Why did you leave Yu Ming?
Would love to hear the experiences who decided to pull their kids out of Yu Ming after enrolling in kindergarten or early elementary.
I went to a campus tour and saw very large classes. Half the students were engaged and half were distracted, and given the intensity of the subject matter (they were drilling Chinese stroke order), I imagined the distracted kids would just fall farther and farther behind if not caught.
Yu Ming has significant attrition. Many hundreds of kinder students eventually transfer out and at the upper elementary and middle grades there are only dozens left.
And Yu Ming's touted test scores are based on the CAASPP and SBAC, which only start testing in grade 3. Yu Ming students score very poorly on the one test that begins prior to grade 3 (ELPAC), with only 17-22% of K-G2 demonstrating English proficiency, as to be expected with a dual immersion school.
So I feel skeptical and I want to hear from parents who opted out. Why did you do so?
Parent Replies
Without revealing too much personal information, I can tell you that we are in this situation of trying to get out of YM. I will caveat our situation by saying that YM works for certain personalities and for certain families, and many parents love this school. So what does not fit my family may actually fit yours.
The reasons we'd rather scrambled together private school tuition than staying at YM for 1st grade are: 1) Restrictive classroom: There is a strict reward system and kids get points off if they misbehave. Kindergarteners are also expected to sit cris-cross apple sauce during class time, and are subjective to other rules that help teachers manage such a large classroom; 2) Little recess time supervision: There seems to be some unmonitored aggressions during recess time that my kid complains about; 3) Reluctance to evaluate special need students and provide accommodations/assistance: I have heard this from multiple parents; 4) No differentiation in learning: This may be a problem not unique to YM,. my kid is academically advanced, and we were told when choosing schools that teachers will provide more challenging work for kids who are advanced. More than a semester into the school year, my kid complains he learns nothing at school, and he's still doing addition within 10's even though he's into two-digit multiplications. Same problem with Chinese writing; 5) Very little communication: Again, this may be a public school problem, but we don't hear anything about our kid unless it's really bad news. We don't get any information to help us work with the kid to "behave better" at school. I will say that if you have a lot of time and energy to do volunteering at school, you may get a lot more information about your kids. But my partner and I work full-time and in-person, so we get all our information through our kid's narrative and the occasional bad news messages.
YM has many advantages that I will not elaborate here. But I'm just providing our two cents on why we've decided it's not a good fit for us.
I haven’t left Yu Ming but my kids have been at the school for several years.
Every school has kids who are distracted since coming back from distance learning. Educators are doing their best to adjust and adapt. I worry parents with young kids have unrealistic pre-pandemic expectations.
If you have family or friends who teach elementary schools kids, I suggest speaking with them as well.