Chinese Education in the United States: Players and Challenges

3.1 Chinese as a critical-need foreign language in the U.S.

With globalization intensifying, the American public, including parents, educators, and business leaders, are awakening to the need for an education system that prepares students for the globalized world and international competition. Chinese language education was thus called for, with 2004 and 2006 as its defining years. In 2004, the College Board conducted a national survey that revealed 2,400 schools expressing interest in offering the Chinese Advanced Placement (AP) Course and Examination (Stewart and Wang 2005: 6). Previously, such AP courses and exams had exclusively belonged to the commonly-taught languages, such as Spanish, French, and German. Moreover, in January 2006 the National Security Language Initiative ^[8] (NSLI) program was established by the U.S. federal government, as “a plan to further strengthen national security and prosperity in the twenty-first century through education, especially in developing foreign language skills. The NSLI will dramatically increase the number of Americans learning critical-need foreign languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Farsi, and others through new and expanded programs from kindergarten through university and into the workforce” (retrieved in July 2015 from NSLI website). Then President George W. Bush requested $114 million to fund this effort, which was successfully granted. The rationale of this initiative is to deal with the post-9/11 world, with “the ability to engage foreign governments and peoples, especially in critical regions, to encourage reform, promote understanding, convey respect for other cultures and provide an opportunity to learn more about our country and its citizens” (retrieved in July 2015 from NSLI website). Under this auspice, Chinese was designated as one of the “critical-need” languages, and Chinese education in the U.S. has since become the major recipient of U.S. federal funds and resources through NSLI initiatives.

The NSLI program is coordinated by four government branches: the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, each of which navigates various programs to develop the critical-need foreign language proficiency, as outlined below:

The Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP), managed by the Department of Education, creates incentives to teach and study critical-need languages in K-12 schools, and provides immersion programs, curriculum development, professional development, and distance learning. In 2009, 58 % of its total funding of $14.1 million was awarded to Chinese language programs. The Teacher Exchange ^[9] and Summer Language Institutes Youth Exchanges ^[10] are sponsored by the Department of State programs. While the former provides critical language teachers to U.S. secondary schools by bringing native speaking teachers and providing American teachers in these languages opportunities for intensive summer study abroad, the latter provides U.S. high school students the opportunity to study Arabic or Chinese abroad as well as school partnerships that provide U.S. schools with linkages to foreign counterparts. In both programs, China is a focused country. The Flagship Program ^[11] operated by the National Security Education Program (NSEP) under the U.S Department of Defense provides advanced instruction in critical languages, which represents a national model for developing a workforce of professionals with superior-level proficiencies in those languages. So far, there are 12 Chinese Flagship programs (44.44 % of the U.S. total) across the states, which have enrolled 1,553 Chinese students in the years of 2010–2013.

STARTALK ^[12] (literally, Start Talking) sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Programs is the “seed” program that provides summer language learning to young students and pedagogical/cultural training to pre/in-service language teachers in the 10 critical languages. From 2009 to 2015, there were a total of 673 student programs and 431 teacher programs across the states, in which Chinese accounted for half of the total in each category and in each year. (See Table 1.)

As shown in Table 1, the Chinese language is the major recipient of the STARTALK program. In most of the years, Chinese teacher programs accounted for two thirds of the total, whose targeted audiences are, in general, current and future Chinese teachers from public/private K-12 and community heritage language schools, with or without teacher certifications.

In general, the Chinese STARTALK programs are scheduled for 4 weeks in the summer, with the first week dedicated to teacher training and the remaining three weeks for student language and cultural learning. Aligned with ACTFL guidelines and the National Foreign Language Standards, the Chinese teacher programs provide training on second language acquisition theories, performance-based activities and assessments, lesson planning and classroom technology. Most of the teacher trainees, after the initial one-week training, engage in teaching practices in the adjoined student programs, which run small language classes at multiple proficiency levels, reinforced with cultural workshops and field trips.

