Similar to other Asian American students, Southeast Asian American students are often stereotyped by the popular press as hardworking and high-achieving model minorities. On the other hand, Southeast Asian American youth are also depicted as low-achieving high school dropouts involved in gangs. The realities of academic performance and persistence among Southeast Asian American students are far more complex than either image suggests. This article explores the various explanations for the struggles, successes, and educational experiences of Southeast Asian students. To highlight differences across ethnic groups, we review the literature on each Southeast Asian ethnic group separately and examine the successes and continuing struggles facing first- and second-generation Vietnamese American, Cambodian American, Hmong American, and Lao American students in the United States.

Organized after-school activities promote positive youth development across a range of outcomes. To be most effective, organized activities need to meet high-quality standards. The eight features of quality developed by the National Research Council's Committee on Community-Level Programs for Youth have helped guide the field in this regard. However, these standards have largely been defined in terms of universal developmental needs, and do not adequately speak to the growing ethnic and racial diversity within the United States, which is further complicated by issues of power and social class differences. Given U.S. population shifts and after-school funding priorities, the time has come to consider new ways to provide organized after-school activities that are responsive to youth's culture and everyday lives. The goal of this article is to explore how we can help ensure that afterschool activities are culturally responsive and address the specific needs of the youth who participate in these activities. Based on theory and empirical evidence, we provide proposed practices of cultural responsiveness for each of the eight features of quality for program structure and staff. The article

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In this theoretical analysis, we discuss the attributional and enactment approaches to identity and present a new Ethnic-Racial Identity Enactment Model derived from extant theory and research. We highlight modes of identity work that provide 1) self-concept and self-esteem protection; 2) achievement and success during everyday encounters; 3) a sense of belonging and attachment to one's ascriptive group; and 4) the relation between internalized oppression and internalized racism in everyday exchanges. We discuss the integration of self-concept mechanisms with mindsets and intentions specific to ethnic-racial identity dynamics. The article ends by highlighting a research procedure that fuses the attributional and enactment approaches to identity research.