Issues in Latino Education

Race, School Culture, and the Politics of Academic Success

Mariella Espinoza-Herold, Ricardo González-Carriedo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315392240
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation multiculturelle

Candid and illuminating, this text exposes the educational realities of Latinos (U.S. and foreign-born) in K–12 public schools in the Western United States from the students' own perspectives. Through the testimonies of students who struggled to graduate from high school, issues that are often oversimplified and commonly misunderstood are brought to life. The students themselves offer pragmatic solutions to reduce the unchanging academic gap among culturally diverse groups. Their accounts are then compared with the viewpoints of a range of K–12 teachers on matters of community, learning, race, culture, and school politics. Examining in depth the question of how to best educate a growing culturally and linguistically diverse student population, this critical case study provides food for thought and provokes reflection on the critical role that human interactions and networking play in attaining one's dreams and human aspirations.

Changes in the Second Edition

• 
  
  

• Updated demographics;

• 
  
  

• New chapter: The Role of the Media in the Transmission of Ideologies Related to Latino Students;

• 
  
  

• Updated conclusions and study implications.

1
Introduction

Every day more than 7,200 students fall through the cracks of America’s public schools. This represents three out of ten students in a graduating class, says Christopher B. Swanson, a researcher at the Urban Institute (2010). Many of the students who cannot realize their academic aspirations are Latinos.

In 2014, the 55.4 million Latinos in the United States represented 17.4 percent of the total population. Their median age, 29 years, made them the youngest population of any ethnic group. In fact, Latino children comprise more than one in four in K-12 public schools today (Krogstad & Lopez, 2015). In spite of this numeric importance, the educational attainment of Latino youth has remained stagnant at best. The rationale for this lack of progress appears to have little to do with either lack of motivation or parental support. In a large survey, Latinos cited education as a top issue—alongside the economy. Even when in recent years Latino students’ high school dropout numbers have decreased (12 percent), they still lag behind other groups: Blacks (8 percent), Whites (5 percent), or Asians (4 percent) (Krogstad, 2015). Arizona, where this study took place, is one of the states with the highest dropout rate and occupies 48th place in the union (see Table 1.1).

Poverty remains a very important obstacle for Latino students today. But other barriers like the quality of public schools they attend, the training of the teachers who work with them, and, most importantly, the perceptions and academic expectations about Latino students need to be examined in more depth. Such is one of the objectives of this publication: to explore from the students’ point of view the not-so-visible factors that affect Latino students’ academic aspirations.

To this end, we begin this chapter by sharing the professional experiences of the two authors of this volume. Although we came to the United States from different parts of the world (South America and Europe) to pursue graduate work, our stories present striking similarities. We both tried to fit our ideals of education

TABLE 1.1 Ranking of States from Best to Worst with Regards to Dropout Rates (2014)

Rank	State	Total
1	Vermont	2.7
2	Alaska	2.8
3	New Hampshire	3.7
4	Massachusetts	3.8
5	Nebraska	3.9
6	Minnesota	4.0
7	Virginia	4.2
8	Wyoming	4.3
9	Connecticut	4.6
10	New Jersey	4.6
11	Maine	4.7
12	Wisconsin	4.7
13	District of Columbia	5.0
14	Hawaii	5.0
15	Iowa	5.0
16	Illinois	5.1
17	North Dakota	5.3
18	Pennsylvania	5.5
19	Tennessee	5.6
20	North Carolina	5.8
21	Missouri	5.8
22	Kansas	5.9
23	Maryland	6.0
24	California	6.0
25	Michigan	6.0
26	New York	6.0
27	Ohio	6.1
28	Rhode Island	6.1
29	Kentucky	6.4
30	Idaho	6.4
31	Colorado	6.4
32	Delaware	6.5
33	Utah	6.6
34	South Dakota	6.6
35	Montana	6.7
36	West Virginia	6.7
37	Arkansas	6.8
38	Oregon	6.8
39	Georgia	7.0
40	Washington	7.1
41	Florida	7.1
42	South Carolina	7.3
43	Texas	7.5
44	Alabama	7.7
45	Oklahoma	7.9
46	Indiana	8.0
47	Mississippi	8.4
48	Arizona	8.5
49	Nevada	8.6
50	New Mexico	9.5
51	Louisiana	10.6

Source: Adapted from National Center for Education Statistics (2015).

within a conservative political environment in the state of Arizona, that oftentimes runs counter to principles of equity and social justice. Mariella immigrated to the United States from her native Peru in the 1980s, at a time when President Reagan’s nationalistic policies left little room for developing bilingual education programs while fueling the emergence of “English-Only” movements across the nation. This initiated a dismissive period in which ideological and political stances dominated the discourse over the best model to educate English learners (Ovando, 2003).

