Study Looks Into Future for Southeast Asian Students

By now, the success stories of Southeast Asian refugee students are almost commonplace: the student who survived gunfire or a leaky boat in an escape; who spent months in primitive, overcrowded camps; who arrived in the United States with no money and no English skills, all to end up several years later at high school graduation as valedictorian.

Yet recently, almost as a counter to the too-good-to-be-true image of academic prowess, there have been stories about Southeast Asian youth gangs, about social alienation as a consequence of being caught between the culture of their homeland and that of their new country.

Lost between the two extremes is the fact that the majority of the more than half-million Indochinese youngsters in America--with by far the largest number in Southern California--are neither academic superstars nor juvenile delinquents but simply doing remarkably well, given the traumatic way they entered the United States.

Recognizing Differences

Often lost as well is the need for school officials and the public to understand that there are important cultural and religious differences between the ethnic groups lumped together as Southeast Asians, that without an approach recognizing Vietnamese as distinct from Khmer (Cambodian), and Khmer as distinct from Lao, the students will not reach their full potential.

Those are the major conclusions in a comprehensive study just completed on the educational success of Southeast Asian refugee youths by two sociology professors from San Diego State University.

The study was paid for by the federal Office of Refugee Settlement in an effort to find out whether the second generation of Southeast Asians, who are almost all children of poverty, is likely to become economically self-sufficient through success in school and not require continued public welfare. While not yet officially public, the results have been presented, in part or whole, to many educators throughout San Diego County and Southern California in small seminars as a way to begin improving existing programs.

“We looked at social adjustments and educational attainment to measure the potential self-sufficiency since most parents (of the students) are on welfare assistance,” Ruben G. Rumbaut, associate professor of sociology, said in an interview.

“The problem is not an either-or,” Kenji Ima, Rumbaut’s colleague on the study, added. “In general, most students are adapting well, yet there are problems of transition (somewhat) different for each group that need to be addressed earlier, although they are not chronic.”

“For the most part . . . we would ask the question ‘when’ and not ‘if’ they will leave the welfare system,” the two professors conclude in their report. Both Rumbaut and Ima strongly criticized a recent study by the research group California Tomorrow that said the vast majority of immigrant students, Southeast Asian, Latino and others, are at risk. The professors said that the majority of all groups are doing “surprisingly well” given the initial obstacles they face.

For their research, Rumbaut and Ima followed almost 600 youths whose families had earlier been examined, between 1975 and 1983, as part of a comprehensive UC San Diego study on Indochinese refugees and therefore whose educational records could be obtained through the San Diego Unified School District.

“And because San Diego has the third- or fourth-largest concentration of (Southeast Asian) refugees in the nation, we believe that the results can be generalized nationally,” Rumbaut said.

Among the findings:

The Southeast Asian students as a group systematically outperform native-born American students on grade-point averages, despite initial or even persistent English language handicaps.

Yet differences exist within the various ethnic groups. Vietnamese score the highest grade-point averages, followed by ethnic Chinese Vietnamese, Hmong, Khmer and Lao students. The differences result partly from length of time spent in the United States, from the number of two-parent families, and the social class of the family in their home country.

Almost 90% of the Vietnamese students come from two-parent families as opposed to just 49% of the Khmer. Almost 95% of the Vietnamese were from urban environments compared to 90% of the Hmong and Khmer coming from rural areas, meaning that Vietnamese parents generally completed more years of education.

“Remember that the Hmong, Lao and Khmer came later (than the first Vietnamese), and with any refugees, the later the year of entry, the education level goes down,” said Rumbaut, who is co-authoring a book on immigration to America scheduled for publication next year.

In addition, younger students do better than older students if both have been in the country the same length of time. Vietnamese, Chinese Vietnamese, and Hmong exhibit more cultural discipline for education than do the Lao and Khmer. Among all groups, the less initial Americanization among families, the greater the educational performance.

All Southeast Asian groups have less trouble with the law than other ethnic groups, but Vietnamese and Lao tend to have more police contact than Khmer and Hmong due to quicker reaction to racial baiting, which is the main reason for school-related conflicts.

The Southeast Asians as a group score well above national achievement norms on standardized mathematics tests. Their English proficiency test scores, while quite low initially, improve over time. But again, Vietnamese score higher than other ethnic groups for reasons similar to those explaining grade-point differences.

The standardized testing shows that basic skills among the various Asian groups are similar to those of blacks, Latinos and other ethnics. But grade-point differences show that the refugees put a far greater effort into translating the skills into achievement by working hard in school, the professors said.

Khmer are the most at-risk of dropping out among Southeast Asians, in part because of the family disorganization caused by the severe trauma of national slaughter during the Pol Pot regime of the late 1970s.

Art Pegas, principal at El Cajon Valley High School, said that all foreign-born students appear to be more motivated than native-born Americans. “I don’t think they have a natural inclination to books (more than other groups) but simply understand that education here is a gift that they should appreciate, that it was a luxury in their homeland,” said Pegas, whose school has one of the county’s largest concentration of refugee students outside the San Diego district. Almost 81% of the county’s Indochinese refugees attend school in the San Diego district.

Rumbaut said that perhaps native-born black and Latino students appear to be at greater risk than the refugees, despite the difficulty for refugees of adjusting to a new country, because of lower expectations asked of them by society and a less-cohesive family structure.

Despite overall success in school, career aspirations differ among Southeast Asian ethnic groups, with more Vietnamese and Hmong expressing aspirations to professional or para-professional and more Lao and Khmer students keyed to office work or blue-collar positions.

But because of cultural imperatives to marry early and because of a lack of role models, few Hmong students go on to college even though they do well in high school, leaving them with fewer occupational options. And while Vietnamese are finding white-collar jobs, their timidity in taking college courses in humanities and the social sciences--courses requiring strong general English language skills--means they may not advance quickly because of a lack of overall English fluency and comfort level.

In a separate document, Rumbaut and Ima outline numerous suggestions to secondary school officials for better results in teaching Southeast Asian students.

In particular, the authors argue for a revamping of English language programs. They ask that reading and critical thinking be emphasized in such programs far more than at present, “in light of the low language scores and the traditional Asian emphasis on rote learning.

“The most difficult areas are reading, writing, and the least of all is math. It will take at least five years on the average for the foreign-born to comprehend well in the English language; even afterward, they will remain behind native English speaking students.”

They also recommend that older refugee students be given English training that initially emphasizes survival skills rather than academics, because students with poor educational backgrounds will otherwise become frustrated.

Ima and Rumbaut also ask that special counseling be available to Khmer youth because of the trauma of living through the Pol Pot genocide, with the consequent breakup of families and nightmarish memories. They would like more occupational counseling especially for the Hmong.