查看完整版本: 拒绝“学霸”?白人家长反击中国式虎妈

pp_dream 2015-12-30 06:01

拒绝“学霸”?白人家长反击中国式虎妈

拒绝“学霸”?白人家长反击中国式虎妈

消息来源: 纽约时报
发表于: 2015-12-29 21:48


  

  新泽西州西温莎市的格罗夫尔中学本月召开的校董会挤满了人。这个学区正在就学生所承受的压力展开大讨论,而讨论的分歧双方往往分属两个种族阵营。  Mark Makela for The New York Times
  


  隶属西温莎-普兰斯堡学区的格罗夫尔中学校园外。Mark Makela for The New York Times
  今年秋天,在新泽西州普林斯顿附近一个成绩优异的学区,负责人戴维·阿德霍尔德(David Aderhold)给家长写了一封令人担忧的信,长达16页。


  他说,该学区正面临着的一场危机。学生负担过重,焦虑不安,要同时应付太多的学业和要求。前一学年,120名初中和高中生被建议接受心理健康评估,40 名学生入院接受治疗。在该学区授权的一次调查中,学生写下了诸如“我讨厌上学”和“在这个学区上了12年学后, 我学到的一点是:一个评分、一个百分比乃至一个点的价值高过一切”这样的内容。
  通过这封信,阿德霍尔德让西温莎-普兰斯堡学区 (West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District)陷入了一场全国性的大讨论中,主题是精英学校对成绩的密切关注,以及这种关注是否太过了。在后来的会议上,他力劝家长和他一起,支持一种培养“完整孩子”的学校教育,尊重“社会-情感发育”和“有意义的深度学习”,而非只重视学业表现。否则,他说这里可能会变成另一个帕洛阿尔托,这个加州城市过去六年里两度出现连续性的自杀事件,青少年学生压力过大据信是原因之一。
  但阿德霍尔德的信并没有让学生家庭团结到一起,反倒曝露出这个有9700名学生的学区存在的裂痕——一道大致沿着种族界限的裂痕。一边是像凯瑟琳·弗利 (Catherine Foley)这样的白人家长。曾在女儿就读的中学担任家长老师学生协会(Parent Teacher Student Association)主席的她认为,该学区让人觉得越来越有压力的氛围不利于学习。“我儿子上四年级。他和我说,‘我不会有出息的,因为我没有什么东西能放到简历上,’”她说。
  另一边是像迈克·贾(Mike Jia)这样的家长。过去10年,数以千计的亚裔美国上班族搬到了该学区。迈克便是其中之一。他表示,阿德霍尔德的改革相当于让他孩子的教育“标准降低”。
  “这里发生的事情反映出了一种全国性的反智倾向,这种倾向不会帮助我们的孩子为未来做好准备,”迈克说。
  从普林斯顿去西温莎和普兰斯堡大约需要10分钟,从纽约市出发需要一个半小时。这两个地方已经成了颇受创业人士、制药业研究人员和工程师欢迎的居住地。他们在很大程度上是被公立学校所吸引。在上一届的三个毕业班中,16名毕业生被麻省理工学院(MIT)录取。这里还频频走出科学奥林匹克获奖者、古典音乐家和SAT高分学生。
  

