The final two secrets for Mainstream Leadership will be coming out with my new book sometime this fall. Keep your eye out for the announcement of the book so you can order early from the first printed copies. I trust the excerpts I shared were helpful to you. As always I welcome your comments and feedback.
Now, I want to turn our attention back to gangs, with an emphsis on the classroom as schools gear up to get back into session during the months of August and September. My goal in particular is to provide helpful information for today’s unsung hero’s – the classroom teacher.
The principles I share for teachers is my attempt to provide a piece of the training, that will equip visionary teachers, who believe in the power of even one transformed life to affect many others in a positive way. The seven principals I suggest are meant to be a practical, daily guide for the common classroom teacher, intended to give the teacher a perspective of the classroom from a Latino paradigm, with the hope of bridging a cultural gap that seems to cause too many unnecessary classroom student-teacher conflicts.
The material of these seven principles is based on my own personal experience as a Chicano/American-Mexican student in the sixties and seventies. They are also based on what I have witnessed working as a correctional officer at a State and Federal prison, as well as being a teachers-aide in the Santa Barbara County Juvenile Hall for four years. I also worked as an “at-risk” counselor for four years at a local Junior High and High School (1990-94), where I worked directly with the school administration, teachers, counselors, probation, law enforcement and parents of “at-risk” youth. Although these insights may seem challenging to teachers, they are offered respectfully and in a spirit of cooperation.
These principles are certainly not exhaustive or scientific. I am sure there will be other Latino professionals, teachers, principals and parents with different views and opinions. Be that as it may, the point is to offer one more piece in an effort to help resolve the horrendous record of Latino gang members/students who are truant, unmotivated, put on probation, placed in alternative schools, and ultimately, are not graduating from High School or enrolling in higher education. Consider the statistics below from the eye opening trends produced in a RAND Corporation study done on behalf of the Hispanic Scholarship Foundation:
Ø Hispanic youth make up the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population
Ø High school completion for Hispanics aged 22-24 was only 64%, compared to 91 and 84% for whites and blacks
Ø By 2010, Hispanics will make up one out of every five young people of high school age, compared with one in ten in 1990.
Ø Hispanics lag behind all other racial/ethnic groups in the rate at which they earn a bachelor’s degree.
Ø In 2000, one of every five new entrants into the workforce was Hispanic-and that number is growing.
Ø Foreign-born Hispanics are the only immigrants who have a lower level of education than their native-born counterparts.
Ø The dropout rate among Hispanic high school students is expected to reach 32% by 2010, and is the only racial/ethnic group that is projected to experience an increase.
Ø By 2010, approximately 20% more Hispanic children will be living in families in which both parents have less than a high school education.
Ø By 2010, the number of Hispanic children living in poor families will increase by 25%.
Ø More than one third of all Hispanic young people (age 24 or younger) live in California.
Ø California high schools, colleges and Universities will educate nearly 40% of the nation’s Hispanic youth.
I believe there are many teachers who sincerely want to reach out to difficult students, such as gang members, but simply don’t know how, or where to begin. As problems persist, they are forced to remove the student and lose them to a system they know is not to their benefit. I am convinced that these teachers wonder to themselves how they can make a difference in these kids and help turn them from becoming another negative Latino student statistic.
Thus, over the next few weeks I am going to pull excerpts from my book, “Got Gangs?” , that outline the seven principals I have used to work with these students. Finally, I must point out that my suggestions are not a guarantee for fixing every situation described, nor am I emphasizing my particular practices, but rather the principle, of handling difficult people problems. Having said that, I offer these insights that have helped my work in successfully transforming many Latino gang members into productive students and citizens of their community.
Get your copy of “Got Gangs?” by visiting: www.RichardRRamos.com
