The Educational Journey Of Mexican Americans

November 25, 2022/in Uncategorized /by SK

PART I

SETTING THE CONTEXT

The Magic Key : The Educational Journey of Mexican Americans from K-12 to College and Beyond, edited by Ruth Enid Zambrana, and Sylvia Hurtado, University of Texas Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csupomona/detail.action?docID=3443788. Created from csupomona on 2020-02-26 11:20:25.

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CHAPTER 1

Locked Doors, Closed Opportunities: Who Holds the Magic Key?

ruth enID zambrana anD sylvIa hurtaDo

How racial barriers play in the experiences of Mexican Americans has been hotly debated. Some consider Mexican Americans similar to European Americans of a century ago that arrived in the United States with modest backgrounds but were eventually able to participate fully in society. In contrast, others argue that Mexican Americans have been racialized throughout U.S. history, and this limits their participation in society. The evidence of persistent educational disadvantages across generations and frequent reports of discrimination and stereotyping supports the racialization argument. vIlma ortIz anD eDWarD telles, “raCIal IDentIty anD raCIal treatment of mexICan amerICans”

Renewed concern has been generated in the twenty- first century regard- ing the educational attainment of historically underrepresented groups1 in institutions of higher learning. Mexican Americans are the most starkly underrepresented nationally with respect to access to and educational progress in institutions of higher education as students or tenure- track faculty.

The Obama administration has indicated a goal for the United States to once again become the highest- educated population in the world (Doug- lass 2010). The benefits of increased educational attainment serve to en- sure not only economic equity but also a democratically engaged citizenry. College- educated individuals are less likely to end up in prison and more likely to vote in elections and contribute to the public good. However, this national goal cannot be achieved without attention to the large numbers of Mexican Americans who are enrolled in schools, seek access to higher education, and experience success in American colleges and universities.

For Mexican Americans, their growing numbers in higher education

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4 The Magic Key

belie educational progress, as relative underrepresentation is perhaps most notable in regions where they are most largely concentrated, in- cluding California (Astin 1982; Hayes- Bautista 2004; Hurtado, Sáenz, Santos, and Cabrera 2008), and equity in attainments remains elusive. Among Mexican Americans/Chicanos,2 a much- neglected population group in terms of research and policy, lower rates of retention in P– 12 and in higher education pose challenges for educational administrators and personnel, and consequently pose serious issues for the progress of their communities.

Data indicate that Hispanics3 will constitute 30 percent of the na- tion’s population by the year 2050 (Ennis, Ríos- Vargas, and Albert 2011). Mexicans are by far the largest Hispanic- origin population in the United States, accounting for nearly two- thirds (64.6 percent) of the U.S. His- panic population in 2011 (table 1.1) and 11 percent overall of the U.S. population (Gonzalez- Barrera and Lopez 2013).

The experiences of Mexican Americans warrant particular attention because they simultaneously are the largest of the Latino subgroups, have the longest history on American soil, and are the group with the lowest levels of educational attainment (Motel and Patten 2012). Before explor- ing the causes behind such adverse educational experiences, it is necessary to acknowledge that population growth is accompanied by greater hetero- geneity in the Latino population. The percentage of Central Americans in the country has almost doubled since 2000, and close to 10 percent of the Latino population is now Puerto Rican (Ennis, Ríos- Vargas, and Albert 2011). Migration activity has also dispersed and has led to the establishment of new settlement locations in regions outside of those that already had large concentrations of Latinos (Flores and Chapa 2009), creating new precollege socialization contexts for students from differ- ent Latino subgroups. Moreover, the long history of settlement and mi- gration since the colonial era suggests distinct variations in the charac- teristics of Mexican Americans today—some with many generations in the same region and others from more recent (im)migration experiences. For these reasons, it is important to disaggregate the Latino population by self- reported ethnic identity categories and other identity markers that intersect with ethnicity, such as race, class, and nativity, to increase our understanding of educational outcomes and experiences among Latino college students.

Recent changes in the demographic composition of the United States demonstrate that the population is becoming more diverse while stagger- ing educational disparities grow more problematic. While investigators

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Locked Doors, Closed Opportunities 5

offer a number of different paradigms and theoretical explanations for why enrollment and retention in higher education remain low for Mexi- can American men and women, the historical and social contexts help to reveal the larger structural forces associated with these realities. All re- searchers conduct their studies within contexts that are bounded by his- torical time. The chapters in this book represent the educational trajec- tory experienced by Mexican Americans/Chicanos across a broad span of historical time frames.

Table 1.1. Statistical Portrait of Hispanics, Detailed Hispanic Origin: United States 2011

Number Percent

Mexican 33,539,187 64.6 Puerto Rican 4,916,250 9.5 All Other Spanish/Hispanic/Latino 2,373,901 4.6 Salvadoran 1,952,483 3.8 Cuban 1,888,772 3.6 Dominican 1,528,464 2.9 Guatemalan 1,215,730 2.3 Colombian 989,231 1.9 Honduran 702,394 1.4 Ecuadorian 644,863 1.2 Peruvian 556,386 1.1 Nicaraguan 395,376 0.8 Venezuelan 258,791 0.5 Argentinian 242,221 0.5 Panamanian 180,471 0.3 Chilean 148,532 0.3 Costa Rican 127,652 0.2 Bolivian 114,094 0.2 Uruguayan 60,764 0.1 Other Central American 40,001 0.1 Other South American 28,719 0.1 Paraguayan 22,876 <0.05 Total 51,927,158 100.0

Source: Pew Hispanic Center tabulations of 2011 American Community Survey (1% IPUMS). Note: Hispanic populations are listed in descending order of population size; universe is 2011 Hispanic resident population. Hispanic origin is based on self- described ancestry, lineage, heritage, nationality group, or country of birth.

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6 The Magic Key

All too often we omit history from empirical work in the disciplines of social science and education. Yet history informs and, more impor- tant, shapes group experiences and patterns, as well as helps us to assess progress or stagnation/retrogression. When examining educational trends and performance indicators, one can interpret data at face value and summarily determine that one group’s status and/or performance is inferior to another’s. On the other hand, one can interpret a group’s per- formance as deeply embedded in a socially constructed historical context that includes educational legal policy, racialization, demographic changes, and structural inequality in access to resources. We seek to provide both depth and breadth to historical events by grounding this book in a histori- cal record that has been mostly ignored. It is this historical narrative that provides an important context for a richer understanding of the higher education experiences of Mexican Americans. Historicity is a central an- chor in intersectionality theorizing. Modes of historical incorporation are associated with the social and economic locations of underrepresented groups in U.S. society (Zambrana 2011). Our goal is to explore how his- torical events and consequent policy have depleted the accumulation of human capital over time and contributed to disinvestments in Mexican American peoples and their communities (MacDonald 2004).

Demographic Profile of Mexican Americans in the United States

A record 33.7 million Hispanics of Mexican origin resided in the United States in 2012 (Gonzalez- Barrera and Lopez 2013). This estimate includes 11.4 million immigrants born in Mexico and 22.3 million residents born in the United States who self- identified as Hispanics of Mexican origin. The size of the Mexican- origin population in the United States has risen dra- matically over the past four decades as a result of one of the largest mass migrations in modern history. In 1970, fewer than 1 million Mexican im- migrants lived in the United States. By 2000, that number had grown to 9.8 million, and by 2007 it reached a peak of 12.5 million (Pew Hispanic Research Center 2011). Since 2007 the Mexican- born population has ex- perienced modest decline as the arrival of newer Mexican immigrants has slowed significantly (Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez- Barrera 2012). Today, approximately 34 percent of Hispanics of Mexican origin were born in Mexico, while nearly two- thirds (66 percent) were born in the United States, half (52 percent) of whom have at least one immigrant parent.

The characteristics of Mexican immigrants have changed over the de-

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Locked Doors, Closed Opportunities 7

cades. Compared with 1990, Mexican immigrants in 2011 were less likely to be male, considerably older (median age of thirty- eight versus twenty- nine), and U.S.- resident for longer (71 percent had been in the United States for more than ten years, compared with 50 percent in 1990). On economic measures, Mexican immigrants have mixed outcomes or income patterns. Although median personal earnings increased by about $2,000 during the last two decades, the median household income of Mexican im- migrants suffered a drop of more than $4,500. This reflects the effects of the recent economic recession that drove up unemployment rates in the nation, particularly among Mexican immigrants (Gonzalez- Barrera and Lopez 2013). More than half (52 percent) of Mexican Americans live in the West, mostly in California (36 percent), and another 35 percent live in the South, mostly in Texas (26 percent).

Of all Mexican immigrants residing in the United States in 2011, 53 percent were men and 47 percent women. In contrast, gender distribu- tions included more females than males among the general U.S. native- born population and overall foreign- born immigrants in the United States (about 49 percent male and 51 percent female for both groups) (Stoney and Batalova 2013). The greatest difference between the two gender groups occurs in the first generation: 45 percent of Mexican immigrants are females, in contrast to 53 percent of non- Mexican immigrants. Only among a third of undetermined- generation Mexican Americans is the gender distribution similar to that of the non- Mexican- origin population (A. González 2001). Mexican immigrant women have lower workforce participation rates than men. Only 47 percent of Mexican immigrant women participated in the labor force in 2009–2010 (Brick, Challinor, and Rosenblum 2011). Significantly, second- generation Mexican Ameri- can women are more likely to be employed (62 percent) than their first- generation counterparts (54 percent) (see table 1.2).

The Mexican American population tends to be younger than other racial and ethnic groups, with about 40 percent of the population under nineteen years of age. Educational trajectories of Mexican Americans are critically important to their future economic and social well- being. Mexican Americans have lower levels of education than other racial and ethnic groups and the Hispanic population overall. Compared to other Hispanic- origin groups, Mexican Americans are the least likely to have a bachelor’s degree. Some 10 percent of Mexican Americans ages twenty- five and older compared with 14 percent of all U.S. Hispanics—and 19.9 percent of Blacks and 34 percent of non- Hispanic Whites—have ob- tained at least a bachelor’s degree (U.S. Census Bureau 2012a). However,

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Table 1.2. Demographic Profile of the Mexican American Population 2010

Mexican Americans

U.S. Population

Hispanic/ Latino

Population

Non- Hispanic Whites

Non- Hispanic Blacks

Reported in percentage unless otherwise indicated Gender Male 53.0 49.3 51.6 49.1 47.6 Female 47.0 50.7 48.4 50.9 52.4 Age median (in years) 25 37 27 42 33 Population by age <5 years 12.2 6.9 11.1 5.4 8.3 5 to 19 years 29.2 20.1 27.2 17.6 23.7 20–44 years 38.8 33.6 38.8 31.7 35.4 45–64 years 15.4 26.5 17.2 29.6 23.8 >65 years 4.5 12.8 5.7 15.7 8.7 Marital status Never married 40.0 31.1 40.0 26.2 46.8 Divorced/widowed/separated 13.6 18.1 14.7 18.7 21.2 Married 46.4 50.8 45.3 55.0 32.0 Nativity and citizenship status1

Native 66.1 87.5 64.0 95.9 90.8 Foreign- born 33.9 12.5 36.0 4.1 9.2 Naturalized citizen 8.6 5.5 11.3 2.4 4.4 Not a citizen 25.4 7.0 24.7 1.7 4.7 Employment status2

Employed 87.3 90.5 87.5 92.2 84.1 Unemployed 12.7 9.5 12.5 7.8 15.9 Median annual personal earnings3

$20,000 $29,000 $20,000 $32,000 $24,400

Family households 4

Two people 20.1 42.9 23.9 48.3 38.7 Three people 20.4 22.5 22.7 21.6 25.9 Four people 25.6 19.8 24.4 18.6 19.3 Five or more people 33.8 14.8 28.9 11.5 16.1 Poverty rate 28.0 15.9 25.9 10.9 27.9 Home ownership 48.1 65.0 46.5 74.0 43.0 Health insurance status Insured 67.5 83.7 69.3 88.3 79.2 Not insured 32.5 16.3 30.7 11.7 20.8

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2012a). 1 “Native” includes anyone who was a U.S. citizen or U.S. national at birth. Conversely, “foreign- born” includes anyone who was not a U.S. citizen or U.S. national at birth. 2 Includes the civilian population 16 years and over. 3 For all ages 16 and over with earnings. 4 Households in which at least one member is related to the person who rents or owns the occupied housing unit.

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Locked Doors, Closed Opportunities 9

native- born Mexican Americans are almost three times more likely to have earned a bachelor’s degree than those born in Mexico—15 percent versus 6 percent, respectively (Gonzalez- Barrera and Lopez 2013). Table 1.3 displays educational attainment of populations twenty- five years of age and older by Hispanic subgroup and gender. Interesting patterns of more females earning bachelor’s and advanced degrees are observed among all Hispanic- origin groups except Cubans.

In spite of a college degree, income inequities are observed by gender and racial/ethnic group. In 2007, the median income of male workers was generally higher than that of female workers for each race/ethnic group and at each educational level. Median income differed by race/ethnicity. For example, for those with at least a bachelor’s degree, the median in- come was $71,000 for non- Hispanic White (NHW) males and $69,000 for Asian males, compared with $55,000 for Black males and $54,000 for Latino men. Among women, for those with at least a bachelor’s degree, the median income was $54,000 for Asians, compared with $50,000 for Whites, $45,000 for Blacks, and $43,000 for Latino women (Aud, Fox, and KewalRamani 2010).

The Magic Key

Why is this topic important? What do we know about Mexican American men and women and their educational journey through P– 16?4 The title of this book builds on the narrative of a first- generation college- bound Mexican American woman Zambrana interviewed in earlier research. When asked how her parents encouraged her to go to and stay in school, and what her inspiration was to persist and meet the challenges, she elo- quently told the following story:

My father took me to the fields where he worked and told me that I would not have to work in the fields if I stayed in school and studied hard. He said, “You will have the magic key, which is your education.” He went on to explain to me that if I used the key I would not have to work in the job he worked at and [would] have a better life than he and my mom had. My father’s story made me want to study more.

This belief, that their children can use education as a vehicle for social mobility, is inherent among Mexican American families. This value was common in the stories of three hundred college- educated women who

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Table 1.3. Educational Attainment of the Population Age 25 Years and Over by Gender, Race, and Latino Subgroup 2011

Total Hispanic

Mexican American

Puerto Rican Cuban

Central American

South American

Non- Hispanic White

Non- Hispanic

Black

Reported in percentage Both sexes 100 Less than 9th grade 20.7 24.7 10.1 10.8 28.9 7.7 2.3 4.1 9th to 12th grade (no diploma) 15.0 17.0 13.4 7.4 16.5 6.8 5.3 11.4 High school graduate 29.8 29.7 32.2 32.2 28.6 28.8 30.9 34.8 Some college or associate degree 20.4 18.6 26.3 22.8 15.3 25.0 27.5 29.8 Bachelor’s degree 10.0 7.3 12.3 18.0 7.8 21.6 21.6 13.2 Advanced degree 4.1 2.6 5.7 8.8 2.8 10.1 12.4 6.7 Male 100 Less than 9th grade 20.7 24.2 10.9 9.4 30.1 7.0 2.5 4.1 9th to 12th grade (no diploma) 15.7 18.1 13.4 7.1 16.7 6.8 5.4 12.1 High school graduate 31.4 31.7 34.4 30.8 28.7 30.9 30.9 38.3 Some college or associate degree 19.1 17.0 24.9 22.5 14.8 25.1 26.2 27.6 Bachelor’s degree 9.3 6.5 12.0 21.4 7.8 20.2 22.1 12.2 Advanced degree 3.8 2.4 4.4 8.7 2.0 10.0 12.9 5.8 Female 100 Less than 9th grade 20.6 25.2 9.5 12.1 27.6 8.4 2.1 4.2 9th to 12th grade (no diploma) 14.2 15.9 13.4 7.7 16.4 6.9 5.2 10.9 High school graduate 28.2 27.6 30.3 33.6 28.5 26.7 30.9 32.0 Some college or associate degree 21.8 20.3 27.6 23.0 16.0 24.9 28.9 31.5 Bachelor’s degree 10.8 8.2 12.5 14.7 7.8 23.0 21.2 14.0 Advanced degree 4.4 2.7 6.7 9.0 3.8 10.2 11.9 7.4

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2012b).

The M agic K

ey : The E ducational Journey of M

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-12 to C ollege and B

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ona/detail.action?docID =3443788.

C reated from

csupom ona on 2020-02-26 11:20:25.

Locked Doors, Closed Opportunities 11

were early pioneers (pioneras) in entry to higher education and subsequent academic and career positions. In other words, parents clearly understood the importance of digging preparatory roots to ensure economic stability and social mobility. The quote is symbolic of Mexican American parents’ transmission of agency and aspirational capital to their children. It deeply disrupts the myths of lack of Mexican parental interest in and commit- ment to education for their children, and highlights the importance of resistance strategies among Mexican American youth who persist in spite of their challenges, particularly of racism, discrimination, and economic constraints.

Building on the work of early- career and senior scholars, we intend to create a counternarrative that reveals the forces and processes that have kept, and continue to keep, the body and soul of Mexican Americans together in the face of racism and inhumane treatment. Racial oppression is central to our focus on the dynamic interaction of social structure and human development (see Cobas, Duany, and Feagin 2009; Feagin and Cobas 2014; Telles and Ortiz 2008). Scholars have forged a new schol- arly tradition to frame new thinking on the ways in which poverty, lack of educational attainment, and unemployment or underemployment in low- wage jobs can be attributed to the interplay of racism with ancestry, nativity, socioeconomic status, and gender.

We argue on multiple disciplinary fronts for the compelling need to produce knowledge regarding the racialized, ethnic, and gender- related educational experiences of Mexican American groups. First and foremost, Mexican Americans are the largest Latino subgroup (64.6 percent) and also continue to experience significant social and economic disadvantage at every stage of the life course. A vast amount of research has been con- ducted in the field of education that has, with few exceptions, focused on scenarios of failure, identifying individual and cultural attributes as pre- dictors of low educational performance. In contrast, a more limited litera- ture on scenarios of success or resilience exists that explores and describes how Mexican Americans and other Latinos have “beat the odds” (Portes and Fernández- Kelly 2008; Portes 2001). Emerging Mexican American and other Latino scholars forge new frontiers of knowledge production using counterstorytelling and an intersectional lens to redirect the field of educational inquiry to new ways of thinking about Mexican Ameri- can educational engagement that can contribute to new policies and ad- vance progress (Espino 2012, 2014; Ramírez 2013; Núñez 2014a, 2014b; Covarrubias 2011; Yosso 2005, 2006). In reviewing this corpus of work, an informed critic must ask how historical exclusionary practices, cul-

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12 The Magic Key

tural stereotypes, bias and prejudice, and educational policies and prac- tices have shaped past and contemporary patterns of educational perfor- mance, access to higher education, and long- term outcomes for Mexican Americans.

Purpose

The purposes of this book are multifold: to examine trends and genera- tional patterns exhibited by Mexican American college students by his- toric era and by gender; to provide an alternative conceptual and analytic lens to broaden understanding of the factors that contribute to educa- tional success among Mexican Americans; to present data from the civil rights era and contemporary era that provide a context for the lived ex- periences of Mexican Americans in P– 16 educational pathways and for their perceptions of the college climate; and to proffer insights on emerg- ing issues in the field of higher education and how policy and practice af- fect the educational attainment of Mexican Americans. We present new models and ways of thinking that can guide the next generation of re- search. An additional purpose of the book is to introduce the work of emerging Mexican American scholars who are generating new and prom- ising knowledge pathways, devising critical lenses, and advancing scholar- ship about the changing circumstances that affect Mexican American men and women.

Throughout the book we provide multiple data sources, including his- torical archival data, national statistical trend data, and a mixed- methods empirical study of three hundred Mexican American women who gradu- ated from college during the period 1960–1978, plus qualitative interviews and focus groups with contemporary Mexican American college students (2000–2010). In addition, several chapters rely on national data sources that provide a unique portrait of Mexican American men and women over time, particularly in their access to four- year institutions, building on the data archives from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) from 1971 to 2012. These sources pre- date federal data collection at the postsecondary level.

The questions that guide this book are sharply focused on what con- tributed to the persistence of Mexican American men and women in edu- cational pathways; what strategies of resistance were/are used to overcome the odds through high school and on college campuses; what is keeping Mexican American men and women from entering higher education sys-

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Locked Doors, Closed Opportunities 13

tems in larger numbers; and what barriers hinder completion of a college degree once they are in the higher education system. The vast amount of prior empirical work on Mexican Americans in the P– 16 pipeline pin- points culture as the culprit responsible for lower levels of participation in higher education institutions. Although systematic and unequal treatment of Mexican- origin students has been documented alongside their failures (Carter and Segura 1979; Haro 1983; MacDonald 2004), cultural factors are most often proffered as major determinants of these failures. Thus, the major focus of this book is to decenter the cultural- problem- oriented arguments and provide significant evidence of structural and normative climate issues and strategies of resistance.

The last three decades have advanced our understanding of the inter- sections of gender, race, ethnicity, nativity, and socioeconomic status (class), and their impact on access to higher education. Yet the reasons for lower participation of Mexican Americans are more complex in terms of structural inequality, which supersedes and frames gender and ethnic background/heritage.

The major premise that drives theorizing around these intersections is the importance of incorporating the historical forces that shaped access to higher education and their impact on the life course of individuals, fami- lies, and groups over generations (Barrera 1979; Almaguer 1994; Telles and Ortiz 2008). A broader intersectional lens, more fully developed in chapter 4, incorporates a historical and structural perspective to best cap- ture those sociopolitical factors that provide an explanatory context for understanding contemporary patterns of educational performance and higher education completion. Drawing upon intersectional theorizing on how race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES), and gender shape access to social and economic opportunity, this volume makes five ex- plicit assumptions. First, historical incorporation and marginalized, un- equal treatment have shaped the life circumstances and opportunities of Mexican American educational attainment. Second, race, ethnicity, SES, and gender are coconstitutive and mutually reinforcing dimensions that shape one’s life chances, opportunities, and, in turn, experiences in the P– 16 pipeline. Third, access to academic and technological resources pre- dominantly limited by segregation is shaped simultaneously by the inter- section of race, ethnicity, gender, and family SES, and is predictive of college entry, experiences in college, and college completion. Further, structural barriers, such as the increasingly resegregated conditions of urban majority/minority secondary schools, limit academic preparedness, and community colleges provide narrow pathways for four- year- college

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14 The Magic Key

enrollment for Mexican Americans. Fourth, stereotypic representations of students as inferior permeate the attitudes of school personnel and contribute to perceptions of Mexican Americans as lacking the motiva- tion or the ability to succeed academically (Cobas, Duany, and Feagin 2009). Last, institutional factors such as climate, policies, and attitudes of teachers and administrators in K– 12 schools and colleges have contributed to the academic disengagement of Mexican American youth and adults, dampening educational expectations and aspirations for college entry and completion (Valenzuela 1999; Fuligni 2007; Solórzano and Ornelas 2002; Zambrana and MacDonald 2009).

Higher education is a principal pathway of access to the economic and opportunity structure, and of ensuring the right to claim one’s benefits as a valuable citizen of U.S. society. History shows that education was denied to not only African American people but also Mexican American people, by means both de jure and de facto, by way of separate schools and academic departments with lower resources (Olivas 2006; MacDonald 2004). The social, political, and economic consequences of this denial came to a turbulent and public crisis during the decade of the 1960s. Im- portant social movements, including the civil rights, health, and women’s movements, spearheaded the convergence of social and political forces to address past inequities entrenched in institutionalized forms of discrimi- nation and racism, which systemically ensured the exclusion of histori- cally underrepresented groups5 in systems of law, health, employment, and education.

Yet the educational agenda for Mexican Americans in the United States has remained relatively unchanged for decades, as evidenced by the on- going White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics (1990– present). The agenda calls for more access to educational insti- tutions and increased educational opportunities at all educational levels. However, the empirical literature has both neglected the “lived experi- ences” of Mexican Americans and simultaneously stigmatized and stereo- typed Mexican Americans for their outsider status (Zambrana 2011). The absence of historical accounts of access to higher education masks the historic patterns of racial inequality that have shaped past and current ac- cess to educational opportunity and completion of higher education. Ac- cess for Mexican Americans did not materialize until the late 1960s. One of the most compelling reasons why Mexican Americans have been un- able to voice their socially driven intellectual concerns is the lack of aca- demic voices, as they are underrepresented in major institutions of higher education as faculty, administrators, and students. In 2011, only 4 per-

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Locked Doors, Closed Opportunities 15

cent of full- time college faculty and 3 percent of full- time college pro- fessors were Hispanic (National Center for Education Statistics 2013). An important domain in assessing structural inequality in education is the construct of compositional diversity (Hurtado, Alvarez, Guillermo- Wann, Cuellar, and Arellano 2012). This notion underscores the repre- sentation of major institutional agents in the P– 20 educational system. According to the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Educa- tion (AACTE) (2013), more than 80 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in education awarded during the 2009–2010 school year were to non- Latino White students; only 4.2 percent were awarded to Latinos.

Data Sources: Drawing from the Voices of Pioneering Women and Contemporary Men and Women

We bring together and weave in data from the lives of pioneering women who completed college and beyond before 1980, and the voices of con- temporary Mexican American men and women in college. Zambrana’s interest in this topic was piqued in 1987, during a conference at Claremont Colleges, California. Participants at the conference highlighted the lack of information available on the experiences of Mexican- origin women, in contrast to the significant amount of literature available on the failures of Mexican- origin individuals, harping especially on stereotypic notions of the females (Zambrana 1987; A. A. Dávila 2001; Cruz 2002; Merskin 2007), particularly and startlingly their depiction as passive, traditional, and non– achievement oriented (Gutiérrez 2008). One of the pioneering study respondents clearly articulated the persistence of stereotypes as a major barrier to completion of higher education: “Yes, stereotypes that exist are harmful. Society doesn’t expect Latino women to be task fo- cused. They expect us to be more social, easily intimidated, and softer; not as goal oriented.”

These respondents represent a particular historical cohort of women who were the beneficiaries of the educational and social gains made by the civil rights movement, el movimiento, and the women’s movement. For all racial/ethnic groups, including Mexican- origin women, this time period (1960–1978) represents entry into the higher education system. They were the first generation of this historically disadvantaged Mexican American population to attain access to educational opportunities in significant numbers and experience social mobility.

Hurtado’s research has focused on large- scale, national studies of the

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16 The Magic Key

climate for Mexican Americans/Chicanos and other underrepresented groups in higher education, initiating studies that document trends in ac- cess and barriers to higher education completion. This focus has allowed an understanding of variability by diverse social identities (e.g., class, gen- der, and sexual orientation), institutional contexts, and historical differ- ences among Mexican American college students. Still, only a handful of small studies speak to the resistance strategies of Mexican American students who successfully complete college degrees. Predominantly, the stories of success focus on foreign- born Latinos of Latin American origin and less on the generations of Mexican American students who labor and learn under the veil of historical myths of inferiority. Moreover, the na- tion’s higher education data systems have not examined the ethnic groups that compose the Hispanic category. Only the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) has consistently monitored ethnic group participation in its national surveys, revealing portraits of Mexican Americans relative to other Latino groups (Hurtado, Sáenz, Santos, and Cabrera 2008). The scholarship on Mexican American men and women remains marginalized and underrepresented in national data, and their lived experiences require insertion into dominant social science and education discourse.

The keen eyes of a number of scholars have provided intellectual chal- lenges to narrow, culturally focused perspectives that exclude and fail to acknowledge the role of historical forces, and how existing institu- tional arrangements shape differential access by racial, gender, and ethnic groups. We wrote and edited this book on the premise that the educa- tional progress of Mexican American women and men requires historical and structural contextualization incorporating broader and more nuanced analyses—access to resources and consequent social mobility are best ex- plained within this contextualization.

Research and practice lend strong support to the need to discard cul- tural determinants as the sole explanatory lens for academic success and failure, and to investigate multiple social, familial, and institutional fac- tors that jointly, across the life course, contribute to academic success, higher education completion, and career success. This book draws on an interdisciplinary, life course, and intersectional approach that offers an exhaustive and nuanced analysis to explain the educational trajectory of Mexican American women and men.

The major contribution of this book is its data- driven approach to ex- tending theoretical insights into the Mexican American educational tra- jectory. To this end, the editors and contributors have collectively:

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Locked Doors, Closed Opportunities 17

• Provided cogent insight into historical processes that have shaped and continue to shape the educational trajectories of Mexican American groups.

• Proffered counterarguments to cultural- deficit explanations (decen- tering) and highlighted the role of structural and historical dynamics.

• Built on prior work by extending the theorizing lens of the educa- tional performance of Mexican Americans through the application of contemporary critical race theory, Chicana feminist theory, and inter- sectional and organizational climate studies to higher education.

• Emphasized the reproduction of inequality, and balanced individual and ethnic group agency to illustrate strategies of resistance, win- dows of opportunity, and the gaining of footholds in the educational progress of Mexican Americans.

• Used an assets- based approach to identify strengths and self- protective and self- enhancing mechanisms in the pursuit of educa- tional progress.

• Conveyed student lived experiences to demonstrate their activism and advocacy throughout history, and their continuing vigilance toward inequality.

We share new findings that begin to create more dynamic views and new thinking about Mexican Americans, changing what we have previ- ously thought, and in some cases reaffirming how little has changed. In other words, we engage in a process of recovering dynamic history and facts to inform Mexican American scholarship, its practitioners, other scholars, and allies, recognizing Chicano Studies as the vanguard of re- search and dissemination in the curriculum, and acknowledging that Mexi- can American scholarship is under attack (e.g., in Arizona’s HB 2281 and A.R.S. §15- 112).6 This book resists suppression of vital knowledge that affirms and supports the voices of Mexican American men and women in their educational journey.

Organization of the Book

The book is divided into four sections: (1) setting the context, (2) concep- tual understandings, (3) contemporary college experiences, and (4) impli- cations for educational policy and future practices in P– 16 pathways and beyond. The collection of chapters draws on the current work of schol-

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18 The Magic Key

ars who are developing novel agendas around the education of Mexican Americans. Chapters stay true to period analyses and follow a chronologi- cal order, buttressed by unique sources of data to ensure that historicity is influencing interpretation—no other book offers this comprehensive approach toward understanding the Mexican American educational ex- perience. We have designed four specific areas that deeply ground the life course experiences of Mexican American men and women who suc- cessfully completed higher education and postgraduate education degrees, and those who are currently enrolled in colleges and universities. Under- standing the unique patterns and processes of the educational trajectory of a specific ethnic group—namely, Mexican Americans—demands ex- amining historical features and the ways empirical data have been col- lected and used to explain patterns of educational underperformance. A significant body of knowledge has examined failure rather than success. Few studies have captured the educational milestones and moments that provide insight into how strategies of resistance were used to negotiate barriers to academic success. Our intent is to provide a richer, more com- prehensive, yet nuanced, perspective on the varied structures associated with educational equity and the future progress of Mexican Americans.

Part I: Setting the Context

The first section addresses the historical incorporation of Mexican- origin peoples into the social and economic fabric of the United States, and pro- vides trend analyses to illustrate the stages of progress in moving toward educational equity.

It is not widely known that different historical forces and prevail- ing ideologies have restricted access to mainstream educational institu- tions. Chapter 2, by Victoria- María MacDonald and Jason Rivera, offers an overview of the unique experiences of Mexican Americans from the 1600s to the present, indicating their attendance at alternative educational institutions throughout history. The chapter gives a historical narrative of more contemporary movements and the resulting investments in the education of Mexican Americans. Included is an account of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which provided access to mainstream educational institutions, prompted philanthropic investments in the 1970s, and gave rise to the 1980s establishment of Hispanic- Serving Institutions (HSIs).

In chapter 3, key differences among Mexican Americans in their par- ticipation, from 1971 to 2012, in the transition from high school to col- lege are examined. Sylvia Hurtado presents trend analyses to illustrate the

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Locked Doors, Closed Opportunities 19

modest increases of Mexican Americans who have entered institutions of higher learning and earned bachelor’s degrees and beyond over the last several decades. This chapter provides additional context for the chap- ters that follow. One of the most significant changes has been the increase in the educational attainment of parents of Mexican American college freshmen (table 1.4). However, the contemporary enrollment patterns of Mexican Americans in four- year institutions are comparable to the enrollment patterns of non- Hispanic White students during the 1970s. Entering freshmen are attaining better course work in schools, at the same time that changes in access policies and aid are creating new barriers for the increasing numbers of students reaching college age—exacerbating financial concerns and constraining choices. This chapter refocuses on issues that will serve to broaden higher education opportunity for Mexi- can Americans, particularly at four- year institutions.

Part II: Conceptual Understandings

In this section authors present an interdisciplinary theorizing lens to fore- ground the multiple factors associated with the attainment of human capi- tal in the United States and engage in in- depth analyses of major socializa- tion mechanisms, such as family educational capital and K– 12 school and higher education systems associated with the accumulation of educational advantage or disadvantage.

The study of the Mexican American educational experience has at its best been incomplete. In chapter 4, Ruth Enid Zambrana and Sylvia Hur- tado offer intersectional theorizing7 that integrates multiple domains of interdisciplinary knowledge to contextualize the life course experiences of Mexican American men and women who complete higher education. The authors examine and argue for an integrated and intersectional per- spective that provides a comprehensive lens. This approach allows for an expanded understanding of the complex roles of family, socioeconomic status, and other institutional/structural factors associated with the com- pletion of higher education. An analytic counterargument is made for viewing these factors not as individual attributes but as markers of power differentials and discrimination. This chapter critiques existing conven- tional theories in education that obfuscate the interplay of social class, gender, and social power in relationships between majority and minority groups, and maintains that an examination of structural and historical forces is key to analyzing the experiences of Mexican Americans. More- over, it is necessary to expand our theoretical lens to include the larger

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Table 1.4. Parental Education Levels among Latina/o Ethnic Groups, 1975–2006

Mexican American/Chicano (%) Puerto Rican (%)

Other Latina/o

(%)

1975 1985 1995 2006 1975 1985 1995 2006 1995 2006

Father’s education HS graduate or less 63.1 55.7 58.6 54.7 71.9 46.8 43.8 44.0 42.4 41.6 Some college or higher 16.8 17.9 19.0 18.4 9.4 12.8 21.1 19.6 17.1 17.9 College degree or higher 20.2 26.5 22.4 27.0 18.8 40.5 35.1 36.4 40.5 40.5 Mother’s education HS graduate or less 70.9 62.4 61.8 53.6 78.7 49.8 42.4 35.2 44.8 37.7 Some college or higher 14.7 20.1 19.9 22.0 8.5 18.3 22.2 24.3 21.2 22.3 College degree or higher 14.5 17.6 18.3 24.5 12.8 31.9 35.4 40.5 34.0 40.1

Source: Hurtado, Sáenz, et al. (2008). Note: The “Other Latina/o” category was first reported from the CIRP surveys in 1992 (see disaggregated tables in second half of report). “Postsecondary school other than college” and “Some college” were collapsed in “Some college or higher.”

The M agic K

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urtado, U niversity of Texas P

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csupom ona on 2020-02-26 11:20:25.

Locked Doors, Closed Opportunities 21

social and political macro forces, so as to appreciate how these forces have shaped the lives of Mexican Americans historically and continue to do so now.

In chapters 5 and 6, Ruth Zambrana and Rebeca Burciaga, and Ruth Zambrana, Anthony De Jesús, and Brianne A. Dávila, respectively, use data from a pioneering cohort of women (1960– late 1970s) to highlight successful features of the educational trajectory in both family and school life, and compare past and contemporary findings to assess whether the equity discourse around schools and families and their transmission of social capital has significantly changed.

Educational advantage is powerfully associated with social capital (re- sources and benefits received from class status networks). Chapter 5 syn- thesizes a significant body of work on the role that family capital has on educational performance, and challenges previous interpretations of the role of parental involvement in Mexican American families as being de- void of educational value. Zambrana and Burciaga argue that for under- standing the role of the family in educational performance, outcomes must be understood within both the economic context of family resources and the structural inequality in school systems. Sufficient evidence con- firms that family support, parents’ expectations, and structural inequality, in confluence, shape the life course of Mexican American youth. Data are presented to demonstrate the role of the family in the success of Mexican American women, and how economic and social barriers are negotiated to ensure success. The unique theoretical contribution of this chapter is that it challenges existing epistemological assumptions regarding causality of academic underachievement by redefining culture as a dynamic and fluid group characteristic that interacts with structures of inequality.

In chapter 6, Zambrana, De Jesús, and Dávila theorize that the under- achievement of Mexican Americans in school is largely due to inequality in schools, unevenly distributed resources, and differential treatment of students. In effect, power relations within the institutional structures of schools contribute to the disengagement and underachievement of Mexi- can American students in general, and Mexican American girls in particu- lar. Important experiences that inspired and encouraged certain young girls are described, such as adult role models, which included teachers and extended family members, and ethnic- specific student organizations. In contrast, low expectations by teachers, lack of role models, scarcity of academic resources such as advanced placement (AP) classes, and low- resourced communities all work against the achievement of Mexican Americans and contribute to underperformance. These data provide in-

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22 The Magic Key

sight into what worked for these women to move them forward, integrat- ing more recent literature on youth in the K– 12 pipeline and assessing the ways institutional practices have changed or remained the same. For the growing percentage of Mexican American youth who decide to go to college, issues of retention have taken center stage in the higher educa- tion literature.

Part III: Past and Contemporary College Experiences

In this section, past and current college experiences as facilitators or bar- riers are the focus. An extensive body of work is available on factors that promote college enrollment, retention, and graduation, but little has fo- cused specifically on Mexican American men and women. Factors such as financial constraints; college adjustment in Predominantly White Insti- tutions (PWIs); race, ethnic, and gender bias in college life; and aca- demic difficulty due to inadequate preparation are principal areas of investigation.

In chapter 7, Nolan L. Cabrera and Sylvia Hurtado describe the ex- periences of Latino students at seven public universities, focusing on the voices of Mexican American/Chicana/o students. Specifically, it focuses on their perceptions of the campus racial climate, utilization of and reli- ance upon racial/ethnic- specific campus organizations, and perceptions of campus racial segregation. The participants tended to perceive a hostile campus racial climate and frequently relied upon Latino organizations. Despite the perception of high levels of campus racial segregation, the participants also had regular interactions across race/ethnicity. In chap- ter 8, Adriana Ruiz Alvarado and Sylvia Hurtado, using a relatively new database on Mexican American students’ experiences with campus climate and with institutional barriers and support, examine key issues in areas associated with validation in the classroom, sense of belonging in college, and support for navigating college. They illustrate difficulties with cli- mate, but also mediating processes that can be enhanced by faculty and staff in building inclusive classrooms and social environments.

