[Senate Hearing 110-84]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 110-84
LOST IN TRANSLATION: A REVIEW OF THE
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S EFFORTS TO DEVELOP
A FOREIGN LANGUAGE STRATEGY
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HEARING
before the
OVERSIGHT OF GOVERNMENT MANAGEMENT,
THE FEDERAL WORKFORCE, AND THE DISTRICT
OF COLUMBIA SUBCOMMITTEE
of the
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND
GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
JANUARY 25, 2007
__________
Available via http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate
__________
Printed for the use of the
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
33-872 PDF WASHINGTON DC: 2007
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COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut, Chairman
CARL LEVIN, Michigan SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine
DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii TED STEVENS, Alaska
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio
MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota
MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana TOM COBURN, Oklahoma
BARACK OBAMA, Illinois PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico
CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri JOHN WARNER, Virginia
JON TESTER, Montana JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire
Michael L. Alexander, Staff Director
Brandon L. Milhorn, Minority Staff Director
Trina Driessnack Tyrer, Chief Clerk
SUBCOMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT MANAGEMENT, THE FEDERAL WORKFORCE, AND THE
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii, Chairman
CARL LEVIN, Michigan GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware TED STEVENS, Alaska
MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas TOM COBURN, Oklahoma
MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana JOHN WARNER, Virginia
Richard J. Kessler, Staff Director
Jennifer A. Hemingway, Minority Staff Director
Emily Marthaler, Chief Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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Opening statements:
Page
Senator Akaka................................................ 1
Senator Voinovich............................................ 3
WITNESSES
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Hon. Michael L. Dominguez, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of
Defense, Personnel and Readiness, U.S. Department of Defense... 6
Holly Kuzmich, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Programs for
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, U.S. Department of
Education...................................................... 7
Everette E. Jordan, Director, National Virtual Translation
Center, on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigations...... 9
Rita Oleksak, President, American Council on the Teaching of
Foreign Languages.............................................. 22
Michael Petro, Vice President and Director of Business and
Government Relations, and Chief of Staff, Committee for
Economic Development........................................... 24
Diane W. Birckbichler, Ph.D., Director, Foreign Language Center
and Chair of the Department of French and Italian, Ohio State
University..................................................... 26
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Birckbichler, Diane W., Ph.D.:
Testimony.................................................... 26
Prepared statement........................................... 91
Dominguez, Hon. Michael L.:
Testimony.................................................... 6
Prepared statement........................................... 39
Jordan, Everette E.:
Testimony.................................................... 9
Prepared statement........................................... 68
Kuzmich, Holly:
Testimony.................................................... 7
Prepared statement........................................... 61
Oleksak, Rita:
Testimony.................................................... 22
Prepared statement........................................... 72
Petro, Michael:
Testimony.................................................... 24
Prepared statement........................................... 87
APPENDIX
Letter from Bret Lovejoy, Executive Director, American Council on
the Teaching of Foreign Languages, dated February 2, 2007, to
Senators Akaka and Voinovich................................... 98
Background Memorandum............................................ 100
LOST IN TRANSLATION: A REVIEW OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S EFFORTS TO
DEVELOP A FOREIGN LANGUAGE STRATEGY
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THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, 2007
U.S. Senate,
Subcommittee on Oversight of Government
Management, the Federal Workforce,
and the District of Columbia,
Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:44 p.m., in
room 342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Daniel K. Akaka,
Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding.
Present: Senators Akaka and Voinovich.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR AKAKA
Chairman Akaka. I call this hearing of the Subcommittee on
Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and
the District of Columbia to order.
Before we begin, I want to say how much I have enjoyed
working with Senator Voinovich. He has been a great leader.
I have worked very well with him, and I look forward to
continue to work with him in a bipartisan manner and maybe I
should say at this time even better than a bipartisan manner.
We have been good friends and our goals are the same: To do
whatever we can to help our country move forward.
I look forward to our continued partnership to improve
government programs and make the Federal Government an employer
of choice. He has been working real hard on that, and we will
see what we can do together in the next few years.
Today's hearing, ``Lost in Translation: A Review of the
Federal Government's Efforts to Develop a Foreign Language
Strategy,'' will examine a critical issue for both our national
and economic security: What is the Federal Government's
strategy for addressing the shortfall of Americans with foreign
language proficiency?
The Federal Workforce Subcommittee has been looking at the
Federal Government's ability to recruit and retain language-
proficient individuals since the year 2000. For the last 6
years, I have tried along with colleagues on both sides of the
aisle to encourage the Administration to address the
government's foreign language needs.
It has become clear that while agencies can offer
incentives for individuals with language skills to work for the
Federal Government, it is increasingly more difficult to do so
when there is a severe shortage of language skills in the
American workforce. That is why today we are discussing the
Federal Government's efforts to address this challenge from all
fronts.
We know that proficiency in other languages is critical to
ensuring our national security. The inability of law
enforcement officers, intelligence officers, scientists, and
military personnel to interpret information from foreign
sources, as well as interact with foreign nationals, presents a
threat to their mission and to the well-being of our Nation.
I remember FBI Director Robert Mueller shortly after the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, making a plea for
speakers of Arabic and Farsi to help the FBI and national
security agencies translate documents that were in U.S.
possession but left untranslated because there were not enough
employees with the right language skills.
Unfortunately, this is not surprising. The United States is
well known for lagging far behind much of the world with
respect to emphasizing foreign language education.
According to the 2000 census, only 9.3 percent of Americans
speak both their native language and another language fluently,
compared with 56 percent of citizens in the European Union.
What is alarming is that 5 years after September 11, we are
still falling behind.
In December, the Iraq Study Group reported that of the
1,000 embassy employees in Baghdad, there were only 33 Arabic
speakers, of which only six are fluent, and recommend that
language proficiency and cultural training be given the highest
possible priority by the Director of National Intelligence and
the Secretaries of Defense and State.
However, strengthening national security should not be the
only reason for improving the country's language proficiency.
The basic economic and career security of many Americans is now
tied to foreign language capability.
Increased globalization allows Americans to compete for
jobs in a marketplace that is no longer confined to the
boundaries of the United States. One basic skill required to
thrive in this new economic environment is fluency in foreign
languages.
According to the Committee for Economic Development, the
lack of foreign language skills and international knowledge can
result in embarrassing and costly cultural blunders for
individual companies. In fact, American companies lose an
estimated $2 billion a year due to inadequate cultural
understanding.
Although the Federal Government has worked to address
language needs in the United States over the past 40 years,
these efforts appear to be in reaction to international events.
We do not have a proactive policy.
In 1958 the National Defense Education Act was passed in
response to the Soviet Union's first space launch. We were
determined to win the space race and make certain that the
United States never come up short again in areas of math,
science, technology, or foreign languages.
NDEA was a great success, but in the late 1970s its
language programs merged into larger education reform measures
and lost their prominence.
The results are clear. In 1979 the President's Commission
on Foreign Language and International Studies said that
``American's incompetence in foreign languages is nothing short
of scandalous and it is becoming worse.''
After September 11, Congress and the Administration once
again took action to address language shortfalls, but I fear
that these efforts will prove to be only a band-aid and not a
complete cure to the Nation's recurring foreign language needs.
To me the most interesting aspect of the problem is that
both the 1979 Commission and the participants of the 2004
Department of Defense National Language Conference called for
naming a senior government official to lead the government's
foreign language education effort and establishing a council or
commission representing a broad spectrum of stakeholders to
report on the Nation's language needs and propose actions to
address them.
In fact, both groups note that all interested parties must
be involved as all sectors, government, industry, and academia,
have a need for language-proficient individuals and no one
sector has all of the solutions.
Despite the Administration's efforts to implement new
programs and policies to address our language shortfalls, I
fear that without sustained leadership and coordinated effort
among all Federal agencies, State and local governments, the
private sector and academia, the United States will remain
where we are today: Scrambling to find linguists after another
major international event.
The United States cannot afford to do this and cannot
afford to wait. The failures of communication and understanding
would have already done their damage.
I am pleased that the Administration's National Security
Language Initiative is coordinating efforts among the
Intelligence Director and the Departments of Defense,
Education, and State to address our national security language
needs.
However, I believe we must ensure that this effort will
continue into future administrations, bring the advice of all
Federal agencies and stakeholders, and address our economic
security needs.
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses on how the
Administration is meeting these objectives and addressing our
broader language needs in both the short and long term. Only
through a coordinated plan of action and long-term leadership
will we accomplish our goal.
I now turn to my good friend, Senator Voinovich, for any
opening statement he would like to make. Senator Voinovich.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR VOINOVICH
Senator Voinovich. Thank you, Senator Akaka. I congratulate
you on being the Chairman of this Committee.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you.
Senator Voinovich. Senator Akaka and I worked together for
many years, and working together I am very proud that we have
made the most significant changes in the Title 5 of the U.S.
Code since 1978, with the hope of making our Federal workforce
competitive and, as Senator Akaka says, the workforce of
choice.
We are very concerned about U.S. competitiveness, and we
know that this subject today, ``Lost in Translation,'' is a
very serious issue and it has been kicking around for some time
and we are going to hopefully bring it to a head and make some
progress with it.
I want to thank all of the witnesses for joining us today.
I am especially pleased to welcome back Diane Birckbichler, who
is joining us from Ohio State University, my law school alma
mater. Dr. Birckbichler chairs the Department of French and
Italian and is also Director of the OSU Foreign Language
Center, which I am proud to note comprises one of the finest
language programs in the country.
The OSU Foreign Language Center includes the Chinese
Flagship Program, one of only nine advanced programs in the
Nation devoted to advanced instruction in critical languages.
This program is funded by the Department of Defense National
Security Education Program.
In September, I was pleased to announce a Federal grant
which will allow the Chinese Flagship Program to develop a
statewide system in Ohio of Chinese K-16 language programs
which will serve as the national model for State school
systems.
I was saying, Senator Akaka, to Dr. Birckbichler that I
have seven grandchildren, and I want to know about the
available language programs in Chinese because I would like
them to begin their language instruction early on.
The significance of foreign language skills to our national
security was emphasized after the terrorists attacks of
September 11. I must say that I was outraged when it was
announced that the U.S. Government needed people that could
speak Farsi and Arabic.
I was the Chief Commanding Officer of the Ohio National
Guard during Desert Storm. I would have thought that 10 years
after we were engaged in that effort that we would have been so
much farther ahead. Somebody in Washington, the State
Department, or Defense Department, should have realized, ``Hey,
we better get some people that know Arabic and Farsi.''
