Jean Anyon's What "Counts" as Educational Policy? Notes toward a New Paradigm serves as a neat bookend to the main foci of this course: socioeconomic systems, the students marginalized by these systems, how to best improve the educational and vocational outcomes of these students, families, and communities. Beginning with a critical look at historical attempts to improve urban educational outcomes, Anyon ties the almost century-long list of inadequate educational policies to ineffective macropolicies that ultimately failed to address the root cause of low achievement in urban schools, poverty.
What is interesting is the persistent relationship public k-12 education shares with the private business sector in regards to the demand on curricula creation. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, the Gary Plan, and A Nation at Risk all express concern for public education's ability to prepare students for employment (based on socioeconomic status, of course).(67-68) Indeed, the Gary Plan significantly business driven, influenced just as strongly by the scientific management movement as it was by Dewey. Scientific management was an early 20th century movement designed to increase efficiency in manufacturing through the increased separation of worker roles and duties, and incentivized wages.(Theide, 2013) These policies continue to trouble me. It is clear that education is a requirement to employment, yet the idea of educational policies tailored to the economic demands for human capital strike me as an obscene context for improvement. The relationship between business and education appears to benefit businesses more than the people in the communties served by schools. As we also learned in last week's readings(Buras, Spring), Anyon discusses the attempts at the privatization of public schools under the guise of school choice, through the implimentation of charter schools and vouchers.(68) However, school improvement projects resulting from federal and state mandates still struggle to provide the intended outcome. And that's because you can throw money at a problem and hope to solve it, you have to actually address the circumstances that created and foster the problem. Yet a number of factors must be addressed in order to create a viable solution with long-term success. The concentration of poverty in urban areas was compounded by white flight to the suburbs in the Post-War era, and reinforced by redlining of real estate. Inadequate public transportation fails potential employees from finding employment at the businesses that also migrated to the suburbs. Finally, zoning laws and NIMBYism prevents the construction of low-income, affordable housing that urban families might move to. And so at the publication of this article, the percentage of people living in poverty are close to the highest historical amount ever, "before massive urban poverty became a national issue."(72-73). Which is not to say that massive urban poverty didn't exist before then, it absolutely did. It just wasn't considered a pressing concern.
Socioeconomic Gradients Predict Individual Differences in Neurocognitive Abilities
Anyon provides ample evidence of longitudinal data from numerous research studies that essentially suggest the same thing: equitable resources would improve the lives of students and families living in poverty. This is critical, because poverty has deleterious effects on the neurocognitive development of the brain, especially during childhood. Poverty robs people of their potential. To take it a step further, the gatekeeping of effective educationthrough spatial politics and socioeconomic status robs humanity of potential. NPR addressed the issue of education and place in it's recent Hidden Brain podcast Zipcode Destiny-The Persistent Power of Place and Education. According to Lee and Burkham (2002), disadvantaged children not only enter kindergrten with significantly lower cognitive skills compared to advantaged peers, but also enter lower quality school systems. (76) Should families receive support to move as they sought to access higher quality public education, their children were disproportionately placed into special education classrooms, a problem discussed in Leonardo and Broderick.(2011)
So we can can see that social inequalities are continually being reinforced by the systems meant to foster economic prosperity. What can be done?Anyon offers an approach that I consider to be reminiscent of Boggs (2011), by addressing the needs of the community. Evidence of several long-term research studies indicate that addressing the needs of the student and their family in a holistic manner through access to wraparound social services, childcare, coaching, and supplemental income greatly improved the educational, financial, and mental health outcomes of the participating families. Mothers reported lower rates of depression and stress, students had fewer behavioral difficulties, and higher levels of achievement on standardized testing. Anyon argues that public policies committed to the development of economic opportunities in urban areas combined with access to comprehensive social services will organically result in tangible improvements in the education outcomes of students in urban educational districts, and offers substantial evidence in support of their argument. The government has historically thrown money at plenty of failed educational policies that addressed the symptoms of poverty, perhaps it's time it funds a series of policies shown to have successful outcomes. Works Cited
