“Puerto Rico Can Teach So Much”: The Hemispheric and Imperial Origins of the Educational War on Poverty

Through a focus on liberal academic and policy networks, this article considers how ideas and practices central to an educational “war on poverty” grew through connections between postwar Puerto Rico, Latin America, and New York. In particular, it analyzes how social scientific ideas about education's role in economic development found ample ground in the colonial Commonwealth of Puerto Rico as the island assumed the role of “laboratory” of democracy and development after the Second World War. The narrative then considers how this Cold War programming came to influence education initiatives in both U.S. foreign aid programs in Latin America and New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly as the number of Puerto Rican students grew amid the Puerto Rican Great Migration. Ultimately, the article suggests a broader hemispheric and imperial framework in narrating the evolution of postwar education policy in the nation's largest city.

Leading after the storm: New York city principal’s deployment of equity-oriented leadership post-Hurricane Maria

As principals navigate numerous priorities to lead their school, crises continue to seize principals’ attention. We collected and analyzed qualitative data to comprehend how principals responded to the influx of Puerto Rican students into New York City public schools post-Hurricane Maria. We attend to how these principals’ leadership activities matched tenets of equity-oriented and equality-oriented leadership. We found that sampled principals enacted equity-oriented leadership along four dimensions: (a) engaging in self-reflection and growth for equity; (b) influencing the sociopolitical context; (c) allocating resources; and (d) modeling. Our findings depict how principals in a large, urban district enact equity-oriented leadership while responding to a crisis. Moreover, we raise questions about supporting, preparing, and empowering leaders to enact equity-oriented leadership.

Leading Through the “Influx:” Leadership Responses and the Influence of a Political Spectacle

Principals encounter numerous crises, such as migration influxes. Relevant literature explains principals respond to these crises in a variety of ways. However, there is a dearth in the literature that examines what influences principals’ responses through a crisis. The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative case study broadly asks, how, if at all, did principals respond to the “influx” of Puerto Rican students, and what factors influenced how the principals’ responded? By applying political spectacle theory, the findings of this study revealed two categories of response: preparing for the influx and recalibration after the influx did not occur. The insights gained from this study extend the knowledge base about principals and how political spectacles influence their responses during a crisis.

Coming of Age in the 1960s

In New York, a circle of Puerto Rican students read a Black Panther newspaper interview with Cha Cha, took a road trip to meet the Chicago gang leader turned revolutionary, and got permission to launch a chapter of the organization in New York. In search of an organizing agenda in East Harlem, they discovered who their parents were and why over 1/3 of them had left Puerto Rico. In 1947, Operation Bootstrap, A US-led industrialization project of the island displaced more farmers than it absorbed into the new economy. A contingency plan encouraged their mass migration to cities like New York, where 70% of Puerto Ricans became proletarianized as superexploited workers in the city’s garment industry. Soon, they encountered displacements in housing and due to urban industrial decline. They wrestled with medical discrimination in the public hospitals and overt racism in the classroom. In 1967, the killing of a Puerto Rican man by police led to the East Harlem riots. The early childhood experiences of the Young Lords in the streets, in the schools, and as language and cultural translators for their parents radicalized them emotionally and compelled the evangelical commitment with which they launched their activism as young adults.

Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race

Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race examines the emergence of linguistic and ethnoracial categories in the context of contemporary US constructions of Latinidad. The book draws from more than 24 months of ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork to analyze the racialization of language as a central form of modern governance. It focuses specifically on youth socialization to US Latinidad as a contemporary site of political anxiety, “raciolinguistic” transformation, and urban inequity. Rosa’s account studies the fashioning of Latinidad in a highly segregated Chicago high school whose student body is more than 90% Mexican and Puerto Rican. Rosa shows how anxieties surrounding language, race, and identity produce an administrative project that seeks to transform “at risk” Mexican and Puerto Rican students into “Young Latino Professionals.” This institutional effort, which requires students to learn to be—and sound like—themselves in highly studied ways, reflects administrators’ attempts to navigate a precarious urban terrain in the city grappling with some of the nation’s highest youth homicide, drop-out, and teen pregnancy rates. Rosa explores the ingenuity of his researchers participants’ creative responses to these forms of marginalization through the contestation of political, ethnoracial, and linguistic borders. The detailed engagement with the relationship between linguistic and ethnoracial category-making that develops throughout the book points to the raciolinguistic, historical, political, and economic dynamics through which people come to look like a language and sound like a race across cultural contexts.

Beyond the GRE: Using a Composite Score to Predict the Success of Puerto Rican Students in a Biomedical PhD Program

The use and validity of the Graduate Record Examination General Test (GRE) to predict the success of graduate school applicants is heavily debated, especially for its possible impact on the selection of underrepresented minorities into science, technology, engineering, and math fields. To better identify candidates who would succeed in our program with less reliance on the GRE and grade point average (GPA), we developed and tested a composite score (CS) that incorporates additional measurable predictors of success to evaluate incoming applicants. Uniform numerical values were assigned to GPA, GRE, research experience, advanced course work or degrees, presentations, and publications. We compared the CS of our students with their achievement of program goals and graduate school outcomes. The average CS was significantly higher in those students completing the graduate program versus dropouts (p < 0.002) and correlated with success in competing for fellowships and a shorter time to thesis defense. In contrast, these outcomes were not predicted by GPA, science GPA, or GRE. Recent implementation of an impromptu writing assessment during the interview suggests the CS can be improved further. We conclude that the CS provides a broader quantitative measure that better predicts success of students in our program and allows improved evaluation and selection of the most promising candidates.