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John Michener's avatar

In short, Asians are grinds - and most students are unwilling to work that hard and most parents are not willing to push their kids that hard. My school district had a lot of highly educated South and East Asians. In general, their kids were reasonably smart and very hard working - and their parents tried hard to get their kids to study hard - and it showed. My kids Honors / IB classes were ~75% South and East Asian. Frankly, rather like when I grew up 50 years earlier on the East coast, when the honors classes were majority Jewish.

My daughter's comments was that her peers had Chinese Dragon mothers and Hindu Elephant mothers and she had an American Eagle father.

I let my kids know that they should get used to it, their peers in high school would likely be their peers in the workforce (I am in tech) and they had to work hard enough to compete effectively - which was quite hard. But we didn't do the Ivy status insanity - the kids headed to the University of Washington, my daughter by early admission, my son via Running Start. They both had their Masters before they turned 22 and both work in tech.

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Steve Campbell's avatar

I was part of this project, teaching to the test. As a substitute teacher with an advanced Degree in History I was recruited to help teach tests in US history, government and civics. We went over the information in class and then after pre testing took the underperforming students into a remedial class with fewer students and more graphics than talk. In general, it worked. We improved enough on the tests that we got out of jail. Then it ended and now, 15 years later, the students are back to knowing little or nothing unless they are in AP classes. Our system is broken , perhaps never to recover.

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