Although it is criticized as a “crisis-response” approach or “languages of the moment phenomenon” (Wang 2010: 11), the NSLI has made undeniable contributions to critical-need language development in the U.S. in recent years and has played a vital role in promoting Chinese education. In a conjoined effort, Asia Society and College Board – the two leading non-government organizations involved in language education – have joined forces to promote Chinese language education. In 2005, Asia Society published a groundbreaking report, entitled Expanding Chinese-language capacity in the United States: What should it take to have a 5 percent of high school students learning Chinese in 2015? It addressed various critical issues in developing the Chinese education and called for a number of actions, such as creating a supply of qualified Chinese-language teachers, increasing the number and quality of school programs, and developing appropriate curricula, materials and assessments (Stewart and Wang 2005: 4). The report was highly influential and largely raised awareness of Chinese education to the American public. It also made the first call to introduce China’s Hanban ^[13] 汉办(The National Office on the Teaching of Chinese as a Foreign Language, then abbreviated as NOCTFL) and its visiting faculty program to the U.S. (p. 10). Ever since, Hanban has been playing a significant role in U.S. Chinese education.

Coupled with Asia Society’s call for qualified Chinese teachers, the College Board created a Chinese guest teacher and trainee program, ^[14] through a collaboration with Hanban (called “the Office of Chinese Language Council International” at the present time). Since 2007, this program has brought more than 900 Chinese language and culture teachers to classrooms across the nation and has grown to be the largest Chinese visiting teacher program in the U.S. Each year, the program serves hundreds of K–12 schools and districts nationwide and reaches tens of thousands of U.S. Chinese students.

Collectively, these efforts have largely boosted Chinese education in the U.S. As shown in Figure 1, Chinese higher education made outstanding changes in 2006 with total enrollments of 51,381 students, indicating a 50.44 % increase over 2002 (34,153 students in total), followed by a 16.53 % increase in 2009 over 2006. In 2013, a large number of foreign language enrollments in the U.S. higher education (i. e., Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, among others) significantly dropped, while Chinese exclusively gained 2 % over 2009 (Goldberg et al. 2015).

Figure 1:

Chinese enrollments in higher education, 1960–2013.

3.2 Chinese as a community heritage language in the U.S.

Chinese education in the U.S. has operated in two major separate fields: the mainstream system and the community heritage language schools. Unlike the mainstream school system where Chinese was almost unknown until recent decades, the Chinese heritage language schools have been the centerpiece of the Chinese community for over 150 years (see Section 2). Data show that almost all U.S.-born Chinese children or young arrivals have some level of experience in Chinese community schools (Xiao 2008), where they learn the heritage language and culture, make friends, and weave ethnic fabrics with holiday celebrations, special gatherings, talent shows, etc. The first Chinese heritage language school was established in San Francisco in 1886 (Liu 2010), with Cantonese as the major medium of instruction, and classic written Chinese texts as the teaching materials. By the end of the 1920s, there were over fifty Chinese-language schools, with most of them in the western states (Chang 2003). However, they were in general independent of each other, without interaction or collaboration. In 1994, two non-profit organizations were established to serve and lead. One of them is the National Council of Associations of Chinese Language Schools 全美中文學校聯合總會 (NCACLS ^[15]), established by immigrants from Taiwan, and the other is the Chinese School Association in the United States 全美中文学校协会 (CSAUS ^[16]), established by people from China. Each of these two organizations has its own affiliated member schools and lends them support in curricula development, mainstream communication, advocacy, and articulation. By 1996, approximately 82,675 students were enrolled in 634 Chinese language schools across the country (Chao 1997). At the present time, it is estimated that 200,000 students are enrolling in these schools, with NCACLS claiming to have close to 100,000 students across 47 U.S. states, and CSAUS having 100,000 students across 50 U.S. states, affiliated with more than 500 member schools.

Although they are managed by leaders from different origins, both organizations share a mission of promoting and cultivating the Chinese language and culture in the U.S. NCACLS aims to serve as the primary contact for national and/or international institutions on Chinese language and culture and provides a forum to share and exchange experience and information for its affiliated member schools. It has organized a number of student contests, teacher training workshops, and the first annual Conference for Chinese Heritage Education (Detroit, Michigan, in August 2015). In a similar vein, CSAUS aims to help younger generations preserve and appreciate Chinese heritage and strives to facilitate educational and cultural exchanges between the United States and China; CSAUS has successfully organized nine national conferences with feature speakers from both China and the U.S.

