Monday, November 12, 2012

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Race and Education

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Race and Education:


Race and Education

We are just coming off a presidential election where, to some degree, race mattered.  Governor Romney lost because the GOP seems to be tone-deaf to the fact that what they allowed various GOP officials, including Romney, to say about Hispanics and women really DID matter.  The GOP can continue this at their own risk but the numbers are against them (and so is history and common decency).
The NY Times had two articles about students and race and its impacts that I thought worthy of posting.  Both are about Asian-Americans.

One article is about Asian-Americans in college.  This is a large and diverse group of students with varying outcomes.  By the numbers, Chinese, Japanese and Korean-American students tend to do fairly well in school.  Pacific Islanders, Samoans, Vietnamese-Americans tend to do less well.   Add into those groups Pakistani, Indian, Filipinos, and Cambodians and you get a lot of people under one umbrella who are wildly different in their attitudes and outcomes about K-12 public education.   The article is referencing college students in Texas against the backdrop of a US Supreme Court case over the use of race in college admissions.

Asian-Americans, who make up 5 percent of the population, are the fastest growing racial group, with