The crisis in Latino education: 10 questions for Patricia Gándara
Stuck in underfunded schools, with virtually no guidance or social support at home, Latinos face a bleak future. Their predicament bodes ill for the nation unless urgent reform is undertaken, maintains Patricia Gándara in a timely and sobering book, “The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies” (Harvard University Press). 
A professor of education at the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, where she is also co-director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, Gándara coauthored the book with Frances Contreras, an assistant professor of education at the University of Washington. Gándara spoke to Today Staff Writer Ajay Singh about what afflicts Latino education and what can be done to remedy it. What is the crisis in Latino education, and how does it compare to similar problems faced by other ethnic groups? As the Latino population has continued to grow and become the largest ethnic group, Latinos have seen virtually no progress in college degree attainment, which has fluctuated between 9 percent and 11 percent over the last 30 years. Meantime, the share of college degrees for just about every other major ethnic group has continued to grow. This data was the impetus for our book
Do the Latinos who go to college tend to drop out? More than half of Latino students go on to college. But that can mean as little as signing up for one course at a community college and never going back. A much smaller percentage of students go to four-year colleges, and very small percentages actually complete college. We also have this drop-out rate, particularly in urban areas, where only about half the students even get their high school diplomas to
make them eligible for college education.
Why is this happening? About a decade ago the University of California got very worried about this problem and formed a Latino eligibility taskforce to look at why so few Latinos are coming into the UC. And their primary finding was that the population was very ignorant about just how to get a college education. This is a population that is disproportionately living in poverty, with no guidance, mentorship, know-how or social capital. In the West, Latinos are more segregated in under-resourced schools than any other group.
To what extent is this problem institutionalized? This country puts very little emphasis on any kind of social support system for families. We have a very unforgiving economy. If you don’t have at the very least a high school diploma, and increasingly a college degree, there are no jobs out there that can provide you with a consistent way of supporting a family.
What’s the cure? We devote the last chapter of our book talking about 10 things that we need to sort out. First, there needs to be some greater acknowledgement for the need for social support for these families and students. Second, there needs to be a lot of emphasis on the importance of recruiting teachers who can speak to these kids and their parents. This is not impossible. We have huge percentages of people in this society who can speak Spanish.
Can the Latino elite do something about the problem? The Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Irvine Foundation have all been helping me a bit to prepare a bi-national curriculum to get kids more successfully out of high school and into college. But it’s a drop in the bucket. There has to be something that’s far more systemic than that.
The National Center for Higher Education Management Systems had a report in 2006 that projected the economies of states a decade and a half down the road, based on the rates at which the states were educating their kids. For California they found that between 1980 and 2000, our per capita income had grown 30 percent – a huge growth. They projected that between 2000 and 2020 our per capita income would
decline by about 11 percent. The reason? Latinos in California, who make up half of the children, are not being educated to college level. So the jobs that were generating great incomes will not be adequately filled.
Does it all go back to Proposition 13, the 1978 California ballot initiative that capped property taxes and squeezed funds for public schools? Some of it is that. Some of it is underfunded education across the board. But some of it is also about policies about how we educate kids. We have this ludicrous policy in California, where things aren’t too different from a lot of other places, that kids can’t be taught in a language they can understand, which goes against federal policy and a Supreme Court decision that says you have to provide access to the curriculum in ways that the kids understand it.
Would a teacher exchange program between Mexico and California help? I’ve actually been working along those lines. What would be helpful is not so much a teacher exchange – we’re talking about millions of kids and there’s no way we’re going to send that many teachers back and forth – but an exchange of people who are training teachers in both countries.
What are some of the strengths that Latinos bring to the education mix? For one thing, they bring us the knowledge of one of the world’s great and most-spoken languages, which will continue to be a very important language of commerce in as far in the future as we can imagine. We can also build on the fact that immigrants tend to be more ambitious, harder working and actually healthier than the populations that they leave behind.
Your own brother was subjected to stereotypes. How did you escape that fate? My brother was raised in Mexico until he was in high school. He went to the best school in Guadalajara and had an excellent education. But when he came here, he was viewed as just another Mexican kid that the schools didn’t know how to deal with. He dropped out in the 10
th grade. The system was totally unprepared to teach him, and he came into a situation that was, frankly, very racist. Our next-door neighbors in Long Beach refused to speak to us because we were Mexican.
I was born here, grew up here, and while my family spoke Spanish, English was the primary language of our home and the primary language of our community. I had teachers who liked me. I liked school and did well.
