There is a family in our school from India and they do place a lot of importance on academics. I don't see them as being particularly pushy, just very involved compared to "American" parents. Teachers in the school have made the nastiest comments to them about how they should back off and let their DD play with Barbie dolls and take her to gymnastics. Ironically, their DD does do those things. Their kids are very bright and excel naturally with academics, but all the teachers can see is that the parents must be pushy and demanding since the kids are so advanced. They probably think of me the same way, but I haven't had any comments yet. Half the time my kids didn't/don't even do their homework so I'm not sure how they could call me "pushy".
This attitude is very common in our district, too, even though it is a very good district. Plenty of parents and teachers point fingers at kids who excel (and their parents) without knowing anything about whether these kids excel: whether it's because they have pushy parents, or because they just care about academics and work hard, or because the *average level* academics is just too easy. But no one has any problem if a family pushes the kids in sports. It's OK if kids are tired out after sports practices, but it's an outrage if a kid gets mentally challenged or even tired once in a while doing academic work. I've had very unpleasant exchanges with school teachers and private teachers about this, and I've seen the same conflict of attitude whenever a group of parents and teachers sit down to talk about instructional standards.
