Who are you calling an “underperformer”?

Close your eyes for a minute and picture a typical academically challenged, underperforming student. If you are really honest with yourself, you probably see one of the “boyz from the hood”—in other words, a black, brown, or Latino male raised in bad circumstances and going nowhere fast.

For many years, the desire to avoid students like the “boyz” fueled what came to be known as “white flight.” Here in Minnesota, whites ran to the suburbs with just as much enthusiasm as their fellow citizens in other parts of the country. Why? Because for many whites, the unspoken assumption was that the phrases “great schools” and “high minority student population” could not co-exist in the same sentence.

So why are whites leaving the well-regarded public schools in Cupertino, California, home to Apple Computer and Silicon Valley’s ground zero? According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the proportion of whites at Monta Vista High School, which boasts some of the highest test scores in California, has dropped to twenty-five percent of the student body—in a town that is nearly half white. No one disputes the quality at Monta Vista or at Lynbrook High, a school with a similar percentage of whites in nearby San Jose. Both routinely send students on to Stanford and the Ivies. They also have a burgeoning population of Asian students, and, as the article attested, it’s the fear of having their children out-performed by these students that is leading many white parents to abandon these schools.

In Silicon Valley, the kids at the back of the bus, academically speaking, are very often white males. The Cupertino superintendent pointed out the racial composition on two different floors at one of his schools. White faces dominated the first floor, which housed the math class for slow learners; among the kids on the second floor, who were primarily advanced-placement students, whites were an underwhelming presence.

This stark reality was not lost on the students. Many of them, both white and Asian, simply assumed the Asian kids were smarter, especially in science and math—an assumption that of course aligns neatly with stereotypes about Asians. Even Cupertino’s superintendent said there is a “white boy syndrome” which he characterizes as a kid who feels that he is part of “a distinct minority against a majority culture.”

In both Cupertino and Minnesota, groups of kids are battling stereotypically based perceptions that they are either human computers or “underperforming” losers. In California, the whizzes are Asian and the “unteachable ones” are white, mostly male, and largely affluent. Here in Minnesota, the academically competent are white and the academically challenged are primarily children of color, male and poor.

One key difference, and it is a big one, is that white parents in Silicon Valley have the resources to place their kids in environments where the parents perceive their kids are valued and not as academically and culturally threatened. In a word, they are increasingly choosing to segregate them.

I do not for a minute think that is the answer—either for those affluent kids in California or, assuming we had the resources, for poor minority students here in Minnesota. Some African-American parents have eagerly jumped on the “Afro-centric” school bandwagon. They believe that an ethnically homogenous environment is most likely to lead to academic success for African-American students, and they point to the huge success of historically black colleges, which still produce a majority of this country’s black doctors, lawyers, and engineers, as proof.

I believe that this approach takes our country’s educational system off the hook for failing to adequately educate all of our students. Beyond that, ethnically segregated schools deprive students of the opportunity to learn from—and learn to get along with—people from different backgrounds.

Stereotyping usually springs from bigoted assumptions and fear—which makes it a stupid and damaging basis for making decisions about our educating our students. Moreover, it is just as damaging for the haves as for the have-nots. That’s because, for better and for worse—as kids in both Cupertino and Minneapolis can personally attest—perceptions and expectations often do become reality.