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Comment by cyberlurker | Hacker News Reader

In NYC they also flatten all Asians into one group and say the “gifted” programs aren't diverse enough because a high percentage are Asian. As if implying Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, etc. all have the same life experience, cultures, advantages, disadvantages…

Also you nailed it on the property tax point. Often overlooked as the biggest issue with education. A similar sized home in a good school district can be 2 or 3x as expensive as one in a mediocre school district.

Edit: when talking about property tax, I am referring to most suburbs, not NYC.

Seems like a lot of people are posting evidence that the property tax point is correlated with better schools but the funding difference is made up for by the stare and federal government. Interesting.

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By that same logic, they also flatten all Whites, Blacks, and Latinos into their own groups as well, even though all are comprised of people from many different countries and cultures.

I think the Asian and Pacific Islander one is interesting because it lacks a shared history of strife to support the amorphous grouping. (Latino should also be treated very differently, this post is about Asian-American and Asians in America)

Asian-American, especially in New York City (but somewhat replicated across the nation), is kind of a burgeoning identity which has now somewhat of a shared distinctly American culture, but is only kind of a self-fulfilling identity because everyone pigeonholes them, domestically and wherever their heritage was from. This makes individuals forced to attempt a shared representation. But it makes less sense compared to "white", "black" and pre-colonial civilizations here, given the lower population and the large time gaps in migration waves, and the large difference in why people migrated to the US at all during those migration waves.

NYC schools are not funded by property taxes.

The city and state fund the DoE and that money is disbursed to schools throughout the district without relationship to the geographic source of the funds. PTAs (especially in wealth neighborhoods) also contribute huge amounts of money to their local schools, often even paying for the salary of extra teachers or classroom assistants.

NYC schools are terrible for any number other reasons, but the property tax argument does not apply.

Sorry, the two comments in my one post were not related. You are right, I was referring to most suburb public schools.

More than that, they also lump "Pacific Islanders" into the same category as "Asian", as if the Pacific Islands aren't on an entirely different continent.

Call me a radical, but to me "our race laws don't have the best categories" is the wrong level to deal with this.

The US has never been without race laws, so I see how it's hard to imagine not having them, but that is what I think is needed.

I think it’s pointing out how absurd the system is for the people actually in it. If you dig deeper though, it’s just another way of trying to define blocs of power (or no power), and draw arbitrary lines to get benefits or avoid being singled out.

There is no objective definition for race or ethnicity I’ve ever found for instance, but to quote a controversial Supreme Court justice, everyone goes ‘I know it when I see it’.

> In NYC they also flatten all Asians into one group and say the “gifted” programs aren't diverse enough because a high percentage are Asian. As if implying Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, etc. all have the same life experience, cultures, advantages, disadvantages…

TBF that was originally something deployed by asian-american populations so they had enough of a cooperative block to make an impact: individual cultural groups were too small to be represented, but a pan-asian block had sufficient power to achieve representation and make political progress.

> As if implying Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, etc. all have the same life experience, cultures, advantages, disadvantages…

Though it's not as if Asian students are a perfect mixture of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, etc. Given demographic trends most of them are going to be Chinese, with a smaller amount Korean.

> "all have the same life experience, cultures, advantages, disadvantages…"

Not to mention: 4th generation versus new immigrant.

They do it to White people throughout the country. They make no difference between White Americans and European-Americans. They ignore the differences among people from a huge continent spanning Western, Central, Eastern Europe, and the Slavic people from the ex-USSR.

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