A New York Times op-ed:
Immigrant Kids, Adrift
By MARCELO SUÁREZ-OROZCO and CAROLA SUÁREZ-OROZCO
LOS ANGELES
THE alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers in the deadly attack at the Boston Marathon should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers.
In 1997, we started a large-scale, five-year study of newly arrived immigrants, ages 9 to 14, in 20 public middle and high schools in Boston, Cambridge, Mass., and the San Francisco Bay Area. Our participants came from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean; many fled not only poverty but also strife, in countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Haiti. Over five years, we interviewed more than 400 students, as well as parents and teachers. We gathered academic records, test scores and measures of psychological well-being.
The two brothers accused in the Boston bombings — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who was killed on Friday, and his brother, Dzhokhar, 19, who was captured later that day — were around 15 and 8, respectively, when they immigrated. Both attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin, that city’s only public high school. They were not part of our study, but they fit the demographic profile of the subjects of our research: birth to families displaced by war or strife, multiple-stage (including back-and-forth) migration, language difficulties and entry into tough urban environments where gangs and crime are temptations.
When asked “what do you like most about being here?” an 11-year-old Haitian boy in Cambridge told us, “There is less killing here.” His response was notably succinct, but not unique.
A Salvadoran 10-year-old whose family had narrowly escaped death squads recounted intense loneliness. When a firecracker was set off in his working-class Cambridge neighborhood, he plunged into the arms of a stunned researcher.
A 12-year-old girl whose family fled chaos in Guatemala for the Bay Area similarly turned inward. She lamented being “encerrada” (locked in) because of gang violence in her new community.
Not surprisingly, students from strife-torn areas were more likely than others to report psychological symptoms like anxiety, depression and trouble concentrating and sleeping.
Many newcomer students attend tough urban schools that lack solidarity and cohesion. In too many we found no sense of shared purpose, but rather a student body divided by race and ethnicity, between immigrants and the native born, between newcomers and more acculturated immigrants. Only 6 percent of the participants could name a teacher as someone they would go to with a problem; just 3 percent could identify a teacher who was proud of them.
When asked what Americans thought about immigrants of their national origin, 65 percent of the students provided negative adjectives. “Most Americans think we are lazy, gangsters, drug addicts, that only come to take their jobs away,” a 14-year-old boy in the Bay Area told us. We also found that many educators, already overwhelmed by the challenges of inner-city teaching, considered immigrant parents uninformed and uninvolved.
Having just one friend who spoke English fluently was a strong predictor of positive academic outcomes. Yet more than a third of the students in our study reported that they had little or no opportunity even to interact with native-born students, much less make close friends.
Our research also confirmed that kids who arrive during their high school years, as Tamerlan Tsarnaev did, face bad odds, especially if they experienced interrupted schooling, family instability and traumatic dislocations back home. ...
Taking in what Emma Lazarus called the “wretched refuse,” including asylum seekers like the Tsarnaev brothers, without providing a scaffold of support undermines the promise of America.
America as the trash dump of the world.
While no doubt we should send more money to Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Carola Suárez-Orozco to do more of whatever it is they do, it sure sounds like it would be better for everybody else involved -- both foreign children and the American people -- to admit fewer immigrants.
Posts
44 comments:
Really, is there anything that can't be blamed on Americans?
It's not enough if I let all the homeless people and criminals in town come live in my house, but I'm also obliged to teach them manners and virtues. If they beat me up and rob me, that only proves that I let them down.
Amazing. I knew this was the tack the media would take, but it's still amazing to see it.
Many newcomer students attend tough urban schools that lack solidarity and cohesion. In too many we found no sense of shared purpose, but rather a student body divided by race and ethnicity, between immigrants and the native born, between newcomers and more acculturated immigrants.
What?! Those schools are vibrant and diverse!!
Taking in what Emma Lazarus called the “wretched refuse,” including asylum seekers like the Tsarnaev brothers, without providing a scaffold of support undermines the promise of America.
What?! Diversity is strength!! Why on earth would a diverse school need the support of pale faced patriarchy?! Why a diverse school should be 10x stronger than those palefaces!!
Liberals are white supremacists. Whatever the problem, they believe whites can and should solve it or fix it. They have no confidence whatever that any other group posses the ability or even moral agency to improve themselves without the white man.
