Coalition calls for better standards, testing, preparation for jobs or college
By Robert Pear
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Monday, February 28, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Thirteen states with more than a third of the nation's students, including Texas, announced Sunday that they are forming a coalition to improve high schools by adopting higher standards, more rigorous courses and tougher examinations.

Unless the nation takes drastic measures on high schools, they said, it will lose its competitive position in the world economy.

"For the first time, a group of states will reshape an institution that has far outlasted its usefulness," said Gov. Bob Taft of Ohio, a Republican. "More than 5 million students each year -- 35 percent of public high school students nationwide -- will be expected to meet higher requirements under this landmark initiative."

Over the weekend, governors, business executives and Bush administration officials built political momentum for the ambitious agenda on high schools at an education summit meeting convened by the National Governors Association.

In addition to Texas, the states are Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Other states are expected to join in the next few weeks.

Six foundations offered $23 million to help states remodel their high schools. The largest grant, $15 million, was from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which directly assists hundreds of high schools across the country.

Others supporting the initiative are the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, with a grant of $4 million; the Carnegie Corporation of New York, $2 million; and the Wallace Foundation and the Prudential Foundation, $1 million each.

Governors and education officials in the 13 states said they would take these steps:

* Raise high school standards to reflect the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in college or the work force.

* Restore the value of a high school diploma by requiring all students to take rigorous courses that prepare them for college and work.

* Test students regularly to measure their progress in meeting stringent state standards. Colleges and employers now pay little attention to state test results because the exams do not measure the skills that students will ultimately need.

* Hold high schools accountable by publishing more data on dropout and graduation rates. Some states focus on the proportion of 12th-graders who fail to graduate, overlooking the fact that many high school students drop out before their senior year.

President Bush's education secretary, Margaret Spellings, welcomed the new initiative.

"Talk is cheap," she told the governors, "but you all have a record of solving the problems you talk about."

Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat who is chairman of the association, said governors want higher standards for high schools but not "the rigidity" of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, with its "bureaucratic oversight from Washington."

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/auto/epaper/editions/monday/news_2422fc2ca4ed005d00bf.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:18 PM 0 comments Links to this post

A common language, Feb. 20.
Are “Latino immigrant kids … getting much better at
reading and writing English” as Jill Stewart claims?
Test scores increased in California for English
learners, but it is not clear that the increase is
real. The test used was first given in 2003. Research
has shown that the first time a standardized test is
given, scores appear low. They rise each year, as
teachers and students become more familiar with the
test.  Some or all of the increase for English
language learners could be due to “test score
inflation.”
Stewart is misinformed about the nature and track
record of bilingual education.  Bilingual education is
not “dumbed down,” and is not “teaching in Spanish,”
so that children “can talk to grandma.”  Students in
bilingual education receive English instruction from
the first day, and learn subject matter in English as
soon as it can be made comprehensible. The first
language is used in ways that accelerate English
language development.
Scientific studies consistently show that students in
bilingual programs acquire English as well as or
better than those in all-English programs.  Studies
also confirm that those in bilingual programs in
California are making the same gains in English as
those in all-English alternatives.
Stephen Krashen
A common language
Jill Stewart
Sunday, February 20, 2005

WHEN TEST SCORES came out recently showing that Latino
immigrant kids are getting much better at reading and
writing English, California Superintendent of Schools
Jack O'Connell urged schools to find ways to move them
out of special English and into mainstream classes.
Good idea, because many can't get access to advanced
placement courses for college so long as they're
designated as "English learners" and kept too long in
training-wheels-style English immersion classes.
I find it rich that O'Connell is urging schools to
act. To a large degree, it's his fault.
Under Proposition 227, immigrant children were only
supposed to stay in special immersion for a year or
so, and then go to a mainstream class. But O'Connell
has refused to credit English immersion for soaring
English literacy rates. His silence emboldens the
anti-English ideologues who still strive to keep
Latino kids in a separate world.
Again this month, O'Connell refused to credit English
immersion, telling The Chronicle he won't guess why
kids are learning English so well.
Guess? Year after year, he has failed to crunch data
that could compare kids still stuck in "bilingual" to
those in English. The state Board of Education finally
ordered O'Connell to produce a study with that in
mind. While we wait, I did my own study. I found that
school districts such as Los Angeles Unified, where
moderate Democrats stamped out failing "bilingual"
education amid fierce lefty resistance, are producing
big, lasting gains in English literacy.
By contrast, districts controlled by left-wing
Democrats with an attitude of "they won't be able to
talk to grandma" are producing smaller gains.
In 2001, of 244,000 L.A. kids who weren't native
English speakers, only 17 percent scored as "advanced
or early advanced" on statewide English tests. Today,
a stunning 49 percent get those high scores.
Back then, Los Angeles was paying 6,000 teachers a
yearly bonus ($2,500 to $5,000) to teach in Spanish --
the disastrous "bilingual" program. Now, only 679
teachers get the bonuses and teach "bilingual."
See any pattern there, Mr. O'Connell?
By contrast, San Diego Unified was run by sad,
fad-obsessed school honchos Alan Bersin and Tony
Alvarado, who kowtowed to its anti-reform teachers
union. It shows. In 2001, of 33,800 San Diego kids who
weren't native English speakers, 24 percent got
"advanced or early advanced" scores on the English
tests. Today, 41 percent get those high scores -- well
behind L.A.
Virulently anti-Prop. 227 Berkeley Unified is almost
frozen in place. In 2001, of the 1,000 Berkeley kids
who weren't native English speakers, 42 percent scored
"advanced or early advanced" on English tests. Today,
45 percent do. Los Angeles -- far more urban and
poverty-riddled -- has blown past leafy Berkeley.
O'Connell's silence emboldens the anti-immersion
advocates. In Sacramento, legislators will soon hold
education "hearings" aimed at dumbing-down Latino kids
with a separate curriculum. The key guest speaker is
an outrageous Pied Piper from the "bilingual" fiasco
days, dead-wrong Canadian theorist Jim Cummins.
We should pray that pragmatic Democrats and Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger stop the hard left. But
unfortunately, pragmatic Democrats are scared. One of
their own -- the brilliant Reed Hastings -- just lost
his job on the state Board of Education for defying
the lefties on immersion.
While the pragmatic Democrats base their views on
facts, the left nurses its longtime religious fervor
against immersion. Just to remind you how bad their
fervor is, let's look back to 1998:
-- Then-San Francisco School Board President Carlota
del Portillo declared that English immersion "has no
educational basis and would set our students back 30
years."
-- Jerry Perenchio, chief of Spanish-language
Univision, spent $1.5 million fighting Prop. 227. A
Republican, he adopted the views of lefty aides at
Univision. One Perenchio aide derided English
immersion -- the most common method used in the United
States -- as "an untested teaching method."
-- Then-Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, now
running for mayor of Los Angeles, denounced Prop. 227
as another Proposition 187.
-- Then-state Sen. Richard Polanco, a Democrat from
Los Angeles, insisted, "[Prop. 227] will do more
damage to the [children] in the long run."
The left should grow up. Each year, California must
educate a massive, new influx of non-English speaking
kids from Third World Mexico and other Central
American countries, in numbers seen nowhere else in
the nation. Ronni Ephraim, the gifted chief
instructional officer at L.A. Unified, says Latino
parents "recognize that at school their child should
acquire a strong base of English, and at home they can
support them in maintaining their home language.
Parents want their children to be competitive."
So why is the Legislature still pursuing a separate
curriculum and lower standards for Latinos, and
inviting in one of the worst Pied Pipers of the
bilingual fiasco?
"I don't understand Sacramento," Ephraim told me.
"Why would anyone want to hold a kid back?"
Well, that's a true conundrum. But abetted by
O'Connell's silence, that's precisely what's afoot.
Jill Stewart, a print, radio and television
commentator on California politics, can be reached at
www.jillstewart.net.
A common language, Feb. 20.
Are “Latino immigrant kids … getting much better at
reading and writing English” as Jill Stewart claims?
Test scores increased in California for English
learners, but it is not clear that the increase is
real. The test used was first given in 2003. Research
has shown that the first time a standardized test is
given, scores appear low. They rise each year, as
teachers and students become more familiar with the
test.  Some or all of the increase for English
language learners could be due to “test score
inflation.”
Stewart is misinformed about the nature and track
record of bilingual education.  Bilingual education is
not “dumbed down,” and is not “teaching in Spanish,”
so that children “can talk to grandma.”  Students in
bilingual education receive English instruction from
the first day, and learn subject matter in English as
soon as it can be made comprehensible. The first
language is used in ways that accelerate English
language development.
Scientific studies consistently show that students in
bilingual programs acquire English as well as or
better than those in all-English programs.  Studies
also confirm that those in bilingual programs in
California are making the same gains in English as
those in all-English alternatives.
Stephen Krashen
A common language
Jill Stewart
Sunday, February 20, 2005

WHEN TEST SCORES came out recently showing that Latino
immigrant kids are getting much better at reading and
writing English, California Superintendent of Schools
Jack O'Connell urged schools to find ways to move them
out of special English and into mainstream classes.
Good idea, because many can't get access to advanced
placement courses for college so long as they're
designated as "English learners" and kept too long in
training-wheels-style English immersion classes.
I find it rich that O'Connell is urging schools to
act. To a large degree, it's his fault.
Under Proposition 227, immigrant children were only
supposed to stay in special immersion for a year or
so, and then go to a mainstream class. But O'Connell
has refused to credit English immersion for soaring
English literacy rates. His silence emboldens the
anti-English ideologues who still strive to keep
Latino kids in a separate world.
Again this month, O'Connell refused to credit English
immersion, telling The Chronicle he won't guess why
kids are learning English so well.
Guess? Year after year, he has failed to crunch data
that could compare kids still stuck in "bilingual" to
those in English. The state Board of Education finally
ordered O'Connell to produce a study with that in
mind. While we wait, I did my own study. I found that
school districts such as Los Angeles Unified, where
moderate Democrats stamped out failing "bilingual"
education amid fierce lefty resistance, are producing
big, lasting gains in English literacy.
By contrast, districts controlled by left-wing
Democrats with an attitude of "they won't be able to
talk to grandma" are producing smaller gains.
In 2001, of 244,000 L.A. kids who weren't native
English speakers, only 17 percent scored as "advanced
or early advanced" on statewide English tests. Today,
a stunning 49 percent get those high scores.
Back then, Los Angeles was paying 6,000 teachers a
yearly bonus ($2,500 to $5,000) to teach in Spanish --
the disastrous "bilingual" program. Now, only 679
teachers get the bonuses and teach "bilingual."
See any pattern there, Mr. O'Connell?
By contrast, San Diego Unified was run by sad,
fad-obsessed school honchos Alan Bersin and Tony
Alvarado, who kowtowed to its anti-reform teachers
union. It shows. In 2001, of 33,800 San Diego kids who
weren't native English speakers, 24 percent got
"advanced or early advanced" scores on the English
tests. Today, 41 percent get those high scores -- well
behind L.A.
Virulently anti-Prop. 227 Berkeley Unified is almost
frozen in place. In 2001, of the 1,000 Berkeley kids
who weren't native English speakers, 42 percent scored
"advanced or early advanced" on English tests. Today,
45 percent do. Los Angeles -- far more urban and
poverty-riddled -- has blown past leafy Berkeley.
O'Connell's silence emboldens the anti-immersion
advocates. In Sacramento, legislators will soon hold
education "hearings" aimed at dumbing-down Latino kids
with a separate curriculum. The key guest speaker is
an outrageous Pied Piper from the "bilingual" fiasco
days, dead-wrong Canadian theorist Jim Cummins.
We should pray that pragmatic Democrats and Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger stop the hard left. But
unfortunately, pragmatic Democrats are scared. One of
their own -- the brilliant Reed Hastings -- just lost
his job on the state Board of Education for defying
the lefties on immersion.
While the pragmatic Democrats base their views on
facts, the left nurses its longtime religious fervor
against immersion. Just to remind you how bad their
fervor is, let's look back to 1998:
-- Then-San Francisco School Board President Carlota
del Portillo declared that English immersion "has no
educational basis and would set our students back 30
years."
-- Jerry Perenchio, chief of Spanish-language
Univision, spent $1.5 million fighting Prop. 227. A
Republican, he adopted the views of lefty aides at
Univision. One Perenchio aide derided English
immersion -- the most common method used in the United
States -- as "an untested teaching method."
-- Then-Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, now
running for mayor of Los Angeles, denounced Prop. 227
as another Proposition 187.
-- Then-state Sen. Richard Polanco, a Democrat from
Los Angeles, insisted, "[Prop. 227] will do more
damage to the [children] in the long run."
The left should grow up. Each year, California must
educate a massive, new influx of non-English speaking
kids from Third World Mexico and other Central
American countries, in numbers seen nowhere else in
the nation. Ronni Ephraim, the gifted chief
instructional officer at L.A. Unified, says Latino
parents "recognize that at school their child should
acquire a strong base of English, and at home they can
support them in maintaining their home language.
Parents want their children to be competitive."
So why is the Legislature still pursuing a separate
curriculum and lower standards for Latinos, and
inviting in one of the worst Pied Pipers of the
bilingual fiasco?
"I don't understand Sacramento," Ephraim told me.
"Why would anyone want to hold a kid back?"
Well, that's a true conundrum. But abetted by
O'Connell's silence, that's precisely what's afoot.
Jill Stewart, a print, radio and television
commentator on California politics, can be reached at
www.jillstewart.net.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:12 PM 0 comments Links to this post

by TIM EATON
Scripps Howard Texas Poll

February 28, 2005 — Eighty-two percent of Texans support a law allowing the top 10 percent of high school students in their class admission to any public college or university in the state, according to the Scripps Howard Texas Poll.

But Texans aren’t so enthusiastic about letting universities set their tuition rates, which the Legislature passed in 2003. Fifty-eight percent of Texans disagree with universities setting their own tuition rates and 36 percent agree.

The top 10 percent rule and tuition deregulation were among a series of higher education questions included on this quarter’s Texas Poll.

Some state lawmakers have filed legislation to do away with the top 10 percent rule but supporters say the public clearly wants to keep it. Gary Bledsoe, president of Texas NAACP, said he was encouraged by the numbers.

"I think it’s clear the vast majority of people support the top 10 percent rule," he said. "It’s a colorblind rule."

Among ethnic groups, 87 percent of Hispanics agree with the rule. So do 80 percent of Anglos and 85 percent of blacks.

The top 10 percent law, created by the Legislature in 1997, was the state’s answer to a court ruling outlawing affirmative action at public universities. It was also a way to make sure minorities and students from rural areas are represented at the state’s institutions of higher learning.

But the some elected and university officials say they want to reverse the rule because a U.S. Supreme Court ruling allows schools consider race during the admission process. Critics also have said the rule dissuades students from taking the most challenging courses.

Meanwhile, Texans also believe it’s important for public colleges and universities to recruit minority students.

Seventy-four percent say it is very important or somewhat important for universities and colleges to recruit minorities — an increase of 6 points from summer 2001.

Among ethnic groups, 92 percent of blacks, 91 percent of Hispanics and 67 percent of Anglos believe minority recruitment is very important or somewhat important.

The increase in support for recruiting minorities could be a reflection of the growing number of minorities in the state, said Angela Valenzuela, a University of Texas at Austin education professor and education chairwoman of the Texas League of United Latin American Citizens.

She also said the state has done well in getting the word out about its Closing the Gaps initiative, a program designed to increase the number of Texans who go to college.

"The campaigns at the state level to close the achievement gap, for a lot of Texans, has heightened their awareness about the importance of recruiting portions of the population that have been historically excluded from higher education," Valenzuela said.

The public sees the top 10 percent rule as a way to do that, Valenzuela said.

The Poll also asked Texans about tuition deregulation and whether Texas public universities are a good value, given the education that students receive.

Eighty-one percent of Texans believe public universities are a good value, up 18 percentage points from 2001. Only 11 percent disagree that the universities are good value and 8 percent don’t know.

Valenzuela said the percentage of people satisfied with the value have looked around and made comparisons.

"When you compare a college education with other states or with private universities, it’s a good buy," Valenzuela said.

Tuition has shot up since 2003. That was the year the Legislature allowed regents of the state’s university systems for the first time to set their own tuitions. At the same time, lawmakers slashed the higher education budget and asked every school to slice out 5 percent from their budgets.

The average increase in tuition statewide went from $1,862 in the fall of 2003 to $2,188 in fall of 2004, a 17.5 percent jump.

The tuition hike was greater at the flagships. Tuition at the University of Texas at Austin leaped 37 percent from the fall 2003. It went from $2,094 to $2,867 in fall 2004.

At Texas A&M University, the tuition jumped 21 percent from $2,450 to $2,974, according to data from Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

Even with recent hikes in tuition, many Texas Poll respondents agree that Texas universities were a good value.

"Tuition’s going up everywhere," said Linda Armbruster, 54, of Grapevine and a mother of a 27-year-old daughter who went to college in Indiana. "The tuitions here appear to be lower than they are in the north."
http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/ts_more.php?id=63902_0_10_0_M36

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:00 PM 0 comments Links to this post

TO: Coalition for Public Schools Organizations

FROM: Carolyn Boyle

School Districts in H.B. 1263: Eight school districts would be required to participate in the private school voucher pilot program proposed in H.B. 1263. The bill author is Representative Linda Harper-Brown (R-Irving), and there are now seven co-authors of H.B. 1263:

Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler

Rep. Carl Isett, R-Lubbock

Rep. Jim Jackson, R-Carrollton

Rep. Jodie Laubenberg, R-Rockwall

Rep. Jerry Madden, R-Plano

Rep. Larry Taylor, R-League City

Rep. Corbin Van Arsdale, R-Houston



According to Erin Sanders, legislative assistant to Rep. Harper-Brown, following are the school districts that would be required to participate in the H.B. 1263 voucher program:



Austin ISD

Dallas ISD

Edgewood ISD (San Antonio)

Fort Worth ISD

Houston ISD

Masonic Home ISD (Fort Worth)

San Antonio ISD

South San Antonio ISD



None of the bill's co-authors represent any of the eight voucher school districts. The co-authors are not willing to have vouchers in their own school districts but want to inflict this risky pilot on other districts. Hundreds of millions of dollars would be siphoned from these urban districts to subsidize private schools. Because of the number of co-authors, it appears that H.B. 1263 may be pushed in the Texas House over H.B. 12, the other voucher bill by Rep. Frank Corte (R-San Antonio).



Students in the eligible districts who would receive a voucher under H.B. 1263 include:

-- Every student of limited English proficiency

-- Every student eligible for the free or reduced price lunch program

-- Every student who is eligible for special education

-- Every student in grades 3-12 who did not pass any section of the TAKS test

-- Every student in PreK-3rd grades who did not pass a readiness test
-- Every student who fails two subjects during a semester

-- Every student who is pregnant or a parent

-- Every student placed in an alternative education program, has been expelled, is on parole or probation

-- Every student who is homeless.



H.B. 2. The number one topic of discussion in Austin this week is H.B. 2, Chairman Kent Grusendorf's education reform bill. It is extremely controversial and opposed by all of the education organizations. Tension is high about this legislation. The committee substitute for H.B. 2 is available at this link:

http://www.tasb.org/issues/documents/cshb2.pdf You may learn a great deal by listening to the meetings of the House Committee on Public Education (it's going on right now if you are reading this Monday evening) or in the archived format at this link: http://www.house.state.tx.us/media/welcome.php



If you are communicating with state legislators regarding H.B. 2 this week, be sure to tell lawmakers to keep vouchers out of the bill and to oppose any other bill or floor amendment that uses public money to pay private school tuition!



***********************************************************
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

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:35 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Texas House of Representatives Grusendorf Proposal
Analysis provided by the Intercultural Development Research Association, a member of Texas Latino Education Coalition

The major school finance proposal that has been submitted for consideration in the Texas House of Representatives is House Bill 2 authored by Rep. Kent Grusendorf of Arlington, Texas.

Recapture
Despite conservative promises to kill the “share the wealth” feature used in part to fund Texas public schools, this proposal does not eliminate recapture. Legislators have found that they still need that source of revenue to support the whole system, but more importantly, recapture provides a way to keep the wealthiest districts from increasing the level of inequity in funding. Although recapture is kept in the system, this major House plan still reduces the level of high-wealth school district contributions, specifying that wealthy districts can now keep 65 percent of money they once gave to the state for re-distribution to all other schools. This approach clearly increases inequity between most school districts and high-wealth districts.

Accreditation-Based Funding
The cornerstone of the proposals introduced into the Public Education Committee in the Texas House of Representatives involves major changes in the way Texas schools are funded. The radically new approach was first introduced in the last failed special legislative session convened in 2004 and serves as the basis for a new funding strategy. Continuing to rely on findings from a controversial study that examined the level of expenditures of school districts would need to meet extremely low state accreditation requirements, the House plan proposes to use a new “accreditation allotment” concept to replace the existing basic allotment, which is the major driver or component in the current funding. The new plan recommends an elementary school accreditation allotment of $4,550 for each student in average daily attendance in grades K-8, and $5,550 for high school students.

Special Population Programs
The House proposal includes provisions that will abandon funding weights for special education, compensatory education and bilingual education programs (where additional funding for these programs is connected to the amount of money provided for “regular” students). This funding is converted from mechanisms that automatically adjust funding based on increases in the state’s basic allotment, to an approach that isolates these specialized programs and requires biennial battles to acquire specific funding for these special populations, a throw-back to the 1960s and 1970s. Historically, such specific fixed dollar-based mechanisms have made it extremely difficult to secure any necessary funding increases since districts that have few such students typically do not support increases that may require tax hikes at the state level.

Hold Harmless Provisions
As in the 2004 special session, this warmed-over plan incorporates provisions that assure all school systems will receive enough money from the state to keep them at their previous revenue levels, plus 3 percent more in state funding to offset changes that are proposed for the system. These, in turn, essentially leave the effects of the prior system in place, delaying any real impact on districts negatively affected by the proposed changes, for at least one year.

Equalized Enrichment
A major reform in the House proposal is a change in the level of local school district enrichment permitted. In the current system, the state allows local schools to supplement the basic funding level by up to 64¢ of local tax effort. This enrichment effort is partly equalized when the state ensures that districts with different abilities to raise local revenue will get similar amounts of money for every penny of tax effort they choose to charge. The potential inequality created by partially equalized enrichment is initially limited by the lower level of enrichment taxes permitted in the new plan. This means that instead of equalizing 64¢ of local enrichment effort, the state only allows districts to have a 10¢ enrichment tax.

On the other hand, because of changes in the recapture part of the system, the extent of inequality in the Texas school funding system is allowed to get bigger than it is now. For example, a school district that qualifies for equalization funding may get up to 45¢ for every 1¢ of enrichment taxes; a wealthy district may be able to net over $200 for every penny of tax, or $155 more for every enrichment penny. If one multiplies both the 45¢ and the $200 by the 10¢ of local enrichment permitted in the new plan, the gap in funding between most districts and wealthy districts would increase to $1,550 per student ($450 in low and average wealth districts compared to $2,000 in the wealthiest), or $31,000 per classroom. Contrary to some claims, this would make the new plan less equalized than the system now in place.

Overall Assessment
The new proposal being considered by the Texas House is a warmed-over plan rejected by House members in 2004. The funding levels promised provide very little “new” money to help local districts meet their cost of operation and are set below the levels estimated for providing every child in Texas an excellent and equitable education. The weakening of existing recapture features also sets up the potential for districts to eventually acquire authority to use the taxing capacity provided to produce high level of un-equalized enrichment, which the existing recapture plan short-circuits. Finally the reversion to fixed funding for special student programs for special education, low-income and students who are learning English would take the state of Texas 20 years back in funding approaches.

To see the full declaration with these principles, go to http://www.texans4fairfunding.org/declare.asp and sign on today!

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:15 AM 0 comments Links to this post

TEA maneuver cuts number of failing campuses but may endanger federal funding
By JASON SPENCER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle


Faced with the prospect of tagging nearly half of the state's school districts with failing grades under the federal accountability system, Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley instead changed the rules to reduce the number of failing schools sixfold.


The move, described by some as a direct challenge to the U.S. Department of Education's enforcement of the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, sets up a potential showdown between Neeley and the Bush administration.

National education observers said Neeley's move makes Texas the first state to outright refuse to follow the law's requirements.

Texas receives more than $1 billion in federal money tied to compliance with No Child Left Behind. Some of that money could be in jeopardy, depending on how federal officials react to Neeley's decision. The TEA released grades Friday.

"It sets up, obviously, a rather interesting situation between the U.S. Department of Education and the state of Texas and you could see administrative funding cuts due to noncompliance," said Scott Young, a senior policy analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Just days ago, the Denver-based group issued a report criticizing the president's education initiative as an overly rigid piece of legislation that undermines states' efforts to educate students.

The disagreement centers on the federal government's requirement that schools exempt no more than 1 percent of their students from testing because of learning disabilities. Once a school crosses that 1 percent special education threshold, any additional students must be counted as failing. In Texas, nearly 10 percent of all students don't take the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills because of their special education needs. Instead, they take a state-mandated alternative test.

It's a predicament that has hurt the ratings of schools in other states as well, including Michigan, where special education participation rates were mostly to blame for the failing grades that went to a third of that state's schools.


Waiver request denied
Last April, Neeley asked the Education Department for a waiver from the special education policy. It was denied in July, long after Texas students had already been tested.



But rather than go along with the ruling as did many other states that lost similar appeals, Neeley granted appeals from 431 school districts and 1,316 campuses that stood to fail under the federal guidelines. When she was finished, only 86 school districts and 402 campuses were on the "needs improvement" list. Those that make the list in consecutive years must allow their students to transfer to better schools.

"We really think this is more of a fairness issue," said Debbie Ratcliffe, a Texas Education Agency spokeswoman. "The poor school districts are caught between conflicting state and federal laws."

The number of passing schools varies wildly under the federal system because each state develops its own tests and sets its own standards. So comparisons across state lines don't work. In Alabama and Florida, for example, 77 percent of schools missed the mark, while all but 4 percent of Wisconsin's campuses got passing grades.

The Washington, D.C.-based Achievement Alliance criticized Neeley for giving the failing schools passing grades. Alliance members include Just for the Kids/National Center for Educational Accountability, the Education Trust, the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights and the Business Roundtable.

"This is a message that we're not going to pay attention to the indicators. Instead, we're going to change the indicators so that we as schools look good," said Delia Pompa, the alliance's director and a former Texas Education Agency assistant commissioner. "The focus shouldn't be on whether the school looks good, but on whether children are learning. If children are learning, eventually, the school will look good."


HISD benefited
The Houston Independent School District was among the hundreds of school systems that benefited from Neeley's decision. The district would have landed on the "needs improvement" list had Neeley followed the federal guidelines. The number of failing HISD campuses shrunk from 77 (more than a quarter of all Houston schools) down to 26 because of her ruling.



HISD officials said they had no reaction to Neeley's ruling.

"That is between the TEA and the U.S. government," said district spokesman Terry Abbott. "We simply follow the guidelines of the TEA."

All of the state's other major urban school districts — Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Fort Worth — also would have missed the No Child Left Behind mark without Neeley's help. Local school districts that benefited from her ruling include: Aldine, Spring Branch, Spring, Alief, Klein, Pasadena, and Galena Park, the school district Neeley ran until Gov. Rick Perry appointed her education commissioner a year ago.

Perry is scheduled to be in Washington, D.C., this weekend attending the National Governors Association winter conference, beginning with the National Education Summit on High Schools.

Neeley did not notify federal education officials of her plan to change the ratings, Ratcliffe said.


Dozen states eye change
Texas is among about a dozen states lobbying federal education officials to raise the 1 percent limit, Ratcliffe said.



Department of Education spokeswoman Susan Aspey had little comment on Neeley's decision.

"We just saw this today," Aspey wrote in an e-mail. "It's a bit premature to comment. ... In general, if we find noncompliance, we have a range of administrative options at our disposal, which does include withholding funds."

Many states that oppose the enforcement of No Child Left Behind will be watching closely to see how the conflict plays out, Young said.

"The state needs to have the ability to decide on a case-by-case approach what the exemption level should be," he said.

"I wouldn't be surprised if the U.S. Department of Education tried very hard to address their concerns without it becoming much of a problem," Young said.

jason.spencer@chron.com
This article is: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/topstory/305783

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:20 PM 14 comments Links to this post

The funds in the latest public ed bill appear to be much less than meets the eye
BY AMY SMITH
AUSTIN CHRONICLE
Feb. 25, 2005

Last week, Rep. Pat Haggerty became the first major Republican House member to publicly criticize the centerpiece education bill that the GOP leadership is touting as the "Roadmap to Results" on school finance. As a nine-term legislator from El Paso, Haggerty's criticism of the bill comes with first-hand knowledge of the specific funding and teaching needs of schools in El Paso County, where more than a third of Hispanic children live in poverty, and 10% go on to become high school dropouts.

Haggerty joined more than three dozen members of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus last week in denouncing HB 2 as a measure that would only widen the inequities between property-rich and property-poor school districts – directly contrary to a December court order directing the Legislature to resolve the school finance crisis. (On Friday, the state Supreme Court agreed to hear the attorney general's appeal of that decision, bypassing the Court of Appeals.)

The bill's author, Rep. Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington, chair of the House Public Education Committee, says his legislation would pump more than $3 billion "new dollars" into public education while "taking the sting out of Robin Hood's arrow" by reducing the amount of money recaptured from property-rich districts. At the same time, the legislation contains a strong shape-up-or-ship-out message to school administrators and teachers, with calls for greater accountability on standardized testing scores and the creation of a merit-raise system in place of across-the-board salary increases for teachers.

But MALC members asked how can lawmakers can expect academic achievement without providing the necessary investment. "The irony is that kids are treated equally when it comes to tests and standards and expectations, but not treated equally when providing funds to meet those standards and expectations," said caucus chair Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine. "If there is no new money," Haggerty added, "there can be no advance in education, and there can be no advance in equality."

Grusendorf later took issue with MALC's criticisms, coming down particularly hard on Haggerty, the lone Republican to speak out at the press briefing. "Pat is not familiar with the bill," Grusendorf told Quorum Report. "He's parroting what somebody said."