3.“Socioeconomic Gradients Predict Individual Differences in Neurocognitive Abilities,” by Kimberly G. Noble et al., in Developmental Science, Vol. 10, No. 4; July 2007. Credit: Amanda Montañez
Chapter 8 of American Education by Joel Spring, titled “Local Control, Choice, Charter Schools, and Homeschooling,” asks deeply important questions regarding the control and dissemination of education in American society,addresses the numerous stakeholders whose perspectives must be considered when creating curricula across the country, and includes the "goal" of "developing human capital to ensure the United States remains competitive in the global economy," (219) a concept I been struggling with since I entered the education program and work with primarily first-generation college students. In it's focus on charter schools, this chapter also provides a top-notch, diplomatic outline of all the reasons I don't support charter schools. Yo, this chapter has everthing: Race, class, gender, religion, spatial concerns, they're in here! It should come as no surprise to my classmates that I am vehemently against charter schools, which I consider an extension of conservative attempts to control the morality of future citizens, break unions, commodify, and corporatize education.
Deeply influenced by free-market economist Milton Friedman, conservatives have turned to using the language of "school choice" as they fund parochial, private, and charter school options to eliminate monopoly public schools held on education. Free-market supporters argue that schools are like any other product in a marketplace, and competition will creat improvement through competition. I disagree, in that I believe that education is a public good, and should not commodified, nor subject to the whims of the market. (This is the part where I disclose that I'm fully #TeamKeynes.)The 2016 Republican platform called for school choice and financing for home schooling, private/parochial schools, charter, magnet, and online schools, career technical education and early-college high schools.
However it is important to consider whether these options provide union support or professional development, and whether they are non-profit or for-profit companies. What is the target student demographic? What are the enrollment requirements, or student code of behavior? And since taxes follow students to their schools, who will be left behind in the public schools? Will these school choice alternatives essentially defund public schools, leaving behind poor student who lost the enrollment lottery, students with behavioral issues, and the special education population? Following No Child Left Behind, the Unsafe Schools Options allowed parents to transfer students to a different school, with the caveat that the transfer school may not be a failing school. For families living in failing districts, this reduces their options drastically. If the only option becomes enrollment in charter schools, it reads like the government is directly targeting poverty-stricken school districts unable to provide support services for lack of funding and aligning themselves with corporate ed groups, to the detriment of public education.
School choice vouchers for parochial schools leads to the question of whether the government should fund religious education, which I also oppose. Many parents are concerned about the religio-moral education of their children, but that's literally the responsibility of the parents and their church. Removing dollars from public schools to fund private, religious education is incredibly problematic. Not the least because it silos the student from learning about the potential plurality of diversity in their surroundings. Although the Supreme Court allowed that Ohio Project (1983) did not infringe any amendments in that the basis of the law was secular, and avoided "entanglement" between government and religion. The fact that the majority of vouchers went to parochial schools because there were no public options available to urban parents reminds us of the segregation and gatekeeping measures in place by suburban schools to provide an academic and professional edge to suburban students to the detriment of their urban neighbors.
The injection of neo-liberal capitalism economics into public goods such as public education has resulted in a muddy mess of American capitalism, class advantage, segregation, and religion that ultimately only benefits corporate stakeholders, politicians, and families with enough capital to provide a rigorous education to their children, and only serves to further widen the inequality gap in the United States.
