Are America’s schools safe for AAPI students?

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. 

By  Charissa S. L. Cheah, Aggie Yellow Horse and Kevin A. Gee,

As schools reopen and students return to their classrooms after 18 months of homeschooling because of the coronavirus virus, AAPI parents worry about safety for their children from that other virus -- hate.

The rise in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic has prompted many Asian American parents to enroll their children in remote learning out of concern for their child’s safety at school. Asian American youths are enrolled in remote learning at much higher rates than other racial groups. 

Federal data show that 78% of Asian American eighth graders attended school virtually in February 2021, whereas just 59% of Black, 59% of Latino and 29% of white students attended school virtually.

Below, three scholars address school safety for Asian American students.

Are America’s schools safe for Asian Americans?

AGGIE J. YELLOW HORSE
Assistant professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at Arizona State University

Data show that many Asian American youths have experienced anti-Asian violence in the past year.

Asian Americans have experienced a great deal of racial harassment amid the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent survey found that 1 in 8 Asian Americans reported experiencing anti-Asian hate incidents in 2020. The victims of that harassment aren’t just adults – they include students.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, more than 3,800 hate incidents targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been reported to the Stop AAPI Hate National Reporting Center. Among the incidents early in the pandemic, 16% percent of the targets were Asian American youths ages 12-20.

The majority of the young victims, about 80%, reported being bullied or verbally harassed. In over half the incidents, the perpetrator used anti-Asian hate rhetoric. About 1 in 5 hate incidents happened at school.

National trends before the pandemic suggested that Asian American students were already more likely to experience racial discrimination, such as race-related name-calling, from their peers at school than other categories of students. About 11% of Asian American students reported being called hate-related words, compared with 6.3% of white students in 2015. A separate study found that bullying and physical violence were less of an issue for Asian American students. Only about 7.3% reported being bullied at school in 2017, compared with 23% of white students.

How common race-based harassment against Asian students is can vary based on different factors, such as where students live, their gender, grades or immigration status. For example, a study from California found that Asian American sixth graders in California reported being bullied and victimized at higher rates than other racial groups.

What are the biggest worries for Asian American youth and parents?

CHARISSA S.K. CHEAH
Professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Many Asian American parents are worried that their children will be the victims of discrimination once school reopens.

Asian American parents are worried about schools reopening. NPR3.38 MB (download)

In one survey, nearly 1 in 2 Chinese American parents and 1 in 2 Chinese American youth reported being directly targeted with COVID-19 racial discrimination in person or online. About 4 in 5 of these parents and their children also reported witnessing racism directed at someone else of their own race either online or in person.

Despite their concerns, some parents may avoid talking to their children about anti-Asian racism to avoid scaring them while they are at school. Even if parents want to have the “race talk” with their children, many struggle with how to talk to their children about the potential racism they might encounter. Some parents may not have been taught these lessons while growing up and are grappling with how to make sense of these experiences.

Anti-Asian racism is also associated with greater depressive symptoms and anxiety in Chinese American parents and their children. A majority of Americans blame China for its mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak. Researchers have found that even thinking that one’s racial or ethnic group is viewed by the general public as a threat to the health of Americans is linked to poorer mental health in both Chinese American parents and youths.

Asian Americans are less likely than non-Hispanic white Americans to seek mental health help. This is due in part to perceived stigma, language barriers and lack of mental health providers of the same ethnicity. These disparities are even greater for Asian American families with fewer financial resources.

Some Asian American parents have also expressed concerns about the ability of schools to maintain appropriate COVID-19-related health and safety measures. They are worried about the health risks that children exposed to others at school might bring home. Asians Americans are more likely to live in a multigenerational household, in which older adults might be at a higher health risk.

Even if parents choose to keep their children home because of one or several of these concerns, they are getting the message that in-person education is superior to virtual education. Being out of physical school could cause Asian Americans to miss out on these opportunities and resources even more. Also, due to the “model minority myth,” which characterizes Asian Americans as successful, the needs of this very diverse group, including a large number of immigrant and refugee Asian families in the U.S., are often overlooked. With 30% of Asian Americans reporting limited English proficiency, these families are more difficult to reach. The fears of being harassed also make some parents reluctant to access educational materials or free meals or even reach out to teachers or counselors for help.

What can schools do to reduce threats to Asian American students?

KEVIN GEE
Associate professor in the school of education at the University of California Davis

Helping students build strong and supportive relationships with each other can reduce their physical victimization and buffer the negative effects of discrimination Asian Americans face.

Schools can also create supportive environments by implementing a range of evidence-based approaches, such as building teachers’ cultural knowledge and strengthening teacher-student relationships. Activities like engaging students in class discussions about bullying have been shown to reduce bullying.

Alongside initiatives to build supportive environments, schools should also consider partnering with parents. Directly engaging Asian American parents in anti-bullying initiatives can help reduce victimization. For example, schools can collaborate with parents to craft disciplinary policies on bullying. Schools can also hold workshops to teach parents how to handle and prevent bullying.

In order to reduce threats and eradicate harm, I believe schools will need to consider whether they are doing enough to protect Asian American youth. One landmark case underscores this. In the aftermath of violent attacks on Asian American students at South Philadelphia High School in 2009, a Department of Justice investigation revealed that the school district was “deliberately indifferent” to harassment against Asian students that fueled the attacks.

A key takeaway: Harms against Asian American students can be systemic and require broader structural solutions. When South Philadelphia High School began to do more to promote multicultural awareness and improved systems to report and investigate harassment, the school saw fewer violent incidents.

