This blog post originally appeared in SSRC’s Items on February 6, 2018, and is part of a series of reflections on A Portrait of LA County. You can access the original article here.

By: Pedro A. Noguera

The recent report, A Portrait of LA County, from the Social Science Research Council’s Measure of America program, provides a clear, if also somewhat disturbing, characterization of life in one of America’s most populous metropolitan areas. The report reveals stunning differences in quality of life that are highly correlated with geography as well as race/ethnicity and the socioeconomic composition of communities. Utilizing the “Human Development Index” as its barometer, the report shows that in critical areas such as health, education, and income, gross inequities limit access to opportunity for many residents of the county and contribute to the persistence of deeply entrenched social and economic disparities. The report also suggests that the fragmentation of the region has created five distinct subregions that face very different prospects and challenges.

Though many aspects of the report are quite illuminating, many of its findings will probably not surprise those who are familiar with the region. The affluent northwest communities of Malibu, Bel-Air, and Brentwood bear little resemblance to the poorer communities in the southeast corner of the county. As is true throughout the United States, economic inequality has profoundly shaped the lifestyles, well-being, and quality of life of LA County residents in the twenty-first century.

Though the portrait is not granular in its detail, it is nonetheless compelling. It succeeds in calling attention to the glaring disparities that impact quality of life throughout the county, exacerbated by rising housing costs, limited educational and economic opportunities, and adverse environmental conditions that are contributing to deteriorating health outcomes for some residents. It also draws attention to the plight of the county’s most vulnerable residents and makes a resounding call for concerted intervention.

Interconnected spaces

Yet, despite the tremendous value of this report, there are two crucial omissions that undermine its value as a resource for decision-makers.

First, the report overlooks how porous the social, economic, and physical boundaries dividing communities are despite decrying the degree of race-class segregation and the pernicious fragmentation throughout the county. There is a degree of interconnectedness that many residents fail to comprehend. By attempting to disaggregate patterns and trends in order to produce an accurate portrait of the county, the report may very well allow policymakers, and many of the more affluent residents, to cling to the misconception that the fates of the most disadvantaged communities are separate from their own.

While in many respects, separations based on social and geographic boundaries are real and measurable, the recent fires in Bel-Air provide a pointed reminder of how connected we are nonetheless. Though Bel-Air has the highest Human Development Index score in the county at 9.51, homeless people are also known to live in the community in unregulated dwellings. In fact, investigators learned that the fire had been caused by a homeless encampment. The subsequent destruction of over seven hundred homes reminds us homelessness is not a problem that is limited to certain communities.

This is just one of the ways in which a region that appears to be so fragmented by race, class, and geography is actually quite interdependent. Had the report drawn attention to the rippling effects many of the trends identified have upon the entire county, it could have highlighted how some residents who endure conditions that contribute to a lower Human Development Index may pose a threat to the entire region. The recent outbreak of Hepatitis B among many of the homeless in San Diego County should serve as a wake-up call that a similar health challenge could threaten LA County.

Connecting housing, transportation, and education

Second, the report does not issue a clear and unambiguous conclusion and warning that LA County will eventually find itself on an unsustainable path if many of the economic and social trends identified in the report are not addressed. Again, a similar alarm could be issued about the long-term effects of economic inequality on American society generally. But with its dense population and extreme wealth disparities, the damaging effects of these trends may very well create major disruptions to the economic and social fabric of LA County—and perhaps other large metropolitan areas—long before they are experienced elsewhere.

For example, the report could draw greater attention to the ways rising homelessness and the affordable housing shortage will affect the future of the entire county, including communities that appear to be buffered by wealth and geography. The report acknowledges that rising housing costs and gentrification are forcing poor and working class people to move further away from their jobs and to endure longer commutes to work. But increased traffic congestion is only one of the problems related to this trend. Long commutes operate as an unofficial tax in time and money borne disproportionately by low-wage workers. Some of these workers (e.g., construction workers, gardeners, restaurant workers, and domestics) provide essential services to the wealthy communities and residents in the county. Without their services the high quality of life experienced by some residents would not be possible.

