A study of non-Hispanic attitudes about bilingual education had two goals: (1) to apply symbolic politics theory to bilingual education and (2) to test the theory's assumption that the symbolic meaning of an attitude object determines which symbolic predisposition it evokes. A national sample of 1,170 non-Hispanics were surveyed via telephone interview about two versions of bilingual education: cultural maintenance and English-as-a-second-language (ESL). There were five main findings: (1) symbolic meaning influenced support for bilingual education, with cultural maintenance drawing the least support; (2) personal experience and self-interest (potential impact on one's children, personal experience with bilingualism, and living in substantially Hispanic areas) had little effect on support; (3) symbolic predispositions had substantial effects on support, particularly symbolic racism, as did attitudes about foreign language instruction and government spending in general; (4) symbolic meaning and symbolic predispositions interacted, with the cultural maintenance version of bilingual education most likely to evoke symbolic racism; and (5) living in an area with numerous Hispanics increased the tendency to evaluate the cultural maintenance plan in terms of symbolic racism. Since the last had little to do with parental variable, it is interpreted as more a case of symbolic group threat than of realistic personal threat or self-interest. (MSE)