The Money vs. the Kids

Haggerty, reached last Friday in El Paso, disagreed. "It's real easy to read numbers, and the money is just not there." The $3.3 billion in "new" money, Haggerty said, doesn't come close to recovering the $3.7 billion in education cuts made in the 2003 session.

Under HB 2, most districts would receive funding increases between 3% and 8%, but many wealthy school districts would get much more than that. "Look at Highland Park," Haggerty said. "They'd be getting a 52% increase in funding." Indeed, Highland Park, an old-money Dallas community and one of the wealthiest school districts in the state, has become a poster child for what's wrong with Grusendorf's legislation.

Critics of the bill say that HB 2 largely ignores what MALC members and the state's own demographer keep reminding us – that the future of Texas will look much like the predominantly Hispanic border communities of today. In other words, without funding that addresses the needs of poor school districts and children considered "at risk" because they are not proficient in English, the Texas of 2040 will, according to state demographer Steve Murdock, see a 40% increase in poverty, a 50% rise in welfare recipients, a 54.3% increase in prison population, and an overall $6.3 billion increase in elementary and secondary education costs. According to one state study, funding needs increase as the number of low-income and English-deficient students increases, yet MALC members point out that HB 2 directs substantially less money to these students than what the state study recommends.

"HB 2 leaves 90% of the children behind," Gallego said. "The disconnect between this bill and the basic needs of Texas schoolchildren is appalling."

Casinos, Credit, and Canadian Drugs

With less than two weeks remaining before the filing deadline, hundreds of new bills are popping up daily – although many are dead on arrival. One major bill still very much in play, filed last Friday, is the long-anticipated but very controversial casino gambling proposal that would give Texas a taste of Las Vegas. As expected, Valley Rep. Kino Flores, D-Palmview, will carry HB 1337 and its House Joint Resolution 49, which calls for a Nov. 8 statewide election on the proposed constitutional amendment. It's not clear that this specific bill has a shot, but pressure is building overall for some form of gambling as an additional revenue source for schools.

As goes gambling, so goes credit card debt – and possibly a new law that would require credit card companies to tell consumers how long it will take to pay off their debt. Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, said he filed HB 1089 to protect the more vulnerable consumers who can only afford to make the minimum monthly payments. "Texans should be able to look at their credit card bill and know that if they only pay the monthly minimum, then this is when their credit card debt will be paid off," said Burnam (e.g., sometime in the next millennium). The bill, if passed, would require companies to include the pay-off date on their monthly statements. Burnam said that about half of all credit card holders pay only their minimum monthly requirement.

On the pharmaceutical front, two Houston Democrats – state Sen. Rodney Ellis and Rep. Scott Hochberg – have started drumming up support for legislation that would allow Texans to make online prescription drug purchases from Canada. The legislative proposals (SB 518 and HB 173) would allow the Texas State Board of Pharmacy to license Canadian pharmacies to sell and ship prescription drugs directly to consumers, Ellis said. In a press conference last week, the Houston legislators said that state residents could see huge savings on popular drugs obtained from Canada, including a 45% savings on the cholesterol drug Lipitor. The two companion bills are modeled after other programs in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, New Hampshire, and Vermont, among others, Ellis said.

Copyright © 2005 Austin Chronicle Corporation. All rights reserved.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:53 AM 3 comments Links to this post

Governor Unfolds Education 'Roadmap'
02/25/2005

Jenny La-Coste Caputo
Express-News Staff Writer

AUSTIN — Gov. Rick Perry joined House Republicans on Thursday to tout "Roadmap to Results."

That's the nickname for the bill aimed at overhauling the state's education finance system, getting tough on low-performing schools and providing property tax relief.

Perry and House Education Committee Chairman Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington, headlined the third of four news conferences held this week to promote the bill.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, House members discussed the fact that the bill would provide $3 billion in new funding over the next two years and provide protection for taxpayers from skyrocketing property tax rates.

The focus Thursday: Financial and academic accountability for school districts.

"We must have more efficiency in our schools," Perry said. "If public money is used to lobby or litigate, taxpayers ought to know."

Rep. Corbin Van Arsdale, R-Cyprus, said House Bill 2 would strengthen sanctions for schools where students consistently perform poorly on state standardized tests. He said if the state is going to pump more money into public education, education has to perform.

"It's a huge investment in our children," Van Arsdale said. "But if we have a chronically failing school, that is a block to the investment. ... We will move in swiftly and close those schools down and reopen them with new leadership."

The bill calls for reducing property taxes by one third while increasing education funding. It doesn't address the source of the money.

Critics of the bill say it increases the spending gap between the state's richest and poorest students because it calls for severely limiting the current system that requires property-rich districts to turn over some of their property-tax revenue to the state to help poor districts.

If the bill becomes law, no more than 35 percent of property-tax districts' property tax revenue would be turned over. That provision means a handful of districts will receive a huge increase in funding.
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jcaputo@express-news.net
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Online at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA022505.5A.lege_education.deebda7e.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:47 AM 0 comments Links to this post

February 24, 2005

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

EDINBURG, Tex., Feb. 23-Macario Guajardo was one child left behind Wednesday when his classmates took the all-important Texas statewide reading test for promotion to the sixth grade.

Actually, 11-year-old Macario, an unlikely crusader at 4-foot-11 and 93 pounds, wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt, left himself behind. He stayed out of school in protest against what he called "the big deal" of the testing program, which he said "keeps kids from expressing their imagination."

"I don't think I'm brave," Macario said at his home here in the Rio Grande Valley. "Any kid could do this. It does take a little bit of guts."

Amid sharp critiques of the Texas-inspired federal education law called No Child Left Behind and its mandatory annual testing to measure school success or failure, a handful of students like Macario have taken the risky step of boycotting their tests. Some students say that the state tests, some of which predate the federal program, focus the learning process on test preparation.

"The protests are very significant; I just think they're nearing the breaking point," said Angela Valenzuela, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Texas and the editor of a collection of critical essays, "Leaving Children Behind," published recently by the State University of New York Press.

In San Antonio on Tuesday, a 14-year-old high school freshman, Mia Kang, refused to take the required reading test, known as the TAKS, for Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Two years ago, another San Antonio freshman, Kimberly Marciniak, 15, made headlines when she boycotted the same reading test in its debut year.

Also in 2003, two Washington State high school sophomores refused to take that state's mandatory exams. In 2002, parents in Scarsdale, N.Y., organized a boycott of the eighth-grade test.

And in Stewart, Ohio, a high school senior, John Wood, 17, who has refused to take any statewide test since the seventh grade, has lost out on graduating this spring. That poses a quandary for his father, George, who is co-editor of "Many Children Left Behind," a 2004 book critical of the federal law, but is also principal of John's school and must keep him from graduating. George Wood said he supported his son, who has been accepted by two private colleges.

In Texas, students like Macario who do not pass a state assessment test can be promoted only if a panel of the child's parents, teachers and principal all agree to make an exception.

"The children are really hurting themselves," said Debbie Graves Ratcliff, a spokeswoman in Austin for the Texas Education Agency, which oversees the state's school system. Ms. Ratcliff said that each year three million students from grades 3 to 11 took the assessment tests in, depending on their grade, math, reading, writing, English language arts, science and social studies. Boycotts are "a rarity," she said.

She defended the current tests as "harder, covering more grades and more subjects."

The current statewide testing system in Texas grew out of an accountability movement fostered by Ross Perot in the 1980's. Jose Luis Salinas, superintendent of Macario's district, acknowledged that "a lot of critics feel we are teaching to the test and not to the child," adding, "As an individual I think a lot of that is true." But Mr. Salinas, with 32 years as an educator, said that "as the individual in charge, I must follow the law. This district stands behind the Legislature, regardless of what some of us may feel."

Alfie Kohn, a Boston speaker and writer on education and the author of "The Schools Our Children Deserve," said, "People are scared to death in Texas to speak out." He added, "The use of fear and coercion to raise test scores has teachers despondent."

Macario's parents, both educators, said they supported his action without trying to influence him either way although, they said, he had been under such stress over the past two years from a succession of substitute teachers and previous assessment tests that he had developed a nervous tic.

His father, Francisco, 40, a former high school teacher, is a professor of education at the University of Texas Pan American in Edinburg. His mother, Yvonne, 40, teaches computer skills at Edinburg North High School and runs a local dance studio where Macario, his brother Daniel, 15, and sister Andrea, 13, study ballet. Daniel and Andrea are taking the assessment tests but say they applaud Macario's stance.

A year ago, to take to an educational conference, Mr. Guajardo made a videotape of Macario giving a critique of the school system. It seems to have planted a seed with Macario.

Last October, his father said, Macario, a student at Robert E. Lee Elementary School, which has earned an "Exemplary" rating for its test scores, "sat me down and said: 'Dad, we need to talk. This is serious. I want to protest the TAKS test.' "

Mr. Guajardo said he told Macario to "let it rest for a month, to see if he would get over it."

But he did not, telling his father, as the boy recalled: "I think we should be doing other creative things that helps kids express their imagination. We don't do any art. We don't get enough recess."

Mr. Guajardo suggested that Macario poll his classmates. Macario, who had earlier been elected class representative, said that he asked his teacher if he could speak to them, and that "she was very supportive."

He made several speeches to the class. "I mentioned the stuff and why I disagreed with this law and how it keeps kids from expressing their imagination," he said.

Father and son also met with the principal, who, Macario said, tried to change his mind. But Macario said he insisted: "I'm still not going to take it. I had better stick to my beliefs."

As word circulated last week with an article in the Spanish-language newspaper Rumbo and two reports on local television, supporters came forward. Frank M. Gonzales, a neighbor of the Guajardos and a former high school principal, said his son, a lawyer, would be ready to help with a lawsuit.

"I'm not against testing," Mr. Gonzales said, "I'm against how they're using it."

Macario said he wanted to be careful how he spent his day of protest. "I didn't want to do something that makes me look like I'm wasting time," he said. He ended up going with his father to visit his grandparents at their nearby farm in Elsa to play with their goats and sheep and try out some chili recipes - he is a pepper devotee. And he read about the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Thursday was set aside for make-up tests for those who missed Wednesday and Macario said he would skip those, too, although he would attend school.

He had another idea, too. He asked his father if he could go to Austin, the state capital. "I want to talk to the government," he said.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/24/national/24refuse.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:31 PM 2 comments Links to this post

February 24, 2005

By SAM DILLON
NYTimes

oncluding a yearlong study on the effectiveness of President Bush's sweeping education law, No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers drawn from many states yesterday pronounced it a flawed, convoluted and unconstitutional education reform initiative that has usurped state and local control of public schools.

The report, based on hearings in six cities, praised the law's goal of ending the gap in scholastic achievement between white and minority students. But most of the 77-page report, which the Education Department rebutted yesterday, was devoted to a detailed inventory and discussion of its flaws.

It said the law's accountability system, which punishes schools whose students fail to improve steadily on standardized tests, undermined school improvement efforts already under way in many states and relied on the wrong indicators. The report said that the law's rules for educating disabled students conflict with another federal law, and that it presented bureaucratic requirements that failed to recognize the tapestry of educational challenges faced by teachers in the nation's 15,000 school districts.

"Under N.C.L.B., the federal government's role has become excessively intrusive in the day-to-day operations of public education," the National Conference of State Legislatures said in the report, which was written by a panel of 16 state legislators and 6 legislative staff members.

Several education experts said the panel had accurately captured the views of thousands of state lawmakers, and local educators. If that is so, the report suggests that the Bush administration could face continuing friction with states and school districts as the Department of Education seeks to carry out the law in coming months.

Nine state legislatures are considering various challenges to the law, and the Utah Senate is about to vote on a bill, already approved by the House, that would require state education officials to give priority to Utah's education laws rather than to the federal law. An Illinois school district filed a lawsuit against the Education Department this month in federal court, arguing that No Child Left Behind contradicts provisions of the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act.

The National Conference, which has criticized the federal law in the past, represents the nation's 50 state legislatures, with a membership that includes 3,657 Republicans and 3,656 Democrats, as well as a few dozen elected from smaller parties, as independents or without any party affiliation.

The task force worked for 10 months and held public hearings in Washington, Chicago, Salt Lake City, New York, Santa Fe and Portland, Ore. It also held deliberations in Savannah, Ga.

"They went out and heard lots of things from different people around the country, and this report reflects the breadth and depth of what they heard, and the changes that many people want," said Patricia Sullivan, director of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington group, who attended some of the deliberations.

An assistant secretary of education, Ray Simon, met with members of the panel in Washington yesterday to discuss the report.

"The department will continue to work with every state to address their concerns and make this law work for their children," Mr. Simon said in a statement. "But the report could be interpreted as wanting to reverse the progress we've made."

He added: "No Child Left Behind is bringing new hope and new opportunity to families throughout America, and we will not reverse course."

A Republican state senator from New York, Stephen M. Saland, the co-chairman of the task force, called the meeting with Mr. Simon cordial.

"Everybody was in agreement about the goals of the law, but we in the states are concerned that the existing structure is very prescriptive," Mr. Saland said. "We think there are ways of doing accountability that recognize differences among states."

The law will come up for reauthorization in Congress in 2007. But Mr. Saland said he and other members of the task force hoped to persuade Congress to change the law before then.

Several groups that strongly support the federal law took issue with the report.

"My big concern is they did a better job of pinpointing problems than identifying solutions," said Susan Traiman, a director at the Business Roundtable, a group that represents top corporate executives. "Most of what they call for would be a reversal that would turn back the clock on what N.C.L.B. is trying to accomplish, all in the name of federalism."

One chapter of the report says that the Constitution does not delegate powers to educate the nation's citizens to the federal government, thereby leaving education under state control. The report contends that No Child Left Behind has greatly expanded federal powers to a degree that is unconstitutional..

"This assertion of federal authority into an area historically reserved to the states has had the effect of curtailing additional state innovations and undermining many that had occurred during the past three decades," the report said.

"The task force does not believe that N.C.L.B. is constitutional," it said.

But Steve Kelley, a Democrat who serves in the Minnesota Senate and a co-chairman of the task force, said the conference had no intention of going to court over the law's constitutionality.

The report also examines what the task force called conflicts between the federal law and the disabilities act. Under No Child Left Behind, a disabled eighth grader whom educators deem to be working at a sixth grade level must take examinations for eighth graders. The report said the requirement contradicted provisions in the disabilities act requiring school authorities to design a unique instructional program suited to the needs and abilities of each disabled child.

"N.C.L.B. requires students with disabilities to be tested by grade level, while IDEA mandates that students be taught according to ability," the report said.

A Republican state representative from Utah, Kory M. Holdaway, who is a special education teacher as well as a task force member, said the federal law's provisions for educating the disabled were a special irritant in his state.

Mr. Holdaway has long been a critic of the federal law and voiced legislators' concerns to the White House last year.

"I hope the feds will have an open mind as far as letting us run our educational system as we feel it should be run," he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/24/education/24child.html?hp&ex=1109307600&en=a3a852a2a2f4314f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:18 PM 0 comments Links to this post

NYTimes Editorial
February 23, 2005

President Bush raised the country's hopes last month when he previewed a $1.5 billion initiative that would promote desperately needed reform in the American high school system. The package laid out in the president's budget proposal touches on many of the right issues, but it is underfinanced and poorly conceived - and dead on arrival in Congress, which has signaled its intent to ignore crucial provisions of Mr. Bush's proposal. The White House, which failed to push for adequate funds for its last big education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, has only itself to blame for failing to do the necessary preparation before unveiling this big idea. Nevertheless, Congress should understand what's at stake here. As school reform grinds to a halt in Washington, American students are falling further and further behind their peers in Asia and Europe, where universally accessible quality schools are producing highly skilled workers at a rate that far outstrips schools in the United States.

The traditional American high school, as conceived a century ago, was never meant to produce well-educated workers in the numbers required by today's economy. Remaking the system so American students catch up with their peers abroad will require several big changes. The curriculum must become far more rigorous across the board, and that can happen only if teachers improve. The schools must offer broad-based remedial instruction to help the eye-popping 70 percent of students who arrive at high school reading too poorly to absorb the complex subject matter they will be required to cover. The system must also develop ways to ensure that students leave school with problem-solving and communication skills that will allow them to thrive in the information economy.

President Bush wants to extend right into high school the testing requirements that are mandated for the lower grades under No Child Left Behind. This page has been second to none in supporting systematic testing, but talking about tests without first addressing all the things that are wrong with the current system is putting the cart before the horse.

Mr. Bush has also proposed a package of academic interventions for struggling students that he would pay for mainly by killing off a $1.3 billion federally financed vocational education program. This figure is far short of what's needed to renovate America's ailing high school system. But the president's underlying point - that many vocational education programs obstruct academic achievement - is perfectly valid. The low-end programs prepare students for low-skill jobs that no longer exist. Worst of all, they commonly become dumping grounds for poor and minority students, who are pushed through shop classes - with no academics to speak of - and then deposited on the street after graduating with meaningless diplomas. Shockingly, the typical American high school student earns more credits in vocational education than in either math or science.

The only way to justify keeping vocational programs is to make sure that they offer a sound academic grounding along with preparation for the new economy's high-skill jobs, instead of just wood shop and fender pounding. At the moment, however, some in Congress would like to push in exactly the wrong way by exempting vocational programs from even the inadequate current academic standards.

Many members of Congress have gotten heat from their districts about the demands made by the current No Child Left Behind standards, and getting them to push for further improvements in quality will be hard. Mr. Bush made a tactical error by failing to prepare the political ground in advance, but the game is not yet lost. Taking aim at vocational education is an excellent way to get high school reform off the ground - but only if the Bush administration will use its political muscle and go public with its case. The opportunity will be missed if the president throws up his hands and slinks away.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/23/opinion/23wed3.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:26 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Note: I don't have a date for this but this incident happened recently. -Angela

By Ellen Barry
Los Angeles Times

LEBANON, Tenn. A judge hearing child-abuse and neglect cases in Tennessee has given an unusual instruction to some immigrant mothers who have come before him: Learn English or else.

Most recently, it was an 18-year-old woman from Oaxaca, Mexico, who had been reported to the Department of Children's Services for failing to immunize her toddler and show up for appointments. At a hearing last month to monitor the mother's custody of the child, Wilson County Judge Barry Tatum instructed the woman to learn English and to use birth control, the Lebanon Democrat newspaper reported.

Last October, Tatum gave a similar order to a Mexican woman who had been cited for neglect of her 11-year-old daughter, said a lawyer who is representing the woman in her appeal. Setting a court date six months away, the judge told the woman she should be able to speak English at a fourth-grade level by that meeting. If she failed, he warned, he would begin the process of termination of parental rights.

"The court specially informs the mother that if she does not make the effort to learn English, she is running the risk of losing any connection; legally, morally and physically; with her daughter forever," reads a court order from the hearing, according to Jerry Gonzalez, the Nashville attorney who represents the woman.

Tatum's orders have become the subject of debate in this Tennessee community, which has seen an influx of non-English speakers over the past decade. Civil-rights advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have called his orders discriminatory and unconstitutional. But many of Tatum's neighbors cheered the principle behind his act, saying new immigrants should be encouraged to assimilate more fully into American life.

Juvenile court proceedings are often more informal than adult cases, and it's not unusual for judges to give lifestyle advice to parents who come before them in neglect or abuse cases. And, when written down and signed by the judge, those instructions take on the force of a court order.

Such orders should pertain to behavior that contributes to abuse and neglect, said Susan Brooks, an expert on family law at Vanderbilt University Law School. Brooks said she was not familiar with Tatum's orders, but typically the inability to speak English would not fall into that category. The state Supreme Court regards the right to raise one's own children as fundamental, she added.

"That's treading on sacred ground," she said.

Tatum did not respond to interview requests from the Los Angeles Times, but he has explained that he gave the orders in hopes that the parents would make a greater effort to assimilate into American society, opening more opportunities to their children. He has given similar orders to non-English-speaking parents in as many as five cases.

He said he has never removed a child from a parent because the parent did not speak English.

Because records from juvenile court are sealed, further details of the cases were not available.

In Lebanon, a city 20 miles east of Nashville with a population of just more than 20,000, it was once rare to hear a foreign accent, much less a foreign language. Now Lebanon has become home to more than 1,200 foreign-born agricultural and manufacturing workers, including about 400 whose primary language is Mixteco, a language indigenous to Mexico.

Though the judge's order may have been a mistake, "the general sentiment is if people are going to be in this country, we all have a moral obligation to learn to speak the language," said Bob Bright, 61, who runs an insurance agency in Lebanon.

"I know if I was in Mexico I would make an effort to learn Hispanic."

In the October case, Tatum made a clear link between the mother's English abilities and her parental rights, said Gonzalez, the mother's attorney.

In the case, an 11-year-old girl had been placed with a foster family after allegations of neglect, Gonzalez said. The mother, who spoke only Mixteco, asked the court to arrange counseling, and the judge denied that request, instead giving the women a deadline for basic mastery of English.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002181460_english16.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:53 PM 0 comments Links to this post

79TH LEGISLATURE
Lawmakers hear debate on financial potential versus social costs

By Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, February 23, 2005

The growing fight over expanding legalized gambling in Texas took center stage Tuesday at the Capitol.

Horse- and dog-racing industry representatives described the legalization of video lottery terminals at racetracks as a lifeboat for lawmakers who want to increase state revenues but do not want to raise taxes. Gambling opponents say the terminals, which are similar to slot machines, will drain money from existing businesses and encourage the types of addiction that tear families apart.

While lawmakers are floating gambling proposals ranging from the sale of lottery tickets at gas pumps to the construction of Las Vegas-like casinos across the state, the prospect of video lottery terminals has created the most intense debate. By some estimates, the state could take in $1.2 billion a year in profits from the machines, though critics challenge those numbers.

Representatives of both sides of the issue took their cases to the House Ways and Means Committee, which took no action.

The issue looks particularly dicey for Republicans, who will be in political hot water if they raise taxes but also want to deliver enough new education money to their local schools and find a way to offset property taxes. They face heavy pressure from the party's grass roots to stop the lottery terminals.

Gambling opponents on Tuesday pointed to figures that show that low-income Texans spend significantly more money on gambling every month than those with higher incomes. Texans who earn between $20,000 and $29,000 a year, for example, spend $106 a month on the state's lottery, on average, while those who earn between $76,000 and $100,000 spend less than $29 a month on average, according to state figures cited by gambling opponents.

"It would be wrong, both from a fiscal and a moral point of view, to adopt a tax scheme that will be dependent on the lowest income-earners in the state to fund our most critical state programs," said Suzii Paynter, director of public policy for the Christian Life Commission of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

Racing officials, however, said people are going to use the machines anyway.

"These people live in Texas already," said Howard Phillips, president of Manor Downs. "They're just going (to other states) to do it, and other than selling them some gas when they drive there, I don't think we're getting any benefit."

Racing advocates also say a growing number of horse owners are breeding their animals in Louisiana, where they can compete for prizes that are boosted by the machines.

Rep. Kino Flores, D-Palm- view, has filed a bill that would expand casinos in the state (there is one Indian-run casino in Eagle Pass), but he said the legalization of lottery terminals will pay faster dividends.

"Would you rather have the opportunity to go play a game of chance and let the state keep $5 worth, or would you rather the state force you to give it five bucks?" he asked.

But gambling opponents said video lottery terminals would attract compulsive players who would neglect their jobs and their families. Rhenel Johnson, a Houston pastor, said a single mother in her church inherited $10,000 but squandered that money by playing slot machines.

"It was so bad that her children would call her on the cell phone and ask her to come home," Johnson said.

House Speaker Tom Craddick has said the fate of gambling legislation will be up to the full House, while Gov. Rick Perry has distanced himself from a plan he floated last year to legalize the machines to help pay for schools.

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jim Keffer, R-Eastland, said he hopes the committee will approve a bill next week that spells out which taxes the Legislature will raise to make up for the one-third reduction in property taxes that state leaders want to deliver as part of their overhaul of the state's $33 billion school finance system.

The legalization of video lottery terminals, which is expected to need approval from two-thirds of the Legislature and from a majority of the public, is not expected to be part of that bill. But it could arrive on the floor of the House separately if House leaders decide they need more money for education, health care or other priorities.

The gambling testimony came a day after Rep. Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie, filed a bill that would replace the local property tax for school operations with a statewide tax. Proponents say it's the best way to ensure that schools have the same amount of money for each student.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/02/23gambling.html
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:24 PM 0 comments Links to this post

February 23, 2005

By GREG WINTER NYTimes

iting the paltry skills of many high school graduates, the nation's governors are calling for more rigorous standards and harder exams than states have already imposed, often with considerable difficulty.

Despite the zeal for academic standards and exit exams that has swept across states in recent years, a high school diploma does little to ensure that graduates are capable of handling the work awaiting them in college or in the workplace, the National Governors Association said in a report issued yesterday. Graduation requirements remain so universally inadequate that it is possible to earn a diploma anywhere in the nation and still lack the basic skills required by colleges and employers, the governors reported.

Indeed, more than 4 in 10 public high school students who manage to graduate are unprepared for either college courses or anything beyond an entry-level job, the governors reported, requiring billions of dollars in remedial training to endow them with the skills "they should have attained in high school."

"We must restore the value to a high school diploma," said Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat who is the chairman of the governors association. "Put simply, our standards have not kept pace with the world or the global economy."

He added, "We must push our students harder and expect more from them."

Many of the proposals the governors are considering are consistent with the tenets of President Bush's signature No Child Left Behind law: higher aspirations for student achievement and graduation rates, close monitoring of improvement and, should progress fail to come, stiff consequences.

But in other ways, the agenda is more ambitious than the federal law, a potential bone of contention considering that states have widely complained that No Child Left Behind is already far too onerous. This month, for example, the Utah House of Representatives unanimously approved a bill ordering local officials to spend as little state money as possible to comply with it.

To begin with, the governors association is proposing that states regularly test their high school students. Federal law requires such tests largely in the lower grades, though President Bush has proposed imposing greater scrutiny on high schools. Beyond that, the governors' agenda not only calls upon states to adopt and achieve clear academic standards, as federal law does, but also urges setting those standards high enough to satisfy colleges and employers - something the governors say that few states, if any, have done.

"Now that we have academic standards in place, we must ensure that they are the right standards," said Gov. Bob Taft of Ohio, a Republican who is the co-chairman of Achieve, an organization created by governors and business leaders to promote academic standards that wrote the report with the governors association.

Mr. Taft added, "Most states have not yet set the bar high enough."

Despite such lofty goals, the governors association says that states will be the ones controlling the "redesign" of their high schools, and therefore will be relatively free from the bureaucratic constraints accompanying the federal education agenda.

"It's not so much about how to get there, as long as you get there," said Dane Linn, education director of the governors association, which is asking its members to draft plans to strengthen their own state curriculums. "It's not something we want the feds to come down and tell the states how to do."

The opportunities for friction are manifold. Educators and children's advocates have mounted fierce opposition to exit exams and other test-heavy changes in education, largely out of concerns that struggling students will be more likely to drop out and that teachers will simply teach to the test at hand, hampering the development of broader skills in thinking.

When Mr. Warner looked at the exit exams of 13 other states in 2003, for example, he said that nine of those "that talked tough about high stakes had retreated and pulled back from their consequences." In that light, getting states to adopt an even stricter curriculum than they already have, and then possibly denying diplomas to those who have failed to master it may not be easy.

"The idea of consequences, and sticking to your guns about it, that is still is very controversial," Mr. Warner said.

Even so, some education advocates applauded the idea of injecting more rigor into state standards and curriculums, especially with the ultimate goal of improving graduation rates and getting more students into college or better paying jobs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/23/education/23govs.html?

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:20 PM 3 comments Links to this post

February 23, 2005
Legislatures Hit With Surge in School Choice Plans
Conservatives Hope for Political Payback With Vouchers, Tax Credits
By Alan Richard and Christina A. Samuels

Mark it down: 2005 may be a banner year for private school choice in state legislatures.

Citing the success of President Bush and other Republicans in the November elections, along with years of grassroots organizing and struggles to break into the political mainstream, conservatives are hoping it’s time for some payoffs on the school choice front.

And there are signs that their hopes are warranted, particularly as the movement is reaching states where few signs of deep political interest in vouchers, tuition tax breaks, and similar programs were present just a year ago.

“This was the first year that school choice forces weighed heavily in state legislative elections,” said Clint Bolick, the president and general counsel of the Alliance for School Choice, a national advocacy group based in Phoenix.

Home schoolers Steven and Kim Beach entertain their son Samuel, 5 months, as they join hundreds of others at the Statehouse in Columbia, S.C., for a rally supporting Gov. Mark Sanford's controversial tax-credit proposal. The couple educate their other two sons, who are 4 and 7, at home.
—Christopher Aluka Berry



Mr. Bolick said political action groups that support school choice stepped up their donations of time and money to the campaigns of many legislative candidates. That help, in his view, likely gave new incentives to some legislators to push for measures to increase parents’ educational options—and boosted support for choice among others. “There’s no question that they elevated the issue of school choice in a number of states,” he said of the political action groups.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act also may be helping to fuel school choice proposals. The law requires states to give options to students in persistently low-rated schools, and some choice proposals are aimed at those schools, said Julie Bell, who follows education policy for the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures.

While school choice legislation is getting serious looks from lawmakers in several places, analysts said last week it was too early in the legislative year to predict which bills would pass.

In South Carolina, Republican Gov. Mark Sanford and members of the GOP-controlled legislature want to open public schools to private-sector competition.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin and Ohio lawmakers are studying expansions of their well-known school voucher programs. The Texas legislature is considering a limited voucher proposal. Other plans are brewing in Indiana, Minnesota, and Missouri.

In South Carolina last week, Gov. Sanford spoke at a rally on the Statehouse steps, championing his proposed “Put Parents in Charge” Act. He argued that it would help struggling students through its mix of competition and income-tax credits.
Rally in South Carolina

“It has a pretty good chance of passing,” said Barbara S. Nielsen, a Republican and former state education superintendent in South Carolina who has advised Gov. Sanford on education and backs his choice plan. “It was a bill that was uniquely designed for South Carolina.”

Mr. Sanford addressed thousands of people at the Feb. 15 rally, most of whom represented private schools and home schoolers, according to local news reports.

The governor’s plan would give families earning up to $75,000 in taxable income—covering almost everyone in the state—a credit on their state income taxes for the cost of public or private school tuition of up to 80 percent of the state’s average per-pupil cost. The amount would increase with the child’s age, and initially would be capped at about $4,000.

