The gap is in the news again. ASCD has pretty extensive/scholarly coverage of this on their wesite. Check out both Part I and Part II in order to look at causes and strategies for closing it, respectively. This is a rather comprehensive examination. The piece below focuses on the Black-White Achievement Gap. The economist doesn't connect up any of this to either NCLB or what I call Texas-style accountability (which would have been logical since NCLB is based on the Texas experience). For resources that make these connections the gap and current policy, check out Many Children Left Behind or my book, titled Leaving Children Behind. Economists typically can only go so far with their analyses.

-Angela

April 28, 2005
BY KATE N. GROSSMAN, Chicago Sun Times

The achievement gap between blacks and whites has stayed the same since 1990, and absent significant changes, the gulf could persist for much of the 21st century, according to new research by a University of Chicago economist.

This is in contrast to much of the 20th century, when the national achievement or "skill gap" between white and black students and young adults -- as measured by test scores, years of schooling and graduation rates -- decreased sharply.

"There are all kinds of things that could happen in the coming decades that could get us back on course, but if we extrapolate the current trends, things look really bleak," said Derek Neal, whose research will be published in the fall in the Handbook of Economics of Education. "We can't wait around and hope things get better."

Neal documented how the gap didn't narrow in the 1990s, and even grew slightly, and showed how African-American youth in urban centers lost significant ground relative to white students in test scores during the 1980s and 1990s.

Chicago statistics

In Chicago, for example, racial gaps in graduation rates increased between 1991 and 2001, according to the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago. Between 1997 and 2004, the gap in reading and math scores also widened, a consortium analysis found. The consortium wasn't involved with Neal's study.

Neal laid out several variables that could explain these trends, though he did not endorse any theory. The factors disproportionately affected black parents and children starting in the 1980s.

These include dropping employment rates and wages for low-skilled workers, growing prison rates for black males, the crack epidemic, differences in black and white investments in their children and how they parent.

By 2000, for example, about half of the black males between 26 and 35 who dropped out of high school weren't working, and a quarter were institutionalized, usually in prison. Neal also reported a dramatic rise in mothers who never married among blacks with no postsecondary schooling between 1980 and 1990, as well as a drop in earnings for black parents of preschool kids. In 1980, blacks earned 68 percent as much as whites. By, 2000, it was 56 percent.

"What we have in the 1990s is very little progress in test scores and educational attainment for young [black] adults, who were born in the 1980s, in the middle of that chaos," Neal said. "I have no proof that the two are connected. What I do know is that I have identified in gory detail that there is a problem."

On a national test, black 9- and 13-year-olds made striking gains in reading and math from the late 1970s through the late 1980s, but then the gap stopped closing.

Family resources in a child's early years are especially crucial, Neal notes, because black children typically start first grade significantly behind whites.

In his paper, which culled data from the census, national labor and education statistics and from other researchers, Neal explores whether differing investments by blacks and whites in their young children are driven simply by economics and time or also by cultural norms.

Early teaching strategy

One tool Neal highlights to help reverse the current trend is quality early childhood education, an intervention well-established by research. The Chicago public school system, for example, has an academic-based preschool program that includes classes for parents at its "Child-Parent Centers."

A University of Wisconsin researcher, who wasn't profiled by Neal, has followed for nearly 20 years the low-income, mostly black kids who went to one of the centers in the 1980s. He found higher high school graduation rates, lower juvenile arrest rates and more total years of schooling than for kids in other preschool programs.

President Bush's 2002 No Child Left Behind law, which measures schools based on the performance of all subgroups, including blacks, was passed in large part to help close achievement data. Neal's data aren't relevant because they largely end in 2000.

Neal and colleagues who reviewed his work said they hope the trend since 1990 is only an aberration.

"There are a lot of things from the 20th century that I don't plan for the 21st, like Jim Crow and other things that retarded progress," said Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist. "I'm actually quite optimistic that we'll achieve parity. . . . But it's not crazy to look at those numbers and say [the gap could persist well into the 21st century]. Only time will tell."

Copyright © The Sun-Times Company
http://www.suntimes.com/output/education/cst-nws-gap28.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:44 AM 2 comments Links to this post

Jenny Lacoste-Caputo
Express-News Staff Writer
4-29-05

AUSTIN — About 40 parents from the Edgewood School District rallied on the steps of the Capitol on Thursday to ask lawmakers to stop attempts to create a taxpayer-funded voucher program in Texas.

Lawmakers are considering three voucher bills currently pending in the House Public Education Committee. Two would create pilot programs which would affect several San Antonio school districts. The third would establish a statewide voucher program, affecting every school in Texas.

The only voucher program in the state now is a privately funded one in San Antonio's Edgewood School District.

Parents who oppose vouchers say they don't provide true school choice because private schools have the final say on who can attend. And, whether funded by private corporations or taxpayer money, vouchers siphon resources from public schools, opponents say.

"These vouchers exert an enormous financial drain on our school district, a tear in the fabric of our goals to educate our children," said Mike Espinoza, an Edgewood parent of an autistic son.

Kathy Miller, president of Texas Freedom Network, a group that advocates for public schools, said a voucher plan would drain between $600 million and $1.1 billion from public schools. Public school supporters cannot support vouchers, she said.

"The parents and teachers here today know firsthand the problems caused by voucher programs," she said.

"They have seen their schools lose precious dollars even while private schools cherry-pick certain students and reject others who have applied. At a time when legislators are struggling to fully fund our public schools, the last thing they should be doing is passing a voucher scheme that drains money from neighborhood schools to subsidize tuition at private schools."

Three weeks ago, nearly 500 voucher supporters rallied on the Capitol steps. They were greeted warmly by Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst.

One of the pending bills, House Bill 12, is sponsored by Rep. Frank Corte, R-San Antonio. It would allow economically disadvantaged students from the state's six largest school districts, including Northside, to use a taxpayer-funded voucher to go to private school.

Corte argues that vouchers would force competition between public and private schools, and that competition will benefit students in both settings.

But Miller said the Edgewood parents in Austin on Thursday have a different story to tell.

"Their stories show that despite all the promises made by pro-voucher lobbyists, vouchers leave kids behind, fail families and hurt communities," Miller said.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
jcaputo@express-news.net

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA042905.13A.lege_vouchers.22318c0e3.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:37 PM 1 comments Links to this post

A One Man Groundswell / texasobserver.org
4-29-05

At the mid-Legislative session mark, the award for the slickest rally at the Capitol goes to the Hispanic Council for Education and Reform (H-CREO). On April 5, H-CREO, which bills itself as the largest Hispanic education group in the state, bused hundreds of parents to Austin to show that there is Latino grassroots support for school vouchers in Texas. Between 300 and 400 parents attended a pro-voucher rally—in plush style by public interest standards—prior to a hearing on voucher legislation in the House Public Education Committee that day. Organizers paid for a large white tent to stake out on the Capitol grounds, so the attendees could sit in the shade while having lunch served to them. They set up a professional sound system on the Capitol steps (it too had its own little white tent). The line-up of speakers was the power trifecta: Governor Rick Perry, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, and House Speaker Tom Craddick (R-Midland). Before a bank of television cameras the three state leaders looked out into the brown faces gathered below and promised them that they heard their urgent cry to reform public schools by instituting vouchers. “School choice is one of the most important things we can do in this state,” Craddick told the crowd. “I assure you from the House side, we support choice.”

Organizers at H-CREO won’t reveal how much the rally cost. Marcela Garcini, a Texas parent coordinator for the group, says they organized the rally in just three days. (If they had started any earlier, it meant someone tipped them off about the hearing before it was publicly posted.) Garcini says the rally’s success was a reflection of H-CREO’s community organizing efforts in Texas since 2001. Organizers for the group go into public schools and churches to talk to parents, says Garcini. “When you really work with communities, when you really understand them, when you tell them the truth about how their kids are doing in the schools—this is the result you get.”

The rally, according to organizers, showed how much grassroots support vouchers have in the Hispanic community. Interviews in the crowd told a slightly different story. A majority of the parents present at the rally had children who were no longer in the public school system. They belonged to Children’s Educational Opportunity Fund, or CEO, a pro-voucher group in San Antonio that provides privately funded vouchers, or scholarships, for parents to put their kids into private schools. CEO San Antonio’s program director Jessica Sanchez estimates 250 parents from their parent organization, Las Comadres, attended the rally in Austin. Most of these parents already receive money to send their children to private schools through the CEO scholarship program.

But Carla Garcia, a parent who attended the rally and whose son has been on a CEO scholarship program since its inception in 1998, says the grants are ending. “Someone has donated the money for people needing it in San Antonio, but the money is running out. Once it runs out, people are going to have to pull their kids out of the schools they are in now because they are not going to be able to afford to keep them there.”

So who is this generous donor who doles out voucher money?

The largest contributor to the CEO program also happens to be the second largest campaign contributor in Texas, Dr. James Leininger. According to Sanchez, Leininger founded CEO and made a 10-year commitment to the organization. To date he has poured between $30 million and $50 million into the scholarship program. In the 2002 and 2004 election cycles, he gave a total of almost $2 million to Texas Republicans, according to figures from the Austin-based campaign watchdog Texans for Public Justice.

It’s not surprising that the large majority of attendees at the H-CREO rally were actually Leininger-funded CEO parents. Federal tax records further confirm that H-CREO and CEO are closely linked. Robert Aguirre, one of the original founders of the CEO program in San Antonio in 1998, is still managing director, but, according to Sanchez, is no longer on the payroll. Aguirre also helped to launch H-CREO in 2001 and now serves as chairman of the board of trustees. In 2003, he received over $100,000 in consulting fees from H-CREO, according to tax records.

H-CREO receives much of its funding from right-wing pro-voucher groups such as the Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart fame and Leininger’s own pro-voucher political action committee, Children First America. (See Political Intelligence, June 4, 2004). It’s a good time to be a Republican fat cat with a cause. In October, H-CREO received a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the Department of Education to inform the public about their options under the No Child Left Behind Act.

While refusing to reveal the origin of the money for the rally, organizers did insist that federal education dollars were not used. Chuck McDonald, serving as a spokesperson for the group’s efforts in Austin, says “they spent enough to attract enough people to get the press to come out” and that it probably fell somewhere in the couple of thousands of dollars. (McDonald was most recently in the media testifying in the Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC) civil trial about his work creating more than four million mailers distributed to voters by the Texas Association of Business (TAB). Bill Cerverha, the defendant in the civil trial, was also at the rally in support.)

Garcini, the Texas parent coordinator for H-CREO, says she feels the organization is being unfairly targeted on money issues. “Who cares about the funds? Is the program working? Are the parents getting informed? Why, when they see the organization is working, when they have the proof, are they questioning the funds?”

Leininger has poured millions of dollars into the fight for school vouchers—including political contributions, but hasn’t seen the Lege give much movement to school voucher legislation. Nearly all the major contributors to the 2002 campaign that captured the Legislature—in a campaign currently under investigation by two grand juries—have already received something in return. Leininger and gambling interests appear to be the only ones left behind.

“I’m here to tell you, that there are people listening to you at the highest level of government,” Perry told the cheering parents at the rally.
And, Dr. Jim, that means you, too.

Lauren Reinlie is a legislative intern for The Texas Observer.
http://www.mollyivins.com/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=1938

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:26 AM 2 comments Links to this post

This reporter below didn’t cover it, but my older daughter, Clara Zamora, spoke, as well, at the press conference today. She shared her views of the TAKS test and how it takes up too much instructional time and how it places too much pressure on children. She said that she doesn’t blame the schools but rather the government because it forces principals and teachers to make it (and the benchmarks) the center of schooling and how that’s unfair. She said that an education should be about learning and not about so much testing.

Though I’m hopelessly biased, Clara rocked! She’s so unassuming and understated that she exhibited, by all accounts, enormous credibility. She also made it clear that there’s nothing wrong with the test itself. The problem is the way it’s used.

As mentioned in an earlier message, Clara also wants to inform kids of their right to not have to take the test. She and some of her friends are signing an on-line petition that they created over the weekend to support State Rep. Dora Olivo’s bills. Hopefully, she’ll be able to use this as part of her testimony next Tuesday, May 3rd, when the Committee on Public Education plans on taking testimony on the legislation—barring any unforeseen contrivance by our unsupportive Chairman on Public Education. Having effectively joined the ranks of other known conscientious test objectors—Kim Marciniak and Mia Kang (both of San Antonio), Macario Guajardo (EdCouch-Elsa), and Emiliano Guajardo (Austin)—she’s in good company. Her parents are very proud about her principled stance and her willingness to speak on behalf of children in Texas. -Angela

News 8 Story

Lawmaker Says There's Too Much Emphasis on TAKS
4/26/2005 6:11 PM
By: Allie Rasmus 

It's a four-letter word that just about every parent with school-aged children knows - TAKS.

Texas students finished taking the standardized test last week.

The statewide exams test third through 11th graders every April on a variety of subjects.

In third, fifth and eighth grades, students who fail the TAKS fail the grade.

"When we get to one bubble-filling day and that makes the decision whether students pass or not, there's something wrong with that picture," Rep. Dora Olivo, D-Rosenberg, said.

Olivo wrote a bill that would make the TAKS test just one of several criteria to determine whether a student stays behind.

"The students' grades, the teacher opinion, plus the test to measure that student's performance," Olivo said.

 WATCH THE VIDEO
The importance of TAKS
A bill would make the TAKS test just one of several criteria for determining student performance.

Elementary school teachers Marlee Criaco and Sue Calhoun say that's not a bad idea.

"It's very high pressure. There are kids who have never been sick before but they're so stressed out they're throwing up on the test, they're getting headaches," Criaco said.

"I don't think there's anything wrong with the TAKS test. We need to teach our children the skills that are in the TAKS test. But I think it's a sad thing that so much accountability is focused on one test," Calhoun said.

Olivo's bills, HB 1612 and HB 1613, weren't included to the House's education reform plan, but the Senate is expected to vote on its version of the House education bill on Thursday.

Olivo said there's still time this session to change the rules and decrease the pressure on Texas students. The bill is still pending in the House Education Committee. It's tentatively scheduled for a hearing on May 3.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:55 PM 3 comments Links to this post

I’ve never known Jerry Bracey, a good friend and colleague, to be “acerbic” as Mathews describes, but rather as a person of intellectual depth, principled and with a strong commitment to social justice. GMU needs him more than Bracey needs GMU and I hope that they come to their senses on their termination of his contract.
-Angela

Don't Fire This Professor

By Jay Mathews

Early in 2003, shortly after he was hired as an associate professor of education at George Mason University, Gerald W. Bracey sat down for lunch at Chiengmai, a Thai restaurant in Fairfax City, with Jeffrey Gorrell, dean of the university's College of Education and Human Development.

It could have been a fruitful discussion about how to make America's schools better, since Gorrell oversaw an important training program for teachers and Bracey was one of the best-informed and articulate critics of education policy in the country. Instead, their conversation began a steady deterioration in relations between the two men that seems about to end with Bracey being fired. (A GMU spokesman said the university is not firing Bracey, just not renewing his contract, and that its action has nothing to do with the issues discussed at that lunch at Chiengmai.)

Deans and professors become irritated with each other all the time, and Bracey, 65, has only an untenured one-quarter-time contract, paying him about $20,000 a year. He is a popular writer and speaker, with a regular column on research in the monthly education magazine, the Phi Delta Kappan. Losing his GMU job will not cause him much financial stress or dim his reputation.

Yet, the events preceding Bracey's leaving are interesting, all the same, as an indication of the personal animosities generated by the ongoing argument over how to help ill-served schoolchildren and the difficulties the most outspoken advocates sometimes have. Bracey and Gorrell don't agree on why his contract was not renewed, so I want to tell their conflicting stories, which only increase my desire that Bracey stay at GMU.

Bracey said Gorrell told him at that lunch that there was a problem they needed to discuss. The dean had invited Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a former assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration, to speak at the education school. In a letter to GMU President Alan G. Merten and Provost Peter Stearns, Bracey said Gorrell told him, "Finn said he would appear on one condition: That I not be in the room."

"Gorrell said that if I didn't agree, he would cancel the invitation," Bracey said. "I was stunned that the decision had been brought to me in the first place." Bracey said he felt the university's proper response was to use the expletive employed by Vice President Cheney in his famous 2004 exchange with Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). "But, as a 25 percent employee on the scene for only a few months, I didn't think it was my place to deprive the rest of [the] faculty of their chance to hear Finn speak," Bracey said.

People reading this who know Bracey are guessing that he would not, despite that mild response, ever take such an insult without a vigorous response. One of the reasons Bracey is not running an education school or state education department himself, given his depth of knowledge and communication skills, is that he is one of the most acerbic people in his field, quick to take offense and not shy about telling people with whom he disagrees how much he thinks they have failed in thought and action.

Take for instance his annual Rotten Apple Awards, which identify journalists, pundits and educators who Bracey thinks have behaved like craven idiots in the previous 12 months. I haven't made the list yet, but I expect my time will come since Bracey and I disagree on many issues. Still, I cite him often in stories and columns because he is too smart and quotable to resist.

In the debate over fixing schools, Bracey opposes the federal No Child Left Behind law, thinks we have put too much faith in testing and calls for more support and money for teachers. He argues frequently that opinion leaders such as Finn, who supports No Child Left Behind, have distorted data and made American public schools look much worse than they are. I think Finn, whom I also quote frequently, is right to support No Child Left Behind, and I think Bracey is right that American schools are better than they are often made out to be, although unlike Bracey I do not think anyone in this debate is acting in bad faith. I admire both men, which neither of them can understand.

Finn's account of the prelude to his speech at GMU is only slightly different from Bracey's, and like Bracey he does not deny the contempt they have for each other. "I distinctly recall saying to Jeff Gorrell, after I learned that he had been inexplicably moved to hire Bracey, that if Bracey was going to be in the audience I'd rather not come to lecture at his institution," Finn said. "That's all I know except that Bracey didn't turn up. I've no idea what transpired between Gorrell and Bracey."

Finn said he thought Bracey was "nothing but a self-aggrandizing spoiler-kvetcher-troublemaker-naysayer."

Although Bracey stayed away from Finn's speech, he made known his feelings about it. "I considered going in disguise," he said, "but settled for preparing and distributing to the faculty 13 questions I thought the faculty should address to Finn. As appalled as I was at the situation, I was then equally appalled that only two faculty members saw Finn's stipulation as a major academic freedom issue and talked to Gorrell about it. The most common reaction was a shrug."

"Dean Gorrell called me on the carpet for using the faculty mailing list to disseminate the questions, saying that in them I had put forth some ad hominem arguments about Finn," Bracey said. "It apparently didn't occur to Gorrell that Finn's ultimatum was predicated on a nothing but ad hominem argument."

Bracey said Gorrell recently told him his contract, which expires at the end of this academic year, will not be renewed. In a March 22 letter to Bracey, Gorrell said, "As I have explained to you several times over the past year or so, the College's contracts with you were associated with a desire to find a good fit between your skills and the needs of the College. I regret that at this time I do not have an assignment for you that would lead to another contract. However, if a project surfaces in the future where we can use your evident abilities, I will be happy to contract for your services again."

He told Bracey the decision had "no relationship to issues of academic freedom" and "while I do not agree with much of your characterization of the events of two years ago, I do recognize your right to hold to your interpretations."

GMU spokesman Dan Walsch noted that Bracey's contract was renewed for two years after the Finn speech, although Bracey contends that the university was looking for ways to remove him each of those years. Academic freedom, Walsch said, "is the bedrock of our institution. Over the years, George Mason has proudly brought many different voices to campus, including Cornell West, J. Gordon Liddy, Margaret Thatcher, Thomas Ridge, Madelyn Albright and John Kerry."

Walsch said that "only several weeks ago, the university's Faculty Senate passed a resolution that reinforced its unshakable belief in free speech. The Faculty Senate's action spoke for all of us. Academic freedom remains alive and well at George Mason University."

That is commendable. But without Bracey the vibrancy of the debate over educational issues at the university is likely to suffer. During his three years at GMU, Bracey gave more than 45 speeches in 23 states, wrote 30 Phi Delta Kappan columns, 17 articles and six books, not counting his upcoming work, "How to Read Research and Avoid Being Duped by Data." He was given the John Dewey Award by the Vermont Association for the Study of Education and the Interpretive Scholarship Award by the American Educational Research Association. The Horace Mann Society named him Educator of the Year. His GMU connection was mentioned in nearly all these publications and occasions.

Bracey, without question, can be a pain, but he plays the same energizing role in the American educational debate that is played by Al Franken, Ann Coulter, Al Sharpton and other passionate and entertaining advocates in our political debates.

Figuring out how to make schools work is hard enough without having a sharp, well-argued discussion of the most difficult points. Bracey has often offended experts by exposing us to alternate interpretations of statistics and trends, but what's wrong with that?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/emailafriend?contentId=AR2005032304303&sent=no&referrer=emailarticle

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:49 PM 0 comments Links to this post

According to the Quorum Report (4/25/04), -- “Rep. Sefronia Thompson (D-Houston) asked, tongue-in-cheek, whether Chisum also was willing to outlaw adultery, fornication and incest, which were all threats to marriage. She later gave a fiery speech paralleling the intolerance against gay marriage with the intolerance against interracial marriage of her childhood. Thompson told the House that HJR 6 was about hate and fear and discrimination.

"I know something about hate and fear and discrimination. When I was a small girl, white folks used to talk about ‘protecting the institution of marriage’ as well. What they meant was if people of my color tried to marry people of Mr. Chisum's color, you'd often find the people of my color hanging from a tree," Thompson said. "That's what the white folks did back then to ‘protect marriage.’ Fifty years ago, white folks thought inter-racial marriages were a ‘threat to the institution of marriage.’"

This is sad. I imagine that the Supreme Court will ultimately weigh in on this issue of legalized discrimination in Texas. -Angela

79th LEGISLATURE
House approves gay-marriage ban

Proposed constitutional amendment still needs Senate, voter approval.
By Michelle M. Martinez
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
> Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Efforts to add a ban on gay marriage to the state constitution advanced Monday when the Texas House of Representatives approved the measure with a necessary two-thirds vote.

Critics were particularly concerned about an amendment to the resolution that they say would ban gay and straight couples from civil unions.

In Texas, same-sex marriages are forbidden, and civil unions are not recognized.

The 101 members who voted in favor of the resolution, which was sponsored by Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, would let Texas voters decide whether the constitution should be amended to say that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

"The Texas Legislature continues to push policies that hurt real Texas families by denying children of placement in loving homes and by closing the door on loving, committed couples from the ability to care for one another and their family," said Heath Riddles, communications director for the Lesbian-Gay Rights Lobby of Texas.

Riddles was referring to a House amendment that was tacked on to a Child Protective Services reform bill last week. That amendment, by Rep. Robert Talton, R-Pasadena, would ban gays and lesbians from being foster parents.

The bill voted on Monday must be approved one more time before it can clear the House and go to the Senate, where it will need approval from two-thirds of the senators to pass. It then would need to be approved by voters.

In 2003, lawmakers made marriage between two people of the same sex and civil unions void in Texas. That measure included a provision that the state would not recognize such unions. When the Legislature passed the bill, also known as the Defense of Marriage Act, state law already prohibited issuing marriage licenses to people of the same sex.

The bill approved Monday would take the issue a step further by amending the constitution — if voters approve. If the Senate agrees, the measure would be put on the Nov. 8 ballot.

Chisum said the move to put the language in the constitution would help should a legal challenge to the marriage act arise.

"I think it's something that's going around in the different areas, and we can prevent all of that by putting this into the constitution, by placing that question in front of the people of the state," Chisum said.

Fifteen states have constitutional amendments defining marriage as a union of a man and a woman, and voters in three others have yet to decide.

Some lawmakers questioned Chisum's motive for wanting to amend the constitution and accused him of playing politics.

"I want the body to clearly understand here that we are not doing anymore with this amendment than what exists now in the state of Texas," Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, said before abstaining from the vote. "We are making a political statement just for the point of making the statement."

Lawmakers were particularly concerned about the amendment that says the state or a political subdivision of the state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage. The proposal would ban civil unions in the state, but there was some confusion as to the effects it would have on common-law marriages. Chisum assured lawmakers it would not affect such marriages.

Kelly Shackelford, president of the Free Market Foundation, agreed. He said the amendment was meant to prevent a situation such as the one in California, where the legislature passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage between a man and a woman and then created domestic partnerships — not considered marriages — for same-sex couples.

"The other side has been very ingenious in trying to do end runs around the people's wishes," said Shackelford, whose Plano organization pushes for less government, lower taxes and "solid family values."

Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, said the measure limits the rights of all unmarried Texans and is a diversion from the real issues facing families.

"It will do nothing to lower property taxes, fully fund our public schools, provide health insurance for children of the working poor and protect abused and neglected kids," she said in a prepared statement. "Shameful votes like this one . . . are designed simply to play politics at the expense of a vulnerable minority in our state."

mmmartinez@statesman.com; 445-3633
 
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/04/26MARRIAGE.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:57 PM 3 comments Links to this post

Ravitch responds to Bill Gates' proposal to make all high school students college ready. She argues that this will be difficult because they inherit the deficits incurred earlier at the elementary and middle school levels. She suggests a bifurcated tracking system that prepares children for different destinies earlier--some toward college and others through technical careers. She also unfairly derides reforms that I believe can get at the heart of the problem of the gap, namely, reforms that address issues of race & class, an area that she accords little weight or attention to in her writings. I suppose she knows what's best for our minorities.

In any case, what she proposes has its own limits. I, for example, didn't know that I would go to college until I was a senior in high school. I was victimized by institutionalized racism and sexism (combined) with teachers never regarding me as college material and tracking me into lower courses without me or my parents being fully aware of the consequences. Under the system she proposes, unwitting "late bloomers" like myself would get routed in the wrong direction too quickly.

Gates (see article below) proposes college readiness for ALL students while Ravitch proposes college readiness for SOME students. Whatever their respective limitations, of the 2 proposals, the latter one depends on ever more sorting, tracking, and segregation—all of which will surely cluster anew by race and class. Wonder what others think?

-Angela

Education Researcher Diana Ravitch Questions the National High School Reform Movement
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just because Bill Gates is ready to pour millions of dollars into a big new idea doesn't make it a good one
------------------------------------------------------------------------

PROCEED WITH CAUTION
Some high schools get high grades
Rush to reform may miss the mark
By DIANE RAVITCH, HoustonChronicle.com, April 16, 2005

Everybody who is anybody seems to have decided that the American high school is responsible for the failings of American students. The Bush administration, many governors and even Bill Gates have now called for radical reforms.

