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THE voices of education reform are once again calling for major changes in the United States educational system. For more than a decade, prominent leaders in education, government, and business, as well as parents and educators, have known that the educational system needs substantive change. Beginning with the publication in 1983 of the report A Nation at Risk commissioned by the then Secretary of Education Terrel Bell, and continuing today with countless governmental committees and local and statewide reform efforts, educators have been reeling from the numerous changes that appear to be under way. The context for this education-reform effort is a nation where children are growing up in increasing poverty and violence and schools are burdened with complex societal issues. The country is facing substantial changes in the economy and in the type of jobs available. Many ideas and plans have been put forth to make the educational system more responsive to the perceived changes in society, to the future needs of our nation, and to our nation's changing relation to the world.
There are many parallels between the present education-reform movement and reform efforts in American industry over the last fifteen years. Because the present movement has been spurred by the perceived lack of American competitiveness abroad as well as by comparisons, of the American workforce with Western European and Japanese workforces, the impetus and some of the models for change have come from a theory that has been developed and applied in the business community. In fact, when one carefully examines the components of education reform, the similarity to the shift in business from the so-called factory model to the learning-organization model becomes apparent.
The vast bureaucratic systems of education are often compared to the factories of the past. In the factory model of business, the vision for the company, if one existed, usually belonged solely to the head of the company. A small group of people made all the decisions, and the workers implemented them without any opportunity for dialogue and discussion. The bureaucracy contained many managers and layers of administration. Workers tended to have specialized jobs and no broad understanding of how the entire product was developed.
Today, some segments of business and industry have been transformed by theories of organizational management promulgated in the United States at the end of World War II and adopted by Japan and other postindustrial nations. Commonly called Total Quality Management, these theories have transformed the factory model into a learning-organizational model. Several elements of these new models can be observed in many of the most successful companies in the nation. First, it is generally accepted by leaders in the business community that change comes about when they create a vision of what the industry or the system should be. Second, the vision is developed and linked to policies. Third, those policies, after being debated and modified, are implemented by an informed and prepared group of stakeholders. Fourth, as a result of the policies and practices implemented, a product is developed. The product is then tested and evaluated through a process that includes development, production, marketing, and sales (McKernan).
In contemporary business philosophy, boundaries between managers and workers are blurred. The system is open, and communication flows in a circular pattern or from the bottom up instead of always from the top down. Decision making occurs at a level close to product development. Visions, goals, and objectives are conceived with comments and suggestions from the workforce. In fact, visions are often created by the workforce. The product is monitored carefully, assessed, and modified to meet everchanging economic demands.
If one examines the national agenda for education reform and the concomitant change agendas in states and local school districts, one sees that the process for change is very similar to the process in business and industry. The call to arms for educational improvement has come from politicians, business leaders, the Education Commission of the States, the chief state school officers, legislators, school board members, administrators, teachers, and parents. Everyone seems to want to forge a new vision for the American educational system. Educators believe standards that can be implemented in schools will be derived from this new vision, whether it be national, statewide, or local in scope. Supposedly parents and teachers, working together, can implement the necessary changes at the local level. At the same time, educators theorize that when local, state, and national standards are in place, the schools, operating independently from the vast bureaucracies of the past, will be able to meet their goals in a number of innovative ways.
Innovation is another element of the education-reform effort. In the United States, innovation is seen as the key to economic success now and in the next century. Some businesses expend tremendous resources in the search for innovation. Business leaders often look to successful international competitors for innovative management theories and practices. Business leaders have also called for the educational system in the United States to build teamwork and critical thinking practices into the delivery of the curriculum to prepare students to join the workforce of the future. Educators postulate that if teachers, administrators, and parents work together to build innovative schools, these schools will foster teamwork and creativity.
Supposedly, once schools have empowered teachers and parents to make decisions about the curricula, a series of assessments will provide checks and balances. Perhaps just as products are judged in the arena of international competition, so too will students and schools be judged by state, national, and international assessments and comparisons.
