This about sums up school finance this session. The recapture approach to school funding lives (known by opponents as "Robin Hood"). If there's no special session, the courts will handle school finance for our state. Today is the last day of the session and lots of folks are clearing out.

Kathy Miller, President of the Texas Freedom Network summed up the session well: “Texans clearly set key priorities for this Legislature, especially dealing with crises in school funding and children’s health care. But lawmakers wasted time on distractions like sexy cheerleaders, scapegoating gay Texans and pushing vouchers. Now three times in three years they have failed to improve the way we pay for our public schools. Next year we’ll find out if
politics has a three-strikes rule.”

See today's post of Carolyn Boyle, of the Coalition for Public Schools, as well.

I'll be out for a week in Guanajuato, attending a conference on ethnography at the U of Guanajuato so this blog will likely be quiet until I return.


-Angela

Excerpt from the Austin A-Statesman—

"The battle over taxes also illustrated the different pressures that the leaders of the House and Senate face.

House Republicans do not need Democratic votes to pass most bills, but Democrats have enough votes in the Senate to block legislation from coming up. Democrats were particularly critical of efforts to raise the sales tax, saying they hurt low- and middle-income families, and Dewhurst's bargaining position reflected that.

Senate negotiators also put more emphasis on seeing that every school district in the state has nearly the same amount of money per student.

The only voters that Craddick has to answer to are the ones in his West Texas district. Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillson said that allows him to pursue a more narrow agenda than that of Dewhurst, who is elected in a statewide vote.

"The West Texas constituency is smaller cities and rural areas, sort of the traditional Texas," Jillson said. "Whereas Dewhurst has to keep his eyes on the cities and the big suburbs around the cities. That is simply an area that is more aware of urban problems, and it has an upper-middle-class constituency that is damn sure their kids are going to get a good education."

jembry@statesman.com; 445-3654

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/05/30schoolfinance.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:43 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is so cool. Omar Ochoa lobbied legislators so that they now have a place at the state's boards of regents. Fingers crossed that Perry won't veto this legislation.
-Angela

By Laura Heinauer
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, May 30, 2005

He has been in office less than two months, but Omar Ochoa already has been able to accomplish more than most University of Texas Student Government presidents.

In the past week, he has lobbied lawmakers to advance legislation that would add students to the state's boards of regents. Student government presidents have been championing the idea for the past 30 years.

On Sunday, the measure passed both houses of the Legislature and was awaiting the governor's signature.

"I'm elated to have this historic victory for students," said Ochoa, who spent Memorial Day weekend lobbying legislators.

Politics is nothing new for Ochoa, whose father was mayor of Edinburg, a town of about 50,000 near the South Texas border with Mexico.

"I was wearing 'Vote for Joe' T-shirts when I was still in diapers," he said, referring to shirts he wore for his father, Joe Ochoa.

That kid in diapers now spends his days rubbing elbows with powerful state politicians and top University of Texas brass.

He was in a meeting discussing zoning and safety issues in UT's West Campus on Wednesday with Austin Mayor Will Wynn when he got the call informing him that the student regent measure, which had looked as though it could fail, had been attached to other pieces of legislation and had been passed in the Texas House.

"We were all so excited, we forgot where we were for a minute," Ochoa said.

One thing Ochoa hasn't forgotten is where he comes from. The day after his meeting with Wynn, he was on his way to Edinburg to speak at his high school's honor society banquet.

He said he'd never forget when about 30 people from his hometown, clad in Vote for Omar buttons and armed with stacks of fliers, came to Austin during his election to help with his campaign. Or when he won, and his hometown county judge and state legislators showed up to watch him be sworn in.

"I come from a very supportive culture, and my family, my community was really terrific," he said.

Ochoa is one of only a few Hispanics to serve as UT Student Government president, and he is well aware that the number of Hispanics going to college isn't keeping up with the population increase.

Having grown up in the Rio Grande Valley, which has one of the lowest college enrollment rates in the state, Ochoa said he knew of several students who could have gone to UT but didn't because they couldn't afford it.

So he has been working to ensure grant money for low-income and first-generation college students. He also plans to make several trips to the Valley during his yearlong term to encourage students that they, too, can go to college.

"I want to be a role model to people from the Valley, to show you can come here to one of the best universities in the country and be successful," he said.

As for his success in the Legislature, Ochoa attributes it to his willingness to compromise, his efforts to build a coalition with other student government representatives throughout the state and a dogged determination to keep all lawmakers with legislation affecting the student agenda in the loop.

He has worked closely with outgoing UT Student Government President Brent Chaney and student government leaders from other colleges to support the installation of nonvoting student regents appointed by the governor.

Ochoa, who faced criticism from students who wanted the student regents to have a vote, said the majority of states that have a student on their boards of regents, including California, started with a nonvoting student regent.

Rep. Roberto Alonzo, D-Dallas, said Ochoa is an energetic young man with a future in politics.

He should know. He also was UT Student Government president. Unfortunately for Alonzo, he was elected the same year that students voted to abolish student government in the late 1970s.

"It's like big, huge, in my opinion — bigger than being a state representative," Alonzo said. "It's the one thing, of all my accomplishments, that I am still the most proud of."

Ochoa says he's just trying to do the best he can.

"It's an overwhelming job, long hours, crappy pay, people criticizing you," he said. "But what motivates me is I've seen how it has worked in the past, and I think we have a good plan for making it work better."

lheinauer@statesman.com; 445-3694

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/05/30OCHOA.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:28 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This article by Sam Dillon of the NYTimes examines the usefulness of disaggregating data by race in looking at the achievement gap. While that kind of information is useful, it says nothing of the collateral effects that occur (e.g., schools becoming test factories) when the test no longer measures the reform but becomes the reform itself. The irony is that the latter is more likely to occur in schools with lots of poor and minority children in them because of the ways that the tests are used (beyond mere aggregation/disaggregation of data). These kinds of analyses of NCLB are always too superficial to be valid. For it to be so, a deeper analysis of the system needs to be investigated as well.

Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond who spoke here in Austin recently reminds us how the numbers (aggregation/disaggregation of data) in themselves don’t provide the info on how to minimize the achievement gap. Hence, mere activity and action are not necessarily synonymous with acting in an informed manner. Plus, politics is always a factor.

We know from decades of research that well-funded & well designed bilingual ed programs are effective at reducing and eliminating the gap, but minorities’ lack of political power & frequently poor leadership in our schools and districts keeps bilingual education from being well funded and thusly, well designed. Also, as noted below, other gaps (e.g., housing, poverty, employment) need to also be addressed as well as schools simply cannot do it all.

Congratulations, by the way, to Dr. Enrique Aleman, my former student, for getting cited in the NYTimes. -Angela

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:26 PM 7 comments Links to this post

Everybody need to check out the following cool commentaries on politics and vouchers this session beginning with Amy Smith's analysis in the AUSTIN CHRONICLE, continuing with John Young's commentary, and MOST ESPECIALLY checking out State Representative Aaron's allegory likened to Star Wars on his blog titled, SB422: The Revenge of the Sith Bill.

Another important sidebar is Archbishop Gomez's support of school vouchers as covered in the S.A. Express News.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:46 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Published: May 25, 2005
Court Showdown Over Fla. Vouchers Nears
By Alan Richard
Miami

In a case being watched nationally and by educators and families here, the Florida Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments June 7 on whether the state’s original school voucher program violates the state constitution.

The court is to decide whether Opportunity Scholarships, available to students enrolled in Florida’s persistently lowest-rated public schools, run afoul of a prohibition on using public money in religious institutions. A decision could come before public schools open in August for a new year.

See Also
Read the story, “Students Use Vouchers to Leave School With ‘F’ Grade.”


But it isn’t just the 720 students statewide who now opt to use Opportunity Scholarships to attend religious or secular private schools whose plans could be determined by how the court rules. Lawyers on both sides agree that if the court strikes down those vouchers, other state K-12 scholarships now being used by some 25,000 Florida students could be in jeopardy.

And the tremors would likely be felt in the school choice movement nationwide. Though the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 upheld the inclusion of religious schools in the Cleveland voucher program under the U.S. Constitution, other states have constitutional restrictions similar to Florida’s.

Along with scrapping the Opportunity Scholarships, a decision against vouchers could lead to the demise of Florida’s McKay Scholarships, which provide state-financed tuition aid to about 14,300 special education students.

Lawyers for the state contend, though, that higher education scholarships and other types of state aid for religious colleges and hospitals could also be at stake.

A court ruling against the scholarships would allow voucher opponents “to pick up a club and attack any program” that offers public aid to religious institutions, said Clark M. Neily, a lawyer for the Washington-based Institute for Justice who will defend the state at next month’s hearing in Tallahassee.

Others cast doubt on how far such a ruling might reach. Ronald G. Meyer, a Tallahassee-based lawyer who is leading the case against the state, disputed the “parade of horribles” that Mr. Neily claims would happen if the state supreme court outlaws the Opportunity Scholarships.

The state can easily distinguish between such vouchers and other forms of state aid to religious colleges and hospitals, Mr. Meyer said. “What the constitution seeks to address is the use of public monies to support the inculcation of religious values,” he said.

Florida is one of 38states with so-called “Blaine amendments” or with similar language in their constitutions prohibiting state aid for religious purposes. The name comes from the prominent late-19th-century Republican politician James G. Blaine.

Such language was the basis for the lower courts’ rulings in Florida. Mr. Neily argues that the Blaine amendment has a “bigoted history” aimed at keeping money from non-Protestant institutions long ago. If the Florida Supreme Court upholds the lower-court rulings, the state will consider an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Mr. Neily said.
Futures in Doubt

Since the Opportunity Scholarships began in 1999, students have been able to use them to transfer out of public schools that receive F ratings on state report cards two times within four years. Currently, 21 public schools across the state are in that category.

One of the most common destinations for Miami students using Opportunity Scholarships is Archbishop Curley-Notre Dame High School in the city’s Little Haiti section, near downtown.

About 72 students used the scholarships to attend the Roman Catholic school in the 2004-05 school year. The modest but bucolic campus run by the Christian Brothers order has become a welcome new home for students on the scholarships.

The school was Florida’s first to integrate black and white students in 1960, said Brother Patrick Sean Moffett, the first-year principal of Archbishop Curley-Notre Dame.

Students say it’s a calm, well-run school that’s small enough for teachers to know all their students. “What we have is parents and youngsters who want something better,” Brother Moffett said.

Because the $4,355 Opportunity Scholarships do not cover the school’s $7,000 annual tuition, the 475-student school serving grades 9-12 must raise additional money to help the voucher students attend. “Financially, it’s costing us a small fortune,” Brother Moffett said of enrolling the voucher students.

The courts should not bar the scholarships, he argued, because parents—not the private schools—decide how to use the money. He added that his school does not force its Catholic beliefs on students. The student body president is Jewish, he said, and other student officers are Muslim and Baptist.

“It’s not supporting religion,” Brother Moffett said of the voucher program. “It’s being used to support parents.”

The school allowed interviews with students who receive Opportunity Scholarships only if Education Week would not use their names. The school keeps their identities confidential to guarantee that other students and teachers will not treat them differently, Brother Moffett said.

Many of the students receiving the scholarships at Archbishop Curley-Notre Dame are from Haitian or other immigrant families. Six students spoke of how the vouchers had helped them escape public middle or high schools that they described as being overcrowded and having serious problems with teacher quality and student discipline.

“If the voucher program can change one person’s life, I think it’s done enough,” said a young man from the Bahamas, an 11th grader. “But it’s not just one person [who benefits],” he said.

“I think they should keep the Opportunity Scholarships. I have two little brothers, and I want them to have the same opportunities to come here,” said another young man, an 11th grader born in Haiti.

“I know my mom wouldn’t be able to afford” the tuition bill if not for the vouchers, said a young woman in the 12th grade.
New Lawsuit Targets?

If the state supreme court ruling goes their way, opponents of Florida’s school choice programs say they will expand their legal battle to target the other state programs that allow students to leave public schools and attend religious schools.

“Obviously, if they decide in our favor, … we’re going to probably take a look at trying to expand it to the other voucher programs,” said Mark Pudlow, the spokesman for the Florida Education Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. The FEA is a major supporter of the case against the vouchers.

But if the scholarships stand, the Florida ruling could help pave the way for programs in other states where Blaine amendments stand in the way of voucher programs, said Mr. Neily, a lawyer defending Florida’s vouchers.

“Florida really has become ground zero for the future of the Blaine amendments,” Mr. Neily said.

Already, school choice advocates in Florida and elsewhere have begun to pursue other programs that do not involve the use of state vouchers at religious institutions, as a way to get around Blaine amendments and other state constitutional provisions that could lead to cases like Florida’s.

For example, Florida’s corporate-tax-credit scholarships for low-income families now help about 10,400 students tap state-sponsored tuition aid using money that flows through nonprofit organizations collecting donations for the scholarships from businesses in exchange for tax breaks. But Mr. Pudlow said even those scholarships could be targeted.

Florida Commissioner of Education John L. Winn, who helped create the Opportunity Scholarships as a policy adviser to Gov. Bush, said he believes the vouchers are the most effective incentive the state can provide for its lowest-performing schools to improve.

“I have absolutely no doubt that public schools hate the scholarship more than they hate the F [rating],” he said.

If the supreme court rules against vouchers, Mr. Winn would not support legislation to offer vouchers only to secular private schools. “If they strike it down, then the whole program will be struck down,” he said.
McKay Users Watching

Although the thousands of special education students and their families using Florida’s McKay Scholarships are not directly covered by the Opportunity Scholarships case, they worry about losing their vouchers nonetheless.

Those concerned include parents like Deborah Kidwell and her 13-year-old son, Daniel, a quiet boy and gifted sketch artist who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder. Like all McKay recipients, the family chose to leave a regular public school and apply for state aid that Daniel can use in a public or private school—secular or religious—of his family’s choice.

The amount of each scholarship varies based on a student’s disability.

“He was getting nowhere” in public school, Ms. Kidwell said during a visit to Spring Gate School, a private school that serves Daniel and 19 other students in grades 1-10 in Plantation, Fla., a western suburb of Fort Lauderdale. “Other kids [at his old school] would not accept the way he was,” she said.

Ms. Kidwell removed Daniel from the Broward County public schools last summer after constant frustrations and failing grades. Now, he’s making straight A’s.

The new school has brought Daniel out of his shell, Ms. Kidwell said. She added that other students at Spring Gate accept Daniel warmly, and he benefits from the extra-small classes that his $9,000 full-tuition voucher pays for. He also receives after-school tutoring.

Tom Ehren, who manages the McKay Scholarships for the 272,000-student Broward County schools, said that the program may work for some families, but it presents problems for others. About 1,900 Broward County students use McKay Scholarships to attend private schools, he said.

Parents cannot easily determine the quality of the private schools in the program, he said.

Others say that many families that have children with disabilities would be in trouble without the McKay program. “I think there would be plenty of parents up in arms if they did away with the McKay Scholarships,” said Debra Kern, the director and founder of Spring Gate School.
Vol. 24, Issue 38, Pages 1,22-23

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:47 PM 1 comments Links to this post

May 25, 2005
Lack of Diversity Persists Among Ph.D. Recipients, Study Says
By KAREN W. ARENSON / NYTimes

As universities try to add more black and Hispanic professors to their faculties in the coming years, they will find they are limited by the lack of diversity among graduate students, according to a new study by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

The study, which is being released this week, said that only 7 percent of Ph.D. recipients in 2003 were black or Hispanic, while nearly a third of all Americans in the age group typically awarded the degrees were.

"The Ph.D.'s who lead the way in the world of thought and discovery are far more monochromatic than the population," Robert Weisbuch, the foundation's president, wrote in the precede to the report, "Diversity and the Ph.D."

He said that though roughly one in four Americans are black or Hispanic, members of those minority groups were earning just one Ph.D. of every nine granted.

Though there has been some increase in the percentage of minority Ph.D. students, he said, "the fact remains that doctoral programs have made significantly less progress in diversifying than have business and government."

The study comes as Harvard and many other leading universities have been criticized for the lack of diversity in their faculties, and have pledged to try to do better. Many have succeeded in drawing more black and Hispanic students, but without offering them many role models in the classroom.

The Woodrow Wilson study suggests that increasing diversity on faculties will become all the more difficult because financial support for minority students in Ph.D. programs is shrinking.

One reason is that some programs meant to foster graduate student diversity have pulled back. In the face of legal challenges, programs once aimed at minorities have opened their doors to other students.

Another problem, the report said, is that many of the black and Hispanic students who do earn Ph.D.'s tend to specialize in certain areas, like education. So while blacks made up 6.6 percent of the Americans awarded Ph.D.'s in 2003, they made up 14 percent of all students who received Ph.D.'s in education. At the same time, fewer than 4 percent of the Ph.D.'s in engineering, in the physical and life sciences and in humanities that year went to blacks.

Hispanic students, however, were spread somewhat more evenly across the disciplines, earning 4.9 percent of all Ph.D.'s awarded to Americans in 2003, and 4.7 percent of those degrees in the arts and sciences.

The study did find that the number of black and Hispanic students earning doctorates had grown in the last 20 years. The study reported that 1,708 blacks earned Ph.D.'s in 2003, up from 925 two decades earlier, an 85 percent increase. In 1983, fewer than 4 percent of all Ph.D.'s earned by Americans went to blacks, compared with the 6.6 percent in 2003.

Similarly, the number of Hispanics earning Ph.D.'s grew to 1,270 in 2003 from only 542 two decades earlier. And their share of the Ph.D.'s granted grew to 4.9 percent in 2003, from 2.3 percent in 1983.

The study also noted that there were very few American Indians in doctoral programs; they earned 133 of 26,000 Ph.D.'s given to Americans in 2003. In contrast, Asian-Americans received 5.2 percent of the Ph.D.'s awarded that year, though they represented 4.1 percent of the population.

Data in the report were drawn from a larger study, Doctorate Recipients From United States Universities: Summary Report 2003, which was based on the Survey of Earned Doctorates published by the University of Chicago in 2004.

http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=KAREN%20W.%20ARENSON&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=KAREN%20W.%20ARENSON&inline=nyt-per

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:41 PM 1 comments Links to this post

With days left in session, sticking points are sales, business taxes

11:38 AM CDT on Wednesday, May 25, 2005

By TERRENCE STUTZ and CHRISTY HOPPE / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – House and Senate leaders declared Tuesday that they were making progress toward a school finance overhaul and tax-swap plan, but with just days left, they still face major roadblocks over business taxes and a sales tax increase.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Tom Craddick met for nearly 1 1⁄2 hours Tuesday. Mr. Dewhurst said the pace of negotiations "absolutely" will have to pick up for an agreement to be reached before the legislative session ends Monday. And he signaled that the Senate is waiting for the House to fully engage.

"All I can do is make sure the Senate is prepared to reach an agreement," he said. "We know where we are."
Also Online

En español: Avanza acuerdo sobre educación


Still, he added, the differences between the two are not great. Mr. Craddick declined to comment on their discussions.

After two weeks of canceled meetings and little public movement on the biggest issue before lawmakers, negotiators outlined several areas in which they had made progress, such as a deal on how much to cut property taxes. But on major school reforms, a half-dozen key issues remain to be resolved.

Among those are student testing in high schools and teacher compensation – including competing plans that would institute a massive incentive pay program for the state's 300,000 classroom teachers.

"We are close enough where we can come to an agreement," said Senate Education Committee chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano. "We've come a long way in the last few days, and I hope we can do something by tomorrow."

Her House counterpart, Rep. Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington, agreed that the two sides "are a lot closer than we were last week. Hopefully we can put the final touches on this in the next few days."

Ms. Shapiro cautioned that the school finance and tax plans are linked, and agreement must be reached on everything for any deal to apply. Top staffers to Gov. Rick Perry were also involved in the discussions.

Sticking points

The five senators and five House members working on property tax relief and new taxes to compensate for it said their talks are down to two big sticking points – how much more consumers should pay in sales taxes and how much businesses should pay in a revamped business franchise tax.

They are close to an agreement on the size of the property tax cuts: probably a 23 percent reduction in the maximum school property tax rate this fall, from $1.50 per $100 assessed valuation to $1.15. It would fall to $1.10 in2006.

On a home taxed at a value of $100,000 – after homestead exemptions and other items are deducted – the savings would be about $350 this fall.

Jim Keffer, the lead House negotiator on the tax bill, said the House is dropping its proposed 3 percent snack tax, which he said caused a lot of potential collection problems that "we didn't want to deal with."

Other expansions of the sales tax – such as to bottled water and car repairs – are still on the table, although one Senate negotiator said: "That junk's gone."

Mr. Keffer, Sen. Kim Brimer and other lawmakers on the tax bill committee said that an agreement hinges on whether lawmakers can compromise on the proposed sales tax increase and restructuring the state's business franchise tax.

House members want a higher sales tax – an increase of a penny to 7.25 percent – and a lower business tax. Senators are pushing for a lower sales tax – a half-cent increase – and a business tax that would raise about three times as much revenue as the House plan.

"If we can get the sales tax and business tax handled, we can make everything else fit it," said Mr. Keffer, R-Eastland. "It's a balancing act."

Mr. Brimer, R-Fort Worth, said that Senate leaders have already agreed to reduce their proposed tax increase on alcoholic beverages from 25 percent to 13 percent and are willing to accept a slightly higher sales tax increase if the House will agree to a business tax that raises more revenue.

"We can make an adjustment, but we're not willing to go to a full penny on the sales tax," Mr. Brimer said. "If we do that, we would have the highest state sales tax in the country."

House leaders have countered that when local sales taxes are figured in – an extra 2 cents in Dallas and many other areas – Texas would still have a lower overall rate than all surrounding states except New Mexico.

Business franchise tax

Just as big an obstacle to an agreement is the structure of the revamped business franchise tax that would be a centerpiece of the tax-swap plan. Each chamber has passed its own version of the new tax – and the differences are substantial.

The House plan would raise about $650 million a year in additional revenue to offset the property tax cuts, while the current Senate plan would generate nearly $2 billion – a figure that is $500 million less than the proposal endorsed by the Senate this month.

"We're giving businesses $2.6 billion in property tax cuts, and they're only going to charge them an extra $650 million in franchise taxes," Mr. Brimer said, calling on House leaders to provide better "balance" between consumers and businesses in their tax-swap plan.

Mr. Keffer pointed out that businesses also pay substantial sales taxes, which must be considered when trying to offset $4 billion in property tax reductions.

Despite the differences, Sen. Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, said there is still time to strike a compromise.

"We're not that far apart where a decision can't be made," said Mr. Fraser, a member of the tax bill committee. "We just have to find the right balance between what businesses pay and what consumers pay."

Mr. Dewhurst said senators are motivated to reach a deal. But in the House, he said, "they've been distracted on a number of different legislative issues, and my whole purpose of going over to see the speaker this afternoon was to share with him that I felt was the urgency for both he and I to reach an agreement and for our conferees to meet and reach an agreement."

He said he believes Mr. Craddick also understands the urgency: "The speaker understands that time is passing."

E-mail tstutz@dallasnews.com and choppe@dallasnews.com
WHERE THEY STAND

House members and senators negotiating a school finance and tax overhaul have reached agreements on a few major provisions ...

SCHOOL FUNDING: Both sides want to put about $3 billion more into the system during the next two years.

PROPERTY TAXES: They are close to a deal to cut the maximum school property tax rate from $1.50 per $100 assessed valuation to $1.15 this fall. It would fall again next year, to $1.10.

SNACK SURCHARGE: The House had wanted a 3 percent tax on snack foods but has agreed to drop it.

CIGARETTE TAXES: Both sides are pushing for a significant increase, but a final amount hasn't been settled.

... but are still far apart on others:

BUSINESS TAXES: The Senate wants a broader tax that hits more businesses and takes in about $2 billion in revenue. The House's version would collect about $650 million.

SALES TAXES: The House is sticking to a penny increase. The Senate is willing to move up a bit from its half-cent increase, but not all the way to a full cent.

ALCOHOL TAXES: The Senate has cut what it sought roughly in half, from a 25 percent across-the-board hike to 13 percent. The House is still wary of any increase.

TESTING: The House wants to give end-of-course tests to high school students. The Senate wants to leave the current Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in place.

TEACHER PAY: The details of how to increase salaries and create an incentive-pay system are still being discussed.

SPECIAL AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION: The Senate wants to continue allocating funds under a formula weighted for how much assistance a student needs. The House wants to provide a set amount per student.

SCHOOL BOARD ELECTIONS: The House wants them held only in the fall; the Senate wants to let districts decide.

Terrence Stutz
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http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/052505dntexschoolfinance.de74e963.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:55 PM 0 comments Links to this post

HOUSTON CHRONICLE
May 25, 2005, 11:05AM

Perry: Voucher Fight Won't End with Session

Governor admits the issue is dead for now, but says it's misunderstood
Associated Press

AUSTIN - Lamenting the defeat of private school vouchers this legislative session, Gov. Rick Perry predicted Tuesday that voucher proponents will renew their fight in two years.

While a voucher plan is "probably done for the session," which ends Monday, proponents will keep up the fight in Texas, Perry said.

"I suspect as long as there are children who are in need of getting some relief in failing schools that it will always be out there and be promoted by a number of Texans," he said.

Amid volatile House debate, legislation that would have allowed limited state-funded private school vouchers collapsed late Monday. The plan would have used taxpayer money for private school tuition for some economically disadvantaged students in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio.

Lawmakers are trying to find more money for public schools and work out a new school funding system before the Legislature adjourns. Texas is under court order to change its school funding method or risk a school shutdown by October.

The next regular legislative session doesn't convene until January 2007.

Perry said he thinks the voucher issue is misunderstood.

"I don't understand why people are afraid of letting these children and their parents have a choice," he said.

Perry noted he has pushed for a pilot school voucher program since he was lieutenant governor in 1999.

One of Perry's major campaign contributors, San Antonio businessman James Leininger, is a supporter of private school vouchers. Last year, Leininger was among those who went on a trip with the Republican governor and some of his aides to the Bahamas over Presidents Day weekend.

The House voucher proposal died on a technicality after several close votes on measures that changed the original intent of the plan that was included in Senate Bill 422.


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

HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Local & State
This article is: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3197104

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:50 PM 0 comments Links to this post

TO: Coalition for Public Schools Organizations
FROM: Carolyn Boyle

We are excited and claiming "victory" after a five hour debate on private school vouchers in the Texas House of Representatives. Tomorrow I'll send a complete report after I've had a good night's sleep and get the vote reports to tell you exactly how the members voted on 5 different voucher votes.

You may have thought I was exaggerating when I was predicting practically a tie vote, but tonight we had repeated votes with numbers like 72-72, 72-70, and 74-70. The whole scene was described as a "circus," "theatre," and "better than anything on TV." If you did not watch it live, you should go back and watch the debate on the Texas House archives. Just go to this site and click on Chamber 79th Session. http://www.house.state.tx.us/media/welcome.php

Passionate efforts led by Rep. Carter Casteel and Rep. Scott Hochberg to strip the voucher subchapter from the bill ultimately failed, and all our folks in the gallery were feeling so down. Then Rep. Charlie Geren proposed an amendment to strip out from the voucher program Dallas and Fort Worth ISDs and to substitute Arlington and Irving ISDs (the districts represented by bill authors Rep. Kent Grusendorf and Rep. Linda Harper-Brown). That amendment passed!

Then Rep. Geren proposed an amendment to remove all the words about private schools from the section and to substitute the words "public schools," turning it into a public school choice program. Then that amendment passed! The bill was effectively gutted of vouchers because the "scholarships" could only be used for other public schools.

All during this time a point of order offered by Rep. Jim Dunnam was under consideration by the chair, and after the bill was stripped of vouchers the Speaker sustained the point of order and killed the entire TEA Sunset bill.

So...it was a victory but not exactly the victory I envisioned. We were very disappointed with the votes of some legislators and very happy about the votes of others (voting records to be shared tomorrow and talked about for months to come). It was also a disappointment that some legislators who oppose vouchers appeared to have been persuaded to "walk" the vote.

I'm heading home with a renewed sense of hope about the legislative process, continued respect for the wisdom and creativity of public school supporters in the legislature, and respect and love for all the wonderful individuals who are advocates for children through the Coalition for Public Schools!

