I disagree with the title in this USA Today piece. Other forms of accountability do--or can be made to exist at earlier levels. So the same rationale for minimizing test in the higher grades applies to the lower ones as well. -Angela

Page 10A
New tests in high schools? They have enough already.
Unlike in lower grades, other measures of accountability exist.
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20051020/edit20.art.htm

Wednesday's big education news was a promising uptick in fourth- and eighth-grade math scores, but mixed results in reading scores.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings says those “encouraging” trends prove that accountability through testing works. Now, she adds, it's time to apply more testing requirements to high schools.

Time out. Ask students, parents and administrators what's wrong with America's high schools, and “not enough tests” isn't likely to top anyone's list.

Spellings has good reason to retain faith in the federal “No Child Left Behind” law's annual testing requirement for grades 3-8, with results broken out by race and income.

For too many years, poor and minority children, particularly, were allowed to drift along uneducated. They dropped out quietly or graduated with worthless diplomas. With its stiff accountability, the federal law has done an impressive job of exposing schools that educated only the easy-to-educate students.

So why not expand the federally required high school testing from one year to three years, as Spellings proposes?

The answer is that unlike younger students, high schoolers already suffer from testing overkill. While a certain amount of testing is needed to help measure progress and identify failing schools, too much of a good thing will undercut public support for reform.

Consider the students at Fairport High School outside Rochester, N.Y. They take the five state Regents tests: math, science, English and two in social studies. Nearly all take the SAT college placement test. Half of those take the ACT admissions test. By their senior year, most students will also have taken two Advanced Placement exams.

Wait. There's more. The 50 students in the prestigious International Baccalaureate (IB) program take all the above-mentioned tests plus demanding end-of-course IB exams.

“We're well beyond being awash in tests,” says Fairport Superintendent William Cala. “We're over our heads in tests.”

In Georgia, students take “End of Course” tests in English, math, science and social studies in every high school grade. Plus the 11th-grade state writing test. Many also take the SAT, the PSAT warm-up to the SAT and those AP exams.

There are better uses for the $250 million a year the U.S. Department of Education wants to spend on more high school testing.

Tracking what a student took in high school, and matching it to testing and college records, would give principals a way to assess which course loads are most effective. Or, the department could help states follow the California example of combining a state assessment with college placement exams. That way, students get an early read on whether they qualify for college coursework.

Improvements like those would add value — not another burden.

© Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:43 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This piece is by Jim Horn, PhD is a very worthwhile read. He writes a concise, powerful history on education reform in our nation in order to demonstrate how the educaction system is the scapegoat for our economic and social policy failures. I like his use of the term, "corporate socialism." It effectively responds to the ostensible free market, pro-voucher supporters who say that public education is "socialist" or an "education monopoly." Read on and also visit Dr. Horn's blog, "Schools Matter," a new link that I've added as well.

Angela

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:08 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This is an interesting tribute to Rosa Parks. It refers to the internalized racism that frican Americans suffer and suggests that this is more a determinant of life chances than racism itself. I know that internalized racism has a powerful impact on us. However, since it cannot exist without racism proper, it should still be seen as a very dynamic byproduct of racism (prejudice and discrimination) that exists outside of communities of color.

On the subject of Rosa Parks, what should also be understood is that she herself was an activist and how she received training in non-violent resistance through the NAACP and Highlander in Tennessee. Her life and actions therefore suggests strongly the impact of activism and social, as well as personal, change.

I posted MLK's powerful Letter from the Birmingham Jail on my blog this weekend. Scroll down the right-hand side-bar to link to it. It's incredible the amount and kind of discipline that these early activists had to engage in with respect to non-violent social protest. They literally had to be willing to lay down their lives and not fight back. It's a real treat to read MLK's letter as it remains pertinent to these times.

-Angela

Parks showed us the power of one
Leonard Pitts, MIAMI HERALD
Saturday, October 29, 2005
'Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good" — Martin Luther King Jr.

Her feet were not tired. At least, no more so than usual.

She always hated that legend, so let us, in this, the week of her death at age 92, set the record straight. And while we're at it, let's correct another misconception: It's not precisely true that she refused to give up her seat to a white man. The seats next to her and across the aisle were empty, vacated by black people who had already heeded the bus driver's command to get up. So there were places for the white man to sit.