Reflecting this growing consensus that the high school is, in Gates' words, an "obsolete" institution, the governors of 13 states have pledged an overhaul of the high school system, and more are expected to jump on the bandwagon of reform.
Let's slow down here. American education is famous for inspiring crusades, and the history of the 20th century is littered with dozens of failed movements. This 21st century campaign will fall flat, too, unless the proponents are clear-headed about the nature of the problem and willing to rethink their proposed solutions.
It is true that American student performance is appalling. Only a minority of students - whether in 4th, 8th or 12th grade - reach proficiency as measured by the Education Department's National Assessment of Educational Progress. On a scale that has three levels - basic, proficient and advanced - most students score at the basic level or even below basic in every subject.
American students also perform poorly when compared with their peers in other developed countries on tests of mathematics and science, and many other nations now have a higher proportion of their students completing high school.
While the problems of low achievement and poor graduation rates are clear, however, their solutions are not. The reformist governors, for example, want to require all students to take a college-preparatory curriculum and to meet more rigorous standards for graduation. These steps will very likely increase the dropout rate, not reduce it.
To understand why, you have to consider what the high schools are dealing with. When American students arrive as freshmen, nearly 70 percent are reading below grade level. Equally large numbers are ill-prepared in mathematics, science and history.
It is hardly fair to blame high schools for the poor skills of their entering students. If students start high school without the skills needed to read, write and solve math problems, then the governors should focus on strengthening the standards of their states' junior high schools.
And that first year of high school is often the most important one - many students who eventually drop out do so after becoming discouraged when they can't earn the credits to advance beyond ninth grade. Ninth grade is often referred to by educators as a "parking lot." This is because social promotion - the endemic practice of moving students up to the next grade whether they have earned it or not - comes to a crashing halt in high school.
It makes no sense to blame the high schools for their ill-prepared incoming students. To really get at the problem, we have to make changes across our educational system. The most important is to stress the importance of academic achievement.
Sorry to say, we have a long history of reforms by pedagogues to de-emphasize academic achievement and to make school more "relevant," "fun" and like "real life." These ideals have produced whole-language instruction, where phonics, grammar and spelling are abandoned in favor of "creativity," and fuzzy mathematics, where students are supposed to "construct" their own solutions to math problems instead of finding the right answers.
Besides, in many ways our high schools are better than our primary system. They are the part of our educational system where students are most likely to have teachers who have a degree in the subject they are teaching.
In the lower grades, most teachers are likely to have majored in education, not in mathematics or science or history; some even have both a major and a minor in pedagogy, yet end up teaching core academic subjects.
This does not mean, of course, that our high schools are ideal. To some extent, the present-day comprehensive high school, in which most American students are enrolled, tries and fails to be all things to all students.
It does not adequately challenge high-performing students, who get low scores when compared with their peers in other nations. It does a poor job preparing average students, nearly half of whom need remedial courses when they enter college. And it loses low-performing students, who are likely to drop out while still lacking the skills they need for gainful employment.
A report released last month by the National Association of Scholars, an independent group of educators, outlined proposals more sensible than those endorsed by the governors. Written by Sandra Stotsky, a former associate commissioner of education for Massachusetts, it proposes that students entering ninth grade be given a choice between a subject-centered curriculum or a technical, career-oriented course of study.
The former would look like a traditional college-preparatory curriculum, with an emphasis on humanities, sciences or arts. The latter would include a number of technologically rigorous programs and apprenticeships.
All students, regardless of their concentration, would be required to complete a core curriculum of four years of English and at least three years of mathematics, science and history. Students graduating from either program would be well-educated and prepared for higher education.
The report also recommends that teachers of core subjects have a solid background - at least an undergraduate major - in the main subjects they teach, that teachers of technical subjects have either solid academic training or work experience in their fields, and that American schools have a longer school day and school year.
In addition, contrary to the philosophy of Gates' foundation, which has spent millions to create hundreds of small high schools with no more than 500 students, the National Academy of Scholars report recommends that schools should have a minimum of 500 students.
Larger schools provide better staff depth and stability - imagine how disruptive it is to a tiny high school if just a couple of teachers leave over the summer - and have a broader range of music, art, drama, debate and sports offerings.

And research by Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that small high schools are more likely than large ones to have out-of-field teachers - that is, teachers who have neither a major nor a minor in their subject.

Our officials should be lauded for their concern about high school graduation rates. But the governors should scrutinize with great care the popular reforms of the day before imposing them on their states' schools.
Just because Bill Gates is ready to pour millions of dollars into a big new idea doesn't make it a good one.

Ravitch is a research professor of education at New York University and the author of "Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms."
The K-12 Committee of The National Association of Scholars:
Recommendations For Reforming the American High School

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/3137543

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:22 PM 1 comments Links to this post

April 17, 2005, 1:51AM

FLUNKING OUT

Our high schools just aren't doing the job we need to create an effective 21st century work force. We have to reinvent them.

By BILL GATES

Our high schools are obsolete.

By obsolete, I don't just mean that they are broken, flawed and underfunded — although I can't argue with any of those descriptions.

What I mean is that they were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Today, even when they work exactly as designed, our high schools cannot teach our kids what they need to know.

Until we design high schools to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting — even ruining — the lives of millions of Americans every year. Frankly, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. The idea behind the old high school system was that you could train an adequate work force by sending only a small fraction of students to college, and that the other kids either couldn't do college work or didn't need to.

Sure enough, today only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready for college, work and citizenship.

The others, most of whom are low-income and minority students, are tracked into courses that won't ever get them ready for any of those things — no matter how well the students learn or how hard the teachers work.

In district after district across the country, wealthy white kids are taught Algebra II, while low-income minority kids are taught how to balance a checkbook.

This is an economic disaster. In the international competition to have the best supply of workers who can communicate clearly, analyze information and solve complex problems, the United States is falling behind. We have one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world.

In math and science, our fourth-graders rank among the top students in the world, but our 12th-graders are near the bottom. China has six times as many college graduates in engineering.

As bad as it is for our economy, it's even worse for our students. Today, most jobs that pay enough to support a family require some post-secondary education. Yet onlyhalf of all students who enter high school enroll in a post-secondary institution.

High school dropouts have it worst of all. Only 40 percent have jobs. They are nearly four times more likely to be arrested than their friends who stayed in high school. And they die young because of years of poor health care, unsafe living conditions and violence.

We can put a stop to this. We designed these high schools; we can redesign them.

We have to do away with the outdated idea that only some students need to be ready for college and that the others can walk away from higher education and still thrive in our 21st century society. We need a new design that realizes that all students can do rigorous work.

There is mounting evidence in favor of this approach. Take the Kansas City, Kan., public school district, where 79 percent of students are minorities and 74 percent live below the poverty line. For years, the district struggled with high dropout rates and low test scores. In 1996, it adopted a school-reform model that, among many other steps, requires all students to take college-prep courses. Since then, the district's graduation rate has climbed more than 30 percentage points.

Kansas City is not an isolated example. Exciting work is under way to improve high schools in such cities as Oakland, Chicago and New York.

All of these schools are organized around three powerful principles: Ensure that all students are given a challenging curriculum that prepares them for college or work; that their courses clearly relate to their lives and goals; and that they are surrounded by adults who push them to achieve.

This kind of change is never easy. But I believe there are three ways that political and business leaders at every level can help build momentum for change in our schools:

• First, declare that all students must graduate from high school ready for college, work and citizenship. Every politician and chief executive in the country should speak up for the belief that children need to take courses that prepare them for college.
• Second, publish the data that measure our progress toward that goal. We already have some data that show us the extent of the problem. But we need to know more: What percentage of students are dropping out? What percentage are graduating? And this data must be broken down by race and income.
• Finally, every state should commit to turning around failing schools and opening new ones. When the students don't learn, the school must change. Every state needs a strong intervention strategy to improve struggling schools.
If we keep the system as it is, millions of children will never get a chance to fulfill their promise because of their ZIP Code, their skin color or their parents' income. That is offensive to our values.

Every kid can graduate ready for college. Every kid should have the chance.

Let's redesign our schools to make it happen.

Gates, chairman of Microsoft, is co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/3138257

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:30 PM 2 comments Links to this post

It's amazing to hear all the praises that are sung about the accountability system at the Texas legislature, as well as in the press, when the state's own data belie this very reality. If one soley relied on the TEA's press releases for information on the condition of education in our state (see Hot Topics for TEA's version of events), one wouldn't immediately grasp this reality.

Sure, 89 percent of the 226,939 students tested passed all their tests, but this rate is in turn is "achieved" through BOTH racial/ethnic disparities AND differences between those who are economically disadvantaged versus their counterparts who are not.

Among 3rd graders, for example, 95% of Anglos met the standard in reading while 85 and 82% of Latinos and African Americans, respectively, did so (March 2005, Statewide Preliminary Report, TEA). Similarly, 95% of economically advantaged in comparison to 83% of their disadvantaged counterparts met this standard.

At the 11th grade level, matters are even more bleak, with only 64% of all students meeting the standard in language arts. That is, while 75% of Anglos met the L.A. standard, only 60% of Latinos and 60% of African Americans did so (December 2004, Statewide Preliminary Report, TEA). Similarly, 69% of economically advantaged in comparison to 60% of their disadvantaged counterparts met this standard.

So, the 3rd grade achievement levels are not only NOT replicated at later grade levels, but the racial/ethnic and socioeconomic gap persists across ALL levels despite 14-plus years of Texas-style accountability. Now, if only our legislators will stop being cheerleaders for the system and start paying attention to those of us who welcome a more constructive and less punishing approach to school reform. -Angela


April 26, 2005, 9:57AM

HISD chief Saavedra says the scores show progress
By JASON SPENCER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

RESOURCES
MATH SCORES
Houston's fifth-graders posted the lowest passing rate among the state's five urban school districts on the TAKS math test. Here's a list of the districts and the percentage who passed the exam.
• Austin: 76 percent
• Fort Worth: 73 percent
• San Antonio: 69 percent
• Dallas: 68 percent
• Houston: 67 percent
• State: 79 percent
Source: School districts

A third of Houston's fifth-graders failed the state's math exam, the school district announced Monday, meaning 4,500 students face the threat of summer school, and perhaps another year in elementary school, if they don't manage to pass by August.

This is the first year that fifth-graders are required to pass the math and reading portions of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exam in order to move on to the sixth-grade.

Those who haven't passed both subjects after the third try in June can still be promoted if their parent, teacher and principal unanimously agree that promotion is in the child's best interest.

Even fewer Houston Independent School District fifth-graders — 62 percent — passed the reading exam on the first try, according to results released last month.

HISD's math passing rate — 67 percent — was the lowest among Texas' five urban school districts and 12 percentage points below the state average.

Still, HISD Superintendent Abe Saavedra said the scores show progress.

Students had to correctly answer 30 of 42 math questions this year to pass, compared with 28 of 42 last year, when 76 percent of HISD's fifth-graders passed.

If last year's weaker standards had been used again this year, 78 percent would have passed, he said.

"We're proud of the improvement in our test scores," Saavedra said.

"But we still have a long way to go to have every child in HISD learning at the highest level."

Students who haven't passed the TAKS test will get extra tutoring to prepare for their next shot at the exam in May, Saavedra said.

They'll have another opportunity in late June.

Saavedra said he expects scores to improve under his new teaching-focused management structure that goes into effect at the end of this school year.

On Monday, he named 18 of the 19 people who will serve as executive principals, each overseeing a high school and all the elementary and middle schools that feed into it.

A few will oversee two feeder patterns.

"These strong academic leaders will focus with laser-like intensity on improving academic performance in every school in HISD," Saavedra said, as the executives stood behind him at the school district headquarters.

Each executive principal will earn a base salary of $95,000 with a potential incentive bonus of up to $30,000. Who gets those bonuses will be determined at least in part on TAKS scores.

jason.spencer@chron.com

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3152871

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

If testing were the answer to our problems, they would have all been solved by now. -Schaeffer of FairTest appropriately recommends that we all respond to the NYTimes on this. -Angela

From: "Bob Schaeffer"
To: "ARN Main List" ; "arn2-strategy"



New York Times editorial writers (primarily Brent Staples) continue to
confuse identification of a very real problem -- inequity and the educational achievement gap that results -- with NCLB's counter-productive "solution." Letters to the editor should be emailed
to letters@nytimes.com or faxed to 212 556-3622. Remember to limit
comments to 150 words or so in order to increase the odds that they will
be printed.

STAND FIRM FOR EDUCATIONAL FAIRNESS
New York Times Editorial -- April 22, 2005
The Bush administration jeopardized the most important education reform
of the last 100 years when it failed to fully finance the No Child Left
Behind Act, which requires states to improve scholastic achievement for
poor and minority children in return for federal dollars. The shortfall
in funds has not only made it more difficult for some states to comply,
but has also provided a handy excuse for those who don't believe that
the achievement gap between white and minority children can ever be
closed - or don't want to make the effort to try.

Right now, when the law is under attack from all sides, it's important
to divide the critics who want to make it work better from those who
simply want to see it go away. It can't be a coincidence that the states
most actively opposed to No Child Left Behind have poor records when it
comes to the very issues the federal law is supposed to address.

The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers'
union, made headlines this week when it engineered a lawsuit asserting
that No Child Left Behind illegally requires states to spend their own
money on enforcing new federal requirements. The N.E.A. has
misrepresented the law to the public from the start, and the primary aim
of its suit is to throw out the baby with the bath water. The union
doesn't want a better No Child Left Behind Act; it wants to make the law
disappear entirely.

The new law has also drawn protests from Connecticut and Utah, two
states where the achievement gaps between white and minority children
are among the largest in the nation. Secretary of Education Margaret
Spellings, who has been working to fix some of the genuine problems with
the administration of the law, struck the right tone this week when she
notified Utah that if it insisted on substituting a weaker system of its
own choosing for the federal rules, it could potentially lose federal
funds.

That same warning should apply to Connecticut, which has threatened to
sue the federal government over the portion of the law that requires
annual student testing in grades three through eight. The testing is
necessary to ensure that the states are actually closing the achievement
gap between white and minority children.

Connecticut, which already tests in some grades, argues that testing
every year in the grades required by the law would be of no value. But
it would be extremely valuable to the parents of at-risk children, who
should not have to wait two years to find out whether the schools are
actually helping their children.

The No Child Left Behind law has been a success on many levels -
particularly in reorienting the thinking of the school districts that
used to average out success by letting the stellar achievements of
middle-class students wipe out the failures on the bottom. But it will
take years, and far more work and money, before the public sees the kind
of improvement it has a right to expect. Right now, everyone who cares
about quality education for all children should be working to make that
happen, not to dismantle what has already been done.

Secretary Spellings should make it clear that Congress meant business
when it declared an end to educational inequality and required the
states to actually teach impoverished children in exchange for getting
federal aid. Money is clearly crucial, but the argument over funds
should not be allowed to derail the new law, which is already showing
that achievement gaps can be narrowed if the schools apply themselves.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:07 PM 0 comments Links to this post

------------------------------------------------------------------------
HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Local & State

April 23, 2005, 12:00AM

Toe the line, education chief warns the agency she once headed
By JUSTIN GEST
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - Education Secretary Margaret Spellings fined Texas $444,282 Friday for the state's continued defiance of the No Child Left Behind Act.

For the last two years, the Texas Education Agency has exceeded the federal cap on how many students with learning disabilities can be exempted from regular state testing, mandated by the act, in favor of an easier exam.

In a stern letter addressed to Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley, Spellings said "the TEA has not shown cause why" she should not withhold the money from the agency's 2004 federal grant.

"The TEA's proposed amendment was not consistent with the law and the regulations, and something the Education Department could not approve," Spellings wrote.

It is only the second fine ever levied against a state under the 2001 landmark education law. It is also the steepest.

Minnesota was fined $113,000 by Spelling's predecessor, Rod Paige, for not testing an adequate number of students in 2003.

In January, Paige threatened to fine Texas for noncompliance, but he gave the state time to submit a defense.

Spellings, formerly of Houston, who took over later that month, was not convinced by the state's justification of its actions.

Texas' fine comes a little more than two weeks after Spellings announced that she would offer more flexibility in meeting No Child Left Behind requirements to states that otherwise adhere to federal rules.

But Texas had flouted the federal guidelines.

Neeley's defiance touched off a public dispute between her and Spellings, who helped design the original No Child Left Behind Act in Texas when she advised then-Gov. George W. Bush from 1994 to 2000.

Neeley was accused of exempting the extra students to falsely inflate state scores. In response, she said the Education Department was out of touch with needs of students in Texas.

Texas may be subject to further sanctions.

The federal limit on the number of students who can take the special exam remains capped at 1 percent, and Texas again exempted nearly 9 percent of its students during the current school year.

"We're going down another path where there's going to be another standoff," said Patty Sullivan, director of the Center on Education Policy in Washington. "They're probably going to fine the state again this year."

But education experts said the penalties were not severe enough to force Texas to change its guidelines.

The $444,282 fine represents a fraction of Texas' $1.1 billion federal allocation, and a sliver of the state's $33 billion annual public education budget.

"Texas got a slap on the hand for breaking a fundamental principle of No Child Left Behind. Now any other state that doesn't comply is going to expect a similar financial penalty," said Scott Young, a policy adviser for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

"Texas called their bluff. Apparently, the department's not going to jeopardize public education in Texas and the individual students there. I can only imagine what Utah and Connecticut are thinking right now."

On Tuesday, Utah's Legislature passed a resolution that declares federal education laws subordinate to state policy.

Last week, Connecticut officials announced plans to sue the Education Department for the right to disregard federal rules, saying the federal government fails to provide enough money.

It is unclear how Texas will return the money from its 2004 federal allocation, all of which has been spent. Officials at both TEA and the Education Department were unavailable for comment when the letter was released Friday at 7:20 p.m. EDT.

justin.gest@chron.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3148917

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:34 PM 11 comments Links to this post

*************URGENT TFN ACTION ***************

The House Public Education Committee will hear testimony at 2 p.m., Tuesday, April 26, on two bills that would swing open the door to widespread censorship of our children's textbooks. These bills would effectively repeal legislation passed in 1995 to prevent the State Board of Education (SBOE) from censoring content in Texas textbooks. By permitting SBOE members to insert or delete content based on their own political and religious ideology, the bills would give far-right censors free rein to target textbooks discussions on such topics as the theory of evolution, slavery, the civil rights struggle, women's rights and the separation of church and state.

H.B. 2534 by Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, allows the SBOE to determine content requirements and limitations for facts and discussions about theories (such as the theory of evolution), citizenship, patriotism and free enterprise, and divergent individuals and groups ("may not encourage lifestyles that deviate from generally accepted standards of society"). This bill would set into law the kind of textbook censorship TFN has fought before the SBOE for the last 10 years.

H.B. 220 by Rep. Charlie Howard, R-Sugar Land, would give the SBOE the authority to reject a textbook or require its revision simply because the book did not conform to the political or religious beliefs of SBOE members. The bill author tried to attach this bill as an amendment to H.B. 4 on technology and instructional materials for schools earlier this week. Rep. Howard said far-right SBOE members Terri Leo and David Bradley asked him for this bill. Both Leo and Bradley have led efforts to censor school textbooks for years and have frequently called on the Legislature to restore the state board's authority over textbook content.

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

TAKE ACTION - TESTIMONY NEEDED!

Give the House Public Education Committee and the media first-hand accounts of how far-right censors on the SBOE have put responsible science, history and health education on trial during battles over the adoption of new textbooks.

Please contact Heather Alden, heather@tfn.org or 512-322-0545, to get more details about testifying Tuesday. e can try to accommodate your schedule with a cell phone call before testimony is starting.

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

The Texas Freedom Network advances a mainstream agenda of religious freedom and individual liberties to counter the radical right.

To make a donation, go to www.tfn.org/donate/

To subscribe to TFN News Clips, Alerts or Action Teams, use the form at www.tfn.org/subscribe/.
To unsubscribe, send an email to tfn@tfn.org.

Texas Freedom Network
P.O. Box 1624
Austin, TX 78767
512-322-0545 phone
512-322-0550 fax
www.tfn.org

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:52 PM 4 comments Links to this post

What this article doesn't mention is that none of these home-schooled children would be subjected to having to take the TAKS exam--which is itself responsible for many of the lousy conditions of schooling that forces families into home-schooling in the first place. So, they get the best of both worlds. With this picture, I DO see lots of families resorting to homeschooling if given such options. And as stated below, at tremendous cost to our already fiscally challenged public school system. -Angela

Families, Plano push for access to subjects, activities, funds

12:52 PM CDT on Thursday, April 21, 2005

By TERRENCE STUTZ and KIM BREEN / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – Thousands of home-school families have struck an unlikely alliance with Plano school officials in a push to allow their children to participate in some classes and extracurricular activities for the first time.

Rep. Brian McCall, R-Plano, submitted a bill early Wednesday that would let home-schoolers pick and choose classes, such as chemistry or a foreign language, or play on sports teams or the band at their neighborhood schools.

DMN file
The bill proposes in return for letting home-schooled kids attend some district classes, the schools would get extra money based on the additional enrollment.

In return, the schools would get extra money based on the additional enrollment.

"It allows parents who choose to home-school to also have the opportunity for their children to participate in certain things that public schools offer, such as chemistry labs," Mr. McCall said.

"They're taxpayers. They pay property taxes for the schools, and if they choose to participate in part of what their local schools have to offer, they should be able to."

Among critics are the state's four teacher organizations, the only lobbyists to testify against the bill before the House Public Education Committee.

"We are opposed to home-school students having any access to public schools," said Johannah Whitsett of the Association of Texas Professional Educators.

"They can already enroll in public schools at any time. There are finite resources in public schools, and allowing these students to come and take classes part time could limit class space for regular, full-time students."

Bill sponsors addressed the biggest obstacle – a hefty price tag – by proposing initial limits on the number of students and tax dollars dedicated. A fiscal analysis indicated that allowing the home-school option without limits would cost more than $116 million over two years.

Mr. McCall said the study far overestimated the number of students who would take advantage of the new law, but he proposed an initial limit of about 2,000 students and $5 million in funding. Enrollment limits could be increased or dropped altogether in future years, he said.

He said the bill has gotten a favorable reaction from House colleagues, and he is hopeful it will pass out of the chamber in coming weeks. Republicans, in particular, have been sympathetic to the concerns of home-school families. Gov. Rick Perry addressed a Capitol rally of home-school parents a few weeks ago.

Mr. McCall said he was asked to sponsor the measure by the Plano school district, where a significant number of home-schooled children live.

The extra revenue could stack up for districts, considering the state's estimate that at least 160,000 children in Texas are taught at home. A group that represents home-school families and backs the legislation said the actual number is closer to 250,000. There is no estimate of how many live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Most important to Plano school officials is part of the bill that would allow home-schooled students to take district online courses for academic credit. The district has been trying for years to get state reimbursement for students who take courses via computer. Those students pay tuition now.

Plano Superintendent Doug Otto said he hopes the bill would be a step toward state reimbursement for those courses, which would make them more affordable to all Plano students, whether they're home-schooled or not.

While state rules limit participation in sports and other extracurricular activities to full-time students, the bill would allow home-schoolers to join the school band or choir, or try out for the football or basketball teams. Residency requirements would be the same as for other kids: Students must attend their assigned neighborhood schools.

A revision to the bill would subject home-schooled students to the state's no pass-no play rule – even if it's their parents giving the grades – for participation in extracurricular activities.

Home-school parents sometime hit a wall when a student's learning exceeds the parent's knowledge or the family home lacks the right equipment. Some of the more elaborate extracurricular activities, such as marching band, aren't available in the home-school setting.

Opening up public school sports teams could be a selling point to some home-school families.

"In my view, the more opportunities the better," said Chuck Hendricks, president of the Home School Athletic Association, which formed a decade ago to give area home-schoolers an opportunity to compete with private school teams.

Mr. Hendricks, father of seven home-schooled children, said legislative change would give some competitive student-athletes the chance to play on Class 5A teams, for example, and have exposure to college recruiters and other opportunities they might not have otherwise.

But some home-school parents predicted there wouldn't be a surge of children into public school classes if the bill becomes law.

Caryl Adams, a Plano mother who home-schools her three children in Plano, said she and her circle of friends shun public schools for a reason.

A biology class in the public schools, for example, wouldn't offer the creationist viewpoint many home-school families seek, Ms. Adams said. And the home-school community has developed so many academic, athletic and social alternatives that they don't need the public school options. She is also leery of developing ties with public schools.

"If we step our foot in the door I think it opens a Pandora's box down the road to become accountable to them," she said.

The Texas Home School Coalition, which represents about 60,000 families, has identified the bill as its top priority for the legislative session. Members of the group have been lobbying senators and House members as they seek the bill's passage before the session ends May 30.

"Nobody is forced to do anything, but it does give public schools a way to reach out to the home-school community and give home-schoolers an opportunity they don't have now," said Tim Lambert, president of the coalition.

Mr. Lambert said his group believes the vast majority of students would be of junior high or high school age.

"It's a fairness issue," Mr. Lambert said. "These families support schools with their tax dollars, both locally and across state."

He noted that Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, has agreed to carry the bill on the Senate side if it passes the House.

E-mail tstutz@dallasnews.com

and kbreen@dallasnews.com
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/042105dntexhomeschool.2f40b762.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:08 PM 0 comments Links to this post

April 21, 2005
By SAM DILLON / NYTimes

Opening a new front in the growing rebellion against President Bush's signature education law, the nation's largest teachers' union and eight school districts in Michigan, Texas and Vermont sued the Department of Education yesterday, accusing it of violating a passage in the law that says states cannot be forced to spend their own money to meet federal requirements.

Some legal scholars said that the union, the National Education Association, had assembled a compelling cause of action. Still, they added, since the case has few close precedents, it was difficult to judge the suit's prospects.

But it was clearly another headache for Margaret Spellings, the secretary of education, who is trying to resolve a federal-state conflict over the law, known as No Child Left Behind, that has taken on new forms in recent days. A day before the suit was filed, Utah's Republican-dominated Legislature approved the most far-reaching legislative challenge to the law.

Both the Utah measure, which requires educators there to spend as little state money as possible in carrying out the federal law's requirements, and the union lawsuit rely heavily on the same section of the federal law, which prohibits federal officials from requiring states to allocate their own money to fulfill the law's mandates.

This month, Connecticut's attorney general also announced the intention to sue the department on the same grounds, saying that the testing the law requires costs far more than the money the state is given to pay for it.

"If the facts about educational spending are as the plaintiffs allege, then this lawsuit has good prospects of winning," said David B. Cruz, a constitutional law professor at the University of Southern California. "It is a strong case because the statutory language is clear. The law says nothing in the act shall be interpreted to impose requirements that aren't being funded."

