Sp or Ch language?

[Anonymous]

Lamb guy--I'll state respectfully that every single part of your paragraph is factually incorrect. The administration does have two people who speak Mandarin. It sounds like that is not enough because the principal is black and one of the Mandarin speakers is bi-racial. The school is also a plurality of black students. The parent association has spent money on outreach and has a whole committee dedicated to the effort. No one drives out bilinguals by making them feel rotten--my kid got picked on because her pasta smelled funny. I understand the point the poster was making--when you aren't part of the dominant [American] culture of a school there are incidents that make you feel like an outsider, but we are talking about children here. Are you really stating that you think that American YY children are ganging up on bilingual children to make them feel rotten?

You're confusing me, WOP guy, with LAMB guy and bullied guy. To my knowledge, nobody on the outreach committee speaks a dialect - hopeless. Look it's not ganging up, it's a ridiculous situation whereby ethnic, bilingual Chinese are a tiny sliver of the school's population and nobody much knows, let alone minds. The limited outreach is done on YY's terms, no sense of meeting the Chinese community halfway (yet the shock that YY was "summarily refuffed" 5 or 6 years ago), or even finding the Chinese where they are. YY still thinks "Chinatown" where hardly any of us congregate, and many of the merchants are in fact Vietnamese.

I'm not going to go there with the principal with no connection to China - the situation is so far gone it's absurd. It's much more than not being part of the dominant American culture; it's being in a domain where nobody but politically weak teachers, and a handful of other parents, gets where you're coming from but almost everybody assumes they do.

American parents love to think that the school is a lot more welcoming to Chinese than it is. They see a good many Asian kids, and decide that Chinese are numerous and happy, when hardly any of the kids are are living Chinese culture outside school. We are talking about children here and I grew weary of mine coming home saying, "Daddy I want to go to Murch and Rockville with my real friends."

[Anonymous]

why doesn't the PA ask the board to invite a panel of local cantonese speakers to a joint meeting to explore these issues? you could go with internal/external representation spanning the socioeconomic spectrum. you're probably not going to draw back anybody you've already lost, but you might learn something...those speaking good English could interpret for the others

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: You got lucky. If LAMB started it's charter today it would not have the luxury of two lotteries. LAMB two-charter exception was granthfathered in under the old charter laws. So it is mighty fine of you to sit on your high horse and say what you would and should do when not faced with the same circumstances and rules. In addition, I would say that the combined Hispanic community with it's multiple ethnicities quadruple the small DC Chinese community. There are more hispanics to go around, even if the only thing they may have in common is a shared language with varying dialects.

LAMB guy here. So your school doesn't have an administrator who can speak to the local community and the parents association isn't asking for one because they have "no power." You don't do outreach because you're focused on building a playground and a middle school. You drive out bilinguals you get by making their kids feel rotten for eating their ethnic food. But you just want your children to learn Mandarin right, never mind all this Chinese culture and community crap.

We don't have a lot of Spanish speakers because we have a lottery for them, we have them because we understand that they add value and treat 'em right, on their terms. You people are pathetic and need your heads examined.

Wow. That is really an unnecessarily cynical summary of this discussion. What I've gotten from this thread is that for the local Chinese community to feel welcome at YY, there probably needs to be a certain number of other like families at the school. Enough of a population so non-Chinese families get to know their culture just by having them as part of the school community, so there is no undue burden of educating non-Chinese families about cultural norms and no one feels like tokens. We've established that charter rules make it difficult to get those numbers but that better outreach to the Chinese community could help. YY has tried that and I'm guessing is working diligently on strategies to continue trying (they just don't post the progress of such efforts here on DCUM). Certainly YY school leaders don't want to run a Chinese immersion school without Chinese speakers. Now, though, since some in that community have had negative experiences as "tokens" at the school, it seems the challenge to convince enough of those families to be firsts without an established existing Chinese population will be even greater. The outreach team will need to pursue creative approaches to have a better chance of bridging the gap (in addition to just telling them to get their applications in first). I'll throw some benefit of the doubt their way and consider they probably know this and are hard at work--YY school leaders have exceeded expectations in many other ways. And I at least am aware that I and everyone else on this board can only guess what they're doing. Strange how people love to assume the worst.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: You got lucky. If LAMB started it's charter today it would not have the luxury of two lotteries. LAMB two-charter exception was granthfathered in under the old charter laws. So it is mighty fine of you to sit on your high horse and say what you would and should do when not faced with the same circumstances and rules. In addition, I would say that the combined Hispanic community with it's multiple ethnicities quadruple the small DC Chinese community. There are more hispanics to go around, even if the only thing they may have in common is a shared language with varying dialects.

