Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

By Elizabeth Weise

TAIPEI, Taiwan – Private schools are a rarity in Taiwan, and the number of schools that offer both English and Mandarin immersion in this island nation can be counted on one hand. I had the pleasure of touring one of the most academically rigorous of them this spring as a guest of its chair, Yvette Chiang.

Chingshin Elementary and Middle School （靜心中小學）has a long and august history. The elementary school was founded in 1956 by General Chiang Wei-Kuo. He was the adopted son of General Chiang Kai-shek, one of the founders of Taiwan. In 1968 he expanded the school to middle school, which in Taiwan goes through ninth grade. His wife, Shi Ching Yi, founded the school’s Kindergarten first in 1951. After her death he expanded the school still further.

The school opened just two years after the Kuomintang moved over two million people from mainland China to Taiwan. General Chiang wanted it to “ease the financial burden of military and public service families with young children” as well as to create a school that was “at the forefront of education,” according to the website.

Fast forward 64 years and the school has become a remarkable educational institution that offers a deep and thorough-going bilingual program. While there are multiple international schools in Taiwan that offer an English (or French or German or Japanese) education, and most of those teach Chinese, very few actually do immersion in both languages the way we understand it in the United States.

Chingshin is a Kindergarten through middle school program. The Kindergarten has 410 students, the elementary school 1,512 and the middle school 798, for a total of slightly more than 2,700 students. The school has 220 full time staff, 28 of whom are foreign teachers who instruct in English as well as 19 local teachers who teach in English.

The school itself is an attractive group of connected multi-story buildings that to the U.S. eye look like an office complex. However this is the normal configuration for schools in large cities in Asia, where land is expensive. The campus has undergone major renovations in the past decades. The school has torn down and rebuilt two-thirds of its campus, replacing older buildings with new ones in addition to a down-to-the-studs renovation of its front building.

School is also different in Taiwan in that class sizes are much larger than we are used to. At Chingshin the average is 42 students per class, with three teachers in each classroom.

Students also spend a lot more time in school that do students in the United States. School runs daily from 7:30 to 4:10 for elementary school students and from 7:30 to 5:50 for middle school students. In ninth grade, when students are studying for the all-important high school entrance examination, classes and study sessions extend to 9:00 each night.

Chingshin is exploring opening a high school program in the next two years, which will allow students to continue their bilingual education throughout their entire school career.

For me, the highlight of my tour was learning about the school’s bilingual track, which half of the students are enrolled in.

“We need to take our Taiwanese culture and mix it with international culture to create something new and innovative,” was how Chiang put it as she toured me through the beautiful building and immaculate classrooms and soaring gymnasiums and music rooms. I especially loved a floor devoted to mock-ups of local buses, cross walks and other city elements, used to teach the youngest students how to safely maneuver through their city of 2.6 million.

For the 1,300 or so student in the immersion program, life in Kindergarten begins in English—they spend 100% of their day being taught in the language, although the vast majority speak Mandarin or Taiwanese at home. This is similar to several programs in the States which begin with 100% Mandarin and slowly add English.

At Chingshin, in first and second grades students switch to 60% of the day in English, 40% in Mandarin. By third grade, classes are 50% in English and 50% in Mandarin.

In grade school, students study math, English, social studies, science, Art, PE and health. They take math in both English and Chinese, both to cement the concepts and to ensure that they have the vocabulary in both languages.

The English textbook series is one many public school families in the U.S. will recognize, it’s the Treasures series by McGraw Hill. The school is in the midst of making changes to its math curriculum, which will be incorporated this fall. It will switch from the Singapore math program and instead translate the Taiwanese national math textbooks into English. “We are doing this because Singapore teaches math very differently, and we find it’ll be a better fit to translate the Taiwan text books instead,” said Su Wei Wang, the head of the English department.

Tests for their English subjects are all taken in English. This is in part to ensure that the students have mastered the vocabulary as well as the material, but also because many families hope that their children will go on to study in an English-speaking country, so being able to pass tests in English is a highly useful skill.

The tuition for a year at the school is about $4,000 U.S., on par with most private schools in the capital. However the English immersion strand is almost double that, $8,000 U.S.. That’s to pay for the extra teachers, training and materials needed in the immersion strand.

The school overall is extremely difficult to get into. There are 51 slots open each year for incoming Kindergarteners. For the 2015-2016 school year, 468 families applied. The lucky families who get a slot are chosen by lottery.

Of course many of our Mandarin immersion programs in the States also allocate seats for incoming Kindergarteners by lottery. However in Taiwan the lottery takes place in public, at the school, with slips of paper being drawn from a large bin while all the families who want a spot gather to watch. This is to ensure that the entire system is fair and so that no one questions whether any type of favoritism might have taken place. While grueling (especially for staff, I imagine), a system like that would certainly quell grumbling.

The school also boasts a very strong music program, with several orchestras and classes available to all students. There’s also an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a large library and outdoor play space.

All told, Chingshin is a beautiful, robust school. I had the chance to look at some of the students’ written work in English and it’s very impressive, quite on par with what you’d find at a similar grade level in the United States. And that while the students are doing all the same work required to do well on Taiwan’s notoriously competitive and demanding national exams. It’s a fine program and one that several Mandarin immersion programs in the United States have toured as a model.

From their site:

The Broadway Mandarin Immersion program is a thriving LAUSD public school program. Because of its success, this program needs more room to grow. Rather than finding a way to support the thriving program by providing it with necessary space, on May 26, 2015 Superintendent Cortines made the unilateral decision to halt construction on a new school and deal with space issues by mandating that our number of incoming kindergarten classes be cut from 4 to 2 beginning in 2016.

This is a crippling blow to the program because it threatens the long-term viability of the Mandarin Immersion program. It is difficult to fill attrition spots after 1st grade because incoming students have to have grade-level Mandarin proficiency. With normal attrition rates, starting with only 2 kinder classes will mean we will end up with only 1 small group of students matriculating to middle school.

More at:

http://www.gofundme.com/xu9dcs

Here’s an example of a program that can work for Mandarin immersion students who finish the program in middle school but then face the prospect of no appropriate-level Mandarin classes for them at the high school level. This one was created with the help of Yalan King at The Mandarin Institute in San Francisco.

 

College Park Elementary in San Mateo, Calif (in Silicon Valley) began its Mandarin immersion program in 2007, an outgrowth of the Mandarin classes it began offering in 2004. It’s a Gifted and Talented Magnet School as well, though all students are able to attend. In 4th and 5th grade the school has special day classes for gifted children:

“The San Mateo-Foster City School District offers a special-day class for gifted students.  This program is located at College Park.  A careful screening is done for all SMFC third grades students.  Those that have scored well on state exams and have their teacher’s recommendation are invited to take an additional problem solving assessment to determine their aptitude for the GATE program.  Invitations to the GATE program at College Park are issued by the GATE department at the SMFC School District.

In addition to meeting the social and emotional needs of gifted students, the core curriculum is compacted and introduced at a highly accelerated pace so that learning experiences are developmentally appropriate to the special needs, interests, and abilities of students in the program. The differentiated curriculum includes instructional strategies that promote inquiry, self-directed learning, discussion, debate, metacognition, and other appropriate modes of learning. Additionally, it includes depth, complexity, novelty, and rigor, reinforcing abstract thinking, big ideas, and cross-curricular connections of the content area.”

 

New leader selected for San Mateo-Foster City: Joan Rosas will take charge of San Mateo-Foster City Elementary School District as superintendent, pending school board approval

June 02, 2015, 05:00 AM By Austin Walsh Daily Journal

Officials have selected Joan Rosas as a finalist to take control of the San Mateo-Foster City Elementary School District, replacing outgoing Superintendent Cynthia Simms. Rosas currently serves as the assistant superintendent of Student Services in the San Mateo County Office of Education, where she has worked since 2011. The district Board of Trustees is expected to ratify a contract for Rosas, and officially name her superintendent, at the upcoming board meeting Thursday, June 4. Rosas has more than three decades of experience working in education, including serving previously as a teacher and administrator in the San Mateo-Foster City district. Board President Audrey Ng said Rosas’ institutional knowledge of the district granted her a leg up when the board was considering candidates to replace Simms, who will retire at the end of the school year. “She knows the people she will be working with and she has the network to take us to the next level,” Ng said. During her previous tenure in the district, Rosas founded Fiesta Gardens International School, the Spanish immersion school in San Mateo, as well as serving as director of Education Services, the assistant superintendent of Student Services and the assistant superintendent of Human Resources.

Please read more here.

“It’s really been an L.A. story,” said Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) board member Steve Zimmer, who is in the middle of a classic Los Angeles conflict that reflects the city’s many cultures and tensions.