Moreover, the report could acknowledge the consequences of growing inequality because of the affordable housing crisis. When workers who are also parents are compelled to leave their homes in the wee hours of the morning to get to their jobs, who makes sure that their children arrive at school on time? Who helps their children with homework, cooks them dinner, or makes sure they are supervised and safe?

Long commutes and the shortage of affordable housing not only affect low-wage workers. Increasingly, it also affects a growing number of civil servants, health-care workers, teachers, and other professionals. How will the vibrancy and viability of the LA economy be maintained in the future if workers who are critical to the functioning of the economy cannot afford to live here and are unable get to work in a reasonable amount of time? In addition, given that increased vehicle traffic is linked to an increase in asthma and other respiratory illnesses, how will we address these health challenges as they grow and become more common?

The amount of productive time lost to traffic congestion is just one of the costs associated with this problem. The departure of families with children is also contributing to declining school enrollment in some school districts. Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)—one of the largest employers in the county—has lost 200,000 students in the past ten years, half of which has been attributed to this trend. The economic toll already being experienced by LAUSD is staggering. Faced with multibillion dollar structural deficits caused in part by rising pension costs and declining enrollments (it is estimated 100,000 children have left for charter schools), the district will soon have no other option than to initiate mass layoffs of teachers and certified staff, a prospect which will likely worsen economic and social conditions in communities that the report describes as part of “struggling LA,” where half of county residents currently reside.

Going further

While education features prominently in the report, both as a feature of the county’s problems and among the potential solutions identified, its recommendations are not sufficiently ambitious. For example, given the vast private wealth in the county and the presence of major institutions of higher education, it could propose the use of education as a means to counter growing inequality. This could be possible through a well-funded strategy that links education and job training to sectors where high-wage job growth is expected, such as information technology and aeronautics. The report wisely calls for expanding access to high-quality preschool. While this is important, it could bring to the front the fact that too many of the county’s poorest communities lack good schools at all levels. Additional recommendations could be: a call to launch an effort to strategically replace ineffective, under-enrolled schools with a new generation of schools that provide state of the art education and training in STEM, health sciences, and other fields with likely high-wage job growth; and a call for a comprehensive strategy to ensure schools in low-income areas are equipped with a broad range of health and social services so that they are better able to respond to student needs.

Given the likelihood that many of the trends identified in the report will continue, and in some communities contribute to further deterioration in the quality of life, it is important to acknowledge the deleterious implications. Perhaps by sounding the alarm even more deliberately than it has, the report could prompt policymakers and business leaders to recognize that the trends identified pose a threat to all and not just the economically disadvantaged. A true portrait of Los Angeles should remind us that our fates are connected and that we have the resources to create a future that is much brighter than the present.

About the author: Pedro Noguera is a distinguished professor of education at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. His research focuses on the ways in which schools are influenced by social and economic conditions, as well as by demographic trends in local, regional, and global contexts. He is the author of twelve books.

This blog post originally appeared in SSRC’s Items on January 23, 2018, and is part of a series of reflections on A Portrait of LA County. You can access the original article here.

By: Jennifer Lee

Americans rely on status markers like our college degrees, jobs, cars, homes, zip codes, and (if you live in Los Angeles) area codes to measure success. We also like to believe that those who are successful earned it through hard work, smarts, and grit. After all, this is what we learned from the American Dream, and it is how we justify why some people and groups are more successful than others.

Take education, for example. In Los Angeles, Asians graduate from college at higher rates than all groups, including Whites. More than half (51 percent) of Asians in LA have at least a college degree compared to 48 percent of whites, 26 percent of blacks, and 12 percent of Latinos. Most of us are no longer surprised by findings like these. We hear and read about the exceptional educational outcomes of Asian Americans when colleges and universities—especially Ivy Leagues—release their latest admissions figures.

