Education: Challenges & Perspectives – General Session I

Ngee Pong Chang:

We had an opening session, with all the star-studded speakers, and they all complimented us on having had a very successful first conference, leading out to a second conference.  We’ve also been challenged to have a topic for the next annual conference.  But before we think of the next conference, let us settle down now for the meat of this conference.  And I am very pleased to have this panel of speakers to address further the issues of education and what the Asian American role would be in it.  I am pleased to introduce our City of University’s Dean of Education, Dean Michelli.

When you heard the speech by Diana Lam, it was on sheets of paper, reading, which is the traditional way in the school system to learn how to read.  A very good speech.  Now we have the university level, where we resort to higher technology.  And higher technology involves this [pointing to overhead projector].

Nicholas Michelli:

This is actually low tech.  Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. I was looking at the program and all the speakers appeared to be on time, so I thought this was going to be the world’s first on-time conference.  Or maybe it was a cultural thing.

Good morning, I am just delighted to have the opportunity to talk to you a bit about the issues that we face.  I am University Dean for Teacher Education for the City University of New York.  I was a dean for 20 years in another university.  For 20 years, I worked as a college dean and my college used to say that being the dean of a college is like being in charge of a cemetery, there are lots of people underneath you but nobody is listening.  So now being the Dean for Teacher Education which means I have no students, I have no faculty, but I have 17 deans and 17 presidents that I work with.  So the other day, as I was trying to come up with another analogy I said, “You know, being a university dean is like trying to move a cemetery.  It’s very hard work and there is not internal support.”

So, it is a hard job, what I am trying to do is to move the university into a position where we would be in the forefront of preparing teachers for the New York City public schools in making a difference in this society.  And we have a responsibility, I go home every night and I worry a great deal.  I worry about the children, I worry about the public schools of New York.  And that means I worry about the future of this society.  I think you understand that the success that we have with New York City, and making a difference in the quality of life in the potential of these young people really, will define the next generation for this society.

Although I certainly want to address some of the issues that are closer to some of the issues that the Asian American community has, but let me show you some of the things that I, in fact,  go home and worry about.  These are some data from a very interesting document that is called “Keeping Track of New York’s Children.”  This gives you some sense of the sorts of things that we are interested in New York City.

First of all, one in every 4 people in NYC is a child, this is tremendous population that we are dealing with.  As you come down the list, you can see every day 316 more are born, every day 2 die before their first birthday, 172 are born in poor families, 29 to teen parents, 21 to a mother without having adequate prenatal care, 26 with low birth weight.  Every day 171,000 children are in poverty in this city, 11,500 are homeless.  Every 3 days, a person under 19 is murdered, nearly 60% of children in NYC middle schools are below reading in the state standards, 15,700 children use health mental services, 151 children are reported abused and neglected.  And that of course is a backdrop, a backdrop that causes tremendous concern for me, and I hope for you, in trying to meet the needs these children have.

What I would like you to do is to say a word about the purposes of public education of the United States.  You may say: “I know what the purposes are.”  I am sure you do, but I think we are confused in this society in some respects.  Let me tell you what I think the purposes are, this is my list.  I think that we should focus it this way – first of all, one of our purposes clearly is as Commissioner said, to ensure our children secure the best possible position they can in this economy so they have the security and the rewards they seek.  That’s the purpose of the public education since about the 19th century.

It wasn’t a great purpose early on because it was pretty clear that people were going to go into roles in the workforce no matter what happened to them.  But since the industrialization of this society, clearly that has become a function that is preparing the people to take their position in the workforce.  I don’t doubt that continues to be a very important function for American public education.  However, there are two other functions that I want to make very clear.

The second function of American public education is to prepare young people to become active, critical participants in our social and political democracy.  If you go through American schools, you will find that almost every one of them lists this as one of their purposes for their schools.  Yet, you will find very little action that translates that into practice.  And we have heard at least three speakers this morning already that talked about the importance of civic responsibilities and how to handle it if you want civic responsibilities.  The young people who are participating in the democracy, where are they going to learn that?  Well, certainly they learn at home, but they also must learn in schools exactly what that means and what the purposes is.