Public school districts would receive the local and federal dollars for students who left, while the state per-pupil aid would follow the student, Ms. Nielsen said.

Home schoolers would not be eligible for the tax credits, but parents would be allowed to deduct textbooks costs, membership dues, and online services.

The plan also would create South Carolina’s first corporate tax-credit scholarships. Unlike similar programs in Arizona and Florida, the South Carolina plan would allow businesses to make virtually unlimited contributions to nonprofit scholarship groups in lieu of paying state corporate taxes. Those groups would then provide scholarships for school tuition.

Gov. Sanford argues that his plan would be a major economic-development boon.

But opposition is mobilizing.

The South Carolina School Boards Association and other education groups say the tax credits could cost the state huge amounts of money and would undermine the institution of public education.

Debbie Elmore, a spokeswoman for the school boards’ association, said that tens of thousands of students could leave public schools under the programs within a few years—disabling a system that works for many students, she said. “This proposal is unaffordable, unproven, and unaccountable,” she said.

Through the tax-credit scholarships, Ms. Elmore contended, private and religious schools would be able, in effect, to divert massive amounts of public money with little oversight. “It’s too wide-open,” she added.

The South Carolina debate could be a prologue to showdowns over private school choice in other states, as policymakers weigh the value of employing competition to spur overhauls of their K-12 public education systems.
Buckeyes and Bucks

“We have made progress [in public education], but it isn’t fast enough, and it isn’t for all kids,” argued Ms. Nielsen, now a policy fellow at Clemson University’s Strom Thurmond Institute of Government and Public Affairs. “Whose children are these? Are they the parents’ children or the government’s children? And that’s not a far-right comment.”

Academic progress, indeed, is one of the themes being sounded in Ohio, where Gov. Bob Taft has proposed expanding the state’s 8-year-old, $17.9 million voucher program currently operating in Cleveland.

The Republican’s proposed fiscal 2006 budget, presented on Feb. 10, would set aside $9 million for the new scholarships.

The Cleveland voucher program now provides up to $2,700 for private school tuition. The new “Ohio Choice Scholarships” would offer up to $3,500 per student from specific elementary and middle schools in the state—those in which two-thirds of students have failed both mathematics and reading tests for three consecutive years.

Currently, 70 Ohio elementary and middle schools fall into that category, based on data collected from the 2001-02 through 2003-04 school years. If approved, the new program would begin in the fall of 2006, said Mark Rickel, the governor’s press secretary. Some 2,600 students could receive vouchers.

The delay is intended to give the targeted schools a chance to improve, and to allow private schools a chance to prepare for voucher recipients, he said. Gov. Taft “has lost patience with the schools that were persistently failing,” Mr. Rickel said.

The program would provide full tuition for participating private schools, which must agree to limit tuition to the voucher amount. In contrast, the existing Cleveland program allows the participating schools to charge additional tuition on top of the value of the voucher.

Also, students in the new program would be required to take the state assessment, like students in public schools, and would have to show progress in order to continue receiving the scholarships. Students in the Cleveland voucher program must also take tests, but test scores showing progress are not a requirement.

The Ohio School Boards Association is “adamantly” opposed to Gov. Taft’s voucher proposal, said Fred Pausch, the group’s director of legislative services. “We need to allocate more money to failing schools before we start allocating money to a whole new program,” he said.

He noted that the Ohio legislature is just beginning to review the governor’s budget. “We’re basically in the first inning of the baseball game,” Mr. Pausch said.

Another Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, has proposed a $4 million tax-credit scholarship plan that would allow 1,500 low-income students in low-rated schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul to attend private schools. The scholarships would come from corporate donations made to nonprofit organizations in exchange for tax breaks.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, also a Republican, has proposed a pilot voucher program for students in low-rated schools in some of the state’s largest school districts.

Other programs are on the table in Indiana and Missouri. An Indiana voucher bill has gained support in the largely Republican state legislature, and the Missouri program would offer tax-credit scholarships for families with moderate incomes, and has backing from new Republican Gov. Matt Blunt.

Meanwhile, the Wisconsin House and Senate have passed bills that would lift an enrollment cap on Milwaukee’s voucher program, though Democratic Gov. James E. Doyle has threatened to veto the legislation.
Vol. 24, Issue 24, Page 8

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:19 AM 0 comments Links to this post

by Jenny LaCoste-Caputo
San Antonio Express-News
February 19, 2005

Mia Kang stared at the test sheet on her desk.

It only was practice. Teachers call it a "field test" to give them an idea of how students will perform on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

But instead of filling in the bubbles and making her teacher happy, Mia, a freshman at MacArthur High School, used her answer sheet to write an essay that challenged standardized testing and using test scores to judge children and rank schools.

"I wrote about how standardized tests are hurting and not helping schools and kids," said Mia, who looks and acts older than her 14 years. "I just couldn't participate in something that I'm completely opposed to."

Mia isn't boycotting just the practice tests. The straight-A student said she'll refuse to take the state- and federally-mandated tests Texas teachers begin administrating next week.

The decision isn't a popular one. When Mia refused to take the practice test, two school guidance counselors came to the classroom to try to change her mind.

"They warned me that it would be a black mark on my record and that I should choose my battles wisely," Mia said.

Mia is the latest in a growing number of students nationwide who are showing their opposition to high-stakes testing by putting down their pencils.

These young people say the "drill and kill" mentality of test preparation is destroying their thirst for knowledge and creating a generation of students who are missing crucial lessons in critical thinking, creativity and discovery.

Frustration also grips teachers, but at least in Texas, it's students who are making their voices heard.

A fifth-grader in Edinburgh also is refusing to take the test this year. And two years ago, Kimberly Marciniak, then a freshman at the North East School of Arts at Lee High School, received national attention for her decision to boycott. Students in Massachusetts and New York also have participated in organized boycotts.

Kimberly, now 17 and studying in New Zealand, said she has no regrets.

"I am definitely not an attention seeker and I was kind of unprepared for the attention it received," Kimberly said. "It really was a bit overwhelming, but I accomplished my goal of creating awareness and attention."

Texas has been gauging student progress with high-stakes standardized tests for the past decade. The state's accountability program, which ranks schools based on student progress, became the blueprint for President Bush's sweeping education reform law, labeled No Child Left Behind.

Under the federal mandate, schools must show progress in the overall student population, as well as in subgroups based on race, ethnicity, disability and economic status. The stakes are high, with some schools standing to lose students, money and autonomy if they fail to meet federal standards because too few students pass the tests.

There is risk for individual students, too. In Texas, third- and fifth-graders must pass the test to be promoted to the next grade, and high school students must pass all four sections of the test — English, math, social studies and science — to earn a diploma, regardless of what their report card says.

Kimberly said she won't take the test when she returns to the state next year even though it could cost her a diploma. She said wagering a child's future on the outcome of one test is unconscionable.

"Each year our country wastes billions of dollars producing and distributing these tests when we could spend that time and money finally giving teachers a salary they deserve or helping schools build classrooms and libraries," she said. "We have third-graders in our state that are being called failures. You call any child a failure and they are bound to feel like a failure."

Macario Guajardo, a fifth-grader at Robert E. Lee Elementary in Edinburgh, said the test puts too much pressure on youngsters. For the first time this year, fifth-graders in Texas must pass the reading and math portions of the test or be held back a grade, with very few exceptions.

"I'm doing this for myself, and all kids too, so they won't have to be going through pressure from the TAKS," Macario said.

Macario's father, Frank Guajardo, encouraged his son to boycott the test.

"Mac was physically sick for a long time," he said of his son's test anxiety.

Guajardo, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Pan American in the department of education leadership, said one test should not determine whether a child can move ahead in school.

"Personally, I don't think we need to get rid of the tests, but it would be very useful to me if we were to follow something like the Rhode Island or Maine state law," he said. "In Rhode Island, they don't allow the test to count more than 10 percent of the criteria of how a child should be passed to the next grade."

Richard Middleton, superintendent for North East School District, which is home to both Mia and Kimberly's schools, said he's not surprised by the backlash against testing, but he hopes students weigh the consequences carefully.

"In both cases, it's not a matter of whether these students could pass or not. They're very, very capable students," Middleton said. "I just hope they don't restrict opportunities in the future by doing this."

But even Middleton understands the frustration.

"There is a real punitive flavor to all of this," he said. "If you're testing to be diagnostic, to identify weaknesses and work on them, that's one thing. But all we hear about is dropping the hammer on schools."

Test preparation dominates classes, Mia says, squeezing out time for meaningful discussion or creative projects.

"These tests don't measure what kids really need to know, they measure what's easy to measure," she said. "We should be learning concepts and skills, not just memorizing. It's sad for kids and it's sad for teachers too.

Mia's mother, Jennifer Radlet, said she supports her daughter.

"She has educated us on the whole issue for years now. I admire her for following through with this," Radlet said.

Radlet, in the midst of a career switch after being a stay-at-home mom for the past several years, is earning her teaching certification. She hopes she can be the kind of teacher who engages students, but she's not sure she can in the test-frenzy environment that dominates America's public schools.

"Children learn when they are allowed to discover things and grasp concepts," she said. "Teachers today have to motivate kids to learn and pass standardized tests at the same time. I don't know if that's possible."

The stakes are likely to get higher for Texas schools. House leaders are proposing sweeping changes to the state's accountability plan. The plan includes allowing the state to close or take over schools with consistently low test scores.

Alfie Kohn, a Boston-based education commentator and author of "The Case Against Standardized Testing," said the accountability movement that has permeated every corner of the nation is riddled with flaws. Chief among them, according to Kohn, are culturally biased tests that are a better measure of a child's wealth than his or her academic potential.

"Standardized tests are exquisite standards of measure of the size of the houses near your school. They're purporting to tell you about school quality and it really tells you about affluence," he said. "Tell me how many kids you have on free and reduced lunch, if their families have a car and if they do, what kind, and I will predict their test scores with frightening accuracy."

A MacArthur High teacher said Mia is showing courage by standing up for what she believes.

"We are constantly being told that character education is an important component of teaching a child," said the teacher, who asked not to be identified. "Clearly this child has learned her values. She's developing her character — a strong, honest character — and she's following through with it.

"Mia threatens people because Mia actually is evaluating what she believes in and is applying an intelligent response to an irrational situation."

Mia doesn't plan to take the TAKS test ever. Like Kimberly, she doesn't intend to participate even though it means her diploma is on the line. Both girls have stellar academic records and hope colleges see beyond one test.

"If my high school diploma means I passed one test in the 11th grade, then that's pretty meaningless," Mia said.

 jcaputo@express-news.net

Staff Writer Macarena Hernandez contributed to this report.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA021905.1A.taks.bfe41eaf.
html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:08 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Joseph Rosenbloom
International Herald Tribune
Tuesday, February 15, 2005

BOSTON

The book's title is a mocking lament: "Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools."

Written by education activists and published by Beacon Press here in September, the book echoes the continuing grumblings in some academic circles about the No Child Left Behind Act, which President George W. Bush signed into law three years ago to prod improvements in U.S. public schools.

In particular, the book zeroes in on the concept of test-based accountability, which the law embodies. That idea has been riding a wave of political support in Washington and state capitols for more than a decade, culminating in enactment of No Child Left Behind four years ago. It passed Congress with broad bipartisan approval; the Senate favored it on a vote of 87-10.

In his State of the Union address on Feb. 2, Bush hailed what he portrayed as the law's success, saying that "standards are higher, test scores are on the rise and we're closing the achievement gap for minority students."

The day before, Bush's newly installed secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, said that the law's testing component is "the linchpin of the whole doggone thing."
But the authors of "Many Children Left Behind," along with leaders of some civil rights organizations and educators' professional associations, are deploring what they say are the harmful effects of "high-stakes tests."

By that they mean federal or state programs that mandate schools to use standardized tests to measure academic achievement, combined with sanctions against schools or students depending on the results.

No Child Left Behind, for example, requires yearly testing in grades three to nine and at least one year of high school to rate students' progress. Schools whose average test scores do not measure up are subject to being ordered to pay for extra tutoring or student transfers to other schools and, ultimately, to being turned over to state or private management. Bush proposes extending the law to cover three years of high school.

The intellectual rebuttal to the high-stakes testing regime, to use the critics' term, is detailed in "Many Children Left Behind," a compendium of seven essays. The book's authors argue, among other things, that such an approach crudely evaluates performance, punishes schools for deep-seated social problems beyond their capacity to remedy and causes teachers to narrow their curriculum and adopt a short-sighted "test-prep" strategy at the expense of real learning.

"High-stakes tests are wooden assessments that are so detached from reality, especially in schools serving poor students, that it's outrageous," Theodore Sizer, a contributor to "Many Children Left Behind," said in a recent interview.

Besides Sizer, a visiting professor at Harvard and Brandeis Universities and a former Brown University professor, other contributors include Deborah Meier, founder of schools for low-income students in Boston and New York City and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, and Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University.
As the prestige of the authors suggests, the book's message reflects a strong current of continuing opposition among American education thinkers to the trend toward test-based accountability.

"Within education schools, my view is distinctly a minority view," acknowledged Robert Schwartz, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who supports the trend.
Studies of high-stakes testing show that they tend to produce higher rates of students dropping out or being held back to repeat a grade, and those who fall by the wayside are disproportionately African-Americans and Latinos, according to Darling-Hammond of Stanford.
"Schools can get rewarded for pushing students out," she said. "If you get rid of the lowest-achieving kids, your average will go up. You are not necessarily improving achievement. You may be just getting rid of the lowest achievers."

In rebuttal, Schwartz said, "There's very little evidence that I have seen that's definitive on that subject." He referred to the finding that test-based accountability results in higher dropout rates.

By long-standing American tradition - epitomized in the legendary extreme of the one-room schoolhouse on the prairie - teachers and local school boards are entitled to a large measure of autonomy. Unlike the educational systems, say, in France and Germany, there was relatively little centralized control over U.S. public schools.

The earliest embrace by the states of standardized exit tests as a qualification for a high school diploma dates to the 1970s. The trend has accelerated as the overall performance of American students has deteriorated, compared to the scores of their counterparts from other industrialized nations.

By the time that No Child Left Behind took effect, in 2002, about half of the 50 states already had instituted a standardized exit exam as one yardstick to determine eligibility for graduation.

"Decentralizing the setting of standards to individual schools had resulted in a lot of inequities," Schwartz said. Test-based accountability "is the most powerful lever we have that's driving the system to get better," he added.

Elaborating on that point during a panel discussion that Schwartz moderated at Harvard last summer, William Moloney, the Colorado education commissioner, noted that five years of such testing in his state "have seen Anglo students at twice the level of African-Americans. When the metro dailies picked that up, that drove change for minority kids in those neighborhoods."
Moloney added that "absent embarrassment, you will see no change."

Darling-Hammond countered recently: "That argument has been put forth for more than 10 years and it just hasn't proven to be true."

Some leading civil rights advocates bemoan the trend toward test-based accountability, but not all of them do. Spellings's African-American predecessor as Bush's education secretary, Rod Paige, often touted No Child Left Behind as the key to closing the "achievement gap" and as the United States' most crucial civil rights initiative.

Among those opposed to No Child Left Behind is the chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Julian Bond. He decried the law at the association's national convention in July, saying that the testing program was disproportionately harming minority children.

Two Democratic members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Representative Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania and Representative Major Owens of New York, raised the issue squarely with Bush at a White House meeting last month, according to Paul Braithwaite, the caucus's executive director.

"You can't have a test until students are prepared," Braithwaite quoted Fattah and Owens as having said to Bush.

The testing features of No Child Left Behind continue to rankle many educational professionals as well. A critique of the law as "overemphasizing standardized testing" and "narrowing curriculum and instruction to focus on test preparation rather than richer academic learning" was endorsed last October by the National Educators Association, which represents 2.7 million educators.

All told, 45 education, civil rights, children's and other groups have supported that position since October, said Monty Neill, co-executive director of Fair Test, an education advocacy group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the prime mover behind the statement.
The list includes such other major educators' associations as the American Association of School Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English and National School Boards Association.

Conspicuously missing is the 1.3-million member American Federation of Teachers, which has supported the accountability principles of No Child Left Behind but has cooled on some aspects of its implementation.

A paramount concern of the educators' associations that endorsed the white paper, according to Neill, was the law's having established a "set of punishments that are likely to be counterproductive and demoralizing of the teaching force."


Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune |


© 2004 - The Forum for Education and Democracy
P.O. Box 216 - Amesville, Ohio 45711
Email info@forumforeducation.org - Phone 740.448.3402

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

Feb. 21, 2005

FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM
Failing third-graders promoted
Many who failed TAKS were promoted

By Cynthia L. Garza
Star-Telegram Staff Writer


More than half the third-graders in Texas who failed the TAKS reading test three times in 2003 were not held back as intended by state law but instead were promoted to the fourth grade.

The 5,077 students who failed the TAKS reading test three times in 2003 and were promoted were allowed to move up because a committee of the child's parents, teacher and principal agreed that the child was ready for fourth grade or because the child took an alternative test most often given to special-education students, according to the Texas Education Agency.

"It's not a loophole. It's not an out. It's an opportunity to provide those students who are just on the edge of passing to be promoted," TEA spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said.

The majority of third-graders in Texas, nearly 97 percent, passed the 2004 Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills reading exam.

Students statewide begin taking TAKS tests this week.

So far, only third-graders have had to pass a portion of the TAKS to be promoted. But this year, fifth-graders must pass the reading and math tests to advance to sixth grade. In 2007-08, eighth-graders will also have to pass reading and math to move on to high school.

All three checkpoints -- third, fifth and eighth grade -- allow for the grade-placement committees to promote students who fail the test.

But high school juniors -- with no exceptions -- must pass the TAKS exit exam to receive their diplomas.

Statewide figures for 2004 were not available, but in the Fort Worth school district, about 35 percent of the 225 third-graders who failed the TAKS reading test three times were promoted. In 2003, 55 percent of the 186 students who failed moved on, according to district data.

The Arlington school district promoted 16 percent of its 153 third-graders who failed in 2004, compared with 38 percent of the 97 students who failed in 2003.

Other area districts -- including Grapevine-Colleyville, Hurst-Euless-Bedford and Mansfield -- promoted from one-fourth to more than half the third-graders who failed.

Case by case

Educators don't necessarily see promoting students who fail the test as circumventing the law. Many believe that the decision to pass or fail a student should be made by those who work with the child.

Fort Worth district Deputy Superintendent Pat Linares said that moving the failing third-graders up a grade is not social promotion. In social promotions, students with failing marks are sent to the next grade so they can remain with children their own age.

"The fact of the matter is, I think these are very well-defined promotions because it does require a collaborative effort," among parents, teachers and principals who "make that decision based on data and information brought to the table," Linares said.

The committee takes into account the student's scores on other benchmark exams and progress in class work, Linares said. By looking at all factors, the committee can pinpoint a child's weaknesses and needs.

"I think anytime you are able to focus in on what is necessary for a child to succeed, that's a good thing," Linares said.

Many educators believe that failing children solely because they failed one high-stakes exam is too punitive.

"Obviously, these decisions need to be made on a case-by-case basis," said Donna New Haschke, president of the 65,000-member Texas State Teachers Association. "No child learns the same as another child. There are all kinds of variables that sometimes a school can't control."

Because of that, the committee considers any surrounding circumstances, Culbertson said. Sometimes the reasons for poor scores extend beyond the classroom, ranging from the child being a recent immigrant to the death of a parent or a sibling.

Sometimes, it may be just test anxiety.

Repercussions for failing -- or even the thought of failing the exam and being retained -- can affect those who educate students as well.

Recently, Westpark Elementary School Principal Lynn Allen was placed on administrative leave while school officials investigated a teacher's claim that Allen asked the teacher to have a parent withdraw a student during the TAKS.

School administrators were reportedly concerned that the fifth-grader -- who has severe test anxiety -- would fail the reading exam.

Allen returned to work Friday but is still being investigated by the state.

A third option

Many educators say standardized testing isn't just about passing and failing students, but pursuing a third option.

Third-graders who fail -- whether they are retained or promoted -- receive the extra attention school officials say is necessary to get them up to par.

The students will get extra tutoring before, during and after school and on weekends. Or perhaps the child will be taught in a smaller group setting.

In economic terms, paying for extra tutoring and advancing the student make more sense than paying for the child's education in the same grade twice, said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy in Washington, D.C. The center is a national, independent advocate for public schools and for making them more effective.

Failing can also bruise a child's self-image.

The child may be "known as the dummy of the class, and this has an effect on how kids view them," Jennings said. That damaged self-image can become internalized and lead to further failure.

Research clearly shows that students who are retained, especially minority students, are more likely to drop out of school.

But students who are socially promoted graduate without the knowledge and skills a high school student should have, and, in turn, are ill-prepared for college and the work force.

The policy that would seem to make the most sense is to move the students on but give them the extra help they need, Jennings said.

As the fifth-grade promotion requirement takes effect this year, educators are not sure whether what has happened in the third grade will be replicated with the older students.

IN THE KNOW

A closer look

• Third-graders must pass the TAKS reading test to be promoted to fourth grade.

• Fifth-graders must pass the TAKS reading and math exams this year to be promoted to the sixth grade.

• In 2007-08, eighth-graders will have to pass the TAKS reading and math exams to move on to high school.

• Juniors must pass the TAKS exit exam -- which tests English/language arts, math, science and social studies -- to graduate.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cynthia L. Garza, (817) 390-7675 cgarza@star-telegram.com

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:55 PM 0 comments Links to this post

by Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

Professor Emeritus of Engllish, Texas State University System–Sul Ross:Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in English, Texas A&M University–Kingsville

Almost 17 years ago, enroute to the Arizona Capitol during the October 22, 1988 march against the English Only Proposition, I was struck by the fallacies and inconsistencies persistent in the arguments of those pressing for its adoption. The English Only law was passed but later declared unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. And here we are in the year 2005 still beset by those same arguments for English Only laws. What are the proponents of English Only afraid of? Recently, a Cuban American in Florida opined that "Spanish may be the native language of many Americans, but it is a language that includes only some, and alienates most." This is a puzzling utterance because there are more speakers of Spanish in the Americas than there are speakers of English.

As a professor of English (now retired), I am not surprised by how little Americans really know about their language and its linguistic roots. Unfortunately, many Americans believe that the linguistic foundation of the United States is English. In the strictest sense of the word it’s not English that we speak in the United States but "American," as H. L. Mencken correctly described it more than 75 years ago.

The American language is a melange of tongues brought to this country by its non-native citizens. When the country was first organized after the War of Independence, there existed a brew of languages spoken by the new Americans, not counting the myriad languages of the indigenous Native Americans. German was so popular at the time that it vied for contention as the language of choice. Domenico Maceri writes: "Indeed, German was so widely used in the eighteenth century that Benjamin Franklin com-plained about German-English bilingual street signs in Philadelphia" (hispanaicvista.com 2/16/05).

That notwithstanding, to institutionalize "English" as the official language of the country (or of Arizona) is to fossilize its growth, to fence it inside boundaries that would stifle its linguistic evolution. But fortunately, as much as one might seek that institutionalization, in the end that effort will prove futile. For languages are like consenting adults: they will "socialize"and produce linguistic issue with lexical dna drawn from borrowings, intrasentential alternations, cross coinages and blends of words that enrich vocabulary and meaning and life in all pluralistic societies. The American language is still a language under construction, as are all languages.

Be that as it may, only the most flawed kind of logic suggests that language is the glue of unity among a people. If that were so, then there should be no strife in Ireland or the Middle East. Nor in the former Soviet Union. Nor where internecine conflict rages between people who speak the same language. It is more than language that creates national character or national unity. More than anything it is "respect for individual differences" that strengthens national purpose. And speaking English does not assure us of equity in the American judicial or economic system. African Americans speak English but that has not assured them of equity in the American judicial and economic system. When the rights of individuals are subordinated to conformity, that way trouble lies. Conformity ne’er built democracy.

But I’m troubled by the minions of the English Only Movement who insist that rational debate on the merits of the English Only Movement are possible independent of the attitudes which brought it into being. That argument is much like one used by a defense attorney pleading leniency for his juvenile client (who murdered his parents) on grounds that being an orphan his client deserved consideration of the court on that score. Stanley Diamond, one of the early proponents of English Only bruited about the "real issues" of the English Only Movement, which is like saying that one can (or could) talk about the "real issues" of German economic reconstruction during the 1930's independent of the anti-Semitism that gave rise to the attitudes underlying the tenets of that reconstruction. Put another way, it’s like insisting on an assessment of Hitler as a good leader, independent of the holocaust. Try convincing American and international Jewry of that.

Indeed John Tanton, one of Diamond’s staunchest supporters issued a memo supporting English Only that "tainted" the issue, just as Hitler’s anti-Semitism tainted the issues in Nazi Germany. That is why John Tanton and Stanley Diamond were the crux of the issue in the English Only Movement of the 80's.

The English Only Movement today cannot beg the question. Public scrutiny will reveal it for what it is--another Aryan manifestation in sheep’s clothing. Those of us who oppose the English Only Movement do not have to conjure up a series of perceived horrors as attorney Jim Henderson would have us believe. When he was Arizona Attorney General Bob Corbin was right in pointing out that the trouble with the English Only Proposition was its mean-spirited design, as Senator DeConcini correctly insisted, and racist in intent as many of us had perceived from the beginning.

Salomon Baldenegro correctly points out that the current Arizona bill (HCR 2030) being pushed by State Representative Russell Pearce is steeped in hate (letters@tucsncitizen.com ). He points out that "Russell Pearce’s disdain for Spanish speakers goes back to his teenage years " when he made fun of a teen-age co-worker who couldn’t speak English (Arizona Republic, 2/11/05)

One wonders if perhaps a comment by the Supreme Court Justices after ruling on the infamous Plessy vs. Ferguson case in 1896 might not have been: "This isn’t what it looks like. All we’re saying is that it’s alright to separate the races, provided we do it equitably." Where was the "common sense" then that Chuck Coughlin assured us would prevail in the future" As we all know, in the heat of the night common sense often loses its ground of being.

Both Henderson and Coughlin are adept at ad-hominem arguments: when your own position is shaky, attack the character of the opponent. That tack is certainly not "debating the issues" of the English-only Proposition as its proponents say they devoutly wish.

Which brings us to an important consideration. There are really two issues embedded in the brouhaha over State Representative Russell Pearce’s Proposition to make English the official language of Arizona: (1) an historical issue and (2) an ideological issue. Both have emotional roots and both are oftentimes severely misunderstood if not understood at all.

The ideological roots of Pearce’s proposition spring from a lexocentrism (linguistic chauvinism) that has historically pitted English against Spanish, dating back to the days of the Spanish Armada and the attempted invasion of England. The Black Legend is one outcome of that ideological conflict. Manifest Destiny, another--fomenting the U.S. war against Mexico in 1846 and against Spain in 1898. The 19th century is manifest with these attitudes. In 1847, one George Wilkins Kendall explained "(The Mexicans) pertinaciously cling to the customs of their forefathers . . . . Give them but tortillas, frijoles, and chile colorado to supply their animal wants for the day, and seven-tenths of the Mexicans are satisfied; and so they will continue to be until the race becomes extinct or amalgamated with Anglo-Saxon stock" (Baldenegro).

Closer to our time, however, American ideology has dressed itself with the garments of Anglo values that took root early in America’s Atlantic seaboard. The primacy of the English language in the United States is of relatively recent origin. The settlements of early-day America were a polyglot assortment of people, all eventually finding common ground in the English language, not because it was the language of unification but because it was the lingua franca between them, the koine of common parlance. There is nothing intrinsically superior about English that it should be our common language.

Consensus is what generated the primacy of the English language in the United States, not coercion. But, as I have already mentioned, the U.S. "English" language has been transformed into an American language whose vitality lies in the rich linguistic diversity of its people. All Americans, including Hispanics of the United States, understand the value and necessity of learning the "language of the country" in order to improve their lot and to carry out their civic functions.

Living in the United States, it’s important to learn English. I’ll vouch for that. I was a speaker of Spanish only until I was 6 years old. Later as a young adult, when I lived and worked in France, I learned French because it was necessary to learn the language in order to participate in the activities of the country. Later I became a highschool teacher of French before starting my university career as a professor of English.

The ideological roots of the English Only Movement create difficulty in determining what exactly its proponents expect it to do or want it to do--apart from what appears to be some inevitable outcomes of its passage. The Anglocentric roots of U.S. English and of its worthy English First ally raise once more the ideological stranglehold that English language and culture has had on its speakers in the United States. Never mind that the country’s population is more than 85 percent non-English. Never mind that Spanish is not a foreign language in the Hispanic Southwest, spoken long before the arrival of English-speaking marauders and intruders frenzied with Manifest Destiny.

This phenomenon illustrates well how a language captures people and develops a mentality–a mind-set–engendered from a linguistic template. This is not a pejoration of the English language or a diminution of its significance in American life and culture. On the contrary--the phenomenon attests to the strength of language to mold character..

But in the United States that strength draws principally from the linguistic mix the language is subjected to in the Americanization process its citizens undergo. That mix is an annealing process, tempering the country’s language to fit the needs of its citizens in place and time as the 18th century philosopher Taine argued.

In the 18th century Samuel Johnson sought to codify the English language, that is, keep it from "deteriorating" as he perceived. He succeeded in creating the beginnings of English dictionaries but failed miserably in halting the "deterioration" of the English language as a consequence of his work. He failed because language is like a living organism whose evolution is inextricably linked to the evolution of humankind and of speech.

The historical issue which receives little attention but which is embedded in the English-only Movement has to do with the native peoples of the United States and their languages. Per the objectives of the English Only advocates the languages of American Indians would be imperiled. What would happen to the languages of Native Hawaiians? What would the status of Spanish be in Puerto Rico? What about the Spanish language of the Southwest? Place names of the region attest to an Hispanic presence prior to the arrival of Americans from elsewhere in the country.

A great number of Hispanics in the American Southwest have long roots in the area. One part of my mother’s family, for example, arrived in San Antonio Texas, in 1731. That predates the Declaration of Independence by some 45 years. A hundred years later members of that family fought for Texas Independence. Since 1848--when by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo more than half of Mexico was dismembered and annexed by the United States--members of my family have fought and died for the American flag and its causes. I served as a Marine during World War II, serving later in the Air Force during the Korean Conflict and into the Vietnam era.

