m****n
发帖数: 2415 | 1 NYT:For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/education/a-grueling-admissio
Ting Shi said his first two years in the United States were wretched. He
slept in a bunk bed in the same room with his grandparents and a cousin in
Chinatown, while his parents lived on East 89th Street, near a laundromat
where they endured 12-hour shifts. He saw them only on Sundays.
Multimedia
Graphic
A Disparity in Top Public High Schools
Related
Charges of Bias in Admission Test Policy at Eight Elite Public High
Schools (September 28, 2012)
A System Divided: To Be Black at Stuyvesant High (February 26, 2012)
Enlarge This Image
Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times
Kassidi Cheng, 12, is in test-prep classes that cost her mother $2,000 this
year alone. Some say that the admissions test for the city’s eight elite
high schools is unfair to those students who cannot afford prep courses.
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
Post a Comment »
Read All Comments (123) »
Even after they found an apartment together, his father often talked about
taking the family back to China. So, following the advice of friends and
relatives from Fuzhou, where he is from, Ting spent more than two years
poring over dog-eared test prep books, attending summer and after-school
classes, even going over math formulas on the walk home from school.
The afternoon his acceptance letter to Stuyvesant High School arrived in the
mail, he and his parents gathered at the laundromat, the smell of detergent
and the whirl of the washing machines filling the air. “Everyone was
excited,” Ting recalled.
Ting’s father said he felt rejuvenated, and now dismissed the idea of
returning: “I thought: the next generation will have a good future,” he
said.
On Saturday, more than 15,000 students are expected to file into classrooms
to take a grueling 95-question test for admission to New York City’s elite
public high schools. (The exam on Sunday, for about 14,000 students, was
postponed until Nov. 18 because of Hurricane Sandy.)
No one will be surprised if Asian students, who make up 14 percent of the
city’s public school students, once again win most of the seats, and if
black and Hispanic students win few. Last school year, of the 14,415
students enrolled in the eight specialized high schools that require a test
for admissions, 8,549 were Asian.
Because of the disparity, some have begun calling for an end to the policy
of using the test as the sole basis of admission to the schools, and last
month, civil rights groups filed a complaint with the federal government,
contending that the policy discriminated against students, many of whom are
black or Hispanic, who cannot afford the score-raising tutoring that other
students can. The Shis, like other Asian families who spoke about the exam
in interviews in the past month, did not deny engaging in extensive test
preparation. To the contrary, they seemed to discuss their efforts with
pride.
They also said they were puzzled about having to defend a process they
viewed as a vital steppingstone for immigrants. And more than a few saw the
criticism of the test as an attack on their cultures, as troubling to them
as grumblings about the growing Asian presence in these schools and the
prestigious colleges they feed into. “You know: ‘You’re Asian, you must
be smart,’ ” said Jan Michael Vicencio, an immigrant from Manila and a
junior at Brooklyn Tech, one of the eight schools that use the test for
admission. “And you’re not sure it’s a compliment or an insult. We get
that a lot.”
Almost universally, the Asian students described themselves on one edge of a
deep cultural chasm.
They cited their parents’ observance of ancient belief systems like
Confucianism, a set of moral principles that emphasizes scholarship and
reverence for elders, as well as their rejection of child-rearing
philosophies more common in the United States that emphasize confidence and
general well-being.
Several students said their parents did not shy away from corporal
punishment as a means of motivating them. And they said that rigorous
testing was generally an accepted practice in their home countries, with the
tests viewed not so much as measures of intelligence, but of
industriousness.
“Most of our parents don’t believe in ‘gifted,’ ” said Riyan Iqbal, 15,
the son of Bangladeshi immigrants, as he and his friends — of Bengali,
Korean and Indian descent — meandered toward the subway from the Bronx High
School of Science one recent afternoon. “It’s all about hard work.”
No student, they said, was off the hook. Riyan, the son of a taxi driver and
a Duane Reade cashier, and his schoolmates said their parents routinely
plied them with motivational tales about the trials they endured back home,
walking to school barefoot, struggling with hunger, being set back by floods
and political unrest. “You try to make up for their hardships,” Riyan
said.
The summer after sixth grade, Riyan spent most days at a small storefront “
cram school,” memorizing surface area and volume formulas. In seventh grade
, he was back there on Saturday and Sundays, unscrambling paragraphs and
plowing through reading passages. The classes cost his parents $200 a month.
“I knew my parents would still love me if I didn’t get into Bronx Science,
” he said. “But they would be very disappointed.”
Jerome Krase, a professor emeritus in sociology at Brooklyn College, and one
of the editors of “Race and Ethnicity in New York City,” said that a
growing number of Asian immigrants in recent years had experienced serious
adversity in their home countries. “The children hold the honor of the
family in their hands,” Professor Krase said. “If they succeed, the family
succeeds.”
(Page 2 of 2)
Complaints about the test and its effect on the racial makeup of the top
schools date back at least to the civil rights era. When school officials
began openly discussing changing the admissions policy in the early 1970s,
white parents persuaded the State Legislature to pass a law cementing the
test as the only basis of admission to the specialized high schools. At the
time, according to an article in The New York Times in 1971, Stuyvesant High
School was mostly white, 10 percent black, 4 percent Puerto Rican or “
other Spanish surnamed,” and 6 percent Asian.
