By Gloria Romero, DFER California State Director
(Translated version – Originally published in Spanish in La Opinion)
As we stop today to honor a great American civil rights hero, let’s ask ourselves: how would Cesar Chavez feel about having his name–or that of Dr. Martin Luther King–affixed to a persistently failing school, where less than a third of Latino children can read at basic levels of proficiency and more than a third of kids drop out year after year?
Each year, millions of California’s children are being sentenced to a life at the bottom of our nation’s economic ladder. For these children, the promise of America – that if you work hard, you can realize your greatest aspirations – is made unattainable. In 2009 there were roughly 2 million children attending more than 2,000 failing public schools. Despite pouring billions of dollars in additional funding into these schools, only a few have left failure behind and become successful.
This is the civil rights issue of our time.
The racial and ethnic inequalities of this failure are alarming; in the 2008-2009 school year, more than one in four Latino students in California dropped out before graduating from high school. Two years ago, on the national test of academic achievement, barely more than one in ten Latino students received a score of proficient or advanced in math or reading. These children are being left behind, and the economy they inherit does not look kindly on workers without solid educational credentials.