Thanks for all you have done to achieve this important victory tonight! But now...we need to be watchful for what is happening Tuesday and Wednesday in the Texas Senate and House.

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

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:48 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This was the best late-night t.v. that was on last night. The passions ran high. See my other post on this from Carolyn Boyle who provides her own description of what happened last night. -Angela

May 24, 2005, 12:46PM
THE LEGISLATURE

Dramatic night at the statehouse ends the quest for this session
By JANET ELLIOTT and JEFFREY GILBERT
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN - A plan to make Texas one of the first states with a large-scale voucher program died Monday night after a raucous debate and a series of close votes in the House.

After the bill was gutted to make vouchers available only for public and not private schools, Speaker Tom Craddick sustained a parliamentary challenge that killed the issue for this session.

"I woke up this morning thinking this may be the day we made history in Texas," said Rep. Kent Grusendorf, sponsor of the proposal. "I'm disappointed."

It was the first time in eight years that the House debated the volatile issue of giving students public funding to attend private and parochial schools. In 1997, the effort failed on a tie vote and Monday's debate delivered similar drama.

Members on both sides of the issue shouted and clapped during the hours-long debate.

"I'm very happy because the people won in this state rather than big money," said Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston.

The voucher proposal was attached to a Senate bill reauthorizing the Texas Education Agency. The author of the bill, Sen. Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, had promised Senate Democrats that he would not agree to a TEA sunset bill containing a voucher proposal.

The education agency will now be attached to a safety-net bill that will continue its functions until the next legislative session in 2007.


HISD, North Forest affected
The language debated by the House would have allowed as many as 30,000 students in the Houston, North Forest and five other urban, high-poverty districts to qualify for vouchers .



"We have to do something to throw a lifeline to help those kids trapped in large urban inner city schools," said Grusendorf, R-Arlington.

He said where vouchers have been tried in other states, the public schools that lost students "actually responded to the competitive pressure" and have improved. "They tried to keep other children from leaving," Grusendorf said.

Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, was one of several members who tried to strip the pilot program from the bill.

"This is a proposal that would drain millions of dollars from public school budgets at a time we can't seem to come up with money for textbooks we've already promised to the kids," said Hochberg.

Hochberg's amendment was tabled 72-71, with Craddick casting the deciding vote after an initial vote yielded a tie. Houston Democrats Kevin Bailey and Harold Dutton were not present for the vote.

After the vote, Dutton was officially excused. Bailey's office said he had to return to Houston for personal reasons.

A second vote on another amendment to strip the provision failed on a 72-72 tie with Craddick voting to table the amendment.

After that, however, Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth, succeeded with two amendments that proved lethal. One stripped out the Dallas and Fort Worth districts, and the other removed private and parochial schools.

The chamber was buzzing Monday with word that Craddick and longtime Republican backer James Leininger were pressuring undecided lawmakers in a back office.

Leininger, a San Antonio businessman, has used part of his fortune to set up a voucher program there.

One lawmaker said at least 12 Republicans had been called into a meeting. Craddick's office would neither confirm nor deny the widespread reports about Leininger's presence.

"There's only one reason this issue is before us at a time when most members would prefer to vote against it, and that is because a major contributor has been sitting in the back hall working members for a week," said Hochberg.


Who would have qualified
Under the bill, students would have qualified by being at risk of dropping out or victims of school violence. The program also would have been open to students in special education or limited English proficiency programs, and those from households whose income does not exceed 200 percent of the qualifying income for free and reduced price lunches.



The vouchers would have been for 90 percent of the statewide average public funding per student.

The Austin-based Coalition for Public Schools, which opposes vouchers, said the Houston Independent School District could have lost $200 million and North Forest $9 million in the next two years. However, a Legislative Budget Board report estimated the school districts affected by the program would have lost a total of about $69 million per year.

 
janet.elliott@chron.com jeffrey.gilbert@chron.com

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/topstory/3195096

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:36 PM 0 comments Links to this post

TOP STORY --EdWeek.org

Monday, May 23, 2005
High School Exit Exams on the Rise
By Kavan Peterson, Stateline.org Staff Writer
      Exit Exams

* Twenty states require high school graduation exams: Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
* Four states are phasing in exit exams by 2006: Arizona, California, Idaho and Utah.
* Washington will withhold diplomas in 2008.



Earning passing grades doesn't guarantee a high school diploma anymore for half of U.S. public school students.

A growing number of states now require high school students to pass an exit exam to graduate, though some states are backpedaling amid backlash over students denied diplomas.

High school students in 20 states this spring must pass a standardized test to get a diploma. The class of 2006 will see the next major expansion of exit exams. Four states -- Arizona, California, Idaho and Utah – for the first time next year will withhold diplomas from seniors who fail the final exam. Washington state will phase in the test by 2008.

Phasing in high-stakes exit exams has been a bumpy road in some places. High failure rates caused lawmakers in Arizona and California to postpone the date for withholding diplomas from 2004 to 2006. In Arizona , 64 percent of the class of 2004 failed the state math exit exam and 41 percent failed the English exam. In California , a study projected that about 20 percent of seniors would have been denied diplomas in 2004 if the test were enforced.

Education officials in both states adopted new standards for the states' exit exams last year that have lead to higher pass rates, raising questions of whether they lowered the bar to pass more students. Lawmakers in both states also are considering legislation to postpone the tests again or to toss the requirement altogether.

"A very intense grassroots battle is being waged in California and Arizona to force lawmakers to fix real problems in schools instead of taking diplomas away from students who are doing their best under poor learning conditions," said Monty Neill, executive director of Fair Test, an organization that has been researching testing in public schools since 1987.

By 2008, seven in 10 students nationwide will be taking exit exams, according to the Center on Education Policy (CEP), which publishes annual reports on high school exit exams. Most students first take the test in the 11th grade and are allowed up to five re-tests if they fail.

Exit exams differ from those mandated by the No Child Left Behind law, which requires annual testing in grades three to eight and at least once in high school. Those tests are not tied to high school graduation.

Lawmakers hope the exit tests will improve student performance and boost the value of a high school diploma. Reforming America's high schools has become a national priority in recent months, with President Bush urging Congress to hold high schools accountable for student achievement by extending federally mandated testing to grades 9-11. The nation's governors also have targeted high school for reform, and 18 states recently formed a coalition pledging to aggressively raise the academic bar in their high schools.

"Exit exams can be a critical lever or incentive for encouraging kids to reach higher standards," said Matt Gandal, vice president of Achieve, Inc., a nonpartisan group sponsored by state governors and business leaders that is coordinating state efforts to reform high schools.

Education researchers, however, said they fear high-stakes tests intimidate students and lead to higher dropout rates, especially among low-income or disabled students and black and Latino high schoolers, who fail at higher rates than white and Asian students.

About 90 percent of high school seniors ultimately pass the test, but a high percentage fail on their first attempt and an unknown number drop out before ever taking the test, according to CEP. Depending on the state, up to 70 percent of students fail the math test and up to 40 percent fail the English test first time around. Pass rates decrease dramatically when broken down by types of students, with black, Hispanic, low-income, non-English speaking and disabled students scoring 30 to 40 percent below Asian and white students.

Measuring the impact of exit exams on dropout rates is difficult, researchers say, because states do not accurately track students who change schools, get held back or drop out.

For example, the Massachusetts Department of Education reported that 96 percent of the class of 2004 passed the state exit exam. But the department did not count high school dropouts in its calculation, said Anne Wheelock, a research associate at the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Education Policy at Boston College .

Instead of counting how many seniors graduated, Wheelock calculated that just 74 percent of Massachusetts students who started as freshmen in 2001 received diplomas in 2004.

"The state's pass rates are really half-truths at best," Wheelock said.

Utah's plans to introduce exit exams next year are on track, but nearly one-third of the 35,000 students in the class of 2006 still have not passed one or more sections of the state's exit exam, which tests reading, writing and math. The state board of education recently asked for $10 million to pay for tutoring, summer school and other programs to help failing students, but the Legislature rejected the request.

Only 11 states with exit exams allocate funds for tutoring and additional instruction for students who fail, according to CEP.

The list includes Virginia , where lawmakers voted last year to boost services to low-income students at risk of failing the state exit exam. Extra funding helped expand a pilot program created by Virginia Gov. Mark Warner (D) that combined summer school, tutoring and online tutorials for about 2,900 high school students. Nearly three-quarters of those students eventually passed their exams and received a diploma in 2004, said Virginia Department of Education spokesperson Charles Pyle.

"The approach to graduation under Governor Warner was to hold fast to the higher standards that had been set while at the same time expanding opportunities for students who were struggling to meet the higher standards," Pyle said.

All states with exit exams allow multiple re-test opportunities and alternate tests for students with disabilities, according to CEP. Thirteen states (Alaska, California, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia) provide alternate diplomas or certificates of achievement for students who do not pass the exit exam. Seven states (Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Maryland, New York, North Carolina and Virginia) allow students to substitute passing scores on other tests, such as the SAT. Nine states (Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Mexico, Ohio and Utah) have a waiver or appeals process so that students who fail can request a diploma if they meet other criteria.

Send your comments on this story to letters@stateline.org. Selected reader feedback will be posted in the Letters to the editor section.

Contact Kavan Peterson at kpeterson@stateline.org.

http://www.stateline.org/live/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=136&languageId=1&contentId=33244

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:06 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Posted on Tue, May. 24, 2005

By R.A. Dyer
Star-Telegram Austin Bureau

AUSTIN - A measure that would have allowed parents to obtain taxpayer-supported vouchers to send their children to private schools was shot down late Monday night by a bitterly divided Texas House of Representatives.

The voucher measure, part of a bill to reauthorize the Texas Education Agency, survived several challenges by House opponents who said it would harm public schools.

Each challenge failed by just two or three votes, and on one vote, House Speaker Tom Craddick, R-Midland, cast a tie-breaker.

But state Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth, tacked on an amendment that effectively gutted the voucher provisions. Craddick then upheld a technical objection to the bill, killing it outright.

State Rep. Kent Grusendorf, the Arlington Republican who sponsored the voucher bill, said it would have given parents more choices in their children's education. But he appeared to concede defeat after Craddick upheld the technical objection.

"We debated a very important issue tonight. I want to thank you," he told members.

The debate was among the most contentious so far in the House this session, with members shouting over one another, clapping, chanting and whistling.

At one point, state Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, ran across the House floor and grabbed the microphone from Grusendorf.

Vouchers also divided the Republicans and split the Tarrant County delegation.

During an exchange over Geren's amendment to gut Grusendorf's bill, Grusendorf bellowed, "Are you going to let me answer? Are you going to let me answer?"

During another exchange, Geren said to state Rep. Jim Jackson, R- Carrollton, "Are you going to ask me a question, or are you going to pontificate?"

Chances are slim that the voucher provision might return before the legislative session ends Monday. Key Senate lawmakers also oppose the measure.

State Rep. Jim Dunnam, D-Waco, raised the technical objection that spelled doom for vouchers. He noted that an official description of the bill did not comply with changes made in a House committee.

Geren's successful amendment, which gutted the bill, stated that the "school choice" provisions would apply only to parents who want to move students from one public school to another but would bar the use of taxpayer-supported vouchers to send children to private schools.

That provision was adopted 74-70.

Area lawmakers who supported Geren were Reps. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth; Toby Goodman, R-Arlington; Bob Griggs, R-North Richland Hills; and Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth.

Lawmakers who supported Grusendorf in opposing Geren's amendment were Reps. Phil King, R-Weatherford; Anna Mowery, R-Fort Worth; Todd Smith, R-Euless; Vicki Truitt, R-Keller; and Bill Zedler, R-Arlington.

Geren also successfully attached an amendment to the legislation that took his home school district, Fort Worth, out of the bill and replaced it with Grusendorf's home district in Arlington. That amendment also removed the Dallas district from the bill, and replaced it with the district of another key voucher supporter, Rep. Linda Harper-Brown of Irving.

As originally written, the measure would have allowed up to 5 percent of students in the state's largest districts, including Fort Worth, to get vouchers. It applied mostly to children at risk of failing and to low-income students, although opponents said that incoming students at any income level could get vouchers.

The legislation also would have allowed up to 5 percent of students in the Edgewood, North Forest and South San Antonio school districts to get vouchers.

That could amount to more than 550,000 children, according to an analysis provided by opponents of the legislation. But supporters said there are only 19,000 places in private schools.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2005 Star-Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.dfw.com
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/legislature/11724106.htm

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:35 PM 0 comments Links to this post

JOHN YOUNG, Opinion page editor

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Let's say that Emily Harrington's evening was a microcosm of the month for many of us.

Take the mad seconds in which she changed backstage from a derby-hatted Charlie Chaplin (singing "Smile" and playing it on the violin) to the blue evening gown in which she barely missed a bar on a "Phantom of the Opera" medley (without a trace of mustache.)

The all-state singer surely lost count of all the costume changes, but missed no cue as the Waco High School choirs staged their year-end Big Show.

Instructor Florence Scattergood went through the motions of a thousand butterfly wings in getting 220 choir members on stage and off. That, too, was analogous of May.

As if August through April aren't chaotic enough, this month rolls around. On top of all else on teachers', students' and parents' plates – like TAKS scores and finals and term papers – one has year-end events, banquets, concerts and more. Toss in such things as UIL playoffs and Little League. Oh, and did I mention commencement?

This all brings to mind a piece of legislation that Texas doesn't need. Pending an actual agreement on school finance, lawmakers are set to make school start uniformly after Labor Day and end a week after Memorial Day.

Though promoted for cost-savings, the proposal goes against the philosophy that school districts should be able to start school according to their needs. I'm no fan of starting in mid-August, but many districts do with the very valid intent of finishing fall semester and finals before Christmas break.

Pending approval, we have another example of lawmakers – who uniformly tout "local control" – telling schools what to do.

So add one more thing that makes May maniacal. The Legislature is still in session. If you're involved in education, that means every morning you open the morning paper with a wince.

What new hoops will lawmakers erect for teachers to earn their paychecks in the name of "accountability"?

Will foes of "government schools" try a stealthy way to enact school vouchers? (Answer last week: Yes, attached to a sunset bill for the Texas Education Agency.)

How close to "adequate" have lawmakers steered the ship of state in funding schools while telling teachers to row at ramming speed? Lawmakers think they've been master navigators on school finance. A judge may shoot a cannonball through that.

Meanwhile, the chaos of a concluding school year continues – outdated books returned to the shelf so they can be one more year removed from current; teachers assessing their next set of impossible missions.

All of which reminds me of one more reason Texas shouldn't require schools to continue classes into June. Some of us already have more May than we can stand.

John Young's column appears Thursday and Sunday. E-mail: jyoung@wacotrib.com

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:15 PM 2 comments Links to this post

Opening UT's Doors
EDITORIAL BOARD
Sunday, May 22, 2005

The appointment of a vice provost to promote diversity at the University of Texas at Austin signals a more aggressive — and welcome — approach to integrating faculty, the student body and academic programs.

Gregory Vincent's appointment as the provost for inclusion and cross-cultural effectiveness was announced last week and should be recognized as a serious step toward making UT reflect today's Texas population. Years of efforts to diversify UT's campus have produced mixed results: The number of Hispanic students has increased, but their numbers still don't represent the percentage of the state's growing Latino population. African American enrollment remains embarrassingly low more than 50 years after the end of legal segregation. The number of Asian students has increased dramatically, far exceeding their proportion in the population; UT faculty is more diverse, but relatively few of its tenured staff are Hispanic or African American.

The new vice provost isn't a magician who can instantly undo a century of policies and culture that produced an environment many minorities find unwelcoming — if not hostile. But the administration's commitment to the effort is reflected in Vincent's title and is underlined by the salary it carries: $170,000 a year.

Preparation for Texas' future begins now. Minorities are rapidly becoming the state's majority population. Therefore, a commitment to diversity isn't a politically correct administrative decoration but a serious economic tool. Economic experts have repeatedly warned that household incomes for all Texans will drop if we fail to graduate from college tens of thousands more Hispanics and African Americans in the next decade. As the state's largest, and arguably best, university, UT has a significant role in charting that future.

In establishing the post, UT is following a road other universities are traveling. Last week, Harvard University unveiled an ambitious $50 million initiative to recruit and promote women and underrepresented minorities on its faculty. A few years ago, Texas A&M University in College Station created a similar post to help boost diversity.

A logical place for Vincent to start is with student and faculty recruitment. About 1,700 of UT's more than 50,000 students are African American; and Hispanic students of all races total just 6,727. Those figures show there is plenty to do.

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/05/22diversity_edit.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:42 PM 1 comments Links to this post

This resonates with the dictum that there is no standard child. -Angela
WASHINGTON, May 17 /U.S. Newswire/ --

Today the Government Accountability Office confirmed what the Children's Defense Fund and other early childhood experts have maintained for the past two years, that the National Reporting System is not a reliable or valid method to assess the progress of young children. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released these findings in a new report titled, "Head Start, Further Development Could Allow Results to Be Used for Decision Making."

In 2003, with only 18 months of development, the Bush administration implemented The National Reporting System (NRS), an initiative to systematically test the early literacy, language, numeracy skills of all four and five year old children enrolled in Head Start. The test was controversial from its onset, with more than 400,000 young children mired in the politics of this detrimental test.

Questions about age appropriateness and cultural fairness of test items were raised by many advocates and scholars. Also, many argued the test was too narrow, and omitted entire areas of childhood development.

More than 900,000 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children from low- income families are served by Head Start each year. Twice a year, this standardized test was administered to more than 400,000 4- and 5-year olds at a cost of more than $22 million.

Experts on child assessment agree that the specific testing approach for young children will inevitably lead to "teaching to the test," narrowing of curriculum, and encouraging teachers to neglect critical components of children's growth and learning. This type of assessment is both limited and short-sighted in terms of helping children in Head Start develop content knowledge, motivation to learn and the ability to develop complex thinking skills-things research indicates are imperative for success in school. Advocates and members of Congress have expressed similar concerns.

"A host of factors make it unrealistic to measure 4- and 5- year olds' progress with an unproven standardized test," said Yasmine Daniel, Director of Early Childhood Development for the Children's Defense Fund. "Early childhood assessment is effective when used as a tool to improve curricula and classroom teaching. Tests, however, are an entirely different matter. They are not a good predictor of children's learning. Children's skills are constantly changing. What they do not know today, they may very well know tomorrow. Early childhood development is a process not a conclusion."

The Children's Defense Fund and other early child care advocates are calling for a freeze on the testing of Head Start children until the National Reporting System can be determined valid and reliable. As Congress debates the reauthorization of Head Start, we ask that it do the right thing for children.

"Early childhood is a time for exploring, engaging and instilling the love of learning, not drilling children with specific test questions. The last thing we need is 'teaching to the test' for preschoolers,"
Daniel said.

---

The Children's Defense Fund's Leave No Child Behind mission is to
ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe
Start, and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood
with the help of caring families and communities.

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

Interesting commentary on Villaraigoza's mayoral victory in Los Angeles last week. This benefits Latinos and humanity, generally, everywhere. -Angela

BY ROBERTO RODRIGUEZ & PATRISIA GONZALES
RELEASE DATE: MAY 23, 2005

By Roberto Rodriguez

As has been universally acknowledged, Antonio Villaraigoza's victory as mayor of L.A. this past week is of historic proportions. Coupled with two other major developments, his election takes on an even greater national and historic significance.

Last weekend, some 40 anti-Mexican bigots were chased out of nearby Baldwin Park as they went from protesting immigration to protesting the Mexican-Indian heritage of the region and continent. What drew their ire are several inscriptions on a monument. One reads: "This land was Mexican once, was Indian always and is, and will be again." Another one reads: "It was better before they came.” Artist Judy Baca says that the latter quote refers to a statement by a white civic leader who was lamenting the influx of Mexican immigrants into the area - not an anti-white statement as the detractors were claiming.

The protest reveals that the anti-immigrant movement is indeed anti-Mexican and anti-Central American, and that these communities are not docile and dormant. In response to the protest, some 500 counter-protestors sent the small group of extremists scurrying home, reminding the world that accepting insults belongs to another era. These hate-mongers had been emboldened by the armed Minuteman militia project (encouraged by Gov. Schwarzenegger and egged on by Lou Dobbs at CNN) that patrolled the Arizona border last month.

Another equally important development is this week's inauguration of the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCLA. It's been a long 36-year wait, and the symbolism is stark.

Villaraigoza attended UCLA during the early years of Chicano Studies (early 70s) when students of color were scarce and not welcome and Chicano Studies was viewed as an illegitimate discipline. This was also the early years of MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan), a student activist organization that was also viewed in a similar light. (Some high schools and universities across the nation continue to view MEChA in a negative light).

Despite the efforts of the extreme right wing to demonize MEChA (along with Chicana/Chicano and Ethnic Studies) Villaraigoza's victory is not so much a vindication of the era's politics of decolonization as it is an affirmation of the larger and current global struggle for equality, human rights and human dignity.

Villaraigoza's victory comes at a time when the anti-immigrant movement has been invigorated by the passage of the REAL ID Act - an apartheid-type law that restricts undocumented immigrants from entering federal buildings, boarding planes and getting a driver's license. (Aren't we all comforted by the knowledge that the next terrorist that ploughs a truck bomb into a federal building, airport, hotel or shopping center will be fully licensed?)

The reality is that it is a fear-driven anti-Mexican measure, not unlike many other Department of Homeland Security initiatives. (While DHS anti-terrorism operations at airports and other facilities have snagged some 1,100 undocumented workers the past two years, they have netted zero terrorists.

This is why Villaraigoza's victory is historic; because it affirms the politics he has been a part of since the 1960s. Normally, this would be irrelevant, but it is so because those are the politics that the extreme right has been vilifying for years. It is these same extremists that have been haranguing Villaraigoza and other elected officials over their involvement in the human rights struggles of that earlier era.

This is also why the inauguration of the Chicana and Chicano Studies department is of equal importance and linked to his victory and also linked to the situation in Baldwin Park. Ethnic Studies is about memory - and precisely why it is in the crosshairs nationwide of those same forces. Without that memory, the extremists get to invent their own history and challenge not just the humanity and indigeneity of the people, but of the land itself.

The anti-immigrants are deluded by their own biases, convincing themselves that they are not anti-Mexican nor anti-immigrant - just anti-illegal alien. Here's a news flash by way of every major religion and great world philosophy: Ningun ser humano es illegal - no human being is illegal.

Humanity's challenge is not to create more illegal categories or larger hunted populations, but to chart a course for the day when there will no longer be any more legal or illegal citizenship or human categories.

That may take 100 years, but that course can be charted now. Villaraigoza has to run the city of the future, but if he so chooses, he can also join in that other leadership role. Either way, he deserves a historic congratulations.

© Column of the Americas 2005

The writers can be reached at: XColumn@aol.com or (608) 238-3161. Please encourage your local newspaper to carry and run our weekly column. For information on the Aztlanahuac Map exhibit and the San Ce Tojuan documentary, go to:
http://144.92.121.201/whsexhibit

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

Arizona State University's Education Policy Research Unit recently released
a report written by my colleague, Gerald Bracey, that effectively demonstrates how charter schools are a failed education reform. (Roll over title for PDF file). -Angela

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:32 PM 6 comments Links to this post

Having not mastered TAKS, hundreds won't see graduation day

12:32 PM CDT on Friday, May 20, 2005

By TAWNELL D. HOBBS / The Dallas Morning News

Kendra Rainey won't be wearing that graduation gown hanging in her closet. And the announcements mailed to friends and family are now a painful reminder.

Last week, Kendra was ushered into a counselor's office at Bryan Adams High School in Dallas to get the bad news: She failed to pass the TAKS in her final attempt and will not graduate with her class Sunday.

"It makes me feel like all I've done is a waste of time," said Kendra, 18, who didn't pass the math and science portions of the test. "I can't be there with my class."

But she is not without peers. Hundreds of area seniors – including up to 697 students in DISD, or about 10 percent of the senior class – will not receive their diplomas after failing to pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

This is the first school year that seniors who did not pass all portions of the TAKS cannot graduate. They began taking the exit-level test in the 11th grade and had up to five chances to pass.

Those students are left to consider some options: They can continue to retake the TAKS until they pass or pursue a GED. Others may choose to do nothing – never receiving a diploma after finishing all of their coursework.

The news has hit students – and parents – hard.

Patricia Rainey said her daughter has cried more times than she can count. She now has to postpone attending Texas Southern University in Houston, where she was accepted.

"She's been crying every day, I feel so sorry for her. She has me crying," she said. "This is holding her back."

Dallas Independent School District spokesman Donald Claxton, who said the final number of affected students will be reported in about a week, agreed that it's not an easy situation.

"They are students who have gone through the school district for 12 years and aren't ready to graduate," Mr. Claxton said. "When that doesn't happen, we share their concern and pain."

He said DISD would work with students wanting to retake the test.

"All hope is not lost. We are going to continue to coach them," Mr. Claxton said.


Number varied



The number of affected seniors varied among area school districts. Fifty-eight students in Garland won't march, and 151 will sit out in Arlington. Seventeen students fell short in Plano, while every senior in the Highland Park and Carroll school districts passed the exit exam.

Of districts reporting results, Dallas had the largest percentage of seniors failing the TAKS.

The Texas Education Agency will soon release statewide numbers, but 11 percent, or 24,937, of Texas seniors still needed to pass a portion of the test in April – before the last retake.

At that time, 95 percent of students had passed math and English language arts, 94 percent had passed science, and 99 percent had passed social studies.

Students said the test – particularly math and science – was challenging.

Ashlee Williams, a student at Skyline High School, was visibly upset when she spoke about the math test.

"It was my fourth time taking it," she said. "What's the point?"

Detorrian Rhone, 18, said the pressure was too much for him. He said he was nervous the whole time taking the math and science exams.

"They were like, 'If you don't pass, you don't graduate,' " said the Bryan Adams student.

The graduation rule involving standardized tests is not new to Texas. Previously, seniors needed to pass the TAAS. But the TAKS, which debuted in 2003, is much more rigorous than its predecessor.

The new exam covers more subjects, including the addition of science. Students also began taking the exit-level TAAS in the 10th grade, which gave them more opportunities to pass. Only about two percent of last year's seniors did not pass TAAS.

TEA spokeswoman Debbie Graves Ratcliffe said state lawmakers wanted to make sure that a high school diploma meant something.

"We know that it is heartbreaking for students to get to mid-May and discover they aren't going to graduate," she said. "But ever since the class of 1987, students have had to pass a state test in order to graduate."

The next opportunity to retake the test is in July. School districts have the option of allowing students to participate in commencement. Or they can give them "certificates of coursework completion," which indicates all necessary credits to graduate were completed.

Dallas and Mesquite allow neither. But the Denton and Richardson school districts allow both.

DeEtta Culbertson, a TEA spokeswoman, said excluding seniors who failed a state exam is not an unusual practice.

"They believe that the kids who are participating are the ones that earned it," she said.


Difficult to handle



But for students and parents, the exclusion is difficult to handle.

"That's like taking their spirit," said Terry Tucker, whose daughter did not pass the science portion. "They've worked for four years for that moment."

Ms. Tucker said her daughter, Tamara Roberts, cried for two days and even vomited when she got the news that she couldn't graduate. She said her daughter now has to postpone attending El Centro College.

Tamara, 17, who tried to pass the science test five times, said it only seemed to get harder.

"I want to walk across that stage," said the Bryan Adams student. "I want them to call my name, too."

Michael Burney, also a Bryan Adams senior, tried to pass the science exam four times. He plans to take it again in July.

"Sometimes it makes me feel like all I've done – it's a waste of time," said Michael, who will delay plans to attend Lincoln Tech in Grand Prairie.

Meanwhile, families have been left to cancel graduation parties and absorb a financial hit. Kendra Rainey spent $250 on a graduation package that included her gown and announcements. She also bought senior pictures for $209 and a senior lunch for $13.

Several parents and students showed up at a Dallas school board meeting Wednesday night with a few homemade signs. One read: "12 years for what? To be kicked to the curb at the end!"

Patricia Rainey, Kendra's mother, said she predicts the dropout rate will increase as students give up on ever passing the test.

"They're always hollering about kids dropping out of school, but look what they're doing," she said.

