Buscando la Libertad: Latino Youths in Search of Freedom in School

Drawing from a two-year ethnographic study of Latino high school students engaged in youth participatory action research (YPAR), this article describes students’ quest for freedom in schools, locating their struggle within a larger effort to realize the democratic ideals of public schooling. Using Latino/a Critical Race Theory as a theoretical lens, the author demonstrates how popular discourse around the “achievement gap” often obscures the oppressive policies and practices implemented by educators that limit freedoms necessary for educational and personal development and profoundly influence the identities and life trajectories of Latino youth. The article concludes with an exploration of YPAR as a practice of educational freedom with the potential to transform the educational experiences and outcomes for Latino youth and other communities that have been traditionally underserved by schools. The academic achievement of Latino youths has received increasing attention over the past decade, as national and state policies have called for an elimination of the “achievement gap,” persistent discrepancies in test scores, high school graduation, and post-secondary enrollment and completion, between students of color and White students, students from lower socioeconomic strata and wealthier students, and students who are native speakers of standard English and those who may be learning English as a second (or third, fourth, etc.) language. Educational statistics regarding the education of Latinos in the United States are disconcerting. It is estimated that 41% of Latinos above the age of twenty do not have a high school diploma, a rate almost double that of African Americans and more than three times that of Whites (Fry, 2010). While Latino high school graduates are attending college at higher rates than in years past, they are still generally underrepresented in higher education and their postsecondary completion rates lag behind those of most other ethnic groups (Fry, 2005; Gándara & Contreras, 2008). The increased focus on gaps in achievement, particularly as they apply to K–12 schools, has revolved around test scores and other quantifiable indices of achievement but has given insufficient attention to identifying and dismantling the policies and practices within schools that serve to reify and widen these gaps (LadsonBillings, 2006; Milner, 2010; Nieto, 2006). Also underexamined is how continuing to compare the educational outcomes of youths of color with those of White students without a concurrent analysis of learning opportunities available to them within their respective educational settings normalizes and reinscribes Whiteness (Kirkland, 2010). The voices of those most directly impacted by the differences in academic preparation and outcomes— those with the most to gain from meaningful changes in policy and practice, namely youths themselves—are typically rendered silent in discussions and policy debates regarding the achievement gap. With the goal of inserting the perspectives of Latino youths into the dialogue regarding the education of Latinos and how to improve it, this article addresses the following broad research question: How are Latino youths experiencing and responding to school policies and practices that arise as educators respond to significant increases in the population of Latino students? To this end, I document how racialized oppression, justified through achievement-gap discourses, has been manifested in the educational experiences of Latino youths, thus hindering their educational achievement and stifling their postsecondary ambitions. I also explore youth participatory action research (YPAR) as democratic education and a vehicle for promoting freedom within schools, and conclude by sharing a vision of schools, informed by Latino youths and rooted in a collective quest for freedom, that supports the intellectual and personal growth of all students. Latinization and the Achievement Gap The racial/ethnic and linguistic texture of the United States is changing rapidly, fueled significantly by increases in the population of Latinos in the country. Now representing approximately 16% of the population and numbering almost forty-nine million, Latinos are the second largest racial/ethnic group in the country. The “Latinization” of the United States is most visible in schools. One in every five children currently attending school is Latino, and substantial increases in Latino school enrollment are expected to continue for decades to come. Demographic projections suggest that by 2050 the Latino school-aged population will have grown by more than 150% and Latino youths will then constitute the largest group of students in US schools (Fry & Gonzalez, 2008). Latinos already constitute more than half of all young people in California schools and are the plurality of students in 22 states (Fry & Gonzalez, 2008). Latinos have a long-standing history in the United States, including a noteworthy legacy of activism in the struggle for educational equity (MacDonald, 2005; Murillo et al., 2010). Despite Latinos’ continuous struggle to secure quality educational opportunities for their children, the educational outcomes for many in this community are cause for alarm. School-level data reveal a consistent pattern of underperformance by Latinos on standardized measures of achievement, particularly in contrast to White students. For example, White students have outperformed Latino students in all areas of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) since 1992 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2010). Commonly referred to in popular discourse as the achievement gap, this persistent discrepancy in test scores is largely reflective of gaps in opportunity. The research literature suggests that teacher quality is correlated with gains in academic achievement and performance on standardized tests (Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2007; DarlingHammond, 2000; Loeb, 2000; Hanusheck, 1992), and schools serving large populations of students from lower socioeconomic strata and students of color tend to have the least effective and most novice teachers (Darling-Hammond, 2000; Darling-Hammond & Youngs, 2002; Gándara & Contreras, 2009). Discourses addressing racialized gaps in achievement often fail to consider the myriad factors—many resulting from larger policy initiatives outside of the control of students and families—that can serve to suppress performance. Concurrent with increased attention given to gaps in achievement, a surge in policies aim at curbing the educational opportunities offered to Latino students. Beginning in 1998, around the same time when Latinos were officially dubbed the oxymoronic majority-minority, several states, including California, Arizona, and Massachusetts, eliminated bilingual education in their public schools. This relegated Emergent Bilingual students (commonly referred to as English Language Learners, ELLs), the overwhelming majority of whom were and still are Latino, to one-year sheltered immersion programs despite the fact that it takes, on average, five to seven years to gain academic proficiency in a new language (Crawford, 2003; Cummins, 2000, 2003). As opposed to the more commonly used ELL, Emergent Bilingual considers students’ home language(s) in addition to the language they are learning (mostly English in the United States), thus retaining the possibility and desirability of supporting multilingualism (García, Kleifgen, & Falchi, 2008). The grand narratives surrounding the achievement gap, rooted largely in deficit perspectives of Latino youths and their families, have also profoundly shaped the type of instruction offered to students. Many districts force teachers of Latino youths to adhere to scripted curricula under the assumption that narrowing the curricular focus and spending “more time on task” will improve the performance of Latino youths on standardized measures of achievement (Crocco & Costigan, 2007). These “test-prep pedagogies” (Rodríguez, 2011) often ignore or suppress the cultural identities and frames of reference of Latino students and are incongruent with the goals of democratic education. Hence, the schooling experiences for many Latino youths can be described as “subtractive” (Valenzuela, 1999), suppressing important aspects of students’ cultures and forcing students to shed part of their identities for a chance at school success. Methods Setting and Participants Genuinely concerned by the lack of academic success experienced by so many Latino youth and in an effort to remain connected to urban schools and communities, especially those serving Latino students, I returned to the secondary-school classroom and offered a course on action research at Rana High School (RHS), a pseudonym, between 2008 and 2010, above my course load at the university. The class was embedded in a larger multigenerational research collaborative called Project FUERTE (Future Urban Educators conducting Research to transform Teacher Education). High school student researchers worked with a small cadre of graduate students and me to critically examine the educational experiences of and outcomes for Latino youths and to develop empirically based recommendations for the preparation of teachers, both preservice and inservice, to work with Latino youths (see also Irizarry, 2011). It was our belief that inserting new, heretofore silenced voices into the debates regarding the achievement gap would challenge these problematic discourses and inform the personal and professional development of educators and could result in changes in policy and pedagogy that might lead to improved learning opportunities for Latino students and other groups who have been historically underserved by schools. During the two-year period in which Project FUERTE included students from RHS (the previous year the project was located at a different urban high school), I simultaneously conducted a multiyear ethno