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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP, the reason that a Mandarin-fluent child can't be admitted after 2nd grade is that the school's charter forbids it. DC charter school law forbids making admission contingent on any sort of placement test. I can't imagine this part of the law ever changing.

The line about preferring smaller upper grades sounds like an attempt to put a good spin on an unfortunate constraint. [/quote]

So how was my daughter able to lottery into Washington Latin for 7th grade, without having studied Latin before?  She was put in "catch up" Latin classes there so she could join the rest of her grade in standard classes eventually (as almost all the other kids had started Latin in 5th).   I can't see the DC Charter Board having a problem with kid coming into YY through a "replacement lottery," like the one Latin runs for grades above 5th.  YY might have a problem with this, but the DC Charter Board?   The PP wasn't asking for a special "placement," he was asking for an appropriate education for his child, like ours gets at Latin.
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YY's charter excludes new admissions after a certain grade because it doesn't have the resources to bring an older child who has never been exposed to Mandarin up to speed with his/her classmates, and it's not allowed to screen out applicants who haven't had any Mandarin.  Washington Latin's situation is different; years of language classes have nothing on even one year of actual immersion.  Add to this the fact that children's facility for learning new languages declines with age (at least a few years ago, 9 was considered the upper threshold for most kids to start learning in order to gain fluency), and the fact that I'm not aware of any current requirements for a Latin accent.  Plus the fact that Latin is an Indo-European language that uses the Latin alphabet.  [/quote]

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