Every Child Achieves Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Ms. HIRONO. Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to support the Hirono-Heller amendment No. 2109.

The current AAPI--American Asian Pacific Islander--category hides huge achievement gaps among subgroups, i.e., Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Japanese, et cetera. With better subgroup data, teachers, parents, policymakers, and community organizations will know where they can target support to the students who need the help most.

Our amendment only applies to districts with over 1,000 AAPI students. We are not talking about 1,000 students but 1,000 AAPI students, which means fewer than 3 percent of school districts nationwide would be affected. That is about 400 out of over 16,000 school districts. Currently, Delaware, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming have no districts that would be affected.

Our amendment is endorsed by over 100 groups, including teachers, principals, school choice and charter school groups, not to mention a coalition of AAPI, Latino, African American, women's, and disability rights groups.

This is not an onerous requirement on school districts. They already have the capacity to collect this kind of what we call disaggregated data, which will enable all of our schools to help the kids who need the help the most.

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