LAMB guy here. So your school doesn't have an administrator who can speak to the local community and the parents association isn't asking for one because they have "no power." You don't do outreach because you're focused on building a playground and a middle school. You drive out bilinguals you get by making their kids feel rotten for eating their ethnic food. But you just want your children to learn Mandarin right, never mind all this Chinese culture and community crap.

We don't have a lot of Spanish speakers because we have a lottery for them, we have them because we understand that they add value and treat 'em right, on their terms. You people are pathetic and need your heads examined.

Wow. That is really an unnecessarily cynical summary of this discussion. What I've gotten from this thread is that for the local Chinese community to feel welcome at YY, there probably needs to be a certain number of other like families at the school. Enough of a population so non-Chinese families get to know their culture just by having them as part of the school community, so there is no undue burden of educating non-Chinese families about cultural norms and no one feels like tokens. We've established that charter rules make it difficult to get those numbers but that better outreach to the Chinese community could help. YY has tried that and I'm guessing is working diligently on strategies to continue trying (they just don't post the progress of such efforts here on DCUM). Certainly YY school leaders don't want to run a Chinese immersion school without Chinese speakers. Now, though, since some in that community have had negative experiences as "tokens" at the school, it seems the challenge to convince enough of those families to be firsts without an established existing Chinese population will be even greater. The outreach team will need to pursue creative approaches to have a better chance of bridging the gap (in addition to just telling them to get their applications in first). I'll throw some benefit of the doubt their way and consider they probably know this and are hard at work--YY school leaders have exceeded expectations in many other ways. And I at least am aware that I and everyone else on this board can only guess what they're doing. Strange how people love to assume the worst.

I think we've established LAMB guy is an idiot.

[Anonymous]

YY has tried that and I'm guessing is working diligently on strategies to continue trying (they just don't post the progress of such efforts here on DCUM). Certainly YY school leaders don't want to run a Chinese immersion school without Chinese speakers.

But the truth is that the leaders HAVE nearly succeeded in running a school without ethnic Chinese speakers, so forgive us for getting the wrong impression. You must have a gaggle of Mandarin-speaking parents who learned Chinese as adults.

Good intentions are peachy. Why not start with an on-line survey of bilingual Chinese families, both in and outside the school. Ask them what they know about YY, why they do or don't put kids' names in the lottery, why they enroll, why they leave. Ask them what they're looking for. If you asked me, I'd say that if at least 1/4 of the YY kids aren't bilingual at home, we'd much rather stay at our great IB school, where we might be tokens, but at least we're not considered snotty, racist, insular etc. for keeping our culture and dialect alive. If YY was running open-enrollment, pay as you play afterschool, weekend, or summer Mandarin lessons and activities for kids, we'd go.

Almost any Chinese-speaking Chinese around could give you a list of venues where you could advertise your survey - most of us head to the same dim sum places, supermarkets and heritage language schools in Rockville and Silver Spring on weekends. We consider Chinatown for tourists, and the small group of Chinese Christians who attend church and the little community center there.

[Anonymous]

But the majority of the Chinese in the heritage schools and the Silver Spring markets and the dim sum places are not from DC. The majority are from Montgomery county. Obtaining the views of people outside of DC is relatively useless for a DC charter school. The opinions of those people would essentially amount to gawkers who have no horse in the race, so to speak.

As an aside, there are no biracial administrators on staff at Yu Ying. The reference may be to the grant coordinator, but she has no contact with parents, families or students and is not an administrator.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:But the majority of the Chinese in the heritage schools and the Silver Spring markets and the dim sum places are not from DC. The majority are from Montgomery county. Obtaining the views of people outside of DC is relatively useless for a DC charter school. The opinions of those people would essentially amount to gawkers who have no horse in the race, so to speak.

As an aside, there are no biracial administrators on staff at Yu Ying. The reference may be to the grant coordinator, but she has no contact with parents, families or students and is not an administrator.

That's where the DC Chinese families head, too. Many of us used to go to a Chinese supermarket in Chinatown, but it closed 5 or 6 years ago. There isn't one left in the District. We go to dim sum in MoCo, shop for Chinese vegetables, and deposit our kids at the heritage language classses. This has been the case since many of the Chinese merchants were burned out of Chinatown in the '68 riots.

