The New York Daily News runs a story on the success of immigrant children. This sounds all well and good but I personally was left with a sense of glass-half-full dismay. Here is how the story starts:
Ask 13-year-old Amarnath Kuppannan and his 10-year-old sister, Aarthi, what they want to be when they grow up and they respond in unison: “A doctor.” Both youngsters, the New York-born children of Indian immigrants, spent their summer at the Elite Academy on 39th Ave. in Flushing.
I fought back nausea at the fact that yet another generation of immigrant kids would be brainwashed down certain paths, and I continued to read trying to focus on the overall positive message in the article.
Starting at 8:30 a.m. and some days finishing as late as 2:30 p.m., the youngsters were drilled and quizzed four days a week in higher mathematics and the complexities of English grammar and composition.
But who am I to judge these parents’ ambitions for their children? As the article points out the father is from a rural Indian village and didn’t get educational opportunities. The article lauds the success of New York’s immigrant children:
A dramatic 62.4% of New Yorkers younger than 18 are foreign-born - the so-called 1.5 generation who come here as children and are reared and educated here.
“These immigrants and their children are the future,” said Prof. John Mollenkopf, director of City University’s Center for Urban Research. “How well they do is critical.”
It seems that the future is in good hands.
“Foreign-born students outperform native-born students on traditional measures of academic achievement,” according to a 2003 study by New York University’s Taub Urban Research Center. “Immigrants have higher reading and math scores … despite their higher poverty rates, limited English skills and newness to the U.S. schooling system.”
