Bilingual Kids in Language Immersion ES Programs, Which Programs Have Many & Strive to Attract Them?

[Anonymous]

At a recent Tyler Elementary open house (Capitol Hill), the principal made surprising statements about her Spanish immersion program that were music to my ears. Her remarks made me think of Yu Ying, how that school community's thinking about ethnic input to language immersion seem to be the polar opposite of Tyler's. I say this having persued most of the YY threads, and having attended open houses at the school. Am I wrong? I don't know much about how the leadership of DC's various PS language immersion programs approaches including bilingual children and parents in their school communities, but would be interesting in learning more. Which view is the norm, the Tyler view, the YY view, or something inbetween?

I've heard that Oyster has a separate lottery for Spanish speakers, and that LAMB gives some sort of preferential treatment to them in admissions. We skipped the YY lottery because nobody there seemed to think that having our ethnic Chinese dialect-speaking kid in the school would benefit the program. The opposite, the principal and PA parents were snippy when we asked about bilingual issues. Our Chinese-American immigrant friends who also mainly speak a dialect at home avoid YY, or try it and leave, feeling like token ethnics there. YY's administrators flat out said that, academically, they would treat our dialect-speaking kid like a student who speaks no Chinese. Chinese teachers tell us that there are only one or two bilingual kids per grade.

Here's what the Tyler principal said (drawing from my notes):

*Tyler's language immersion program suffers from having few bilingual Spanish-speaking students and Latino immigrant families involved, a problem we are determined to correct. We wish to celebrate the DC Latino immigrant experience in our program.

*We have started to reach out to the Latino population of nearby neighborhoods to attract more bilingual children to our lottery. And we are working with DCPS to set aside places for such children. We are also moving to identify native Spanish speakers on our wait list and to move them to the top. Our PTA parents support this approach.

*We need more bilingual children in our program to model the language and culture for the other children. We believe that this is an essential component of a successful ES language immersion experience. Our teachers are concerned that our Spanish immersion students speak too much English amongst themselves outside of class, and are too far removed from Latino culture. We want more Spanish-speaking English Language Learners at Tyler. Likewise, our PTA is determined to attract more ethnic Spanish-speaking parents.

[Anonymous]

Happy Oyster parent who thinks that DCPC screwed up bigtime in getting a charter law passed that doesn't permit for selective admissions for speakers of targetted languages, as DCPS does. Hope that the DCI crowd comes together to lobby to constructively amend the law. Can't see that the city council would block this logical change. Most of the charters play sneaky games to pluck assesrtive native speakers off wait lists (don't know if YY does this). Hardly a transparent approach to admissions.

[Anonymous]

Yes to 9:52, YY does pluck like that.

So I was surprised to hear op's recap of conversations with admin. I believe her but it YY's acts seem contradictory

[Anonymous]

OP, OK, but does YY know who to pluck? They pluck kids whose parents who call administrators reporting that Mandarin is spoken at home? How is Chinese proficiency or fluency verified? Through backdoor meetings with the Mandarin-speaking vice principal, kid in tow? They only pluck Mandarin-speaking kids? Other dialects won't do the job, although kids who speak dialects can learn Mandarin much faster and more easily than kids who speak no Chinese?

A friend's kids attend a Mandarin immersion school in NYC where a kid's name goes into a lottery for Chinese speakers only after getting through a short interview in one of half a dozen major dialects. NYC Mandarin immersion schools don't particularly care if the parents are ethnic; they care if the kid speaks Chinese pretty well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes to 9:52, YY does pluck like that.

So I was surprised to hear op's recap of conversations with admin. I believe her but it YY's acts seem contradictory

Ooh, I'm not surprised. OP is hardly the only ethnic parent who felt unwelcome after visiting. The founders and PA parents value DIVERSITY far more highly than bilingual inputs, always have, always will. Other YY threads have delved into the issue of YY not hiring an ethnic Chinese administrator willing and able to run effective outreach to the mostly Cantonese-speaking local Chinese community.

To answer OP's Q, I don't get the feeling that the other language immersinon schools have strained relationships with their language-speaking communities. Not at all. They work hard to draw in bilingual families. Tyler is just getting on board.

