Once upon a time Gloria Fajardo and I used to ride the school bus together. That’s not all we had in common.
Both our fathers served in the U.S. Army; we spoke Spanish; we played the guitar and were fans of Carlos Santana; and we graduated from the same high school. Our Lady of Lourdes Academy was an all-girls school in South Florida that required an entrance exam for admission.
After high school, my interest in Santana and the guitar waned. Gloria, conversely, joined a band with her new husband, Emilio Estefan, and became an international singing sensation.
Arsenio Hall, the former talk-show host, once interviewed the diva from Havana, Cuba. The pair discussed higher ed. Gloria talked about her professors at the University of Miami and described her energetic mother as “Joe College.”
I understood what my former classmate meant when she used that phrase. Young, middle-class Hispanic-Americans, who grew up in the ’70s, heard many lectures from their parents about the importance of obtaining una educacion (an education). Our elders simultaneously viewed the United States as the land of economic and academic opportunity.
Since my salad days, Hispanics’ attitudes toward learning haven’t changed, according to one poll. The 2002 National Survey of Latinos revealed that more than three quarters of adults – whether they hail from Cali, Colombia; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; or Managua, Nicaragua – think that Hispanic children who grow up in the United States will receive a better education than they did.
But the opposite is the reality. “Latinos are the least well-educated segment of the American population,” reports the Pew Hispanic Center. In fact, only 57 percent of Hispanics finish high school, in contrast to 89 percent of whites. In Oklahoma, for instance, the scores from the National Assessment of Education Progress are also revealing – only half of Hispanic fourth graders demonstrate competent reading skills.
One of the reasons for the meltdown is that lower-income Hispanic youth are concentrated in cities where the neighborhood schools they attend are failing. Not only are the buildings and grounds ugly, but the teachers are often more preoccupied with crowd control than with imparting knowledge. These “schools” are a complete waste of taxpayer money and cause more prosperous families to flee to the suburbs.
Another problem is that many Latino newcomers are relegated to the ghetto of bilingual education where they languish – sometimes for years – without learning English or much about American culture. A study was done of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test scores for children in bilingual programs for the first two years that the test was administered. Researchers discovered that, as a group, bilingual children scored the lowest in the state, lower than kids in special education. Bilingual education students, as Lincoln Tamayo, a Cuban-born immigrant and English immersion supporter, wrote in a Boston Globe opinion piece, have “the highest drop-out rates of all major groups.”
So, can anything be done to liberate a studious Pablo or Maria from this 12-year sentence? Si. School choice!
This is an ideal policy for states that have a burgeoning population of Hispanics and where a menu of choices (magnet schools, online programs, religious academies, homeschools, etc.) exists. Hispanics themselves want more alternatives than the status quo (government assignment based on geographic district). Douglas Dewey, of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, says that in 1999 the parents of at least a quarter of a million Latino children applied to his organization for a partial scholarship to attend a private school. Texas homeschooling parent Jorge Gomez offers seminars to fellow Mexicans about the educate-at-home option. And the Gloria Estefan Foundation has a mission of “funding annual scholarships for students who need financial assistance.”
The chattering classes sometimes stereotype Latinos as the group of immigrants “who do the dirty work that others won’t do.” Certainly, manual labor is an honorable way to earn a living. But average Central or South Americans, who leave their homelands because they prize literacy don’t advise their sons and daughters: “If you work hard in America, you can grow up to be a dishwasher.” They probably ask their child what my husband asks our teen-aged son: “Have you ever thought of becoming a doctor?”
The people of the United States have a marvelous gift for encouraging newcomers to dream big dreams while holding them to high standards. Choice in education gives deserving Hispanic parents a shot at tapping into that winning formula.
School choice … para los ninos!
Izzy Lyman, the daughter of Costa Rican immigrants, is the author of “The Homeschooling Revolution.”
