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Essentially asians in general keep their kids out of sports, from dating, and from working. The extra time goes into studying.
While they may keep them from those specific activities, many have their kids do alternative extra curriculars (e.g. play a musical instrument), so it's not just all about study study study.
you get people like my ex-boyfriend, whose mom took "tiger mom" to another level, who attended cram schools in Japan, and ended up being very imbalanced in just about every other aspect.
in addition to book knowledge, i want my daughter to have real life knowledge and experience, as I have. So yes, she will be getting a job.
again, chicken and egg. I'm pretty certain that the wealthier Black and Hispanic kids do well on standardized tests, and I'm almost 100% certain that their parents are heavily invested in their kids' education. And sorry, other than NYC, there are few poor Asians. It's not the same as blacks and hispanics in the ghettos because many Asians don't live in ghettos unless they're maybe first generation and even then they pool their resources so that they move to an area that's at least lower middle class.
BTW, in my middle school in NYC, Blacks and Hispanics comprised 50% of the student body. The school was still acclaimed and performed well on standardized tests. A quarter of the students in the gifted classes were Black. And you want to know why? because the development that fed into the school was comprised of solidly middle classed people - the transit workers, the cops, the teachers. Back then, whether you were Black, Puerto Rican, Dominican, whatever, you had the strong family and community.
Conversely, I attended a "school within a school" similar to LASA for grades 9-12. That was a real eye opener regarding income. The student body of the main campus was overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic, but the difference was those kids mostly came from public housing throughout the city. Not surprisingly, there was gang violence, teen pregnancy, low graduation rate, etc.
So we have two groups, same races, different income levels. The school itself didn't encourage the kids or give them much opportunity and teachers passed kids just to get them out of their classrooms.
Money provides opportunity, and there also tends to be higher expectation when it comes to performance. You're saying that people shouldn't use income, etc. as a cop out because that dissuades people from working hard, and I can agree with that. But I've also witnessed the struggles that those who are lower income have to overcome.
Well said, although the bold isn't really true. There are huge populations on the west coast that are 3rd+ generation and live in the hood, particularly when you look at Cambodian, Laos, Hmong and Viet populations. Texas has a bit of a different dynamic, and the Tiger Parent thing is very real...
This is something I think about a lot, in part because of my job, and in part because it's such a thorny issue that is difficult to even describe, much less talk about effectively in public. A bit of a longer answer to your question that tries to dodge a simple explanation without being impenetrable.
My perspective:
- 10 years working in the New York school reform sector, particularly with the organization responsible for some of the best test scores in the State with some of the poorest and/or "most diverse" demographics
- Some close friends who have worked in AISD district schools and also the local charter sector
My personal involvement is on the technology side, so I have nothing to do with making policy; but I work with people who do, so these are just my observations from trying to puzzle through why urban districts have some of the same problems around the country, even when you subtract some of the regular (and worthy) villains like teachers' unions.
This problem is usually explained away as a money or "parental involvement" issue, which is one of the reasons that diversity became such a worthy goal decades ago: it's a reasonable assumption, after all, that if parental involvement and resources are a tide that lift all boats, then part of the mission should be to spread that tide around, even if it means constituting our entire district policy around that notion.
Before I had any involvement in education policy, I would have found this to be a plausible idea, because it explains the "heat map" of income vs. educational performance that you can see replicated over and over. The trouble is that it's been the same heat map for nearly forty years, and the needle has only been moved in a couple places and for a couple reasons. The conclusions I draw are of the "least bad best guess" variety and not the "I'm married to the following dogma" variety, so by all means, take with a grain of salt.
Take your typical classroom of around 20-25 kids and apply an average distribution: every teacher knows you've got some number of stars, some number of problems, and then the rest of the bell curve between those things. Note that I'm talking here specifically about classroom management and not academic performance, though obviously those things are correlated: but my interest is in the kernel of what makes for a good or bad classroom, and by extension, a good or bad school. There are obviously a lot more inputs to 'a good school' than just classroom management, but I'm looking at things that can reasonably predict success, based on firsthand evidence of witnessing exactly that in places where you would not expect to find it based on the socioeconomic level of the neighborhood. Another disclaimer: there are, just as obviously, more ways than measuring the success of a school or a school system than test scores, but we're talking about the district level, here, and not the individual, parenting level of 'is this school right for my kids.'