In addition to the organization-led Chinese heritage language schools mentioned above, there are “community-based” heritage language schools, which were created and managed by immigrant families and/or religious institutions. Thus, Chinese heritage schools are treated as two separate datasets (i. e., organization-based and community-based) in the Heritage Language Programs Database ^[17] managed by CAL. The database collects and publicizes school profiles (apparently from voluntary submissions), which include a number of measures, such as program description, language being offered, student background and enrollments, instruction and instructor, materials being used, funding sources, challenges being faced, etc.

A search on the Organization-based dataset showed 23 entries, with NCACLS and CSAUS being listed as two lone entries without linkage to any of their member schools. Also, some schools listed in organization-based section claim their own organizations such as Huaxia Chinese language schools 华夏中文学校 and American Chinese Schools 美中实验学校, and some of their member schools are also listed in the “community-based” dataset. Given the developing information of the “organization-based” dataset, the researcher resorted to the “community-based” dataset for data analysis, which consists of 191 entries with specific school names and locations. Two of the entries were eliminated for data analysis: one is a STARTALK summer program, and the other a repetition. Data from the remaining 189 schools from 28 states are used for computation and analysis. (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2:

Languages offered by community-based Chinese heritage language schools.

As shown in Figure 2, out of the 189 community-based schools, 152 offer Mandarin (80.42 % of the total), 32 (16.93 %) offer Cantonese and Mandarin, 3 (1.59 %) offer Cantonese, and 2 (1.06 %) offer Mandarin and others such as Arabic, Hindi, and Tamil. Regionally, 63 of the 189 schools are in California (33.33 % of the total), out of which 3 offer Cantonese (100 % of the total) and 21 offer Cantonese/Mandarin (65.63 % of the total). Moreover, 48 schools were selected as Chinese Education Model Schools in the U.S. by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council, China, in 2009 and 2011. Out of them, 40 were selected in 2009, which included Huaxia Chinese Schools 华夏中文学校 (27 campuses), Hope Chinese Schools 希望中文学校 (6 campuses), Atlanta Contemporary Chinese Academy 亚特兰大现代中文学校 (4 campuses), Xilin Chinese Schools 希林中文学校 (2 campuses), and Nam Kue School 旧金山南侨学校 (San Francisco, CA). The remaining 8 were selected in 2011: American Chinese Schools 美中实验学校 (6 campuses) and Ray Chinese Schoo1 瑞华中文学校 (2 campuses).

The majority of the 189 respondents claim to be 501(c) (3) nonprofit organizations which allows them to seek and receive tax-free donations. Except for three, none of these schools have its own teaching quarters, but rent from local schools or churches. The three exceptions are Nam Kue School in San Francisco, CA; Shoong Chinese School in Oakland, CA; and Tucson Chinese School, AZ. The Nam Kue School was established in 1920 and acquired its own building and lot in 1926 through donations from the local Chinese community. The school evolved from a small class with one teacher and 35 students to a large educational institution of more than 1,700 students at the present time. Shoong Chinese School was established by the Shoong family in the late 1940s, and in 1953 it moved into the Shoong family Chinese Cultural Center in Oakland, CA. Tucson Chinese School was also established over 50 years ago, and in 2005 it moved into the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center and became a local Chinese school with excellent facilities.

Moreover, according to the information provided in the database, the instruction time of these schools ranges from 1 hour to 4 hours per week; students range in ages from 3 to 18, or pre-K to 12; and instructors are all part-timers. Student enrollments range from 80 per school (i. e., The Yen Wulin Alaska Chinese School, AK) to 1,700 (i. e., The Nam Kue School), with 300–400 students as the norm. Curriculum-wise, these schools are extremely diverse and open. Besides Chinese language teaching, they engage students in a wide range of cultural activities such as Chinese chess, dance, painting, calligraphy, martial arts, Taiqi, and opera; among others. Some of the schools also administer the Hanban-authorized Chinese standardized tests, prepare students for SAT or SAT II Chinese and/or math, and organize Chinese summer camps, festival celebrations, and cultural exchanges.

