In Fremont, California, the local school board was determined to reroute elementary and middle school students from the posh Mission Hills neighborhood away from high-performing Mission Hills High School to lower-performing schools in the area. Mission Hills parents objected, and even weighed splitting off to form their own school district, though in the end they did not. What makes this story different from similar occurrences is that the lower-performing schools are mostly white and Mission Hills is almost exclusively Asian - Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian, mostly. The standard accusations are hurled at the Asian parents: that they greedily lay claim to more than their share of the district's resources, they're obsessive about school, exclusionary and standoffish. Remarkably, the Asian parents respond forthrightly that, not only do they, yes, care deeply about school performance, but that the real problem is that other parents don't take school seriously enough. (A point one mother would seem to confirm when she remarks, "We in Fremont see Mission Hills differently because they have a strong Asian population, and the whole way they do school is different from the way others do school.") Unfortunately, NPR managed to muck up a great man-bites-dog story with a bunch of empty blather about racial identity. Reporter Claudio Sanchez seemed certain that Mission Hills' high achievement conceals a roiling subculture of stress, racial tension, cheating, and drug use, though he offered no proof besides a few kids' tall tales. There is another way to read the facts: old-fashioned envy at newcomers making good and dismay over what their success might say about the lesser achievements of others.
"Immigrants weigh splitting from Calif. school system," by Claudio Sanchez, National Public Radio, November 29, 2004 (audio link)