Most U.S. Latino History is Left Out of High School Textbooks, Study Finds

BY EDWIN FLORES

Mhost of the seminal events impacting U.S. Latino history are not a subject of study in high schools across the country, according to a new report by Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and UnidosUS, a national Latino advocacy and research organization.

The study found that 87% of key Latino topics were either not covered in U.S. history textbooks or were mentioned in just five or fewer sentences.

"Only 28 of 222 important topics were covered well, leaving out many aspects of the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the U.S. acquisition of Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal, the modern civil rights movement, Cold War politics, and legal developments shaping the Latino experience, such as the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and racial

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segregation," according to a release on the report.

Over a quarter of the nation's K-12 public school students are Latino.

Researchers analyzed five U.S. history textbooks used in seven states and one AP U.S. history book. The study looked at the overall depiction of the Latino experience throughout the centuries, the balance between discussions about inequality and the Latino contributions to the U.S., the use of language and the authenticity of images.

The topics with the greatest depth of content were American land purchases from Mexico and Latin American foreign policy — a 1.4 out of a maximum of three. But when it came to coverage of U.S. Latino "firsts" from 1821 to the present, the coverage was the "thinnest" — a .1 out of three.

The report also found that while the AP textbook and a couple of other textbooks contextualized the significance of certain