Mon Jan 31,11:35 AM ET White House - AP Cabinet & State
By BEN FELLER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Margaret Spellings, a loyal adviser to President Bush back to
his days in Texas, was sworn in Monday as secretary of education and vowed
to "stay the course" on the president's school reform agenda.

Spellings pointed out that she's the first mother of school-age children to
lead the Education Department. Bush said that gives her a personal stake in
the state of the nation's schools.

As Bush's domestic policy chief in his first term, Spellings helped write
the demanding education law known as the No Child Left Behind Act. The law
requires yearly gains among all students, regardless of race, income or
English ability. Schools that receive poverty aid face penalties if they
fall short.

Many education leaders say they struggle with the law, from getting top
qualified teachers in every class to finding room for students who are
promised transfers.

Spellings said the law has been a success, with test scores in reading and
math on the rise.

"When you signed No Child Left Behind into law three years ago, it was more
than an act ˜ it was an attitude," Spellings told the president after she
took the oath of office. "An attitude that says it's right to measure our
children's progress from year to year so we can help them before it's too
late. An attitude that says asking children to read and do math at grade
level or better is not too much to ask.

"We've learned a new equation ˜ accountability plus high expectations plus
resources equals results," she said. "We must stay the course."

Bush said Spellings was "instrumental" in helping to get his signature
education reform passed and will help extend accountability standards to
high schools.

"Today only about 60 out of every 100 students entering our public high
schools ever make it to graduation four years later," Bush said. "Margaret
understands that is unacceptable."

On the Net:


http://www.whitehouse.gov

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:27 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Jan. 31, 2005, 4:57PM

by JASON SPENCER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle


Houston ISD Superintendent Abe Saavedra's promise last week of a new culture that values teaching over testing has made him the darling of those who think the school district's test-heavy accountability system has gone too far.

"These are the best proposals I have seen during my 23 years in HISD. I strongly applaud and support you," Westbury High School teacher Faye Volcy wrote Saavedra via e-mail with "Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!" in the subject line.

Although some saw the move as a retreat from the test-based reforms that landed former Houston Independent School District Superintendent Rod Paige a job as U.S. education secretary, Saavedra is emphatic that Paige's core values still drive HISD philosophy.

"We're not retreating," Saavedra said. "The issue with the testing is that after 10 years, we need to examine whether testing has grown to where it needs to be cut back."

Still, following through on his plan to give those No. 2 pencils a break could be a tough task for the first-year superintendent.

Most of the 22 standardized tests used by HISD would be difficult to discard. Some, such as the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, are state-mandated. Others measure college-readiness, such as the PSAT, or identify gifted students, such as the Naglieri.

That leaves few options for a newly formed committee of teachers, principals and administrators as they try to come up with recommendations for Saavedra.

Already, Saavedra has his eye on two tests as candidates for a major overhaul — the so-called "snapshot" practice tests that gauge how prepared students are before they take the real TAKS and the Stanford Achievement Test.

Use of several exams urged
Yet some educators say even those tests, particularly the Stanford, are vital to pinpointing weaknesses in students' education.

The best way to keep teachers from teaching to the test, they say, is to use several tests to measure learning.

The Stanford, given in grades 1 to 11, is the only test that compares HISD students with their peers nationally. Though committed to keeping the Stanford, Saavedra said he may scale back its role in HISD.

"The question is, do we need to be giving it at every grade level," he said.

It wasn't long ago that HISD viewed the Stanford, which costs nearly $1.9 million to administer, as key to proving Houston students really were learning.

The exam, produced by San Antonio-based Harcourt Assessment Inc., came to Houston in 1996, when lagging public confidence in the school system resulted in voters' rejection that year of HISD's $390 million bond package.

"The whole purpose behind the use of the (Stanford) test was to convince the public and the business community and the other stakeholders that schools were performing well enough to meet national standards," said Gary Dworkin, who runs the University of Houston's Sociology of Education Research Group.

Expert affirms need
Don McAdams served on the school board that authorized Paige's testing proposal in 1996. He still considers it one of HISD's smartest steps toward silencing critics who questioned the validity of students' high passing rates on the old Texas Assessment of Academic Skills.

"That's exactly why HISD developed an accountability system that used the TAAS and the Stanford," said McAdams, now a nationally recognized education consultant. "If you are testing in various ways, it prevents teaching to the test."

McAdams agrees it's time for a re-evaluation of the tests taken by Houston's 209,000 students

"But I would not want to see the public fall into the trap of thinking that teaching and testing are somehow opposed to each other," he said.

If decision-makers in Houston and elsewhere are concerned with freeing up more instructional time, "The place to start is movies, field trips and other activities that aren't involved in supporting the curriculum and the learning process."

Some wonder about the motivation for getting rid of a test that has served as ammunition for skeptics of the No Child Left Behind Act that Paige championed in Washington, D.C.

Those critics often point out that the education reforms that led to HISD's big gains on the old TAAS didn't yield the same results on the Stanford.

Usefulness is questioned
"We would like them to keep Stanford administered on all grade levels," said Lester Houston, executive director of the Houston-based Parent Leadership Union of Texas, which has 4,000 dues-paying members in the Houston area.

"If you eliminate it in early grades, you put kids in a deficit situation," Houston said. "School districts allow the learning gaps to increase so dramatically, it's almost impossible to close those gaps once kids get into high school."

Others, though, question the Stanford test's usefulness since its questions don't reflect Texas' curriculum the way TAKS questions do.

"Testing is just a way to get information about students' learning, and we have far too much testing going on," said Thomas Haladyna, an Arizona State University professor specializing in standardized test research. "When it comes down to which tests are most useful, that would be the TAKS. The Stanford would be the least useful because it's not aligned with Texas' standards."

Texas, Haladyna said, would do well to follow the lead of Arizona and other states that have embedded Stanford questions in their state accountability test. "We're cutting down on testing time and increasing teaching time," he said.

Practice TAKS sessions
It could be the Stanford has outlived its usefulness for Houston schools, said Dworkin, the UH researcher. School ratings in both the state and federal systems are based on TAKS performance, he said.

"As we move toward No Child Left Behind, TAKS becomes the measuring stick for Texas, and it may be feasible to drop some of the norm-referenced testing — Stanford is one — especially as TAKS becomes more rigorous," he said.

Although opinions vary on the Stanford exams, there's less debate on snapshot TAKS tests.

HISD requires that students in grades 3 to 11 take three or four TAKS snapshot tests a year. Saavedra said he is considering letting teachers decide for themselves whether and how often to give those tests.

Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, said the union has been pushing for less snapshot testing for years.

"Some of our schools have gone absolutely over the edge on benchmark testing," she said. "We have schools where kids are taking the prep test for the TAKS over and over and over, sometimes as frequently as once a month."


'Drill and kill' method
Sandy Kress, an Austin attorney who was a top education adviser to George W. Bush as Texas governor and in the early years of his presidency, agreed some schools go overboard with such testing.

"That's an area where test-makers and test-givers probably need to be a little more artful," said Kress, now a lobbyist. "If short assessments are used on a timely basis during the year to see that the curriculum is being learned, that can be a very helpful tool for everyone involved."

Often, Fallon said, principals ask teachers to use the snapshot results to identify test-taking weaknesses and use a "drill and kill" method that focuses on narrow concepts instead of the broad curriculum.

"If you teach the curriculum," she said, "they should do all right on the test."

jason.spencer@chron.com

This article is: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3016727

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:31 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Hundreds — including some who took a 'staff development day' — lobby lawmakers on education issues.

By Mike Ward AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, January 31, 2005

More than 400 teachers from across Texas converged on the state Capitol on Monday to press lawmakers to pump more money into public schools in Texas.

And to raise their pay. And some were doing it on the taxpayer's dime. Sort of.

Several lawmakers raised eyebrows about having so many teachers around on a school day.

"Who's paying for all the substitutes?" asked Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, echoing the sentiments of other lawmakers.

Some of the teachers said they had taken the day off, either on paid leave or without pay. But others said they were there on a "staff development" day, which they are entitled to take to receive in-service training or improve their schools.

"I think it's great that they have concerns and want to talk to us, but they could do that at our district offices or they can send us a message," Shapiro said. "In my opinion, it doesn't look professional to have this many teachers all up here at once like this."

According to state and local school officials and the teachers, the lobbying day was legit. It's just the first of several this spring that teacher and educator groups will organize in Austin to lobby lawmakers.

State rules require students to receive 180 days of instruction each semester, with teachers allowed to take off up to six days per year for staff development. The exact number varies from district to district. On those days, educators most often attend training programs, seminars or conferences.

Some districts allow staff development to include the Capitol visits because the lobbying days are sometimes connected with a professional conference in Austin, such as one that the 105,000-member Association of Texas Professional Educators held over the weekend.

Some schools, including those in Austin, had staff development days already scheduled for Monday and held no classes.

Andy Welch, a spokesman for the Austin district, said teachers were not allowed to count the Capitol visit as staff development. But they could take one of three paid personal-leave days allowed each teacher annually.

"It's no-questions-asked," Welch said. "What they do on those days is up to them. They just get three."

Marcy McNeil, a fourth-grade teacher at Odom Elementary who has taught for 29years, did just that. She is the local president of the professional educators group.

She and hundreds of other teachers made the rounds of legislators' offices advocating for more funding for public education, smaller class sizes, a salary increase for teachers and restoration of a medical-benefit payment that lawmakers slashed in half two years ago. They were also opposing school vouchers.

Other teachers from Houston, Fort Worth and San Antonio — several of whom said they were using professional development days — bristled at the suggestion they should be in class.

"I'm appalled anyone would suggest I'm here for myself," said one teacher, who, like several others, refused to give her name after a reporter questioned who was tending to their classrooms. "I'm here for better public education. I'm here for the students. Better schools make Texas better for everyone."

Randall Iglehart, state president of the educators group, said he came to the Capitol on a professional development day. He has taught for 28 years, currently English-as-a-second-language classes at a San Antonio middle school.

"Some are here on professional development days, some are here on personal days, but everyone is here to help make public education better in Texas," he said. "Some districts see this kind of thing as important and benefiting public schools in general. It's the kids who are the heart of what we're doing."

And should anyone wonder who was minding his classes Monday, Iglehart said not to worry, because he's covering the costs himself.

"I'm paying for my own substitute," he said.

In Austin, that would be between $60 and $80 a day, depending on the substitute, Welch said.
What's a staff development day? The Texas Education Code allows staff development days that are 'designed to improve education in the district.' Among other things officials said they may include: •Programs for reading/language arts, mathematics, science, social studies. •Teacher conferences. •Training in discipline policies and strategies. •Instruction for alternative education programs. •Other types of training approved by the local district. Source: Texas Education Agency, from state law and agency policy

here

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:38 AM 3 comments Links to this post

TO: Coalition for Public Schools Organizations
FROM: Carolyn Boyle

All signs are showing that a major piece of legislation which includes private school vouchers will start moving in the Texas House of Representatives soon, and Governor Rick Perry will be its chief cheerleader. The governor used the "State of the State" speech January 26 as his platform to call for vouchers, saying, "Every child is entitled to a public education, but public education is not entitled to every child. Let's give children who need a second chance new choices that can forever change their future. Let's give them school choice."

According to insider reports, leaders in the Texas House are polling members on their first choice among three approaches to public school finance, and all three include vouchers. Vouchers also may be included in a "school reform" bill that is expected to be filed in the House next week. House Speaker Tom Craddick told a Texas Public Policy Foundation audience Thursday that House members "aren't going to play" with the school reform bill--they will just "make decisions and go on." H.B. 12, a proposed voucher pilot program in urban areas, also is expected to start moving soon.
The Texas Senate did not include vouchers in its consensus outline for Senate Bill 2, an omnibus bill on public school excellence and school finance reform. But even if there is no Senate voucher legislation, amendments that fund private school tuition could be proposed on the Senate floor.

WRITE YOUR LEGISLATORS IN OPPOSITION TO VOUCHERS

Voucher legislation is expected to move quickly, so NOW is the time for public school supporters to write LETTERS (not email) to their state representatives and senators. (We'll urge activists to make phone calls at a later date when there are bill numbers and key dates for action) If you do not know who represents you in the Texas Legislature, go to http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/fyi/fyi.htm
Addresses are:
Representatives: Texas House of Representatives, P.O. Box 2910, Austin, Texas 78768-2910
Senators: Texas Senate, P.O. Box 12068-Capitol Station, Austin, Texas 78711

A FEW POINTS YOU COULD MAKE (but please personalize your letters)

-- Legislators should solve the problems with our state's school finance system and not get distracted by divisive, ill-conceived schemes that would take away money from neighborhood public schools. Vouchers would just create new school finance problems.

-- A voucher pilot program in urban areas would be a new "Robin Hood" that takes tax money from rural and suburban public schools to subsidize private, religious, and forprofit academies in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio.

-- H.B. 12 proposes a new "school stamp" program, giving a private school tuition voucher to every urban child from a low income family who fails any section of the TAKS test. Legislators must be fiscally conservative and not create a new, unaffordable entitlement program. Plus, the TAKS test should not be turned into a voucher eligibility test.

-- Legislators should vote against any bill that uses our limited public funds to subsidize private schools and home schools.

-- There are only 3 neighborhood public schools in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Austin ISDs that were rated low-performing for two consecutive rating years. The consistently failing schools are charter schools, which must either improve or be closed by the state.

Thank you for making letter-writing a priority, and please encourage your family and friends to write letters, too!!
***********************************************************
Coalition for Public Schools, 1005 Congress Avenue, Suite 550, Austin, Texas 78701-2491, (512) 474-9765, Fax: (512) 474-2507, Carolyn Boyle, Coordinator
email: cboyleaust@aol.com www.coalition4publicschools.org

The Coalition for Public Schools is comprised of 40 education, child advocacy, community, and religious organizations representing more than 3,000,000 members in Texas. Founded in 1995, CPS opposes expenditure of public funds to support private and religious schools through mechanisms such as tuition vouchers, franchise tax credits, and property tax credits. The Coalition believes public tax dollars should be spent only to improve neighborhood public schools, which serve more than 94 percent of all Texas children.

Coalition for Public Schools groups are: American Association of University Women, American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, Americans for Religious Liberty, Americans United for Separation of Church & State, Anti-Defamation League, Association of Texas Professional Educators, Delta Kappa Gamma Texas, Jewish Federation of San Antonio Community Relations Council, League of United Latin American Citizens, League of Women Voters of Texas, Let Freedom Ring, National Council of Jewish Women, Parents for Public Schools of Houston, People for the American Way, Texas Advocacy Inc., Texas AFL-CIO, Texas Association for Bilingual Education, Texas Association of Community Schools, Texas Association of Mid-Size Schools, Texas Association of School Administrators, Texas Association of School Boards, Texas Association of School Personnel Administrators, Texas Association of Secondary School Principals, Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission, Texas Classroom Teachers Association, Texas Council of Administrators of Special Education, Texas Counseling Association, Texas Educational Support Staff Association, Texas Elementary Principals and Supervisors Association, Texas Federation of Teachers, Texas Freedom Network, Texas Impact, Texas Parents and Teachers Association, Texas Retired Teachers Association, Texas Rural Education Association, Texas School Public Relations Association, Texas State Teachers Association, The Arc of Texas.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:40 PM 15 comments Links to this post

New York Plans Test to Affirm Fitness for Jobs
By SUSAN SAULNY

Under mounting pressure from business and labor groups, New York is expected to become the first state in the nation to issue a "work readiness" credential to high school students who pass a voluntary test measuring their ability to succeed in entry-level jobs, state officials say.

Employers have complained for years that too many students leave high school without such basic skills, despite the battery of exams - considered among the most stringent in the nation - that New York requires for graduation. The work-readiness credential, employers say, will make hiring decisions easier and cut employee turnover.

The test would cover so-called soft skills in 10 broad areas, including the ability to communicate, follow directions, negotiate and make basic decisions. It will be tried out in pilot programs this spring and could be ready as early as the fall, officials said. The test, given by computer, would include one section on speaking skills, with oral answers to be recorded and then analyzed by examiners.

James C. Dawson, a Regent who represents several upstate counties, said that many details of the proposal had yet to be worked out, but that he had little doubt the Board of Regents, which controls education policy, would endorse some form of the new credential.

"It is going to be an interesting discussion," he said. "But the bottom line is to do something that will help students who are inclined to go into the work force at an early age."

Other states including Florida, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Washington are part of a national plan by the United States Chamber of Commerce to create a work-readiness credential that would be recognized across the states, a project that is supported by the New York State Departments of Education and Labor.

The Board of Regents is expected to take up the proposal next month. State officials say the Regents are likely to adopt the idea because of the state's role in the national initiative, and because the commissioner of education, Richard P. Mills, is a member of a quasi-governmental state group, the Workforce Investment Board, that has been one of the credential's main proponents.

"This is something that business has wanted for a long time," said Harry Phillips, a Regent from Hartsdale, N.Y. "The Regents had an original reaction that maybe it would dilute the diploma. But I hope that we have come around to feel that it is not that, and is something we should support."

Officials still have not determined whether students who do not earn a diploma, either because they fail the Regents exams or do not take them, would be eligible for the work-readiness credential. Some Regents are expected to insist that the credential be tied to the diploma, so it does not become an incentive for dropping out of school.

Critics of the proposed credential question the need for yet another high school assessment in New York, which is already among the most aggressive states in requiring testing. Further, they question whether schools have the time and resources to put in place the new courses required to prepare students for the work-readiness test.

Still others ask a more basic question: How is it that students can graduate from high school without the basic skills necessary for entry-level work?

"If the diploma now provided after a student takes five Regents exams - if that is not enough for a student to be ready for the rigors of life, then one has to question the worth of that assessment," said Assemblyman Steven Sanders, chairman of the Assembly Education Committee. "Here we have the highest-stakes examinations of any state in the country, and the business leaders are saying there's something missing here. That means there's something wrong with this approach. The Regents have a problem here."

Eva S. Moskowitz, the chairwoman of the New York City Council's Education Committee, had similar thoughts.

"I'm glad that the business community has piped up about its needs, and I hope it will continue to be vocal about its expectations for high school graduates," she said. "I don't believe, though, that the credential as I understand it will actually improve students' ability to be successful in the workplace. Kids should be practicing public speaking in social studies, for example. A good education, college preparatory or vocational, would guarantee that students have mastered these skills."

In a report about the proposed credential addressed to the Regents, Commissioner Mills noted that statewide learning standards already included "foundation skills" that were similar to what businesses were calling for. State education officials have also said that the Regents exams already judge foundation skills.

But business leaders have been clear that the current system is not measuring up. "Right now, most work development programs tend to be fragmented," said Margarita Mayo, director of education and training at the Business Council of New York State. "Having people be able to get this credential and pass an assessment that is recognized nationally, that would really help students in having something to present to employers that is valid."

In his report, Mr. Mills did not take a position on the credential. Nonetheless, he told the Regents, "We must redouble our efforts to guarantee to students, parents and the employer community that the diploma means 'ready to work.' "

Daniel E. Richardson, the director of finance and planning at Latta Road Nursing Home, a facility in Rochester, and a member of the Workforce Investment Board, said, "We owe it to ourselves and our society to come up with a metric, much like the Regents did 10 years ago for academic standards."

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:45 PM 1 comments Links to this post

The presidents of America's four major black Baptist denominations prepare for Friday press conference.

Black Baptist Leaders Affirm Shared Values
by Bob Allen
01-28-05

The presidents of America’s four major black Baptist denominations on Friday issued a joint statement opposing the war in Iraq, the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General and efforts to divert public funds to private schools.

The leaders said they hoped the statement would expand the discussion of faith and values and have an impact on American politics.
 
William Shaw, president of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., described the shared points of agreement among the four national bodies as “a faith perspective that is quite different” from that espoused by the religious right.
 
Issued at a press conference, the statement outlined points of agreed actions stemming from forum sessions during a four-day joint board meeting of the four groups in Nashville, Tenn.
 
The statement, issued through the four convention presidents, also called for extending provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, increased funding for children’s healthcare and “an end to the prison-industrial complex trend.”
 
The leaders opposed efforts to make recent tax cuts permanent and called for a national living wage. They also called on national leaders to address and invest in aid relief and development for nations in Africa, the Caribbean and Central and South America, including increased relief to combat AIDS.
 
One of the leaders expressed hope that a united voice from denominations representing nearly 15 million African-American Baptists would focus energies toward “some revolutionary change in America.”
 
“We have the power in terms of black registered voters across the country to make a decisive input to who sits in the White House,” said Stephen Thurston, president of the National Baptist Convention of America, Inc.
 
“What we have discovered this week is there is strength in numbers,” said Major Jemison, president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention.
 
“We have come together in one room, and now we speak with one voice,” said Melvin Wade, president of the National Missionary Baptist Convention of America.
 
The Baptist leaders called for an end to the war and withdrawal of U.S. military from Iraq.
 
They called the war “a costly and unnecessary military action begun on grossly inaccurate, misconstrued or distorted intelligence against a nation that did not pose an immediate or realistic threat to the national security of our nation.”
 
The war “is not only creating a hell for the poor in Iraq,” the leaders said, but also disproportionately affects poor and struggling families in the United States, who are more likely than wealthy families to send loved ones into the active military or as reservists or members of the National Guard.
 
The statement called on President Bush and the Congress to “immediately enact and sign into law an extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” which is set to expire in 2007.
 
Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists struggled to give substance to the right to vote guaranteed by the 15th Amendment, they noted. “Yet each election cycle reveals disturbing evidence of continued and deliberate efforts to intimidate, discourage or suppress voting by people of color, senior citizens and people of limited income and impaired physical ability.”
 
“Democracy in the United States deserves at least as much attention as democracy abroad,” the presidents stated.
 
They called on the Senate to vote against the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General over his views supporting use of torture against prisoners of war. “Cruelty is not moral or just no matter who tries to give it legal sanction,” they said.
 
They declared “full commitment to the public education system” and a belief that public schools are threatened by “deliberate attempts to divert public monies and resources to private schools,” including vouchers and charter-school incentives.
 
“We are wholeheartedly opposed to the effort to privatize public education and believe the Bush administration’s Leave No Child Behind Law fails to address the needs of children in public schools across the nation,” they said.
 
They also labeled “immoral” efforts to “undermine the safety net for children through block grants, budget cuts, caps or freezes in child healthcare programs such as Medicaid and the Children’s Heath Insurance Program.”
 
The leaders called for an end to mandatory minimum sentences for crimes and opposed privatizing of construction, operation and administration of prisons. States should address the problem of repeat offenders by a system of education and job retraining, rather than just building more prisons, they said.
 
They opposed efforts to make recent tax cuts permanent and said that a nation that can afford to spend $200 billion in Iraq can afford a national living wage for its own people.
 
While supporting relief efforts for tsunami victims in Asia, the leaders urged equal attention to suffering nations like the Sudan and Haiti. “As religious leaders, we urge our national leaders to give equal development and aid to global suffering in black nations, rather than intimate by their actions that black suffering is somehow not as deserving of relief and black aspirations for development not as deserving of support.”
 
More than 10,000 delegates attended at least part of the first-ever joint winter board meeting of the four groups, which have splintered over various organization and philosophical differences during the last 90 years.
 
The presidents said plans would be developed for future joint gatherings, probably before the presidential elections in 2008. “This is not a one-time event,” the NBCUSA’s Shaw said.
 
Asked about the possibility of a formal merger, Shaw said, “There is in the will of God a thing called the fullness of time.” Crediting the Holy Spirit with bringing the four groups together for the initial meeting, he said, “What the Holy Spirit will work out in terms of structural relationship, we will leave up to Him.”
 
Bob Allen is managing editor of EthicsDaily.com.

http://www.ethicsdaily.com/article_detail.cfm?AID=5300
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:45 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Bill launches property tax talks in House
Selling lottery tickets at the pump is one proposed option for relief
By JANET ELLIOTT
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN - Smokers would pay more, businesses would ante up and drivers could buy lottery tickets at service station pumps under a House plan to cut school property taxes.

Rep. Jim Keffer, chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, on Thursday filed House Bill 3 as a "shell bill" to begin discussions on property tax relief.

The bill's highlights were listed in a press release sent late Thursday after the Legislature had adjourned for the week. The text of the bill was not available.

When the Senate outlined its school finance proposals Jan. 12, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and all 31 senators held a news conference and answered questions. The Senate has not yet filed a bill incorporating the ideas it discussed that day.

Similar to a plan unveiled by the Senate two weeks ago, local school property taxes would be lowered to $1 per $100 valuation. The state would need to raise more than $5 billion to pay for such a cut.

Keffer's bill proposes raising the cigarette tax by $1 per pack and a minor expansion of the sales tax base.

It also would continue the Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund, a fee assessed on phone service and would authorize the sale of lottery tickets at service station pumps, allowing motorists to use credit cards to play the lottery.

The corporate franchise tax, currently paid by only one out of every six businesses, would be eliminated and replaced by an unspecified business tax.

"We want to start looking at a uniform business tax," said Keffer, R-Eastland. "What the ingredients will be in that we don't know."

Keffer said the payroll tax he proposed during last spring's special session on school finance may be one option.

Labor-intensive companies argued that a payroll tax would unfairly burden their business.

The more specific plan outlined earlier by the Senate would rely on increases in sales, tobacco and alcohol taxes, and closing a loophole on sales taxes for used cars.

The Senate would replace local school property taxes for maintenance and operations with a statewide property tax. The House would leave the local school property tax in place but lower the cap from $1.50 to $1.

House Speaker Tom Craddick said this week that he personally favors a statewide property tax because it would end court challenges by school districts over inequities in property wealth. But he said some rural lawmakers are opposed to a statewide tax and he might have trouble getting the needed two-thirds vote to place the issue on the ballot.

The Senate also proposed spending $1 billion to raise teacher pay. The House will be handling teacher pay issues and other educational changes in a separate bill that is expected to be filed next week by Public Education Committee Chairman Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington.

janet.elliott@chron.com

HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Local & State
This article is: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3012954

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:51 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Picking on public schools
EDITORIAL BOARD
Friday, January 28, 2005

Much of Gov. Rick Perry's State of the State speech on Wednesday was standard fare for such legislative addresses. But there was a disturbing undertone of hostility toward public education.

At one level, the governor had the usual bromides: Improve school and teacher accountability for classroom performance, reward outstanding teachers financially and do more to help struggling schools.

And, he said, all this could be done with no new taxes.

But after making a proposal reasonable on its face, Perry would follow it up with a kick at public education.

For example, he called for more detailed disclosure by school districts of how much of their costs go to classrooms and how much to administration.

But then he added that taxpayers "deserve to know how much is spent on administration and how much they are paying for lobbyists and lawyers who seek to extract even more tax dollars from their pockets."

The governor favors "school choice" — diverting some public education funds to private schools. We dislike the idea, but it's worthy of debate.

But the governor again attacked public education, saying of parents, "They deserve better than to leave their fate in the hands of a local monopoly that is slow to change without the benefit of competition."

And, he added, "Every child is entitled to a public education, but public education is not entitled to every child."

A casual listener could be forgiven for not knowing that the Texas Constitution declares that it "shall be the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools."

And the Constitution says it's the governor duty to make sure the laws — including those regarding public education — are "faithfully executed."

If that system is screwed up, it's Perry and the Legislature's job to fix it — not campaign against it as though they have nothing to do with its present state of affairs.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/01/28perry_edit.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:45 PM 1 comments Links to this post

79th LEGISLATURE
Prepared text of Perry's State of the State address
Scheduled for Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Text of Gov. Rick Perry's State-of-the-State Address


(NOTE: Gov. Perry frequently deviates from prepared text.)


Thank you. Statewide officials and members of the judiciary, members of the Legislature and distinguished guests, friends and fellow Texans: I am honored to uphold our constitutional tradition and speak to you today on the state of our state.


As always, we are joined on this occasion by distinguished friends and neighbors. Please join me in welcoming Governor Eugenio Hernandez Flores of Tamaulipas. And please join me in recognizing two distinguished guests from Canada, Premier Gary Doer of Manitoba, and Premier Bernard Lord of New Brunswick.


In this people's house we have many outstanding officials, two of whom join me today on this dais. Please help me recognize a great lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst. And please join me in recognizing an equally extraordinary leader and a fellow West Texan, Speaker Tom Craddick.


West Texas not only raised me, it gave me the love of my life. I'm proud to have by my side today, and every day, a wonderful woman who makes every day a radiant one – your First Lady, Anita Perry.


It was twenty years ago that I first took the oath of office in this House. And while much has changed, it's good to know some things have stayed the same. It's good to see in this House so many veteran lawmakers, including two old classmates, Harold Dutton and John Smithee. And it is good to see long-serving leaders in the Senate, such as the dean, John Whitmire, and Ken Armbrister.


Anita and I want to issue a special welcome to our newest members. You are the invigorating lifeblood every democratic body needs. Thank you for your willingness to serve.


Democracy functions best when we have an active citizenry. It is great to see the balconies filled by folks our forefathers called, "we the people." I want to issue a special welcome to a group of Texans who have a vision for extending educational opportunity to every corner of this great state – the members of HOPE, Hispanics for Opportunity and Progress in Education.


As we gather today, I am more optimistic than ever about our future.


Dark economic clouds are dissipating into an emerging blue sky of opportunity. In the last 15 months, we have added 162,000 jobs. In 2003, we attracted nine of the 24 largest capital investments in the nation, including the single largest investment, a $3 billion Texas Instruments semiconductor plant.


Last year we convinced Vought Aircraft to add 3,000 jobs in Texas, and then we persuaded Countrywide Mortgage to bring 7,500 jobs to our state – the largest job expansion nationwide in four years.


These major investments, and many more, were made possible by the Texas Enterprise Fund, a fund that is not only bringing jobs to the big cities, but to towns like Brownwood, New Braunfels, Buda, Nacogdoches, Port Neches, League City and Ennis too, Chairman Pitts.


It's no wonder Site Selection Magazine called Texas the best business climate in the nation in 2004.


We can feel good about our economic progress because more families are making a good living. Jobs are not just economic statistics, they are an investment in our people and a generator of revenue.


Job growth has led to tremendous revenue growth. In two years we have gone from $10 billion in the red to $6 billion above what we last budgeted. That didn't happen by accident. It happened because we made the hard decisions and you cast the tough votes. And today you deserve much of the credit.


Among the ten largest states, six still faced revenue shortfalls heading into this year. All six recently raised a patchwork of taxes, and one borrowed up to $15 billion to address their budget gap.


We took a different path. We asked every agency to justify their budgets. For the first time since World War II, we lowered general revenue spending. And we addressed the priorities of our people without raising their taxes.


Going forward, we must not retreat on the principle behind our prosperity, fiscal responsibility.


