My wife is a Mandarin language teacher, in a community (Bay Area) that due to language diversity, is a political battleground between those for, and against, the addition of relevant foreign languages into public schools.
I hear the war stories every day.
Limited or reduced education budgets effectively imposes that when an additional foreign language stream is added, an existing language stream (and associated specialist language teachers) must be DROPPED.
The political lobby for Spanish is so strong that by default, the Euro languages become the targets for cancellation, when Mandarin or Hindi stream is added.
You can try, but you won’t even imagine how vicious this war gets between the entrenched Euro-language teachers (and their various supporters in the education districts), trying to sabotage the good-natured efforts by the Mandarin and Hindi (and other) languages proponents.
But it isn’t a 2-way war where equally vicious tactics are used by both sides.
The only “offense” committed by the Mandarin and Hindi teachers is their simply showing up to positions they have been hired for to teach those languages in our public schools. And the “offense” by the Chinese and Indian parents is their merely asking school boards to add these languages.
That’s when they encounter endless cruel tactics thrown at them by the Euro-language advocates, to sabotage the Mandarin and Hindi programs.
My wife has witnessed the following on multiple occasions:
Targeted political and verbal abuse of Mandarin/Hindi language teachers by their Language Dept Heads (who support Euro-languages) and by dept staffer Euro-language teachers, with their express goal to sabotage the Mandarin and Hindi streams by causing enough emotional distress among those language teachers that they quit. And they ARE effective in causing those teachers to quit.
Language Dept Heads in public schools (who support Euro languages) REFUSING to accept large free money / equipment grants for their school’s Mandarin/Hindi programs, or accepting and then hijacking ALL the granted money and equipment for use solely by the Euro and Spanish language departments! We are talking hundreds of thousands of dollars per school in state and federally granted money and equipment, which is legally required to be used only by Mandarin/Hindi programs
After class registration, but prior to class starting, Language Dept Heads and/or School Principle forcing Mandarin/Hindi teachers to throw REGISTERED and QUALIFIED students off language class rosters in order to give appearance of less demand, and to avoid hiring of additional Mandarin/Hindi teachers when class size would dictate, and also to kill off trials of Advanced Placement language classes.
Regarding the TRUE POLITICAL INTENT of the Spanish language advocates active (some at high levels) in our CA education departments, my wife has heard them frequently state in high-level internal meetings they want a FULLY DUAL TRACK LANGUAGE (Spanish/English) system where ALL students are forced to learn Spanish from kindergarten on up, in addition to English. Half or more classes would be all Spanish as would textbooks. This is explicitly stated as preparing CA kids for a state (CA) and nation that adopts laws requiring a bilingual English/Spanish on EVERYTHING. Wake up – that is their true agenda.
Euro-language teachers and department heads, and principles, using vicious tactics at school boards meetings to ensure the voices from the Mandarin / Hindi parents are NOT heard, to prevent adoption by school boards of those language streams. We’re talking about school districts where over 60% of homes are Hindi or Mandarin but cannot get those language classes taught in schools, even though they pay taxes.
I leave you with this one example. There is a school district in Silicon Valley where over 50% of homes are Mandarin-speaking Chinese, yet for years the Euro-language teachers (and school district leaders) blocked all attempts by the community to have Mandarin added.
Eventually, the Chinese community got so pissed off that they gathered funding and showed up in the thousands at school board meeting and threatened to pull all their children out of the district public high schools and use their funding to create a private high school with a Mandarin language program. And they had the required millions in funding, and they had to bring in political heavy-weight Chinese CEO’s who also lobbied local political leaders on the matter.
That was the extremes they had to go to before the school district finally gave in.
I think at least at the public high school level, ALL Euro-languages should be KICKED OUT, begrudgingly Spanish kept, and (opt-in) immersion programs brought in for Mandarin and Hindi that start at the grade-school level.
For the Euro-languages, there should only remain a few scattered magnet high schools, that kids can bus to if they are so desperate to learn French or German, or whatever (apparently so they can try to remember it years later when they vacation in Europe? They won’t use it anywhere else.)
And obviously I NEVER want to see a Spanish/English bilingual America.
Our kids can’t get even access to learn Mandarin or Hindi in America’s public schools, and then people wonder why America doesn’t stay competitive on the world stage. What a joke.
