As a none-american, can I ask: Are public schools in the USA bad? Like, I have such a negative view of them as underfunded, understaffed, filled with overworked & burned out staff. just somewhere that education goes to die, really.
Is that view accurate? Or do I just have that view due to media bias(The bias being that there's no news story: 'Random School is well run, more at 11')?
It depends heavily on your location. Public schools are generally assigned based on the student's primary address, so houses in good school districts tend to attract a premium. This leaves schools in poor areas chronically underfunded and understaffed
Even “poor” schools in the US are generally receiving more funding per student than the average school in other countries.
The “bad” public schools are a result of increasing and spreading social dysfunction (see the other comment in this thread about drug dogs), not funding.
super location dependent. There are many reasons, from the absurd to the cruel (CA for example doesn't allow property taxes/council rates to track market value, largely because of campaigning in the 70s after the Supreme Court said CA had to fund schools in poor neighborhoods to the same extent as those in rich neighborhoods).
I'm from NZ, so my US partner's Oakland, CA high school experience was horrifying:
* They had metal detectors on entrances
* They had armed police (or something similar: a precursor to the modern US "school resource officers")
* They had drug dogs, one of which OD'd
* The toilet stalls did not have doors
On the other hand, if you drove 15 minutes up the road into Berkeley, their public high schools have their own swimming pools.
I’ve never heard of toilet stalls without doors in schools. The really flimsy walls high above the floors, sure, but no doors? That sounds like a massive open door for bullying
I grew up in Virginia, an hour south of DC. Public schools there were large campuses, generally built within the past 30 years, with what seemed to be a good balance of teachers who actually lived near the schools they taught at. There wasn’t much of a concept in my family or anybody I knew growing up of “choosing a house near a good school” and the county would redraw the school districts from time to time to help with the bus routes or spreading load or something and it never seemed like a huge deal.
I now live in Southern California and am always surprised to see schools as 1-story buildings from the 1960s with so many trailers outside. I have no idea how far the teachers have to drive to get to them as the houses around nice schools cost so much.
Like others have mentioned, public schooling in the U.S. is heavily location-dependent. Many affluent suburbs with wealthy, involved parents have great public schools. You don't hear about them because of reporting bias: if the schools are good, the last thing you want is lots of other people coming to your town to take advantage of them, but if they're bad it makes for a good outrage piece.
I don't think it's so much about "affluent suburbs" having "great" schools and some places having very bad schools. I grew up in an upper middle class Virginia county that nonetheless spent less than the national average per student on education (back when Virginia was a red state), but had well regarded schools. I think in most of the country, if you live in a community where nearly all the kids parents are married, the schools will be fine, even if the places aren't "wealthy" or don't spend a lot of money on education.
I also went to some very good schools and did not live in a rich area. It was a good area sure, you weren't going to hear gunshots on your walk to school, but it was not the "rich people" area. The rich people area actually had worse schools academically speaking. This makes sense when you think about it. We tended to have a lot of students whose parents were highly educated immigrants, whereas the rich part of town generally tended to be old money and not as focused on being hyper competitive academically.
American schools are fine. They are not underfunded: we spend the OECD average on K-12 as a percentage of GDP, and since we are so rich it ends up on the high end in absolute terms. Our class sizes are right around the OECD average, smaller than Germany or France: http://oecdedutoday.com/how-does-class-size-vary-around-the-....
The problem is that American kids are bad—poorly behaved and uninterested in education.
I am 43, definitely not my experience when I was growing up in CA. When did the kids go from "good - well behaved" to "bad -poorly behaved"? Honest question - I really don't know any kids.
The drop in attendance is not because schools are under funded, or the staff is burnt. It's pretty clear the biggest changes that have happened in US schools in the last years.
It’s a huge country and there are a lot of public schools, so you see a lot of variance. They all (99% anyway) have the funding and infrastructure to be fine especially large cities. The problem is large swaths of parents who don’t get involved in their kids education or behavior at all, and those kids become a nightmare for teachers and other students to the point where it becomes a safety issue. It’s always in poorer areas of mostly cities. You can throw all the money you want at those schools and it won’t work because too many of the parents are just trash.
It depends on where you are city wise. If you are in an affluent area, like my cousins, then you have after school programs, Scout troops, available tutoring, excellent teachers, little to no violence and safe transportation to/from.
