Chanya Bordeerat, who attends an alternative high school in Beaverton, has always tried her best in school. But she never felt like a “stereotypical Asian kid.”

The stereotypes she saw in her schools were that Asian American students were academic whizzes, pushed to success by parental expectations. They’re in band, she said, play sports or take on other extracurriculars.

Bordeerat, whose parents immigrated from Laos and Thailand, says she was a good student in elementary and middle school – she listened to teachers and got her work done – but she wasn’t the best in her class.

“I wasn’t the stereotypical Asian kid. The high achieving ones, you know?” Bordeerat said. “As much as I wanted to, I just didn’t have those opportunities.”

Oregon’s education data shows that the state’s Asian American students surpass their peers on nearly every academic metric. More of them perform at grade level in math and English than the state average, they have higher attendance rates and they’ve posted the highest four-year graduation rate, at 92%.

Nevertheless, advocates argue the state should collect more detailed data. The broad “Asian” category overgeneralizes the academic experience of students from dozens of distinct ethnicities, they say, and can mask needs that could be specific to some groups.

The generalized data can also contribute to the high-pressure “model minority” stereotype that Asian American students are doing well academically and discourage or disenfranchise students who need help, students, educators and activists say.

When Bordeerat ran into a problem with school work, she felt like she was on her own to solve it. Raising her hand in class was hard enough for a shy elementary-aged Bordeerat, and she felt too ashamed to ask a second time if she still didn’t understand a concept. Her parents spent long days running a restaurant and were limited in how they could help with school work. They struggled to read English, Bordeerat said, and by fourth grade her math lessons outpaced her parents’ formal education.

When she couldn’t figure something out, Bordeerat sometimes gave up and looked for homework answers online. Then she struggled to prove those skills on tests.

“When we look at the general statistic that Asian American students are performing well, we kind of overlook a lot of the challenges that a lot of other people within the community are facing,” said Annie Duan, a senior at Jesuit High School. “We fail to realize that there are students that are struggling and there are students that we need to center in academic spaces … and make sure that they’re getting the same academic support that other demographics may be receiving.”

Minnesota, Washington and some California institutions have adopted policies to collect detailed student outcomes by ethnic group, instead of relying on broad federally mandated categories for reporting student data by race. Federal legislation to force more detailed education data collection for Asian American and Pacific Islander students failed to advance in 2023, as did an attempt by Oregon lawmakers to increase ethnicity data collected by the Oregon Department of Education.

But that idea is again simmering ahead of the 2025 legislative session. A state Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs has made collecting more detailed data on ethnicities at the state level a priority. Senate Education Chair Michael Dembrow, a Portland Democrat who is set to retire before the upcoming session, is working on a legislative concept to address this issue, though it’ll be up to other lawmakers to see it through to the finish line.

“We want to be able to target those students who need support most,” Dembrow said. “If this can help us to do that, it’s necessary.”

TAKEAWAYS FROM OTHER STATES

The Oregon Department of Education, taking its cue from the U.S. Department of Education, requires school districts to report data for only six racial and ethnic categories: American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Black, Hispanic/Latino, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and white. Students can identify as a member of more than one group.

Districts can collect more detailed data, but it’s unclear how many do so. Beaverton, Portland and Hillsboro, three of the four districts with the largest number of Asian American students, don’t collect ethnicity data that could be used to tease out differences in student outcomes at the district level, spokespeople said.

Other states have gone further. In Minnesota, school districts report enrollment and outcome data that distinguishes Somali students from Nigerian students from other Black and African American students, allows some Indigenous students to identify their tribal affiliations and distinguishes outcomes for eight different Asian ethnicities. The data collection requirements, passed in 2016, sparked pushback from some parents, particularly in Chinese communities, who raised concerns that the data would be used for ethnic profiling, The Minnesota Star Tribune reported.

Minnesota’s data does show disparities across Asian American student groups. In 2023, the state’s large population of Hmong students, as well as smaller groups of Karen and Burmese students, were in clear need of additional academic support to reach science, reading and math proficiency levels demonstrated by students of other Asian ethnicities.

The Asian diaspora is not a monolith, said Sokho Eath, director of the Pacific Islander and Asian Family Center for Portland’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization. Southeast Asian students, for example, can have vastly different experiences from East Asian students, he said.

“The communities’ and families’ experiences really impact how a student will be able to access services or access the needs that they might have in the classroom,” Eath said.

Southeast Asian groups including the Iu Mien, Hmong, Cambodian and Lao communities, for example, have faced persistent barriers to joining the workforce or finding housing since immigrating to the U.S. as refugees following The Vietnam War era, Eath said. Students from these communities are often the first in their family to go to college, Eath said, and may not earn bachelor’s degrees at the same rates as other Asian groups.

Looking at Asian American student data as a whole doesn’t capture the unique needs of these students or other more recent immigrants and refugees, Eath said.

“That lack of data continues to perpetuate that invisibility that these students have, or the lack of cultural support,” Eath said. “I think that’s where it becomes more intergenerational.”

A report from Washington’s Southeast Asian American Education Coalition highlights how trends can vary. All but 6% of Washington’s Vietnamese students who started high school between 2013 and 2015 decided to pursue higher education, the report found. Among Hmong, Cambodian and Laotian students, closer to 30% did not pursue higher education.

Oregon has adopted sweeping standards for collecting health data that could lay the groundwork for how the state disaggregates information for students, Eath said. New rules require state health providers to collect data for dozens of ethnic categories, including around 15 different Asian ethnicities.

