From The Society Pages:
Following a recent public lecture in my hometown of Philadelphia, I was approached by a female member of the audience who asked where I had gone to high school. A retired high school teacher, she was curious about my educational background. She told me: "I was so happy whenever I had Korean students in my classes. They were my best students; they were so bright and worked so hard! And some of these kids, they have parents who don’t even speak English." I had heard the same thing many times before from people who believed I shared their views about “Asian American exceptionalism”—that is, Asians are intrinsically brighter, more hard-working, and more high-achieving than other students. After all, I am Asian. [Jennifer Lee is in the sociology department at the University of California at Irvine and was a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar for 2011-2012.]

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