Latinos face major education challenge

By William Mckenzie

Here’s a number to remember: 20 percent. In fact, memorize it. It tells the story of America’s future, especially in big states like Texas, California and New York.

It’s the percentage of America’s public school students who are Hispanic. In the two largest states, California and Texas, the figure is closer to 50 percent.

Another fact to remember: There’s a serious gap between Latinos’ successes in school, including their high school graduation and college-going rates, compared to their white peers. The difference is what educators call the “achievement gap,” and closing it is the second-greatest challenge facing the country (behind getting the international religion-and-politics equation right so we don’t blow each other up).

If we don’t close that gap, America’s workforce will lack the high-order skills the economy demands. There’s no upside to allowing such a fast-growing demographic group trail behind, unless we prefer second-tier nation status.

Fortunately, the Obama administration gets the problem, as did the Bush administration. In fact, going back to the first Bush presidency, the White House has had an initiative to improve Latinos’ educational progress.

Juan Sepuvelda now heads that effort, and the former San Antonio management consultant was in Dallas last week as part of a national listening tour. He’s learning what communities are doing to improve Latino success in schools and what they must do to ramp it up.

About 100 people came to Dallas’ Mountain View College on Friday, sitting in tables of six to eight people, each asked to write goals for greater Latino academic progress. Some were asked to present them to the whole group.

The refreshing part was the younger attendees. The older ones were activists who tended to talk like bureaucrats. By contrast, the under-30s spoke passionately about real-life problems, like attending school with little parental support. They talked movingly about Hispanic parents needing to support their children in school.

In a discussion on The Education Front blog last month (dallasnews.com/educationfront), Sunset High School principal Tony Tovar pointed to his school’s parents as a reason a predominantly Latino Dallas high school improved to the state’s second-highest rank. He explained how the school’s community liaison, Nora Garcia, works constantly to attract parents to PTA meetings, parenting classes and teacher meetings.

Cultural similarities

More Hispanic teachers also would help. Remember the 20 percent number? Sepuvelda foils that against only 5 percent of America’s teachers being Latino. His boss, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, is on a campaign to improve that ratio, too. The answer is not a quota system, but more teachers who can reach students from a similar culture.

Strong teachers, too. Sepuvelda said in an interview that the best schools not only have longer days and Saturday classes, their teachers are classroom leaders.

But here’s the reality: Even when largely Latino schools progress, too few of their students are truly ready for college.

The data at some heavily Hispanic Dallas schools highlights this problem. Often, far fewer than half their students pass the state’s achievement exam at the “commended” level, which reveals whether they are on a track that prepares them for college.

Sepuvelda acknowledges the problem but also cites campuses like the International High School of the Americas in San Antonio. Students enter it through a lottery and face rigorous course work, and some end up at Ivy League schools.

Can this happen elsewhere? Yes, but only if parents, students, schools — and the rest of us, too — make that happen.

You’d think we would when we consider one more fact: 25 percent of Americans under age 5 are Hispanic.

They are our destiny. Why would we neglect them?

X William McKenzie is an editorial columnist for The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.