Language, Culture: How Schools Cope

When Arcadia High School sophomore Johnson Lee gets home, his mother has vegetable sushi and eggrolls waiting on the kitchen table. When he stays up late before a big exam--say, to cram with friends over the Internet--she brews a pot of coffee to keep him going. And when there’s just no room in his backpack for a hefty Advanced Placement biology textbook, no problem--she copies the chapters he needs on the machine outside his bedroom.

In this household, failure is spelled B.

Up in Kern County, Taft Union High School student Dusty Watkins, the son of a petroleum company worker, wants to be a police officer or game warden. Watkins, though, seldom does his homework--”It’s boring.”

Sure, his father will ground him for nine weeks if he gets a shoddy grade. But what’s a bad grade in this family? D.

Down at San Diego’s Hoover High School, there’s a group that calls itself the Crazy Brown Ladies. They wear heavy makeup--”ghetto paint,” they call it--and loathe carrying schoolbooks. For their academically inclined sisters, they’ve reserved a special slur: “School Girls.”

What gives Lee his drive? Why does Watkins shrug off schoolwork? Why do the Crazy Brown Ladies eschew all things academic?

The answer may be culture.

What goes on in students’ lives outside the classroom often does more to shape school performance than what transpires inside it. One of the strongest outside influences is the mix of attitudes, beliefs and expectations about education that can mold motivation--and may underlie startlingly persistent differences in academic achievement among white, Asian, black and Latino students.

Of course, averages for large, diverse racial or ethnic groups do not account for individual achievements.

At Katella High School in Anaheim, there’s Karina Valenzuela. The Tijuana-born senior has hopscotched through 10 schools since her arrival in the United States 12 years ago. For a while she and her family of six lived in a van. In spite of such hardships--usually a formula for academic disaster--Karina has a 3.8 grade-point average and is bound for college.

Yet despite such examples, in one measure of academic fitness after another--dropout rates, grades, enrollment in advanced courses--the patterns shout: Asians generally come out on top in California’s schools, whites second, blacks third, Latinos last.

A Search for Causes

What’s going on? Race or ethnicity by itself does not explain these differences. Social scientists have widely discredited the notion that one ethnic group is innately smarter or works harder than another.

Nor does immigration status fully account for the performance gap. Indeed, contrary to some stereotypes that criticize immigrants as a source of trouble in the state’s schools, repeated studies have found that immigrant children of almost any origin tend to do better in school than ethnic peers who have been in the United States longer. The problem is that subsequent generations do worse than the first--suggesting that exposure to American culture weakens immigrants’ drive, rather than the other way around.

Nor does money fully account for the distinctions. Yes, Asian Americans and whites are richer on average than Latinos and blacks. With greater income comes greater access to the tools of success--computers, books, museum trips and a quiet place to study--making money a major factor.

And of course, racial definitions always over-generalize, particularly in a population as large and varied as California’s. Racial categories lump together many people of different heritages who often have little in common culturally or socially.

But still ethnic differences remain, even after accounting for income, parent education or the language a student speaks at home.

The accomplishments of Asian American students are one of “the most consistent findings” ofstudies on school achievement in America, according to Temple University researcher Laurence Steinberg, who writes about ethnic differences in academic performance in his 1996 book “Beyondthe Classroom.”

“It is more advantageous to be Asian than to be wealthy, to have non-divorced parents or to have a mother who is able to stay home full-time,” he writes.

Why? And what are the implications for schools?

UC Berkeley anthropologist John Ogbu offers one possibility: that years of workplace discrimination have discouraged blacks and Latinos from investing time and effort in school.

Ogbu, an African American social scientist, was one of the first to describe “the burden of acting white,” a theory that suggests that many black students resist schooling to protect their self-image and distinguish themselves from a majority culture that too often devalues their abilities.

Ana M. “Cha” Guzman, a Texas community college administrator who recently headed a presidential commission on Latino education issues, cites another factor: Many Latinos face intense pressure to join the work force and “see the pursuit of a college degree as a selfish choice” that puts their own welfare ahead of their family’s.

Nationwide, Latino men have the highest work force participation of any ethnic group. But Latinos also drop out of school at the highest rate--about 30%, according to federal estimates--and attend college at the lowest.

“Latino students, perhaps because of a cultural issue, tend to take themselves out of the [education] game prematurely,” says UC Davis education professor Patricia Gandara, “whereas other groups gut it out more.”

