California's recent vote to dismantle bilingual education is already generating reaction in Massachusetts. Parent advocates vow to defend what they see as their children's only, albeit deficient, protection in the difficult environment of the public schools and education policy makers see the high rates of Latino educational failure and the possibility of large savings and advocate quick immersion into the English language. The die cast in California will surely reverberate in Massachusetts -and so it should, since it was here that the first mandatory transitional bilingual education law in the United States was passed in 1970.

The story of how Massachusetts attained that unique place in the history of bilingual education in the United States begins much earlier, with the first attempts on the part of Puerto Ricans living in Boston to address the educational problems faced by children of migrant workers toiling in farms just outside the city. By the 1960's, many of the families accompanied the migrants in their treck north and settled in Boston during the harvest. Migrant children caught in this back and forth movement were seldom able to maintain attendance either here or in the island. Boston's own efforts began with a summer program for the migrant children in 1963, which was funded by the State with federal funds and held in a neighborhood grammar school in the South End. Armando Martinez, an organizer of this program, had lived in Boston since the 1950's. In an interview, he explained that at that time, "there was no bilingual education, no books on how you did this -nada, nada. We taught the kids … about the Anglo culture in Spanish and then we taught English as a second language By the next year, the federal government had changed its regulations regarding the type of migrants who qualified for the program and excluded those that were settled in the cities. That ended Boston's first experiment in a bilingual, bicultural approach to children's learning. However, Armando Martinez and his group had gained some valuable experience. They would later become part of the organizing effort for bilingual education in the state.

But, the situation of Puerto Rican children continued to be a great concern. Large numbers were not matriculated in the schools, and those that were faced multiple and serious problems. A 1973 report prepared by the School Volunteers for Boston, Inc underscored the high rates of non-matriculation and drop out (estimated at 90% by a Puerto Rican leader quoted in the report) among Puerto Rican children. Hubie Jones, then Director of the Roxbury Multiservice Center and Chairperson of the Task Force of Children Out of School, years later would explain that in The Way We Go to School, a 1969 report of children not in school, "we estimated that there may have been 10,000 kids not attending school who had a right to do so because of the exclusionary policies and practices, primarily practices, of the school system. The largest group of those people that we estimated were Latinos."

But even children in school were exposed to difficult circumstances. ESL programs that began to be offered in 1967 provided one hour of English instruction during the school day for children that could neither speak nor understand the content of the teaching that went on for the rest of the day. Students were often misgraded by several grade levels and -because intelligence and other testing was conducted in English- many Puerto Rican children were labeled retarded

By 1967, Congress had passed the Bilingual Education Amendment to Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The Title VII Amendment, introduced and steered through Congress by Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, provided federal commitment to the implementation of bilingual education. But Massachusetts school districts languished in the implementation of the program.

In the hands of the community

In Boston, Puerto Rican parents and leaders began to focus on bilingual education soon after the federal law was passed. The Spanish Federation, the first advocacy organization founded in the Latino community and the precursor to Boston's Hispanic Office of Planning and Evaluation - organized an education committee in 1968 that begins to gather together parents and activists interested in the development of educational alternatives. Alex Rodriguez, head of the education committee of the Spanish Federation, recalled in 1986: "The Spanish Federation organizes an education committee and starts making the contacts. ...We … attended conferences on Title VII to find out what it was all about.... we start understanding bilingual and we're right there in the forefront of it. We're trying to think how we do it here…

With the help of some ESL teachers at a South End school, the group wrote a proposal for a demonstration bilingual education project to Title VII. The two classes funded by this program were the first in the state and "proved that students worked better in a bilingual situation" and "served as the model for the proposal and funding of Title VII bilingual programs in the (Boston) Public Schools", according to a 1972 report by Boston School Committee (although they failed to acknowledge the community's role).

By 1969, the struggle was on to implement this program through the city. First was the battle for documentation. "The thing that was fascinating is that the school system had very little systematic data on the kids in the Latino community", Jones would comment years later. "Although they required every school system to do a census of the children in school as well as those children in the community as well as in school, Boston never did that, they would check off their form and count the people inside the schools and that would be their census". Yet, when the community would come to demand services, they would be told that there was no documentation of the need. "We had to prove to them that the need existed, we had to produce the ' warm bodies' " Rodríguez, the chair of the education committee of the Spanish Federation would say.

And they found the warm bodies… During the summer of 1969, as part a of summer program for migrant children that enrolled close to 400 children, Sister Francis Georgia, a Spanish nun that had taught in Puerto Rico and a member of the Education Committee of the Spanish Federation, personally canvassed a ten block area in Roxbury, known for its high concentration of Puerto Rican families and found that 65% of the children had never registered in school. A community worker did the same thing on a street in the South End; the 400 children in the summer program were surveyed. Overall, the group -community workers and parents- canvassed neighborhoods through the city and all came up with similar findings.