Calling attention to Arizona, Baldenegro writes: "To the extent that our state is ’great,’ people of Mexican descent have contributed immensely to that greatness through their decency, heroism, honest work and strong work ethic. Quite simply, Arizona history cannot be told without discussion of the substantial and substantive contributions of Mexicanos and Chicanos. Indeed, some of the greatest aspects of Arizona’s history were made in Spanish."

ispanics are not newcomers to the American experience. They are part of that experience. Hispanic children learn about John Smith, the Mayflower, Ellis Island. But they do not learn that their forebears were not part of that experience. But that’s not the only history of Americans in the United States.

All American children ought to learn as Hispanic children of the Southwest and Puerto Rico know that the American experience has a different form in those areas. As it does in Hawaii. And as it does where Asian Americans and African Americans came into the country.

Even though I was an American, when I started school in San Antonio, Texas, in 1932 I was forced to attend a segregated school for "Mexicans" as we were generically identified then. The public schools of Texas did not end their segregation of "Mexicans" until 1969 when ordered to by a federal court (see "Montezuma’s Children," The Center Magazine, November/December 1970). Ultimately I mastered the English language, and several others along the way.

The United States is not just a land of immigrants. The preponderance of African Americans are not immigrants to the United States. Puerto Ricans are not immigrants to the United States. Asians from Hawaii are not immigrants to the United States. By and large, Mexican Americans (especially of the conquest generation) are not immigrants to the United States. The United States came to them. To impose by force of fiat the conqueror’s language upon them is not the way to win friends and influence people--especially when a preponderance of Hispanics have already learned the language of the country, despite the erroneous impression that they don’t want to make or have not made the effort to learn English.

The agenda of the English Only advocates is dark and sinister, full of sound and fury auguring turmoil for the country. The begining of fascism takes many forms. In Nazi Germany it was the Jews. Are Hispanics to be scapegoats for American fascism?

It’s surprising how people are ready to give up their freedoms in the name of "unity," how they are ready to replace one tyranny with another, as described in George Orwell’s superb fable, Animal Farm. The lessons of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Cuba ought not to be lost on us. The Russi-fication of the Soviet Union--establishing the primacy of the Russian language in all the jurisdictions of the Soviet Union–did not work. Not because the ethnic peoples of the Soviet Union with all their linguistic diversity opposed the Russian language, but because the proponents of Russian Only opposed all other languages in their domain.

The issues of language are not easy, any more than the issues of culture are not easy. What makes the issue of language particularly difficult is that language lies at the core of one’s existence, it is the primary vehicle by which one mediates the world about one. Therefore to attack the language one speaks is to attack the very heart of one’s identity. That’s why helping people bridge from one language to another is so important. Yet Russell Pearce opposes funding for community-based English classes, believing, erroneously perhaps, in the "permeation theory" of second-language acquisition –that the sonic emanations of the English language permeate the bodies of second-language learners investing them thus with the meanings of English words. That ‘s not the silver bullet of second-language learning, though many Anglo Teachers thought it was when I started to learn English.

People should not be made to feel that they must give up one linguistic identity to become members of another linguistic group. We have surely progressed to the point where we understand that the Americanization process ought to be an additive one. That, in this case, to become an American is to add the American language to one’s linguistic repertoire.

As Hamlet muses during the play within the play: This is miching malecho (mischief badly done). English Only propositions are acts full of mischief and mean-spiritedness. It is not an act by which we shall all come together but an act that will surely divide us as a people where no division need exist and where none should. English Only propositions will bestow to our heirs a legacy of discord. That is not what Arizona nor the country needs at the onset of the 21st century and the struggle against terrorism.

The United States is not what it was 200 years ago. It will not be in 200 years what it is now. It will be, we can hope, the bastion of democracy and the refuge of people seeking liberty as it was in the beginning and as it has been into our time. The United States belongs to its people: the Marshalls, the Blackmuns, the O’Connors, the Scalias, the Singhs, the Renquists, the Garcias, et al. It does not belong to the English, the Italians, the Irish, the Africans, the Hispanics. It belongs to all of us who are American citizens at this moment in time. Our American patrimony cannot be bought, nor can it be sold.

I daresay, should the English-only mentality become national dogma, American Hispanics will not wait three-score years for a Brown v. Board of Education decision to free them from linguistic shackles. They will not go gently into that good night. Nor should they. Hispanics have a history of fighting for American freedoms.

Recently, Senator Mel Martinez (R-Florida) delivered his maiden speech to the Senate in Spanish. While that distressed some folks, I regarded that as a genuine effort on the part of the Senator to remind his fellow Senators that the United States is not a monolithically linguistic enclave. The Senator’s speech in Spanish ought to be a wake-up call for lexocentric monolingual Americans that leadership in a polyglot world requires encouraging our children to learn as many languages as they can.

Because of the diversity of its population at its birth and because of the myriad languages of that population, the founding fathers were wise not to proclaim English as the official language of the newly-founded country. We should value that wisdom and not tie up Americans with linguistic straight-jackets. An example of judicial straight-jacketing occurred recently in Lebanon, Tennessee, where a judge has been ordering "Mexican" women who are American citizens who have run afoul of the law to learn English, or else. If they make no effort to learn English they run the risk of losing their children The court would terminate their parental rights.

The issue here is about assimilation not second-language acquisition. Arbitrarily and capriciously, the judge ordered one "Mexican" woman to achieve a fourth grade level of English in six months. What is astonishing is hat the citizens of Lebanon, Tennessee, are in full support of the judge’s rulings.


Copyright © 2005 by the Author. All rights reserved. Some of the material herein is drawn from an earlier version of this text published by Caravel Press in 1989.

http://www.hispanicvista.com/HVC/Opinion/Guest_Columns/022105OrtegayGasca.htm

Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature
Retired Tenured Faculty, Texas State University System--Sul Ross
English, Linguistics, Journalism, Information Studies, Bilingual Education, Chicano Studies
Dean Emeritus, Hispanic Leadership Institute, Arizona State University
Chair Emeritus, The Hispanic Foundation, Washington DC

1317 E. FM 1717, Kingsville, Texas 78363
Phone: 361-592-2030 Email: felipeo@usawide.net

Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in English and Bilingual Studies
Texas A&M University at Kingsville
Phone: 361-522-8256 Email: p-ortego@tamuk.edu

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:29 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Feb. 21, 2005, 10:30PM

Privatization is Put On Hold

Saavedra opts to create advisory groups to improve 3 low-performing HISD high schools
By MIKE SNYDER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Houston school administrators will not replace the management of three low-performing high schools without the support of parents and community leaders, Superintendent Abe Saavedra said Monday.

After meeting with leaders of the NAACP and other groups opposed to privatizing Yates, Kashmere and Sam Houston high schools, Saavedra said he will form advisory committees of parents and community leaders to help develop reform plans for each school.

In his State of the Schools speech last week, Saavedra called for reforming the schools, saying HISD would solicit proposals to "totally redesign" them because incremental reform efforts had failed. The state has ranked the schools as low-performing since 2001.

"No recommendation to outsource will move forward (to the school board) unless the community has embraced it," Saavedra said Monday.

He said the advisory groups will consult with Houston Independent School District officials as they seek proposals from nonprofit groups, for-profit firms or HISD employees to improve student performance at the three schools.

James Douglas, the general counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Houston chapter, said the organization would oppose any plan to shift management of the schools away from HISD. Opposition to outsourcing was overwhelming among more than 200 parents who met with Saavedra later Monday at Kashmere, said U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston.

"They (Kashmere parents) equate outsourcing with closing the schools," Jackson Lee said, adding that outside managers would not understand the schools' or communities' history. Her district includes Kashmere and Yates.

School trustees on Friday approved Saavedra's plan to seek proposals for new management at the schools. Jackson Lee said Kashmere parents want trustees to amend their vote to reflect Saavedra's commitment not to move forward without community support.

The NAACP, along with some other groups and parents, has said problems at the three schools are the result of years of neglect and inadequate funding.

U.S. Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, said the three high schools have historic importance in their communities. Kashmere and Yates are predominantly black schools, while Sam Houston is predominantly Hispanic.

"Yates is one of the most historic schools in this city," Green said. "It is a shame that during Black History Month we are having this conversation."

Green said misconceptions had arisen in the aftermath of Saavedra's speech, including the idea that HISD was considering closing the high schools.

Saavedra said that was never his intention.

"HISD totally agrees that these schools will not be closed," he said.

mike.snyder@chron.com
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3050964

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:18 PM 2 comments Links to this post

Topics such as marriage edited for school board

By Scott Gold
Los Angeles Times

February 20, 2005

SPRING, Texas - Outside the Spring Church of Christ, a large roadside sign says a lot about the prevailing sensibility in this cordial town. It reads: "Support New Testament Morality."

This is the home and power base of Terri Leo, a state Board of Education member representing 2.5 million people in east Texas. At the urging of Leo and several other members - who describe themselves as Christian conservatives - the board approved new health textbooks for high school and middle school students in November after publishers said they would tweak references to marriage and sexuality.

One agreed to define marriage as a "lifelong union between a husband and a wife." Another deleted words that were attacked by conservatives as "stealth" references to gay relationships; "partners," for example, was changed to "husbands and wives." A passage explaining that adolescence brings the onset of "attraction to others" became "attraction to the opposite sex."

Leo said she pushed for the changes to combat the influence of "liberal New York publishers" who by "censoring" the definition of marriage are legitimizing same-sex unions.

Some education advocates have criticized the board.

"This was never about defining marriage," said Samantha Smoot, president of the Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based nonprofit that opposes what it calls religious "extremism." "It was an effort to get anti-gay propaganda in the books."

Gilbert Sewall, director of the New York-based American Textbook Council - an independent organization that reviews textbooks - also criticized the Texas-approved books' promotion of abstinence-only sex education. Such programs are "naive and confused," said Sewall, who described himself as an "educational conservative."

Research, much of it conducted by the federal government, has raised a host of questions about the effectiveness of abstinence programs in preventing disease and pregnancy. Teenage girls who are taught in the programs do wait longer before having sex, many experts believe, but are less likely to use protection when they do - causing them to contract sexually transmitted diseases at the same rates as those who have sex earlier.

"I have very little use for this religion-driven curriculum," Sewall said. "This confuses sex and moral education."

Texas is the second-largest buyer of textbooks in the nation, after California. Books purchased here wind up in classrooms across the nation because publishers are loath to create new editions for smaller states. As a result, five social conservatives on the 15-member Texas board, frequently joined by five more moderate Republicans, have enormous clout.

Publishers have no choice but to heed many of the group's wishes, said Don McLeroy, a dentist, Sunday school teacher and Texas Board of Education member.

"They've got to sell books," he said. "It's business."

Conservatives' efforts over the years to edit textbooks are legendary here. In a nod to those who believe God created the Earth 6,000 years ago, a sentence saying the ice age took place "millions of years ago" was changed to "in the distant past." Descriptions of environmentalism have been attacked as antithetical to free-enterprise ideals; a passage describing the cruelty of slavery was derided as "overkill."

The board's stance on the health texts, some observers said, speaks to a critical factor in the GOP's recent success: a recognition by evangelical conservatives that all politics is local.

The political ascendance of Christian conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s was fueled by their coordinated effort to win seats on school boards, city councils and other local bodies. A leader of the Christian Coalition said at the time that he'd be willing to train an evangelical to run for dogcatcher.

Copyright © 2005, The Baltimore Sun
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-te.textbooks20feb20,1,5990600,print.story?ctrack=2&cset=true

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:21 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Note: This NYTimes editorial is a message to our young/younger leadership. We should all be concerrned about these directions that policy is taking at the national level. -Angela

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: February 19, 2005

here's going to be another Ross Perot, and this time he's going to be younger. There's going to be a millionaire rising out of the country somewhere and he (or she) is going to lead a movement of people who are worried about federal deficits, who are offended by the horrendous burden seniors are placing on the young and who are disgusted by a legislative process that sometimes suggests that the government has lost all capacity for self-control.
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He's going to be set off by some event like what is happening right now with the Medicare prescription drug benefit. He's going to look at an event like that one, and he's not only going to be worried about the country's economic future - he's also going to be morally offended. He's going to sense that something fundamentally decadent is going on.

And he's going to be right.

In the past months we have learned that the prescription drug benefit passed last year is not going to cost $400 billion over 10 years. The projections now, over a slightly different period, are that it's going to cost over $700 billion. And these cost estimates are coming before the program is even operating. They are only going to go up.

That means we're going to be spending the next few months bleeding over budget restraints that might produce savings in the millions, while the new prescription drug benefit will produce spending in the billions.

That means that as we spend the next year trying to get a grip on one entitlement, Social Security, we'll be launching a new one that is also unsustainable.

Over the next few months we will be watching a government that may be millions-wise, but trillions-foolish. We will be watching a government that sometimes seems to have lost all perspective - like a lunatic who tries to dry himself with a hand towel while standing in a torrential downpour.

And much of this new spending will go to people who have insurance to pay for their drugs.

In Congress, some are taking a look at these new cost projections and figuring that maybe it's time to readjust the program. In the House there are Republicans like Mike Pence and Jeff Flake (whose predictions of this program's actual cost have been entirely vindicated by events). In the Senate there are people like Judd Gregg and Lindsey Graham. These fiscal conservatives want to make the program sustainable.

Perhaps the benefits should be limited to those earning up to 200 percent of the level at the poverty line. Perhaps the costs should be capped at $400 billion through other benefit adjustments. These ideas are akin to what the candidate George Bush proposed in 2000.

But the White House is threatening to veto anything they do! President Bush, who hasn't vetoed a single thing during his presidency, now threatens to veto something - and it's something that might actually restrain the growth of government. He threatens to use his first veto against an idea he himself originally proposed!

Have we entered another world, where up is down and rationality is irrational?

Every family and business in America has to scale back when the cost of something skyrockets. Does this rule not apply to us as a nation?

We may as well be blunt about the driving force behind all this. The living and well organized are taking money from the weak and the unborn. Over the past decades we have seen a gigantic transfer of wealth from struggling young families and the next generation to members of the AARP. In 1990, 29 percent of federal spending went to seniors; by 2015 roughly half of all government spending will go to those over 65. This prescription drug measure is just part of that great redistribution.

But what can't last won't last. Before too long, some new sort of leader is going to arise, especially if we fail to reform Social Security this year. He's going to rail against a country that cannot control its appetites. He's going to rail against Republicans who promise to be virtuous - but not just yet. He's going to slam Democrats who loudly jeer at Republican deficits but whose own entitlement proposals would make the situation twice as bad. He's going to crusade against the interest groups who are so ferocious on behalf of their members that they sacrifice the future.

It won't be a green-eyeshade economic crusade this leader will be launching. It will be a moral crusade, and it'll be quite a show.

E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:15 PM 5 comments Links to this post

February, TEXAS MONTHLY

By Jan Jarboe Russell

Grand Opportunity Party

The Republicans and George W. Bush won a record share of the Hispanic vote in November—and that ought to scare the Democrats to death.

THE CRITICAL BATTLE FOR THE HISPANIC VOTE, and all it portends for Texas and for America in the years to come, has its roots in a meeting at the Capitol in the fall of 1998. Karl Rove, the political adviser to then-governor George W. Bush, summoned Lionel Sosa, the head of a San Antonio advertising agency that specialized in marketing to Hispanics, to talk about how Bush’s reelection campaign could generate a big Hispanic turnout. Rove was already thinking ahead to a presidential race in 2000, and he saw an opportunity to prove to Republicans outside Texas that Bush had the ability to win over a traditionally Democratic constituency. The meeting was scheduled for one hour. It lasted three. Bush had three goals. First, he wanted the highest percentage of the Hispanic vote of any Republican candidate in Texas history. Second, he wanted his message to be emotional and bilingual—“un nuevo día,” “a new day.” Last, he wanted the campaign to be a road map for Republicans, starting with himself, to effectively target Hispanic voters in the future.

Sosa had a wealth of political experience to draw on. Back in 1978, when Texas was still largely a one-party Democratic state, Republican John Tower hired him to create advertisements in English and Spanish for his reelection race for the U.S. Senate. Sosa’s ads played on the cultural conservatism of Hispanics: patriotism, work ethic, and strong family ties. Tower claimed to have won 37 percent of the Hispanic vote (because of the stakes, such estimates have been hotly disputed), which proved to be essential in a race decided by less than a percentage point. In subsequent years, Sosa advised Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush, saying, in effect, that the secret to winning over Hispanic voters was that there was no secret. Hispanics wanted what other voters wanted—a good candidate with an authentic message. Sosa’s message was simple: No group of voters is as hungry for the American dream as Hispanic immigrants, and the Republican party is a better guardian of that dream than the Democratic. For Bush’s 1998 campaign, Sosa would focus on an explicit emotional connection. “I’m proud of the Hispanic blood that flows in my family,” Bush said in an ad that showed him with his nephew George P., the son of Florida governor Jeb Bush and his wife, Columba, who was born in Mexico. On election night, Bush got 49 percent of the Hispanic vote, the highest percentage any statewide Republican candidate had ever received.

In the 2004 presidential election Bush called upon Sosa again, and again the strategy proved successful. Depending on whose figures you believe, Bush’s percentage of the national Hispanic vote ranged from 36 to 44 percent, with the consensus being around 40 percent. (The explanation for the wide range, dueling spinmeisters say, is that some surveys oversampled suburban areas while others undersampled the suburbs in favor of barrio precincts.) But the precise number isn’t as important as the first digit; anything in the forties is huge for Republicans. Democrats have been counting on the ever-growing Hispanic population to make them competitive in Texas and around the country, but Republicans believe that Sosa’s cultural-conservatism, American-dream message can enable them to lock in a significant fraction of the Hispanic vote and solidify their majority status.

One bit of good news for the Republicans is the increasing diversity of the Hispanic vote. It was much easier for Democrats to roll up big majorities when almost all Hispanics lived in poor inner-city neighborhoods like the West Side of San Antonio or Houston’s East End. But in recent years many second- and third-generation Hispanic voters have moved to the suburbs and small towns. They don’t always have Hispanic names, and they may not feel the same sense of ethnic identification as barrio voters. A growing number are Protestant, not Catholic. The more diverse Hispanics become—in where they live, in where they worship, in what they do for a living, and in how many generations they are removed from their Mexican origins—the more independent their voting habits are likely to be. On November 2 Bush won at least 50 percent of the vote in several South Texas counties, including Cameron (Brownsville and Harlingen), and averaged 41 percent in the counties along the U.S.-Mexico border.


How did the GOP broaden its appeal to Hispanics? Conventional wisdom credits the cultural conservatism noted by Sosa and its influence on Hispanic support of the war in Iraq and antipathy to abortion and gay marriage. The challenge for Democrats is to counter the appeal of the Sosa message to contemporary Hispanic voters. In some ways, the Democrats are still stuck with the messages of the fifties and sixties, when Texas was strongly tainted by segregation and Mexican Americans were frequently its victims. Even around San Antonio “No dogs or Mexicans allowed” signs could be found at restaurants, and Mexican Americans could not use public swimming pools or water fountains. The Hispanic community on the city’s West Side needed a champion, and Democrat Henry B. Gonzalez, a first-generation Mexican American with strong emotional ties to Mexico, emerged to fill that need. In 1957 Gonzalez, then a member of the Texas Senate, conducted a 22-hour filibuster against segregation legislation. Throughout a 37-year career in the U.S. Congress, Henry B.—as he was known by everyone—preached the message of civil rights for Mexican Americans.

Then, in the late seventies, another son of the West Side, Henry Cisneros, emerged as a different kind of champion. Henry C. was a second-generation Mexican American. He learned the political lessons of the first generation from, among others, his late uncle Ruben Mungia, who owned a print shop on the West Side and served as Henry B.’s campaign manager in his first race for the Texas Legislature. On Sunday afternoons Mungia would load his nieces and nephews in the back of his truck, and they’d spend the afternoon politicking at union picnics and campaign rallies. Henry C. was the embodiment of the first generation’s dream: He had college degrees from Texas A&M, Harvard, and George Washington University. When he was elected to the San Antonio city council, in 1975, he focused not on civil rights but on a new issue—better jobs for San Antonio. The appeal reached not only Hispanics, who wanted their children to prosper, but also Anglos, who wanted their city to experience the good times that Houston and Dallas had enjoyed. His message—that a rising tide lifts all boats—was powerful enough that, in 1981, he was elected mayor, a nonpartisan office, with the help of more than 40 percent of the Anglo vote. Democrats pressed him to run for governor or U.S. senator, but as we know, he spurned what many saw as his destiny, leaving Texas in 1993 to serve as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. When he was charged by the FBI because it found that, during a background check, he had understated payments he’d made to his mistress, his political prospects and influence evaporated.

By then, Henry C.’s message was getting competition from Sosa’s mantra that Republicans were better guardians of the American dream. Sosa’s partner, Frank Guerra, quit his job as an executive producer for San Antonio’s KENS-TV in 1992 to run the congressional campaign of Henry Bonilla, also an executive producer at the station. Bonilla became the first Hispanic Republican from Texas to be elected to Congress. Bonilla reflects the change in San Antonio’s Hispanic community. He was born in a public-housing project but now lives on the suburban North Side. “Times have changed,” Guerra told me. “Hispanics are in the mainstream now. They don’t need the Democratic party to be their champion. They are making it on their own. The victim message no longer works.”

Bonilla has announced that he will seek the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate if Kay Bailey Hutchison runs against Governor Rick Perry, raising the possibility that the history of Hispanic politics in Texas would evolve from Henry B. to Henry C. to a very different Henry B. Bonilla is trying to position himself as Cisneros once did—as an archetypal figure with a statewide future. The question is whether he can win a Republican primary race, since the party is dominated by Anglo voters and candidates. Tony Garza, currently Bush’s ambassador to Mexico, couldn’t do it; he finished fourth in the 1994 attorney general’s race.

The difference in the Republican and Democratic messages could be seen on the Web sites of the two 2004 presidential candidates. Cisneros, who is now back in San Antonio as founder and chairman of the affordable-housing developer American CityVista, delivered John Kerry’s main message to Hispanics, narrating the Massachusetts senator’s biography. The site also had a long list of detailed comparisons of Kerry and Bush on major issues such as health care and education. The approach of using Cisneros as a broker seemed especially outdated. Bush, meanwhile, narrated his own Web site biography, and a slogan on a banner promised that he would fight for Hispanics cuerpo y alma—body and soul.

For Democrats, the 2004 Bush vote suggests that the days of the party’s being able to count on straight-ticket Hispanic voters are over. Republicans are going to contest the Democrats’ traditional dominance of the Hispanic vote and build a Hispanic farm system of statewide officeholders, as Bush did and as Perry has continued to do with appointees like railroad commissioner Victor Carrillo and Supreme Court justice David Medina. In 2002 Perry easily won reelection, with an estimated 35 percent of the Hispanic vote, against Tony Sanchez, a billionaire banker—the same percentage that Greg Abbott received in the attorney general’s race and five percentage points more than John Cornyn polled in his Senate race against Ron Kirk. “For now, if Republicans can get a third of the Hispanic vote in statewide races, they win,” says Mike Baselice, a Republican pollster in Austin. “Republican candidates will continue to win statewide races in Texas for at least a decade.” The day will come, sometime around 2030, when the Democratic dream of a Texas that is majority Hispanic will be a reality, but if the Democrats don’t change their stand-by-your-party message, they may not be able to change the direction of Texas politics.

Copyright © 1973-2005 Texas Monthly, Inc. An Emmis Communications company. All rights reserved.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:18 PM 0 comments Links to this post

February 14, 2005

It is my pleasure to announce February 23, 2005 as TEXAS Grants Day at the Texas Capitol. Please help us ensure that TEXAS Grants continues to provide hope and opportunity for future students by helping us make TEXAS Grants Day a success.

As you know, the TEXAS Grants program has helped thousands of students better afford the rising cost of a college education. In its first five years, 205,000 TEXAS Grants have been awarded and the program has grown from $100 million to $320 million per biennium. Unfortunately, there are efforts in the legislature to slash funding for this program, which could eliminate TEXAS Grants for up to 33,000 students -- maybe you or your child or a student you know.

Help protect TEXAS Grants and ensure the program continues to provide hope and opportunity for future students. Come to Austin for TEXAS Grants Day and contact your legislator, and especially the members of the Appropriations Committee, the Speaker of the House, and the Lt. Governor and the Governor. Ask them if they are going to fully fund the program.

If you are interested in helping make TEXAS Grants Day a success, please contact Chris Smith in my office at (512)463-0113, or via e-mail at christopher.smith@senate.state.tx.us

Sincerely,



Rodney Ellis

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:13 PM 0 comments Links to this post

To whom it may concern-

As an Upward Bound alumna, it disheartens me to learn
that President Bush has proposed to cut Upward Bound, Talent Search, and
Gear Up in his proposed FY 06 budget. (Like others) as I determine what personal
sacrafices I am able to make in order to support the continuation of such
programs, I've determined that the 1st step I can take is to organize an
online petition where TRiO/Gear Up supporters can express their desire
for Congress to continue favorable funding of Upward Bound, Talent
Search, & Gear Up.

With that, I ask you to take a few minutes to sign this petition located at web site address http://www.ipetitions.com/campaigns/save_trio/

Your assistance, time, and cooperation with this is truly
appreciated!

Veronica Hernandez
1993 ASU Upward Bound Alumna
1992 UC Berkeley UBMS Participant

"TRiO Programs: Making a difference!"

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:52 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Improving Education With True Accountability
Davy McClay
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Page C - 5
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Since our governor's State of the State address, talk of merit pay for
teachers has resurfaced. We've been there and done that.

Let's see what happened with the merit pay system we had from 2000-2002,
before the funds vanished. Frankly, there were problems: We got paid more
for giving students less! As soon as it was known what was needed for
"success," we teachers were issued powerful de facto mandates -- which are
still in effect -- to feed students a rigorous diet of the targeted
material, to the exclusion of virtually all other curricula. Naturally, our
test scores experienced a sudden dramatic inflation for a couple of years.
What else would you expect? However, the ensuing flattening of test scores,
and then decreases in 2004, raise doubts about the efficacy of a curriculum
based on test preparation.

I recognize that, like McDonald's, we've expanded our menu. In 2001,
writing was added to elementary grades' multiple-choice tests. But
teachers, so busy preparing students for testing, no longer have time to
work with students on creating original literature. And yes, due to
expanded tests, we now teach some science at some grade levels. And social
studies? It's not tested. So guess how much social studies most kids learn?
(Somewhere between slim and none!).

Just as fast-food entrees are bland accommodations to the masses, so is our
test-preparation curriculum. We're not producing gourmet thinkers; we're
churning out one-size-fits-all test-takers. And the "one size" is
pathetically anemic.

Pseudo-accountability brought us here. Genuine accountability can lift us
out of this fast-food mentality and into true education. How? By holding us
accountable for things we control. True accountability must be aligned with
responsibility. So, here are the three responsibilities of teachers:

-- Classroom delivery skills, including firsthand/hands-on deep knowledge
for students in all content areas. Hold us accountable for our delivery. If
we can't perform, don't sign our checks. Likewise, if we're doing well we'd
love some tangible appreciation. But please do it with significant
within-our-ranks input.

Also, gauging how well students "receive" our deliveries and translate them
into test scores is limited. How much of those test scores are attributable
to moodiness, hunger or, especially, home influence? Nobody really knows.
Statisticians can only render "probability," based on their mix of
variables. So don't hold us accountable for student receptivity until you
can determine an unbiased, exact measure of the extent of our impact.

The next two responsibilities aren't easy to objectify. But they're
critical components of true answerability and true education. The governor,
indeed everybody, must also actively promote these ideals:

-- Following the mandates of my heart: Our most powerful teaching skill is
what and who we are deep inside. That takes place without saying a word. We
must each find the real truth within ourselves, accompanied by daily self-
reminders and refocusing, and with unselfish love and concern for the well-
being of each student. This mandate also includes being creative and
teaching to the needs of individual students, even when our beloved
curriculum silently yells, "No. Don't you dare!"

-- Helping parents hold themselves accountable: There's a cultural gap
between the values that drive education and urban families. All
socio-economic classes share identical beliefs and attitudes about
education. But less-than- affluent families often haven't been through "the
system" and thus tend to lack experiential knowledge for translating those
beliefs into actions. They must know what behaviors are required. We must
teach those critical behaviors and provide parents with cultural capital to
buy into the system. I use a first-day-of-school meeting with parents, at
least one home visit per year, monthly evening trips to public library, and
a few extra phone calls when they aren't needed. Teachers should be family
and parents should be teachers.

So I ask the governor to enthrone substance -- true accountability -- over
show. We need our governor to pave the way for us teachers to magnify all
these responsibilities, over and above scrambling to satisfy some new
program that will be replaced in a few years.

Davy McClay (davy@trueeducation.net) is a National Board certified teacher
at Sylvan Park Elementary School in Van Nuys and an instructor at Michael
D. Eisner College of Education, CSU Northridge.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/02/13/EDGSMAPBO81.DTL

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:15 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Lawmakers from MALC give House Bill 2 an F
The Mexican American Legislative Caucus held a news conference yesterday criticizing the current version of House Bill 2 saying that it fails kids, fails teachers, and fails the test of leadership. Lawmakers stated that it does not provide enough money to guarantee every Texas child an exemplary public education. It also widens the equity gap between a handful of haves in 24 school districts, and every other child in Texas. It is a roadmap to disaster.
http://www.malc.org/pdfs/HB2-021605.pdf
 

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

********************************************
TO: Coalition for Public Schools Organizations
FROM: Carolyn Boyle

Another huge, expensive, private school voucher bill has been filed in the Texas House of Representatives, H.B. 1263. Co-authors of the bill are Representatives Linda Harper-Brown (R-Irving), Jodi Laubenberg (R-Parker), and Carl Isett (R-Lubbock). You may read the text at: http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/cgi-bin/tlo/textframe.cmd?LEG=79&SESS=R&CHAMBER=H&BILLTYPE=B&BILLSUFFIX=01263&VERSION=1&TYPE=B

I'll have more details in the coming days, but here are the highlights:

-- It is an urban voucher pilot program in counties with a population of 800,000 or more. That would include the counties of Harris (Houston), Dallas, Tarrant (Fort Worth), Bexar (San Antonio), and Travis (Austin).