In the entry that asks for “Program Funding,” all of the respondents claim “student tuition,” including the 48 schools that were selected as China’s overseas education models by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council in 2009 and 2011. The typical tuition these schools charge is $200-$250 per semester. On top of the student tuition, some schools obtain “donations from local business companies, parents, churches, or adjacent college student activity funds.” Only two of them (i. e., Chinese School of Delaware and Columbus Chinese Academy, OH) mention “home government (Taiwan) financial support” on top of student tuition and help from the local community. The Columbus Chinese Academy also claims that the textbook used is published by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission (OCAC), Taiwan. In the entry of “challenges faced by the program,” adversities includes insufficient funding, unaffordable facility rentals, dearth of resources for curriculum design and training for teachers who are in general parent volunteers and part-timers (with full-time jobs elsewhere), scarcity of appropriate textbooks, and students’ lack of interest, among others. As the evidence provided above indicates, the Chinese heritage language schools in the U.S. have accommodated large enrollments of Chinese students, more than the American public schools and higher education combined, but have been facing many challenges. They are entirely grass-roots efforts, with zero support from the U.S. mainstream system. Moreover, the majority of the community-based schools offer Mandarin Chinese, while the other Chinese languages/dialects are unknown except for Cantonese, which has a marginal presence, mostly in California. In addition, one third of the community-based schools (33.33 %) are in California; schools that offer Cantonese alone are in California; and two thirds of the schools that offer Cantonese/Mandarin are also in California. Such linguistic distribution reflects on the history of Chinese immigration, which started in California by Cantonese-speaking pioneers and expanded into the hub of Chinese immigration, where one finds the most, oldest, and largest community-supported Chinese heritage schools in this country.

3.3 Chinese language as China’s soft power in the U.S.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, China successfully built up its economic hard power as the second-largest economy (in GDP and foreign trading) in the world and the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury Bonds (a total of $1,202.8 billion by the end of 2012, 21.7 % of the total U.S. foreign holding) (Kennedy and Fan 2013: 17). In the meantime, the nation was awakening to the need of increasing the country’s soft power, the ability to shape the preferences of others through appeal and attraction or “a form of power, one way of getting desired outcomes (Nye 2011: 82)”. In November 2006, China’s then President Hu Jintao brought the “soft power” concept to the nation. ^[18] One year later, the notion of “increasing the soft power of Chinese culture” was put on the government’s agenda (Xinhua News Agency 2007) and repeatedly emphasized by Hu on several occasions (e. g., January 22th, 2008; October 18th, 2010; July 1^st, 2011). On October 18^th, 2011, at the Party’s Central Committee convention, President Hu again called for “striving to build a strong socialist country through connecting the world and enhancing its cultural soft power 面向世界, 增强国家文化软实力，努力建设社会主义文化强国,” which was warmly received and factored into the nation’s strategic plan. The effort continued and intensified after Xi Jinping succeeded to Hu in China’s presidency (Xinhua Net, December 31, 2013 ^[19]). In fact, long before the “soft power” concept was brought to light, the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language (TCFL) was promoted by the country as an important source of soft power. In the 1950s and 1960s, TCFL served to build up international relations by mainly working with the Third World countries such as Vietnam and some African countries (Zhao and Huang 2010: 130). In 1985, four top-notch Chinese universities established academic departments in TCFL, which was soon followed by many other universities (Ministry of Education 2005). By the end of 2012, there were 63,933 students majoring in TCFL in the country, and at the present time 342 universities offer Bachelor’s, Master’s, or doctoral degrees in TCFL (China Daily ChineseNet ^[20] on May 5, 2014). A large number of these trained CFL teachers come overseas. In the U.S., they arrive basically in three channels: (1) sent over by Hanban through the Confucius Institute program, (2) recruited by the Guest Teacher Program co-sponsored by the College Board and Hanban, and (3) admitted into Chinese graduate programs in American universities and become permanent Chinese teachers in K-12 schools or lecturers/professors in universities.

