Race at the Top

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The suburbs hold a privileged place in our cultural landscape not just for their wide, manicured lawns and quiet streets, but often for their high-quality schools. These elite enclaves are also historically white, and they have allowed many white Americans to safeguard their privilege by using their kids' public school educations to secure places at top colleges. But nonwhite parents also see the advantages to be had by sending their kids to those excellent suburban schools, and, increasingly, those that can afford to are finding ways to move in, all in hopes of helping their kids get a leg up as they apply to college and prepare for careers. In Getting Ahead, Staying Ahead, Natasha Warikoo takes us into an elite suburban high school in the Northeast she calls Collegiate High, examining the ways that white parents react when Asian American kids start beating their children at the meritocracy game. Asian American kids whose parents have moved into the Collegiate school district are pushed to succeed in the school's top-notch academics, and they often wind up taking spots at the top of the class previously held exclusively by white students. After generations of privilege and success, white parents don't just take this lying down. Instead, they go to the school with complaints that the academic environment has become too rigorous, petitioning the principle to mandate less homework. The academic climate, they declare, is bad for kids' mental health. Above all, they find new ways of gaining advantages, pushing their kids to excel in extracurriculars like sports and theater and diminishing the importance of top academic performance at the school. Even when they are bested, white families in Collegiate work hard to change the rules in their favor so they can still remain the winners in the meritocracy game."--