If Latino Students Fail, The U.S. Will Fail

We all know that education is the key to our future, yet, as Latino students increasingly make up a majority of students in our nation’s school districts, these institutions are failing them. The upshot, according to a story from Time, is that the future of this country is in jeopardy. If we don’t have enough educated leaders in the future, the country will suffer as a whole.

You’d think those numbers would grab the attention of policymakers and educators and spur action—but you’d be wrong. Our public schools are woefully unprepared to deal with the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States. Only 17 percent of Hispanic 4th-graders score proficient or better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a national test given to samples of students each year) while 42 percent of non-Hispanic white students do. Nationally, the high school graduation rate for Hispanic students is just 64 percent, and only 7 percent of incoming college students are Hispanic, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education.

These two tectonic issues—our rocketing Hispanic population and the inadequate education of Hispanic students—are on a collision course that could either end in disaster or in another story of successful assimilation in America. The stakes are clear: How we meet this challenge will impact our politics, economy, and our society itself.

The entire story is great and worth reading, because it points out what we’ve reported before. When politicos fail to care for institutions that will serve Latinos, the country as a whole will suffer. Take Texas’ public education system as an example; gutting the school system just as we find out that the majority of students in the schools are Latino may be an economic coincidence (maybe), but the upshot is that, when Texas is ready to compete on a global scale with China and India, the state will be woefully short of leadership capable of taking on that challenge.

This is a nationwide problem, what do you think is a solution?

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD