A quarter of the teachers at Lakewood Elementary are leaving.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The problem is an inexperienced principal coming in with sweeping changes that drove out the teachers that made this school great. A lot more consultations with the teachers and staff who've been here for 20 years and the parents before enacting sweeping reforms would be a start. She goes about this with an arrogant attitude that she knows better and your issues are none of her concern. That's the biggest problem.

Not inexperienced. Principals intern before being assigned. They are trained.

Principal intern is still very inexperienced. Trained doesn’t equal experienced.

Sure, but again, some school has to get the administrators at the beginning of their career. This time, it was LES's turn. Next time, another school will get the early-career principal. LES is not any more or any less special than any other school in MCPS, and the attitude demonstrated by some folks on this thread make it seem like a pretty toxic community, with some real challenges around race in particular.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The problem is an inexperienced principal coming in with sweeping changes that drove out the teachers that made this school great. A lot more consultations with the teachers and staff who've been here for 20 years and the parents before enacting sweeping reforms would be a start. She goes about this with an arrogant attitude that she knows better and your issues are none of her concern. That's the biggest problem.

Not inexperienced. Principals intern before being assigned. They are trained.

Principal intern is still very inexperienced. Trained doesn’t equal experienced.

Sure, but again, some school has to get the administrators at the beginning of their career. This time, it was LES's turn. Next time, another school will get the early-career principal. LES is not any more or any less special than any other school in MCPS, and the attitude demonstrated by some folks on this thread make it seem like a pretty toxic community, with some real challenges around race in particular.

It’s ok to be inexperienced but not ok to make so many sweeping changes so quickly as a new principal. Don’t gaslight the LES community. Nobody deserves a brand new principal who doesn’t communicate, share and listen to teachers, students and community.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree with the other posters. It is good advice to get more involved and “watch like a hawk” as someone put it (lol).

As with most things, including RJ, the problem with anti racist ideology is its implementation. This principal seems to be aggressively imposing this ideology on a mostly minority community that has many immigrant parents. My immigrant parents would have no clue what antiracist dogma she is babbling about. She is out of touch and hasn’t made the effort to understand who she is trying to lead and what their needs are.

Let's not forget, when it comes to these immigrant parents... there's a lot of generational trauma around educational access and political beliefs. My parents still bring up being pulled out of school and being sent down to the countryside because they were labelled as "bourgeois".

Yes, so many stories and experiences to share in a diverse community. It’s tough, but important to navigate the nuances of each.

I’m still very upset about the teachers leaving and the apparent toxic environment of this school year. I do know that we have strong parent support of many races and that by being more involved next year we can hopefully help make the environment peaceful, fun, and most important, a place to receive the best advanced quality of education, for our children.

I was thinking about how I was saying that the Lakewood community, having a high minority population, could use context when it comes to US-centered anti-racist discussions, so I thought maybe I'd share a little about my family's immigration story to provide some context for the other side as well. That said, my family's immigration story is not going to be the same as any other Asian family's immigration story, though I think many immigrants (and not just Asian ones!) will find commonalities. My family is from Mainland China, which means that our experiences are not going to be the same as the Chinese people who came to the US in the late 1800s to build railroads or mine gold. Also not going to be the same as Hoa (ethnic Chinese in Vietnam) people who fled after the Vietnam war, or Mandarin-speakers who immigrated from Taiwan, or Cantonese-speakers who immigrated from Hong Kong. To most non-Chinese, all these groups would all be grouped as "Chinese," but there are actually a lot of linguistic and cultural/generational differences depending on area of origin and when your family came to the US. (Does anyone know or remember if Lakewood missives are written in Simplified or Traditional Chinese? Because that's a thing too.) Anyway, I digress.

My parents performed a rendition of the Immigration Story approximately 4 times a year, roughly corresponding to whenever report cards released, dates of major tests, or, depending on the year, however long I could successfully hide a report card from my parents. In good years, it's a brief after-dinner chat to remind me about the importance of education. In bad years, it was delivered at high volume, with several encores, and more screaming than a metal concert. But the abbreviated version is basically:

My dad's family bootstrapped themselves from being rural farmers to owning a small plot of land and a store. When the Communists took over at the end of the Chinese Civil War, this was seen as Very Bad, because people who owned property were the bourgeois parasites preventing Chinese society from progressing. Land reform meant that private property was taken away. There were social consequences too: when my grandmother, a widow with seven children, tried to register my father for middle school, the local cadre in charge of education refused to allow him to enroll. Remember what I said about being rural farmers? My grandmother was actually only semi-literate herself. She had to leave school to help financially support her family, so she never had the same opportunities her younger siblings did. Because education was denied to her, she valued education very, very much. So much that she went "well, if I can't trust these people to guarantee my child's educational success, I guess I have to step up myself," scraped together whatever meagre resources she had at her disposal, and managed to find my dad a place in another district two hours travel away that would allow him to be enrolled. My dad once told me how they couldn't afford to eat eggs often, but on days he had important tests, she would fry two eggs and plate them with a pair of chopsticks to make "100": the score she hoped he would get.

