“Una Nación bajo Dios, entera, con libertad y justicia para todos.”
How can a nation promote liberty and justice for all if it does not do its utmost to communicate with its citizens?
More than 75 percent of residents in Miami-Dade County speak a language other than English at home. Nationwide, as of 2019, 70 percent of Latinos ages five and older spoke Spanish at home. In total, upwards of 37 million Americans, at a minimum, would prefer if not benefit from more government resources being available in Spanish.
En otras palabras, esta es una nación mucho diferente de los Estados Unidos cuando Jefferson, Washington, y Hamilton eran las personas más importantes. Even though the number of Americans who speak another language other than English at home has tripled since 1980, the majority of our textbooks and statutes resemble a bygone era.
As long as our schools and systems of government and commerce fail to reflect our multicultural and multilingual society, we will fall short of our collective potential. By way of example, consider that eight states, including Louisiana, still require high school students to pass exit-exams to graduate–despite substantial evidence that such exams disproportionately result in Black and Latino missing out on receiving their diplomas. There is also no evidence that exit exams improve academic achievement or employment rates. For “English Learners” or students who do not speak English as their first language, this out of date insistence on the supremacy of English can come at a cost to the individual student and their community.
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