-- the issue is family culture and upbringing, usually reinforced by the expectations of friends from similar homes--

Living in Chicago, you don't say, tell me something I didn't know.

Just one point:

This sort of bigotry isn't soft in the least. It is as hard as it comes. It doesn't destroy the people's bodies, it destroys their future, and probably the future of any offspring as well as demeaning the culture in which they live.

Baloney. My kids went to a school with more than half Asian students. The Asians did not average A-.

A big part of the problem -- all of Bush's problem -- is that what he wants to measure cannot be measured by the tools he wants to use.

I had a talk once with a professor at a top engineering school about the differences between his American and Asian graduate students.

The Asians were, naturally, the cream of the crop. Studious, hardworking. But they had been trained to "know the answer." There was one, and they would know it or die trying.

Of course, in engineering, there is never "the answer." Americans students get this. Asians, by and large, don't.

As the prof told me, they want to know the exact answer, and if they cannot figure it out on their own, they want to find it in the back of the book and memorize it.

I was surprised by this, but I have since asked every engineering prof I meet about it, and all of them agree it's true.

Asians do great on multiple-guess tests.

Harry:

With respect, you are stereotyping pretty hard here. Dismissing the students who work like slaves and beat the pants off ours as automatons with a tragic flaw is perhaps a little mean-spirited.

Yes, creativity and originality have always been American strengths. May they always be. But surely a problem is that these have become "stand-alone" goals in the sense that American students and their parents extol them in isolation. It is one thing to master a field thoroughly and then build something new and exciting on that base. It is quite another to skip the hard work and imagine one can jump straight from ignorance to sublime creativity. Or, even worse, see factual and historical learning as an impediment that stifles the spirit.

I know nothing about engineering, but even in my wife's private, fairly no-nonsense school, I grit my teeth when I read the posted poetry from the classes. It is always free-verse and self-regarding and ultimately very boring. ("Snow tickling my nose...I love winter!" Yawn!) The kids couldn't put a rhyme or metre together to save their lives, and are being deprived of the fun and challenge of trying. I won't even talk about the "verbally-gifted" children who can't read or sit still.

OK, so it's only gradeschool poetry, but Harry, don't you think that it is a bit of a fraud to keep encouraging our youth to strive for originality at the cost of downgrading the need to master that which is already known? Wouldn't you agree that we are paying dearly for shielding our kids from the rote, demanding, repetitive learning the Asians excel at? How many creative, original engineers do we need? More importantly, how many are we willing to pay for?

Harry:

Which is one reason why you're so wrong about Japan's future.

Peter, all you say is fine.

I was trying to make a couple points, though.

That Asians do well in rote tests is not a sign of their overall superiority. I don't buy "white man can't sing the blues" arguments in any form, nor do I buy them turned inside out.

It's a fact, though, that devotion to robotic answers is no better an educational program than Summerhill.

The second point is borrowed from Howard Gardner. It isn't easy to define intelligence, even harder to measure it.

No Child Left Behind is mere ritual. The program does not understand the problem and cannot provide a solution.

The solution is to voucherize education dollars and let consumers spend them as they see fit.

Is it bigotry, when the expectations are not external to your race/culture, but have been internalized ?

Michael-

Yes- most commonly, it's called internalized racism/ oppression.

Vouchers for consumers. This is the conundrum of a democracy within capitalism. Schools are for the citizenry- socialist in nature, yes- for the betterment of our country not for ME, Me, me. Vouchers have, along with Charter schools, proven to further the gap, privatize public education, and propagate further educational segregation. Not to mention, in most cases, they are unconstitutional (despite what the Ohio Supreme Court said).

There are a few issues with the Thernstrom's claims- while some of them are quite intriguing, there are a number of issues they don't look at. They claim that every reform effort ever tried has failed. One reform effort we've never tried, however, is equal distribution of funding (except in VT, and the improvements are impressive). They also look at a number of "excuses"- poverty, integration, inadequate spending, class size, teachers...but they never say a dang thing about the tests. SAT's and nearly every high-stakes test in this country shows significant cultural bias- Deborah Meier once commented that if the same percentage of White students were failing these tests, the first thing to happen would be to throw out the tests. It's not even brought up. Also, education, compounded with 400 years of racial discrimination (let's not forget that we have de facto only had integrated schooling for about 30 years- and it is arguably more segregated now than 20 years ago), is WAY too complicated to try to account for it through any one of these issues (poverty, integration, etc)- it is ALL of these things- and what do they expect- most of these reform efforts have a life-span of 3 years. You pour some money into a school for a few years and expect to undo a lifetime of inadequate schooling?

I agree that there are cultural differences in homes- the problem is that there aren't cultural differences in our schools- in curriculum, pedagogy (the Thernstroms talk about Black teachers not having an effect- most of whom went through emergency or alternative certification programs and many of whom get jobs out of high-needs districts).

Absolutely schools should instill a culture of success- they should also provide EVERY student in this country with every opportunity they can imagine- as Kozol has said, if extra-curricular activities, recreational facilities, etc are appropriate for the sons and daughters of our top CEO's, then they are appropriate for every son and daughter in every public school in this country.