Although many voices are calling for reform in education, they do not all make the harmonious music! In fact, many of the reform efforts seem contradictory. For example, the calls for innovative “break-the-mold schools” are being made at the same time that national standards and assessments are being promulgated. In addition, the present efforts at reform are affected by political and educational realities. Schools and school systems are complex institutions involved in complex societal transformations. The educational system certainly cannot change quickly or without the resources to support teachers and administrators and to relieve them of the weight of the societal change occurring in nearly every school in the nation. Change takes time. It cannot take place without enormous suspicion and resistance from teachers and administrators toward change agents, such as school-board members, school principals, and superintendents, who enter and leave the system every two to four years. Also, teachers become demoralized when they make tremendous efforts to be creative and successful with students only to see their innovative practices, programs, and schools eliminated in budget cuts by new administrators or school-board members.
When Europeans or Canadians examine the educational-change process supposedly going on at every level of society in the United States, they are amazed that Americans have chosen this method. In countries with national educational policies and national curricula, both the establishment of vision and assessment are done by a central authority. Educators in other nations find it almost inconceivable that a nation would attempt to have this change process go on in every institution at every level, but this is precisely what is happening in the United States. So strong is the concept of local autonomy that the federal effort at establishing a vision to be implemented in schools nationwide has been severely attacked by local and state legislators, policy makers, and parents. The current national efforts will result in strictly voluntary educational standards that may or may not affect local school districts. Although this result seems inconceivable to those outside our country, for those who work in United States education it may actually be a healthy and enduring way to ensure true reform.
In 1983, language educators were as shocked as other educators to see the dismal and depressing findings of the National Commission on Excellence appointed by Bell. Although language teachers had known for years that the language capabilities of American youth lagged far behind those of their counterparts in almost every other nation, they were stunned to find out that our youth lacked essential knowledge in many other disciplines as well. As a result of A Nation At Risk , some of the first steps of education reform included foreign language initiatives (Bell and Crosby 592). States and local districts were prompted to examine their curricula, practices, and assessments. Foreign language requirements were enacted at some local and state levels, and programs were widely expanded in some states. Inspired by A Nation at Risk and by the calls for more and better foreign language education from political champions such as Senators Paul Simon, Christopher Dodd, and David Boren and former Representative Leon Panetta, some beneficial legislation was enacted. The report drew attention to the need for citizens of the United States to be cognizant of their neighbors abroad as well as to be able to converse with them. Many of the promising initial reform efforts are still under way, but some have not been implemented because of a lack of resources.
A second wave of education reform came as a result of initiatives begun under President Bush. In 1989, the National Governor's Association met with President Bush in Charlottesville, Virginia, to begin to establish a new vision for American schools. The meeting resulted in national educational goals that eventually formed the basis of the recently enacted Goals 2000: Educate America Act, President Clinton's education initiative.
As most language teachers recall, the original form of the national education goals drafted in 1989 did not include foreign language as a core subject. Shortly after the release of the report, the debate about which subjects would be included in the core began. Leaders in our profession and teachers across the nation knew that if foreign language education was omitted from the national vision for education, the goal of enabling Americans to communicate in languages other than English would never be realized.
Thanks to the efforts of many, foreign language has been added under goal three in the Goals 2000 legislation. If the first element of the reform effort is the establishment of a national vision, then we have taken that first step.
A second element of systemic reform lies in the development of standards, as well as policies and practices that derive from the standard-setting process. In business, standards are used as a guarantee against a shoddy product. The concept of standards in education appeals to parents and educators who want to ensure that after twelve years in school students will have acquired the knowledge to be productive citizens, as well as the skills that will enable them to find employment in the next century.
