All roads lead to Irvine in the drive toward academic success
Parents dial in from Texas, New York and Nevada.
In person, a mother from Arcadia runs into the spic-and-span tutoring center in Irvine, asking about local hotels. She needs to book an extended stay, after signing up her kids for honors biology and not wanting to shuttle daily from the San Gabriel Valley.
Math teacher Young Lee, who doubles as receptionist at Ardent Academy for Gifted Youth, routinely takes calls from families that are out of state, or out of the country, wanting to know about a Science Olympiad or area lodging.
“They contact us from Asia, even from Europe — the distance is not a problem when they aim for their kids to be at the top,” she adds. “They figure out how to get them to Irvine for school breaks or for summer training.”
Irvine. Many roads lead to this suburban city, as folks gravitate to the Roosevelt Office Park, where more than 50% of businesses like Ardent dedicate themselves to all things collegiate, from counseling and robotics to navigating the financial aid puzzle.
Day to day, scores of parents pull up in their SUVs, unloading youngsters carrying thick binders of homework.
“If you are committed to a chosen field, you find the best teachers for your children,” Lee said. “That’s what we’re offering.”
Lisa Chan, who commutes from San Diego to Irvine during summers, would agree.
“Make no mistake. This is the place to be,” she said, helping her access what she calls “No. 1 guidance.”
“If you’re a B student in Irvine schools, you could be an A student elsewhere,” Chan said. “I realized that for my children to be really good, I have to get them the best training that is possible.”
Irvine’s reputation spread because “when you have so many success stories, it’s easy to draw the top students, the top teachers,” said academic coach Sophia Chang, who screens Southern California applicants to Harvard, her alma mater. “It’s a breeding ground for excellence, and you will hear people in Asia talk about how they plan to send their kids over. The discipline and resources available here — they’re a magnet.”
For those not lucky enough to live locally, the option is to check in during vacations, or as Lee describes it, fly in to attend weekend chemistry tutorials, as one young scholar did, all the way from Princeton, N.J.
“We see kids who cram all year, but Irvine is special because it can draw global talent,” says Michael Kim, a member of the faculty at ReadWrite, a spinoff of South Korea’s academic powerhouse, Chungdahm, with a center just a few hundred yards from Ardent.
One afternoon, inside a cubicle-filled room at ReadWrite, a pair of siblings simulated taking the SAT with Vice Principal Philip Lee. Just last fall, one of his pupils, a high school freshman, became one of fewer than 600 students nationwide to get a perfect score of 2,400 on his SAT — from a pool of more than 1.6 million test-takers, College Board records show.
“I picked Irvine to make a difference as a teacher because of its culture of education,” said Lee, a graduate of the Wharton School, the prestigious business program at the University of Pennsylvania, and a test guru with perfect scores in the SAT and ACT as recently as 2013.
“We care that they understand the material — not just memorize it — and we work with children to learn real-life skills, useful stuff that they can depend on.”
Irvine officials don’t keep tabs on the number of education-focused companies within their borders, according to city spokesman Craig Reem, but city publications tout “superior schools,” where high school graduation reached nearly 96% for the class of 2014, compared with 88.6% for Orange County and 80.8% statewide.
About 90% of Irvine’s high school graduates go on to college — a statistic published in Asian media catering to the city’s Asian population — nearly 40% of the city’s population of more than 236,000, according to the U.S. Census.
Nathan Hsu, 12, hopes to go to an exceptional college. He joined the Gifted and Talented Project at the Read/Write center, where kids start dissecting sentence structure as early as grade 3, and he intends to ace his SAT.
“This is the right place to prepare me for the biggest challenges,” he said.
Sarah Pak, 15, is glad her family moved from North Carolina to Irvine so she can soak up the “academic spirit found everywhere here. You cannot avoid it. It’s in the air.”
At ReadWrite, tuition for an SAT/ACT training session can cost $120 per hour, while a four-week SAT boot camp — complete with customized instruction for each student — runs $2,400.
Back at Ardent Academy for Gifted Youth, a cluster of students strolled out into the sun, clutching pears and Cheetos for a snack break. Within minutes, they returned to a dark classroom, lit only with the light of laptop screens and a projector detailing coding for a Java programming course.
John Li, Ardent’s founder, who holds a PhD in physics, opened the academy more than a decade ago, inspired by his own son, a gifted math student.
“I could put our school anywhere in Southern California, but Irvine is the right atmosphere,” he said. “This community has a drive and the energy to push people to do their best.”
Community members track each other’s progress, parents say, and when a student performs exceptionally well, their families or peer groups share their success in informal seminars or prompt them to appear in the Chinese-language press.
“We’re parents who keep updated on the college rankings,” said Chan, whose relatives from Taiwan will be sending their elementary-age youngsters to Irvine for summer study in 2016. “You keep following the numbers, like with stocks.”
Irvine resident Julie Mathew, who has roots in India, said there’s no need “to wait until they’re in their teens to start pushing kids to master a skill.”
Her son, Jaden, is a fourth-grader studying language arts at ReadWrite.
“In this city, you see parents who on Monday, they’ll have their kids in soccer,” said Mathew. “On Tuesday, it’s tennis. On Wednesday, it’s tae kwon do. On Thursday, it’s piano. And every day, there’s tutoring. The academics and the scheduling is like no other place.”
Twitter: @newsterrier