Multimedia
Graphic
A Disparity in Top Public High Schools
Related
Charges of Bias in Admission Test Policy at Eight Elite Public High
Schools (September 28, 2012)
A System Divided: To Be Black at Stuyvesant High (February 26, 2012)
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
Post a Comment »
Read All Comments (123) »
This year at Stuyvesant, 72 percent are Asian and less than 4 percent are
black or Hispanic.
Melissa Potter, a spokeswoman for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund, one of the groups that filed the complaint with the United States
Department of Education in September, said that though some of the city’s
poorest Asian immigrants had found their way into these schools, many were
still being left out, for the same reason that poor blacks and Hispanics
were: they do not have access to the grueling, expensive and time-consuming
test preparation for the exam. The complaint argued that other factors, like
school grades, teacher recommendations and personal experience should also
be taken into account.
City education officials, as well as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, have
rejected the idea that the one-test entry system should be rethought. “You
pass the test,” the mayor said last month, “you get the highest score, you
get into the school — no matter what your ethnicity, no matter what your
economic background is.”
The city began offering a free test-prep program several years ago for black
and Hispanic students, but after a legal challenge, other ethnic groups
were granted the same access to the course. Today, 43 percent of the
students in the program are Asian. Three years ago, Ting Shi was one of them.
The filing of the complaint has led to some uncomfortable discussions about
race, aided by the anonymity of the Internet. On the elite schools’ alumni
Web sites, discussions can veer into “dangerous territory,” as one
commenter from Brooklyn Tech recently noted during a heated exchange. The
discussion included a post about how the N.A.A.C.P. ought to be pushing
parents to get “more involved in their children’s education.”
Meanwhile, a parent on a popular education e-mail list referred to the “
Asian-ification” of the elite schools, and a post on Urban Baby grumbled
about “Asian kids taking all the spots because they prep excessively.”
Criticizing Asians’ success on the test is “like a defense mechanism,”
said Faria Kabir, a sophomore at Brooklyn Tech, who emigrated from
Bangladesh when she was 6. “It’s like someone is blaming you for something
that isn’t actually your fault.”
Beyond issues of race, those who favor a broader admissions policy say the
reliance on one test for admission, one that has spawned an industry of
tutoring programs, has distorted what it means to be a top student.
Sharon Chambers, the owner of a karate studio in Queens, whose son, Kyle, is
was scheduled to take the test on Saturday, said students should be able to
demonstrate their abilities in a more well-rounded way, one that might not
cost so much. “A test like this is not a full indicator of a child’s
potential,” Ms. Chambers, who is black, said.
Others take issue with the exam on philosophical grounds. “You shouldn’t
have to prep Sunday to Sunday, to get into a good high school,” said
Melissa Santana, a legal secretary whose daughter Dejanellie Falette has
been prepping this fall for the exam. “That’s extreme.”
But a Bensonhurst resident, Emmie Cheng, who is of Chinese descent but
emigrated here as a child from Cambodia, was not sure she agreed.
This fall, her daughter Kassidi has spent every Tuesday afternoon and all of
Saturday at the Horizon Program, a tutoring program near her house,
reviewing work she has done over the past three years. Kassidi also takes a
prep class on Sundays.
Still, Ms. Cheng, a director at a shoe importing company, said guiding her
daughter through this process — which cost her about $2,000 this year alone
— paled in comparison to what she had experienced earlier in her life. Her
father and four brothers died of starvation during Cambodia’s civil war.
And once here, she said, she watched her mother struggle in a garment
factory.
“This is the easy part,” Ms. Cheng said. | m****n
发帖数: 2415 | 2 感觉是白人不满在好学校里亚裔占大多数，找黑人和拉丁人来当枪？ | s******t
发帖数: 12883 | 3 这些非裔和西裔有病， 你们既然不擅长学习， 而擅长体育或者音乐或者社交，
那就不要去挤以学习为主的elite high school. 你们可以去挤那些以体育为主，
以音乐为主， 以社交为主的elite high school. 这些civil rights group
都有很基础的逻辑flaw.
【在 m****n 的大作中提到】
: NYT:For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones
: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/education/a-grueling-admissio
: Ting Shi said his first two years in the United States were wretched. He
: slept in a bunk bed in the same room with his grandparents and a cousin in
: Chinatown, while his parents lived on East 89th Street, near a laundromat
: where they endured 12-hour shifts. He saw them only on Sundays.
: Multimedia
: Graphic
: A Disparity in Top Public High Schools
: Related
| s******t
发帖数: 12883 | 4 不会。 就是黑人和西裔不满， 还有想帮助黑人和西裔获得更高社会和经济低位的
liberal不满。
【在 m****n 的大作中提到】
: 感觉是白人不满在好学校里亚裔占大多数，找黑人和拉丁人来当枪？
| m****n
发帖数: 2415 | 5 要上大学，还是进以学习为主的high school入学率更高吧。。哪有那么多的体育，音
乐社交的program啊。。而且搞体育，音乐的能成功的是少数，其他的话连找饭碗的工
作都难
【在 s******t 的大作中提到】
: 这些非裔和西裔有病， 你们既然不擅长学习， 而擅长体育或者音乐或者社交，
: 那就不要去挤以学习为主的elite high school. 你们可以去挤那些以体育为主，
: 以音乐为主， 以社交为主的elite high school. 这些civil rights group
: 都有很基础的逻辑flaw.
|
|