But under the segregation statutes of Montgomery, Ala., no white man was expected to suffer the indignity of sitting next to a black woman or even across from her. So driver J.F. Blake asked again. And Rosa Parks, this soft-spoken 42-year-old department store seamstress just trying to get home from work, gave him her answer again. She told him no.

Her feet were not tired. Her soul was exhausted.

On Dec. 1, it will be 50 years since that drama played out in Court Square in the capital of the Old Confederacy. Fifty years since police took her away. Fifty years since black Montgomery protested by boycotting the buses. Fifty years since community leaders tapped as their leader the boyish-looking new preacher at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr.

That moment in Court Square was the birthplace of the 13-year epoch called the Civil Rights Movement. You could make a compelling argument that it was also a birthplace of the modern world.

None of which Rosa Parks could have foreseen that December evening half a century ago. All she knew was that she was tired, sick of acquiescing, accommodating, accepting foolish white laws and white people who said she wasn't good enough to occupy a bus seat. Something had gotten into her that wouldn't let her go along any more, something that turned a lifetime of yes into an electric moment of no.

In the world born from that moment, it is not uncommon for white men to sit next to black women. Or to work for them; be married to them; even get arrested by them. Indeed, any list of the most powerful women in America is likely to have two black women — Oprah Winfrey, Condoleezza Rice — at the top.

Racism that was once brazen enough to demand a black woman's bus seat is covert now, a throw-the-rock-and-hide-your-hand charade, its effects as visible as ever, its workings mostly hidden. But for all that, it is now only the second most worrisome threat to African American life.

African Americans are the first. Because many of us have internalized the lies of inferiority so deeply as to make racism superfluous. We don't need white people to destroy us; we happily destroy ourselves. Destroy our families by exiling fathers from them, destroy our futures by declaring education something only white people do, destroy our spirits with a culture that celebrates all that is seamy, soulless and material.

This is the threat that troubles most, simply because while racism strangles aspiration, nihilism renders it stillborn.

And in the face of this threat, too many of us do what Rosa Parks got sick of doing: acquiesce, accommodate, accept.

Indeed, let a white man call our children fatherless, ill-educated thugs and we will, justifiably, rip him an orifice God never intended. Let our children say the same thing of themselves and many of us call it music and look the other way.

The lesson of Rosa Parks' life is that you don't have to look the other way. That night on the bus, she wasn't a movement, wasn't an icon. She was just a woman; one woman who'd had enough, who refused to comply any longer with a system that dehumanized her.

Her death reminds us that there is no number more powerful than one, no word more potent than no.

And no force more compelling than a soul grown exhausted enough for change.

Pitts can be contacted at lpitts@herald.com.


http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/10/29pitts_edit.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:58 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is a tragic state of our state. -Angela

Texas leads nation in rate of households at risk for hunger

By LIZ AUSTIN
Associated Press Writer
AUSTIN — A higher percentage of Texas households were at risk of going hungry over the past three years than in any other state, according to data released Friday by the U.S. Agriculture Department.

Between 2002 and 2004, more than 16 percent of Texas households were food insecure, meaning that at some point they had trouble providing enough food for all their family members, the USDA report said.

In nearly 5 percent of Texas households, at least one family member went hungry at least one time during that period because they couldn't afford enough food. That's the fourth-highest rate in the country.

Nationwide, 11.4 percent of households were at risk of going hungry during that period, and 3.6 percent of U.S. households had at least one member go hungry, the USDA said.

While Texas has consistently ranked among the top five states, this is the first year it leads the nation, said Celia Hagert, a senior policy analyst at the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates more state spending on education and social programs.

The news didn't surprise Mildred Wauson, director of the St. Thomas Center in Angleton, about 40 miles south of Houston. Her nine-church ecumenical program runs a food pantry, helps people pay their rent and utility bills and provides other emergency services.

Wauson said she's seen a significant increase in the number of families seeking help from their food pantry and twice as many senior citizens.

"You hear all the time about how the United States is getting so much better off and I'm thinking, 'Wait a minute, how about us down here?'" she said.

Texas was one of just nine states to see statistically significant increases in food insecurity and hunger rates when the USDA compared three-year average rates for 1999-2001 and 2002-2004.

An average of nearly 14 percent of Texas households were at risk for hunger between 1999 and 2001, and an average of 3.6 percent of Texas households experienced hunger.

Nationally, an average of 10.4 percent of households were at risk for hunger between 1999 and 2001, and an average of 3.1 percent of households experienced hunger.

