The nation’s Hispanic student population reached a number of milestones in 2011, according to an analysis of newly available U.S. Census Bureau data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.

For the first time, the number of 18- to 24-year-old Hispanics enrolled in college exceeded 2 million and reached a record 16.5% share of all college enrollments. 2 Hispanics are the largest minority group on the nation’s college campuses, a milestone first achieved last year (Fry, 2011). But as their growth among all college-age students continues to outpace other groups, Hispanics are now, for the first time, the largest minority group among the nation’s four-year college and university students. And for the first time, Hispanics made up one-quarter (25.2%) of 18- to 24-year-old students enrolled in two-year colleges.

In the nation’s public schools, Hispanics also reached new milestones. For the first time, one-in-four (24.7%) public elementary school students were Hispanic, following similar milestones reached recently by Hispanics among public kindergarten students (in 2007) and public nursery school students (in 2006). Among all pre-K through 12th grade public school students, a record 23.9% were Hispanic in 2011.

Read the full report.

Driven by a single-year surge of 24% in Hispanic enrollment, the overall number of 18- to 24-year-olds attending college in the United States hit an all-time high of 12.2 million in October 2010, according to a Pew Hispanic Center analysis of recently released data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

College-age Hispanics accounted for 1.8 million, or 15%, of the overall enrollment of young adults in two- or four-year colleges in 2010 — setting records both for their number and share of young college students. More Hispanic young adults enrolled in college from 2009 to 2010 than young blacks and young Asian Americans. The number of young whites enrolling in college decreased during that period.

Rising educational attainment was a dominant driver of the enrollment trends for young Hispanic adults, over the long term as well as in recent years. Hispanic educational attainment rose sharply from 2009 to 2010: the share of Hispanic 18-to-24-year-olds who have completed high school increased to 73% in 2010 from 70% in 2009, and the share of young Hispanic high school graduates who are attending college increased to 44% in 2010 from 39% in 2009.

Read the full report at pewhispanic.org for more details on the factors behind enrollment trends among Hispanics and also for young blacks, whose college enrollment reached its highest level on record in 2010.

Just one-in-ten Hispanic high school dropouts has a General Educational Development (GED) credential, widely regarded as the best “second chance” pathway to college, vocational training and military service for adults who have not graduated from high school. By contrast, two-in-ten black high school dropouts and three-in-ten white high school dropouts have a GED, according to a Pew Hispanic Center analysis of newly available educational attainment data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2008 American Community Survey.

The relatively low level of GED credentialing among Hispanic high school dropouts is especially notable because Hispanics have a much higher high school dropout rate than do blacks or whites. Some 41% of Hispanics ages 20 and older in the United States do not have a regular high school diploma, versus 23% of comparably aged blacks and 14% of whites.

Among Hispanics, there are significant differences between the foreign born and the native born in high school diploma attainment rates and GED credentialing rates. Some 52% of foreign-born Latino adults are high school dropouts, compared with 25% of the native born. And among Hispanic dropouts, some 21% of the native born have a GED, compared with just 5% of the foreign born.

Hispanics are the nation’s largest minority group; they make up 47 million, or 15%, of the population of the United States. As of 2008, there were 29 million Hispanics ages 20 and older; of this group, 41% are native born and 59% are foreign born.

This Pew Hispanic Center report also analyzes labor market outcomes of Hispanic adults based on whether they dropped out of high school, have a GED or obtained a regular high school diploma or more. Among its key findings:

• As of 2008, Hispanic adults with a GED had a higher unemployment rate than Hispanic adults with a high school diploma — 9% versus 7%.
• However, Hispanic full-time, full-year workers with a GED had about the same mean annual earnings ($33,504) as Hispanic full-time, full-year workers with a high school diploma ($32,972).

Read the full report at pewhispanic.org.

This is part of a Pew Research Center series of reports exploring the behaviors, values and opinions of the teens and twenty-somethings that make up the Millennial Generation

Overview

Hispanics are the largest and youngest minority group in the United States. One- in-five schoolchildren is Hispanic. One-in-four newborns is Hispanic. Never before in this country’s history has a minority ethnic group made up so large a share of the youngest Americans. By force of numbers alone, the kinds of adults these young Latinos become will help shape the kind of society America becomes in the 21st century.

This report takes an in-depth look at Hispanics who are ages 16 to 25, a phase of life when young people make choices that — for better and worse — set their path to adulthood. For this particular ethnic group, it is also a time when they navigate the intricate, often porous borders between the two cultures they inhabit — American and Latin American.

The report explores the attitudes, values, social behaviors, family characteristics, economic well-being, educational attainment and labor force outcomes of these young Latinos. It is based on a new Pew Hispanic Center telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 2,012 Latinos, supplemented by the Pew Hispanic Center’s analysis of government demographic, economic, education and health data sets.

