"They took up several obviously wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances."
-Charles Dickens
English for the Children Philosophy
Great Expectations
• English is the national public language of the United States of America and of the state of Arizona.
• The public schools of Arizona are currently doing an inadequate job of educating Mexican-American students, wasting financial resources on costly experimental language programs which have been gross failures over the past twenty years, as demonstrated by high drop-out rates and inexcusably low test scores, as well as low English literacy levels of many of these students.
• Young immigrant children can easily acquire full fluency in a new language, such as English, if they are heavily exposed to that language in the classroom at an early age. Therefore, our goal is to dismantle bilingual education as it is practiced in Arizona public schools, for the intellectual, social and economic welfare of all Mexican-American students. To that end we believe that all children in Arizona public schools should be taught English by being taught in English. We believe that this can best be accomplished in sheltered English immersion, as needed, during a temporary transition period not normally intended to exceed one year.
• It is not our intent, nor do we believe that Spanish should be prohibited from being spoken at any time in schools, by teachers, students, or parents.
• We are not a group which supports the English only movement, nor do we favor any type of anti-immigrant laws.
• Our group is a bipartisan, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and interfaith organization whose sole concern is with the intellectual, social, and economic welfare of immigrant students.
