Latinos Lagging on Every School Level, Study Finds : Education: From preschool to college, they are under-represented and losing ground nationally.

From enrollment in preschool to attainment of graduate degrees, the nation’s Latinos are “grossly under-represented at every rung of the educational ladder” and, by many measures of academic achievement, are losing ground, according to a study by the American Council on Education.

The study, released in Washington this week, showed that the proportion of Latino students completing high school slid from 60.1% in 1984 to 55.9% in 1989. By contrast, the completion rate for blacks rose slightly during the same period--from 74.7% to 76.1%. While the rate for Anglos dipped somewhat, down to 82.1% in 1989, it remained dramatically higher than those of the two minority groups. Based on census data, the report did not provide separate completion rates for Asians and American Indians.

Educators and some political leaders have long been concerned about Latinos’ acute lack of success in the schools system, and President Bush recently launched a special effort to improve the educational lot of this group.

But the ACE study, its Ninth Annual Status Report on Minorities in Higher Education, paints the most detailed--and perhaps the darkest--picture to date.

“It’s not just that there is no improvement . . . we are losing ground,” Blandina Cardenas Ramirez, director of the ACE’s Office of Minorities in Higher Education, said in an interview Wednesday.

Ramirez said the findings cannot be attributed to the influx of large numbers of poor immigrants alone, as U.S.-born Latinos also have considerably lower education levels than non-Latinos. Furthermore, the decrease in high school completion rates occurred during a time when immigration rates for Latinos were relatively low.

The study said the lack of access to equal educational resources “may well be the most powerful (factor) in explaining the low levels of educational attainment for Hispanics.” It went on to say that “school finances in a number of states with large Hispanic enrollments have been found to be grossly unequal.”

Ramirez and other education experts cited several other factors, including the culture of poverty, a pattern of poor educational facilities in predominantly minority communities, shrinking funding for public schools, low performance expectations on the part of schools and the students themselves, and lack of effective ways to involve parents in their children’s schooling.

These problems are shared by many low-achieving students. But for Latinos they may be exacerbated by language fluency difficulties, experts say.

The study’s findings are especially significant for California, where Latinos make up 33% of the public school pupils in kindergarten through 12th grade. The state Department of Finance expects that proportion to climb to 41% by the year 2000 and to 43% by 2005.

The report did not include state-by-state data, but information collected independently by the state Department of Education indicates that large numbers of Latinos in California and in the Los Angeles Unified School District--where they represent 63.3% of school enrollment--also are failing to finish high school.

The high school completion rate for all California students was 67.3% in 1989, the most recent year for which data is available; for Latinos, it was 53.7%; and for blacks 53.5%. In the Los Angeles district, the high school completion rate for that year was 43.7%; the rate for Latinos was 35.7%. For blacks, the rate was 41.6%.

But California education experts say the completion rate is too imprecise a measure to be of much significance, failing to account for students who graduated ahead of or behind their class, moved away without requesting that school records be forwarded or got a high school equivalency degree at an adult school.

Instead, education department officials prefer to use a more narrowly defined measure to arrive at a “dropout rate” that includes students who are gone for more than 45 days with no explanation or request for transcripts.

That measure’s figures provide little comfort for those concerned about Latinos’ track record. In California, the three-year dropout rate for the class of 1989 was 20.4%; for Latinos it was 28.5%. In the Los Angeles district it was 35% overall and 36.2% for Latinos. The dropout rate for blacks was even higher, at 44.4%, while 27.8% of Anglo students were classified as dropouts.

“We have a massive crisis now in education, and for us as Latinos, it’s a super-crisis . . . with devastating implications for the future,” said Armando Navarro, executive director of the San Bernardino-based Institute for Social Justice, which emphasizes community organizing to improve conditions for Latinos. Earlier this month, Navarro headed a statewide summit meeting to find ways of addressing the myriad Latino education issues.

The ACE, a private, nonprofit organization representing about 1,600 colleges and universities throughout the United States, issues annual reports on minorities’ status in higher education.

The report found that Latinos are less likely than members of other groups to have enrolled their children in preschool programs or to pursue college or graduate education. Because of the decline in Latino high school completion, the gap between Latino and Anglo college attendance rates is widening. And Latinos were the only group to experience a decline in graduate school enrollment between 1986 and 1988.

Although both blacks and Latinos began to close the college attendance gap in the mid-1970s, things soon began to change again for Latinos. By 1989, only 16.1% of all Latinos 18 to 24 were enrolled in college, compared with 23.5% of blacks and 31.8% of Anglos.

Asian-Americans made the largest proportional gains in college enrollment, the report found. Their enrollment went up 10.9% between 1986 and 1988.

Significantly, Latinos remained concentrated in two-year colleges, where they will be unable to earn bachelor’s degrees without transferring to a four-year school. About 56% of all Latinos enrolled in higher education programs were at community colleges, contrasted with 38% for the general population.

In 1976, Latinos represented just 2% of all those earning bachelor’s degrees. In 1989, that figure had increased only to 3%--despite a doubling of the college-age Latino population during that time, the report found.

Things appear particularly bleak for Mexican-Americans, who make up the largest group of Latinos. Unlike other Latinos, young adult Mexican-Americans showed “essentially no improvement in attending four or more years of college” compared with their elders.

“The evidence is clear that for Hispanics (the education system) is not working,” Ramirez said, adding that the problems must be addressed much earlier than high school if the situation, which she said is exacerbated by “continued unequal access to the resources of education,” is to be improved.

In California, there have been efforts by several school districts to improve attendance and parent participation and expose youngsters to wider educational and career opportunities and at increasingly younger ages. But, without significant amounts of money, most of these efforts have been on a small scale.

STUDENT ACADEMIC ATTAINMENT High school completion rates and college participation rates by race/ethnicity:

Total Population % Enrolled High School of 18- to 24-year-olds in College Completion % ANGLOS 1984 23,347,000 28.0 83.0 1985 22,632,000 28.7 83.6 1986 22,020,000 28.6 83.1 1987 21,493,000 30.2 82.3 1988 21,261,000 31.3 82.3 1989 20,825,000 31.8 82.1 BLACKS 1984 3,862,000 20.4 74.7 1985 3,716,000 19.8 75.8 1986 3,653,000 22.2 78.5 1987 3,603,000 22.8 76.0 1988 3,568,000 21.1 75.1 1989 3,559,000 23.5 76.1 LATINOS 1984 2,018,000 17.9 60.1 1985 2,221,000 16.9 62.9 1986 2,514,000 18.2 59.9 1987 2,592,000 17.6 61.6 1988 2,642,000 17.0 55.2 1989 2,818,000 16.1 55.9

Source: American Council on Education, compiled from census data