-- A school district would be required to participate in the voucher pilot program if: (a) the district is the largest district in the county in which a majority of the students are educationally disadvantaged OR (b) at least 90 percent of the students in the district were educationally disadvantaged during the preceding school year.
(NOTE: I'll have a list of affected districts as soon as possible. The second criteria would bring in smaller districts. For example, in Bexar County it is likely that the districts mandated to distribute vouchers would include San Antonio ISD, Edgewood ISD, Harlandale ISD, and South San Antonio ISD. Under the bill, charter school districts in the five counties also would be required to distribute vouchers if 90 percent of the students are disadvantaged. This might make it possible for some charter schools to convert to become unregulated private schools funded with vouchers.)

-- Following are the children eligible for a voucher: A student who has dropped out of school OR a student who attended a public school for the majority of the preceding semester or is starting school for the first time; AND meets one or more of the following criteria:
a. Meets the definition in Texas Education Code 29.081 of "at risk of dropping out of school," which is wide-ranging, including: did not pass any section of the TAKS test, did not pass a readiness test in PreK-3rd grade, failed two subjects during a semester, is pregnant or a parent, has been placed in an alternative education program, has been expelled, is on parole or probation, is homeless, etc.
b. Is in kindergarten through grade 12 and is eligible to participate in a district's special education program
c. Is a student of limited English proficiency
d. Resides in a household whose income did not exceed 200% of the qualifying income for a reduced-price lunch
e. Is the victim or is the sibling of a victim of certain acts of violence.

-- The voucher amount would be the lesser of 90 percent of the statewide average annual cost per student for the preceding school year (amount to come) or the private school's average actual annual cost per student. If the child is a special education or bilingual education student, the voucher would be the amount of funding to which the school district would be entitled.

Texas taxpayers cannot afford this huge, expensive, irresponsible private school voucher program that would take money away from public schools in urban areas and statewide! Please write a snail-mail letter to your state representative and state senator in opposition to H.B. 1263, H.B. 12, or any other bill or floor amendment that would use public dollars to pay tuition at private and religious academies.

-- Texas legislators need to solve school finance problems, not create new problems!
-- Texas legislators need to provide more funding for neighborhood public schools, not take money away to give to private schools!
-- Lawmakers who are fiscal conservatives should not create a new "school stamp" entitlement program in urban areas.
-- Schools in rural and suburban areas cannot afford to lose funding to subsidize private academies in big cities.

State legislators must hear from public school supporters NOW!! Please write a letter to your state representative and senator.

Addresses are:
State Representatives and Speaker of the House Tom Craddick: P.O. Box 2910, Austin, Texas 78768-2910
State Senators and Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst: P.O. Box 12068-Capitol Station, Austin, Texas 78711

If you do not know who represents you at the Texas Capitol, go to http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/fyi/fyi.htm

Thank you for making it a priority to send a letter to your state leaders! And if you have a chance to see a legislator in your home community or in Austin, be sure to tell him or her that private school vouchers are a bad idea!!

***********************************************************
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 8:49 AM 1 comments Links to this post

79TH LEGISLATURE
Hispanic Caucus Flunks House Education Plan
Members say education bill is unfair and spends too little.

By Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, February 17, 2005

Texas House leaders' plan to reform the state's education system is unfair and inadequate, members of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus said Wednesday.

About 35 members of the House, almost all of them Democrats, gathered to denounce the bill in the loudest statement of opposition since Republicans filed it two weeks ago.

"What we're really doing is in essence rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and really not making any substantive changes or substantive improvements in our education system," said Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine, the caucus chairman.

Backers of the bill say it would increase overall education spending by more than $3 billion over two years, which would be in addition to the estimated $1.2 billion needed just to cover enrollment growth. But caucus members say that they've run their own numbers and that the bill would not provide enough money even to make up for the cuts that lawmakers made two years ago, which included reductions in spending on teacher health insurance, technology and textbooks.

"It's disingenuous to say we're going to get more money when, in fact, we're just going to go back to zero," said Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, D-Austin.

The Public Education Committee has heard testimony on the bill for the better part of two weeks. House Speaker Tom Craddick, who hopes to have a bill to the floor of the House by early March, defended the amount of money it puts into education.

"I don't know that the school districts are ever going to think that there's enough money in there," he said. "But the state's got to look at what they can afford to do and what takes care of us at the courthouse."

The Mexican American caucus attacked the bill for not including an across-the-board pay increase for teachers and for spending too little money to help economically disadvantaged students. Gallego said the group does not have its own proposal for how much new money should go into education because members first want to determine how much the schools need.

The group also pounced on a Republican proposal to put a 35 percent cap on how much of its local property tax money a school district with high property values must send to the state. About two dozen districts would be likely to see significant funding increases because they would be able to keep more of their money with the cap in place.

The group pointed to the Highland Park district, a wealthy Dallas-area enclave that stands to see its state and local funds increase by as much as 52 percent under the House proposal. The Austin, Houston and San Antonio districts would each see increases of less than 5 percent.

Most of the other districts affected by the 35 percent cap, though, have fewer than 500 students but have high property values because they include oil fields, power plants or other features that drive up values. In 13 of these 23 property-wealthy districts, more than half of the students were considered economically disadvantaged last year, according to Texas Education Agency data.

Bill supporters have defended the cap by saying it would affect roughly $30 million in a statewide education system that costs $33 billion annually. They also say districts that have been sending as much as 70 percent of their local money to other parts of the state deserve to keep more.

The 40 members of the Mexican American caucus — or the 63 Democrats in the 150-member House, for that matter — do not have the votes to stop the bill. One Republican who is a member of the caucus, Rep. Pat Haggerty of El Paso, spoke out against the House plan Wednesday.

Democrats also hope to corral support from rural Republicans who do not think the system will give their schools enough new money.

Craddick said supporters of the bill have met with all but about five members of the Legislature.

"Overall, I'd say the bill is very acceptable to most members of the House from both parties," he said.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/02/17schools.html
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:32 PM 0 comments Links to this post

February 17, 2005

Do You Know What Your Kids Are Watching on
"Educational" TV at School?

By Dr. TERESA WHITEHURST

"A parent who's too busy or doesn't realize the
importance of tuning in to his or her child often
expresses surprise when the child gets into trouble or
drops out of school. The child knows, but can't
explain, that those "bad kids" he or she hangs out
with are alike a lifeline. This is the secret pullall
the unpleasantness and risk in the world is worth the
feeling of being seen and heard by someone."

from Jesus on Parenting: 10 Essential Principles that
Will Transform Your Family

I learned something new yesterday. Channel One News,
the "educational" TV show that my daughter Isa and
millions of other American kids watch every morning at
school, is busy recruiting our teenagers into the
military.

"Mom, they're really aiming at the black kids, and the
Hispanic kids too. I'm so sick of seeing those
military ads everyday. "The Power of One", and all
that lots of my friends are falling for it!"

This is especially upsetting to Isa because several of
her black friends, 18, 19 and 20 years old, have been
shipped to Iraq. Some were promised they wouldn't have
to be in combat, but would be doing "mechanical work",
"communications", or "wiring".

It seems doubtful that, when push comes to shove, kids
who've been promised such jobs will be allowed to
avoid combat. One of her friends has already been shot
"in an embarrassing place"; he's being treated
overseas instead of the US so that he can be sent
quickly back into combat in Iraq. Mr. Bush's military
needs warm bodies, able or not.

I stopped the car and asked, "Wait a minute. What do
you mean when you say you're "seeing those military
ads every day"?"

"We have to watch this short thing every morning in
homeroom called "Channel One News"," Isa explained
with a weary tone. "It's educational, supposedly. You
know, the day's news, so we'll be up on current
events. But in between the stories, there are more and
more ads for the Army and the Marines."

I thought about "No Child Left Behind" and the
malignant purpose behind that sweet-sounding act that
Mr. Bush and his men (and at least one journalist paid
$250,000 by the White House) have continuously
promoted to trusting parents across the US. After
catching my breath I asked,

"Are you saying you're being recruited through the TV
you watch during homeroom?" She nodded. I asked again,
"What do your teachers think about this? What about
Mr. Hitchens (not his real name), who told you
privately that he's antiwar? Doesn't he say anything
against it?"



Persuaded Away from College, Towards the Military

"No, I think the teachers and the kids are so used to
it at my school that they don't even notice anymore. I
mean, the other day I was walking to Sociology class
and heard the ROTC instructor telling the kids, "Okay,
this is how you hold your M-16". The whole culture of
the school is military these days, so nobody notices
anything unusual about this. And I think the few
teachers who aren't prowar or proBush are afraid to
get in trouble if they say anything that doesn't sound
pro-military."

As noted in my recent articles on military recruitment
and the coming draft, for two years my daughter and I
have been fighting the aggressive and often sneaky
efforts of military recruiters to sign her up.
Certainly they don't want her for her physical
prowess-she weighs 98 pounds-so I can only assume they
want her for other reasons. Either they've seen her
high verbal scores, or they just want young
bodies-even a tiny one-to serve as cannon fodder.

With a military recruiter present every day in the
cafeteria, military "speakers" visiting classrooms,
and huge recruiting posters in the guidance office,
perhaps it's not surprising that teachers and even
guidance counselors have been influenced by the
constant hum of "enlist, enlist, enlist". Students at
Isa's school are told that, yes, they could consider
college, but that it's "very expensive" and "may not
guarantee you a job", while the military "will pay for
college" and "practically guarantees you'll have a
great career". Oh, and "a big cash bonus right now if
you sign up today!"

Joining the military is presented as the one and only
path of honor, heroism, and service to one's country.
Many students, not surprisingly, want to be heroes or
get out of poverty, so they're signing up in droves.
College recruiting is a rarity at this school, and at
her previous school, as well. Ah, but military
recruiters are constantly lurking around, spending
quality time with fatherless boys, handing out
materials, giving "aptitude tests" (played down as
"just helping you figure out what you're really good
at"), handing out Marine bumper stickers, and
otherwise making their smartly-uniformed presence
known.

"It's just everywhere", Isa continued. "Here's an
example: In gym we don't exercise or play sports like
we used to do-now we "sound off", just like in the
military, while running and doing jumping jacks,
push-ups, and pull-ups. The freshmen are told to
shout, "one, two!", then the sophomores are supposed
to answer, "three, four!", and then the whole group of
us has to say "Sound off!" I mean it's ridiculous Mom!
How are you supposed to exercise while you're shouting
at the top of your lungs?"

As I started driving again, I took a moment to reflect
on this "military culture" that's replacing the
educational culture in America's public schools.
Surely Channel One News, which parents and educators
have criticized from the start as nothing more than a
way to let corporations advertise their products
directly to kids without their parents' knowledge,
wouldn't go so far as to market the military to
children as a (better, more heroic, more exciting)
alternative to college? Surely they wouldn't override
Mom and Dad by sneakily recruiting through
"educational" TV at school? Would they? Could they?

To be continued in, "Military Recruiting Commercials
on "Educational" TV in Public Schools: Day after Day,
Military Ads Target Children-Especially Hispanics and
Blacks-On Channel One News in Schools Across the
Nation"

Dr. Teresa Whitehurst is a clinical psychologist and
writer. Her most recent book describes the nonviolent
guidance of children,Jesus on Parenting: 10 Essential
Principles that Will Transform Your Family, Baker
Books, 9/2004.

You can contact her at DrTeresa@JesusontheFamily.org

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Feb. 16, 2005, 3:26PM

HISD Can't Fix 3 Schools

Saavedra hopes his plan to give outsiders control turns the troubled campuses around
By JASON SPENCER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Superintendent Abe Saavedra delivers the State of the Schools speech at the George R. Brown Convention Center on Tuesday. The Houston schools chief announced Tuesday he would consider giving outsiders control of the city's three lowest-performing high schools to accomplish what the school system hasn't been able to do on its own.

When the next school year begins in the fall, Yates, Kashmere and Sam Houston high schools will be operated by someone other than Houston Independent School District administrators, according to the plan introduced by Superintendent Abe Saavedra. He unveiled the proposal before 2,000 business and community leaders during the annual State of the Schools speech at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

Saavedra said he is open to offers from nonprofit and for-profit groups, and HISD employees. That could include universities, school reform companies such as New York City-based Edison Schools, or local nonprofits, such as the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) or Project GRAD (Graduation Really Achieves Dreams), both of which have a presence in HISD.

In his first such speech since taking over the 209,000-student district in December, Saavedra also promised:

•More pre-kindergarten classes for low-income children and tuition-based pre-kindergarten for those who can afford it.
•Less standardized testing.
•Zero tolerance for cheating on tests.
The three high schools marked for takeover have worn the state's "low-performing" label since 2001, despite leadership changes and other HISD-based reform initiatives.

"These redesigned schools must be fundamentally different from what exists today," Saavedra said. "The reform groups that take over these schools will have to correct the deficiencies, raise academic standards, redesign management practices, improve capacity among staff members or replace staff, and engage parents in the process."

Trustees back takeover
The admission that HISD is out of in-house ideas to turn the troubled schools around comes two years after it was named the top urban school district in America by the Los Angeles-based Broad Foundation.

School board trustees will vote Thursday on whether to let Saavedra seek offers from groups willing to take over the high schools that have a collective student body of about 5,000. Several trustees, including board President Dianne Johnson, said they like the idea.

"It's bold," she said. "We're not going to have students stuck in low-performing schools."

Other urban school districts have taken similarly drastic steps to overhaul chronically under-performing schools, though many have been school systems in financial and academic crisis.

The School District of Philadelphia has hired a handful of groups, including Kaplan, Drexel University and the Princeton Review, to manage 16 high schools beginning next school year. Private companies already run 54 of Philadelphia's elementary and middle schools.

Some parents have promised to oppose Saavedra's idea.

"It is an awful thing," said Arva Howard, the mother of a Yates freshman and the vice president of Parents for Public Schools. "It is an unfair thing and it's something we will fight."

Yates' problems, she said, are the result of a long history of mismanagement and a lack of adequate resources. Howard said parents have been pleased with first-year Principal George August and she questioned Saavedra's priorities in light of the recent opening of a school exclusively for over-school-age immigrants.

"It's interesting that immigrants can come in and get a fully equipped school, but the children of taxpaying citizens cannot," Howard said.

Mercedes Alejandro, president of Parents for Public Schools, said she may support bringing in an outside organization to run the schools, but questioned Saavedra's timing. It was only last week that the school board approved Saavedra's plan to reorganize the school district administration, a move that Alejandro had hoped would improve the weaker schools.

Still, most trustees agreed something drastic must be done to get Yates, Sam Houston and Kashmere on track.

"We have given everyone involved ample time to remedy the situation," said trustee Kevin Hoffman, who represents Kashmere. "We have to act now on behalf of the students."


Targeting feeder schools
Mike Feinberg, a Houston teacher who co-founded KIPP more than a decade ago, said the organization would only be interested in an arrangement that would give it control of all the elementary and middle schools that feed into the high schools.

"Four years is not enough time to bring kids from where they're performing to the highest levels," Feinberg said. "The problems with Yates, Sam Houston and Kashmere do not start in ninth grade."

KIPP, which operates 38 schools nationally and plans to open nine more this summer, opened its first high school, a charter school, in Houston last fall. KIPP schools specialize in raising performance of urban students by using long class days and weekend studies.

Feinberg's sentiments were echoed by Chris Barbic, head of the three successful YES College Preparatory Schools in Houston.

"The way you ensure high schools perform well is by having great middle schools," said Barbic, who added that he won't be submitting a proposal to HISD.

Saavedra said he's open to proposals that include control of the feeder schools.

Yates and Sam Houston already host Houston-based Project GRAD programs, as do the schools in their feeder patterns. The organization does not manage the schools but offers its own curriculum, requires schools to impose strict disciplinary policies and promises college-bound graduates $1,000 annual scholarships.

Although some HISD trustees and administrators have recently raised questions about Project GRAD's effectiveness, the reform group is considering a takeover proposal, said executive director Roy Hughes.

Whoever gets the contract, it will likely be several years before any of the schools show significant progress, said Robert Wimpelberg, dean of the College of Education at the University of Houston.

"It takes at least six or seven years in a secondary school ... for demonstrable change that is institutionalized," he said. "This is a tall order, and starting with schools that are behind the eight ball is part of the challenge."

jason.spencer@chron.com

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/topstory/3042049

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:39 PM 0 comments Links to this post

79th LEGISLATURE
Some districts would see huge windfall

by Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, February 16, 2005

The new debate over school finance in the Legislature keeps coming back to an old question.

The issue of how to make sure schools across Texas have similar amounts of money to educate each child has carried the debate over school finance in and out of the courtroom for the better part of four decades. Leaders of the Texas House say the major education bill they're pushing this year would make an already equitable system even more so, in large part by reducing schools' reliance on local property taxes for revenue.

"We've never considered this degree of equity in the history of the state," said Rep. Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington, chairman of the Public Education Committee.

But critics of that plan point out that about two dozen of the 1,040 school districts in Texas stand to see their revenue shoot up, by more than 50 percent in some cases, because the House plan would limit the amount of local property tax money that a district must hand over for redistribution to other schools.

None of those districts is in the Austin area.

"You take a select group of schools and you super-fund them when you don't have enough money to meet the basic needs of some districts," said Wayne Pierce, executive director of the Equity Center, an advocacy group that represents schools with relatively low property values.

The plan calls for the maximum property tax rate for school maintenance and operation to be reduced from $1.50 per $100 in assessed property value to $1. The state would make up for that money by increasing other taxes. School districts that have smaller tax bases relative to their enrollment would get more money from the state so that all schools have roughly the same revenue per student.

There would still be some revenue-sharing among districts to prevent property-wealthy districts from raising significantly more money than districts with smaller tax bases, though far less than there is now.

In addition, local voters could agree to let the district tack another 10 cents onto their tax rate over five years in the form of a "local enrichment tax."

Grusendorf said the House plan would guarantee that 90 percent of students are in districts that can raise about the same amount of revenue per student with the enrichment tax, up from 79 percent under the current system.

"The Supreme Court has clearly said so long as you equalize the basic program that you can have local enrichment," Grusendorf said. "In my mind there's no question that this passes the constitutional test."

Pierce, however, said the figure fell to 79 percent because lawmakers directed some education money away from the formula in 2003, instead sending it directly to districts.

The House plan would put a 35 percent limit on the amount of local property tax money that a property-wealthy district must send back to the state. Right now, for example, Rep. Dan Branch, R-Dallas, said that one of the school districts he represents, Highland Park, sends about 70 percent of its property tax money outside the district.

"Caesar should never take more than about a third off of an individual's plate, a family's plate or a school district's plate," Branch said.

But the two dozen districts that would have to pay out more than 35 percent if not for the new cap would see large increases in the money available to them. State and local revenues for maintenance and operation in Highland Park would increase from $5,883 per pupil to as much as $8,948, a 52 percent jump.

But many of the other two dozen districts are not in wealthy residential areas. Webb Consolidated, near Laredo, which sits on oil-and gas-rich property but has only about 300 students, would see its per-pupil spending jump from $14,178 to $18,793.

The per-student revenue in the Austin school district would increase from $6,325 per student to $6,515, a 3 percent increase.

Those figures do not account for the enrichment money that districts could raise.

Districts can have vastly different per-student amounts because the current system provides extra money for some types of students, such as those who speak little English or need special education. There is also money in the system to help small school districts.

Still, critics are alarmed by the 23 districts' potential ability to raise and spend so much. Pierce said it's important to remember that districts are part of a larger system.

"You could say all the money in our system is in the state system for public education, regardless of which way it is raised," he said.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/
legislature/stories/02/16equity.html
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:16 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Published: February 16, 2005

Plan Would End 48 Programs; High School Effort Is Funded

By Erik W. Robelen
Washington EDUCATION WEEK

It’s really a matter of simple math.

President Bush wants to fashion several new education programs this year, including pricey items central to his oft-touted high school agenda. But he also is proposing for the first time since he entered the White House to cut the overall budget of the U.S. Department of Education.

So, if Mr. Bush is serious about reining in the agency’s spending, something’s got to give.

And he’s asking Congress to give up a lot—48 line items, to be exact. That’s how many of the department’s programs the president wants to put out of business to make room for his priorities. This is not the first time Mr. Bush has sought to abolish a raft of education programs; he’s tried repeatedly, but lawmakers from both parties have largely foiled those efforts.

Among the items on the chopping block this time are funds for education technology, vocational and technical education, arts education, and state grants under the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities program.

Overall, the president’s fiscal 2006 budget request would reduce the Education Department’s discretionary budget by $530 million, or about 1 percent, to $56 billion. The last time the agency’s budget actually shrank was a decade ago, during President Clinton’s administration.

Some lawmakers, including key Republicans, have made clear they’re not interested in Mr. Bush’s idea of shifting $1.3 billion in vocational and technical education aid to his high school agenda.

“I would hate to see the high school program sort of built on the funding back of vocational education,” Rep. Michael N. Castle, the Delaware Republican who chairs the House Education Reform Subcommittee, said last week. “And I don’t think I’m alone in this.”

He predicted that federal lawmakers—as they have before—were likely to substantially rearrange the figures in Mr. Bush’s request before it finally reaches his desk. Indeed, Mr. Castle expressed skepticism last week that the cornerstone of President Bush’s second-term education agenda, expanding high school testing and accountability, would become law this year.
A ‘Disciplined Budget’

The Education Department was one of numerous federal agencies whose budgets were slated for cuts in the budget request that President Bush forwarded to Capitol Hill on Feb. 7. The White House has emphasized that the $2.5 trillion budget package comes in tight fiscal times, as the war in Iraq, homeland security issues, and the president’s stated intention to gradually decrease budget deficits make trade-offs necessary.

“I would call it a disciplined budget,” Mr. Bush said during a Detroit speech a day after announcing his budget plan for fiscal 2006, which begins Oct. 1. “My budget reduces spending—reduces spending—on nonsecurity discretionary programs by 1 percent, the most disciplined proposal since Ronald Reagan was in office.”

The budget, Mr. Bush’s fifth, represents the first time he’s sought to cut the Education Department’s overall discretionary spending, which has grown steadily—and in some years rapidly—since the mid-1990s.

But the big hikes of a few years ago have tapered off. In fact, Congress, which typically had raised the final budget above Mr. Bush’s request, last year for the first time provided less than he asked for. The final discretionary number for the Education Department in fiscal 2005, $56.6 billion, was an increase of almost $1 billion over the previous year, or 1.6 percent.

This year, Mr. Bush has especially set his sights on high schools for added focus, and money.

He is asking Congress to provide $250 million to help states meet his plan to require expanded high school testing. He also wants to create a flexible $1.2 billion pot of money for intervening with high schoolers at risk of academic failure. Beyond that, he wants to boost by eightfold the budget for Striving Readers, a middle and high school reading program, to name a few of the biggest-ticket high school items.

Further, he’s called for a new, $500 million Teacher Incentive Fund to help pay incentives to teachers in high-need schools and high-need subjects, such as math and science. And, he’s seeking to carve out an extra $1 billion to increase the budgets for the Title I program for disadvantaged students—the centerpiece of the No Child Left Behind Act—and special education state grants.

“The budget focuses on key priorities of this department and of the president and on getting results,” Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said in a Feb. 7 conference call with reporters.

She argued that many of the programs the president wants to shut down have been proved ineffective or are too small to make much of a difference.

“I will tell you that 15 of those are $5 million or less,” Ms. Spellings said of the programs targeted for extinction. “It’s hard to get a critical mass for a national program . . . with small amounts.”

But big or small, members of Congress rarely seem inclined to say farewell to programs.

At a Feb. 7 rally in Philadelphia, Rep. Chaka Fattah, a Pennsylvania Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, vowed to fight Mr. Bush’s plans to eliminate the $307 million GEAR UP program. An acronym for Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, the program helps low-income elementary and secondary students prepare for college.

“We have seen it work in every state,” Mr. Fattah said. “President Bush . . . should be ashamed to submit this budget to the United States Congress.”
‘Stay and Fight’

In an interview last week, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, expressed dismay with Mr. Bush’s request. He and other Democrats have long argued that with the ambitious demands of the No Child Left Behind Act to improve student achievement, the federal government must provide much more aid.

“The fact is, the education budget of the administration is just inadequate to meet the education needs of this nation,” Mr. Kennedy said. “This nation, with a $2.5 trillion budget, ought to be able to afford the kinds of investments in the No Child Left Behind Act, vocational education, and in higher education which are absolutely essential.”

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he has decided to remain as the chairman of the Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee for labor, health and human services, and education this year to protect social spending from the president’s proposed cuts. He had been contemplating a shift to a new spending panel on intelligence matters.

“Strong advocacy for education, health care, and worker safety will be indispensable if they are to get their fair share of President Bush’s austere budget,” he wrote in a Feb. 8 op-ed piece in The Washington Post. “Fiscal 2006 looks like an especially tough year, so I’ve decided to stay and fight rather than switch.”

But some members of Congress were more welcoming of the president’s plan.

“I commend President Bush for proposing a fiscally responsible budget that will rein in federal spending and protect our top priorities, such as national defense, homeland security, and job creation,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, a freshman Republican from North Carolina who serves on the education committee, said on the House floor last week.

Although she suggested that lawmakers may differ with the president on some details, Ms. Foxx called the plan a “good first step in the right direction.”

“I am encouraged that he wants to hold federal programs to a firm test of accountability and eliminate programs that no longer serve their intended purpose or perform a vital function,” she said.

Rep. Castle said in an interview that while he opposes some of the president’s proposed cuts, he foresees little, if any, growth in the education budget total beyond Mr. Bush’s request.

“This White House is serious about the numbers,” he said, “so I think if you want to come back and say, ‘Hey look, we’ve got to fund this on education,’ we’ve got to be ready to show what we’re not going to fund this year, unlike a lot of other years.”

One of the most controversial targets in the plan is vocational and technical education.

Mr. Bush wants to redirect the $1.3 billion currently spent on those activities to his new High School Intervention program. The Education Department notes in its detailed budget proposal that the vocational state grants, which account for most of that money, have been rated “ineffective” by the White House Office of Management and Budget for having “produced little or no evidence of improved outcomes for students despite decades of federal investment.”

And yet, many department programs not targeted for elimination haven’t exactly received a thumbs-up. The OMB analysis rated many programs as “results not demonstrated.” For instance, the OMB said of the nearly $11 billion special education state grants that “there is no evidence that this program improves outcomes.”

The new high school program, the Education Department says, would support targeted interventions that raise the achievement of high schoolers, especially those at risk of not meeting state standards. States could still choose to fund vocational programs with that money, though vocational education advocates argue that support for their programs would likely get squeezed out.

Hanging the high school plans on cuts elsewhere may be risky.

Last year, the president tried to cut the vocational and technical education grants by some $300 million, but Congress refused to go along. Vocational programs have some influential friends, from Rep. Castle to Sen. Michael B. Enzi, R-Wyo., the chairman of the Senate education committee, and Rep. John E. Peterson, R-Pa., who serves on the House appropriations panel.

“This is one of my top issues, and I find it very disappointing that we have to go through the . . . battle again,” Rep. Peterson said in an interview last week.

“We’re trying to send everybody down this academic trail,” he said, arguing that many jobs require technical training.

“We beat it back last year,” Mr. Peterson said of the president’s previous effort to trim vocational aid. “I don’t think they’re going to win that battle.”
PHOTO: Customers wait to pick up copies of the proposed fiscal 2006 federal budget last week at the Government Printing Office in Washington. For the first time in his tenure, President Bush is seeking a cut in Department of Education spending.
—Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Vol. 24, Issue 23, Pages 1,35-36
http://www.edweek.org/

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:00 PM 0 comments Links to this post

79th LEGISLATURE
Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said Monday that he does not think the state should replace the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in high schools this year with a series of end-of-course exams.

A major education bill endorsed earlier this month by the leaders of the House would require students to pass state tests at the end of their courses to graduate, instead of passing the 11th-grade TAKS. House leaders also want to phase out the TAKS in grades nine and 10 to make room for the end-of-course tests.

"Right now we need to focus on raising our performance criteria on the test," Dewhurst said. "We just started this new test. Let's not scrap it today."

This is the third year that Texas schools will give the TAKS. For most grades, the percentage of correct answers needed to pass has increased each year. The 11th-grade passing standard is increasing as well, but at a slower pace.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/02/15legebriefs.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:20 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Dr. Robert H. Kimball
University of Houston/Clear-Lake

Hispanic students are victims of a public education system that does not recognize their culture, language or goals. Consequently, many Hispanics become disillusioned and are convinced to leave public schools. The dropout rate for Hispanic students in public education ranges from 10% to as high as 60% in the Border States. At least 7 states are reporting to the Department of Education that the dropout rate for minorities is over 50% (1998). The Intercultural Development Research Association (2003) reported that the attrition rate for Hispanics in public education was 50% in Texas.

School districts, for example, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) often report inaccurate dropout data to their state education agency. Reporting false data is an attempt to inform the public that HISD does not have a dropout problem. In 2003, HISD reported a dropout rate for Hispanic students as only 1.2%. Some schools in Houston with over 80% of minority and economically disadvantaged students have reported a dropout rate of zero.

School board members, the Superintendent, and community groups deny that the dropout rate is that low. In spite of public denials of this fabricated dropout rate, the rate remains the official dropout rate in Houston. When school districts, like Houston, argue that Hispanics are not dropping out of school, few programs are put in place to reduce the exodus of young Latinos from public schools. When you consider that half of the Hispanic population in the United States are of school age and eligible to be in the public school system, this treatment is not only criminal it is unconstitutional.

The school board trustees for HISD have contributed to the pushout policy for Hispanic students. When they report inaccurate dropout data to the community, they are hiding the fact that there is a crisis in providing an education to the majority (Hispanic) of students in the District. Hispanic students who are pushed out of public schools are not given the tools necessary for success.

The media frequently report the murder, rape or victims of other crimes of young Hispanic youths in major cities. The victims or perpetrators are almost always high school dropouts. One research study reported that 82% of the persons in prisons did not graduate from high school. Gangs actively recruit young Latino youth who have become disillusioned with the public education system. The unemployment rate of Hispanics between the ages of 16-24 is the highest of any ethnic group. Today, many schools, especially HISD, are providing a track for Hispanics that quickly leads from the school house to the jailhouse. School Districts are spending more tax dollars for failure than they are for success.

