As the largest and fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the country, Latinos' educational success is a national priority. In the Los Angeles Unified School district, the country's largest, high school graduating rates for Latinos hover at near 40%. Examining this institutional and societal tragedy through the school-to-prison pipeline…

This article asserts that schools have tremendous positive power over the lives of students--the power to teach them academics; the power to socialize them to be engaged citizens; the power to transform their lives in positive ways--but schools also have negative power: the power to mark a student with a discipline record; the power to force a…

This article presents findings from two research projects concerning the educational achievement and well-being of Hispanic children. The first set of findings is from the first-ever study to calculate high school graduation rates for children with different levels of reading skill in third grade, by race-ethnicity and poverty experience. This…

Through combining the methodology of portraiture with the epistemological stance of youth participatory action research, this article positions Latino/a youth as experts with their encounters with the school-to-prison pipeline. This article examines what it's like to live within the tight and probational spaces of criminal justice-based…

In this paper, I argue that school-to-prison pipeline (SPP) research on Latina/os shows the existence of an interconnected system of policies and social practices, in and out of schools, punitive and non-punitive in nature, which together work to criminalize Latina/o students and their families. This intersection (Crenshaw, 1991) and multiplicity…

The exploration into cultural practices occurring in households has become more fluid and transparent process thanks to the presence of mobile technologies that allow members of a group to capture daily occurrences. This case study explored ways in which three Latino preservice teachers used mobile devices to discover connections between…

This article builds upon a community cultural wealth framework (Yosso, 2005) to discuss how strategies for school persistence are articulated, cultivated and employed through individual aspirations and practices. The analysis draws from testimonios of six Latina/o young adults between the ages of 18 and 20 living in California's 9-County…

This article examined the manner in which Latina teachers' enacted agency to challenge institutional barriers impacting Latinas/os in the educational system. A theoretical framework is suggested as a tool to describe the practices of four Latina teachers working in elementary schools serving a high population of Latino students in Southern…

In 2002, the New Mexico State University College Assistance Migrant Program (NMSU CAMP) was created to increase the number of baccalaureate degrees held by students from farmworker backgrounds by mediating structural impediments that typically normalize post-secondary inequities for this population. Migrant and seasonal farmworker students are…

The essay argues that the Coleman Report helped give credence to contemporary deficit ideologies in education by proclaiming that schools do not make much of a difference in the educational outcomes of students in poverty including Latino communities. Furthermore, the author explores how deficit ideologies influence compensatory funding, in…

The work of addressing the challenge of the education of Latinos/as has begun through, among other efforts, the National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project (NLERAP). Beginning in 2000 as a national initiative of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos at Hunter College, NLERAP's goal has been to add multiple Latino/a perspectives to the…

From the start, NLERAP has been based on two major premises: one is that a sociocultural and sociopolitical approach to learning is more effective than a traditional approach, particularly in the case of populations that have historically been marginalized through their education; and the second is that research is more meaningful and inclusive…

This article presents a brief demographic portrait, with particular emphasis on school-related issues, that points to the dire situation of Latino/a education. According to the 2010 Census, the number of Hispanics (the term used in government data) currently was 50,477,594 million, an increase of 43 percent since 2000, making this group the…

In this article, the authors examine some of the historical instructional approaches that have been used with Latino/a students, and they analyze the impact these have had on their educational experiences and outcomes. They also highlight some participatory action research projects and culturally responsive pedagogy as promising instructional…

The problem of low academic attainment for Latino/a students may be a result of the situation at the K-12 levels, a situation that is beyond the control of students or their families (Martinez, 2003). Analyses of school success must take into account the social and political hierarchies in schools, school systems, and communities, as well as the…