Last fall, the College Board asked 14,000 high schools in the United States
how many of them planned to offer Advanced Placement (AP) courses in Chinese in the fall of 2006, in preparation for the first Chinese language AP exam in 2007. The Board expected a few hundred to say yes, but jaws hit the floor when 2,347 schools said they were interested in Chinese. For those who believe that American children should learn more languages, especially those of economic competitors like China, this is good news. But there's one problem: We don't have enough qualified teachers. The system would need an estimated 2,000 more officially certified Chinese language teachers before all the interested schools could offer AP Chinese. A 2004 report by the Chinese Language Association of Secondary-Elementary Schools counted only 110 high school-level teachers.

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