Forty-nine per cent of all California public school k-12 students today are from Latino households, and most are doing poorly in the state’s public education system. While the failure of a huge percentage of students to achieve their academic and civic potential bodes ill for California’s future, it also represents an incredible and unacceptable failure on the part of the state’s education system to be responsive to the needs of its current population.

Some of the factors underlying Latino students’ lack of success in school are obvious: Latino students in California are typically in large overcrowded schools with high percentages of children from poor families, in classrooms with high student: teacher ratios, with less-qualified and less experienced teachers than students in more affluent and white neighborhoods, and are more likely to suffer the effects of a dumbed-down and irrelevant curriculum and an almost complete lack of academic guidance. They and their families are frequently stereotyped by school personnel as being uninterested in educational attainment, or as being unwilling or unable to lift themselves out of cycles of poverty, violence and victimization.

Add to these factors the decreasing numbers of Latino teachers coming into the profession, a lack of exposure to role models from students’ communities who have become professionals, a culture of deficit-based attitudes towards minority and low income students’ funds of knowledge, and the general unfriendliness of schools and their organization to parents who are unfamiliar with its systems.

Under such circumstances, certainly, the odds are stacked against Latino students graduating from high school and successfully navigating their way to higher education.

One California program, The Puente Project’s High School Program, currently in 35 public high schools and housed at the University of California’s Office of the President, has been quietly implementing high school reform practices to reverse this trend and, has been achieving solid results that hold promise for schools statewide.

Puente’s program design encompasses two distinct models: 1) the student program model and 2) the staff training model, which ensures fidelity to the program design and supports the long-term sustainability of the Puente program. Combined, these two models address the major barriers of higher education which educationally underserved students face.

Not an ELL or bilingual program, not a program for at-risk students, and not a remedial program, the Puente Project is a college preparation program targeting schools with a high proportion of students from underserved communities. Puente is open to all students.

Puente combines innovative and culturally competent teaching and counseling methods with community involvement. Since 1993, the program has trained hundreds of California public high school teachers and counselors to work together at their school sites to accelerate student progress and connect Puente students’ learning to the lives, experiences, and aspirations of their families and communities.

In their ninth and tenth grades, students stay with the same Puente-trained English teacher in an accelerated college-prep class. Puente teachers take a developmental approach to providing intensive instruction in writing; integrate Latino literature, culture, and issues into the curriculum; and require that each student submit a rigorous writing portfolio containing multiple genres at the end of each year.

Students’ social and cultural capital is recognized and built upon through interviews with family and community members, and through students’ own inquiries into cultural and community traditions, issues, and expectations. Such community-based writing assignments further their literacy and critical thinking skills, and prepare students for writing, reading, and research across the disciplines.

Students receive sustained academic counseling throughout high school with the Puente-trained bilingual counselor who ensures they take a challenging college-preparatory course of study. Counselors also coordinate college visits and other field trips. They are the heart of the parent component, developing and delivering a sequence of workshops to empower parents to become advocates for their children’s education and to fully understand the requirements for college.

Through the program’s community leadership/mentoring component, students develop leadership skills and devote considerable effort in community service. They meet and learn from role models and mentors from the professional community who help them determine and achieve their academic and career aspirations.

The components of Puente — intensive language arts, academic guidance, parent empowerment, and community support — work together to provide the rigor, motivation, and relevance that empower students from underserved communities. Ample research has shown Puente to be successful. The program has weathered enormous funding cuts and staff layoffs and works against the grain in many schools where Latino students are tracked into remedial classes, and yet it endures because most of its students are beating the odds: 86% of Puente’s 2008 graduating cohort went on to college.

Schools need to explore avenues for integrating these practices into whole-school reform, and the need is so great that we need to consider how we can leverage the success of Puente’s experience to meet the needs of even younger students. Puente is currently responding to calls to implement the program at middle schools. Districts interested in partnering with the Puente Project can send a letter of interest to Frank Garcia, Puente’s Executive Director (frank.garcia@ucop.edu) and/or Jane Pieri, Director of HS Programs and Training (jane.pieri@ucop.edu).

Before yet another generation of Latino youth becomes disengaged and emerges from schooling with low skills, low self-esteem, and low expectations for their future, California’s education crisis needs to be recognized as a social justice issue that requires the scaling up of practices and policies that we know work.

Jane Pieri is Puente’s Director of High School Programs and Training. She has several years experience providing professional development for high school teachers and counselors and developing cross-disciplinary teams. Before coming to the Puente statewide office, she was a high school English teacher in the Bay Area.