La Plaza Central

On today’s docket, another article about the impending crisis in Latino education.  We’re familiar with the disproportionately high dropout rates for Latinos, but something I did not know was that only 11 percent attain a bachelor’s degree or better.  So while the graduation rate is around 55-60 percent, only 11 percent go on to finish college.

I think everyone can reasonably agree that children of Latino families need to learn English, and most people who work with these children, myself included, can see that they do learn at a fairly young age.  The issue, as the researcher in this article points out, is that starting with English-only instruction can make it difficult for the child to learn anything.

In Patricia Gándara’s words, “The problem with that [mandated English-only education] is that if I stand here and speak to you in Russian for the next four hours, about five minutes into the conversation you are going to tune out and go get some coffee. So this focus on language as the problem has led us down a pathway away from improving education for Latinos.”

I would be interested to read her work, The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies.

Update: This post may seem to fly in the face of an earlier post about rising Hispanic enrollment in colleges across the country, but the difference is that this one talks of percentages while the old post refers to raw numbers.  So while there are more Latinos in universities today than ever before, the percentage of Latinos in the U.S. finishing college has only gone from 9 percent in 1975 to 11 percent in 2005.