FYI.
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Education Week
Published Online: September 30, 2008
Published in Print: October 1, 2008
Testing Expert Sees ‘Illusions of Progress’ Under NCLB
By Scott J. Cech
Washington
Harvard University researcher Daniel M. Koretz has some good news and some bad news for policymakers looking ahead to the reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind Act: The nation’s K-12 students are now attending Lake Wobegon schools.
Because of rampantly inflated standardized test scores, Mr. Koretz contended at a panel discussion here last week, all children seem to be above average, as in the fictional town made famous by the radio personality Garrison Keillor—or at least better academically than they actually are.
“We know that we are creating, in many cases, with our test-based accountability system, illusions of progress,” Mr. Koretz told a roomful of policymakers and educators at a Sept. 22 forum hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.
Mr. Koretz, a professor of education at Harvard’s graduate school of education who has written a new book, Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, said that under the No Child Left Behind law, widespread teaching to the test, strategic reallocation of teaching talent, and other means of gaming the high-stakes testing system have conspired to produce scores on state standardized tests that are substantially better than students’ mastery of the material.
“If you tell people that performance on that tested sample is what matters, that’s what they worry about, so you can get inappropriate responses in the classroom and inflated test scores,” he said.
Mr. Koretz pointed to research in the 1990s on the state standardized test then used in Kentucky, which was designed to measure similar aspects of proficiency as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federally sponsored testing program often called “the nation’s report card.”
Scores on both tests should have moved more or less in lock step, he said. But instead, 4th grade reading scores rose sharply on the Kentucky Instructional Results Information System test, which resembled an NCLB-test prototype, from 1992 to 1994, while sliding slightly on NAEP over the same period.
“If you’re a parent in Kentucky, what you care about is whether your kids can read, not how well they can do on the state test,” Mr. Koretz said. “And the national assessment told us that, in fact, the gains in the state test were bogus.”
Shortage of Studies
In his book, Mr. Koretz says a similar situation occurred during the “Texas miracle” of the 1990s: Minority students posted large gains on the high-stakes Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, but much smaller ones on NAEP.
Mr. Koretz said the relative dearth to date of comparative studies on large-scale state assessments isn’t for lack of trying. He said he and other scholars have often been rebuffed after approaching officials about the possibility of studying their assessment systems.
“There have not been a lot of studies of this,” Mr. Koretz said, “for the simple reason that it’s politically rather hard to do, to come to a state chief and say, ‘I’d like the chance to see whether your test scores are inflated.’?”
Bella Rosenberg, an education consultant and a longtime special assistant to Albert Shanker, the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, echoed many of Mr. Koretz’s critiques.
“This is officially sanctioned malpractice—if we did this in health, in medical practice, we’d all be dead by now,” she said of the testing system under the NCLB law. “The fact is, we’re doing a great job of obscuring instead of illuminating achievement gaps.”
But fellow panelist Roberto Rodriguez, a senior education adviser to U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee who helped shepherd the NCLB law through Congress in 2001, cautioned against “throwing the baby out with the bath water.”
While a more effective accountability system “needs to be a goal, I would argue, of the upcoming reauthorization of the [Elementary and Secondary Education Act],” he said, that “summative assessment is a critically important area of accountability.” The No Child Left Behind law is the current version of the ESEA, first enacted in 1965.
On the tug of war between advocates of the current system and detractors who prefer that tests better reflect the course content that students are supposed to be mastering, Mr. Rodriguez said, “I think we can have our cake and eat it too.”
Incentives for Instruction
But Mr. Koretz said some parts of the nearly 7-year-old NCLB law need to be fundamentally reworked.
“I think we ought to mandate, as part of No Child Left Behind, independent evaluations of state accountability programs,” he said. “There is nobody involved in this system who has an incentive to look for good instruction anymore—all the incentives are lined up in one direction: Increase scores on the summative tests at any costs.
“We need to create a system in which somebody … has incentives to make sure we’re not just gaming the system.”
Williamson M. Evers, the U.S. Department of Education’s assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development, who attended the panel discussion, suggested that any changes to the ESEA law should preserve its essence.
“Some are proposing changes in accountability that remove consequences; this would make it accountability in name only,” Mr. Evers said in an e-mail. “Results should be comparable statewide, or parents, taxpayers, and teachers themselves can’t tell how students are doing.”
Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, praised the points Mr. Koretz makes about testing under NCLB in his book, and suggested steps to address the law’s flaws.
“Washington should first ensure that states use a common benchmark that defines proficient student achievement in reading, writing, and math,” Mr. Fuller, who is the director of the Policy Analysis for California Education research center based at Berkeley and Stanford University, said in an e-mail. “Second, neo-No Child policies should ensure that each state sets a valid way of tracking student growth over time, and provide states the resources to build necessary data systems.”
