Minorities Education

In an attempt to mollify critics, the U.S. Department of Education has revised draft guidelines on how schools and colleges can use standardized tests without violating the civil rights of minority students, who often score lower on such tests than whites.

The most comprehensive analysis ever of California's mounting teacher shortage warns that education reform is doomed unless the state mounts a costly, emergency campaign to address the dearth of qualified teachers at public schools serving poor, minority children. The report, to be released today, found that the percentage of ill-trained teachers at schools serving the greatest number of minority children is on average six times the level at schools where most students are white.

Raymond Landis is fluent in the language of mechanical engineering, a field in which terms such as heat transfer, thermodynamics and numerical analysis roll off the tongue like couplets in a sonnet. But Landis, the dean of engineering and technology at Cal State Los Angeles, prefers the vocabulary of success when he talks to his Minority Engineering Program (MEP) students, to whom he offers terms such as goals, motivation, peer support and pride.

A Chicano student group at Cal State Northridge has launched a protest against the campus paper over what it says was a harsh and insensitive editorial supporting a new state requirement that sets penalties for remedial freshmen who fail to catch up. The editorial was published in the Sundial a week ago under the headline "How Did They Get Here in the First Place?"

Alarmed that only two blacks are among the 286 new faces this fall at UCLA Law School, students and professors walked out of class Thursday vowing to help end what they labeled the "resegregation" of their school.

Black and Latino students lag behind white and Asian students academically-- even when they come from similarly privileged backgrounds, according to a report released Sunday. Surveying data going back to the 1960s, the report by the New York-based College Board, which administers the SAT, found that academic underachievement among black and Latino students begins in the earliest grades and persists all the way into higher education.

Unless schools target Latino students aggressively, stop justifying their failures and help them to succeed, Ventura County educators fear that a growing number of these students could be in danger of falling behind their peers or dropping out of school. Already, the challenges are daunting. Educators are scrambling to find ways to motivate Latino students in the face of low test scores, high dropout rates, and language and socioeconomic barriers that have historically plagued many of them.

Millions of young Latinos are qualified for college but never attend, often becoming stuck in dead-end, low-paying jobs, according to a study released last week. The study by the Educational Testing Service, the firm that produces the SAT, said 22% of Latinos ages 18 to 24 attend college, compared with 32% of the general population of that age group. Closing that gap would produce 430,000 more Latino college students and more than 100,000 more Latino college graduates, the study said.

A groan ripped through the audience of high school counselors. Bob Laird, the man who decides if their students make the cut for UC Berkeley, had just announced his plans to retire. A few high school counselors stood and began to applaud. A dozen more rose to their feet. Soon the entire auditorium joined in a long, noisy tribute to Berkeley's admissions director. What was going on here? Hadn't this guy crushed the dreams of thousands of their high school seniors who wanted to go to Berkeley?

A class-action lawsuit filed in Los Angeles this summer made some disturbing allegations. It said many African American and Latino students in California don't even have a shot at getting into the state's most prestigious public universities because their schools don't offer enough Advanced Placement classes. Those highly demanding courses are more crucial than ever these days.