Latinos are majority in Texas schools, but can the state handle them?
Latinos are now the largest ethnic group in Texas public schools, surpassing non-Hispanic whites in Lone Star State enrollment for the first time in history.The dramatic change, though, has not been without major pressures on the already financially stressed school systems throughout the state, which ranks 48th in per-student spending. Many of those Latino students are from poor families – including recent immigrants – with major repercussions in classrooms.
And those pressures on the Texas school districts and teachers are expected to heighten as the Hispanic population continues to grow in the state.
“From the start, immigrant and working-class families and people of color don’t have the same opportunities,” says Kandace Vallejo, of the nonprofit Workers Defense Project in Dallas and Austin.Latinos now comprise more than 50 percent of students in the Texas public schools. Newly released statistics by the Texas Education Agency, show there are 2,480,000 Hispanic students in the state’s public schools, representing 50.2 percent of the total enrollment, which is 4,933,617.
These numbers are forcing some Texas school districts to question just how equipped they are to teach a