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Public schools in Macon, Ga., and surrounding Bibb County have a lot of problems. Most of the 25,000 students are poor enough to qualify for free and reduced lunch, and about half don't graduate.

Bibb County's Haitian-born superintendent Romain Dallemand came into the job last year with a bag of changes he calls "The Macon Miracle." There are now longer schools days, year-round instruction, and one mandate nobody saw coming: Mandarin Chinese for every student, pre-K through 12th grade.

Instructors and other young teachers from China are being provided to Bibb County schools by a nearby Confucius Institute, one of a number of nonprofit cultural centers partially funded by the Chinese government. Beijing wants to spread Mandarin abroad, and at just $16,000 per instructor per year, the price is right for Dallemand.

"Bibb County is not known for producing the highest-achieving graduates," says Macon resident Dina McDonald. "You'll see that many of them can't even speak basic English."

McDonald herself has a ninth-grader in the public schools and says she can imagine some students going into fields where Mandarin could be useful, like international business, technology or law. But with lower achievers, she says, "Do you want to teach them how to say, 'Do you want fries with that?' in Mandarin?"

"While we do know that Mandarin is a critical language, another critical language here in the United States is Spanish," Eric Spears says.

Bibb high schools will continue to offer Spanish and French on top of Mandarin, but for most of the elementary kids, it's Chinese or nothing. Considering the Hispanic population doubled in Georgia over the last census period, the "Why not Spanish?" question is one Dallemand gets a lot.

The International Baccalaureate program—which is growing rapidly across U.S. school districts but sparking occasional pushback—will no longer be offered at an Idaho high school after the school board voted 4-0 for its removal.

The action last week by the Coeur d'Alene district comes two years after protesters in the area began making their case, arguing that the program was spreading an anti-American ideology in public schools.

In New Hampshire earlier this year, the state House passed a bill that would have prevented schools from adopting the IB program. Chief complaints were that the program indoctrinates students to be "world citizens" and infringes on local control.

Pinky wrote:$16,000 per year and no union contract? They should hire these Chinese teachers to teach every subject.

Twenty-five thousand Chicago teachers are planning to walk off the job Monday if they don't have a contract by midnight Sunday. As the Democrats look to unions to help them get out the vote, a strike by Chicago teachers might just put a crimp in those plans.