Global Strategies: Portland PTA's mayoral debate

Last night the Portland Council PTA held a one hour mayoral debate featuring Charlie Hales and Jefferson Smith. About fifty attended. The format relied on questions, many from student moderators. Both candidates gave education high priority. Both will, they said, advocate for more educational funding.

There was one interesting question relevant to the foreign language education themes of this blog. There was a question about ?multilingual schools.? It was not clear what the questioner meant, so both candidates interpreted the question differently.

Charlie Hales spoke of his experiences with and general satisfaction with immersion programs. Both of his sons were educated in a Spanish language immersion program in Portland Public Schools. One son, because he already knew one second-language, was taught Arabic in the military and served as an Arabic interpreter. The other son is now the stage manager at the Milagro Theater, where he speaks Spanish daily.

Jefferson Smith spoke of school districts where student spoke up to seventy-six different foreign languages. He said we need to ?adapt? the schools to their needs but currently have not yet figured out how to do that. He offered a few general ideas.

Neither, unfortunately, connected their answers to Portland?s economic future. Portland?s best economic future is to export more to the large and growing markets abroad. To do so we need workers with foreign language skills and foreign market experiences. Right now our educational system is not producing such workers in sufficient numbers. ?More immersion programs in critical languages, like Mandarin, are needed and those students who speak foreign languages in their homes should be seen as opportunities for us to develop.

Source: http://daveporter.typepad.com/global_strategies/2012/10/portland-ptas-mayoral-debate.html

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