Reply to the DC International Public Charter School (DCI)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Similar to Oyster, wouldn't you have to have a written/oral test in the immersion language to qualify for entry?  You can't just have English-only kids plopped into a middle school with immersion tracks.  So very few kids would qualify outside of Stokes, Oyster and LAMB, etc. [/quote]

Even if there are true "immersion" tracks at DCI it is perfectly plausible to program intro level language offerings for newcomers to language study who lottery into the school's available spaces.  The model for this is the private Washington International School Structure, which organizes students into an immersion "humanities/social studies" class in the target language for at-grade level literate students, an intermediate level and an intro level.  While DCI may not accomodate with all those bells and whistles, I'm sure they will give thoughtful attention to how to support newcomers and third language acquisition among the bilinguals.  [b]I am confident there will be opportunities for students to join DCI from a lottery and to benefit from language offerings tailored to their level.  Without that, the model is a non-starter because there is no way to maintain necessary enrollment goals[/b].[/quote]

Seems to me you're missing one of the key points to this being a joint venture between 3 or 4 feeder schools: the point being, if you assume attrition and know you can't screen/test for language comprehension levels because you're a charter, having a certain number of feeder schools that feed into this middle and high school may very well provide the "numbers" you need to keep a middle and high school going, without losing what - given again that they can't test for language level of new incoming students - is a very specific educational model that requires consistency throughout the school years after the last entry grade.

If this was just YY or just Stokes, you'd be right, with attrition how could they maintain the numbers?  But with 4 feeder schools, why do you doubt they'd be able to keep the overall level of enrollment where it needs to be, and they'd just need to figure out within the school what the language immersion looks like with 3 (currently) languages included in the school.

So inother words, one ofthe whole points of this proposal is for them to be able to do this exactly because they do NOT want to take kids in later grades if they can't test for language level of new students.  This gets them a middle and high school withough compromising their models.[/quote]

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