Wednesday, May 5, 2010
best practices for teachers of latina students
These recommendations are found in the National Women's Law Center/Mexican American Legal Defense and Education fund Report:
These recommendations can also help other poverty-level girls of color.
These include:
- Raise college awareness: Talk to students early and often about college choices, and long-and short term aspirations. Expose students to opportunities in post-secondary schooling, field trips, career options, provide role models.
- Make school environments culturally inclusive: Take care to incorporate Latino culture into programming, activities and curricula. Enforce anti-discrimination policies.
- Help Latino parents get more involved with children’s education: Make efforts to communicate in Spanish. Work around poverty-level work-schedules. Make college information available. Follow up with parents by phone, if necessary.
- Take steps to help prevent teenage pregnancy: Within state guidelines, make medically accurate, age-appropriate sex education available in a culturally sensitive manner.
- Help pregnant students stay in school: Enforce Title IX and eliminate discrimination against parenting or pregnant students. To the extent possible: Excuse pregnancy-related absences, allow home-bound instruction, offer parenting classes for mothers and fathers. Encourage pregnant students.
cultural attitudes: living at home until marriage
Living at home until marriage. According to the Pew Hispanic Research Center Between Two Worlds report, living at home until marriage is a traditional habit that is causing generational rifts in American Hispanic families. Family conflicts arise when female students are offered the chance to go away for college.
For Hispanic high school girls, this pressure not to leave home until they’re married contributes to a self-censoring “opting-out” of the choice of college. And once college is not an option, the often-unengaging world of high school seems irrelevant to their lives.
But change is coming. The UCLA Higher Education Research Institute found that Hispanic students are gradually attending colleges more than 50 miles from home. While 66 percent of white students have attended “away” colleges since 1975, Hispanic students studying away from home have increased from 46 % in 1975 to almost 60 % today.
The Pew research shows that 88 % of Spanish-language-dominant Hispanics youth and 72% of Hispanics older-than-26 agreed with the statement: “It is better for children to live in their parents’ home until they get married,” whereas less than half (45%) of third generation native-born Hispanics agreed.
immigration status anxiety affects latina school performance
Immigration Status: Hispanic students’ anxiety about immigration status of themselves and their parents causes a distraction that can affect schoolwork. In their book Learning a New Land: Immigrant students in American Society, Carola and Marcel
Suarez-Orozcos describe how a good student realized undocumented status made college financially impossible:
I was brought over to the United States when I was seven years old… I did very well in high school and worked incredibly hard. I was on the, lacrosse team, key club member… I was enrolled in honors English, honors science, AP American history and advanced French. I had worked my entire life to accomplish all of that, but when time came for me to apply to college everything changed. I had expected to be able to receive a scholarship to attend college, but found out my junior year of high school that illegal immigrants aren’t eligible for scholarships. So while all of my friends went off to school, I have been stuck in my hometown desperately trying to find a way to live the American dream.
The NWLC/MALDEF study points out that undocumented status alone can’t account for drop-out rates. Ninety-one percent of Latino youth in the US are native-born. But almost 3 million Latino children have undocumented parents. Stress from living in a “mixed status family” can hurt educational achievement. An interviewed school staffer described the gradual disengagement of undocumented students as they gradually understood their predicament:
Sometimes kids don’t always know that they’re undocumented, in middle school they are starting to figure it out, but they don’t really understand. It’s a hard thing to comprehend…[But some kids are] worried about being called by Immigration – they are sometimes not allowed to answer the door and stuff in case it’s a raid. They are living in fear.
Students weigh the value of working hard in high school with the unlikelyhood of being able to afford a college education, and then the lack-of-status that would prevent them from working in a higher paying job:
A lot of kids have a hard time because they feel like, what’s the point, I work in the field now and I’m going to end up working in the field, because they can’t get other, better jobs because they don’t have immigration status. These kids are aware, they know exactly what’s going on – the problem is that the mainstream community does not understand.
Hispanic parents reluctant to send children away to college
March 1, 2010
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA Sun-Times Columnist
'Go away!" I tell them. Let me explain. On occasion, well-meaning teachers call me in to high schools to talk to kids who are poised to be the first in their family to attend college. I get to impress these future leaders of America and their parents with the endless benefits of higher education.
