In L.A.’s Koreatown, A Relentless Focus on Schooling
The sidewalks in Koreatown are teeming with students leaving school on a Tuesday afternoon. Rather than heading home, though, many of the children are hauling their backpacks to private after-school programs for several more hours of schooling.
Those programs, run out of homes, storefronts, and churches, are so popular in the Korean-American community here that the Korean-language phone book lists about 300 of them. Many others are said to operate on a less formal basis.
J. Grace Yoon, the principal of Wilton Place Elementary School, estimates that 80 percent of the Korean-American children in her school attend after-school programs or have tutors. "Most parents want their children to get an education," said Ms. Yoon, who was born in South Korea and immigrated here in the 1974. "But it’s not enough to get...
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