If you live in an area with lots of halfway houses like I did as a kid (We called it murder valley), you can expect: Violence, blatant racism, drugs, gangs, sexual assault, weekly riots, casual fights, attempted murders, one or two actual murders a year, burnt out teachers, closed after school programs, dangerous busses, and police harassing you constantly.
I was constantly getting hauled up to the office because I had the same name as a career criminal at the age of 13. Substitutes would refer kids to the office who looked sleepy for the nurse to check us for drug use. I was in constant fights with black and hispanic kids trying to prove something to their friends by beating up the white kids. Drug dogs would patrol the school. The place was run like a prison. Walking home, one of the girls in my high school went missing and her pelvis was found in a ditch a few years later...
So yeah, some of them are pretty bad. But at least we have the most overfunded military in the world.
The public schools in the nicer American neighborhoods run leaps and bounds ahead of public schools in comparable neighborhoods in other countries.
In nicer neighborhoods, the local high school is frequently comparable to a small college, with the academic (and athletic) facilities and staff to match.
There is not single answer to your question. In general, they are okay if averaged out. US schools get a bad rap compared to other rich countries mostly due to some very tragic situations that make it impossible for some schools to do their jobs. For instance, there is a not insignificant portion of the student population in some places that do not speak English as a first language and sometimes at all. This is not necessarily the worst problem with our schools, I chose it simply as an illustration of something that can lead to low performing schools even if the school and staff are otherwise doing their jobs exceptionally well.
On the other hand, the US also has some of the best public schools in the world. In a lot of cases, public schools beat out very expensive private schools in metrics like average AP score, average number of AP tests taken, average SAT, percentage of students at or above grade level, etc. At this high end, the US school system outperforms peer countries significantly. Its often the case that these high performing schools are relatively accessible for non wealthy people as well. You just need to rent an apartment nearby. You don't need to buy a property in Martha's vineyard. If these types of schools didn't exist, and the US public school system was as bad overall as it appears in the media, I suspect we would not have as many ambitious and highly educated immigrants wanting to live here.
> At its core, the field of ethnic studies is the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity, with an emphasis on the experiences of people of color in the United States. People or person of color is a term used primarily in the United States and is meant to be inclusive among non-white groups
> Furthermore, considering that European American-centered history and cultures are already robustly taught in the school curriculum, ethnic studies presents an opportunity for more inclusive and diverse histories and cultures to be highlighted and studied in a manner that is meaningful and can be transformative for all students.
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> Italian and German kids, by contrast, are not taught about the discrimination against those groups—even though German and Italian Americans today mostly are descended from 19th and 20th century immigrants who came here in poverty and faced discrimination, while most Asian Americans came here after 1990.
firstly, why the concentration on discrimination? ethnic studies covers much more than that...
also, the reason they don't cover groups that are considered "white" is because as stated above, in regular american history those history of italians/germans/irish are covered there well, but things like the chinese exclusion act, or railroad workers usually get about a paragraph or so in regular history (speaking of my own experience anyways) so adding more context and depth is good no?
> It's a naked attempt to socialize "children of color" into identifying as oppressed minorities.
maybe, maybe not, but whats your alternative? don't teach history of generally ignored groups in ethnic studies?
> firstly, why the concentration on discrimination?
Ask that to the people who put together the model ethnic studies curriculum! If you look at the sample lessons for Asians, almost all are about discrimination, exclusion, etc.
> ethnic studies covers much more than that...
In theory, yes, in practice, no. You can’t realistically expect white Americans to teach Indian or Chinese kids about their own cultures and experiences. So the focus tends to be on how white Americans relate to minorities, which in liberal states like California tends to be through the lens of white guilt. That’s how you end up with a curriculum that’s all about discrimination.
> also, the reason they don't cover groups that are considered "white" is because as stated above, in regular american history those history of italians/germans/irish are covered there well
We didn’t cover German, Italian, and Irish immigration in K-12. Maybe we spent a day talking about Ellis Island. More importantly, we never learned anything about the discrimination against those groups.
There is a clear dichotomy: white kids are not taught ethnic identity, and are not taught to identify with the struggles of and discrimination against their immigrant ancestors. Minority kids, by contrast, are taught to be conscious of their race and ethnicity, and are taught to identify with the struggles of Asians or Hispanics that in most cases they aren’t even descended from.