In response to that, Senator Akaka has pointed out that
this Subcommittee held a series of hearings on the needs of our
intelligence workforce, and we did pass the Intelligence Reform
and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004.
The legislation was aimed at improving the Federal
Government's ability to recruit and train skilled translators
and linguists to meet our national-security needs.
Several years later it is appropriate for Congress to take
stock of these efforts and monitor progress. At the same time,
the need to expand our knowledge of foreign languages, cultures
and regions extends well beyond the critical needs of our
national security force.
Without an educated applicant pool of Americans proficient
in critical foreign languages, we cannot meet the needs of our
21st Century workforce, nor can we maintain America's position
as a global leader.
One of the things that I keep talking about is that we are
in this unbelievably competitive environment and what we should
be doing is building the infrastructure of competitiveness so
that our children and grandchildren will be able to have the
same opportunities for our high standard of living. One of
those tools for competitiveness has to do with developing
foreign language skills.
According to the 2000 census--well, Senator Akaka gave you
the statistics on that. I will not repeat them.
Being able to share a spoken language means so much. I
speak [In Russian], and that is about all I can say. But it is
amazing to me when I travel abroad how flattered foreign
citizens are to even hear a few words of their native language.
It is a way of letting them know that you think enough of them
that you have made an effort to study Serbo-Croatian or Russian
or whatever.
I can imagine how much richer interpersonal connections
would be if we had more people that could speak foreign
languages. Even a lot of our people that represent us in the
State Department conduct U.S. affairs in countries and cannot
speak the language.
The need for improved language skills is not an abstract
deliberation. In order to maintain our competitive business
edge and keep our country safe, Americans must learn to be
global citizens and communicate effectively with other peoples
around the world.
I am deeply concerned that Americans are lagging behind
much of the world in crucial and critical foreign language,
cultural awareness, and geographic knowledge. This lag can
negatively impact our Nation in real ways, such as losing
valuable business opportunities overseas, and the competition
is keen; faulty intelligence from failing to properly translate
critical documents; or a misunderstanding in diplomatic
communications.
We had a recent hearing before the Foreign Relations
Committee and we were talking about troops operating in
Baghdad, and basically one of the witnesses says, ``These are
cabinieri,'' policemen in the neighborhoods.
And if they are going to be good cabinieri, they should be
able to speak the language; yet most cannot. And people get
information and they are not sure just what they are getting
and whether the translation is accurate and so forth.
It pains me to consider whether we could have been more
successful in winning the hearts and minds of people in Iraq,
preventing an insurgency had U.S. soldiers and diplomatic
personnel on the ground been able to communicate more
effectively in Arabic with Arab citizens. Senator Akaka pointed
out the statistics about how few people over in our embassy
there can speak fluently. Can you imagine how successful we
could have been if our soldiers could speak directly with the
foreign citizens they are trying to protect and did not have to
rely on translators?
Our success in public diplomacy has also been limited. The
image of the United States abroad is at stake and is lower than
any point in recent history. Just look at the studies by the
Pew Foundation. We sorely need to improve our ability to
communicate and connect with foreign audiences and explain
American identity, values, and ideals.
This country needs language and cultural expertise more
than ever before to combat the pervasive negative
misconceptions about America that have been created and spread
by our enemies in certain critical regions around the world.
I think the President understands this, and I commend him
for taking action by establishing the National Security
Language Initiative. I look forward to learning more about the
initiative from our first panel.
Each of us are gathered in this room today because we know
that raising the national level of foreign language proficiency
is absolutely critical to ensuring American national security
and economic vitality.
I look forward to a productive conversation about our
national strategy for achieving those goals, and I thank the
Chairman so very much for holding this hearing.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you very much, Senator Voinovich.
At this time I want to welcome to the Subcommittee our
witnesses, Michael Dominguez, Principal Deputy Under Secretary
of Defense for Personnel Readiness at the U.S. Department of
Defense; Holly Kuzmich, the Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary
Spellings at the U.S. Department of Education; and Everette
Jordan, Director of the National Virtual Translation Center.
As you know, it is the custom of the Subcommittee to swear
in all witnesses, and so I would like to ask all of you to
stand and raise your right hand.
Do you swear that the testimony you are about to give to
this Subcommittee is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth, so help you, God?
Mr. Dominguez. I do.
Ms. Kuzmich. I do.
Mr. Jordan. I do.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you. Let it be noted in the record
that the witnesses answered in the affirmative.
Mr. Dominguez, you may now proceed with your statement.
TESTIMONY OF HON. MICHAEL L. DOMINGUEZ,\1\ PRINCIPAL DEPUTY
UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE (PERSONNEL AND READINESS), U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Mr. Dominguez. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Senator
Voinovich. I am pleased to be able to appear before you today
to discuss the actions the Department of Defense is taking to
address the need for greater foreign language capability both
in our force and, through our involvement in the National
Security Language Initiative, in the Nation as a whole.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Dominguez appears in the Appendix
on page 39.
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My written statement goes into some detail about these
actions and I request that be entered into the record.
Chairman Akaka. It will be included in the record.
Mr. Dominguez. Thank you, sir. Some of the actions we have
taken, for example, are we made organizational and policy
changes to support foreign language improvement for the long
term. We reoriented our training to focus on the languages
critical to our success today and important for the future,
languages such as Arabic, Chinese, and Pashto.
For the first time we are conducting an assessment of the
language proficiency of our military and civilian personnel,
and we have increased our payment for maintaining those
language skills to encourage identification, sustainment and
development of those languages.
We are providing just-in-time basic instruction in language
and culture to our forces before they deploy. Our military
academies are expanding language programs, and we are expanding
the number of foreign area officers, our top-level
professionals who possess not only foreign language but
significant regional expertise.
But a very important point I wish to underscore today is
the Defense Department cannot meet the full set of our national
security needs solely though a strategy of teaching language to
people after they have joined us.
We believe that this country, which supplies us with the
people that we need, needs to rededicate itself to the study of
foreign languages so that people arrive in our workforce
already equipped with those skills.
A large part of our effort, therefore, has been reaching
out to universities, school systems and our sister Federal
agencies and to the American population to stimulate progress
in this area.
In January 2006, the President announced the National
Security Language Initiative, in which we joined with the
Department of State, Department of Education, and the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence in crafting an ambitious
national agenda designed to increase the number of Americans
speaking critical languages at advanced levels.
The Department committed funds in its fiscal year 2007
budget in support of our part of NSLI, and we embraced the
initiatives as part of our Quadrennial Defense Review.
With the support of our Defense Oversight Committees, I am
pleased to say that DOD is progressing toward the objectives
the President set for us in NSLI. Our partner agencies were not
so well supported, and those proposals deserve the Congress'
support and funding.
Mr. Chairman, we appreciate your interest in this important
area so vital to our national security and our future economic
development. Thank you.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you for your statement. Ms. Kuzmich,
please proceed with your statement.
TESTIMONY OF HOLLY KUZMICH,\1\ DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF FOR POLICY
AND PROGRAMS FOR SECRETARY OF EDUCATION MARGARET SPELLINGS,
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
Ms. Kuzmich. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Senator Voinovich.
Thanks for the opportunity to testify on behalf of the
Department of Education regarding our efforts to improve the
Nation's foreign language education, especially in critical-
needs languages.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Kuzmich appears in the Appendix
on page 61.
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You both talked about the critical needs that we have, so I
am not going to get into details on that. I am going to focus
on the things that we have done at the U.S. Department of
Education to start supporting foreign language education and to
work with our sister agencies.
When the Administration announced the National Security
Language Initiative in January 2006, it included $57 million in
initiatives at the Department of Education, and very briefly,
we had five different requests as part of that.
The first was a $24 million request for the Advancing
America Through Foreign Language Partnerships Program to allow
for the creation of continuous programs of study of critical-
need languages from kindergarten through university. This
program was modeled after the successful program at the
Department of Defense that they have started, their K-16
pipeline model.
We also included $24 million for the Foreign Language
Assistance Program, which provides incentives to school
districts and States to offer instruction in critical-need
foreign languages in elementary and secondary schools around
the country.
Because we also know, obviously, critical-need language
programs and language programs in general mean we need a supply
of teachers, we included $5 million for a Language Teacher
Corps, which would provide training to college graduates and
professionals with critical-need language skills who are
interested in becoming foreign language teachers.
We also included $3 million in funding for the Teacher-to-
Teacher Initiative to provide intensive summer training
sessions and online professional development for foreign
language teachers and $1 million for a nationwide E-Learning
Clearinghouse to help deliver foreign language education
resources to schools, teachers, and students across the
country.
This clearinghouse would provide a central repository for
schools, teachers, and the general public to find materials and
web-based programs and language programs from our National
Resource Centers, K-12 instructional programs, institutions of
higher education and agencies of the Federal Government.
While continuing to advocate for additional appropriations
for NSLI, we have also leveraged our existing foreign language
programs, and one of those examples is the Foreign Language
Assistance Program at the U.S. Department of Education.
During our 2006 grant cycle, we proposed to develop
projects that would establish, improve or expand foreign
language learning in grades K-12 in one or more of the
critical-need languages.
Of the 70 grants we made to school districts last fall, 57
address one or more of the critical-need languages for a total
of $32 million. We also gave four grants to States around the
country, and three of those address critical-needs languages.
Also, during fiscal year 2006, the Department conducted a
series of summer workshops through its Teacher-to-Teacher
Program to promotes best practices for foreign language
instruction with an emphasis on critical-need languages.
We brought together over 500 educators to share best
practices in two workshops, one in California and one in
Virginia, focused on Mandarin Chinese.
In the summer of 2007, we will expand the number of
workshops for foreign language teachers to four and the
languages will be focused on both critical-need languages and
commonly-taught languages in an effort to expand our reach.
Another way the Department is able to improve language
skills is through our Title VI Programs of the Higher Education
Act, the National Resource Centers where we are providing
incentives for them to reach out to the K-12 community.
NRCs are funded in a variety of world areas including
Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, East Asia, Southeast
Asia, Central Europe, Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America. And
in fiscal year 2006 we encouraged our grantees to consider the
NSLI goals as they launched their new projects.
In addition, the Department is undertaking a comprehensive
review of our Title VI Programs, our largest foreign-language
investment, to make sure they are meeting their purpose and
adequately preparing Americans for public service.
We also have a new program at the Department of Education
called the National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain
Talent Program, which we call the National SMART Grants. And
these provide an additional $4,000 to third and fourth year
Pell-eligible students to major in math, science, and critical
foreign language. And that is an exciting new program that we
have got going in the past year.