My dad studied very hard and was a good student. (I am sure every immigrant child has heard their parent tell them that they were good students, which is why in turn they should also be good students, so as not to waste the sacrifices their parents made for them to come to America.) Then the Cultural Revolution happened. Chairman Mao was losing the support of the people because the Great Leap Forward was a resounding failure that led directly to the Great Chinese Famine (names are explanatory), and his brilliant idea was to double down on centrally-planned Communist ideals and labelling anyone who opposed them as "capitalists," "anti-revolutionaries," or "rightists". Background for non-Chinese history nerds: the Cultural Revolution was a Bad Time in Chinese history. If you didn't fall in line with what the Party espoused, you would face consequences. (If you enjoy science fiction, I recommend checking out the Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin, which goes into this a little bit. President Obama famously recommended this book back in 2017.) All higher education was shut down between 1966-1968.

In some parts of China, things got REALLY bad. In an era where traditional culture and values were seen as hindrances to the great Communist cause, teachers, educators, and intellectuals were considered "class enemies" and victimized. In one particularly horrific case, a middle school teacher was beaten to death by her students, and later they barbequed and ate her organs. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre) There's lots more, but I know you all can Google.

My dad doesn't like to talk about it much. I've only heard bits and pieces over the years, and then I did a lot of reading and research myself.

Once he told me about watching a teacher at his school get dragged out and beaten to death.

One of his uncles spoke out about some local incident that he felt wasn't investigated properly. He got sent to labor camp for 10 years. (He was one of the lucky ones; he actually came back.)

A woman in his village was pulled up on stage during a public "self-criticism session" and sexually assaulted.

I'm sure there is more, but I've always been afraid to pry.

Part of the Cultural Revolution was something called the "Down to the Countryside Movement" where educated city youths (like my parents) who were thought to have bourgeois sympathies, were sent down to remote, rural villages to work on farms and learn the value of the proletariat. My dad has not gone into specifics, but from what I can surmise, he was not treated well there because of his "bourgeois" background.

I don't suppose you see why some immigrants can get real skittish about the intersection of politics and education?

Eventually Chairman Mao realized that the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards were doing more harm than good (like most of his initiatives) and started phasing it out. He opened up schools again. When we talk about high stakes testing in the US, keep in mind that China is the OG of standardized testing, dating back to the Imperial Examinations established during the Sui dynasty (~500 AD). In China, scores on the gaokao (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaokao) determine which colleges or universities you'll be admitted to -- if you're admitted at all. No report cards, no letters of recommendation, no squishy feel-good metrics like "likeability" and "helpfulness" that could help tip you over if you were right on the border. (https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/harvard-admissions-personality/563198/) Had a bad day and didn't do well? Sucks, no retakes. You'll have to wait until next year. My dad told me he spent 3 months studying, and the stress of it cause him to lose 20 pounds on his already lean 5'7/130 pound frame. Well, it paid off! He got into one of the top universities in China. Yay, education!

This was an era of relative stability; my parents married and had my sibling. They were both educators. (It runs in my family; my maternal grandmother was actually a school principal.) At some point, my dad went back to school for a Masters... and then he decided to pursue a Ph.D. At the time, China didn't have any PhD programs (since, you know, since higher education was destroyed) but because he was such an outstanding student, he somehow managed to convince his professor to recommend him to go to the US. Remember, this was not long after Nixon's historic visit "opened China to the West" (1972). Also worth nothing, Chinese immigrants from the Mainland were pretty rare in the US due to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), which was only fully abolished in 1965.

Coming to the US was hard. There was the struggle with learning a whole new language (my dad came to the US in his late thirties) and of course, a huge cultural shift as well. It also meant that the discrimination he faced was now racial instead of class-based. (He mentions being a TA and having students pretend to not understand him; being deliberately splashed with water by cars, stuff like that.) Eventually my dad managed to bring my mom and my brother over to the US as well, and then I (the anchor baby) was born. My parents frequently remind me that education is the reason for my existence, as I wouldn't have been born if they stayed in China because of the One Child Policy.

