A school district in Washington that has 16,000 students has apologized for lumping Asian American students with white people.
The North Thurston Public Schools excluded Asian American students as people of color in its latest equity report, called “Monitoring Student Growth.” The “students of color” included “Black, Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Multi-Racial Students” and the study measured their “persistent opportunity gaps.”
Many Asian Americans were upset and, consequently, the district issued an apology.
The school district said the study was to help underperforming groups by “eliminating achievement and opportunity gaps.”
“Upon reflection and response by members of the Asian American community, we will change how we look at achievement data and appreciate the feedback we received. We apologize for the negative impact we have caused and removed the monitoring report from our website.
“We feel it is important to continue the practice of disaggregating data, so we make equity-based decisions. When we reviewed our disaggregated data, it showed that our district is systemically meeting the instructional needs of both our Asian and white students and not meeting the instructional needs for our Black, Indigenous, Multi-racial, Pacific Islander, and Latinx students. The intent was never to ignore Asian students as “students of color.”’
The term “student of color” excludes the whites for the purpose of demonizing the whites.