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

Asia Society Professional Development and Resources for Chinese Language Teachers
As demand for Chinese language programs skyrockets in the U.S. Schools, Asia Society continues to play a leading role in training and developing Chinese language teachers. On January 15–17, the Asia Society’s China Learning Initiatives held the 5th Annual Teachers Institute in Houston in collaboration with Asia Society Texas Center. More than 100 participants from 21 states were selected to attend the conference, which was themed “Effective Chinese Language Instruction: Step by Step.” Participants visited k–12 Chinese language programs in Houston and attended lectures and workshops. In addition to this annual conference, Asia Society’s year-long Chinese Language Teaching Fellows program selects promising candidates from schools nationwide, provides one-on-one coaching with experts, films real classroom teaching, and makes exemplary instructional videos: TEQ Series available online.

http://asiasociety.org/china-learning-initiatives/teq-series

From the Atlantic

America’s Lacking Language Skills
Budget cuts, low enrollments, and teacher shortages mean the country is falling behind the rest of the world.

AMELIA FRIEDMAN MAY 10, 2015
Educators from across the country gathered in Washington, D.C., this past Thursday to lobby in the interest of world languages. It was Language Advocacy Day, an annual event on Capitol Hill that is aimed at garnering more federal support for language education.

As I sat in sessions and congressional conference rooms, I heard a persuasive urgency in these educators’ voices. Each year as national budget priorities are determined, language education is losing out—cuts have been made to funding for such instruction, including Title VI grants and the Foreign Language Assistance Program. And the number of language enrollments in higher education in the U.S. declined by more than 111,000 spots between 2009 and 2013—the first drop since 1995. Translation? Only 7 percent of college students in America are enrolled in a language course.

Please read more here.