WSJ: The New White Flight

[question everything]

The New White Flight

The Wall Street Journal

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.

(snip)

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... 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.

(snip)


Write to Suein Hwang at [e-mail]

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113236377590902105.html (subscription)

[afdip]

1. more of the dumbing down of white kids . . . when i was in

grad school i had a friend getting a phd in number theory who used to complain all the time that the chinese grad students would spend 30-50 hours on one problem and he just didn't have the time . . . ."

[bluestateguy]

2. It's a subscription article and I can't read the whole story

So I'll just pass judgement on what I have read here:

I went to a high school that was about 20% Asian. There seemed to be a divide between the first generation kids who were immigrants and not born in the US, and the native born Asian-Americans.

Among the former, they tended to insluate themselves into subjects like math and science, and usually did very well, while doing mediocre at best in social studies and English: we had one kid who got an 800 on the math part of the SAT and 440 on the verbal part of the test. Their groups of friends were exclusively Asian and they did not get involved in extra curricular activities.

Among native born Asians, they were the best students, who did well in all subjects, had white friends and were very involved in extra-curricular activities. Our student body president was Asian.

[MrBenchley]

3. What's the opposite of white supremacy (snicker)?

[Karenina]

4. Whenever and wherever whites' view

of their inherent superiority is challenged, cut and run is the order of the day. That is, unless the illusion of the total destruction of "the other" can be maintained. See: New Orleans.

[newswolf56]

5. The old but still very relevant post-Sputnik education debate...

was a bitter clash between proponents of schools that mandate genuine learning and therefore intellectual excellence -- the European/Asiatic (and yes even Soviet) modes of education -- and the proponents of the singularly American mode of education: schools that produce "well-adjusted citizens" -- lockstep conformists who are violently anti-intellectual and utterly incapable of any critical thinking.

The demand for the lockstep-conformist, viciously anti-intellectual mode of education was always overwhelmingly high amongst the white American bourgeoisie -- themselves the most malevolently conformist, savagely anti-intellectual people in Western Civilization. Minorities, who tend to favor the European/Asiatic/Soviet modes of education precisely because they recognize true education as the one dependable upward path, are nearly always denied their wishes, often brutally so.

But here in these two California schools a minority has achieved that which it is customarily forbidden. This is a huge, magnificently revolutionary achievement because in the process it was necessary to overcome not only the abysmal chronic mediocrity of the so-called "teachers" turned out by U.S. colleges of education, but also to totally overthrow the preparation-for-the-corporate-workplace modality that for 50 years has methodically dumbed down U.S. public schools.

The dark side of this story is its further evidence of the extent to which the white bourgeoisie is hopelessly, irremediably reactionary. For now the white bourgeoisie is revealing its true values: given the opportunity to embrace better public education, it is spitting in education's face instead, fleeing its challenges willy-nilly -- proving once again the infinitely damning truth that mainstream America is ignorant/conformist/bigoted/anti-intellectual/xenophobic/nyekulturniy not by happenstance or oppression but purely by choice: entirely through its own small-minded malice.