Vol. 28, Issue 06, Page 8
Thursday, October 16, 2008
A Somali influx unsettles Latino meatpackers (From International Herald Tribune)
Interesting developments in Nebraska.--Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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International Herald Tribune
A Somali influx unsettles Latino meatpackers
By Kirk Semple
Thursday, October 16, 2008
GRAND ISLAND, Nebraska: Like many workers at the meatpacking plant here, Raul Garcia, a Mexican-American, has watched with some discomfort as hundreds of Somali immigrants have moved to town in the past couple of years, many of them to fill jobs once held by Latino workers taken away in immigration raids.
Garcia has been particularly troubled by the Somalis' demand that they be allowed special breaks for prayers that are obligatory for devout Muslims. The breaks, he said, would inconvenience everyone else.
"The Latino is very humble," said Garcia, 73, who has worked at the plant, owned by JBS U.S.A. Inc., since 1994. "But they are arrogant," he said of the Somali workers. "They act like the United States owes them."
Garcia was among more than 1,000 Latino and other workers who protested a decision last month by the plant's management to cut their work day — and their pay — by 15 minutes to give scores of Somali workers time for evening prayers.
After several days of strikes and disruptions, the plant's management abandoned the plan.
But the dispute peeled back a layer of civility in this southern Nebraska city of 47,000, revealing slow-burning racial and ethnic tensions that have been an unexpected aftermath of the enforcement raids at workplaces by federal immigration authorities.
Grand Island is among a half dozen or so cities where discord has arisen with the arrival of Somali workers, many of whom were recruited by employers from elsewhere in the United States after immigration raids sharply reduced their Latino work forces.
The Somalis are by and large in this country legally as political refugees and therefore are not singled out by immigration authorities.
In some of these places, including Grand Island, this newest wave of immigrant workers has had the effect of unifying the other ethnic populations against the Somalis and has also diverted some of the longstanding hostility toward Latino immigrants among some native-born residents.
"Every wave of immigrants has had to struggle to get assimilated," said Margaret Hornady, the mayor of Grand Island and a longtime resident of Nebraska. "Right now, it's so volatile."
The federal immigration crackdown has hit meat- and poultry-packing plants particularly hard, with more than 2,000 immigrant workers in at least nine places detained since 2006 in major raids, most on immigration violations.
Struggling to fill the grueling low-wage jobs that attract few American workers, the plants have placed advertisements in immigrant newspapers and circulated fliers in immigrant neighborhoods.
Some companies, like Swift & Company, which owned the plant in Grand Island until being bought up by the Brazilian conglomerate JBS last year, have made a particular pitch for Somalis because of their legal status. Tens of thousands of Somali refugees fleeing civil war have settled in the United States since the 1990s, with the largest concentration in Minnesota.
But the companies are learning that in trying to solve one problem they have created another.
Early last month, about 220 Somali Muslims walked off the job at a JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, saying the company had prevented them from observing their prayer schedule. (More than 100 of the workers were later fired.)
Days later, a poultry company in Minnesota agreed to allow Muslim workers prayer breaks and the right to refuse handling pork products, settling a lawsuit filed by nine Somali workers.
In August, the management of a Tyson chicken plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, designated a Muslim holy day as a paid holiday, acceding to a demand by Somali workers. The plant had originally agreed to substitute the Muslim holy day for Labor Day, but reinstated Labor Day after a barrage of criticism from non-Muslims.
In some workplaces, newly arrived Somali Muslims have not protested their working conditions. That has been the case at Agriprocessors, a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. About 150 Somali Muslims have found jobs there, most of them recruited by a staffing company after the plant lost about half its work force in an immigration raid in May.
Jack Shandley, a senior vice president for JBS U.S.A., said in an e-mail message that "integrating persons of diverse backgrounds regularly presents new and different issues."
"Religious accommodation is only one workplace diversity issue that has been addressed," Shandley said.
Nationwide, employment discrimination complaints by Muslim workers have more than doubled in the past decade, to 607 in the 2007 fiscal year, from 285 in the 1998 fiscal year, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which has sent representatives to Grand Island to interview Somali workers.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employers to discriminate based on religion and says that employers must "reasonably accommodate" religious practices. But the act offers some exceptions, including instances when adjustments would cause "undue hardship" on the company's business interests.
The new tensions here extend well beyond the walls of the plant. Scratch beneath Grand Island's surface and there is resentment, discomfort and mistrust everywhere, some residents say — between the white community and the various immigrant communities; between the older immigrant communities, like the Latinos, and the newer ones, namely the Somalis and the Sudanese, another refugee community that has grown here in recent years; and between the Somalis, who are largely Muslim, and the Sudanese, who are largely Christian.
In dozens of interviews here, white, Latino and other residents seemed mostly bewildered, if not downright suspicious, of the Somalis, very few of whom speak English.
