New Rules for our Public Schools #9: Our children need to speak the language—or languages—of the 21st Century.
by YourSFPublicSchools Team ~ November 13th, 2009
By Beth Weise
Starr King Elementary School parent
So here’s what my third grader learned about in school this week: the solar system, how to summarize a story, her eight-times-tables and a poem about longing for home.
Her sister, in first grade, is working on writing words like run, ocean and country, and figuring out where the thousands go.
Pretty common stuff for your typical grade schooler. Except they’re learning it all in Mandarin Chinese.
Most of their school day, with the exception of an hour and a half of English in the morning and lunch and recess, happens in Mandarin.
It’s not a language we speak at home. Far from it. But when the time came to start school, we were thrilled that there was a school (two of them by the time our first-grader got to Kindergarten) where kids in San Francisco could find a public Mandarin immersion program.
Before that, you had to go to one of the few private Mandarin immersion programs in the country, downtown on Oak St., and pay upwards of $20,000 a year for what we’re getting for free.
Here’s what people ask me most often:
Do they really speak Chinese?
Yes. I took my girls to get their hair cut in Glen Park with a Mandarin-speaking stylist, and when they got over being shy they were chatting away with her. In fact, my first-grader chided her sister for not knowing the Mandarin word for ‘crayons.’
They read in Chinese, they write in Chinese. They talk in Chinese. Not as well as someone who grew up speaking Chinese, but everyone tells us they sound like natives.
The second most common question is: How can you help them with their homework?
It’s harder, I’ll admit. Despite three years of Mandarin in college, my third-grader has now outstripped my now long-forgotten Chinese. I can’t just glance at it and know what they’re supposed to do. But the teachers put most of the instructions in English, or go over it in class so the kids know what they’re supposed to do. Parents ask each other for help on the class email list. And thank God for online Chinese dictionaries!
Finally, people ask ‘Why?’
To which I always answer – why not? They’re going to learn the same stuff that every other kid in the San Francisco Public Schools learns, they just learn it in Chinese.
(Though I must say I’m looking forward to seeing how the names of the Missions, which all California fourth-graders learn about, get transliterated into Chinese. What does San Carlos Borromeo de Carmel sound like in Mandarin, anyway?)
To me, immersion schools are a free gift, you get the education and you get the language. They may never use their Mandarin; they could grow up and decide to become potters or fix bicycles for a living and that would be fine.
But China has 20% of the world’s population, so they’ll also be able to talk to every fifth person on the globe. And that can’t be a bad thing.
Weise is the president of the Mandarin Immersion Parents Council, which supports Mandarin immersion families, teachers and schools in the San Francisco Unified School District. http://miparentscouncil.org/
November 14th, 2009 at 3:08 am
This article’s author starts out by saying our children need to speak the languages of the 21st Century, one of the “New Rules” as enumerated on this website. So why is it that the author doesn’t provide a single reason why her children need to learn Mandarin, other than to be able to speak with their hair stylist? Her only response to others who have asked her why (speak Mandarin) is “Why not?” That reasoning hardly accounts for why we should all be in lock step speaking either Spanish, Mandarin, French or any other language as second languages, or why we should fund immersion schooling.
As a person that learned the Portuguese language later in life I have no issue with anyone wanting to speak another other language and I encourage it for that matter. But I’m hard pressed to understand why my children would be better off learning a second language during school hours rather than using the knowledge of a first language to excel in other subjects like history, science, writing, debating, literature, math etc. Language is mostly a means to an end, despite any languages’ inherent beauty.
Another so-called rule propagated on this website is the idea that we need to get away from “old school” type education. Strange then that every year we become more standards-based and our curriculum becomes less and less flexible – a trend that is, in fact, old school to the core. These “New Rules” that are presented here as fact are little more than the current notions of the present SFUSD leadership. They are being directed upon us to limit the dialogue by framing the issues in advance. Why? In order to compel an agenda that revels in multiculturalism at the expense of academics. Let me explain.