Ricardo, on the other hand, arrived in the United States from his native Spain, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, when the anti-bilingual rhetoric (fueled by media supported by conservative groups) was at its peak, and states such as Arizona, California, and Massachusetts were in the process of passing laws that ultimately eliminated bilingual education programs from public schools.

The following sections briefly summarize our professional journey as educators in the Southwest of the United States.

Mariella's Story: The Rural Reality

My intellectual interest in the success and failure of schools serving Latinos, and the high school dropout phenomenon—highly visible in Arizona and California schools—began during my first year as a public school teacher in a rural school in southern Arizona. At that time, I had just completed a Master’s degree in Linguistics and English as a Second Language. I was highly energized and focused on putting into practice those theories of second language acquisition and bilingualism that I had spent several years learning about. It was hard for me to imagine then that this first experience in a public school classroom in the U.S. was going to provoke a dramatic shift in my intellectual interests from linguistic theory to a passionate advocacy for social justice issues and human rights.

After that first teaching experience in 1989, it became clearer to me that the interactions between students and teachers are far more essential for students’ school success than the best language methodologies, brilliant lecturers, or innovative language research employed in the classroom. As stated by Jim Cummins (1996) in his influential framework coercive vs. collaborative relations of power, and later verified by the high school students whom this research involved, educators define their roles, behavior, assumptions, and expectations interactively when they come into contact with students from culturally diverse backgrounds. If the interaction is of a positive nature, some students will initiate a process of self-empowerment and self-affirmation of their identities. This directly contributes to their ability to persevere academically, overcome obstacles, and achieve their educational aspirations. Negative interactions, however, destroy their self-esteem, make them feel devalued and inferior, distort their identity, and ultimately push them out of the system. The influential research of Professor Cummins, which I frequently read as a graduate student, played out exactly in the classroom in my new role as the secondary teacher of linguistically diverse students.

More than two decades ago, when I began my first journey inside a rural American public high school, I had assumed that my employer wanted to utilize my freshly gained knowledge in English as a Second Language and linguistics to implement a program for the growing number of Mexican immigrant students enrolled at the school. Later, I realized that the administration was far more interested in making use of my French skills and credentials to offer a new French program and relegate my ESL assignment to a secondary function. Thus, while the school authorities invested large amounts of money in textbooks, technology, and materials to carry out a full-blown French program, the Arizona mainstream teachers at this school were desperately complaining about crowded classrooms now filled with strange students that they did not know how to teach. The enormous frustrations these educators faced logically gave way to intense animosity and anger toward this new group of students who were perceived as a burden because of their English language limitations and overall academic inferiority. Similar to Deyhle’s (1995) research findings of Navajo students, which confirm the deficit hypothesis common in American schools, the bicultural students in this school were judged by what they didn’t have (English language, middle-class Euro-American values, money, and so on) rather than the funds of knowledge they had brought with them in the form of community-orientation, strong family values, native language ability, or cultural, cognitive, and vocational resources.

During the three years that I remained at the school, dozens of bright students dropped out and violent interracial conflicts among students escalated. Daily, these linguistically diverse students crowded school detention rooms, were suspended, or received failing grades in ratios far exceeding those of their Anglo counterparts. Some of these students managed to develop a toughness that allowed them to stay in school in spite of their perception that some educators and administrators did not like them. Those resilient enough to stay in school were forced to accept a form of inner exile in which they were continually discouraged in their attempts to succeed despite rigid policies and practices and, in some cases, direct remarks from teachers and administrators. In my interaction with faculty members, I soon learned that bilingual education was a bad word in this closed, conservative educational community that was financed largely with property taxes of wealthy retirees. With the aid of a few concerned and caring mainstream educators who felt education was not just a job but a true mission, we managed to design a non-labeled pilot program. This program offered science, math, and American government classes in Spanish language in the morning. Every lesson included introductions to content-related key words in English and, in the context of learning the content, students were quickly able to establish syntactic and morphological comparisons between the two languages.

The same lesson was offered to the students in English in the afternoon by a group of mainstream teachers who voluntarily agreed to assist these students by adjusting their teaching styles and methods. Much attention was paid to students’ learning styles and, in contrast to their English-only courses where students worked alone on individual desks, our students worked in groups learning from one another and building on each other’s knowledge.

At the end of the first year, we saw significant improvements in the steady decrease of dropouts, academic improvement, and engagement of the students. A few encounters with several of these students several years after they left the school greatly contributed to the conceptualization of the ideas behind the writing of this book. Today, many of them have become successful professionals and are productive and caring human beings. A few years after I had left the school, one of these high school students told me:

It did not matter in which language I learned—I felt the teachers in my dual language program in high school actually cared for me and wanted me to get ahead; I was not just another “number” in the class.

(MF)

As the rapid and unexpected gains obtained from this mini-pilot program began to gain visibility in terms...