At the first public hearing on the recommendation, held October 17 at City Hall, the task force invited Ron Unz to testify. Unz spearheaded a ballot initiative in California to defeat bilingual education, spending $800,000 of his own money to back this attack on democratic rights. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said that students should be barred from bilingual programs after two years, citing one study indicating that some students remain in the program for up to eight years. The task force proposed that students be allowed a maximum of three years to achieve proficiency in English.

In New York's public schools, one in every five students is enrolled in English as a second language program.

Juan Figueroa, president and general counsel for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, an organization involved in shaping the current bilingual programs three decades ago, voiced concern that under the guise of "English immersion" the city would move to end all education of children in their native languages.  
 
Demand in anti-discrimination struggles
Bilingual and bicultural education has been a central demand raised in the struggles of oppressed nationalities and national minorities in the United States. In 1974 the Supreme Court ruled that the failure to provide bilingual programs to students with little or no proficiency in English is a denial of equal educational opportunity under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The decision was based on a suit by Chinese parents in San Francisco.

New York City, with a large and diverse population whose first language is not English, has been the arena of struggles to win and defend bilingual education--like the one waged for Puerto Rican, Black, and Chinese community control over the schools in District One in the mid-1970s. Currently students can choose to learn academic subjects in their own language and to study English in separate classes, or to be placed in English as a second language classes while taking their subject classes in English. The right of students to take bilingual programs rather than English as a second language courses is written into New York state law.

One example of English-language immersion used in California requires teachers to instruct students in English, and to only use a student's native language if they do not understand a word or phrase after the teacher has repeated it three times.

Opponents of bilingual education play on dissatisfaction with the public school system and its failures in teaching English in their efforts to gain a hearing for steps to undermine previous gains.

But the proposal has run into some resistance here. The Times reported that Unz was frequently booed and occasionally heckled at the October 17 hearing. Norma Flores, a native of Mexico whose nine-year-old son attends a bilingual school in East Harlem, said that she came to the meeting "not because I want to eliminate bilingual programs but rather to express my concern about public schools." Flores, like many other working people attending the hearing, argued that classes to learn English should be improved by such measures as increased funding and the hiring of more qualified teachers.