Getting real about the ‘model minority’: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders fight their stereotype
By:
Carol Brydolf
Candice Shikai, herself the very epitome of the “model minority” student stereotype, might seem an unlikely activist in the campaign to overturn the decades-old misconception that Asian Americans have it made when it comes to academic achievement and other crucial measures of prosperity, health and overall success.
Yet during her senior year at UCLA last fall, this young woman and hundreds of her classmates throughout the elite University of California won a major victory in the battle to call attention to the needs of a diverse group of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Contrary to the model, activists argue, the broad Asian/Pacific Islander category includes thousands of Californian students whose parents have little formal education and who are themselves struggling in school, speak little or no English, lack access to health care and live in poverty.
The UC students’ “Count Me In” campaign convinced UC regents to make the university the first public institution in the state to collect and report application, admission and enrollment data for 23 specific Asian American/Pacific Islander student subgroups—from the numerically dominant and high-achieving Chinese to the smaller numbers of Hmong, whose parents and grandparents came from the mountains of Indochina, and the even smaller group whose forebears emigrated from the South Pacific island archipelago of Tonga.
The university will report numbers for all these groups beginning in the fall of 2009, a UC spokesman says, to “capture the complexity” of its Asian American and Pacific Islander population, and identify whether some students are being overlooked.
The push for disaggregated AAPI student data at the university is just one aspect of a much broader campaign to spread the word that this is a diverse and rapidly growing group of Americans who, experts say, include many students who are struggling in school. Educators familiar with the AAPI community say that the model minority stereotype just makes things worse.
Defying the stereotype
Shikai—whose parents are second- and fourth-generation Japanese Americans who live in the working-class Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles—says she was not aware that her AAPI classmates at UCLA came from so many diverse backgrounds.
“I grew up among Japanese Americans who have been here a long time and are pretty well off,” she says. “I did not know many students from Southeast Asia—Hmong, Cambodians and Vietnamese—and I was unaware of all the obstacles they face. These students, along with other students of color, were at the heart of our campaign.”
“The prevalent model minority myth can make many disadvantaged members of our community invisible to policymakers,” Shikai adds. “Collecting data on more Asian American and Pacific Islander groups will result in a more accurate picture of how students are doing.”
Conventional wisdom has long held that Asian American students are conscientious, brainy and successful, and a look at the statistics makes it clear that many are.
These students routinely post the highest scores on California’s standardized tests, are most likely to graduate from high school and have had the highest rates of eligibility for admission to UC for at least the last 20 years. Asian American students constitute about 12 percent of the state’s K-12 student population but make up more than 40 percent of the undergraduates at UCLA and Berkeley—the most selective of the 10 UC campuses.
Clearly, many Asian Americans have overcome tremendous obstacles to build extremely successful lives in California and elsewhere in the United States. But these numbers don’t tell the whole story, say AAPI leaders.
‘Facts Not Fiction’
“The model minority stereotype goes back to the 1960s, and like every stereotype, there’s a little truth to it,” says Don Nakanishi, professor and director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center. “But it’s amazing how this image has carried forward, given how dramatically the Asian American population has changed and given the incredible diversity of this community.”
“In 1970, there were 1.5 million Asian Americans in the entire country, the largest subgroup was the Japanese, and a majority of Asian Americans were born in this country,” recounts Nakanishi. “Now there are 17 million Asian Americans in the U.S. and nearly 5 million in California. A majority is foreign-born, and Chinese Americans constitute the largest subgroup.”
This year advocates for the AAPI community released two national studies that highlight the huge disparities between the highest- and lowest-achieving members of the Asian Pacific Islander population and called for specific changes in national education policy and resource allocation to better address the needs of these students.
The first, “Left in the Margins: Asian American Students and the No Child Left Behind Act,” from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, called for sweeping changes in the landmark federal legislation.
