By Jill Stewart

Alice Callaghan wonders just how odd times are, when a committed leftist and bilingual Episcopalian nun who's dedicated her life to helping Latino children on Skid Row can wake up one day to find unmistakable pangs of political incorrectness tugging at her soul.

A frank and serious person, not really given to giggling, Alice actually giggles wickedly as she admits, "This is the first politically incorrect thing I have ever done in my life."

Callaghan is referring to her public support -- announced two weeks ago at the Las Familias del Pueblo children's center she runs on Skid Row -- for a political initiative slated for next June's ballot known as the English for the Children measure.

Sponsored by an unlikely mix of Latinos, conservatives, and leftists, and authored by Silicon Valley multimillionaire Ron Unz, the English for Children initiative already promises to spawn the hottest political debate of the year in California.

The measure would wipe out the state's failing, $320-million-a-year "bilingual" instructional program for immigrant schoolchildren, replacing it with intensive English instruction. Under the measure, immigrant parents could insist upon traditional "bilingual" education for their kids only by asking for a waiver. In addition, the measure would create free classes for immigrant adults in English -- as long as they agreed to later tutor kids in their communities in English.

"I just can't tell you the admiration I have for Ron Unz," says Callaghan, arching her brow and nearly whispering, "He's a conservative Republican, did you know?"

Told of this praise, Unz responds with a guffaw, "Well, gosh, I couldn't do this without Alice."

The affable Unz is the computer egghead who tried to wrest the Republican gubernatorial nomination away from Pete Wilson in 1994 and managed to get 35 percent of the vote. Though officially a conservative, his politics are rather eclectic. He strongly opposed the anti-illegal immigration Prop. 187, for example, and managed to persuade former Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp to publicly denounce it.

Officially co-sponsoring the English for the Children initiative with Unz is award-winning Mexican-American educator Gloria Matta Tuchman, a first-grade teacher in Santa Ana who has spent 20 years using immersion English to teach Latino immigrant kids. Although education bureaucrats openly disdain Tuchman's incredibly successful curriculum, it is impressive indeed. Every school year Tuchman produces yet another crop of first-graders who are fully literate readers and writers of English.

Tuchman's results are a stunning achievement in California, where bilingual teachers -- who heavily emphasize Spanish over English -- have a success rate of just 6 percent in moving immigrant children from Spanish to English each school year. Tuchman, by contrast, graduates 99 percent of her kids from Spanish to English each year.

"My school really supports me wonderfully," says Tuchman, "but the Santa Ana school board wishes I would just -- fttpp! -- disappear. They cannot accept that bilingual is a failure."

Education bureaucrats in every California city hold those same nonsensical views about bilingual efforts, and that's why Alice Callaghan was driven to act. Last year the Latino grade-school children she cares for at Las Familias del Pueblo were forced into Spanish classes at their downtown-area school -- even after their angry immigrant parents insisted on English.

So Callaghan and 200 immigrant parents staged a boycott and kept the children home from school to protest the forced teaching of Spanish. Their battle attracted the help of Mayor Richard Riordan and a pro bono attorney, and the school was finally publicly embarrassed into offering the children classes in English.

Unz, who decided to launch his initiative drive after reading about the bizarre battle to get English classes for immigrant kids in Los Angeles, says he "never got over seeing the story in the L.A. Times, and when I visited Alice I found out the situation was far worse than the Times portrayed. It was the most Alice-in-Wonderland public policy I had ever encountered."

Rather than help the parents get their kids into English classes, the principal at Ninth Street Elementary School had trumped up a phony curriculum to prove that the children were learning "English" practically all day -- if you counted recess, silent homeroom, and the lunch hour. Since then, Callaghan has probed further and discovered that many L.A. children in fourth and fifth grades -- products of years of "bilingual" -- are completely illiterate in English reading and writing.

"You want to see one of L.A. Unified's big bilingual success stories?" Callaghan asks me. She pulls out a classroom paper, written by one of "her kids" -- a little guy going to sixth grade next year. After six years of "bilingual education," the boy wrote the following English assignment for his teacher at Ninth Street:

I my parens per mi in dis shool en I so I feol essayrin too old in the shool my border o reri can grier das mony putni gire and I sisairin aliro sceer.

Says Callaghan: "This boy has actually been judged by the district to be a successful word decoder. A good reader. He's transitioning out of bilingual. Big success! Good Lord."

As Unz and Matta Tuchman both note, one of the most bizarre aspects of the bilingual education movement, spawned by angry Chicano-rights activists 30 years ago and ensconced in grade-schools in California by legislation 10 years ago, is the continuing belief that it "works."

"Publicly, a lot of the Latino leadership and union people say it does work, but in private a lot of them, with whom I have met, have deep, deep doubts," says Unz. "But nobody wants to get caught in the middle on this thing, so they haven't spoken up."

That timidity is already changing with the emergence this month of Unz's statewide measure. Los Angeles school board member David Tokofsky -- a bilingual educator who has long fought for the rights of Latino school kids -- calls the measure "very, very moderate and sensible-sounding." And privately, Unz says, some leading Latino activists who fought hard for bilingual education 10 years ago have told him, "We know bilingual education is dysfunctional."

In fact, bilingual education in California is creating so many kids illiterate in English that some educators now blame it for the record-high 50 percent dropout rates among Latino children -- a problem that bilingual education was supposed to fix. Even worse, Latino kids in California are now so far behind in English reading and writing skills that they place dead last among Latino kids in nationwide tests.

Despite such heaps of outrageous real-life evidence, California's leading bilingual education/whole language guru, USC Professor Stephen Krashen, has persuaded LAUSD and other California districts to believe that "research" favors bilingual education -- with a heavy emphasis on Spanish over English. Political leaders, from Los Angeles board members Jeff Horton and Vicky Castro to officials of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, routinely claim that "research" proves that bilingual education helps kids.

In truth, Krashen -- whom I and many others see as one of the most foolish Ivory Tower types pushing destructive theories upon minority children in California -- derives his beliefs not from real research but from his own gut feelings and musings. There is almost no legitimate research on bilingual education using true, controlled studies, peer review, and accepted scientific methodology. What scant real research does exist suggests, in fact, that children in bilingual programs don't benefit from the method.

The best longitudinal, real-life study of bilingual education is, of course, the 330,000 or so kids in L.A. currently stuck in "bilingual" classes. Most of these children, the vast majority of whom are Mexican-American, are for their early years limited to just one-half hour of formal English instruction per eight-hour day -- a scheme promoted heavily by Krashen, who created the current plan for Los Angeles and much of California, and spends his time traveling the state explaining how great his scheme is.

With California's bilingual program built upon the views of a windbag like Krashen, it's little wonder that Latino children are the first major immigrant group in the state incapable of reading or writing English much better than their foreign-born parents.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Pro-gress, a widely re-spected test that includes essay and multiple-choice questions, Latino children in every other state in the nation learn to read English faster and better than they do in California. In fact, California's Latino kids even lag behind Latino kids in Louisiana, Alabama, and Guam. And, the NAEP results showed, in states where English gets the big emphasis, Latino kids are vastly better off.

"What a surprise," says Callaghan ruefully. "The earlier you teach English to grade-school children, the more and better English they learn. How can this be?"

Unz, I dare say, is also catching on to the problem. He says Krashen patiently explained to him in a phone conversation that, contrary to popular belief, adults pick up foreign languages more easily than do children. And that, claimed Krashen, is why English should be withheld from immigrant kids until they're well into their Spanish.

What Krashen says must be true, and the rest of us must all be wrong. After all, he's got the research to prove it.