Reply to Yu Ying - Do/Can Non-Native Kids Actually SPEAK Chinese?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Thanks for sharing.

Now we get it. You guys don't want to work that hard, so you find a ready excuse in claiming that the path to fluent Mandarin for young Americans would jeopardize high attainment in English and math.

We sympathize, knowing how studying German, French and English coterminously torpedo math learning in Swiss elementary schools, and how studying Swedish, Finnish and English derail math progress for Finnish children. Shame on those European parents, for screwing their kids up like that.[/quote]

[b]Are you seriously comparing kids in these countries to DC, where the majority of students are black/Latino, come from generations of poverty, and face huge obstacles from basically birth?

[/b]Here's the rub, actually.  YY detractors keep bringing up what works well for immersion schools in CA, Northern European countries, etc., but that's apples and oranges.  YY would've never gotten approved as a charter in the first place if they didn't make a strong argument for first and foremost serving the kids who already form the majority of students in the system.  You can't expect them to every change their mission mid-stream.  The repeated insistence that they should seems to me a misunderstanding of how public schools work in DC.

As I said a few pages back (I'm the PP with a kid in another language immersion school with lots of native speakers), [b]perhaps outreach to native speakers should continue[/b], but I'm frankly not encouraged about how those efforts will go, given what's been said here re: their skepticism and scoffing about YY not being a school for them.[/quote]

Actually, the rub is that DC charter supports an immersion program where the demands of studying a difficult Asian language work to scare away almost all of the kids you describe. The approach works so well that it scares away not only low SES black/Latino kids, but the low SES native speakers of Chinese.

Year after year, when DCPC publishes new demographic data for its schools, we see that the percentage of poor kids at YY has dropped a percentage point or two. YY is thought to be in the single digits on FARMs this school year (same category as JKLM and Brent).  The immersion Mandarin works a charm as cover for high SES families to avoid low SES families, without the immersion itself being taken very seriously.  This just isn't how the DCPC Spanish immersion programs work.

ABCs are comparing kids studying languages in schools in European countries to those at YY because the demographics match without the quality of the immersion program in question beginning to measure up. We can pretend that YY primarily serves the kids its charter describes in the name of being good liberals without that being remotely honest.

What outreach to native speakers?  YY did a little eight or ten years ago, mostly in MoCo dim sum places and community centers in Chinatown, in a really clueless way, without disseminating promotional materials in Cantonese/traditional characters, or sending dialect speaking representatives into the local community to spread the word about what the program offers. Admins and PA parents then threw their hands in the air, blaming the local ethnic community for their lack of buy-in.
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