Education & Affordable Housing
Dropout rates among Hispanic students may continue to be high because of inaccurate reporting of data, according to a recent report released by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University.
The report, “Losing our Future," said that although the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 requires schools to publish dropout rate information, the numbers being used hide actual numbers of high school students who leave school without a diploma.
If the public is not clearly informed, the dropout rates will continue to be an invisible crisis without a solution, the report said.
Irma Guadarrama, a professor at the University of Houston's College of Education, said she believes that the focus on the inaccurate numbers is a step in the right direction to finding solutions to the problem.
Hispanic students make up 40.6 percent of the student population in Texas, but only 55.9 percent graduate as compared to 73.5 percent of white students, according to the report.
“The schools are insensitive to the needs of the students and their curriculum reflects this,” Guadarrama said.
Even in school districts where the majority of students are a minority group, like Pasadena Independent School District, the percent of Hispanics graduating is still lower than that of whites.
Of the 44,000 students attending PISD, 68.9 percent of them are Hispanic, but the percentage of Hispanic high school students not graduating in four years or less in 2001-2002 was twice as high as that of white students – 8.5 percent compared to 4.5 percent, according to the Texas Education Agency’s Academic Excellence Indicator System.
Guadarrama said that little has been done at the state level to address the dropout rates of Hispanics and other minorities. but efforts are often made at the school level to help students.
For non-English-speaking Hispanic students, language is a barrier, and students are often considered intellectually inferior, resulting in an internalized feeling of failure, she said.
Most of Pasadena’s elementary schools have a bilingual transition program. With the average two-percent yearly increase of the Hispanic population residing in the district, eventually all schools will have the program, PISD spokesperson Kirk Lewis said.
“While it’s not a dropout prevention program per se,” Lewis said, “we know that it helps because if a child falls two years behind because he is trying to learn a language and at the same time trying to learn an academic concept, you’ve almost doomed him for failure.”
Pasadena’s three-year program begins teaching students academic skills in their native language the first year, and progresses to almost full English by the end of the third year while still learning the same skills as other students, Lewis said.
“Bilingual education is a sound pedagogy that focuses on helping students use their cognitive and linguistic skills in the most efficient and effective ways,” Guadarrama said.
Over the last 10 years the district’s standardized test scores for Hispanic third graders have doubled, according to the TEA. Last year 88.6 percent passed the TAKS test. In 1994 only 41.6 percent passed the TAAS test, the predecessor to the TAKS.
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