Championing Need in Asian and Pacific Islander Communities

By Deborah Chang

The U.S. News and World Report came out with a list of America's Best High Schools 2009. (For full report, please see here: http://www.usnews.com/sections/education/high-schools/). It ranks schools based on, not only test performance on AP/IB tests, but also test performance corrected for percentage low-income and percentage minority students.

Now there is a lot to be criticized in this methodology, but what caught my eye in particular was that when I looked up my old high school the day the rankings came out, I found that a school that was majority Asian was listed as having 7.3% minority. Nowhere was it explained that the U.S. World and News Report did not include Asians in its calculation of percent minority, even though this must have been the case for my school's numbers to make sense.

The website has since been updated to include racial breakdown beyond just "minority" and a clarification that for the purpose of the U.S. News and World Report, the formula used to determine rankings took in only percentages of the Black and Hispanic population, but the lapse in explanation touches upon many themes in race discussions concerning academic achievement. One is the theme of the Asian American model minority, and another is the theme of race labels (e.g., Asian, Black, Hispanic) being overly inclusive, hiding many of the education achievement gaps that plague subgroups.

The Asian American model minority stereotype in an educational context holds that Asians and Asian Americans are successful in school, particularly in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) subjects, because they come from a culture that values hard work and education. Although at first glance, there appears to be little threat in the Asian model minority stereotype, the problem occurs when it is over generalized. Asians and Asian Americans who have had to overcome tremendous challenges to achieve at high levels have their accomplishments written off as to be expected, while Asians and Asian Americans who are struggling may have a sense of failure for not meeting the model minority stereotype. Furthermore, the model minority stereotype fails to take in the diversity of interests within the Asian American population, many of whom choose to go into business or the humanities. Also, attributing academic success to a stereotype is damaging for students from traditionally low-performing racial backgrounds. The temptation is to place the responsibility of education solely on the shoulders of culture and individual students instead of recognizing the systematic ways in which our nation's K-12 schools have failed to educate huge swaths of the population.

The second trend of race labels being overly inclusive is illustrated by how, if we look at the numbers for subgroups considered Asian American by the federal Census 2000 definition, we see that while Chinese, Pakistani, and Indian Americans may be performing at levels higher than the national average, but Hmong, Cambodian, Marshallese, Fijian, and Tongan Americans are performing at much lower levels, due in large part to the differential immigration histories of different Asian ethnicities. Therefore, in the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, success is just as correlated with income/family education as in the U.S. population as a whole. Yet, the U.S. News and World report did not separate Pacific Islander from Asian American, nor did it include Asian American subgroups that are traditionally underserved within its methodology. This choice by the U.S. News and World Report is representative of how few programs or resources are dedicated to students from these subgroups because their struggle is masked by the success of the Asian American community as a whole and this mask is strengthened by the Asian American model minority stereotype.

This exploration of the Asian American model minority stereotype and the overly inclusive nature of race labels drives home the point to me that as Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, we must be diligent about championing the need for greater attention to be paid to our underserved members, and that we cannot fall into the temptation of buying in to stereotypes of either the Asian American and Pacific Islander community or any other community.