What Does Obama’s Budget Proposal Mean for Latino Education?

By John Benson, Voxxi

The recently released Obama’s budget proposal has educators within the Latino community cautiously optimistic.

One such person is California State University San Bernardino Education Professor and Latino Education and Advocacy Days (LEAD) Executive Director Enrique G. Murillo, Jr. PhD.

“From my stance as an educator professional and someone who deals with issues around Latino students, I have to praise it,” Murillo told VOXXI. “Of course, it’ll go through a process and things get changed but the blueprint is favorable to Latinos in higher education.”

According to Murillo, among the highlights of Obama’s budget proposal are the increase in Federal Pell Grants and work-study programs. He said the latter, a federally funded program assisting students with the costs of post-secondary education, are lacking in colleges across the country.

Latinos in College Director of Operations for Latinos Christine L Mendonça told VOXXI,“ President Obama’s 2014 budget proposal would benefit the Latino community tremendously, from increasing the number of students who have access to early childhood education to aligning high school education with the demands of a global marketplace to a focus on containing the cost of secondary education.”

The national non-profit Latinos in College is based in New York with a mission to increase the number of Latino students who attend and graduate from four-year universities.

“We are excited about the College Scorecard,” Mendonça said. “Though its not perfect, it is a tremendous first start in providing students and their families with key data to make informed decisions on what colleges and universities are potentially a best fit for their future.”

Other highlights of Obama’s budget proposal include a $1 billion competition with Race to the Top to increase the affordability of college, a community college-business alliance to promote education and workforce needs, and lower interest amounts for student loans.

“The student loan interest rate is interesting,” Murillo said. “I have no idea how it would work being tied to a market based system but overall the most favorable thing is in order to make funds available for low-income students you want to have low-interest rates, the lowest possible.”

All of the above fit squarely into the LEAD mission statement of bringing a broad-based awareness to the educational crisis in Latino education and to enhance the intellectual, cultural and personal development of our community’s educators, administrators, leaders, parents and students.

The group includes researchers, teaching professionals and educators, academics, scholars, administrators, independent writers and artists, policy and program specialists, students, parents, families, civic leaders, activists and advocates.

“Within Latino education, we envision education on two levels,” Murillo said. “One of them is education is a right, it’s not a privilege. And the other is education is an investment, so any proposal that kind of meets that criteria is favorable.”

Specifically on Murillo’s mind is enhancing the educational pipeline, which he said begins before elementary schools.

“In some communities, as high as 70 percent of Latino families don’t have access to quality pre-K,” Murillo said. “My understanding is this budget includes more funds for pre-K partnerships and for early learning programs. So that’s an example there that even though that’s not in higher education, doing and investing early on eventually when the students get older they feed into the pipeline. And the pipeline increases so that means there are more kids that will be eligible later on. More kids will graduate from high school and will be eligible for college.”

Murillo added, “You invest and put more money into the program that we know works and you might not see the results right away but over time you’re going to see that investments are strategic. These are things like early learning and preschool programs. These are programs that work for Latino students.”

For League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the battle regarding early-childhood development has been going strong for months. Not only does the organization await the potential sequestration cuts to vital programs like Head Start, WIC, GEARUP and TRIO, but now the upcoming budget battle remains its focus.

LULAC Director of Education Policy Luis Torres writes in an op-ed piece that it’s estimated more than 30 percent of current national Head Start participants are Latino Americans.

“For these reasons, LULAC is calling on the Latino community to engage with its representatives in an all-out effort to protect the funding for this critical program,” Luis said.

This article was first published in Voxxi.

John Benson is employed as a fulltime freelance writer writing for local/national outlets. When he’s not covering news, music or entertainment, he can be found coaching his boys (basketball, football and baseball) or spending time with his wife, Maria.