“Contrary to stereotypes that cast Asian Americans as model students of academic achievement, many Asian American students are struggling, failing and dropping out of schools that ignore their needs,” the report concludes. “We have found that some schools allow Asian American ELL [English language learner] students to drop out or even intentionally push them out for fear that ELLs will score low on NCLB-mandated standardized tests.”
Among other things, the report called on federal lawmakers to increase funding for such services as translation, outreach to isolated “Asian ethnic enclaves” and adult literacy classes, as well as bilingual education specialists and training to help teachers effectively teach an increasingly diverse student population.
The other report was issued in conjunction with an education summit that U.S. Rep. Mike Honda, a Democrat from San Jose who chairs the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, convened in Washington, D.C., in June to challenge the myths about Asian student success. “Facts Not Fiction,” prepared by the College Board, is an exhaustive demographic study that laments the “false assumptions” that lead to “misinformed policy and practice that can be harmful to AAPI students.” The report, conducted by New York University in collaboration with the National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education, generated national headlines.
Report author Robert Teranishi, a professor of education at NYU, says the myth of the Asian Pacific Islander academic juggernaut is inaccurate and unfair. “Under the ‘model minority solution,’ Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are all lumped together as if they have the same traits—that they are all high-performing achievers,” Teranishi says. “Yes, there are exceptional Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who are extremely accomplished, and they are the source of pride and inspiration. But it is simply not true that they are typical.”
“There is no such thing as a single AAPI composite,” he adds, “especially when there are more differences than similarities between the many peoples designated by the federally defined categories of ‘Asian American’ and/or ‘Pacific Islander.’ ” The AAPI classification, he notes, can include as many as 50 different racial and ethnic groups.
California: The heartland
California, which has the nation’s largest AAPI population and is home to more than a third of all Asians and Pacific Islanders in the country, is “the heart of America’s Asian Pacific Islander community,” in the words of one AAPI leader.
More than 4.5 million Asians and 245,934 Pacific Islanders live here, and those numbers are expected to double by 2025. Chinese and Filipinos are the largest two Asian groups in the state, and together they make up more than half of the Asian population. Asian Indians are the fastest growing and—by some measures—the most highly educated and successful of the new wave of AAPI immigrants. Although their absolute numbers are modest in comparison to the state’s largest student subgroups, Asian Americans are majority populations in nine California communities and make up a third of the populations in 17 others.
“The Diverse Face of Asian and Pacific Islanders,” a 2005 analysis of California’s AAPI communities by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, underscores both the achievements of these populations and the challenges they face.
Asians are represented at both the high and lowest ends of the achievement spectrum. They are more likely than whites to have graduated from college (41 percent versus 34 percent), but they are also more likely to have less than a high school education (19 percent versus 10 percent), the report says. More than a third of California’s Asian population is limited English proficient, and about 15 percent of AAPI students are English learners. Four Southeast Asian groups—Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian and Hmong—have educational attainment levels far below the state average, some among the lowest in the state.
Fleeing war zones
Earlier waves of Southeast Asian immigration were made up largely of prosperous families with white-collar jobs and advanced academic degrees. Many of the more recent arrivals are refugees and asylum-seekers who have less education and fewer resources. Students who arrive here from war zones or refugee camps sometimes come to school suffering from post-traumatic stress and other emotional problems.
California districts with high concentrations of AAPI students, including large urban districts like Sacramento, San Francisco and Fresno, and smaller districts like Cupertino and Oak Grove, are well aware of the real struggles their students face. All have established special counseling, academic support and outreach programs to help AAPI immigrant students and their families make the transition to their new American lives.
Fresno Unified educates more than 11,000 AAPI students, 15 percent of the total district enrollment. Most are Hmong. The district developed Hmong curriculum resources for grades 2-11, adopted a textbook on Hmong history and culture, designed a “Hmong Voices” Web site and opened “The Academy for New Americans” for Southeast Asian students. Fresno employs six Hmong administrators and 100 Hmong teachers. The district has also established a special intervention and prevention department to assess and intervene early with children and parents if students show signs of emotional or mental health problems.
