Rebecca Weiner 2013-05-25T03:02:43-04:00 Rebecca Weiner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=rebecca-weiner Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Rebecca Weiner Good old fashioned elbow grease. Don't Kill Foreign-Language Funding tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.952918 2011-09-08T14:47:13-04:00 2011-11-08T05:12:02-05:00 Rebecca Weiner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-weiner/
The Foreign Language Assistance Program is the only source of federal funding for K-12 foreign language programs. Costing $26 million total, the program supports thousands of school districts nationwide, including many in economically disadvantaged inner city districts that serve the children most vulnerable to global economic disruptions. In New Haven, Connecticut, for instance, a FLAP grant is letting kids who might otherwise be condemned to frying burgers learn Chinese (which Bloomberg Rankings recently ranked as the world's most useful business language after English) and Arabic (which the U.S. State Department ranks as such a super-critical language for diplomats that they offer Arabic speakers extra "points" when scoring candidate career fitness). These direct career benefits to fluency in critical languages are in addition to the demonstrated benefits of any foreign language learning for strengthening academic performance across all academic fields.

Foreign language learning, especially in "critical languages," thus offers real economic security in our troubled times.

The stakes have never been higher. Businesses increasingly demand multilingual, multicultural talent. Responding to that demand, Europeans often graduate from college tri-lingual. Most Chinese graduate speaking Mandarin and English. Latin Americans often speak Spanish, English and, increasingly, Portuguese. Meantime the U.S. is the only industrialized nation where many -- if not most -- high schools and colleges still grant degrees with zero foreign language requirements. Even those with requirements often accept just a year or two of foreign language study, a minimal proficiency level that won't get graduates far in the global marketplace.

Business guru Oded Shenkar, in his book The Chinese Century, predicts that the ability to work across borders and cultures will increasingly be core not just to global mobility, but to middle class status altogether, while the monolingual, lower-skilled poor of all countries will increasingly resemble each other, whether they live in Boise or Bangladesh. This is our children's future. We must prepare them for it by increasing foreign language learning programs.

In addition to individual economic security, foreign language competency offers much-needed political and military security. The Defense Department and former President George W. Bush declared as much when originally authorizing the National Strategic Language Initiative (NLSI), of which FLAP is part, stating "the ability to engage foreign governments and peoples, especially in critical regions" is "an essential component of U.S. national security in the post-9/11 world.... Americans must be able to communicate in other languages, a challenge for which most citizens are totally unprepared."

The NLSI was funded under George W. Bush, not a noted internationalist, because he and Congress then understood that our national security is at risk when our diplomatic and defense communities lack foreign language skills. According to a recent article in National Review:
  • The FBI has a critical shortage of qualified translators, leaving 31% of captured foreign-language e-mails and electronic communication un-translated and 25% of captured audio un-translated.
  • The State Department has a serious shortage of personnel with key language skills, with some 30% of Foreign Service officers unable to meet the foreign languages proficiency requirements supposedly mandatory for the positions they hold.
  • Less than one-third of CIA's analysts and overseas spies were proficient in a foreign language.


FLAP funding for 2011 was less than 4/100,000ths (.00378%) of the $530 billion in base defense budget plus $157.8 billion in overseas contingency spending provided to the Pentagon in 2011. Many are up in arms that military spending might be slashed to just $472 billion in 2013. But even at that lower figure, keeping funding for FLAP, which the Pentagon itself has declared critical to our future defense, is less than a rounding error. As we approach the 10th anniversary of the terrors of September 11th, 2001, a national disaster we still have trouble explaining to our children, a disaster that occurred in part because our intelligence community lacked sufficient foreign language experts to keep up with the intercepts they had available, keeping FLAP should be a no-brainer.

Yet despite all we know about the importance of foreign language learning, support for foreign language learning has been hacked away again and again. The devil's-bargain Budget Control Act passed in August included mandated cuts in many areas. Marty Abbott, Director of Education for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, explains that "Already, higher education spending for foreign languages (Title VI) has been cut by $50 million, a 40 percent reduction from the previous year." For the K-12 years, so crucial for foreign language exposure and education, FLAP is all we have left.

