Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education

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  • Fewer than 2,000 Americans are studying in China today

    A fascinating article. Back in 2015, there were more than 20,000 Americans studying in China. Today it’s less than a tenth that. Whatever the future brings, the U.S. and China need to better understand each other, and you can’t get the level of understanding necessary by watching a few movies on Netflix. It takes making friends, which you need the language for. Kids in Mandarin immersion today are going to be important to decades to come.

    Fewer opportunities, less passion, no clue? How the US’ China expertise is fading

    Geopolitical friction and a lack of career paths are hollowing out the pipeline of US specialists who truly understand China.

    By Meredith Chen, South China Morning Post
    19 Jul 2026

    As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, it confronts a new world order dominated by its relationship with China. In this wide-ranging series, we examine the pressure points and possibilities in those ties, from hard tech to soft power. Here, Meredith Chen looks at how tensions and shrinking academic exchange may be eroding America’s deep, experience-based understanding of China.

    Long before China could be studied through satellite images, social media, big data or computer modelling, American scholars learned about the country the slow way.
    Many travelled to the country. Some went far beyond its major cities, reaching remote county towns and villages by train, bus and boat to conduct fieldwork.

    They spent months, even years, knocking on doors, lingering over tea, combing through archives, and interviewing cadres and ordinary members of the public to build a deep understanding of a country undergoing extraordinary transformation.

    This was the reform era. As China reopened and the two countries’ relationship normalised after prolonged Cold War estrangement, American scholars gained access to a society that had been closed to them for decades.


    Many of those who entered China in those years would go on to become the backbone of American expertise on the country, shaping scholarship, training future generations and influencing how Washington dealt with Beijing.

    As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, however, that intellectual tradition is under strain.

    Please read more here.

  • Utah education board wins immunity in Mandarin immersion curriculum dispute

    This is pretty in the weeds, but of interest to a lot of teachers and administrators.

    Utah education board wins immunity in curriculum dispute

    By George Basharis, J.D.

    A curriculum vendor’s copyright and business interference claims failed after a federal court determined that Utah’s education board is entitled to Eleventh Amendment immunity as an arm of the state.

    A longstanding curriculum provider for Utah’s Mandarin language immersion program cannot pursue copyright infringement and related business tort claims against the Utah State Board of Education because the board is shielded by Eleventh Amendment immunity, a federal court has concluded. The ruling stems from the board’s decision to stop purchasing the company’s online language-learning licenses and instead work with a competing vendor (Mandarin Matrix Ltd. v. Utah State Board Of Education, No. 2:25-cv-01067-DBB-CMR (D. Utah Jun. 18, 2026)).

    Background. The lawsuit was filed by Mandarin Matrix Limited, a Hong Kong company, and its U.S. affiliate, Mandarin Matrix Inc., which had supplied curriculum materials for Utah’s Chinese Dual Language Immersion program since 2014. According to the complaint, the companies provided printed educational materials and access to an online platform known as the Mandarin Matrix Online Classroom to schools participating in the statewide program.

    Please read more here.

  • Got kids in Mandarin immersion? These researchers would love to interview you

    Note that the referral for this research came through Dr. Shuhan Wang, who for many years ran the Mandarin immersion research group at the Asia Society. So they’re quite reputable.

    About the Research: We are a research team led by Professor Chun Chen-Cheng from the Graduate Institute of Teaching Chinese as a Second/Foreign Language at National Kaohsiung Normal University, Taiwan.

    We are conducting a cross-national research project titled “Family Language Policy: Chinese Identity and Family Language Policies in Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United States.”

    This study explores how families make decisions about language use, practices, and identity across different sociocultural contexts.

    Focus on USA

    The United States is an important context for Chinese immersion education. As Mandarin continues to develop in K–12 educational settings, Chinese immersion programs provide a valuable setting for exploring how families negotiate language use, identity, and educational choices.

    We invite U.S. families with children enrolled in Chinese immersion programs to participate in this study.

    How to Participate

    If you are interested, please complete the online questionnaire:

    https://forms.gle/5xWfsNs8pVLEc4MK9

    which takes about 1.5 ~3 minutes and includes a preview of the interview questions. After completion, we will send the interview questions and an informed consent form via email as well as arranging the formal interview.

    NKNU Research Assistants

    (Contact Person): Eunice / Ya-Ling, Chang / Yi-Ying Lai

    Email: eunice.cy@gmail.com / mostnknu@dhakka.nknu.edu.tw / tt-tkids@mail.nknu.edu.tw

    感謝您對本研究的支持與協助！

    THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND PARTICIPATION IN THIS STUDY.

