Education

As immigration from Latin countries continues to swell, so has speculation about the implications of increasing Latino populations in communities where they settle. Such speculation ranges from potential changes in local community life and culture to public policy.

Researchers at Arizona State University believe that, at least for the city of Phoenix which experienced a phenomenal triple-digit growth rate of 226 percent in its Latino population between 1980 and 2007, they have helped answer a pivotal question regarding impact on local public services.

According to the researchers, they found that Latinos in Phoenix are generally willing to pay for quality public services. Their findings, based upon analysis conducted on data collected by Phoenix-based Behavior Research Center as part of the City of Phoenix’s 2002/2004 Community Attitude Surveys, appear in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly.”*

The University of Texas at El Paso has been awarded nearly $1 million from the National Science Foundation to help students earn doctorates in science, technology, engineering or mathematics in an effort to bolster the number of minorities with graduate degrees in these disciplines, according to a UTEP news release.

The $987,000 award will fund UTEP’s Bridge to the Doctorate program, which is part of The University of Texas System Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation. The award will support 12 students pursuing graduate degrees. Under the program, students will each receive a $30,000 stipend a year for two years plus funding to help cover tuition and related cost-of-education expenses.”*

Today the Oregon Secretary of State’s office announced that Initiative Petition #19 has qualified for the upcoming ballot. The unfunded mandate termed “English Language Instruction” would prohibit teaching a public school student in a language other than English for more than two years. This November, Oregonians will have the choice to reject or pass a law which will take control away from local school boards, families and educators and place it in the hands of convicted racketeer Bill Sizemore.

“School children targeted by Bill Sizemore’s measure speak over a hundred languages in our public schools and come from a variety of backgrounds. Many of these children suffer from economic hardship and some have spent years in refugee camps with no formal schooling before coming to Oregon,” said Kayse Jama of the Center for Intercultural Organizing. “This is a new low even for Sizemore, destroying their educational hopes in a land where they should be given equal opportunity”.

Similar measures that have been passed in other states have been shown to hinder the ability of children to learn English. In California, a recent study revealed that after six years since an anti-bilingual education measure’s passage just one-quarter of Hispanic pupils could expect to be reclassified as fluent in English.

This staggering revelation shows that students have been prevented from making the most of their education thereby having a negative impact on their economic future and the future of the communities they live in. The fact remains, children learn English more quickly, along with math and science and other academic subjects, when at least some of their instruction is in their native language. Last year, there were 62,084 students enrolled in English Language Development programs in Oregon school districts.

A broad coalition of immigrant, refugee, educators and ally organizations are set to fight the ill-conceived measure by educating Oregonians about the additional costs the measure will create, the fact that it will take federal money away from Oregon’s General Fund Budget, the harm it will do to children and the control it will take away from local school boards, families and educators, those whom know best about educate our children.

“We are in the process of educating families in communities around Oregon about the harmful consequences of this measure”, said Aeryca Steinbauer, coordinator of CAUSA. “Oregonians everywhere should be concerned about its damaging effects on children and disruption of local control”.”*

Two bills have been introduced this legislative session. Both seek to toughen the community colleges’ new policy of excluding people from degree programs if they can’t prove legal status. The bills would bar illegal immigrants from all courses, including English as a Second Language or continuing education, and one would keep them out of the state’s universities as well.

“They’re illegal. It’s as simple as that,” said Rep. George Cleveland, a Jacksonville Republican who is sponsoring one of the bills. “The state should be doing anything it can to discourage illegal aliens from being in the state.”

But Cleveland and Sen. Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, sponsor of the second bill, said their measures appear doomed to die in committee. They said the legislature’s leadership has refused to allow them to be heard.”*

About half of Hispanic high school students in Indiana would be the first in their families to attend college, and most feel they can’t afford a higher education, according to a new survey.

Learn More Indiana’s annual survey of high school freshmen and juniors found that most students expect to earn a four-year college degree. But fewer Hispanic students expected a four-year degree compared to their peers.”*

Murano brings a unique perspective to A&M.

As a child, she fled Cuba and settled in Miami. She was the first in her family to attend college.

She then became an associate professor at Texas A&M.

In 2001, she was tapped by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to become the highest-ranking food safety official in U.S. government and presided over the first case of mad cow disease.”*

TRPI has released a report entitled: African American and Latino Enrollment Trends among Medicine, Law, Business, and Public Affairs Graduate Programs. The purpose of the report is to provide an analysis of the fields of medicine, business, law, and public affairs, and to present other relevant data pertaining to African American and Latino students in graduate education. The first section provides an overview of action policy and court cases. The second analyzes the relationship between affirmative action and nationwide enrollment trends of African American and Latino students in the four selected professional programs indicated.

Discovery:

• There have been significant improvements since the 1970s in high school graduation rates of African American and Latino students. Despite this, a low rate of African American and Latino high school alumni restricts the pool for medicine, business, law and public affairs students, because these disciplines require a bachelor’s degree.
• Multiple reasons and processes account for an underrepresentation of African American and Latino students in certain graduate programs, including factors stemming from affirmative action policy and court cases that have resulted from it.
• Institutional enrollment data from a significant number of schools need to be more transparent and more available so that the results of data analysis can be made public.
• Latino and African American applicants do not often have a lineage rooted in education from elite institutions, reducing their access to these gateways in fields of law, medicine, business and public affairs. (Half of the country’s business leaders come from elite schools, which comprise .5% of the nation’s colleges.)

National Enrollment Trends:

• The elimination of affirmative action has sharply decreased the number of underrepresented students enrolling in medical schools. African American applicants who applied to the top 10 public and private medical schools declined by 25%, from 5,379 in 1995 to 4,033 in 2001. Latino applicants to the same schools decreased 38.6%, from 2,769 in 1995 to 1,700 in 2001. Together, African American and Latino enrollment in the nation’s top 10 public and private medical schools declined by 11.2% and 27.2% respectively.
• From fall 1995 to fall 2006, the number of admitted African American and Latino students in University of California’s three law schools declined by 28% under California’s anti-affirmative action movement.
• Over the past nine years, there has been an increase in undergraduate business degrees awarded to African American and Latino students. These degrees rose from 9% of total degrees in the US in 1995-1996, to 15% in the 2003-2004 academic year. However, it should be noted that this statistic is not in keeping with growth of the African American and Latino population in the U.S., currently at 25%.
• MBA degrees for African Americans and Latinos are increasing faster than that of other master’s degrees (though it is also not in keeping with growth of the African American and Latino population in the U.S.).
• Public affairs master’s degrees train students for careers in government, business, media, nonprofit organizations, NGOs and other international organizations. M.A.s in underrepresented groups have increased from 18% in 1996 to 25% in 2004 (though the numbers are inconsistent with the growth of the African American and Latino populations in the U.S.).

Going further, TRPI’s Professor President Harry P. Pachon said, “It is not a question of affirmative action, it is a question of realizing the full intellectual potential of minority students in these programs.”

Download this report from Publications page under the education header at www.TRPI.org.

The report was prepared by Rodolfo de la Garza, and Sepehr Hejazi Moghadam, from the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute office at Columbia University.

Special thanks to the Ford Foundation who made this project possible.

A decision by the North Carolina Community College System to disallow illegal immigrants from becoming students will not affect University policy, according to Thomas Griffin, director of Undergraduate Admissions.

N.C. State, along with other UNC-system schools, will continue to admit undocumented students if they pay out-of-state tuition, Griffin said, and they may not receive financial aid. “*

In Bolivia last month on business, Diego Arias of Arlington County picked up a newspaper and stopped at a familiar face. Prominently placed on the third page, in a section separating winners from losers, was a photograph of Emma Violand-Sanchez.

Somehow the landlocked South American nation that Violand-Sanchez left as a teenager more than four decades ago not only knew about her victory in a party caucus to endorse Arlington School Board candidates but also considered the development newsworthy.

“It’s amazing,” Laura Anduze said, looking at a copy of the newspaper her husband, Arias, brought home. “She must have a lot of people who believe in her.”"*

No classroom building or dormitory at UCLA is named after Reginaldo Francisco del Valle. Nor does any plaza, fountain, auditorium or library wing bear the name of the state legislator and Los Angeles civic activist who died in 1938 at age 84.

The name does not register with most UCLA professors, and the school’s official history mentions Del Valle just once, only in passing.

Such an omission is historically and morally wrong, contends UCLA medical school professor David Hayes-Bautista. For the past several years, Hayes-Bautista has been crusading to gain recognition for what he describes as Del Valle’s crucial role in founding the state teachers college that later became the University of California’s first campus in Los Angeles.”*

Latino-owned businesses, whether Hispanic grocery stores, landscaping companies or restaurants like El Dorado, are one of the fastest growing business sectors in Delaware, which is why the University of Delaware Small Business Development Center in Georgetown has launched a statewide Hispanic business assistance program.

On Thursday the center became Delaware’s first recipient this year of a rural business enterprise grant for $27,000 from USDA Rural Development.

Besides reaching out to potential and existing Latino business owners, the grant also will be used for technical assistance, training and educational seminars. A bilingual business resource center at La Esperanza in Georgetown also is in the works.”*

The Idaho Commission on Hispanic Affairs will host a statewide summit next month aimed at closing the gap between Hispanic students and their non-Hispanic classmates.

A commission study this year showed Latino students in third through eighth grades, and 10th graders, scored below non-Hispanic students in reading, math and language skills on 2006-2007 statewide tests.”*

For more than 30 years, students have been urging the administration to bring Latino studies to Princeton University. Students have met with university officials over the years and staged a famous sit-in with Asian students in 1995, but those efforts didn’t bear much fruit.

“The university has had the opportunity since the ’70s to begin to increase the number of Latino faculty and to build Latino studies and they just haven’t,” says Dr. Raul A. Ramos, assistant professor of history at the University of Houston and 1989 Princeton graduate. “There is a huge student demand and it’s a demand that has been there a long time.””*

Ten outstanding students of Hispanic descent will start college with $8,000 already paid toward their education thanks to a scholarship from the Ronald McDonald House Charities of Southern California, Southern California McDonald’s and San Diego County McDonald’s.

The Hispanic American Commitment to Education Resources scholarship is offered to high school seniors who have at least one parent of Hispanic heritage and who are eligible to attend a two- or four-year college or university with a complete course of study. Scholarship recipients in good academic standing will be awarded a $2,000 scholarship renewable for an additional three years, for a total scholarship of $8,000.”*

University of Arizona Press authors from across the nation earn acclaim at 2008 International Latino Book Awards

Since 1999 the nonprofit organization Latino Literacy Now has honored the many positive contributions being made to Latino literature by publishers and writers worldwide through its annual International Latino Book Awards competition. Attracting nominations from publishers across the United States as well as Mexico, South and Central America, and Spain, this competition highlights titles that exemplify literary excellence within the Latino community. Presented at BookExpo America, this year’s awards honored titles running the gamut of subjects from murders of innocent women in Juárez to the history of the Day of the Dead. Four University of Arizona Press titles were recognized as vital contributions to Latino history and culture.”*

Twenty high school students living on the United States side of the border with Mexico will attend the first ever University of Arizona CampCIENCIAS, being held Monday through Friday next week.

The camp, which translates to Camp Science, was conceived of and planned by three Latina program coordinators working at the UA’s U.S. Mexico Binational Center and Superfund Basic Research Program, part of the UA College of Pharmacy.

Mónica Ramirez, Denise Moreno and Rocio Estrella worked with the UA Office of Early Academic Outreach to publicize the camp and recruit students from Arizona border cities to apply for the free camp.”*

Staff members with the Ventura Unified School District’s Adult and Continuing Education program and the founders of Open English share a vision.

Both see a future where language courses use technology to speed Latinos and other English language-learners toward fluency. In fact, the adult education program and language-learning business recently teamed up to help accomplish that.

With Open English providing the Internet platform and Ventura Unified’s program supplying the academic expertise, a multimedia studio and students to test new content, the two have begun sculpting an interactive language-learning system.”*

Emily Torres, 4, has no problem following her daily routine. Unprompted, she performs tasks most preschoolers only do when reminded.

“At bedtime, she brushes her teeth, combs her hair and puts her pajamas on,” said her mother, Angelica Torres. “She removes all the (decorative) pillows on her bed and piles them up and goes right to bed.

“But she’s very quiet,” Torres said.

Disturbingly quiet.

Emily, whose speech is delayed, withdraws from other children - something that mystified her mother, who had observed other 4-year-olds interact and chatter away.”*

What’s the chance for immigration reform with a Barack Obama or John McCain presidency? My quick answer: The post-election Congress will pass the DREAM Act for undocumented students and the AgJobs agricultural worker bill.

I see those bills passing no matter who wins the presidency, though immigrants will likely do better under Obama. Broader reform with a path to citizenship for our 12 million undocumented workers is years away.

Recent efforts to reform immigration law have been disappointing. What American author Mark Twain once said about the weather is true about immigration reform: Everyone talks about it, but no one does anything about it. A new administration in Washington may change that.”*

Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne will hold a press conference today to say why he thinks Tucson’s largest school district should “abolish its Ethnic Studies Department.”

Tucson Unified School District officials say the press conference will be nothing more than a rehash of Horne’s personal politics. And they’ve called their own press conference for a half-hour earlier than Horne’s to say so.
…
While TUSD’s Ethnic Studies Department has four disciplines with a focus on African-American, Asian-American, Native American and Latino studies, Horne has specifically targeted the department’s Mexican-American/Raza Studies program.”*

TUSD’s Raza Studies is not a divisive program. Raza Studies provided me with a sense of community, empowerment and sense of direction. This class taught me skills that are not taught in textbooks.