Race is the central focus of the Balanced Scorecard by design and any real discussion of increased student achievement, the subverted but true purpose of this and any school district and how race and culture relate to student achievement, is viewed as improper and inflammatory. Hence any genuinely frank articles on race and culture and their effect upon student achievement are censored out on Your SF Public Schools, given that it is SFUSD’s central office that directs the content of this blog. Sadly, it is just that kind of dialogue that needs to take place to cross-pollinate academic success across racial and geographical divides.
That achievement is a corollary of culture is a fact borne out by the data that bureaucrats so love. Cultural and racial divides in achievement data remain present even in multicultural environments. Why is it then that the cultural shift that the central office envisions in its strategic plan does not include open and honest discussion on the role of culture on achievement as it relates to parenting and community? Instead we are being told that students who don’t perform well are simply the victims of a segregated public education, which is untrue on its face – that the “under-served” perform poorly through no fault of their own, but as a result of the schools. And this we are told even while we are informed that 80% of the students are in a school of their choice. Moreover, a strong case can be made that the under-served are actually over-served relative to the others within the district, due to weighted student formula and compensatory education funding. Until we can all speak openly and honestly about these issues and learn from the positive examples set by some, little will come out of the so-called “dialogue” which the district supposedly wants to encourage here (but not really) on this blog and in the schools. If they did want to have this conversation they would not edit out such content in their main articles. Nor would they shut off the microphones of those that speak to these issues at the school board in violation of the First Amendment.
The central message being propagated by SFUSD leadership is this: Schools can be made better through socially engineered integration – shuffling populations via lotto style assignment systems. This is sad and cynical to its core. It belies our egalitarian principles – that all men are created equal, and that all races and classes can achieve equally given equal opportunity. It assumes that racially homogeneous schools that have not performed well in the past are doomed to failure in the future and that only through mixing of culture can achievement thrive. Worse yet, the individual student’s achievement does not typically change in a diverse culture as is clearly indicated by a closer look at the statistics. Only the averages change on the whole. The individual himself is lost in this PR milieu of high profile statistical socio-economic and racial averaging. Ironically, in our era of scant education finance, we can no longer afford the transportation cost of integration. But it is also true that a bus ticket is not a ticket to success. Shuffling the deck doesn’t help children. It helps politicians and bureaucrats look good on paper.
In the end what is important for a student and a school? Learning. Learning is the product of the right training within the home, in the community and at school, along with the hard work and dedication of the student. Toiling is old school and district leaders rarely if ever talk about the fruits derived from study and determination. Instead we are fed a steady diet of self esteem raising dialogue and joyful learning-type mantras – both of which conspire to divert us from the task of skills building and achievement. Such policies do little to prepare anyone for the 21st Century unless we spend that Century in the service of bewilderment for why we didn’t take advantage of the free education that was offered. With the way things are going, it is not assured that a free education will remain so forever. Let’s make more of it than simply to raise the American students’ self-esteem to the highest in the world, while academic performance rates among the lowest of any industrialized nation.
Please forgive any errors as it is late and I don’t have the inclination or the will to edit this comment for mistakes.
Don
November 15th, 2009 at 2:39 am
While my kids don’t go to a bilingual school, I think the bilingual schools are a wonderful idea. Studies show that kids must learn a language before puberty to become a native/natural fluent speaker of a language. I consider myself fluent in Spanish, French, Italian and decent in Portuguese, having read over 10 books in the first 3, but will never be a native level speaker in these languages because I started at too late an age. My kids go to Nicaragua each year and are bilingual, and I am teaching them Italian and French at home.
Europeans and Asians show that kids can become bilingual by studying at a young age, but Americans don’t generally start learning them until 14, when it is too late to truly become fluent with little effort. In Europe, they laugh at Americans because almost all Europeans are bi or multilingual and most Americans can only speak one language. They tell jokes, such as what do you call someone who speaks 2 languages, bilingual, 3 languages, trilingual, 1 language, American. It is sad but true. Too many of us never learn to speak a 2d language and only remember one vaguely, even make lame jokes about not having learned despite spending years in class and getting decent grades in the class. The world is becoming smaller and more interconnected and to compete we must become a nation where all Americans speak at least 2 languages well, including reading and writing fluently.
