Loperena said, most students feel the test is a “joke” while others contend that they can easily become familiar with the test, given in the fall and the spring, enabling some of them to graduate from the program even though they may not necessarily be proficient in English.

“And that test, which is given to the student to see if he is eligible for the program, is given again to see if he can leave the program and return to the normal classroom setting.”Īs a result, Mr. “The LAB tests do not vary according to grades, so you have students in the 12th grade receiving the exact same test as those in the 7th,’ Mr. Loperena said his organization was especially dis‐satisfied with the so‐called LAB tests. “In some school districts, the program has not yet been inplemented.” He called this “a clear violation of the decree.” “We feel that the board is more or less dragging its feet on the matter,” said Ernesto Loperena, executive director of Aspira. ĭespite some bilingual progress, Aspira, an education organization dedicated to the social advancement of the Puerto Rican community, filed its second contempt‐of‐court proceedings against the board last January, charging that the board had violated the timetable of the decree.

In a formal response to Federal charges that the system was maintaining nearly 3,800 illegally segregated classes, the school board said the segregation was attributable not to discrimination but to the Aspira order and to a desire to group students according to academic ability. The court‐ordered bilingual program was cited by the Board of Education yesterday as one of the causes of racial segregation in the classrooms. Several students who entered the program in its first year have since been transferred back into regular school programs. Nevertheless, at least 80 percent of the thousands of Spanish‐speaking students who qualified for a bilingual program are receiving it and more than half of the city's schools offer bilingual classes. Most of the discontent focuses on the board's Language Assessment Battery Test, which is used to screen students who might need a bilingual program, the board's monitoring procedures and the lack of qualified bilingual teachers. Neither the board, which runs the program, nor Aspira of New York, a plaintiff in a suit that resulted in the 1974 decree, is fully satisfied with the program, which is currently being conducted in over 500 schools. Three years after a court‐mandated bilingual education program began in New York City's schools, the Board of Education, parents and leaders in the Hispanic community are embroiled in a controversy over what the program should entail and how it should be run.

Aspira judicial consent decree