E-mail tdhobbs@dallasnews.com
TAKS IMPLICATIONS
This is the first school year that seniors must pass the TAKS to graduate. Here is a look at some area districts:
School district Number of seniors Number who failed TAKS % not graduating
Arlington 3,351 151 4.5% *
Cedar Hill 447 14 3%
Dallas 7,000 697 10% *
Denton 765 17 2.2%
DeSoto 460 8 1.7%
Duncanville 644 18 2.8%
Frisco 639 20 3.2%
Grapevine-Colleyville 950 4 0.4%
Garland 3,190 58 1.8%
Lancaster 301 19 6.3%
McKinney 762 9 1.2%
Mesquite 2005 37 1.8%
Plano 3,220 17 0.5%*
* Approximate number of seniors
SOURCE: Dallas Morning News research
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/052005dnmettaksgrads.c48da1b3.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:25 PM 2 comments Links to this post

Pat Kossan
The Arizona Republic
May. 13, 2005 12:00 AM

Try scoring a 59 percent on a reading test, and most high school teachers would flunk you.

But that is now a passing grade on the reading section of the high school AIMS test for the Arizona's Class of 2006. You can now get 60 percent correct on the math section and still pass.

This year's junior class is the first that must pass the reading, writing and math high school AIMS test to get a diploma. They got a considerable break Thursday after state officials reviewed their spring test results and then officially lowered the score needed to pass the exit exam, whose full name is Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards.

With the help of the new, lowered passing scores, and after taking a third crack at the high school AIMS test, an estimated 61 percent of the Class of 2006 passed. That's up from the 43 percent passing rate for the fall 2004 tests.
On Thursday, after two days of deliberations and on the advice of a teacher committee and testing experts, the Arizona State Board of Education reduced the passing score for math to 60 percent correct from 71 percent. It also reduced the passing score for reading to 59 percent correct from 72 percent.
But that isn't the only reason for the jump in the percent of students passing the test.

• The number of students enrolled in the Class of 2006 also fell. It dropped to 63,500 during 2005 spring testing from 67,853 on the first day of the exam in spring 2004.

• State officials made the test easier, better matching the questions to what students are learning in the classroom.

• Districts scrambled to add teacher training, special courses dedicated to getting students to pass the test, and free tutoring.
Now, the Legislature wants to help, too. It was close Thursday night to passing a bill that would raise the AIMS scores of kids who pass core high school classes with A's, B's or C's.
Despite the flurry of efforts to get more kids to pass the exam and get a diploma, lowering scores and adding points for course work will help only the small number of students already close to passing the test, experts said. Students still lagging far behind will have to study their way to a passing grade and do much better on their final two AIMS attempts before graduation day.
Most Arizona State Board of Education members said lowering the scores would look as if they were lowering the bar and backing off high standards for high school graduates, but still they voted 9-1 to do it.
Member Michael Crow, Arizona State University president, did not attend the deliberations or vote.
Only Arizona state schools chief Tom Horne voted against lowering the passing scores and said that students already are improving without the change.
Horne said that about 55 percent of the Class of 2006 would have passed the AIMS without lowering the scores and they have two more times to take it.
"The students already are doing a lot better by virtue of our tutoring programs and the schools' efforts and student motivation," Horne said. "I believe that will be clouded by people focusing on the percent they need to get correct."
But Horne got little backing from fellow members of the State Board of Education. Some questioned the validity of using the ever-changing high school AIMS test as the only door to graduation, while others said the state hasn't fulfilled its duty to reach the poorest students in the poorest and most poorly equipped schools.
State Board President Matthew Diethelm has been a strong supporter of using AIMS as an exit exam, but in the end couldn't imagine keeping nearly half the Class of 2006 from getting a diploma.
Diethelm said he was frustrated that state education officials hadn't done enough to help students at the very bottom of the heap.
"This is the fair and correct thing to do no matter what the perception of those who haven't been involved in the process," Diethelm said.
Jesse Ary, the only African-American and minority on the 11-member board, said more than just lowering the passing score needs to be done for students unable to pass the test.
Ary said the test needs to be carefully examined for cultural bias and that state must spend more time and money on its poorest students.
"The best ways to elevate the best of our students is to find ways to elevate the least of our students," Ary said.

Reach the reporter at pat.kossan@arizonarepublic.com.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0513scores13.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:26 AM 0 comments Links to this post

79th LEGISLATURE
Roundup: Revisions to top 10% law on hold; Senate: Vote where it's convenient
Thursday, May 19, 2005

HIGHER EDUCATION

Revisions to top 10% law on hold

It's anybody's guess whether lawmakers will revise a law guaranteeing students in the top 10 percent of their Texas high school graduating classes admission to any public college or university in the state.

The latest twist: On Wednesday, Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos, D-Austin, put a 48-hour hold on a House-passed bill that would allow campuses to limit top 10 percent students to half the freshman class. That means the Senate Education Committee cannot consider House Bill 2330 until 10 a.m. Friday. The panel had planned to take up the measure today.

Barrientos was the Senate sponsor of the top 10 percent law when it was enacted in 1997.


ELECTIONS

Senate: Vote where it's convenient


Voters would be able to cast ballots at select polling sites anywhere in their county, instead of just in their neighborhood, under legislation approved unanimously Wednesday by the Senate.

Frank Madla, D-San Antonio, the Senate sponsor of House Bill 758, said the measure allows for county election officials to try out the change in some elections. Under current law, early voting is allowed outside precincts; but on election days, voters can cast their ballots only in their precinct.

The idea: More voters will turn out if they can vote at the the most convenient place.


HONORS

Ronald Reagan highway in works


The latest, and probably last, attempt to name a highway for former President Reagan was approved Wednesday by the Texas Senate without so much as a whimper of opposition.

Earlier this spring, proposals to name highways in Houston and streets in Austin, Williamson County and elsewhere prompted lively and emotional debate thanks to insistent opposition from Democrats. They offered unsuccessful amendments to name them instead for Democrats such as former President Johnson and former Govs. Ann Richards, Preston Smith and Dolph Briscoe, among others.

Wednesday, the Senate unanimously approved House Bill 55, which would name a portion of Interstate 20 that runs between the Tarrant-Parker county line and Grand Prairie as the Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway.

Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos, D-Austin, voted for the bill while holding his nose.

INVESTIGATIONS

More money for integrity sleuths


House and Senate conferees on the state budget have agreed to increase funding for Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle's Public Integrity Unit, the sleuths who investigate politicians.

The additional funding has to be used to investigate and prosecute insurance fraud, not to investigate public officials. Insurance and tax fraud are two other areas that the unit has authority over.

Under the House version of the budget, the unit's funding would have been increased to $3.3 million a year for the next two years, allowing for an additional forensic analyst position. The Senate version would have jumped it up even even more to add two full-time forensic analysts and a part-time law clerk.

Some House members have been less than enamored with the unit for its investigation of House Speaker Tom Craddick, aides to powerful GOP U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, and a Republican-business political action committee.

Earlier in the legislative session, rumors swirled that funding for the unit might be slashed in reprisal.


CONFRONTATION

Tow truck drivers want answers


Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, was confronted Wednesday morning by angry tow truck drivers outside his Capitol office.

Whitmire said the group of Houston wrecker owners demanded to know why he is continuing to support legislation on Houston's Safe Clear program, which allows disabled cars to be towed quickly from expressways as a safety measure.

"They wouldn't take 'no' for an answer," Whitmire said. "They wouldn't let it go. It was just me and them. . . . I was getting a little concerned, frankly, because of their attitude."

An aide summoned state troopers, who promptly ushered Whitmire into his office and dispersed the drivers.

Whitmire said the drivers were upset because they have not been included as contract operators in the Safe Clear program.


WINE

Industry gets help from the House


It's hard to promote the state's wine industry if people can't find the wineries.

The Texas House on Wednesday tentatively approved legislation to change that, authorizing the wineries to advertise where customers can buy their wines and giving the state Transportation Department the authority to erect signs to direct traffic to wineries.

However, the House repealed a section allowing wineries to sell beer in wet areas if food is served.

It also decided that for a wine to be labeled a Texas wine, at least 75 percent of the grapes have to be grown in Texas. Some members wanted to drop that to 50 percent.


Quote of the day


"Mr. Speaker, did a fire alarm go off?"

Rep. Harold Dutton

The Houston Democrat made the comment after dozens of lobbyists left the House gallery en masse when a point of order derailed a proposal to allow statewide franchises for television providers.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/05/19LegeBriefs.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:01 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Proposal added to TEA bill; home-school plan also resurrected

07:59 AM CDT on Thursday, May 19, 2005

By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – Contested legislation that would allow low-income and at-risk students in Dallas and other urban school districts to transfer to private schools at state expense was added by a House committee Wednesday to an unrelated bill reauthorizing the Texas Education Agency.

The private school voucher proposal was approved as part of the TEA measure by the House Public Education Committee, which passed a nearly identical voucher bill this month that died before it was considered by the full House.

The proposal would enable thousands of students in Dallas, Fort Worth and at least five other urban districts to attend private schools as long as those schools meet certain standards, such as annual testing of students.

Committee members also resurrected another measure that was presumed dead – legislation that would allow about 2,000 home-school students to take some classes and participate in extracurricular activities at regular public schools.

That proposal by Rep. Brian McCall, R-Plano, was substituted for an unrelated Senate bill that governed payment of tuition to school districts by nonresident students. As now written, the Senate bill would allow home-school students to enroll in a public school for one or more classes – such as chemistry or a foreign language – and would increase funding for districts based on how many of the students they educate.

Both bills face a Tuesday deadline for passage by the House.

Approval of the voucher plan drew sharp criticism from voucher opponents, while groups supporting vouchers applauded the panel for letting the legislation go forward.

"School choice opens the door to a brighter future for many children," said Texas Public Policy Foundation President Brooke Rollins. "Chairman [Kent] Grusendorf and his colleagues on the House Education Committee should be praised for bucking the special interests that have for too long held back the needs of Texans." The foundation is a conservative think tank based in Austin.

The Texas Freedom Network, which battles with conservative groups over education issues, said the voucher plan is a "reckless" scheme that could jeopardize the existence of the state agency that oversees public schools in Texas.

"The committee chose today to hold all Texas schoolchildren and the TEA hostage to the wishes of wealthy political donors who want taxpayers to subsidize tuition at private and religious schools," said Kathy Miller of the freedom network, referring to campaign contributions from key GOP donors who support vouchers.

Those concerns may prove to be unfounded as the Senate author of the TEA bill promised Senate Democrats that he would kill the measure if the House used it as a vehicle to launch a voucher program. The promise was made shortly before the Senate approved the "sunset" legislation, which reauthorizes the agency.

Opponents – including virtually every public education group in the state – said the voucher plan would deal a huge blow to public schools, depriving them of millions of dollars at a time when many districts are cutting programs and employees to make ends meet.

Rep. Linda Harper-Brown, R-Irving, author of the voucher language, has pointed out that students she is targeting are those in greatest need of help because they are poor, at risk of dropping out, in special education or are victims of school violence.

Further she said, her legislation limits the number of students who would be eligible for vouchers to 5 percent of each district's enrollment. That figure represents about 30,000 students statewide.

A Legislative Budget Board fiscal note on the bill indicated that if 15,000 students take advantage of the voucher option, the seven school districts would lose nearly $70 million a year in funding.

The home-school legislation could prove significant in future years, considering that at least 160,000 children in Texas are taught at home.

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

E-mail tstutz@dallasnews.com


------------------------------------------------------------------------
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/051905dntexvouchers.bf43ed5c.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:53 PM 0 comments Links to this post

79TH LEGISLATURE

At-risk students would benefit from plan, though it faces long odds on approval.
By Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, May 19, 2005

Efforts to send at-risk students in Austin and other urban areas to private schools with public money were revived at the Capitol on Wednesday, but the proposal still faces long odds as the legislative session winds down.

Conservative lawmakers and advocates have long tried to create a voucher program in Texas but have met steady resistance from school and parent groups, Democrats and rural legislators.

"We really have a problem in our urban schools," said Rep. Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington, the chairman of the House Public Education Committee. "We need to provide these children another opportunity to succeed."

Grusendorf's committee tacked a pilot voucher program onto Senate Bill 422, which allows the Texas Education Agency to stay open. But the lawmaker who is carrying that measure in the Senate has assured voucher opponents that he will not accept the change.

Despite those hurdles, the vote by the education committee illustrated the determination of key House member to push vouchers.

The pilot program would allow students in the state's largest school districts to transfer to another public school or attend a private school and use public money to pay at least some of the cost.

Students qualifying for the program would include dropouts, special-education students, students who speak limited English or those who are victims of assault at the hands of another student. Also qualifying would be students whom the state considers to be at risk of dropping out or who come from families with incomes that are no more than twice the amount that would qualify them for reduced-price meals at schools.

No more than 5 percent of a district's students could get a voucher.

A similar measure that would have affected an estimated 15,000 to 19,000 students was approved by the House education committee but was not considered by the full House before a legislative deadline stopped it last week.

A preliminary Legislative Budget Board analysis of that plan said it would save the state about $2 million the first year but that it would cost the state almost $9 million a year by 2009.

It warns that the cost could be much higher if students who attend private school briefly enroll in public school in order to receive a voucher, then go back to private school.

The analysis said the bill would cost the state after the first couple of years because an increasing number of students who otherwise would pay to attend private school would use the vouchers.

It also said local districts would lose $69 million a year because their funding is based on enrollment, and as enrollment shrinks, so does funding. The state would continue spending most ofthat money but would send it to private schools.

"The committee chose today to hold all Texas schoolchildren and the TEA hostage to the wishes of wealthy political donors who want taxpayers to subsidize tuition at private and religious schools," said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, which monitors social conservatism in government.

Even if the Senate bill stalls because of vouchers or other provisions, lawmakers are expected to find other legislation to keep the education agency operating.

jembry@statesman.com; 445-3654


http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/05/19vouchers.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:30 AM 0 comments Links to this post

COMMENTARY-OPINION
Bishops pushing school vouchers
By Guillermo X. Garcia
Express-News Austin Bureau

AUSTIN — May 19, 2005 - Texas Catholic bishops have launched a statewide effort targeting lawmakers, many of them Catholic, whom the bishops believe can be persuaded to vote for an expanded school voucher program, lobbyists for the church acknowledged Wednesday.

As part of that effort, San Antonio Archbishop José Gomez wrote to a number of Bexar County lawmakers last week saying it was his "personal expectation" that they would support voucher programs.

The House education committee Wednesday passed a voucher proposal for a 12-year pilot program authored by Rep. Linda Harper-Brown, R-Irving, sending it to the House floor.

Two lawmakers who oppose voucher programs said they were disappointed by the tone in the archbishop's letter, which they termed threatening and intimidating.

"Most people don't respond well to threats, veiled or otherwise, and I take this (letter) as a threat," said one lawmaker, who described himself as a devout Catholic, and asked not to be named.

Deacon Pat Rodgers, communications director for the Archdiocese of San Antonio, said Gomez's intention was not to intimidate or threaten but to ask legislators to consider alternatives to public education.

He said Gomez wants quality education available to all, and "if he doesn't advocate for Catholic education, who will?"

Brother Richard Daly, executive director of the Texas Catholic Conference, said the group sent the names of targeted legislators to their home dioceses.

"We are coordinating this statewide," he said. The voucher issue "one of our legislative priorities."

Some legislators who received the letter said they didn't feel intimidated by it.

But those legislators also said that they were not persuaded by Gomez's argument.

"I wasn't intimidated by the letter, but it was quite a direct message, no minced words," San Antonio Democrat Rep. Carlos Uresti said. "I respect (Gomez's) position, and I appreciate his passion, but with all due respect to the archbishop, he did not change my mind. I opposed vouchers before the letter, I continue to oppose vouchers after the letter."

On the heels of the letter, James Leinninger of San Antonio, a wealthy physician whose CEO Foundation is sponsoring 160 Edgewood School District students via a privately funded voucher program at Holy Cross High School, this week personally lobbied lawmakers off the House floor.

Although they appeared to overlap, it wasn't immediately clear if Gomez' letter and Leinninger's lobbying effort were coordinated.

One lawmaker said he felt the efforts were linked.

"As a Catholic, I'm tremendously disappointed to hear that my church has purposefully aligned itself with folks who are strict advocates of the Republican Party," said Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine. "Mr. Leinninger clearly is not bipartisan."

Leinninger, who couldn't be reached for comment, is viewed as a lightning rod for voucher programs, which seeks to use public tax dollars to fund private or faith-based schools.

Harper-Brown said her bill, in the form of an amendment, was added as an amendment to a bill that reauthorizes the Texas Education Agency, which lawmakers must consider before the session ends May 30. Without passage of the sunset measure, the agency ceases to exist.

If approved, the pilot program is estimated to cost $69 million.

The Senate sponsor of the TEA sunset bill, Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, said he will not accept the planned House voucher amendment and would work to strip it from the bill.

Voucher proponents say the goal is to provide a high-quality education for students from lower socio-economic levels who could not otherwise afford private school tuition. They view vouchers as providing competition to public schools and force greater accountability in the public education system.

Opponents say the public education system is hemorrhaging from a lack of financial resources and claim that voucher programs seek to "cherry pick" prized students, while leaving behind special needs students, who require more money to educate.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

ggarcia@express-news.net   

The Associated Press and Staff Writer J. Michael Parker contributed to this report from San Antonio.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/stategov/stories/MYSA051905.1A.lege_voucher_archbishop.28a6d0c40.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:31 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Spent time in Georgia this past week. The changing demographics are definitely impacting outcomes. They're registering, for example, a phenomenal 300% increase in the Latino population—virtually all immigrant and poor. They are concentrated in the poultry, carpet, and farming industries. They are mostly all Mexican and first generation with virutally no Mexican/Mexican American middle class. It breaks up the black-white dynamic and introduces a new mix, as well as new challenges. The upside is that Georgia has no history with Mexicans/Mexican Americans and despite fears of this new diaspora, hope also seems to exist coupled with a will on the part of many in power to do something positiive about this. Have had Georgia on my mind....
-Angela


Some minorities have less than half a chance to earn a diploma on time.
Paul Donsky - Staff
Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Less than half of Georgia's black and Hispanic students graduate from high school within four years, according to a study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University.

The report, to be released Thursday during a conference at Atlanta's Spelman College, found that 47 percent of the state's black students and 43 percent of Hispanic students graduate on time, compared with 64 percent of non-Hispanic white students.

The study, which looked at graduation rates across the South, is based on 2002 data, the latest available.

"A 50-50 chance for minority students . . . is just totally unacceptable," said Dan Losen, a co-author of the report.

Georgia's overall graduation rate of 58 percent ranked below the average of 65 percent for the Southern region, which includes 16 states and the District of Columbia.

The study also found that DeKalb County had the lowest overall graduation rate, regardless of race and ethnicity, among the five largest Georgia school systems, with 51 percent of students finishing high school in four years. Cobb County had the highest graduation rate, 73 percent, followed by Gwinnett County at 71 percent, Fulton County at 68 percent and the city of Atlanta at 52 percent.

In each of the five school districts, black and Hispanic students graduated on time at a much lower rate than non-Hispanic white students.

"Schools are doing very poorly in terms of providing adequate teaching, curriculum and the kind of resources that poor, minority kids need to achieve," said Losen, a senior associate at Harvard's Civil Rights Project.

Educators on the front lines say students who drop out are often ill prepared when they enter high school.

"They come in behind, and it's just difficult to catch up," said James Jackson, principal at Crim High School in East Atlanta.

Losen said schools looking to increase test scores are increasingly forcing low-achieving students out of school.

The Harvard report said students who fail to finish high school will face much lower earning potential and are at greater risk of landing in jail than their peers who graduate.

Losen said he hoped the study serves as a wake-up call.

"Eventually, people are going to see that we need to be graduating far more students than we are," he said.

The study calculated graduation rates by taking the number of students entering high school and dividing by the number of graduates four years later.

McNair High in DeKalb County, for instance, had 505 students in its freshman class the fall of 2001. Only 200 students are expected to graduate Saturday with a diploma --- a rate of 40 percent, said principal Albert Sye.

"That's a disturbing trend," said Sye, who is finishing his first year on the job.

Atlanta-area school officials are trying to address the problem. McNair, for instance, is one of many high schools now offering more nurturing environments for ninth-grade students. McNair also has so-called career academies with themes like communications and the arts, which aim to spark student interest and make learning more relevant.

Atlanta Public Schools will open two new high schools next year. Crim High in east Atlanta will turn into a "non-traditional" school for students who have dropped out or need a flexible schedule to accommodate work or child care schedules.

The new Carver High will feature four small, largely independent mini-schools with different themes, such as performing arts and science and technology. The goal is to create more intimate, and interesting, learning environments that will make students excited to learn.

"Those kinds of ideas show a lot of promise," said Harvard's Losen.

But he said Georgia must do much more, such as offer incentives to recruit and retain quality teachers to work with minority students.

He urged the state to set higher graduation rate targets. Georgia requires high schools to have a graduation rate of at least 60 percent or face sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

"That's an outrageously low goal," Losen said.

A study last year by the Harvard group and other organizations found that Georgia's graduation rate was the fourth worst in the nation.

Dana Tofig, spokesman for the state Department of Education, said state School Superintendent Kathy Cox is determined to improve Georgia's graduation rates. Georgia reported a 65 percent graduation rate in 2004, up from 63 percent in 2003 and 61 percent in 2002.

Tofig noted out that students in grades 3 and 5 now must pass parts of the state curriculum test to be promoted. Eighth-grade requirements are coming next year.

"We want to make sure that kids are ready to move on to high school when it's time to get there," he said.

"We're not happy with the graduation rates, and we want it to get better."

2002 GRADUATION RATE
..............Did not graduate on time..Graduated
SOUTH REGION...... 64.5%..................35.5%
FLORIDA............57.4%..................42.6%
GEORGIA............57.6%..................42.4%
LOUISIANA..........66.4%..................33.6%
MISSISSIPPI........60.7%..................39.3%
NORTH CAROLINA.... 64.6%..................35.4%
---
GEORGIA BY RACE
..............Did not graduate on time..Graduated
Native American....67.3%..................32.7%
Asian..............23.4%..................76.6%
Hispanic.......... 57.6%..................42.4%
Black..............52.6%..................47.4%
White..............36.3%..................63.7%
---
Source: Harvard University
/ ELIZABETH LANDT / Staff

http://www.ajc.com/wednesday/content/epaper/editions/wednesday/news_24a8fde117c2e14300fb.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:44 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Web Posted: 05/17/2005 12:00 AM CDT
San Antonio Express-News

Trying to keep up with education and tax reform efforts in the Texas Legislature is like riding a bucking bronco or attempting to jump on a moving train.

In all three cases, the chances are great for getting left behind in the dust.

While there is agreement that education and taxation in the state require greater equity, there is no clear consensus about how to accomplish both tasks.

And, unfortunately, the need to properly fund education clashes with the Legislature's desire to lower property taxes and avoid other tax increases as much as possible.

That's the situation as differing versions of legislation passed by the House and the Senate head for the conference committee that has the task of reconciling the efforts.

After seeing what the House had produced, we held out hopes that the Senate would arrive at better results. But a statewide property tax that held the potential of more equitable education funding went by the wayside in the Senate. Thus, differences between the two were not so great after all.

Even if legislative leaders pass variations of House Bill 2 and House Bill 3, the education and tax reform bills, this session, they do not provide a meaningful comprehensive reform or a long-term solution to the problems that have bedeviled Texas for a decade or more.

They offer short-term solutions held together with chewing gum and baling wire.

The basic Robin Hood system remains in place, although it affects fewer school districts.

Although property taxes would be cut, less by the Senate bill than by the House version, additional funding for education would come through raising a variety of other taxes, including the cigarette tax and sales tax. Some new form of business tax is inevitable as well.

The smoke won't clear until legislation emerges from conference. Meanwhile, the bronco continues bucking and the train rolls on.


http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/editorials/stories/MYSA051705.06B.education.27ecfbae9.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:29 AM 0 comments Links to this post

May 2005 | Volume 62 | Number 8
Supporting New Educators    Pages 79-81
All About Accountability / NAEP: Gold Standard or Fool's Gold?

W. James Popham
Since 1969, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has periodically tested samples of U.S. students to determine their skills and knowledge in major subject areas. NAEP designers call their assessment program The Nation's Report Card, and, because of the substantial psychometric sophistication they lavish on its tests, regard it as the “gold standard” of education measurement.
Recently, state-by-state NAEP results have been reported alongside the results from the state accountability tests required by No Child Left Behind (NCLB).1  With rare exceptions, far fewer students score “at or above proficient” on the NAEP tests than on the state accountability tests. The national test's results are widely viewed as more credible: People believe that the NAEP is objective and rigorous, whereas state NCLB tests can be soft and self-serving.
I can best explain the flaws in this thinking through a modern-day parable. Imagine that two federal health-related programs have recently been installed in U.S. public schools: One focuses on promoting students' physical conditioning (let's call it “Fitness Forever”), and one focuses on students' auditory ability (let's go with “Hearing Health”). For the Fitness Forever initiative, each state measures every student's physical fitness using its own state-chosen assessments and arrives at its own definition of whether a student is normal, above normal, or below normal. Annually, every state must report the percentage of its public school students who display normal-or-above physical fitness.
In contrast, the Hearing Health program evaluates each state's success according to a nationally collected, sample-based assessment of students' hearing using identical, standardized audiometric tests. On the basis of a prestigious national panel's definitions of normal, above normal, and below normal, federal authorities annually report state-by-state percentages of students whose hearing is classified as normal-or-above.
If state-by-state results on the two assessments were published side by side, would it make sense to use the scores on the nationally administered hearing test to confirm the validity of a state's results on its state-determined fitness test? Of course not! The fitness and hearing tests were designed to satisfy different measurement functions.
The moral of this parable should be apparent: It is absurd to confirm the legitimacy of results derived from one test by using results based on a markedly different test. But, the reader may protest, don't state accountability tests and NAEP tests have the same measurement function: namely, to assess students' math and reading achievement levels? Actually, no.
State accountability tests are designed to detect instructional improvements in a state's public schools. Indeed, NCLB gave each state's educators 12 years to get their students to earn proficient-or-better test scores, stipulating that each public school must make adequate yearly progress in attaining that lofty goal. If a state's NCLB tests are not sensitive enough to detect instructional improvement, then the cornerstone of NCLB's accountability strategy crumbles.
NAEP, on the other hand, was originally designed to serve as an objective, nonpartisan mechanism for monitoring long-term student achievement trends in the United States. NAEP was never supposed to play a role in enhancing the learning of U.S. students. In fact, for more than three decades, those who govern NAEP have unrelentingly resisted any serious effort to make their “gold standard” assessments contribute to improving the instruction taking place in the nation's classrooms. NAEP officials are, above all, devoted to the accuracy of NAEP-based longitudinal analyses. Making NAEP truly sensitive to changes in instruction would be antithetical to the thinking of those who run NAEP.
Yes, NAEP provides educators with the curricular frameworks on which its assessments are based. And in my view, those frameworks are first-rate. But during the nuts-and-bolts creation of NAEP tests, developers take care notto create assessments apt to be meaningfully influenced by instructional interventions. Such instructional sensitivity would diminish the measurement bliss that longitudinal analyses can provide to NAEP psychometricians. Looking back at NAEP results over the years, you'll rarely see anything other than fairly minor fluctuations in performance. So, if you're seeking systematic evidence of long-term instructional progress, don't look at NAEP scores. A more accurate label for this costly federal program would be the National Assessment of Educational No-Progress.
Should the public and education policymakers regard NAEP results as “fool's gold”? Of course not. NAEP has carved out its own distinctive measurement mission. But a test that fulfills one measurement function should not be employed to validate a test that fulfills a different function. When the results of this “gold standard” test are invoked in an attempt to judge the accuracy and credibility of state-level NCLB test results, then the people doing the judging are the fools.


Endnote


1  For example, see Skinner, R. A. (2005, Jan. 6). State of the states. Education Week, pp. 77–78, 80.

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

W. James Popham is Emeritus Professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information studies; wpopham@ucla.edu.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:11 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Studies Suggest the Best Ways to Help Non-Native Speakers Learn English Well
by Susan Black / American School Board Journal
 
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, three teenage Lithuanian boys from different families landed in a small school in rural upstate New York. Their parents, hoping to provide them with the proverbial “better life,” remained in their homeland and put the boys in the hands of the school and foster families.

