Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education

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  • Avenues founder to open new Mandarin immersion school in DC

    Whittle launched Avenues: The World School in New York a few years ago. It’s billed as having two programs, one Mandarin immersion and one Spanish immersion. I can’t speak to the Spanish immersion side, but I’ve heard from some parents that it’s debatable whether the Mandarin immersion side is, in fact, immersion. The website says that in K – 5 a full 50% of the curriculum is taught in Mandarin. But parents have told me that there’s less time spent actually in Mandarin than the school’s site would claim, or at least less push on the literacy side than they had expected and wanted.

    I haven’t seen any data on what ACTFL proficiency levels students achieve by 5th grade and how they line up with programs we know to be strongly immersion. I would welcome any insight readers might have into what’s actually happening at Avenues. It might tell us what to expect at the new D.C.-based school.

     

    Private school with global ambition to open in D.C. and China in 2019

    By Nick Anderson February 7 at 7:00 PM

    Education entrepreneur Chris Whittle shows a mock classroom inside a Connecticut Avenue building that will become home to the D.C. campus of a school with global ambition, opening next year with a sister campus in China. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

    An education company backed by U.S. and Chinese investors is launching a global private school for students ages 3 to 18, with the first two campuses scheduled to open next year in Washington and the Chinese coastal city of Shenzhen.

    Whittle School & Studios will offer foreign-language immersion — Chinese in the United States, English in China — with a curriculum centered on mastery of core academic subjects, ­student-driven projects and off-campus learning opportunities in major world cities.

    On Thursday, veteran education entrepreneur Chris Whittle plans to announce the debut of the D.C. campus in fall 2019 at a prominent site near a cluster of embassies — the striking aluminum and glass edifice at 4000 Connecticut Ave. NW once known as the Intelsat building.

    Please read more here.

  • Will Houston’s fabulous Mandarin immersion magnet survive the district’s budget crisis?

    Will magnet schools survive the HISD budget crisis?

    Bernardo Pohl

    February 7, 2018

    Magnets, like the Mandarin Chinese Language Immersion Magnet School, have been the pride and joy of HISD for many decades. Photo: Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle / © 2016 Houston Chronicle

    Photo: Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle

    Magnets, like the Mandarin Chinese Language Immersion Magnet School, have been the pride and joy of HISD for many decades.

    In the spring of 2011, the Dallas Independent School District (DISD) and the city’s residents found themselves in an uncomfortable position: They were facing deep budget cuts and needed to confront how best to utilize scarce financial resources.

    The panorama was not an easy one. Against a backdrop of criticism, Superintendent Michael Hinojosa and DISD officials had to make the tough decision of redistributing financial resources across the district and choosing which programs would suffer the consequences of this financial shortfall.

    The answer for them was to inflict massive cuts to the magnet school system, especially the Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Magnet Center — a complex that houses several college preparatory and career-oriented high schools in science and engineering, health professions, law enforcement and gifted and talented.

    Please read more here.

  • Top 5 myths about Mandarin immersion schools

    This comes for the blog of Virginia Duan, a Taiwanese American blogger who writes on identity, homeschooling, Chinese/English bilingual education and raising multi-ethnic kids among other topics.

    Duan speaks Mandarin and is teaching it to her kids, so she faces a different set of challenges and opportunities than non-Chinese speaking parents hoping to have their kids learn Chinese.

    That said, she makes excellent and very cogent points about exactly what Mandarin immersion programs can and cannot do. Her piece is well worth reading.

    Which isn’t  to say that kids from English-speaking homes in Mandarin immersion programs won’t learn Chinese. But she’s absolutely right, they won’t be fluent and they won’t be literate.

    Still, they can end up pretty darn good. Our youngest child is now in 9th grade and is taking 2nd year college Chinese at San Francisco City College as part of the San Francisco Unified School District’s Chinese Flagship program. Both kids are comfortable if not fluent Chinese speakers. Enough so that they’ve both said they’d be up for trying for internship in China or Taiwan during the summers.

    So the message here is that the glass is half full – a solid immersion program pursued through high school should result in students who are strong Mandarin speakers and culturally comfortable in a Chinese-speaking environment. The half-empty side of things is that they won’t read well at all (but then many Chinese speakers in the U.S. don’t read Chinese that well either) and they won’t be fluent.

