Ethnic System of Supplementary Education

Supplementary Education in Greater Los Angeles

Take, for example, such developments in two immigrant communities in Los Angeles. The Chinese system of supplementary education has radiated outward from Los Angeles's Chinatown and into the affluent suburban cities of the San Gabriel Valley, developing indirectly from a nonprofit institution—Chinese language schools—and directly from ethnic entrepreneurship. Chinese language schools are registered as nonprofit organizations and have been an integral part of ethnic social structures of the Chinese immigrant community in the United States since the late 1880s. The original purpose was to provide a basic education to immigrant young men and for helping immigrant children to keep their culture, custom, heritage, and language alive in the United States. Since the 1980s, Chinese language schools have grown rapidly and have evolved to a much broader range of functions beyond the preservation of ethnic language and culture, operating after school daily or on weekends year round. The majority of Chinese schools at present are nondenominational and aim not only to maintain language and culture but also to serve the educational needs of immigrant children. Suburban Chinese schools usually operate on Saturday mornings or Sunday afternoons, offering 2 hours of Chinese language classes and 1 hour of enrichment electives, including fine arts, classic Chinese painting and calligraphy, handcrafts, origami, chorus singing, band, dancing, weiqi (Go, an ancient board game), calculation with an abacus, martial arts, Ping-Pong, tennis, and basketball. There are also various tuition-supported programs for academic tutoring and college preparation, such as math, English reading comprehension, English composition, and SAT I and SAT II subject preparations.

The development of Chinese language schools in the Chinese immigrant community has paralleled the development of for-profit private institutions targeting children's education since the late 1980s. The 2004 Southern California Chinese Consumer Yellow Pages listed 90 Chinese schools, 135 academic after-school tutoring establishments (including buxibans and kumon), 50 art schools and centers, and 90 music or dancing schools, most of which are located in Los Angeles's suburban Chinese community in the San Gabriel Valley. Driving around the commercial core of the growing Chinese “ethnoburb” east of Los Angeles, Monterey Park, one can see flashy bilingual signs for these establishments, with names such as Little Harvard, Ivy League School, Little Ph.D. Early Learning Center (a preschool), Stanford-to-Be Prep School, IQ180, and Hope Buxiban. Major Chinese language media, such as the Chinese Daily News, Sing Tao Daily, and China Press, publish a weekly edition of educational news and commentaries and have numerous advertisements for private after-school institutions.

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