How can we prepare our students for a global world without foreign language instruction? How can we make America great again while destroying the programs our children need to compete in today's global marketplace?

We must fight to keep foreign language in the budget as a critical component to our children's success. Take action, now! If you care about and appreciate the critical importance of foreign language learning in our schools, call and write your member of Congress TODAY and tell them NOT to cut FLAP.

Stacie Nevadomski Berdan and Rebecca Weiner are both authors, international business women and parents trying to raise global children. Stacie's next book, GO GLOBAL! Launching an International Career Here or Abroad, will be released this month and covers the critical issue of foreign language learning among other topics, including a chapter on working in China by Rebecca.

]]> Why the PISA Debates Are Misleading -- and Useful tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.793589 2010-12-13T14:02:29-05:00 2011-05-25T18:15:22-04:00 Rebecca Weiner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-weiner/ New York Times story on December 7 about students in Shanghai trouncing U.S. student scores on the global PISA exam has stirred quite a debate, as it was clearly intended to. Dillon quoted Reagen-era U.S. Department of Education official Chester Finn comparing the score gap to "Sputnik," the Russian satellite that launched the "space race" a generation ago. ABC News called the PISA results a "wake-up call." The Times online closed comments on Dillon's article after receiving 712 of them.

Much debate centers on China: why China leads PISA scores, China's focus on rote testing, China's challenges in promoting creativity, and critical thinking. China's "high test scores aren't everything," one Times online commenter writes plaintively. Other debaters question PISA test results. Dillon quotes Bush-era DOE researcher Mark Schneider demurring "there was no evidence of cheating" in Shanghai scores. A National Review blog derides "bogus" comparisons between Shanghai municipal scores and U.S. national scores (a point Dillon also raised); National Review comments rage against Chinese cheating and censorship. Even the excellent James Fallows, while reminding us to take PISA scores seriously, spends most of his blog on possible statistical flaws.

Methinks the bloggers doth protest too much. China is not the issue. Chinese statistics are not the issue. The statistical issues Dillon and Fallows discuss may explain why Shanghai significantly topped scores from ALL non-Chinese nations tested. They don't explain why the United States ranked 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading out of 34 countries surveyed. Or why students across Europe excel in two languages (three in Finland, which also tops the science ratings) while ours score in English below countries for which English is not a native language.

The truth, the real news, is that there is no news here. These results should be no surprise. The long slide in American student performance relative to global peers has been a constant drumbeat, paralleling the domestic failures of our schools shown in Waiting for 'Superman'. The DOE's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), tracking math and science scores since 1995, has long found us in 15th place globally or worse. A 2005 panel on "Creating a World-Class Education System in Ohio" concluded that given poor U.S. scores, "high ranking within the United States is no longer enough" to count as global excellence.

There is plenty of blame to go around for the perennially sad comparisons between United States' and global scores. The left tends to focus on poor teacher salaries and budgets that favor the military over education. The right tends to focus on poor parenting, teacher's unions, and an overgrowth of educational bureaucracy. Many also blame our students themselves. "PhD scientist," commenting on the Times online, fumed "Most of the people who work around me did not grow up in the U.S... There is a complete lack of interest [among U.S. students] in learning anything of economic value." Those criticisms may well ALL be right -- none of those factors are mutually exclusive.

The real question is how to get past the politics, and the blame games, and work together to better our educational results. While China is not the real issue, if a Sputnik-style push to do better based on being trounced by Shanghai helps spur a real answer, that's fine by me. Together with my frequent co-author Rebecca Weiner, I have long focused in my writing on the need for stronger global awareness, more foreign languages, and greater overall excellence in our educational systems. If the PISA test results give us the impetus we need to truly prioritize academic education -- in our families, communities, governments, and schools -- then all the hype will be more than worthwhile.

What do you think will help the United States improve its test scores and better prepare our students for global competition? ]]>