Brouke Brookins couldn’t understand a word his teacher was saying on his first day of kindergarten at Jie Ming Mandarin Immersion Academy.
“We were sitting on the carpet in a circle, all of us, and the teacher walked over and just started speaking another language,” he said. “I remember looking left and right, and I was like, ‘I don’t know what she’s saying. I don’t know if she’s greeting us or what.’”
The same thing happened the next day, and the day after that.
It took several months before Brookins, a member of the first class to complete St. Paul Public Schools’ full K-12 Mandarin-immersion program, finally began to comprehend some words in Mandarin — at school and in his dreams.
“I started dreaming in Chinese, and that’s when I realized, ‘Oh, I know this,’ and the next day at school, all of us were, like, understanding the teacher,” he said. “It started like that. First, we understood what she was saying, but we could not quite speak it yet, and then we transitioned from just understanding what she was saying to us to actually being able to speak it and communicate with each other outside of just talking to the teacher in the class setting.”
Despite tough standards and barriers, Baltimore County is approved for its second charter school
WYPR Baltimore, April 2024
Baltimore County residents will gain a new language-immersion charter school in September 2025, becoming only the second charter option in the district — and the first to open since 2019.
On Tuesday night, county school board members unanimously voted to approve the application for Bilingual Global Citizens Public Charter School. The school will offer instruction half in English and half in French or Chinese starting with kindergarten through third grade, and adding a grade each year until they enroll eighth graders.
Here’s the school’s website. And here’s what they say about the program:
The Bilingual Global Citizens Public Charter School offers a Balanced Dual Language Immersion Program, providing students with a 50/50 split between instruction in Chinese or French and English. Starting in kindergarten and continuing through fifth grade, students are fully immersed in both languages to develop fluency and literacy. Each day is divided between two dedicated teachers—one for Chinese or French instruction and the other for English—ensuring high-quality, language-specific education throughout students’ formative years.
The day is divided equally between both languages. The English-speaking teacher focuses on English language arts and other subjects, while the Chinese or French-speaking teacher covers Chinese or French language arts as well as portions of math, social studies, science, and other topics aligned with the Maryland State Core Curriculum. This balanced approach provides students with a well-rounded, bilingual education.
This K-5 immersion model seamlessly transitions into middle school (grades 6-8), offering a cohesive K-8 immersion experience. The middle school curriculum emphasizes language, literacy, and cultural studies, while preparing students for higher proficiency through alignment with the AP World Language and Culture coursework, setting the foundation for university-level language pathways.
Note that these schools are still offering Chinese and still have Chinese majors, they’re just not getting the additional support they had from the flagship program.
That leaves eight Mandarin Flagship programs open at these schools:
Western Kentucky University
University of Rhode Island
University of Mississippi
University of Minnesota
Indiana University
University of North Georgia
Hunter College
Arizona State University
Defense Department Cuts 13 of its Language Flagship Programs
Linguists are concerned about the implications the elimination of these programs may have on foreign relations.
The U.S. Department of Defense is withdrawing funding for more than a third of the 31 language flagship programs it supports at 23 universities across the country.
The move, which a department spokesperson said in email was driven by a “Congressional change in funding,” caught the linguistics community by surprise as one of the latest examples of declining support for postsecondary foreign language education.
“The decision by the National Security Education Program under the U.S. Department of Defense to terminate funding for the [University of Oregon’s] Chinese Flagship in 2024 was shocking, given the national strategic security interest in promoting professional-level language proficiency in languages like Chinese and Korean,” Zhuo Jing-Schmidt, director of the Chinese Flagship Program at the University of Oregon, said in an email.
I don’t write much about international schools on this blog as it’s focused on U.S. K-12 schools. That said, there is a section for international schools on my list of Mandarin immersion schools here.
I heard from an old friend from San Francisco recently about a surprising shift in Hong Kong, though, and thought I would share.
Hong Kong International School (HKIS) is an American-style Pre-K – 12 school in Hong Kong that was founded in 1966. It was started by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and is still a school grounded in the Christian faith. Today it has over 3,000 students at two campuses, about 1,200 of whom are U.S. citizens.
And, interestingly for an American school on a Cantonese-speaking island, it’s adding a full Mandarin immersion program (which the school calls a dual language immersion program) next year. It will be available for those families who chose it for their incoming Reception 1 class, what in the U.S. we would call a Pre-Kindergarten class of four-year-olds. About 20% of the next incoming Reception 1 class will be in the immersion program.
