I am curious if French or Spanish etc medium schools exist.
I mean the medium of instructuion is Spanish; Physics, Chemistry etc are taught in Spanish, English is taught ONLY as a course by itself.
Does the US constitution allow the existence of such schools?
Veera.
PS. While I am pretty sure the answers to the above questions are “YES, you moron, this is the USA!!”, I want to confirm before I flame a guy who insists otherwise.
While they are not forbidden by the constitution or any laws that I know of, they must be very rare.
Even here in polyglot Los Angeles I do not know of any. I seem to dimly recall some “magnet schools” that are in a foreign language (French comes to mind), but again, they are extremely rare.
Not sure, but isn’t Lycée Français (where Jodie Foster went to high school) taught completely in French?
I don’t know if anyone has actually tried it, but there has been some talk in educational circles of creating schools that are “bilingual across the curriculum.” What’s usually proposed is teaching all classes in both English and Spanish (this being California.)
Cher,
It was possibly thought about, but in Cali, we voted to remove ESL classes didn’t we?(I believe it was found unconstitutional in the end, but…)
In my old high school, as close as we got to bilingual were the foreign language classes and ESL.
-Sam
There’s a German school in Rockville, Maryland. I believe they teach mostly in German, with English classes added. They follow the German educational system’s structure of classes, as far as I know. I knew a couple kids who went there while I was growing up. The kids who went there were mostly the children of diplomats and other people who were in the U.S. temporarily. Rockville is in Montgomery County, which is just a stone’s throw from D.C.
I hear that my old public elementary school (Kittredge Elementary in Dekalb County, GA) now has a mandatory German and Russian program (among other things). It was just a ‘normal’ (but very good IMHO) elementary school when I went there Way Back When, but I ended up learning German (well), Russian (poorly), and a ton of other languages as soon as I ‘graduated’ from Kittridge, so I absolutely could not be prouder of my old alma mater for its new curriculum.
Hmm… here’s a link to one of its home pages but it looks very different than it did a few years ago when I read it thoroughly [durn kids, gotta go mess with everthin’!) so I wonder if my info is out-of-date
I also live near a school now, which based on the fact that it calls itself a ‘gakuen’ rather than a school, is probably pure Japanese language (but it’s a private school)
Yeah, GaWd I think so. The discussions I saw related to private and charter schools, though. Also, this type of school might not violate the law because it puts everyone on an equal footing–except of course the students who don’t speak English OR Spanish, of which there are also many in California.
Since English is not the official language of the U.S., is there any law that mandates public schools must be taught in English? In other words, if there was a school that taught all in Spanish, and within a reasonable distance, there was one that taught in English, would that be disallowed?
I’m not familiar with the laws in this area.