The three spoke very little English -- they could count to 10 and recite only a handful of words and phrases. They showed up with nothing but tattered copies of Lithuanian-English dictionaries and an unstoppable drive to succeed in academics and sports.

“Everyone in the school and community -- teachers, kids, townspeople -- took the boys under their wing,” the superintendent recalled. “Maybe we were inexperienced and a little naive, but we believed we could put a plan together to help them succeed.”

He was right. A first-grade teacher used picture books and phonics to teach the boys basic English, and other teachers chipped in, constructing vocabulary lists with pictures that corresponded to chapters in their high school textbooks. Some students became buddy-readers for classroom lessons and homework assignments, and still others volunteered to tutor the boys after school.

“It was something to see,” the then-counselor remarked. “These boys, each over six feet tall, practiced long shots on the basketball court, but during time-outs they sat on the bench studying their first-grade books.”

How did things turn out? In high school the boys earned GPAs over 3.5 and passed Regents exams with scores of 92 and above. In college they earned graduate degrees in computer science and business administration. Two went on to play professional basketball in Europe.

Learning English well

Will the 5.5 million English-language learners now enrolled in the nation’s schools have similar opportunities?

Or will their English remain rudimentary, increasing the chance that they’ll languish at the bottom of their class and drop out?

Not just learning English, but learning English well, makes all the difference, says Steven Klein in a 2004 report on language minorities for the National Center for Education Statistics. It’s a distinction that’s increasingly important, thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act’s requirement that schools show adequate yearly progress for their English-language learners, as well as their other students.

And, as Klein and his colleagues report, the distinction is crucial for students:

• English-language learners are more likely to finish high school if they speak English “very well.” Students who say they speak English “not well” or “not at all” are more likely to drop out.

• Spanish-speaking students who do not speak English well are more likely to repeat grades and drop out.

• English learners who speak English “very well” enroll in college at about the same rate as native English-speaking students. Students who have difficulty speaking English are far less likely to try college.

• For Spanish-speaking students, 31 percent who speak English very well sign up for college, but only 6 percent of those who speak little English enroll.

The time factor

But learning English well takes time. The American Educational Research Association (AERA) says students who begin school speaking little or no English can gain reading and spelling skills equal to those of native English speakers in two years -- if they receive “skilled, explicit instruction” in phonics and the recognition of spoken sounds, as well as frequent in-class assessments and daily practice reading in English.

In Philadelphia, kindergarten children from low-income Asian families who received systematic reading instruction and individual tutoring read at close to grade level by the end of first grade. And in Canada, nearly 1,000 non-English-speaking kindergartners who had intensive lessons on word identification, spelling, and reading comprehension achieved on par with their classmates by the time they reached second grade.

Kindergartners who grow up speaking English have a repertoire of 5,000-7,000 words, but many English learners know only a handful of English words. Having these students memorize new words, a common strategy, has minimal effect. Instead, AERA recommends teaching words in context, especially through conversations, stories, science experiments, and other vocabulary-building activities.

English learners also need lessons in English grammar and word order, which are likely to be different from the linguistic structure of their native language. English learners of all ages benefit from the same kind of beginning reading instruction that works for English-speaking children -- but they need more of it, and they need immediate intervention to correct pronunciation and other errors. (For more on literacy, see “Reaching the Older Reader,” April.)

Becoming proficient

Many schools give English-language learners a scant one year to become proficient. But researchers such as Florida State University’s Vickie Lake and N. Eleni Pappamihiel say that’s unrealistic.

English learners can master social English -- or basic interpersonal communication skills, often referred to as “playground English” -- in a year or two. But Lake and Pappamihiel say it takes five to eight years to learn academic English, or cognitive academic language proficiency. And this is the English students need to read textbooks, pass tests, and otherwise excel in school.

Appearances can be deceiving, Lake and Pappamihiel caution, noting that many English learners quickly learn to communicate such things as favorite games and foods. But learning textbook words, such as “ecosystem” and “equation,” takes much more time. They recommend that teachers use visual and contextual clues, such as pictures and labels, to speed up these students’ learning during classroom lessons.

The federal government recently acknowledged it takes more time than previously thought for non-native speakers to learn English.

In February 2004, former Education Secretary Rod Paige introduced a new policy that “adds flexibility” to NCLB’s testing requirements for language-minority students. Schools had been required to test English learners in math and reading during their first year of learning English; now schools have “a little extra time” -- an additional one-year transition period -- to help students learn English.

What works and what doesn’t

But the question remains -- what’s the best way to teach English to English learners?

Some states have allowed voters to decide. California, for instance, passed Proposition 227 in 1998, followed by a student accountability mandate in 1999, requiring that English learners be taught and tested through English-only programs instead of bilingual programs. And Arizona passed Proposition 203 in November 2000, requiring public schools to conduct all instruction in English and placing English learners in “an intensive one-year English immersion program to teach them the language as quickly as possible.”

But some researchers say the English-only approach shortchanges English learners in the long run.

A five-year study by the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence examined 200,000 K-12 Spanish-speaking students’ achievement in a number of urban and rural school sites from Maine to Oregon.

Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier, the project’s principal investigators, reviewed English learners’ scores on standardized tests and found:

• Students in English-only immersion classes showed large decreases in reading and math achievement by fifth grade, compared with students in bilingual classes or classes in English as a second language. Most dropouts came from the immersion group, and those who remained in school through 11th grade fell to the 25th percentile on standardized reading tests.

• English learners who were given ESL content classes for two or three years, followed by immersion in English, improved their academic performance.

• English learners assigned to separate remedial programs remained deficient in overall achievement. Students in language-enrichment programs gained higher proficiency in English than those in remedial programs.

• Students with no proficiency in English who were placed in short-term programs of one to three years achieved far less than those in four-year programs. Four years was found to be the minimum required to raise English learners to grade-level performance.

• English learners schooled entirely in English initially outperformed those schooled bilingually when tested in English, but by the secondary grades, bilingually schooled English learners had higher achievement.

UCLA researcher Kris Gutierrez reached similar conclusions. In a 2002 study of English learners attending California schools, Gutierrez and her colleagues found that, contrary to public opinion, English-only programs “predict a very dismal future” for large numbers of elementary-age students.

School programs that are “subtractive” -- that is, they take away English learners’ native language and use English only for classroom learning and tests -- generally produce negative results, Gutierrez reported. Students are far more likely to master English and have higher achievement when schools use an “additive” approach -- that is, when they are allowed to use their native language while they’re learning English.

A 1974 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court supports that approach. In Lau v. Nichols, the Court found that Chinese students were excluded from educational opportunities, even though they had received the same instruction and materials as English-speaking classmates. The court decided that the Chinese students’ inadequate English left them unable to learn in an equal, fair, or developmentally appropriate manner.

Easing into English

All things considered, English learners seem to fare better when school leaders and teachers are welcoming and willing to help.

Kama Einhorn, a specialist in teaching techniques and teacher training, says schools need to remember that new English learners, especially those who are anxious and afraid, need “a little shelter from the storm.”

She recommends easing them into learning English with these strategies:

• Pair English learners with English-speaking buddies for such things as school tours, social conversations, and paired learning.

• Give English learners picture dictionaries, and label classroom items in both English and their native languages.

• Teach English-speaking students some basic vocabulary in the English learners’ home language, and incorporate classroom learning about the English learners’ culture and community into daily lessons.

• Provide translators for parents at school meetings and during home visits.

• Involve English learners by making lessons challenging but achievable.

• Correct language errors in a helpful, nonthreatening manner.

Remembering the Lithuanian boys in the rural New York school, perhaps the first and best thing schools and communities can do is take their English learners under widespread wings.

Susan Black, an ASBJ contributing editor, is an education research consultant in Hammondsport, N.Y.

Selected references

Einhorn, Kama. “Welcoming Second-language Learners: Terrific Techniques to Ease Students from Every Nation into the School Year.” Instructor, September 2002, pp. 54-55.

Gutierrez, Kris, and others. “Sounding American: The Consequences of New Reforms on English Language Learners.” Reading Research Quarterly, July-September 2002, pp. 328-345.

Klein, Steven, and others. “Language Minorities and Their Educational and Labor Market Indicators -- Recent Trends.” National Center for Education Statistics, June 2004.

Lake, Vickie, and N. Eleni Pappamihiel. “Effective Practices and Principles to Support English Language Learners in the Early Childhood Classroom.” Childhood Education, Summer 2003, pp. 200-2003.

Resnick, Lauren, editor. “English Language Learners: Boosting Academic Achievement.” Research Points: Essential Information for Education Policy.” American Educational Research Association, Winter 2004.

Thomas, Wayne, and Virginia Collier. “A National Study of School Effectiveness for Language Minority Students’ Long-Term Academic Achievement.” Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence, 2002.

© 2005, NSBA
http://www.asbj.com/current/research.html

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

Article Last Updated: 5/15/2005 02:49 AM
Walkout has schools, city at the ready
Downtown rally to protest No Child Left Behind on Tuesday
By Alex Katz, STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area
OAKLAND — City school hallways may be a lot less crowded Tuesday when local activists, union leaders and others are expected to encourage students to walk out of class and attend a "Take Back Our Schools" rally in downtown Oakland.

The event, not sanctioned by the school district, is designed to teach students about what organizers say are threats to public education on the 51st anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which officially abolished segregation in public schools.

In past years, school walk-outs have been common during the spring months in Oakland.

But Tuesday's event, planned by both adults and teenagers, is not a walkout, organizer Michael Siegel said.

"I am not organizing a walkout," Siegel said. "I am organizing a conference on Brown v. Board of Education."

Students who come to the event will hear about the federal No Child Left Behind Act and why the district should ignore the law mandating controversial changes at schools that repeatedly fail to raise test scores, organizers said.

Organizers also plan to demand more funding for California schools and a return of "local control" to the Oakland school district, now run by the state after a massive financial collapse two years ago.

Those issues are relatedto the Brown case because they fit "under the rubric of equal education for all," said Siegel, son of school board member Dan Siegel.

Other school board members didn't buy that explanation.

"This is being organized by adults who are using students as political props," school board member Kerry Hamill said. "I want students to be getting the standards during instruction time. I don't want them getting indoctrinated with somebody else's political view. I just can't say enough bad things about it."

Oakland schools State Administrator Randolph Ward has told campuses that the event is not an authorized field trip.

Official field trips must be approved by school principals. On Friday, the principals of Bret Harte Middle School and Oakland Technical High School said they had received no field trip requests from teachers.

An unsanctioned field trip "becomes a tremendous liability if anything was to happen," Oakland Tech Principal Sheilagh Andujar said.

Ward said he hopes students won't be used for political purposes Tuesday.

"I've seen examples of it in the past and I hope it doesn't continue to be tolerated in the community," he said.

A walkout organized to protest the start of the Iraq war in 2003 turned chaotic when hundreds of students left class.

Students at a protest downtown blocked traffic and smacked passing cars, and bottles were thrown from the crowd toward police. Others stormed a BART station and threw rocks at trains.

By all accounts, a number of students have used past walkouts as an opportunity to ditch school.

Siegel said planners of this week's event have worked to avoid similar problems. About 20 people have been trained as "peace keepers" to make sure there are no conflicts during the event, and teachers will instruct students about the issues of the day in class, he said.

"This is fundamental," Siegel said. "If you go to school every day, it makes sense to take a day to reflect on ... the forces that are affecting your education."

http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/localnews/ci_2736691

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:54 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Friday, May 13, 2005

By CHRISTY HOPPE / The Dallas Morning News


AUSTIN – A few minutes after midnight, the sharp bang of a gavel became the death knell for about 5,000 bills.

It was the deadline for a bill to pass the full House, and it became the clear line between the survivors and (according to their authors) the ideas that were ahead of their time.

The big-ticket items – the $138 billion budget, property tax cuts, school changes, Child Protective Services – had cleared the major hurdles and will continue the sweaty struggle that is the last two weeks of the Legislature's session.

But weary lawmakers Friday were tucking away hundreds of others, like forlorn fans, saying: Just wait till next session.

Bang! Down went a bill to let home-schoolers to attend some public school classes.

Bang! A bill to allow a university student to serve on the board of regents, gone – unless someone can attach it to a Senate bill.

Bang! No clarification of how to measure a knife to determine if the blade is illegally long.

OK, so some bills are more lamentable than others. But not to their authors.

"All these members are disappointed when they don't get their bills up," said House Speaker Tom Craddick. "But ... all the major legislation was passed."

Thus far, the House and Senate have passed a combined 2,340 bills. In 2003, they passed 4,724 new laws, a mark they're unlikely to reach this time. From here on out, everything is an uphill race against the clock.

"This process was meant to be difficult, and I have no problem with that," said Rep. Brian McCall, R-Plano. "Except on my bills."

E-mail choppe@dallasnews.com
LEGISLATURE '05: WHERE THINGS STAND

Deadlines designed to prevent a last-minute legislative free-for-all are looming over Texas lawmakers. The first major one passed late Thursday, when any bill originating in the House had to pass that chamber to become law. Here's where some major legislation stands with the ultimate deadline – the May 30 end of the session – just a little over two weeks away:
TAXES AND SPENDING

$138 billion budget: House and Senate members are meeting this weekend to negotiate a compromise on the one bill they are constitutionally required to pass.
Status: Alive

Limit property appraisal increases to 5% annually: A major defeat for Gov. Rick Perry.
Status: Dead

Gambling initiatives to allow slot machines, casinos and electronic bingo: Social conservatives overcame an expensive lobbying effort.
Status: Dead

Lower the limit on how much local government revenue can increase, and allow voters to rescind the increase: Local governments are fiercely fighting this effort.
Status: Alive

Cut property taxes by raising sales and business taxes: A key to the school-finance fight; can lawmakers reach a deal in time?
Status: Alive
SCHOOLS

Ban on "sexually suggestive" cheerleading: The Senate has no appetite for it.
Status: Dead
EDUCATION

Revamp school finance, raise teacher salaries, start school later, and create a merit pay system: A court order and political chaos could hang in the balance.
Status: Alive

Allow home-schoolers to participate in public school activities: Time ran out for Rep. Brian McCall, R-Plano.
Status: Dead

Give public money to students in low-performing schools for private school tuition: Vouchers, always a contentious issue, are a priority for conservatives.
Status: Critical condition

Restrict the use of the "top 10 percent" rule for automatic college admissions: The House and Senate must reach a deal.
Status: Alive
SOCIAL ISSUES

Ban gay marriage and civil unions through a constitutional amendment: After a bruising fight in the House, no senator has picked up the amendment as a sponsor.
Status: Critical condition

Allow a legal defense for marijuana if used for chronic medical conditions
Status: Dead

Mandate parental consent, instead of notification, for minors to have an abortion
Status: Critical condition

Allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions that end a pregnancy
Status: Dead
LAW AND ORDER

Compensation for wrongly convicted
Status: Alive

How to comply with a Supreme Court ruling on the execution of the mentally retarded
Status: Dead

Create the offense of life without parole in capital murder cases: The U.S. Supreme Court gave life to the issue by barring execution of killers younger than 18.
Status: Alive
GOVERNING THEMSELVES

Shut down use of corporate money and late stealth attack ads
Status: Dead

Mandate lawmakers votes on most matters be recorded
Status: Critical condition
YOUR POCKETBOOK

Let Texans order cheaper drugs from Canadian pharmacies
Status: Dead

Make the Texas Residential Construction Commission more consumer friendly: New homebuyers have complained, but developers won this round.
Status: Dead
BUSINESS ISSUES

Ban on Internet hunting by prohibiting for-profit use of camera-mounted rifle
Status: Alive

Worker's compensation reform
Status: Alive
SOCIAL SERVICES

Hire more investigators while privatizing parts of child and adult protective services: Budgetary issues are hanging up a deal on this issue, designated an "emergency" by Gov. Rick Perry.
Status: Alive

Christy Hoppe
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/legislature/stories/051405dntexdeadalive.a5bc07bd.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:45 PM 0 comments Links to this post

May 16, 2005
Recruiters Over Teachers and Students
How Many Schools Left Behind?

By JESSIE MULDOON

THE NO Child Left Behind Act is the Bush administration's deeply flawed legislation that claims to be the solution to the many problems of public education. Signed into law in January 2002, it won bipartisan support--most notably, from liberal Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy.

NCLB promised to close the achievement gap between middle-class suburban students and those at under-funded inner-city or rural schools. Bush and others spoke of accountability and equity, but the critics of NCLB saw through the rhetoric for what the law really is--an attempt to privatize education and transfer the responsibility and cost of educating our children from the federal government to individual and often impoverished school districts.

NCLB is built around the use of standardized tests--with the promise that gaps in testing will be gone by 2014. Progress toward this goal is to be measured by Average Yearly Progress (AYP) scores, with sanctions imposed on schools that don't make the annual goals.

The law promises parents that their children will be taught by "highly qualified" teachers and allows them to request a transfer to a different school. The law opens the door to vouchers and charter schools, threatens to privatize services currently provided by unionized public school employees and welcomes faith-based groups into school programs. But the real centerpiece of NCLB is standardized testing.

 

* * *



THE NATIONAL Education Association (NEA)--the country's largest teachers union--has filed a lawsuit against NCLB, charging that due to under-funding, the law forces states and school districts to comply with impossible demands. School districts are required to implement curriculum, structure and restructure programs, and hire or lay off employees.

Since 2002, shortfalls in federal funding for NCLB are estimated at $27 billion. Ultimately, state governments have made up the difference, putting a further strain on their budgets. This burden has caused a quiet rebellion against the law. The state governments of Michigan, Texas and Vermont are protesting the law and participating in the lawsuit.

However, teachers have a joke about this question: "Republicans won't fund No Child Left Behind, and Democrats say they will. We don't know which is worse." The point underlying the joke is that there's no reason to believe that NCLB, even fully funded, would really improve the educational system.

For one thing, NCLB's overemphasis on testing forces teachers to "teach to the test"--by focusing mainly on areas covered in the standardized tests. Currently, math and reading are the most-tested areas--so social studies and science, and even more so, art and music, are shoved to the side.

Most education experts believe that an educational program has to be balanced. Cutting the arts or history to make way for test prep will likely improve a student's test scores--as will eliminating libraries so that a school can buy required test prep materials or replacing a literature class with a one-size-fits-all scripted reading curriculum. But this does little for students beyond helping them "bubble in" answer sheets.

What does testing really tell us? Crudely, it shows little more than how well a student takes a test and how well a teacher prepared their class for the test.

In fact, testing is big business. Testing companies--especially the ones that also publish textbooks--make huge profits from the tests and supplementary materials that schools are often forced to purchase. According to the article "Testing Companies Mine for Gold" from Rethinking Schools, the two largest testing companies, Harcourt and McGraw-Hill, are billion-dollar giants.

In the same article points out another profitable element of the testing industry: scoring. The General Accounting Office report on NCLB estimates that it costs approximately $7 to score a test with open-ended questions, compared to $1 each for scoring tests with all multiple-choice questions. It is no surprise, then, that under-funded school districts opt for the cheaper, but less meaningful, multiple-choice tests.

 

* * *



WHAT HAPPENS when a school "fails"? If a school falls short of its AYP goals two years in a row, it becomes a "Program Improvement" (PI) school. PI schools become subject to a complicated, high-pressure timeline in which they are set up to fail. By law, if PI schools don't make satisfactory progress--as measured by NCLB--at the end of four years, they face major restructuring.

PI schools are supposed to be entitled to extra resources to help them catch up. Do they get those resources? Not likely--hastening the school's restructuring.

In Oakland, Calif., by December 2004, the district was gripped by the fear of restructuring under NCLB. In the midst of heated and controversial contract negotiations with the teachers union, the state-appointed district administrator--pointing directly to language in NCLB--announced that 13 "Year Four" schools would be converted into charter schools.

Becoming a charter school is one of the NCLB options for a "Year Four" school--along with reconstitution, when the entire staff of a school is transferred, and a new staff is brought in. In many cases, charter schools are non-union, and sometimes even run by for-profit companies.

The most famous charter school corporation is Edison Schools, which was affiliated to Gap Corp. Edison was touted as the solution to the problems in public education when it took over several elementary schools in San Francisco in the late 1990s. But within a couple years, the schools were faring no better, and many suffered from massive teacher turnover.

In Oakland, the state administrator tried to play a clever shell game. Most of the 13 schools on the list to become charters were to be governed by a new company launched and staffed by...the Oakland Unified School District itself!

The school district described these schools as "internal charters"--something that the California Teachers Association says is illegal and needs to be negotiated through the regular bargaining process. This is precisely what school administrators are trying to avoid.

Activists partly backed the district off its drive to charterize. Currently, five of the original 13 schools will not become charters. Teachers were able to prove that they could meet the requirements to restructure by extending the school day (optional, with pay) and reducing class sizes. This was a small but significant victory.

Nationally, the NEA's lawsuit is drawing attention to the flaws in NCLB. It is highlighting what school districts have had to cut--arts, music, extended-year programs--in order to comply with the law. Fighting against these harsher elements of the law calls NCLB into question as a whole.

Some educators are working to reform the law. But tying funding to scores, punishing teachers and students in the most difficult districts and privatizing public education are not things that can be reformed--nor is the Bush administration likely to let go of these provisions easily.

Pushing for reforms may put a dent in No Child Left Behind, but ultimately, the law has to be scrapped.

Full funding of quality education should be a top priority. Money should flow into the schools until every child has what they need, until every teacher has all the resources and space they need, and until every school is renovated or rebuilt into a safe, asbestos-free learning environment.

Why doesn't this happen? The politicians say, "You can't just throw money at the problem." Instead, they blame the teachers, scapegoat students and parents, and test, test, test. In fact, the U.S. government has always been willing to throw money at the Pentagon, and corporations and the wealthy in the form of tax breaks. But when it comes to education, health care and other services that impact our human and civil rights, they say no. We shouldn't stand for it.


How the law aids military recruiters

ONE LITTLE- known provision of NCLB requires high schools to turn over names, phone numbers and addresses of all students to the military, or risk losing NCLB funding. Parents have the right to opt out, and many school districts have organized to educate students and families of their rights.

In Montclair, N.J., schools tell parents about the requirement as soon as their child enters 9th grade and follow up with letters home and reminders. The school district reports that at last count, 92 percent of families had requested that their child's information not be sent to the military. At many high schools in the Bay Area, teachers have organized similar opt-out campaigns.

With the military regularly falling short of its recruitment goals, this NCLB provision is becoming even more important to the Bush administration. The movement to kick recruiters off campuses is a natural ally to the teachers' unions and parent organizations opposing No Child Left Behind.

Jessie Muldoon is a teacher in Oakland and member of the Oakland Education Association.
http://www.counterpunch.org/muldoon05162005.html

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

This report proves my point that if even an ounce of the Texas Miracle were true, that it would show up in improved preparation for higher education of which ACT, SAT, college enrollment, and degree of required remedial instruction are indicators. This is very tragic though not surprising. -Angela

High schools failing college students
Kelly West/AMERICAN-STATESMAN
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz, Laura Heinauer
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, May 15, 2005

Third in an occasional series

It's a Friday morning, and students are filing into Room 122 at the Austin Community College campus on Rio Grande Street. Some of them have tattoos. All of them carry backpacks. It's an unremarkable scene except for one thing:

These college students are here to learn high school math. On this day, instructor Don Lavigne will explain how to calculate the volume of a cylinder. For Corey Ferguson, one of the students, mastering the basics of algebra and geometry is at once satisfying and a tad embarrassing.

"I hate carrying this book around," Ferguson said. " I always try to make sure the cover is hidden, but sometimes you get some 16-year-old kid who sees it, and I just want to be, like, 'Yeah, I don't know fractions, dude.' "

He's not alone in needing remedial education, also known as developmental education.

Half of the students entering public colleges and universities in the state are ill-prepared for college-level work in math, reading or writing and must therefore take at least one remedial course, according to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Ninety percent of the students in higher education in Texas attend public universities and community colleges.

Underpreparation for college is a problem throughout the nation, but Texas faces a special challenge because of its shifting demographics.


Texas' challenges

College enrollment is rising in Texas among those who historically have not attended in great numbers and who often have weaker academic backgrounds, including Hispanics, blacks and low-income students. Even more such students — especially Hispanics, the fastest-growing population group in the state — will have to enroll if Texas hopes to educate its citizens on a par with other states.

And so, the demand for remedial education is likely to increase.

But the harsh reality is that academic success eludes most students taking such courses. Just 16 percent of underprepared students in Texas earn a certificate, a two-year degree or a four-year degree within six years of enrolling, compared with 47 percent of college-ready students.

Improving the success rates for developmental education will take time, money and a multifaceted approach. Among other things, scholars recommend more tutoring by faculty members and fellow students, creation of formal study groups, more frequent academic advising sessions, better preparation in middle school and high school, and intensive study sessions between high school and college to shore up areas of weakness.


Going the wrong way

In some ways, Texas is heading in the wrong direction. A survey by the coordinating board found that colleges have reduced the frequency and amount of advising they provide in recent years. In 2003, the state Legislature cut the two-year budget for developmental education by $12 million, to $173 million, even as the demand for such education was increasing. Lawmakers have not finalized a budget for the next two years, but developmental education is expected to remain flat or rise modestly.

Perhaps the most urgent need is for wider recognition of the problem, especially among college officials. The coordinating board found that a third of public colleges listed developmental education as a minor or nonexistent part of their strategic plans.

Raymund Paredes, the commissioner of higher education, says a survival-of-the-fittest approach to developmental education students is simply unacceptable.

"We can't practice what constitutes a kind of academic Darwinism," Paredes said. "We've got to help these students. We should make a commitment as educators that we are going to do everything we can to ensure the academic success of the students we admit. Right now, we're not anywhere close to that."

Paredes plans to convene a summit of sorts on developmental education in the fall, to explain the urgency to college presidents and other campus officials.

ACC officials say developmental education is a high priority on their campuses. About 8,000 of the nearly 30,000 students are involved in remedial studies. One sign of ACC's focus on the developmental mission: Sixty-eight percent of entering students who need remedial courses return the following semester, compared with 65 percent of students who did not receive remediation.


Study groups needed

On the other hand, ACC falls short in using study groups led by a student who has already taken the course to reinforce what students are learning in class. That would be a worthwhile initiative, said Kathleen Christensen, ACC's associate vice president of student services and retention, but study group leaders must be paid, and there isn't money in the budget to do so.

It's not unusual at ACC for a remedial math class to start out with 18 students and wind up with a dozen, the rest having dropped out because of difficulty with the material, distractions at home or pressures resulting from full- or part-time employment. Some students must take a remedial course two or even three times before they pas — a heavy toll in time, money and frustration. Such courses do not count toward a two-year or four-year degree.

"A lot of students have a bitter taste in their mouth about developmental education to start with," Lavigne said. "You take a test, you're told you have to go to basic math — how is that going to make you feel?"

On the recent Friday, five of the original 18 students showed up on time for his class. A few more drifted in as Lavigne reviewed formulas for measuring the volume of boxes, cylinders and spheres. His low-key manner and patient explanations seemed to put students at ease.

"I always thought math was interesting, but I didn't understand it," said Liz Ruggles, a journalism major. "Now I'm getting it."

Anne Praderas, who teaches developmental math at ACC's Northridge campus, said her students often need guidance to improve their study skills.

"Teaching this, it's not so much that you have to be a brilliant mathematician," Praderas said. "You need to be a good teacher. You have to be able to communicate clearly. You have to explain things three different ways."


Students lack skills

In many cases, students taking remedial courses don't lack ability; they lack skills. Sometimes, they've simply forgotten material they learned years ago.

June Reynolds, 40, who is working on an accounting degree, signed up for college-level business math but realized on the first day of class that she wasn't prepared for it. So she switched to a developmental course in elementary algebra.

"I haven't had algebra since high school," Reynolds said. "Luckily, I have an A in the course."

Others have only recently graduated from high school. Alli Crews, who is pursuing a degree in sociology, said math is something she has struggled with since grade school. She said she has probably been taught the same basic principles of algebra six times, but they never seemed to stick. When she found out she would have to take remedial math in college, she was not surprised.

"In the beginning I felt like, 'God, I'm so stupid. I should know this at this point in my life, and I just suck at it,' " she said. "Now I'm starting to figure out that I just wasn't taught right."