Most recently, Secretary Spellings along with Assistant
Secretary of State Dina Powell returned from leading a
delegation of U.S. university presidents, including the
President of Ohio State, on a three-country Asian tour to
highlight the United States as a premier destination for study
abroad.
That trip was a direct outcome of our January University
Presidents Summit that we hosted with the Secretary of State
where the President announced the National Security Language
Initiative.
In closing, NSLI has produced a unique collaboration among
Federal agencies. Having reached agreement on the importance of
foreign language acquisition and the goals of this initiative,
the agencies are working in a coordinated way to allocate
needed resources and implement the initiative, with each agency
concentrating on those activities and programs that best
utilize its existing expertise and relates to its individual
mission.
Thank you, and I would be happy to answer any questions.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you very much. Mr. Jordan, will you
proceed with your statement.
TESTIMONY OF EVERETTE E. JORDAN,\1\ DIRECTOR, NATIONAL VIRTUAL
TRANSLATION CENTER (NVTC), ON BEHALF OF THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF
INVESTIGATIONS
Mr. Jordan. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chairman Akaka and
Senator Voinovich. It is good to be here. I thank you for the
opportunity to speak to you about the National Virtual
Translation Center, which I am going to refer to as the NVTC
for the rest of my comments and discuss how we are assisting
the U.S. Government in meeting the translation needs and
requirements that are coming at us.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Jordan appears in the Appendix on
page 68.
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The NVTC was established 4 years ago through the House
Intelligence Authorization Act to create a cadre of translators
available anytime around the United States who could handle the
overflow of information from the U.S. Government.
We were here to augment existing resources and also build
the pool, make it get bigger and find the methods to do that,
use the possible means of training that is there, as well as
take advantage of people who do have skills already who are
perhaps leaving the government or maybe between jobs with good
skills but perhaps located outside of Washington, DC, and put
them to work, moving the work to the translator versus trying
to bring the translator to the work.
We were told to do a new thing in a new way. We were told
to be relevant, innovative, and creative, and we tried to do
that in putting the NVTC together.
We are an interagency organization made up of members of
the intelligence community at the leadership level whose job it
is to work as a business, a small business of the government,
if you will, in that we have to generate a client set, generate
a provider set, generate revenue and turn out a product. So we
are not like most government organizations.
We function to develop new policies, procedures and systems
for managing NVTC translation requirements and services. And we
have created a virtual information sharing architecture that
connects the translation tasks, the language resources and
linguists anywhere in the United States. We are seeking to
identify and utilize translation resources from the U.S.
Government, academia and private industry.
For instance, as a method of ensuring that the vital
language applicants to government agencies can be used while
their clearances and background investigations are taking
place, the NVTC has offered to bring these people aboard and
get them working on unclassified overflow material from any one
of its 42 intelligence community customers.
When the parent agency is ready to bring them on full time,
the NVTC releases them. This way the resources that the
government really wants to bring on and maintain are not lost
for waiting for their clearances or waiting for other accesses.
This is one of the ways that we are able to not lose the
resources that we have available to us.
I would also add that we support continued development and
fueling of proven human language technologies designed to help,
process and exploit foreign language data.
Most important is who we do this for. We do it for the 16
member agencies of the intelligence community. Those are the
major agencies. We work for approximately 42 distinct customers
within that agency set now.
It is very interesting. They are coming from all around the
intelligence community and their needs are quite varied, but
they require language translation skills at the highest level.
For us the issue is not so much the numbers of people; it
is an issue of quality. And the quality comes through training,
it comes through education, it comes through abilities that
have been first introduced, been practiced then tested and
tested again, then applied.
The NVTC works at the application layer. Our translators
learn their job as they do it. We provide feedback to them to
help them improve their skills. We feel that you just do not
automatically get good translators; you train good translators.
You work with them.
The National Security Language Initiative assists us in
bringing and providing a very good, rich pool of people who
have the language-skill training, the education from the
earliest ages on up to college. This is important for us
because we cannot do our jobs unless the foundation of the
education has been put there in the first place.
We partner well with non-government organizations such as
the American Translators Association and the National
Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators. These
are groups of people who are all around the country. Some of
them may not have worked for the U.S. Government before, but
they are willing to lend their skills to our needs.
We would use them in the case of our intelligence community
translations that might be required, but also in the event of
natural and national disasters that come up where they may be
able to help locally. We provide information on their
capabilities and ability to the local agencies that can provide
that assistance.
And so we partner with the Interagency Working Group on
Limited English Proficiency as well as the Red Cross and FEMA
to make sure that our translators can help end the national
need. This is one good way to help build and use the entire
pool.
We are a member of the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence and a member of the Foreign Language Executive
Committee that oversees the process and the progress made
towards foreign language policy within the intelligence
community.
For us it is about partnerships, it is about relationships,
and trying to make the best use of the resources that are there
as well as growing the pool for tomorrow's resources, and with
that, I will close.
I thank you for your time, and if you have any questions,
we would be happy to answer them.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you very much, Mr. Jordan. Thank you
all for your testimony.
We will have two rounds of questions. My first question
goes to Mr. Dominguez. I want to applaud DOD's work to address
the language needs of the military and civilian workforce in a
comprehensive manner.
Despite these efforts, however, the Iraq Study Group Report
said that there are still too few Arab-language-proficient
military and civilian officers in Iraq. What is the Department
doing to address this specific need?
Mr. Dominguez. Senator, we are doing a lot of things, but
the first caveat is that it takes a long time to build an
Arabic speaker if you are starting from scratch, so a lot of
our effort was associated with not starting from scratch.
I think the most exciting program that I would like to make
sure you are aware of is what the Army calls the 09L Program.
09L is a military occupational specialty that has been granted
to heritage speakers, the expatriates from the Arab world that
we are recruiting to bring into the individual ready reserve
with the prior agreement that they will be mobilized for 2
years and sent into the combat theater to work with our
maneuver forces right there.
That has been a wildly successful program. The volunteers
for that program love it, the commanders downrange love it. We
have got contracts to acquire interpreters and get those into
the fight in support of our troops.
We do some cultural prep training and some basic language
survival skills to every unit that is deploying. We try and
make sure that there are translators so there is reach-back
capability available to commanders.
On the other side in terms of just building capacity, we
have doubled the number of Arabic linguists, people studying
Arabic at the Defense Language Institute. It is up to about 900
to 1,000 people a year there.
More importantly, we have done this inventory of the people
in our workforce who have self-identified skills. We are now in
the process of having them tested to see what level of skills
they have so that we can make that inventory available to meet
the need in the theater.
And just looking at that without regard to what skill level
these people may have, we have more than 8,500 people self-
identified with some level of Arabic speaking skills in the DOD
workforce, military and civilian.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you. I just want to note at this
point that in World War II and particularly in the Pacific, the
military had what they called an ``MIS,'' which is the Military
Intelligence Service.
During that time, MIS trained Japanese-speaking and reading
troops, and it was very successful partly because many of the
Japanese in Hawaii knew Japanese, so that did not take that
long for them to learn. These individuals were deployed out
into the Pacific, and history tells us that World War II was
shortened by 2 years because of their work. That is really an
accomplishment.
I hope the military would continue this kind of effort:
That whenever our military action might require language needs
DOD would set up MIS's.
I do understand that you cannot teach language skills to
new troops overnight because you have to train them for other
things.
Let me ask the next question to Ms. Kuzmich. State and
local governments have great latitude in deciding whether to
include foreign language education in school curricula. What
can the Federal Government do to encourage foreign language
education in elementary and secondary schools when
administrators are focused on meeting the requirements of No
Child Left Behind?
Ms. Kuzmich. I think obviously one area where we have
already been putting a lot of focus on is our Foreign Language
Assistance Program and putting out model programs across the
country in foreign language instruction. You are right, the
Federal Government is only an 8 percent investor in education.
Chairman Akaka. I should say that you testified on some of
the programs that are in place now that have been successful.
Ms. Kuzmich. Correct. And one of the things we are trying
to do is incentivize through that program not just traditional
language programs but programs that can be models for other
districts that will provide online resources for a lot of areas
where they do not have as much access to foreign language
education.
One of the things we know is a school cannot teach foreign
language if they do not have the teachers to teach it, and so
that is partly why we are proposing the new Language Teacher
Corps and the new E-Learning Clearinghouse to be able to have a
central repository for a lot of the instructional materials
that are being developed across the country, especially in some
of these critical-need languages where there are not a lot of
resources and a lot of--district officials who are interested
in expanding programs in their community do not know where to
go to find them.
The other thing we are doing through our continued growth
in Teacher-to-Teacher is showing schools how to do foreign
language programs in their schools at the same time that they
are focusing on reading and math, which are obviously the goals
of No Child Left Behind.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you.
Mr. Jordan, you said that most of the members of the
intelligence community rely on linguists in their own agencies
first and that NVTC linguists are usually used when there is a
critical overload of intelligence, a tight deadline, or a
specific language need.
Mr. Jordan. Yes.
Chairman Akaka. Based on the requests you have received,
which agencies seem to have the greatest need for linguists in
their own agency?
Mr. Jordan. Right now we have both the National Security
Agency and the Department of Defense, those are the ones that
are greatest by work that comes to the NVTC, by far and away
the greatest need. Next comes the CIA, and they send a lot of
material to us that needs to be done in many different
languages.
We have found the need to be in 60 languages to date. It
was not our task to prepare for 60, but we have found through
our clients calling up asking for translation services it has
been 60 languages, and the major languages as well as the less
commonly taught languages in all different shapes and sizes of
the task itself. This has been a discovery for us from the
Defense Department as well as the intelligence community.
The type of language needs that there are do not so much
conform to what we consider to be Global War on Terrorism
languages. People who may tend to do harm to this country will
speak any language they feel like speaking to anyone else, and
it is up to us to find people with those language skills, at
the right depth of knowledge, to provide the service back to
our client.
Chairman Akaka. I would ask you about NVTC's capacity in
foreign languages. Would you be able to teach or translate any
language that is spoken or are you limited to 60?
Mr. Jordan. No, sir, to the first part. We are unable to
teach any language that there is. Our job is to respond to the
question at hand.
Most of the time, we do pretty well. We are able to find
people with the right skills. Sometimes finding the people with
the right skills is not so much a problem with a foreign
language as it is the English that the person possesses.
Their English may not be good enough to get information
into good idiomatic English for our customers, and so we have
taken steps especially working with the English Heritage
Language students at Georgetown and also at the University of
Washington, Seattle, to help them improve their English. As
they translate from the foreign language, we provide feedback
and guidance to them as to ``this is better put in English this
way.''