In a typical, district school, the template for failure is the school system's inability to deal appropriately with the handful of children that prevent the classroom environment from succeeding. The genesis of this issue is where you can find truth in the correlation to poverty: a home life with two active, involved, and married parents is a huge predictor of success, more than any other demographic indicator. If the 20-25 family lives backstopping your classroom have a higher proportion involved, married parents, numerous problems have been solved before the doors to the school even open. Essentially, any idiot could do an OK job educating a kid in Eanes, because the kids have demands placed upon them by an authority much higher than a school system, even without veering into the 'tiger mom' sector. Of course, Eanes isn't going to hire any idiot, and these are plum teaching jobs (assuming you can handle all the helicopters) but the point is that the primary function of an Eanes School District is to take 'good' and make it 'great' rather than taking 'needs help' and making it good or great.
By far the most interesting revelation in my experience has been that this sort of family isn't actually necessary for the success of the child or the school system. It's not a question of taking those families and sprinkling them around the district (and the moral imperative judgments that go along with well-to-do families' refusal to do just that, thereby "skimming the cream" out of the public district entirely). It's a question of giving all families the equipment they need to succeed, and accepting the school district's role not only in doing so, but in drawing a line beyond which the district takes the politically impossible position of "if you cannot do this, not only will you not succeed, but you will prevent others from succeeding, and therefore you cannot be in this classroom." That's the land mine of public education, both because it's a tough question (and line) to address in any classroom, public or private, and because all it takes is one parent, the news media, and a couple attorneys to dominate a conversation and tie up resources over litigating these disputes (whether in actual litigation or just the press).
A case in point is Crockett High School in Austin, though I really don't mean to pick on them for any reason other than that it serves as a convenient example: several years ago, they had a real problem with kids playing on their phones in class. They kind-of, sort-of instituted a policy that you could not use your phone for any reason during class, but they didn't empower their teachers to actually confiscate them. They said they did, but the first time a parent challenged them over the predictable "I need to be able to reach my baby 24/7" (...in high school...) the administration folded, because public school districts have every incentive to fold under such pressure and no incentive to insist that the line, wherever it was drawn, cannot be crossed. The result was an arbitrary mish-mash of enforcement where some teachers could get away with confiscating phones if they jumped through a lot of hoops and others just wrote it off and tried their best to work around it. The kids, of course, see this and realize that rules aren't really rules and that the system can be easily exploited.
There are two really unfortunate take-aways: one, that it's a small minority of kids who both cause this problem and make solutions so difficult. Crockett is not one of the worst high schools in Austin by a long shot. Most of the kids there, given the right environment, would learn as well as kids anywhere else. But the District won't go to bat over these issues, because there are a lot of them, and because fighting them requires an iron will and a willingness to temporarily look bad in the press (which Success in NYC certainly does, at least a couple times a year).
Two, that the teachers themselves see the district's answer to such issues as fundamentally bureaucratic and "check out" -- not in a critical, "you're a bad teacher" way, but in a "if I am punished for trying to do what's best in this situation, I'm going to play by the rules and nothing more or less than the rules" sense that any one of us would likely do in the same position. Your typical Austin District teacher is older, more experienced, and better educated (in terms of graduate degrees) than your typical Success Academy teacher in the Bronx or Harlem. But they will get better results, by far, and it's not because the Austin teacher is in any sense inferior. Quite the opposite. But the Success teacher has the support of a system that is going to minimize distractions. Your typical Eanes School District simply has fewer such kids, and if those problems do arise, the District doesn't have to fight the battle because it knows the community will. A government entity is fundamentally unsuited to challenging a community, even when they're working to improve it. You can see this in how AISD approaches school closures and the recent blow-ups about this in East Austin. They kick the can down the road for as long as possible, and then they announce fifty things at once, hoping to "roll up" the 'bad news' (the 'good school' you were zoned to is now a 'not-so-good' school, but if you make that observation you'll be labeled a racist) with a lot of supposedly good news (new academic programs). The reality is that not even a school district can ignore market changes forever, and schools have to change and evolve over time; but districts are terrible at keeping up with the market for the same reason that they're terrible at enforcing rules: because they serve the electorate and are vulnerable to political pressure. Private schools and charters are not immune to these things, but the penalty for failure when you're private or a charter is that you cease to exist and get replaced with a new entity, whereas there are schools in NYC that are failing just as horribly today as they were in 1970, and the NYC DOE isn't doing anything about it besides throwing money away.
