I’m angry. I’m very angry.
While googling the Amigos School to try to post a link to an Aaron Sorkin play being performed in both English and Spanish, I got a link to a post by Fred Baker on the Cambridge Republican City Committee’s blog suggesting that my daughter’s school be blown up. I’m not only angry, I’m stunned. How am I supposed to react to that? Is proposing a terrorist act of such magnitude even legal? I suspect it is given the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, but I’m appalled, disgusted and even scared.
Which of our children does he think should be murdered? Which of our teachers, friends, and city employees does he think should die for his racist fantasy?
Mr. Baker was responding to Michael Selva’s “The Right View” column in the July 10, 2008 edition of the Cambridge Chronicle. The column is a biweekly free pass that the Chronicle gives to the Cambridge Republican City Committee to express its views in a city whose citizens express predominantly progressive views.
The Amigos School is a Cambridge public school that employs the dual immersion technique in its curriculum. Lessons are taught equally in two languages. In this case English and Spanish. The overall academic results are good. Our students score relatively well on the standardized tests, and the kids enter high school with an in depth knowledge of two languages. The Anglo kids (my daughter included) get the academic advantage of nine years of instruction in Spanish as well as the appreciation of many cultures from around the world. Children who enter the school speaking no English don’t lose a year or more of academic instruction just learning English, and consequently do better here than in an English only curriculum
I hate bad government as much as anybody and agree with most of what Michael Selva had to say in his article, but his fellow traveler Fred Baker needs to seek out whichever rock he crawled out from under and go back and stay. If the Cambridge Republican City Committee elects people with these views as its chairman, perhaps it should crawl off too.
Mark Jaquith
Amigos School parent
Edit July 13, 2008. Here is the link. My critics are correct that I should have included it.
http://groups.google.com/group/cambridge-gop/browse_thread/thread/c7fcfd...
Edit July 14, 2008. It seems they have closed their blog to public view.
I'm still here.
Rather than pasting in an image that is too small for anyone to read, would it have been so difficult to post the link to the actual column so people could see this obviously humorous statement in context?
http://groups.google.com/group/cambridge-gop/browse_thread/thread/c7fcfd...
Fred made a lot of great points in his diatribe listing all that is wrong with Cambridge. His fantasy list of improvements include:
* Take a sledgehammer to the statue of Vellucci in Inman Square, replace
it with one of Ronald Reagan and rename the park for him: the REAL
architect of positive change for this country in the 2nd half of the
20th century.
* End bilingual education in the schools and BLOW UP the Amigos School
as a symbolic act in doing so, complete with a lever to push and
dynamite at the ready, with a nice ceremony complete with a band
and balloons.
* Stop blocking off the streets of East Cambridge to traffic during
the 4th of July evening and allow people to both park and drive
through there. Hey, you're not forced to live there if you don't
like it.
* Start a Home Rule petition to allow restaurants to decide THEMSELVES
if they will have smoking in their OWN establishments, superseding
state law.
Does the angry Mr. Jaquith honestly believe that these statements were written with the intent to inspire vandalism, racism(?), terrorism, illegal parking, and (horrors!) smoking in public?
Is Mark Jaquith obtuse or malicious?
Did he really not understand Mr. Baker's laugh-out-loud funny rantings? (Psst -- Mr. Jaquith, the very next line about including a band and balloons was a dead giveaway.)
Or did he know very well what Mr. Baker meant, take his sentence out of context, intentionally not add the link to the blog and instead, add a ridiculous, impossible-to-read, picture of the blog. Perhaps he thought the picture would suffice as the "smoking gun" and hoped people wouldn't check on their own.
Obtuse or malicious -- one or the other has to be true.
Mr. Jaquith has formulaically incorporated the techniques that the left currently uses to surpress the free speech of anyone who doesn't agree with them. Begin with mock outrage, intentionally take one or more comments out of context to sensationalize, do not provide original sources, do not under any circumstances address what was actually being discussed in the original, and finish off with uncalled for ad hominem attack.
Cambridge would be so much more interesting if the allegedly well educated lefty loonies who live there would get over their intellectual laziness and develop some respectable debating skills. Sadly, they never fail to disappoint.
Creo que la declaración era una broma, mis amigos.
I like humor, it is an essential tool to communicate difficult matters, to bridge gaps, to highlight the good and the bad. But used in the wrong circumstances it can turn into a malicious propaganda instrument or a frivolous and pitiful attempt to attract attention.
A clown outside of the circus is not funny, it is sad.
Humor in the wrong context only serves to pet the ego of the humorist, leaving behind him a trail of division and discord. If it is the approach of Mr. Baker, long leave Mr Healy.
Here is the link:
http://groups.google.com/group/cambridge-gop/browse_thread/thread/c7fcfd...
