Growing Diversity Fuels Chinese School

The bi-lingual CAIS school in San Francisco uses many of the tools and teaching methods that are used at the Chinese Language School of Connecticut.

For more info on ways to engage your children in learning Chinese please visit: www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org

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By YUKARI IWATANI KANE

San Francisco's Chinese American International School has long had a reputation for strong academics, but it has grown more popular as a rising number of non-Chinese parents bank on Chinese-language skills for their children's future.

Lianne Milton for The Wall Street Journal
First-grader Martha Chessen gets help from instructor Xiu Geng in a math-in-Mandarin class at the Chinese American International School, where a growing number of students come from non-Chinese backgrounds.

When Christine Chessen decided to send her oldest child to CAIS eight years ago, her blond-haired daughter stood out among the sea of mostly Asian or half-Asian children. Her stock-trader husband opposed the idea, and friends thought she was crazy.

She went ahead and enrolled her daughter, because she wanted to expose her to a completely different culture. The move made sense to Ms. Chessen when she learned that there are more native speakers of Chinese in the world than those whose mother tongue is English or Spanish.

These days, her daughter isn't so unusual at CAIS, a private school that instructs in both Mandarin and English from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.

"With the rise of Asia, people are finally jumping on the bandwagon," said Ms. Chessen, a stay-at-home mom who now has all three of her children—a first-, fourth- and sixth-grader—enrolled in the school. Her children, she said, are growing up singing Chinese songs, playing Chinese instruments and learning Chinese calligraphy, which she said she now considers all "part of our culture."

A recent survey by the school found that CAIS's non-Asian population has grown 42% over the past decade and currently makes up 27% of its 472 students. The remainder are children with partial or full Asian backgrounds, though most come from non-Chinese-speaking families.


Even though the school has increased its overall student population by 35% since 2000, it continues to be difficult to get into. More than 100 families vied for the 25 to 30 pre-K spots available next year. In the lower grades, instruction is half in Chinese, half in English; in middle school, which starts with grade six, 35% is in Chinese. The day school, in Hayes Valley, costs about $22,000 a year.

CAIS's growth is part of a nationwide trend as China's rise in the global economy prompts parents to seek Chinese-language instruction for their children—including President Barack Obama, whose daughter Sasha is learning Mandarin.

The San Francisco Unified Public School District said Chinese, including the Mandarin and Cantonese dialects, was the most requested language program by parents of kindergartners after Spanish for the next academic year. There are several public Chinese schools in San Francisco, and a new Chinese-language charter school is set to open in the Oakland area in the fall.

While there are no overall figures on how many students take Chinese-language classes nationwide, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages said it saw a threefold increase in the number of public-school students taking such classes to 60,000 in the 2007-08 academic year from three years earlier.

Programs like CAIS's carry little risk, said Marty Abbott, director of education at ACTFL, because even those students who spend their entire day in another language eventually catch up to and might even surpass their peers in English-language skills.

"The beauty of immersion programs, whether they're partial or full, is that students spend a considerable amount of time hearing the language and develop it and use it," Ms. Abbott said.

At CAIS one recent afternoon, a Chinese-speaking teacher led a kindergarten class in a game. The children sat in a circle around a collection of sea animal toys and tried to guess which were each other's favorites by asking questions in Mandarin.

On other floors, a fourth-grade class took an English spelling test while a group of seventh-graders practiced playing the Chinese yue qin guitar and the zither-like guzheng in a music class.

Tzara Geraghty, a tall, 13-year-old eighth-grader, plays the yangzin, a Chinese dulcimer, in a Chinese music ensemble, loves to eat tangyuan (dumplings made of rice flour with red bean, sesame and peanut butter fillings) and is looking forward to a coming school trip to Beijing.

Tzara, who has been at CAIS since pre-kindergarten, said she didn't realize she was Caucasian until she grew much taller than her classmates in fourth grade. "I never felt like I was different," said Tzara, who also plays volleyball, basketball and soccer.

For parents and teachers, it's a slightly different matter. Jeff Bissell, the head of the school, said the greater number of non-Asian families has prompted CAIS to adopt the more collaborative American educational approach along with the traditional top-down Chinese style.

Even then, there are challenges, because teachers are dealing with parents and students who are unfamiliar with Chinese teaching methods, such as the rote memorization required to learn the written script.

"Ten years ago, I could demonstrate how to write a character and make sure students got it, but now we have to break down the steps more," said Kevin Chang, the lower school's director.

Last year, the Parent Association took an extra step, holding a Mandarin 101 class for parents for the first time. The goal was not to teach Chinese but to familiarize parents with how the language works so they could understand what their children were learning.

Ms. Chessen said she values the school's lessons. "What my kids have learned about the Chinese culture they apply to the rest of the world," she said. "It makes us feel like we're part of a bigger community."

Write to Yukari Iwatani Kane at yukari.iwatani@wsj.com