Let me show you one of the quotes from my favorite political scientist.  This is Benjamin Barber who is a sociologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.  I think you can just get a sense of this from the point that he makes.  “We make the assumption in the society that democracy will just go on forever in each generation.”  And Barber makes a point that in fact democracy is carefully defended on education, and that this is what he says, “not an actual form of human association, but rather an extraordinarily rare contrivance of cultural imagination.  Countless societies that have had exhibited properties of democracy, there are a lot of them, and certainly we are not done in this society.”  So, what Barber argues is that this critical role of having young people learn how to make judgments and make decisions about the issues that they face is a part of American education.

The third purpose, at least on my list, is that we need to have young people who can learn to lead rich and rewarding personal lives as full participants, as what [Michael –] called the human conversation.  And this means, for example, being certain that they are open to arts, that they learn about literature, the general education, and the richness of this human society that we are all part of, multiculturally becomes a part of what they learn to do.  Very clear purposes: the economic life that young people will lead, their participation in the democracy is very important to do, and they lead rich and rewarding personal lives.

But, as it turns out, a lot of people, many of them policymakers, some of them politicians, some of them journalists, have come to the conclusion that the purpose of the American public education is to have people pass other people’s tests, and that examinations are in fact, the outcome.  In fact, this is the way that we measure the success of the schools.  I think what we have to be cognizant of and be careful about is being certain that those tests that increasingly drive the way we live our lives as educators are consonantly consonant with what we believe the purposes of public education are.  And they are in consonant with the outcome that either you have in mind or you would argue for, or I would argue for that enable us to have a mismatch.  We have a mismatch between the purposes and the sort of things that are being measured.

Now let me give you a quick example, and then I am going to talk about two more things and then stop.  If these are our purposes then this should be our focus both in the schools and for the teachers that we prepare.  City University will prepare 6,000 teachers this year.  New York City needs 11,000 new teachers by this September so if anyone wants to volunteer, we can talk.  Here’s the list of goals, first of all, we must make absolutely certain that young people have access to knowledge, that they really learn the content that is deeply embedded in the disciplines that are part of our culture.

Not only that, but they should learn to think critically about those disciplines and about that knowledge.  Now this is our moral responsibility and here is the disconnect in public schools and urban centers, probably the schools that your children attended, or perhaps that you attended.  This means transmitting knowledge to children, and that’s one of the things the test structure leads to, that we want to be sure that we hack that knowledge into the minds of the children that we are dealing with so they can pass tests and go do what they have to do.

That is not what we would find in the suburban societies and the societies where we don’t have the crises we have in urban schools.  There, children learn that they can have the power to create knowledge.  They learn that knowledge is not something that people with power have and that their job is to accept it, but rather that they have the ability to contribute to knowledge over time.

Now, I challenge you to find one CEO in this society that doesn’t know that, who doesn’t know that they have the power to create knowledge.  And yet, you will find in many schools that this is not the case. I have a good friend who is a motivation speaker.  He says: “Listen, I can teach you eight words and if you learn them we guarantee you a job.” And the eight words are: “Do you want that with or without fries?”  It’s funny thinking that we can take a bit of knowledge and say “This is knowledge, this is access to knowledge and this will allow you to function.”   But of course, it is tracking to the lowest level within the economy.

Initially, how do we get teachers who can have this deep knowledge? Every one of our graduates major in the field that they are going to teach.  A lot of people think that what they study is how to operate an overhead projector.  Well, they don’t.  What they learn is the content knowledge that is essential to their success as teachers.  And when I talk about democratic practice, I want to be clear that I am not talking just about learning how to register and how to vote, although those are obviously important.  But these are examples of some of the qualities we look for, that we need to develop among young children.  They are things like the ability to make good judgments, and we can talk for an hour about making good judgments, and I promise you that we won’t.  But that is a very important issue.

When do you have to argue well for one’s positions?  When you believe in something, how do you learn how to stand up for it? How do you learn how to argue and respond to the positions that other people hold? What about learning how to compromise? Because democracy is about compromising, it’s about learning how to compromise what you are protecting, where do you draw the line with respect to finding the common ground between you and someone you don’t agree with perhaps.  Finally, learning how to deal with others’ perspectives, learning understanding.  In our view, these are not the sweet things that one teaches in a separate course, but they are focally to be the essence of the school.

