Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education

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  • Got kids in Mandarin immersion? These researchers would love to interview you

    Note that the referral for this research came through Dr. Shuhan Wang, who for many years ran the Mandarin immersion research group at the Asia Society. So they’re quite reputable.

    About the Research: We are a research team led by Professor Chun Chen-Cheng from the Graduate Institute of Teaching Chinese as a Second/Foreign Language at National Kaohsiung Normal University, Taiwan.

    We are conducting a cross-national research project titled “Family Language Policy: Chinese Identity and Family Language Policies in Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United States.”

    This study explores how families make decisions about language use, practices, and identity across different sociocultural contexts.

    Focus on USA

    The United States is an important context for Chinese immersion education. As Mandarin continues to develop in K–12 educational settings, Chinese immersion programs provide a valuable setting for exploring how families negotiate language use, identity, and educational choices.

    We invite U.S. families with children enrolled in Chinese immersion programs to participate in this study.

    How to Participate

    If you are interested, please complete the online questionnaire:

    https://forms.gle/5xWfsNs8pVLEc4MK9

    which takes about 1.5 ~3 minutes and includes a preview of the interview questions. After completion, we will send the interview questions and an informed consent form via email as well as arranging the formal interview.

    NKNU Research Assistants

    (Contact Person): Eunice / Ya-Ling, Chang / Yi-Ying Lai

    Email: eunice.cy@gmail.com / mostnknu@dhakka.nknu.edu.tw / tt-tkids@mail.nknu.edu.tw

    感謝您對本研究的支持與協助！

    THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND PARTICIPATION IN THIS STUDY.

  • A $52,000 private Mandarin immersion school opens as San Francisco Unified’s waitlists grow

    San Francisco Chronicle By Jill Tucker July 4, 2026

    In the race to attract more families to San Francisco’s public schools, district officials are in the process of opening a Mandarin immersion school next year, starting with just under 90 transitional kindergarten and kindergarten students.

    If the district manages to open just over a year from now, it will still have to play catch-up after a private school opens this fall, offering coveted seats for Mandarin bilingual instruction.

    The Hiba Academy, part of a global network of Chinese language international schools, will start with up to 35 students in preschool to first grade at its 68,000-square-foot home in the former Airbnb headquarters, with an expected 400 to 500 K-5 students and a separate school for middle and high school grades, officials said. 

    Please read more here.

  • Once again, a district sets out to destroy a Mandarin immersion program

    Chinese immersion program is renamed after parent pushback

    The parents are correct – immersion programs are at least 50% in the target language through fifth grade, generally shifting to around 30% in middle school and one (or in exceptional cases, two) classes per day in high school. Cambridge no longer has a true Mandarin immersion program, they have “Mandarin immersion lite.”

    Cambridge school district acknowledges reduction in Mandarin instruction time.

    by Tavishi ChattopadhyayMonday, June 22, 2026

    Since 2021, a Mandarin Chinese immersion program that has been a draw for Cambridge families has cut down on its Chinese instruction hours and changed its curriculum. Now, after months of debate between the school district and parents, the program is being renamed. 

    Parents of students at both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School and Putnam Avenue Upper School (PAUS) have been embroiled in conversations with school and district officials about changes to the immersion program’s curriculum and instruction hours. Parents say the program offers full immersion only from kindergarten to 2nd grade. After that, they say, the 50/50 split the program advertises becomes more like 33/67. 

    Please read more here.

  • Fort Collins, CO Mandarin immersion school getting new building

    AXIS International Academy is a K-5 charter school that offers 50/50 immersion programs in Mandarin, Spanish and French.

    An article about their new building (partly behind a paywall) is here.

    Info about the school is here. The school’s enrollment seems to be climbing (figures here.)

    Again, it baffles me that charter schools keep opening that offer immersion and do well while school districts keep trying to cut popular immersion programs.

    .

  • Big new report on Mandarin immersion programs just published

    Want to know what’s up with Mandarin immersion programs in the US? Looking for information on how to help your child’s school? Trying to convince your school district to open a new Mandarin immersion program? There’s a new report out for you.

