U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono has introduced legislation requiring schools to disaggregate their student data by specific ethnic groups, focusing on the Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations.
The legislation, known as the All Students Count Act, would require the U.S. Department of Education, state education agencies, and school districts to gather and report data on the AANHPI students, which are often lumped into one group.
The purpose of the bill is to ensure equitable resources go to impacted students in the education system.
The bill was last introduced in 2017 but was two votes shy of passing the U.S. Senate.
Asian American and Pacific Islander communities have called for data disaggregation for years as it can reveal disparities in health care and education.
Hirono, who co-introduced the bill, said disaggregated data is essential, using the COVID-19 pandemic as an example.
“When COVID-19 hit, we knew that there were a lot of students in our country who experienced learning loss and that this learning was not standard,” Hirono said at a Thursday news conference. “There were economic disparity issues, cultural issues and English language learning issues."
The bill would also require that data for Asian American groups be broken down into at least 15 subgroups, including Chinese, Asian Indian, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Pakistani, Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, Thai, Taiwanese, Burmese, Bangladeshi, Nepalese.
For Pacific Islanders, it includes Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Chamorro, Tongan iTaukei and Marshallese.
States would determine additional subgroups.
The legislation would also require the Institute of Education Sciences to evaluate methods to report on these groups efficiently.
