The materials for this week emphasize educational inequalities specifically among Latinx students’ attainment of degrees and provide potential solutions to addressing such disparities. The reading, Still Falling Through the Cracks, and the movie Precious Knowledge both provide critical insight to the educational inequalities Latinx students’ face in California and Arizona respectively. The reading primarily focuses on providing a statistical report and analysis of the educational pipeline from K-12 education to higher education that is constituted by the parameters of California, Los Angeles County and the Los Angeles Unified School District. Based upon the data, the authors of the report suggest solutions such as changes in pedagogical practices and more structural elements such as the actual curriculum (e.g. offering ethnic studies courses). Precious Knowledge particularly focuses on ethnic studies in the state of Arizona as a point of contention. Many of the students and their families in the film express content with an ethnic studies curriculum as it reinforces the claim made in the Hubert et. al report in which a curriculum that reflects the students’ experiences as students of color can positively impact their academics and achievement. On the other hand, the film also shows how politicians have gone against an ethnic studies curriculum as it is deemed “anti-American.” As a product of LAUSD, Los Angeles County and California, I could really relate to and understand within my own experiences and observations, the findings and recommendations provided by the report. I attended K-12 schools all located across distinct areas of the city; elementary a couple blocks down the road, middle school in Glassell Park, and high school near Downtown LA. My experience across all three schools were animated by a profound connection to the large Latinx student population within LAUSD, and it hasn’t been until much later that I realized how as the 2nd largest school district in the nation and the largest in the state, the district lacks in providing quality and equitable educational opportunities to one of its largest student communities. More specifically, an example that appears with my own experience is the talk of academic and college counseling in which my small Highschool of approximately 800 students shared 2 academic counselors, split by last names A-L and M-Z, and 1 college counselor. Also ethnic studies for the most part are pretty nonexistent within the curriculum. I only came to learn about the term in college.
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