Since 1987, when China’s CFL policy stepped up into a significant stage through Hanban, which involved 11 ministries of the central government (Zhao and Huang 2010: 131), Hanban has become the chief agent of promoting TCFL through various vehicles such as 汉语桥 ‘Chinese Bridge Proficiency Contests’，汉语水平考试 ‘Chinese Proficiency Test’，汉语志愿教师计划 ‘Chinese volunteer teacher program’, 奖学金 ‘scholarships’，交流合作 ‘exchange and cooperation’，教学资料 ‘teaching materials’，and 孔子学院 ‘Confucius Institute (CI)’. Out of them, the CI program is the key one. Since its inception in 2004, CI has rapidly expanded throughout the world with its global promotion of Chinese language and culture. Although “soft power” is not declared in its mission statement or funding principles, CI has been playing an important role in China’s soft power campaign, because through CIs “tens of thousands of Chinese teachers are sent abroad each year, and each of them is a business card of China,” stated Ms. Xu Lin, the Director-General of CI headquarters, at a press conference on March 14, 2014. ^[21]”

By August 2015, there have been 443 CIs and 648 Confucius Classrooms (CCs) in 126 countries/regions in the world. As the sole superpower in the world, the United States has the most CIs and CCs in North America and in the world as well. Since its first CI being established in the University of Maryland in November 2004, the U.S. now has a total of 97 CIs and 357 Confucius Classrooms (CCs), more than one fifth of the world total of CIs (21.90 %) and over half of the CCs (55.09 %). In the meantime, each of the remaining continents has a major power partner that has the most CIs and CCs: the UK in Europe (25 CIs and 92 CCs), Australia in Oceania (13 CIS and 35 CCs), South Korea in Asia (20 CIs and 4 CCs), and South Africa in Africa (5 CIs and 3 CCs).

As stated in its founding principles, ^[22] the CI program is committed to teaching and spreading the Chinese language and to strengthening educational and cultural exchange and cooperation between China and other countries. A survey of 24 U.S. CIs (conducted in fall 2009 and spring 2010) showed that these institutes primarily focused on Chinese language teaching, teacher education, as well as academic and cultural events (Li and Tucker 2013: 29). Among the 23 CIs that offered Chinese language and cultural courses, 17 targeted K-12 schools, 16 targeted universities, and 13 targeted the general public (p. 36). Besides language teaching, the CIs also provide a variety of cultural activities. At the researcher’s university, the CI opens to the general public with non-credit Chinese language classes (for business professionals or young children), Chinese tea workshops, celebrations for Chinese Moon Festivals, Spring Festivals; and also conducts activities on campus such as monthly China briefing series, non-credit adult evening Chinese classes, Dragon Dance, Taiqi, tennis, and Chinese tutorial sessions, among others. It has also sponsored nine CCs with funding, curricular consultation, and materials in neighboring public schools. Most of these CI-sponsored activities and classes are free, or at a very low cost, such as $40 per semester for an adult evening class. Nevertheless, the CI does not interact/coordinate with Chinese community heritage language schools, nor does it provide any financial or curricular support for these schools.

As discussed above, there is a close connection between China’s rise and its worldwide promotion of Chinese language learning. In the U.S., Chinese language is employed as an important source to increase China’s soft power by means of the hundreds of CIs and CCs. Through collaboration with K-12 public schools and universities, the CI program has reached millions of American people and students. However, unlike the early TCFL program that focused on underdeveloped/developing countries, the current TCFL through CIs is taking a “mainstream approach” 高端路线 gaoduan luxian that favors major developed powers over developing countries and chooses public schools and universities over the marginalized community heritage language schools.

