School choice

Top 10 Reasons for Being in an Immersion Program


• To acquire a second language

• To have a greater capacity for listening

• To think more creatively and analytically

• To develop better communication skills

• To express enthusiasm and have an aptitude for problem solving

• To have a greater awareness of self and others

• To gain insights into other cultures

• To unify staff and students in creating a shared linguistic community

• To provide access to a greater part of the world

• To take advantage of the optimal time to learn a language and develop an appreciation and understanding of diverse cultures, peoples, and perspectives in the world


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It’s school choice time in Minneapolis! This presents a terrifying scenario for the critical educator who wants to neither alienate nor compromise… too much. So my husband and I embarked on the search for our sons’ academic home in a manner similar to how I remember approaching the college search: intense background research, a long lull, punctuated by an eleventh-hour freak-out and snap decision. Now that the “choice card” has been submitted (a process that I, a former public school teacher halfway to a Ph.D, found confounding), I feel I can take a deep breath and reflect on the experience of navigating “school choice.”

When Robin introduced this task last week, I wrote down “microinteraction,” and thus was thinking more about verbal exchanges between people that could be considered pedagogical. With that in mind, I’m considering the conversation I had this (Tuesday) morning at a school tour along with the text below, copied from the school website. The tour took place at a dual immersion elementary school, and I found the Top 10 list on the school’s website after my visit to the school. I want to problematize two elements of my interactions with the text and the tour guide: first, the “de-fanging” of the real power of language immersion in favor of a softer, “celebrate diversity” discourse. Along with that comes, of course, a lack of acknowledgement of the role of power itself in choosing a curricular framework for a public school. Again, thinking about binaries: by choosing immersion, the school leaders were not choosing lots of other things, particularly a testing-focused, reading and math-heavy academic schedule. Second, the individualism inherent in the language of the top ten list: the message I read here is that being bilingual will benefit your child and his or her interactions in a “global society.” My top 10 list would refer to subverting English dominance, building social cultural capital among both native English and native Spanish speakers, growing a generation of children who look at language, culture, power, and the purpose of public schooling in critical ways (Ladson-Billings’ sociopolitical consciousness), redefining academic “success” while acknowledging the need to succeed in the present testing climate, etc. These include benefits to individuals but don’t leave out how the individual shapes and is shaped by society.

I hope that the school we’ve chosen for our kids does the real work of immersion education, but I don’t see that in the top-ten list below. This problem of publicly representing a deeply researched and considered perspective brings me back to my key question on the first day of class: how do we communicate about critical work in a way that is both comprehensible and true to the work itself? What is lost when we go too far in either direction?