Researchers from NYU and the University of California, Irvine found that most Asian American parents generally prefer sending their children to schools with a majority Asian population. Participants in the study cited concerns about anti-Asian discrimination and a belief that Asian American students have “stronger educational values” than other minority groups.
Steinhardt professor Adriana Villavicencio and two UC Irvine Ph.D. students conducted the December study, which was published in the Harvard Educational Review. The report consisted of 34 interviews with Asian American parents of students ranging from kindergarten to ninth grade, which were conducted as part of a larger study including 1,865 surveyed parents.
After interviewing the participants, researchers found that 29% of them — amounting to 10 people — favored schools with predominantly Asian American students and about a third of them avoided schools with at least a 25% Black and Latino population. 15% of the participants, who represented a wide range of income levels and ethnicities, said that they prioritized their children learning at “racially diverse schools.”
“Families use and understand the word ‘diversity’ differently,” Villavicencio said in an interview with WSN. “It’s important that when school districts talk about their own policies to diversify the district, they be explicit about what they mean by diversity, so that people can see their own values and own priorities reflected in those goals.”
The study reported that high-income parents defined diverse schools as those that served students from various racial backgrounds, while low-income and middle class participants attributed diversity with schools that largely host students from their own racial background. Of the 34 participants, 13 of them had an income higher than $150,000, whereas 11 of them made less than $50,000.
Tiffany Wu, a UC Irvine student who co-authored the study, said that the discrepancy in how high-income and low-income parents defined diversity was likely reflective of their lived experiences in the community. For instance, those living in racially diverse neighborhoods may have been more likely to perceive Asian Americans as a racial minority.
“Parents’ racial views very clearly informed their perspectives on the school district’s active effort to desegregate schools by removing merit-based criteria for high-performing schools,” Wu said in a statement to WSN. “A lot of the Asian American parents we interviewed found merit-based admission to work against Asian American students, which was unsurprising given parent’s beliefs that Asian Americans tend to work harder and academically achieve more than other minority groups.”
The researchers concluded that their findings illustrate an internalization of the “model minority myth,” which stereotypes Asian Americans as more intelligent and hardworking than people of other minority groups. In the study, they also highlighted parents’ concerns of racism against Asian Americans.
Villavicencio said that a limitation of the study was that it did not account for parents’ immigration status or country of birth, although it did include parents from various Asian American groups — such as Korean, Indian, Japanese and Filipino — and offered interviews in both English and Mandarin to the 18 Chinese or Chinese American parents.
“One of the broader implications from this work is the importance of bringing multicultural communities together to both listen to diverse perspectives and stories, and to also find shared values and goals for our schools and students,” Villavicencio said. “In a climate where racial diversity is being disinvested, it’s even more important to think about how different families value different types of diversity, and how they can find some shared priorities and visions for what their schools look like.”
Contact Kaleo Zhu at [email protected].