Academic Overachievers

November 22, 2005

Now don’t get me wrong, we all know an overachieving Asian American or two or three (hell, my sister is one). Stereotypes are rooted somewhere, but wow, what a disservice to go around pushing the same old stereotype. If the point is that parents need to get involved and that education starts at home, not at school, well that’s not really culture specific. It doesn’t have anything to do with being Asian. That’s just common sense. What a marketing gimmick.

The book seems to be getting good reviews from customers on Amazon, but feedback from some folks in the Asian American community have not been as kind. It’s been kind of angry, actually. A mental health expert wrote in to the Times saying that the book ignored the dangers of putting too much pressure on your kids to succeed academically. And how he saw many patients coming into therapy, Asian Americans, who were trying to shake what their parents wanted to figure out what they wanted for themselves. (You hear that parents? Stop being so overbearing or your lawyer and doctor sons and daughters will be spending their hard-earned cash on years of therapy.) The sisters point out in the book that Asian Americans only make up 4 percent of the population, but 20 percent of the students at Ivy League colleges. How about this stat? Young Asian American women have the highest suicide rate.

That last point was made by reporter Monica Eng in this story that ran in the Chicago Tribune. She was not impressed by the book.

(And a minor quibble: what's with the book cover and the super short jeans? Are Asian kids also tremendously fashion-impaired because they are studying so much?)

And then, over the weekend, this story ran in Wall Street Journal about white parents who are moving their kids out of Asian-dominated schools, citing oppressive competitiveness and lack of "roundedness." A different kind of white flight.

You might need to be a subcriber to get to the story, so here is the text below:

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The New White Flight
In Silicon Valley, two high schools with outstanding academic reputations are losing white students as Asian students move in. Why?
By SUEIN HWANG
November 19, 2005; Page A1

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- By most measures, Monta Vista High here and Lynbrook High, in nearby San Jose, are among the nation's top public high schools. Both boast stellar test scores, an array of advanced-placement classes and a track record of sending graduates from the affluent suburbs of Silicon Valley to prestigious colleges.

But locally, they're also known for something else: white flight. Over the past 10 years, the proportion of white students at Lynbrook has fallen by nearly half, to 25% of the student body. At Monta Vista, white students make up less than one-third of the population, down from 45% -- this in a town that's half white. Some white Cupertino parents are instead sending their children to private schools or moving them to other, whiter public schools. More commonly, young white families in Silicon Valley say they are avoiding Cupertino altogether.

Whites aren't quitting the schools because the schools are failing academically. Quite the contrary: Many white parents say they're leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports and other personal interests.

The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian.

Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School's parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. "This may not sound good," she confides, "but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class." All of Ms. Gatley's four children have attended or are currently attending Monta Vista. One son, Andrew, 17 years old, took the high-school exit exam last summer and left the school to avoid the academic pressure. He is currently working in a pet-supply store. Ms. Gatley, who is white, says she probably wouldn't have moved to Cupertino if she had anticipated how much it would change.

In the 1960s, the term "white flight" emerged to describe the rapid exodus of whites from big cities into the suburbs, a process that often resulted in the economic degradation of the remaining community. Back then, the phenomenon was mostly believed to be sparked by the growth in the population of African-Americans, and to a lesser degree Hispanics, in some major cities.

But this modern incarnation is different. Across the country, Asian-Americans have by and large been successful and accepted into middle- and upper-class communities. Silicon Valley has kept Cupertino's economy stable, and the town is almost indistinguishable from many of the suburbs around it. The shrinking number of white students hasn't hurt the academic standards of Cupertino's schools -- in fact the opposite is true.

This time the effect is more subtle: Some Asians believe that the resulting lack of diversity creates an atmosphere that is too sheltering for their children, leaving then unprepared for life in a country that is only 4% Asian overall. Moreover, many Asians share some of their white counterpart's concerns. Both groups finger newer Asian immigrants for the schools' intense competitiveness.

