What was going on when I was born?

BY upholding a New Jersey regulation that requires bilingual-education teachers to demonstrate their proficiency in both English and Spanish, a Federal court in Trenton may have put the spotlight on one of the more controversial issues in public education today.

Franklin A. Thomas, who will soon complete his first year as president of the Ford Foundation, has an implicit distaste for studies that lead to more studies.

WASHINGTON, May 19--The United States sought to avoid further public strains in the Western alliance today by stifling its irritation over the FrenchSoviet meeting in Warsaw and by reluctantly accepting the limited economic sanctions adopted yesterday against Iran by Western Europe's Common Market as the best that could be achieved.

TRENTON, May 19--The Legislature gave final approval today to a long-delayed proposal to revamp the Casino Control Commission and to measures to impose strict ethical standards on legislators and state officials to prohibit their working for the casino industry for two years after leaving government service.

WARSAW, May 19--President Valery Giscard d'Estaing of France met for five hours here today with Leonid I. Breahnev, the Soviet leader, and then left having made little if any progress on ways to solve the Afghanistan crisis.

DETROIT, May 19--The recreational vehicle industry, which should be in the peak of its spring selling season, instead is trapped in a slump. Manufacturers are reporting losses and layoffs and, as in the case of the big automotive industry, no turnabout is in sight for the industry, which has suffered a three-year sales decline.

"WITH a kite," Buckminster Fuller once said, "a child can reach the sky." This is the season when many children, and not a few older folk wise enough to resist acting their age, take to lawns and parks, beaches and fields and reach the sky with kites of all sizes and shapes.

Con Errico, a 58-year-old former jockey, was found guilty last night of bribing jockeys to fix thoroughbred horse races at Aqueduct and Saratoga in 1974 and 1975.

GREEN VALLEY, Ariz.--In a propounced shift of wealth and capital between regions of the United States, billions of dollars in pension benefits and pension-fund investments are flowing from North to South and East to West.

WASHINGTON, May 19--In an exercise that has large implications for the American economy in the 1980's, the Carter Administration has been appraising the vitality of the entire American automobile industry and whether it can prosper without Government assistance.

A gray cloud of volcanic ash spread a gritty fallout across large areas of the Pacific Northwest yesterday as the eruption of Mount St. Helens disrupted lives, endangered crops and water supplies, and upset business, education and government activity on a widening scale in four states.