Part IV: Implications for Educational Policy and Future Practices in P– 16 Pathways and Beyond

Education is a critical asset for the social and economic integration of individuals into a highly industrialized society. Yet for Mexican Ameri- cans, educational progress has been slow in spite of the national focus

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Locked Doors, Closed Opportunities 23

on equity and disparity. The discourse of equity and diversity needs to be extended to ensure the inclusion of not only global citizens but also our domestic talent pool. In chapter 9, Victor B. Sáenz and Luis Pon- juán describe the educational future for Mexican American male students as being in a state of peril throughout the American education pipeline. This trend has been especially evident at the secondary and postsecondary levels in recent years. The question of why males are struggling to access and succeed in America’s colleges is complex, and this chapter explores some of the social and educational factors, as well as familial and labor force demands, that may be driving this trend. Chapter 10 provides an overview of ways to implement a more informed perspective on Mexi- can Americans and integrate it into the policy arena, and suggests specific mechanisms that can be used to implement policy and engage in research. State and federal policy sectors have the potential to be an avenue for ad- dressing the needs of this consistently expanding yet underserved segment of the student population. Frances Contreras examines some imperative policy issues for Mexican Americans and higher education. This chapter highlights select public policies that have served to support or hinder the progression of Mexican American/Chicano students through the P– 16 pipeline. The emphasis in her data analyses is placed on policies related to college readiness, transition, and persistence. In particular, discussions of accountability policies (such as exit exams), inequitable curricular ac- cess, rising tuition costs, affirmative action policy, and shifts in financial aid policies are included to assess the effect that public policies have on Mexican American/Chicano student transition to and success in college. A specific set of policy recommendations is proposed to increase student preparedness and college completion.

Throughout the century, many important scholars in the history of edu- cation and educational policy have constructed a foundation upon which we can continue to build. These scholars have interpreted demographic data, explored histories, and conducted empirical research to explode common stereotypic notions of Mexican Americans (Vallejo 2012; Ortiz and Telles 2012; Solórzano and Delgado Bernal 2001; MacDonald 2004). Their studies have been vital sources of data that provide insights into how racial/ethnic oppression shapes life choices and limits the options of Mexican Americans (Telles and Ortiz 2008; Delgado Bernal, Elenes, Go- dinez, and Villenas 2006).

Research has provided frequently inadequate explanations for the ways in which the social system shapes Mexican American experiences through

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24 The Magic Key

P– 16 pathways. New transformative work forces us to address the way critical findings by and/or about Mexican Americans are often neglected by policymakers and researchers who reject theories and explanations that point to structural flaws in the social system. This critical approach taken by scholars has not been without challenges from dominant epistemology, prevailing values in the power structure, and scholarly norms. To put it more bluntly, Mexican American Studies scholars and their research have been ghettoized, and their segregation has stunted the growth of the field. Meanwhile, the raging debate on whether the failure of Mexican Ameri- cans in schools is due to poor role models in the home or racist attitudes in the school or college persists. Whatever the explanation, Mexican Ameri- can children continue to be denied access to important educational path- ways that lead to social mobility.

In this book, the authors present data to demonstrate that, without an understanding of the U.S. educational system as one that promotes the re- production of a system racialized and socially stratified by class and gen- der, in which Mexican American students are maintained in or relegated to low- status jobs and occupations, we are bound to fail at providing them with the education they deserve.

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CHAPTER 2

History’s Prism in Education: A Spectrum of Legacies across Centuries of Mexican American Agency; Experience and Activism 1600s– 2000s

vICtorIa- maría maCDonalD anD Jason rIvera

The fruit of secondary education is higher education, and in higher education Mexican- Americans are virtually unrepresented. A survey conducted at the University of California’s Berkeley campus revealed that there were 231 Negroes and 76 Mexican- Americans in the student body of 26,083. At the Los Angeles campus there were 70 Mexican- Americans in an enrollment of 26,000. forD founDatIon, “a mexICan- amerICan legal Defense anD eDuCatIon funD”

Competing ideologies over the purpose of U.S. public schools have always existed (Labaree 1997). Founding principles included democratic liter- acy for citizenship participation, preparation of a workforce for a strong economy, and the assimilation of immigrants into American culture and the English language (Kaestle 1983). For at least one population, Mexi- cans,1 the promise of public education as a vehicle of upward mobility, realization of full citizenship, and constitutional safeguards under the Fourteenth Amendment has been largely a hollow promise. For example, as late as 1960, the median educational level of Mexican Americans in the Southwest was still only the eighth grade, four years behind their White, Black, and Asian counterparts there (Grebler, Moore, and Guzman 1970). Even after a civil rights revolution, desegregation, and decades of cur- ricular, pedagogical, and federal school reforms designed to interrupt this educational disparity, Mexican American youth still underperform on key indicators of school achievement, such as standardized tests, high school completion, college entrance examinations, and graduation (Balfanz, Bridgeland, Moore, and Fox 2010; Orfield, Losen, Wald, and Swanson 2004; Perlmann 2010; Telles and Ortiz 2008; U.S. Department of Educa-

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26 The Magic Key

tion 2010b). The role of institutional and structural racial discrimination in these outcomes, particularly evident in the shockingly high dropout rate, has remained virtually absent in the literature. In this chapter, we use the prism of history to chronicle across four centuries how agency and the persistent struggles waged to circumvent and challenge systemic ob- stacles facing Mexicans have been refracted through schooling. Although this legacy of resistance is rarely acknowledged in the literature, Mexican American leaders, parents, communities, and students have consistently fought for educational rights when they have been withheld or been in- adequate. One of the consequences of this overlooked and still evolving history is its contribution to the characterization that Mexican Americans have not cared about, or resisted, subtractive educational practices. To the contrary, grassroots organizations and leaders have employed a wide variety of strategies, including the formation of women’s and men’s advo- cacy organizations, utilization of Mexican consuls to exert international pressure, and enrollment of children in alternative institutions such as Catholic, Protestant, or independent schools. Parents and students have marched, protested, penned petitions, litigated, and leveraged political and economic power for equitable policies and practices. In this chapter we bridge the past and present by deconstructing the deeply embedded historical ideologies, policies, and practices surrounding the role of Mexi- can Americans in U.S. society and education.

A historic reliance upon Mexican immigrants and their descendants as expendable and migratory labor and residential segregation enforced with racial covenants and other discriminatory practices virtually ex- cluded Mexican American children from high school and then college in the first half of the twentieth century (Foley 1997; García and Yosso 2013; Montejano 2010; Ong and Rickles 2004; Ramos 2001; Romero and Fernandez 2012). Further, the absence of Mexicans as an officially recog- nized category in federal and state classifications until the 1970s,2 and the dominance of scholarship that privileged a male, Anglocentric history, prolonged the invisibility of Mexicans as part of the U.S. narrative. In the 1970s, an increasing number of historians, mostly of Mexican descent, challenged this dehistoricization and began to document and revise an incomplete and often flawed history, an ongoing process each generation of historians continues.

The role of social class and education among Mexican Americans has been little discussed in historical monographs and is included here to pro- vide a more comprehensive portrait of the range of educational access and achievement. Although a small slice, we have identified through pri-

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History’s Prism in Education 27

mary (including oral histories) and secondary sources the presence of what we term a “Mexican American Talented Tenth.” The term “Talented Tenth” is based upon W. E. B. DuBois’s conception of an elite, highly educated leadership class in early- twentieth- century African American society (DuBois 1903). The middle- and upper- class Hispanics who were permitted access to the “White” schools (segregation was never mono- lithic), an estimated 10 percent of the pupils present in “White,” “Ameri- can,” or “Anglo” public schools, were of Mexican descent. Factors such as lighter skin color (phenotype), “American” surname (typically based upon marriage with Anglos), higher economic or political status, and claims of pure Spanish ancestry permitted access and upward mobility in educa- tion and workplace. Acknowledgment of this privileged group is emerg- ing in recent historical literature (Barajas 2012; García, Yosso, and Barajas 2012; Whitaker 2005). The legacies of this segmentation are revealed in the work of contemporary scholars documenting how phenotype can sig- nificantly impact access, equity, and upward mobility in educational and workplace settings (Hannon, DeFina, and Bruch 2013; Ortiz and Telles 2012; Telles and Murgia 1990). In contrast to this Mexican American Tal- ented Tenth, the vast majority of Mexican Americans prior to the civil rights era were forced to actively resist White attempts to maintain domi- nance and suppress educational advancement (San Miguel, Jr. 1987, 2013). Our focus here is on the estimated 90 percent who underwent subtrac- tive and discriminatory experiences in schooling (Valenzuela 1999), while acknowledging the contestation that expanded access to more inclusive levels across the twentieth century.

The strategies and practices of contestation from the Spanish colonial era forward unfold in nine chronological sections: (1) Legacies of Casta, Catholicism, and Differentiation of Educational Opportunity in the Span- ish Colonial Era (1500s- 1821) and Mexican Independence (1821–1848); (2) Schooling under Mexican Independence; (3) Conquest, Segregation, and Resistance (1848–1924); (4) Understanding Mexican Educational Marginalization and Segregation in the Era of Xenophobia, Eugenics, and Scientific Racism; (5) Incubating a Civil Rights Generation: K– 20 (1920s– 1950s); Tackling K– 8 Segregation and Secondary School Exclu- sion; (6) World War II and Its Legacies: Stimulus for Latino Civil Rights; (7) Higher Education from the Progressive Era through World War II; (8) Fighting for Our Rights: Impact of the Chicano Movimiento on Edu- cation; and (9) Post– Civil Rights to the Present.

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28 The Magic Key

Legacies of Casta, Catholicism, and Differentiation of Educational Opportunity in the Spanish Colonial Era (1500s– 1821) and Mexican Independence (1821–1848)

The educational origins and trajectory of Mexican Americans stem from broad preconquest cultural, religious (Catholic), legal, political, and eco- nomic values and factors that were adapted in the New World. One sig- nificant Iberian concept, limpieza de sangre, evolved into the sistema de castas (caste system)3 in its adaptation through the transatlantic passage to New Spain racial hierarchical orders. Limpieza de sangre (cleansing of the blood, or purity) stemmed from the Crown’s wish to ensure that only individuals free from Jewish or Muslim blood or heresy would occupy the highest tiers of Spanish society (Martínez 2008). In the Spanish Ameri- can colonies, including what is now Mexico and the southwestern part of the United States, limpieza de sangre slowly transformed over the centuries of early conquest in the 1500s and 1600s into an increasingly rigid and hierarchical racialized sistema de castas. Widespread racial miscegenation based largely upon unions (forced and free) between Native American women and Spanish men occurred in the initial decades of conquest.4 This multiracial society expanded considerably when African freed persons and slaves were also brought as laborers to New Spain. According to Martínez (2008), Peninsular Spanish values of honor, status, and prestige were thus mapped onto Spanish, Native American, and Black blood, “influencing colonial power relations, individual and group identities” (166–167). The classic authors on castas, Mörner (1967) and Lipschütz (1944), and con- temporary scholars such as R. A. Gutiérrez (1991) and M. E. Martínez (2008), emphasize the enormous variety and fluctuation of terminology utilized across time and generations, and via political and religious legal rulings. Lipschütz, the Chilean sociologist who originally coined the term “pigmentocracy” in 1944, emphasized the link to Whiteness and status in the colonies among casta. Gutiérrez (1991) explained, “The whiter one’s skin, the greater was one’s claim to the honor and precedence Spaniards expected and received. The darker a person’s skin, the closer one was pre- sumed to be to the physical labor of slaves and tributary Indians” (198– 199). The embedded colonial favoritism for light- skinned peoples con- tinues to have implications for today’s Mexican American students despite centuries of racial mixing (Ortiz and Telles 2012).

Broadly, one’s legal and social status was calculated based upon the three principal racial groups present at the point of contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples in Latin America and Africa—Whites,

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History’s Prism in Education 29

Native Americans, and Blacks. Additional factors that were calculated to determine rank included legitimacy through Catholic baptism versus ille- gitimate birth, and generational origin in New Spain. As Mörner (1967) points out, legal and social classifications were not parallel. European Spanish– born peninsulares (Spanish- born Spaniard or Mainland Spaniard) occupied the highest legal and social status. Criollos (creoles), individu- als born in New Spain of pure Spanish parentage, represented the next level. Native Americans ranked next on the legal scale; but mestizos, mixed Spanish- Indian peoples, ranked socially immediately below criollos. Mesti- zos (and those in accompanying derivative categories based on race mix- ture) are the foremothers and forefathers of today’s Mexicans and Mexi- can Americans. Contemporary scholars often utilize the term mestizaje in critical studies and with a different interpretation (Banks 2006), but it stems from these colonial origins. In some regions, Africans held higher social status than Native Americans based upon the prestige of their Span- ish owners or urban occupation (Mörner 1967; M. E. Martínez 2008). African slaves, free Blacks, and mulatos (from forced and free unions be- tween Africans, Native Americans, or Spaniards) legally remained at the lowest tier. The status of Afro- mestizos and other mixed- race individuals continued to decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in New Spain, drawing from centuries- old biases against Blackness under Moor- ish conquest (Sweet 1997).