Debbie Graves Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency, acknowledged that the coordinating board's findings about the number of students in need of remedial education were troubling, especially because many of these students are just coming out of high school.

Ratcliffe said educators are aware that some classes, such as introductory algebra, are difficult for many students. Increasing class times for algebra and turning it into a two-year course haven't seemed to help, she said. It's too early to tell if the newest strategy — to start teaching basic principles of algebra while students are in elementary school — will succeed.

Several other changes aimed at improving high school education are just beginning. This year's senior class is the first that had to pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test in order to receive diplomas. Those results, Ratcliffe said, should better help educators identify problem areas and develop strategies for improvement.


High school tougher

The state's course requirements for high school students also are beginning to get tougher. This year's high school freshman were the first in Texas who will be required to take an advanced algebra course and an upper-level physics course to graduate.

"After several years of improvement at the lower grade levels, I think the focus is finally beginning to shift to the upper grades," Ratcliffe said, noting how in the last several months, President Bush and U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings have advocated expanding the accountability changes in the No Child Left Behind Act to the nation's high schools.

It's a cause championed in the private sector as well. Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates, who has contributed more than $2 billion to education since 1999, made headlines earlier this year when he said he was "appalled" by the state of high schools in the country.

Gates' focus is on creating small "learning communities" in high schools to promote stronger relationships between students and teachers.

In Texas, Gates' foundationhelped pay for a multimillion-dollar high school redesign and restructuring program launched this year at numerous high schools rated academically unacceptable, including Johnston in the Austin school district.

"Most high schools in Texas won't graduate a single student who will get an engineering degree in a decade," said Geoffrey Orsak, dean of engineering at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "People who walk the halls of the state Capitol don't realize how broadly uneducated the state is.

"Neither higher education nor public education wants to take ownership of these students who have graduated from high school but are not prepared for college. Both need to take ownership."

rhaurwitz@statesman.com; 445-3604

lheinauer@statesman.com; 445-3694

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/metrostate/content/metro/stories/05/15highed.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:08 PM 0 comments Links to this post

For my California colleagues, also take note of a boycott in Oakland, California (posted on my blog last week). I unfortunately do not have the news link to this story.

There’s also another California effort (not related to the Oakland protest, it appears), called the State Campaign for Quality Education. They’re calling for the application of multiple criteria assessment of their state’s exit exam (AB1531). They’re located at the following website.

State Campaign for Quality Education

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:16 AM 8 comments Links to this post

This is an extremely worthwhile piece that ALL should read. -Angela
http://www.mollyivins.com/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=1947
Feature: 5/13/2005

Te$t Market
High-stakes tests aren't good for students, teachers, or schools. So who are they good for?

BY EMILY PYLE / TEXAS OBSERVER

The committee hearing in the basement of the Texas Capitol on February 28 offered a glimpse of what the next phase of public school reform in this country might look like. The House Public Education Committee heard testimony on House Bill 2, an omnibus school finance and reform package. If the bill passes and Texas continues to serve as a national blueprint for school reform, the rest of the country should brace for more tests, with more riding on those tests than ever. The new legislation would inject additional “accountability” into public education, this time by expanding standardized testing in high schools, and tying funding, including teacher salaries, to performance on state exams. Those proposals aren’t popular in many quarters. Eighteen people representing teachers, administrators, parents, and public school advocates testified against the bill. They asked for fewer testing mandates and more public school funding. The critics of the bill are part of a growing movement against the Texas education model, enshrined in the landmark federal law No Child Left Behind. Opponents say the current focus on testing degrades education and drains resources from the neediest schools.

Only one witness testified in favor of the bill. There was a small stir as Sandy Kress came to the microphone; in gatherings like this, he is something of a celebrity. Ten years ago, public school accountability was a vague, unenforceable ideal from free market enthusiasts who wanted to see schools run more like businesses. Kress, a Dallas lawyer, was serving what would be his last, tumultuous term as president of the Dallas school board. Fellow board members were calling the newspaper to denounce him as a racist and a bully. The fortunes of the reform movement and of Kress have risen together. He is one of the principal designers of No Child Left Behind, and has used his knowledge and connections to earn millions as a high-powered lobbyist for test publishers.

Despite the lack of an endorsement from any major Texas education group, passage of HB 2 out of the committee was a foregone conclusion. Accountability, with its powerful allies, seems unstoppable. Its supporters are free market reformers who say test scores bring a needed dose of reality to lazy educational bureaucracies. Others are education reformers who believe that the best hope for poor and minority students lies in the public humiliation of their “low-performing” schools. And a select few enrich themselves supplying the demand public school reform has created for tests, and the tools it takes to pass them. Kress appears to be all of the above.

“A decade earlier, Texas was going backwards,” Kress told the committee. “Graduation rates were going down. Our minority youngsters were going nowhere.” Now, he insisted, because of accountability, schools are better. The committee should go further, and faster—more tests, shorter deadlines, tougher standards. It was a radically different perspective than that voiced by other witnesses. Of course, unlike other witnesses, Kress was not lobbying on behalf of schools, teachers, or students, but a coalition of business interests who have pushed their version of school reform in Texas for more than a decade.

Kress can be an appealing witness—unusually alert and impassioned, with a voice that readily conveys sincerity in the faintest of Dallas inflections. He champions cash incentives for teachers who improve student test scores, but says they should be used primarily to draw talented teachers into the poorest schools. (Business groups use incentives as a means to side-step blanket pay raises, teachers’ groups say.)

Kress plays up the interests of poor and minority students, while soft-pedaling the need for increased funding. Business leaders have thrown themselves foursquare against more money. “I think the business community feels we ought to spend more and more on education,” Kress told the committee. “I think some would be willing to pay more. But I think they all feel very deeply that if they’re going to pay more, they want to see results, they want to see efficiency, they want to see accountability.” HB 2, with its emphasis on test scores and its marginal increases in funding, seemed to be exactly what business leaders wanted. Kress closed with, “Keep up the good work.”

Eleven days later, the Texas House of Representatives approved HB 2, and though the Senate has tinkered with the bill’s financing, the testing provisions remain intact. If it seems peculiar that a system so good for business and so hard on public schools should also be packaged as the best answer for “disadvantaged” students, that’s the genius of Sandy Kress. From his days in Dallas to his tenure in the Bush administration, Kress has pushed accountability as the final solution for poor and minority kids stuck in under-performing public schools. Since returning to Austin and high-profile lobbying firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in 2002, Kress has been teaching businesses to turn a profit helping schools meet the mandates of No Child Left Behind. In the process, he’s made about $4 million in lobbying contracts, in large part from companies that profit from provisions of the law he helped to design. Kress says his clients share his vision of schools where unequivocal standards make educating every student no longer optional.

“When I take on a client, I try to take on people who seem committed to the same goals I have,” says Kress, who agreed to answer interview questions by e-mail. “I expect to be judged by the same standard by which I judge others—has this work contributed to improved educational results for students, particularly disadvantaged students?”

It’s a question that’s still very much up for debate.


In Dallas in the late eighties, Kress was an anomalous figure, a prominent lawyer involved in local Democratic politics—he was elected to chair the Dallas County Democratic Party in 1986—with strong connections in the local, mainly Republican, business community. “Sandy had close ties to business in Dallas,” says Rene Castilla, former president of the Dallas Independent School District’s board of trustees. “They listened to each other.”

It was during Castilla’s term as board president that Kress first began to dabble in school board politics. At the time, Dallas business leaders were worried about the abysmal standardized test scores in the city’s predominantly black schools. “Dallas had a pretty poor reputation for the performance of its schools,” Castilla says. “That didn’t sit well with business. A business community wants to attract new business to the area, and there’s two questions people ask before relocating—housing and schools.”

Accountability was an idea then making the rounds among business leaders. Both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton tried to implement national standards for American education, but attempts to enforce the new rules met with complex partisan opposition and by the early nineties the movement had stalled. Business leaders began to suggest the solution was to treat failing schools like failing corporations: Establish clear-cut standards, monitor whether they were met, and either reward the successful or punish the failures. “Just as businesses are results-oriented, so schools must also be,” Lou Gerstner, then CEO of IBM, wrote in his book Reinventing Education in 1994. “Results are not achieved by bureaucratic regulation. They are achieved by meeting customer requirements by rewards for success and penalties for failure. Market discipline is the key, the ultimate form of accountability.”

Kress presented accountability to the school board in 1990 as a way to simultaneously raise test scores and win the support of business. To a school board then trying to float a hefty bond issue against business opposition, that sounded like a good deal. The board tapped Kress to head a commission that would shape an accountability system for the district. After months of study, the commission proposed a system that rated schools by their test scores, with schools that showed the most improvement getting cash awards of $5,000 to $10,000. Perhaps most importantly, the system would force schools to disaggregate test scores, keeping administrators from disguising low scores for poor, black, or Latino students by averaging them into the general population. The board unanimously approved the commission’s proposals in 1991. The next year, Kress was elected to the school board with the overwhelming support of influential business leaders, including Texas Rangers owner George W. Bush. “Sandy believed minority kids deserved better than they were getting,” says Castilla, who lost the board presidency to Kress in 1994. “He was very hard-working, very zealous about making a difference.”

However, black school board members saw accountability as an attempt to undermine the city’s 1974 desegregation order, which allotted extra money and resources to Dallas’s historically neglected black schools. Kress did torpedo several key components of the desegregation order, heading efforts that slashed more than $15 million from bond proposals for a magnet school in a mostly black part of town. He also sought to limit the money spent on “learning centers” meant to reverse the city’s busing policy by bringing black students back into their own neighborhoods. As board president, Kress brought a hardball style of politics to what had been a sleepy municipal body; black board members accused him of meeting in secret with favored board members and manipulating the board’s committee system to dilute the minority vote. Secretly taped conversations alleged to be between Kress and fellow board member and political ally Dan Peavy supported the accusations. Peavy used racial slurs when describing plans to curb the influence of black board members. Kress’s identity on the tapes was never confirmed, but soon after they came to light in 1995, he announced he would not run for another term as board president. “I have no idea what the next challenge will be,” he told reporters at a press conference in January 1996. “But I am sure there will be one.”

He didn’t have long to wait. A year later, Kress moved to Austin, where he already had friends. In 1993, he had worked with Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock on the first draft of the Texas accountability system, which introduced the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills test. He had briefed George W. Bush on education policy during his 1994 run against incumbent Ann Richards. Once in Austin, Kress helped Gov. Bush lobby for pet reforms like ending social promotion. As a paid consultant for the Governor’s Business Council, Kress traveled across the state pushing Bush’s education agenda. He also served as a board member of the Texas Business and Education Coalition, and a lobbyist for TBEC’s lobbying arm, Texans for Education. By 1998, Kress was working for Akin Gump. Through the firm, Kress held lobbying contracts for McGraw-Hill, the textbook publishing company that had long-standing personal ties to the Bush family. Kress was one of the architects of the Governor’s Reading Initiative, which eventually landed McGraw-Hill the lion’s share of the Texas textbook market.

In 2000, Kress helped Bush craft the education platform that became the centerpiece of “compassionate conservativism” and stumped for Bush’s plan throughout the campaign, telling the story of the “Texas miracle”—rising test scores, happy urban school kids, a bright new future—again and again. When Bush finally secured his victory, he took Kress along with him to Washington, D.C. Once inside the Beltway, Kress played key roles in crafting and passing No Child Left Behind. Officially still a Democrat, he was instrumental in putting together the bipartisan push behind the bill, pulling Democratic lawmakers Ted Kennedy, George Miller, and John Boehner into the president’s court. The law that took shape required states to test every student in the third through eighth grades and once in high school, and publicize the scores. By 2014, all students, including those in special education and those with limited English skills, would have to pass the exam. To that end, the states would establish “adequate yearly progress” or AYP standards. Schools that receive Title I funding—federal aid for schools with high numbers of poor, minority, and at-risk students—would be penalized if they failed to meet the standards for three years running.

Kress continued to promise that high-stakes testing would save poor and minority students by drawing attention to their low scores. Some credit Kress as the original coiner of Bush’s “soft bigotry of low expectations”—the catch-phrase now used to lob a subtle accusation of racism and class-ism at anyone who protests that testing mandates are unfair to those same disadvantaged kids.

he General Accounting Office predicts states will spend between $1.9 and $5.3 billion a year meeting the testing requirement of the law. But that’s only a fraction of the law’s costs; other provisions are even more expensive—and, to the suddenly burgeoning education industry, even more lucrative.

No Child Left Behind requires states to produce “interpretive, descriptive, and diagnostic reports… that allow parents, teachers, and principals to understand and address the specific academic needs of students.” Since few pretend that a standardized test given once a year can do anything so sophisticated, schools are finding they need separate “formative testing programs” to meet the requirement. The formative testing model, according to the test publisher NCS Pearson, is to “teach, assess, report, diagnose, and prescribe.” Pearson, with other publishers, offers a full range of products for every step of the process.

Schools with high numbers of low-scoring students have three years to raise their scores before penalties kick in, and those are also expensive. The so-called “choice” provision, with its passing resemblance to vouchers, has attracted media attention, but has proved unpopular so far. The provision allows students at low-performing campuses to transfer to one of their district’s better performing schools, but only about 1 percent of eligible students made the transfer last year, according to data kept by the U.S. Department of Education. Instead, parents are taking advantage of another provision that requires low-performing schools to provide free after-school tutoring services, using a state-approved, “research-based” tutoring program.

The law also demands a highly qualified teacher in every classroom by the end of the 2006 school year. Though the definition of “highly qualified” is vague, with states setting their own standards of quality, the requirement has opened up a new market in materials geared toward teachers. Most major publishers now offer professional development products and services, some of which provide general training in pedagogy, but many of which merely train teachers to use another of the publisher’s classroom products.

In a time of growing budget crises, few states—let alone districts and schools—have the time or the money to develop the programs that No Child Left Behind makes mandatory, or all but mandatory. That’s where business, and Sandy Kress, come in.


Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law in January 2002. Five months later, Kress registered with the U.S. Secretary of the Senate as a lobbyist for NCS Pearson. Kress specializes in helping his clients tailor themselves to the requirements of No Child Left Behind, something Pearson has done with startling success. A publishing conglomerate that owns The Financial Times and Penguin Books, Pearson had been a bit player in the education market, concentrating on the scoring of standardized tests. In 2000, however, Pearson acquired National Computer Systems, the company that held the contract for designing and scoring the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. Since then, Pearson has built an accountability empire of sorts, becoming the third-largest testing company in the country, behind CTB McGraw-Hill and Harcourt Educational Measurement.

NCS Pearson publishes software systems that allow teachers to create, administer, and score “diagnostic” tests that purport to show how well students are learning by demonstrating in part how prepared they are for state tests. Subsidiary Pearson Educational Measurement holds test design contracts in states with large testing programs, like Florida and Texas. Pearson Education, another subsidiary, publishes reading, math, science, art, and music curricula for grades K-12. Other subsidiaries offer online testing, data management services, and professional training for teachers, including an online master’s degree program. The company claims to have at least one product placed in 50,000 schools nationwide.

Another of Kress’s clients, Educational Testing Services, Inc., also made a sudden market surge in the wake of No Child Left Behind. A non-profit best known as the publisher of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), ETS stayed clear of the commercial testing business for nearly 50 years. Beginning with the spin-off of for-profit subsidiary K-12 Works in 2000, however, ETS has aggressively pursued state testing contracts. The company now holds contracts with New Jersey, Indiana, and the plum of the state testing market, California. ETS also offers a professional development program for teachers and one of the few tests so far available to certify teaching aides.

Another Kress client, Kaplan, Inc., which formerly specialized in prepping students for college entrance exams, now offers a variety of test-related services. These include prep courses tailored to the standardized tests in 13 states and the District of Columbia, “Intervention” programs targeting low-scoring students with skill-drilling software, and professional development courses in which, for roughly $1,000 an hour, Kaplan specialists give teachers tips on how to coach their students to pass the test.

Kress also lobbies for HOSTS Learning, which publishes online testing tools and an associated line of curricular materials and for Kumon North America, a rising star in the brand-new after-school tutoring market. Other clients include Community Education Partners, a for-profit school management company that runs alternative campuses for students with disciplinary problems, as well as companies that help schools and districts collect, manage, and report the volume of data required by No Child Left Behind.

There’s a lot of money in what’s coming to be known as the assessment market, but most of it is going to the handful of companies, like Pearson, who have successfully built up assessment empires. “The top four or five players in the textbook market are also top players in the testing market,” says Mark Jackson, a senior analyst with Eduventures, a firm which tracks trends in the commercial education market. As the focus on testing intensifies, the test prep materials these companies offer are becoming the standard curriculum, especially in poor schools, where the scores are often lowest, and the pressure to raise them most extreme. “It’s a zero-sum game of financing,” Jackson says. “What fits into the testing model gets bought, and what doesn’t, doesn’t.”

But what’s been a boon for a handful of publishers has been a disaster for education, critics say. As pressure to raise scores intensifies, teachers and principals at low-performing schools have found creative ways to raise scores—from encouraging low-scoring students to drop out of school before Test Day to simply erasing and rewriting students’ testing sheets. The most common resort, however, is to drill the reading and math skills covered by the test, to the detriment of other, untested subjects. As an ever-greater percentage of class time goes into test preparation, more money flows to the companies that publish test prep material.

The schools under the most pressure are those that educate large populations of poor, minority, and limited-English students. Ninety-nine percent of the kids in the Laredo Independent School District are Latino; ninety-five percent of them come from families below the poverty level. The district’s test scores are consistently low. “These are kids who often don’t speak English, kids without the kinds of experiences that kids elsewhere may have,” says Laredo ISD superintendent Sylvia Bruni. “They come from homes without books. Some don’t have televisions.” They are, in fact, the disadvantaged kids for whom Sandy Kress has been pitching accountability for nearly 15 years.

Laredo’s third-grade teachers spent the equivalent of one day a week administering either the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test itself or diagnostic “formative assessment” tests this school year, a district-wide testing inventory found. The inventory didn’t count time spent on test prep, which Bruni says is “almost constant”—extended school days, Saturday test prep classes, and a portion of every class, in every subject, every day. Since individual schools purchase most of their test prep materials themselves, Bruni doesn’t have a district-wide figure on how much money is spent. But she says it’s a large percentage of resources that the district—one of the poorest in the state—can ill afford. “The district spends money, the campuses spend money, the teachers spend money,” Bruni says. “It’s a lot.”

Laredo administrators have decided to cut back on practice tests in future years, but the decision is a hard one. Test prep isn’t education, Bruni says, and the time and money spent on it mean that other, more sophisticated curriculum must be dumped. The district is under increasing pressure to raise scores, however. Two of Laredo’s three high schools failed to make adequate yearly progress in 2004, and progress requirements will climb each year. Without extensive drilling, more students will fail the test and the sanctions of No Child Left Behind will kick in. Earlier this year, Laredo ISD joined the National Education Agency’s lawsuit against the Department of Education, challenging the law. “You can’t seem to break the stranglehold,” Bruni says. “The temptation is just to drill. It isn’t meaningful for the kids, but teachers know that the scores will go up.”

If tests are over-emphasized, Kress says, teachers and principals themselves are at fault. “Why do administrators allow test prep materials to dominate the curriculum in schools that serve the poor?” he asks. “Damn it, they’re the ones in charge.” Despite protests from districts like Laredo, Kress is pushing for higher stakes, tougher standards, and swifter retribution against schools that don’t make the grade. Kress was the head cheerleader for proposals from the Governor’s Business Council that wound up in HB 2: requiring a passing score on high school exit exams for course credit (and thus graduation), reducing the deadline for improvement from three years to two, and allowing private companies to take over consistently low-performing schools.

He has also used his position on the Texas Education Commissioners’ Accountability Advisory Committee to push the Texas Education Agency to toughen its accountability rating system. At an advisory committee meeting in March, Kress laid out a proposal under which the percentage of students who must pass the test before a school is rated “acceptable” would jump by 10 points. Rates would then climb five points a year until 2010, when 100 percent of students must pass the reading exam before a school will be considered acceptable. When other committee members called for a more gradual and realistic stepping-up of the rating system, Kress lost his temper. “He threw a tantrum,” says one fellow committee member. “He had a very ideological perspective, and others were trying to introduce some realism. He seemed to be trying to shout us into doing what he wanted. He’s a charming, agreeable, persuasive guy, but in front of an audience he’s not trying to charm, he’s a bully.”


Accountability’s supporters continue to push testing as the surest, fastest solution for the poor kids in weak schools. That a handful of companies are making a killing off accountability, they say, is incidental—just another example of the beauty of the free market system. But a mounting body of evidence suggests the “Texas miracle” Sandy Kress used to sell accountability to the country is a sham. Critics point to Texas’ rising dropout rates and flagging scores on college entrance exams as signs that test-prep-centered teaching is taking its toll on kids—especially those who are black, Latino, or poor.

Almost two out of five Texas high school students never earn a high school diploma, according to a report released this year by the Intercultural Development Research Association, which has tracked Texas dropout rates since 1986. IDRA’s report showed that in 2004, 36 percent of students who were freshman in 2001 were gone by last spring’s graduation ceremonies. That number is down slightly from previous years, but still higher than it was 20 years ago. Attrition rates are highest among minorities, the IDRA report shows, and the gap is growing. In 1986, 27 percent of Anglo students left school without graduating. Last year, Anglo students’ attrition was down to 22 percent, while rates for black students had climbed from 34 to 44 percent, and for Latinos from 45 to 49 percent. The report estimates dropouts have cost the state $500 billion over the past two decades in lost productivity and in the costs of social services, courts, and jails.

Dr. Albert Cortez, director of IDRA’s Institute of Policy and Leadership, is quick to point out that Texas’ dropout trouble predates high-stakes testing. But the tests, far from being a solution, have become part of the problem, he says. Narrowed curriculum bores and daunts some students into dropping out. Students who don’t think they’ll pass the high school test—a requirement for graduation—may stop going to school. Other researchers, including Dr. Angela Valenzuela of the University of Texas and Rice education professor Linda McNeil, say administrators under pressure to raise test scores may push potentially low-scoring students to drop out before the exam.

Despite the emphasis accountability supporters put on “narrowing the achievement gap,” state scores on college entrance exams show minority students losing ground since the tests were instituted. Fewer Texas high school students are taking the SAT and ACT now than 10 years ago, data from the Texas Education Agency shows, and on average they are scoring worse. The average score on the SATs for Latino students has fallen 17 points since 1996. The average score of black students has also drifted down, from 852 in 1996 to 843 in 2003. Only Anglo students show slight improvement, from 1043 to 1051.

Sandy Kress knows the data on high schools isn’t good. His solution is more tests. The gains tests bring in elementary and middle schools are lost in high school, Kress says, because high schools aren’t held accountable. Here in Texas, Kress has agitated to extend standardized testing to high schools. “We still are not where we need to be in terms of college-going rates, particularly for poor and minority kids,” Kress says. “That’s what this secondary school focus is all about. We still have some schools that perform pitifully without consequence.” And if the teaching curriculum has narrowed to suit the demands of the test, Kress says the answer is to test more. “This will make some testing critics cringe, but one thing the accountability system can do with the narrowness problem is have more subjects tested,” he says.

Testing critics do indeed cringe when they imagine what history, science, and art will look like broken down into manageable, multiple-choice, worksheet-length bites. Worse, a recent report by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice suggests No Child Left Behind is exporting Texas-style testing scandals to the rest of the country: In New York, school administrators have been accused of pushing thousands of low-scoring students into high school equivalency programs, where, although they never earn diplomas, they don’t count as dropouts. In North Carolina, eight out of ten elementary school teachers say they spend more than 20 percent of class time preparing for tests. Reports of cheating by principals and teachers have surfaced in more than 20 states.

Bush’s proposed education budget for 2006 echoes Texas’ planned expansion of testing. The bulk of the president’s High School Initiative is $1.24 billion in “research-based interventions” for students at risk of failing the new tests. Few districts have such interventional programs; even fewer know how to go about designing and implementing them. Luckily, most test-publishers already offer their own versions. The jury is still out on whether the tests are good for kids, and whether more tests will be better. But they will be very, very good for business. And, of course, they’ll be good for Sandy Kress.

Emily Pyle is a freelance reporter based in Austin.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:00 AM 0 comments Links to this post

In today's Quorum Report, OLIVEIRA COMMENTS ON LACK OF MINORITIES ON HB2

Public Education vice-chair questions, "Who is going to believe..."

"Minority children make up 60 percent of the students in our public school system, so obviously we have a great stake in any changes made to the school finance system," said Rep. René O. Oliveira, D-Brownsville and Vice-Chairman of the House Committee on Public Education. "Denying minority House members a seat on the education bill conference committee eliminates any voice those children need. Politically, the lack of minorities greatly undermines the credibility of the committee and the legislation. Who is going to believe that the bill is as helpful as it can be to minorities, when minorities had no input in its development?"

No Democrats in the House voted for HB2. http://www.quorumreport.com/ -Angela

79th LEGISLATURE
Craddick and Dewhurst tussle over taxes

Legislative leaders trade jabs over school finance measures.
By W. Gardner Selby
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, May 14, 2005

House Speaker Tom Craddick and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst sniped over differences between House and Senate renditions of tax measures Friday, perhaps signaling that pending negotiations could turn personal and prickly.

Craddick appointed 10 Republican negotiators, including one woman, to tussle with Senate colleagues over House Bill 2, a school reform plan, and HB 3, the multibillion-dollar proposal intended to cut school property taxes by raising sales and tobacco taxes, among other sources of funding.

Asked why no Democrats or non-Anglos made it to the negotiation squads, Craddick said he chose individuals who voted for the proposals after House debate.

Dewhurst, asked if diversity would play into his awaited choice of negotiators, said it would.

"They're going to stack up" differently, Dewhurst said. "Diversity is important."

Craddick, answering reporters' questions, earlier questioned the Senate's decision to put what he termed $4 billion in additional education spending into its version of the tax plan.

He insisted such spending doesn't fit with the topic of HB 3 — "financing public schools in this state and reducing school property taxes," as he described it — though he didn't say precisely why.

He said House leaders have told the Senate as much 50 times.

"You can raise a jillion dollars if you want to raise it in the bill, but it all has to go to property tax reduction," Craddick said. "We've said that all along."

Dewhurst disagreed, saying some $3.2 billion slated for public schools in the proposal will come largely from accounting adjustments and other non-tax elements. Of Craddick, he said, "You know, it's Friday the 13th, anything can happen. Or rather, someone could say anything."

If things blow up on the tax and school measures, Dewhurst said, "It's not going to be the Senate's fault."

Craddick named Rep. Kent Grusendorf of Arlington to lead House negotiators on HB 2. Others named to that conference panel: Reps. Dianne Delisi of Temple, Bill Keffer of Dallas, Dan Branch of Dallas and Rob Eissler of The Woodlands.

The speaker named Rep. Jim Keffer, R-Eastland, to lead House negotiators on HB 3. Keffer will be joined by Reps. Warren Chisum of Pampa, John Otto of Dayton, David Swinford of Amarillo and Charlie Geren of Fort Worth.

Dewhurst has not yet named Senate negotiators.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/05/14dewhurst.html

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

EDITORIAL BOARD / Austin Am-Statesman
Saturday, May 14, 2005

Texas needs a fair college admissions law that attracts the state's brightest and best students from across its vast geographic areas. It should be an admissions law that promotes ethnic and racial diversity and gives students who tackle tougher courses an advantage over those who opt for easy ones.

The Texas Senate found a way to do just that — it took a good law and made it better. Not so the Texas House of Representatives, whose members took a narrow approach that would erode years of progress in populating universities with smart, talented kids of all races and income levels. The Senate plan establishes a level playing field for all students, while the House plan gives an unfair advantage to students in affluent suburban districts.

Under the House plan, public colleges and universities would fill no more than 50 percent of their freshman classes with students who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class. Currently, there is no limit. The change would permit colleges and universities to admit other students using criteria besides grade point average, — such as SAT scores or a particular talent — over students who make the best grades and work the hardest.

Both the House and Senate plans would require students to take the advanced high school curriculum to be eligible for top 10 percent admissions. The Senate plan also includes incentives for students who take advanced placement or magnet courses, giving extra points to increase their chances for admission under the top 10 percent law.