The impetus for national standards came also at the 1989 conference in Charlottesville. President Clinton has continued implementing the Goals 2000 philosophy, and the Congress has recently enacted legislation that will establish standards in the core disciplines. The standards describe what a student should know and be able to do in grades 4, 8 and 12. They are high, world-class standards, not minimal competencies. States and local districts may use them as models, but they are not required to do so. Some funding will be available through the Goals 2000 legislation and the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to encourage states and local districts to develop their own standards.
Work on foreign language standards has begun with a grant from the United States Department of Education to a consortium of professional language organizations that includes the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF), the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG), and the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP). These professional language organizations created a board of directors and charged it with overseeing the drafting of the proposal to establish national standards and with planning for the potential funding of teacher-education standards.
In June 1993 a writing team was appointed. For one year, the team, in collaboration with more than one hundred reviewers and a national advisory council, worked at developing a vision statement and draft standards. After establishing nine standards in the draft document, the writing team generated benchmarks of achievement for students in grades 4, 8, and 12 and offered learning scenarios and classroom vignettes as examples of how the standards might be implemented in the K-12 sequence.
Each of the nine draft standards has a knowledge component and a performance component. In the performance component teachers will see the relation of the draft standards to the result of a decade of work already completed in performance assessment in foreign language education, namely, the ACTFL-Interagency Language Roundtable proficiency guidelines. The question of assessing and improving student performance is left to local districts or states to determine.
In July 1994 ACTFL, in collaboration with the language-specific groups (AATF, AATG, and AATSP), held a conference in Baltimore, Maryland, to review the initial development of the standards. Representatives of the states and other local and regional articulation projects attended. The group members agreed that the writing task force and the national standards were headed in the right direction. The participants seemed excited about the broad view of foreign language learning and the emphasis on the longer sequence of language learning.
During the 1994–95 school year, interested school districts are being encouraged to use the draft document as a set of guiding principles for some of their work. Official pilot districts will be selected to field-test the standards. Additions and modifications based on the pilot testing will be made to the draft document. Learning scenarios will be pulled from the pilot-testing sites for use in the final document.
While the draft of the national standards is being reviewed, many fine local, state, and regional projects that are under way in almost every corner of the nation will continue to develop. Preliminary findings from a survey distributed to state foreign language supervisors by the Joint National Committee for Languages and from anecdotal information provided at the ACTFL conference in Baltimore in July 1994, indicate that standard setting is taking place in almost every state to varying degrees (LaBouve). Most states have developed vision statements, some of which have been influenced by governors and commissioners of education.
Many states are revising standards and statewide curricula for specific academic disciplines. Foreign language is considered a part of the core curriculum in some states but not in others. Under the Goals 2000 legislation, in the 1994–95 school year states are encouraged to apply for funding for the development of state standards, and in the 1995–96 school year an increasing amount of funding will go to local education agencies to develop standards in collaboration with states or with educational institutions.
A third aspect of systemic reform involves the implementation of new policies and standards, as well as the encouragement of innovative ways of meeting new standards. Perhaps one of the most obvious effects of systemic reform in business and industry has been in so-called restructuring. Restructuring means basically the same thing in business and industry as in schools. Driven partly by contemporary theories of business management and partly by the desire for larger profits, companies have been downsizing and learning to “do more with less.” The desire for innovation has often been used as an excuse for restructuring, but for educators in public schools in grades K-12 the reality belies the rhetoric. Most notable in foreign language education has been the elimination of positions for foreign language supervisors or specialists in local and state agencies. In some state agencies, positions have not been totally eliminated, but foreign language specialists have been expected to take on many new tasks.
K-12 schools have moved away from employing content-area specialists and toward empowering building administrators (e.g., principals and vice principals) to work with teachers in collaborative decision making. Unfortunately, in foreign language education, the elimination of the language specialist has hurt language programs. It is hard to imagine how new, voluntary national standards or state and local standards will be implemented in schools without knowledgeable language planners in place.