I spent the day on Tuesday in a public school in East Harlem.  That was about the most diverse place I have ever seen.  Children from all over the world… there were Asian children, there were children from the Arab nations, there were lots of children from South America, lots of African American children.  It was, I think the most intense learning environment that I have been in a very long time.  What I found was that teachers who were understanding that some of these goals for some children are very difficult because teaching involves being responsive to cultural differences.  It involves learning that, for some children it is very difficult to stand up to take a position and argue.

For some children, for example, a lot of researches have been done with African American children on the nature the dialog that occurs at home, the way that interaction occurs, what children learn about what is appropriate for children to do and say when they are among adults.  And that often works counter to what we expect them to do in schools.  We are just beginning to understand, according to the applications to the cultures that are represented in the Asian community.  Very significant, trying to understand, so that teachers are able to find out what reasonable expectations are in terms of the behaviors that children exhibit, and then adapt them so they really do adjust to the highest goals.

We know unequivocally that there is one factor, and this is based on the research done by [inaudible] and others and I can give you the research later.  We know that there is one factor that is most important for student achievement.  That over time, virtually every other problem that we face—let me show you what those problems are quickly, this will be an eye test—these are the challenges that children face, in terms of their success ultimately.  Born into poor families, below poverty, low birth weight, mothers who have no prenatal care,  infant mortality rate per 1,000 births.  Children who are high school drop outs, birth to teen mothers, children who are abused and maltreated, and the percentage of children that is in foster care.  As it turns out, if we look across this spectrum, you will find that the lowest percentages in almost all of these challenges are for Asian children in schools.

But of course as Diana Lam rightly pointed out, the Asian community may be the most diverse in the city.  If you look at, for example, what is labeled as “Hispanics”, we are talking about a group of people whom for example, there is a common language.  Yet for the Asian community which we tend to group together we have this tremendous degree of variation.  But you can see, that at least by these measures it is only in three areas—children born into poor families, children below poverty, and children with no prenatal care, where the Asian community is not in the best position with respect to this.  Not withstanding all the challenges that one might expect to face.

What I want to point out is that the academic success is one thing, the other kinds of success are really another issue.  What we can do to overcome the challenges that children face?  Because I hope you are like me, who care as much as about the children who at risk as we reflected here as about your own children.  Because I think we have to be if we are going to the point where this society will do it most for these children.

All the research shows, I am sorry to say this, but the one factor that makes the difference in overcoming poverty and overcoming social economic class, and most of these challenges is the quality of the teachers that children experience.  Over and over again, we can demonstrate that when teachers are prepared with deep content knowledge, with understanding of cultural differences and child development, they make a difference.  Those are the qualities that in fact, this state sets up for certification.  New York has the highest standards for certification in the nation.

So, what happens is I want you to know the challenges we face in this society.  If you look at New York City, and assume that the quality of teaching is going to make all the difference in the world.  This is the difference, this is the distributions of certified teachers in New York City as of 2001 and 2002.  The darker the mark, the fewer the certified teachers.  And as you can see, there is a tremendous inequity in that the uncertified teachers almost uniformly fall in the great African American and Latino ghettos of New York City.  So that clearly, the distribution of quality teachers in New York City does not match up with anything that we would describe as equity.

Now, it is unsurprising that, therefore, when we look at distribution of test scores—this one is Mathematics—almost precisely the same distribution.  You will find that it is the same for Reading as well, I have a similar chart that we can show you.  Now I am not suggesting an absolute cause and effect here because those are other factors, but I will leave you with these thoughts.  I cannot, as University Dean for Teachers Education, do teach education through the College of Education alone.  I need Arts and Science faculty, I need all faculty in our university to recognize that this has to be a university-wide responsibility.  Secondly, I need New York City public schools to be certain that our future teachers have the appropriate fields of experiences that prepare them to teach.

This is a big challenge.  We cannot possibly overcome all of those barriers that we listed earlier without doing things like redistributing income.  And we know that that isn’t going to happen in this society.  But at the very least, we can be certain that we meet the educational needs of our children by being sure we know what the purposes of the schools are, and being certain that we prepare teachers to achieve those purposes.  Teachers who have deep content knowledge, teachers who understand what democracy is all about.  And not only that, teachers who see education as a vehicle for social justice.  Unless we get to that point, I worry at night, I lose sleep at night about the next generation.

