Tag Archive for 'race'

“Carlos Is Asian At Heart”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 18, 2008 in Education News. 0 Comments

L.A. TimesFriends of Carlos Garcia, a Latino student at with a knack for math at Lincoln High School tell him, ‘You’re more Asian than Hispanic.’” An Asian student, Julie Loc concurs. “I think Carlos is Asian at heart,” she says. And what do students at this Los Angeles high school say about their Asian peers who struggle in school? “I had an Asian friend, but he didn’t necessarily get that great a grades. We used to say, ‘He’s Mexican at heart.’”

The Los Angeles Times convened this frank discussion about race and achievement for a front page story.

Both the neighborhood and student body are about 15% Asian. And yet Asians make up 50% of students taking Advanced Placement classes. Staffers can’t remember the last time a Latino was valedictorian….According to a study of census data, 84% of the Asian and Latino families in the neighborhoods around Lincoln High have median annual household incomes below $50,000. And yet the Science Bowl team is 90% Asian, as is the Academic Decathlon team.

Asian parents are more likely to pressure their children to excel academically, the students agreed. The students talked not just about parental expectations, notes the Times, but also about those of peers. One girl drew laughter when she said of other students, “They expect me to be smart. Even if, like, I do everything wrong on purpose, they still copy off of me — as if I’m right just because I’m Asian.”

Teachers at Lincoln, meanwhile, detect a self-defeating attitude among Hispanic students. “I think the thing I always hear from the Latino kids is, ‘Oh, well, Miss, he’s Asian, she’s Asian. Of course they do well,’ ” said Alli Lauer, who teaches English. “It’s frustrating to hear them do it to each other.”

Gaming NCLB

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 27, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Educational Policy. 0 Comments

Eighty California schools got “out of trouble” with No Child Left Behind in the past two years by changing the way they classify their students, according to an analysis by the Sacramento Bee. The changes enabled the school to alter their status from failing to passing under the law.

The paper cites the example of Sacramento’s Will C. Wood Middle School. Last August, most of the school’s students had met benchmarks set by No Child Left Behind. But African American students’ math scores fell far short. “One hundred students were categorized as black when they took the test last spring. But if the school had fewer than 100 students in that group, their low scores wouldn’t count,” the Bee reports. “So Principal Jim Wong reviewed the files of all the students classified as African American on the test, he said, and found that four of them had indicated no race or mixed race on their enrollment paperwork. Wong sent his staff to talk to the four families to ask permission to put the kids in a different racial group.”

“You get a kid that’s half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?” Wong told the paper. “If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble.”

A pretty extraordinary admission for a principal to make on the record. And quite a job of reporting on the games schools play by the Sacramento Bee, which notes California doesn’t verify whether the changes schools make accurately reflect the students they serve.

Culture, Race, Ethnicity and Achievement

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 7, 2008 in Opinion. 0 Comments

Mercury NewsNice piece of enterprise journalism turned in by the San Jose Mercury News (hat tip: Joanne Jacobs) on culture, race and ethnicity in Silicon Valley schools, which takes an unblinking look at cultural expectations of student performance among various ethnic groups. Among Latino kids:

“The 17-year-old seniors are called ‘whitewashed.’ Mataditas – dorks. Cerebritas – brainiacs,” the Mercury News reports. “They’re told they’re ‘losing their culture’ – just because Sandra has a 4.0 grade-point average and Bibiana has a 3.5. The put-downs are clear: Smart is not cool. And too many Latino students are choosing cool over school.” The paper contrasts this with a heavily Asian middle school nearby where the attitude is exactly the opposite. If you’re not smart, “you’re really looked down on,” says a Vietnamese-American eighth-grader.

“After years of tiptoeing around racial issues for fear of invoking stereotypes, California educators are now looking squarely at how ethnicity and culture shape achievement and attitudes toward school,” the paper reports.

More on this theme can be found in a recent report by researchers at Vanderbilt University, which found that gifted black students who underperform in school may do so because of peer pressure to “act black.”

Continue reading ‘Culture, Race, Ethnicity and Achievement’