It is a way of trying to build the entire workforce from
the native speaker's standpoint as well as the non-native-
learner's standpoint.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you. Mr. Voinovich, do you have
questions?
Senator Voinovich. Thank you. As I mentioned in my opening
statement, improving the Federal Government's ability to meet
its human capital needs has been one of our top priorities of
this Subcommittee. And over the past several years, Senator
Akaka and I have worked together to produce significant reforms
of the Federal workforce.
Do you currently have the flexibilities you need to go out
and recruit individuals to come to work for you in this area or
are you thwarted by not having the flexibilities?
Mr. Dominguez. I will start. I think that our flexibilities
will be enhanced as we begin deploying or continue deploying
the National Security Personnel System, because there are
flexibilities that were incorporated into that legislation.
But I believe the other activity we have is through the
National Security Education Program where people go in and get
advanced skills in language and then come back seeking service
in the Federal Government as part of a program design. I think
that is of great benefit to us as well. So I do not know of
actually any impediments that would keep us from hiring
somebody.
There are some problems we are working with the
intelligence community on with regard to getting people their
clearances because people, particularly either heritage
speakers or people who have studied abroad, pose problems to
the traditional way the intelligence community would view them
in terms of being able to validate their security risk. But we
are working through the intelligence community with that right
now. It is a shared goal of streamlining that process.
Senator Voinovich. In other words, let us say that you are
out there looking for people to come to work for the State
Department or the Department of Defense. Can you go out into a
university, for example at Ohio State, and look at some
exemplary students there maybe in their sophomore year and say,
``We really like you and we would like you to think about
coming to work for the Federal Government when you graduate,''
and offer them any kind of incentives, say internships, so that
when they get out of school, they will go into your agencies?
Chairman Akaka. Mr. Jordan, you want to answer that from
your perspective?
Mr. Jordan. I also liked the first question too. As far as
recruiting, we try to go to the professional organizations and
go to their conferences where they have a lot of people who
have high-level skills that we are looking for.
Also, one of the hindrances to us is the U.S. citizenship
requirement in that we are required to only hire U.S. citizens.
Some of the people who could provide services to us may not be
U.S. citizens and some of the material I need to have done is
open-source unclassified material that they may do from home.
And so one of the impediments we have right now to really
opening up an entire--like 200,000 to 300,000 more people is
the citizenship requirement. Yes, of course, we would put them
through checks to make sure that they are who they say they
are, and we would also test their language skills, but I would
very much like to be able to use that pool as well.
Senator Voinovich. Are you precluded from hiring non-
citizens? Is it just a matter of security?
Mr. Jordan. At this time we are precluded from using them
because the requirements put on us is that all of our employees
must be U.S. citizens.
Chairman Akaka. Is that in the law?
Mr. Jordan. That is directive guidance from I guess in this
case would be our executive agent who is the FBI.
I need to be reminded on the second part of the question. I
want to make sure I have that right. The second part of your
question, sir?
Senator Voinovich. Are you able to bring them in, and do
you have a strategic human capital plan in place that you are
following right now?
Mr. Jordan. Yes, we do. We have put together a strategic
plan which we delivered to the Director of National
Intelligence as to how we will reach out around the country and
go into universities and work with actually the students in
particular, to send them open-source unclassified material
whereby as part of their classroom environment, they can work
on material that is real-world that requires translation and
return it to us.
The students work on it, the teacher grades it and sends us
back a completed copy. The student gets college credit for it,
but moreover, they get experience and exposure to our
standards, our quality issues, deadlines, time lines, methods
of doing this.
It does not matter to us so much where they go to work when
they graduate, but we are satisfied that they know how to do
translation work, that they understand the higher use of
language as it will be required by the U.S. Government.
We are very pleased with that approach. It is called the
Virtual University Translation Network, and we have been at it
for about 14 months now with universities around the country.
Kent State is one of the universities. My colleague, Galal
Walker, over at Ohio State, he and I have talked about it a
bit. He has the Chinese Flagship Program there.
I am also happy [in Russian] earlier, so thank you.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you. We had the General
Accountability Office's report in 2002 and they talked about
five agencies which could use human capital strategies to
address staffing and proficiency shortfalls, and that was the
Department of State, the Army, the National Security Agency,
the Foreign Commercial Service, and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
Is there now a written plan in each of the agencies to
increase foreign language skills? If we asked you to come into
our office and sit down and show us your plans that agencies
put in place as a result of the GAO report, would we be able to
see what kind of progress that you have made in those agencies
to implement the plans?
Mr. Jordan. Although I do not speak for the FBI, I can tell
you that the FBI representatives would be able to come in and
speak to you about the plan that they have put together.
Senator Voinovich. I think really it is important that
strategic plans have measurable benchmarks that allow you to
measure if progress is being made.
The other thing that came to my mind as you all three are
here sitting at the table is whether your agencies get together
to look at the big picture and see whether there is any
duplication and how you could coordinate better with your
respective responsibilities?
Ms. Kuzmich. We have. I will take that first. Obviously, in
putting together the National Security Language Initiative, we
started meeting the Departments of Education, State, Defense,
and the Director of National Intelligence most directly have
the pieces of the National Security Language Initiative.
But we started meeting almost 2 years ago and included even
other agencies within that to look at what programs do we
currently have at our agencies, where do we need to expand our
efforts and that is how we came up with our initiative, and why
at the Department of Education we are so focused on starting
the pipeline of getting speakers earlier so that when they
enter higher education they have already got a base of language
knowledge and can be proficient when they graduate and meet the
needs of the workforce in the Defense and State Departments.
Senator Voinovich. So the lightbulb went on and you said,
``Look if we are going to do this, we better get the Department
of Education and see if we cannot start working with them
because we are going to need the teachers and we are going to
need the students, and we better start early and we are looking
at the long-term picture.''
I would like you each to comment on if you had a magic
wand, what additional things could you be doing that you cannot
do currently because of resources?
And right now, Senator Akaka, we have this Continuing
Resolution. I just cannot believe it, because when I was a
mayor and a governor, if you did not pass the budget in your
appropriations, people would have recalled you. Yet here we are
in January and we are talking about a Continuing Resolution,
which from what I am picking up more and more from agencies is
really putting everybody in kind of an uncertain position about
whether or not they are going to be able to go forward with
their priorities.
But that being said, if you want to comment on it, you can,
and if you are unwilling to do that, I would like to know, if
you had your druthers, if you really wanted to do the job that
you would like to do, what resources would you need to make a
difference or do you feel that you are adequately funded right
now to get the job done?
The point is that so often we ask agencies to do things,
and then you do not get the resources to do them. And I am just
really interested to know, if you really wanted to increase
foreign language proficiency at your agencies and said, ``This
is something that really is needed,'' do you have the resources
currently to get that job done?
Mr. Jordan. Senator, let me leap in and say from the
Defense Department's point of view, I think we have made an
enormous effort and got enormous support from the Congress for
these resources.
Where I would say the marginal addition ought to be is the
Department of Education needs to take those K-16 pipelines and
expand them all over the country. The plan was for them to be
able to get to 100. I do not believe, and Ms. Kuzmich will be
able to address that, but I do not know that they will be able
to do that under a continuing resolution.
We need forums like this where we focus the national
attention on this challenge, and we need our business leaders
engaged in putting this on the agenda so kids know this is
important to them so they should study this because that is
where the jobs will be.
So I think we are doing what we can. I really am concerned
about the support my partner agencies need for the creative,
imaginative concepts they have come up with and our business
community is still not heavily engaged in the discussion.
Senator Voinovich. Have you ever brought this up with the
National Business Roundtable?
Mr. Dominguez. We are planning this year to do conferences
regionally around the flagship universities where we bring in
local governments and local businesses, again to start
generating some demand pull from that community.
Senator Voinovich. Ms. Kuzmich.
Ms. Kuzmich. You are right, Senator, we are under a
Continuing Resolution, so obviously we are doing as much as we
can with the programs we have right now. It would help if we
were able to get funding for the pieces we had included in our
budget last year.
But I do think we are doing a lot of other things with the
higher Education and K-12 community because we are a small
piece of the education funding stream in America. In colleges
and universities we have been working with our Title VI
institutions.
As I said, Secretary Spellings led a delegation of
university presidents. We have been encouraging them to think
more strategically about where they are focusing their dollars
and what programs they are spending them on. So I think it is a
partnership there.
Senator Voinovich. Any other comment, because I am running
out of my time.
Mr. Jordan. Also on funding, it would be fantastic for
sustained, long-term funding across fiscal years would be very
good because short-term, one-year money does not always help us
put the programs together that we need for the long-term
outcome.
Working with the business community, I have found in my
discussions with Boeing and also with Disney, a lot of the
times they just reach out to a local company who may be able to
provide services, and the training of their executives has been
of secondary concern in that they did not necessarily see the
need to train their executives because they would only be in a
country for 2 or 3 years and then out.
So spending 2 or 3 years to teach them the language then
putting them there for a short period of time was not
necessarily as cost-effective as just hiring local assistance.
One of the problems that we have in getting the buy-in from
the business community is for them to see the vision, for them
to see how it is important to have that very good language
capability within their own staffs and to take the time to
develop their workforce that as they go either nationwide or
internationally that they are able to reach out and do business
in certain communities and at the government leadership level
wherever with people who are skilled and are trained and are
comfortable with the language skills.
So this is a challenge still to us we engage regularly, and
they do come to our conferences now because they see that
language is something not just easily done. It takes time, it
takes study, it takes education and practice.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you very much, Senator Voinovich. I
would like to direct this question to Mr. Dominguez. Last year
David Chu, the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and
Readiness, invited the Chief Human Capital Officers to join DOD
in building the Language Corps.
In what ways has OPM, as well as the CHCO Council, been
involved in working with Federal agencies to address the
Federal Government's foreign-language needs?
Mr. Dominguez. Other than the discussions that Mr. Chu has
with the Chief Human Capital Officers and the staff dialogue
that we have with several agencies about this Language Corps
that we are trying to build, the Civilian Language Reserve
Corps, I do not know of anything concretely.
One of the problems that you run into here is that outside
of the intelligence agencies there are some narrow positions in
the DOD. Civilian jobs in particular are not written as they
must require this language skill, and so unless it is an
interpreter or an intelligence analyst or something, that skill
is not really a big piece of the way agencies viewed their
missions in the past.
Now as we engage and support each other, interagency
support, to be able to reach out and do the kind of work that
is required in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Horn of
Africa, where you are helping locals establish the rule of law
and build institutions to deliver services to people and create
credibility and we need to then tap into those skills.