Our lack of ability to speak foreign languages is connected with our lack of empathy for other people, part of why we invaded Iraq despite advice to the contrary from most of the world and to horrible, tragic results. We are isolated. San Francisco has historically been 20-30 ahead of the rest of the country in many ways (worker rights/the General Strike of 1934, teaching of evolution, science and technology, the sexual revolution, anti-war sentiment, interracial marriages, racial progress, gay and lesbian rights, anti-smoking laws, and many more areas). We must again lead the nation by teaching more and more children to be bilingual from a young age. More American-born parents should put their kids in these schools because Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese are important languages which will make their kids more successful. My only complaint is that they should add a few languages, have a French school or two, a Russian school, and a German school. Many more parents will happily join SFUSD, proudly, and the average test score will go up because parents who care about this tend to be educated, donate and volunteer and teach their kids to study hard and care about school.
This is a wonderful idea and draws many dedicated, successful parents to send their kids to SF Public Schools. If we are ever to become a strong community, we must stop being a temporary stopping ground for people who plan to relocate or use private schools and be, like most of America, a place people move to only if they plan to stay and raise a family and use public schools and help be a part of building the community. Some neighborhoods hardly seem part of San Francisco. We must make clear that we welcome everyone to our City except we only want people who move here who want to truly be a part of our City, not just come and go, if you want to spend your middle years with children in Burlingame, please move to Burlingame from the start so San Francisco can be a place for people who love it and want to make it the greatest City in the world and build a community. Sadly some of the nonloyal, temporary residents drive up housing and rental prices, only to be replaced by a new generation who do the same thing, keeping out people who would love to dedicate their lives to this City and be a part of it and send their kids to these bilingual schools, and this must stop, we must become like most American Cities a community of the entire life cycle, a diverse community of people who want to make the world a better place and build a wonderful future.
This goes for immigrants as well, they must make a stronger effort to learn English and participate in the PTA and their schools. Too many immigrants to not work hard enough at learning English and do not participate in their children’s PTAs. At many schools with 20-30% white populations, the PTA is 80% white and the minorities are nearly all American-born, with immigrants almost entirely out of the loop. If you went to PTA meetings you’d think SFUSD were 75-80% white when the actual number, after adjusting for the many white and half-white kids categorized as ONW and Decline to State, is approximately 20-25% of the district. All parents should be more involved in PTA and PTSA organizations. This isn’t to deny many great contributions from many indivisuals of all races, just to make a point that SF can be stronger if we all participate, and making an effort to assimilate can help build our community, which is very very diverse, and that as we have many immigrants, we can all relate to each other more if immigrants prioritize learning English..
I agree with Don that the district implies, but won’t say, that it is key for black and Hispanic families to learn from Asian families and educated families of all races, though at the same time most teachers seem to disapprove of fanatical studying (I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that Lowell is OK but Lincoln and Washington are OK, while anyone with half a brain can see that Lowell is ranked consistently in the top 60 schools in America and would be ranked higher were it not for minus points Newsweek assigns for being selective, so in terms purely of quality of school and students it’s in the top 10 in the U.S. and far better than expensive private schools in average SAT Score, such as Bellarmine, Mercy, St. Ignatius, Sacred Heart, Riordan, is a world class high school uniquely positioned to send kids to UC Berkeley, UCLA, MIT, Cal Tech., Stanford and Ivy League Schools and be ready to thrive there). It is nonsense though often said that Lowell is no better than Mission, but everyone knows there’s a weird conspiracy to state this and it is not in any way related to facts. If you look at average SAT Score or the college admittance from Lowell to any top college, save Julliard (SOTA), you can see that Lowell is better by far than any other public or private school in the Bay Area.
