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 low-

performing 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-fits-

all,’ racialized categories.