    All things considered, it’s a pretty sweet deal. As long as you don’t have unreasonable expectations. But I’ll let Virginia talk about that…

     

    Top 5 myths about Mandarin immersion schools

    [From Mandarin Mama]

    myths mandarin immersion school

    I would like to say that I’m a practical and reasonable person. (Well, except when I’m not. But then, aren’t we all?) I totally understand that everyone who wants their kids to learn Chinese is NOT going to be homeschooling bilingually in Chinese and English.

    I get that.

    For many folks, their best option for teaching their kids Chinese will be a local (or not so local) Mandarin Immersion school. Despite what you may think, I consider Chinese immersion programs a totally legitimate option for many families. In some cases, perhaps the best option.

    After all, depending on the program, your child will be surrounded by Chinese speaking adults all day and learn many subjects in Chinese as well as English. It’s a nice way to ease in newly immigrated children as well as teach a really hard language in a somewhat less arduous way.

    Please read more here.

  • Kansas’ only Mandarin immersion school doing well

    This is from last year, I’m hoping to hear from some parents at the school now to hear how it’s going and I’ll report back. – Beth

    Screen Shot 2018-02-01 at 7.39.09 AM

    Think you could learn Mandarin? This Kansas kindergarten classroom is Chinese-only

    BY KATY BERGEN

    kbergen@kcstar.com

    October 26, 2017 11:39 AM

    On a recent morning in Overland Park, Kan., at a school next to a horse pasture in the middle of the country, a kindergartener raised his hand and asked to go to the bathroom — in Mandarin Chinese.

    Students sang a Chinese song about family as teacher Claire Pan, a native of Taiwan, pointed to corresponding characters. Later, when Pan gave instructions for a craft project, a young girl spoke quietly to her classmates at a table.

    “That means whisper,” she says.

    In a Wolf Springs Elementary School classroom with “Chinese Only Zone” signs taped to the walls, kindergarteners are learning their core subjects in the primary language of a global economic superpower located across the world.

    Please read more here.

  • Something to be aware of about China

    Note: This is an issue in colleges and universities but not, as far as I’ve ever heard, in K-12 programs. But it is real and anyone with kids in a Mandarin immersion program should know about what’s going on, if only to be able to address these issues when others bring them up.

    My theory is that knowledge (and language) is power, so by having our kids master Chinese, we’re giving them options – including deciding how they choose to use that power when they grow up.

    Another resource if you want to know more is a new book, Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities by Daniel Golden.

    ===

    From Politico Magazine

    How China Infiltrated U.S. Classrooms

    Even as they face criticism, Chinese government-run educational institutes have continued their forward march on college campuses across the United States.

    By ETHAN EPSTEIN

     

    Last year, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte made an announcement to great fanfare: The university would soon open a branch of the Confucius Institute, the Chinese government-funded educational institutions that teach Chinese language, culture and history. The Confucius Institute would “help students be better equipped to succeed in an increasingly globalized world,” says Nancy Gutierrez, UNC Charlotte’s dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and “broaden the University’s outreach and support for language instruction and cultural opportunities in the Charlotte community,” according to a press release.

    But the Confucius Institutes’ goals are a little less wholesome and edifying than they sound—and this is by the Chinese government’s own account. A 2011 speech by a standing member of the Politburo in Beijing laid out the case: “The Confucius Institute is an appealing brand for expanding our culture abroad,” Li Changchun said. “It has made an important contribution toward improving our soft power. The ‘Confucius’ brand has a natural attractiveness. Using the excuse of teaching Chinese language, everything looks reasonable and logical.”

    Li, it now seems, was right to exult. More than a decade after they were created, Confucius Institutes have sprouted up at more than 500 college campuses worldwide, with more than 100 of them in the United States—including at The George Washington University, the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa. Overseen by a branch of the Chinese Ministry of Education known colloquially as Hanban, the institutes are part of a broader propaganda initiative that the Chinese government is pumping an estimated $10 billion into annually, and they have only been bolstered by growing interest in China among American college students.

    Please read more here.

  • Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School’s expansion request denied

    Charter school issues are frequently contentious, so there’s an overlay here above and beyond Mandarin immersion.

    That said, parents who want their kids to learn Mandarin face an uphill road in many areas. If their local school district says no, one option is for them to try to launch a charter. But then they run into another problem – these schools tend to do too well and they don’t always appeal to the full spectrum of families in the district.

