December 13, 2004

Educational pressure-cooker

By Katherine Corcoran, Mercury News

In middle school, honor student Sheila Chen was famous for obsessing about her grades. At Cupertino High School, Sheila is just famous.

She loves her high school, where as student body vice president, a homecoming princess and an editor who helped save the yearbook she found a world beyond her studies and blossomed. But in darker moments, Sheila sees all the fun and extracurricular activities as costing her a perfect GPA, her SAT scores and her relationship with her parents, high-tech professionals from China who implored their eldest child to spend more time with her books.

As she struggles to balance academics with other interests, the 17-year-old girl embodies the larger dilemma facing Cupertino High. Like dozens of other schools in the Bay Area, the campus has seen a rise in students from highly educated, successful immigrant families seeking Silicon Valley's most rigorous schools.

'Tino, as it's affectionately known, is the "friendly school" in the hyper-performing Fremont Union High School District: Close-knit teachers dress up wacky for Spirit Week, and students boast about their school's laid-back vibe. But in the past five years, test scores have climbed, and more students are averaging fewer hours of sleep.

Four decades after a monumental change in immigration laws opened the United States to the Pacific Rim, education -- for themselves or their children -- is one of the top reasons Asians have come to the United States, according to a Mercury News/Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation survey.

The poll, conducted in five languages, showed a strong emphasis on education shared across Asian cultures. Sixty-six percent of parents said it's important for their children to go to an elite college, such as Stanford University; three-fourths said it is either very or somewhat important that their children attend graduate school. And 84 percent said they pay a lot of attention to grades.

Cupertino Principal Cary Matsuoka, a third-generation Japanese-American, has vowed to maintain his school's open and relaxed atmosphere in the face of rising academic pressure. He wants more students like Sheila, a diminutive burst of teenager who wants to make an impact on her school, not just make the grades.

"She's us," said school historian, alumnus and teacher Wes Morse. "She's Cupertino High."

Yet rather than triumphant, Sheila entered her last year of high school racked with doubt. "I have been exposed to so much that I have a passion for," she said. "But when it comes down to it, maybe it would have been better if I just studied."

Star district
• Factors behind the success

By most measures, Cupertino High is a phenomenal school, ranking 64th among California's 900 public high schools last year in standardized test scores, feeding colleges such as MIT and the University of California-Berkeley. But in the Fremont Union High School District, it places fourth out of five, living in the shadows of two of the country's biggest academic powerhouses, Lynbrook and Monta Vista. When PTA treasurer Shyla Sohoni tells fellow Indo-American parents her son attends Cupertino, she says, "There is silence."

Many link the spike in achievement in Fremont Union to the dramatic rise in the district's Asian-American student population, which has grown from 30 percent of all students to 45 percent in the past 10 years. Its schools are so desired that, according to district lore, people in Taiwan can name the street boundaries for Lynbrook and Monta Vista, where the pressure can be so great that students tell tales of classmates sobbing over A minuses.

But there is another often overlooked factor behind the success: the education level of parents, one of the strongest predictors of student achievement. In Fremont Union, nearly three-fourths of all students, regardless of race, have at least one parent with a bachelor's degree or some graduate school.

After 20 years in two of the state's most competitive schools, first as a science teacher at Saratoga High School and then as vice principal at Lynbrook, Matsuoka turned his eye on Cupertino High when he decided to become a principal.

"It was a healthy place," he said. "I felt this school had a sense of balance. The kids were good students, but it hadn't become a really stressful, overachieving place."

But he knew forces were already at work to change that. "I could see what was going to happen as it moved from a predominantly Caucasian school to one that is half and half. And here's what happened: The academics began to change for the better. The test scores went up every year."

Matsuoka took the helm in 2002, valuing high academics, but putting a priority on beefing up extracurricular activities, including athletics, theater and choir. "I'm not going to add A.P. chemistry in here. I'd rather you guys play football," Matsuoka said. "You don't need calculus as a junior. Life is not a race."

That year, he received a visit from former Cupertino Mayor Michael Chang, a Stanford-educated De Anza College professor who was the first Asian-American elected to the city council. Like many parents, Chang, who grew up in Hong Kong and lives in Cupertino High's attendance area, was concerned that test scores weren't as high as other area high schools. Matsuoka laid out his vision for a more balanced education -- and Chang enrolled his son.

"That meant a lot to me," Matsuoka said. "He trusts us to educate his kids."

A head start
• Sheila's path clearly laid out

Even as a preschooler in China, Sheila liked to take charge. When a day care teacher explained that the class needed a bus and a driver for a spring field trip, Sheila decided it was her job to find one. She did, asking her grandfather's bus-driver friend.