If you think that suggesting blowing up schools and destroying monuments to local leaders is funny then we have more than political differences. I am not disputing Mr. Baker's rights to say what he wants, but if what he suggests involves violence against innocents, including my family, thems fightin words.
How else can I interpret this statement as other than racist given the proven success of the education received at Amigos. Maybe success isn't what he is looking for if it wouldn't agree with his prejudices.
As for mock anger, this is the worst bit of hate speech that I have seen directed at my family since we were run out of the state of Alabama by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan under death threat when I was six years old. They bombed churches, you suggest bombing schools.
If it is a joke, then it's right up there with the "ethnic humor" that decent people know better than to use. If Christian Blanc wants to use it as the platform in the next City Council, then it will be amusing indeed.
Nice try, Mr. Jaquith, but you are still way off base. Your smears were already libelous, and now you resort to equating the intentions of a respectable citizen of Cambridge with those of the Ku Klux Klan.
Anybody with a brain who looks at the original will realize that no one was suggesting actual violence again anyone, including you, whoever you are.
If you want to start a blog about how wonderful you think bilingual education is then do so. I'm sure it's great for your daughter, and for the kids there who already speak English who are getting exposure to a second language culture. Unfortunately, it's at the expense of foreign-born children whose futures are being purposely undermined by being fed the lie becoming proficient in English just isn't that important.
You obviously are unaware that Fred Baker ran for school committee in 2001 partly on the platform of opposing bilingual education. He, and the more than 70% of Massachusetts voters who voted to eliminate bilingual education in the state on ballot question 2 in 2002, oppose it because as kind as it may sound on the surface, the result is sabotage of the futures of foreign-born, less affluent children.
I've worked overseas a lot, and speak a few languages because I know that it is arrogant and wrong for me to go to another country and expect others to just "talk American" to me while I'm there getting a paycheck in their currency. How many countries in the world do you think offer public education in any language other than the official language of that region?
The exceptions, when you find them, will be in places such as the Phillippines where half the school day may be in English because they actually want their children to succeed in the world, and English is the de facto language of business worldwide.
Discouraging or minimalizing the importance of English to children in this country is nothing more than an attempt to maintain a permanent underclass of people who are not prepared to function without the permanent aid of government assistance.
Now who is the racist?
wow, quite a bit of name calling in these posts, instead of constructive dialogue. I hope that the citizens of our city can manage a bit of dispute and disagreement......
Just for accuracy's sake, since when is English the official language of the U.S.? As far as I knew, our country has never had an official language.
Ms. Imrie,
You are correct that teaching foreign-born children that they do not need to learn English would be a huge mistake. However you are completely wrong if you think that is what happens at Amigos.
Rather than just give you my own opinion and experience as a parent to support this, here's a little data, from the DOE web site:
Grade 7 ELA MCAS Results for 2007, Hispanic / Latino students (shown
as percentages for Amigos / Cambridge / statewide, in that order):
Advanced: 0% / 6% / 2%
Proficient: 79% / 57% / 40%
Needs Improvement: 14% / 31% / 37%
Warning: 7% / 6% / 21%
Composite Performance Index: 89.3 / 85.6 / 71.5
Grade 8 ELA MCAS Results for 2007, Hispanic / Latino students (shown
as percentages for Amigos / Cambridge / statewide, in that order):
Advanced: 7% / 3% / 3%
Proficient: 64% / 56% / 45%
Needs Improvement: 29% / 34% / 35%
Warning: 0% / 6% / 17%
Composite Performance Index: 89.3 / 85.1 / 75.2
Any way you want to slice this data, Hispanic / Latino students at Amigos are clearly doing better on this test *of English academic ability* than their counterparts elsewhere in Cambridge or in Massachusetts. The percentage of students demonstrating proficiency in English (proficient + advanced) is much higher in both grades than for Hispanic / Latino students in the district overall, or in the state.
Amigos students also do as well as ALL students (not just Hispanic / Latino students) statewide -- here's the data:
2007 ELA Composite Performance Index (CPI), grade 7:
Amigos Latino / Hispanic students: 89.3
Statewide ALL students: 86.9
2007 ELA Composite Performance Index (CPI), grade 8:
Amigos Latino / Hispanic students: 89.3
Statewide ALL students: 89.5
To make sure this was not a fluke, or a specific cohort that was particularly proficient in English, I checked 2006 and 2005 as well. The 2006 data are similar or perhaps better. For 2005 the comparison of Amigos to Cambridge is similar; the state comparison can't be done as the report on the DOE site does not show statewide data for comparison -- it only has school and district data.
Two-way bilingual education at Amigos is actually giving these students BETTER success in English than the monolingual programs in other schools. This is exactly what a couple of decades of research on bilingual education shows: two-way programs, properly implemented, are highly successful at exactly the task that is important to you -- making sure that non-native speakers learn English well.
