Latinos, Education of

Who Are Latinos?

Latinos are not a homogeneous group, but have different histories and different origins. This fact results in distinct circumstances among the states [Page 1345]with large Latino populations. In the Southwest—California, Arizona, Nevada, and Texas—Latinos are overwhelmingly of Mexican origin, the most disadvantaged of Latino subgroups. Latino students in this region comprise up to half of all students in the schools and suffer from very low academic achievement. Florida has a large Latino population, the majority of whom come from Cuba and Central or South America. Florida's Latinos are generally more advantaged than other Latino groups and often outperform native-born Whites on many measures of school achievement. In the Northeast, the predominant Latino groups are Puerto Rican and Dominican. They also tend to fare poorly in school, but they comprise only 9% and 3%, respectively, of the total Latino population. Across the United States, more than two thirds of all Latinos are of Mexican origin; consequently, Mexican culture often permeates even heterogeneous Latino communities. School personnel frequently fail to distinguish among Latino students from different cultural backgrounds, assuming they are all the same, which they are not. Nevertheless, most Latinos feel they have many characteristics in common in addition to speaking the same language.

Educational Achievement and Attainment

As a group, Latino students begin school significantly behind their non-Latino peers and continue to fall behind throughout their schooling careers. At entry into kindergarten, Latino children are half as likely as Whites to have pre-reading skills in the highest quartile of performance, and about two and a half times as likely as White students to be found in the lowest quartile of performance. These gaps remain, and sometimes widen, throughout K–12. Recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for 2009 show that by eighth grade, 39% of White students score as proficient in reading on this nationally administered test. (The NAEP is widely acknowledged to set very high standards for proficiency.) But only 16% of Latinos reach proficiency level. In math the gaps are even larger: Only 17% of Latinos reach proficiency compared with 43% of White students. This lackluster performance in school often culminates in dropping out. In urban areas, up to 50% of Latino males leave school without a diploma; the figure is only slightly lower for Latinas. Thus the pool of Latino students who graduate from high school ready for college is small.

...