J. Larry Brown, the director of the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis University, pointed out that the increases came at a time when the economy actually was improving. While more people are working, they're getting paid less, he said.

"People are constantly having to make decisions when they get their small paychecks about whether they pay their rent or medical care or put groceries on the table," Brown said.

Because people often can't control their rent, utility and medical bills, their food budget often takes the first hit, he said. The worst off go hungry, he said, while others buy food that's cheap and filling but nutritionally empty.

Another problem is low rates of participation in federally-funded food stamp programs.

About 2.4 million Texans received food stamps in August, Texas Health and Human Services Commission spokeswoman Jennifer Harris said. (That number spiked after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as the commission temporarily relaxed standards for families affected by the storms.)

An estimated 2 million more Texans are eligible for food stamps but don't get the help they need, Hagert said.

Some people don't know they're eligible, Hagert said, while others have gotten turned off by the complicated enrollment process or fear the stigma of applying for help.

"An unacceptable number of Texans and Texas families are suffering from hunger ... and there's no reason why with all this federal money out there to support the food stamp program," Hagert said.

Wauson said churches and schools in the Angleton area are doing everything they can to help the center's food pantry, but she's concerned the support could wane as time goes on and energy bills go up this winter.

"We have put such a plea out to everyone for so long now ... that I keep wondering are we going to overtax them and they're going to say I can't do anymore," she said. "That's a great concern."

http://www.statesman.com/metrostate/content/gen/ap/TX_Hunger_Study.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:40 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This is pretty big news for colleges and universities. According to this NYTimes piece, b Sam Dillon and Stephen Labaton, "The federal government, vastly extending the reach of an 11-year-old law, is requiring hundreds of universities, online communications companies and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications." Forunately, Universities themselves have opposed this, citing the huge cost and rapid timetable for this to occur. Civil liberties, however, should concern the rest of us. You may read this article here.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:26 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Texas gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell offers a critical statement on high-stakes testing. -Angela

by Chris Bell

Friday, October 21, 2005 /Dallas Morning News

The Texas Supreme Court is expected anytime now to hand down its ruling in the all-important school finance lawsuit, and, as a parent of two public-school students, I hope and pray that opinion prods our governor and state lawmakers into finding a way to put more money into public education.

But even if we fund our public schools at much higher levels, we will fail to get the results we seek because of a broken accountability system that looks at one test score as the sole measure of a student's and a school's success.

Dr. Linda McNeil, a Rice University professor, calls this "Enron-style accountability" because it clearly shows how a well-intentioned effort to raise education standards for all schoolchildren has instead corrupted the curriculum, created a school-to-prison pipeline, left fraud unchecked and driven teachers out of the classroom. She likens the corruption of accountability to the singular emphasis that Ken Lay placed upon the stock price of Enron to the exclusion of other factors, such as debt and whether the production matched the propaganda.

George W. Bush was at his best when he spoke out against the "soft bigotry of low expectations," but the promise of the Texas Miracle has gone unfulfilled under Rick Perry. Texas students continue to lose ground to their peers on the SAT; students who do graduate are faring worse and worse each year on the state's college readiness test.

Mr. Perry thinks he can use tests to make our kids smarter. A test won't make you smarter, just like a ruler won't make you taller. Tests aren't the answer; they're the best way to ask the question.

I want our state to answer Bill Gates' call for a fundamental redesign of the high school curriculum to adequately prepare children for the 21st century economy. Education is the best economic development program ever created, which is why we should commit to making Texas public schools the best in the country within 10 years.

Education trumps the economic development benefit of a toll road or a tax break for yet another big-box superstore.

But Mr. Perry continues to back an Enron-style accountability system that holds kids back to keep them out of the test pool. This "ninth-grade bulge," which education researchers say is a result of high-stakes testing, has pushed the state's effective dropout rate to nearly 40 percent, tops in the country.

The sad fact is that most residents of our prison system lack high school degrees. The perverse incentive to encourage kids to drop out of school has created a school-to-prison pipeline that is a silent moral crisis in Texas. Incredibly, Mr. Perry was one of only three governors not to sign a national agreement by the National Governors Association to accurately track dropouts. We can't keep using the prison system to hide our failures like Enron used offshore dummy corporations to hide its debt.

Another unfortunate, if avoidable, byproduct of Enron-style accountability is the silent crisis of teacher dropouts. We have a shortage of qualified, certified teachers because 60 percent of all teachers quit within their first five years.

