Reply to CHARTERS MAY MERGE AT WALTER REED (The DC International School, IB Diploma Programme)

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[quote=Anonymous][b]It is certainly arguable YY does the same given what it has, the district of columbia with &lt;1% Chinese. [/b]

It's not the size of a local bilingual population that determines how well an immersion school serves a community as much as the way bilingual kids enter a program.  For example, there's a dual-immersion public Chinese school in Chapel Hill, NC that's very popular with ordinary Chinese families, although that bilingual community is much smaller than DC's.  Bilingual kids need to pass an interview in one of the half dozen major dialects to be admitted, even at age 4.  Such children make up around 1/3 of the school's population.

Less assimilated Chinese (including some high-SES families) like their kids to learn Mandarin with a good many other Chinese to a greater extent than more assimilated Chinese.  We're not planning to enter the YY lottery because we aren't comforable with the idea of our children joining the school's tiny bilingual student group, not when our IB school is one of the best.  We're hardly alone in this regard in the DC Chinese community.  But we would jump at the chance to send our kids to a dual-immersion program like Oyster, or a near-dual-immersion program like LAMB, if Chinese was the target language.

Posters laugh at the concept of using an ethnic MIL as a volunteer, but this is the sort of community support that dual-immersion programs draw on.  These schools easily get volunteers from the local ethnic community in a variety of capacities because they serve both the bilingual and non-bilingual communities as communities.

There are two models for public school dual-immersion programs in this country, the &quot;balanced&quot; language model (Oyster's, 50/50 native speakers and non-native speakers) and the &quot;minority language dominant model,&quot; which many of California's dual-immersion schools use.  Most Mandarin immersion programs coast to coast are in fact &quot;balanced&quot; programs (there are a dozen, and even several Cantonese and mixed-dialect immersion programs in Cal).  They aren't one-way immersion programs like YY, whatever the perception may be at the school, because dual-immersion programs have been shown to generate more robust language acquisition outputs than those where teachers supply almost all the linguistic and cultural inputs.

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