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March 11, 2005/Adar I 30 5765, Volume 57, No. 28
Speaking the same language
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
When Mario Cuomo speaks, people listen.
At least 1,100 women did at the recent Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix Challenges lunch where Cuomo was the featured speaker.
The former New York governor and Democratic standard-bearer dished up a provocative take on a raft of issues while infusing his remarks with just enough Jewish tam to satisfy his audience. His message, even when it smacked of good old-fashioned partisan politics, was laced with a healthy helping of social responsibility and right action, suitable for a Jewish fund-raising event.
But Cuomo really had his audience eating out of his hand when he spoke of his parents, poor and uneducated Sicilian immigrants who settled in a rough neighborhood in Queens where he was born.
"What about people like my mother and father who couldn't read?" Cuomo asked his rapt audience.
What about them, indeed? And my grandparents and countless others like them who came to this country with scant resources and few tools, including language skills, to make their way?
My grandparents never truly mastered English. My mother, who learned to speak English in the first grade in a New York City public school, became the family's designated English speaker when language proficiency was required. She led the way for her five younger siblings, several of whom graduated from college, two with advanced degrees, far exceeding the expectations of their Turkish fruit peddler father.
So I wondered what Cuomo and his mother and father - and mine - would think about the brouhaha in the Arizona state legislature about English language learning.
The state has yet to act on a court order to provide "adequate" funding for English language learners. There are at least 175,000 of them in Arizona, children who are not native English speakers or who live in homes where English is not spoken. These students need specialized instruction to teach them to speak, read and write and keep up with their classmates. Estimated cost is $1,500 per child per year, with a little more than a third of that currently available from other sources. The Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest is pushing the legislature to come up with the additional $900 per child.
The original lawsuit, filed in 1992, held that the state is in violation of the federal Equal Opportunity Act that requires it to remove barriers for English language learners. It has dragged on, even after a U.S. District Court judge ruled in 2000 that the funding was "arbitrary" and has languished for the past five years as the state initiated a study to look at projected cost.
And meanwhile, the kids are falling farther and farther behind.
We have a responsibility to keep making life better, exhorted Cuomo. And that means assuring that our schools provide Arizona's children with the skills they need to get ahead.
So they can speak, and we can listen.
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