Some whites fear that by avoiding schools with large Asian populations parents are short-changing their own children, giving them the idea that they can't compete with Asian kids. "My parents never let me think that because I'm Caucasian, I'm not going to succeed," says Jessie Hogin, a white Monta Vista graduate.

The white exodus clearly involves race-based presumptions, not all of which are positive. One example: Asian parents are too competitive. That sounds like racism to many of Cupertino's Asian residents, who resent the fact that their growing numbers and success are causing many white families to boycott the town altogether.

"It's a stereotype of Asian parents," says Pei-Pei Yow, a Hewlett-Packard Co. manager and Chinese-American community leader who sent two kids to Monta Vista. It's like other familiar biases, she says: "You can't say everybody from the South is a redneck."

Jane Doherty, a retirement-community administrator, chose to send her two boys elsewhere. When her family moved to Cupertino from Indiana over a decade ago, Ms. Doherty says her top priority was moving into a good public-school district. She paid no heed to a real-estate agent who told her of the town's burgeoning Asian population.

She says she began to reconsider after her elder son, Matthew, entered Kennedy, the middle school that feeds Monta Vista. As he played soccer, Ms. Doherty watched a line of cars across the street deposit Asian kids for after-school study. She also attended a Monta Vista parents' night and came away worrying about the school's focus on test scores and the big-name colleges its graduates attend.

"My sense is that at Monta Vista you're competing against the child beside you," she says. Ms. Doherty says she believes the issue stems more from recent immigrants than Asians as a whole. "Obviously, the concentration of Asian students is really high, and it does flavor the school," she says.

When Matthew, now a student at Notre Dame, finished middle school eight years ago, Ms. Doherty decided to send him to Bellarmine College Preparatory, a Jesuit school that she says has a culture that "values the whole child." It's also 55% white and 24% Asian. Her younger son, Kevin, followed suit.

Kevin Doherty, 17, says he's happy his mother made the switch. Many of his old friends at Kennedy aren't happy at Monta Vista, he says. "Kids at Bellarmine have a lot of pressure to do well, too, but they want to learn and do something they want to do."

While California has seen the most pronounced cases of suburban segregation, some of the developments in Cupertino are also starting to surface in other parts of the U.S. At Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Md., known flippantly to some locals as "Won Ton," roughly 35% of students are of Asian descent. People who don't know the school tend to make assumptions about its academics, says Principal Michael Doran.
"Certain stereotypes come to mind -- 'those people are good at math,' " he says.

In Tenafly, N.J., a well-to-do bedroom community near New York, the local high school says it expects Asian students to make up about 36% of its total in the next five years, compared with 27% today. The district still attracts families of all backgrounds, but Asians are particularly intent that their kids work hard and excel, says Anat Eisenberg, a local Coldwell Banker real-estate agent. "Everybody is caught into this process of driving their kids." Lawrence Mayer, Tenafly High's vice principal, says he's never heard such concerns.

Perched on the western end of the Santa Clara valley, Cupertino was for many years a primarily rural area known for its many fruit orchards. The beginnings of the tech industry brought suburbanization, and Cupertino then became a very white, quintessentially middle-class town of mostly modest ranch homes, populated by engineers and their families. Apple Computer Inc. planted its headquarters there.

As the high-tech industry prospered, so did Cupertino. Today, the orchards are a memory, replaced by numerous shopping malls and subdivisions that are home to Silicon Valley's prosperous upper-middle class. While the architecture in Cupertino is largely the same as in neighboring communities, the town of about 50,000 people now boasts Indian restaurants, tutoring centers and Asian grocers. Parents say Cupertino's top schools have become more academically intense over the past 10 years.

Asian immigrants have surged into the town, granting it a reputation -- particularly among recent Chinese and South Asian immigrants -- as a Bay Area locale of choice. Cupertino is now 41% Asian, up from 24% in 1998.