Since Ms. Spellings took office in January, she has pledged to improve relations with the nation's educators, which had frayed partly because of the law's demands for sweeping changes in local education practices.

The law requires that every racial and demographic group in every school must score higher on standardized tests every year. Falling short can bring sanctions, including the closing of schools.

Ms. Spellings has promised more flexibility, but those assurances have failed to blunt resistance to the law, even in strongly Republican states like Texas, which is defying a federal ruling on the testing of disabled children.

"If I were sitting in the White House, I would be concerned about the backlash against the law," said Patricia Sullivan, who tracks education politics closely as director of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington group. "It's growing, and it's breaking out in many states."

In Utah yesterday, Tim Bridgewater, an aide to Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., a Republican, said that the governor would sign the bill that was approved on Tuesday. During the debate, several lawmakers protested the growth of federal influence on Utah's schools, asserting that while Washington paid 8 cents of every education dollar in the state, the law had given it virtually total control.

In a statement yesterday, Secretary Spellings said that though most school decisions should be made locally, "the federal government plays an important role" by keeping educators' attention on minority students who lag behind.

"States across the nation who have embraced No Child Left Behind have shown progress," she said. "The same could be true in Utah, whose achievement gap between Hispanics and their peers is the third largest in the nation and has not improved significantly in over a decade."

"Returning to the pre-N.C.L.B. days of fuzzy accountability and hiding children in averages will do nothing" to help Utah students, she added. Ms. Spellings did not comment on the lawsuit filed and financed by the National Education Association, but her spokesman, Susan Aspey, called it "regrettable."

"President Bush and Congress have provided historic funding increases for education, and yet we continue to hear the same weak arguments from the N.E.A.," Ms. Aspey said. "Four separate studies assert that the law is appropriately funded and not a mandate."

The union suit was filed in Federal District Court in Detroit, which has jurisdiction over one of the plaintiff school districts, in Pontiac, Mich., an urban system with 21 schools and 11,000 students, most of them blacks.

Other districts in the suit were Laredo, Tex., a mostly Hispanic district with 23,000 students and 30 schools; and six rural Vermont districts with a total attendance of about 1,500 students, most of them white.

In the complaint, the union argues that the law has already obligated the nation's schools to face "multibillion-dollar national funding shortfalls." The Bush administration contests this assertion, citing significant raises in federal education aid since President Bush took office.

The complaint seeks a court order notifying states and districts that they are not required to spend their own money to comply with the federal requirements.

"The law says that you don't have to do anything it requires unless you receive the federal money to do it," said Robert H. Chanin, the union's lead counsel. "There's a promise in the law, and it is unambiguous."

Robert W. Adler, a University of Utah law professor, said he was skeptical about the suit's prospects, because "generally, the Supreme Court has not been receptive to the unfunded federal mandates argument."

But the wording of the law, Mr. Adler said, might provide the plaintiffs a firmer legal standing than similar cases have enjoyed in the past.

Sylvia Bruni, superintendent of the Laredo schools, which have an annual budget of $170 million, said that her district this year had been obligated to spend $8.2 million of its own funds to comply with the federal law. Mostly, she said, those funds were spent to lengthen the school day and year, and to offer Saturday classes for students who had fallen short on standardized tests.

"It's all focused on passing the tests," she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/21/education/21child.html?

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:19 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Dear Students, Friends, and Colleagues:

You are invited to participate tomorrow in a statewide video-conference—Thursday, April 21st at 6 pm to continue the dialogue on the transition from high-stakes testing to accurate assessment. We will be joined in Austin via video-conference by teachers, parents, students, superintendents, school board members in Dallas, El Paso and the Panhandle. The video-conference will be simulcast on the web and you can watch it live with the link available on Representative Olivo’s website . Please sign up. I will be moderating this event. Also, you should know that...

House Bill 220 is making it through the legislature now (see text below). The bill was tabled yesterday evening with some of us suspecting—at least in part—because LULAC was present to testify against this bill at the wee hours of the morning (Tuesday, April 20, Committee on Public Education Hearing).

All of this can and should be interpreted in light of the pieces of legislation listed below, as provided earlier by the Texas Freedom Network www.tfn.org (see below).

Incidentally, Dora Olivo’s anti-high-stakes testing bills (HB1612 and 1613) were supposed to have been heard yesterday evening (Tuesday, April 19), but Chairman Grusendorf decided to postpone a hearing on her legislation until next Tuesday because he allegedly had “too many bills” to hear yesterday—one of which was supposed to be HB220 by Charlie Howard (see www.doraolivo.com for a complete update on her multiple measures/accurate assessment legislation).

In the meantime, we hear the voices of children who are feeling abused by our state’s testing system—including, presently, my own twelve-year-old, 6th grade daughter—who is protesting the TAKS test (we’ve had a wonderful past 2 days together, by the way [these were TAKS-testing days]).

What’s very sad is that Chairman Grusendorf and his colleagues are supportive of bills that are anti-public education (e.g., privatization and school vouchers) and now he’s prioritizing the erasure of minorities’ already anemic representation in children’s history textbooks (HB 220) over the pleas of children who are suffering because of the negative psychological and social impact of these exams on which so much hinges (retention/promotion & graduation/non-graduation).

My daughter is not exactly “suffering” as she is an exceptional student in a very good elementary school. However, she does think that the many tests that students take, take up too much valuable class time while scaring kids unfairly. She hopes to inform children of the nonsensical impact of a single exam and also of their right to protest.

It’s interesting as a parent to now be on the receiving end of all of this with my daughter herself wanting to be counted in that number of students who are refusing to take the test. Yesterday, she shared with me the following: “Before, I only protested (she’s attended rallies, written to President Bush, and submitted testimony to the Texas state legislature [two years ago at the age of 10]); and now, I’m actually doing something about it.” Anyone who knows her knows that she doesn’t like to draw any attention to herself. So it’s neat to see her stand firmly right now on principle—given that hers is indeed a position that will surely draw attention in her direction. Her parents are, of course, very proud of, and inspired by, her principled decision and stance.

-Angela


H.B. 2534 by Rep. Chisum allows the State Board of Education (SBOE) to determine content requirements and limitations for facts and theories (theory of evolution), citizenship, patriotism and free enterprise (history and social studies), divergent individuals and groups (“may not encourage lifestyles that deviate from generally accepted standards of society”). This bill would set into law the kind of textbook censorship TFN has fought at the SBOE for the last 10 years. The bill has been referred to committee, but a hearing has yet to be scheduled.

H.B. 220 by Rep. Howard, R-Sugar Land, would give the SBOE the authority to reject a textbook or require its revision simply because it did not conform to the political or religious beliefs of SBOE members. This same bill was filed in the Senate last week as S.B. 378. H.B. 220 and S.B. 378 have both been referred to committee, but hearings have yet to be scheduled.

H.B. 973 by Rep. Madden, R-Plano, would give the SBOE broad authority to change the state’s social studies curriculum by allowing the SBOE to decide whether or not textbooks “focus in an unreasonably negative manner on American values, culture, or history.” This bill has been referred to House Public Education Committee, but a hearing has yet to be scheduled.

H.B. 2576 by Rep. Grusendorf is the Texas Education Agency Sunset bill. This bill opens up a door to vouchers, virtual charter schools and lessening of school standards. The bill has been referred to committee, but a hearing has yet to be scheduled.
?79R903 BDH-D
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By: Howard H.B. No. 220



A BILL TO BE ENTITLED


AN ACT


relating to the State Board of Education review of public school
textbooks.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF TEXAS:
SECTION 1. Section 31.023, Education Code, is amended by
amending Subsection (b) and adding Subsection (c) to read as
follows:
(b) Each textbook on a conforming or nonconforming list
must:
(1) be free from factual errors, including errors of
commission or omission related to viewpoint discrimination or
special interest advocacy on major issues, as determined by the
State Board of Education; and
(2) comply with textbook content guidelines adopted by
the board under Subsection (c).
(c) The State Board of Education shall by rule adopt
guidelines that define general textbook content standards under
this subchapter, including standards related to curriculum
requirements under Section 28.002. The board shall reject any
textbook that does not comply with the textbook content standards
adopted under this subsection.
SECTION 2. Section 31.023(b), Education Code, as amended by
this Act, applies only to textbooks adopted by the State Board of
Education on or after September 1, 2006.
SECTION 3. This Act takes effect September 1, 2005.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:53 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Wow! Utah is complicated, though, because based on a conversation with a colleague at the University of Utah, they also resist keeping data on ethnicity and how minority groups are faring within the system. -Angela

4/20/2005


No Child: Lawmakers defy Bush mandate and pass HB1001; they disdain possible funds loss
By Ronnie Lynn / The Salt Lake Tribune

Saying they don't take kindly to federal threats, Utah legislators defied President Bush on Tuesday and approved a measure that challenges his No Child Left Behind education initiative - despite warnings it could cost the state $76 million.

    House Bill 1001 cleared the House 66-7 and the Senate 25-3, just a day after a letter from U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings noted the potential loss of $55 million in federal funding for disadvantaged students, $19 million for teacher training and $2 million for parental-choice programs.

    All of the opposing votes came from Democrats.
    Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. probably will sign the bill this week, possibly today, education deputy Tim Bridgewater said.
    "I am so relieved because this has been a serious issue for Utah," said HB1001 sponsoring Rep. Margaret Dayton, R-Orem. "We now have the option to focus on our own priorities."
    For many GOP lawmakers, Spellings' letter reinforced their resentment of what they maintain is federal intrusion into the state's responsibility for education.
    "I'd just as soon they take the stinking money and go back to Washington with it," said Rep. Steve Mascaro, R-West Jordan. "Let us resolve our education problems by ourselves. I will not be threatened by Washington over $76 million."
    Spellings wrote that Dayton's bill itself doesn't jeopardize the money, but it may encourage Utah to defy No Child Left Behind provisions. Noncompliance would be costly, she warned.
    HB1001 directs state school leaders to put Utah's education priorities ahead of NCLB mandates and authorizes them to ignore provisions that conflict with state priorities or cost state dollars.
    NCLB requires schools to show annual test-score gains for all students, regardless of ethnicity, native language, disability or family income.
    State school leaders and policy-makers want to use Utah's accountability system - called the Utah Performance Assessment System for Students (U-PASS) - to measure school quality.
    Sen. Karen Hale, D-Salt Lake City, questioned whether lawmakers' priorities are in the best interest of students.
    During the general session, the Legislature rejected the state Office of Education's request for $6 million to pay for tutoring of students who risk not getting a diploma because they failed the high school exit exam.
    "That's part of our U-PASS system," said Hale, who ended up voting for Dayton's bill. "And yet we didn't prioritize it. We didn't fund that. So I'm really concerned that we are saying things are important and we have a great system, but we're not willing to fund it."
    Bridgewater and other officials have spent the past few months negotiating with the feds for more flexibility under NCLB, namely to use U-PASS as Utah's accountability system.
    HB1001's passage shouldn't threaten those discussions, Bridgewater said.
    "We expect negotiations to continue," he said. "HB1001 has been helpful in getting the attention of the federal government. Now, it's about making sure states determine how they want to handle their own education systems."
    That philosophy dominated floor debate, which lasted 90 minutes in the House.
    House Majority Leader Jeff Alexander, R-Provo, said the bill cleans up a mess created when Congress passed NCLB in 2001. "I'm disappointed with our congressional delegation," he said. "Why did they pass it, and why don't they fix it? You start doing your work so we don't have to do it for you."
    Lawmakers shot down proposals by Rep. Duane Bourdeaux, D-Salt Lake City, to add language that would ensure Utah tracks, reports and addresses the achievement gap.
    Minority groups have stepped up their demands that the state do more to improve the academic performance of minority and disadvantaged students. They fear Utah's anti-NCLB sentiment could hinder that effort.
    The House soundly defeated Bourdeaux's amendments, with many representatives calling them unnecessary.
    rlynn@sltrib.com
    ---
    Tribune reporter Rebecca Walsh contributed to this story.

http://www.sltrib.com/ci_2669791
   

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:16 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Sunday, April 17, 2005
by KENT FISCHER / The Dallas Morning News


One of the big problems with our current system of education is the monopoly it holds over the market, particularly in rural areas and the inner cities where education options are few and often expensive. With a captive audience and no real competition, public schools are fat, lazy and slow to change, or so the theory goes.

Enter charter schools, the conservative school reform movement's most successful effort to shatter that monopoly and "deregulate" American public schools.

Charters, funded by taxpayers, operate outside the boundaries of traditional school districts. The idea is to open the education marketplace and let the "invisible hand" of competition spur innovation and boost quality. Indeed, the school-choice movement is largely based on the notion that, like pizza parlors, schools would have to put out a good product or they'd go out of business for lack of customers – because parents won't leave their children in lousy charter schools.

Turns out, they do.

Nine years after the first charter school opened in Texas, policy-makers have realized that charter schools don't go out of business, even when they offer a demonstrably inferior product, as judged by test scores and graduation rates. Thousands and thousands of parents appear perfectly willing to leave their children in questionable charter schools.

"I don't know why, but they do," said state Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano. The market "isn't working."

It certainly isn't a Texas-only issue. Charter schools exist in virtually every state. One recent report estimated 3,400 charters serve nearly 1 million school children in the United States. In Texas, 275 charter campuses enroll more than 60,000 kids and pull in an estimated $350 million from taxpayers. One report estimated that less than 1 percent of charters close for academic reasons.

"Around the nation there are certain number of charter schools that clearly are not performing, but they remain open," said Nelson Smith, head of the Washington, D.C.-based Charter School Leadership Council. "It doesn't appear that the model is working the way we thought it would."

Texas has granted a total of 235 charters over the years. Of those, 34 have closed. The state shut down 11 for financial and academic mismanagement. That leaves 23 charters that closed on their own. Eleven of those closed before they ever even opened their doors; another closed over a dispute with its landlord. The remaining 17 charters opened but were unable to survive "in the market" and, accordingly, closed without state intervention. Those 17 charters equate to a 7 percent failure rate.

Consider that many economists claim that more than 50 percent of new businesses dry up within three years. Yet Texas charters boast a 93 percent "success" rate.

Martin Carnoy, an economics professor at Stanford University and a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute, said the fatal flaw with school-choice theory might be the assumption that public school systems are inherently inefficient.

If public schools aren't as inefficient as many assume, then important principles of market theory begin to break down, he said. And that could lead to bad charters staying in business.

"It's complicated, but perhaps this idea that there's room for improvement through competition is the wrong assumption," Dr. Carnoy said.

Enter Ms. Shapiro, who's offered up to lawmakers a complete rewrite of the state's charter school law. In it, the state would be required to shut down low-performing charters in two years. No more waiting around for "the market" to regulate itself, she said.

"Those schools that are doing a good job need to be freed [from state bureaucrats], but those that aren't need the hand of government to come in" and shut them down, Ms. Shapiro said.

Ms. Shapiro's bill, submitted as a rewrite of the House Bill 2 – the proposal to restructure Texas school finance, could move out of committee this week.

If it becomes law, the state could close dozens of charters within two years. And, in Texas at least, the notion that the market drives quality would be history.

E-mail kfischer@dallasnews.com

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/localnews/columnists/all/stories/041805dnmetedcol.1fc64737.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:09 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This week's exam will be make or break for 11 percent of state seniors
Tuesday, April 19, 2005

By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – Nearly 11 percent of high school seniors in Texas – about 25,000 students – are still sweating out whether they'll receive a diploma next month because they have yet to pass the state's high school graduation exam.
The Texas Education Agency reported Tuesday that a significant number of seniors still have not passed one or more of the subject area tests on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills after four tries dating to the spring of their junior year. Their fifth and final chance will occur this week.
Although Texas students have been required to pass a graduation exam to earn a diploma since the late 1980s, the Class of '05 is the first that is being called on to pass the new TAKS graduation exam – a much more rigorous test than its predecessors.
Also Online
The percentages of Texas high school seniors passing all four subject area tests of the TAKS – English, math, science and social studies – after four tries (the final chance to pass is this week):

African-Americans, 82%
Hispanics, 83%
Whites, 95%
All students, 89%
SOURCE: Texas Education Agency

The good news is that 89 percent of the Class of '05 has cleared the TAKS hurdle.
"These are very encouraging results for our first class of TAKS graduates," state Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley said Tuesday.

"They are living up to the state's higher standards and expectations. Our school districts are again offering intense instruction to the students who are still attempting to pass one or more parts of the TAKS. The overall passing rate is sure to increase by the end of the school year."

Students have had the most difficulty with the science test, which has been passed by 94 percent. Identical percentages – 95 percent – passed the English and math tests. The fourth subject area test – social studies – has been passed by 99 percent of students.
Black and Hispanic students have passed in lower percentages than white students, according to an analysis of test results by the TEA.

The passing rate was 82 percent for black students and 83 percent for Hispanic students after four testing dates. About 95 percent of white students have passed the graduation test.
Among economically disadvantaged students, the passing rate was 82 percent, while for limited-English-speaking students it was 54 percent.

The TAKS graduation test was introduced in high schools in the spring of 2004, replacing the old Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. Because the TAKS is a more difficult exam that measures knowledge in two additional subject areas – science and social studies – the State Board of Education voted to set a lower passing standard in the initial years of the test.
This year's seniors had to correctly answer fewer than half the questions to pass the test under a phase-in plan approved by the board. Juniors this year have to get more answers correct to pass, and the cutoff score will increase even further for juniors next year.

E-mail tstutz@dallasnews.com

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/042005dntextaks.2a11a9b7.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:21 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Laredo ISD is one Texas district, by the way, that's named in this lawsuit. Go LISD!!! -Angela

by BEN FELLER
AP Education Writer
April 20, 2005


WASHINGTON (AP) _ The nation's largest teachers union and school districts in three states are launching a legal fight over No Child Left Behind, aiming to free schools from complying with any part of the education law not paid for by the federal government. The lawsuit, expected to be filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for eastern Michigan, is the most sweeping challenge to President Bush's signature education policy. The outcome would apply only to the districts involved but could have implications for all schools nationwide. Leading the fight is the National Education Association, a union of 2.7 million members that represents many public educators and is financing the lawsuit. The other plaintiffs are nine school districts in Michigan, Texas and Vermont, plus 10 NEA chapters in those three states and Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Utah. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, as the chief officer of the agency that enforces the law, is the only defendant. The suit centers on a question that has overshadowed the law since Bush signed it in 2002: whether the president and Congress have provided enough money. The challenge is built upon one paragraph in the law that says no state or school district can be forced to spend its money on expenses the federal government has not covered. ``What it means is just what it says _ that you don't have to do anything this law requires unless you receive federal funds to do it,'' said NEA general counsel Bob Chanin. ``We want the Department of Education to simply do what Congress told it to do. There's a promise in that law, it's unambiguous, and it's not being complied with.'' The plaintiffs want a judge to order that states and schools don't have to spend their own money to pay for the law's expenses _ and order the Education Department not to try to yank federal money from a state or school that refuses to comply based on those grounds. Spending on No Child Left Behind programs has increased 40 percent since Bush took office, from $17.4 billion to $24.4 billion, federal figures show. The Bush administration has repeatedly said schools have enough money to make the law work. Yet the suit accuses the government of shortchanging schools by at least $27 billion, the difference between the amount Congress authorized and what it has spent. The shortfall is even larger, the suit says, if the figures include all promised funding for poor children. The suit, citing a series of cost studies, outlines billions of dollars in expenses to meet the law's mandates. They include the costs of adding yearly testing, getting all children up to grade level in reading and math, and ensuring teachers are highly qualified. To cover those costs, the suit says, states have shifted money away from such other priorities as foreign languages, art and smaller classes. The money gap has hurt schools' ability to meet progress goals, which in turn has damaged their reputations, the suit says. Plaintiffs include the Pontiac School District in Michigan, the Laredo Independent School District in Laredo, Texas; the Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union in Brandon, Vt.; and six of the school districts that are part of Rutland Northeast in south central Vermont. The NEA promised to bring the suit almost two years ago and began recruiting states to be plaintiffs. But the union found no takers _ in part because states had no firm cost estimates, and in part because states were wary of the political fallout of suing the federal government. More than a dozen states, however, are considering anti-No Child Left Behind legislation this year. On Tuesday, the Utah Legislature passed a measure giving state education standards priority over federal ones imposed by No Child Left Behind. The school districts involved in the lawsuit give the NEA the diversity it wanted, from rural Vermont students to limited-English learners in Laredo to poor students in Pontiac. In the suit, Spellings is accused of violating both the education law and the spending clause of the U.S. Constitution. The NEA and the Bush administration have had a testy relationship. When the union first promised the lawsuit, then-Education Secretary Rod Paige accused the NEA of putting together a ``coalition of the whining.'' He later referred to the NEA as a ``terrorist organization'' for the way it opposed the law, a comment for which he later apologized.

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

April 20, 2005, 7:53AM

Texas Taking Its Time with No Child

The state tells feds it will keep defying rule until its Legislature adapts to law
By JUSTIN GEST
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau


WASHINGTON - Texas will continue to buck the federal No Child Left Behind Act until its Legislature changes state law to include the same requirements, state officials told the U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday.

Texas served in large part as President Bush's model for the national law.

But for the last two years, the Texas Education Agency has exceeded the federal cap on how many students with learning disabilities can be exempted from regular state testing. Including them could lower schools' overall passing rates, although officials say that's not the motive.

In a letter to the U.S. Education Department, agency officials told Secretary Margaret Spellings that she will have to wait while the state adapts to national standards at its own pace.

Spellings helped craft No Child Left Behind laws in Texas when she advised then-Gov. George W. Bush.

"Texas school districts may continue ... using alternative assessments, consistent with state law, at a rate that exceeds the cap imposed on the school district," state officials wrote.

The letter also said the Texas Legislature will consider amendments to state education laws to better align them with No Child Left Behind requirements, but no promises were made.

It is unlikely such legislation will be passed during this year's waning legislative session.

The Legislature is scheduled to convene next in 2007.

State law now authorizes a committee of a special-education student's parents, teachers and doctors to decide which test suits the child's needs.

The TEA letter was the agency's first public communication with the federal department since April 8, when Spellings threatened to cut Texas' federal funding for violating the cap. The secretary can cut as much as $11 million from the agency's annual federal allocation.

Education Department representatives declined to comment further until they review the letter.

Texas is the second state to officially declare that state education laws override the department's No Child Left Behind rules.

The Connecticut attorney general has announced plans to sue the Education Department for the right to disregard federal guidelines on grounds that the federal government fails to provide enough money.

Texas has defied the 3 percent federal cap on exemption by allowing 9 percent of its students to take an alternative exam.

TEA officials said they will try to phase into compliance by reducing exemptions to 5 percent, a limit created by the agency.

"Our tests were developed on specific statutes, and you can't change them overnight," said Criss Cloudt, TEA associate commissioner.

"It takes three years to create the assessment programs, and it will require another three years to change them."

Spellings has repeatedly said that the cap is not negotiable, and she has expressed disappointment with the resistance from her home state.

But on Tuesday, Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley said in a private meeting of state education officials in Washington that she had a good relationship with the U.S. Education Department, according to an official who attended the meeting and spoke on the condition of not being identified.

The official said Neeley blamed the news media for exaggerating differences between the state and federal governments.

Neeley plans to meet with Deputy U.S. Education Secretary Raymond Simon today to discuss bringing the Texas plan in line with federal law.

justin.gest@chron.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3143729

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:26 AM 0 comments Links to this post

from the April 19, 2005 edition

Connecticut, Utah, and Texas are either refusing to adopt all of the No Child Left Behind Act or suing the US to block it.

By Alexandra Marks | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

KILLINGWORTH, CONN. - An education rebellion is under way from Utah to Connecticut.

Three years after the passage of President Bush's controversial education reform known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the law is facing its most significant challenges yet - and they're coming in the courts, state legislatures, and local education departments.

Connecticut has announced it's suing the US Department of Education, claiming the law mandates changes without giving the funding to carry them out. The education commissioner in Texas unilaterally decided Washington's requirements were flawed, and she simply disregarded part of them - a kind of civil disobedience.

And Tuesday, Utah, the state that gave Mr. Bush his biggest win last November, is about to provide the most stinging rebuke yet to NCLB. In a special session, the state Senate is expected to pass overwhelmingly a bill to ensure that in a conflict between state and federal education regulations, Utah's rules will trump Washington's dictates. The House has already passed the bill, and if the Senate does as well, Utah is putting at risk $120 million it receives in federal education aid.

"The paramount question is who runs this show: Is it state and local government or Washington?" says state Sen. Thomas Hatch (R). "Are we going to let the federal government contribute a very small percentage of the education budget and dictate what we can or cannot do, or are we going to maintain control at the local level?"

The local rebellions come on the heels of an announcement by US Education Secretary Margaret Spellings that the department intends to exercise more flexibility than under her predecessor in addressing states' concerns about the law. NCLB requires annual testing in Grades 3 to 8 and sets out penalties for schools that fail to show "adequate yearly progress." In making the announcement, however, Secretary Spellings said there were certain "bright lines of the statute," such as reporting annual testing results by student subgroups, that "are not up for negotiation." This led some frustrated state officials like Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to refer to any new flexibility as "more rhetoric than reality."

Historically, there's always been tension between states and federal government on education reform. When President Clinton tried to implement new standards, he also met resistance, often from Democratic governors. Now Bush finds himself facing similar concerns from some Republican governors, including Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell.

Yet the heightened frustrations are also coming at a time when most states are reporting some success in raising test scores. While they insist that's in part because of state reforms put in place before NCLB became law, they do acknowledge it's had some positive effect.

"But they also see two big problems with the law: its rigid rules and lack of help for schools that have been identified as not doing well," says Jack Jennings, executive director of the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy in Washington, which has done the most extensive studies yet of the impact of NCLB. "The law is good at identifying them, but the money isn't there to help them."

That's Connecticut's main concern. It contends that complying with NCLB's testing requirements would cost state taxpayers an additional $8 million annually.

For 20 years, Connecticut has tested in the fourth, sixth, eighth, and 10th grades. Washington wants the state to add tests in the third, fifth, and seventh grades. The state says it would rather use the money to fund problem areas it has identified. "Our children are robbed of the resources they need ... to improve their classrooms and educations," says Mr. Blumenthal.

The state is also arguing that because Washington is not providing enough money to implement its requirements, NCLB is essentially an unfunded mandate and this is in violation of its own law.

The US Department of Education counters that it has provided enough funds, noting that Connecticut has received $750 million to implement NCLB.

Raymond Simon, assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, says it's "disappointing" that Connecticut chose a legal challenge. "The additional federal funds that have been given to the states have been sufficient and in record amounts," he says.

The department also points out that minorities score significantly lower than whites in the state, and it argues that NCLB could force improvement.

