Yu Ying - advice please

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Not OP, but don't agree that this thread has been sad. Good points are being made (and by idiots! gosh!). It isn't all rainbows and kittens at YY. The parents of the little kids tend to be happier than those of older ones. DCI isn't wowing all the upper grades parents and the Chinese program isn't serious enough for everybody.

Well, we certainly know the Chinese program isn't serious enough for the DCUM heritage parents who DON'T have children who attend YY or DCI.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, YY isn't in high demand because it's a serious Chinese immersion program, as PPs love to claim on these boards. Look in California, MoCo, New York or the Carolinas for one of those. Not at all. The school's in high demand because the Mandarin requirement works brilliantly to deter most poor families from applying, enabling the rest to fall into place (nurturing environment, strong test scores for English and math, fundraising mechanisms in high gear, fun sleepover field trips, great playground, long WL etc.) They've got a FARMs rate on a par with JKLM and Brent, way down from their FARMs rate ten years ago. There are schools in Upper NW with a higher percentage of poor kids (Hearst, Stoddert). YY parents and admins don't want to admit how this works, but it's more than obvious.

This is it. This is the answer. All the hoey about "supporting Mandarin at home" is to further abet what you see above. I write this as a very happy parent of two YY students who love the school. But folks should be a bit more honest about why the school is so attractive. It's not because all our kids are going to work for Google in Beijing when they grow up.

[Anonymous]

Do most YY graduates continue on to DCI?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, YY isn't in high demand because it's a serious Chinese immersion program, as PPs love to claim on these boards. Look in California, MoCo, New York or the Carolinas for one of those. Not at all. The school's in high demand because the Mandarin requirement works brilliantly to deter most poor families from applying, enabling the rest to fall into place (nurturing environment, strong test scores for English and math, fundraising mechanisms in high gear, fun sleepover field trips, great playground, long WL etc.) They've got a FARMs rate on a par with JKLM and Brent, way down from their FARMs rate ten years ago. There are schools in Upper NW with a higher percentage of poor kids (Hearst, Stoddert). YY parents and admins don't want to admit how this works, but it's more than obvious.

This is it. This is the answer. All the hoey about "supporting Mandarin at home" is to further abet what you see above. I write this as a very happy parent of two YY students who love the school. But folks should be a bit more honest about why the school is so attractive. It's not because all our kids are going to work for Google in Beijing when they grow up.

Are you saying you like the school because there aren't very many poor children?

That is the premise of the previous post.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, YY isn't in high demand because it's a serious Chinese immersion program, as PPs love to claim on these boards. Look in California, MoCo, New York or the Carolinas for one of those. Not at all. The school's in high demand because the Mandarin requirement works brilliantly to deter most poor families from applying, enabling the rest to fall into place (nurturing environment, strong test scores for English and math, fundraising mechanisms in high gear, fun sleepover field trips, great playground, long WL etc.) They've got a FARMs rate on a par with JKLM and Brent, way down from their FARMs rate ten years ago. There are schools in Upper NW with a higher percentage of poor kids (Hearst, Stoddert). YY parents and admins don't want to admit how this works, but it's more than obvious.

This is it. This is the answer. All the hoey about "supporting Mandarin at home" is to further abet what you see above. I write this as a very happy parent of two YY students who love the school. But folks should be a bit more honest about why the school is so attractive. It's not because all our kids are going to work for Google in Beijing when they grow up.

Yes, you're right. This is a city with a fast rising high SES population, and a school system WITHOUT GT programming, more than one popular neighborhood middle school (Deal) and high school (Wilson), and test-in middle school programs. As a general rule, there's aren't enough nearly enough educators and counselors in a given public school building to intervene effectively when struggling students need more remedial work, gifted students need more advanced work, and a range of students need critical socio-emotional supports. Parents who can vote with their feet to particularly strong elementary schools with FARMs rates in the teens and single digits do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, YY isn't in high demand because it's a serious Chinese immersion program, as PPs love to claim on these boards. Look in California, MoCo, New York or the Carolinas for one of those. Not at all. The school's in high demand because the Mandarin requirement works brilliantly to deter most poor families from applying, enabling the rest to fall into place (nurturing environment, strong test scores for English and math, fundraising mechanisms in high gear, fun sleepover field trips, great playground, long WL etc.) They've got a FARMs rate on a par with JKLM and Brent, way down from their FARMs rate ten years ago. There are schools in Upper NW with a higher percentage of poor kids (Hearst, Stoddert). YY parents and admins don't want to admit how this works, but it's more than obvious.

