Smart vs. cool: Culture, race and ethnicity in Silicon Valley schools

By John | Sunday, April 6, 2008 | 2 Comments

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I think you can figure out where this blog posting is going to go with a title like Smart vs. cool: Culture, race and ethnicity in Silicon Valley schools, as written in today’s San Jose Mercury News. California, and especially the San Francisco Bay Area, is a racially diverse region. Within Silicon Valley, there are a lot of Asian-Americans, as well as white, Latino and to a lesser extent, African-Americans:

After years of tiptoeing around racial issues for fear of invoking stereotypes, California educators are now looking squarely at how ethnicity and culture shape achievement and attitudes toward school…The Mercury News interviewed dozens of students from varying backgrounds to examine the “racial achievement gap” and a delicate question that underlies it: Why do so many kids – especially Latinos – believe “school is uncool.” The Harvard study didn’t break out the attitudes of Asian-American students, but interviews with local students indicate that many Asians think classmates must be smart – but not act smart – to be popular.

Akrypti had blogged about the Harvard paper last August as well. I’ve always been interested in educational policy, especially at a national level, when comparing the United States to other countries. When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, I became especially interested as to how Asian-Americans were perceived.

The San Jose Mercury News article attempts to describe the different factors that apply to the peer pressures of different ethnic groups regarding academic achievement. Regarding Asian-Americans, local educators attribute academic success as “cool” as part of the “Confucian values on education, obligation to family and high parental expectations.”

According to the article, parents of all ethnic groups generally have high expectations of their kids, but the actual definition of “success” varies, where getting a C or better might be considered success for one ethnic group. One Taiwanese-American student described how her parents continued to be competitive, not only with students in at San Jose’s Evergreen – which is 46 percent Asian – but at Asian-Americans students at high-scoring high schools in Palo Alto, Cupertino and Sunnyvale. This brings back memories of my parents asking why I couldn’t get better grades, even though I was getting A’s (i.e. what about A+’s ?).

The article goes on to describe some of the efforts to combat the “stigma” of “acting white” and academic achievement amongst Latinos and African-Americans.

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ancient one

Regard the Asian Americans described, it's fairly accurate but not completely true for all Asian-American kids. At my kids' mostly Asian private schools, (K-8 and high school), getting good grades is definitely part of being "cool" and popular. I suspect though, that there are still a lot of Asian American kids for who getting grades is not particularly cool. It was that way when I was in high school. The Asian gang member types who I grew up with would never say hi to me when they were in a group (they would say hello when they were alone). My good grades certainly didn't make me popular with them! Years later, I would recognize "Augusto" in "The Debut" (http://debutfilm.pinoynet.com/launch.asp)as a type of person I had run into before, and he was based on people the filmmakers ran into when they were growing up in the Berryessa area of Silicon Valley.

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