Social Class, Culture, and Asian Social Positioning: Rethinking Education and Power in the New Millennium (2013)

Introduction: Americans in the Social Class DiscussionAsians, now outpacing Hispanics, have become the largest stream of new immigrants coming to the United States annually (Pew Research Center, 2012). Research on immigrant students in general has focused on reporting and explaining the success story, treating them as a single, undifferentiated homogenous group, especially at the secondary and post-secondary level (Kao & Thompson 2003; Sakamoto, Goyette & Kim 2009; Teranishi, 2010). This model minority image is further solidified by the reported high achievements among Asians in the annual Nations' Report Card and by researchers' use of Asians as comparison groups to explain the achievement gaps between Whites and Blacks and between Whites and Hispanics (e.g., Fryer & Levitt, 2004; Reardon & Galindo, 2009).While the Asian model minority myth continues to circulate in the media and in the field of education, researchers such as Lee, 2009; Li, 2003, 2004; Ng & Lee, 2007) have reported counternarratives or counter stories of low achieving students as well as the socio-emotional struggles of many high achieving students. Researchers on counternarratives also found that vast within-group diversities such as race, class, and gender exist among subgroups and that there is a critical need to attend to these diversities, rather than seeing Asians as homogenous group free of social and educational problems. In this article, I highlight one of the often neglected issues within the subgroups: the SES (socioeconomic status) or social class issue.As Asians, especially East Asians, have been constructed as high achieving educationally and hence socio-economically, poverty issue and SES gaps are often absent in the national discussion on poverty or social class issues. In a recent Pew Research Center discussion on the wealth gaps in the U. S. for example, Asians were not mentioned in the report (Kochhar, Fry & Taylor, 2011). In fact, there exists a huge diversity in the poverty rates among the subgroups, with some groups' poverty rates surpassing the national average. According to the US Census in 2010, while 15.1% of the general population lived in poverty, 12.6% of all persons lived in poverty, compared to 9.9% of all non-Hispanic White persons. Among the subgroups, the poverty rates of some South-East groups' poverty rates are even higher than the national average and those of the Hispanic (26.6%) and the Black (27.4%). For example, the poverty rate of the Hmong is 37.8%, Cambodian 29.3%, Laotian 18.5%, and Vietnamese 16.6%. The exclusions of Asians in public discussions on poverty has led to some scholars conclude that Asians presents a category crisis in the American conceptions of class and class mobility (Chang, 2003).The Impact of Social Class on AmericansSo does social class matter for immigrants? And how does it matter? According to Lareau & Conley (2010), class differences permeate the neighborhoods, the classrooms, the workplaces where we live our daily lives. Social classes matters in terms of how they raise their children, and how/what they socialize their children in daily lives, what kinds of schools they send their children to, and how they interact with schools. For children, social class matters in their early literacy development, their family resources and school achievement, and their college preparation, choices, and experiences. In terms of early literacy, our research on early reading achievement from kindergarten to third grade drawing on four waves of data from the ECLS-K class of 1998-1999, shows that a persistent achievement gaps between low-and high-SES groups, even among specific ethnic subgroups (Yang & Li, 2013).Social class also influences family resources, parental involvement, and academic achievement. Take two children from my qualitative research in two cities, Derin Liu (See Li, 2002) and Anthony Chan (Li, 2006) as examples. …