Yes, Yes, Yes: Why We Must Continue to Fight for the Goals of the Brown Decision
Dr. Valerie O. Pang

We need to shift people from mainstream values of exclusion, segregation, and racism…caring and social justice are intimately tied.

The purpose of this presentation was to discuss the obstacles still in the way of implementing equity education 50 years after the Brown decision. Dr. Pang addressed five of them:

• Mainstream values and expectations
• The conflict between our ideal and our reality
• Perennial stereotypes
• Lack of theoretical framework
• The fact that in education each subject is in its own separate little box

We need to challenge the status quo and change values, to shift people from mainstream values of exclusion, segregation, and racism to values of caring and social justice. We need to think about what caring means in a democracy. In education, because we are teaching a person, caring must be central to teaching. In a caring-centered framework, culture matters, and we need to be culturally relevant. We need to connect what students are learning with what is culturally relevant to them.

We need a paradigm shift from the traditional teacher-centered, teacher-directed, just teacher talking, passive learning, lower levels of thinking, Western civilization assimilation model where the student moves to understand the teacher, to the caring-centered model where the teacher moves to understand the student. In the latter, there is a community and multicultural orientation, broader global focus, higher order thinking, and empowered, self-directed learning.

As an example of perennial stereotypes, Dr. Pang pointed out the stereotype of Asian/Pacific American students as always doing really well in school and the resulting under-representation of them in special needs classes. Another contributing factor to their under-representation is that the parents of these students do not want to show that their children and families have problems.

Toward the end of the presentation, Dr. Pang gave some examples of culturally relevant teaching. One example was of a boy of mixed cultural backgrounds with Asperberger’s who was able to remain in the regular classroom because of the type of extra help she gave him.

Follow-up Discussion with Dr. Valerie O. Pang

Gifted Asian Children
The following points were discussed in this roundtable:

• Students of Chinese and Japanese background do well in school because the values and habits they have learned fit well with the American mainstream and because they are pushed by their parents to work harder to get further in our racist society. However, underneath, a lot of these students are very stressed, and there is a large alcoholism problem.

• Despite the fact that aggregated data on Asian/Pacific American students show them doing very well in school, there are some groups of them that do not do well, especially the Cambodians and Samoans. They do not have the same cultural values and often were not literate before coming to the U.S.

• Asian American students tend to do well in math and science and not in reading comprehension and writing. This is probably because of how they are socialized, the statistics on their achievement, and how they are then channeled in school. It is important to have them develop their reading and writing skills too. Do not take the statistics that stereotype all Asian students as doing better in math and science and apply that to all Asian individuals. Do not steer Asian students toward math and science if that is not what they are interested in.

• We need to learn about each different cultural group among Asian Americans rather than seeing them as a single entity. We also need to look at each student as an individual and at the neighborhood each one comes from. For example, some Asian students who grow up in black neighborhoods take on black English and culture, especially if they do not have enough role modeling and information about Asian cultures.

• Because Asian students are overrepresented in gifted programs and African American and other minority students are underrepresented in gifted programs, teachers tend to look for Asian students, and not other minority students, for the gifted programs. It is important not to get caught in this way of looking at students.

• In trying to disaggregate statistics by racial/ethnic group there is the additional factor to consider that many students are from mixed backgrounds. Having just the information that they are from a mixed background is not that helpful unless you know the specific mix of each
student.

• One participant asked how to pursue a dissertation topic or research agenda that is somewhat out of the mainstream and be successful at balancing the kind of work we know we need to be doing with the expectations of those in power.

Responses included:

• Decide what your passions are and what is important to you and go for it.

• Do some things that are not politically correct because even if you do everything the way they tell you to do it and you make compromises, you still may not be perceived as good enough.

• Choose people for your dissertation committee who you know will support your work and from whom you can get information and help on the subject you are working on. Do not choose two people who disagree with each other.

• When you are applying for positions, make it clear what your research agenda is. If they don’t like it, go somewhere else.

• Give presence to your work in the community that is related to your work and build a sincere relationship with that community, even if that means losing some articles. In the end, the support of that community may keep the university honest in hiring and promotion decisions.