This dichotomy is historically inaccurate. For example, if you really want to understand how say Hispanics fit into America—economically, socially, and culturally—the closest analogy is to Italians. But in California, Italian kids are taught something completely different about their identity than Hispanic kids. Separating non-white immigrants from previous generations of immigrants paints a misleading picture of the immigrant experience.
This dichotomy is also bad for minority kids. It socializes them to think of themselves as victims without agency, who are acted upon by white people who have agency. It’s othering—you have white teachers talking about what “we” did to “you.” And it’s enormously demotivating for kids to be told that they have the decked stacked against them because of your skin color.
> maybe, maybe not, but whats your alternative? don't teach history of generally ignored groups in ethnic studies?
Yes. My kids don’t need to learn Asian American history from some white lady. And they certainly don’t need their white friends being socialized to think of them as being somehow different. I don’t care how good the intentions are—teachers highlighting differences isn’t a good thing for visible minorities.
And if we insist on doing so, we should strive to be accurate. If you’re going to teach about the Chinese Exclusion Act, also teach the German American kids about when states banned the teaching of German. Teach Italian and Irish kids about anti-Catholic school legislation.
i mostly agree with the most of your reasoning, i guess for me i don't see it as a huge issue personally... i come from a mixed background so learning about how my ancestors were treated didn't make me feel victimized... but n=1 and all that
i'd like to see some studies about these things than just our personal experiences tbh
> We didn’t cover German, Italian, and Irish immigration in K-12. Maybe we spent a day talking about Ellis Island. More importantly, we never learned anything about the discrimination against those groups.
its hard to discuss this because curriculum varies widely depending on where you went to school (for me these were quite thoroughly covered), again it would be good to have some studies/data
> If you’re going to teach about the Chinese Exclusion Act, also teach the German American kids about when states banned the teaching of German. Teach Italian and Irish kids about anti-Catholic school legislation.
i think thats totally fair
> My kids don’t need to learn Asian American history from some white lady.
while i can totally understand this feeling (i've thought this myself at times) how do you know a priori the teacher will be white? and furthermore, does it really matter in the end as long as they are fair?
> while i can totally understand this feeling (i've thought this myself at times) how do you know a priori the teacher will be white? and furthermore, does it really matter in the end as long as they are fair?
80% of public school teachers are white, and outside majority-minority schools, it’s 90%+. And I think for this issue, it makes a difference. Parents of white kids have a fundamentally different stake in these issues than parents of minority kids. As a parent of brown kids, my concern is about ensuring their success in a society where they will always be visibly different. I don’t think it’s an especially racist society, but being different is always a liability. (And if it was as racist a country as many white people say it is, that would be even more reason to teach my kids to keep their heads down and their mouths shut!) By contrast, in my experience, white people overwhelmingly think of these issues in terms of what they want their white kids to learn about how to treat “other people.”
> If you’re going to teach about the Chinese Exclusion Act, also teach the German American kids about when states banned the teaching of German. Teach Italian and Irish kids about anti-Catholic school legislation.
One of those things is much worse than the other two. Two are limitations in education, the other is not allowing people to come from that country at all.
We (well, I assume Californians and Washingtonians) are on the west coast, locally speaking, discrimination against Chinese and Japanese were local issues more than discrimination against Italians and Irish, which happened more on the east coast and perhaps Midwest. We teach the former because they are a part of our region’s own tragic past, not the tragic past of other regions in the USA.
> One of those things is much worse than the other two. Two are limitations in education, the other is not allowing people to come from that country at all.
No, trying to erase the culture of people who are already here out of xenophobia is much worse than exercising border control over who can immigrate. More importantly, most German and Italian Americans are descended from the people who faced discrimination. By contrast, Asian Americans are most not descended from groups that faced discrimination. That history doesn't help those kids understand their own experience and place in American society.
That distinction is critical insofar as we consider the present effect of past discrimination. In structural terms, Asian and Hispanic Americans are the least disadvantaged of any non-British immigrant group. Life in America has been far easier for me as a brown guy with Muslim name who entered adulthood right after 9/11, then it would have been if I had been Italian in 1930. The California ethnic studies curriculum wildly misrepresents that state of affairs.
You are ignoring the fact that education is local, that education in California is going to be biased to California history rather than New York's history. There is so much to cover, that educators prefer to prioritize local/regional topics. I never heard much about Japanese interment when I went to school in Mississippi, but I heard plenty about the civil war (over and over again, sheesh). But when I went to school in Washington state, it was the exact opposite.