During the first centuries of Spanish colonization, three general forms of schooling at the elementary level emerged, reflecting the ideologies of the sistema de castas: settlers’ schools, mission schools for Native Ameri- cans, and nonformal education. The settlers’ schools provided cultural and linguistic continuation for children of the highest castas. The Span- ish language, Catholic religion, and culture were embedded throughout the curriculum and via the teachers’ knowledge of Iberian customs and culture. Among the earliest schools of this era was a Franciscan classi- cal school and preparatory seminary founded in 1606 in St. Augustine, Florida (MacDonald 2004).

Mission schooling for Native American/American Indian children and youth took place within the walls of the large network of Catholic mis- sions established largely on land that became Texas and then California in the 1700s. Native American children were often placed in the missions under the tutelage of missionary priests at the ages of seven or eight, seg- regated by gender, and subjected to cultural and linguistic subtraction. Within the walls of the mission, students were taught the superiority of Catholicism to other forms of religion, the Spanish language, and a gen-

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dered curriculum based upon Spanish views of the Native Americans’ roles as subordinated colonial workers. Girls placed under the strict care of a female guardian, and locked in at night in a nunnery for safekeeping against predatory Spanish soldiers, learned sewing, weaving, and cooking. Even as privileged women of high casta in Mexico City were denied ad- vanced learning, much more so were Native American girls or mestizas. Boys learned agricultural, woodworking, and other utilitarian skills. Some priests selected the brightest boys for accelerated and classical education to enter the universities and become priests or leaders. However, in some cases, such as the famous Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the mestizos (some- times called ladinos) utilized their educational skills to rebel against the colonizers. Higher education for this population was increasingly viewed negatively, as reflected in a Spanish colonial dicho (saying), “Mestizo edu- cado, mestizo colorado” (an educated mestizo is a red devil) (Burns 1908; Gallegos 1992).

The remoteness of New Spain’s lands and the limited mobility of sol- diers and settlers resulted in sporadic access to formal education, particu- larly in the northern regions that comprise today’s southwestern states of the United States. As a result, families often utilized what print culture was available in their homes, such as Catholic prayer books or legal docu- ments, to impart literacy. For instance, Apolinaria Lorenzana, who later became a teacher, recorded, “When I was a young woman in California, I learned alone to write, using for this the books I saw, imitating the let- ters on whatever white paper I found discarded. Thus I succeed in learn- ing enough to be make myself understood in writing” (Ruiz and Korrol 2005, 7).

The Spanish colonial period established a hierarchical link among education, racial purity, economic status, and curriculum whose legacies are still evident in modern form. Colonial- era privileging of European Whiteness in the sistema de castas translated into a classical educational curriculum to prepare a very small number of young men to enter the uni- versities and become ruling colonizers or priests (Nieto- Phillips 2004). At the University of Mexico in Mexico City, admission was increasingly restricted to ensure the dominance and superiority of Spaniards. M. E. Martínez (2008) noted that in the 1630s the Crown “prohibited the ma- triculation of Indians, mulattos, and illegitimate mestizos and made them ineligible to hold university degrees” (152). Thus some mestizos, Native Americans, and other racial mixes at the lower levels of the casta system were blocked from full access to the educational landscape. Instead, many,

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if they were provided with schooling at all, received handicraft and skilled labor training.

Schooling under Mexican Independence

When Mexico declared independence from Spain in 1821, its many demo- cratic reforms (such as eliminating the casta system) ironically narrowed the number of educational options that had been available under the colo- nial regime. The Mexican government’s secularization of the missions greatly weakened the Catholic Church’s role in schooling. Because they were lucrative financial entities, the new government withdrew subsidies for missions and ordered the return of Church- controlled lands to the public domain (Martinez and Alire 1999). The Republic of Mexico’s 1824 Constitution stipulated public education and normal schools for teacher training, but the distance and isolation of the far northern territories from Mexico City, coupled with limited finances and political instability, com- promised the ability of the fledgling nation to carry out its democratic educational reforms (Berger 1947). Some of the government’s efforts were successful, however. In 1834, for example, the Mexican government sent twenty teachers to open schools in Alta California. Further, the Sis- ters of Charity ran the Young Ladies Seminary in San José, and in San Francisco, the Church of Saint Francisco School remained active (Men- chaca 2001). Overall, an estimated one thousand children in California were being educated during the Mexican Independence Era in a variety of Catholic, private, and public schools (MacDonald 2004).

The Republic of Texas, established in 1836 and annexed to the United States in 1845, also created ambitious plans for public education, con- demning the Republic of Mexico for its failure to establish public schools. However, economic difficulties and political instability also constrained Texas from carrying out a concrete or systematic public school system until much later under statehood. Overall, the brief period of Mexican independence revealed the persistence of Catholic schools as favored educational institutions and the beginning, at least on paper, of pub- lic support for secular schools in the new Republic of Mexico and the short- lived Republic of Texas. The long intertwined history of Catholi- cism and schooling would clash with the Protestant Anglo- based public education introduced when the southwestern territories were annexed to the United States through the Mexican American War (1846–1848) and

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the Gadsden Purchase (1853–1854). However, the limited funds available for public schooling during Mexican independence gave Anglo settlers coming from the eastern part of the country the false impression that education was little valued. Cultural conflict between the arriving Anglo- Protestant settlers and new Mexican Americans surfaced in muted terms during the 1830s and 1840s, but escalated during the Mexican American War and into the 1850s and beyond. Anglos arriving in Texas and Califor- nia brought with them negative stereotypes of the character, religion, and racial composition of Mexicans. In general, Mexicans were disparaged as “greasers,” immoral, sexually degenerate, indolent, “mongrels,” “papists,” and potentially subversive political elements during times of international discord (De León 1983; Horsman 1981). These beliefs, coupled with an era of extreme anti- Catholicism in the United States, contributed to the marginalization and dismissal of alternative forms of education for Mexi- cans in favor of the Anglo- Saxon Protestant, middle- class public school reform movement of the mid- nineteenth century (MacDonald 2001). In this chapter, education is contextualized and woven into the larger narra- tive of Mexican American history. One of the unsettled issues across this history is the differential treatment accorded to a small group of “hon- orary white” (López 1997) Mexicans by the dominant White population. MacDonald (2011b) has named this group a “Mexican American Talented Tenth,” documenting that Mexican segregated schools were always par- tially integrated by students from this population and from those whose parents actively resisted segregation.

Conquest, Segregation, and Resistance (1848–1924)

Beginning in the mid- nineteenth century, the United States began an era of expansionism, supported ideologically by the notion of “Manifest Des- tiny”—that the spread from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts of the United States was God- ordained for Anglo Protestants. This ideology, linked to the desire for more land, ultimately provided justification for the Mexi- can American War of 1846–1848. As a result of the war, the United States gained more than one- half million square miles of land, which, along with 300,000 square miles acquired in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, increased U.S. territories to include the current states of Arizona, California, Colo- rado, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah, in addition to the Texas annexa- tion in 1845.

The defeat of Mexico, ratified in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe

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Hidalgo, rendered Mexicans as colonized peoples on their former land. Articles VIII and IX of the Treaty articulated the rights and responsibili- ties of the approximately 100,000 Mexicans who had been conquered and were given one year to choose to become U.S. citizens or remain Mexi- can nationals. The terms of the treaty stipulated that Mexicans would be lodged in the United States’ “White” race category. According to Men- chaca (2001), many individuals who were Native American/Spanish mes- tizos chose “White” to avoid the discriminatory American “Indian” classi- fication. As territories entered U.S. statehood, their constitutions largely granted suffrage only to Mexicans considered of the White race. For in- stance, California enfranchised “every white, male citizen of Mexico who shall have elected to become a citizen of the U.S.” (del Castillo 1990, 66). The technical legal classification of “White,” however, never matched the social treatment of Mexicans. According to Gómez (2007), “off- white” captured the new social reality of Mexicans in the American racialized hierarchy, residing somewhere below Anglo Protestant Whites and above Blacks and Native Americans. Although the Republic of Mexico had tech- nically ended the sistema de castas as part of its independence and the adop- tion of a democratic ideology, Mexicans, in their new jurisdiction, found themselves once again subject to state classification based upon race and ethnicity.

The status of Mexicans remaining north of the Rio Grande thus de- creased rapidly through a series of formal and nonformal policies and practices, including the devastating loss of land by families who held Span- ish land grants but could not prove ownership through titles. The U.S. Congress’s passage of the California Land Act of 1851 and the subsequent 1862 Homestead Act granted license for squatters to secure lands and re- sulted in the reduction of many older Mexican families to bankruptcy as a result of protracted legal battles to preserve their land (Pitt 1966). Im- portant distinctions existed, however, among the new territories in the power of Mexican- descent communities to hold on to their political and economic power.

The tangible aspects of the American conquest codified in citizen- ship and property law represented only some of the dramatic changes for Mexicans in the nineteenth- century Southwest. Educational policies dur- ing this era varied depending upon the local economic and political power of the Mexican- descent population. Texas is an illustrative example of shifting educational conditions during the nineteenth century as Anglos garnered power and increasingly imposed educational policies inimical to Mexican interests. As a republic (1836–1845), Texas had attempted a

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public school system, with little success. In 1854, the state established a permanent system of common public schools. Only two years later, in 1856, and again in 1858 (Eby 1918; Gammel 1898), new constitutional amendments were added stipulating that “no school shall be entitled to the [monetary] benefits of this act unless the English language is princi- pally taught therein” (Eby 1918, 336). Targeted at Mexicans, the policy to eliminate the Spanish language and, by proxy, culture marked the be- ginning of a continuing and persistent practice to this day to assimilate children through the elimination of their familial language and to create monolingual English- speaking citizens. Mexican parents with resources responded to this act and the virulent anti- Catholic sentiments that Prot- estant Anglo settlers brought to the Southwest by enrolling their children in Catholic schools or establishing their own independent private schools (San Miguel, Jr., and Valencia 1998).

According to San Miguel, Jr. (2013), Catholic schools were popular among Mexicans in the Southwest for three reasons. First, Catholic school- ing was seen as a form of preserving their identity because of the closely intertwined nature of religion and Mexican culture. Second, the Catho- lic Church permitted the speaking of Spanish in school. Thus, instead of imposing culturally “subtractive” measures upon Mexican children, de- fined by San Miguel, Jr., and Valencia (1998) as ones that “inculcate[d] American ways, but also . . . discourage[d] the maintenance of immigrant and minority group cultures” (358), Catholic teachers permitted “addi- tive” measures, such as bilingual or trilingual language instruction. Third, unlike coeducational U.S. public schools, Catholic schools were largely single- sex, an important culturally congruent practice.

Between 1848 and 1900, dozens of Catholic schools for boys and girls were established in Texas (MacDonald 2004). Female teaching orders that came to Texas from Europe in the nineteenth century played a pivotal role in spreading education, particularly for Mexican girls and young women. In general, European religious orders brought with them lin- guistic fluency and a cultural acceptance of multilingualism, in contrast to the monolingual English Anglo- Saxon culture. The promulgation and acceptance of linguistic diversity bolstered a positive academic environ- ment. For instance, the Ursuline Academy of San Antonio, founded in 1851, taught traditional academic subjects, and all students were required to learn Spanish, English, and French, “not only by theory, but by prac- tice: the pupils were required to converse in these languages in the respec- tive classes” (Castañeda 1958, 292). The Incarnate Word in Brownsville, Texas, was founded in 1853 for girls between the ages of five and eighteen.

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While many of these schools for girls undoubtedly included the ornamen- tal arts of sewing, music, and etiquette, as could be found in the south- ern and northern U.S. states, they provided solid academic educational opportunities. Tuition requirements, however, did slant student enroll- ment toward an upper- income population, contributing to the building of a Mexican American Talented Tenth (MacDonald 2011b). For instance, boarding students at the Ursuline Academy were reputed to come from the wealthier class of Mexicans, but the sisters also opened a “free day school principally for the benefit of Mexican children” (Castañeda 1958, 292). Simultaneously, Texas Bishop Odin also enthusiastically championed Catholic education for boys.5

Protestant denominations, particularly the Presbyterian Church, also saw Texas specifically and the Southwest in general as a missionary enter- prise. Tejanos enrolled their children in Protestant schools for several rea- sons: lack of alternatives (particularly during the frontier decades), per- ceived advantages for their children learning English from Anglo teachers, or anticlerical sentiments toward the Catholic Church that dissuaded them from sending their children to Catholic schools (Yohn 1995).

