THE PERFORMANCE OF LATINOS IN RURAL PUBLIC-SCHOOLS - A COMPARATIVE-ANALYSIS OF TEST-SCORES IN GRADE-3, GRADE-6, AND GRADE-12

Over the last few decades, California's rural communities have experie nced a sociodemographic transformation as the percentage of Latinos in these towns increased dramatically. These high concentrations of lati nos are correlated with poverty and low educational achievement. Using multiple regression analysis, this study examines how socioeconomic s tatus, school funding, English proficiency and Latino concentration af fect test scores. This study's major findings are: (a) that the socioe conomic status of parents in rural communities is the primary predicto r of academic performance; and (b) that the academic performance of bo th rural Latinos and Whites improves as Latino concentration increases . This last result is in contrast to previous studies, which have reli ed on pairwise correlations and focused on primarily urban populations .