On Sat, 10 Dec 2005 21:11:30 -0800, Captain Compassion
<daranc@NOSPAMverizon.net> wrote:

The New Separate But Equal
The American Thinker ^ | 07 December 2005 | James Chen

Rising test scores and higher academic standards in public schools are
usually a cause for celebration among parents of school-age children.
But in the liberal suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area, this
development is triggering panic among white parents who are
increasingly choosing to send their children to private schools, or
moving to more exclusive neighborhoods.

Despite living in safe and desirable areas where diversity and
tolerance are preached as gospel, white parents in the Bay Area are
apparently avoiding many high-performing public school systems for the
simple reason that they have too many Asians. The slow but steady
disappearance of white students from suburban public schools is an
obvious but rarely-discussed demographic trend that recalls the “white
flight” from America’s largest cities decades earlier.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article ($link), reporter Suein Hwang
delves into the racially-charged world of high school academics in
Northern California. Hwang’s “The New White Flight” is as interesting
as it is disturbing:

I'll tell you what's disturbing. What's disturbing is that
although people in that area for years have prided themselves on their
"liberal" attitudes, we're probably going to get the chance now to see
how much they didn't really mean it all those years.

By most measures, Monta Vista High here and Lynbrook High, in nearby
San Jose, are among the nation’s top public high schools. Both boast
stellar test scores, an array of advanced-placement classes and a
track record of sending graduates from the affluent suburbs of Silicon
Valley to prestigious colleges.

But locally, they’re also known for something else: white flight. Over
the past 10 years, the proportion of white students at Lynbrook has
fallen by nearly half, to 25% of the student body. At Monta Vista,
white students make up less than one-third of the population, down
from 45%—this in a town that’s half white. Some white Cupertino
parents are instead sending their children to private schools or
moving them to other, whiter public schools. More commonly, young
white families in Silicon Valley say they are avoiding Cupertino
altogether.

I guess we're already seeing it.

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.

I knew a girl in high school who went to Japan as an exchange
student. She told me the kids in the family she was staying with would
stay up until 2:00am studying - and that's on nights WITHOUT tests the
next day. They probably didn't sleep at all on nights where they were
having a test the next day.

The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so
bluntly, are too Asian.

I’ve witnessed this phenomenon first-hand during recent house hunting
searches in Alameda and San Mateo Counties. As the parent of two young
children, I often check data on neighborhood schools for comparative
purposes. Primarily, this means reviewing a school district’s SARC
(School Accountability Report Card), the state-mandated public report
containing vital information on student achievement and demographics.

My survey of schools in the area revealed an interesting demographic
trend: in a continuous arc of high-performing public school districts
ringing San Francisco Bay, Asian student enrollments have climbed
sharply over the past decade as white enrollments plummeted. These
include middle-class neighborhoods in cities throughout the most
liberal region in the United States. Suburban cities in the area with
both rapidly-growing Asian student populations and
steadily-diminishing numbers of white students include Alameda,
Albany, Fremont (Kerry by 51%) Cupertino, San Jose (Kerry by 29%) and
San Mateo (Kerry by 40%).

Among students, the view is that Asian-American parents are more
academically demanding of their children, which has resulted in a
greater overall competitiveness level in the public schools,

That much is true. In Japan, it's not just a matter of the
young 'uns going to university, they have to get good enough grades to
go to the "right" university. I expect it's the same with immigrants
from Japan, not to mention China.

particularly within these middle-class suburbs. In classrooms
throughout the area, Asian-American school children dominate
academically, and often take a disproportionate share of student
awards and scholarships.

For white parents, the most often-cited reasons for leaving their
local public school system are a lack of diversity, intense
competition and the “singlemindedness” of Asian students. A common
complaint is that Asian students are not as “well-rounded” as others,
an often-used reference to the perception that Asians partake less
frequently in extracurricular activities. Many cite Asian students’
low participation rates in varsity sports such as football and
basketball, and in activities such as pep rallies, drama and
cheerleading. These white parents insist that they are not biased
against Asians, and blame the media for injecting a racial component
into a non-racial issue.

Typical "liberals"... blame the media... LOL! This is rich!

Meanwhile, in nearby school systems such as Palo Alto, Los Altos and
Piedmont, white parents have few complaints about the high test scores
resulting from a rigorous curriculum and high academic standards. But
unlike their counterparts in Alameda or Fremont, these school
districts are overwhelmingly white, and homes in these neighborhoods
are beyond the means of most middle-class families. Even with whites
comprising over 70% of the student population, the schools’ websites
boast of having “socially diverse” student bodies.

So what is wrong with this picture? Is it possible to conclude from
the mountain of statistics, anecdotal evidence and visual signs that
white students—who have nearly vanished from the nearby San Francisco
(Kerry by 68%) and Oakland (Kerry by 51%) public school systems—are
leaving public schools in the middle-class suburbs of blue-state
California? And why is it that a school with a 70% white student body
is considered “diverse”, while one with a 70% Asian population is not?