The data paint a mixed picture. Young Latinos are satisfied with their lives, optimistic about their futures and place a high value on education, hard work and career success. Yet they are much more likely than other American youths to drop out of school and to become teenage parents. They are more likely than white and Asian youths to live in poverty. And they have high levels of exposure to gangs.

These are attitudes and behaviors that, through history, have often been associated with the immigrant experience. But most Latino youths are not immigrants. Two-thirds were born in the United States, many of them descendants of the big, ongoing wave of Latin American immigrants who began coming to this country around 1965.

As might be expected, they do better than their foreign-born counterparts on many key economic, social and acculturation indicators analyzed in this report. They are much more proficient in English and are less likely to drop out of high school, live in poverty or become a teen parent.

But on a number of other measures, U.S.-born Latino youths do no better than the foreign born. And on some fronts, they do worse.

For example, native-born Latino youths are about twice as likely as the foreign born to have ties to a gang or to have gotten into a fight or carried a weapon in the past year. They are also more likely to be in prison.

The picture becomes even more murky when comparisons are made among youths who are first generation (immigrants themselves), second generation (U.S.-born children of immigrants) and third and higher generation (U.S.-born grandchildren or more far-removed descendants of immigrants).¹

For example, teen parenthood rates and high school drop-out rates are much lower among the second generation than the first, but they appear higher among the third generation than the second. The same is true for poverty rates.

Identity and Assimilation

Throughout this nation’s history, immigrant assimilation has always meant something more than the sum of the sorts of economic and social measures outlined above. It also has a psychological dimension. Over the course of several generations, the immigrant family typically loosens its sense of identity from the old country and binds it to the new.

It is too soon to tell if this process will play out for today’s Hispanic immigrants and their offspring in the same way it did for the European immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries. But whatever the ultimate trajectory, it is clear that many of today’s Latino youths, be they first or second generation, are straddling two worlds as they adapt to the new homeland.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center’s National Survey of Latinos, more than half (52%) of Latinos ages 16 to 25 identify themselves first by their family’s country of origin, be it Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republican, El Salvador or any of more than a dozen other Spanish-speaking countries. An additional 20% generally use the terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” first when describing themselves. Only about one-in-four (24%) generally use the term “American” first.

Among the U.S.-born children of immigrants, “American” is somewhat more commonly used as a primary term of self-identification. Even so, just 33% of these young second generation Latinos use American first, while 21% refer to themselves first by the terms Hispanic or Latino, and the plurality — 41% — refer to themselves first by the country their parents left in order to settle and raise their children in this country.

Only in the third and higher generations do a majority of Hispanic youths (50%) use “American” as their first term of self-description.

Immigration in Historical Perspective

Measured in raw numbers, the modern Latin American-dominated immigration wave is by far the largest in U.S. history. Nearly 40 million immigrants have come to the United States since 1965. About half are from Latin America, a quarter from Asia and the remainder from Europe, Canada, the Middle East and Africa. By contrast, about 14 million immigrants came during the big Northern and Western European immigration wave of the 19th century and about 18 million came during the big Southern and Eastern European-dominated immigration wave of the early 20th century.²

However, the population of the United States was much smaller during those earlier waves. When measured against the size of the U.S. population during the period when the immigration occurred, the modern wave’s average annual rate of 4.6 new immigrants per 1,000 population falls well below the 7.7 annual rate that prevailed in the mid- to late 19th century and the 8.8 rate at the beginning of the 20th century.

All immigration waves produce backlashes of one kind or another, and the latest one is no exception. Illegal immigration, in particular, has become a highly-charged political issue in recent times. It is also a relatively new phenomenon; past immigration waves did not generate large numbers of illegal immigrants because the U.S. imposed fewer restrictions on immigration flow in the past than it does now.

The current wave may differ from earlier waves in other ways as well. More than a few immigration scholars have voiced skepticism that the children and grandchildren of today’s Hispanic immigrants will enjoy the same upward mobility experienced by the offspring of European immigrants in previous centuries.³

Their reasons vary, and not all are consistent with one another. Some scholars point to structural changes in modern economies that make it more difficult for unskilled laborers to climb into the middle class. Some say the illegal status of so many of today’s immigrants is a major obstacle to their upward mobility. Some say the close proximity of today’s sending countries and the relative ease of modern global communication reduce the felt need of immigrants and their families to acculturate to their new country. Some say the fatalism of Latin American cultures is a poor fit in a society built on Anglo-Saxon values. Some say that America’s growing tolerance for cultural diversity may encourage modern immigrants and their offspring to retain ethnic identities that were seen by yesterday’s immigrants as a handicap. (The melting pot is dead. Long live the salad bowl.) Alternatively, some say that Latinos’ brown skin makes assimilation difficult in a country where white remains the racial norm.

