At the “Out of the Margins” conference on Friday, speakers described the story of a California-born Pakistani girl who was pulled out of her classes and placed in English as a second language, even though she had the highest grade in her honors English class.
The panelists also discussed legislative staff in Sacramento who did not have data on teen pregnancy rates among Asian Americans because they “didn’t think Asian kids got pregnant.”
Stories of misconceptions and many more like these were discussed at the conference. Professors, graduate students and student leaders spoke about the problems Asians and Pacific Islanders face in the educational system and the misconception that all Asians are performing well in school.
Professors from throughout the University of California system were present, along with Chancellor Gene Block and professors from other universities.
Judy Sakaki, UC vice president of student affairs, also announced at the conference that, starting in 2008, the UC system will begin disaggregating the data for Asian and Pacific Islander applicants, so students can choose a more specific category for their ethnicity. The new application will include 23 categories total ““ three times the options available now ““ and will split Pacific Islander completely from Asian American.
This change is a direct result of the Count Me In! campaign created by UCLA’s Asian Pacific Coalition, Sakaki said.
Started last spring and spreading to other UC campuses over the summer, the campaign aimed to disaggregate the data collected for Asians and Pacific Islanders because, though Asians are performing similar to whites in terms of higher education, many subgroups, such as Hmong and Khmer, are performing much lower.
Candice Shikai, director of the Asian Pacific Coalition and a speaker at the conference, said she was thrilled the campaign was so successful and hopes the data collected can be used to benefit struggling communities by helping to provide funding for educational assistance programs.
“There is a myth that all (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) are doing well, and without official information from the UC it is hard to get funding,” Shikai said.
The Asian Pacific Coalition, 21 different Asian and Pacific Islander student organizations at UCLA, worked to collect 4,000 postcards from people supporting disaggregation of Asian and Pacific Islander data, which will show how certain ethnicities are actually performing.
Only 30 percent of Cambodians in the United States have a high school diploma, and Hmongs, as well as Pacific Islanders, do not fare all that much better, according to the Asian Pacific Legal Center.
Native Guamanian Christine Santos, a co-chairwoman of the Pacific Islands Student Association, said she was upset when applying to the UC system because Pacific Islander was listed under “other Asian.”
“But we aren’t even Asian,” she said. “We are not being heard in the higher education system. They don’t even know our identity.”
Santos helped found Count Me In! and said she was thrilled that some of its goals were met so quickly.
“People think students don’t have power, but we do,” she said. “We can affect policy.”
There were also community members and policy-makers at the conference, including state Assemblyman Mike Eng, D-San Gabriel, who spoke about the ignorance in Sacramento on Asian and Pacific Islander issues.
Eng said the data simply has not been collected for Asian and Pacific Islanders regarding imprisonment, obesity, health care, gangs and pregnancy, and he asked that the faculty present at the conference do research in these areas.
“I want to know,” Eng said. “I need more information, so I can be a more effective legislator.”
Many speakers also discussed how Americans tend to think of Asians as an academically homogenous group, when actually they have the widest distribution of SAT scores of any minority group, said Rob Teranishi, an assistant professor of education at New York University.
“Current data and research is limited,” he said. “Asian Americans are largely missing from the discourse on education policy and are in the shadows of America’s commitment to equality and social justice.”
After the conference, several speakers said they hoped progress could come out of having this dialogue.
“The conference was the first time such a large group of people came together to discuss these issues. But we still have a lot of work to do from here,” Santos said.