"I kind of admire all the effort they make to follow that religion, but sometimes you have to adapt to the workplace," said Fidencio Sandoval, a plant worker born in Mexico who has become an American citizen. "A new culture comes in with their demands and says, 'This is what we want.' This is kind of new for me."
Hornady, the mayor, suggested somewhat apologetically that she had been having difficulty adjusting to the presence of Somalis. She said she found the sight of Somali women, many of whom wear Muslim headdresses, or hijabs, "startling."
"I'm sorry, but after 9/11, it gives some of us a turn," she said.
Not only do the hijabs suggest female subjugation, Hornady said, but the sight of Muslims in town made her think of Osama bin Laden and the attacks on the United States.
"I know that that's horrible and that's prejudice," she said. "I'm working very hard on it."
She added, "Aren't a lot of thoughtful Americans struggling with this?"
For their part, the Somalis say they feel aggrieved and not particularly welcome.
"A lot of people look at you weird — they judge you," said Abdisamad Jama, 22, a Somali who moved to Grand Island two years ago to work as an interpreter at the plant and now freelances. "Or sometimes they will say, 'Go back to your country.' "
Founded in the mid-19th century by German immigrants, Grand Island gradually became more diverse in the mid- and late-20th century with the arrival of Latino workers, mainly Mexicans.
The Latinos came at first to work in the agricultural fields; later arrivals found employment in the meatpacking plant. Refugees from Laos and, in the past few years, Sudan followed, and many of them also found work in the plant, which is now the city's largest employer, with about 2,700 workers.
In December 2006, in an event that would deeply affect the city and alter its uneasy balance of ethnicities, immigration authorities raided the plant and took away more than 200 illegal Latino workers. Another 200 or so workers quit soon afterward.
The raid was one of six sweeps by U.S. agents at plants owned by Swift, gutting the company of about 1,200 workers in one day and forcing the plants to slow their operations.
Many of the Somalis who eventually arrived to fill those jobs were practicing Muslims and their faith obliges them to pray at five fixed times every day. In Grand Island, the workers would grab prayer time whenever they could, during scheduled rest periods or on restroom breaks. But during the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims fast in daylight hours and break their fast in a ritualistic ceremony at sundown. A more formal accommodation of their needs was necessary, the Somali workers said.
Last year, the Somalis here demanded time off for the Ramadan ceremony. The company refused, saying it could not afford to let so many workers step away from the production line at one time. Dozens of Somalis quit, though they eventually returned to work.
The situation repeated itself last month. Dennis Sydow, the plant's vice president and general manager, said a delegation of Somali workers approached him on Sept. 10 about allowing them to take their dinner break at 7:30 p.m., near sundown, rather than at the normal time of 8 to 8:30.
Sydow rejected the request, saying the production line would slow to a crawl and the Somalis' co-workers would unfairly have to take up the slack.
The Somalis said their co-workers did not offer a lot of support. "Latinos were sometimes saying, 'Don't pray, don't pray,' " said Abdifatah Warsame, 21.
After the Somalis went out on strike on Sept. 15, the plant's management and the union brokered a deal the next day that would have shifted the dinner break to 7:45 p.m., close enough to sundown to satisfy the Somalis. Because of the plant's complex scheduling rules, the new dinner break would have also required an earlier end to the shift, potentially cutting the work day by 15 minutes.
Word of the accord spread quickly throughout the non-Somali work force, though the reports were infected with false rumors of pay raises for the Somalis and more severe cuts in the work day for everyone.
In a counterprotest on Sept. 17, more than 1,000 Latino and Sudanese workers lined up alongside white workers in opposition to the concessions to the Somalis.
"We had complaints from the whites, Hispanics and Sudanese," said Abdalla Omar, 26, one of the Somali strikers.
The union and the plant management backed down, reverting to the original dinner schedule. More than 70 Somalis, including Omar and Warsame, stormed out of the plant and did not return; they either quit or were fired.
Since then, Ramadan has ended and work has returned to normal at the plant, but most everyone — management, the union and the employees — says the root causes of the disturbances have not been fully addressed. A sizeable Somali contingent remains employed at the factory — Somali leaders say the number is about 100; the union puts the figure at more than 300, making similar disruptions possible next year.
"Right now, this is a real kindling box," said Daniel Hoppes, president of the local chapter of the union, the United Food and Commercial Workers.
Xawa Ahmed, 48, a Somali, moved to Grand Island from Minnesota last month to help organize the Somali community. A big part of her work, Ahmed said, will be to help demystify the Somalis who remain.
"We're trying to make people understand why we do these things, why we practice this religion, why we live in America," she said. "There's a lot of misunderstanding."
