French Immersion School embraces diversity, global identity
Students come from all religions and cultures, just like native speakers
Patrice Nassalang towers over his young students on the stage at Milwaukee French Immersion School. Pounding his bare feet into the boards, the Senegalese dancer runs them through the rhythmic movements of the Mendiany, a celebratory dance of West Africa.
“En bas,” Nassalang calls in French over the sound of the thundering drum, and they swing their arms low.
“En haut,” he calls, and they reach for the sky.
African dance is a relatively new offering at Milwaukee French Immersion, one of a handful of internationally known full-immersion language schools in Milwaukee Public Schools.
Created as part of a network of magnet programs intended to desegregate
MPS, French Immersion remains one of the most integrated schools in what is now a largely resegregated district. Nassalang’s class is part of a concerted effort by Principal Gina Bianchi to embrace that diversity — and the reality that French is a global language spoken around the world, from Europe to Africa and the Caribbean to the Middle East.
“Our diversity is so rich, and it’s not just racial,” said Bianchi, who took over as principal in fall 2013. “It’s geographic and socioeconomic. … And we have students who come from all different religions and cultures.”
“The opportunity our kids have to learn from each other is just as important as the language.”
Milwaukee French Immersion marked its 40th anniversary this month with a visit from the French Consulate, which bestowed on the school an international language accreditation that brings with it a number of new resources for students and teachers.
Consul General Guillaume Lacroix said he was particularly moved by the commitment of families and staff and the school’s history as a vehicle for righting a historic wrong.
“I was very impressed . ... It is quite innovative,” said Lacroix, who missed his evening train back to Chicago that night rather than cut short his visit.
“It was used as an instrument to break the racial divide,” he said. “And seeing the alumni who send their children there ... generation after generation — there is something very powerful there,” he said.
Immersed in language
Language immersion is, as it sounds, a method of teaching in which students receive all of their lessons — literature, math, everything — “immersed” in the target language.
It begins in the earliest grades, as kindergarten teacher Dawn Balistreri illustrated on a recent morning.
“Compte pour madame,” she tells the class, pointer in hand as she guides them through the calendar.
And they oblige in unison: “Un, deux,
trois, quatre, cinq ...,” until they devolve into a cacophony of tiny voices somewhere north of “dix-neuf.”
Milwaukee’s language immersion schools — in French, German and Spanish, as well as a partial program in Italian — draw students from across the city and surrounding suburbs through open enrollment.
At French Immersion, a number of the children are second-generation students. And many of the staff are alumni who, like Bianchi, have their own children enrolled there.
Families are a mix: white, black, Latino, interracial and intercontinental, some of whom speak French at home. They are drawn by the transformative experience of learning another language, they say, as well as for the diversity the school offers.
“French is the language that binds my children to their family halfway around the world,” said Naiimah Zeriouh, who is married to a Moroccan man and has two children in the school.
“I can’t imagine them being at any other school,” she said. “They have friends from different countries, friends who are black, who are white, friends from just about anywhere you can imagine.”
‘A radical move’
Introduced in the U.S. in the 1970s, immersion schools were modeled after French language schools that were sweeping across Canada and fueled by research showing that students taught in the immersion model performed as well and often better than peers in English-speaking schools.
The idea wasn’t entirely new. Foreign language instruction has been a priority for families of means around the world for millennia, said Tara Fortune, immersion director for the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota. But providing it free in public schools, she said, was a “radical move.”
MPS was an early adopter, creating some of the first public immersion programs in the country. Today it offers full immersion — in German, French and Spanish — in three elementary schools. And it remains one of a few districts to offer a middle and high school option at its Milwaukee School of Languages.
Integration was a key objective from the beginning for MPS, which launched the immersion schools and other magnet programs as a way to comply with a federal court order to desegregate.
“What was cool about Milwaukee was that when it started, 40% of the population needed to be students of color,” Fortune said, though that quota was later rescinded. “That was just an awesome start because it said we are really committed to this idea of integration.”
Like many large urban districts, where white families continued to flee, MPS has essentially resegregated, with many of its schools overwhelmingly black, white or Latino. No school mirrors MPS’ racial makeup exactly — about 53% black, 26% Latino and 12% white — but French Immersion remains one of its most integrated with its white population at about 27% and the majority students of color.
Embracing the mission
For years, Milwaukee’s language immersion programs operated almost under the radar, drawing mostly white families through word of mouth and earning reputations as somewhat “elitist.” But as the district became increasingly black and brown, MPS in the interest of equity has made a conscientious effort to make its higher-performing and specialty programs more available to students of color.
It moved French Immersion from the far southwest side to its more central location at West North Avenue and North 52nd Street about 15 years ago, in part so it had room to grow. And Bianchi, as principal, has embraced that mission.
During her tenure, the school has hired native French speakers from Africa (men and women), adapted the curriculum to better reflect the global nature of the French language, launched a book club in which parents can explore issues of race and culture, and more.
Over the last decade, enrollment has grown by 56% to about 614, most of that since Bianchi arrived. And hers is the only one of the four immersion schools to maintain and increase white enrollment even as its percentage of black and brown students rose.
Academic performance is mixed, depending on the subject. Overall, the percentage of students proficient in English language and math — 35.4% and 18.3% in 2016-’17 — are well above the district average but below the state’s, according to the latest data maintained by the Department of Public Instruction. And, as in the district and the state, wide disparities persist in achievement between black and white students.
Bianchi cautioned against reading too much into the data.
“Numbers only tell one piece of a story,” said Bianchi, who noted that students are taught in French but tested in English, and that the school does not “counsel out” students who struggle.
“Students who have traditionally been successful here continue to be,” she said. “Our challenge is to work with families to strengthen (all of) our students’ performance . ... They are only going to help us get better at teaching.”
She said a new math curriculum in French, its first aligned to state standards, has already shown progress this year, boosting proficiency scores by 10 percentage points.
And she points to the new accreditation, known as the Label FrancEducation program, which will bring a host of resources to benefit all students, including a French-speaking intern, a visiting artist and an opportunity for a teacher to study in France. Already, the program helped fund the school’s first round of testing for DELF diplomas awarded by the French Ministry of Education Education to prove French language skills.
MPS’ language schools were at the center of a debate this spring over the high cost of busing in the district. Pressed by board members to rein in MPS’ $64 million a year transportation costs, then-Superintendent Darienne Driver floated a number of proposals, including one that would have limited busing for the citywide schools to a seven-mile radius around those buildings.
Teachers and families, mostly from the language schools, turned out in protest. Rolling back busing, they argued, would cut off hundreds of children, effectively resegregating the schools and setting up a series of dominoes that would send the programs into a downward spiral.
“If this program is harmed to the point that it cannot function, then what we’ve really done is turned our backs on the whole idea of integration,” said Margaret Rozga, the widow of the late Civil Rights activist Father James Groppi, whose children and grandchildren have attended Milwaukee French Immersion and whose daughter now teaches there.
“Is integration still a value? Is an inclusive community still a value?” Rozga said. “If it is, then we need to make decisions that protect that value.”