Obama latino students

President Barack Obama took to the Spanish-language network airwaves Monday to discuss challenges in educating Hispanics students.

In a Univision-sponsored town hall meeting with Hispanic students and educators at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, the president said to out-educate and out-innovate the global competition, the Latino community must play a key role in the future.

"Our workforce is going to be more diverse; it is going to be, to a large percentage, Latino. And if our young people are not getting the kind of education they need, we won't succeed as a nation," Obama said.

With several students and parents asking questions about immigration and deportations, Obama said the answer wouldn't be overnight. He hoped the DREAM Act, which would give kids who have grown up in the United States an opportunity to earn citizenship despite their family's immigration status, would be passed in the future.

"We didn't get it passed this time, but I don't want young people to be giving up because if people in the past had given up, we probably wouldn't have women's rights, we wouldn't have civil rights. So many changes that we've made had to do with young people being willing to struggle and fight to make sure that their voices are heard," said Obama.

Carrie Cofer, an English teacher at Lincoln-West High School in Cleveland, says one challenge she faces with her Hispanic students is that they haven't been in the United States long enough to become proficient in English.