The House policy does speak to concerns raised by University of Texas at Austin administrators who have complained that their freshman seats are increasingly being filled with top 10 percent students. We don't see the problem there. Top 10 percent students typically have the highest SAT scores, work the hardest to get ahead, are more likely to possess special talents and have overcome economic and social obstacles to rise to the top of their class.

Who can be more deserving that that?

According to UT figures, students who gain admission under the top 10 percent rule stay in college in greater numbers and graduate faster than non-top 10 percent students. In short, they outperform their non-top 10 percent peers. Why not reward those students? Again we ask, who else is more deserving?

It's worth noting the words of Texas Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes, who cautioned that imposing a cap on the number of students admitted to UT under the top 10 percent law could erode racial and ethnic diversity on that campus for a few years.

But the top 10 percent law has done more than enhance diversity; it has given every high school student an incentive to work hard and get good grades. Cutting it back would dampen students' motivation.

All that makes for a clear choice: the Senate plan is the best for Texas.

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/05/14top10_edit.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:23 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Jim Nelson is a former attorney and Commissioner of Education. -Angela
12:10 AM CDT on Friday, May 13, 2005

Richardson schools Superintendent Jim Nelson said last week that he could fade the heat from any conflict-of-interest complaints involving his district and his former employer.

Here's some heat.

The month after Mr. Nelson took his job in Richardson last summer, the district began obtaining state-bought reading materials sold by his former company.

By the end of January, RISD paid nearly $400,000 of its own money in several separate transactions for additional materials from that company, Voyager Expanded Learning.

Aside: Mr. Nelson's wife was, and still is, employed by Voyager Expanded Learning, as is former RISD Superintendent Vernon Johnson.

As outlined in an article by Dallas Morning News reporter Kristine Hughes, Mr. Nelson says the RISD-Voyager deals were legal, completed with the knowledge of the board and yielded him no financial gain. He maintains the district got the best reading program available for struggling students.

None of that does anything to stop our queasiness in watching the revolving door between the private and public sectors – especially while the Texas Legislature is entertaining various privatization ideas for public schools.

Mr. Nelson has one of the most prominent names in Texas public education, having served two governors as education commissioner. He left that job three years ago to become a vice president at Voyager, an ambitious Dallas-based supplier of education materials with a reputation of cultivating political connections.

A high-profile statewide job typically sharpens sensitivity about maintaining an unassailable record of handling public dollars. If Mr. Nelson's sensitivity meter needs recalibrating, his school board would be wise to do the job to protect the public trust. RISD could at least insulate Mr. Nelson from decisions involving Voyager. It's notable that the nearly $400,000 in purchases occurred without formal board approval.

This editorial page has criticized well-salaried superintendents for paid consulting agreements in which they dispense advice to major suppliers of education products.

The Voyager case falls in the same category of offensiveness. The issue is not lawbreaking. It is ensuring absolute confidence in the men and women responsible for spending taxpayers' money to run Texas' public schools.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/editorials/stories/051305dnedirichardson.a02f4f44.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:51 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Professor David Berliner has another piece out titled, "The Near Impossibility of Testing for Teacher Quality"

It appears in the May/June edition of the Journal of Teacher Education.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:22 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This is really interesting. The Houston Idependent School District IS a business now, selling a whole range of things. See their Doing Business with HISD Website for more specific information.

The Houston Independent School District is even more of a business now, selling a whole range of things, even "virtual" schooling (also termed “virtual vouchers” by opponents) delivered over the Internet for home-schoolers. I wonder what the district’s position is on the virtual voucher bill making its way through the legislature right now. H.B. 1445, the virtual schools bill is being heard in the House this PM (Wednesday). If it passes, more than 300,000 home-school and private school students will become eligible for taxpayer dollars in order to fund approved virtual school course offered via CD or DVD, that is, on-line via the Internet.

Yes, the question is correct. Who does profit from all of this? And how can a business count on serving the needs of all children adequately when those interests collide with the “bottom line,” or with that which is profitable?

Though I honestly don’t know the district’s position on this, a look at who’s pushing this legislation right now might provide some insights. Last session, former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett was on hand lobbying for this as his curriculum software company, K12, Inc., was going to profit directly.

-Angela

District sells products to aid budget, but do the children profit?
Wednesday, May 11, 2005

By BRUCE NICHOLS / The Dallas Morning News

HOUSTON – School districts around the country have sold exclusive rights to soft drink companies, put paid ads on buses and even let advertisers pipe music into hallways – all part of the new rage of running public education like a business.

But few have gone so far as to sell products and services to outside buyers.

One big exception: the Houston Independent School District. It dipped its toe into the marketing waters a decade ago and is now selling nine HISD-brand products and services to other districts, including Dallas.

"School districts are clearly taking lessons from the private sector," said Charles Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of the 65 largest districts in the nation. But "nobody has been as aggressive for as long as Houston."

At a recent Austin meeting of school business officials, Houston ISD fit right in with the sellers of buses, janitorial supplies and gym equipment. Standing under a large HISD logo, the district's retired chief financial officer, Leonard Sturm, handed out brochures and answered questions about curriculum software, construction services and other wares the district sells inside and outside Texas.

Some question whether becoming more like a business detracts from a school district's core purpose of educating children – especially in Houston, where the school system has suffered embarrassing scandals involving cheating on standardized tests and under-reporting of dropout rates.

But Mr. Sturm – rehired as a consultant to lead the sales push – said the effort is a response to the rising pressures of tighter budgets, topped-out tax revenues, ratcheted-up performance demands and a political environment that favors private-sector solutions.

"Everybody that was coming to look at us was saying you guys need to treat the district more like a business," Mr. Sturm said. "That's really the origin of what we're doing."

He's had some success. Sales totaled $12.5 million in 2003-04, the last complete year for which figures are available. Nearly $1.7 million of that was net gain that could help defray operating costs. It's a drop in the bucket when you look at the district's $1.2 billion budget, but it's a start, he says.

The upside: Taxpayers, theoretically, save every time HISD sells something to another district. HISD recovers some of its operating costs. And customers save through the buying power of the nation's seventh largest district, with more than 200,000 students.

Detractors' concerns

But some see big downsides.

"It's a bad thing because what it does is it creates an organization whose focus is further and further removed from actual teaching and learning of children," said Alex Molnar, director of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University. He also decries the drift toward turning schools into businesses, the "erosion of the idea of public education as a public good instead of a market-driven commodity."

Mr. Sturm says HISD's main mission, education, will always come first. The district's a long way from becoming a business, he says.

With its recent problems, why would anyone buy anything stamped with the HISD brand.

"It's not like HISD is a shining star for management," chuckled Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers.

Mr. Sturm says HISD's problems haven't hurt his efforts because the district's products are "state of the art. I believe strongly in HISD's products and services."

The main problem, he says, is that he's doing something new for most districts.

"We're breaking down barriers as we do this, and that's why we haven't grown as fast as I'd like to go," he said. "It's a mindset thing."

Although Dallas hasn't made the leap, other districts are considering it.

"We're not marketing like HISD at the moment, but we're thinking about it," said Ruben Rojas, director of revenue enhancement for the Los Angeles Unified School District in California.

There appear to be no comprehensive statistics on the phenomenon, but Charlotte, N.C., schools sold a curriculum to a private company and collect royalties. Round Rock, Texas, ISD markets construction services. And Texas' 20 regional education service centers have long offered districts cooperative buying and other services for a fee.

Still, no program appears as far along as Houston's. HISD started selling its services in the mid-1990s, helping other districts collect Medicaid for the nursing support given special education students. Most districts are too small to do it themselves, but with HISD's help, 193 are collecting it.

Over time, the Houston district's stable of brands has grown. It now includes professional development training, printing, construction services and lighting retrofits. HISD also sells access to its list of minority-owned vendors to help others meet diversity goals.

Mr. Sturm opened what may be the first marketing office of its kind in 2002, concentrating on selling employee benefits management services and a curriculum package. He's looking into marketing other products, including "virtual" schooling delivered over the Internet to enrich smaller districts' programs or educate home-schoolers.

Mr. Sturm is paid a commission on his sales. His contract caps his income at $9,500 a month, but the ceiling will rise if sales take off, said HISD chief financial officer Melinda Garrett.

"You've got to have somebody who knows how to open doors," she said. "Leonard knows everybody."

Mr. Sturm has sold HISD products and services to districts as far away as Charleston, S.C., and St. Louis, though most customers are in Texas.

DISD is a customer

Since 2002, Dallas ISD has bought the benefits management services Houston sells in tandem with an HISD contractor, Mercer Human Resources Consulting. Mercer does the work and gets most of the money. HISD makes the deals and gets $2 per employee per month. This year's deal is for nearly $5 million.

"If it wasn't them, it would be somebody else," said Charles Fridia, DISD division executive for business operations, benefits and compensation. "We don't have the resources internally to deal with Web site and benefits management. We'd have to have a larger staff."

A key to HISD's sales is a state law allowing special agreements between districts. Through such an agreement, a district can get a product or service without spending its own time and money to take bids. It satisfies bid laws by using Houston's low-bidder.

Because the law also applies to cities and counties, it has resulted in some interesting linkups.

Collin County government hired HISD's contractor for a flooring job. Grand Prairie bought some roof repair. Edinburg, in the Rio Grande Valley, had some work done at the airport.

Cities and counties find this "job order construction" service through the BuyBoard, a statewide purchasing cooperative run by the Texas Association of School Boards, which posts the availability of HISD's low bidder to do work elsewhere through interlocal agreement.

It hasn't been all smooth sailing.

HISD's partnership with Mercer has led to lawsuits alleging illegal practices in the sale of employee insurance. And people familiar with the matter say the Texas Department of Insurance is investigating. HISD and its contractors say their operations are legal and above board.

The dustup hasn't slowed Houston's sales effort. The district would like to market other products the same way it markets job order construction, through a single statewide source. One candidate: its curriculum software, known as CLEAR. The district would stand a better chance of recovering the $17 million development cost if it could persuade the Texas Education Agency to sell CLEAR statewide.

"We're having discussions about that," Ms. Garrett said.

Don McAdams, an education consultant and former Houston school board member, said he hopes HISD's marketing effort keeps growing because it improves efficiency and saves money.

"This has been a very valuable revenue stream for HISD," he said.

It makes sense all the way around, Dr. McAdams argued. "Why should anyone have to reinvent the wheel when they can buy from Houston? If Houston can sell it, recoup the cost of development, why shouldn't they?"

E-mail bnichols@dallasnews.com

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/051105dntexhoustonisd.9659a9d8.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:56 PM 0 comments Links to this post

If the legislature rules on school finance this session, by all appearances, there will be an even more regressive tax structure primarily impacting Texas' poor. Moreover, "According to an analysis by the Legislative Budget Board, only households with annual incomes of more than $140,853 would realize a net tax cut — an average of 1.52 percent — under the tax trade-off. Other income groups would see average tax increases ranging from about one-half of a percent to more than 4 percent." Read on. -Angela

May 11, 2005, 5:02PM
Proposal for state property tax killed before package's approval
By CLAY ROBISON
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN - With the clock ticking on efforts to overhaul Texas' school funding system, the Senate early today approved a tax tradeoff that, sponsors said, would cut local school property taxes by more than $6 billion over the next two years in exchange for higher state taxes.

The measure was approved 21-10 at about 2 a.m. after seven hours of debate. Four Republicans, including Tommy Williams of The Woodlands, and six Democrats, including Rodney Ellis and Mario Gallegos of Houston, voted against the measure.

Before approving the package, senators made two major changes. They killed a controversial proposal to replace most local school taxes with a lower, state property tax, and they restructured a new business tax that had drawn strong opposition from the business community.

The new tax, which will apply to all forms of businesses except sole proprietorships, would allow a company to pay an expanded franchise tax or a payroll tax.

"With the passage of this bill, we can tell Texans that their property taxes are going to be lower and their schools are going to be better," said Senate Finance Chairman Steve Ogden, R-Bryan.

But Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos, D-Austin, cited a legislative analysis that only the wealthiest Texas households would realize a net savings from the tax tradeoff.

The Senate, he said, was "not only ensuring a permanent underclass, we're expanding it."

Senators rejected an amendment by Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, that would have forced landlords to share their property tax savings with renters, who account for one-third of Texas residents and 53 percent of Houstonians, according to the Texas Apartment Association.

Senators also rejected an attempt to legalize video slot machines at racetracks and on Indian reservations, despite arguments by Gallegos, the amendment's sponsor, that the expanded gambling would raise $2 billion for education or other programs over the next two years.

Removal of the state property tax may make it easier for House and Senate negotiators to reach a compromise on a tax overhaul before legislators adjourn on May 30, Shapiro said. Speaker Tom Craddick has said there is strong House opposition to a state property tax.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said most senators still favored a state property tax as the most equitable way to raise money for public education, but added, "at the end of the day we want to move the ball forward."

Senate Education Chairman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, said it also would be difficult to sell a state property tax to Texas voters, who would have to approve it as a constitutional amendment. The proposal also had threatened local homestead exemptions, a form of tax break, for about 400,000 Harris County homeowners.

Without the state property tax, Ogden, the tax bill sponsor, amended the bill to reduce cuts in school property taxes from the 40 cents per $100 valuation initially planned by the 2006-07 school year to 35 cents.


Some see stalemate
The state property tax was only one of several significant differences between the House and Senate tax plans. Some Capitol insiders already are predicting the regular session will end without a new school funding plan, which the governor and legislative leaders have labeled a top priority.

But Shapiro disagreed.

The new franchise tax option would be 2.5 percent of a base that includes a company's taxable income plus employee compensation, with $30,000 per employee deducted from the base up to half of the total compensation.

The payroll tax option would be 1.75 percent up to $1,500 per employee.

The minimum tax a company would have to pay, however, would be equivalent to one-quarter of one percent of a company's gross receipts in Texas.

The Senate unanimously adopted the change which replaces a plan drafted by the Senate Finance Committee to tax a combination of a company's income and payroll.

The House has approved a tax bill that also offers an option to businesses, but unlike the Senate it doesn't set a minimum.

The Senate package also includes a half-cent per dollar increase in the sales tax, a 75-cents per pack increase in the cigarette tax and a 25 percent increase in alcoholic beverage taxes.

The bill sparked controversy with the release this week of a legislative analysis showing that the Senate tax trade-off, like a bill approved several weeks ago by the House, would provide a net tax cut for only the wealthiest Texans.

Dewhurst, however, said the Senate plan, which he played a key role in drafting, would provide significant cuts in local school property taxes, which are unpopular among many Texans.

Ogden blamed much of the inequity in the tax bill on the increase in the cigarette tax, which would dig deeper, proportionately, into the pockets of low-income smokers.

The increase would almost triple the current cigarette tax, now set at 41 cents per pack, but is less than the $1.01 per pack jump approved by the House.

According to an analysis by the Legislative Budget Board, only households with annual incomes of more than $140,853 would realize a net tax cut — an average of 1.52 percent — under the tax trade-off. Other income groups would see average tax increases ranging from about one-half of a percent to more than 4 percent.

Several hundred thousand families who use the Lone Star Card to receive food stamps and welfare benefits would receive a sales tax rebate worth about $10 a month in the form of cash or additional food stamps.
clay.robison@chron.com
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3176567

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:44 PM 0 comments Links to this post

EDITORIAL
Killer V's, WACO TRIBUNE-HERALD
----------------
Wednesday, May 11, 2005

We shouldn't be surprised, but it is amazing nonetheless. In a legislative session supposedly focused on equitable funding of public schools, look at what they're talking about: funding private schools and homeschoolers.

Excuse us? The funding thus far proposed for public schools barely makes up for previous budget cuts. It also comes up $1 billion short of what a district judge has said is adequate.

We're told that's all the money the Legislature can spring for public schools. Yet look:

* House Bill 1263 could take as much as $600 million from the state's eight largest school districts in the first two years – that money going to church-run and private schools through school vouchers.

* House Bill 1445 would spend $23 million over two years to provide computers and learning materials for more than 300,000 homeschoolers connected to "virtual" schools.

On cost alone, these bills should be spiked. They can't be rationalized at a time when lawmakers appear ready to play "chicken" with Travis County District Judge John Dietz. He has ruled that school funding must not only be equitable but also adequate. If it isn't, he's threatened to shut schools down in the fall.

Voucher proponents say their legislation's price tag is minimal since when students transfer, schools have fewer costs. But fixed costs – heating, cooling, maintenance – remain even if a few students leave. Vouchers are a direct and substantial funding cut.

Though the voucher bill would apply to only a few districts, in 2010 it could involve any school district if the school board votes to participate.

And Texans should be wary of a "pilot" program. It sounds innocuous. However, look how the "pilot" program of charter schools took off at a mad gallop long before the state had any means of guaranteeing that state dollars were being spent appropriately or that students were benefiting.

As for funding homeschoolers, the state has no business doing it. Families are entitled to homeschool their children but not to receive state funding for it.

Indeed, vouchers and "virtual" schools would create costly new entitlements and require new educational bureaucracy, not exactly the platform on which the Republican leadership ran.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:41 PM 0 comments Links to this post

TO: Coalition for Public Schools Organizations
FROM: Carolyn Boyle

H.B. 1263, a risky, expensive private school voucher bill, could come up for a vote on the floor of the Texas House of Representatives on Wednesday or
Thursday, May 11-12. Neighborhood public schools in eight school districts
could lose more than $600 million in the first two years under H.B. 1263. In
2010, every school district in Texas could join the voucher program if
approved by a majority of its school board.

If this legislation passes, our Texas public education system based on
neighborhood public schools will be forever changed. The new privatized
school system envisioned by voucher supporters is one with tax-supported
chains of for-profit private schools, tax-supported religious academies,
charter schools converted unto unregulated yet publicly-funded private
schools, as well as limited regulation and academic accountability for
private schools that receive public money.

IMMEDIATE ACTION IS NEEDED TO STOP H.B. 1263. Call your state
representative's office in Austin, where you will talk with an assistant who keeps a tally of phone calls. Even if you've called before, call again and mention the specific bill number the lawmaker should oppose. If you don't know your representative's name and phone number, go to this capitol website where you may enter your home address and find the listing for "Texas State Representative." Tell your representative:

-- VOTE NO on H.B. 1263 or any floor amendment to another bill that would
use public money to fund private school tuition vouchers
-- Legislators need to solve school finance problems NOW--not create new
problems with vouchers.
-- (If you are a taxpayer in one of the 8 school districts immediately
affected by the voucher pilot project) My neighborhood schools can't afford
to lose millions of dollars to fund private school tuition vouchers.
-- (If you are a taxpayer in one of the other 1028 school districts) Rural
and suburban taxpayers can't afford to spend tax money to subsidize private
schools in urban areas. Express concerns that your children and schools will
be harmed if vouchers are approved in 2010 by a future school board.

H.B. 1263 has not yet been set on the House Calendar, but all indications
are that it will come to the floor for a vote this week. The bill passed
out of the House Committee on Public Education May 5, and it is now in the
Calendars Committee which will determine when it is scheduled for a floor
vote. May 12 is the final day for floor action on House bills on second
reading on the daily or supplemental calendar, according to that body's
rules.

Here are the most important provisions about the bill, and additional
financial details are attached:

Participating school districts 2010-2011 school year and onward: Effective
August 1, 2010, every school district in Texas would be eligible to
participate in the Texas voucher program based solely on action by its
school board. Special interests seeking public funding for private/religious
schools and for-profit school chains would start planning immediately to
take over school boards so majorities would be in place by 2010 to vote for
vouchers.

Participating school districts in 2005-2010 and how much public money they
could lose due to vouchers in the first TWO years:

Austin ISD could lose: $74 million
Dallas ISD could lose: $165 million
Edgewood ISD (San Antonio) could lose: $13 million
Fort Worth ISD could lose: $79 million
Houston ISD could lose: $200 million
North Forest ISD (Houston) could lose: $9 million
San Antonio ISD could lose: $54 million
South San Antonio ISD could lose: $9 million
The amount of money these districts could lose after August 1, 2008 is
inestimable, because as of that date there are no limits on how many
students could receive a private school tuition voucher.

All suburban school districts in metropolitan areas would be impacted: Since
initially there will be some limits on private school capacity, the bill
provides that all students eligible for vouchers in the eight urban
districts may also transfer to any suburban school district under guidelines
for the Public Education Grant program.

Eligibility to receive a voucher: A student who does not pass any section
of the TAKS test in grades 3-12 or is eligible for the free/reduced price
lunch program, of limited English proficiency, eligible for special
education, does not pass a readiness test in PreK-3rd grades, fails two
subjects during a semester, is pregnant or a parent, placed in an
alternative education program, has been expelled, is on parole or probation,
is homeless. Students from upper-income families could receive a voucher
solely by not passing a section of the TAKS test. Eligible students must
have attended a public or charter school for a majority of the preceding
semester or be starting school for the first time. [Note: If current private
school students enroll in public school for one semester to qualify for a
voucher and then return to private school, it will cause myriad staffing,
facilities, and funding problems for school districts.]

To read H.B. 1263, click on the following H.B. 1263 link.

It only takes 30 seconds to call your state representative's office, and
your call can make a difference! Thank you for speaking up for Texas
children and supporting your neighborhood public schools.

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

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:39 PM 0 comments Links to this post

In the event you missed the CNN Special  regarding high-stakes testing, you have a chance to see it next  Saturday. The program that aired last night will be  repeated next Saturday, May 14th at 2 p.m., 7 p.m. (8 p.m. EST), Texas time. They interviewed me for this program and my appearance is rather brief. Aside from exposing all the fraud, I like very much the human element, the incredible burden and stresses that this testing system places on children in a very abusive manner. -Angela

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:58 PM 2 comments Links to this post

This is a big story that is breaking out--first on 'DailyKos—Charter Schools USA Storyand is also being discussed on another education blog AnOldSoul that I list on my sidebar. Thanks to Joe Thomas, a fellow blogger in Arizona (also listed on my sidebar) for alerting me to this. The politics are worth a read. (Also see related news story below.)

Below, I also posted a story about a major protest in an Oakland, CA elementary school that includes serious concerns that parents have about the testing of their children. It resonates so well with the story that CNN produced on high-stakes testing in Virginia, Texas, and Florida.

I also posted some other news about Bush's high school bill being dead on arrival. I hope that some of these concerns are finally registering in Congress.

-Angela.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charter threatens parents with lawsuit
By DAVE BREITENSTEIN, DBREITENSTEIN@NEWS-PRESS.COM
LISA RAMIREZ-JOHNSON, LJOHNSON@LEHIGHNEWSSTAR.COM
Published by news-press.com on May 6, 2005

Charter Schools USA is threatening legal action against parents who use an Internet discussion board to air grievances about Gateway Charter. Parent Angela Reigelman, who created the virtual forum, received a letter via FedEx on Thursday ordering her to remove the forum. The company also warned other Web contributors Thursday.

Postings on the forum address topics ranging from academics and school events to complaints about school leadership and rumor control. Some parents bluntly state their dissatisfaction with teachers, Principal Deborah Nauss and Charter Schools USA President Jonathan Hage, who said Thursday the company will "vigorously defend" its reputation.

"CSUSA has reviewed the Web site and has determined that your and other parents' and other Web site participants' published accusations, comments and statements are unlawful, defamatory and libelous against CSUSA, Gateway Charter School and Dr. Nauss," attorney Lisa MacClugage stated in the letter to Reigelman.
"Accordingly, CSUSA hereby demands that you immediately cease and desist your continuous published libel and defamatory accusations, comments and statements." Reigelman says the Web forum gives parents an open venue to discuss educational issues.

It's especially critical, she says, after a May 3 letter to parents signed by the PTO's executive board stating: "In light of the fact that various individuals and groups are trying to politicize the PTO, we have decided to cancel all further PTO meetings for the duration of the 2004-05 school year."

The Web forum contains 65 registered members and shows nearly 36,000 page views since it was created last month.
Reigelman, of Alva, said she monitors the site to make sure only facts are posted.

"Information in there is fact-based and can be found through public record in Lee and Hendry counties," she said. "I have not threatened anyone and don't feel I have. This was not meant to be malicious." Reigelman said she simply wants the school to respond to parents, either in a Web forum or face-to-face meeting.

"I really don't understand why attorneys were brought into this," she said. "We are not an angry mob. All we want is to be heard, and it doesn't appear that they want to hear from all of us." The company's demand to close the forum does raise free-speech issues. "Any action by school officials to remove it raises serious First Amendment concerns," said Robert Corn-Revere, a Washington D.C.-based attorney who specializes in Internet-related free-speech issues. "No one likes to be criticized, but that doesn't make it libelous."

Neither Hage or Senior Vice President Tom Geismar would specify which postings were objectionable.
Geismar said the company has a responsibility to ensure a safe environment for students and staff, and he supports "positive, open communications" with parents.

Some messages question Nauss' side jobs and her husband's role with finances at the school, how Hage afforded his East Coast home and a rumor about why an assistant principal left Gateway Charter.
Nauss said Thursday she hasn't seen the site but is aware of its content. She supports the company's decision to begin legal remedies. She said she hopes the situation doesn't escalate.

"I think anyone in administration at a school can be viewed by many different people in different ways and open themselves up to scrutiny," Nauss said. "We are attempting to do things differently at the charter schools. We realize folks will have questions." Parent Mary Vance, of Lehigh Acres, was among those who received the attorney's letter but isn't sure why she was targeted.

"I can't figure out how it was learned I was involved in the message board," Vance said, adding that parents use member names, not their real names. "I'm trying to figure out what I have said or done that is libelous and defamatory. I don't have fear for this. I have concern. To me, it seems like a scare tactic."

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:52 PM 0 comments Links to this post

by Ken Epstein
May 4, 2005

A parent group is boycotting standardized testing at Allendale Elementary School in East Oakland to protest the involuntary transfer of seven teachers and demand the reinstatement of the After School Coordinator, who was fired for his alleged role in an earlier protest.

“…the Oakland school’s district’s community relations have totally broken down,” said Alisia Williams, spokesperson for the Allendale’s new parent organization, Allendale Fighting Back.

“We are…turning in waivers from parents opting out of the standardized testing program in order to protest
the transfers and the firing,” she said.

The Coordinator, Henry Hitz, had been in charge of Allendale’s after-school tutorial program, which operated on a contract with the ARC, a non-profit in Oakland. He is also the coordinator of a citywide parent advocacy organization, Oakland Parents Together (OPT).

Hitz was fired immediately after a one-day boycott of classes on April 8, to support the demand to retain the teachers who the district is involuntarily transferring to other sites at the end of the school year. About 85 percent of the school’s 450 students
stayed home on the day of the boycott.

In addition to opposing the involuntary transfers, the boycott focuses on what parents perceive as the misuse
of the standardized test results and the basic inequities of the testing itself. This year’s testing started at Allendale on May 3.

“We are asking parents to boycott the test to protest the fact that the school is being punished for low
test scores, but the tests are given only in English,” Williams said.

“Fifty percent of our students come from Spanish speaking homes ú they speak two languages, but neither
the students nor the school get any credit for those skills,” she continued. “Too many bad decisions, like
the transfer of good teachers are being made solely on the basic of these tests.”

According to parent estimates, parents of more than 50 students have signed waivers saying they don’t want
their children taking the test.

Maria Rendon, a parent of first and second graders at Allendale, emphasized that the test has a negative
impact on children’s self esteem.

“Many kids, second and third graders do cry in the classroom, she said. “Some are anxious in the morning
before going to school; or they don’t want to do school, or sometimes they can’t sleep the night before.”

Summing up parent concerns, Rendon said, “Some don’t like the test, and others are angry because the school
is not taking parents into consideration.”

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:26 PM 0 comments Links to this post

From the Friday, May 6 edition of Education Daily:

Bush's High School Reform Appears Dead on Arrival

Lawmakers say president.s timing was bad, no legislation will be introduced

Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Education and the Workforce
Committee, said yesterday there won't be any legislation to authorize
President Bush's high school reform initiative emerging from the committee
this year. Boehner and Education Reform Subcommittee Chairman Mike Castle,
R-Del., said they support in principle the administration's ideas to reform
high schools, but it was too early to expand No Child Left Behind Act
testing into high schools. "With all due respect to the president's
pronouncements ... to moving No Child Left Behind to high schools, I'm not
too sure we're ready to create legislation on that," Castle said. He said he
wasn't exactly sure how to extend NCLB into high schools, and, "frankly,
there's political opposition to that, and it's not just democrats."

