Abstract
The chapter analyzes the challenges associated with public education on the Texas side of the border along with the opportunities that educators, parents, and constituents have seized to create better educational experiences for border students. Special focus is placed on one of Texas’ top-ten-sized urban school districts, in which nine of ten students are Hispanic, one of four English learners, and eight of ten economically disadvantaged. Despite the constraints of a state and federal system that locks all students—despite their complex heritages and diverse household incomes—into a one-way-fits-all educational structure and rigid standardized testing, community-oriented leaders, educators, and parents designed local policies to include bilingual programs, language magnet schools, service learning, and strategies to strengthen students’ pathways to higher education that enhance prospects for a prosperous border gateway region of the Americas.
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Dow, P., Staudt, K. (2012). Education Policies: Standardized Testing, English-Language Learners, and Border Futures. In: Lusk, M., Staudt, K., Moya, E. (eds) Social Justice in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4150-8_12
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