    Published this month, it titled, “PreK – 12 Mandarin Immersion Programs in the United States: 2025 Survey Report” and written by Shuhan C. Wang, Ph.D. and Jiahang Li, Ph.D.

    It’s a the first big effort from Nexus Mandarin, a new non-profit dedicated to Mandarin language education in Pre-K through college. [Note: I’m on the board]

    The authors sent out a survey to Mandarin immersion programs and got 102 responses from 22 states plus Washington, D.C. One of the starting-off points they used for their initial list was the Mandarin Immersion school list here.

    Some of the interesting data [Note this is only from the 102 schools that responded, not all MI schools]

    • 68% of schools public, 15% charter, 16% private
    • 55% strand, 33% stand-alone, 12% strand in a multi-lingual school
    • 2011-15 was the Golden Age for Mandarin immersion year starts, 36% of the nation’s schools started during that time.
    • 81% of MI programs are in K – 6, 48% in middle school and 20% in high school. (I think that’s a little high for high, probably a result of who answered the survey.]
    • Chinese language arts and math are the classes most commonly taught in Mandarin.
    • 92% of schools use simplified characters, 6% use traditional and 2% use both.
    • Students in MI programs tend to have high academic achievement.

    Use Mandarin immersion as a way to sell your school

    For parents fighting to keep programs going or to get their school district to start a new one, there’s useful data.

    The authors say that “programs should brand MIPs as an innovative alternative to traditional educational programming.” It is a “value-added education with the same amount of funding and effort as for monolingual education.”

    Students in Mandarin immersion programs develop the knowledge, skills, grit, and a broader worldview. ”

    Not only that, but Mandarin immersion “is value-added education with the same amount of funding and effort as for monolingual education.”

    What is Nexus Mandarin?

    Nexus Mandarin is meant to fill some of the gap when the Asia Society moved away from focus on Chinese language learning in Kindergarten through high school in the United States. That included shutting down the Chinese Early Language and Immersion Network, which has done a lot of work on immersion programs in the U.S.

    The Asia Society did this in part because those programs were funded by the Chinese Ministry of Education and it wanted to get away from any government funding.

    Hopefully Nexus Mandarin can take on some of the important work the Asia Society was doing up until 2022.

  • Dual-Language Immersion Programs and School Diversity 

    Note that this is long and pretty research-heavy, and much of it is about Spanish immersion programs. But still, some interesting thoughts on how immersion programs function compared with bilingual programs, which are focused on English-language learners so that they can learn English while retaining their home language.

    I will say there are counter-arguments made by some that immersion programs can too easily be inequitable because they’re focused on students who already speak English and, often, who are socio-economically more privileged than the English-language learners in their programs.

    To that, I would reply two things: Public schools are meant to support all students. And, immersion programs bring families in districts and schools they might otherwise not choose, which brings federal per-student funding up and also brings in families eager to support the school. With districts struggling as student populations drop, bringing in more students is a win.

    The Century Foundation March 13, 2025 By Conor Williams

    Dual-language immersion (DLI) programs are increasingly popular in communities and states across the country. Their number is growing largely on the strength of two key shifts: one in the research on bilingual education’s efficacy and a subsequent change in public demand for multilingualism. These programs can be a powerful way for education leaders to support English learners’ success while also growing access to diverse learning environments for all students. This report explores the DLI ecosystem in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region blessed with extraordinary linguistic, racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity, but also a region wrestling with gentrification and significant wealth inequality.1

    Please read more here.

  • Being in Mandarin immersion enhances kids’ ability to discriminate musical pitch

    An interesting study…

    From a paper published in Development Science for May.

    Compared musical pitch perception of young US children enrolled in Mandarin-language immersion education to their peers enrolled in English-only education at the same school. Mandarin-immersion education is associated with children’s enhanced ability to discriminate musical pitch, even when differences in working memory are controlled for. Mediation analyses revealed lexical tone accuracy for the most discernable trials mediated the relationship between immersion education and musical pitch sensitivity. These results provide support for language-to-music perceptual near transfer, grounded in shared pitch-processing mechanisms.

    Please see more