Latino Parents Upbeat on Schools

Latino households with school-age children find more to like in the nation’s public schools than do white parents or black parents, a national survey finds. The Pew Hispanic Center, in conjunction with the Kaiser Family Foundation, polled adults between August and October of 2003, asking a variety of questions about K-12 education.

The survey, “Attitudes Towards Education And Assessment of Schools Today,” reveals that Latino parents generally view public education in a more positive light than either white parents or black parents.

North Carolina is home to a significant and growing Latino school population. In 2002, the Census recorded 19,308 Hispanic residents in Raleigh alone. The Wake County school system added 4,600 net new students in 2003-04. According to reports in the News & Observer of Raleigh, Hispanics were the fastest-growing component of that group. In January 2004, Business North Carolina estimated that the state’s Hispanic population was about 400,000, or 5 percent of total residents.

Fieldwork for the 3,421 families in the Pew Survey was conducted by International Communication Research, and respondents could opt to conduct the interview in Spanish or in English.

Based on the question “Are you, yourself, of Hispanic or Latino origin or descent, such as Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Central or South American, Caribbean or some other Latin background?” 44 percent of the adults sampled answered “Yes.”
To better understand the answers, the sample was split several ways: parents vs. non parents, native-born vs. foreign-born Latinos, non-Latino whites, and non-Latino blacks.

Only 37 percent of the 3,421 adults surveyed had children in a K-12 school program. Just over half of the parents identified themselves as being part of a Latino household. Another 27 percent of parents were white, and the remaining 19 percent of parents in the survey were black.

Some questions were asked only of the parents in the study. The relatively small sample size for some responses brings the margin of error for the poll to plus or minus 2.43 percentage points overall. The poll consists of two sections: one on education and schools today, and a second on politics and policy.

Perceptions about public schools vary among white, black, and Hispanic parents. Hispanic parents, especially those who are foreign-born, give schools higher ratings and are more optimistic about the future of the schools than any other group.

In the survey, 52 percent of all Latinos gave the schools nationwide an A or B, and 63 percent rated their community schools as deserving of an A or B.

But a breakdown between foreign- and native-born parents shows that confidence is higher among foreign-born parents. More than twice as many of the foreign-born Latino families thought community schools were top-notch, as compared to native-born parents. And the rate of approval for the nation’s schools for foreign-born parents was triple the A-rated approval from Latino parents born in the United States. About half of all Latino families expressed confidence that U.S. schools have improved over the past five years.

When compared to responses from the Latino community, whites and blacks were far less positive. Only 25 percent of white parents thought the schools have improved since 1999; 31 percent of black families expressed the same view. “Whites and African Americans are more negative about public schools than Latinos, and are less likely to give public schools good ratings,” the survey results read.

Security at school was the No. 1 concern of Latino parents. They ranked problems with teachers, school funding, problems with other children in the schools, and curriculum behind safety in the survey.

Security issues reflect concerns about drugs, violence, and gang activity on school property. Between 24 and 29 percent of Latino parents said security was their biggest worry about the school system.

By comparison, white families ranked school funding far ahead of security issues. About 24 percent of white parents, compared to 16 percent of blacks and 10 percent of Latinos, picked school funding as the most serious problem with American schools. Only 11 percent of white parents, and 17 percent of black parents, thought violence, drugs, or gangs were the most urgent school issues.

Are the schools that serve mostly Latino or mostly black students comparable to those that serve mostly white students?

Parents of children in Latino-majority schools were more positive about the quality of the schools their children attend than were parents of children in mostly-black schools.

About 53 percent of Latino parents said schools that serve a primarily Latino population are just as good as the ones that serve mostly white students. Half that number, 28 percent, thought that mostly Latino schools were worse than white schools, while 13 percent said the Latino schools were probably better.

When Hispanic parents were asked how black-dominated schools stack up against those with a majority of Hispanic kids, most said the schools are about equal. Seventy-one percent of Hispanic parents think mostly black and mostly Hispanic schools are on par with each other.

Only 9 percent of Latinos think black students attend schools that are generally worse than schools with a majority of Latinos. Fourteen percent say Latino schools are of higher quality than mostly black schools.

Black families don’t share the same perceptions as Hispanic parents when they evaluate schools. Schools with a majority of black students, 38 percent of black parents said, are not likely to be comparable to schools with a majority of white students.

Nearly half of black parents are convinced that their children already attend lower quality institutions, when compared to mostly white schools.

Asked how mostly Latino schools compare to mostly white ones, 45 percent of black parents said they perceived Latino-majority schools to be just as good as white-majority schools.

Robert Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C., commented on the expectations of Hispanic parents as expressed in the survey. “In a lot of different surveys and on a lot of different questions, immigrants are generally more optimistic about their lives in the United States and about their children’s future here. They’re learning as they raise their kids how this all works… and there’s more of a willingness to go along with things.”

When survey responses split out the answers of foreign-born vs. native-born Latinos, Suro’s observations seem validated. Overall, 80 percent of the Latino parents surveyed thought that their children’s teachers had a good understanding of their children’s strengths and weaknesses, though a much smaller proportion — 43 percent of foreign-born vs. 66 percent of native-born — thought they have a good understanding of the curriculum or academic goals for their children’s grades. On a similar note, 50 percent of foreign-born Latino parents say schools have improved over the last five years, but only 39 percent of native-born Latino parents agree.

As to why Latino children are not doing as well as their white peers, parents assign the reasons to schools, teachers, to themselves, and to their children.

Teachers, expectations, labeling, culture, language, and lax attitudes all contribute, they say.

Opinions about President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law were mixed, but Latino parents endorse the use of standardized tests, and the idea of holding schools accountable for student performance.

Dr. Karen Palasek is assistant editor of Carolina Journal.