Sligo Creek Elementary -- French immersion program

[Anonymous]

Hi, this is the "chip on the shoulder" RCF parent here, and the PP just confirmed, I think, my observation about English parents having a chip on their shoulders. For example:

"As a neighborhood parent, I think my child has as much right as any other child to an appropriate education, which to my mind involves having the right peer group."

If you want to be really honest about it, the classes in the English side have neighborhood kids that include children who live in apartment buildings close to the school, who come from a lower socioeconomic environment, who are English learners, etc.

So you feel that on the English side, the peer group isn't right, but it is on the Spanish side. Even though you object to the characterization of the "chip," you are demonstrating one.

The truth is that your neighborhood has more of a mixed profile, SES-wise, than the other Chevy Chase schools. That's not the fault of the immersion program -- it's just how your neighborhood falls in the cluster. It's this "poor us" attitude that creates some of the tensions between the two groups.

As for the discipline and behavior issues, I can only comment on the SP side, but there are some, maybe not as much as on the English side. There is a wide range of abilities, though, and I can attest to the fact that it's really hard for the teachers to accelerate appropriately when they are dealing with 26 students whose range of abilities varies widely.

[Anonymous]

To put it more clearly, the attitude is "we have to deal with the poor kids and the SP parents don't."

That's what having the right peer group means, eh?

I think it makes my case even more strongly that the English parents have chips on their shoulders. They have Chevy Chase addresses and poor kids whose parents don't speak English in their schools. How did THAT happen?!?!

As for me, I get to live in my cozy Silver Spring neighborhood with my reasonable Silver Spring mortgage and my kids still get to go to BCC. Lucky me!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To put it more clearly, the attitude is "we have to deal with the poor kids and the SP parents don't."

That's what having the right peer group means, eh?

I think it makes my case even more strongly that the English parents have chips on their shoulders. They have Chevy Chase addresses and poor kids whose parents don't speak English in their schools. How did THAT happen?!?!

As for me, I get to live in my cozy Silver Spring neighborhood with my reasonable Silver Spring mortgage and my kids still get to go to BCC. Lucky me!

I am not the PP to which you respond, but I don't know what you mean about Chevy Chase address. All kids who go to Rock Creek Forest Elementary live east of the parkway. I don't know if one wrote a letter to them if it is "Chevy Chase" in their address, but certainly the area is not a traditional part of Chevy Chase. More in between Chevy Chase and Silver Spring to me. And the houses, for the most part in the neighborhood are much more modestly priced than in Chevy Chase west of Rock Creek. The only area that goes to BCC which is more Silver Spring than Rock Creek Forest is Rosemary Hills and these areas are paired with North Chevy Chase, Chevy Chase or Bethesda for 3-6.

The RCF problem is one twist on the whole issue of integration which has become entwined with the way the schools in this area developed. In the late 70s, all schools were K-6. Rosemary Hills was 95% black and Chevy Chase was probably 99% white (as were the other schools west of Rock Creek). Rock Creek Forest also had a very high minority population. All these school communities struggled with how to rebalance the minority and non-minority populations so the schools would be more integrated. Which schools should be closed, whose kids should be bused, etc.? It was pretty contentious, but ultimately Bethesda, Chevy Chase and North Chevy Chase were paired with Rosemary Hills. Special math and science elementary magnet programs were established at some of the schools (CC, NCC and RH) and special academic support was promised by the school system to make the integration transition successful. Over time, this worked and all 4 of these schools are very successful today. Kids in these schools are fully integrated, meaning that although there is academic differentiation, the differentiation happens for the most part w/in heterogenous classes and kids are also fully mixed for lunch specials, etc. Parents are, by and large, satisfied with the range of academic challenge that is offered to kids of all races. Still, there are problems with participation (e.g. are low income parents de facto excluded from activities such as after school class which require extra fees and whether all capable minority/low SES kids are identified for academic challenge?) These remain problems throughout the county.