Now, I consider myself bilingual and bicultural, and I am grateful that I have had the educational background to understand things like systemic racism and it's history in the US. Denial of access to education has always been a tool used by those in power to keep out those who are not. I think if phrased that way, pretty much all families would be on board with improving access to education for everyone. But just like I don't think most people read about Chinese sociopolitical history for fun, I don't think most immigrants trying to adapt to life in the US are making time to dig into chattel slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, segregation, redlining, Brown vs. Board of Education, John Howard Griffin writing "Black Like Me," Rosa Parks, MLK, Malcolm X, all the way up through electing our first Black president, followed by electing his polar opposite... I mean, there's A LOT of history to cover. (Shout out MCPS and my AP US History teacher, though, for getting through it.)

My sibling is Gen X, while I'm considered an elder Millennial. Within the few years that we both went through MCPS, education on this topic has changed a lot, and now that our children are in school, it has changed even more. When I try to talk about these things with my sibling, they act like I'm doing a Chris Rock bit, because they grew up in the "racism is solved, everybody is the same!!" era of racial education. If you visit China and go to a drugstore, you'll see that one of the most popular domestic brands of toothpaste is named "Darlie," and has a picture of a man in blackface as it's logo. Believe it or not, that's actually the improved version, because they changed the name to Darlie by replacing the original "K" with an "L" sometime in the early '00s. The Chinese brand name still translates literally to "Black Person Toothpaste." But the Chinese have never had a history with minstrel shows and blackface, no "Soul Man" movie starring C Thomas Howell (1986), no Uncle Ben's or Aunt Jemima branding built on the history of black domestic labor in white households... I think it is understandable if immigrants are not as sophisticated about racial dynamics. After all, do we not give plenty of latitude towards white Boomers who say similarly off-putting things? (But it's "economic anxiety" when they do it, I guess.)

I'm just speaking for myself, and not on the behalf of the community. But I think if we can give grace to Dr. Kelly for her inexperience -- considering that her previous experience as a Principal Intern was at a school with a 14% Asian population -- we can also leave some for immigrant families who are not as aware of the complex racial history of the US.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree with the other posters. It is good advice to get more involved and “watch like a hawk” as someone put it (lol).

As with most things, including RJ, the problem with anti racist ideology is its implementation. This principal seems to be aggressively imposing this ideology on a mostly minority community that has many immigrant parents. My immigrant parents would have no clue what antiracist dogma she is babbling about. She is out of touch and hasn’t made the effort to understand who she is trying to lead and what their needs are.

Let's not forget, when it comes to these immigrant parents... there's a lot of generational trauma around educational access and political beliefs. My parents still bring up being pulled out of school and being sent down to the countryside because they were labelled as "bourgeois".

Yes, so many stories and experiences to share in a diverse community. It’s tough, but important to navigate the nuances of each.

I’m still very upset about the teachers leaving and the apparent toxic environment of this school year. I do know that we have strong parent support of many races and that by being more involved next year we can hopefully help make the environment peaceful, fun, and most important, a place to receive the best advanced quality of education, for our children.

I was thinking about how I was saying that the Lakewood community, having a high minority population, could use context when it comes to US-centered anti-racist discussions, so I thought maybe I'd share a little about my family's immigration story to provide some context for the other side as well. That said, my family's immigration story is not going to be the same as any other Asian family's immigration story, though I think many immigrants (and not just Asian ones!) will find commonalities. My family is from Mainland China, which means that our experiences are not going to be the same as the Chinese people who came to the US in the late 1800s to build railroads or mine gold. Also not going to be the same as Hoa (ethnic Chinese in Vietnam) people who fled after the Vietnam war, or Mandarin-speakers who immigrated from Taiwan, or Cantonese-speakers who immigrated from Hong Kong. To most non-Chinese, all these groups would all be grouped as "Chinese," but there are actually a lot of linguistic and cultural/generational differences depending on area of origin and when your family came to the US. (Does anyone know or remember if Lakewood missives are written in Simplified or Traditional Chinese? Because that's a thing too.) Anyway, I digress.