(Asian schools tend to be big, Hong Kong International School has ten incoming classes for four-year-olds.)
The dual-language immersion program will launch in the fall of 2025. It’s being led by Kevin Chang, who spent many years at the oldest Mandarin immersion school in the United States (and possibly the world), the Chinese American International School in San Francisco.
HKIS has offered Mandarin as a subject for a long time, but adding an immersion track is new.
There are of course many internationally focused schools across Asia that are bilingual, offering an English-language education while also teaching Chinese. But true immersion, where at least half the academic day is taught in Chinese and half in English, is still rare though growing
While Hong Kong is still predominantly Cantonese speaking, Mandarin is increasingly important as it’s the official language of China, there so adding Mandarin rather than Cantonese immersion was “a natural and easy decision,” Chang said, especially since HKIS already has a full Mandarin language program, in which both simplified and traditional Chinese characters are offered. The immersion program will teach simplified Chinese characters, the ones used in China, rather than the traditional characters still in use in many parts of Hong Kong.
KAWC | By Howard Fischer, May 30, 2024 Capitol Media Services
PHOENIX — State schools chief Tom Horne has been ordered to pay more than $120,000 in legal fees over his unsuccessful bid to quash dual-language instruction in Arizona schools.
The new order comes more than two months after Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Katherine Cooper ruled that Horne had no legal authority to force all Arizona schools to use only “structured English immersion” to teach the language to students who are not proficient.
More to the point, Cooper said nothing in state law even allowed Horne to go to court and ask her to declare that schools districts are violating a 2000 voter-approved measure dealing with English instruction. Any such right, she said, actually belongs to the state Board of Education.
Judge dismisses State Superintendent’s English Language Learner suit
Arizona Mirror, March 2024 A lawsuit launched by Arizona schools chief Tom Horne last year in the hopes of shutting down dual language instruction across the state was tossed out of court on Friday.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Katherine Cooper, in a 14-page ruling, offered a blistering criticism of Horne’s complaint, repeatedly stating that the Superintendent of Public Instruction has no authority or standing under Arizona state law to challenge the teaching model.
“Simply put, no Arizona statute grants the Superintendent an open-ended general grant of authority to sue,” she wrote.
An interesting article from western Massachusetts, where the school superintendent of the Amherst-Pelham School District is concerned that a Spanish immersion program at a district school is a school within a school which creates “a troubling level of segregation based on language proficiency” as the local newspaper put it.
It’s interesting because the program they’re talking about offers Spanish immersion, which in my experience districts are not typically as worried about. Spanish immersion programs tend to attract larger numbers of Latino students, which contributes to diversity. Mandarin immersion programs can be more problematic because they are tend to have higher percentages of white students (in areas where there aren’t a lot of Asian families) and can be attacked as elitist.
And as I tend to say ad nauseam, language immersion programs are often (though not always) put in a public school to do two things: provide important language support for immigrant families and to attract families to a school that is either under-enrolled or struggling. They’re a win-win for districts because they can fill and invigorate schools that were under-enrolled or even on closure lists (see Starr King Elementary in San Francisco, Woodstock Elementary in Portland, Broadway Elementary in Los Angeles.)
Note that several of the parents interviewed in the article said the Spanish immersion program was what attracted them to the district. In a time when districts are facing dropping enrollment, that’s a win.
But when the programs get very popular, they bring new issues. The English-language program can feel pushed out, the composition of the school changes and the new families can be attacked as destroying the very school they were originally pulled in to save (see Starr King Elementary in San Francisco, Woodstock Elementary in Portland, Broadway Elementary in Los Angeles.)
What’s fascinating here is that Superintendent Herman suggests a school that’s 100% Spanish immersion (she calls this a “full-school” program) might be better. But many districts reject such whole-school programs because they don’t support struggling schools.
I’d welcome comments from parents in districts where these issues are coming up. What are the concerns of your district? How are they being addressed and how are parents responding?Feel free to email me if you’d prefer not to post.
Amherst parents worry about dual language program’s future at Fort River
From the Daily Hampshire Gazette
October 21, 2024
AMHERST — Families with children enrolled in Caminantes, the dual language program at Fort River School, are raising concerns about whether Superintendent E. Xiomara Herman will support its continuation, after she identified a series of issues with what she is calling a “school within a school.”
