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We homeschool our kid but this might be fraying our nerves too much.
The public schools here are generally terrible, and the private schools are either religious or hippie-woo garbage that I don't want to waste time at.
There are a handful of Immersion schools, however. Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.
We're white but my thinking is
Yes this is racist. But also... accurate? Thoughts?
Just on the language piece, Spanish is absolutely and infinitely more useful in the US. Wikipedia says that in the US it’s something like 42 million vs 3.5 million and the Spanish one feels like maybe even an underestimate. I’m not saying Chinese is useless - personally I’d view it as #2 most useful second language? But a 10-fold difference increase in speaking opportunities is pretty stark. Frankly everything after that falls off pretty quickly in usefulness, possibly with the exception of French, where the point of learning is more for its own sake rather than an actual expected ROI of any kind. (They say that a second language eventually can help mental development, after a brief confusion period depending on the age, so language of any kind might still be a mild net benefit even without a lasting return, but the significance of this is debated.)
You may have a point about the Chinese school. It’s not all sunshine and roses though, as noted below, but I’d say directionally it sounds like an idea worth exploring for sure.
I'm okay at Spanish and haven't found it very useful. Whereas I feel like I'm somewhat blind to one of the largest cultural and geopolitical transformations of our time by not being able to understand Chinese.
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Speaking spanish is the only other language as an American that doesn't correspond with an increase in income, though (I believe this fact is from a freakonomics podcast ten years ago).
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I can semi-concur with you here. I went to a French immersion school in a decently black area as a kid, and it was a far better school than its demographics would suggest. Most of the black kids were either immigrants from Francophone Africa or otherwise upper-middle class, and while it still wasn't private-school quality, it seemed a hell of a lot better than the surrounding public schools.
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Your #5 makes me think that you might've stumbled on some serious alpha here. You might be getting private-school quality peers for your children at discounted prices (assuming that immersion language school is cheaper than full-on private school).
I think you, and most other reasonable folks can see as plain as day how the demographics of your child's friends will influence educational and, consequently, life outcomes, so there's nothing racist about that.
As an east asian myself, the only caution is that a lot of Chinese families treat education as an arms race and a zero-sum game. And in certain ways, they are correct, there are only so many spots at top colleges/companies/positions of power. But I feel like this optimizes for some local minima, and one can get swept up in this whole competition for an unclear objective.
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Why would Japanese or Spanish be useless?
Oh I just don't believe in language transfer skills.
They all seem useless in terms of utility. Chinese maybe slightly less so because China is at least an ascending global superpower with billions of speakers.
Languages are ultimately useless, until they aren't. I think any of the three would be a good choice. Japanese would probably have a lot of the same benefits as Chinese, and it would open your kid up to working in neat liberal democratic Japan instead of crazy and bad and oppressive China (or Taiwan, I guess). There are a lot more admittedly insular Chinese speakers in America that could be spoken to, but Japan puts out a lot more cultural output, providing something you might actually want to use the language for.
I guess part of the consideration here would be that Spanish is relatively easy for an English speaker to learn, and Japanese and Chinese are not.
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I never thought I'd be someone who could converse in Japanese. I actually think at least in the US Spanish would have a great deal of utility in just dealing with people, but then the positives you list regarding the Chinese school may not be part of the Spanish-school package.
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