  弗利倡导的“归还童年”运动制作的徽章。弗利是当地的一位家长。她认为,该学区让人觉得越来越有压力的氛围不利于学习。  Mark Makela for The New York Times
  该学区越来越受来自中国、印度和韩国的移民家庭的欢迎。今年,该学区65%的学生是亚裔美国人,而2007年,这一比例还只是44%。他们中的很多人都是家里第一个在美国出生的成员。
  他们对该学区的影响越来越大。亚裔美国家长热情地支持有竞争性质的器乐课程。他们也是学区内的高等数学课程的大力支持者。高等数学一度是从四年级开始的,但现在将从六年级开始。学习该课程的学生中,90%是亚裔美国人。这门课的调整是阿德霍尔德的改革之一。
  亚裔美国学生是该州一个项目的热心参与者。该项目允许学生参加夏季校外课程,获取高中学分。这使他们能够充分增加自己能修的优等生课程和预修课程数量。这是阿德霍尔德在这个学年要限制的另一做法。
  在很多亚裔美国学生参加补充辅导项目的情况下,一些白人家长觉得,为了适应那些学生,学校的基础性课程加速了。
  亚裔美国家庭和白人家庭均表示,过去几年里,随着亚裔家庭数量的增加,双方之间的紧张关系逐步升级。但最近几个月,随着阿德霍尔德施行改革,分歧变得愈发明显。相关改革包括晚上不布置家庭作业、取消高中期中和期末考试弗利以及发起一项“尖叫权”行动,该行动旨在降低学生参加前述音乐课程的难度。
  加州大学欧文分校(University of California, Irvine)社会学教授、《亚裔美国人成就的悖论》(The Asian American Achievement Paradox)的作者珍妮弗·李(Jennifer Lee)表示,第一代亚裔美国家长和那些在这个国家生活了较长时间的人之间经常存在误解。她说,白人中产阶级家长往往不理解,新移民觉得推动孩子跻身中产阶级的压力有多大。
  “他们自己没有同等的机会,让孩子获得律所的实习或工作机会,”珍妮弗说。“因此,他们认为,自己的孩子必须在学习环境中比白人同学更优秀,这样才能有在以后胜出的同等机会。”
  近年来,随着马萨诸塞州牛顿和帕洛阿尔托等地的学校通报称发生了连续性的自杀事件,精英学区的学生感到压力大这个问题备受关注。西温莎-普兰斯堡学区近年并未发生青少年自杀事件,但阿德霍尔德表示,他看到了一些令人担心的迹象。他已在该学区工作了七年,担任负责人也有两年半时间。
  在前不久的一次美术作业中,一名初中生画的是一个负担过重的孩子因为微积分考试只拿到了A,没有拿到A+而挨训的场景。画中的母亲训斥这名学生的话是,“真丢人!”
  而且他说,新泽西州教育部(New Jersey Education Department)标出了至少两篇有关州英语语言评估的作文。学生在文章中表现出了自杀的想法。
  西温莎-普兰斯堡学区委托进行的调查发现,参加高中优等生课程和大学预修课程的学生中,68%的人反映“一直或大部分时候”对学校感到紧张。
  “我们希望恢复一些平衡,”阿德霍尔德说。“大家都不希望等到为时已晚的时候。”
  但并不是所有舆论都以种族为界限分布。
  卡伦·苏(Karen Sue)是一名华裔美国母亲,孩子一个上五年级,一个上八年级。她认为,学区内的竞争已经失控了。父母是移民,自己在美国出生的她希望其他家长能够回到以前。“已经成了军备竞赛,教育上的军备竞赛,”她说。“我们都想让自己的孩子有所成就,取得成功。问题是,代价是什么?” (作者KYLE SPENCER2015年12月28日。翻译:陈亦亭)

pp_dream 2015-12-30 06:03

牛泽西的一些牛校区亚裔比例太高了,孩子拼得太狠。

dd223 2015-12-30 06:11

公平的高考录取制度是中华父母的选择,
没有乐趣的童年生活是亚裔家长的选择。

toboyMM 2015-12-30 11:22

在你的帖子里,见过几次palo alto high school,这个学校好像是精英高中,有学生不堪压力自杀。我一个很熟的朋友,两个儿子高中转到这所学校,还真没见孩子压力有多大,除了妈妈租房压力大,加州本身就贵,学区房比几个街区外价格要翻倍。
这两个孩子上海出生长大的美国籍,初中在上海中芯,成绩一个中上一个中下,但国内数理基础应该不错。两个理工男,大学都学了工程,进了加州和外洲排名40多,70多的公立大学。我的意思是,只要基础教育内容能够对接高等教育,家长对大学排名要求也不太高的话,其实可以挺轻松的。
话说那种高中最后爬藤的还是极少数。

pp_dream 2015-12-31 02:17

回复 4楼toboyMM 的帖子

Palo Alto High学生的自杀时有发生.我听我同学提到过,他们的孩子大都在Palo Alto High或Cuun High,他们确实说孩子面临很强的竞争,那里补习是比较常见的。

我女儿同学的爸爸是我们以前公司的,他们搬到硅谷,我女儿还一直跟她同学有联系,小姑娘确实有说那里竞争激烈,她一直请家教。

当然,我没有在那里居住过,都是听说而已,呵呵。
如果不是万不得已,我是不会搬到硅谷的,那地方虽然工作机会大把,但孩子太受罪了,我们乡下这里孩子轻松多了。

pp_dream 2015-12-31 02:36

新泽西几个热门校区高中,亚裔的比例越来越高,我知道有一个牛校高中亚裔比例超过50%,我认为这其实是非常不利的。
我的一位老中同事一直在犹豫是否搬离那个牛校区,这样的牛校,孩子进不了前20%或者10%,其实对申请大学不利。
这些牛校区的孩子各种补课是常见的,在微信群里就时有听说各种补课。
家长反感补课,可他们还是会push孩子去参加各种补课或请家教。家教的费用越来越高了。

倒是我们宾州乡下这里,我是两眼一么黑,根本找不到补课的地方,呵呵。

补课,其实就是提前学,据微信群新泽西的家长说,孩子学AP课程已学到复变函数,常微分方程了。我认为不到18岁的孩子,除非特别高智商的以外,真没必要过早接触高等数学,我甚至认为他们学AP微积分都太早了。可是现在这趋势,不学个AP Calculus BC都不敢申请大学了。

