I completely agree that there's rampant discrimination against Asians, but which came first? I This is not what "forces" the parents to do x, y, and z. The behavior came first. The discrimination came later, for many reasons, but a good deal of which is caused by the fact that the Asian parent pressure produces kids whose abilities simply make a lie of their resumes. I've taught enrichment English at an Asian academy for many years. I run into kids all the time who got the highest level, Advanced, on their end of year state tests who simply don't have anything approaching the vocabulary or writing skills to back these scores up--and this is simply not the case for whites, blacks, and Hispanics with similar scores (or later generation Asians). I know lots Asian immigrants with 2400 SAT scores, and I know a few whites with same, as well as Americans of all races with over 2100 totals. Again and again, the Asian immigrants are simply ordinary swots, often having forgotten the information they crammed for. The others with equivalent scores are not.

As for "pure merit", while I'm definitely in favor of rewarding brains, the fact is that Asian immigrants have "broken" our test system, particularly the College Board side of things. I have no idea if it's just a gaming method of decoding the test, or if the cheating is so substantial it turns up in the scores. Certainly the AP Calc tests are too easy or too formulaic--the Bio test was just changed a couple years ago and scores dropped. Similar changes need to be made to the Calc tests. But the SAT scores---Asian scores have increased dramatically in the past 15 years, while every other race average has stayed roughly constant. That suggests something other than just hard work.

The situation with the Asian students is far more complicated than discussed in the article and a very serious problem. Many of the Asian students in our school are the children of foreign high tech parents and in other cases the parents have sent the children here to rent a room alone in the district just to attend the school. There children completely self segregate themselves for the rest of the school, rarely play sports, and help each other cheat at a very high rate. Yes they are high achieving but many of them take the math or science class the summer before the local college and then try to get the teachers to skip the information they already know. Quite honestly the local teachers mostly despise the Asians because of their singular goal of getting an A.