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Michael Bacon is the Chinese Flagship Director and Immersion Achievement Coordinator at Portland Public Schools.

The benefits of immersion are well documented.  Besides bilingualism and biliteracy, students tend to perform better academically than their peers in English only programs, develop higher cognitive skills, and acquire strong cross-cultural skills.  In their book “Dual Language Education for a Transformed World” (2012), Virginia Collier and Wayne Thomas share research that shows these benefits also occur for historically underserved subgroups such as African Americans and children of poverty.  Furthermore, research clearly demonstrates that immersion programs, unlike traditional ESL programs, close the achievement gap for Emerging Bilinguals (EB’s = English Language Learners) (Thomas & Collier 2009)

Portland Public Schools (PPS) is engaged in racial equity work requiring continuous examination of practices and perspectives to move towards equitable outcomes for students of color.  Based on research, data and this equity work, increasing access to immersion became a district priority, especially for our EB’s and students of color.  There are “wins” for our children:

Win for African Americans: Last year only 2% of the students enrolled in PPS immersion programs were black in contrast to 11% district wide.  However, Albina Head Start, located in North Portland in the heart of the African American community, began offering Mandarin lessons two years ago.  Albina families wanted more, but the only elementary school offering Mandarin was Woodstock located far away.  So PPS partnered with Albina Head Start and others to establish a new Mandarin immersion program at King School (K-8) providing much better access for students of color and poverty.

Win for Vietnamese:  After two years of collaborating with the Vietnamese community leaders, PPS established the first two-way Vietnamese immersion program in the State of Oregon this fall. With an estimated population of over 45,000 in the Portland area the Vietnamese community is a large linguistic and cultural asset, but whose children’s academic, cultural and linguistic needs are often ignored.  The two-way Vietnamese immersion program at Roseway Heights reverses that trend.

Win for Chinese:  The Woodstock Mandarin immersion program receives significant attention as a model program.  However, up until this fall the program primarily served English speaking children learning Chinese as a second language with no priority given to EB’s.  Applying an “equity lens” PPS worked with staff and parents to change the enrollment process to serve both Chinese and English speaking children.

Win for All: Improving equity increases bilingual educational opportunities while embracing the linguistic and cultural assets of all children.