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Latino Education, Civic Engagement, and the Public Good

Latino students in the United States face a number of challenges. It is estimated that almost one in two Latino students currently drops out of high school.1 Although more than 40% of Latinos enter some sort of postsecondary educational program, fewer than 20% complete a 4-year degree. These educational challenges negatively affect Latinos’ ability not only to achieve socioeconomic mobility but also to engage in politics and therefore to be represented in the policymaking process at a level commensurate with their proportion of the electorate. The result is a catch-22. Large numbers of Latino children have their opportunity structures determined by educational policies that are created and implemented with little input from Latino community members. The failure of those educational policies to effectively address the unique challenges Latinos face within the educational system makes it unlikely for Latinos to achieve educational success and therefore to achieve the socioeconomic status (SES) that would lead to their increased engagement with U.S. politics. The strong relationship between education and civic engagement is what leads Fraga and Frost (2010) to describe the U.S. school system as a “center of democratic governance” (p. 119). For immigrant communities, schools also serve to foster political socialization and incorporation. This chapter considers schools’ democratic roles from an input perspective—the degree to which those making education policy are representative of the population as a whole—and an output perspective—the degree to which schools produce equitable outcomes and, therefore informed, democratic citizens. At the heart of this analysis is the normative contention that education policy should result from a truly inclusive democratic decision-making process and therefore that its success should be judged by the equity of its outcomes. We will see below that for Latinos2 in the United States, neither the inputs nor the outputs can be defined as equitable.