As far back as 1986, education researcher Harold Hodgkinson, in a report “California: The State and Its Educational System,” urged state officials to “think of ways in which the motivations and achievements” of Asian Americans “could be transferred to others.”

That would include striking at the complacency that hampers so many of California’s white students, who have shown a sharper drop on reading scores in California in this decade than either blacks or Latinos.

Or it may mean trying to change the habits that immigrants can carry over from impoverished countries like Mexico or El Salvador. In some Los Angeles schools, for example, officials find that attendance drops sharply on rainy days--a phenomenon they attribute in part to immigrants who come from places where schools simply shut down when it rains.

The Latino superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District sees the role of culture in low achievement. What is needed, says Waldemar Rojas, is to “eliminate the disparity that is there because of despair--[the attitude that] school is never for me. . . .”

Consider attendance, how three-quarters of the Chinese and Japanese students in San Francisco are present for virtually all--more than 90% of--their classes. Only 29% of the black students--and 54% of the whites--attend class that regularly.

“Certainly, we have to transfer that disposition to learn--and that work ethic”--of Asian Americans to others, he says. “Intelligence is modifiable. But if you’re not in class, it’s less modifiable.”

More educators are beginning to favor a frontal assault on cultural issues.

Already, for example, 18 California high schools with large numbers of underachieving Latino students are participating in the Puente program.

Puente is designed to prepare them for college through small classes, extensive counseling, exposure to successful Latino professionals, and an intense focus on writing and the literature of Mexican American authors.

Ethnic Trends

The persistence of ethnic gaps in school success is a key finding of a months-long examination of the state’s public schools by The Times, which analyzed school records and trailed students from a variety of backgrounds around California.

Analyses conducted for The Times by UCLA, for example, show that proportionally twice as many Asians as whites take the high school courses required for admission to the University of California. In certain areas, the gap is even more stark: Asians enroll in advanced math and chemistry classes, for instance, at as much as three times the rate of whites.

In a separate study by Times computer data analysts, students in Asian- and Latino-majority high schools were found to be quite similar in two key factors. In both types of schools, 24% to 30% of students spoke limited English and about 20% were from families on welfare.

Yet 45% of the seniors in the majority-Asian schools completed the college preparatory courses recommended for admission to the University of California, compared with 30% in the mostly Latino schools.

Research provided to The Times by the College Board, the New York-based organization that sponsors the SAT, also shows marked disparities in performance despite common group traits. Similar percentages of Asian and Latino SAT-takers last year spoke a language other than English at home, for example, and proportionally more whites than Asians are from families earning $40,000 or more annually. Yet the Asians had the highest grade-point averages.

As an example of how even low-income groups of Asian American immigrants have achieved educational success, consider the Hmong.

Originally refugees from Laos who immigrated to the United States in the 1970s after the end of Indochina’s wars, the Hmong have the highest poverty rates of all immigrant groups in California. Yet according to Michigan State University sociologist Ruben Rumbaut, who tracked 2,000 immigrant students in San Diego over five years, Hmong students put in more homework time than anyone--as many as four hours a night.

Lia Thao, a senior at Hoover High, immigrated when she was 5 years old after spending a few years in a Thai refugee camp. When she started first grade in the United States, she spoke no English.

Now she lives in a three-bedroom apartment near Hoover with her parents and five siblings. To help her family make ends meet, she works at a middle school as a classroom aide and at a taco restaurant.

Despite those demands, she spends four to six hours on homework each night. With the second-highest grade-point average among Hoover graduates this year--a 4.3--she plans to attend UC San Diego as a premed.

She gives much of the credit to her father, who fought the communists in Laos and who now delivers produce.

“One of the things he tells me is, a pen is heavier than a sword.”

Of course, not all Asians perform at the same levels. Rumbaut found that San Diego’s Hmong, despite all their homework, had a 2.9 grade-point average as 10th-graders, lower than Filipino and Vietnamese students--but still higher than Mexican immigrants.

At Arcadia High, it escapes no one’s notice the astonishing degree to which Asians dominate academically. You can measure it simply by walking through classrooms--the tougher the course, the more seats they fill.

The numbers also tell the story. Of 902 Advanced Placement exams last year that earned a passing score of 3 or better at the school, 713, or 79%, belonged to Asian students, who make up 56% of Arcadia’s 3,000 students.

Whites, 34% of the students, accounted for only 95, or 10%, of the passing exams.

