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August 1, 2009
Vol. 51
No. 8

Preparing Latino Students for College Success

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Latino students make up the fastest growing K–12 population in the United States. School and business leaders and education advocates are looking for new ways to ensure these students have the academic skills they need to enter and succeed in college.
The recent U.S. Supreme Court nomination of federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor might seem an obvious indicator that Latinos have "arrived"—that talent, a good education, and hard work can propel a poor kid from the housing projects into one of the most esteemed intellectual positions in U.S. society. However, the reality is that Latino students are among the least likely of any minority group to finish college or even to graduate from high school.
By the mid-21st century, the Latino school-age population will be the largest racial and ethnic group in U.S. K–12 public schools. Unfortunately, the high school dropout rate of Latino students born in the United States is 15 percent, nearly twice the 8 percent rate for non-Latino white students and exceeding the 12 percent dropout rate for black students, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. When foreign-born Latinos, who often have limited English proficiency, are added to the equation, the dropout rate for Latino students climbs to 21 percent.
Even for Latinos who do graduate from high school, college may not be an attainable dream. Many leave high school unprepared for college for a variety of reasons, say experts, including enrollment in dysfunctional urban schools; lack of English proficiency; failure to take college-prep academic classes in high school; and lack of awareness about the college exploration, selection, application, and financial aid processes.

Minding the Gap

In the article "College Readiness for All: the Challenge for Urban High Schools," Melissa Roderick, Jenny Nagaoka, and Vanessa Coca write that a student's capacity to enter and thrive in college depends largely on four factors: content knowledge and basic skills; core academic skills such as writing and analytic thinking; noncognitive skills, including studying, time management, and good work habits; and knowledge about the college selection and application processes.
Deficiencies in one or more of the college readiness factors may account for an "aspirations-attainment gap" among Latinos. Like their counterparts across racial and ethnic lines, Latino high school students have increasingly aspired to go to college over the last 30 years, but there remains a divide between aspirations and attainment of a bachelor's degree, say the authors.
In her research, Nagaoka, the project director of the Chicago Postsecondary Transition Project at the University of Chicago, learned that many Latino students are the first in their families to consider going to college, which means their adult family members may not fully understand how to navigate the college pathway. Nagaoka says even high-performing Latino students may make decisions about where to attend college based on the school's proximity to their neighborhood or on ads they've seen on buses for for-profit trade schools specializing in secretarial, fashion design, medical assistant, computer, or automotive training. "Often, the [career] path seems clearer when you're being told that you're going to get a certificate that's supposed to lead to a job than it is if you go to a four-year college," Nagaoka says.
Orange County (Calif.) Public Schools works directly with parents, providing them with the appropriate information to guide their children towards college. The district, which has a total enrollment of about 500,000, has a significant Latino student enrollment that will make up almost half the student body by 2020.
In response to a 2004 Orange County Register article series about the hardships faced by Latino families in understanding the local school system, the Orange County Department of Education, local business leaders, and community groups formed a partnership to launch the Latino Educational Attainment (LEA) initiative to help Latino students close the aspirations-attainment gap. The partnership projected that if the county's 18 percent college-readiness rate among Latino high school graduates did not increase, an estimated 14,611 Latino students would not be eligible to enter the University of California or California State University systems by 2015.
Based on parent focus group feedback, the LEA initiative developed informational workshops targeting Latino families in the neighborhoods surrounding the 106 lowest-performing schools in the county. The more than 6,000 participating parents learned the LEA's "Ten Education Commandments for Parents":
  1. Commit as a family to be involved in school.
  2. Do my part in helping my child study.
  3. Understand how grades work.
  4. Learn how schools are structured.
  5. Learn what my child needs to graduate successfully from high school.
  6. Help my child prepare for college early.
  7. Realize college is affordable.
  8. Support the learning of mathematics, science, and English.
  9. Encourage my child to take honors and advanced courses.
  10. Teach my child to hope and to visualize the future.
William Habermehl, superintendent of schools for Orange County, hopes that Latino parents who participated in the workshops now understand "their role as advocates in the system, the function of grade point averages, and how to apply for financial aid for college." Initial results show that the achievement levels of students whose parents attended the workshops are somewhat higher than those of a control group, says Habermehl.

Raising Academic Expectations

Rockville Centre Public Schools, a small, suburban district on Long Island, N.Y., has a wide socioeconomic range and a student population that is 12 percent Latino, 9 percent black, and 3 percent Asian. Twenty years ago, the district decided to start dismantling its academic tracking system by eliminating lower-track classes that did not lead to the state's Regents diploma and rooting out implicit tracking in the district's middle school. Before Rockville Centre detracked, the district's minority and low socioeconomic status students were in effect locked out of academically challenging classes, Carol Burris and Delia Garrity say in their 2008 ASCD book Detracking for Excellence and Equity.
In 2008, 97 percent of Latino students in the district earned the Regents diploma, and 67 percent attained the diploma with advanced designation. The latter recognition requires students to take additional exams in a second science, math, and a second language, and only 40 percent of all New York high school students attain this designation, points out Burris, the principal of Rockville Centre's South Side High School. Because Latino and black students are expected and encouraged to take part in a more rigorous curriculum that includes international baccalaureate (IB) classes, these minority students can gain the credentials that they were systematically denied in the past, says Burris.
Nicolette Rodriguez is a former South Side High School student now entering her third year at Brown University's Program in Liberal Medical Education, an eight-year program that culminates in a medical degree. Rodriguez says that the school's open curriculum allowed her to enroll in the IB program, which prepared her academically for the rigors of Brown. Rodriguez also learned valuable skills like "being responsible, timely, and dedicated" to her work, she says. In addition, Rodriguez credits the support of South Side staff as an influence on her success.
Rodriguez says that, for herself and some of her friends whose parents also immigrated to the United States, going to college was a display of gratitude for their parents' sacrifices. "It was almost as if we owed it to our parents to go to college and achieve the 'American Dream' because they had striven so hard to give us the opportunity to attain it," Rodriguez says.

The Dual Enrollment Option

To encourage more young people to attend college, several school districts and universities have formed partnerships that allow high school students to obtain college credits while still enrolled in high school. At the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College (UTB/TSC), 8,466 high school students, most of whom are Latino, were enrolled at both the university and their local high school this year.
The dual enrollment classes are free from UTB/TSC, with the university picking up the costs for tuition and fees while the school districts pay for books, testing, and student transportation, says Linda Fossen, associate vice president for enrollment at the university. Also, students who follow the eight-year high school–college advisory plan receive college support services, such as advising and tutoring.
Students participating in the dual enrollment program at UTB/TSC "learn how to succeed in the college environment academically, socially, and culturally," Fossen says. She adds that once matriculated into the university, students who participated in the dual enrollment program often take heavier course loads, earn higher grade point averages, and have higher retention rates than students without this experience.
"Dual enrollment definitely encourages students who otherwise would not see themselves as college material to go to college," Fossen says. After students complete a college class, they gain the experience and confidence to take more—and are pleased that their parents now view them as successful college students, Fossen notes. "They're proud that they're leading the way for their brothers and sisters to successfully complete a college degree," she says.

Rick Allen is a former ASCD writer and content producer.

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