Las Carpetas Documentary on the files created by the surveillance of Puerto Rican pro independence activists. Previewed in Festival de Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano in Cuba.

Racialization of Hispanic and Asian Students in the Educational System

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Racialization of Hispanic and Asian Students in the Educational System: Training Administrators, Teachers and Parents for Policy Changes

by

Victor M. Rodriguez Domínguez, John N. Tsuchida and Jose F. Moreno
California State University, Long Beach

(Policy Brief Written for the NEA, 2009)

INTRODUCTION

Racialization is the social and historical process of assigning individuals and groups a racial identity and social status (Rodriguez, 2007). The creation of a racial identity and social status includes a series of political processes which construct racial meanings, shape the identities of individuals and groups, and place them into positions of dominance or the dominated. The processes of racialization are always legitimized through ideologies and operate in the various institutional systems/arrangements that are the foundation of our society. In the economic arena, such systems/arrangements lead to stark differences in income on the basis of race, and cause lopsided incarceration rates of people of color in the criminal justice system. A strategic pillar of our society, the educational system has as one of its major latent functions, the perpetuation of a system based on inequality. The educational system historically has been part of our nation-building processes and functioned as the place where our national ideologies are inculcated and disseminated.

Our national ideology and identity are rooted in notions about racial differences, and about inferiority and superiority. We learn which cultural patterns and norms define who we are, and dictate how we understand the world and how we relate with one another. These lessons are taught in explicit and implicit ways; we learn them through narratives and practices perpetuated in the educational institutions where we teach and learn. The way we fund public education and the glaring inequities that exist between and within school districts convey a powerful message to students who are attending well financed and inadequately funded schools about their status in society. The distortions, absences and inadequate coverage of the history and culture of Hispanics, African Americans and Asian Americans in the educational offerings constitute a hidden curriculum that teaches students whose history and contributions are really important in defining who we are as a nation.

Classroom dynamics and pedagogical practices tend to reinforce wittingly or unwittingly racial ideologies by clearly evidencing the concrete reality of a racial hierarchy in the classroom. The way students of color are disciplined, often with racially diverse consequences, tends to legitimate culturally racialized notions of how violent or unruly some racial groups are in contrast with the majority group. Furthermore, the ways parents, teachers and administrators interact with each other indicate to children which individuals and groups are dominant and powerful in society. The absence of diverse teachers and administrators portends a vision of our present and future racially stratified society where students of color do not seem to fare well. The role of education in the racialization process has deep roots in our history and requires meaningful changes in institutional policy and culture.

GENEALOGY OF THE RACIALIZING FUNCTION OF EDUCATION
European immigrants who came to the shores of what today is the United States encountered the indigenous people and developed notions of difference that created hierarchical frameworks of racial and cultural inferiority and superiority. These ideas would further develop and dictate how decisions would be made as to who were worthy of inclusion in civil society and who were not. Education was an important tool that delineated the boundaries for Euro-Americans and people of color, as well as for citizens and non-citizens. Indigenous people were initially excluded from education and society, and it was not until 1924, when the Snyder Act (43 Statutes-at-Large 253, ante, 420) was enacted to grant them citizenship in the United States. Enslaved Africans were also excluded from education and citizenship; they were prohibited from becoming U.S. citizens until the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1868.

Although American-born Asians automatically became U.S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, Asian immigrants had long been denied the right of naturalization until the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 (66 Statutes-at-Large 163) made all foreign-born Asians eligible for naturalization after meeting residency requirements. However, the U.S. Congress had previously accorded the privileges of naturalization to the Chinese in 1943 (Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act of 1943, 57 Statutes-at-Large 600), and to the Filipinos and Asian Indians in 1946 (Luce-Celler Act of 1946, 60 Statutes-at-Large 416), due to their countries’ military alliance with the United States during World War II. The denial of naturalization rights to alien Chinese and Japanese for 61 years and 30 years, respectively, coupled with their physical differences and the media misrepresentations of Asian Americans as a whole, was no doubt responsible for many White Americans mistaking or misidentifying U.S.-born Asian Americans as foreign-born.

A White waitress in a Rochester, Minnesota, restaurant automatically presumed a Sansei (a third-generation Japanese American) customer to be foreign-born and commended him on his “good English.” This customer was a lawyer born and raised in that state and educated at the University of Minnesota Law School, and naturally spoke impeccable English. An immigration inspector at the U.S.-Canadian border harassed another Minnesota lawyer of Japanese ancestry who was returning from his short trip to Toronto in the mid-1980s, and almost denied him reentry into the United States, because he did not have his passport. This lawyer only had his driver’s license from Minnesota, which then was a perfectly acceptable official document for U.S. citizens making brief trips to Canada and returning to the United States. This Sansei lawyer was unable to reenter his own country until the immigration officer received a faxed copy of his passport. Even former three-term U.S. Senator Spark Matsunaga was not immune from such occasional annoyances. At a State Department reception in 1981 in honor of Japanese diplomats, then Secretary of State Alexander Haig “welcomed” Senator Matsunaga to the United States and asked him: “How are you enjoying your stay in our country?” The Senator from Hawaii deliberately replied in pigeon English: “Secretary Haig, I happened to be one of the Senators who confirmed your appointment as Secretary of State.” One can easily imagine Secretary Haig’s embarrassment. The late Representative Robert Matsui, a 13-term Member of Congress from California, once stated that although every guard on Capitol Hill knew who he was, once he was outside the Congressional buildings, most people simply assumed him to be a Japanese national and treated him as such. Racialization of Asian Americans as foreign-born is a continuous problem which could occasionally cause them various degrees of annoyance and inconvenience in schools, employment, government offices, and commercial public places.

Hispanics, particularly people of Mexican descent, experienced a different relationship with the United States. After the Mexican American War of 1846-48, close to 100,000 Mexicans became U.S. citizens as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which also ceded more than 500,000 square miles of Mexican national territory to the United States. While education, when available, was not denied to the new citizens of Mexican descent, increasingly a system that segregated Mexican students from their white counterparts became the educational norm. In Orange County, California, for example, some small school districts segregated Mexican American students from white public schools through the late 1940s, allegedly by reason of their limited English proficiency. Led by Gonzalo Mendez, a group of Mexican parents filed in 1945 a class action in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, against the Westminster, Garden Grove and El Modeno School Districts, and the Santa Ana city schools, because their children were required to attend segregated schools allegedly on account of their limited English proficiency. The court held in 1946 that such segregation was prohibited by California’s Constitution and Education Code (Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County et al., 64 F. Supp. 544 [1946]). When the school districts appealed, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court decision, holding that “respondents have violated the federal law as provided in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution by depriving them of liberty and property without due process of law and by denying to them the equal protection of the laws (Westminster School District of Orange County et al. v. Mendez et al., 161 F.2nd 774 [1947]).” Severn years prior to the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Mendez case invalidated all school segregation throughout the Ninth Circuit Court States of Alaska, Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, as well as the Territory of Hawaii.

