Filipino Immersion Program 1
Running head: FILIPINO IMMERSION SCHOOL
Proposal for a Filipino immersion elementary program in Anchorage Alaska
Andrew Castro Pongco
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Introduction
Anchorage. It is the home of around 264,134 people (U.S Census Bureau, 2003). It is the city where we can read a newspaper outside on our porches at eleven o’clock at night, because we have the midnight sun, giving us twenty hour long days in the summer. It is the city where we can see the northern lights in the winter, covering the entire sky three hundred sixty degrees, disappearing, reappearing and changing color, while others who live outside Alaska can only read about it or see it through pictures in books. It is the city where we host the most important airport for international trade, an airport that traffics more cargo than any other airport in the world giving us stable jobs year round. It is the city where we can enjoy the fruit of the land once every year in the form of the Permanent Fund Dividend check, a check that comes from the profits of our oil companies. We can agree that we have a lot of resources. We have a lot of things to cherish in this city. We have a lot of things to be thankful for. However, there is one resource that is left untapped in our city. It is a resource that we would have never considered being a resource. It is a resource that we see, hear, and live with everyday but goes unnoticed. It is the gift from the Filipino community residing in Anchorage: their language. Although there are many dialects from the Philippines spoken in Anchorage, such as Ilokano, Kapamgangan, and Pangasinan, the majority of Filipinos speaks Filipino since it is the national language of the Philippines, a language that is heavily based on Tagalog but include linguistic elements from the different regional dialects of the Philippines as well as Spanish and English words.
There is a big and strong Filipino community in Anchorage. According to the US Census Bureau, for 2003, they projected an estimated Filipino population of 8,544 living in households, excluding Filipinos living in other living arrangements such as university dormitories, institutions, and group quarters. It is about 53% of the 16,070 Asians in Anchorage and 3% of the entire Anchorage population. However, I want to give you not only an idea of size of the population but also an idea of the cohesiveness of the community. There is a local public television program called FilAm Showtime which broadcasts news of events taken place within the Filipino community residing in Anchorage. Also, there is an exclusive basketball league with three divisions: adult, junior, and peewee. You can go to Rainbow Video in midtown, a video rental store that has a collection of over a thousand movie titles produced in the Philippines. You can go to the midtown Walmart, midtown McDonalds, the United States Postal Office branch near the airport, and the airport itself and you can see dozens if not hundreds of Filipino employees that communicate in Filipino, joke around with each other in Filipino, and talk about how they want to pass their language down to their children in Filipino. But for this paper, I want us to focus on the huge amount of Filipino students in the Anchorage School District.
As a Filipino child, I recall being pulled out of my home classes at Willow Crest Elementary school with my other Filipino friends and attending intensive ESL classes. As I progressed to Romig Junior High School, I remember meeting the other Filipinos who attended different elementary schools and the size of my group of friends expanded. Needless to say, this trend of expansion continued to West Anchorage High School where it seemed that there was an army of us roaming the school. Although it has been years since I entered the halls of my alma maters, I can imagine my experience is the same for other Filipinos in the school district. In 2004, the Anchorage School District reported that the second most spoken language of students is Filipino (Goldsmith et. al, 2005). So, we can assume that someone in the school district, whether if that person is a student, a teacher, a principal, a librarian, a nurse, or a superintendent, will be exposed to Filipino.
With the size of the Filipino population in mind as well the availability of the language in the school district, let us utilize our resources efficiently. Let us draw upon what we have stored but never use. I propose the implementation of a Filipino immersion program in an elementary school within Anchorage Alaska. Considering the population of Filipinos who obtained post secondary education from a university from the Philippines and are qualified to teach but take up unrelated-to-their-educational-background jobs at Walmart or McDonalds, and considering the increase of potential Filipino language teachers from establishments like the Filipino undergraduate program at University of Hawaii at Manoa, there is a future for teaching Filipino-as-a-second language. Before I propose the implementation of a Filipino immersion program in an elementary school of the Anchorage School District, we need to understand two things. First, in order to understand how a Filipino immersion elementary school can fit in the framework of the Anchorage School District, we need a brief overview of the Bilingual/ Multicultural Education Program and how its roots began in order to comply with the federal requirements under Title VI of the Civil Rights of 1964 and the Alaska law statute, AS 14.30.410. After understanding the background of the program and its goal, we will see the noticeable problems between policy and practice. Second, I will examine how immersion programs address that problem but differ in effectiveness due to availability or lack of availability of language resources for students entering an immersion program in Anchorage.
Anchorage School District Bilingual/Multicultural Education Program
The requirement under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act states “No Person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from the participation in, be denied benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Immigrants to the United States fall under this jurisdiction and cannot be denied public services, such as primary and secondary education because of their national origin. However, due to the limited of English proficiency of most immigrants, this poses as a complex issue for educators. How do you provide instruction for math, science, and basic life skills for immigrants who possess limited proficiency in the medium of instruction, English? Also, how do you provide education for immigrants without denying their heritage and language background? As an attempt to solve this dilemma, the state of Alaska addresses the need for bilingual education programs. Stated in Alaska Education Regulations Chapter 34, 4AC34.101,
The department believes that providing equal opportunity to these (minority) children through the establishment of Bilingual/Bicultural programs of education will provide more effective use of both English and the student’s language, foster more successful secondary and higher education careers, facilitate the obtaining of employment, tend to bring about an end to the depreciation of local culture elements and values in solving educational problems, effect a positive self-image, allow genuine options in choosing a way of life and facilitate more harmonious relationships between the student’s culture and the mainstream of society.