The school’s Pathways program for failing students, by contrast, enrolls mainly whites and Latinos. One is James White, a friendly sophomore with shoulder-length blond locks who attended about a dozen different schools before landing at Arcadia.

Although James completes assignments much of the time and enjoys reading Shakespeare on his own, his highest grade last term was in auto shop. “I really don’t like school,” he says. He rarely spends more than 20 minutes on homework, and if it is too hard, “I just don’t do it.”

A veteran teacher at Arcadia says: “[Asian parents] say, ‘We’re going to go here and you will perform.’ They’ll sacrifice everything to move here for the education. White families I don’t think have that attitude.”

Findings from a Times poll back that up. Among Asian parents of school-age children in California, 22% said some students achieve more than others because they work harder. By contrast, only 14% of Latinos, 8% of blacks and 5% of whites cited working hard. Members of those ethnic groups were more likely to cite parental involvement or a stable home life.

Asian parents were also most likely to report that their children spend a hefty chunk of time on homework. Almost 50% of Asian parents reported two hours or more on homework every night, compared with 33% of blacks, 27% of whites and 18% of Latinos.

“There is nothing magical going on here,” says Temple University’s Steinberg. “Asian youngsters and their parents are more likely to believe that hard work pays off.” That belief is rooted, at least in part, in Confucianism, the ancient philosophy that people can improve themselves through effort and instruction.

Perhaps even more important, Steinberg found, is that Asians also strongly believe that failing to work hard in school will bring negative consequences. Whites and other non-Asians, on the other hand, are “far more cavalier” about the downsides of sloughing off, he says.

At nearly all-white Taft Union High near Bakersfield, the anti-work ethic seems widespread. Many students, like aspiring game warden Dusty Watkins, admit they just don’t try hard. Moreover, the school doesn’t expect them to. Many students don’t do their homework, so teachers often don’t bother giving it.

It’s a vicious cycle, one that makes some Taft teachers throw up their hands in defeat.

“If you assign them to read a story and two-thirds haven’t read it, where are you?” English teacher Steve Shinn asks with resignation.

Raising Expectations

The process of changing such attitudes is not easy.

Prompted by the observations of a Times reporter who spent a week on the Taft campus as part of this series--as well as the findings of a school accreditation team--Taft administrators and faculty are stiffening requirements to prevent students from just sliding by.

The school suffers from “different levels of expectation” for its students, says Taft Principal Bill Wickwire.

The plan now is to merge lower-level “general education” courses with the college track to help raise the learning standards for large numbers of students.

The principal worries, however, whether it will work.

“Teachers couldn’t cope with the low reading ability of a large group of the kids. That’s their fear,” Wickwire said.

The Puente experience, however, suggests it is possible to transform students’ anti-achievement attitudes.

More Puente students complete college-prep courses than do non-Puente students matched by socioeconomic levels and grades. And grade-point averages of Puente students have increased slightly.

But the program’s real value, UC Davis’ Gandara says, is cultural--as illustrated by a question posed to 1,000 students, half in Puente and half not.

Researchers asked the students to pick one of the following types to identify with: a popular student who gets invited to the best parties; a nice person who listens to others’ problems; a cool student who is fun to be around; or a good student who helps others with school work.

Puente students were most likely to choose the smart student identity. By contrast, non-Puente students listed the good student image as their third choice.

“These Puente kids are much more willing to say, ‘I want to be a scholar. I’m willing give up things to make it happen,’ ” Gandara says.

Many of them also have embraced a technique used effectively by Asian American students: study groups. Puente classes encourage participants to work cooperatively, a practice that has begun spilling over to after-school hours.

“It’s absolutely possible” to teach others some of Asian American students’ strategies, she concludes.

Iris DeLeon, a sophomore enrolled in the Puente program at Pasadena High School, has heard the message.

The petite, green-eyed daughter of a Guatemala-born gardener and a Mexican mother, Iris admits she was not a stellar student in junior high. She was used to people telling her that she was “too dumb” to bother with school. So when she entered the ninth grade, she gave in to temptations--ditching class to hang out with others who had already dropped out.

But the ditching soon got boring, and getting caught was no fun. So, when a counselor asked her to consider the Puente program, she agreed.

Iris found herself working harder than ever before. Some days, she would go home and cry, stressed out by demands such as writing a thesis on Shakespeare.