  • A $52,000 private Mandarin immersion school opens as San Francisco Unified’s waitlists grow

    San Francisco Chronicle By Jill Tucker July 4, 2026

    In the race to attract more families to San Francisco’s public schools, district officials are in the process of opening a Mandarin immersion school next year, starting with just under 90 transitional kindergarten and kindergarten students.

    If the district manages to open just over a year from now, it will still have to play catch-up after a private school opens this fall, offering coveted seats for Mandarin bilingual instruction.

    The Hiba Academy, part of a global network of Chinese language international schools, will start with up to 35 students in preschool to first grade at its 68,000-square-foot home in the former Airbnb headquarters, with an expected 400 to 500 K-5 students and a separate school for middle and high school grades, officials said. 

    Please read more here.

  • Once again, a district sets out to destroy a Mandarin immersion program

    Chinese immersion program is renamed after parent pushback

    The parents are correct – immersion programs are at least 50% in the target language through fifth grade, generally shifting to around 30% in middle school and one (or in exceptional cases, two) classes per day in high school. Cambridge no longer has a true Mandarin immersion program, they have “Mandarin immersion lite.”

    Cambridge school district acknowledges reduction in Mandarin instruction time.

    by Tavishi ChattopadhyayMonday, June 22, 2026

    Since 2021, a Mandarin Chinese immersion program that has been a draw for Cambridge families has cut down on its Chinese instruction hours and changed its curriculum. Now, after months of debate between the school district and parents, the program is being renamed. 

    Parents of students at both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School and Putnam Avenue Upper School (PAUS) have been embroiled in conversations with school and district officials about changes to the immersion program’s curriculum and instruction hours. Parents say the program offers full immersion only from kindergarten to 2nd grade. After that, they say, the 50/50 split the program advertises becomes more like 33/67. 

    Please read more here.

  • Fort Collins, CO Mandarin immersion school getting new building

    AXIS International Academy is a K-5 charter school that offers 50/50 immersion programs in Mandarin, Spanish and French.

    An article about their new building (partly behind a paywall) is here.

    Info about the school is here. The school’s enrollment seems to be climbing (figures here.)

    Again, it baffles me that charter schools keep opening that offer immersion and do well while school districts keep trying to cut popular immersion programs.

    .

  • Big new report on Mandarin immersion programs just published

    Want to know what’s up with Mandarin immersion programs in the US? Looking for information on how to help your child’s school? Trying to convince your school district to open a new Mandarin immersion program? There’s a new report out for you.

    Published this month, it titled, “PreK – 12 Mandarin Immersion Programs in the United States: 2025 Survey Report” and written by Shuhan C. Wang, Ph.D. and Jiahang Li, Ph.D.

    It’s a the first big effort from Nexus Mandarin, a new non-profit dedicated to Mandarin language education in Pre-K through college. [Note: I’m on the board]

    The authors sent out a survey to Mandarin immersion programs and got 102 responses from 22 states plus Washington, D.C. One of the starting-off points they used for their initial list was the Mandarin Immersion school list here.

    Some of the interesting data [Note this is only from the 102 schools that responded, not all MI schools]

    • 68% of schools public, 15% charter, 16% private
    • 55% strand, 33% stand-alone, 12% strand in a multi-lingual school
    • 2011-15 was the Golden Age for Mandarin immersion year starts, 36% of the nation’s schools started during that time.
    • 81% of MI programs are in K – 6, 48% in middle school and 20% in high school. (I think that’s a little high for high, probably a result of who answered the survey.]
    • Chinese language arts and math are the classes most commonly taught in Mandarin.
    • 92% of schools use simplified characters, 6% use traditional and 2% use both.
    • Students in MI programs tend to have high academic achievement.

    Use Mandarin immersion as a way to sell your school

    For parents fighting to keep programs going or to get their school district to start a new one, there’s useful data.

    The authors say that “programs should brand MIPs as an innovative alternative to traditional educational programming.” It is a “value-added education with the same amount of funding and effort as for monolingual education.”

    Students in Mandarin immersion programs develop the knowledge, skills, grit, and a broader worldview. ”

    Not only that, but Mandarin immersion “is value-added education with the same amount of funding and effort as for monolingual education.”

    What is Nexus Mandarin?

    Nexus Mandarin is meant to fill some of the gap when the Asia Society moved away from focus on Chinese language learning in Kindergarten through high school in the United States. That included shutting down the Chinese Early Language and Immersion Network, which has done a lot of work on immersion programs in the U.S.

    The Asia Society did this in part because those programs were funded by the Chinese Ministry of Education and it wanted to get away from any government funding.

    Hopefully Nexus Mandarin can take on some of the important work the Asia Society was doing up until 2022.