My parents performed a rendition of the Immigration Story approximately 4 times a year, roughly corresponding to whenever report cards released, dates of major tests, or, depending on the year, however long I could successfully hide a report card from my parents. In good years, it's a brief after-dinner chat to remind me about the importance of education. In bad years, it was delivered at high volume, with several encores, and more screaming than a metal concert. But the abbreviated version is basically:

My dad's family bootstrapped themselves from being rural farmers to owning a small plot of land and a store. When the Communists took over at the end of the Chinese Civil War, this was seen as Very Bad, because people who owned property were the bourgeois parasites preventing Chinese society from progressing. Land reform meant that private property was taken away. There were social consequences too: when my grandmother, a widow with seven children, tried to register my father for middle school, the local cadre in charge of education refused to allow him to enroll. Remember what I said about being rural farmers? My grandmother was actually only semi-literate herself. She had to leave school to help financially support her family, so she never had the same opportunities her younger siblings did. Because education was denied to her, she valued education very, very much. So much that she went "well, if I can't trust these people to guarantee my child's educational success, I guess I have to step up myself," scraped together whatever meagre resources she had at her disposal, and managed to find my dad a place in another district two hours travel away that would allow him to be enrolled. My dad once told me how they couldn't afford to eat eggs often, but on days he had important tests, she would fry two eggs and plate them with a pair of chopsticks to make "100": the score she hoped he would get.

My dad studied very hard and was a good student. (I am sure every immigrant child has heard their parent tell them that they were good students, which is why in turn they should also be good students, so as not to waste the sacrifices their parents made for them to come to America.) Then the Cultural Revolution happened. Chairman Mao was losing the support of the people because the Great Leap Forward was a resounding failure that led directly to the Great Chinese Famine (names are explanatory), and his brilliant idea was to double down on centrally-planned Communist ideals and labelling anyone who opposed them as "capitalists," "anti-revolutionaries," or "rightists". Background for non-Chinese history nerds: the Cultural Revolution was a Bad Time in Chinese history. If you didn't fall in line with what the Party espoused, you would face consequences. (If you enjoy science fiction, I recommend checking out the Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin, which goes into this a little bit. President Obama famously recommended this book back in 2017.) All higher education was shut down between 1966-1968.

In some parts of China, things got REALLY bad. In an era where traditional culture and values were seen as hindrances to the great Communist cause, teachers, educators, and intellectuals were considered "class enemies" and victimized. In one particularly horrific case, a middle school teacher was beaten to death by her students, and later they barbequed and ate her organs. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre) There's lots more, but I know you all can Google.

My dad doesn't like to talk about it much. I've only heard bits and pieces over the years, and then I did a lot of reading and research myself.

Once he told me about watching a teacher at his school get dragged out and beaten to death.

One of his uncles spoke out about some local incident that he felt wasn't investigated properly. He got sent to labor camp for 10 years. (He was one of the lucky ones; he actually came back.)

A woman in his village was pulled up on stage during a public "self-criticism session" and sexually assaulted.

I'm sure there is more, but I've always been afraid to pry.

Part of the Cultural Revolution was something called the "Down to the Countryside Movement" where educated city youths (like my parents) who were thought to have bourgeois sympathies, were sent down to remote, rural villages to work on farms and learn the value of the proletariat. My dad has not gone into specifics, but from what I can surmise, he was not treated well there because of his "bourgeois" background.

I don't suppose you see why some immigrants can get real skittish about the intersection of politics and education?

Eventually Chairman Mao realized that the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards were doing more harm than good (like most of his initiatives) and started phasing it out. He opened up schools again. When we talk about high stakes testing in the US, keep in mind that China is the OG of standardized testing, dating back to the Imperial Examinations established during the Sui dynasty (~500 AD). In China, scores on the gaokao (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaokao) determine which colleges or universities you'll be admitted to -- if you're admitted at all. No report cards, no letters of recommendation, no squishy feel-good metrics like "likeability" and "helpfulness" that could help tip you over if you were right on the border. (https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/harvard-admissions-personality/563198/) Had a bad day and didn't do well? Sucks, no retakes. You'll have to wait until next year. My dad told me he spent 3 months studying, and the stress of it cause him to lose 20 pounds on his already lean 5'7/130 pound frame. Well, it paid off! He got into one of the top universities in China. Yay, education!

This was an era of relative stability; my parents married and had my sibling. They were both educators. (It runs in my family; my maternal grandmother was actually a school principal.) At some point, my dad went back to school for a Masters... and then he decided to pursue a Ph.D. At the time, China didn't have any PhD programs (since, you know, since higher education was destroyed) but because he was such an outstanding student, he somehow managed to convince his professor to recommend him to go to the US. Remember, this was not long after Nixon's historic visit "opened China to the West" (1972). Also worth nothing, Chinese immigrants from the Mainland were pretty rare in the US due to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), which was only fully abolished in 1965.