A 2023 legislative proposal from Democratic Reps. Hoa Nguyen of Southeast Portland and Ben Bowman of Tigard would have required education data collection to mirror that new health standard, but the bill never made it to a floor vote.

Nguyen said more specific data collection would not only help differentiate the experiences of Asian American students, but also could point to how the experience of Russian and Ukrainian students differs from other white students, or how many students who fall into the Black or African American category identify as African immigrants. The bill had widespread support from agencies representing communities of color including the Latino Network, the Coalition of Communities of Color and the Native American Youth and Family Center action fund.

The state recognizes the “substantial differences” between students and staff of specific cultural backgrounds, Oregon Department of Education spokesperson Peter Rudy said. The department is currently trying to collect more detailed tribal data for Indigenous students, he said.

The federal government is also expected to implement a requirement that states collect data on a new Middle Eastern/North African racial category by 2027, Rudy said, and the state wants to align any new data collection with that effort.

“I think (collecting more specific data) really is something that needs to be done for all of us for better resources,” said Araya Ouanesisouk, a student at Adrienne C. Nelson High School in the North Clackamas School District, who identifies as Filipino, Indian and Lao. “Not only for Asians but for everyone so that their experiences are represented and valued.”

STUDENTS WEIGH IN

Mannix Sourivong, an eighth grader at Hillsboro’s R.A. Brown Middle School, said his teachers do a good job of offering help to every student, no matter their race or ethnicity. But students sometimes lean into stereotypes, he said.

A friend in math class once asked Sourivong, who is Lao, for help, he said. They were surprised when Sourivong said it wasn’t his strong suit.

“They started reciting something about how Asians are always good at math,” Sourivong said. He felt stereotyped, like “he’s supposed to be different from other people.”

Victoria Huynh, a Vietnamese student at Portland’s Franklin High School, said the “model minority” myth is used to make the case that Asian American students don’t need as many resources since the vague data suggests they succeed academically. She thinks it overshadows the lived experiences, racism and struggles that Asian Americans have faced, and can be used to pit people of color against one another.

“It’s like erasure,” she said, “You’re erasing that part of being Asian and only looking at the good side.”

Duan, the Jesuit senior whose parents are from China, thinks stereotypes about Asian American students have also created a stigma around activities like math, chess and swimming that can make Asian American students want to avoid them. When Duan was in middle school, for example, she tried to spend more of her time focusing on art than on math, because she didn’t want to be typecast.

“Me, along with a lot of people, don’t want to be just defined by or just embody a stereotype that we’ve been placed into for so many years,” Duan said.

If schools collected more data about their students by race or ethnicity, it could curb racist assumptions about student identities, said Penelope Yang, sophomore at Parkrose High who is Hmong. Other students have assumed Yang was Chinese, she said.

“Chinese, Korean, Japanese are the main ones we’re all expected to be, even though we’re all different,” Yang said. “If the school were given more data on us, we could be more represented and we wouldn’t be expected to be just those three.”

That data could pinpoint ethnicities that schools could highlight in ethnic studies classes, students say, and could help schools recognize which ethnicities are not represented within their staff.

Tailored ethnic studies courses could help students “learn their culture, feel represented and feel like they’re seen,” said Gabe Gonzales, a Filipino-American Franklin High School graduate who now studies at Portland Community College.

“If there was a teacher that was Mien or Hmong or one of our (Southeast Asian) ethnicities, I feel like it would give us a deeper connection or make us feel a lot more comfortable to ask for help or talk to them about anything,” said Liberty Tzeo, a Iu Mien sophomore at Reynolds High.

FIRST TO EARN A DIPLOMA

Bordeerat, the Beaverton student whose parents immigrated from Thailand and Laos, shook off the weight of perfectionist academic expectations by middle school. As a younger student, she’d get mad at herself about her academic performance, worried that she was “not what an Asian American parent would want,” she remembers.

“I couldn’t be that person,” Bordeerat said. “I never told myself I wasn’t good enough, but it just wasn’t who I am.”

Bordeerat thinks the most useful thing schools could recognize is whether a student is from an immigrant household. Her friends growing up were students from various backgrounds who shared the experience of watching their immigrant parents struggle, of having to translate for them or help to decipher complex medical and insurance forms as early as elementary school.

That experience differentiated her from Asian American friends whose parents and households Bordeerat considered more “professional.” “Professional Asian” families got automatic respect for how they looked and how they spoke, Bordeerat said, while her parents were spoken down to and had to gain the respect of teachers and other parents.

“The school system definitely underestimated my parents a lot,” she said.

Bordeerat wishes her schools had done more to help her parents navigate the language barrier, she said. It wasn’t until middle school that she got any paperwork sent home in Thai, she said.

“It was never going to be a thing where my parents just eventually understood,” Bordeerat said. “Those really important emails about how I’m doing in class or something, how I did on my last test, they were still struggling to understand. I had to read my own report cards to them, you know?”

Things have gotten better for Bordeerat in high school, she said. She now attends the community school at Merlo Station, an option for students who want more support in smaller classes. She likes that classes are on a term schedule, instead of semesters, and plans to graduate early.

She intends to be the first person in her family to earn a traditional high school diploma. She’s eager to earn that accomplishment.

“I do kind of want to have that weight on my name,” Bordeerat said.

Sami Edge covers higher education and politics for The Oregonian. You can reach her at sedge@oregonian.com or (503) 260-3430.