The First Step Towards Opportunity: A Conversation about Bilingual Education with Former Governor Jack Markell

Jack Markell served as the governor of Delaware from 2009 to 2017, Throughout this period, education reform was an important part of his work. In fact, during Governor Markell’s first term, Delaware was chosen as one of the first two states to receive competitive federal funding from the “Race to the Top” program.

One of Governor Markell’s most noteworthy education initiatives was a language immersion program designed to help young students become fluent in Mandarin Chinese or Spanish. Here, we discuss how this initiative progressed from an idea to a successful program, and Governor Markell offers advice for policymakers interested in leading innovative education reforms.

 

CPR: Tell me about the bilingual education program that you helped launch in Delaware.

Markell: About six or seven years ago, we decided to launch a bilingual immersion education program in Delaware. I have always thought it’s so important that people are able to converse in more than one language, and I wanted to give a lot of Delaware students that opportunity.

We started in kindergarten. Every child has to start in kindergarten because every year [language] builds on what you’ve already learned. We have about 5,000 kids, with maybe two-thirds doing Spanish and one-third doing Chinese. They spend half of every school day learning in their target language. It’s not that they just take a Spanish class or a Chinese class; they learn science, social studies, and math in that target language.

 

CPR: Why did you decide to pursue that program? What was the path from idea to implementation?

Markell: I am a big believer that the global economy is for real; it’s not just rhetorical. If we want our kids to have as many opportunities as they possibly can when it’s time to enter the workforce, they can have a big leg up if they can do business in and be conversant in another language. We had a specific situation: We had an employer in Delaware that had an office in Delaware and another office in Belgium. They were in the business of providing phone support to clients all over the world. When it was time for them to expand, we wanted them to expand in Delaware, but they expanded in Belgium because the people of Belgium speak more languages than the people in Delaware. I thought, “That’s not the way I want it to be in the future.” Obviously, it’s going to take years and years and years for this to pay off, but that’s all the more reason to start today.

I also went to Utah, which probably had the best-known program for immersion education. I went there when they hosted the National Governors Association meeting, and they also invited a number of Chinese governors. We all watched these little kindergarteners sing a song in flawless Chinese. You could tell the Chinese governors were thinking, “Wow, if we’re going to do something in the United States, we might as well do it in Utah because they’ve taken the time to make sure the next generation can speak our language.” So I thought it was important that we do something similar, or hopefully better.

So that was the genesis of the idea, and then I talked to the people that specialize in world language education at our Department of Education. They were, of course, very excited about it, and they looked at best practices and they chose a particular model. They had to go recruit teachers, originally mainly from Spain and from China. And then they had to get support within the schools. We only did this in schools where the principals were really supportive, and we had to educate the rest of the teachers. We had to find teachers who would team with the language instructor. So it’s involved, but it’s gone really, really well.

 

CPR: I know this is a program with long-term goals, but how has the program gone so far? Can you point to markers of success? What will you look for in the future?

Markell: One marker of success is that more and more schools have adopted it because they’ve heard demand from their parents. So that is really important and exciting that the population of kids pursuing this has increased. The kids are making the kind of progress that we had hoped they would make in terms of proficiency improvements over the years, which is not a surprise, but still it’s good to see. So, across those kinds of metrics, we can see it’s doing what we hoped it would do.

I’m anxious to see how it does in the middle school. It’s one thing to do it in elementary, but it’s another thing to see it in middle school. I’m eager to see how many of the students, when they get to ninth grade, decide to take the AP tests in those languages and how they do on those tests. And of course I’m interested to see whether these students do in fact pursue more opportunities to work in those languages or with businesses that do business in those languages. And ultimately, I’d like to see the economic development aspect of this: both kids being able to have more opportunities for themselves, and more businesses deciding to locate in Delaware because there’s this much bigger population of bilingual speakers.

 

CPR: What kind of feedback have you gotten from constituents? Did you get any pushback at the beginning? 

Markell: Yes, I got pushback at the beginning from some legislators who thought it was a waste of money, from citizens who said things like, “Kids can’t even speak English, why are you having them learn another language?” People thought it was a waste of time. They couldn’t see relevance for a child growing up in Delaware to be able to be fluent in Spanish or Chinese. And I just had a very different vision for what our state should be and could be.

I had this one grandparent, a guy I had known for a long time, and he said, “Governor, I like you, but I think this is a waste of time.” Then he came to see me a year later and he said, “I gotta apologize, because my grandson is enrolled in this program, and it’s the best thing since sliced bread!” And this is a guy who had real deep ties to Delaware. He didn’t have a lot of international exposure, but I think he could see a linkage between what his five-year-old grandkid was learning and what he might be able to do in the future as a result of this.

 

CPR: Many education reforms tend to come and go with new leadership. How did you ensure that this initiative would last beyond your term?

Markell: The most important thing I did was get it started early. I had a concern about that very issue, and I thought the single most important thing we could do was to develop a cadre of thousands of parents who would be very upset if somebody tried to take it away.

 

CPR: What advice would you give to policymakers or future policymakers in other communities that are interested in starting a similar program – either a bilingual program or another innovative education program?

Markell: Have a strong rationale, and have as much evidence at your fingertips that you can. It did help, for example, that there is some research out there that shows that students that do this don’t lose anything in terms of their other subjects. If you can argue that there’s no downside, it helps to have that argument. I would definitely do some research about what the evidence shows; I would do research on what best practices look like; I would talk to people in other states who had tried to do something similar.

If it’s truly, truly brand new, then I might say, “Why don’t we try it in a school and see how it goes before we expand it elsewhere?” That is essentially what we did here; we started it in a couple schools where we had a particularly supportive principal and superintendent. The only way it was able to grow is when other schools signed up. We weren’t forcing anyone to do this. We just thought it was so compelling that schools would choose to do it. So, if you’re going to do something like that, it is important that it be a success out of the gate. Otherwise, it’s just not going to develop the momentum it needs. It helps to have a very supportive principal and superintendent. We sent them to Utah so that they could see firsthand what this was like. That got them very excited. And we got to the point where other states are now sending their kids to Delaware.

CPR: Is there anything else you’d like to share about your experience?

Markell: The best thing about being governor is that you get to meet people whose lives are better because of something that you’ve done. So when I meet the parents now — including, frankly, people who didn’t particularly like me and their agenda wasn’t really my agenda on most of the stuff I did — when they say, “I don’t really like you, but thank you for making this available to my kids,” that’s sort of fun. I just know what those kids are going to be able to do as a result. By that point, they will have forgotten about me. They won’t know who I was, but that’s not what it’s about. They’ll know there was somebody at some point who said Delaware should be a leader in this, and their kids will have a better future because of it. And that’s what it’s all about.

Featured photo: cc/(EikoTsuttiy, photo ID:856407290, from iStock by Getty Images)