The fact that Latina/o students are losing ground to their non-Latino White peers in four-year college enrollment and bachelor's degree attainment even as Latino college enrollment and graduation rates are at an all time high constitutes a perplexing puzzle. In order to realize the potential "demographic dividend" embedded in the diverse youth population entering the U.S. workforce in the next two decades, it will be critical to fill in the missing pieces of what has been referred to as the Hispanic college puzzle. The current study contributes several new pieces to the puzzle of Latina/o postsecondary attainment. Using a national longitudinal database and structural equation modeling techniques, I investigate the possibility that the degree of alignment, or, alternatively, misalignment, between high school students' postsecondary expectations and their actions taken toward fulfilling those ambitions mediates intergenerational resource transmission. The results demonstrate that the extent to which students with high postsecondary expectations prepare during high school to realize their goals can have a marked influence on the level at which they enroll in college. This is true regardless of whether the student is White or Latino, and irrespective of nativity status among Latino youth. The findings also suggest that there are meaningful differences both between Latino and non-Latino White students, as well as within the Latino youth population across generations, with respect to the availability and convertibility of various types of parent capital--in particular, forms of parent social capital--into higher levels of student alignment and college enrollment. Overall, the results of this research suggest that alignment can serve much like a bridge on the road to college, such that when students are able to align their actions with their college expectations and then fully capitalize on that match, they are more likely to enroll in a four-year institution. However, in order for Latino students to bridge their college expectations to higher levels of enrollment, students and their families must be able to forge the sorts of social connections that can help them access and make use of timely and accurate information and guidance during the college choice and enrollment process.

A direct democracy initiative that placed restrictions on bilingual education was codified into the California Education Code by the passage of Proposition 227 in 1998. This initiative attempted to address the problem of educating the current 1.4 million English learners enrolled in public schools who continue to lag behind native-English-speaking students academically (California Department of Education, 2013; Umansky & Reardon, 2014). This study focused on policy entrepreneurs in relation to Proposition 227 – both proponents and opponents of the Proposition – and the political strategies they employed to garner support for their preferred policies via the mass media. Research shows the attention newspapers give to education, including language education policy, can influence the education of immigrant students and ELs (Wright, 2005).

The methodological approach employed to study the political language used by policy entrepreneurs, interpretive policy analysis, and the guiding conceptual framework, political spectacle, aligned well to help uncover and understand the generation of meaning(s) by policy entrepreneurs and media around Proposition 227. Political spectacle is constructed via the language and images the media use when presenting political views and often serves to distort public policies and maintain the status quo (Edelman, 1988). An in-depth media study was conducted that included data from California newspapers covering three regions across the state and videos downloaded from a popular social media site. Findings revealed spectacle around Proposition 227 including the use of symbolic language to depict bilingual education as a failure, the casting of immigrant students as objects, and the enactment of dramatic actions that benefited the policy entrepreneurs rather than the immigrant students. The study also revealed Proposition 227 to exemplify the joining of three streams – problem, policy, and political – which opened a window through which the authors of Proposition 227 were able to push their policy (Kingdon, 1995). The study suggests that attending to the political language used by policy entrepreneurs can shed light on the political strategies that work to convey influential policy messages via the media. This insight should aid in the development of more effective and equitable language education policies in the future.

Students in the United States are highly mobile. Previous research has shown that the majority of students in the United States change schools between grades 1 and 12 for reasons other than promotion from one level to another (e.g., elementary to middle school.). Research also has found that student mobility is generally detrimental to student achievement. Despite this evidence, the issue of student mobility has not received much attention from educational researchers, practitioners, or policy makers.

In this report we examine student mobility among California Latino adolescents. Student mobility may be especially important in California because of its highly mobile population. Latinos are the largest and fastest growing segment of the state population. According to California Department of Finance estimates, the Latino public-school population is projected to triple in size between 1986 and 2006, while the non-Latino public-school population is projected to decrease (see Figure 1.1). Consequently, if student mobility can be problematic for both students and schools, as previous research suggest, it is especially important to understand the nature of mobility among the Latino population.

Using longitudinal data on two samples of California students—the first a group of 8th grade students who were surveyed over a sex-year period from 1988 to 1994; and the second a group of low-income, urban Latino 7th grade students who were first studied over a six-year period from 1990 to 1996—this study examined the incidence, causes, and consequences of student mobility, particularly during high school. Throughout this study we examine differences between Latino and non-Latino white students, as well as differences among Latino students. Here we summarize some of the major findings of this study.

Background

Methods

Results