With this evidence and a $62,000 matching grant from the Educational Development Center, Sister Francis Georgia, community leaders and parents members of the Spanish Federation appeared before the Boston School Committee. There are many stories of how the positive vote was achieved. Freida Garcia, a participant, now head of the United South End Settlements recalled it this way: "… Sister Francis Georgia used to call up the members of the school committee at 5:30 in the morning. These men had all had nuns for teachers . It was key in getting commitments for votes. They were all thinking that when it got to a vote their vote wouldn't matter. But she would have done that with five others, and when it came to a vote, in fact, the votes were there". Rodriguez said that they "walked up and placed the $62,000 check on the School Committee's desk and said "We did our part, if you match this check we have $124,000 to start the program...They were embarrased...."

The Boston Public Schools provided the funds, but it was up to the community to implement the program. "We had to plan the clusters", the Chair of the Spanish Federation's Education Committee said, "it was the first program ever started by the Boston schools where school people were not involved in the planning. The community planned it, we hired the staff. They gave us an empty building, we even had to get the pencils, the chalkboards, the chalk." Even the desks were donated. The official indifference of the public schools gave the group almost total control over the program.

In January, 1970, and after considerable pressure from the Roxbury-North Dorchester parents and activists, the first "bilingual clusters" started in Denison House. A month later another one would start in the South End. In these schools, children were taught basic subjects in their native language and were taught English by bilingual and ESL teachers. In September 1970, the Department of Bilingual Education of the Boston Public Schools opened its doors in the South End.

Community Debate and Legislative Support

But the only way to get bilingual education into a firm footing was by having the legislature mandate the creation of bilingual programs where they were needed. Several things would come together for the law to pass in 1970. The first, was the publication of all the documentation on the exclusion of children from the state's schools. The report exposed the profound exclusion not only of bilingual children, but also of the handicapped and the retarded children from the public schools. Hubie Jones who was involved in the publication said in 1986,

The report had impact beyond our wildest dreams... The reason: it represented controlled fury. People were going around saying this can't be - 10,000 kids aren't in school. However, the greatest impact of the report was on the legislature. The speaker of the House had 500 copies of the report distributed in the legislature. And he said, I want you to come down and talk to us about it. I want to do something about this.

The second factor was the involvement of the community. Bilingual education was the first citywide Latino effort in Boston. Meetings were held throughout the community sponsored by the Spanish Federation. These meetings were very well attended and involved people from the South End, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Brighton. The community organizations supported the effort by providing it with the infrastructure for organizing -meeting space, copying machines, staff assistance. According to participants, although parents were upset about the situation of the schools, the first task of the organizers was to explain that Puerto Rican and Latino children had the right to go to school and to have programs that actually benefited them. Many immigrant parents never thought that their children had those rights. Parents were recruited by word of mouth from other parents. And they got involved in the process of passing the law. Signatures were collected, groups lobbied the legislature, parents and leaders testified at the hearings and "we had busloads of people go to the state hearings on bilingual education", Armando Martinez later recalled.

Within the community, discussion about the goals of bilingual education was a heated topic. Although there was agreement that some form of bilingual education should be implemented, the differences /within the community lay in the type of approach that should be advocated. Some argued for transitional bilingual education, where children would be involved in a bilingual program until able to be "mainstreamed" into a regular English language classroom. Others advocated bilingual education for maintenance, where children are taught in both languages throughout their schooling. This became a point of contention. Sister Francis Georgia and Alex Rodriguez, the Chair of the Education Committee of the Spanish Federation- advocated for the transitional program, others, including many parents, wanted the children to maintain their spanish as they learned English. But, the wishes for maintenance had to succumb to the pragmatism of achieving some gain on the issue that was central for all: getting Puerto Rican and other Latino children into programs that would actually help them to learn.

In 1970, Education Committee Chairman Michael Daley and House Speaker David Bartley sponsored the transitional bilingual education Law, which was approved in a unanimous vote of the Massachusetts House and Senate. The transitional bilingual education law required that any city or town that identifies twenty or more school children of one linguistic minority must provide bilingual education. The program would be full time, with children participating up to three years in instruction in the student's native language. A school population census ordered by the State Department of Education in 1972 revealed that 51 Massachusetts cities and towns were required to make provisions for bilingual programs in accordance with the new law.

Bilingual education, was a tremendous achievement for the young Latino community of Massachusetts and for those that so strongly supported their efforts to improve the education of their children. And thus any debate about the issue now, almost thirty years later, has not only to take into account this history but also should be called upon to document that any change proposed would be better than the status quo, as Latinos were forced to do thirty years ago.