A group has issued a report that says the best way to handle Iowa’s growing Latino population is to make sure their children get a good education. Bethany Little works for the Alliance for Excellent Education,
and says as the population becomes more and more minority, she says there’s a need to increase the graduation rate of minority students, because otherwise we’ll have fewer graduates as a percentage of our population.
The group this month issued the report titled “Demography as Destiny: How America Can Build a Better Future.” Little says the report concludes that minority graduation rates now are lower than those for white students, but the state needs more young people who are educated and ready to go on to college, and success in work and life.
“There’s a true cost to students dropping out,” Little says, “in terms of their ability to become taxpayers instead of ‘tax-takers,’ real productive members of our society in the future.” This report concludes that if minority students achieve in school up to the level of other kids, it’ll mean billions to the nation’s economy — and pump 336- Million dollars into the state’s economy by the year 2020. The report’s on-line at “All 4 Ed-dot-org”