Coming to the US was hard. There was the struggle with learning a whole new language (my dad came to the US in his late thirties) and of course, a huge cultural shift as well. It also meant that the discrimination he faced was now racial instead of class-based. (He mentions being a TA and having students pretend to not understand him; being deliberately splashed with water by cars, stuff like that.) Eventually my dad managed to bring my mom and my brother over to the US as well, and then I (the anchor baby) was born. My parents frequently remind me that education is the reason for my existence, as I wouldn't have been born if they stayed in China because of the One Child Policy.

Now, I consider myself bilingual and bicultural, and I am grateful that I have had the educational background to understand things like systemic racism and it's history in the US. Denial of access to education has always been a tool used by those in power to keep out those who are not. I think if phrased that way, pretty much all families would be on board with improving access to education for everyone. But just like I don't think most people read about Chinese sociopolitical history for fun, I don't think most immigrants trying to adapt to life in the US are making time to dig into chattel slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, segregation, redlining, Brown vs. Board of Education, John Howard Griffin writing "Black Like Me," Rosa Parks, MLK, Malcolm X, all the way up through electing our first Black president, followed by electing his polar opposite... I mean, there's A LOT of history to cover. (Shout out MCPS and my AP US History teacher, though, for getting through it.)

My sibling is Gen X, while I'm considered an elder Millennial. Within the few years that we both went through MCPS, education on this topic has changed a lot, and now that our children are in school, it has changed even more. When I try to talk about these things with my sibling, they act like I'm doing a Chris Rock bit, because they grew up in the "racism is solved, everybody is the same!!" era of racial education. If you visit China and go to a drugstore, you'll see that one of the most popular domestic brands of toothpaste is named "Darlie," and has a picture of a man in blackface as it's logo. Believe it or not, that's actually the improved version, because they changed the name to Darlie by replacing the original "K" with an "L" sometime in the early '00s. The Chinese brand name still translates literally to "Black Person Toothpaste." But the Chinese have never had a history with minstrel shows and blackface, no "Soul Man" movie starring C Thomas Howell (1986), no Uncle Ben's or Aunt Jemima branding built on the history of black domestic labor in white households... I think it is understandable if immigrants are not as sophisticated about racial dynamics. After all, do we not give plenty of latitude towards white Boomers who say similarly off-putting things? (But it's "economic anxiety" when they do it, I guess.)

I'm just speaking for myself, and not on the behalf of the community. But I think if we can give grace to Dr. Kelly for her inexperience -- considering that her previous experience as a Principal Intern was at a school with a 14% Asian population -- we can also leave some for immigrant families who are not as aware of the complex racial history of the US.

Thank you so much for sharing your family’s history, China’s complex history, and your family’s experience with immigration to the US.

I believe in order for our community to move forward, there definitely needs to be grace and open dialogue all around.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How did you get from "I know at least two of them are leaving" to "A quarter of the teachers are leaving"?

There are 9 out of 40 teachers leaving and more to follow, including some 20+ year long term teachers. The new principle is toxic.

They have the same scenario at Travilah elementary. The principal is toxic and in a war with the teachers and this year 6 left, last year it was more than that. Teachers have been getting into fights with her and she took a surprise leave of absence where she didn’t even email the school families to let them know. She just ran without saying anything. It’s stressful and a betrayal of her calling as an educator not to reach out to the families plus destroying the previous principal’s good work building the school into a powerhouse. Such a tragedy.

When will MCPS step in and end toxic culture???? Who are we when we don’t protect the teachers?????

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How did you get from "I know at least two of them are leaving" to "A quarter of the teachers are leaving"?

There are 9 out of 40 teachers leaving and more to follow, including some 20+ year long term teachers. The new principle is toxic.

They have the same scenario at Travilah elementary. The principal is toxic and in a war with the teachers and this year 6 left, last year it was more than that. Teachers have been getting into fights with her and she took a surprise leave of absence where she didn’t even email the school families to let them know. She just ran without saying anything. It’s stressful and a betrayal of her calling as an educator not to reach out to the families plus destroying the previous principal’s good work building the school into a powerhouse. Such a tragedy.

When will MCPS step in and end toxic culture???? Who are we when we don’t protect the teachers?????

.

how do you know the leave of absence wasn't MCPS stepping in?

[Anonymous]

That’s a good point. We don’t!!! I very much hope they did get involved, we cannot have this level of attrition! Principals are crucial and so valuable but FFS teachers are too!!!!

[Anonymous]

As a parent of a child who graduated from Lakewood ES years ago, I always thought that the teachers should look more like the student body. Studies have shown that students do better when teachers look more like them.