A year later, her best friends are all Puente students. And she has enough confidence that on Cinco de Mayo, she got up before hundreds of schoolmates in an auditorium decorated with streamers, tissue-paper flowers and portraits of Mexican American leaders. She had rummaged through books and newspapers for days, searching for a poem she could recite at the assembly celebrating the Mexican holiday.

She stumbled across an anonymous poem called “When, Raza?”

Her favorite line went like this: Yesterday is gone, and manana doesn’t come.

To Iris, it sums up the lesson of the last year. “It means, ‘Today you’re here, but tomorrow where are you going to be?’ ”

If she can keep pulling up her grades, now mostly Cs, Iris knows where she will be: college.

“I want to be a doctor.”

In essence, what programs like Puente are trying to do is replicate parts of the mixture of inner drive, family support and school strategies that powers the success of students like Johnson Lee.

His day starts at 6:30 a.m. in the converted attic bedroom of a modestly furnished home near campus that he shares with his mother, Yvonne Lee, and sister Michelle. He lingers in bed until 7:30, cramming a little more for three tests today--in biology, calculus and a course on ancient Greek history and literature. Homework was heavy the night before; he’s had barely four hours of sleep.

By a little after 8 a.m., he is reciting sentences with reflexive verbs in Spanish. By 9:30, he is bent over a quiz on seed germination in Advanced Placement biology. By 10:30, he is at his seat as sophomore class president announcing that 10th-graders are planning a carwash fund-raiser.

By 11:05, he is snacking on a piece of licorice as he walks across campus to meet the counselor who will help students choose courses for next year.

This is what he wants to take: Advanced Placement English, Advanced Placement U.S. history, Advanced Placement calculus, Spanish 3, marching band and Advanced Placement physics.

The counselor, Peggy Bott, suggests that four AP classes is too much. “Johnson,” she says gently, “you’ve been looking very stressed out this year.”

There’s no doubt that, for ambitious students like him, Arcadia is not a happy-go-lucky school. It’s a pressure cooker: Johnson worries that the one B he got last term--in Advanced Placement biology--will hurt him.

But he ignores Bott’s advice for now. “I’m going for everything,” he says later. “You can only stay in high school for four years and you want to do everything. I want colleges to pick me, not say, ‘Oh, he didn’t do enough, his classes weren’t hard enough.’ ”

When the school day ends, he heads to a nearby middle school, where he volunteers as a clarinet tutor. For the next hour he and two other tutors run through some new songs--a minuet by Faber, another by Mozart and a Handel selection. When he dismisses the younger students, it’s not without homework. “Play your arpeggios!” he commands.

By 4:30, he is home, plunging into Spanish homework as his mother sets out the sushi. At 8 p.m., he is off to a class with a private biology tutor. At 10, he is back home, sipping a soda for energy. Sometime after 11, he falls asleep over a copy of “Lord of the Flies,” the subject of tomorrow’s English test.

Yvonne Lee, a Taiwan native, says that Johnson needs no prodding to study hard. “My job is to be the driver,” she says, joking about his frenetic schedule.

Yet Lee plays a strong supporting role. Aside from the hearty snacks and pots of coffee, she has equipped him and his older sister with a fax machine, a copier and computers wired to the Internet. Johnson uses the fax to send homework problems to classmates. He goes on the Internet for late-night chat sessions with buddies cramming for the same big exam. He has a beeper and his own phone line so that friends seeking or offering homework help after midnight can reach him without waking up the household.

Lee, who runs a small El Monte company that distributes plastic bags and pallets, says she immigrated to the United States in 1987 so her children could attend school here.

She makes sure that Johnson does not forget that.

“My job is, I take care of you. Your job is only to study. Your job,” she tells her son, “is education.”

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A Profile of California’s 1997 SAT Takers

The College Board, which gives the SAT college entrance exam, collects extensive information about the high school students who take the test. The data show, for example, that 32% of white test-takers have a parent with a graduate degree and that the largest percentage of Mexican American students--35%--come from households that earn under $20,000 annually.

Parent’s education

*--*

No H.S. H.S. Assoc. Bachelor’s Graduate diploma diploma degree degree Native American 4% 41% 11% 25% 20% Asian 13 27 6 32 22 Black 3 46 12 23 16 Mexican American 37 38 7 10 8 Puerto Rican 8 42 10 24 18 Other Latino 24 37 7 17 16 White 1 26 9 32 32 Other 4 29 8 28 31 All Students 10 30 8 27 24

*--*

Trends of enrollment in advanced math and science

% enrolled in . . .