So how does an institution like Success get results that good with a less experienced set of teachers and a higher burnout rate? They cultivate parents early on. You have to start in their system by the third grade, or you pretty much aren't getting in, because their position is that they really want to begin the relationship with the family in Kindergarten. They want to give parents reading logs and call them at night to ask whether the homework is done. To some, this is overbearing and condescending. But the results don't lie. These people want their kids to succeed and when you engage them correctly, you get many more kids who do and far fewer "problem kids" on your distribution curve that have to be dealt with by a clumsy system when the child is 13 or 14.
You can make the criticism that people are left behind with this approach, and that is undoubtedly true. It's a lot fewer people than are left behind by one of the few great quotes of GW Bush, the soft bigotry of low expectations. It transforms kids and it transforms the school system. It's tough and there are a lot of stumbles, but they're head-on stumbles with a lot of critical reflection and iteration. It's not a panacea and what works in Harlem isn't going to translate completely to Austin, but the fundamentals are very similar. The parents see that expectations are crystal clear up front. You do have to allow for some school choice here, because part of being crystal clear is that you've got to have an escape valve for parents whose needs don't align with those expectations; but if your school system can create a good classroom environment and really support its teachers when the fires inevitably erupt, you can get Eanes-level results from most kids, most of the time. Part of any system design is an acknowledgment that it will fail in certain edge cases, and even if the number of edge cases is 3, 4, or 5 percent, that's still a lot of kids. But much better to do right by 90-95% and then solve that problem than tire yourself out with symbolic gestures toward those 5 percent while failing to educate most everybody -- which is the average result of your typical urban school district.
Well said, although the bold isn't really true. There are huge populations on the west coast that are 3rd+ generation and live in the hood, particularly when you look at Cambodian, Laos, Hmong and Viet populations. Texas has a bit of a different dynamic, and the Tiger Parent thing is very real...
Yes, you're right I forgot. Further proof of the income correlation.
Those southeast asian communities are plagued with the same issues as lower income blacks and hispanics, if not more so:
And Austin97 I dated a Japanese man for four years so I’m very familiar with the Asian attitude when it comes to education.
This is offensive and I don't think you intended it to be. It would be better if you said I know a Japanese man and you've gleaned a perspective based on that relationship. There is know way you know how all Asians feel about education based on that one relationship.
Moving on from that, I find this thread really interesting. I'm a current NYC public school parent. My school aged kids attend very diverse (racially, ethnically, and economically) high performing schools and we are hoping for the same when we move to Texas next summer. We haven't decided on Dallas or Austin (we have opportunities in both cities) but have begun our research into school options. Eanes is on our radar but seems to fall short in the categories of racial and economic diversity. I know NYC is unique in many respects so perhaps we won't find what we're exactly what we are looking for.
If any of you are interested in topics such as the opportunity gap and why schools fail more broadly, I know NPR's On Point did an episode on the topic recently and they also did an episode on one of their other shows sometime last winter. Spoiler alert: it usually comes down to socioeconomics. However, groups with strong extended familial ties out perform despite their lower socioeconomic status.
And I also want to add about my high school, my mom was absolutely floored when she attended her first school-wide PTA meeting and discovered that she was one of a handful of people who shown up. This was out of a student body of hundreds.
Probably because there were a large number of parents on social services or barely making ends meet and didn't or couldn't spend the extra time to attend a weeknight meeting. Few if any kids took the PSAT. There were two types of diplomas awarded in NY - a regular diploma that was conferred after passing the basic standard exams and the regent's diploma, which was conferred after passing college ready exams. The only kids who received regents diplomas came from my division. Getting the other kids to pass the regular classes was a challenge. Eventually the school was shut down and carved up into charters, with middling results.
Unlike my middle school where there was a very active and vocal PTA. Teachers didn't give out 65s like they were candy. And it was expected that you'd pursue higher education. And the kids came from close, cohesive environments. People were married, though I came from a divorced household. I was an outlier. My high school, with the exception of my division, didn't prepare the kids for college and was mainly a trade school but even that was a fail because the kids didn't even want to learn a trade.
So yes, money is the primary gear in the engine. In addition to the realization of living check to check, there is a distinct poverty mentality found here in America. This mentality is multi-generation. Like homelessness, grand poobahs have been trying to figure out ways to address the problem but have very mixed results. Meanwhile, people just decide to move (to a area with higher h/h income) to improve their kid(s) chances.
Money is correlated with the outcome but it is not responsible for the outcome, or else we wouldn't have 40+ schools in NYC teaching some of the worst-off kids in the country and getting better results than district schools in Scarsdale.
Money is correlated with the outcome but it is not responsible for the outcome, or else we wouldn't have 40+ schools in NYC teaching some of the worst-off kids in the country and getting better results than district schools in Scarsdale.
