Big issue. Big set of questions to ask. The first and foremost difficulty is the resource-poor environment. Public school systems have enough challenges already in meeting the needs of Special Education students, and to do so all in English.
The craze over language immersion has created a new set of challenges - how can you identify and meet the needs of a kid who may have special education needs while s/he is in an early language immersion program (starting from K or 1st grade) when it would be crazy difficult to figure out what was happening when this kid has emerging skills in both English and a language that the family does not know?
While some experts have termed this stage "emerging bilingualism," I am skeptical that this is even appropriate. The bigger issue is whether or not this kid got any support and intervention during the pre-K years. This issue should get lumped into the "school readiness" or "pre-school for all" camp, not in the language immersion camp.
Unfortunately, the "equity and access" principle is being leveraged, here. That is to say, parents who are so desperate for what they see as a leg-up for their kids in being able to "have access" to learning Mandarin Chinese, they have lost sight of the bigger picture. And so have many professional educators. Why would you want to hinder a child's best chances at success by dumping him/her into a language immersion program when s/he might be better served in a special needs classroom/school wherein s/he could get the early intervention and support that can make or break their later transition into the Mainstream? Or even make or break their greater abilities to attain higher levels of skills than if they never got this help? Getting Mandarin as a Foreign Language, however, is a different thing. Sometimes called the FLES model (Foreign Language in Elementary School), this approach makes a lot more sense for special needs kids.
Even more bizarre, I've heard some parents express their resentment at not being able to get FLES Mandarin, so they take it out on the immersion program, trying to insist that the goals of the immersion program should be at the same level as a FLES program, since the FLES program doesn't exist. This is not reasonable.
I am a big believer in the Nurture side of the Nature/Nurture debate. I have mommy friends who have gone down the path of getting their kids that early intervention. They have attested to how much it made all the difference. Transformative. Confidence-feeding, not draining. But there remains a lot of fear of stigma in parents' minds. And that is just for getting a general education, in the English language, in the language that is known to everyone involved. Compound all this with language immersion, let alone a language like Mandarin Chinese which is so vastly different than English as compared to languages like Spanish or French or German... Sheesh. Talk about asking for trouble.
Then there are the native Chinese who show up. And they are confused by this entire matter. What I've seen is that most don't even know to ask the question. But one of the key areas to look at is whether or not your District/School has the resources to support these special needs kids. If the answer is "No," then you have to realize that no one gets chased out in public education. What happens is that everyone hobbles along, unless your parent community has the ability and the will to close the gap. There are schools who are able to leverage their parent and teacher social capital to make things happen. But there are schools that cannot.
But you have to realize that it takes moving mountains to meet the needs of special needs kids inside a Chinese/English Dual Immersion program. Identifying these kids would be a huge hurdle. Then figuring out what special support they needed would be another.
We left the public MI program we had started because we saw that this gap was too huge and the parent/teacher social capital was not ever going to be able to meet the challenges in order to make up the shortfall of the District's inability to address this.
Another layer of the problem are the parents, themselves. It is one thing to identify these kids and their needs, but if there are parents who are using the weakness of the system to hide, then the program is in even more trouble. We saw plenty of parents in denial about their kids needing special attention. It was draining for the teachers who were already overly taxed by needing to get a huge number of English-Only kids on board to basic Mandarin.
The end result? Not only were the kids not learning anything beyond basic "baby" Mandarin, but they simply weren't accomplishing much else in any other school subject. (The English-Only parents would further cover up this fact by supplementing at home for Reading and Math in English so that the kids would test well. But that was all there was to it. Sounds simple, right? Send kid to free MI program, get "baby" tourist Mandarin skills, come home and drill on reading in English and Math, test okay for a District that has low standards anyway, tell everyone you're at a "good school." Some parents could add to the list their hard work in advocating for a low-standards program that would continue up the line through high school. Many parents don't realize that this is what is being advocated for. But that is what is happening. It's up to the high school teachers to stop this trend that is alighting like an epidemic trying to infect the whole system.)
The thing is - the poor kids. For the ones who are "stuck" doing early immersion but need special ed help, they are not to blame. They did not choose to be in the program. They don't know what is happening.
I've also heard some English-Only parents try to compare themselves to Chinese-proficient kids who would need special education support. Well, that is entirely different. And by the way, most of the bilingual immersion programs in the entire country have their roots in supporting these Chinese-proficient kids in the first place. The kids are coming from Chinese-proficient backgrounds. The point of these programs was to have teachers who are proficient in both English and Chinese, and also trained to support special needs, thereby creating a manageable pathway for these special needs kids who already understand the Chinese language and need further development of their language skills in both Chinese and English as a way to further their cognitive development. The end goal was so that they would become more educated and proficient in the English language. But that they needed the Chinese instruction in place as a bridge to become "more educated" (since the information/knowledge could be carried by the vehicle that is the Chinese language which they already understood) and proficient in the English language, so that "The System" could churn out competent citizens (who are proficient in English which is the language of public life in the USA).
But somehow, all this has gotten warped. Many kids are losing out. But especially those who could benefit from the early interventions that they would get in a normal, regular program that could identify their special needs.
But working with a kid who walks in the door with special needs and does not have any Chinese skills... this is ignoring the true needs of the kid. I think it is outright cruel. Most importantly, this kid should have gotten better support in the pre-K years. A MI program isn't going to fix what this kid needs. Parents, however, in their hysteria over what they think "getting" Mandarin is all about... it all just feeds the denial.
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