We did not tax and spend our way to a revenue surplus, and we need not tax and spend our way to future shortfalls. Our challenge is to make sound, strategic investments that stand the test of time.


That is what we have done for many years in education. Standards are higher and test scores are rising again. According to a study by Achieve Incorporated, Texas is the first state to make a college-prep curriculum the standard coursework in high school, starting with this year's ninth grade class.


We were the first state to require individual graduation plans for at-risk students, and provide a personalized study guide for eleventh grade students that fail state assessments. And we have joined the Gates Foundation in investing $130 million in the Texas High School Initiative to reorganize and reconstitute failing schools.


The foundation for future prosperity is built on the bedrock of good jobs and great schools. We are building a strong foundation one job at a time and one educated Texan at a time.


Progress can be measured on other fronts too. Because of leadership on both sides of the aisle, doctors are returning to areas once deemed high-risk, hospitals are seeing double-digit declines in their insurance costs, and patient access is improving because the personal injury trial lawyers are no longer calling the shots when it comes to Texans' health care.


We also passed sweeping reforms to address one of the top job-killers in Texas:...frivolous lawsuits.


Texans stuck in traffic now know that help is on the way. The Trans Texas Corridor is quickly becoming a reality with the private sector willing to expend $7.2 billion up front without asking for one dime in state money for construction. This toll project will allow us to build needed corridors sooner and cheaper. And for those who like driving on free lanes today, let me be clear: I do not support tolling existing lanes.


The reforms of the last two years have protected Texans' pocketbooks, preserved their health care and improved the job climate. With our recent economic growth, continuing gains in education and a better budgetary picture, the Lone Star of Texas is once again on the rise.


So today I am proud to declare the state of our state is vibrant and our future is limitless.


Because of the right choices you have made, we find ourselves at the brink of a new era of possibility. And today I ask you to consider what is possible if we make wise investments in good jobs, great schools, and stronger families.


Nothing impacts our future like the education of our children. It is the one issue foremost on the minds of every leader in this room. And today it is the focus of my remarks.


Education often gets reduced to a numbers game inside the walls of this Capitol. But inside the walls of our schools, the greatest concern is whether our children grow and learn. Let us keep the most important issue the most important issue: and that is the quality of education in our schools.


This is not merely an exercise in accounting, or a chance to change our complex funding formulas. It is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make sure children of every background are given a chance in life.


The financing component is critical, but it is only the means to an end destination. And we will not arrive at that destination until every child, in every corner of this state, can walk through the schoolhouse doors and have waiting for them the best teachers, the best curriculum, and the best opportunity to succeed.


Our challenge in education is to go from good to great by empowering children of modest means to live unlimited dreams.


I ask you to think about what is possible, not what is standard practice, when it comes to education. We've climbed a long way up the mountain, but many of our schools still have no view of the top.


We must have two goals: ensuring more students graduate and ensuring more students graduate prepared for college. It's that simple and it is the greatest challenge we face.


Despite a decade of progress and gains by students of every background, we still have an achievement gap in Texas schools that will be an opportunity gap when today's students become tomorrow's workers.


Today we have 36,399 students trapped in failing schools. Last year 889,468 students failed at least one section of the TAKS. And two years ago 15,665 students dropped out.


The answer to these great challenges is not simply more money poured into the same system. If it were, then the $7 billion in new money appropriated in the last six years would have solved these challenges.


How much money we spend on education is important but not nearly as important as how the money is spent. Washington, D.C., has some of the best-funded public schools in America and yet they consistently rank near the bottom.


When our work is done, parents won't measure our success by how much money we spend, but whether more children learn. I support additional dollars for our schools, but even more importantly, I support dedicating new money to rewarding and supporting our best teachers and providing incentives for progress at schools with large numbers of economically disadvantaged students.


Let's attract our best and brightest teachers to our toughest learning environments. Too often our struggling schools attract our most inexperienced teachers. We need to recruit proven teachers to under-performing schools, teachers who can turn around a campus one child and one classroom at a time.


We have many excellent teachers in Texas. I want our best and brightest teachers to be paid salary incentives as high as $7,500 a year when they rekindle the love of learning among children too often left in the shadows of success.


Excellence should not be rewarded the same as mediocrity; otherwise, mediocrity becomes its own incentive. When money follows results, we will get more results for our money.


That's exactly what is happening with the Advanced Placement incentive program that rewards schools with up to $100 for each student that registers a high score. In its first five years, the A.P. incentive helped double student participation and helped us nearly triple participation among African-American and Hispanic students.


Achievement incentives work. With the right incentives, we can encourage more students to take our hardest course of study, the distinguished achievement program, and improve student performance on the TAKS test. We should also reinstate end-of-course exams in subjects like algebra, biology, English and history, and allow schools to offer these exams on an optional basis, with incentives tied to student results.


The achievement gap will begin to narrow when we reward student performance and teaching excellence. But for any incentive plan to succeed in closing the achievement gap, it must be focused on schools with the greatest challenges.


We have more than 660,000 students who have limited proficiency in English. Many show up for class several grades behind. We must provide meaningful progress incentives for schools that serve mostly disadvantaged student populations. The challenges these schools face are difficult but not impossible. Let's meet this challenge with new resources, proven teachers and higher expectations.


At the same time, bad schools that refuse to change and chronically fail our children must not be allowed to do so without consequences. And we must have zero tolerance for those that tamper with test results.


It is wrong to blame our testing system for test tampering. Cheaters are not victims, they are perpetrators of a crime, and a terrible example to our children.


While test tampering is likely an isolated problem, schools that fail our children remain too prevalent.


Our first response to failing schools should be to send extra help. We must establish school turn-around teams at the Texas Education Agency that specialize in improving management practices and provide additional mentoring to teachers who lack the support they need.


But if schools refuse to change, they must be shut down and begin again with new leadership. Here is why: we simply cannot sentence our children to a lifetime of mediocrity because of a state-sponsored policy of passive indifference.


Instead, we must be passionate about making a difference, especially in pockets of failure where parents lack the opportunity to say "no" to failing schools.


That is why, as we look to end the era of Robin Hood, we cannot turn our back on the era of equity.


Equity should be about more than fair funding. The fact is, a poorly run school will produce poor results regardless of funding. We won't have equity in education until we have equity in educational opportunities.


Parents that can't afford private tuition and can't afford to quit their jobs to home school their children... have fewer choices, and their children have fewer opportunities. They deserve better than to leave their fate in the hands of a local monopoly that is slow to change without the benefit of competition.


Every child is entitled to a public education, but public education is not entitled to every child. Let's give children who need a second chance new choices that can forever change their future. Let's give them school choice.


Choice has worked for many at-risk charter school children. Because of innovative charter schools, once-struggling students are now succeeding.


Successful charter schools should be emulated across Texas. But those that fail our children, and worse yet, those that exist to enrich fly-by-night operators, should be shut down without delay. I'm tired of bad charter schools obscuring the work done by the good ones.


Reforming education must begin long before our five-year olds enter the kindergarten classroom. Two years ago I worked with Senator Zaffirini and Chairman Grusendorf to initiate a pilot pre-K program that takes a scientific approach to early childhood learning. The Early Start Initiative focuses on the building blocks of reading and language development...and it is working for our youngest children. It is time to take the next step and increase funding for the Early Start program to give more children a true head start.


I also support the expansion of teacher mentoring. A good mentor can be as valuable to a young teacher as any course offered by a college of education. And a good mentor can make a tremendous difference for children who come from broken homes.


That is certainly true for Jamar Gipson, whose father has been in prison since he was three months old. A sixth grader at Fitzgerald Elementary in Arlington, Jamar has had a big brother looking out for him for the past two years. Jamar's performance in school has improved, and he has his sights set on one day becoming either a police officer, a business owner, or a professional basketball player. We are honored to be joined today by Jamar, and his Big Brother Charles Pierson...shining examples of the difference mentoring can make in young lives.


Charles Pierson left a successful career in international business to work full-time at Big Brothers Big Sisters as the North Texas chapter's CEO. He is one of many Texans who make a difference by mentoring.


Let's do more to help children in broken families, including children of prisoners, make right choices and break the cycle of incarceration. Let's do more to promote responsible fatherhood for dads that have lost their way. Let's invest $25 million more in mentoring programs that can build stronger communities, one changed life at a time.


The two essential ingredients to our children's success are strong families and great schools. I have talked a lot today about education because we have no greater priority. In order to get better results in our schools, we need more transparency in school budgeting. That's why we need a "Truth in Spending" initiative that gives every taxpayer detailed information on how local school dollars are spent.


Taxpayers should know what percentage of their money makes it to the classroom and what is considered a classroom expenditure. They deserve to know how much is spent on administration and how much they are paying for lobbyists and lawyers who seek to extract even more tax dollars from their pockets.


The taxpayers writing the check ought to be able to look at every debit on the account. It's a matter of trust. If schools are going to demand more money for education, then Texans should be able to demand more education for their money.


Reforming education is a tremendous challenge with great possibilities. And I can't think of two better Texans to help lead this effort than Senator Florence Shapiro and Representative Kent Grusendorf.


Like both of them, I believe the work of the Legislature should not be left to the courts.


Each day that passes without a school finance bill represents another day of uncertainty for our schools...and another day Texans must live under a property tax system gone awry.


It is time to cut property taxes for the hardworking people of Texas. In fact, let's not only give Texans property tax relief...let's give them appraisal relief too.


Texans don't like taxation without representation, and they are sick and tired of taxation by valuation.


The time has come to draw a line in the sand for the taxpayer: Let's cap appraisals at three percent.


If you oppose a three percent cap on the philosophical grounds of local control, I can respect your position. But then I would hope you would be consistent, and advocate for the repeal of the ten percent cap on the same basis. There is no point in being lukewarm on this issue. Either be hot or cold; either provide real appraisal relief, or none at all. But let's stop this false pretense of taxpayer protection at ten percent.


Last year I also proposed a property tax revenue cap. Since then I have listened to other ideas and I think we can learn a lesson from some wise West Texans. In Lubbock, the city council refuses to accept the proceeds of an appraisal windfall because, as Councilman Gary Boren points out, re-evaluations often amount to a hidden tax.


Excluding new construction, Lubbock leaders automatically lower their rate to adjust for appraisal growth so they generate the same amount of revenue as the year before. Then they have a vote on whether they need to raise or lower that rate.


Two years ago, this saved Lubbock taxpayers from having to pay $2 million more in taxes. I think it is such a good idea that I asked Lubbock's Mayor, Marc McDougal, and Councilman Boren to join us today in honor of their fiscal restraint on the local level. Thank you for your leadership. I look forward to working with you and Representative Isett to champion this issue.


The fact is it's not a tax cut when your rate goes down if your total tax bill goes up. Let's bring Lubbock's "Truth in Taxation" plan to every local jurisdiction in Texas.


As we lower property taxes, we must all work together to find the right mixture of new revenues without harming Texans' jobs. I join the leadership of both houses in support of the concept of a broad-based business tax that is fairly distributed, assessed at a low rate and reflects our modern economy.


When it comes to a business tax, most employers want you to keep it simple, treat everybody fairly and create protections so the rate is not easily raised. This is vital to continuing our prosperity.


We should view this as a rare opportunity to modernize our tax system, and eliminate inequities. But just to be clear: The goal is to create greater tax fairness, not a greater tax burden for the people of Texas.


With our vastly improved budgetary picture, we can provide new money for education and real reductions in property taxes without increasing the net tax burden on Texans.


Some say it can't be done. But if we can avoid a tax hike in the face of a $10 billion shortfall, we can do it again in times of surplus. And I pledge to work with you over these 140 days to get it done.


Today I am submitting a budget that substantially increases investments in jobs, public education, higher education, health care and protective services and that reduces spending at 60 percent of our state agencies. And it provides a $2.3 billion cushion to close out the books on this biennium and invest even more money in key priorities.


Some will argue we can't invest in jobs when we have so many human needs. Those critics argue against themselves. To make long-term investments in health care, education and the social welfare, we need the revenue generated by economic growth.


To date we have attracted more than 22,000 new jobs and $6 billion in capital investment because of the visionary job creation tool you created last session: the Texas Enterprise Fund.


We are in stiff competition for these jobs. Sometimes we lose, such as when we made a $45 million offer to bring jobs to the Rio Grande Valley. But we've had more than our fair share of victories because I have two strong negotiating partners in Governor Dewhurst and Speaker Craddick.


Because of our good economic climate, we're spending a lot less than other states to attract a lot more jobs. One state offered $240 million and another state offered a $3.2 billion package to land a single project. Both amounts are more than we have allocated to bring more than a dozen projects to Texas.


But consider the possibilities if we not only invest in specific job creation projects but in the innovations and new technologies that will be the foundation of the future economy. I ask you to not only replenish the Enterprise Fund, I ask you to make investments to grow our world-class research institutions, develop cutting edge technologies and harvest the miracle of modern science with a new $300 million Emerging Technology Fund.


Over the next ten years, California is investing $3 billion in one area of biotechnology, Ohio is putting up $1.1 billion for technology commercialization and Kansas is investing half a billion dollars in biotechnology. We can't afford to be left behind.


In the next ten years, emerging technologies will generate $3 trillion in revenue worldwide. The question is, where will those investments be made, and who will reap the benefits? Where will the better, faster computer architecture be designed, the gene therapies and treatments that will rescue people from terminal and chronic diseases, the cleaner technologies that will clean the air our children breathe? I want them developed in Texas labs by Texas minds to the benefit of the Texas economy.


This is a test of our vision: Will we succumb to short-term thinking, or invest in limitless possibilities?


Preserving jobs requires action on three other fronts.


First, I ask you to relieve Texas employers of some of the highest workers compensation costs in the nation. With the leadership of Senator Staples and Representatives Giddings and Solomons I know we can get this done.


Second, as the Public Utility Commission goes under sunset review, I ask you to modernize telecommunications laws so we have a regulatory framework that keeps up with technology advances...and allows for greater economic opportunity.


And third, it is time to end Texas' status as the home of frivolous asbestos lawsuits. Let's care for those who are truly sick, while preserving legal rights for those who are not.


Our choice this session is not between jobs and human services as some suggest. We can make sound, strategic investments in both.


Medicaid and CHIP meet a great need. Today more than two million children are insured by these two programs, compared to one million children just six years ago.

When it comes to CHIP, better economic times will allow this legislature to re-examine the program's benefits, and provide dental, vision and mental health care. I support such an investment. Our goal should be to provide benefits we can afford while preserving CHIP for families that need it the most.

The most startling fact regarding the uninsured in Texas is not that we rank 18th in the nation in the percentage of children covered by Medicaid but that we rank 46th in the percentage of children receiving employer-sponsored insurance.

We must not lose sight of the long-term goal to move more Texans from subsidized insurance to private insurance. Last session we provided small employers lower cost options and today there are health insurance options available that cost up to 30 pecent less.

We need to continue these successes by promoting innovative options like health savings accounts so Texans have viable health care alternatives that put them back in charge of health care decisions.

And when it comes to a healthier border region, I ask you to make two critical investments. Let's fully fund the Irma Rangel Pharmacy School in Kingsville. And let's fully fund the Texas Tech Medical School in El Paso.

Our greatest concern in health and human services must be to invest in the most fundamental components of our safety net so we can protect those who can't help themselves: those in the dawn of their lives or the twilight of their years who are at risk of neglect and abuse.

The investigations I ordered last year revealed a safety net that fails many vulnerable Texans. But the results of these investigations can lead to lasting improvements that will change Texas for the better.

Working with Senator Nelson and Representatives Hupp and Uresti, I am confident we can greatly reduce investigator caseloads at Child Protective Services, improve salaries, improve case management with better technology and refocus this important agency on its core mission: protecting our most precious resource, Texas children.

We must take the same passion to reforming Adult Protective Services, with expanded training, additional caseworkers and the transfer of guardianship services to the Department of Aging and Disability Services.

We must not only reform protective services, we must improve programs that can prevent the need for protective services for many Texans. With greater local control, decreased administration and a better integration of services, we can improve behavioral health for persons with mental illness and chemical dependency while also improving aging services and care for Texans with disabilities.

This is the unfinished work of our health services reorganization. Improvements made on the state level must now occur on the local level so that when Texans need help, they will always have somewhere to turn.


Our vow as a society to protect those who cannot help themselves must never exclude some of our most vulnerable Texans – unborn children.


Within a matter of weeks, a beating heart can be detected in the womb, and early sonograms show human life in its most precious and fast-developing state. This great human journey, from the moment of conception until our last moments on earth, is sacred.


The right to life is a fundamental right declared by our forefathers. If you send me a bill requiring parental consent for a minor to have an abortion, I will sign it without delay because it will protect innocent life.


And in order to preserve the sanctity of human life, I ask you to send me a bill to ban human cloning in Texas.


Texans agree there is a legitimate role for government but there must also be a limited role for government. While government must meet a great many social needs, it should never loom larger in our lives than our freedoms.


What makes this state great is not the size of our government or how much we spend. The greatness of this state is measured by the vision, the values and the virtue of our people.


Texans have never shied away from the tough tasks and have never viewed sacrifice as the calling of another. A great many Texans have made sacrifices for freedom in recent years in the American Spirit of service to causes greater than self Today we have once again been reminded that freedom is protected at a great price with the news that 31 Marines were killed in a helicopter crash early this morning in Iraq, the deadliest day since American forces began the liberation.


These brave Americans gave up their dreams so our children can realize theirs. Every member of the Armed Forces makes a great sacrifice, as is the case with two Texans here with us today who served a tour of duty on the front lines of the war on terror.


Technical Sergeant Cindy Matzen with the 204th Weather Flight of the Texas Air National Guard was deployed north of Kabul, Afghanistan for seven months in 2003, leaving five children behind, and five precious grandchildren.


And Lieutenant Colonel Foy Watson, the son of one of our Senate doorkeepers, and a deputy commander with the 71st Information Operation Group of the Texas Army National Guard served in Baghdad as the Chief of Information Operation Plans for Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez. He left behind four children and six grandchildren who missed him dearly those six months he was gone in 2003 and 2004.


These two Texans and a great many more honor us with their heroic service. And the least we can do is honor them with a hero's welcome for their courage on the front lines of freedom.


The state they have returned to is a state that honors service. Each of you has answered the noble calling of public service as elected representatives of the people. And though we come from different places and different points of view, we all gather to do what is best for Texas.


A new era of possibility awaits us, one full of promise and prosperity if we invest in our children and the opportunities worthy of their future.


It can only happen if we stand together reconciled in causes that serve a greater interest than party or personal ambition. We must strive to be, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned, a "beautiful symphony of brotherhood," a people in pursuit of the common good united by the common bonds of our humanity.


Our work is before us. It cannot be passed to future legislatures and must not be passed to future generations. May we boldly seize the moment with singular unity. And may we build a Texas of unlimited possibility. Thank you, God bless you, and God bless Texas.

Find this article at:

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:47 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Jan. 26, 2005, 6:12AM

Singing schools' praises

Group plans to advertise the positive side of public education
By JASON SPENCER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle


News reporters have been so busy chasing negative stories about Texas
public schools that the positive stories have gone unheard, a group of
Houston business leaders was told Tuesday night.
ADVERTISEMENT


Scott Milder's newly formed Friends of Texas Public Schools plans to
correct that.

"I've seen firsthand all the good things that happen in the public
schools and they never get coverage," Milder said.

He was raising money for his nonprofit organization Tuesday night with
the help of Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley, who sits on the
organization's advisory board.

"There's this negative perception out there that public schools are
failing or in a crisis," Milder said. "We're saying, let's celebrate
successes and help them improve."

Milder's crusade comes at a time of allegations of widespread cheating
on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and a state judge's
ruling that Texas' school funding levels are inadequate and
unconstitutional.

"We are doing a good job in Texas public schools, but we're not
perfect," Neeley said.

Neeley said the cheating allegations were "blown out of proportion," but
acknowledged that wrongdoing occurred.

"We're not going to bury our head in the sand. ... We're going to deal
with it very aggressively," she said.

Milder's friendship with Neeley dates back to 1996 when she hired him as
her spokesman in the Galena Park Independent School District. Today,
Milder is in charge of public relations for a Dallas architectural firm
that specializes in school design. The company, SHW Group Architects,
has annual revenues of $40 million, according to Milder's résumé.

Before Tuesday night, the nonprofit group had collected about $5,000
from donors, Milder said. He hopes to haul in much more to pay for a
pro-public-schools advertising blitz that will include billboard,
television and radio advertising.

"The public schools are an easy target," Milder said. "We want to change
that. We want people feeling better about public schools."

On the group's Web site, Neeley describes herself as a "cheerleader" for
Texas public education, calling on business and community groups to
"circle the wagons" to promote the school system.

"I can lead and I can cheer but every school in Texas needs the strong
support of our public and the business community," Neeley wrote.

Although his company makes its money from school building projects that
often depend on voter-approved financing, Milder said that had nothing
to do with his decision to form the organization.

"Our motives are pure and to be perfectly honest, the reason behind
doing this is, it's the right thing to do for kids in Texas," Milder
said. "Everybody is going to benefit."

He said his boss, SHW Group CEO Gary Keep, told him he could spend half
of each work day running the nonprofit. Keep also sits on the advisory
board, as do representatives from Houston Habitat for Humanity and Texas
Tech University.

Milder called the organization a grass-roots operation. He said he
invited business leaders, particularly those from the construction
industry, to attend Tuesday night's fund-raiser.

"Everybody has an interest in the public perceiving the schools
accurately and that's what we're about," Milder said.

Texas' Asian American fourth-graders, for example, outscored all peers
nationally on a standardized test, according to the group's Web site,
www.fotps.org.

Parent and teacher groups applauded the effort by Milder and his
schoolteacher wife, Leslie, who helped him form Friends of Texas Public
Schools.

"There are more things going on that are positive than are negative,"
said Mercedes Alejandro, president of the Houston chapter of Parents for
Public Schools. "The stories that don't get reported are the ones where
students are excelling."

The ads could convince more people to pursue teaching careers, said
Richard Kouri, spokesman for the Texas State Teachers Association.

"Education in general has an image problem," Kouri said.

Staff writer Rosanna Ruiz contributed to this report.

jason.spencer@chron.com rosanna.ruiz@chron.com

This article is:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3009645

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:05 AM 2 comments Links to this post

by TOM HAYDEN, a social activist since the 60s, has been a California State Assemblyman and state senator. He is a professor at Occidental College and the author of nine books.


ON THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY of Walden, several new editions of the classic were published. Some are elegantly footnoted or designed. Others explore the recurring significance of Thoreau as a mirror reflecting America's nature, and Barksdale Maynard's detailed history of Walden Pond itself contains invaluable new material for students of Thoreau.


Rachel Carson kept Walden by her bedside. Annie Dillard wrote her master's thesis about Walden Pond. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were affected by it in their early years, as was Pete Seeger. Arlo Guthrie named his cat after Henry; my wife named a dog. Besides these individuals, millions of anonymous backpackers carry their own paperback editions of Walden wherever they seek respite.


These days Thoreau is mainly remembered for the self-conscious life he lived, and for his vital role in the creation of environmentalism. In his own time he embodied ideas that others merely discussed in their parlors. The liquid clarity of Thoreau's sentences arose from the natural simplicity in which he was grounded.


The danger in such memories is that he becomes a harmless icon whose example is salutary but obsolete. The problem is that Thoreau cannot be understood through Walden alone. One wonders if the prestigious publishers of these volumes will issue new editions of the whole Thoreau, the Thoreau who drafted Civil Disobedience (1849), who penned Slavery in Massachusetts (1854), A Plea for Captain John Brown (1860), and Life Without Principle (1863), who kept thirteen notebooks on Native Americans, and whose last mysterious words were "moose" and "Indians" -- or whether he will be reduced to an ascetic hermit.


In 1960, I was spellbound as a student editor listening to a representative fresh from the Southern sit-ins cite Thoreau's refusal to pay taxes for the Mexican war. His conversation with Emerson from jail -- "Why Henry, what are you doing in there?" "Ralph Waldo, what are you doing out there?" -- was the most powerful expression of the credo that carried thousands of young people, mostly African Americans but some whites as well, to fill the southern jails in protest against racial segregation: "A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority... but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight."


The same Thoreau inspired the resistance to the Vietnam War and to domestic police brutality: "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison... It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them." It was also this Thoreau who framed the issue of voting in a larger moral context: "Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, by your whole influence."


Since Thoreau drafted both Walden and Civil Disobedience in the two years spent at Walden Pond, we must conclude that there was only one Thoreau, not an earlier nature writer and a later champion of Indians, Mexicans, tax-refusing war resisters, and violent abolitionists. The message linking all the issues Thoreau addressed was to live naturally wild and free, like the rest of Creation, not in conformity to institutions or dogma. "Action from principle," he wrote in Civil Disobedience, "the perception and the performance of right, -- changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with any thing which was." In essence, action -- the fully lived life -- creates an evidence of its own that the social order can change, just as the natural order changes through the drama of evolution.


The lesson of Thoreau is not that environmentalists and nonviolent spiritual seekers should retreat from the worlds of poverty, racism, and war, or focus on voluntary simplicity alone as the antidote to consumption. Their natural dignity, he seems to argue, requires that they understand themselves as carriers of a "wildness" that resists all bondage. To be faithful, if we would follow Thoreau into the woods, should we not follow him to the prison cell? If we respect the reasons he retired to his cabin -- a radical act at the time -- why not admire his defense of Captain John Brown?


Thoreau's call is to live heroically as nature does, to feel both the inner and outer as one, to link personal self-reliance with direct action in the world, and to resist the nature of any state that does not conform to the state of nature.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:06 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Published: January 26, 2005

By Alan Richard

Florida could become the first state to require students to pass a reading test to advance at every grade level, under a plan approved by the state school board last week.

The plan requires lawmakers’ approval, but support for limited bans on “social promotion” has been strong for years in the Republican-controlled legislature.


Commissioner of Education John Winn said in an interview that the plan would take hold only gradually if passed into law.

The state already requires most 3rd graders to pass a reading test—normally the reading portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test—before they advance to 4th grade. High school students similarly must pass an FCAT reading test or an alternative before they can graduate. Low-scoring 3rd graders must attend three-week summer reading classes, which enable some students to escape retention.

The Florida board of education voted unanimously on Jan. 18 to ask the legislature for the authority to expand the social-promotion ban into other grades. In social promotion, students who have fallen short academically are advanced to the next grade to keep them with their peers.

Mr. Winn said last week that he would recommend the ban start with 4th and 5th graders—students who already have been subject to the 3rd grade requirements. State board members then could determine how swiftly the program would reach other grades.

“This could take 10 years” to implement, the commissioner said.
Catalyst or Quick Fix?

The existing policy against social promotion has improved reading skills among 3rd graders and has been a catalyst for higher student achievement in the elementary grades, Mr. Winn said. Expanding the program to all grades would keep students with poor literacy skills from advancing through school without the preparation they need, he added.

Florida would be the first state to link student retention to standardized-test scores at all grade levels, if the plan proceeds. Eight states now link retention to test scores at some grade levels, typically in grades 3, 5 and 8, according to the Education Week Research Center.

But critics warn that the plan may need more thought.

Mark Pudlow, a spokesman for the Florida Education Association, said the union was surprised by the state board’s plan.

The union, a merged affiliate of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, favors leaving the decision to retain or promote students in the hands of teachers and parents, rather than judging pupils by a test score.

“When you have a child that’s behind in a particular grade, then I think you need to launch all kinds of special attention on the kids. That’s something that’s lacking,” Mr. Pudlow said.

School district leaders may also be skeptical of the plan to end social promotion in all grades.

“We’ve never been a big proponent of social promotion, but keeping a student back a grade level isn’t the only way to address a student’s shortcomings” on tests, said Connie M. Milito, the director of government relations for the 183,000-student Hillsborough County schools.

Commissioner Winn said the state board’s plan fits into Florida’s other strategies for improving public schools. “Social promotion is just the symptom” of the problems that exist in teaching children to read, he said. “What we need to work on is better teaching and learning.”
Chance for Approval

It’s not yet clear how the legislature will respond to the state board’s plan.

Towson Fraser, a spokesman for Speaker of the House Allen Bense, a Republican, said the speaker had not reviewed the state board’s plan. But the speaker backed the 3rd grade program when it was approved in 2002, he said.

“The idea that you just keep pushing kids along when they’re not prepared to be better students is not something he agrees with,” Mr. Fraser said on behalf of the speaker.

Mr. Winn and other supporters of expanding the social-promotion ban cited recent test data as proof that the 3rd grade program is something to build on. Sixty-six percent of the state’s 3rd graders scored at acceptable levels in reading in 2004, while only 57 percent did in 2001, according to the state.

Most 3rd graders who have been retained under the social-promotion ban were able to improve their reading scores enough to move on to 4th grade the following year. The program exempts some students who are learning English, or who do not take state tests because of disabilities.

Also, some students are allowed to show progress using portfolios or tests other than the FCAT. Still other low-scoring 3rd graders can advance after taking three weeks of remedial-reading classes and passing a test during the summer.

Now in its second year, the 3rd grade policy resulted in about 28,000 retentions in the 2003-04 school year. Fewer than half that number of pupils were retained in the other elementary grades.

Mr. Winn said that retaining more students would not result in more high school dropouts, as critics claim, because more children would improve their basic skills at earlier ages. School leaders should not panic over the proposed changes, he said.

“You will not see the governor or me proposing massive retention in grades that we already know that we haven’t experienced success in,” the commissioner said.
Vol. 24, Issue 20, Pages 22,27

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:49 PM 0 comments Links to this post

January 25, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST, NYTimes

By DAVID BROOKS

n his Inaugural Address President Bush embraced the grandest theme of American foreign policy - the advance of freedom around the world. Now that attention is turning to the State of the Union address, it would be nice if he would devote himself as passionately to the grandest theme of domestic policy - social mobility.

The United States is a country based on the idea that a person's birth does not determine his or her destiny. Our favorite stories involve immigrants climbing from obscurity to success. Our amazing work ethic is predicated on the assumption that enterprise and effort lead to ascent. "I hold the value of life is to improve one's condition," Lincoln declared.

The problem is that in every generation conditions emerge that threaten to close down opportunity and retard social mobility. Each generation has to reopen the pathways to success.

Today, for example, we may still believe American society is uniquely dynamic, but we're deceiving ourselves. European societies, which seem more class riven and less open, have just as much social mobility as the United States does.

And there are some indications that it is becoming harder and harder for people to climb the ladder of success. The Economist magazine gathered much of the recent research on social mobility in America. The magazine concluded that the meritocracy is faltering: "Would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap."

