Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Meaning, she knew no Mandarin when she started as the YY Principal, or meaning she did know some, and has learned more since coming on? I get that your assessment is she's not great on the tones, but is she conversational?

(From what I remember) At her previous school in Virginia she worked with the Mandarin program. I was under the impression that she spoke none or very little at that time, but has since picked up some basics. She is not conversational and could not present something like an info night. I speak very little Mandarin myself and can pick up that her tones are as flat as mine are. I'm not troubled by that in terms of how it looks to outsiders. What concerns me is that over half of her staff is Chinese and she can't understand them.

Yeah but the person who does all the hiring speaks fluent Mandarin, the director. The principal was either the principal or vice-principal of a fairfax county school prior to YY. She was instrumental in establishing that school's IB program.

FWIW, there are a couple of mandarin administrators on board. They are white or bi-racial (black/Chinese). I understand from this thread that the ethnically Chinese administrator is somehow tainted by the AA blood running through her veins, therefore not good enough for you racist.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I think you are mistaken to think that YY focuses on any Chinese at all....It aspires to catch DC's growing ranks of middle-class parents who want decent schooling for their kids. Currently bilingualism is a fashionable trend in the concept of decent schooling. That this language is Mandarin is irrelevant. It may as well be Portuguese...

Ten years ago, the Dept. of Ed commissioned a comprehensive study of dual immersion language program outputs in public schools nation-wide, done by the Center for Applied Linguistics. The researchers concluded that 50/50 dual immersion outputs are superior to one-way immersion, at least when ES students arrive with a firm grounding in English. The study report talks about how peer-provided cultural inputs are as important as language inputs in motivating children to continue with language study later. http://www.csos.jhu.edu/crespar/techReports/Report63.pdf

If what you say is true, PP, if the aim of language immersion is simply to catch DC's growing ranks of middle-class parents, with target languages used being irrelevant, why would DC staunchly reject educational best practices in pursuit of this goal? Why would the District ignore the research when setting admissions policies for most of its immersion schools? It's one thing to strive to create dual immersion programs and fail, perhaps because there aren't enough speakers of a target language with young children in a school district, another to set out to do what research has shown doesn't work very well.

If LAMB burns for its lottery law-breaking, maybe its school community members should go down brandishing the report at the Dept. of Ed.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Meaning, she knew no Mandarin when she started as the YY Principal, or meaning she did know some, and has learned more since coming on? I get that your assessment is she's not great on the tones, but is she conversational?

(From what I remember) At her previous school in Virginia she worked with the Mandarin program. I was under the impression that she spoke none or very little at that time, but has since picked up some basics. She is not conversational and could not present something like an info night. I speak very little Mandarin myself and can pick up that her tones are as flat as mine are. I'm not troubled by that in terms of how it looks to outsiders. What concerns me is that over half of her staff is Chinese and she can't understand them.

Yeah but the person who does all the hiring speaks fluent Mandarin, the director. The principal was either the principal or vice-principal of a fairfax county school prior to YY. She was instrumental in establishing that school's IB program.

FWIW, there are a couple of mandarin administrators on board. They are white or bi-racial (black/Chinese). I understand from this thread that the ethnically Chinese administrator is somehow tainted by the AA blood running through her veins, therefore not good enough for you racist.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
This is such BS. A college friend, a kick ass admin at a W. Coast Mandarin immersion school, and a dialect speaker, has responded to YY's advertisements for admins several times. S/he has family in the MD burbs Chinese community and is eager to relocate. S/he gets nowhere. Just an anecdote,right, but where's the evidence that YY does its damdest to find Chinese-speaking admins, let alone an ethnic one?

I don't doubt this in the least. All of the applications funnel through one very young woman who, amongst other things, typically doesn't even entertain applicants with US degrees. If the applications do not pass her review then they never see the light of day on the admin desks.

Interesting. I know a Mandarin speaker, an excellent teacher with 12 plus years teaching in the US, who was offered a classroom assistant position.

Do you think this is a way to keep power over all these young, inexperienced teachers who need the YY job to stay in the country? Of course the track record for hiring English teachers is equally bizarre. It's as if they only consider teachers with zero experience. The leading class has never had a teacher with more than 2 or 3 years of experience. Oh how it shows!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am a YY parent and also want the school to serve all children. In fact, I wanted my child there and not in our fairly homogeneous IB school.

But as 00:11 notes, the school gives off a very weird vibe when the tour guides, administrators, parents at Open Houses are so defensive when asked basic questions about Chinese language and cultural issues surrounding the school that you don't see at Spanish immersion schools -- governed by the same laws. It is really frustrating and I think does not serve our school well.

Um, could it be that the school is weird? I, single mom, went with MV after being offered a PreK YY slot. Knowing zilch beyond web site info before a visit, I assumed that a small bilingual community had been involved all along. An open house disabused me of the notion.

MV has a bilingual Latino community firmly behind it, which serves our school well.

Wow, I can only hope I'm as lucky as all these parents who ALLEGEDLY applied and got into both MV and YY for pre-K. The odds of that have to be off the charts (even including getting in off the waitlist). And interesting how DCUM has so many of these lucky parents... Does that mean the more I post here on DCUM, the better my odds are of getting into at least 2 uber popular charters? Cuz the odds seem to improve drastically here!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^ Because the Asian kids in DC basically have the same background/socioeconomic level as the White kids in DC. Hard to find a FARM White kid in DC at any school: Are there FARM Asian kids in DC? I wouldn't be surprised if really low to nonexistent given the # of Chinese in DC.

Yes, they go to Thomson. They live with their grandparents in the Wah Luck house in Chinatown while their parents work multiple jobs. YY focuses strictly on "embassy" Chinese and pretends these children don't exist. The parents of these children find the academics (both English and Mandarin) at Yu Ying to be weak, not to mention the attitude of the administration.

I think you are mistaken to think that YY focuses on any Chinese at all. YY does not aspire to becoming a destination school for the Chinese-origin DC residents, a home away from home, so to speak. It aspires to catch DC's growing ranks of middle-class parents who want decent schooling for their kids. Currently bilingualism is a fashionable trend in the concept of decent schooling. That this language is Mandarin is irrelevant. It may as well be Portuguese. The underlying frustration you see in YY-focused threads is that Chinese-origin families come to this school with an expectation of finding somewhat of a "home", a special place for the Chinese, and the school was never designed to be that. That's the only reason you see these threads.

Anonymous wrote: