The San Francisco Unified School District announced plans in July to open a school offering Chinese and English instruction using private funding, following a parent-led campaign to start a charter school with a similar focus.
Proposals to expand bilingual programs in Chinese, which focus mainly on Mandarin, the official language of China and Taiwan, have attracted significant public attention. Yet the reduction and consolidation of existing dual-language classes have largely gone unnoticed.
District officials cited low enrollment in those classes as reasons for the cuts, saying it helps them to better use its resources and place teachers with more students. A district spokesperson emphasized the plan for a new school and said the district would collaborate with other groups to increase the availability of bilingual teachers. But closing and merging classrooms means certain programs are winding down grade by grade. A Public Press review of district data shows that half of the programs designed for students who speak Cantonese have been cut or scheduled to close in the past four years. Most schools with language programs have merged two grade levels into a single class.
Many of these changes were made to the language biliteracy program, which mostly serves families who speak little English and happened quietly with little public attention. In some cases, parents weren’t aware that the programs they hoped their children would join were being phased out.
Meanwhile, public and media attention has largely focused on expanding a different language program, dual-language immersion, which is open to all students, including those from English-speaking families. These efforts are driven largely by parents seeking bilingual opportunities for their children rather than students who need language access to keep up in school.
The district is “slimming down” language programs without widespread public notice, said Laurance Lem Lee, who ran for school board last year. “People do that because they know families don’t talk to each other,” he added.
The district rejected claims that the cuts lacked public input, saying decisions were made at each school’s site council meetings in the spring, with families and staff of that school involved.
Classes disappear
When Derrick Tam learned last summer that Visitacion Valley Elementary had stopped enrolling new kindergarten students in its program for Cantonese-speaking children, he couldn’t believe it. He found out after being contacted by the Public Press.
“I just signed my daughter up for that school,” he wrote in a text message in Cantonese followed by a screaming emoji.
Tam registered his daughter for the transitional kindergarten in the school, hoping she could join the Cantonese program the following year when she started kindergarten. But he didn’t realize the program was being phased out and the district had canceled the enrollment of kindergartners, even as families like his were still signing up for schools.
At the time, the district still listed the program on its website and in enrollment materials without explaining that enrollment for lower grades had ended. Even with the website updated, the latest enrollment guide and application form still show some programs as available without explaining that lower grades are no longer taking new students, meaning that classes in those programs will slowly disappear as current students move up each year.
Katrina Kincade, the district’s media relations coordinator, wrote in an email to the Public Press that the enrollment guide and application will be corrected for the next cycle. She said families can always directly contact the district to figure out if programs are available.
Parents — especially first-time parents with limited English skills like Tam — can be left behind when changes happen and information isn’t updated. Tam enrolled his daughter in the Cantonese biliteracy program per a neighbor’s advice, hoping it would help her adjust to an English-speaking classroom while staying connected to the language her family speaks at home.
During her year in transitional kindergarten, Tam said, his daughter had a Cantonese-speaking teacher, which helped her navigate school without much struggle, though she isn’t speaking in her first language as much now.
“She mostly speaks English now,” Tam said. “We often have to tell her, ‘We don’t understand what you are talking about, say it in Chinese.’”
But that teacher will leave the school in the coming year, and with no more Cantonese program his daughter can enroll in at that school, Tam tried to transfer her to another school with a Chinese-speaking class. “We are still waiting in line for that school,” Tam said.
Tam’s experience isn’t unique. Five of the 11 Cantonese programs designed for families like Tam’s who speak mostly Cantonese at home have stopped enrolling new kindergartners since 2021. As a result, fewer than half of the program’s kindergarten seats remain.
Kincade attributed those closures to a 2022 shift of control of classroom capacity from individual schools to the central office. Under the new policy, the district cancels or merges classes with another grade if enrollment falls below a certain threshold and too few new students request to join.
Cutting or consolidating classes that serve as entry points into a program can mean the entire dual-language pathway will disappear, because no lower-grade students move on to fill seats in higher grade levels.
A step away from school closure
For families in these programs, the concern over losing a single language classroom goes beyond the program itself. It can also set the stage for the district to close the entire school. In a letter last June, Visitacion Valley parents warned the district that canceling the Cantonese bilingual classes would lead to fewer students enrolling in the school, “potentially leading to its closure.” The school’s enrollment dropped 10% that year.
Even without classroom cuts, many schools with Cantonese programs for English learners face possible closure. Last year, when the district considered school closures, three of the nine elementary schools slated to close or merge had Cantonese programs. While that plan was reversed after public outcry, little attention was paid to the two schools that lost their kindergarten Cantonese classes.
Lee said those who pay attention to public education are noticing more and more small-scale cuts, like closing kindergarten classrooms or merging two grades with fewer students into a single class to meet the capacities set by the district at individual schools with language programs. For the 2025-26 school year, the district’s minimum class size is 15 students. The district’s own report last May, published amid public input on school closure proposals that ultimately were not enacted, noted that at least 21 of the 38 elementary schools with language programs had classes with students from two grades in one room.
It’s not just Cantonese programs. The district also combined grade levels in the only two elementary school Filipino language classes in the nation, drawing strong pushback from a community already facing limited options.
While that change drew media attention, most classroom closures and mergers happen quietly, with news circulating only within individual school communities. Lee said the district adopted this strategy to cut programs because large-scale efforts have sparked strong backlash. “For instance, when the school closures happened, that’s when you saw whole schools pushing back against the superintendent,” he said. When a class is cut or grades are merged with, “they’re like, ‘I guess it’s something I can’t do anything about.’”