We had some truly great reading this week that have incorporated some great concepts within them. In Preparing Culturally Responsive Teachers, Villegas and Lucas declare that "teacher
educators must first articulate a vision of teaching and learning within the
diverse society we have become...then
use that vision to systematically guide the infusion of multi-cultural issues
throughout the teacher education curriculum" to move beyond the current fragmentary method of addressing student diversity as a strength. To achieve this goal, Villegas and Lucas offer what they call a "Curriculum Proposal for Preparing Culturally Responsive Teachers," predicated on six separate strands designed to be interwoven into a comprehensive teacher education (Villegas & Lucas, 2002, p21). These strands include sociocultural consciousness, an affirmative attitude toward students from culturally diverse backgrounds, commitment and skills to act as agents of change, constructivist views of learning, learning about students, and culturally responsive teaching practices. I enjoyed reading this article, recognizing similarities to how I approach student support services for a diverse student populations in higher education as a graduate assistant. The program I work with was created by and is primarily staffed with social workers and graduate students working on their Masters in Social Work. Almost all of the strands Villegas and Lucas have similar counterparts in social work and echo the National Association of Social Worker's Code of Ethics, most especially sociocultural consciousness, the commitment to act as agents of change, and affirmative attitudes towards students from culturally diverse backgrounds. Similarly, Dr. Shawn Ginwright's article discussing the unintended effects of trauma-informed education is also steeped in a very social-work informed background. "The term “trauma informed care” didn’t encompass the totality of his experience and focused only on his harm, injury and trauma." This sentence perfectly encapsulates the potential negative outcome of a methodology intended to support and promote resiliency but instead reduces an individual to their trauma. Ginwright points out the value of a more holistic approach to working with students who have experienced trauma at both an individual and collective level, stating the importance of the healing centered approach. The example questions of "What's happened to you?" vs "What's right with you?" could easily be questions that any social worker with a focus on healing could (and probably would) use with a client. Healing centered engagement is inherently political, much like education and social work. Healing, like many aspects of social work, highlights the intersectional nature of identity and offers an opportunity at collective healing, embracing race, class, gender, culture, age, etc., whereas trauma-informed education is focused primarily on the individual. The two previous articles complimented each other very well, and provide a good background to the final article, Community as Text: Using the Community as a Resource for Learning in Community Schools (Blank, Johnson, Shah, 2003). This article again recalls the grand concepts of Grace Boggs for schools to be inextricably tied to the communities in which they are based, and provides several methods to successfully integrate community learning into the school curriculum, while engaging culturally diverse groups of students. The success of the students in these community schools is in part due to the engagement of teachers who were culturally responsive to their students. Likewise, the community schools offered complement of health and social services for the students, providing holistic student support as opposed to only offering academic services. And as with the healing centered appoach, the collective engagement between educators, families, and students fostered a true sense of collaboration and community.
Works Cited
Villegas, A. M., & Lucas, T. (2002). Preparing Culturally Responsive Teachers: Rethinking the Curriculum. Journal of Teacher Education,53(20), 20-32. doi:10.1177/0022487102053001003 Ginwright, S. (2018). The Future of Healing: Shifting From Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@ginwright/the-future-of-healing-shifting-from-trauma-informed-care-to-healing-centered-engagement-634f557ce69c Blank, M. J., Johnson, S. D., & Shah, B. P. (2003). Community as text: Using the community as a resource for learning in community schools. New Directions For Youth Development, 97,107-120.
Monday, October 29, 2018
The documentary "Precious Knowledge," by Ari Palos and Eren Isabel McGinnis, focuses on a small group of Mexican-American students and treachers in the Tuscon Public School District of Arizona and the curriculum of the ethnic studies program (Raza) they are enrolled in, and attempts by white lawmakers to eliminate the program.
The most recent US Census (2010) lists the Hispanic population of Tuscon Arizona at just over 42%, almost three times the national average. Yet according to the documentary, the traditional high school curriculum did not provide more inclusive educational opportunities. And similar to what we read in Rios and Galicia Smoking guns or smoke & mirrors? (2013), Mexican-American students in Tuscon High School felt as if they were being pushed out of school, even though they wanted to be there and knew how important it was to finish their education. In fact, one teacher stated that close to half of all Hispanic students had dropped out of school. To reach the Mexican-American students in their school district, Tuscon High School established an ethnic studies program with typical courses such as writing, history, and math, using concepts and examples steeped in the traditional ethnic culture of Mexico. Enrollment in the Raza program proved to be a gamechanger for the students involved. Participants felt connected to and proud of their heritage, and empowered to take control of their education. Students in the documentary can be heard making statements such statements as, "I hate when I can't be here," and "I want to go to school now!" Recalling the writings of Grace Boggs, a community-centered vision inspired the educators and administrators to make critical changes in favor of the student population. These changes offered tangible evidence of success, too. Test scores of students enrolled in Raza courses were higher than students not enrolled, additionally ethnic studies studies enjoyed a 93% graduation rate. Unfortunately, not everyone in Arizona supported the Raza program, most notably Superintendent of Schools Tom Horne, and Senator John Huppenthal, both older, white men of professional status. Horne's arguments were fringe-based racial fears that hinged on the concept of "ReConquista," in which Mexicans would rise up and re-conquer the land that had been taken from them by the United States. Horne argued that because the curriculum was based on the writings of Marx and Guevara it was anti-American and Communist, and the Raza focus on Mexican culture was ultimately racist. Yet he couldn't understand the ultimate irony of an educated, middle-class white man representing the pinnacle of the public eduational authority suppressing an educational curriculum based on and about the local marginized population of students, even though it had proved to increase attendance, retention, and graduation of that marginalized student population. Likewise, Sen. Huppenthal also exhibited incredible tunnel-vision that focused almost soley on the fact that one book in the entire curriculum, Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was Marxist in nature. In fact, Pedagogy argues for a transformative education, similar to Dewey, but based on a critical framework. Huppenthal agrees to attend one of the Raza classes, yet afterward stated that although the students were intelligent, articulate, polite, and engaged in the class, that it was most likely staged for his benefit. It feels as if Huppenthal entered the classroom with his mind already made up. Both men argued that America is great, provides opportunities for everyone, and that all citizens are equal. But if that were true, why would even high school students recognize the fallacy in that statement?
It is impossible for just one history or literature course to cover everything about the United States in depth. Most curriculums offer little mention of Hispanic/Latinx, or other races and ethnicities, in their course content. Thus, ethnic studies courses allow students to discover diverse experiences of different ethnic groups within the United States, and basic knowledge that all citizens can use. Perhaps if Horne and Huppenthal had the opportunity to learn from ethnic studies courses, they would not have been so blind to the concerns of the Raza students. Precious Knowledge showed us that students found education to be more rewarding and relevant once they were allowed to engage with materials related to their personal sense of cultural and racial identity. Ethnic studies provide support and a fundamental knowledge about the histories, experiences, and artistic expressions of groups that are not often discussed, and ultimately benefit all students, not just "ethnic" students.
Monday, October 22, 2018
Educational Equity, Discipline, and the School to Prison Pipeline
This weeks readings Messy, Butch, and Queer: LGBTQ Youth and the School-to-Prison
Pipeline (Snapp, Hoenig, Fields, and Russell, 2015) and Smoking Guns or Smoke & Mirrors?: Schools and the Policing of Latino Boys (Rios, Galicia, 2013) both focus on issues of equity and discipline among students of marginalized populations, LGBTQ and Latino students respectively.
