For years, teachers and researchers have scratched their heads
about why Latino boys did bad in school and had one of the highest
drop-out rates of any ethnic group. Now, the Superintendent’s
Advisory Committee at San Benito High School is hoping to find a
solution to the troubling trend.
Hollister – For years, teachers and researchers have scratched their heads about why Latino boys did bad in school and had one of the highest drop-out rates of any ethnic group. Now, the Superintendent’s Advisory Committee at San Benito High School is hoping to find a solution to the troubling trend.
Latino students make up the majority of San Benito High School’s population at 52 percent and most are Mexican immigrants or of Mexican descent. But many do poorly on state tests and end up dropping out before graduation, prompting the committee to take up the cause.
While the average score on the California Achievement Test for a non-Hispanic 11th grader who attends the school is 53, it is only 33 for students who identify themselves as Latino. The California Department of Education does not group results by both ethnicity and gender, but for boys in the same grade, the score, 35, is nearly as low.
It’s those test results the committee, which is comprised of teachers, administrators, community members and several students, hopes to raise. Since its creation after Dr. Jean Burns Slater arrived at the school in 2003, the advisory committee has tackled the budget, drop-out rates and other issues facing the district.
“We’ve read articles, summarized them and plan on brainstorming on the topic and bringing ideas forward” on how to improve the scores, said Slater.
Many of what Slater and other committee members are reading are research papers by academics who devote their lives to studying Latino immigrants in the U.S.
One of them is Ruben Rumbaut, a sociology professor at the University of California at Irvine, who points out that academic achievement varies greatly among Latinos, depending on what country they are from, whether they are legal or not and how long they have been in the U.S.
“Mexicans, in addition to being the largest immigrant group in the U.S, are also the least educated group,” said Rumbaut.
Children whose parents immigrated from Mexico, but in many cases only completed grade school, can’t be expected to automatically perform as well in school as white students or immigrants from more privileged backgrounds, he said.
“The children of Mexican immigrant workers and those of Chinese professionals are not starting out with the same level of resources,” he said. “It’s not a level playing field at all.”
“The term ‘drop-out’ should not even apply to them because they never even ‘dropped in'” or intended to go to school, Rumbaut said.
The two strongest predictors of scholarly success beyond high school is what kind of expectations a student has of themselves upon completing middle school and their Grade Point Average, or GPA, according to Rumbaut’s research.
Though few would argue the educational challenges Latinos face in San Benito County, the reasons for low achievement are complex and vary depending on who you ask.
Ray Rodriguez, the father of two students at the school and a member of the committee, says one problem among Mexican-American kids is that they are caught between recent immigrants who speak primarily Spanish and non-Latino kids who don’t always identify with them. As a result, these second or third generation children of immigrants are left scrambling for their own identity, with little support from the administration.
“They have their Latino last name, so they don’t belong to the general population, but they also don’t speak the language,” said Rodriguez. “And they don’t always fit in with the white kids.”
Only 13 percent of teachers on campus are Latino, another reason Rodriguez attributes to low achievement in the group. When kids go to class, they are taught by mostly white teachers, but when they step out, they see Latino employees sweeping the courtyard, answering telephones or monitoring the crosswalk, creating a sort of deficit in role models, said Rodriguez.
“I am not saying that classified employees aren’t important, but teachers are the ones that have 105 minutes of direct contact with kids,” said Rodriguez, who works at a research facility physics lab at Stanford University and lives in Hollister.
Another reason for the low academic scores among Latinos is many recent immigrants in their teens don’t come to the U.S. to study, but rather to make money and go back home.
The committee has not made any decisions about how exactly they intend to correct the problem, which is not unique to Hollister. But Rodriguez also hopes that some of his ideas and thoughts, such as increasing the number of Latino teachers and investing more money into remedial classes will be the right steps towards reversing the problem.
“We need to push from the bottom instead of pulling from the top,” said Rodriguez, who still has several children at the school. “We brag about kids taking the AP (advanced placement tests), but if we are going to improve the school, we need to start where the majority of the kids are living and that’s below the 50 percentile.”
Karina Ioffee covers education for the Free Lance. Reach her at (831)637-5566 ext. 335 or
ki*****@fr***********.com
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