TALAS E-newsletter – March 28

On Wednesday, students at Aoy Elementary School filled the campus gymnasium with rolled up blue T-shirts in their hands.

When told, the kids unrolled them, revealing the name of the El Paso children’s museum – “La Nube: The Shape of Imagination.”

“It’s the cloud we can all go up to, to think, imagine and feel,” said El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser at the announcement Wednesday morning.

Three leaders in education in North Texas sat down for a roundtable with the Texas Tribune Thursday. All three have either left or are leaving their position. 

Fort Worth’s Kent Scribner is retiring in two years, Richardson’s Jeannie Stone left in December, and Michael Hinojosa is leaving Dallas ISD too. 

The roundtable started with what it has been like leading through a pandemic.

“It’s been one issue after another and none of these things were in our strategic plan,” Hinojosa said. “Dallas ISD found a way to persevere despite these huge challenges.”

Many students’ education plans were disrupted due to the COVID-19 pandemic and new research reveals how Black and Latino students were disproportionally impacted. Almost a third of Black and Latino students cancelled their plans to continue their post-secondary education, a much higher rate than white students. 

A new report published by the Latino Policy & Politics Initiative at University of California, Los Angeles, used Census Bureau data to understand how the coronavirus pandemic impacted American households. The results found that during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic and even a year later, many students of color planned to cancel all their plans for postsecondary education.  

The Feb. 21 Williamson County, Tennessee, school board meeting opened with far less commotion than the raucous gatherings that came before it: Gone were the hecklers, sign wavers, screamers and air pokers who made headlines around the world for threatening doctors and nurses who spoke out in favor last summer of reinstating a mask mandate for young children. 

Placards were banned and attendees were warned at the start not to use vulgar language, single out board members or otherwise disrupt the proceedings lest they be hauled off by deputies. 

When most Americans think about bilingual education, what first comes to mind isn’t its long history in this country. But Manka Varghese, a professor at the University of Washington’s College of Education, reminds her students that the United States has always had multiple languages, starting with Indigenous ones. Before compulsory education laws were on the books, public schools offered instruction in languages like German to attract immigrant families, Varghese says, and the Supreme Court has affirmed both a school’s right to do so, in 1923, and, in 1974, the responsibility. In the latter case, Lau v. Nichols, the court found that English-only instruction unlawfully deprives non-English speaking students of the opportunity to learn.

The recent report from the U.S. Census confirmed what many experts and advocates have worried about over the past two years, that despite achieving an accurate overall estimate of the population, the 2020 Census suffered from a significant undercount of Latinos and other racial and ethnic minorities. The undercount of Latinos was 4.99%, three times the 1.54% undercount in 2010, a statistically significant difference.

The following quote, in reaction to the first release of apportionment numbers from the 2020 Census numbers last year, speaks to the consequences that this undercount will have for Latino communities across the country.