In Messy, Butch, and Queer, Snapp and colleagues interviewed LGBTQ-identifying students, adult advocates, and one straight ally, primarily choosing to interview participants who identified as minorities to capture intersecting identities. Through interviews, the researchers discovered that students who exhibited gender or sexuality identity outside the norm faced discrimination not only from students, but faculty and administrators as well. Students reported selective enfocement of PDA (public display of affection) among same-sex students, in comparison to the larger percentage of opposite-sex students who engaged in acts of PDA in greater number and magnitude than the LGBTQ students. (p. 65)The youth in the article discussed several occasions in which they had experienced bullying from other students, but educators and administrators failed to support the reporting LGBTQ students by diminishing the acts against them, "It wasn't meant to be like that...you're ebing a princess." (p.64) And should LGBTQ students defend themselves or each other, they are maore likely to receive stiffer disciplinary action than the bullies. (p.69) Reading through the participant stories, I was filled with such anger that people who would consider themselves educators would treat students in this manner. It was, therefore, unsurprising to me to discover that students who identify as LGBTQ are at greater risk of being pushed out of their education and more likely to be incarcerated. Smoking Guns or Smoke and Mirrors usesthe critical framework of Anyon's social stratification reproduction and applies it to a post-manufacturing economy. Rios and Galicia examine the public education experiences of Latino youth living in zero-tolerance schools, in the school to prison pipeline. Apart from the participant interviews, the realest statement of the article stated
"Since schools have the power
to package, construct, label, and deem students as troublemakers and
offenders, they often become a launching pad from which young people are
catapulted into the criminal justice system. Schools have the power to determine
the life-course outcomes of marginalized young people." (p. 57)
The underlying issue Latino students expressed are implicit biases. Their teachers, educational administrators, and the police, have treated the participant students as though they have already done something wrong. Although the students haven't engaged in criminal actions, they are being disciplined by school officials at greater rates for minor infractions, and treated by police officers as if they have already transgressed the law. (p.59) I found the usage of threats by school administrators to report undocumented students to ICE, as well as eliminating students' ability to use the Boys and Girls Club after school reprehensible. These actions further contributed to the participants' forced removal from their community, and greatly incresed the risk that these students face incarceration. (p. 60)
This week's readings made me incredibly angry on behalf of the students. That feeling of marginalization experienced by students of color and LGBTQ students is something that educators should strive to educate non-marginalized students about in order to eliminate or reduce discriminative behaviors. In the case of discrimination by faculty or administrators, I strongly believe it is necessary that any laws supporting and protecting the students should be fully enforced, by litigation of necessary. However, under the current administration, I cannot imagine such litigation will make much of a difference. Moving forward, it might be the responsibility of the individual communities to support marginalized students, but what can those students do if their communities do not support them?
The acquisition of language in spoken or written form provides a fundamental connection to an individuals social world. This connection can sometimes be recognized through regional accents, dialects and languages. The readings this week focus on some of the languages and dialects spoken by students in American schools, other than Standard English.
In Lomawaima and McCarty's text When Tribal Sovereignty Challenges Democracy: American Indian Education and the Democratic Ideal, the authors establish an understanding of an educational framework based on diversity, democracy, and sovereignty based on the critical pedagogies of Friere and Giroux. As Lomawaima and McCarty so eloquently stated, "These words...are not simple abstractions or lexical tags. They carry whole domains of human experience...they are built of the backs of human lives, human stories, and personal, individual reality." (p. 284) In their examination of "the struggle between tribal aspirations and federal constraints on American Indian education," (p. 282) Lomawaima and McCarty begin with the colonization of Native American children through educational removals that placed them into boarding houses beginning in the late nineteenth century. Meant to "civilize" Native American children and assimilate them into an appropriate social status within the white-controlled world, education in the boarding school was highly racialized and forbade the usage of native languages and religion.Traditional Native crafts were acceptable, as they provided a form of vocational training that allowed for economic engagement. These examples support the authors' argument of the policy regarding American Indian education as a series of attempts by the federal government to support or suppress the various aspects of Native American life it considers safe vs those it considers dangerous.
THE AMERICAN INDIAN: GOVERNMENT EDUCATION
Lomawaima and McCarty move on the discuss the value of sovereignty in education, pointing to the success of Native American students enrolled in community-controlled schools. Students enrolled in bilingual education outscored those in English only curricula, and reported higher levels of confidence, pride, interest in learning, and retention. Perhaps more important than the testing outcomes of students is the survival of Native languages in the face of the historic atrocities by the federal government in its attempt to colonize or exterminate entire nations of indigenous people. The ability of Native Americans to retain their own languages allows them to retain the sovereignty of self-determination against the dominant culture.
