Current MCPS language immersion programs are incredibly classist

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the future for MCPS is more Spanish/English dual-language programs in schools with high ESL and FARMS rates, perhaps with the option of families from outside the school zone to attend, if there is space available. I think they are going to re-focus these programs on reducing the achievement gap.

That would be asinine... A complete empty gesture... Dual immersion will not close the achievement gap. The gap exists despite AA coming in knowing English so why would you think dual immersion so or solve the gap for Hispanics.

Perhaps because AAs and Hispanics have pretty little in common? Your argument is pretty stupid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the future for MCPS is more Spanish/English dual-language programs in schools with high ESL and FARMS rates, perhaps with the option of families from outside the school zone to attend, if there is space available. I think they are going to re-focus these programs on reducing the achievement gap.

That would be asinine... A complete empty gesture... Dual immersion will not close the achievement gap. The gap exists despite AA coming in knowing English so why would you think dual immersion so or solve the gap for Hispanics.

Perhaps because AAs and Hispanics have pretty little in common? Your argument is pretty stupid.

They have a ton in common as do we all. Cultural issues explain the achievement gap not languages.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"Anonymous wrote:
I purposely did NOT sign my kid up for an immersion program because they are all in crap or overcrowded schools.

And if you are an illiterate parent, that is not the county's problem. That is the parent's problem. Stop enabling.


This... Everywhere I go I spread word on the immersion program. By far the majority have no interest, many of whom live in less desirable clusters. Some think we're crazy for doing it. So I never feel like I won some free ride they others can never obtain. Most people certainly are not trying to escape and are content where they are at."

That depends on where you live. Do you live in the DCC?

I live in a lower-performing school district and language immersion was NOT chosen as a way to escape my lower-performing HS. My DC completed high school closer to home and did just fine. Using this as an escape is really doing your child a disservice. And let's be honest, it's not the school but the composition of the student body that people want to avoid. So you plant your child in a language immersion program and then discourage their continuation to a culturally diverse environment. That's just screwed up all away around if you ask me.

Cool story... But hate to tell you that immersion schools are more diverse than many parents homeschool.

Umm...Nope. Not all of them.

Most of them, sweetie...

I am trying to follow your train of thought but it's really making no sense in the context of this message stream. So you're saying that most people do not enroll their child in a language immersion program as a way to escape their homeschool cluster? If you are saying that, this is absolutely not the case for all the language immersion programs, and there is one program, in particular, where this is well-known tactic. If you are saying that diversity is not the issue when one wants to avoid a particular school, you can argue that point until you are blue in the face and no one will ever believe you.

[Anonymous]

Not PP but diversity can be different thinhs depending on who is defining it.

Some people say their area or school is diverse because it has people from various countries / races even if they are all uniformly upper middle class (see areas of Bethesda). Other people mean a DCC type school where a majority or at least very large minority of the school is Latino or black often coupled with a high FARMS rate. Some immersion programs might be diverse on terms of having many races in them. But I find it hard to believe they are tremendously economicly diverse as some of the home schools are that kids are applying to get out of.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Not PP but diversity can be different thinhs depending on who is defining it.

Some people say their area or school is diverse because it has people from various countries / races even if they are all uniformly upper middle class (see areas of Bethesda). Other people mean a DCC type school where a majority or at least very large minority of the school is Latino or black often coupled with a high FARMS rate. Some immersion programs might be diverse on terms of having many races in them. But I find it hard to believe they are tremendously economicly diverse as some of the home schools are that kids are applying to get out of.

It pretty clear that when posters say parents want to escape a school it's because of diversity as code for high minority population and high farms. For the sake of this argument that's the only relevant diversity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the future for MCPS is more Spanish/English dual-language programs in schools with high ESL and FARMS rates, perhaps with the option of families from outside the school zone to attend, if there is space available. I think they are going to re-focus these programs on reducing the achievement gap.

That would be asinine... A complete empty gesture... Dual immersion will not close the achievement gap. The gap exists despite AA coming in knowing English so why would you think dual immersion so or solve the gap for Hispanics.

l

+1 Hispanics can't even speak/write/learn in their own native language correctly, let alone English. And their culture places very little on education and still has high poverty. You will never find enough teachers to implement this and I as a legal tax-paying resident of this county would be completely against anything like this. All it is doing is enabling immigrants and decreasing assimilation. All the while dumbing down the curriculum for most average students and making dual language education extremely hard for native English kids living in poverty.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

+1 Hispanics can't even speak/write/learn in their own native language correctly, let alone English. And their culture places very little on education and still has high poverty. You will never find enough teachers to implement this and I as a legal tax-paying resident of this county would be completely against anything like this. All it is doing is enabling immigrants and decreasing assimilation. All the while dumbing down the curriculum for most average students and making dual language education extremely hard for native English kids living in poverty.

Let's examine your assumptions here.

1. The native language of all people in the US who are Hispanic is Spanish.
2. They can't speak, let alone learn, their own native language.

Maybe think about those assumptions?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

It pretty clear that when posters say parents want to escape a school it's because of diversity as code for high minority population and high farms. For the sake of this argument that's the only relevant diversity.