Although empowering teachers and having them collaborate is appealing, in reality teachers who have not had access to other professional development because of severely constrained budgets often find it difficult to work with an education generalist. When a building administrator or district supervisor who has expertise in something other than foreign language tries to guide the process, that person's help may be based on an antiquated notion of what should be going on in foreign language classrooms. Perhaps voluntary national standards will be able to guide even the generalist in districts where it is unlikely that a language specialist will be hired at the level of middle management.
In business, when a reform effort shifts decision making to the people closest to the product, the need for centralized management is lessened and costs are reduced. It is easy to see how this approach to reform has led educators to the concept of site-based management, a term that is widely used in business as corporations cycle between centralized and decentralized control. Decentralization of control in education is thought to contribute to innovation.
Many of the efforts at education reform have centered on terminology such as break-the-mold schools or break-the-mold philosophies . Breaking the mold in education generally means starting with local decision making. It involves establishing camaraderie and a sense of teamwork among students, teachers, building administrators, and parents. In many states, the establishment of charter schools is encouraging educators to be innovative. Charter schools free teachers from centralized decision making. Although a local board of education may continue to oversee a charter or may grant the charter, the idea driving charter schools is that the faculties and administrations of these innovative schools will not be subject to the same rules and regulations as their counterparts in other local schools are.
How foreign language programs will fare in the move to site-based management is a burning question. Anecdotal evidence seems to corroborate one of the worst fears of language educators, particularly at the elementary school level; languages are subject to the whim of a site-based administrator or of a team that usually includes parents. These individuals, lacking the experience of having studied a foreign language in the elementary school, knowledge of how languages are taught today, or an understanding of the importance of articulation, make uninformed decisions. They sometimes want to implement programs quickly, and when their expectations are not fulfilled, programs are eliminated. When budget difficulties create a need to cut back, foreign language programs are often the first to be scrutinized. In contrast, foreign languages seem to fare well under site-based management when the principal or group of parents has had experience with foreign language, particularly if the principal comes from that field and knows something about gaining access to information about program implementation, staffing, and evaluation.
The move to side-based management presents other difficulties for language educators. Frequently there is no coordination among elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. Even if an elementary school is quite innovative, its students might study a language for a few months or even years and then go on to a school where foreign languages are not even offered.
Some school systems have implemented language programs at the elementary level and have no plan for middle school programs. In others, students might develop a sequential knowledge of one language in an elementary school program, only to find when they enter sixth or seventh grade that they will have six weeks of one language and six weeks of another in an exploratory program.
Many people advocate site-based management in part because they feel that, with strong national standards, schools will have direction for their curricula and will not need constant oversight by a systemwide specialist. In theory, this process could work well; in fact, however, states and local school districts do not have to follow the national standards in any curriculum area. Moreover, in and of themselves, standards do not provide the professional development teachers need if they are to expand their understanding of research and its implications for the language field. Foreign language teachers and administrators working at the local and state levels understand that educating managers, teachers, and parents who are not oriented toward the issues in foreign language study can be overwhelming and time-consuming.
In the 1960s, foreign language programs in the United States were directly affected by the lack of articulation of programs and by the inexperience of new teachers. Many of the high school teachers recruited to fill elementary and middle school classrooms lacked a thorough understanding of the developmental and psychological differences between early learners, adolescents, and high school students. Colleges did not change their teacher-preparation programs to reflect the training needed for the elementary school component. Elementary school programs were evaluated by language specialists from high schools and universities, who, not understanding the damaging effects of a discontinuous program of study, declared these programs not worthy of funding and a waste of time for students. Certainly, if national and state standards are not mandatory and if no systemic, consistently validated assessments are conducted, the profession will risk repeating this experience. In the United States today, there is a very real danger in having curricula that are not well planned and well articulated. Seen from this perspective, site-based management is potentially the greatest obstacle to coherent reform in foreign language education.
That the language profession is organized vertically is both a curse and a blessing. Language teachers tend to associate with other language teachers. They attend language conferences and subscribe to language journals. Yet one major conclusion emerging from the discussions of the national and state standards project is that language teachers need to take a look at the context of their discipline.
