Week # Air Date

You heard about it before and still it's so hard to fathom, children leaving elementary school and junior high school unable to read. Latino children, many of whom speak in both English and Spanish, are in even greater danger of missing out on this most basic skill. Faced with that handicap, they often give-up on their education all together. The drop-out rate for Latinos in this country is above thirty percent, that's twice the rate for African Americans, and almost four times the rate for Anglo students. Behind the numbers are many stories: poverty interfering with learning, overwhelmed teachers coping with large classes, and schools that promote children to the next grade despite gaps in their knowledge. We're gonna share one story now. From Washington, D.C. producer Katy Davis. She's been a mentor and informal madrina, or god mother, to a teenage boy in her neighborhood for six years. We'll call him Julio. Here now is Julio's story about trying to learn how to read.

Julio's story is one that could be seen hundreds of times in school districts across the country, but unlike Julio other Latino kids often don't have access to tutors, or special resources, or adult mentors, a swat team to help them navigate through an education system that often fails to address their needs. Joining us now is panel of Latino education experts to discuss some the issues raised by this report. Dr. Samuel Betances is an educational consultant based in Chicago. He's a sociologist and president of the Fourth Annual Conference on Educating Hispanics. Marcelo Suarez-Orozco is a professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Education and Maria Castillo Rutherford is a second grade bilingual educator at Norman elementary school in Austin Texas. Maria has 23 years of class room experience as both a teacher's aide and a certified teacher. Thanks for joining us all of you.

Finally on this special education program we remember a pioneer in Latino education and civil rights. Antonia Pantoja was born in Puerta de Tierra in Puerto Rico in 1921. She taught in rural Puerto Rican villages before migrating to New York City in 1944. By the time she received her master's degree from Columbia University's School of Social Work in 1954, Antonia Pantoja had seen firsthand the poverty of New York's Puerto Rican community. At that time the drop our rate for New York Latinos was over 80 percent and Antonia Pantoja set out to change that. She recalled those years in a 1994 interview with Latino USA.