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Archive for March, 2011

Foreign Language Assistance Program on the chopping block: a major threat to K-12 language instruction in the US

Saturday, March 12th, 2011

The following is reprinted from the Asia Society website: http://asiasociety.org/education-learning/world-languages/-american-schools/language-funding-jeopardy

On Saturday, February 19, the House of Representatives passed HR1, the FY 2011 continuing budget resolution, which cuts funding for the Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP). FLAP is funded at $26.9 million and is the only source of federal education funding for K-12 foreign language innovation and best practices. On March 4^th, the Senate Democratic Leadership introduced their version of a 7-month Continuing Resolution (CR) which would not cut FLAP, but would maintain it at the current levels.

Please call or email your Senators and urge them to support the continuation of funding for the Foreign Language Assistance Program in 2011 and to oppose any resolution or budget proposal that would eliminate the funding of FLAP programs.

Read on for more information from the Asia Society.

In an effort to prevent government shut down, the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a proposal, HR 1, which contains $100 billion in cuts from the President’s FY 2011 budget request. To reach that number the House cut billions through eliminations, reductions, and rescissions, including the elimination of the Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP) within the Department of Education.

FLAP is the only source of federal education funding for K-12 foreign language innovation and best practices. The $26.9 million in funding are being used to develop programs in critical languages to help support our economic and national security interests and prepare our graduates to compete in the 21st century. The US Department of Education awards, on average, between 25-35 FLAP grants each year to local education agencies and state education agencies.

Last Friday, March 4th, the Senate Democratic Leadership introduced their version of a seven-month Continuing Resolution which would maintain FLAP funding at the current levels. In contrast, the House-passed CR would cut $51 billion more than the Senate measure, with the vast majority of House cuts coming from non-defense spending. The Senate will vote on HR 1—the House proposal and the Democratic alternative, on Tuesday March 8th. Although neither is expected to get the 60 votes needed to advance, the votes will set the parameters for the upcoming budget negotiations and determine the final level for FLAP funding this year.

Need for Increased World Language Programs

Only 25 percent of elementary schools in the United States offered any world languages in 2008, down from 31 percent in 1997. American secondary schools offer more opportunities yet involvement is still low; currently, only half of all American high school students take even one year of a world language. Like many other academic advantages, language-learning opportunities are less available in urban schools than in suburban or private schools. For the past fifty years, school language choices have remained for the most part the same commonly taught European languages. Many FLAP grants aim to change this, focusing on programs that provide students the opportunity to learn a critical need foreign language such as Mandarin or Arabic.

The American language-education offerings contrast markedly with those of other countries where learning a second language is a higher priority. Twenty out of twenty-five industrialized countries start teaching world languages in grades K-5 and twenty-one of the thirty-one countries in the European Union require nine years of language study. It is not surprising that a 2007 report from the National Academy of Sciences warned, “The pervasive lack of knowledge of foreign cultures and languages threatens the security of the United States as well as its ability to compete in the global marketplace and produce an informed citizenry.”
To find out more about FLAP grants and where they have been awarded, please see: http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oela/funding.html

Notes
Presentation by Shuhan Wang, Finding Solutions: Reforming World Language Teacher Supply System. STARTALK 2009 Teacher Certification Summit. December 2009. Accessed: http://startalk.umd.edu/2009/meetings/certification/
National Academy of Sciences, Rising above the gathering storm: Energizing and employing America for a brighter economic future. (2007) Available: http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309100399/html

Discussion Question
What can we do to help save the FLAP program?

Tags: Education, FLAP, legislation, Mandarin, Politics, Public Schools
Posted in Guest Blogs | 1 Comment »

José and Maria: A Story of Courage

Monday, March 7th, 2011

Lydia Breiseth is Manager of Colorín Colorado, a bilingual website serving parents and educators of English language learners based at public broadcasting station WETA in Washington, DC. The following is a guest post inspired by her conversations with SIT filmmaker Ken Schneider and some of the subjects from Speaking In Tongues.

by Lydia Breiseth

We recently had the opportunity to interview Ken Schneider, co-director of Speaking in Tongues, for the bilingual English language learner (ELL) website Colorín Colorado. Ken provided a great behind-the-scenes glimpse of the film’s production process, as well as some thoughtful insight on attitudes towards dual-language education around the country.

One of the words that Ken used has stuck with me as I think about ELLs who enroll in dual-language programs: courage. Courage, he says, is what enabled José and Maria Patiño, a humble couple with little education, to put their son Jason in a two-way Spanish immersion program rather than send him to school in an English-only environment. In the film, José notes that it would be difficult for him and Maria if their son lost his Spanish as the lines of communication would be broken – but that’s not their only motivation in enrolling him in a dual-immersion program. Maria expresses her hopes her son will be “better prepared when he is older, to find a better job and have twice as many opportunities because he speaks two languages.”

For most families like the Patiños, the overwhelming pressure to learn English is communicated in the schools and by the mainstream media. We meet a Latino father in the film who believes that his daughter is speaking too much Spanish at her dual-language program; his impassioned plea at a parent meeting for his daughter to learn more English underscores the desire that so many immigrant parents share to see their children succeed in the U.S. It also underscores the limited access that parents have to information about the benefits of building strong language and literacy skills in the first language, and the many kinds of benefits (academic, social, emotional, and cultural) of effective dual-language programs.

For the families that don’t have access to that information when high-quality dual-language programs are offered in their school district , questions arise about which language to use at home. Sometimes Spanish-speaking parents stop reading to their children since they can’t read aloud in English. Parents may see their native language as an obstacle rather than an asset, sacrificing the family’s communication in the name of their child’s success and thus creating a rift as the child grows older and speaks less Spanish.

This is an important part of the conversation that Speaking in Tongues has inspired: What does it mean for our ELLs to succeed? Does it mean fluency in English, even if it’s at the expense of the native language (as we see in the case of Kelly’s parents)? Or does it mean giving our children the chance to become fully bi-literate and bilingual? While many of their counterparts understandably choose the former, the Patiños chose the latter. So far Jason’s prospects for a future with “twice as many opportunities” – and one in which his parents can play an active part – look bright. When the film was released in 2009, Jason was testing well-above grade level in English and Spanish, and he has identified the college he plans to attend.

José and Maria are parents whose courage we can learn from as we look to our rapidly-changing student population around the country. We need Jason to succeed, and we need José and Maria to be there alongside him every step of the way.

Special thanks to Dr. Karen Ford from the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and Giselle Lundy-Ponce from the American Federation of Teachers for their contributions to this post.

Tags: English Languge Learners, Immersion, Parental Choice, parents, Public Schools, San Francisco, Spanish
Posted in Guest Blogs, Heritage Languages, Language Immersion, Multilingual Education | 7 Comments »