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]You consider 1:33's remark blatantly racist?  He was explaining how his parents, immigrants of the older generation, think with a touch of humor.  You can't take YY parents claiming they want more bilingual families seriously.  There is a pattern - fully bilingual families who don't know much about the school learn more, maybe at an open house, wake up to the reality that they probably won't fit in, then head to MoCo heritage schools where they augment domestic immersion, looking toward MS and HS out of DC.  Low-SES Chinese families don't stay that way for long, no matter where the kids attend school.  With the low-SES Spanish speaking kids in this city, the outlook isn't nearly as rosy.  [i]Believe it or not, Spanish immersion charters have trouble convincing low-SES Latino families to send their kids because parents worry that they won't learn enough of either language in school.[/i]  They gravitate to not-so-great non-immersion charters and IB schools.

Too often, the end result is that the kids emerge without a firm grounding in literacy in Spanish or English.  These parents don't support a network of heritage language schools like the upwardly mobile Chinese.  We have kids disappear because parents, worried that their Spanish wasn't up to scratch, send them back to Mexico to attend school from grandma's house.  And we have parents pull kids out to send them to inferior IB schools and non-immersion charters out of concern that their English isn't good enough.  No neat solution presents itself to how best to serve these kids.  We grapple with the reality of too much attrition from both low-SES Spanish-speaking families, concerned about weak language acquisition across the board, and high-SES families concerned about overall quality (bound for Washington International School immersion, Spanish immersion in the burbs, or wherever).  We also have a terrible time getting low-SES parents working long hours involved in parent organizations.  It's a long way from rosy-ville here in the SI charter universe.

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