Radical Read Free Page B

norm coast to coast, from inner-city schools to small towns to suburbs. The declining state of public education in the United States during the 1970s and ’80s provoked a reaction from Washington. President Ronald Reagan asked his Department of Education to establish a commission to study public schools. In 1983 the commission published A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.
    â€œCertainly,” President Reagan said at the commission’s first meeting, “there are few areas of American life as important to our society, to our people, and to our families, as our schools and colleges.”
    For eighteen months, Reagan’s commission held hearings across the country and researched schools. Its conclusion: “We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.
    â€œWhat was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.”
    The commission found that twenty-three million Americans were literally or functionally illiterate. Thirteen percent of all seventeen-year-olds were illiterate; the College Board’s SAT scores had fallen steadily from 1963 to 1980 by 50 points in verbal and 40 in math; business and military leaders complained they were spending millions of dollars on remedial reading, writing, and math skills.
    â€œThe world is indeed one global village,” the report stated, concluding: “America’s position in the world may once have been reasonably secure with only a few exceptionally well-trained men and women. It is no longer.”
    Toledo public schools were not what they once had been. Shang and Inza Rhee didn’t have to read A Nation at Risk to understand that their children might not thrive in public schools and be able to compete with the best. They surveyed their options and evaluated the schools based on their roots in education and the education-crazy country from which they came.
    My parents settled the family in Rossford, about five miles south of Toledo, along the Maumee River. We lived in a neighborhood called the Colony, and it was every bit as exclusive and pretentious as it sounds. The sprawling yards separated neighbors at a comfortable distance, and many of the houses looked like mini castles. Good luck trick-or-treating there—the houses were too far apart and the neighbors too crotchety to lead to a good haul. There weren’t very many children who lived in the neighborhood, so my brothers and I had to venture outside the stone gates in order to play with our friends. With significant trepidation and skepticism, my parents enrolled my brothers and me in the neighborhood public school, Eagle Point Elementary.
    T HE TEACHERS AT LITTLE MEADOWS nursery school got one thing right: I was an extremely shy and sheltered kid through primary school. My mother was creating a daughter modeled on her upbringing in Seoul. We weren’t Americans. We were Koreans living in America. They were so serious about this that they sent each of us to Korea after sixth grade for a year to be immersed in the culture.
    So in the summer of 1978 they shipped me off to Seoul to live with my aunt and her three children. I couldn’t speak a lick of Korean. What a shock: I was now living in a tiny apartment, sleeping in a cramped room with my two cousins, and waking up to a breakfast of rice and banchan (small plates of seasoned vegetables) every morning.
    The biggest adjustment, though, came when I went to school.
    Students started every day by lining up and standing at attention. Then we did calisthenics. I remember thinking to myself: “Are you serious? Do I really have to