This is it. This is the answer. All the hoey about "supporting Mandarin at home" is to further abet what you see above. I write this as a very happy parent of two YY students who love the school. But folks should be a bit more honest about why the school is so attractive. It's not because all our kids are going to work for Google in Beijing when they grow up.

Are you saying you like the school because there aren't very many poor children?

That is the premise of the previous post.

Cut the holier than thou class baiting already. How many well-educated, high SES DC parents are dying to send their kids to Title 1 schools? The odd parent owns up to voting with their feet to a school without many poor children, but most keep mum on this touchy subject. In conversation, they attribute their use of schools with few poor kids to luck and interest in a particular curriculum in the case of a charter, and where they happened to buy or rent a place with a DCPS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I feel like this thread has really gone off track from the OP's questions.

We are family who also just got lucky in the lottery and are deciding on whether to send our toddler to Yu Ying.

Like the other parent, what we want to know is whether the school is intentional about teaching the kids how to be kind to each other, nurturing the whole student in terms of their social skills and emotional management, including in the pre-k classrooms. It is very valuable to us that the school teachers chinese, but I want to know about the fuller spectrum of teaching skills and curriculum that current parents have observed.

Thanks in advance for additional perspectives on those topics.

Hey PP! Have you given up on this thread yet? It's gotten pretty sad, and unfortunately this is how it always seems to go with YY threads.

To bring it back to your question, though, we are a new PK3 family and never cease to be amazed at how great a school it is. YES, they absolutely nurture the whole student. The kids are really well taken care of. There is a lot of play and an emphasis on sharing, kindness, and cooperation. The teachers really know my DC and communicate with me about him daily (letting me know about days when he was grumpy/acting out, when he had to apologize to another student, when he had fun playing with a particular toy, and much more). It's been seven months and I'm still impressed with the school every single day. We put it at the top of our list for the Chinese, but now that I know the school better, I have to say I am mostly grateful not for the language (although it's cool!) but for all the other aspects of the school. I feel like I lucked into a private school that happens to be free.

Thank you for this response. Very helpful perspective.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Anyone who continues to compare the cohorts at the Spanish immersion schools to the paltry number of Chinese speakers in DC is an idiot. They are not even in the same league. Particularly Oyster, which is allowed to run a dual lottery (LAMB did this for a number of years, and many of those kids are still at LAMB.)

In its ten years of existence, YY has found a beautiful permanent home, grown to over 500 students, achieved and maintained Tier 1 status, successfully implemented the PYP IB curriculum, and founded a middle and high school, ALSO with a beautiful, permanent home. All while teaching Chinese, one of the most difficult languages to learn, to randomly selected DC students. So, yeah, many parents aren't enraged at the administration for not (yet) producing perfect Chinese speakers.

Ding ding ding! At least there's one voice of reason in this discussion, and yes, the admins have done one hell of a job in creating a stable school with a lovely campus and a path to a decent (maybe even very good) middle and high school. Those are not small achievements, they're huge. And the low student turnover pretty much speaks for itself - much louder than the cranky people claiming it to be such an inferior place.

[Anonymous]

I've heard various voices of reason on this thread. Apparently, you just want to hear booster speak.

[Anonymous]

The reason you would come to Yu Ying is for the Chinese immersion. If you're happy where you are, and have no interest in Chinese immersion, I don't see why you would make the change.

If you got into YY, do you have other options? You must have gotten a good lottery number and would likely get in elsewhere as slots shift, or was YY your top choice?

As for the support and the support you would need to provide, YY is a very warm environment in my experience. However, in talking to another parent who is new to PK4 this year, their child was having some difficulty with some of the other students picking on them. On the other hand, I noticed when we started with our older child, within a week, it seemed all the other students in the school knew the names of all the new PK kids.

