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发帖数: 29853 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 USANews 讨论区 】
发信人: bepsazo (崭新), 信区: USANews
标 题: 看Betsy Mccaughey 把种族aa， "holistic" evaluation看得多透彻
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Sun Jan 24 20:44:04 2016, 美东)
http://betsymccaughey.com
From NYC to Harvard: the war on Asian success
Posted by Betsy on Wednesday, December 30, 2015 ·
The year 2015 was a dismal one for American public education — at least by
the numbers.
But don’t blame the kids. Parents are missing in action.
Except most Asian-American parents, that is. They tend to oversee their
children’s homework, stress the importance of earning high grades and
instill the belief that hard work is the ticket to a better life.
And it pays off. Their children are soaring academically.
The outrage is that instead of embracing the example of these Asian families
, school authorities and non-Asian parents want to rig the system to hold
them back. It’s happening here in New York City, in suburban New Jersey and
across the nation.
As a group, Americans need to take a page from the Asian parents’ playbook.
American teens rank a dismal 28th in math and science knowledge, compared
with teens in other countries — even poor countries. Singapore, Hong Kong,
South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are at the top.
We’ve slumped. For the first time in 25 years, US scores on the main test
for elementary and middle school education fell. And SAT scores for college-
bound students dropped significantly.
Could changes in these tests be to blame? That convenient excuse was
torpedoed by the stellar performances of Asian-American students. Even
though many come from poor or immigrant families, they outscore all other
students by large margins on both tests, and their lead keeps widening.
Here in New York City, Asian-Americans make up 13 percent of students, yet
they win more than half of the coveted places each year at the city’s
selective public high schools, such as Bronx Science and Stuyvesant.
What’s at play here? It’s not a difference in IQ; it’s parenting. That’s
confirmed by a recent study by sociologists from City University of New
York and the University of Michigan, which showed that parental oversight
enabled Asian-American students to far outperform the others.
No wonder many successful charter schools require parents to sign a pledge
that they’ll supervise their children’s homework and encourage a strong
work ethic.
That formula is under fire at the West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School
District in New Jersey. The district, which is 65 percent Asian, routinely
produces seniors with perfect SAT scores, admissions to MIT and top prizes
in international science competitions.
But many non-Asian parents are up in arms, complaining there’s too much
pressure and their kids can’t compete. In response, this fall
Superintendent David Aderhold apologized that school had become a “
perpetual achievement machine.” Heaven forbid!
Aderhold canceled accelerated and enriched math courses for fourth and fifth
grades, which were 90 percent Asian, and eliminated midterms and finals in
high school.
Using a word that already strikes terror in the hearts of Asian parents, he
said schools had to take a “holistic” approach. That’s the same euphemism
Harvard uses to limit the number of Asians accepted and favor non-Asians.
Aderhold even lowered standards for playing in school music programs.
Students have a “right to squeak,” he insisted. Never mind whether they
practice.
Of course, neither Aderhold nor parents in charge of sports are indulging
nonathletic kids with a “right to fumble” and join a mostly non-Asian
varsity football team.
Meanwhile, in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NAACP want to
reduce the role the competitive exam plays in admissions for the city’s
eight selective high schools in favor of a “holistic” approach. That means
robbing poor, largely immigrant and first-generation kids — nearly half
the students get subsidized school lunches — of the chance to study hard
and compete for a world-class education.
As Dennis Saffran explains in “The Plot Against Merit,” some Asian-
American eighth-graders practice for two years for the test, while their
parents toil in laundromats and restaurants to pay for exam-prep classes.
What’s stopping white, Hispanic and black parents from doing the same thing?
Betsy McCaughey is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research. |