If the new teachers who are being hired by Dr. Kelly look more like the student body and represent the student body more (like a soft quota), then I think it is not necessarily a bad thing that 10 out of 40 teachers left.

If Dr. Kelly is responsive to her school and her student body, then she probably should hire new teachers accordingly, right?

[Anonymous]

https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/regulatoryaccountability/glance/currentyear/schools/02209.pdf

forgot to add the link.

[Anonymous]

reading all 18 pages, there seems to be a commingling of issues: (1) Dr. Kelly's "toxic" management style forcing out teachers with years of service at the school and (2) MCPS's anti-racism audit.

While some parents may disagree with the scope of the anti-racism audit, that should not be mixed together with Dr. Kelly's management.

If your goal is to improve Lakewood ES for the students, then focus on Dr. Kelly's management (or lack thereof).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As a parent of a child who graduated from Lakewood ES years ago, I always thought that the teachers should look more like the student body. Studies have shown that students do better when teachers look more like them.

If the new teachers who are being hired by Dr. Kelly look more like the student body and represent the student body more (like a soft quota), then I think it is not necessarily a bad thing that 10 out of 40 teachers left.

If Dr. Kelly is responsive to her school and her student body, then she probably should hire new teachers accordingly, right?

Unfortunately, Asians don't seem to go into education often. Actually, one of my best friends was an MCPS educator (and was Asian!) but she left teaching, because, well... *waves hands around vaguely* this kind of stuff.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a parent of a child who graduated from Lakewood ES years ago, I always thought that the teachers should look more like the student body. Studies have shown that students do better when teachers look more like them.

If the new teachers who are being hired by Dr. Kelly look more like the student body and represent the student body more (like a soft quota), then I think it is not necessarily a bad thing that 10 out of 40 teachers left.

If Dr. Kelly is responsive to her school and her student body, then she probably should hire new teachers accordingly, right?

Unfortunately, Asians don't seem to go into education often. Actually, one of my best friends was an MCPS educator (and was Asian!) but she left teaching, because, well... *waves hands around vaguely* this kind of stuff.

My school has lost an Asian educator every year for the last 5 because of the toxic environment. Another factor is that there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to who gets recognized for exceptional work, let alone promoted into school level leadership. I can understand family or cultural pressure to move on after a couple years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree with the other posters. It is good advice to get more involved and “watch like a hawk” as someone put it (lol).

As with most things, including RJ, the problem with anti racist ideology is its implementation. This principal seems to be aggressively imposing this ideology on a mostly minority community that has many immigrant parents. My immigrant parents would have no clue what antiracist dogma she is babbling about. She is out of touch and hasn’t made the effort to understand who she is trying to lead and what their needs are.

Let's not forget, when it comes to these immigrant parents... there's a lot of generational trauma around educational access and political beliefs. My parents still bring up being pulled out of school and being sent down to the countryside because they were labelled as "bourgeois".

Yes, so many stories and experiences to share in a diverse community. It’s tough, but important to navigate the nuances of each.

I’m still very upset about the teachers leaving and the apparent toxic environment of this school year. I do know that we have strong parent support of many races and that by being more involved next year we can hopefully help make the environment peaceful, fun, and most important, a place to receive the best advanced quality of education, for our children.

I was thinking about how I was saying that the Lakewood community, having a high minority population, could use context when it comes to US-centered anti-racist discussions, so I thought maybe I'd share a little about my family's immigration story to provide some context for the other side as well. That said, my family's immigration story is not going to be the same as any other Asian family's immigration story, though I think many immigrants (and not just Asian ones!) will find commonalities. My family is from Mainland China, which means that our experiences are not going to be the same as the Chinese people who came to the US in the late 1800s to build railroads or mine gold. Also not going to be the same as Hoa (ethnic Chinese in Vietnam) people who fled after the Vietnam war, or Mandarin-speakers who immigrated from Taiwan, or Cantonese-speakers who immigrated from Hong Kong. To most non-Chinese, all these groups would all be grouped as "Chinese," but there are actually a lot of linguistic and cultural/generational differences depending on area of origin and when your family came to the US. (Does anyone know or remember if Lakewood missives are written in Simplified or Traditional Chinese? Because that's a thing too.) Anyway, I digress.