Economists and sociologists do not all agree, but it does seem there is at least slightly less movement across income quintiles than there was a few decades ago. Sons' income levels correlate more closely to those of their fathers. The income levels of brothers also correlate more closely. That suggests that the family you were born into matters more and more to how you will fare in life. That's a problem because we are not supposed to have a hereditary class structure in this country.

But we're developing one. In the information age, education matters more. In an age in which education matters more, family matters more, because as James Coleman established decades ago, family status shapes educational achievement.

At the top end of society we have a mass upper-middle class. This is made up of highly educated people who move into highly educated neighborhoods and raise their kids in good schools with the children of other highly educated parents. These kids develop wonderful skills, get into good colleges (the median family income of a Harvard student is now $150,000), then go out and have their own children, who develop the same sorts of wonderful skills and who repeat the cycle all over again.

In this way these highly educated elites produce a paradox - a hereditary meritocratic class.

It becomes harder for middle-class kids to compete against members of the hypercharged educated class. Indeed, the middle-class areas become more socially isolated from the highly educated areas.

And this is not even to speak of the children who grow up in neighborhoods in which more boys go to jail than college, in which marriage is not the norm before child-rearing, in which homes are often unstable, in which long-range planning is absurd, in which the social skills you need to achieve are not even passed down.

In his State of the Union address, President Bush is no doubt going to talk about his vision of an ownership society. But homeownership or pension ownership is only part of a larger story. The larger story is the one Lincoln defined over a century ago, the idea that this nation should provide an open field and a fair chance so that all can compete in the race of life.

Today that's again under threat, but this time from barriers that are different than the ones defined by socialists in the industrial age. Now, the upper class doesn't so much oppress the lower class. It just outperforms it generation after generation. Now the crucial inequality is not only finance capital, it's social capital. Now it is silly to make a distinction between economic policy and social policy.

We can spend all we want on schools. But if families are disrupted, if the social environment is dysfunctional, bigger budgets won't help.

President Bush spoke grandly and about foreign policy last Thursday, borrowing from Lincoln. Lincoln's other great cause was social mobility. That's worth embracing too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/opinion/25brooks.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:41 PM 0 comments Links to this post

by Jackie Hallifax
The Associated Press

January 25, 2005

TALLAHASSEE · Backed by several dozen students on the steps of the Florida Supreme Court, a West Palm Beach minister spoke out Monday in defense of state laws that let parents send their children to private schools on state vouchers or scholarships.

Florida's high court is considering the constitutionality of Florida's original voucher program. Bishop Harold Ray and his supporters say a ruling against the 1999 law would put in jeopardy several other programs that are used by thousands of students, including the state's forthcoming pre-kindergarten program.

"School choice is rapidly becoming the pre-eminent civil right of the 21st century," said Ray, a senior pastor at Redemptive Life Fellowship and a senior administrator at Redemptive Life Academy.

Voucher opponents said Ray and his backers are resorting to scare tactics. Voucher opponents include the state's teachers union, the Florida PTA, the League of Women Voters and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"This lawsuit is not to destroy everything," said Ruth Holmes, a retired Panhandle teacher.

The Supreme Court has not yet scheduled oral arguments in the case, which came to it after the 1st District Court of Appeal ruled in November that the law violates the church-state separation provision of the Florida Constitution. It forbids the state from using tax dollars to aid any church, sect or religious denomination.

Nearly 700 children attend private schools on state vouchers under the original law, which is triggered when a public school earns failing grades from the state two years out of four. More than half the students attend religious schools; the law specifies that students cannot be forced to pray or profess a religious belief.

Although the law at issue in the lawsuit is Florida's first school voucher program, it is dwarfed by later voucher programs.

Nearly 14,000 students attend private schools on McKay scholarships, which were created for children with disabilities, and another 10,000 students attend private schools on scholarships granted by businesses that get tax credits from the state.

Voucher supporters warn that programs such as these, as well as the popular Bright Futures college scholarship and the pre-kindergarten law, are at risk if the Florida Supreme Court upholds the appellate ruling.

Parents who spoke Monday said they wanted to send their children to private schools because of smaller class sizes, greater physical safety and academic content.

Micelle Emery, a Castleberry mother who wants to send her youngest to a Christian preschool, said she wanted her children to be taught creationism as an alternative theory to evolution.

"Why should I lose my rights to send my children to a school that promotes the values, the level of education and the safety that are important to me simply because that school is religious?" Emery asked.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/florida/sfl-fvouch25jan25,0,7881858.story?coll=sfla-news-florida

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:56 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Note: This is an incredible story. I just had to post it. I reveals what the power of a single individual can do. -AV

by Denise Roy
Thirty years ago, in the country of Kenya,
90% of the forest had been chopped down.
Without trees to hold the topsoil in place,
the land became like a desert.

When the women and girls would go in search
of firewood in order to prepare the meals,
they would have to spend hours and hours
looking for what few branches remained.

A woman named Wangari
watched all of this happening.
She decided that there must be a way
to take better care of the land and
take better care of the women and girls.

So she planted a tree.
And then she planted another.
She wanted to plant thousands of trees,
but she realized that it would take a very
long time if she was the only one doing it.
So she taught the women who were looking
for firewood to plant trees, and they were paid
a small amount for each sapling they grew.

Soon she organized women all over the country
to plant trees, and a movement took hold. It was
called the Green Belt Movement, and with each
passing year, more and more trees covered the land.

But something else was happening
as the women planted those trees.
Something else besides those trees was taking root.
The women began to have confidence in themselves.
They began to see that they could make a difference.
They began to see that they were capable of many
things, and that they were equal to the men.
They began to recognize that they were deserving
of being treated with respect and dignity.

Changes like these were threatening to some.
The president of the country didn't like any of this.
So police were sent to intimidate and beat Wangari
for planting trees, and for planting ideas of equality
and democracy in people's heads, especially in women's.
She was accused of "subversion" and arrested many times.

Once, while Wangari was trying to plant trees, she was
clubbed by guards hired by developers who wanted
the lands cleared. She was hospitalized with head injuries.
But she survived, and it only made her realize that she
was on the right path.

For almost thirty years, she was threatened physically,
and she was often made fun of in the press. But she
didn't flinch. She only had to look in the eyes of her
three children, and in the eyes of the thousands of
women and girls who were blossoming right along
with the trees, and she found the strength to continue.

And that is how it came to be that 30 million trees
have been planted in Africa, one tree at a time.
The landscapes--both the external one of the land
and the internal one of the people--have been transformed.

In 2002, the people of Kenya held a democratic
election, and the president who opposed Wangari and
her Green Belt Movement is no longer in office.
And Wangari is now Kenya's
Assistant Minister for the Environment.

She is 65 years old,
and this year she planted one more tree
in celebration and thanksgiving
for being given a very great honor:

Wangari Maathai has been awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize. She is the first
African woman to receive this award.

After she was notified, she gave a speech entitled,
"What Do Trees Have To Do With Peace?"
She pointed out how most wars are fought
over limited natural resources, such as oil, land,
coal or diamonds. She called for an end to
corporate greed, and for leaders to build more
just societies. She added:

"Our recent experience in Kenya gives hope
to all who have been struggling for a better future.
It shows it is possible to bring about positive change,
and still do it peacefully. All it takes is courage and
perseverance, and a belief that positive change is possible.
That is why the slogan for our campaign was 'It is Possible!'"

"On behalf of all African women, I want to express
my profound appreciation for this honour,
which will serve to encourage women in Kenya,
in Africa, and around the world to raise their
voices and not to be deterred."

"When we plant trees, we plant the seeds of
peace and seeds of hope. We also secure the future
for our children. I call on those around the world
to celebrate by planting a tree wherever you are."

As she received the Nobel Peace Prize this week
in Oslo, she invited us all to get involved:

"Today we are faced with a challenge
that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that
humanity stops threatening its life-support system.
We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds
and in the process heal our own."

* * *

Can we accept Wangari's invitation?

(c) 2004 Denise Roy. All
rights reserved. www.familyspirit.com).(You can read it on her recent newsletter page at
www.familyspirit.com/recent.htm)

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:04 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Rough Draft

Rodolfo F. Acuña, author of OCCUPIED AMERICA

On February 2, 1848, Mexico and the United States signed the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the Mexican American War. Very few places in
the United States or Mexico will be memorializing this date. Try
quizzing your parents or your peers. Even ask teachers what happened on
February 2, 1848 and I’ll bet 99 percent won’t know why February 2 is
important.

February 2 is the day when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed.
It ended the Mexican American War and the borders shifted south. This is
what Chicanos mean when the say the “borders crossed them.” The war was
not popular with all Americans. Ulysses S. Grant called it an unjust
war. Abraham Lincoln questioned the invasion of Mexico. And, Benito
Juarez opposed signing the treaty. Years later, Mexican President
Porfirio Díaz would lament, Pobre México tan Lejos de Díos y tan cerca a
Los Estados Unidos!

The War cost Mexico over half its land and made Mexicans a conquered
people. However, it is a date that most Americans and Mexican politicos
currying favor with the United States would like to forget. For
instance, there is no rush in either country to declare February 2 a
holiday. Holidays are supposed to be special days that mark special
dates. More often than not we celebrate important historical dates
without really thinking about them. A holiday makes it special.

We can all appreciate holidays. From the beginning of time, rulers
marked special days. The ancient Maya would chisel them on use glyphs to
mark the importance of events in their lives.

But, not all important dates are chosen as holidays. The truth be told,
may dates that are not holidays are more important than the holidays and
they affect our lives much more than the so-called special days.

For instance, February 2 takes on special meaning in the context of what
is happening today. Arizonans recently passed Proposition 200 which
requires state and local employees to verify the immigration status of
people applying for public benefits and report undocumented immigrants
or face possible criminal prosecution. It makes snitches out of teachers.

If we isolate Proposition 200 from the past, the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo has no relation to it. Some would say it is the mixing of apples
with oranges. However, what happens today is an extension of yesterday.
And while I do not want to get bogged down in the merits of the war,
because like my sainted mother used to say, Palo dado ni Díos lo quita,
what would the world look like if Mexico had not lost more than fifty
percent of its land? Would Mexicans and Central Americans be clamoring
to cross the border?

The fact is Mexico ceded vast mineral deposits to the United States.
Playing what if, if Mexico today had California and Texas, it would have
more oil than Saudi Arabia. Mexico would today be one of the richest
nations in the world. This wealth would have allowed Mexico to build an
infrastructure to give employment to its citizens.


This is relevant to Proposition 200 because Mexicans do not migrate to
the United States for democracy, free medical services or handouts. They
migrate to the United States because of a lack of jobs. It is part of
the global economy that moves poorer countries to richer ones.

Mexico has a population of more than a 100 million people. It is larger
than Spain and most European countries. Because of its vulnerability,
small family farms have been declining. The last time I looked 30
percent of Mexicans lived in rural areas. But, because Americans want
cheap fruits and vegetables, Mexican farmers don’t grow as much for
locally consumed products. U.S. companies pay more for strawberries so
they produce berries and not beans or corn. The commercialization of
farm land means that machines have replaced the small farmer. The result
is that in the next twenty-five years the rural population of Mexico
will decline from 30 to 5 percent. So where will 25 to 35 million
displaced Mexicans go?

Logically we can ask, what role February 2 play in these phenomena and
whether Proposition 200 will stop Mexicans from coming over. Once they
are over here, do we as compassionate human beings have a duty to feed,
cloth and care for undocumented workers? The Catholic Bishops have said
that it was a mortal sin to discriminate against immigrants.
Unfortunately, the Church has not enforced this dictum. For example, to
my knowledge it has not withheld the sacraments to any politico
supporting Proposition 200.

As I have raised in past articles, thirty years ago, Spain was the
principal exporter of workers in Europe. Today, it is one of the main
importers of labor. Why? Because it has jobs. The European Union taxes
the richest countries and gives subsidies to poorer European nations
have used that money to industrialize. In contrast, the United States
has a policy of keeping Latin American dependent. It gives money to the
military of Latin America who in turn keep the poor poorer. In 2000,
Mexico received $15 million in aid from the US. Egypt received a
billion; Egypt has a population of 76 million. It gave Israel $6billion.
Israel has a population of six million. Mexico has a population of 106
million.

Logically, if Americans wanted a solution, they would as in the case of
Europe try to strengthen the economies of Mexico and Central America.
History shows that quite the contrary the United States has frustrated
the development and reforms of the region.

Another fact is that Mexico’s economy and that of all Central America
would have collapsed without the migration to the United States. This
would have meant turmoil which the United States would have reacted with
military force. A case in point is the Central American revolutions of
the 1980s in which the US supported death squads.

Mexican workers send remittances to Mexico as do Central Americans.
Mexicans send more than $8 billion annually to relatives in Mexico.
Salvadorans another billion. Unlike the cases of Egypt and Israel, these
remittances do not cost the American taxpayer a cent. However, without
the remittances millions more undocumented workers would be forced to
come to the United States.

February 2, 1848 will continue to haunt Americans and Mexicans alike as
long as the Proposition 200s continue to be passed in the context of a
historical limbo. The past is the present.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:35 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Jan. 25, 2005, 10:37PM

By RICK CASEY
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

I have a confession to make. In some previous columns I have been
entirely too hard on Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley.

I have not properly appreciated her self-proclaimed role as head
cheerleader for our public schools.

Who else could respond to news reports indicating evidence of cheating
on the all-important Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test at
more than 200 schools by asking the public to "please keep in mind that
no problems have been found at an additional 7,500 campuses"?

The boldness of that statement became clear when she announced at the
same time that her agency was hiring an outside expert because it had no
system for monitoring the administration of the test.

Now, I'm happy to say, Neeley's cheerleading efforts are going to be
amplified. Last night she was in Houston to speak at a fund-raiser for a
new Texas schools organization called the Friends of Texas Public
Schools.


Grass roots are greener
This "grass-roots organization" was founded and is headed by Scott
Milder, who used to be director of public relations for Galena Park ISD.



That's Commissioner Neeley's old district.

Now Milder works in Dallas for SHW Group Architects.

On his résumé, Milder says the firm hired him to help increase its
market share in school architecture, and that the firm's revenues in
that field have doubled to more than $40 million.

He says he's accomplished that by "getting involved in the world of
education, to see the world through their eyes. Exhibition, sponsoring
and attending sessions at educational conferences, for example have
opened opportunities to meet decision makers. Involvement on educational
association committees has opened doors for SHW Group as well."


Right to know
SHW Group's CEO, Gary Keep, is on the advisory board of the Friends.



According to its Web site (www.fotps.org), the organization has a noble
goal that eclipses that of opening doors:

"We at Friends of Texas Public Schools believe that the people and
businesses of Texas have a right to know that their money is being spent
wisely in our public schools."

The media, as you know, have conspired to keep that truth from the
people and businesses of Texas, and I, for one, am ashamed of my role in
that conspiracy.

To right that wrong, Milder has recruited an impressive board of
directors and corporate sponsors.

One of their principal goals is to raise money to conduct an advertising
and public relations campaign to get out the good news about schools.

Milder told Chronicle reporter Jason Spencer he plans a campaign that
includes billboards and radio and television advertising.

I'm impressed with the level of ambition, but I'm afraid Mr. Milder has
not been paying attention to the latest trends in educational public
relations, as pioneered by one of the all-time masters of the field, Rod
Paige.

It was Paige, after all, who produced the national image of the Houston
ISD as the nation's best large urban school district. He did it so well
that he went from being superintendent here to, until recently,
secretary of education in Washington.

In that role, Paige spawned a breakthrough in education public relations.

In selling President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" plan, Paige's
Department of Education didn't waste money on expensive billboards and
radio and TV advertising.

It quietly slipped $240,000 to columnist and commentator Armstrong
Williams to plug the controversial program. It was a brilliant
stratagem, given the credibility that columnists and talking head
commentators have these days.

It did come under some criticism, most of it terribly unfair. One
objection, however, had merit.

Williams himself said he was already in favor of "No Child Left Behind"
even before he got the cash and spoke favorably about it from his heart.
So the money was wasted.

Milder and his group can get much more bang from their buck if they can
obtain the services of, say, a columnist from the state's largest
newspaper whose coverage of the Texas school establishment has sometimes
trampled on the rights of people and businesses to know that their tax
money is well spent.

One who feels, or can be made to feel, very sorry. (See contact
information below.)

You can write to Rick Casey at P.O. Box 4260, Houston, TX 77210, or
e-mail him at rick.casey@chron.com.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/casey/3009642

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:21 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Commentary by Elsa Salazar Cade
January 24, 2005

According to the GAO report (The United States Accountability office)  January 2005:    http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-5: Nearly all of the 39 states in our survey reported that they released  charter schools from some traditional public school requirements. - All but 2 states offered release in one or more of 30 areas that states  identified, from reporting requirements to staffing practices to  student discipline. The greatest number of states released charter  schools from teacher termination procedures and length of school day  (21 states), teacher compensation and benefits (22 states), collective  bargaining procedures (22 states), and requirements established for  local school boards (23 states). Officials in 6 states reported that  the state released charter schools from almost all traditional public  school requirements, while a few requirements, such as the minimum  number of teachers required, the use of district-approved text books,  and graduation requirements, were released in only a few states. Most  states released charter schools from some traditional school  requirements.

The most that the report said was that we needed more data. According  to the report a school may fail to meet the improvement targets for  three years before our kids get extra help!

"If a school does not meet the target for a third year, students must  be offered supplementary educational services, such as tutoring. " page  26 of the report GAO-05-5. Three years is a HUGE amount of time in a  child's life.  The tutoring would not start until the child's fourth  year in school.  Who would deliver the tutoring the same school that  fell down in educational delivery?

On top of that, The  study by the National Assessment Governing  Board, which examined data for about 6,500 charter school students and  376,000 regular public school students—found that charter school  children taught by teachers with four years of experience or less  performed significantly worse in both reading and math than students in  regular public schools with similarly inexperienced teachers. And  students at charter schools were far more likely to have such teachers  

It also found that far more teachers in charter schools lacked regular  teaching credentials.  Charter schools have poor infrastructure, and  lack educators with credentials. This sounds a lot like failing  neglected public schools.

    If lack of credentials and release of traditional requirements look  like a winning ticket for your child, go to it I guess.  To me it looks  like more of the same.  Poor people of color are given the same choice  they had before.  The right wing ideologues propose withdrawing funding  from already poorly funded schools and sending it to charter schools  with a variety of mandates. 

But, we need more data before we find out  they don't work.  This gives the appearance of reestablishing the  separate but equal system.  Charters schools with fundamentalist  Christian mandates get federal funding and the have-nots get to go to  "other" schools that don't have to meet the requirements of regular  schools.  Catholic schools and other private schools have to charge  tuition in order to run their schools.  Those folks know that if they  want their children to get religious education or elitist education, 
they have to pay for it.

The charter system sets up publicly funded  private schools and at the same time off loads minority children on to  schools that don't have to meet requirements.  This sounds like  "separate but equal"  to me. 

They won't "throw" money at public  education,  but they are willing to spend money on collecting data on  charter schools to see if they work or not.

    Frankly, common sense tells you that to release charter schools from  having to meet the requirements of a public school doesn't really make  sense.  Yeah, in a time when public education is establishing standards  of education for all Americans, we are sitting back and letting the  Bushies tell you that less is more for Hispanic children.

Don't take it  sitting down write your congressman!   Demand equity in education for Hispanic American children.  Racist educational policy remains  entrenched regardless of what you call it!

For a view from the left go to......... Conservatives flip flop on  research standards:     http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8638


http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-5

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:10 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Note: Recent important editorial on how the language in Judge Dietz’ ruling may compromise the current school finance battle. -Angela

Texas Civil Rights Review
Weekend Edition January 22 / 24, 2005

By GREG MOSES

In late December, Texas media headlined the State Attorney General's
announcement that he would go directly to the Texas Supreme Court to
overturn a trial-court order for reform in school funding. On that same day,
the same media did not report on a motion filed in the trial court by the
Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) asking for an even stronger
ruling.

And this week, as well-fed Texans feted their first family in Washington,
the pattern of selective perception continued. On Wednesday, as the high
rollers of Texas power tightened their ties and buffed their boots for a
pre-inaugural orgy of schmooze, the State Attorney General repeated his
request for a fast track hearing before the Texas Supreme Court. And all
those things made headlines.

But with the news agenda hijacked by inaugural or anti-inaugural activities
on Thursday, the property-rich districts in the school funding trial broke
ranks with their poorer cousins at MALDEF and asked the Texas Supreme Court
to get double busy for them, too. As this story goes to press, there is no
mention of this significant event in the usual places Texans look for hot
buzz.

So that makes two times in two months that the State Attorney General was
crowned king of the media battle against school funding reform in Texas,
getting all His Majesty's Ink, without even a fair or balanced notice, not
even in nine-point type, that something else is going on.

"I'm surprised altogether by the State and the West Orange Cove Plaintiffs
efforts to circumvent the laws we have in place," says MALDEF attorney David
Hinojosa, speaking by telephone from his San Antonio office Friday evening.

While MALDEF and other allies for equity were openly cheering the original
trial-court ruling that ordered the state to reform its school funding
during the upcoming legislative session in Austin, a closer reading revealed
that the judge had written a small puzzle.

At one point in the Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law handed down on
Nov. 30, District Judge John Dietz found that the state fails to provide
constitutionally guaranteed education to Texas children because "the current
funding capacity of the Texas school finance system, in conjunction with the
inequitable access to revenue in the system, does not provide property-poor
districts with sufficient access to revenue" (FOF 294). This phrasing
suggests that not only is the state funding too low to be constitutional
overall, but also that the property-poor districts can't get their hands on
their constitutionally equitable share.

About 20 pages later, however, the judge says that "a structural disparity
in access to revenues, that, while not reaching the level of a
constitutional violation at this time, still puts property-poor districts at
a financial disadvantage when compared to Chapter 41 districts [the legal
definition of a property-rich district under Texas law]" (FOF 435). Which is
to say, what? That "inequitable access" to funds among property-poor
districts is pretty bad, but not really a constitutional concern for Texas
at this time? In its Dec. 28 motion to the trial court, MALDEF asks to have
this language revised.

All through this latest round of the school funding trial, property-rich
districts allied with property-poor districts because both sides said out
loud in court that they supported each other's claims. The property poor
districts agreed to the property-rich argument that Texas needed more money
overall in absolute dollars. If this argument prevailed in court the
property-rich districts would get to raise and spend more money from their
gilded tax bases at home.

In return for this kind of support from the property-poor side, the
property-rich districts gave lip service to the claim that inequities
between rich and poor districts also deserved the court's attention. Any
court-ordered increase in overall revenues should be accompanied by enough
re-distribution of wealth to keep the tax bases equitable, so said the
rich-district attorneys in court.

Smells like catfish bait in August when the property-rich districts suddenly
join the state's effort to get inside the jurisdiction of the all-Republican
Supreme Court, as MALDEF is trying to finish up its equity advocacy at the
trial-court level. The rich districts already have the ruling they need from
the trial court, don't they? They've got their constitutional issue in the
pocket that mandates more overall funding at higher tax rates. Why do they
suddenly need to speed up the appeal?

"The issue of equitable access to revenues for maintenance and operations
funding has yet to be fully rendered by the trial court, yet the
property-rich districts think certain issues should be yanked up by the
Supreme Court?" asks Hinojosa in a question punctuated by 500 years of
exasperation.

Hinojosa wears his tired voice like a black-tie tuxedo some days, and he was
formally weary in tone and cadence as he talked about the one-two punch of
Wednesday-Thursday motions filed by state attorneys and rich districts who
are suddenly rushing into each other at the Supreme Court door.

It's plain as day to us lowly observers of Texas politics that a deal has
been cut to enrich the richies and cut the poor folks out at the final
buzzer. It's the only theory that makes sense. Only thing at this point for
us know-nothings is to ask: is it a done deal yet? When everybody gets back
from the parties in Washington, we'll see. But you won't get the headline
from the usual media publishers, so please stay tuned.

Meanwhile the solidarity chant of the moment seems pretty clear to me:
finish the trial court business you black-boot Texas lawyers, before you go
the appeal.

Note: motions filed by the Texas Attorney General and the West Orange Cove
Plaintiffs are available in pdf format at the Downloads section of the Texas
Civil Rights Review: http://texascivilrightsreview.org/phpnuke

Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of
Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of
Nonviolence. His chapter on civil rights under Clinton and Bush appears in
Dime's Worth of Difference, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St.
Clair. He can be reached at: gmosesx@prodigy.net

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:00 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Kent Grusendorf
Special to the Star-Telegram

Once again, the Texas school finance system has been found unconstitutional.

Mark Yudof, chancellor of the University of Texas System, said in the early 1990s that school finance is "like a Russian novel -- it takes a long time, is very dull and boring, and everyone dies in the end."

Harvey Kronberg, editor of the online Quorum Report, recently said of school finance, "There really isn't any solution that's risk-free, or even low-risk."

There are no easy answers to school finance -- just tough choices.

I know we can do it right in 2005. Virtually every state leader has acknowledged the importance of the issue, and it is at the top of the legislative agenda.

We have thousands of dedicated, hard-working educators in Texas. They have made tremendous strides in recent years. We must give them the support and freedom necessary to do what is best for all Texas students.

I believe that we will put more money into public education. I believe that legislators will make the tough decisions necessary to solve the problem. Nothing we do is more important than the education of youth.

However, we owe it to the public to do first things first.

During the past 18 months, we have heard from hundreds of state and national experts on this subject. We have taken endless hours of testimony.

Most of the discussions have been about money: How much is enough? What is adequate funding? The focus has been on money rather than results and the tough choices necessary to attain the best results.

Before we decide how much new money we will put into education, we must first examine how the $30 billion we are currently spending is being allocated.

Are we getting maximum benefit from each dollar spent? Are we receiving $30 billion worth of results? Until we answer such questions, it is inappropriate to calculate how much additional money is needed.

School superintendents statewide are fairly unanimous in voicing the need for additional funding. A minority of educators, however, tell me that we need to spend our current resources more wisely and that more money should not be allocated until greater efficiency is attained. Business leaders tend to send a similar message.

All three groups are right.

How much is enough? During the past decade, we have increased educational spending in Texas significantly. In fact, when the first Edgewood decision came down, we were spending an average of about $3,800 per student. Today we spend well over $8,000 per child.

The truth is that there will never be enough. Regardless of how much we increase spending, there will always be a demand for more. There will always be another good program, another wonderful vendor, another potential employee or consultant, always something else to do or try.

Individuals and institutions must make tough choices in order to allocate scarce resources in the most effective manner to achieve the best possible results. Allocate scarce resources effectively, and you will find success. Allocate them poorly, and you will suffer failure.

Our school finance study has found that some schools are doing a much better job of resource allocation than others. Some are spending most of their education dollars wisely to produce classroom results; others are wasting too much on administrative expenses or just making poor decisions.

In a statewide study of school efficiency last year, Lori Taylor of Texas A&M University found that, if all school districts were as efficient as the most efficient district in Texas, we would save approximately $1.5 billion statewide. If all were as efficient as the Arlington district, we would save about $400 million statewide.

Conversely, if all districts were as inefficient as West Orange-Cove (one of the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit for more money), we would be required to spend another $4 billion statewide.

Recently, an Austin judge ruled that certain parts of the school finance system have created a de facto statewide property tax. I believe this is a valid argument that probably will be upheld by the Texas Supreme Court.

However, the remainder of his ruling was significantly more activist in nature. He defied all historical data and ruled that the Legislature should appropriate more money for education.

I believe that we will put additional money into our schools, but I do not believe that this is a decision for a Travis County judge to make.

During the past few years, some school districts have spent millions of dollars -- money intended for the education of kids -- on legal fees to sue the state. In effect, the districts in the recent school case are using taxpayer dollars to sue the taxpayers for more money. In the opinion of many, those millions should have been spent on classroom efforts, not courtroom efforts.

In addition to waste at the local level, we have some built-in inefficiencies driven by the state. For example, the Wilmer-Hutchins district superintendent was sent home on Nov. 1 after being indicted the previous week. However, he was sent home on paid leave.

State law requires that an educator remain on the payroll until all due process is afforded. Districts can waste thousands of classroom dollars and spend months trying to get someone off the payroll.

Keeping an ineffective educator on the payroll -- administrator or teacher -- is an injustice to students and is a built-in statewide inefficiency.

We grossly underpay our best teachers. However, there will never be enough money to pay every teacher what the best teacher is worth. Great teachers are frustrated when they receive the same money and respect as someone across the hall who is not doing as good a job.

We lose many of our best teachers to the private sector or to school administration because we treat them all the same. Few other professions are treated this way, with the best and the worst all receiving an annual step increase. We must find a fair and equitable way to reward those who are doing a great job.

During a hearing in Austin, one panel of experts told us that it would be wiser to put $1 billion of new money into performance incentives than to put an additional $10 billion into the status quo. Spending more money to buy the same thing that we are currently purchasing may go a long way to purchase votes, but it is not at all beneficial for our students.

We must revamp the system and empower local educators to make common-sense decisions that will benefit their students.

We must have greater transparency and financial accountability to ensure that taxpayer money is spent wisely to benefit Texas students.

We must establish clear consequences for failing schools to ensure that every Texas student has a fair opportunity for success.

And we must make the tough choices necessary to reward success.

We must focus on the results that we want to achieve and spend our scarce resources in a manner that will achieve those results.

That requires tough choices by the Legislature, and it also will require tough choices by school administrators statewide. Texas students are just too important for us to accept anything less.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kent Grusendorf is chairman of the House Public Education Committee.
Republican Kent Grusendorf has been an Arlington state representative since 1987.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2005 Star-Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.dfw.com

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:19 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Testing Companies Mine for Gold

by Barbara Miner

There's gold in them there tests.

Thanks to the testing mandated by the federal No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) legislation, private companies are mining the
testing field with all the power their accountants, test-
makers, and marketers can muster.

States are likely to spend $1.9 billion to $5.3 billion
between 2002 and 2008 to implement NCLB-mandated tests,
according to the non-partisan Government Accounting Office
(GAO).

Those GAO figures cover just the direct costs of six years
of developing, scoring, and reporting the tests˜which is
performed under contract with private companies. Add in
indirect costs, such as the amount of classroom teacher
time devoted to coordinating and giving the tests and,
increasingly, preparing students with ongoing "practice"
tests, and testing experts say the figure could be 8 to 15
times higher.

The amount of education money devoted to standardized tests
is only part of the problem. Invariably, the private
testing companies that control standardized testing operate
behind closed doors with little to no public
accountability. They function as subsections of
multinational conglomerates that view the U.S. testing
industry as just one tentacle of publishing and
entertainment empires that span the globe.

"There's very little oversight of the testing industry,"
notes Walt Haney, an education professor at Boston College
and a senior researcher at its National Board on
Educational Testing and Public Policy (NBETPP). "In fact,
there is more public oversight of the pet industry and the
food we feed our dogs than there is for the quality of
tests we make our kids take."