4.1 National issues affecting Chinese language education in the U.S.

Despite the fact that there has been a strong social discourse of diversity and multilingualism in the U.S., few U.S. students receive long-term, articulated instruction in any foreign language (Brecht and Ingold 2002: 1). The ACTFL report (2010) shows that, in 2004–2005 and 2007–2008, more than 80 % of K-12 public school students do not study foreign languages” (p. 21). The national survey involving 5,000 U.S. schools also shows that there is a huge mismatch between what is happening in U.S. schools and what the country is demanding – an education system that prepares all children to be competent world citizens with foreign language proficiency (Pufahl and Rhodes 2011: 272). At the present time, while most of the countries around the world are moving toward foreign language instruction for all their students at a young age, the vast majority of American students are not given the opportunity to study a foreign language before middle schools and many not until they reach high school (p. 271). One example is that 59,860 students learn Chinese in the U.S., while 200 million Chinese children learn English in China (ACTFL report 2010: 21). The reason for such a mismatch is multifold. The major issues identified in the above reports are: lack of articulated sequence of instruction, shortage of qualified teachers, and insufficient funding. Pufahl and Rhodes’s survey report (2011) shows that 85 % of the 226 school respondents stated that “they had been negatively affected by the lack of qualified language teachers” (p. 269). And of the schools not planning to offer languages, 177 stated “lack of funding (e. g., “We do not have the financial resources)” (p. 262). The finding is confirmed by the report from the Committee for Economic Development that “there has been little funding directly aimed at promoting language education in America’s school” (in ACTFL report 2010: v).

On top of the issues mentioned above, there are the major adverse effects of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, Public Law 107–110, 2001), which inadvertently neglects students’ foreign language proficiency development. It has been widely agreed that, among the many U.S. ideologies, processes, or policies that are blamed for harming multilingual development, such as “de-ethnization and Americanization processes” (Fishman 1966), “the anti-bilingual education acts” (Krashen 1996), and “the one-nation one-language English-only U.S. ideology” (Hornberger 2003), NCLB is the most tangible agent that does the harm and reinforces the damage with regulations, benchmarks, and standards (Hornberger 2003; Shin 2006; Lo Bianco 2007; Wang 2007; to name just a few).

NCLB is a United States Act of Congress that is a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. In 2002, Congress reauthorized ESEA, and President George W. Bush signed the law, giving it a new name: No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which was reauthorized by the Obama Administration. Under the NCLB law, states are required to administer annual standardized tests to all students in reading and math in grades 3–8 and once in high school ^[23] to measure their progress with Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). If required improvements are not made, the schools face decreased funding and other punishments, such as school closure, restructuing, hiring private company to run the school, or asking the state office of education to run the school directly. The consequence is that one-third of all public schools with foreign languages programs are negatively affected, because “funds and time have been directed to reading and math” (Pufahl and Rhodes 2011: 271). And in some cases students were pulled out of foreign language and other non-tested content courses in order to provide more extensive reading and math support (p. 271). Through her observations as a school teacher and an East-Asian heritage language researcher, Shin (2006) reports that NCLB assigns little value to the bilingual abilities of language minority students and requires schools to move these students into mainstream English-only classrooms as quickly as possible (pp. 127–128). Under such tremendous pressure, school curriculum and instruction are driven by materials that are covered by the test subjects, while those non-tested subjects such as foreign languages are neglected, especially minority languages. She witnessed a Chinese course being cancelled in a high school in her school district despite the fact that there were students who were interested in taking this course, and after the course was abandoned, any discussion of restarting the program was prevented for several years (p. 139).

As shown in Section 3, Chinese education has been a small part of the American K-12 public school system. When a funding cut occurs, Chinese is usually the first on the chopping board despite the unprecedented opportunities brought by the NSLI initiatives, the fast-growing Chinese community heritage language schools, and China’s CI program. Out of them, the NSLI and heritage schools are “home” players in U.S. Chinese education, while the CI program is a “China-financed” partner, which has been marginalized and controversial (see more discussion in Section 4.3). The NSLI initiatives have gained enormous government funds to support some special projects involving a number of Chinese students and teachers, but they have no mechanism to, financially or administratively, defend Chinese education in the U.S. public school system.