DROPOUT FACTORS

Reasons for students dropping out of high schools have been the subject of many research projects. The Harvard University Civil Rights Project suggest schools provide a negative environment for Hispanic students. They report four factors that create this negative environment. They are:

1. High Stakes Testing and grade retention
2. Zero Tolerance policies for school discipline that lead to frequent suspensions and expulsions
3. Inadequate funding and resources
4. Lack of support from teachers and community

Numerous research projects provide other reasons for students dropping out. One study suggests that a contributing factor to the large Hispanics dropout numbers is the high birth rate among young Hispanic teenagers. A recent survey found that 40% of Hispanic dropouts cited being pregnant or having to care or provide for a child as a reason for dropping out. Latinas are more likely to dropout because of a conflict over traditional family roles of motherhood and family responsibility. It is estimated that over 50% of the parents of Hispanic children are high school dropouts. Many Latinas who become pregnant often decide to dropout because their parents dropped out of school.

The language barrier is also cited as a reason for a high dropout rate. There are many public schools that have no Spanish speaking members on the staff. Many school counselors and administrators have preconceived
attitudes that Hispanic students are not interested in obtaining an education. Many school staff members are not making an effort to learn Spanish or study the culture of Hispanic students. One study reports that 40% of Hispanic students who are pushed out of school are not proficient in English. It reports a high correlation between language proficiency and school success.

There are elementary schools in HISD which are classified as bilingual programs but in reality only teach subjects in Spanish. As a school administrator, I was assigned to an elementary school in HISD where every student was Hispanic and fluent in Spanish. The teachers only taught in Spanish. On a daily basis, I visited these classrooms and never observed lessons being taught in English. One student who had been a student at the school for 3 years could not communicate in English. The research on bilingual programs is mixed. However, no one would argue that the Spanish only program at this HISD School is a typical bilingual program. This teaching method, Spanish only, does not help students succeed and will only result in them becoming a dropout because of a lack of proficiency in English.


There are many Hispanic students who overcome all barriers and graduate from high school. These students become graduates of schools that are successful in helping Hispanic students succeed. These caring schools encourage students to stay in school and do not practice policies that results in pushing out Hispanic students from public schools.

The President of the North Carolina Society of Hispanic Professionals, Marco Zarate, argues that “The number #1 reason that dropout rates are higher for Hispanics is not work-related and it’s not family related. It is school related. If a child is doing well in school, if he or she feels part of the school, they are not going to drop out”. A Department of Education survey supports his argument. It found that 51% of students who dropped out said they did not like school and 35% said they could not get along with their teachers. Almost 40% reported that they dropped out because the school was failing them.

PUSHOUT POLICIES

Research is beginning to provide evidence that Hispanic students are not dropping out, they are being pushed out by the policies and behavior of school Administrators, teachers, and board trustees. In many Texas schools, Hispanic students are being targeted by educational leaders for elimination from the public school system. They targeted them because they are not likely to pass the state examinations that are used to rate schools and provide financial incentives to all employees. In Texas, the school rating system discriminates against those school districts with large Hispanic populations. Patricia Hardy, member, State Board of Education, argues that “The rating system rewards school whose populations are largely wealthy and white…a silent form of segregation”.

In Texas, the state puts pressure on schools to increase results on state mandated tests. Schools put pressure on administrators, teachers and students. As a result, students are being systematically pushed out of the educational system. It’s called a plan to hold schools accountable, but in reality, it’s a plan that encourages schools to push out low performing students and in some cases according to recent media reports, help them cheat on state mandated tests.

Several strategies are being used by school districts to push out Hispanic students. In 2002, the School Board of the Houston Independent School District adopted a policy of retaining students who did not pass one core course in high school. This policy had been in effect since 2000 at many of the high schools in Houston because these schools had asked for a waiver on course requirements. When the waiver policy significantly increased scores on state mandated test, the Board made it a District policy. By making this policy change, they were able to keep the low performing Hispanic students from taking the Texas examinations at 10th grade where it counted for the school’s rating.

In Houston, over 20,000 Latino youth were kept in the 9th grade for up to 3 years under this policy. Latino youth became disillusioned at being retained and often quit. Statistically, students have a 50% chance of dropping out if they are retained one year and 90% if they are retained two years. Educational leaders were informed of this research finding but continued to use this policy to push out Latino youth from public education.

In Houston, a group of activists obtain national media attention to this problem. After the national media’s attention, Houston changed its policy of requiring that students pass all subjects to be moved to the next grade level. However, today, in spite of that change, there are still a very large number of Latino students being retained in the 9th grade in Houston. Today, there are many high schools that begin with a freshman class of over 1000 students and in four years graduate less than 200 of them.

Other methods to push out Hispanic students are for Principals to hire “bouncers” as Assistant Principals. These are school administrators who will do anything it takes to increase attendance rates, a factor in school ratings. They are also hired to insure that only the best students are still enrolled when the time comes to take the state mandated test that will determine the school’s rating and bonuses.

As an assistant principal in a Houston high school, I personally observed these bouncers at work. They would walk the halls and tell students to go to the office and withdraw. When the student asked why, they were told it was because they had too many absences or were sent to the office too many times for discipline. Sometimes they would be told that they had poor grades. Oftentimes, these administrators would suspend Hispanic students for minor infractions which would make them appear as troublemakers and help build a case for pushing them out. Many of these students were 16 years of age and sometimes as young as 15.

In Houston schools and many others across the nation, Principals have replaced counselors with Deans (formerly called Assistant Principals). These Deans are placed over a small population of the school under the small school concept reform movement. Unfortunately, these Deans do not have the experience nor will they take the time to help students who need counseling. They were hired to bounce students, not retain low performing students.

The counselor who used to provide encouragement and help students with problems have almost disappeared in many high schools as a result of the small school reform movement. The Deans are also not trained in how to help a student select a course required to graduate on time. Many students took courses they did not need for graduation or were placed in courses for which they had already had credit.

As a result, they often discovered a few weeks before graduation that they were not qualified to graduate. A recent study of 10 high school programs in the HISD that list the names of graduates revealed that between 10 and 20% were not eligible to graduate in spite of being on the official graduation program.

RESULTS OF PUSHOUT POLICIES

Unfortunately, these polices are destroying the lives of many Hispanic young people. The current polices and practices of many school districts are causing the Hispanic community to subject their youth to a life of prisons, welfare, substandard health care and a lack of safety because they are doomed to live in high crime areas.

These polices have a major impact on the economic future of Texas. It is estimated that between 1985-1986 and 2002-2003 school years, the costs of public school dropouts were in excess of $500 Billion in lost revenue, income and costs associated with the State paying for prisons, welfare and unemployment. Pushout policies impact a city’s growth, because major businesses evaluate the education attainment of a community when deciding to relocate. According to the Department of Education, Texas is 47th in the nation in educational attainment.

How we educate our children in Texas will determine our economic future. Businesses and growth depend on an educated population. Two cities, as an example, Gary, Indiana, and Detroit, Michigan, have experienced the loss of many businesses because of the low level of education of many of its citizens. Businesses have left the city and new businesses are not moving to those cities. The Detroit public school system is going to close 110 schools. If cities like Houston do not recognize that its pushout policies are going to severely impact its economic future and destroy many young lives, it will quickly become another Gary, Indiana or Detroit, Michigan.

Communities like Houston, Texas must stop the practice of pushing out Hispanics or they will cease to be a viable community in the future. The State of Texas and other States will only lose their most valuable resource, educated people, if they do not change policies that are designed to deprive them of a constitutional right…an education and the right to pursue happiness. Recently, the Chairman of the House Education Committee in Texas, Kent Grussendorf provided great advice. He stated,” You can not hide your head in the sand. Children are too important not to solve the problem”.


Dr. Robert Kimball

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:06 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Lawmakers Need to Face Up To Real Costs of Good Schools

by Carlos Guerra
Web Posted: 02/15/2005 12:00 AM CST

San Antonio Express-News

After years of warnings, how can so many lawmakers refuse to adequately fund public schools and cling to the fantasy that today's kids will be prepared for the increasingly demanding world they face?

In 2000, U.S. Department of Education tests showed that 23 percent of Texas fourth-graders and 32 percent of eighth-graders were behind in math, and 71 percent of fourth-graders lagged in reading.

And though a high school diploma now is required for many more jobs, our lawmakers still want to keep taxes — and expectations for students — far too low for anyone's good.

Texas already ranks 45th in high school completion rates and 46th in the percentage of people with high school diplomas. How can leaders define it a "success" when only 55 percent of students pass high school-exit exams?

And after all those tests lawmakers foisted to create the illusion of accountability, our education miracle's phantom nature is being revealed in comparisons of Texas students with those of other states.

After scores in state tests "improved" each year for more than a decade, Texas scores in nationally normed measures have not, and in some cases they have worsened.

National SAT test scores rose from 1,010 in 1995 to 1,020 in 2002, for example, while scores in Texas — which ranks 47th — dropped from 996 to 991.

"Businessmen will tell you that you have to spend money to make money," muses Dick Lavine of the Center for Public Policy Priorities.

State Demographer Steve Murdock issues more dire warnings.

"Texas may add 3 million kids between 2000 and 2040 to its public school population, a 70 percent increase," Murdock says. "Minority children are already a majority in our school systems, and we project that two of every three kids over the next 30 or 40 years will be Hispanic and about eight of every 10 will be non-Anglo."

This high growth of minority students demands that we reconsider school funding adequacy.

"To argue that you will hold districts accountable for programs which you do not provide the resources to achieve is a cruel joke," says Paul Colbert, a former lawmaker who has closely tracked school funding for 30 years. Colbert, who sponsored Texas' first student assessment measures, likes districts being held accountable for their students' performance.

"But you have to provide the resources necessary, and study after study indicates that it costs at least 40 percent more to appropriately educate an economically disadvantaged kid, and at least 40 percent more to educate a kid who has limited proficiency in English," he says. "And if a kid is both, it costs the combined effect of those two."

House Bill 2, that chamber's school funding bill, would end supplemental funding for gifted-and-talented students entirely and slash special education funding 40 percent.

"Currently, we provide $877 for economically disadvantaged kids, and it would cut it to $665," Colbert says. "But the (state's own) study says that you need $1,960 and they want it set at a fixed dollar amount, so if it's adequate this year, it will be more inadequate the next year and the next year."

The state's study also pegged limited English proficiency costs at $1,248 per student in 2004. HB 2 would fund it at $450.

"That is better than the $438 it's currently funded at," Colbert says, "but if it's inadequate this year, it will be inadequate the next year and even more the next year."

And when will we face reality?


------------------------------------------------------------------------
To contact Carlos Guerra, call (210) 250-3545 or e-mail cguerra@express-news.net.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Online at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA021505.01B.Guerra.ab1f5ab3.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:47 AM 0 comments Links to this post

By Joseph Rosenbloom International Herald Tribune

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

BOSTON The book's title is a mocking lament: "Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools."

Written by education activists and published by Beacon Press here in September, the book echoes the continuing grumblings in some academic circles about the No Child Left Behind Act, which President George W. Bush signed into law three years ago to prod improvements in U.S. public schools.

In particular, the book zeroes in on the concept of test-based accountability, which the law embodies. That idea has been riding a wave of political support in Washington and state capitols for more than a decade, culminating in enactment of No Child Left Behind four years ago. It passed Congress with broad bipartisan approval; the Senate favored it on a vote of 87-10.

In his State of the Union address on Feb. 2, Bush hailed what he portrayed as the law's success, saying that "standards are higher, test scores are on the rise and we're closing the achievement gap for minority students."

The day before, Bush's newly installed secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, said that the law's testing component is "the linchpin of the whole doggone thing."

But the authors of "Many Children Left Behind," along with leaders of some civil rights organizations and educators' professional associations, are deploring what they say are the harmful effects of "high-stakes tests."

By that they mean federal or state programs that mandate schools to use standardized tests to measure academic achievement, combined with sanctions against schools or students depending on the results.

No Child Left Behind, for example, requires yearly testing in grades three to nine and at least one year of high school to rate students' progress. Schools whose average test scores do not measure up are subject to being ordered to pay for extra tutoring or student transfers to other schools and, ultimately, to being turned over to state or private management. Bush proposes extending the law to cover three years of high school.

The intellectual rebuttal to the high-stakes testing regime, to use the critics' term, is detailed in "Many Children Left Behind," a compendium of seven essays. The book's authors argue, among other things, that such an approach crudely evaluates performance, punishes schools for deep-seated social problems beyond their capacity to remedy and causes teachers to narrow their curriculum and adopt a short-sighted "test-prep" strategy at the expense of real learning.

"High-stakes tests are wooden assessments that are so detached from reality, especially in schools serving poor students, that it's outrageous," Theodore Sizer, a contributor to "Many Children Left Behind," said in a recent interview.

Besides Sizer, a visiting professor at Harvard and Brandeis Universities and a former Brown University professor, other contributors include Deborah Meier, founder of schools for low-income students in Boston and New York City and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, and Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University.



As the prestige of the authors suggests, the book's message reflects a strong current of continuing opposition among American education thinkers to the trend toward test-based accountability.

"Within education schools, my view is distinctly a minority view," acknowledged Robert Schwartz, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who supports the trend.

Studies of high-stakes testing show that they tend to produce higher rates of students dropping out or being held back to repeat a grade, and those who fall by the wayside are disproportionately African-Americans and Latinos, according to Darling-Hammond of Stanford.

"Schools can get rewarded for pushing students out," she said. "If you get rid of the lowest-achieving kids, your average will go up. You are not necessarily improving achievement. You may be just getting rid of the lowest achievers."

In rebuttal, Schwartz said, "There's very little evidence that I have seen that's definitive on that subject." He referred to the finding that test-based accountability results in higher dropout rates.

By long-standing American tradition - epitomized in the legendary extreme of the one-room schoolhouse on the prairie - teachers and local school boards are entitled to a large measure of autonomy. Unlike the educational systems, say, in France and Germany, there was relatively little centralized control over U.S. public schools.

The earliest embrace by the states of standardized exit tests as a qualification for a high school diploma dates to the 1970s. The trend has accelerated as the overall performance of American students has deteriorated, compared to the scores of their counterparts from other industrialized nations.

By the time that No Child Left Behind took effect, in 2002, about half of the 50 states already had instituted a standardized exit exam as one yardstick to determine eligibility for graduation.

"Decentralizing the setting of standards to individual schools had resulted in a lot of inequities," Schwartz said. Test-based accountability "is the most powerful lever we have that's driving the system to get better," he added.

Elaborating on that point during a panel discussion that Schwartz moderated at Harvard last summer, William Moloney, the Colorado education commissioner, noted that five years of such testing in his state "have seen Anglo students at twice the level of African-Americans. When the metro dailies picked that up, that drove change for minority kids in those neighborhoods."

Moloney added that "absent embarrassment, you will see no change."

Darling-Hammond countered recently: "That argument has been put forth for more than 10 years and it just hasn't proven to be true."

Some leading civil rights advocates bemoan the trend toward test-based accountability, but not all of them do. Spellings's African-American predecessor as Bush's education secretary, Rod Paige, often touted No Child Left Behind as the key to closing the "achievement gap" and as the United States' most crucial civil rights initiative.

Among those opposed to No Child Left Behind is the chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Julian Bond. He decried the law at the association's national convention in July, saying that the testing program was disproportionately harming minority children.

Two Democratic members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Representative Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania and Representative Major Owens of New York, raised the issue squarely with Bush at a White House meeting last month, according to Paul Braithwaite, the caucus's executive director.

"You can't have a test until students are prepared," Braithwaite quoted Fattah and Owens as having said to Bush.

The testing features of No Child Left Behind continue to rankle many educational professionals as well. A critique of the law as "overemphasizing standardized testing" and "narrowing curriculum and instruction to focus on test preparation rather than richer academic learning" was endorsed last October by the National Educators Association, which represents 2.7 million educators.

All told, 45 education, civil rights, children's and other groups have supported that position since October, said Monty Neill, co-executive director of Fair Test, an education advocacy group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the prime mover behind the statement.

The list includes such other major educators' associations as the American Association of School Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English and National School Boards Association.

Conspicuously missing is the 1.3-million member American Federation of Teachers, which has supported the accountability principles of No Child Left Behind but has cooled on some aspects of its implementation.

A paramount concern of the educators' associations that endorsed the white paper, according to Neill, was the law's having established a "set of punishments that are likely to be counterproductive and demoralizing of the teaching force."




 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:13 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Note: This courageous protest is by an 11-year old boy and son of one of our graduates, Dr. Francisco Guajardo, who lives in south Texas. He’s saying that he wants to change the way that children learn. “We should be preparing them for life, instead of TAKS,” he says below in Spanish. Macario, the son, will also be on the abc affiliate tonight on the five o'clock news as part of a two part series on his protest of the TAKS.


http://www.diariosrumbo.com/
-------------

14 de Febrero de 2005

A Debate Utilidad de TAKS Para una Buena Educación

BY DAVID ROBLEDO

Unos defienden al TAKS como la única vía de asegurar el aprendizaje, otros dicen que le resta importancia a los niños
edinburg — Por primera vez desde su puesta en marcha en la primavera de 2003, la Evaluación de Conocimiento y Habilidades de Texas, mejor conocida como TAKS, encontró la oposición abierta de un estudiante.
Macario Guajardo, de 11 años, estudiante de quinto grado, se niega a presentar el TAKS como protesta contra la forma en la que se desalienta el aprendizaje del arte y la cultura y se presiona constantemente a maestros y estudiantes para aprobar los exámenes.
"Quiero cambiar la manera como aprenden los niños. Debemos estar preparándonos para la vida en vez de para el TAKS", dijo Guajardo. Aseguró que no tomará el TAKS la próxima semana.
En entrevistas por separado, los padres del niño y las autoridades del Distrito Escolar de Edinburg coincidieron en que tiene todo el derecho a protestar.
Presión constante
La comisión del TAKS infringe la ley del estado que exige a todos los estudiantes tomar la prueba. Quien no la tome no puede pasar al siguiente nivel, aunque haya logrado buenas calificaciones, dijo DeEtta Culbertson, portavoz de la Agencia de la Educación de Texas (TEA).
La prueba TAKS evalúa los conocimientos de los alumnos para determinar si se ha cumplido el currículo, y también califica a las escuelas y distritos por el rendimiento de esos alumnos, desde inaceptable hasta ejemplar. Para la TEA, las pruebas estandardizadas tienen por fin que los alumnos aprendan, no que deserten.
Mientras los alumnos deben tomar el examen y ajustarse a él para avanzar al año siguiente, los maestros y los administradores sienten otra clase de presión pues, de manera indirecta, del resultado en el TAKS puede depender su futuro profesional.
Los distritos escolares aumentan los salarios de supervisores y administradores de escuelas con altas calificaciones en las pruebas estandardizadas, y despiden a los otros, explicó Ángela Valenzuela, profesora de Pedagogía en la Universidad de Texas en Austin y autora del libro Leaving Our Children Behind: How 'Texas-Style' Education Fails Latino Youth.
Las escuelas con bajas calificaciones en el TAKS también pueden verse desfavorecidas con la posibilidad de que sus estudiantes se vayan a otras escuelas y, por lo tanto, el financiamiento que reciban sea menor.
Los estudiantes con bajas calificaciones se convierten así en una carga que amenaza las finanzas de los educadores.
El resultado de los temores y el estigma vinculado a no aprobar el TAKS es que los estudiantes se retiran de la escuela, explicó Valenzuela.
Macario dice que él y todos estudiantes siente ese presión.
"Los maestros tratan de asustarnos para salir bien el TAKS. Ellos deben estar alentándonos, no tratando de asustarnos", dijo.
Para Guajardo, y para cada vez más educadores, las pruebas estandardizadas han ido demasiado lejos.
Los clases extraordinarias, los sábados y en el verano le han quitado toda diversión a la escuela. Evitar que la escuela repruebe a toda costa el TAKS parece haberse convertido en un fin en sí mismo.

Riesgo latente

Los estudiantes que no aprueban el TAKS, tienen altas probabilidades de desertar, según una investigación independiente del Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA).
En el caso de los que reprueban dos veces, la cifra es más alta.
Eso demuestra que el TAKS no es lo mejor para los estudiantes, dijo Valenzuela.
"Lo que Macario está haciendo es muy bravo. ", dijo Louisa Acosta, maestra de Muscota New School en Nueva York, que se opone a la concentración en las pruebas estandarizadas.
"Sus acciones están llegando al punto mejor que nadie, explicando por qué el examen no lo ayuda a cumplir sus propios objetivos y crea interrogantes sobre la falta de respuesta del gobierno frente a los asuntos reales que enfrenta la comunidad", dijo Acosta.
Guajardo opina exactamente lo que los expertos han concluido después de años de investigación.
"En la escuela la podríamos pasar mucho mejor", dijo.
Texas está en el sendero equivocado, dijo Guajardo, porque los estudiantes sufren las consecuencias de querer imponer que la aprobación de los exámenes sean el único sentido del aprendizaje.

¿Una prueba contraproducente?
Los alumnos que no aprueban el TAKS suelen desertar, dice IDRA.
Los alumnos que reprueban el TAKS una vez tienen más probabilidades de desertar, según el IDRA.
Y si lo reprueban dos veces, la probabilidad es aún mayor, según el IDRA.
La TEA asegura que deserta sólo 1% de los estudiantes del Valle.
Más de 200 escuelas están en un nivel ejemplar, en comparación con 6 en 1994, según la TEA.
Aunque mejoran las calificaciones del TAKS, los resultados en las pruebas de admisión en las universidades de Texas están bajando.

Copyright 2004 RUMBO

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:18 PM 2 comments Links to this post

From: Packer, Joel [NEA] [mailto:JPacker@nea.org]
Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2005 2:56 PM


By the way, here's how the President's budget proposes to legislatively accomplish his high school reform proposals. As opposed to proposing to actually amending NCLB, the Budget proposes to simply do all this as amendments to the FY 06 education appropriations bill using existing NCLB authorized programs or adding new mandates to Title I.
Here's how:

1) Add two more grades to high school mandated NCLB testing. The budget proposes to add language to the FY 06 education appropriations bill that would provide $250 million for grants to States to develop the additional math and reading tests (interestingly, nothing about additional science tests). Any State that receives Title I funds (which is all states) must develop such assessments and incorporate them into their AYP systems, under "such conditions as the Secretary may establish".

2) High School Intervention: Proposes $1.24 billion for a new program, to be run through the Fund for the Improvement of Education program under NCLB, that would provide formula grants to states (no formula specified) which in turn would provide competitive awards to school districts to "enable them to implement targeted interventions in high-need [undefined] secondary schools". A key piece here is that since part of the funding for this new program comes from the proposed elimination of TRIO Upward Bound, TRIO Talent Search, and GEAR-UP, and those programs have multi-year grants to awardees, more than half of this $1.24 billion ($683 million) will go to pay for such continuation grants.

The only further information provided is this:

High School Interventions. This new initiative would support formula grants to States that wold (sic) in turn award the funds competitively to local educational agencies to enable those entities to implement targeted interventions in high-need secondary schools in order to increase student achievement and narrow achievement gaps between students from different ethnic and racial groups and between disadvantaged students and their more advantaged peers.

3) Mandate that all states participate in 12th grade NAEP: Simply says that as a condition of receiving Title I funds states must do this, "if the Secretary pays the cost of administering such assessments". The budget does propose an additional $22.5 million for such costs.



The overall "new/increased" funding for high school programs in the Bush budget broadly defined includes the following:



Extend NCLB testing for two additional high school grades = $250 million

High School Intervention = $1.240 million

Increase Striving Readers = $175 million

Increase math/science partnerships = $90 million

Increase advanced placement = $22 million

State Scholars Capacity building = $12 million

Mandated NAEP 12th grade state participation= $22.5 million

Total = $1.811 billion



However, these "increases" are paid for by proposed elimination of the following existing high school programs (broadly defined):

Vocational Education State Grants = $1.194 billion

Voc ed tech-prep states grants = $105.8 million

Smaller learning communities = $95.5 million

TRIO Upward Bound = $280 million

TRIO Talent Search = $145 million

GEAR UP = $306 million

Total eliminations = $2.126 billion



NET CUT FOR HIGH SCHOOL PROGRAMS = $315 million


Joel Packer
Manager, ESEA Policy
Government Relations
NEA
202-822-7329
202-255-0915 (cell)
202-822-7309 (fax)
JPacker@nea.org

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:12 AM 0 comments Links to this post

EDITORIAL

A Smart Idea for TAKS Test
EDITORIAL BOARD, AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, February 13, 2005

Texas teachers and students are TAKSed-out.

Who can blame them? At many schools, the focus on the state's standardized testing is so great that teachers are cheating, schools are manipulating data and students are playing hooky. To keep scores up, some campuses are sorting children, sending the ones at risk of failing exams home on testing days or labeling them in ways that exempt them from testing or their scores from being counted.

This is madness.

We're all for assessing students' abilities, as the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exam aims to do. Public schools certainly have improved because of such accountability. But it's gone beyond what anyone imagined. Texas has created a testing monster that pretty much determines curriculum, promotion, campus bonuses and graduation.

Finally a breath of fresh air is offered by state Rep. Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington, chairman of the House Public Education Committee.

Instead of paper and pencil tests, Grusendorf's bill would have students take tests online. TAKS would be replaced with end-of-course tests — a better assessment because such exams, as Grusendorf points out, would test for the entire curriculum, provide broader skill levels and give better feedback.

Under the format, all students would start with basic questions. A right answer prompts the computer to feed tougher questions. Answer wrong and the computer prompts easier questions. The computer provides an instant score at the end of the test and does something more — points out students' strengths and where they need improvement. That would give teachers the feedback to immediately address academic deficiencies and allow them to allocate more challenging work to students who score well.

Criticism that high-stakes testing drives curriculum, forcing teachers to narrow instruction to only those items on the test, is legitimate. Grusendorf's proposal would shift that focus to where it should be — on assessment of a student's academic skills.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/02/13Taks_edit.html
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:42 PM 0 comments Links to this post

An Education Only a Boss Could Love:
Public Schools Lurch a Little Closer to Privatization with HB 2

by Amy Smith

HB 2 author Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington

The House education bill introduced last week drew instant criticism from teachers unions, tempered praise from legislative leaders, cautious restraint from school administrators, and ... heads up, everybody ... an enthusiastic thumbs up from the Texas Association of Business!

Uh-oh.

The state's most powerful business lobby group hasn't been this tickled since the new Republican majority delivered on tort reform in '03. Now comes House Bill 2 – the court-ordered first step toward fixing the school finance system – and TAB President Bill Hammond's excitement is already giving others the urge to send what's being called "A Road Map to Results" to the junkyard before it's even left the driveway. If you're one of the thousands (and counting) of conspiracy theorists who believe the state's leaders are on a mission to privatize public education, the "Road Map" bill – and the business lobby's endorsement of its "free-market principles" – provides additional evidence to support the theory.

State Rep. Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington, who chairs the House Public Education Committee, crafted the legislation as part of a two-pronged approach to changing the "Robin Hood" funding method of sharing local property tax revenues. (A second bill, pending in the House Ways & Means Committee, proposes cutting local school property taxes by a third.)

Indeed, HB 2 carries strong whiffs of free-market influence on several levels. The bill would extend more local control of school districts, establish a uniform "best practices" system, tighten accountability (i.e., standardized testing) standards, weaken teacher contract rights, and stretch dollars whenever possible. "Accountability works," Grusendorf said at a Feb. 3 press conference. "That's why we're dropping the hammer on low-performing schools." In that vein, the bill would give the education commissioner the authority to "move more swiftly and aggressively to take over failing campuses," Grusendorf said. HB 2 would also, for the first time, establish accountability standards "with consequences" for bilingual education programs – although most school districts are desperate even to find qualified bilingual teachers.

The 128-page bill doesn't include across-the-board pay raises for Texas teachers, whose salaries are $6,000 below the national average. Instead, HB 2 promotes a subjective system of rewarding teachers based on "merit" – one aspect of the Republican conviction that any and all workers, including teachers, respond best to individualized financial incentives. (The Senate, by contrast, has made across-the-board salary increases one of its goals for education reform.)

Perhaps the strongest evidence to support the school privatization theory (and the "business model" of school organization) is on page 48 of the bill, under the heading "Educator Quality." There you'll find new language that would eliminate any requirement that superintendents and school principals have prior experience as educators. Instead, HB 2 seeks to identify and hire school administrators with "significant management and leadership experience" to guide teachers and children toward academic excellence. Bruce Banner, a vice-president of the local teachers union, Education Austin, shudders at the thought of retired CEOs running school districts and midlevel business managers serving as principals. The only people who will benefit from that scenario, says Banner, "are the powerful interests that want to expand charter [schools]."

On its face, Grusendorf's bill represents a starting point for crafting a far-reaching education package that Speaker Tom Craddick wants to see moved to the House floor no later than the second week of March. In its nuts and bolts, the bill would:

• Give all school districts a funding boost of at least 3%. For AISD, that means per-pupil funding would increase from $6,325 to $6,515 in 2006.

• Require school districts to start classes on the same day – the day after Labor Day – which Grusendorf said will save taxpayers more than $85 million a year.

• Establish uniform November election dates for school board members, who would serve four-year terms.

• Require schools rated low-performing for two consecutive years to be "reconstituted."

• Restore $1,000 in health care funds that teachers lost in the last session.

Behind the face may be something else. Education advocates, for example, take strong exception to the bill's pretension of restoring the health benefits cut in the last session, especially since nonteaching employees (hit harder by the cuts) are left out of the equation. Said Texas Federation of Teachers President John Cole: "Instead of restoring that money, this plan actually repeals the state's commitment to give all school employees $1,000 in supplemental compensation for health care. The inclusion of a $1,000 increase in teacher pay thus turns out to be less than meets the eye – a matter of taking money out of the pockets of all school employees and then softening the blow by raising pay for a fraction of them."