In Texas, the concern is about the federal requirement that children with disabilities and those who are still learning English be tested using the same grade-level standards applied to others. With Spellings's announcement of more flexibility, 3 percent of students will be exempt from the grade-level tests - a percentage decided on by the department, based on nationwide averages. But Texas decided to exempt 9 percent, contending that including the scores of children with disabilities unfairly skews test results.

"In Texas, it's just an out-and-out case of civil disobedience," says David Shreve, an education expert at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver. "They're saying it just doesn't work here, and we're not going to follow it."

The US Department of Education has given Texas until the end of this week to come up with an alternative that will not exempt so many students. If it doesn't, Spellings has threatened to cut some of Texas' federal funds. Mr. Simon refused to comment on the Texas situation, saying instead he was waiting for its reply.

But he insists that NCLB is working and that this is no time to be talking about fundamental changes. "The achievement gap is narrowing and student achievement is up, so now is not the time to deviate from the mission to weaken or back down on the standards," he says. "We'll work with states to continue to make it less bureaucratic and easier for the states to accomplish the mission."

For their part, the states don't disagree with the law's fundamental mission, just the way the DOE is implementing it.

"NCLB is absolutely desirable in concept and goals. No one disagrees with its objectives," says Blumenthal of Connecticut. "It's the implementation that's so faulty - the one-size-fits-all approach and the inflexibility on unfunded mandates."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
www.csmonitor.com | Copyright © 2005 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0419/p01s02-uspo.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:31 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is really unfortunate. Check out the link for more information on Texas Grants. Along with tuition increases due to recent deregulation, this is going to hit working families hard.
-Angela

April 11, 2005, 12:06PM

Lawmakers May Tighten Rules on 2 Key College Aid Programs

Bills could make it more difficult to benefit from TEXAS Grant, B-On-Time loans
By JEFFREY GILBERT
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

TUITION OPTIONS
Two bills propose changes to two programs that help students pay for college:
The programs
• TEXAS Grant: Students must take at least nine hours per semester and do not repay the grants.
• B-On-Time: Loans are forgiven for students who graduate with a B average in four years (five years for such programs as architecture) or within six credit hours of what their degree requires. Students who don't must repay loans, interest-free.
• Both programs: Students must take recommended high school curriculum. They receive $3,590 per year for university, $1,980 for technical schools and $1,270 for community colleges.
The bills
• House Bill 3 000: First two years are a TEXAS Grant, and final two years are B-On-Time Loan. If requirements aren't met, loan must be paid back, interest-free.
• Senate Bill 31: Students receiving a TEXAS Grant must take at least 30 hours per year, with exceptions for people who have severe illness or are responsible for the care of a sick, injured or needy personAUSTIN - Houman Hassanpour maintains close to a 3.9 grade-point average at the University of Houston, taking such classes as organic chemistry and participating in many extracurricular activities.

He moved to Houston from Iran five years ago, and lives at home to help his mother raise his two younger brothers. Hassanpour is using a TEXAS Grant to pay for college. Without it, he wouldn't be able to attend.

"I don't have time to work enough to cover tuition," he said. "If I wouldn't have had the grant, I would have either been very, very down on my hours or had to drop out of school because we don't have a good family income."

Lawmakers often wring their hands over the low number of students who attend college — Texas ranks 45th in the number of high schoolers who enroll in college, at just more than 50 percent.

But Texas provides about $120 million less in state financial aid than the other five biggest states in the nation. Georgia, a state one-third the size of Texas, spends $50 million more in direct state financial aid.

Now, the state's most successful college assistance program is in danger of being further eroded by merging with another state scholarship program, and students such as Hassanpour could be left without a way to fund their education.

Created in 1999, the TEXAS Grant program provides tuition and fees for Texas students who take challenging courses in high school and require financial aid in college. Since its inception, about 115,000 students have received more than $600 million in financial aid.

Budget cuts eliminated 22,000 students from the program last session, and more people are set to be cut again. While the current budget allocates $324 million for the program, the proposed Senate fiscal plan gives $294 million over the next biennium and the House version allocates $322 million.

One idea has the program merging with B-On-Time, an initiative that began two years ago and forgives the loans of students who graduate with a B average within four years for a four-year degree or within six credit hours of what their degree requires.

Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, led the effort to create the TEXAS Grant program six years ago, and said the merger is a bad idea.

No other state requires students to meet both the grade and time requirement, Ellis said, and having Texas students do that could cause a hardship. Many scholarship recipients must work to pay for other college costs, such as books and board, Ellis said.

"I want (students) out, and I want them out with a good average, but the first step to getting them out is to get them in," Ellis said. "I can assure you one thing: If you don't get them in, you will not get them out."


Stiff requirements
About 23 percent of all Texas college students and 17 percent of TEXAS Grant students graduate in four years, according to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, meaning a majority wouldn't meet the B-On-Time requirements and could be dropped from the program.


"I think there's a role for the notion of the B-On-Time program, but in today's economy, that's more of a suburban, upper-class program," he said. "Texas is so far behind the national curve already. We've simply got to get more of our young people on the college track."

Already in his third year, Hassanpour, a 21-year-old sophomore, said he will take at least five years to graduate, because of his tougher course load and extra activities.

"I don't think it makes much sense," he said. "You can't graduate in four years unless you take advanced classes in high school, and not everybody can do that."


Time restraints
Rep. Geanie Morrison, R-Victoria, is sponsoring the bill that would merge the two programs. In her plan, the first two years would remain a TEXAS Grant, but the second two would become a B-On-Time loan. Students who don't keep a B average or take more than four years to get out of school would have to pay back the loan, interest-free.



"We are trying to get the most for the money we have," Morrison said. "Students are staying in school for six years to get their degrees, and that's a detriment to the state, to the school and to the citizens. Hopefully this will help."

Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, opposes the merging of the two programs because they have "two totally different purposes." Ellis' program is a grant that doesn't need to be repaid, while B-On-Time is a loan.

Zaffirini is sponsoring a bill that would require TEXAS Grant students to take at least 30 hours per year.

"I think that's very reasonable," she said. "The longer a student takes to get a degree, the more expensive it is. We are trying to do everything we can to motivate students. A typical student should take more (than 30 hours). There's a responsibility associated with receiving scholarships."

Both women said getting students out faster will free up space for more people to get the scholarships, and will get them into the work force earlier, which benefits everyone.


'Pretty tough road'
To fight the plans, Ellis said he is "sounding the alarm." He has written university presidents from around the state, including Jay Gogue, president of UH. He is meeting with student newspapers, editorial boards and has sent information packets to his colleagues.



Public university presidents have been slow to get involved, Ellis said, because they are scared they could lose funding elsewhere. Sometimes it comes down to lobbying for the grants or for a new science building.

"They need to decide what their priorities are," he said, "the students who they are charged with educating, or putting more money into the infrastructure. I'm not all that sure they can't make a case for both."

Gogue said UH students benefit at a far greater rate from TEXAS Grants than they do from the B-On-Time program. He said 82 percent of his students work at least 30 hours a week, and imposing a time restriction for graduation could cause problems.

"That's a pretty tough road for most people," he said.

Gogue said he understands lawmakers are worried about the state's growing population, but if changes have to be made, he would advocate for restrictions on the number of courses a student has to take, rather than the amount of time one has to complete them.


Motives questioned
Ellis also wonders why measures aren't being taken to merge funding for the Tuition Equalization Program with TEXAS Grants and B-On-Time. That program subsidizes Texas students who go to a private college. Zaffirini's bill does require the private school students to take at least 30 hours per year, as well.



Ellis points out that his program carries tougher requirements because students getting Tuition Equalization grants aren't required to take the recommended high school curriculum and only have to take six hours in college.

"What's driving this is not altruism, it's money," he said. "If the goal is flexibility, then put that program in there as well."

Hassanpour said his brother is applying to colleges now, and his family is counting on grants like the one he has.

jeffrey.gilbert@chron.com

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3127778

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:20 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Study: Teaching Credential Matters
by Jill Tucker, STAFF WRITER
4/16/2005


It seems obvious.

Teachers who formally learn how to teach are better for kids than those who don't — was the conclusion reached by an extensive Stanford University study released Friday.

While the concept might seem obvious, the need for a formal teaching credential in the classroom has been hotly debated in recent years.

In 2002, then U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige argued for changes in teacher certification with an emphasis on verbal ability and content knowledge rather than formal training at a university education program.

Stanford professor of education Linda Darling-Hammond, who led the study, said her research settles that debate.

"Unequivocally, certified teachers are more effective in promoting student learning," she said from Montreal, where she was presenting the research.

The study looked at 271,015 students and 15,344 teachers in Houston schools from 1995 to 2002 — and compared performance on three standardized tests.

Teachers with less than a full teaching credential — including those in the Teach for America program — saw "negative effects on student achievement," according to the study.

Darling-Hammond said there is no reason to expect a different result in California.

In fact, she said, the requirements for obtaining a California teaching credential are more rigorous than in Texas. That means the disparity in student achievement depending on teacher qualifications could be even greater, she added.

In California, schools with greater populations of low-income or minority students are more likely to have teachers who don't have a full credential. Many of those schools score at the bottom on state standardized tests. That means those students are more likely to be taught by interns studying for a credential, those with emergency permits, substitutes or participants in the Teach for America program.

Teach for America teachers — typically recent graduates from some of the best universities in the nation — have been touted as examples of good teachers without credentials.

"The young people who go into it are often quite noble and hardworking," Darling-Hammond said. "And they care and they want to do well."

But the reality is, their students perform about the same as those with other uncertified teachers, according to the Stanford research. In short, Darling-Hammond said, we need to get credentialed teachers into classrooms. All classrooms.

She suggested reinstating programs such as California's short-lived Governor's Fellowships, which gave a $20,000 education grant to those who earned a teaching credential and then worked in a low-performing school.

The program, under then Gov. Gray Davis lasted only a couple of years before it was pulled for lack of funds.

The fellowships and other teacher recruitment programs cost the state about $50 million at their peak — a small investment that was making a difference, Darling-Hammond said. "There are some kids who get those untrained and inexperienced teachers year after year," she added.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:59 PM 4 comments Links to this post

TO: Coalition for Public Schools Organizations
FROM: Carolyn Boyle

The past two weeks have been a whirlwind. I'd like to take a few minutes to reflect on what has happened and tell you what may happen in the next 44 days in the Texas Legislature. First, we'll look back:

Press Conferences: The Coalition for Public Schools held a press conference April 4 on the steps of the Texas Capitol to release financial projections on how much money could be drained from public schools by the three private school voucher bills: H.B. 12, H.B. 1263, and H.B. 3042. The news coverage was terrific, with really good reporting by metropolitan daily newspapers and Austin TV and radio. Newspaper stories were included on all the Austin-based print and electronic clipping services, resulting in widespread readership. The word at the Capitol the following morning was that legislators were "spooked" by the numbers we released. While some of the bill authors questioned the Coalition's financial projections, the numbers are REAL. The projections were prepared by Cindy M. Russell, an experienced school finance consultant who we hired. In the first biennium, H.B. 12 could drain $2.2 billion from public schools and H.B. 1263 could drain $603 million. The cost of H.B. 3042 is inestimable, as every public school student in Texas could receive a private school tuition voucher. Lawmakers must know the worst case financial scenarios about any legislation they are considering. We believe bipartisan opposition to vouchers continues to grow!

On Tuesday, April 5, another anti-voucher press conference was held on the Capitol steps by the League of United Latin American Citizens, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, People for the American Way, and other groups. A major point made was that two recently-created pro-voucher organizations are funded by wealthy special interests and grants from the U.S. Department of Education awarded under former Education Secretary Rod Paige. Hispanic CREO (Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options) and BAEO (Black Alliance for Educational Options) don't speak for all minorities, said LULAC, NAACP, and MALDEF. The long-established advocacy organizations for Hispanics and African-Americans oppose private school vouchers.

Public Hearing on Voucher Bills: An 11-hour public hearing on the private school voucher bills was held April 5 before the House Committee on Public Education. As expected, it was a mob scene outside the locked hearing room, with everyone scrambling for seats as soon as the door was unlocked. At least 100 voucher supporters had been bused to the hearing, and they filled a large number of seats in the hearing room. But our side had many assertive seat-grabbers, so voucher opponents had a visible presence. There also was an overflow room with the hearing projected on a large screen. The first 5+ hours (2:15-7:15 p.m.) of the hearing were devoted SOLELY to voucher supporters. We had hoped the chairman would alternate pro and con speakers. The testimony from about 7:15 p.m. to 1 a.m. was by more than 40 voucher opponents, and they did a FANTASTIC job! So authentic, heartfelt, compelling, rational, wise, moving... You may listen to the hearing at this URL:
http://www.house.state.tx.us/committees/broadcasts.php?session=79&cmte=400

The Voucher Bills: At the end of the April 5 public hearing, Chairman Grusendorf left the three voucher bills pending. We thought one bill might be voted out of committee April 12, but it was not. The longer it takes to get a voucher bill out of committee, the harder it becomes to get the bill all the way through the process before the end of the session. May 12 is the last day for the Texas House to consider non-local House bills and joint resolutions on second reading, and that is 25 days away. Our hope is that House members who are not on the Public Education Committee are asking members of that committee not to bring voucher bills to a vote on the House floor. Legislators are being influenced by the large number of phone calls, letters and emails they have been receiving. Your efforts are making a difference!

Also still pending in the House Committee is H.B. 1445, the "virtual vouchers" bill that allows students in home-schools and private schools to receive public funding to take electronic and on-line courses. Rep. Jerry Madden is working on a committee substitute, which may be considered by the committee on Tuesday, April 19.

The three most commonly mentioned scenarios about what could happen with the voucher bills (and there are more than three scenarios) are:
Scenario 1. Voucher bills will be passed out of the House Committee on Public Education this week (either at the Tuesday committee meeting or at a quickie desk meeting on the House floor) and sent to the Calendars Committee and then on to the House floor. Some sources are saying a state leader has promised a key voucher proponent that a voucher bill will make it to the House floor this session.
Scenario 2. The voucher bills will not be passed by the House Committee as stand-alone bills, but in the House committee or on the House or Senate floor vouchers will be amended on to the Texas Education Agency Sunset bill (see below).
Scenario 3. This is always my dream scenario: The wise and fiscally conservative members of the House and Senate will assertively say taxpayers cannot afford private school vouchers. They will drop consideration of any voucher legislation and put all their focus and resources on strengthening every neighborhood public school.

Texas Education Agency Sunset Bill

Background: Under the Texas Sunset law, the Texas Education Agency is set to be abolished on September 1, 2005 unless it is reauthorized by the legislature. (Every state agency is on a 12-year cycle for review and reauthorization. You may read more about the process at www.sunset.state.tx.us ) The Texas Sunset Advisory Commission and its staff reviewed TEA in 2004 and issued a 171-page report and recommendations in November 2004. The proposed agency Sunset bills were based on this report. The two companion bills are S.B. 422 by Sen. Mike Jackson and H.B. 2576 by Rep. Kent Grusendorf. You may read the Senate bill at this URL:
http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/cgi-bin/tlo/textframe.cmd?LEG=79&SESS=R&CHAMBER=S&BILLTYPE=B&BILLSUFFIX=00422&VERSION=1&TYPE=B

The "Christmas Tree" Phenomenon: The Sunset process as originally envisioned was well-intentioned and in the public interest...but that was before the Christmas tree phenomenon appeared. Today Sunset bills tend to start out as relatively short, well-researched bills; however, then special interests start putting "ornaments" on the "Christmas tree." Sometimes these ornaments are seen as good, sometimes as bad, depending on the perspective. Because the TEA Sunset bill has a broad caption--"relating to the continuation and functions of the Texas Education Agency and regional education service centers"--amendments on myriad functions of the agency are germane for amendments. As a result, many people believe there will be efforts to amend the Sunset bill to include vouchers and "virtual vouchers" for tax-funded home-schooling.

The Schedule: A public hearing on S.B. 422 was held April 4 before the Senate Education Committee, and the bill was left pending. A public hearing on H.B. 2576 before the House Committee in Public Education is scheduled for April 19.

So, that's what's happening--the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you have not yet written or called your state representative, do it now! The address for state representatives is P.O. Box 2910, Austin, TX 78768-2910. It's also very important to be sending letters or calling state senators, because the Texas Education Agency Sunset bill may be passed out of the Senate Education Committee soon. The message to senators is: Keep private school vouchers off the TEA Sunset bill! The address for senators is: Texas Senate, P.O. Box 12068-Capitol Station, Austin 78711. You may find names and phone numbers for your legislators by going to this web site and entering your home address: http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/fyi/fyi.htm

Onward!

***********************************************************
Coalition for Public Schools, 1005 Congress Avenue, Suite 550, Austin, Texas 78701-2491, (512) 474-9765, Cell: (512) 470-1215; 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.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:32 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Public Education continues to be assaulted by the House Leadership. This particular bill has been championed by LULAC for several years. Please read below and take ACTION:

Urgent Action Alert: Transition to Accurate Assessment

April 21st: Statewide Video-conference

April 26th: Day of Action at the Capitol

Dear Friends,

Thank you for your continued support and actions through your phone calls, faxes and e-mails to the members of the Public Education Committee requesting a committee hearing for HB 1612 & HB 1613.

I would also like to recognize those organization who are reaching out to their members with our message to help broaden our base of supporters and encourage the passage of these two pieces of legislation: PTA, National Council of La Raza, the Texas Association for the Education of Young Children, LULAC, NHCSL, IDRA and the Texas Freedom Network.

Recently you might have been notified of a committee hearing on both HB 1612 & 1613 for Tuesday, April 19th. Unfortunately, the chairman of the Public Education Committee decided to take these two bills off of the schedule due to the number of bills on the calendar for that day. I cannot emphasize enough the important role you play in encouraging the chairman to reschedule these two bills as soon as possible. These are important bills that directly affect the lives of our children and could have an impact in providing a more accurate assessment of our student's education.

Our children will begin another round of the TAKS testing next week and it is very important to let everyone know that you support a transition to accurate assessment. Recently Rebecca Coleman, an eighth-grade English teacher for a school district in Dallas, was quoted in the April 14th edition of the Dallas Morning News that "Teaching is more than turning out good test takers. We're creating minds, nourishing souls and contributing to the betterment of our society. Let's not cheapen the importance of education by measuring it based on the results of one bubble-filling day."

CALL TO ACTION

1. Please call the Public Education Chairman Kent Grusendorf's office and urge your support to not delay the discussion of HB 1612 & 1613, a transition to accurate assessment. Request that a committee hearing be set for Tuesday, April 26th for both HB 1612 & 1613. Chairman Grusendorf can be reached through his capitol number: (512) 463-0624.

2. Please plan on attending the "Transition to Accurate Assessment Mobilization Day" at the Capitol on Tuesday, April 26th. This is the day we hope to have HB 1612 & 1613 set for a hearing and we plan on having a number of people to testify and sign witness affirmations. If we are unable to get this hearing on Tuesday we will use this day to break into groups and talk with Senators, Representatives and their staff serving on both the House Public Education Committee and Senate Education Committee in regards to our bills. There will be a press conference on the South steps of the Capitol at noon to draw attention to the need for testing reform. It would be great to get as many people there as possible. Spread the word.

3. This coming week we will be hosting a statewide video-conference on Thursday, April 21st at 6 pm to continue the dialogue on the transition from high stakes testing to an accurate assessment. We will be joined in Austin via video-conference by teachers, parents, students, superintendents, school board members in Dallas, El Paso and the Panhandle. The video-conference will be simulcast on the web and you can watch it live with the link available on my website. I encourage your participation and ask that you sign up at my website www.doraolivo.com.

If you have any input, suggestions and/or questions, please call Joshua Cinelli in the capitol office at 512-463-0494 or toll free 1-888-777-0033.

E-mail is Joshua.Cinelli@house.state.tx.us

Sincerely,

Dora Olivo

District 27 State Representative

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:42 AM 1 comments Links to this post

OK, Armstrong's activities were unethical but not illegal. What's to stop this then from happening again? Very little, I would say.

What I also find interesting, in a parallel manner how it apparently is not illegal either for groups like Hispanic CREO and the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) to take (huge sums) money from the federal government in order to educate parents about school choice which means vouchers in practice. These groups decry big government while profiting from government largesse. Their activities merit further scrutiny as well. -Angela
April 16, 2005

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 9:57 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration's hiring of a pundit to tout its education agenda was not illegal or unethical, but it was a poor decision and continued even after concerns were raised to the White House, an internal investigation found.

The report by the Education Department's inspector general cited a pattern of blunders that led to the $240,000 contract with conservative commentator Armstrong Williams.

Senior officials showed poor management, information didn't get to the right people and the agency paid for work that was poorly produced, Inspector General Jack Higgins said.

The department approved $240,000 for Williams, a commentator with newspaper, television and radio audiences, to promote President Bush's No Child Left Behind law. The deal was part of a $1.3 million contract the department had with Ketchum, a public relations firm.

Williams, who is black, was hired to inform minorities about Bush's law by producing ads with then-Education Secretary Rod Paige. Yet, records show Williams also was hired to provide media time to Paige and to persuade other blacks in the media to talk about the law.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings acknowledged ''serious lapses in judgment by senior department officials'' but said those directly responsible are no longer at the agency. She pledged to adopt the report's recommendations and restore credibility to the department.

''It think this was wrong,'' said Spellings, who took office in January. ''I think it was stupid. I think it was ill-advised. I think it showed a lack of judgment.''

Paige, who was secretary when the contract was signed, did not reply to a telephone message Friday seeking comment.

The report also said two Education Department officials had warned the White House last summer about concerns, including the ''inherent conflict'' of paying a pundit to endorse the president's education law.

David Dunn, then-special assistant to the president for domestic policy, agreed with the concerns, yet neither the White House nor the department halted the contract until it was disclosed by the news media in January. Dunn is now chief of staff to Spellings, who distanced the White House from any blame for the hiring of Williams.

The episode has proved embarrassing for the administration, which has paid at least two other conservative columnists to promote its agenda and has been criticized for distributing news videos that don't make clear they were produced by the government.

Bush has said the hiring of Williams was wrong and that the White House did not know in advance that a pundit had been hired. Spellings said Friday that description is true.

The inspector general's review dealt only with contract law -- not whether the administration has violated a ban on covert propaganda. That is the subject of a review by congressional investigators at the Government Accountability Office.

''The report paints a picture of a Bush administration that is sloppy and careless with taxpayer funds,'' said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., added: ''I commend the secretary for taking this issue seriously. Whether this activity is legal or not, it is just wrong for the administration to use taxpayer dollars for self-serving propaganda.''

Williams approached Paige about doing work for the department. His company was hired through Ketchum in late 2003 at the direction of the department despite some internal divisions about whether it was a good idea. Those divisions grew deeper.

When Williams' contract came up for renewal in May 2004, Paige's chief of staff and the department's deputy director of communications raised concerns about whether money was being spent wisely -- and whether there was a conflict in hiring a commentator. The concerns were so strong, the report said, that Dunn was told about them at the White House, and he agreed.

Asked Friday why the contract was not stopped at that point, Spellings defended Dunn. She said the White House assumes that the people hired to run federal agencies do so properly.

The report is available at:

Federal Report

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:24 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Here's an editorial from today's Statesman that rules on the side of evidence. For your info below, I also provide LULAC's position on the Top Ten Percent Plan. It's unfortunate that such a few wealthy and powerful people in our state can exhibit so much clout and power that they force the whole system to bend in their direction, on the one hand, and also that our universities feel unduly pressured to change, on the other, even against their own interests of devising a process that translates into freeing up spots at the university level. (The Statesman shows that these students have higher retention and graduation rates than non-Top Ten Percenters.) Maybe there should be a cost analysis that shows how much money is actually saved by bringing in TTP-ers. Just a thought. -Angela

EDITORIAL, AUSTIN AM-STATESMAN
Friday, April 15, 2005

We've heard a lot of talk from state leaders about the pressing need to increase minority enrollment at the state's colleges and universities. Ideally, Texas would have an admissions system that rewards effort, doesn't discriminate and gives students from rural areas an equal shot at top universities.

Texas has that kind of system right now. And the facts show that the students who gain admission under the top 10 rule are more competitive than those who are admitted under other criteria. Surprised? We were, too, given critics' statements that the top 10 students are not as "competitive" (you can read that in any number of ways) as students with high SAT scores. The facts demonstrate that the law is doing what it is supposed to do. But the Legislature is considering repealing the law or substantially revising it in an attempt to give preference to students from affluent suburban districts who have lost ground in the competition for seats at the University of Texas at Austin.

There is fierce competition for limited seats, especially at UT-Austin. Unfortunately, Texas public schools are not equal in resources, funding and quality. That is the genius of the top 10 law: it rewards merit and effort. Those who work the hardest earn the prize. The law is fair, and it is working. It shouldn't be repealed, as state. Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, proposes in a bill he filed this session.

Under the 1997 law, students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school classes in Texas can attend the state university of their choice. That means that the top 10 percent of seniors in the Del Valle school district with a large number of economically disadvantaged students has the same opportunity to gain admission to UT-Austin or Texas A&M University as the affluent students in the Eanes school district. It means that students at Palmer High School in the small-town district in North Texas have the same shot at UT-Austin as students at Highland Park High in the wealthy Dallas suburb.

The law ignores a student's race, ethnicity, income and geographic origin. Even so, it has significantly boosted minority enrollment at UT-Austin and Texas A&M University. It has also helped many white students from rural communities and small towns gain admission to selective schools.

Critics complain that top 10 students from Brownsville, Dallas or rural East Texas are less deserving than non-top 10 students from Plano, Highland Park or Eanes. Therefore, they argue, Texas is losing its brightest and best students because top 10 students are filling up so many seats that there aren't any left over for other gifted students who don't graduate in the top 10 percent of their class.

But UT-Austin's own figures show that top 10 students stay in college in greater numbers and graduate faster than non-top 10 students. It's true that top 10 students are taking a greater share of seats at UT and A&M. But there still are plenty of seats available at those institutions for others because thousands of students who are admitted don't enroll.

Texas has a fair admissions policy that gives every student the same chance to gain admission. It can be improved, as Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, is proposing with legislation requiring students to take the recommended high school curriculum to be eligible for top 10 admissions. But it shouldn't be repealed or substantially altered to favor those with the greatest influence at the Capitol. Any student who works hard enough to rise to the top of his or her class is treated the same under the law. The top 10 law puts the focus on merit. Wentworth and the Legislature should do that, too.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/04/15admissions_edit.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LULAC NATIONAL PRESS RELEASE
2000 L Street, NW, Suite 610; Washington, DC 20036
(202) 833-6130; (202) 833-6135 FAX; www.LULAC.org

For Immediate Release
Contact: Brent Wilkes, (202) 833-6130

March 30, 2005

LULAC CALLS FOR PRESERVATION OF TOP 10% ADMISSIONS RULE
National Board Supports Continuation of Successful Policy

Austin, TX - The National Board of the League of United Latin American
Citizens voted unanimously to support the continuation of a Texas law that
guarantees college admission to students who rank in the top 10 percent of
their high school class. Citing the 10 percent plan's success at increasing
diversity in Texas public universities, LULAC opposes any attempts to
abolish the law.

