Strategies for Blacks and Latinos to succeed academically, this article published the findings of Succeeding in the city a report form the New York City Black and Latino Male High School Achievement study. The study conducted face-to-face interviews with over 400 successful minority students from local colleges and high schools. The primary focus was to identify what motivated successful students to defeat failure barriers. In the interviews, students credited several factors to their success: family expectations, relationships with caring adults in the school, ambition to overcome poverty and their ability to elude gangs as the most important.
As a Latino immigrant, public school graduate, urban educator and parent engagement advocate, this topic speaks to me in a very personal way. I would also cite the aforementioned as important factors in my success. I believe family and home relationships are crucial to the potential success of our minority students. I have been teaching regular and ESL students for 13 years; I have no doubt that our families want the best of their children and want them to succeed; the disconnect lies on how minorities define and measure success as opposed to middle class America.
I can certainly speak for my family and the Latino community I represent. Many Latino parents believe that learning the language and securing a job is being successful. The majority of Latino families come from poor and oppressed third world countries; therefore it is understandable that for those families living in the United States, having a job and sending their children to school can also fit the definition of success.
American schools revolve around norms and language that are foreign to our minority students and parents. Urban school communities need to revisit or create home-school communication protocols with the conviction that these relationships are