During the first years of statehood in California, 1850–1855, Catholic schools continued to educate Mexican Americans and were often provided with public funds. The Spanish language was also permitted, and numer- ous public schools were bilingual. However, the 1855 revised school law removed public funds for religious schools, and English was ordained as the only language of instruction in the California public schools (Mac- Donald 2004). During the immediate postwar decades, fluidity charac- terized the status of Mexicans and their educational experiences. Elite families from the preconquest era, identified as Californios, Tejanos, and, in New Mexico and Colorado, Hispanos, or broadly Los Ricos (the wealthy/ rich ones), had been accorded a special status with Anglo settlers due to class, adopted nomenclature of “Spanish Americans” versus Mexicans, intermarriage with Anglo settlers, and phenotype. As these families ex- perienced downward social mobility, captured poignantly, albeit roman- tically, in María Ampara Ruiz de Burton’s classic novel The Squatter and the Don, the power to control public educational policies and practices decreased. As the next section illuminates, waves of new immigrants from Mexico arrived during a complex and long period of international strife between the United States and Mexico, encompassing the Mexican Revo- lution of 1910, U.S. involvement in Mexican politics, and concern over the country’s alliance with Germany during World War I to invade the United States and retake Mexican lands, as proposed in the famous 1917 Zimmer-

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man Telegram between Germany and Mexico. One impact of these pro- tracted struggles was increased hostility toward Mexicans residing in the United States, whether citizens or new immigrants. As in Texas, a small number of Mexicans initially controlled a considerable portion of the land and political power in California at the time of American conquest, but rapidly experienced downward mobility and numerical marginalization, particularly with the draw of the California Gold Rush (Pitt 1966).

Understanding Mexican Educational Marginalization and Segregation in the Era of Xenophobia, Eugenics, and Scientific Racism

The numerically largest and most diverse immigration surge in U.S. his- tory (roughly 1880–1920) had almost finished when the Mexican Revo- lution of 1910 triggered the flight of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans north to the United States. The sheer number of Mexican newcomers in a short period of time and their rural, working- class backgrounds fueled a reactionary nativist movement against immigrants (Ngai 2005). The Johnson- Reed Immigration Act of 1924, including the National Origins Act and Asian Exclusion Act, did not, however, exclude peoples from the American continent, including Mexico and Canada, an exception that catered to the needs of agribusiness and manufacturers. Immigra- tion restrictionists angrily denounced this clause of the immigration act (R. A. Gutiérrez 1991). The rise of so- called scientific evidence also bol- stered Anglo attitudes embracing the alleged genetic inferiority of Mexi- cans and other non- White populations. The impact of these macro events and the continued view of Mexicans as transitory migrant and agricultural or manufacturing laborers—rather than future citizens—promoted fur- ther marginalization and increased segregation of children into “Mexi- can” schools.

African American students in the eleven former Confederate States of the South were placed in de jure segregated schooling based upon strict racial classification grounded in the “one drop” of Black blood rule. In contrast, Mexican American children were placed in “Mexican” or “Americanization” classrooms or entirely separate schools as a result of “custom” or “color of the law” beginning in the early 1900s. However, in the five southwestern states where Mexicans predominated (Texas, Cali- fornia, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico), statutes or constitutional measures requiring or permitting the segregation of Mexican Americans did not exist (Donato and Hanson 2012). As Sánchez and Strickland de-

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scribed in 1948, the decision to place students in a White or Mexican school was “arbitrary and capricious” (22). The practice of segregating Mexican American pupils, or what Valencia (2008) calls the “no- statute” phenomenon, was conducted outside of the legal structures, rendering its identification and demolition particularly difficult for litigators. Tuck (1946) observed in the 1940s how the extralegal nature of these practices posed a difficult challenge: “Rather than having the job of battering down a wall, the Mexican- American finds himself entangled in a spider web, whose outlines are difficult to see but whose clinging, silken strands hold tight” (198).

Anglo administrators justified this practice because of English- language deficiencies, objections from White parents to having their chil- dren schooled with allegedly “dirty and diseased” Mexicans, and other pretenses (San Miguel, Jr. 1987). Underlying these rationales was an ide- ology among Whites that most Mexican children belonged to a different and lower class, in a system based upon the political economy of south- western agriculture (Montejano 2010), and should be excluded from the American polity (Ngai 2005). Nomenclature of schools is telling in this regard. Schools in Texas and California with mostly White children were called “American,” while children of Spanish or Mexican descent were segregated into “Mexican” schools. Although historians have recently em- phasized that a select number of Mexican children were always permitted access to de facto segregated “Whites only” elementary spaces in the pre– civil rights era, restrictions became more severe in high schools, which enrolled and graduated fewer Mexican children.

The Aoy Preparatory School in El Paso, Texas, is illustrative of the tran- sition, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from parent- created grassroots bilingual schools to racialized and segregated “Mexi- can” public schools. Mexican parents founded the Aoy School in 1887 and hired Olives Villanueva Aoy (1823–1895) as a bilingual private school- teacher for Spanish- speaking pupils. The next year, the El Paso, Texas, public school board incorporated the school into its system, retaining Mr. Aoy and hiring his two English- speaking assistants (San Miguel, Jr. 1987). However, by 1905, Mexican children were mandatorily separated by lan- guage and race: “All Spanish speaking pupils in the city who live west of Austin Street will report at the Aoy School, corner of 7th and Campbell, English speaking Mexican children will attend the school of the district in which they live” (Report of the Public Schools of El Paso, Texas 1905–1906, 35). Increasingly, students in Mexican schools were required to spend three years in the first grade until they reached English proficiency. This

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discriminatory system, which consigned non- English- proficient Mexi- can children to unnecessary grade repetition, was utilized throughout the Southwest (G. Gonzalez 1990; Wollenberg 1976). Furthermore, this de- laying tactic, called “retardation,” coupled with the use of discriminatory intelligence testing, resulted in many students reaching the end of com- pulsory school attendance and going to work before they could attend “White” junior or senior high schools (MacDonald 2011b).

During the first four decades of the twentieth century, Mexicans in the United States experienced increased racialization, hostility, and seg- regation. In the Progressive Era, in what were initially characterized as “Americanization” schools or classrooms, several factors, including de- mands by White parents and communities, led to widespread segregation of Mexican children. The Mexican schools in this early era were almost entirely taught by White English- speaking teachers, and students were punished for speaking Spanish. Few children continued on to high school, and in many elementary schools, administrators added sixth, seventh, and eighth grades within the building rather than permit students to attend the “White” junior high school. As discussed in the next sections, parents and communities fought back against marginalization of their children’s educational opportunities in underresourced schools, racial segregation, and exclusion from secondary education (San Miguel, Jr. 2013).

Incubating a Civil Rights Generation: K– 20 (1920s– 1950s); Tackling K– 8 Segregation and Secondary School Exclusion

By the 1920s, children born in the United States, largely to parents who had fled the Mexican Revolution, were coming of age. Through paren- tal vigilance, their own persistence, and activism, this group, dubbed the “Mexican American Generation,” accrued sufficient educational, politi- cal, and economic power to push for their civil rights (M. García 1989; G. J. Sánchez 1995). The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s stipulation that Mexicans belonged to the “White” race drove the overall legal strategy to fight segregation. Scholars such as Foley (1997) have argued that uti- lizing Whiteness as a basis for racial integration represented a “Faus- tian Pact,” which would impede Mexicans in their long- term civil rights quest. Other scholars, such as Blanton (2006), have framed this “whiteness strategy” more sympathetically in terms of the limited pre- 1950s politi- cal and economic capital of Mexican Americans. For example, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, approximately one- half million Mexicans

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were repatriated, including countless U.S. citizens who would thereby be separated from their families (Ngai 2005). Regardless of the scholarly debates, the record of Mexican school segregation and desegregation has until the last decade been largely overlooked in the history of U.S. edu- cational discrimination.

The denigration and racialization of Mexicans in the pre- 1930 decades contributed to the rapid response of school districts to White parental pressure for separate buildings or classrooms. In some cases, students were diverted to basements, or buildings no longer used for White students. Mexican American parents utilized the assistance of Mexican consuls, lawyers, and community organizations to contest the placement of their children into these largely inequitable, poorly resourced, and education- ally deficient “Mexican schools.” Furthermore, except for the “Chosen Few,” students were blocked from continuing on to the “White”- identified junior or senior high schools (MacDonald 2011b).

Emerging work documents how, prior to the use of litigation, parents of Mexican nationality utilized the Mexican consuls to reject and contest U.S. society’s ideological construction of a Mexican race barred from full participation in the nation’s public institutions. Between 1912 and 1931, U.S. State Department records reveal, parents filed almost a dozen com- plaints concerning the racial segregation of their legally White children into Mexican or Black public schools and their exclusion from secondary schools. Guzmán and MacDonald (2013) argue that despite sustained pro- tests from parents that reached all the way to the U.S. secretary of state, governors, ambassadors, and attorney generals, and from there down to the local level via the consuls, most students remained segregated, ex- cluded, and/or subject to physical and verbal harassment and hazing. The limits of diplomacy in these situations indicate that despite transnational political pressures, embedded notions of the non- White racial identity and inferiority of Mexicans prevented acknowledgment of their legal White racial status and blocked full exercise of their constitutional rights.

In the earliest known legal case over these rights, Adolpho Romo v. William E. Laird et al. (1925), a Mexican American parent sued the Phoe- nix, Arizona, school district for placing his children in the Tempe Normal Training School with student teachers instead of fully trained teachers. Judge Joseph S. Jenckes agreed that the board’s practice of essentially seg- regating Mexican students rather than giving them opportunities equiva- lent to those of other children to attend the regular public schools violated the students’ rights, and he ruled for the plaintiffs. However, the prece- dents established by Romo v. Laird and two subsequent desegregation cases

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were limited by jurisdiction to only the level of the school/district/county/ state named in the suit (L. K. Muñoz 2013).

A significant lever for Mexican American advocacy and reform during this era was the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), founded in 1929 in Corpus Christi, Texas. LULAC supported several school desegregation cases decades before the Brown v. Board of Educa- tion decision of 1954. The first case LULAC supported, Del Rio Indepen- dent School District v. Salvatierra (1930), alleged that children in this south Texas community were unconstitutionally segregated by the “color of law” and that the construction of another “White” school, while maintaining Mexican American children on the other side of town, would ensure fur- ther segregation. Although Salvatierra won at the district court, the Texas Court of Civil Appeals overturned the decision. Judge J. Smith, presiding, basing his decision on the right of a school board to utilize “educational reasons,” in this case, the language needs of Mexican children, permitted the school district to continue its construction of another school far from the Mexican American community (Valencia 2008). Utilizing the “special language needs” of Spanish- speaking children as a premise for segregation in the lower grades was a practice common throughout the Southwest.

In Roberto Alvarez v. Lemon Grove School District (1931), the first suc- cessful Mexican American school desegregation case, pursued through a class action suit, parents fought the attempt of a California school board to move Mexican students into a Mexican residentially segregated area and utilize a building locally called La Caballeriza (the stable) because of its use for animals. Parents of the schoolchildren denied entrance to the regular schoolhouse formed a committee, Comité de Vecinos de Lemon Grove (Lemon Grove Neighbors Committee), hired lawyers, and success- fully fought the case. San Diego Superior Court judge Claude Chambers ruled that school boards had no right under California law to segregate Mexican American children. Contrary to the school board’s premise that the segregated school would provide opportunities for English language learning and Americanization, the judge reasoned that these goals could not be accomplished without integration among White non- Spanish- speaking pupils (Alvarez 1986; Valencia 2008).

The lawsuits of the 1920s and early 1930s, while not all fully success- ful, demonstrated the esteem in which education was held among Mexican Americans and their willingness to challenge the dominant community’s resistance to their social acceptance and legal “White” status in a racial- ized U.S. society. To date, historians have not uncovered school desegre- gation lawsuits during the 1930s Great Depression, when job scarcity and

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repatriation movements most likely discouraged resistance. Each of these early pre- Depression cases had only local jurisdiction; however, they rep- resented the inception of the use of litigation among Mexican Americans as a strategy for equitable schooling opportunities.

World War II and Its Legacies: Stimulus for Latino Civil Rights

The harsh Depression era slowly vanished with the onset of World War II and the creation of jobs in military defense industries. Mexican Ameri- cans—volunteers and draftees—were racially integrated into the mili- tary forces and numbered an estimated 500,000 (Rivas- Rodriguez 2005; del Castillo 2008). The global experiences of Mexican American soldiers serving abroad and fighting alongside White citizens outside of the de facto segregated Southwest stimulated a nascent civil rights movement. Veterans who had heroically risked their lives and seen family members and friends sacrifice theirs for the larger cause of maintaining democracy abroad recognized the hypocrisy of homeland discrimination. Further- more, the U.S. government recognized the risk of alienating Mexico, its neighbor on the southern border, which might ally with fascist or other totalitarian regimes. Programs and policies such as the Good Neighbor Policy, at the federal level, and state- level commissions were created to curb anti- Mexican discrimination, particularly in the manufacturing in- dustries, but also other arenas (Bernstein 2011; Foley 2010; Gugliemo 2006). Furthermore, Mexican American veterans were imbued with a re- newed sense of their rights as part of the U.S. body politic and became more proactive in securing improved access to constitutionally protected rights and governmental services. Litigation and grassroots community organizing into advocacy organizations such as the GI Forum positively impacted the upward mobility of Mexican Americans through education.

