Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Model Minorites Scaring Everyone Away

This last Saturday, the Wall Street Journal featured a column titled "The New White Flight," covering Bay Area high schools Monta Vista and Lynbrook. Look for it here.

How bizarre it is to read that white parents are pulling their children out of high schools because of the overachieving antics of Asian American students. And these are public high schools, people.

I was amused to read the following:

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. . .

Gunn High School represent! I'm proud to say I was once one of those overly stressed students (still am), striving to prove the model minority myth right, even when separated from my clan in Cupertino, in the midst of lilly-white Palo Alto. (I kid, I kid.)

4 comments:

noirah said...

Can't seem to convince MET that this is not an Onion article.

noirah said...

White families in Silicon Valley are going about it all wrong. The only way to combat Asian high achievement is to breed it out. If we all work together, every generation can succeed just a little bit less than the one before. Eventually all people can reach a level of relaxed mediocrity that until now has been reserved for privileged Caucasians. I know, I'm just a dreamer...

janjan said...

MET, we have a Wall Street Journal subscription.

I thought I was doing my mostest to breed out the overachieving gene - but it turns out that M is really an AsAm in diguise!!!

noirah said...

Worry not, Tengu. I'm on it!