Texas pays its teachers $6,100 less than the national average, but it costs more than $13,000 to replace each teacher. This is perhaps the best example of Enron-style accounting. Consequently, we have more certified teachers not teaching in Texas than are working in the classrooms. We need to bring their salaries up to the national average and then empower them to teach our kids something more important than how to take yet another standardized test.

A broad consensus of Texans is agitating for well-funded public schools. Standardized testing is an important tool for making sure this money is well spent, but it can't be the only tool. We need to make sure this investment is better placed than the retirement accounts of so many Enron employees.

Attorney Chris Bell, a Democratic candidate for governor, is a former at-large City Council member and congressman from Houston. Readers may contact him through his Web site at www.chrisbell.com

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-
bell_21edi.ART.State.Edition1.1ddf6b2b.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:57 PM 1 comments Links to this post

TEXAS LEGISLATURE

Fed up, pro-education candidates step up
Believing lawmakers won't give schools a fair shake, some educators will try to take their jobs instead.

Rodolfo Gonzalez/AMERICAN-STATESMAN
(enlarge photo)
Education activists with the Texas Parent PAC hope to raise $125,000 to support candidates in the March primaries, said Chairwoman Carolyn Boyle, right, here with Treasurer Staley Gray. 'Our hope is that a typical contribution will be $5,000 to $10,000 per candidate,' Boyle says.

By Jason Embry, Robert Elder
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, October 23, 2005
WAXAHACHIE — At a recent Rotary Club meeting in nearby Midlothian, Q.D. "Duke" Burge had planned to deliver an energetic speech for his campaign for the Texas House. The day before, he was told that the club doesn't allow political speeches. Undeterred, Burge sat down at the club's piano and knocked out a five-song set that featured indirect jabs at the Legislature.

"Whatever it takes," Burge said over lunch at the Applebee's near his computer services business.

Burge is in his sixth year on the Midlothian school board, so he's no political novice. But he's punching in a new weight class, challenging 13-year incumbent Jim Pitts, the well-funded chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, in the Republican primary in March.

An impossible dream? In most years, yes, and probably in 2006 as well.

But Burge hopes to tap a well of frustration over lawmakers' repeated failure to improve public schools while also lowering property taxes.

Burge, in fact, is just one of about 15 candidates with education ties, either as school board members, administrators or teachers, who are planning to run for House seats next year. That's an unusually high number, and more candidates are likely to emerge in the next couple of months. Many are counting on unprecedented turnout and financial support from education-minded voters.

Beyond the Legislature's lack of policy solutions, some educators are infuriated by what they see as lawmakers' disregard for their opinions and contempt for how they do their jobs. In August, for instance, House Speaker Tom Craddick characterized the school system as a "bottomless pit" in need of reform as much as new funds.

"The difficult thing for all of us is not to take this personally," says Mary Ann Whiteker, superintendent of the Hudson Independent School District and president of the Texas Association of Mid-Size Schools. "You just walk through the Capitol thinking, 'Why do they hate me so much?' "

"Of course," she adds, "I think there were times where legislators thought we hated them."

All this is more than name-calling. Control of the education agenda in the Legislature affects how much money schools have — and who is going to pay more taxes as a result. The state ranks near the bottom nationally in high-school graduation rates and Scholastic Assessment Test scores, and it's in the bottom 50 percent in teacher pay and per-student spending. School districts are plagued by reports of cheating on standardized tests and concealing dropout rates, among other governance issues.

Long term, the health of the state economy rides on the quality of public education. The friction between legislators and educators raises questions about the chances for reaching consensus on the way forward.

School lobbying groups of every stripe prided themselves on maintaining a solid front this year at the Capitol. They fought off proposals for private tuition vouchers, a plan to let voters veto tax increases by school districts and a funding proposal they deemed inadequate.

But a political campaign is a more individual pursuit, and the emergence of the new House candidates has been far less organized. Education groups seem unlikely to unify behind them, considering that these candidates stress varying issues — to the extent they've laid out agendas at all.

View from the top

State District Judge John Dietz last year declared the Texas system of paying for schools unconstitutional. His ruling that schools do not have the money to meet state and federal mandates emboldened school leaders, who have borne the weight of legislative funding cuts and tougher state tests.

Legislative leaders entered 2005 trying to comply with the part of Dietz's ruling that told the school finance system to rely less on property taxes.

But they largely ignored his calls for huge increases in state funding, instead offering a smaller funding boost — the House wanted $3 billion more over two years, about a 4.5 percent increase in total funding — paired with education reforms that made school leaders nervous, such as incentive pay for teachers and requiring school districts to hold elections in November instead of May. School officials regularly lined up at meetings of the House and Senate education committees to assail the school finance plans, pleading for more money with fewer strings attached.

Rep. Bill Keffer, a Dallas Republican on the House committee, says he tuned out education lobbyists who said they would rather have no funding increase than what the House was offering. "After I heard about the 10th person say that, it almost became pointless for those folks to come testify before the committee, as far as I was concerned personally, because I didn't feel like they were participating in the process in good faith," he says. The Senate fought off some of the most controversial elements of the House proposal, such as moving school board elections to November and capping the amount of money that districts with extremely high property values must share with the rest of the state.

In part because of educators' objections, the two chambers didn't complete a plan during their 140-day regular session or two 30-day special sessions. That made a total of five fruitless sessions since 2003.

Keffer likens education groups to the Luddites, English workers who destroyed manufacturing equipment to slow the Industrial Revolution.

"I imagine someone sitting around, hoisting a mug of ale after busting the printing press thinking, 'Well, we took care of that, didn't we?' " he says. "Well, that lasted for however long it lasted, but it didn't stop progress."

House Public Education Committee Chairman Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington, says not all educators opposed the plan. House members behind the plan included former teachers Dianne Delisi and Glenda Dawson, former principal Martha Wong and Rob Eissler, a former school board member.

At least one of the educators now seeking a House seat says he, too, found the leadership plan "acceptable."

Republican Kelly Hancock has been on the Birdville school board near Fort Worth for 13 years; he also owns a chemical distribution company.

"I'm a businessman, strong conservative, that happened to be involved in education for 13 years," says Hancock, who is running for a seat being vacated by Bob Griggs, R-North Richland Hills.

The parent PAC

Carolyn Boyle is a former PTA president at Doss Elementary School in Austin. For eight years she coordinated the Coalition for Public Schools, a leading voice against vouchers, which would use public money to send students to private schools.

Vouchers failed again this year. Even with that victory, Boyle says she became fed up with what she saw as a Legislature that did not listen to educators or parents. She and a handful of like-minded parents formed the Texas Parent Political Action Committee to dole out campaign contributions to candidates whom they consider pro-education.

The PAC has received donations from 150 people. Boyle declines to give a total raised so far but has set a goal of $125,000 for the March primaries.

"Our hope is that a typical contribution will be $5,000 to $10,000 per candidate, plus a group of parent volunteers recruited by Texas Parent PAC," she says. Though Boyle's anti-voucher work had made her a thorn in the side of many Republicans, she expects GOP candidates to receive much of that support. That's different from the approach taken for the 2004 primaries by the state's four major teacher groups, whose political committees stuck to incumbents or gave most of their money to Democrats.

In heavily Republican districts, though, the GOP primary is the only race that matters.

The groups that focused their money on Democrats say that could change if they find the right candidates. "As Republican party politics mature, we probably will become increasingly involved in Republican primary races," says Richard Kouri, public affairs director for the Texas State Teachers Association. The other group is the Texas Federation of Teachers.

"Let's just come up with some new talent," Boyle says. "Clearly, the talent that's there couldn't get the job done."

Grass roots

If Boyle is a familiar insider at the Capitol, Frank "Bo" Camp is a field soldier. On a Tuesday night early this month, Camp, clad in sweat pants and a T-shirt, perspires mightily as he sets up tables and chairs inside the sweltering Former Students' Association Building in the small East Texas town of Gladewater. Camp's wife, Carmen Camp, is a special education teacher in the nearby Longview Independent School District.

Both are also brand-new political activists. They are two of the founders of a group called No Texas Teacher Left Behind, which is holding the fifth in a series of rally-the-troops meetings, mostly in East Texas.

Sitting on a folding chair, Bo Camp thumbs through thousands of pages of e-mails the group has received since June through its Web site. "We can't even answer them all," he says.

"We're degraded; we're laughed at by legislators," says Bo Camp, a former trustee of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas. "It just blows my mind that those people feel the way they do about public education."

Two middle-school teachers in Gladewater, Jan Doerr and Martha Wright, established the group as the regular legislative session endedin the spring.

"We're full-time educators who decided that just whining is not our style," Wright tells the group of about 70 people.

No Texas Teacher's agenda calls for a $4,000 teacher pay raise, a cost-of-living raise for retirees, who haven't had one since 2001, and more state money for the underfunded Teacher Retirement System.

Showing a PowerPoint slide on the generous pensions for veteran lawmakers — a lawmaker with just 12 years of service can draw a $34,000 annual pension — Wright peers over her glasses and says, "Let's help these legislators reach their retirement goals" by throwing them out of office.

The group is trying to marshal the votes and financial strength of the state's 1.1 million active and retired educators — roughly one of every 20 Texans.

Mesquite Fire Department Lt. Chuck Tull is there with his wife, Susan, a fourth-grade teacher. He is challenging two-term House member Dan Flynn of Van in the GOP primary.

Voters know "we've not really accomplished anything" on education at the Capitol, Tull says as his wife grades papers nearby. "I think we're going to have a few fresh faces" in the next Legislature.

Fighting history

In 2004, all 12 Republican House members who had primary challengers walloped them, each getting more than 60 percent of the vote.

Republican political consultant Craig Murphy predicts that no GOP candidate would win in 2006 running against the party's education position. "I don't know what the major issue is going to be in March, but it's not going to necessarily be the same one that was a major issue in July," Murphy says.

Retired Lewisville school Superintendent Clayton Downing ran for the House in 2002, saying he would use his experience to improve the school finance system. Incumbent Mary Denny beat him by 19 points in the Republican primary.

Downing figured he had a strong support base because the suburban Dallas district included part of the school district where he was superintendent for 18 years. He said longtime friends who were active in GOP politics told him they had to publicly support Denny because she had the support of the party establishment.

"I worked my tail off and could not get people to vote," said Downing, who today heads the Texas School Coalition, a group of districts with high property values. "It was just really hard to focus in and get people to really give it the attention that I thought it deserved."

Downing said a challenger running in the primary "doesn't have a prayer" without unifying all of the education groups, such as those representing teachers, parents and administrators, in their districts.

But pulling all of those forces together for a House campaign is unheard of, he said. "I think it could happen, but I sure haven't seen it happen," he said.

Groups that present a united front to all of the legislators in the Capitol see their influence diluted when it is spread among 254 counties and 150 House districts, and the burden falls to local officials and teachers who often do not have an interest in politics, he said.

Challengers are bound to be underfunded, as well. If the Texas Parent PAC, for example, were to contribute $10,000 to Burge, that would be small beer compared to Pitts' fundraising muscle. In 2004, against a 21-year-old Democratic opponent, Pitts raised about $300,000 and won 72 percent of the vote.

But former Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff said the school community could be a force.

"That is the great unanswered question, whether this sleeping giant of PTAs, school boards and teachers will ever organize enough to make their presence known" at the polls, says Ratliff, who advises the Texas Association of School Boards. "I do think it's a sleeping giant, though."

What the Legislature liked, educators didn't

Proposals that leading lawmakers supported, and many educators opposed, during this year's legislative sessions. Included in broader school finance legislation, they ultimately died when the Legislature failed to reach a consensus on the finance issue.

Voter-approved tax increases

Legislature: Wanted school boards to seek voter approval before boosting tax rates beyond the state cap, arguing that it would give taxpayers more control.

Educators: Said the elections would hurt children in areas that regularly defeat tax increases; said other political bodies, such as the Legislature, do not need voter approval to increase taxes.

Incentive pay for teachers

Legislature: Said principals should be able to reward teachers with higher salaries if they take challenging assignments or if their students show marked improvement.

Educators: Teacher groups say incentive-pay programs concentrate raises in the hands of a few teachers.

November school board elections

Legislature: House leaders said November elections would produce higher turnout in school board elections, giving more taxpayers a say in choosing their boards. Turnout is always higher in November, when there are more high-profile races than in May. Senate leaders showed much less enthusiasm than their House counterparts for November board elections.

Educators: Said school board candidates, now elected in May in most districts, would be lost among the many partisan races held in November and would be asked by voters' groups to answer questions on topics unrelated to education, such as gun control and abortion.

Instructional spending

Legislature: Said schools should spend at least 65 percent of their operating budgets on instruction, up from 63.8 percent.

Educators: Argued that the mandate, without a significant increase in overall funding, would tie school boards' hands and trigger cuts in areas such as counseling, transportation and food services.

