The Data Quality Movement for the Asian American and Pacific Islander Community: An Unresolved Civil Rights Issue

Making Visible the Invisible: Multistudy Investigation of Disproportionate Special Education Identification of U.S. Asian American and Pacific Islander Students

“…For PI students, the elevated relative risks observed-albeit counter to earlier special education research-are consistent with some findings in the medical literature of populations still residing in the Pacific Islands (e.g., Sanders et al, 2015) and may support the notion of differential susceptibility to specific conditions. The roots of potential susceptibility are debatable, however, given the broad range of historical and continued marginalization experienced by PIs under multiple social systems and institutional forces (Nguyen et al, 2019;Poon et al, 2016) contributing to disparities in both public health (Stafford, 2010) and education (Teranishi et al, 2016). Consideration of the nature of disproportionality is controversial given the potential relations to proximal and distal biases that may be especially difficult to isolate via quantitative analyses, but state patterns indicate the need to consider the intersection of health differences and disparities with special education disparities.…”

“…The available quantitative studies, typically utilizing the general panethnic aggregate, suggest AAPI students are broadly and substantially underidentified for special education (Morgan et al, 2018), with local variations (e.g., Cooc, 2018) and some notable findings of overrepresentation (e.g., elevated risk of autism identification in schools; Sullivan, 2013). Compared to earlier reviews (e.g., Waitoller et al, 2010), more recent syntheses of special education disproportionality have prioritized nationally representative estimates for the panethnic aggregate AAPI category (Morgan et al, 2018), but these likely obfuscate important variability that may be attributed to differential need or opportunities among subgroups (Teranishi et al, 2016).…”

“…This diversity makes it difficult to fully describe the experiences and outcomes, or to discern the disparities, of AAPI students when treated as a single panethnic aggregate. Indeed, the movement for data disaggregation has been called one of the most important civil rights issues for U.S. AAPI communities (Teranishi et al, 2016). Many reports describe AAPIs as one of the most successful groups in the United States, with average educational attainment and income surpassing their White counterparts (e.g., PRC, 2017), but this perspective is criticized for oversimplifying AAPI experiences and outcomes in the United States (Nguyen et al, 2019).…”

“…The overgeneralization of the experiences and outcomes of AAPIs in U.S. schools may be at least partially attributable to the MMM, which was first used to describe the socioeconomic and academic success of certain Asian immigrant groups in an effort to undermine the civil rights arguments of Blacks' oppression and systematic racial bias in order to "to up hold White supremacy through the racial discip li ning of other people of color" (Peterson, 1966, cited in Poon et al, 2016. In schools, the MMM can be enacted via assumptions that these students are uniformly doing well and do not require support (Teranishi et al, 2016). In addition, even where AAPI individuals have higher educational attainment on average, their average incomes and occupational prestige lag behind comparable White peers, regardless of language or immigrant status, attributable to the glass ceiling, or structural barriers that preclude advancement based on educational attainment or other achievements commensurate with White peers (Pang et al, 2011;Takei et al, 2013;Varma, 2004).…”

Asian American & Pacific Islander Students: A Snapshot of the 2017 Matriculating Student Class

“…Despite the implied homogeneity of the common "AAPI" label, there are 23 subgroups 3 with diverse and varied cultures and lifestyles included under the "AAPI" umbrella term. Because of the differing cultural, immigrational, and socioeconomic characteristics 4 of these subgroups, the AAPI label represents a vast and richly complex mix of cultures and peoples. Yet, AAPIs do share commonalities, and for the sake of analysis of their experiences, we have grouped them together as one in this report.…”