Reply to LAMB Enrollment Increase

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

NP here.

YY's charter finalizes its entry year at 2nd grade, and everyone seems to understand why that makes sense.  For those who don't: If you enter YY at 2nd grade with no Mandarin, you simply won't be able to catch up.  The class a student would be entering would have had two full years of immersion (PS3 & PK4) and then two years of 1/2 English & 1/2 Mandarin (K & 1st).  It's unfair to a child to bring them into an environment where they're going to be so far behind their classmates - the psychological repercussions would probably be even more severe than the academic ones of losing half a year of instruction (presumably they'd continue to learn in English, but be utterly lost in Chinese).  FWIW, this is rarely of issue, because the retention rate is so high that there are rarely any open seats anyway.  YY's entry classes are almost completely filled with siblings.

This is relevant, because a school's curriculum is part of its charter.  When outsiders start demanding changes to the charter, they are unlikely to understand the repercussions to the curriculum and how their good faith attempts to make change can undermine the good work inside the school.  I'm using the YY example because some people might find it easier to understand what a challenge a language like Chinese introduces.

LAMB's situation is in fact similarly specialized.  Not only are they teaching the Montessori method, they're also immersing the students in another language.  It's easy to demand from the outside that they revamp their charter and curriculum to suit someone's angry whims.  It's a lot more to try to understand the ramifications in the classroom and to the educations of several hundred other students in the program.

I suspect you can complain to the PCSB and vent your spleen on DCUM, but at the end of the day, nobody is interested in trying to "fix" a school like LAMB, which clearly is not broken in the first place.[/quote]

Thank you for this excellent post. I totally agree. [/quote]

This argument makes a lot of sense - BUT not accepting at all grades is against the letter of what the charter law calls for and the DCPCSB has to at least go through the exercise of pushing on the provision a little.

FWIW when LAMB's charter was approved back in the day it was approved by the now-defunct DC School Board, not the PCSB.

Each time LAMB has come up for an amendment they have had discussion about this policy and have said they would prefer LAMB changed it. I do not think they have allowed any other recently chartered elementary school to follow suit.

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