CHARTERS MAY MERGE AT WALTER REED (The DC International School, IB Diploma Programme)
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Anonymous
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It is certainly arguable YY does the same given what it has, the district of columbia with <1% Chinese.
It's not the size of a local bilingual population that determines how well an immersion school serves a community as much as the way bilingual kids enter a program. For example, there's a dual-immersion public Chinese school in Chapel Hill, NC that's very popular with ordinary Chinese families, although that bilingual community is much smaller than DC's. Bilingual kids need to pass an interview in one of the half dozen major dialects to be admitted, even at age 4. Such children make up around 1/3 of the school's population. Less assimilated Chinese (including some high-SES families) like their kids to learn Mandarin with a good many other Chinese to a greater extent than more assimilated Chinese. We're not planning to enter the YY lottery because we aren't comforable with the idea of our children joining the school's tiny bilingual student group, not when our IB school is one of the best. We're hardly alone in this regard in the DC Chinese community. But we would jump at the chance to send our kids to a dual-immersion program like Oyster, or a near-dual-immersion program like LAMB, if Chinese was the target language. Posters laugh at the concept of using an ethnic MIL as a volunteer, but this is the sort of community support that dual-immersion programs draw on. These schools easily get volunteers from the local ethnic community in a variety of capacities because they serve both the bilingual and non-bilingual communities as communities. There are two models for public school dual-immersion programs in this country, the "balanced" language model (Oyster's, 50/50 native speakers and non-native speakers) and the "minority language dominant model," which many of California's dual-immersion schools use. Most Mandarin immersion programs coast to coast are in fact "balanced" programs (there are a dozen, and even several Cantonese and mixed-dialect immersion programs in Cal). They aren't one-way immersion programs like YY, whatever the perception may be at the school, because dual-immersion programs have been shown to generate more robust language acquisition outputs than those where teachers supply almost all the linguistic and cultural inputs. |
Anonymous
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"Why would less assimilated families be interested in a Chinese immersion school? Recent immigrants want their kids to learn English. It does not matter if the school is dual-immersion with targeted "dialect transition" or a school like YY. The native speakers who move to the U.S. want their kids to learn English and go to Harvard like other Asian immigrant parents. Immersion schools by their very design attracts native English speakers who want their children to learn another language usually this means higher SES families who care about such things thus the high number of higher SES families at YY."
It does matter if a school is dual-immersion, really matters. Chinese immigrants do tend to want their children to learn Mandarin, to position them to take advantage of the opportunities a rising China will bring their generation of Americans. My niece, who's at Harvard, is a Cantonese speaker and graduate of PS 163, in Flushing NY, a "balanced" Mandarin dual-immersion program. Our family immigrated in the 70s, but many of her PS classmates were recently arrived immigrants. The explosion of private Mandarin schools in Chinatowns and Chinese enclaves around the country (where low and medium-SES families are more like to live than high-SES) is testament to immigrant drive to learn the dialect. My sister complains that most of the services at her NYC Chinatown church are no longer conducted in Cantonese, they're done in Mandarin, partly to attract young people. |
Anonymous
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Link to a 2009 NY Times article on the subject of how Mandarin is rapidly eclipsing Cantonese in NYC's Chinatown.
Front page picture of little immigrant and 2nd generation kids studying Mandarin. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/nyregion/22chinese.html?pagewanted=all |
Anonymous
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+1. WOTP guy. There are low-SES immigrant Chinese families enrolled at my kids' MoCo weekend heritage language school, which teaches Mandarin & cultural classes (Chinese chess, Wushu/Kung Fu). Most of the families involved live in Eastern areas of the county, where there aren't Mandarin immersion schools (although there's an IB MS in Silver Spring which teaches Mandarin), or are from DC. Hard scrabble DC Chinatown families with young children are involved - the school doesn't charge them much. I've talked to a number about why they aren't at YY and, for the most part, it's not the immersion that's turned them off, it's the lack of a Chinese administrator and a significant number of bilingual families.