[Anonymous]

^^ Can't speak for the other immersion schools, but LAMB works nothing like what's being described of YY. We must be on the Tyler end of the bilingual spectrum. I estimate that 1/3 of the kids are fully bilingual, 6-10 per class. The great majority of the Latino families seem happy and stay. I'm not sure how our lottery works (my kid just started in the fall), but there is some system in place to draw in many native speakers, speaking whatever dialect of Spanish the families speak.

[Anonymous]

Yu Ying parent, reasonably happy but would really like more bilingual kids. I don't see them coming, not when the Tiger parents generate much jealousy & resentment.

YY primarily serves Petworth, Brookland and the Hill, neighborhoods with many crappy IB schools and few Chinese families.

The administrators and parents who founded YY lack strong ties to the ethnic community and are too focused on MS to develop them!

[Anonymous]

OP is inventing a false "spectrum" because all admissions to charter schools in DC are by lottery only. Anyone can apply, anyone can get in.

Now some "ethnic" parents might choose a school that teaches a language that reflects their own heritage, that is true. But that doesn't mean other families aren't choosing the same school for different reasons.

Regarding Yu Ying and ethnic Chinese parents - OP again is spewing nonsense. Lots of ethnic Chinese do attend Yu Ying, and lots more families that have one spouse Chinese or adopted a Chinese daughter. Lots of us have gotten together this very weekend, in fact...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:At a recent Tyler Elementary open house (Capitol Hill), the principal made surprising statements about her Spanish immersion program that were music to my ears. Her remarks made me think of Yu Ying, how that school community's thinking about ethnic input to language immersion seem to be the polar opposite of Tyler's. I say this having persued most of the YY threads, and having attended open houses at the school. Am I wrong? I don't know much about how the leadership of DC's various PS language immersion programs approaches including bilingual children and parents in their school communities, but would be interesting in learning more. Which view is the norm, the Tyler view, the YY view, or something inbetween?

I've heard that Oyster has a separate lottery for Spanish speakers, and that LAMB gives some sort of preferential treatment to them in admissions. We skipped the YY lottery because nobody there seemed to think that having our ethnic Chinese dialect-speaking kid in the school would benefit the program. The opposite, the principal and PA parents were snippy when we asked about bilingual issues. Our Chinese-American immigrant friends who also mainly speak a dialect at home avoid YY, or try it and leave, feeling like token ethnics there. YY's administrators flat out said that, academically, they would treat our dialect-speaking kid like a student who speaks no Chinese. Chinese teachers tell us that there are only one or two bilingual kids per grade.

Here's what the Tyler principal said (drawing from my notes):

*Tyler's language immersion program suffers from having few bilingual Spanish-speaking students and Latino immigrant families involved, a problem we are determined to correct. We wish to celebrate the DC Latino immigrant experience in our program.

*We have started to reach out to the Latino population of nearby neighborhoods to attract more bilingual children to our lottery. And we are working with DCPS to set aside places for such children. We are also moving to identify native Spanish speakers on our wait list and to move them to the top. Our PTA parents support this approach.

*We need more bilingual children in our program to model the language and culture for the other children. We believe that this is an essential component of a successful ES language immersion experience. Our teachers are concerned that our Spanish immersion students speak too much English amongst themselves outside of class, and are too far removed from Latino culture. We want more Spanish-speaking English Language Learners at Tyler. Likewise, our PTA is determined to attract more ethnic Spanish-speaking parents.

Interesting. There are issues of race and socio-economic status that inevitably creep into these discussions, which is perhaps why at some schools like Yu Ying choose to downplay the whole issue. A child who speaks Spanish because his dad works for the UN and just returned from a stint in Madrid has a whole different set of issues from a child from Guatemala whose parents came over illegally a few years ago to work at odd jobs.

I'm sure I'll inspire some disagreement here, but learning Chinese is a heck of a lot more difficult than learning Spanish. Therefore it you send your kids to Yu Ying you'd better be focused on academic achievement from as early an age as they start there.

[Anonymous]

OP's experiences are as valid as anybody else's. There are some Chinese and Chinese-American parents at YY, and a few more all the time, but lots is stretching it. There really are very few bilingual kids entering the school because many of the ethnic parents are highly assimilated types who don't speak much Chinese at home. No secret that most of the Chinese kids there were adopted by whites.