It will probably take at least another generation’s worth of new facts on the ground to know whether these theories have merit. But it is not too soon to take some snapshots and lay down some markers. This report does so by assembling a wide range of empirical evidence (some generated by our own new survey; some by our analysis of government data) and subjecting it to a series of comparisons: between Latinos and non-Latinos; between young Latinos and older Latinos; between foreign-born Latinos and native-born Latinos; and between first, second, and third and higher generations of Latinos.

The generational analyses presented here do not compare the outcomes of individual Latino immigrants with those of their own children or grandchildren. Instead, our generational analysis compares today’s young Latino immigrants with today’s children and grandchildren of yesterday’s immigrants. As such, the report can provide some insights into the intergenerational mobility of an immigrant group over time. But it cannot fully disentangle the many factors that may help explain the observed patterns-be they compositional effects (the different skills, education levels and other forms of human capital that different cohorts of immigrants bring) or period effects (the different economic conditions that confront immigrants in different time periods).

Readers should be especially careful when interpreting findings about the third and higher generation, for this is a very diverse group. We estimate that about 40% are the grandchildren of Latin American immigrants, while the remainder can trace their roots in this country much farther back in time.

For some in this mixed group, endemic poverty and its attendant social ills have been a part of their families, barrios and colonias for generations, even centuries. Meantime, others in the third and higher generation have been upwardly mobile in ways consistent with the generational trajectories of European immigrant groups. Because the data we use in this report do not allow us to separate out the different demographic sub-groups within the third and higher generation, the overall numbers we present are averages that often mask large variances within this generation.

Read the full report at pewhispanic.org

<sub>1. In this report when we refer to the third and higher generations of Latinos, we are describing a group with diverse family histories vis-à-vis the United States. We estimate that 40% of this group are grandchildren of immigrants. The rest are more far removed from the immigrants in their families. And a small share comes from families that never immigrated at all — their ancestors were living in what was then Mexico when their land became a part of the United States in the 19th century as a result of war, treaty, annexation and/or purchase.
2. These estimates do not include U.S. residents born in Puerto Rico. However, in the rest of the report, people born in Puerto Rico are included among the foreign born because they are from a Spanish-dominant culture and because on many points their attitudes, views and beliefs are much closer to Hispanics born abroad than to Latinos born in the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
3. See, for example, Gans (1992) and Portes, Fernandez-Kelly and Haller (2008).</sub>

Executive Summary

Young Latino adults in the United States are more likely to be in school or the work force now than their counterparts were in previous generations. In 1970, 77% of Hispanics ages 16 to 25¹ were either working, going to school or serving in the military; by 2007, 86% of Latinos in this coming-of-age group were taking part in these skill-building endeavors, according to a comprehensive analysis of four decades of Census Bureau data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.

The growth over time in the share of youths involved in such market-oriented activities is not limited to Latinos. Similar changes have occurred among black and white youths. But the Latino trends are particularly noteworthy because their share of the young adult population has risen so dramatically during this period — to 18% in 2007, more than triple their 5% share in 1970.

The increase in their attachment to school or the work world (which includes employment by the military) has been driven mainly by the changes in the endeavors of young Hispanic females. In 1970, only one-third of young female Hispanics were enrolled in school or college; by 2007, nearly half of young female Hispanics were pursuing schooling.

The labor force participation of young female Latinos has also grown during this time period, from 40% in 1970 to 54% in 2007.

Even with these gains, however, nearly one-in-five (19%) female Latino young adults in 2007 were not in school or in the work force. This figure exceeds the 16% share of young black men who were not in school or in the work force, a surprising comparison in light of the fact that the labor market and schooling difficulties of young black men have received much more public attention than have those of young Hispanic women.

In the case of young Latinas, motherhood accounts for some — but not most — of their detachment from work and school. Birthrates among young Latino women are higher than those of whites or blacks, but these rates have been falling for decades. In 1970, two-thirds of the young Hispanic women who were not in school or the work force were mothers; by 2007, this share had dropped to less than a majority.

Looking more broadly at the changing pathways into adulthood across all dimensions of race and ethnicity, Hispanic youths (young men and women combined) lagged behind white youths in 2007 by about the same gap that their counterparts trailed whites in 1970. In 2007, 93% of white youths were either in school or working, compared with 86% of Hispanic youths. As Table 1 shows, Hispanics also had a lower school enrollment rate (44%) in 2007 than either white (58%) or black (53%) youths. The labor force participation rate of young Hispanics in 2007 (62%) also trailed the rate of white youths (66%), due to the lower labor force participation of young Hispanic females.

Meanwhile, engagement rates for Hispanic and black youths were identical in 2007 (86%), and they were also very close in 1970 (77% and 78%, respectively).

The growing attachment of Latino youth with school and work comes during an era of dramatic changes in the U.S. economy. For those without a college degree, the pathways into middle-income status appeared to vanish with the rapid loss of manufacturing jobs.² The income gap between those with a college degree and those without increased steadily from the 1970s onwards.

Another major development since 1970 is the entry of women into the labor force in large numbers. In 1970, only 43% of all women were working or looking for work. That share rose to 60% by 1999.³

This report analyzes the changing pathways of Latino and other youth into adulthood from 1970 to 2007. In addition to exploring their school and work patterns, it reviews trends in military service and incarceration among young men. For young women, the report also focuses on motherhood.

Patterns in Education

Young Hispanics’ growing pursuit of schooling since 1970 has occurred at both the secondary and post-secondary levels. Hispanic high school dropout rates have sharply declined since 1970, when more than one-third of young Hispanics were high school dropouts. By 2007, fewer than one-fifth were dropouts.

College enrollment has also expanded among Hispanic youths. In 1970, only 25% of young Hispanic high-school completers were enrolled in college at the time of interview. By 2007, almost 40% of Hispanic high-school completers were pursuing college.

But white and black youths are also increasingly staying in school and attending college, and Hispanic youths continue to trail white and black youths in school enrollment. In 2007, for example, 19% of Hispanic youths were high school dropouts, compared with 10% of black youths and 5% of white youths.

Labor Force Participation

The most notable development is in the increase in labor force participation — share of young adults at work or looking for work — among women. In 1970, 40% of young Latino women were at work or looking for work (whether or not they were also enrolled in school or college). That share rose to 54% by 2007. Among young Latino men the labor force participation rate increased from 65% in 1970 to 68% in 2007. Male Latino youth are active in the labor force at the same rate as male white youth and the share of either exceeds the share of male black youth. However, in spite of the increase in labor force participation by young Hispanic women, they continue to have the lowest rate of labor force participation of all the race/gender groups examined.

Marriage and Parenting

Young Hispanics’ growing pursuit of school or the work world since 1970 reflects changes in patterns of marriage and parenting. During this period, young women, including young Hispanic women, have grown less likely to marry during their youth. They have also become less likely to be mothers. In 1970, 35% of young Hispanic females were mothers. By 2007, only 21% were mothers. Young mothers are less likely than other young women to continue their schooling. As young motherhood has waned, young Hispanics’ pursuit of market-oriented pathways has grown.

Other Pathways: Military Down, Prison Up

One pathway into adulthood that has significantly diminished for young Hispanics is military service. In 1970, at a time when a military draft was in place, 5% of young Hispanic males were in the armed forces. By 2007, only 1% of young Hispanic males were in the military. White and black male youth employment in the military has also declined since 1970. For example, 2% of young white males were in the armed forces in 2007, down from 8% in 1970.

A pathway that has grown more common over time — albeit from a small base — is prison or jail. By 1990, about 2% of Hispanic youths were incarcerated, up from less than 1% in 1970. There has been little change in the incarceration share since 1990. The share of white youths incarcerated has remained about 1% since 1970. Black youths incarceration peaked at about 5% in 2000 and has since declined to 4% in 2007.

Immigration and Demographics

The sharp growth in the Hispanic share of this 16-to-25 age group has been driven by a combination of high immigration levels and high birthrates among Latino immigrants. These trends in turn have altered the demographic profile of Latino youths. The white and African-American youth populations continue to be largely native born. In contrast, the origins of Latino youths have shifted since 1970 — not once but twice. In 1970, only one-third of Hispanic youths were foreign born. By 2000, almost half of Hispanic youths were immigrants. Since then, the share of Hispanic youths who are foreign born has receded (to 39% by 2007) as more Latino young adults are the children of the immigrants who arrived in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

Continue reading the full report at pewhispanic.org.

<sub>1. This report refers to those who are ages 16 to 25 as “young adults” or “youths.”
2. Estimates from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the manufacturing sector’s share of total employment decreased from 24% in 1970 to 10% in 2007.
3. These are the labor force participation rates as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.</sub>

The student population of America’s suburban public schools has shot up by 3.4 million in the past decade and a half, and virtually all of this increase (99%) has been due to the enrollment of new Latino, black and Asian students, according to a Pew Hispanic Center analysis of public school data. Once a largely white enclave, suburban school districts in 2006-07 educated a student population that was 41.4% non-white, up from 28% in 1993-94 and not much different from the 43.7% non-white share of the nation’s overall public school student population. At the same time, suburban school districts have been gaining “market share”; they educated 38% of the nation’s public school students in 2006-07, up from 35% in 1993-94.

The most potent driver of all these trends has been the near doubling of the Latino share of suburban school district enrollment — to 20% in 2006-07, from 11% in 1993-94. Over this same time period, the black share grew to 15% from 12% and the Asian share rose slightly, to 6% from 5%. Overall, white students made up just 59% of the enrollment in suburban public schools in 2006-07, down from 72% in 1993-94.

The movement of minority students into suburban schools has had the overall effect of slightly reducing levels of ethnic and racial segregation throughout the nation’s 93,430 public schools. However, trends vary for different minority groups, community types, school districts and, especially, individual schools. For example, despite the sharp rise in the racial and ethnic diversity of suburban district enrollments overall, there has been only a modest increase in the racial and ethnic diversity of student populations at the level of the individual suburban school.