米国孩子普遍数学基础不好,不扎实,没会走就想跑,急什么?对于不想深度从事理科专业的孩子,我认为完全没必要早早在中学就学高等数学。11年级的孩子(除非高智商的孩子)去操练常微分方程,有必要么?他们能真正理解和消化知识么?

pp_dream 2015-12-31 02:41

很惭愧地说,我的数学一直学到泛函,学到希尔伯特空间,算达到工科博士基本数学水平吧,其实工作里一分分都用不上!

pp_dream 2015-12-31 02:43

发信人: cxl (老马), 信区: Parenting
标  题: Re: 取消AA,只会把学校变成苦逼大本营,对华裔孩子没啥好处
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Sun Dec 27 15:05:34 2015, 美东)

支持楼主。西方社会的规则基础是自然选择,这个系统里面,成功不是一个可以预测的
东西,而是自然选择的结果,而选择的标准,使无法预测的。譬如恐龙时代,看起来最
成功的策略就是更大更强,但陨石一来,恐龙灭绝了。
这一点,华人特别不适应。因为华人传统是农业社会,种地都是一样的方法,只有比别
人勤奋节俭才能高产出,成地主。西人是以开发新领域来取胜,做别人没做过的事才有
价值。但这是一个高风险的模式,结果必然是大量不成功的个体。华人对于失败的容忍
度很低,所以喜欢拷贝复制他人成功经验,恰恰造成华人很少成功。
所以对于这个系统,最重要的保持多样性,对于个体,最佳的策略是发挥自己的长处天
赋,做自己有热情的事才有可能脱颖而出。华人的推娃行为,最重要的是破坏了孩子的
天性,埋没特长,漫长机械的爬藤刷题刷活动,让他们真正输在起跑线上,完全自绝于
社会竞争系统之外,该有的技能和见识都没有,还成功个啥?其次是使精英教育系统的
选择标准产生抗药性,选择了很多伪精英。结果是双输,华人付出很多努力,得到的无
非一纸文凭,藤校也搞出了很多平庸的校友。何必如此?
当华人来到一个新的社会,要反省自身的文化和教条里那些使适应新社会的,那些是不
适应的。反思新社会里的许多原则和规矩,是不是有它的道理,是不是比自己的老原则
老规矩好。一味坚持,很可能让糟粕和愚昧延续,非华人之福。

pp_dream 2015-12-31 02:49

From NYC to Harvard: the war on Asian success

By Betsy McCaughey December 29, 2015 | 8:48pm


From NYC to Harvard: the war on Asian success



The year 2015 was a dismal one for American public education — at least by the numbers.

But don’t blame the kids. Parents are missing in action.

Except most Asian-American parents, that is. They tend to oversee their children’s homework, stress the importance of earning high grades and instill the belief that hard work is the ticket to a better life.


And it pays off. Their children are soaring academically.

The outrage is that instead of embracing the example of these Asian families, school authorities and non-Asian parents want to rig the system to hold them back. It’s happening here in New York City, in suburban New Jersey and across the nation.

As a group, Americans need to take a page from the Asian parents’ playbook. American teens rank a dismal 28th in math and science knowledge, compared with teens in other countries — even poor countries. Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are at the top.

We’ve slumped. For the first time in 25 years, US scores on the main test for elementary and middle school education fell. And SAT scores for college-bound students dropped significantly.

Could changes in these tests be to blame? That convenient excuse was torpedoed by the stellar performances of Asian-American students. Even though many come from poor or immigrant families, they outscore all other students by large margins on both tests, and their lead keeps widening.

Here in New York City, Asian-Americans make up 13 percent of students, yet they win more than half of the coveted places each year at the city’s selective public high schools, such as Bronx Science and Stuyvesant.

What’s at play here? It’s not a difference in IQ; it’s parenting. That’s confirmed by a recent study by sociologists from City University of New York and the University of Michigan, which showed that parental oversight enabled Asian-American students to far outperform the others.

No wonder many successful charter schools require parents to sign a pledge that they’ll supervise their children’s homework and encourage a strong work ethic.

That formula is under fire at the West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District in New Jersey. The district, which is 65 percent Asian, routinely produces seniors with perfect SAT scores, admissions to MIT and top prizes in international science competitions.

But many non-Asian parents are up in arms, complaining there’s too much pressure and their kids can’t compete. In response, this fall Superintendent David Aderhold apologized that school had become a “perpetual achievement machine.” Heaven forbid!

Aderhold canceled accelerated and enriched math courses for fourth and fifth grades, which were 90 percent Asian, and eliminated midterms and finals in high school.

Using a word that already strikes terror in the hearts of Asian parents, he said schools had to take a “holistic” approach. That’s the same euphemism Harvard uses to limit the number of Asians accepted and favor non-Asians.

Aderhold even lowered standards for playing in school music programs. Students have a “right to squeak,” he insisted. Never mind whether they practice.

