Anonymous wrote:I'm seriously suggesting that the YY principal is incompetent and the board appointed her without a interviewing multiple candidates. I'm seriously suggesting that YY is an insular community where the board, administrators, and increasingly the faculty have students at the school. As a group, their opinion is that the school is great, there is no opening to criticism of any kind. There is little responsiveness to ongoing social problems (that overused word bullying). Everyone in the building either is the parent of a child in the building or is very young, having all of their professional experience at YY.

How would you know if she is incompetent. What do you know of her credentials. Or, is the only credential that you would consider worthy is her inability to choose her race and ethnicity. WowS

As for administrators and faculty sending their children to the school, I don't think you understand what start-up charters are. At any time you can create your own charter and seek approval from the charter board. Your children will then have immediate acceptance into your charter, along with all the board members children. First however, you must be a citizen of the District of Columbia.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: Re MV getting over 1/3 spanish speaking students, I'm amazed and impressed. However, there are 10x as many Hispanics as Chinese in DC so it would be very hard to YY to do likewise. Less than 1% of the DC population is Chinese.

It is hard when YY doesn't try hard. Where’s the outreach? My family frequents venues popular with area E. Asians (certain supermarkets, dim sum places, cultural centers, heritage language schools), as well as reads Chinese newspapers and watches ethnic TV geared to local consumption. YY has little or no presence where the Chinese are. And, yes, having a black principal who doesn’t speak Chinese well certainly doesn't help. Argue that we know "nil" about the school, fine, but we know our culture well enough to get that the make-up of the administration transmits a clear message "school unwilling to meet Chinese community halfway.” The arrangement wouldn’t be objectionable if public monies weren’t behind charters. We aren't involved enough to "hate" YY.

What bothers you the most? Is it the color of the principals skin, Black, or her inability to speak Mandarin fluently. Your post screams BLACK. And now we know your true reasons.

Anonymous wrote:
YY's charter excludes new admissions after a certain grade because it doesn't have the resources to bring an older child who has never been exposed to Mandarin up to speed with his/her classmates, and it's not allowed to screen out applicants who haven't had any Mandarin. Washington Latin's situation is different; years of language classes have nothing on even one year of actual immersion. Add to this the fact that children's facility for learning new languages declines with age (at least a few years ago, 9 was considered the upper threshold for most kids to start learning in order to gain fluency), and the fact that I'm not aware of any current requirements for a Latin accent. Plus the fact that Latin is an Indo-European language that uses the Latin alphabet.

Ask any immigrant with young children or ESL teacher. If the kids are 7 yrs old or under when they arrive in the US, the kid will be English dominant and many will not be able to able to speak their native/birth language except in a very rudimentary manner within 2 yrs unless they get a lot of support to maintain their native language. Many of you seem to forget we're not talking about college students or even teenagers here.

Seriously, I doubt allowing a few bilingual kids into YY when they are 4, 5, 6, etc. will make a lot of difference to the language acquisition of their peers not to mention the added logistical issue of testing to see how proficient they are in "Mandarin" they have to be to get such preference.

All the belly-aching and criticisms aside, the main complaint appears to be how hard it is to get in - like many of the popular charters in DC. OP, you are very lucky! Best wishes on whatever you decide!

Whoops, Roman alphabet, not Latin alphabet.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP, the reason that a Mandarin-fluent child can't be admitted after 2nd grade is that the school's charter forbids it. DC charter school law forbids making admission contingent on any sort of placement test. I can't imagine this part of the law ever changing.

The line about preferring smaller upper grades sounds like an attempt to put a good spin on an unfortunate constraint.

So how was my daughter able to lottery into Washington Latin for 7th grade, without having studied Latin before? She was put in "catch up" Latin classes there so she could join the rest of her grade in standard classes eventually (as almost all the other kids had started Latin in 5th). I can't see the DC Charter Board having a problem with kid coming into YY through a "replacement lottery," like the one Latin runs for grades above 5th. YY might have a problem with this, but the DC Charter Board? The PP wasn't asking for a special "placement," he was asking for an appropriate education for his child, like ours gets at Latin.

YY's charter excludes new admissions after a certain grade because it doesn't have the resources to bring an older child who has never been exposed to Mandarin up to speed with his/her classmates, and it's not allowed to screen out applicants who haven't had any Mandarin. Washington Latin's situation is different; years of language classes have nothing on even one year of actual immersion. Add to this the fact that children's facility for learning new languages declines with age (at least a few years ago, 9 was considered the upper threshold for most kids to start learning in order to gain fluency), and the fact that I'm not aware of any current requirements for a Latin accent. Plus the fact that Latin is an Indo-European language that uses the Latin alphabet.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: When I discovered that the YY principal was black I thought, oh right, a practical approach to drawing in the area Chinese community. YY could have done a nation-wide search to find and hire at least one experienced ethnic Chinese administrator. There are school districts in California where half the administrators are Chinese.