The bill doesn't breathe an explicit word about vouchers, but rest assured the issue will remain an integral part of the debate that shapes the legislation. The first public hearing on the bill opened this week before Grusendorf's nine-member Public Education Committee, recast this session with three new Republican members replacing three GOP former members considered friendly toward teachers. The committee's two returning Democrats are Vice-Chair Rene Oliveira, D-Brownsville, and Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, both staunch but increasingly isolated defenders of public education. Oliveira has already pointed out what he believes are HB 2's shortcomings – inadequate funding for poor children and children with limited English proficiency, no equitable classroom construction funding, and inadequate teacher salaries. He is also raising doubts about the bill's ability to end school finance litigation, if approved in its current form. "The bill might buy us some time on unconstitutional taxation, but we will still have serious equity and adequacy questions," Oliveira said. (The decision last fall by Judge John Dietz covered both the inflexible structure of the state's property tax system and the inadequacy and inequity of public school financing as a whole.)

Perhaps the most diplomatic nonendorsement of the bill came from Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who said he was "encouraged" that both the Senate and the House were able to roll out proposals less than a month into the session. Dewhurst also expressed confidence that both chambers would produce an education package that, among other things, "provides Texas teachers with the competitive pay they deserve."

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:30 AM 13 comments Links to this post

Panel Passes Bill to Make English Official Language
CAPITOL MEDIA SERVICES
Feb. 11, 2005

PHOENIX - The House Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to declare English
the state's official language.

The prime sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, said the
use of Spanish and other languages damages national unity.

Pearce's bill won support from the Republican-dominated committee in a 6-3
party-line vote.

"In the name of diversity, we continue to promote and encourage people to
speak other languages," Pearce said, comparing the practice to spoiling a
child by providing a car, an allowance and a place to stay. "Pretty soon, if
you're good enough to him there's no need for them to go get a job.

"If you're going to encourage people not to learn English and provide
crutches for them, then you continue to damage what brings us all together
as a nation. We're Americans. We speak English."

HCR 2030 would require all "official actions" of government to be conducted
in English. That includes anything done on behalf of state or local
government that binds or commits the government or "appears to present the
views, position or imprimatur" of the government.

Exceptions are provided to comply with federal law, teaching other
languages, encouraging international trade, protecting the rights of crime
victims and anything that protects public health and safety.

It also would permit "informal and nonbinding" communications.

That provision appears designed to resolve problems with a similar
constitutional amendment approved by voters in 1988. That amendment was
subsequently struck down after courts said it would interfere with the
ability of lawmakers and others to communicate with the public.

Pearce said the intent is to stop government "from encouraging
multiculturist kinds of attitudes by giving out crutches."

He said places like Canada, Malaysia and France with multicultural societies
"have tension and clashes and civil wars that are brewing."

Rep. Ben Miranda, D-Phoenix, said people want to learn English and suggested
that Pearce's bill include a requirement that the state provide adequate
funding for programs to teach it.

Pearce rejected the suggestion, noting that he believes enough already is
being spent.

The last word, though, will likely come from the courts. A federal judge has
ordered Arizona to invest more money into public education to teach English
to students from homes where it is not the main language.

The measure now goes to the full House. If adopted, voters who would have to
approve the change in the 2006 election.

The 1988 version was approved by a margin of less than 1 percent.

http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/news/60953.php

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:24 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Thu, Feb. 10, 2005

By Amie Streater
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

FORT WORTH - Westpark Elementary School Principal Lynn Allen is on administrative leave while Fort Worth school officials investigate a teacher's report that Allen asked the teacher to have a parent withdraw a child from school just before the TAKS is to be administered.

Westpark administrators expect the student, a fifth-grader with severe test anxiety, to fail the reading portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills this month, according to statements given to Fort Worth school district investigators.

On Jan. 26, Allen and Assistant Principal Karen Brown were discussing how to help the student when they called in the child's teacher, Jennifer McMillan, according to statements.

According to McMillan, the conversation crossed the line when Allen told her to ask the student's parents to withdraw the child from school before the TAKS test. Fifth-graders must pass the reading and math portions of TAKS before advancing to the sixth grade.

"She asked me to do this not as a school official, but as if the child were mine, that this is what I would do. I sat there stunned. This is not what I would do if this were my child," McMillan wrote in a statement given to school district investigators.

"This is not morally or ethically right for a teacher or administrator to do. I will not do this."

Bobby Whiteside of the district's Office of Special Investigations said he believes that the administrators were trying to do the right thing for the student.

"Evidence available at this time leads me to believe that Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Allen were simply interested in the child's well-being and were not attempting to alter the TAKS scores at the school," he said.

After meeting with Allen and Brown, records show, McMillan reported the conversation to a co-worker and to Larry Shaw, executive director of the United Educators Association.

Shaw, in turn, alerted school district investigators.

There is no indication from school district records that the child's parents were ever in-formed of the plan.

McMillan declined to comment to the Star-Telegram Wednesday.

Allen was placed on paid administrative leave Friday pending the outcome of the investigation. She also declined to comment Wednesday.

It is not clear whether laws or rules were broken.

Whiteside said the matter has been referred to the Texas Education Agency as a possible violation of its testing rules.

"The investigation is proceeding to determine if the alleged action is actually a law violation, an ethics violation, a testing violation, or since the child was never withdrawn, can the FWISD determine its own disciplinary action without TEA," Whiteside wrote in a report.

'A hard place'

Shaw said McMillan "thinks very highly" of the principal.

"I think Jennifer is a really good person, a good teacher, who was put in a hard place," Shaw said. "She is upset by what she thought she had to do."

Whiteside's report cites a Jan. 19 memo from TEA, which states that educators who violate "test security or confidential integrity" or fail to report violations can lose their teaching certificates.

Allen told investigators that the student had failed the reading portion of the TAKS in the third grade. When Allen took the student out of class for a second attempt at the test, Allen said, the child cried all the way down the hall and while taking the test.

Records show that despite tutoring and extra help, the student has given no indication of having less anxiety this year.

"It hurts me to see a student placed under so much pressure by one test that they become almost physically ill," Allen told investigators Feb. 3.

Allen said the idea to remove the child initially came from Brown, who according to Allen said, "We could tell the mom to withdraw the child and home-school [the student] during the week of the test and then re-enroll" the child.

Allen told investigators that she told Brown that could not be done.

Brown, however, had a different recollection.

In a separate interview, Brown told investigators: "I never said or implied to the teacher or anyone that home-schooling this child was the solution ... to get out of this testing situation. At that point, I remember Mrs. Allen saying something to the effect that this is what she would do if that was her child. However, I do not recall anyone telling Mrs. McMillan to call the parent and ask her to home-school her child."

Brown is on maternity leave and could not be reached for comment.

Declined polygraph

On Feb. 4, Allen met again with Whiteside and initially offered to take a voluntary polygraph test, records show. But when Whiteside "advised her to consider the evidence, Ms. Allen declined the polygraph test."

A fourth person, school diagnostician Jo Stephens, was present during the discussions, records show, because she was waiting for another meeting to start.

Stephens' account of the discussions matches the teacher's.

"Mrs. Brown recommended to Mrs. Allen that the classroom teacher should suggest to the parent to check the student out of school the day before the TAKS. After the completion of the TAKS, the parent could re-enroll the student back into the school. Mrs. Allen agreed with the plan," Stephens wrote in a statement given to investigators.

Stephens wrote that she heard Allen ask McMillan to contact the parent about the withdrawal.

Superintendent Joe Ross declined to comment on the specifics of the investigation. But, he said, test time is tough on everyone in the school system.

"This is a high-stakes, high-pressure accountability system in Texas. It does put pressure on students, teachers and administrators," Ross said. "But we have it, and we have to live with it."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amie Streater, (817) 390-7541 astreater@star-telegram.com

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

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:25 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Lawyer for group says House plan 'about $1,000 a kid light'

07:48 AM CST on Thursday, February 10, 2005

By TERRENCE STUTZ and ROBERT T. GARRETT / The Dallas Morning News


AUSTIN – Lawyers for hundreds of school districts that successfully sued the state over education funding warned a House committee Wednesday that its preliminary reform plan falls more than $4 billion short of a court order to boost school funding.

Houston lawyer David Thompson and San Antonio lawyer David Hinojosa of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund both told the House Public Education Committee that its proposal to increase overall funding for schools by $1.5 billion next year will not provide much relief for districts. The plan would guarantee every district at least 3 percent more in revenue.

"The one concern that overrides all other concerns is the amount of money in this bill," said Mr. Thompson, who was once the state's chief education lawyer. "You're probably about $1,000 a kid light."

The committee proposal includes minimum guarantees of $4,550 per elementary and middle school student and $5,550 per high school student.

Mr. Hinojosa said the funding figures, particularly for younger children, are "nowhere near adequate to educate children" based on the federal and state requirements that school districts face.

The MALDEF lawyer also objected to provisions in the plan – drafted by House Public Education Committee Chairman Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington – that would limit the amount of "Robin Hood" sharing of local property taxes from some of the state's wealthiest districts. Those districts would have to surrender no more than 35 percent of property tax revenues.

Citing estimates that about 10 percent of districts would get more money than the rest, Mr. Hinojosa said it would result in 430,000 students "getting substantially more money for their education" than other students in Texas.

"There is no reason why certain students deserve more money than other students who attend public schools," he argued.

In earlier remarks, Mr. Grusendorf touted his plan as significantly improving funding equity among school districts while curtailing "Robin Hood" sharing of property taxes from $1.2 billion to $145 million a year.

The Legislature is under pressure this year to fix the troubled school finance system after a state judge ruled it was unconstitutional and did not provide enough money for districts to properly educate their students. The judge set a deadline of Oct. 1 to overhaul the $30 billion-a-year system; although the state has appealed to the Texas Supreme Court.

Lawmakers are trying to comply while also giving taxpayers relief on property taxes. Gov. Rick Perry on Wednesday renewed his push to reduce the maximum increase allowed in property tax appraisals to 3 percent a year, down from the current 10 percent.

Mr. Perry said his proposal has solid support in the House, which he predicted "will be for the taxpayers in the final analysis."

However, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jim Keffer, R-Eastland, expressed less confidence that enough votes could be gained to pass a constitutional amendment lowering the cap to 3 percent. Amendments require a two-thirds vote in both houses and approval by a majority of voters.

"I wouldn't say anything's for sure right now," Mr. Keffer said.

Cities and counties oppose lowering the cap. They argue that budget cuts in areas such as social services have left them with more responsibilities and no way to pay.

Mr. Perry has touted other taxpayer protections, and if they win support from lawmakers, he said, he might accept a cap that is greater than 3 percent. Mr. Keffer said one such idea might be to make it easier for residents to force a recall election of officials who repeatedly increase property taxes.

E-mail tstutz@dallasnews.com and rtgarrett@dallasnews.com

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/021005dntextaxes.51159.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:37 PM 0 comments Links to this post

79TH LEGISLATURE

Online testing touted as more efficient way to gauge learning

By Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, February 10, 2005

In the eyes of state Rep. Kent Grusendorf, taking a test with a pencil and paper is so 20th century.

The Arlington Republican and chairman of the House Public Education Committee filed a package of education reforms last week that called for major changes in the state testing program. The most ambitious changes include proposals to administer the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills on computers instead of paper as soon as 2006 and to replace the TAKS in high school with a series of end-of-course tests.

"Online interactive testing will test for the entire curriculum, measure for broader skill levels and give you better feedback," Grusendorf said.

Under the format, all students would start with a basic set of questions. If they get the questions correct, the computer would feed them more difficult ones. Incorrect answers trigger easier questions.

The test not only scores the student at the end, but quickly points out where students need more work and where they excelled. House aides say the online test would be more difficult than TAKS for some students because the computer would feed advanced questions to those who show they're on grade level.

Across the Capitol, Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, said she supports online TAKS testing as a goal and wants educators to help lawmakers determine its timetable.

Butsaid she's not ready to retire the three-year-old TAKS in high school and replace it with end-of-course tests, which the state largely abandoned when the TAKS came along.

"It's too quick, I think, to turn it back around again," Shapiro said. "I think we're sending mixed messages. If we can find statistics . . . anything that shows that one is better than the other, then I would be happy to look at it."

Shapiro said she has not seen that data yet.

In addition, the Legislative Budget Board cautioned this week that Grusendorf's proposed testing changes carry a heavy price tag, though it did not specify how much. Virginia — with about one-fourth as many students as Texas — has spent $55 million to $60 million per year since 2000 to give its schools the hardware and network upgrades necessary to give state tests online.

Texas' TAKS budget is about $45 million, which pays for developing, administering and scoring the test and releasing the test scores and questions.

The full reform bill that Grusendorf laid out calls for about $1.5 billion more in education spending per year.The Texas school system now costs more than $33 billion a year.

The new money, however, will go quickly: Grusendorf wants about $270 million to fund teacher incentive pay, for example. And with Texasleaders trying not to raise taxes while providing more money for priorities such as bilingual education and teacher pay raises, the cost alone of the test changes could slow them considerably.


A trial run in Texas


The state launched the TAKS in 2003 to determine more thoroughly how well students learn the contents of the state's curriculum. Students take the test in grades three through 11. But Grusendorf said he still hears that teachers tailor their lessons to prepare students for the test and that the TAKS covers too little of the state curriculum.

"There's no way any particular individual teacher can know which questions that particular student is going to get," Grusendorf said of the online tests. "So instead of measuring for a narrow part of the curriculum, you measure for the entire curriculum."

About 22,000 eighth-graders took the TAKS online during a practice run last spring. The students scored slightly lower than they did on paper, but it's unclear whether testing online is more difficult or whether the students weren't giving the test their best effort because they knew the scores did not count, said Lisa Chandler, director of student assessment at the education agency.

Districts told the state agency that students liked the online tests and adapted easily, while teachers liked the speedy feedback and the absence of heavy test booklets. Educators voiced concerns about the limited availability of computers and test security.

Grusendorf said he wants the state to begin switching to the online TAKS in the spring of 2006 but that some schools still will need to give the test on paper for a few years. The bill does not say how the state would provide money for the computers needed to administer the tests.

The end-of-course exams that Grusendorf wants high schools to give would also be administered online.

High schoolers must pass the 11th-grade test to graduate. Grusendorf said an end-of-course test would better measure what students learned recently. "You're not testing two or three years after the kid had the course," he said. "You're individualizing the test for the course they attended."

The end-of-course tests could act as final exams in a class. The bill, which calls for the use of end-of-course tests by the 2008-09 school year, gives the state education commissioner room to specify which end-of-course tests are required for graduation.


Setting an example


In Virginia, only high schools test online, with middle schools starting this year, said Lan Neugent, the state's assistant superintendent for technology and human resources.

The Virginia online tests are basically electronic replicas of the paper versions, which Neugent said allow teachers to give students faster, more precise feedback.

"Teachers are not nearly as tech-savvy as kids are, and there was a great reluctance in the beginning to adapt to something that they didn't think was going to work properly," he said. "But once they got on board and realized this stuff is not that hard, then they realized the things that they could do with it."

Teachers could be slow to get on board in Texas as well, if early reaction is any guide.

"Teachers would prefer that the Legislature study the impact of the current testing system on student learning and the time that teachers have to take to give the tests before making substantive changes to the testing system this session," said Brock Gregg, director of governmental relations for the Association of Texas Professional Educators.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/02/10taks.html
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:32 PM 2 comments Links to this post

Contact: Wayne E. Wright (210) 458-2024 (email) Wayne.Wright@UTSA.edu or
Alex Molnar (480) 965-1886 (email) epsl@asu.edu


Tempe, Ariz. (Tuesday, February 8, 2005)- By way of devaluing bilingual
education through high-stakes testing and English-only programs, the No
Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 fails to address the needs of language
minority students, according to a policy brief released by the Language
Policy Research Unit of Arizona State University's Education Policy Studies
Laboratory.

The brief, "Evolution of Federal Policy and Implications of No Child Left
Behind For Language Minority Students," illustrates how the federal
government had progressively taken steps toward meeting the needs of English
language learners and, in doing so, gave worth to bilingual skills.

In 2001, however, the passing of NCLB into law marked a dramatic shift in
that path. The word, "bilingual," was absent from the act and English
language learners were re-categorized as "limited English proficient," or
LEP.

Dr. Wayne E. Wright, assistant professor at the University of Texas at San
Antonio and author of the brief, finds that the government's change in
education policy and its use of high-stakes testing brings on the following
issues:

* Schools are expected to make adequate yearly progress in their test scores
with regard to all subgroups, including students labeled LEP. When testing
the LEP students, NCLB allows for exceptions and accommodations, but the
number of students whose scores can be excluded is minimal, and acceptable
accommodations are neither defined nor spelled out.

* The goals for LEP programs are simply to mainstream the students as soon
as possible and to teach them the content of the state standardized exam.
The pressure of raising scores discourages instruction focusing on the true
needs of LEP students.

* The majority of LEP students are being forced to take standardized tests
in a language in which they are not yet proficient.

* Funding for LEP students nearly doubled, however, these federal funds are
now spread more thinly, resulting in less dollars per eligible LEP student.

* NCLB no longer makes a distinction between bilingual programs or special
alternative instructional programs. The federal law now only requires that
LEP students be placed in "language instruction education programs." The
use of teaching the student's native language is "optional."

* While LEP students must be tested, states are finding creative ways to
exclude their scores, thus helping many schools avoid being held accountable
for a LEP subgroup. This may create an illusion of success while the real
needs of LEP students are being ignored.

* Bilingual education programs are still allowed under NCLB, but only if
state education leaders deem them as "scientifically based" and are willing
to fund them. Anti-bilingual education measures in some states make it
extremely difficult for schools in those states to offer quality bilingual
education programs.

Wright concludes: "Many schools are adopting scripted one-size-fits-all
curricular programs (often with federal support) which take up large amounts
of instructional time. The irony here is that while teachers are giving up
what they recognize as good instruction for LEP students in the name of
preparing them for high-stakes tests, many of these students' test scores
will end up being excluded anyway from school AYP designations, using the
minimum group size rule and negotiated exclusions with the U.S. Department
of Education...

"This is a recipe for leaving LEP students behind."


Find this document on the web at:
http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/EPRU/documents/EPSL-0501-101-LPRU.pdf

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:42 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Tue, Feb. 08, 2005

CHARLOTTE OBSERVER EXCLUSIVE

N.C. Hires Company to Inspect School Test Data

By PETER SMOLOWITZ

Staff Writer
With high-stakes standardized tests now determining school rankings, teacher bonuses and federal aid, pressure is mounting for schools to perform. Which helps explain why a growing number of schools nationwide have been caught cheating. On Monday, North Carolina signed a $60,000 contract for a 2-year-old company called Caveon to analyze test data and search for red flags. North Carolina and South Carolina are among just three states to hire the Utah-based firm, believed to be the first of its kind. Delaware has also hired the company, and a co-founder said they're negotiating with about a dozen other states. Most Carolinas education leaders do not suspect rampant cheating, though allegations have arisen about teachers having access to questions in advance. In Indiana, a teacher was suspended after being accused of pointing out wrong answers while third-grade students were taking a test. Some argue the hiring alone will scare cheaters, the same way burglars avoid homes with yard signs warning of alarm systems. "There are people who put those signs in their yards who don't even have those systems, because they know it is a deterrent," said N.C. testing director Lou Fabrizio, who said the timing coincides with a review of the state's tests. "We're just trying to be as proactive and as comprehensive as we can." Caveon uses a process called data forensics to look for unusual patterns: Kids answering hard questions correctly and missing easy ones. An abnormally high pass rate in one class. Tests with several wrong answers erased and replaced with the right ones. "One of the things I'm looking for is evidence of coaching or proxy test-taking," said Caveon chief scientist Dennis Maynes. "In an educational setting, the greatest concern is (that) the administration and teachers are actually doing the cheating, not the students." How widespread is cheating? There's no way to know how common cheating is, but Caveon and other analysts estimate it could occur with as many as 10 percent of school tests nationwide.An Arizona State University professor said he conducted an anonymous survey in the late 1980s that showed 10 percent of Arizona teachers admitted cheating to help boost students' scores. And those tests didn't count nearly as much as today's, said Tom Haladyna. "It's amazing," said Haladyna, an education psychology professor who studies test score accuracy. "And these are only things we know about. It's like an iceberg." Within the past year, cheating allegations nationwide have prompted officials in Texas, Indiana, Mississippi and Arizona to launch investigations, suspend staff or throw out scores. And recently questions have been raised in the Carolinas. In February 2003, the Guilford County School District disciplined several employees suspected of sharing state standardized test questions with high school students in advance. Prosecutors in Beaufort County, S.C., are investigating claims that in 2003, middle school administrators showed state tests to teachers in advance, fueling fears the instructors could have coached kids on actual questions. The Carolinas have stringent safeguards that Haladyna said were tougher than those of several states. Rules require or recommend that two adults be present during all tests. Officials make unannounced visits to testing sites. And teachers not only get trained in the state's code of ethics, some schools require teachers, proctors, principals and test coordinators to sign forms agreeing to comply or swearing that they have. But the states still wanted Caveon to analyze answers and check for weaknesses in their test-security system. "In order for the test scores to be valid and reflect what the students know and are able to do, then test security must be maintained," said S.C. testing director Teri Siskind. "It's an equity, fairness and validity issue, in addition to an ethical issue." Maintaining integrity Caveon comes from the Latin word "caveo," meaning "safeguard." The company was founded in 2003 by a dozen people who had helped write and design tests, but worried about security as the Internet made it easier for people to publish answers in advance. Those fears could cloud the reputation of companies and workers. "Everybody loses," said co-founder Jerry Christensen. "There is this weakness there, and nobody else has really looked at it." Caveon has worked with about 25 companies that offer entrance exams or certification tests, Christensen said. Caveon workers have helped businesses make it tougher for people to steal questions, and they have caught people selling questions on the Web. In June, they started working with schools. It's unlikely they'll find much wrongdoing in the Carolinas, said Colby Cochran, Rowan-Salisbury's testing director, who helped revise the testing code of ethics. But they will be checking things local districts don't typically examine, and that will help make the scores "beyond reproach." "This is the era of accountability," Cochran said. "Somebody else needs to look at you from time to time to see if you are really doing what you say you are doing."

Peter Smolowitz: (704) 358-5249; psmolowitz@charlotteobserver.com

© 2005 Charlotte Observer and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.charlotte.com

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:26 AM 0 comments Links to this post

http://www.nclbgrassroots.org/index.php is the link to Civil Society Institute's page of newsclips on NLCB. They really are keeping up with a regular flow of significant clips (since there is a flood, they must select). The clips are reachable by topic areas and chronologically.
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:27 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Some Conservatives Express Concern at Agenda

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 9, 2005; Page A01


President Bush's second-term agenda would expand not only the size of the federal government but also its influence over the lives of millions of Americans by imposing new national restrictions on high schools, court cases and marriages.

In a clear break from Republican campaigns of the 1990s to downsize government and devolve power to the states, Bush is fostering what amounts to an era of new federalism in which the national government shapes, not shrinks, programs and institutions to comport with various conservative ideals, according to Republicans inside and outside the White House.

Bush is calling for new federal accountability and testing requirements for all public high schools, after imposing similar mandates on grades three through eight during his first term. To limit lawsuits against businesses and professionals, he is proposing to put a federal cap on damage awards for medical malpractice, to force class-action cases into federal courts and to help create a national settlement of outstanding asbestos-related cases.

On social policy, the president is pushing a constitutional amendment to outlaw same-sex marriage in the states and continuing to define and expand the federal government's role in encouraging religious groups to help administer social programs such as community drug-rehabilitation efforts.

"We have moved from devolution, which was just pushing back as much power as possible to the states, back to where government is limited but active," said John Bridgeland, director of Bush's domestic policy council in the first term. Bridgeland and current White House officials see Bush's governing philosophy as a smart way to modernize the government, empower individuals and broaden the appeal of the GOP.

Bush maintains a stated desire to streamline the government. On Monday, he sent Congress a budget that would eliminate or consolidate 150 programs. But a growing number of conservatives are uneasy with what they deride as "big-government conservatism."

"He keeps expanding the federal involvement into state and local affairs," said Chris Edwards, a tax and budget expert at the Cato Institute, a think tank that often supports the president's agenda. "My hope would be that there would be an electoral rebuke of big [-government] Republicans like there was when the tectonic plates shifted in 1994."

Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), said: "The Republican majority, left to its own devices from 1995 to 2000, was a party committed to limited government and restoring the balances of federalism with the states. Clearly, President Bush has had a different vision, and that vision has resulted in education and welfare policies that have increased the size and scope of government."

Pence, an influential leader of House conservatives, said 50 Republicans gathered in Baltimore this past week and discussed, among other things, an overwhelming desire to protest the expansion of government by opposing Bush's education plan for high school students. While only 33 House Republicans opposed the No Child Left Behind law in the first term, Pence predicted that a significantly larger number will vote against expanding the program to cover high schools. Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation, a pro-Bush think tank, agreed. "It's a non-starter" in the minds of a large number of Republicans, he said.

In many ways, Bush is simply accelerating the trend toward a bigger, more activist government that was started early in his presidency. Bush not only greatly expanded the federal education system with the No Child Left Behind law, but he also signed the largest expansion of Medicare benefits when he added prescription drug coverage to the program in 2003. The Medicare plan alone is now estimated to cost at least $720 billion over the next decade. Reacting to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Bush created the Department of Homeland Security, provided the federal government broad surveillance powers through the USA Patriot Act, and requested a significantly larger national defense budget.

All of this is a far cry from Republican dogma circa 1995 -- the year of the Republican Revolution. Back then, GOP leaders from Sen. Robert J. Dole (Kan.) to House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) talked of eliminating entire Cabinet departments, including Education, shrinking government, and returning power to the states and the people.

"If I have one goal for the 104th Congress, it is this: that we will dust off the 10th Amendment and restore it to its rightful place in the Constitution," then-Senate Majority Leader Dole said in his first speech of January 1995. "We will continue in our drive to return power to our states and our people." Republicans talked of devolution, ending "unfunded mandates" and killing government programs with the same zeal they reserve today for fighting terrorists and restructuring Social Security.

In some areas, Bush has moved to reduce the size of government. The president signed three tax cuts into law in the first term, shrinking government receipts; held non-defense discretionary spending to a nominal increase in last year's budget; and is calling for similar austerity in this year's budget.

Even so, spending has exploded under Bush -- as have budget deficits. The government spent $2.3 trillion and ran a $412 billion deficit in 2004, compared with the $1.8 trillion it spent and the $86 billion surplus it ran in the final full year of the Clinton administration.

Despite the deep cuts in domestic programs in Bush's budget, his second-term agenda is focused more on rethinking than shrinking the federal government's role. Even the president's plan to create individual Social Security accounts, billed as providing Americans more control over their retirements, would require a bigger bureaucracy to administer.

Pence said the only reason Republicans have not paid a political price for overseeing a huge growth in government has been the failure of Democrats to field a deficit hawk as a presidential candidate and to capitalize on the public appetite for smaller government. "I think to the extent Republicans depart from the historic commitment, we do so at our peril."

Yet most of Pence's colleagues have not fought Bush's expansion of the federal government. They recently rejected budget rules that could help slow spending and voted in large numbers for the entire Bush agenda over the past four years. A large majority supports Bush's plans to grow the federal role over lawsuits, marriages and other social policies.

Bush, never seen as a big fan of shrinking government, has chosen to redefine the Republican Party as more activist, "compassionate" and committed to providing individuals a lift through government policies, aides say. In doing so, he often pushes policies that require conservatives to sacrifice one principle to accomplish another.

Consider education and lawsuits. To win tough testing standards and impose accountability, two goals of many conservatives, Bush pushed through a huge increase in education spending and expanded the federal government's power to police schools, two ideas that would have been viewed by Republicans as heresy a decade ago.

As for lawsuits, Bush and most Republicans support a federal cap on punitive damages in medical liability cases -- which would usurp the power of states -- to create a freer, less costly and more predictable marketplace for doctors and consumers. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who was first elected to the House in 1994, calls this anathema to the GOP's states'-rights philosophy.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9307-2005Feb8.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:23 PM 0 comments Links to this post

EDWEEK.ORG

February 9, 2005

By Sean Cavanagh
The Santa Fe Indian School is one U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs school where students are taught to go to college and return to their pueblos with newfound knowledge.

The letter sat for days in a stack of tabletop mail, a plain envelope with an Albuquerque return address, as easy to ignore as a credit card offer or cut-rate vacation deal. He figures it was almost a week before anybody noticed it.

“Congratulations,” Russell Sandoval remembers reading, after peeling it open. “You have been admitted to the University of New Mexico as a beginning freshman for the fall 2005 semester.” The institution even sweetened the deal with a scholarship that could save him thousands of dollars in tuition.

His mother hugged him. His father, who was working in the front yard, smiled and congratulated him. Amid all that elation, the son, who was at home on the San Felipe Pueblo for the Christmas holiday, reminded his parents that this was only a first step.

“One down,” Sandoval said. “Let’s see how many more I get in to.”

Like many of his senior classmates here at Santa Fe Indian School, Sandoval harbors an ambition that no single bit of recognition, however appealing, can fully satisfy. His view is long-term. Next fall, he envisions himself on a college campus, in New Mexico, Arizona, or Colorado, away from home, but not too far away. He hopes to be working toward a degree in the computer field, and meeting students from places he’s never seen.

And after graduation, he sees himself returning to San Felipe, or a nearby pueblo, using his college skills to help improve the community. It is a longing shared by many of the seniors at Santa Fe Indian School, which, in recent years, has defied long-standing trends among Native American students by sending an unusually strong percentage of its graduates to college, including some of the country’s most prestigious institutions.

While reliable estimates of American Indian students’ college participation are scarce (in part because their numbers are so low), the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Santa Fe has taken steps to make postsecondary education the norm, rather than the exception, even while serving many disadvantaged youths. Overall, the academic proficiency of the 700-student school’s students also ranks well above the recorded averages of other BIA facilities, which serve some of the nation’s most disadvantaged students.

In large measure, the Santa Fe school is accomplishing what many schools serving academically at risk children long to do: encourage their students early on to consider college and then give them the support to get there.

For many of the school’s students, who arrive from Indian communities across New Mexico, and occasionally outside the state, the first leg of that journey is often the toughest. It begins in 7th grade, when they move into dormitories on the campus, a tan chessboard of adobe-style buildings along a churning roadway south of the city’s chic downtown plaza. The new arrivals follow a program that blends New Mexico’s state curriculum with lessons about native culture and with potent doses of career and college counseling.

And over time, many of those students develop a conviction, pressed upon them by their parents and elders, that college is not only a ticket to the world outside the pueblo, but also a promise to return.

