and ethnic inequality in education. Her new book, Race at the Top: Asian Americans and Whites in Pursuit of the American Dream in Suburban Schools illuminates tensions related to achievement and emotional well-being in a suburban, high-income town with a large and growing Asian American population.
Warikoo applied the “Page 99 Test” to Race at the Top and reported the following:
Race at the Top: Asian Americans and Whites in Pursuit of the American Dream in Suburban Schools details social life in a well-off suburb with a large and growing Asian American population, with a focus on parenting and high school life. Page 99 brings readers to a discussion of how school administrators and parents attempted to address their concerns about high school students’ emotional well-being. As I show in the chapter, “Overall, while school staff and parents alike were concerned about students’ emotional lives, the actions the predominantly white school staff took at school to address emotional well-being most frequently aligned with the desired actions of white parents.” This included policies to reduce academic competition, such as ending the naming of class rank and class valedictorian, and a new policy to reduce homework teachers could assign. In contrast, Asian parents more frequently dealt with concerns about their children being overstretched by imploring their children to quit time-consuming extracurricular activities, especially sports. Many of them disagreed with the reduction in homework the policy change demanded. Overall this chapter shows that both Asian and white parents in the town were concerned about their children’s emotional well-being, but they had different strategies for addressing those concerns.Visit Natasha Warikoo's website.
The Page 99 Test: Balancing Acts.
--Marshal Zeringue
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