There is an insane, but common thread among the left. It is the idea that there is value in the valueless, and if only we throw enough resources at it, good things will happen. If this doesn't work, it's because the implementation was wrong.
This is seen in attempts to cast prisons as a place of rehabilitation. When this is implemented, what happens is that young, naive psychologists, social workers and the like are conned by experienced, worldly cons. The result is that cold blooded killers are unleashed on society again.
This is seen in the push for useless byproducts and tailings to be recycled or sold rather than dumped somewhere. "Surely these must be valuable to someone!" the thinking goes.
And this is again seen in immigration policy, where the left would have us import loads of third world people with the belief that if only enough ivy league college grads can be compelled to interact with them, then these people might be capable of becoming like Americans used to be.
It is innumerate, magical thinking, on the level of believing that by adding water to soup you are somehow making that soup more nutritious. Or that by adding enough paint thinner, you can paint a whole house with a single bucket of paint.
As Thatcher once said, "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." Not that some socialism in the context of an ethnically homogenous society is a bad thing, but as currently implemented by transferring wealth from the host to hordes of immigrants, it is a horrible, suicidal, self-cannibalizing thing and will soon implode.
Guess we better stop bringing them here if we're doing a bad job of this(also they can elect to not come here for the very same reason).
"Having just one friend who spoke English fluently was a strong predictor of positive academic outcomes. Yet more than a third of the students in our study reported that they had little or no opportunity even to interact with native-born students, much less make close friends. " - Which way does the arrow of causality go? From having an english speaking friend to being successful? or being successful to having english speaking friends?
I most strongly object to the NYT's use of cheap foreign labor in the production of that article. There are plenty of Americans who would gladly write articles about how badly we suck, if only the editorial board would pay them a living wage.
Married border-jumping Journos live like penned pigs in their crowded Santa Monica condos and don't need to eat out at sh*tty ethnic restaurants every other meal just to maintain credibility. How are we supposed to compete?
-The Judean People's Front
. . . should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers.
Okay, I'm done reflecting. Conclusion: we don't do an adequate job assimilating immigrants, either adults or those who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers, and we should end the practice immediately. Why keep banging our heads against the wall and causing misery all around?
Steve, as I've long said, there is something absolutely vile at heart about America, an evil that lurks right at the centre and defines it.
This passage from the novel The Plumed Serpent (D.H. Lawrence) is fitting in light of recent events:
And sometimes [Kate] wondered whether America really was the great death-continent, the great No! to the European and Asiatic, and even African Yes! Was it really the great melting-pot, where men from the creative continents were smelted back again, not to a new creation, but down into the homogeneity of death? Was it the great continent of the undoing, and all its peoples the agents of the mystic destruction! Plucking, plucking at the created soul in a man, till at last it plucked out the growing germ, and left him a creature of mechanism and automatic reaction, with only one inspiration, the desire to pluck the quick out of every living spontaneous creature.
Was that the clue to America? she sometimes wondered. Was it the great death-continent, the continent that destroyed again what the other continents had built up? The continent whose spirit of place fought purely to pick the eyes out of the face of God? Was that America?
And all the people who went there, Europeans, Negroes, Japanese, Chinese, all the colours and the races, were they the spent people, in whom the God impulse had collapsed, so they crossed to the great continent of the negation, where the human will declares itself ‘free’, to pull down the soul of the world? Was it so? And did this account for the great drift to the New World, the drift of spent souls passing over to the side of Godless democracy, energetic negation? The negation which is the life-breath of materialism. And would the great negative pull of the Americans at last break the heart of the world?
Is this what we, including the Brothers Tsarnaev, kick against?
I wonder.
"Taking in what Emma Lazarus called the “wretched refuse,” including asylum seekers like the Tsarnaev brothers, without providing a scaffold of support undermines the promise of America."
When did we vote on or agree on this "promise of America", or the fact that a poem that was placed on the statue in NY harbor be the law of the land (Or more importantly our reigning mythology)?.
Or more importantly, what is is store for those who do not believe in this mythology, The Clockwork Orange Treatment?
Southern gentry bad.
Northern gentry good.
Keep gentrifying.
I heart Chechens. More Chechens in blue cities please.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bigoHbEa5tM
There is actually a growing force of influential liberals that oppose immigration on a humanitarian basis. There was a TED talk about how fruitless of an endeavor it is, not even skimming the skim off the top.