Where's the Outcry?
There has been little public outcry over the fact that
private, multinational companies operating beyond public
oversight are determining which students, schools, and
districts in the United States are deemed "failures" and
which are deemed "successes." Given the secrecy that
shrouds testing company operations, information is
negligible. What the public doesn't know, the public
doesn't complain about.

Critics of standardized testing also point to a third
problem beyond the amount of money and the secrecy. That's
the problem of missed opportunity. There's little doubt
that the Bush administration's obsession with standardized
tests as the sole determinant of school success has
undermined reforms that focus on teaching children to think
and to do more than fill in circles on test forms.

"The amount of money spent on standardized testing is not
the real problem," notes Monty Neill, executive director of
the Boston-based group FairTest. "The real problem is how
it distorts teaching and learning."

The Testing Explosion
NCLB, introduced two days after George W. Bush took office
and passed a year later, instituted an unprecedented level
of federal mandates for testing public school students. The
mandates built on bipartisan support for a corporate-
influenced agenda of increased standardized testing. But
NCLB carried that agenda to new levels, both with the
number of tests and the harsh sanctions for those schools
not meeting predetermined levels of test progress.

NCLB requires annual testing of students in third through
eighth grades in mathematics and reading or language arts,
and testing once in high school. Beginning in 2007-08,
states will also be required to give tests in science at
least once in elementary, middle, and high school. All
told, there will be 17 NCLB tests each year for school
districts. This translates into unfathomable amounts of
school time devoted to standardized testing and teaching to
those tests. It also creates untold business opportunities
for the companies that produce the tests. (If you add in
district- and state-mandated tests on top of NCLB
requirements, and the growing number of "practice" tests
given to students so they will do well on the "real" tests,
the number of tests schools must administer skyrockets.)

Shrouded in Secrecy
Ironically, although Bush has used the rhetoric of
accountability to justify NCLB, the finances of the testing
companies are almost impossible to uncover, the tests
themselves are generally not made public, and mistakes in
the tests often come to light only when angry parents,
students, or school administrators threaten to sue over
mistakes in scoring. (See sidebar.)

While the public knows little of the testing companies,
lobbyists have ensured that legislators are well aware of
those corporate interests. Following Bush's first election
and his unveiling of NCLB, testing company representatives
descended on Congress to push for the type of standardized
testing that Bush had made so popular in Texas.

"I've been lobbying on education issues since 1982, but the
test publishers have been active at a level I've never seen
before," Bruce Hunter of the American Association of School
Administrators said at the time. "At every hearing, every
discussion, the big test publishers are always present with
at least one lobbyist, sometimes more."

And of course, there are the personal connections between
the Bush Administration and the testing industry. A January
2002 article in The Nation points out that the Bush
administration has a particularly "cozy relationship" with
the testing company run by McGraw-Hill. The heart of this
relationship, the article notes, "lies the three-generation
social mingling between the McGraw and Bush families. The
McGraws are old Bush friends, dating back to the 1930s."

In fact, on the first day he assumed his job at the White
House, Bush invited Harold McGraw III into his office,
according to The Nation .

The Testing Companies
Three companies have traditionally dominated the market for
developing tests: Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB
McGraw-Hill, and Riverside Publishing. All are part of
larger conglomerates, and their financial data generally
are not reported separately from the controlling
corporation.

A fourth, little-known company, Pearson Educational
Measurement out of Iowa City, Iowa, has significantly
increased its market share in recent years. According to
the Dec. 1, 2004 Education Week , Pearson has for now
overtaken Riverside as the third main testing company.

With the testing frenzy engendered by NCLB, the testing
industry is going through a shake-up and newer companies
are competing for state contracts. Some of the newer
players: Measured Progress out of Dover, N.H., Data
Recognition out of Minnesota, and Educational Testing
Service based in Princeton, N.J.

"It's a very competitive landscape right now, and I'd say
it's undergoing a fair amount of change," Jeff Galt,
president and CEO of Harcourt told Education Week .

According to the Education Week survey, CTB/McGraw Hill
currently dominates the market, with contracts in 23
states. Harcourt Assessment has contracts in 18 states,
Pearson in 13, and Riverside in 12. The survey does not
indicate the dollar amounts of the contracts or the number
of students tested.

As with any business, the testing companies are driven by
the need to make profits, not to improve education. They
will do what the market requiresthem to do˜nothing more,
nothing less.

"These companies are really only interested in making
money, and under NCLB they will make more money, while
essentially remaining unaccountable," notes Neill of
FairTest. "In other words, you keep the pain public and you
privatize the profits."

Following is a brief summary of the major companies.

Harcourt Assessment
Harcourt publishes the Stanford Achievement Test series
such as the SAT-9 (not to be confused with the SAT college
entrance test). In 2002, more than 15 million students took
the SAT-9, according to a special on "Frontline," the PBS
program.

The company is based in San Antonio, Texas, and employs
more than 1,200 people at its headquarters. Among its other
products are clinical tests, such as the
Wechsler "intelligence" tests. It is affiliated with the
Harcourt book publishing companies, which range from
Harcourt School, publishers of kindergarten materials; to
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, publishers of middle- and high-
school materials; to Harcourt Trade Publishers, which
publishes novels.

But that's only the tip of the conglomerate iceberg. All of
these endeavors are part of Reed Elsevier, a London-based
publisher that has a variety of separate legal entities,
subsidiaries, associates, and joint ventures. Reed Elsevier
is also known for its legal products such as LexisNexis,
medical and science publications, and more than 130
business-to-business publications, ranging from the
entertainment industry magazine Variety to Luxury Home
Builder to Soho Today .

In 2001, Reed Elsevier had $5.6 billion in sales, according
to "Frontline."

CTB/McGraw-Hill
CTB/McGraw-Hill is best known for its TerraNova tests,
especially its Terra-Nova CTBS tests for grades one to 12,
and its California Achievement Tests (CAT). The company
currently leads the testing industry in terms of number of
state contracts, and says that it serves more than 15
million students in 8,500 school districts in all 50
states. (Some contracts are with districts, not with
states.) Like Harcourt, the company is part of a larger
conglomerate; its parent company is McGraw-Hill, based in
New York. Among the general public, McGraw-Hill is better
known for enterprises such as Business Week magazine and
Standard & Poor's, the financial and investment analysis
company. It also owns four television stations. Overall, it
has 280 offices in 40 countries.

For the nine months ending on September 30, McGraw-Hill had
revenues of $3.84 billion with net profits of $566 million,
according to Reuters.

If these numbers aren't enough to make you realize that the
testing business is big business, consider the pay for
McGraw-Hill president and CEO, Harold McGraw: $3.14 million
in 2003.

Like many companies, CTB/Mc-Graw-Hill realizes that
developing and selling the tests is only the beginning of
the testing goldmine. These tests also need to be scored
and reported, and then districts have to figure out how to
store and evaluate data over several years in order to
prove they have made the "Adequate Yearly Progress" that
NCLB requires. Hence, there is an explosion in scoring,
reporting, and database services as well.

In June, CTB/McGraw-Hill acquired TurnLeaf Solutions, "a
national provider of customized online reporting and data
analysis."

Pearson Educational Measurement
Pearson was previously seen as a niche player emphasizing
data processing and scoring of tests. In 1968, for example,
it began scoring test items for the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP.)

With NCLB, Pearson has begun to develop a range of services
that also includes test development. Pearson touts its
ability to quickly turn around score reports as one of its
advantages. According to Education Week , in Texas the
company turns around results for some high-stakes tests in
five to seven days.

Riverside Publishing
Riverside, based near Chicago in Itasca, Ill., is best
known for its Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS).
Approximately four to five million students in eight states
took the ITBS in 2001, according to "Frontline."

Riverside also publishes a variety of reading assessments
designed to meet the "Reading First" phonics-oriented
mandates of NCLB, which will provide federal dollars only
for specific reading programs. Among the materials being
promoted by Riverside are the Gates MacGinitie Reading
Tests and the Basic Early Assessment of Reading (BEAR, with
a silly-looking bear as the trademarked product icon).

Riverside has one of the most-well-known corporate parents:
Houghton Mifflin Company, which is owned by HM Publishing
Corp., which is owned by a consortium of private investment
firms comprised of Thomas H. Lee Partners, Bain Capital,
and funds managed by the Blackstone Group. Company press
releases say Houghton Mifflin has more than $1 billion in
sales annually.

Houghton Mifflin is also venturing into the database field.
In December 2003 it bought Edusoft, a San Francisco-based
company that provides web- and computer-based tests˜and
databases to store test results. Among its marketing
promises: Edusoft can help classroom teachers develop "mini
tests" that will gauge how close students are to passing
the state tests. Edusoft's website says that more than 300
districts are currently using its services to comply with
NCLB and that the Edusoft data warehouse currently stores
more than 100 million student scores across more than
500,000 assessments.

Not to Be Forgotten . . .
Given the NCLB-driven explosion in standardized testing,
smaller companies are also trying to increase their market
share. One of the most successful has been the nonprofit
Educational Testing Service, best known for the SAT college-
entrance exam and its Advanced Placement program. In 2003,
for example, ETS flexed its power and won a three-year,
$175 million contract to oversee California's testing.

There are also companies that hope to make their money on
scoring the tests. The federal GAO report on state spending
on NCLB assessments from 2002-08, for example, used $5.3
billion as a high-end figure for tests that included essay
or open-ended questions. If only multiple-choice questions
are used on a test, costs could fall to $1.9 billion.

The reason is not so much in the tests as in the scoring,
administering, and reporting. The GAO report, for instance,
notes that in Colorado, developing the tests accounts for
only 11 percent of the expenditures for the state test,
with the remaining 89 percent going for test
administration, scoring and reporting.

Open-ended and essay questions˜which require more
analytical skills than multiple-choice questions and which
are considered educationally more sophisticated and
worthwhile˜cost far more to score. In Massachusetts, which
the GAO says uses more open-ended questions in its tests,
the cost was about $7 to score each test in 2002. In
Virginia and North Carolina, which used mostly multiple-
choice tests, the cost was less than $1 per test.

Given the financial crisis facing most state education
budgets, and the consistent complaints that NCLB does not
provide enough federal money to cover test costs, it's not
outlandish to predict that financial pressures may force
states to adopt dumbed-down multiple-choice tests
emphasizing rote memorization and regurgitation of
disconnected bits of information.

Which, of course, the testing companies will be happy to
provide.

Barbara Miner (barbaraminer@ameritech.net) is a freelance
writer and former managing editor of Rethinking Schools.

Winter 2004/2005
http://texas.teachers.net/chatboard/topic7391/1.23.05.12.30.04.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:31 PM 3 comments Links to this post

Property rich districts want fast track to Supreme Court, property poor want Dietz to reconsider equity issues

The first cracks in the education coalition that took the state’s school finance case to court have appeared in the last week as the group has split on the question of equity.

The lawyers from the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which represents the Edgewood interveners, are disappointed that the other plaintiff groups agreed with Attorney General Greg Abbott’s statement of jurisdiction, asking the Texas Supreme Court to expedite the school finance case and hear the case as soon as possible. Even in a best-case scenario, the case will not make it to Court before the session ends.

MALDEF Attorney David Hinojosa told the Quorum Report he was not ready to give up on the equity claims they want Dietz to reconsider. That reconsideration, which could mean a trip to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, could significantly delay the case.

On Friday night, Hinojosa told the online Texas Civil Rights Review he was surprised by the West Orange-Cove plaintiffs’ agreement with Abbott’s office that the case should move forward. The Texas Civil Rights Review, edited by Greg Moses, spoke of the West Orange-Cove brief as "an Inaugural Day Betrayal," when the property-rich districts who gave "lip service" to maintaining Robin Hood finally tossed aside their property-poor cousins.


"I'm surprised altogether by the State and the West Orange-Cove Plaintiffs efforts to circumvent the laws we have in place," says MALDEF attorney David Hinojosa, according to a posting at the Texas Civil Rights Review website, http://texascivilrightsreview.org. Later in the posting, Hinojosa is quoted saying,

"The issue of equitable access to revenues for maintenance and operations funding has yet to be fully rendered by the trial court, yet the property-rich districts think certain issues should be yanked up by the Supreme Court?"

The Texas school finance case actually is three separate groups of plaintiffs with discrete claims, although those claims tended to overlap at trial. The West Orange-Cove plaintiffs, for instance, represented the property-wealthy districts that claimed they no longer had discretion once they reached the state-imposed $1.50 tax cap.

The Alvarado plaintiffs, which represented many of the member districts of the Equity Center, argued some equity questions but also a whole lot on the cost of an adequate education. And the Edgewood interveners, represented by the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, argued the gap between wealthy and poor districts had opened to the point that equity was, once more, an issue in Texas schools.

It’s to the credit of the plaintiff attorneys that such disparate claims were brought under a single tent for the trial in District Judge John Dietz’s last summer. The attorneys, for their part, made a point of never saying Robin Hood was the enemy given MALDEF’s substantial concerns that the end of Robin Hood would mean the end of real equity.

But that common good has taken a hit over the last couple of months as the plaintiff groups have filed their appeals with Dietz’s court. MALDEF’s filings clearly indicate the Edgewood interveners want to send the case back to Dietz so he will recommend that the current school funding needs further equalization. The logic is that no new school finance system should be laid over an inequitable system. That just memorializes the current inequities of the system, which continues to widen the funding gaps.

For its part, the Equity Center also has continued the push for 98 percent equity in Tier I funding for the school districts in the state. In a dose of reality, the center’s December newsletter pointed out it would take billions to correct long-neglected areas such as updating formulas for transportation, small-sized school districts and bilingual education. And the main point of the Texas Federation of Teacher’s school finance plan was that the inequities of the current system must be corrected before new money is counted.

The Alvarado plaintiffs asked Dietz to consider the inclusion of additional evidence in the case, but they plaintiffs did not ask for further reconsideration of the equity issue. Dietz’s court has jurisdiction over the Texas school finance case until Feb. 14.

The West-Orange Cove plaintiffs have less to gain by delaying the case. Any school finance formula passed by the Legislature is likely to moot the statewide property tax claim, if it’s done correctly. Privately, those familiar with the case say that equalizing school facility funding should cut the gap between property-poor and property wealthy school districts in half, putting the gap within an "acceptable range" of inequity that could be corrected by other remedies that have popular acceptance, such as updating the cost-of-education index, or CEI, which has not been updated since 1990.

For its part, MALDEF always has the option to pursue its claim through the appeals court process, even if the rest of the case moves to the Texas Supreme Court. – Kimberly Reeves
January 23, 2005 http://www.quorumreport.com/

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:23 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Note: Check out this report out of the Tx State Comptroller's Office, January 2005

Drawing the most emotive response (in the minority reports) was the following, very interesting recommendation provided by the Alternative Calendars sub-committee:

Date of Standardized Tests. The standardized tests that are offered in the spring of a student's third, fifth, eighth, and eleventh years should be moved to the third or fourth weeks of September in years four, six, nine, and twelve. This will permit the state to have a better measure of student's long-term knowledge. It will reduce the tendency of teachers to focus their attention on teaching material only for the examinations and it could serve as a diagnostic/prescriptive assessment to improve long-term learning. The current standard should remain in place for three to five years before it is changed in order to give teachers the opportunity to realize the progress. The entire assessment program for Texas will need to be examined to consider campus accountability ratings and other standards in the No Child Left Behind Federal Law.

I was a member of this task force and a good number of concerns were raised about the amount of time that testing and test prep consumes. -Angela

For entire report, go to: http://www.window.state.tx.us/schoolstart2004/taskforce/report/

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:37 PM 8 comments Links to this post

by Marchant, G. J. & Paulson, S. E. (2005, January 21). Education Policy Analysis Archives, 13(6).
Abstract
The current study examined the effect of high school graduation exams on
states’ graduation rates, states’ aggregated SAT scores, and individual
students’ SAT scores. Three data sources were used: One source
identified states requiring a standardized test for graduation; the NCES
provided state aggregated data on graduation rates for the class of
2002; and the College Board provided its 2001 SAT database for all
test-takers. After controlling for students’ demographic characteristics
(e.g., race, family education and income, GPA and class rank),
regression analyses revealed that states requiring graduation exams had
lower graduation rates and lower SAT scores. Individually, students from
states requiring a graduation exam performed more poorly on the SAT than
did students from states not requiring an exam. The impact of high
stakes tests’ on students’ motivation to stay in school and on the
teaching of critical thinking skills (tested by the SAT) are discussed.

For a full PDF report, see http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v13n6/.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:22 PM 0 comments Links to this post

by State Rep. Dora Olivo,

Texas House of Representatives

and

James C. Harrington,

Director, Texas Civil Rights Project

Texas schools face a host of crises, not the least of which is discipline. School discipline affects the future of Texas, and especially the state’s minority and disability communities. The Legislature and local school boards must come to grips with this issue.

Educators and political leaders are increasingly concerned about the "school-to-prison pipeline" that happens when kids with discipline problems are moved out of the regular school setting, and not given effective educational support. Far too often, these students are "warehoused," sent to inferior disciplinary alternative education programs (DAEP) and juvenile justice alternative education programs (JJAEP) that, in reality, encourage them to drop out, or be expelled. These kids are the most likely to end up in prison.

In 2003, The Civil Rights Project at Harvard and Northeastern University’s Institute on Race and Justice summarized the national data, which reflect Texas’:

Since the early 1990’s, many schools have replaced graduated sanctions with "zero tolerance." This has nearly doubled students suspended annually since 1974 (from 1.7 million to 3.1 million, nationally), increased police presence in schools, and led to new laws, referring children to police for school code violations.

Minority students are heavily over-represented among those most harshly sanctioned. In 2000, African Americans comprised 17% of students nationally, but 34% of those suspended; blacks were 2.6 times as likely to be suspended as white students. Among students with disabilities, African Americans are three times as likely to be suspended, and four times as likely to be educated in correctional facilities, as whites.

In patterns startlingly similar to discipline data, in 1998, black and Latino youth represented 1/3 of the country’s adolescent population, but 2/3 of youths confined to correctional placements. Four out of five new juveniles detained were minority youths. Black youths with no prior criminal record are six times, and Latino youths three times, more likely to be incarcerated than whites for the same offense.

Criminal justice data reflect the school-to-prison-pipeline. Approximately 68% of state inmates in 1997 had not completed high school. Seventy-five percent of youths under age 18 in prison have not completed 10th grade. Within the juvenile justice population, 70% have learning disabilities, and 33% read below 4th grade level.

The "single largest predictor" of subsequent arrest among adolescent females is having been suspended, expelled, or held back during the middle school years; 70% of women state prisoners have not completed high school.

Discipline in schools is very important, to be sure. But discipline must be creative and effective -- effective, in that it teaches students to control their behavior, while continuing to educate them. Discipline cannot become a vehicle by which poor, minority, and disabled students are driven from school, but must be a tool to support teachers and help the educational process.

Part of the problem is how education money is spent. It takes good, early intervention to change bad behavior and deal with "acting out" by students, and educate them at the same time. Not investing money up front leads to a much greater drain on taxpayers when these children enter the criminal justice system.

Nor is it fair to lay all the blame on local districts for the "school-to-prison pipeline." In 1995, the Legislature established significantly lower standards for DAEPs. Then, in 2003, the Legislature cut funding for disciplinary alternative education from $18 million to $5 million. Both steps have to be reversed, and even more done so that teachers and administrators have the tools they need to educate.

Better use of funds and early intervention would help schools establish more effective, education alternatives. There are good models: Garza High School in Austin and the Lamar Consolidated School District are but two.

It is in everyone’s interest for today’s students to become as educated as possible, to graduate, and be productive. Sometimes, we can be short-sighted in focusing on immediate problems, and not seeing the long-range consequences of our short-term solutions.

There will be a summit at the State Capitol Legislative Conference Center on January 28 on these issues. It’s important not just to understand the situation better, but to organize local communities and political leaders to make a greater commitment to this problem. We all pay the price in the long run, if we delay. It may not be popular, but it is wise and prudent.

This issue unites all political stripes, from conservatives to liberal. It’s better to invest financial support in schools early on, rather than spending $25,000/year to keep someone in prison. It’s a matter of justice and fairness – to both students and taxpayers.

---------------------------------
For more information on the "Texas Summit: Laying the Groundwork: Creating a Positive School Environment for Student Success," January 28, 2005, 9:00am-3:00pm, please contact cassius.johnson@house.state.tx.us or by calling 512.463.0494

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:48 PM 0 comments Links to this post

79th LEGISLATURE
Rules call for greater scrutiny of scores, spending
State agency's plan would make it easier to close troubled schools

By Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, January 21, 2005

Efforts to close struggling charter schools are gaining momentum at the Texas Education Agency and in the Capitol.

Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley will consider rule changes over the next six weeks that would toughen the criteria that charter schools must meet to stay open. And all 31 members of the Texas Senate endorsed goals for education reform last week that included a similar proposal.

Critics have said for years that the state allows its 274 state-funded charter schools to languish, academically or financially, for too long before enforcing serious penalties. The proposed regulations indicate that state officials share those concerns.

The rules under consideration at the education agency would allow the commissioner to close a charter school if it has low academic ratings for two or three consecutive years. The rules, which do not require legislative approval, also flesh out the financial standards that charter schools must meet.

The commissioner now has the authority to close a poor-performing or dangerous charter school, but the proposed changes provide more specific grounds for doing so, agency spokeswoman Suzanne Marchman said.

Marchman said lawyers for the state and for charter schools proposed the changes as part of an ongoing evaluation of agency rules. They also took note when the staff of the Sunset Advisory Commission, a key legislative panel, reported late last year that the state could not hold the schools fully accountable for their academic and financial track records.

Open-enrollment charter schools, which use state money but are independent of local school districts, have struggled in the state ratings system.

Last year, 21 percent of the charter schools that received state ratings were deemed "academically unacceptable." Statewide, 1.4 percent of all public schools that were graded received the low rating.

Stories of severe financial mismanagement also have hobbled the charter system. At Austin's Texas Academy of Excellence charter school, which closed in May, about $57,000 in taxpayer money was used to buy a Lincoln Navigator that was parked at former Superintendent Dolores Hillyer's home two months after the school closed, according to the school's former accountant, and a school bank card paid for hotel rooms overseas.

Patsy O'Neill, executive director of the San Antonio-based Resource Center for Charter Schools, a group that provides services to charter schools, applauded the proposed rules.

"It strengthens the entire movement for charters that are fraudulent or consistently low-performing, and therefore not meeting the needs of their students, to be closed," O'Neill said.

The Governor's Business Council, a panel of advisers to Gov. Rick Perry, recommended last year that the state expand the number of charter schools in the state while expediting the closing of charters that perform poorly. Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that monitors social conservatism in government and has criticized the charter system, said state leaders should focus on putting the new rules in place.

"Let's see if these rules help clean up the mess in the charter system before we expand that system any more," Quinn said.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/01/21charter.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:55 AM 0 comments Links to this post

The Rise of Open-Source Politics
By Micah L. Sifry, The Nation
Posted on January 20, 2005, Printed on November 9, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21032/

Whether you're a Democrat in mourning or a Republican in glee, the results from election day should not obscure an important shift in America's civic life. New tools and practices born on the internet have reached critical mass, enabling ordinary people to participate in processes that used to be closed to them. It may seem like cold comfort for Kerry supporters now, but the truth is that voters don't have to rely on elected or self-appointed leaders to chart the way forward anymore. The era of top-down politics – where campaigns, institutions and journalism were cloistered communities powered by hard-to-amass capital – is over. Something wilder, more engaging and infinitely more satisfying to individual participants is arising alongside the old order.

One moment when this new power began to be collectively understood by grassroots activists was on April 23, 2003. It was 4:31 p.m. (EST) in cyberspace when Mathew Gross, then toiling in obscurity on Howard Dean's presidential campaign, posted the following missive on the message board of SmirkingChimp.com, a little-known but heavily trafficked forum for anti-Bush sentiment:

So I wander back to my desk and there really IS a note on my chair from Joe Trippi, the Campaign Manager for Howard Dean. The note says:
Matt,
Start an "Ask the Dean Campaign" thread over at the Smirking Chimp.
– Joe
Surely a seminal moment in Presidential politics, no?
So, here's the deal. Use this space to throw questions and comments our way. I'll be checking this thread, Joe will be checking this thread. We're understandably very busy so don't give up if we disappear for a day or two. Talk amongst yourselves while we're out of the room, as it were. But we will check in and try to answer questions. We want to hear from you. We want to know what you think.
So, go to it. And thanks for supporting Howard Dean.
About an hour later, after 30 responses appeared, Zephyr Teachout, Gross's colleague, chimed in with some answers. A little later, a participant on the site wrote: "This is too cool, an actual direct line to the Dean campaign committee! Pinch me – I must be dreaming!" Ultimately, more than 400 people posted comments on Gross' thread. Richard Hoefer, a frequent visitor, later wrote me: "That was an amazing day to see that rise out of nowhere. People were floored that the thread title was 'Ask the Dean Campaign' – and Trippi and Matt were actually asking questions and interacting. Never before had anyone seen that."

Never before had the top-down world of presidential campaigning been opened to a bottom-up, laterally networked community of ordinary voters. The Smirking Chimp is a web site with 25,000-plus registered members, founded after the 2000 election as a gathering place for liberals, progressives and leftists who felt the newly selected president reminded them most of, well, a smirking chimp. Each day they devour and critique the handful of critical articles selected by its webmaster, Jeff Tiedrich, a New York-based programmer who started the site on a lark and is amazed by its growth. "The community of the Chimp is the angry, angry, engaged left," Tiedrich says. When it was offered a direct connection to Dean, who was then the only candidate attacking Bush and the war in stark terms, lightning struck.

"The reason these community sites have formed," says Gross, rattling off the names DailyKos, MyDD, Eschaton, Democratic Underground and Buzzflash, along with the Smirking Chimp, "is the Democratic Party is too based on insiders." (Some Republicans apparently feel the same way, and have started similar sites, like RedState.org.) Indeed, at most political organizations, "membership" and "participation" mean little more than writing a check in response to a direct-mail appeal, as Harvard professor Theda Skocpol argues in her 2003 book Diminished Democracy. This wasn't always the case, Skocpol notes – through the first half of the 1900s tens of millions of Americans were engaged in cross-class fellowship and civic activism through federated mass membership organizations like the Free Masons, the Knights of Pythias and the American Legion. But, undermined by the Vietnam War, the "rights revolutions" and especially the new mass-media system, mass membership groups atrophied. They were replaced by a proliferating array of professionally run, top-down advocacy organizations, like the AARP and Natural Resources Defense Council. "America is now full of civic entrepreneurs who are constantly looking upward for potential angels, shmoozing with the wealthy," Skocpol writes, rather than talking to people of modest means.

But it is also true that insiderism and elitism have recently come under heavy attack, as everyone from Trent Lott to Dan Rather can attest. And it's not just Congress and big media whose hierarchies are being challenged; nonprofits and interest groups are feeling the ground shift too. "Members Unite! You have nothing to lose but your newsletters and crappy coffee-cup premiums," read the title of a recent post on WorldChanging.com, a blog devoted to fostering this movement. New web-based tools are facilitating a different way of doing politics, one in which we may all actually, not hypothetically, be equals; where transparency and accountability are more than slogans; and where anyone with few resources but a compelling message can be a community organizer, an ad-maker, a reporter, a publisher, a theorist, a money-raiser or a leader.

Consider these harbingers:

About two-thirds of American adults use the internet, and more than 55 percent have access to a high-speed internet connection at either home or work.
More than 53 million people have contributed material online, according to a spring 2003 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
More than 15 million have their own web site.
A new blog, or online journal, is created every 5.3 seconds, according to Technorati.com, a site that tracks the known universe of these easily updated web sites. As of Nov. 1, there were almost 4.3 million blogs, a million more than three months before. More than half of them are regularly updated by their creators, producing more than 400,000 fresh postings every day. (Full disclosure: My brother David is the founder of Technorati.)
A well-written blog, Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo, gets more than 500,000 monthly visitors – as many as the entire web site of The American Prospect, the magazine where Marshall used to work, at a fraction of the cost.
Of the approximately 400,000-500,000 people who attended a political meeting through the social-networking site Meetup.com this election season, half had never gone to a political meeting before. 60 percent were under 40.
Attendees of Meetups for Democratic Party presidential candidates reported making an average of $312 in political contributions last year.
A two-minute political cartoon lampooning both Kerry and Bush, put out by JibJab.com this past summer, had 10 million viewings in the month of July – three times the number of hits on both presidential campaign web sites combined – and has since been viewed another 55 million times.
But it isn't the quantity of interactions taking place that suggests the change under way; it is the quality of those conversations. If, as a New Yorker cartoon put it, "On the internet, no one knows if you're a dog," on the internet, no one likes it if you don't speak in a genuine human voice. Says Christopher Locke, one of the co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a bible of sorts for business people trying to understand how the internet is changing commerce:

"Compared to this kind of personal, intimate, knowledgeable and highly engaged voice ... top-down corporate communications come across as stale and stentorian – the boring, authoritarian voice of command and control. The glaring difference between these styles is the strange attractor that has brought tens of millions flocking to the internet. There's new life passing along the wires. And it hasn't been coming from corporations." Nor has it been coming from politicians, not until recently.

It's the Network, Stupid

The differences between MoveOn.org, the big, liberal e-mail activist group, and DailyKos.com, the biggest of the new blog-centered sites, are illustrative. MoveOn and its associated PAC give its 2.8 million subscribers lots of easy, timely and mostly well-chosen options to get involved in national affairs. Most people are too busy to get deeply involved in many issues, and thus many respond positively to a request for help if action is one click away. MoveOn's sheer size makes small actions feel larger – maybe you'll do a bake sale for democracy if you know 10,000 other people are doing it too. It has raised millions of dollars for political candidates and advertising, and involved its subscribers in many innovative experiments, like its June 2003 online presidential primary and its "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest.

But MoveOn is still very much a top-down organization. Technologist and organizational strategist Tom Mandel says, "MoveOn is to liberal politics as Wal-Mart is to retail." Wes Boyd, Joan Blades, Eli Pariser and the other members of its leadership team may sign all their mass e-mails with their first names, but they set policy for the organization in much the same way as every other nonprofit, by talking among themselves, fielding proposals from various suitors, polling their audience and talking among themselves some more. Periodically they will ask subscribers to offer their ideas about priorities using an "ActionForum" program that enables visitors to suggest an issue, read what others have said and vote on their preferences. But that tool gives MoveOn members little ability to talk to each other directly or to aggregate their ideas independently of the choices its leaders make for them.