--------------------------------------------------------
International Herald Tribune
A Somali influx unsettles Latino meatpackers
By Kirk Semple
Thursday, October 16, 2008
GRAND ISLAND, Nebraska: Like many workers at the meatpacking plant here, Raul Garcia, a Mexican-American, has watched with some discomfort as hundreds of Somali immigrants have moved to town in the past couple of years, many of them to fill jobs once held by Latino workers taken away in immigration raids.
Garcia has been particularly troubled by the Somalis' demand that they be allowed special breaks for prayers that are obligatory for devout Muslims. The breaks, he said, would inconvenience everyone else.
"The Latino is very humble," said Garcia, 73, who has worked at the plant, owned by JBS U.S.A. Inc., since 1994. "But they are arrogant," he said of the Somali workers. "They act like the United States owes them."
Garcia was among more than 1,000 Latino and other workers who protested a decision last month by the plant's management to cut their work day — and their pay — by 15 minutes to give scores of Somali workers time for evening prayers.
After several days of strikes and disruptions, the plant's management abandoned the plan.
But the dispute peeled back a layer of civility in this southern Nebraska city of 47,000, revealing slow-burning racial and ethnic tensions that have been an unexpected aftermath of the enforcement raids at workplaces by federal immigration authorities.
Grand Island is among a half dozen or so cities where discord has arisen with the arrival of Somali workers, many of whom were recruited by employers from elsewhere in the United States after immigration raids sharply reduced their Latino work forces.
The Somalis are by and large in this country legally as political refugees and therefore are not singled out by immigration authorities.
In some of these places, including Grand Island, this newest wave of immigrant workers has had the effect of unifying the other ethnic populations against the Somalis and has also diverted some of the longstanding hostility toward Latino immigrants among some native-born residents.
"Every wave of immigrants has had to struggle to get assimilated," said Margaret Hornady, the mayor of Grand Island and a longtime resident of Nebraska. "Right now, it's so volatile."
The federal immigration crackdown has hit meat- and poultry-packing plants particularly hard, with more than 2,000 immigrant workers in at least nine places detained since 2006 in major raids, most on immigration violations.
Struggling to fill the grueling low-wage jobs that attract few American workers, the plants have placed advertisements in immigrant newspapers and circulated fliers in immigrant neighborhoods.
Some companies, like Swift & Company, which owned the plant in Grand Island until being bought up by the Brazilian conglomerate JBS last year, have made a particular pitch for Somalis because of their legal status. Tens of thousands of Somali refugees fleeing civil war have settled in the United States since the 1990s, with the largest concentration in Minnesota.
But the companies are learning that in trying to solve one problem they have created another.
Early last month, about 220 Somali Muslims walked off the job at a JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, saying the company had prevented them from observing their prayer schedule. (More than 100 of the workers were later fired.)
Days later, a poultry company in Minnesota agreed to allow Muslim workers prayer breaks and the right to refuse handling pork products, settling a lawsuit filed by nine Somali workers.
In August, the management of a Tyson chicken plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, designated a Muslim holy day as a paid holiday, acceding to a demand by Somali workers. The plant had originally agreed to substitute the Muslim holy day for Labor Day, but reinstated Labor Day after a barrage of criticism from non-Muslims.
In some workplaces, newly arrived Somali Muslims have not protested their working conditions. That has been the case at Agriprocessors, a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. About 150 Somali Muslims have found jobs there, most of them recruited by a staffing company after the plant lost about half its work force in an immigration raid in May.
Jack Shandley, a senior vice president for JBS U.S.A., said in an e-mail message that "integrating persons of diverse backgrounds regularly presents new and different issues."
"Religious accommodation is only one workplace diversity issue that has been addressed," Shandley said.
Nationwide, employment discrimination complaints by Muslim workers have more than doubled in the past decade, to 607 in the 2007 fiscal year, from 285 in the 1998 fiscal year, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which has sent representatives to Grand Island to interview Somali workers.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employers to discriminate based on religion and says that employers must "reasonably accommodate" religious practices. But the act offers some exceptions, including instances when adjustments would cause "undue hardship" on the company's business interests.
The new tensions here extend well beyond the walls of the plant. Scratch beneath Grand Island's surface and there is resentment, discomfort and mistrust everywhere, some residents say — between the white community and the various immigrant communities; between the older immigrant communities, like the Latinos, and the newer ones, namely the Somalis and the Sudanese, another refugee community that has grown here in recent years; and between the Somalis, who are largely Muslim, and the Sudanese, who are largely Christian.
In dozens of interviews here, white, Latino and other residents seemed mostly bewildered, if not downright suspicious, of the Somalis, very few of whom speak English.
"I kind of admire all the effort they make to follow that religion, but sometimes you have to adapt to the workplace," said Fidencio Sandoval, a plant worker born in Mexico who has become an American citizen. "A new culture comes in with their demands and says, 'This is what we want.' This is kind of new for me."
