California public school enrollment sees big drops

If you live in an area with lots of halfway houses like I did as a kid (We called it murder valley), you can expect: Violence, blatant racism, drugs, gangs, sexual assault, weekly riots, casual fights, attempted murders, one or two actual murders a year, burnt out teachers, closed after school programs, dangerous busses, and police harassing you constantly.

I was constantly getting hauled up to the office because I had the same name as a career criminal at the age of 13. Substitutes would refer kids to the office who looked sleepy for the nurse to check us for drug use. I was in constant fights with black and hispanic kids trying to prove something to their friends by beating up the white kids. Drug dogs would patrol the school. The place was run like a prison. Walking home, one of the girls in my high school went missing and her pelvis was found in a ditch a few years later...

So yeah, some of them are pretty bad. But at least we have the most overfunded military in the world.

Ask that to the people who put together the model ethnic studies curriculum! If you look at the sample lessons for Asians, almost all are about discrimination, exclusion, etc.

> ethnic studies covers much more than that...

In theory, yes, in practice, no. You can’t realistically expect white Americans to teach Indian or Chinese kids about their own cultures and experiences. So the focus tends to be on how white Americans relate to minorities, which in liberal states like California tends to be through the lens of white guilt. That’s how you end up with a curriculum that’s all about discrimination.

> also, the reason they don't cover groups that are considered "white" is because as stated above, in regular american history those history of italians/germans/irish are covered there well

We didn’t cover German, Italian, and Irish immigration in K-12. Maybe we spent a day talking about Ellis Island. More importantly, we never learned anything about the discrimination against those groups.

There is a clear dichotomy: white kids are not taught ethnic identity, and are not taught to identify with the struggles of and discrimination against their immigrant ancestors. Minority kids, by contrast, are taught to be conscious of their race and ethnicity, and are taught to identify with the struggles of Asians or Hispanics that in most cases they aren’t even descended from.

This dichotomy is historically inaccurate. For example, if you really want to understand how say Hispanics fit into America—economically, socially, and culturally—the closest analogy is to Italians. But in California, Italian kids are taught something completely different about their identity than Hispanic kids. Separating non-white immigrants from previous generations of immigrants paints a misleading picture of the immigrant experience.

This dichotomy is also bad for minority kids. It socializes them to think of themselves as victims without agency, who are acted upon by white people who have agency. It’s othering—you have white teachers talking about what “we” did to “you.” And it’s enormously demotivating for kids to be told that they have the decked stacked against them because of your skin color.

> maybe, maybe not, but whats your alternative? don't teach history of generally ignored groups in ethnic studies?

Yes. My kids don’t need to learn Asian American history from some white lady. And they certainly don’t need their white friends being socialized to think of them as being somehow different. I don’t care how good the intentions are—teachers highlighting differences isn’t a good thing for visible minorities.

And if we insist on doing so, we should strive to be accurate. If you’re going to teach about the Chinese Exclusion Act, also teach the German American kids about when states banned the teaching of German. Teach Italian and Irish kids about anti-Catholic school legislation.