On the other hand, Chinese community heritage schools enroll tens of thousands of Chinese students across the 50 states but cannot offer help to the public schools by enrolling their students who do not have the opportunity to take Chinese course(s). For one thing, students’ credits obtained in the heritage schools are in general not accepted by the public school system, and chances are getting slimmer in recent years. Liu (2010: 3) notes that 92 of 102 Chinese heritage language schools in southern California were eligible to apply for receipt of credit in public schools in 1996, but at the present time only 28 schools have been granted such credit transfer status. This is not that bad when compared with many other states where “credit transfer status” has not even been heard of. As shown above, these three essential “home” elements of the U.S. Chinese education are, in essence, self-contained in their own “bubbles” without much interaction or centralized/concerted efforts, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3:

The “bubble effect” on the U.S. Chinese language education.

Figure 3 shows that the American public school system operates under the mandate of NCLB, which places the standardized test subjects (i. e., math and English) as the top priority, with foreign language instruction being put on the back burner. As for funding allocation and program offering in the public schools, decisions are made at the local level, with the decision makers being school districts, local school boards, and community leaders (ACTFL report, 2010). Being a small less-commonly-taught language, Chinese language courses and programs do not have much opportunity to expand but often get the chance to be terminated when there is a funding cut. Backed by the government funds, NSLI initiatives support special projects such as FLAP, Teacher and Youth Exchanges, FLAGSHIP, STARTALK, where Chinese language is a focus. However, these initiatives are on the sidelines of the U.S. school system and are in general short-term, project-based, programmatic, and piecemeal in nature. Also on the sidelines are the Chinese heritage language schools, which are outside of the mainstream system and entirely supported and operated by parents and community volunteers. (See discussion below.)

4.2 Chinese community heritage as grass-roots efforts

As evidence provided in Section 3.2, the Chinese heritage language schools in the U.S. have accommodated a large number of Chinese students, more than the American public schools and higher education combined, but they are marginalized and face many challenges. Data in the (CAL) Heritage Language Programs Database (see Section 3.2) show that the Chinese community schools are not yet full-fledged educational institutions, having difficulties in funding, teaching materials, and teacher training. They are characterized by mini-operation (one to four hours per week), makeshift classrooms and facilities, out-of-date traditional teaching practices (instructors are mostly untrained volunteers), and lack of support from the U.S. government, the mainstream school system, or their home countries. Their main financial resources are student tuitions and community donations. The majority of these schools have to rent teaching space from schools, churches, or other institutions with “unaffordable rent.” One school states,

Major challenges facing the program include locating resources and materials for curriculum design and organizing training sessions for volunteer instructors. Training student instructors to be able to effectively teach and engage language learners has been challenging, as most have no formal background in education. We would like to set up brief training seminars for interested volunteer instructors and strategies for effective curriculum design for heritage language learners. Also, the program currently does not receive funding from the Student Activities Board, and is in the process of searching for funding sources or sponsorship.

Under such circumstances, the majority of schools are looking for “funding and other support for professional training and for grant application proposal writing” to ameliorate the challenges. Moreover, unlike the formal education system, community Chinese schools have no bench marks or national/state regulations to follow/guide, nor power to track or reinforce the academic standards. One hears many compliments about their contributions as well as many complaints about their teaching quality. From her four-year-long observations, Wang (2004) reported that, in the Chinese community classrooms, students were asked to copy and memorize Hanzi over and over again, with the instruction seldom going beyond sentences. She concluded with an alarming message that “there was no sense of progress or achievement and students basically stay at the same level, unable to move forward in their heritage language proficiency or literacy” (p. 368). The observation is supported by the (CAL) Heritage Language Programs Database, which show that students often lack interest in the Chinese study provided by the heritage language schools, and many of them drop out in the middle of the program.

4.3 Confucius Institutes in controversy and debate

In the U.S., China’s CI model of spreading the Chinese language and culture through the partnership of two academic institutions, one American and one Chinese, has been conceptually attractive to American universities, public schools, and the general public. By 2011, the U.S. CIs and CCs together offered 6,217 Chinese classes with total enrollments approaching160,000 students (China News Service 2012, April 13; in Li and Tucker 2013: 34). They also organized or sponsored 2,800 cultural events with 1.47 million participants. However, as the CI program grows, concerns grow in the American discourse. Some of them have been translated into negative policies and actions.