Similarly, Alexandria Neason's article How Hawaiian Came Back From the Dead examines the resurgence of indigenous language in educational settings in post-colonial Hawaii, and the conflict that results from dual concerns for maintaining a traditionally marginalized culture while retaining the ability to benefit from engagement within the dominant cultural economy through the use of English language. The struggle of traditional language versus English language is shared through stories of parents Like Samuel, forbidding the native language when his son Herring Kekualike Kalua skipped schooling in English. The generational repercussions of this linguistic trauma are evident when we are introduced to his daughter Kamomi, who never learned the native language, and expresses regret when discussing her inability to fully experience the hula, "Without understanding the Hawaiian-language words and chants tied to it, dancing hula is like memorizing a song in a foreign language." That regret led to support of her daughter's desire to receive a Hawaiian language education that embraced all aspects of traditional Hawaiian culture, while simultaneously worrying about her daughter's economic future.
The final reading, What Should Teachers Do, written by Lisa Delpit, considers what the appropriate response to student usage of Ebonics in the classroom educators should express. Like the previous authors, Delpit underscores the importance of cultural identity tied to linguistics and the inherent oppression such cultural identity and language receives from the dominant majority, again with a recognition that deviation from the dominant dialect leads to negative economic outcomes. Delpit provides readers with the example of a valuable exercise used with her (presumably cultural majority) students that shows how second language acquisition creates obstacles to thought formulation and expression of thought, which allows future teachers to consider the perspective of their students. (p. 32) I think the most salient point of Delpit's article is that educators should not confuse new language acquisition with reading comprehension, perfectly summing this concept up, "...the teacher proceeding to correct the student's Ebonics-influenced pronunciations and grammar while ignoring the fact that the student had to have comprehended the sentence in order to translate it into her own language (emphasis added)." (p. 37)
Ultimately I believe there are several concepts to be extracted from these readings, starting with ideas of meaning-making. Words have meanings, and words have power. The usage of words informs how individuals perceive, and are perceived. We see through the readings, and historically, how the colonization of marginalized people is not just restricted to their bodies, but also their minds, intent on changing the very ways in which they think. How colonized people thought/think has/is influenced/controlled by the dominant/oppressive culture, by law or other less official methods. And as we have heard from the marginalized people themselves, an ability to express through their linguistic preference affords them agency and self-determination, a more true meaning of what that individual is trying to express.
Hank Willis Thomas’s 2013 sculpture “Raise Up” is a striking embodiment of black social death. Ten brass figures reach out of a white pedestal, facing the wall with their hands held up. While each differing slightly, all ten are presumably men. Why are their faces obscured? Perhaps it is a lineup (but none of the hands are flat against the wall). They could be at a prayer service (though that is not reason enough to face them away from us). After the Michael Brown shooting of 2014, it would certainly be easy to imagine it paying homage to the activist “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” We can only see one’s set of shoulders. The rest are submerged so deeply in the white base that torsos, necks, mouths are sliced off. Some sort of inhumanity has occurred – these are incomplete people; not only have we been cut off from them, but they are have been separated from themselves. In spite of everything, the figures are still somehow active. It is not as if the heads and arms have been carelessly strewn about or arranged in a stilted attempt to unnaturally pose them.