Asian Americans make up more than one-fifth of the entering classes in Ivy League universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia yet are only 6 percent of the country’s population. In prestigious public universities like the University of California, Berkeley, they comprise more than 40 percent of the student body. These figures would be unremarkable if Asian American students uniformly hailed from high socioeconomic backgrounds, but this is not the case. Even the children of Chinese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees whose parents have less than a high school education graduate from college at nearly the same rate as their middle-class peers, pointing to a vexing Asian American achievement paradox.

Unable to explain the achievement paradox, pundits and commentators of varying political persuasions point to Asian culture: there must be something essential about Asian culture that drives such extraordinary educational outcomes. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof devoted a Sunday column to the so-called “The Asian Advantage.” He even cited our book, The Asian American Achievement Paradox, but in the end, Kristof concluded that Asian American academic achievement can be explained by “East Asia’s long Confucian emphasis on education,” “hard work, strong families and passion for education.” How else could the daughter of poorly educated Chinese factory workers raised in an impoverished neighborhood buck the odds and graduate from Harvard?

Disaggregating Asian: Not all Asians excel

As compelling as this narrative may be, it misses the mark. The cultural roots of Asian success are much less plausible when disaggregating the category of “Asian.” Drawing on Measure of America’s report, A Portrait of Los Angeles County, examining differences among and within Asian ethnic groups complicates the stereotypical view of Asian American educational success in two key ways.

First, not all Asian groups—even those who share a Confucian orientation—boast high levels of education. For example, while 72 percent of Indians, 53 percent of Koreans, and 49 percent of Chinese in LA have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, the corresponding figures for Vietnamese and Cambodians is 30 percent and 18 percent, respectively. Moreover, about one-third of Vietnamese (30 percent) and Cambodians (36 percent) and nearly one-fifth of Chinese (18 percent) do not have a high school diploma. Disaggregating data highlights the enormously diverse outcomes among Asian Americans, who are often studied as a monolith.

Second, international comparisons are useful points of reference. If culture can explain the high achievement of some Asian groups, then we should expect these groups to excel in the greater United States and abroad, but this is not the case. While Koreans in the United States exhibit high educational outcomes, Koreans in Japan fare poorly. Moreover, unlike second-generation Chinese in the United States, their counterparts in Spain exhibit the lowest educational aspirations and expectations of all groups, as Alejandro Portes and his colleagues have shown with their research. Despite the disconfirming evidence, culturally essentialist explanations that point to Asian culture and values thrive in popular discourse.

The hyper-selectivity of Asian immigration

In our book, The Asian American Achievement Paradox, Min Zhou and I tackle this argument head on, and assert that there is nothing essential about Asian culture or values that promote exceptional academic outcomes. Rather, the cultural manifestations of Asian American achievement have legal and structural roots—namely the change in US immigration law in 1965 that altered the socioeconomic profiles of Asian immigrants. Privileging those with high levels of education and skills, the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 ushered in a stream of highly educated, highly skilled immigrants from Asia.

The change in immigration law explains why contemporary Asian immigrants are, on average, highly educated and highly selected. For example, 51 percent of US Chinese immigrants have a college degree compared to only 4 percent of adults in China, meaning that Chinese immigrants in the United States are more than 12 times as likely to have graduated from college as their non-migrant counterparts. In addition, they are more highly educated than the general US population, 28 percent of whom are college-educated. We refer to this dual positive immigrant selectivity as hyper-selectivity, and as figure 1 shows, we find similar patterns for Korean immigrants in the United States. While Vietnamese immigrants are less likely to have graduated from college than the US mean, they are still positively selected compared to their non-migrant counterparts.

Figure 1: Educational achievement by ethnicity

The success frame for achievement

Hyper-selectivity has both direct and spillover effects. First, hyper-selected immigrants import class-specific cultural frames, institutions, and mindsets from their countries of origin, including a strict success frame. The frame not only spells out a clear definition of success, but it also lays out a clear pathway to achieve it.