Of course, neither Aderhold nor parents in charge of sports are indulging nonathletic kids with a “right to fumble” and join a mostly non-Asian varsity football team.

Meanwhile, in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NAACP want to reduce the role the competitive exam plays in admissions for the city’s eight selective high schools in favor of a “holistic” approach. That means robbing poor, largely immigrant and first-generation kids — nearly half the students get subsidized school lunches — of the chance to study hard and compete for a world-class education.

As Dennis Saffran explains in “The Plot Against Merit,” some Asian-American eighth-graders practice for two years for the test, while their parents toil in laundromats and restaurants to pay for exam-prep classes.

What’s stopping white, Hispanic and black parents from doing the same thing?

Betsy McCaughey is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research.

[[i] 本帖最后由 pp_dream 于 2015-12-31 02:52 编辑 [/i]]

pp_dream 2015-12-31 03:34

The Plot Against Merit

Seeking racial balance, liberal advocates want to water down admissions standards at New York’s elite high schools.
Summer 2014

In 2004, seven-year-old Ting Shi arrived in New York from China, speaking almost no English. For two years, he shared a bedroom in a Chinatown apartment with his grandparents—a cook and a factory worker—and a young cousin, while his parents put in 12-hour days at a small Laundromat they had purchased on the Upper East Side. Ting mastered English and eventually set his sights on getting into Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of New York City’s eight “specialized high schools.” When he was in sixth grade, he took the subway downtown from his parents’ small apartment to the bustling high school to pick up prep books for its eighth-grade entrance exam. He prepared for the test over the next two years, working through the prep books and taking classes at one of the city’s free tutoring programs. His acceptance into Stuyvesant prompted a day of celebration at the Laundromat—an immigrant family’s dream beginning to come true. Ting, now a 17-year-old senior starting at NYU in the fall, says of his parents, who never went to college: “They came here for the next generation.”

New York’s specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant and the equally storied Bronx High School of Science, along with Brooklyn Technical High School and five smaller schools, have produced 14 Nobel Laureates—more than most countries. For more than 70 years, admission to these schools has been based upon a competitive examination of math, verbal, and logical reasoning skills. In 1971, the state legislature, heading off city efforts to scrap the merit selection test as culturally biased against minorities, reaffirmed that admission to the schools be based on the competitive exam. (See “How Gotham’s Elite High Schools Escaped the Leveler’s Ax,” Spring 1999.) But now, troubled by declining black and Hispanic enrollment at the schools, opponents of the exam have resurfaced. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed a civil rights complaint challenging the admissions process. A bill in Albany to eliminate the test requirement has garnered the support of Sheldon Silver, the powerful Assembly Speaker. And new New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, whose son, Dante, attends Brooklyn Tech, has called for changing the admissions criteria. The mayor argues that relying solely on the test creates a “rich-get-richer” dynamic that benefits the wealthy, who can afford expensive test preparation.

As Ting’s story illustrates, however, the reality is just the opposite. It’s not affluent whites, but rather the city’s burgeoning population of Asian-American immigrants—a group that, despite its successes, remains disproportionately poor and working-class—whose children have aced the exam in overwhelming numbers. And, ironically, the more “holistic” and subjective admissions criteria that de Blasio and the NAACP favor would be much more likely to benefit children of the city’s professional elite than African-American and Latino applicants—while penalizing lower-middle-class Asian-American kids like Ting. The result would not be a specialized high school student body that “looks like New York,” but rather one that looks more like Bill de Blasio’s upscale Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Established in 1904 as “a manual training school for boys,” Stuyvesant stressed engineering and other applied sciences. Starting in 1919, the school restricted admissions, based on academic achievement, and it implemented a competitive entrance examination in 1929. Brooklyn Tech was founded in 1922 to prepare boys for engineering or other technical careers, and Bronx Science, conceived as a science and math school for boys, followed in 1938. With assistance from Columbia University, Bronx Science and Stuyvesant devised a common entrance exam; Brooklyn Tech later adopted it. All three schools had gone coed by 1970. Five smaller schools, now comprising 20 percent of the specialized-school population, were added during the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Admission to these schools is based upon the same exam.

