Fighting A New Segregation

Latinos are counting on greater educational accountability and choice to help them cross the achievement gap.

WASHINGTON (By Kathryn Jean López) July 2004 - This summer, a Pew Hispanic Center study announced a troubling trend in higher education: Although Hispanic high school students are about as likely as white non-Hispanic seniors to enroll in college, Hispanics are half as likely to stay with it long enough to earn a bachelor’s degree.

“Degree completion is lower across the board for Latinos,” reported Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center.

Fifty years after the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education decisions desegregating America’s public schools, experts are citing a different kind of segregation—or at least a distinction, and not a healthy one—involving the fastest-growing segment of the population.

The evidence is low test scores and abandoned degrees. Researchers at the New York-based Manhattan Institute complete the dismal picture: In 2001, they say, only 16 percent of the Latino 18-year-olds graduated from high school with basic literacy skills.

While everyone from the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity to the liberal Children’s Defense Fund agree to “leave no child behind”—the motto is now stamped on an awning outside the United States Department of Education in Washington, D.C.—there is not a clear consensus on how to fix things.

But there is more agreement than before.

President Bush’s ambitious No Child Left Behind initiative, which holds schools accountable for their results and gives students greater educational choice, initially galvanized the support of Democrats and Republicans alike in the same way welfare reform did several years earlier. And, according to the president’s Latino supporters, it’s working.

“[It’s] making sure schools are held accountable for the academic progress of every child and empowering Hispanic parents to remove their children from failing schools,” says Raúl Damas, director of grass-roots development at the Republican National Committee.

The reforms are the most significant since 1965. The law, passed nearly three years ago, sets out to ensure that all minorities and poor children can read and do math at grade level by 2014. It requires districts to identify schools with weak reading and math scores and begin applying sanctions if the scores don’t improve. It also gives students the ability to choose and attend higher-performing schools.
Yet as a new school year is about to begin, continued disappointment with the nation’s education system—and disagreements over what else needs to be done—are sure to make education a key election-year issue.

“The true test of commitment to these children … is to provide the resources necessary to make the No Child Left Behind Act work. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration has failed this test,” the National Council of La Raza complained in a statement released this summer.

Democrats agree; some, such as U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA) say the law is underfinanced by as much as $27 billion.

Bush’s opponent, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), voted for the No Child Left Behind Act, but in Spanish-language ads that have run in Arizona, Florida, New Mexico, and Nevada, he accuses Bush of breaking his promise to “be a friend of the Latino community and do what’s best for our children.”

Bush’s proposed 2004 budget makes an effort to remedy the lack of resources. It would result in a 49 percent funding increase for elementary and secondary education since 2001, according to Damas. But the best way to achieve better results—and real accountability—in schools, say many of the president’s Republican supporters—the same ones who are leary about “throwing money” at problems—is to give parents even greater school choice than is outlined in the law. What they would like to give parents is the option to take a child from a failing public school and enroll him or her in a private, perhaps Catholic, school.

Although the nation’s largest Hispanic public-policy group, the National Council of La Raza, has no official position on such vouchers—tax refunds for parents choosing to send their children to private rather than public schools—it tends toward skepticism. They’re concerned that, in the long run, vouchers can “erode support for public schools that minority children are attending,” as one NCLR education analyst put it.

Latino parents seem willing to take the risk. According to a CBS poll, a majority of Hispanics (63 percent) support greater school choice. Indeed, Hispanics are emerging as one of the driving forces behind the school voucher movement.

One of the most dramatic examples is Ohio’s program, where a state-sponsored study found the proportion of Hispanic and multiracial students in voucher programs is nearly twice that of Hispanic and multiracial students in public schools.

Increasingly, Hispanics are also advocates for the legislation that creates the programs. In Colorado, two school-choice drives failed before leaders enlisted prominent Hispanics. And a growing movement in New Jersey revolves in part around Hispanic grassroots groups.

Folks with the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options (Hispanic CREO), which sponsors Hispanic-focused school choice rallies, say they are very familiar with the trend. At a June meeting in Camden, New Jersey, Rev. Miguel Rivera, president of the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders, told supporters that school choice was a moral cause and called for holding teachers to account for their performance.

“If we have a minister who can’t attend his services,” he said, “we remove him.”

Some say Florida’s Opportunity Scholarships program suggests that school choice helps public schools, benefiting more than the kids who get to leave failing schools. A survey published in the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation’s Education Next journal found that Florida “public schools whose students were eligible for vouchers made significantly larger test-score gains than other public schools in the state.”

The voucher programs face stiff resistance from some quarters, however. The American Civil Liberties Union and other liberal groups oppose using government dollars for religious school education. Teachers’ unions are also against them, saying that the programs divert desperately needed cash from state education budgets—budgets that they say are already underfinanced.

A lack of resources is, of course, one of the chief complaints from Hispanic education advocates, including supporters of No Child Left Behind who want to see more resources dedicated to achieve its goals. And it’s not just the schools that are underfunded, they say.

“Money is the No. 1 reason Latino youth drop out of school,” says Sara Martínez Tucker, head of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund.

In any case, “Latino parents know that their children are not getting the same education as others are getting,” Marisa Demeo, regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, told the Boston Globe recently. “What I don’t know is who are they going to blame: the states, the Congress, the president?”

Even more elementary: They may blame the schools. Through accountability and choice, many are hoping to change the very face of education in America.