Although the overall high school graduation rate in California stands at 71 percent, the graduation rate for Latino and black students is much lower.
According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, 60 percent of Latino students and 56.6 percent of black students graduate.
As the Los Angeles Unified School District is the second largest school district in the nation and contains many racial minorities, it is time to face reality and take action.
We need to focus on what we should be doing in order to decrease the number of dropouts in LAUSD schools.
Last year, I worked for an access program for Santa Monica high school students. Our goal was to empower students to graduate high school, attend college, and give back to their communities. I often encountered students who would attend the program only because they felt it was a requirement. There were also those students who only sought tutoring.
Because of this, we couldn’t engage many of them in the program. Sometimes I even felt that in the effort to make changes in their education, we often repeated the same old tricks their teachers had been practicing for years.
What we failed to acknowledge is that students have a creative and adventurous side.
And something that is not offered to them, most of the time, is engagement in creative forms of expression that are culturally relevant to them.
If this Santa Monica high school was struggling to retain its students even with its abundant resources and successful performing arts program, imagine those schools in Los Angeles that do not receive enough funding for such programs.
We need to take action and acknowledge that our less-advantaged LAUSD schools are not giving students the opportunity to find new talents that will keep them motivated, especially offering courses that they feel they can culturally relate to.
Such courses could include urban arts and culture, graffiti as art, hip-hop and reggaeton culture, Chicano/a studies and African American studies.
Because black and Latino students are the two major racial groups in the LAUSD, these options would target them specifically.
Adding an extra class period to students’ days is worth the extra money and effort because that class may be the only one that motivates them to stay in school. Therefore, these courses are worth the district pushing for increased taxes.
We need to give high school students in LAUSD a chance to find a new interest, a new motivation, a string that will pull them through school and keep them from giving up.
Navarro is a fourth-year sociology student.