We'd go for a good DCPS dual-immersion school if one existed. Maybe we should be talking to DCPS, although I'm having hard time imagining the Chancellor being interested at a time of budget stringency. Maybe we'll have a new opening once Gray and Kaya go, particularly if YY's waiting lists lengthen. |
Anonymous
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^ we're at yy, not chinese, and would prefer a dual immersion program there, and at dci. we know oyster families who have sold us on the approach. good luck advocates.
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Anonymous
| The charter board is perfectly willing to approve niche schools. If you plan a decent Chinese school, it will get approved, YY notwithstanding. I think that's the only way to get what you want--you need to be the one to do the work. |
Anonymous
| Yes do the work and stop castigating those who have already done their work. If you ask nicely YY would probably share you their presentation. Afterall, they shared it with MV and MV was approved. |
Anonymous
I don't doubt that YY would help if another immersion charter were in the works. What some of the dialect speakers worry would happen if a 2nd school went charter is that, without a lottery for bilingual kids, you'd mainly attract families who aren't as interested in Mandarin and Chinese culture as in escaping IB schools. I favor the Oyster model, where a Latino community is drawn in as a community. If you threw open the door to dialect speakers entering via a separate lottery, and the new school seemed as strong as Oyster, I'd wager that you get 75-100 bilingual kids, maybe 5 times the number at YY. But you couldn't find enough for a 50-50 native speaker non-native balance, so any dialect-speaking applicant would be welcome. And you'd get a host of ethnic parents happy to teach Tai Chi, Chinese chess, cooking, brush painting, folk/Lion dance and music, Chinese knotting etc. With considerable community input, a school can have a lot of fun with the culture. I'd like to see such a school emerge as one of the first DCPS/Charter hybrids Kaya is talking about. That way, maybe it could have a DCI feed. The more strong immersion schools with the feed, the better for the MS. These programs are a cut above most PS elementary programs. Gray doesn't look like he'll get through 2014, if he tries. We'll wait for a new Chancellor to ask the hard questions. |
Anonymous
I think that all sounds very sensible. I posted above that folks should start their own school, and I didn't mean it to be snarky--just that at this point posters are describing something that would require a rewrite of YY's charter. And I agree that this is probably done best with heavy DCPS input--among other things, they have the buildings and the $ for a startup. |
Anonymous
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"And you'd get a host of ethnic parents happy to teach Tai Chi, Chinese chess, cooking, brush painting, folk/Lion dance and music, Chinese knotting etc. With considerable community input, a school can have a lot of fun with the culture. "
uh, Yu Ying offers all this and more from native Chinese folks.. |
Anonymous
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I concur. And I'm optimistic that eventually, maybe in 2 or 3 years, this discussion will take off. China will keep rising, more bilingual families will come into the District, and stay, as neighborhoods and schools continue to improve, and more immigrant families accept government service as a solid career choice.
Since Mandarin isn't a niche language, like, say, Aramaic or Farsi or even Hebrew, founders do need to be careful not to attract droves of families who are OK with the Mandarin but not Chinese attitudes, and are out of touch with the Sino immigrant experience. You can have a minority of such families, but when they become the majority, as at YY, the less assimilated want no part of it and even high-SES bilinguals can feel token. There isn't a market for Cantonese immersion anywhere outside several California population centers. And there's enough tension over assimilation, challenge and cultural authenticity issues at YY: no point in exporting them to a sister charter. Competition wouldn't hurt YY. Maybe it would help effect a change in administration that would benefit the school. I don't see why a handful of immersion schools should be the only ones feeding into DCI either. |
Anonymous
Yea, sort of hired help. Rarely parents, uncles, grandparents. We've established that there isn't a Chinese community behind the school. |
Anonymous
So volunteers teach better than professionals? And I'd say that DCUM has only "established" that there's a ton of hostility against YY. It won't be able to "establish" much about the actual experience of Chinese-American parents who choose to stay at the school, since those voices are routinely ignored around here. |
Anonymous
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amen.
especially since much of the criticism leveled at the school comes from outsiders or people who left yet continue to haunt every thread related to YY. kinda makes you wonder...could it be they didn't get their way on an issue? were they busted for living outside of dc? did a relative not get a position at the school? were they fired from a position at the school? are they trying to assuage guilt over not choosing the school for their chinese children? just curious as to why they doth protest so much...... |
Anonymous
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