Before last fall, Jianping Xiong rarely gave much thought to school district affairs. He and his wife sent their three sons to the bus stop and went about their day.
That began to change after he attended a board of education meeting last September. The meeting was packed with parents—most of them Asian—who were there because the administration was proposing to eliminate the accelerated and enriched math programs for fourth and fifth graders. All three of Xiong’s children were already enrolled in the A&E math program, and the changes would have no impact on them. But the district proposal, adopted in December, was the latest in a series of curriculum changes that Xiong found worrisome. The changes reinforced his impression that the school district had been putting in place constraints that ultimately decrease educational standards.
The A&E program became a cause célèbre last fall, and the administration worked tirelessly to address community concerns about numerous curriculum changes. At a school board meeting last November, superintendent David Aderhold said well being and academic excellence were not mutually exclusive. Overall, he said, the district had a “stress crisis.”
“WW-P needs to confront the reality that the demands that so many are placing on their children are not healthy,” he said.
Not everyone agrees with Aderhold, however, and the changes made to the curriculum in the past year have galvanized some people in the community. Xiong is one of them. “It’s hard to understand the intention of the school,” he said. “We want our children to learn as much as they can.”
In May, a group of residents who are opposed to the curriculum changes founded the WW-P Education Support Association. The mission of the nonprofit, of which Xiong is a trustee, is to “support educational excellence” for students in the district, according to its website, wwpesa.org. The other trustees are president Zhigang Zhang, vice president Jie Gao, Yunqing Li, Helen Yin, Weiming Tang and Maggie Wu. Like Xiong, all are originally from China.
Other objectives include helping members obtain information from the district, encouraging them to get involved in district activities, helping them advocate for children at school or in the school system, and “organizing community advocacy when needed.”
As a tax-exempt nonprofit, the organization cannot endorse or donate to a political candidate or lobby for legislative change. But it did organize two forums at Plainsboro Library this election season, one for school board candidates from West Windsor, one for those from Plainsboro. At the West Windsor forum held Oct. 1, WWPESA went to the heart of the matter, asking every candidate, “What is your opinion on the recent changes made at WW-P schools in the past two years (e.g., A&E, midterms and finals, no homework nights, option II, science bowl, etc.)?”
School board president Tony Fleres, asked about the WWPESA, said he doesn’t know anything about the group except what he’s read on their website.
Fleres did say that aid there are already organizations like the West Windsor–Plainsboro Education Foundation and the school PTAs that provide such support, and he doesn’t know what WWPESA can provide that the others cannot. “When I know more about them … maybe they have a good reason,” he said.
Fleres was in attendance at the West Windsor candidates forum, and he gives credit to the WWPESA for trying to provide information to the public.
“The people I recognized in the audience, I’ll say they are not fans of Fleres and Aderhold,” Fleres said. “A bunch of the officers of the organization have written letters to the paper. They’ve made enough public comments that I know who they are. They probably know what my thoughts are, and we just disagree on things, and that’s part of life. It’s their district too, they live here, and that’s what elections are for. I disagree that the district is limiting students. I think in many ways we are expanding opportunities for students.”
Xiong has lived in Plainsboro for 13 years, and never imagined he would get involved in public school affairs. Then again, growing up in a rural village of rice farmers, the prospect even of going to college was a remote possibility.
The province of Jiangxi is 500 miles inland from Shanghai, and Xiong is from a small village where everyone shared the same surname. His father was the principal of the small elementary school in the village, where his mother also taught. In the 1970s, elementary school students from his small village would go to the middle school in a larger town. Xiong boarded at the middle school, returning home twice a week to fetch food supplies.
Only a third of students in his middle school grade went on to high school. The rest returned home to farm the land. Because he was the top student in his class, Xiong gained entry into a top high school in the city of Fengcheng, which today is a modest-sized Chinese city of more than one million people.
More than 30 years later, Xiong remembers that he was initially ranked 100 out of the 400 students in his grade. It turns out that a big fish in the middle school pond wasn’t so big in the city. Yet going to school in the city also meant better resources, including a cafeteria and college-educated teachers.
“In the countryside, we don’t have much information. We knew if you did better, you could go to the city. Then in high school, college became the next goal,” Xiong said.
Xiong estimates only half the students in high school back then went on to some sort of postsecondary education, but by the time he graduated in 1985, he was second in his class. He was one of 60 in his whole province that year to attend Tsinghua University, a school considered the MIT of China. The first person from his village to go to college, they held a riotous send-off party for Xiong.
Asked about the pressure of his childhood education, Xiong shrugs and matter-of-factly says he worked hard and studied. He never imagined he would end up studying physics in Beijing, much less bear witness to a world-historical event.
A college student in Beijing in the late 1980s, Xiong was swept up in the student-led Tiananmen Square protests that culminated in the what the Chinese refer to simply as the June Fourth Incident.
That night, the government broadcast warnings to stay clear of the public square. Naturally, out of solidarity, Xiong and his classmates descended en masse to the site. Xiong recalls a long night of gunshots and roving tanks, and says he was lucky to able to emerge unscathed.
After the demonstrations were violently quashed, Xiong says the student body became disillusioned. More than half his classmates began studying for English standardized tests with the intention of emigrating.
Xiong had similar intentions, but he was short on cash to sign up for the necessary exams. Instead, after Tsinghua he spent three years at Nanjing University, earning a masters in physics, which he then leveraged into a two-year master’s program at Rutgers University. Along the way he met his wife, Zhengjin Tang.
While Chinese emigrants in WW-P may not share his explicit political education, Xiong says most of the Chinese in his age cohort have a similar background. They attended top universities in China, determined America had greater opportunity, and proceeded to avail themselves of any chance to matriculate onto a U.S. campus. With relatively limited English skills, most emigrants used STEM as the toehold to study in the U.S.
For nearly 20 years, Xiong has worked in the medical physics department at the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. His employer sponsored his third masters degree, this one in computer science.
His wife is a homemaker, and their two younger sons go to South and Grover respectively. Their oldest, Charles, is a freshman at Rutgers, studying business on scholarship.
“Charles is very smart, but does not put a lot of time into studying,” Xiong said. “If he worked a little bit harder, he might get into MIT. It’s not a big deal. I think Rutgers is suitable for him.”
Xiong says everyone should strive to attend a top university. “If you can, you try to be the best,” Xiong said. “My brothers and sisters did go to college, but not the top ones. They are still in China. You work harder, you achieve more.”
At the same time, Xiong has also reconciled his expectations. “Through Charles’ 10th grade I was frustrated, then I realized everyone has their own life,” he said. “What they do is their own consequences. They at least need to work hard. What they achieve doesn’t matter.”
Xiong’s second son, David, is currently in high school. In his case, Xiong expresses frustration that the mandatory study hall period cannot be used to take an additional science course. David is also in orchestra, so he has no other elective period. This year, he has dropped history in order to take a second science, physics honors.
“The goal is to take the most rigorous courses the school offers. If the school offers it, you should provide a path to finish that,” Xiong said.
In this case, the goal is to take AP bio, chemistry and physics by the end of high school Xiong acknowledges that “finish” entails six years of science courses in a four-year time frame.
“He’s good at science and math. He wants to be able to get into all the advanced science course,” Xiong said. “I think we should encourage hard work, not to decrease competition. Though I don’t think we should push too hard so students get exhausted. Most talented students, without limits then can achieve more.”
As for Xiong’s role in the WWPESA, he says one initiative under consideration is create a student-to-student tutoring program.
“We’re forming not to confront the administration but to support the district,” Xiong said.