Some teachers seem to tell C students they should work harder, yet tell A students that an A and a B aren’t so different and it’s more important to have balance and not be too stressed. This is a bad message, we want the C students to get better but also want the 3.5 students to strive to become the best they can be, and as most American kids don’t achieve their potential, may just be the Ivy League. We shouldn’t close the achievement gap by encouraging our best kids to study less, but by encouraging our loer-performing kids to study as much as the best students do. We must encourage excellence and it is a very competitive world. Too many feel your kid should only go to Harvard or MIT if they are born with great genetics, that you either are or are not born the “type of kid” who will go to a great college and that you should feel “less pressure”, sort of a Eugenics approach. Asian Americans are over-represented at the best Universities because they really work hard and go all out. No one ever becamse the best by pure genetics, you must believe and convince your child is capable of anything but only by showing great character, work ethic, focus and preserverence. We control our own destiny, aren’t simply born into it, a kid not that academic can become academic. The eugenics approach is a weakness many white parents have as compared to Asian parents, as Asian parents believe they can push their kids to greater achievement and teach them to feel empowered, and too many white and other parents feel genetics will determine the type of child their kid is and only if they have lucky genetics should they dream of going to the Ivy League, rather than taking the bull by the horns and doing all they can to become that person and control their own destiny. Geniuses are made, self-made, but not born and we must move towards merit, not genetics, based child raising.
There is too much denial of basic logic in SFUSD. We must praise the best and encourage the rest to work hard. Human potential being wasted is the saddest thing imaginable. We can all do better and teachers and parents need to send an unequivocal message to students that studying and working hard is crucial to a good future.
The world is competitive and America is the world’s most competitive nation. We aren’t helping anyone by discouraging hard work. Many teachers are anti-competitive and send the wrong message. We must close the achievement gap by bringing up the kids who are struggling by focusing on hard work and parenting, not by discouraging our top students. We really should enter the post-racial era. Anyone can succeed, if they work hard at it.
We must credit our top students and recognize it takes sacrifice, the kids who get the perfect SAT Scores and get into Berkeley sacrifice a lot of free time, fun, joy and excitement for many years to do so, and for the kids who are struggling, they will have to spend hundreds of hours a year they are now spending relaxing with their nose in a book, working hard, to achieve the same result. This is a basic fact which is often ignored.
November 15th, 2009 at 3:07 am
My 5th grader writes easily at a tenth grade level in English. As a former teacher I had few tenth grade strudents that could write better than he, even if their writing was sometimes more mature in nature. If he were in an immersion school he would not excel in this way. I do not believe that he would still write like that even if he did not have the time to learn to do so in an all English school.
My 2nd grader is having enough trouble just trying to read and write in English. I cannot imagine the confusion it would cause him to be in an immersion program. This is just to say that immersion is not right for everyone.
To be clear I’m not anti-immersion. But I don’t think Beth Weis made much of a case for it. Maybe she wasn’t trying to.
I don’t by into the dumb monolinguistic American idea. We managed to grow this country into the world’s powerhouse of ideas and industry as a predominately English speaking nation. Europeans, live in a geographically dense area with numerous languages. Their situation is entirely different. Travel to Asia and you will not find on average that most people are bilingual, Yet many Asian countries have very strong public education systems.
I learned a second language and I appreciate the richness that a second language can provide. As a choice for public school it is on the whole a positive. But to the extent that it may increase costs, they should be borne by the recipients. Having said that, I understand that most immersion school models do not substantially raise the cost of education.
November 15th, 2009 at 7:55 am
Being bilingual has been shown to make kids smarter. A disproportionate percentage of perfect SAT scores come from bilingual, immigrant families. It builds a part of the brain that enables creative thought, improves vocabulary, and builds self-esteem (real self-esteem, based on fact, not self-esteem built on nonsense for it’s own sake).
It is no coincidence we are the only advanced industrialized nation in the world where most of our residents speak only one language and also one of the last in math and language test scores. I believe we should embrace this aspect. Not all schools should be immersion or bilingual, but if San Francisco made the effort to create a German School, an Italian School, a French School, a Russian School and a Korean School, as well as perhaps a Hindi school and maybe some others, the increase collected in property tax from the revenues would more than pay the cost and we would develop a unique connection to that country. Remember, anything that encourages families to buy a home here quickly turns a source of $800 in property tax into a source of $6-10,000 or more in property tax, annually, forever. The more turnover, the more we collect.
