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TWO

A Quality Education for Whom?

Education has always been at the center of suburban politics.

MICHAEL JONES-CORREA

NESTLED AMONG FREMONT’S southern foothills is Mission San Jose, a neighborhood that has long been known for the 18th-century Spanish mission, which marks the main intersection of its historic downtown.¹ More recently, the neighborhood has become internationally recognized for another landmark—Mission San Jose High School. Until the mid-1990s Mission High was a prototypical suburban American school, made up of a largely White middle-class student body. Today it is a premier destination for highly educated families from all over the world, especially Asia, and one of the highest-ranked schools in California (Figure 6).

FIGURE 6. Mission San Jose High School has become an internationally renowned public high school, especially popular among Asian American families. Photo by author.

Over the last few decades Asian Americans have transformed the face of many American public schools, especially those at the top. In 2010, California’s five highest-ranking public schools all had majority Asian American student bodies.² The academic performance of Asian American students in schools across the United States has raised a host of scholarly debates about the factors that constrain and promote their educational achievement—the role of the model minority myth, culture, parenting, income, selective immigration, and other individual and structural factors.³ But there are other important questions to ask about the forces behind these trends and their impacts.

In this chapter, I examine how schools figured into the aspirations that many Asian American families brought with them to Silicon Valley and the ways in which their desires and decisions about education reshaped the region’s schools, neighborhoods, and development politics. By taking a close look at changes that have engulfed Mission San Jose High and its wider neighborhood over the past few decades, I argue that schools have been a major catalyst for the remapping of regional racial geographies and a critical battleground for Asian American suburban politics.

For many Asian American families, high-performing schools such as those in Mission San Jose were the dominant factor drawing them to relocate to Fremont from around Silicon Valley, the United States, and even abroad. Schools were key to many Asian Americans’ visions of success in the United States and their newly adopted suburban communities. Many viewed education as their primary means of cementing their social and economic status and made highly strategic, calculated decisions to place their children in Mission San Jose schools, often at great personal and economic expense. Once there, Asian American parents worked hard to ensure that the schools met their expectations in terms of their academic culture, curriculum, and high academic standards. Like generations of White Americans before them, “good schools” were a key part of their suburban dream.

But many Asian American families in Fremont also held different ideas about what constituted good schools than those of their White neighbors. As well-educated, technically skilled professionals, many Asian Americans parents placed priority on a rigorous education, especially in math and the sciences, that would prepare their children to enter professions like their own. Whereas many established White families claimed to want less competitive schools that offered a more “well-rounded” and “balanced” education, Asian American families were widely associated with an increasing sense of academic competition, stress, and a culture that placed a premium on high grades and academic rigor. Tensions over these differences catalyzed racial and ethnic tensions within the Mission San Jose schools and led a number of White families to leave the neighborhood and the district. This was also true for a number of native-born Asian Americans, who perceived the area as becoming too heavily driven by Asian immigrant values.

The social reshuffling sparked by Asian Americans migration to Mission San Jose schools runs counter to the typical narrative of suburban segregation. Most scholarship has focused on Whites’ efforts to seal themselves off from racial integration in schools, especially with African Americans, because of racism, fears of property value decline, and reduced educational quality.⁴ The traditional narrative of White flight focuses on the movement of Whites away from inner-city schools and the battles fought to give students of color greater access to White suburban schools through policies such as busing and regional redistricting. The dynamics of White flight explored in this chapter are different. In Mission San Jose, academic competition and the perception of disparate educational values between White and Asian American families have produced and reinforced racial divisions. This fragmentation occurred within suburbs as well as among two relatively economically privileged groups often thought to exist on the same side of the educational divide. Such divisions contributed to the racialization of Mission San Jose schools as spaces that seemingly marked Asian Americans’ inability or unwillingness to assimilate the dominant culture of American education and instead introduce “foreign” practices that many established families claimed were “inappropriate” and “unhealthy” in American suburban schools.

The racial undertones of educational debates in Fremont were also evident in the public deliberation over school boundaries. As Whites left Mission San Jose and the schools became increasingly dominated by Asian American students, Asian American families found themselves, somewhat inadvertently, competing for spots within increasingly racially “segregated” schools. When the Fremont School District tried to redraw the Mission San Jose attendance boundaries to address population and achievement imbalances across the district, the uproar that ensued showed that Asian American educational practices and ideas continued to be marginalized as out of place and foreign. But the case also showed that education has been an important arena in which Asian Americans have defended their right to helping to craft the culture and character of suburban space.

FROM WHITE TO ASIAN AMERICAN SCHOOLS AND NEIGHBORHOODS

Asian Americans’ decisions about education have transformed the social geography of Silicon Valley and the neighborhoods in which they have settled. While immigration reform, globalization, and economic restructuring in the latter half of the 20th century forever changed the face of the valley, not all neighborhoods were equally affected. Mission San Jose quickly rose to the top as Fremont’s hub of Asian American families. According to the 2014 American Community Survey, Mission San Jose had the highest concentration of Asian American residents of any neighborhood in Fremont, with Asian Americans comprising 71% of the population.

Asian Americans of various ethnic backgrounds consistently reported that schools were their top reason for locating to Mission San Jose and, for many, to Fremont. In the 1980s, Asian Americans employed in high tech tended to move to Cupertino, Sunnyvale, and Menlo Park—more established communities closer to the valley core that had higher-ranking public schools. But Fremont, and more particularly Mission San Jose, offered families an enticing alternative—increasingly good schools and new upper-end housing at a more affordable price. Looking for a nice neighborhood with good schools for their young son, Dan and Elaine Chan had been convinced that Mission San Jose schools were worth a try when they purchased their home in the neighborhood in the early 1980s. They quickly realized what a wise decision they had made. Over the next few decades, many other Asian American families followed suit.

