r***@hotmail.com
2005-11-26 23:01:09 UTC
Hmmm, a wrinkle of diversity here? Joke: What do you call a smart
'white'? Jew! Honest answer though: people just love to do what they're
good at, no matter how middle class, no matter how geek. It's just
sooooo much easier to build on biological if not genetic momentum.
------------------------------------
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB113236377590902105-lMyQjAxMDE1MzIyMDMyNjAzWj.html
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
(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)
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.
[flight]
White students are far outnumbered by Asians at Monta Vista High School
in Cupertino, Calif.
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.
[Jane Doherty]
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.
[library]
Students in the library at Lynbrook High School
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 X," 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 say students of all races get along well. In fact,
there's little evidence of 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 as: "Kids who are white feel themselves a distinct
minority against a majority 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.
[Mark Seto]
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."
Write to Suein Hwang at ***@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications:
In this article, 9th-grade algebra class described was held at Monta
Vista High School. The article incorrectly placed the scene at Lynbrook
High School in Cupertino, Calif.
'white'? Jew! Honest answer though: people just love to do what they're
good at, no matter how middle class, no matter how geek. It's just
sooooo much easier to build on biological if not genetic momentum.
------------------------------------
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB113236377590902105-lMyQjAxMDE1MzIyMDMyNjAzWj.html
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
(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)
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.
[flight]
White students are far outnumbered by Asians at Monta Vista High School
in Cupertino, Calif.
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.
[Jane Doherty]
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.
[library]
Students in the library at Lynbrook High School
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 X," 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 say students of all races get along well. In fact,
there's little evidence of 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 as: "Kids who are white feel themselves a distinct
minority against a majority 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.
[Mark Seto]
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."
Write to Suein Hwang at ***@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications:
In this article, 9th-grade algebra class described was held at Monta
Vista High School. The article incorrectly placed the scene at Lynbrook
High School in Cupertino, Calif.