A Correlated Constraints Model of Risk and Resilience for Latino Students with Emotional/Behavioral Disorders.

As of July 2001, people of Hispanic origin are the largest minority group in the United States (Armas, 2003). In addition, they are the fastest growing racial/ethnic minority group growing by 58% between 1990 and 2000 and accounting for 40% of the total U.S. population increase (Guzman, 2001). Although this rapid and substantial increase in the Latino population has not gone entirely unnoticed, this population has been ignored too often. In acknowledgment of this problem, the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans (www.ed.gov/offices/ OMA/Hispanic) was formed to bring greater attention to what they described as "the growing crisis of the 'invisible' Hispanic students" (Figuroa & Hernandez, 2000, p. v). One of the greatest aspects of this problem is the significant and consistent achievement gap between Latino students and their White peers.The Latino-White Achievement GapExamination of the results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows that Latino students have performed significantly lower than their White peers in reading (Lee, Griggs, & Donahue, 2007), math (Lee, Griggs, & Dion, 2007), and writing (Persky, Daane, & Jin, 2003). These differences are in all three grade levels of the NAEP (Grades 4, 8, and 12) and have remained significant over the past 30 years (Campbell, Hombo, & Mazzeo, 2000; Lee, 2006). Although this achievement gap appeared to decrease slightly from 1973 to 1982, it has changed little since then and may in fact be widening (Lee, 2002, 2006). The gap remains even when parent income and housing value are controlled for (Meece & Kurtz-Costes, 2001). One of the major goals of the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) is to eliminate the minority achievement gap. The elimination of this gap is to be achieved through targeting of Title 1 funding and programs; however, this has been occurring for more than 30 years (Darder, Torres, Gutierrez, & Darder, 1997). Why then, despite funding and interventions designed to reduce the achievement gap, does it remain a persistent phenomenon?The Relation Between Achievement and BehaviorOne hypothesis of the robustness of the achievement gap despite years of targeted solutions is that the gap remains steady because of the strong relation between achievement and behavior (Hinshaw, 1992b; Maguin & Loeber, 1996). Although causality has not been determined in the relation between these two variables (McMichael, 1979), it has been posited that poor performance in one area may act to inhibit or suppress performance in the other. Some authors contend that it is achievement that drives behavior (Huffman, Mehlinger, & Kerivan, 2001; Williams & McGee, 1994), whereas others contend that it is behavior that drives achievement (Cornwall & Bawden, 1992; Peth-Pierce, 2000). No matter whether one causes the other or not, the well-documented relation between achievement and behavior (Falk & Wehby, 2001; Hinshaw, 1992a; Maughan, Pickles, Hagell, Rutter, & Yule, 1996; Richmond & Blagg, 1985) indicates that no discussion of one is complete without inclusion of the other (Gunter & Denny, 1998). This does not bode well for discussions of the achievement of Latino students because there is little research that has focused on their behavior issues (Hoernicke, Kallam, & Tablada, 1994).Behavior and Latino StudentsBehavior issues of Latino students may receive negligible attention because they are actually underrepresented in programs for students with emotional or behavioral disorders (Donovan & Cross, 2002). What this means is that Latino students in the United States are identified as having an emotional disturbance (ED) approximately one half as often as White students (Donovan et al., 2002). This is represented by a relative risk ratio of 0.54 (U.S. Department of Education, 2006)- a risk ratio significantly below 1 .00 indicates an underrepresentation of this group in that category (for a more thorough description of the use of the risk ratio for determining disproportionality, see Hosp & Reschly, 2003). …