Bright – Peter Willhoite
“More than half of the world’s population is bilingual, but less than 20 percent of people in the United States speak a second language. Presidio Knolls School (PKS) is an elementary school off 10th Street in downtown San Francisco. It’s one of 200 foreign language immersion schools in California, part of a growing trend in education to reverse what Lee Drolet, head of school at PKS, refers to as our “lagging in language comprehension” problem. There are actually more than 1,000 immersion programs in the United States; over half are Spanish-language programs, while less than 20 percent are Mandarin. But the tide is changing: In 2005, there were just 19 Mandarin immersion programs around the country, whereas today there are more than 200—and not only in states like California with large Asian populations, but also in places like Casper, Wyoming, and Fitchburg, Wisconsin. The demographics of these programs vary by state and by location, but I was surprised to learn that none of these schools are dominated by native speakers. At Yu Ming with 257 students — 45% are Asian and 37% “multiracial.”At PKS, Drolet says, most students are not actually from Mandarin-speaking families, and there are just as many, if not more, students of other ethnicities as there are Chinese students.”(more)