Inside a sunny classroom in northeast Washington, D.C., Baby Snoopy, Thing One, Spiderman, and other children in costume are busy tucking into lunch when three visitors—including me—disrupt the feast. As I wave, awkwardly, one of the students offers a shy greeting: Ni hao.
That could be because I am Chinese—or because these children spend their days immersed in Mandarin. At the Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School, which I’m visiting on Character Day, 3- and 4-year-olds play, eat, and learn in Mandarin. (Older students are taught in both Mandarin and English.) Having reported on how deteriorating U.S.-China relations have throttled higher education and academic exchanges, I am here on a June morning with a related mission: to see if Washington’s hawkish China consensus has affected demand for Mandarin immersion programs in its own backyard.
CASPER, Wyo. — Chinese ethnic groups, traditional games and food were the focus of a school-year-end Culture Day celebration among CY Middle School students.
Culture Day on Thursday, June 8, honored nine years that the CY eighth graders in the Natrona County School District Mandarin Chinese Dual Language Immersion Program had spent gaining language proficiency and knowledge of China.
“It is a happy ending,” CY teacher Fengxiang Shi said.
It’s fitting, of course, as they’ve been immersed in the language for which their school is named since kindergarten.
Both student speakers at the school’s seventh annual commencement ceremonies Wednesday, Dexter Knight-Richard and Augusto Schwanz, acknowledged at the outset of their speeches that many in the audience would not understand the words — at least until they reverted to English. But the sentiments of what they were saying certainly came through.
In the relaxed cadences of her native Taiwan, Kelly Chuang instructed her students to repeat after her.
“Wo bu shi taiwan ren. Wo shi meiguo ren” — “I’m not Taiwanese. I’m American.”
She projected the written Chinese for the phrases onto a whiteboard. “Taiwan” appeared in the traditional form, with 25 strokes in the second character alone.
The four adults were studying Mandarin, Taiwanese style — elaborately written characters over the simplified versions used in China, no “ers” appended to words, less of a curled tongue for “sh” sounds.
In a small way, as they struggled over the language’s four tones and learned how to make Taiwanese spring rolls last month in a classroom in San Marino, they were part of a high-stakes global chess game.
“It looks intense,” said Deseree Oaxaca, 25, as she stared at the characters for “Taiwan” on the board.
The class and others like it in the U.S. and Europe are backed by the Taiwanese government, which hopes to spread its version of Mandarin — along with its values of freedom and democracy — as China’s threats against Taiwan become increasingly bellicose.
Every once in a while a new school pops up on my radar and I think, wait, what? Wasn’t there another school in that same location? Then I check my list and realize there was. I’m grateful to the Silicon Valley International School for having such a nice history section on its website to make clear how this all came about. So often schools change names or merge and never explain what happened, making it very confusing to those of us trying to keep track.
This is especially important when there are multiple schools with similar names. Nearby there’s also the German International School of Silicon Valley that’s entirely separate. And Yew Chung International School-Silicon Valley. You see how a person could get confused.
There isn’t actually a new Mandarin immersion school south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley, but one of the ones that’s there has a new name.
Silicon Valley International School in Palo Alto, California is an amalgam of several schools. The Kindergarten through high school now offers Mandarin, French and German immersion.
It all dates back to 1979, when a French immersion school named the Peninsula French American School was founded in Palo Alto.
That school added a Mandarin program in 1996 and changed its name to the International School of the Pacific.
Fast forward to 2020 and the school rebranded itself as the Silicon Valley International School.
Meanwhile, back in 1993, the Deutsch-Amerikanische Schule San Francisco, a German immersion school, began talks with the International School of the Peninsula to discuss how both schools could benefit from a merger.
This one school now offers three distinct language tracks, Mandarin, French and German, in addition to a bilingual International Baccalaureate World School.
And if this all sounds a little familiar, it could be because much the same thing happened up near Portland Oregon, when the German International School merged with a Mandarin school, creating a German-Mandarin immersion program.
District Superintendent says students in the program “underperform expectations both academically and behaviorally.”
The Daily News, Feb. 25, 2023
By Cory Smith
GREENVILLE — A second-language curriculum that has been utilized to teach students how to read and speak Mandarin for more than a decade at Greenville Public Schools is now scheduled to be phased out of the district, starting with the upcoming school year.
Since 2012, Greenville has offered a Chinese immersion program, which begins for students at Walnut Hills Elementary School in kindergarten, teaching students to eventually become bilingual and biliterate in Mandarin.
While the curriculum was originally launched as a six-year commitment allowing participating students to study and learn the language from kindergarten through fifth grade, it has since expanded into secondary education (middle school and high school) via a partnership with Western Michigan University.
Chinese immersion students can continue with the program through high school, concluding upon graduating from Greenville High School while having earned up to 28 college credits at no cost to the student who will have earned a college minor in Mandarin.
However, on Feb. 15, Superintendent Wayne Roedel communicated, first in person with teachers at Walnut Hills and then by email with parents of students at the school, that the program was coming to an end.
“The Chinese immersion program has been a point of pride for the Greenville community since its inception in 2012. However, over time, it has become clear that the program must be reviewed as some students, especially in grades K through 5, underperform expectations both academically and behaviorally,” he wrote in his email.
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council 