Hispanic students in the United States: enrollment, achievement, and barriers

¶ … English Only Case

Educating Hispanic Students:

Obstacles and avenues to improve academic achievement.

Per the article, what is the status of Hispanic Students in the U.S.

Even with the fact that the number of Hispanic Students in the U.S. experienced a significant growth during recent years, the authorities failed to design educational programs meant to assist them in integrating society effectively. The Department of Education has directed its attention toward diminishing and eventually closing the gap between Hispanic students and White students. The current cultural environment in the country appears to prevent Hispanic students from being able to accumulate information similar to how White children do. Changing the environment is the key to enabling these respective students to integrate society and to eventually be able to play an active role in helping the Hispanic community as a whole experience progress.

The article lists factors associated with underachievement of Hispanic students; Lack of qualified teachers, inappropriate teaching practices, at risk school environment. How can these factors be changed to better serve our students and future workforce?

Teachers should be prepared to deal with ELLs in their classrooms or Hispanic children should be moved to Hispanic groups in order for the small number of ESL teachers to be able to address their needs. There are not enough ESL certified teachers and this issue would have to raise alarms regarding the condition of Hispanic students in the U.S. today. Teachers would have to restructure their whole teaching philosophy in order to be able to provide Hispanic students with information that can help them experience progress. With the current type of teaching treating students as a group rather than providing them with individual attention, Hispanic students are less likely to keep up with the rest of the class as a consequence of being ELLs. By changing their attitudes toward ELLs, teachers would be better prepared to deal with their needs and to provide these respective students with the chance to actually learn information that would assist them in overcoming their likeliness to become an active part of poor environments.

In addition to teachers having to adopt new attitudes that would help Hispanic students integrate, school environments in general would have to change in order for these students to be able to progress. The main idea is that learning environments need to change rather than students having to. Schools would have to change the way they operate so that they would no longer alienate Hispanic students. These students would eventually be drawn to school and would acknowledge the significance of being educated. A school environment would have to encourage students to continue to attend classes.

3. Several suggestions were given in the article to help with Hispanic students' success. If we know there are techniques and strategies to improve the classroom for students, why are they not being implemented?

The lack of proper funding and the fact that the authorities seem unconcerned about the matter in general are among the principal reason why Hispanic children in the U.S. are not provided with the support they need in order to integrate the social order. With teachers being unprepared to address their needs and with the Department of Education only acknowledging the existence of the problem without actually intervening, Hispanic students continue to experience hardship as they struggle to integrate.