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The New White Flight
One of our local school districts made the front page of the New York Times this past weekend, in a story titled District Eases Pressure on Students, Baring an Ethnic Divide. In a nutshell, the West Windsor-Plainsboro (WW-P) school district is implementing policies such as eliminating mid-terms and finals at the high school level, and making it easier for students to earn a seat in the district’s orchestra program. These measures are being taken in response to concerns by school counselors and parents that the district’s hyper-competitive academic program is putting students at risk for anxiety and depression.
I should qualify that last sentence. It’s not all parents that are concerned. Predominantly, it’s the white ones. WW-P, as it’s known, is about 65% Asian and growing. As the Times article points out, most WW-P Asian parents are just fine with the current level of rigor.
I was aware of the issue because the WW-P district is close to ours. Plus, my husband occasionally works co-counsel with an Indian-American attorney with kids enrolled in WW-P. He reported that whites are exiting the district in droves because it’s just “too competitive.”
White liberals fleeing because of demographics (and I’m assuming they’re liberal because this is New Jersey, after all)? Whatever happened to “celebrate diversity”?
All kidding aside, I think efforts like eliminating mid-terms/finals and letting the “squeakers” play in the orchestra are both wrong-headed and futile. “The district” isn’t demanding any kids get straight A’s. “The district” isn’t demanding any kids take a full load of AP courses, plus summer classes at the community college. Parents are doing that, and lowering the bar isn’t going to make them push their kids any less harder to succeed. Besides, shouldn’t high schoolers take mid-terms and finals to prep them for college And shouldn’t the orchestra seat go to the kid who takes private music lessons and practices three hours a night? (as opposed to my kid, who quickly tired of practicing and managed to make the flute sound like a dying squirrel?)
This isn’t to say the school district doesn’t have a point. The school counselors noted an uptick in student referrals for mental health evaluations, student surveys show a high degree of stress (especially at the high school level), and no one wants a repeat of the teen suicides that occurred in Palo Alto, California and Newton, Massachussets.
Still, I think WW-P is taking a clumsy, top-down approach to issues that are rooted in family and culture. These are also issues without a one-size-fits-all solution. A lot of Asian immigrants are moving to our own school district. My son and daughter have become friends with first-generation Chinese kids whose parents set extremely high standards. After school, it’s straight to Kumon Learning Center and then the cello before hitting the books. Some of them are by all accounts happy, well-adjusted and thriving; others burst into tears if they get anything less than a 90 on a test. It all depends on the kid.
My suspicion is that WW-P is motivated by blowback from parents, angry to learn that their child didn’t make the cut for the gifted-and-talented program or “Mathletes.” But what’s the school supposed to do? In a district full of academic and insanely hard-working kids, them’s the breaks. Either the school lowers its standards… or you’d better get moving.
Published in General
One could make an argument that the problem actually began in the 30’s with the gradual destruction of phonics-based reading in favor of the look-see method, and the rise of teachers colleges where teaching method was substituted for substantive teaching. Academic performance declined, but instead of addressing the problem, schools shifted to producing so-called “well rounded,” i.e., not-so-smart students. Many families moved to suburbs in which schools were in fact more competitive and their faculties better trained, but the dominant educational ethos continues to do its damage.
I wonder, too, how many of the white families in WW-P are broken, and how many of the mothers are in demanding, full-time professions. Shepherding children is a big job.
Immigrant children, eh? Imported to fill what need of the existing American population – that our own children are lazy or are being raised poorly? Well, thanks, Overlords.
Perhaps those middle-class whites in West Windsor-Plainsboro will get all “xenophobic” and “nativist” when they realize that multi-culturalism and immigration won’t only displace landscapers and union construction workers; it will also displace their own children from the colleges and careers that the society those whites’ parents and grandparents created for them to inherit.
And remember, those new Asian-Americans vote overwhelmingly for the party everybody reading this post detests.
And we criticize the kids for being lazy and the parents for being wrong-headed!
This is an interesting discussion.
I spent the summer working on a manuscript on education reform in China. The book was written by a Chinese government official who was actively engaged in education reform over those years, Zhu Yongxin, and it covered the last fifty years of efforts made to improve education in China.
The Chinese and all other Asian countries discussed in the book such as South Korea and Japan have all the same problems within their education systems that we have, and their achievement curves look just like ours–some students at the bottom, some in the middle, some at the top. There is nothing innately superior about Asian students to students in other countries.
The success of Asian students in the United States mirrors the success of Asian students in Asian countries. They succeed because they are highly motivated to do so. In China, for example, the number 1 ambition among their top students is to attend a top American university. That is most likely true of Asian students in the United States as well. Such ambitions are powerful incentives for learning.
The Asian student success story is about culture and motivation, not genius genes.
And to make another point:
If I were running a school, and I have thought this for a long time, even while my own kids were in school, I would depersonalize the entire testing and grading process. As some testing and measuring experts have said, education is sequential and the progress should be thought of as marked out on a 12-inch ruler. You have to got to pass the first inch before you are ready to go to the second inch.
The education goals are the high-stakes standardized tests the kids are facing. It is not personal. The rigor of the curriculum is tied to the rigor of the tests at the end of the road. If kids and their parents want to pass those tests and do well on them, then they have to master the content.
That said, if too many kids are having trouble in a particular class, I’d look at the teacher and/or the textbook.
One year, the kids in my daughter’s English class were complaining about how hard the class was. Three weeks after school began, I went to the parents’ open house, and this particular English teacher was rambling so dreadfully in his presentation to the parents that I couldn’t even take notes. I was very irritated with how poorly prepared for class he was. His lack of preparation would make it hard for kids to learn.
So maybe the kids are right. It is too hard.