FYI, OP, Mandarin IS Chinese to YY. This reality probably explains why the adin was short with you (I'm assuming that you don't speak Mandarin, or at least didn't speak it to an administrator). It's not a great mindset, but it is what it is.

[Anonymous]

Interesting. There are issues of race and socio-economic status that inevitably creep into these discussions, which is perhaps why at some schools like Yu Ying choose to downplay the whole issue. A child who speaks Spanish because his dad works for the UN and just returned from a stint in Madrid has a whole different set of issues from a child from Guatemala whose parents came over illegally a few years ago to work at odd jobs.

I'm sure I'll inspire some disagreement here, but learning Chinese is a heck of a lot more difficult than learning Spanish. Therefore it you send your kids to Yu Ying you'd better be focused on academic achievement from as early an age as they start there.

+1. There are several hundred DC Chinese dry cleaner and restaurant families facing similar issues similar to those confonted by the Latino illegals. Haven't noticed any at YY. Tiny tots learn Chinese without difficulty. It's maintaining the language that's difficult in DC, a part of the world where it's hardly used, where precious few parents studied it at school or learned it at home.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP is inventing a false "spectrum" because all admissions to charter schools in DC are by lottery only. Anyone can apply, anyone can get in.

Now some "ethnic" parents might choose a school that teaches a language that reflects their own heritage, that is true. But that doesn't mean other families aren't choosing the same school for different reasons.

YY doesn't seem to know or care that unless you're a fairly assimilated 2nd or 3rd generation Chinese immigrant family, you strongly prefer safety in numbers where studying Chinese is concerned (hence the popularity of the MoCo weekend heritage language schools). One reason that YY has so few bilingual kids is that the anybody-can-apply-as-an-individual approach doesn't do it for a Chinese community. For cultural reasons, ordinary Chinese need to be welcomed as a community by an ethnic administrator, or they aren't coming. Not that this bothers many at YY. The Spanish immersion schools seem to deal with DC Latino neighborhood communities as communities. Their teachers are Latino Americans prepared to initiate outreach, not guest workers on one-year visas.

[Anonymous]

That makes sense. We're at Stokes. The school does outreach to the Haitian immigrant community, which seems to work pretty well. I'm guessing that nearly half the kids speak French, or a French-based Creole, at home. It's common for bilingual kids like mine (parent from France) to get together outside school. It's just not a terribly well run school.

[Anonymous]

OP here. False dichotomy or not, YY's bilingual situation warrants scrutiny. We know that the school doesn't involve more than a dozen fully bilingual ethnic (or half ethnic) children from teachers, several of whom speak our dialect and have been willing to do head count for us. We find that YY parents, and prospective parents, who aren't native speakers tend to assume that there are many bilingual kids in the school when there aren't.

Why is accurate information about YY's bilingual situation so difficult to come by? The administrations won't provide it, no data on bilingualism is collected, and no screening or initial testing of bilingual kids is done. The lack of data makes it easy for administrators and parents to claim "we have lots of Chinese-speaking ethnic families!"

What makes the other immersion schools different in regard to their treatment of bilingual families and bilingualism, apart from the obvious DCPS two lotteries-DCPC one-lottery divide?

Thanks for sharing, PPs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: Interesting. There are issues of race and socio-economic status that inevitably creep into these discussions, which is perhaps why at some schools like Yu Ying choose to downplay the whole issue. A child who speaks Spanish because his dad works for the UN and just returned from a stint in Madrid has a whole different set of issues from a child from Guatemala whose parents came over illegally a few years ago to work at odd jobs.

I'm sure I'll inspire some disagreement here, but learning Chinese is a heck of a lot more difficult than learning Spanish. Therefore it you send your kids to Yu Ying you'd better be focused on academic achievement from as early an age as they start there.

+1. There are several hundred DC Chinese dry cleaner and restaurant families facing similar issues similar to those confonted by the Latino illegals. Haven't noticed any at YY. Tiny tots learn Chinese without difficulty. It's maintaining the language that's difficult in DC, a part of the world where it's hardly used, where precious few parents studied it at school or learned it at home.

I personally know of at least one "restaurant family" at Yu Ying. Be careful about your assumptions.