Though, they still support it for economic reasons, citing people like Sergey and Yang. I know you don't like that too much though..
I'm a convert! Long Live Americhechnya!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjCPg8ne8Iw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzRQS4M99jY
Trash dump is harsh.
Let's just say we're the recycling center of the world.
Seriously, I was thinking of Pinker's Better Angels (NB: I haven't read it) and wondered just how many rough edges there still are on the global cabinet. Can America - liberal democracy, constitutional republicanism, whatever you want to call it - really sand them all?
The stomach can process a lot of acid, but too much overwhelms it. I think the current population balance in America is somewhat analogous: too much.
There are signs that we haven't tamed ourselves to the optimum level we would like. Now we've got to go back to the cage and work with a fresh batch of lions?
Anyway, note the contradiction. 1. Our duty is to recycle the trash of the globe, tame the more violent populations, smooth the edges, whatever metaphor you fancy for the task of civilizing the uncivilized. 2. But we are constrained by policy and opinion from actually doing so, at least at home. How to tame a community of Chechen immigrants to the American standard of, say, metrosexuals in Provincetown - or hell, simply to that of good ol' boys in Alabama, 2013? Do we "dump" our charges in front of MTV, tell 'em to get a job at the Tasty Freeze, put an ATV in every suburban neighborhood, and hope for the best? How does hands-off strategy square with the hands-on strategy found at school, namely, fanning the flames of ethnic resentments with a lot of anti-white multiculty political indoctrination? You see the problem.
It isn't our responsibility to save the wogs from Hell or tribal thinking. The white man has laid down his burden. We can only go about our business with other civilized nations, reshaping our own economic, political, and cultural environment to our interests, a side benefit of which we might be some form of inadvertent artificial selection (negligent Social Darwinism?) in the various backwaters, one that selects out the more violent tribal mentalities. For all I know, this resembles Pinker's conclusion. Mine is bland, but it's certainly a better one than turning our nation into a recycling center. (Note: this is different from positive action to press everyone into the Davos Man mold. It is, to repeat, not more than going about our business while keeping out of our country all but the most agreeable.)
Just once I'd like to hear the immigration enthusiasts detail how the near-moratorium from 1924-1965 made the country worse off. In fact, I'd like to hear them establish just one relevant social metric by which life for the average American didn't drastically improve.
Of course, it would be unfair to suggest that the incredible progress during that time was because we took a hiatus from Ellis Island mythology. But it pretty conclusively establishes that taking in everyone who wants to come isn't necessary to our national improvement.
Americans should feel guilty, I guess, for what we haven't done for our immigrants.
I seem to recall 30 years ago that the classic immigrant (maybe it was a stereotype) was fiercely patriotic, and loved America and revered it as the best country in the world.
This sentiment doesn't really seem to apply to the current batch of immigrants. The Latinos seem to have a smug sense that they are just taking back what is theirs anyway. West Indians hate America and Americans. The Chinese seem happy enough to be here, but mostly because they can make money and keep being as Chinese as they want to be. Indians don't seem to hate Americans necessarily, but they do seem to think they are smarter than us. Pakistanis are another story.
I don't hear a lot of gratitude. I'm not saying these people owe me anything in particular. But why don't the Dreamers or any of the illegals' advocates ever just say, "We love America so much. We are so grateful to be here, and want to contribute more than we have so far." Don't you think that would go a lot further to make their case than their resentful grousing?
THIS IS AMERICHECHITA!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZeYVIWz99I
"'THE alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers....'"
half-chechen. (^_^)
"Plainly we Americans are the fools of the world."
--John Derbyshire
Anon 8:17 has it. I'd say more, not just Northern Gentry good, Southern Bad (Southerners have at least as many good points if not more than Northerners); but bad bad bad "trash" lower and working class Whites. Who are not cool, and don't have ultra hot famous women and ultra hot dominating men.
There is nothing "bad" about America that makes it a "death continent." The Tsarnaev Borat Brothers were not unique -- you can find their kind in London, in Malmo, in Berlin, in Vienna, in Madrid, in Copenhagen, in Oslo, in the North of England, pretty much anywhere Muslims arrive in the West, they behave like the Bombing Borat Brothers. That's who they are. If Derbyshire is right and Islam is a Dog Collar for Low IQ populations, its not much of a dog collar.
