THE NEW WHITE FLIGHT? REALLY?

the asian grade wreckers are coming!
Considering that two different friends sent me this same article yesterday, I figure it must be news-worthy. The Wall St. Journal is reporting on a new kind of "white flight" from public high schools in the Silicon Valley suburb of Cupertino. Cupertino's burgeoning Asian American student population is nothing new - I've known about it, anecdotally, for years but it sounds like, in the last 10 years, the ratio has rocketed to the point where now, white students (or better said, their parents) are pulling out of Cupertino's public schools and attending private schools and moving out of the district entirely. A few notable pull quotes:
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• "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."
  
  
• "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."
  
  
• "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. 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."

Some thoughts: First of all, I think it's interesting how some of this tension is being cast as nativist vs. immigrant (including within the Asian American community). Looks like immigrant scapegoating is popular in any community, even intra-ethnic ones.

In any case, I was talking about this article with my friend Hua Hsu who grew up in Cupertino and attended Lynbrook; he pointed out that this article relies most only anecdote but very little on hard data, let alone a real demographic/statistical analysis. It's not like the WSJ needed to publish the article as if it appeared in a sociology journal instead but you clearly get the idea that the writer is trying very hard to paint a racial divide hear yet her "evidence" doesn't necessarily support such a claim.

For example, Hua points out that demographically speaking, in order to really prove that there's substantial white flight happening within the school district, you'd have to be adjust for changes in the number of white children in Cupertino to begin with. In other words, if, for example, there's been a large influx of Asian families into the city (which there sounds like there has been), but the white population has stayed stable and has aged past the point where there are high school aged children still left, then you would see a drop in white enrollment and rise in Asian enrollment and there's no actual "flight" going on.

So I took a look at what data is easily available and what it suggests is that, yes, there's a significant decrease in the white population of Cupertino between 1990 and 2000 - about 24% in terms of the per capita white population and 18% in the raw, numerical decrease. That cannot be due to death alone so presumably, of the 4,500 whites who left the city, you'd figure most did it in a moving van and not a hearse. However, that information alone isn't necessarily suggestive of a wide-scale example of racially motivated white flight. For example, it could be there was a substantial number of white families who no longer had children of school age and given rising property values in Cupertino, decided to cash out and move some place less expensive.

On the flipside, you could also theorize that the increasing rate of Asians living in the city was a disincentive for new white families to move into town. That's something the data isn't going to show.

The simple point is this: lesson one in economic or sociological analysis: just because a correlation exists doesn't mean a causality does. (This is something the Freakanomics authors stress over and over). In other words, just because sets of data seem to be related (i.e. increasing Asian enrollment, decreasing white) doesn't mean they actually are.

I'll say this much though: S and I had thought about moving to Cupertino because 1) S works in Cupertino and therefore, her commute would improve considerably, 2) the reputation of the schools (yeah, we have that Asian mentality too) and 3) there's a Mandarin immersion program there that'd we'd love to enroll E into.

However, I too was concerned about the skewed demographics of the school district. I grew up in a city where the Asian student population was at least 30% and now, I hear it's grown to 45-50%...so I can relate to what's happening in Cupertino. And honestly, I like the idea of E going to school in a diverse environment, one that isn't dominated by any one ethnic group, white, Asian or otherwise. To me, the choice between a predominant Asian school and predominantly white school (or commonly found, split Asian/white schools) are all equally discomforting, though for different reasons (Mandarin immersion school excepted).

--O.W.