Glossing over the obvious

The omnipresent Sewell Chan writes Immigrants’ Children Find Better Lives, Study Shows off a panel presentation by the study's authors he moderated, that raises a question:

A decade-long study of adult children of immigrants to the New York region has concluded that they are rapidly entering the mainstream and doing better than their parents in terms of education and earnings — even outperforming native-born Americans in many cases. ...

It focused on five groups: Dominicans, Chinese, Russian Jews, South Americans (consisting of Colombians, Ecuadoreans and Peruvians) and West Indians, defined as immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean, including Belize and Guyana. The researchers also interviewed native-born whites, blacks and Puerto Ricans (those born on the mainland) in the New York area for comparison purposes. ...

The authors acknowledged that it was hard in some cases to explain why some of the five groups studied appeared to do better than others. The relative success of Russian Jews seemed clear: They immigrated with high levels of education, benefited from government programs because they came as refugees and received aid from established Jewish organizations.

The authors said it was more difficult to explain why “Chinese youngsters have achieved the greatest educational and economic success relative to their parents’ often humble origins.” The Chinese have a fairly cohesive community with “a high degree of social connection between its better- and worse-off members,” the book argued, while ethnic newspapers, churches and media served as a link between middle- and working-class immigrants and helped share “cultural capital,” like information on how to get into the city’s best schools.

Finally, Chinese parents were less likely to divorce, and they encouraged their children to put off marriage and children until their education was completed.

Sure, those are all reasons--wonder why the famously productive Chan doesn't also note that maybe the Chinese Americans kids just worked harder, too.

They've got the time, after all, as Dylan Loeb McClain's article, Brooklyn Public School Is a Big Winner at National Championships alludes to:

At the elementary school national championships in Pittsburgh last weekend, public schools won many of the top prizes. ...

Among the public schools that did well was Intermediate School 318 in Brooklyn. For the second year, the school won the section for players in kindergarten through the sixth grade. ...

Elizabeth Vicary is the school’s chess coach. She worked for Chess-in-the-Schools but is now on staff at I.S. 318, where she teaches English and chess.

“I am not sure that this will come across the way I mean it,” Vicary said, “but there are some advantages to teaching kids who don’t have a lot of opportunities in their lives. They are not also going to soccer games.”

Well