Kincade, from the district, rejected the claim. She said the decision to close classrooms is “a transparent, public process” discussed with families.
Divergent views on language needs
Enrollment of Cantonese-speaking students dropped sharply during the 2020 COVID pandemic. Though there was a slight uptick in 2021, around the time the district began phasing out the Cantonese biliteracy program, enrollment hit a new low last year, far below pandemic levels and just over half of what it was before the pandemic.
Josephine Zhao, president of the Chinese American Democratic Club and a member of the Asian American Parent Advisory Committee, also observed a sharp decline in demand for Cantonese biliteracy programs. She attributed the drop to restrictive immigration policies during the pandemic, which limited the arrival of immigrants from China.
“For the remaining students, even those living on the south side of the city, their parents prefer biliteracy programs in Chinatown because of the stronger support system there,” Zhao wrote in a text message in Chinese.
She argued that the district should consolidate the curriculum of its various existing Asian language programs and expand Mandarin immersion programs, which have seen high demand, particularly in schools where Cantonese biliteracy programs were closed.
Vanessa Marrero, director of Parents For Public Schools Inc., offered a different perspective. She said opening just one more school with a few more seats for bilingual education is not enough. Marrero said the district’s failure to invest in multilingualism as a core goal has hindered the expansion of its language programs, which she sees as among the most innovative in the country. She said multilingualism deserves broader implementation across all district schools.
Two types of dual language program
The district’s biliteracy programs are intended to help students to maintain the language they speak at home while gaining English proficiency. San Francisco also has dual language immersion programs, which teach both languages simultaneously and are open to all students regardless of language experience. While biliteracy programs designed for English learners are struggling, those open to all students face unique challenges: too few seats to meet soaring demand, especially from families who don’t speak the language.
The district caps the number of English-only speakers who may enroll in these programs, typically reserving two-thirds of seats for students who demonstrate proficiency through a language assessment and leaving just one-third available for those who don’t.
Conor P. Williams, a researcher focused on education at the Century Foundation, a public policy think tank, described this cap as a “best practice” to boost diversity and academic outcomes by encouraging native speakers of each language to learn from one another. Given the shortage of dual-language programs, he said, the district should prioritize English learners and students who speak the non-English language at home, as they stand to benefit the most.
Bilingual education is popular today but was once undervalued and even banned. In 1973, Chinese American families sued the district for failing to provide bilingual instruction and won their case in the U.S. Supreme Court. As a result, the district came under court oversight to ensure it was working to provide proper services for English learners.
In 1998, California voters passed an English-only policy banning bilingual education statewide, but San Francisco did not comply as the district was bound by the court oversight. That oversight lasted 45 years until the U.S. District Court of Northern California ruled that the school district was in compliance with the order in 2019. Three years later, the district began canceling some language classes for English learners. Voters had repealed the state’s English-only policy in 2016.
These days, more parents, including those who speak only English, view multilingualism as a positive. These parents are becoming a political force advocating for more multilingual programs, according to Williams.
But the district struggles to balance strong demand from English-speaking families with limited spots in dual-language programs. Demand from English-speaking households consistently exceeds that from English learners. Two of the five schools with the highest demand per seat have immersion programs for English speakers, with more than 22 applicants vying for each spot. While the number of dual-language immersion programs has remained unchanged, more than half experienced a decline in English learner enrollment.
This imbalance concerned Williams: While growing interest from English-dominant, higher-income families can bring more political support for expanding dual-language programs, it can also crowd out English learners from less privileged backgrounds who need those programs most.
He pointed out that the district’s current use of language assessment tests might not be a sufficient equity metric for determining which students qualify for seats reserved for native speakers of the languages. A student fluent in a non-English language is not necessarily an English learner. And not all English learners are underserved, just as not all English-speaking students are privileged.
With the intense demand and limited supply affecting the dual-language program, “at some point, privileged English-dominant families will likely seek — and find — ways to circumvent or undermine linguistic integration,” Williams wrote in a March report.
Demand for Mandarin immersion
Brian Hollinger is one of the parents pushing the district to create a Mandarin immersion charter school. With two children in the district’s Mandarin immersion program, he knows firsthand how competitive it is. Many families, he said, pay for Mandarin immersion preschools to prepare their children for the language assessment and boost their chances of getting in.
Hollinger believes private schools have stepped in to meet the demand the district cannot. “There’s been a massive proliferation and expansion of private Mandarin immersion K–8 schools,” he said.
Critics say adding a charter school could worsen the district’s budget problems if it were to draw students, and therefore funding, away from public schools. Williams, the education researcher, acknowledged that concern and added that it would be worthwhile for the district to find ways to respond to parent demand and keep families in the public system. On the other hand, he said charter schools might have a unique advantage over district schools in that they aren’t required to adhere to the same curriculum or schedules. They might also face less difficulty than a public school would in hiring bilingual teachers working toward getting bilingual teaching credentials.
From Hollinger’s perspective, the proposed charter school wouldn’t draw students away from the district, but rather attract families pushed out of public schools due to a lack of available seats in its Mandarin immersion programs.
In June, the district unveiled plans to open a Mandarin-immersion school. The district also plans to develop training programs and systems to help more Chinese bilingual teachers become certified to teach in both languages. The new school is scheduled to open in fall 2027, with funding from an anonymous benefactor.