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A quality education is key to health, science shows.
Latinos are making progress in educational achievement. The Latino high-school dropout rate is at an all-time low. Graduation rates are at an all-time high. More Latinos are enrolling in two- and four-year universities than ever before.
But there remains a large educational gap between Latinos and their peers.
A new initiative by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), founded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, and The College Board is trying to significantly close this gap.
The two-year effort aims to expand access to “unique personalized learning pathways” to help lower-income and rural area students prepare for key “college gateway tasks,” such as the PSAT, SAT and Advanced Placement courses.
What’s the Plan?
The partnership will underwrite research on student motivation and achievement.
“[The partnership with CZI] would move the field forward and ongoing research [on this] topic would be ‘a Manhattan Project’ on academic motivation,” said College Board President and CEO David Coleman.
The collaboration will also fund expansion of “near-peer advisers” in high schools. This program brings young people (either recent graduates or currently enrolled college students) to supplement schools’ counseling staffs.
CZI was created to give away 99% of Facebook shares worth $45 billion owned by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The initiative focuses on four broad areas: curing disease through preventative research, supporting entrepreneurship, spreading access to education, and empowering all people to use their talents.
“The only way that we reach our full human potential is if we are able to unlock the gifts of every person around the world,” the duo said in an interview with USA Today.
This is not Zuckerberg’s first attempt at assisting education; in 2010, he gave $100 million to the troubled Newark, NJ (35.63% Latino population) public school system.
Read more about this story here.
By The Numbers
84
percent
of Latino parents support public funding for afterschool programs
