Is foreign language in elementary school a frill?
Since The New York Times erected its pay wall, I’ve dramatically curtailed my reading, so I apparently overlooked “Charter School Battle Shifts to Affluent Suburbs” on suburban battles over charter schools, esp. charter schools seeking to offer bilingual immersion in English and Mandarin Chinese:
Jutta Gassner-Snyder, Hua Mei’s lead applicant, said some of the school’s 12 founders had received threatening e-mails.
“This is not just about the education of my child,” said Ms. Gassner-Snyder, who sends her daughter, Kayla, 4, to a private Mandarin-immersion preschool. “If we just sit back and let school districts decide what they want to do without taking into account global economic trends, as a nation, we all lose.”
Millburn’s superintendent, James Crisfield, said he was caught off guard by the plan for charters because “most of us thought of it as another idea to help students in districts where achievement is not what it should be.” He said the district could lose $270,000 — or $13,500 for each of 20 charter students — and that would most likely increase as the schools added a grade each year.
“We don’t have enough money to run the schools as it is,” Mr. Crisfield said, adding that the district eliminated 18 positions and reduced bus services this year.
Millburn offers Mandarin only in high school, fueling the arguments of those seeking the new charters. “Kids are like sponges,” said Yanbin Ma, a Hanyu founder. “There are so many things they can absorb and become good at, and I feel that our public schools haven’t done enough to take advantage of that.”
But to Mr. Stewart, a leader in a growing opposition that includes Livingston mothers who have helped collect more than 800 petition signatures, this sounds “selfish.”
“Public education is basically a social contract — we all pool our money, so I don’t think I should be able to custom-design it to my needs,” he said, noting that he pays $15,000 a year in property taxes. “With these charter schools, people are trying to say, ‘I want a custom-tailored education for my children, and I want you, as my neighbor, to pay for it.’ ”
I know enough about globalization, the benefits of bilingualism, and the special window of opportunity kids have to easily acquire new languages to feel that any elementary school that doesn’t teach a second language is defective. I sympathize with Millburn’s budget problems, but if they’re not teaching a foreign language — whether Spanish or Mandarin — in elementary school, they’re doing their kids a grave disservice. Every 21st Century American kid should view the world through multiple cultural and linguistic frameworks. And in overwhelmingly rich, white towns, like Millburn, exposing kids to other cultures and languages is especially important.
Bilingual immersion programs are fabulous. Deep knowledge of a second language is an enriching and empowering life-long communication tool. And thinking in multiple languages exercises brains in very healthy ways.
Millburn superintendent James Crisfield — who feels his budget is threatened — should ask himself why so many parents want to yank their kids out of Millburn’s “great” schools and enroll them in a not-even-functioning charter school with no track record. It’s (long since) time for Millburn’s school system to re-think its definition of a “great” education. Why do so many private schools offer foreign languages? Bilingualism is the main theme of Manhattan’s newest private school, Avenues: The World School, which when “still over a year until its first campus opens” had received “More than 1,200 applications for its early admissions program… by the June 15 deadline.”
Many enlightened parents consider any monolingual school inherently flawed, no matter how well its students add fractions or read English. Any superintendent at a “top” school district (like Millburn’s) who doesn’t appreciate the great value of teaching 21st Century kids foreign languages isn’t doing their job. If you refuse to teach kids foreign languages, don’t cry when someone else fights to offer kids an invaluable educational experience you insist on denying them.
Faced with strong parental interest in a bilingual Mandarin program, a town like Millburn should respond not by fighting a charter school but by creating one or two bilingual immersion classrooms at one of its elementary schools, as Palo Alto’s top school system has. Give parents choice. It’s something many parents feel so strongly about that they’ll move to Millburn just to enroll their child in your bilingual program: “We tried to enroll our son in the Ohlone Mandarin immersion program in Palo Alto but found it was massively oversubscribed. We ended up moving to San Francisco and my son now attends Jose Ortega.”
Posted by James on Wednesday, August 10, 2011