An article published by ACTFL in 1979 suggested that if teachers do not pay attention to broader pedagogical concerns, “language programs and faculty will be perennially buffeted by the winds of historical accident, having little effect on their own direction or that of the school and the community” (Zais 52). This insight is as true in 1995 as it was in 1979. Because foreign language educators want their programs expanded into much longer sequences and because education reform is now in place, it is absolutely imperative that language teachers be team players as well as team members. The greatest innovation of this movement must be informing the broad educational public about the value and process of learning another language.
In addition, language educators must set aside their past experience of working with only one type of learner and understand that to be part of the reform movement, they have to embrace all learners. Work on learner strategies and higher-order thinking skills has certainly informed the other disciplines in the core. Language teachers have to turn to researchers in learning-strategy theory and colleagues in other disciplines, especially special education, English for speakers of other languages, and bilingual education, to understand how to make foreign language available to all learners.
In the past, language teachers saw their discipline as having a set content: the language system and the vocabulary. In the last decade, language educators have taken a much broader view of language teaching and have a general understanding that if students are going to be able to communicate in a language they will need much more experience with the language than that which comes from merely manipulating the language system and learning customary vocabulary. The success of foreign language immersion-education programs in Canada has shown that students have greater success in acquiring a second language when the material they learn is tied to the teaching of other concepts (Genesee).
The project National Standards in Foreign Language Education has taken a broad view of language learning. While the language system, learning strategies, communication strategies, and technology can all be used to aid second language acquisition, the heart of the process is the desire to have students communicate with other people to find out new information. When viewed from this perspective, the content of foreign language can be rich and cross-disciplinary instead of simply a corpus of grammatical and lexical items. Working in an interdisciplinary context, the language teacher can be an integral part of any learning team at the elementary, middle, or high school.
In the elementary school the language teacher can use elements of mathematics, science, and social studies to excite children about communicating in another language. Technology can help students see the purpose of communicating with other children. Even students in the most rural and isolated areas, through electronic mail and other learning networks, can make friends all over the world and get to know individuals in their own neighborhoods as well.
Students in the elementary school can be enriched through the same world literature being presented in the elementary classroom in English. By being exposed to the tapestry of literature through the target language, they can acquire new insights into their own culture and other cultures. The language teacher in the elementary school can introduce concepts that the regular classroom teacher might not be prepared to address.
In the middle school, the language teacher must become an integral part of the core team, instead of being relegated to the fringes of the educational process as often happens today. National and state standards should help school administrators begin to see the cross-disciplinary nature of the language learning process. As high schools in the United States become more interdisciplinary and as some are organized by teams, language teaching and learning will have a central role to play.
Presently, ACTFL is seeking funding to write standards for teacher education in collaboration with other organizations. This initiative cannot happen quickly enough. New members of the profession need to have the training that reflects what teachers need to know today.
In addition to the preservice training so needed for elementary, middle, and high school teachers, new training mechanisms will have to be developed for in-service training for teachers already in the field. Through the Goals 2000 Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, language educators are hoping to see greater financial resources for in-service educational and professional development for teachers. Foreign language teachers have benefited from a number of initiatives funded by public and private sources, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships for Foreign Study Abroad. Certainly teachers who have had immersion experiences will be far better equipped to implement some aspects of the language standards. Other teachers will need help in applying their pedagogical philosophies to the task of helping students develop communicative and cross-cultural competence.
