34 percent of the vote against incumbent Gov. Pete Wilson, who got 61 percent. That’s a pretty impressive score against an incumbent who won re-election the next fall.
Next, why does reporter Jennifer Medina use the phrase “more than a decade ago” when the much more concise “in 1994” or (in the case of the ballot proposition, on which more anon) “in 1998”? That would be more precise and at the same time would indicate to any reader aware that we are now in 2016 — i.e., any reader — that his candidacy happened quite a few years ago.
Now about that 1998 ballot proposition. No it was not, as Medina writes, “a ballot initiative opposing bilingual education.” It was a ballot proposition, labeled Proposition 227, limiting foreign-language instruction to one year in most cases. Which is to say that it didn’t end foreign-language instruction, but rather set a reasonable time limit on it rather than have it continue indefinitely. It was an issue which Unz put on the ballot, but not one on which he achieved much prominence, since he was not featured in the campaign for it.
And — a fact Jennifer Medina neglected to mention — it passed by a 61 to 39 percent margin. In my view — and I covered this issue extensively at the time — this had a hugely beneficial effect. So-called “bilingual education” in California, which then had one-third of the nation’s Hispanic schoolchildren, was neither bilingual nor education. Instruction was often in poor Spanish — Spanglish — and children kept in the foreign-language ghetto for many years often failed to develop proficiency in English, which in this country is necessary for almost any form of economic advancement. It did have the advantage of employing a large number of Spanish- (or Spanglish-) speaking teachers who paid dues to the teacher unions, who naturally opposed 227.
Sadly, California’s wacky Democratic legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown have put on the 2016 ballot a proposition repealing most of Proposition 227. It would be tragic if this passes; it would reduce opportunities for advancement tens or hundreds of thousands of California students. But, hey, it would help the teacher unions and the Democratic party into which they funnel taxpayer money, and that’s what’s important, isn’t it?
Of course the New York Times’s factual errors prevent readers from having any accurate idea of what Ron Unz proposed and what Proposition 227 has accomplished. But they do help promote the teacher union spin.