As an aside, the research I have read says that the transitional programs which the voters eliminated clearly have less success than the two-way model, though in my view they are not nearly as bad *on average* as the rhetoric around that campaign suggested, even though some specific programs were poorly run.
A further note ...
Re whether this whole thing was supposed to be humorous, that seems ridiculous. I'd agree that Mr. Baker didn't seem to mean his comments literally. However they are embedded in a list of what appear to be fairly serious proposals. The comment about Amigos was an example of hyperbole, not humor. Ditto the comment about the statue.
If you want to make a serious point and ruffle some feathers, it seems odd to hide behind "oh he was just trying to be funny" when you get ruffled feathers. It also seems odd to put forward a political rant, as Mr. Baker did, then complain that the response seems to you like too much of a ... political rant.
Thanks for some real data; your tone and content elevate the conversation. I'd love to hear some Amigos graduates speak about their school experience.
Actually, the trend in our increasingly globalized and competitive world is towards multilingual education. The European Union, to name one example, promotes educational policies that strengthen linguistic diversity as a means to deepen international understanding, consolidate democratic citizenship and sustain social cohesion. So, I don't know where this idea that bilingual education hurts minorities from getting ahead economically comes from.
Bravo for the Amigos School if they have found a way to make bilingual education actually work for the benefit of the foreign-born students. I haven't looked at this issue since I, like the vast majority of Massachusetts citizen, voted against it in 2002. At that time the general consensus was that so-called bilingual education didn't work very well when it came to the "learning English" part.
Be that as it may , Mr. Jaquith still owes Fred Baker a public apology.
Jaquith knows very well that neither "terrorism" nor "racism" were being advocated in Baker's amusing and intelligent rant. Here again, is the link to the original (you will have to scroll to the top):
http://groups.google.com/group/cambridge-gop/browse_thread/thread/c7fcfd...
Jaquith started this page by purposely taking Baker's comment out of context and sensationalizing it, and with the intent to smear Baker's good name and throw dirt on the Cambridge Republican City Committee.
As I stated above, Jaquith's brainless attack is a typical example of the tactic used by the left to surpress free speech by anyone who does not go goosestepping along with their ideas of whatever is "politically correct".
Cambridge lefties, if they really do place a value on free discourse, ought to be glad for the existence of the "Right View" columns in the Chronicle and the Cambridge Republican City Committee.
From what little I now know of Jaquith, he seems to be nothing more than an irresponsible attention-seeker. I doubt that he will ever man up and come forth with the apology he owes to Fred.
Speak on, just don't expect that when you suggest outrageous illegal things that no one is listening. I still fail to see any humor there. No matter how hard I try it comes off as viscious.
Mr. Baker's piece was at best in bad taste and at worst offensive. Mr. Jacquith doesn't owe anyone anything. He expressed, as he has the right to, the outrage he felt that a political representative would express such a view.
I don't believe Mr. Baker speaks for Republicans in Cambridge, and would urge the Republican committee to pay closer attention to whom they elect as their representative.
Mr. Jacquith, thank you for bringing my attention to this piece.
Want to see what a blown up school looks like? Do a Goggle image search on Beslan. It's not funny.
While the actual subject of this post seems to have gone far off topic, I feel that I must respond to the people calling out bilingual education as a bad choice.
I am a graduate of the Amigos school. I attended from kindergarden through 8th grade. I was valedictorian of the first official class of Amigos as a school rather than a subset program of the Kennedy. After that, I went on to Boston Latin School, one of the top high schools in the country, where was in the top 15% of the class. I am now a student at Bennington College, a school celebrated for its innovation in the dance and arts world, and I am doing very well there with a 3.85 GPA. If you had any doubt that Amigos is able to prepare its students for life and future education, I am here to erase that doubt. I am proof that it is entirely capable of preparing students just as well as any other K-8 school.
I am grateful to Amigos for its wonderful program.
Allowing native speakers of Spanish to retain their first language without diminishing the importance of English in the USA is what the Amigos school does best. It also allowed me, a native English speaker, to learn a second language from age 5. In a world that is becoming ever more connected, being multi-lingual is once of the most valuable skills out there.
To Ms. Imrie: You wanted to hear from an Amigos graduate, so here I am. I am sad to hear that you voted against my school. Every student in the school at the time went to the hearing that year to fight for our school's right to exist. I was there, supporting bilingual education. Amigos provided me with an opportunity that is incredibly rare in our country--the ability to be fluently bilingual before high school.
I am quite aware that many so-called "bilingual" schools in this country do not in fact succeed in teaching their students English, and yes, those schools should be made to reform. Those schools have no right to claim to be bilingual. And yes, those schools minimalize the importance of English, and ultimately hold their students back. Amigos is not one of those schools.
