Pacific Islander students who struggle with poverty, who are English-language learners increasingly likely to leave school with rudimentary language skills, who are at risk of dropping out, joining gangs, and remaining on the margins of society, and who are subjected to violence and discrimination on account of race, class, gender, ethnicity, or language. In other words, the facts tell a dramatically different story.‖ (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders—Facts, Not Fiction: Setting The Record Straight, The National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education (CARE) and The College Board, 2008, p. 3) http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/08-0608-AAPI.pdf
Further, a 2011 post by Allie Grasgreen for Inside Higher Ed noted that, according to higher ed officials, ―. . . Asian students‘ geographic region of origin can be a significant predictor of what type of college they‘ll attend and whether they‘ll succeed; and how the general public continues to wrongly believe that Asian students -- the ―model minority‖ -- excel in all aspects in college.‖ According to Grasgreen‘s posting, Yet overall rates of growth do not fairly represent the complexity of Asian demography and educational attainment. The U.S. Census Bureau has identified 48 different ethnic groups within the AAPI racial category, and some fare far less well than others. For example, about half of Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander students (such as Vietnamese and Native Hawaiian) will leave college without earning a degree; they are three to five times more likely to drop out than are East Asian (such as Japanese and Chinese) and South Asian (such as Korean and Indian) students.
(Allie Grasgreen, ―New Voice for Asian Students,‖ Inside Higher Ed, June 28, 2011.) http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/06/28/new_group_formed_to_repr esent_asian_pacific_islander_colleges
Similarly, Jennifer Gonzalez, reporting in The Chronicle of Higher Education, noted that ―In fact, nearly half of all Asian-American and Pacific Islander students, known as AAPI students, attend community colleges, and many of their ethnic groups have some of the lowest high-school-graduation and college-degree-attainment rates in the United States.‖ (Jennifer Gonzalez, ―Asian-American and Pacific Islander Students Are Not Monolithically Successful, Report Says,‖ The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 27, 2011.) http://chronicle.com/article/AsianAmericanPacific/128061/
As Peter Sacks put it in an interview about his book Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, ―Instead of a system of equal educational opportunity, we are creating a system of educational haves and have-nots that increasingly is based upon birthright. Yes, a system based upon class origins.‖—Scott Jaschik, ―Tearing Down the Gates,‖ Inside Higher Ed, May 9, 2007. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/09/sacks
Princeton Historian Anthony Grafton cited the finding of economist Nancy Folbre that ―of every 100 9th graders, 69 will graduate from high school 99