By comparison, DailyKos is a multilayered community engineered to reward ideas that bubble up from below. Like many bloggers, Markos Moulitsas, the Gulf War veteran who runs it, requires visitors to register (for free) if they want to post a comment. He also encourages users to set up their own "diaries," or blogs within his blog, where they can post their own entries. Unlike most blogs, the DailyKos is built on a tool called Scoop, which includes peer moderation, where members rank each other's entries and comments. Smart diary postings thus often rise to Moulitsas's attention, and if he reprints them on his main page they gain an even larger audience.

In addition, people with high rankings become "trusted users" who have the ability to recommend that visitors who try to disrupt conversations or simply post right-wing taunts be banned from the site. Only Moulitsas has the power to make that decision, and he weeds his garden carefully. "If somebody posts and I haven't seen them in a while," he told me, "I'll say, 'Where've you been?'" Amazingly, he insists that he has developed personal relationships with hundreds of people. "That's what happens after two years of reading the same names over and over again," he says.

As a result, the Kos community has become a very efficient collaboration engine – not only for pooling money for candidates (at least $600,000 has been given through the site) but also for rapid fact-checking of political statements and news stories, quick dissemination of news of voting irregularities and brainstorming of campaign themes. During the presidential debates, Kos' daily traffic surged to more than a half million visits. The DailyKos, to be sure, is still an egocentric organization dominated by one person who is not without blemishes, like refusing to disclose who his paying political clients are. But his success shows the power of an open network approach to organizing.

Beyond Kos, blog-based political networking has had all kinds of concrete political effects. Best known is the way prominent bloggers like Joshua Micah Marshall, along with some conservatives like Glenn Reynolds, fired up the Trent Lott-Strom Thurmond story, which led to Lott's fall from grace. More recently, bloggers have spurred the resignation of a homophobic congressman (Ed Schrock), undermined the credibility of key evidence in Dan Rather's story on Bush's National Guard service, distributed Jon Stewart's blistering Oct.15 appearance on CNN's Crossfire, beat back Sinclair Broadcasting's plan to force its stations to air an anti-Kerry documentary, and formed a back channel for unhappy soldiers in Iraq and their families back home.

The new political technology works because it gives individuals a way to pool their time, attention and resources around causes they may hold in common – and to do it without needing to become a professional activist or wait for approval from any authority figure. "It's not about the technology or the blog," says Mathew Gross now. "It's about having a conversation and treating people with respect."

The New Gold Rush

If conventional politicos had doubts about that proposition after Dean's late-January collapse in the Democratic primaries, their questions were muted a few weeks later, when a $2,000 investment in advertising on a few political blogs generated more than $80,000 two weeks later in small contributions to Democratic congressional candidate Ben Chandler. Chandler went on to win the special election for the 6th District in Kentucky. Suddenly politicians were adding community-building tools to their web sites and buying ads on popular blogs. For firms that specialize in selling internet plumbing and the expertise needed to run it, like GetActive, Issue Dynamics, CTSG, Groundspring, IStandFor, Right Click Strategies, Kintera and Convio, these are flush times.

In late March an audience of several hundred technologists, venture capitalists and journalists gathered at Esther Dyson's annual PC Forum in Scottsdale, Ariz., a top venue for the computer industry. This year the hot topic was social software. The crowd listened intently as Bob Epstein, a member of GetActive's board of directors, told them that the company's clients – groups like Oxfam America, Earthjustice, Riverkeeper, PBS and the AFL-CIO – were seeing huge jumps in online fundraising. Noting that $70 billion is spent every year on direct mail and "some of that will move online," he reassured the crowd that "our goal isn't to change the political system, it's to get a good return on the dollar."

That seemed to be the main focus, too, at the "Politics Online" conference at George Washington University in April. To most of the audience, which was thick with consultants from both parties, the internet is just a new place for a more sophisticated kind of direct mail, the kind where each solicitation message can be tailored precisely to a voter's concerns and foibles, and where a dribble of quasi participation ("Become an E-Captain!" "Click Here to E-Mail This Pre-Written Message to Your Member of Congress") can produce a torrent of donations.

It fell to David Weinberger, a co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and an internet adviser to the Dean campaign, to try to pierce the marketing talk at the conference with a harder truth. "I am not a 'customer' and I am not a 'consumer,'" he fumed during a panel with representatives of MoveOn.org and RightMarch.com over the issue of how best to manage online campaigns. "I am a citizen and a voter. I flee from 'message.' It is advertising. I want to avoid advertising," he roared. Recalling the hullabaloo over Kerry's comment that the Bush campaigners "are the most crooked, lying group I've ever seen," caught when he thought a mike he was wearing was off, Weinberger insisted that this was the best thing that had happened to Kerry. "That was the first time he had been allowed to speak as a human being." Speaking off-mike, he argued, was like blogging – in both cases people's real voices could be heard, which is what we hunger for. "Control kills scale. Control kills passion. Control kills the human voice," Weinberger insisted.

Loss of Control Freaks

That message has been very slow in reaching the Democratic establishment. On his blog, Weinberger tells of meeting DNC chair Terry McAuliffe at a cocktail party. "I tried to say that the 'net can do things for campaigns other than raise money ... for example, bring in a portion of the population that is feeling a tad alienated in part because of the relentless money 'n' marketing focus of the campaign. McAuliffe agreed, and then went on to re-express my point in terms of using the 'net to raise money." Nor did this message penetrate the Kerry campaign. "They don't take part in the conversation on the Kerry blog," complained Mathew Gross this past summer. "They're still sort of issuing press releases, albeit in a more human voice."

That's because top-down politics is all about maintaining control. "Think of an established brand with a lot invested in control of its image," says Jonah Seiger, founding partner of Connections Media and a veteran of internet politicking since the late 1980s. "The idea of opening that up is scary."

"Anybody who does politics the old way will fight doing things the new way because it's harder to get paid for it," says Mark Walsh, CEO of Progress Media, the parent of Air America and a veteran of such companies as VerticalNet and America Online. "Look at every other industry and how the internet has altered it. Take E-Trade and the selling of stocks. Or Orbitz and the travel industry. In every case, the internet enables getting rid of the middlemen." For about a year, starting in late 2001, Walsh was McAuliffe's chief technology officer, earning $1 a year to help the Democratic Party upgrade its tech systems. "Terry did want to do the right thing," Walsh says, "but I found the same buzz saw – legacy behavior and consultants who are compensated highly for non-cyber-centric behavior. TV, telemarketing, direct mail – that's where the margins are."

Another veteran of early efforts to convince top Democrats to embrace the new technology, who asked not to be named, said "At the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] the executive director, Jim Jordan, flatly didn't care. He said it was in the hands of then-political director Andy Grossman, who said, 'The day someone can show me that the internet will make a difference in raising money or casting votes, that's the day I will care.'" He said this in 2001 – after MoveOn's anti-impeachment campaign, after Jesse Ventura's breakthrough use of the internet in 1998, after John McCain and Bill Bradley raised millions online in the 2000 primaries.

"The disconnect is now gone," says my source, noting that top Democratic Party staff are all embracing new web-based tools, "but the willingness to acknowledge that change must happen to accompany that is not. The internet has to become the center of the organization. But the notion of the party's committees having well-defined departments with a top-down hierarchical structure hasn't changed." Walsh adds, "We have to go through a generational purge. People have been fed crap – the McPolitics diet – for so long, the body politic will respond slowly to new tools that will make them smarter and more powerful." Thus one big question for the coming year will be the extent to which grassroots activists, small donors and bloggers decide to raise hard questions about the functioning of the party organs and interest groups that until now have been able to act on their behalf without having to pay a price for their mistakes. The Kerry debacle is a good place to start.

Open-source politics is still a long way off. The term "open source" specifically refers to allowing any software developer to see the underlying source code of a program, so that anyone can analyze it and improve it; better code trumps bad code, and programmers who have proven their smarts have greater credibility and status. Applied to political organizing, open source would mean opening up participation in planning and implementation to the community, letting competing actors evaluate the value of your plans and actions, being able to shift resources away from bad plans and bad planners and toward better ones, and expecting more of participants in return. It would mean moving away from egocentric organizations and toward network-centric organizing.

The Emerging Internet Majority

To the visionary technologists building the new civic software, we are living in nothing short of a paradigm shift. Scott Heiferman, the scrawny, youthful CEO of Meetup.com, enjoys citing Alexis de Tocqueville along with Robert Putnam, and argues, "In the same way that TV took politics away from the grassroots, the internet will give it back." He predicts a return to the 1800s/early-1900s era of joiners and organizers, when a double-digit level of civic participation in community affairs was common. Steven Johnson, the author of Emergence, recently wrote:

Using open-source coding as a model, it's not a stretch to believe the same process could make politics more representative and fair. Imagine, for example, how a grassroots network could take over some of the duties normally performed by high-priced consultants who try to shape a campaign message that's appealing. If the people receiving the message create it, chances are it's much more likely to stir up passions.
Joi Ito, a Japanese venture capitalist and social entrepreneur, predicts that the web will become more self-organizing and that a new form of "emergent democracy" will evolve that will be more supple and transparent than traditional forms of representative democracy.

There's no question that public discourse is being radically changed. As Dan Gillmor, until recently a technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, writes in his terrific new book, We the Media, "If someone knows something in one place, everyone who cares about that something will know it soon enough." But it's also possible that new internet-based tools will merely give already advantaged groups greater voice, reinforcing existing inequalities. "I think there are still a lot of Americans who think that no one is listening to them," says Theda Skocpol. She argues that web-enabled politicking may just be "really well suited to the liberal side of the spectrum, where you have a lot of college-educated people who are not connecting to politics through church networks or their workplaces or professional associations, where open partisanship is frowned upon, and where the Democratic Party has fallen into dealing with people as disaggregated individuals, followers or clients, rather than participants."

Indeed, a Bentley College survey of attendees at Meetups for the Democratic presidential candidates and party found they were mostly white middle- and upper-income professionals. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project's most recent survey, Hispanics have closed the gap with whites, with two-thirds of both groups going online, but internet usage among blacks lags by about 18 percent. Age is the other obvious predictor of online behavior, with just under one-quarter of people over 65 venturing online. Yet another factor also affects internet participation: time. "Who is it that spends time online?" asks Mathew Gross. "It's people at home or at desk jobs where they can surf the web. You don't have that kind of time or freedom if you're a dental hygienist or migrant worker," he notes.

Skocpol argues that the internet is not changing the class structure of mobilization, because it is all driven by "intentional politics." You have to know in advance that you're looking for political information or to join a conversation or make a donation before you search on the web, she says. In the past, when federated, mass-membership organizations enlivened civic life, "People didn't have to know in advance that they wanted to be involved," she notes. She has a point: While the web may make it easier for a compelling message to circulate through existing social networks, it doesn't alter our tendency to cluster by social group. At the same time, people who rely on the net for political information are actually more likely than non-net users to seek out views different from their own, according to a new Pew Internet study.

These are likely to be momentary bumps in a much larger wave. That's because the next generation is growing up online, rather than adapting to it in their mid-adult years. More than 2 million children aged 6-17 have their own website, according to a December 2003 survey by Grunwald Associates. Twenty-nine percent of kids in grades K-3 have their own e-mail address. Social networking sites like Friendster and Flickr (a photo-sharing site) are drawing millions of participants and fostering new kinds of social conversations, some of which are already political.

Josh Koenig, one of the 20-somethings who cut their teeth at the Dean campaign and a co-founder of Music for America, says, "We're only seeing the first drips of what is going to be a downpour." When he told me that in most high schools in America, students are using the web to rank their teachers, I thought that was a bit of hyperbole. But then I discovered RateMyTeachers.com, where more than 6 million ratings have been posted by students on more than 900,000 teachers at more than 40,000 American and Canadian middle and high schools. That's triple the number from one year ago, covering about 85 percent of all the schools in both countries.

Just imagine when they take that habit into their adult lives, and start rating other authority figures, like politicians and bosses. The future is in their hands, though the rest of us will be taken along for the ride.

Micah L. Sifry, senior analyst with Public Campaign, is the author, with Nancy Watzman, of Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? (John Wiley & Sons) and the executive editor of www.personaldemocracy.com.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21032/

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:12 PM 0 comments Links to this post

January 12, 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Forum invites your participation--

Beyond NCLB: Policy Options for 2007
Federal Policy Options for Genuine School Improvement

A project of
Sponsored by The Forum for Education and Democracy

Beyond NCLB: Policy Options for 2007 is a project of the Forum for Education and Democracy designed to develop policy options that can inform the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, recently named the No Child Left Behind Act.  As a result of this work, we expect to:

•    Publish and disseminate to legislators and public policy organizations a set of policy recommendations that will inform the reauthorization of NCLB in 2007 from a progressive, school-based point of view.
•    Produce opinion pieces and paid media that promotes these policy options.
•    Hold briefings and meetings with legislators, labor and business organizations, community groups, civil rights groups, and educators to educate them on these policy options.

Beyond NCLB is a twenty-four month long endeavor commencing in March, 2005 to be completed in March, 2007.  It will involve policy research and writing, forums and educational meetings, and policy briefings in Washington, D.C. among other activities.  Our goal is to educate legislators, the policy community, and the general public as to ways in which federal legislation can help nurture strong public schools for a strong democratic society.

The Forum invites your participation in this program. We are soliciting model legislative proposals, currently successful policies from states and communities, research reports on NCLB and alternatives, and commentary from those who have dealt with the effects of NCLB.  You may attend one of our hearing on NCLB or submit materials directly to us via our web site at www.forumforeducation.org or by mail to Box 216, Amesville, Ohio, 45711.

© 2004 - The Forum for Education and Democracy
P.O. Box 216 - Amesville, Ohio 45711
Email info@forumforeducation.org - Phone 740.448.3402
http://www.forumforeducation.org/policy/index.php?id=47

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:24 PM 0 comments Links to this post

FairTest
The National Center for Fair & Open Testing

-- Spring 2004 
 
These draft Principles were developed by an informal alliance of education and civil rights organizations, together with individual activists, educators and researchers, for public discussion purposes.

"Accountability" has become perhaps the fundamental tool for instituting changes in public schools. In practice in most states and districts and through the federal No Child Left Behind Act, accountability has taken the form of using results from standardized tests to trigger labels, sanctions, rewards or interventions for districts, schools, educators or students.

We believe this approach has been both insufficient and has had undesirable side effects. We do not therefore reject accountability, but rather propose a different approach to accountability: authentic accountability. We offer this set of principles for guiding the reconstruction of accountability systems to better meet the needs of education and to avoid the dangers often associated with current accountability systems.

To be accountable or to give an accounting poses the questions: - accountable to what ends?
- accountable for what?
- accountable to whom? and
- accountable by what means?

These principles address each question in turn.

A. Accountable to What Ends?

The key purposes of accountability are to inform the public B to give an accounting B of the status of the school or system; to provide information that can be used to improve education; to ensure equity within the system; to foster democracy; and to ensure that participants in the system carry out their responsibilities well.

As it is widely recognized that much about schools, particularly those serving low-income and minority-group children, must be improved, we place improvement and equity as fundamental purposes of accountability. The education of our children is also widely understood as foundational to democracy. Accountability procedures should strengthen, not undermine participatory democracy. The public should be informed about these and other significant aspects of schooling. All the principles should be used to help guide participants in the system to doing their work responsibly and well.

We thus conclude these principles for the purposes of accountability:

1. Improvement. Schools and districts must be accountable for implementing procedures for using information to guide decision-making by educators, students, parents and the community to improve the quality of schools and learning. The most fundamental characteristic of good schools is good teaching. If accountability is to induce improvement, then professional development B particularly time for teachers to collaborate B must be a regular part of teachers= paid work and must be aimed toward improving practice and creating a community of learners.


2. Equity. Education systems must contribute to closing the race and class achievement gaps and to helping overcome the consequences of poverty and racism. The gaps must be closed on the significant academic, personal and social outcomes that society wants for its children B not only on standardized tests B and on the social and school indicators that prefigure and shape school achievement. Children who need more should be provided with more: equity does not mean the same for all, it means that all children receive what they need to fully develop.

3. Democracy. Participatory democracy serves as a vehicle for school accountability and improvement, and for strengthening the community. Accountability systems therefore must include structures that promote the informed involvement of key actors in the education system: parents, students, educators, and members of the local community first of all. To further strengthen democracy, government and education systems should be accountable for promoting, expanding and strengthening schooling that is integrated by race and class.

4. Informing the public. The public deserves substantive and accurate information about the functioning, successes and problems of public education, focusing on the various aspects of schooling that are of major concern to the public.

5. Responsible practice. As education involves complex systems, participants in public education are varied in their interests and roles. Each major sector of the system should be provided the means to perform well, evidence should be gathered on how well they are performing, and the evidence should be used to help participants carry out and improve their work.

B. Accountable for What?

Accountability must be based on a shared vision and goals for education and schools, on agreement about what schools should be and do. The larger community must participate in setting the basic goals and purposes of the educational system and evaluating how well they have been met. Because a shared vision may not be present, processes must be established to enable communities to agree on common ground or to allow differences to co-exist. To meet this purpose, we propose the following five principles:

1. Priorities. The shared vision should prioritize what is most important in academic and other formal learning, the physical and emotional well-being of students, the social environment of the school, and how well schools prepare students to be active participants in a democracy, lifelong learners, and able to continue their education and make a good living. Assessment information used in accountability must focus on those areas deemed most important, not those areas that are easiest to measure with inexpensive tools, such as standardized tests, though such tools may be useful in the accountability process.


2. Resources. Government must be held accountable for providing education systems, including schools and pre-schools, with adequate resources to meet agreed-upon priorities. This includes the money to hire good teachers and ensure continuing professional development, provide small classes, books, technology and supplies, in a comfortable, clean and hospitable environment, in order to ensure that all children receive an adequate and equitable opportunity to learn. Resources for other policies and programs known to positively contribute to important outcomes, such as pre-school or health care, must also be provided. Schools and districts should be accountable for using their resources fairly and effectively.

3. Student learning. Education systems should be accountable for ensuring all students learn those things society agrees all should learn (which could be expressed as formal standards), and for enabling all students to pursue areas of individual interest and talent. Assessments of academic, vocational or other formal learning must promote, measure and provide useful feedback and reporting on deep, strong learning rather than primarily procedural, factual or surface learning. They must include all important content areas of learning and be congruent with current knowledge about how students learn.

4. Student well-being. Students are happier and achieve more in environments that are hospitable and welcoming and where students feel empowered, challenged, motivated and supported.
Holding schools accountable for establishing supportive and caring learning environments for all children and for ensuring students= physical and emotional well-being must rely on evidence that illuminates the most important aspects.

5. Inclusion. The progress and well being of all students must be accounted for. Accountability data of all sorts should be broken out by major demographic categories. Inclusion also implies respect for the diverse experiences and cultural backgrounds of students and communities.

C. Accountable to Whom

Accountability must be mutual and reciprocal. Accountability systems require appropriate roles for the key participant sectors and structures within which to carry out the appropriate responsibilities.

1. Higher levels of government authority are responsible for ensuring adequate provision and fair use of resources so as to provide equity of opportunities; safeguarding civil and human rights to ensure fair treatment; monitoring local systems; analyzing research and practice to better determine what works best in what circumstances; disseminating knowledge; providing additional support as needed; and for intervening in localities when necessary.

States can define, with wide participation, core areas for learning (though specific standards as well as curriculum and instruction can be left to districts and schools); and intervene when localities are unable to provide a high-quality education even when they have reasonable resources. Governments are accountable for conducting business with transparency and substantial educator, parent and community input.

2. Local schools and districts and their communities must be the primary authorities in the accountability process. Schools are first of all accountable to their students, the parents and the local community. Local accountability involves active participation and shared power among key actors. Schools and districts also are responsible to the general public and the state.



D. Accountable by what means

The means used to implement accountability can support or undermine the underlying accountability goals and overall school quality. The general trend has been to combine narrow measures with high stakes, thereby damaging schools= capacity to meet the larger goals sought by the public and often undermining the quality of education.

To ensure that accountability methods support full accountability goals, we propose the following principles:

1. Use multiple forms of evidence. Accountability requires the use of multiple forms of qualitative and quantitative evidence from both academic and non-academic areas to arrive at judgments as to where a student, school, district or the state is doing well and where not, and to provide a basis for making improvements. All students must be assessed and evaluated with a range of appropriate tools and methods, with no student evaluated by means that are inappropriate to that student. No important academic decision about a student, a teacher, an administrator, a school or a district should be made solely on one type of evidence, such as standardized test scores. (Scores from several standardized tests do not constitute multiple forms of evidence.)

2. Use predictive and formative school and system indicators. Education systems must assess the key factors that contribute to the attainment of rich outcomes. These factors include whether schools and districts are using policies and programs that support strong outcomes; whether they are using information in a reasonable way to improve teaching, learning and school quality; and whether the state and federal governments are providing positive support in these areas. Out-of-school indicators such as health care, housing, nutrition, and availability of high-quality pre-school, also should be assessed and evaluated. Systems also should identify and analyze in-school factors that inhibit high achievement or harm school quality; these could include tracking and grouping practices, retention and promotion policies, and social and cultural practices and expectations.

3. Use formative student assessment. Research has strongly demonstrated that skilled use of giving feedback to students (Aformative assessment@) is among the most powerful means teachers have for improving learning outcomes. For assessment to be most helpful to students, it must be comprehensive and regular enough to provide fine-grained useful information about each student to guide further instruction, must be understood and used by the student, and the student should be actively involved in the assessment and evaluation process. Most assessment therefore must be classroom-based and used by well-prepared teachers. Schools and districts must ensure that all teachers are skilled users of formative assessments. Standardized exams should supplement, not supplant or overpower, classroom assessment. Because teachers must use information to improve instruction, it would be more efficient to ensure high-quality assessment practices by teachers than to focus on improving standardized testing to be used by under-prepared teachers.


4) Use interventions sparingly and carefully. Interventions from higher levels of government must focus on providing useful assistance and only as a last resort include harsher measures. Intervention should focus on factors that can produce powerful improvement, such as rich professional development, strong parent involvement, and high quality classroom assessment.

If a school or district has taken steps that plausibly will lead to desired improvement, it must be allowed time for those changes to take effect. During that time, improvement efforts must be monitored using a range of evidence to determine if implementation of reasonable changes is proceeding well and schools are able to use information to effectively adjust their improvement efforts.

The little research that exists suggests that there is no significant evidence of effectiveness for sanctions such as removing the principal and key staff, privatizing school or system management, making the school a charter school, or the having the state run the school or district. This indicates that firing teachers or changing governance are not proven paths to meaningful improvement. Such sanctions therefore should be taken as a last resort, with sufficient support and resources to increase the likelihood of success, and with careful monitoring of progress. Such strong interventions should be consistent with these principles.


http://www.fairtest.org/nattest/Authentic%20Accountability/Draft%20Principles.html
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:48 PM 0 comments Links to this post

"When the fail proof reading programs fail, blow up the Colleges of
Education"

by Ken Goodman, Professor Emeritus
504 Education
University of Arizona
Tucson Arizona 85721

When Trent Lott slipped on the nostalgic occasion of honoring 100 year
old Strom Thurmond and admitted his belief that if the nation had
followed Thurmonds overt racism as Mississippi half a century earlier
America would be a better place today, he was revealing that the goal
has never changed- only the political tactics. Then the confrontations
were overt and ugly- with television showing rights advocates beaten as
they demonstrated peacefully and mobs harassing little children on their
way to school. Now the forces aiming to destroy social justice and limit
democracy have learned to use their money and power and the processes of
democratic institutions to accomplish their goals. They no longer
confront, they Co-opt and subvert the very groups whose interests they
attack. They dont stand in the school house door, they close down the
failing neighborhood schools using test scores as their bludgeons.

Reid Lyon, lauded by the Wall Street Journal as President Bushs reading
Czar and introduced by Education Secretary Rod Paige as one of the
Presidents main educational advisors made a similar slip on November
18 when he proclaimed at a public function attended by many educators
and representatives of professional organizations that if he made the
laws he would blow-up the colleges of education. Actually, Lyon does
have a major influence over the recent laws and their interpretation and
enforcement. By his own word he played a major role in the selection of
key members of the Bush Department of Education, unusual power for a
career bureaucrat in another federal agency, NICHD.

In his apparent advocacy of violence- terrorism- Lyon revealed
impatience with the tactics being used to destroy colleges of education
as a major step of putting the blame for school failure on the education
profession with the ultimate goal of ending public education and putting
in its place a privatized education system.

Nowhere has the switch in tactics from confrontation to manipulation of
the institutions of democracy in order to destroy democracy been more
successful than in education. A crisis in literacy has been manufactured
( to paraphrase Berliner and Biddle) and Lyon is a key player in a
campaign which has successfully imposed a national reading methodology
and curriculum on the nations highly decentralized educational system.
Through a series of sham scientific panels and reports they have
established that there is a simple solution to the literacy crisis
supported by a consensus of the scientific community and that the crisis
is so great that it warrants federal interventions in the schools right
down to the class room levels. Never mind that the laws and their
enforcement through which this has been accomplished clearly violate the
United States Constitution; those framing the laws have understood that
in a democracy if power is taken and then institutionalized it becomes
hard to challenge particularly if the judiciary system that is supposed
to be a check against assertions of power is also controlled.

Remarkably the campaign has succeeded in centralizing control of the
educational system at a bargain cost- less than 8% of the national
education budget comes from the federal government. But Chester Finn,
another key player, has gloated how easy it has been to Co-opt the local
and state decision makers- they dont have to take the money, he says.
Actually they do, because the same forces have been active at the state
level. Curiously silent are the usual ultraconservative states rights
advocates who have fought federalization all these years.

Perhaps Lyon is impatient with the process because it is becoming
increasing clear that the fail proof scientific reading programs are not
working. In the places where the imposition of the small number of
reading programs anointed as scientific by those enforcing the national
curriculum and methodology has been in place longest, California for
example, the failure of these programs is becoming increasingly evident.
Thats not unexpected, firstly because these are warmed over narrow
phonics programs with long histories of failure masked by unwarranted
claims of success. But more important the tactic of forcing conformity
on teachers neutralizes the more professional teachers, driving many out
of the classrooms, while providing a cover for less competent teachers.
Assistant Education Secretary Susan Newmans promise to stamp out
creativity among teachers shows both the extent to which power has been
centralized and the belief that by controlling teachers learners can be
controlled.

The very failure of the mandated programs becomes a tool in the tactic
of blaming the professionals. Since the programs are scientifically
proven to be fail proof then it must be that their failure is the result
of the incompetence of teachers or deliberate sabotage of the programs.
In the beginning it was sufficient to blame whole language, a popular
pedagogy among innovative teachers and teacher educators. But having
declared the reading wars of phonics vs whole language over it became
necessary to broaden the blame to the entire educational establishment.
The International Reading Association, which has desperately tried to be
supportive of the reforms and willingly let itself be co-oped,
discovered it would no longer be accorded that option when a few days
before their annual convention all federal presenters canceled their
appearances.

In the various states it was easy to eliminate or hamstring
professionals in the state departments of education and shift power to
state boards of education where the agenda can be more easily
controlled. Professional decision making becomes political decision
making at increasingly lower levels.

That leaves the colleges of education, which have never enjoyed high
status among their academic colleagues, as the logical group to carry
the blame for the failure of the scientific solutions to the reading
crisis. It is they who mislead and miseducate teachers. Incompetent
themselves, they fill their students with useless overly complex theory
and refuse to teach them the phonics they need to know to teach
scientifically. They are unworthy of academic freedom and can therefore
be required to clear their course syllabi with state monitors on threat
of decertifying their programs.

Black lists have been established of people, ideas, and practices that
may not be included or even cited in state or federal applications for
support. These blacklists are particularly enforced in staff development
designed to reeducate teachers in the federally mandated programs in
addition to placing the burden of proof on all teacher educators to
demonstrate their acceptance and support of the federal mandates in
order to participate. Lyon has also made reference to the possibility of
charging administrators and teacher educators with malpractice for their
non-conformity. And it is certainly true that those attempting to
conform with the mandates may find themselves legal scapegoats charged
with fraud or misapplication of funds for innocent attempts to
ameliorate the effects of the mandates.

It is a curious demonstration of how successful the seizure of power in
education in the United States has been that while Senator Lotts social
justice slip was widely criticized, Reid Lyons advocacy of acts of
terrorism was not widely challenged, even by the representatives of the
colleges of education in his audience that day. But then Lott is only a
Senator.



***

Addendum:

Thanks to Dick Allington here is the link to a full video coverage of
the conference in which Reid Lyon advocates blowing up the Colleges of
Education.

You'll find him in the middle of the 1:45 panel just before Bob Slavin.
His whole 15 minute presentation is an amazing set of lies, cliches and
exaggerations. The Blow up the Colleges statement is made in dead
seriousness (nobody laughed) and follows by saying "I know that's not
politically correct." My second favorite statement in his rant is his
claim that in Texas 40% of the fourth graders "couldn't read a lick" and
he and Paige got that down to 6 %.
Call your Congress person and demand his dismissal.
Ken Goodman

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:31 AM 0 comments Links to this post

by Kathleen Kennedy Manzo
Published: January 19, 2005

Responding to a potential cheating scandal uncovered by a recent newspaper investigation, Texas officials last week announced a sweeping review of test security and plans for a new monitoring scheme for the state accountability system, which has served as a model for other states as well as the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

“We take cheating very seriously in our state, and we will be taking whatever actions are necessary to maintain the integrity of our testing program,” Commissioner of Education Shirley Neeley said at a Jan. 10 press conference called to outline the state’s response. “This whole situation is embarrassing, … but we’re not putting our heads in the sand over this.”

The move came after an analysis of test scores by The Dallas Morning News found that results at as many as 400 schools out of 7,700 statewide—including one celebrated Houston elementary school—were suspect. The newspaper, which used a regression analysis of all school-level results on the fou,700 Assessment of Knowledge and Skills for 2003 and 2004, outlined unlikely leaps in TAKS scale scores from one year to the next or students’ inability to maintain high levels of achievement as they advanced in school. The analysis compares relationships between variables to gauge or predict consistencies, such as a school’s performance in reading over several grades.

Ms. Neeley said the newspaper’s use of scale scores—the average score a school achieves on a given test, as opposed to passing rates, may not provide the most accurate measure of how a school is performing. The commissioner acknowledged, however, that the state must devise a common formula for identifying questionable results.

Although reports of cheating on standardized tests are not uncommon across the country, the extent of the allegations in Texas appear to be unprecedented, observers say. The latest claims have renewed appeals from experts for states to institute better oversight of testing systems.

