WASHINGTON - Hispanic children are much more likely than white or black
students to attend the nation's largest and poorest public high schools, a
new analysis shows.

More
than half of Hispanic teens, 56 percent, attend schools with enrollments of
roughly 1,800 students - schools that rank in the 90th percentile in terms
of size. Only 32 percent of black children and 26 percent of white children
attend schools that large, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonprofit
research group that studies the Latino population.

At
the same time, Hispanics are more likely to be in high schools that have the
highest concentrations of poverty and largest ratios of students for every
teacher. Hispanics can be of any race, but in this report, the groupings of
whites and blacks included no Hispanics.

The
study also found that almost four in 10 Hispanics go to high schools with a
student-teacher ratio of greater than 22-to-1, while less than two in 10
white students or black students go to such schools.

"Hispanic teens are more likely than any other racial or ethnic group to
attend public high schools that have the dual characteristics of extreme
size and poverty," said Richard Fry, senior associate at the center and the
author of the new research.

The
Pew Hispanic Center's data are from an Education Department survey that
collects data on every public high school in the country. The figures come
from the 2002-03 school year.

School size matters, Fry said, because research shows students in large
schools have higher dropout rates and more trouble making academic gains.

As
the president, Congress and governors give more attention to high school,
Fry said, Hispanics may have the most to gain by efforts to reshape schools
into smaller environments.

The
number of Hispanics surpassed the number of black people in the United
States in the 2000 census, making them the largest minority group in the
country.

Much
of the research on the achievement gap between Hispanics and whites has
focused on family income, parents' level of education and the ability of
students to speak English.

But
Fry said educators and policy-makers have significantly more control over
changing the characteristics of the school buildings than they do the traits
of the students themselves.

Most
Hispanic students are concentrated in seven states that tend to have larger
high schools: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Arizona, Illinois and
New Jersey.

The number of young
Hispanic students attending college is rising, according to another report
released by the Pew Hispanic Center on Tuesday.