At Amigos, every single student is able to speak both English and Spanish by graduation. Yes, every single student in my class was bilingual. This is an amazing feat.
As to the original content of this posting--clearly the comment was intended to be humorous, but for anyone with an attachment to the Amigos school it is nothing but a horrible insult. It was a joke in poor taste. The author of the comment clearly does not know that the Amigos school is an honest to goodness bilingual school, with a strong educational program. In that sense I agree with the original author of this post that it was a disgusting comment. I hope next time Mr. Baker actually takes time to do some research before dismissing all forms of bilingual education out of hand.
To Mr. Jaquith, I do believe your post is an overreaction, but I appreciate your sentiment.
It is interesting that you ran to another state and not another country, say, North Korea, Darfur, or Iraq...
Mr. Jaquith, another thought. I was part of the "Lunch Buddies" program, sponsored by the Volpe Center, a few years ago. I read with a boy whose first language was Spanish and he was having a hard time, understandably, with reading English. I asked where he was from and he replied, "El Salvador, and someday I will go back home."
I doubt this 5th grader felt the need for a "bilingual education", nor did his parents.
Which begs another question. If the school is truly committed to bilingual programs, why Spanish? Why not Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Arabic, Polish, or Russian? As a Cambridge taxpayer, I'm footing the bill for a program which, pardon the pun, I had no say in.
And, by the way, that's "vicious", not "viscious". Perhaps a little more English in that "bilingual education?"
Marynia Mackiewicz
My Dear Ms. Mackiewicz,
I sincerely hope that this young fellow is doing fine wherever he is. Did you ask him if he would like to go to a school that taught academic subjects in a language he was fluent in while at the same time teaching him English in an atmosphere that respected him and his native culture? Did you ask his parents?
Why Spanish? A large population of students in need, a pool of talented people to implement the program, and a lot of support in the city. I'm sorry you don't support the idea; I would think that all of you "good government" advocates would rally around something so successful.
Why not Chinese? Was that Mandarin, Cantonese or one of the others that you meant? Indian? Do you mean Asian or American? (Yes most natives in the Americas call themselves Indian, or Indio, when not referring to their particular group.) Of these which of the several hundred languages do you mean? These and all the others you suggest? Is it practical, is there a large enough population of each here in Cambridge to be able to do that? Maybe you could take on the project.
As for having a say in how your money is spent on education maybe you should run your own candidate for School Committee. Oh, right, you ran Fred Baker in 2001. He didn't do too well. He came in ninth out of ten in number one votes after the recount (328). Marla Erlien, an outspoken Amigos advocate who came in eighth, got over three and a half times that number (1188). I hope you voted.
Thank you for the spelling correction. I will try to learn from my mistake. I never had any bilingual instruction in my public school education. If I had then maybe I would have saved myself the embarrassment of having my seven year old be my interpreter on a trip to Peru a few years ago. She did really well, though, thanks to the public school education she was getting at Amigos. I think that she and her classmates are being given far more opportunity than I ever was.
HOW DARE HE SAY BLOW UP THE AMIGOS SCHOOL !
THE SCHOOL I WENT TO FRM 2-8TH GRADE ?!
it was the best education ever and the spanish classes are better than any spanish class in high school !
Fred Baker makes me sick . u q h
Since the Cambridge Republican City Committee closed its blog to public view, (after I was criticized for not including a link to it) I thought I would copy the text of Fred Baker's post to this forum.
I did not edit the following in any way. I copied the text to a word processing document, and then copied it below.
Fred Baker
View profile
More options Jul 8, 2:46 pm
From: "Fred Baker"
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2008 14:46:43 -0400 (EDT)
Local: Tues, Jul 8 2008 2:46 pm
Subject: Re: [Cambridge-GOP] new RIGHT VIEW column: "The Contract with Cambridge"
Reply | Reply to author | Forward | Print | Individual message | Show original | Report this message | Find messages by this author
Nice column, Michael, but I wish you would have included some
other really necessary changes:
* End affirmative action in all city hiring considerations.
* End all contracts with Teachers' Unions.
* Eliminate the Department of Traffic and Parking and rip up
every parking meter citywide.
* Make resident parking stickers free and stop requiring nearly a urine
sample to get one, especially for long-time residents of the City.
* Reduce street sweeping to every OTHER month without the towing penalty.
* Cut city budget by 50%, including disposal of the Dance Complex,
Cambridge Multicultural Arts center and Dept. of Human Service Programs.
* Cut property taxes by a proportional amount for each property owner
based on the amount saved by budget cuts.
* Allow rent escrowing.
* Get rid of Proportional Representation (PR) voting in municipal elections.
Top nine council candidates win, top six on School Committee.
Councilors continue to decide among themselves who will be the Mayor,
who continues to be a weak Mayor in a Plan E government (City Manager).
* Stop the $500+ of free food at all City Council meetings!!