The first post– World War II victory for Mexican Americans in educa- tion was a constitutional challenge to school segregation. A class action suit, Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District (1946), supported on ap- peal by an amicus curiae brief from the National Association for the Ad- vancement of Colored People (NAACP), was filed on behalf of more than five thousand students in this California district. Of particular signifi- cance was the judge’s finding that the students’ rights should be protected under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (Valen- cia 2005). The State of California’s initial requirement in 1863 of sepa- rate schools for “Negro, Mongolian, and Indian children” (Wollenberg

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1976, 13) left nebulous the status of Mexican children. The segregation of Black, Asian, and Native American children was eventually removed from the California statutes; Mexicans, however, continued to be seg- regated without a code stipulating inclusion in or exclusion from White schools. In Mendez et al. the judge finally ruled that Mexicans were White and ordered them integrated into the “American” schools. Furthermore, the judge also ruled that separating Spanish- speaking children from their English- speaking classmates denied them access to learning the English language. In particular, Judge McCormick invoked the democratic spirit of the post– World War II era, arguing that separating children “foster[s] antagonisms in the children and suggest[s] inferiority among them where none exists,” and that, instead, “commingling of the entire student body instills and develops a common cultural attitude among the schoolchil- dren which is imperative for the perpetuation of American institutions and ideals” (Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District [1946]).

Encouraged by the success of Mendez et al., activists in Texas backed the class action lawsuit of six- year- old Minerva Delgado. In Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District (1948), plaintiffs claimed that Mexican- descent students were routinely denied entrance to so- called White schools. One of the key figures involved in this case was George Isidore Sánchez, a pro- lific and exceptional Mexican American educator, activist, and leader of the era. One of the key points that lawyer Gus García had to demonstrate in court was that segregating Mexican children, although not enacted by statute, was a custom and could be tried in a court of law. Plaintiffs were successful in Delgado, although the judge ruled that Spanish- speaking chil- dren could still be segregated in the first grade for pedagogical reasons. Although neither Mendez et al. nor Delgado overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court case upholding the separate but equal doctrine, thereby ending de jure segregation throughout the country, the cases’ legacies were notable for at least three reasons. First, they led to the legislative termination of school segregation in their respective states of California and Texas (discriminatory practices continued for at least another decade). Second, the discriminatory and unsound rationale of English- language deficiency, the “pedagogical cloak” for segregation, was finally declared indefensible. Third, through Mendez et al. the equal- protection-of-the-law clause of the Fourteenth Amendment became a successful test for future litigators in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

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History’s Prism in Education 43

Higher Education from the Progressive Era through World War II

During the late 1800s and until World War I, college participation in the United States among all adults was still small (less than 5 percent) in pro- portion to the entire population. Among Tejanos, Californios, and Hispa- nos in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the sons and daughters of these elite (but downwardly mobile) classes often attended private Catholic colleges. These schools offered a smooth continuity with the Spanish language, culture (sex segregation, for example), and religion. Many of these Catholic colleges started first as academies to provide col- lege preparation before they reached collegiate status and accreditation. The most prominent included Santa Clara College in San Jose, Califor- nia (1851); College of San Miguel/St. Michael’s College (1859), chartered again in 1874 as College of the Christian Brothers of New Mexico; Notre Dame College, San Jose, California (1868); and Our Lady of the Lake in San Antonio, Texas (1895) (MacDonald and Garcia 2003).

Distancing themselves from the segregated practices in Texas and Cali- fornia carried out by White school officials who viewed Mexican Ameri- cans as racially inferior, unclean, and in need of Americanization, Hispa- nos in New Mexico and Colorado emphasized their distinct heritage as something to be affirmed in the public schools. One prominent example of the economic and political clout of Hispanos was their creation of a public bilingual teacher training institution. In 1909, the state legisla- ture of New Mexico founded the Spanish- American Normal School at El Rito. The legislature charged the institution to educate “Spanish- speaking natives of New Mexico for the vocation of teachers in the public schools of the counties and districts where the Spanish language is prevalent” (Nineteenth and Twentieth Annual Reports 1911, 19, 144; Twenty- Seventh and Twenty- Eighth Annual Reports 1918, 30). The school continued through the 1930s as a normal school and then was absorbed into the New Mexico higher education system and is now called Northern New Mexico College, an accredited baccalaureate institution (MacDonald and Garcia 2003). Similarly, the New Mexico Normal School, founded in 1893 in Las Vegas, New Mexico, became New Mexico Normal University in 1902 and New Mexico Highlands University from 1941 to the present.

Few scholars have focused on the role of Mexican American women in teaching or on larger questions regarding the intersection of gender, schooling, and Mexican girls and women. Vicki Ruiz pioneered the in- clusion of women in Mexican/Chicano history, with a larger focus on social, economic, and political history.6 However, emerging scholars have

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44 The Magic Key

begun to engage the role of Mexican women in pre– civil rights com- munity activism, their involvement in World War II defense industries, and their emergence as public and private school teachers (C. E. Orozco 2009). Women attended teacher training institutions, Catholic colleges, and junior colleges during the era of segregation, an area warranting greater exploration. The first junior college opened in 1901 in Joliet, Illi- nois; junior colleges quickly became popular commuter institutions for students as affordable alternatives to four- year residential schools. Par- ents of Mexican girls also preferred junior colleges because their daugh- ters could live at home and study nearby, making it possible to safeguard ethnic cultural traditions. Some schools were vocational/technical in na- ture from their origins, and others offered both skilled training programs and academic preparation for transfer to four- year schools. In Browns- ville, Texas, a predominantly Mexican American community, many high school students advanced to the Junior College of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, founded in 1926. In 1931, its name was changed to Brownsville Junior College and then Texas Southmost College in 1950, the appellation in use today. In Corpus Christi, Texas, the state founded Del Mar College in 1935 as a vocational/technical school, a role it has continued in until the present. Catholic colleges, teacher training schools, and junior colleges/ community colleges thus appear to have educated the majority of both male and female Mexicans and other Latinos in the pre– World War II era.

The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 provided monies for each state to open land grant universities for all students. The 1890 Act, in the age of Jim Crow, provided federal funds for southern states to open segregated Black institutions. As in the K– 12 public school system, Mexican Ameri- cans were not legally excluded from public colleges or universities, but de facto, their presence was discouraged. Extracurricular activities were another site for oppression and discrimination. Sororities and fraternities barred students on public university campuses, except for a limited few who possessed “honorary Whiteness.” Undeterred, many Mexican and Hispano students formed their own organizations (MacDonald 2011a).

The admittance to higher education of Mexican Americans, increas- ingly middle- class and aided by philanthropic organizations and their own determination, widened in the pre– World War II era. However, local cus- toms, the relatively weak social and political clout of Spanish- speaking citizens, and other intangible factors negatively impacted access and the nature of the college experience. Perhaps the greatest factor block- ing college entrance was the insufficient number of Mexican Americans who could complete eighth grade and attend secondary schools. For most

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Cultural And Diversity Characteristics Map

November 25, 2022/in Uncategorized /by SK

Title

ABC/123 Version X

Cultural and Diversity Characteristics Map

CUR/518 Version 3

University of Phoenix Material

Cultural and Diversity Characteristics Map

Reflect on the characteristics that make up your own cultural diversity.

Select eight types of sources that have influenced your personal culture, such as:

· History

· Geography

· Biology

· Environment

· Education

· Language

· Religion

· Family

· Gender

· Economic class

· Personal experience

· Nationality or government

· Societal customs, traditions, or relationships

Write a source in each circle in the following map. Below the map, list the sources you selected and write any good or bad rules, norms, beliefs, and values that you believe you have learned from that source.

Influences on My Cultural Diversity

1. Environment

2. Education

3. Religion

4. Relationships

5. Traditions

6. Economic

7. Gender

8. Family

Environment

Economic class

education

religion

relationships

family

gender

traditions

Difficult Decisions Case Study

November 25, 2022/in Uncategorized /by SK

While teachers are always expected to be professional and uphold professional standards of practice, they also have to make decisions that sometimes do not have a clear response. In these situations, teachers must turn to the ethical standards and relevant laws and policies to guide their decisions. The purpose of this assignment is to allow you to practice making some of those difficult decisions.

For this assignment, read “Case Study – Danny,” In a 500-750 word essay, provide answers to the following questions related to the case study:

1. Summarize the key issue from the case study.

2. What are the ethical considerations? How could Ms. Rodriquez have better responded to Ms. Tang?

3. What are 2-3 possible alternative responses?

4. Out of the possible alternatives, which do you recommend and why?

Support your findings with a minimum of three scholarly resources, in addition to the textbook. Be sure to cite the NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct and Statement of Commitment we well.

Ethics And Talent Management

November 25, 2022/in Uncategorized /by SK

This week’s assignments will focus on synthesizing the learning for the course and considering the role that ethics plays in human talent management. As a principal, you will be thrust into many different leadership roles and situations that will put all eyes on you. As a leader, it is essential to lead, teach, and model for the staff and students. Your words need to match your actions because that will affect the culture and climate of the campus. It is equally vital to be knowledgeable of best practices, instruction, and technology to ensure that every student is getting a quality education. When working through the assignments, consider all your new learning and how everything works together to improve instruction, achievement, and campus culture.

EDLD 5345 Human Resource Management

Week 5: Ethics and Talent Management

*All parts of the weekly assignment must be completed at or above a rubric level 2 (approaching) to receive a weekly grade. All weekly assignments and discussion boards must be completed in order to receive a grade for the course.

Overview

The Week 5 assignments will focus on synthesizing the learning for the course and considering the role that ethics plays in human talent management. As a principal, you will be thrust into many different leadership roles and situations that will put all eyes on you. As a leader, it is essential to lead, teach, and model for the staff and students. Your words need to match your actions because that will affect the culture and climate of the campus. It is equally vital to be knowledgeable of best practices, instruction, and technology to ensure that every student is getting a quality education. When working through the assignments, consider all your new learning and how everything works together to improve instruction, achievement, and campus culture.

Rubric

Use this rubric to guide the work on the Week 5 Assignment.

Tasks

Level 1: Does not meet the minimum criteria

(Below 70%)

Level 2: Approaches minimum criteria

(70-79%)

Level 3: Meets criteria

(80-89%)

Level 4: Exceeds criteria

(90-100%)

Week 5, Section A:

Ethical Practices: Case Study

The candidate did not complete the case study or did not demonstrate knowledge and skills, as indicated in the Texas Educator Code of Ethics. And/or did not respond to the questions related to the case study.

(0 points)

The candidate attempted to complete the assignment, but minimally demonstrated knowledge of the Texas Educator Code of Ethics in answering the questions related to the case study.

(14 points)

The candidate completed the assignment and demonstrated the required knowledge and skills regarding the case study.

(16 points)

The candidate provided an exemplary response to the assignment questions that demonstrated critical thinking and analysis regarding the case study.

(20 points)

Week 5 Section B: Comprehensive System for Human Talent Management

Opening and Paragraph 2

NELP Component 2.2 Ethical Advocacy

Domain VI Ethics, Equity, and Diversity

Competency 011a Ethics and Advocacy

SBEC Pillar #5 – Hiring, Selection, and Retention

The candidate will use local and legal policies related to recruitment, hiring, and selection to develop a job description based on identified needs and develop a job posting related to the job description.

Candidate 1) created a job description that did not clarify the identified campus staffing needs, and 2) created a job posting that was not in alignment with local or legal policy.

The candidate had more than three errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar.

(0 points)

The candidate 1) demonstrated the capacity to evaluate the local and legal policies for developing a job description aligned to campus staffing need but 2) lacked the alignment with the district’s established policies regarding ethical hiring practices evidenced by the job posting and

3) lacked evidence of the ability to communicate about and advocate for ethical and legal decisions, evidenced by the lack of alignment with local and legal policies.

The candidate had more than three errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar.

(14 points)

The candidates demonstrated the capacity to 1) evaluate the ethical dimensions of issues by developing a job description that aligns to the campus staffing need

2) analyze decisions in terms of established ethical frameworks evidenced by following local and legal policies related to job postings and

3) communicated about and advocate for ethical and legal decisions through both the job description and job posting.

The candidate had 2-3 errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar.

(16 points)

The candidate demonstrated the capacity to 1) evaluate the ethical dimensions of issues by developing a job description that aligns to the campus staffing need

2) analyze decisions in terms of established ethical frameworks evidenced by following local and legal policies related to job postings.

