by Anti-Racist Parent contributor Margie Perscheid
I read a disturbing post at Angry Asian Man this morning; the original article is here: Student rejects ‘demeaning’ test, is suspended. Please go read.
At the center of the controversy is Lori Phanachone, a young woman described in the article this way:
Lori Phanachone is a member of the National Honor Society, has a 3.9 grade point average and ranks seventh in the senior class of about 119 at Storm Lake High School.
Lori has been suspended. Her scholarships are threatened. She has been counseled to just lie about her first language, which she rightfully has refused to do. The injustice is so clear, so overwhelming, that it was shocking, really to see the following comment right up at the top of the list:
If you are going to fight for injustice in this world then at least make it a fight for a worthwhile cause.
How someone could miss such an obvious wrong is mind-boggling. I take this comment to mean that this person either believes racism no longer exists, or that fighting it isn’t a worthy endeavor. Makes no difference: whether these attitudes stem from deeply-engrained beliefs or post-election nonsense, they’re both dangerous. Lori’s situation provides a frightening example why.
I can look within my own family for proof. My husband’s first language isn’t English. In college, where we met, he was required on college forms to identify his first language, and he answered honestly. No one ever required him to prove his English proficiency.
He is white, however, and his first language is German, a European language. With the same language proficiency but a different face, I have no doubt that he could have experienced what Lori Phanachone is experiencing now.
Shame on Storm Lake High School and the Storm Lake Board of Education. Bravo, Lori, for taking a stand! We’re standing with you!
Many thanks to Angry Asian Man for providing contact information at Storm Lake High. Contact them to share your outrage and show your support for Lori.
Paul Tedesco – Storm Lake School District Superintendent
ptedesco@slcsd.org
Mike Hanna – Principal
mhanna@slcsd.org
Beau Ruleaux – Assistant Principal
bruleaux@slcsd.org
Storm Lake High School phone number : (712) 732-8065
Margie Perscheid is the adoptive mother of two Korean teens. She is a co-founder of Korean Focus, an organization for families with children from Korea with chapters across the country. Margie is on the Board of Directors of the Korean American Coalition DC Chapter, a former board member of KAAN, the Korean YMCA of Greater Washington (now KAYA), and ASIA (Adoption Service Information Agency). Margie writes about her intercountry adoption experiences at Third Mom. She, her husband Ralf, and their two children live in Alexandria, Virginia.
I was involved with a charter school for Chinese for a while. The group started up when the school system most of the board lived in offered to teach Chinese. If the kids would register as ESL students so the system could get more money. All of these children spoke either English as a native language or were adopted a very young age. The fact that this very well off school system would be willing to brand students like this and subject them to extra testing, just as this young woman was supposed to endure, drove the parents out of the school system entirely.
Storm Lake HS has a full website including contact numbers. I’m pretty tempted to give them a call and tell them exactly how disgusted I am with this policy.
Aaaand … that’ll teach me to read to the end before I get incensed. Calling now.
Go Moll! I hope everyone who reads this calls or writes to the school.
I did notice that Mike Hanna’s email bounced back. I tried again using the same organizational name as the others, and it seemed to work:
mhanna@slcsd.org
And that should have been Go MollY!
Thanks for calling attention to this. I read the same post on AAM and wanted to blog about it as well, but I get so incensed every time I try to do so that I can’t write or think. I can understand why the original policy might have been created, but it’s shocking that no one in authority will acknowledge the faulty assumptions inherent in it and instead focus all their energies on putting Lori “back in her place” (and we all know “the place” of a young woman of color). The assistant principal should be fired after that Rosa Parks remark.
I read some of the comments in the related news articles and they are absolutely appalling…whoever said that racism is dead in this country is seriously delusional.
I just sent a message to all 3 email addresses about this shameful incident. thank you so much for bringing it to our attention and calling us to action!
FYI, the principal’s email address rejected my email (mhanna@storm-lake.k12.ia.us)
Wow! This is my first real visit to your site and what a way to kick off a discussion!
I never heard of someone being asked not put their native language as opposed to English. Is there some statistical advantage that benefits the school for doing so?
Isn’t this a violation of her civil rights? She definitely has a legal case on her hands, and I doubt those threatened scholarships will truly be threatened in the end because she is clearly a very bright student.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention,
Please please forgive me. I am not trying to play “Devil’s advocate” or be a troll. I am just trying to understand. I read the AAM post and both articles he linked to and I am just failing to see the racism. Do I have the main facts straight? The school receives federal money for students who speak English as a second language because of No Child Left Behind. As part of this, they are required to objectively demonstrate that these students are making progress or else risk losing the federal aid. It seems that it is a matter for a separate debate whether THIS policy is racist. But that doesn’t seem to be what the student is protesting.