With comments from parents and members of the Caminantes Advisory Council provided to both the superintendent and the Amherst School Committee, Herman told committee members at Tuesday’s meeting that she is not considering eliminating the program but wants to grasp its pros and cons.
She said the program has provided better family engagement, cultural competency and academic growth, but also deals with staffing shortages, funding gaps and schedule conflicts. The superintendent also pointed to what she sees as a troubling level of segregation based on language proficiency.
I’ve spent the last two weeks going through the full Mandarin immersion school list and have updated and cleaned it up as much as I am able. There are still some gaps (Examples: Just when was the Baltimore International Academy East founded? Does Triad International Studies Academy in North Carolina use traditional or simplified characters?)
As of today, we have 367 schools with Mandarin immersion programs in the United States.
Here’s the latest list:
To see the list, click the link above. It will download to your computer and you can open the file there. There are also tabs at the bottom for international programs and Cantonese programs.
The number of schools has fallen by 27 since July when I last updated the list However, there’s some nuance to that. Some schools have indeed closed, and I expect we’ll see even more closures over this year as school districts struggle with a decrease in students.
In addition, a number of schools that had been set to open, or in fact did open, ended up closing or never opening in the first place. This was especially true in California, where several Mandarin immersion private schools were announced but never opened. These included Balboa International Education, Cornerstone Mandarin Immersion School, Avenues: Silicon Valley and Green Ivy Silicon Valley. It’s not clear to me if this was related to COVID-19 disruptions or lower interest overall.
There’s also some oddness going on in New York City, with several expensive private schools either not opening or jettisoning Mandarin immersion. That includes Polis Montessori World School and Avenues: The World School. Polis never opened, Avenues is down to only offering Mandarin in K – 5 (and it’s a K – 12 school.) I’ve gone back and forth about Green Ivy International Schools in Manhattan, which only offers between 60 and 90 minutes a day of Mandarin in grade school. That’s not 50% of the day and so it’s really immersion. They’re still on the list but I’m thinking I should take them off.
Why do I think there’s so much movement in the Mandarin immersion world? A couple of reasons:
There’s less interest in Chinese language from American parents. Today, China doesn’t feel like the amazing opportunity and great jumping off place for young Americans that it did ten years ago. Parents don’t seem to be thinking “Wow, if my kid could only work in China when they get out of college, they’d be set,” as they once did.
That said, tides turn and we’ll always need people who are bicultural and comfortable in both languages. When I was in college everyone said Japanese was the way to go and they made fun of us for studying Chinese. Then things changed. They will change again. And China is 1.4 billion people – we need to be able to talk to them!
It’s getting a lot harder to hire bilingual teachers. There were multiple programs through the Chinese Ministry of Education which sent seasoned Chinese teachers to schools across the United States. Those have mostly shut down now, making it difficult to staff new programs.
School districts are realizing that it’s difficult to support programs as they move up through the grades. In many districts, there are classroom size limits for Kindergarten through second grade. So say you can only have 20 students in a second grade class, but that bumps up to 33 for third grade. Suddenly you’ve got two second-grade classes of 20 which is 40 students all told. When they start third grade, classes they’ve enlarge to 33 students, meaning you’ve got one and a half classes. It can’t be done. Which either means Mandarin immersion classrooms have fewer students (which is an equity issue for English classes) or you do a 4th/5th grade split class where you mix them up so you get enough kids in each. But that’s a really hard way to teach and requires expert teachers and lots of support. So hard to pull off.
The “would you like Mandarin with that?” thinking that was prevalent a few years ago has lulled. As parents know, there are always fads in schools. One year everyone wants arts magnet schools. A few years later it’s STEM in everything. (Or STEAM, which is science, technology, engineering, arts and math – which is basically school but don’t get me started….) Next everyone’s clamoring for social-emotional learning with a strong dose of computer science. And project-based learning! Language immersion in general but Mandarin in particular was one of those fads and schools that weren’t strongly committed are moving on to whatever comes next. Lately I’m seeing lots of schools with titles that include “Renaissance,” “Traditional” and “Classical.”
What else am I missing? What are you seeing where you live? I welcome your thoughts.
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council 