* Cut City Councilors' salary to $15k/year, meetings max. once every other
week except Summer (when they meet no more than once).
* Cut School Committee members' salaries to same as City Councilors.
* Take a sledgehammer to the statue of Vellucci in Inman Square, replace
it with one of Ronald Reagan and rename the park for him: the REAL
architect of positive change for this country in the 2nd half of the
20th century.
* Stop blocking off the streets of East Cambridge to traffic during
the 4th of July evening and allow people to both park and drive
through there. Hey, you're not forced to live there if you don't
like it.
* Revoke all Sister City relationships.
* Start a Home Rule petition to allow restaurants to decide THEMSELVES
if they will have smoking in their OWN establishments, superseding
state law.
* Repudiate the Community Preservation Act.
* End bilingual education in the schools and BLOW UP the Amigos School
as a symbolic act in doing so, complete with a lever to push and
dynamite at the ready, with a nice ceremony complete with a band
and balloons.
* Institute absolute school choice (no lotteries or set-asides).
* Cut public housing to include elderly/infirm housing only.
* Stop requiring business licenses for most types of companies to
set up in Cambridge.
* Nearly eliminate the License Commission and abolish fees to
have radios, televisions, dart boards and certain types of food
in bars and restaurants.
* Ticket people aggressively who put old chairs and card tables with
three legs missing in the street to "save" a parking space they
just shoveled out (or didn't) after a snowstorm because they
feel entitled to it.
To readers who do that: knock it off, you don't own that space --
it's city property. And no argument or opinion can change that.
* And so much more ... just wait until I get started!
To all the liberals, Rockefeller/1970s Republicans, greens and
moonbats who might be in our ranks: I can only HOPE I've pissed
you off. The above is all positive and necessary change for
Cambridge. Without it, residents like me just keep hating on
the city and continue hiding our residency among non-Cambridge
friends. This place has made me SO ashamed to live here, I'll
probably be gone inside of a year from now, with Cambridge and
myself both happy for the change. Cambridge is NOT the real America.
-Fred Baker,
the former Chairman.
I couldn't decide whether to put my own two cents in on this post, but I finally couldn't not say anything. Let me start with full disclosure: I'm Mark's wife. However, anyone who knows us more than casually can testify that we have our own opinions and aren't shy about expressing them. We're also both open to hearing other people's opinions and modifying ours if it seems warranted.
First of all, my personal opinion is that Mr. Baker and all of the people who cheered him on on the Cambridge Republican City Committee blog meant every single word of what they said. Now they're trying to claim it was only a joke, but I think they're just sorry they got caught. I for one am sick to death of people saying abhorrent things and then claiming they were just joking when they're called on it. Of course, I don't believe they'd actually do anything; I think they're likely all hat and no cattle. But that doesn't excuse them for saying it, and I doubt they'd excuse someone who went after them in the same way, nor would I.
Of course, they have a right to say anything they want (short of shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater), but we also have a right to condemn it as hateful and not fit for civilized conversation. It does pose the conundrum of telling when Mr. Baker and his friends are joking and when they aren't, considering the placement of the comments regarding the Amigos School and the late Al Vellucci in the middle of a list of what appear to be serious policy recommendations, some of which I might even agree with. This coarsening of political discourse is all too common today and serves only to divide us and prevent us from actually talking about anything important. And now they've cut their blog off from public view so they can express their innermost hopes and desires without having to worry about being overheard by someone who doesn't know the secret handshake. All we can see now is bits and pieces like this:
Don't they know that, as the Republicans keep telling us, we live in a Post-9/11 World(TM)? People can't run around willy-nilly making threats without expecting others to take them Seriously. After all, we must live in fear All the Time Because The Terrorists are Going to Get Us. Indeed, as an Amigos parent pointed out in another forum, if a student were found with a list like Mr. Baker's, the student would be yanked from the classroom, the police would be called, and the student would likely be suspended or worse. Why does Mr. Baker think the rules shouldn't apply to him?
I doubt my great-grandfather Francis Arnold Hoffman would recognize the party he helped found. That brings me to the second topic that has been under discussion, bilingual education. Most of you probably don't know that we German-Americans were the first to demand, and get, bilingual education for our children. It didn't make us not Americans, and it didn't keep us from learning English. It did, however, make us able to read, write and speak two languages fluently instead of just one. In fact, my great-grandfather insisted on speaking only German at home, which probably came as a surprise to his American-born, English-speaking wife. She persevered nonetheless and managed to stick with him and learn German. Being bilingual didn't stop him from being elected to statewide office as lieutenant governor of Illinois and being successful in several other careers, nor did it stop his children from being successful themselves.
