Hispanic Education Starts at Home

There is an education crisis

among Latinos in the

United States. But don't tell that to Samuel Perez, Sr.

You see, Samuel and his wife, Maria Elena, both Mexican immigrants who never got past the sixth grade themselves, just saw their youngest of eleven children graduate from college this past year.

That's an accomplishment that would make any parent's heart swell with pride.

But what makes Samuel and Maria Elena's story so compelling is that their ten other children have already gone on to graduate from a four-year university as well. That's eleven kids with eleven bachelors - six of those from USC. Five of their children have gone on to graduate school for a master's degree, while another has just begun her doctorate program.

This comes at a time, when a new Harvard University study recently reported that nearly half of Latino and African-American students who should have graduated from high school in 2002, did not. In my hometown of Los Angeles, the situation is far worse, with a measly 39% of Hispanics graduating from the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Even White and Asian students, who usual fare much better with student achievement, aren't doing well themselves, with only 67% and 77% picking up their diplomas, respectively.

These anemic numbers in Los Angeles are so dismal that the folks over at Harvard called many of these high schools in Los Angeles "dropout factories" that seemingly produce more and more unskilled labor every year.

So how did a low-income family in one of Los Angeles' poorest and gang-infested neighborhoods achieve such an incredible level of success? To find out the secret, I recently spoke to Mr. Perez, as he sat at the kitchen table preparing nopales or cactus plants to eat.

Having been poked, prodded, observed and questioned for the secret of success by dozens of local and international journalists, educators, as well as parents, I still got the feeling that the Perez' didn't know what all the fuss was about.

"The secret?" asks a humble, soft-spoken Perez, who spent most of his life working three jobs as a machinist and gardener in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley. "Well, as parents, we just did our job. ...