Instead, my Raza Studies mentors taught me to think outside the box. This program has not brainwashed me, but has helped mold me into a critical and conscious person. I have also learned to have compassion and respect for my community.
I have witnessed many social inequalities and barriers, such as unequal access to housing and education and environmental hazards in poverty-stricken neighborhoods.”*

The Hispanic Scholarship Fund (HSF), the nation’s largest organization in support of Latino higher education, has selected Ralph de la Vega, President and CEO of AT&T Mobility, as an honorary inductee into its 2008 Alumni Hall of Fame. De la Vega will receive the Triunfador Award at the HSF Alumni Hall of Fame gala on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2008, at the Pierre Hotel in New York City.

Each year, HSF selects five accomplished Latinos to induct into its prestigious Alumni Hall of Fame. Four of the exceptional individuals are HSF alumni, who each received HSF scholarships to support their higher education aspirations. A fifth individual, while not a former HSF Scholar, is presented with the honorary Triunfador Award for realizing the ultimate professional achievement and “raising the bar.”

“We are proud to honor Mr. de la Vega because he personifies the mission and values of HSF,” said Frank D. Alvarez, HSF President & CEO. “He is an inspiration to aspiring Latinos everywhere. His success story is testimony to the impact of higher education and the tremendous difference it makes in a life.”

Alvarez said de la Vega serves as a positive role model for Latino students, which is a trademark of previous HSF Alumni Hall of Fame honorees. “Annually, the inspiring stories of HSF’s inductees put a face on and demonstrate the power of higher education,” he said.

A native of Cuba, de la Vega came to the United States alone at the age of 10, while his parents were forced to stay behind because of complications with their immigration documentation. Leaving behind everything but his suitcase and the clothes on his back, de la Vega lived with family friends in Miami for four years before reuniting with his parents and sister.

In spite of these challenges, de la Vega’s family instilled in him an appreciation for education, and he went on to earn a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Florida Atlantic University and an MBA from Northern Illinois University. In addition to his degrees, de la Vega completed the Executive Program at the University of Virginia.

De la Vega’s commitment to community service is reflected by his active participation in many youth-oriented organizations. He serves as Vice Chairman of the Board for Junior Achievement (JA) Worldwide and sits on the Boy Scouts of America Board of Directors. He also serves as Chairman of the JA Hispanic Initiative, a program that encourages Hispanic students to remain in school and prepare for success in the business world.

“I am honored to be a part of HSF and the valuable work it does in developing the next generation of Latino leaders,” de la Vega said. “I have always believed in helping young people recognize their own potential and become all they can be. And HSF is among the most successful organizations in our country at doing this.”

De la Vega has had a distinguished career in telecommunications. In 1974, he started with BellSouth (then Southern Bell) as a Management Assistant. He worked his way up to directing all of BellSouth’s Telecommunications Network Operations for Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. He has also worked internationally, serving as President — BellSouth Latin America, with overall responsibility for BellSouth’s Central and South American operations in 11 countries.

In 2004, de la Vega joined Cingular Wireless as Chief Operating Officer and successfully guided the company through a landmark merger with AT&T Wireless to create the nation’s largest wireless phone company.

In late 2007, shortly after the new AT&T acquired BellSouth and took full ownership of Cingular, de la Vega was appointed President and CEO of AT&T Mobility, ensuring the successful rebranding of the company and the launch of the revolutionary iPhone, as well as a continuum of other innovative devices and services.

De la Vega is the first honoree to be selected for the 2008 recognition. The four alumni recipients will be announced in July.”*

It was certainly a special day for the children and staff, at the first graduation ceremony from the permanent facility of Primeros Pasos First Steps, on Savannah Road in Georgetown.

Three students from the class enter kindergarten at public schools this coming fall, and other students graduated to the next learning level.

“We value diversity and we welcome all children in our community. One of our goals is to ensure that every Hispanic student entering kindergarten speaks both English and Spanish fluently,” said program director Trudy Cole. “Some of the students who entered the program last fall only spoke Spanish. These 3- and 4-year-old graduates can count at least to 20, know their ABCs, their shapes and their colors.” “*

Marchers Say Education Officials Are Changing LGE “Behind Teachers and Students’ Backs”

A sea of umbrellas flooded Santiago’s central Plaza de Armas around midday last Wednesday as teachers, high schoolers, university students, and parents took over the rainy Santiago streets in a national protests called by the Teacher’s Association. The protest was against the General Education Law (LGE), an education reform package being put forward to replace the existing Organic Constitutional Education Law (LOCE).”*