Asian Americans: America’s Education Football
March 6, 2000
Few other groups get used as fodder for discussions on education as much as Asian Americans. There have been moments when we were players and not just pawns — such as in Gong Lum vs. Rice, a 1927 case unsuccessfully challenging school segregation; the 1968 and 1969 strikes at San Francisco State and U.C. Berkeley, from which ethnic studies was born; and Lau vs. Nichols, the 1974 case in which San Francisco’s Chinese American community won the right to bilingual education. Moreover, today’s Asian American students, teachers, administrators, school board members and community activists are doing their best to shape their own destinies.
In the relentless corporate drive to privatize education, however, Asian Americans are the poster children for the “merit” philosophy, while thousands of struggling Asian American youth are overlooked. Still, the model minority myth lives on in part because of the need to perpetuate a belief that our education system works well, that struggling students have only themselves to blame, and that corporate solutions will work whenever under-funded public school systems break down.
Some Asian Americans are participants in the problem as well, because they see themselves as better than other people (especially other minorities). While benefiting from the inequalities perpetuated by the model minority myth, they fail to work to end those inequalities.
Current debates about school vouchers, teacher merit pay increases and charter schools are part of an increasingly ominous threat to the very core of democracy in this country. Schools are the great socialization tool, and anchors for stable, caring and inclusive communities. When run like La Escuela Fratney (Fratney Street School), a bilingual two-way language school in Milwaukee, they can champion a holistic worldview that welcomes diversity and prepares our children for a global economy.
When we take taxpayer dollars and use it to fund private schools, which are not accountable to many governmental regulations and which further the interests of particular faiths, we hasten the day when religious intolerance — a staple of American life for all but the last few decades — will return.
Like all other Americans, Asian Americans face education issues: how to deal with standardized testing, how to deal with violence in the schools, how to get into institutions of higher learning, how to pay for that education once admitted, and how to get a high-quality education without perpetuating a system of tracking that consigns some students (mostly poor, urban, and minority) to a second-tier education. On top of those issues, however, we and other immigrant communities face the problem of finding linguistically and culturally appropriate schools that will also lead to mainstreaming at the earliest possible opportunity.
While there are many difficult issues facing our students and our schools in the years ahead, we are fortunate that a nationwide network of education activists, who have grown up in the past 20 years, can help local efforts to organize for progressive education reform. Without mentioning the usual leaders at the California universities, here are a few resources:
- The venerable Asian American Curriculum Project in San Mateo (AACP; www.best.com/~aacp/; 650-343-9408) has been selling Asian American books for three decades. Its website has plenty of resource materials, and its staff, led by the legendary Florence Hongo, is very knowledgeable about most education issues.
- Asian American United, which has been spearheading education reform in Philadelphia thanks to the efforts of curriculum specialist Debbie Wei, Executive Director Ellen Somekawa, and others (www.aaunited.org; 215-925-1538). Curriculum guides and information are available.
- Literacy Assistance Center of New York (212-803-3300; www.lacnyc.org) has one of the best online resource lists for literacy organizations, funding agencies, multicultural education resources and learning disabilities. It even has resources for teachers such as the HTML Crash Course for Educators (http://metalab.unc.edu/edweb/htmlintro.html ).
- The National Center for Fair and Open Testing (also known as Fairtest, www.fairtest.org; 617-864-4810) is an advocacy organization working to end the abuses, misuses and flaws of standardized testing and ensure that evaluation of students and workers is fair, open and educationally sound. They place special emphasis on eliminating the racial, class, gender and cultural barriers to equal opportunity posed by standardized tests.
- The National Coalition of Education Activists (NCEA, http://members.aol.com/nceaweb/ , 914-876-4580 is a multiracial network of families, school staff, union and community activists, and others organizing for equity and fundamental changes in local school districts. Its purpose is to support activists in their efforts to develop, promote and implement progressive school reforms, to provide a counter to the right, and to fight racism and other forms of institutional bias. “Breaking Barriers: Working Together for Justice in Schools” is the theme of the next conference, to be held on the campus of UCLA in July, 2000.
- The Network of Educators on the Americas (www.teachingforchange.org ; 202-588-7204) sells hundreds of multicultural, anti-racist books, videos, posters and other classroom resources from its web site. Its links page also has invaluable referrals to other online organizations involved in education services and education reform.
- Rethinking Schools (www.rethinkingschools.org; 414-964-9646) is an activist publication, with articles written by and for teachers, parents, and students. Yet it also addresses key policy issues, such as vouchers and marketplace-oriented reforms, funding equity, and school-to-work. It began as a local effort in Milwaukee to address problems such as basal readers, standardized testing and textbook-dominated curriculum. Since its founding in 1986, it has grown into a nationally prominent publisher of educational materials, with subscribers in all 50 states, all 10 Canadian provinces, and many other countries. The Spring 2000 issue of Rethinking Schools contains two articles that should be read by the presidential candidates: It examines the fallacies that underlie most merit-pay plans, and spotlights alternatives, which instead reward teachers based on knowledge, skills and responsibility. It also describes a Wisconsin experiment that once again shows cutting class size makes more sense than funneling public dollars into private schools.
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