3) communicated about and advocate for ethical and legal decisions through both the job description and job posting and

4) articulate their understanding and capacity to undertake and implement this work within a school setting.

No errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar & correctly formatted.

(20 points)

Week 5 Section B: Comprehensive System for Human Talent Management

Paragraph 3

The candidate will provide a written response of the development of a comprehensive plan for human talent management, including a paragraph on how to create a collaborative professional culture to promote school improvement, teacher retention, the success of staff and students, and the development of an effective communication system.

Domain II: Competency 3, A Competency 4, A Competency 5, A & B Competency 6, A

NELP Component 7.2 Collaborative Professional Culture

SBEC Pillar #6 – Observation and Feedback

The candidate does not articulate the importance of and

how to engage staff in a

collaborative professional

culture designed

to promote school

improvement, teacher

retention, and the success and well-being of each student and adult in the school.

The candidates cannot explain how to:

1) develop a

comprehensive plan

for providing school

community members

with a healthy and

positive school building

environment,

2) design and cultivate

a collaborative

professional culture,

and

3) model and

foster effective

communication.

The candidate had more than three errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar.

(0 points)

The candidate explains

how to engage staff in a collaborative professional

culture designed

to promote school

improvement, teacher

retention, and the success and well-being of each

student and adult in the school.

The candidate provided little description or information on how to:

1) develop a

Plan for providing school community members with a healthy and

positive school building

environment,

2) design a collaborative

professional culture,

and

3) develop a process

for modeling and

fostering effective

communication.

The candidate had more than three errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar.

(14 points)

The candidate explains and provides examples

how to engage staff in a

collaborative professional

culture designed

to promote school

improvement, teacher retention, and the success

and well-being of each student and adult in the school.

The candidate can explain how to:

1) develop a

a comprehensive plan for providing school community members with a healthy and

positive school building environment,

2) design a collaborative

professional culture, and

3) develop a process

for modeling and

fostering effective

communication.

The candidate had 2-3 errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar.

(16 points)

The candidate explains and provides action steps of how to

engage staff in a

collaborative professional

culture designed

to promote school

improvement, teacher retention, and the success

and well-being of each student and adult in the

school.

The candidate explains and provides action steps of how to:

1) develop a

comprehensive plan

for providing school

community members

with a healthy and

positive school building environment,

2) design a collaborative

professional culture,

and

3) develop a process for modeling and

fostering effective

communication.

The candidate uses their skills, knowledge, and capacity to undertake and

implement this work within

a school setting.

No errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar & correctly formatted.

(20 points)

Week 5 Section B: Comprehensive System for Human Talent Management

Paragraph 4

The candidate will provide a written response of the development of an instructional coaching program that including a paragraph on engaging all staff members in professional learning, evaluation of staff, cultural responsiveness, identification of teacher leadership, distributed leadership, digital literacy, and summarizes the findings of the peer review of the plan.

NELP Component 7.3 Professional Learning

SBEC Pillar #6 – Observation and Feedback

The candidate does not explain how to engage in personally,

as well as collaboratively

engage school staff in,

professional learning

designed to promote

cultural

responsiveness, distributed

leadership and digital literacy.

The candidate had more than three errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar.

(0 points)

The candidate provides little description of how to personally engage in,

as well as collaboratively

engage school staff in, professional learning designed to promote cultural responsiveness, distributed

leadership and digital literacy.

The candidate did not articulate the findings from the peer review.

The candidate had more than three errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar.

(14 points)

The candidate explains, and a describes of

how to personally engage in,

as well as collaboratively

engage school staff in,

professional learning

designed to promote

cultural

responsiveness, distributed

leadership and digital literacy.

The candidate explains how to:

1) evaluate professional

staff capacity needs and

management practices,

2) identify leadership

capabilities of staff,

3) plan opportunities for

professional growth that promotes

cultural responsiveness and

digital literacy.

4) plan opportunities

for engaging staff in leadership roles, and

5) develop a plan

for utilizing digital

technology in ethical and appropriate ways

to foster professional

learning for self and others.

(16 points)

The candidate describes and provides action steps of how to personally engage in,

as well as collaboratively

engage school staff in, professional learning designed to promote

cultural

responsiveness, distributed

leadership and digital literacy.

The candidates explain how to and provide specific examples of how to:

1) evaluate professional

staff capacity needs and management practices,

2) identify leadership

capabilities of staff,

3) plan opportunities for

professional growth that promotes

cultural responsiveness, and

digital literacy.

4) plan opportunities

for engaging staff in leadership roles, and

5) develop a plan

for utilizing digital

technology in ethical and appropriate ways

to foster professional

learning for self and others.

The candidate uses their skills, knowledge, and capacity to undertake and

implement this work within

a school setting.

No errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar & correctly formatted.

(20 points)

Week 5 Section B: Comprehensive System for Human Talent Management

Paragraphs 5 and 6

The candidate will provide a written response of the development of an instructional coaching program that includes a paragraph on evaluation, support and supervision, district policies, feedback, and use of instructional best practices to promote school improvement and student success.

The candidate will create an instructional coaching plan based on the data provided in the case study and researched best practices in instruction.

NELP Component 7.4 Supervision, Support, and Evaluation

Domain III Human Capital

Competency 005 Coaching and Professional Development

SBEC Pillar #6 – Observation and Feedback

The candidate does not

explain how to:

1) evaluate professional

staff capacity needs and

management practices,

2) identify leadership

capabilities of staff,

3) plan opportunities for

professional growth

that promote reflection,

cultural responsiveness,

digital literacy, school

improvement, and

student success,

4) engage staff in

leadership roles, and

5) utilize digital

technology in ethical

and appropriate ways

to foster professional

learning for self and

others.

The candidates do not explain how to:

1) observe teaching in a

variety of classrooms,

2) gather and review

district policies

on instructional

expectations,

3) provide teaching

staff with actionable

feedback to support

improvement, and

4) develop a system for

monitoring whether

supervision and

evaluation strategies

promote improvement.

No summary or detail of future professional impact.

Multiple APA, spelling, and grammar errors.

(0 points)

The candidate lacks specificity in the explanation of how to:

1) evaluate professional

staff capacity needs and management practices,

2) identify leadership

capabilities of staff,

3) plan opportunities for professional growth that promote reflection, cultural responsiveness,

digital literacy, school

improvement, and

student success,

4) engage staff in

leadership roles, and

5) utilize digital

technology in ethical

and appropriate ways

to foster professional

learning for self and

others.

The candidates explain but lack specificity in how to:

1) observe teaching in a variety of classrooms,

2) does not provide

district policies

on instructional

expectations

3) How it will impact school

improvement and student

success.

The closing paragraph summarized but did not detail future professional impact.

The candidate had more than three errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar.

(14 points)

Candidate explains

how to evaluate, develop,

and implement systems

of supervision, support,

and evaluation designed

to promote school

improvement and student

success.

The candidate explains how to:

1) observe teaching in a

variety of classrooms,

2) does not provide

district policies

on instructional

expectations,

3) provide teaching

staff with

feedback to support

improvement, and

4) develop a system for

monitoring whether

supervision and

evaluation strategies

promote improvement.

Closing paragraph summarized and detailed future professional impact.

The student had 2-3 errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar.

(16 points)

The candidate explains and provides action steps of how to evaluate, develop,

and implement systems

of supervision, support,

and evaluation designed

to promote school

improvement and student

success.

The candidates provide a specific plan for how to:

1) observe teaching in a variety of classrooms,

2) gather and analyze district policies on instructional

expectations,

3) provide teaching

staff with actionable feedback to support

improvement, and

4) develop a system for monitoring whether supervision and evaluation strategies

promote improvement.

The candidate uses their skills, knowledge, and capacity to undertake and

implement this work within

a school setting.

Closing paragraph summarized and detailed future professional impact.

No errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar & correctly formatted.

(20 points)

Week 5: Code of Ethics (W5LO1, W5LO2, CLO2, and CLO3)

Use your experiences and the shared experiences of others (such as your mentor) to complete this week’s assignment.

Resource:

Access the TAC Chapter 247 Educators’ Code of Ethics at the following link:

http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/sbecrules/tac/chapter247/ch247.html

Week 5, Section A: Case Study. (W5LO2, W5LO3, CLO2, and CLO 3)

Directions:

1. Read the case study:

2. Carefully analyze the events in the case study as you read.

3. Answer the questions related to the case study.

Debra Pennington, principal of Weldon Elementary School, faced a tearful and distraught teacher. When second-grade teacher Nancy Musick told Ms Pennington last week that she would be out for several weeks, beginning a chemotherapy regime for breast cancer, Nancy had assumed that the conversation would be confidential. However, yesterday afternoon at the local Kroger Superstore, another Weldon Elementary School teacher, Paula Carter, shared her concerns about Nancy’s health and wished her a full recovery. Since Nancy had told only one person, her principal, about her medical condition, she knew that Debra had not kept their conversation private.

Indeed, Debra had discussed Nancy’s cancer diagnosis and treatment with two other second-grade teachers soon after Nancy left her office last Wednesday afternoon. They had considered plans for a substitute teacher to teach in Nancy’s absence and whether to tell the second graders about the seriousness of Nancy’s illness.

Now Nancy is distraught, charging Debra with betraying confidence. “If I had wanted the entire school to know, I would have told them myself. I trusted you to help me, and you let me down.”

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Can you justify the actions of the principal in the case ? Why or why not?

Place your answer here.

2. How would you handle this conference if you were the principal?

Place your answer here.

3. Develop your personal code of ethics to use in professional situations. Make sure that they align with the Texas Code of Ethics for Educators. This may be bulleted but must be in complete sentences.

Place your answer here.

4. Would your professional code of ethics differ from your personal code of ethics for your personal life? If so, in what ways? If not, why?

Place your answer here.

Week 5 Section B: Create a comprehensive system for human talent management (W5LO1, W5LO2. W5LO3, CLO2, CLO3, and CLO 6)

In this task, you will demonstrate your ability to develop a comprehensive system of human talent management on a campus. This will include but is not limited to teacher contracts, ethical considerations, evaluation, coaching, professional development, support of staff, and documentation. In the space below type in paragraph form, how you would develop a comprehensive system of human talent management on your campus. Be sure to include best practice research in order to justify your decision and system components. You may provide artifacts to help support your writing, such as forms to be used, a timeline, a flow chart, and/or spreadsheets. Also, consider if the development of this system will be a collaborative process, who will be involved in helping you create this system, and what is their value added to the process. Be sure to review the rubric for specific details that must be included to reach maximum points for this assignment. This assignment is a synthesis of all your learning during this course. Review all your coursework for this course. You may use any of that information to complete this assignment. Follow the APA guidelines for citations. Double spacing is not necessary. Paste or type your comprehensive plan in the space below.

Opening paragraph- Talk about the process of creating this system and why you need a system.

Paragraph 2: You will be creating a job description and a job posting for this paragraph.

· Evaluate and your district’s local and legal policies regarding job postings and refer to week 1 to ensure that local and legal guidelines are met.

· Create a job description that will align with your local and legal policies.

· Create a job posting that follows local and legal guidelines.

· Reflect on your understanding of the importance of following local and legal guidelines in job descriptions and job postings.

Paragraph 3: Creating a collaborative professional culture to:

· Promote school improvement

· Action Steps- Collaborative School Culture, Modeling, and Fostering effective Communication

Paragraph 4: Collaboratively engage staff in professional learning designed to promote cultural responsiveness, Distributes leadership, and Digital Literacy.

The candidate explains how to and provides specific examples of how to

evaluate professional staff capacity needs and management practices,

identify the leadership capabilities of staff,

plan opportunities for professional growth that promote cultural responsiveness, and digital literacy.

4) plan opportunities for engaging staff in leadership roles, and 5) develop a plan for utilizing digital technology in ethical and appropriate ways to foster professional learning for self and others. Candidate uses their skills, knowledge, and capacity to undertake and implement this work within a school setting.

No errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar & correctly formatted.

Paragraph 5: The candidate explains and provides action steps of how to evaluate, develop, and implement systems of supervision, support, and evaluation designed to promote school improvement and student success. The candidate provides a specific plan for how to

observe teaching in a variety of classrooms,

gather and analyze district policies on instructional expectations,

provide teaching staff with actionable feedback to support improvement, and

develop a system for monitoring whether supervision and evaluation strategies promote improvement.

Candidate uses their skills, knowledge, and capacity to undertake and implement this work within a school setting. Closing paragraph summarized and detailed future professional impact. No errors in APA citations, spelling, or grammar & correctly format.

Paragraph 6: Closing. Summary of your system and a reflection of what you learned in course and how it will impact you as a future leader.

Place your Synthesis Paper `below.

2016 Lamar University version Jan2020 1 of 6

The Educational Journey Of Mexican Americans

Cultural And Diversity Characteristics Map

University of Phoenix Material

Cultural and Diversity Characteristics Map

Influences on My Cultural Diversity

Difficult Decisions Case Study

Ethics And Talent Management

Experience

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