Rather, what is wrong with the West is recent. It is the pill, condom, and raised living standards and thus freedom and expectations of women. White women basically have one big beef with men, because they can: White guys are not sexy and dominant enough. That's "White people problems," i.e. the problems faced by wealthy people who don't have to struggle from paycheck to paycheck much less worry about basic food needs.
But no place else in time and space has had such absolute freedom for women, with such disastrous results. Most of it stems from a belief that repeating a lie will make it so; like magic. And the atomizing effect of technology that erodes normal intermediating institutions: churches, civic organizations, neighbors, family, etc.
If most every White guy was just a lesser copy of say, Brad Pitt or George Clooney or Ryan Reynolds or Leonardo di Caprio, would you see this kind of attitude: America as dumping ground? No. But because to most American women their men have become worthless, they treat the country that created the men as worthless too.
I don't hear a lot of gratitude. I'm not saying these people owe me anything in particular. But why don't the Dreamers or any of the illegals' advocates ever just say, "We love America so much. We are so grateful to be here, and want to contribute more than we have so far." Don't you think that would go a lot further to make their case than their resentful grousing?
America is Dead. Even Jared Taylor, a Yale grad whose family has been here since about 1630 says so. Time to start thinking about something new.
I think the paper the authors are referring to is in "Devel. Psychol," 2010, vol 46 (available on the web). They surveyed children from "Asia" (China) and right away there are huge differences between Chinese kids and Mexicans, Dominicans etc. In Table 1: chinese kids are more likely to come from 2-parent homes, one parent working, more likely to be proficient in English(!) and lowest level of "psychological symptoms". Chinese children appear to do better than the other children who are From the Western Hemisphere! Is there a racial propensity for assimilation, educational performance regardless of socio-economic status? No of course not its not in the paper!.. (Is the NSF, William T. Grant, Spencer Foundations going to fund a study like that? Don't hold your breath...)
Christ, this is what the English First movement was all about, providing some national cohesion and at least a language to which immigrants could assimilate. But I recall a professor I knew on the U.N. Human Rights Commission saying the English First movement was simply a front for racism or xenophobia... They don't get it.
The news is not all bad. Two lib friends brought up the outrageous stuff they heard over the weekend, lunacy like this. Tipping point?
For crap like this, we ought to bring back tar and feathering.
"Taking in what Emma Lazarus called the 'wretched refuse”... without providing a scaffold of support undermines the promise of America."
Bollocks.
None of the pre-1965 immigrants had a "scaffold of support" and, with the exception of a statisticaly insignificant few Emma Goldman communists and Italian anarchist cranks, all of them assimilated perfectly, seamlessly. Moreover, those who made parasites or pests of themselves got themselves deported tout de suite.
The immigrant disaster we have now is the consequence of these acts of foolhardiness and of contempt for American citizens and our Constitution:
1) The consequence of the Import The Third World suicidal 1965 immigration act (thank you Teddyquiddick Kennedy!)
2) The consequence of our Dear Rulers having dropped the requirements that immigrants be able to support themselves, be in good health, and not be a danger to anyone or to our republic
3) The consequence of unelected State Department toffs importing entire blocs of unassimilating refugees
4) The consequence of massive H-1B visa scamming
5) The consequence of our holier-than-thou intelligentsia having inoculated immigrants against assimilating by injection and incessant booster shots of the toxin of multiculturalism
6) The consequence of the foolish, suicidal present interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment
7) The consequence of economic-financial sector power overwhelming and puppeting our Dear Rulers (and their loyal Praetorian Guard of public sector unions and federal, state, & municipal bureaucratst)to have them do the bidding of the wage-depressing, wealth inequality gap-widening one-percenters - the one percenters being globalist-capitalists who are the only people who truly "Think Globally, Act Locally" in their marionetting of candidates and the elect to do their bidding.
