In school, Latinos find fewer resources, ethnic isolation

LOS ANGELES -- Jacqui Heiland, a teacher at Garfield High School for 48 years, put a blunt question to her social studies class: "How many of your parents were not born in this country?" All but one student raised a hand. "OK, how many have family members from Mexico?" Again, nearly everyone's hand went up. "Is this good or bad that nearly all the students in the school are of the same culture?" she probed. The class embarked on a discussion about school integration.

"For one thing, there is no racism," said one student. "No stereotypes," added another. "But," a third student interjected, "just think of the experiences you could get from other races."

At Garfield High in East Los Angeles, 99 percent of nearly 5,000 students are Mexican-American. Similarly, Latinos across the country largely miss out on the experience of going to school with classmates of different races and cultures.

Today, 50 years after the Supreme Court ended enforced segregation in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Latinos, the nation's largest minority group, are the most segregated in public schools, according to Harvard's Civil Rights Project. The 1954 landmark decision did not apply to Latinos until 1970.

Besides ethnic isolation, the Civil Rights Project says, Latinos endure overcrowded schools in areas like East Los Angeles, where immigrants settle in large numbers. In addition, Latino-majority schools tend to have less qualified teachers and fewer educational resources, the project says. The large number of immigrant children who arrive at class unable to properly speak English has also hindered academic achievement in the schools, it says.

"The problems that we are developing in the metropolitan areas are as serious as the problems in the South before Brown," said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project. "We are a society that basically says you can't treat people differently because of race by passing a law that says we won't allow Latinos in good schools, but you can do it by housing segregation and by separating school boundary lines. Nobody objects to that at all."

Officials at Los Angeles Unified School District, where minorities make up 70 percent of the 746,000 students, say segregated schools for Latinos are largely caused by factors they cannot control, such as immigration and housing patterns. District officials say the problem is so stubborn that their focus is to try to make sure Latino and other minority students get an equal education, rather than to promote desegregation.

"I am saying just because a school happens to fall into a category of students of color, it doesn't mean it can't be an excellent school," said Ted Alexander, associate superintendent. "Ideally, an integrated experience is the way we should go for every child, so he or she can learn to live and work with others. . . . Brown vs. the Board dealt with equal educational opportunity, but I am saying now we need to look at equal education outcome. What do we need that will level the playing field?"

According to a recent study by UCLA's Institute for Democracy Education and Access, the playing field is far from level in California. John Rogers, the institute's director, said schools in the state serving large numbers of Latinos are six times more likely than majority-white schools to be overcrowded.

Such schools also have unqualified teachers and inadequate learning materials, including books and computers, he said.

In a modest residential area with small wooden and brick houses, Garfield High was portrayed in "Stand and Deliver," a book and movie about Jaime Escalante, a Bolivian-born math teacher who in 1982 inspired poor students there to master the advanced-placement test in calculus.

In the 1930s, Garfield's student body was predominantly white, but it did include African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans.

By the 1960s, Latinos were quickly becoming the majority, as Mexican immigrants flooded into East Los Angeles, an area the size of San Francisco. The change was part of a broader trend in California, now a state with one of the largest Latino populations.

"In the 1970s, the average Latino student in California was in a majority-white school. Now the schools are about one-sixth white," Orfield said. "It's a huge change in terms of the experience of the average Latino kid. . . . Most of this change comes after the civil rights era, so there really hasn't been any initiatives to address it substantially."

In 1970, when the Supreme Court ruled in Cisneros v. Corpus Christi Independent School District, Latinos were given the same protection as African-Americans under the Brown decision. According to the Civil Rights Project, Latinos in California, New York, Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey are increasingly attending overcrowded schools where there is no contact with white students.

Overcrowding is a problem at Garfield and the other high school on the east side, Roosevelt, which enrolls more than 5,000 Mexican-American students. As a result, the schools are on controversial year-round schedules, causing students to receive 17 fewer days of instruction.

Luis Sanchez, director of Inner City Struggle, a nonprofit organization that works to improve Los Angeles schools, said some Garfield students are left without textbooks during the first few weeks of school, others use dated books, and still others cannot take the books home, because they might be lost. The California Department of Education says 19 percent of Garfield teachers are not fully certified.

Another obstacle to achievement starts outside the school. One-third of Garfield students do not speak English as their primary language, which education specialists say only adds to the isolation. Many students come largely from poor immigrant families in East Los Angeles, and their parents are unable to help with homework because of language barriers.

Two years ago, Samandi Sanchez, arrived in the United States from Puebla, Mexico, 60 miles from Mexico City. The other day she sat in her English as a Second Language class, where students quietly chatted in Spanish. While Garfield High has the usual cliques -- the jocks, the rockers, and the geeks -- Sanchez and other students said they are also divided by those who speak English and those who cannot. To improve her English, Sanchez hangs around the school's few African-American and white students. Some are in her ROTC class.

"At first, it was hard to be here," she said. "All the people look at you if you cannot speak good English."

The overcrowding, uneven teaching, and language problem contribute to the school's poor academic results. About 60 percent of Garfield freshmen drop out or leave within four years. Two out of 10 Garfield students take the courses required to get into college, and an average of 99 seniors enroll in a four-year college every year, said Luis Sanchez, the director of Inner City Struggle.

Garfield's acting principal, Onofre Di Stefano, said Garfield is hardly equal to predominantly white schools in the city, but cites some educational accomplishments. The advanced-placement calculus program is still going strong, he said, though Escalante left in 1991. He ticked off the names of alumni who made it to college and even a few who got into Harvard.

"By no means is it perfect," Di Stefano said of Garfield's segregated student body. "The ideal situation is for our students to see the world as it really is, and the world is not all Latino. But for our kids, we want them to be able to converse and negotiate with kids who are different, and leave here able to compete with other groups."

Orfield warned that if Latino students around the nation continue to be isolated from students who are white, those who are middle class, and those who speak English, they will be less able to compete.

"It's dangerous," he said. "That three-way kind of isolation is devastating to kids' development. . . . When you add up all these things up, it's really a devastating picture for opportunity."