If we want to attract ambitious, education-focused, hard-working, curious-about-the world families to San Francisco from surrounding suburbs, which will increase real-estate values, our tax base and our diversity, the best way is to add new public language immersions schools in French, Italian, German, Russian, Korean and perhaps some other languages. Hindi? Arabic? Many in the Bay Area would move to San Francisco for this and pay money for after school programs or aim to raise their kids to be bilingual but simply give up because they lack the time, or it seems harder once they realize it will take 250 hours a year, not just a few minutes saying “comment allez vous.” Many parents plan to teach their kids a language and flake out on it, s would be expected. Many wealthy families would move here to take advantage of an education not available elsewhere. Even New York City doesn’t have an Italian Immersion School, and many Italian American parents deeply wish they had been taught Italian and want their kids to learn the language.
November 15th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Learn Spanish. We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us. You took our land, learn our language. Spanish should be the official language of California. San Francisco is in the Spanish language. It was racist that this became part of the United States and it is racist for you to make us learn English and refuse to learn Spanish. Look at the key cities here, San Francisco, San Jose, San Mateo, Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, Fresno, Modesto, Reno, Las Vegas. All in this state are in Spanish. We started this culture and were robbed and oppressed by violence and racism. Now we want equality, but we are deported without due process and often stopped at the border? You can’t keep us down anymore, a black man is President and you must show RESPECT!
November 16th, 2009 at 1:21 am
I think you’re too hard on Beth. She realizes she made a mistake to let it go and is trying to rectify that mistake with her children. Also, she learned it in college, which is part of the problem. You can no longer become a fluent/native speaker at 18 or older, but you can from age 5-10. We should all strive to raise our children to be better than ourselves, as each generation should improve. Beth is doing the right thing. There is nothing sadder than a parent being satisfied to see their kid do no better than they, or even sadder to see a successful parent raise mediocre kids. Love and praise and teaching a good work ethic lead to success and honor in achievement.
The only thing I fault Beth on is saying her kids may fix pots or bicycles, come on, we have some of the best schools in the State and Lowell is better than just about any American high school, set your sights higher than that. If you’re a decent parent in SF your kids should be able to go to a good college, whether they go to Lowell or any other high school in SFUSD, they are almost all decent and almost all boast of over 50% of their students becoming College Graduates, Lowell 99%, and Washington and Lincoln over 80%. Teach your kids to take ownership of their future and not be satisfied with anything less than a college education. No one is saying they should be forced to do any one thing, but no matter what their interests, they can become successful.
November 21st, 2009 at 4:10 pm
In any given culture, there is a dominant language. You can have your own religion, or lack thereof in my case, your own interests, and your own family life and be successful. However, you have to make people feel comfortable. You have to get along with people. You have to impress people.
In our culture, the dominant language is Standard English. We aren’t going to have a revolution any time soon that makes Spanish or Ebonics the dominant language, or any other. Most Hispanics after a few generations are half Hispanic or a quarter or three quarters and speak English and not Spanish, same as happened with the Italians and every other immigrant group. It’s great to speak multiple languages, but this is simply a fact. Most blacks who become successful drop ebonics like a bad habit, which it is.
Anyone who truly loves their children and wants them to be successful is severely handicapping them if they teach them to speak ebonics, Spanish, or any form of slang or substandard English. It’s a simple truth that you have to be able to speak fluent standard English to do well in law, business, sales, politics and most other fields, to deal with people.
Now if you learn a second language, that’s great, I’m all for it. But let’s not pretend, Pedro, that you’re doing anything else than cutting your childrens’ chances of being successful and having a good life in which htey can afford to live in this great city and own a house and have a family. I grew up in the Mission and I remember the blacks and Hispanics who hung out with me and strived to speak proper English, at their parent’s direction, were often ridiculed. But now, 25 years later, it is they that own houses in San Francisco and make 6 figure salaries. The kids who spoke ebonics to the point where hey couldn’t speak a paragraph of proper English if their life depended on it or Spanglish, who didn’t care about grades, they moved to Stockton or Georgia, they couldn’t afford it here anymore. Wake up, teach your kids proper English, Pedro. It’s the right thing to do.
January 11th, 2010 at 1:44 am
Thank you so much, there aren’t enough posts on this… or at least i cant find them. I am turning into such a blog nut, I just cant get enough and this is such an important topic… i’ll be sure to write something about your site
January 13th, 2010 at 6:06 am
Thank you so much, there aren’t enough posts on this… keep up the good work