"It is clear to anyone who looks at enrollment data that the 10% plan has
increased diversity in our colleges and universities," stated Hector M.
Flores, LULAC National President. "If the 10% plan were to be abolished it
would destroy the tremendous opportunity that the program has created and
turn back the clock on diversity in Texas."

The university admissions law was adopted after a 1996 5th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals decision that eliminated affirmative action in Texas
college admissions. Since the 10% law was passed, the number of Hispanic and
black students admitted to Texas universities has more than doubled.

"Texas LULAC is firmly in support of preserving the 10% admissions rule,"
stated Roger C. Rocha, Jr., LULAC Texas State Director. "This rule provides
an equal opportunity for all Texans to receive a good education and achieve
the American dream."

LULAC plans to lobby the Texas legislature to preserve the plan which had
been championed by the late Texas Legislator Irma Rangel.

"Representative Rangel pioneered this landmark legislation and it was
supported by President George W. Bush when he was Governor," stated Flores.
"LULAC commends Texas Senator Royce West from Dallas and other legislators
for their ardent support of the 10% plan. We won't let the opponents of
equal opportunity jettison this plan simply because it has proven to be
effective."

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) is the oldest and
largest Latino civil rights organization in the United States. LULAC
advances the economic condition, educational attainment, political
influence, health, and civil rights of Hispanic Americans through
community-based programs run by more than 700 LULAC councils nationwide.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:43 AM 5 comments Links to this post

Hello everybody. I've been out of the country and have had difficulty with computer access and so I'm barely getting back to the blog. I'll post recent developments on Texas shortly as well.

I've been at the American Educational Research Association meetings in Montreal, Canada. The conference has been really interesting and it's been great being in a bilingual, French-English, province where the two languages are in constant negotiation in a very fluid, non-problematic way. You DO have to be bilingual though to hold lots of jobs, especially those that require interactions with the public.

Regarding the panels, session after session expresses great concern with NCLB. If anything is missing though, it's history on standards-based reform as well as analyses of the monied interests behind these reforms. It's dangerous, in my opinion, to not look at this because then one is left with the idea that these state-mandated controls have evolved "naturally" and that real people aren't actually profiting from all of this right now revealing a powerful motive that has nothing to do with children's learning.

Maybe AERA will someday be the organization that makes Karl Rove nervous.

I have good news on my book, LEAVING CHILDREN BEHIND. It--along with my other book--SUBTRACTIVE SCHOOLING--are the top 2 out of 4 best sellers for the State University of New York Press. I've also come across some great reviews of the book. I'm glad it's getting the reception that we all wanted it to get.

This was written by seven Penn State students. I think it's clever and so I thought that I'd share. -Angela

Ten Things I Hate about NCLB

1. One "proficient" standard for all is not very kind
when lots of such words need to be defined.

2. About this bill we need to be critical,
the reasons and arguments have become highly political.

3. The government went all Atilla the Hun
and took away all of our funds.

4. Teaching right now isn't the best
when all that you learn is geared to the test.

5. This policy leaves kids in the dark,
lacking attendance yields a big black mark.

6. We don't like federal mandates on patrol,
when all the states should be in control.

7. This point really is an abomination:
those improving students change stratification.

8. Why start a new controversy
and penalize schools with diversity?

9. Changing the purpose of education is funny;
when you teach to a test just for money.

10. Educators need room to reach
and not be confined when they try to teach.

Dan Oechsner-deo114@psu.edu
Melissa Dangel-mbd5005@psu.edu
Dan Mckee-dmm490@psu.edu
Dan Merrick-djm5007@psu.edu
Steve Jones-drj5007@psu.edu
Tara Scalfani-tes5000@psu.edu
Scott Fura-swf5002@psu.edu

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:41 PM 0 comments Links to this post

EDITORIAL
Power grab
Waco Tribune Herald
--------------
Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Vast numbers of schools would be taken over by the state and principals would be shown the door under proposals contained in both the Senate and House in Austin.

It is proposed in the name of "accountability" and "setting the bar high." But it has the look of being driven by anti-government ideology and not necessarily the best interests of public schools, their communities or their students.

House Bill 2 and the Senate substitute differ in degree, but both would order state takeover of schools that lag under a certain threshold.

The House bill would allow the state to take over schools that are among the lowest 5 percent in performance standards for two years in a row – even if they were actually rated academically acceptable under state guidelines.

Under the Senate bill, the state would take over schools rated "unacceptable" for two years in a row. That may seem more incremental, but it's not. Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley just announced that the Texas Education Agency will raise test scores schools need to be rated "acceptable." The Austin American-Statesman reports that 1,213 schools would be unacceptable under these criteria.

Two Waco schools, Doris Miller Elementary and G.L.. Wiley Middle, are rated unacceptable. Several others are on the "bubble" and could be turned over to for-profit management firms or other entities such as regional education service centers, univer- sities or charter-school operators.

Authors downplay the prospective role of for-profit management groups. But there seems little likelihood that nonprofit groups will be lining up to manage inner-city schools. Meanwhile, businesses like Edison Schools would line up. The Dallas ISD severed a contract with Edison after two lackluster years. Such a company and its kin covet the chance to get their hands on so many tax dollars.

A state takeover is a valid sanction for the most egregious situations, like Dallas's chronically mismanaged Wilmer-Hutchins ISD. But the matter should not be taken as lightly as either of these bills do. It's as if the authors feel it is an imperative to get for-profit firms into the education business. No, it's not.

Lawmakers who run for office using the phrase "local control" and then support a power grab like this are engaged in false advertising.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:19 PM 0 comments Links to this post

When the test IS the reform--rather than, say, used to measure it, diminishing returns as we see here are inevitable. -Angela

By GREG WINTER
New York Times
Published: April 13, 2005

The academic growth that students experience in a given school year has apparently slowed since the passage of No Child Left Behind, the education law that was intended to achieve just the opposite, a new study has found.

In both reading and math, the study determined, test scores have gone up somewhat, as each class of students outdoes its predecessors. But within grades, students have made less academic progress during the school year than they did before No Child Left Behind went into effect in 2002, the researchers said.

That finding casts doubt on whether schools can meet the law's mandate that all students be academically proficient by 2014. In fact, to realize the goal of universal proficiency, the study said, students will have to make as much as three times the progress they are currently making.

The study was conducted by the Northwest Evaluation Association, which develops tests for about 1,500 school districts in 43 states. To complete it, the group drew upon its test data for more than 320,000 students in 23 states, a sample that it calls "broad but not nationally representative," in part because the biggest cities, not being Northwest clients, were not included.

One of the more ominous findings, the researchers said, is that the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students could soon widen. Closing the gap is one of the driving principles of the law, and so far states say they have made strides toward shrinking it.

But minority students with the same test scores as their white counterparts at the beginning of the school year ended up falling behind by the end of it, the study found. Both groups made academic progress, but the minority students did not make as much, it concluded, an outcome suggesting that the gaps in achievement will worsen.

"Right now it's kind of a hidden effect that we would expect to see expressed in the next couple of years," said Gage Kingsbury, Northwest's director of research. "At that point, I think people will be disappointed with what N.C.L.B. has done."

The findings diverge from those of other recent studies, including a survey last month by the Center on Education Policy, a research group. It found that a significant majority of state education officials reported widespread academic progress and a narrowing of the achievement gap.

"This new study should give everybody pause before they run off and say, 'We're marching to victory,' " said Jack Jennings, the center's president. "Maybe we're not."

Kerri Briggs, a senior policy analyst at the Education Department, said the Northwest study had both encouraging and worrisome aspects, but added that she would have to examine it more closely before passing judgment.

Some critics speculated that because the study lacked data from big cities, which have large populations of minority students and have posted significant gains on test scores in recent years, it might have overstated or mischaracterized what was happening with the achievement gap.

"It's hard to know how much you can extrapolate from this study," said Ross Wiener, policy director for the Education Trust, which released its own report in January showing mixed results on student performance and achievement gaps. "I don't think you want to make generalizations about what's going on nationwide."

Still, the Northwest study tracked student performance at a level that others did not, a factor that may help explain why some of its findings appear unorthodox. Rather than relying on test scores at just one point in the year, the Northwest study looked at how students fared in the fall and then again in the spring, in an effort to see how much they had learned during the year.

With this approach, Northwest found that test scores on its exams did, in fact, go up from one year to the next under No Child Left Behind, typically by less than a point. The reason successive classes appear to do a little better than those before them may stem from the fact that younger students have grown up during a time of more regular testing than their immediate predecessors, the researchers said, and are therefore higher achievers.

But rising test scores tend to mask how much progress individual students make as they travel through school, the researchers found. Since No Child Left Behind, that individual growth has slowed, possibly because teachers feel compelled to spend the bulk of their time making sure students who are near proficiency make it over the hurdle.

The practice may leave teachers with less time to focus on students who are either far below or far above the proficiency mark, the researchers said, making it less likely for the whole class to move forward as rapidly as before No Child Left Behind set the agenda.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:14 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Posted on Mon, Apr. 11, 2005

Regulation is too High a Price for Vouchers
By Michele Quinones
Special to the Star-Telegram

During the last election cycle, active Texas Republicans gathered in state Senate district conventions and finally at the Texas Republican State Convention. Appointed committees worked on platform language detailing the beliefs of local or state Republicans on many issues, including educational vouchers or school choice.

In Tarrant County, the platforms for Senate Districts 10 and 12 did not support vouchers, primarily because of the regulation of private schools that would come with government funding.

District 12's platform said: "The Party, an uncompromising supporter of private and home schools and private and home school autonomy, does not recommend vouchers/tax credits (child-centered school funding) for private schools and home schools. Private and home school parents already have the maximum freedom to choose the content and goal of their children's education. Accepting government money will turn private schools into public schools and thus will diminish the parent's freedom to determine the content and goal of their children's education."

District 10's platform plank was very similar.

These Republicans realized that private schools that take government money will become government schools. Many active Republicans from the Tarrant County area do not support vouchers.

The state party platform supports vouchers but includes these words: "This measure could only be considered upon passage of a state constitutional amendment that prohibits imposition of state regulations on private and parochial schools." The Republicans at this convention did not want any of the regulation on private schools that would come with government money.

State Rep. Bob Griggs, R-North Richland Hills, has openly opposed vouchers. Other representatives and senators from District 10 and District 12 back vouchers.

Our legislators must get the message that we do not want the government to regulate our private schools.

Government money always brings uniformity and regimentation, less freedom and less choice. When private or home schools take government money, jurisdiction over children's education is taken out of parents' hands and is placed into those of the government.

In the landmark 2002 decision of Zelman vs. Simmons-Harris, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a voucher program that is neutral in regard to religion would pass constitutional muster. Private schools that accept voucher money must admit students regardless of religious faith.

Schools will not be able to screen students on the basis of criminal activity, truancy or academic ability. This would drastically change the way that private and religious schools handle admissions.

Private schools also would be required to educate handicapped and special-education students. However, without federal assistance, private schools would not have the funds necessary to follow federal rules regarding the education of these students. This assistance would bring more government regulation into private schools.

One of the current voucher bills, House Bill 1263, says that in order to participate in the Texas voucher program, a qualifying school must "not advocate or foster unlawful behavior or teach hatred of any person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion."

How would a parochial school handle this requirement? How would the courts rule regarding offensive teaching? Would the Christian teaching regarding salvation, taken from the Bible, be considered hateful toward other religions?

There is no way to know the answers to these questions until there is a court challenge.

The traditional, classic literature that students in these schools are reading, including the Bible, would offend many students. These religious schools would have to change their reading material, curriculum and goals.

The Texas House is considering four voucher bills and will vote on them very soon. If you are a parent who sends your child to a private or parochial school, or a Republican or citizen who cares about protecting the individual rights and freedoms of private and home school students, you must contact your representative.

Let that person know that you oppose to an educational voucher system.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michele Quinones of Haltom City is active in the Republican Party. She teaches sixth- and seventh-grade history and math in a private school.
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:09 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Texas' Rush to Privatize

JOHN YOUNG Opinion page editor
The Waco Tribune-Herald

Sunday, April 10, 2005

What Texas is doing with Child Protective Services almost reminds one of the serial killer who, with shaky hand, pens, "Stop me before I kill again."

What Texas is writing relative to child protection is, "I've blown it too many times. Take this task off my hands."

There's no question that Texas has blown it – and too many times. The question: Is privatizing the answer?

Republican leaders in Austin surely would like it to be so. They'd like to see as many state operations as possible contracted away, including public schools. You see, we just can't be trusted as a state to manage our own affairs. We must hire a management firm.

A House committee last week voted to put Child Protective Services on a fast track to full privatization. The Senate has passed a more incremental bill. It privatizes recruitment of foster parents and adoptive families, but stops short of contracting out case management on suspected abuse cases. It would try a pilot project to see if the latter works.

It's odd to see the House wanting to rush into privatization, when it is clear that Texas has never given the current system sufficient resources to do what it must.

Texas spends less per capita on child protection than all but two states, an average of $110 per child compared to a national average of $167. Its child abuse caseworkers have an average caseload of 61, twice the national average.

Has CPS done its job sufficiently? A host of high-profile horror stories say no.

But a rush to privatize in Texas is comparable to a baseball team owner saying to the manager, "I realize we could afford only three infielders, and we had to recruit the catcher each game from the stands, but you're the reason why we're losing."

Should the House plan become law, it will be interesting to see how many companies will line up to try to do what the state apparently can't do with available resources. Two years ago the state set in motion the privatization of mental hospitals and group homes. The requirement was that contractors show how they could do the same thing with 25 percent less. Bidders stayed away in droves.

In the last Legislature, a restructuring of mental health-mental retardation services ordered privatization when possible but was careful not to require or assume any cost savings whatsoever.

Of course, privatizing guarantees this: Unlike bodies without a profit motive, businesses will seek to boost their caseloads and trim their costs to pump up their margins. Will this result in better services or just lower-cost services, and higher profits for those involved?

What else will come with the package? Last year an auditor's report cited $20 million in unnecessary payments to an insurance subcontractor for the Children's Health Insurance Program, as well as obscenely excessive payments – $7 million split between four consultants.

And here we were telling CHIP recipients we couldn't afford to check their teeth or provide them with eyeglasses.

Next target: schools

Don't look now, but schools are next up on the to-do list for Privatization Inc. Legislation in both houses would make it possible for private management firms to take over low-performing schools. Authors say that the privatization angle is being overplayed, since regional service centers, universities and others could do the same.

But it isn't these players who are lining up in Brooks Bros. suits. It's for-profit groups like Edison Schools, which flunked its own test run in Dallas. The school district there pulled the plug on its contract with Edison after two years.

Our Legislature seems in much too much of a hurry to abdicate state affairs to something other than the government we've created as a people, including the school boards we elect.

If our leaders lack such confidence in the enterprise of governing, maybe they should abdicate as well.

John Young's column appears Thursday and Sunday. E-mail: jyoung@wacotrib.com. Carlos Sanchez' column will return soon.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:03 PM 0 comments Links to this post

EDITORIAL BOARD
Austin Am-Statesman
Friday, April 08, 2005

There's no question that the state Senate's approach to fixing the school finance crisis is better than the bill passed by the Texas House. House Bill 2 and its financing companion, House Bill 3, are so bad it would have been difficult for senators to do worse.

There are many features worth noting in the Senate bill by state Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano. We like the approach to teachers' pay raises. The bill calls for an across-the-board raise of about $1,500 a year per teacher and sets up a merit system that provides additional pay incentives for teachers in low-performing schools or teachers with certification in certain specialized fields. That approach recognizes the reality of the situation in Texas: Teachers as a group are underpaid; and the demand outstrips the supply for teachers who are certified in secondary math, science and special education. The Senate bill also tightens accountability for failing charter schools and expands pre-kindergarten.

Unfortunately, the Senate suffers from the same obsession as the House in dealing with school financing. Both chambers focused their efforts on reducing local property taxes over financing public schools. Both bills fall short of funding public schools at a level needed to equip Texas' 4.3 million students with the skills needed to graduate, get jobs or go to college.

The Senate plan would generate about $3.2 billion in new money — about the same as the House bill. It doesn't eat those dollars up in new mandates the way that the House plan would. And it creates a statewide property tax of $1 per assessed valuation — a more reliable and equitable method of financing public schools than the House plan, which relies heavily on increases in the sales tax. But the amount of money in the Senate plan falls short of what state District Judge John Dietz ruled was needed for public schools.

Like everything else in life, education costs money. People at the Capitol are fond of saying you can't solve problems by throwing money at them. That's faux folk wisdom because Texas politicians have never really tried throwing money at education. Education gets a lot of lip service but comparatively little cash — certainly not enough to keep pace with population growth and the special needs of modern students and the demands placed on them by modern politicians.

Another troublesome provision shared by the Senate and House versions is one that would privatize hundreds of failing schools. The Senate plan calls for the state education commissioner to replace the principal and management team at any school rated low-performing for two consecutive years. The commissioner could put those schools under management of private firms, a state university or a group of community leaders.

That would be a step backward for schools that desperately need to move forward. Private firms have been fired from several public districts across the United States for failing to improve student performance. Placing schools under the management of "community leaders" is a risky proposition because, however well intended those folks might be, they are no match for trained teachers and administrators. The idea that there is a magic bullet, such as a state university, that can instantly improve schools is flawed.

Private schools excel because they offer smaller classes, discipline, high expectations, a rich curriculum and quality teachers. Give failing schools those same tools and watch them shine.

When the horse trading begins in earnest in conference committee, we're hoping that legislators will face educational reality and commit the money it's going to take to keep the state economically viable.

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/04/8education_edit.html
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:00 PM 5 comments Links to this post

URGENT: Action Plan Attached
April 5, 2005

Dear Friends,

We need your help in getting a hearing set for HB 1612 and 1613 regarding high stakes testing. The bills have been referred to the Public Education Committee, but the bills have not been set for a hearing yet. The deadline to vote a bill out of the Public Education Committee is May 9th and the last day to vote the bills out of the Calendars Committee is May 21st. Senator Leticia Van de Putte is sponsoring these bills on the senate side with SB 1717 and SB 1718.

For those of you who joined us, the conversation and dialogue we had during the video-conference has been the springboard of the legislative action center that you can find on my website, (www.doraolivo.com). I want to thank all who participated in the video-conference. We must continue to strengthen our alliance and continue to broaden the outreach to gain support for passage of these bills. Reforming standardized testing is one of the initiatives outlined by the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators (NHCSL) and the National Black Caucus of State Legislators (NBCSL) in their joint effort entitled "Closing the Gaps." Both Representative Harold Dutton and myself are representing Texas in this national effort.

Also, please sign up at the website to receive e-mail notices of upcoming events and actions. Working together we can achieve a more accurate way of measuring our children's abilities-by the use of multiple criteria instead of just a single test.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or call my legislative aide Joshua Cinelli at 1-888-777-0033. In Austin 512-463-0494. Joshua.Cinelli@house.state.tx.us.

Once again we need your help in getting HB 1612 and HB 1613 set for a hearing and passed out of committee. Please look at attached Action Plan.

Sincerely,

Dora Olivo





Please Note: Urgent Action Plan

Please contact all the Public Education Committees and ask them to please set HB 1612 & HB 1613 for a hearing and to pass bills out committee.

House Public Education Committee
The Honorable Kent Grusendorf-Chair
kent.grusendorf@house.state.tx.us
Phone: 512.463.0624

Members:
Rep. Rene Oliveira (512.463.0640)-Vice Chair
Rep. Dan Branch (512.463.0367)
Rep. Harold Dutton (512.463.0510)
Rep. Anna Mowery (512.463.0608)
Rep. Dianne Delisi(512.463.0630)
Rep. Rob Eissler(512.463.0797)
Rep. Scott Hochberg (512.463.0492)
Rep. Bill. Keffer (512.463.0656)
Senate Education Committee
Chairwoman:The Honorable Florence Shapiro
florence.shapiro@senate.state.tx.us
Phone: 512.463.0108

Members:
Sen. Royce West (512.463.0123)-Vice-Chair
Sen. Kim Averitt (512.463.0122)
Sen. Kyle Janek (512 463-0117)
Sen. Steve Ogden (512.463.0105)
Sen. Todd Staples (512.463.0103)
Sen. Leticia Van de Putte (512.463.0126)
Sen. Tommy Williams (281.364.9426)
Sen. Judith Zaffirini (512.463.0121)

Also Contact your Representative and your Senator and the following state officials listed below to ask for their support and also get them to contact all members of the House Public Education Committee to set bills for HB 1612 and 1613 for a hearing and to get the bills voted favorably out of committee. Also, have them contact the Senate Public Education Committee to set bills for a hearing on SB 1717 and SB 1718 and vote them favorably out of committee.


Office of the Governor
The Honorable Rick Perry
Website: www.governor.state.tx.us
Email: rick.perry@governor.state.tx.us
Phone: 512.463.2000
Citizen's Opinion Hotline: 1-800-252-9600 Office of the Lieutenant Governor
The Honorable David Dewhurst
Website: http://www.ltgov.state.tx.us
Email: david.dewhurst@ltgov.state.tx.us
Phone: 512.463.0001
800-441-0373

Speaker of the House
The Honorable Tom Craddick
Website: www.house.state.tx.us/speaker/welcome
Email: tom.craddick@house.state.tx.us
Phone: 512.463.1000 Texas Education Agency Commissioner
Dr. Shirley Neeley
Website: http://www.tea.state.tx.us/sboe/commissioner.html
Email: commissioner@tea.state.tx.us




To Keep things in Perspective:
A part of the poem "Hurry Up, Hurry Up" by Clydia Forehand

There are so many children, from so many places
To test for conformity really erases.
All that they are; all that they dream.
All that they look for and all that they see.

Taught not to question; taught not to ask.
Stay in your seat; stick to the task.
Each one so different; each boy and each girl.
They are lag behind children in a hurry up world.

Please contact Joshua Cinelli ( joshua.cinelli@house.state.tx.us ) or at
1-888-777-0033 and 512.463.0494 for more information.

The standardized testing reform efforts are part of the Texas Campaign to close the achievement gaps.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:07 PM 1 comments Links to this post

EDITORIAL BOARD
Friday, April 08, 2005

There's no question that the state Senate's approach to fixing the school finance crisis is better than the bill passed by the Texas House. House Bill 2 and its financing companion, House Bill 3, are so bad it would have been difficult for senators to do worse.

There are many features worth noting in the Senate bill by state Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano. We like the approach to teachers' pay raises. The bill calls for an across-the-board raise of about $1,500 a year per teacher and sets up a merit system that provides additional pay incentives for teachers in low-performing schools or teachers with certification in certain specialized fields. That approach recognizes the reality of the situation in Texas: Teachers as a group are underpaid; and the demand outstrips the supply for teachers who are certified in secondary math, science and special education. The Senate bill also tightens accountability for failing charter schools and expands pre-kindergarten.

Unfortunately, the Senate suffers from the same obsession as the House in dealing with school financing. Both chambers focused their efforts on reducing local property taxes over financing public schools. Both bills fall short of funding public schools at a level needed to equip Texas' 4.3 million students with the skills needed to graduate, get jobs or go to college.

The Senate plan would generate about $3.2 billion in new money — about the same as the House bill. It doesn't eat those dollars up in new mandates the way that the House plan would. And it creates a statewide property tax of $1 per assessed valuation — a more reliable and equitable method of financing public schools than the House plan, which relies heavily on increases in the sales tax. But the amount of money in the Senate plan falls short of what state District Judge John Dietz ruled was needed for public schools.

Like everything else in life, education costs money. People at the Capitol are fond of saying you can't solve problems by throwing money at them. That's faux folk wisdom because Texas politicians have never really tried throwing money at education. Education gets a lot of lip service but comparatively little cash — certainly not enough to keep pace with population growth and the special needs of modern students and the demands placed on them by modern politicians.

Another troublesome provision shared by the Senate and House versions is one that would privatize hundreds of failing schools. The Senate plan calls for the state education commissioner to replace the principal and management team at any school rated low-performing for two consecutive years. The commissioner could put those schools under management of private firms, a state university or a group of community leaders.

That would be a step backward for schools that desperately need to move forward. Private firms have been fired from several public districts across the United States for failing to improve student performance. Placing schools under the management of "community leaders" is a risky proposition because, however well intended those folks might be, they are no match for trained teachers and administrators. The idea that there is a magic bullet, such as a state university, that can instantly improve schools is flawed.

Private schools excel because they offer smaller classes, discipline, high expectations, a rich curriculum and quality teachers. Give failing schools those same tools and watch them shine.

When the horse trading begins in earnest in conference committee, we're hoping that legislators will face educational reality and commit the money it's going to take to keep the state economically viable.

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/04/8education_edit.html
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:04 PM 0 comments Links to this post

79TH LEGISLATURE
By Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, April 07, 2005

The Texas House overwhelmingly approved a $137.5 billion, two-year state budget early Thursday. Critics said the spending plan would only marginally improve state services.

The House approved the budget with a 105-41 vote after more than 16 hours of debate on state spending. Although more than 100 amendments were offered, the debate lacked the intensity of 2003, when lawmakers passed a bare-bones budget in the face of a $10 billion budget shortfall.

The House also passed a bill Thursday allocating $3.4 billion to pay for shortfalls in programs such as Medicaid and public education this year. That bill also includes some money to spend over the next budget cycle. Between the two measures, the House intends to spend about $139 billion during the next two years, or 10 percent more than in the current budget.

The Senate has passed a $139 billion budget. Lawmakers will write the final budget in a conference committee.

"We feel like we've covered the needs of the State of Texas," House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie, said of the two bills. "During the course of the conference committee hopefully we can address some other needs."

But Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, said much of the new money in the budget pays for enrollment growth in programs such as public education or Medicaid, leaving little room to upgrade services for the poor, the elderly and college students.

"If you look at the things where we have an opportunity to make decisions for the state, the decision was made to keep the bad status quo," Coleman said.

The House budget does not restore some services cut in 2003, such as hearing aids, eyeglasses and mental health counseling for adults on Medicaid. It also does not increase the rates paid to doctors who treat patients in Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, which were cut in 2003. It also continues to require families to reapply for the children's insurance program every six months instead of once a year.