Hornady, the mayor, suggested somewhat apologetically that she had been having difficulty adjusting to the presence of Somalis. She said she found the sight of Somali women, many of whom wear Muslim headdresses, or hijabs, "startling."
"I'm sorry, but after 9/11, it gives some of us a turn," she said.
Not only do the hijabs suggest female subjugation, Hornady said, but the sight of Muslims in town made her think of Osama bin Laden and the attacks on the United States.
"I know that that's horrible and that's prejudice," she said. "I'm working very hard on it."
She added, "Aren't a lot of thoughtful Americans struggling with this?"
For their part, the Somalis say they feel aggrieved and not particularly welcome.
"A lot of people look at you weird — they judge you," said Abdisamad Jama, 22, a Somali who moved to Grand Island two years ago to work as an interpreter at the plant and now freelances. "Or sometimes they will say, 'Go back to your country.' "
Founded in the mid-19th century by German immigrants, Grand Island gradually became more diverse in the mid- and late-20th century with the arrival of Latino workers, mainly Mexicans.
The Latinos came at first to work in the agricultural fields; later arrivals found employment in the meatpacking plant. Refugees from Laos and, in the past few years, Sudan followed, and many of them also found work in the plant, which is now the city's largest employer, with about 2,700 workers.
In December 2006, in an event that would deeply affect the city and alter its uneasy balance of ethnicities, immigration authorities raided the plant and took away more than 200 illegal Latino workers. Another 200 or so workers quit soon afterward.
The raid was one of six sweeps by U.S. agents at plants owned by Swift, gutting the company of about 1,200 workers in one day and forcing the plants to slow their operations.
Many of the Somalis who eventually arrived to fill those jobs were practicing Muslims and their faith obliges them to pray at five fixed times every day. In Grand Island, the workers would grab prayer time whenever they could, during scheduled rest periods or on restroom breaks. But during the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims fast in daylight hours and break their fast in a ritualistic ceremony at sundown. A more formal accommodation of their needs was necessary, the Somali workers said.
Last year, the Somalis here demanded time off for the Ramadan ceremony. The company refused, saying it could not afford to let so many workers step away from the production line at one time. Dozens of Somalis quit, though they eventually returned to work.
The situation repeated itself last month. Dennis Sydow, the plant's vice president and general manager, said a delegation of Somali workers approached him on Sept. 10 about allowing them to take their dinner break at 7:30 p.m., near sundown, rather than at the normal time of 8 to 8:30.
Sydow rejected the request, saying the production line would slow to a crawl and the Somalis' co-workers would unfairly have to take up the slack.
The Somalis said their co-workers did not offer a lot of support. "Latinos were sometimes saying, 'Don't pray, don't pray,' " said Abdifatah Warsame, 21.
After the Somalis went out on strike on Sept. 15, the plant's management and the union brokered a deal the next day that would have shifted the dinner break to 7:45 p.m., close enough to sundown to satisfy the Somalis. Because of the plant's complex scheduling rules, the new dinner break would have also required an earlier end to the shift, potentially cutting the work day by 15 minutes.
Word of the accord spread quickly throughout the non-Somali work force, though the reports were infected with false rumors of pay raises for the Somalis and more severe cuts in the work day for everyone.
In a counterprotest on Sept. 17, more than 1,000 Latino and Sudanese workers lined up alongside white workers in opposition to the concessions to the Somalis.
"We had complaints from the whites, Hispanics and Sudanese," said Abdalla Omar, 26, one of the Somali strikers.
The union and the plant management backed down, reverting to the original dinner schedule. More than 70 Somalis, including Omar and Warsame, stormed out of the plant and did not return; they either quit or were fired.
Since then, Ramadan has ended and work has returned to normal at the plant, but most everyone — management, the union and the employees — says the root causes of the disturbances have not been fully addressed. A sizeable Somali contingent remains employed at the factory — Somali leaders say the number is about 100; the union puts the figure at more than 300, making similar disruptions possible next year.
"Right now, this is a real kindling box," said Daniel Hoppes, president of the local chapter of the union, the United Food and Commercial Workers.
Xawa Ahmed, 48, a Somali, moved to Grand Island from Minnesota last month to help organize the Somali community. A big part of her work, Ahmed said, will be to help demystify the Somalis who remain.
"We're trying to make people understand why we do these things, why we practice this religion, why we live in America," she said. "There's a lot of misunderstanding."
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Why don't we ever hear about the Asian-American vote? (from Slate.com)
Indeed a segment of the population that must pay attention to. -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
----------------------------------------------------------------
Chinese Democracy
Why don't we ever hear about the Asian-American vote?
By Christopher Beam
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008, at 4:57 PM ET
Read the rest of the Swingers series.
Asian-American voters
Presidential campaigns can feel like an informal census. As the candidates traverse the country, they pander to Latino voters, African-American voters, working-class white voters, older voters, younger voters, elite-college-graduate voters … everyone gets to feel important.