My parents performed a rendition of the Immigration Story approximately 4 times a year, roughly corresponding to whenever report cards released, dates of major tests, or, depending on the year, however long I could successfully hide a report card from my parents. In good years, it's a brief after-dinner chat to remind me about the importance of education. In bad years, it was delivered at high volume, with several encores, and more screaming than a metal concert. But the abbreviated version is basically:

My dad's family bootstrapped themselves from being rural farmers to owning a small plot of land and a store. When the Communists took over at the end of the Chinese Civil War, this was seen as Very Bad, because people who owned property were the bourgeois parasites preventing Chinese society from progressing. Land reform meant that private property was taken away. There were social consequences too: when my grandmother, a widow with seven children, tried to register my father for middle school, the local cadre in charge of education refused to allow him to enroll. Remember what I said about being rural farmers? My grandmother was actually only semi-literate herself. She had to leave school to help financially support her family, so she never had the same opportunities her younger siblings did. Because education was denied to her, she valued education very, very much. So much that she went "well, if I can't trust these people to guarantee my child's educational success, I guess I have to step up myself," scraped together whatever meagre resources she had at her disposal, and managed to find my dad a place in another district two hours travel away that would allow him to be enrolled. My dad once told me how they couldn't afford to eat eggs often, but on days he had important tests, she would fry two eggs and plate them with a pair of chopsticks to make "100": the score she hoped he would get.

My dad studied very hard and was a good student. (I am sure every immigrant child has heard their parent tell them that they were good students, which is why in turn they should also be good students, so as not to waste the sacrifices their parents made for them to come to America.) Then the Cultural Revolution happened. Chairman Mao was losing the support of the people because the Great Leap Forward was a resounding failure that led directly to the Great Chinese Famine (names are explanatory), and his brilliant idea was to double down on centrally-planned Communist ideals and labelling anyone who opposed them as "capitalists," "anti-revolutionaries," or "rightists". Background for non-Chinese history nerds: the Cultural Revolution was a Bad Time in Chinese history. If you didn't fall in line with what the Party espoused, you would face consequences. (If you enjoy science fiction, I recommend checking out the Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin, which goes into this a little bit. President Obama famously recommended this book back in 2017.) All higher education was shut down between 1966-1968.

In some parts of China, things got REALLY bad. In an era where traditional culture and values were seen as hindrances to the great Communist cause, teachers, educators, and intellectuals were considered "class enemies" and victimized. In one particularly horrific case, a middle school teacher was beaten to death by her students, and later they barbequed and ate her organs. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre) There's lots more, but I know you all can Google.

My dad doesn't like to talk about it much. I've only heard bits and pieces over the years, and then I did a lot of reading and research myself.

Once he told me about watching a teacher at his school get dragged out and beaten to death.

One of his uncles spoke out about some local incident that he felt wasn't investigated properly. He got sent to labor camp for 10 years. (He was one of the lucky ones; he actually came back.)

A woman in his village was pulled up on stage during a public "self-criticism session" and sexually assaulted.

I'm sure there is more, but I've always been afraid to pry.

Part of the Cultural Revolution was something called the "Down to the Countryside Movement" where educated city youths (like my parents) who were thought to have bourgeois sympathies, were sent down to remote, rural villages to work on farms and learn the value of the proletariat. My dad has not gone into specifics, but from what I can surmise, he was not treated well there because of his "bourgeois" background.

I don't suppose you see why some immigrants can get real skittish about the intersection of politics and education?

Eventually Chairman Mao realized that the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards were doing more harm than good (like most of his initiatives) and started phasing it out. He opened up schools again. When we talk about high stakes testing in the US, keep in mind that China is the OG of standardized testing, dating back to the Imperial Examinations established during the Sui dynasty (~500 AD). In China, scores on the gaokao (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaokao) determine which colleges or universities you'll be admitted to -- if you're admitted at all. No report cards, no letters of recommendation, no squishy feel-good metrics like "likeability" and "helpfulness" that could help tip you over if you were right on the border. (https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/harvard-admissions-personality/563198/) Had a bad day and didn't do well? Sucks, no retakes. You'll have to wait until next year. My dad told me he spent 3 months studying, and the stress of it cause him to lose 20 pounds on his already lean 5'7/130 pound frame. Well, it paid off! He got into one of the top universities in China. Yay, education!

This was an era of relative stability; my parents married and had my sibling. They were both educators. (It runs in my family; my maternal grandmother was actually a school principal.) At some point, my dad went back to school for a Masters... and then he decided to pursue a Ph.D. At the time, China didn't have any PhD programs (since, you know, since higher education was destroyed) but because he was such an outstanding student, he somehow managed to convince his professor to recommend him to go to the US. Remember, this was not long after Nixon's historic visit "opened China to the West" (1972). Also worth nothing, Chinese immigrants from the Mainland were pretty rare in the US due to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), which was only fully abolished in 1965.

