How Viet refugees rose: 'They work harder'

Years ago, as the Vietnamese "boat people" arrived in San Jose, I asked a high school teacher:

"Is it true what they say about Vietnamese students?"

"Yes!," she said, with no need to ask what I meant. "They're my best students."

"But you teach English, and they're still learning the language. How can that be?"

"They work harder," she said.

Vietnamese refugees moved into low-income and working-class neighborhoods, enrolled their children in not-so-great public schools and "made a striking leap in education attainment" in a single generation, writes Jen L. Phan in Education Next.

The adults who came to San Jose took community college classes to learn English and qualify as electronics technicians. Their children worked hard in school and went to community colleges, Cal State universities and the University of California.

Fifty-five percent of U.S.-born Vietnamese-Americans hold at least a bachelor's degree, according to the Pew Research Center, compared to 38 percent of the general population.

Vietnamese people see education as "the primary pathway to economic security and upward mobility," writes Phan. "Equally important are the dense social networks shaping students’ educational environments," such as "churches, temples, businesses, and neighborhood organizations." These networks celebrate academic success, while "failure carries a social stigma."

Phan, a Harvard sophomore, interviewed two of her Vietnamese-American classmates for the story.

San Jose teachers worried that their Vietnamese students were under heavy pressure to bring home straight A's, and might be punished for anything less.

One teacher showed me essays his students had written on the subject of "my parents and my grades." One seventh-grader said his parents had risked their lives on a small boat --they were so hungry they'd chewed on the wooden rails -- to give him the opportunity to grow up in America, and he owed it to them to succeed. A girl said she'd earned straight A's on the first two report cards, but the third one showed six A's and a B. "What happened?", they asked. "You were doing so well."

I visited a middle school in a working-class neighborhood with lots of immigrants from Mexico, Vietnam and a dozen other countries. The principal told me math teachers had never imagined they'd be able to offer eighth-grade algebra, because students just weren't ready for it -- until the Vietnamese wave hit. Now, said the principal, the school offered two pre-algebra classes in seventh grade and two algebra classes in eighth, and was about to add a third class at each level. Of course, non-Vietnamese kids were in those classes too. Expectations and opportunities had been raised for everyone.