Last night, I edited op-ed columns by high school students participating in Mosaic, a summer journalism workshop at San Jose State run by an old friend and former colleague of mine. In one column, a girl from high-scoring Lynbrook High, which is 74 percent Asian-American and 22 percent white, described being asked by the only non-Asian student in calculus whether she had “Asian failed” or “white failed” the test. At Lynbrook, an Asian fail is a B; a white fail is a D.
In 2005, the Wall Street Journal wrote about white flight from Lynbrook and its sister school, Monte Vista High. Some whites don’t like the very competitive atmosphere, but more Asian families are trying to get their kids in.
Well, at least the school still has D as a grade!
Considering a B to be a failing grade is also true in Jewish families.
Huh. My college roommate went to Lynbrook, was white, and considered an A- to be a failure. She was a little difficult to live with actually. Perfectionism isn’t the best way to live IMO–for the perfectionist or her associates.
Your comment “some whites don’t like the very competitive atmosphere, but more Asian families are trying to get their kids in” brings up a couple of questions for me. Do the Asian kids really want to be in the atmosphere, or is it their parents who want it? Do the white kids who opt out still go on to college and do well?
Although I’m all for good education (I’m a classical homeschooler), I really dislike the pressure cooker that high school has become for ambitious kids. Taking all honors or AP classes, overworking oneself in the quest for the perfect GPA (plus extracurriculars), killing oneself to get into Harvard–it’s too much. A lot of kids end up burnt out when they get to that all-important Ivy League college.
It’s not worth it to me. Harvard is simply not that great, and even if it is, it’s only an undergrad degree anyway. I refuse to allow my daughters to kill themselves through overwork and pressure and competition–it’s counterproductive and wrong.
dangermom, I don’t think it’s just Harvard. The UC website says that the average GPA for incoming freshmen for Berkeley and UCLA is 4.14. Yes, 4.14.
Santa Cruz has the lowest average GPA and it’s something like 3.85.
If your goal is to attend a UC, getting a B is failing grade.
As a youth leader in a church located near the high schools in question, I’ve been hearing “Asian fail” for a while. First time was when a bright kid in my group complained continually that he was failing a class. I was really concerned, asked if he was getting tutoring, if there was something we could do to help. He looked at me with startled eyes, then laughed, and said not to worry, it was just an “Asian fail”.
He’s now at Berkeley; last I heard he was still planning to be a doctor.
His mom used to ask me if there were any fun activities he could do during the summer — she worried that he spent too much time on academics.
Usually around here it is the parents driving the kids to achieve, but sometimes it really is the kids pushing.
“Do the Asian kids really want to be in the atmosphere, or is it their parents who want it?”
Well, the parents’ attitudes tend to rub off on the kids. Many of my friends carried that same overachiever attitude throughout undergrad, even though their parents were no longer breathing down their necks.
It’s funny, though — one friend got into Harvard Law, and she’s mellowed out a lot. I once asked her if she had done the reading in order to prepare for a mock trial of sorts, and was dumbfounded when she shrugged and said, “Eh, I think I’ll just wing it.”
I’m Asian and opted out of the system as much as possible in HS. My aforementioned Harvard Law friend and I both went to Monta Vista (one of the schools in the Wall Street article) and called ourselves slackers. Only took 1 AP (US History, the easiest one) and 1 Honors (Physics). The rest of our friends piled on the APs.
Yeah, well, I was kind of using “Harvard” as shorthand for all the highest-ranked colleges. I went to Cal Berkeley myself, but I don’t really expect my kids to get in there–the competition has gotten tougher. I got in by the skin of my teeth, really. Not that I’ll *object* if my kids want to go to Cal–but I’m not going to tell them that they have to get in someplace like that.
So I’m pretty familiar with the way that Asian kids absorb their parents’ attitudes–I’m not trying to say that they’re completely being forced into working so hard. But I’ve also known a lot of kids who didn’t necessarily really want to go into whatever field their parents were “encouraging” them to enter. Some of them felt very pressured, I know, and that they didn’t have a choice.
Heh, I knew a bunch of people from Monta Vista too.
I myself, however, went to a rotten high school and was pretty unprepared for college (but then, being from that area helped me get into Cal, so I shouldn’t complain!).
On back-to-school night, parents always ask me what they can do to help their children succeed in school.
I sometimes thought about saying, “The best thing you can when you have kids is to hand them over to Japanese parents and then pick them up in 18 years.”
When I had my son, I didn’t follow this advice.
His last report card had three B+’s.
I asked him why he didn’t get all A’s and he gave me some sort of nonsense that he tried to do well, putting forth reasonable effort, and that’s all I should expect of him.