Ngee Pong Chang:

Thank you, Dean Michelli .  Next we have a member of our Board of Trustees, Wellington Chen, who has been very supportive of the establishment of AAARI, and has been very active in promoting our Asian American role.

Wellington Chen:

Good morning everyone, I know we are behind schedule, so I will keep my remarks fairly brief.  Number one, I have to commend AAARI and Dr. Tam for what a remarkable job they have done with little resources.  I was going through your website and was just looking at the diversity, the richness and the complexity of the issues that are confronting us, and some of the challenges that Dean Michelli expressed so well.  I think that I love to share—human being would like to share—we start out from Africa maybe some 70,000 years ago.

Coming back to the basics of what education is, obviously we didn’t start out with formal education process, we started out with informal education process.  The birthplace of formal education is now really believed to be Mesopotamia, where we have this conflict in Iraq.  Before that, what is the reason for we to share our knowledge?  I think it is very fundamental that first and foremost we should obviously secure the survival of our species, we share our gathering and hunting techniques and our cultivation techniques and also how to evade dangerous animals.  But apart from that and I think that’s what Dean Michelli’s point is so well put.  I would add two more points to this address which is that at the end of the day we would to translate that knowledge into wisdom, and from that wisdom we can translate into making a difference.  That is fundamentally what education is all about.

On the larger issues… the thing that concerns me a little bit is I know now how high a tall order we have to confront in terms of educating our young.  For example, the situation in Iraq, how do you cultivate democracy?  Obviously through education.  How do you, given we are in a era of scarce resources, and I don’t mean just for 9/11, I mean that in terms of looking at the world as our brothers.  I am giving a plug to PBS: PBS is doing a fabulous series, if you go to their website, there is a three part series called “Race.”  What’s shocking to me—I was talking to some professors this morning—that at the end of the day, what divides us as a race is a fairly recent phenomenon.  And you know when it started?  It’s started in 1882 Exclusion Act with the Chinese because you need to separate between the Mongroids, the Caucasians and the Negroids.

The conclusion of that PBS special actually is that there is very little difference between the so-called races.  We are more similar in many aspects than we think we are.  So, many speakers especially from elected officials alluded to this funding issue, this funding issue didn’t start overnight.  I would implore the elected officials and the policymakers to look at the fundamental investment in education because we have a decline in full time professorship here since 1975, and BMCC has only 35% full time faculty, they are not full time teaching positions.

So if we are serious about educating our young and making a difference, what Chancellor Goldstein so eloquently put in breaking down barriers and what my favorite topic is about building communities, we’ve got to be serious about investing in education.  And that is not just through funding but it is also through the professional development and staff development.  There is nothing more worthwhile than investing in the training of teachers and letting teachers have a more effective teaching technique.  And then leveraging this new technology—start with Internet technology—that we can teach our younger generation.  With that I will turn over the mike.

Ngee Pong Chang:

Next we will turn the mike over to Ron Woo, Superintendent of New York City Department of Education.

Ron Woo:

I am a Superintendent at the New York City Department of Edcuation.  For some of you who know me, I am also a professor of Education Law here at Baruch, so don’t worry, you are not getting D’s today for being here.  I am mindful of the time as well, but let me just carry this conversation beyond where Diana Lam and Professor [inaudible] have started.  We talked about broadly what kids in this city looks like, what I like to do is to focus a little bit more on what the Asians look like in this town.  For those of you who don’t know, nearly one in seven New Yorkers are Asians, that’s over one million people.  And if you would characterize these one million people, they would fall somewhere in the top ten cities of this nation.  A million or more, huge number.  So what do the Asians look like? We already know that the Asians are not monolithic, but a polyglot of different types of people.  Where do they come from?  There are more than 20 to 30 different countries of where they are from.  There are Asian Indians, there are Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, and on and on and on.