Asian students were also segregated from public schools for a long time, beginning in 1860 when California excluded Asians, Blacks and American Indians from public schools (Ancheta, 1998; Chen, 1982). Although Mendez had direct impact on the outcome of Brown, Chinese Americans in Mississippi had challenged, albeit unsuccessfully, the unconstitutionality of the “separate but equal” doctrine two decades earlier. Article 8, §207 of the Mississippi Constitution of 1890 provided: “Separate schools shall be maintained for children of the white and colored races.” Legally classified as “colored,” Chinese immigrants’ U.S.-born children were barred from attending Mississippi’s public schools.
Gong Lum was a prosperous Chinese grocer in Rosedale, Mississippi. When his nine-year-old daughter Martha was not allowed to attend a public elementary school in the Rosedale Consolidated High School District 1924, Lum filed a petition in the State Circuit Court of Mississippi for the First Judicial District of Bolivar County, seeking a writ of mandamus to force the school district to admit his daughter (Loewen, 1971). Although the trial court issued a writ of mandamus, ordering the school to admit Martha (Rice v. Gong Lum, 139 Miss.760, 104 So. 105), the Supreme Court of Mississippi overturned the lower court’s decision, holding that Article 8, §207 of the state Constitution required Martha to attend a school for colored races (Rice v. Gong Lum, 139 Miss.760 [1925], 104 So. 105). Undaunted by the Mississippi Supreme Court decision, Lum appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which addressed the issue of whether Mississippi accorded Martha the equal protection of the laws by giving her the opportunity to attend a segregated school. In affirming the Mississippi Supreme Court’s decision, the U.S. Supreme Court relied on Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537 [1896]) which established the doctrine of “separate but equal,” and Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (175 U.S. 528 [1899]) which held that “the education of the people in schools maintained by state taxation is a matter belonging to the respective states” (Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 [1927]). After losing the legal challenge, the Lum family relocated to Elaine, Arkansas, to enable their daughters to attend a White public school. Some Chinese families with school-age children moved to Memphis, and others bid farewell to the South once and for all. Lum v. Rice shows that Chinese Americans, though an extremely small ethnic group in the United States before World War II, also struggled courageously to abolish school segregation in the pre-Brown era. The Lum case was a precursor to Lau v. Nichols (414 U.S. 563 [1974]), a U.S. Supreme Court decision leading to the creation of bilingual education across the country.

While the manifest function of the educational system is providing the knowledge and skills necessary for the full participation of citizens in a democratic society, more often than not, education became an instrument that created a social hierarchy between inferior and superior citizens within a racially stratified society. Public schools in the nineteenth century became institutional arrangements that would perpetuate the dominance of Anglo-Saxon protestant culture and world views (Spring, 2006). Native Americans were sent to boarding schools where they were forced to assimilate (Spring, 2006). Chinese in California, particularly in San Francisco, were legally required to attend Oriental Schools until the Mendez case ended de jure school segregation across the Western States. African Americans, particularly in the wake of Plessey v. Ferguson of 1896, were relegated to segregated and inferior schools throughout the nation. Hispanics, especially Mexicans, began to be subjected to “Americanization” programs and attendance at “Mexican Schools” which developed as Mexican immigration began to rise in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century (Gonzalez, 1990). These Americanization programs were not designed to create upwardly mobile citizens but were molding, through vocational and civic instruction, a docile and domesticated labor force. These educational efforts were legitimated by the “Mexican problem ideology” which assumed that Mexicans were clannish, inassimilable, passive, fatalistic and violent and therefore unable to be equal to Whites (Gonzalez, 1990). The latent outcome of all of these educational efforts with students of color resulted in the internalization of a sense of inferiority and a racial identity that precluded them from full participation as citizens of this nation. Unfortunately, while much progress was achieved during the Civil Rights Movement, the role and latent function of the educational system has not been fundamentally transformed.

THE PERSISTENCE OF RACIALIZING IDEOLOGIES
Race continues to be the core organizing principle in U.S. society; this is most evident in the educational system. During the Civil Rights Movement, the struggles of African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asian Americans gained the moral high ground and led to a national consensus regarding the need for educational reform. In the post-Civil Rights Movement period, the legal, political and pedagogical discourse around race has shifted dramatically. This new element that is shaping how we address legal, political and pedagogical issues around race is called by some scholars the “color-blind ideology” (Bonilla-Silva, 2003).

This “color-blind” ideology is the outcome of major societal changes that took place since the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education held school segregation unconstitutional and abolished the doctrine of “separate but equal.” This historic decision, coupled with the political and grassroots struggles of communities of color to enhance access to democratic rights, provided a platform for a series of laws enacted by Congress which provided a formal framework for the implementation of liberal ideals about racial justice. However, the de-mobilization of the Civil Rights Movement, the major social and economic changes that transformed the nature of our economic system, and the demographic changes in the racial and ethnic composition of the nation, have created the illusion that we have now become an inclusive society. The election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States and his inclusion in his cabinet of three Asian Americans (Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, and Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke), two Hispanics (Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and Secretary of the Interior Kenneth Salazar), and an African American (Attorney General Erick Holder) may have added further credence to the popular belief that American society has become more democratic and inclusive.

It is within this context that this ideology has taken the principles of liberal thinking (work ethic, meritocracy, equal opportunity and individualism, etc.) and turned them into lenses to understand, naturalize or dismiss the persistent inequities that pervade our educational system. Today, those groups in positions of social, cultural and political dominance in our society fail to see race as a factor in the inequities that plague the nation’s educational system. The discourse of racial justice is considered an anachronism given the legal and discursive efforts during the last decades to address racial inequality (Steinberg, 1995). Therefore, elements of traditional liberalism are used today to discount race from being a factor in the inequities and have guided educational policies that fail to address the persistence of racial inequity. Instead, racial inequality is seen as the outcome of individual or group deficiencies that can be remedied if individuals and groups adopt the dominant culture.

This perspective is rooted in the “culture of poverty” theories that became dominant in the 1980s, and still persist today in many liberal attempts to address economic and racial inequalities. This new form of discourse encompasses a recurrent framework that blames the victim and leaves policies, organizational patterns and structures, economic conditions, and residential patterns excluded from any rigorous, critical examination. This framework is still the dominant perspective being used to understand the challenges of educational achievement and poverty among Hispanics, Asian Americans, and other children of color. In some educational systems around the nation, frameworks for understanding poverty, like the popular Ruby Payne model, are woven together with efforts to address the gap in educational achievement of students of color (Payne, 2001). These “new” perspectives, like those of the past, tend to make it difficult for us to accurately diagnose the root causes of the educational achievement gap, thereby further contributing to the perpetuation of the problem (Gorski, 2005, 2007, 2008). This is particularly troublesome given the large numbers of students of color who attend schools with a higher percentage of students from low socio-economic backgrounds.

One of the most damaging effects of these ideologies and their pedagogical practices is that like all ideologies, they become powerful instruments that make the process of racialization invisible to policy makers and practitioners (Gorski, 2007). Its dominance in contemporary educational systems requires sustained efforts to educate and organize faculty, administrators and parents in order to challenge its hegemony (Schoefield, 2001). This effort is even more urgent today as we face the most dramatic demographic change this nation has ever experienced in its history since the beginning of European immigration. This is the time for education to be about truth and not about the building of myths.

CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS OF YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES
Challenging the role of racialization processes in the educational system becomes more urgent as the nation transitions to the most dramatic changes in the racial make-up of its population in the 21st century. Within the next three decades, the nation will become, for the first time since the establishment of the republic, a country where half of its residents will trace their ancestries not to Europe, but to Africa, Asia, Latin America and to its indigenous populations.



