Juan Sepúlveda is no stranger to challenges. Hailing from a Mexican-American neighborhood in Topeka, Kan., Sepúlveda became only the third Latino to receive a Rhodes scholarship. In 1997, he was picked to run the first-ever Bipartisan Congressional Retreat to, more or less, get members of Congress to play nice. And in 2008, he headed up President Obama’s Texas campaign.

But for his latest – and perhaps most difficult – challenge as director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans, he is trying to find ways to reverse decades of low graduation and college-going rates.

Here, in an interview edited for length, he talks about obstacles Hispanic student face and why the dropout rate isn’t improving.

Q: Education Secretary Arne Duncan appointed you on May 19, 2009. What have you been working on?

A: There weren’t a lot of folks outside D.C. who even knew this office existed. And so the first thing we did was get out of D.C. to host a series of community conversations, introduce ourselves to the community, get a chance to hear from folks directly about what they were going through in the Latino community.

The first year we visited 20 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico. We had 100 community conversations, and close to 10,000 people across the country participated.

Q: Did some common themes surface?

A: Yes and no. On the K-12 side, not a surprise: A big focus on the dropout question itself. Across the communities, people were concerned about what the dropout rate really is. There’s a sense from a lot of folks that the numbers being reported are not accurate.

We heard a lot of concern about our kids not getting through high school. We heard loud and clear across the country that Hispanics want their kids to go to college and graduate. So it was countering what people writing articles are saying: “Oh, maybe Latino parents don’t want their kids to go to school, you know, go get a job. Go take care of the family.”

We heard the complete opposite. And we also heard a lot of: “Help us understand the system. We want our kids to go, but we don’t know how it works.”

Q: It seems like the Hispanic dropout rate hasn’t improved a lot since the 1980s. Why do you think that is?

A: If you look at the research, the achievement gap for minorities in particular, there are 16 different factors – things that are happening inside the school and outside the school. In Latino high schools, and in the public schools in general, Latino students are more likely to have teachers who are missing a large number of days in their jobs. Teaching and leadership are part of the equation. When you look outside of the classroom – health care, safety and violence – all of those things come together to make it a more challenging experience for Latino kids to get through. Economics and class play into it as well.

The big challenge now is that the numbers have grown. The demographics have changed. Latinos are the largest minority within the public school system today. If you’re not in Chicago, if you’re not in Texas or California, you may not know that. If you’re on the East Coast, where the government is, there is a tendency to still think that the system is still traditionally an African-American and an Anglo system. But if you look at the numbers today, there are more than 11.5 million Latinos in the pre-K through 12 public school system.

If we want to reach the president’s 2020 goal of being No. 1 in the world again with the highest percentage of our population with a piece of paper beyond high school, you numerically can’t get there without the Latino community. I think the president gets that. Arne, as the education secretary, gets that. The demographics have changed the conversation.

Q: It seems like this goal of increasing the number of Hispanics who achieve a two-year or four-year degree is ambitious, given that 40 percent aren’t completing high school in some regions of the country.

A: This is not an easy thing to be taking on. One of the things Arne did in Chicago, that needs to happen in other communities, is that when presented with the real numbers about how bad things were, instead of running away from them, he said, “We have to be honest about the numbers.”

Once you’re honest about the numbers, you have a baseline to then move from. If you start with a high school class of 1,000 and four years later only 400 students graduate, it’s kind of hard to say the dropout rate is 10 percent. We know part of it is that there are a lot of pressures on schools to make things look as strong as they can.