to quiet any parental doubts. At the same time, however, they observed evi-
dences of activist parent movements in many of the urban school systems that
their children attended. These movements directly confronted school authori-
ties and demanded changes.

During the 1980s, when Cambodians emigrated to the United States in large
numbers, some began to participate as active parents. What was novel about this
role was the directness with which parents encountered authority, the organized
character of the action, and the cooperation with non-Cambodian parents. Be-
cause many of the schools involved were located in inner-city areas, they en-
rolled a broad range of children from ethnic and racial groups whose parents
were dissatisfied with the education being provided their children. In Philadel-
phia, Asian parents, including Cambodians, filed a lawsuit against the board of
education, which was charged with a long list of educational failings. A settle-
ment was reached in the case. ¹²³ In Lowell, Massachusetts, the second-largest
Cambodian community in the United States, Puerto Rican, Cambodian, and
other parents combined to protest against inadequate language policies and
programs of the city's school board. ¹²⁴ Massachusetts, which was the first state
to enact a bilingual education law had, a decade later, become a center of the
English-only movement. By the early 1990s, Cambodian families began a large-
scale move away from Lowell. ¹²⁵

Cambodians have been largely submerged as parts of two groupings: Indo-
chinese and Southeast Asians. The first term was invented in 1886 by the French
to cover Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, the French colonial empire in Southeast
Asia. ¹²⁶ The second term stood for Indochina and surrounding countries, in-
cluding Thailand and Burma. Although Indochina disappeared in 1954 when
the French armies were defeated by Vietnam, the term continues confusedly to
describe present-day countries. For example, in 1993, a researcher wrote that,
"Overall, Indochinese students are performing admirably in American schools";
unfortunately, this is followed immediately by a caution that "it is important to
recognize that there is considerable between-group and in-group variation." ¹²⁷
No specific groups are mentioned and the reader is left to speculate whether
Vietnamese, Cambodians, or Lao are meant. Undoubtedly, the second assertion
is quite correct but is difficult to apply in the absence of subgroup data. In the
previous chapter and the present one, the span of social class and education was
seen to be very large as between Cambodian and Vietnamese. (The cases of the
Lao and Hmong are examined in the next chapter.)

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