Two recent reports highlight alarming facts for Black and Latino students in High School.
(Schott Foundation) More than a half-century after Brown v. Board of Education, the nation’s urban public school systems continue to be a pipeline to failure for most Black male students, a report by the Schott Foundation for Public Education finds.
“This report sheds light on a national crisis, and puts valuable information into the hands of public school advocates and stakeholders, who can use it to hold the stewards of the nearly 15,000 U.S. school districts accountable for eradicating systemic failure as well as open avenues of opportunity to millions of Black male students,” said Dr. John H. Jackson, President & CEO, Schott Foundation for Public Education.
Current inequities in school systems deny equal rights to a quality education, because many Black males have little choice but to attend substandard schools with overcrowded classrooms, placing them squarely on a path to failure, the report finds.
Among the study findings are these:
• Only 47% of Black male students nationwide graduate from high school on time.
• Forty-six percent of male Black students nationally score at or above basic Grade 8 level in reading and math.
• The million Black male students enrolled in New York, Florida, and Georgia public high schools are twice as likely not to graduate with their class as do their White peers.
• Nevada and Florida graduated just over one-third of their Black male students on schedule, while Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, South Carolina, and Wisconsin graduated fewer Black males with their peer group than the national average.
• Nationally, nearly three times as many male Black students are expelled or given out-of-school suspensions as would be appropriate, given their share of enrollments. According to the report, suspensions are an efficient means to close off educational opportunities for Black youth.
Why Education Matters to All of America
This issue is important to the nation as a whole because the failure to adequately educate more than half of a generation of Black males places increased pressure on society, the report points out. Inequitable resources, biased policies, and unfair institutional decisions push Black male students out of school and into the streets or into jail.
The report also offers educational success stories, citing examples of counties that have sustained positive results due to unbiased institutional decision making.
• This year the public schools in Fort Bend, Texas enrolled over 10,000 male Black students, graduating over 80% on time, a graduation rate identical to the district’s graduation rate for male White, non-Hispanic students.
• Two large suburban Maryland districts – Baltimore and Montgomery counties – have large Black enrollments and graduate male Black students with their peers at a rate comparable to the national average for White, non-Hispanic male students.
• The state of New Jersey, as a whole, graduates its male Black students at the same rate as the national average for White, non-Hispanic male students.
For the 50-state data set visit blackboysreport.org
High school graduation rate lower for Hispanics
Researchers: Hispanics have among the highest dropout rates in the nation, and the disparities in the South are even greater.
Researchers: Hispanics have among the highest dropout rates in the nation, and the disparities in the South are even greater.
(Perla Trevizo, Chattanooga Times FP – March 2008) Roberto Rojas has seen too many Hispanic students fall victim to “the monster of dropout,” a troubling trend the educator is working to reverse.
The problem is “something every school in the country is battling,” said Mr. Rojas, director of the NovaNet program aimed at decreasing the Hispanic dropout rate at Dalton High School.
“Hispanics are a segment of the population that cannot be ignored, that’s going to be the future work force of this town and (who) have made dramatic changes,” he said.
But researchers say Hispanics have among the highest dropout rates in the nation, and the disparities in the South are even greater.
In the Dalton Public Schools system, 66 percent of Hispanic students graduated compared to an overall graduation rate of 74 percent in the 2006-2007 school year, records show. In Whitfield County, 65 percent of Hispanic students graduated compared to an overall graduation rate of 72 percent.
In Hamilton County, 78 percent of Hispanic students graduated compared to an overall graduation rate of 75 percent during that school year. But while Hamilton County’s Hispanic graduation rate appears to be good, some educators said that is because Hispanic students in the county often drop out before they reach their senior year.
“We tend to take in a great number at kindergarten and elementary, but oftentimes we are losing our children in middle school and high school and we don’t know if they entered the work force,” said Sabrina Walton, director of the English Language Learner program at Hamilton County Schools. “Sometimes they return home. There are (many) situations that dictate how many kids are actually graduating.”
Jessica Castañeda, state coordinator and recruiter for the Tennessee Migrant Education Program, said the program is aware of about 100 Hispanics between the ages of 14 and 21 who never enrolled in a Chattanooga school system.
“We have seen a lot of youth that come from other areas who haven’t gone very far in school due to language barriers,” she said. “They don’t have the skills or ability to graduate from school, so a lot of them drop out when they are 14, 15, 16 years old.”
DROP-OUT Contributors
Dr. Richard Fry, senior researcher with the Pew Hispanic Center, said factors that play a role in Hispanic student drop-out rates include:
• The quality of English as a Second Language programs
• Language barriers
• Parents’ economic status and education level.
• Overall growth rates in the South in the 1990s.
“These schools not only were experiencing growing enrollment in general, which creates strains in the school systems, but also most of the Hispanic arrivals were from Mexico and Central America,” Dr. Fry said.
Among Hispanic youth, those two groups tend to have higher drop-out rates, he said.
Read the full article at Timesfreepress.com