David Sarasohn: King School’s Chinese immersion program (OPINION)
By David Sarasohn

For The Oregonian

May 29, 2015 at 2:54 PM

By David Sarasohn

First graders, having recently escaped from Sesame Street, spend a lot of time working on shapes and colors. So last week in inner Northeast Portland’s King School, 10 first graders were working, with intense concentration, to puzzle out the differences between a triangle, a circle and a square.

Except everything they’re saying, and everything written on the wide sheets of paper in front of the class, is in Chinese.

Nobody ever got to that stretch of Sesame Street.

This Wednesday’s Junior Rose Parade will feature a new entry: several dozen inner city kindergartners and first graders who are immersed in Chinese. It’s the first year of the King program, and the first time anything quite like it has surfaced in this neighborhood.

As parade entries go, it beats a clown car.

Portland Public Schools already had one Chinese immersion program, at Southeast Portland’s Woodstock Elementary School, with a sizable Asian student population. The King school program was spurred by a Chinese language program at nearby Albina Head Start, with teachers from the Chinese government’s Confucius Institute. Ron Herndon, head of Albina Head Start, pushed hard for an elementary school Chinese immersion program for AHS alumni.

Please read more here.

At the beginning of May, the California State Board of Education approved, with a landslide vote, the Wei Yu International Charter School. Wei Yu will be the first Mandarin immersion charter school in Santa Clara County, and it is scheduled to open for the 2016-17 school year.

The journey to approve Wei Yu took the group of founding parents, led by Dr. Felicity Miao, through challenging hearings at the local Moreland School District, Santa Clara County Office of Education, and finally, the State Board of Education in Sacramento where they achieved success.

Roy Stanley, President of the governing board of Wei Yu commented, “The Wei Yu founding parents established a strong network of experts to bolster their curriculum development, but at the core, it was a grassroots effort led by a group of dedicated parents from the community who persevered in getting this innovative educational program approved. I am pleased that the State Board of Education recognized this need and reacted positively to our voices. We are very grateful to have the expertise of our board and advisors such as Dr. Danni Tsai, whose advocacy of language immersion education guided the parents to success.”

In addition to Dr. Tsai, Wei Yu’s governing board and advisors include Nobel Laureate Thomas Südhof, noted bilingual educator Helen Wong, and a team of seasoned teachers and administrators.

The founding families hail from diverse backgrounds and share the goal of raising children in a multilingual educational program that prepares them to succeed in the global economy.

Despite long waiting lists in existing Mandarin immersion programs, and the U.S. State Department deeming Mandarin a “critical language,” access to Mandarin immersion programs in Silicon Valley remains extremely limited. Even though Silicon Valley tech giants conduct heavy business with China, only two communities in Santa Clara County offer public Mandarin immersion programs in the elementary years, with the most recent program in Palo Alto having launched over seven years ago.

The addition of Wei Yu International Charter School as an option for learning Mandarin will give California a chance to catch up with states like Utah and Minnesota that lead the nation in public elementary Mandarin programs per student.

According to Dr. Danni Tsai, an educational visionary who was instrumental in the adoption of the Cupertino Union School District Mandarin program, “The benefits of bilingualism are clear. It is imperative that we prepare students for the needs and demands of a global society. Schools like Wei Yu will provide access and opportunities for children to acquire multilingualism, an important life and career skill. A language immersion curriculum coupled with STEAM is clearly relevant to our area. Parents should have curriculum options that match the inventive nature of Silicon Valley.”

Wei Yu International Charter School will be a K-8 Mandarin immersion STEAM school. The school plans to seek facilities in the Moreland neighborhood of West San Jose and will open its doors in July 2016 with Kindergarten and 1st grade classes.

Please visit http://www.weiyucharter.org for more information.

Just in: ‘Game changer’ to game over for Westside ‘immersion’ school

Boren Scholar with a talent for study abroad makes plans for China

May 8, 2015 – 1:08pm

When she was in kindergarten, Megan Garland did the usual things 5-year-olds do — she counted, she colored, she learned Chinese.

She didn’t know it then, but China would soon fill her horizon, and no mere ocean would keep them apart. Now the UO’s newest Boren Scholar, Garland is about to graduate with degrees in Chinese and international studies before crossing the Pacific to spend a year in the country that has captivated her for so long.

“It’s just a really interesting place. It’s so different,” the UO senior said recently of her China fascination. “But the people are really, really nice, and its culture is just this interesting mix of modernism and traditional Chinese.”

The Boren Awards for International Study are among the most coveted scholarships for students who wish to study abroad. An initiative of the National Security Education Program, they can run from a summer to a semester to a full year.

Garland received a full-year, $20,000 scholarship to study at Nanjing University in the eastern city of the same name. She will spend half the year taking classes, some with other American students and others with Chinese students, and then do an internship for the remainder of the year.

But it won’t be Garland’s first trip to China. Or her second or third, for that matter.

She’s already had three study-abroad trips to China and made other visits on vacation. And it all traces back to kindergarten, when Garland was in the first-ever class of a Mandarin immersion program in Portland Public Schools.

