While Buffalo Public Schools announced in February that the district’s graduation rate had raised by 2.2%, setting the rate now at 78.5%, there are still disparities that have left many questioning the efficiency of the district’s efforts to raise these numbers, specifically for Latino/a students and English-language learners (ELLs).
Dr. César Cabrera has been an advocate for the Hispanic community in Buffalo for over 2 decades. While his involvement has not always been in education directly, his background in government administration, and workforce and economic development have interconnected him in a variety of different ways to the field of education- of which he has become increasingly more passionate about in recent years. As a candidate for a seat on the Buffalo Public School Board representing the West School District, Dr. Cabrera is focusing his efforts surrounding the disparities found in our city’s school district, and the data that seems to show repeating inconsistencies.
“I gathered a lot of this information for my dissertation years ago, but more recently I was given data that was made public at a school board meeting by a group called HERE and their numbers mirrored my numbers only now we’re now talking eight years, almost a decade later.”
The study concluded that Hispanic ELLs graduation rate was significantly below par when compared to all students.
The data collected by HERE members Lucy Candelario, Cas Rodriguez, David Baez, Jose Rivera, and David Caban show a three-year (2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19) summary of Hispanic ELLs graduation rate with and without local diploma. The study concluded that Hispanic ELLs graduation rate was significantly below par when compared to all students.
- Hispanic ELLs = 20% versus All Students (excluding Hispanic ELLs) = 66%.
- The graduation rate with Regents diplomas (excluding local diplomas), they concluded that Hispanic ELLs graduation rate was dramatically deficient in contrast to All Students:
- Hispanic ELLs = 11% versus All Students (excluding Hispanic ELLs) = 59%.
- The 3-year graduation average for ELLs (excluding Hispanic ELLs) with Regents and local diplomas (LD) is 41% (78/189) and ELLs with Regent diplomas excluding local diplomas is 35% (66/189)
While these numbers reflect data from three years ago, we are still seeing these gaps in our current BPS numbers. WBFO reported in 2021 that, “Buffalo has the highest achievement gap among Hispanic students compared to white students, at 15.7 percentage points.” For Dr. Cabrera, this is alarming data that should cause a sense of urgency among decision makers in the district, which is the majority of the reason he is running for a seat on the school board; to hold people accountable.
The remedy to this problem is ever evolving but according to Dr. Cabrera there are a few areas of focus that should initially be addressed.
“The district is 24% English language learners. So, you need to be able to have resources, to have potentially smaller classes, and of course funding so that these students are complete in multilingual education and immersion in learning the English language and meeting basic standards- just because they don’t speak the English language doesn’t mean they’re not good at math. How do you help the students? I hate to keep going back to resources and funding, but you need to also have strategic partnerships.”
While funding remains a consistent issue with our Buffalo Public Schools, it is also equally as important to discuss how those funds are allocated, and for Dr. Cabrera and others it’s clear where the need lies.
“I don’t see a sense of urgency from the current board majority, and we need to change that. There’s a lot of work, but it can be done.”