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=Anonymous]
Now, the norm among most parents I know is to extensively research schools, worry about your IB school, attend multiple open houses at charters and schools where you're OOB, and of course, worry about transporting your kids to and from school and before/after care since so many households have two working parents.  I had thought that most people did all this because they worried about finding a quality school where their kids would be challenged to excel.  Little did I know that in addition to all of the above I should be worried about finding a school where I feel "comfortable" as a parent.  Go figure.[/quote]

The mom who left again. It hit us one day that since we do have school choice, unlike our poor parents, and were finding YY a psychological hassle, despite our best efforts to like it, we could go.  We knew that the PA doesn't hire staff, and learned that nobody much with the power to do so cares if YY has an ethnic administrator (at least not without the PA pushing like mad for this for a long time, not the case while we were there).  [b]We still don't understand why every charter needs a population that closely mirrors the entire city's, when maintaining such a study body doesn't serve the mission of the school[/b]--teaching Chinese to kids--as well as having many bilingual Chinese onboard would.

Our kids now learn Mandarin from Cantonese at a weekend school in Rockville.  They race ahead with Mandarin because the weekend program builds intelligently on their extensive Cantonese-speaking skills.

What's the point of stressing that parents want more native speakers when the school community hasn't put its money where its mouth is on this front?  [b]We could have made all sorts of practical suggestions to YY on how to draw in bilingual families if we hadn't been risking unpleasantness if we did. [/b]More bilingual families is great in theory, but in practice it gets messy.  As the previous PP pointed out quite rightly in describing how his narrow-minded ILs think, [b]immigrant Chinese who teach their children dialects at home tend to be a fairly insular bunch.  They don't buy into pluralism and civic-mindedness en masse to meet YY's current standards for these qualities. [/b] A few will, but most will not. Look, we love our easy-going IB school, so all's well that ends well for us.
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Refreshingly honest and straightforward.  So you think the reason that there aren't more immigrant families is that there's a fundamental clash in values.  YY values diversity and nondiscrimination, immigrant families want homogeneity and discrimination.  But isn't the solution to educate immigrant families about these values--positive values that are held by most Americans and that their children will have whether they like it or not--rather than cater to the outdated and negative (and even racist) values they have now?  Is that the kind of ideas you could have shared?  Or were they along the lines of "lose the AA principal and hire someone Chinese"?[/quote]

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