Bear Market for Languages
The share of U.S. public elementary schools teaching foreign language has fallen by almost 40% over the last decade. You know--the decade when 9/11, globalization, and growing diversity at home fueled calls for greater knowledge of other languages and cultures.
Education Week published these disheartening preliminary results of a new survey by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL). The full results will be available in autumn.
The EdWeek article lays out some of the decline's more sobering implications:
The decline of foreign-language instruction at the elementary level could make it harder for the United States to create a pool of language specialists who can speak both English and those languages deemed critical to the country’s economic success or national security, such as Chinese and Arabic.
CAL's data reflect the state of elementary foreign language instruction in 2008, before the nation's economy went from bad to worse. I shudder to imagine what growing budget pressures might do to foreign language instruction in the coming years.
We often hear that essential academic subjects like the arts and foreign language go through boom and bust cycles with the economy. That, in itself, would be troubling, because it suggests that we cannot find a baseline of commitment to either subject area.
Yet as I review the CAL results over the past few decades, I'm seeing much more bust than boom.
SIGN UP
Visionaries
Click here to browse dozens of Public School Insights interviews with extraordinary education advocates, including:
The views expressed in this website's interviews do not necessarily represent those of the Learning First Alliance or its members.
New Stories
Featured Story
The Long Turnaround
According to the numbers, Central Elementary School in Roundup, Montana, seems to fit the currently fashionable definition of a “turnaround” school. After many years of below-average test scores, the school has recently made double-digit gains in the number of its students meeting proficiency on the statewide assessment. In true turnaround fashion, that improvement appears to have happened in a very short period of time. As recently as the 2005–2006 school year, for example, Central’s math score was nearly 20 percentage points below the state average. In 2009 it was at the state average.
But ask current principal Vicki Begin about the school’s success and she’ll insist that it’s been anything but a quick turnaround. Begin, who is in her third year at Central, gives much of the credit not only to the school’s veteran teaching staff, which averages 23 years of experience, but also to her predecessor, Joe Ingalls, who guided the school from 1994–1995 to 2006–2007. Obviously, this is not a case of overnight success or of cleaning house and starting over. Read more...
School/District Characteristics
Hot Topics
Blog Roll
- Boardbuzz
- Edwize
- NSDC Reflections
- Advancing the Teaching Profession
- Principals' Office
- Principal's Policy Blog
- ASCA Scene
- The Leading Source
- PDK Blog
- ASBO Intl.'s Economic Recovery Blog
- Always Something
- AASA's The Leading Edge
- U.S. Department of Education Blog
- The Core Knowledge Blog
- This Week in Education
- PTA Blog
- Such a Smart Mom
- Eduwonkette
- Teacher Leadership Today
- On the Shoulders of Giants
- Relentless Pursuit of Acronyms
- Teacher in a Strange Land
- Teach Moore
- The Tempered Radical
- TLN Teacher Voices
- The Educated Reporter
- The Character Education Partnership Blog
- Center for Public Education
- Connect for Kids
- Once Upon a School
As far as learning another
As far as learning another language, is concerned, can I put in a word for the global language, Esperanto?
Although Esperanto is a living language, it helps language learning as well.
Five British schools have introduced Esperanto in order to test its propaedeutic values. The pilot project is being monitored by the University of Manchester and the initial encouraging results can be seen at http://www.springboard2languages.org/Summary%20of%20evaluation,%20S2L%20...
You might also like to see http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
Confirmation can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
Thanks for your note,
Thanks for your note, Brian.
I fear Esperanto will have little chance of taking root in U.S. schools as long as time and resources are limited. Given the demands on schools' time--and the move in some states to decrease learning time as a response to growing budget pressures--world language instructures would likely protect existing language classes before trying Esperanto.
Of course, I've been wrong before....
Post new comment