It was a trait that would ultimately serve her well when she moved at age 4 to the United States, where -- she told her Chinese classmates -- "my hair will turn blond."

For her parents, the priority was education. They stretched their money to buy a piano for lessons, enrolled her in competitive swimming and later brought home thick texts so she could work ahead of the American schools' meager math program.

"You have to get a head start, be on top of things," her father told her.

But Sheila had her own plan. "I don't want to compete," she would answer. "I want to have fun."

Still, Sheila went along. She was labeled gifted and attended one of Cupertino's most competitive middle schools, where the only blemish on her perfect report card was a single A minus, a penalty for talking.

By eighth grade, she was on the path her parents had prescribed to "a good college, a good job and a good life." And that path didn't go through lower-scoring Cupertino High. She wanted Lynbrook, but her home is outside the attendance area. Her parents tried renting a room for her inside the district. The plan fell through, and she enrolled at Cupertino.

She was grabbed by its spirit at freshman orientation, where she was inspired by student leader Michael Joiner, a person who knew how to make things happen. She became a class officer and joined the marching band. With her Shirley Temple-round face and waist-length hair, which she later cut to donate to wigs for cancer patients, she was a fixture on the floor at pep rallies.

Kurt and Lily Chen watched Sheila's commitments multiply, and worried. Growing up in an education system where students get one shot at college, they wanted her to spend 80 percent of her time studying and do well on the SAT. They spent $1,800 on test preparation.

By junior year, she had a frenetic schedule: two honors and two advanced placement classes, districtwide leadership council meetings on Mondays and band on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Wednesdays were for youth court, a peer-run judiciary system for teens committing shoplifting or other minor offenses, where Sheila argued cases so successfully that other students dreaded going up against her. And she was voted homecoming princess, waving from the back of a vintage yellow Thunderbird convertible on the football field as fireworks exploded behind her.

If that weren't enough, Sheila signed on as co-editor of the yearbook, the Nugget, usually put out by a class of about 30. But facing budget cuts, Cupertino eliminated the class shortly after Sheila and two friends, Jodi Chao and Erica Lang, took over. Their free time went to saving the yearbook. When everyone else left for winter break, the editors headed to their adviser's house to look at page proofs.

Her parents urged her to first drop band, then yearbook. But she told them: "I signed up for the job. Even if it wasn't what I expected, I can't let go of something like that. What lesson would that teach me for the future?"

Sheila and her co-editors poured their hardships into the yearbook, which they titled "Face It," a reference to facing the challenges of high school -- and school budget cuts. The cover was a collage of student faces in two perpendicular lines, intersecting at a "crossroads."

"Why do we choose to strangle ourselves in order to convince the world of what we are made of?" Sheila wrote on an introductory page.

As Sheila rejected her parents' pleas, the bad news started to hit: She got her first C, in advanced placement biology. When she finally took the crucial SAT, she scored far less than she had hoped, despite doing well in practice tests. Her scores, she says, are private. She retook the test to try to boost them, but it didn't work, and Sheila declared the subject off limits to her parents.

By the end of junior year, Sheila worried that maybe her parents were right, while Kurt and Lily Chen worried that maybe they had done something wrong.

"I don't know if that was her fault or my fault," her mother said of Sheila's SAT score. "Maybe we push too much."

Parents' experience
• Early struggles with life in U.S.

If Sheila were still in China, following her parents wouldn't be an issue. Growing up in the eastern city of Hefei, Kurt Chen knew his father's word was law. He hated it. But listening to his dad got him what he needed: a stable job as a mechanical engineer, a good salary to support his family and a home in a large apartment complex.

Still, he was young and adventuresome. In 1989, he and his wife left for the United States, where he was accepted at San Diego State University as a graduate student in computer science.

Like so many immigrants before them, the Chens found the new world much harsher than they expected and often thought of going back. Lily Chen, not knowing English, went from being a professional accountant in China to a cafeteria worker, eventually changing careers three times. She was the sole breadwinner when her husband was in graduate school and again in 2002, when he was laid off.

For the Chens, education would allow Sheila to avoid their struggles.

"For me, activities come later," Lily Chen said. "Education is like building a house. If you don't build the foundation, the other weight won't hold."

When they hear that some American parents consider their efforts "pushing," it is particularly hurtful. "It's like saying we don't understand it here, we don't belong here. But sometimes you need to push," Kurt Chen said. "Push is assistance."

Matsuoka recognizes the conflict between Asian and American cultures, between a homogenous and an open society, between serving the family and serving yourself.

