Lake Forest, Illinois offers a cautionary tale of the unintended consequences that can spring from Mandarin immersion.

Lake Forest is a small, affluent and attractive suburb about five miles north of Chicago. It’s a town with great schools. So great that every year Chicago families with young children nearing kindergarten age pack up and move there. “We’re really a white picket fence kind of place,” one resident told me.

The school district is small. It contains just five schools; three K – 4 schools, one middle school and one high school. Together they serve the communities of Lake Forest, Lake Bluff and Knollwood.

Three years ago, in an effort to provide an innovative program that would better prepare students for work in a global economy, Lake Forest launched Mandarin immersion at Cherokee Elementary School. Cherokee was chosen because it is the most centrally-located of the district’s three K – 4 schools. The program began with two kindergarten classes and two first grade classes.

Cherokee historically had four kindergarten classes each year, capped at a maximum of 22 students in each. The Mandarin program was so popular among parents that by the 2013-2014 school year it had 150 students.

In kindergarten at Cherokee Elementary, 42 of the kindergarteners were in the program. That’s a whopping 70% of the school’s kinder class.

This is where the unintended consequence come in. Just as the Mandarin program was ramping up, the recession was doing the same. Suddenly families in Chicago who in past years could reliably be expected to sell their condos and move to the suburbs for a house, a big yard and great schools weren’t knocking on Lake Forest realtors doors. Overall district enrollment began to fall, especially in the lower grades and most precipitously in kindergarten.

Which is how, by 2013-2014, the English language kindergarten at Cherokee was just 14 kids in one class. Meanwhile Mandarin had two packed classes of 21 each. In fact Mandarin students by 2013-2014 made up 31% of the entire kindergarten student population district-wide.

Suddenly a school district that had always prided itself on neighborhood schools was faced with a dilemma. An extremely popular program had unintentionally turned the traditional English program into a minority within a school—and enrollment in the English program was continuing to decline.

Things got testy. Parents who chose the traditional English program felt their children were not getting the attention they deserved. A few vocal parents made comments about elitism, fairness and the involvement of the Chinese communist government. While these few parents did not represent the overall tone of the English program families, there was broad concern about the English program becoming a minority within the school.

All the while, the immersion program was drew some Chicagoland parents to move to Lake Forest.

Lake Forest offers one of four Mandarin immersion programs in the entire state of Illinois. The only other ones are the Intercultural Montessori Language school in Chicago, Campanelli Elementary in Schaumburg, 30 miles northwest of Chicago and Barrington School District ten miles farther out than Schaumburg.

District administrators began surveying families, trying to understand the underlying issues. But there was nothing they could do about the economy or the dwindling enrollment in the district as a whole—or the demand for Mandarin immersion among parents.

In order to stay on track for incoming kindergarten registration and staff for 2014-15, on February 27 the school board decided to remove the immersion option from the 2014-15 kindergarten program. The 150 students currently enrolled in the immersion program would continue their 50/50 language learning through fourth grade. The district would continue to study how to best meet the needs of every child with a second recommendation to the Board in May.

Lake Forest presents an interesting case. Some school districts, facing declining enrollment, have used Mandarin immersion and other types of magnet schools, to bring in families from out of district. That tends to work best in school choice areas such as Minnesota, where families have the right to send their children to any school in the state, no matter where they live.

That was the strategy of the Minnetonka, Minn. public schools, which launched a very highly regarded Mandarin and Spanish immersion program in its schools. They were successful in reversing declining enrollment, which for Minnetonka was caused by an aging population.

Illinois is not a school choice state and families can only enter the Lake Forest schools if they live there, so the Minnesota model isn’t an option.

More meetings are scheduled in the coming weeks. What the outcome will be is hard to predict.

 

 

 

Summer Camps for Mandarin Chinese Learning: Summer 2014

By Lelan Miller 孟樂嵐

Spring vacation is coming up soon, meaning now is the time to start planning and applying to summer camps specific to Chinese language learning. This is also a good time to keep an eye on the Startalk site which will soon be posting site selections for summer 2014. The site in Utah is already taking applications:

http://ce.byu.edu/cw/startalkChinese/

 

The Mandarin Learning Center in Taipei is now taking applications for the 2014 International Summer Mandarin Language Camp for ages 7-15 with two sessions being offered this July and August:

http://mlc.sce.pccu.edu.tw/summer-camp/

The National Taipei University of Education has announced their 2014 Mandarin Summer Camp for ages 6-15 with two four-week sessions to be slated between this June and August:

http://www.taiwanembassy.org/public/Data/312423553071.pdf

 

National Taiwan Normal University is organizing Mandarin language learning camp for ages 8-15 on its campus for summer 2014:

http://chinese.mtc.ntnu.edu.tw:8080/summercamp/en/index01.html

This is by no means an

Pearson Singapore

Pearson is a large international producer of educational materials. Their Singapore office has created multiple iPad Mandarin books. They can be read simply as books, they can read the story aloud in Mandarin or the reader can touch individuals phrases to hear how they’re pronounced. There are over 50 titles available, each at $5.99. They range from relatively simple to stories appropriate for students in fourth grade and beyond.

