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For Public Comments to the Commission, please click here
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7 MEETING OF THE PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON
8 EDUCATIONAL EXCELLENCE FOR HISPANIC AMERICANS
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11 The Venetian Hotel
33 55 Las Vegas Boulevard, South
12 Las Vegas, Nevada
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14 Wednesday, April 17, 2000 8:00 a.m.
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24 Reported by: Wanda L. Barnes CCR 676, RPR
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1 MR. HANNA: It's good to see everyone again.
2 I'm Frank Hanna for those of you who may not remember
3 every name -- we met in our original meeting -- and I
4 want to welcome everyone to Las Vegas to our meeting for
5 the President's Advisory Commission on Educational
6 Excellence for Hispanic Americans.
7 As we start I want to first recognize State
8 Farm Insurance. There are two representatives of State
9 Farm, Mr. Gonzalez, who is the senior vice president
10 with State Farm, and Ken Lamb, an operational vice
11 president.
12 State Farm has agreed to sponsor the work of
13 the commission this year and so we want to welcome their
14 attendance at our meeting and also thank them for their
15 sponsorship and their interest in Hispanic education.
16 I also want to recognize a couple of
17 representatives from America's Promise, William Renos
18 and Verice Campbell. Thank you for being here.
19 America's Promise has given us a lot of help
20 in putting together our town hall meeting that we'll be
21 having later on and so we want to thank them for their
22 help and their support and for being here with us today.
23 I also want to point out a commission member
24 who was not able to join us at our last meeting but is
25 here today. Some of us already met her. I want to
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1 recognize Norma Garza who is right here sitting by
2 Octavio.
3 I would also like to welcome Mary Jane
4 Pearson from the United States Department of Education.
5 Region representative for region 9.
6 We're going to launch into our program in
7 just a minute, but before doing that I'm going to ask
8 Adam to come up and actually before recognizing Adam I
9 want to -- we all had chances I think at our last
10 meeting to meet the various members of the commission
11 staff, the White House Commission staff, but those who
12 are here with us today.
13 I haven't seen Erica this morning. Erica is
14 working all hours on all the various materials that she
15 puts together for us, but Erica Romero, Desi Avila right
16 here, Edwardo Tobias and Erin Ross who is sitting up
17 here. They have been putting in yeoman's work and
18 effort and hours to prepare this meeting and to prepare
19 all the materials for us and our working groups and
20 such.
21 We want to also be mindful of the time and
22 energy that staff is putting in on our behalf and on
23 behalf of the efforts that we're all about.
24 Adam, if you could come up now and walk us
25 through our agenda. When Adam is through we'll proceed
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1 to introduce our experts and launch into our business.
2 MR. CHAVARRIA: Thank you. Good morning. I
3 just want to briefly go over the schedule for today. As
4 you can see it's very tight and we want to adhere as
5 close as possible to the schedule.
6 We have a very informative and productive
7 schedule including presenters you're going to hear from
8 this morning and then followed by a question and answer
9 period. When we're done with the presentation by the
10 presenters, we're going to take a lunch break at 11:45.
11 Actually lunch will be served at 12 so we'll have a few
12 minutes to break before we gather for lunch. It's going
13 to be the same room, from 1 to 2:00 and then promptly
14 reconvening at 2:00.
15 There will be first a series of working
16 groups. You know they had working sessions yesterday
17 and from what I understand they were very, very
18 productive and creative in many ways as well.
19 We're going to have a break this afternoon
20 and then conclude with a third and final working group
21 presentation and then have a recess at 4:15. You will
22 have an opportunity to freshen up, recharge, and then
23 we're going to be departing very, very promptly at 5:30.
24 There will be some school buses appropriately
25 that will be transporting all the commission members and
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1 some other guests over to Roger High School this
2 afternoon and we'll be arriving at Roger High School
3 principal's office.
4 You will have an opportunity to spend a few
5 minutes with the secretary. As you know this will be
6 the first opportunity you will have to meet with him and
7 he's looking forward to greeting each and every one of
8 you. And then we will be proceeding to the reception
9 area before the actual time our meeting commences.
10 At the town hall meeting you will be seated
11 near the -- it's going -- you will be seated near the
12 stage and those of you that are participating have
13 already been notified, and we should have a very, very
14 rewarding and informative session. So we look forward
15 to your participation and certainly involvement.
16 We're very grateful to State Farm Insurance
17 Company once again for agreeing to be the President's
18 Advisory Commission national sponsor.
19 We're also grateful to America's Promise
20 because they have been instrumental in helping us put
21 together this town hall meeting that we have this
22 evening. We will have of course Secretary Page and the
23 U.S. treasurer joining us as well.
24 And then when we're done and we hope to be
25 done around 8:00. We're going to be coming back to the
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1 hotel and then courtesy of State Farm Insurance Company
2 we're going to have a group dinner at -- forgive me.
3 It's French. I'm not very fluent in French. Pinot.
4 That's on the casino level or the lobby level of the
5 hotel.
6 And I want to thank Desi because she arranged
7 the group dinner, and apparently it's a very, very good
8 restaurant and highly recommended.
9 We'll conclude the evening at that point and
10 resume again tomorrow morning. We're going to conclude
11 relatively early for those of you who need to make early
12 flights to your respective destinations.
13 That is an overview of the schedule. Looking
14 forward to having a very, very informative session. And
15 staff will be around if you have any questions or need
16 any assistance with any work of the commission.
17 Thank you.
18 MR. HANNA: We have with us this morning two
19 distinguished authorities who are going to speak to us.