You can also look at international statistics of achievement and see the same thing. Asians are much poorer in terms of buying power, but rank much higher. Family culture can make up for socioeconomic situations as the graph I posted shows. Someone said, but asians make more money. The graph clearly shows for a given income level asians score higher than their white and other minority peers. The poorest asians score about the same as whites with double or triple the income.
I agree that the culture of the school, if it replicates the key aspects of those cultural traits, could be just as effective.
For an individual family trying to achieve success is it easier to
1) as a family make education a top priority over everything else (e.g. 13 hours/week of studying, averaging in the summer as well)
2) change the school to have a culture of education
3) change the other students to not disrupt students that are trying
4) as a family increase their socioeconomic standing
5) eliminate racism
For the vast majority of people #1 is the only thing they have control over. If they do #1 their kids can be as successful as kids from much wealthier families.
If you believe that socioeconomic status is the primary lever, then poor minority students have no hope.
I believe otherwise and believe the data supports my view.
Money is correlated with the outcome but it is not responsible for the outcome, or else we wouldn't have 40+ schools in NYC teaching some of the worst-off kids in the country and getting better results than district schools in Scarsdale.
I'm familiar with the magnet/charter schools you speak of. But let's face it, they are sadly outliers vs. the average schools in America that serve underclassed communities. It may in fact be some of the school's fault (as shown by the performance of these magnets), I'll give one that, but it's a whole lot more. The topic at hand is what makes Eanes as a district better and money, be it schools themselves or the communities that feed into them, which in turn brings about more opportunity, more involvement, higher expectations, etc., still remains IMO the reason.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Austin97
You can also look at international statistics of achievement and see the same thing. Asians are much poorer in terms of buying power, but rank much higher. Family culture can make up for socioeconomic situations as the graph I posted shows. Someone said, but asians make more money. The graph clearly shows for a given income level asians score higher than their white and other minority peers. The poorest asians score about the same as whites with double or triple the income.
I agree that the culture of the school, if it replicates the key aspects of those cultural traits, could be just as effective.
For an individual family trying to achieve success is it easier to
1) as a family make education a top priority over everything else (e.g. 13 hours/week of studying, averaging in the summer as well)
2) change the school to have a culture of education
3) change the other students to not disrupt students that are trying
4) as a family increase their socioeconomic standing
5) eliminate racism
For the vast majority of people #1 is the only thing they have control over. If they do #1 their kids can be as successful as kids from much wealthier families.
If you believe that socioeconomic status is the primary lever, then poor minority students have no hope.
I believe otherwise and believe the data supports my view.
These poorest performing Asians that you mention are obviously not Southeast Asian.
No one is saying that people who are lower income are doomed but the struggle is real. Economically disadvantaged kids have additional struggles beyond academic ones. Without a support system somewhere some place, even kids who want to achieve are knocked back down. Additionally NYC is different from texas, income levels tend to be mixed.
Additionally NYC is different from texas, income levels tend to be mixed.
Forgive me, but you aren't familiar with the charter schools I'm speaking of, because that's not the case. This is addressed in the very first paragraph of the linked article:
Quote:
Across the network, 76% of students are from low-income households; 8.5% are current and former English Language Learners, and 15% are current and former special needs students. About 93% of students are children of color.
They're outliers because it's taken a monumental force of will to open them and keep them open when doing so cedes power from the district, which will complain about declining enrollment as people desert traditional district schools in favor of better options. You've heard the same charge here, and most charters in Austin, while outperforming their corresponding district schools, aren't on the level of Success in NYC. The reason for that is because they are still answerable to the political climate, and charters aren't super popular in Texas -- sometimes for good reason, because it's not the charter system itself that is necessarily the solution, but rather how it was applied in NYC. And even then, that's a solution for dense, urban districts with a demographic similar to theirs - it's not necessarily a solution for a rural, tiny Texas town.
The point is that we've been having this conversation for nearly forty years and we know what won't work, but we keep doubling down on it because doing so lets us make a lot of symbolic gestures to the underserved: more money, more technology, more whatever, but never a solid system of expectations that is backed up by everyone from the assistant teacher to the Superintendent. It is only a resource question inasmuch as the school system needs to look at what their kids are bringing to the table and adapt accordingly. You can't count on overachieving parents in Bed Stuy any more than you can in Southeast Austin. So the system has to make up the difference.
In Austin, as in most of the country, we can't even talk about what the difference is because we haven't got the political spine to insist that the district has to 'make up for' anything.
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