A high-poverty school is not economically diverse, any more than a high-affluence school is economically diverse. A high-poverty school is a segregated school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

+1 Hispanics can't even speak/write/learn in their own native language correctly, let alone English. And their culture places very little on education and still has high poverty. You will never find enough teachers to implement this and I as a legal tax-paying resident of this county would be completely against anything like this. All it is doing is enabling immigrants and decreasing assimilation. All the while dumbing down the curriculum for most average students and making dual language education extremely hard for native English kids living in poverty.

Let's examine your assumptions here.

1. The native language of all people in the US who are Hispanic is Spanish.
2. They can't speak, let alone learn, their own native language.

Maybe think about those assumptions?

^^^Let's look at some data.

-Hispanic people are about 17% of the US population
-65% of Hispanic people were born in the US (50% of Hispanic adults were born in the US).
-68% of Hispanic people speak only English at home or speak English very well (89% of US-born Hispanic people).
-75% of Hispanic people are not living in poverty.
-18% of US-born Hispanic people 25 or older have a bachelor's degree or more, and another 33% have a two-year degree or some college

Now, somebody might respond that they don't believe those data. But that would be an ignorant thing to say.

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/05/12/statistical-portrait-of-hispanics-in-the-united-states-2013-key-charts/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

It pretty clear that when posters say parents want to escape a school it's because of diversity as code for high minority population and high farms. For the sake of this argument that's the only relevant diversity.

A high-poverty school is not economically diverse, any more than a high-affluence school is economically diverse. A high-poverty school is a segregated school.

That's all true. We all realize that technicality but as I said it's irrelevant to this discussion. It's what people who use the word in these arguments think it means.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the future for MCPS is more Spanish/English dual-language programs in schools with high ESL and FARMS rates, perhaps with the option of families from outside the school zone to attend, if there is space available. I think they are going to re-focus these programs on reducing the achievement gap.

That would be asinine... A complete empty gesture... Dual immersion will not close the achievement gap. The gap exists despite AA coming in knowing English so why would you think dual immersion so or solve the gap for Hispanics.

l

+1 Hispanics can't even speak/write/learn in their own native language correctly, let alone English. And their culture places very little on education and still has high poverty. You will never find enough teachers to implement this and I as a legal tax-paying resident of this county would be completely against anything like this. All it is doing is enabling immigrants and decreasing assimilation. All the while dumbing down the curriculum for most average students and making dual language education extremely hard for native English kids living in poverty.

Pp who you gave a +1 to here.. When you make dumb comments like Hispanics can't speak, read , write in their native language you ruin the other valid points to your argument.

[Anonymous]

^ not the pp you replied to but I do think the fact that many of the Latino kids that the county is worried about (ie not the kids of World Bank employees from Argentina) come from families where they do not have a strong literacy foundation in their native language thereby making it tougher than a situation where a child knows how to read in their native language already and is really mostly focused on now making the jump to doing so in a 2nd language.

Pp's brush was too broad but the point about the literacy concerns of many of the Latino immigrants that are driving the achievement gap (again - mostly poorer kids, not well off families who happen to have come from Latin America) is valid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:^ not the pp you replied to but I do think the fact that many of the Latino kids that the county is worried about (ie not the kids of World Bank employees from Argentina) come from families where they do not have a strong literacy foundation in their native language thereby making it tougher than a situation where a child knows how to read in their native language already and is really mostly focused on now making the jump to doing so in a 2nd language.

Pp's brush was too broad but the point about the literacy concerns of many of the Latino immigrants that are driving the achievement gap (again - mostly poorer kids, not well off families who happen to have come from Latin America) is valid.

Well, whether poor kids can read or write in Spanish is not relevant at all to the fact that Dual immersion won't help with the achievement gap. Most low income immigrants I know certainly read in Spanish. Whether they are highly educated is a separate matter.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:^ not the pp you replied to but I do think the fact that many of the Latino kids that the county is worried about (ie not the kids of World Bank employees from Argentina) come from families where they do not have a strong literacy foundation in their native language thereby making it tougher than a situation where a child knows how to read in their native language already and is really mostly focused on now making the jump to doing so in a 2nd language.

Pp's brush was too broad but the point about the literacy concerns of many of the Latino immigrants that are driving the achievement gap (again - mostly poorer kids, not well off families who happen to have come from Latin America) is valid.

How many children entering kindergarten know how to read in any language?

Also, "well-off families who happen to have come from Latin America"? Why the "happen to have"? Those families are just as Hispanic -- no more, no less -- than poor families who "happen to have" come from Latin America.

[Anonymous]

"How many children entering kindergarten know how to read in any language?

Also, "well-off families who happen to have come from Latin America"? Why the "happen to have"? Those families are just as Hispanic -- no more, no less -- than poor families who "happen to have" come from Latin America."


Are you just trying to find reason to take offense? Not all ESOL kids in MCPS come in K so while that is true for K kids it would not be as relevant for all the other grades they show up in. Also although of course anecdotally I know many of the low income Hispanic families at our school can read Spanish it is also considerably more common to find low income Hispanic immigrants whose parents cannot read well in Spanish.

To the second point - the point here is that the upper middle class Hispanic kids whose families immigrants here and surely know how to fluently read in spanish are not the main concern regarding the achievement gap between white and Hispanic kids. They are also not the majority of the Hispanic student population as FARMS status helps to indicate. just because something is not true100% of the time does not mean it is not relevant the majority of the time.