But in this case, that’s a good thing. And what it makes it doubly impressive is that Democratic state Sen. Chris Romer of Denver bucked his own party AND the Senate Education Committee, which is often nothing more than a rubber stamp for the teacher’s union, in order to support a commonsense education initiative. From the Rocky Mountain News, “Bill pushes English”:
Students would have to demonstrate mastery of English to graduate from high school under a bill approved by the Senate Tuesday.
Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, said Senate Bill 73 will spark a dialogue on how to prepare non- English-speaking students for the workplace while respecting other languages.
“The public yearns for a thoughtful discussion about assimilation, not just immigration,” said Romer, the sponsor of SB 73. “You have to send a signal about assimilation. It doesn’t mean we can’t be bilingual.”
Romer’s bill passed easily on a voice vote. It comes up for a tallied vote this morning, then moves on to the House.School districts would have five years to adopt a procedure to test for English proficiency. The statewide achievement tests can’t be used. They are given only through 10th grade.
Opposition came from Sen. Sue Windels, D-Arvada, the chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee.
Some foreign-born students arrive in their junior or senior year of high school, giving districts little time to teach them English, Windels said. Districts would have to teach students for another year if they fail to graduate, driving up costs, she said.
Romer countered that such students now are being “warehoused” until they are handed a diploma. They can learn English through an intensive immersion program, he said.
Romer helped found the New America Schools, a charter that serves non-English-speaking students at three campuses, with a fourth location in the works.
Romer drew heavy Republican support for his bill.
This return to the idea of assimilation—particularly when it is floated by Democratic politicians—is a crucial step to recovering national identity and breaking the inevitable Balkanization of society that follows from a multiculturalist approach to public policy.
Romer is to be congratulated. Likewise, he should serve as a reminder that not all Democrats hew to the “progressive” agenda favored by the Democratic base—and that we need to be careful to distinguish the “left” from the larger field of Democrats.
Pushing English! That stuff’ll kill you!
Does it lead to the harder stuff, like Latin?
Yeah, and Fortran. It’s a gateway language.
It’s hard, Jeff, seeing as how the inmates have taken over the Democrat asylum.
Wait…being proficient in English isn’t already a requirement to graduate from high school? wtf?
Democrats at the state level often seem to be much more level headed than they do at the national level. Closer proximity to their constituency I suppose. At least that’s the way it is here in TX. There are times when I could almost see my way to supporting a D in a statewide race simply because the R’s have gottten fat, happy and silly here. But I can’t see it for a national office. The stakes are two high on just the issue of defense alone to entrust them with power.
This just in, via Lucianne:
I for one wish her well and a return to good health.
The horror! The horror!
(Actually, much worse than Fortran was PL/1. Thought that may have been the program that was my primary exposure to it—the printout of the source was, I shit you not, 1” thick. I was told to sort the output in a different order. I added the first function definition to the program.
Oh, and each test run of the program took an entire day: First thing in the morning, check the compile results, then send off the job to be run. After lunch, the run would be complete, and I could examine the results. Tweak the code through the afternoon, and then submit for a compile in time to go home. Took me two weeks to make the change.)
Same here.
I worked in the American Field Service exchange student program for more than twenty years. Immersion always works. Never fails. Helps to have a start–which most of our kids did–or an English-only family, which all of our kids did.
But it never fails. Not all that difficult, either, nor expensive.
Unfortunately, you don’t need to hire specialist teachers to do it, so there’s going to be resistance.
two high = too high
Fuckin’ homonyms.
You mean, they aren’t all assholes? Ok, then. Duly noted.
A lot of Democrats are secretly federalists at heart. Well, I don’t about “a lot”, but there are some. I am related to a few. It’s our common ground for anything politically related. It works.
I agree with you 100% in regards to being able to vote for democrats on a state or local level. I have plenty of times, as some of the republican candidates were useless. I try to vote libertarian at times, too. However, I just can’t in any type of faith, vote democrat on the federal level. I am physically unable to punch that ballot.
Ditto.
Just found out yesterday my former brother-in-law has inoperable lung cancer. The Big C sucks.
Yep. First, it was Fortran on the VAX/VMS. That taste was overwhelming. Then Pascal on an IBM PC/XT where 40 computers shared a 10MB networked hard drive. Then assembly on a Terak that ran using 8in floppy drives.
After that, well, I couldn’t stop. It’s no ones fault but my own that I started using C. Taught it to myself and ran programs on my Amiga. Then, of course, C++ was the logical next step in my slide towards doom. When even that wasn’t enough, I did some Perl.
Yeah, I admit it.
My secret shame is I don’t do JAVA like all the cool kids do. I pretend, sure, but they’re years ahead of me.
I’ll catch them one day, though.
Why hast thou forsaken Cobol?
“ALTER X TO PROCEED TO Y” ????
Anyone? C’mon? We love that stuff.
A little respect, eh?
John W. Backus, the software pioneer who developed Fortran, died earlier this week at 82.
