Business School: The New Asian Stereotype?

Hu’s on First for 3/21/2008
By Arthur Hu for www.asianweek.com

Business School: The New Stereotype?

We know there are a lot of Asians at engineering schools and medical schools. But check out these Business Week undergraduate business school numbers. Here’s the percent of Asians compared to whites at some leading schools: UC Berkeley 54/23 Sloan MIT 37/25 Carnegie Mellon 30/37. The Asians outnumber whites at Berkeley and MIT. Even Mormon Brigham Young has 8 percent Asians vs 78 for whites, more than MIT had in 1976. I have no idea as to WHY this is happening, if you do, let us know.

Indian Education

Watch out for those Indo-Americans. They are the only ethnic group I’ve tracked with proportionally more awards than Jewish or Chinese Americans. The January 2nd New York Times reported the latest education fad in Japan is into Indian style schools where kids learn to multiply in kindergarten. Yet they reported in the January 17 issue that although more Indian children are going to school than ever, 4 out of 10 fifth graders could not read at 2nd grade level and 7 out of 10 could not subtract. So remember that when your local educracy is rallying for “world class standards”

Those !@#$% Finns

The February 29th Wall Street Journal reveals Finland’s world-beating performance comes from the very “back to basics” approach spurned by spurned by “standards-based” education mania. Contrast Asians here to blond kids there who dye their hair black to be fashionable. They get just a half hour of homework for high schools, and use chalkboards. With chalk. They concentrate on students who are behind instead of offering quadruple honors. Instead of cram preschools, school doesn’t start until age 7. There’s no “high standards for all” when tests rank the top college-bound half from the others who will finish with vocational courses.

The Emporer’s New Textbooks

The Finns aren’t hobbled by my 6th grader’s “Connected Mathematics”. Math is now a “Blue Clues” game which asks “what do you think”, and then asks students to “create your own algorithm and make sure it covers all these examples.” I never had to create and write down a method because that used to be what the book was for. The new “reform” instruction method simply cuts instruction out of the book. Only the teacher’s manual and the letter to the parents hide away the forbidden secret that “one possible answer” is to convert to common denominators”. Every Physics book states Newton’s 3 laws, yet students can’t find the “Pi r squared” they’re supposed to learn anywhere in their books. People like Michael Paul Goldenberg of rationalmathed.blogspot.com and my teachers are offended that we think something is dreadfully wrong when researchers gone amok have produced an abomination where students have to figure out and write in all of the math they’ve deliberately left out of the textbook. I hate to sound like Obama’s Rev. Wright, but if most other Americans are stupid enough to buy into this, Asian parents should know better and raise a stink.