Latino education conference set for Cal State San Bernardino
10:00 PM PDT on Saturday, March 27, 2010
As editor of the Journal of Latinos and Education, Enrique Murillo has a deep knowledge of the challenges facing Latino students and of proposed strategies to improve their educational performance.
But the Cal State San Bernardino professor realizes that much of what he and other academics discuss never makes it past the ivory tower.
That's how what was initially planned as a small event to launch the new Handbook of Latinos and Education -- of which Murillo is editor-in-chief -- morphed into a major conference at Cal State San Bernardino on Monday that will be webcast to 69 college campuses nationwide and to four Latin American countries. The event is geared toward a broad audience.
"This summit is a way to create a public forum....," Murillo said. "So many institutions and people are hungry for information on Latino education, especially because of the dire crisis we're in."
Latinos lag behind their white and Asian counterparts on achievement tests, have higher dropout rates and attend college in smaller numbers. The free conference will include discussions of the roots of the problem and how to close the achievement gap.
Art Delgado, superintendent of San Bernardino Unified School District, which is nearly 70 percent Latino, said he will attend the conference in part to learn the strategies that others are pursuing to improve Latino students' educational attainment.
"Nothing gets done unless you begin to talk about the needs of any group of students," Delgado said.
Among the speakers are the director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans; Dolores Huerta, co-founder with Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers union, and Sylvia Mendez, a