Reply to Chinese "immersion" outside of school hours

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The DCPS Spanish immersion are getting better, particularly Bancroft, Bruce Monroe and Tyler. You can see how the new Spanish dominant lotteries are helping attract English-speaking high SES families to these programs. Parents know that two lotteries means language study is being taken seriously, with 2-way immersion as the goal.

DCPC is missing a real opportunity in failing to reconsider the issue of how to improve its own language immersion charter programs at a time when DCPS is stepping us its game with Spanish. Parents who feel threatened by preferences for native speakers claim that the DC charter LEA arrangement is set in stone, when it's not. What's true is at the DC immersion charters have never come together to ASK DCPS and the city council for preference for native speakers. Parents who fight preferences don't want to deal with reality that you can't have a high-performing language immersion program without the preferences.

Preferences for Chinese could work like they do in MoCo, where kids who speak any dialect decently can easily test in to replace a drop-out from K up. There shouldn't be controversy on the issue. When the bilingual families in your city reject your program en mass, you're  not offering a high-quality program for language. The program may be fantastic in every other way, but not for language.

If a kid speaks one Chinese dialect as a native speaker (meaning that s/he uses a lot of slang), the child can learn another dialect without much trouble. So recruiting strong Cantonese speakers to a Mandarin program, if that's the best you can do for native speakers, is common sense. I know this because I speak 3 Chinese dialects pretty well (and no, I'm not "heritage dad"). I learned 1 dialect from birth, the 2nd from K, and the 3rd, Mandarin, in college, grad school and my work.  [/quote]

Here's what I suspect will always be a deal-breaker:  if you allow test-in schools for a public charter, then parents with means will be able to pay for resources that provide access.  Parents without means will not.  Then you will have created a private school on the public dime.

It's one thing to take lowly schools with poor reputations and try to entice higher-SES families into it.  That's what the DCPS neighborhood-based programs do.

It's something entirely different to create a brand new school (no legacy of low-SES families in the pipeline) and set up barriers to entry, such that wealthy families can buy their way via language au pairs, private tutoring, business or diplomatic contacts, etc.

You can say that Rockville is a better model, but if you desire it so much you should move there.  Otherwise your continued insistence betrays an inability to understand the reality of DC.  There are three steps to achieving a dream:

1.  Where do we want to go?
2.  Where are we now?
3.  How do we create the path?

Anyone who wants to have a Chinese test-in school in DC seems to think we can skip step 2.  Or maybe you aren't, but then you need to own your personal decision to avoid the reality of the needs of the majority of DC public school students.  Yes, there is a rising cohort of higher-SES students.  The reality is that the majority are still low SES.  A system that deliberately sets up more barriers to exclude them isn't going to fly.  And, it shouldn't.[/quote]

The reality of DC is that public education offerings have been expanding at breakneck speed since around 2003.

Maybe you're right about the deal-breaker, but I can't agree with the other points you put across. The Charter Board leadership could be educated to understand that stakeholders can't buy native speaker status, and that the creation of dual-immersion charter programs would help all the students. DC Public Charter need not create barriers to entry--MoCo doesn't--only the option for drop-outs to be replaced by native speakers. Decision makers could have their eyes opened to the fact that most juvenile native speakers of Chinese in DC are in fact low SES, as with Spanish. Their parents work in take-out places, in dry cleaners, and in other blue collar jobs.

Native speakers use a lot of slang when speaking their home languages and dialects. I assure you that native speakers of Chinese don't speak the "Court Mandarin" taught at YY, no matter how many dialects they know. If a child from a non-native speaking child had lived in China for a number of years while being cared for by native-speaking nannies all day, they might use a lot of slang, too. But there are so few kids in this town in that situation that they wouldn't pose a threat to low SES access to YY.

No, the real issue here is a strong tendency on the part of DC ed policy makers to shield low-performers from high performers, which does us no good. This is why ES and MS GT programs remain taboo. We need to embrace best practices in education as a city, period.[/quote]

It's not that I don't get your point, I'm sympathetic.  However, you need to understand that YY's demographics already make it look like a WOTP school.  Anything that further lowers the number of low SES students is very likely a non-starter to anyone in any position to make a decision such as you are proposing.[/quote]

Right, 9.5% FARMs last year and a lower still this year, not even as many as Stoddert, Eaton or Hearst.

Relatively easy fix, propose tweaks to YY that would draw in low SES Chinese immigrants, raising the FARMs percentage. If you talk to DC fast food and dry cleaner families in their dialects about why they don't try to lottery in, you learn that they don't for 4 reasons:

Reason #1, Nobody in the upper echelon of the administration is a Chinese immigrant/native speaker. A related problem is that the school doesn't communicate with parents, or do any real community outreach, in Chinese.  
Reason #2, There are only a handful of native-speaking kids in the school  Parents tell you "We don't have a network there, our children don't belong there; we belong at Thomson ES, at Jefferson MS, or in MoCo."  
Reason #3, YY doesn't know how to deal with students who arrive speaking Chinese; there is no dialect transition support built into the curriculum or instructional methods, meaning that native-speaking kids are treated like those who arrive speaking, reading, and writing no Chinese. Chinese immigrant parents who knock themselves out to ensure that their kids' Chinese is decent aren't attracted by the arrangement.  
Reason #4, There is no Chinatown-to-YY shuttle bus (though I'm sure the Chinatown Community Cultural Center would arrange transportation if more Chinatown kids enrolled.

If YY and the Charter Board were to move to address these problems,  I assure you that they could YY could raise its FARMs percentage.

Incidentally, Chinese immigrants who qualify for free or reduce meals often won't enroll in the program for cultural reasons. My parents were that way. They considered it bad luck, and dishonorable, to accept free food without being starving. They knew about starvation from childhoods spent in the Pearl River Delta during WWII. If YY were to enroll some of these families to try to boost the FARMs %, convincing them to enroll in the school lunches program would likely be a challenge.

[/quote]

Ahem, there is also the problem that some Chinese immigrants don't like black kids and would never send their kids to a DC public school. We don't talk about that here.[/quote]

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