It started with a memorandum by the U.S. Department of State dated May 17, 2012, which states that “any academics at university-based institutes who are teaching at the elementary- and secondary-school levels are violating the terms of their visas and must leave at the end of this academic year, in June” (May 21^st, 2012, The Chronicle of Higher Education ^[24]). Moreover, after a "preliminary review," the State Department has determined that the institutes must obtain American accreditation in order to continue to accept foreign scholars and professors as teachers (Fischer 2012). The directive largely shocked and troubled Handan and its American partners. One week later, the State Department denied targeting Confucius Institutes, but the department held firm to another part of the policy guidance, by which Confucius Institutes cannot provide Chinese-language teachers to elementary and secondary schools (Fischer 2012). The consequence is that, starting in fall 2012, CI teachers are banned from teaching in American public schools even though there is a serious teacher shortage in some schools.

Following the policy of the U.S. State Department, there is a chain of actions that that are contributing to an apparent campaign to drive CIs out of American university campuses. In June 2014, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) ^[25] issued a statement, calling on North American universities to rethink their relationship with Confucius Institutes. “They function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom. Their academic activities are under the supervision of Hanban, a Chinese state agency,” the statement expressed. In other words, China’s CIs are viewed to threaten the academic freedom of American universities (Graham, 2014). The AAUP stance immediately sparked a national conversation entitled “the Debate Over Confucius Institutes,” featuring 24 renowned academics and administrators, with a focus on the costs and benefits of having a Confucius Institute on a university campus; the economic forces at play; and the role of China in university life (ChinaFile June 23, 2014 ^[26] and July 1, 2014 ^[27]). Critics say that the CIs are funded by the Chinese government and physically located on American university campuses, which empowers them to impose external manipulation, potential threats to their hosts’ academic freedom, interference or self-censorship. By doing so, U.S. universities allow Chinese governmental intrusion and buy into China’s schemes for global dominance. Supporters of CIs say that the accusation is a “nameless fear” without hard facts, made by people who do not have personal involvement with CIs or CCs. On the contrary, through CIs, American students learn Chinese language and culture, which enables them to access more information about China and other Chinese-speaking communities. For smaller colleges or public schools that do not have the budget for teaching the critically-needed Chinese language, a CI or CC is a good source to help serve their students’ needs.

However, in September 2014, the University of Chicago announced the closing of their 5-year-old Confucius Institutes “amid growing concerns about whether universities that host them are granting undue influence to the Chinese government in matters of curriculum and staffing” (Inside Higher ED, ^[28] September 26, 2014). This followed a petition, signed by more than 100 faculty members, which raised concerns that in hosting the Chinese government-funded center for research and language teaching, Chicago was ceding control over faculty hiring, and course content. Within one week, Pennsylvania State University became the second American institution to confirm that it would not be continuing its agreement to host a Confucius Institute (Inside Higher ED, ^[29] October 1, 2014). In confirming that the university would be ending its Confucius Institute agreement at the end of the year (December 31, 2014), the dean of Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts cited goals that were inconsistent with those of Hanban. To join in the chorus voices, the U.S. House designated a panel to investigate whether academic freedom is being threatened at universities building campuses in China and partnering with the Chinese on "Confucius institutes" in the U.S. (USA Today, ^[30] December 4^th, 2014).

To sum up, amid CI’s fast expansion that has reached millions of American people and students, criticisms and controversies grow on its role in the context of U.S. higher education. CI supporters note that, so far, no hard facts have been found that any CI in the U.S. has interfered with the academic freedom at universities where they are located. What drives the campaign seems to be some general distrust within universities and the public at large, or a “Trojan horse” effect (Paradise 2009: 647) that, by providing money for the establishment of a Confucius Institute, Hanban will have a great deal of power in influencing teaching and other language and cultural promotion activities, either directly or indirectly (p. 662).