Читать книгу Hispanic Catholics in Catholic Schools - Hosffman Ospino PhD - Страница 7

Section II: Students and Their Families

“Partnership between a Catholic school and the families of the students must continue and be strengthened: not simply to be able to deal with academic problems that may arise, but rather so that the educational goals of the school can be achieved.”

—Congregation for Catholic Education, The Religious Dimension of Education in a Catholic School (1988), n. 42

Hispanic Students in the United States

Ninety-three percent of all Hispanic/Latinos younger than 18 were born in the United States.

The vast majority of Hispanic students are enrolled in public schools. National data indicates that 96% of all school-age Hispanic children attend public schools, just over 2% are enrolled in Catholic schools, and 1.5% attend private, non-Catholic schools.

FIGURE 3

DISTRIBUTION OF K–12 HISPANIC STUDENTS IN THE U.S. BY SCHOOL TYPE

Hispanic Students in Public Schools

Based on estimates from the National Center for Education Statistics, 25% of students enrolled in public schools during the 2013–14 school year identified as Hispanic. Specifically, Hispanics comprised almost 12.5 million of approximately 50 million public school students.³⁷

In most individual states the percentage of students who self-identify as Hispanic is higher in public schools than in Catholic schools,³⁸ except for eight states: Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Maine, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Such was the case during the academic year 2012–13 for which most recent complete state-level data is available. Florida is the state where this reality is more prominent: 35% of Catholic school students are Hispanic compared to 29% of students in public schools.

FIGURE 4

HISPANIC CHILDREN ENROLLED IN CATHOLIC SCHOOLS

Sources: 1) Gray, Mark M. (2014, June). Catholic Schools in the United States in the 21st Century: Importance in Church Life, Challenges, and Opportunities. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. 2) McDonald, D. & Schultz, M.M. (2014). United States Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools 2013–14: The Annual Statistical Report on Schools, Enrollment and Staffing.

Note: Numbers are approximations.

Poverty Among Hispanic Children is Real

In the 2014 report America's Hispanic Children, the. Child Trends Hispanic Institute provides troubling statistics about the economic condition of Hispanic children in the United States. The report notes that 62% of Hispanic children live in low-income families, approximately one-third live in poverty, and one-in-eight lives in deep poverty. More than one-third of Hispanic children live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty.³⁹ Only 11% of non-Hispanic white children live at or below the poverty level.

Family Life

Most Hispanic children live in low-income households. The majority (58%) live with parents who are married. Fifty-nine percent share home-cooked meals with their families at least seven times per week, which is a higher percentage compared to non-Hispanic whites, blacks, and the U.S. population as a whole. Seven out of 10 Hispanic children have at least one parent who is employed fulltime throughout the year.⁴⁰

Language

Eighty-seven percent of school-age Hispanic children speak only English at home or speak English very well. Among foreign-born Hispanic school-age children the proportion is 70%.

Hispanic Adults Raising Hispanic Children

Among Hispanics between the ages of 20 and 49, 51% are U.S. born and 49% are immigrants.

More than 60% of Hispanic adults 18 and older say that they only speak English at home or speak English very well. English language proficiency drops by half among foreign-born Hispanic adults: only 32% report the same level of English language ability.⁴¹

Six in 10 Hispanic adults ages 25 and older have earned a high school degree or less. Approximately one in four has an associate’s degree or attended some college, and 14% hold a bachelor’s degree or higher.⁴²

As of 2013, Hispanic adults 18 and older self-identified with the following religious traditions: Catholic: 55%, Protestant: up to 21% (16% Evangelical/Pentecostal; 5% mainline), Non-religiously affiliated: 18%, Other Christian: 3%, and Other: 1%.⁴³

Hispanic Catholic Students

More than half of all school-age Catholics in the United States are Hispanic. However, only 4% of Hispanic school-age Catholics are enrolled in Catholic schools. By comparison, among all school-age Catholics (including all races/ethnicities), 12% are enrolled in Catholic schools.⁴⁴

Catholic school data for the academic year 2013–14 reveals that only 15% of students enrolled in Catholic schools were Hispanic.⁴⁵

Hispanic Students in Responding Schools

Enrollment

Reponding principals report that the median percentage of their school’s student body identifying as Hispanic is 16%. However, this proportion varies widely based on region: principals from the South and the Midwest said that only about 10% of their students are Hispanic. This figure increases to 16% in the Northeast, and 33% in the West. (See Figure 5)

Hispanic students represented by the survey attend schools with an average enrollment of 272 students compared to the national average of 295 based on NCEA data (2014–15). Yet over half of these Hispanic students go to schools where the majority of the student body is also Hispanic. Roughly one in four attends a school where over 75% of the student body identifies as Hispanic and over half of Hispanic students attend schools where 10% or less of the students are white.