Except Asian-American voters. Somehow, amid all the demographic navel-gazing, the country's third-largest, fastest-growing minority—now 15.2 million people, or 5 percent of the population—gets overlooked.
Not this week. Or, more accurately, not for several hours on Tuesday. That's when a nonprofit group called Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics held a news conference excitingly titled "Political Role of Asian Americans Examined" while the Obama campaign scheduled interviews about its outreach efforts to Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters. The message from both events: Asian voters can make a difference. Attention must be paid.
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More about that later. But first, a question: Why, with all our obsessing over demographics, do we hear so little about the Asian-American vote?
The most obvious reason is size. Asian-Americans make up only 5 percent of the U.S. population. (Note: "Asian-American" here, and at the press conference Tuesday, is defined in the broadest possible sense, to include Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Thai, Filipino, Indian, Pakistani, and Indonesian, among others.) Fifteen million people is a lot, but not compared with other ethnic groups. African-Americans now number 38.4 million, according to the 2006 census; Latinos boast 44.4 million. Plus, Asian-Americans have the lowest proportion of eligible voters compared with the populations (about 52 percent) of any racial group. And of those, very few (about 50 percent in 2006) actually register to vote. So we're talking about 7 million eligible voters and about 3 million actual voters.
But wait—it gets worse! The five states with the largest Asian populations are, in order, California, New York, Texas, Hawaii, and New Jersey. Not exactly the swingiest places around. There are two big exceptions: Nevada and Virginia. Both states have rapidly growing Asian-American populations—they constitute 6 percent of eligible voters in Virginia, possibly enough to swing a competitive presidential race.
Another difficulty is the Asian-American community's heterogeneity. Koreans and Chinese and Vietnamese aren't necessarily more or less fractured than Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and Cubans. But, unlike Latinos, they speak different languages. Campaigns can easily cut Spanish-language ads to run nationwide; it's tougher to run ads in Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, etc. (Only about 60 percent of Asian-Americans speak English.) Then you'd need to target ethnic media, which is costly and, on the national level, of marginal benefit.
Then there is the difficulty of targeting Asian-American issues. This is a problem in ethnic politics generally—opinions on immigration, for example, are more diverse among blacks than among the interest groups that lobby on their behalf—but it is especially acute among Asian-Americans. Yes, there are general bread-and-butter issues like health care and education for which platitudes about access and opportunity are useful. There are also hyperspecific concerns that are not ideal campaign talking points: Chinese care a lot about U.S.-China relations. Taiwanese care about China-Taiwan. Vietnamese favor anti-Communist policies. And Filipinos often vote based on whoever supports benefits for Filipino veterans of World War II. Plus, segments of the Asian-American community often disagree—as Taiwanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans do on Taiwan, for example, or Pakistanis and Indians on Kashmir.
Finally, as if demographics and geography and message weren't challenging enough, there is partisanship. Or, more precisely, lack thereof. African-American voters break heavily toward Democrats; Latino voters (with the exception of Cubans) are also largely Democratic. Asian-Americans, meanwhile, can't make up their minds. About a third of them are Republican, a third Democratic, and a third unaffiliated. This last group consists largely of immigrants—more than half of Asian-American were born overseas—who often won't develop party loyalty for another generation.
An argument can be made—and is—that excessive partisanship is exactly the problem with a lot of ethnic politics. It goes something like this: Democrats take black voters for granted, Republicans don't even try to win them over, and the result is that they have less influence than they would if they had less party loyalty.
But an argument can also be made that partisanship enhances influence. On the national level, the most powerful groups—unions, African-Americans, evangelicals—are often the most partisan. A pandering politician wants to maximize the efficiency of his pandering. So if the strategy is to mobilize the base, it makes more sense to court a loyal group. (Plus, it gets you more media coverage. The one time the national media noticed Asian-Americans this election cycle was when Hillary Clinton won 75 percent of their votes in California.)
So what are Asian-Americans planning to do about their underwhelming influence? One idea is something called the 80-20 Initiative, a political action committee dedicated to persuading 80 percent of Asian-Americans to vote for one side. Since 2000, the group has endorsed a candidate and asked Asians to support him or her. (They endorsed Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. In the 2008 primaries, it was Hillary; in the general, it's Obama.) The goal of the group, the brainchild of former Delaware Lt. Gov. S.B. Woo, is eventually to turn the Asian-American vote into a bloc vote that can swing both ways, Republican or Democrat.
It's a quixotic enterprise. On the one hand, it's an artificial way to replicate the normally organic process of party identification—and so far, it hasn't quite worked. "You can't get to 80-20 by making a targeted approach in a single election cycle," says Taeku Lee, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "You build a constituency over time." At the same time, the Asian-American vote already is increasingly Democratic. By the time 80-20 could persuade four-fifths of the group to vote one way, they might already be there. 80-20 does take credit for Hillary Clinton's winning the California Asian-American vote by 3-1. But swinging party primaries isn't the goal here.
