Eye on the future, MLK seeks to be Chinese-language immersion school
The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School website includes pictures from an April trip taken by student and staff to Cambridge’s Chinese sister city, Hangzhou. The school is seeking to expand its focus on China and become a Mandarin Chinese-language immersion school.
The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School is seeking to become a Chinese immersion school, meaning students would be taught in English and Mandarin Chinese.
Cambridge has another school already operating on the dual-language immersion model — the Spanish-language Amigos School — but the Chinese program would have five years of partial funding from a U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language Assistance Program grant, according to Teresa Walker, a technology assistant at the school.
The reasoning behind the expansion is sound: China is considered the world’s fastest-growing economy, with some of the world’s fastest-growing cities; and Asian-Americans are expected to jump to 9.3 percent of the U.S. population by 2050, from 3.6 percent at the time of the U.S. Census in 2000. Cambridge’s universities are a magnet for Chinese scholars, just as the business environment draws collaboration with companies bases in China, and the region — starting with Boston’s Chinatown — is Asian friendly.
A report by the Credit Suisse Research Institute shows China to be the third-largest wealth generator in the world, with total household wealth of $16.5 trillion, behind only the United States’ $54.6 trillion and Japan’s $21 trillion. Total household wealth in China is on track to rise 111 percent, to $35 trillion, by 2015.
The K-8 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School already has a Chinese-language focus in its Ni Hao (Hello!) Mandarin Chinese program, in which the students get at least a half-hour of Mandarin Chinese instruction daily — learning to write in traditional Chinese, read Pinyin and speak the language. (The city’s high school, Cambridge Rindge & Latin, also offers Mandarin courses.) In April, eighth-graders and some faculty traveled to Cambridge’s Chinese sister city Hangzhou, led by Principal Gerald Yung, a graduate of Lesley, Harvard and other schools.
“I believe that these programs offer students a great opportunity to become leaders in an increasingly globalized world,” Yung said in an interview last year on Cambridge Public School’s Chalkboard Chatter site.
The program expansion needs approval by the School Committee. If approved, it would begin at the junior and senior levels of kindergarten in the school year starting in 2011.
First comes a 6:30 p.m. Oct. 25 information night at the school, 100 Putnam Ave.
The school’s partners in developing the program are the China Center of the Confucius Institute, the Applied Linguistics Department at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and Learning Innovations at WestEd in Woburn.
To contact Yung, who serves as project director as well as principal, call (617) 349-6562, ext. 150, or send e-mail to [email protected].
This post drew significant amounts of information from a press release.
Hi Marc,
Thanks for the article covering the important subject of bilingual education in Cambridge.
I would like to remind all Cambridge Day readers that Cambridge also has a long-running and very active Portuguese/English two-way immersion program, K-8, at the King Open School.
More details can be found in the School District´s web site for King Open or in the link to the Parent site.
Thanks,
Marcio
Amigos, which shares a building with King, also provides Mandarin instruction to its students. When Amigos moved to that building, the school’s administration saw the opportunity to share resources with the Ni Hao program, and it has turned out that Amigos students are doing really well picking up their third (at least) language.
I wish the King School well in this endeavor. It’s very hard work running a good immersion program, but it’s extremely rewarding.
Hello all. I just want to correct a few things. The MLK school has been awarded a five year grant. The first year of that grant is to evaluate whether a dual immersion program in Mandarin should or should not be instituted. The School Committee had this grant in front of us a few months ago and had several questions. The first being, if we are going to change the MLK School into a dual immersion program, is this the way to go about it? There seemed to be little imput from parents, and no input from the school committee, who ultimate has final approval over making such a change in the structure of a school. This may very well happen, but it is not for certain. Another question we are grappling with is what do you do when an individual school institutes its own program that ultimately impacts the entire district? For example, if the MLK school ultimately becomes a dual immersion school, the result will be that some students will transfer out and others will transfer in. Either way, the MLK cannot do this in a vacuum.
Marc McGovern
Cambridge School Committee
I agree with Marc that the logistics of putting all this in place is daunting, and the people who wrote the grant is up to the task. As for the lack of input, the grant was not a sure thing when it was done. Hence a probable cause for the lack of input. Now that the grant is in place, there can be a more concerted effort to engage, as should be. But we should all rejoice that we would have a chance at doing this. Cambridge can really be a “global” city.
I also wanted to add a few words of support and clarification. The proposed program would serve to strengthen the existing program at the King School. Mandarin has been taught for 15 years at this school. In addition, the current proposal for this program expansion maintains both immersion and non-immersion classes for children at the school. It would be a shame to lose the opportunity have rich multi-linguistic programming in this Cambridge school if program implementation is not approved by the school committee. It is fortunate that this grant has been awarded to the school. I sincerely hope that expanded Mandarin programming will be made available to the children in our district.
-Current King School parent