Results and Implications of the Fall 2001 CCPCR Census of Pre-College Russian Programs:

The Decline Slows, But Now is the Time for LOCAL Action

Last year's vigorous efforts to identify missing pre-college programs, actively and conspicuously aided by a series of articles published in the ACTR Letter, as well as in the AATSEEL Newsletter and the AAASS NewsNet, have borne fruit. Missing schools have come forward to identify themselves, and teachers are increasingly using the internet for the census process, significantly reducing the expense of postage and phone calls. All teacher e-mail addresses listed in the Fall 2001 census pages for each state function as direct and current hyperlinks which can be used to send e-mail to each school's teachers. The internet approach has resulted in the posting of data much earlier than ever before, and for the first time we can realistically take stock of the status of pre-college Russian language programs before the end of the spring semester. The data is posted at the Committee on College and Pre-College Russian website at < www.american.edu/research/CCPCR>.

The statistics that emerge from the comparison of this year's fall census with previous data are telling. Since 1998, 136 pre-college programs have been terminated or are currently being phased out. Specifically, from 1998-2000, 127 programs were lost; in AY 2000-2001, five programs, in AY 2001-2002, two programs; and two more are currently being phased out. While the pace of termination has decreased considerably, and one new program was initiated in Arizona, the impact of such significant overall losses on a national scale since 1998 is overwhelming. Added to these figures are 22 previously reported programs that did not respond to the fall 2000 or fall 2001 census; though possibly also terminated, and raising our total loss to over 150 schools, they have yet to be finally confirmed as such. All terminated programs in each state can be found on the CCPCR website.
As of April 15, 2002, 102 teachers from 97 schools in 33 states (and the District of Comumbia) have, almost entirely by means of the electronic e-mail census form on the CCPCR website, reported 6,276 students in their programs,. In comparison, by continuing the attempts to contact schools throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 2001, the Fall 2000 CCPCR Census identified a total of 138 teachers in 124 schools with a total of 6,672 students. The same process is continuing now for the Fall 2001 numbers, with phone calls to schools that have not responded to e-mail or to census forms sent by regular mail. At the end of March, eighty follow-up census forms were mailed to all schools that responded in 2000, but not in 2001, as well as to other schools identified as possibly having programs by readers of the ACTRLetter and the other organization Newsletters.

On a state-by state basis, the picture is grim. In eleven states--Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wyoming-- plus the District of Columbia, only one pre-college Russian program has been reported to date (less than half of these states have previously reported more than one school, and the DC program is currently being phased
out). Fifteen states, including Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawai'i, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and West Virginia, to the best of our knowledge now have no Russian programs at the pre-college level.

As in the past, more schools will ultimately respond toin the next few months to CCPCR's repeated requests for information about their programs, and the totals reported on the CCPCR website will grow, but not enough for us to feel that the decline has bottomed out. It is most probable that a significant number of non-responding schools--particularly those that have not supplied information for the past two years--have simply lost their programs. While compared to the three years from1998 to 2000, our rate of loss has clearly diminished, this is no time for complacency. September 11 has focused America's attention upon the connection between foreign language knowledge and national security in a way only paralleled by the launching of Sputnik in 1957. This is a crucial time to act locally to maintain and even grow K-12 programs.

Counterintuitively, at a time when national consciousness has been raised in regard to the importance of foreign languages in general and of critical foreign languages in particular, the Bush administration is at present seeking to zero out the Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP) support for K-12 foreign languages from the next budget, a budget that called for a modest $12 million for the entire nation and which serves as the sole governmental funding program to assist K-12 foreign language instruction. As a critical language, Russian at the pre-college level is itself in critical condition. Retaining and protecting the programs we still have will require determination and, above all, self promotion at the local level while national support for the development of critical languages is being mustered in Congress by such groups as the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC), the Joint National Committee on Languages (JNCL), and the American Council of Education -International Committee on Education (ACE-CIE), among others. Now is the time to act, before it's too late! Make your program as visible as possible to your students, to parents, and to administrators!
If you are aware of a program that we have not reported, or if your own program has yet to respond, you can send information to CCPCR@american.edu, or go directly to the CCPCR website given above.

John Schillinger
Chair, CCPCR
American University