Figure 1 Table 6: Percent of the Projected Population by Race and Hispanic Origin for the U.S. Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, 2008

As Figure 1 indicates, by 2040, close to half of all Americans will not be of Anglo-Saxon descent. While we do not have any historical experience from which to draw on to fully interpret what this will mean, it is clear that given the salience of race and racialization in the nation’s public school systems, there is an urgent need to implement policies to reduce their negative consequences. If these consequences impacted the educational aspirations of numerically small populations decades ago, this time around they will determine the possibilities of further social and economic development for the entire nation. The United States cannot afford to exclude more than half of its population from the educational development that is necessary in a competitive and globalized economy and society.

The dramatic transformation in the racial make-up of the nation will be much more pronounced in the population under the age of 18. By the year 2030, racial and ethnic minorities will make up more than half of the U.S. population under 18. This is a trend that is also beginning to take place in public school systems throughout the nation. In Figure 2 and Figure 3, the dramatic transformation of the racial make-up in K-12 from 1972 through 2006 illustrates and portends the dramatic changes that the nation’s public schools will face in the next few decades.


Figure 2 Percentage of racial/ethnic minorities enrolled in public schools from kindergarten to high school, 1972-2006. (Planty et al, 2008)


Figure 3 Percentage of racial/ethnic minorities enrolled in public schools from kindergarten to high school, 1972-2006. (Planty et al, 2008)

A significant proportion of the rise of students of color is due to the dramatic rise in the Hispanic student population in the public school system. While representing only 6 per cent of all students in the system in 1972, Hispanics accounted for 20 per cent by 2006 (Planty, et al., 2008 10). This growth occurred in all regions of the United States, although the rate of increase varied by state and region. In the West, for example, students of color comprised 55 per cent of public school students, whereas Whites represented 45 per cent (Planty, et al., 2008 10). Recently (2009), the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute of California released an analysis of national data on school enrollment by race and ethnicity. According to the report, in nine of the nation’s largest cities a majority or a nearly half of students enrolled in first grade are Hispanic.

Policy and practice changes in the educational system will be impacting a large segment of the public school student population, which nationally will be composed of predominantly racial and ethnic minority students. If policies are not developed to address the challenges that racialization poses to students of color, the nation’s ability to enhance educational and economic opportunities for all Americans might be imperiled. Racialization, as studies suggest, is an important barrier in the academic achievement of students of color. This is particularly troublesome in the experience of Asian and Hispanic children.

RACIAL INEQUALITIES IN THE PUBLIC EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM
Significant social, economic and achievement gaps exist between Whites and the various racial and ethnic minorities who are rapidly becoming the majority of the student enrollment in our public educational system. In economic terms, in 2005-06, larger percentages of Hispanic, African Americans and Native American/Alaskan Native students attended schools that were considered “high-poverty.” These are schools where 75 per cent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (Planty, et al., 2008 ix). This is much higher than the percentage for White and Asian American students. With $64,200, Asian Americans collectively had the highest median household income in 2006 of all ethnic groups in the United States, compared to $50,700 for White households. However, the poverty rate for Asian Americans was 10.3 per cent, whereas the corresponding rate was 8.2 percent for non-Hispanic Whites (U.S. Census Bureau News, 2007). Many students from Asian American families in poverty attended school in high-poverty, high-crime areas.

In terms of the funding of education, federal and state funding has increased while local sources (such as property taxes) have decreased. The percentage of total revenues from local sources decreased from 47 per cent to 44 per cent. In some areas which have greater concentrations of Hispanics, this decrease is more pronounced than in other regions. Although the property taxes earmarked for school districts decreased in the West, they increased in all other regions (Planty, et al., 2008 166). These structural inequalities, coupled with institutionalized racialization practices within schools, lead to a significant achievement gap for students of color.

Hispanics demonstrate some of the lowest educational outcomes, whereas Asians/Pacific Islanders exhibit more positive indicators. In 2006, 49 percent of Asian Americans 25 years and older had bachelor’s degrees, compared to 27 per cent for all Americans in the same age bracket. However, the degree of educational attainment differed widely among Asian ethnic groups. For example, 69 per cent of Asian Indians had college degrees, as opposed to 26 percent of Vietnamese Americans (UCLA: 2008 Statistical Portrait of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Other Pacific Islanders). Although Cambodians, Laotians and Hmong are educationally more disadvantaged as newer refugee/immigrant groups, the lack of current disaggregated data makes it difficult to accurately evaluate the status of their educational attainment.

Figure 3 KewalRamani et al, 2007, p. 122

The proportion of adults (25 years and older) who have achieved a high school education has increased from 1990 to 2005, but intra-racial and ethnic differences are stark. While Hispanics have increased their high school completion rate during this period from 51 per cent to 58 per cent, unlike Blacks they have not narrowed their achievement gap with Whites (KewalRamani et al., 2007). In 2005, the gap between Hispanics and Whites was 32 percentage points, compared to 31 percentage points in 1990 (KewalRamani et al., 2007). According to the same study, as of 2005, only 11 per cent of young Hispanics (25 to 29 years of age) had completed a four-year college education, compared with close to 28 percent of all young adults in the United States who had bachelor’s degrees.

The racial and ethnic differences in the dropout rate among the 16- to 24-year-old cohort continue to be a serious problem in the educational system. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey of 2005, 7.2 per cent of Whites were high school dropouts, in comparison to the corresponding figures of 22.8 per cent for Hispanics, 11.6 per cent for African Americans, and 3.5 per cent for Asians.


Figure 4 Percentage of 16-24 year-olds who were high school dropouts by nativity and ethnicity ACS, 2005

When Hispanic statistics are disaggregated, they point to significant differences among Hispanic sub-groups, and between the native-born and foreign-born groups. Mexican American youth had a 25.5 per cent dropout rate, while 16.9 percent of Puerto Ricans and 32.6 percent of Central American youth were dropouts. These differences are even starker when nativity is factored in. For example, only 13.8 per cent of native-born Mexican American youth were dropouts, whereas the corresponding figure for foreign-born Mexicans was 41.9 per cent. Puerto Rican data is not disaggregated by nativity since migrants from Puerto Rico are not technically “foreign-born.”

In addition to the challenge that dropping out has for various youth groups of color, the context of their communities presents an additional difficulty that at times leads to the stigmatization of students of color. Such a problem is particularly evident in the challenge and safety issues that gangs and gang violence present for students of color. This is another dimension of the experience of students of color that is also shaped by their race and ethnic background. The National Crime Victimization Survey of 2005 indicated that among youth between the ages of 12 and 18 years, 38.4 per cent of Hispanics, 36.6 per cent of African Americans, and 16.6 of Whites reported that gangs were present at school during the previous six months. The percentages vary significantly depending on the neighborhood context with inner city students of color experiencing rates more than 40 per cent (National Crime Victimization Survey, 2005). With respect to realistic fear for their safety, furthermore, 10 per cent of Hispanic students and 9 per cent of African American can students reported in 2005 that they were afraid of being physically harmed at school, in comparison with only 4 per cent of White students (Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 2007).

THE CONTINUING CHALLENGE OF SEGREGATION
Students of color face another challenge that is still pervasive in the nation’s schools. The persistence of segregation is a gnawing problem that erodes the possibilities for qualitative change in the educational system. Hispanic and African American students are more likely to attend segregated schools. These schools tend to have fewer resources, less funding, and higher rates of teacher turnover. In the 2005-06 academic year, while 23 per cent of all schools in the nation had 75 per cent or more students of color, 56 per cent of Hispanics and 50 per cent of African Americans attended such “segregated” schools (Planty, et al., 2008 50). While the rate of segregation is lower for Asian/Pacific Islander students than for Blacks or Hispanics, it is still higher than for Whites. Hispanics, according to the work of Gary Orfield (2004), are the most segregated group in the educational system.