Ms. Mackiewicz, I hope you and your lunch buddy both enjoyed the experience; things like that can truly enrich our lives. However, I would suggest to you that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. In addition to your apparent lack of knowledge of world languages that Mark pointed out, I'd like to suggest that you learn the proper usage of the term "begging the question". The misuse you illustrated is far too common. I can put it no better than begthequestion.info: "'Begging the question' is a form of logical fallacy in which a statement or claim is assumed to be true without evidence other than the statement or claim itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place." There is much more at the website, presented with humor, including cards you can print out and keep with you to help you and others remember what "begging the question" means.
This whole brouhaha leaves me sad. We should be able to discuss our differences of opinion in a civilized manner and learn from each other. I have been reading Susan Jacoby's latest book, "The Age of American Unreason". One of the things she discusses is the current phenomenon of the political echo chamber, where people don't seek out the views of people they don't already agree with, which is a real break with the habits of just a couple of generations ago. I think the demonizing of perceived opponents and the far-too-frequent call for their murder or assassination and/or the destruction of their homes, businesses or other property fuels this stark division between Us and Them. Death and destruction, with rare exceptions, just aren't funny, and the sooner we all learn that, the better.
Mark and I have both agreed with many issues raised in The Right View, and the Chronicle has published at least one letter of his praising one of those columns wholeheartedly. I have said many times that one-party rule is bad for everyone and taken the Massachusetts Republican Party to task for not even contesting most races. How pathetic is it that the Green Party, in no one's estimation a major political force, no matter how many people agree with many or most of the positions it takes, had more candidates for the top statewide offices in the last election than the Massachusetts Republican Party did? Adopting Mr. Baker's comments as your platform, as several people advocated on your blog, will do nothing to improve your electoral chances, and will likewise do nothing to advance true democracy in our city, our state or our country. For that, you should apologize to each other and all of us.
Fred Baker's comments were not funny to my family - our son's in the Amigos first grade. Why would blowing up something and making it a festival with balloons be funny?
But as to the program itself, much of what I would say has already been said by Amigos grads and other parents, but the one thing that I notice is that Mr. Baker thinks that the English-speaking parents are out to get our kids the benefit of speaking Spanish but that it will be at the expense of the Spanish native speakers not learning English. Does he imply that our English-speaking kids are capable of learning in two languages but that the Spanish-speaking kids are not? Why does he think that the Spanish speakers in the program can't learn English but doesn't doubt that the English kids can learn Spanish? The parents of the Amigos students realize that learning two languages if valuable to BOTH Spanish and English. And to the woman who questioned, why Spanish and not Chinese? The kids are taking Chinese - once per week at the youngest grades. Those who continue throughout their primary educations can qualify to go after 8th grade on a trip to China. English-only educations in today's multi-cultural world is short-sighted. Europeans, Asians, Africans - all are educated in multi-languages from the time that they are little. Perhaps rather than blowing up Amigos' program, we might think to expand other schools' language instruction and offer educations in MORE languages so that our students will be prepared for the global society that they will be living in by the time they graduate.
Jennifer KG
Humanities Teacher
Cambridge, MA
I wholeheartedly agree that it is doing our kids a great disservice to let them grow up speaking only English - I am mono-lingual and it seriously restricts my relationships, my travel, and my ability to understand news and current affairs from a perspective other than our own.....Fortunately, the kids in the Amigos program will have more expansive horizons.
Mr. Jacquith -
In your haste to ventilate your wrath about Fred Baker's comments regarding the Amigos program, you mistakenly described the source of your distress as "a post by Fred Baker on the Cambridge Republican City Committee’s blog." Wrong! This was a PRIVATE communication sent by Fred to a small number of people who signed up for a PRIVATE email discussion list hosted by Google. Participation in this group is by invitation only. It was intended to foster discussion of local issues among ourselves.
When I set up the list a couple of weeks ago, I thought that its status as a closed, private list would prevent casual Googlers from reading the contents of these messages. Obviously, I was mistaken, and I therefore apologize for my small role in this sorry tale. Yesterday, I figured out how to shield these messages from the all-seeing Eye of Google, and that is why you discovered on July 14th that "it seems they have closed their blog [sic] to public view." Once again, it was NOT a "blog" to begin with.
I believe that you owe Mr. Baker a public apology for revealing the contents of a private communication. The polite thing to do when you receive a letter intended for someone else is to give it back to the postman for delivery to the right person. The same rule applies to electronic mail. The fact that you stumbling into Mr. Bakers's message while searching for something else does not absolve you of the necessity for civility and respect for privacy.
Michael Selva
Vice Chairman
Cambridge Republican City Committee
Dear Mr. Selva (at least I spelled your name right),
The participants didn't think it was private. They criticized me for not providing a link to it. Perhaps you owe Mr. Baker and the committee an apology for not building in safeguards. Your bad. The fact is that I found it innocently while trying to find another group.