"I spent my teenage years escaping my Japanese roots and culture," he said, "the conformity, the need to always be successful."

"I want you to quote me," he added later. "When parents value their children based on what they achieve, what school they go to, what job they have, it's really bad for the kids."

That attitude, Matsuoka says, is prevalent among Asian immigrant parents, and contributes to the kind of pressure he is trying to prevent at Cupertino.

But Stanford Professor Denise Clark Pope, who is spearheading a Stressed Out Students study at Cupertino High and elsewhere, says Asian immigrant parents are getting too much blame. The same pressure-cooker schools have existed for decades in wealthy white suburbs, filled with children of highly educated parents. Of the top 20 high schools in California in 2003, six are majority Asian-American, but 10 have a majority of students whose parents have college degrees or at least some graduate school.

"I don't know why we say it's an Asian thing when we do it ourselves," said Margaret Ann Joiner, the mother of Sheila's role model, Michael. He had his own stress meltdown as a junior, screaming, "It's your fault that I'm taking all these classes!"

The whole debate leaves the Chens, like their daughter and her school, searching for a balance. They defend their focus on Sheila's future. But they also agree with Matsuoka that parents shouldn't value their children solely for grades or test scores.

"We're not like our parents. We think we've already changed or moderated," Kurt Chen said. "But it's not enough."

He loves that Sheila and her younger brother, Benjamin, are outgoing and confident, what he calls "American" traits. He beams when anyone mentions Sheila's ability to express herself.

"It's what Mike Honda has. It's what Gary Locke has," he said, comparing his daughter to two of the nation's most famous Asian-American politicians.

He even sees her yearbook experience as important. "She made a big contribution," he said. "She learned to sacrifice, and that's a good characteristic."

But there are things about China's education system he wanted his daughter to adopt: rigorous study skills and a drive to overcome one's weakness. Somehow, he thinks he failed. So he's resigned to letting Sheila decide.

"Maybe the American system is good," he said. "Maybe the kids have the best ideas. But it's too much."

Chapter closing
• Amid high spirits, college concerns

4:45 a.m.: Sheila's bedroom window is the lone square of light in a dark row of stucco duplexes in West San Jose. A vintage Celica pulls into the driveway and Sheila emerges, arms loaded with a backpack and bags of clothing, items for the senior tradition of decorating campus on the first day of school. This year, seniors chose a pirate theme to welcome freshmen. Sheila and 50 classmates were up past midnight painting posters in a friend's driveway.

As the sun rises, cars pull up to the school's drop-off circle. Sheila -- dressed in a head scarf and eye patch -- is front and center among scores of students, directing freshmen to the senior hallway, leading to a cardboard pirate ship with a board for "walking the plank" into a wading pool.

Amid her normal schedule that day -- two advanced-placement courses, leadership class and band -- Sheila stops to fill out a survey for Pope's project, asking her to rate her stress level during junior year. Even at the "friendly school," she chooses eight on a scale of 10 to describe the amount of stress she was under; nine for the pressure she says she received from her parents.

Matsuoka doesn't know if he can stop the pressure. At Meet the Principal night, a parent wanted to know why Cupertino doesn't offer the advanced placement classes Monta Vista does. He is reconsidering whether to add more, even though his school this year nearly caught up to Lynbrook in one measure: high school exit exams. Cupertino also lost enrollment and Matsuoka fears some of it went to Lynbrook, which had open enrollment this year. On his first day back, Matsuoka checked the roster, searching for one particular student. Michael Chang's son was still enrolled.

Sheila started the year with anxiety about the college application process, which in her mind would offer a verdict about whether her choices were right or wrong.

But by early November, as she dropped her first application in the mail for early admission to Columbia, she had a sense of peace, even if it was mostly a combination of fatigue and relief.

She wrote eight drafts of her admissions application essay. Even though she knows her scores don't stack up, she's determined to make the best of whatever happens.

"I don't believe my abilities should be judged by numbers," Sheila said.

Instead, her worth was measured on a night in the spring, when she handed out the 2003-04 Nugget at the annual yearbook dance and watched her fellow students crack the covers with "oooos" and "awwwws."

One girl, who didn't appear much in its pages, discovered a piece of her face in the crossroads collage on the cover and ran over to Sheila and a co-editor. "That's so cool," the girl squealed. "I've never been on a cover."

That night, Sheila knew she had done what she wanted in high school. She had made a difference.

"My pain for other people's happiness," she says now. "That makes me feel like I've accomplished something."

Copyright © 2004 The Mercury News