Perception! When that perception is by "liberals", apparently.

White liberals argue that the statistics are misleading, and that the
decrease in the numbers of white students is being driven primarily by
the retirement of the baby-boomer generation, and the immigration of
Asian engineers to the Silicon Valley. Assuming this is all true, how
do we explain the disproportionately low numbers of white students
enrolled in the public schools? In cities like Cupertino, whites make
up half the overall population, but less than a third of the student
body. At the top performing elementary school in all of California,
Faria Academic Plus School of Cupertino—where admission is based on a
lottery under which all elementary-age students within the district
are eligible—Asian-Americans comprise an astounding 94% of the student
body.

Clearly, there exists a double-standard among white liberals who claim
to be advocates of public schooling and defenders of diversity, yet
cannot bring it on themselves to send their children to public schools
where children from other racial groups dominate both academically and
numerically. This apparent disregard for liberal principles results
from whites being placed in a situation where they no longer exert
control over a minority group they claim to champion.

I've read some of your posts before, and I generally agree
with most of what you have to say, but you've really outdone yourself
this time in exposing yet another vein of liberal hypocrisy, and also
in explaining it in a way that is undeniable by anyone other than the
dinks on this newsgroup who are willing to resort to what they think
are witticisms to defend this sort of thing. I'm putting you in my
watch filter. From now on I'll be making sure I don't miss any of your
posts. Kudos!

One white parent
called this double-standard “the secret that everyone knows, but no
one wants to talk about”, adding, “You’ll be called a bigot (or worse)
if you mention it.”

According to parents and students of both races, what white parents
fear most is their children being marginalized in the college
admission process by the academic achievements of their Asian-American
peers. This fear is perhaps best summarized by the patron saint of
white liberals, Bill Clinton. In a 1995 interview with the Sacramento
Bee, then-President Clinton stated that excessive reliance on academic
qualifications in higher education could have dire consequences. His
warning that “there are universities in California that could fill
their entire freshman classes with nothing but Asians” echoes their
concerns.

That's probably partially true, and I'm sure the Asian
students don't all love that their parents think sending them to
school is another way of sending them to war (think "Tora! Tora!
Test-Scora!"), but the typical denials by the "liberals" of their
motivations in sending their kids to other schools is just what we
should expect.

As a last resort, liberal school boards, courts and administrators
will typically take it unto themselves to implement policies to
introduce more “diversity” into their student bodies. In the San
Francisco public schools, this took form through the recently
terminated 1983 Consent Decree which set a school enrollment limit of
45 percent for any single racial or ethnic group.

If they were true liberals, this probably means something like
"...so we can have 10% Asian, 10% African, 10% Native American, 10%
Native South American, 10% English, 10% German, 10% French, 10%
Belgian/Dutch, 10% Australian....", etc.

Chinese-American
parents charged that the racial caps were aimed primarily at limiting
their children’s access to the city’s most prestigious schools.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the University of California imposed
an affirmative-qction-based quota system, which temporarily maintained
the white plurality at its most prestigious campuses.

But these policies never worked as intended. Over the course of two
decades, the San Francisco public schools became almost completely
segregated and Asians students began to dominate the flagship UC
campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles. In both cases, the use of quotas
was not enough to convince white students to stick around. Eventually,
the courts ruled against the explicit use of quotas, and California
voters outlawed the use of Affirmative Action through the
voter-initiated Proposition 209.

Isn't that a sign of the end of the World or something? "When
the liberal shall say 'no more affirmative action'...". Something like
that. I'm not sure.

Quotas aside, the lessons of blue-state California should be clear to
anyone with more than a passing interest in school choice and
segregation. Stated bluntly, white liberals will object strenuously to
school choice and racial segregation as long as their children are in
the majority and among the top performers in school. However, when
their children are fewer in number and relegated to the lower tiers of
academic performance, they will happily embrace school choice and
voluntarily segregate the public schools by moving to whiter school
districts or sending their children to private schools.

If these demographic trends continue, the most likely fate of suburban
schools in California and other blue-states with large concentrations
of Asians such as New York, New Jersey and Maryland, is the emergence
of a new “separate but equal” system of education mirroring the
defacto segregation of schools in America’s largest cities.

It is time for Asian-American parents to reject this new “separate but
equal” system of public education imposed upon them by white liberals
in blue-state America. Our best hope for a truly color-blind society
is not quotas or reverse-discrimination, but to allow all parents the
opportunity to provide the best education for their children by
offering them options such as tuition vouchers, charter schools,
school choice and merit-based teacher pay. Does it surprise anyone
that white liberals are against all of these educational initiatives?

It may surprise some. Not anyone who watches them with mild
interest and has a memory, however.