Why Oakland parents are flocking to Chinese immersion school

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-oakland-parents-are-flocking-to-a-chinese-immersion-school

by rayiner • 4 years ago

9 4 4 years ago

The article doesn't even attempt to explain what they are doing differently to improve test scores (which is the fundamental reason driving people to put their kids there)

telotortium• 4 years ago

Hope? Many, many unusual education interventions have been attempted in the US public school system since the 1960s, and the vast majority end up having little lasting effect on test scores once they're scaled up (i.e., once the most motivated teachers and parents aren't disproportionately participating). So I doubt this program will magically improve test scores (and we're usually doing this in the worst schools in the first place, which means they have the least able or motivated teachers, students, and parents in the first place) once we scale up from the one charismatic founder.

There are other motivations for parents to opt for this program even if test scores ultimately can't be raised:

- If kids have to be in class for something anyway, they might as well be learning Chinese at the same time, which is at least a useful skill that's easier to learn in childhood.

- Chinese education is associated, rightly or wrongly, with more rigorous math instruction, which might well increase test scores even if the "underlying" math ability isn't increased.

- (Speculatively) teaching in Chinese might lessen children's exposure to "woke" ideology in the classroom. I can't find the article now, but I read an article a few weeks ago that argued that linguistic barriers form a major check on the spread of wokeness within countries, because wokeness achieves a lot of its power via equivocating between unobjectionable and "woke" definitions of words like "gender", "diversity", "racism", "tolerance", etc. For example, Germanic-speaking countries where the level of English knowledge is highest are the European countries most influenced by wokeness (outside of native English speaking countries), while for example the very idea of transgenderism seems ridiculous in Hungarian because the very word for "gender" in its non-grammatical sense is borrowed from English, making the equivocation mentioned above impossible. Chinese has its own similar political language around Communism, but China's soft cultural power in the West is quite weak, so no one's worried that their children in America will become fans of the CCP.

trh0awayman2• 4 years ago

I think you misunderstood me, or I didn't articulate myself well (maybe because I went to a public school?).

The article says that the reason parents are flocking to this school is because of the high test scores. I was curious what they are doing in the first place to achieve that.

opwieurposiu• 4 years ago

My kid started Mandarin language kindergarten, I am trying to learn enough to help him with his homework. Mao simplified the language quite a bit when he took over. This is why in Taiwan they still use traditional characters. Mao was considering converting to the Latin alphabet as well but apparently Stalin told him it would invite western decadence.

Because there are around 8k characters, the ABC song we teach kids for use in ordering dictionaries does not work. There are 3-4 different ordering systems so you end up owning 3-4 different dictionaries, though often I give up and just use an app. There are 8,105 simplified Chinese characters according to the official list, 3,500 classified as "frequent." My kid has about 4500 hours of elementary school left so he has to learn about one character per hour.

Mandarin does not use spaces between the words. This introduces some ambiguity in parsing multi-character words but it does not seem to be a huge problem in practice.

There are some things that are easier though, Mandarin does not have much in the way of conjugation, possession, plurals and gender like you do in French and Spanish. There are some counting words you have to learn, like how in English we have flock, pack, herd, etc.

Why Oakland parents are flocking to Chinese immersion school

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