The program places students in Chinese-speaking classes half the day and English classes the other half, starting in kindergarten. Garland was among the first 40 students enrolled.

The UO later partnered with Portland schools to establish the nation’s first K-16 Chinese Flagship language program, making it all but inevitable that Garland would ultimately enroll here. The program worked so well that when Garland arrived as a freshman, she tested into the Chinese language program at the 400 course level, effectively allowing her to skip most of the lower-division curriculum.

Please read more here.

[I added in a tidbit at the end: LAUSD has had a 20% decline in enrollment in the past 8 years and is looking to better market itself…]

The Los Angeles Unified School District has decided to cut the highly successful Mandarin immersion program at Broadway Elementary from four classes of incoming Kindergartners to two, thus halving the side of a program that revitalized a school and brought hundreds of families into the public school system that might otherwise have gone elsewhere.

Why? Because, in the words of Ramon Cortines, the superintendent of public schools for Los Angeles, it must be “right-sized” in order to also accommodate at Spanish immersion program that was opened at Broadway last year and the school’s original English program.

The Mandarin program had been slated to move to the soon to-be-rebuilt Mark Twain middle school. There it  would have become a K – 8 school much like the hugely popular Houston Mandarin Chinese Language Immersion Magnet School in Texas,

However pushback from families at the middle school (which had suffered from decreasing enrollment) combined with neighbors who said it would bring increased traffic and pedestrians, caused LAUSD to back off that.

In a letter appended below, Cortines also noted that the Mandarin immersion program had not attracted sufficient Mandarin speakers and was composed mainly of English-speaking students, making it a one-way rather than two-way immersion program.

The differences between one- and two-way (i.e. dual language and foreign language) are huge politically. Dual language immersion, i.e. two-way, serves English Language Learners. There’s a lot of federal money for that and it also helps the district comply with the Lau Decision So there’s a lot of incentive for the district to back two-way programs.

One-way programs, on the other hand, are simply fluff as far as many urban districts are concerned. They serve English-speaking students who mainly come from middle class families and thus don’t fulfill any of the needs of the District. I hate to be harsh, but I haven’t seen many urban districts (beyond Houston, they’re a real outlier) who don’t behave this way.

I’ve yet to hear of a school district that had sufficient Mandarin-speaking English language learners to fill such a program. It works with Cantonese in San Francisco and Sacramento but I do not know of any programs that work for Mandarin speakers. (if you know of any, please get in touch.)

Broadway is also supposed to support a Spanish immersion program as well as a mainstream English program. There simply isn’t enough room for all three, given the popularity of the Mandarin program, which has been enrolling four Kinder classes a year and could easily enroll six if it had the space.

Cortines said he would encourage the development of dual and foreign language programs at school sites that had space and where there was need and desire for them.

As I’ve written in my book, A Parent’s Guide to Mandarin Immersion, school districts’ have their own reasons for wanting immersion programs, reasons that are often very different from the families whose children fill them.

In this case, an amazing principal, Susan Wang, launched the program to save her school, which was severely under enrolled. It worked all too well. Families flocked to the school from across Los Angeles and the school filled to bursting.

But instead of embracing the program and giving it room to grow and flourish, the District has seemed to do everything it could to crush it. This is where knowing District motivations is important. For big urban districts, the motivation for immersion is often to fill empty classrooms, create racial and socio-economic diversity in schools that often had few White or Asian students  and fulfill their Lao Decision requirements to educate non English speaking students in their native languages.

In Broadway’s case, the fact that it could easily have filled the whole school, and in fact a much larger school, didn’t matter because the families that were drawn to the program were in general White and Asian and English-speaking. That’s not the kind of school the District wanted to create, so it didn’t.

There are some districts that seem willing to embrace Mandarin immersion and the students it tends to attract (Houston! Minnesota!) but others which do their level best to break them up (Portland, San Francisco (at times)) I wish it weren’t the case but it is.

I’m so sorry for the Broadway program, which is fantastic. It will continue on but won’t be allowed to grow as it might have. Perhaps LAUSD will open another program somewhere else. It has two others, neither of which seem to work much with each other and neither of which seem to have attracted a lot of families from outside their neighborhoods.

I guess time will tell.

Interestingly, LAUSD enrollment has dropped 20% in the last eight years and is looking at how to better market itself. See a great story about about it here. Some quotes:

“We are still in a very precarious situation,” said school board member Steve Zimmer. “How do we attract families who have increasing choices?”

At the board’s Committee of the Whole meeting on Tuesday, members recommended a new marketing campaign to attract and keep more students. The effort could include public television segments, neighborhood door-knocking and promotions of magnet schools focusing on science or art and dual-language programs, such as Spanish, Korean and Mandarin.

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LAUSD letter MANDARIN FOREIGN LANGUAGE IMMERSION PROGRAM AT BROADWAY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL AND THE CONSTRUCTION PROJECT AT MARK TWAIN MIDDLE SCHOOL