Why does everyone prioritize language immersion?

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04/05/2018 13:29

Subject: Why does everyone prioritize language immersion?

quote

Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are good and bad reasons, hard to separate because they are generally true to some extent regardless of a given parent's actual weighing of factors and motivations.

* Bilingual education as more than normal elementary education. When someone asks if you want a better package as an option do you say no?
* Valuing cosmopolitan internationalism - many in DC are educated migrants or immigrants who view themselves as separate from monolingual whitebread America.
* The clear fact that almost anyone can learn a second language if it's started very early, like early elementary school, but almost no one can gain fluency without effort if started too late, e.g., during high school. And the typical American course of behavior is to start language courses at about 14, spend several years on it, and fail to achieve long-term useful language ability despite everything.

Yucky factors:
* there is a stereotype that children of Hispanic immigrant families are compliant and safe for upper class children to be with, contrasting this with children of DC's black dysfunction, who are perceived to put DCUM children at risk.
* language-based programs because of their specialization limit entry. From the beginning they are only for those who choose them - no one goes there by default, which cuts down on lazy and uninvolved parents.
* They cause the children in these programs to cohort together, meaning the pool of children mixing with DCUM children to be limited in absolute numbers and programmatically.
* The programs do not allow entry for children who have not been in these programs in the past and they do not allow entry at all after cutoff grades - the cohorts can really only get smaller. Your children are thus at decreased risk of being joined by children who have bounced around from school to school (the "churn" that happens in DC schools), e.g., no one expelled by a charter for biting their classmates goes into a bilingual program after winter break if the program is full. The general education classroom in their home DCPS for their grade gets that kid. No homeless third grader is likely to join your kid's bilingual class.
* It allows access to specialized schooling channels outside the DCPS system, e.g., the DCI secondary schools, based on a principle that is not facially based on distaste for the core longstanding population of gentrifying parts of DC - black families with poor educational and career outcomes and trauma in their lives which they are transmitting on to children with whom your DCUM child would be placed in school. Instead of having to say, negatively, that you are against having your child next to someone you think will act out and fail tests, you can then say that you want your child to be in a unique program of particular positive value to your family. And the results will effectively be the same.

A lot of truth here. Many upper middle class people will only say the "yucky" things to themselves, but you can hear more palatable versions publicly if you listen for them.

-- upper middle class parent at an immersion school who doesn't want to admit all those things about myself, but can be honest that most of them have crossed my mind. and who has seen friend groups clearly stratify by language, race, economics. Still very happy to have my kid in a diverse school that works really hard to help the poorer kids. Alternatives in DC are pretty much either: school with 85-95% kids living in poverty, or move WOTP and get much less racial, language and economic diversity.

Often these thoughts are wrongly assigned to “racist, white, UMC “ parents strictly, when in fact UMC and even middle class back parents share the sentiments. Everyone wants their child to be around “their ilk”. And what that means varies wildly! I