During my master’s degree program in education policy, I read loads of education research. With maybe one exception that I can recall, Asian students weren’t in any of my assigned coursework across economics, school systems governance, program assessment, statistics, or research design. If they were, they were part of the “Other” category, usually combined with Native American, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and multiracial students.
When I started applying to jobs, many of the mission statements of the research and policy organizations I had interest in focused on “students of color,” but their work products often left Asian students out or wrongly benchmarked them with white students as the “model minority” in contrast to other students of color. A couple of years later, I joined SEARAC and learned more about how even within the oft-overlooked “Asian” category, the aggregation of an incredibly diverse population of students concealed the realities for certain Asian Americans like Southeast Asian Americans (SEAAs), with very real consequences on the access and support such students had to succeed in their educational pursuits.
Over the years of supporting SEARAC’s education advocacy, I have referred often to population estimates from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) for information on the educational attainment of SEAA communities. This was out of necessity. The ACS has long been one of the very few, if not only, nationally and readily available datasets on a variety of key social and economic outcomes for SEAA communities. And yet, this important data provides only one measurement of educational attainment — the highest level attained by adults aged 25 and older.
Rising Up, a new report from SEARAC, tackles this dearth of numbers on SEAAs and education, and it is SEARAC’s latest contribution to a rich, 50-year history of advocacy by SEAA students, educators, researchers, and communities for educational equity. Conducted in partnership with research consultant Theresa Chen, our report highlights what limited data do exist for different SEAA communities across national, state, local, and institutional sources, in order to show both the accomplishments of generations of SEAAs and the obstacles that remain for future students to thrive. We also provide recommendations for protecting and building upon the SEAA community’s hard-fought gains, especially in the face of the US government’s current violence and hostility toward immigrants and people of color. I’m grateful to Theresa for her collaboration on this report, which she wrote with deep intention and care for SEAA communities. I also give my great appreciation to the many community partners, researchers, and SEARAC colleagues, both past and present, who generously contributed their time and knowledge to this report.
Anna Byon is SEARAC’s Director of National Policy.
