WASHINGTON — Asian students in the United States are vastly better prepared for success than white, black, Latino or American-Indian kids, according to a study released Tuesday by a child-advocacy group.
The findings are far from startling.
Instead, the report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation confirmed what other researchers and casual observers have long held: Asian families groom their children for success.
Asians thrive in the United States because, more than any other group, they are raised to value work, marriage and family, Paul Taylor, an executive vice president of the Pew Research Center, recently told USA Today.
Taylor, who has conducted similar research into why Asians quickly became an economic powerhouse in the United States, noted that they prize their reputation for being prosperous and instill a drive for success in their children.
“If that’s a stereotype that people have assigned to this group, believe me, that’s a stereotype this group has embraced,” he said. “It stands out.”
The study is bound to rekindle the controversy ignited by Amy Chua in her best-selling book, “The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” which extolled the tough-love parenting of Asian mothers over the coddling American style.
Chu, who advised parents to threaten to burn their kids’ stuffed animals if their homework wasn’t perfect, describes Asian parenting as “extremely high expectations, high discipline and definitely unconditional love.”
In the new study, Asian children were slightly ahead of whites, but those two groups had such a wide lead over other races that the study’s authors called for immediate action to bridge the “racial gap.”
The study, titled “Race for Results,” created a first-of-its-kind scale to measure a child’s potential for success on a scale from zero to 1,000.
Asians scored 776 nationally, followed by whites (704), Latinos (404), American-Indians (387) and blacks (345).
The results were similar in every region of the country.
The score was based on 12 indicators, including reading and math proficiency, high-school graduation data, teen birthrates, employment prospects, family income and education levels, and neighborhood poverty levels.
The study described the challenges facing African-American children as “a national crisis.”
For black children, the states with the lowest scores were in the South and upper Midwest.
Patrick McCarthy, president of the Casey foundation, said the findings are “a call to action that requires serious and sustained attention from the private, nonprofit, philanthropic and government sectors to create equitable opportunities for children of color.”
Among its recommendations, the report urged concerted efforts to collect and analyze race-specific data on child well-being that could be used to develop programs capable of bridging the racial achievement gap.