Update 7-12-2011: According to a press release from the school, they now have over 1,200 applications for early admission. I’d be very curious to know who’s putting together their Mandarin program and where they taught before. There can’t be too many candidates out there with the necessary experience, given how new most Mandarin immersion programs are. Anybody know?

-Beth

The Best School $75 Million Can Buy

The New York Times

By JENNY ANDERSON

Published: July 8, 2011

How do you sell a school that doesn’t exist?

If you are Chris Whittle, an educational entrepreneur, you gather well-to-do parents at places like the Harvard Club or the Crosby Hotel in Manhattan, hoping the feeling of accomplishment will rub off. Then you pour wine and offer salmon sandwiches and wow the audience with pictures of the stunning new private school you plan to build in Chelsea. Focus on the bilingual curriculum and the collaborative approach to learning. And take swipes at established competitors that you believe are overly focused on sending students to top-tier colleges. Invoke some Tiger-mom fear by pointing out that 200,000 Americans are learning Chinese, while 300 million Chinese have studied English.

Then watch them come.

As of June 15, more than 1,200 families had applied for early admission to Avenues: The World School, a for-profit private school co-founded by Mr. Whittle that will not open its doors until September 2012. Acceptance letters go out this week. Gardner P. Dunnan, the former head of the Dalton School and academic dean and head of the upper school at Avenues, said he expected 5,000 applicants for the 1,320 spots available from nursery through ninth grade. “You have to see the enthusiasm,” Mr. Whittle crowed.

And this for a school whose building remains a construction site, where the curriculum is still being designed and only 8 of 180 teachers have been hired.

The for-profit model for primary and secondary schools, while popular abroad, is relatively untested in the United States. And while tuition at Avenues will cost about the same as Horace Mann’s or Collegiate’s in 2012 — almost $40,000 annually — the new school has no track record.

The same cannot be said of Mr. Whittle, whose last venture, Edison Schools, did not revolutionize public education as he had envisioned or make the money he had thought he could.

None of that may matter, thanks to the brute reality of the Manhattan private-school admissions race: There is a serious supply-demand imbalance between school seats and children, especially downtown. The population of children under age 5 in Manhattan has risen 32 percent in five years, while the number of seats at top independent schools has inched up by 400 in the past decade, Mr. Whittle said. And, he said, those spots are going to siblings and legacies.

But Avenues is not just about offering new private-school seats. It also proposes to educate children differently. The world has changed, Team Avenues says, and the way private schools educate has not.

The founders say students at Avenues will learn bilingually, immersed in classrooms where half of the instruction will be in Spanish or Mandarin, the other half in English, from nursery school through fourth grade. The school will be part of a network of 20 campuses around the world with roughly the same curriculum. If Mom and Dad move to London, little Mateo doesn’t have to find a new school, or maybe even miss any class. When Sophia is in middle school, she can spend her summers in Shanghai, and when she’s in high school, she can globe-trot by semester. Avenues will foster “mastery,” finding students’ passions early and building on them.

“Schools need to do a better job preparing children for international lives,” Mr. Whittle said. He and his team call themselves “fervent evolutionaries,” purposefully shying away from the r-word since, as they (now) acknowledge, most parents aren’t too keen to mix “revolution” and “my children.”

Read more here.

[An interesting look at how the desire for Mandarin plays out at the college level.0

From the Providence Journal

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

By Gina Macris, Journal Staff Writer

SOUTH KINGSTOWN — When Mandarin Chinese 101 first appeared in the course catalog at the University of Rhode Island in the fall of 2004, 30 students immediately filled all the available seats.

In the fall of 2010, about 170 students enrolled, almost all of them taking a second semester in the spring.

On June 27, while some of those students continued their studies in China, the Board of Governors for Higher Education gave the language program official sanction, approving a bachelor’s degree in Mandarin Chinese.

“Economically, politically, culturally and socially, our students are very astute about emerging trends,” said Winifred Brownell, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “There’s a great fascination with China.”

