Why Oakland parents are flocking to Chinese immersion school

Hope? Many, many unusual education interventions have been attempted in the US public school system since the 1960s, and the vast majority end up having little lasting effect on test scores once they're scaled up (i.e., once the most motivated teachers and parents aren't disproportionately participating). So I doubt this program will magically improve test scores (and we're usually doing this in the worst schools in the first place, which means they have the least able or motivated teachers, students, and parents in the first place) once we scale up from the one charismatic founder.

There are other motivations for parents to opt for this program even if test scores ultimately can't be raised:

- If kids have to be in class for something anyway, they might as well be learning Chinese at the same time, which is at least a useful skill that's easier to learn in childhood.

- Chinese education is associated, rightly or wrongly, with more rigorous math instruction, which might well increase test scores even if the "underlying" math ability isn't increased.

- (Speculatively) teaching in Chinese might lessen children's exposure to "woke" ideology in the classroom. I can't find the article now, but I read an article a few weeks ago that argued that linguistic barriers form a major check on the spread of wokeness within countries, because wokeness achieves a lot of its power via equivocating between unobjectionable and "woke" definitions of words like "gender", "diversity", "racism", "tolerance", etc. For example, Germanic-speaking countries where the level of English knowledge is highest are the European countries most influenced by wokeness (outside of native English speaking countries), while for example the very idea of transgenderism seems ridiculous in Hungarian because the very word for "gender" in its non-grammatical sense is borrowed from English, making the equivocation mentioned above impossible. Chinese has its own similar political language around Communism, but China's soft cultural power in the West is quite weak, so no one's worried that their children in America will become fans of the CCP.