That California biases to Asian and Hispanic history in the Americas is purely due to California being located in California rather than New York.
> You are ignoring the fact that education is local, that education in California is going to be biased to California history rather than New York's history.
There are 5.6 million Asians in California. The vast majority have no connection whatsoever to Chinese railroad workers or Japanese internment. Moreover, the model curriculum also covers Hmong and Cambodian immigrants, which number less than 100,000 each, and don't have any particular connection to California (apart from California being a big state and having a lot of every group). Meanwhile, Orange County has 140,000 German Americans, and for some reason they don't merit an ethnic studies unit.
> That California biases to Asian and Hispanic history in the Americas is purely due to California being located in California rather than New York.
That doesn't explain why the model curriculum frames "ethnic studies" almost entirely in terms of sob stories. Nor does it explain why the curriculum draws a stark distinction between white kids, who aren't invited to identify with historic oppression, and Asian and Hispanic immigrants, who are.
> There are 5.6 million Asians in California. The vast majority have no connection whatsoever to Chinese railroad workers or Japanese internment.
They definitely empathize with it, more than gangs of New York-style stories pitting Italian vs. Irish immigrants.
> Moreover, the model curriculum also covers Hmong and Cambodian immigrants, which number less than 100,000 each, and don't have any particular connection to California
Given that there are that many of them in San Jose, why not include it there? I'd expect something like that in Minneapolis as well, I would expect the same. Arabs in Dearborn, seems like fair game to me.
> Nor does it explain why the curriculum draws a stark distinction between white kids
They actually do mention white kids, Slavic and Jewish are in the books we get at my kindergartener's west coast school. I noticed you didn't mention those, however. Mostly it doesn't matter since white kids are still in the majority, why would they emphasize majority experiences when talking about minorities?
You might be mixing up your Germans with your Irish, were absolutely subject to discrimination when they first moved here. This discrimination was fundamental to the development of Irish American enclaves in many cities, including especially NY and Chicago.
German immigrants were subject to some, but significantly less discrimination owing to their shared Protestant backgrounds with the majority English Protestant descendants comprising of the American upper class.
But more to the point: almost no German Americans were imprisoned during WWII despite many of them providing intelligence to the Nazis. OTOH, nearly every Japanese American on the West Coast was incarcerated in Manzanar and their property and businesses confiscated.
There were under 150,000 Japanese Americans in the 1940s. There’s 1.4 million Japanese Americans, and despite being one of the oldest Asian American groups, the vast majority of those came here or are descended from people who came here in the latter half of the 20th century.
German Americans were treated better than the Japanese, though I think you’re overstating the significance of Protestantism. A large fraction of German Americans are Catholic. More significant is that Germans by then were a large, well established immigrant group. They made up almost 9% of the population in the 1790 census. By 1920 there were 9 million German Americans. Even still, the discrimination they faced was far worse than what say Muslims faced during the war on terror: https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entries/german-ame....
> socialize them to understand their ethnic identity in terms of American slavery.
This is historical context for why these groups are still face discrimination today. Someone who's racist has no idea if you're a recent immigrant from Nigeria, you will face the exact same discrimination as a descendant of slaves. This is the public education equivalent of "the talk" parents have to have with their kids for why they're treated differently.
One of my good friends is a second generation immigrant from Thailand and in white suburbia in the 80s her mom was told to go back to China. Even people totally disconnected from the historical acts of discrimination are affected by it.
The "standard" US history curriculum is comically bad, come over on my Mayflower, have Thanksgiving with the Indians, Taxation Without Representation, Tea Party, The Federalist Papers, The Constitution, slavery, The underground railroad, Lincoln's emancipation proclamation, civil war for two seconds, jim crow, then MLK solved racism, paper shuffling, the end, Murica!
In practice it seems many racists actually do discriminate based at least partially on national origin. I have overhead multiple US small business owners state that they like to hire recent immigrants from Nigeria (and other African countries) instead of the native-born descendants of slaves due to a perceived difference in employee work ethic and attitude.
To be clear I don't support discrimination and I abhor all forms of racism. I'm just pointing out that different groups may have wildly different experiences with discrimination despite looking somewhat similar.
> This is historical context for why these groups are still face discrimination today. Someone who's racist has no idea if you're a recent immigrant from Nigeria, you will face the exact same discrimination as a descendant of slaves.
