On the Right - W.'s Strange Flirtation.(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, JULY 17

It is, alas, hard to measure the collapse of the Bush administration in the matter of education. The bill that is making its way through Congress has good points in it, even as it can be said, with Christian resolution, that Sen. Kennedy has good points in him-indeed, it is mostly a Kennedy bill. The national despair over bad education is as dogged as the administration's refusal to do anything substantive about it. Concern for education is almost always listed as the first concern of the citizenry. Well, there are two ways to better education in those parts of the country where education languishes. One is to encourage competitive schooling; another is to mercy-kill bilingual education.

On the matter of vouchers, millions have been spent and very little progress recorded. The teachers unions, the most disciplined in the country-setting aside the inchoate union of trial lawyers-has obstructed private schooling as if it were the enemy, rather than the friend, of public schooling. The voucher can be said to have run into a stone wall, political and constitutional. But the persistence of bilingual education is very difficult to understand, and millions, under the present system, will find it difficult to understand why as mature "Americans" they will feel estranged from the American mainstream. And it isn't the fault of the immigrants. It is the fault of the professionals whose stake, very simply, is in federal bilingual money. They are the equivalent of the class of Americans who made horse carriages in 1910, averring the right to continue in their profession athwart the advent of the automobile.

There is much seething on this subject, with a column by Ruben Navarrette Jr. in the Chicago Tribune, another by John O'Sullivan in National Review, both deeply informed. But the great presence onstage in this struggle has been Ron Unz, a California software millionaire who has made the cause his own.

He did this by sponsoring plebiscites on the subject, first in California, then in Arizona. Now get this figure: In California, the unions outspent him 25-1. Yet Proposition 227 prevailed with a 22-point margin. Flash forward to Arizona, 2000. There the bilingualists outspent him again, but this time by a mere 10-1. The anti-bilingual cause nevertheless won by a 27-point margin. Contrast the presidential contest in Arizona that same year: W. won by a mere 1-point margin.

Mr. Unz is going to carry on the fight in Colorado, but he is wondering: What does it take to get the government of the United States to cut out this subsidy of ...