The success frame entails earning straight As, graduating as the high school valedictorian, getting into a top school (defined as a University of California campus or an Ivy League school), and then working in one of four professions—medicine, law, science, or engineering. In metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and San Francisco that have witnessed a steady influx of hyper-selected Asian immigrants, grades are recalibrated on an “Asian scale” such that an A-minus is an “Asian F.”

Second, the success frame is supported by supplementary education programs that hyper-selected immigrants import from their countries of origin and recreate in the United States. Chinese, Korean, and Indian immigrants come armed with the human capital and economic resources to create ethnic institutions like after-school academies, tutoring services, and SAT prep courses for their children that boost academic outcomes.

Third, because hyper-selected immigrant groups recreate these ethnic institutions in a range of price points—some of which are freely available in ethnic churches, temples, and community centers—they reach the children of working-class coethnics. Thus, supplementary education (which is typically reserved for affluent and middle-class children) becomes available to the children of factory workers, waiters, manicurists, and taxi drivers.

Here, working-class children and parents learn about the importance of enrolling in Advanced Placement and Honors classes, when to begin preparing for the SAT exam (which some children begin in seventh grade so that they are fully prepared to take the exam in the eleventh grade), and how to navigate the complex college admissions process. These are the spillover effects of hyper-selectivity that help to explain how the daughter of Chinese factory workers who have only a sixth-grade education and do not speak English makes it into Harvard. This is not to deny the hard work, smarts, and grit on the part of students who make it to college, but, rather, a reminder that not all those who work hard, are smart, and demonstrate grit have the same chance of making it.

The hypo-selectivity of Latino immigration

Whenever I give public lectures on Asian American achievement, I often get questions about why Latinos do not form ethnic institutions like Asians. People point to ethnic institutions like after-school programs, and wonder why Latinos—and specifically Mexicans—fail to follow suit. To address this point, I explain that unlike Chinese immigrants, Mexican immigrants are hypo-selected: they are less likely to have graduated from college than their non-migrant counterparts and less likely to be college-educated than the US mean. Only 5 percent of Mexican immigrants have graduated from college, compared to 17 percent of Mexico’s adult population and 28 percent of the US population. This dual negative selectivity is what we refer to as hypo-selectivity. In figure 2, we show how the hypo-selectivity of Mexican immigration compares to the hyper-selectivity of Chinese immigration.
Figure 2: Hypo- and hyper-selectivity

As hypo-selected immigrants, Mexicans lack the resources to build the ethnic institutions that would assuage their children’s disadvantaged starting point, including, in some cases, their parents’ undocumented legal status.

Redefining success

Comparing Latinos to Asians points to yet another problem with the way we measure success. When we compare groups to each other, we overlook the remarkable progress that the children of Mexican immigrants in LA have made. Our research shows that in just one generation, they double the high school graduation rates of their parents, double the college graduation rates of their fathers, and triple that of their mothers.

This is also the case of Latinos in LA more generally, as Measure of America’s report reveals. While Latinos in LA have the lowest educational outcomes of all groups, when we disaggregate the data by nativity, we find significant differences between Latino immigrants and those born in the United States. More than half of Latino immigrants (55 percent) have not graduated from high school, and only 7 percent have graduated from college. US-born Latinos in LA look remarkably different: they are nearly three times as likely to graduate from high school and more than two and a half times as likely to graduate from college as Latino immigrants. The educational mobility of Latinos in LA is astounding, but this point is completely lost when we compare Latinos to Asians.

Many Americans work hard, are smart, and exhibit grit in spades. In spite of this, Americans will not graduate from college at the same rates because we begin the race at different points on the starting line. Moreover, some Americans get extra boosts during the race to help them speed across the finish line. So before we measure someone’s success by their diplomas, jobs, or zip codes, let’s first ask about the diplomas, jobs, and zip codes that came before them.

About the author: Jennifer Lee is a professor of sociology at Columbia University and has published award-winning books and articles about immigration, the new second generation, education, intermarriage, multiracial identification, and race relations.