Reply to Chinese "immersion" outside of school hours

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Chinese "immersion" outside of school hours"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]Why do pps waste time on these dead-ended Chinese immersion threads?[/b] OP could find "immersion" outside of school hours easily enough if he or she was willing and able to pay up. It's as simple as that.

Hardly anybody at YY/DCI wants language immersion on a par with Oyster. Parents mainly want to escape in-boundary schools full of poor kids. Some also want to believe that their kids are gaining fluency in Mandarin at YY without supplementing relentlessly. Parents want to slam ethnic Chinese who point out, quite rightly, that failing to make a point of including native speakers, particularly the low SES DC variant, is bad educational policy. The policy could, and should, be changed but won't for many years.

When we were at YY, we raised these issues at PA meetings, with admins, and at Charter Board round tables on immersion language programs various times. Nobody we talked to seemed serious about change because the school was set up as a one-way immersion program and parents (mostly black with no real connection to China, Chinese immigrants, or Chinese culture) bought wholeheartedly into a deeply flawed model from the get go. The model had been pitched to them by clever salesmen.

If you're a native speaker of Chinese, you get it; if you aren't, you probably don't and never will. You love YY because you found what you were looking for.  [/quote]

One could ask you the same question, PP.

Personally, I would be fine with allowing students to test in.  That said, the law is the law and if you want it to change then you should be lobbying elsewhere.  Just complaining about YY won't help.  No matter how critical you want to be, the fact remains that YY students speak and write better Chinese than those of any other school in the city.  Hands down.  So you're just not going to get a lot of traction trying to get YY parents to change the law on your behalf.  [/quote]

Lighten up. This is a discussion board, not a public hearing where lobbying is done.

PPs often come to DCUM to point out the limitations of experimental DC public school programs not designed to mature to compete with comparable programs around the region and country, not even close. The city rolls out an endless parade.

Arguing that YY students speak and write Chinese better than those at any other public school in DC is akin to arguing that Banneker's average SAT scores (at or slightly below the national average) are better than those of other all-minority schools in the city. Hands down. Staying mired in relativism is something to cheer about?

As things stand, YY will not get traction in attract native speakers, or graduating many kids who can communicate effectively in the target language.  For that matter, in the long-run, DCI won't be able to keep many families who are serious about IB Diploma language studies or elite college admissions. The arrangement may not bother most YY parents, admis or teachers, but these are still wasted opportunities for DC rising, a worthy topic for discussion on or off these boards.  No more from me.   
[/quote]
I do wish I had your crystal ball. It's so great that you can tell the future of DCI and all of its college admissions, ever, even though it's oldest students are only in ninth grade and there are two other tracks in addition to Chinese. And that it all could be miraculously fixed if YY would drop all of its other priorities and fight tooth and nail to get the tiny number of elementary aged native Cantonese speakers who live in DC to attend. Hire new administrators! Get Congress to change DC charter laws! Develop special curricula to support Cantonese speakers to transition to Mandarin! It's all so simple, why don't you idiots just listen to me![/quote]

+ 1000. And have lots of native speaker students despite the minimal population in DC compared to MoCo!

Fine ideas. But not easy to implement. At all. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics