This piece demonstrates that this country only wants to deal superficially and in a self-serving manner with immigration. Rather than paying the prevailing wage in the rebuilding of New Orleans, they hire immigrant labor. Georgia was similarly rebuilt after Hurricane Andrew and also, later, the olympic park in Atlanta during the international olympics. Now, they have half a million Mexican residents there. And yes, they’re a prolific community and they’re setting up their own institutions (churches, businesses, restaurants). Though ambivalence toward this community prevails, all of this is still viewed as somewhat of a novelty in Georgia.

I quote from the piece below, “Ironically, even as they risk being put into deportation proceedings if they access aid, immigrants are apparently being courted as a major part of government-driven rebuilding New Orleans.” If history is any guide, perhaps the future New Orleans will be a gentrified city with a “new” underclass that includes unprecedented numbers of nationals from Mexico and Latin America—and yes, with their own institutions as part of an overall survival strategy.

Georgia is now looking for solutions to the massive under-education of its Mexican residents. Congress will be soon taking up immigration policy. There are several proposals that will be addressed, including the Dream Act and the Kennedy-McCain bills.

I plan to post such news items as they critically affect the future of our country and as the article below suggests, the well-being of the immigrants themselves. -Angela


http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/2410

by Kari Lydersen
Sep 28, 2005

Undocumented workers and families in the areas devastated by one of the worst storms in US history – including Central American survivors of Hurricane Mitch – face perhaps the steepest route to recovery.

Many Hondurans came to the New Orleans area after Hurricane Mitch tore through their homeland in 1998, devastating the already poverty-stricken country. Few funds were available for aid and rebuilding, and corrupt officials siphoned off much of the foreign financial help. Many parts of the capitol Tegucigalpa still stand in ruins seven years later.

Hurricane Katrina was an all-too-familiar experience for those who were already refugees. About 150,000 Hondurans were among an estimated 300,000 immigrants living in the areas hit by the storm. And in a country far wealthier than their homeland, many found their access to aid and support was not much different. Those from Honduras and other countries who are undocumented and living illegally in the US, usually working low-wage jobs, have had an even harder time than other impoverished residents in surviving and relocating after the hurricane, since they are afraid to ask for aid.

And for good reason. After initial governmental reassurances that immigrants should seek aid, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) declined to promise that immigrants would not be placed in deportation proceedings if federal authorities find them through relief efforts. At least five evacuees have been placed in deportation proceedings, three in El Paso and two in West Virginia.

"While that seems like a small number, it sends a message to the community," said Jennifer Ng’anbu, health policy analyst for the National Council of La Raza, an organization that advocates on behalf of Hispanics in the US. "It doesn’t take much for them to become fearful. Immigrants are isolated; they feel there are real consequences of disclosing themselves."

In his national address on September 15, President Bush noted that undocumented immigrants cannot get temporary homes, subsidies, Social Security checks or mail delivery promised to legal residents displaced by Katrina. Some groups like Catholic Charities and Catholic Community Services of Baton Rouge are helping undocumented immigrants with shelter and cash, but the intense climate of fear and language barriers make even these services hard to access.

Days after the hurricane struck, Mexican president Vicente Fox delivered televised addresses urging the 40,000 Mexican nationals in the area to seek aid and announcing an agreement with the US not to deport undocumented Mexicans, though the US government has not confirmed this promise.

"We’ve had no formal or informal promises" to suspend immigration enforcement, noted Ng’Anbu.

This is a departure from US policy after the September 11 attacks and the string of hurricanes that struck the Southeast last year, when the federal government explicitly suspended enforcement of immigration laws.

Since most immigrants from Latin America send money back to their families in home countries, the hurricane will have ripple economic effects across the hemisphere.

The National Council of La Raza was joined by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) in calling on Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff to suspend deportation proceedings against all immigrants seeking help in the wake of Katrina.

"Whether folks are undocumented or not, the message that FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security is sending is really mixed, first telling them to report for relief services and then reporting them [to authorities]," said Ng’anbu. "They’re frightened, they’re not seeking the help they need to get back on their feet."

Hondurans and other Central American immigrants made up the bulk of the service sector working in casinos and restaurants in the New Orleans area, while Mexicans and other Latin American immigrants also constituted a large agricultural workforce in the surrounding region. The immigrant population in areas affected by Katrina included the 150,000 Hondurans and 40,000 Mexicans along with about 9,600 Salvadorans, 10,000 Brazilians, and immigrants from Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, and Costa Rica, according to numbers provided to the press by consulates.

Natalia Fernandez, a Honduran immigrant in the Bronx whose niece and her three children were displaced by Katrina, was close to tears as she described what her family has been through.

"There’s so much sadness, so many problems," she said in Spanish, describing how her niece and young children were living on the fifth floor of a hotel with no amenities and no elevator and had to walk miles through the heat. They eventually made it to New York to stay with family.

"She’s so tired, it was so hot, no social workers visited them, no therapy, the kids have been out of school, they had nowhere to go," said Fernandez. "It’s a trauma, not only for them but for the whole family. The relatives suffer, too. This is what happens to them for being undocumented."

She blamed President Bush for her family’s misery.

"He’s bad; he’s a criminal," she said. "People are getting sick emotionally and physically, and he doesn’t have a heart. We never had a good government [in Honduras] and we thought it would be different here, but it’s the same."

Mirtha Colon, with the group Hondurans Against AIDS in New York, noted that since most immigrants from Latin America send money back to their families in home countries, the hurricane will have ripple economic effects across the hemisphere.

The fear of detection makes it difficult for consulates and family members to find out what has happened to immigrants. Many do not know if their relatives are safe and where they are. Consulates have generally reported locating only a few hundred of the thousands of their nationals in the region, according to numerous media reports.

LULAC has organized the distribution of long-distance phone cards to immigrants in refugee shelters as part of relief efforts that also include sending out roving medical teams and collecting funds for families who have taken in displaced immigrants.

LULAC director of policy and legislation Gabriela Lemus noted that several thousand migrant farm workers in particular have been ignored leading up to and throughout the disaster.

"They didn’t find out about it until it was too late to evacuate, so they didn’t have a chance to get out," she said. "They had to batten down the hatches and wait. The farm owners were more concerned about their crops than [about] the workers."

Groups including the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities and Familias Unidas have urged lawmakers to hasten passing liberal immigration reform bills like the McCain-Kennedy Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act to help undocumented immigrants caught in Katrina avoid deportation and start new lives in the US.

Ironically, even as they risk being put into deportation proceedings if they access aid, immigrants are apparently being courted as a major part of government-driven rebuilding New Orleans. In a September 8 Executive Order, President Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act requiring construction workers on federal contracts be paid the average wage in a region, and the Department of Homeland Security promised employers it will suspend checking documentation of workers.

As advocates see it, this is a microcosm of how immigrant laborers have been treated in the US in general – welcomed and used for their labor, but largely denied job stability, permanent residence and social services.

© 2005 The NewStandard.

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

John Young always writes in such a lucid manner. Here's a concise commentary that questions the alleged virtues of privatization. I include it in this blog because the concerns translate directly into moves to privatize schooling. It asks the question "Who really profits from this privatization?" And just as importantly, "What governance structures are in place to offer protections when things go awry?" -Angela

John Young, WACO HERALD-TRIBUNE
Wednesday, September 28, 2005

The joke wasn't so funny a few days ago, but it's starting to assume resonance: Why couldn't the people of Louisiana get support when they needed it? Because the lines to New Delhi were down.

It's still not funny to those in despair. But it says a lot about a corporate-driven culture and the government it has spawned.

Now that the leave-it-to-Fox-News crowd has regained its footing after Washington's inexcusable federal response to Katrina, we hear such shiny stars as Tony Snow calling for complete privatization of FEMA to make it more efficient.

Snow should know that the fruits of privatization were already on display with the "new, improved and repackaged FEMA; now with Homeland Security!"

For instance, FEMA had hired a Jacksonville, Fla., firm, Landstar System, Inc., to coordinate logistics for evacuating after hurricanes. It subcontracted and subcontracted. You know the drill. When Katrina hit, nothing but free-market bureaucracy stood in the way.

"The bureaucratic chain of command (under Landstar) made it tough to get the word out to bus operators," a spokesman from the American Bus Association told the Louisville (Ky.) Business Journal. The association had an armada of buses ready to stream to the Gulf, but: "You had a company hired to do a job that I don't think really even knew where to find enough buses to do the job."

Katrina and FEMA aside, the encouraging news is that rather than caving further to the forces of privatizing and outsourcing, even Republican-controlled Washington is looking anew at the issue.

Last week, the Senate passed an appropriations bill for the U.S. Department of Agriculture with language that prohibits states from using federal money if they privatize more than 10 percent of their food stamp program operations. The amendment was authored by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.

The companion bill in the House has no such language, so it will be debated in conference committee. If it were to become law, it would crimp Texas' pedal-to-the-metal effort to privatize human services. Pursuant to a massive restructuring bill in 2003, the state plans to lay off 2,500 people in a move to private call centers for food stamps under a contract with Accenture. The move has yet to be approved by the USDA.

Organizations that advocate for services for the poor are urging a go-slow approach on privatizing, and they have good reason. Often the "benefits" of privatizing go not to the people who need them but to corporate chieftains and the consultants who snag the contracts.

Two years ago, the Lone Star State, which had dropped hundreds of thousands of children off the Children's Health Insurance Program — CHIP — was red-faced when auditors found it had overpaid a vendor $20 million for administering it, including millions for individual consultants.

Of course, the traditional form of administering government programs has waste and incompetents. But at least government is governed. At least it's ours. Privatizing makes it someone else's.

Privatizing does more than lend itself to profiteering at the expense of the taxpayers. It also cuts them out of the loop when they seek information about the companies operating with public funds. Such information is called proprietary, meaning, "It's your tax dollars, but it's our business."

Post-Katrina, post-Rita, every citizen should be thinking afresh about the function of government and understanding the stakes when we parcel its functions out to the lowest bidder.

It's a good time to discuss curious comments like this from President Bush's first budget director Mitch Daniels: "The business of government is not to provide services, but to make sure that they are provided."

That's all the people of Louisiana were asking of FEMA, new, improved and already knee-deep in privatization.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:21 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This editorial by the Statesman is very encouraging. It appropriately critiques high-stakes testing for reasons that scholars and advocates have known all along. It goes beyond this, however, and supports State Representative Dora Olivo’s House Bills 1612 and 1613 that call for the use of multiple measures in assessment. For teachers and reformers, this equates to authentically assessing youth’s work in a more comprehensive manner. Besides being a more just and valid measure of students’ work, amplifying the criteria upon which youth are assessed logically translates into an expanding, rather narrowing, of curricula. The Statesman accurately notes that the Olivo bills additionally respond to teachers’ concerns over the excessive amount of time devoted to teaching tests and not children, fostering their critical capacities. So that she can continue spearheading this and other proposals that promise to benefit all Texas children, the representative needs our support:

Dora Olivo Campaign
P. O. Box 517
Richmond, Texas 77406-0517
281-342-0880
www.doraolivo.com

-Angela

EDITORIAL
When an exit exam becomes an exit ramp for too many Texans
Wednesday, September 28, 2005 / Austin Am-Statesman

For several years, state Rep. Dora Olivo, D-Missouri City, has been fighting to de-emphasize the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in promoting and graduating Texas students. Her bills to do that have met with fierce resistance from lawmakers who swear by high-stakes testing as a means of improving student performance. De-emphasizing the test, they argue, would weaken standards.

But a new study shows high-stakes testing programs in Texas and elsewhere might do as much harm as good. It might finally dispel those mistaken notions and give the bills the momentum they need.

When the Legislature meets in 2007, it should pass Olivo's measures, House Bills 1612 and 1613. The legislation would leave intact the best of Texas' testing system and fix what isn't working. The measures would permit schools to use multiple criteria, including grades, teacher evaluations and TAKS scores, to determine promotion and graduation. As it stands, seniors are denied diplomas if they don't pass the exit TAKS, regardless of their grades.

It's worth repeating that state skills exams are a good way to measure what students are learning and diagnose academic weaknesses. But Texas has used the test inappropriately to determine student promotion, retention and graduation. Because schools place so much emphasis on the TAKS, teachers long have complained that they are devoting too much time to teaching the test and not enough time helping students learn how to think critically.

The study, released earlier this month by the Education Policy Studies Laboratory, examined the effect of high-stakes testing in Texas and 24 other states. It found "no convincing evidence" that punitive measures aimed at pressuring schools and students to improve scores produced better student achievement than would otherwise have been expected. But it did find that high-stakes testing was having a negative effect on many minority students. The study found that states with greater numbers of minority students are using testing systems that exert greater pressure. Researchers think that increased testing pressure is related to larger numbers of students being held back or dropping out of school.

We've seen that happen in Texas public schools. This year, there were 21,198 seniors who did not pass the exit TAKS, so they didn't graduate. Those students completed other graduation requirements, but couldn't pass the skills exam.

Failure rates were highest among African Americans (15 percent didn't pass the exit TAKS) and Hispanics (14 percent). Five percent of white students flunked the exam.

For several years, we've been concerned about Texas' high-stakes testing program. This school year again, the exam will be used to determine whether third- and fifth-graders should be promoted and whether seniors should get their diplomas.

It is true that Texas' testing program has illuminated the gap in performance between white and minority students and between students from middle- and upper income families and those from low-income homes. That is good because it allows schools to focus their resources on the students who need it most. It also helps schools design more challenging curricula for higher performers who might otherwise be ignored.

It would be fine if the testing program stopped there. But Texas takes it a few steps too far. De-emphasizing the test would improve public schools.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/09/28testing_edit.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:03 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out this publication by Professor DAVID HURSH. It is titled, "Neo-liberalism, Markets and Accountability: transforming education and undermining democracy in the United States and England," pages 3-15 -Angela

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:58 PM 0 comments Links to this post

New Report: "A Look at Immigrant Youth: Prospects and Promising Practices"
By Ann Morse
National Conference of State Legislatures: Children's Policy Institute
March 2005

This paper, produced for the National Conference of State Legislatures Children's Policy Initiative, outlines the demographics of LEP and immigrant youth and some of the challenges facing them and institutions that serve them, including new requirements in the No Child Left Behind Act for assessments, staffing, and parental involvement. The report also identifies some creative programmatic responses to serve LEP and immigrant children and their parents through newcomer schools, parent outreach and training, and after school programs.

(...Read the complete report  in pdf form.)

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

Also see Texas Civil Rights Review for a synopsis/presentation or report highlights.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:55 PM 2 comments Links to this post

September 28, 2005

Some worry that a plan for vouchers might delay overall relief package.
By Michelle R. Davis
Washington

As schools torn apart by Hurricane Katrina look to rebuild, and districts welcoming displaced students wonder how to pay for their education, federal officials last week were still mulling options for providing aid to schools.

Congress is weighing several large education aid packages that would provide differing levels and methods of funding.

But progress on passing relief for school districts could be snagged by a growing insistence from some Republicans for cuts elsewhere in the federal budget to offset massive spending for hurricane relief, and by controversy over President Bush’s proposal to provide private school vouchers for students displaced by the storm.


Assistant Secretary of Education Henry L. Johnson, left, listens as Sen. Trent Loft, R-Miss., addresses a Senate subcommittee last week on hurricane aid to schools.
—Christopher Powers/Education Week

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said last week that the budgetary concerns may mean that some Department of Education programs put on the budget chopping block by President Bush earlier this year, but saved by congressional appropriators, may again be at risk.

“Obviously, there are things in the Department of Education budget and in the federal budget in general that the president has called for either trimming or eliminating,” she said in a Sept. 21 speech at the National Press Club here. “We have some programs in our own budget that are not as effective as they could be. … Those things will be on the table as we negotiate.”

Meanwhile, education leaders in Louisiana and Mississippi, the states most directly affected by Katrina, say they need money immediately. They are looking to Washington for relief, even as their own legislators weigh state-level responses. ("Louisiana, Mississippi Lawmakers to Weigh Revenue Needs," this issue.)

Hank M. Bounds, the Mississippi state superintendent of education, said in an interview on Capitol Hill last week that the federal government must help his state fill in the gaps in lost tax revenue in order for it to begin rebuilding.

“The revenues school districts receive obviously will not look like what they budgeted,” said Mr. Bounds, who met with Secretary Spellings last week and requested $1.8 billion in aid on top of the $1.2 billion he expects from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “There is nothing Mississippi can do to help those districts survive.”

At a Sept. 22 hearing before the Senate education committee’s Subcommittee on Education and Childhood Development, Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., pressed her fellow lawmakers to speed the process.

“This is going to take quick action,” she said. “The situation is quite dire.”

Competing Programs
The competing ideas on the table in Washington include a bipartisan bill introduced by Senate education committee leaders on Sept. 15 and President Bush’s own hurricane-relief package for schools, the details of which were made public the following day. On Sept. 22, Sen. Landrieu unveiled her own wide-ranging relief bill that included a school component.

Sen. Landrieu’s legislation and the committee bill would authorize Congress to spend money on hurricane-related aid, but wouldn’t actually appropriate it.

The Landrieu plan includes $2 billion to help areas rebuild or repair school buildings; $1 billion for the Louisiana Department of Education to continue school district funding regardless of enrollment; $750 million in teacher-incentive funds to help affected districts retain their staffs; and $4,000 per student to districts enrolling evacuated students.

The bill introduced by Sen. Michael B. Enzi, R-Wyo., the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the committee’s ranking Democrat, would authorize aid to hard-hit school districts seeking to rebuild.

“Children can’t lose a year of school,” Sen. Kennedy said in a statement. “In the weeks and months ahead, we must also focus on rebuilding and reconstructing the schools devastated by the tragedy so that, as soon as possible, children can return to schools fully stocked with the resources they need.”

The measure, if funded, would award up to $900 million in immediate grants to districts directly harmed by Hurricane Katrina to reopen schools. That money would supplement money from FEMA. Districts could use the money under the Enzi-Kennedy bill to recover data, replace instructional materials and equipment, and establish temporary buildings and classrooms. But the money could not be used for construction or renovation of schools.

Money for reconstruction costs will come from private insurance and FEMA, said Melissa Janssen, a spokeswoman for the federal agency. Federal construction money is being funneled to states through two hurricane-aid measures that have already been enacted, she said.

FEMA money typically flows to states to repair infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, and schools. For projects costing over $55,000, following estimates for rebuilding, FEMA sends the money to the state, which then doles it out to school districts, Ms. Janssen said.

Meanwhile, under the Enzi-Kennedy plan, districts enrolling displaced students would be able to tap in to $2.5 billion to serve them. The money would be distributed based on a formula that ultimately would pay the entire cost for displaced students, based on the state’s average per-pupil expenditure on education, said Craig Orfield, a spokesman for Republicans on the Senate education committee.

“We felt it was a great start,” Mary Kusler, a lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators, said of the Enzi-Kennedy bill.

Aside from funding, the two senators’ bill would also provide the secretary of education with waiver authority for provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, including reporting requirements, assessment, and school improvement action. And it would permit temporary reciprocity across state lines for “highly qualified” teachers and paraprofessionals to help states comply with the federal law.

President Bush’s $1.9 billion plan for aiding K-12 schools requires approval from Congress.

“Just as appropriators do with the president’s budget or anything else he sends up, it doesn’t mean they’re going to do exactly what he wants,” said Joel Packer, a lobbyist for the 2.7 million-member National Education Association.

Giving and Taking Away
The Bush administration’s proposal differs from the Enzi-Kennedy package significantly in how it would provide hurricane-related aid for schools. Under the administration plan, the federal government would pick up 90 percent of the costs of educating displaced students, up to $7,500 per student, in addition to covering costs such as new-teacher salaries, extra busing, and new materials. ("Bush Proposes Evacuee Aid for Districts, School Vouchers," Sept. 21, 2005.)

For Louisiana and Mississippi, money would flow to the state, rather than directly to districts, to enroll students in open schools and kick-start rebuilding efforts.

And the president proposed $488 million in aid to give any evacuated family up to $7,500 a student for tuition at a private or religious school. ("Relief Palcs Spurring Debate Over Vouchers," this issue.)

President Bush’s plan would force both school districts devastated by Hurricane Katrina and those only enrolling displaced students to vie for the same pot of money, said Jeff Simering, the legislative director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a Washington-based group that represents 65 large urban districts.

“New Orleans would be competing with Baton Rouge and Shreveport, who are receiving thousands of kids, for the same pot of money,” Mr. Simering said of the effect in Louisiana. “We don’t think that is a viable or a wise strategy.”

The president’s plan would also give the secretary of education authority to waive most aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act on a case-by-case basis. However, at the Senate education subcommittee hearing Sept. 22, Henry L. Johnson, the department’s assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, who until recently was Mississippi’s state schools chief, said there would not be a long list of waivers issued.

“The secretary has been very clear that she has no intention of doing blanket waivers,” he said.

Secretary Spellings said she understood the urgency of providing aid to districts that need to rebuild or expand classrooms for displaced students.

“Expediency is of the essence,” she said. “These schools do need resources.”

President Bush’s voucher proposal tops the list of provisions that could slow the passage of a relief package for education, said Norman J. Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.

“I think they’re going to have some real difficulty building support for the package, including in the Republican Party,” he said of the Bush administration.

Staff Writer Alan Richard and Assistant Editor Erik W. Robelen contributed to this report.

Vol. 25, Issue 05, Pages 24,26

© 2005 Editorial Projects in Education

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/09/28/05katfed.h25.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:38 AM 0 comments Links to this post

September 28, 2005 / EDUCATION WEEK

States Address Academic Concerns
Students get some answers about exams, graduation; NCLB waivers remain uncertain.
By David J. Hoff

State and local officials are slowly untangling complicated webs of accountability, testing, and graduation policies, hoping to give thousands of students displaced by Hurricane Katrina a better handle on their academic standing.

But while officials in Texas, Tennessee, and Alabama offered some guidance to such students last week, school leaders in storm-ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi continued to wait for responses to their requests for flexibility in meeting some federal requirements.

Mississippi state schools chief Hank M. Bounds pressed his case in Washington with members of Congress and officials at the U.S. Department of Education. His state has asked that districts battered by Katrina and those enrolling large numbers of displaced students be exempted this school year from the No Child Left Behind Act’s rules on adequate yearly progress.

Mississippi state schools chief Hank M. Bounds and top aide Susan Rucker pause in the Cannon House Office Building on Sept. 21. They were in Washington to seek financial help and policy waivers for districts coping with hurricane-related needs.

—Christopher Powers/Education Week
“The sentiment right now [in the Education Department] is not to grant the waiver on AYP,” the centerpiece of the federal law’s accountability provisions for schools, Superintendent Bounds said in an interview after those meetings last week. “There may some sentiment [to do so] in the future.”

Cecil J. Picard, the state superintendent in Louisiana, has made a similar request. He had hoped to get answers from U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings during a Sept. 22 meeting in Baton Rouge. That meeting was canceled as federal officials geared up for another potentially devastating storm, Hurricane Rita, which was headed for the coast of Texas and southwestern Louisiana late last week.

Overall, though, the transition from crisis-management mode to one of long-term planning is well under way in state education agencies dealing with the academic implications for students uprooted by Katrina.

“Our top priority has been getting students into schools,” said Kim Karesh, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Education, which reported that 3,281 displaced students had enrolled in the state’s schools. “Now we’re coming back and saying what does this mean.”

Testing in Texas
While federal officials deliberate over how they will handle federal rules, state officials are addressing questions about how to assimilate large numbers of students who have been held to different standards and coursework requirements in their home states.

Hank M. Bounds, Mississippi's state schools chief, listens to questions during an interview with Education Week in Washington on Sept. 21. Mr. Bounds has lobbied federal officials on his state's request for waivers of some provisions of the No Child Left Behind law.
—Christopher Powers/Education Week

Their decisions have the potential to change whether a student earns a diploma next spring or advances to the next grade in the 2006-07 school year.

Last week, Mr. Picard met with Texas Commissioner of Education Shirley Neeley to discuss ways to ensure that seniors from Louisiana who have ended up in Texas can earn diplomas on time.

The two state chiefs sought ways for Texas schools to accept credits earned in Louisiana, share transcripts of students returning home, and even administer Louisiana’s high school exit exam to students who want to earn diplomas from their home schools, according to a news release from the Louisiana Department of Education. According to the most recent count, Texas has enrolled 45,129 Katrina evacuees, most of whom came from Louisiana.

Louisiana students also have the option of taking online high school courses that satisfy their state’s graduation requirements through Louisiana State University’s Web site, the state education department said.

While many of such issues remained unanswered last week, other decisions have been made.

For example, if a Louisiana student wants to earn a Texas diploma, he or she will need to abide by the Lone Star State’s rules, according to Ms. Neeley. She announced that displaced students must pass the state’s graduation test to earn a Texas diploma and urged them to sit for the Texas test when it’s given next month. “If it seems likely that a student will remain in Texas and work toward a Texas high school diploma, the student and his or her parents should choose for the student to test this October,” Ms. Neeley said in a Sept. 15 memo to school administrators.

In the lower grades, Texas requires students to pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS, before being promoted to the 4th, 6th, and 9th grades. The same will be true of evacuees. State law does not give the state commissioner the power to waive the testing requirements, said Debbie Graves Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency.

But Texas school officials are concerned that students from Louisiana and Mississippi may not be prepared to pass the TAKS, which is aligned to a different curriculum from those that the children have studied.

Texas officials point out that students who fail the tests in the spring will have two chances to pass before the 2006-07 school year begins.

“If they fail, they immediately get tutoring and all kinds of intervention,” Ms. Ratcliffe said. “They won’t be left floundering.”

In Louisiana, where most of the nearly 70,000 students from the New Orleans and St. Bernard districts are unlikely to return to their home schools this school year, the state board of education was scheduled to meet this week to discuss whether to go forward with testing required under the No Child Left Behind law.

In Alabama, students who have been displaced from other states will need to pass the Alabama high school exam to earn a diploma there, school officials said.

But officials in Tennessee and Mississippi said they would compare their own state exit exams against those already given to displaced students in other states. If the exams are comparable, they said, the states will waive their own tests and award diplomas to students who have passed the tests in their home states.

Accountability Questions

Mississippi officials don’t know to what extent their schools will need to comply with the NCLB law’s accountability requirements. Still, they plan to assess all students—including those displaced by the hurricane—in reading and mathematics this year in grades 3-8 and once in high school, as required by the federal law

In the wake of the storm, Mr. Bounds, the Mississippi schools chief, said that the worst-hit districts wouldn’t need to test students this year. ("Mississippi Begins Clearing Wreckage, Planning for Classes," Sept. 14, 2005.)

He now says that most of the state’s testing will occur as planned, which includes the reading and mathematics tests needed to calculate adequate progress under the federal law, and will be administered statewide.

But Mr. Bounds hopes to scale back the potential sanctions for districts in the Gulf Coast and for districts that have accepted large numbers of displaced students—both under state and federal accountability rules.

“When you have the right curriculum and funding in place, you should be held accountable,” Mr. Bounds said. But it’s not fair, he added, to hold schools to standard accountability rules after they have missed more than 30 days of instruction—as many schools in the Gulf Coast will have missed—or taken in up to 500 students, as districts in Jackson and near Memphis have done.

Mr. Bounds favors letting districts carry over last year’s state accountability ratings if their scores drop because of the storm’s impact. He also remains hopeful that the federal Education Department will grant waivers on AYP to schools and districts temporarily closed because of Katrina or enrolling its displaced students. Federal officials told him they would consider those waivers on a case-by-case basis.

“I’m all for accountability,” Mr. Bounds said. “I am much more concerned today about the mental health of children and adults.”

Accountability is expected to come under discussion in a special Mississippi legislative session that was slated to begin Sept. 27, when school officials plan to ask legislators to allow storm-hit districts to request flexibility under the state’s school accountability and finance laws, said Steve Williams, an executive assistant to the state education superintendent. ("Lousiana, Mississippi Lawmakers to Weigh Revenue Needs," this issue.)

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/09/28/05katrequire.h25.html?print=1

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:25 AM 0 comments Links to this post

In light of the stellar pieces written by David Berliner and another by Jonathon Kozol on poverty, this is an encouraging read. Hopefully, the nation is listening....

We've always known that test scores correlate to income. As critics of NCLB have always said, if you want to raise achievement, you have to address root causes in achievement and not the symptoms. Ralieigh's attempts to address such inequalities are paying off. I'm curious though of the long-term meaning of these effects. Will they translate into higher college-going rates—or even parity with middle-class families—for the poor? This is the REAL test.... -Angela

September 25, 2005

By ALAN FINDER / NYTimes

RALEIGH, N.C. - Over the last decade, black and Hispanic students here in Wake County have made such dramatic strides in standardized reading and math tests that it has caught the attention of education experts around the country.

The main reason for the students' dramatic improvement, say officials and parents in the county, which includes Raleigh and its sprawling suburbs, is that the district has made a concerted effort to integrate the schools economically.

Since 2000, school officials have used income as a prime factor in assigning students to schools, with the goal of limiting the proportion of low-income students in any school to no more than 40 percent.

The effort is the most ambitious in the country to create economically diverse public schools, and it is the most successful, according to several independent experts. La Crosse, Wis.; St. Lucie County, Fla.; San Francisco; Cambridge, Mass.; and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., have adopted economic integration plans.

In Wake County, only 40 percent of black students in grades three through eight scored at grade level on state tests a decade ago. Last spring, 80 percent did. Hispanic students have made similar strides. Overall, 91 percent of students in those grades scored at grade level in the spring, up from 79 percent 10 years ago.

School officials here have tried many tactics to improve student performance. Teachers get bonuses when their schools make significant progress in standardized tests, and the district uses sophisticated data gathering to identify, and respond to, students' weaknesses.

Some of the strategies used in Wake County could be replicated across the country, the experts said, but they also cautioned that unusual circumstances have helped make the politically delicate task of economic integration possible here.

The school district is countywide, which makes it far easier to combine students from the city and suburbs. The county has a 30-year history of busing students for racial integration, and many parents and students are accustomed to long bus rides to distant schools. The local economy is robust, and the district is growing rapidly. And corporate leaders and newspaper editorial pages here have firmly supported economic diversity in the schools.

Some experts said the academic results in Wake County were particularly significant because they bolstered research that showed low-income students did best when they attended middle-class schools.

"Low-income students who have an opportunity to go to middle-class schools are surrounded by peers who have bigger dreams and who are more academically engaged," said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has written about economic integration in schools. "They are surrounded by parents who are more likely to be active in the school. And they are taught by teachers who more likely are highly qualified than the teachers in low-income schools."

To achieve a balance of low- and middle-income children in every school, the Wake County school district encourages and sometimes requires students to attend schools far from home. Suburban students are drawn to magnet schools in the city. Low-income children from the city are bused to middle-class schools in the suburbs.

Some parents chafe at the length of their children's bus rides or at what they see as social engineering. But the test results are hard to dispute, proponents of economic integration say, as is the broad appeal of the school district, which has been growing by 5,000 students a year.

"What I say to parents is, 'Here is what you should hold me accountable for: at the end of that bus ride, are we providing a quality education for your child?' " Bill McNeal, the school superintendent, said.

Asked how parents respond, Mr. McNeal said, "They are coming back, and they are bringing their friends."

Not everyone supports the strategy. Some parents deeply oppose mandatory assignments to schools. Every winter, the district, using a complicated formula, develops a list of students who will be reassigned to new schools for the following academic year, and nearly every year some parents object vehemently.

"Kids are bused all over creation, and they say it's for economic diversity, but really it's a proxy for race," said Cynthia Matson, who is white and middle class. She is the president and a founder of Assignment By Choice, an advocacy group promoting parental choice.

The organization wants parents to be responsible for selecting schools, and it objects to restrictions that, in certain circumstances, make it difficult for some middle-class children to get into magnet schools.

"If a parent wants their kid bused, then let them make the choice," Mrs. Matson said. "But don't force parents to have their kids bused across town to go to a school that they don't want to go to."

Supporters of economic integration contend that the county offers parents many choices but that the school district needs the discretion to assign some children to schools to avoid large concentrations of poor children. "I believe in choice as much as anyone," Mr. McNeal said. "However, I can't let choice erode our ability to provide quality programs and quality teaching."

The board of education had two motives when it decided to make economic integration a main element in the district's strategy: board members feared that the county's three-decade effort to integrate public schools racially would be found unconstitutional if challenged in the federal courts, and they took note of numerous studies that showed the academic benefits of economically diversifying schools.

"There is a lot of evidence that it's just sound educational policy, sound public policy, to try to avoid concentrations of low-achieving students," said John H. Gilbert, a professor emeritus at North Carolina State University in Raleigh who served for 16 years on the county school board and voted for the plan. "They do much better and advantaged students are not hurt by it if you follow policies that avoid concentrating low-achievement students."

One sign of the success of the Wake County plan, Mr. Gilbert said, is that residential property values in Raleigh have remained high, as have those in the suburbs. "The economy is really saying something about the effort in the city," he said.

About 27 percent of the county's students are low-income, a proportion that has increased slightly in recent years. While many are black and Hispanic, about 15 percent are white. Moreover, more than 40 percent of the district's black students are working- and middle-class, and not poor.

Wake County has used many strategies to limit the proportion of low-income students in schools to 40 percent. For example, magnet schools lure many suburban parents to the city.

Betty Trevino lives in Fuquay-Varina, a town in southern Wake County. Ms. Trevino drives her son, Eric, 5, to and from the Joyner Elementary School, where he goes to kindergarten. Students are taught in English and Spanish, and global themes are emphasized at the school, which is north of downtown Raleigh, more than 20 miles from the Trevinos' home. With traffic, the trip takes 45 minutes each way.

"I think it works," she said of her drive halfway across the county, "because it's such a good school."

Many low-income children are bused to suburban schools. While some of their parents are unhappy with the length of the rides, some also said they were happy with their child's school.

"I think it's ridiculous," LaToya Mangum said of the 55 minutes that her son Gabriel, 7, spends riding a bus to the northern reaches of Wake County, where he is in second grade. On the other hand, she said, "So far, I do like the school."

The neighborhood school has been redefined, with complex logistics and attendance maps that can resemble madly gerrymandered Congressional districts.

The Swift Creek Elementary School, in southwest Raleigh near the city line, draws most of its students from within two miles of the school, in both the city and suburbs. But students also come to Swift Creek from four widely scattered areas in low-income sections of south and southeastern Raleigh; some live 6 to 8 miles from the school, while others are as far as 12 miles away.

Ela Browder lives in Cary, an affluent, sprawling suburb, but each morning she puts her 6-year-old son, Michael, on a bus for a short ride across the city line to Swift Creek.

"We're very happy with the school," Ms. Browder said. "The children are very enriched by it. I think it's the best of both worlds."

Of the county's 139 elementary, middle and high schools, all but 22 are within the 40 percent guideline, according to the district's data. Some are only a few percentage points above the guideline, while others are significantly higher.

The overwhelming majority of the 120,000 children in the district go either to a local school or a school of their choice, officials said. Slightly more than 85 percent of students attend a school within five miles of home and another 12 percent or so voluntarily attend magnet or year-round schools.

Although the figures can be calculated many ways, Mr. McNeal says about 2.5 percent - or about 3,000 children - are assigned to schools for economic balance or to accommodate the district's growth by filling new schools or easing overcrowding in existing ones. Most of those bused for economic diversity tend to be low-income, he said.

A school board election will take place in October. While the board has continued to endorse economic integration, some supporters worry that that could change one day.

"It's not easy and it can be very contentious in the community," said Walter C. Sherlin, who retired two years ago as an associate superintendent. "Is it worth doing? Look at 91 percent at or above grade level. Look at 139 schools, all of them successful. I think the answer is obvious."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/education/25raleigh.html?th&emc=th

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:33 PM 5 comments Links to this post

In light of similar designs here locally with the Austin ISD, this is a timely piece. -Angela

Some Lessons in Frustration
L.A.'s high schools struggle to divide crowded campuses into small learning centers. Critics cite a lack of district support.
By Joel Rubin
Times Staff Writer

September 25, 2005

It was meant to be the blueprint of the future in a city pockmarked with failing, old-style high schools.

The gleaming new South Los Angeles campus would be divided into five small schools within the school. Students would choose one based on their interests and would receive personal attention from teachers. Test scores would improve.

Things, however, have not gone according to plan.

Since the campus opened in July on the old Santee Dairy site, its teachers and administrators have received little or no training in how to run the so-called small learning communities. Staffing shortages have caused students and teachers to bounce among the groups, blurring their supposedly separate identities. Fights and other discipline problems have been common.

"Ideally, everyone should already know what it means to be in a small learning community," said Principal Brenda Morton. "But the district wanted us to jump right into this. I just wish we had more time to get ready."

The Los Angeles Unified School District, under pressure to reverse years of low graduation rates and student achievement, has turned to a long-term reform effort aimed at dividing its crowded high schools into smaller, semi-autonomous groups.

But after years of focus on elementary school reform and a massive building program, the district is left scrambling to catch up with other urban districts.

An uneven pace of change in Los Angeles, critics say, is being followed by a poorly defined strategy tightly controlled by a reluctant district leadership. The result, they say, is teachers and principals without the autonomy, resources and support needed to carry out the move toward the smaller learning clusters.

Supt. Roy Romer is unapologetic about the tight grip he has maintained on the reform plan. Caution, he believes, is needed because there are dangers to granting wide-ranging freedom to school leaders in such a large, troubled district.

"I know we've got to make this work. But it's kind of like designing the train as it's going down the track," Romer said. "That concerns me very much, because we're going to make mistakes…. I'm not going to kid anyone that we're on a bumpy ride, but it's the only ride we can take."

In recent decades, major demographic shifts in Los Angeles and other cities have pushed the limits of the traditional high school model. Enrollment at most Los Angeles campuses has swelled to between 2,500 and 5,000 students, many of whom are learning English as a second language.

Teachers, who typically see 175 to 200 faces each day, struggle to remember names, let alone provide personal attention.

"It's the factory model to a T," said Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University professor who has extensively studied the concept of smaller learning centers. "The students come into class in a large group, teachers stamp them with a lesson, and then they move on."

The strain has taken its toll on learning. At 27 of the district's 49 comprehensive, or traditional, high schools, fewer than a quarter of the students showed proficiency on state English exams.

State and federal laws are increasing the pressure to improve high schools. The district is required to restructure 19 high schools that have consistently failed to meet performance targets under the federal No Child Left Behind law. And, this year, students are required to pass a mandatory high school exit exam to graduate.

The district is banking on its latest reform. Small learning communities are typically theme- or career-based programs aimed at making school more relevant to teenagers. Classes are clustered along hallways or in separate buildings to keep the students together. The cadre of teachers is expected to meet regularly to link lesson plans across departments and intervene with struggling students. Administrators and teachers have more say than they do in traditional schools over how money is spent.

Although learning communities are not very different from charter schools — which are independently run, publicly funded smaller campuses — the idea is a departure for the nation's second-largest school district, which serves about 156,000 high school students.

But with little coordination or oversight from the district's central administration, school principals in recent years have been largely left to experiment on their own. The reform program has developed sporadically into a haphazard patchwork in which most of the district's high schools have only partly converted — some in name only — and 18 haven't started yet.

"There is no time for us to be pointing fingers at why we're not getting the job done," said Marlene Canter, school board president. "There is no reason for our children to wait, and they have been waiting."

The district's slow pace has left Los Angeles without the large-scale support offered to other urban districts, including New York and Chicago, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation has given about $700 million to other school districts to aid in the push toward smaller schools.

In 2003, the Gates Foundation awarded Los Angeles Unified a $900,000 grant to kick-start its planning, but since then it has been waiting for the district to present a comprehensive strategy, according to district and foundation officials.

Romer ordered that high schools built as part of the district's massive construction project be designed for the new smaller arrangements. But 15 of the 35 planned high schools had already been designed in the traditional mold, including Principal Morton's South L.A. Area New High School No. 1. As a result, these campuses will be imperfect and need to be modified.

That flaw, along with the rush to open the new school, has left several students who transferred from traditional high schools wondering how it's different.

"It's just like I'm floating around. It's the same as before," said James Mendoza, a junior who attended neighboring Jefferson High last year.

In a common encounter, Morton confronted a tardy student in the cafeteria one day last month. "What is your SLC?" she asked, referring to his small learning community.

The teenager didn't know. "I think it's on the third floor."

Morton consulted a roster and sighed heavily. The student belonged in the fashion and design group on the second floor.

Overhauling the district's existing schools has also proved challenging. Despite a school board policy calling for all middle and high schools to convert to the mini-schools by 2009, officials have struggled to put together and carry out a cohesive districtwide plan. Romer said he was reluctant to move aggressively until he was confident the district could assess whether the more creative teaching was working.

High schools still "have an obligation to get students to a certain level in algebra, for example…. If they want to combine algebra and music theory, that's fine…. But we're still going to require evidence that their students are learning math at a rigorous level.

"Obviously," he said, "I've got to combine autonomy and accountability, and that's what we've got to work out."

Romer only recently bolstered a meager staff, allowing his executive officer, Liliam Castillo, the authority to hire 14 people who will help guide principals as they redesign their campuses. Late last month, he held his first meeting with senior staff to discuss district-level changes necessary to give campuses the flexibility they need.

Most pressing, officials and several teachers said, is the need to shift how schools receive money from the district so that each group on campus can control much of its own budget. Currently, most of a school's funding is determined at the district level, leaving administrators with little freedom to hire additional teachers or staff.

Maricela Ramirez, a lead teacher in Roosevelt High School's technology-themed community, expressed a common frustration: "We're stuck building a new program within an old bureaucracy," she said. "It's not matching."

Despite the lack of support, Roosevelt, among the district's lowest-performing and most overcrowded schools, has had some success. Today, three-quarters of its 5,200 students are assigned to one of 12 clusters.

Roosevelt junior Luis Bautista said he had been a "screw-up," slipping by with mediocre grades, before joining the social awareness and leadership group last year. "I always felt neglected," he said. "I knew I wasn't doing great, but I felt like no one cared."

Social studies teacher Gustavo Reynoso said he and other teachers discussed Bautista in their weekly meetings. He was a smart kid, they agreed, who wasn't applying himself.

One after the other, they cornered him after classes, hammering him with the same message.

"When they talked to me, it was motivating," said Luis, who says he now makes A's and Bs. "Mr. Reynoso told me he knew I was smart. I asked him how he knew and he told me, 'We've been watching you. We know you.' "

Teachers at Roosevelt and elsewhere are apprehensive about whether such small victories will be replicated throughout the district.

"It makes me nervous because this could really be a great thing," said Ramirez, the technology teacher. "But only if the district changes. If they don't, then what? Was all this just a noble experiment?"

http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-small25sep25,1,4186391.story?coll=la-news-learning

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:01 PM 0 comments Links to this post

09/25/2005
Craddick airs views on school finance and reform
Bob Campbell
Midland Reporter Telegram

Editor's note: This is the second story in a two-part series about the Texas Legislature's year-long effort to finance public schools and reform their operations.

By Bob Campbell

Staff Writer

Fresh from three legislative sessions that failed to finance public schools, House Speaker Tom Craddick is as dead set as ever to tie appropriations to reform.

With the state Supreme Court poised to rule on the "Robin Hood" system, Craddick will brook nothing but a complete overhaul -- lower property taxes, more accountability and transparency, course-ending exams, an emphasis away from books to technology and post-Labor Day school starts.

The Midland republican also wants a "65 percent rule" to mandate spending that much of districts' budgets in classrooms and to move school board elections from May to November.

"We're going to change the system one way or another," he told Midland Young Republicans at the Petroleum Club Thursday. "We may be there for two or three years, but we're going to get it done. It'll be a system fix.

"We don't need school board elections in gyms on an odd Saturday in the spring."

He said schools spend far too much on administration, vouchers should offer private school alternatives and districts need revenue caps along with lower taxes to avoid property value inflation. "We're not going to pour more money into this bottomless pit without reform," he said.

"As long as I'm speaker, we're not going to do it."

Craddick said starting school in August costs $840 million a year and the tab to educate Hurricane Katrina evacuees, including opening three mothballed Houston schools, will be as high as $1.5 billion.

"I'm for closing the bad schools," he said. "As you know, a lot of schools are cheating on TAKS. I support making the responsible school officials criminally liable. But the Texas Association of School Administrators says, 'No.'"

Contrary to some perceptions, he said, the Austin Legislature did have significant accomplishments during the regular session last spring, balancing the budget and adding asbestos provisions to 2003 tort reform.

He said criticism for upping total state expenditures from $118 billion to $139 billion for the next biennium was misinformed because $9 billion of that was in federally-funded Medicare and highway spending, leaving an actual increase of only 3 percent.

Craddick said the Supreme Court in Austin will not close the schools and athletic and band programs aren't in jeopardy. "Five of the judges are up for re-election, so if you believe that I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you," he joked.

Rep. Delwin Jones, R-Lubbock, one of 12 Republicans who often sided with democrats this year, said Friday education wasn't reformed or financed because Texans didn't hear any ideas they liked. "People are saying the Legislature failed," said Jones.

"I think we succeeded because our job is to vote what the public wants and, statewide, the man on the street and general public never found any plan satisfactory as proposed. I didn't find any evidence of Craddick trying to break any arms. He let that thing flow smoothly and fairly.

"The court could shut the schools down, but I don't think that's likely. Even if they sustain the lower court that the system is unconstitutional, they could say to leave the present plan in place until the Legislature has a chance to correct it at the next regular session in 2007."

Jones said lobbyists representing education, oil and gas and other interests were not very noticeable during the regular session last spring but became active during the two special summertime sessions.

Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, told the Reporter-Telegram the tax battle came down to where the burden should be heaviest -- on corporations like Dell and SBC or the more "capital intensive" businesses like oil production and refining.

Disputing the speaker's contention his TASA-backed amendment would have revved up education spending from $34 billion to a prohibitive $37.5 billion, Hochberg said, "No, we repeatedly revised it to meet whatever budget bill the leadership had.

"We couldn't do otherwise because the leadership passed a rule every time that a bill on the floor couldn't add money to the cost. We would've lowered the property tax less but would have tripled the $1,500 homestead exemption."

Hochberg's June amendment to replace the House leadership's tax bill drew a 74-74 tie with Craddick voting to table it. Hochberg revived it in the second special session, but it was rejected on a procedural point.

He sought a $3,200 annual raise for teachers as opposed to House Bill 2's $1,500 and wanted to cut school property taxes from $1.50 to $1.30 per $100 in valuation. HB 2, while reducing taxes to $1.15, didn't propose a homestead exemption hike.

"The oil and gas lobbyists were not really involved in the education battle," said Hochberg. "Ultimately the tax bill as laid out had nothing to do with the education budget. There were zero dollars from new taxes to fund public schools. The ground rule Mr. Craddick laid out was that any new money for schools was going to come from the existing budget separate and apart from any new taxes.

"All new taxes were going to go to property tax reduction. The oil and gas industry wanted tax relief and I think rightfully so. But no one was ready to give heavy industry a lower tax burden."


http://www.mywesttexas.com/site/printerFriendly.cfm?brd=2288&dept_id=475621&newsid=15274611

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:45 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Partly as a result of Hurricane Katrina, more attention is being accorded to the connections between race/ethnicity, education & poverty. Check out as well my other post today, a piece titled, "As Test Scores Jump, Raleigh Credits Integration by Income."

Below is a pdf link to Arizona State University Professor David Berliner’s widely circulated piece on educational reform. These are all good companion pieces to the previously posted Jonathan Kozol piece on poverty.

Austin didn’t get any rain from Hurricane Rita, by the way, though we experienced strong, cooling breezes. And the 2.5 or more million evacuees from the Houston area are returning home already. East Texas and southeastern Louisiana didn’t fare well at all. Fortunately, at least for now, the death toll appears minimal.

-Angela

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

The Education Policy Studies Laboratory (EPSL) would like to call your
attention to: "Our Impoverished View of Educational Reform" by David C.
Berliner published August 2, 2005, by Teachers College Record.

Contact: David C. Berliner (480) 727-7413 (email) berliner@asu.edu or
Alex Molnar (480) 965-1886 (email) epsl@asu.edu

This analysis is about the role of poverty in school reform. Data from a
number of sources are used to make five points. First, that poverty in the
US is greater and of longer duration than in other rich nations. Second,
that poverty, particularly among urban minorities, is associated with
academic performance that is well below international means on a number of
different international assessments. Scores of poor students are also
considerably below the scores achieved by white middle class American
students. Third, that poverty restricts the expression of genetic talent at
the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Among the lowest social classes
environmental factors, particularly family and neighborhood influences, not
genetics, is strongly associated with academic performance. Among middle
class students it is genetic factors, not family and neighborhood factors,
that most influences academic performance. Fourth, compared to middle-class
children, severe medical problems affect impoverished youth. This limits
their school achievement as well as their life chances. Data on the negative
effect of impoverished neighborhoods on the youth who reside there are also
presented. Fifth, and of greatest interest, is that small reductions in
family poverty lead to increases in positive school behavior and better
academic performance. It is argued that poverty places severe limits on what
can be accomplished through school reform efforts, particularly those
associated with the federal No Child Left Behind law. The data presented in
this study suggest that the most powerful policy for improving our nations'
school achievement is a reduction in family and youth poverty.


Find this document on the web at:
http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/EPRU/documents/EPSL-0508-116-EPRU.pdf


CONTACT:
David C. Berliner
Regents' Professor
(480) 965-3921
berliner@asu.edu

Alex Molnar, Professor and Director
Education Policy Studies Laboratory
(480) 965-1886
epsl@asu.edu
http://edpolicylab.org

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:20 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Editorial: Choices already clear for funding schools
Web Posted: 09/23/2005 12:00 AM CDT
San Antonio Express-News

When in doubt, appoint a committee.

And given the failure of the Legislature to deal with the school finance issue, we can't offer a much better suggestion.

The twist to this committee is that Gov. Rick Perry has appointed John Sharp, his rival for lieutenant governor in a hotly contested 1998 race, to lead the effort.

In appointing Sharp, Perry called for "a new approach that puts partisanship aside to do what's best for Texas."

While we applaud that strategy, the statement shouldn't be necessary. That's the way business should be conducted. Voters are sickened by the petty partisanship that overshadows the work of the Legislature, as well as Congress.

Nasty partisanship is relatively new to Texas politics. One of George W. Bush's strengths as governor was his ability to work with Democrats.

If Perry's pronouncement signals a return to a more collegial approach, we welcome it.

At the same time, we question whether a new committee will come up with any innovative ways of raising revenues while lowering property taxes. Perry and Sharp already have taken a state income tax off the table.

The hope, presumably, is that the committee will help build a constituency for some particular solution.

Sharp has been one of the more creative, innovative and competent state officeholders during recent times, so his return to the public scene is welcome.

Sharp's committee colleagues have yet to be named. Let us hope that when they are, this committee will move deliberately and swiftly to recommend changes.

The system is broken, whatever the Texas Supreme Court may decide this fall. The Legislature, not the courts, should fix the problem — even if another committee is required to help legislators do that.

Online at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/editorials/stories/MYSA092305.01O.Perry.1bfd6b05.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:53 PM 2 comments Links to this post

This is a sign of the times, pre-schooler expulsions at all-time highs. Incredible. -Angela
Page 1A
Out-of-line preschoolers increasingly face expulsion
Failure to adapt can turn child, parents upside down
September 21, 2005

By Marco R. della Cava
USA TODAY 

SAN FRANCISCO — When Stephanie Crowe put her son, Davis, now 4, into an acclaimed Montessori preschool last fall, she hoped it would prove a bright spot in her suddenly fraying life.

The single mother of two was pulling dawn-to-3-p.m. workdays at an investment management firm to spend more time with her children, who were coping with a recent move as well as their parents' tense separation.

“I had high hopes for Davis,” says Crowe, 39, whose daughter, Madeleine, 6, immediately took to the public school in Ross, a suburban enclave.

Then the calls rolled in. Davis wasn't sharing. Davis seemed angry. Davis pushed a child. Meetings were arranged and warnings were issued.

This was strange: Davis had not been disruptive at his previous Montessori school. Nevertheless, Crowe hired a child-development expert to evaluate her son, who told her that though Davis needed help expressing his frustration in words, he otherwise was a typically rowdy little boy.

The misbehavior continued. Finally, in February, Crowe faced the school's director and three teachers, hopeful for an innovative solution. Instead, Crowe was handed her son's things. Out.

Expelled at age 3 seems a harsh way to start an academic career. But researchers say it's an increasingly common occurrence. Each year, about 5,000 children are asked to leave state-financed preschools, which include some private institutions, a rate three times higher than public school students in kindergarten through grade 12, according to a report by the Yale University Child Study Center.

Nearly seven preschoolers in every 1,000 are expelled, and some for-profit schools eject children at nearly twice the rate of public preschools, says Walter Gilliam, the report's author. The results were even more alarming in the study's pilot project, which broadly encompassed licensed child care centers in Massachusetts and found that 27 in every 1,000 children were expelled.

“This is an issue that cuts across (demographic) settings,” Gilliam says. “We're talking about the educational equivalent of capital punishment being handed down to the very young.”

The nation's toddlers haven't become gum-snapping thugs. And preschool teachers say they aren't evicting instead of instructing. In fact, their jobs may be tougher than ever as the number of students enrolled in special-education programs has risen 30% over the past 10 years, the National Education Association says.

But some experts are concerned that preschools are stretched too thin, which can result in children with relatively minor developmental problems being dismissed as unmanageable.

“Often there are not enough adult bodies in a classroom, which boosts the stress level for everyone,” says Claire Lerner, director of parent education at the non-profit group Zero to Three. “So all of a sudden if a couple of kids are needy, they risk being expelled.”

The toll can be great on parents and kids alike, Lerner says. “When you're essentially told you have a demon child, you feel like you've failed yourself and your kid.”

Clearly, parents and educators are grappling with often unprecedented hurdles in their mutual quest to socialize the nation's newest crop of toddlers. Interviews as well as hundreds of comments e-mailed to ParentCenter.com, which conducted a website survey for USA TODAY, reveal that:

•The prevalence of dual-income families means children spend long days in often pricey preschools. In Crowe's case, she paid nearly $10,000 a year for a half-day program — almost the same as room, board and tuition at a state college. Such fees can lead parents to expect a level of attention that most schools can't provide.

•Schools adopt zero-tolerance policies to reassure parents who don't want their children exposed to disruptive behavior, but that leaves little leeway to work with kids who need extra attention.

•Parents and teachers agree it's crucial to distinguish between typical toddler behavior (the occasional bite or push) and extraordinary displays of anger, a distinction made with greatest precision at schools with mental-health experts waiting to help. “The reciprocal blame between parents and child care providers helps no one, least of all the children,” says Kadija Johnston, a pioneering force in getting preschools to not give up on students who act out. “Being expelled at 4 just leaves you with a rejected sense of self.”

As director of the University of California-San Francisco's Infant-Parent Program, Johnston has spent two decades sending mental-health experts to about 40 Bay Area schools with the goal of keeping problem kids in class. She says the Yale study “just confirmed what we know, and we hope the masses are now duly concerned.”

Some parents indeed are seeking out preschools that can offer their children that second chance to get things right. Kangaroo's Korner in Watertown, Conn., is just such a place. Founded by pediatric occupational therapist Catherine Risigo-Wickline, the school initially focused on toddlers with Down syndrome but was soon swarmed by a new type of parent.

“These people had kids who had been thrown out of four and even five centers. It was amazing. I thought, ‘Could the kids really be that bad?' ” Risigo-Wickline says. “What I found was that their misbehavior often resulted from being asked to do things that weren't developmentally appropriate.”

Kyle DeNigris, 5, had exhibited some aggressive tendencies before arriving at Kangaroo's Korner a few years back. Mom Raquel says that at his previous center, Kyle was placed with younger children because he wasn't yet potty-trained.

As a result, “he was bored, and so he acted out,” she says. “When another family complained, it was presented as ‘it's either you or them,' but it was clear it was us. Even though we were paying lots of money, I didn't feel like we were a team working for my son. We left.”

At Kangaroo's Korner, a staff child-development expert noticed Kyle wasn't focused while eating and recommended he be further evaluated. Kyle was diagnosed with sensory integration dysfunction, “which meant he had trouble filtering out distractions,” DeNigris says.

Back at his new preschool, teachers helped Kyle with his focus; he is now in kindergarten “and is doing much better,” DeNigris says.

But opting out of a preschool isn't always an easy choice, especially in large cities where preschools often have waiting lists.

That's why Carolyn Miller of Hyattsville, Md., sweated out the seemingly unending phone calls “to the point where I was petrified to answer when I was at work, thinking it was them.”

“Them” were the directors of the two Montessori preschools she tried for twins Linda and Stephen, now 5. She says the first school asked both kids to leave and urged her to have her son evaluated.

After both children were expelled twice, Miller sent the pair to a small school run by Italian nuns. The school's mellow atmosphere — lots of whispering and lights kept low — worked wonders. “All of a sudden we're told, ‘You have such beautiful children,' ” Miller says.

The two are doing fine in local public schools after being evaluated through Child Find, a federally funded early-intervention program. Linda fell within the normal range, while Stephen had some minor problems with gross motor skills, for which he is receiving help.

Miller says the preschools were too quick to dismiss her children.

“We felt no one wanted to help us or our kids, even though the complaints were things like throwing mulch and running ahead of the group,” says Miller, who works full time, as does her husband. “Were those things really beyond what the school could handle?”

Some preschools do see behavior that pushes staff limits and jeopardizes the classroom's ability to carry on as a group.

In San Diego, Betsy Jones asked three children to leave her day care/preschool center last year — the first expulsions in 11 years.

“It isn't done easily and without a lot of talk, but, to give you an example, one child slapped a teacher so hard that it made her cry,” says Jones, executive director of the Escondido Community Child Development Center. “I know that the parents' need for child care is so great that without us they'd really be in trouble. But we're also seeing kids now from fractured families with no ability to bond.

“I don't like to expel, but sometimes you don't have an alternative.”

When Michelle Artibee of East Lansing, Mich., felt pressured to pull Katelyn, now 5, out of preschool, she was frustrated that the center “only seemed to be able to deal with the traditional child.” She didn't blame the school; she knew that her daughter's violent behavior was holding back the class.

At the second preschool, Katelyn's anger flashed again. But this time Artibee was referred to KEEP (Keeping Early Education Positive), part of the Michigan Childhood Expulsion Prevention Program.

The program sent a specialist to observe Katelyn at school. Soon she was diagnosed with an auditory dyslexia that makes it difficult for her to follow directions in sequence. Now on a regimen of drugs, Katelyn successfully is navigating first grade.

“I understand that everyone has their issues, including schools,” Artibee says. “But my lesson was that parents must be the advocates for their kids, because you can't expect the care providers to be.”

But some school administrators say parents shouldn't be left to shoulder all the responsibility when it comes to helping preschoolers find their scholastic legs.

Kentucky and Hawaii both ban expulsion from state-financed preschools. In the former, laws are being put in place (new teachers must have a B.A. in child care) and mental-health experts are being dispatched (15 tend to 200 children who are at a “crisis point”) to keep 37,000 preschoolers on track.

“Sure, kids at this age will sometimes bite, kick and refuse to share, but too often we immediately label them developmentally challenged,” says Kim Townley, early-childhood expert at the Kentucky Department of Education. “You need to have realistic expectations and work within that framework.”

That's certainly the hope of Bay Area mom Crowe, whose son Davis now attends preschool at “a sweet little place that looks like it's run by someone's grandmother.”

But she's still upset that her son was asked to leave before the academic year ended (“He wondered why his sister still got to go” to school) and that she didn't get to implement the plan she was asked to draw up (“The child therapist was set to observe Davis in class, but the school wasn't interested”).

The longtime director of San Anselmo Montessori who expelled Davis has retired. New director Michele King says the school can't comment on the case but adds: “It's the first time we've expelled someone in the nine years I've been here, and it clearly is something we would do only in the best interest of the child. Obviously, our school was not the best place for him.”

Crowe is unmoved, expressing emotions that are sure to flare up across the country this academic year as parents and schools struggle to do right by their charges.

“Isn't preschool the very first place where we're taught about conflict resolution?” she says. “I just feel it's a shame those very skills couldn't have been used by adults to maybe help this kid.”

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20050921/1a_cover21.art.htm

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

By Dan Genz Tribune-Herald staff writer

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Most children from New Orleans and other storm-ravaged communities who have settled into Waco-area public schools will have to take the state's high-stakes exams this school year if they stay through May.

The Texas Education Agency told schools last week that students from the Gulf Coast must take the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, ending speculation that those students might receive waivers and skip the controversial, increasingly difficult tests.

The decision means students from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are quickly entering the same tutoring programs as local classmates who need extra attention in reading, math and science to prepare for the exams in February and April.

“We're going to go to great lengths to prepare them as best as possible,” said Jack Henderson, director of student management for the Waco Independent School District, where 60 evacuee students have enrolled.

Hillsboro ISD Superintendent Jerry Maze said most children among storm evacuees across the state will need extra help to prepare for the exams, even though Louisiana has an established state testing program.

“No matter what they're used to, it's going to be different and it's going to be difficult,” said Maze, whose Hill County district is now home to seven students uprooted by Hurricane Katrina.

The decision could also impact schools' state and federal ratings. All three Waco ISD high schools must post higher passing rates on the test this school year to avoid No Child Left Behind sanctions next fall. Each has taken in at least two students.

Waco High School principal Donald Garrett said “it's fair” for the TEA to require new arrivals to demonstrate the same achievement expected of local students, though under the circumstances it could prove challenging.

“The advanced kids may not have any trouble at all, but I suspect it could be tough for some of the students” if their families stay in Waco long, he said.

“Many of the children I've talked to have said, ‘We're going to get back to Louisiana and graduate there,'” Garrett said.

The TEA is still working out some details for the testing, especially as it relates to graduation requirements, TEA spokeswoman Suzanne Marchman said.

Evacuees who want a Texas diploma this school year will have to pass the exit exams students typically take in 11th grade. Students who want a Louisiana diploma will have to have passed that state's exit exams, given in 10th grade, Marchman said.

Craig Thompson Jr., 17, from New Orleans passed the Louisiana test on his first try back at Abramson Senior High School. He said more tests are about the last thing he wants to tackle after Hurricane Katrina.

“We spent a whole year preparing for (the exit test) and I don't want to have to go through that again,” he said.

“I just want to support my family,” said Thompson, who is living with his aunt in Waco, attending Waco High School and searching for an after-school job to help support his mother and sisters in Atlanta.

Unlike seniors, students in grades third through 11th will be required to take TAKS, Marchman said. Promotion requirements, such as that mandating that third-graders pass the reading test, will be in effect for children who plan to stay in Texas for more than a year.

dgenz@wacotrib.com

757-5743
http://www.wacotrib.com/news/content/news/stories/2005/09/21/20050921wactaks.html

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

This article looks at teachers' concerns about the impact of too much focus on testing. The narrowing of curriculum is the central concern. -Angela
by Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 20, 2005; A16


Two years ago, W.H. Keister Elementary School in Harrisonburg, Va., began to take the No Child Left Behind law very seriously. Intensive 120-minute reading classes were installed, along with more math. Physical education went from 150 to 90 minutes a week. Music time was cut in half.

This was part of a national movement to make sure all children, particularly those from low-income families -- as were 50 percent of Keister students -- mastered reading and math skills essential to their lives and the rest of their educations. But such parents as Todd Hedinger, whose son, Gabe, attended the school, reacted negatively, saying there was too much emphasis on a few core subjects.

"The emphasis on instructional time pushes everything else out of the way," Hedinger said.

Such concerns have been part of the continuing debate over No Child Left Behind. The time devoted to reading and math has increased. And in many places, the increase has brought results. Between 2002 and 2004, Keister Elementary's passing rate went from 81 to 92 percent on the state English test and from 86 to 90 percent on the math test.

But critics of the federal law say children need a more complete education.

The Washington-based Center on Education Policy reported this year that 27 percent of school systems say they are spending less time on social studies, and nearly 25 percent say they are spending less time on science, art and music. "This tendency results in impoverishing the education of all students, but particularly the education of students who perform less well on the tests," said Robert G. Smith, Arlington County school superintendent, who said his schools have resisted the trend.

Many educators defend the focus on reading and math, as long as it is done properly. Lucretia Jackson, principal of Maury Elementary School in Alexandria, said that basic skills are very important and that many children need extra time to acquire them. Her school made significant test-score gains this year by scheduling after-school classes and enrichment activities three days each week.

"They need to develop the quality of skills that will enable them to meet the needs of the future society," Jackson said.

Rob Weil, deputy director of the educational issues department at the Washington-based American Federation of Teachers, said reducing time for nonacademic subjects has been going on much longer than people realize and until now has had little to do with federal achievement targets. "Districts started cutting art, music and physical education over 15 years ago, in an effort to save money, not in an effort to increase performance," he said.

Andrew Rotherham, co-director of the nonprofit group Education Sector and a member of the Virginia state school board, said: "When faced with disappointing achievement in math and reading, the first reaction of too many schools is to just teach those subjects more and consequently squeeze out other subjects. This 'solution,' however, ignores one common culprit for low achievement -- teaching. Instead of using data to determine if teachers are teaching the material, are able to teach it and what exactly students are struggling with, too often schools decide to just extend the time on these subjects. The problem is, if your instruction is weak for 60 minutes a day, it's going to be for 90 minutes, too."

Mary Alice Barksdale, associate professor of teaching and learning at Virginia Tech, agreed: "There is lots of evidence that the one thing that really makes a difference in the classroom is the teacher and what she knows and does."

Several elementary school programs have shown good results by inserting science, social studies, art and music into reading lessons, rather than removing them from the curriculum. The Core Knowledge program, based in Charlottesville, has first-graders reading about ancient Egypt and second-graders learning about Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. New York University educational historian Diane Ravitch called it "the best national program available."

Project Bright IDEA, which has produced good test results in lower elementary grades in North Carolina, uses advanced materials such as nonfiction books and techniques used previously with just gifted students. "We believe in teaching all children from kindergarten through high school a highly academic program," said Margaret Gayle, the project's manager and co-designer.

Nancy Scott, who teaches English to children from non-English-speaking families in Fairfax County, said she applauds the integration of science and social studies with reading and writing classes but said it might be dependent in some cases on which subjects are on the state test. In her fourth-grade classes, she said, she puts more emphasis on history and lets science take a back seat because that is the year of the Virginia social studies test.

Barksdale said that among the activities teachers have told her they dropped because of test pressure were silent reading, book talks, science experiments, picnics, field trips, classroom skits and creative writing.

"The logic of the fundamental importance of reading and mathematics is universally accepted," said David P. Driscoll, Massachusetts state education commissioner. "However, the testing of those subjects leads people to spend more time out of fear. While some extra focus particularly around test-taking skills and the most common standards is appropriate, this pushing other subjects aside to concentrate on reading and math is not. A full, robust program whereby kids are actively engaged in their learning produces the best results."

At Keister Elementary, test scores are up not only in reading and math but in science and social studies, despite fears of a negative result. Hedinger congratulated the "dedicated, loving, smart and creative people" who teach at the school but said he still does not like the long reading classes and athletic and music cuts because they reduced his son's love of learning.

"Is the meaning of education cramming as much knowledge in, to pass a standardized test, or is it meant to include something else -- creativity, reflection, synthesis, hypothesizing, daydreaming?" Hedinger asked. "What happens to all of that in the process?"
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:00 PM 1 comments Links to this post

This report came out in late September. It tells the story of an organization, Hispanic CREO, that is ineffect part of the pro-voucher propaganda machine out of the Department of Education. I don't have a link for this Toppo article. -Angela

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

One Sunday last October, readers of The Dallas Morning News opened their newspapers to an angry op-ed penned by Marcela Garcini, a self-described "ninja parent" who took the Dallas school system to task for dragging its heels on No Child Left Behind, saying it was "limiting the future and opportunities for our children."

"I am tired of hearing excuses about the lack of funding for schools, particularly under No Child Left Behind," she said.
Garcini wanted readers to know that, thanks to NCLB, students in "failing" schools now had the right to transfer to better-performing schools. "It's time to say 'basta!' (stop!). Our children don't want, nor does any child deserve, to be left behind."
Appearing 23 days before the Nov. 2 election, her piece read like an ad for President Bush's 2002 education reform law, a cornerstone of his domestic policy. But what readers never knew was that, for all practical purposes, it was an ad ˜ paid for, in part, by taxpayers, through a grant from the Bush administration.

In 2003 and 2004, Garcini's nonprofit group, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Education Options (CREO), received two unsolicited grants, totaling $900,000, from the U.S. Education Department, to promote school choice and tutoring options for Hispanic children. But in two op-eds in the Morning News and a third that appeared in two Spanish-language publications earlier in 2004, Garcini never disclosed, as was required by law, that CREO had received the government grants.

Federal investigators probing the department's public relations contracts this week say the department has given nearly $4.7 million to groups including Garcini's to promote administration education priorities since 2002, but that in 10 of 11 cases examined, the groups didn't disclose ˜ in print, on radio or in other media, such as brochures or handbooks ˜ that taxpayer funds were used.

John Higgins, the department's Inspector General, found no "covert propaganda" at work, but told administration officials that they should consider asking for some of their money back.

"The Department of Education is trying to define itself out of trouble by setting the bar very high for what constitutes covert propaganda," said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., who requested the investigation.

"But this report shows that, in case after case after case, grantees ˜ without disclosing who was paying them ˜ took taxpayers' money and used it to promote controversial policies. Department officials allowed this practice to continue with such frequency and such consistency that they cannot now claim that they were ignorant that it was happening. Either the Department is grossly incompetent when it comes to awarding grants and contracts, or it is misleading investigators and engaging in a cover up of the misuse of taxpayer dollars."

According to the report, released late Thursday night on the Education Department's Web site, investigators also said the department needs to do a better job of monitoring how millions of dollars are spent. They found that more than $1.7 million went to outside PR contracts for which officials couldn't produce all of the materials, including one $1.6 million contract to ZGS Communications that Higgins still wants to review.

Among other disputed contracts were:
One for $631,775, awarded last October to the Cuban American National Council, which the report says had yet to produce anything.

One for $2,650, awarded to North American Precis Syndicate (NAPS), which produced what amounted to a 284-word infomercial for the National Center of Education Statistics Web site.

Overall, Higgins found that just over $7.7 million in grants and contracts were either properly notated with government disclaimers or produced products, such as reports, that weren't disseminated to the public.
He didn't directly fault Education Department personnel, finding that in several instances they had told groups that the disclaimers were required. But he noted a pattern of such deals, including one in which the department gave $1.3 million over three years to the Black Alliance for Educational Options for a "multi-layered media campaign." None of the materials had the required disclaimer, Higgins said.

In a response filed with the report, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings agreed with most of the findings, but disagreed with characterizations about Garcini's pieces. Spellings also said the department would review its recordkeeping practices and search both its records and ZGS's for materials related to the $1.6 million contract.

The findings come nearly five months after Higgins criticized the Education Department for its $240,000 contract with prominent black commentator Armstrong Williams. That contract called for him to promote No Child Left Behind in op-ed columns and on his syndicated television show and to encourage others to do the same.
Since USA TODAY in January first reported on the Williams deal, several other agencies have admitted that freelance commentators wrote op-ed columns that promoted Bush administration policies on marriage and the environment without noting that they'd received government funds either to write the pieces or to support their interest groups.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:15 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Displaced seniors can opt out of taking the test, but they'll apparently still have to meet graduation requirements in their home state (though this not well spelled out in this piece). -Angela

Displaced students can skip exit exam
Evacuees may receive diplomas from home state, officials say

12:00 AM CDT on Saturday, September 17, 2005

By KAREN AYRES / The Dallas Morning News

High school seniors who fled here from Louisiana will be able to bypass the Texas exit exam next month and probably will receive diplomas from their home state, state officials said Friday.

Displaced seniors can opt out of taking the test, which is normally required for a Texas high school diploma. It is given in October to seniors who did not pass the test their junior year. Those who do not pass have three more chances throughout the year.

Texas Education Agency spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said officials are confident that they can soon find a way for evacuees in the 12th grade to receive diplomas from their Louisiana districts, which would make it unnecessary for them to take the Texas test.

"It's the humanitarian thing to do because these kids, through no fault of their own, got uprooted their senior year," Ms. Culbertson said. "They're in a new state, and we just want to do what is best for the child.

"We don't want to hinder them in any way from receiving a diploma."

TEA Commissioner Shirley Neeley sent a letter to all superintendents on Friday noting that it is up to displaced parents to decide whether they want their 12th-graders to skip the October tests.

However, students in other grade levels will be required to take the statewide TAKS exams when they are given in the winter and spring.

TEA officials are to meet with Louisiana education leaders next week to discuss how to transfer Texas credits and issue Louisiana diplomas to displaced students.

They will also discuss how to administer the Louisiana exit exam to students who have failed sections of that state's mandated test.

More than 40,000 evacuees had registered in Texas schools by Wednesday. It was unknown how many of those students were seniors.

In her letter, Dr. Neeley said any displaced senior who wants a Texas diploma should take the TAKS exam, which is based on Texas curriculum.

As evacuees continue to enroll in Texas schools, many school districts had been waiting for the state to announce the testing policy. School officials had voiced concern that scores from the seniors, as well as the younger students tested, could affect state and national accountability ratings.

Performance in the high school exit exam is not included in the national No Child Left Behind accountability system; however, those results are included in the Texas rating system. Texas officials have said they plan to consider whether any considerations should be made for evacuees' scores.

Reavis Wortham, a spokesman for the Garland school district, which has roughly 370 evacuees enrolled, said Friday that the district is still getting students settled into their new schools.

"We knew the state was going to make a ruling, and we were waiting for that," Mr. Wortham said.

The TEA also extended the opt-out offer to seniors from Mississippi, but Ms. Culbertson said Friday that the agency hasn't discussed arrangements for testing or diplomas with officials from that state.

Parents will be required to notify their child's Texas school district in writing by Sept. 26 if they don't want their child to take the October test.

E-mail kayres@dallasnews.com

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-
kattestfolo_17met.ART0.North.Edition2.230e5d61.html

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

Krugman points correctly to the race problem in America and how everyday belief systems, however, race- or power-neutral on their face, help perpetuate the racial hierarchy in our nation. While African Americans were indeed disproportionately impacted by what came down in New Orleans, racism against people of color, generally, merits acknowledgement.

For instance, 145,000 Latinos were displaced from Katrina as well. Many of them are, in some sense, even more marginal. Many will not recover from the relief effort similarly due to their undocumented status. This combines with their lack of fluency in the English language to further compromise their current situation. Clearly, this need is what prompted the Mexican military to come to Texas in order to provide relief to the thousands of Mexican nationals who have few options.

So my main point here is that the Black-White construct is a dichotomy that fails to capture the extent and complexity of both racial/ethnic strife and social, political, & economic inequality in our state and nation. Having said this, I am still very pleased that race is actually (back) on the table for discussion. It's hiaitus in public discourse, I believe, is reducible to its eclipsing by such dominant discourses as free markets and individual responsibility.

-Angela

September 19, 2005
Tragedy in Black and White
By PAUL KRUGMAN / NYTimes

By three to one, African-Americans believe that federal aid took so long to arrive in New Orleans in part because the city was poor and black. By an equally large margin, whites disagree.

The truth is that there's no way to know. Maybe President Bush would have been mugging with a guitar the day after the levees broke even if New Orleans had been a mostly white city. Maybe Palm Beach would also have had to wait five days after a hurricane hit before key military units received orders to join rescue operations.

But in a larger sense, the administration's lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina had a lot to do with race. For race is the biggest reason the United States, uniquely among advanced countries, is ruled by a political movement that is hostile to the idea of helping citizens in need.

Race, after all, was central to the emergence of a Republican majority: essentially, the South switched sides after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, states that had slavery in 1860 are much more likely to vote Republican than states that didn't.

And who can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, "There but for the grace of God go I." A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, "Why should I be taxed to support those people?"

Above all, race-based hostility to the idea of helping the poor created an environment in which a political movement hostile to government aid in general could flourish.

By all accounts Ronald Reagan, who declared in his Inaugural Address that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem," wasn't personally racist. But he repeatedly used a bogus tale about a Cadillac-driving Chicago "welfare queen" to bash big government. And he launched his 1980 campaign with a pro-states'-rights speech in Philadelphia, Miss., a small town whose only claim to fame was the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers.

Under George W. Bush - who, like Mr. Reagan, isn't personally racist but relies on the support of racists - the anti-government right has reached a new pinnacle of power. And the incompetent response to Katrina was the direct result of his political philosophy. When an administration doesn't believe in an agency's mission, the agency quickly loses its ability to perform that mission.

By now everyone knows that the Bush administration treated the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a dumping ground for cronies and political hacks, leaving the agency incapable of dealing with disasters. But FEMA's degradation isn't unique. It reflects a more general decline in the competence of government agencies whose job is to help people in need.

For example, housing for Katrina refugees is one of the most urgent problems now facing the nation. The FEMAvilles springing up across the gulf region could all too easily turn into squalid symbols of national failure. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which should be a source of expertise in tackling this problem, has been reduced to a hollow shell, with eight of its principal staff positions vacant.

But let me not blame the Bush administration for everything. The sad truth is that the only exceptional thing about the neglect of our fellow citizens we saw after Katrina struck is that for once the consequences of that neglect were visible on national TV.

Consider this: in the United States, unlike any other advanced country, many people fail to receive basic health care because they can't afford it. Lack of health insurance kills many more Americans each year than Katrina and 9/11 combined.

But the health care crisis hasn't had much effect on politics. And one reason is that it isn't yet a crisis among middle-class, white Americans (although it's getting there). Instead, the worst effects are falling on the poor and black, who have third-world levels of infant mortality and life expectancy.

I'd like to believe that Katrina will change everything - that we'll all now realize how important it is to have a government committed to helping those in need, whatever the color of their skin. But I wouldn't bet on it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/19/opinion/19krugman.html?th&emc=th

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

Sunday, September 18, 2005 - 12:00 AM
Paige, top aides now education consultants
By Ben Feller
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Rod Paige and his former top aides at the Education Department have organized a consulting group to offer high-dollar advice on policies they helped create and later enforced, including the controversial No Child Left Behind Act.

Paige, who resigned as education secretary 10 months ago, has agreed to be chairman of Chartwell Education Group.

The firm, which has begun soliciting business, is seeking clients ranging from state school chiefs to foreign leaders.

It is not unusual for Washington, D.C., officials to become consultants after leaving government. But this venture involves virtually an entire leadership team from President Bush's first term.

"We're pretty confident that we're heading into a place where there's a void," said John Danielson, Paige's former chief of staff and the new company's chief executive officer.

"You have lobbying firms out there, you have smaller consultancies on specific issues, but you don't have a comprehensive firm in education like this one," Danielson said.

Danielson confirmed details about the company in an interview.

At least three other former Education Department managers have signed up:

• William Hansen, the No. 2 department official under Paige, is known for expertise in higher education. He held several positions at the department, including transition-team director for Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney after their election.

• Susan Sclafani, who was Paige's chief federal adviser on matters of vocational and adult education.

• Ron Tomalis, who had a pivotal role in enforcing the No Child Left Behind law as acting assistant secretary over elementary and secretary education.

Patricia Sullivan, director of the Center on Education Policy, said Paige's team did not have a reputation in office for showing the flexibility many potential clients may want.

At the same time, she said, "they provide access, in terms of relationships with the White House, Capitol Hill and Congress, and access to knowledge of the bureaucracy. I can't think of a person who knows the workings of the Department of Education more than Bill Hansen."

Under Bush's prodding, Congress in 2001 passed the most sweeping federal education law in a generation. It aims to get all children up to par in reading and math by 2014. But states and districts have battled the Education Department over the way the law is enforced.

By law, former senior officers may not engage in business dealings with the agency for at least one year from the date they departed, a restriction that would still apply to Paige and Sclafani. Danielson said the company is not a lobbying firm and will not seek business with the government.

In practice, however, the line between lobbying and consulting is often unclear, said Kent Cooper, co-founder of the PoliticalMoneyLine Web site.

Last week, Ron Peiffer, a Maryland Education Department official, met with company leaders to discuss their services.

"It seemed like a powerful group, very impressive in terms of what they could bring to the table," said Peiffer, deputy superintendent for academic policy in Maryland. "Having the secretary there, and many of these other folks that we've dealt with in various other capacities, it was interesting."

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?
document_id=2002502811&zsection_id=2002107549&slug=paige18&date=20050918

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:36 AM 0 comments Links to this post

White House seeking $2.6 billion to pay for displaced students

12:00 AM CDT on Saturday, September 17, 2005

By ROBERT DODGE / The Dallas Morning News


WASHINGTON – Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Friday that the Bush administration is proposing $2.6 billion to help schools in Texas and elsewhere educate student evacuees from hurricane-ravaged states.

JUDI BOTTONI/AP
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who visited a sixth-grade class in Bellaire, Texas, on Friday, said a new plan would pay districts up to $7,500 for each evacuee student.

She said districts would receive money for each evacuee student for 90 percent of the state's average pupil expense, up to $7,500. She said the balance would be covered by the districts and by funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The education funds will be in a disaster assistance package to be approved by Congress.

"This is a very unique situation in many ways," Ms. Spellings said in a teleconference from Houston with reporters.

Federal education officials estimated 372,000 students from Louisiana and Mississippi were displaced by the storm. Texas officials say that 41,000 have already enrolled in the state's schools, and they expect as many as 60,000.

The $7,500-per-student allocation in emergency federal aid would add up to additional funding of more than $300 million for Texas schools.

The announcement drew praise from Texas educators.

"We're thrilled," said Donald Claxton, a spokesman for the Dallas Independent School District. "We certainly were counting on the Bush administration to help us through this time, and it clearly looks like a positive step."

Said Kathy Walt, press secretary for Gov. Rick Perry: "We are hopeful Congress will be encouraged to approve this funding, which will address the extraordinary impact on Texas public schools."

The U.S. Education Department said the funds would pay for things like teacher salaries, transportation, materials and equipment, counseling, tutoring, and special services for students with disabilities.

Ms. Spellings said the funds would be distributed quarterly during the 2005-06 school year so that the money can follow students if they move from one school to another.

In a move that is already stirring controversy, the Bush administration will make $488 million available for reimbursements by check directly to families with children in private schools. Ms. Spellings noted that communities in Louisiana had higher-than-average numbers of students in private schools.

But Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, said the reimbursement represented an effort by the Bush administration to advance an ideologically based policy – vouchers for private schools.

"Vouchers do nothing to solve the problems created by Hurricane Katrina," he said. "It is opportunistic and inappropriate to raise the voucher debate at this time."

Ms. Spellings noted that in four severely damaged parishes, 61,000 of about 187,000 students were in private schools. She said the effort was not intended to provoke a voucher debate but to "provide aid for displaced families whether they have been in public or private schools."

The secretary said she also was asking Congress for expanded authority to waive federal education requirements, most notably involving the No Child Left Behind Act. But she reiterated that waivers would be granted on a case-by-case basis and that there would not be an across-the-board lifting of the program's testing and accountability standards.

The Bush administration's package also contains $227 million in assistance for colleges and universities that have accepted students who were previously enrolled in Gulf Coast institutions.

The funds also would be used to help evacuees make payments on student loans and to provide assistance to institutions in storm-damaged areas.

Staff writer Tawnell D. Hobbs in Dallas and Terrence Stutz in Austin contributed to this report.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:58 PM 2 comments Links to this post

"Texas schools welcoming Hurricane Katrina evacuees into their classrooms may be placing their state and federal ratings on the line. " -Angela

Schools with evacuees risk academic rankings

Web Posted: 09/16/2005 12:00 AM CDT

Jenny LaCoste-Caputo
Express-NewsStaff Writer

Texas schools welcoming Hurricane Katrina evacuees into their classrooms may be placing their state and federal ratings on the line.

School leaders in Texas and other states have asked for flexibility under No Child Left Behind, the sweeping public school overhaul that carries sanctions for schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress two years in a row.

But U.S. Department of Education leaders say it's too early to exempt schools from the law's requirements.

Students displaced by Katrina also will be counted in the state's accountability system — for now, Texas Education Secretary Shirley Neeley said.

"It's too early to make that call," she said.

Besides determining a school's ranking, the scores carry high stakes for individual students. Children in third and fifth grades must pass portions of the test in order to promote to the next grade.

Neeley and U.S. Education Department Deputy Secretary Ray Simon met with local superintendents Thursday and visited two schools serving the city's hurricane shelters.

Simon said the education department is reviewing Texas' request for leniency under No Child Left Behind. State officials also have asked for help with funding and flexibility with deadlines for developing individual education plans for students with disabilities, among other services

"We're using common sense," Simon said. "Right now, the important thing is to get the children in school."

Federal education officials said no to a request from Mississippi that adequate yearly progress, or AYP, be waived this year for schools affected by the storm.

"Since the tests in Mississippi on which AYP determinations are made will not be administered until spring 2006, it is premature for us to consider this request at this time," U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings wrote to Hank Bounds, superintendent of education for Mississippi.

During his visit, Simon reassured school leaders that local districts and states wouldn't be left with the monumental tab of educating displaced students.

The price of schooling storm victims in Texas could reach $450 million. About 40,000 displaced students have enrolled in Texas schools, and state officials say that number could grow to as many as 60,000.

Simon said Spellings, a key education adviser to then-Gov. George W. Bush, is developing a plan to ensure sufficient short- and long-term funding. The proposal will be submitted to Congress for consideration.

In the meantime, the Federal Emergency Management Agency can use disaster funds to provide temporary school facilities, as well as transportation to and from schools.

Neeley and Simon spent the day touring Hull Elementary in Northside School District and West Campus High School in South San Antonio School District. They praised the schools' staff and students for welcoming the "Katrina kids."

"Did you hear that?" Neeley asked, after meeting a group of students at Hull. "He said, 'This is my friend from New Orleans,' Isn't that wonderful?"

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jcaputo@express-news.net

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:59 PM 3 comments Links to this post

Texas, Louisiana officials discuss which state's exit exam to use

06:43 AM CDT on Thursday, September 15, 2005

By KAREN AYRES / The Dallas Morning News

High school seniors who fled the Gulf Coast could soon face another hurdle – the Texas high school exit exam.

Education officials said this week that evacuees who enrolled in Texas schools as seniors will have to pass the state tests required to graduate, unless officials come up with another arrangement.
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If the testing is required, potentially thousands of high school seniors from Louisiana and Mississippi would take the tests, which are based on Texas curriculum, as early as next month. If they do not pass the first attempt, they would have three other chances, just as other Texas seniors do.

TEA spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said there is no way to waive the state requirement that all students pass the exam to receive a Texas diploma.

"Right now, we have to go by what Texas law says," Ms. Culbertson said. "Unless the law is changed or we can work something out with Louisiana to test the students on their own test, the possibility of them having to take the Texas test is pretty strong."


No final decision yet



Susan Barnes, assistant commissioner for the Texas Education Agency, said Wednesday that her department is working with education officials in Louisiana to reach a final decision on the testing policy. She said the agency hopes to make a decision in the next few days.

"I cannot really give any detail because we don't have anything really solid at this moment," Ms. Barnes said. "We're very aware of the concern. We certainly don't want to add to any of the difficulty the students have coming into our schools."

Ms. Culbertson said many districts have been calling the state to find out whether evacuees' scores, for high schoolers and younger students, could affect their status on federal and state rankings.

"We really don't know how all of this is going to affect us," she said.

State officials have already decided that evacuees at all other grade levels will be required to take the standardized Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, administered in the winter and spring.

However, TEA sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Education to ask for a waiver from requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, which uses testing data to measure school success. Officials plan to review the Texas system in the new year to address evacuees.

During a visit to Dallas on Wednesday, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Tom Luce said it's going to take some time to resolve these issues.

"A lot of Louisiana kids want to graduate with a Louisiana diploma," he said. TEA Commissioner Shirley Neeley "is working to see how we might use the exit test from Louisiana to get the Louisiana high school diploma."

By Tuesday, nearly 38,000 evacuees had enrolled in Texas schools. It was not known Wednesday how many of those are high school seniors.

The Texas high school exit exam measures English language arts, social studies, science and math skills based on the state curriculum.

Last year, 91 percent of seniors passed all four required sections in time for graduation.

In Louisiana, students first take the state's graduate exit exam as 10th-graders. They are required to pass English language arts, math and either science or social studies to graduate.

About 95 percent of students passed all required sections by graduation last year, according to Meg Casper, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Education.

However, records from last spring show many students in the Orleans Parish, one of the areas hardest hit by the hurricane, didn't fare so well. Nearly half of 10th-graders failed the math section and about 40 percent of 11th-graders failed the science and social studies sections.

Ms. Casper said her agency has been more focused on placing students over the past couple weeks and has not made decisions on how testing will be handled.

"All of that is still very much up in the air," she said.

Texas schools will likely have access to students' records from Louisiana in the coming days to get a better handle on evacuees' academic backgrounds.

Ms. Culbertson said the Texas test measures basic skills.

"Most students who have taken high school courses should be able to take the test," she said.


At a disadvantage



Nonetheless, Brad Lancaster, assistant superintendent for learner services in the Allen school district, said the test is clearly based on Texas curriculum that could pose a challenge to a newcomer.

"Regardless of whether they got here by Katrina or otherwise," he said, "that's going to be a tough way to take a test because they haven't been in the system."

Mr. Lancaster said his district, which has more than 130 evacuee students, puts on a "full-court press" with extra tutoring to help seniors who fail parts of TAKS prepare for retests before graduation.

Mr. Lancaster said he wouldn't be surprised if the state waived the requirement.

"There are so many parts of this situation that are so unfair on so many levels," Mr. Lancaster said. "Will a child's interest be served in light of this catastrophe by forcing them to take this state requirement? That's hard to say."

Karla Oliver, a spokeswoman for the Plano school district, which has more than 550 evacuees including 40 seniors, said her district is waiting for answers.

"We are looking for some directives from the state," Ms. Oliver said.



Staff writer Tawnell D. Hobbs contributed to this report.
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Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/
091505dnccokattest.173a186f.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:33 PM 1 comments Links to this post

This is interesting as it addresses whether the public has a right to see films of alleged behind-the-scenes armtwisting on legislation at the capitol. Interesting to see how the War on Terror is used as a justification for not making such information available to the public even though we all know that such matters can have enormous impact on public policy. Wonder what others think. -Angela
Fight was prompted by the Texas Observer's request for tapes.
By W. Gardner Selby
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, September 14, 2005

A journalist's request for a videotape thought to show political arm-twisting has prompted the Texas Department of Public Safety to go to court over Capitol security concerns for the second time since 2003.

A lawsuit filed against Attorney General Greg Abbott in Travis County this month suggests that videos taken by Capitol security cameras should not be available to the public.

Abbott had no comment about the lawsuit Tuesday.

Last month, he said DPS should release the tape. Jake Bernstein, executive editor of the Texas Observer, a biweekly journal, had asked for any video taken of the hallway behind the Texas House chamber on May 23.

Legislators that day rejected a proposal to allow select low-income students to attend private schools with state funding amid speculation that voucher proponent James Leininger of San Antonio was secretively leaning on members.

Bernstein said, "We thought we would try to put those rumors to rest by seeing the video."

The DPS says the release of such tapes could weaken security by yielding insight into camera placement and angles and what they do or don't record.

"Events in recent years have shown that the Texas state Capitol is a likely location for terrorist attacks to occur," Sgt. Donnie Weakly said in a statement filed by the agency in its lawsuit against Abbott over a previous request for a tape.

Weakly called the building's security cameras among the Capitol's first lines of defense.

If tapes were available, he said, anyone could "detail and map out the specifications, operating procedures and location" for the cameras.

Weakly said the Capitol fielded four bomb threats in 2003, and officers responded to 16 anthrax scares from 2001 through 2003.

DPS, in its new lawsuit against Abbott, cites exceptions in state laws on disclosure of government records tied to the detection, investigation or prosecution of crime and information relating to the specifications, operating procedures or location of a security system.

Abbott's office advised the DPS on Aug. 26 that it saw no law enforcement reason to bar the release of the tapes.

DPS "has not adequately shown how the submitted video taken from Capitol security cameras relates to the specifications, operating procedures, or location of a security system used to protect public property from an act of terrorism or criminal activity related to terrorism," states the advisory letter from Ramsey Abarca, an assistant attorney general.

Bernstein said: "This has become an issue about what's a public record. It seems to be a no-brainer."

In March, DPS and Abbott agreed to a judgment in the previous dispute. It states that videotapes showing a Capitol hallway in April 2003 are exempt from disclosure. The tapes had been sought by the Republican Party of Texas after a GOP leadership aide said draft maps of judicial and congressional districts vanished from a meeting room in his absence.

Abbott, who initially said the tapes should be available, relented after being told that they were part of an investigation into the items' disappearance, spokesman Tom Kelley said.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/metrostate/content/metro/stories/09/14DPSTAPE.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:33 PM 1 comments Links to this post

U.S. funds to help with facilities, computers for evacuee students

09:16 AM CDT on Tuesday, September 13, 2005

By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – Federal officials will provide emergency funds to Texas school districts to cover the costs of portable buildings and computers for thousands of Louisiana evacuee students, but reimbursement for other expenses such as additional teachers will have to wait.

Federal Emergency Management Agency officials on Monday notified Texas what expenses associated with the relocation of displaced residents from Louisiana into the state will be covered by billions of dollars in emergency relief funds approved by Congress and the Bush administration.

On the list of eligible expenses for school districts are portable classroom buildings that must be used to handle the influx of as many as 50,000 to 60,000 evacuee students, mental health counselors for those students and new computers. On the other hand, hiring of additional teachers and purchase of textbooks are not eligible at this time.

Texas Education Agency officials, who reported Monday that enrollment of Hurricane Katrina evacuees in the state's public schools has reached 28,000, said they are not concerned about the costs that won't be compensated with the first wave of public assistance funds related to the disaster.

"We're still optimistic that there will be other federal funds made available to cover the costs our school districts are accruing with the influx of new students," said Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the TEA.

Ms. Ratcliffe also said school districts seem to be enrolling all the new students with few hitches. "Districts are doing their best to get kids in class and make them feel comfortable," she said.

In an interview with The Associated Press on Monday, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said at least 372,000 students in Louisiana and Mississippi have been displaced by Hurricane Katrina – and it is still unclear where the funding will come from to educate those students until they can return home.

In Louisiana, more than 247,000 public and private school students have been displaced, 489 schools have been closed and at least six parishes have destroyed or damaged buildings. In Mississippi, more than 125,000 students have been forced to leave, with 226 schools in 30 districts closed and nearly 30 school campuses destroyed.

Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley has estimated that it could cost up to $450 million to educate 60,000 evacuee students in Texas, based on the current average annual cost of $7,500 per pupil in the public schools.

Ms. Spellings also has indicated she will use her authority to waive parts of the federal No Child Left Behind Law, which requires school districts and campuses to show yearly progress on standardized tests and to employ only teachers that meet certain standards.

E-mail tstutz@dallasnews.com
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Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/DN-
katfunds_13tex.ART.State.Edition1.e70b72f.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:50 PM 1 comments Links to this post

by Ben Feller, AP Education Writer  |  September 13, 2005

WASHINGTON --The United States is losing ground in education, as peers across the globe zoom by with bigger gains in student achievement and school graduations, a study shows.

Among adults age 25 to 34, the U.S. is ninth among industrialized nations in the share of its population that has at least a high school degree. In the same age group, the United States ranks seventh, with Belgium, in the share of people who hold a college degree.

By both measures, the United States was first in the world as recently as 20 years ago, said Barry McGaw, director of education for the Paris-based Organization for Cooperation and Development. The 30-nation organization develops the yearly rankings as a way for countries to evaluate their education systems and determine whether to change their policies.

McGaw said that the United States remains atop the "knowledge economy," one that uses information to produce economic benefits. But, he said, "education's contribution to that economy is weakening, and you ought to be worrying."

The report, released Tuesday, bases its conclusions about achievement mainly on international test scores released last December. They show that compared with their peers in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, 15-year-olds in the United States are below average in applying math skills to real-life tasks.

Top performers included Finland, Korea, the Netherlands, Japan, Canada and Belgium.

A separate international review last year showed U.S. eighth-graders gaining on their peers across the globe in science and math. At the same time, though, fourth-graders here are falling behind others passed as their test scores remain stagnant, that study found.

"We're not just letting down too many of our students; we're (also) not giving our taxpayers the best return on their investments," said Ray Simon, the deputy education secretary, after the release of the international report.

Younger students are making gains, Simon said, but that progress is often lost by the later grades. He said a new push to improve the accuracy of high school graduation data should help steer attention toward students who are at risk of dropping out of education.

McGaw said other measures of achievement -- including how U.S. students do on this country's federal math and reading test -- are fair to consider in rating performance.

Given what the United States spends on education, its relatively low student achievement through high school shows its school system is "clearly inefficient," McGaw said.

In all levels of education, the United States spends $11,152 per student. That's the second highest amount, behind the $11,334 spent by Switzerland.

"The very best schools in the U.S. are extraordinary," McGaw said. "But the big concern in the U.S. is the diversity of quality of institutions -- and the fact that expectations haven't been set high enough."

The Bush administration says the 2002 federal law known as the No Child Left Behind Act is fueling higher achievement among all students -- particularly poor and minority kids -- by holding schools accountable for progress. But the international data, mostly gathered in 2003, are not recent enough to confirm that the law is producing results, McGaw said.

Higher education in the United States remains strong, and the nation continues to hold an advantage in innovation based on research conducted at universities, McGaw said.

The report also underscores that women continue to get paid less than men.

Women in the United States who are 30 to 44 and who hold a university degree -- meaning a bachelor's degree, master's degree, doctorate or medical degree -- make only 62 percent of what similarly qualified men do.

That's a lower rate than in all but three of the 19 countries for which numbers are available. The nations with greater inequity in pay are Germany, New Zealand and Switzerland.

------
On The Net:
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development: http://www.oecd.org 
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2005/09/13/
us_world_position_in_education_slipping/

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

Mon, Sep. 12, 2005

by BEN FELLER
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Hurricane Katrina has booted at least 372,000 students from classrooms in Louisiana and Mississippi, and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Monday there are no clear answers about who will pay to educate them.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Spellings gave the broadest assessment yet of how the hurricane has affected schools at the start of their year.

In Louisiana, more than 247,000 public and private school students have been displaced. The storm forced 489 schools to close. At least six parishes have destroyed or damaged buildings, she said.

In Mississippi, more than 125,000 students have been forced elsewhere. Some 226 schools in 30 districts are closed. Almost 30 schools have been destroyed.

Spellings declined to estimate how much it will cost states to rebuild school districts or serve displaced students - or how much the federal government will cover.

"I shouldn't be talking about the details that I'm in negotiations with the White House and the (Capitol) Hill on," Spellings said. "As soon as I can talk about it, I want to talk about it."

President Bush has told Spellings to develop a plan to provide aid for the states.

In the interview, Spellings said she will ask Congress for unprecedented authority to ease aspects of a federal law governing the education of homeless children. She already had pledged to consider using her powers to waive parts of the law known as No Child Left Behind, including requirements on yearly testing and teacher quality.

Still, Spellings cautioned: "I obviously don't think this is an opportunity for every state in the country to get 'No Child Left Behind is off this year.' We're just not there yet."

In a letter obtained Monday by The Associated Press, Spellings waived a requirement for Mississippi that normally forces school districts to spend some money to obtain federal aid. That means some of the states can cut or shift spending without penalty.

Spellings denied the state's request to excuse some districts from having to make yearly progress on math and reading tests. Because those tests will not be given until the spring, she said, it is too soon to waive the "linchpin" of federal accountability.

It was Spellings' first response to a state request for help dealing with Katrina. Her department has a request pending from Texas.

School districts nationwide are enrolling displaced students who have friends or family from the Gulf Coast - or children who just have nowhere else to go.

Universities are absorbing tens of thousands of college students stranded by the hurricane. In Louisiana, an estimated 73,000 such students from public and private schools have been displaced and 15 campuses have been closed, Spellings' office said.

"I think the school community has responded very well. Obviously, we're part of that," she said. "We've tried to make this as easy as possible, with all the tools that we have to bring to bear immediately. I'll be accountable for that."

Overall, more than 25 states say they have taken in displaced students.

Texas schools expect an influx of roughly 60,000 students. In a letter to the Education Department, Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley said she expects to spend $7,500 per student this year. That means the price of educating evacuees could be at least $450 million.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has told the state it is eligible to be reimbursed for expenses such as temporary schools and mental health counselors. But the hiring of teachers and buying of books are not eligible expenses for relief aid, a FEMA memo says.

The Houston school system has taken in more than 3,000 students displaced students. If the figure reaches at least 5,000 students, as expected, the district's cost would be about $30 million, said spokesman Terry Abbott.

As for college students, Spellings said the government would not try to take back federal financial aid already given students who been forced to move to other schools for at least a semester. That could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars, out of about $100 billion disbursed annually.

The department is considering what to do about aid distributed to help affected students who opt to take time off or work rather than enrolling at a new school, a spokeswoman said.
---
Associated Press writers April Castro, Suzanne Gamboa and Justin Pope contributed to this report.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/12626093.htm

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:51 AM 1 comments Links to this post

For once, we get the costs of all of these tests our state administers: "Last school year, the state spent about $61.5 million to administer all its tests. The Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills alone cost $48.3 million.
TPRI and Tejas Lee cost the state about $4 million annually." Scroll to bottom to see more detailed costs. One wonders whether greater levels of reading proficiency would occur if these millions went straight into the classroom rather than into the pockets of the testing companies. To be sure, the plight of the hurricane evacuees will be a boon to the testing companies. Who really profits from this reforms?

-Angela

by L. Lamor Williams
Star-Telegram Staff Writer /September 9, 2005

Educators say the state has been forcing school districts to use a state-funded reading test that doesn't accurately measure student progress or to pay for better exams themselves.

Each year, Texas kindergartners, first- and second-graders take the Texas Primary Reading Inventory or its Spanish cousin, Tejas Lee, which were implemented in the 1999-2000 school year. In 1996, then-Governor George W. Bush established the Texas Reading Initiative, which called for the testing.

The state fully reimburses districts that use the TPRI or Tejas Lee. If a district chooses to administer another state-approved exam, it gets partial reimbursement or no reimbursement from the state. And in some cases, those exams must be given more often than TPRI or Tejas Lee.

Ninety percent of districts in the state use TPRI and Tejas Lee, according to the Texas Education Agency. They include the Arlington, Birdville, Mansfield and Fort Worth school districts.

At a time when districts are already strapped for cash, some say districts have no choice but to go with the fully-funded TPRI.

"They've made it real clear. We're almost under their thumb," said Wally Carter, the Arlington school district's research and testing director.

Bush's challenge to educators when he created the Reading Initiative was that they use scientific, research-based instruction to ensure that all students were reading at or above grade level by the end of third grade. The tests are given three times a year in first and second grades and twice in kindergarten.

"Based on these tests, a teacher can identify which students are struggling and provide them early with intervention," said Linda Limon, director of the Texas Reading Initiative. "We found that a lot of kids fell through the cracks."

Each year, Texas spends millions of dollars on testing.

Last school year, the state spent about $61.5 million to administer all its tests. The Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills alone cost $48.3 million.

TPRI and Tejas Lee cost the state about $4 million annually, TEA curriculum director Monica Martinez said.

Until recently, the state would annually revamp the test. Now, TPRI and Tejas Lee have been retooled so districts can use the same test materials for two years.

The TEA has allocated $4.9 million for the new cycle of two-year test kits, which cover the 2006-07 and 2007-08 school years, Martinez said.

With funding from the state, TPRI is developed by the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Tejas Lee is developed by the Texas Institute of Measurement Evaluation and Statistics.

Some educators say the tests rely too heavily on phonics, and many preferred the Diagnostic Reading Assessment. The DRA is on the state's approved list of assessments, but a district wouldn't be fully reimbursed for using it. It would cost Arlington $158,877 to buy DRA kits for the district's 762 kindergarten, first- and second-grade teachers.

Sylvia Davies, the Birdville school district's elementary English language arts consultant, said teachers were upset that the state stopped giving the DRA. Curriculum officials in the Fort Worth school district could not be reached for comment.

"There are other tests available that would give teachers a more precise reading level," Davies said. "Maybe someday the state will provide those also."

Limon maintains that the TPRI is a more comprehensive exam.

"Some people love TPRI and some think it takes too much time," Limon said. "But having spoken to people throughout the state, it has a lot more advocates than detractors."

IN THE KNOW

Test costs

In the 2004-05 school year, Texas spent about $61.5 million on testing.

• Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills English, exit level and Texas Assessment of Academic Skills -- $42.1 million

• Spanish version of TAKS -- $6.2 million

• End of course exams -- $400,000

• Texas English Language Performance Assessment -- $900,000

• Reading Proficiency Test in English -- $2.1 million

• State Developed Alternative Assessment II -- $5.8 million

• Texas Primary Reading Inventory and Tejas Lee -- $4 million

SOURCE: Texas Education Agency
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ONLINE:www.tea.state.tx.us/reading

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/state/12600026.htm

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:22 AM 1 comments Links to this post

by JENNIFER RADCLIFFE
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle September 9, 2005

"Is that our bus yet?" the squirming second-grader asked his mother. "I want to go to school now ."

The boy was among 161 children from the Reliant complex to attend Douglass Elementary on Thursday, a southeast Houston school that was reopened specifically for evacuated students. Districtwide, more than 624 from Houston's large shelters enrolled in school by midday Thursday.

More than half of the 18,905 displaced children attending school in Texas are enrolled in Houston-area schools, both public and private, in the neighborhoods of their hotels, houses and shelters.

"That's a huge step forward — just getting them back in school," said Kathy Christie, a vice president with the Education Commission of the States. "Texas deserves a great big pat on the back."

While Hurricane Katrina's youngest survivors need extra care, integrating them into schools with typical Houston students will be key in helping them resume their childhood, Christie said.

"Talking about (Katrina) is good, but talking about Harry Potter is good, too. You need a little bit of both," she said.

Hundreds of these students will stay in Houston schools for months or even years. Officials announced Thursday that St. Bernard Parish will not reopen this year. Orleans Parish leaders are determining when or if they can open. Jefferson Parish may not open until Jan. 19.

HISD Superintendent Abe- lardo Saavedra said his district is prepared to educate as many as 14,000 displaced students. So far, enrollment of Katrina evacuees is about 2,300.

"It's going smoother than I expected," he said. "I'm very encouraged. I'm very proud of our staff."


Children a priority
Winston Harrison, who opted to see his fourth-grade son off to school Thursday morning rather than wait in a long line for disaster assistance, said more Louisiana residents should be focused on sending their children to school.



"The children are more important. The lines are going to drop. I can take care of that later," Harrison said.

Richard Washington was apprehensive about putting his kindergarten daughter on a school bus in a strange city.

"That's my love. That's my shadow. I ain't happy about it, but I don't have a choice," Washington said, just before 5-year-old Elegria boarded the bus with a fuzzy teddy bear.

Jackie Lawson, one of the thousands standing in line for FEMA help, said school would have to wait at least one more day for Alaji, her 10-year-old great nephew. Even though he was registered for class, his family was too busy trying to get much-need housing assistance.

"I think a lot of people have that problem. It's all up in the air," said Lawson, adding that the boy would probably attend school today.

Children sent to Douglass laughed and giggled as they entered school. They were impressed by the yellow lockers and lime green cafeteria walls.

"The children were beautiful. They were all thrilled to death. They wanted to come to school," principal Sue Ann Payne said.

Teacher Zella Markey, a principal of a private school in New Orleans who was hired by HISD, said some of the children were a little anxious at first — a feeling she can relate to.

"They've been venting a little bit about what happened at the Superdome," said Markey, whose kindergarten class was all smiles as they sang The Wheels on the Bus .

As the students attended their first day of class, several hundred other teachers, aides, nurses, bus drivers and other school personnel put in job applications at Houston school district's job fair Thursday afternoon. Some applicants were Louisiana evacuees, while others were retired educators.

Staff writer Cynthia Garza contributed to this report.

jennifer.radcliffe@chron.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ENROLLMENTS
These are the number of evacuated students that area districts say they've enrolled:

• Houston: 2,305

• North Forest: 110

• Humble: 476

• Fort Bend: 1,268

• Spring: 494

• Pasadena: 409

• Katy: 1,089

• Brazosport: 73

• Pearland: 219

• Spring Branch: 231

• Cypress-Fairbanks: 1,148

• Alief: 811

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3346005

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

Sept. 10, 2005, 10:21PM
An income tax, other proposals draw responses along party lines
By CLAY ROBISON
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN - Although a growing number of Texans believe their local property taxes are too high, most support the controversial law, dubbed "Robin Hood," that requires property wealthy school districts to share tax revenue with poorer schools.

But there are sharp differences between Republicans and Democrats over the share-the-wealth law, the Scripps Howard Texas Poll shows, underscoring one reason for the Legislature's prolonged inability to overhaul the school finance system and cut local school taxes.

During their 2002 election campaigns, Gov. Rick Perry and many Republican legislators vowed to repeal Robin Hood and lower property taxes, which now account for about 60 percent of public school funding.

But lawmakers have failed to accomplish either goal during four sessions over the past two years.

According to the Texas Poll, 65 percent of Texans believe their property taxes are too high, compared with 60 percent in May and 54 percent in February.

'Makes a lot of sense'
But despite the Republican attacks against Robin Hood, 57 percent of the survey's respondents agree that rich districts should share their money with poorer schools. Some 38 percent disagree, and 5 percent don't know, reflecting similar polls earlier this year.

"The vast majority of people, as they study it, say it makes a lot of sense to take the state's wealth, where it is in abundance, and move it to where the children are in abundance," said Wayne Pierce, executive director of the Texas Equity Center, which represents several hundred low- and middle-wealth school districts.

"The vast majority of districts benefit from Robin Hood," he added.

Only 156 of the state's 1,037 school districts must share their local tax money under the law. Many rural districts represented by Republican lawmakers as well as heavily minority, urban and South Texas districts represented by Democrats receive funding from Robin Hood.

But many of the districts that give money are in suburban, heavily Republican areas, which may help explain why most of the opposition to Robin Hood comes from Republicans.

Only 44 percent of Republicans favor the law, while 49 percent oppose it, and 7 percent don't know, according to the survey. Democrats, however, approve of Robin Hood by a 72 percent to 23 percent margin, with 5 percent undecided. Independents support the law, 59 percent to 36 percent, also with 5 percent unsure.

Dick Lavine, a tax policy analyst with the Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates for low- and middle-income people, said the Robin Hood law has benefited the entire state because it has promoted equity in school funding.

Perry backs equity
Spokesman Eric Bearse said Perry, despite his opposition to Robin Hood, also supports equity and, despite the Legislature's failure to act, has proposed plans to increase equity by increasing state funding for public schools.

The law, enacted in 1993 in response to a Texas Supreme Court order for more equity in funding between rich and poor districts, was declared unconstitutional by a state district judge last fall.

The judge also declared the funding system inadequate, and the Supreme Court is now reviewing his decision.

There also has been major disagreement among legislators, even among Republican leaders, over what state taxes should be raised to pay for local property tax reductions.

Even on income tax
Although leaders have vowed to find a tax trade-off that is "revenue neutral," 61 percent of the Texas Poll respondents believe their overall taxes will increase if the Legislature ever enacts a new school finance plan.

Some 25 percent of respondents blamed the school finance impasse on lawmakers, 24 percent blamed it on lobbyists and special interest groups and 14 percent blamed the governor.

Only 3 percent specifically blamed House Speaker Tom Craddick and 1 percent blamed Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. But 17 percent said "all of the above."

Texans, the poll indicates, are about evenly divided on whether the Legislature should enact a state income tax to reduce property taxes and increase education funding. Some 45 percent support an income tax, 47 percent don't and 8 percent are unsure.

But there were significant partisan differences over an income tax. Only 35 percent of Republicans like the idea, and 57 percent oppose it. Democrats support it by 60 percent to 31 percent, and independents are evenly divided at 48 percent.

The telephone poll of 1,000 Texans was conducted Aug. 22-Sept. 3 by the Scripps Research Center. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

clay.robison@chron.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3347283

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:13 PM 8 comments Links to this post

Former Republican Representative Bob Griggs is right on target. Educators do need to put their hat in the ring for public office at the state level. Read on. -Angela

Run for state office to aid public education, representative says

08:35 AM CDT on Thursday, September 8, 2005

By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News


AUSTIN – A Republican state representative who parted ways with GOP leaders on school finance is urging local school board members and administrators to run for the Legislature next year and counter the "false" beliefs many lawmakers hold on public education in Texas.

Rep. Bob Griggs of North Richland Hills, said he was "putting out the call" for more educators to run for state office so they can fight the "misguided and damaging efforts to dismantle Texas' educational system" that have surfaced in the Legislature over the last few years.

Mr. Griggs, former superintendent of the Birdville school district in Tarrant County, recently announced he would not seek a third term next year.

In a letter distributed through the education community, the Republican said he has seen firsthand the widely held belief in the Legislature "that established educators are the problem with education and that the system cannot be fixed without wiping the slate clean and starting over from scratch."

"While I continue to fight this battle, it has become apparent there is more than just one retired superintendent can handle without additional reinforcement," he said. "Texas needs you to step up to the duty we all share as community leaders to run for state office."

Dr. Griggs noted that parent groups and political action committees are organizing around the state to back candidates who are more supportive of public schools than many current lawmakers.

"These organizations will prove a valuable resource to assist you in an effort to win election to the Legislature," his letter said.

This year, the former teacher joined Democrats in opposing a GOP-backed school finance bill that he said contained too many mandates and not enough money for school districts. The legislation was universally opposed by school districts and education groups across Texas.

Conservative groups were critical of Mr. Griggs' stance, and he had been expected to face strong primary opposition had he run for a third term in the House.

The school finance and tax swap bills failed in the regular legislative session this year, as well as in two special sessions called by Gov. Rick Perry this summer. House Republican leaders blamed school superintendents and their lobbyists for defeat of the legislation.

E-mail tstutz@dallasnews.com


------------------------------------------------------------------------
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/DN-griggs_08tex.ART.State.Edition1.3785213.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:04 PM 5 comments Links to this post

Sept. 8, 2005, 3:08PM


Carlos Antonio Rios / Chronicle
Teen-age hurricane evacuees get on a bus to Jones High School today at Reliant Center.

A chance for youth to return to routine
Evacuee parents enroll hundreds in HISD, where students will begin classes today
By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
HURRICANE KATRINA


NOAA
Hurricane Katrina swirls toward the Gulf Coast.

• Complete Chronicle coverage
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Note: Some graphics are oversized and require scrolling
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
Video, graphics courtesy Associated Press and KHOU; free Real Player, Flash plug-in and Acrobat Reader may be required.)


Dozens of children lined up outside Reliant Center this morning to board school buses heading for Douglass Elementary and Jones High schools.

 They were among the 445 students from the main shelters who registered for school in the Houston Independent School District during Wednesday's big enrollment push.

"Is that our bus yet? I want to go to school now," said Reginald Williams, 7.



Even as the children lined up to board buses, however, hundreds of Hurricane Katrina evacuees, including many school-aged children, lined up to register for debit cards, prompting some to question the priorities of parents who put their children in the line for money instead of the line for school.  

 "The children are more important," said Winston Harrison, who was taking his young son Winston Jr. to school.

The first day of school comes as a welcome change for many of the parents and children who have spent nearly two weeks fleeing Hurricane Katrina's wake and sleeping in area shelters.

Parents said they don't want their children to fall behind academically.

"All they're doing here is running from one end of the hall to another. Enough is enough," said Reliant Center resident Cynthia Hampton, 56, who signed up nine grandchildren for school Wednesday. "They need new surroundings."

Evacuee enrollment in the state's largest school district is expected to increase this week, as HISD's enrollment push continues through Friday at the Reliant Park complex and the George R. Brown Convention Center.

Children colored pictures as their parents filled out yellow, green and pink forms. Dozens of volunteers, registrars, counselors and health experts were on hand to guide them through the process.

Wednesday's enrollment session brings HISD's count for evacuated students to more than 1,885. District leaders said they have 14,000 available seats.

"We're taking in the equivalent of another school district," HISD trustee Kevin Hoffman said.

Most of the younger students will be sent to Douglass and Ryan elementary schools, which are being reopened today for the Katrina survivors.

Other elementary students could be placed at Dodson, McDade, Frost and Anson Jones, if needed. Middle school students could attend Fleming, Fondren, Black and Holland, while high schoolers may be placed at Jones, Kashmere, Barbara Jordan, Sterling and Scarborough.

District leaders are hoping state and federal governments will help offset the $60 million it could cost to educate as many as 10,000 evacuated students for the entire year. The actual enrollment and cost could be less. Right now, district employees said they are just happy to help.

"Words can't describe how I feel in being able to help our neighbors get back into a normal routine," Hoffman said.

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said school districts such as Houston can expect some financial aid, but she offered few specifics. "We're trying to figure out ... how best to do that," she said. "We're working on it."

Returning to class is an important step in helping the children put their lives back together, volunteers said.

"The thing is just to put some normalcy in their life," said Cathe Phipps, a Texas Baptist Men volunteer from Dallas. "I have seen children who are very excited about going back to school. They're ready."

Suburban districts in Harris County have taken in roughly 6,900 evacuated students, including 1,148 in Cypress-Fairbanks, 811 in Alief, 404 in Klein and 900 in Katy. Educators said they are trying to make sure the children have the clothes, supplies and emotional support they need. Many students escaped the storm with just the clothes they were wearing.

They've since survived even more trauma.

"We didn't come with anything because we were stuck in an attic," explained Terryanna Durel, a 9-year-old who registered Wednesday. "We got in a boat and went to the Superdome. I didn't like it there. They were raping and killing people. I'm just glad I came out safe."

Terryanna said she misses her friends, bike, television and favorite clothes. But the girl, who hopes to be a nurse, is excited about going to school in Houston.

"New Orleans is a small town. This is like a city right here," she said.

Of course, her view of Houston has been limited to the Reliant Center complex.

"Do they have houses in Houston?" she asked. "Big ones?"

Her little sister quickly added: "Do they have stores?"

Adrian Peters, 17, said it may be hard to keep his mind off what he's been through in the past week and a half.

"I'm going to think about all this for a long time," said Peters, who made his way to the Superdome through deep water.

"I'm ready to start going to school. I'm tired."

Reliant resident Raymond Warner, 17, said he's anxious to see the campus, students and teachers today at Jones High School.

He hopes to try out as a wide receiver on the school's football team.

"It's new. I've never been to Houston before," said Warner, a senior. "Hopefully they'll treat me the same way as everyone else."

After being separated from her three children for a week, 22-year-old Rebecca Soloman said it'll be a little tough to send her 4-year-old daughter, Kariell, off to prekindergarten.

"We didn't know where they were," said Soloman, whose children were rescued by the Coast Guard. "I promise I will never let them split us up again."

Other families found the registration process frustrating.

"I got down here at 7:45 a.m. Now, I have to wait on a phone call," said Veronica Bowman, who moved out of the Astrodome on Tuesday and was having trouble enrolling her three sons. She wasn't sure how she is supposed to transport her children to Longfellow Elementary, the closest school to their new apartment.

"They're just sitting around doing nothing. They need to be in school," she said.

jennifer.radcliffe@chron.com

This article is: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3344350

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:58 PM 1 comments Links to this post

I knew when the bankruptcy law passed, that it would collide with the real needs associated with folks who really need options—such a the Katrina victims, AND that it was really serving the interests of the credit card companies. What no one could have predicted though was a collision of this magnitude. -Angela

Sept. 8, 2005, 8:30PM

By LOREN STEFFY
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

A bad law just keeps getting worse.


The devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is exposing more shortcomings in the federal bankruptcy law that's scheduled to take effect Oct. 17.

The so-called Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act is the love letter that Congress wrote to the credit card industry this spring. It's been widely decried by corporate and personal bankruptcy attorneys alike for making the process more convoluted, expensive and difficult for consumers, companies and even creditors.

Now it may bog down the Katrina recovery effort as well.

"The victims of Hurricane Katrina may face a cruel second blow when they take steps to try to put their lives back together," says Brad Botes, a bankruptcy attorney with the firm Bond & Botes, which has offices in the southeastern U.S., including some of the regions affected by the storm.

With jobs lost, lives uprooted and homes and businesses destroyed, bankruptcies are certain to rise in the coming months.

"The things that force people to file bankruptcy are usually some sort of catastrophic event," says Susan Matthews, a bankruptcy attorney with the Houston office of Adams and Reese. "Having their home wiped out and losing their job would force people to seek bankruptcy protection."


Mostly it's crises
Katrina reminds us that crises, not irresponsibility, are the primary cause of personal bankruptcies.



The new law, though, assumes that most debtors are simply dishonest, that they're looking for a way to shirk their obligations. So beginning next month, in order to file a standard Chapter 7 bankruptcy, debtors will have to show not only that they are broke, but that they've been broke for at least six months. Losing everything in a hurricane apparently won't be enough.

The law also requires additional paperwork such as copies of tax returns, pay stubs, bank statements and other financial records that, thanks to Katrina, may simply no longer exist.

Congress also enacted a provision requiring debtors to undergo credit counseling. In most cases, though, people forced into bankruptcy by a natural disaster don't need counseling, they need relief.

Debtors may be able to get some of these requirements waived, but they would have to petition the court, on an individual basis, which
takes additional time and money.


Waiving provisions
The Consumer Federation of America and the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys on Wednesday called on Congress to delay or waive the more onerous provisions of the new law for victims of natural disasters.



Four U.S. House members, including Houston's Sheila Jackson Lee, said Thursday they plan to introduce legislation that would do just that when Congress reconvenes next week.

"What we need to do here is avoid kicking hurricane victims when they're already down," says Botes, who is an NACBA director.

Even without the changes in the law, evacuees such as those in the Astrodome and other shelters around Texas may have difficulty filing bankruptcy. Residents of Louisiana, for example, can't file a case in Texas. Federal law stipulates that debtors must file in the judicial district where they reside.

(The State Bar of Texas is setting up mobile clinics for evacuees in need of legal advice.)


A second chance
It's an unfortunate consequence of disasters that people succumb to financial hardships they often couldn't imagine. Even if lenders cooperate in delaying payment demands temporarily, some borrowers, having lost both home and employment, may find themselves unable to catch up.



In America, we believe in the second chance. We believe in the idea of picking ourselves up from failure and trying again. It's the basis for our bankruptcy laws, which are unique in the world.

Nowhere is that concept more essential than in those areas digging out from Katrina's devastation.

"It's the only safety net these people have right now, and it needs to be there," Botes says. Along the Gulf Coast, the next few months will be a time of rebuilding, of starting over. It's a time for second chances, not just for the storm victims, but for members of Congress, too.

They have a chance to fix some of the mistakes they legislated in the spring.


Loren Steffy is the Chronicle's business columnist.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/3345871

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:05 PM 3 comments Links to this post

Thu, Sep. 08, 2005

Assessing displaced students is priority
By Diane Smith
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

Teacher availability, class size and student assessments are the top concerns for North Texas educators as children from the Gulf Coast enter area schools.

"We are going to do whatever is necessary to assist them," said Stephen Waddell, superintendent of the Birdville school district, which had 35 new students as of Wednesday morning.

Getting a sense of the long-term effect on schools isn't easy. Students may be on the move soon after enrolling, leaving shelters for more-permanent homes.

Assessing new students -- to find out where they fit within Texas' curriculum standards -- is also a priority. And educators must determine which students have special needs.

"There are just a whole host of questions," said Francine Holland, deputy executive director of instructional services at the Region XI Education Service Center in Fort Worth.

The center helped area superintendents cope with these issues during a meeting Wednesday. Information is also available on the center's Web site.

About 70 superintendents attended the meeting.

Superintendents received packets that included a provisional enrollment form, a list of shelters and requirements that have been relaxed for students displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Just days after fleeing Louisiana, many evacuees became Texas' newest students. They've entered suburban, urban and rural schools. While some districts are accommodating dozens of youngsters, others have enrolled only one or two.

Robert Damron, superintendent of Cleburne schools, said school finance reform remains a top concern for districts grappling with tight budgets and should be on the front burner even as new students enroll.

Cleburne schools, which serve 6,500 students, have added 25 Louisiana students.

"We're going to treat them like our kids, but our Legislature needs to treat our kids better," Damron said.

Susan Simpson, superintendent of White Settlement schools, said the district has 12 new students who are staying with families. Simpson said the district can address their needs directly.

"We can literally do one-on-one and work with families," she said.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ONLINE:www.esc11.net
Diane Smith, (817) 390-7675 dianesmith@star-telegram.com
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/state/12589391.htm

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:09 AM 2 comments Links to this post

This is a quick and powerful read. -Angela

September 1, 2005

By David Montejano*

This week the US News & World Report (Aug. 29, 2005) released its annual ranking of the country's best colleges. A review of the rankings reveals that the very best colleges have student bodies overwhelmingly comprised of students who graduated in the top ten percent of their high school class. It should come as no surprise that nearly ninety percent (and upwards) of the entering freshmen at the best private universities graduated in the top ten percent of their high school class. But this holds true for the best public universities as well.

Top ten percenters basically made up the entire entering class at the University of California-Berkeley (99%) and the University of California-Los Angeles (97%). In fact, Berkeley and UCLA, with a 25% and 23% admit rate, rejected many top ten percent applicants.

In Texas, where legislators recently considered modifying HB 588 (the “top ten percent” admissions law) because of fears that its flagship universities would be “overrun” by top ten percenters, the national rankings should provide some perspective. The University of Texas-Austin, with only two-thirds (66%) of its freshmen graduating in the top ten percent and with a 51% admit rate, has a fairly relaxed profile compared to much higher ranked universities. Texas A & M University-College Station has even more breathing room: only half (49%) of its entering class were top ten percenters and three-quarters (72%) of all applicants were admitted.

Special Report: America's Best Colleges*
Rank School Freshmen in top 10% of HS class ('04) Acceptance
(admit) rate ('04)
1 Harvard 96% 11%
5 Stanford 87% 13%
17 Rice 86% 22%
20 UC-Berkeley 99% 25%
25 UCLA 97% 23%
27 UNC-Chapel Hill 74% 36%
30 USC 84% 27%
52 UT-Austin 66% 51%
60 TAMU-College Sta. 49% 72%
*U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT (Aug. 29, 2005)


The national rankings make two points very clear:

(1) that the freshmen of the very best universities are overwhelmingly made up of top ten percent students; and (2) that acceptance (admit rates) by the very best universities is extremely competitive.

One final point might be added: universities with top ten percent student bodies can play football. Look at USC, UCLA, and --well, maybe-- Cal (Berkeley).
________________________________________________________________________
*Professor David Montejano is Chair of the Center for Latino Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:48 AM 1 comments Links to this post

September 7, 2005

By SAM DILLON

School districts from Maine to Washington State were enrolling thousands of students from New Orleans and other devastated Gulf Coast districts yesterday in what experts said could become the largest student resettlement in the nation's history.

Schools welcoming the displaced students must not only provide classrooms, teachers and textbooks, but under the terms of President Bush's education law must also almost immediately begin to raise their scholastic achievement unless some provisions of that law are waived.

Historians said that those twin challenges surpassed anything that public education had experienced since its creation after the Civil War, including disasters that devastated whole school districts, like the San Francisco earthquake and the Chicago fire.

"In terms of school systems absorbing kids whose lives and homes have been shattered, what we're going to watch over the next weeks is unprecedented in American education," said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan.

The vast resettlement was already under way last week, with schools in Baton Rouge, La., Houston and other cities near the Gulf Coast enrolling some students. Yesterday, officials in cities including San Antonio; Phoenix; Olympia, Wash.; Freeport, Me.; Memphis; Washington; Las Vegas; Salt Lake City; Chicago; Detroit; and Philadelphia reported enrolling students or preparing for their arrival.

The total number of displaced students is not yet known, but it appears to be well above 200,000. In Louisiana, 135,000 public school students and 52,000 private school students have been displaced from Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes.

President Bush, speaking with reporters at the White House yesterday, thanked the nation's educators "for reaching out and doing their duty," and he said that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was working on a plan to help states absorb the educational costs but gave no hint of what kind of assistance might be provided. The Department of Education set up a Web site to coordinate private donations to schools enrolling displaced students.

"They said we could brace for about 500 kids," said Sue Steele, coordinator of homeless student programs for the public schools in Wichita, where buses carrying 1,800 storm victims were expected to arrive yesterday, part of some 7,000 headed for Kansas.

Many students were concentrated in districts along an arc from the Florida Panhandle west through Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas.

The Santa Rosa County School District in the Florida Panhandle has enrolled 137 students, said Carol Calfee, a district official.

"And we still have folks coming in," she said. "They're walking through the door and some of them just have nothing, so it's really hard." The local United Way has said it will try to buy school supplies for every displaced student, she said.

The crisis poses new challenges for Ms. Spellings, including financial. The Department of Education's budget this year for homeless student programs is about $61 million, which she said was insufficient.

Ms. Spellings, who has spent her first months in office fighting a backlash by local educators and state lawmakers against the federal law known as No Child Left Behind, is also hearing calls from advocacy groups that she take emergency measures that could be controversial.

The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, asked her on Friday to waive the accountability provisions of the law for schools in the hurricane's path as well as in Texas and other states receiving large numbers of students, a move Ms. Spellings said she was reluctant to take.

Private companies that operate online courses or charter schools are urging her to use emergency powers to authorize them to enroll displaced students at the Houston Astrodome and other shelters across the nation.

Ms. Spellings has invited 40 education groups, including the P.T.A. and teachers unions, to meet at the Department of Education today to discuss disaster recovery efforts. Reg Weaver, president of the N.E.A., which has challenged No Child Left Behind in federal court, said he immediately accepted the invitation.

But in a separate letter, he also asked Ms. Spellings to use her powers to waive provisions of the law, which requires school districts to raise student scores on standardized tests each year by a percentage set by each state, a goal known as making adequate yearly progress.

"Until these children, their teachers, districts and families gain their footing under these extremely difficult circumstances, I encourage you to implement the provisions in N.C.L.B. that deal with the impact of natural disasters on testing and adequate yearly progress," Mr. Weaver's letter said.

Ms. Spellings is consulting with state school superintendents as she considers whether to waive the law's accountability provisions in some cases, said her spokeswoman, Susan Aspey. One consideration is how many displaced students that individual schools or districts enroll; those with higher concentrations may be more likely to receive waivers, Ms. Aspey said.

"There is no one-size-fits-all approach," she said.

Even before the storm, hundreds of schools that had failed to meet the federal law's proficiency requirements for several years, most of which educate the urban poor or non-English speaking immigrants, were facing sanctions that include school closings and the firing of staff. Thousands of others were expected to be placed on academic probation or labeled as low-performing.

Theodore R. Sizer, a visiting professor of history at Harvard, said that unless the law's accountability provisions were waived during the emergency, they would add tensions to the resettlement crisis.

"Imagine you're the principal of a big high school in city X, and your scores are above the state minimums, so you're doing fine with the law, and suddenly you have 300 displaced kids," Mr. Sizer said. "That not only brings crowding but also means that on the next exams your scores could plummet and the federal law will say you run a terrible school."

The Bush administration must also make decisions about another hotly debated issue in public education: charter schools. The National Council of Education Providers, which represents the nation's largest commercial school management companies, has asked the Department of Education to authorize it to enroll students housed at emergency shelters in Internet-based courses offered by its companies.

The National Council's Web site yesterday highlighted its request to the department to establish a "national virtual charter school" that would "serve evacuees wherever they are."

"Once students have access to computers and connectivity - borrowed, donated or shared - companies are standing by to waive state restrictions and log these students on," the Web site said. The restrictions in question include enrollment caps in state laws that apply to charter schools. The National Council wants the federal government to waive those laws during the emergency.

Jeanne Allen, a paid consultant to the National Council who is also president of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit organization, said she delivered a draft "Emergency Public Charter School Act" to members of Congress yesterday.

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

This is a piece about the for-profit group, Community Education Partners (CEP) and is worth reading. -Angela

by Annette Fuentes
The Nation
>
>Morris Gandy's son was a problem student throughout elementary school,
>playing hooky and acting up. A few days after he began sixth grade in 2002
>at Gillespie Middle School in Philadelphia, he was suspended. Gandy, a
>single parent, beseeched the principal, "What can you do for a problem
>child?" He got no help.
>
>Then a neighbor told him about Community Education Partners (CEP), an
>alternative school for kids like his son. So Gandy enrolled the boy,
>expecting that teachers there would know how to handle him. Instead, the
>situation went from bad to worse. "The teacher said my son shot him in the
>head with a rubber band," Gandy said. "I said, 'What are you going to do
>about it? This is supposed to be a school for troubled kids.'" His son told
>Gandy that all they did was watch movies. He went truant. "They are
>supposed to be the experts on the kids outside the box. They are supposed
>to get them back inside the box," Gandy said. "They couldn't hold his
>interest."
>
>Morris Gandy is what you'd call a dissatisfied CEP customer. CEP, however,
>continues to prosper. Founded ten years ago in Houston, the company entered
>the private-school market at a time when Texas was a roiling caldron of
>Republican politics and Enron-style corporate dealing--and a laboratory for
>education reform. George W. Bush was governor, the mantra was
>accountability for public schools and the tools were high-stakes testing
>and privatization. What emerged from the mix were the so-called Texas
>Miracle, which boosted student achievement; Rod Paige as President Bush's
>Education Secretary; and ultimately Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law,
>authored by Texas education player Sandy Kress.
>
>The Texas Miracle has since been debunked as so much manipulation of test
>scores and phony graduation rates. Paige, who rode to the White House on
>its falsehoods, is history. And Bush's NCLB is sagging under the weight of
>impossible test goals and unfunded mandates, with even some Republicans now
>criticizing it. But privatization in public education and the credo of
>accountability through testing still chug along.
>
>CEP is one beneficiary. Despite a tarnished history and no independent
>evidence that its student-customers fare better than in regular public
>schools, CEP uses political clout to carve a niche market serving students
>the public schools don't want, and it makes millions in the process. CEP's
>story is a primer on how the politics of education reform serve business
>interests. Its success represents the triumph of free-market ideology over
>sound pedagogy and the fallacy of the accountability-through-testing
>approach to teaching. "It's fair to say they [CEP] have avoided true
>scrutiny," said Carl Shaw, a former Texas state official who evaluated
>CEP's program. "Their modus operandi is political, not educational and not
>scientific."
>
>The CEP Program: Be Here, Be Tested
>
>CEP contracts with public school districts in Houston, Atlanta,
>Philadelphia, Richmond and Orlando, and in the Pinnellas and Bay districts
>in Florida, to run alternative schools for students in grades six through
>twelve who've been suspended for behavioral problems. Most students sent to
>CEP also are academically failing, and the vast majority are
>African-American and Latino. CEP's contract requires that students spend
>120-180 days in the program--far in excess of the typical ten-day
>suspensions public schools impose on misbehaving students. CEP's rationale
>is that it needs time to transform kids' behavior and academic performance,
>but the company also has an obvious financial incentive for a longer
>placement. CEP's per-student charge varies by district, but it's more than
>the districts spend per pupil on regular students. In Orlando CEP gets
>$8,865 per pupil, double the district's own cost. Philadelphia pays CEP
>about $13,000 per pupil--almost twice the district's $7,000 average cost.
>"We charge more. We're a premium product," said Randle Richardson, the CEO
>of CEP. "Anyone can warehouse a child."
>
>CEP renovates abandoned big-box stores or industrial spaces, creating
>sex-segregated "learning communities." The students can't mingle and are
>walked in groups to bathrooms at specific times. Lunch is provided in their
>classrooms. Students may not bring money to school and are screened as if
>going through airport security, shoes and coats off. Teachers take
>attendance with an electronic fingerprint scanner that transmits the
>information back to CEP headquarters for payment. Some critics have called
>CEP schools "soft jails."
>
>CEP boasts that it employs "certified teachers and degreed individuals with
>experience in behavior management, counseling or social services." But CEP
>faces the same shortage of certified teachers the public schools do, and it
>pays lower salaries. In its early Houston days, says Marsha Sonnenberg, a
>Fort Worth educator who consulted for CEP, "they used some people from
>corrections and some they trained. Some had been from the streets
>themselves and rehabbed. Some were a little more like me." Irving Mitchell,
>principal of CEP's Atlanta school from August 2003 to January 2004, said
>his school had few certified teachers and high turnover, so on an average
>day classes were doubled up. "There was very little instruction, because
>you were dealing with fights and staff shortages," Mitchell said.
>Richardson said CEP pays for teacher-certification training when needed,
>and that such classes are brought onsite for his Philadelphia staff.
>
>"Be Here, Behave and Be Learning," is CEP's motto, but it should include
>"Be Tested," because students spend much of their learning time at
>computers with Plato, a self-paced tutorial that tests and assesses
>achievement. CEP uses Plato data to prove its claims of student
>improvement, but assessment experts give Plato mixed reviews, and some
>who've worked with it say cheating is not difficult.
>
>Political Juice
>
>Richardson founded CEP with his college buddy Phil Baggett, CEP's vice
>chairman. Richardson says his inspiration came from his early years as a
>small-town lawyer taking $50 juvenile delinquency cases from the family
>court judge. Then Richardson ran the Tennessee Farmers Home Administration,
>making loans to low-income homeowners. John Danielson, who would become
>Under Secretary of Education to Paige, was also a founder. Initial
>investors included Bill McInnes, formerly of the Hospital Corporation of
>America, and Tom Beasley, founder of the Corrections Corporation of
>America, the private prison company. CEP's early investors put up $65
>million; the company is now backed by Stephens Inc., a Little Rock,
>Arkansas, investment bank, and the Texas Growth Fund, a private equity firm
>created by the Texas legislature with public employee pension funds.
>Richardson says CEP's annual revenues are $70 million.
>
>Richardson bristles at questions about Beasley's role, sensitive to critics
>who've likened CEP schools to juvenile jails. "We had discussions early on
>that we are not going to be correctional," Richardson said. "Tom
>understood. He said, 'I'm an investor. You guys are here to run the
>company.'" But like Beasley, Richardson saw a ripe business opportunity in
>privatizing a public service--one that, like prisons, deals with society's
>messy failures. CEP's first contract was to operate a juvenile detention
>alternative-education program for Harris County, Texas.
>
>Giving CEP entree into the Texas education scene was George Scott, then
>president of the Tax Research Association, a nonprofit education-reform
>group in Houston, and now a senior writer for the online newspaper
>Education News. Scott, who was close to Paige when Paige was Houston
>schools superintendent, helped CEP score its first public school contract,
>with the Houston district. Scott said he told Paige, "Rod, this is it. This
>is privatized accountability at its best." Scott later became a CEP critic,
>though, charging that the company evaded real accountability for a program
>that was educationally flawed and a waste of taxpayer money. "I look back
>on my role with CEP, my dedication and commitment to accountability, and it
>is the greatest professional disgrace in my career," Scott said. "As long
>as the district and the vendor have influence over accountability measures,
>it is corrupt."
>
>Richardson says his background is in government, but it's his Republican
>Party credentials that pay off. Like Tom Beasley before him, Richardson was
>Tennessee's GOP chair--from 1992 to 1995--helping to lead Republicans "out
>of the wilderness and into control of statewide offices," according to one
>news account. Richardson soft-pedals his political ties, calling himself a
>"Howard Baker Republican" and insisting CEP is above the partisan fray. But
>CEP has thrived on the accumulated political juice Richardson and his
>cohorts have squeezed, mostly Republican-flavored, since its founding.
>
>In Texas CEP executives cultivated powerful friends, hiring Houston school
>board member Larry Marshall as a $6,000-a-month consultant and landing an
>endorsement from George Bush Sr. at the opening of CEP's first Houston
>school. "They were putting together the juiciest political team," Scott
>said. "They had powerful people at their beck and call." Political pull
>helped CEP waltz into Florida. Richardson and Baggett contributed to
>Charlie Crist's successful 2000 run for state education commissioner and to
>Governor Jeb Bush's 2002 campaign. In 2001 CEP's Florida lobbyist Juhan
>Mixon helped write a provision in a state appropriations bill that
>earmarked $4.8 million for "Alternative Schools/Public Private
>Partnerships." It was "to serve a minimum of 500 or more disruptive and low
>performing students"--a description tailored to CEP. Mixon also lobbies for
>several Florida school districts, including Bay, which hired CEP.
>
>In Philadelphia CEP found privatization high on the agendas of
>then-Governor Tom Ridge, a Republican, and state politicians. The state
>took control of the bankrupt Philadelphia school district in 2001, and
>state legislators made privatizing schools one of the conditions for the
>bailout. CEP's chief political ally has been Republican State House Speaker
>John Perzel, whose beefy visage graces the company's website along with his
>testimonial. Richardson, Baggett and CEP execs have contributed more than
>$11,000 to Perzel's campaigns. CEP's five-year, $28-million-a-year contract
>with Philadelphia schools was renewed in May 2004 with no debate.
>
>Accountability in Action
>
>CEP is a product of the high-stakes testing and accountability approach to
>education reform, which aims to run public schools like businesses whose
>products are students. Yet holding CEP accountable has been a quixotic
>undertaking because of the fluidity of the student population, the
>malleability of statistics and the company's political savvy. The few
>totally independent evaluations of CEP's effectiveness have rated it
>poorly. Several evaluations were paid for by CEP, like one in 1999 by Bush
>Sr. Education Department appointee Diane Ravitch, whose glowing endorsement
>of CEP's Houston program appears on CEP's website. Others were based on
>testing data completely controlled by CEP.
>
>In Texas CEP's first brush with evaluation was a lesson in the pitfalls of
>accountability and the importance of data control. In 1997 Texas state
>education commissioner Mike Moses hired Carl Shaw, former chair of the
>Texas Education Agency's (TEA) assessment committee and head of Houston's
>testing for fourteen years, to assess CEP's first contract, the juvenile
>detention program. Shaw found limited student progress after six months in
>CEP, and after a year, actual regression. "I could find no evidence that
>there was a strong-enough academic program in place to produce change," he
>said. "One report I wrote for [the Houston Independent School District]
>said few CEP students would be smart enough for prison education. It's
>shocking, and here's a company touted as a leader." Shaw said CEP head
>Richardson was angry at his findings and his refusal to compromise his
>work. "The first reaction I had from Richardson was, 'I am more powerful
>than you,'" Shaw said.
>
>CEP executives turned to Scott, the taxpayers' group president, for backup.
>"They wanted support that his test had gone awry," Scott said. "I told them
>I was 100 percent into Dr. Shaw's approach." Scott says discussions he and
>CEP had been having about a consultancy and shares of founders stock broke
>down because Scott refused to repudiate Shaw. Richardson says CEP raised
>concerns about Shaw's tests having "both positive and negative
>aberrations," and that they couldn't be validated by the TEA. Richardson
>noted that his relationship with Scott soured after the problems with
>Shaw's testing emerged.
>
>Next up was Dr. Tom Kellow, an evaluation specialist for Houston's schools.
>In 1999 Superintendent Paige asked Kellow to evaluate CEP--but he was
>forbidden to visit the school and could only use data CEP provided. Kellow
>learned that CEP's contract stated that it could only be held accountable
>based on its own in-house testing, not the statewide Texas Assessment of
>Academic Skills (TAAS). "What I found is what Carl Shaw found," Kellow
>said. "The longer [students] stayed, the worse their performance." Although
>under NCLB all schools must meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standards
>for specific percentages of students testing at grade level in math and
>reading, the TEA exempts CEP. For both 2003 and 2004, the AYP status of
>CEP's two Houston schools is listed as "Not Evaluated." CEP's school
>profiles on the Houston schools website also reveal that the company evades
>the accountability that public schools face: No TAAS scores are listed and
>no information is provided for either state or district accountability
>measures.
>
>Houston continues to contract with CEP despite those early assessments, but
>Dallas's public school district was more discriminating. Dallas hired CEP
>in 1999, with a five-year, $10 million yearly contract. But after three
>years the district bowed out; its own evaluation of CEP in 2002 recommended
>ending the contract, stating that "the model of education provided by [CEP]
>was untenable from a pedagogical standpoint. The reliance on non-certified
>teachers for the bulk of the student-teacher interaction was useful for the
>company to save money, but was not a design in the best interest of the
>students.... Students who attended Community Education Partners did not do
>very well academically." CEP had refused to provide its budget data, the
>report noted, making it impossible to know just how it was spending the
>district's money.
>
>Dallas's report and a series of critical articles about CEP in the Houston
>Press, an alternative newsweekly, helped New Orleans public schools decide
>against a contract with CEP, according to former school board president
>Cheryl Mills. But Atlanta public schools ignored the negative press and
>evaluations, contracting with CEP four years ago. CEP's Atlanta school was
>the target of community organizing in early 2005 after the Atlanta Voice, a
>black newspaper, ran a series exposing serious inadequacies at the CEP
>school. The articles were based on the accounts of former CEP principal
>Mitchell and of a former teacher. "It became a dump for human waste,"
>Mitchell said. "Accountability is with the Atlanta school board for
>disenfranchising these kids. There was a contract and expectations, and I
>feel they were not met. The statistics show they weren't met."
>
>Atlanta schools deputy superintendent Kathy Augustine called Mitchell
>"disgruntled." She said she was unaware that students could not take books
>home, that there was no homework or that there was a teacher shortage. "I
>think we're improving," Augustine said. "It's a developing relationship.
>Finding leadership is key to that." She said she had no evidence that CEP
>was not living up to its contract. Told that CEP's school had failed to
>meet AYP standards for reading and math in the 2003-04 school year,
>Augustine said, "The AYP piece is different for nontraditional schools
>because children are very fluid." She noted that the school board had voted
>to extend CEP's contract through 2009.
>
>In Philadelphia even supposedly independent evaluations of CEP were
>dependent on company-controlled data. In March Philadelphia released an
>evaluation of CEP's two schools conducted by researchers at Temple
>University. The report surveyed seventy students and seventy parents who
>offered positive reports on CEP's program--a fraction of more than 4,300
>students CEP has served. In evaluating student academic growth, the report
>relied entirely on CEP's own Plato data, which claim astounding gains of
>three to four "grade levels" in reading and math for students who spend 180
>days at CEP--but there's no indication of how many students actually stay
>that long. The school district itself partakes of the statistical spin.
>Paul Socolar, editor of Philadelphia Public School Notebook, an independent
>newspaper, noted that in 2004 the district issued a CEP fact sheet that
>excluded CEP scores on the statewide standardized test for eighth graders,
>which had gone down; in January of this year the district excluded results
>for CEP eleventh graders, which had gone down. "It's a total manipulation
>of data," Socolar said. And as for meeting the AYP standards, CEP's Philly
>schools don't.
>
>CEP's Richardson says the proof of his company's success is that districts
>keep renewing their contracts. The question is how success is defined.
>Public schools have strong incentives to remove the lowest-performing
>students from their classrooms and make them CEP's problem, especially
>since the passage of No Child Left Behind. "CEP was a way to get around
>NCLB," said Mitchell. "If you move these kids from the regular school
>program, you automatically decrease the dropout rate and get a gain on your
>test scores. So you contract those kids out; they're in a separate
>environment, but they aren't counted in the total." For Socolar, CEP is a
>political solution to the public system's failures: "From the beginning,
>the concern that jumped out about CEP is whether putting these students in
>the hands of private companies is a way of putting them out of sight and
>out of mind," he said. While the public schools are hammered by the
>accountability-through-testing mandates of NCLB, CEP skirts the same
>accountability and proves the uselessness of high-stakes testing as an
>education strategy. Judging CEP by its test data only seems to make sense
>because the company and school districts that hire it buy into that
>accountability measure. Test scores, in truth, can never be an end in
>themselves--or proof that children are learning. That's why NCLB is phony
>education reform.
>
>At the end of an interview Richardson asked in almost plaintive tones, "Are
>we the enemy?" Well, yes and no. CEP may be doing a poor job, but it's only
>a symptom of the crumbling national commitment to public education,
>including the public schools' failure to educate huge percentages of mostly
>black and Latino students. Vouchers and other privatizing efforts in
>education have still not gained the momentum that conservatives had hoped
>for. But companies like CEP in the expanding private education industry
>help chip away at the public school infrastructure by targeting a
>market--the "bad students"--that has few advocates. CEP promotes
>privatization in a more quiet, effective way than Chris Whittle's troubled
>Edison schools have. And Richardson's future ambitions reveal an astute
>understanding of the changing nature and needs of today's student
>population: He'd like to run schools for overage students--17- or
>18-year-olds who work or raise families and need flexible programming, the
>students who "don't fit in the box," he says.
>
>As the box holding traditional students shrinks, one challenge facing
>public school educators is how best to serve all students--from high
>achievers to the most disruptive kids like Morris Gandy's son. If the
>public sector abdicates its responsibility to educate all children,
>businessmen like Randle Richardson are ready to step in. >
>
>This article can be found on the web at:
>
>http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050919/fuentes
>
>Visit The Nation http://www.thenation.com/

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:12 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Be sure to read the NYTimes piece by Sam Dillon below. Incidentally, I had a conversation with my graduate students last night about the usage of the term, “refugees,” to describe Katrina’s victims. We agreed that it “others” them, treating them like foreigners. The Austin Am-Statesman used the term, “evacuees” in yesterday’s headlines. This is perhaps a more positive or at least neutral term. Just a suggestion.

I also learned today that there were about 145,000 Latino/as, most of them immigrants, who were also displaced. They are an even more marginal group among the marginalized. I know that the Red Cross is looking for Spanish-speaking volunteers.

Respectfully,

Angela


By SAM DILLON

School districts from Maine to Washington State were enrolling thousands of
students from New Orleans and other devastated Gulf Coast districts
yesterday in what experts said could become the largest student
resettlement in the nation's history.

Schools welcoming the displaced students must not only provide classrooms,
teachers and textbooks, but under the terms of President Bush's education
law must also almost immediately begin to raise their scholastic
achievement unless some provisions of that law are waived.

Historians said that those twin challenges surpassed anything that public
education had experienced since its creation after the Civil War, including
disasters that devastated whole school districts, like the San Francisco
earthquake and the Chicago fire.

"In terms of school systems absorbing kids whose lives and homes have been
shattered, what we're going to watch over the next weeks is unprecedented
in American education," said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and
education at the University of Michigan.

The vast resettlement was already under way last week, with schools in
Baton Rouge, La., Houston and other cities near the Gulf Coast enrolling
some students. Yesterday, officials in cities including San Antonio;
Phoenix; Olympia, Wash.; Freeport, Me.; Memphis; Washington; Las Vegas;
Salt Lake City; Chicago; Detroit; and Philadelphia reported enrolling
students or preparing for their arrival.

The total number of displaced students is not yet known, but it appears to
be well above 200,000. In Louisiana, 135,000 public school students and
52,000 private school students have been displaced from Orleans, Jefferson,
St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes.

President Bush, speaking with reporters at the White House yesterday,
thanked the nation's educators "for reaching out and doing their duty," and
he said that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was working on a
plan to help states absorb the educational costs but gave no hint of what
kind of assistance might be provided. The Department of Education set up a
Web site to coordinate private donations to schools enrolling displaced
students.

"They said we could brace for about 500 kids," said Sue Steele, coordinator
of homeless student programs for the public schools in Wichita, where buses
carrying 1,800 storm victims were expected to arrive yesterday, part of
some 7,000 headed for Kansas.

Many students were concentrated in districts along an arc from the Florida
Panhandle west through Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas.

The Santa Rosa County School District in the Florida Panhandle has enrolled
137 students, said Carol Calfee, a district official.

"And we still have folks coming in," she said. "They're walking through the
door and some of them just have nothing, so it's really hard." The local
United Way has said it will try to buy school supplies for every displaced
student, she said.

The crisis poses new challenges for Ms. Spellings, including financial. The
Department of Education's budget this year for homeless student programs is
about $61 million, which she said was insufficient.

Ms. Spellings, who has spent her first months in office fighting a backlash
by local educators and state lawmakers against the federal law known as No
Child Left Behind, is also hearing calls from advocacy groups that she take
emergency measures that could be controversial.

The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union,
asked her on Friday to waive the accountability provisions of the law for
schools in the hurricane's path as well as in Texas and other states
receiving large numbers of students, a move Ms. Spellings said she was
reluctant to take.

Private companies that operate online courses or charter schools are urging
her to use emergency powers to authorize them to enroll displaced students
at the Houston Astrodome and other shelters across the nation.

Ms. Spellings has invited 40 education groups, including the P.T.A. and
teachers unions, to meet at the Department of Education today to discuss
disaster recovery efforts. Reg Weaver, president of the N.E.A., which has
challenged No Child Left Behind in federal court, said he immediately
accepted the invitation.

But in a separate letter, he also asked Ms. Spellings to use her powers to
waive provisions of the law, which requires school districts to raise
student scores on standardized tests each year by a percentage set by each
state, a goal known as making adequate yearly progress.

"Until these children, their teachers, districts and families gain their
footing under these extremely difficult circumstances, I encourage you to
implement the provisions in N.C.L.B. that deal with the impact of natural
disasters on testing and adequate yearly progress," Mr. Weaver's letter
said.

Ms. Spellings is consulting with state school superintendents as she
considers whether to waive the law's accountability provisions in some
cases, said her spokeswoman, Susan Aspey. One consideration is how many
displaced students that individual schools or districts enroll; those with
higher concentrations may be more likely to receive waivers, Ms. Aspey
said.

"There is no one-size-fits-all approach," she said.

Even before the storm, hundreds of schools that had failed to meet the
federal law's proficiency requirements for several years, most of which
educate the urban poor or non-English speaking immigrants, were facing
sanctions that include school closings and the firing of staff. Thousands
of others were expected to be placed on academic probation or labeled as
low-performing.

Theodore R. Sizer, a visiting professor of history at Harvard, said that
unless the law's accountability provisions were waived during the
emergency, they would add tensions to the resettlement crisis.

"Imagine you're the principal of a big high school in city X, and your
scores are above the state minimums, so you're doing fine with the law, and
suddenly you have 300 displaced kids," Mr. Sizer said. "That not only
brings crowding but also means that on the next exams your scores could
plummet and the federal law will say you run a terrible school."

The Bush administration must also make decisions about another hotly
debated issue in public education: charter schools. The National Council of
Education Providers, which represents the nation's largest commercial
school management companies, has asked the Department of Education to
authorize it to enroll students housed at emergency shelters in
Internet-based courses offered by its companies.

The National Council's Web site yesterday highlighted its request to the
department to establish a "national virtual charter school" that would
"serve evacuees wherever they are."

"Once students have access to computers and connectivity - borrowed,
donated or shared - companies are standing by to waive state restrictions
and log these students on," the Web site said. The restrictions in question
include enrollment caps in state laws that apply to charter schools. The
National Council wants the federal government to waive those laws during
the emergency.

Jeanne Allen, a paid consultant to the National Council who is also
president of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit organization,
said she delivered a draft "Emergency Public Charter School Act" to members
of Congress yesterday.


·
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company



September 7, 2005

School Routine Provides Welcome Change From Chaos

By JOHN M. BRODER

HOUSTON, Sept. 6 - Before the sun came up on Tuesday morning, Elejaine
Gobert had her five children scrubbed and dressed in white shirts just like
those they wore for school back in Mississippi, before Hurricane Katrina
ripped up their lives.

The school-day routine was a welcome relief after a chaotic escape from the
storm and a week in the Red Cross shelter behind St. Peter Claver Catholic
Church in the northeast corner of Houston. There was little for the
children to do during the day at the shelter, and Ms. Gobert was insistent
that their schooling continue, despite their having lost everything in the
storm.

"That's the most important thing," said Ms. Gobert, who said she was a
nurse. "They don't need to be here all day depressed at the shelter. Back
at home, they love school."

Just after 7 a.m., a bus from the North Forest Independent School District
pulled into the church lot to pick up Ms. Gobert's five youngsters and the
three children of Webb and Theresa Pierce, who fled to Houston from
Marrero, La., just ahead of the hurricane.

As an orange sun rose, off they rode to a new school, new teachers and new
classmates in a scene that played out thousands of times in Texas alone on
Tuesday morning, as the storm-tossed clung to the one constant raft in
their lives.

Texas school officials said they could not provide a complete count of
children of the storm now enrolled statewide; their latest estimate, at the
end of last week, was 6,100.

That number is expected to soar this week, as school officials enter the
large shelters at the Astrodome and two large convention centers in Houston
to begin registering school-age children. Terry Abbott, spokesman for the
Houston Independent School District, which will absorb the largest number
of storm evacuees, said the district expected to sign up at least 5,000
children from those shelters. In addition, he said, several thousand
students now staying in hotels, outlying shelters or in private homes will
enter the Houston school district in coming days.

The Houston district, the state's largest, can accommodate as many as
13,000 new students, Mr. Abbott said. The district has already decided to
reopen two elementary schools that were closed last spring because of
declining enrollment and plans to hire hundreds of teachers. Among the new
hires, Mr. Abbott said, are dozens from Louisiana, and scores who were in
the applicant pool in Houston last spring.

The influx of students will be another big challenge for Houston, which
trumpets its school district as one of the most successful in the nation,
with a high rate of achievement under President Bush's education law, the
No Child Left Behind Act. But last year, the system was found to have
vastly underreported its dropout rate and manipulated its 10th-grade test
scores.

The State of Texas has suspended its required ratio of one teacher for
every 22 students and waived immunization requirements for displaced
students, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency said. The state will
also reimburse all costs, including those for free breakfasts and lunches,
for districts that take in more than 50 new students. In Dallas, school
buses picked up about 150 children from downtown shelters on Tuesday and
delivered them to schools in the city.

As the buses pulled up, many children eagerly clambered on board.

"Some of them jumped for joy," said Ivette Cruz Weis, a spokeswoman for the
Dallas Independent School District. "They were so ready" after a week
sitting around the shelters, she added.

At A. G. Hilliard Elementary School in northeast Houston, four of Ms.
Gobert's children and the three Pierce youngsters were assigned to classes
based on what grade they said they had been in back home. The eldest of the
group, John Gobert, 15, was assigned to a magnet high school because he is
a ballet dancer.

The leader of Hilliard's second-grade teaching team, Erica Chandler, took
Nashia Gobert, 7, by the hand and showed her to a locker. Nashia slipped
off her empty Nickelodeon backpack (obviously a donated item, because it
had the name Leslee Ivy in bold letters on it) and lined up for breakfast,
a carton of Golden Grahams and a half-pint of 2 percent milk.

"These kids are amazing," Ms. Chandler said after she had placed Nashia in
a classroom. "I thought they'd be a little upset, a little distraught. But
they talk about what they went through just like adults."

Ms. Chandler said she took several of her other storm-displaced students to
a Jack in the Box restaurant over the weekend and broke down crying at the
stories they told. One girl, Gabriel Santiago, had deep bruises on her side
from sleeping jammed against a pole at the Superdome in New Orleans, where
her family was huddled on the concrete floor. Ms. Chandler said the girl
said to her, "I told my mom, why are you complaining? We're still alive."

"They show no signs of what they went through," Ms. Chandler said. "They're
not despondent and they're not acting out in any way."

Sharon Wyckoff described herself as the "principal, cook and custodian" at
Hilliard Elementary, which has more than 500 pupils. The school has taken
in 22 evacuees. One thing she wanted to do, she said, was to find them red
shirts and blue pants, the school uniform, so they feel a part of the
community.

