The American Dream is alive and well and living on Lincoln Avenue.
Once upon a time, parents and teachers sang the same one-note song: This is a land of opportunity, so if you work hard in school and make good grades, you`ll get into a top college and land a well-paying job.
Young people get that message a lot less often now. But it is still the reigning philosophy of the Language and Math Academy, a most unusual after-school educational program for students in 5th grade through high school, housed in a nondescript office building on Chicago`s Northwest Side. Its director, Dong Man Cha, is a kind of pedagogic Emma Lazarus: Send us your huddled masses, he tells his fellow immigrants, and we`ll turn them into college material.
”I explain to every new student that being an immigrant is like being handicapped,” said Cha, who immigrated to the U.S. from Korea 10 years ago.
”It`s a disadvantage we have to work just that much harder to overcome.”
Cha`s 600 students are obviously getting the message. They average 1,400 points on the Scholastic Aptitute Test.
The SAT, as it is popularly known, is the most widely used college entrance exam and is generally taken in the junior year of high school. A quarter of a century ago, American students averaged 956, out of a possible 1,600 points, on the SAT. By 1989, those scores had slipped to 903, a decline that most experts take as a barometer of the nation`s ever-deepening educational crisis.
Yet in Cha`s bare-bones study halls, it is hard to believe that this is a nation whose school kids can no longer make the grade. A few years ago, one of Cha`s disciples, John Park, scored a near-perfect 1,587 on the SAT, then went on to enroll in Harvard.
Year in and year out, Cha`s students have better SAT scores than do the freshman classes of such superselective universities as Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Because of their prestige, those institutions draw students from all across the country, so their SAT averages represent the creme de la creme of a nationwide pool of college-bound young people.
Cha`s student body is pretty much limited to the West Rogers Park neighborhood, plus a few suburbs close enough for working parents to commute there twice weekly, delivering their children to Cha`s three-hour sessions. He also has about 2,000 correspondence students around the country.
”Most parents find us by word-of-mouth reputation,” Cha said. ”They are concerned about academic success and worried that the schools are not giving their children enough.”
He was signing up two new students, whose mother explained that the family had come to America two years ago. For a long time, the woman assumed the public schools would teach her children English and inspire them to study. She reluctantly concluded that just wasn`t happening, so she brought them to Cha`s academy.
Enrolling her children was a financial sacrifice, which she didn`t take lightly. With measured movements, she opened the clasp on a small change purse and withdrew a roll of $10 bills to pay the first month`s tuition, which averages $70 a month.
Actually, her story became clear only later, since the woman speaks only Korean. During her conversation with Cha, the only recognizable word was
”homework,” which he repeatedly dropped into his explanation of the school`s method. The woman nodded at the bargain Cha proposed: She would see that her children faithfully kept up with their assignments. He would help them earn an educational passport to the middle class.
To seal that arrangement, Cha took a ball point pen from a desk drawer and gave it to her. Like similar advertising giveaways, its barrel is lettered with his enterprise`s name and address.
”When I was growing up in Korea, I dreamed of one day coming to the United States,” said Cha, 58. ”To my little boy`s imagination, this was a magic land where a penniless immigrant can become a success, with a little hard work.”
Each classroom is staffed by an instructor, but clearly it is Cha`s presence that sets the school`s tone. Making his customary rounds, he found a boy in one room resting his foot on a study table. Cha delivered a light but sharp karate chop to the boy`s extended leg. Then he reminded the class that academic success begins with respect for education.
Passing Cha in the halls of his academy, young people bow deeply from the waist, a greeting also extended by parents dropping off and picking up their children.
”In Korean culture, students always look up to their teacher,” Cha said. ”Failure would be a sign of disrespect. Except for the hallowed role of the teacher in our society, my family`s lot in life would have been much harder.”
His father threatened
Cha explained that his father, Jong Cha, was a Presbyterian minister in a village near Pyongyang, in northern Korea, where he also ran the community`s school. After World War II, Korea was divided, and the communists, who took over the northern half, dealt harshly with missionaries, whom the communists identified with the rival South Korean government, supported by the U.S.
From time to time, his father came close to losing his church and school, like the other missionaries. But at the last minute, word would come to the village from North Korea`s capital that Jong Cha was to be left alone.
”Kim Il Sung, the communist dictator, was from our village and had gone to my father`s school,” Cha explained. ”As a Marxist, he was violently opposed to Christianity. Still, he would never allow any harm to befall his former teacher, my father.”
Graded on the spot
Cha`s educational method is simplicity itself. His academy lacks even a single computer, slide or movie projector, programmed-learning machine or any of the other high-tech gadgets American schools rely on. The walls are bare, except for one lone plaque lettered: ”Homework and pencils.” The unspoken message is: Don`t forget them!
