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Reviewed by:
  • Achieving Equity for Latino Students: Expanding the Pathway to Higher Education through Public Policy by Frances Contreras
  • Michael A. Olivas (bio)
Frances Contreras . Achieving Equity for Latino Students: Expanding the Pathway to Higher Education through Public Policy. New York: Teachers College Press, 2011. 192 pp. Paper: $29.95. ISBN: 978-0-8077-5210-4.

In 1986, I edited the first scholarly book on Latino college students, cleverly titled Latino College Students (Olivas, 1986), in which I gathered most of the few scholars then writing in this field, and hammered the various papers into this volume, which was published by Teachers College Press. I have been approached over the years to revisit the subject, perhaps inviting more work from some of the original authors and attracting the newer scholars now mining this subject. Mostly, I have resisted for the reasons that Thomas Wolfe pointed out, noting that one cannot return home. My scholarly interests have morphed, and I have been developing the legal issues and immigration issues that I teach more regularly, so I have been frustrated that I have not been able to find time for this much-needed [End Page 560] book project. I do not have to worry any longer, with the appearance at Teachers College Press of Frances Contreras's estimable Achieving Equity for Latino Students: Expanding the Pathway to Higher Education through Public Policy. Indeed, because it is the single work of an accomplished and developing scholar, I can rest easy that the field will not only endure, but will prevail.

The 1986 book featured several scholars who worked with the inadequate national data bases that then characterized the treatment of Latinos, essentially as afterthoughts to the more thoroughly measured White and Black college student populations. Although Latinos were and are a national population, the sampling techniques of the 1970s and 1980s were inadequate to the task, neither oversampling Latinos, disaggregating them properly into the major subgroup populations, taking into account the largely geographic concentrations, nor looking more carefully at two-year colleges, where this population was overwhelmingly and disproportionately concentrated.

This social science statistics marginalization was equaled by and interrelated with the social science attention span, which not only inconsistently labeled and defined Latinos, but which simply treated them as the law and U.S. polity had done for so long—as White, or slightly-off-White variants. I write this review the week President Obama was reelected and can only laugh at the various recriminations Republicans are employing about how they did not do enough outreach to this population (Preston, 2012). All I can say about this is that we were hiding, if at all, in plain sight. And we vote our interests, as do any other American voters—and urging us to "self-deport" the undocumented, as was set out in the GOP platform, is not outreach. It is even less alcanse, the term in Spanish.

I explore this sidebar only because it illustrates the newly discovered Latino population in a way that actually spans educational practice and the electoral polity. The Latino percentage of children in the Texas school system in 2011-2012 is over half, while Latinos are the plurality in school districts in Seattle, San Diego, Miami, and Hartford. There are more Latinos in Illinois than in Arizona and in my home state of New Mexico. In other words, we are everywhere; and attention must be paid, in K-12 education and in higher education, and in graduate and professional education. This book by Contreras will be a good place to start, especially for newcomers unfamiliar with the data and issues.

She begins by laying out public policy details and then takes several policy analysis approaches in each chapter: enrollment and dropouts, high-stakes testing, college financial aid and affordability, undocumented college students, general anti-affirmative actions (including state ballot issues and the like), and a concluding chapter (optimistically labeled "The 'Sleeping Giant' Is Awake," noting the underachievement that again ties together educational policy and the electoral polity).

In this sense, she took a different approach than we did 25 years ago, when we were trying to use the poor data to set out and establish the contours...

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