Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
education ladder. Supplementary service providers supply enrichment and
enhancement outside normal school hours and this pattern has carried over
to North America. In Westside Vancouver public high schools it became
normal in the 1990s for students to have after school tutors, most widely in
mathematics and English, but in other subjects as required. For younger
children, Kumon mathematics and reading classes became popular supple-
ments, as well as after-school or Saturday lessons in (mainly Chinese) lan-
guage schools (Zhou and Kim 2007). A ratcheting up effect was put in
place, as parents could not allow their children to be left behind in a pro-
gressive spiral of educational enhancement. Many of these proliferating
services were either informal or unregulated, and inevitably quality has
varied greatly while scams have sometimes trapped the unwary.
Just as the overseas Chinese carried the idea of property to Canada so
they transported the habit of studying hard to establish the educational
foundation for economic success. Chinese-Canadian children have become
top achievers in the public and private school systems. At graduation, stu-
dents in British Columbia schools from homes where a Chinese language
was the primary means of communication attained grade point averages
that were at least 10 percent higher than children from English-speaking
homes (Frost 2010).
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This is a remarkable achievement, for Chinese-
language children working in a second language are out-performing chil-
dren, most of them Canadian-born, who do not face this penalty. The British
Columbia results are not isolated, for a national study has revealed that an
astonishing 70 percent of the children of immigrant Chinese-Canadians
complete a university degree, a rate 2.5 times greater than the Canadian-
born (Abada et al. 2008).
The Geography of Educational Advantage
In securing educational advantage, geography matters. Undoubtedly the
availability of strong secondary schools has been a factor influencing
the location of millionaire migrants in Vancouver's Westside neighbour-
hoods, and among real estate advertisements the local school name is com-
monly mentioned. In a ranking of Vancouver schools from annual Ministry
of Education data by the Fraser Institute, a conservative think tank, Westside
secondary schools capture the strongest performance scores in the prov-
ince. They comprise almost half of all entries in the top five percent of sec-
ondary schools in British Columbia and Westside fee-paying schools
occupied the first three positions over the 2000-06 period (Figure 7.1).
York House, Little Flower Academy and St. George's are private schools
dating from the 1930s and each attained perfect scores on the Fraser
Institute index. York House, an independent girls' school, and Little Flower