Some students struggle in Cupertino's high schools who might not elsewhere. Monta Vista's Academic Performance Index, which compares the academic performance of California's schools, reached an all-time high of 924 out of 1,000 this year, making it one of the highest-scoring high schools in Northern California. Grades are so high that a 'B' average puts a student in the bottom third of a class.

"We have great students, which has a lot of upsides," says April Scott, Monta Vista's principal. "The downside is what the kids with a 3.0 GPA think of themselves."

Ms. Scott and her counterpart at Lynbrook know what's said about their schools being too competitive and dominated by Asians. "It's easy to buy into those kinds of comments because they're loaded and powerful," says Ms. Scott, who adds that they paint an inaccurate picture of Monta Vista. Ms. Scott says many athletic programs are thriving and points to the school's many extracurricular activities. She also points out that white students represented 20% of the school's 29 National Merit Semifinalists this year.

Judy Hogin, Jessie's mother and a Cupertino real-estate agent, believes the school was good for her daughter, who is now a freshman at the University of California at San Diego. "I know it's frustrating to some people who have moved away," says Ms. Hogin, who is white. Jessie, she says, "rose to the challenge."

On a recent autumn day at Lynbrook, crowds of students spilled out of classrooms for midmorning break. Against a sea of Asian faces, the few white students were easy to pick out. One boy sat on a wall, his lighter hair and skin making him stand out from dozens of others around him. In another corner, four white male students lounged at a picnic table.

At Cupertino's top schools, administrators, parents and students say white students end up in the stereotyped role often applied to other minority groups: the underachievers. In one 9th-grade algebra class, Lynbrook's lowest-level math class, the students are an eclectic mix of whites, Asians and other racial and ethnic groups.

"Take a good look," whispered Steve Rowley, superintendent of the Fremont Union High School District, which covers the city of Cupertino as well as portions of other neighboring cities. "This doesn't look like the other classes we're going to."

On the second floor, in advanced-placement chemistry, only a couple of the 32 students are white and the rest are Asian. Some white parents, and even some students, say they suspect teachers don't take white kids as seriously as Asians.

"Many of my Asian friends were convinced that if you were Asian, you had to confirm you were smart. If you were white, you had to prove it," says Arar Han, a Monta Vista graduate who recently co-edited "Asian American," a book of coming-of-age essays by young Asian-Americans.

Ms. Gatley, the Monta Vista PTA president, is more blunt: "White kids are thought of as the dumb kids," she says.

Cupertino's administrators and faculty, the majority of whom are white, adamantly say there's no discrimination against whites. The administrators ay students of all races get along well. In fact, there's little evidence o any overt racial tension between students or between their parents.

Mr. Rowley, the school superintendent, however, concedes that a perception exists that's sometimes called "the white-boy syndrome." He describes it s: "Kids who are white feel themselves a distinct minority against a mjority culture."

Mr. Rowley, who is white, enrolled his only son, Eddie, at Lynbrook. When Eddie started freshman geometry, the boy was frustrated to learn that many of the Asian students in his class had already taken the course in summer school, Mr. Rowley recalls. That gave them a big leg up.

To many of Cupertino's Asians, some of the assumptions made by white parents -- that Asians are excessively competitive and single-minded -- play into stereotypes. Top schools in nearby, whiter Palo Alto, which also have very high test scores, also feature heavy course loads, long hours of homework and overly stressed students, says Denise Pope, director of Stressed Out Students, a Stanford University program that has worked with schools in both Palo Alto and Cupertino. But whites don't seem to be avoiding those institutions, or making the same negative generalizations, Asian families note, suggesting that it's not academic competition that makes white parents uncomfortable but academic competition with Asian-Americans.

Some of Cupertino's Asian residents say they don't blame white families for leaving. After all, many of the town's Asians are fretting about the same issues. While acknowledging that the term Asian embraces a wide diversity of countries, cultures and languages, they say there's some truth to the criticisms levied against new immigrant parents, particularly those from countries such as China and India, who often put a lot of academic pressure on their children.