“Your heart is there,” says Sandoval, 17. “You grew up in there, in that atmosphere. You know that you have to have a responsibility to go out and get an education, and then come back and help your people.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the day they made the half-hour drive north to the Santa Fe Indian School six years ago, Russell Sandoval and his parents, Michael and Sandra, carried a mental picture with them. A school for Native Americans. Operated by New Mexico’s Pueblo tribes. A place where Indian youths lived and studied together, like a family.

But after his parents dropped him off, the boy found little that was familiar to him. At a student orientation, his classmates described themselves as Navajo, Apache, even Plains Indians. “I thought this was a Pueblo school,” Sandoval recalls thinking upon meeting students from other tribes. Even among the other Pueblos he met, he heard Indian languages that were completely different from the Keresan dialect he knew from San Felipe, a community of 3,200 people that straddles the Rio Grande River.

Sandoval was right about the school’s Pueblo status, though it would take years for it to secure that standing. Santa Fe Indian School opened in 1890, with nine Pueblo students and a mission that paralleled those of the other federal schools serving American Indians at the time: to educate and “civilize” Indian youths, by removing them from their family culture and making them conform with white society. That pattern of forced assimilation, which was occurring around the country, persisted for decades. It swept up many of the families and staff members who are connected with Santa Fe Indian School today, including Gil Peña, the school’s dean of students.

At a school assembly, Superintendent Joseph Abeyta exhorts students to embrace academics and native tradition.
—Sevans



Peña, a 58-year-old with orderly gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses, acts as both the school’s czar of student discipline and an adviser to longtime Superintendent Joseph Abeyta. A former Pueblo governor with a nutcracker-strength handshake and a tone that shifts smoothly between lighthearted and serious, he seems well suited for the sometimes difficult meetings with parents and students that accompany his job. A school should nurture students as it educates them, he says. Santa Fe Indian School’s parents and tribal communities help accomplish that goal.

His own experience was much different. Peña’s first school was a BIA facility on his native Nambñ Pueblo, about 15 miles north of Santa Fe. He arrived there not knowing a word of English, and when he tried speaking to his classmates in his Pueblo language of Tewa, his teacher, an Anglo woman from Texas, cracked him on the head or the hand with a ruler. He remembers running off into the nearby hills, and school officials catching him and bringing him back.

“It was a scary time for me,” Peña says. “You leave your culture, your tradition, your language, when you walk in that door.”

Each fall, Peña is charged with delivering a pointed message to incoming 7th graders at Santa Fe Indian School: Some of you won’t last here. Some will leave for disciplinary reasons; others won’t cut it academically.

In discipline, student life, and academics, the school today encourages tribal influence, and in some cases relies on it. On this December morning, Peña is preparing to meet with the parents of a Navajo girl who’s been misbehaving. When he sees the incident report, he recognizes the family name right away.

In similar cases, Peña will ask to meet with both the parents and the family’s tribal governor, in the home community. He will present the situation to the native leader and ask for help. That approach pays off, Peña believes. Students come away with a strong message from their families and tribal leaders: Disrespect the school, and you disrespect us.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Members of the Pueblo community have a strong incentive to immerse themselves in the Sante Fe Indian School: They operate it, under an arrangement with the BIA, an arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

In the 1950s, the original campus was closed, a move that outraged many parents. According to author Sally Hyer’s history of the school, One House, One Voice, One Heart, the BIA later told students that their best option would be to attend Albuquerque Indian School, 60 miles to the south, an aging, decrepit facility in the memories of many Santa Fe staff members.

In 1977, frustrated leaders on the All-Indian Pueblo Council, a coalition of native governments, voted to take over administration of the Albuquerque school, and later relocated it to the Santa Fe campus. Today, the school is operated by the 19 Pueblo tribes of New Mexico—separate, federally recognized sovereign nations—and it receives federal funding from the BIA. About 60 percent of roughly 180 BIA schools today operate under similar grants or contracts.

While Santa Fe Indian School offers only one Advanced Placement subject, English, it allows students to enroll jointly in local community colleges. The school’s classes are also modified to include “community based” education—student-led projects on relevant issues affecting Indian tribes. Each year, Pueblo leaders advise school staff members on those topics, which have recently included air and water quality and animal migration. The goal for students is not only to gain knowledge about social issues, says Glenda Moffitt, the school’s director of planning and evaluation, but also an understanding of what it takes to run tribal governments.

Santa Fe Indian School has established policies aimed at promoting student discipline—and independence. Students follow a tight routine: a 6 a.m. wakeup call, breakfast at 7, classes till about 3 p.m., followed by after-school activities, such as sports.

Senior Daryl Montoya pauses on the stairs as he exits the second floor of a boys' dormitory at Santa Fe Indian School. The school, in the midst of a federally financed $38million renovation project, is built in an adobe architectural style in the tradition of the Southwest.
—Sevans

Dorm life brings its own responsibilities. Sandoval’s uncluttered room, on one of the residential hall’s upper stories, is about three quick strides wide, with identical beds and bookshelves occupying both sides. A chrome-tinted stereo sits on a central desk, above a pair of gym shoes belonging to his roommate, fellow senior (and state cross-country champion) Jerome Tafoya. A short hallway leads to a bathroom, almost as big as the bedroom itself.

School officials believe the residential component can prepare students for college dorm life. Sandoval plays a role in that training: The tall, lanky teenager with dark, short-cropped hair is a dorm proctor, responsible for overseeing cleaning duties and dorm checks.

For Sandoval, the possibilities after high school became clearer his sophomore year, when he took a required seven-week career unit led by school counselor Pat Schubauer. He began researching colleges, some of which he applied to this year, such as the University of New Mexico. His top choice, Arizona State University, was also on that list.

Each year, Schubauer reviews college applications with students, advises them on the accompanying essays and recommendations, and tries to encourage them to think about the postsecondary setting that will best suit them.

She often introduces the concept of going to college with a question: Think about the job you want someday—what training will you need to get there?

The counselor agrees with other faculty members that her students’ desire to improve their pueblos—through better social services, new businesses, and other means—often outweighs financial and career motivations. The pressure to help the pueblos “is not like something that’s put on them from the outside,” she says. “It’s something that’s lived in their community.”

It seems to be paying off. The school estimates that at least 90 percent of seniors, on average, go on to two- or four-year colleges, including technical schools, a rate that eclipses the adult percentage of Native Americans with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Not that the school doesn’t face hurdles. While its students far exceed the test-proficiency levels of the overall BIA population, Santa Fe Indian School was placed on “alert” status under the federal No Child Left Behind Act this academic year, joining about two-thirds of all BIA schools that didn’t make adequate yearly progress, bureau records show. That designation was triggered by special education students not making AYP, according to BIA data.

Some critics say the school’s location, in a tourist mecca famed for its resorts and art galleries, gives it unparalleled advantages. Other BIA facilities, in far more remote, impoverished areas, face a much harder task in recruiting staff members, they say. Still others suspect that Santa Fe Indian School, in requiring prospective students to complete an application process, ends up serving more academically gifted students than other BIA facilities.

Moffitt calls that criticism baseless. She maintains that the application is meant to provide basic information, not to screen students. The average 7th grader, Moffitt points out, arrives with academic achievement at a 3rd or 4th grade level, and more than 100 of the school’s 700 charges qualify as special education students. The school meets those needs through extensive after-school tutoring and remediation, she says.

Despite its ability to help students reach college, only 40 percent are graduating in a two- or four-year period, Moffitt estimates. Some who drop out return later, says Moffitt, who believes about 60 percent eventually secure a college degree. (That number surpasses some college-persistence estimates for Indian students nationwide.)

Byron Abeyta, an 8th grader, and his mother, Shereen Martinez, return to his dorm room on a Sunday evening.
—Sevans


Keith Candelaria is a 1999 graduate who went on to Dartmouth College. After receiving a degree in environmental earth science from the Ivy League institution, he returned to New Mexico to work as a water-protection specialist. Today, the 23-year-old educates Indian communities about water contamination—an issue he worried about as a boy, on the Jñmez Pueblo.

“Growing up, it’s instilled in you,” he says. “You see what the reservation lacks.”

Yet those bonds are also part of what makes college so difficult for Indian students, adds Candelaria, who remembers some native undergraduates quitting college for that reason.

Russell Sandoval expects to grapple with those transitions, too. He knows he will miss the customs like his pueblo’s corn dances, a centuries-old tribal ceremony. His expectations come across in an essay on his application to the University of New Mexico. The paper is historical, touching on the Catholic Church’s influence on pueblo society. It is biographical, detailing his record as a National Honor Society member and senior class president. And it speaks to why he’s applying to college in the first place, drawing upon a conversation he had with his grandmother.

“She is the link to the past, and to the future, for she is wise,” Sandoval writes. “It pains her to see that most teenagers aren’t too eager to move on to a higher education. She always tells me constantly to make something out of the opportunity I have been given. … [I] want to be that person that brings change and a sense of direction to the community.”
PHOTO: Jenae Sanchez and Russell Sandoval work on a project during evening study period.

PHOTO: Counselor Pat Schubauer helps a student prepare college applications.
PHOTO: A student sweeps up outside a dorm, performing a typical task assigned to youths at the school.
PHOTO: During limited free time, senior James Garcia lines up a shot in the recreation center.
—Sevans

Vol. 24, Issue 22, Pages 26-30



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“Bill Allows Construction Bonds for Indian Schools,” September 29, 2004.
“Indian Schools Struggling With Federal Mandates,” July 28, 2004.
“‘No Child’ Law Poses Challenges To Indians,” May 5, 2004.
“Judge Says Montana Falls Short On Indian Education,” April 28, 2004.
“Hitting the Jackpot,” April 7, 2004.
“Mich. Tribe at Center Of Charter School Debate,” August 6, 2003.
“Wash. Program Strives To Sustain Tribal Languages,” February 5, 2003.
“Tribal Colleges' K-12 Links Called Key to Reservations,” May 30, 2001.
See other stories on education issues in New Mexico. See data on New Mexico's public school system.

Visit the Santa Fe Indian School to learn more about the school's academic programs and its student life.
The New Mexico Tribal Coalition maintains a teachers corner.
The Office of Indian Education Programs at the Bureau of Indian Affairs posts information and resources on American Indian education.
The National Congress of American Indians—the oldest and largest tribal government organization in the United States—provides resources on issues affecting American Indian culture.
The American Indian Education Foundation, an advocate for American Indian education, coordinates programs to support American Indian students in K-12 education.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:17 AM 0 comments Links to this post

EDWEEK.ORG
February 9, 2005

By Linda Jacobson

Hoping that child-care centers and preschools in their states will respond to higher expectations, more governors are proposing rating systems both to encourage providers to improve their services and to give parents the information they need to choose a high-quality environment.

Govs. James E. Doyle of Wisconsin, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, and Tom Vilsack of Iowa have all made rating systems—similar to the methods used to evaluate hotels or restaurants—part of their legislative agendas this year. The three are Democrats.

“Right now, we pay the worst child-care facility and the best child-care facility the same amount, and that’s wrong,” Gov. Doyle said during his State of the State Address last month. “My plan will reward quality, encourage improvement, and give parents the information they need to choose the right child-care center.”

Meanwhile, Gov. Napolitano is recommending a rating system as part of a package of improvements designed to better prepare Arizona’s children for school and to help parents make decisions about care.

“Parents need to be able to go to work knowing their children are safe and nurtured,” Gov. Napolitano said during her speech to the legislature in January.

Rating systems—which measure such indicators as staff-child ratio and the educational level of the teachers at a center—are useful as consumer guides.

Equally important, experts say, is that such ratings can be used to reward programs for improving quality. Under the systems proposed in Arizona, Iowa, and Wisconsin, centers with higher ratings would receive more state child-care money to serve children from low-income families than would centers with lower ratings. In addition, highly rated centers or preschools would be more likely to be chosen to take part in the states’ preschool programs.

Representatives of child-care centers and preschool providers, however, say that any financial incentives tied to ratings need to be based on what it truly costs to provide high-quality care—and that technical assistance must be part of the system to help programs improve.
Star System

According to the National Child Care Information Center, a federally financed clearinghouse and technical-assistance center based in Vienna, Va., 16 states have some form of quality-rating system, with some of them still implementing the programs on a pilot basis.

For example, in Colorado, programs serving children from birth through kindergarten can volunteer to have their programs evaluated on a five-level scale by Qualistar, a Denver-based nonprofit organization that rates programs and helps refer parents to centers that meet their needs.

Under that state’s program, which started in 2002, centers earning no stars are considered substandard, in large part because health and safety guidelines are often neglected and the centers require no teacher training.

In a two-star center in Colorado, toys are available, children are read to regularly, and their basic needs are met, but efforts to reduce staff turnover, adopt daily routines, and improve staff development are still considered by evaluators to be in need of improvement.

In a four-star program, teachers have training in early-childhood development and provide a curriculum that addresses the social, emotional, physical, and academic needs of young children. In addition, activities for fun are provided every day and frequent communication with parents is part of the school’s culture.

The RAND Corp., a research organization based in Santa Monica, Calif., is evaluating Colorado’s rating system to determine whether the program is raising quality and whether the changes are improving outcomes for children.
‘Quality Matters’

Experts say rating systems, to some degree, are state versions of the accreditation offered by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.


In fact, most states that rate centers use the NAEYC’s detailed criteria for accreditation to design their tiered ratings, said Mark Ginsberg, the executive director of the Washington-based professional association.

“I think [rating systems and accreditation] are not only compatible, but complementary,” Mr Ginsberg said, pointing out that in many cases, the NAEYC standards for accredited programs mirror the highest rating a state will give a center.

He also credited state rating systems for contributing to an increase in both the number of applications for NAEYC accreditation and the number of centers earning the credential.

But Lynn White, the policy director for the National Child Care Association, based in Conyers, Ga., said requiring national accreditation in order to receive a top state rating poses problems for centers, because it can take a year to complete the accreditation process.

Only one state—North Carolina—has taken the ratings concept a bit further by implementing a rated licensing system, meaning that the various levels of quality are actually written into the state’s licensing regulations, and each child-care program receives a rating, depending on its level of quality.

Sue Russell, the president of Child Care Services Association, a research and advocacy organization in Chapel Hill, N.C., said the system has made more providers aware of the components of quality and given them an incentive to make improvements.

The association has tracked North Carolina’s center ratings, which have been based on a five-star system since the program began in 2000.

The group has data showing a steady decline in the proportion of centers in the state with just one star—from almost 40 percent the first year to less than 10 percent in 2004. At the top of the scale, the percentage of centers with four-star licenses has quintupled, from about 6 percent to 30 percent over those years.

“I think we have really seen a tremendous growth in high-quality programs—those with four and five stars,” Ms. Russell said. “We have seen gains in education of the workforce and a drop in [staff] turnover as well.

“Quality matters to parents, children, and teachers who work every day in those settings.”

Vol. 24, Issue 22, Page 17

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

EDWEEK.ORG
Published: February 9, 2005

Many Lawmakers May Resist Proposal for Increased Testing
By Erik W. Robelen
Washington

A cornerstone of President Bush’s second-term agenda for education—imposing greater accountability in high schools through more testing—appears likely to face serious political and practical challenges that some observers argue could imperil the plan.

Mr. Bush first announced the plan for extra testing during his 2004 campaign. Since his re-election, he has made clear that this and other aspects of his high school agenda remain a high priority.

See Also
See the accompanying item, “Table: President’s High School Agenda.”


And yet, early signals suggest the president may have a tough time marshaling the kind of broad, bipartisan support he achieved early in his first term with the No Child Left Behind Act.

Some leading Democrats appear skeptical of Mr. Bush’s plans, citing their frustration with education funding levels they deem inadequate to meet the current demands of federal 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,” Rep. George Miller of California, the top Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, said in a statement last month. “Adding new mandates while schools lack the resources to meet the current demands will not help schools.”

President Bush shakes hands with members of Congress after his Feb. 2 State of the Union Address, in which he cited his accountability plan for high schools.
—Luke Frazza/AP/Pool



The resistance may not be solely partisan. Some conservative Republicans who were not big fans of the No Child Left Behind law to begin with may balk at more federal mandates. Even key GOP leaders in Congress on education, while not saying they’re opposed to the high school agenda, haven’t exactly warmly embraced the idea.

Beyond the political issues lie other potential barriers.

For one, since most high schools don’t receive federal aid under Title I—the flagship program for disadvantaged students under the No Child Left Behind Act—more testing would not necessarily lead to the kind of accountability the president wants.

Currently, schools that don’t receive Title I aid are not subject to the law’s specific consequences for low-performing schools, such as allowing students to transfer to a higher-performing public school or get free tutoring.

The Department of Education declined to comment for this story.
A ‘Plausible’ Goal?

President Bush made improving high schools a key idea in his re-election bid. He often touted the No Child Left Behind Act—a signature achievement of his first four years that overhauled the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—and vowed to bring a greater emphasis to high schools in his second term.

Last month, he reiterated that plan and offered more details, proposing to target $1.5 billion to his new high school initiative. Some $250 million of that would be reserved for helping states expand high school testing, and $1.2 billion would help states hold high schools accountable and intervene with students not learning at grade level. ("Bush Promotes Plan for High School Tests," Jan. 19, 2005.)

The White House hinted that it would divert funds from existing Department of Education programs to pay for at least part—and possibly all—of the high school plans. Further details were expected this week when Mr. Bush unveils his budget request for fiscal 2006, though there’s widespread speculation that much of the money would come from the agency’s politically popular vocational education programs.

“[W]e need to be sure that high school students are learning every year,” the president said at J.E.B. Stuart High School in Falls Church, Va., on Jan. 12. “Listen, I’ve heard every excuse in the book not to test. My answer is, how do you know if a child is learning if you don’t test.”

The No Child Left Behind law requires all public schools to test students annually in grades 3-8 in reading and mathematics, and once in high school. The new plan would call for testing in both subjects in the 9th, 10th, and 11th grades. Administration aides have said the tests would be phased in, and likely wouldn’t begin until the 2009-10 school year.

The vast majority of states do not now administer statewide English and math tests each year in 9th, 10th, and 11th grades, according to data gathered by the Education Week Research Center.

Thomas E. Mann, an expert on politics at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said he expects Mr. Bush’s testing plan to face an uphill struggle on Capitol Hill, with resistance not just from Democrats, who may see little to gain in cooperating, but also from some Republicans.

“I think in general, they are not going to be thrilled with this,” he said of GOP lawmakers.

At the same time, Mr. Mann said no one should write off the president’s initiative.

“Among his very ambitious items, this is one of the more plausible and doable, certainly compared to Social Security reform, tax reform, reducing the deficit in half, establishing democracy in the Middle East,” he said.

“There’s going to be more pressure for changes in No Child Left Behind, as opposed to extending it to more grades,” predicted Joel Packer, a senior lobbyist with the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union and a group that frequently criticizes the federal law.

Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group of more than 100 conservative House members, said at a January press briefing that he wanted to “reverse the expanding federal role in primary and secondary education, which conservatives believe is a state and local function,” according to the Associated Press.

Money alone could be a big obstacle for Mr. Bush. Last year, given tight fiscal constraints, Congress showed little appetite for some of the president’s initiatives. Lawmakers, for example, rejected his plan to provide enhanced Pell Grants for college to needy students who pursue a rigorous high school curriculum. Congress also chopped his $100 million request for the Striving Readers initiative—which seeks to help struggling middle and high school readers—to $25 million.

For fiscal 2006, President Bush has said he wants $200 million for Striving Readers and $250 million for the new high school testing, among other items.

But without a significant increase in overall Education Department funding—and one is not expected in his 2006 request—getting federal lawmakers to reserve $250 million for high school tests won’t be easy.

Still, some analysts suggest the administration may have one persuasive factor in its favor: the new secretary of education, Margaret Spellings. Formerly the president’s top domestic-policy aide, she’s considered to possess the political savvy and good relationships with lawmakers that could help the fate of the testing plans on Capitol Hill.

The Republican leaders of the House and Senate education committees seemed cautious when asked last month about the president’s new testing plans.

“This proposal will spark a healthy debate in the United States Congress,” Rep. John A. Boehner of Ohio, the chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, said in a statement.

Sen. Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, the new chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said in an interview that he has many questions about the plan.

“How do we institute it, how do we do it?” he said. But he said he was open to the idea.

“It may have to be incremental; it may take a little while to get imposed,” Sen. Enzi said. “I could be supportive of two more years of testing. We need to make sure that it’s put in at the proper stage, though.”
‘Nourish Them Now’

Some education leaders question the value of still more testing, even while welcoming Mr. Bush’s attention to high schools.

“I have a whole plethora of statistics that already tell us that 9th and 10th graders have a number of problems,” said Gerald M. Tirozzi, the executive director of the Reston, Va.-based National Association of Secondary School Principals, who was an assistant secretary of education during the Clinton administration. “We need to nourish them now and address problems. Why spend all that new money on testing?”

Edgar B. Hatrick, the superintendent of the 45,000-student Loudoun County school district in Virginia, said he would like to see the president “work on refining No Child Left Behind and its testing requirements” before expanding the demands in high school. He also said the law needed to be better funded before Congress mandates more tests.

Peter McWalters, Rhode Island’s education commissioner, said he’s a strong supporter of testing tied to accountability, but he questioned the need for the extra high school assessments.

“I have what I need to know a school is not effective or needs intervention,” said Mr. McWalters, whose state currently has statewide high school assessments for reading and math only in 11th grade. “The issue of more testing is more useful testing at the student level.”

Mr. McWalters said that what’s needed are the kind of local tests that closely gauge the progress of individual students and provide speedy feedback for educators to intervene, something his state is now working on with some districts.

Another issue is whether more high school testing would be reliable for judging schools. Several experts said teenagers may not give such tests their all unless the tests are linked to graduation or college admissions.

“A lot of kids, they’re not going to take it seriously,” said William J. Erpenbach, an education consultant based in Madison, Wis. “Anything connected with state testing programs, they could care less.”

Furthermore, while President Bush sees the expanded testing as linked to accountability, under current law most high schools would not face the core consequences for low performance spelled out in the No Child Left Behind Act. That’s largely because most school districts, with limited Title I funds, usually first target the aid to elementary and middle schools. Indeed, several superintendents interviewed for this story said none of their high schools receives Title I aid.

At a December forum at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, a White House aide said Mr. Bush envisions the extra tests counting for accountability purposes under the law.

“We’ll have to work with Congress [on] … exactly how we might want to engage some of those consequences at the high school level to go beyond those schools that receive Title I dollars,” said David Dunn, who has since become Secretary Spellings’ chief of staff in the Education Department.
Vol. 24, Issue 22, Pages 22,24



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“Bush Plan Worries the Voc. Ed. Community,” January 26, 2005.
“Calls for Revamping High Schools Intensify,” January 26, 2005.
“Bush Promotes Plan for High School Tests,” January 19, 2005.
“Report: High Schools Must Demand More,” January 5, 2005.
“Governors Urge High School Reform as a Top Priority,” November 24, 2004.
“Bush’s School Agenda Will Get a 2nd Term,” November 10, 2004.
“Bush Test Proposal for High Schoolers Joins Wider Trend,” September 15, 2004.
“Bush to Seek Accountability in High School,” September 8, 2004.
For background, previous stories, and Web links, read High School Reform.



Read a fact sheet on President Bush's high school initiatives, from The White House.
View the Alliance for Excellent Education's response to President Bush's high school proposal. See also a statement from the National Association of Secondary School Principals on the subject.

© 2005 Editorial Projects in Education

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

79th LEGISLATURE
Bills range from repeal to tweaking of top 10 percent rule.

By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, February 09, 2005

State Sen. Jeff Wentworth doesn't mince words regarding a law that entitles students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school classes in Texas to attend the public university of their choice:

"I'm for repeal."

The San Antonio Republican filed a bill last week that would do just that. Thirteen other like-minded senators have signed on. A competing bill filed by Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, would preserve the automatic admission law but stiffen the high school curriculum requirements for students accepted under its provisions. West has lined up support from 12 other senators.

Neither side enjoys enough legislative firepower at this juncture to guarantee that its bill will pass. But the stage is set for a vigorous debate and perhaps for a compromise. Two years ago, West successfully filibustered Wentworth's effort to limit the number of students admitted under the top 10 percent law.

The law was enacted in 1997 after a court case involving the University of Texas resulted in a ban on affirmative action in admission to the state's public colleges and universities. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a separate case that race and ethnicity could be used as factors in admission.

In Wentworth's view, that ruling eliminated the need for the top 10 percent law. What's more, he argues, it is unfair to decide admission on one factor.

"What we need to do is unhandcuff admissions officers so they can consider the whole person," he said Tuesday.

Supporters of the top 10 percent law say it has helped diversify the state's two public flagship campuses, UT and Texas A&M University. They say it has broadened opportunities not only for blacks and Hispanics, but also for white students from rural areas. And they say there's nothing wrong with using more than one tool to achieve diversity.

"The top 10 percent law has worked well in Texas," said state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso.

The law's practical application is limited mainly to UT and A&M. Most of the state's other public colleges and universities open their doors to virtually anyone who applies.

Top 10 percent students make up a growing portion of the student bodies at the two flagships.

Sixty-seven percent of the students from Texas who were admitted to UT in the fall of 2004 gained admission under the law, UT President Larry Faulkner said. Applications for fall 2005 admission are up about 9 percent, and so the proportion of top 10 percent students is also likely to rise, he said. Separately, UT uses race and ethnicity as factors in admissions.

Faulkner would like to see the automatic admission law modified so that his university would have to admit no more than 50 percent or 60 percent of its freshmen from Texas on the basis of class rank.

At A&M, 58 percent of Texas residents admitted in fall 2004 were top 10 percent graduates. The school is not using affirmative action, although administrators have been visiting urban schools and other under-represented areas in an effort to drum up applicants.

"We're going to live with the policy decision that the Legislature makes about top 10 percent," said Stanton Calvert, the A&M System's vice chancellor for governmental relations. "We believe we can make it work whatever decision they make."

A few other bills concerning automatic admission also have been filed. State Rep. Beverly Woolley, R-Houston, authored a measure mirroring Wentworth's proposal. Rep. Tony Goolsby, R-Dallas, has crafted a middle-ground offering that would limit automatic admission to the top 5 percent, starting in the 2009-10 school year.

Other key elected officials are beginning to weigh in as well. Rep. Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, said Tuesday that he is open to modifying the law but opposed to repealing it.

"It's the only way a student at Palmer High School can go to UT-Austin," he said, referring to a small-town school in his district.

House Speaker Tom Craddick indicated that he would support repeal or a cap of some sort when he addressed UT and A&M representatives at the traditional "orange and maroon" lobbying day last week, UT spokesman Don Hale said.

Both Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Gov. Rick Perry have said the automatic admission law is causing too many well-qualified students to enroll in out-of-state schools because they can't get into UT or A&M.

Such students often hail from competitive high schools, such as Westlake in the Eanes school district and Alamo Heights in San Antonio.

When Meagan Metcalf was attending high school in Plano, she knew several students whose families moved to less competitive school districts for the sole purpose of ensuring a high class rank and therefore automatic admission to the flagships.

"I also know lots of people who couldn't get into UT and A&M who were very good students, probably better than some of the students from Podunk who got in," said Metcalf, 21, a senior advertising major at UT.

But Michael Johnston, a 22-year-old senior hoping to attend medical school, said current law provides an important measure of certainty for budding scholars: "It allows those who struggled to be in the top 10 percent a way of getting into school."

Find this article at: http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/02/9TOP10.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:41 AM 1 comments Links to this post

02/08/2005

Jenny LaCoste-Caputo
Express-News Staff Writer

The school finance plan House Republican leaders unveiled last week would result in a windfall for a handful of Texas school districts while the majority of districts would have to settle for a modest boost in spending that barely keeps up with inflation.

The House Public Education committee begins debate today on the plan, which local school leaders have criticized, claiming it would widen the spending gap between rich and poor students.

"The question I have is, how equitable is this?" said John Folks, superintendent for Northside School District. "They're still not putting enough money into the system. The more money you put in, the more equity we might achieve."

In Bexar County, property-rich Alamo Heights School District would get the biggest spending increase.

Per-pupil spending would jump more than 8 percent there, while Bexar County's poorer districts, among them Edgewood and San Antonio, would see a 3 percent bump, according to legislative calculations attached to the bill.

Highland Park, an affluent Dallas enclave, would get a 52 percent funding increase, to $8,948 per student from $5,883, according to the proposal's funding formula.

The 35 top-ranked districts — those slated to receive the biggest spending boosts — fall into the state's property-wealthy category.

They include Seminole, near Midland, which would get a 21 percent increase in per-student spending, and Carthage in East Texas and Calhoun County on the coast near Corpus Christi, which both would see more than a 13 percent bump.

"It is very evident that (the plan) is very rich on property tax relief," said Richard Middleton, superintendent for North East School District. "I think it's a retreat from equity."

The bill, introduced by House Education Committee Chairman Kent Grusendorf, would reduce local property taxes by as much as a third and increase state education spending by $1.5 billion.

It also would sharply scale back the state's school finance system — dubbed "Robin Hood" by critics — in which property-rich districts send money back to the state to help fund property-poor districts.

When Grusendorf, R-Arlington, unveiled the plan Thursday, he called it the state's most equitable ever because the state would pay a greater share of the funding so districts would rely less on local property taxes.

But while every school district would see an increase in funding, the biggest boosts would go to wealthy districts.

"I know everybody complains about Robin Hood, but if you don't have a Robin Hood situation you have a Prince John and Sheriff of Nottingham situation," said John Walch, assistant superintendent for Edgewood School District. "Money should be based on student needs, not on how nice their neighborhoods are."

The proposal calls for reducing local property taxes that fund schools from a current cap of $1.50 per $100 property valuation to $1 per $100 valuation. School districts could raise an additional 10 cents for local use at a rate of 2 cents per year.

The $1.5 billion in state funding would provide increases ranging from 3 percent to 8 percent for most districts.

Alamo Heights Superintendent Jerry Christian said he likes the lawmakers' approach conceptually, because as local property taxes rise, the district would see some of the benefit from those taxes.

The challenge, Christian said, is to reach a reasonable standard of education equity across rich and poor districts.

"We want to make sure it helps not just us, but everyone," Christian said. "I'm encouraged to see the legislators are being creative."
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jcaputo@express-news.net

Staff Writer Jeanne Russell contributed to this report.
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