As for supporting your child's studies, we don't do a lot to support their Chinese language learning. We don't have an au pair, tutor, babysitter or anything and they seem to be picking things up well. We'll sometimes show them Youtube videos or get CD's from the library with music.

Do I expect our kids to be at Chinese school equivalent grade level with their Chinese? No. I do expect that at the end of their time at YY that they have a fairly strong foundation in formal school taught Chinese. Yes. They are alternating between Chinese and English every other day, so of course they are not going to be perfectly fluent, but they will, and do, speak a lot more than likely anyone with a year of college level Chinese. So they seem to be doing fine without any supplemental instruction or assistance from parents.

YY is a very good school for elementary education even without the Chinese so I can see how it would be attractive even if you have no interest in Chinese, but I just can't see why you would want to send your child to a school that does alternate every other day between Chinese and English if you have no interest in them learning the language.

[Anonymous]

Kids almost always do "fine" in Chinese at YY without any supplemental instruction or assistance from parents because the bar for Mandarin just isn't set very high, particularly for speaking. The instructional emphasis is on writing and grammar. When we sent our YY student to a summer immersion sleepover camp attended by a whole bunch of kids from Mandarin immersion schools in NY and NJ (both public and private weekend programs) after 3rd grade, we were surprised to learn that they had a lot of trouble keeping up on speaking and listening. They weren't just trailing campers who spoke dialects at home, they were behind the curve period.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Kids almost always do "fine" in Chinese at YY without any supplemental instruction or assistance from parents because the bar for Mandarin just isn't set very high, particularly for speaking. The instructional emphasis is on writing and grammar. When we sent our YY student to a summer immersion sleepover camp attended by a whole bunch of kids from Mandarin immersion schools in NY and NJ (both public and private weekend programs) after 3rd grade, we were surprised to learn that they had a lot of trouble keeping up on speaking and listening. They weren't just trailing campers who spoke dialects at home, they were behind the curve period.

Which camp did you go to, was it Concordia?

I always sort of roll my eyes when people critcize YY students' Chinese speaking skills bc the school emphasizes reading and writing over conversation. If the school did the opposite, and focused on speaking/understanding at the expense of reading and writing, then the criticism would be "yeah the kids speak ok but are illiterate."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The reason you would come to Yu Ying is for the Chinese immersion. If you're happy where you are, and have no interest in Chinese immersion, I don't see why you would make the change.

If you got into YY, do you have other options? You must have gotten a good lottery number and would likely get in elsewhere as slots shift, or was YY your top choice?

As for the support and the support you would need to provide, YY is a very warm environment in my experience. However, in talking to another parent who is new to PK4 this year, their child was having some difficulty with some of the other students picking on them. On the other hand, I noticed when we started with our older child, within a week, it seemed all the other students in the school knew the names of all the new PK kids.

As for supporting your child's studies, we don't do a lot to support their Chinese language learning. We don't have an au pair, tutor, babysitter or anything and they seem to be picking things up well. We'll sometimes show them Youtube videos or get CD's from the library with music.

Do I expect our kids to be at Chinese school equivalent grade level with their Chinese? No. I do expect that at the end of their time at YY that they have a fairly strong foundation in formal school taught Chinese. Yes. They are alternating between Chinese and English every other day, so of course they are not going to be perfectly fluent, but they will, and do, speak a lot more than likely anyone with a year of college level Chinese. So they seem to be doing fine without any supplemental instruction or assistance from parents.

YY is a very good school for elementary education even without the Chinese so I can see how it would be attractive even if you have no interest in Chinese, but I just can't see why you would want to send your child to a school that does alternate every other day between Chinese and English if you have no interest in them learning the language.

I don't get why OP would change schools either, and it was clear from the 1st post that Chinese itself was not a priority. That said, since apparently OP doesn't really care about Chinese (and hasn't said otherwise 5 pages in), all the people saying that YY students don't end up speaking Chinese well enough may not really be an issue for OP. I don't believe with those criticisms, but in terms of the decision OP is making, sounds like OP doesn't really care so it's more why leave a place you already know you like? And no, I'm not in the lottery, very happy with the dual language school our kids are at, so for all who are about to say "you just want OP's spot", I'm not even in the game this year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The reason you would come to Yu Ying is for the Chinese immersion. If you're happy where you are, and have no interest in Chinese immersion, I don't see why you would make the change.