Then language is an additional duty requirement, but it was
not what we hired the person for and you will not find it in
the position description. So we are working through those
challenges now of trying to find out how to define the
requirement in our workforce for languages.
I think we are going to end up moving away from position-
based and more to inventory. We need a bunch of petroleum
engineers who also can speak Farsi and we need to find
mechanisms to reach out and grab them from their full peacetime
jobs and engage them when we need them when a provincial
reconstruction team is being assembled by the State Department
to help one of our partner countries.
So there is a lot of talk and dialogue in trying to figure
out how to do this, but there is some heavy lifting yet in
front of us on this.
Chairman Akaka. My reason for asking that is to find out
whether there were ways in which these agencies and departments
coordinated their efforts of trying to find language speakers.
Let's say, OPM gets a request from DOD that it needs a certain
kind of language. Could OPM reach out into the Federal
workforce and find someone to help DOD temporarily?
Mr. Dominguez. Right. Senator, we are trying to build that
kind of capability within the Defense Department, and we are in
dialog with our partner agencies on those same kind of
capabilities.
Again, the provincial reconstruction teams that are part of
the President's strategy in Iraq, for example, are very
definitely interagency challenges, and so we will need these
kind of capabilities.
Chairman Akaka. And that speaks to what you said that often
you do not have people and you do not have the time to teach
them.
Mr. Dominguez. Right.
Chairman Akaka. If you have somebody in the workforce in
other places that may be able to do that.
Mr. Dominguez. Absolutely.
Chairman Akaka. Now, let me ask you another question, Mr.
Dominguez. I thought the white paper was extremely effective on
laying out the critical steps needed to address the Nation's
shortfall on language skills.
The first recommendation calls for strong and comprehensive
leadership; specifically, a national language strategy to be
developed and implemented by the National Language Director and
for a Coordination Council to coordinate implementation of the
strategy.
Do you agree with this recommendation and is such a
leadership structure in place today?
Mr. Dominguez. Senator, I agree that this is an interagency
challenge, that the Federal Government has to work together. As
I have said, I want the Department of Education's programs to
succeed, so that is an illustration of how important the
interagency aspect of it coordinated across the Federal
Government action.
Now, I believe that we are doing those things. We are
talking to each other. We are working together so whether it is
the Chief Human Capital Officers talking about how to get
language capabilities into the Federal workforce or it is the
people who are working the National Security Language
Initiative coordinating their activities, those kind of
activities are on-going.
This white paper did a great thing in being the cause to
bring us together to begin those discussions to begin
aggressively working together.
I would not, however, accept that one way to do it is the
only way to do it. They offered a structure, but that is only
one way to get the job done. The important thing is the
outcome, the achievement, agencies working together and moving
the Nation forward that way. I believe that is happening.
Chairman Akaka. Can you tell me who is in charge of NSLI?
Mr. Dominguez. I would say it is a collective
responsibility monitored by the Domestic Policy Council that
the President has assembled would be my answer to that.
Chairman Akaka. And finally, before I turn to Senator
Voinovich, Mr. Dominguez, what steps are being taken to sustain
and institutionalize continued leadership in language education
in future administrations to look ahead?
Mr. Dominguez. Sir, at least in the Defense establishment,
we have identified senior language authorities across the
Defense Department, and there is one in my shop.
This will be a long and continuing and compelling need in
the national security business. So we are not going to stop
screaming that this country has to take language seriously and
we have to take language seriously because it is a critical
skill now to success on the battlefield.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you very much. Senator Voinovich.
Senator Voinovich. I would like you to go back to your
respective offices and give me a list of things that, if we
could do them, it would enhance your ability to do what we are
asking you to do with the idea that there are some things that
Senator Akaka and I can do in this Subcommittee to help you.
For example, this citizenship requirement, I think that is
something we ought to look at.
I would assume that the fact that we are doing such a lousy
job on security clearances is also a problem? What bothers me
is a Federal agency hires somebody to come in and work, but
then they say to that individual, ``Hey, you cannot go to work
until you get your clearance.''
And security clearances have been on the GAO High Risk List
now since 1990, and our Subcommittee is trying to work on that.
But the neat thing is that it appears that, at the NVTC, you
are able to provide temporary employment to language skilled
individuals while they await their clearance.
Is there kind of like Defense wants to hire an individual
but must wait until he or she has the proper clearance, and do
you then find translation work for them at NVTC so we can at
least utilize them in the meantime?
Because if I am going to hire somebody and then I tell
them, ``I am sorry, but you really cannot go to work for 6
months,'' they say, ``Bye.'' Is that going on now?
Mr. Jordan. This is in its very early stage, meaning within
the last 4 weeks that we decided to do this. It is all quite
informal. We would call and ask.
So far the NVTC has approached one of the major agencies to
see if this is possible and that agency says, ``Yes, it is very
possible.'' We just happen to do it because we are in the
language business.
The same may be possible with analysis or any other type of
skill that the government needs that can be done not
necessarily onsite. It can be done in an area whereby you send
the information in, you start training the people in the
skills. So right now it is quite informal but it is quite
possible.
Senator Voinovich. I would like you to think about it and
get back to me on it because I think that this might be a way
of saying to somebody, ``OK, we cannot put you on the payroll
yet, but we can temporarily employ you at MVTC where you can
work on translating and you have got a job.''
Mr. Jordan. This is possible, yes, definitely.
Senator Voinovich. That way, an individual will be there
while we try to adjudicate their security clearances.
The other thing that I am interested in is, for example,
Ohio State has a great language program. Does this type of
consideration impact where you focus your K-12 efforts?
In other words, we have an emergency here. I keep thinking
about how do we get this going, and are you looking to States
where you have got low-hanging fruit? In other words, you have
good language universities, so that kids can have incentive to
study language in primary and secondary school and they know
they can continue at the university level.
Ms. Kuzmich. I think one of the biggest areas where we
would like to expand that my colleague talked about is this K-
16 partnership model that the Department of Defense has
started.
We know that, I think, learning lessons that they have
already learned, the places we would most likely go first are
our strong Title VI centers, our flagship programs where they
have significant capabilities already at the higher education
level to start pushing those language programs down into the K-
12 level.
So we have always talked to that community and we know they
would be most likely to be the first ready to sign up and able
to push these programs farther down.
Senator Voinovich. I understand DOE did not budget money to
conduct your survey of foreign language education.
Ms. Kuzmich. The Clearinghouse?
Senator Voinovich. Yes. I guess you did not get any money
in 2006.
Ms. Kuzmich. We are under a CR.
Senator Voinovich. OK. You think that is important, we
should fund that so you have got a baseline to know where you
are starting from.
Ms. Kuzmich. Yes.
Senator Voinovich. But the point I am making is, can you
look at the schools that are really doing a terrific job, and
say, ``By golly, they are the ones that we ought to really
start concentrating on right now,'' because the possibility of
generating fluent language speakers from them is greater than
just widely distributing resources and saying, ``Well, we are
going to fund them all.'' Are you doing any of that?
Ms. Kuzmich. Hopefully if we get additional resources and
are able to start some of these programs, that would happen
during our grants process.
Normally, the way that they have to write grant
applications is to put down their efforts that they have
already made and give us the most serious and most capable
people are usually the ones that rise to the top. So that is
likely to happen if we get this program funded in the future.
Senator Voinovich. OK. I think, Senator Akaka, we both have
a vote.
Chairman Akaka. Yes. We have 3 minutes left.
Senator Voinovich. I have no other further questions.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you very much. Let me say thank you
to our witnesses, and I want you to know we look forward to
working with you on improving the foreign language capacity of
the Federal Government. I want to thank you for your testimony
this morning.
I would also like to note for the record that the
Department of Labor was invited to testify today but declined
the invitation stating that the Department has not been active
in reviewing the American workforce language needs or its own
needs.
So with that I want to dismiss this panel, and I am going
to call for a recess of about 15 minutes and we will have the
second panel when we return.
Thank you very much.
[Recess.]
Chairman Akaka. This hearing will come to order.
I would like to welcome our second panel, Rita Oleksak,
President of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign
Languages; Michael Petro, Vice President and Director of
Business and Government Policy for the Committee for Economic
Development; and Dr. Diane Birckbichler, Director of the
Foreign Language Center at Ohio State University.
I welcome all of you. As you know, it is a custom of this
Subcommittee to swear in all witnesses, and I would like to ask
you to stand and raise your right hand.
Do you swear that the testimony you are about to give
before this Subcommittee is the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth, so help you, God?
Ms. Oleksak. I do.
Mr. Petro. I do.
Ms. Birckbichler. I do.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you. Let me start in the order of the
way in which I introduced you and ask you to proceed with your
statement. Thank you, Ms. Oleksak.
TESTIMONY OF RITA OLEKSAK,\1\ PRESIDENT, AMERICAN COUNCIL ON
THE TEACHING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES
Ms. Oleksak. Chairman Akaka, and Ranking Member Voinovich,
thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Oleksak appears in the Appendix
on page 72.
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ACTFL supports the premise you so eloquently stated in your
letter inviting us to testify: That the national security and
economic vitality of the United States and the basic career
security of many American citizens is now tied in large part to
our foreign language capability.
We believe this capability is in dire need of
strengthening. Indeed, the United States suffers from a
language deficit because our country has failed to make
language learning an important part of every child's education.
ACTFL and the language teaching profession support initial
efforts by the government to address this language deficit
through proposals made by the Department of Defense following
its 2004 National Language Conference, as well as their Defense
Language Transformation Roadmap.
We also support the President's National Security Language
Initiative, but the lack of authorizing legislation has
resulted in an incomplete plan, duplication of efforts, and an
unequal emphasis on the importance of the initiative within the
various agencies.
While the Department of Education has redirected some of
its existing resources, it, too, does not have the authorizing
legislation it needs to implement all of the education-based
activities envisioned by NSLI.
The initiatives and funding from the Departments of Defense
and State are welcomed, but for the long term, we do not
believe that it makes sense for the National Security Agency
and the Director of National Intelligence to run teacher
training and summer youth programs.
Just as the military has its Defense Language
Transformation Roadmap, we need a similar roadmap for a
comprehensive and coordinated plan to expand and strengthen
school-based foreign language education in the United States.
The goals of achieving a language-trained military and
language-qualified personnel in embassies around the world will
fail unless strong support is provided to our Nation's K-20
foreign language education infrastructure.
