Eugene Garcia grew up in a Spanish-speaking household, did well in English-only schools, went on to college, got a Ph.D, did post-doctoral work at Harvard and pursued a successful career.
So, there you go - another example of how the American school system did just fine without all these new multicultural-multilingual-mollycoddling classrooms. Who needs them?Garcia shakes his head at that kind of thinking. "I grew up in a family of 10 children. Of those 10, only four graduated from high school, and I was the only one to go to college."
The generation that followed fared no better. Of his 28 nephews and nieces, only 16 graduated from high school, and only one has graduated from college.
"It's a misuse of human resources," Garcia says with a passion that carries over into his job. "It's not right. We shouldn't allow that to happen to any family."
But it happens all too often and all over the United States, and it doesn't have to be that way, according to Garcia. As director of the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs for the U.S. Department of Education, Garcia carried that message to Utah school teachers and administrators Friday.
Speaking at the state's first Multicultural, Multilingual Teaching Conference on the campus of Weber State University, Garcia said diversity is not a problem to be overcome, but rather a resource.
A native of Grand Junction, Colo., Garcia is no stranger to Utah. While working as an assistant professor of child psychology at the University of Utah in 1972, he was elected to the Salt Lake City Board of Education, becoming the first Hispanic to serve in that capacity.
Garcia said the multilingual-multicultural reform movement sweeping the country was started at the local level by parents and teachers, not by the federal government.
Washington is involved, he said, because "we won't allow injustices to occur." However, he insisted that federal policies and programs that focus on multilingual and multicultural educations are merely resources for the "bottom-to-top" reforms.
While requiring that all students are educated to the highest standards, Garcia said federal policies are, by necessity, flexible. "Use the resources that work in your context," he said.
The topic of multilingual and multicultural education has hit close to home in Utah. Last year, the Office of Civil Rights found that seven Utah school districts were not meeting federal guidelines on educating students with limited proficiency in English. Non-compliance could result in a cut in federal funding.
Garcia said the directions coming from Washington shouldn't be construed as dictates. "With flexibility, we're saying high standards for all students should be met," he said. "You decide how to do it."
The government does expect an accounting, however. "You ought to be able to tell us and parents how you're doing. Use the indicators you think best," Garcia said.
Guidelines, policies and bureaucracies aside, the real issue is equal access to a quality education, he said. Students with little or no English skills should be taught English, but they should also be taught math, science and all the other subjects they will need to go on with their education, Garcia said.
"You can't assume that when the children enter the classroom, they leave everything they are behind them," he said. Instead of shutting out diverse languages and cultures, educators should make use of them, he added.
Garcia recalled that when he was a child, his older brother came home from school bloodied and bruised from a fight. Someone had called him a "dirty Mexican." Their mother had always sent them to school clean, and he wasn't about to let anyone call him dirty. That was the insult, not the part about being Mexican, he said.
"It's OK to be Mexican. Being different, speaking another language, doing things differently isn't bad," Garcia said. "It's no reason why we shouldn't have equity in education."
Garcia also cautioned teachers against adopting a "pobrecito syndrome," where they lower their standards or expectations for students who don't speak English.
In an interview following his address, Garcia said teachers have at their disposal the knowledge base, techniques and resources to meet the special needs of non-English- speaking students without sacrificing the rest of the class. For example, teachers can enlist the help of parents or bilingual older students as tutors and make use of available technology.
However, he said there are no "silver bullets or magic ways." To the teachers, he said, "You got to care . . . you got to care like they were your own kids."