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Abstract
In 2002, voters in Massachusetts and Colorado faced identical ballot initiatives to remove bilingual education programs from the public schools. The measure passed in Massachusetts and failed in Colorado. This paper investigates the debates over the issue in these two states. It provides insight into how people reason with respect to minority politics. It also helps to make sense of the states’ divergent outcomes. Content analysis of letters-to-the-editor reveals that voters are motivated by ethnic competition and fiscal concerns, as existing theories would predict. Additionally, citizens debate which kinds of programs work best for English learners and take stands on how these youngsters can be successful in life. The inter-state comparison reveals that a major factor distinguishing the two statewide debates was ethnic paternalism, a logic often used by members of ethnic majorities to justify restrictive policy decisions on the basis of what they think is best for the affected population. The analysis shows that themes related to doing what is best for English learners were significantly more salient in Massachusetts than Colorado. This finding implies that where public debate over this issue is framed in terms of helping minority youth, the fate of bilingual education is not secure.
Notes
The author is indebted to Jason Barnosky, Joe Coleman, Eric Gonzalez-Juenke, Eric Kisskalt, Jennifer Wolak and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
1 All data from the U.S. Census 2000: http://www.census.gov/.
2 Three letters did not take a clear stand on the issue, and so were excluded from the analysis.
3 To be certain that no one newspaper biased the content analysis, a series of bivariate logit models were run to predict whether a letter was pro- initiative. The independent variables were dummy variables for each newspaper. The Boston Herald (coeff.=1.2, significant at 97.7%) and The Boston Globe (coeff.=−.96, significant at 99.6%) were the only papers with statistically significant effects. But their opposing signs and similarly sized coefficients suggest that they balanced each other out. No other newspapers had statistically significant effects.
4 A focus group participant in Massachusetts stated that the bilingual education issue was the most important element of the election except for the race for governor (CitationCapetillo-Ponce & Kramer, 2006: 281).
5 Moreover, this approach to understanding the debates via letters-to-the-editor probably underestimates the importance of the educational proposals. As noted above, interviews of newspaper editors reveal that letters discussing research or technical details are not very popular. Editors prefer to publish pieces that evoke emotion or recount personal stories (CitationWahl-Jorgensen, 2001).