Reply to Hardy middle school .... question about the student racial make-up.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My son gets called names like cracker or referenced as white boy but it doesn’t bother him. He has friends of all races there. He said there is nothing to worry about. He doesn’t let things bother him though. His friends parents are wanting to take their son out of school though because of things like that.  My daughter has no terrible issues at hardy either and she is blonde haired and blue eyed. She has said that she has had trouble making friends though, unfortunately. [/quote]

Come on, only one public school in the entire city enrolls enough Asian students to pull PARCC scores for Asians out by subgroup.  That's Deal - they have at least 25 Asian kids taking the PARCC.  Even YuYing and DCI don't.

There are dozens of white kids at Hardy and hardly any Asians, same as in the Hardy feeders.  OP is wise to be concerned.[/quote]

No - BASIS has at least 25 Asian students as well.[/quote]

Do you have a link showing PARCC scores for BASIS Asian students pulled out by subgroup?  I can't find one.

Maybe a question we should be asking ourselves here is why are there so few Asian students in our DC public schools. No more than 10% at any particular school, and 0% isn't uncommon, just not a lot wherever you look. Before you say, oh, that's just DC demographics for you, if you're looking for Asians, head to Rockville. Think again.

Our in-boundary middle school--Stuart Hobson--and high school--Dunbar--are both 0% Asian, which won't work for this Asian immigrant family. We may try to lottery into Hardy but are more likely to head to MoCo, like a gazillion DC Asians before us. [b]One problem is that every DC public middle and high school we might have access to would force instruction in an Indo European language on us (Latin, Spanish).  No thanks.[/b][/quote]

That sure is a weird "problem" to single out when you are living in a Western country.[/quote]

Right, weird problem, forcing kids to learn Spanish in public school (not a national language of the US last time I checked) to attend by-right schools.  There's a corpus of case law from Western states stemming from the issue.  Asian immigrant parents in Cal, Nevada, Utah etc. have sued public school systems for forcing Spanish on their children, and have won in court or settled in almost every case on civil rights grounds.  Partly as a result, few states still do this, but DC does.  It's common for kids to be forced to study an Indo European language in DC public schools.   The (higher performing) suburban municipalities in this Metro area don't do this.  They don't do it because they'd much rather support families teaching their children difficult Asian languages than penalize the families for not being "Western" enough.

[/quote]

Sorry, but as a European who grew up with "forced" English instruction and then a choice of French or Latin, I will shake my head at those "civil rights" suits. But we know that in the US, you can sue for anything. Do the schools then have to offer the difficult Asian languages the families want to teach, or is the sole point to protect their kids from exposure to Spanish?[/quote]

Do you want to learn, or are you looking for more ammunition to knock Asians in DC public schools?

Asian languages are super difficult to learn well, particularly their writing systems, so best to start young and stay focused through the teen years.  With knowledge of at least 3,000 characters supporting basic literacy in Japanese and Chinese, immigrants from these countries tend not to want their kids bogged down with mandatory instruction in Indo-European languages on the road to taking AP and/or International Baccalaureate exams in Asian languages.  If the kids want to study Spanish etc. in college and later on, fine.

Also, Asian immigrant families tend not to rely on school instruction to raise their kids bilingual and biliterate.  They do the work at home, and participate in parent-run heritage language programs on weekends.  But in DC, unless a school is willing to work with you not to insist on instruction in an Indo-European language, or perhaps basic Chinese that's far too easy for the child (at Deal, BASIS, Wilson, DCI), or you bring a case to the DC PS Ombudsman challenging the requirement, you can't get out of it.  This is one reason Asian immigrant families leave DC public schools. You may think it entitled and silly of them ask to be left alone to pursue private language learning goals while using by-right schools, but they don't.  Fortunately, neither do the state and Federal court judges hearing the mandatory language instruction-related lawsuits they bring.

Perhaps best for the conversation to return to the subject of pros and cons of Asians and Asian-Caucasian 11 year-olds enrolling at Hardy.[/quote]

I am not at all looking for any ammunition to knock Asian-Americans in DC public schools and have actually been one of the defenders of the OP in my previous posts on this thread. I still have little sympathy for the particular plight you describe regarding language instruction and how it supposedly detracts from their private endeavors. Foreign language instruction in American high schools is not that hard or burdensome that it should be "bogging" anyone down, and there are good arguments to be made for every American to learn at least some Spanish. But I can see that you have an axe to grind and probably a history of fighting DCPS on this, so it's not like I'm trying to convince you of anything.[/quote]

NP. When I read posts like this, I get why there are so few Asian families DCPS.

Christ, the Asian immigrant families aren't asking for sympathy or battles with the system. They're asking to be left alone or supported to excel academically. There's a reason MoCo, Arlington, Fairfax, Louden County etc. pump resources into helping immigrant families build on math and languages skills acquired outside school.  They do it so their students can knock it out of the park on standardized language tests later. DCPS attracts few families like that.

Other than Spanish immersion, DCPS language classes are for beginners and the math isn't for high fliers either.  Deal, Hobson, Hardy it's ALL THE SAME. [/quote]

So which is it, that the Spanish instruction is a burden that interferes with their higher extracurricular endeavors, or is it not challenging enough? Or is this about students being able to customize their public school experience completely? What if some other family (assuming you won't just extend this privilege to Asians) decides that trigonometry is really detracting from their academic pursuits?

As an immigrant from a country where high school is a lot more academically challenging than in this country, but where foreign language instruction is mandatory with limited choices, I would say that individually helping kids excel academically is a completely separate issue from whether they can opt out of foreign language instruction that is part of the school's general curriculum (and I don't doubt that other school systems do a better job at it than DCPS).[/quote]

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