Race to the top of the class

Why do Asian migrant children dominate Australian classrooms? Academic Christina Ho’s theory is a minefield.

UTS academic and author Christina Ho is keenly aware of the potential minefields in her cultural commentary on Asian-Australians in education. Picture: John Feder

At age six, Asian-Australians spend 23 more minutes per school day on educational activities than do their non-Asian peers. It rises to 25 minutes on weekends.

This early effort bears fruit quickly, as Sydney academic Christina Ho details in her new book, Aspiration and Anxiety: Asian Migrants and Australian Schooling.

From selection for opportunity classes to entry to selective schools, the children of Asian migrants put down an outsized academic footprint.

As a group, they are “disproportionately successful in education in Australia, and in other countries such as the US, Canada and UK. They outperform others in standardised tests, are over-represented in high-performing schools and classes, and have higher rates of admission to university”.

Nowhere is this more dramatically evident than in Australia’s burgeoning selective school sector. Before the 1990s, selective school enrolments in Australia were dominated by white students. Now more than 90 per cent of students in fully selective schools in NSW and Victoria are of Asian background, despite only about 12 per cent of Australians claiming Asian ancestry. So what lies behind the Asian migrant revolution in Australian classrooms?

“It’s their culture” seems to be the most common refrain, as if an innate mark-scoring genius is transmitted through mother’s milk, driving the inexorable progress of an armada of migrant prodigies through Australian classrooms. But can differences in culture fully account for the phenomenon of the so-called tiger parent and their dragon offspring?

Ho, associate professor of social and political sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney, attempts to unpack the nurture-versus-nature argument amid a complex, and increasingly heated, public debate.

Aspiration and Anxiety, by Christina Ho.

While culture certainly plays a role — she cites Confucian traditions prizing effort, industry and obeying authority as an example — looking solely through that lens is not only “simplistic but dangerous”.

The reality is far more nuanced, she argues: from academically struggling Asian-Australian students who fail to meet the ‘‘model minority’’ stereotype, to the impact of class and socio-economic differences among migrants, to the role of government policy in socially engineering the very outcomes so many Anglo-Australians find discomfiting.

Fundamentally, Asian migrants are driven by the twin forces of aspiration and anxiety, Ho believes. Deprived of cultural capital — the advantages of local networks, social connections and insider knowledge — they focus on aspiration capital, upward social mobility based on children’s education and career.

This is built, however, on a bedrock of anxiety about being locked out of opportunity because of racial discrimination and the so-called bamboo ceiling. Ho points to research on the negative effect of Chinese surnames in job applications.

Drawing on qualitative research, education statistics and interviews with close to 40 subjects in Australia and Hong Kong, Ho presents a detailed account of tiger parenting in Australian education. From the politics of aspiration driving the hunt for properties in school catchment zones, to the rise of blue-chip selective schools in lockstep, it seems, with Australia’s $1.25bn private coaching industry, there’s a shadow academic subculture now so pervasive some critics see it as undermining traditional classroom teaching.

A spotlight is shone on a world where parents pay up to $20,000 a year in private tutoring, where maths textbooks are imported from India and China for their superior intellectual standards, where successful tutors have cult followings, wait lists and near-celebrity status, where 1000 students converge on Sydney Olympic Park for selective school trial tests in an annual summer ritual.

Ho features an interesting grab bag of personalities along the way: academic outcast Fiona, who struggles with the stigma of not meeting the ‘‘smart Asian’’ cliche; Felicity, who speaks of the racism her selective school attracts (“We’re not viewed as a complex amount of individuals. We’re viewed as that “slope school”); Indian-Australian Hari and his sharp anthropological dissection of school tribes from the ‘‘curry munchers’’ to the ‘‘skips’’; disgruntled Anglo-Australian mum Ros and son Robert, and their complaints about the perils of minority whiteness in selective school culture (‘‘it’s a case of spot the blond kid”).

Ho devotes much detail to the coaching industry, a touchstone for increasingly racially heated discourse about “unfair” migrant practices. She makes the point that Australians generally have no problem with sending their children to private tuition or coaching for sport and music.

These tensions over coaching lay bare another uncomfortable truth, she says. Traditionally, Anglo-Australians like to consider themselves as liberal and laissez-faire, proponents of the “let children be children” school of parenting, but many now share the same anxieties and pressures of their Asian peers, and it’s the direct result of an increasingly competitive and hierarchical educational culture engineered by neoliberal reforms in education and immigration by governments over the past 20 years.

In many ways, Ho writes, the Asian tiger parent is the “perfect neoliberal citizen: aspirational, enterprising, self-sufficient and competitive”. They have flourished in a system that prioritises skilled migrants over refugees and family reunion programs.

“The promotion of school choice, the expansion of the selective school system and the growth in standardised testing have created a culture of competition in education that rewards competitive and strategic behaviour”.

These policies have created the very conditions in our schools that fuel racialised resentment about tiger parenting in education. So why blame the offspring of tiger parents for benefiting from the conditions that our governments have created?

By moving away from the reductive narrative of culture — a closed box where free debate often goes to die, in her view — we can ask the hard questions: have we got the balance of migrants right? Do we really need selective schools? Why do we have one of the world’s most segmented and segregated school systems?

As an Asian-Australian herself, Ho knows she can speak freely, and she does so with remarkable candour, particularly at the conclusion of the book. Here, she acknowledges the downsides of “the aggressive and instrumentalist approach to education” taken by many Asian migrants, and queries whether “an economically unbalanced” migrant community’s “legitimate pursuit of self-interest threatens to undermine social cohesion in this country”.

Candid stuff — and Ho is keenly aware of the potential minefields in such cultural commentary. As her young interviewee, Felicity, says, “As soon as you critique (the issues), it just gets hijacked by the wrong people and turns into sort of like racism”.

But meaningful debate can only come from speaking freely, away from the distorting prism of culture, Ho concludes, and we need to extend this privilege to all Australians, regardless of background.

Sharon Verghis is a journalist and writer.

Aspiration and Anxiety: Asian Migrants and Australian Schooling

By Christina Ho. MUP, 216pp, $34.95