If you got into YY, do you have other options? You must have gotten a good lottery number and would likely get in elsewhere as slots shift, or was YY your top choice?

As for the support and the support you would need to provide, YY is a very warm environment in my experience. However, in talking to another parent who is new to PK4 this year, their child was having some difficulty with some of the other students picking on them. On the other hand, I noticed when we started with our older child, within a week, it seemed all the other students in the school knew the names of all the new PK kids.

As for supporting your child's studies, we don't do a lot to support their Chinese language learning. We don't have an au pair, tutor, babysitter or anything and they seem to be picking things up well. We'll sometimes show them Youtube videos or get CD's from the library with music.

Do I expect our kids to be at Chinese school equivalent grade level with their Chinese? No. I do expect that at the end of their time at YY that they have a fairly strong foundation in formal school taught Chinese. Yes. They are alternating between Chinese and English every other day, so of course they are not going to be perfectly fluent, but they will, and do, speak a lot more than likely anyone with a year of college level Chinese. So they seem to be doing fine without any supplemental instruction or assistance from parents.

YY is a very good school for elementary education even without the Chinese so I can see how it would be attractive even if you have no interest in Chinese, but I just can't see why you would want to send your child to a school that does alternate every other day between Chinese and English if you have no interest in them learning the language.

I don't get why OP would change schools either, and it was clear from the 1st post that Chinese itself was not a priority. That said, since apparently OP doesn't really care about Chinese (and hasn't said otherwise 5 pages in), all the people saying that YY students don't end up speaking Chinese well enough may not really be an issue for OP. I don't believe with those criticisms, but in terms of the decision OP is making, sounds like OP doesn't really care so it's more why leave a place you already know you like? And no, I'm not in the lottery, very happy with the dual language school our kids are at, so for all who are about to say "you just want OP's spot", I'm not even in the game this year.

OP here (yes, still deciding and reading these posts, thank you!). There are a few reasons why I'm considering YY despite loving our current school. Our current school ends at 6th grade, so the DCI feeder pattern is desirable. I like that YY is on three wooded acres. And the test scores are impressive. I have read a lot of positive things about the benefits of dual language. That said, I love the Montessori school too. I love the education, as well as the teachers, classmates, and families. I realize I am deciding between two excellent choices, but the decision is still difficult.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Kids almost always do "fine" in Chinese at YY without any supplemental instruction or assistance from parents because the bar for Mandarin just isn't set very high, particularly for speaking. The instructional emphasis is on writing and grammar. When we sent our YY student to a summer immersion sleepover camp attended by a whole bunch of kids from Mandarin immersion schools in NY and NJ (both public and private weekend programs) after 3rd grade, we were surprised to learn that they had a lot of trouble keeping up on speaking and listening. They weren't just trailing campers who spoke dialects at home, they were behind the curve period.

Which camp did you go to, was it Concordia?

I always sort of roll my eyes when people critcize YY students' Chinese speaking skills bc the school emphasizes reading and writing over conversation. If the school did the opposite, and focused on speaking/understanding at the expense of reading and writing, then the criticism would be "yeah the kids speak ok but are illiterate."

There would also be a lot of criticism if the program emphasized speaking and listening because the students from families without a Chinese speaker in the home who supplement extensively (particularly by hosting Chinese au pairs year after year, to the tune of 15-18K a year) would have a big advantage in language studies over the others.

The problem is that writing and grammar flow from speaking and listening. Kids are a lot more likely to retain and use a language as teens and adults if they can really speak than if they can really read and write. If you look at curricula for language studies around the country, and indeed the world, the emphasis on speaking and listening has grown for both kids and adults. Indeed the IB Diploma exams put a lot more emphasis on speaking and listening than they did only a generation ago. YY is something of a throwback, emphasizing instruction in writing and grammar.