Introduction

The United States has a long, lamentable history of marginalizing Latino youth. Even with numerous education reform efforts ostensibly aimed at aggressively addressing achievement disparities, Latino students continue to be underrepresented in a vast array of achievement outcomes. There are many kinds of direct influences that play a role in the academic trajectory of youth. Disparities between Latino and higher achieving White students remain, and, unfortunately, this enduring gap is often interpreted as evidence that Latino achievement has not improved at all. One example is Latino students' performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading and mathematics, which demonstrates that they have steadily increased performance across both grade levels and subjects. Contrary to the discourse that suggests there has been no improvement in educational outcomes among Latino students, there have been substantial real gains across various metrics over the past several decades. This chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.