When I read a story on Yahoo Finance about America’s best high schools (summarizing rankings by US News and World Report), I noticed that Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology was at the top of the list. When you look at the detailed statistics for the school, it says that the school is 4.6% minority. I thought, “wait, didn’t John write about the fact that the school has an Asian plurality?” Then I remembered in many forums, Asians aren’t counted as minorities. Are we now interchangeable with white people? Must be why we get so few roles in the Last Airbender Movie. 🙁 It’s a funny stat – if someone went to #3 ranked Whitney High School, thinking it was mostly white with only 11.5% “minority,” they would be surprised to find it being 84.9% Asian.
I am just glad this story does not include Yellow Peril warnings about the large numbers of Asian Americans at elite high schools or tales of white flight from Asians. Some of the high schools we talked about in previous posts are ranked highly by US News and World Report, such as Lowell High School (#28) and Mission San Jose High School (#36).