20 First I want to introduce Dr. Steve Murdock who is a
21 professor in the Department of Rural Sociology at Texas
22 A&M University.
23 Porfessor Murdock earned his BA in sociology
24 at North Dakota State University, his masters in
25 sociology, University of Kentucky, and Ph.D. in
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1 sociology at the University of Kentucky. In 2001 he was
2 appointed the state demographer for the State of Texas
3 and the first person ever appointed to that position, I
4 think indicating the increasing awareness of the
5 importance of the study of demography and its
6 implications.
7 He's the author of ten books, more than 120
8 articles and book chapters, 125 research reports and
9 monographs and 70 popular articles on the determinants
10 and consequences of demographic, socioeconomic and
11 natural resource change.
12 He is also the author of the Texas Challenge,
13 Population Change of the Future of Texas. As we all
14 know, many of the trends particularly within the
15 Hispanic community that have been taking place in Texas
16 are a precursor for the type of change that occurs
17 throughout the country. We're honored to have him with
18 us today.
19 Dr. Murdock.
20 DR. MURDOCK: Thank you. It's a pleasure to
21 be here.
22 What Terri and I want to do today is to
23 really do two things. I want to discuss the really
24 demographic picture that we use to try to form ideas
25 about the needs in Texas relative to a variety of
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1 educational and other factors and Terri will talk
2 specifically about programs being done in higher
3 education in the state of Texas.
4 I am a demographer and I know the first thing
5 in the morning you're saying: Is he a CPA? But I will
6 try to keep things interesting.
7 I have a couple things I should say as I get
8 started. I have a habit of walking around like this.
9 The reason I do, the very first course of sociology,
10 which they had 1100 students in there, the only way we
11 could keep them awake is stand by them.
12 At the end of this I may just be a little bit
13 preachy. If I do so, it is because I have a right to do
14 so. You're saying how can he say that? Well, because
15 many of you know demography is a divine power. We know
16 it is because there is a book of numbers in the bible
17 and it's all about censuses. Just look it up.
18 What I want to talk about are some of the
19 demographics in Texas and specifically I want to think
20 about three trends that we think are important as you
21 look at educational issues in Texas. Simply looking at
22 the change in rates and sources of population growth,
23 the increase in the non-Anglo population, and we're
24 going to talk about the aging of the population.
25 If you haven't heard about the aging of the
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1 population, you haven't been on the planet earth because
2 every newspaper has something about age.
3 Let's start off talking about population
4 growth and you'll have to see me for some slides that
5 look like this. You take about 600 numbers and you see
6 as you can plainly see. This is one of my as you can
7 plainly see slides and you will also notice a lot of
8 these slides. You will see Texas and U.S. comparisons.
9 It's just in Texas we like to compare ourselves to other
10 nations. So you will see a lot of these comparisons.
11 The point of it is if you look at that in
12 every decade since Texas allowed the U.S. to join it, we
13 have grown more rapidly than the country as a whole. At
14 the nominal growth, 1970s, 27 percent, 1980s, 19
15 percent, and this last decade, 23 percent rate of
16 growth.
17 If you look at other states, only California,
18 if we increased our population by 3.9 million persons,
19 and if you put that in perspective in Texas terms, that
20 is equal to the 1990 populations of the city of Houston,
21 city of San Antonio, city of Lubbock.
22 That 3.9 million is greater than the total
23 population of 24 of the 50 states and that means that
24 nearly one of every eight persons added to the U.S.
25 population was added in Texas. So we had phenomenal
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1 levels of growth in numerical terms. In percentage
2 terms we were the eighth fastest growing.
3 We can see like this only state had greater
4 growth in percentage terms. If you take the larger
5 state, only Georgia grew nearly as rapidly as we did.
6 Our growth has been substantial.
7 But more important than our total growth has
8 been the composition of that growth. We are the second
9 largest state. What I have up here is showing the Texas
10 rank with four different population groups.
11 If you look at us in terms of change in this
12 decade, we have also shown phenomenal growth. We have
13 the second largest increase in our state of our Anglo
14 population, 780,000.
15 One of the things I like to point out to
16 people is we were second both in terms of the number of
17 Anglos and the number of Hispanics, but you notice the
18 number of Hispanics that set us at No. 2.
19 I like to point out to people because
20 sometimes it gets lost. It won't be to this group, but
21 often when I talk to people, people say we know about
22 this diversification of population and that's
23 California, Texas, New York, Florida, phenomenal. It's
24 not true.
25 Increasing diversification of the population
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1 is a U.S. phenomenon and I would like to show this chart
2 just to point that out. This is this chart the Anglo
3 population changed from 92,000 for the ten largest
4 states. Notice that in five of those ten there were
5 absolute numerical declines in the number of Anglos and
6 populations. Probably the most phenomenal case of that
7 is California. California had a total population
8 increase of 4.1 million persons while at this same time
9 having a net decline of 635,000 Anglos. So the
10 diversification of population is all over.
11 In fact, if you look at numerical terms and
12 other ways you can say about 48 of the 50 states the
13 fastest growing population growth was Hispanic,
14 including Iowa, Idaho. So the patterns and
15 diversification, particularly the growth of the Hispanic
16 population is no longer just a few states. It is a
17 nationwide of phenomenal importance to all Americans.
18 In fact, I now argue because of our rank in
19 terms of Anglos that we are the most diverse state in
20 the entire country. Only Hawaii, California has a
21 smaller portion of Anglo than we do.
22 When we look at our change, if you're trying
23 to follow along -- I'm going to jump around a little bit
24 -- you might want to just use those for reference, but
25 you can see that although we had a second largest
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