School guidance counselors say that the shock of relocation and sudden
placement in an unfamiliar school are bound to affect many of the children.
The president of the Texas Counseling Association, Sadie Woodard, said
youngsters were as susceptible to post-traumatic stress symptoms as adults.
She said she expected to see anger and aggressive acts, depression,
difficulty concentrating and other signs of trauma as thousands of new
students poured into Texas schools in coming weeks.

"This is going to present a number of different counseling problems," said
Ms. Woodard, who is also the assistant superintendent for guidance
counseling at the 85,000-student Cypress Fairbanks Independent School
District in northwest Houston.

"They've been displaced from their homes, living in shelters; they have to
adjust to that," she said. "They are going to a school where they don't
know anyone. In many cases they waded through deep water and saw dead
bodies and lost their homes and everything they had. It's going to cause
all kinds of emotional responses."

Ms. Woodard said that 400 evacuated children were now enrolled in her
district and that she expected a couple hundred more. Each has met with a
counselor and has been encouraged to recount his or her experiences in the
disaster. The older children are being assigned a fellow student to help
show them the ropes.

"When they came here, they were tired, hungry, frustrated and in shock,"
she said. "Once they get through that phase, there will be other problems
to address."

She added, "These kiddos are going to need support for a very long time."

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:01 PM 1 comments Links to this post

***please circulate widely***

Friends and Colleagues,

By now, we’ve all gotten wind of the epic proportions of the disastrous effects of hurricane Katrina. In Texas, there is a special burden on us to be good neighbors to victims. Many are already giving. For those of you who are looking for ways to help, this urgent message comes to me from friend and colleague, Houston City Council Member Adrian Garcia. At this moment, thousands of victims are flooding in from the New Orleans Superdome to the Houston Astrodome and they’re in desperate need of supplies. Compliments of the Austin Am-Statesman, numerous other ways to help also appear below. -Angela

------ Forwarded Message
From: Adrian Garcia
Date: 1 Sep 2005 00:08:43 -0000
To: Angela Valenzuela
Subject: Hurricane Katrina Victims


Angela, as you might imagine, we here in Houston, Texas have been busy making preparations to deal with the sudden influx of refugees fleeing the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana.

The Red Cross is handling the logistics of opening and operating shelters. Information for those seeking assistance can be had through the Red Cross phone bank number 1-(866) GET-INFO.

The United Way has agreed to be the point agency for accepting donations from generous Houstonians. They can be reached by dialing 211. That is, the Red Cross is handling shelters, and the United Way is handling all donations.

Thank you for helping our friends and family of the New Orleans community!

Sincerely,

Adrian Garcia, Council Member City of Houston
Council Member
City of Houston - Adrian
PO Box 1562
Houston, Tx 77251
work 713-247-2003
mobile 832-814-2421
fax 713-247-1252
?
How to help
Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Although a variety of government and private agencies are en route to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina, federal officials said people wanting to help should not head to the affected area unless directed by an agency. Instead, Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, urged people to make cash contributions to these groups:

•American Red Cross, www.redcross.org or (800) HELP NOW (435-7669); (800) 257-7575 in Spanish.

•Operation Blessing, (800) 436-6348.

•America's Second Harvest, www.secondharvest.org or (800) 771-2303.

•Adventist Community Services, (800) 381-7171.

•Catholic Charities, www.catholiccharitiesusa.org, (703) 549-1390.

•Christian Reformed World Relief Committee, (800) 848-5818.

•Church World Service, www.churchworldservice.org, (800) 297-1516.

•Convoy of Hope, (417) 823-8998.

•Episcopal Relief and Development, http://erd.servicenetwork.com/Donate/Donate.asp, (800) 334-7626, ext. 5129.

•Lutheran Disaster Response, (800) 638-3522.

•Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, (800) 872-3283.

•Salvation Army, www.salvationarmyusa.org, (800) SAL-ARMY (725-2769).

•Southern Baptist Convention — Disaster Relief, (800) 462-8657, Ext. 6440.

•United Methodist Committee on Relief, (800) 554-8583.


—The Associated Press


Local charities

•Capital Area Food Bank of Texas, www.austinfoodbank.org,

282-2111.

•Mobile Loaves & Fishes, www.mobileloavesandfishes.org, 328-7299.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:07 PM 7 comments Links to this post

I don't usually post stuff like this, but this is scandalous and folks need to know where our government's priorities are. This is very upsetting. Check out my other post on how you can help.

-Angela

Experts say government scrimped on storm spending and shifted attention to fighting terrorism

By Seth Borenstein
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
Thursday, September 1, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The federal government has bungled the job of quickly helping the multitudes of hungry, thirsty and desperate victims of Hurricane Katrina, former top federal, state and local disaster chiefs said Wednesday.

The experts, including a former Bush administration disaster response manager, said the government wasn't prepared, scrimped on storm spending and shifted its attention from dealing with natural disasters to fighting terrorism.

The disaster preparedness agency at the center of the relief effort is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was enveloped by the new Department of Homeland Security with a new mission aimed at responding to the attacks of al Qaeda.

"What you're seeing is revealing weaknesses in the state, local and federal levels," said Eric Tolbert, who until February was FEMA's disaster response chief. "All three levels have been weakened. They've been weakened by diversion into terrorism."

But Bush administration officials said they're proud of their efforts. Their first response emphasized rooftop rescues over providing food and water for already safe victims.

"We are extremely pleased with the response of every element of the federal government (and) all of our federal partners have made to this terrible tragedy," Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said Wednesday.

The agency has more than 1,700 truckloads of water, meals, tents, generators and other supplies ready to go in, Chertoff said. Federal health officials have started setting up at least 40 medical shelters. The Coast Guard reports rescuing more than 1,200 people.

But coastal residents, especially in Biloxi, Miss., said they aren't seeing the promised help.

"We need water. We need ice," Biloxi Fire Department Battalion Chief Joe Boney said. "I've been told it's coming, but we've got people in shelters who haven't had a drink since the storm."

The slow response to Katrina and poor federal leadership is a replay of the mishandling of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, said former FEMA Chief of Staff Jane Bullock, a 22-year veteran of the agency.

Bullock blamed inexperienced federal leadership. She noted that Chertoff and FEMA Director Michael Brown had no disaster experience.

Budget cuts haven't made disaster preparedness any easier.

Last year, FEMA spent $250,000 to conduct an eight-day drill for a mock killer storm hitting New Orleans.

This year, the group was to design a plan to fix such unresolved problems as evacuating sick and injured people from the Superdome and housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens.

Funding for that planning was cut, said Tolbert, the former FEMA disaster response director.

"I don't know if it would have saved more lives," said Tolbert, who was the disaster chief for the state of North Carolina. "It would have made the response faster. You might say it would have saved lives."

FEMA wasn't alone in cutting hurricane spending in New Orleans and the surrounding area.

Federal flood control spending for southeastern Louisiana has been chopped from $69 million in 2001 to $36.5 million in 2005, according to budget documents. Protection for the Lake Pontchartrain vicinity in the Army Corps of Engineers' budget dropped from $14.25 million in 2002 to $5.7 million this year. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., requested $27 million this year.

In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune newspaper reported.

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Jefferson Parish emergency management chief Walter Maestri told the newspaper.

The Army Corps' New Orleans office, facing a $71 million cut, also eliminated funds to pay for a study on how to protect the Crescent City from a Category 5 storm, New Orleans City Business reported in June.

Further complicating the relief effort in Louisiana is scandal within the state agency. Recently, three top officials of Louisiana's emergency management office were indicted in an investigation into the misuse of relief money from last year's Hurricane Ivan.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/auto/epaper/editions/thursday/news_34618a0670620253007e.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:04 PM 1 comments Links to this post

This news story title seems over-stated in light of the Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB (see statement below) that LULAC, NAACP, NABE and numerous other groups endorsed. I disagree with Bill Taylor’s analogy to forced integration in order to presumably establish a rationale for why civil rights orgs should support NCLB. Forced integration indeed made the restaurants, schools, and hotels accountable, as intended. However, NCLB is misdirected because accountability is not to the public, but rather in the opposite direction—to the state.

Forced integration, moreover, was not forced on those patronizing the schools and businesses but rather on those who owned and operated them. In contrast, the politically weakest individuals in the system (children and their teachers) are held responsible for the outcomes when these correlate to funding and the flow of finance over which neither has any control—alongside a host of other issues beyond schools related to housing, health care, crime, and poverty that most school reform models ignore.

This current high-stakes model is akin to making consumers responsible for the quality of a product over which they had no role in making. This approach doesn’t even make good business sense—unless, of course, the real purpose here is to discredit public schools to pave the way to vouchers and privatization. Yet such critical analyses are rare with the press opting, in my opinion, to either sensationalize differences or treat in a reductive manner legitimate differences in perspective that exist between civil rights groups when such is inevitable with legislation that is as over-arching as NCLB. -Angela



Published: August 31, 2005
Civil Rights Groups Split Over NCLB
Accountability Provisions Stirring Heated Debate
By Karla Scoon Reid /Edweek.org

Leading national civil rights groups and advocates are increasingly divided over whether the No Child Left Behind Act will improve the academic achievement of poor and minority students, a rift that is generating conversation and concern among a circle of people accustomed to working together.

The differences of opinion range from qualified support to harsh criticism, leaving some longtime civil rights activists on opposing sides for the first time. “Unity is always best,” said John H. Jackson, the national director of education for the NAACP, which has joined forces with those seeking major changes to the nearly 4-year-old federal law. “But a little of what everyone is saying is correct. Each side is presenting a voice that needs to be heard.”

The divisions are deep enough that last year, two civil rights groups joined forces with a prominent business organization to form the Achievement Alliance, a coalition that counters attacks on the law.

Few civil rights advocates disagree with the law’s overarching goal: bringing all U.S. students’ state test scores in reading and mathematics to the proficient level by 2013-14. Because that goal requires closing gaps between African-American and Hispanic students and their white peers, most support the law’s mandate to break down performance data for racial, ethnic, economic, and other subgroups to hold schools and districts accountable for their progress.

But the law’s sanctions for failing to make adequate yearly progress toward its goals have some in the civil rights community claiming it penalizes and stigmatizes struggling districts and schools without giving them the resources needed to improve.

Others believe the law is the best tool available to pressure schools and districts to ensure that all students receive a high-quality education. The NCLB law, the centerpiece of President Bush’s agenda for schools, passed Congress in 2001 with large bipartisan majorities.

The debate came into sharp focus this summer, when the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University released a report examining district-level accountability under the federal law in six states. It concluded that districts facing sanctions, such as student transfers, serve large numbers of poor and minority students.

The report, which characterized the law as having a “racially disproportionate impact,” also contended that federally approved changes to some states’ accountability standards are letting predominantly white suburban districts off the hook.

Accountability at Issue
Gary Orfield, the director of the Civil Rights Project, said some civil rights leaders who were “very involved” in writing the law believe in demanding a level of academic achievement from schools and districts and setting deadlines to get the job done. But that approach is not founded in any research or understanding of effective ways of improving education, he argued.

Assessing the No Child Left Behind Act

Raul Gonzalez

Legislative Director, National Council of La Raza

"For the most part, civil rights groups all have the same goal in mind. Given the breadth of NCLB, it shouldn't be a surprise that there are some differences of opinion."


Gary Orfield

Director, Civil Rights Project, Harvard University

Civil rights leaders are "absolutely committed to racial justice. It's a matter of understanding how to get there."


Reg Weaver

President, National Education Association

"There's a growing chorus of dissatisfaction with the implementation of NCLB that can't be swept under the rug."

The “adequate yearly progress” requirements and sanctions in the law were “misconceived in serious ways by people who had the best of intentions,” Mr. Orfield said. He added that the measures have resulted in “unanticipated, deep consequences” that are undermining efforts to improve schools.

The Achievement Alliance immediately issued a news release to counter the Civil Rights Project’s conclusions.

“The fact that students in larger, more diverse districts are being paid attention to and given extra help is a welcome change in an education system that routinely shortchanges such students,” the statement said. “This additional support should not be characterized as punishment.”

The Achievement Alliance is made up of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a national watchdog group; the National Council of La Raza, a leading Hispanic advocacy group; the Education Trust, a research and advocacy group that promotes high achievement for poor and minority students; the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives of major corporations; and the National Center for Educational Accountability, an Austin, Texas-based nonprofit organization that promotes the use of data to improve learning. The other groups are located in Washington.

“Kids were getting punished before this,” said William L. Taylor, the chairman of the Citizens’ Commission, who helped write the education law. “Even if they’re not held back in school, they are coming out of school without having learned what’s necessary to be effective participants in society.”

Mr. Taylor, a veteran desegregation lawyer and longtime activist, characterized the split within the civil rights community as harmful to achieving the law’s goals.

“It’s a war on the whole idea of reform. Gary [Orfield] wasn’t opposed to sanctions when it came to dealing with segregated schools,” he said. “When public officials are not carrying out their duties, you sanction them.”

Observers say that civil rights advocates have differed on the No Child Left Behind law since its inception, but that those differences have been overshadowed by the National Education Association’s April lawsuit challenging the act and by widely publicized examples of state resistance to the legislation.

Monty Neill, the co-executive director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, or FairTest, a Cambridge, Mass.-based group critical of standardized tests, said most civil rights groups have found “serious flaws” with the law, including an over-emphasis on testing and a lack of adequate funding.

Calling for Changes

Mr. Neill helped write a joint statement last fall that calls for substantial changes to the law, which is due for renewal by Congress in 2007. More than 50 groups support the continuing effort, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Asian American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the NEA, and the National School Boards Association.

“You can’t just outline these requirements and sanction students and teachers without also providing the resources to do it,” said Mr. Jackson of the NAACP.

Reg Weaver, the president of the 2.7 million-member NEA, said some critics are erroneously portraying the union as anti-No Child Left Behind to drive a wedge between it and civil rights groups.

In fact, Mr. Weaver argues there are few differences in their positions, because the union supports standards, accountability, and elimination of achievement gaps.

“All we’re talking about is fixing it and funding it,” he said of the law. “I think it’s a cruel hoax to have the data disaggregated and find out what you need, but in many instances not have the needs of the students met.”

Civil rights advocates do share common criticisms of several provisions under the law, including concerns about the quality of testing for English-language learners and a wish to extend the law’s transfer option to allow students to move to better schools in neighboring districts, not just their home districts.

Raul Gonzalez, the legislative director for the National Council of La Raza, believes that cohesiveness proves that views of the law are not that far apart.

“I believe that the civil rights community, at the end of the day, will come up with some principles that we can all rally behind,” he said.

Vol. 25, Issue 01, Pages 1,20-21
?
Joint Organizational Statement on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act
October 21, 2004

The undersigned education, civil rights, children’s, disability, and citizens’ organizations are committed to the No Child Left Behind Act’s objectives of strong academic achievement for all children and closing the achievement gap. We believe that the federal government has a critical role to play in attaining these goals. We endorse the use of an accountability system that helps ensure all children, including children of color, from low-income families, with disabilities, and of limited English proficiency, are prepared to be successful, participating members of our democracy.

While we all have different positions on various aspects of the law, based on concerns raised
during the implementation of NCLB, we believe the following significant, constructive
corrections are among those necessary to make the Act fair and effective. Among these concerns are: over-emphasizing standardized testing, narrowing curriculum and instruction to focus on test preparation rather than richer academic learning; over-identifying schools in need of improvement; using sanctions that do not help improve schools; inappropriately excluding low-scoring children in order to boost test results; and inadequate funding. Overall, the law’s emphasis needs to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement.

Recommended Changes in NCLB


Progress Measurement



1. Replace the law's arbitrary proficiency targets with ambitious achievement targets based on rates of success actually achieved by the most effective public schools.



2. Allow states to measure progress by using students’ growth in achievement as well as their performance in relation to pre-determined levels of academic proficiency.



3. Ensure that states and school districts regularly report to the government and the public their progress in implementing systemic changes to enhance educator, family, and community capacity to improve student learning.



4. Provide a comprehensive picture of students' and schools' performance by moving from an overwhelming reliance on standardized tests to using multiple indicators of student achievement in addition to these tests.



5. Fund research and development of more effective accountability systems that better meet the goal of high academic achievement for all children



Assessments


6. Help states develop assessment systems that include district and school-based measures in order to provide better, more timely information about student learning.

7. Strengthen enforcement of NCLB provisions requiring that assessments must:
· Be aligned with state content and achievement standards;
· Be used for purposes for which they are valid and reliable;

· Be consistent with nationally recognized professional and technical standards;

· Be of adequate technical quality for each purpose required under the Act;

· Provide multiple, up-to-date measures of student performance including measures that assess higher order thinking skills and understanding; and

· Provide useful diagnostic information to improve teaching and learning.



8. Decrease the testing burden on states, schools and districts by allowing states to assess students annually in selected grades in elementary, middle schools, and high schools.



Building Capacity



9. Ensure changes in teacher and administrator preparation and continuing professional development that research evidence and experience indicate improve educational quality and student achievement.



10. Enhance state and local capacity to effectively implement the comprehensive changes required to increase the knowledge and skills of administrators, teachers, families, and communities to support high student achievement.


Sanctions

11. Ensure that improvement plans are allowed sufficient time to take hold before applying sanctions; sanctions should not be applied if they undermine existing effective reform efforts.

12. Replace sanctions that do not have a consistent record of success with interventions that enable schools to make changes that result in improved student achievement.

Funding

13. Raise authorized levels of NCLB funding to cover a substantial percentage of the costs that states and districts will incur to carry out these recommendations, and fully fund the law at those levels without reducing expenditures for other education programs.

14. Fully fund Title I to ensure that 100 percent of eligible children are served.

We, the undersigned, will work for the adoption of these recommendations as central structural changes needed to NCLB at the same time that we advance our individual organization’s proposals.

Advancement Project
American Association of School Administrators
American Association of University Women
ASPIRA
Association of School Business Officials International (ASBO)
Campaign for Fiscal Equity/ACCESS
Children's Defense Fund
Citizens for Effective Schools
Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders
Council for Exceptional Children
Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform
Division for Learning Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children (DLD/CEC)
FairTest: The National Center for Fair & Open Testing
Forum for Education and Democracy
International Reading Association
Learning Disabilities Association of America
National Alliance of Black School Educators
National Association of School Psychologists
National Association of Social Workers
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE)
National Down Syndrome Congress
National Education Association
National School Boards Association
National Urban League
Service Employees International Union
School Social Work Association of America

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:02 PM 2 comments Links to this post

This comes from TexasISD.com—a highly critical assessment of the legislature deemed as anti-school by a Superintendent from Devine ISD. -Angela

TexasISD General News
Letter by a Superintendent
By Rickey Williams
Aug 30, 2005, 08:31

Fw: Letter by a superintendent

My party, the Republican Party, although holding the Governor's Mansion and
a majority in the Texas House and Senate, has failed to develop a workable
system to finance Texas public schools in one regular and two special
sessions this year.

Not only have the elected officials of my party made the profession of
public education their whipping boy, but fewer of the state's best and
brightest students will choose education as their profession.

My party has become the enemy of public education in Texas. The Republican
Party has consistently wrapped itself in the banner of local control but has
turned on itself in legislating areas of local decisions.

If the Legislature can propose and pass laws detrimental to public education
without outcries from the public, then we as educators must shoulder most
of, if not all, the blame. If eradicating cupcake parties from elementary
campuses creates more public outcry than reducing teachers' pensions, then
we in the profession must better inform the public of our mission.

The first word in public education is public. Without the support of the
public, there is little we can do to fend off the blitzkrieg of assaults
every two years from the Legislature in the always fashionable name of
"education reform."

Public schools take all students who enter our doors regardless of their
abilities. We offer programs to accelerate instruction for students who have
special learning needs and offer courses for college credit. We teach
foreign language to English speakers and the English language to foreigners.
We drive, feed, exercise, remediate and accelerate any and all students.
There is accountability, technology, ESL, LEPs, ARDs, IEPs, AEPs, ISS,
SROs, drugs, drug dogs, drug testing, guns, gangs, steroids and,
unfortunately, consternation from the lawmakers and rule-makers who should
be supportive of what we do but instead tell us we're not good enough as
they push through more and more unfunded mandates.

The governor enjoys the jingle, "We don't need more money for education, we
need more education for our money." If that's the case, then let teachers
teach, let principals oversee their campuses and stop asking public
educators to correct all of society's ills. If the Legislature worked as
hard upholding its promise of increasing teachers' salaries to the national
average as it has cutting property taxes, then we would have more
college-bound students choosing education as their profession and less of a
need for emergency certified teachers.

We must elect officials who value public education and recognize that public
education is the cornerstone of our American democratic way of life. We do
not need public education executioners as our legislative leaders. We need
legislative leaders who will execute legislation that is positive for all
Texans and positive for public education. We didn't create the $1.50 cap on
school funding, but we're told to run the schools regardless of increased
costs. We didn't create the deficit in the Teacher Retirement System by
reducing the state's contribution in 1995, but now we're mandated to put
more of our salary into the system and accept a cut in benefits.

It is shocking that the Legislature would cut teachers' pensions and then
propose to increase their own pension by raising the pay for judges and
hiding their individual votes from the public through a voice vote. If
raising the salaries of judges is the right thing to do, then make the vote
a part of the public record.

We, the public and public educators, must change our message and the
leadership in the Legislature. The current Legislature has done the talk.
After the elections in this and subsequent Novembers, if we do our job, the
enemies of public education and their supporters in the Legislature will
take a walk.


Rickey Williams is superintendent of the Devine School District.



C Copyright 2001 by TexasISD.com

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:54 PM 0 comments Links to this post

by Ben Feller, Associated Press | September 1, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The schools devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and those trying to help them, will be given leeway in complying with a federal law that aims to raise education standards.

US education leaders said yesterday that they will consider broad requests for relief from states in the overwhelmed Gulf Coast, meaning schools could get significantly more time to raise yearly test scores or to ensure that all their teachers meet federal qualifications.

''You can be assured that the red tape will be put in the drawer," the deputy education secretary, Ray Simon, said after taking part in a White House meeting about hurricane response.

An estimated hundreds of thousands of displaced students will attend school in a different district, if not a different state, as the school year begins. Education officials also pledged to relax rules on college aid, including timelines for students to pay their loans.

As the storm's fallout became clearer, officials in schools and colleges in states such as Georgia, Kansas, Ohio, Virginia, and Tennessee pledged to enroll displaced students.

''Children are being dislocated, literally," Simon said. ''They're homeless. They're traveling hundreds of miles to find temporary homes, which means they will also have to travel several hundred miles to find schools."

In response, the Education Department told school chiefs in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas that they could expect fast relief. State leaders are still figuring out what kind of help they will seek, but they are expected to jump on the department's offer to consider waivers under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Henry Johnson, the assistant secretary over elementary and secondary education, is a former state school superintendent in Mississippi. He said that in five or six coastal counties in that state, half the schools have been leveled. The other half, he said, are so damaged that it is unclear whether they can be used this year.


© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:33 AM 0 comments Links to this post