In June 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. (Nos. 05-908 and 05-915) severely set back the progress made by Brown v. Board of Education. In that case, the Seattle School District and the Jefferson County District, Kentucky developed student assignment plans based on “white or non-white” and “black or other,” respectively, to maintain racial balance among their schools. The parents of students in these districts filed suits, on the grounds that it was a violation of the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to assign students solely on the basis of their race. In ruling in favor of the parents, the Supreme Court distinguished these reassignment cases from Grutter v. Bollinger (539 U.S. 306 [2003]). The Court concluded that in Grutter, the University of Michigan Law School’s “narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body” is constitutional “in the context of higher education,” but that the school districts’ student assignment plans based on “a binary conception of race” are designed only to achieve “racial balance, an objective this Court has repeatedly condemned as illegitimate (Community Schools v. Seattle School District [Nos. 05-908 and 05-915]).” In the wake of the Supreme Court’s regressive decision, the process of de facto school segregation will continue unchecked and unrectified for many years to come.

LACK OF DIVERSITY AMONG FACULTY
For example, Hispanics and Asians/Pacific Islanders share the challenge of being in school systems which lack teachers of color or staff. A little more than 44 per cent of the nation’s schools do not have teachers of color or staff (Irvine, 2003). Close to 83 per cent of all teachers in K-12 are White, only 7.9 per cent are African American, and 6.2 per cent are Hispanic (Snyder, 2008 22). Even though Asian American students account for 4.3 per cent of K-12 students, Asian American teachers represent only 1.8 per cent of the faculty (Klein, 2007 507). The lack of teachers who are culturally competent has serious consequences on the educational experiences of students. It impacts their achievement and cognitive development. Furthermore, the lack of cultural competence and awareness of the role of schools in the racialization process leads to problems in the development of the students’ self-concept and attitudes. The absence or scarcity of same-race teachers not only impedes the diversification of faculty, but also deprives ethnic minority students of various school enhancement benefits, and above all, role models to emulate (Klein, 2007).

Many teachers have been trained to uncritically accept color-blind pedagogies and practices, and have unknowingly given validity and meaning to the racialization processes that devalue the culture, perspectives, values and world views, which students from different cultures bring to the classroom. Instead of utilizing these as resources for the enrichment and the broadening of perspectives, many teachers ignore them, thereby sending a subtle but powerful message that the cultures and experiences of students of color are not worthy. It is not a coincidence that these students become silenced or that they begin to cope by internalizing oppositional identities which tend to reproduce inequality and limit the achievement of some groups of students of color (Tatum, 1997; Valenzuela, 1999). Moreover, the lack of cultural competence discourages parents from actively participating as advocates and supporters of their children’s education.

Hispanics and Asians/Pacific Islanders have the highest percentage of students who speak other languages than English at home. Approximately 2.5 million people five years and older regularly speak Chinese at home; Chinese is the second most widely spoken non-English language in the United States. Furthermore, each of the other three Asian languages―Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Korean―is spoken at home by over one million people (UCLA: 2008 Statistical Portrait of Asian Americans). The lack of translators or bilingual teachers and staff dissuades parents from participating in teacher/parent conferences, PTA’s, and school board meetings. In the end, parents are blamed for the inadequacy of school systems in providing the resources needed to incorporate the diversity of students and parents in our educational midst.

LOCAL LEVEL
What is often most difficult to process in a color-blind ideological paradigm is the development of data, specifically, quantitative data that may suggest the outcomes of a racialized schooling environment. Indeed, as school districts and state systems increasingly develop a rhetoric of concern and focus for the “achievement gap” and racial disparities in outcomes, they often confound the gap as a product of language barriers, poverty, negative neighborhood influences, and poor parenting skills or absentee parents. Educators, along with policymakers and the general public, tend to take a view that schools’ low achievement levels are concentrated in geographic locations that are poverty-stricken or economically marginalized and thus attribute the “achievement gap” as a function of class. What happens however when we analyze data and achievement patterns within a school site? How might we explain racial/ethnic disparities within a school? Typically data is produced that displays racial/ethnic outcomes on one chart and then data is displayed on academic outcomes for students who are socio-economically disadvantaged on another chart, and still further we then display a chart for outcomes for English Language Learners. In other words, we compartmentalize “deficits.” In order to understand how racialization may be playing out in schools, one must analyze data across these dimensions as a means of best framing and thus exploring the embedded nature of a racialized school environment.

For example, Figure 5 below displays data from a large urban district in California on the percentage of students who graduate having completed a college-prep curriculum known as the A-G Requirements in California. These courses are required by the University of California and California State University for admissions eligibility. By displaying data by race/ethnicity AND socioeconomic background (we use the measure of free/reduced lunch program as districts do not collect data on family income), we can see that there are disparate outcomes by race/ethnicity AND class. While we can see disparities across racial/ethnic groups and across “class” categories, it is striking to note that a smaller proportion of African American and Hispanic students who are NOT on free/reduced lunch complete the college-prep sequence than all other students including White and Asian American students. Such district-wide disparities are often explained as a function of housing segregation patterns, which then concentrate low-income and minority families in underresourced neighborhood schools.


Figure 5
*Note: Economic background based on Participation in Federal Free/Reduced Lunch Program. Low income = Yes; Non-Low Income = No

The realities of the negative impacts of housing segregation (themselves a function of racialized housing covenants) are most certainly at play in these district-wide data. However, when we examine College-Prep outcomes within a school site the same pattern holds true. Figure 6 displays similar disparities across race/ethnicity and economic background. While this school is a highly racially/ethnically diverse school, with no single group exceeding 30% of the student body, these data certainly suggest that there are processes that intersect race/ethnicity and class which result in disparate outcomes for Hispanic students. Indeed, while 34% of Non-Low Income Hispanic students complete the College-Prep sequence, over 44%, 37% and 50% of White, Asian American and Filipino students who are Low-Income complete the College-Prep sequence.

Figure 6. California High School A-G College Prep Completers by Race/Ethnicity and *Economic Background

*Note: Economic background based on Participation in Federal Free/Reduced Lunch Program. Low income = Yes; Non-Low Income = No

While limited in what can be concluded from this data, there is a developing body of research which suggests that school sites that may appear “desegregated” in their student body make-up, the curriculum and types of courses within the school are highly segregated by race/ethnicity as well as income. While we have known for decades about the curricular tracking that has occurred in schools, disparities that cut across race/ethnicity and economic background are little understood. So, how might we explain a finding that non-low income Latino students are faring worse than low income White and Asian American students?

Analyzing Mathematics data from the National Assessment of Education Progress, the Nation’s Report Card under President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, Lubienski (2003) found that “differences in [instructional] practice are related to students’ race as well as their SES, with high-SES black students likely to encounter many of the practices that low-SES students generally encounter. This provides evidence that, almost 50 years after Brown v Board of Education, schools continue to employ unequal educational practices with students on the basis of race, in addition to SES.” (pg. 28) In her analysis, Lubienski found that teachers tended to utilize more rudimentary and basic skills teaching practices with Black students regardless of SES, while there was less use of such methods and for shorter periods of time for White students. In short, a racialized practice wherein expectations, however benevolent, were shaped by the ascription of Black students as a group needing more basic emphases by their teachers, led to lower achievement levels for Black students across SES.