ACTFL offers the following recommendations to strengthen
the foreign language capabilities of our Nation:
One, ensure that all languages are supported in our
educational system, not just the languages that are deemed
critical for today. Since research supports the notion that
after learning a second language, a third and a fourth language
come more easily.
It is important to support any language that a school
system considers important for its community and for which
teachers are available.
Two, encourage and support the creation of articulated,
continuous sequences of language courses beginning in the
earliest grades and continuing through college with immersion
and language study abroad as key components.
Three, include funding for the development of a consistent
program of assessment starting in the earliest grades to
measure student progress towards proficiency in foreign
languages.
Four, since learning a foreign language increases
performance in other core subject areas, make foreign languages
truly part of the core curriculum in every school.
Five, provide assistance to community colleges and
universities offering specialized foreign language instruction
focused on combining language instruction with other majors and
for special purposes such as law enforcement, healthcare, and
first responders.
Six, provide incentives to enhance teacher recruitment and
retention, such as loan forgiveness, and ensure teacher quality
through teacher education and certification process.
Seven, require intensive training for teachers recruited
from abroad so they understand how to teach in American schools
and provide professional development for teachers currently in
their classroom on how to incorporate standards-based teaching
into the curriculum.
Eight, develop the skills of our heritage language speakers
by encouraging the continued learning of their native language
as well as English.
Nine, fund research into a wide range of areas including
enrollments, best practices, and longitudinal studies to
examine the effects of language education on cognitive
development as well as the academic and career success of
students.
And finally, 10, provide funding for public education
initiatives, such as ``Discover Languages . . . Discover the
World!'' campaign. Policymakers and business leaders need to
support efforts to change public attitudes towards foreign
language learning.
In summary, we need a coordinated plan and funding of
Federal legislation to strengthen foreign language education
and enable us to provide the linguistic capabilities so
desperately needed by government agencies and the workforce in
general.
ACTFL and the language profession stand ready to assist
Congress in developing this plan in order to achieve a
multilingual citizenry, thereby strengthening our national
security and securing our leadership role in a global economy.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you for your testimony. Mr. Petro,
you may proceed with your testimony.
TESTIMONY OF MICHAEL PETRO,\1\ VICE PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR OF
BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT RELATIONS AND CHIEF OF STAFF, COMMITTEE
FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Mr. Petro. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Voinovich, and
Members of the Subcommittee. I want to thank you for inviting
me to testify at today's hearing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Petro appears in the Appendix on
page 87.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am speaking on behalf of the Committee for Economic
Development, a nonpartisan public policy organization comprised
of over 200 business leaders and university presidents
throughout the country.
CED has been providing a business perspective on public
policy issues for almost 65 years. CED was formed in the 1940s
when our business trustees participated in discussions on how
to move the country from a wartime to a peacetime economy.
CED's first policy study became the blueprint for the
Marshall Plan. In fact, CED's first chairman, Paul Hoffman, CEO
of Studebaker became the first administrator of the Marshall
Plan.
Today what I would like to do is briefly highlight a CED
study released last year entitled, ``Education for Global
Leadership: The Importance of International Studies and Foreign
Language Education for U.S. Economic and National Security.''
CED has long been a business voice for education reform and
globalization. From preschool to higher education, CED
recommendations have called for reform of our school system to
prepare today's children to become tomorrow's educated
workforce. CED's work on globalization has called for
enhancement of education and training of the workforce to
maintain U.S. competitiveness.
As we all know, the education reform movement of the 1980s
and 1990s urged greater focus on standards and accountability
in our schools, particularly in subjects such as reading,
science, and mathematics. At the same time, globalization of
the world's economies has created a host of distinctly new
demands on our workforce, our citizens, and our students.
CED is concerned that the recent trend in these two policy
areas may be pulling us in opposite directions. Full
participation in this new global economy will require not just
competency in reading, science, and math but also a proficiency
in foreign languages.
In addition, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and their
aftermath remind us of the need for the study of the less-
commonly-taught critical languages that are crucial to national
security, such as Arabic, Persian, Farsi, Chinese, Hindi,
Korean, and Japanese.
Unfortunately, some school districts have shifted resources
away from foreign language instruction in recent years in order
to concentrate on teaching the subjects that require testing
under No Child Left Behind, and this trend must be reversed.
The study of foreign languages must figure prominently in
the overall effort to improve educational outcomes through
standards and assessment. CED recommends that high school
graduates should be required to demonstrate proficiency in at
least one foreign language.
Meeting this challenge will require a concerted and
coordinated effort among all levels of government as well as
the private sector.
CED recommends an expansion of the foreign language
training pipeline at every level of education. This will
require an intensified focus from the Federal Government as
well as additional resources to support partnerships between
higher education institutions, State governments, local school
systems, and the business community.
Federal language initiatives should encourage States and
local school districts to implement language programs in
elementary grades and offer more advanced language classes in
middle schools and high schools.
Strengthening the teacher training and professional
development is another critical factor in improving foreign
language studies. Higher education institutions should partner
with State and local education systems to provide professional
development in foreign language instruction.
I want to conclude in encouraging coordination among all
levels of government, higher education institutions, and the
private sector.
I want to let this Subcommittee and the folks here know
that CED is about to launch an endorsement campaign where we
send letters out and communicate to our 200 trustees asking
them to publically endorse the CED recommendations. In
addition, we will ask them to reach out to their colleagues in
business and get them to publically endorse these
recommendations.
This campaign will take a few months, but once this group
is ready to get together, this partnership, I think, will be
key in playing a role to continue the support of these vital
programs.
So I am here to answer any questions and I thank you for
inviting me.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you for your testimony. Dr.
Birckbichler.
TESTIMONY OF DIANE W. BIRCKBICHLER, PH.D.,\1\ DIRECTOR, FOREIGN
LANGUAGE CENTER AND CHAIR, DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN,
OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
Ms. Birckbichler. Certainly. Chairman Akaka and Senator
Voinovich, I want to thank you for holding this hearing dealing
with the Federal Government's efforts to develop our national
capacity in foreign languages.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Birckbichler appears in the
Appendix on page 91.
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I am also pleased to be part of a panel that represents
multiple stakeholders in the language learning enterprise, a
clear indication that cooperation and collaboration are
essential in our collective futures.
As already indicated by other people testifying, the
language profession and the Federal Government have begun to
respond to the task of preparing a global-ready citizen
equipped with professional-level language and culture skills.
Major changes have occurred in our language programs over
the past several decades that make language learning and
language teaching more congruent with the goals of this panel.
Gone are classrooms where students learn through grammar
translation and through dialogue memorization, a hallmark of a
popular methodology in the 1960s.
Today's students learn in classrooms where their
performance is linked to nationally-accepted norms for levels
of language proficiency such as the Foreign Service Institute
or the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.
Today's students learn in classrooms where the focus is no
longer exclusively on literature but has expanded to include
history, culture, economics and mass media, to give a few
examples. With increasing frequency, today's students
participate in longer-articulated sequences of language
instruction.
Today's students are encouraged, as our panelists have
already indicated, to go beyond basic requirements and work
toward advanced levels of language and culture proficiency
whether through longer periods of study, intensive language
courses, or studying abroad.
This substantial progress that the language profession has
made owes much to initiatives and programs sponsored by the
Federal Government, among them the National Security Language
Institute, Title VI programs that were talked about earlier,
the National Flagship Initiatives have been essential, and I
would like to single out the Partnership for Public Service, a
very successful collaboration of the Federal Government, a
private foundation and academia.
In light our new curricula, strong State and Federal
support, the advocacy of organizations such as the Committee
for Economic Development, the foreign language community
recognizes that much progress has been made; at the same time,
we realize that much work still needs to be done to create a
language-ready workforce for the future.
I would like to suggest the following, and some of them
will repeat what my colleagues on this panel have said and what
has been said earlier.
We need continued funding of language programs that offer
longer-articulated sequences of foreign language instruction
and which clearly and unequivocally target the development of
advanced language skills. The National Flagship Programs in the
critical languages serve as models in this area.
We do, however, need additional funding opportunities to
support extended sequences in both commonly and less-commonly
taught languages to build a strong infrastructure in all of the
languages that we teach in our K-16 curriculum.
As we develop and implement longer sequences of language
study, we need to ensure funding of programs that develop a
corps of qualified language teachers, particularly in the
critical languages, where a teacher infrastructure needs to be
established. The State of Ohio's House Bill 115 funding of
alternative licensure programs is an excellent example of the
support needed in this area.
We need continued Federal support for study abroad programs
where language and culture skill development are integral to
the program; that is to say where the programs take place in
the foreign language and not in English.
The benefits of study abroad are too numerous to mention
here, but a recent finding of a study by the Institute of
International Education of Students quoted in a report of the
Commission on the Abraham Lincoln Study Abroad Fellowship
Program is noteworthy. Eight percent of the respondents said
that study abroad allowed them to acquire skill sets that were
important to their careers, and this is added to the many
benefits of study abroad.
We will need continued advocacy for foreign languages by
the Federal Government, by State Governments, and by
educational and business organizations to make foreign
languages part of the core curriculum and one of our basic
educational skills.
When asked about the President's National Security Language
Initiative, one Midwestern superintendent replied that we would
be better off focusing on more ``meat and potatoes'' subjects.
This comment gets to the core of the problem: Foreign languages
need to be part of the core. Languages need to be considered
``meat and potatoes,'' an essential part of the educational
meal and not just a tasty dessert.
Finally, we need to develop a national language policy that
clearly emphasizes the importance of foreign language to our
collective interests. A policy that calls for the development
of advanced skills with longer sequences of language
instruction and a policy that clearly establishes foreign
language as a basic component of a core curriculum at all
levels of instruction.
Thank you for giving me this opportunity.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you very much, Dr. Birckbichler. I
was glad to hear of some of the programs that you have. I was
pleased to see that the Partnership for Public Service and Ohio
State joined together to hold a foreign language career day.
Ms. Birckbichler. Right.
Chairman Akaka. Can you share with us a little more about
that event and how it was viewed by students in attendance?
Ms. Birckbichler. OK. I can do that. And let me also say
that in November, I think it was, at least it was in the fall
quarter, in collaboration with the Partnership for Public
Service, we had a campus-wide Federal career day, attended by
1,300 students and represented by 55 agencies.
The student reaction to the foreign language career day was
excellent. We had over 200 students, which is really a large
number of students, and I think what is significant is the next
day when several of the agencies had special briefing sessions,
they were very well-attended. Thirty and 40 students attended
them.
