Global Courant 2023-05-18 01:42:27
Most seminal events affecting American Latino history are not a subject of study in high schools across the country, according to a new reportT by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and UnidosUS, a national advocacy and research organization for Latinos.
The survey found that 87% of major Latino topics were either not covered in U.S. history textbooks or were mentioned in just five or fewer sentences.
Only 28 of the 222 major topics were properly covered, leaving many aspects of the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the US takeover of Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal, the modern civil rights movement, Cold War politics, and legal developments shaping the Latino experience, such as the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and racial segregation,” said a publication in the report.
More than a quarter of the country’s K-12 public school students are Latino.
Researchers analyzed five U.S. history textbooks used in seven states and one AP U.S. history textbook. The study looked at the general representation of the Latino experience over the centuries, the balance between discussions of inequality and the Latino contributions to the US, language use and the authenticity of images.
The most in-depth topics were US land purchases from Mexico and Latin American foreign policy – a 1.4 out of a maximum of three. But when it came to coverage of American Latino “firsts” from 1821 to the present, the coverage was the “thinnest” — a 0.1 out of three.
The report also found that while the AP Handbook and a few other textbooks contextualized the meaning of certain concepts and their impact on the Latino experience — for example, the role of nativism in examining how certain groups of people, including Latinos, were treated — others textbooks “were intellectually flat.”
In addition, the investigation revealed that the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latino Supreme Court justice was the only event in the past 200 years to be cited in all books as a pivotal Latino moment.
The report made several recommendations, including that publishers develop textbooks “that fully expose students to the experiences of Latinos, with rigorous content, including both primary and secondary sources. At a minimum, publishers should commission independent reviews of their texts as measured by the using the groundbreaking content.”
The researchers also urged teachers, parents and community leaders to advocate for more inclusive curricula and materials, and to hold meetings with school officials and school boards.
“As the country becomes more diverse,” Viviana López Green, senior director of the racial equality initiative at UnidosUS, said in a statement, “it is essential for our future employees, business people, community leaders and government officials to learn about the contributions and experiences of all Americans, including Latinos, that of the country largest racial/ethnic minority.”
José Gregory, an American history teacher in Atlanta and an advisor to the project, said in a statement that “the American Latino experience must be accurately represented to our young people in the classroom if we want them to grow up in a society that recognizes and values the contributions of people of color.”
