Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

I’ve spent the last two weeks going through the full Mandarin immersion school list and have updated and cleaned it up as much as I am able. There are still some gaps (Examples: Just when was the Baltimore International Academy East founded? Does Triad International Studies Academy in North Carolina use traditional or simplified characters?)

As of today, we have 367 schools with Mandarin immersion programs in the United States.

Here’s the latest list:

To see the list, click the link above. It will download to your computer and you can open the file there. There are also tabs at the bottom for international programs and Cantonese programs.

Click here to access the list

Some analysis

The number of schools has fallen by 27 since July when I last updated the list However, there’s some nuance to that. Some schools have indeed closed, and I expect we’ll see even more closures over this year as school districts struggle with a decrease in students.

In addition, a number of schools that had been set to open, or in fact did open, ended up closing or never opening in the first place. This was especially true in California, where several Mandarin immersion private schools were announced but never opened. These included Balboa International Education, Cornerstone Mandarin Immersion School, Avenues: Silicon Valley and Green Ivy Silicon Valley. It’s not clear to me if this was related to COVID-19 disruptions or lower interest overall.

There were also schools that had said at one point that they offered Mandarin immersion which proved in the end to offer only an hour a day of language class, which doesn’t count as immersion. The actual term for this is FLEX, for “foreign language experience.” These tend to achieve cultural awareness but don’t really teach kids to speak another language.

There’s also some oddness going on in New York City, with several expensive private schools either not opening or jettisoning Mandarin immersion. That includes Polis Montessori World School and Avenues: The World School. Polis never opened, Avenues is down to only offering Mandarin in K – 5 (and it’s a K – 12 school.) I’ve gone back and forth about Green Ivy International Schools in Manhattan, which only offers between 60 and 90 minutes a day of Mandarin in grade school. That’s not 50% of the day and so it’s really immersion. They’re still on the list but I’m thinking I should take them off.

Why do I think there’s so much movement in the Mandarin immersion world? A couple of reasons:

• There’s less interest in Chinese language from American parents. Today, China doesn’t feel like the amazing opportunity and great jumping off place for young Americans that it did ten years ago. Parents don’t seem to be thinking “Wow, if my kid could only work in China when they get out of college, they’d be set,” as they once did.
  • That said, tides turn and we’ll always need people who are bicultural and comfortable in both languages. When I was in college everyone said Japanese was the way to go and they made fun of us for studying Chinese. Then things changed. They will change again. And China is 1.4 billion people – we need to be able to talk to them!
• It’s getting a lot harder to hire bilingual teachers. There were multiple programs through the Chinese Ministry of Education which sent seasoned Chinese teachers to schools across the United States. Those have mostly shut down now, making it difficult to staff new programs.
• School districts are realizing that it’s difficult to support programs as they move up through the grades. In many districts, there are classroom size limits for Kindergarten through second grade. So say you can only have 20 students in a second grade class, but that bumps up to 33 for third grade. Suddenly you’ve got two second-grade classes of 20 which is 40 students all told. When they start third grade, classes they’ve enlarge to 33 students, meaning you’ve got one and a half classes. It can’t be done. Which either means Mandarin immersion classrooms have fewer students (which is an equity issue for English classes) or you do a 4th/5th grade split class where you mix them up so you get enough kids in each. But that’s a really hard way to teach and requires expert teachers and lots of support. So hard to pull off.
• The “would you like Mandarin with that?” thinking that was prevalent a few years ago has lulled. As parents know, there are always fads in schools. One year everyone wants arts magnet schools. A few years later it’s STEM in everything. (Or STEAM, which is science, technology, engineering, arts and math – which is basically school but don’t get me started….) Next everyone’s clamoring for social-emotional learning with a strong dose of computer science. And project-based learning! Language immersion in general but Mandarin in particular was one of those fads and schools that weren’t strongly committed are moving on to whatever comes next. Lately I’m seeing lots of schools with titles that include “Renaissance,” “Traditional” and “Classical.”
• What else am I missing? What are you seeing where you live? I welcome your thoughts.