Now, we talked about this earlier.  There has been a huge increase in the Asians in New York City, they are the most rapidly rising population. Well, how rapid was that rise? Well, between the1990 census and the 2000 census, the number of Asians in the City of New York has grown by more than 230%. Two hundred and thirty percent.  Interesting things from the 2000 census.  Almost a quarter of Asian Americans in this city do not have a high school degree.  What we are finding is that a third of the Asian American students in New York City public school systems has dropped out or failed to complete four years of education and graduate from high school.

We also know that nearly half of the Asian Americans in this town are less than 25 years old. We also know that nearly half of the youngsters who are Asians and are enrolled in our school systems are coming at later times—they are not coming at school years, they are not coming at preschool, at kindergarten, they are coming at middle schools.  And they are very [inaudible].  Yes, we still have a good crop of American-born Asians who are 1.5s, so to speak, as well as a different immigrant population. An immigrant population that includes students with interrupted formal education, students that go through something called cyclical migration.  And you’ve read this in the newspaper, those who have come here to be born, to be sent back, to be educated, reeducated or not educated, then to return here to the States to continue their educations.

What else do we know? We know that 25,000 of our Asian American students do not speak English.  Of the 135,000 Asian American students that Diana Lam has talked about, 25,000 do not speak English coming to this school system.  They do not represent one singular Asian language, and again, a polyglot of languages.

We also know that nearly one in five of Asian Americans live in households that are below the poverty line.  What do we need to do?  I think today in having gone through the program earlier, and having talked to Tom and Betty and others, we have a lot of information.  The challenge for us, and the challenge for the educational policymakers—I turn to Wellington to my right, I talk to program developers—I turn to Dr. Michelli in the end, and I talk to program heads—that’s Itami to my right..  And I say to them: “what programs do we develop? What are we balancing in terms of programs?  What you hear today, not just from me, but from all the presenters this afternoon, are all the different things our Asian American youngsters need.  It is not one thing.  Diana Lam talks about the ability to observe; yes, we need to have the ability to observe.  But beyond that, is to take what we observe, and put them into strategies of service delivery, educational services delivery.

And I am going to take what Commissioner Betty Wu spoke of, the educational services that we have is life long.  We are talking about Asian Americans in this town, in this city, to be productive citizens, lifelong citizens.  Education is not merely about education of the youngsters at the lower end, it is not merely about education for the youngsters in institutions and higher education, it’s not merely about education for academics.  It’s about how to education our citizenry to make them the most productive members of this society.

Our challenge is to take this information to turn them to programs and services.  And perhaps I will turn this to Tom.  Tom, for next year’s conference, let’s talk about solutions.  And solution has to be, what can be done?  Where are those services?  What do we know about this town? We know that the number of Asians in Queens has tripled, in Eastern Queens.  Are our service delivery mechanism now the best way of doing it? Are campus services the best way of delivering those services? Do we need to have offsite services?  Do we need to bring services to the communities?  How often should those services be given? Where should they be given? When should they be given? Is it enough to have classes between eight and nine? Is it enough to have them between three and four? Should we have them at night? Should we have them on the weekends? Who are our clients?

We know the data is there.We just need to have the wherewithal to take the things you will hear this afternoon and to turn them into programs and services.  Thank you.

Ngee Pong Chang:

Finally we will turn the mike over to Michi Itami.  Art professor at City College.

Michi Itami:

I hoped to do an Internet thing and I don’t know if we can be plugged up to the Internet.  But any way, I am a professor at the City College in the Art Department, I also run an MFA program.  As Dr. Tam suggested to me that this is a broad audience, I don’t know what your interests are, but I was thinking that relating this to the fact that in our recent news we are hearing about the looting and the sacking of the Iraqi museum.  You know that is one of the great museums in the world.  In some ways I can’t understand except for the fact that the Bush Administration, that in some ways that was even allowed because that is one of the great cultural institutions of the world.

If you think about it, in some ways all the cultures of the world have been judged and evaluated by the cultural artistic artifacts that are left.  And if you think about it, when you go to the British Museum in London to see the Elgin Marbles—what the Greeks had, talk about colonialism—the Elgin Marbles happen to be in London.  But nevertheless, if you think about it, every culture has been evaluated by the artifacts that have been left.

We can go on and on about China’s great ruins and the cultural artifacts that have been left, the temples in Kyoto and many of these artifacts are in other countries as well because of colonialism.  But nevertheless, if you think about the whole position of arts education, what is the impact or what is the relationship of the arts to Asian Americans.