They may face prejudice, but they don’t face what academics today would call systemic or structural racism. To use your example, Nigerian immigrants have such high income mobility they reach parity with similarly educated whites by the second generation. Indeed, studies show that virtually all immigrant groups enjoy higher income mobility than native born Americans.
> This is the public education equivalent of "the talk" parents have to have with their kids for why they're treated differently.
What “talk?” My parents never said anything about racism, even though I grew up in an almost completely white Virginia town in the 1990s. And I’m grateful for it, because I never had any reason to expect to be treated differently. It would be wildly inappropriate for a teacher, 80% of whom are white, to try and address how a minority kid should relate to living in a white majority society.
> One of my good friends is a second generation immigrant from Thailand and in white suburbia in the 80s her mom was told to go back to China. Even people totally disconnected from the historical acts of discrimination are affected by it.
And? Did that keep your friend from getting into school? Getting jobs? Etc? Prejudice between different groups is nearly universal. I was born in Thailand, but my family is from Bangladesh. If I had continued to live there I can guarantee you I’d have more than a few stories. The other day I was in an elevator with some Arabs, and one muttered “Bangladeshi” to the other. I don’t speak Arabic but I guarantee you he wasn’t saying anything nice!
As an Asian, your friend is more likely to make more money and live longer, and less likely to get shot by the police or incarcerated than the average white person. Comments like that are unpleasant and rude, but have nothing to do with historically rooted structural racism.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 92.9 ms ] threadIs that view accurate? Or do I just have that view due to media bias(The bias being that there's no news story: 'Random School is well run, more at 11')?
The “bad” public schools are a result of increasing and spreading social dysfunction (see the other comment in this thread about drug dogs), not funding.
I'm from NZ, so my US partner's Oakland, CA high school experience was horrifying:
On the other hand, if you drove 15 minutes up the road into Berkeley, their public high schools have their own swimming pools.I now live in Southern California and am always surprised to see schools as 1-story buildings from the 1960s with so many trailers outside. I have no idea how far the teachers have to drive to get to them as the houses around nice schools cost so much.
The problem is that American kids are bad—poorly behaved and uninterested in education.
If you live in an area with lots of halfway houses like I did as a kid (We called it murder valley), you can expect: Violence, blatant racism, drugs, gangs, sexual assault, weekly riots, casual fights, attempted murders, one or two actual murders a year, burnt out teachers, closed after school programs, dangerous busses, and police harassing you constantly.
I was constantly getting hauled up to the office because I had the same name as a career criminal at the age of 13. Substitutes would refer kids to the office who looked sleepy for the nurse to check us for drug use. I was in constant fights with black and hispanic kids trying to prove something to their friends by beating up the white kids. Drug dogs would patrol the school. The place was run like a prison. Walking home, one of the girls in my high school went missing and her pelvis was found in a ditch a few years later...
So yeah, some of them are pretty bad. But at least we have the most overfunded military in the world.
In nicer neighborhoods, the local high school is frequently comparable to a small college, with the academic (and athletic) facilities and staff to match.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaqI6y_B0Os
School finding is primary via property taxes, so rich districts get good schools and poor ones struggle.
On the other hand, the US also has some of the best public schools in the world. In a lot of cases, public schools beat out very expensive private schools in metrics like average AP score, average number of AP tests taken, average SAT, percentage of students at or above grade level, etc. At this high end, the US school system outperforms peer countries significantly. Its often the case that these high performing schools are relatively accessible for non wealthy people as well. You just need to rent an apartment nearby. You don't need to buy a property in Martha's vineyard. If these types of schools didn't exist, and the US public school system was as bad overall as it appears in the media, I suspect we would not have as many ambitious and highly educated immigrants wanting to live here.
also, the reason they don't cover groups that are considered "white" is because as stated above, in regular american history those history of italians/germans/irish are covered there well, but things like the chinese exclusion act, or railroad workers usually get about a paragraph or so in regular history (speaking of my own experience anyways) so adding more context and depth is good no?
maybe, maybe not, but whats your alternative? don't teach history of generally ignored groups in ethnic studies?Ask that to the people who put together the model ethnic studies curriculum! If you look at the sample lessons for Asians, almost all are about discrimination, exclusion, etc.
> ethnic studies covers much more than that...
In theory, yes, in practice, no. You can’t realistically expect white Americans to teach Indian or Chinese kids about their own cultures and experiences. So the focus tends to be on how white Americans relate to minorities, which in liberal states like California tends to be through the lens of white guilt. That’s how you end up with a curriculum that’s all about discrimination.