It certainly had no indication of privacy when I found it, and perceiving an implication of a threat against my child, I became angry and reacted as any responsible parent or citizen should. BLOW UP A SCHOOL?!! How a person can even lend his name to a defense of anyone suggesting that boggles the mind.
Blog, discussion group, I guess I can't tell the difference. I'm no webmaster. I saw what I saw. Blame Google or yourself that I did see it, but it was out there. I believe the more apt analogy is seeing a flier stapled to a phone pole; nobody sent this to me intentionally or by accident.
As for civility, I am not the one who included BLOW UP THE AMIGOS SCHOOL and take sledgehammers to the statue of our former mayor in the midst of a list of desired political reforms.
Mr. Baker's continued professed ignorance of the outstanding performance of the Amigos School (not program), considering his having run for School Committee, makes me wonder whether he really cares about educating our children or only wants to bash people he thinks are immigrants.
As for further apologies, I think Mr. Baker and his defenders owe the Amigos School a big one.
If someone made a statement against any member of my family that I could consider a realistic and valid threat, neither my first nor my second reaction would be to run to the computer to start a blog page about it.
Clearly, you never perceived any such threat. You are full of crap.
Your intention was to libel Fred Baker and the Cambridge Republican City Committee by sensationalizing one statement presented out of context.
I am the one who added the link to the original, above, in an attempt to correct your blatent omission of it.
We just heard that the Chronicle also blogged about this. Thought it would be pertinent to your discussion.
http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/news/x1346885039/Bilingual-foe-says...
As another NeighborMedia blogger, I want to commend Mark for a post that has generated more comments than I've seen for any previous NM entry. I only wish everyone were willing to attach names to their comments. I don't have any children in the school system, but I've learned a lot from reading this string about the Amigos school. I think it has been very constructive, despite some regrettable flame-throwing comments
That aside, I think we could do with some clarification of "two-way" bilingual programs (such as the one at Amigos) that involve both native English speakers and native speakers of other languages versus the often-reviled "biliterate" or bilingual programs that involve only native speakers of a language other than English. The problem with the latter, and part of the reason voters did away with them in California, was that they tended to stick kids who did not speak English at home into classes where they might spend years learning neither their native language nor English very well. They also segregated immigrant kids from their American-born peers. Critics contended that these classes were little more than employment programs for teachers and that English immersion classes were a better alternative.
But again, that's not what's going on at Amigos. A California Department of Education web page I found explains the two-way concept pretty well and notes that with two-way programs, children who are native English speakers are supplementing their knowledge of English with an additional language. It's language enrichment, rather than replacement of English instruction. A great deal of research has shown that it is critical for children to start learning a second language at a very early age. When I was in school, instruction in a second language never started until high school. By then it is at too late a stage of brain development for most students to become anywhere near fluent.
There are lots of parents who spend money hiring tutors, nannies and so on so that their young children can converse with someone in another language, knowing that as adults, these kids will have to compete in a globalized world. It's not all about Spanish either--there's a large and growing demand for people who can speak Mandarin, Arabic, Russian, etc. In addition, colleges often require a certain level of second-language instruction and AP or SAT tests (mine did). I got into college in spite of--rather than because of--my grasp of French, which improved only years later when I lived in France. I wish I'd had the opportunity to go to an Amigos-style program where I could have learned, and appreciated, another language at a young age.
I'm so very grateful to Mr. Baker for making my day happier with his funny comments about the Amigos school. Who doubts that he was just joking? Have we all lost our sense of humor? Are we all so serious that we can't take a sarcastic comment for what it really is and nothing else? Come on, Amigos parents and teachers, couldn't you tell that he really didn't mean it? That is too bad, because I am still smiling at his remarks and at all of those who take his words so seriously.
I would like to spread his funny words even more, so that more folks can keep laughing. I just thought that I would send a letter to Mr. Robert Haas, Cambridge Police Commissioner, and to Ms. Martha Coakley, Massachusetts Attorney General, and let them know about Mr. Baker's jokes. I'm sure they'll be amused and delighted by his sense of humor...Too bad that now they can't read his words directly from the blog where they were posted, the blog has now gone "undercover", which really puts Mr. Baker words in the hilarious "underworld" where they belong.
Perhaps, who knows, one of these days we can all laugh on our way to court.
Thank you to the writer of the last post. I am very unclear on the legality of statements like Mr. Baker's in this Post 9/11 (TM), post Columbine, post Virginia Tech world. I did not inform law enforcement authorities because I would like to maintain my belief (possibly fantasy) that the Constitution is still the rule book on this.
My thought was that the power of free speech was the best defense against some whacko picking up Mr. Baker's repugnant suggestion and acting on it. By broadcasting his words to our local legislators, the City Council and the School Committee I thought that they could make the decision whether or not any police involvement was called for. I also thought they should be informed as to the writings of the former School Committee candidate and member of the Cambridge Republican City Committee elected by the citizens in last February's election.