At BYU, one of the English professors is named  no, really  William Shakespeare. He goes by “Bill.” On his office door are newspaper clippings with headlines such as the subject of this post, “Bill Pushes English,” and others saying what “Bill” does or would do. I thought it amusing.
As for immigrant children learning English, this business of acting like they won’t pick it up in just a couple of months is ridiculous. Yes, immersion, by all means, supplemented by English classes. Kids that age, even up to high school, still have the ability to learn languages pretty quick. Shoot, I learned Spanish in 2 months of classes and four months of immersion in the country, and I was 21.
But the bilingual education programs are designed not to help the immigrant kids but to give bilingual teachers jobs. They mightily hamper the kids’ integration into society. But no teachers union is going to favor student welfare over teachers’ jobs. Nope. Not gonna happen. Wouldn’t be prudent.
That stuff is just nasty. It should be banned.
What makes you think it will just be the children of immigrants who fail to meet the English proficiency requirements, dice?
Why, don’t you guys know that a national identity and a coherent community is just nationalism! An that’s bad.
It’s bad for members of a national community to be able to communicate with each other.
It’s bad for members of a national community to be able to do business with each other.
It’s bad for members of a national community to be able to educate themselves using sources outside their own narrow ethnic and partisan sources.
It’s bad.
/jackass
Sorry, here in Michigan the state Demos are just as bat-shit crazy as the national ones.
I was into GW Basic, LOGO and Pascal but that stuff never really gave me a kick. Now I do the odd fix of HTML, and that’s all.
When I moved to London, I never ever expected that the locals had to adapt to my incomplete knowledge of English (I thought I knew until I experienced the dreaded Essex accent). Rather, I expected to have to learn; my college had free advanced Egnlish classes and I perfected my skills there.
And it’s a feature, not a bug, that even Americans will have to be language-proficient under this scheme.
I think the point was that immersion works. But you knew that.
Republicans’ “the only good socialist is a nationalistic socialist” crush on the likes of Lieberman and Webb (and Giuliani) is not a good thing for conservatives outside the Party to internalize. Their reasons are not yours. Take care.
And, hello:
I prefer this kind of corruption to the baser, more purely political sort–he’s laying some groundwork for a personal post-political life, the very idea of which is foreign to all but a handful of our masters–but no politician should ever be congratulated for being merely corrupt.
Cultivating an interest, to the point of obligation, in our making such almost perfectly false distinguishments is a thoughtfully adopted political strategy that benefits both groups. If you want to help them–and it is a them, of which Republicans, too, comprise a mostly falsely distinguished part–go right ahead.
Real programmers code in assembler. That is, when they aren’t just patching the executables directly.
I’ve been doing this stuff far too long.
Heck, why not just program directly in machine code?
Cut out the middleman, I say.
I’m not sure anyone is even learning assembler any more. I just checked the CS curriculum at my alma mater; I saw no reference to it.
Bah. Too far from the machine. The true studs program in AHPL. That’s “A Hardware Programming Language”. The compiler outputs circuits.
Yeah, but Al Gore INVENTED global warming.
Why stop there? The compiler should manufacture the thing and barf it out.
Those were collator boards that we wired to do things like find duplicate cards… You remember punched cards. Those evil things you had to store your programs and data on. Heaven help the lazy person who didn’t punch sequence numbers into a deck and dropped it.
There is nothing new. It’s just all improved old stuff.
This is Geek to me.
Heaven help the lazy person who didn’t punch sequence numbers into a deck and dropped it.
Heaven didn’t help me when I dropped a stack of Fortran 77 cards in the rain while walking to class, but some sympathetic geeks did. Had to retype a bunch of them. (The cards, not the geeks.)
Luckily, the puncher thinger printed the English translation onto the top edge of the card or I would have been in deep poo. (It was a beginning class, so nothing too complex.)
I’d wish you had retyped the geeks. That would have been something to see…
I thought real programmers reset registers by hand, with carbon nanotubes and an electron microscope… realtime…
And, by the way, when I was a kid I had to carry bits in my hands back and forth from the only local BBS, uphill, both ways, in a hail of metorites.
01010010…
[scroll down for the rest –ed.]
Crap.
Sorry….
01010010 01100101 01100001 01101100 00100000 01001100 00110011 00110011 00110111 00100000 01101000 00110100 01111000 00110000 01110010 00110101 00100000 00110101 01110000 00110011 00110100 01101011 00100000 01100010 00110001 01101110 00110100 01111001
Oh yeah? Same to you, pal.
The binary code assholes did something amazing to the column width…
We’ve been HaxXord!!11!
COBOL: Completely Obsolete Bad Old Language
Scarier still, there is a truckload of legacy COBOL out there that will be used until they stop making compilers for it.
Why yes, I do indeed have follow-up notification. It helps me pretend I have a life.
OK, who left door open and let all the geeks in?
And I’m out of spray…
What a mess.
/bb|[^b](2)/
You need us geeks, pal.
Now be quiet or I’ll slash your credit rating.
Cranky, if you can slash my credit rating you must have invented the monomolecular blade…