In the early years, Bronx Science, which focused on pure rather than applied science, was the most prestigious of the original three schools. Its graduates have won eight Nobel Prizes, more than any other secondary school in the world, as well as six Pulitzer Prizes, and it also leads all schools in Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Talent Competition winners. Over the last two decades, however—especially since its 1992 move from a ramshackle old building on 15th Street to a gleaming new waterfront facility near the financial district—Stuyvesant has overtaken Bronx Science as the most exclusive and coveted of the specialized schools. Stuyvesant graduates have won four Nobels (tied for second in the world); and over the last 16 years, it has led the country in Intel Competition winners. Stuyvesant and Bronx Science have traditionally provided a springboard to success for talented but poor kids, primarily Jews at first, but later including African-Americans as well. Among the notable Jewish graduates (in addition to 11 of the schools’ 12 Nobel laureates) are sociologist Daniel Bell (Stuyvesant ’35), teachers’ union leader Albert Shanker (Stuyvesant ’46), political commentator and Pulitzer Prize winner William Safire and literary critic Harold Bloom (both Bronx Science ’47), and novelist E. L. Doctorow (Bronx Science ’48). Prominent black graduates include political scientist Thomas Sowell (Stuyvesant ’48), former Harvard Medical School dean Alvin Poussaint (Stuyvesant ’52), radical activist Stokely Carmichael (Bronx Science ’60), astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (Bronx Science ’76), and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (Stuyvesant ’69).

The social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s led to attacks on the specialized high schools and on the entrance exam as racially biased and exclusionary. In 1971, the board of Community School District 3, then a predominantly black and Puerto Rican district on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, charged that Bronx Science was, as characterized by the New York Times, “a privileged educational center for children of the white middle class because ‘culturally’ oriented examinations worked to ‘screen out’ black and Puerto Rican students.” Threatening a lawsuit, the board criticized the exam for being “heavily loaded with ‘intelligence test’ approaches” and proposed that students should instead be admitted solely based on recommendations. Mayor John V. Lindsay, an affluent Upper East Side liberal Republican-turned-Democrat who sent his children to exclusive private schools, moved quickly to placate District 3. Lindsay’s leftish schools chancellor, Harvey Scribner, appointed a committee to study the specialized schools’ admissions policy, saying that there was “a question as to the extent any test of academic achievement tends to be culturally biased.”

Scribner’s apparent receptiveness to ending the exam sparked a strong reaction from specialized school alumni, parents, and faculty, and led to the introduction of a bill in Albany to mandate its continued use. Sponsored by Democratic Assemblyman Burton G. Hecht and Republican Senator John D. Calandra, both of the Bronx, the bill required that admission to the specialized schools—and any others that the city might create in the future—continue to be based “solely and exclusively” on “a competitive, objective and scholastic achievement examination.” The bill passed both houses with strong bipartisan support in May 1971 and was signed by Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

Criticism of the specialized schools and the admissions test subsided in the four decades following the enactment of the Hecht-Calandra Law. A notable exception was a 1997 report by the radical Acorn group assailing racial imbalance at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. But strikingly, the Acorn report focused less on the entrance exam and merit selection than on improved preparation of minority students, and it called for “suspension” of the exam only “until the . . . students of each middle school have had access to curricula and instruction that would prepare them for this test.” In a related report, Acorn made this focus more explicit: “The question is not whether the entrance exam is unfair. The question is why students who attend public elementary and middle schools for eight or nine years are so unprepared to do well when they take it.”

There is no dispute that black and Latino enrollment at the specialized schools, while always low, has steadily declined since the 1970s. Blacks constituted 13 percent of the student body at Stuyvesant in 1979, 5 percent in 1994, and just 1 percent the last few years, while Hispanics dropped from a high of 4 percent to 2 percent today. Similarly, at Bronx Science, black enrollment has fallen from 12 percent in 1994 to 3 percent currently, and Hispanic enrollment has leveled off, from about 10 percent to 6 percent. The figures are even more striking at the less selective Brooklyn Tech, where blacks made up 37 percent of the student body in 1994 but only 8 percent today, while Hispanic numbers plunged from about 15 percent to 8 percent.

These declining minority numbers have not been matched by a corresponding increase in whites, however. In fact, white enrollment at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech has plummeted as well, dropping from 79 percent, 81 percent, and 77 percent, respectively, in 1971 to just 22 percent, 23 percent, and 20 percent today. Rather, it is New York City’s fastest-growing racial minority group, Asian-Americans, who have come to dominate these schools. Asians, while always a presence in New York, didn’t begin arriving in the city in large numbers until immigration restrictions were lifted with passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, championed by Senator Edward Kennedy. Since then, their proportion of the city’s population has increased from less than 1 percent to about 13 percent, and their share of the specialized school population has skyrocketed. Asian students constituted 6 percent of the enrollment at Stuyvesant in 1970 and 50 percent in 1994; they make up an incredible 73 percent of the student body this year. The story is similar at Bronx Science, where the Asian population has exploded from 5 percent in 1970 to 41 percent in 1994 to 62 percent today, and at Brooklyn Tech, where their presence increased from 6 percent to 33 percent to 61 percent.

Asians now make up 60 percent of enrollment throughout the specialized schools, though they constitute only 15 percent of New York’s public school population. Blacks and Latinos, by contrast, make up 13 percent of the specialized school population but 70 percent of the overall public school enrollment, while whites account for 24 percent of specialized school enrollment and 14 percent of the overall public school population. Passage rates for the exam reflect Asian dominance. Last year, Asians accounted for 30 percent of test takers but 53 percent of admissions offers, whites 17 percent of test takers and 26 percent of offers, and blacks and Latinos 46 percent of test takers but only 12 percent of offers. Looked at another way, 33 percent of Asian test takers and 28 percent of whites, but only 5 percent of blacks and Latinos, gained admission.

