(Yuqing Zhang will be a freshman at Thomas Jefferson in the fall. With him are his father, Ronald Zhang, and mother, Yehong Zhou. (By Michael Alison Chandler — The Washington Post)
Early in June, New York University and the College Board had published a study about Asian Americans attempts to dismantle the stereotype that Asian-Americans are all a bunch of math & science geeks focused on nothing but academic achievement and without legitimate needs, titled “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight.“ 8Asians’ blogger Bo blogged about it in her post, “Breaking News: We’re not homogenous!” To possibly reinforce the stereotype and possibly suggest a rising yellow peril, today’s Washington Post, the newspaper reports on its front page, “At Magnet School, An Asian Plurality.”
“At Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in the Alexandria area this year, more than 2,500 applicants vied for 485 seats. Asian American students got 219, or 45 percent of the total, while white students got 205, or 42 percent… A plurality of Asian American students in a high school class would be an anomaly in the Washington region, where fewer than one in 10 residents is Asian American. In Fairfax, which supplies most of the school’s students, people of Asian descent account for 16 percent of the population, census data show. That percentage has doubled since 1990 and is the highest in the area…The rising concentration of Asian Americans at T.J. mirrors demographic trends in other elite math and science magnet schools. In New York, the selective and specialized Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School have Asian American majorities, although about 10 percent of the metropolitan population is of Asian descent. In San Francisco, Asian Americans make up more than 60 percent of the students at selective Lowell High School and about a third of the city’s population.”
There are more Asian Americans than whites in Thomas Jefferson – it must be news! And of course, Asian Americans are good at math and science and are filling up all the science & math magnet schools across the country! Perhaps there will be a “New White Flight” in Fairfax County? Well, I am being a bit sarcastic – if you read the whole article, it really isn’t being too alarmist and raises the typical Asian American “model minority” stories and questions issues around affirmative action and college admissions.
The newspaper also references Jenny Tsai, “a recent Harvard graduate” who wrote her senior college thesis on “‘Too Many Asians at this School’: Racialized Perceptions and Identity Formation” which I blogged about earlier this year.
Do you think the Washington Post is simply reporting the news? How do you feel about articles like these – proud? awkward? ashamed? or apathetic?
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10 Comments to “Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology: An Asian American Plurality – 45% Of Freshmen”
Souldrummer wrote:
I'm Black not Asian and I'm not sure who generally wanders into this blog, I'm here because there's a link from the Washington Post website.
Focus on why this article was written: Asians are now beating whites. Poor performance of Blacks and Latinos at TJ is not news. Better performance from Asians over Whites is. Whites have more political power in Fairfax. They want their kids in TJ. They fear that immigrants, especially immigrants whose parents are not citizens, may be overrepresented. I don't expect a major change in Black representation. I expect a lot of talking about change in Black representation. I do expect a flip-flop of numbers to 45% white and 42% asian based on some kind of bogus residency requirement. The Chinese family quoted in this article was foolish to talk to the Post. That will only add fuel to a residency requirement that rewards families who have paid more taxes to Fairfax and discriminates against recent immigrants.
I'm interested to see which way the numbers go for Asians next year.
FYI: I'm souldrummer and I posted on the comments to the article as well.
Posted on 07-Jul-08 at 6:53 am | Permalink
julie wrote:
I went to U of Waterloo in Canada, one of the big schools for math and eng. I majored in math and I think the eng and math faculties were 50%+ Asian. A lot of students referred to the two main cs buildings, MC and DC as Mainland China and Downtown China.
I'm a French-Canadian girl, in my year a demographic represented by exactly one student in my faculty (me), since French-Canadians don't tend to go into tech subjects, and they don't tend to go to English universities.
I once had a tutorial session for the whole class where the TA got frustrated with speaking English and started giving the answer in Mandarin to the student he was trying to help, another Mandarin speaker. A lot of the class understood his answer.
Of course I am viewing this as an outsider, and I understand that Asian people don't want to just be stereotyped as nerds, but from talking to my classmates there seems to be a big tendancy for Asian parents to push their kids into subjects like math, science, accounting, engineering. My professor did career counselling sometimes and he said he was so depressed at seeing the number of Asian kids majoring in things that they HATED because their parents wanted them to be engineers or accountants.
