advantages, Asian Americans are still fighting to make the valley their home and for broader recognition of their rights as suburbanites. Just as Japanese American tenant farmers once hoped to put down roots and leave their mark on the land upon which they worked and raised their families, so too are today’s Silicon Valley migrants. Their challenge is to build communities that reflect their identities, broad geographic ties, mobile lifestyles, extended social and familial networks, and everyday social and cultural practices. They struggle with how to express their dreams in a suburban landscape precast for a different set of dreamers. Their battles are not fought on the streets or with neighbors openly hostile to their presence and instead are waged more quietly in city council meetings, with planning commissions, in development reviews hearings, in school board meetings, at parent-teacher conferences, and over the white picket fences of their well-manicured lawns.
Undoubtedly one of the arenas in which Asian Americans’ pursuit of their suburban dreams have been the most rigorously pursued and hotly contested has been local schools. In the next chapter, I explore how the premium that Chinese Americans and Indian Americans have often placed on enrolling their children in high-performing schools has reshaped Silicon Valley neighborhoods, Fremont city politics, and the lives of Asian American youths. The chapter shows how the changing racial and ethnic composition of some of the region’s most competitive schools has raised tough questions about what constitutes a quality education and equitable schools in Silicon Valley’s diverse suburbs.
TWO
A Quality Education for Whom?
Education has always been at the center of suburban politics.
MICHAEL JONES-CORREA
NESTLED AMONG FREMONT’S southern foothills is Mission San Jose, a neighborhood that has long been known for the 18th-century Spanish mission, which marks the main intersection of its historic downtown.1 More recently, the neighborhood has become internationally recognized for another landmark—Mission San Jose High School. Until the mid-1990s Mission High was a prototypical suburban American school, made up of a largely White middle-class student body. Today it is a premier destination for highly educated families from all over the world, especially Asia, and one of the highest-ranked schools in California (Figure 6).
FIGURE 6. Mission San Jose High School has become an internationally renowned public high school, especially popular among Asian American families. Photo by author.
Over the last few decades Asian Americans have transformed the face of many American public schools, especially those at the top. In 2010, California’s five highest-ranking public schools all had majority Asian American student bodies.2 The academic performance of Asian American students in schools across the United States has raised a host of scholarly debates about the factors that constrain and promote their educational achievement—the role of the model minority myth, culture, parenting, income, selective immigration, and other individual and structural factors.3 But there are other important questions to ask about the forces behind these trends and their impacts.
In this chapter, I examine how schools figured into the aspirations that many Asian American families brought with them to Silicon Valley and the ways in which their desires and decisions about education reshaped the region’s schools, neighborhoods, and development politics. By taking a close look at changes that have engulfed Mission San Jose High and its wider neighborhood over the past few decades, I argue that schools have been a major catalyst for the remapping of regional racial geographies and a critical battleground for Asian American suburban politics.
For many Asian American families, high-performing schools such as those in Mission San Jose were the dominant factor drawing them to relocate to Fremont from around Silicon Valley, the United States, and even abroad. Schools were key to many Asian Americans’ visions of success in the United States and their newly adopted suburban communities. Many viewed education as their primary means of cementing their social and economic status and made highly strategic, calculated decisions to place their children in Mission San Jose schools, often at great personal and economic expense. Once there, Asian American parents worked hard to ensure that the schools met their expectations in terms of their academic culture, curriculum, and high academic standards. Like generations of White Americans before them, “good schools” were a key part of their suburban dream.
But many Asian American families in Fremont also held different ideas about what constituted good schools than those of their White neighbors. As well-educated, technically skilled professionals, many Asian Americans parents placed priority on a rigorous education, especially in math and the sciences, that would prepare their children to enter professions like their own. Whereas many established White families claimed to want less competitive schools that offered a more “well-rounded” and “balanced” education, Asian American families were widely associated with an increasing sense of academic competition, stress, and a culture that placed a premium on high grades and academic rigor. Tensions over these differences catalyzed racial and ethnic tensions within the Mission San Jose schools and led a number of White families to leave the neighborhood and the district. This was also true for a number of native-born Asian Americans, who perceived the area as becoming too heavily driven by Asian immigrant values.
The social reshuffling sparked by Asian Americans migration to Mission San Jose schools runs counter to the typical narrative of suburban segregation. Most scholarship has focused on Whites’ efforts to seal themselves off from racial integration in schools, especially with African Americans, because of racism, fears of property value decline, and reduced educational quality.4 The traditional narrative of White flight focuses on the movement of Whites away from inner-city schools and the battles fought to give students of color greater access to White suburban schools through policies such as busing and regional redistricting. The dynamics of White flight explored in this chapter are different. In Mission San Jose, academic competition and the perception of disparate educational values between White and Asian American families have produced and reinforced racial divisions. This fragmentation occurred within suburbs as well as among two relatively economically privileged groups often thought to exist on the same side of the educational divide. Such divisions contributed to the racialization of Mission San Jose schools as spaces that seemingly marked Asian Americans’ inability or unwillingness to assimilate the dominant culture of American education and instead introduce “foreign” practices that many established families claimed were “inappropriate” and “unhealthy” in American suburban schools.
The racial undertones of educational debates in Fremont were also evident in the public deliberation over school boundaries. As Whites left Mission San Jose and the schools became increasingly dominated by Asian American students, Asian American families found themselves, somewhat inadvertently, competing for spots within increasingly racially “segregated” schools. When the Fremont School District tried to redraw the Mission San Jose attendance boundaries to address population and achievement imbalances across the district, the uproar that ensued showed that Asian American educational practices and ideas continued to be marginalized as out of place and foreign. But the case also showed that education has been an important arena in which Asian Americans have defended their right to helping to craft the culture and character of suburban space.
FROM WHITE TO ASIAN AMERICAN SCHOOLS AND NEIGHBORHOODS
Asian Americans’ decisions about education have transformed the social geography of Silicon Valley and the neighborhoods in which they have settled. While immigration reform, globalization, and economic restructuring in the latter half of the 20th century forever changed the face of the valley, not all neighborhoods were equally affected. Mission San Jose quickly rose to the top as Fremont’s hub of Asian American families. According to the 2014 American Community Survey, Mission San Jose had the highest concentration of Asian American residents