Foreign language educators need to teach students and parents about new goals and approaches in language education. Unfortunately, many students still assume that learning a foreign language means meeting the college entrance requirement. Some high school programs and curricula are organized primarily for the very small percentage of students who reach the upper levels in most language courses and take either the SAT Achievement Test or the Advanced Placement Test. Although these tests are under revision, and the College Board, as a result of efforts at education reform, is looking at the implementation of a new project, Pacesetter Spanish, many college students and parents still associate language learning with the acquisition of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Even in districts where major initiatives provide a long sequence of language or tie language to the broader content of the curriculum, students and parents clamor for a return to textbooks, fill-in-the-blank exercises, and a corpus of material that can be easily mastered in a year or two. Until the colleges and universities engage in a serious reform effort in foreign language and undertake to set their own standards, it will be difficult to convince some students and parents of the merit of studying a language in the way indicated by the new state and national foreign language standards. Colleges and universities have to be equal partners in reforming the K-12 sequence; otherwise the failures of the past will be repeated.
One of the other goals added to the original vision of Goals 2000 is the involvement of parents. Parents should continue and will continue to play a critical role in the education reform movement. Because of the sophistication of many parents today, their understanding of restructuring in business and industry, and their easy access to multiple sources of information, families are demanding that students have a much broader educational experience at a greater depth. Elementary school parents are especially active in promoting education reform. When given the opportunity to participate in the process, parents are interested in orienting the curriculum to give their children the necessary tools to be competitive in the next decade.
Many of the attempts to expand the language sequence in the United States to the earlier grade levels have come from parent lobbying groups. Although immersion programs are not growing by leaps and bounds, they have steadily increased over the last ten years thanks to the efforts of parents. The same is true of elementary language programs generally, with the greatest gain coming in the private schools. But while more and more parents now understand the value of language study for their children's lives and careers, they also generally lack the understanding to help plan language programs and curricula. Unless they have lived or studied abroad, most of them have not studied a foreign language in elementary school.
While some parents demand higher quality in teaching and in the content of the curriculum, others are becoming more disenfranchised from the system. Tragically, because of poverty or substance abuse, some families break up, and the children no longer have parent advocates. Between the two extremes are parents who are interested in education but may not know how to approach the school or become involved in it. Language educators are responsible for informing all parents of their children's progress and of the possible benefit of a long sequence of foreign language study. Parents and language teachers can become the greatest allies in the implementation of national standards.
The foreign language discipline has come late to the process of forming business partnerships. Probably because American business is ambivalent about the need for language learning, language teachers have had a difficult time forming such partnerships. There is some indication that the corporate philosophy about business partnerships with language education might be taking a turn for the better. As international business comes to understand the importance of cross-cultural awareness and the absolute need to tie foreign language to cultural competence, it is looking to the schools to produce better and more enlightened students.
Through business partnerships in the elementary and secondary schools, language teachers can educate businesspeople about the value of language learning. Students can visit businesses that have active global investments and see the value of language and the need for high linguistic competence. Enlisting the help of business and industry in school partnerships not only furthers the concept of a competent American workforce but also helps at the local level when language teachers and supervisors need support from the business community to keep pressure on school boards to maintain and increase budgets.
Once standards and policies related to standards are implemented in the business arena, assessment and evaluation of the product and the process become integral to the change process. American business can assess its success by the quality of the product marketed at home and abroad. Naturally it is more difficult to assess students than it is to assess a product. Nevertheless, foreign language has a unique opportunity in the assessment phase of the reform effort. Since the language profession is leading some of the other disciplines in performance assessment, because of a decade of work on oral proficiency testing through ACTFL and the Educational Testing Service, language teachers understand the value of testing. Through our focus on testing in oral proficiency and in other skill areas, language teachers have gained an appreciation for the type, quality, and quantity of material that a student has to be exposed to before language skills can improve. Various portfolio-assessment initiatives in foreign language are also informing the profession as to what kind of samples can be used to evaluate students throughout a long sequence of language learning.
A final element of education reform ought to be the recruitment of outstanding citizens to the field of teaching if any serious effort at educational reform in any academic discipline is to take place. Beginning in elementary school, students need to be shown the merits of a career in language teaching. Language teachers and foreign language professional organizations could perhaps use the process of building national standards to begin to build a cohesive plan for creating a new workforce in language teaching.
