“All you have to do for your kid to receive the best education in the Bay Area is put them in a classroom where their teachers will not speak English for most of the school day.” That’s what columnist Jay Caspian Kang writes about the Yu Ming Charter School, a free K-8 Mandarin-immersion school in North Oakland that has attracted a diverse student body. For some parents, the school’s language program is the main source of its appeal. “China is a growing country, and maybe this will set her up for success,” one parent says, talking about her daughter, a first grader. But, for others, the Mandarin model is more of a quirk, secondary to the school’s high test scores and top ranking. Kang speaks to a variety of parents, and explores the idea that the families drawn to such a school represent a distinct cohort of Americans—one that blurs traditional ethnic and class distinctions—who are looking for a different kind of public education for their kids. —Ian Crouch, The New Yorker newsletter editor
Excerpts from Caspian Kang’s column:
There’s a thoroughly unsympathetic but deeply felt crisis that hits the grown children of upwardly mobile immigrants. These second-generation strivers—who are largely assimilated, educated in the U.S., and often ostensibly liberal—have children of their own, and, when faced with the more lax customs of their neighbors, start to wonder if their parents, who forced them into all sorts of academic labor, might have been right all along. I call this population the Amy Chua Silent Majority, after the infamous author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” Despite the association with Asian American tropes, members of the A.C.S.M. are actually quite ethnically diverse. I’ve met Russians, West Africans, West Indians, Central Americans, and South Asians who belong to this group. They squirm every time they hear about “play-based learning.” They collectively roll their eyes at the idea of homework bans. They wonder if it’s really necessary to let kids just be kids…
Immigrant parents who feel alienated from or squeamish about public schools still send their kids to parochial schools. But, in many of America’s largest cities, another option, which has none of the religious hangups of the Catholic school nor the price of private schools, has presented itself: the Chinese-language-immersion school…
The main campus of the Yu Ming Charter School, in North Oakland, is situated in a former Catholic school, near the intersection of Alcatraz Avenue and San Pablo Avenue. A relief of the Virgin Mary still hangs above the front door, but the interior has been scrubbed clean of any vestiges of its parochial past. There are no converted altars or pews or cramped quarters that might have served the nuns…
The students at Yu Ming wear navy-blue and white uniforms, and learn in classrooms that are modest and cozy. Kindergarteners sit on a rug on the floor and listen to a teacher speak to them in Mandarin; across the hall, first graders jump up and down, singing a Chinese song set to the tune of “Ten Little Fingers.” I visited during just the seventh week of classes, meaning that roughly seventy per cent of the kindergarten class could not yet understand what was being taught, except through physical cues or the very occasional hint whispered in English. But, by the second grade, they will know how to write stories in Chinese characters. In third grade, they’ll start taking the standardized tests required of every student in California—and they’ll most likely excel…
In the 2018-19 school year, ninety-four per cent of Yu Ming’s third through eighth graders met or exceeded standards on the English language and literacy section of California’s main standardized test, compared with just a fifty-per-cent pass rate statewide. In the Oakland Unified School District (O.U.S.D.), only forty-five per cent of students passed. The disparities in math were even more stark, with ninety-four per cent of Yu Ming students exceeding standards, compared with O.U.S.D.’s thirty-six-per-cent pass rate. U.S. News & World Report ranked Yu Ming the seventh-best elementary school in California—and it was the only entry in the top ten that is not a magnet school or situated in a wealthy suburb. The Web site Niche, which provides a popular database for school rankings, named Yu Ming the top charter elementary and charter middle school in the Bay Area. Owing to enormous demand among local families, Yu Ming has expanded to three campuses across Alameda County. According to the school’s internal numbers, it has about two and a half applicants for every kindergarten seat…
All of this is unusual for a Chinese-language-immersion school, especially in Oakland, where enrollment in both district and charter public schools has been declining in the past five years. One might attribute Yu Ming’s success to an increase in the Chinese population in the area, or even some trend that draws Chinese American parents back to their cultural roots. But what’s striking about the student body of Yu Ming is how many students aren’t Chinese. Roughly half of Yu Ming students are Asian American; an additional twenty-three per cent are “two or more races” (the bizarre institutional term given to multiracial kids). The remaining students are split relatively evenly between Black, Latino and white. Only about thirty per cent of kindergarteners at Yu Ming speak Mandarin when they get to the school; others come from households that speak Afrikaans, Mongolian, Russian, Yoruba. Sue Park, the school’s head (who has the odd title of C.E.O.), is Korean American, and does not speak Mandarin, nor can she read or write in Chinese… READ THE STORY >
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Honorary contributors to DesPardes: Adil Khan, Ajaz Ahmed, Anwar Abbas, Arif Mirza, Aziz Ahmed, Bawar Tawfik, Dr. Razzak Ladha, Dr. Syed M. Ali, G. R. Baloch, Haseeb Warsi, Hasham Saddique, Jamil Usman, Javed Abbasi, Jawed Ahmed, Ishaq Saqi, Khalid Sharif, Majid Ahmed, Masroor Ali, Md. Ahmed, Md. Najibullah, Mushtaq Siddiqui,, Mustafa Jivanjee, Nusrat Jamshed, Shahbaz Ali, Shahid Hamza, Shahid Nayeem, Shareer Alam, Syed Ali Ammaar Jafrey, Syed Hamza Gilani, Shaheer Alam, Syed Hasan Javed, Syed M. Ali, Tahir Sohail, Tariq Chaudhry, Usman Nazir
