The Core Knowledge Blog

Here’s a comment I haven’t seen repeated or discussed anywhere.  Juan Sepulveda, director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans, said in New Mexico last week that Hispanics aren’t being aggressive enough about closing the academic achievement gap.  According to a report in the Albuquerque Journal, Sepulveda has visited 18 states discussing the Hispanic achievement gap and “noticed a disturbing trend”:

The most surprising thing…in our conversations is what I didn’t hear, and that was a sense of urgency,” Sepulveda said at a summit in Albuquerque. “We hope you can step up to help us to create the national will, the political will to say, ‘This is something that has to happen now,’ and to create a sense of urgency that we can’t lose another generation.”

To its credit, the Obama Administration has been clear and consistent in preaching the gospel of parental responsibility (to what degree that is reflected in its policies is up for debate), most notably in the President’s “put away the Xbox” speech to the NAACP.  Sepulveda’s remarks can be viewed in that light. 

I’ll defer to Sepulveda’s take, even if it feels not quite right.  Anecdotal observations from my time teaching mostly Hispanic kids in the South Bronx drives my perception:  The families I worked with, often first or second generation Americans, defered almost reflexively to school personnel on issues of student performance, and even on discipline.  It feels to me that the issue is not a lack of urgency, but what I interpreted as a lack of experience advocating on their children’s behalf, plus few models of what effective schooling looks like.  In short, the parents of the students I worked with were not critical consumers of education.  If the school said “your child is doing fine” or “we’re doing just fine” there was almost always taken at face value.  There was very little pushback.