5 responses to “Immersion Program Update”

1. Rich Grogan

   September 18, 2006

   Am I to understand the students that are going to participate in the Immersion Program are fluent in english and can pass the english portion of the High School Proficiency Test. If not, there is no need for the tax payers to fund such a program, when the current system is having such a difficult time of handling the need to graduate students able to pass the english portion of the High School Proficiency Test. After all, English is the official language of United States!

   This program sounds like a special program for a select few, who do not wish to speak learn to speak english and do not wish to assimilate into our culture.

   The parents, who are pushing this program, indicated they learned a foreign language by going to another country and being immersed in that specific language. I would like to suggest if these parents wish their child to learn a specific language I would like to suggest they go to the country of their choice and relive their childhood experience with their child and assist them in learning the language of that country.

2. Anonymous

   September 19, 2006

   Rich,

   A major benefit of this immersion program is that it takes English-speaking kids and makes them bilingual – it is not about not wanting to learn to speak English and assimilate into “our” culture. Indeed, my understanding is that the most difficult part of recruiting for these programs is typically to find enough native speakers of the immersion language to participate.

   Parents pushing the program, myself included, are not interested in “reliving childhood experiences”. Personally, I’m hoping to avoid the mistake of not starting to learn another language at a young enough age. We have the opportunity to have a generation of children come away from our schools with a great education including a second language – society’s interest in this is that it will serve these kids well throughout a lifetime in a shrinking world.

   I would hope that our aspirations for a high quality education extend beyond the boundaries of the High School Proficiency Test. Even if they are to be so limited, participation in an immersion program does nothing to limit a student’s ability to pass this or any other test.

3. Rich Grogan

   September 21, 2006

   Please do not make the mistake of thinking I do not believe a second language is not an asset, because I do. You will not convince me a child in the 3rd grade has the command of the English language. Mainly because I have a 3rd grader and I know what type of work she doing.

   If you wish to fast track you child’s ability to speak a second language I would like to suggest you continue to pay for the after school language program, but please do not ask me to fast track your child in a second language when he/she does not have a command of the PRIMARY language within the United States.

   My daughter loves Irish dancing and we pay for the after school dance lessions. I would never ask my neighbors/taxpayers to pay for her love of learning Irish dancing.

   Before we have accomplished the task of teaching our children to master English, I do not feel we can afford the luxury of fracturing our education program by offering tax payer sponsored immersion programs. I do not believe the tax payers wish to sponsor the construction of another Tower of Babylon

4. Anonymous

   September 21, 2006

   of Babel…

5. Anonymous

   September 22, 2006

   Rich,

   We seem to agree on overall goals get kids an excellent education, including a mastery of the English language. Your concern about the ability of students to pass the High School Proficiency Test I assumed applied to where we wanted them to be by high school, not 3rd grade (or kindergarten). If that’s the case, I’m with you. We just need to figure out the best way of getting there.

   If you are concerned that participation in a language immersion program in elementary school is going to produce high school students less capable of passing this test, I don’t believe the data collected over years of immersion programs support this. According to the California Dept of Education website (http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/el/ip/faq.asp), participants in immersion programs perform as well as or better on tests of English than their English-speaking peers who have been instructed only in English?.

   Your comparison to dance implies that a program like this would detract from the teaching of other subjects. If we decided to teach dance in 3rd grade, every minute spent dancing would be one minute less spent learning the curriculum. We would need to hire a dance teacher, provide a separate location, etc. In the case of an immersion program however, it does not work this way. Kids in first grade may still spend 30 min per day studying math in their classroom with their teacher it’s just done in Spanish rather than in English. They still have one room, one teacher, and one mathbook the book is just written in Spanish. There is no reduction in math teaching time, and minimal extra material or personnel cost.

   I share your general concerns about spending tax dollars on education wisely. We teach Spanish as well as other languages in middle school and high school, even to kids who have yet to pass their exit exams. I would submit that putting an immersion program in at the level where kids’ brains are most receptive to language education is a far more effective use of those limited dollars. For practically no additional cost, you end up with a much better command of the second language, and spend virtually no extra class time to get there (unlike in later years, when the language class is taken in a dedicated period). This is not to say we should stop offering it in later years for those who did not get it when they were young, just that immersion at a young age is a much more cost-effective way of instilling this learning than a dedicated period per day as a teenager.

   The problem at the tower of Babel was that people were unable to communicate with one another teaching all our children two languages rather than one accomplishes just the opposite of this. Doing so in a language that is spoken by over 100 million people living within a few days drive of Burlingame is most certainly a goal worthy of public support.