These findings are based on an analysis of the most recent available enrollment figures for the nation’s public schools. The National Center for Education Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education collects this information and also classifies school districts as being suburban, city or town/rural districts.

School-Level Diversity in the Suburbs

In 2006-07, the typical white suburban student attended a school whose student body was 75% white; in 1993-94, this same figure had been 83%. So at a time when the white share of student enrollment in suburban school districts was falling by 13 percentage points (from 72% in 1993-94 to 59% in 2006-07), the exposure of the typical white suburban student to minority students in his or her own school was growing by a little more than half that much — or 8 percentage points.

Meantime, the typical black suburban school student in 2006-07 attended a school that was 34% white, down from 43% white in 1993-94. The typical Hispanic suburban student attended a school that was 31% white, down from 40% white in 1993-94. And the typical Asian suburban school student attended a school that was 48% white, down from 55% white in 1993-94. Thus, suburban minority students’ exposure to white students has declined since 1993-94, reflecting the overall lower proportion of white students in suburban district enrollments.

Looking at the exposure of minority suburban students to their own racial or ethnic group rather than to whites, a different pattern emerges for Hispanics than for blacks or Asians.

Suburban Hispanic students are increasingly attending schools whose student bodies have a high percentage of Hispanics. In 2006-07, the typical suburban Hispanic student attended a school that was 49% Latino, up from 42% Latino in 1993-94. By contrast, there was little change during this period in the levels of racial isolation of black and Asian suburban students. In 2006-07, the typical suburban black student attended a school that was 44% black, up only slightly from 43% black in 1993-94, and the typical suburban Asian student attended a school that was 23% Asian, down slightly from 24% Asian in 1993-94.

The National Perspective

The movement of minority students into suburban school districts since 1993-94 has had an impact on national trends in minority student isolation. Nationally, the typical black student in 2006-07 attended a school that was 52% black, down from 54% black in 1993-94. This modest decline is partly attributable to the fact that a greater share of black students are now educated in suburban schools, where they tend to be less isolated than in city schools. Nationally, the typical Hispanic student in 2006-07 attended a school that was 55% Hispanic, up from 52% Hispanic in 1993-94. The increase in Hispanic isolation nationally would have been even greater in the absence of the shift of Hispanic students out of city school districts and into suburban areas. Nationally, the typical Asian student in 2006-07 attended a school that was 23% Asian, up from 22% in 1993-94.

When it comes to increases in public school student enrollment, the suburbs are where most of the action has been over the past decade and a half. Since 1993-94, two-thirds of the 5.1 million increase in public school enrollment nationwide has occurred in suburban school districts. In 1993-94, city school districts educated a majority of the nation’s minority students. That is no longer the case. City school districts educated 47% of the nation’s Hispanic students in 2006-07, down from 54% in 1993-94. Similarly, city school districts educated 48% of the nation’s black students in 2006-07, down from 54% in 1993-94. In addition, a declining share of the nation’s Asian students are educated in city school districts. The movement out of city schools has nearly exclusively been suburban school districts’ gain because the share of the nation’s minority students educated in town/rural school districts has been stagnant or has declined.

Overall, suburban schools are much closer in racial and ethnic makeup to the nation’s public school population as a whole than are city schools, which tend to be disproportionately minority, or rural and town schools, which tend to be disproportionately white. The typical minority student in a city school has fewer white classmates than does a peer who attends a suburban school. In 2006-07, the enrollment of a city school attended by the typical black or Hispanic student was about 20% white and 80% minority. Most of the minority students in these schools were students of the same race/ethnicity as themselves. The typical city black student attended a school with 60% black enrollment, and the typical city Latino student went to a school with 63% Hispanic enrollment.

These levels of racial/ethnic isolation are significantly above those of their peers educated in suburban school districts. Minority students in town and rural school districts tend to have more exposure to white students than do minority students in suburban school districts. The typical town/rural black student attended a school with 47% white enrollment, and the typical town/rural Hispanic student attended a 43% white school. However, minority students in town/rural school districts tend not to be less isolated than their suburban peers. The typical town/rural black student attended a school with 44% black enrollment, and the typical town/rural Latino student went to a school with 47% Hispanic enrollment.

Asian students in town/rural school districts are less isolated than their suburban counterparts. The typical town/rural Asian student attended a school with 5% Asian enrollment, compared with the 23% Asian proportion of suburban schools attended by Asian students.

The Dissimilarity Index: Another Measure of School Segregation

This report examines the changing levels of exposure that minority students have to themselves and to white students, and the changing levels of exposure that white students have to themselves and to minority students. Such isolation/exposure indexes are a commonly used research tool, but they are not the only way researchers measure school segregation. Another widely used measure is the dissimilarity index, which gauges the evenness of the spread of students across the schools in a school district. Formally, it is the proportion of a student group that would have to change schools for all schools in the district to have the same proportion of the group as the district-wide average.

