Chapter 3: Ethnicity, Language, and Educational Inequality: Challenges Confronting Hmong Students in American Public Schools

Hmong students and other linguistic minority students in California’s K-12 public schools face a multitude of obstacles and problems such as low English literacy and low test scores which hamper their chances of academic success. While these obstacles and problems are linked to their disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and refugee/immigrant status, efforts by the state and public schools to reform educational policy targeted at helping these students may sometimes have unintended effects. In this study, we show that the causes for academic success or failure are not simply rooted in an individual’s family socioeconomic status (SES), ethnic background, ability and effort, or even school characteristics alone, but are intertwined in and related to broader historical and contemporary processes of class and racial stratification in American society. Using students’ language census, academic test scores and tracking data from California’s Department of Education, we explain how state-mandated classification, selective testing, and tracking inadvertently create new forms of segregation that disadvantage linguistic minority students.