Dia Moua, a Hmong American who moved to the Central Valley as a kindergartner after her family emigrated from a refugee camp in Thailand, says curriculum and support services like those offered in Fresno would have made a huge difference. “I was so busy trying to swim without sinking that I didn’t have a chance to wonder why there was nothing about my people in the history I learned,” says Moua. “I had to learn English really fast because I was the oldest [of seven children] and had to act as a translator. It wasn’t until college that I learned about how the history of my people related to the history of this country. I know there are some support services now, but if there were such services when I was growing up, I was not aware of them.”
Now an aspiring lawyer, with an undergraduate degree from UC Riverside and a law degree from UC Davis, Moua says it’s still “a constant clash every day” to balance the values of her family-centered Hmong culture with an America that “is more focused on the “I.”
‘Linguistic isolation’
A look at recent Census data makes it clear that large numbers of California’s AAPI are living on the margins of mainstream society.
The data show that Asian households have the highest levels of what demographic researchers call “linguistic isolation” in the state. Households are defined as “linguistically isolated” if they do not include anyone 14 years old or older who speaks English “very well.” A number of California communities include significant concentrations of these families. This demographic development has obvious implications for schools.
In the Southern California city of El Monte, for example, half the Asian households (2,757 families) are considered linguistically isolated. In San Francisco, where 35 percent of Asian households are linguistically isolated, nearly 30,000 families do not include anyone over the age of 14 who speaks English very well.
All students could benefit
In terms of sheer numbers, California’s AAPI students represent a much smaller percentage of the state’s student population than the state’s Hispanics, who now make up almost half of all public school students here. There are obvious and compelling reasons that the special needs of Hispanic students are at the top of the state’s public education reform agenda—but it’s not a zero sum game, say California educators.
Strategies that help engage immigrant Latino parents can also reach out to AAPI families who aren’t fluent in English, for example. Allocating additional funds for translation services, development of culturally sensitive curriculum, and training and recruitment of bilingual and ESL teachers could help struggling students from a variety of ethnic and racial circumstances.
A number of California districts have had to scramble when the demographics of their communities shifted quickly.
In early 2000, when the last refugee camp in Laos closed, some 2,000 Hmong moved to Sacramento. When 200 of these students enrolled in the Sacramento Unified School District’s Luther Burbank High School, veteran teacher Larry Ferlazzo immediately looked for ways to help these newcomers build “face-to-face relationships” with their teachers and classmates. Most of these new students, he says, had never been to school—and neither had anyone in their families.
“It was a great opportunity,” Ferlazzo says. “How often would a high school teacher get to spend five hours each day with a classroom of students who were going to school for the first time in their lives? It was also, obviously, a challenge.”
He created an ESL computer lab class after school for his Hmong students and enlisted native English-speaking students as peer tutors. The lab soon attracted more than 100 immigrant students. Now the Luther Burbank Family Literacy Project offers free computers to families who agree to spend at least an hour a day studying English on the project Web site. The program includes more than 50 Hmong, Spanish-speaking and Pacific Islander families.
Thanks in part to the success of its EL population, Luther Burbank was able to move out of Program Improvement status under NCLB. Ferlazzo has won international honors for his groundbreaking work. He says it is crucial that educators begin viewing their EL students and families as assets rather than liabilities. Half of Burbank’s 2,000 students are learning English.
“We believe that having large numbers of English language learners did not inhibit our escaping NCLB sanctions,” he says. “On the contrary, we believe that having to address the needs of our large number of English language learners had a very positive impact on instruction for all our students.”
Disaggregating the data
Congressman Honda, (a former school teacher and principal), has introduced new legislation, the Strengthening Communities through Education and Integration Act, to increase resources for English language instruction and expanded learning time for English learners in middle and high school, provide tax credits for teachers who earn English-language certification and give employers incentives to offer English instruction for workers.
As he and his colleagues in the Asian Pacific American Caucus continue to advocate for more data about and support for the AAPI community on a federal level, the state Legislature’s Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus has also been at work in Sacramento.