(Note: After this failed to clear the Legislature, Gov. Rick Perry ordered the Texas Education Agency to write and implement a 65 percent rule.)

New to the game

Groups formed in the past 13 months to promote education issues.

Texas Parent PAC

Headquarters: Austin

Mission: political action committee for "pro-public-education" candidates

Goal: Raise $125,000 for 2006 primaries

Leader: Carolyn Boyle, former lobbyist for Coalition for Public Schools

Size: 150 donors to date

No Texas Teacher Left Behind

Headquarters: Gladewater

Mission: "Restore respect" from lawmakers and the governor for public educators

Goal: Generate widespread activism and voting among educators

Leaders: Martha Wright and Jan Doerr, middle-school teachers in Gladewater

Size: Undetermined; group is processing membership applications and sorting through 4,000-plus e-mails

Friends of Texas Public Schools

Headquarters: Rockwall

Mission: "Strengthen the public's faith in public schools"

Goal: Apolitical public relations campaign and polling to boost public support for school system

Leader: Scott Milder, vice president of an architectural firm that designs school facilities

Size: 500 individuals ($25 minimum contribution) and about 35 business ($500 minimum) have donated money

From schools to the campaign trail

Candidates with ties to education are emerging at a faster-than-usual pace to run for the Texas House. Many are frustrated by the political stalemate over school finance. But they're not a slate of candidates in the traditional sense, and they hold varying views on education and tax issues. Other candidates are likely to emerge before the end of the candidate filing period in January.

District Name Party Education tie Incumbent
2 Graham Sweeney Democrat Boles superintendent Rep. Dan Flynn, R-Van
2 Chuck Tull Republican Edgewood school board Rep. Dan Flynn, R-Van
10 Duke Burge Republican Midlothian school board Rep. Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie
48 Donna Howard Democrat Formerly on Eanes school board Rep. Todd Baxter, R-Austin*
48 Kathy Rider Democrat Formerly on Austin school board Rep. Todd Baxter, R-Austin*
52 Kelly Felthauser Democrat Substitute teacher Rep. Mike Krusee, R-Williamson County
54 Jimmie Don Aycock Republican Formerly on Killeen school board Rep. Suzanna Hupp, R-Lampasas*
63 Anne Lakusta Republican Formerly on Lewisville school board Rep. Mary Denny, R-Aubrey
72 Drew Darby Republican school site management committee Rep. Scott Campbell, R-San Angelo
72 Kevin Housley Republican Christoval school board Rep. Scott Campbell, R-San Angelo
91 Kelly Hancock Republican Birdville school board Rep. Bob Griggs, R-North Richland Hills*
98 Bill Skinner Republican Retired teacher, administrator Rep. Vicki Truitt, R-Keller
129 Sherrie Matula Democrat Teacher Rep. John Davis, R-Houston
133 Barbara Larson Republican Formerly Spring Branch school board Rep. Joe Nixon, R-Houston*
* Incumbent is not seeking re-election


Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/metrostate/content/metro/stories/10/23statelocal.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:05 AM 0 comments Links to this post

The question remains. Why can't we have an accountability system that doesn't place the burden of so much of the change on the children themselves when the playing field is an unlevel one?
Angela

Sandy Kress: Texas schools should be proud of progress

05:19 PM CDT on Sunday, October 23, 2005

The news concerning Texas students is very positive, according to statistics released this week by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which charts performance by fourth- and eighth-grade students nationwide in reading and math.

Texas is one of only three states that made significant gains in fourth-grade math, fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. White, black and Hispanic students in our state are performing better than their peers nationally in each subject and in each grade.

As an active participant in Texas school reform since 1990, I'd point to three reasons for this strong showing:

•The leadership at the state education agency and Board of Education, with the support of the governor, raised the bar steadily over the past four years regarding expectations for students on the annual state assessments. Legislative leaders endorsed this increased rigor, both in terms of consistent policy and targeted resources.

•Texas educators, local officials, parents and students met the challenge by working harder and smarter, thus lifting student performance. Some naysayers resisted accountability, saying it wouldn't work. Others pleaded to move more slowly. Happily, most Texans paid them no heed, and, as a result, we are all the beneficiaries of this good news.

•The Texas Reading Initiative, promoted by former Gov. George W. Bush with bipartisan support from the Legislature, is working. Texas was one of only eight states to see real progress in fourth-grade reading results.

