Walk through the halls of any school in our city and you will see what we, who study demographic changes in the United States, have anticipated for years: the full growth of the Latino student body. In the same way that the Hispanic population in the United States has duplicated in the last 30 years, so has the population of Latino students in New York City schools.
The significance of this radical change in the demographic composition of the education system in the Big Apple is clear. Today, when we talk about the quality of instruction in our schools, what we're talking about is the quality of education that the vast majority of Latino youths in the city will receive. In fact, to talk about education reform is to talk about an issue that affects Latinos more than any other group in New York.
Fifty years ago in New York, Board of Education [now the Department of Education] officials, the mayor, and community leaders expressed a deep dismay for the poor academic performance of Puerto Rican students who had arrived to the city's schools. These officials, despite not having the data mine my colleagues and I have, knew that the future of New York depended on the academic achievements of the Latino kids in their classrooms.
At that time, their concern turned into a campaign to Americanize the students. Nowadays, years after fighting against that Draconian regime, the system has changed. The new students who occupy the seats of classrooms in El Barrio (Spanish Harlem), Washington Heights and Corona – students born in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Mexico – enjoy a system that doesn't try to break the links to their native countries but instead cultivates them, as they integrate the youths to academic life in New York.
However, the change in strategy between education officials – together with the increased presence of bilingual teachers – has not produced the education system that our Latino youths deserve. Or at least, that has been the message of those attempting to radically change the public education system in our city. Are those who support a complete change to our schools right?
My colleague Herbert Klein and I analyzed census data from 1980 to 2008 and what we found was that throughout the last 30 years, the academic performance of Latino students in the United States has clearly improved. In 1980, only 44 percent of Latinos graduated from U.S. high schools. By 2008 that figure had increased to 63 percent. What's more, in 1980, only 8 percent of Latinos in the United States had received a university degree. Nearly 30 years later, the percentage of Latinos who had a university degree was 14 percent.
To what do we owe these improvements? The answer is complicated, but we do know that increased investment of resources in schools on the government's part, emphasis in reducing class sizes and thus allow more personal interaction between teacher and student, and the involvement of parents in their children's education all are part of the formula that produces better results for Latino students.
There is no doubt that the academic performance of Latino youths falls behind that of other groups like Asians and African Americans. And as a university professor, I can state that some of the Latino students who come to my classroom at Lehman College often lack the skills necessary to succeed in college. But, if the figures that Professor Klein and I have found are a reliable index, the situation is improving. Whoever hopes to radically change the present system should provide a plan that would guarantee results better than those we have been seeing since 1980.
