Print edition: 
Many people predicted that if the No Child Left Behind law began linking federal dollars to student performance in math and English, only math and English would matter. Sure enough, as a headline in the Sunday Eagle put it: "Focus on basics cuts foreign language back."
When push has come to shove, especially during budget cutting, foreign languages and subjects such as art and music have been treated as expendable, rather than as essential to the comprehensive education of American children in the 21st century. As a result, according to a federal study released last fall by the Center for Applied Linguistics, the number of elementary schools offering foreign languages nationally dropped from 31 percent in 1997 to 25 percent in 2008; at the middle school level, the decline was from 75 to 58 percent.
And though experts say that foreign languages are most easily picked up by young children, the number of elementary schools in the Wichita district with foreign language instruction has dwindled to two, Horace Mann Dual Language Magnet and Gordon Parks Academy.
The Wichita district offers no Advanced Placement foreign language classes (21 percent of U.S. secondary schools did in 2008).
Even Chinese, the one foreign language to have seen a statistically significant gain across the nation's K-12 schools in the past decade, is only taught at six Wichita schools, and then only to 235 total students.
At least Kansas high schools are required to offer foreign language classes to maintain state accreditation.
The diminished importance of foreign language makes even less sense because it has coincided with the globalization of the American economy. The United States is also conducting two wars and trying to stave off more, making multilingualism in intelligence gathering, military planning and diplomacy more important than ever.
Meanwhile, U.S. economic competitors such as China and India are requiring 10-year-olds to begin foreign language study. Most Europeans learn two or more foreign languages.
All of which makes this a good time to remind President Obama that, as a presidential candidate, he criticized No Child Left Behind for having "pushed out a lot of important learning that needs to take place" and neglecting foreign languages, saying "I want to put more resources into it."
Leaders from the local district through Congress need to wake up to the consequences of not making foreign languages an educational priority. As the Center for Applied Linguistics study concluded: "When legislators, administrators and other education policymakers recognize the need to incorporate foreign languages into the core curriculum, the necessary funding and other resources will follow. This change in attitude is the necessary first step in moving our country toward parity with nations around the globe that graduate students who can communicate in more than one language."
