Asian Emigres’ Skills in Math, Science Add Up for Alhambra

The campus of cobbled cement courtyards and olive trees has the slightly bleached look of a thousand California high schools. Fund shortages have left much of the student body stuffed into portable classrooms. The football team had a lousy season. The drinking fountains sometimes back up. Nothing unusual there.

But without government planning or special admissions standards, Alhambra High School--an otherwise average four-year school in a small, somewhat forgotten Los Angeles suburb--has become an academic giant. Its name is on the lips of college admissions officials and at the top of lists of the leading science and mathematics programs in American education.

In the last great wave of immigration to the United States early in this century, special high schools such as Boston Latin, Stuyvesant and the Bronx High School of Science blossomed in large Eastern cities with the influx of first-generation American children. They were often from Eastern European, Jewish families with an intense belief in the advantages and necessity of education.

Student Body Is 54% Asian

In the new wave of immigration flooding the nation’s Western cities, Alhambra High--through an accident of geography and real estate promotion--has found itself serving the largest suburban Asian community in the country. Its student body is 54% Asian, one of the highest concentrations anywhere outside Hawaii. It is experiencing, in the fashion of two or three generations ago, the extraordinary power of immigrant cultures committed to education.

Alhambra is the only public school in the country to surpass Stuyvesant and Bronx Science--the competitive-enrollment New York “superschools”--in the number of students taking the Advanced Placement calculus test. And when the school asked for volunteers to take the highly competitive American High School Mathematics Examination, there were so many eager participants “we had to beat them off with a stick,” said mathematics department chairman Steve Kneeland.

The school won half of the first-place awards at a recent Los Angeles County science fair, and senior Paul Han won first prize in biochemistry at the International Science Fair in Knoxville, Tenn. Senior Christine Tsou is one of the top 40 national winners of the Westinghouse science talent search and is among the Alhambra students who took four of the five top places in a recent Southern California regional Junior Sciences and Humanities contest.

Ernest Chen, a junior calculus student, said his interest in the subject may have been reinforced by the strong mathematics program in Taiwan, where his parents were educated.

Enthusiasm Harnessed

The Alhambra school system has harnessed the enthusiasm of immigrant parents and students by improving junior high mathematics courses and encouraging students to attend summer school. Students who exhaust the high school curriculum often take special courses in local colleges.

Unlike Stuyvesant and Bronx Science or Lowell High in San Francisco with its similarly high percentage of Asian students, Alhambra has no special requirements for admission other than residence in its district. The school draws students from Alhambra and Monterey Park, a majority Asian city because of a 1970s ad campaign by a Chinese-American real estate developer that attracted many immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Even parents who have not emigrated have sent their children to relatives living in Alhambra’s district. One Alhambra teacher called an urgent parent- teacher conference and discovered that the student’s father had flown in from Hong Kong for it.

The school was founded in 1898. It was known as a good school with good football teams in a community of mostly white middle-income technicians, merchants and young professionals 7 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. Like many schools with a long history, it has its share of famous graduates: peanut butter magnate Laura Scudder, baseball star Ralph Kiner, humorist Stan Freberg, model Cheryl Tiegs.

Woo’s Alma Mater

A more typical representative, however, is Michael Woo, class of ‘69, a city planner and the first Asian-American elected to the Los Angeles City Council.

Woo said the school’s Asian percentage has more than tripled since he graduated. Its latest achievements, he said, “are a reflection of Asian cultural history, with some connection to Confucianism” and other doctrines that stress education as the path to enlightenment. Some Chinese parents still note the centuries when education in Confucian China brought power and wealth and sense a similar system in America today.

The program has also profited from an unusually stable and energetic group of teachers. Sayuri Buell, a calculus teacher of Japanese ancestry, was instrumental in bringing new students into the program and is known for staying late to help them.

Whatever traditional influences lurk within the Alhambra student body, they are difficult to discern on the surface. Teen-age couples cuddle in corners of the small courtyards. The sequin-covered Moorettes drill team has won scores of competitions with its jazzy, sultry precision.

The school is 31% Latino, 14% Anglo and 1% black, but Asian names take up most of the space in lists of student government officers, editors of the student newspaper, The Moor, and scholarship winners. All but 14 of the 177 Alhambra students who took calculus last year were of Asian descent; this month about 185 took the Advanced Placement examination, with a similar preponderance of Asians.

Alhambra students sometimes bristle at the suggestion that they represent a “model minority.” Although many have affluent, college-educated parents, Principal Frank Cano notes that 28% of the 3,190 students qualify for free or reduced-price federal lunches. Most of them are also Asian, including many Indochinese refugees on welfare.

‘Fresh Off the Boat’

As in every American high school, students form cliques, but the divisions here are hazy and often based more on differing language groups--Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, East Indian--than on wealth or social status. American-born Alhambra students of Asian descent also have been known to refer to recent immigrants as FOBs, for “fresh off the boat.”

Educators say students’ academic performance is generally linked to their skill in English--one reason many of the newer immigrants often focus initially on math, in which they can compete immediately. But Duane Nichols, Alhambra’s coordinator of gifted students and a science teacher, noted that good math students here usually excel in other subjects as well.

With his enrollment well beyond the school’s 2,800-student capacity, Cano has had to juggle resources and look for more space. Until a new set of portable classrooms arrived last year, 12 classes met in a nearby church dubbed St. Alhambra School. Eager students make up for a host of brick-and-mortar deficiencies, teachers noted, and help explain low faculty turnover.

“They are a pleasure to teach,” Kneeland said.