Reply to Yu Ying

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Yu Ying"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We know four families at our DCPS who mostly speak Chinese at home with ES age kids. We come together to organize Chinese New Year celebrations at the school. The kids' Chinese sounds terrific to me (though they use a lot of slang), the PP who spent a decade working in China.

We've asked, and none of these families has ever applied to YY. The parents say they're not interested in becoming token bilingual families there, and don't like how they've never been able to find a senior admin who speaks good Chinese or is ethnic.

You can claim that the tiny, and dwindling size of the Chinese bilingual community ([b]it's actually growing steadily[/b]) is all that keeps the numbers down. It's obviously not.[/quote]

Any source for this?  I just looked and this article from a couple of years ago states that DC's Chinatown has decreased greatly over the years:

"The population of Chinese Americans in Chinatown has shrunk from a high of 3,000 to about 300 — half of whom are now fighting to be able to stay."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/dcs-chinatown-has-only-300-chinese-americans-left--and-fighting-to-stay/2015/07/16/86d54e84-2191-11e5-bf41-c23f5d3face1_story.html?utm_term=.7c09e0d2f468

Now, it could be that Asian Americans are increasing slightly in other areas of DC, particularly upper NW, but I thought the focus here re: YY was forming relationships with the Chinatown bilingual community.  If that is indeed the focus, it seems understandable if YY is not reaching out to this tiny group.  And I say that even though the model of two-way immersion is definitely valuable--it just doesn't seem feasible with Mandarin in the DC context.
[/quote]

I posted a few pages back. Chinatown's population has been shrinking since the '68 riots, but the immigrant and ABC population of DC has been growing slowly but steadily since the 90s. Between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, the population climbed by several thousand (tiny group?). There are around 7,000 of us.  The census doesn't ask how many of the new arrivals are bilingual, but many are, particularly the New Yorkers and Californians. When we started taking our older child to a weekend heritage school in MoCo some years ago, there were a handful of DC Chinese families involved. Now there are two dozen, not just NW families. Nobody currently enrolled at YY, but several of the families tried the program (and advised the others not to). Some of us are involved in the church in Chinatown and the Benevolent Society (mainly assisting the elderly housing community) but don't live there. Most of us speak Cantonese as our first dialect, but we want our children to learn Mandarin, so we use the heritage schools.  The kids do around 30 minutes of Chinese HW a night, and attend class for several hours on a weekend afternoon. Not that any of this is relevant to YY.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics