Wow… makes you really appreciate the supervision in a proper boarding school.
Sentenced to prison for assault, teenage ‘parachute kids’ deliver warning to adults in China
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-parachute-kids-sentencing-20160217-story.html
The model reported for this sort of education is rather dismal, and shows how much demand there must be in China for an “American education”, not to mention the ignorance with which that demand is fulfilled. Sounds like predatory edu-capitalism to me.
The model involves a “host family” (room and board in LA for $1500/month) and matriculation at “Oxford School, a cluster of portable classrooms tucked away in the back of a Rowland Heights strip mall. The athletic facilities are minimal: three worn basketball hoops, a volleyball net and a soccer goal on a small patch of parched grass”, which cost/s $13,000 per year. This was bought by a newly enriched, recently urbanized Chinese family in which the parents have no English language skills. Who was the “middleman”?
GMTplus7, thank you for the link. I had never heard the term “parachute kids” before. What a sad story that is. I feel badly for everyone involved.
Searching for the term online, I found this article, which does give more detail into the phenomenon: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/some-parachute-kids-hard-landing-american-schools-n397961.
There’s also the phenomenon of the “left-behind children” in China, at the other end of the socioeconomic distribution: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21674715-there-are-70m-reasons-ease-chinas-curbs-internal-migration-pity-children.
I haven’t heard the term before, but I do know of one local private day school that has this host family system. Maybe it’s because we are in a rural area, where it’s not so easy to get into even minor trouble without getting noticed (i.e. before it can escalate), but such activity has not been a problem.
What I have observed, in the school with host families and in another nearby with small (5-10 student) dorm-style houses with houseparents, is that the students don’t really integrate with their fellow students. Their experience is vastly different from that of students at boarding schools.
Scary. Both. And saddest because any trend in China probably affects a LOT of people.