So we had a very positive reaction, and the positive
reaction was that our students did not know that these
opportunities existed. They were very much taken by the
incentives, the pay incentives, and so we felt that this
opportunity gave our students--this is another pipeline to the
Federal Government. Very well received.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you for that. Ms. Oleksak, you
testified that efforts to encourage programs to study critical
need languages should not be at the expense of current programs
that are teaching languages such as French, German, and
Spanish.
Ms. Oleksak. Yes.
Chairman Akaka. Could you elaborate on the importance of
continued Federal support for those languages?
Ms. Oleksak. Absolutely it is imperative, and I am going to
bring it back to a local level because I am the Foreign
Language Director in Glastonbury, Connecticut Public Schools
where we have a 50-year history of elementary foreign language
program. We are also bringing in Chinese currently at our high
school. We are hoping to run a summer camp in Chinese as a way
to influence the program.
And we are also looking at the elementary school where we
teach about China in third grade as part of Social Studies, but
we are doing that in a very delicate way because we also offer
Russian, Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish. And our program is
grades 1-12 Spanish. Our students build upon the Spanish to
learn a second foreign language and then a third foreign
language.
It is a delicate balance that you have to have a
conversation with in your communities, what is the need of your
community for language learning.
We have a website and on our website for our foreign
language program we have a link to alumni where they talk about
how they have used their languages, all the languages that we
teach, in a variety of ways, whether it is for business or
government, we have some that have gone in the foreign service.
So I think that the word is a delicate balance and the need
will be we have to continue the funding for all languages
because today's critical need will not be the same need next
year and we will always need, as was said earlier in testimony,
for interpreters in many languages.
Chairman Akaka. I was interested in your 10-point program
that you mentioned and wish you well on that.
Mr. Petro, both you and Mr. Dominguez from DOD testified
about the need for business to be involved in supporting
foreign language education programs.
What is the business community doing to support foreign
language programs and how can we increase these efforts?
Mr. Petro. Senator, I think they are probably not doing
enough. I would argue, though, that there are reasons to be
optimistic. I think there are several large companies around
the country that have started to compensate their employees for
learning foreign languages. I believe they are Proctor and
Gamble, IBM, and Intel. I know that, for instance, the CEO of
UPS, Michael Eskew, has been quite eloquent in speaking on
behalf of increased funding for these programs.
However, what CED is doing and what I had mentioned earlier
in my testimony is really informing, engaging, and mobilizing
business leaders around this issue. Since so much of this is
about money, when legislators hear from large employers that
this is an issue of concern, when they see an op-ed from a CEO,
it is a different player in this issue. All of a sudden it
turns heads and it says, ``Oh, my goodness, those people
represent voters, those people represent a large part of the
population.''
So it is really sort of informing business but also
mobilizing them and giving them things to do and that is what
CED's role is and that is the way we view the things that we
can add to this debate.
Chairman Akaka. Dr. Birckbichler, you testified that the
United States needs a national language policy.
Ms. Birckbichler. Yes.
Chairman Akaka. Can you discuss what is lacking in our
current efforts and what should be included in any language
policy?
Ms. Birckbichler. What is lacking is that if there is one,
its not very well known. It is not. There are bits and pieces,
and one could pull together what we think is the national
language policy. The National Security Language Initiative
(NSLI), there are all sorts of initiatives that work around
languages, that relate to languages, but what I would like to
see is a very strong policy that says the United States of
America is committed to developing a global-ready workforce
equipped with professional-level language and culture skills
and that in order to do this, we need to do the following: We
need advanced language skills, we need longer sequences, and we
need to be in the core curriculum.
I truly believe that not being in the core curriculum is
one of the things at least in the K-16 language programs is
what holds us back. We do not need to be left behind, and as
long as we are not in the core, we continue to be left behind.
We are put aside because there are proficiency tests that need
to be taken, but they are not foreign language proficiency
tests.
So that is what I would like to see, and I would like to
see that policy developed by the Federal Government, by the
business community, by language professionals, by
representatives from K-16.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you very much. My time has expired.
Senator Voinovich.
Senator Voinovich. I thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Usually when people exert effort, they have to be
motivated, and would you like to each comment quickly on the
fact that today more countries around the world are teaching
English, and that as a result of that there seems to be a
lessening in people's heads of the need to develop foreign
languages here?
There was a day when you had to learn French or you had to
learn German, you had to learn another language, but today I go
to international conferences and everybody speaks English. It
seems to me that part of the reason why businesses and others
are not motivated to learn a foreign language is because they
figure they do not have to do it and they will save the cost
and effort.
Ms. Oleksak. I would be happy to talk about that because I
think what is so important for us to keep in mind is that
learning a language is more than just learning to communicate
in that language, but it is learning to understand the culture
as well. And when I say ``culture,'' I think about not only the
products that are in existence but the practices and the
perspectives.
And I think that in learning about the culture, which is a
part of learning another language, about the people and the
community in which they live, would help us have a much better
understanding on both an education level and also on a
government level and on a security level.
Senator Voinovich. What are the average curriculum
requirements? Now, for instance in Ohio, the governor finally
adopted more math and science, but they kind of punted on
languages and said, ``We want to study it.''
No Child Left Behind does not really emphasize languages.
Universities, undergraduate schools, liberal arts, in order to
get a degree in the old days at least you had to have 2 years
of a language to graduate. What I am trying to say that some of
the motivation here has got to do with requirements.
Ms. Oleksak. And if I can continue, I would say that on a
couple of factors to address your question that is why we need
a coordinated effort, and I went so far as to say K-16 that on
the opposite from the first panel instead of looking from the
top down, in our district in Glastonbury I could say from the
bottom up. I would like to see people come down and talk to our
juniors and seniors and encourage them in high school to move
on to college programs.
Senator Voinovich. Do you have AP courses?
Ms. Oleksak. Yes, we do.
Senator Voinovich. Are any of your kids who are taking AP
courses taking languages?
Ms. Oleksak. Yes.
Senator Voinovich. They are?
Ms. Oleksak. Yes. And actually, we have some students that
are taking as many as two AP language courses at the same time,
sometimes three. I can say that we have to work with parents
and families to talk about a skill set, a language as a skill
set to help them.
And one of my 10 points that I talked about the opportunity
of combining with another career and language is the value-
added piece of success in the future in a global economy.
Senator Voinovich. OK. Mr. Petro.
Mr. Petro. When it starts to affect the bottom line, that
is when people notice. And what I would argue is that
technological advances and lower trade barriers have paved the
way, as we all know, for lesser-developed countries to compete
in the marketplace and that affects the bottom line.
Ms. Oleksak mentioned about international knowledge. I want
to read something from the CED report that Microsoft
Corporation developed a time zone map for its Windows 95
operating system. It inadvertently showed the region of Kashmir
lying outside the boundaries of India. India banned the
software and Microsoft was forced to recall 200,000 copies of
the offending product. That cost money.
So what I would argue is it is the bottom line, and I do
think business is starting to see that. And I agree when you go
to these conferences, everyone is speaking English, but I think
it is deeper than that and I think especially with these
developed countries entering into the fray, it is starting to
change some views on that.
Ms. Birckbichler. I think it is a very naive assumption on
the part of businesses, and I am really kind of shocked that
they continue to have that, that all business is done in the
boardroom. All business is not done in a boardroom or in the
scientific lab. So much of business takes place, at least in
many cultures, outside of that formal business environment. So
that combined with the compelling economic arguments, I think,
would go a long way to convincing some people.
Senator Voinovich. Mr. Petro, in your testimony you noted
the intense global competition facing American businesses and
emphasized a need to address 21st Century economic challenges
with employees who possess knowledge of foreign languages and
cultures. Yet even many of our Nation's finest business schools
continue to lack foreign language requirements and much of our
corporate workforce lacks foreign language skills or cultural
awareness.
Your committee reports that American companies lose and
estimated $2 billion a year due to inadequate cross-cultural
guidance for their employees in multi-cultural situations.
Do you have specific examples of those costly blunders or
lost opportunities that maybe Senator Akaka and I could
communicate to the National Business Roundtable?
Mr. Petro. Yes. I can certainly provide them from this
Subcommittee. I do not have them right here in front of me. I
would say that, as I mentioned earlier, university presidents
are part of CED, and we do have some of the great business
schools on board with us and we have talked to them about the
need to increase instruction.
I will talk to you about a survey that 80 percent of the
business school graduates over the last 20 to 30 years talk
about the fact that having a knowledge or a proficiency in a
foreign language has given them an added advantage. So clearly,
the people coming out of the schools know that it makes a
difference, but there are plenty of examples that I will be
happy to provide this Subcommittee with.
Senator Voinovich. I was just thinking, Senator Akaka, if
you could maybe draft a letter for us----
Mr. Petro. All right.
Senator Voinovich [continuing]. And we could embellish it
and kick it around a little bit and send it over to the
National Business Roundtable----
Mr. Petro. Sure.
Senator Voinovich [continuing]. And say, ``You guys, this
is a problem, what are you doing about it?''
Mr. Petro. Right.
Senator Voinovich. And ask them to get back to us about
whether they have goals in place and is receiving attention in
corporate America.
It is not enough for them to say, ``Oh, boy, we need more
people coming in that speak the languages,'' but what are they
doing about it?
And one thing that is tough, Ms. Oleksak, is that we have
limited resources here. I know you had many suggestions of what
we all ought to do, and I know your job is to kind of get it
all out there, but I really hope that you will talk with your
co-workers and come back with a strategic priority list,
because we cannot do it all. I mean, we would like to do it
all, but it will not happen.
So I would like to know what are the top three priorities
that maybe we could work on that would make a difference for
you and the things that you care about.
Ms. Oleksak. We will be happy to provide that. Definitely.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you very much. Senator Voinovich, we
will have a second round.
Ms. Oleksak, I noted with interest your support for a
director of national language initiatives as outlined in the
Department of Defense white paper. At what level in the Federal
Government do you believe a national language director should
be placed and what should be his or her responsibilities?
Ms. Oleksak. What I would like to say is that I do not feel
that I have the right actually to determine what level the
person should be placed at, but what I do think is that we need
a coordination of efforts.
There are many different initiatives going on across the
country K-16. I am talking even within the education field. And
I think that what we need is the opportunity to gather
information at both the State, regional, and local levels, and
we need to be able to look across the country at all the
programs where the funds are going and how to best streamline
our efforts.
There were comments made in the earlier panel about not all
districts having sufficient funding or opportunities to provide
foreign language education to the same level that other
districts can do.
I think this is where we would be able to look and see
where the gaps are and hopefully fill in those gaps and try to
combine our efforts to try to explore a variety of avenues, not
only between teacher training, professional development. We
could also look at the education department and talk about
Teacher-to-Teacher.