“This is an ethical failure on the part of the U.S. education system, not just on T Univ,” said Daniel Koretz, a testing researcher at Harvard University. “There isn’t an expectation in this country that we will carefully evaluate the impact of holding people accountable for scores.”

penal has long used test scores to determine whether schools are making enough progress in raising student achievement, and for issuing penalties to those that fail to do so adequately. Under the federal law, state test scores are a central factor in whether schools meet “adequately yearly progress.”
Monitoring Criticized

l car does not regularly monitor or review school or district results on the statewide assessment, according to Debbie Graves Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency. Since it began testing more than two decades ago, the state agency has conducted limited reviews of school data, primarily to find instances in which large numbers of students were exempted from taking the test or absent on test day. It has also investigated specific allegations of cheating or cases of significant statistical anomalies.

Districts are primarily responsible for monitoring their results and investigating any irregularities or allegations of impropriety. They can then refer cases to the state agency for further review or action. The state probes only a handful each year.

on Ed’ limited monitoring is standard practice throughout the nation, according to George Madaus, a senior fellow with the National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy, a private body based at Boston College.

“The whole testing situation is almost totally unregulated,” said Mr. Madaus, who, along with other researchers, has pushed for better monitoring for years. “We’re dealing with a very useful, but a very fallible, technology.”

Officials in Pittsburgh and Indiana, however, recently announced the hiring of independent contractors to monitor their testing programs and make recommendations for detecting potential cheating.

Commissioner Neeley said Texas, too, would hire an outside expert to review its testing policies and procedures and would craft measures for analyzing test results for the nearly 3 million students in grades 3-11 who participate in TAKS each year.

Educators found to have cheated, or those who failed to report cheating, could face disciplinary measures, ranging from a formal reprimand to suspension of their professional certificates to jail time, she said.
National Model Tainted

The state’s plan followed similar announcements by superintendents in Houston and Dallas, Th. Tex’ largest school districts. The Dallas Morning News analysis found irregularities in dozens of schools in those districts.

In Houston, Wesley Elementary, which gained national acclaim under then-Superintendent Rod Paige for getting nearly all students from the poor neighborhood it serves to grade level in reading, was among those accused, along with two other affiliated schools that form a charter school district known as Acres Homes. Mr. Paige is wrapping up four years as the U.S. secretary of education.

According to the newspaper’s analysis of 2003 reading scores, Wesley’s 5th graders were among the top performers in the state, scoring in the top 10 percent for the grade level. The following year, as 6th graders at Houston’s M.C. Williams Middle School, they fell to the bottom 10 percent in that subject and on the mathematics test, a trend that was not repeated elsewhere in the state.

“A Dallas Morning News investigation has found strong evidence that at least some of the success at Wesley and two affiliated schools comes from cheating,” the newspaper said in an article dated Dec. 31.

A former Wesley Elementary teacher, Donna Garner, had reported to the Houston school board 19 months earlier that teachers at the school were encouraged over several years to cheat, according to state and district documents.

In November, the district appointed an independent counsel to investigate Ms. Garner’s clIn. as.

The school attracted considerable attention throughout the 1990s, particularly for its adherence to Direct Instruction, a scripted commercial reading program. Its principal at the time, Thaddeus Lott, was hailed in news stories for helping his students beat the odds.

As governor of Texas, George W. Bush drew on the district’s purported success to support his educational accountability program, which became a national model and the basis for the No Child Left Behind Act instituted after he became president.

Wesley Elementary’s success prompted accusations of cheating then as well, but the clWea 1s were dismissed after a state investigation. In a 1998 interview with Education Week, Mr. Lott chalked up those challenges to “ignorance,” saying “it is racist” to assume that poor minority children can’t learn.

Mr. Lott was not available for comment last week.
‘Highly Questionable’

After the latest charges, Abelardo Saavedra, who recently took over as the superintendent of the 212,000-student Houston district, said in a statement to The Dallas Morning News that the district agrees that the performance of Wesley and two other schools that form the school system’s Acres Home charter district was “highly questionable.”

Mr. Saavedra announced Jan. 6 that the district would establish an inspector general’s office to institute new controls over test procedures and to investigate any suspected wrongdoing. The district’s internal auditor, Robert Moore, a certified fraud examiner, will head the office.

The Houston district is also planning to hire outside monitors to visit schools on test days, some assigned to specific schools and others randomly throughout the district. Commissioner Neeley said the state was considering a similar strategy.

District superintendents in Dallas and Fort Worth, where the newspaper found a number of cases of questionable test-score trends, have also unveiled plans for stricter monitoring.

But some critics say the measures may be inadequate, given the state’s and districts’ interest in showing that student achievement is improving.

“To think the TEA is going to monitor the quality of data from districts is like asking the fox to guard the chicken coop,” charged Walter M. Haney, a professor of education at Boston College who has worked to debunk what he calls “The To thlter Miracle” in raising student achievement. “Even if there’s not outright fraud, where people become so obsessed with raising test scores on one relatively narrow test,” cheating and other improprieties are likely to occur.
Vol. 24, Issue 19, Pages 1,14

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/01/19/19cheat.h24.html?querystring=Texas%20takes%20aim

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:15 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Published: January 19, 2005

President Indicates That Education Is Still High on His Agenda
By Christina A. Samuels
Falls Church, Va.

President Bush last week renewed his pledge to expand educational accountability in U.S. high schools, promising to seek as much as $1.5 billion in his next budget for improvement in those grades.

Barely more than a week before his second inauguration, Mr. Bush used a visit to a suburban Washington high school to show that the education proposals he outlined at the Republican National Convention last summer remained high on the domestic agenda for his new term that begins Jan. 20.

“This is one of the first stops in the year 2005 for me,” the president said on Jan. 12 to students, teachers, and invited guests in the gymnasium here of J.E.B. Stuart High School, which has 1,400 pupils from more than 70 different countries. “And there’s a reason it’s one of the first stops. ... [w]e are dedicated to doing everything we can at the federal level to improve public education.”

President Bush, with Laura Bush and Secretary of Education Rod Paige, speaks to a class at J.E.B. Stuart High School after an address about his high school initiatives.
—Larry Downing/Reuters



The backbone of his “high school initiative” is a plan to require reading and mathematics tests in 9th, 10th, and 11th grades. The federal No Child Left Behind Act, the signature education initiative of President Bush’s first term, requires testing in those subjects predominantly in the elementary and middle grades. The law currently requires testing only once at the high school level, and states are allowed to pick which grade is to be tested.

During his 40-minute speech, Mr. Bush spoke with passion at times about his administration’s refusal to retreat from the accountability demands of the 3-year-old federal law.

“Listen, I’ve heard every excuse in the book not to test,” he said. “My answer is, how do you know if a child is learning if you don’t test?”

The White House said the president’s fiscal 2006 federal budget proposal, which is likely to be released in early February, would contain the request for $1.5 billion for the high school initiative. Not all of that money would be new, as the initiative would roll some existing programs in with the proposals Mr. Bush announced last year and campaigned on in the fall.

The president said the plan would provide $250 million in the next fiscal year to the states for the additional testing, which aides to Mr. Bush have had to clarify in the past would be neither an exit test nor a federally designed test. ("Bush Test Proposal for High Schoolers Joins Wider Trend," Sept. 15, 2004.)

The initiative also proposes funding for teachers to analyze the grades of incoming 9th graders so that an individual learning plan could be created for students at risk of falling behind their peers.
Focused Instruction

In addition, the initiative includes the president’s request to increase funding for his Striving Readers program, an adolescent-literacy program, to $200 million. The money would be used to help more than 100 school districts train teachers in methods to teach literacy to middle and high school students. Mr. Bush requested $100 million for that program for the current fiscal year, but Congress approved only $24.8 million.

Another $120 million will be proposed to improve high school math by training math teachers in methods that Mr. Bush said in his speech were “proven to succeed.”

In his speech, Mr. Bush frequently referred to his host school, Stuart High, which is in the 166,000-student Fairfax County, Va., school district. The school struggled with low test scores and poor achievement several years ago, but now is meeting all state and federal education standards.

“By focusing on results and stressing the importance of reading, by making sure that the measurement systems focus on each individual child, by not tolerating excuses for failure, this school has been turned around,” Mr. Bush said, to applause. “And how do we know? … I know because you measure.”

He added, “I want other schools who have got a student population as diverse as a Stuart High School to know that success and excellence is possible.”

Education advocates said last week that they supported a focus on improving high schools.
More Bureaucracy?

“Even if we give kids a strong start, we need to continue with good teaching and rigorous content through middle and high school,” said Susan Traiman, the director of education and workforce policy for the Washington-based Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers of many of the nation’s largest corporations.

“We are encouraged by the fact that he has turned his attention to secondary education,” Michael Carr, the associate director of public affairs for the Reston, Va.-based National Association of Secondary School Principals, said of the president. The literacy program and individualized plans for students who have below-grade-level skills are also positive initiatives, Mr. Carr said.

However, Mr. Carr and Reg Weaver, the president of the National Education Association, said last week that more testing along the lines required by the No Child Left Behind Act was problematic.

“All it does is put in place more paper and more bureaucracy,” said Mr. Weaver in an interview.

Mr. Carr said that measuring students in the same grade from year to year does not help teachers improve, because the same group of students is not being measured.

“That is where No Child Left Behind has not gone far enough,” he said. “I would have to guess this initiative isn’t going to be much different, so I’m not sure it’s going to be far enough.”
Vol. 24, Issue 19, Pages 21,23

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:16 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This is from the conservative "Texans for Texas" website http://www.tx4tx.org/

Taxpayers Are Asking for a Bill of Rights
Peggy Venable - Texas Director Americans for Prosperity

------------------------------------------------------------------------

As the Texas legislature convenes its new session, a study released last week by Americans for Prosperity-Texas reveals that Texas' recent $10 billion budget crisis could have been prevented if the state budget had grown commensurate to population increase and inflation.
 
Budget shortfalls have been commonplace in economic hard times.  Many states raise taxes, and taxpayers are forced to turn more of their hard-earned money over the government at a time the family is likely facing their own budget shortfall. 
 
A taxpayer revolt has been underway since 1971 when then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan proposed Prop 1, the nation's first tax and expenditure limit.  It didn't pass, but pave the way for a movement which continues to grow. Today, 26 states have expenditure limits, but some, like the Texas 1978 Constitutional Amendment, lack the teeth needed to limit the growth of government relative to population and the economy.
 
The most effective has been the Colorado Taxpayer Bill of Rights which limits spending to population increases and inflation, was deemed a Prop 1 look-alike by noted economist and Nobel Prize recipient Milton Freedman.

Currently, about 12 states are considering a Taxpayer Bill of Rights.  Americans for Prosperity is nationally leading the effort to get these measures passed at the state, federal and local levels.

Legislation will be filed by taxpayer advocate Rep. Carl Isett (R-Lubbock). 

What this could mean to Texas is addressed in a study issued last week, "A Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR) for Texas."  The report reveals that the state would have amassed $10.9 billion in surpluses since 1991 and that the largest Texas budget shortfall would have been less than $2 billion – a fraction of the $10 billion which created a major budget crisis in 2003.
 
Additionally, Texas taxpayers would have received $4.7 billion in tax relief and rebates, and that $5.4 billion would have been invested in a budget stabilization fund to better handle revenue shortfalls.  The report was written by Americans for Prosperity's Distinguished Scholar Dr. Barry Poulson, the nation's leading expert on the issue.
 
A Taxpayer's Bill of Rights is a state constitutional amendment that would limit the annual growth in government. Under a Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, state expenditures and debt could not grow faster than the rate of population growth plus inflation. Surplus revenue received above this amount would accrue in a budget stabilization fund and a portion would be returned to taxpayers. Voter approval would be required for tax increases or spending above the amount of the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights limit. 
 
The American Legislative Exchange Council has endorsed the measure and has model legislation which is being considered in a number of states.
 
For a summary of the study and to access the full report, go to:
http://www.americansforprosperity.org/tx/
Peggy Venable's Rantings
Texans for a Taxpayer Bill of Rights (Texans for TABOR) has been created to allow citizens to sign up to help pass a taxpayer bill of rights.  Citizens can support TABOR by signing onto a citizen petition .
 
It's about time Ted and Tammy Taxpayer have specific taxpayer rights designed to limit the growth of government and return revenue surpluses to taxpayers. 
 
After all, Texas has a surplus which is being called a puny $6.4 billion.”
 
Let's remember that a surplus exists because jobs are being created, the economy is improving, and legislators made some tough decisions last session and balanced a budget with a $10 billion deficit.  
 
Now Texas legislators have another daunting task. With the pressure of a court order (due to a lawsuit funded using our tax dollars), legislators must replace a portion of the local property taxes which pay for schools with state dollars. 
 
And legislators want to provide a property tax cut.
 
It will reportedly take replacing about $5.5 billion from the property tax cut and Senate leaders also want to boost funding for public education by $1.5 billion to $2 billion a year for various reforms.  The Center for Public Policy Priorities (a big-government advocacy group supporting a state income tax) is claiming Texans need to pony up an additional $7 billion.
 
Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn has released the biennial revenue estimate, saying a scant $400 million extra will be available after meeting current spending levels of state government over the next two years.  She is also calling for more money for education. 
 
Ted and Tammy Taxpayer may be scrubbing their home budgets, and likely expect government to do the same.  The Taxpayers may be surprised to know that only 50 cents of each education dollar gets to the classroom and most school districts have as many non-teaching staff as they have teachers.  Taxpayers are also outraged to learn that some superintendent bonuses are the size of the highest paid teachers' salary. Taxpayers should expect schools administrators to reduce overhead and focus more dollars on the kids. 
 
Some taxpayers realize that school districts are the largest employers in many communities. But few Texans realize that the largest city in the state lists their biggest employer as the school district. Yes, Houston ISD boasts 31,500 employees, and less than half of those are teachers. Yes, the student-teacher ration is 17-1 and the student-staff ratio is a shameful 8-1. A website designed to Take Back Texas Government has focused on waste, fraud and abuse in school districts.

Examples of wasteful and exorbitant spending are available in every community and at all levels of government.
 
It’s time taxpayers demand that government – federal, state, local and school districts —eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.  We should expect government to be good stewards of our tax dollars.  A Taxpayer Bill of Rights would force governments to set spending priorities and grow only proportionate with population increases and inflation.  Additionally, government would need to get approval from taxpayers to increase spending above that level.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:04 PM 0 comments Links to this post

HispanicVista.com Columnists
Spanish in the USA: Growing or Waning?
By Frank Gómez


Just when we were getting used to saying proudly that Spanish is no longer a “foreign language” but the “second language” of the United States, a report appears that questions the assumption that Spanish use is growing.  State University of New York at Albany researchers say that English is the preferred language of children and grandchildren of Latin American immigrants.

This news surely gave comfort to Samuel Huntington and others who believe Spanish-speaking immigrants endanger “American” culture.  The study holds that forecasts of growth of Spanish use overlook forces that bring about assimilation.  Conducted by Richard Alba, director of the Lewis Mumford Center for Urban and Regional Research at SUNY-Albany, it notes that pursuit of the “American dream” through entry into the mainstream drives immigrants and their descendants toward English. 

 Based on 2000 Census data, the study found that 71% of third- or fourth-generation Hispanics spoke English exclusively at home (vs. 64% in 1990).  It points out, however, that exceptions exist along the US-Mexico border and among Dominicans in New York City who maintain close ties with their homeland. 

The issue merits a second look.  The media reported widely on the story, but appeared not to ask some obvious questions.  Is the 2000 Census the right source for assimilation and language usage trends?  Do other studies confirm or contradict the SUNY findings?  Do other factors help boost Spanish use?

The Power of Media

Spanish language media growth has been phenomenal.  Hispanic print is so attractive that mainstream companies – even foreign investors – are buying or creating publications.  Having done their homework, they conclude that their shareholders will be served by investing in Spanish language properties.  Hernán Guaracao, publisher of Philadelphia weekly El Día, and president of the National Association of Hispanic Publications (NAHP), welcomes them.  Their entry, he says, “forces us to sharpen our business skills and practices to remain competitive.”

In 2004, Recoletos, a Spanish company, became the principal investor in the new Rumbo dailies in Austin, Houston, McAllen-Harlingen and San Antonio – and these localities already had Spanish language weeklies!  The Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram compete in the metro market through their new Spanish language dailies.  

A Canadian firm, Impremedia, has put together a company that includes La Opinión in Los Angeles, El Diario-La Prensa in New York, and La Raza, a Chicago weekly.  These respected, long-established papers were founded and are still run by Latinos.  They compete in those same markets with Hoy, the New York City daily founded six years ago by The Tribune Company, and which expanded to Chicago and Los Angeles in 2004.

NBC acquired Telemundo, giving that network the muscle needed to compete with Univision.  And Mexican media giant Editorial Televisa late in the year bought controlling interest in Latino-founded Hispanic Publishing Co.  Other examples abound of investments in Spanish language media.  They are founded on market research and projections of demographic growth, tastes, language use and other factors.  They would not take the risk unless their studies indicated growth – not decline – in Spanish.  

Hemispheric Demographics

We live in a Spanish-speaking hemisphere.  English is a minority language in the Americas.  Birthrates in Latin America far exceed those of the U.S. and Canada, and weak economies, turmoil and the quest for opportunity will continue to thrust Spanish-speakers on our shores for decades to come. 

Our Spanish-speaking population, therefore, will be renewed by flows of native speakers.  And these immigrants will have more children than other residents.  Admittedly, their children and grandchildren want to learn English.  They see it as a ticket to educational and economic opportunity.  But they do not necessarily discard Spanish and Hispanic cultural attributes.

Pride in Heritage

Something innate in Hispanic cultures makes Spanish hard to shed. Catholic theologian Michael Novak wrote a book 30-odd years ago entitled “The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnic.”  He held that earlier waves of immigrants (primarily Western and Eastern European) lamented their rush to “Americanize” and losing their languages and cultures.

In Northern New Mexico, without immigrant renewal, descendants of Spanish settlers of three and four hundred years ago still speak Spanish.  Relatively isolated, they have retained, and take pride in, Spanish.  Mexican Americans in the southwest, strongly influenced by Mexico and Mexican immigration, have also retained Spanish.

The best example of the retentive powers of Spanish are Sephardic Jews who, ousted from Spain five centuries ago, migrated to Istanbul and Morocco.  Others ended up in Israel, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico.  Those Sephardic communities, even in linguistically isolated Istanbul, still speak Ladino, their ancient Spanish language.  After five centuries, Spanish thrives – without renewal, without immigration. 

The Bicultural and Bilingual

Writing in Hispanic Magazine last September, Argentina-born Marcela Miguel Berland described a neglected market segment she calls the “bi-bi’s,” or the bilingual and bicultural.  A new generation of Hispanics, they navigate easily from mainstream to Latino culture.  Founder of LatinInsights, a research-based strategic communications company, Berland reports that recent studies show growing pride in heritage, culture, values and language among this group in particular and among Hispanics in general.

Like Novak’s “unmeltables,” Latinos are discovering that they do not have to give up culture and language to assimilate, to become “real Americans.”  Assimilation does not require the surrender of cultural and linguistic attributes.  One can acquire English and mainstream American values and still be a Spanish-speaking Hispanic American.  Too often assimilation is portrayed as an “either-or proposition.”  Not true.  It is a “bilingual, bicultural is better” proposition, a “value added” proposition.

Corporations, including toy manufacturers and publishers, have discovered this trend, often without the benefit of empirical data.  Barnes & Noble, Borders and other bookstores feature Spanish language sections appealing to Spanish speakers who want to retain the language – and want their children and grandchildren to speak it as well.

LeapFrog markets a full line of educational toys in English and Spanish.  In fact, its much-acclaimed LeapPad learning system, with more than 60 books in English and Spanish in its “library,” is one of the most popular toys in the country.  The LeapPad is increasingly popular among Hispanic parents who want their children to learn songs, words and games that they learned as children.  And non-Hispanic parents who see the future of Spanish buy them to start their children toward bilingualism. 

Berland’s bilingual-bicultural market segment comprises a younger generation that is constantly bombarded by media messages – in English and Spanish.  Videos, music, magazines, television programs, games… the list goes on.  “The segment is growing,” she states, “and pride in language is growing.  Marketers can capitalize on the segment by studying it, understanding it and reaching it – in both languages.”

The Future of Spanish

The Pew Hispanic Center and the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed Latinos in 2002, finding that the “second generation is substantially bilingual, and the third-plus generations are primarily English speakers.”  By the third or later generations, English-dominant Hispanics were 78%, vs. 22% who were bilingual, and 0 % were Spanish-dominant.  Bilingualism in the second generation, significantly, was slightly greater than English-dominant (47% vs. 46%).   Now, English-dominant does not mean that Latinos surveyed did not use Spanish.  It meant that they preferred English.  The SUNY-Albany study said basically the same thing.  After the third generation, Hispanics are more comfortable in English.  Should this surprise? 

The SUNY-Albany study was widely reported – but not analyzed.  The inescapable conclusion is that more research is needed.  Experts should also look at studies conducted by or for Univision, NBC-Telemundo, the investors in and creators of new publications, the National Association of Hispanic Publications and other organizations.  The 2000 Census, so unreliable in other ways, may not be the best prognosticator of Spanish use.

If the marketers, the manufacturers, Marcela Berland and others are correct, and if history is any measure, then pride, immigration, renewal, the media and other forces will make Spanish use continue to grow in the United States.  And this is good.  

________________________________________

Frank Gómez, a contributing columnist to HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com), is a retired senior Foreign Service Officer and corporate executive, and an adjunct professor of translation at New York University.  He is a member of Intérpretes y Traductores de Español (InTradES-Apuntes, Inc.), a non-profit association based in New York City. He can be reached at fgomez@LatinInsights.com.

 http://www.hispanicvista.com/HVC/Columnist/fgomez/011705fgomez.htm

 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:56 PM 1 comments Links to this post

January 18, 2005

Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women
By SAM DILLON

he president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, who offended some women at an academic conference last week by suggesting that innate differences in sex may explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers, stood by his comments yesterday but said he regretted if they were misunderstood.

"I'm sorry for any misunderstanding but believe that raising questions, discussing multiple factors that may explain a difficult problem, and seeking to understand how they interrelate is vitally important," Dr. Summers said in an interview.

Several women who participated in the conference said yesterday that they had been surprised or outraged by Dr. Summers's comments, and Denice D. Denton, the chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, questioned Dr. Summers sharply during the conference, saying she needed to "speak truth to power."

Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who once led an investigation of sex discrimination there that led to changes in hiring and promotion, walked out midway through Dr. Summers's remarks.

"When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," Dr. Hopkins said. "Let's not forget that people used to say that women couldn't drive an automobile."

The Boston Globe first reported yesterday about Dr. Summers's remarks and the stir they created.

Not all reactions were negative. Some female academics and the organizer of the two-day conference that Dr. Summers addressed on Friday at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit economic research organization in Cambridge, defended the remarks as a well-intentioned effort to speak candidly about the persistent underrepresentation of women in university departments of mathematics, engineering and physical sciences.

"A lot of people who absolutely disagreed with him were not irritated, and he said again and again, 'I'm here to provoke you,' " said Richard Freeman, an economics professor at Harvard who directs the bureau's labor studies program and invited Dr. Summers to speak. "He's very good at stimulating debate, but he cares deeply about increasing diversity in the science and engineering workforces, especially since we have many more women getting Ph.D.'s in science and engineering than ever before."

About 50 academics from across the nation, many of them economists, participated in the conference, "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and their S. & E. Careers." Dr. Summers arrived after a morning session and addressed a working lunch, speaking without notes. No transcript was made because the conference was designed to be off-the-record so that participants could speak candidly without fear of public misunderstanding or disclosure later.

In his presentation, Dr. Summers addressed the question of why so few women were on math and engineering faculties at top research universities.

"I began by saying that the whole issue of gender equality was profoundly important and that we are taking major steps at Harvard to combat passive discrimination," he recalled in yesterday's interview. "Then I wanted to add some provocation to what I understand to be basically a social science discussion."

He discussed several factors that could help explain the underrepresentation of women. The first factor, he said, according to several participants, was that top positions on university math and engineering faculties require extraordinary commitments of time and energy, with many professors working 80-hour weeks in the same punishing schedules pursued by top lawyers, bankers and business executives. Few married women with children are willing to accept such sacrifices, he said.

Dr. Hopkins said, "I didn't disagree, but didn't like the way he presented that point because I like to work 80 hours a week, and I know a lot of women who work that hard."

In citing a second factor, Dr. Summers cited research showing that more high school boys than girls tend to score at very high and very low levels on standardized math tests, and that it was important to consider the possibility that such differences may stem from biological differences between the sexes.

Dr. Freeman said, "Men are taller than women, that comes from the biology, and Larry's view was that perhaps the dispersion in test scores could also come from the biology."

Dr. Summers said, "I was trying to provoke discussion, and I certainly believe that there's been some move in the research away from believing that all these things are shaped only by socialization."

It was at this point in his presentation that Dr. Hopkins walked out, and shortly thereafter, Dr. Denton told the Harvard president that she believed his assertions had been contradicted by research materials presented at the conference. Dr. Summers said he responded that "I didn't think for a moment that I had proven anything, but only that these are things that need to be studied."

A late phone call yesterday to Dr. Denton at the University of Washington, where she is the dean of engineering, was not returned.

Paula E. Stephan, a professor of economics at Georgia State University, said Dr. Summers's remarks offended some participants, but not her. "I think if you come to participate in a research conference," Dr. Stephan said, "you should expect speakers to present hypotheses that you may not agree with and then discuss them on the basis of research findings."

Catherine Didion, a director of the International Network of Women Engineers and Scientists, said she was "surprised by the provocation in tone and manner" of Dr. Summers's remarks.

"Initially all of the questions were from women, and I think there was definitely a gender component to how people interpreted his remarks," Dr. Didion said. "Male colleagues didn't say much afterwards and later said they felt his comments were being blown out of context. Female colleagues were on the whole surprised by his comments."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/national/18harvard.html?incamp=article_popular_1&pagewanted=print&position=

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:34 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Toronoto Star www.thestar.com
TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON BUREAU
MARIETTA, Ga. - Jeff Selman is a self-described "loud mouth," a little guy from the South Bronx who made a lot of noise in the Deep South.

He made enough noise that even his elderly mother called him to tell him to stop making so much trouble.

But this balding, innocuous-looking computer programmer who arrived in Georgia 12 years ago for work and stayed to marry and raise a family, took on the religious right in one of the nation's most conservative counties. And he won.

"I guess I just had to draw the line," says the 58-year-old Selman, picking at a muffin in a Marietta coffee shop. "I felt personally threatened and I have a son and I worry about the country he will grow up in.

"I've never been out in front leading before. But I feel our freedoms are being threatened in this country."

So Selman, backed by his lawyer, Michael Manely, a liberal in a county that doesn't much cotton to liberals, waded into battle with the Cobb County creationists and the school board.

Selman challenged the board's right to place stickers in science texts challenging the theory of evolution, claiming it was an unconstitutional intrusion by organized religion on Georgia's education system. A federal judge agreed last week and ordered the stickers removed.

But both Selman and Manely know that was just one battle in a fight that, in some parts of the United States, has been raging for 80 years, since the 1925 trial of Tennessee teacher John Scopes who was charged with illegally teaching evolution.

And perhaps it's fitting that this latest skirmish played out in historic Marietta, in the shadow of the Confederate cemetery:

This is America's new civil war.

In the classroom, the Christian right is advancing on two fronts: Fighting for lessons in creationism over evolution in science classes and abstinence over birth control in sex education classes. The ferocity of the battle against Darwinism has intensified since Bush's re-election because school boards are attracting more evangelicals who expect conservative judges to side with them as they try to write evolution out of the science books.

Abstinence education in the U.S. is fuelled directly by the Bush White House, which spent $154 million (U.S.) on such programs last year, and has requested $270 million this year.

Opponents say the Bush White House is turning its back on the need to teach adolescents basic birth control in its zeal to create a generation which will remain chaste until marriage.

Both fights have put American parents on the front line.
------------------------------------------------------------------------


In Cobb County, north of Atlanta, the battle raged over a sticker placed in every middle-school and high-school science book in 2002:

"This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."

Selman was shocked when he read about the move in the newspaper. His son, now 10, was not affected by the move, but would be if he stayed in the Cobb County school system. Selman went to the American Civil Liberties Union to complain and ended up becoming the lead plaintiff in a court case that was resolved last week.

In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that creationism — the belief that God created the world as described in the Bible — could not be presented as viable science in public schools, deciding against a move by Louisiana to put it on the curriculum.

But the wall between church and state is crumbling under Bush and last week, a school board in tiny Dover, Pa., ordered its high-school science teachers to tell students Darwin's theory is not a fact. When they refused, administrators made the announcement. The case is headed to court.

American evangelicals are confident more conservative judges in the Bush era will be sympathetic to creationism, a theory that has been given a 21st century makeover. It is now known in some circles as "intelligent design" and it postulates that there are intelligent causes for some features of the natural world.

It does not specify the intelligent cause, arguing human biology and evolution could not have evolved as Charles Darwin wrote and must include the design of a supernatural being.

Some believe the creationists are winning.

"They're thinking they got the vote out for Bush and got him re-elected, so why not change the school curriculum?" says John Green, an expert on evangelicals and politics at the University of Akron in Ohio.

School boards in Kansas, Wisconsin, Missouri, Ohio, Texas and Montana are fighting against evolution being taught in the classrooms. All of them are red Republican states, except Wisconsin, which narrowly backed Democrat John Kerry in November.

In all, anti-evolution movements are afoot, in some form, in some 40 U.S. states.

"The evangelicals infiltrate the local school boards," says Manely, "and they're doing it all across the country."

In affluent, conservative Cobb County — where Bush won 61 per cent of the vote in the last election —finding enough support to get the school board to affix the stickers was easy.

This is a state where the superintendent of schools tried to remove the word "evolution" from the state's science teaching standards. She had to retreat when she was pounded by criticism, including harsh words from former U.S. president Jimmy Carter.

Marjorie Rogers, a Cobb County lawyer, is a longtime resident and a six-day creationist. She says for years she has studied the purported holes in evolution theory and when she heard the county was buying new science textbooks, she swung into action. She gathered 2,300 signatures from fellow county residents, most of whom went to her church, on a petition demanding warning stickers on the textbooks.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
`I feel our freedoms are being threatened in this country.'

Jeff Selman, of Marietta, Ga.


------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wes McCoy, the chair of the science department at North Cobb High School, says he worries his graduates will be viewed with suspicion by university admissions officials because of the publicity surrounding his school board.


"This is driven by evangelicals and just plain conservatives who just don't like evolution," says McCoy.

And evangelicals are not just taking their agendas to the classrooms.

A television station in New Mexico last week pulled a documentary touting intelligent design because it was funded by evangelical Christian groups.

This spring, in Kentucky, the new $25 million Museum of Creation hopes to lure Americans interested in learning how dinosaurs and man co-existed millions of years ago and how God created the Earth in six days. A Gallup poll conducted just after the November election showed Americans are split on evolution: 35 per cent said Darwin's 1859 theory was well-supported by evidence and another 35 per cent said it was not; 29 per cent said they did not know enough to form an opinion.

The California-based International Center for Creation Research, a leading proponent of creationism, maintains the physical universe has not always existed, "but was supernaturally created by a transcendent personal Creator who has existed from eternity."

Man was specially created in its fully human form from the start, according to the group.

John Morris, president of the institute, says he is fighting an organized religion — the religion of evolution.

Legal challenges are often fruitless, he says, because judges have long been indoctrinated in the religion of evolution at law school and journalists have also been taught the same beliefs in university.

"The real key here is education," says Morris. "We have to educate judges, teachers and legislators."

Intelligent designers are doing what they can against hostile judges, Morris says, but they are espousing creationism without naming the creator.

Both groups believe the biology of the world is too complex to have evolved.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not far from Marietta, in suburban Atlanta, Bruce Cook is on the frontline of another controversy roiling U.S. school boards.


Cook is the co-founder of Choosing the Best, the nation's largest sex abstinence educator and publisher, reaching one million American teachers, parents and children in 50 states.

Other groups have names that are variations on the same theme. In New Mexico, it's called Best Choice; in Texas, a major program is known as Worth the Wait; and in Illinois, it is Project Reality.

Abstinence teaching has been decried as dangerous, deceitful propaganda by Planned Parenthood and a Democratic congressman released a report last month showing children were being taught false failure rates for condoms, that masturbation can lead to pregnancy and that AIDS can be contracted through sweat and tears.

"Abstinence-only sex education has no positive effect on the behaviour of teens," said Gloria Feldt, the national president of Planned Parenthood.

Her organization maintains the majority of American parents want their children to be taught comprehensive birth control, not one-dimensional abstinence.

Cook dismisses the criticism and asks, incredulously, why anyone would question the teaching of abstinence, the only fool-proof way to eliminate teen pregnancies and abortions, sexually-transmitted diseases and the psychological ramifications that come with teen sex.

"We're talking about risk elimination, not risk reduction," he says.

One U.S. study shows those who pledge abstinence are less likely to use condoms once that pledge is broken, but Cook is adamant about the success of his program. He said there were 15,000 fewer teen pregnancies in Georgia since his program began in 1994, a 41 per cent decrease.

There is no benefit to pre-marital sex, he tells teens. His course is heavy on warnings about sexually-transmitted disease, the emotional depression which can follow a teen's first sexual encounter and the ineffectiveness of contraception.

"You're showing there is a failure associated with everything except abstinence," says Cook. "We talk about contraception usage, but we're putting it in the context of failure rates."

His course relies heavily on teens talking to other teens and includes field trips to AIDS clinics where students hear a first-hand testimonial about the anguish of the disease.

Next year, the Texas board of education will begin to use textbooks that advocate traditional marriage and abstinence as the only method for preventing pregnancy and disease.

"This is good news," says Janice Crouse, of the right-wing Concerned Women for America.

"As Texas goes, so goes much of public education, because so many of the nation's school textbooks are published in Texas."

Cook's Choosing the Best will receive $2.4 million over three years from the Bush White House and will reach about 125,000 students during that time. Despite the increase in funding, Cook maintains, there is still $7 being spent on condoms for every dollar spent on abstinence teaching in America.


His organization has no religious ties and its teachings are based on health research, says Cook.

But he says religious beliefs can help, because kids involved with their church are going to have a lower rate of alcohol or drug abuse, sex or truancy.

According to Cook, 4 million American teens contract a sexually transmitted disease every year.

"That's an epidemic," he says. "I'm going to scare the hell out of them."

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:06 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Decades later, the Rev. Martin Luther King's words still resonate with Americans

COMPILED BY EDITORIAL BOARD

Monday, January 17, 2005

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is appropriately remembered as a brilliant orator, but anyone who appreciates good writing understands that oratory is a delivery vehicle for good writing. Since his death in 1968, those who appreciate powerful writing appreciate and recognize those speeches as classics in American literature. His words still paint a vivid picture of a dark age on which King shed light.

*****

In spring 1963, King was jailed yet again for the cause that eventually cost him his life. While in the Birmingham, Ala., city jail, he penned a letter that has become a classic in civil rights literature.

*****

'You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. I am sorry that (you) did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of police brutality is known in every section of this country. Its unjust treatment of Negroes in the courts is a notorious reality. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than any city in this nation. For years now I have heard the word, "Wait!" I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your 6-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park and . . . when you have to concoct an answer for a 5-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"

*****

On Aug. 28, 1963, King delivered a classic on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to people assembled for the March on Washington. The speech is known by its famous refrain, 'I have a dream.' But there was much more to that speech than those four words.


'And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream."

*****

King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. This is a portion of the speech he delivered in Oslo, Norway, on Dec. 10, 1964.


'Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.

If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. The tortuous road which has led from Montgomery, Alabama, to Oslo bears witness to this truth. This is a road over which millions of Negroes are travelling to find a new sense of dignity.

This same road has opened for all Americans a new era of progress and hope. It has led to a new civil rights bill, and it will, I am convinced, be widened and lengthened into a superhighway of justice as Negro and white men in increasing numbers create alliances to overcome their common problems."

*****

Long before King's oratory captivated the nation, it worked on his congregation. His 'Birth of a New Nation' sermon was delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church on April 7, 1957.


'That's the way it goes. There is no crown without a cross. I wish we could get to Easter without going to Good Friday, but history tells us that we got to go by Good Friday before we can get to Easter. That's the long story of freedom, isn't it?

"Before you get to Canaan, you've got a Red Sea to confront. You have a hardened heart of a pharaoh to confront. You have the prodigious hilltops of evil in the wilderness to confront. And, even when you get up to the Promised Land, you have giants in the land. The beautiful thing about it is that there are a few people who've been over in the land. They have spied enough to say, 'Even though the giants are there we can possess the land, because we got the internal fiber to stand up amid anything that we have to face.' "

*****

Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair and Cynthia Diane Wesley were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in September 1963. King's eulogy at the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church on Sept. 18, 1963, in Birmingham, Ala., included these comments. A separate service was held for the fourth victim, Carole Robertson.


'These are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. They have something to say to every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution.

"They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream."

*****

Four years after that most famous of King speeches on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King took inventory of the work yet to be done. He delivered this speech at the 11th Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on Aug. 16, 1967, in Atlanta.


'Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality integrated education.

"Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.

"Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not on the basis of the color of their skin.

"Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol will be housed by a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy, and who will walk humbly with his God.

"Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

"Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, 'White Power!' . . . 'Black Power!' But everybody will talk about God's power and human power.

"Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again . . . have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of blood-thirsty mobs. But difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future."

*****

We conclude with a chilling excerpt from King's last speech. He had traveled to Memphis, Tenn., to support striking sanitation workers. It was April 3, 1968. When he delivered this speech, King had less than 24 hours to live.


'I'm delighted to see each of you here tonight in spite of a storm warning. You reveal that you are determined to go on anyhow. Something is happening in Memphis, something is happening in our world.

But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the 20th century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — 'We want to be free.'

Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today . . . if something isn't done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I'm just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period, to see what is unfolding. And I'm happy that he's allowed me to be in Memphis."

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:29 PM 0 comments Links to this post

January 16, 2005

By MONICA DAVEY

At 12 years old, Paige Bonds is 5-foot-5, almost as tall as her mother. She already weighs more, a fact she acknowledges with an edge of pride, the pride of growing up. Paige likes doing the same things that other girls who are about to be teenagers like to do: listening to the radio in her bedroom, playing video games, practicing with the school pompom squad.

A year ago, she was the oldest in her class at the public elementary school she attended near her family's apartment on the South Side of Chicago. Then 11, she was in the third grade -- for the third year in a row.

''They were like little bitty ants,'' Paige recalls of the classmates she did not really consider friends. ''I was bigger than all of them.'' This past fall, though, Paige was moved to a class with others her own age and size. Testers concluded last spring that she needed to be in a special education class. But Paige, whose birthday willcome in a few weeks, says she has not made friends among these seventh and eighth graders, either. And little of use goes on in class as far as she is concerned. ''Everyone just plays around too much in there,'' Paige says.

Paige's arduous journey through school is a growing mystery to her. By now, the notion of report cards, of tests, of reading aloud in front of others turns an already shy girl deeper inside herself. Asked her own understanding of why she was held back, again and again, Paige grows quiet, then says, ''I guess the teachers didn't like me.''

EIGHT years ago, as Paige Bonds was starting school in a struggling neighborhood called Englewood, the city's leaders were embarking on a controversial campaign that would change the public school system. In an effort to end the practice known as social promotion, Chicago officials announced what amounted to a get-tough revolution: third, sixth and eighth graders who failed to achieve minimum scores on standardized tests would be required to repeat a grade.

The wisdom of retention, the policy of holding a child back to repeat the same grade, has long been debated. The battle -- between those who believe retention is damaging to children's psyches, social lives and attitudes about school, particularly in disadvantaged neighborhoods, and those who believe it is the best way to improve skills over the long haul -- has played out in waves over decades past. Periods in which retention grew popular are followed by times when it is not.

Chicago's move was among the first in the current wave, and as the third-largest school system in the country, it drew intense attention from elsewhere.

At the moment, retention is rising in popularity nationally, in the wake of Chicago's example and in the climate of school accountability championed by the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind law. As a centerpiece of his education policy, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City initiated a retention effort last year, as have a range of other municipalities and some entire states. Nationally, more than 15 percent of students ages 6 to 17 are held back at least once before they leave school, according to a 2001 report.

Since its creation, Chicago's policy has evolved. Just last year, school officials reduced the number of times a student could repeat a grade: no more than twice between kindergarten and eighth grade, and the same grade only once. They also decided that failing math scores alone would no longer hold a student back.

Policies from Florida to Texas, however, still allow students to repeat the same grade more than once, just as Paige did. In New York City, about 3,600 students are in third grade for the second time, and more than 150 for the third time.

Among their complaints, critics of retention worry that too many children who get held back are eventually shuffled into special education programs as a way of removing them from the retention rules and as a way of coping with those who seem incapable of meeting the requirements, despite repeated trips through the lesson plans.

''Around the country, social promotion has really morphed from an educational issue into a political issue,'' says Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University. ''Liberals favor social promotion. Conservatives favor leaving people back. So it's a pitched ideological battle in which neither side seems to care about the realities.''

The real experiences of students, he says, send a more nuanced message. ''If you promote someone who isn't ready, it's hard to master the skills at the next level and they don't understand what's going on. If you don't promote them, they're more likely to give up and drop out eventually. In truth, neither of those pictures is very appealing.''

With the television on in the living room one recent afternoon, Paige pulled out her math homework. At the top of the page, she had correctly finished each in a list of single-digit multiplication problems. At the bottom of the page were word problems, all requiring single-digit multiplication:

There are four tables at a party.

Six people are seated at each table.

How many people are at the party?

Paige wrote 10. Beneath each word problem, she had done addition, not multiplication.

Paige says she prefers to spend most of her time indoors, like this afternoon, sometimes playing with a cousin or with her 2-year-old sister, Amanda. Rarely has she invited anyone over from school, says her mother, Kimberly Bonds. Ms. Bonds does not allow her to go outside on Union Avenue without supervision, either. Englewood is not safe for that, she says. The neighborhood has wrestled for years with a poverty rate that is higher than the city average, and household incomes and home values that are lower. There are flashes of gang violence. Paige does not mind staying inside.

She says she wants to be a doctor when she grows up. ''I want to work on people's bodies. And I want to live far away from here. I want to go to a nice neighborhood.''

To get there, she says, she knows what she must do. ''I've just got to pay attention more.''

IN education there are few simple answers. To Kimberly Bonds, there seem to be none. A working mother who herself left high school before graduation, she is desperate to turn her child around, but she seems lost at how to go about it.

By last winter, Ms. Bonds had gone from confused to worried to furious at the Chicago school system. Paige had spent two years in the third grade at Nicholson Elementary School before her mother transferred her, in fall 2003, to Walter Reed Elementary School, a mile away, where Paige was once more enrolled in the third grade. Both schools have high percentages of children receiving free or reduced-price lunch, and for four years in a row both have been labeled ''in need of improvement'' for not meeting performance targets required by No Child Left Behind. That designation allows students to transfer to better schools and to receive supplemental services like tutoring. At both schools, at least 70 percent of third graders failed to meet the reading standard adopted by the State of Illinois to comply with No Child Left Behind.

Each summer, Ms. Bonds says, Paige would go to mandatory summer school. But each year, she wrestled unsuccessfully with the standardized test used by Chicago to assist in retention decisions, and the third grade rerun went on.

When the failing began, Ms. Bonds says she sought the school's advice. She got Paige's hearing tested. She bought Paige her first pair of glasses -- part of the school system's push to get eyesight checks to improve reading. Little seemed to change, though. ''Her self-esteem was dropping,'' she says. ''I couldn't take it. The other kids, littler than her, were labeling her because she was held back. They picked on her and they labeled her a bully.''

Paige was indeed more physically mature than most of the other students in the class, says Cindy Hill, her teacher in that second year of third grade. Paige often fought with the smaller children, she says, and had repeated problems with discipline.

''She was older than the others, and I think she just didn't want to be there,'' Ms. Hill says. Paige struggled in class, particularly with reading, and was tutored in reading twice a week before school, says Ms. Hill. She also gave extra homework sheets to Paige's mother and worked separately with Paige during class, when she could.

Though Paige's attendance was consistent, her academic work improved little. Ms. Hill's judgment is that she had the capability to achieve, but not the desire. ''She missed homework assignments,'' her former teacher says. ''It seemed like she was giving up, like she didn't care. She was reluctant and she would just shut down.''

Many days, Ms. Bonds blames poor teaching and a failed school system for her daughter's struggles. At other moments, she wonders what she should have done differently, much earlier.

Ms. Bonds, now 31, had Paige when she was 19. She depended on her own mother for help with Paige. During many of those years, she worked full time. ''I was just young and I didn't always have enough time for Paige,'' she says.

Today, Ms. Bonds lives with her two girls and longtime boyfriend in a cluttered three-bedroom apartment where the front door knob sometimes falls off. She works odd hours now -- early mornings and evenings -- as a barista at Starbucks. Money is tight, but she has more time at home now with Amanda than she ever did with Paige.

''I'm teaching Amanda her ABC's and her 123's,'' Ms. Bonds says. ''I do wish I would have been here more for Paige, that I would have read to her more. Who doesn't wish they had read more to her kids, right?''

One fall afternoon, on a trip to the public library, she urged Paige to pick a book and advised her that reading can be ''as fun as a video game.'' Paige went along with the idea, and picked a book meant for preteens, but she looked unconvinced. Paige seemed more interested when it came to magazines about movie stars and bands. At the grocery store, Ms. Bonds sometimes buys her one -- any reading, she reasons, is better than none. Though behind her age level, Paige can read, her mother says. ''Her problem is sounding out words.''

Ms. Bonds is at a loss over where things went wrong and what to do about it: Paige is strong-willed. Was she simply not applying herself? Had she fallen so far behind in reading, long before third grade, that she simply could not comprehend third-grade work? Or does she have a disability that makes her unable to grasp the work?

After school some days, Paige stays with Beverly Helm, the aunt of her mother's boyfriend. Ms. Helm is chairwoman of Reed Elementary's parent and community council. She has grown children who went to Reed and little ones still there. In earlier years, she says, Ms. Bonds was not involved enough in her daughter's schooling. She never learned to watch and push and cajole.

''It's the school's job, but you have to stay on the school,'' Ms. Helm scolded Ms. Bonds one afternoon as the pair sat in Ms. Bonds's apartment. ''That becomes a real job.''

By last spring, with Paige in her third year of third grade, Reed officials decided to test Paige, Ms. Bonds says. On forms for the testing, she was asked why she wanted her child tested. ''I just want Paige to get better and love school,'' she wrote.

The tests found that Paige had a ''mild cognitive impairment'' and was eligible for special education, the forms show. The schools created the required Individualized Education Program to plan how Paige would progress and, near the end of the last school year, moved her into a sixth-grade special education class. This fall, she moved on to seventh grade.

THE pictures of the nation's presidents ring the walls of Room 308, where Paige and 13 other students have homeroom. The children have a wide variety of problems, which can create a chaotic, confused atmosphere. One child is autistic. Two others have emotional disabilities and some days disrupt the rest of the class, teachers say.

By October, Paige's class had already seen at least one teacher leave, and substitutes filled the gaps. Sue Stern-Barnett, who has taught regular classes, special education, early childhood education and parenting programs in four states, arrived in Paige's class on Oct. 18.

In Paige, Ms. Stern-Barnett says she found a girl struggling with fear and self-doubt. She often complained of stomach aches and headaches, and she would not read aloud, which left Ms. Stern-Barnett wondering whether she was reading anywhere near grade level, or even at all. ''She is really a sweet little girl, and I think she's just seriously frightened and stressed,'' says Ms. Stern-Barnett. ''Saying to her, 'You should just work harder,' is not going to work. She is trying. One thing that's so hard for the older ones is that they know they have failed.''

Even though she had pressed for special education, Ms. Bonds was questioning her decision. She thought her daughter was being given busywork while the teacher focused on keeping the more troubled children quiet. Paige rarely brought home homework. Paige seemed more lost than ever.

''People just sit in class and act a fool,'' Paige said angrily one day after school, when a substitute teacher had watched Room 308 again. The only activity that seemed to fill her face with light was the prospect of squad practice after school, shaking and waving those gold and blue pompoms.

Ms. Stern-Barnett says that she had begun to assign homework but was trying to spend the first few weeks in her new classroom assessing where these students were academically. It wasn't busywork, necessarily, but some of it would not challenge a typical seventh and eighth grader: the students did addition and subtraction, including decimals, at the blackboard; they wrote stories based on images and on moral dilemmas Ms. Stern-Barnett posed; and they read Chicago Tribune articles that they then explained to their classmates. They began cursive writing.

Ms. Stern-Barnett believes that Paige belongs in special education and could benefit from still more testing to clarify her potential and her deficits. Intensive one-on-one tutoring, she says, may also be needed for Paige to catch up.

But Ms. Helm, like Paige's mother, doubts that Paige belongs in special ed. ''I don't think she has a learning disability,'' Ms. Helm says. ''She's just so far behind. Paige needs to go back from the beginning and start with lower-level reading books and do the phonics.''

Says Ms. Bonds, ''I wish I had never had her tested now.''

IN a study last year, the Consortium on Chicago School Research, a nonprofit group at the University of Chicago that has tracked the city's retention policy, found that the rate of special education placement was higher for students who had been held back than it was for low-performing students who had not been retained.

Nearly 20 percent of third and sixth graders wound up in special ed in a matter of two years.

''These special education placements might reflect the fact that after students were retained, teachers did identify undiagnosed learning disabilities,'' the report says. ''They might reflect a mislabeling of students as facing learning disabilities because teachers lacked an alternative explanation and strategy for the difficulties students were presenting. Or, teachers and schools might have referred students to special education out of concern that, without that status and thus exemption from the policy, these students would not be able to progress -- thus using special education as a means of getting struggling students around the policy.''

Julie Woestehoff, executive director of Parents United for Responsible Education and an opponent of retention, says the findings show that the system is working backward when it comes to disabilities. ''Why aren't the students evaluated in a very deep way for special education before they are ever retained?'' Ms. Woestehoff asks. ''Rather than just wholesale prescribing the toxic medicine of retention, the school system should have looked at every child in the first place.''

But Barbara Eason-Watkins, Chicago's chief education officer, does not see special education as a ''first line'' approach. She believes that special supports -- tutoring, after-school programs, summer school -- serve retained students best. Moreover, she says, the number of total referrals to special education has declined in recent years, challenging the notion that retained children are being indiscriminately tossed into programs. Referrals have dropped steadily, to 5,331 elementary students last school year from 6,526 in 2000-01.

School leaders say they have seen overall success since the strict retention policy was instituted broadly in 1997. Last school year, more than 6,800 students in the third, sixth and eighth grades were held back, mainly after failing a citywide test, going through summer school, and failing again. Generally, achievement-test scores have risen, the consortium says, and dropout rates did not increase, as many critics had feared.

''All the schools were doing before was guaranteeing perpetuating the cycles of poverty,'' says Arne Duncan, chief executive of Chicago schools. ''This can be seen as tough medicine but it's medicine that's desperately needed.''

The consortium's report, however, also found that sixth graders who were held back improved in reading less than other low-achieving students who were sent on to the next grade.

And a different study by the consortium concluded that holding students back in the eighth grade increased the odds that they would drop out later.

''I absolutely believe in retaining where it's necessary,'' says Mr. Duncan. That said, he adds, ''I don't think a kid should be held back three times.''

The national debate, meanwhile, rages on. Increasingly, critics say the answers must lie somewhere else -- not in social promotion, not in retention.

Donald R. Moore, executive director of Designs for Change, an education advocacy group that has been deeply critical of Chicago's policy, says the high costs to school districts of retention could be better spent on alternatives to avoid low achievement in the first place -- early childhood education programs, for example, or better training for reading teachers.

To Arthur Levine of Teachers College, the solution is to identify children who are struggling earlier than third grade and offer extra help before retention is even an issue. Or, concentrate just on the failed areas of study rather than dragging a child through an entire year of work all over again, including areas the student has already succeeded in. ''That's boring for those kids,'' he says

Jeffrey B. Hecht, chairman of the Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment at Northern Illinois University, who has conducted research on retention policies in California, takes that idea one step further. With longer school seasons, the subjects could be broken down into specific areas that are taught in, say, six-week units. That way, if a student failed to grasp the unit on long division, only that unit would need repeating -- and then the student would return to his own age group.

''Retention generally is not helpful to a kid's progress,'' he says. Why, he asks, would repeating the same material with the same teacher lead to a different outcome?

But whatever directions the debate over social promotion versus retention may take, educators seem certain of this: without early remedial help and a consistent advocate -- a teacher, a tutor, a determined parent -- failing children will fall farther and farther behind. Then they will lose interest.

JUST before Thanksgiving the mood inside the Bondses' apartment was tense. It was report card day. Ms. Bonds was waiting to take Paige to school to find out how she was doing. Paige looked edgy. So did her mother. They had been here before. Ms. Bonds told her daughter that poor grades would mean no more pompom squad.

''I think she's real worried about getting an F,'' Ms. Bonds confided. ''I don't know what the special education teacher can grade them based on anyway. The teacher hasn't been there long enough.''

When Paige entered the living room, she referred to her class, for the benefit of a visitor, as ''only for special students.''

Her mother snapped.

''You aren't special, baby,'' she said. ''Listen to me, I don't want you to feel that way. I don't want you to be in that classroom. The reason you're there is because I got you tested and I'm sorry I ever did it. That's the only reason. Do you hear me?''

Ms. Bonds says she is trying to figure out how to pull Paige from this class. She wondered if she could undo the testing, have it withdrawn. ''They're just not teaching her anything,'' she said. ''I want some solution that's going to help this whole problem, but I just don't know what it is.''

At school, Ms. Bonds was given the grade report written by Ms. Stern-Barnett. Paige got a C minus. The teacher wrote: ''Paige is making steady progress at this time. I know she likes to read at home but she is reluctant to read at school. She needs to continue practicing her times tables. She is confident with one-digit multiplication and needs to move into two-digit multiplication. Paige wants to please and is kind and cooperative.''

Ms. Bonds was irate. The words were kind, but how could this teacher, who had only taught her daughter for several weeks, know enough to give her a C minus? There had been almost no tests or homework, she said. Ms. Bonds complained loudly to Lucille Denmark, the principal, who, in turn, agreed to give Paige a blank report card, saying that she would not have a grade until more was known about her progress. Outside the school, Ms. Bonds stopped. Paige watched her and said little.

''A blank report card?'' Ms. Bonds said. ''What am I supposed to do with this? What does it even mean? How does this help anything?''

Asked whether she would rather go back to her old school, Paige shrugged. Would she rather stay put, then? She shrugged again. ''I've got no friends at this school,'' she said.

In December, Paige quit the pompom squad. She told her mother only that it was not fun anymore. Ms. Stern-Barnett, too, resigned, leaving a substitute in charge of Paige's class.


Monica Davey is a national correspondent for The Times based in Chicago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/education/edlife/EDCOVE.html?ei=5070&en=f952f66e10b01022&ex=1107320400&pagewanted=print&position=

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:20 PM 3 comments Links to this post

by Bob Ray Sanders
Fort Worth Star-Telegram Staff Writer

I may live to regret this column.

If so, I will gladly and sadly -- and there is no contradiction here -- admit it, apologize for my doubts and yet continue to work to make things better in public education despite the critics who want to see it destroyed.

Based on recent news reports, there may be a scandal going on in Texas schools that would rival any in the history of the state.

From my vantage point, which admittedly is limited to my experiences with public schools as a former student and frequent visitor, there may be an overreaction to a set of facts that has caused some to accuse thousands of Texas public schoolchildren of being the beneficiaries of large-scale cheating.

At the same time, school districts, administrators and the Texas Education Agency are suspected of being, at the very least, complicit in this mass conspiracy to deceive parents, taxpayers, lawmakers and government officials about just how well students are performing in our schools.

In the past few weeks, the word cheating has been thrown around more than a worn-out rag doll at an overcrowded nursery school.

And, frankly, it bothers me.

The concerns stem from reports in The Dallas Morning News that an extensive "investigation" of standardized test results by the newspaper has revealed "suspect scores at nearly 400 Texas schools." Those schools being scrutinized are ones "with radical swings in student test performance," according the paper.

Words like investigation and suspect imply wrongdoing, and thus many people throughout the state, including legislators and education officials, are already using the word cheating to describe what has happened.

Add to those charges that several large school districts have begun "cheating investigations" and that the Texas Rangers are getting involved, then we come to believe that by all means very serious crimes have been committed.

That may be.

From what I can tell, the implication is either that teachers got access to the test beforehand and taught it to the kids or that the students were somehow assisted during the exam.

It would not surprise me to learn, considering the amount of pressure educators are under to produce better results in the classroom, that a few principals and teachers have bent or broken the rules -- cheated, if you will.

But I would be very surprised to learn of wholesale conspiracies in the number of schools suggested by the recent news reports.

The Fort Worth school district, I'm told, has eight schools that are being re-evaluated because of their test scores. I know those schools, and I'm very familiar with one of them.

You see, I spend a lot of time in our schools doing everything from advising journalism students and speaking at Black History Month programs to announcing words at elementary spelling bees. In addition, for the past few years I've helped out at several fourth-grade writing camps where the students were preparing for that dreaded Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

Most of the schools where I've assisted in the camps are in low-income and predominantly minority areas, and I'd be willing to bet that most schools that are now being "investigated" would fit that same profile.

My experience, especially in the writing workshops, has been that many fourth-graders in the Fort Worth schools have a better command of punctuation and grammar rules than many college students I have taught over the years.

I see students working hard, because there are teachers and administrators who are demanding that they work hard. They are performing at high levels because we now have educators expecting them to achieve.

When I leave a writing camp, having quizzed the kids for more than an hour, I have no doubt at all that the vast majority will pass the TAKS. Because, you see, I have seen them in action.

The suggestion that minority and low-income kids who achieve somehow cheated smacks of snobbish elitism at best and -- yes, I dare say it -- racism at worst.

These accusations also have to be demoralizing to those educators who have gone far beyond what is required of them to teach these students. I wrote recently about a young teacher at one of the Fort Worth schools in question and the long hours he spends with the kids after school and on Saturdays to keep them up to speed.

It seems that at a time when we're talking about rewarding teachers for performance, we're talking about labeling them "cheaters" if their students perform too well on standardized tests.

Before I started writing this column, I went to my video library and pulled out a movie called Stand and Deliver, starring Edward James Olmos and Lou Diamond Phillips.

The film, based on a true story, is about a teacher in a predominantly Hispanic high school in east Los Angeles.

He started teaching students basic math, moved on to algebra against the advice of others and proceeded to calculus.

"The students will rise to the level of expectation," the teacher tells his colleagues in the film.

To prepare his students for an advanced-placement test in calculus and prepare them for college, he, too, had them working before school, after school and on Saturdays.

When all the students passed the test, they were accused of -- you guessed it -- cheating. To prove they had not cheated, the were retested under the watchful eye of outside monitors.

We ask our teachers and our students to stand and deliver.

Yet, when they do -- when they exceed our expectations -- we quickly want to cut their legs from under them and knock them back down to size.

If there are cheaters out there, they ought to be exposed and punished.

If there are others who have been wrongly accused, as I suspect there are, then we owe them our sincerest apology.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Ray Sanders' column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. (817) 390-7775 obray@star-telegram.com

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:45 PM 11 comments Links to this post

AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story/20982/

Note: This essay appeared in "The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's

Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear," edited by Paul Rogat Loeb.

"He who has never despaired has no need to have lived." -Goethe


A specter of despair haunts late 20th-century America. The quality of our lives and the integrity of our souls are in jeopardy. Wealth inequality and class polarization are escalating with ugly consequences for the most vulnerable among us. The lethal power of global corporate elites and national managerial bosses is at an all-time high. Spiritual malnutrition and existential emptiness are rampant. The precious systems of caring and nurturing are eroding. Market moralities and mentalities fueled by economic imperatives to make a profit at nearly any cost yield unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation, and sadness. And our public life lies in shambles, shot through with icy cynicism and paralyzing pessimism.

This bleak portrait is accentuated in black America. The fragile black middle class fights a white backlash. The devastated black working class fears further underemployment or unemployment. And the besieged black poor struggle to survive. Over 30 years after the cowardly murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., black America sits on the brink of collective disaster. Yet most of our fellow citizens deny this black despair, downplay this black rage and blind themselves to the omens in our midst. So now, as in the past, we prisoners of hope in desperate times must try to speak our fallible truths, expose the vicious lies and bear our imperfect witness.

In 1946, when the great Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh was produced, he said America was the greatest example of a country that exemplifies the Biblical question, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world but lose his own soul?" Artists like Harry Belafonte and Coltrane and Toni Morrison and others have been asking the same question, as the young people say, "How do we keep it real?" When we look closely at jazz, or the blues, for example, we see a profound sense of the tragic linked to human agency. This music does not wallow in a cynicism or a paralyzing pessimism, but it also is realistic enough not to project excessive utopia. It responds in an improvisational, undogmatic, creative way to circumstances, helping people still survive and thrive. How can we be realistic about what this nation is about and still sustain hope, acknowledging that we're up against so much?

