Quality Education for Latinos and Latinas: Print and Oral Skills for All Students, K–College

Preface

Preface As a husband-and-wife team of educators, we have written this book to make Americans aware of the nature of the interactions that often make learning particularly dif- ficult for Latino and Latina students. We have written Quality Education to show that the failure and dropout rates among such students and among students of all backgrounds and ethnicities can be considerably reduced through a unified effort that repairs our schools. Only after experiencing problems in different schools and in different states, after finding confirmation in the research of other educators, and after knocking futilely on the doors of people empowered to effect change in the schools did we finally resort to writing this volume. We decided to pursue this option because we have been frustrated in our efforts and we want to demonstrate how and why education systems that succeed for some students are dismally failing others. By doing so, we hope to enlist educators and American society in helping not only Latino and Latina students but all students not served well enough by current educational approaches. We focus attention on Latinos and Latinas because demographic statistics since the 2000 U.S. Census inform us that Spanish-speaking students now comprise the largest ethnic minority population in U.S. schools. Throughoutthisvolume,werefertofemaleandmaleSpanish-speaking students as Latinos, the masculine form, because when both genders are intended the male form is used in the Spanish language. When not grammatically cumbersome, though, we have included the word Latinas, the feminine form, specifically in the title and where appropriate in the text. Readers will notice that our stories concern not only Latinos and Latinas but African Americans and people of other races and backgrounds. In every instance, we intend inclusion, not exclusion. We believe quality education can be made equally available to all students from kindergarten not only through the twelfth grade but includ- x quality education for latinos and latinas ing college. For proficiency in the skills that we promote is a lifelong issue for all of our citizens. In order to provide a quality education to every student, however, we have learned that it is necessary to make viable suggestions that can be implemented within the real-life constraints that educators face daily. Actual classroom teaching time has been substantially reduced by other school tasks that, while often well-intended, are not directly extending the knowledge of students or stimulating their learning capacities. Learning assignments for this and other reasons that we discuss in the following pages tend toward rote classroom tasks that do not sufficiently engage students’ interest nor their imaginations and creativity. Our extensive teaching experiences have taught us that most educators simply do not have enough time in their busy schedules to think about how they can also deliver quality education to a greater number of educationally underserved students. Based on our observations and on the experiences of students in our classrooms, we are convinced that one of the best contributions that educators of our generation can make to the general welfare of society is to offer a higher quality of education to more students, regardless of color or ethnicity. That objective, we believe, can be responsibly and sensibly achieved by examining and adjusting the ideas that we highlight in the following chapters to the different realities that each school and every school district face. We hope that no readers will feel singled out by our analysis of the current education scene. For this reason, we want to state clearly at the outset that we have not written our book to criticize or fault the schools or anyone in or related to the education establishment. We hasten, in fact, to recognize the courageous efforts of many teachers, administrators , and citizens who, despite considerable stressful challenges, continue to devote their best energies to improving the increasingly difficult environment in which U.S. schools function. Some of our ethnographic stories will be distressing to read. Indeed, when we have related a few of these factual school events to different audiences over the years, occasionally we have been told, “You’re so negative,” and once even, “You sound un-American.” We have listened to such responses with dismay because we realize that the points of the stories we have carefully attempted to narrate have not been accepted. Such responses, in turn, delay the desired improvements. Our intention in describing the school incidents is to raise awareness about the messages that words, looks, and actions...