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Who can seriously claim that a Harvard University that was 72 percent Asian would deliver the same grooming for elite status its students had gone there to receive?

The researcher was talking about what some refer to as the “Bamboo Ceiling”—an invisible barrier that maintains a pyramidal racial structure throughout corporate America, with lots of Asians at junior levels, quite a few in middle management, and virtually none in the higher reaches of leadership. The failure of Asian-Americans to become leaders in the white-collar workplace does not qualify as one of the burning social issues of our time. But it is a part of the bitter undercurrent of Asian-American life that so many Asian graduates of elite universities find that meritocracy as they have understood it comes to an abrupt end after graduation

It’s racist to think that any given Asian individual is unlikely to be creative or risk-taking. It’s simple cultural observation to say that a group whose education has historically focused on rote memorization and “pumping the iron of math” is, on aggregate, unlikely to yield many people inclined to challenge authority or break with inherited ways of doing things.

Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics. LEAP has parsed the complicated social dynamics responsible for the dearth of Asian-American leaders and has designed training programs that flatter Asian people even as it teaches them to change their behavior to suit white-American expectations. Asians who enter a LEAP program are constantly assured that they will be able to “keep your values, while acquiring new skills,” along the way to becoming “culturally competent leaders.”

The law professor and writer Tim Wu grew up in Canada with a white mother and a Taiwanese father, which allows him an interesting perspective on how whites and Asians perceive each other. After graduating from law school, he took a series of clerkships, and he remembers the subtle ways in which hierarchies were developed among the other young lawyers. “There is this automatic assumption in any legal environment that Asians will have a particular talent for bitter labor,” he says, and then goes on to define the word coolie,a Chinese term for “bitter labor.” “There was this weird self-selection where the Asians would migrate toward the most brutal part of the labor.” By contrast, the white lawyers he encountered had a knack for portraying themselves as above all that. “White people have this instinct that is really important: to give off the impression that they’re only going to do the really important work. You’re a quarterback. It’s a kind of arrogance that Asians are trained not to have. Someone told me not long after I moved to New York that in order to succeed, you have to understand which rules you’re supposed to break. If you break the wrong rules, you’re finished. And so the easiest thing to do is follow all the rules. But then you consign yourself to a lower status. The real trick is understanding what rules are not meant for you.” This idea of a kind of rule-governed rule-breaking—where the rule book was unwritten but passed along in an innate cultural sense—is perhaps the best explanation I have heard of how the Bamboo Ceiling functions in practice. LEAP appears to be very good at helping Asian workers who are already culturally competent become more self-aware of how their culture and appearance impose barriers to advancement.

If the Bamboo Ceiling is ever going to break, it’s probably going to have less to do with any form of behavior assimilation than with the emergence of risk-­takers whose success obviates the need for Asians to meet someone else’s behavioral standard. People like Steve Chen, who was one of the creators of YouTube, or Kai and Charles Huang, who created Guitar Hero. Or Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos.com, the online shoe retailer that he sold to Amazon for about a billion dollars in 2009.

though the debate she sparked about Asian-American life has been of questionable value, we will need more people with the same kind of defiance, willing to push themselves into the spotlight and to make some noise, to beat people up, to seduce women, to make mistakes, to become entrepreneurs, to stop doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to their worthiness, to stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone’s happiness, and to dare to be interesting.

What does research say on these issues? It has consistently failed to find any real advantage of cursive over other forms of handwriting

our real understanding of how children respond to different writing styles is surprisingly patchy and woefully inadequate

Evidence supports teaching both formats of handwriting and then letting each student choose which works best for him or her

So was cursive faster than manuscript? No, it was slower. But fastest of all was a personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript developed spontaneously by pupils around the fourth to fifth grade

They had apparently imbibed manuscript style from their reading experience (it more closely resembles print), even without being taught it explicitly

While pupils writing in cursive were slower on average, their handwriting was also typically more legible than that of pupils taught only manuscript. But the mixed style allowed for greater speed with barely any deficit in legibility.

