Reply to Bilingual Kids in Language Immersion ES Programs, Which Programs Have Many & Strive to Attract Them?

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Reply to "Bilingual Kids in Language Immersion ES Programs, Which Programs Have Many & Strive to Attract Them?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][/quote]

I am a YY parent and would love dual immersion. This is not a "claim" this is a fact. However, I do not make the decisions about where the school puts its resources and if they don't put them into attracting Chinese families how exactly does that invalidate what I feel? But you're right about one thing--I don't think anyone wants a bunch of racist bastards at the school. Happily I think the Chinese families at YY parents nights ("real" or "unreal") might take issue with that educated guess of yours.[/quote]

Unlilkely.  According to our good friends who left YY, almost all the Chinese families who sign on are highly assimilated, highly educated, high-SES families, unlike my ILs and other ordinary immigrants, the sorts likely to make the effort to raise fully bilingual children.  My wife is doing it mainly because my IL's English remains weak, decades into their US lives.  It's an open secret that ordinary Chinese immigrants tend to have fairly negative views of AAs, and try to teach their children to think similarly (but often fail). Maybe you would indeed love dual immersion, but it would mean being around many ordinary immigrants, with all that entails.  An AA friend with children in a strong dual-immersion program in the Bay area, where more than half the kids speak a dialect at home, tells me that she's had to learn to roll with the punches where the immigrant parents are concerned.  They make all sorts of statements that shocked her initially.  She's come around to the view that they're not as racist as they are insular.  They commonly socialize only within their ethnic communities, and reject American civic-mindedness in a big way.

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I attended a public magnet school in another major city, and it was racially and ethnically (and economically) incredibly diverse.  I'm AA, and I know for a fact that the parents of many of my friends had feelings about AAs as well as other minorities.  But it is exactly because we as children were all in school together, went over to each other's houses for after school and overnights, ate each other's foods, and visited each other's parents' jobs from the Chinese restaurant to the Korean-owned jewelry store to the Jewish investment banker's office (these are real examples of my friends' parents real jobs) and my mom's office at the YMCA.  We visited each other, learned tolerance (for the most part), and for all those reasons, if I get my kid a slot at YY I will absolutely welcome immigrant families, dialect-speaking families, and support whatever ways there are to increase the population of bilingual kids in the school within charter policies (and advocate for changes in thsoe policies).

It's nothing new for groups in the US to be prejudice against AAs, and for there to even be prejudice within the AA community between different groups of AAs.  The most direct, effective, lasting way to combat that is for real people to get to know other real people.  Every person here generalizing about YY parents is being ridiculous.  I am not a parent there, but I am an adult and I have yet to ever be in ANY group of adults where one can generalize and be right about everyone in the group.  I'm confident that YY, like every other school in DC, has parents with diverse views, even among gruops with the same race/ethnicity and class.  [/quote]

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