Dutifully, I cover all of the important stuff that comes from completing a degree or certification: the increased opportunity for a lifetime of stable careers, the pure joy of intellectual enlightenment. Then I get to the part that makes parents cringe: the unparalleled fun of breaking away from all you know and becoming an independent adult for the first time ever.
Often this goes over poorly with the parents in the room. When it's a predominantly Hispanic crowd, the brows furrow in a synchronized wave of distaste at the mere mention of "going away" to college. That's because in Latino households where a college education is a cherished hope, it's also generally expected that the student in question will stay home to be supported by the family in the endeavor.
Culturally speaking, Latinos are literally all about the family. Generations live together under the same roof, caring for each other from infancy to old age. You fear Dad more than you fear God, and Mom is the center of the universe. So no matter how much of a fancy schmancy smarty pants you think you are, you just don't break Mami's heart by going away to college!
school district takes steps for pregnant/parenting students
When Mary Jane Garza became assistant superintendant for curriculum at her school district in West Oso, Texas, a small town south of San Antonio, she noticed that a number of female students would check out and leave the high school building during the day, “We began to see a pattern… as we began to look at every single student that left -- we discovered that many of the young ladies that were leaving were pregnant – and we had nothing available for them.
Garza instituted a follow up with every student who checked out and – without hiring more staff – managed to fill needs for her at-risk female students that kept them in school. Based on asking students what they needed, she got buses with child safety seats to transport children of students to nearby daycares. She provided transportation to doctors. She modified the school day (within Texas state guidelines) so that parenting students could attend school during special off-hours classes. In two years, economically disadvantaged West Oso Independent School District (with 2,100 students – 84 percent Latino, 12 percent African American and 2 percent Asian) went from a completion rate of 54 percent with close to 300 female students dropping out, to a completion rate of 92 percent and 5 total dropouts.
“Interesting to note that two years ago we had 15 young ladies that were pregnant. Last year was ten, and this year we began with three… We’ve had the same abstinence program because in Texas we do have an abstinence-only policy. But it’s not so much the abstinence program, it’s the fact that the girls are coming to school, and they intermingle with every student. And other students see the trials and tribulations that are challenging them.”
From National Women's Law Center
Promising Practices to Improve Latina's Graduation Rates (Teleconference 10/14/2009)
Making a difference in chicago: latinas mujeres en accion
Non-profit Mujeres Latinas en Accion in Pilsen began in the late 1970s as a shelter for runaways escaping from domestic violence. Domestic violence help for all women is still a big part of their mission, according to program director Meusa Gaydan. But over the years the organization has expanded to tutor and mentor Latina girls and give them leadership experiences.
In an interview she told me: “In Proyecto Juventud we take 22 girls from the neighborhood (mostly Mexican) who need academic assistance. After school they come for the computer lab. The have instructors to help with homework. When it’s time to get report cards, the staff accompany the parents so they can talk to the professor and see the needs for improvement. These girls are poverty-level, so they would not have a computer at home. The parents have a low level of education.” Mujeres also sponsors a leadership program for Latina girls focusing on sex education and opportunity for social development. For leadership projects they are trained in “peer education” giving presentations in schools.
Gaydan said early on, the organization was distrusted by the Mexican immigrant community because they were seen as undermining the authority of families. But now they are more welcomed. “We have a staff person here who came in contact with the agency when her daughter ran away in the 70s. She was angry at the agency at the time. The community thought we were breaking up families because these girls wanted to be independent. Now she has been working for us for 20 years!”
In a hopeful development, the Federal DREAM Act, co-sponsored by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin and Rep. Howard Berman of California, has been gaining steam as a method to reward and help tap into the potential of high-achieving non-documented children brought to the United States before age 16. The act would make undocumented children eligible for in-state tuition, making a college dream more affordable. “We are supporting advocacy work for the DREAM Act with Obama,” said Mujeres’ Gaydan. “Now that healthcare has been passed, we want to demand that immigration is next. And the DREAM Act is not enough. We need comprehensive immigration reform.”
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