Why do so many American schools teach French?

By Liam Day
July 24th, 2008

In response to the labor market, of course. Schools teach French because French teachers are easier to find than those who teach Mandarin or Arabic. Nevertheless, if one were to make a list of which foreign languages our children will need to make themselves as attractive as possible in a 21st century economy, Mandarin and Arabic would be close to, if not at the top of it and French much further down.

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette has a heartening feature today on the Mandarin classes now being offered in Shrewsbury’s public schools. But as Steve Ackley, spokesman for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, points out:

There aren’t enough qualified Chinese teachers to serve the growing demand.

What’s a school district to do?

Virtualize.

I think today there is an inherent bias against virtual education - in many ways similar to the one against online dating that was once so common. Many people hear virtual education and think immediately of a correspondence course, which, of course, doesn’t have the same academic rigor as a classroom based one. Or so the prevailing wisdom would have us believe. But, just as today online dating is not nearly the social stigma it once was, there is a similar move in the direction of normalizing virtual education.

For instance, we at Pioneer just recognized the Florida Virtual School as the winner of our 2008 Better Government Competition and one of the recommendations (granted, just one of a myriad of recommendations) in the Governor’s Readiness Project report is the creation of a virtual school.

Virtual schools have the potential to upend the delivery mechanism for education, which currently, in its classroom form, is labor intensive. In a labor shortage, therefore, the service does not get delivered at a pace to meet demand - a la Mandarin and Arabic instruction. Harnessing technology for more efficient delivery would allow us to overcome just such a predicament.