*--*

Calculus Physics G.P.A.* Native American 15% 39% 3.11 Asian 38 61 3.36 Black 10 33 2.84 Mexican American 14 37 3.06 Puerto Rican 14 39 3.12 Other Latino 15 39 3.09 White 22 46 3.31 Other 26 50 3.26 All Students 23 47 3.23

*--*

* Grade Point Average

Academic aspirations:

- Degree aspirations

*--*

BA MA and PhD Native American 22% 28% Asian 15 65 Black 20 64 Mexican American 20 58 Puerto Rican 20 61 Other Latino 17 62 White 22 56 Other 14 66 All Students 19 60

*--*

Family income*

*--*

Under $20,000 to $40,000 to $60,000 to Over $20,000 $40,000 $60,000 $80,000 $80,000 Native American 17% 27% 23% 14% 17% Asian 28 27 18 13 16 Black 31 32 17 10 9 Mexican American 35 32 15 9 7 Puerto Rican 23 32 20 12 14 Other Latino 34 31 16 9 10 White 7 19 23 19 33 Other 18 25 22 15 20 All Students 19 25 20 15 21

*--*

* Numbers may not add up to 100% due to rounding

Source The College Board

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Times Poll

Views on Education

Asian American parents are more likely than others to say that students who succeed in school do so because of hard work, according to a Times poll of California adults that included parents of schoolchildren.

Do you think your child is (asked of parents) / you are (asked of students) assigned too much, too little or about the right amount of homework?

PARENTS

*--*

All White Black Latino Asian Too much 9% 13% 5% 4% 6% Too little 22 19 32 18 33 About right 68 66 63 76 60 Don’t know 1 2 -- 2 1

*--*

*

STUDENTS

Too much: 17%

Too little: 9%

About right: 73%

Don’t know: 1%

*

Why do some students do better in school than others?

PARENTS:

*--*

All White Black Latino Asian Parents more involved 46% 45% 40% 55% 35% More stable home life 13 14 18 12 9 They work harder 10 5 8 13 22 Natural ability 6 6 5 5 9 Better teachers 5 4 6 6 8 Preferential treatment 2 1 4 2 2

*--*

*

*--*

Teacher Students Parents more involved 43% 15% More stable home life 24 5 They work harder 6 52 Natural ability 4 11 Better teachers 2 3 Preferential treatment -- 1

*--*

*

Have immigrant children had a positive or negative impact on California public schools?

PARENTS:

*--*

All White Black Latino Asian No impact 11% 8% 11% 14% 13% A positive impact 35 26 30 40 61 A negative impact 40 51 39 36 14 Don’t know 14 15 20 10 12

*--*

“Parents” refers to parents of children 5 to 17 years old attending school in California. “Students” refers to children 12 to 17 years old. “--” indicates less than 0.5%. Totals may be less than 100% where not all answer categories are shown.

Source: L.A. Tmes polls

*

How much time do you spend on homework each school day on average?

1 hour: 41%

2 hours: 21%

30 minutes or less: 18%

Don’t have homework: 7%

More than 2 hours: 13%

*

How often do you have time to help with your child’s homework?

PARENTS:

Always: 55%

Usually: 27%

Sometimes: 13%

Rarely/never: 4%

No homework/no need: 1%

*

Has teaching non-English speaking students in the public schools in your district had a positive or negative impact on the quality of education for English speaking students?

No impact: 40%

Positive impact: 30%

Negative impact: 24%

Don’t know: 6%

*

Times Poll results are also available on the World Wide Web at:

https://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/POLLS

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KEY FINDINGS

CONTRASTING CULTURES: Cultural influences have a big impact on success or failure. The success of Asian American students contrasts sharply with other ethnic groups.

JOB PRESSURE: Latinos have the highest employment rate of any ethnic group, but also the highest dropout rate.

THE LANGUAGE CHALLENGE: California has 1.4 million students who are not fluent in English--more than the total public school populations of at least 38 states.

SLOW TRANSITION TO ENGLISH: Last year, 1,150 schools around the state with non-English-speaking students failed to advance a single student into English fluency.

LITTLE HELP: A third of schools failing to advance any students to English fluency were teaching only in English; many of the rest taught primarily in English.

TOO FEW BILINGUAL TEACHERS: California has only one bilingual teacher for every 92 students with limited English skills. As a result, more than 220,000 such students got no special help last year.