NYC Public Schools, The Lunar New Year Bill And 2011 CACF/Pumphouse Project Report

If I lived in New York City’s Chinatown, I wouldn’t go to school on Lunar New Year (LNY). No way would I miss out on the firecracker festivities. According to the Principal at Public School 130, many school children there share my sentiment. Around 80% of the students took absences on LNY last month, to spend the holiday with their families. So it would sound pretty reasonable to me to make LNY a public school holiday. Assembly member Grace Meng and Senator Daniel Squadron thought so too, and sponsored a bill to make LNY a school holiday in districts with substantial Asian populations.

Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg didn’t support the idea: “In some of these cases they started to have holidays… simply because of teachers that were from that religion and you wouldn’t have enough teachers to run the school… As the ethnicities and religions of the teachers change, we don’t go back and redo that… If anything, we need more school days.”

But it looks like the NYC public school system needs more than an extra school day. In December 2011, The Coalition for Asian American Children and Families (CACF) and Pumphouse Project released a report about the APA students who make up around 14% of the NYC public schools. The report addresses the contradiction between the model minority myth and the fact that half of the 2005-06 APIA cohort “finished their fourth year in high school unqualified to earn Cs on basic college coursework”. APA students (“probably Chinese and Korean”) make up over 60% of the students at the famous straight-to-Harvard schools: Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. But the report points out that these students only make up 5% of the APA enrollment in NYC public schools. The remaining 95% of the APA school children aren’t able to access adequate resources, or culturally competent services.

Monami Maulik, Founder and Executive Director of Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) commented that “[w]e are not a ‘model minority’ but mostly low-income families facing the same civil rights crisis impacting communities of color nationally – the dismantling of public education and the school-to-prison pipeline targeting youth of color.”

So I sincerely hope Mayor Bloomberg reads the report. Seems like preventing kids from celebrating a day of LNY with their families isn’t really going to solve the problems with your city’s education system, mayor.

[Photo courtesy of Colorlines.]