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

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments The Race and Ethnic Studies Institute (RESI) at Texas A&M University supplied start-up funding for the early research needed to write this book. During the past two years, our Mexican American/U.S. Latino Faculty Association (MALFA) has also been working steadfastly to establish the Mexican American/U.S. Latino Research Center (MALRC) at Texas A&M. In May 2004, we are pleased to report, the Board of Regents approved MALRC, formally encouraging other new research efforts on Latinos and Latinas like the current one. Our hope is that Quality Education for Latinos and Latinas will substantially enhance the education and thus the life and career options available to students like the ones we describe in these pages. We believe the testimonial stories we have taken from our teaching experiences call for and even demand the kind of changes we advocate. From the enthusiastic responses we have received from Texas A&M junior and senior students, most of whom will be teachers, we believe we have written a book that readers will find eye-opening and compelling. We are convinced that to produce more educated citizens and better teachers and administrators, all Americans need to contribute in some way to the communal obligation of helping students who through no fault of their own struggle academically. Only by recognizing the lack of resources and by uniting to provide the kind of community support that such students require will all learn to capitalize on school opportunities that deliver quality education. We particularly want to thank the students at Texas A&M, too many to name individually, who carefully read earlier versions of this study and who provided us with helpful responses. Graduate students Kerri Barton and Hilary Standish and educational administration professor Maynard Bratlien of Texas A&M offered helpful suggestions during the early stages of the manuscript. We want to express our appreciation to David A. Sustaita, Virgilio Martínez, and Richard Sanchez, too, for their xiv quality education for latinos and latinas computer assistance at different junctures of this book. The final work, however, expresses our own views. Although we have discussed some of these views with sympathetic friends who have kindly listened and asked questions that have helped us articulate our ideas over the years, no other person is responsible for our diagnoses of the schools or for the solutions that we recommend. ...