Thread: Obama reforms will aid Hispanic students, official says

Obama reforms will aid Hispanic students, official says

By SCOTT MARTINDALE
The Orange County Register
Monday, August 17, 2009

White House education leader Juan Sepúlveda speaks optimistically of cash infusion, changes coming to public education.

SANTA ANA – Praising the majority-Latino schools here as models of progress, a leading White House education official said Monday that the Obama administration was committed to sweeping reforms that will help close the achievement gap for minority students.

U.S. education officials are working to simplify the application process for college financial aid and to forgive student loans for promising, newly minted teachers, among other reforms, said Juan Sepúlveda, director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans.

"We are going to turn around schools – the 5,000 worst schools," Sepúlveda told an audience of about 100 parents, local education officials and community leaders at Santa Ana College. "A lot of these are in our communities. We want to be able to show them we can do it, that our kids want to learn and can learn."

Sepúlveda met with the Orange County group as part of a national, 35-city tour that is seeking to engage the Hispanic community in the educational process through dialogue and collaboration. The tour includes 12 stops in California.

Sepúlveda said public education was "at the top" of President Obama's agenda and that the president wanted to have "hard conversations" about controversial reform issues, including using test scores in teacher evaluations and getting rid of "bad" teachers.

"It's all about the kids," Sepúlveda said. "We've got to get past our fighting with each other."

The U.S. Department of Education will dole out $4.35 billion alone for a one-time competitive grant called Race to the Top, which will reward schools nationwide that use test data and teacher evaluations to drive success, Sepúlveda said.

To encourage the best and the brightest college graduates to the enter the teaching profession, White House officials are working on a federal program that will waive student loans for promising new teachers, especially those who go to work in inner-city schools, Sepúlveda said.

Additionally, the application process to apply for federal financial aid for college will be reduced from 30-something pages to just five or six, and new online features will be added that will allow students to easily retrieve their parents' financial information from the IRS's Web site, Sepúlveda said.

"We feel that we're poised in a very special place for us to do some incredible things for our kids in the Latino community," Sepulveda said.

Rosa Harrizon, the lead organizer for a Santa Ana-based parent mentoring group called Padres Promotores de la Educación, applauded the reform efforts, but said real change in the Latino community would come from one-on-one dialogue aimed at educating Latino students and their parents about college.

"We need more parent training so they know how to help the kids succeed in high school and college," said Harrizon, whose group offer home visits to help Latino parents understand that college is within their child's reach. "Our goal is to have more parents so we can cover all of Santa Ana."

Sepúlveda, who grew up in Topeka, Kan., and has worked on Latino education initiatives for much of his career, said Santa Ana is a model for other communities with a majority Latino population in what can be accomplished through grassroots collaboration.

"Until you spend time down there, you think, 'Oh, my gosh, there are gangs; I'm going to get jumped,'" said Sepulveda, who worked in Santa Ana in the mid-1990s through a privately funded education leadership initiative. "But when you look the data, you see steady progress has taken place."

Santa Ana College is a shining example of this steady progress, officials say. Over the past decade, the transfer rate from Santa Ana College to four-year colleges has nearly tripled, from 606 transfers in 1997-98 to 1,791 in 2008-09, said Santa Ana College President Erlinda Martinez.

"There is no quick fix; it takes long-term commitment," she said.

John Palacio, a Santa Ana Unified School District trustee, said he was concerned that even the White House might not understand the magnitude of the problem facing educators in communities like Santa Ana.

Perhaps 50 percent or more students might be dropping out, Palacio said, a reality not reflected by official dropout rates.

"You have to accept that as a problem before you can work to find solutions," he said.

Contact the writer: 949-454-7394 or smartindale@ocregister.com

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/sepu ... ion-latino

For these to be Latino public schools is segregation, something this country overcame years ago, or so we thought.
Educating parents--great! So many are non-English speakers, so how can they help their kids in education, unless that education is entirely in the native language, and the parents are at least fluent in their home tongue, it is ridiculous.
You identify a problem in education, but you don't just throw money at it. What about the kids in Detroit that are asked to bring toilet paper and light bulbs to school, as the school districts are beyond broke?

Quote:
"To encourage the best and the brightest college graduates to the enter the teaching profession, White House officials are working on a federal program that will waive student loans for promising new teachers, especially those who go to work in inner-city schools, Sepúlveda said."

I believe the Democrats also want to "forgive student loans" for medical students who become "primary care physicians", thus creating two new and separate classes of students: 1) those who have to repay their federal student loans and 2) the "privileged few" who don't.