I live in Thailand now, and I also notice that there's a lot of social approval for nerd subject in Asia. If I tell people I studied cs or math, they're like “oh, that's very good”. If you say you studied theatre, your average person will be “what a bum, they're not serious and they're probably poor.
So maybe I'm wrong, but perhaps there is a need for this “nothing exists except accounting, engineering and medecine” mentality to change among asians too.
Posted on 07-Jul-08 at 10:27 am | Permalink
John wrote:
Souldrummer – thanks for your comment and thoughts. Where Asian Americans are outnumber whites has been written up a lot in California – especially in regards to college admissions (less so about high school, but I did blog/link to the Wall Street Journal article about “The New White Flight.”)
Julie – actually, as I had blogged and referenced in my posting, most Asian Americans DO NOT major in science, technology, engineering and math, as the released report, “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight“ by New York University and the College Board finds. Maybe at your university, they did (my brother went to MIT, so not too many Asian Americans majoring in the humanities there…) Is it so wrong that Thais want their children to study something that might get them a good paying job?
Posted on 07-Jul-08 at 12:15 pm | Permalink
Daniel wrote:
Journalists can make something ordinary like kids eating chocolate and turn it into big news with certain details added in there and emphasizing in certain aspects of such a topic.
Overall, it's not really new but I know that many parents are proud. Maybe it might be a very big issue for those born or raised in North America, but a lot of Asians (I include everyone from South Asia to East Asia) who have immigrated here do take pride in education and these subjects such as Math, I.T., Science, Engineering, Architecture and the Arts (don't be surprise to notice there there is quite a lot in this field). are quite practical. Actually, you can pretty much find someone of Asian descent studying and working in nearly every subject.
It doesn't mean that these students will end up finding a job related since after graduation it's up to themselves to do the work and by then it really is their individual choice for such career. Then there are those who will work for possibly 5-10 years and move on for a different career path or not.
Posted on 08-Jul-08 at 4:44 pm | Permalink
Bo wrote:
The Post article is nothing but fear mongering vaugely disguised as “responsible journalism.” I find it hilarious that white Americans laude the value of meritocracy until it comes to bite them in the butt.
BTW, while it's bad that some Asian-American kids feel pressured to major in subjects that they don't want to – one can't argue that the US would benefit if more people majored in technical areas such as math and engineering rather than humanities such as theater and english. I don't see too many Comp Lit majors working towards solving the current energy crisis.
Posted on 08-Jul-08 at 11:52 pm | Permalink
Lawrence wrote:
Most of the “news” that comes from the mainstream American corporate media has to be analyzed critically against the grain, as it were. Their assertions can never be taken prima facie as good coin.
The lies about “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq peddled by the American media–including the Washington Post–are one prime example of how the corporate media operates.
Posted on 09-Jul-08 at 1:04 am | Permalink
ancient one wrote:
Bo – not sure about the last paragraph – did you mean that “one can argue that the US would benefit more” in your sentence? Then again, people do move around between fields. One of my frequent collaborators with whom I published a number of technical papers in computer science was an English major.
Posted on 09-Jul-08 at 11:17 pm | Permalink
Gautam wrote:
We just linked to your piece on the Asian American Action Fund Blog: http://www.aaa-fund.com/?p=463.
Posted on 11-Jul-08 at 9:08 am | Permalink
8Asians.com » Stating the Obvious: Cupertino has a lot of Asians: An Asian American/Asian Canadian Blog wrote:
[...] have just moved to the area, this can take some getting used to. And there can be some backlash, especially when it comes to high schools and “white flight.” Asian Americans in the South Bay have also flexed their political muscle a little bit more (at [...]
Posted on 13-Dec-08 at 11:00 am | Permalink
8Asians.com » High Grades, High Stress for Asian-American Students in Bay Area: An Asian American/Asian Canadian Blog wrote:
[...] like the Wall Street Journal’s infamous “New White Flight,” or maybe an alarmist article as I had blogged concerned about in the past. But it was a fairly well-balanced looked at the environment in the San Francisco Bay Area about [...]
Posted on 06-Jan-09 at 4:24 pm | Permalink
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