Another solution is strengthening the ground game. In Virginia, the Obama camp has hired Asian-American field directors and recruited Asian-American volunteers. It's also distributing foreign-language campaign literature to local communities in Fairfax County—in Vietnamese, for example, in Falls Church and in Korean in Centreville. "We definitely have the potential to be the swing vote," says Betsy Kim of the Obama campaign. There's evidence, too: In 2006, Jim Webb won 76 percent of the state's Asian-American voters and eked out a victory over George Allen. Many believe those voters—with an assist by Allen's "macaca" moment—made the difference. McCain also has done some outreach, but the enthusiasm seems to lie with the Democrats. One columnist even called Obama "the first Asian-American president."
One area where politicians do make concessions is representation. Asian-Americans make up 5 percent of the population, but only about 1 percent of elected officials. So they want candidates to include more Asian-Americans in their administrations. President Bush earned points by appointing Elaine Chao secretary of labor. On a questionnaire, Hillary Clinton promised to select Asian-American judges; Obama balked at quotas but committed to appointing qualified Asian-Americans.
Experts offer up all sorts of other solutions to the relative invisibility of Asian-Americans in politics. Terry Ao, director of the Asian American Justice Center, argues that congressional districts must be redrawn to consolidate the Asian-American vote. She also says the U.S. census understates their population—since Asian-Americans value their privacy and immigrants are often afraid to provide information—and needs tweaking. Voter registration is another solution. Once Asian-Americans register, says Lee, they vote in high numbers. Some activists also encourage pollsters to include "Asian-American" as a demographic, instead of lumping it in with "Other." And of course, electing more Asian-American leaders would raise their profile considerably. The best-known Asian-American politicians now are probably Hawaii Sens. Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka, both Democrats, and Chao and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, both Republicans.
Since 1980, the Asian-American population has tripled. By 2030, it's expected to nearly double again. Meanwhile, Asian-Americans are flooding battleground states like Nevada, Minnesota, and Virginia faster than other immigrant groups. So maybe 80-20 shouldn't be telling Asian-Americans how to vote. Maybe it should be telling them where to move.
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Chinese Democracy
Why don't we ever hear about the Asian-American vote?
By Christopher Beam
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008, at 4:57 PM ET
Read the rest of the Swingers series.
Asian-American voters
Presidential campaigns can feel like an informal census. As the candidates traverse the country, they pander to Latino voters, African-American voters, working-class white voters, older voters, younger voters, elite-college-graduate voters … everyone gets to feel important.
Except Asian-American voters. Somehow, amid all the demographic navel-gazing, the country's third-largest, fastest-growing minority—now 15.2 million people, or 5 percent of the population—gets overlooked.
Not this week. Or, more accurately, not for several hours on Tuesday. That's when a nonprofit group called Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics held a news conference excitingly titled "Political Role of Asian Americans Examined" while the Obama campaign scheduled interviews about its outreach efforts to Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters. The message from both events: Asian voters can make a difference. Attention must be paid.
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More about that later. But first, a question: Why, with all our obsessing over demographics, do we hear so little about the Asian-American vote?
The most obvious reason is size. Asian-Americans make up only 5 percent of the U.S. population. (Note: "Asian-American" here, and at the press conference Tuesday, is defined in the broadest possible sense, to include Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Thai, Filipino, Indian, Pakistani, and Indonesian, among others.) Fifteen million people is a lot, but not compared with other ethnic groups. African-Americans now number 38.4 million, according to the 2006 census; Latinos boast 44.4 million. Plus, Asian-Americans have the lowest proportion of eligible voters compared with the populations (about 52 percent) of any racial group. And of those, very few (about 50 percent in 2006) actually register to vote. So we're talking about 7 million eligible voters and about 3 million actual voters.
But wait—it gets worse! The five states with the largest Asian populations are, in order, California, New York, Texas, Hawaii, and New Jersey. Not exactly the swingiest places around. There are two big exceptions: Nevada and Virginia. Both states have rapidly growing Asian-American populations—they constitute 6 percent of eligible voters in Virginia, possibly enough to swing a competitive presidential race.
Another difficulty is the Asian-American community's heterogeneity. Koreans and Chinese and Vietnamese aren't necessarily more or less fractured than Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and Cubans. But, unlike Latinos, they speak different languages. Campaigns can easily cut Spanish-language ads to run nationwide; it's tougher to run ads in Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, etc. (Only about 60 percent of Asian-Americans speak English.) Then you'd need to target ethnic media, which is costly and, on the national level, of marginal benefit.