If reform is to take root in the language profession, we will need to draw from the ranks of the computer-literate and from the group of students whose home or heritage languages are among those taught in the nation's classrooms. Although in-service education is important to the phasing in of some of the national goals, these local, state, and national initiatives cannot be fully implemented until many more language teachers are recruited and until many of these recruits have had positive experiences in longer sequences and model programs.
Just as a new vision for education is being crafted at every level of society, the professional language organizations must put forth a new vision for foreign language education. National and state leaders in foreign language education will have to prepare teachers in the field for public-relations efforts and information campaigns that reach well beyond the present audiences. The attempt to establish national language standards is an important first step in the enormous effort that lies ahead if language is going to remain on the playing field with the other disciplines. If decisions about foreign language programs, such as hiring, program and staff evaluation, curriculum development, and professional development, are made at the local level with little input from a language specialist, then the professional language organizations are going to have to work far more closely with school-based administrators. As foreign language teaching moves farther and farther away from the grammar-translation approaches used in the 1940s and 1950s and the audiolingual approaches used in the 1960s and early 1970s, the chasm between building administrators such as principals and vice principals and the language classroom grows wider. It is important to recognize that most school administrators studied, at best, two years of a foreign language in high school. Most have no knowledge of what an elementary program could offer, no knowledge of language learning tied to adolescent interests and motivation, and no knowledge of the communicative and cross-cultural approaches being presented today. The concept of being able to deal with content material in the target language eludes even some foreign language teachers, not to mention the vast majority of school administrators and policy makes. If the language profession is to effect a monumental change in the way languages are delivered in the schools, it will have to provide training for administrators and school board members.
Unless this massive undertaking is coordinated and spearheaded by foreign language organizations, proprietary schools may rise up to fill the void, as in other countries where the delivery systems for the teaching of English or other foreign languages could not be mobilized fast enough. The reform effort in the United States may in fact spawn a need to teach languages in a fashion that the existing schools cannot accommodate. Certainly native speakers of languages other than English in the United States are already making use of religiously affiliated and community-affiliated proprietary language schools. The planned Edison Project will include the introduction of foreign language in the primary grades as well as the introduction of classical languages in the elementary schools. The greatest growth in foreign language education in United States elementary schools is coming in private schools.
Change is the norm and not the exception. The present reforms in education will affect language teachers at every level. Whether these reforms are opportunities for teachers or threats to the existence of the language profession depends on changing the attitudes of the present workforce and understanding the context in which language education takes place. For many language educators this means shifting the paradigm to a focus on the learner, a comprehension of what goes on outside our profession, a belief that all students can learn another language, and a commitment to the maintenance of heritage or home languages.
The author is Foreign Language Supervisor for the Glastonbury, Connecticut, Public Schools.
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LaBouve, Robert. Draft Survey of State Foreign Language Supervisors . Washington: Joint Natl. Committee for Langs., 1994.
Lieb, Barbara, comp. Achieving World Class Standards: The Challenge for Educating Teachers . Proc. of the Office of Educ. Research and Improvement. Study Group on Educating Teachers for World Class Standards. 22–24 Mar. 1992. Washington: US Dept. of Educ., 1992.
McKernan, John R., Jr. Introduction to Systemic Education Reform . Educ. Commission of the States, ERIC, 1992. ED 350 677.
Moffett, James. “On to the Past: Wrong Headed School Reform.” Phi Delta Kappan 75 (1994): 584–90.
Pitsch, Mark. “Alliance for Learning.” Education Week 13 Apr. 1994: 3–22.
Zais, Robert S. “Developing Foreign Language Curriculum in the Total School Setting: The Macro-Picture.” Building from Experience—Building for Success . Ed. June K. Phillips. ACTFL Foreign Language Education Series 10. Rpt. in New Cases for Foreign Language Study . Comp. Phillips. Middlebury: Northeast Conference, 1981. 47–52.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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