Setting the stage

Nevertheless, Boehner said the committee will hold several hearings on
reforming high schools this year, the first tentatively scheduled for next
week. The hearings may lead to a push for legislation next year, he added.
President Bush announced his $1.5 billion high school reform initiative
earlier this year (ED, Jan. 13) and said several times during the 2004
presidential campaign that he would like to expand NCLB testing in secondary
schools (ED, Nov. 4). The administration also proposed folding the popular
Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education funding into the
initiative, which now looks highly unlikely after the strong support the
reauthorization received in the House and Senate (ED, May 5). Castle said
that little in terms of concrete proposals came from the administration
after the announcement. "There are not fundamental differences in doing what
the president wants, it's just going to take longer to do it," he said.
-Stew Magnuson

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

TEXAS FREEDOM NETWORK PRESS RELEASE:
SENATE REJECTS VOUCHERS IN TEA REAUTHORIZATION BILL

Senate Passes Bill after Sponsor Pledges to Reject Any Efforts by House to
Add Vouchers
May 5, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contacts: Dan Quinn, 512-322-0545, 512-799-3379 (cell)

AUSTIN – The president of the Texas Freedom Network today commended state
senators for closing the door on any voucher amendments to a bill
reauthorizing the Texas Education Agency (TEA). "Senators today took a
strong stand for neighborhood public schools and against reckless schemes
like private school vouchers," TFN President Kathy Miller said. "Vouchers
are so controversial that lobbyists hope to sneak a voucher amendment in
through a back door. Senators today firmly closed one
such door."

Senators voted to pass Senate Bill 422, which authorizes TEA to continue
operations, a requirement under existing "sunset" rules. Responding to
direct questions from three other senators (Royce West, D-Dallas; Leticia
Van de Putte, D-San Antonio; and Rodney Ellis, D-Houston) before the final
vote, the sponsor of SB 422, Sen. Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, pledged that he
would not concur on any House TEA reauthorization legislation that includes
vouchers.

Vouchers are tax dollars used to pay for tuition at private and religious
schools. The Legislature has rejected attempts to pass a voucher scheme in
every session since 1995. Last week, however, the House Public Education
Committee passed H.B. 1263, which would drain more than $600 million from
public schools over the next two years to pay for voucher programs in the
state’s largest counties. That bill has not yet been considered by the full
House.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:08 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is the html version of a pdf which you may download here if you like. -Angela
Page 1
Summary of Private School Voucher Bills Filed in the Texas House of Representatives
H.B. 1263 by Reps. Linda Harper-Brown (R-Irving),
Ken Paxton (R-McKinney), and Charlie Howard (R-Sugar Land); Co-Authors: Reps. Leo Berman (R-Tyler), Carl Isett (R-Lubbock), Jim Jackson (R-Carrollton), Jodie Laubenberg (R-Rockwall),
Jerry Madden (R-Plano), Larry Taylor (R-League City), Corbin Van Arsdale (R-Houston), William Zedler (R-Arlington)

Note: The bill authors do not represent school districts that would be required to participate in this voucher program.

8 School Districts, 886 Public Schools in Voucher Program:

Austin ISD, Dallas ISD, Fort Worth ISD, Houston ISD, San Antonio ISD, South San Antonio ISD, Masonic Home ISD
(Fort Worth), Edgewood ISD (San Antonio) would lose funding to pay for private school vouchers.
Estimated Number of Vouchers To Be Given Out: 2005-2006—25,492; 2006-2007—50,984; 2007-2008—76,476

Potential Funding That Could Be Siphoned from 8 School Districts: $530,511,000 for the first three years

Under the current tax structure, 72% would be local funding, 28% state funding.

Amount of Voucher: $6,937 in 2005, but would be higher in subsequent years.

Students Eligible for a Voucher: Every student in 8 districts meeting any one of the following criteria: does not pass any section of the TAKS test in grades 3-12, eligible for the free/reduced price lunch program, of limited English proficiency,eligible for special education, does not pass a readiness test in PreK-3rd grades, fails two subjects during a semester, is pregnant or a parent, placed in an alternative education program, has been expelled, is on parole or probation, is homeless.

Minimum Accountability, No Consequences: Private schools must administer the TAKS test or other nationally norm-referenced assessment instrument approved by the commissioner. The school must provide aggregated test results to the public and researchers. There are no consequences for poor academic performance, no school accountability ratings, no financial accountability, no cutoff of state funding for failing private schools.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
H.B. 12 by Reps. Frank Corte (R-San Antonio) and Debbie Riddle (R-Houston)
6 School Districts, 916 Public Schools in Voucher Program:
Austin ISD, Dallas ISD, Fort Worth ISD, Houston ISD, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD (Houston), Northside ISD (San Antonio)would lose funding to pay for private school vouchers.

Estimated Number of Students Eligible for a Voucher in 2005-2006: 188,556
Estimated Funding That Could Be Siphoned from 6 School Districts: $3,300,361,866 in first three years

Under the current tax structure, 87% would be local funding, 13% state funding.

Amount of Voucher: $5,064-$6,352, with an average voucher amount of $5,755.

Students Eligible for a Voucher: A student in the 6 districts who was enrolled in a charter school or public school during the preceding school year or is enrolling in pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, or first grade for the first time and:

-- Qualifies for the free or reduced price lunch program based on family size and income (ranging from $28,990 for a family of three to $52,522 for a family of seven); and
-- Failed to meet the standard on all sections of the most recent TAKS test (English version, Spanish version, or Special Education SDAA version); OR
-- Qualifies for the lunch program and is eligible under the state Public Education Grant public school choice program to attend another public school in the district in which the child resides or to receive a public education grant to attend a public school in another district, but has an application to attend another school district or school rejected.

Minimum Accountability, No Consequences: Private schools must administer the TAKS test or other assessment instrument approved by the commissioner. The commissioner would publish the school’s performance information and make it available to parents. There are no consequences for poor academic performance, no school accountability ratings, no financial accountability, no cutoff of state funding for failing private schools.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Page 2
H.B. 3042 by Reps. Debbie Riddle (R-Houston) and Charlie Howard (R-Sugar Land)

Voucher program would include 1031 school districts and 215 charter school districts

Estimated Number of Students Eligible for a Voucher in 2005-2006: 4,300,000+

Estimated Funding That Could Be Siphoned from All School Districts: Billions!

Amount of Voucher: $5,500, to be adjusted yearly using the average of the Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers for Dallas and Houston for the preceding year

Students Eligible for a Voucher: A student is eligible to receive a voucher if he or she:
Resides in Texas, is eligible to attend public school, and attended a public school full time during the final semester of the preceding school year; OR

The child received a voucher during the preceding school year. (There is no requirement that this be a publicly-funded “voucher,” so it should be assumed that children currently attending a private school who received a privately-funded tuition voucher would be eligible.)

Minimum Accountability, No Consequences: Parents must ensure that the child is tested annually with a nationally recognized, norm-referenced assessment. There are no consequences for poor academic performance, no school accountability ratings, no financial accountability, no cutoff of state funding for failing private schools.

Source for Financial Information: Cindy M. Russell Consulting
Source for Data on Student Eligibility: Texas Education Agency

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:38 AM 1 comments Links to this post

After 4 months, with only 3 weeks to go, House, Senate aren't even close

10:19 PM CDT on Saturday, May 7, 2005

By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News


AUSTIN – When lawmakers arrived in the capital in January, Gov. Rick Perry declared an emergency: fixing school finance.

But after four months of working on the details, the House and Senate are not even close to a deal that would overhaul education funding and cut property taxes for millions of homeowners and businesses. The Senate, slowed by fights over business taxes, has yet to pass its versions of the bills so negotiations with the House can begin.

And with just three weeks left, most lawmakers and lobbyists agree that a compromise by the session's end, May 30, would be a surprise.

So much for the emergency.

"If I were a betting man, I would say it's going to be very difficult to get something done before the end of the session," said Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas. "Both houses are still pretty far apart on many of the key issues."

Chief among them: how to tax businesses and consumers; how much, if at all, to raise teachers' pay; and whether to enact a statewide property tax to ease complaints of unequal funding.

As if the battle over the $30 billion system wasn't complicated enough, it could have broad political implications – especially for Mr. Perry, who is trying to fend off challenges in the GOP primary.

If lawmakers can't agree, the future is unclear for the whole state, though, not just the governor. A state judge has threatened to cut off school funding Oct. 1 if the system isn't changed. Many lawmakers may be hoping the state Supreme Court, which will hear an appeal of the funding lawsuit, will bail them out. Others anticipate returning for a special session or two this summer.

"It has usually taken an order from the Supreme Court before the Legislature would act definitively," said John Fainter, a former secretary of state and chief of staff to former Gov. Ann Richards.

Mr. Fainter, who had to deal with the school finance crisis that led to the current Robin Hood funding law in 1993, said lawmakers' task is daunting. The legislators seem to know it.

"It's going to take a lot of work and a lot of luck to get everything done," said Sen. Kim Brimer, R-Fort Worth. "It can be done, but there are a lot chances for things to fall apart in the final days of the session."


What's the holdup?



If school finance is the session's biggest priority, and all the major legislative leaders are Republicans eager to cut property taxes, why can't they agree?

Competing outside pressures are one reason – not only from school districts and teachers, but also suddenly from leading business groups who are concerned about the tax changes outlined.

The House plan would increase funding for schools by about $1.5 billion a year, and the Senate proposal would add $1.4 billion. Virtually all of the state's school districts say that's not nearly enough.

And those numbers – representing a boost of about 5 percent – are far less than the $4 billion suggested by state District Judge John Dietz when he ruled the system was unconstitutional.

Teachers and mainstream education groups also are fighting reform proposals in the bills, such as a proposed incentive-pay program for teachers that would be based mostly on student test scores.

"Bringing this inadequate education plan to the Senate is like a student coming to class and saying, 'The dog ate my homework,' " said Donna New Haschke, president of the Texas State Teachers Association. "That excuse doesn't work in the classroom, and it should not work in the Texas Legislature."

Mr. Fainter said he has never seen school districts and education groups so united against such important legislation.

"Rich and poor districts. Urban and rural districts. The teachers. They're sticking together in a way that hasn't happened before," he said.

Following in the footsteps of education groups, leading business organizations are digging in against the plans to offset property-tax reductions with an oft-revised business franchise tax and increases in the state sales, auto sales and cigarette taxes. (The Senate also would raise taxes on alcoholic beverages.)

At a hearing before Senate tax writers last week, business groups ripped the plan, insisting it would increase their overall tax burden and jeopardize the financial health of many companies.

That prompted an angry response from Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst – himself a businessman – who said business lobbyists were more interested in preserving tax loopholes than ensuring adequate funding for schoolchildren.

"The next three weeks will be full of lobbying activity by every interested group we know in the state, but we've got an obligation to do what is right for the state of Texas," Mr. Dewhurst said.

Senate leaders, nonetheless, tweaked the plan before it emerged from the committee.


Much to iron out



The organized opposition merely adds pressure to the long list of differences in the House and Senate plans.

The House tax plan, for example, includes a one-cent increase in the sales tax to 7.25 percent, a half-cent more than the Senate wants. Senate Democrats have vowed to block the House sales tax increase, arguing that it represents a huge tax shift to lower-income Texans.

Senators are pushing a new statewide property tax for schools to replace the current local levy. Senate leaders contend that it will end years of litigation by eliminating property-wealth disparities among districts and providing the same amount of money for all students. It would also end Robin Hood sharing of property taxes from higher-wealth districts.

"This would finally get us out of the courthouse," predicted Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden, R-Bryan.

But the shift would require a constitutional amendment – and that sets a major hurdle of a two-thirds vote of each chamber, as well as voter approval in a statewide election.

House Speaker Tom Craddick, R-Midland, says he personally favors the amendment, but he has repeatedly voiced doubts about whether he can get the necessary 100 votes in the House. Most school districts are fighting the idea, complaining that it would rob them of local control.

There are also major differences in the two chambers' business-tax plans. The House would gives businesses a choice of taxes, while the Senate is backing a uniform tax for all businesses.


Political ramifications



A surprise agreement would greatly benefit Mr. Perry, who called a special session on education a year ago only to watch it fail. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn both seem eager to take on the governor in a GOP primary, and both could seize on the lack of a school-finance solution as a sign of failed leadership from Mr. Perry.

Despite that, the governor has done little publicly to prod lawmakers and help them work out their differences, other than to play down the possibility of another special session.

"I have the sense that things are moving along fine," Mr. Perry said last week. "There's plenty of time. I see absolutely no reason why we should be here on the 1st of June – or the 31st of May."

Some lawmakers are optimistic that the political landscape may yet yield a solution because the officeholders won't want such a major distraction from preparations for next spring's primary elections.

"We've got major elections on the horizon, and folks who want to get out and run," said Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso. "I'm not sure they want to spend the summer in Austin."

E-mail tstutz@dallasnews.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/050805dntexskulfi.86cb9182.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:56 PM 9 comments Links to this post

Houston schools to fire six teachers in cheating scandal
CNN.com
May 5, 2005

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- Administrators in Texas' largest school district said Wednesday they plan to fire six teachers and demote two principals and an assistant principal after finding evidence of cheating on state tests at four schools.

Houston Independent School District Superintendent Abe Saavedra said three other district employees, including a principal, will receive formal reprimands.

A Dallas Morning News review of standardized test scores throughout the state prompted a handful of Texas school districts to investigate test results at individual schools from recent years.

The Houston district began an internal investigation four months ago after finding unexplained jumps in scores and statistical irregularities on standardized tests at 23 schools, Saavedra said.

Two months into the investigation, Saavedra announced the district had identified two teachers at an elementary school who assisted students on the state exam. The district has recommended those teachers be fired, and has demoted the school's principal.

On Wednesday, Saavedra said the investigation was over and confirmed cheating occurred at another three elementary schools. At those schools, four teachers have been recommended for firing and a principal and an assistant principal will be demoted, he said.

At one school, investigators found that four eighth-graders were taken from their regular classrooms to another room where a math teacher helped them answer questions. The four answered all of the test questions the same way -- and incorrectly answered the same two questions.

Robert Moore, the district's inspector general who led the review, said all the teachers and administrators accused have denied wrongdoing.

Chris Tritico, an attorney for one of the principals and two of the teachers fighting to retain their jobs, claimed investigators picked a target "and then molded their facts around that target."

Other schools around the nation have faced similar incidents.

In Iowa, science test results for a seventh-grade class have been invalidated and a teacher has resigned after administrators discovered he quizzed students on materials found in the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, the district's superintendent said.

"They were talking about things that were awfully close to the test itself," said Tim Hoffman, Adel-DeSoto-Minburn's superintendent. "Students still had to figure things out, but the public has to depend on us to maintain the integrity of those tests."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/05/05/houston.schools.ap/index.html
 

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

It saddens me greatly to see that Houston Representative Joe Moreno died in a car crash early Friday morning on Highway 71 near LaGrange. It happened close to 2AM after hitting a median, over-correcting, and his truck rolling over several times. Two others driving with him were also injured, namely, Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas, and legislative staffer Monica Lisa Piñon. Anchia was released and Piñon is still in the hospital.

See Lawmaker Led With Good Humor in today's Austin Am-Statesmen for more on this.

Though I didn't know him very well, I knew him for a long time, beginning back when I lived in Houston during the late 90s and was always impressed with his spirit and dedication to the underprivileged and poor in the Latino community. This is a great loss to our state and nation. My condolences to the family. -Angela

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:02 AM 0 comments Links to this post

The issue of priorities in our state is right on target. You just wonder how in the world the state is going to enforce non-suggestive chearleading. I'm very happy to again see John Young weigh in on the testing provisions of HB2. With so much focus on school finance--or should we say--property tax reliefe DESPITE Judge Dietz's ruling on finance equity--so little focus has been accorded to the 13 more end-of-course exams. We'll see what the Senate in its wisdom decides.

-Angela

Please, Liberate Our Schools

John Young, WACO TRIBUNE-HERALD
Saturday, May 07, 2005

Sis boom bah. Coming into this session, when Texas lawmakers asked citizens what they wanted them to do in Austin, you know the one request that kept coming up: "Please, regulate our cheerleaders."

You don't think so? So why, instead of laughing the idea out of the chamber, did the Texas House salute Rep. Al Edwards' ban on "suggestive" cheerleading and send it to the Senate?

Here's why: State leaders are so addicted to controlling what goes on in schoolhouses, why not also control what happens on the sidelines?

Yes, we know: Each of these lawmakers has been a stump-speech cheerleader for "local control." But in every way, and with every session, Texas lawmakers exert more control over schools.

In the "age of accountability," this particularly applies to state-mandated testing that drives virtually every waking, working and learning moment in Texas public schools.

Lawmakers in general seem oblivious to how standardization has taken something that should be in living color and turned it to a whiter shade of pale. If they were truly pro-education, rather than pro-standardization, lawmakers would have interim studies on what the overemphasis on testing has done to education, and would be taking the results seriously. Instead, all we get are pasty bromides about "raising the bar" and devising new tests.

Such is the case with House Bill 2, the education reform bill that got sent to the Senate.

For purposes of graduation, it would phase out the exit-level Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and replace it with 13 end-of-course tests in individual subjects.

Bill author State Rep. Kent Grusendorf says the reason for the proposal is that with the all-encompassing TAKS, students sometimes get tested on material they might not have studied in more than a year. That's a legitimate problem with TAKS, but adding more state tests is not the answer.

The answer is contained in another Grusendorf proposal: administering TAKS online. If administered properly, students would be able to take, say, the TAKS math portion when they were finished with exit-level material and when it was fresh in their minds.

The appealing thing about online tests as proposed is that they could be true diagnostic devices, giving teachers and students instant information that shows how they did, what they did right, what they did wrong.

The most important thing is that with online testing entire campuses wouldn't have to stop dead for TAKS. Individually or in classes, students could rotate in and out from the school diagnostic lab.

In the meantime, in addition to making our testing system more diagnostic, we need to devise ways to make one test less of a cataclysmic moment in a student's life.

This week with hearings in the House Public Education Committee, State Rep. Dora Olivo, D-Rosenberg, pressed on in a mission to base the promotion or retention of students on multiple criteria and not just TAKS scores.

Olivo's House Bill 1612 would require schools to fully analyze a student's academic strengths, not just his or her test-taking ability.

To opponents, this sounds like "social promotion." To proponents, it is decompressing the system that puts way too much weight on one moment and on one test score. Why, proponents say, would you want one means of evaluating a student instead of several? Why, indeed.

If parents of schoolchildren were running this state, they wouldn't be worried about suggestive cheerleading routines. They'd be worried about bleaching the vitality from their children's education at the altar of standardization.

They'd also do something about micro-managing schools from afar in the name of "local control."

Young is editorial page editor of the Waco Tribune-Herald. Contact him at jyoung@wacotrib.com.

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/05/7young_edit.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:35 AM 0 comments Links to this post

79th LEGISLATURE
Senate Preserves Top 10 Percent Admission Law

Efforts to Curtail, Repeal It Fail Narrowly.
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, May 07, 2005

The Texas Senate on Friday narrowly rejected efforts to repeal or curtail a state law guaranteeing public university admission to students graduating in the top 10 percent of their high school classes.

However, senators approved a measure that requires students gaining admission under the law to have taken the recommended or advanced high school curriculum. Current law allows students to take a less stringent curriculum. The measure, Senate Bill 333, now goes to the House.

The Senate's action was a victory for Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, the chairman of the Senate's higher education subcommittee who filibustered two years ago to keep the top 10 percent law intact. He says the law assures that the state's universities, especially the University of Texas, have student bodies that are racially, ethnically and geographically diverse.

UT officials were disappointed by the outcome. They have been urging lawmakers to revise the law, which was enacted in 1997 after a court case involving UT resulted in a ban on affirmative action in admission to the state's public universities and colleges.

UT President Larry Faulkner said he nonetheless remains hopeful about prospects in the House. He argues that it's unwise to accept a large number of students on the basis of a single factor. In addition, UT now considers race and ethnicity because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that colleges may do so.

"I think this is only one step in the Legislature's addressing of this issue," Faulkner said. "I think there will be more to come."

Faulkner contends that some sort of cap on admissions under the top 10 percent law would be the best approach and that repealing the law altogether would be better than no change.

Currently, any student graduat- ing in the top 10 percent of a high school in Texas can attend the public college of his or her choice.

UT, more than any other school in the state, is accepting an increasing portion of its student body under that provision. Seventy-two percent of students admitted from Texas high schools for this summer and fall qualified under the law.

An amendment offered by Sen. Kyle Janek, R-Houston, to West's SB 333 would have allowed universities to accept no more than half a freshman class on the basis of class rank. The amendment was tabled, 15-13.

Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, offered an amendment that would have essentially repealed the top 10 percent law. The amendment would have required admissions officers to consider 18 factors, including an applicant's academic record and socioeconomic background.

Senators tabled that amendment as well, 16-12.

Wentworth said afterward that two senators — John Carona of Dallas and Chris Harris of Arlington, both Republicans — had been expected to support repeal or a cap but were absent Friday.

Asked whether he would try again this session to repeal or modify the law, Wentworth said it would depend on whether he can line up sufficient support. "If I can't get people to change their mind, I am not going to waste the time of the Senate," he said.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/05/7topten.html
 

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:13 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Wanted to let everybody know that this Sunday night on CNN at 7PM, the recent HISD Cheating Scandal will be covered.
I am among those interviewed for this story.

Angela

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:46 PM 3 comments Links to this post

Teachers, Some Schools Worried by Privatization Proposals

05/06/2005
By LIZ AUSTIN  / Associated Press
Chalk in hand, about 15 second-graders line up to go outside and practice their spelling words on the sidewalks under the warm spring sun.
"A-R-E" they shout as assistant superintendent Jo Ann Garrison quizzes them in the hallway of Marlin Elementary School. She beams at their enthusiasm and hugs a boy before sending them out the door with their teacher.
It's easy to see why this small Central Texas town has rallied around Garrison, who has devoted 19 years to Marlin schools. Standardized test scores have risen dramatically in the two years since she and a team of administrators took over the elementary school, one of just four Texas campuses deemed low performing the last three times ratings were issued.
But for-profit companies, universities and other outside groups may replace homegrown reformers in other struggling Texas schools under a plan being pushed in Austin.
A bill approved by the Texas House calls for private management of campuses that, for two straight years, rank in the bottom 5 percent of the state's accountability rating system and fail to show annual improvement as required under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The Senate is considering a plan that would apply to campuses identified as academically unacceptable by the Texas Education Agency two years in a row.
It's an unpopular idea among teachers' unions and public education advocates, who fear the state's most vulnerable children could be at the mercy of a company's bottom line.
"When you turn a school over to a for-profit company their number one priority is making a profit for their investors. That's not necessarily what it should be when we're talking about educating Texas kids," said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, a public education watchdog group.
But for-profit companies have no chance of making money if they don't do great things for kids and schools, said Adam Tucker, a spokesman for Edison Schools, the nation's largest for-profit school operator.
"Our number one bottom line is academic achievement for kids," he said.
The House bill's author, Republican Rep. Kent Grusendorf of Arlington, also emphasized that nonprofit groups, community organizations and other school districts will be encouraged to apply for management roles.
"I'm not really nearly as interested in who it will be as I am the results that are going to be obtained," Grusendorf said.
Schools around the country have seen mixed results after privatizing low-performing schools.
The Dallas school district ended its 2 1/2-year relationship with Edison Schools after the 2002-03 school year, saying test scores didn't improve enough to justify the expense. The district paid Edison $39 million to manage seven schools in the 2001-02 school year alone.
A 2003 study by the Government Accountability Office found students in privately managed schools in San Francisco and Denver had significantly higher reading and math scores than students at similar traditional public schools. But in Cleveland and St. Paul, Minn., scores were significantly lower in privately run schools.
Philadelphia is in the middle of the nation's largest experiment in privatization. Twenty-three of 45 city schools run by outside managers, including Edison, met requirements under No Child Left Behind last year, up from seven the prior year.
But those improvements largely mirror gains seen in most of Philadelphia's regular schools since the state took over the roughly 270-school district in 2001 after years of low academic achievement and rampant discipline problems.
"The early evidence is (privatized schools) are no better," said Clive Belfield, associate director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University. "Certainly they haven't run away with the argument yet."
It's hard to predict how many Texas schools would end up under private management if the proposals become law.
Last year, 92 of Texas' roughly 7,800 schools — or about 2 percent — were rated academically unacceptable, the state's lowest rating. Eighteen schools, including eight charter or other non-traditional schools, have received an unacceptable rating at least two years in a row.
About 400 Texas schools failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind in 2004. Thirty-three were also rated academically unacceptable by the state.
And Texas continues to make it harder to receive an acceptable rating as it works toward No Child Left Behind's goal of getting 100 percent of children proficient in reading and math by 2014.
Starting next school year, 60 percent of a school's students will have to pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in reading/English language arts, writing and social studies. Fifty percent had to pass this year. The passing rate requirement also will jump from 25 to 35 percent in science and from 35 to 40 percent in math.
If those standards had been in place last year, about 1,200 schools would have received an unacceptable rating. But Texas Education Agency spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said the agency expects fewer schools to miss the mark. Texas has raised its passing rates several times over the years, and schools have responded with higher scores.
Marlin Elementary's test scores skyrocketed with a restructured curriculum aligned with state guidelines. Administrators also replaced or reassigned about half the school's teachers and reworked the schedule to add time for teaching.
A $1 million state grant helped the impoverished district 30 miles southeast of Waco buy reams of supplies and pay for a teacher trainer, a community liaison and a curriculum expert.
Seventy percent of Marlin Elementary's third-graders passed the math portion of the TAKS last year, up from 29 percent in 2003. Eighty-two percent passed the reading section, compared with 51 percent the year before.
Some scores are still lagging. Only 27 percent of fifth-graders passed the science portion in 2003 and 2004, and the school would have received an acceptable rating last year if two more had passed that part of the test.
But the turnaround was so impressive that the TEA in June pulled the intervention specialist it assigned to the school in 2002.
"Every little face that comes through this door we're glad to see them," Garrison said. "I think that that is now what has been established in the last two years. That we're glad to see them, and we're going to do whatever we can."
Like Marlin, most low-performing schools could improve if given the right resources and advice from the state, Miller said.
"That seems to me to be far more responsible than the state and the Legislature saying, 'We just can't take care of this problem. We want to turn it over to someone else,'" she said.
___
On the Net:
http://www.dentonrc.com/sharedcontent/APStories/stories/D89TP5UO0.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:38 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Late Tuesday evening, members of Texas and National LULAC were at the House
Public Education Committee to testify in favor of real assessment (multiple
criteria) bills sponsored by Rep. Dora Olivo.  Texas LULAC has been
supporting these bills since their inception.
 
Clara Valenzuela Zamora, age 12, refused to take the TAKS exam this year.
She said in the committee hearing that we need to bring fun and teaching
back to the schools. The full text of her testimony can be seen below.
 
Our Children Are Worth More Than a Single Test - They should be evaluated on
real assessment such as grades and performance.  Their needs should be
identified earlier, not when they have failed a test for the third time.
 
WE NEED YOUR PHONE CALLS!!  -  SEND TO YOUR FRIENDS.
 
Angela Valenzuela, TX LULAC Education Chair, says we need to call Chairman
Grusendorf  and members of the House Public Education Committee and tell
them to let the full House decide whether to vote for HB 1612 (relating to
promotion of students to certain grade levels in public) and HB 1613
(relating to the requirements for a high school diploma).  
 
House Education Committee Members:
Chairman Grusendorf, R-Arlington, (512) 463-0624,
Vice-Chair Rene Olivera, D-Brownsville, (512) 463-0640,
Rep. Dan Branch, R-Dallas, (512) 463-0367
Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, (512) 463-0510
Rep. Anna Mowery, R-Fort Worth, (512) 463-0608
Rep. Dianne Delisi, R- Temple, (512) 463-0630
Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, (512) 463-0797
Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, (512) 463-0492
Rep. Bill Keffer, R-Dallas, (512) 463-0244
 
Clara V. Zamora

May 3, 2005 - Testimony Before the Committee on Public Education
            
Thank you for allowing me to testify today.  First of all, I
want to say that I am a sixth-grade student at Barton Hills Elementary in
the Austin Independent School District.  And also, I am refusing to take the
TAKS test at my school because I do not agree with the way that the TAKS is
being used.  One of the ways that it is being used in a bad way is that it
is being used to show the students' abilities, when if they want to see that
information, they should look at the rest of the students grades, not just
ONE test.  The student could be the brightest kid in the world, but have a
low test score and be categorized in an incorrect way according to the test
score.  And this isn't fair.
 
