Dr. Tyrone Howard, professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles
A new report reveals how the pandemic’s unequal toll on Black and Latinx students in Los Angeles threatens to undo years of California’s progress to better support such students into and through college at the same rates as their white peers.
The Campaign for College Opportunity, a nonprofit dedicated to higher education equity in California, released the report titled, "The State of Higher Education for Latinx and Black Angelenos." California is home to the nation’s largest Latinx population and fifth largest Black population. And Los Angeles County, the state’s most populous county, is home to about one third of Blacks and Latinx in California.
“This is a really important location from an equity standpoint in the state,” said Dr. Vikash Reddy, senior director of policy research at The Campaign and one of the report’s authors. “COVID-19 has had such a different impact on communities of color. But from our findings, it doesn’t look like we’ve made targeted investment and support to address the fact that the pandemic itself was targeted. We need to make sure that the equity gaps we found don’t remain durable in the pandemic.”
Over the last decade, the share of Black and Latinx graduates in the LA Unified School District (LAUSD) who completed courses required for eligibility to the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) systems has nearly doubled. These courses are known as the A-G curriculum, and they have become part of LAUSD’s high school graduation requirements.
But as the report notes, this positive trend dramatically shifted in 2020 when the pandemic hit. That year, the percentage of Black and Latinx students graduating from LAUSD who completed A-G courses plummeted from 63% to 54% for Latinx graduates—and 53% to 46% for Black graduates. Yet over the same time period, the percentage of white graduates in LAUSD who met A-G requirements went up from 66% to 67%.
“That’s a notable decrease, especially when there has been so much intentionality over the years around increasing those numbers,” said Dr. Tyrone Howard, a professor of education in the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). “To see them go down is troubling. That coupled with LA’s community college enrollment drops is concerning.”
