Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education

recent posts

about

Author: Elizabeth Weise

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Utah’s renowned immersion programs under threat

    Utah has the best statewide language immersion program in the nation. The Salt Lake Tribune Parents of students in Utah’s dual language immersion programs in Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish should be concerned about the Utah State Board of Education’s decision to eliminate the entire state team of DLI directors and coordinators. This…