Cultural Group Essay

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Culture/Traditions

By now, it is pretty much common knowledge that Latinos comprise the nation’s largest minority group, both as a percentage of the population (17.6 percent) and as a percentage of school-age students (25 percent). That is, one in four K–12 students in the United States are Latino or Latina. While the related challenges are often overemphasized, the tremendous assets these young people bring with them are often overlooked. While most Latino children in the United States were born here and enjoy the full rights of citizenship, many have at least one parent born outside this country. That means these children often must deal with the troubled history that can accompany migration—leaving homes and loved ones behind— and can traumatize families. Moreover, some members of these families are not citizens and lack legal status. While no exact number is available, best estimates suggest that more than one in four Latino students live with at least one undocumented parent. The underperformance of Latino children has frequently been attributed to the fact that so many grow up in homes and neighborhoods where Spanish is the primary language. In fact, this notion has largely driven language education policy, which has pushed schools to adopt English-only instruction to reclassify their English learners to English-proficient status as quickly as possible.

Plenty of challenges remain in closing achievement gaps for Latino students. But these students represent enormous assets for our nation. Given that most Latino students are the children of immigrants (and to a much lesser degree immigrant themselves), I have outlined five ways these students are primed for “deeper learning,” a pedagogy that has been heralded as fostering the kinds of skills that best serve 21st-century challenges. That is, an emphasis on critical thinking, analysis, cooperative learning, and teamwork. The five characteristics that are typical of many immigrant students are a collaborative orientation to learning, resilience, immigrant optimism, multicultural perspectives, and multilingualism.