HOW SHE SEES IT In Texas, they grow their problems big

By MARACENA HERNANDEZ
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
You've heard the distressing statistics: About half of Latino kids don't graduate from high school. They're more likely to live in poverty and least likely to go to college.
In coming years, more than 90 percent of Texas' population growth will be non-Anglo, and the majority of new Texans will be Latinos.
Between 2020 and 2030, Latinos will become the state's majority.
There is a huge education gap: As of 2000, only 30 percent of Anglos, 15 percent of blacks and less than 9 percent of Latinos in Texas had college degrees.
Clearly, state leaders need to figure out how to make the educational system work for more Texas children.
"Our fates are intertwined and related," Steve Murdock, the state's official demographer, told me. "People must understand that it really is everyone's problem. Because how well our non-Anglo citizens do in Texas is how well Texas will do."
But even if they came up with the perfect plan to solve the problems afflicting our schools, nothing would work without parental involvement. Teachers can teach kids to read and subtract, but parents must teach them values and self-worth.
Parents need to expect more.
As a 10th-grade teacher in the Rio Grande Valley a few years ago, I found it depressing that so many of my students had stopped dreaming. I wondered whether some had ever dreamed. At the age of 15 or 16, many had already decided college wasn't for them: They didn't think they could make it, didn't know anyone who had or couldn't imagine how they would pay for it.
Sadly, few of them were expected to.
Some parents were too busy making up for lost time: partying and living the life that stopped when they became teenage parents. Others were caught in life's daily grind. Considering that poverty rates are three times higher for blacks and Latinos than whites, most parents were just too busy working to make ends meet.
Free to dream
'But teaching your kids to dream -- to set goals -- is free.
I still remember the day I told my father that I was going away to college, that I needed him to drop me off in Waco for orientation. You would have thought I had told him I was pregnant and didn't know who the father was.
My father had grown up judging a person's worth by physical labor. To him, sitting in a classroom for more than 12 years seemed irresponsible.
I was embracing the American way, asserting myself and demanding a college education. But all my father saw was a 17-year-old mocosa, a kid, defying her parents. I was a single, young woman, a mujercita, choosing a life far from my family and close to temptation.
Classic case of culture clash.
Besides, my parents simply never thought college was an option. They couldn't imagine how they could send their kid to a university that charged half of the family's annual income. Thank God for student loans.
A couple of months ago, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board reported that Latino college enrollment had increased by 11,119 students. Sounds impressive? Hardly. That was less than half of the board's goal for Latino enrollment for 2005. Anglos and blacks met their enrollment goals a year earlier than expected.
If these trends continue, Latino children are destined for low-paying jobs and destitution.
The only way out is an education, which is the most reliable predictor of future income.
"Whether you look at the Irish 200 years ago, or the Germans or Italians," Mr. Murdock said, "education has played a key role in closing the socioeconomic gaps."
Education is an investment and a necessity. Teachers can't do it alone. Our kids and state will fail unless parents get involved.
X Macarena Hernandez is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.