Asians in New York are overwhelmingly first- and second-generation; some three-quarters of the students at Stuyvesant are immigrants or the children of immigrants. They’re hardly affluent, notwithstanding de Blasio’s implication that families who get their kids into the specialized schools are “rich.” True, Asians nationally have the highest median income of any racial group, including whites—and in New York City, their median household income ranks second to that of whites and well ahead of blacks and Hispanics. But Asians also have the highest poverty rate of any racial group in New York, with 29 percent living below the poverty level, compared with 26 percent of Hispanics, 23 percent of blacks, and 14 percent of whites. Poor Asians lag far behind whites and are barely ahead of blacks and Latinos. Thus, the income spectrum among Asians in New York ranges from a surprisingly large number in poverty, through a hardworking lower middle class, and on to a more affluent upper middle class.

It might seem reasonable to assume—as de Blasio and others apparently do—that the Asian kids at the specialized schools come largely from families at the top of this pyramid. But this isn’t the case. Half the students at the specialized high schools qualify for free or subsidized school lunches, including 47 percent at Stuyvesant and 48 percent at Bronx Science—figures that have increased correspondingly with Asians’ rising numbers at these schools. Based upon these figures, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science (as well as four of the other six specialized schools) are eligible for federal Title I funding, given to schools with large numbers of low-income students. Think about that: two public high schools that, along with half their students, are officially classified as poor by the federal government rival the most exclusive prep schools in the world.

The poor students get into such schools through hard work and sacrifice—both their own and that of their parents. The students typically attend local tutoring programs, which proliferate in Asian neighborhoods, starting the summer after sixth grade and for several days a week, including weekends, during the school year prior to the test. The costs are burdensome for poor and working families, but it’s a matter of priorities. (See “Brooklyn’s Chinese Pioneers,” Spring 2014.) As Chinese parent leader Stanley Ng noted in an NPR story last year: “Even the lowest-paid immigrants scrape up enough money for tutoring, because those high schools are seen as the ticket to a better life” for their children. Thus, one immigrant family featured in the NPR story had spent $5,000 per year, of the parents’ combined $26,000 income as garment workers, to send their three sons to tutoring. Their oldest boy, now a student at Stuyvesant, said of his mother, who did not speak English and, like her husband, did not finish high school in China: “Basically, she just worked every day . . . and saved up the money.”

All this once would have been the stuff of liberal dreams: a racial minority group historically victimized by discrimination begins coming to America in greater numbers because of an immigration reform sponsored by Ted Kennedy. Though many in the group remain in poverty, they take advantage of free public schools established by progressive New York City governments. By dint of their own hard work, they earn admission in increasing numbers to merit-based schools that offer smart working-class kids the kind of education once available only at Andover or Choate.

To modern “progressive” elites, though, the story is intolerable, starting with the hard work. As Charles Murray has observed, while affluent liberals themselves tend to work hard, they seem embarrassed by their own lifestyles and refuse to preach what they practice in an age that frowns on anything bourgeois, self-denying, or judgmental. These liberal elites seem particularly troubled by the Asian-American work ethic and the difficult questions that it raises about the role of culture in group success. While the advancement of Asian students has come overwhelmingly at the expense of more affluent whites, it has also had an undeniable impact on black and Latino students, whose foothold at these schools, small to begin with, has all but vanished.

Alarm at this development has triggered a new wave of assaults upon the entrance exam—now known as the Specialized High School Admissions Test (“SHSAT”)—and the Hecht-Calandra Law that mandates its use. In September 2012, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, which dispenses federal educational funding to the city, charging that use of the SHSAT as the sole basis for admission violates Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination by federal aid recipients. The complaint does not allege that the exam intentionally discriminates against black and Hispanic students. Instead, citing statistics regarding declining black and Latino enrollment and SHSAT pass rates, the LDF bases its argument entirely on the theory of “disparate impact”—that is, that discrimination should be inferred merely from racial differences in test scores.

In the complaint and in a subsequent report released last fall to coincide with Mayor de Blasio’s election, the LDF argues for replacement of the SHSAT with a “holistic” admissions process—one that would consider “multiple measures” of academic potential, “both quantitative and qualitative,” including not only grades but also such subjective indicators as interviews, recommendations, “portfolio assessments,” “proven leadership skills,” and “commitment to community service.” Other factors could include applicants’ “backgrounds and experiences” and the “demographic profile” of their schools and neighborhoods. To the extent that a test would be allowed at all, it would merely “supplement” these other criteria. The LDF also called for guaranteed admission for valedictorians and salutatorians, and perhaps other top students, at each public middle school program—a proposal that sounds modest but would actually require a set-aside of at least 1,000 of the 3,800 seats in each class. Breaking with Acorn’s focus in its 1997 report on test preparation, the LDF declared that “more test prep is not the answer” and quoted the president of another civil rights group, who said that “encouraging students to spend weeks and months furiously studying . . . is wrongheaded and clearly hasn’t worked.”

