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

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Spirit: News from the Texas A&M Foundation, fall 1999, cover page quotation . Inside this newsletter, Mr. Cantu continues: “‘If you say today we’ve got 28 million Hispanics . . . and 38 percent don’t have a high school diploma, that’s 10.6 million,’ he says. ‘Double that number by 2020, as the experts predict, and you’re going to have over 21 million people—darned near half of the Hispanic population then—without diplomas. Imagine what impact that’s going to have on America’s social structure and the way we compete in the world market.’” 2. “Thousands of Schools to Be Declared ‘Failing,’” Associated Press, in Houston Chronicle, April 24, 2002. Schools will be under increasing pressure during the next few decades, which means that all kinds of new theories and programs will emerge to improve testing scores. The article continues: “Part of the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which President [George W.] Bush signed in January [2002], included a requirement that students in grades three through eight be tested annually in reading and math. For the first time, students in schools where scores don’t improve adequately over three or four years would be given federally funded tutoring or allowed to transfer to another public school with most of their transportation costs paid.” 3. See Marco Portales, “Examining the Recruitment and Enrollment of Eligible Hispanic and African American Students at Selective Public Texas Universities ,” in Education of Hispanics in the United States: Politics, Policies, and Outcomes, edited by Charles Teddlie, Abbas Tashakkori, and Salvador Hector Ochoa, volume 16 of the Readings on Equal Education Series (New York: AMS Press, 1999), 201–222. This collection of essays by leading educators, including Eugene E. Garcia, Angela Carrasquillo, Richard A. Figueroa, Raynoldo F. Macias, Amaury Nora, Yolanda N. Padrón, Laura I. Rendon, Nadeen T. Ruiz, and others underscores the deplorable condition of K–16 education for Latinos throughout the United States. At a conference hosted on January 26, 2001, by the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, titled “Latinos and Educational Equity: A Public Forum on High-stakes Testing and Percent Plans,” scathing reports were presented on “the quality of the educational pipeline for historically underprivileged youth in Texas,” California, and wherever Hispanic and minority students are attending U.S. schools. 1. Thinking About Our Spanish-speaking Students in the Schools 1. In the Chronicle of Higher Education of August 17, 2001, Vartan Gregorian , president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and former president of Brown University and the New York Public Library, cites Carnegie Corporation statistics and a study that estimates that “‘of 600 students who enter a four-year teaching program, only 180 complete it.’” Gregorian has brought to bear his considerable academic experience and expertise on this most important of education issues and concluded that “‘higher-education institutions, in fact, must accept much of the responsibility for the dismal state of public-school teaching today.’” For an argument that cannot be easily obviated or avoided any longer in the training and curricula of colleges of education as well as higher education institutions in general see “Teacher Education Must Become Colleges’ Central Preoccupation ,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Chronicle Review, Section 2, August 17, 2001, B7. This is the type of academic issue that should set the agenda of education colleges and universities at least for the next decade. 2. In “Hispanic School Achievement Pivotal to Texas’ Future,” Houston Chronicle, June 4, 2002, Kim Cobb and James Kimberly write: And the stakes are high. The economic well-being of Texas soon will rest on the shoulders of Hispanic wage-earners. While fairness was the goal of early public school desegregation, equity may prove to be the state’s economy. When the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregated schools in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the justices were attempting to close the educational divide between black and white children. Hispanic children weren’t even part of the equation. Nearly 50 years later, Hispanics now rival blacks as the nation’s largest minority group. They make up a third of the Texas population and a majority in several Houston-area school districts. But Hispanic schoolchildren, like black students, frequently do not perform as well academically as whites. Closing the achievement gap for all minority students, and subsequently improving their earning potential, will have economic implications for Texas as whites lose majority status. 3. Systems theory is...