White House Offers Goals for Improving Latino Schooling

The White House today will unveil a set of goals designed to eliminate or sharply narrow existing gaps in the educational attainment of Latino students over the next 10 years, including a potentially controversial commitment to English language proficiency for all high school graduates.

The goals, to be presented at a White House strategy session, would urge substantial improvement in education for Latino children at every level, from preschool through college. And strategies for achieving such gains are likely to stir disagreement, especially on the politically explosive subject of how to attain proficiency in English.

But whatever the means, the gains must be achieved to lift low-income Latinos and to strengthen the national labor force in an era of rapid growth in the Latino population, said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Maria Echaveste. Although progress has been made in narrowing differences in the educational attainments of white, African American and Latino students in some areas, Latinos continue to trail by substantial margins overall.

“For our economy, for the advancement of this community . . . gaps of this nature are just unacceptable,” Echaveste said.

High school graduation rates, for example, are now virtually the same for blacks and whites, about 88%, but high school completion rates for Latinos are at 63%.

Similarly, the proportion of Latinos who graduate from four-year colleges is less than half that of white students, according to an analysis by the president’s Council of Economic Advisors that was prepared for the White House strategy session. About 25% of whites over age 25 have earned a bachelor’s degree.

Not surprisingly, the council’s report found that in the present economy, lower levels of education carry severe penalties in terms of income. Twenty years ago, the report says, a male Latino student who graduated from college could expect to earn 67% more than a male Latino who failed to complete college. Today, the average earnings difference is 146%.

To deal with the problem, the administration will propose measurable goals for improvement by 2010 in five areas:

* Raising the level of participation in high-quality preschool programs at least to the national average. About 45% of white 3-year-olds and almost 50% of blacks are enrolled in preschools, compared with less than 30% of Latino toddlers, according to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.

* Ensuring that all Latino students graduating from high school demonstrate proficiency in English.

* Eliminating the achievement gaps that exist between Latino and other students in elementary, middle and high schools, as measured by state tests and other standards. Though results vary in different schools and localities, Latinos on the whole do significantly worse on such tests than other groups.

* Increasing Latino high school completion rates to 90%.

* Doubling the percentage of Latino Americans who earn associate and bachelor’s degrees.

Echaveste acknowledged that the administration’s goals do not include concrete strategies for achieving the desired improvement, but she said promulgating the goals would help send “a wake-up call” to the country.

Hashing out concrete proposals for action will be the chief business for today’s White House conference of Latino leaders, educators, school officials and business and community leaders, she said.

Echaveste and the council report pointed to the rapidly growing, high-paying field of information technology to illustrate the consequences of the education gap.

Latinos employed in major information technology jobs earn only slightly less than comparable white workers and twice as much as Latinos working in other fields. But they are substantially underrepresented in the information technology field. Although Latinos make up 11% of all workers, they constitute only 4% of information technology workers, the report says.

“Given the rapid growth of the Hispanic population in the U.S., the gap between Hispanics and their peers is a matter of critical importance for Hispanic young people and to society generally,” the report says.