To understand the lack of motivation among most Hispanic/Latino and many African-American students, all one need do is be aware of a few facts, which I have written about in several posts.
In Needs versus Education – What comes first? – Part 3, we discover that forty-four percent (44%) of youth gang membership are Hispanic/Latino while thirty-five percent (35%) are African-American, which means that combined, Hispanic/Latino and African-American youths make up almost 80% of youth-gang membership in America, and youth gangs are not pro-education.
Then in Civil Disobedience and No Child Left Behind – Part 7 we learned the dropout rate in Mexico’s schools is almost 70% compared to 8.1% in the United States.
You may question why the dropout rate in Mexico has anything to do with America’s public schools until you learn that about 3.5 million public school students in the US are here illegally from Mexico and that high dropout rate is an indication of a cultural bias toward education. When those students slipped across the US border, many brought their lack of motivation to learn with them.
As most of us know, actions speak louder than words, and The Pew Hispanic Center offers more facts that indicate a lack of motivation. Pew.org says, “Nearly nine-in-ten (89%) Latino young adults ages 16 to 25 say that a college education is important for success in life, yet only about half that number — 48% — say that they themselves plan to get a college degree… ”
In fact, In 2009, just 19.2 percent of Latinos between 25 and 34 had a university degree, while among Asians the percentage was 69.1 percent, with 48.7 percent for non-Hispanic whites and 29.4 percent for African Americans.” Source: Fox News
In addition, the largest numbers of dropouts come from Hispanic/Latino (17.6%) and African-American (9.3%) students, which is another indicator of motivation. However, only 5.2% of Whites drop out while 3.4% of Asian/Pacific Islanders do.
In Yet One More Doomed Education Reform, Robert Weissberg defines the ‘politically correct’ head in the sand when he says, “Like the unsuccessful NCLB and every other reform of the last few decades, it speaks of transforming the ‘lowest performing schools’ as if schools, not the occupants, were the culprit.”
Weissberg then asks, “Why should a kid who hates school improve if moved to a new building?” Then he explains why Americans do not put the blame where it belongs.
“The term “bad school” is a euphemism,” Weissberg says, “a way of avoiding political trouble with grievance group leaders just waiting to exploit alleged [ethnic/racial] “insults” to rally the troops to extract material benefits.”
Continued on October 30, 2011 in Blind, Deaf and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail – Part 4 or return to Part 2
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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