And Ms, Imrie, as for your contention that I am full of crap, I am Looking forward (NOT) to a colonoscopy as part of my 50 year 500,000 mile check-up. That should answer that question once and for all.
Interesting question about free speech in the post 9-11 era. I think the Patriot Act did away with all of that messy stuff.
> [Mark Jaquith says] I am very unclear on the legality of statements like Mr. Baker's
Actually, I think what you're unclear on is *meaning* of his statement. ...Or you're intentionally misconstruing it because you like making bogus accusations against people with different political views than yours. I suspect the latter, but let's check. Mr. Jaquith, please answer these questions honestly:
1) Keeping in mind that Fred Baker posted a long list of things he thought the ideal city government should do, and his statement about the Amigos school was part of that list, do you agree he intended it as a suggestion for what the city government ought to do?
2) Do you agree that the city government has the right to demolish a building that doesn't meet the needs of the city (i.e. that to do so is a legitimate act, not a terrorist act)?
3) If the city government demolished the Amigos school building (not that they should, but supposing they did) in the way Fred Baker suggested -- with a ceremony complete with a band and balloons -- do you honestly think *anyone* would be inside that building at the time? Do you really think such a festive, well-publicized, city-organized event would result in intentional physical harm to anyone?
Assuming you answered Yes, Yes, No, do you agree you ought to apologize to Mr. Baker for accusing him of advocating terrorist acts and murder?
Thanks god they block off the residential streets to traffic on the Fourth of July. It is hard enough dealing with all the vadalism that takes place on the Fourth. Blocking off residential streets for these types of events is common practice in any city or town. It is great that people can walk, or use public transportation during the summer. Maybe everyone stuck in traffic should try an alternative method for getting to the river on the fourth.
Mr. Selva, how would one believe something was meant for private eyes if it was posted for the public to see? The Google Groups policy is clearly stated when setting up and managing your group (I should know, I manage one). Personally, I think making jokes about blowing up the school shows the mentality of the group. If a non-republican made such a comment, fox news would surely pick up on it, and we would find that person is locked up on charges.
Susan Imrie, having been educated by a prior email from an Amigos' parent on the success of the Amigos School (most especially for Latinos), now says bravo to the Amigos School after having voted for the Unz Referendum that tried to eliminate all bilingual education, including the Amigos School. Gee, Susan, you voted without real information on bilingual education. Many people, along with parents from Amigos, spent months organizing at the legislature to stop the effects of that referendum and succeeded only by getting an exclusion for two-way bilingual schools--a kind of 50-50 English and another language structure. Thus Amigos was saved, but unfortunately hundreds of students have been plopped into English-only classes and have lost important development because their ability to think in Spanish has no value and it takes years to develop a facility to think in English. Since I worked against this referendum heralded by Mr. Baker, Susan and others, I heard why people were supporting it. I spent many weekends at shopping centers and other public venues talking with people on the subject. On the top of the list was, I don't want to be around others speaking a language I don't understand. Then, I can't understand the waitresses at Wendy's (or other such restaurants/coffee houses) and thus think foreigners should learn good English, etc. It rarely had anything to do with how kids learn, or children at all. It was more so about the kids' parents who have limited English and are employed in the service jobs. Peoples' votes for the most part really had little to do with knowing how bilingual programs worked, and rather the fear or dislike or discomfort with people who spoke other languages motivated their vote against programs that allowed for any language other than English! And Susan Imrie proved the point. She knew nothing about her own local Amigos School or the English/Portuguese program and yet, voted to destroy them.
To "MErlien", let's be clear. Bilingual education stinks of what President Bush aptly refers to as the "soft bigotry of low expectations." I voted against bilingual education, and would do so again today, primarily because in these United States, bilingual education tends NOT to work very well for the group that's supposed to be learning English. It is a SCAM, and the victims are the taxpayers who pay for it, and the kids whose futures are tarnished. Refer to the post by "k.raila", the Amigoes grad who is well aware that the Amigoes program is an exception in this regard.
I grew up with kids who learned English very quickly -- though daily immersion in school! I've lived and worked overseas and became fluent in several languages as an adult. The vast majority of other countries aren't offering free, public bilingual programs for English-speaking kids. When programs like that do exist, they are private.
So, "MErlien", your lame attempt to paint me and other people critical of bilingual education as somehow intolerant is as off base as was Mark Jaquith's intent to smear another Cambridge resident's reputation by starting this blog based on a purposely misinterpreted statement.
Mr. Jaquith, you never responded to Bill Hees' comment above. Now that your irresponsible blogging equivalent of yelling "fire" in a movie theatre has gotten you the sick attention you craved, don't you think it's time to publicly apologize to Fred Baker?
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