[Anonymous]

If you read up a little on the acquisition of foreign languages you'll quickly find that for the acquisition of a second language it doesn't matter all that much how many native speakers there are. We're a bi-lingual family (English-German) who has lived in both language contexts and our kids confirm research results, namely that the language they speak with each other will sooner or later gravitate towards the environmental language, that spoken in public. They will address teachers and parents in the language because they understand that's part of the family, cultural, or instructional expectation. But amongst each other, informally, they'll speak English. I'm willing to bet that's the case in any foreign school around here, even schools with close to 100% native speakers. Any parent who has tried to foster a second language via language playgroups will have come face-to-face with exactly this phenomenon.

[Anonymous]

They're not going to do a survey, because that would involve singling out/counting people who speak Chinese at home, to which YY's leadership has been staunchly opposed from the get go. Speaking Chinese at home isn't something AA families in the District do (other than maybe the odd State Dept., international organization, or multinational firm family), and they're the biggest group at the school, as DC Charter wants it. I can't see more Asian Chinese-speaking families being drawn in w/out 2 lotteries plus an ethnic principal, with no chance of either. The outreach is going nowhere. The YY leaders and DC Charter dug the school into this hole, and delivered them hundreds of parents who don't mind being in it. So they're better off organizing committees and spending money on other things.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you read up a little on the acquisition of foreign languages you'll quickly find that for the acquisition of a second language it doesn't matter all that much how many native speakers there are. We're a bi-lingual family (English-German) who has lived in both language contexts and our kids confirm research results, namely that the language they speak with each other will sooner or later gravitate towards the environmental language, that spoken in public. They will address teachers and parents in the language because they understand that's part of the family, cultural, or instructional expectation. But amongst each other, informally, they'll speak English. I'm willing to bet that's the case in any foreign school around here, even schools with close to 100% native speakers. Any parent who has tried to foster a second language via language playgroups will have come face-to-face with exactly this phenomenon.

So zero native speakers works as well as 50%? You can explain away the many studies proving that 2-way immersion produces better results for elementary and middle school-age kids than 1-way? And the fact that 2-way immersion is the norm in this country where enough native speakers can be found? You're not just learning a language with immersion, you're learning about a culture. At least you lived in both language contexts - who at YY is doing that with kids?

[Anonymous]

As usual, a thread that has evolved into vehement YY bashing. I am a YY parent and am very, very happy. Is the school perfect? Of course not - what school is? Has my DC thrived? A resounding yes. I don't think many (any?) YY parents would be against more Chinese-speaking kids at the school. Many would even say that they should get preference. As has already been established, charter schools prevent preference. I'm not aware if YY even has a chance at getting an exception. I also want to say that while of course it would be preferable to have as many Chinese native speakers as possible, I've been quite impressed by how well the kids have done. My DC is in pre-K and I noticed a huge shift in the last few months of the year. The children were speaking all Chinese in class, and some quite a lot. I have to say that it was a marked change from the first part of the year when I heard hardly any Chinese in class. My friend is a native speaker, recently returned from a few years in China, and spoke to my DC and she said that her tones were great and that she sounded like a little Chinese pre-schooler. I'm sure she was being overly positive () but the fact is that it is pretty incredible how much these 4-5 year olds learned in a year. They came in not knowing one word of Chinese in most cases (there are a few heritage speakers in the class) and now they can communicate. And not at the expense of learning - I've been pleased by her progress in math, other concepts, etc. I am a big fan of the IB PYP curriculum as well.

I'm quite astonished by some wrong facts that I've seen in this thread - one person mentioned a YY "policy" of not hiring teachers from other immersion schools. This is wrong. I know at least one teacher (and I have really only gotten to know the ones in my kid's call) who came from another immersion school in Baltimore. Also, I don't quite understand the comments about feeling unwelcome. I only really got to know the parents in my kid's class and as in most things in life, much comes from what you put into it. I never felt unwelcome at all. I didn't make as much of an effort as I should have in getting involved so didn't get to know as many parents as I would like. But to a fault the parents and administrators have been welcoming.