The dispute is taking place in West Los Angeles, in an area encompassing parts of Venice and Mar Vista. The people who ran a popular Mandarin immersion program at Venice’s Broadway Elementary School wanted to expand to both Mandarin and Spanish immersion and move to a new building, proposed to be built on the Mark Twain Middle School campus in Mar Vista, a few miles west. The new building would cost $30 million.

Please read more here.

Boundary to change for popular Vancouver elementary school

In the May 28 blog summary of the GPA’s transportation committee’s first meeting with SFMTA, traffic engineer Damon Curtis had promised to look into two things:

–creating simultaneous protected lefts northbound and southbound on Diamond

–switching the new protected northbound left on Diamond to be southbound in the evening to accommodate rush hour traffic

Neither option will be possible. The rationales given by SFMTA are summarized below (and Curtis’s full email is attached here).

One important term to note: LOS means “Level of Service,” a state standard that basically measures how many cars can be pushed through an intersection in a given time. It is graded from A to F. Its applicability is changing in a way that I didn’t totally understand, sorry to say.

On creating simultaneous protected lefts northbound and southbound on Diamond:

Curtis modeled simultaneous protected northbound and southbound left turns with both a 90-second and a 120-second signal cycle. For the former, the intersection level of service [LOS] degrades to F and for the latter it degrades to E. Therefore both scenarios trigger a significant impact that would require additional, extensive environment review.

A protected NBLT does not degrade LOS to an E or an F because northbound traffic can still proceed straight through the intersection at the same time. (See more detail in the longer answer below.)

On switching the new protected northbound left on Diamond to be southbound in the evening to accommodate rush hour traffic:

 

Technology exists to allow for different left-turn phasing at different times of day to meet changing demand, but based on the traffic counts from the Glen Park EIR Traffic Impact Study which SFMTA used as the basis for its recent left-turn analysis, northbound left turn volumes far exceed southbound left turn volumes in both the AM and PM peak hours (229 versus 137 in the AM, and 210 versus 117 in the PM).

More from Curtis:

“In traffic signal timing we base the amount of green time for a given movement on the volume of cars and the movement that requires the most amount of green time is defined as the critical movement. If we base the timing on percentages, the intersection would not operate efficiently and inevitably one or more approaches would begin to back up.

“For the NBLT and SBLT at Diamond/Bosworth, the left-turns as a percentage of all traffic on their approach are about equal, but we know that beneath those percentages are real numbers and that the NBLT has a demand of 229 cars and the SBLT demand is 137 cars. That means the NBLT has 67% more vehicles than the SBLT. In addition, in the NB direction there are 243 vehicles going straight or turning right, but in the SB direction that total is only 165, i.e., the NB demand is 47% greater.

“And since cars going straight and cars turning right must share a single lane (the case for both NB and SB), it only takes having that first vehicle in the queue wanting to go straight to hold up all of the potential right-turners and therefore the expectation is that the majority of the straight thru and right-turn movements will occur only when the light is green.

“Taking all these factors together, we can begin to understand why the intersection Level Of Service breaks down when we introduce a protected SBLT phase – it’s primarily because during a protected SBLT phase, all of the NB straight thru and right turn traffic must be held back, then during the subsequent green phase we are unable to provide enough time to serve all of those vehicles, not to mention serving the demand for EB and WB, and still keep the overall signal cycle length below 120 seconds.”

 

GPA: What about congestion backflow into GP Village?

Curtis: “Regarding favoring southbound [protected left] over northbound because the effects of congestion are greater in the residential/commercial area north of the intersection than they are coming off the freeway to the south, I will start by saying say that when it comes to the signal timing at Diamond/Bosworth there is no magic bullet and there will be some trade-offs.

“I discussed this very point with Ricardo [Olea, City traffic engineer] and we both agree that when taking a more macro view of traffic operations at and around Diamond/Bosworth, there is little question that causing back-ups on NB Diamond (which having a protected SBLT would do) will negatively impact traffic on Monterey as far back as the freeway on/off-ramps at Monterey/Circular, and that would have a far greater impact on a much larger number of people than the alternative.”

[Note from Heather] If you’ve read this far, you’re a true geek and might want to check out this presentation from Ricardo Olea titled “Signal Timing and Pedestrians.”

Click to access OleaRicardo_DesigningCitiesPHX.pdf