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Jewish World Review May 25, 2005 / 16 Iyar, 5765 Minorities, ‘racism,’ and the UMASS flap By Jeff Jacoby
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Consider two questions that appear to have nothing to do with each
other:
1. If 22 percent of the students at Quincy High School are Asian, why
do Asians account for 94.4 percent of the math club?
2. If J. Keith Motley would have been the first black chancellor of the
University of Massachusetts at Boston, why is the UMass board of trustees
about to give that job to somebody else?
Each of those questions has been the subject of recent media attention.
On May 18, Michael Winerip devoted his ''On Education'' column in The
New York Times to exploring the overwhelming Asian makeup of Quincy High's
math club. What is it about math, he wondered, that attracts so many Asian
kids? His answer, in a nutshell: Most of the school's Asians are recent
immigrants who struggle to communicate in English.
''When I was a freshman, half year in US, English is a big problem,''
one student told him. ''I just know, 'Hello, how are you?' History is a big
problem. You don't openly express yourself because you don't know what to
say and stuff. . . . You don't have the basic English.''
But math doesn't pose that hurdle. In the words of Evelyn Ryan, the
head of Quincy High's math department, ''Math is a universal language.''
She rejects the notion that Asians have a natural aptitude for math. ''She
believes it's partly cultural,'' Winerip wrote, since ''math and
mathematicians are championed over there'' — in Asia — ''the way reading
and writers are here.'' Before Asians began immigrating in large numbers to
Quincy in the 1980s, Quincy High had only 10 students studying calculus;
today there are two calculus classes totaling 40 students, 75 percent of
whom are Asian.
I agree: The secret to Asian dominance in the math club and calculus
classes lies in Asian culture. But the critical cultural ingredient isn't
that mathematicians ''are championed'' in Asia. It's that Asian parents
make their kids do homework.
By virtually any measure, Asian Americans achieve spectacular academic
success. They make up just 4 percent of the US population, but 17 percent
of the incoming students at Harvard, 18 percent at Columbia, 25 percent at
Stanford, and 27 percent at MIT. Fewer than 1 New York City student in 10
is Asian, yet Asians fill half the seats in the city's elite public
schools, Bronx Science and Stuyvesant. One-fifth of US medical students are
Asian, as are 10 to 20 percent of the students attending Harvard, Yale,
Stanford, and other leading law schools. Asian students score in the
highest bracket on the SAT — both verbal and math — at far higher
proportions than their share of the public. Likewise the specialized SAT II
subject tests, in which Asians amass triple their proportional share of top
scores in writing and history, five times their share in biology, and eight
times their share in math, chemistry, and physics.
These illustrations — there are many more — come from ''No Excuses,''
Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom's 2003 book on racial differences in
academics. Why do Asians do so much better than their peers in school?
Because, the Thernstroms conclude, they care so much more about academic
success.
On average, Asian students spend twice as much time doing homework as
their non-Asian classmates. They believe they'll get in trouble at home if
their grades fall below A-, while for whites the ''trouble threshold'' is
B-, and for blacks and Hispanics, C-. They don't believe that success or
failure in school depends on factors beyond their control. ''They believed
instead that their academic performance depended almost entirely on how
hard they worked,'' the Thernstroms write, summarizing the findings of
survey researcher Laurence Steinberg. ''Their performance was within their
control. A grade below an A was evidence of insufficient effort.''
Quincy High's math club may be virtually all-Asian, but Asian American
students don't excel only at math. They tend to excel, period. And they do
so not because they are compensating for weak English skills, but because
they grow up in an environment that places enormous value on academic
achievement — and pegs that achievement to individual effort.
Which returns me to the University of Massachusetts, and the current
flap over the decision to name Dr. Michael Collins to run the Boston campus
instead of the acting chancellor, J. Keith Motley. One of three finalists
for the job, Motley would have been the first black chancellor of
UMass-Boston.
The chairman of the UMass board of trustees says the choice came down
to Collins's executive experience — while Motley was a dean of student
services at another university, Collins spent 10 years running a
multibillion-dollar hospital network. But a vocal chorus of disgruntled
Motley supporters are calling the decision racist.
Leonard Alkins of the Boston NAACP blasts it as proof ''that the
plexiglass ceiling is still there for people of color.''
Motley's supporters plan to flood the trustees with phone calls and to
stage a protest at the UMass president's office. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino
boycotted a UMass breakfast to demonstrate his solidarity with those
playing the race card. No doubt the story will continue to seethe for a
while.
Is there a connection between the Asian math whizzes at Quincy High and
the accusations of racism against the UMass board of trustees? Not an
obvious one. And yet I can't help wondering what kind of message black
students absorb when racism is invoked, as it so often is, to condemn
anything black politicians and activists disapprove of. Who is more likely
to succeed — the child who grows up in a culture that tells him success
depends on his own hard work, or the one who keeps hearing that until white
prejudice is eradicated, minorities will never get a fair shake?
Asian kids don't have a gene for calculus or getting into Yale. They
have a culture that demands hard work, cares deeply about academic success,
and rejects ''racism'' as an excuse for mediocrity. When the same can be
said about black American culture — or, for that matter, about white
American culture — the math club at Quincy High will look very different.
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Jeff Jacoby is a Boston Globe columnist. Comment by clicking here. © 2005, Boston Globe |
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