By Sara Behunek

Tuesday, 20 December 2011

Northwest Austin feels effect of changing demographic

In the past 10 years, the size of Austin’s Asian community has increased by 40 percent, bringing the share of the city’s population to 6.3 percent—the 10th highest share in the nation, according to Census Bureau data.

Insight into cultural differences

Amy Wong Mok, founder of the Austin Asian-American Cultural Center, said she is sure the increase in Northwest Austin’s Asian-American population has made area schools, especially in Round Rock Independent School District, more competitive.

“Education is really important to our culture, and I hope it’s a good influence,” she said.

Mok grew up in Hong Kong and moved to the United States in 1975. She said she thinks the most challenging task for the school districts is to get the involvement from Asian parents.

“In the Asian culture, teachers are very respected … it is trusted that the teachers will have the children’s best interest in mind, so [parents] don’t interfere,” Mok said. “To ask [immigrant parents] to join the PTA, to get into the classroom, a lot of Asian parents feel like this makes the teacher feel badly about being watched.”

Changing these beliefs simply takes education on everyone’s part, she said.

Nowhere has this change been more evident than in Northwest Austin, where employment and highly ranked public schools are drawing a growing swath of the city’s Asian residents.

“Northwest Austin is really becoming a destination neighborhood for middle-class and upper middle–class Asian households,” said Ryan Robinson, demographer for the City of Austin.

Since 2000, the size of the Asian population in the area that Community Impact Newspaper identifies as Northwest Austin—the 78727, 78729, 78750, 78758 and 78759 ZIP codes as well as part of 78726—has leapt by 78 percent, compared with a total population growth of 14 percent.

“It’s not gentrification by any means because you are not having the displacement of lower-income households with higher-income households,” Robinson said.

In fact, as the Asian population in the area has grown, so too has the average level of education and the median income.

Robinson said that while the existing households in Northwest Austin have benefitted from the overall strength of Austin’s economy during the past decade, the increase in affluence can largely be attributed to the families that are moving into the area.

“Most of [the Asians] are either in IT-related industries or in medical fields,” said Ali Khataw, chairman of the Austin Asian-American Chamber of Commerce. “These are high-paying jobs that require quite a bit of education.”

Westward migration

Census data implies a strong suburbanization pattern across all races and ethnicities as the population sprawls outward, but Asian households in particular have been leaving Austin’s urban core.

“What you definitely see during the 10-year period is a migration [among Asians] out of 78753 and 78758,” Robinson said.

Throughout those two ZIP codes, the size of the Asian population shrunk by nearly 17 percent, according to census data. Meanwhile, to the west, the Asian population in 78750 and 78759 grew by about 56 percent.

The far northwest region is particularly popular among Asian Indians, who, Robinson said, tend to cluster there to be close to the city’s high-tech employers, among other reasons.

“By and large, the Asian Indian households are very well-educated and have solid employment at places like IBM, Dell, Samsung and then the whole other tier of smaller companies that support those big places,” he said.

The RRISD factor

Employment is only part of what is driving Asians to relocate to Northwest Austin. The other part is the Round Rock Independent School District.

“Round Rock [ISD] is enjoying a very strong positive perception academically among middle-class and upper middle– class Asian Indian and Asian families,” Robinson said.

Test results indicate this may not be unwarranted. At the district level, RRISD students outperformed their peers at Austin ISD and Pflugerville ISD in every subject of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, a standardized test administered annually.

Area residents who spoke with Community Impact Newspaper said they thought the growth of RRISD’s Asian-American student population has made certain schools more academically rigorous as Eastern ideologies about education become more prevalent. For proof, these people point to Westwood High School in RRISD near the intersection of US 183 and Lake Creek Parkway.

At Westwood, where a senior must have a grade point average of 5.08 or higher just to rank in the top 10 percent of the 2012 graduating class, about a quarter of the students are Asian or Pacific Islander—by far the largest percentage of Asian-American students than at other high schools in the area.

“I think there are cultural aspects to [Westwood’s] focus on academics,” RRISD Superintendent Jesús Chávez said. “All you have to do is see how education is done in some of the Asian countries. Think of tests being given on Monday so that students have the opportunity to study Saturday and Sunday; you think of the schooling that goes on by these families over the weekend.”

Whether the increase in Asian-American students has made Westwood and RRISD as a whole more difficult or whether the district’s reputation drew families with a focus on schooling, thereby upping the academic ante, is one of those chicken-or-the-egg conundrums.

“Asian and Asian Indian households value education at a very high premium; there’s no two ways about it,” Robinson said. “So you have all of these college-educated individuals who have kids … and then those [kids] and of course their parents, in a simultaneous, way raise the academic rigor where they are.”

Correction: The wording of the introduction to this article has been changed to clarify that the share of Austin’s Asian population to the city’s total population is the 10th largest in the nation as opposed to being the 10th largest Asian population in the country.

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