8) The consequence of the Ayers-Dohrn-Zinn cabal's perversion of curricula and syllabi
9) The consequences of one-percenters having strong-armed the FCC to deregulate media ownership, so that now a very few rich, powerful globalist capitalists control huge global Enemedia-Pravda empires which relentlessly force-feed citizens with sugar-coated pills of the Multi-Culti Diversity Fairytale Delusion
10) The consequence of our Dear Rulers' openly brazen refusal to enforce existing immigration law, because our Dear Rulers work only for their crony globalist-capitalist one-percenter campaign puppeteers
11) The consequence of federal, state agencies, and of private charities, extending privileges and benefits to illegal and legal immigrants who have never paid taxes and who become habitual wards of the Nanny Welfare state
12) The consequence of the open treason committed by so-called "sanctuary cities."
"whose family fled chaos in Guatemala
She lamented being “encerrada” (locked in) because of gang violence in her new community."
What is the ethnicity and national origin of these gangs?
>I'd like to hear the immigration enthusiasts detail how the near-moratorium from 1924-1965 made the country worse off.<
I'd like to hear how it prevented Jewish refugees from emigrating from Germany during Hitler's first years in power (c. 1933-37). On the one hand, we all celebrate the Niagara of famous names who scandalously had to escape from the land of poets and philosophers and settle in places like Beverly Hills. On the other hand, we hear that the door was slammed tight in '24.
Maybe only those Jewish immigrants who had enough money to make the trip could immigrate. This is America's fault? Why, yes, it is. It is proof positive of anti-Semitism. Isn't everything?
Steve, as I've long said, there is something absolutely vile at heart about America, an evil that lurks right at the centre and defines it.
This passage from the novel The Plumed Serpent (D.H. Lawrence) is fitting in light of recent events:
And sometimes [Kate] wondered whether America really was the great death-continent, the great No! to the European and Asiatic, and even African Yes! Was it really the great melting-pot, where men from the creative continents were smelted back again, not to a new creation, but down into the homogeneity of death? Was it the great continent of the undoing, and all its peoples the agents of the mystic destruction! Plucking, plucking at the created soul in a man, till at last it plucked out the growing germ, and left him a creature of mechanism and automatic reaction, with only one inspiration, the desire to pluck the quick out of every living spontaneous creature.
Was that the clue to America? she sometimes wondered. Was it the great death-continent, the continent that destroyed again what the other continents had built up? The continent whose spirit of place fought purely to pick the eyes out of the face of God? Was that America?
And all the people who went there, Europeans, Negroes, Japanese, Chinese, all the colours and the races, were they the spent people, in whom the God impulse had collapsed, so they crossed to the great continent of the negation, where the human will declares itself ‘free’, to pull down the soul of the world? Was it so? And did this account for the great drift to the New World, the drift of spent souls passing over to the side of Godless democracy, energetic negation? The negation which is the life-breath of materialism. And would the great negative pull of the Americans at last break the heart of the world?
Is this what we, including the Brothers Tsarnaev, kick against?
Well, the brothers were smelling the same stuff as American Adam Ganhan did. Remember a Islamic radical influnece Adam in Orange County to join Al-Queda and so forth,
LBF,
Are you sure you want to include the brothers Tsarnaev in your "we." They were not disillusioned literary gents hellbent on striking out against soulless modernity after their 5th re-reading of the collected works of Evola. They were crudely violent ingrates who lashed out at a society that gave them shelter from their sworn enemies.
-The Judean People's Front
1) The consequence of the Import The Third World suicidal 1965 immigration act (thank you Teddyquiddick Kennedy!)
At the risk of being pedantic, I will not let this go. Kennedy did not write, introduce, nor sign into legislation the Immigration Act of 1965. Emanuel Celler wrote and introduced it into the House. Philip Hart introduced it into the Senate. LBJ signed it into law.
Please give credit where credit is due.
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco is dean of UCLA's graduate Ed. school.
Pobre Los Angeles, tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de la basura querida de los Suarez-Orozcos.
-The Judean People's Front
I wish the General Social Survey allowed you to correlate belief in the veracity of the book The Secret with New York Times subscription.
That Chechnya Uber Alles Youtuber above has for his account avatar a hand-inked icon sketch of Malcolm X (the pensive version). Or maybe it's an icon of Denzel Washington playing Malcolm X...
I'm with the gloomier posters on this, watching a small army massed against a wounded 19- year old and all the bleating and handwringing. America is under mass psychosis. "It will all end in tears."
This speaks to a sense of powerlessness among the grass roots of immigration traitors.