The Department of Education has not yet acted on the complaint, though it remains to be seen whether this represents bureaucratic lethargy or a political strategy to wait and see if the state legislature will repeal the test requirement. Bills to do so were introduced in the legislature in 2012 but went nowhere at first. However, during last fall’s mayoral campaign, de Blasio came out for replacement of the SHSAT with a multiple-factors process. As de Blasio’s election became increasingly certain, Speaker Silver climbed aboard the repeal bandwagon. And in the closing days of the legislative session in June, a new bill to replace the test with “multiple measures of student merit” was introduced with much fanfare and the backing of the powerful United Federation of Teachers (a leading supporter of the original Hecht-Calandra bill in 1971). The measures identified in the bill did include some sort of test, as well as grades, but also such soft criteria as attendance and any other factors chosen by the city Board of Education. While the bill did not pass this year, when the legislators are up for reelection, a renewed push is likely in 2015.

Such subjective admissions criteria would be likelier to favor the kids of New York’s professional class than children from less affluent backgrounds. De Blasio suggested, for example, that a student’s extracurricular activities should be one of the selection factors. But as a past president of the Stuyvesant Parents Association noted, “the kids that have the best résumés in seventh and eighth grades have money.” A Chinese student like Ting Shi who has to help out in his parents’ Laundromat is not going on “service” trips to Nicaragua with the children in de Blasio’s affluent Park Slope neighborhood. The LDF’s suggested admissions criteria—student portfolios, leadership skills, and community service—are all subject to privileged parents’ ability to buy their children the indicia of impressiveness.

Ironically, eliminating the SHSAT would magnify the role of what progressives call “unconscious bias”—the idea that we have a preference for those who look like us and share our backgrounds. Subjective evaluation measures like interviews and portfolio reviews are much more susceptible to such bias than is an objective examination. Evaluators are inherently predisposed toward applicants who mirror their own lifestyles and values—which, for the teachers and educrats who would be doing the evaluating under a “holistic” process, are generally those of a professional elite. The upper-middle-class applicant who volunteers at the food co-op or the AIDS walk and who manifests an air of self-confident irony will have a leg up over the quiet immigrant kid who works hard and studies. Sure, the decision makers will do their best to admit a few more black and Latino kids (especially those from the same upper-middle-class backgrounds), but the primary beneficiaries will be affluent white students who didn’t study hard enough to perform really well on the test but seem more “well-rounded” than those who did. As always, the losers in this top-bottom squeeze will be the lower middle and working classes. Among the applicant pool for the specialized high schools, that means Asians.

Comparing the specialized schools with other selective city high schools that don’t use the SHSAT bears this out. These “screened” high schools are, to varying degrees, more selective than regular neighborhood high schools; they choose students using the multiple criteria supported by SHSAT critics. A comparison of the eight most selective screened schools with the eight specialized schools shows that the screened schools, while more heavily black and Latino, are also considerably whiter and more affluent—and considerably less Asian. Remember that the specialized schools are 13 percent black and Hispanic, 24 percent white, and 60 percent Asian. The top screened schools are 27 percent black and Hispanic, 46 percent white, and only 26 percent Asian. And while 50 percent of the students at the specialized schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, only 37 percent of the students at the top screened schools do.

Subjective selection criteria also inevitably favor the affluent and connected—as a comptroller’s audit of the screened-school admissions process revealed. The study found that most of the schools examined did not follow their stated selection criteria and could not explain the criteria that they actually did use. SHSAT opponents argue that elite colleges use a subjective admissions process rather than relying on a single test. But strong evidence exists suggesting that this process results in “Asian quotas” at the top colleges, reminiscent of those once imposed on Jews. As Northwestern’s Asian-American studies director put it in a 2012 New York Times op-ed, after noting that whites were three times as likely as Asians with the same scores to be admitted to elite colleges: “Sound familiar? In the 1920s, as high-achieving Jews began to compete with WASP prep schoolers, Ivy League schools started asking about family background and sought vague qualities like ‘character’ . . . and ‘leadership’ to cap Jewish enrollment.”

There is also a big difference between evaluating 17-year-old college applicants and 13-year-old high school applicants. The younger candidates have had far less opportunity to distinguish themselves on such vague qualities as “character” and “leadership.” A selection process based on these intangibles can easily fall prey to arbitrariness, prejudice, and parental gamesmanship.

