Lycee Rochambeau

Before you select this school, request that they send you the annual report that is sent to all parents, which summarizes the school’s performance over the past year. This report contains the number of graduating students who were accepted by various universities, which ones they plan to go to, the percentage of students passing the Bac (100%), and the number who took the SAT (very low — only a handful of students) as well as their average score (disappointing — not high enough to get in to University of MD). This school may be a good preparation for continuing higher education in the French system, but many of the students do so poorly on the SAT that they have limited options at US universities after they graduate.

My son went to the French International School and graduated from it in 2005. The program there is good, but it is the standard curriculum imposed by the French government, and it is very solid. The execution of it at the French school, however, is iffy at best. Some teachers are excellent; some even extraordinary, especially in elementary school (well, back when my son was there), but some are downright bad, and nothing is done about it. If they are so bad that lots of parents get really noisy, the teacher is eventually removed, but nothing is done in the interim to minimize the negative impact on the students. The school authorities have no authority to critique the quality of teaching or to make improvements (even simple) if they are needed. Also, there is no accountability for teachers and no incentive to do a good job. The French authorities in France are too far away to know about the problems, and the American authorities have no authority.
The English program is a joke! Maybe it has improved, but when my son first started in 1992, all that was done in the English classes was playing: wrapping mummies, doing arts and crafts; no reading, grammar, spelling, or sentence structure. I got the state board of education involved, and they examined the English «curriculum.» Well it turned out not to be a curriculum; it didn’t meet even the minimal requirements to qualify as a curriculum, as required by the state. The school was ordered to come up with one, so until I complained, the school was out of compliance with the minimal state requirements as far as English. Many kids had trouble reading until middle school, and most don’t know how to write to this day. This was attributed to their bilingualism, but that’s incorrect: bilingual children are as good or better with grammar as monolingual; those who were tutored on the side did fine.
Also, discrimination in grade practices was rampant. Some French teachers (not all) automatically assumed that if the student is not from a French family, he could not write in French and gave him poor grades, which in many cases affected college applications. The teachers wouldn’t even necessarily read the writing carefully. They would just triage the kids according to their family background and assign grade ranges that way. I’d seen one teacher «grade» a paper by glancing at the name on it. She didn’t even read through all of it once. The true reason was probably not even primarily discriminatory but rather it was burn out and complacency, but for the student the result was the same: demoralizing. I was told by the economics teacher point blank that a student not writing in «his native tongue» could not be expected good grades in economics. Thank goodness for the anonymous baccalaureate exams, in which the identity of the student is not known by the examiner. On his economics baccalaureate exam my son got the second highest grade in his graduating class. Very sad. A closed mind is not a terrible thing to waste.