Against the Dark:
Antiblackness in Education Policy and Discourse
Providing readers with an explanation of the focus of
antiblack scholarship as a framework for the article, Michael J. Dumas looks at
the concepts of antiblackness through racialized educational policies, the
signification of Black bodies in educational spaces, and the perceived threat
of the Black body to non-Black students. Like Leonardo, Dumas operates within
an understanding that whiteness is a social construct, employed as a method of
negating “others,” to which Blackness is oppositional. That Blackness, however,
is constructed as a “racialized social group that shares a specific set of
histories, cultural processes, and imagined and performed kinships,” that the various
white (European) ethnic groups do not share. (Dumas, 2106, p. 12) Dumas makes
the point that his capitalization of Black is used “to signify the imagined
representations of the physical Black body.” (p. 13) His usage of this signification
is particularly important, not only to the message of the essay, but also to
the greater historical understanding of Black bodies. We are again living through
a period in which white supremacists are attempting to use imagined
representations of the physical Black body as ideological scare tactics. Such ideologies
support Dumas’ argument that the Black body is not recognized as human. Following
the argument that Blacks are not considered fully human citizens in our
society, then it is understandable to see why Afropessimists believe that there
are no true methods for Blacks to petition for reparation.
Compounding the argument that this is truly an antiblack
society is the embrace of capitalistic multiculturalism, which Dumas argues is
more profitable global economy that ignores Black experience, justified as
anti-racist because it’s inclusive beyond the white/Black binary. This movement
beyond the binary represents a “social death” of Black people and further contributes to the concept of the Black problem, thus again underscoring the
removal of Black humanity. (p.15) Perhaps most aptly illustrating the thesis of
the article is this statement, and also the result of historical anti-Blackness,
“And this, then, is the essence of antiblackness in education policy: the Black
is constructed as always already a problem-as nonhuman; inherently uneducable,
or at the very least, unworthy of education; and, even in a multiracial
society, always a threat to what Sexton (2008, p. 13) described as ‘everything
else.’” (p. 16)
The whole article was engrossing, but one passage caught my
eye. “Antiblackness allows one to capture the depth of suffering of Black
children and educators in the predominantly white schools and connect this contemporary
trauma to that of the longue dureé of slavery from bondage to its afterlife in
desegregating (and now re-segregating) schools.” (p. 16) This is an especially
intriguing conceptualization, and I wish that Dumas had dedicated more space within
the article to expand on this topic.
BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE:
The Model Minority Myth and the Invisibility of Asian American Students
Jean Yonemura Wing addresses the negative effects resulting from the stereotype of the Asian American Model Minority student through a case study of a diverse group of Asian American students attending Berkeley High School in California. In American culture, Asian American students are believed to be naturally hard-working, smarter than non-Asian students, and excel in mathematics. According to Wing, these students are often “lumped together, with no distinctions regarding such basic differences as national origin and history, class background, immigration status, language(s) spoken, or parent’s educational levels and occupations, or what classes they are taking.” (Wing, 2007, p. 457) This reductive lens thus ignores the diversity of Pan-Asian representation, as well as the academic and economic struggles that these students may encounter. Of the six students interviewed, we meet: students with working-class parents and students with a more middle-class upbringing; parents with no education and college educated parents; and students who have navigated the traditional gender expectations in different manners.
The social construct of the model minority, although seemingly benign, allows Asian Americans (more broadly) to be utilized as a political tool, providing white people a buffer between other, and potentially more threatening, people of color. (p460) Wing later provides further examples of discrimination against Asian Americans, such as Yellow Peril, “You all look alike,” inability and apathy toward correct pronunciation of student names, and selective exclusion from the school curriculum by focusing on select histories of select Asian immigrants. One of the more interesting foci of discrimination felt by the Asian American students in the study involved high school athletics. Where prestige sports are dominated by students exhibiting size and strength, the students in the study were involved in lower-prestige sports in which speed or agility were more beneficial. Similarly, the notion of relative functionalism as an explanation for the large percentage of Asian students in STEM fields was intriguing, but also disappointing that so-called “soft skills” such as reading, writing, and speaking, are neglected rather than addressed for improvement. (p. 479)
Cambodian-American education activists and members of the Khmer Parent Association discuss the struggles the community faces in schools, and why there is no “one-mold-fits-all” approach that can address the needs of all Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. (NBC Asian America)