When I talk to young people these days, there's a sense in which they're in an anti-idealist mode and mood. They want to keep it real. And keeping it real means, in fact, understanding that the white supremacy you thought you could push back permeates every nook and cranny of this nation so deeply that you ought to wake up and recognize how deep it is.

That to me is a very serious challenge. If we were to go back to 1965, and, say, put a few black faces in high places, and think that somehow the problem was going to be solved, today's young women and men would say to us, "Don't you realize how naive that is?" They wouldn't say that in the form, "We are victims." They'd be saying, "We're going to get around that some way, but it's not going to be the way you think. We're going to get around it the way most American elites have, by hustling, by stepping outside the law, by shaping the law in our interest, and so forth." And people say, "Oh, but that's rather downbeat talk, isn't it? That's not very hopeful." And the young people say, "Well, the level of hope is based on the reality." Now, what do we say back to them? Part of my response has to do with a certain kind of appeal to their moral sense. Part of it has to do with their connection to a tradition, from grandmother to grandfather to father to mother, that has told them that it is often better to be right and moral as opposed to being simply successful in the cheapest sense.

And yet we all know that there must be some victories, some successes, if we're going to keep alive this tradition and the legacy of King, Harry Belafonte, Paul Robeson and others. To convince them that what we're talking about is real, what do we say? This is what I struggle with every day. I think that rage is an understandable and appropriate response to an absurd situation, namely, black people facing white supremacist power and hegemony. The question becomes, "How do you channel the rage?" Because it's going to come out. It's going to be manifest in some way. Too often it's manifested in cowardly ways not guided by political consciousness, in self-destructive ways, like physical violence. Malcolm's great insight, among many, was that we need to have some moral channels through which this rage can flow.

Malcolm wasn't the only one who pointed this out; he learned it from Elijah Muhammad and Marcus Garvey and others. We also get it from other traditions, from King and A. Philip Randolph. This rage needs some targeting and direction. It has to reflect a broad moral vision, a sharp political analysis of wealth and power. Most important, it's got to be backed up with courage and follow-through.

When there's a paucity of courage and follow-through, you can have the broadest vision and the most sophisticated analysis in the world, and it's still sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. It's empty, if you don't have follow-through. Again this is where young people have so much to teach us. Because when they say, "Make it real," in part they're saying they want to see a sermon, not hear one. They want an example. They want to be able to perceive in palpable concrete form how these channels will allow them to vent their rage constructively and make sure that it will have an impact. What Malcolm, I think, was able to perceive is: Look, we're going to have to deal with black rage one way or another. Let's at least try to channel it.

The country is in deep trouble. We've forgotten that a rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. This is true at the personal level. But there's also a political version, which has to do with what you see when you get up in the morning and look in the mirror and ask yourself whether you are simply wasting your time on the planet or spending it in an enriching manner. We need a moral prophetic minority of all colors who muster the courage to question the powers that be, the courage to be impatient with evil and patient with people, and the courage to fight for social justice. In many instances we will be stepping out on nothing, hoping to land on something. That's the history of black folks in the past and present, and of those of us who value history and struggle. Our courage rests on a deep democratic vision of a better world that lures us and a blood-drenched hope that sustains us.

This hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that things are going to get better. Yet we know that the evidence does not look good. The dominant tendencies of our day are unregulated global capitalism, racial balkanization, social breakdown, and individual depression. Hope enacts the stance of the participant who actively struggles against the evidence in order to change the deadly tides of wealth inequality, group xenophobia, and personal despair. Only a new wave of vision, courage, and hope can keep us sane and preserve the decency and dignity requisite to revitalize our organizational energy for the work to be done. To live is to wrestle with despair yet never to allow despair to have the last word.

Adapted from Cornel West, Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America (Beacon Press, 1997), and from West's comments in bell hooks and Cornel West, Breaking Bread (South End Press 1991). Cornel West's newest
book is Democracy Matters (Penguin Books).

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:59 PM 0 comments Links to this post

79th LEGISLATURE

Business, school organizations waiting to hear more about proposed Senate reforms to education, tax systems.

By Jason Embry
AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Representatives of schools and businesses weren't quite sure Thursday how enthusiastically — if at all — they should support the goals for school finance reform laid out by the Texas Senate this week.

Led by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, all 31 senators signed on to a five-page outline calling for more education spending, a property tax cut and teacher pay raises, among other objectives.

But no bill has been filed, making it difficult for the people who will feel the effects of the reforms to know whether they should sing the praises of Dewhurst and the senators or start looking for candidates to replace them.

"At this point, it's a little bit like apple pie and motherhood," Texas Association of Business President Bill Hammond said when asked about the Senate proposal to expand the corporate franchise tax and lower its rate. "We've got to see more detail."

Hammond's group would rather see a one-sixth cut in property taxes and the elimination of the franchise tax, but leaders of the House and Senate have said they want to cut property taxes by a third.

The plan calls for new taxes and nontax revenue to raise $1.6 billion in the first year after the cut in property taxes. Overall, the Senate aims to increase education spending by as much as $6.7 billion over two years.

Clayton Downing of the Texas School Coalition, a group of more than 100 school districts with relatively high property values, said the districts he represents do not like the proposal for a state property tax instead of locally set property taxes for school maintenance and operations.

A statewide tax would be the "granddaddy of all recapture," Downing said, using the term for the plank in the current system that requires the districts with the highest per-student property values in the state to share their tax money with districts who have smaller property rolls.

Overall, however, Downing said he needed more information about the plan to fully evaluate it.

Wayne Pierce of the Equity Center, which represents districts with low- and moderate-wealth districts, said he's encouraged that the plan calls for more money for teachers and pre-kindergarten.

But the details of the plan released so far leave him unsure that the system is going to be as fair as he would like.

"We don't have enough details right now to make a good judgment," he said. "There are things in it that look promising; there are things in it that cause concern."

Teachers groups were cautiously optimistic after hearing that senators want teacher pay to reach the national average.

But senators did not spell out how they would make that happen.

John Cole, president of the Texas Federation of Teachers, applauded Dewhurst and the Senate for putting teacher pay in the outline. But he said the group will continue to push for across-the-board raises.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/legislature/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/01/14finance.html
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:45 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By ANNE E. KORNBLUT

ASHINGTON, Jan. 13 - Education Secretary Rod Paige broke his silence yesterday about a controversial deal between his agency and Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator, ordering an expedited review to address "perceptions and allegations of ethical lapses."

Mr. Paige said he found it "deeply disturbing" that the reputation of the department had been marred by a contract, revealed publicly last week, under which Mr. Williams was paid $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind Act on his syndicated television program. Mr. Paige insistedthat the payments were legal, geared "exclusively toward the production and airtime of advertisements in which I described the law and encouraged viewers and listeners" to seek more details.

But the contract itself, made public by the Department of Education, states that the arrangement also guaranteed Mr. Paige and other officials the option of appearing on Mr. Williams's program as guests and pushed the commentator to produce segments about the legislation.

Several Democrats have already demanded that the Bush administration investigate the contract and similar programs promoting administration policy in recent months. On Thursday, Senators Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, sent a letter to the Department of Education requesting a "careful review" of the agreement between the public relations firm hired as an intermediary, Ketchum, and Mr. Williams.

"Given our jurisdiction over the funds involved, we would appreciate your careful review of the contract with Ketchum and the payment made to Mr. Williams," the letter to Mr. Paige said. Mr. Specter and Mr. Harkin are the most senior members of the Senate subcommittee that oversees education financing.

At the same time, Jonathan S. Adelstein, a Democratic member of the Federal Communications Commission, urged the agency to investigate whether any laws had been broken, Reuters reported. Mr. Adelstein said that federal law requires broadcasters to inform the public when they have been paid for on-air promotions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/14/politics/14williams.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:42 PM 1 comments Links to this post

washingtonpost.com

By Michael A. Fletcher and Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 13, 2005; Page A19


President Bush yesterday proposed extending federal testing and accountability requirements to the nation's high schools, which for decades have been plagued by troubling dropout rates and flagging achievement levels.

In a speech at J.E.B. Stuart High School in Falls Church, the president outlined a $1.5 billion plan that would require students to take annual tests in reading and mathematics through 11th grade. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, which Bush signed into law three years ago, public school students are required to take annual tests in grades 3 through 8. Schools face an escalating series of sanctions if students perform poorly on the exams.

"Testing is important. Testing at high school levels will help us to become more competitive as the years go by," Bush said. "Testing in high schools will make sure that our children are employable for the jobs of the 21st century."

Bush's plan to expand the testing requirements into secondary school was applauded by education advocates, who noted that school improvement efforts most often focus on students in lower grades despite clear shortcomings among high school students.

"We're excited to see the federal government step up its involvement in high schools, long the most ignored and least effective part of our educational system," said Tom Vander Ark, executive director for education programs at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In recent years, the Gates foundation has invested $800 million in high school improvement projects around the country.

Stuart Principal Mel Riddile, who introduced Bush in a gymnasium decorated with football and track championship banners, said the president's plan will prod educators to do more to help low-achieving students.

"What I said to the president is: The end of the book is just as important as the beginning of the book," Riddile said. "The students need instruction at every level, particularly if they come from a disadvantaged background."

Just 36 percent of the nation's high school seniors are proficient in reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a respected federal test. The picture is even bleaker when it comes to math, a subject in which only 17 percent of the nation's 12th-graders are proficient, according to the latest NAEP statistics. Those achievement levels have changed only slightly since the 1970s.

Currently, about 68 percent of the nation's ninth-graders graduate from high school, with the others dropping out or earning equivalency diplomas. And among those students who graduate and go on to college, more than half are forced to take remedial classes, according to the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

"We should have turned our attention to high school a long time ago," said Patricia Sullivan, director of the Center on Education Policy, a research organization. "But there is a belief that if you get it right with students by third grade, you're golden. But the problem is, we're not getting it right."

Bush's plan was met with immediate skepticism from congressional Democrats, who say that despite sharp increases in federal education spending in recent years, the No Child Left Behind Act remains underfunded.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), ranking minority member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said that Bush undercut his credibility with many Democrats by not putting more money into the No Child Left Behind law. "This proposal for high school, regardless of what merits it might or might not have, will encounter stiff resistance in Congress and in the country until President Bush fulfills the commitments that have already been made to our public schools," Miller said. "Adding new mandates while schools lack the resources to meet the current demands will not help schools."

In his remarks, Bush said that he will earmark $1.5 billion for the proposal in his upcoming budget, but much of the money will come from existing programs. "We've got money in the budget to help the states implement the tests. There should be no excuse saying, well, it's an unfunded mandate," Bush said. "Forget it -- it will be funded."

The president also proposed increasing funding for rigorous Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs. The programs are popular among high-achieving students and have become a virtual requirement for those who hope to attend selective colleges.

Bush asked Congress to increase funding for two small programs that train high school teachers in math and reading instruction for under-performing students. "It sounds odd, doesn't it, for the president to stand up and say we need to focus on reading in high school," Bush said, "but that's the state of affairs."

Bush said one of the reasons he wanted to come to Stuart was that the diverse school had long struggled academically but has made a dramatic turnaround in recent years. Riddile, who said teachers rely on standardized tests to track each student's performance, attributes the success to programs such as mandatory after-school tutoring for failing students, remedial reading classes and wake-up calls for students. More than 50 percent of the approximately 1,500 students live in poverty, and about 66 percent do not speak English as a native language.

In 1998, only 65 percent of juniors at Stuart passed Virginia's standardized English test. But last year, 94 percent passed. The school's SAT scores climbed more than 100 points in the past five years, and about 90 percent of seniors go on to college.

Said Riddile: "If we can do it, anybody can do it."


© 2005 The Washington Post Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:25 PM 0 comments Links to this post

by George Wood

Did anyone notice the bill we sent to our children recently? With barely a peep from fiscal conservatives, Republicans, the President, or the press the Congress raised the debt ceiling by $800,000,000,000 (that's eight hundred billion, folks). A bill that will come due sometime in the future, after this Congress and President is long gone. A bill that our children will pay; and pay, and pay.
We all heard the excuses for raising this debt limit. It was necessary to keep the government running, we will deal with budget deficits later, and without it essential services will end. What we did not hear was how this additional debt is to be added to the already massive federal deficit of $7,500,000,000,000 (yep, 7.5 trillion) that has been run up in just the past four years.
What is interesting is within two days after raising the federal debt limit the Republican-controlled congress passed, finally, an omnibus spending bill. This is the budget that will spend all that debt just approved. And what will it be spent for? Here is a sample of the nearly 10,000 special projects Congress funded for over $25 billion:
$225,000 for the Blue-Gray Theme Park in Kentucky
$2,000,000 for the First Tee program (run by the wealthy Professional Golfers Association)
$250,000 for the Lou Frey Institute of Politics at the University of Central Florida
$270,000 for sustainable olive production
$1,400,000 for the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, Az.
Certainly each of these pet projects, affectionately known as 'pork', will help someone do something. Probably they are necessary to keep our already uncompetitive House races even more uncompetitive. Over the holidays our elected leaders will fan out over the country to tell folks at home about all the stuff they put in local Christmas stockings. But I can't help but wonder what we are putting in the stockings of our children this year.
This is the year of the anti-Santa as far as I can see. Our leaders in Washington are sending our children a Christmas gift that will keep on taking. Dropped in their hopefully hung stockings, a symbol of their faith in a benevolent and jolly man who brings them gifts that they will enjoy, they will instead find an IOU. An IOU that they did not sign, but they will be expected to pay.
And pay they will.
The combination of a growing national debt and tax cuts for the rich means something has to go. Can we imagine all those little pork projects ending? No, what will probably go will be the services upon which our children depend. Services that make it possible for them to grow up and become the citizens our democracy needs.
For example, to pay off just $1 trillion of the federal debt would require that we cut funding for more classroom teachers, teachers that reduce class size and improve public schooling. A cut of this magnitude would eliminate 400,000 teachers each year for the next 50 years.
To cover just 1/7th of the debt the Head Start program, a program run by local communities and one of the most effective government programs ever launched, would have to cut services to 1.5 million children nationwide every year for the next one hundred years.
To cover just 1/100th of this growing national debt would require cutting health care insurance to 5 million poor children for 10 years, or stopping the next 10 years of free school lunches for the 24 million children who count on these as their only hot meal of the day.
The list of what our children will lose in the coming years to cover our current unwillingness to pay our fair share is terrifying. And the terror grows daily along with the national debt. We avoid this terror by ignoring the problem, but our children have no such option.
Federal borrowing to pay for pet projects to keep congress elected and tax cuts for rich contributors to political campaigns do not put dollars in our pockets free of charge. No, they take dollars out of the pockets of our children, who we saddle with debt because we do not have the courage to pay our own way. Our government behaves like a dead-beat dad, unwilling to pay child support for the children we say we love.
What we need is not more debt or tax cuts. What we need is a fair system of taxation, an efficient government, and a leadership that sees the most important work of a democratic government is to invest in a future for the next generation - not squander our resources on the excesses of this one.


George Wood is Principal of Federal Hocking High School in Stewart, Ohio and Director of The Forum for Education and Democracy (www.forumforeducation.org).

Note: was picked up by the Athens (OH) Messenger, the Ashville (NC) Citizen Times, and some paper in Texas. -G. Wood

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:25 PM 0 comments Links to this post

From the Capitol
The 79th Legislature began a new 140-day regular session Tuesday, January 11, 2005. With the customary celebration and fanfare of the first day of the session, legislators played host greeting constituents and other guests at their offices. Some had little time and attention to talk about issues, but they and their staff welcomed any information that would help them during the school finance debates.

In a news conference following the swearing-in of members, the Speaker of the House, Tom Craddick, outlined his legislative priorities, which included school finance. The Speaker admitted that the state leadership has not arrived at a consensus on a plan for funding Texas schools.


Governor Designates School Finance as Emergency Legislation
Earlier in the week Governor Rick Perry designated school finance legislation as an emergency item for the 79th Legislature, along with the reforming of the Adult Protective Services (APS) and Child Protective Services (CPS). This means that the legislature will accelerate its process for selecting committees and begin holding public hearings on the issues earlier in the 79th Legislative Session.

Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst applauded the governor for making those issues top priority and in a press release added that, I have been working with senators daily on a school finance reform plan that will improve the quality of education in our schools, provide our good teachers with better pay, and lower property taxes for hardworking Texans.

Speaker of the House, Tom Craddick, similarly praised the governor for the items he outlined.

Features of Governors School Finance Plan
In the same news release, the governor announced that his plan for funding schools includes:
a significant cut to property taxes,
a new business tax,
salary incentives for the best teachers,
incentives for student achievement on the TAKS exam, and
penalties for schools that are failing.

Read the news release, Gov. Perry Declares APS, CPS Reform and Education Emergency Legislation online at
http://www.governor.state.tx.us/divisions/press/pressreleases/PressRelease.2005-01-10.4248


Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst Announces Support for His School Finance Plan
Dewhurst announced that all 31 members of the Texas Senate have signed on to the provisions of his public education bill that provides for sweeping changes in the states public education system and the way the system is funded. Dewhurst stressed that the plan announced Wednesday is only a starting point.

Features of the plan include:
reduced local property taxes by creation of a statewide $1 property tax and other tax revenue,
some localized enrichment, phased in over time,
increased funding for special populations, specifically English language learners,
strengthened accountability for charter schools,
increased teacher salaries, including performance incentives, and
increased facilities funding, particularly in high-growth areas.

Read the outline of the plan (in PDF format) http://www.senate.state.tx.us/75r/ltgov/assets/pdf/TexasChildrenFirst.pdf



Budget Surplus Announced
Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn announced a budget surplus of $400 million, but suggested that the state cannot continue under-funding education and expect stellar results.

I say no matter how strong our economy is, fixing our broken school finance system cannot be done within our existing revenue estimate, she said. The governor needs to show the people of Texas a real school finance reform plan that will cut skyrocketing local property taxes, have the state pick up more of the tab, and have equityWe must drive more of every education dollar directly into the classroom with the teachers and the students where it belongs, Strayhorn said. And we need to say out loud: We need more money for education.

Read the news release, Strayhorn Estimates Budget $400 Million in the Black Says The Shortfall Is in Governors Leadership at http://www.window.state.tx.us/news/50110bre.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:04 PM 1 comments Links to this post

By Roddy Stinson

San Antonio Express-News

So much baloney, so little space:

SASD checking for test tampering

"We have zero tolerance for cheating."

—Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley at a Jan. 10, 2005, news conference, responding to a Dallas Morning News investigation that found evidence of "organized educator-led cheating" on standardized tests at hundreds of Texas schools.

"We simply cannot tolerate cheating (on standardized tests )."

—Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe on Feb. 18, 1999, following an investigation that found evidence of cheating in 33 Texas schools

Same song. Same thundering, cover-your-backside verse.

Could get better, but 'twill only get worse.

If TEA officials' unwillingness and/or inability to stem the cheating tide between 1999 and 2005 is an indication of their ethical commitment and professional competence, it's easy to predict that Commissioner Neeley's "zero tolerance" will produce a future investigation that finds cheating in THOUSANDS of Texas schools.

The state may have already reached that unethical distinction.

"The News' method of looking for unusual test scores does not catch all cheaters," the Dallas investigators reported. "It does not, for instance, detect schools that cheat consistently across multiple grades and multiple subjects.

"It also doesn't catch more subtle cheaters. A teacher who gives students a few correct answers on test day could raise her students' scores enough for them to pass, but not enough for a huge score increase that might draw attention."

Such info is old news to Express-News readers.

From an April 1993 column:

"For the past eight years, I have written commentary after commentary about cheating on standardized tests. I can recite a half-dozen ways to boost scores, all described to me by educators."

From a July 1995 column:

"... raising scores is as simple as leaning over a child's desk and saying, 'Are you sure that answer is correct?' ... or making a gesture to indicate whether an answer is right or wrong."

From an April 1998 column:

"The ease with which a 'helpful' educator with an eraser can raise scores makes a joke of the 'assessment of academic skills.'"

A search through Express-News databases found numerous other published reports of cheating.

One of the most chilling:

"Are educators cheating on TAAS? Is anyone going to stop them?" — a 7,500-word exposé published in the Feb. 25, 1999, Houston Press.

Excerpt:

"(Two educators) say they were shocked when their normally struggling students received high marks on the TAAS. One says she had an overflow class of particularly low-performing students one year, yet almost all of them received 'academic recognition' when their scores came back, even one whom she had tried to get tested for learning disabilities. 'When I saw the test scores, I said there's no way those kids passed. I mean, they couldn't read.'"

The same database search found virtually no reports of cheaters paying any penalties.

From the 1999 Houston Press report:

"(The TEA) has revoked only one certificate for (cheating), back in 1993. It has suspended certificates on five occasions."

Attempts to determine the number of cheaters penalized since 1999 proved futile.

"I don't know," a TEA spokeswoman said Monday when I asked her how many educators had been penalized for cheating and/or document tampering. She said the State Board for Educator Certification might provide information on revoked/suspended teacher certificates. But calls to that agency on Monday and Tuesday produced nothing but recorded messages and no return calls or info about the number of penalized cheaters.

A good guess: Zero.

And the leniency isn't likely to change — as evidenced by this news conference comment by Education Commissioner Neeley:

"Don't rush to judgment just because scores on a test increase rapidly. That result is more likely to mean it's time to celebrate, rather than investigate."

Same song.

Umpteenth clever, cunning, cover-up verse.

To contact Roddy Stinson, call (210) 250-3155 or e-mail rstinson@express-news.net

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:49 PM 0 comments Links to this post

New rules would close schools that fail to raise low state ranking

By KENT FISCHER / The Dallas Morning News

Charter schools that post abysmal test scores for two straight years could be shut down under new rules put forth by state education officials.
The new rules also give Commissioner Shirley Neeley more specific power to close charter schools that waste taxpayer money or endanger the health and safety of their students.
The rules announced Monday are expected to go into effect in March and could have an immediate impact on dozens of charter schools.
Although the Texas Education Agency is not saying how many charter schools could be affected, 28 last year received an accountability rating of "academically unacceptable," the lowest ranking and the threshold for closure set in the rules. Those 28 schools could be sanctioned if they receive a second unacceptable rating this year.
Under the state's current laws and rules, it takes much longer to close a charter school for low academic performance, according to state charter experts. There are loopholes in the law, ambiguities in the rules and a lengthy appeals process – all of which can make closing a charter school a complicated, time-consuming effort.
Charter Q&A
What is a charter school? A charter school is a public school, funded by tax dollars, that is operated outside the local public school system. Generally, community groups, businesses and nonprofit agencies are paid by the State Board of Education to run the schools.
Why do we have them? By creating new public schools, reformers hope to infuse competition and new ideas into public education.
How many charters are there? Texas law allows for up to 215 organizations to hold a charter. However, each charter holder can operate multiple campuses. There are 201 current charter holders operating about 275 schools.
How many students attend charters? About 63,000 students.
How much do charters cost? Texas spent an estimated $340 million on charters during the 2003-04 school year.

The new rules "cut to the chase," said Hanz Wasserburger, a TEA lawyer who helped write them.
"We're no longer going to have to sit around for three years and wait for bad things to happen," he said.
The question of what to do with low-performing charter schools has been brewing almost since their creation in 1996. Although the TEA has closed down five for lousy academic performance, the agency has been criticized for not closely monitoring the publicly financed schools and for failing to crack down on the chronic poor performers.
The Texas Sunset Advisory Commission, which periodically conducts a review of all state agencies, recently blasted the TEA as having "very little ability to hold charter schools accountable."
The new rules should go a long way to remedying that problem, said Mike Feinberg, superintendent of KIPP Academy, a national chain of charter schools based in Houston.
"We have to have quality control," Mr. Feinberg said. The charter movement "needs to be able to look the governor and the Legislature in the eye and say 'We're doing an acceptable job.' We can't do that today."
On Wednesday, a Senate committee outlined a school finance bill that included similarly tough sanctions for charter schools.
Five of the 28 charters that received an unacceptable rating last year are local: Honors Academy in Dallas, the Academy of Dallas, Azleway Charter School in Arlington, Evolution Academy in Allen, Golden Rule Charter in Dallas, and Jean Massieu Academy in Dallas.
Honors Academy CEO John Dodd said he favors more accountability, but he hoped that the state would consider the efforts a school is making to improve before it shuts it down.
"We hoping for some reasonableness," he said. "If a school has two years of low performance, their head should be on the block – unless they can show that they're trying to change."
Mr. Wasserburger, the TEA lawyer, said the agency considers two years enough time for a charter school to prove that it can do that job.
The rules go beyond academic performance. Charters that fail to pass muster in an annual financial audit can be closed, as can those that "fail to protect the health and safety or welfare of their students."
The state allows for 215 charters. Two hundred one have been issued; they operate about 275 campuses.
Of those, 28 were labeled "academically unacceptable" last year; 101 others received a rating of "exemplary," "recognized" or "acceptable." The remainder received no rating, either because they served learning-disabled children, were too small or were too new to effectively evaluate.
The governor and some legislators have proposed that charter schools play a more influential role in Texas school reform. With only 14 charters left to be issued, the state would have to make more available to newcomers. Closing ineffective charters is one way to do that.
"It's true that as charters are revoked, those slots would be opened up to new charters," said Patsy O'Neill, the executive director of the Texas Resource Center for Charter Schools. "But the main reason [for the changes] is to close down the charters that aren't serving their students."
Although the rules would give state officials more power to crack down on low performers, they also would loosen state restrictions on successful schools.
A charter school that proves its mettle with commendable test scores could see itself freed of state hiring and training rules. The idea is to let successful schools innovate while keeping the others on a short leash, said Mr. Feinberg of KIPP Academy.
Even with the new powers the rules would give to Ms. Neeley, some, including Mr. Feinberg and Mrs. O'Neill, think the state could go even further.
"I commend them for the proposed standards. But if they need to be stronger, then make them stronger," Mrs. O'Neill said.
E-mail kfischer@dallasnews.com
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/011405dnmetcharter.3881b.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:37 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Jan. 13, 2005

The real problem with TAKS isn't the cheating

Questions to consider on reasons for problem, timing
By RANDALL IGLEHART

HoustonChronicle


Recently, allegations of unethical educator conduct have brought TAKS testing results into question in various parts of the state. These allegations are troubling and certainly do not reflect the standards of the majority of Texas teachers. And by no means does the state's largest educators group, the Association of Texas Professional Educators, condone any action that reflects poorly upon the individual or the education profession.
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However, we need to examine some interesting aspects of the recent developments. One: Why would an educator even think of cheating or allowing cheating on the exam? And two: Is there anything awry with the timing of these allegations (just prior to the start of the 79th legislative session)?

The first question is best answered by looking at what TAKS results mean for the student, the teacher, the school, the school district and the state. Students in the third, fifth and eighth grades have to pass the exam to move on to a higher grade while students in 11th grade have to pass the exam to graduate.

Teachers are judged in part on how their students perform on the exam. It can help them or cost them in promotions, recognition and job retention. And obviously teachers are not immune to the pressure. The real problem here is that the TAKS test is not a diagnostic exam. It's given at the end of the school year rather than at the beginning. So, even if a teacher is successful in improving a student's knowledge and skills, it's difficult to tell how much of a role the teacher actually played. In other words, a student can score poorly on the exam but still be miles ahead of where they were when the school year began.

For the schools and school districts, TAKS exam results are the cornerstone of their success or failure. The results are a factor in how the schools and districts are categorized. The Texas Education Agency annually rates schools and districts using the Academic Excellence Indicator System (AEIS) and awards the following ratings: exemplary, recognized, academically acceptable or academically unacceptable.

This rating is of such importance that it can make a difference in local real estate values and the overall community attitude toward a school.

Statewide, Texas is compared to the rest of the nation in terms of quality of education based in part on the results of this test.

Clearly, the TAKS test is an extremely high stakes exam, so much so that it appears some are willing to break the rules to benefit themselves, their students, their schools, school districts and the state. This by no means excuses the allegations of cheating, and, again, in no way can we condone such behavior. But this is a result of a high-pressure system that has taken the opportunity to teach away from teachers.

We are not suggesting the TAKS exam be completely scrapped, but we are saying that the test is being used in an inappropriate way. The answer here is not a one-shot performance test at the end of the year but instead a diagnostic test. If the TAKS is moved to an early-year exam, many will benefit. The stress will be eased from the student, and the teacher will be given wonderful insight into each pupil's needs based on the information gathered. In other words, the teacher will be allowed to actually teach.

This problem is not easily dismissed, but it is not endemic either. If we treat it as such, districts will likely hire independent monitors to oversee testing on every campus. This will only add to the anxiety of students on test day as well as the expense of testing. However, it's an action the Houston Independent School District is already taking for testing in February and April. The current proposed plan calls for hundreds of monitors to show up at both assigned and random classrooms.

And finally, let's look at the timing involved in this issue. We are set to begin an incredibly important chapter in our state's history with regard to public school finance. The 79th Legislature convened Tuesday. It's going to be a session in which, once again, the interests of students, teachers and schools are at the forefront. We have a funding method right now that is in limbo before the Texas Supreme Court. It will be easier for the Legislature to limit spending on education when there are questions about teacher integrity in the classroom.

We cannot state strongly enough that the allegations are not indicative of the behavior of the overwhelming majority of teachers in this state. Texas educators have an incredible desire to provide your children with an exemplary education. All they want is the opportunity to teach.

Iglehart is president of the Association of Texas Professional Educators in Austin.

This article is: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/2990190

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:12 PM 0 comments Links to this post

79th LEGISLATURE
Lawmakers make education recommendations
State property levy, revamped franchise tax win early support

By Jason Embry
AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, January 13, 2005

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst secured unanimous support in the Texas Senate on Wednesday for a school finance plan that cuts property taxes and raises teacher salaries but does not spell out how the state would pay for those proposals.

The plan is not a bill but rather a list of goals.

It would create a state tax of $1 per $100 of assessed property value to replace the local school property tax for maintenance and operations, which is capped at $1.50. It also would expand the corporate franchise tax to all businesses but sole proprietorships.

Dewhurst's outline calls for other tax increases and other new sources of revenue to provide $1.6 billion per year more than the current local property tax while saying that overall education spending in the state will grow by more than 10 percent.

Senators still must determine, however, where they will find the money to make that happen.

Lawmakers have discussed increasing the sales tax, motor vehicle sales tax, and cigarette and alcohol taxes, but Dewhurst did not say how much those taxes might go up.

Tax bills usually start in the House, and Dewhurst said the Senate does not want to step on House members' toes by outlining a full tax plan.

"This is meant to be a starting point," Dewhurst said. "Our feet are not in concrete."

Dewhurst had promised over the past couple of weeks that senators were moving toward consensus, but the absence of specifics from his plan indicates that much of the dirty work remains.

His announcement follows the pattern set by the Senate's approval of a school finance plan in May 2003: Dewhurst announcing a bipartisan consensus while the