Latinos aim to reduce dropout rate in Maryland

As public attention continues to focus on the education of Latino children, the high dropout rate and the dire consequences of ignoring it, two things become more and more apparent: a) comprehensive reform needs to happen within the education system and b) finding the right solutions is no easy task.

This past Monday, a group of Hispanic education experts, parents, community advocates and government leaders in the Baltimore area met to discuss the state of Latino education in the area and possible ways to improve education outcomes for Latino students.

The meeting, organized by the Governor’s Commission on Hispanic Affairs, focused on the state of education for Latino students in the area and on finding ways to capture and engage them in the academic pipeline.

The first part of the meeting featured Dr. Andrés Alonso, CEO of Baltimore City School System, as the night’s main speaker. According to Dr. Alonso, students in Maryland are outpacing their counterparts nationwide in Advance Placement test scores. In fact, he mentioned, this January, Maryland’s public schools were ranked number one in the nation by both Education Week Magazine and the College Board.

This means that the educational achievement of MD students in general has improved, but where does that leave Hispanic students?

That seems to be more of a mixed bag. There's been an influx of immigrants to the area in recent years. Hispanic students account for 5.5 percent of the 49,900 students in the Maryland school system, with the biggest concentrations happening in the Prince George and Montgomery Counties. This unprecedented growth has posed both logistical and policy challenges to schools in these districts, as they may not necessarily have been prepared to deal with a whole new demographic group.

Yet, “We’re not sliding back, we’re pushing forward”, insisted an optimistic Dr. Alonso. When it comes to the perennial achievement gap, he said, Latino children in the area have made extraordinary progress.

One of his slides showed how, in terms of English scores, Latino kids have seen the achievement gap narrow significantly, to roughly 7%, in spite of language gap. There has been a huge jump in last 2 years. In Math, the gap is hardly perceptible between Latino and White students: 2.7%, a jump of 24% for Latino students.

These figures, although encouraging, cannot obscure the fact that Latino children still have a lot of catching up to do.

According to the 2007 Maryland Report Card prepared by the Maryland State Department of Education, although graduation rates improved in 2009 for both African American and Hispanic subgroups, Latino children drop out of the school system at 4.03 percent, which is the highest of any ethnic group. The Baltimore City county average is 1.39 percent.

“Part of the issues have to do with the language gap, the fact that schools don’t have the flexibility to give these students more time to progress," said Dr. Alonso, adding that there are also socioeconomic issues that act as a gravitational pull for teens towards work so they can help their parents. “Our discussion now involves where the students come from, what is influencing their lives, what is going on in school in terms of programs and how to provide access to the programs that can help them.”

After Alonso’s presentation, Montgomery County Councilmember Nancy Navarro spoke of possible solutions to the problem and some of the efforts that have proven successful in her county. She was very emphatic about what still needs to be done in order to support different facets of the students’ life: “There has to be a combination of efforts: one-on-one, grassroots, going to where community is as well as making translated materials available.”

Yet, for these efforts to be effective, she believes, “it cannot be a one-size-fits-all policy solution. There has to be a combination of efforts in a holistic fashion. We have to set the successful efforts to scale, get them codified in the policies, make them a line item in the budget. Until we get to the level of sharing best practices, instead of having a piece-meal approach, we will always celebrate small victories.”

Later in the evening, participants were invited to share their questions and suggestions, which the Education Committee of the Governor’s Commission of Hispanic Affairs will then add to a set of recommendations they will forward to the Governor, the General Assembly, and the Maryland State Department of Education. The suggestions from the different attendees included:

-    Encouraging parent participation in school life
-    Assigning Spanish-speaking trained liaisons in schools as a resource to parents
-    Requiring an ESL certification to teachers in certain schools
-    Creating policies and programs that support kids who are already outside of the system
-    Making it a priority for school systems to talk amongst themselves to implement successful programs on different areas
-    Offering teachers cultural awareness training
-    Provide skill-set training to immigrant teenagers who arrive with a low education level and the need to join the workforce

While there’s no guarantee that these or any other recommendations will completely erradicate the dropout problem in the city, the fact that our community is willing to work together to ensure the educational attainment of our youth, is more than commendable. It is refreshing.

But talking about it can only get us so far. As Mrs. Navarro asserted, “Change has started to happen, but we need to implement it structurally, which will lead to those changes to happen on a bigger scale.” For meaningful change to happen, the efforts have to be constant, comprehensive and applied system-wide.

Giving each high school student the chance to gain the skills and knowledge necessary to pursue his or her dreams and succeed in college or the workplace is now, and should continue to be, one of our biggest focus. Our economic future, our children’s future, demands it.

Agree? Disagree? Your comments are a vital part of this discussion. Please add them below or send an e-mail to eramos@elianneramos.com