American values! He probably got them from his mother…
Remember, Asian kids are basically competing against themselves. But if you’ve done any work with Asian kids, it’s patently obvious that they aren’t brighter than white kids (except occasionally in math). They just do the slog work and make the teachers happy.
Grades are a fraud, but until UCs (and consequently most elite schools) stop valuing grades more than test scores, Asians will benefit over white kids not because they are smarter or work harder, but because they are better at pleasing the dull but moralizing teachers of the world.
“Grades are a fraud, but until UCs (and consequently most elite schools) stop valuing grades more than test scores, Asians will benefit over white kids…”
Erm, except that Asians outscore white students on these tests, too.
…Well, they do on math, anyway. I’m not sure about English. I think white students come out ahead by a few points because you’re counting all the foreign-born Asian students too.
Okay, I managed to find some stats on InsideHigherEd.
Mean SAT Scores for 2006
Asian Students
Critical Reading: 510
Math: 578
Writing: 512
White Students
Critical Reading: 527
Math: 536
Writing: 519
So yes, white students slightly outscore Asians on both English-related sections, while Asians do much better in math. Let’s not act as if white students are getting totally shafted — it’s not like they’re completely kicking ass, as far as these scores are concerned.
While American education is a land of second (and third, and fourth..) chances, and past performance is no guarantee of future performance, the fact of the matter is that past performance is the best predictor of future performance. Kids who do well in school, and given that the useful material of the current 12 grades could be covered in 8 there is no reason why most cannot do well, what they are really doing is developing a track record of success.
They should do the best they can and find out how good that is. There should be reasonable pressure to achieve. There’s pressure in the real world and that’s what their eduction should be preparing them for. But if a kid is trying hard and getting B’s it’s time to acknowledge the effort and adjust the expectations to achieve a productive, successful fulfilling life. They should live in neither a pressure cooker nor a bubble. And that’s why we left Palo Alto for the real world.
So I applaud the kids who apply themselves without burning themselves out. My retirement depends on them.
I wish I had these kinds of problems at the schools at which I’ve worked–”Asian fail” vs. “white fail.” Along these lines, my biggest problem is combating the reverse mentality; not one exclusively of any ethnicity, but typical, sadly, of lower-income students of all races. Let’s call it “low-class A,” meaning anything higher than an F.
At my school, in order to be in the Asian “club,” which practically owns the tennis and badminton teams, you have to get perfect grades. It’s an exclusive club made up of “points sluts” that will do anything to get an A. Are they thirsty for knowledge? Are they there to learn? Not really, but they will eagerly go through the motions to remain in the “club” and get accepted at a good university. Classroom deportment is impeccable. I take off points for violations of class rules. On the other hand, I have had Asians in class who do not belong to this “club” of over-achievers, and who even play football and bring a skateboard to school, for God’s sake. As human beings, they are so much nicer than the points sluts.
So yes, white students slightly outscore Asians on both English-related sections, while Asians do much better in math. Let’s not act as if white students are getting totally shafted — it’s not like they’re completely kicking ass, as far as these scores are concerned.
I wasn’t for a moment saying that white kids had higher scores than Asians because I knew full well (as you clearly didn’t) that whites outscored Asians in English and reading, whereas Asians outscore whites in math.
When we eliminated affirmative action in California, the UCs needed some method of ensuring that they could accept some percentage of underrepresented minorities. They use grades, obviously, as in low income schools, the teachers can give any grades they want and pretend that an algebra class is AP Calculus. Thus, the best graded-kids in low income urban schools are accepted to the UCs despite scores in the low 400s. But the schools need cover, so they have to prioritize high GPAs for everyone.
So the UCs now weight GPAs as 75% of acceptance, which is a joke, but it’s a joke that benefits Asians more than any other demographic–even though the weighting is implemented to benefit blacks and Hispanics (where it only helps the low income kids).
So Asians do better at UC admissions, despite the fact that white SAT and AP scores are equivalent, because they get better grades. Moreover, the emphasis on grades to get into AP courses means that a very bright white kid could get denied an AP course at Monte Vista or Lynbrook just because they got a B, despite equal skills to an Asian kid who got an A.
My point: Asians aren’t smarter than whites. They aren’t harder working or more ambitious. They just have parents who will beat them into the ground (or the teacher, if that help) if they get less than perfect grades, so they do all the crap work that makes the teachers happy and gets them good grades. There’s nothing wrong with this, and I don’t blame them, but rather the crap admissions policies at the UCs designed to flout the law. I do object when they are regarded as morally superior or smarter.
A fellow congregant of mine just finished a year of teaching in a county with one of the best school systems in the state. He says the Indian and Pakistani parents (he hasn’t seen many from Japan, China or Korea) make the Jewish parents look uninvolved.