5QChannel.com

A stellar site out of Taiwan that has apps and stories online, in both simplified and traditional characters. Kids love it and they have nice animation. Definitely worth signing up for. They have a very high fee, $140 per year, which is really aimed at schools. They offer a lower priced alternative, usually $30, for parents in the United States. Email them to ask for more information about their US pricing. jr@5qchannel.com. Highly recommended.

ChildRoad

http://www.childroad.com

This is a digital library of over 1,000 books read aloud in Mandarin. Children can see the story and hear it read to them. There are stories for kids age 4-12, including fairy tales, idiom and famous novels, all narrated by professional Chinese narrators who include TV and radio hosts. Idiom or proverb stories are the stories behind traditional Chinese idiomatic sayings, often called Four Character Stories. They’re used a lot in everyday speech, kind of like “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” only much more literary. You have to know the story to get the meaning.

eGlobalReader

http://www.eglobalreader.com

This site offers books in Chinese that can toggle between characters, pinyin and English. They only had eight books in 2014 but plan to expand.

Children’s Cultural Center

This is a website by the Taiwanese Ministry of Culture that features fun Chinese videos and information for kids. It’s kind of like PBS for kids in Chinese. It’s all in traditional Chinese but you can click around and see what you find. And there are no worries about stumbling upon something inappropriate. Most of the stories have the Bopomofo transliteration system next to the characters, that’s what the squiggles are that your child probably won’t know. But it doesn’t matter, the stories are fun to watch.

http://children.moc.gov.tw

From our friends at the Asia Society’s Chinese Language Initiative

 

by Chris Livaccari

How many Americans have studied four or five years of French or Spanish in school and yet can barely manage a sentence of that language once we hit adulthood? Why do Americans continue to be ridiculed and sneered at by people around the world for our lack of linguistic prowess?

Many educators with a global outlook are wrestling daily with these legacies of American exceptionalism. The reality, of course, is that many Americans are multilingual. Indeed, many of the best foreign speakers of Chinese and Japanese I have ever met are Americans. I think the problem is one of being a nation of extremes—a country in which you’d expect to find the very best language learners and the very worst, just as you’ll find, for example, the most obese people and the most health-obsessed.

The major challenge is lack of incentives. Why do people in Iceland speak such beautiful English? The answer is simple: you wouldn’t get very far in life speaking only a language understood by less than half a million people on a single island north of Europe. While there is currently an explosion of interest in Chinese language learning among Americans, the fact is that the vast majority of international business conducted in China—and globally—is conducted in English. So what’s the incentive for any American kid to learn another language?

Please read more here.

This is the district where Mandarin immersion has been  popular among parents, enough that half of the students in Cherokee Elementary are in the program. However  parents who did not chose the program  called it elitist and unfair.

Clearly they won the day. The district announced on Feb. 27th that there will be no incoming kindergarten Mandarin immersion class at Cherokee Elementary School. Instead all students will get the traditional kindergarten program in English.

The district hopes to “improve the program and look at the best immersion and language instruction options for our community and then reopen registration in 2015-2016,” according to the post below.

Students already in the immersion program will be allowed to continue through the end of fifth grade. What the district will offer them at that point is unclear.

You can read more about the decision here.

The level of vitriol in this district around immersion has been remarkable.

Here’s one example:

“Laura questions, does integrating the immersion program with children not in the immersion program meet these needs? Laura has personally observed her own children become victims to an inferior educational experience where their needs are not being met due to the overwhelming demands of the Mandarin Program at Cherokee. Instead, it seems that the children are being divided by the program. An elitist milieu has been created, an us versus them mentality. The school should feel united and school proud. This program is breeding contempt and a sense of inequality, worse yet the children’s basic needs are failing to be met.”

You can read more of this perspective here.

My feeling has always been that no district should force students to enter into an immersion program. But allowing families to chose it hardly seems elitist. Not everyone wants immersion. Is wanting it then elitist in and of itself?

In Lake Forest, Illinois it appears to be.

Language Immersion Schools picked for project to diversify leadership

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