Dive Brief:
- Support for bilingual education is growing in the U.S due to its potential economic advantages, the Atlantic Monthly reports.
- The state of Utah is leading the charge, with language immersion investment costing $2 million dollars annually to incorporate teaching Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish in the classroom to over 25,000.
- According to experts, the U.S. "lags behind" other countries in terms of producing a multilingual workforce ready for the global stage.
Dive Insight:
This past September, bilingual education received a boost when President Obama unveiled his "1 Million Strong" initiative, which aims to teach Mandarin to one million American students by the year 2020. The cognitive benefits are proven, with yet the expansion of dual language immersion programs remains controversial. The number of U.S. students who speak foreign languages at home now totals 4 million. Some states have even created "official language" rules declaring English to be their official tongue.