Thousands of students have qualified over the last two years for the Texas Grant program, which pays college tuition and fees for students who take tough classes in high school and show financial need, but they have not received the grants because of limited funding two years ago. The House budget under consideration Wednesday was not likely to provide a grant for everyone who will qualify over the next two years.

The budget would restore some services cut in 2003, such as dental and vision benefits in the children's health program. It also aims to prevent growth in waiting lists for programs that serve people with disabilities, and it pays for major reforms for the agencies that protect children and the elderly from abuse and neglect.

"Some Texans will think we're not spending enough. Some Texans will think we're spending too much," Pitts said, adding that the plan is "just right, reflecting our priorities, our needs and our revenues."

The House voted down most amendments that Democrats tried to add to the budget. Some of those amendments would have added restrictions to the Texas Enterprise Fund, a deal-closing account used to encourage businesses to expand in Texas, or redirected money from that fund to other programs. Critics say the fund is a boondoggle for big businesses in a state strapped for money to spend on government services.

One amendment that won approval would reduce the advertising budget of the Texas Lottery Commission to increase the allowance given to nursing home residents for personal needs, such as adult diapers.

The supplemental spending bill would pull about $1.9 billion out of the state's so-called rainy day fund, effectively taking all of the money from it. If that measure is in the final budget, this would be the second legislative session in a row that lawmakers have used that fund to balance the budget, causing Rep. Craig Eiland, D-Galveston, to say it should henceforth be called the "Every Day Fund."

The fund consists, in part, of excess oil and gas tax revenue. With oil and gas prices escalating, Pitts said the account would be replenished quickly.

The House would spend less in its budget than the Senate on several areas of government, including higher education and criminal justice.

The House plan includes $3 billion to be spent over two years on education reforms. Senators want to spend about $3.2 billion on school reforms but did not include that money in their budget. Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst has said senators will fill that void with what he has described as nontax revenue.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/04/7statebud.html

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

Thursday, April 7, 2005

By ROBERT T. GARRETT / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – About 6,000 fewer college students would receive financial aid and the state would spend the least it's spent on school textbooks in a decade under a two-year budget plan that passed in the House early Thursday.

Discussions stretched into the wee hours of the night as weary lawmakers labored through a stack of amendments.

Despite surging enrollment in public schools, the House budget, approved by a 105-41 vote, would pay out $336 million for textbooks – $54 million less than lawmakers approved amid a huge shortfall last session and less than half what was spent when the state enjoyed big surpluses a few years back.

In higher education, the House would assist 50,327 students a year from financially strapped families, down from 56,109 students this year and 63,834 last year. In the last two years, some 82,000 freshmen were eligible but denied the aid, called TEXAS Grants.

"Even though we talk about education, we really don't put our money where our mouth is," said Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine. He said the budget would squeeze middle-class Texas families already reeling from recent tuition increases.

Rep. Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said the budget is "sound and responsible" but would spend record amounts on public schools and health care programs for the poor.

Paraphrasing a fairy tale, Mr. Pitts said: "Some Texans will think we're not spending enough. Some Texans will think we're spending too much. The Appropriations Committee believes this budget is just right, reflecting our priorities, our needs and our revenues."

Spending in the next two years would grow by nearly 9 percent, to $137.5 billion in state and federal funds, Mr. Pitts stressed. Earlier, the House passed an emergency appropriation bill, 137-8. It would spend an extra $1.9 billion in 2006-07, for a total of $139.4 billion.

However, while the House would spend some $13 billion more in the next two years, most of the new money would be soaked up by inflation and population growth. Some of the additional expenses:

•Nearly $4 billion more than in the current budget to cover enrollment growth and soaring costs for prescription drugs and medical care in Medicaid, the state-federal health program for the poor, disabled and elderly.

•Some $3 billion to fund an overhaul of school finance that would end Robin Hood transfers of money from property-rich school districts to poor ones. GOP budget writers said it includes some $600 million for school technology, part of which might pay for textbooks, easing pain school districts would feel because a lower amount was earmarked for books.

•About $1.1 billion more for public schools, to catch up with some of the cost of increased enrollment and a payment the state delayed last session.

•An immediate infusion of $300 million to hire new caseworkers and make other improvements at Child Protective Services and Adult Protective Services.

•Hundreds of millions more to cover higher costs of providing health coverage to current and retired public employees, including teachers.

The outlook for social programs was mixed, however.

While poor youngsters in the Children's Health Insurance Program would regain coverage of dental and vision care, the changes in eligibility and enrollment procedures made in 2003 would stand, despite Democrats' attempt to undo them. They helped cause enrollment to dip, by some 179,000 children, to 328,350 as of last month.

Waiting lists would not shrink for respite and community care programs designed to keep the mentally retarded and frail elderly out of institutions that cost more. Adults on Medicaid would not regain coverage of eyeglasses, hearing aids, podiatry services and mental health counseling cut last session.

However, the House approved an amendment that would increase a monthly allowance for impoverished nursing home residents on Medicaid. Last session, lawmakers cut the stipend from $60 to $45. The House would increase it to $75.

The budget now returns to the Senate, which is expected to reject House changes, setting up a showdown in a House-Senate conference committee.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

E-mail rtgarrett@dallasnews.com
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Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/040705dntexbudget.114b5.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:55 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Point of View Essay
by

Gerald Bracey, Associate Professor of Education
George Mason University
March 9, 2005
______________________________________________________________________________
The “wealth clock” that tracks your net worth currently reads a little over $60 billion, but if you had applied the same level of critical acumen to Microsoft’s 1975 business plan as you recently applied to education while bashing American schools, Microsoft would have gone
belly-up in 1976 (your focus was the high school, but you kept jumping illogically around to
4th graders and 8th graders, too).

You and the governors were quite vague about what makes the schools obsolete or what to
do about it. What is it, exactly, that schools are not teaching that they need to?
Let’s consider reading, math and science. Are schools obsolete because they teach these
topics? International comparisons, I notice, assess…reading, math and science. You and
the governors chose your statistics from these comparisons to put America in the worst
possible light. I can’t imagine leaders of any other country doing that, but you were wrong
in any case.

For instance, in the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, 11 of 24
nations scored significantly higher than the U. S. in math at the fourth grade, but only 3
scored higher in science. At the eighth grade level, only 9 of the 44 countries scored
significantly higher than the U. S. in math and only 7 scored higher in science. If American
schools are obsolete, many other nations’ schools are more archaic.

You claimed that our kids were at the top in fourth grade, but at the bottom by 12th. To
make that statement, you had to uncritically accept one of the worst comparisons in
education history, that from 1995’s Third International Mathematics and Science Study,
Final Year Report. That study took extreme care to point out how very different that final
year of secondary school is in different nations. Alas, the U. S. Department of Education
presented this study as if it were an apples to apples comparison of high school seniors
around the world. Apples to aardvarks is more like it. If you examine the scores of
comparable students, U. S. students are average, as they were in eighth grade.

You said to the governors, “When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow.” Really? My guess is that when you travel abroad, your hosts, wishing to impress you, do not take you to average or below average schools. Visit some good schools here and your terror will abate. Schools teach general knowledge and skills. Certainly that’s true in the college preparatory curriculum you and the governors want for all children, but jobs require highly specific skills.

You have to teach these on the job. We often can’t even imagine what those skills will be in
the future. But advances in technology makes life simpler, not more complicated. Think
digital camera vs. the manually operated SLR of 30 years ago. In 1986, my secretary was
ecstatic when I replaced her IBM Selectric III typewriter with a word-processing personal
computer. Imagine being able to revise a manuscript without retyping the whole document!
Of course, for this change to go smoothly, we had to provide our clerical staff on-the-job
training, something that American corporations are loath to do. Research in the Nineties
found that compared to companies in other nations, when it comes to developing employees, American corporations are real cheapskates. And, in contrast to companies abroad, which developed low-skilled and high-skilled employees, American companies invested almost entirely in employees who were already highly skilled.

You say our workforce is at risk. The World Economic Forum, which you have addressed,
doesn’t agree. Among 104 nations, it ranks the United States second in Global Competitiveness and sees no future decline. We used to be number 1, but the WEF has not
been pleased with the Bush tax cuts, our ever-increasing debt, our ever-increasing trade
deficit and the endless parade of indicted CEO’s (lowers our score on the WEF’s “corruption
index”).

I do congratulate you for focusing some attention on economically deprived schools. Alas,
you and the governors appear to think that school reform can, all by itself overcome their
problems. But poor students arrive at school behind their middle class peers. As measured
by tests, they learn the same amount during the school year, but lose the gains over the
summer, leaving them farther behind. You and the governors should look for ways to
eliminate the factors that cause poor children to lose ground during the months when the
schools are closed. Good luck.

Gerald W. Bracey is an educational researcher and writer in Alexandria, VA. He is author of
Setting the Record Straight: Responses to Misconceptions About Public Education in the U.S.
(Heinemann 2004) and On the Death of Childhood and the Destruction of Public Schools
(Heinemann, 2003).

This document is available on the Education Policy Studies Laboratory website at:
http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/EPRU/POV/EPSL-0503-104-EPRU.pdf

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

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NEW STUDY SHOWS THAT HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION SHOULD DEPEND ON MORE THAN A TEST

Contact: Barbara McKenna; mckenna@handful.biz, 831.460.9933

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

STANFORD, CA -- In 2003, more than half of public school students in the U.S. were required to take an exit exam in order to graduate from high school. In some states this test will determine whether they graduate, regardless of what courses they have taken, what grades they have earned, and what abilities they have demonstrated in other ways. With additional states planning on phasing in new exit exams over the next several years, an increasing number of students will be expected to take such tests. Despite the growing popularity of these high-stakes tests, there has been little focus on their impact and efficacy.

A new study released today by Stanford University researchers sheds light on these policies, examining the impacts of state testing practices and the effectiveness of various approaches. The study, Multiple Measures Approaches to Graduation, is authored by researchers from the university's School Redesign Network. The report documents research findings on states that have required exit examinations as the primary basis for graduation from high school. In these states, research has documented:
Reduced graduation rates, especially for African American and Latino students, English language learners, and students with disabilities.
Incentives for schools to push out students who do poorly, when school ratings are contingent on the average pass rates of students.
Narrowing of the curriculum and neglect of higher order performance skills where limited test measures are used.

The report also examines a range of approaches to high school graduation that include tests as one element in a broader array of indicators about student proficiency. These "multiple measures" approaches to graduation, used in at least 27 states, differ from single-test approaches in that they consider a variety of student work, which may include student academic records, research papers, portfolios, essays, capstone projects and oral exams. The report provides an in-depth examination of the assessment systems in the 27 states that use multiple measures approaches. It also discusses testing for English language learners and students with disabilities, and makes recommendations based on the body of evidence about test uses and effects.

"High school graduation policies have important consequences for teaching, learning, and student achievement," says Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University and lead author of the report. "It is important both to balance tests with other sources of evidence and to encourage students to do real-world tasks that go beyond what can be measured with multiple-choice questions.

"Evidence from the last decade suggests that states that have used multiple measures approaches to graduation have tended to maintain high student test scores and high graduation rates," adds SRN co-director, Ray Pecheone, who directed assessment policy in Connecticut during the 1990s. "Multiple measures systems that evaluate the full range of standards in a more balanced way produce student who are better prepared for today's workforce and for higher education."

Multiple measures assessments have proven to be more effective for a number of reasons.
They provide a comprehensive assessment of students' abilities by examining a broad
range of students skills, including higher-order performance skills such as problem solving, that multiple-choice tests can't measure. Systems that include local performance assessments also provide more comprehensive and timely feedback on student achievement -- teachers can use the results of ongoing diagnostic assessments throughout the academic year to inform their planning. Finally, multiple measures assessments provide a balanced means for holding students and schools accountable, one which stimulates ongoing improvements.

The report highlights four components of a balanced assessment system that appear particularly productive for leveraging both high-quality assessment and high-quality instruction:

Employing a range of assessments of student performance
Providing assessment options for students with special needs
Developing local assessments
Implementing a process for review and approval of local assessment systems

The report concludes that using a multiple measures approach to graduation, in contrast to using a single test, can provide broader means for students to demonstrate their learning, better strategies for schools to evaluate the full range of standards in valid and appropriate ways, and rich individualized information about student learning, which is essential to school improvement and directly beneficial to classroom teachers.

Multiple Measures Approaches to Graduation is authored by Stanford University Professor of Education Linda Darling-Hammond, SRN Associate Director of Assessment & Accountability Elle Rustique-Forrester, SRN Co-executive Director Raymond Pecheone, and Stanford University Research Associate Alethea Andree.

The School Redesign Network (SRN) is housed at Stanford University and supported through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. SRN supports research on school redesign; is home to an extensive clearinghouse of materials for communities working to improve their schools; and hosts institutes, seminars, working groups, and leadership/study tours.

To schedule interviews, or for additional material, please contact Barbara McKenna at 831.460.9933.

Contact number to publish for public inquiries: 650.725.0703

#####

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:00 AM 1 comments Links to this post

This report published by the Commonweal Institute is a MUST READ. I quote: "[Written by] by David C. Johnson and Leonard M. Salle, analyze the conservative movement’s attack as a strategic process aimed at privatizing education. The report provides a detailed plan for how public education advocates can work with their allies to form a network of organizations and individuals - an infrastructure - that will be able get their messages to the broad public and increase political support for public education."

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:39 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This article, Homeschooling Alone: Why Corporate Reformers are Ignoring the Revolution in Education, looks at the corporate world's influence on education reform. A key point is that the private sector has always been involved in the affairs of public schools. And now they disingenuously decry a system that they helped create. -Angela

"Today’s private-sector benefactors forge an entirely different path, dumping only hundreds of millions each year into the public school system. They promote charter schools (which boast a nationwide enrollment of around 500,000). They champion school vouchers (which are currently used by fewer than 20,000 students nationwide)."

"If today’s corporate reformers don’t know much about history, they do display a well-developed sense of irony. In one breath, they argue for more “school choice.” In the next, they advocate the development of “best practices” that can be franchised from classroom to classroom and lobby for legislation like the No Child Left Behind Act, which essentially coerces all schools everywhere to teach the same subjects using the same methods and materials."

Here's another comment about why corporate philanthropists don't invest heavily in homeschooling:

What makes such lack of interest especially baffling is that, theoretically at least, homeschooling seems tailor-made to the values and needs of business. It’s a private, union-free institution in which the government plays only a minor role. It’s an endlessly customizable approach to education that offers an alternative to the one-size-fits-all limitations of public school. It produces self-directed individuals who have learned how to acquire new skills without constant supervision or coercion.

The downside? It may be a little harder to mass-market Doritos, Nikes, and other articles of trade in a Southern Baptist’s living room than it is in a public school. But in an era when the phrase school choice has become the mantra of so many education reformers and philanthropists, homeschooling, a choice that millions of parents and children have already enthusiastically embraced, remains the most unleveraged asset in the education universe. 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:13 PM 0 comments Links to this post

"And a new Senate proposal could pave the way to dozens or hundreds of those failing schools being taken over by private companies." Read on.... -Angela

Many more schools will be 'unacceptable'; bill could spur privatization

Wednesday, April 6, 2005

By JOSHUA BENTON / The Dallas Morning News


The number of schools the state considers failing will skyrocket next year under a tougher accountability system approved by state Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley.

And a new Senate proposal could pave the way to dozens or hundreds of those failing schools being taken over by private companies.

"I'm not concerned about how many schools become 'unacceptable,' " said state Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, chairwoman of the Senate education committee. "I'm more concerned about what happens in the classroom that makes them unacceptable."

The confluence of two distinct shifts in the Texas education world has some wondering whether schools are being set up for failure.

"There are people out there promoting the idea that public schools are bad," said John Cole, president of the Texas Federation of Teachers. "You'd almost forget that we have a president who ran on the idea that he had fixed the schools in Texas."

Dr. Neeley formally approved the new system Monday after more than a month of consideration by Texas Education Agency committees and staff members. Starting next year, the passing rate schools have to reach to be "academically acceptable" will increase by 10 percentage points in reading, writing, social studies and science. In math, the required passing rate will increase 5 points.

That – combined with other changes in the accountability system – will make it much harder for schools to stay out of the ratings gutter. Last year, 92 Texas schools were labeled unacceptable. If the new standards had been in place, 1,213 schools would have received the tag. Texas has about 7,700 public schools.

"Our goal is to bring our schools up to a really good standard," TEA spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said.

It's unlikely that the number of failing schools would reach 1,213. Scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test generally improve every year as teachers figure out how best to teach to the test. Those improvements will probably reduce the number of unacceptable campuses by several hundred.

But if Ms. Shapiro's bill becomes law, many of those schools would be managed by private – perhaps for-profit – companies. Under her proposal, any school that is rated unacceptable for two years must be removed from the control of the local school board and handed off to "alternative management."

The most likely candidates for such management would be school management companies.

The best-known is Edison, a for-profit company that has managed public schools in Dallas and elsewhere. It's received mixed reviews; many of the districts that've worked with Edison, such as Dallas, have severed ties to the company.


For-profit fears

Ms. Shapiro emphasized that "alternative management" does not necessarily mean a for-profit company. "It could be a group of parents that wants to do a better job," she said. "It could be UT-Austin or UT-Dallas or a school with a college of education. I think we're focusing too much on the potential of a for-profit management team."

But her bill includes language that appears to favor established companies over upstarts. The bill requires anyone wishing to take over a school to have "documented success in whole school interventions that increased the educational and performance levels of students in low-performing campuses."

Her bill is a Senate substitute to House Bill 2, the school finance bill passed last month by the Legislature's lower chamber. The House bill contained a similar private-management provision. But instead of tying takeovers to the "unacceptable" label, it targeted schools whose test scores ranked in the bottom 5 percent of the state.

That change makes Dr. Neeley's change to the definition of "unacceptable" more important. Under current law, schools rated unacceptable for several years can be subject to dissolution by the commissioner. But that tool has been used rarely.

Ms. Shapiro's proposal removes much of the commissioner's leeway in determining whether intervention is appropriate.

"I just think we need a stronger plan," Ms. Shapiro said. "We've talked about low-performing schools for an awfully long time and said that, over a period of time, they would change. And they haven't."

Whether her assertions are correct come down to what, exactly, it means to be "unacceptable." Texas has had a school-rating system since 1993, but what it takes to earn the state's lowest label has changed in most years since then. Nearly every school in the state has seen dramatic increases in state test scores over that time, and the state's standards have increased to match them.

Over the last decade, the rating system has kept the number of failing schools relatively low – generally 50 to 150.

But prominent players in education policy – led by former Bush education adviser Sandy Kress – believe that number is too low. Mr. Kress, a former Dallas school board president, has said the state's system should identify about 10 percent of schools as poor performers.

"This is a bigger jump than anyone was looking for," said Whit Johnstone, Irving's director of testing and research, who served on a statewide committee that recommended a smaller increase in standards than what Dr. Neeley chose. "Resources are finite, and you can't spend as much money as you want to move everything along at the same time," he said.

Challenges ahead

He said dealing with the increases would be difficult for districts such as his. Irving would have had several schools slip to unacceptable status had the standards been in place last year.

"A 10-percentage-point increase in the passing rate is pretty significant," he said. "It's not going to be a simple thing for any school district."

Some educators said there's little evidence that removing schools from the control of school districts increases their quality.

"If charter schools are to serve as an example of the effectiveness of the private sector, I think the results have been very mixed," said Maria Whitsett, executive director for accountability in the Austin school district. "I don't believe we can assume privatization is a blanket solution."

Staff writer Russell Rian contributed to this report.

RISING STANDARDS
Under a new set of rules adopted by Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley, it will be much tougher to be an "acceptable" Texas school next year. Here are the passing rates schools will have to attain to be labeled acceptable in 2006 compared with this year:
2005 2006 Increase
Reading 50% 60% +10
Writing 50% 60% +10
Social studies 50% 60% +10
Mathematics 35% 40% +5
Science 25% 35% +10

SOURCE: Texas Education Agency
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http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/040605dnmetunacceptable.d48c.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:04 PM 1 comments Links to this post

04/06/2005 12:00 AM CDT
Jenny LaCoste-Caputo
Express-News Staff Writer

AUSTIN — More than 500 parents, many from San Antonio, traveled Tuesday to the Capitol to rally in support of school choice and to testify before lawmakers who are considering three bills that could make Texas a model for taxpayer-funded private education.

"We need options," said Debra Cortines, who lives in the Edgewood School district. "Parents want a choice when it comes to their children's education."

Two of the bills being debated in the House Education Committee target San Antonio school districts specifically, including San Antonio, South San Antonio, Edgewood and Northside. The third bill would make every public school student in the state eligible for a voucher that could be used for private-school tuition.

Voucher supporters gathered at noon on the steps of the Capitol, waving Texas and American flags and shouting school choice slogans in English and Spanish.

"You're here today to make sure your voices are heard. And I'm telling you there are people listening to you at the highest level of state government," Gov. Rick Perry told the crowd. "When you give parents a choice, you give children a chance." Perry discounted the argument by critics that vouchers pull money from public schools and do nothing to help children left behind, pointing to Edgewood as an example.

Students there have been eligible for privately funded vouchers since 1998.

Just before the rally, representatives from civil rights organizations including the NAACP and LULAC held a news conference to urge lawmakers to end their "assault" on public schools.

The civil rights groups contend that while urban public schools are chronically under- funded, organizations like the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options, funded partially with a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education, are attempting to persuade minority communities that diverting money from schools in the name of choice will benefit them.

"They are portraying this as an opportunity for middle-income and poor kids to have a stipend that will allow them to attend rich kids' schools, but it isn't that," said Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas NAACP. "It is true that parents, whatever their socioeconomic level, want their children to have the best education possible, but these proposals are fool's gold." House Public Education Committee members heard five hours of testimony from voucher supporters, while scores of opponents waited in frustration for their turn.

"We were told to expect to be here until midnight," said Dinah Miller, a parent from Dallas who had to leave at 6:30 p.m. after traveling to Austin to voice her opposition of vouchers. "The deck was stacked against us." Miller said she wanted to tell lawmakers that vouchers would drain much-needed resources from public schools.

"I wish they would focus on excellence in public education," Miller said. "Schools need more money, and we thought that's what they were getting this session.

"The kids that public schools are serving are just getting more and more needy, and they need more resources."

House Bill 12, sponsored by Rep. Frank Corte, R-San Antonio, would allow economically disadvantaged students from the state's six largest school districts, including Northside, to use a taxpayer-funded voucher to go to a private school.

"Where you live should not make you captive in a failing environment," Corte said.

He said vouchers would force competition between public and private schools, and that competition will benefit students in both settings.

"I support school choice, because I'm a huge believer in the free market system," he said.

House Bill 1263 would allow students with special needs or circumstances from districts in the state's five largest counties to apply for a voucher. The districts, which include San Antonio, South San Antonio and Edgewood, must serve a majority of economically disadvantaged students.

Kathy Miller, president of Texas Freedom Network, said the voucher bills would drain between $600 million and $1.1 billion from public schools.

"If you support public education in Texas, you can not support vouchers," Miller said.
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jcaputo@express-news.net

Express-News staff writer Guillermo X. Garcia contributed to this report.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA040605.15A.lege_vouchers.1acb03eaf.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:01 PM 2 comments Links to this post

April 6, 2005

Connecticut to Sue U.S. Over Cost of Testing Law
By SAM DILLON , NYTIMES

The State of Connecticut will sue the federal government over President Bush's signature education law, arguing that it forces Connecticut to spend millions on new tests without providing sufficient additional aid, the state's attorney general announced yesterday.

Although a handful of local school districts, in Illinois, Texas and other states, have filed legal challenges to the law, known as No Child Left Behind, Connecticut would be the first state to do so.

Its suit would open a new chapter in a struggle between states and the federal government that has seen legislatures lodge various protests over the law, and at least one state education commissioner, in Texas, issue an order this year that appeared to directly contradict a federal ruling.

Connecticut's attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said he was announcing his plans now because he was going to be contacting attorneys general in other states, in the hope that they would join the suit. He said he expected to file within weeks.

"The federal government's approach with this law is illegal and unconstitutional," Mr. Blumenthal said in an interview. He declined to predict whether any of his colleagues in other states would join his action, but he said he was finding "fertile ground."

"There is burgeoning unhappiness among both Republicans and Democrats," Mr. Blumenthal said. "The dissatisfaction is felt across the country and is across the board, politically. So I can pretty much call any of my colleagues and get an earful."

Legal scholars said that previous lawsuits brought against the federal government over so-called unfunded mandates had had mixed success. But Connecticut's suit could gain traction because the No Child Left Behind law includes a passage, sponsored by Republicans during the Clinton administration, that forbids federal officials to require states to spend their own money to carry out the federal policies outlined in the law.

The federal law requires Connecticut to spend some $112.2 million to expand its testing program and to help local districts carry out other federal requirements over the next three years, while Washington has appropriated only $70.6 million, leaving the state with an unfunded burden of $41.6 million, Connecticut's commissioner of education, Betty J. Sternberg, said in a report issued last month. In a statement issued yesterday, D J Nordquist, a federal Department of Education spokeswoman, said Connecticut had based its planned suit on flawed accounting and she called Mr. Blumenthal's announcement "a sad day for students in Connecticut."

"The basis for the state's lawsuit appears to rest on a flawed cost study of the No Child Left Behind act that creates inflated projections built upon questionable estimates and misallocation of costs," Ms. Nordquist said.

She added, "It is very disappointing that officials in Connecticut are spending their time hiring lawyers while Connecticut's students are suffering from one of the largest achievement gaps in the nation."

Connecticut is not the only state to have charged that the federal government is not paying for all the requirements it is imposing on school systems under the three-year-old No Child Left Behind law. And many states also complain that the federal law interferes with states' rights and their own efforts to improve schools.

In Utah, the House of Representatives, for example, has passed a measure that would require Utah officials to give higher priority to the state's educational goals than to the federal law, and the Utah Senate is to vote on the measure at a special session this month.

Connecticut currently tests public school children in grades four, six, eight and 10, while the federal law requires all states to administer standardized tests in every school year from three through eight. Expanding Connecticut's testing program to cover grades three, five and seven will force the state's Department of Education to spend $8 million of its own money over the next three years, Dr. Sternberg said in a report to Connecticut's General Assembly last month.

In preparing the lawsuit, Mr. Blumenthal said he had relied heavily on Dr. Sternberg's educational views.

"I'm the lawyer, she's the educator, and we have a good partnership," Mr. Blumenthal said. "Our legal action will vindicate the policies that she has advocated so eloquently in recent months."

