Undermining the myth of the model minority

Vivian Shuh Ming Louie, assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (GSE), doesn't have to look far to see how the myth of Asian Americans as a "model minority" has gained such traction in the American imagination. After all, she embodies it. The daughter of Chinese immigrants who worked in New York City's restaurant and garment industries, she boasts a resume dotted with the education world's most coveted brand names: Andover Phillips Academy, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.

Yet even as she was marching proudly through academia, earning a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale and a fellowship and ultimately assistant professorship at Harvard, Louie saw family members and friends from her former Chinatown neighborhood struggling to stay in, or get into, college. Turning a scholarly lens on this experience, Louie has produced "Compelled to Excel: Immigration, Education, and Opportunity Among Chinese Americans" (Stanford University Press, 2004).

"The model minority thesis is used to make the argument that race doesn't matter, that class doesn't matter, because look at all these Asian Americans. Look how well they're doing," says Louie. "But in fact, I find that class matters and race matters as well."

For "Compelled to Excel," which grew out of Louie's dissertation, she conducted qualitative research on Chinese American students in two distinct higher education environments in her native New York: Hunter College, a commuter college that is part of the City University of New York, and the Ivy League Columbia University. In all, she interviewed 68 second-generation Chinese American college students and the parents and adult siblings of eight students to learn how their socioeconomic class and, surprisingly to her, race affected their educational opportunities.

Her findings complicate the myth of the model minority that has captured the American imagination for more than a century, from Jewish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century to black West Indians today.

'Is it culture or structure?'

Louie set out to explore socioeconomic class as it relates to immigrants and education because, she says, it's particularly under-examined among Asian Americans. According to U.S. Census classifications, "Asian American" comprises 25 different groups. "When you lump all those groups together a lot gets leavened out. One of those is the class dimension," she says.

Further, within the broad classification of Asian Americans, Chinese Americans are an especially bifurcated group. While some respondents in her study (most likely the Columbia students) came from solidly white, middle-class suburbs where their parents worked as professionals, others grew up in Chinatown, the sons and daughters of immigrants with relatively low levels of formal schooling who worked in what she calls "the twin engines of the enclave economy," the garment and restaurant industries.

"I want to complicate the idea of, is it culture or is it structure?" Louie says. "Is it these values and beliefs that people have that shape their behaviors? Or is it structure, a matter of selective migration, a matter of economic and social resources that different groups have?"

It's both, Louie found. Regardless of class, Chinese Americans shared what she calls "immigrant optimism."

"Chinese immigrant parents have a lot of optimism about their kids' outcomes that they shared with their children," she says, noting that such optimism extends to other immigrant groups, as well. "The optimism is based on what the parents perceive to be the relatively open opportunity structure in the United States as compared to their countries of origin."

Education, particularly free, accessible public education, is the backbone to such opportunities. Yet Louie found that structure - economic resources as well as parents' own levels of education, language, and networking - created different educational outcomes among Chinese Americans.

Growing up in more affluent, suburban families, immigrant children accessed many of the same opportunities their nonimmigrant peers did: good public schools (and occasionally private schools), summer enrichment programs, strong college guidance.

In Chinatown and other urban enclaves, Louie saw that immigrant parents relied on ethnic networks to scout out the best public schools for their children. Yet subtle economic distinctions continued to influence their children's educational path. Wealthier immigrant parents - those who managed restaurants or owned shops - often sent their children to "cram" schools in the enclaves, private institutions owned by fellow Chinese that prepare students for the SAT or for tests to gain entrance into the public exam or magnet schools. Parents on lower rungs of the economic ladder often could not access such opportunities.

Common to the children of urban enclaves, no matter what their parents' incomes, was the sense that they had to take sole ownership of their K-12 education. Their parents, with limited education, English language skills, and contacts outside the ethnic network, were often at a loss to help.

"They don't know what schools do here," says Louie. "They know school's important, but they don't know what they do."

While she suspected that class had an impact on the education of second-generation Chinese Americans, Louie was surprised to find that race did, too.

"I found that there was what I called 'immigrant pessimism,' which is across class. It's not all a rosy picture," she says. Immigrant parents of all classes conveyed to their children that the United States is a racially and ethnically stratified country and that being Chinese could hurt them as they sought opportunities.

One solution to facing racial discrimination, says Louie, is college. "Higher education becomes especially important as a way to mitigate the potential effects of discrimination," she says.

Telling another side to the story

Louie, now in her second year on the GSE faculty after spending two years as a Harvard Post-Doctoral Fellow on Education, has extended her research to explore the educational paths of second-generation Dominican- and Colombian-American immigrants.

Despite the scholarly aims of "Compelled to Excel" - "It wasn't my goal in the book to lay out policy implications," she says - Louie is eagerly taking the message of the research to practitioners and policy-makers. She recently spoke about her work at a conference of English-language-learning educators, and at last night's (Dec. 8) Askwith Education Forum at the GSE, she was joined on a panel by educators and administrators who work with Boston's Chinese American K-12 students, as well as several students.

"I think it should be of interest to people who want to learn about immigration and education," she says. Confounding the myth of the model minority with her research, she says, will help provide better services to immigrant students.

"I don't mean to suggest that people like me don't exist. I exist. ... but there's another side of the story that's not often told," says Louie. "I think it's important to tell it so that we can understand the fuller range of educational experiences and what we can do to get immigrant parents more connected to public schools, or to meet the needs of immigrant children, to help them learn about college."