Last year the Legislature passed Assembly Bill 295 by caucus chair Assembly Member Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, which would have required the state of California to add 10 ethnicities to the list of 11 subgroups already being tracked. The bill, supporters said, would have helped the state create a more complete picture of these populations.
But Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the measure. For now, Lieu’s office and other bill supporters are negotiating with state agencies, including the California Department of Education, to expand the collection and reporting of AAPI data.
This year state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, introduced a bill that would require CDE to disaggregate AAPI data and to publish those numbers on the department Web site. CSBA supports Senate Bill 1524, which is a two-year bill currently on the suspense file, and Karen Leong Clancy, a member of CSBA’s Delegate Assembly, testified in favor of it.( She also testified before Congress last fall about the need to modify NCLB to better address the needs of AAPI students.)
Dispelling the myth
Describing any community as the “model,” critics say, does a disservice both to the so-called “model” and to other minority groups. Labeling Asians the “good” minority, one that advances by working hard, implies that other disadvantaged groups could succeed if only they tried harder.
Ronald Takaki, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, says “pundits and the media” bear some responsibility for perpetuating a myth that drives a wedge between different racial and ethnic groups.
“The Asian American model was used as a sword against blacks,” he says. “The assertion was that Asians were making it without welfare, and blacks weren’t. The sentiment was ‘Asians are doing it right. We should bottle this for blacks and Latinos.’
Takaki says policymakers should ask themselves, “Why are some students struggling so much to handle K-12 education?” Instead of taking about Asian success, he adds, “We should be looking at the impact of Proposition 13, a measure that led to the disintegration of inner city schools. We need a tax system that distributes resources where they are needed most.”
Takaki has this advice for school boards: “Some groups of students have advantages because of where they are born and where they go to school,” he says. “If school boards want to make a difference, they have to address these structural realities.”
He also urges boards to make sure they use an “inclusive curriculum” that addresses the history, culture and contributions of all their students. “I think about the American history I learned,” says Takaki, a Japanese American who grew up in Hawaii. “I couldn’t find myself anywhere. We have to get away from the notion that this country was settled and built exclusively by European Americans.”
The pressure to be perfect
Ben Liao, CSBA director-at-large, Asian Pacific Islander, is a school board member in the Cupertino Union School District—one of the highest-achieving districts in the state and one with a significant percentage of AAPI students. Liao says he is extremely concerned about the crushing pressure that some parents in his district and elsewhere (of every demographic) are exerting on their children. Convincing parents to ease up has been difficult.
“Most parents in Cupertino are pushing very hard,” Liao says. “Their children are competing academically, they are competing to see who can join the most clubs, who can perform the most community service, who can play basketball and play a musical instrument in the band. Students are not supposed to sleep only four hours a night throughout their high school years. It’s devastating to kids. They are doing this to themselves, and they don’t feel it until later.”
Liao is working with educational and community organizations to develop collaborative programs that focus on nurturing “the whole child.” CSBA’s Student Issues Conference Group for AAPI students will take up the issue at this year’s Annual Education Conference and Trade Show in San Diego, Liao says.
“Students need more than academics,” he says. “We want students to be successful in life, and there’s more to life than test scores and grades.”
The model minority image puts Asian students in a tough spot. “It doesn’t just hurt low-achieving students, it also hurts students in the middle,” Liao says. “If an Asian student isn’t at the top, people say, ‘You must not be working hard enough. You’re Asian, so we know you’re smart.’ ”
Shikai, the UCLA student who helped persuade the UC regents to expand their documentation of AAPI groups, graduated last spring with a major in history and a philosophy minor. She says she was not particularly offended by the stereotype before she went to college. Now that she has learned more about the struggles of students from other Asian and Pacific Islander communities, she feels differently.
“It’s an attempt to pit different communities of color against each other by saying one is best,” she says. “Asian Americans at both ends of the scale are starting to realize that these stereotypes aren’t OK any longer.”
Carol Brydolf (cbrydolf@csba.org) is a staff writer for California Schools.
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