In a letter to Margaret Spellings in January after her designation as education secretary but before her confirmation, Dr. Sternberg noted Connecticut's "effective 20-year history of testing in alternate years," and requested that Connecticut be relieved of the requirement to expand the testing. Annual testing, Dr. Sternberg wrote, "will cost millions of dollars and tell us nothing that we do not already know about our students' achievement."

In a reply faxed to Dr. Sternberg on Feb. 28, Secretary Spellings refused that request, saying that "annual testing is important." The secretary followed up with a March 20 opinion article in The Hartford Courant that chided Dr. Sternberg for requesting the waiver, saying many Connecticut students "would welcome the chance to be tested only every other year, but the adults in charge of their education surely know better."

That article angered many Connecticut educators and parents, to judge from letters to the editor and e-mail messages received at the state's Department of Education, and one of those offended was Gov. M. Jodi Rell, a Republican, who wrote Secretary Spellings on Thursday.

"As Connecticut's governor, and as a parent who deeply values high-quality education for every child, I was offended by your commentary," Governor Rell's letter said. "You disparaged the knowledge and judgment of Connecticut educators who - with the full, bipartisan support of governors and legislatures over more than 20 years' time - have conducted a highly effective student testing program since 1984."

Governor Rell also said Secretary Spellings's Feb. 28 letter "included incorrect information, data stated in misleading ways and a suggestion that Connecticut might consider not adhering to federal law" and was "hardly becoming to the federal Secretary of Education."

Yesterday, the governor's spokesman, Dennis Schain, said: "On the one hand the Department of Education fails to provide states with the funds needed to implement the law and on the other, it resists requests for flexibility.

"Governor Rell understands there are reasons for bringing the lawsuit but believes the best solution for our children is for the federal government to grant states flexibility."

Stacy Stowe contributed reporting for this article.



 
 
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:02 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Here is the Testimony that I gave this morning before the Committee on Public Education in the House. I ended up testifying at 12:15AM. It was a long night to say the least. Word is that it'll come out of committee and that the vote in the House is going to be close. What the reader should understand is that legislators said that the public shouldn't see this as an attack on public education since it would only affect .5% of all public school students, depending on their eligibility. That's beside the point, as I indicate below. -Angela

by

Angela Valenzuela, Texas LULAC

April 6, 2005

Thank you for this opportunity to speak. I'm here representing the Texas League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the largest and oldest Latino civil rights organization in this state, as well as nationally. Texas LULAC opposes vouchers. I am a scholar, researcher, and parent of two public school children.

Notwithstanding some statements heard today that the proposed voucher bills are not an attack on public schools, anyone who has kept up with the voucher movement knows that nothing could be farther from the truth. And all Texans need and deserve to know this. If we look at the work of scholars such as Shaker and Heilman, Joel Spring, Michael Apple, a recent report by Johnson & Salle from the Commonweal Institute and others such as myself, it is clear that there has been a relentless, very well funded and organized campaign on the right to demonize public schools, teachers, and teachers unions.

In my studied opinion of the public accountability system-and this appears in my book titled, Leaving Children Behind: How 'Texas-style' Accountability Fails Latino Youth-I maintain that one of the purposes of high-stakes testing is to discredit the public school system in order to pave the way to vouchers and privatization, generally. There are clearly many agendas in public education, but I maintain that this is the leading one. In this view, the ultimate form of accountability is the market. In this new “commonsense,” we are to behave as individual consumers before a marketplace of options. In light of this agenda, it is clear why no comparable accountability testing requirements are attached to any of the voucher house bills. The ultimate form of accountability is the market. (They may test their students, but they're not used in the same punishing way as they are used in the public school system.)

Vouchers have been promoted today as providing “choice,” “as serving economically disadvantaged children” or “as rescuing children from failing public schools” but HB 3042, in particular, unmasks the agenda of which I spoke-that is, the complete privatization of our schools.

Accordingly, in a 1995 Cato Institute Briefing, Milton Friedman who testified here last legislation session for vouchers expresses the following:

“The voucher must be universal, available to all parents, and large enough to cover the costs of a high-quality education. No conditions should be attached to vouchers that interfere with the freedom of private enterprises to experiment, to explore, and to innovate. The problem is how to get from here to there. Vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system.”

Even if one grants that a privatized schooling system will foster a spirit of competition, this would be nullified the damaging effects of a culture of consumerism and separation that such a system would create. It would also exacerbate the differences between the rich and the poor. In this imagined and desired space (by some) of a totally privatized system, the crucial counterweight to state and corporate power would be gone.

This violates such core democratic notions of the public sphere and the common good. Education is about shared governance in order to grow healthy children, communities, and citizens for a democracy. I underscore the notion of “shared governance.” Without a public school system, lost is that precious space between the private realm of the family and the public realm of the market within which private interests can be pursued and where the market can be critiqued.

If there is a problem with decaying infrastructure, limited resources, uncaring bureaucracies-and indeed there is-then this is indeed a threat to democracy within the public school system. The answer to this problem, however, is a reinvigorated public space and not the dismantling of democratic institutions.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:35 AM 1 comments Links to this post

April 4, 2005, 9:03PM

But lawmaker disputes figures given by coalition
By JANET ELLIOTT
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

AUSTIN - The Houston school district could lose up to $900 million over the first two years under various private school voucher bills being considered by the Texas Legislature, according to an organization that opposes the proposals.

"Texas lawmakers need to solve school finance problems, not create new ones with vouchers," said Carolyn Boyle, coordinator of the Coalition for Public Schools.

The group released its report on vouchers' potential impact on Houston and other urban school districts Monday, the day before a House committee debates the volatile issue.

The sponsor of one voucher bill, Rep. Linda Harper-Brown, R-Irving, disputed the coalition's numbers. She said her bill would apply to fewer than one-half of 1 percent of the state's 4 million public school students.

"Vouchers will not take any money away from the public schools," said Harper-Brown. "It's strictly a scare tactic."

Boyle said the projections on potential loss of school district funding were based on the maximum number of eligible students using the vouchers. She said the numbers are conservative because they don't include students currently enrolled in private school or home-school students who could qualify for funding.

Voucher proponents, however, have powerful allies. Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Tom Craddick all support a pilot program to allow students in low-performing schools to use taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private schools.

Perry and Dewhurst will speak at a pro-voucher rally today shortly before the House Public Education Committee is scheduled to consider three voucher bills.

janet.elliott@chron.com
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3117788

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

Schools stand to lose millions, coalition contends
By Laura Heinauer
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, April 05, 2005

The Austin school district could lose as much as $302 million in the next two years under one of three school voucher proposals being tossed around in the Legislature, according to a group that opposes vouchers.

The cost estimates, which were calculated to show the monetary effect of each pilot program if all eligible students participate, were released on the eve of a House Committee on Public Education debate.

"Texas lawmakers need to solve school finance problems, not create new ones," Carolyn Boyle, coordinator of the Coalition for Public Schools, said Monday at a Capitol news conference.

Voucher supporters practiced reciting their talking points. They argue that schools won't need as much money if there aren't as many students to serve.

"It gives us a chance to help kids in our system that are in failing schools,nonperforming schools," said House Speaker Tom Craddick,R-Midland. "I believe that we need to try anything that we can do that gives them a better chance at a better education."

The coalition found that House Bill 12, a bill they said could cost Austin schools $151 million per year, could add up to as much as $1.1 billion per year if it were adopted in six urban school districts as proposed.

The budget for the Austin district in the 2004-05 school year is $732 million.

The bill would allow students to apply for private school vouchers if they qualify for free or reduced-price lunches or if they fail all sections of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

House Bill 1263, which will be discussed in committee today, could cost Austin schools as much as $74 million in its first two years, the group said. The money lost by all eight school districts in that program could amount to nearly $600 million during that time, the group said.

A third bill that would provide vouchers to all Texas students who attended a public or charter school the preceding semester could cost several billion dollars a year, the group said.

Boyle called the numbers conservative, saying her projections did not reflect the students currently enrolled in private schools or those who are home-schooled, who would also qualify for money under the proposed legislation.

"The private school voucher bills also propose a huge unfunded mandate by the state. For example, in Austin the vouchers proposed under HB 12 would be funded 96 percent by local taxpayers," Boyle said.

At the Capitol, she stood alongside more than a dozen supporters representing several agencies, including the Texas Federation of Teachers and the Parent Teacher Association.

Staley Gray, a PTA member at O. Henry Middle School, said 29 percent of the 800 students at the West Austin school would be eligible for the programs proposed in two of the bills.

"You wouldn't think it in West Austin, but this affects schools everywhere," she said.

John O'Sullivan, secretary-treasurer of the Texas Federation of Teachers, said private schools don't always provide the same special needs and bilingual
programs that public schools offer.

"There's the potential that a vast minority could be underserved when they go to these schools and find out there's nothing there for them," he said.

Texas Public Policy Foundation Vice President Michael Sullivan, who supports vouchers, called the Coalition for Public Schools a "front group for the education bureaucracy" more concerned about money than education quality.

"The truth is, when we talk about giving parents more choice, we're talking about the best kind of accountability there is," he said.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/04/5voucher.
html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:47 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Study Puts Oakland Dropout Rate at 52%

by Nanette Asimov
San Francisco Chronicle
Fewer than half the freshmen who enter Oakland public high schools - - just
48 of every 100 -- stick around long enough to graduate.

That's the devastating news from a recent California study by the Harvard
University Civil Rights Project and the Urban Institute Education Policy
Center in Washington, D.C., whose researchers described high schools with
graduation rates lower than 60 percent as "dropout factories.''

In the Bay Area, the study listed graduation rates for Oakland and San
Francisco. At The Chronicle's request, the researchers also ran the numbers
for seven other large Bay Area districts: South San Francisco, Santa Rosa
High School, Novato, San Jose, West Contra Costa, Hayward and Mount Diablo.

Oakland's graduation rate was substantially lower than all of them.

The study estimated that dropouts cost the state $14 billion a year in lost
wages, crime and jail time.

"It's astounding and unconscionable," said Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown. "It's
a crisis that's been going on for decades. Oakland is trying hard. They need
money. They need leadership. It's quite daunting, and it's going to require
a lot more truth-telling and honesty than has been forthcoming in recent
decades."

In Oakland, 68 percent of the 50,400 public school students are poor enough
to qualify for the federal lunch program. Their odds of getting a diploma
are worse than the 50-50 chance of winning a coin toss.

And that makes Oakland schools emblematic of one of society's most vexing
dilemmas: How to educate children growing up amid violence, poverty, drugs,
single parenthood, teen pregnancy and unemployment.

Problems are not confined to the students. In 2002, the Oakland schools went
bankrupt. In 2003, the state ousted the superintendent, suspended the school
board and appointed state administrator Randy Ward.

Intent on restoring solvency, Ward has cut spending and slashed programs --
and in the process alienated teachers and parents. With the focus on
survival, tension is palpable. Ward relies on a bodyguard for protection.

On Monday, Ward said through a spokeswoman that he doesn't have time to
discuss the poor graduation rate.

His high school director, Sue Woehrle, acknowledged that some kids slip
through the cracks. Oakland's response, she said, has been to begin
transforming the culture of high school.

Little by little, the district is breaking up its vast, impersonal schools
into smaller campuses of no more than 400 students each. That endeavor is
being paid for in part with $12.6 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation.

"It's about getting to know the students, calling their families when
they're absent, and paying attention to what's going on in their lives,"
Woehrle said.

She and Ben Visnick, president of the Oakland teachers union, both
questioned the accuracy of the Harvard study graduation data. They suggested
that the missing students may be moving away, not dropping out.

"We're seeing a huge exodus of families moving out of Oakland due to
affordable housing," Visnick said. "There's a lot of migration to Fairfield,
Antioch, Tracy."

Christopher Swanson, who analyzed the data for the Urban Institute,
acknowledged that the researchers could not account for transfers. But he
said the method was reliable because it relies on enrollment, not dropouts.
While some students move out of Oakland, others move in.

"It will generally provide more accurate information than the methods most
states, including California, are using," he said.

State education officials admit that their own dropout numbers are based on
guesswork and have urged the Legislature to implement a student-tracking
system that could tell when students enroll anywhere in the state. But that
system is at least five years away.

Meanwhile, the state figures show that nearly two-thirds of Oakland's
freshmen earn a diploma. Harvard says it's closer to half -- a difference of
more than 500 kids.

The researchers used enrollment figures to estimate how many ninth- graders
would graduate four years later. That method pulls the state's graduation
rate from the official 87 percent down to 71 percent -- and Oakland's from
66 to 48 percent.

"Only half? That's amazing -- but it's believable," said senior Abraham
Pena, who like many students at Oakland's Street Academy has considered
quitting school.

The lure of the street reached Pena when he was only in middle school, lost
in classes of 35 students and "just hanging around, not doing my work," he
said.

An older brother had already dropped out as a sophomore. But that experience
proved a cautionary tale.

"He wasn't getting any good jobs," Pena said. "It made me think that if I
finished high school, I could get a good job and not have to struggle a
lot."

So Pena enrolled in Street, a school designed to keep kids in class. Instead
of teachers, students have "CTMs," which stands for
consultant/teacher/mentor. The CTMs stay until 5 p.m., helping students with
homework, talking with attention-starved kids, and offering guidance that
may be missing at home.

"My CTM, Gina, she's like a second mom to me," said Aaron Davis, 18, who
used to wander the halls at Oakland High counting floor tiles instead of
going to class. "It's been a really good year. At the other school, as soon
as the bell rings, they're gone. Here, they stay."

Most Street students landed there after failing at other schools. As they
spoke, themes emerged of harsh lives -- arguments, absent fathers, few
demonstrations of love -- and classrooms where students didn't understand
their assignments, and where the rules were so lax that they could act out
with impunity.

Parent Regina Bess wishes she had a magic formula for her son, Freddie, 16,
a student at Street. There, despite the fact that Freddie has a mentor, a
good program, and a small school that provides time and attention, she is
concerned that he will follow his estranged parents' pattern.

Bess dropped out at age 14, but returned two years later to earn her
diploma.

His father shrugs off the issue of education. "He says Fred will figure it
out," Bess said.

E-mail Nanette Asimov at nasimov@sfchronicle.com.

— Nanette Asimov
San Francisco Chronicle

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/05/MNGM6C3CB51.DTL

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:41 PM 1 comments Links to this post

79th LEGISLATURE

Property tax relief would vary widely across state, with most going to wealthier counties.
By Bill Bishop
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, April 04, 2005

Residents of suburban Dallas should be more than three times happier than those of San Angelo about the massive tax bill passed by the state House of Representatives in mid-March.

Though residents of Collin County would see their property taxes go down an average of $408 under the bill, those living in Tom Green County would realize only a $120 average drop.

Speaker Tom Craddick, R-Midland, hailed the measure as going "miles toward bringing the type of property tax relief that Texans have asked for," but that relief varies dramatically across the state, benefiting residents in some places far more than others. The tax bill would reduce the overall school property tax levy 30 percent. But because of wildly different property values across the state, a 30 percent decrease means more in some counties than in others.

Counties with small populations but extensive oil and gas properties would see net decreases in their school property tax levy of more than $1,000 per resident. Other counties would see decreases that average less than the cost of a single night at an interstate motel.

Struggling to bring down property taxes by about one-third and still fund its version of education reform, the House also wants to increase the general state sales tax by 1 cent. Its bill would boost taxes on cigarettes and a variety of consumer items, such as bottled water and snack food, and impose new taxes on business.

The House bill has gone to the Senate, which has said it will retain the same level of property tax reductions but wants to tinker with the rest of the package, possibly opting for a smaller increase in sales taxes and a bigger boost to business taxes.

With general agreement on a property tax cut, the Austin American-Statesman analyzed how the benefits of House Bill 3 would be distributed geographically. Individuals in every county would benefit from the property tax decrease just as they would pay more in sales tax.

This analysis captures both business and individual property tax reductions; both are included in the per capita comparisons. Counties with extensive industrial sites, such as Galveston and Jefferson, show large property tax reductions as a result. The American-Statesman used tax collections from 2003 for this comparison.

Taking just the state's 50 most populous counties, a predictable pattern emerges in winners and losers: Counties in fast-growing urban centers scored the biggest savings; counties with low property values in rural Texas or on the border with Mexico had the least savings.

"I'd be shocked if it worked any other way," said Lori Taylor, a Texas A&M University economist who worked with the Joint Committee on Public School Finance, a committee of senators and representatives who dealt with this issue between legislative sessions. Places with low property values — slow-growing cities and poor counties in the Valley — will derive the fewest benefits from the House bill.

Rice University economist George Zodrow said this was the aim of the tax changes. "The driving force (behind the House bill) was the huge increase in property tax burdens" in fast-growing urban counties, Zodrow said.

Currently, Zodrow said, the school finance system depends on transferring money from a small number of districts with extremely high property values to poorer regions.

"What we're moving to is a system where the state as a whole takes responsibility for financing those redistributive expenditures," Zodrow said. "So it's just inevitable that you are going to have redistribution across geographic regions. That's really, in a sense, what you are trying to do."

The redistribution, at least in the House bill, works two ways. First, according to a Legislative Budget Board analysis of the House bill in early March, total overall taxes on 80 percent of Texas families would increase. They would decrease only for the 20 percent of families with the highest incomes. These richer families would see a net decrease of about $440 million in the first year of the plan.

The Statesman analysis shows that there would be a geographic shift in tax burden, too. Richer, faster-growing regions around Austin, Dallas and Houston would receive per capita benefits from the property tax reduction that swamp those reductions in areas along the border with Mexico and in more rural regions.

That relationship doesn't change when the 1 percent sales tax increase is included in the analysis. When the sales tax increase and property tax decrease are combined, the average resident of Lubbock County would see a $70 overall tax decrease, while each person in Williamson County would save $282.

Rep. Scott Campbell, a Republican from San Angelo, said rural representatives "spoke our piece behind closed doors" about the disproportionate benefits of the House bill.

"But the wealthy districts have a right to be wealthy districts," Campbell said. "We live in the country by choice, because we love it. . . . And property tax reduction was a big deal for my constituents, too."

"It gives us very little relief in terms of property taxes," said Rep. Stephen Frost, a Democrat who represents Bowie County. The average property tax savings for a resident of the county that includes Texarkana is $152, compared with an average savings of $328 in Travis County.

"Overall my district loses, and that's why I voted against it," Frost said. "It's not tax relief. It's a tax shift."


COUNTIES WITH THE LARGEST PER CAPITA PROPERTY TAX SAVINGS:

County (major city)Tax savings

Collin (Dallas) $408.44

Williamson (Austin) $395.85

Galveston (Houston) $385.69

Travis (Austin) $328.33

Comal (San Antonio) $327.73

Denton (Dallas) $291.62

Brazoria (Houston) $289.55

Dallas (Dallas) $287.58

Hays (Austin) $274.46

Jefferson (Beaumont) $267.10


COUNTIES WITH THE SMALLEST SAVINGS:

County (major city) Tax savings

Coryell (Gatesville) $70.09

Walker (Huntsville) $98.83

Hidalgo (Edinburg) $111.71

Cameron (Brownsville) $112.41

Tom Green (San Angelo) $120.47

El Paso (El Paso) $125.40

Hunt (Greenville) $131.35

Bell (Belton) $142.32

Taylor (Abilene) $148.73

Webb (Laredo) $151.87

Source: Comptroller's office

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/04/4taxgeography.html
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:31 PM 0 comments Links to this post

April 4, 2005
By SUSAN SAULNY, NEW YORK TIMES

Propelled by the No Child Left Behind law, the federally financed tutoring industry has doubled in size in each of the last two years, with the potential to become a $2 billion-a-year enterprise, market analysts say.

Tutors are paid as much as $1,997 per child, and companies eager to get a piece of the lucrative business have offered parents computers and gift certificates as inducements to sign up, provided tutors that in some cases are still in high school, and at times made promises they cannot deliver.

This new brand of tutoring is offered to parents by private companies and other groups at no charge if their children attend a failing school. But it is virtually without regulation or oversight, causing concern among school districts, elected officials and some industry executives. Some in Congress are calling for regulations or quality standards to ensure that tutors are qualified and that the companies provide services that meet students' needs.

"The potential here is unbelievable, and it's not being regulated by the states or the Education Department," said Patty Sullivan, the director of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based research group that released a study in late March examining the tutoring programs. "We're pouring a lot of money into it, and we're not sure it works. To the extent that it is going to grow, we've got to get a handle on it."

Critics are particularly concerned about aggressive marketing tactics, like the offers of computers, gift certificates and basketball tickets, though they acknowledge that such practices do not violate the law.

Students are not required to enroll in a tutoring program. The option is merely offered at poor schools that have been deemed "failing" for two years in a row. But because families can choose from a list of state-approved providers, some tutoring groups have reacted by engaging in aggressive solicitations.

School officials in Clark County, Nev., the district that includes Las Vegas, had to call security to remove tutoring providers from a school where they were soliciting families too aggressively, the Center on Education Policy found in its report. The parents, many of whom did not speak English, said they felt that they were being pressured to sign things against their will, according to the official who called the school police.

In New York City, where more than 81,700 students are being tutored, complaints about inappropriate incentives led officials to start an inquiry into all the providers about six months ago. It is expected to be completed by the summer.

The law's silence on such issues is not an oversight.

"We want as little regulation as possible so the market can be as vibrant as possible," Michael Petrilli, an official with the federal Education Department, told tutoring company officials at a recent business meeting organized by the education industry.

In fact, hundreds of new companies and community groups have been established to take advantage of the law, joining more established names in test preparation and tutoring like the Princeton Review, Kaplan and the Huntington Learning Center. Across the country, there are more than 1,800 "supplemental educational services providers," as they are called in the law.

Experts say these groups will earn as much as $200 million this school year, with about 30 percent of that going to the big national companies. And the revenue is only expected to grow, as more schools are labeled as failing under national law and more parents take advantage of tutoring programs. Only about 11 percent of eligible students are now being tutored.

Experts point to the potential for fraud as a major issue. But so far, most of the problems reported appear to reflect poor management. In March, for instance, the Chicago school system asked Platform Learning Inc., the nation's largest federally financed tutoring company, to leave seven of its schools because of numerous lapses - including repeated absences by tutors - leaving hundreds of struggling students without extra help just before the Illinois Standard Achievement Test.

In one incident at the Spry Community School on the West Side of Chicago, six Platform tutors did not show up for work one day, and about 70 students wound up watching the movie "Garfield" instead of studying reading and math.

Gene Wade, the chief executive of Platform Learning, which was created two years ago with the sole purpose of doing business under the new federal law, attributed the problems to "logistical and operational hiccups" inherent in tutoring nearly 14,000 students across the city.

But beyond such issues, there has yet to be a scientific national study judging whether students in failing schools are receiving any academic benefit from the tutoring.

"There's a requirement in No Child Left Behind that teachers must be highly qualified, but they didn't apply those same standards to supplemental service providers," said Gail L. Sunderman, a Harvard researcher who is writing a book on the tutoring program. "There's a lower standard. The people coming in aren't familiar with the schools, students or the curriculum."

At the business conference held in Washington in March, a gathering of the Education Industry Association, Representative George Miller of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, urged tutoring providers to take a proactive approach in protecting themselves.

"History is, when you put this kind of money on the street, you get a lot of suede-shoe operators," Mr. Miller, a co-author of No Child Left Behind, told the group in his keynote address.

Yvonne Jones, the mother of an eighth-grade student at an East Harlem junior high school, said she could have benefited from more exacting standards. She was shocked that after one month of tutoring, her daughter arrived home with a letter from Interfaith Neighbors, a state-approved group, saying it was closing its doors.

"The site that I chose, they just shut down on me," Ms. Jones said. "They said it was money. I don't know what happened."

Shirlene Little, the PTA president at Middle School 222 in the Bronx, took her son - an eighth-grade student who needed help in math - out of a program run by the Eastside House Settlement because she thought the tutors were not qualified.

"The only thing he seemed to do was cut up and play," Ms. Little said.

Earlier this year, the Education Industry Association drafted a code of ethics that it has urged tutoring companies to adopt. Many have done so, as has the State of New Jersey.

While it does not address student achievement, the code does advise companies against offering or accepting illegal payments, misrepresenting their programs and offering students any form of incentive for signing up, among other things.

"We asked the feds for some language or guidance; they said it was a state function," said Judy Alu, New Jersey's federal tutoring coordinator. While searching for standards, Ms. Alu said state officials came across the association's code, and liked it.

Suzanne Ochse, the director of Title I programs in New Jersey, said: "What really prompted this is that we were getting reports that some providers were offering signing bonuses. We decided this is not professional sports, and that signing bonuses were not the appropriate way to register students in an educational tutoring program."

Mr. Wade of Platform Learning embraced the code and said the field could use even more guidance.

"What's missing in our industry is this: a yardstick," he said, adding: "If this industry is going to evolve and be accepted, we're going to have to build some standards. We have to be able to say, 'Here's what success is.' "

Tutoring providers must win approval from state officials before they can seek business. The federal law offers some guidance: states should only accept groups that are financially sound and have a proven record of effectiveness, as defined by the states. And they are required to evaluate providers after two years to ensure that some academic improvement has occurred.

States can remove poor-quality tutors, but only a handful of states have even begun to develop a method for evaluating the services.

Louisiana is one of the few states that has made progress, with a system that allows for real-time monitoring of tutors, who must sign on to a computer system at the beginning of every session and summarize what they accomplished at the end. In addition, state officials make unannounced spot-checks.

"We're hoping to get an idea of how many hours of service it takes to get an impact on student achievement," said Donna Nola-Ganey, an official with Louisiana's Department of Education.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/04/education/04tutor.html?ei=5070&en=ed4fc159f43d79d1&ex=1113278400&pagewanted=print&position=

Peter Beller contributed reporting for this article.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:19 AM 2 comments Links to this post

This article appeared in today’s Waco Tribune Herald. It also appeared earlier in the Laredo Morning Times and the San Angelo Standard Times. Unfortunately, given the (really important) focus on school finance that is central to HB2, these other massive, new testing provisions are being ignored. So do circulate this piece widely.
-Angela

Say 'No' to More [Testing]
ANGELA VALENZUELA Guest column

Sunday, April 03, 2005

AUSTIN – It is incumbent upon the Texas Senate to kill the ominous new testing provisions that are contained within House Bill 2.

Specifically, they state that high school students may not receive course credit unless they perform satisfactorily on 13 end-of-course tests. These tests are to be administered beginning in the 2008-09 year.

The most positive aspect of the proposed end-of-course testing requirements is that students can be assessed on material in the semester that they take the course, rather than being held accountable for material that they took one or two years earlier. Beyond this, it is hard to ascertain other benefits.

In 2008-09, to receive a high school diploma, students must pass both the TAKS test and all their end-of-course exams. In the unfortunate situation of a student successfully completing or passing end-of-course exams but failing the TAKS test, students would be issued a “certificate of coursework completion” in place of a diploma.

