The model students in US education

Why are Asian-Americans so good at school? Or, to put it another way, why is Ms. X so perfect? Ms. X came to the United States in 1994 as an 11-year-old Vietnamese girl who spoke no English. Her parents, neither having more than a high school education, settled in Nebraska and found jobs as manual laborers. The youngest of eight children, Ms. X learned English well enough that when she graduated from high school, she was valedictorian.

Now she is a senior at Nebraska Wesleyan with a 3.99 average, a member of the USA Today All-USA College Academic Team and a new Rhodes Scholar. Increasingly in America, stellar academic achievement has an Asian face. In 2005, Asian-Americans averaged a combined math-verbal SAT of 1091, compared with 1068 for whites, 982 for American Indians, 922 for Hispanics and 864 for blacks. Forty-four percent of Asian-American students take calculus in high school, compared with 28 percent of all students.

Of course, not all Asian-Americans are so painfully perfect – Filipinos are among the largest groups of Asian-Americans and they do very well without being stellar. Success goes particularly to those whose ancestors came from the Confucian belt from Japan through Korea and China to Vietnam. It’s not just the immigrant mentality, for Japanese-American students are mostly fourth-and fifth-generation now, and they’re still excelling.

Nor is it just about family background, for Chinese-Americans who trace their origins to peasant villages also graduate summa. So then why do Asian-Americans really succeed in school? Aside from immigrant optimism, I see two and a half reasons: First is the filial piety nurtured by Confucianism for 2,500 years. Teenagers rebel all over the world, but somehow Asian-American kids often manage both to exasperate and to finish their homework.

Second, Confucianism encourages a reverence for education. In a Confucian culture, it is intuitive that the way to achieve glory and success is by working hard and getting A’s. Then there’s the half-reason: American kids typically say in polls that the students who succeed in school are the "brains." Asian kids typically say that the A students are those who work hard.

That means no Asian-American ever has an excuse for not becoming valedictorian. If I’m right, the success of Asian-Americans is mostly about culture, and there’s no way to transplant a culture. But there are lessons we can absorb, and maybe the easiest is that respect for education pays dividends.