tinyurl.com/8lpcn -> online.wsj.com/article_email/SB113236377590902105-lMyQjAxMDE1MzEyOTMxNjkzWj.html
Personalized Home Page Setup Put headlines on your homepage about the companies, industries and topics that interest you most. The New White Flight In Silicon Valley, two high schools with outstanding academic reputations are losing white students as Asian students move in. But locally, they're also known for something else: white flight. Over th e 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 stude nts 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 s ending their children to private schools or moving them to other, whiter public schools. More commonly, young white families in Silicon Valley s ay they are avoiding Cupertino altogether.
White students are far outnumbered by Asians at Monta Vista High School i n Cupertino, Calif. Whites aren't quitting the schools because the schools are failing academ ically. Quite the contrary: Many white parents say they're leaving becau se the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and ext racurriculars like sports and other personal interests. The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntl y, are too Asian. Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School's parent-teacher as sociation, 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 b e the only Caucasian kid in the class." All of Ms Gatley's four childre n 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 s chool to avoid the academic pressure. Ms Gatley, who is white, says she probably wouldn't have m oved to Cupertino if she had anticipated how much it would change. In the 1960s, the term "white flight" emerged to describe the rapid exodu s of whites from big cities into the suburbs, a process that often resul ted in the economic degradation of the remaining community. Back then, t he phenomenon was mostly believed to be sparked by the growth in the pop ulation of African-Americans, and to a lesser degree Hispanics, in some major cities. Across the country, Asian-Ameri cans have by and large been successful and accepted into middle- and upp er-class communities. Silicon Valley has kept Cupertino's economy stable , and the town is almost indistinguishable from many of the suburbs arou nd it. The shrinking number of white students hasn't hurt the academic s tandards of Cupertino's schools -- in fact the opposite is true. This time the effect is more subtle: Some Asians believe that the resulti ng lack of diversity creates an atmosphere that is too sheltering for th eir children, leaving then unprepared for life in a country that is only 4% Asian overall. Moreover, many Asians share some of their white count erpart's concerns. Both groups finger newer Asian immigrants for the sch ools' intense competitiveness. Some whites fear that by avoiding schools with large Asian populations pa rents are short-changing their own children, giving them the idea that t hey can't compete with Asian kids. "My parents never let me think that b ecause I'm Caucasian, I'm not going to succeed," says Jessie Hogin, a wh ite Monta Vista graduate. The white exodus clearly involves race-based presumptions, not all of whi ch are positive. That so unds like racism to many of Cupertino's Asian residents, who resent the fact that their growing numbers and success are causing many white famil ies 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 e verybody 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 pub lic-school district. She paid no heed to a real-estate agent who told he r of the town's burgeoning Asian population.
She says she began to reconsider after her elder son, Matthew, entered Ke nnedy, the middle school that feeds Monta Vista. As he played soccer, Ms Doherty watched a line of cars across the street deposit Asian kids fo r 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 besid e you," she says. Ms Doherty says she believes the issue stems more fro m recent immigrants than Asians as a whole. "Obviously, the concentratio n 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 y ears ago, Ms Doherty decided to send him to Bellarmine College Preparat ory, a Jesuit school that she says has a culture that "values the whole child." Kevin Doherty, 17, says he's happy his mother made the switch. Many of hi s 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 lear n and do something they want to do." While California has seen the most pronounced cases of suburban segregati on, some of the developments in Cupertino are also starting to surface i n other parts of the US At Thomas S Wootton High School in Rockville, Md, known flippantly to some locals as "Won Ton," roughly 35% of stude nts 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, NJ, 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 stil l attracts families of all backgrounds, but Asians are particularly inte nt that their kids work hard and excel, says Anat Eisenberg, a local Col dwell Banker real-estate agent. "Everybody is caught into this process o f driving their kids." Lawrence Mayer, Tenafly High's vice principal, sa ys he's never heard such concerns. Perched on the western end of the Santa Clara valley, Cupertino was for m any years a primarily rural area known for its many fruit orchards. The beginnings of the tech industry brought suburbanization, and Cupertino t hen became a very white, quintessentially middle-class town of mostly mo dest ranch homes, populated by engineers and their families. Today, the orchard s are a memory, replaced by numerous shopping malls and subdivisions tha t are home to Silicon Valley's prosperous upper-middle class. While the architecture in Cupertino is largely the same as in neighboring communit ies, the town of about 50,000 people now boasts Indian restaurants, tuto ring 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 -- p articularly among recent Chinese and South Asian immigrants -- as a Bay Area locale of choice.
Students in the library at Lynbrook High School Some students struggle in Cupertino's high schools who might not elsewher e Monta Vista's Academic Performance Index, which compares the academic performance of California's schools, reached an all-time high of 924 ou t 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 stu dent in the bottom third of a class. "We have great students, which has a lot of upsides," says April Scott, M onta Vista's principal. "The downside is what the kids with a 30 GPA th ink of themselves." ...
|
http://csua.com/feed/