To make Asian American youth feel safe and protected, schools need to track, report and respond to incidents of hate against Asian Americans, especially among Asian American ethnic subgroups. Subgroup data, often lacking on Asian Americans, can be a powerful tool in revealing potential disparities and highlighting groups that schools need to target for support.

I believe schools also need to invest in longer-term systemic changes such as including a more complete history of Asian Americans in U.S. social studies curricula.

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The writers: Charissa S. L. Cheah, Professor of Psychology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Aggie Yellow Horse, Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies, Arizona State University, and Kevin A. Gee, Associate Professor of Education, University of California, Davis

STUDY: Schools lack a clear view of AAPI discipline disparities

By David Washburn

REPRINTED BY PERMISSION / EDSOURCE

When examining school discipline disparities, data consistently show that Asian American students, compared to other racial and ethnic groups, have the lowest rates of suspensions and expulsions.

But educators and researchers have long said the numbers don’t paint an accurate picture of what many students who fall within the Asian category experience in school because the classification itself is such a gross generalization of the many ethnicities and nationalities in that category, which makes up nearly half the world’s population.

It is against this backdrop that a team of researchers from UCLA, the University of Washington and Lewis & Clark College in Oregon released findings this month showing that discipline outcomes varied considerably among Asian and Pacific Islander subgroups. Students from Southeast Asian countries, like Vietnam and Cambodia, had suspension and expulsion rates that were 2 to 3 times higher than those from China, Japan and other East Asian countries, according to the study.

The study also found that rates for Pacific Islander subgroups — which include students from Hawaii, Guam, Samoa and other Pacific islands — were significantly higher than any of the Asian subgroups. The research focused on Washington state because it is the only state that requires schools to break out data by Asian and Pacific Islander subgroups. California schools report Pacific Islanders separate from Asians but do not report Pacific Islander subgroups.

Pedro Noguera, one of the study’s co-authors and director of UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools, said the research team was not surprised by the differences. Students from Southeast Asia are far more likely than their East Asian counterparts to come from families who came to the U.S. as refugees and live in low-income communities.

Southeast Asian students “have higher rates of trauma and instability due to the refugee trauma…they live in poor communities and their parents often don’t speak English,” Noguera said. “That is why generalizing about different groups is so unhelpful.”

Today more than 20 million people, including nearly 3 million K-12 students, from 20 countries in East and Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent call the United States home. And the circumstances that brought them here, as well as the conditions they now live in, are as diverse as the people themselves.

UCLA’s Noguera said he would expect results in California, which is home to nearly a third of all Asians living in the U.S., to be similar to those in Washington. He said families from refugee communities throughout the U.S. suffer from many of the same inequities and struggle to navigate school systems.

However, the research team was surprised that the rates of suspensions and expulsions for Southeast Asians were still lower than they were for whites. These results could be related to what researchers and youth advocates call the “model minority myth,” said the study’s lead author, Bach Mai Dolly Nguyen of Lewis and Clark College.

A long-held stereotype of Asian as well as Pacific Islander students is they are smarter and work harder than whites and other racial and ethnic groups and they are also non-confrontational. This “monolithic” view of Asians and Pacific Islanders is both inaccurate and harmful, the researchers say.

While data show that some Asian and Pacific Islander groups are consistently high-achieving academically, others are far less so. For example, the high school graduation rate among Japanese and Taiwanese students is around 95 percent, the report stated. But it’s below 70 percent for Cambodian and Laotian students.

Yet, these disparities often go unnoticed by school officials and school-based health and mental health providers and the underlying issues that these students face are not addressed, the authors wrote.

“The prevalence of the model minority stereotype distorts and renders invisible the experiences of these smaller groups,” the report’s authors wrote. “However, the few studies that are available on these subgroups reveal that they face significant structural barriers that often impede their educational achievement…and, thus, their life circumstances.”

In previous research, Noguera delved into how discipline disparities suffered by African-American, Native American and Latino students might impact their academic achievement. These student groups, especially Native Americans and African-Americans, are disciplined at significantly higher rates than their white classmates.

Noguera and his co-authors concluded that in some respects the discipline gap and the achievement gap — which refers to disparities among racial and ethnic groups in various measures of student success, like standardized tests and graduation rates — are “two sides of the same coin.” The argument being that the same factors that contribute to the achievement gap — high rates of neighborhood poverty and schools with few resources — lead to the discipline gap.

However, they ultimately found that a clear correlation can’t be made without more robust research. It’s even more difficult to gain insight into the relationship when it comes to Asian and Pacific Islander students because of the lack of data and almost non-existent research, the authors of the current study said.

“There are aspects of these broader racial categories that are either misunderstood or entirely invisible,” Nguyen said.

Lailan Huen, the program manager for Oakland Unified’s Asian Pacific Islander Achievement Program, said her experiences with students jibe with the study’s overall hypothesis.

Oakland Unified has just begun to collect discipline data and doesn’t have enough to determine trends among subgroups, she said. However, she added, data the district does have on academic performance among the Asian and Pacific Islander subgroups show that broad model-minority assumptions are usually inaccurate.

For example, she said, Vietnamese student scores can vary widely by school, with scores considerably higher in schools with a strong academic culture. And though many Vietnamese students come from families that are first- or second-generation refugees from the Vietnam War, they tend to have lower rates of trauma than Cambodian students from families that suffered through the Khmer Rouge genocide of the early 1970s.

“You find more families [with significant trauma] who are survivors of that genocide — entire families were murdered or disappeared,” Huen said. “Because what happened was so violent and the trauma was so intense, the ability of some of the elders to even function is in disrepair.”

Huen said a large percentage of Pacific Islander students live in neighborhoods with high poverty and family trauma. “Pacific Islanders are among the least-resourced communities in the Bay Area,” she said. “It’s one of the really overlooked populations.”

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