LULAC’s Education Panel: Reform without Change
The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), in celebration of its 79th annual convention, hosted a discussion on July 9, 2008 highlighting some of the education system’s biggest shortcomings.
For slightly over two hours, eight panelists discussed the abysmal academic performance of Hispanics and African-Americans and the inadequate governmental action taken to rectify the situation.
Dr. Emma-Violand Sanchez’s presentation summarized the discussion well, underscoring the serious achievement gap between minority and non-minority students. Not only are Hispanics and African-Americans the least likely to graduate high school, with rates as low as 63% even in districts that spend over $18,000 per pupil, such as Washington, DC. And not only are these groups attending the poorest schools in the nation with the worst teachers. Ultimately, even those who manage to graduate also struggle, unable to find jobs or to succeed in college because they lack the necessary writing and reading skills.
As if these problems were not bad enough, the panelists also seemed to believe that the government was not doing enough to address them. They maintained that although potentially beneficial, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) still needs much reworking to make a difference. Holly Kuzmich and Roberto Rodriguez noted that since the original legislation focused on elementary and middle schools, the aim now is to focus on high school education. Both panelists agreed that one of the first steps in this process is assuring that schools calculate their graduation rates in a nationally consistent manner, allowing officials to determine which schools have the most problems, and hence, need the most help.
Another important component of high school reform involves English-language learners. In the current form of the Act, English-language learners are exempt from federal testing for a year, though there has been discussion about increasing this number, giving students more time to learn the language. Instead, Sandra Licon, Joel Gomez, and Peter Zamora all advocated for alternative assessment methods for these students; invariably, these other methods mean testing the students in their native language until they achieve English proficiency. The panelists argued that by excluding English-language learners from NCLB tabulations, they might be left behind for good, decreasing the chances that they ever learn English.
Although they raise a legitimate problem, the logic behind their proposed revision is problematic: how would testing students in Spanish, or any other language, gauge their process in learning English, much less develop their basic English skills in the first place? If students are graduating with sub par reading and writing skills, testing them in a language other than English seems counter-intuitive and ineffective. Ultimately, the change would disservices exactly the community it aims to help.
Indeed, although informative, the LULAC panel suffered from such pseudo-solutions. The underlying question that permeated the discussion remained unanswered: how, exactly, are we to address the achievement gap in high school? Apparently, nobody knows. The speakers deftly described the symptoms of the problem but failed to deliver any kind of solution, however tentative. Private school vouchers were immediately discarded, and although charter schools were supported, their endorsement came with a precondition: if they do not function, they need to be shut down. Now why can’t that same rule apply to public schools, where minority children are performing the worst?
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