Report Says Latino Education in Decline

Latinos are the most uneducated ethnic group in the country and the educational gap between Latinos and other groups is widening, according to a report to be presented today at a gathering of California educators in Del Mar.

The report, prepared by the National Council of La Raza, an ethnic advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., shows that by age 18 one in three Latinos has dropped out of school as compared to about one in six blacks and one in seven whites.

Also, in tests conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, Asian-Americans and whites were three to four times more likely to score at the advanced level in mathematics than Latinos, said the report. This information will be presented at the Hispanic Caucus, a three-day convention of educators from California that began Friday.

The report, whose data comes from the Census Bureau, federal agencies and other published studies, also shows that 56% of Latinos in the United States are functionally illiterate, compared with 16% of whites and 44% of blacks.

“Indeed, the data are ominous,” said Charles Kamasaki, a vice president of La Raza. “Hispanics leave school earlier and drop out in greater proportions from college. That does not portend well for either Hispanics or the country as a whole.”

In San Diego County, the dropout rate for Latinos last year was lower than the national figure, 28.1% compared to the national rate of 31.3%, according to the county office of education. The county’s overall dropout rate is 18.2%.

About 30 of the 250 conference attendees come from San Diego County districts. Absent, however, were representatives from Carlsbad, Oceanside and San Marcos, where drop out rates for Latinos last year were 16.4%, 30.1% and 16%, respectively, all significantly higher rates than the rest of their students.

“There’s a wall of denial in North County,” said Marsha Mooradian, a school board member from the San Dieguito Union High School District in North County. “They have not accepted Latinos as part of our community. People perceive that if we close the borders, Hispanics will go away, and that’s not true.

“We need the Anglo population to realize that this is everyone’s problem and if we don’t deal with it now, 10 years from now it will be a social services problem,” said Mooradian, an organizer of the fifth annual conference.

The study also noted that because the Latino population has increased five-times faster than the rest of the population since 1980 and the median age of Latinos is seven years younger than the non-Latino population, Latinos in the future will be carrying a larger burden in paying for the social welfare system.

“Hispanics are a fast-growing proportion of the student population and work force at a time when the rest of the country is aging demographically,” Kamasaki said.

“You need workers to support Social Security and Medicare, and what you’re looking at is critical, where the country is aging in general and the elderly are living longer and they have more needs. That puts more pressure on the work force, and the Hispanic proportion of that work force is increasing,” Kamasaki said.

Latino students make up 26% of the San Diego County student population, 39% statewide and 10% nationally.

La Raza researchers say that while the high school completion rates for whites, blacks and Latinos have improved, the gap between whites and Latinos has not lessened even though the gap between blacks and whites has shown progress.

“Latinos are falling behind blacks in high school completion as well as (behind) whites,” said Carlyle Maw, co-author of the report.

Maw also said the gap between the percentage of Latinos and whites who had finished college had increased in the last 20 years from a gap of 6% to an 11% gap.

But Kamasaki said there is good news for Latinos.

“We didn’t find anything in the data that suggests that the Hispanics are an educational underclass or that the public is not amenable to a solution. We know how to better educate Latinos and there is growing evidence that Latinos value education,” Kamasaki said.

“It’s not that we don’t know how to do it. The only question is do we have the political will to allocate the resources to solve these problems,” Kamasaki said. Such programs as Head Start, in which underprivileged children are given a preschool boost in educational skills, can make a major difference, he said.

Few at the conference felt that either the federal or state governments had made substantive improvements in the education of Latinos.

“When the Soviets appeared to be dominating the space race, we developed a national policy on space research and provided the funds to back it up,” said John Arvizu, president of the Hispanic Caucus, in his opening address. “Now we need a national policy for education reform with the funds necessary to educate our children.”