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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]That’s a feature, not a bug. If you want true autonomy for the school leadership then you give up accountability.[/quote]

I think poster raises a good point. Charters are essentially set up to be their own fiefdoms paid for with taxpayer dollars. I am at MV and while my kids have had generally good experiences so far, I am starting to find it disconcerting that if I ever have a problem there is essentially no where to go since school leadership is pretty useless. I am considering moving to the suburbs to be part of a functional school system.[/quote]

Exactly.  There is nowhere to go, if your neighborhood school is egregiously underperforming.  It may be fine for early grades, but what is a 5th grader or middle schooler to do?  Sacrifice the whole educational pathway through high school, to express discontent that will be ignored anyway?  Leaving is not a viable strategy to make change, if they can easily replace you.  Parents need some way to at least force the charter board to take an interest.  A hearing with public testimony could compel the board to answer parent questions, at least.  Nobody likes to bring bad publicity on their school, but I'm running out of other ideas.[/quote]

This. Things are generally okay for ECE - even poorly performing DCPS schools frequently get this right. Then the problems start after we've already committed years to Chinese immersion. That's when we realize the admin lacks the skills and motivation to resolve serious issues. So do we accept that we sacrificed years of our children's education for the language immersion to pull them out and end the language immersion experience? Accompanied by a move to a better school district (likely suburbs)? Or do we stick with it in the hopes that DCI is better than our feeder? Or will we encounter the same types of admin issues at DCI?

As PP suggested, we need better oversight of the charter schools. There has to be some way to hold the admin accountable, because right now it's brick wall city.[/quote]

What were you expecting, PP?  Why did it take you years to figure out that YY admins lack the skills and motivation to resolve serious issues?  I figured this out at the open house I attended after we got a PreK4 spot.  The principal was a bitch when I raised my hand to politely asked which dialects the Chinese teachers speak, if they speak to bilingual children in "home" dialects or only in Mandarin, what sort of dialect transition support is built into the curriculum (if any) and how much communication comes home in Chinese.  I asked the last question for the sake of my in-laws, who also attended but can't read English well and provide most of our family's childcare.  She didn't seemed to know the answer to any of my questions, but took the opportunity to snap at me for asking them in front of my in-laws and the other parents.  Later, at break, my in-laws and I chatted with teachers who speak our dialect to get basic info - the teachers were very forthcoming, and said critical things about her as an admin.  I realized that she wasn't on top of things - how could she be?  We moved to a good school district within DC and enrolled at a DCPS.  Better oversight of charters will only get you so far when DCPC is hiring admins who are unqualified in fundamental ways. Why would DCI be better than the feeder?  [/quote]

PP you're responding to here. I didn't get the kind of insider info that you got during the open house. Then things were going along fine in the early years, before most schools encounter the types of problems that it takes a strong leadership team to manage. By the time we realized how weak the administration is, we were years into Chinese immersion. I should mention that we have no Chinese background, so heritage school isn't an option for us.

Not sure why I wonder if DCI might be different. Maybe because it's a different school with a different administration? But I get the point that I think you're making, which is that it's likely to be more of the same crap.

So now we're back to our original choices of ending the immersion experience for our children (includes moving) or hanging in there to try DCI . . .

You bring up an interesting point though. Have any current DCI parents had issues with the Yu Ying administration, but found DCI to be much better?[/quote]

What were those problems, and how did parents try to influence them?[/quote]

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