Providing Equal Opportunities for Latino Children

Audio Highlight from Conference Session

In this audio excerpt from her session, "The Challenges of Latino Demographics to Educational Accountability in a Democracy," hear Ana Martinez Aleman discuss how high-stakes testing disproportionately affects the burgeoning population of Latino students in America.

Listen to a brief excerpt of Aleman's comments.

• Learn more about Aleman's perspective.

• Anica Diaz Rivera Urges: Don't Treat All Latino Students the Same Way

• Explore the issues involved in Multicultural Education.

• How do educators in countries outside the United States teach about other cultures? Find out how conference attendees from outside the Unites States answered this.

• Join ASCD's Hispanic/Latino-American Critical Issues network.

• Get information on purchasing audio CDs of select conference sessions. A complete listing of individual session CDs will be available in mid-May.

If you have difficulty with the audio file, a transcript is provided below.


Transcript
For Latino children this is especially problematic. As the fastest growing sector of our American population, we should be especially concerned with our ability to truly provide equal opportunities for Latino children to develop their gifts, their idiosyncracies--to develop their positive contributions to American society. When we restrict their development through educational policy that presupposes that individuality, that believes them to be already be made, or that they have talents or abilities that are free of time, place, and the conditions of their environment, we're really resorting to what Dewey would say is an undemocratic vision. In that, we betray a more productive and improved American future. What the data on accountability tell us about the prospects of Latino children in the coming decades is that they will be limited largely to service sector and low-wage employment. We're educating the fastest growing sector of our school children to do little more than that. Latino children today will likely be adults whose intellectual resources are unlikely to have been tapped by public schooling, and whose contributions to art, politics, science, music, athletics, medicine, and the law will be underachieved. They will be individuals that John Dewey would charactarize as unused resources in democracy.