Some parents and students say these various forces are creating an unhealthy cultural isolation in the schools. Monta Vista graduate Mark Seto says he wouldn't send his kids to his alma mater. "It was a sheltered little world that didn't bear a whole lot of resemblance to what the rest of the country is like," says Mr. Seto, a Chinese-American who recently graduated from Yale University. As a result, he says, "college wasn't an academic adjustment. It was a cultural adjustment."

Hung Wei, a Chinese-American living in Cupertino, has become an active campaigner in the community, encouraging Asian parents to be more aware of their children's emotional development. Ms. Wei, who is co-president of Monta Vista's PTA with Ms. Gatley, says her activism stems from the suicide of her daughter, Diana. Ms. Wei says life in Cupertino and at Monta Vista didn't prepare the young woman for life at New York University. Diana moved there in 2004 and jumped to her death from a Manhattan building two months later.

"We emphasize academics so much and protect our kids, I feel there's something lacking in our education," Ms. Wei says.

Cupertino schools are trying to address some of these issues. Monta Vista recently completed a series of seminars focused on such issues as helping parents communicate better with their kids, and Lynbrook last year revised its homework guidelines with the goal of eliminating excessive and unproductive assignments.

The moves haven't stemmed the flow of whites out of the schools. Four years ago, Lynn Rosener, a software consultant, transferred her elder son from Monta Vista to Homestead High, a Cupertino school with slightly lower test scores. At the new school, the white student body is declining at a slower rate than at Monta Vista and currently stands at 52% of the total. Friday-night football is a tradition, with big half-time shows and usually 1,000 people packing the stands. The school offers boys' volleyball, a sport at which Ms. Rosener's son was particularly talented. Monta Vista doesn't.

"It does help to have a lower Asian population," says Homestead PTA President Mary Anne Norling. "I don't think our parents are as uptight as if my kids went to Monta Vista."

Contributor: 

Melissa Hung

Founding Editor

Melissa Hung is the founding editor of Hyphen. She was the editor in chief for the magazine's first five years and went on to serve in many other leadership roles on the staff and board for more than a decade. She is a writer and freelance journalist. Her essays and reported stories have appeared in NPR, Vogue, Pacific Standard, Longreads, and Catapult, among others. She grew up in Texas, the eldest child of immigrants. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Comments