    Mandarin immersion charters tend to have more white and Asian students in them, which can be a problem because charter schools are supposed to mirror the populations of their districts as a whole. Another wrinkle is that in area where there are large Spanish-speaking populations, families tend to want to focus on English and not add a third language.

    Mandarin immersion charters also tend to have pretty high scores overall. There are studies that will tell you this is because learning a second language (and Chinese in particular) tends to make kids do better academically overall.

    There’s also a lot of anecdotal evidence that kids who struggle academically tend to leave Mandarin immersion programs, leaving an overall student body that’s higher achieving. So there’s definitely a chicken and egg question that schools aren’t always eager to answer.

    And of course then there’s the elephant in the room – Mandarin immersion programs tend to draw more academically inclined families of all incomes, as well as families with more highly educated and wealthier parents. You can argue a long time about why that is, but it’s true. And as hundreds of studies have shown, children whose parents are more highly educated or from wealthier families tend to do better in school.

    In bilingual Canada, where French public immersion schools are common, they’re called “The Poor Man’s Private School” for a reason.

    So launching a Mandarin immersion charter school is difficult because without a whole lot of effort (and sometimes even despite that). it’s very likely not going to serve a student body that looks exactly like the district or area as a whole.

    Which is what’s happening in Pioneer Valley, a very popular and extremely highly achieving school in western Massachusetts. As the article below states, “The school’s percentage of students meeting or exceeding expectations on the test was the highest in Hampshire County, and among the highest in western Mass.”

    What to do about this is the question. Bilingualism is good. Mandarin bilingualism is good. Having  public schools that serve all students equally is also good. It’s a conundrum. I’m eager to hear how schools are solving it.

     

    • Community members of Hadley’s Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School, including Jasper Ekwere, 7, of Amherst, prepare to ask for an increase in maximum enrollment for the school in 2016 in Malden. Gazette file Photo

    By DUSTY CHRISTENSEN 
    For The Recorder

    Tuesday, January 16, 2018

     

    HADLEY — The state’s chief executive for public schools has dealt a significant blow to the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School’s desire to expand.

    Acting Education Commissioner Jeff Wulfson decided Friday not to recommend the charter school’s expansion request to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. This means the board will not take up the request — the second the school has submitted in the past two years — in the near future, though the school can appeal Wulfson’s decision for the board to review in June.

    “Our school is unique and a sought-after option for families in the Pioneer Valley,” the school’s executive director, Richard Alcorn, said in a statement. “We will make a decision in the coming days on our next steps in our pursuit to best serve more families who wish to join our nationally recognized learning environment.”

    The charter school submitted an expansion request in 2016 that was recommended to the board by then-Commissioner Mitchell Chester, who died in June. The board, however, took the rare step of going against the commissioner, voting 7-2 to deny the request last February.

    Please read more here.

  • The Intrusion of White Families Into Bilingual Schools

    Updated Jan. 17.

    Beth’s note: The premise of the article linked to below is an interesting one, and one that touches on many issues families and schools negotiate when it comes to immersion programs in general.

    The basic premise is that in two-way immersion programs in schools that have specific enrollment boundaries it’s too easy for white, middle class families to move into the neighborhood, driving up rents and home prices and pushing out less-wealthy families, which tend to include a higher proportion of English Language Learner kids.

    Thus a two-way immersion program can become one-way immersion and no longer serve the students it was originally created for. (And yes, while all parents in immersion want their kids to be bilingual, in just about any school district that’s got two-way immersion, the overarching goal of the district is to insure that students who aren’t proficient in English become so. It’s a happy side effect that this also allows English-speaking students to learn another language.)

    For those not steeped in education terminology, two-way language immersion programs are built to teach both English Language Learners (ELL’s in education-jargon) English and English-speaking students the “target language” (in our case, Mandarin.) One-way immersion programs are meant for an English-speaking study population who are learning a second language. For example, in Canada all the French-immersion public programs are one-way because they’re set up for English-speaking students to learn French.

    Most Mandarin immersion programs in the United States are either one-way, or at least de facto one-way simply because there aren’t enough Mandarin speakers in most districts for them to be two-way.

    Two-way immersion is a primary way that many school districts work to help ELLs learn English, so having them lose access to these programs is very problematic.