What's wrong with this picture? For starters, the specter of significantly more testing will mean ever more test prep and less learning.

The things that make school worthwhile, enriching and intellectually stimulating like the arts, field trips and thematic units are already crowded out by testing.

This is of tremendous consequence to youths, many of whom already feel alienated and objectified by an educational system that reduces their worth to a number on a piece of paper.

Despite the rhetoric by education officials of “improved accountability,” the practice of attaching high-stakes consequences like graduation or non-graduation to exams is patently unethical, invalid and unprofessional.

Not only is there no national educational association of any repute that supports such uses of testing, the makers of the tests themselves, such as McGraw-Hill, openly disagree with such test abuse.

In contrast, myriad educational associations argue for basing high-stakes decisions on authentic assessments of student work such as student exhibitions, portfolios, demonstration products and performance tasks.

More state-mandated testing in Texas will not mean more learning or better education. Instead, it will mean that fewer children will receive high school diplomas and a substantially increased dropout rate – further aggravating this already serious problem that we have in our state.

In an apparent contradiction, HB2 further proposes that the eleventh-grade TAKS would be phased out by 2008.

In light of concurrent bill language that refers to diplomas versus certificates of completion, one can only conclude that the end-of-course exams will be used in combination with another state-mandated exam. The details are unclear and potentially misleading.

Yet again, this level of state intervention is based on the grossly implausible premise that a level playing field in the quality of personnel, instruction and resources exists across all courses offered in every school and in every classroom in our state.

According to the 2003-04 Academic Excellence Indicator System (www.tea.state.tx.us), for example, property-rich districts like Alamo Heights in San Antonio boast many more certified teachers with advanced degrees (52 percent) and more teaching experience (15.2 years).

In property-poor districts like Edgewood, also in San Antonio, far fewer teachers have either advanced degrees (22 percent) or comparable years of teaching experience (11.6 years).

Finally, in the absence of either scholarly deliberation or public debate, this dramatic overhauling of the state's testing system is an affront to the democratic principles upon which public schooling is founded.

http://www.wacotrib.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2005/04/03/20050403wacvalenzuelaguest.html

Angela Valenzuela is Education Committee chairwoman of the Texas League of United Latin American Citizens and associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas in Austin.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:19 PM 3 comments Links to this post

FALLING SHORT: PROBLEMS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
For Latinos, path to college is steep one
Cultural and financial hurdles slow state's efforts to close the gap

By Laura Heinauer, Ralph K.M. Haurwitz
AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, April 03, 2005

LOS FRESNOS — Second in an occasional series

Every senior at Los Fresnos High School has applied to college, and more than three-fourths already have been accepted. That would be an impressive achievement at virtually any public high school, but it is an astonishing one here in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, one of the poorest areas in the nation.

It required years of selling the idea of college not only to the students, nearly all of whom are Hispanic, but also to their parents, many of whom didn't complete high school. It required dragging students out of class to work on applications. And it required working side by side with parents to help them fill out financial aid forms.

True, most of the colleges to which the students applied accept virtually all comers. And it remains to be seen how many students will actually enroll, and how many of those will go on to earn degrees.

The pride is nonetheless palpable at Los Fresnos High, in a town that sits between fruit stands and Gulf Coast beaches, in the heart of the Valley. Nearly half of the students who graduated from Los Fresnos in 2003 enrolled that fall in college, and school officials are confident that the state's follow-up tallies will show even higher enrollment rates.

But Los Fresnos is hardly typical. The reality is that Hispanics in Texas, to a large extent, are missing out on educational opportunities. Just over a third of Hispanic high school graduates go on to college promptly, compared with about half of whites, and they are less likely to finish on time. The disparities emerge early in the education pipeline, with Hispanics dropping out of high school at triple the rate of whites.


These problems have been apparent for years, but new findings show that the scope and implications are more severe than has previously been recognized. Last year, for example, only one in 14 Hispanic students in Texas who took the ACT Assessment, a college-entrance examination, did well enough to be deemed ready for college-level work in English, math and science. One in four white students met that standard.

Perhaps even more worrisome, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board has found that Hispanic enrollment in higher education is rising too slowly to meet goals that the board set five years ago in an effort to achieve parity with whites by 2015.

And to compound matters, the faster-than-expected increase in the Hispanic population means that the goals weren't set high enough. It now appears that the state will need to have 676,000 Hispanics enrolled in 2015 rather than 588,000 under the prior goal, according to the coordinating board. About 309,000 Hispanics were enrolled in public or private institutions of higher learning last year.

"We are falling way behind in achieving our Hispanic targets," said Raymund Paredes, the state's commissioner of higher education. "And now that we are going to have to reset our targets at an even higher level, the danger is we're going to fall even further behind."

But just as the larger nature of the challenge is becoming clear, budget cuts contemplated at the state and federal levels could make it even harder for Hispanics to go to college.

A college-readiness program that has helped many students at Los Fresnos High would be abolished if President Bush's proposed budget is approved by Congress. State legislators, meanwhile, are poised to reduce the amount of money available for financial aid grants, which do not have to be repaid, in favor of loans. Although the loans would be forgiven if students graduate in four years with at least a B average, critics say such a strategy would harm many Hispanics, who often take longer to graduate.

Blacks also lag whites in many measures of educational attainment, but their prospects are somewhat brighter than those of Hispanics in a few important respects. For example, proportionately more blacks in Texas hold college degrees than do Hispanics. And black enrollment rates in public universities rose significantly in a recent 10-year period, while Hispanic rates declined slightly.

The implications of all this are dire, and not just for Hispanics. The average college graduate earns about $1 million more during his or her career than a high school graduate. Hispanic household income in Texas is about $17,000 a year lower than white household income. Hispanics are currently a third of the state's population, but they are the fastest-growing segment and are expected to constitute more than half by 2030, give or take a few years.

The stakes are clear, said Steve Murdock, the state demographer and a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. "If you do not change those disparities, you become a poorer and less educated society," he said.

Such a society needs more social services but generates fewer tax dollars to pay for them. It is less able to attract economic development. It has more crime and more disease. In short, the state's future will hinge in part on how well the Hispanic population is educated.

"The state has to be able to compete in the global marketplace," said María Robledo Montecel, executive director of the San Antonio-based Intercultural Development Research Association, an independent group that studies dropout rates and other trends. "That marketplace is unforgiving to people who don't have the skills and education."

Some heavily Hispanic schools in the state's largest cities have especially low enrollment rates. For example, Austin's Travis High and Fort Worth's Diamond Hill-Jarvis High each sent about one in five graduates to college in 2003, according to the most recent state records. L.G. Pinkston High in Dallas saw just 11 percent enroll.

But nowhere are the social, intellectual and financial obstacles to higher education for Hispanics more stark than in the Valley. High school counselors say a college-going mindset has only recently begun taking hold in the region, and not without resistance.


Seventeen-year-old Yemeli Navarro, one of the 413 seniors at Los Fresnos High who applied to college, illustrates the complexities. Her passion to pursue a career in medicine is obvious.

"I love babies," she said with childlike excitement. "I watch all the shows where they do the real-life deliveries with the blood squirting out. My mom thinks maybe I should be a nurse, but I'm a doer. I only want to be a doctor."

That could be a tough academic challenge. Her score on the ACT was 14. The statewide average for Hispanics last year was about 18, and the statewide average for all students was about 20. A perfect score is 36.

In addition, Yemeli's parents can't afford to help pay for school. So, like most Hispanic students, she would have to juggle studies with work. And because of the financial pressures, many Hispanic students spend too much time working and not enough studying.

And then there is the delicate question of whether Yemeli's family supports her goals. Her father, Carlos, said he would allow her to attend day classes at the University of Texas at Brownsville but would insist she live at home with the rest of the family next to the small engine shop he owns on Texas 100.

"Sometimes I feel like they wish I wouldn't go at all," Yemeli said one recent afternoon between classes. "It's like, when we talk about it, they don't really pay attention."


High school counselors say the close-knit nature of Hispanic family life can make it hard for students to pursue college. Parents are particularly reluctant to lose their oldest daughters, who often help raise siblings.

"A lot of parents are just adamant that their children will not leave the Valley," said Denise Davis, who runs a college-awareness program in the Los Fresnos school district. "They need them to work to support the family. We have to sell the parents the idea of college."

But Antonio Flores, president of the San Antonio-based Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, said it's not that Latino parents don't have high goals for their children's education. "Surveys show they have very high aspirations, but the realities they face work against that," he said.

One of those realities, he said, is that Hispanic families tend to be larger than their white counterparts. That, coupled with a lower household income, means there's less money available per child for tuition, books and other college expenses.

In addition, many Hispanics are reluctant to go into debt — a generally laudable trait but one that can run counter to their long-term interests when it comes to getting a degree and the earning potential that comes with it, said Ricardo Romo, president of UT-San Antonio.

Furthermore, only about half of Hispanic adults in Texas have a high school education. And only about 9 percent have a bachelor's degree, compared with nearly 16 percent of blacks and 30 percent of whites. So Hispanic families have less knowledge and experience dealing with the daunting tasks of applying for college admission and financial aid.

"That's a strike against Hispanic children — a family setting where parents didn't have the benefit of a good education," Flores said.

That setting, in turn, helps explain why Hispanic students often fall behind early.

"We know that a lot of Latino students are reading below grade level in the third grade," Paredes said. "So the fate of our children is sealed at a very early age. (They) fall behind very early and they almost never catch up."

A lack of role models doesn't help. Hispanics are underrepresented in the ranks of public school teachers and college professors, and all too often, they drop out.

"Students who drop out of school are not engaged with and connected with the school, and that is particularly so for Latino students," Robledo Montecel said. "There has to be one adult who works with the student to assure they graduate from high school, whether it's a teacher, counselor, parent or someone else."

All this is compounded by the complexities that many Hispanic students face in daily life. Some are children of migrant workers and therefore live with different relatives. Others don't have Social Security numbers, often because they entered the United States illegally.

"It's all very fragile," said Julia Christensen, who heads a college-awareness program at Port Isabel High School in the Valley. "You get situations like these, and you realize any roadblock could potentially stop them."

The students themselves are acutely aware of the roadblocks.

Griselda Escalone, a senior at Los Fresnos High who has spent the past several summers picking lettuce and green onions on a farm in Ohio, wants to go to Ohio State so she can be near her parents. She worries about the out-of-state tuition.

For Marylynn Garza, another Los Fresnos senior, the desire to become a psychologist is tempered by reluctance to leave her family. "I can't leave my mom because I have two little brothers and someone has to take care of them," she said.


Most students from the Valley who enroll in college wind up at local institutions such as UT-Brownsville and its junior-college cousin on the same campus, Texas Southmost College. For some, the academic struggle is just beginning. Officials say nearly half of the Brownsville-Southmost students must take remedial courses. And only one in five earns an associate's degree or a bachelor's degree in six years.

They also must work to make ends meet. Abraham Ponce, this year's student vice president of administration at UT-Brownsville, said most of his friends hold one or more jobs. Many students live at home, leaving at 7 a.m. and not getting back until 8 or 9 at night.

"Two, three jobs, that's the norm here. Last year's student vice president had three kids and worked," he said. "I see students work for years just to get out of the remedial courses. Graduating in four years would be a miracle for most of us."

But timely graduation is exactly what state lawmakers are demanding. The Legislature is considering a number of proposals intended to create incentives for students to graduate faster, including a reduction in grants and an increase in loans that would be forgiven only if students graduate in four years with at least a B average.

Critics say such a strategy would harm the very students who are least likely to graduate on time, who are most dependent on grants and who often must work one or more jobs while attending classes: Hispanics and blacks.

"Does it make sense to make it more difficult for these students to go to college?" said Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston.

Bush's proposal to cut college readiness programs has also raised alarms.

One such program, called GEAR UP — for Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs — began encouraging this year's crop of seniors at Los Fresnos High, Port Isabel High and other schools around Texas to think about college since the students were in the seventh grade. Students and school officials say the program is working.

Before the GEAR UP program was established, Los Fresnos did little to track which students filled out college applications, took standardized tests or filled out financial aid forms. Now the school has three full-timers and one part-timer helping students wade through the forms and procedures.

A file on each student includes everything from test scores to personal identification numbers for filling out the federal aid application online. Davis, who leads the Los Fresnos program, even shuttles students to standardized test sites and accompanies them on visits to colleges in South Texas.

Bush's proposed budget would eliminate GEAR UP and two other programs that also seek to encourage economically disadvantaged students to attend college. The three programs together are budgeted at $66 million this year in Texas.

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in an interview that an Office of Management and Budget review found that the programs weren't effective when students in them were compared with a control group. However, there's no reason Texas and other states couldn't retain such programs in cases where they seem to be working, Spellings said. But education officials in Texas say there's no way the programs could continue in this state without federal money.

A separate, state-funded program with a go-to-college message is decidedly more modest. The state spends $1.5 million to $2.5 million a year on the program, known as the College for Texans Campaign.

Under the program, about 100 "go centers" have been established in high schools, many of them in low-income and minority areas, and promotional spots have been running on radio and TV stations. Proponents had hoped the program would become as widely known as the state's anti-litter campaign, Don't Mess with Texas, but that hasn't happened.

"The destiny of Texas is all connected here in having educated people," said Don Brown, a former commissioner of higher education who is executive director of a private foundation that has raised $1.5 million in cash and $2.8 million in pledges to supplement the state's campaign. "The only way these goals can be realized in a state as large and diverse as Texas is to spread awareness of the problem, awareness of a solution, in such a way that people all over the state agree this is one of most important things that needs to be done."

http://www.statesman.com/metrostate/content/metro/stories/04/3highed.html
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:02 PM 2 comments Links to this post

CHECK OUT CHECKER FINN'S ANALYSIS OF SPELLINGS' RECENT DECISIONS TO ADJUST NCLB FOR PARTICULAR STATES. -ANGELA

On Saturday, the Washington Post featured an op ed by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings declaring her "willingness to work with states to make [NCLB] fit their unique local needs." Today, Spellings will announce-at a special meeting with state chiefs at Mount Vernon, near Washington-the particulars of the plan, which will include allowing states that can prove they've made progress toward closing achievement gaps greater flexibility on how to move special education, ESL, and other subgroups toward proficiency. The Post also reports that the choice provision will be revised or relaxed and perhaps made the second intervention, after SES. Doubtless sensing an opportunity to promote their respective "unique local needs," a gaggle of states, including Utah, Florida, New Jersey, and Texas, have already submitted a litany of complaints. And one state, at least, remains recalcitrant: the same day the New York Times editorialized that "the core part of the [NCLB] law . . . must remain sacrosanct, and the Bush administration must stand firm against districts that simply don't want to make the effort," Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced that the Constitution State will be the first to file a federal lawsuit challenging NCLB on its face. This after they've already been denied waivers several times (see "Playing Chicken on NCLB," http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/gadfly/issue.cfm?id=184#2200, for details on Connecticut's "woes"). Meanwhile, the Department is still negotiating with Utah (see "Rebellion in Utah," http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/gadfly/issue.cfm?id=183#2190). What to make of all this? As always, the devil is in the details. If the Department can come up with a reasonable, objective measure of "progress towards proficiency," it might make sense to cut some slack for states that are truly making significant progress. But if the entire process degenerates into backroom negotiating where states that whine the loudest get breaks-always a possibility-this move could sound the death knell of NCLB. And while placing the choice provision after SES as an intervention is a promising proposal, if the provision is watered down or rendered even more toothless than it already is, we believe that will be a drastic mistake. Giving up on choice means surrendering the most effective stick the Department has to compel improvement. We certainly hope the Department would not commit hari-kari in this way. Strange as it sounds for Gadfly to say, the Times put it best: The federal government "cannot backtrack because early progress has been rocky. If Washington wavers and begins to cut deals with recalcitrant states . . . the effort to remake the country's public schools will fail."
------------
Our High Schools Need Help . . .
By Margaret Spellings, WASHINGTON POST

Saturday, April 2, 2005; Page A21

Education has been front-page news and page-turning drama of late. To hear the media tell it, there is a new civil war going on between the federal government and the states. But the truth is that having this discussion is a healthy development and one I applaud.

At the heart of the story is the No Child Left Behind Act -- a law that asks one thing: that our public schools teach students to read and do math at grade level. It is imperative that we turn out young adults who can compete with the rest of the world in the global marketplace of ideas and talent.

So why all the noise about No Child Left Behind, and why now? There's no question that the law has been revolutionary: It calls for accountability for increased student achievement. And as with any change, particularly one that affects some 3.5 million educators serving 50 million students, there will be a period of adjustment. But it continues to be the right policy at the right time.

There is indeed a compelling national interest in education. The federal government has a role to play. Just as the Brown v. Board of Education decision moved to end unequal education because of race, the federal government can now help ensure that states provide a quality education to every student.

Under No Child Left Behind, students and parents are given options. Thanks to the law's insistence on assessing all students regardless of their race or background, teachers and administrators have been able to find out which students are learning and which need extra help and attention. And if schools continue to underserve their customers, the law calls for intervention and assistance. The needs of the student, not the system, come first.

No Child Left Behind is the law of the land. My goal as secretary of education is to help states continue to implement it, and to stabilize and embed this positive change. I understand some aspects of the law have been more difficult to implement than others, which is why I have signaled a willingness to work with states to make it fit their unique local needs. That's why each and every state has developed its own accountability plan: No two states are alike, and neither are their plans.

But some bright lines must be drawn. Annual assessments are nonnegotiable, because what gets measured gets done. This is the heart of accountability. The data must also be reported by student group -- African Americans, Hispanics, those with special needs, etc. -- so that those who need the most help aren't hidden behind state or district-wide averages. Some states have asked for waivers from the law. Some have sought to exempt whole grades or student groups from annual assessments. Others have sought to keep some students' test scores under wraps. That is simply unacceptable. It undermines the very purpose of the law. Perhaps not coincidentally, some of these same states have the largest achievement gaps in the nation, with minority students lagging dozens of points -- whole years, really -- behind their white peers.

In states where the law has been embraced, it is working. Teachers, principals, superintendents, parents and children have all chosen to roll up their sleeves and meet the challenge. As a result, children are achieving, and the achievement gap in the early grades is closing. In those states, public confidence in public education is soaring.

Now we must expand the promise of No Child Left Behind to our high schools. Its principles of accountability, flexibility, choice and research-based practice can help restore value to the high school diploma, making it a ticket to success in the 21st century. There is a growing consensus behind high school reform. Never before have so many groups -- governors, business leaders, children's advocates -- been so united on the need to act.

I am heartened that so many states are seriously considering innovative ways to reform our high schools. But this must become a national effort. That's why President Bush has proposed a $1.5 billion High School Initiative to ensure that every student graduates prepared for college or the workforce. We need to encourage students to take challenging coursework, and to assess our high school students every year, so that teachers can intervene before a problem sets in and sets a student back for life.

Three years after the No Child Left Behind Act was signed, more children are learning and children are learning more. This law is a bipartisan expression of the fact that we as a nation no longer find it acceptable to let some children remain in the shadows, without the skills to achieve the American Dream. Instead of trying to go back to those days, we should go forward and take the next step. Let's work together, in the same bipartisan fashion as we did three years ago, to help our high school students.

The writer is U.S. secretary of education.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20064-2005Apr1?language=printer

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:06 PM 8 comments Links to this post

4/02/2005

Utah resistance: Letter exchanges, editorial, TV show are among the recent developments
By Mike Cronin

Despite more than a year of working with the U.S. government, the relationship Utah education officials have with their federal counterparts remains frosty over the state's plans to measure student performance and define qualified teachers.
    The dispute stems from differences over how to implement President Bush's education-reform law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
    State Superintendent Patti Harrington said she hoped that the tense dynamics change soon. Yet, a letter she recently received from the U.S. Department of Education indicates the rift remains.
    "At every turn, they're threatening us with the loss of funds," Harrington said.
    Developments in the ongoing saga include:
   * A segment on the PBS program "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" that focuses on the NCLB differences between Utah and the feds will be shown early next week.
   * USA Today soon will publish an editorial lambasting Utah's position on how to define highly qualified teachers - and a rebuttal by Orem Rep. Margaret Dayton, who consistently has argued that education reform is a states' rights issue.
   * At 9 a.m. on Tuesday in Room W135 on Utah's Capitol Hill, the Education Interim Committee will hold a hearing on No Child Left Behind.
   * An April 7 meeting between Utah officials and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings will take place in Washington.
    In its letter, the U.S. Department of Education said a state that does not implement a standards-and-assessment system by the 2005-06 school year could lose its funding, be forced into a statutory agreement that requires compliance within three years or receive mandatory oversight status - to ensure compliance is achieved during 2006-07.
    State Office of Education officials mailed a reply on Thursday outlining Utah's criteria for identifying highly qualified teachers in rural areas. In an earlier letter, 20 of the state Senate's 21 Republican senators directly challenged President Bush's NCLB bill. It puts the GOP caucus on record as supporting House Bill 135, which would have given preference to Utah's standards for school and teacher quality.
    NCLB sets criteria for teacher quality and holds schools accountable for improving test scores among students of all ethnic, income and language groups, as well as students with disabilities.
    Utah wants its own accountability system - the Utah Performance Assessment System for Students - to count toward No Child Left Behind compliance.

mcronin@sltrib.com
http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_2637129
   

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:58 PM 0 comments Links to this post

In preparation for next week’s (Tuesday’s, April 5th) hearing on vouchers, here are some resources. We will meet during class time at the legislature at the Auditorium located in the Annex of the legislature. In case you can make it earlier, the hearing starts at 2PM and will continue through the evening/night. Also, earlier in the day, there will be a LULAC/NAACP press conference on vouchers and privatization at 10:30AM, north steps of the capitol. THIS IS NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH MONDAY'S PRESS CONFERENCE (posted yesterday) THAT IS SPONSORED BY THE CAROLYN BOYLE AND THE COALITION FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS. You are welcome, of course, to either.

Check out earlier blog posts for the recent fuss over the so-called voucher poll that pro-choice/voucher group, Hispanic CREO, is relying on. I’m trying to get my hands on the poll. It apparently has a bogus question on it that is supporting Hispanics’ alleged support for vouchers. In Texas, HCREO is targeting Austin, Houston, San Antonio and Dallas. As an organizing strategy, they’ve had a door-to-door campaign and they apparently target Latino families who have children in the public school with special needs.

They other key group is the Black Alliance for Educational Options

Both CREO and BAEO are getting huge sums (literally millions) of Department of Education federal dollars through NCLB to support their cause. Previously, these groups only got private foundation money (e.g., from the Walton Family Foundation and the Friedman Foundation), now, they profit from our taxpayer dollars! Hypocritically, they profit from governmental largesse while decrying so-called the “big government” that public schools represent. As long as they don’t use this money to lobby, nothing here is illegal, though clearly insidious and under-handed. Below are resources that will help orient you for the voucher hearing in the afternoon.

See you soon! -Prof. Valenzuela

This website provides PRO/CON positions. You’ll see Alex Molnar’s work there though especially at the EPSL site listed after it. He’s the one that I mentioned in class.
www.infidels.org"

Education Policy Studies Laboratory
Education Policy Studies Laboratory

The National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University


A big name in the pro-voucher camp is Caroline Hoxby. Here are a couple of pieces that turned up in google.

MPS gains are linked to vouchers

Rising Tide

Another piece from the Center for Policy Alternatives is also helpful.

A Donor’s Guide to School Choice also contains a lot of interesting info.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:48 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Note from Carolyn Boyle, Chair, Coalition for Public Schools Organizations & Friends

You're invited to attend and show your support for public schools at a press conference to be held at 10:30 a.m. Monday, April 4 on the NORTH steps of the Texas Capitol in Austin. The Coalition for Public Schools will release information showing that proposed private school voucher legislation could drain more than $1 billion from Texas public schools. Speakers also will provide personal accounts of the true cost of vouchers for neighborhood public schools. -Angela

by Jenny LaCoste-Caputo
Express-News Staff Writer

More than 70 percent of Bexar County Hispanic voters surveyed in a recent poll favor a pilot school choice program that would allow students to transfer to private schools using taxpayer-funded vouchers.

Voucher supporters say the poll results are a battle cry from frustrated parents to legislators that they want more options when it comes to their children's education.

Voucher opponents say the survey, conducted by a pro-voucher group partially funded by the U.S. Education Department, contained vague and misleading questions and doesn't reflect the true opinions of Bexar County parents.

The poll targeted about 1,000 Hispanics in Bexar, Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Travis counties and asked about everything from teacher quality and segregation in schools to educators' expectations of Latino children.

It found that more than 70 percent statewide either strongly or somewhat favored a statewide school choice program and nearly 76 percent favored a limited pilot school choice program. Less than 29 percent of respondents described the overall quality of education that low-income, inner-city Latino children receive as excellent or good.

"In my opinion, it is a call for action," said Rebeca Nieves Huffman, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options, the group that sponsored the poll.

But Kathy Miller, president of the Austin-based advocacy group Texas Freedom Network, said the survey questions didn't explain that the vouchers are taxpayer funded and take money out of public schools.

"It shouldn't surprise anyone that a pro-voucher group, backed by pro-voucher money would create a push poll that gave them the results that they want during a legislative session," she said. "They (respondents) were told the program wouldn't cost any additional money, but not told that it actually pulls money from the public school."

The poll was conducted by Montgomery and Associates, an Austin public opinion and market research firm that primarily works for Democrats, according to firm President Jeff Montgomery.

Huffman said the voucher movement has been cast as a "Republican, right-wing agenda to privatize public schools" but that even among Hispanic Democrats, 66.5 percent strongly or somewhat favored statewide choice in the poll.

"This is an issue that has been highly politicized," she said.

Texas lawmakers are considering three bills that would establish pilot voucher programs, with the potential for thousands of San Antonio students to be eligible. The House Public Education Committee will hear public testimony Tuesday.

Shelley Potter, co-president of the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel, said every other recent poll on school vouchers shows a majority of Texans do not support them. A recent Scripps Howard Texas Poll showed that 55 percent of respondents do not support vouchers, 39 percent do support them and 6 percent didn't respond.

"This is contrary to what every other poll that I know of recently is showing. In fact, the trend is the other way," Potter said.

Rosie Ybarra, whose children attend Christian Academy of San Antonio under a privately-funded voucher program for students in Edgewood School District, is tired of the politically-charged debate over school vouchers.

"We are looking for school choice. We want options for our children," she said. "It's not about politics. It's about our children."

------------------------------------------------------------------------
jcaputo@express-news.net
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA040105.1B.voucher_poll.193710398.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:32 PM 0 comments Links to this post