To see if we would find patterns consistent with those of our isolation/exposure analysis, we tabulated the dissimilarity index for all suburban districts and used it to examine the degree of segregation within a particular school district (not a larger geographic area such as a metropolitan area).

We found that trends in the suburban school district dissimilarity index are fairly similar to the trends in the isolation measure reported above. For black and Asian students, there was a small decline in suburban school district segregation from 1993-94 to 2006-07, according to the dissimilarity measure. For Hispanic students, suburban school segregation has increased since 1993-94. These trends are based on the average of the dissimilarity index across suburban school districts. There are, of course, individual suburban districts whose change in the dissimilarity index does not mimic the overall trend.

For each minority group, the level of segregation tends to be greater in city school districts than in suburban school districts, according to the dissimilarity index.

Across all school districts in America (city and suburban as well as town/rural), the dissimilarity index indicates that district-level segregation has declined since 1993-94 for black, Hispanic and Asian students. Part of this decline, again, is to due to the change in the geographic locus of minority education since 1993-94. Suburban school districts tend to be less segregated than city school districts, and an increasing share of each minority student group is being educated in suburban school districts.

In addition to examining the trend over all suburban school districts, this report examined changes since 1993-94 in individual suburban school districts. The analysis examined the fastest-growing suburban school districts in terms of minority enrollment. On the basis of the dissimilarity index, the suburban school districts with the highest levels of racial/ethnic segregation are also noted.

Read the full report at pewhispanic.org

The number of Hispanic students in the nation’s public schools nearly doubled from 1990 to 2006, accounting for 60% of the total growth in public school enrollments over that period. There are now approximately 10 million Hispanic students in the nation’s public kindergartens and its elementary and high schools; they make up about one-in-five public school students in the United States. In 1990, just one-in-eight public school students were Hispanic.

Strong growth in Hispanic enrollment is expected to continue for decades, according to a recently released U.S. Census Bureau population projection. The bureau projects that the Hispanic school-age population will increase by 166% by 2050 (to 28 million from 11 million in 2006), while the non-Hispanic school-age population will grow by just 4% (to 45 million from 43 million) over this same period. In 2050, there will be more school-age Hispanic children than school-age non-Hispanic white children.

While Hispanics account for 20% of public school students nationally, their share of enrollment is greater in several states. In 2006 Hispanics were about half of all public school students in California, up from 36% in 1990. They were more than 40% of enrollments in three additional states (Arizona, New Mexico and Texas) and between 20% and 40% of all public school students in five states (Nevada, Colorado, Illinois, Florida and New York). Overall, Hispanics are the largest minority group in the public schools in 22 states.

Using data from the 2006 American Community Survey (ACS), this report presents information on the demographic characteristics of Hispanic students in public schools. It compares Hispanic public school students with their non-Hispanic counterparts. The large sample sizes available in the ACS also enable detailed comparison of Hispanic students across generational groups.

Highlighted Characteristics of Hispanic Public School Students

Demographics

• The vast majority of Hispanic public school students (84%) were born in the United States.
• More than half (52%) of all Hispanic students are enrolled in public schools in just two states, Texas and California.
• Although most Hispanic students live in the nine “established” Hispanic states, foreign-born Hispanic students are more likely than native-born Hispanic students to live in the “new” and “emerging” Hispanic states.
• Hispanic kindergartners in public schools are overwhelmingly born in the U.S. (93%), compared with 86% of Hispanic students in grades 1 through 8 and 77% in high school.
• The majority of Hispanic students are of Mexican origin (69%), followed by Puerto Rican (9%), Dominican (3%), Salvadoran (3%) and Cuban (2%).
• Nearly three-in-five Hispanic students (57%) live in households with both of their parents compared with 69% of non-Hispanic white students and 30% of non-Hispanic black students.
• More than seven-in-ten U.S. born Hispanic students of immigrant parents (71%) live with both parents. Smaller shares of foreign-born students (58%) and U.S.-born students of native parentage (48%) reside with both parents.
• More than a quarter of Hispanic students (28%) live in poverty, compared with 16% of non-Hispanic students. In comparison, more than a third of non-Hispanic black students (35%) reside in poverty and about one-in-ten (11%) non-Hispanic white students live in a poor household.
• Foreign-born Hispanic students (35%) are more likely than their native-born counterparts (27%) to live in poverty.
• A significant minority of Hispanic public school students (34%) have parents who have not completed high school. Fewer than one-in-ten (7%) non-Hispanic students have parents who have not finished high school.

Language Skills

• Seven-in-ten (70%) Hispanic students speak a language other than English at home.
• Almost 30% of Hispanic public school students report speaking only English at home, and an additional 52% of Hispanic public school students report speaking English “very well.” The remaining 18% of Hispanic students speak English with difficulty.
• Nearly half (44%) of first-generation students speak English with difficulty, compared with 20% of second-generation students and 5% of the third-and-higher generations.
• Most Hispanic students (78%) live in households in which at least one household member over the age of 13 speaks only English in the home or speaks English very well.