Sure, the economy is circling the drain, and the historic American nation probably won't survive, and they're increasingly surrounded by hostile outsiders. But since the problem is all *their* fault, then the solution is completely in *their* hands.
This makes them the most powerful people in the room, since all the terrorism, criminality etc., of the non white, non Western populations is apparently simply a reaction to white Westerners not being generous enough.
Admitting that some problems can't be solved short of partition, that we're not powerful enough to simply turn everyone else into darker versions of us and that there *is* a possibility that we could lose even if we decide to go all out in our own defence for the first time...well, that's an admission of powerlessness.
Derbyshire once described ostentatious anti racism as a mating display that one is powerful enough to not be concerned by all those petty coloured people. This ostentatious refusal to acknowledge that - gasp! - sometimes Muslims do things completely independently of us is more of the same. It's a show that they're not so blinkered as to think that - pah! - Muslims are a worthy adversary.
Nope. Everything is under our control, we can totally win this as soon as we pull our collective finger out and the only real enemies (read: worthy adversaries we won't be embarassed to admit we fought when telling war stories to our grandchildren) are white conservatives.
Yes, the leadership is conniving, malicious, knowing, etc. But the grassroots are terrified, and telling them that they can single handedly defeat terrorism by being, like, totally nice gives them a comforting sense of power.
Rather, what is wrong with the West is recent. It is the pill, condom, and raised living standards and thus freedom and expectations of women. White women basically have one big beef with men, because they can: White guys are not sexy and dominant enough. That's "White people problems," i.e. the problems faced by wealthy people who don't have to struggle from paycheck to paycheck much less worry about basic food needs.
What makes Japan so exceptional? They have the pill, the condom, and raised living standards and thus freedom and expectations of women. Why don't we see the same problems in Japan? Why does Japan remain essentially closed to non-east-Asian immigration? Why don't Japanese women seem to hate Hate HATE Japanese men?
Lemme guess: Japanese men are just that sexy and dominant. Right?
Oh, wait, I know: no Puritans in Japan. Lots and lots of Jews, but no Puritans. Am I right?
If most every White guy was just a lesser copy of say, Brad Pitt or George Clooney or Ryan Reynolds or Leonardo di Caprio, would you see this kind of attitude: America as dumping ground? No. But because to most American women their men have become worthless, they treat the country that created the men as worthless too.
Ha! I knew it! Most every Japanese guy is a lesser copy of Brad Pitt, Ryan Reynolds, or Leonardo di Caprio! That's the only logical conclusion.
Hey, thanks Whis. Your theory sure has predictive power.
Judean People's Front - three good ones in this thread. Thanks for the laughs.
Re the article - On the bright side, aside from the smattering of inevitable Nice White Ladies of both sexes, and one or two butthurt Nicky Diaz-type immigrant whiners, most of the commenters seem pretty disgusted with the article.
I once suggested every black should be assigned a well-meaning, white liberal caretaker. That should be expanded to include immigrants.
The managerial state hasn't noticed yet that soon it is not going to have enough managers.
As managerial state dysfunction increases so will managerial state hostility toward those who reject its premises.
Rohan Swee said...
Judean People's Front - three good ones in this thread. Thanks for the laughs.
Thank you, Rohan. I've been lurking around the iSteve comments section for years and always enjoy your commentary.
-The Judean People's Front
P.S. Don't feel left out Svigor. The front also considers you righteous among the nations.
I do my reflecting in mirrors. Thanks anyway.
NYT: "Boston Marathon should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job"
That's not my deaprtment.
The researchers seem to leave out some details. They mention the immigrant children end up in "tough urban schools". Are those code words for all-black ghetto schools? They've had problems with school closings and student reassignments in Chicago because of all the clashing gang affiliations. No wonder the immigrant kids are unhappy, they're thrown in with domestic blacks and browns who are mostly drawn from the left side of the bell curve. Getting harassed, beat up, robbed is probably a daily occurrence. The educational experience is like going to a part-time prison complete with metal detectors and on-site police. The curriculum is dumbed down to the common denominator. Of course the students will be divided and feel estranged. The teachers say the parents are uninformed, but it takes time to learn the ropes. They probably have some naive faith in the American educational system. Those with the home-grown advantage know that "tough urban schools" are the kiss of death, to be avoided at any price.
Post a Comment