And I just know that in running my own program, which is the MFA program, I would say that in the 25 to 30 students that 30% of the students are Asian.  Of those Asians, I would say maybe the largest number are from Korea, but there are also several from Taiwan, and a couple from Japan and a couple from India.  There really is this range.  Considering all the populations of New York City as we talked about, it is quite amazing the large number of Asians.

Asian influence in the arts has always been a great one, so there is that whole position there of what Asian art and what the position of art is.  Art education is something that you really have to think about as a positive force and as something that is possible in terms of a job also, if you think of the impact of the Internet now on the workforce, even though we have the drop in Internet stock and all that.  But still we have a tremendous job force that has been created and it is largely art related.

I thought in terms of education it will be very interesting for you to know about these sites.  A very good friend of mine, Loni Ding.  Loni Ding has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate at Stony Brook, and she has done a whole lot of Internet sites here but she’s basically done movies and videos on the immigration and migration of the Chinese to America.  If you have not seen some of these videos, it is something you should.  They are all on TV, you can also go to the site.  Here is the “Ancestors of America”, they are teaching all kinds of things here.  This is www.cetel.org, and you can see all of these things there.

I have learned things from these videos.  I didn’t know that so many Chinese were brought in to mine [inaudible]—they worked the railroads of course—but you never knew that the Chinese were brought in to mine [inaudible], in the islands of South America.  They are very interesting things.  You will see photographs of the railroads and you will see that the white Americans are placed in front of the Chinese.  Let’s face it, the railroads exist because of the Chinese.  They were among the first immigrants, much earlier immigrants than many of the Americans that live in New York City.  Quite amazing.  So there are these things.  And if you go to PBS.org/AncestorsintheAmericas,  so here is another site.  If you join the discussion you can see all the different stories, but I think these are definitely very interesting to see.

How many of you have done a search on Google.com.  I know most of the young people here are totally Internet savvy, right?  How many have done search on Asian American? Well, good, quite a few. Isn’t it interesting how many different sites there are and how many Asian studies programs and different assignments and what you can see?  I just wanted to tell you that all of these are very arts related, if you didn’t have the artistic background, you couldn’t do this. What I think is fascinating. I just want to tell you that all these different sites just take you to a more contemporary time.

I have another very good friend Angie Eng who is a very innovative and cutting-the-edge Internet artist.  She just recently had a piece on the New Museum site.  You can go to the site yourself, I am worried about time.  But these are projects which combine traditional storytelling, moving image, and it comes from another site of hers.  There’s a lot of interesting things going on here.  I am going to proceed to go on to another site here that she did, called [–.org].  She had a grant to do this.  This is her site, I will go to my own site, I did a piece on this.  She and several artists—it’s a revolving group of artists—talk about censorship.  Around that time there was a lot of issues on that.  I had wanted to show people different sites on the Internet that talk about censorship.

I am now going to my own web site http://www.michiitami.net).  I have been using photographs of my own family.  I am going to go back here and show you this image that combines photographs of my father and my grandfather, who was a samurai in the [inaudible] rebellion, and you can see the American flag etched in the back, lynched to an atomic… You can see all these things, the use of art in contemporary ways.

I will show you one more piece.  This is a piece of mine that is about my father.  We were all in the relocation camp during the war.  This is in the background; this one is called “The Irony of Being American.”  It’s about the experience we had gone through, where we were supposed to be American citizen and yet were put in the camp.  My father spoke Japanese and English so well that they made him professor or teacher of Japanese language.  From there they took him to Washington, where he formed a library of Japanese publications.  They gave him the Legion of Merit, a non-combat honor.  There is a great irony in that first they put you in camp, denied your citizenship rights, and then they give you a metal.  After getting the Legion of Merit, he became Head Interpreter in the war crimes trial in Japan.  As a result we went to Japan as American dependants.  That is another irony.  Maybe the life of being Asian American is full of irony.

Ngee Pong Chang:

As the program says, you can post your comments online for discussion.  We will pass on the questions to the speakers.  Then you can have a high-tech discussion.  I would like to thank the speakers for a well-constructed presentation.

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