Officials Told Latinos Left Out in School : Education: Reforms must address widening economic gap and the community’s curricula needs, leaders at Anaheim convention hear.

The special needs of Latinos must be part of a national education policy in order to close a widening economic gap between them and the rest of the population, experts agreed Saturday at a gathering of Latino leaders.

“In the nation’s education reform debate, Hispanics appear nowhere,” RAND Corp. policy analyst Georges Vernez complained during the closing day of the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials convention in Anaheim.

One of the main reasons, Vernez said, is that nearly two-thirds of the country’s Latino population is concentrated in four states--California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico--so its problems do not command sufficient national attention.

Statistical studies show that Latinos are falling behind in educational achievement, Vernez and others said during a panel on the future of Latino youth, in part because of the influx of new immigrants and also because the educational system fails to prepare and support ethnic minorities.

The focus on improving the opportunities of youth, panelists said, is especially important in the Latino community, where half of the population is made up of people 24 and younger.

The percentage of young Latinos living in poverty in the United States, Vernez said, has increased from 27% in 1970 to 40% today. That reflects a wage gap: Latino men today earn just 66% as much as white men, down from 74% in 1980.

Vernez contended that “45% of the wage difference is caused by educational differences.”

Throughout the nation, he said, high school dropout rates are declining for white and black children but increasing for Latino youth, with two out of five Latino high school students failing to graduate.

Also, he said, while the percentage of white high school graduates who go on to college has been gradually rising since 1970, the percentage of Latino youths enrolling in college has declined.

Amado M. Padilla, a professor in the School of Education at Stanford University, said support programs for Latino children should begin at an early age to prepare them for first grade with English fluency and other skills, including computer literacy.

Parents must take responsibility, said Padilla, who noted: “Many of our parents are very young and do not have prerequisite parenting skills,” so programs to train parents are also needed.

Padilla agreed with Vernez that Latinos should play a larger role in setting policies for achieving the national education goals that have been established by the Bush Administration.

Padilla said Latinos must push for more bilingual education. He also warned that plans to establish a standardized national achievement test could have the negative effect of “tracking” Spanish-speaking students into inferior educational paths.

“It is not sufficient just to say, ‘Let’s stem the problem of the high school dropout,’ ” Padilla said. “In California, even if you are a high school graduate and Latino, 86% to 87% are ineligible to enter any of the four-year institutions of higher education” because they do not meet admission standards.

Too often, Padilla said, Latino students with weak academic records enter two-year community colleges with false expectations that later they can transfer to four-year institutions.

Generally, he said, “community colleges today do not serve as steppingstones to higher education.”

Encouraging Latinos to continue their college educations is vital to eliminating a severe shortage of Latino teachers, he said.

Some at the conference strongly disagreed with Padillo’s statements about community colleges. In an interview after the panel, David Lopez-Lee, president of the Board of Trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District, acknowledged that just 15% to 20% of community college graduates transfer to four-year institutions, in part because many of them are seeking vocational training.

But he insisted that community colleges have proven very successful at giving high school graduates “a second chance” at a four-year degree.

Lopez-Lee estimated that two-thirds of the students who enter community colleges because they are ineligible for four-year institutions succeed in transferring at the end of two years of study and perform on a par with other students at four-year colleges.

Moreover, Lopez-Lee said, transfers will become easier with the application of new state legislation intended to ensure that the curricula of community colleges is compatible with that of four-year state institutions.

Organizers of the conference also drew sharp criticism from the audience for not including women on the youth panel. And there were complaints that RAND’s economic data applied only to men.

“Our culture does not give enough importance to women,” said Mary Helen Barro, vice president of a Latino radio broadcasting company in Bakersfield and national president of the American Hispanic Owned Radio Assn.

Vernez agreed that the RAND studies of the Latino working population to date have not included women.

“Unfortunately, not as much is known about women as men,” he said, but he promised that future studies will rectify that.