Need for a national language Czar?

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the New Republic, Post date 10.19.05 | Issue date 10.24.05


THE CASE FOR A NATIONAL LANGUAGE CZAR WITH REAL POWER.
Tongue Tied
by Michael Erard

Last fall, the College Board asked 14,000 high schools in the United
States how many of them planned to offer Advanced Placement (AP) courses
in Chinese in the fall of 2006, in preparation for the first Chinese
language AP exam in 2007. The Board expected a few hundred to say yes, but
jaws hit the floor when 2,347 schools said they were interested in
Chinese. For those who believe that American children should learn more
languages, especially those of economic competitors like China, this is
good news. But there's one problem: We don't have enough qualified
teachers. The system would need an estimated 2,000 more officially
certified Chinese language teachers before all the interested schools
could offer AP Chinese. A 2004 report by the Chinese Language Association
of Secondary-Elementary Schools counted only 110 high school-level
teachers. ...

https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20051024&s=erard102405

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