Beyond soccer leagues, music camps, and drama lessons, today’s youth are in an education arms race that begins in elementary school. Tutoring companies were already growing rapidly before Covid-19, and remote learning has accelerated this trend. While often associated with Asian Americans, this has expanded widely. The result is not only a threat to public education but also has implications for childhood and academic inequality. Drawing on over 100 in-depth interviews with teachers, tutors, principals, children, and parents, Pawan Dhingra explains how the motivations for “hyper education” extend beyond that of so-called “tiger parents” committed to education and, in addition, involve parents’ moral concerns, including anti-blackness. Teachers resent this trend but their efforts to tamp down will not work. Meaningful changes will require re-envisioning what we want public education to be.

Pawan Dhingra is Professor of American Studies and Faculty Equity and Inclusion Officer at Amherst College. He is Former Curator at the Smithsonian Institution for Beyond Bollywood. An award-winning author and teacher, his most recent book is Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough. His bylines include The New York Times, CNN, and elsewhere, and his work has been profiled in The Washington Post, National Public Radio, The Guardian, and other venues.

He is also the author of the multiple award-winning Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream, and the award-winning Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities . He is the co-author of widely-used Asian America: Sociological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, with its second edition forthcoming. Dhingra earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University.