By WINNIE HU
May 16, 2008
New York Times
NEW HYDE PARK, N.Y. — For nearly a decade, the lesson that the world is interconnected — call it Globalization 101 — has been bandied about as much in education as in economics, spurring a cottage industry of internationally themed schools, feel-good cultural exchanges, model United Nations clubs and heritage festivals.
But the high-performing Herricks school district here in Nassau County, whose student body is more than half Asian, is taking globalization to the graduate level, integrating international studies into every aspect of its curriculum. A partnership with the Foreign Policy Association has transformed a high-school basement into a place where students produce research papers on North Korea’s nuclear energy program or the Taliban’s role in the opium trade. English teachers have culled reading lists of what they call “dead white men” (think Hawthorne and Hemingway) to make space for Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee and Khaled Hosseini. Gifted fifth graders learn comparative economics by charting the multinational production of a pencil and representing countries in a mock G8 summit.
Starting this year, every sixth grader at Herricks Middle School is required to take art in French, Spanish, Italian or Chinese, a dual-language approach that the school is considering expanding to gym as well. Preparing to create a Haitian-style painting in one French/art class last week, the students reviewed indigenous plants and wildlife in photos of Haitian rainforests and beaches projected onto a screen.
“Bird,” called out one boy.
“En français,” chided the teacher, Tom Coleman.
“Oiseau,” the boy corrected himself.
The global outlook at Herricks comes amid an $8.4 million investment by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others in a nationwide campaign by Asia Society to create new public schools with an integrated global focus; 10 have opened since 2004, including two in New York, and up to 30 more are expected by 2013.
In other instances of educational globalism, New Jersey, Connecticut and more than 20 other states have convened task forces or held conferences on globalization in recent years, some of them appointing international-relations specialists to coordinate school programs.
Last year, Indiana adopted ambitious new standards for classroom teaching of Chinese, Japanese and Korean, with a checklist of what skills students should master from kindergarten to 12th grade.
In Jacksonville, N.C., elementary school students recently paired up with their counterparts in Puebla, Mexico, to write a bilingual book and to trade astronomy lessons as part of North Carolina in the World, a $200,000-per-year program financed by the State Legislature.
“The whole notion of having a global focus is a trend nationwide, but how deep it’s going is more of an open question,” said Anthony Jackson, who oversees the International Studies Schools Network at Asia Society, a nonprofit educational group that fosters ties between the United States and Asia. “The real prize is to really think about the core courses and analyze them to see how they can be internationalized.”
For example, at the College of Staten Island High School for International Studies — one of the Asia Society schools — a recent biochemistry assignment measuring the caloric content of food was followed by a discussion of world hunger.
Some foreign policy specialists and parents say most schools are still taking the equivalent of baby steps and relegating much of the serious learning about international relations to electives and extracurricular activities.
Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president of the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, cautioned that American schools were already giving short shrift to American history and government and could not afford to layer global studies on top of already stretched curriculum.
“In some of these trendy schools, there is an ethos that we are all citizens of the world, and that’s all that matters,” he said. “Students need to be taught to be American citizens first.”
The Herricks district, located 20 miles east of Manhattan, is carved out of six affluent communities: New Hyde Park, Roslyn, Roslyn Heights, Albertson, Manhasset Hills and Williston Park.
The district was once primarily Jewish, Italian and Irish but shifted with an influx of Korean, Indian and Chinese immigrants beginning in the late 1980s. Today, officials say, Herricks High School students come from homes where 69 different languages are spoken, and Bhangra music from India is often played at school dances.
Jack Bierwirth, the Herricks superintendent since 2001, said the district began developing a global curriculum not only because of its diversity but also because parents and teachers said they wanted to demand more from their students, who have posted some of the highest standardized test scores in the state.
“What if you get finished with the A.P. exam but can’t remember where Afghanistan is?” Mr. Bierwirth asked. “It’s important to place knowledge in the context of the world.”
