One Shoe Fits All

Made-in-the-U.S.A., One-Size-fits-All: Racialized Categories Asian Americans accounted for about 8 percent of California’s K-12 enrollment, yet epitomized 40 percent of the student body at one of the state’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, the University of California, Berkeley. Many success stories abound among this small but growing minority of the U. S. population. However, not every Asian group performs equally well. These extraordinarily high percentages can exaggerate the achievement of lowperforming and high-poverty subgroups, such as Cambodians and Laotians that get placed into the broad cluster of Asian American. Educational researchers enunciate that these simplified created categories camouflage more intricate concerns and perplex endeavors to identify and react to diverse educational needs. Correspondingly, above-average performance by other ethnic subgroups, such as Caribbean blacks, can be overlooked. Many educators and policymakers recognize the need to avoid such generalizations. They identify the complexities and suggest better data availability to educators. The more detailed the information, the more useful disaggregating performance data is for most school districts. Recently, the Seattle School District administered their annual test scores into 18 categories, this allowed officials to track and address the educational needs of specific groups. The report revealed that students of Japanese and Korean descent tend to outperform their Asian peers from China, the Philippines and Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam. Such data separated into detail can help alter stereotypes and dangerous overgeneralizations.

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When large-scale reporting data are available and broken down in detail, some commonly held beliefs come into question. A recent study concluded that Cuban-American students from the most recently arrived parents made up the lowest achieving group of immigrant children. This is in stark contrast to the conventional wisdom that Cubans outperform their Hispanic peers. The attributed discrepancy is due in part to the less welcoming attitude toward recent Cuban refugees, combined with their lower socioeconomic standing compared with that of Cubans who arrived in the years immediately following the 1959 revolution in Cuba. It has been argued that including Cubans with all Hispanics has helped educators miss the problems of newer Cuban families whose need get overlooked. This educational research demonstrates the absurdity of lumping scores of national-origin groups from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and elsewhere into ‘made-in-the-U.S.A., one-size-fitsall,’ racialized categories.

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