            Another reason why I do not agree with the TAKS test and think
it is wrong is because it is taking up a bunch of the teachers' teaching
time for preparation of the test.  It's not fair to the students or the
teachers.  We have to spend SO much time to prepare for the test, that the
teachers don't have enough time to make teaching fun!  I remember for awhile
we were late on learning some things in math, so we had to skim through the
whole book, just so that we'd know something about what was in the book,
before the test came along.  It's not fair that it has to be a drag for the
students to go to math or reading class anymore.  I know that if the TAKS
test is not emphasized so much that all the students will enjoy school a lot
more, and all of the teachers, will like teaching more.  The ratio of the
hours of school for preparation of the TAKS to the hours of school total is
overwhelming.
 
            Another thing about the TAKS test that troubles me is that we
have taken TAKS tests from the years before, and according to the grade on
those, certain students get pulled out of class at certain times of the day
for tutoring.  I don't think there's anything really wrong about that,
except for the fact that those students probably get embarrassed and they
are missing out on important things that they might need to actually know
for the TAKS test while they are in tutoring.
 
            I am not protesting this for my own sake.  I am doing this for
all of the students in Texas that have to take the TAKS test every year.  I
hope that me doing this will have an effect on them, and show the students
that they don't have to put up with this, and they don't have to take it.
Though their rights aren't shown, all of the students do have rights.  I
hope more and more students will protest the test and not take it, to the
point that the government finally realizes that they do have to do
something.  The government can start by passing House Bills 1612 and 1613
since they call for a better way to determine students' abilities than the
current way.  Thank you very much.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:13 PM 0 comments Links to this post

It's worth looking at this piece. It speaks directly to the validity of the TAKS exam. Can you imagine how much worse this exam is compromised when it gets translated into Spanish for English language learners? -Angela

April 24, 2005

TESTING: None of the Above
By LISA GUERNSEY

O years ago, fifth graders taking Texas's annual standardized science test faced this multiple-choice question: "Which two planets are closest to Earth?" The four choices were "Mercury and Saturn," "Mars and Jupiter," "Mercury and Venus" and "Venus and Mars."

Simple, right? The Texas Education Agency thought so; every fifth grader should know that Venus and Mars orbit on either side of Earth's orbit (remember the mnemonic "My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas"?). "Venus and Mars," therefore, would have been a good pick.

But wait, said Mark Loewe, a Dallas physicist who was curious about what students are expected to know and so took the test. The question asked which planets - not which planets' orbits - were closest to Earth. So the correct answer depends on when the question is asked.

"Mercury, which orbits closest to the Sun, is closest to Earth most often," Dr. Loewe said, and sure enough, during that test week in spring 2003, Mercury and Mars were the planets closest to Earth, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Web site. That pair was not among the possible answers.

So is the question valid? Perhaps, since the problem was written for a typical 10-year-old, not someone with Dr. Loewe's understanding of science. On the other hand, the problem ignores the physical world woven into the question, and that might trip up brighter fifth graders.

Beware the perils of ambiguity. It is a mantra that is increasingly pertinent to tests in mathematics and science. The two fields might seem immune from imprecision. But in mathematics, for example, today's tests assess more than a student's ability to do "naked computation," as Cathy Seeley, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, puts it. In many places, calculators have rendered meaningless the testing of basic computational tasks. Instead, more questions test students' comprehension in real-world contexts. A triangle is a corner garden bed. A rectangular object intersected by a line is a juice box, with a straw. A sloped line on a graph represents a year's worth of payments to the power company.

With these scenarios come variables, and mathematicians and scientists from British Columbia to Boston spend much time picking apart the questions, particularly in online discussion groups. If students are asked how many seeds can be planted in the surface area of a triangular garden, do you put seeds in the corners where there isn't room for plants to take root? What about relevant considerations like seasonality of utility bills or position of the planets? Multiple-choice questions, with no place to show your work and thinking, make such realities more vexing.

"To the lay eye, it may appear that I am being picky, criticizing the minutest detail of the exam," wrote James A. Middleton, a mathematics education professor at Arizona State University, in an online critique of his state's high school exams. "I am being picky. Any first-semester student of psychometrics (the statistical study of test design, administration and analysis) could tell you that if a test is to provide reliable and valid data, its items must be designed well, reflect the standards of the content, and clearly allow students who understand the content to demonstrate that understanding."

Professor Middleton decided that a quarter of the questions he analyzed had mistakes in content or context (he has just completed an analysis of recently released questions and says there is improvement).

"It's an increasingly severe problem," says Walter M. Haney, a senior researcher at Boston College's Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy.

The process by which questions are vetted is long and costly. "On most of the tests that are created today, the people who write them and the people who review them do a conscientious and good job," says Gregory Cizek, an education professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has been an elementary school teacher and a test writer for ACT Inc. But, he adds, "stuff always slips through."

Part of the challenge is writing appropriate questions for a particular grade level while not misleading a student who happens to know more. A 10th grader with a sibling in 12th grade may know some higher-level math; a 12th grader taking a physics course at a local college or online may look at a question differently than another student in the same grade.

Consider, for example, another question critiqued by Dr. Loewe on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in 2003. Students in 11th grade were asked to calculate how much force a frog would exert against a river bank while leaping off. Dr. Loewe, who has co-written a textbook on quantum mechanics, says that when he worked out the problem, he included the frog's gravitational weight (its force during rest, which he determined by using the formula for acceleration due to gravity, which was provided at the beginning of the test). But the answer key made clear that the question writer did not expect students to consider that.

Dr. Loewe found several other problems and informed the Texas Education Agency. "Texans are ill-served by such incompetence or dishonesty," he wrote. The agency responded by hiring university professors to review exam questions, says Victoria Young, director of instructional coordination in the agency's testing office. The professors review tests that relate to their areas of expertise but are also familiar with what is taught in high school.

Nonetheless, Ms. Young disputes Dr. Loewe's specific complaints. Asked whether the planets question might have led students to Dr. Loewe's answer, she responded, "Not a realistic viewpoint, in my opinion." And of the leaping frog, she says that physics educators have told her that "only if you brought a very advanced level of college physics to the table would you know enough to know that the answer could be arrived at differently."

Not so, says Dr. Haney of Boston College. Students should have known to take the frog's gravitational weight into account, and so argued a few Texans in letters to The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which reported on the dispute. Dr. Haney says one reason for the problem is that "a lot of the people who may be writing the math and science questions may not have a deep understanding of the math and science that they are trying to test."

In most cases, the people who write the questions are or have been teachers. Often, they are paid to attend summer workshops led by companies that have contracted with the states to develop the tests.

Marilyn Rindfuss, national senior mathematics consultant at Harcourt Assessment, which creates standardized tests for dozens of states, emphasizes a process she calls "tightening up." Ms. Rindfuss asks every question writer to go through a checklist that includes such questions as "Is the fictional information realistic? (no 75-pound housecats)" and "Is there one, and only one, clearly correct answer?" She also rejects questions that ask test takers to extrapolate patterns, because some people see a pattern that a question writer does not, leading the scorer to start "counting answers wrong that are, in fact, correct."

(To get a sense of such patterns, try this question, which has been kicking around New York City high schools for decades: What comes next in this sequence: 28, 23, 18, 14, __? Read on to find the answer.)

Once questions are written, they are typically reviewed by multiple groups that include test writers, teachers, editors, statisticians and content specialists. And then most developers test the questions on real students in real exam settings. In field testing, statisticians may discover that most top-scoring students selected answer "d" when answer "c" was deemed correct. What made "d" so appealing to the advanced students? Could a flaw in the question have led them to arrive at an equally correct answer? In most cases, the incongruity is a red flag, prompting developers to discard the question.

INSUFFICIENT field testing was blamed in part for the controversy in New York high schools in 2003, when two-thirds of test takers failed the Math A exam, which is required for a diploma. As a result, the state Board of Regents overhauled the math curriculum, and last month announced that the state would abandon its approach of integrated mathematics in favor of the old-fashioned curriculum of algebra for freshmen, geometry for sophomores and algebra II and trigonometry for juniors. The first revised exam based on those standards will be given in 2007.

Daniel Jaye, an assistant principal at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, served on the panel charged with investigating the troubled exam. He recalls a telling moment during the administration of the test at his school. "One of the kids raised his hand and the proctor called me into the room," Dr. Jaye says. The student was puzzled by a question about a straw that rested diagonally in a rectangular box, 3 by 4 by 8 inches. The question asked for the length of the straw to the nearest 10th of an inch. The answer, according to the Board of Regents, was 9.4 inches.

But, the student asserted, there was not enough information to answer the question correctly. If the question asked about the length of a line, he figured he could solve the problem. But because it asked about the length of a straw, he needed the radius of the straw to determine where it would touch the corner of the juice box.

"How am I expected to come up with an accurate answer?" the student asked.

"I started laughing because he was right," Dr. Jaye recalls. "I said, 'I don't know. I really don't know.' "

Jerry P. Becker, a professor of curriculum and instruction at Southern Illinois University, wrote this in an online discussion about ambiguous math questions: "We're talking about kids who are desperately trying to penetrate the minds of adults and figure out what is 'really' being asked and what 'the trick' is."

Professor Becker particularly dislikes multiple-choice questions. They are inexpensive to score, because they can be run through machines, but they include plausible incorrect choices, he says. Worse yet, many educators and scientists say, the multiple-choice format does not allow for creative, unexpected solutions.

Which brings us to the pattern question posed earlier: What comes next after 28, 23, 18 and 14? Actually, it's a math teacher's idea of a joke.

The answer is Christopher Street, the next stop downtown on the 1 and 9 lines in the New York City subway system.


Lisa Guernsey contributes articles on education and technology for The Times.


Copyright 2005 The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/education/edlife/guernsey24.html?ex=1115524800&en=09c10f265b40574f&ei=5070&oref=login

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:09 PM 1 comments Links to this post

House Panel OKs School Voucher Bill

09:41 PM CDT on Thursday, May 5, 2005

By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News


AUSTIN – Fiercely debated legislation that would allow low-income and at-risk students in Dallas and other urban school districts to transfer to private schools at state expense was approved Thursday by the House Public Education Committee.

The private school voucher bill, passed at a hastily called meeting of the committee, would enable thousands of students in Dallas, Fort Worth and at least five other urban districts to attend private schools as long as those schools satisfy certain requirements, such as annual testing of students.

Committee members approved the measure on a 6-3 vote, with all three Democrats on the panel voting no.

The measure, which faces an uphill battle for passage, now goes to the full House. The Senate has not considered private school vouchers this session.

Rep. Linda Harper-Brown, R-Irving, author of the bill, said that students in greatest need are poor, at risk of dropping out, in special education or victims of school violence.

Further she said, her legislation limits the number of students who would be eligible for vouchers to 5 percent of each district's enrollment through 2008. That figure represents about 30,000 students statewide.

Opponents – including virtually every public-education group in the state – assert that the voucher scheme would deal a huge blow to public schools, depriving them of millions of dollars at a time when many districts are cutting programs and employees to make ends meet.

A Legislative Budget Board fiscal note on the bill indicated that if 15,000 students take advantage of the voucher option, the seven school districts would lose nearly $70 million in funding.

"Legislators need to do the math," said Carolyn Boyle, a spokeswoman for the Coalition for Public Schools, which represents most school districts and education groups in the state. "We can't afford to take away money from public schools to subsidize private schools in Texas."

Another group, Texas Freedom Network, called the legislation a "payback" to wealthy campaign contributors who want to see tax dollars used to fund private schools.

Those groups warned that tax funding for private schools could eventually reach $600 million a year under the bill.

Voucher supporters have been trying for several years to pass legislation setting up a pilot program in Texas, but they have been unsuccessful – even though there were backed by former Gov. George Bush, Gov. Rick Perry and legislative leaders.

Public opinion polls have generally indicated that most Texans are opposed to use of their tax dollars for private school education.

E-mail tstutz@dallasnews.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/050605dntexvouchers.7c8f0808.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:04 PM 1 comments Links to this post

The very latest word on vouchers is that Archbishop Gomez in San Antonio is taking a public stand in support of vouchers as a solution for the financing of Catholic parochial schools. Though a counter-strategy is currently being devised by leadership in San Antonio, this will likely affect a number of parishioner's opinions on vouchers. If 5 % say, at most, 7% of all young people attend Catholic parochial schools in Texas, then this Archbishop is willing to sacrifice the remaining 93%--including the majority of his own parishioners-- so that Catholic schools may benefit. His "leadership" on this issue is extremely unfortunate and unfortunately divisive. -Angela

from Adrian Rodriguez, Texas LULAC

At a press conference on April 4, the Coalition for Public Schools – which
includes the Texas Freedom Network – estimated that the three voucher bills
would drain $600 million to $2.2 billion over a two-year period from our
public schools to pay for tuition at private and religious schools. The next
day, Texas LULAC and the NAACP held another press conference to counter
efforts by other groups to build support for vouchers in the Hispanic and
African-American communities.

The same day, Gov. Perry, Lt. Gov. Dewhurst and House Speaker Craddick
addressed a large pro-voucher rally on the Capitol steps. Hispanic CREO, an
organization funded by the far-right Walton and Friedman foundations and the
U.S. Department of Education to push voucher legislation, sponsored the
rally. None of this was a surprise – too many of our state’s leaders and
wealthy special interests have been conspiring for years to bring vouchers
to Texas. They see this year as their best chance to win.

Refusing to Be Silenced
The House committee’s public hearing on three voucher bills demonstrated the
extreme measures that far-right legislators will take to silence the
opposition to vouchers. For the first five hours, committee Chairman Kent
Grusendorf, R-Arlington, called only pro-voucher testimony. Most of those
speakers came from folks Hispanic CREO and other far-right groups bused to
the Capitol from San Antonio.

Scores of voucher opponents also came, however, many traveling hundreds of
miles on their own to Austin. Shortly before midnight, all who remained in
the committee room were those dedicated supporters of neighborhood public
schools. They were clearly determined to be heard, regardless of the
maneuvering to keep them frustrated and silent as the hours have clicked by.


Fighting for Our Public Schools
The House Public Education Committee has yet to vote out any of the three
voucher bills. Many phone calls, visits and other contact between supporters
of public schools and lawmakers are making a difference. In fact, strong
opposition from across the state has beaten back voucher schemes in every
legislative session since 1995. Polls show that most Texans still strongly
oppose vouchers.

Yet it is hard to overstate the serious challenge facing our public schools
right now. As the end of the session nears, pro-voucher interests may try to
force a bill on to the floor of the House or Senate. Another possibility
would be amending a separate bill with a voucher scheme. Yet we can still
stop this dangerous agenda by keeping the pressure on legislators with calls
and letters. The time to stand up and fight for our public schools is NOW!
  _____  

Resources

  Take Action
  Learn More about Vouchers

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:38 PM 1 comments Links to this post

COMMENTARY

Gary Bledsoe, Ana Correa and Nelson Linder, LOCAL CONTRIBUTORS
Friday, May 06, 2005

In 2003, the Austin school district joined other plaintiffs in the West Orange Cove case. It led to a decision by state District Judge John Dietz of Travis County that gave constitutional weight to what many of us have been arguing for a long time: that Texas' system of paying for its public schools has become financially inefficient, inadequate and unsuitable. The system has proved particularly onerous for property-poor districts, with their high number of students who speak limited English or are economically disadvantaged.

We say this despite our support of the previous Texas Supreme Court decisions on this topic, although so-called Robin Hood school financing plan, which worked well at the beginning, is no longer very efficient.

Dietz admonished the Texas Legislature to address the many problems uncovered in the West Orange Cove case. So far, the most likely legislative responses are House Bill 2 and House Bill 3, which passed the House and await consideration in the Senate.

Sadly, it appears that the House's school finance legislation is compromised by an overriding concern with lowering property taxes, not with carrying out Dietz's mandate. Austinites should take note of the following:

•The bills' overall funding level is inadequate, with the so-called new money barely covering inflation, much less meeting the system's growing needs.

Under the old system, Austin was one of many districts forced to live on a fixed income. Unable to raise local property taxes above the state's maximum rate of $1.50 per $100 of assessed value, major urban districts — such as Austin — had used 99.5 percent of their capacity to raise revenue. The resulting funding crunch forced the Austin district to cut its budget by $41 million, eliminating 650 positions.

•Austin has experienced substantial growth in the number of students who are poor and who don't speak English — in other words, students who cost more to educate.

Unfortunately, HB 2 eliminates funding weights, which means that funding for low-income students, students with limited English proficiency and special education students will now be fixed. Instead of automatically increasing, schools will be forced to approach the Legislature every two years and ask for more.

•Every child deserves the opportunity to learn in structurally sound, technologically-equipped classrooms. By ignoring the need for renovation and construction to alleviate over-crowded and dilapidated classrooms, and without a permanent annual funding source for facilities, the bills leave intact one of the major forms of inequity addressed in the West Orange Cove case.

•The testing requirements in HB2, along with continued high-stakes testing in general, amount to intentional discrimination against African Americans and Latinos.

The higher failure rates of students who are economically disadvantaged or who lack English proficiency, and the effects of requiring high-stakes tests while also holding back funding, are well-established. The Legislature cannot plead ignorance.

We refer to a recent Texas A&M report, which estimates that it costs $1,960 for an economically disadvantaged student and $1,248 for a limited-English proficiency student to master these tests. The bill would provide only $877 for economically disadvantaged students and $500 for students with limited English. As a result, these students are much more likely to fail these tests and ultimately drop out of school because of it.

•Austin school officials, to their credit, have avoided the temptation to set the district's needs above those of the state's property-poor districts.

But HB2 would allow the wealthiest 10 percent of districts to unhitch their interests from the state's common interest, enshrining an "I got mine" mindset.

With the bill's limit on how much a wealthy district must share with poorer ones, along with the new method of tax increases (2 cents per year, without weights or proportions), wealthy districts essentially will be able to pay what they want to educate their students. And the problem only will be compounded over time.

By whatever standard, be it equity, economic soundness or legality, HB2 fails the test. We hope the state Senate will act more in the interests of all Texas citizens, not just a select few.

Bledsoe is president of the Texas NAACP; Correa is with the Texas chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens; Lindner is president of the Austin branch of the NAACP.

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/05/6naacp_edit.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:18 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Editorial / Dallas Morning News

Wednesday, May 4, 2005

Go back to the argument that lawyers representing poor school districts made last year about how Texas funds schools. The attorneys told state District Judge John Dietz that legislators either look into the state's kitty to see what's available or simply ignore schools' needs.

To us, that's what is still wrong with the Legislature's attempt to fund schools. Legislators are funding only the amount that – for political reasons – they can live with, meaning everyone fears raising taxes to improve schools.

Legislators may feel like that's all they can do, but Judge Dietz understood the plaintiffs' point of view. He sided with them, as well as with plaintiffs from rich districts, declaring legislators had until October to adequately fund schools.

Unfortunately, lawmakers are up to their old tricks and not meeting Judge Dietz's admonition. The House has offered about $3 billion extra for the next two years, while the Senate is likely to approve an extra $2.8 billion this week.

The Senate would help with programs like bilingual education, but it won't allow schools to repair the deep cuts they've made recently in their teaching ranks and course offerings. Heck, one superintendent told us he's struggling to pay for maps. It's hard to compete with India and China if your students can't even find them on a map.

Here's another reason to worry about the shortfalls. The state needs to reduce achievement gaps between districts. Judge Dietz argued this point eloquently:

"The key to changing our future is to close the gap in academic achievement between the haves and have-nots," he wrote. "The rub is that it costs money. It doesn't come free. So, are Texans willing to pay the price, to make the sacrifice to close the education gap, to secure their future and their children's future?"

Our hunch is yes, but legislators won't ask them. They want to keep funding schools on the cheap. That's the sad reality, and Texans can only hope the Supreme Court justices who will soon review Judge Dietz's ruling are watching. It's Texas' future we're talking about here.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/editorials/stories/050405dnedischool.71bbe138.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:41 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Perry Praises Home Schoolers

By GLENN EVANS

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

BIG SANDY – Gov. Rick Perry opened a nationwide home school seminar here Tuesday by praising about 3,000 parents and children from across the country for seeking a more abundant life than public education delivers.

"Doing well in traditional subjects is important but, you know, scoring high on the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) cannot help a child overcome the moral challenges every young person faces on a daily basis," Perry told the group of Christians who are scheduled for seminars meshing faith and education ending Friday evening.

International Alert Academy is holding its second Advanced Training Institute conference in as many years at the former Ambassador University complex west of Big Sandy.

"Each of you is here not only because you want the best possible education for your children, but because you want the best possible life for your entire family – the ‘life more abundant' promised in John 10:10," Perry said.

The governor referred to a Biblical passage in which Christ contrasts himself with thieves who come to take and kill, whereas he came so his sheep could have abundant life.

Perry spoke perhaps 10 minutes to the appreciative audience, declining afterward to speak to the Longview News-Journal. His topic stayed on praise of the home schoolers' movement and its abundance in Texas.

"I'm proud to be the governor of the state that is home to more home schools than any other state in the nation – over 100,000 of you out there," he said. "You see, in Texas we understand that parents are the most equipped to know the educational needs of their children."

Parents also are in position to know where their children will get those educational needs met, he said, whether that's in public school, private school or home school.

"And for those who choose to teach at home, government regulation must always stop at your door," he said. "Home schools work. They work because of parental involvement. ... Home schools – it also works for another reason, and that's freedom. Home schools work because of that freedom parents have to teach their children according to their values."

Perry was accompanied on the brief visit by Republican state Reps. Dan Flynn of Van and Bryan Hughes of Mineola.

"It's a big deal what you're doing," Hughes said before delivering an opening prayer. "You're honoring the Lord in this."

http://www.news-journal.com/news/content/news/stories/2005/05/04/20050504LNJPerry.html;COXnetJSessionIDbuild74=CC5WTZBThy2mP9HhNA0bQZe0oSgaybWqMA4EkKEu21whR05b5bJV!1925061078?urac=n&urvf=11158798942690.132830739594479

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:38 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Education Agency's PR Budget Topped $9M

By BEN FELLER
The Associated Press
Wednesday, May 4, 2005; 3:37 AM


WASHINGTON -- The Education Department has committed more than $9 million to public relations in recent years, from informing people about test scores to touting the school agenda of President Bush, new records show.

The largest share, $5.45 million, went to the Hager Sharp firm for coordination of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test also known as the nation's report card.

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Documents detailing the department's hiring of private firms were released to The Associated Press on Tuesday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

The department has come under fire for how it promotes its agenda, leading new Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to pledge tighter scrutiny.

The total spending includes a $1.3 million contract with the Ketchum public relations firm _ $240,000 of which went to conservative commentator Armstrong Williams to promote Bush's education law. That hiring proved embarrassing to the administration and Williams.

Most of the newly released records cover spending during 2002, 2003 and 2004, although at least one significant contract, $1.69 million with ZGS Communications, was for 1998-2002. That contract went for audio, video and print materials about department programs.

Overall, most of the money committed for public relations appeared to go toward routine expenses, the documents indicate. Those expenses include public service announcements, materials about financial aid and promotion of the department's Web site.

"There's no point in spending taxpayer money on these programs if we're not going to provide parents with information that they exist," said department spokeswoman Susan Aspey.

More than half of Hager Sharp's total was spent on meetings concerning development of the national achievement test. Those tasks, handled by a subcontractor, were bundled into the testing contract and had nothing to with public relations, said Hager Sharp Vice President Debra Silimeo.

The rest of the Hager Sharp money, roughly $2.2 million, went for public relations, the Education Department records show. That includes the formal release of federal test score results and promotional booths about the voluntary test at education trade shows.

"People need to understand what it is and why it's important, and people who participate in it deserve to know what the results are," Silimeo said about the test.

The records also reveal new detail about the Ketchum contract, outlining how money was committed for aids for teachers, promotion of a science summit and brochures on tutoring.

The Ketchum deal also included an analysis of coverage by education reporters, giving them points if they made the Bush administration and the Republican Party look good. The department has said the ratings had no influence over how it treats reporters.

Beyond hiring Williams through Ketchum, the agency paid for a promotional "video news release" that looked like a real news story, a tactic congressional investigators have called "covert propaganda" in at least two other cases.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/04/AR2005050400300.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:36 AM 0 comments Links to this post

SAT Essay Test Rewards Length and Ignores Errors
By MICHAEL WINERIP
May 4, 2005

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

IN March, Les Perelman attended a national college writing conference and sat in on a panel on the new SAT writing test. Dr. Perelman is one of the directors of undergraduate writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did doctoral work on testing and develops writing assessments for entering M.I.T. freshmen. He fears that the new 25-minute SAT essay test that started in March - and will be given for the second time on Saturday - is actually teaching high school students terrible writing habits.

"It appeared to me that regardless of what a student wrote, the longer the essay, the higher the score," Dr. Perelman said. A man on the panel from the College Board disagreed. "He told me I was jumping to conclusions," Dr. Perelman said. "Because M.I.T. is a place where everything is backed by data, I went to my hotel room, counted the words in those essays and put them in an Excel spreadsheet on my laptop."

In the next weeks, Dr. Perelman studied every graded sample SAT essay that the College Board made public. He looked at the 15 samples in the ScoreWrite book that the College Board distributed to high schools nationwide to prepare students for the new writing section. He reviewed the 23 graded essays on the College Board Web site meant as a guide for students and the 16 writing "anchor" samples the College Board used to train graders to properly mark essays.

He was stunned by how complete the correlation was between length and score. "I have never found a quantifiable predictor in 25 years of grading that was anywhere near as strong as this one," he said. "If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you'd be right over 90 percent of the time." The shortest essays, typically 100 words, got the lowest grade of one. The longest, about 400 words, got the top grade of six. In between, there was virtually a direct match between length and grade.

He was also struck by all the factual errors in even the top essays. An essay on the Civil War, given a perfect six, describes the nation being changed forever by the "firing of two shots at Fort Sumter in late 1862." (Actually, it was in early 1861, and, according to "Battle Cry of Freedom" by James M. McPherson, it was "33 hours of bombardment by 4,000 shot and shells.")

Dr. Perelman contacted the College Board and was surprised to learn that on the new SAT essay, students are not penalized for incorrect facts. The official guide for scorers explains: "Writers may make errors in facts or information that do not affect the quality of their essays. For example, a writer may state 'The American Revolution began in 1842' or ' "Anna Karenina," a play by the French author Joseph Conrad, was a very upbeat literary work.' " (Actually, that's 1775; a novel by the Russian Leo Tolstoy; and poor Anna hurls herself under a train.) No matter. "You are scoring the writing, and not the correctness of facts."

How to prepare for such an essay? "I would advise writing as long as possible," said Dr. Perelman, "and include lots of facts, even if they're made up." This, of course, is not what he teaches his M.I.T. students. "It's exactly what we don't want to teach our kids," he said.

SAT graders are told to read an essay just once and spend two to three minutes per essay, and Dr. Perelman is now adept at rapid-fire SAT grading. This reporter held up a sample essay far enough away so it could not be read, and he was still able to guess the correct grade by its bulk and shape. "That's a 4," he said. "It looks like a 4."

A report released this week by the National Council of Teachers of English mirrors Dr. Perelman's criticism of the new SAT essay. It cautions that a single, 25-minute writing test ignores the most basic lesson of writing - that good writing is rewriting. It warns that the SAT is pushing schools toward "formulaic" writing instruction.

This is a far cry from all the hoopla when the new SAT was announced two years ago. College Board officials described it as a tool that could transform American education, forcing schools to better teach writing. A "great social experiment," Time magazine said.

In an interview, five top College Board officials strongly defended the writing test but sounded more muted about its usefulness. "The SAT essay should not be the primary way kids learn to write," said Wayne Camara, vice president for research. "It's one basic writing skill. If that's all the writing your high school English department is teaching, you have a problem."

They said that while there was a correlation between writing long and a high score, it was not as significant as Dr. Perelman stated. Graders also reward g