I’m attending the Early Childhood Chinese Immersion Forum in San Francisco today. I’ll be posting throughout the day. Keynote speaker: Helena Curtain How immersion benefits preschool kids Remember that most children in the world are in immersion programs – because in two-thirds of the globe children go to school in a language different than the…

In the fall of 2018 the East Voyager Academy will open in Charlotte, N.C. It will be the first whole-school Mandarin immersion school in the state, joining eight others. The charter school is launching with Pre-K to Grade 4 for the 2018-2019 school year and will add a grade each year until Grade 8. It will…

From the fabulous LA School Report blog (and oh how I wish we had a benefactor that could create something similar in San Francisco!) The pertinent paragraph is this one: Of particular importance for a district struggling with persistent declining enrollment, 18 percent of the applications were for students not currently enrolled in LA Unified.…

Mandarin immersion programs do many things: they teach Mandarin-speaking students English, English-speaking students Mandarin, serve as magnets to bring middle class families to high-poverty or low-test score schools and in some districts entice families to the district itself to fill empty school seats. But balancing all those needs and desires is never easy. A case…

BY GREG CHILDRESS March 02, 2018 04:45 PM CHAPEL HILL Big changes could be coming to Glenwood Elementary School under a proposal to convert it into a magnet school in time for the 2019-20 school year. The magnet conversion would mean students, both those inside the school’s attendance zone and those outside it, would have…

I spent some time last week going through all the emails and updates that have come in about various schools and input them all in to the master Mandarin immersion school list. I also spoke with several people in New York City about what schools there do and don’t offer Mandarin immersion and updated that…

A guest post by Mary Field in San Antonio, Texas.* I did a little bit of or back of the envelope math the other day, and I found that about half of my current Mandarin students speak Spanish at home with at least one parent. When I worked in Austin, I noticed a similar trend.…