Critics of the SHSAT will reply that something must be done about declining black and Hispanic enrollment at the specialized high schools. The answer, however, can never be to lower objective standards. Doing so hurts everyone, including minority students. For all its other faults, Acorn was on the right track in 1997 when it wrote that the “question is not whether the entrance exam is unfair” but why minority students in the city school system “are so unprepared to take it.” The LDF and other progressive advocates have gone off course when they declare that “more test prep is not the answer” and dismiss spending long hours “furiously studying” as “wrongheaded” and futile. Adopting this cynical approach would do no favors for black and Latino children, while opening the door to discrimination against Asian kids like Ting. It is not the specialized schools’ emphasis on merit, but rather the advocates’ defeatist worldview that is truly—and tragically—wrongheaded.

Dennis Saffran is an appellate attorney and was recently the GOP candidate for the city council seat representing District 19, in Queens.

pp_dream 2015-12-31 03:35

回复 10楼pp_dream 的帖子

文章太长,不过里面的数据值得一看

pp_dream 2015-12-31 04:22

在教育问题上,米弟这样多种族多阶层的国家,是很难拿捏公平标准的。

教育一方面面向所有孩子希望达到教育公平,一方面也一定希望培养一批优等生,他们将是各领域的栋梁。

我认为,单纯强调教育公平实际上是无法达到,并适得其反;而另一群体(比如亚裔)过度追求成绩优秀,又给整个教育带来了不少羁绊。

比如亚裔努力学习,这很难说是不对,高校在录取上已经有族裔潜规则来控制亚裔学生数量,还要怎样?亚裔通过自己的努力过上富裕的日子,这无可厚非。

比如黑人和拉丁裔孩子大比例的成绩较差,这很难说是对的,为什么他们不努力还有理了么?这些群体大比例的低收入,吃国家福利,有理了么?


另一方面,亚裔的同质化确实又阻碍了亚裔的发展,亚裔太过趋同,没有多样性,使得亚裔间竞争加剧。


这个问题真是没答案。。。

钊元妈妈 2015-12-31 11:36

听说大颈的亚裔学生比例已经超过80%, 这里拼学区热情不比国内差啊!

嗲虫妈 2015-12-31 14:40

要修炼成学霸,到哪都不轻松。

nightingale2013 2016-1-1 00:00

回复 8楼pp_dream 的帖子

偶也有此看法吖![em11]

nightingale2013 2016-1-1 00:02

回复 12楼pp_dream 的帖子

问题就是华人追求的东西过于同质化啊!真不是好事!:(

nightingale2013 2016-1-1 00:56

关于10楼的长贴

如PP所言,文章的数据比较说明问题,能看出各族裔人口在这些名高中的变迁。个人以为,华人hardworking and sacrificing 没有错,是移民改变人生的重要途径,一百多年前的犹太人就是这么做的,文章中也有所提及。但是,犹太人知道如何争取自己的权益,也非常团结互助。在米国,争取权益一定要赢得话语权,通过立法实现,文章中不是提到那些 blacks and hispanics 也动不动为自己的偷懒被淘汰抗争嘛。华人要改变学霸被拒的局面,团结起来主张权益是必须的。随着二代的成长,我相信会有那么一天的。

ql7788 2016-1-4 12:56

我们圈子里的妈妈们讨论孩子就读的学校满意程度的时候,对于非常满意的学校,没几个家长考虑过自己能为学校做点什么或者用行动来表达感谢(不好意思,私下给老师送礼的不在讨论之列)。大家认为花那些钱,不如给孩子上补习班。白人尤其是犹太人群体对名校的影响力不是一代两代人,家长的价值观对孩子有深远的影响,也影响着名校对某些种族群体的好感度。除了让孩子上补习班,华人家长真的要好好考虑华人学生群体除了学习好还能给学校带来什么!

lean 2016-1-6 09:15

[quote]原帖由 [i]ql7788[/i] 于 2016-1-4 12:56 发表 [url=http://ww123.net/redirect.php?goto=findpost&pid=9808398&ptid=4884843][img]http://ww123.net/images/common/back.gif[/img][/url]
我们圈子里的妈妈们讨论孩子就读的学校满意程度的时候,对于非常满意的学校,没几个家长考虑过自己能为学校做点什么或者用行动来表达感谢(不好意思,私下给老师送礼的不在讨论之列)。大家认为花那些钱,不如给孩子上补习班。白 ... [/quote]
:handshake 同意!因为孩子申请到非常满意的大学,妈妈群里每个人都觉得很自豪很开心,对学校是万般赞美;可是收到学校的捐款信时,大多数人的第一反应是:捐款是强制的么?可以不交么?不捐款会对孩子有影响么?我们已经交了那么多学费,为什么还要捐款?...让少数有意捐款的家长都不好意思出声。
前人种树,后人乘凉。可现实是,若没有直接的利益关系,大多数人是不会去种树的。
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