U.S. history textbooks for high schoolers are lacking when it comes to covering the Latino experience, a report by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and Latino civil rights organization UnidosUS found.
The two institutions designed the project in fall 2022 and released the findings this month. The report, which Hopkins in a news release dubbed the “first comprehensive analysis” of its kind, discovered that 87% of key moments in Latino history weren’t covered in the textbooks reviewed. Books that did touch on those historical moments only described those Latino experiences in five sentences or fewer.
Researchers focused on five states with significant Latino student populations — New Mexico, California, Texas, Florida and New York — and two with smaller Latino demographics, Iowa and West Virginia. They identified commonly used textbooks in those areas and settled on five high school U.S. history textbooks and one Advanced Placement U.S. history book.