Are you seriously suggesting that YY should have turned down a qualified principal because she is black in order to pander to the assumed racism in the Chinese community? No matter how "practical" that may be, I wouldn't want to be a part of such a school.

This particular principal isn't the one to break down barriers. A different story if she spoke great Mandarin, had lived in China, and, preferably, had a Chinese spouse and mixed-race children. Pandering to racism in the Chinese community is a loaded statement. Working around centuries-old prejudices in a sensible and strategic way in the choice of admin team wouldn't have hurt the school.

It's worth taking a hard look at the origins and nature of Chinese prejudices as a tool to breaking them down. The strongest my Hong Kong immigrant relatives harbor certainly aren't against those of other races, they're against Mandarin-speaking northerners and other "mainlanders." You probably have to start with the Opium Wars to get your head around it. They love to refer to mainlanders as crooks and prostitutes. If you get self-righteous with them, start sermonizing, and push random Mandarin speakers on them, you fuel the fire. What the ABC generation does to challenge is tease them, to joke in Cantonese about how paranoid they sound. You can get them to laugh and admit that they've been knee-jerk in their thinking.

shuoputaosuan

By the way, can one of the ABC's possibly translate this phrase for me? I'm not sure I have it right:

shu?pútaosu?n

Anonymous wrote:I'm seriously suggesting that the YY principal is incompetent and the board appointed her without a interviewing multiple candidates. I'm seriously suggesting that YY is an insular community where the board, administrators, and increasingly the faculty have students at the school. As a group, their opinion is that the school is great, there is no opening to criticism of any kind. There is little responsiveness to ongoing social problems (that overused word bullying). Everyone in the building either is the parent of a child in the building or is very young, having all of their professional experience at YY.

I'm a YY parent, and I see a lot of truth in this--it's definitely a downside to the school. However, I see that as peripheral to the issue of the races of the principal or any other administrator. (In fact, having an African American principal in a city with a plurality of African American residents doesn't surprise me in the slightest, and I wonder how those who think her race is the thing that disqualifies her are able to get anything done in DC.)

Anonymous wrote:I'm seriously suggesting that the YY principal is incompetent and the board appointed her without a interviewing multiple candidates. I'm seriously suggesting that YY is an insular community where the board, administrators, and increasingly the faculty have students at the school. As a group, their opinion is that the school is great, there is no opening to criticism of any kind. There is little responsiveness to ongoing social problems (that overused word bullying). Everyone in the building either is the parent of a child in the building or is very young, having all of their professional experience at YY.

How in the world could that possibly be a bad thing?

I'm seriously suggesting that the YY principal is incompetent and the board appointed her without a interviewing multiple candidates. I'm seriously suggesting that YY is an insular community where the board, administrators, and increasingly the faculty have students at the school. As a group, their opinion is that the school is great, there is no opening to criticism of any kind. There is little responsiveness to ongoing social problems (that overused word bullying). Everyone in the building either is the parent of a child in the building or is very young, having all of their professional experience at YY.

Anonymous wrote: When I discovered that the YY principal was black I thought, oh right, a practical approach to drawing in the area Chinese community. YY could have done a nation-wide search to find and hire at least one experienced ethnic Chinese administrator. There are school districts in California where half the administrators are Chinese.

Are you seriously suggesting that YY should have turned down a qualified principal because she is black in order to pander to the assumed racism in the Chinese community? No matter how "practical" that may be, I wouldn't want to be a part of such a school.

PP here - i meant DC's PUBLIC school, i.e., your neighborhood. Chinatown doesn't count (albeit it only had 800 Chinese people 10 years ago)

OP - what % of your DC's school do you expect to actually be Chinese? Percentage of the U.S.? 0.000001% ? Versus 15 to 50% Hispanic? More in some towns?

I cannot believe this is even up for debate - what is there to decide? Clearly, Spanish is overwhelmingly more useful in the U.S. The only utility of Chinese in the U.S. right now, except for the random Chinese person you might meet less than 10 times in a lifetime, would be practicing with other YY kids or a trip to China. So useless!

It all depends on the school's charter. If it says "only admits until 2nd grade" then that is that. They could amend the charter, but they don't want kids coming in who speak no Chinese (and they can't do admission preference).

Regarding the principal: she was just promoted, without a search of any sort. They restructured things so that she is assuming the role of head of school from what were formerly the executive director and principal roles. They created a Chief Operating Officer role. That woman is great. I hope they push her to lead the meetings from now on. I have no idea if she speaks Chinese, but she is kind and thoughtful about every question that is ever asked of her at the the parent association meetings (the principal never attends those anymore and has very little interaction with parents).