Comments

This story raises three troubling issues about white people in the US and particularly in the Cupertino area.Firstly, it is the stereotype by whites themselves. I checked the HS website..most of the faculty is white and they are the ones placing white students in remedial classes...implying white kids are dumb compared to Asian kids. In another HS in Albany, GA a world away from Cupertino..the whites place white kids in advanced placement and blacks in remedial courses, whether deserved or not. Seems like a racial hierarchy is being formed.Second, the most troubling. Seems like whites do not have the spinal cord to compete. When they fight against Affirmative Action, eg. Michigan, whites insist that only GPA and test scores must count but not student backgrounds, especially race. When they compete against Asians, they want student background to count, not racial, but other stuff such as atheletics, and say that only GPA should not count. Seems like white people just want to keep their white skin privilege. Needless to say, the "inferior" white students in the remedial classes would probably get the managerial jobs while the high achieving white students would probably work for them. Case in point Mike Brown of FEMA and other low performers in the administration, some of whom are proud to be underachievers and say so openly. No wonder the country is in such as mess and the best performers in the administration are women who are minorities..Condi Rice and Elaine Chao...yes, Condi came up through AA.Finally, there may be race mixing bigotry involved here. Most of the students who are being transferred are white boys implied by this story. Is it possible that the white parents especially mothers are afraid of their sons dating Asian girls and eventually marrying Asian women? End of the dream of having a blonde blue eyed granddaughter..and end of white privilege?
One thing I failed to mention in the last post. As far as the last point in the previous post is cocerned, if you dont believe me, visit Littleton, Colorado...and talk to white folks especially white mothers of teenage boys who made a decision to move out of Orange County, CA when the Asians moved in or those who have moved to the Inland Empire fleeing Asians..places such as Glendora.
"Second, the most troubling. Seems like whites do not have the spinal cord to compete. "Did you just figure out that the US isn't the meritocracy it's supposed to be? Try googling 'cronyism' You don't have to be Asian to think that it's a bad thing. Even the far right punished Bush for the Meirs debacle.
Its also possible that whites move out for the reasons they state - to have a more well-rounded environment. Unfortunate that an angry little loser like GC is unable to comprehend. Also, unfortunate that asian bigots don't realize that high test scores don't necessarily define the best education. And many of those white kids will get great educations and become leaders in their fields of interest as well as their communities. And all of this will happen while competing and succeeding on their own terms, not the terms set by myopic asian parents. Reminds me of those kids from Beijing who can use a calculus to multiply very large numbers very quickly - So what?
I suppose some of thoes white kids will go on to be the next 'Michael Brown' - handed a 'leadership role' they aren't qualified for; deliver a shoddy, substandard and failing performance and cost lives and $$$$. Of course he will go on to have yet another 'hand picked' job. An 'affirmative action' hire that no one wants to discuss.Seems to me that the asian families aren't the bigots. They just came to school to do what they thought school demanded - excel academically.Don't hate the player - hate the game.And guess who invented the 'game'?
The comments made by the first guy/girl are rather idiotic.
When you take away white privelage whites are nothing. Absolute zeros. Whites in position of power advanced on the backs of people of color. That is the ways it has been for a long time. But now whites run when they cant compete. Go ahead they should all move to Colorado and lets drop an Atom bomb there!
I'm sensing a little hostility here K.G. Colorado has some pretty scenary and nice animals. What did they ever do to you?
as a student at one of the implicated silicon valley schools, i think it's disgusting how such articles are written. it's obvious that these blogs promote bigotry and continue to feed stereotypes. even the titles are loaded. "white flight." what the hell is that supposed to mean? the word "flight" in itself carries a bad connotation. there are so many other factors to consider that it's completely ignorant to say that "whites are fleeing the area w/ the influx of asians at local high schools."and "academic overachievers" ? is that really necessary? when did hard work become overrated? You can't stereotype a whole school with that shallow little catch phrase. students are high-achieving, but they're also very well-rounded, playing/excelling in everything from football (yes, football.) to badminton.
Some asians can be very annoying. My Wive's 1st generation immigrant family pushed her to become a nurse so that she could follow in the family business, but she wanted to get a degree in art. It took her 2 years and several thousand dollars to get her to finally stand up to her bossy,prudish family. It took her 6 years to get a liberal arts degree instead of 4 because mommy and daddy wanted to show off in front of "the family" These same parents pushed her older brother to get into the medical field. He was also too afraid of disappointing his parents, and he eventually started partying heavily and drinking too much until he dropped out of school. He's now a single father, still lives at home, and complains about not going to school for his business degree.
Ugh, it's because asians are annoying.With their parents shrieking at them to excel, the kids are in essence, being forced to comply.The 'asian' kids study hard to get the hell out of their parents houses. White parents may not be as adamant about the kids grades, based upon what some are referring to as 'the white privilege', then let them lay in that. Hey, whose parents emigrated here (not the ones from hundreds of years ago), but recently, because the densely populated parts of Asia are overcrowded cesspools?And it's the parents who refuse to 'let go' of the old ways. I remember when I went to school, and the 'asian' kids and parents were just trying to fit in. They were the ones who thought that coming over to America would give them a real chance. The recent influx of 'asians' has changed that. They come here to have a chance, but they can't let go of 'the old ways'. And that, is what is driving away everybody...