The Pursuit of Excellence Arcadia High School, the academic juggernaut, is one of the most remarkable places I know where students who are not valedictorians or even one of the 49 salutatorians still get admitted to Ivy League schools. The school's pursuit of excellence has it ranked 30th out of more than 1,300 public high schools in California, according to Niche.com. Arcadia High School's academics are world-class: the average ACT score is 31, the average SAT score is 1,340 out of 1,600, and at least 35% of graduating students have taken at least one AP test during their time in high school. . In terms of feeder schools for UC, Arcadia has the highest number of admissions in the University of California system, according to the UC website; more than 361 students were admitted in 2015 out of a student body of 895. The class of 2016 had more than 5 admits to Harvard, 69 to UC Berkeley, 59 to UCLA and at least 1 student committed to each school ranked in the “Top 10 universities” by US News. The high school's academic results are staggering, but there is a huge problem underlying this success: 68.8% of the students are Asian, but they filled 100% of the Class of 2016 student council and 90% of the salutatorians. A parent at Arcadia High School's 2016 graduation summed up the high school's failure in one sentence: "Non-Asians are the reason our school is ranked way lower than it should be." be. » The school administration is failing to do its job to encourage all of its students to succeed. Asians rely on their culture of success or punishment to push them toward Ivy League schools. On the other hand, African Americans, Hispanics, and even Caucasians do not have as overwhelmingly an achievement-based culture and often find themselves lost in the Yellow Sea of ​​overachievers, their hopes of achieving excellence s fading with time. Not to mention, teachers much prefer the easier job of caring for the bright students who already automatically push themselves to succeed rather than the students who need the most support and motivation. If Arcadia High School truly wants to achieve excellence and further raise its rankings, it must help the three least motivated groups of students achieve excellence: those whose dreams are not in the STEM field, those who need to find their dreams, and those who cannot consider their dreams because they cannot exceed their grades. All three groups need peer support and administrative support. The school needs to hire more counselors so students who need counseling have immediate access. On the one hand, addressing these key high school issues is the responsibility of Arcadia High School and will foster excellence among all ethnicities, regardless of the career path that calls them. On the other hand, students are also responsible for their own education. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay Motivation is the driving force of success, if you are not motivated it becomes extremely difficult to achieve success. As mentioned earlier, most Asians rely on their culture of success or punishment that motivates them to succeed for the sake of their family's pride and future well-being. Fortunately, in terms of education, there are many non-STEM courses that often motivate students to succeed in school, such as art, drama, and music. Yo-Yo Ma, a famous Asian-American cellist and songwriter, focused on this idea in hisessay Necessary Edges: Arts, Empathy, and Education, heavily promoting the new term “STEAM:” Science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics. . Ma believes that the arts develop emotional and empathetic intelligence that is disappearing in our schools, stating that "empathetic thinking is something that is sorely lacking in our education today, which is solely STEM oriented" (259). This is a sad reality in many low-income cities across the country, where many high schools are forced to defund arts programs due to budget cuts. Ma believed that the arts develop "empathetic thinking [that] is sorely lacking in our education today" because STEM fields are considered better and more successful than all other fields of study (260). Promoting STEAM at Arcadia High School could motivate even more students to succeed in non-science careers, which will become viable and respectable among their peers. During my four years at Arcadia High School, the administration slowly began to invest money into arts programs. by building a new performing arts center, which now houses theater and orchestra programming. The overhaul of the theater program pushed many of my advanced drama classmates to succeed in school because they had to get good grades to be able to act; many of them took advantage of the cart of Chromebooks donated to the ministry. That being said, Arcadia High School still needs to take a big step forward in promoting the arts and non-STEM courses in its curriculum if it ever wants to achieve excellence for its students and for its ranking. spectrum, a less talked about high school statistic is that Arcadia also sends hundreds of students to community colleges. Contrary to popular belief, a good number of students who end up attending community college at Arcadia High School did not attend because of poor grades; they went there because they didn't know what they wanted to do with their lives. Indeed, the STEM field is not for everyone, but due to Arcadia High School's fierce STEM culture and minimalist arts degree requirements, many students will take on a STEM-centric workload and will never find a career they are truly passionate about. Arcadia High School needs to change the STEM culture that is ingrained in all of its students and classes. However, because the high school is majority Asian, about 70% of the student population, it will be extremely difficult to push Apache Helicopter's Asian parents and even the students' peers to accept art and other non-STEM fields as a viable career choice. Ultimately, it will take time for Asians to integrate into American culture, and Wesley Yang, a controversial Korean-American writer, focuses on this problem in Asian culture in his essay Paper Tigers. Yang looks at Stuyvesant High School, a competitive public school similar to Arcadia High School in terms of academic achievement and a majority Asian student body. In Asian culture, high school is an exam, as one instructor says in his essay: "Learning math isn't about learning math...you're just learning how to pass whatever standardized test you take" (523 ). You take the rigorous coursework so that you can pass the AP/SAT test and thus get into a top 10 university. Unfortunately, this mentality applies to all aspects of high school, as my good friend Jackson said best: "Will this be on theAP test? Asians take rigorous AP courses, such as AP Chemistry, not because they are interested in the subject, but because it seems interesting to universities. Unbeknownst to these students, the credits they used in a relatively meaningless course could have been better used to help them find a career to pursue. And in cases like Arcadia High School, this culture blinds all students who walk through the doors, who can go to an art school, like Otis, and pursue their dreams in fashion design, or go to UCSD and become a biochemist. so that their peers don't make fun of them. Most students chose the latter option. There is also a small, hidden population of students at Arcadia High School who will never have the opportunity to choose which college they want to go to after high school. I was one of them. My grades were mostly B's, which made my GPA around 3.00. The problem I faced was that accredited Asian colleges wanted at least a 3.7 GPA, so I simply didn't apply to the UC system. Instead, I only applied to two colleges, Cal Poly SLO and Long Beach State, and I didn't get into any of them. My grades were a direct result of poor decisions during class time. I never asked questions or did my homework because the homework didn't directly benefit our grades and, unfortunately, many other students fell into the same trap as me. In the Arcadia High School classroom environment, questions are frowned upon even if you don't understand the lesson; even if the teacher didn't explain a concept well, the Asian culture of high school made you "go home and figure it out." Likewise, students ask themselves, “Why do homework if there are no immediate benefits?” » These fundamental problems at Arcadia High School lead a handful of students each year down a path of diminishing motivation, and many alumni become lost in the community college system due to their poor work habits. If Arcadia High School wants to improve its rankings and achieve excellence, it must motivate students with poor grades. Teachers need to take the initiative and talk to students who are performing poorly, asking them questions such as why are they performing poorly and what can they do to help them? My homeroom English teacher, Mr. Feraco, did this last year because over 50 students, about one? of all his classes, failed English and did not graduate; although many of them already have incredible academic backgrounds. Two assignments were due each week in this class, and many students dropped out because they were unable to complete their assignment the day before. He gave each class a lesson on time management and decided to allow students to make up missing essays for full credit. If Arcadia High School wants to improve its rating, other teachers will need to do the same; they will have to start pushing their students to succeed in their classes and sometimes offer their students an olive branch to get them out of their situation. They must promote an atmosphere conducive to questions and discussions on the subject matter. This will help students understand the topic better and encourage them to complete their homework, which will help them pass the test. Likewise, students should take the initiative and change the classroom environment. When teachers encourage participation in class, students should take advantage of this opportunity. If they don't understand any subject.