My daughter attended Lowell, the high school in question, for about a week and hated it. It is much like a prison--the physical environment and some of the staff--and children march there glumly through the fog towards it in the morning without any happiness or joy, most of them not even talking. It is not a place where learning is joyful. Competition is so stiff that many of the students are utterly miserable. I felt horrible dropping my daughter off at such a glum place,and was relieved when she realized it was not a good choice for her.
Making it even more Chinese would cause this to become an even worse situation, in my opinion. It seems reasonable that only 45% of the students can be from one racial group. In San Francisco, at least, Asian parents tend as a group to pressure their children to succeed academically. Although it is a definitely stereotype, I observed that when toddlers are playing in the parks the Asian parents tend to socialize them not to smile or establish eye contact, which is the opposite of the way non-Asian children are socialized here. And Asian parents tend to stress math and science intensely, at the expense of other subjects.
This is not an indictment of all Asian parents--math and science will probably get their children high tech jobs, and as more recent immigrants they are driven to work very hard and be successful, so is is logical that things would be this way. But certainly, if some spaces at Lowell are not held out for white, black and other non-Asian children, it would even up being an even worse place to go to school.
What really needs to happen is to create enough high quality high schools that there is enough room for all the children who are doing well in college preparatory courses. As it is in San Francisco, most high achieving white children attend private schools in high school because Lowell is the only public choice, and it cannot hold all who are well qualified to go. |