    The interesting point here is that the Washington DC school district seems to function much differently than most. In the majority of two-way language immersion programs I’ve heard of, the school reserves a number of seats in each grade for English-speaking and English Language Learner students and sticks to it. That’s one reason spaces in these programs is almost always based on a lottery and seldom on residential areas – you want to make sure you’re giving everyone equal access to a scare resource.

    Though it does happen. Thanks to the folks at Lotus Chinese Learning in San Antonio for telling me that the Mandarin immersion program at Doss Elementary in Austin, Texas requires that families  live in the Doss enrollment zone. According to them, the program at Doss Elementary “turned the school (and its surrounding real estate) from ‘meh’ to highly desirable over the past few years.”

    There sound educational research behind this. Having half the students fluent in one language and half the students fluent in the other is ideal for having both learn both – and for creating an environment where both languages are used as social and not just academic languages.

    Here in San Francisco, our immersion programs hold seats on what’s at least theoretically a 33-33-33 system: one-third for monolingual English speakers, one-third for monolingual Mandarin (or Spanish, in our Spanish immersion programs) speakers and one-third for students who arrive at school bilingual.

    In the early days of our Mandarin immersion program, we didn’t have enough Mandarin-speaking applicants, so we were effectively a one-way program (i.e. almost all the students were English speakers and all were learning Mandarin.)

    It used to be tremendously frustrating to parents and the schools when the District would hold seats for the nonexistent Mandarin speaking students they were waiting for, while we had English-speaking families dying to get into the program.

    This was a problem because of funding – our Mandarin immersion classrooms were frequently much smaller than they could have been, which cost the school money (about $5,000 per student per year) and which we couldn’t ever make up. That’s because new students couldn’t come into the program after first grade unless they had skills in both language already, which was rare unless they were transferring from another immersion program somewhere else in the country.

    Thankfully, the programs have matured, Mandarin-speaking families are applying and San Francisco’s schools are more fully two-way now.

    But back to Washington DC. And Spanish immersion, which is very different because most districts that have Spanish immersion programs have a fairly large Spanish-speaking parent community – so finding enough Spanish-speaking students isn’t a problem.

    What’s surprising to me is that Washington DC allows admission into immersion programs based on living in the school’s admission boundaries. It appears DC thinks it’s  obliged to do it that way, though I don’t know of any other districts that do.

    It is true (or it used to be) that in Portland, Oregon families got a slight advantage in the school lottery if they applied to their neighborhood school.

    It’s an easy problem to solve – make the school’s enrollment area district-wide and hold places for kids with the appropriate language skills and needs, just as everyone else does.

    Of course, that leaves families having to take their kids long distances to get to school, which isn’t possible for everyone. I certainly know that we died a thousand deaths trying to deal with carpools and driving our kids to Starr King, which is at the top of a hill in San Francisco that’s very poorly served by public transit.

    Even so, if the lottery is district-wide, it wouldn’t encourage families to move near to a school because doing so wouldn’t give them an advantage in the school.

    I’m curious if readers know of other districts where this is a problem? And how has it been dealt with?

    The article that sparked this:

    The Intrusion of White Families Into Bilingual Schools

    From: The Atlantic

    Will the growing demand for multilingual early-childhood programs push out the students these programs were designed to serve?

    By Conor Williams

    Stephanie Lugardo’s second-grade classroom at Academia Antonia Alonso in Wilmington, Delaware, is bubbling. Students chatter with one another as they work, smiling and joking and wiggling in and out of their chairs. Sure—it’s an elementary-school classroom. It’s expected to exude the earnest joy of children growing into themselves. But this one is different. Smiles break out on an array of faces, and the chatter spills out in English and Spanish.

    This is an incarnation of a new American pluralism, one of the latest iterations of Walt Whitman’s “teeming nation of nations” flowering in “their curiosity and welcome of novelty.” Downstairs, in a kindergarten class, an African American student exclaims to her friend, “I know how to say that in Spanish!”

    José Aviles, the head of Academia Antonia Alonso, describes the school as a sort of multicultural nirvana. “We tell parents, ‘Your kid is going to be surrounded by Latino kids, white kids, African American kids—we offer everyone the same education, the same quality, the same love,’” he told me.

    Please read more here.