Then there is the difficulty of targeting Asian-American issues. This is a problem in ethnic politics generally—opinions on immigration, for example, are more diverse among blacks than among the interest groups that lobby on their behalf—but it is especially acute among Asian-Americans. Yes, there are general bread-and-butter issues like health care and education for which platitudes about access and opportunity are useful. There are also hyperspecific concerns that are not ideal campaign talking points: Chinese care a lot about U.S.-China relations. Taiwanese care about China-Taiwan. Vietnamese favor anti-Communist policies. And Filipinos often vote based on whoever supports benefits for Filipino veterans of World War II. Plus, segments of the Asian-American community often disagree—as Taiwanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans do on Taiwan, for example, or Pakistanis and Indians on Kashmir.
Finally, as if demographics and geography and message weren't challenging enough, there is partisanship. Or, more precisely, lack thereof. African-American voters break heavily toward Democrats; Latino voters (with the exception of Cubans) are also largely Democratic. Asian-Americans, meanwhile, can't make up their minds. About a third of them are Republican, a third Democratic, and a third unaffiliated. This last group consists largely of immigrants—more than half of Asian-American were born overseas—who often won't develop party loyalty for another generation.
An argument can be made—and is—that excessive partisanship is exactly the problem with a lot of ethnic politics. It goes something like this: Democrats take black voters for granted, Republicans don't even try to win them over, and the result is that they have less influence than they would if they had less party loyalty.
But an argument can also be made that partisanship enhances influence. On the national level, the most powerful groups—unions, African-Americans, evangelicals—are often the most partisan. A pandering politician wants to maximize the efficiency of his pandering. So if the strategy is to mobilize the base, it makes more sense to court a loyal group. (Plus, it gets you more media coverage. The one time the national media noticed Asian-Americans this election cycle was when Hillary Clinton won 75 percent of their votes in California.)
So what are Asian-Americans planning to do about their underwhelming influence? One idea is something called the 80-20 Initiative, a political action committee dedicated to persuading 80 percent of Asian-Americans to vote for one side. Since 2000, the group has endorsed a candidate and asked Asians to support him or her. (They endorsed Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. In the 2008 primaries, it was Hillary; in the general, it's Obama.) The goal of the group, the brainchild of former Delaware Lt. Gov. S.B. Woo, is eventually to turn the Asian-American vote into a bloc vote that can swing both ways, Republican or Democrat.
It's a quixotic enterprise. On the one hand, it's an artificial way to replicate the normally organic process of party identification—and so far, it hasn't quite worked. "You can't get to 80-20 by making a targeted approach in a single election cycle," says Taeku Lee, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "You build a constituency over time." At the same time, the Asian-American vote already is increasingly Democratic. By the time 80-20 could persuade four-fifths of the group to vote one way, they might already be there. 80-20 does take credit for Hillary Clinton's winning the California Asian-American vote by 3-1. But swinging party primaries isn't the goal here.
Another solution is strengthening the ground game. In Virginia, the Obama camp has hired Asian-American field directors and recruited Asian-American volunteers. It's also distributing foreign-language campaign literature to local communities in Fairfax County—in Vietnamese, for example, in Falls Church and in Korean in Centreville. "We definitely have the potential to be the swing vote," says Betsy Kim of the Obama campaign. There's evidence, too: In 2006, Jim Webb won 76 percent of the state's Asian-American voters and eked out a victory over George Allen. Many believe those voters—with an assist by Allen's "macaca" moment—made the difference. McCain also has done some outreach, but the enthusiasm seems to lie with the Democrats. One columnist even called Obama "the first Asian-American president."
One area where politicians do make concessions is representation. Asian-Americans make up 5 percent of the population, but only about 1 percent of elected officials. So they want candidates to include more Asian-Americans in their administrations. President Bush earned points by appointing Elaine Chao secretary of labor. On a questionnaire, Hillary Clinton promised to select Asian-American judges; Obama balked at quotas but committed to appointing qualified Asian-Americans.
Experts offer up all sorts of other solutions to the relative invisibility of Asian-Americans in politics. Terry Ao, director of the Asian American Justice Center, argues that congressional districts must be redrawn to consolidate the Asian-American vote. She also says the U.S. census understates their population—since Asian-Americans value their privacy and immigrants are often afraid to provide information—and needs tweaking. Voter registration is another solution. Once Asian-Americans register, says Lee, they vote in high numbers. Some activists also encourage pollsters to include "Asian-American" as a demographic, instead of lumping it in with "Other." And of course, electing more Asian-American leaders would raise their profile considerably. The best-known Asian-American politicians now are probably Hawaii Sens. Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka, both Democrats, and Chao and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, both Republicans.
Since 1980, the Asian-American population has tripled. By 2030, it's expected to nearly double again. Meanwhile, Asian-Americans are flooding battleground states like Nevada, Minnesota, and Virginia faster than other immigrant groups. So maybe 80-20 shouldn't be telling Asian-Americans how to vote. Maybe it should be telling them where to move.
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