education

Reports: Latino’s, Education and Language Proficiency

• English Usage Among Hispanics in the U.S.
  By: Shirin Hakimzadeh and D’Vera Cohn
  Organization: Pew Hispanic Center
  Nearly all Hispanic adults born in the United States of immigrant parents report they are fluent in English. By contrast, only a small minority of their parents describe themselves as skilled English speakers. This finding of a dramatic increase in English-language ability from one generation of Hispanics to the next emerges from a new analysis of six Pew Hispanic Center surveys conducted this decade among a total of more than 14,000 Latino adults. The surveys show that fewer than one-in-four (23%) Latino immigrants reports being able to speak English very well. However, fully 88% of their U.S.-born adult children report that they speak English very well. Among later generations of Hispanic adults, the figure rises to 94%. Reading ability in English shows a similar trend.
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• Latinos Online
  By: Susannah Fox and Gretchen Livingston
  Organization: Pew Hispanic Center
  In 2007, Latinos comprised 14% of the U.S. adult population and about half of this growing group (56%) goes online. By comparison, 71% of non-Hispanic whites and 60% of non- Hispanic blacks use the internet. Several socio-economic characteristics that are often intertwined, such as low levels of education and limited English ability, largely explain the gap in internet use between Hispanics and non-Hispanics.
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• One-in-Five and Growing Fast: A Profile of Hispanic Public School Students
  By: Richard Fry and Felisa Gonzales
  Organization: Pew Hispanic Center
  The number of Hispanic students in the nation’s public schools nearly doubled from 1990 to 2006, accounting for 60% of the total growth in public school enrollments over that period. There are now approximately 10 million Hispanic students in the nation’s public kindergartens and its elementary and high schools; they make up about one-in-five public school students in the United States. In 1990, just one-in-eight public school students were Hispanic.
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• The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of U.S. Public Schools
  By: Richard Fry, Senior Research Director
  Organization: Pew Hispanic Center
  The recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on school desegregation have focused public attention on the degree of racial and ethnic integration in the nation’s public schools. A new analysis of public school data finds that since 1993-94 white students have become less isolated from minority students while, at the same time, black and Hispanic students have become slightly more isolated from white students. These two seemingly contradictory trends stem mainly from the same powerful demographic shift: an increase of more than 55% in the Hispanic slice of the public school population since 1993-94.
  In 1993-94, fully one-third of all white students attended a school in which fewer than 5% of the students were non-white. By 2005-06, just one in five white students was attending a nearly all-white school. Meanwhile, black and Hispanic students have become slightly more isolated from white students. Roughly three-in-ten Hispanic (29%) and black (31%) students attended schools in 2005-06 in which fewer than 5% of the students were white, and these percentages were both somewhat higher than they had been in 1993-94. Download PDF here