I sometimes feel the thread comments are talking about an entirely different school. And once again I am not saying that this is perfect and nothing can be improved. But it is a good school with welcoming parents and administrators in my opinion.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This thread makes me sad too. Mainly because I wish more kids anywhere in the US were encouraged to learn Chinese or Spanish. I came back from a recent trip where I attended a function that included a large number of Latinos. Protesting the function was a group that carried signs saying, "SPEAK ENGLISH". Xenophobia is alive and well all over the US, and this thread is about as myopic as it is depressing. The white, black, and other non ethnic, non Mandarin kids at Yu Ying (or ANYWHERE!) are taking a step that many American people think is useless--why learn a language at all. In China, as in many other countries in Asia, there are whole industries of private language schools teaching English. Parents in these countries are trying to add a skill to their children's lives in a decidedly "non-two way immersion environment". Yu Ying parents of any race are trying to do the same.

Ironically, Yu Ying may end up being more of a skill based school (learning Mandarin) like Asian language schools teaching English, than a cultural immersion school. Regardless, I hope the city tries to support all the immersion schools trying to make a difference, trying to build bridges, and see the forest through the trees.

Many Asian kids that come out these "one way immersion" English schools speak excellent English and do well enough to attend college in the U.S., undergrad and graduate. They come to the U.S. to learn about American culture. This model works well in Asia and if my kid at YY learns enough Mandarin to function anywhere near that level, I'll be happy.

[Anonymous]

WOP guy. Parents love to claim "oh, but there are a heritage speakers in my kid's class!" How do you know when nobody's counting them, or evaluating their language skills? We bought into this view ourselves, until we realized that most of those being passed off as heritage speakers really weren't. They might have learned a little Cantonese or Mandarin or whatever at home, but not much. Truly, those who work hard to teach their kids Chinese at home are rarely interested in YY. It's all too easy to argue, "I feel very welcome, so, if you don't, you must be the problem" if you're not a bilingual Chinese parent who feels token, despite your best efforts not to.

It was disruptive for us all to pull out; I mulled it over for two years beforehand. And then I wondered by why I'd delayed - the pressure was off and we were free to be ourselves again. When Chinese associates approach me to ask about YY, I try to say positive things, but when I get to the part about the administrators being non-Chinese, and the 2-3% bilingual, by my count, they say not for us. No way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As usual, a thread that has evolved into vehement YY bashing....I only really got to know the parents in my kid's class and as in most things in life, much comes from what you put into it. I never felt unwelcome at all. I didn't make as much of an effort as I should have in getting involved so didn't get to know as many parents as I would like. But to a fault the parents and administrators have been welcoming.

I sometimes feel the thread comments are talking about an entirely different school. And once again I am not saying that this is perfect and nothing can be improved. But it is a good school with welcoming parents and administrators in my opinion.

Have not posted before. Constructive criticism is hardly bashing. It is a different school if you are Chinese, not entirely, but it is.

So this PP tells us that because s/he has never felt unwelcome, we are not entitled to. I stay mainly because: fewer than 1/3 of the 3rd graders at my IB school test proficient; I cannot afford an independent; and, I am not unhappy enough yet to move to the burbs.

Just the fact that it seems to have taken PA parents years to figure out that Chinese in this city congregate at dimsum places and markets in MoCo, something I learned my first weekend in DC from the neighborhood Hong Kong dry cleaner guy, says a lot.

I am a lawyer who has been through the charter law carefully. I do not see anything mitigating against voluntary placement tests for incoming kids. My Cantonese speaking child could actually learn Mandarin at an accelerated pace, but nobody with any clout has stopped to figure out that his Cantonese is good. When I suggested a placement test to the principal, I was told off.

Why not test kids whose parents want them tested? Why not evaluate kids who speak Chinese on day 1 and count them? Yes, the parents and administrators are welcoming, but, for the most part, they are also a lot more clueless about our situation than they know.

[Anonymous]

More misinformation.
The PA DID target marketing to those places listed, and did so in Mandarin (not Cantonese). However, that is the job of the school and not the parents.
District charter law DOES prevent preferential admissions criteria. Furthermore, it needs to be clearly stated in the charter formation documents that admission will be based on a lottery if more than enough applicants apply. The charter board will not approve anything else and it would be grounds to have a charter pulled if a school were to attempt something like that.
The students are assessed and placed in Mandarin ability groups regularly. The SOPA, CIRCLE and running records place the children by ability to their correct level. I'm curious what leads you to believe that your child is not placed appropriately? Do you mean to imply that you would wish for your child to be in a more native-speaker grouping? Or are you troubled that there are non-native speakers in the highest groups?