Friday, August 30, 2002

Too many of the president's natural allies think that people can be forced to learn the language and want to enact public policies in furtherance of that objective.

They need instead to look to the example set down by Bush and by his brother, the governor of Florida. To reach these immigrants, these new citizens and potential citizens, they need to hear that the helping hand of friendship is extended in a way they can understand.

Thursday, August 29, 2002

Helping non-English speaking patients talk to their doctors is a growth industry at Boston Medical Center. The hospital, which receives 120,000 requests for translators each year due to the high number of immigrants, spends $2 million a year on 29 staff interpreters who speak 17 languages. In addition, it hires outside contractors who speak another 30 languages. . . .

[A] new federal mandate that requires all doctors, including those at smaller hospitals and private medical practices across the country, to provide comprehensive interpretive services is causing an uproar among doctors and hospital administrators. As the number of non-English-speaking people and immigrants reach every corner of the country, they say that the $30- to $400-per-hour cost of providing translation services could be staggering for small operations, possibly even discouraging doctors from locating in rural areas. . . .

The disagreement revolves around a ruling by the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services stating that physicians who receive federal payments, including Medicaid reimbursement for low-income patients, must provide at their own expense a trained clinical interpreter for all their limited-English-proficiency patients, regardless of whether the patient is covered by
Medicaid, Medicare, or a private insurer. Effective immediately, the mandate does not provide funds to doctors to pay for interpreter services. . . .

At Boston Medical, a Spanish interpreter costs $20 per hour with a two-hour minimum, hospital officials said. The hospital was once charged $70 per hour for a Hungarian interpreter. Their interpreters receive 10 weeks of training, including medical terminology and anatomy. . . .

Private physicians may spend between $1,500 and $3,500 a month for about 100 minutes of phone-interpreter services at vendors such as Language Line Services. They are charged $2.20 per minute for high-demand languages such as Spanish to $2.60 per minute for more specialized languages like Urdu. Certified medical interpreters, though, cost $3 per minute.

Tuesday, August 27, 2002

Monday, August 26, 2002

Saturday, August 24, 2002

Friday, August 23, 2002

Thursday, August 22, 2002

Last Thursday, in Sydney, the pack leader of a group of Lebanese Muslim gang-rapists was sentenced to 55 years in jail. . . . Now Australians need to ask themselves, "Why do they rape us?" As Monroe Reimers put it on the letters page of The Sydney Morning Herald:

"As terrible as the crime was, we must not confuse justice with revenge. We need answers. Where has this hatred come from? How have we contributed to it? Perhaps it's time to take a good hard look at the racism by exclusion practised with such a vengeance by our community and cultural institutions."

Wednesday, August 21, 2002

Luis Ramirez, a Guatemalan immigrant behind the wheel of a garbage truck, said his conversations with English-speaking co-workers were mainly "Hola, como estás" -- hello, how are you. But he applauded their efforts. "If they learn a bit, we'll learn [English] too, and we'll communicate more," he said.

Tuesday, August 20, 2002

But while the particulars seem unfathomable, the attack itself had a context and perhaps a motive that are perfectly comprehensible - and especially important for educators to grasp.

The historical record suggests that the United States has no problem with terrorism as long as its victims don’t live here or look like most of us. In the last couple of decades alone, we have bombed Libya, invaded Grenada, attacked Panama, and shelled Lebanon - killing civilians in each instance. We created and funded an army of terrorists to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua and when the World Court ruled that we must stop, we simply rejected the court’s authority. We engineered coups in Iran, Zaire, Guatemala, and Chile (the last of which coincidentally also took place on Sept. 11).

Friday, August 16, 2002

Census figures show that one out of every nine residents is now foreign-born. The response from politicians? Many are signing up for Spanish lessons. They should be telling immigrants to sign up for English lessons.

Thursday, August 15, 2002

Thursday, August 08, 2002

Wednesday, August 07, 2002

The Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 covers discrimination based on foreign language, though it is an aspect of the law that has not been consistently enforced, said Marcela Urrutia, a policy analyst with the Hispanic advocacy group, National Council of La Raza.

An executive order issued in 2000 by the Clinton administration sought to clarify that, ordering federal agencies and organizations receiving federal funds to ensure they have a system that provide services for limited English proficiency residents so they "can have meaningful access to them."

Many teachers cited the opportunity for fairness that two-way immersion education can provide as a major benefit. Because TWI [Two-Way Immersion] can put all students on an equal level, it gives them an equal chance to broaden their horizons and an equal opportunity to learn from and teach one another. According to one second grade teacher, "For native Spanish speaking students, TWI can be a chance to have Spanish language and culture validated and can potentially raise students' self esteem by giving them the experience of being the ones in the know."

Tuesday, August 06, 2002

Monday, August 05, 2002

Friday, August 02, 2002

The city will need to hire about 100 Spanish-speaking people to work at the polls on election days, said Jan Tyler, a Denver Election Commissioner. Estimated costs could be about $80,000.

But Denver City Councilman Ted Hackworth doesn't like spending any money on the law. The city's current financial woes - cuts that are threatening the Denver Police Department - should be a priority, he said.

"Should we lay off 50 policemen to handle an unfunded federal mandate?" Hackworth said. "I doubt that's good business."

The job title for the district attorney became “hamlet prosecutor,” and the county clerk-recorder was described as “office secretary” in the information mailed to 25,000 voters by the county registrar. “They translated some things very, very wrong,” Chuyen Van Nguyen, of the Vietnamese American Voters Coalition of Orange County, told the Associated Press. “These kind of sloppy translations have happened in prior years, too.”

Those of us who don’t speak Vietnamese will have to take his word for it. And that is precisely the problem. . . .

When the ballot and other election materials are translated into foreign languages, the integrity is compromised. Some languages, including Vietnamese, do not have exact equivalents of English words, so a precise translation is impossible. Thus, after a judge determines exactly how a candidate must be described or how a proposition must be worded in English, translators with no accountability to the public can change the descriptions on the foreign-language versions.

Thursday, August 01, 2002

Q. What's gone wrong with public education?

A. What's wrong is the funding system. Public education does not have the financial support it needs to be a success.