Near the beginning of a new study on racial attitudes and college attainment, the authors note the story of Desiree Martinez, who attended a high school in a low-income part of Los Angeles and longed to enroll at the University of California, Los Angeles. She confided her ambitions to a teacher. The teacher frowned and said, “I don’t know why counselors push students into these schools they’re not ready for … Students only get their hearts broken when they don’t get into those schools, and the students that do get in come back as dropouts.”
Martinez, crushed, told another teacher, who encouraged her, and said she should not let people like the first teacher “hold you back.”
The discouraging teacher was white. The encouraging teacher was Latino.