RCF, by contrast, was "integrated" through the establishment of the Spanish immersion which, because of the overall demographics of MoCo residents who apply through lottery, has a much higher white/high SES population than the English program side of the school. There are many RCF parents who don't think this is healthy. I personally shopped around a lot in these neighborhoods before we choose a school area to move to (besides RH it's the only affordable part of the whole BCC cluster). I heard many parents who live in the RCF neighborhood say that they didn't want to send their kids to RCF because they felt it was still very much a segregated school w/i a school. When they said this they didn't mean "I don't want my high income white kids to go to school with poor minority kids." They meant "the poor minority kids and other non-immersion RCF district students are left in a track in which they don't get the appropriate academic support, in which there is no higher level academic challenge, and I don't want my child in an environment where the rich non minority kids get a special program while the rest of the school is left to languish." This is a problem for the RCF in bounds and out of bounds community to solve together. How can the school become more truly integrated while still maintaining the immersion program and improving the academic offerings of the English track, devoting more resources to behavior management, supporting ELL students, etc.?

I think we all have to be honest that low SES and racial minorities and ELL kids often come to school (when measured across the whole group) with less academic preparation than high SES/non minority kids. This is well-documented. Schools don't often serve this population well, and are often not doing a good job of bringing low SES/minority/ELL students up to grade level, nor providing them with above grade level acceleration when they are ready. All of this is magnified when groups of kids are separated in different tracks, even when done thru race neutral programs like the lottery based immersion program. And to say this doesn't negate the fact that there are probably a lot of very bright minority or low SES students who either are prepared or could easily succeed w/ more academic challenge if they had the opportunity and support.

Parents in the immersion program can't take an "it's not our fault" approach. Because although it might not be their fault that this is the original way the school system chose to integrate the RCF school, current RCF immersion parents benefit from being used by MCPS in this way. RCF immersion parents benefit from a special program and thus have a special obligation to make sure that their presence and this program benefits the whole school. Think about it this way, if the RCF immersion program didn't exist then RCF would surely have a higher FARMS rate, higher minority numbers, and, likely, lower academic achievement. The school system would be forced to provide more resources to ameliorate or to integrate it in a more holistic way. If there are some "behavior" problems on the SP side and more on the EP side, then the whole school should be discussing a unified approach to successfully dealing with these behavior problems. If there are kids on the EP side who don't have a "peer" group for advanced math and the SP students are getting advanced math (or some should be but don't get it), then the whole school has to talk about how to make sure that all students who are qualified get advanced math. SP and EP should also be thinking about how each program can benefit the other -- don't the native SP speakers in the EP program have a skill that they can be proud of and share with the SP side? Most immersion schools actively seek out native speakers to participate in the immersion program because it improves success for non-SP speakers. Perhaps there should be discussion about expanding the immersion so that all neighborhood kids can have the option to opt in. Or maybe the immersion format could be changed so that all kids can participate; for example, WIS uses an alternating English/Spanish structure to teach immersion after K. Perhaps this would allow more mixing of kids between the 2 programs. Is it really necessary that math be taught in Spanish?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most immersion schools actively seek out native speakers to participate in the immersion program because it improves success for non-SP speakers.

Do you know this to be a fact? How do they actively seek out native speakers? What would be the point of having a lottery? Is the lottery a farce? How would the schools know from the application whether the child is a native speaker or not? Please enlighten us all. Thank you

[Anonymous]

The "seek out native speakers" idea is not a policy of the MCPS immersion programs -- in fact, you aren't supposed to enroll if both parents speak the language natively. (People do, though.)

I think the PP's post was very interesting and enlightening. As an RCF parent from the SP side, I know many families whose address is Chevy Chase who attend RCF as a neighborhood school. However, RCF is notoriously neglected -- the building is falling down around our ears. It's finally on the list for a renovation, sometime in the next few years, but it is really a scandal that it's in such bad shape.

As for the idea that the SP kids get this great education while the English kids languish, I would have to say that I'm not all that impressed by the education in the immersion program. The opportunities for enrichment aren't as great as you'd think, the quality of the instruction isn't all that wonderful ... I think it's a program that needs some serious improvement.

And that is part of the problem -- the parents on the English side feel that the SP kids are getting something special that there kids are not. In reality, they are getting the same old same old, just in Spanish.

The Spanish part is great, but if the instruction itself, the challenge, the enrichment isn't there ... well, the emperor has no clothes.

[Anonymous]

I know of children in the immersion program who are native speakers. Their parents complain about the quality of instruction, insisting that they themselves and their children know better. Some belittle the education their children are receiving yet they continue to take advantage of it.