The path that Irene Yang took to Mission San Jose was typical of many Asian Americans who arrived in Fremont in the 1980s and 1990s. As we chatted over tea in her kitchen, she recalled her early days in Fremont. Irene had recently finished her graduate degree, gotten married to Henry, and had her first son. The Yangs then decided to move from New York to Fremont. Irene’s brother and mother were already living in the city, and Irene and Henry felt that as Asian Americans, they would have better job prospects on the West Coast than in the East. In the mid-1990s the Yangs rented a home in Ardenwood, a neighborhood in northern Fremont with smaller and more affordable homes than those in Mission San Jose. The neighborhood, however, had highly ranked elementary schools, which was the major draw for Irene, just as it had been for her brother who lived nearby. Irene enrolled her son in the Mandarin bilingual program at Forest Park Elementary, which in 1993 was one of the first of its kind in the state. Many credited the program with helping to make the neighborhood attractive to Chinese American families such as the Yangs. After several years Irene’s husband’s real estate business was booming, and they had saved enough to purchase a house in Mission San Jose—a neighborhood where, Irene explained, most Asian Americans in Fremont aspired to live. The Yangs made the move right after their son graduated from elementary school so as to avoid sending him to a lesser-ranked middle school in Ardenwood and place him on track to attend Mission High.

Asian Americans’ migration into Mission San Jose schools compounded year after year. As more families moved into the neighborhood for the schools, test scores rose—and as test scores rose, more Asian American families located within the neighborhood (Map 4).

MAP 4. Asian Americans have clustered near Fremont’s top performing schools, all of which rank 10 out of 10 on California’s Academic Performance Index, the state’s standard measure of academic achievement. The Mission High attendance area also has the city’s largest concentration of Asian American residents. Image by author.

In a few short decades, Mission High became one of the highest ranking schools in California, with an internationally recognized reputation. In 2008, 2009, and 2010, Mission High was ranked the number one comprehensive high school in the state, based on its standardized test scores. In 2009, US News and World Report rated Mission High as the 36th best academic school (among both public and private schools) and 4th best public open-enrollment high school in the nation. William Hopkins Junior High, its feeder school, had the highest standardized test scores among public junior high schools in California in 2005 and 2007. Mission San Jose’s four elementary schools have also been consistently ranked among the highest in the state.

Mission High’s academic ascent happened as quickly as its demographic transformation. When the California Board of Education first began recording racial demographics in 1981, Mission High was 84% White. Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans who had lived on and worked the land for generations made up the majority of its non-White students. Having grown up in the area, Paula Jones, who now teaches at Mission High, recalled that well into the 1980s, the school was referred to as “Little Scandinavia” for its predominance of blond-haired, blue-eyed students. But as Maria Lewis, a longtime Mission San Jose resident and now a teacher at Mission High, observed, “The 1990s marked the end of the dominance of the White, blond-haired group at Mission High.”

Between 1981 and 2009, Mission High’s White population declined from 84% to 14%, while its Asian American population soared from 7% to 83%. Growth among students of Chinese and Indian descent far outpaced those of other Asian American groups. In 2009, Chinese Americans made up 49% of Mission High’s Asian American student body, and Indian Americans made up another 17%. Roughly a quarter identified as “other,” a category that likely includes a large number of students of mixed Asian and Caucasian ancestry, which Mission High students commonly refer to as “Wasians” and “Hybrids.” Although neither the school nor the district record parental country of origin, most Chinese American families are reportedly from Taiwan, a trend consistent with the larger neighborhood.⁵ Most students are native-born, second-generation Asian Americans, and a number are among the so-called 1.5-generation, who were born overseas but raised in the United States. In 2010, 76% of Mission High’s Asian American students were born in the United States, but over two-thirds spoke a non-English language at home, an indication of their parents’ immigrant status. Latinos and African Americans made up only 2% and 0.5% of the student body, respectively (Table 2).

TABLE 2. Mission San Jose High’s student population went from predominantly White to Asian American in only a few decades. During the same period, the standardized tests scores for the school rose sharply.

As evidence of Mission High’s changing student body, at graduation time administrators often ask students to line up by C’s and W’s because of the large number of graduating students with common Chinese last names such as Chen and Wong.

With many parents employed as Silicon Valley engineers and researchers, Asian Americans have also raised the class status of the school and the neighborhood. In 2014, 70% of Mission San Jose residents age 25 and over held a bachelor’s degree or higher, and among these nearly 40% held a graduate degree or higher. Among employed adults, 73% worked in management, business, science, and arts-related occupations, with over half of these related to computer technology, engineering, or science.⁶ In 2005, the neighborhood appeared on Forbes magazine’s list of the 500 most affluent communities in the United States with a median income of over $114,000. By 2014, this had risen to $144,000.⁷ That same year, less than 4% of Mission High students qualified for free and reduced lunch, compared to 17% across the district and 58% in the state.

David Li reminded me of just how much had changed in Mission San Jose since he had grown up there in the late 1960s and 1970s. We gathered at Mission Coffee, a trendy and upbeat café just steps from the original mission—an ideal place to think about old and new. Here, Mission High teens crowded around overstuffed couches and rustic tables piled high with laptops, textbooks, and lattes, while old-timers discussed the local landscape paintings that lined the walls, read, and visited with neighbors and members of the various local civic and social clubs that regularly met there. Over the hum of these many voices, David recounted tales of his early school life and reflected on how much had changed. He recalled that when he graduated from Mission High in the early 1980s, “everyone just drove a car to get around.” But during his most recent visit to the school, students were sporting fancier cars than his. Many arrived in Lexuses, Audis, and BMWs, the latter of which is commonly known to students as “Basic Mission Wheels.”