Even as URI launched introductory courses in Chinese, “the pressure was on to offer more,” she said. “Faculty and students recognized a need to go well beyond introductory offerings.”

“I was amazed when I saw the interest,” Brownell recalled, saying the first course resulted from a petition signed by 300 undergraduates.

Since then, “Chinese has become very much part of globalizing the university,” said Provost Donald DeHayes, the chief academic officer.

More than half the students who took Chinese during the past academic year also were enrolled in one of two five-year international bachelor’s degree programs, which combine a foreign language with engineering or business.

The most-advanced Chinese-language students — currently about 20 — participate in URI’s Chinese Language Flagship Program, part of the National Security Education Program at the U.S. Department of Defense, which was created to address strategic needs for expertise in key foreign languages and cultures.

More here.

What’s so fascinating about this is how differently NJ has reacted to Mandarin immersion compared to many other districts. We know that in many urban school districts, Mandarin immersion is offered both as an aid to  Chinese-speaking students and to encourage English-speaking middle class families to stay in their districts rather than going to the suburbs or to private schools.

But how does it play out in other, non-urban, school districts? If your child is in Mandarin immersion, tell us why your district created your program. What are the motivations for school districts? What are the motivations for parents?

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From Patch.com

Two Mothers Hand-Deliver Petition Opposing Mandarin Charter School to Department of Education More than 1,200 residents from the three sending school districts signed the online petition.

By Greta Cuyler

Two mothers, one from Princeton and one from neighboring South Brunswick, hand-delivered on Tuesday a “Say No to Proposed Mandarin Charter School (PIACS)” petition to the New Jersey Department of Education.

Lisa Grieco-Rodgers of Monmouth Junction and Liz Lempert of Princeton Township, anticipating a request from Princeton International Academy Charter School for another year’s planning extension, delivered a petition containing the signatures of more than 1,200 residents of Princeton, South Brunswick, Plainsboro and West Windsor asking that Acting Commissioner of the Department of Education Christopher Cerf and Director of the Office of Charter Schools Carly Bolger deny any requested extension.

Grieco-Rodgers and Lempert hoped to deliver their petition to Cerf but Alan Guenther, the department’s director of communications, accepted the petition on Cerf’s behalf. Citing the more than 500 residents from the three sending school districts who showed up to protest PIACS before the South Brunswick Zoning Appeals Board, Grieco-Rodgers said residents’ concerns include adequate numbers of restrooms, proper food prep area, private-enclosed nurse’s office and proper child drop off/pick up.

 

Story is here.

Another story on the topic is here.

The Center for Applied Linguistics at the University of Minnesota  keeps one of the best databases on immersion K-12 schools in the country. They’re updating it now – make sure your program’s in there, if you’re a total or partial immersion program in any language.

And while you’re at it, check out the MIPC web site for schools and make sure we’ve got correct info about your Mandarin program.

CARLA’s page is here.

Be Counted: This summer, the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) is updating their searchable Directory of Foreign Language Immersion Programs in U.S. Schools. See if your total or partial immersion program should be included. > Learn more.

The Lake Oswego School District will offer two half-day Kindergarten Mandarin Immersion classes in 2011-12, contingent upon hiring qualified staff and on achieving sufficient enrollment to support the program.

These classes will be located at River Grove Elementary School . Instruction time is 50% in Mandarin and 50% in English. The literacy component of instruction employs the Read Well program, which is the district’s early childhood reading curriculum.

The Kindergarten Mandarin Immersion Program is a stand-alone program. Enrollment in this program does not guarantee placement in next-level programs that may be added to LOSD offerings. To date, no commitment has been made to continue this program beyond the kindergarten level.

Enrollment in the Kindergarten Mandarin Immersion Program will be conducted by lottery. Those wishing to participate in the lottery must submit their application to the District Administration Office no later than 3:30 PM on Friday, July 15, 2011. Parents interested in enrolling their students should complete and submit the application form as soon as possible.

Their website is here.

 

 

 

 

The soon-to-open program (they’re hoping) has  a new web site at

 www.cicusd.com