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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.