Moving to DC, and can't decide between Oyster and MoCo

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One of the early posters talked about having to compete with native speakers and/or parents who speak Spanish. I think that's just a cop-out. DS is in an immersion program in Arlington and they start actually build up very slowly and offer supplemental instruction for native speakers. This fear of having to compete is ridiculous.

Well, that is not how Oyster works. These concerns are not a copout and they're not ridiculous -- they're students' concerns, based on their in-class experience. They sometimes withdraw because they don't speak Spanish as well as their classmates. Oyster teachers are aware of this, and would not call their students' experience ridiculous. Some students leave Oyster because they get tired of the bilingual program. Again, if OP is considering Oyster, she needs to understand what the program might involve.

I'm the parent in Arlington who originally posted on this. It is a cop-out in the sense that immersion students have to stretch themselves a bit. If they come in knowing absolutely nothing in Spanish and expect to get everything they need to know in school without making a bit of extra effort, their parents are responsible. The kind of (mostly white), educated parents who send their kids to Oyster need to do a little more and it's so easy. We take our son to theatre in Spanish, buy books in Spanish, check books out of the library, watch TV in Spanish, and put ourselves in Latino environments -- all of this is easy to find right in the city and the close-in suburbs. We don't do these things all the time but the minor effort that we expend makes all the difference in our son's success.

And, gasp, kids aren't going to be the top in everything. Those who drop out because they're not as good as some of their classmates are setting themselves up for a lifetime of disappointment. I'm white and I happen to be glad that privileged white kids experience a bit of the frustration that children in immigrant families who start school knowing little or no English experience on a much more profound level.

As for the other poster who talked about the need for "added value" in the upper school curriculum, the added value is the language and the fact that kids who stick with these programs through middle school typically can knock off the AP exam in Spanish as freshmen in high school.

[Anonymous]

Those who drop out because they're not as good as some of their classmates are setting themselves up for a lifetime of disappointment.

I would not call students switching to other schools at Grades 4 or 6, after five or more years in the program, "dropping out." Immersion programs are not for everyone. They just aren't.