The title of James Crawford’s latest collection of essays says it all: diversity,
anxiety (not to say paranoia) and war are indissolubly linked in the public mind
where American language policy is concerned. In the wake of the 11 September,
2001, bombings of the World Trade Center, the temptation may be to extend the
association to other types of public policy—a linkage that most of Crawford’s
readers should have no difficulty making. But this collection predates that memorable
date by more than a year; it is a welcome gathering together of six long essays,
five of which have been in print before (between 1994 and 1999). Crawford is the
former Washington editor of Education Week. His previous collections, Hold Your
Tongue and Language Loyalties, both of which date back to 1992, are still excellent
sources of background material on the history and impact of the English-only
movement in the United States. The more comprehensive Bilingual Education: History,
Politics, Theory and Practice, in its fourth edition as of 1999, has shown its
usefulness as a course text in the American context.

At War with Diversity brings the story of the English-only movement upto date in
four articles, including a detailed analysis of the Californian campaign against
bilingual education in 1997–1998. The remaining two articles offer an accessible look
at issues surrounding the continued survival (or not) of Native American languages
in the United States. All in all, At War with Diversity is a valuable addition to
Multilingual Matters’ Bilingual Education and Bilingualism series, and, like many of
the books in the series, would be an affordable and appropriate choice as a course
text at graduate or upper undergraduate level in any program in which language
policies in education are discussed. Crawford’s readable journalistic style, which
draws in and engages the reader without any sacrifice of scholarly rigour, is a fringe
benefit not to be underestimated.

Some of the essays reproduced in this volume are also accessible on Crawford’s
beautifully laid-out and extraordinarily informative Language Policy Web Site. Readers are urged to consult the
website in order to follow the links to the originals of many of the United States
government documents and relevant media sources to which Crawford refers in the
book. They are warned, however, that surfing the website is not a substitute for
buying the book. In this case, modern technology makes it possible to enjoy the best
of both print and on-screen worlds.

It must be said that the reader of At War with Diversity should be prepared to
undergo a thorough immersion in the more sordid details of the American political
process, with its corporate-funded lobbying, its backroom deals, its media-swayed
outcomes. Crawford revels in the painstaking uncovering of suspected but hithertounproven
connections between organizations whose motives are, to say the least,
highly suspect—such as the Pioneer Fund and the Ku Klux Klan—and the injection
of crucially-needed funds into the English-only campaign at key stages, together
with the perennial, otherwise mystifying lack of funding and support for wellresearched,
well-documented bilingual education programs. We see how the conceptualization
of ‘bilingual education’ familiar to many North American and European
researchers has in fact been hijacked over the past 30 years in the United
States and made to serve a regressive political agenda, one in which ‘linguistic
human rights’ are redefined in terms of market forces. It becomes apparent to the
reader that the actual language learning needs of children in the public school system,
as defined by any rational standard that includes consideration of both first and
second language development, have become subservient to a notion of ‘American
values’ in which conformity and homogeneity take first place. Crawford’s stance is
intended as a rallying call to many of us: ‘Of course, most educators would prefer to
avoid politics. . . but. . . increasingly it is politics, not pedagogy, that determines how
children are taught’ (p. 3).

The first essay, ‘Anatomy of the English-Only Movement’, situates English-only
activism in the United States in its historical context as an offshoot of the ongoing
political debate about access to power and privilege. In a survey that offers the possibility
of interesting comparisons with other groups and regions, Crawford traces the
past histories and present prospects of a number of American language minority
groups—from the Pennsylvania Germans, through French-speakers in Louisiana and
Spanish-speakers in California and Puerto Rico, to speakers of indigenous languages
both in the continental United States and in Hawaii. He shows clearly how language
functions as a red herring in the debate—the underlying issue is one of control of those
perceived to be ‘different’ from the ruling group, who, as far back as memory reaches,
happen to have been white Anglo-Americans. The way in which this ruling group has
tried to set the agenda for discussions on the language of education is the theme of
several of the essays in the collection, including the second essay, ‘Boom to Bust:
Official English in the 1990s’. The sordid story of power jockeying over that decade
among the various English-only activist groups—Official English, US English, English
Plus, English First, and a large cast of supporting actors—will be of special interest to
bilingual educators and bilingual education lobbyists working in the United States.

Over the next two pieces the focus shifts to resistance and the fight for the survival
of Native American languages. In the third essay, ‘Endangered Native
American Languages: What is to be done, and why?’ metaphors such a language
death (suicide, murder) are usefully unpacked. The various reasons that have been
advanced for supporting the minority language rights of Native Americans are
clearly set out, with Crawford coming down decisively on the side of the socialjustice
argument. The ‘Seven Hypotheses on Language Loss’ that form the central
portion of the fourth essay, of that title, owe a great deal to the work of Joshua
Fishman. Undoubtedly, however, many readers of Crawford’s collection will find
this restatement of Fishman’s ideas less technical and more accessible than the
original formulations (which are scattered across a number of Fishman’s scholarly
tomes, not always easy for the general reader to track down). Crawford gives
Fishman full credit for his work in analyzing the causes of language loss and language
retention in minority communities. Examples to support the seven hypotheses
are taken from half a dozen communities, and although the overall picture
remains bleak, Crawford holds out some hope for Native communities who
developactive strategies of resistance and self-determination, and sketches some
ways in which this can be done. His reporter’s ‘inside track’ voice renders these
stories immediate and compelling.

The final two essays in the collection bring us back to post-Title VII bilingual
education issues (Title VII, the American ‘Bilingual Education Act’, was the piece of
legislation that emerged from the landmark United States Supreme Court case in
1994, Lau vs. Nichols, and that resulted in a proliferation of programs after that date
all bearing the ‘Bilingual Education’ label). ‘The Political Paradox of Bilingual
Education’ is an extremely useful restatement of the ‘counter-intuitive’ facts known
to most researchers into bilingual education, namely, that for children learning the
majority language for school purposes, less ‘time on task’ results in better school
achievement—if the time not spent on the ‘task’ of learning the second language is
intelligently used to boost the children’s first language literacy development and to
help them access academic material in their mother tongue. The article appears here
for the first time, and points out how easy it has been for educators and politicians
on both sides to use bilingual education as a political football, given the ‘paradoxical’
facts. The final essay in the collection, ‘The Proposition 227 Campaign: A
Post Mortem’ is no less fascinating for being as gloomy as its title implies. For those
of us outside California who had watched with admiration over the previous decades
as progressive maintenance (as well as transitional) bilingual programs were
put into place in that state, it came as a considerable shock to learn of the so-called
‘Unz Amendment’ that was voted on by referendum by the people of California in
June 1998. How could a whole infrastructure of support for bilingual education programs
have unravelled so quickly and so completely at the instigation of one businessman,
however wealthy and influential? This essay answers that question, and will
hopefully serve as a warning to educators. The continuing debate over bilingual education
in the United States and elsewhere is one in which on-line technology allows us
all to participate, and it is to be hoped that many readers will follow Crawford’s lead.

Mela Sarkar
Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
E-mail address: mela.sarkar@mcgill.ca