On the brink of becoming the nation’s largest minority, Latinos have begun talking among themselves about taking power and taking over. But before they deserve to do either, they must first take responsibility for their own children.
While public school graduation rates for white and black students have steadily increased over the last few decades, the dropout rate of Latino students remains alarmingly high with scant signs of any improvement.
The 2000 Census reports that, for whites, the dropout rate is down to 12.3 percent. For African-Americans, it is down to 23.1 percent. For Latinos, the figure is 44 percent.
Today’s dropouts are tomorrow’s low-wage workers. And with the number of Latinos rising rapidly, the problem takes on national significance. That’s because when the first wave of baby boomers begins to retire at the end of this decade, more and more of those in the workforce – whose contributions to Social Security help support the nation’s retirees – will have brown faces.
Already, the blame game for this sorry academic state has begun. Indeed, there is plenty to pass around.
Start with a public educational system that too often puts the interests of adults who work in schools ahead of those of the children who study in them. Blame teacher unions that fight public demands for testing and other ways of increasing accountability, and administrators who look the other way as their teachers practice daily what President Bush correctly diagnoses as the “bigotry of low expectations” – treating differently those students who come from different cultures. And blame teachers and administrators alike who constantly claim that they want greater parental involvement, then do absolutely nothing to make the school settings more hospitable and less intimidating to parents, especially those with limited English proficiency.
Latinos can go along and blame the system, the teachers or the schools for the fact that almost half of their children never attain a high school education. But they too need to know that after the blaming is done, the bulk of the responsibility for the problem falls just as much of their shoulders as it does on policymakers who attack the dropout problem the wrong way.
Parents may have little control over what their children learn in school, but they have more control than they realize over whether those children decide to drop out. One can still detect among Latinos a devotion to the idea of using education to better oneself, or to improve the lot of one’s family. Yet one does not find much evidence that Latinos apply much of a stigma to those who let their children leave school early. Too many Latino parents either don’t disapprove of their children’s choices or – more likely – fail to voice disapproval loud enough.
If they were raising their voices, they just might be able to keep their children in school. Researchers who have studied the dropout problem note that while Latino students may not fear the truant officer, many have enormous respect for their parents and want to avoid disappointing them. And so parents have the ultimate power – the power of disapproval. Used correctly, it can convince an “at-risk” student to stick it out until graduation.
Those, however, who seek to attack the problem through government have far less power than they think, and what little they do have, they often waste by focusing their efforts in the wrong direction. In the last 20 years, the public and private sectors have spent millions to make it more affordable for Latinos to attend colleges and universities while paying little attention to reforms aimed at getting more Latino students to graduate from high school.
The last bunch to fall into this trap was the Texas Legislature, which recently passed legislation to stop state universities from charging out-of-state tuition to undocumented immigrants. Sponsors of the legislation sold it to colleagues with promises that it would, among other things, help stem the high school dropout rate among Latino immigrants.
The emphasis is misplaced. Offering Latino students a better deal on college tuition might help a little to keep some kids in high school. But a firm parental commitment could do much more. It would also show the leadership that comes with displaying the courage of owning up to one’s responsibilities.