A Pew Hispanic Center analysis of public school data from key states finds that English language learners (ELL) students tend to go to public schools that have low standardized test scores. However, these low levels of assessed proficiency are not solely attributable to poor achievement by ELL students.

These same schools report poor achievement by other major student groups as well, and have a set of characteristics associated generally with poor standardized test performance–such as high student-teacher ratios, high student enrollments and high levels of students living in or near poverty.

When ELL students are not isolated in these low-achieving schools, their gap in test score results is considerably narrower, according to the analysis of newly available standardized testing data for public schools in the five states with the largest numbers of ELL students. These five states – Arizona, California, Florida, New York and Texas – educated about 70% of the nation’s 4 million ELL students in the 2003-04 school year.

Prior analyses of assessment data uniformly indicate that ELL students are much less likely than other students to score at or above proficient levels in both mathematics and reading/language arts. The new report quantifies the extent of ELL concentration in low-achieving public schools and the degree to which this isolation is associated with the large achievement gap in mathematics between ELL students and other major student groups.

In each of the five states examined, about 90% of the ELL students who took the state assessment test were educated in public schools that had at least a minimum threshold number of ELL students. ELL students tended to make up either a majority or substantial minority of the student populations of these schools. For example, in the California public schools in which ELL test-takers were concentrated, they constituted 45% of all test-takers. In the other California public schools (where the number of ELL students was below the minimum threshold), ELL test-takers were just 6% of all test-takers.

In all five states investigated and irrespective of grade levels, ELL students were much less likely than white students to score at or above the state’s proficient level. However, when ELL students attended public schools with at least a minimum threshold number of white students, the gap between the math proficiency scores of white students and ELL students was considerably narrower, the analysis found. This suggests that the lag in test score achievement of ELL students is attributable in part to the characteristics of the public schools they attend.

ELL students perform better on the state’s standardized math assessment test if they attend a public school with at least a minimum threshold number of white students. For example, among eighth-grade ELL students in Florida, about 30% score at or above the proficient level in math if they attend a middle school that has a minimum threshold number of white students. Among Florida ELL eighth-graders at middle schools that do not have a sufficient number of white eighth-grade students, only about 10% scored at or above the proficient level in math.

The relatively poor proficiency levels at public schools with high concentrations of ELL students is underscored by comparing the standardized test scores of white and black students who attend the schools in which ELL students are concentrated with the scores of white and black student who attend other public schools. In California, 75% of white third-grade students who attend public schools without the minimum threshold number of ELL students perform at or above the proficient level on the state’s mathematics assessment test, whereas just 67% of the white California third-graders who attend schools with the minimum threshold number of ELL students score at or above the proficient level.

The average proficiency rate in math for black third-graders who attend California public schools without the minimum threshold number of ELL third-grade students is 46%. In contrast, 34% of black third-grade students who attend California public schools with the minimum threshold number of ELL students score at or above the proficient level on the state’s mathematics assessment test.

Most of the new Pew Hispanic report’s findings are based on analyses using three U.S. Department of Education databases. The analysis of mathematics performance on state-designed assessments across different types of public schools utilizes the new National Longitudinal School-Level State Assessment Score Database. The NLSLSASD maintains state standardized assessment test results for every public school in a state. Because the NLSLSASD is a school-level data set, we can identify for the first time which public schools tested English language learner students and thus measure at the state level the degree of concentration of ELL students in particular schools. Using the NLSLSASD’s standardized testing results by subgroup, the analysis illuminates the potential role of school isolation in student test score performance.

Previous Pew Hispanic Center analyses of standardized testing data for public schools revealed a large achievement gap between ELL students and other students in math and reading proficiency (Fry, How Far Behind in Math and Reading are English Language Learners?, Pew Hispanic Center, June 6, 2007), and that black and Hispanic students are increasingly isolated from white students in the public schools (Fry, The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of U.S. Public Schools, Pew Hispanic Center, Aug. 30, 2007). The new report builds on those findings by illustrating that the educational isolation of ELL students is associated with the math proficiency gap between English language learners and other students. It also shows that white and black students who attend the public schools in which ELL students are concentrated are doing worse than their peers who attend public schools with few English language learner students.