The grip that cursive has on teaching is sustained by folklore and prejudice

for typical children, there’s some reason to think manuscript has advantages

freeing up cognitive resources that are otherwise devoted to the challenge of simply making the more elaborate cursive forms on paper will leave children more articulate and accurate in what they write

the difference in appearance between cursive and manuscript could inhibit the acquisition of reading skills, making it harder for children to transfer skills between learning to read and learning to write because they simply don’t see cursive in books.

There’s good evidence, both behavioral and neurological, that a “haptic” (touch-related) sense of letter shapes can aid early reading skills, indicating a cognitive interaction between motor production and visual recognition of letters. That’s one reason, incidentally, why it’s valuable to train children to write by hand at all, not just to use a keyboard.

even if being taught both styles might have some advantages, it’s not clear that those cognitive resources and classroom hours couldn’t be better deployed in other ways.

that cursive is still taught primarily because of parental demand and tradition, rather than because there is any scientific basis for its superiority in learning

How much else in education is determined by what’s “right,” rather than what’s supported by evidence?

Beliefs about cursive are something of a hydra: You cut off one head, and another sprouts. These beliefs propagate through both the popular and the scientific literature, in a strange mixture of uncritical reporting and outright invention, which depends on myths often impossible to track to a reliable source.

the reasons to reject cursive handwriting as a formal part of the curriculum far outweigh the reasons to keep it.

it’s often the case that the very lack of hard, objective evidence about an issue, especially in the social sciences, encourages a reliance on dogma instead

There needs to be wider examination of the extent to which evidence informs education. Do we heed it enough? Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms?

Secondly, I would try to build a school culture where sharing is just a normal part of what we do and where we understand the relevance of this global exchange of ideas and information to what we do in the classroom.

There’s a great book called Rethinking Education in an Era of Technology by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson. For me, these guys absolutely peg it. They talk about how we went from a kind of apprenticeship model of education in the early 19th century to a more industrialized, everybody-does-the-same-thing model in the 20th century. And now we’re moving into what they call a “lifelong learning” model—which is to say that learning is much more fluid and much more independent, self-directed, and informal. That concept—that we can learn in profound new ways outside the classroom setting—poses huge challenges to traditional structures of schools, because that’s not what they were built for.

What we have to do is build a professional culture that says, “Look, you guys are learners, and we’re going to help you learn. We’re going to help you figure out your own learning path and practice.” It’s like the old “give a man a fish” saying. You know, we’re giving away a lot of fish right now, but we’re not teaching anybody how to fish.

If you were a principal, in order to foster network literacy as you envision it, what kind of professional development would you provide to teachers? I think that teachers need to have a very fundamental understanding of what these digital interactions look like, and the only way that you can do that is to pretty much immerse them in these types of learning environments over the long term. You can’t workshop it. That’s really been the basis of our work with Powerful Learning Practice: Traditional PD just isn’t going to work. It’s got to be long-term, job-embedded. So, if I’m a principal, I would definitely be thinking about how I could get my teachers into online learning communities, into these online networks. And again, from a leadership standpoint, I’d better be there first—or, if not first, at least be able to model it and talk about it.

But the other thing is, if you want to have workshops, well, that’s fine, go ahead and schedule a blogging workshop, but then the prerequisite for the workshop should be to learn how to blog. Then, when you come to the workshop, we’ll talk about what blogging means rather than just how to do it.

If you were starting a school right now that you hoped embodied these qualities, what traits would you look for in teachers? Well, certainly I would make sure they were Googleable. I would want to see that they have a presence online, that they are participating in these spaces, and, obviously, that they are doing so appropriately. Also, I’d want to know that they have some understanding of how technology is changing teaching and learning and the possibilities that are out there. I would also look for people who aren’t asking how, but instead are asking why. I don’t want people who say, “How do you blog?” I want people who are ready to explore the question of, “Why do you blog?” That’s what we need. We need people who are willing to really think critically about what they’re doing.