Conversely, the opposite may hold true for Asian American students vis-à-vis classroom practices. Asian Americans are often perceived as the “model minority,” a mythology which pervades educator beliefs about this ethnic group. Consequently, educators may tend to racialize Asian Americans as inherently intelligent and/or culturally superior academically and thus needing greater academically challenging work, thereby further raising teacher expectations. Greater teacher expectations, fed by the racialization of Asian Americans as more studious and committed to their schooling, may then lead to greater academic outcomes and placement in college prep course sequences. While the data for this type of analysis is quite limited, analysis of California High School Exit passage rates shows a similar pattern of Non-Low income Latino students (and Black students) passing at a lower rate than low-income Asian American and White students across major urban districts in California. Additionally, scholars have noted similar disparities across race/ethnicity and SES in SAT and other standardized test scores.
The lesson from these descriptive data at a local level is that the framework of racialization can help educators frame their analytic questions in such a way as to not be dismissive of racialized processes. Rather such analyses can move them away from a “color-blind” ideological premise that a Ruby Payne framework or liberal ideologies might otherwise lead them towards. Therefore, utilizing disaggregated local-level achievement data by race/ethnicity and economic background and then intersecting these data points can lead to powerful findings about the extent to which racialization may be playing out within a district and school sites. These data may also suggest that racialization works in the interest of some students while simultaneously working against others. With racialization permeating our public education, we need to explore ways in which a framework of racialization can help us understand disparities in outcomes, challenges and successes within our school systems.

FOCUSED AREAS OF CONCERN
There are a number of areas where research indicates that racialization has negative consequences in the public school system. We will examine each one briefly and suggest some policies to address some aspects of these challenges in order to begin a process of change to improve the quality of education for all students.

Classroom Pedagogy and Management
Schofield’s (2001) classic study indicates that a color-blind perspective and practice leads to an atmosphere where racist stereotypes are not challenged and thus become embedded in the world views of many students. Moreover, a color-blind ideology and practice impacts how educational systems deal with the disciplining of children. Amanda Lewis’ work, Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color-Line in Classrooms and Communities (2003), clearly illustrates how the school can contribute to the creation of criminalized stereotypes which lead to the more severe disciplining and suspension of members of some racial groups than others. Sagar and Schofield (1980) also illustrate in an exercise how the same behavior is evaluated and racialized in different ways, depending on the race of the actor. Such disparate and arbitrary evaluation has been highlighted as a major factor in the significant difference in the discipline rates of Hispanics and African American children as compared to White children. It is not surprising that the incarceration rate of Hispanic youth, particularly males, is rapidly increasing in the nation.

The pervasiveness of color-blind ideology in the classroom perpetuates and reproduces the racialized narratives all children have learned through the process of racialization. According to Bonilla-Silva (2003), there are four basic frames that illustrate the role of this ideology.
• Frame 1: Minimization of the existence of racial disparity (normalizing differences)
In the classroom, this is manifested by the lack of knowledge, beyond a mythologized version of U.S. history, of how the system of race was created. In the curriculum, a series of myths are taught in social science and history that obscure rather than reveal the complex origin of the social construction of race in the United States. This leads to a world view that normalizes racial inequality and ascribes poverty, lack of educational achievement, exclusively to individual faults and weaknesses (Lewis, 2003 24). Also, there is a reluctance to engage in the classroom in the understanding and discussion of issues of difference and racial disparities.
• Frame 2: Blaming the pathology of non-White cultures (modern version of culture of poverty theory) for inequality
One of the main justifications for the assimilation model in our educational system is the assumption that the cultures of communities of color are an obstacle and a cause of the social, economic and educational disparities that impact these communities. Native Americans were sent to boarding schools, away from their parents in order to assimilate them into the dominant culture. A similar process took place in the Southwest with Mexican children who in many instances were placed in segregated schools and were provided vocational instruction. Similar efforts were also applied in Puerto Rico with the imposition of English as the language of instruction, the hiring of U.S. English-speaking teachers, and the use of textbooks which distorted the history, culture and memory of Puerto Rican children.
• Frame 3: Racial phenomenon is “natural” (people of color like to self-segregate; therefore segregation occurs.
Another way the classroom can serve as an affirmation of a color-blind ideology is to make no efforts to train teachers about the underlying reasons for social, psychological, and developmental processes that lead students, especially adolescents, to “self-segregate.” The work of Tatum (1997) has illustrated how these processes are not “natural” but part of socio-psychological processes of development in a racialized society. Also, something not clearly understood is how “oppositional” cultures are created by youth as a way of coping with their racialized experiences (Lopez and Stanton, 2001; Suarez-Orozco, 2000). Unfortunately, these oppositional cultures are assumed to be “natural,” but in reality they are means of resisting a racialized environment in ways that are unfortunately self-destructive. Peer groups tend to reinforce this oppositional culture when they stigmatize their fellow students of color who try to excel in school by labeling them as “acting White.”
• Frame 4: Upholding abstractly the ideals of equality and meritocracy without grounding them. Absolutist view that when a group is dominant or privileged it always “deserved” it.
This frame tends to assume that all children are on a level playing field and that society offers equal opportunity to all; therefore, failure and lack of success is not due to context, structures or policies but to the inability of children of color and their families to concretely live out the core values of the dominant culture. Again, the lack of historical context and knowledge, and the lack of culturally competent teachers that could help process racializing events in the classroom cause children of color to internalize inferiority and White children to internalize superiority. These scripts then become self-fulfilling prophecies of success and failure for many children (Loewen, 1995; Lopez and Stanton, 2001).

CONCLUSIONS
The challenges that students of color face are not insurmountable. Research has shown that given appropriate policies and pedagogies, significant changes can be implemented that will improve the quality of education. Social psychology research in higher education is increasingly providing evidence that all students can benefit from a pedagogy that integrates diversity into the curriculum (Antonio, 2001; Hurtado, et al., 1999; Milem, 2000).

In the meantime, our educational system is no longer considered one of the best in the world and we are losing our ability to compete academically at the international level. In the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), fourth graders’ reading literacy was assessed and compared with 45 educational jurisdictions across the world. Students in ten jurisdictions scored higher than U.S. students. Nations like Russia, Sweden and Italy received significantly higher reading literacy scores. Within the U.S., White fourth graders scored higher than Hispanics, African Americans and American Indians/Alaskan Natives in reading literacy (Planty, et al., 2008 28). In terms of science literacy, the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA 2006) found that the United States’ average score was below 30 countries from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). One of the areas of weakness among U.S. students was in their ability to explain phenomena scientifically and to use scientific evidence (Planty, et al., 2008 29). Among the nations that scored higher than the U.S. were Canada, Japan, Australia, Ireland, Netherlands, and Korea.

The issue of how racialization stigmatizes Asian and Hispanic cultures is also relevant to the challenges that students of color face in the public educational system. "Maintenance of the culture of origin acts as a powerful buffer in mediating the entry of the child into mainstream culture, communities that keep children close provide them with a protective frame of reference (Suarez-Orozco, 2001).” According to Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, "The future of our education system depends on how we can advance Hispanics through the ranks," which is also is true for Asian Americans and other students of color (Quaid, 2009).

POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

• Development of longitudinal data systems wherein student achievement can be more closely analyzed across multiple demographic dimensions (e.g., race/ethnicity, economic background, gender, English Learner etc.).
• Explicit State and Board policies that seek to infuse on-going cultural competency training and development for teaching and administrative leadership staff.
• Greater attention to the preparation of teachers in Teacher Education Programs including the provision of culturally competent training, curricular and pedagogical development, and tracking of credentialed teachers to examine promising practices in Teacher Education.
• Explicit curricular policies that support multicultural and multiethnic materials and frameworks.
• Explicit hiring policies and practices designed to provide a diverse teaching and administrative leadership staff.
• Professional development for teachers and administrative leadership staff to enable them to use data to examine disparities in outcomes and to engage in conversations about race and schooling outcomes.



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Links to National Educational Association Resources (training module and powerpoint presentation)

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Social Protest and the Future of Higher Education in Puerto Rico

http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2011/JA/feat/rodr.htm

Social Protest and the Future of Higher Education in Puerto Rico

ACADEME: Magazine of the American Association of University Professors (2011 Issues July-August 2011)

Hidden from the eyes of the world, the most intense struggle for democracy and public education since the 1960s is now under way in Puerto Rico. The outcome is uncertain.

By Victor M. Rodríguez

In 2010, in thirty states across the nation, students and faculty members protested for access to public education and against tuition and fee hikes. A common theme of the protests was the fear that rising tuition would effectively privatize public higher education, making it inaccessible to a broad segment of the nation’s youth. These protests were followed by massive demonstrations in early 2011 over the efforts of states like Wisconsin and Ohio—under the guise of cutting deficits—to limit the ability of labor unions to engage in collective bargaining.

Puerto Rico was not immune to these deficit-cutting policies; what was unique and terrifying was the government’s violent repression of faculty, staff, and student protests.

In April 2010, after gathering by the thousands in a massive assembly, students voted to strike to repudiate an $800 tuition increase, which amounted to a 50 percent hike. They occupied the largest campus of the University of Puerto Rico system, in Rio Piedras, for two months. At various points during this period, all but one of the system’s eleven campuses were closed. These protests won island-wide support from labor unions as well as religious, professional, and community organizations. This initial stage of the protests also led to an agreement with the UPR administration that included a postponement of the tuition increase. However, late in 2010, the UPR administration again decided to impose the $800 tuition fee increase, so the protests continued into 2011.

After a year of instability, the social conflict at the University of Puerto Rico is polarizing the island to such an extent that this US possession, which used to be heralded as a “showcase of democracy” during the Cold War ideological struggles, is now sliding into systematic civil and human rights violations. The University of Puerto Rico, for the first time in decades, is occupied by police. Political demonstrations are banned; summary expulsions of student leaders are common; and hundreds of students have been arrested, beaten, and at times sexually assaulted or tortured.

On February 9, 2011, riot police violently intervened in Rio Piedras because students were painting murals protesting the fee increase and the police presence on campus. The students were creating the murals in an area of campus where they are routinely allowed to do that. Not this time. Twenty-eight students were arrested, many were hurt, and chaos ensued when police used pepper gas and batons to arrest students and bystanders. The police violence was of such a magnitude that the faculty organization, the Puerto Rican Association of Professors, and the Brotherhood of Nonfaculty Employees called for a twenty-four-hour strike, which was later extended to seventy-two hours.

The university was closed. The president of the system, José Ramón de la Torre, after writing a letter requesting the removal of the police from the campus, announced that he was resigning. Nonetheless, the hostility to dissent did not end. Unlike in the protests over the curtailment of collective bargaining rights in Madison, the specialized units of the Puerto Rican police did not join the protesters; instead, they used excessive force against them. The prevailing attitude of government officials is best illustrated by a comment made by Marcos Rodríguez Emma, Governor Luis Fortuño’s chief of staff: “Sincerely, I would kick them [the students] out of the university and would fire the professors who allow themselves to be used.”

Social Movement or Permanent Crisis?

With the exception of the 2009 and 2010 student protests at University of California campuses in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Santa Cruz and the recent protests by students and faculty members of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, most in today’s academic community have not organized into a broad social movement to challenge the ideology underlying the restructuring of how public higher education is financed. Puerto Rico may be a significant exception. In some sense, as political scientist Laurel Weldon argues in her recent book When Protest Makes Policy, the social movement for public education in Puerto Rico has provided a voice for a segment of society that felt powerless while the government dismantled public higher education and created the basis for a seemingly permanent crisis.

Since its founding in 1903, the University of Puerto Rico has had to face the political intervention of the state. The university was organized during the period just after the US military government of Puerto Rico ended. The chancellor was provided with broad powers, and higher education became part of the “Americanization” process that was used with other racial minorities in the United States. The university was modeled on the system created for the education of African Americans and Native Americans during a period when social Darwinism permeated American culture and some political and educational leaders took a paternalistic view of the “natives” of newly acquired territories.

Unfortunately, this colonial legacy is still woven into the institutional norms and practices of the university. In fact, it was the government’s extensive intervention into university affairs—almost every chancellor was under the direct control of the governor—that led the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools to refuse to accredit the university in 1937 (accreditation was granted in 1946). The university’s colonial origin, its centralized administration, and the intrusion of partisan politics are the sources of most of the social conflicts that have pervaded the history of the institution. In 1942 and 1948, faculty, staff, and students protested political encroachment, leading to two major strikes that closed down the university. Throughout the 1960s and 1980s, university life was again punctuated by protests, calls for educational reform, and debates about whether fiscal autonomy might ensure the academic community a central role in governance.

While strikes and protests have been relatively common throughout the history of the university, three factors have converged today that together could either crush the hope for progressive educational reform or create the momentum for real reform in the not-too-distant future: first, the worst recession the island has experienced since the 1930s, one that began two years before the downturn on the mainland; second, the political intervention in university affairs by Puerto Rico’s Fortuño administration; and third, the use of force against protesters.

The protest movement’s efforts to link with other sectors of Puerto Rican society—especially environmental, community, and labor groups—and the resignation of the university leadership have elicited such deep-seated fear that the island’s government is using unconstitutional surveillance tactics. On December 19, 2010, the island’s superintendent of police, former FBI agent José Figueroa Sancha, admitted that police used video surveillance during the university protests. Later, in March 2011, the police approved a protocol for the videotaping of protests, despite a 1990s ruling of the Puerto Rico Supreme Court banning the use of unrestricted surveillance against political dissidents.

The University and the Governing Part y

When this article went to press, Miguel Muñoz, former chancellor of the engineering campus in the western city of Mayagüez, was the interim president of the UPR system. While a process exists to name a permanent replacement, the faculty senates of four campuses in the university system have refused to participate in the search. The other four created search committees, yet two of them chose “none of the above”; only one, the Bayamon branch, has supported the interim president. In fact, even the engineering school in Mayagüez, where the interim president served as chancellor, did not participate in the search process.

Decades of politically partisan intervention in university affairs have fostered mistrust among faculty, staff, and students. Puerto Rico’s legislature expanded the number of trustees who govern the system so that lawmakers could name people loyal to the governing party. As a result of an electoral landslide in 2008, the legislature is now under the full control of the New Progressive Party (PNP), which is led by Governor Fortuño. (The system of government on the island does not allow for recalls, as in some states.)

The PNP, which is neither progressive nor new, has supported statehood for Puerto Rico since the party’s creation in 1968. It has used its almost unrestricted power to increase the number of judges on the island’s supreme court to solidify its control of the judiciary. The police force under José Figueroa Sancha, an appointee of Governor Fortuño, has been militarized, and a number of new units have been created, including the Unit for Tactical Operations and the Special Arrests Unit. Sancha also has increased the deployment of SWAT units with automatic weapons, and Tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and shields have been used to quell student protests.

The US Department of Justice, in response to a December 20, 2010, request by the American Civil Liberties Union, is investigating the police of Puerto Rico. In January 2011, two high-ranking members of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division visited the island to investigate. The local civil liberties union and other organizations from Puerto Rico’s civil society expect that some form of consent decree will be implemented this year to curb the widespread violations of human and civil rights. The crisis led US Representative Luis Gutiérrez, a Democrat from Illinois who is of Puerto Rican descent, to denounce the violations in a session of Congress.

The protests quieted in spring 2011, however, after an incident in which Ana Guadalupe, chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras, was attacked with water bottles and pushed by students. While she was unhurt, the incident divided supporters of the strike. Most of the student protests now are held through conferences, meetings with community leaders, and strategy sessions. The police remain on campus, but the local media have limited their coverage of student organizing. And even during the most active period of the protests, in spring 2010, coverage by media from the mainland was scant. The principal non–Puerto Rican outlets to report on the crisis were Al Jazeera and Tele Sur (of Venezuela). In order to break the silence, students in Puerto Rico, like their Egyptian counterparts, created media outlets of their own to tell the world what was happening in this US territory. The website Estudiantes de la UPR Informan (UPR Students Inform) and the radio station Radio Huelga (Radio Strike), managed and controlled by students, cover the events and promote dialogue about the issues.

Public Education and Economic Crisis

Hidden from the eyes of the world, and especially from the US public, the most intense struggle for democracy and public education since the 1960s is now under way on this island with 3.7 million inhabitants. “The epicenter of the struggle for the public university in Latin America is Puerto Rico,” said José Carlos Luque Brazán, a professor and researcher of political science and urban planning at the Autonomous University in Mexico City.

The academic community on the Rio Piedras campus has led the island-wide movement. Rio Piedras, which has twenty thousand students and one thousand faculty members, is a selective research-intensive university and the most prestigious institution of higher education in the Caribbean. Because of its selectivity, Rio Piedras also has the most creative and most persistent defenders of educational reform and of the expansion of public education.

Unfortunately, ideology is guiding the government’s response to the educational and social crisis at the university. Since his landslide election in 2008, Fortuño has implemented a series of neoliberal measures that have polarized the island’s population and increased economic inequality. Fortuño is the first Puerto Rican governor to be an avowed member of the national Republican Party, despite the fact that the GOP as such does not participate in Puerto Rican elections. Breaking his electoral promises, he has fired seventeen thousand public workers and reduced investments in social services and education. Puerto Rico, moreover, has one of the lowest labor participation rates in the world, a rate that has declined dramatically in recent years. In July 1999, 47.8 percent of working-age adults were in the labor force; by December 2010, the figure had dropped to 41.1 percent. In contrast, the labor participation rate on the US mainland in January 2011 was 64.2 percent.

In the meantime, efforts to privatize segments of public services—including education—are being made through what the government calls “public-private partnerships.” These are ways of providing the private sector with public assets without the risks involved in the private market. One proposed partnership (which faces strong citizen opposition) would involve building a gas pipeline through some of the most environmentally fragile areas of the island, close to population centers.

The privatization of higher education is another strategy to achieve the same objective. Since 1997, government funding for the University of Puerto Rico has been cut by $336 million. The 50 percent tuition hike was justified by the system’s budget deficit. This increase will mean that nearly ten thousand students will not be able to attend the university system as a whole. Further reductions in federal Pell Grants, which seem likely, will price more poor and middle-class students out of a college education.

Meanwhile, from 2001–02 to 2006–07, enrollment in private universities increased in Puerto Rico by 34 percent while enrollment in the public system declined by 10.7 percent. The quality of education in private colleges and universities is much lower than that in the UPR system. According to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System of the US Department of Education, six-year graduation rates in 2007–08 for private colleges and universities ranged between 18.15 and 45.3 percent. In comparison, graduation rates for the eleven campuses in the public system range between 36.4 and 61 percent.

If the government’s policy of cutting financial support for public education continues, a still more economically stratified system of education will develop. Since private universities are less selective, economically disadvantaged students are more likely to attend private universities than public ones. The burden of educating the island’s youth will continue to be shifted to private universities, which rely more on federal Pell Grants. By expanding the role of private universities, neoliberals are thus increasing the burden for US taxpayers.

Governor Fortuño’s poll numbers are very low, yet he is steadfast in supporting the repressive measures used against the university community. One reason behind his obstinacy may be that he is being courted by the national Republican Party as a way of attracting the Latino vote. Fortuño recently traveled to California to attend events sponsored by the Koch Brothers and the Heritage Foundation. At such venues, he asserts that he has established law and order in Puerto Rico. Most recently, on February 11, he spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s 2011 meeting in Washington, DC, where he touted his policies. Toeing the Tea Party line, he spoke about reducing government, improving bond ratings, and reducing the government’s structural deficit. (While it is true that Puerto Rico has a structural deficit of $3 billion, a tax cut for multinational corporations effected ten years ago cut the same amount, $3 billion, in general funds revenue from the island’s coffers.)

Sadly, although Puerto Rico’s bond ratings have increased somewhat (they are still considered risky), the island’s social fabric is collapsing. Dora Nevares, a UPR criminologist, had predicted in the 1990s that the strong-arm tactics of Pedro Roselló, the previous PNP governor, would lead to increased violence on the island. Then, Rosselló sent the National Guard and the police to raid public housing projects. The raids targeted the youth and stigmatized the poor as violent. Most of the one thousand murders committed last year on the island (which has a higher murder rate than any other state or territory) are committed by youths against other youths engaged in the drug trade. In the meantime, the population of the island, for the first time in modern history, has decreased. From 2000 to 2009, more than four hundred thousand Puerto Ricans migrated to the mainland. This is the highest number of emigrants since the great migration that followed World War II.

The University of Puerto Rico was placed on probation last year by the Middle States Association. Two of the main reasons cited were poor governance and poor financial management. The academic senate of the Rio Piedras campus submitted an addendum to the university report to Middle States that included an account of police brutality on that campus. When Chancellor Guadalupe refused to include the addendum in the report, the faculty sent it separately.

The students and their allies continue organizing and entering into dialogue with broader sectors of Puerto Rico’s civil society. While the US mainstream press may not cover these events, in some important sectors a sense is emerging that the government needs to reconsider its repressive actions. The only local English-language daily paper, the moderately conservative Daily Sun, editorialized on February 10, 2011, that “the indiscriminate aggression of police riot squads against students, who are exercising their constitutional rights in public areas without interfering with any academic or administrative activity, is a gross violation of their rights and an act comparable only to the acts of the dictatorships we all denounce and reject….We do not want this new order, neither for our university, the Capitol, La Fortaleza or our neighborhoods. We reject it with all our might; exercising our freedom of speech, or freedom of association, is not a crime.”

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote something appropriate to this Puerto Rican moment. He described the fear of institutions that create thoughtful citizens capable of critical thinking: “They know the risk that they face when they let the imagination run through books, how seditious the fictions become when the reader explores the freedom that makes them possible and that in them is exercised, with the fear and the darkness that lurks in the real world.”



Víctor M. Rodríguez is professor of Chicano and Latino studies at California State University, Long Beach. He is the author of Latino Politics in the United States. His e-mail address is vrodrig5@csulb.edu.

Growth of Minority Population in Florida

California Ethnic Minority Growth, 2010 Census

The Dismantling of Public Education in California

The Dismantling of Public Education in California

Victor M. Rodriguez Dominguez


Recently in Texas, the Texas Public Policy foundation, a conservative think tank, proposed a business model for reshaping the University of Texas, Austin. A response by the College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Executive team characterized the proposal as a “business-style, market-driven approach under which colleges and universities would treat students as customers, de-emphasize research that isn’t immediately lucrative, and evaluate individual faculty by the tuition revenue they generate. Advocates of these proposals see them as a necessary response to the rising cost of higher education, a cure for a system they suggest is inefficient and inaccessible.”

The model, which purports to improve “efficiency” is part of the national efforts of conservative organizations and individuals to infuse “market forces” inside higher education as a response to the “budget crisis” many states are facing. This model also is presented as an effort that will save money for the starving state governments while maintaining educational excellence.

This model, which is not new or novel, is based on the ideas of Frederick Taylor at the beginning of the 20th century. His model of “scientific management” was also predicated on the idea that efficiency would increase productivity. While it was being introduced in the industrial system this model was also influential as the system of higher education in the nation was being created. “Taylorism” promoted reducing tasks to its most minute components which made the labor process faster as workers specialized in smaller movements. It also introduced ways of measuring productivity that tended to reduce the wages paid to workers if certain production standards where not reached. It also transferred the control of the labor process to management taking away the autonomy that was enjoyed by the craftsmen. Workers became cogs in the industrial wheel.

There are a number of serious pedagogical issues that this model when applied to higher education will not address. First, the creativity and innovation which are part of academia are based on the relative autonomy that faculty enjoys. Not all research has to produce economic profit but research will enrich our knowledge and understanding.

Secondly, in states like New Mexico, Texas and California the challenges of a diverse student population are not even considered by proponents of this model. In these three states, according to the 2010 census, the majority of the K-12 enrollment is made up of students of Latino descent. The educational system created at the end of the 19th century while it has experienced important changes still has some of the basic features of the early system of schooling. It still has not incorporated the curriculum and pedagogy necessary to address a very different population than the one it was created to serve in the 1900s. In many ways, the educational system is focused more on “Americanizing” students than on educating students. In many ways the education of students is sacrificed so that students will assimilate quickly even at the expense of their knowledge of science, math etc. New research on learning shows that new knowledge is easier to be learned if connected with the knowledge that students bring to the classroom. For example, in terms of language acquisition, “intercomprehension” research shows that the best way of acquiring a language is by building on the language a student already knows. This was a major contribution of Paulo Freire, the founder of Liberation Pedagogy who created a curriculum to teach peasants how to read in Northeast Brazil. His concept of “contextualized education” built on the idea that the culture of people can be used as a foundation for new knowledge.

Fallacy of the Budget Crisis

Also, the business model is defended as a way of solving the “budget crisis” that states like California are facing. Unfortunately, the reality is that, at least in California there is no budget crisis, what exists is a revenue shortage created by policies implemented by the state government. According to the California Budget Project (2009) "Corporate income taxes have declined over time as a share of General Fund revenues and as a share of corporate profits. If corporations had
paid the same share of their profits in corporate taxes in 2006 as they did in 1981, corporate tax collections would have been $8.4 billion higher."

A more recent report by the CBP (April 2011), reported that because of corporate tax breaks and tax loopholes, personal income tax receipts have increased their share of General Fund revenues from 35.4 per cent in 1980-81 to 51.5 per cent in 2010-11. The burden of supporting government services, including education has been placed on individual tax payers. In addition, more corporate tax breaks approved in the September 2008 and February 2009 budget agreements will reduce by $2 billion a year the revenue from corporations in California. Another source of revenue that has declined are the high income earners ($200,000 a year) who paid no taxes. This high income “no tax” since 1997 has increased in California, from 579 to 2,431 individuals tax returns.

In terms of the financing of education the impact of proposition 13 is that contrary to most states, most of the financing of K-12 education is not local but by the state and federal funds. We are also reducing our financial investment in higher education, according to Mortenson (2009) in a study prepared for the California Faculty Association:

“In 1980 California appropriated $12.86 from state tax funds for the operations of higher education for every $1000 of state personal income. This ranked California’s investment effort 11th among the states. By FY2008 this had dropped $7.71 per $1000 of state personal income, a decline of 40.0%. California ranked 21st among the states by 2008.”

This decline in California’s investment in education is also reflected on our bottom standing with respect to most variables related to quality education: we are 44 in terms of spending per pupil, we are 46 with respect to education spending as a percentage of personal income, we are 50 in terms of students per teacher and 49 in terms of students per guidance counselor (CBP, 2010).

We also have one of the lowest college attendance rates in the nation, 55.8 per cent, states like Tennessee, Missouri, North Carolina have much higher rates despite having less wealthier populations (PPIC, 2009). At a time when it is projected that by 2025:

"California will have one million fewer college graduates than it needs in 2025-only 35 percent of working-age adults will have a college degree in an economy that would otherwise require 41 percent of workers to have a college degree." (Johnson and Sangupta, PPIC, 2009)

Most of the students who will not be able to have access to a quality education in California are Latinos. Given the achievement gap that exists between whites, Latinos and African Americans, many of these students will face challenges to succeed in college. The reasons are not entirely the fault of the individuals but of a system that is broken. “In California, 12% of math teachers, 18% of physical science teachers and 11% of life science teachers are considered out-of-field teachers” (California Report Card, 2010). The schools were African Americans and Latino are most likely to attend are segregated, under funded and the ones which have high rates of students per teacher, per guidance advisor etc. It is no wonder that the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress report found that while in 2009, Latino and white students have increased their reading and math scores from previous years, the achievement gap remains the same. These are the reasons for the alarming fact that 50 per cent of Latinos do not graduate from high school (Gandara, 2009). Latinos have not had significant progress in college attainment in 30 years.

Patricia Gandara, education professor at UCLA and part of the Civil Rights Project, says that this is a crisis derived from failed social policies. While the popular media blames immigrants, the reality is that, as many empirical studies have demonstrated, immigrants tend to do better than native-born. Middle class immigrant students educated elsewhere do better than native born Latinos. Some studies argue that in fact Latino children, the more they spend in the educational system the more passive and less optimistic they become (Quiroz, 1997). Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, from the Harvard Immigration Project argues that his longitudinal data shows that assimilation has not been a positive process for Latinos.

Poverty and lack of resources, as Mortenson argues will provide additional challenges to California:

"On the demographic side the share of California's K-12 students approved for subsidized school lunches has increased from 35.2% in 1989 to 51.5% by 2007, and this share will increase much further and probably rapidly and indefinitely in future years. These students will have zero resources to pay for higher education when they reach college age. But they also represent a growing share of California's future workforce that must be higher educated for the most valuable work to be done in the Human Capital Economy." (Mortenson, CFA, 2009)

Given that 51% of K-12 are Latinos, the declining investment on education in California will have a disparate effect on Latinos. But in the end it will affect the progress of California in the next few decades when a significant proportion of the baby boomers will be retiring. Since programs like Social Security are supported by taxes paid by working people, is California and other states do not invest in the education of youth, the labor force will be made up of workers who will be less educated and who will pay less into the coffers of the system. In the end, today’s voters will pay the consequences in the future.

Excellent Summary of Social Movement for Public Education Against Neo-Liberalism