Among the report’s other key findings:

• Nationally, the English language learner student population is expected to grow rapidly. The projected number of school-age children of immigrants will increase from 12.3 million in 2005 to 17.9 million in 2020, accounting for all the projected growth in the school-age population. A significant portion of these children of immigrants will likely require ELL services.
• In the five states with large ELL student populations, the proportion of ELL students scoring at or above the proficient level on the state mathematics test is often below the proportion of black students scoring at or above the proficient level. For example, in Texas 22% of ELL eighth-graders scored at or above the proficient level on the math assessment, compared with 44% of black eighth-graders.
• In both elementary grades and middle school grades in these states, ELL students are much less likely than white students to score at or above the proficient level in mathematics. The measured gaps are in the double-digits. For example, in Florida 45% of ELL third-graders scored at or above the proficient level on the math assessment, compared with 78% of white third-graders, yielding a white-to-ELL gap of 34 percentage points.
• ELL students who took the state mathematics assessment were heavily concentrated in the public schools that had to disclose publicly the English language learner testing results — that is, public schools with a minimum threshold number of ELL students taking the test. White test-takers and black test-takers were much less concentrated in the public schools reporting ELL testing outcomes. For example, in New York more than 90% of the fourth-grade ELL students taking the math test attended the 763 elementary schools that reported their test scores. The New York public schools that reported results for ELL fourth-graders educated less than 20% of white fourth-grade test-takers in the state and slightly more than half of black fourth-grade test-takers.
• In the five states with large ELL student populations, the public schools in which ELL test-takers are concentrated are much more likely to be central city schools.
• The public schools in which ELL test-takers are concentrated have a much higher enrollment, on average, than other public schools in the state.
• The middle schools in which ELL test-takers are concentrated have, on average, significantly higher student-to-teacher ratios than other public schools in the state.
• The public schools in which ELL test-takers are concentrated have, on average, a substantially greater proportion of students qualifying for free or reduced-price school lunches.
• The public schools in which English language learner students are concentrated are significantly more likely to be designated Title I schools. A Title I school has a student body with a large proportion of economically disadvantaged students and receives additional federal funding. For example, in Arizona 92% of the schools that reported test results for ELL students on the third-grade math assessment were eligible for Title I funds. Of the other Arizona elementary schools, half were Title I-eligible.

The 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in June to strike down school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville has focused public attention on the degree of racial and ethnic integration in the nation’s 93,845 public schools. A new analysis of public school enrollment data by the Pew Hispanic Center finds that in the dozen years from 1993-94 to 2005-06, white students became less isolated from minority students while, at the same time, black and Hispanic students became slightly more isolated from white students.

These two seemingly contradictory trends stem mainly from the same powerful demographic shift that took place during this period: an increase of more than 55% in the Hispanic slice of the public school population. Latinos in 2005-06 accounted for 19.8% of all public school students, up from 12.7% in 1993-94.1 During this same period, the black share of public school enrollment rose slightly — to 17.2%, from 16.5% — while the white share fell sharply, to 57.1% from 66.1%.

In part because whites now comprise a smaller share of students in the public schools, white students are now more likely to be exposed to minority students. In 1993-94, fully one-third (34%) of all white students attended a nearly all-white school (this report defines a school as “nearly all-white” if fewer than 5% of the students are non-white). By 2005-06, just one in five white students (21%) was attending a nearly all-white school. The number of nearly all-white public schools fell by 35%, from 25,603 in 1993-94 to 16,769 in 2005-06.

But even as the decrease in the white share of the public school population has led to a greater exposure of white students to minority students, it has also led to a diminished exposure of black and Hispanic students to white students. Roughly three-in-ten Hispanic (29%) and black (31%) students attended schools in 2005-06 that were nearly all-minority (by this report’s definition, a “nearly all-minority” school is one in which fewer than 5% of the students are white), and these percentages were both somewhat higher than they had been in 1993-94, when they stood at 25% for Hispanic students and 28% for black students. The number of nearly all-minority public schools almost doubled in this time period, increasing from 5,498 in 1993-94 to 10,135 in 2005-06.

The growing exposure of white students to minority students is largely due to the growth in Hispanic enrollments, which in turn is related to the sharp increase in the Hispanic share of the nation’s population. In 1993-94, 74% of white students attended schools in which fewer than 5% of the students were Hispanic. By 2005-06, just 58% of whites attended schools with that very low Hispanic share of enrollment.

Not only are black and Hispanic students similarly isolated from white students, they also tend to be isolated from one another. In 2005-06, 56% of Hispanic students attended a majority-Latino public school (a school in which at least half of the students are Hispanic). These majority-Latino public schools educated just 7% of the nation’s black students. Similarly, the nation’s majority-black schools, which educate nearly 50% of black students, educate just 4% of the nation’s Hispanic students.

To be sure, levels of racial and ethnic segregation and integration in the public schools are affected by factors other than the demographic changes in the school population at large. In particular, they are affected by the geographic dispersion of racial and ethnic groups; by local residential housing patterns; and by desegregation policies at the school district level. This report does not look at those factors, nor does it attempt to determine which factor has had the greatest impact on the changing patterns of integration and segregation in the public schools since 1993-94. Rather, it simply tracks the changes over a 12-year period in the levels of racial and ethnic isolation and exposure in public schools among black, white, Hispanic and Asian students.