> also, the reason they don't cover groups that are considered "white" is because as stated above, in regular american history those history of italians/germans/irish are covered there well
We didn’t cover German, Italian, and Irish immigration in K-12. Maybe we spent a day talking about Ellis Island. More importantly, we never learned anything about the discrimination against those groups.
There is a clear dichotomy: white kids are not taught ethnic identity, and are not taught to identify with the struggles of and discrimination against their immigrant ancestors. Minority kids, by contrast, are taught to be conscious of their race and ethnicity, and are taught to identify with the struggles of Asians or Hispanics that in most cases they aren’t even descended from.
This dichotomy is historically inaccurate. For example, if you really want to understand how say Hispanics fit into America—economically, socially, and culturally—the closest analogy is to Italians. But in California, Italian kids are taught something completely different about their identity than Hispanic kids. Separating non-white immigrants from previous generations of immigrants paints a misleading picture of the immigrant experience.
This dichotomy is also bad for minority kids. It socializes them to think of themselves as victims without agency, who are acted upon by white people who have agency. It’s othering—you have white teachers talking about what “we” did to “you.” And it’s enormously demotivating for kids to be told that they have the decked stacked against them because of your skin color.
> maybe, maybe not, but whats your alternative? don't teach history of generally ignored groups in ethnic studies?
Yes. My kids don’t need to learn Asian American history from some white lady. And they certainly don’t need their white friends being socialized to think of them as being somehow different. I don’t care how good the intentions are—teachers highlighting differences isn’t a good thing for visible minorities.
And if we insist on doing so, we should strive to be accurate. If you’re going to teach about the Chinese Exclusion Act, also teach the German American kids about when states banned the teaching of German. Teach Italian and Irish kids about anti-Catholic school legislation.
This is done in the Midwest all the time (Know-Nothing party, etc in US history)
i mostly agree with the most of your reasoning, i guess for me i don't see it as a huge issue personally... i come from a mixed background so learning about how my ancestors were treated didn't make me feel victimized... but n=1 and all that
i'd like to see some studies about these things than just our personal experiences tbh
its hard to discuss this because curriculum varies widely depending on where you went to school (for me these were quite thoroughly covered), again it would be good to have some studies/data i think thats totally fair while i can totally understand this feeling (i've thought this myself at times) how do you know a priori the teacher will be white? and furthermore, does it really matter in the end as long as they are fair?80% of public school teachers are white, and outside majority-minority schools, it’s 90%+. And I think for this issue, it makes a difference. Parents of white kids have a fundamentally different stake in these issues than parents of minority kids. As a parent of brown kids, my concern is about ensuring their success in a society where they will always be visibly different. I don’t think it’s an especially racist society, but being different is always a liability. (And if it was as racist a country as many white people say it is, that would be even more reason to teach my kids to keep their heads down and their mouths shut!) By contrast, in my experience, white people overwhelmingly think of these issues in terms of what they want their white kids to learn about how to treat “other people.”
One of those things is much worse than the other two. Two are limitations in education, the other is not allowing people to come from that country at all.
We (well, I assume Californians and Washingtonians) are on the west coast, locally speaking, discrimination against Chinese and Japanese were local issues more than discrimination against Italians and Irish, which happened more on the east coast and perhaps Midwest. We teach the former because they are a part of our region’s own tragic past, not the tragic past of other regions in the USA.
No, trying to erase the culture of people who are already here out of xenophobia is much worse than exercising border control over who can immigrate. More importantly, most German and Italian Americans are descended from the people who faced discrimination. By contrast, Asian Americans are most not descended from groups that faced discrimination. That history doesn't help those kids understand their own experience and place in American society.
That distinction is critical insofar as we consider the present effect of past discrimination. In structural terms, Asian and Hispanic Americans are the least disadvantaged of any non-British immigrant group. Life in America has been far easier for me as a brown guy with Muslim name who entered adulthood right after 9/11, then it would have been if I had been Italian in 1930. The California ethnic studies curriculum wildly misrepresents that state of affairs.
That California biases to Asian and Hispanic history in the Americas is purely due to California being located in California rather than New York.