Obviously there are a lot of problems with the school officials’ responses and some of the language they have apparently used. But as long as the policy is evenly applied at THIS school, I am just really struggling to understand it as racist. You can certainly argue that the test is not the only way that she could demonstrate English proficiency-but the school needs some kind of objective method and this test is what they currently have. Don’t they need the same metric for all non-native English speaking students? They didn’t single her out based on her appearance or make assumptions based on her name, right?
The young lady’s problem with the test seems to be that it is so easy that it is insulting and simply because it is so easy for HER, it is therefore demeaning and a waste of her time. She complains that by asking to test her, they are not looking at her as a person. I mean you could say this of ALL standardized tests. All tests really. I don’t know. I’ve been going over this in my mind all weekend and really want to understand but I just don’t. Please educate me.
I am outraged. Here is the letter I just sent to the principal, vice-principal, and superintendent:
Dear Sirs,
I am writing to express support for Lori Panachone, and to express my extreme disappointment and anger that she is being so harshly penalized for refusing to take a test that is both demeaning and insulting. As a student with a 3.9 GPA, who has already been awarded significant scholarship money, she should not be required to demonstrate any further proficiency, and she most certainly should not have those scholarships threatened because of her refusal to do so. It is your policy that needs correction, not this student.
As an educator and an adoptive mother of a child who did not speak English until he was five, I am outraged to imagine that my son might one day be subjected to this sort of test. I hope you don’t waste precious school funding to defend your policies. They need changing. Now.
Our school district required an English proficiency test of my two girls who were adopted as babies from China.
That’s their standard procedure (as it was explained to me, the school does whatever it can to get any extra federal money).
When we showed up for the test, the instructor spent a minute talking to the girls and then excused them. So, common sense prevailed over the “rule.” Panachone’s school administrators need a good dose of common sense.
Good Karma has a point. I think the school is penalizing this kid too harshly and it’s unfair to keep her from graduating or threatening her scholarships, etc., for refusing to take a test. On the other hand, this is a situation where I’d tell her to pick her battles. Take the test, pass it with 100 percent, graduate and get her scholarships, and THEN raise hell over this. At this point she’s choosing to make a point and get on her high horse while the school still has power over her.
No Child Left Behind holds an enormous sword over school districts that are not making “adequate yearly progress.” The progress of kids who don’t speak English as a first language is one of the areas schools are held accountable for and will lose control of funding over if they don’t make AYP. The test scores and graduation rates of minority students, of low-income students, of students with disabilities are also singled out and the school is penalized if those individual groups aren’t performing as expected even if the rest of the student population is. Schools have to send teachers for extra training, have to spend federal money on training, tutoring for students, at some point can be required to replace staff or allow students to attend other schools, with transportation at district expense, if AYP isn’t met. Pressuring this kid to take this test is likely related to the school’s need to make AYP in this area, not to racism. If there was a kid who spoke German as a first language in the school and wouldn’t take the test, he’d fall under exactly the same law and the school would also need HIM to take the test to prove AYP.
What on earth do you people find so demeaning about this test. This woman should be eager to show that she speaks and writes English well. She is an immigration success story.
Markus,
Aaaah…there in lies the problem. Lori is not “an immigrant succes story.” She is a young woman of Laotian descent who was born in California and lived in upstate New York before moving to Iowa. She is an AMERICAN.
This is definitely a problem with how US schools see/judge/treat students of color and immigrant students. I believe this young lady’s 3.9 GPA demonstrates her proficiency.
My kids, who are Black, attended Hungarian schools while we lived there for 6 years. Their exam scores demonstrated their proficiency in the Hungarian language, same as for any other student.
When we returned to the US, the school told us that maybe the honors program “wasn’t the right placement” for them, as they “might be behind” and have “language difficulties”. Ridiculous because 1) English was their first language, and 2) Hungarian schools were far ahead of the US schools.
My kids were treated inequitably as “immigrants” in their own country, but were not treated that way when they actually WERE “immigrants” in another country. The US really needs to revamp their attitudes and treatment.
As comment #13 shows, students of color are often ID’d as immigrants when that is not even the case, and are subjected to inequitable treatment. I’ve seen White kids who have lived in other countries, and no one assumes they’re behind or have language difficulties – in fact, they’re praised for being bilingual, while for students of color, it’s seen as a drawback!
Our schools need an attitude adjustment.
But isn’t the school system right now a “revamped system”.
I could be wrong and since I can’t find it easily on-line I am going off a very lousy memory but wasn’t the whole ESL and ‘No Child Left Behind’ instituted because the former system in this country for decades was a ‘sink or swim’ system. You learned as you went or failed. I thought it was argued that this was a racist system that destined immigrant children and children of immigrants to failure.
Now what is happening to this girl is obnoxious and given that hers is the ONLY district that holds this policy is a good indication that she doesn’t HAVE to take it but they WANT her to take it, probably because of funding.