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265 PATRICIA GÁNDARA Latinos, Language, and Segregation Options for a More Integrated Future Latinos are both the largest ethnic minority in the United States and the most segregated group in their schools. The Latino pubic school population nearly doubled in the United States between 1987 and 2007, from 11 percent to 21 percent of all students.1 Since 1987, it has grown more rapidly than any other group. In fact, during this period, the percentage of public school students who were black declined from 17 percent to 15 percent nationwide.2 Thus, while the problem of school segregation has traditionally been cast as an issue of black and white, today Latinos are actually more likely than blacks to attend segregated schools. In 2005–6, approximately 78 percent of Latinos attended predominantly (50 to 100 percent) minority schools, while about 73 percent of black students attended similarly segregated schools.3 Nationwide, Latinos are slightly more likely than blacks (39.5 percent vs. 38.3 percent) to attend hypersegregated schools, those that are 90 to 100 percent nonwhite, but in the West, Latinos are much more likely to attend such schools. In the large central cities in the West, more than 60 percent of Latino students are in hypersegregated schools; 47 percent of black students attend these schools.4 In addition to school district and housing policies, western segregation is also linked to the exploding growth of the Latino population in that area of the country. The majority of new kindergarteners beginning school in Texas and California are now Latino students. In Texas, 14 percent of K–12 students were African American compared to 47 percent Latino in 2008,5 and in California, a little more than 7 percent of students were African American compared to 49 percent Latino in 2009.6 This fact results not only in the segregation of Latino students into minority schools in these states but often in their isolation in schools that are almost all Latino. The rapid growth of the Latino population brings particular urgency to the problem of increasing school segregation. Racial and ethnic segregation of both African American and Latino students tends to be associated with high socioeconomic segregation as well.7 Studies demonstrate that concentrated poverty is associated with everything from less optimal physical devel- 266 PATRICIA GÁNDARA opment to families’ inability to stay in the same neighborhood long enough for schools to have powerful educational effects.8 Concentrated poverty in schools is also closely related to students’ and their parents’ diminished social capital—knowledge of how important institutions work and access to persons with the ability to advocate on one’s behalf within these institutions. Black and Latino communities are too frequently powerless to change the circumstances of their neighborhoods or their schools because of this lack of the social capital generated in middle-class communities through equal-status interaction with knowledgeable members of the society. Latino Students and Triple Segregation Isolation of Latino students into schools that are largely Latino can carry an additional disadvantage; Latinos are often triply segregated—by ethnicity, poverty, and language.One recent national study found that only 5,000 schools in the United States educated 70 percent of all English Language Learners (ELLs).9 Likewise, in California in 2005, more than half of all elementary-age English Language Learners attended just 21 percent of the state’s elementary schools, where they comprised more than 50 percent of the students on campus .10 Isolation by language presents a particularly thorny problem: it is difficult to learn the language of the land if one is exposed to few models of native English speakers and has few friends or neighbors who speak the language well. In a 2006 article, Bernard Gifford and Guadalupe Valdés reported that their “analysis of the hypersegregation of Hispanic students, and particularly Spanish-speaking ELLs, suggests that little or no attention has been given to the consequences of linguistic isolation fora population whose future depends on the acquisition of English. . . . For ELLs, interaction with ordinary Englishspeaking peers is essential to their English language development and consequently to their acquisition of academic English.”11 A recent study by Marcelo Suárez-Orozco,Carola Suárez-Orozco, and Irina Todorova found that the best predictor of whether an immigrant student will gain a firm mastery of English is whether he or she has a good friend who is a native English speaker. Without such natural language support, it can be very challenging to learn...

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