With these intentions, the state of Alaska passed the law, AS 14.30.410 that “mandates districts to provide in accordance with state regulations a bilingual/bicultural education for each school with eight or more students of limited English-speaking ability whose primary language is other than English”. This made it possible for schools in rural areas to open integrated cultural and language programs promoting Native Alaskan heritage, such as Cu’pik culture programs in the Kashunamiut School District in Western Alaska and Yu’pik bilingual education in Bethel, programs that draw upon its surrounding local culture. Following accordance with the state statute, the Anchorage School District implemented the Bilingual/Multicultural Education Program, a program that serves around 6200 students, 13% of the student population who speak a language other than English as their primary language (Goldsmith et. al, 2005).
However, after analyzing the current policy of the bilingual program, I found a serious discrepancy between the language policy of the district and the language policy of the state. According to Bilingual/Multicultural Education Program website, the program within elementary schools provides intensive ESL classes for students with limited English proficiency by pulling them out of their home classes. This is no different from my experience of being pulled out of my class when I attended Willow Crest Elementary and put into “bilingual education” class. I recall attending “bilingual education” classes but I don’t recall using my first language of Tagalog extensively or encouraged to use it. Similar to my experience, students nowadays can be pulled out for up to three hours until they “become more proficient in English and they are gradually mainstreamed into their homeroom classes” (Anchorage School District, 2006a) or how my friends and I in elementary school used to view it, “graduate bilingual education class”.
Although the multicultural education side of the program encourages school staff to hold cultural events to promote awareness of the diversity of cultures in the district and with hopes that it will increase the self-esteem and self-image, there is no mention of providing language maintenance in the students’ first language or any development of literacy in their first language in bilingual education plan. This nonexistence of minority language use or nonexistence of the encouragement of use is inconsistent to the section of Alaska Education Regulations Chapter 34, 4AC34.101 when they state that bilingual programs “will provide more effective use of both English and the student’s language” (italics added). Without the development of a student's first language especially during the early ages of the student, they will lose that language rapidly (Wong Fillmore 1991; Cummins 1991). After a student loses their first language, they are no longer bilingual and become monolingual which is contradictory to the program’s name itself, “Bilingual”/Multicultural Education. Unfortunately, the student learns a second language at the expense of losing the first.
However, there is some hope. After searching through files on the Anchorage School District online database, I discovered the abstract of the “Bilingual/Multicultural Education Program Six-Year Instructional Plan”, published in January 9, 2006. Apparently, this is a plan that is made to comply with the Alaska law statute AS 14.17.420 (b) that states, “If a district offers special education, gifted and talented education, vocational, or bilingual education services, in order to receive funding, the district must file with the department a plan that indicates the services that will be provided to students who receive these services.” In one of the bullets appearing the plan's abstract, the Bilingual/Multicultural Education Program will "provide effective teaching strategies in order for limited-English-proficient students to develop native-like proficiency in English as well providing students the opportunity to maintain and develop their native language (i.e., language immersion programs)" (Anchorage School District, 2006b). Sadly, I scanned the document and found no plans for any opening, expansion, or even a mere mention of an immersion school. According to the six-year plan, it appears that the efforts to provide services to limited-English-proficient students are only more frequent English language assessment tests, more culturally responsive teachers, and improved English-as-a-second-language program. Perhaps what is more shocking to me is the implementation of English-as-second-language classes for parents which suggests that the district wants to encourage English interaction between parents and students and not their home language. Overall, there is some attempt to maintain or develop a minority student’s primary language. Three immersion programs that I know of that exist in the primary level: Japanese in Sand Lake Elementary, Russian in Turnagain Elementary, and Spanish in Government Hill Elementary.
Immersion programs in the Anchorage School District elementary schools
With the widespread belief in Anchorage that languages take time to acquire and a bilingual education will help children become mentally flexible by being able to think in two different linguistic frameworks, parents are eager to have their children enter immersion programs in elementary schools (D’Oro 2005). Sand Lake Elementary School’s Japanese Immersion Program has been around since 1989 and its Japanese immersion program is coordinated with similar programs in Mears Middle School and Dimond High School, ensuring that students can progress in grade level, Kindergarten to their senior year in high school, while being able to continue their Japanese language and culture studies. Students are taught half the day in Japanese and then the remaining half is taught in English. This has become a well sought out program for parents because participants in this program are viewed as “highly marketable” and “tend to be accepted in the top tier of colleges” (Gerjevic 2003). In order to enter this program, parents enter a lottery in hopes of their child or children to be selected and this process is the same for both the Russian program in Turnagain and Spanish program in Government Hill. Turnagain Elementary School’s Russian Immersion Program is similar to Sand Lank in that it provides half the day instruction in Russian and the other in English. However, the aim of this school is more focused on promoting historical studies about Russia and Alaska because of Russia’s former ownership of Alaska. Plus, the school is focused on promoting international relations with Russia because of its geographical closeness.