There are 5.6 million Asians in California. The vast majority have no connection whatsoever to Chinese railroad workers or Japanese internment. Moreover, the model curriculum also covers Hmong and Cambodian immigrants, which number less than 100,000 each, and don't have any particular connection to California (apart from California being a big state and having a lot of every group). Meanwhile, Orange County has 140,000 German Americans, and for some reason they don't merit an ethnic studies unit.
> That California biases to Asian and Hispanic history in the Americas is purely due to California being located in California rather than New York.
That doesn't explain why the model curriculum frames "ethnic studies" almost entirely in terms of sob stories. Nor does it explain why the curriculum draws a stark distinction between white kids, who aren't invited to identify with historic oppression, and Asian and Hispanic immigrants, who are.
They definitely empathize with it, more than gangs of New York-style stories pitting Italian vs. Irish immigrants.
> Moreover, the model curriculum also covers Hmong and Cambodian immigrants, which number less than 100,000 each, and don't have any particular connection to California
Given that there are that many of them in San Jose, why not include it there? I'd expect something like that in Minneapolis as well, I would expect the same. Arabs in Dearborn, seems like fair game to me.
> Nor does it explain why the curriculum draws a stark distinction between white kids
They actually do mention white kids, Slavic and Jewish are in the books we get at my kindergartener's west coast school. I noticed you didn't mention those, however. Mostly it doesn't matter since white kids are still in the majority, why would they emphasize majority experiences when talking about minorities?
German immigrants were subject to some, but significantly less discrimination owing to their shared Protestant backgrounds with the majority English Protestant descendants comprising of the American upper class.
But more to the point: almost no German Americans were imprisoned during WWII despite many of them providing intelligence to the Nazis. OTOH, nearly every Japanese American on the West Coast was incarcerated in Manzanar and their property and businesses confiscated.
German Americans were treated better than the Japanese, though I think you’re overstating the significance of Protestantism. A large fraction of German Americans are Catholic. More significant is that Germans by then were a large, well established immigrant group. They made up almost 9% of the population in the 1790 census. By 1920 there were 9 million German Americans. Even still, the discrimination they faced was far worse than what say Muslims faced during the war on terror: https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entries/german-ame....
This is historical context for why these groups are still face discrimination today. Someone who's racist has no idea if you're a recent immigrant from Nigeria, you will face the exact same discrimination as a descendant of slaves. This is the public education equivalent of "the talk" parents have to have with their kids for why they're treated differently.
One of my good friends is a second generation immigrant from Thailand and in white suburbia in the 80s her mom was told to go back to China. Even people totally disconnected from the historical acts of discrimination are affected by it.
The "standard" US history curriculum is comically bad, come over on my Mayflower, have Thanksgiving with the Indians, Taxation Without Representation, Tea Party, The Federalist Papers, The Constitution, slavery, The underground railroad, Lincoln's emancipation proclamation, civil war for two seconds, jim crow, then MLK solved racism, paper shuffling, the end, Murica!
To be clear I don't support discrimination and I abhor all forms of racism. I'm just pointing out that different groups may have wildly different experiences with discrimination despite looking somewhat similar.
They may face prejudice, but they don’t face what academics today would call systemic or structural racism. To use your example, Nigerian immigrants have such high income mobility they reach parity with similarly educated whites by the second generation. Indeed, studies show that virtually all immigrant groups enjoy higher income mobility than native born Americans.
> This is the public education equivalent of "the talk" parents have to have with their kids for why they're treated differently.
What “talk?” My parents never said anything about racism, even though I grew up in an almost completely white Virginia town in the 1990s. And I’m grateful for it, because I never had any reason to expect to be treated differently. It would be wildly inappropriate for a teacher, 80% of whom are white, to try and address how a minority kid should relate to living in a white majority society.
> One of my good friends is a second generation immigrant from Thailand and in white suburbia in the 80s her mom was told to go back to China. Even people totally disconnected from the historical acts of discrimination are affected by it.
And? Did that keep your friend from getting into school? Getting jobs? Etc? Prejudice between different groups is nearly universal. I was born in Thailand, but my family is from Bangladesh. If I had continued to live there I can guarantee you I’d have more than a few stories. The other day I was in an elevator with some Arabs, and one muttered “Bangladeshi” to the other. I don’t speak Arabic but I guarantee you he wasn’t saying anything nice!
As an Asian, your friend is more likely to make more money and live longer, and less likely to get shot by the police or incarcerated than the average white person. Comments like that are unpleasant and rude, but have nothing to do with historically rooted structural racism.