We are looking at that with foreign language in ACTFL and
we have invited them to participate with us this fall in our
National Foreign Language Conference. Not only will foreign
language teachers participate with Teacher-to-Teacher, we have
invited them to join us as well. And I think that what we need
to do is try to pool our efforts to try to work together
better.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you. Mr. Petro, you testified that
the media, political leaders, and the business and
philanthropic communities should make the public aware of the
importance of improving education in foreign language and
international studies. I support such a public awareness
campaign because it will increase the interest and demand for
more programs.
What recommendations do you have for us to ensure that
there is a coordinated effort to educate the public on this
issue?
Mr. Petro. I would agree with what Ms. Oleksak just said. I
think some sort of a coordinating body or some leadership from
government that can help, that can tap into the various
different sectors so people know what we are all doing at the
same time.
I know that if you look at models and examples certainly in
the States around certain education efforts, the private sector
sits very prominently on some of these task forces and boards,
so there is a willingness for business certainly to participate
in these sort of outreach efforts.
But I do think that it is important. Just being here for
the few hours I have learned in just chatting with some of my
colleagues about certain things going on that I did not know
about, so I think at the very least some sort of coordinating
body or individual to help bring it together would be helpful.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you. Ms. Oleksak, you testified that
universities are increasingly offering double majors coupling
language study with another major such as engineering or
physics.
Ms. Oleksak. Yes.
Chairman Akaka. Do you have any information or any
statistics on this?
Ms. Oleksak. We can provide that information for you. I can
give you an example that comes to mind right now. The
University of Rhode Island offers a combined program in
International Engineering and German and they are expanding to
other languages as well. They have a high success rate and
great student participation in this program, but ACTFL would be
happy to provide that information for you.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you very much. I want to tell you
that I really appreciate the responses from our witnesses. I
feel you are very enthusiastic about this and together we can
certainly put things together. Keep in touch and share
information with each other as we go along. Senator Voinovich.
Senator Voinovich. Just another comment. I am thinking
about all of the places where you would get an opportunity to
give foreign language education a jolt, and I am fairly
familiar with the report of the National Academy of Sciences,
``Gathering Above the Rising Storm.'' It is basically on math
and science preparation, upgrading math and science teachers.
But it was interesting: I do not think they even mention
languages. They just kind of left it out.
These are the kind of reports and recommendations in which
there should be some real effort to emphasize the importance of
foeign language education. If it is not there, then they think,
well, all you need to do is just study math and science, forget
the rest of the stuff. It is that way with a lot of the States
and our testing program in Ohio.
I asked a question of the other panelists, and maybe you
can help me on this, Dr. Birckbichler. When you get money from
the Federal Government, tell me about how it gets out to the
schools and how do schools access those funds?
And it gets back to the question I have is if I want to get
something done quick, what you do is you go for the low-hanging
fruit.
Ms. Birckbichler. Right.
Senator Voinovich. How does that work?
Ms. Birckbichler. The way it works best is if you have a
school with a strong language program like you mentioned
earlier that has already begun to make connections with the K-
12 community.
One of the reasons that I think Ohio State has been so
successful with the K-16 Pipeline Project is that the director
of that program had already begun work in talking to high
school teachers and especially high school administrators and
superintendents. So there was already a network that was being
established before the funding was given.
And I do not know whether it was Ms. Oleksak or someone
else talked about collaboratives, and I think this whole idea
of partnerships is really important because if you establish a
K-16 collaborative project in a State, you already have that
network formed and it makes it much easier to identify the
people you want to work with.
Senator Voinovich. OK. But how much money did you get?
Ms. Birckbichler. It was $1 million.
Senator Voinovich. So you got $1 million and do any of the
schools get any of that money?
Ms. Birckbichler. At this point and, correct me if I am
wrong on the trajectory, the trajectory right now is to develop
the curriculum and then start putting it in the schools.
Senator Voinovich. And so in effect you have not done that
yet, you are working on that right now?
Ms. Birckbichler. Right.
Senator Voinovich. Probably, as you say, you have got some
networks out there that you are getting input from about what
they think about the best way of doing this.
Ms. Birckbichler. Yes.
Senator Voinovich. There are some very innovative ways to
teach people languages these days. The Federal Government has
got some really good training programs.
Is there any kind of communication back and forth about
what is really working the best?
Ms. Birckbichler. There have been programs like that in the
past. I know at ACTFL there are oftentimes speakers from the
Federal Government, but I do not know of any recent initiative
where we had a formal gathering to do just that.
Ms. Oleksak. If I could just add that at ACTFL, as you
mentioned, Dr. Birckbichler, that we have worked with the
Defense Languages Institute for a number of years and we have
increased participation annually at our conference.
We also have been working closely on a contract to develop
assessments that are appropriate in the language profession
that are proficiency-based assessments applicable for students
K-12, and we are trying to transition that into the education
field.
We have ongoing conversations about the issues that exist
at both the government level and at the local level and we also
have the FBI invited to our conference and we are looking to do
more to expand that as well.
I can also say that a couple of years ago we had an
assessment summit that brought in groups from various
organizations to come in and talk about it. It was a
culminating activity as part of New Visions in Education and
talking about a variety of different areas.
But if I could also add another piece about Federal
funding, Glastonbury and formerly when I was in Springfield
Public Schools, an urban district in Massachusetts, we received
foreign language assistance program grant funding to develop
curriculum at the elementary level, to also develop
assessments.
Senator Voinovich. Was that from your State?
Ms. Oleksak. Yes. And I can tell you though that because
you asked the question about does it go to the schools. It does
impact all the schools in the way the curriculum is delivered,
and part of the requirements of that grant funding is that you
also disseminate the information in the profession and share
what you have created so that other teachers through
professional development and other opportunities can learn
about your program and replicate it.
Senator Voinovich. Do you have any communication with each
other, Dr. Birckbichler and Ms. Oleksak?
Ms. Oleksak. Oh, absolutely.
Ms. Birckbichler. Yes.
Ms. Oleksak. Dr. Birckbichler is a past president of ACTFL.
Ms. Birckbichler. Right.
Senator Voinovich. OK. All right. That is good. Ms.
Oleksak, is that Slovak or a Czech name?
Ms. Oleksak. Czechoslovakian, yes.
Senator Voinovich. We have a good Italian, German, Serb,
and native Hawaiian. That is America.
Ms. Birckbichler. That is right. [Laughter.]
Senator Voinovich. My mother did not start to speak English
until she was in the first grade. She speaks perfect Slovenian
and my dad spoke perfect Serbian.
That is another thing that is happening that I think ought
to be encouraged. In my family, my folks were first generation,
both of them unusual, college graduates, went to college in the
Depression, and they never spoke their native languages at
home, so I never learned.
But maybe we ought to be saying, yes, we want your kids to
learn to speak English for certain. But for goodness sakes, do
not let them lose their heritage.
Ms. Birckbichler. To build on.
Senator Voinovich. I guess what I am saying is that so
often we think about all these complicated programs, but there
are also some simple things that we ought to look at here.
The other issue I would like you each to comment on is we,
in the Homeland Security Committee are very concerned about
integrating the Muslim population in the United States and how
few people are really learning Arabic and Farsi and it gets
back to the need for cultural education.
What outreach could be made in that community, a real
aggressive outreach to talk to Muslim and Arab American
youngsters about the opportunities that they have for getting
good jobs if they continue their language and get others to
learn the language so you get some kind of a cross-
fertilization going on with them.
My last question is about Partnership for Public Service.
Senator Akaka and I feel very good about that organization. The
Partnership for Public Service got started when we had an
executive session that began up at the John F. Kennedy School
of Government that Dean Nye put together with Max Stier. Can
you tell me how the Partnership for Public Service is assisting
with this issue.
Ms. Birckbichler. Well, it harks back to what Senator Akaka
said at the very beginning of the testimony and that is making
the Federal Government the workplace of choice, and I think
what it does is establish that pipeline between the Federal
Government and its agencies and American undergraduates who did
not know of these opportunities or did not have as easy access
to them as they do now that the Partnership exists.
Senator Voinovich. So because the Partnership has a
relationship with your school, they are bringing to your
attention the opportunities that your graduates would have in
the Federal Government; is that right?
Ms. Birckbichler. That is right, and what is nice is it is
very reciprocal, that means we also know there is a
clearinghouse, there is a one-stop shopping for us that we know
we can go to the Partnership and ask about opportunities in the
State Department, in the DIA, and the CIA. So it has been very
convenient in many ways.
Senator Voinovich. Does that help you market your program
at all?
Ms. Birckbichler. It does. Yes, it does.
Senator Voinovich. Yes.
Ms. Birckbichler. And we hope to have the same type of
career day this coming spring and invite back the same Federal
agencies and if not more.
Senator Voinovich. Can you market that with the School of
Engineering and your business school and other majors?
Ms. Birckbichler. The campus-wide did, and the Partnership
I believe has relationships with the College of Engineering.
This was all a pilot program. At OSU there was the Foreign
Language Initiative and engineering and I think there were one
or two others.
Senator Voinovich. That is great, isn't it? Thank you.
Chairman Akaka. Thank you very much, Senator Voinovich.
This has been a great hearing. I want to thank all witnesses
today and to tell you you have provided valuable information to
this Subcommittee.
As I mentioned in my opening statement, I believe there
must be sustained leadership in the Executive Branch and a
coordinated effort among all levels of government, the private
sector, and academia to ensure that Americans have a real
understanding of other languages and cultures.
Based on what I have heard today, I am more convinced than
ever that legislation is needed to make this happen. Next week
I will reintroduce the National Foreign Language Coordination
Act to establish a national language director and a Foreign
Language Coordination Council to develop and oversee the
implementation of a national language strategy. Our economic
and national security depends on it, without a doubt.
The hearing record will be open for one week for additional
statements or questions from other Members.
Are there any further comments you want to make?
Senator Voinovich. I would like very much if Mr. Petro
would respond about drafting a letter to the Business
Roundtable about the importance of foreign language skills to
our economic competitiveness.
Mr. Petro. Yes. We will put together a letter in the next
few days and get it over to your offices.\1\
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\1\ The letter referred to appears in the Appendix on page 98.
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Senator Voinovich. Thank you. Are any of your groups
familiar with Senator Akaka's legislation?
Mr. Petro. Yes.
Senator Voinovich. And you are supporting it?
Mr. Petro. CED generally does not support legislation, but
I can get my members to respond on their own behalf.
Senator Voinovich. Good.
Chairman Akaka. I thank you very much again. This hearing
is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 5:19 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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