Understanding the growing achievement gap between white and Asian-American students requires looking beyond family income and education.

Educators tend to be familiar with an educational achievement gap between black and Hispanic students on one hand and white students on the other, a gap that seems to be tied up with relative rates of poverty.

But there is also a fairly startling — and growing — achievement gap between white students and Asian-American students, and it can’t be chalked up to family income or education (e.g., Hsin & Xie, 2014). While some Asian immigrants are professionals and successful businesspeople, far more are not, and their children are, on average, just as far ahead.

The foundations of Asian-American student success are well-known and once might have been taken as common sense:

  • Hard work. Researchers find that Asian-American families are more likely to attribute achievement to effort than to inherent intelligence. If you want to do better, you can — you just have to work harder. Although researchers have found no significant distinction in academic ability between the two groups as they enter school, Asian-Americans significantly outperform whites by 5th grade.
  • Prioritizing education. Asian-American parents often make extraordinary efforts to live in neighborhoods with good schools. Education is often the priority — simply more important than other things.
  • Respect for teachers. Good teachers model the value and joy of learning, but they cannot serve as a model if children and parents don’t respect them. Asian-American parents are more likely to respect educators to a greater degree and to explicitly teach their children to do so (e.g., De Vos, 1973, 1980; Mordkowitz & Ginsberg, 1987).
  • A defined role as a student. Asian-American parents tend to have a more focused view that the child’s main task is to succeed in school so they can succeed in life (e.g., Chua, 2011).
  • Self-esteem as a result, not a right. While many parents will give their kids a pat on the back for any effort, Asian-American parents are more likely to reserve praise for excellence (Abboud & Kim, 2005). Otherwise, parents believe they and the child should figure out how the child can improve.

Some speculate that Asian-American children succeed but at too great a cost. In some studies, Asian-Americans do report feeling less positively about themselves than whites. But Americans overall tend to score abnormally high on such measures, so coming in behind white Americans may just mean Asian-American kids are fairly normal in the global picture. This also may be an effect of their outsider status and the often stereotypical representations of Asian-American in mainstream media.

What should we make of arguments that Asian-American students may succeed academically but endure greater parental pressure and conflict, that they are less psychologically adjusted and socially engaged in school, and that those who are not successful are made to feel un-Asian? Simply put, we make a mistake — bordering on racism — by dismissing Asian-American success as pathological. When whites outscore blacks and Hispanics, we don’t pathologize white success. More to the point, evidence for the cost of Asian-American success is often cherry-picked. For example, researchers make much of the occasional finding that Asian-American youth do less well on some measures of well-being while ignoring the many measures on which Asians do better. For example, Asian-American children suffer far less obesity and far less teenage pregnancy than other ethnic groups, though we hear little about these.

Perhaps, educators can find something to benefit all children by learning from Asian-American families. What if sacrificing for education, respecting educators, and ranking academics over sports and media became an American norm and not something uniquely Asian? It’s hard to see any losers in a shift like that.

References

Abboud, S.K. & Kim, J.Y. (2005). Top of the class: How Asian parents raise high achievers — and how you can too. New York, NY: Berkley Books.

Chua, A. (2011). Battle hymn of the tiger mother. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

De Vos, G.A. (Ed.). (1973). Socialization for achievement. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

De Vos, G.A. (1980). Ethnic adaptation and minority status. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 11 (1), 101-124.

Hsin, A. & Xie, Y. (2014). Explaining Asian-Americans’ academic advantage over whites. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111 (23), 8416-8421.

Mordkowitz, E.R. & Ginsberg, H.P. (1987). Early academic socialization of successful Asian-American college students. Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 9, 85-91.

Citation: Pittinsky, T.L. (2017). Backtalk: Learning from the other achievement gap. Phi Delta Kappan 98 (5), 80.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Todd L. Pittinsky

TODD L. PITTINSKY is a professor at Stony Brook University and a senior distinguished fellow of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center on Long Island in New York. He is the author, with Barbara Kellerman, of Leaders Who Lust .