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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I like it when DC residents complain about half assed ed programs for their tax dollars and organize to challenge dumb policies. Nobody should be forced to move in a Metro center for the type of school that's available in jurisdictions just a few miles away. It's a shame that there aren't any immersion programs with set asides for native speakers in this city other than for Spanish at Oyster and Adams. If DCI has been set up as a DCPS-DCPCS hybrid program, which was seriously considered years ago (DCPS said no, not DCPCS), they could have had a lottery for native speakers to attract native speakers of all three target languages. The small number of Chinese immigrants in the city isn't the crux of the problem. It's also a shame that BASIS and Latin can't give admissions tests (like the middle school magnets my spouse and I attended in different East Coast cities).

Blaming individuals who seek best ed practices for not moving as they seek common sense solutions isn't the answer. [/quote]

[b]The thing is, as a native speaker, what these people want is not just native speaker preference, they want the schools to match the pressure cooker environment of their hukao or whatever. [/b]I would prefer not to have that. I took my first streaming exam at 6 years old, then had them roughly every 4 years to place again. For university I had to place in the top 30 or so to do CS. In my parents generation you didn’t even get to choose your major- if you were in the top decile or so you went to med school. 
By the time I hit the equivalent of high school I knew 4-5 kids who’d had complete nervous breakdowns.

I think schools could be a little more rigorous here don’t get me wrong, but I think people who think the pressure cooker system is good for kids are a little ridiculous, and if they think their kids will come out on top they’re naive. [/quote]

And you know this because you've conducted a survey of native speakers of Chinese with middle and high school-age children in the DMV? Because of course almost every Chinese immigrant parent attended a hukao or "whatever." This Chinese immigrant parent attended a NYC magnet HS followed by an Ivy, no hukaos involved.

The reason DC charters attract very few East Asian immigrant families is because they're not nearly as good as the best suburban options. BASIS and Deal have the highest Asian percentages, not DCI or Latin Cooper. DC can do better.[/quote]

Basis and Deal barely have any Asians, a few percentages more but nothing significant.

[b]The reason charters don’t attract asians is because it’s not a guarantee thing.  They are a lottery.  They don’t admit based on a testing score threshold.[/b]

The biggest reason though that there are few Asians in the city is because there is no tracking at the elementary, middle, and high school level to push the high achievers to their fullest potential.  There are no magnet schools. This blame does not lay with individual schools.  It lays at the hands of the mayor and city who only care about the bottom.

What I will say though like others have said on this thread is that DCI has one of the highest “tracking” off the record for high performers in middle school with math and the electives, social studies, etc…taught in the language.[/quote]

Not buying this. Most of the fellow DC East Asian immigrant families we know have hit the road for the burbs during or right after the ES years. Same for the "WAsian" families (white/East Asian). These families, both high and low SES, don't tend to bother with the school lottery because they have a strong tendency to move to MoCo or NoVA for schools. There are DC public magnet schools--Walls, Banneker, Duke Ellington--just not those on a par with those in the burbs. The highest performing charters keep some Asian and WAsian families without the dough for privates in the District, but not most of these families. While individual schools bear some of the responsibility for the failure to provide sufficient challenge to advanced students in DCPS, the mayor, ed leaders and voters are mostly to blame. [/quote]

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