MCPS should filter the native speakers out of the immersion program.

[Anonymous]

On the other hand, those complaints could be valid. When an immersion teacher is selected, she/he must be willing to teach the entire curriculum in SP and to create his/her own instructional materials, as the county doesn't provide a lot of them (math being the exception). Plus take on a larger class, often. And this person has to be fluent in SP (or French or whatever). That's a pretty long list of things. It's hard for the program to find qualified teachers.

Plus, someone can be a native speaker who grew up in the US and never had formal education in Spanish -- that person wouldn't necessarily have perfect grammar, etc.

For several years we had outstanding teachers from Spain until the county, in its wisdom, discontinued that program.

[Anonymous]

How are the immersion teachers hired? Where do they find the Spanish and French teachers? Chinese immersion teachers are brought to the school directly from China.

[Anonymous]

Somewhat off topic, and I apologize, but how are the autism prgm kids (and families) received by the school community?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To put it more clearly, the attitude is "we have to deal with the poor kids and the SP parents don't."

That's what having the right peer group means, eh?

I think it makes my case even more strongly that the English parents have chips on their shoulders. They have Chevy Chase addresses and poor kids whose parents don't speak English in their schools. How did THAT happen?!?!

As for me, I get to live in my cozy Silver Spring neighborhood with my reasonable Silver Spring mortgage and my kids still get to go to BCC. Lucky me!

Well, you're the one who didn't want your child to go to the Silver Spring schools so you must not have wanted this peer group either. And please spare me that you got your kid into the immersion program because you really want them to learn another language.

And, by the way, the County is most likely discontinuing the automatic entrance to Westland/BCC so let's see how you feel when your child has to go to Einstein or you have to shell out a lot of dough to move.

[Anonymous]

@ 15:53

I was being sarcastic about the "lucky me" part, in response to the poster who talked about peer groups.

I have taken one of my kids out already and I put him in a Silver Spring school. And I won't send the other kid to the BCC cluster middle and on to BCC -- it's too far from where I live and I think it would have a really negative effect on our quality of life. We have SP immersion at Silver Spring International Middle School so that's what we will do.

I chose immersion because of the language aspect -- you can believe it or not, but there are plenty of experts who talk about the cognitive advantages, and I myself speak a number of different languages -- you can think what you want about my reasons, but there you have it.

I have never heard about discontinuing the automatic Westland/BCC part -- where did you learn that? -- but it would not affect us at all.

[Anonymous]

Can I just interject that as a RCF neighborhood parent with a child in the english academy- I have been very happy with the education that my child is getting. The class sizes are small, the children are diverse, the parents are diverse, the teachers that we have encountered thus far are terrific. Perhaps we do have a "chip on our shoulders' but really who wouldn't when we constantly hear our program being put down by SI parents and their children. It is not nice when other parents assume b/c I am white that my kid is in SI, and then make negative comments about the English Academy to me, until they realize that I am an E.A parent- and believe me this has happened MANY times just this year. It also isn't helpful when my child comes home to tell me that the SI kids tell the EA kids that they are stupid for not being in SI, and that "Spanish rules". Where do you think that comes from, I'm going to guess from the same parents who tell me how awful it is for those "poor kids in the EA". So perhaps there is something to this "why can't we get along" b.s. that goes around our school. In any event, I just want any parents out there who have kids who didn't get into the SI program at RCF (and might be feeling upset about it) to know that we love the EA at RCF, we love the kids and we love the teachers.

[Anonymous]

My kid went through French immersion at Sligo. I pretty much agree with the answers that have been given. I could maybe add two points.

First, the teachers are hired first because they speak French, so math instruction is not "all that". Homework with graphs with the axes not labeled, for example, so that DH and I who are both pretty good at math can't figure it out. That said, DC and several kids from the same immersion class are now at the Takoma math magnet and doing just fine, so can't have been that bad.

Another thing we saw on entering middle school is that the Spanish immersion kids are required to start with Spanish 1 in 6th grade while the French immersion kids started with French II in 7th grade, at least in TPMS, and reflecting perceived (by TPMS anyway) differences in how much grammar was taught in the respective immersion programs. That said, we heard that Lycee Rochambeau won't take French immersion graduates because their grammar isn't too great either. There's a definite focus on speaking over grammar in both programs.