Catholic schools serving Hispanic students report an average of four different languages used by their students in addition to English. In decreasing order of frequency, languages most commonly spoken include Spanish, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

Sharing the Workload

As might be expected, Hispanic students are not evenly distributed across all participating study schools. Instead, just 15% of responding schools educate over half of the Hispanic students represented in the study. These schools—which enroll approximately 140 or more Hispanic students—are not concentrated in any one region. Instead, their distribution (19% in the Northeast, 22% in the Midwest, 30% in the South, and 29% in the West) generally aligns with the regional distribution of all survey respondents.

Where Were Responding Schools’ Hispanic Students and Their Parents Born?

Among schools surveyed, the median percentage of enrolled Hispanic students born in the United States was 80%. The median response ranged from 63% in the Northeast to 86% in the West. By comparison, national-level data for all Hispanic children in the U.S. indicates that 93% of Hispanic children were born in this country.⁴⁶

While the vast majority of Hispanic children in the study schools were born in the United States, most (53%) have at least one foreign-born parent. For approximately 38%, both parents are foreign born.⁴⁷

FIGURE 5

HISPANIC ENROLLMENT AMONG ALL RESPONDING SCHOOLS, BY REGION

The Catholic School and the Hispanic Family

The term family resonates strongly in the ears, minds, and hearts of Catholic educators and Hispanic Catholics. Our shared Catholic heritage constantly invites us to affirm the communal dimension of our faith as members of one family: God’s family. On the one hand, Hispanic cultures embody a strong sense of family life, expressed through multiple levels of relationships that begin with parents and children and regularly embrace relatives as well as many others through bonds of faith and friendship. On the other hand, Catholic schools are family-supportive environments in which educators birth new life as they share knowledge and faith, care for the whole person, work with children and adults as partners, prepare young people to be active citizens in society, and shape souls to achieve fullness across generations. That Catholic schools and Hispanics coincide in the affirmation of the familial bond is not an accident. It is the starting point of a relationship that deserves to be affirmed.

Catholic Schools as Resources

The Hispanic presence is transforming the entire American Catholic experience. In several parts of the country, to speak of Catholicism is to speak of how Hispanic Catholics are witnessing their faith and building the Church. The greatest treasure that Hispanic families have is their children. When asked about the American Dream, most Hispanics name a better future for their children as the number one expression of their vision. For Hispanic Catholic families this new future includes a stronger Catholic identity and better opportunities to contribute to the life of society. One of the best resources that the Church in the United States has to partner with Hispanic families and achieve these goals is Catholic schools. Yet the small percentage of Hispanic children attending our Catholic schools is appalling, especially knowing that the majority of school-age Catholics is Hispanic. Catholic schools need to be resources to Hispanic families not because the Church as an institution finds itself compelled to provide a service to them but because these families are also the Church—along with Catholic families from various other cultures—and their children are vital to its future.

Hispanic Families as Partners and Contributors

In the history of education in the United States, Catholic schools stand out as institutions that take seriously the conviction that welcoming a child means welcoming a family. Many are the stories of women and men religious, priests, deacons, and lay teachers/principals in Catholic schools who took time, again and again, to engage families, making a memorable difference. We need to continue to do this with renewed commitment in an increasingly Hispanic Church. Engaging Hispanic families requires that all in our schools understand the complexity of the Hispanic experience: not all Hispanics are immigrants, though many are; not all Hispanics are poor, though many are; not all Hispanics speak Spanish, though many do. Hispanic families have much to contribute to our Catholic schools. But such contributions are only possible when schools genuinely create the spaces for these families to truly express their voice—and this happens very often in Spanish. Hispanic families can be instrumental in exposing the Catholic school community to the richness of cultural traditions that today give a new air to American Catholicism. The very presence of these families challenges our educational institutions. They often pose questions that perhaps the majority of families attending our schools until recently had ceased to ask. When Hispanic families see themselves as true partners and contributors to the success of our Catholic schools, they will not hesitate to invest in their growth just as countless Catholic families have done in the past. ■

Questions for Dialogue and Reflection

1. Why is it important that everyone in the Catholic school, parish, and diocese takes the time to learn more about the social and cultural realities that shape the lives of Hispanic families and children?

2. What is your reaction the fact that barely 4% of all Hispanic Catholic school-age children are in Catholic schools? What strategies do you suggest to significantly increase that percentage?

3. What must change to start treating Hispanic families as partners of Catholic schools and not merely as recipients of a benefit?