Coming to the US was hard. There was the struggle with learning a whole new language (my dad came to the US in his late thirties) and of course, a huge cultural shift as well. It also meant that the discrimination he faced was now racial instead of class-based. (He mentions being a TA and having students pretend to not understand him; being deliberately splashed with water by cars, stuff like that.) Eventually my dad managed to bring my mom and my brother over to the US as well, and then I (the anchor baby) was born. My parents frequently remind me that education is the reason for my existence, as I wouldn't have been born if they stayed in China because of the One Child Policy.

Now, I consider myself bilingual and bicultural, and I am grateful that I have had the educational background to understand things like systemic racism and it's history in the US. Denial of access to education has always been a tool used by those in power to keep out those who are not. I think if phrased that way, pretty much all families would be on board with improving access to education for everyone. But just like I don't think most people read about Chinese sociopolitical history for fun, I don't think most immigrants trying to adapt to life in the US are making time to dig into chattel slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, segregation, redlining, Brown vs. Board of Education, John Howard Griffin writing "Black Like Me," Rosa Parks, MLK, Malcolm X, all the way up through electing our first Black president, followed by electing his polar opposite... I mean, there's A LOT of history to cover. (Shout out MCPS and my AP US History teacher, though, for getting through it.)

My sibling is Gen X, while I'm considered an elder Millennial. Within the few years that we both went through MCPS, education on this topic has changed a lot, and now that our children are in school, it has changed even more. When I try to talk about these things with my sibling, they act like I'm doing a Chris Rock bit, because they grew up in the "racism is solved, everybody is the same!!" era of racial education. If you visit China and go to a drugstore, you'll see that one of the most popular domestic brands of toothpaste is named "Darlie," and has a picture of a man in blackface as it's logo. Believe it or not, that's actually the improved version, because they changed the name to Darlie by replacing the original "K" with an "L" sometime in the early '00s. The Chinese brand name still translates literally to "Black Person Toothpaste." But the Chinese have never had a history with minstrel shows and blackface, no "Soul Man" movie starring C Thomas Howell (1986), no Uncle Ben's or Aunt Jemima branding built on the history of black domestic labor in white households... I think it is understandable if immigrants are not as sophisticated about racial dynamics. After all, do we not give plenty of latitude towards white Boomers who say similarly off-putting things? (But it's "economic anxiety" when they do it, I guess.)

I'm just speaking for myself, and not on the behalf of the community. But I think if we can give grace to Dr. Kelly for her inexperience -- considering that her previous experience as a Principal Intern was at a school with a 14% Asian population -- we can also leave some for immigrant families who are not as aware of the complex racial history of the US.

Oh Jesus. This is why CRT is taught in college. Stop wasting time on all this nonsense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As a parent of a child who graduated from Lakewood ES years ago, I always thought that the teachers should look more like the student body. Studies have shown that students do better when teachers look more like them.

If the new teachers who are being hired by Dr. Kelly look more like the student body and represent the student body more (like a soft quota), then I think it is not necessarily a bad thing that 10 out of 40 teachers left.

If Dr. Kelly is responsive to her school and her student body, then she probably should hire new teachers accordingly, right?

Yes, people should only associate with others of the same race. How absurd.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a parent of a child who graduated from Lakewood ES years ago, I always thought that the teachers should look more like the student body. Studies have shown that students do better when teachers look more like them.

If the new teachers who are being hired by Dr. Kelly look more like the student body and represent the student body more (like a soft quota), then I think it is not necessarily a bad thing that 10 out of 40 teachers left.

If Dr. Kelly is responsive to her school and her student body, then she probably should hire new teachers accordingly, right?

Yes, people should only associate with others of the same race. How absurd.

Good faith arguments, please. I previously cited a study published by MDSE showing that students of all races benefit from having diverse teachers: see page 42.

https://www.marylandpublicschools.org/stateboard/Documents/2022/0726/TabGBlueprintAndDataDeepDiveTeacherPipelineAndDiversity.pdf

Significance of Matching Effects in Education
•“For both Black and Hispanic students, we find consistent evidence that increased diversity amongst teachers and broader sets of school
professionals benefits test-score performance, and—in several instances—also leads to improved school behaviors.”

• “Increased shares of same-race/ethnicity professionals result in increased test scores, and decreased suspensions and absences for
Black and Hispanic students. We also find that exposure to nonWhite school staff leads to improved outcomes for these students, whether or not they are from the same racial/ethnic group.”

— David Blazar, Professor at the University of Maryland College Park
Findings based on Maryland data, courtesy of the Maryland Longitudinal Data System