The Language and Math Academy was hollowed out of an office suite that Cha guessed had housed a consumer finance venture of some sort. Now each room is furnished with chairs and metal office tables-one for boys, another for girls-around which Cha`s students sit and quietly do assignments.
At the beginning of each session, every student is given a packet of study materials, which look like pages from a school workbook. At the top of each is a reading passage or an explanation of a mathematical proposition, followed by a series of questions or problems. After working his way through them, the student brings his papers to the instructor, who grades them, points out the errors and makes sure the young person understands how he went astray. When a student does well, he is given a verbal pat on the back, plus another set of study materials at the next higher level of difficulty. If the instructor uses too much red pencil, the student is required to repeat the lesson until he masters it. At the end of the evening, everybody gets still one more study packet to take with as homework.
Flurry of copying
”Everything here is very scientific,” said Cha, who writes each lesson, then monitors the students` response, replacing less effective study packets with revised versions.
His wife, Minza Cha, dressed in a long, Oriental-style robe, runs a high- speed copier producing the hundreds of study sheets required by Cha`s academy. Another woman works virtually full time stapling the packets and piling them on shelves that line the largest room in the office suite. Cha`s half-dozen instructors constantly run back and forth between there and their classrooms, lugging fresh study packets.
Cha himself buttonholes his students, reminding them that they don`t have time to waste, even though they see American students doing just that in the public schools they attend during the day. He tucks the same message into the study materials he mails weekly to his correspondence students. Cha has not placed a limit on enrollment, which continues to grow. In fact, he`s debating whether he has time to serve on the board of nearby North Park College, which has invited him to join because of his reputation in the Korean community.
”When others sleep, we need to work,” Cha told one student. To another: ”Your freedom will be in the future. For now, you must do just what your teachers ask.”
An intolerable regime
Cha said he never intended to establish his educational factory. When the two Koreas went to war in the 1950s, Cha said, he escaped to the south, where he served in the army. Later he came to the U.S., was a graduate student in sociology at the University of Chicago, then moved on to Heidelberg University in West Germany, where he earned a Ph.D.
Returning to South Korea, he became an assistant for foreign affairs to that nation`s president. But by the 1970s, South Korea was under the grips of a dictatorial regime, which Cha felt he could no longer serve. So he returned to Heidelberg, where he taught for seven years. In 1980, he returned to Chicago, this time on an immigrant`s visa.
He got here just as the first large-scale Korean immigration to this city was beginning, and was hired by the Korea Times newspaper to survey the newcomers` educational problems.
”They wrote an article in the paper asking people to bring children in to be evaluated,” Cha said. ”I set up a table in the public library at California and Devon, and we tested 500 young people. Most of them were lagging about two to three years behind in their schoolwork.”
Next the paper asked Cha to try to find a way to help those students, so he set up an experimental group of 10 children. But when he started tutoring them, he found the problem wasn`t just that they were newcomers in a country whose language they barely understood.
In the 20 years between Cha`s first and second visits to America, an enormous change had come over the nation`s schools. Discipline, the work ethic and intellectual standards had virtually disappeared from the classroom, he said.
”I was shocked to find that all those virtues I had associated with America, the very things that had made me want to come here as a boy, were now rapidly vanishing,” Cha said.
When other parents heard about Cha`s experimental group, they insisted that their children be tutored too. So he rented a small office and offered after-school programs, which he eventually moved to his present quarters at 5933 N. Lincoln Ave.
No one attends free
Ten years after he started it, Cha`s academy, which runs year round, enrolls not only Koreans but Chinese, Japanese, Greeks and Spanish-speaking newcomers. Every Saturday, a van pulls up at the academy, bringing a dozen students whose parents send them on a four-hour round trip from Northwest Indiana.
If a parent has established a business for himself, or is a professional, his children are charged $80 instead of the standard $70. That allows Cha to offer poorer parents a price of $30. Everybody, though, must pay something.
”I tried giving free tution to some, but it doesn`t work,” Cha said.
”If you get something for nothing, then you don`t come to class when it`s raining or cold outside.”
According to Cha`s chief assistant, Eva Ghuneim, Cha continually preaches that the nation`s top colleges are scrambling to find first-rate students and couldn`t care less if they are first-generation Americans or Mayflower descendants.
Ghuneim, herself a Palestinian refugee, reports that the academy`s students are already debating the virtues of, say, Stanford versus Brown, at an age when many American students are only dimly aware of the differences between one college and another.
”I`ve got 5th graders in my class,” Ghuneim quipped, ”who only know two words of English: `Ivy League.”`