Yet even with this good news of improvement, we must face the sober reality that we are still far from our goal of fully preparing all students and leaving "no child behind." For example, 31 percent of our eighth-graders are below basic standards in math, and 28 percent of our eighth-graders are below basic in reading. These youngsters are prone to drop out of school or to do so poorly in high school that they face a bleak future.

We must do more, and we must do better. First, we must vigorously implement the Student Success Initiative to assure that all students complete the eighth-grade ready for a rigorous high school education. By succeeding here and taking other key steps, we can drastically reduce dropouts. And then, by adding higher-level work and expectations in high school, we can better assure that high school graduates are prepared for quality jobs or higher education.

Further, we must no longer allow schools to fail year after year without fundamental restructuring or takeover. Schools – and teachers – that bring about substantial growth in achievement for their students, particularly the disadvantaged, must be rewarded. Taxpayers, educators and the public must have a better and keener sense of how public dollars are spent in education so that what works gets more funding and what doesn't work gets less or no funding.

We must devote more resources to improving teachers' skills and knowledge and utilizing intervention strategies that are proven by research and experience to be effective at boosting students' performance.

The climb is not over. There's a long way to the top, and we must think and work hard to get there. But today, let's take a moment to celebrate how and why we've come this far. The lessons that we have learned and the satisfaction that has been earned from productive work are the best resources we have to finish the climb.


Sandy Kress, former education adviser to President Bush, headed the committee that proposed Texas' educational accountability system in 1993. His e-mail address is skress@akingump.com.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:57 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This is an unfortunate, if predictable, effect of the voucher program in D.C. It reveals how a parent with a voucher doesn't pick a school. It's the school that picks the student (with a voucher). -Angela

By V. Dion Haynes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 21, 2005; B01

Parents of students in the D.C. school voucher program generally believe that they are benefiting academically from the private-school grants, but some think their children have been stigmatized by teachers and classmates, according to a new study.

The study by the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute, released yesterday, was based on focus group meetings with 45 parents and 23 students in fall 2004 and spring 2005, only a small fraction of the 1,027 children who participated in the voucher program in its initial year. Now in its second year and with an enrollment of about 1,700 students, the program provides federally funded scholarships of up to $7,500 for low-income District children to attend private or parochial schools.

Although the report is not a scientifically valid survey, it offers insights about issues that parents think should be addressed in the remaining years of the five-year federal experiment, said Patrick J. Wolf, an associate professor of public policy at Georgetown and one of the study's authors.

"The study sends a signal to the broader education community what low-income D.C. parents are looking for in their education environment," he said.

Wolf also is involved in a separate study that will analyze test score results to determine whether voucher students are outperforming their counterparts in public schools. That report, which is federally mandated, will not be completed until 2007.

The authors of yesterday's report, called "Parent and Student Voices on the First Year of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program," interviewed parents of students in grades 3 through 12. Although most parents thought their children were performing better academically than they had at their old public school, some thought the students were being treated unfairly, the study said.

The federal voucher law and the policies of the Washington Scholarship Fund, the nonprofit organization that runs the program, require that the identities of voucher students not be revealed to anyone at their school other than the principal and admissions staff. But some parents said they believed their children's status had been divulged to others, according to the study, which did not name any of the families or schools involved.

"When she first got there . . . she was having a little bit of adjustment problems and the teacher told her in front of the classroom, 'If you don't stop acting like this, remember, you are here on a scholarship and we could put you out,' " one parent was quoted as saying.

Another parent told the study's interviewers, "There is elitism in the parent organization 'cause I went to a meeting and I was pointing out some issues and a parent just said, 'Why don't you leave?' "

Wolf said such comments came from a small minority of the parents interviewed.

Shirell Simmons, a voucher parent who did not participate in the Georgetown study but spoke to a reporter yesterday about her child's experiences, agreed that stigmatization is a problem. Her 9-year-old daughter attends Rock Creek International School in Northwest Washington.

She said that other children shun her daughter and that last year another student told her child: "Why do you dress like that? You dress like a thug. . . . You look like one of those hoodlum rappers."

Simmons said that the school has been unresponsive to her concerns. "I feel the administration isn't supportive of voucher students," she said. "They're treated as second-class citizens."

Josh Schmidt, director of admissions and advancement at Rock Creek, denied Simmons's allegations. "Voucher students are no different from any other student," he said. "We are race-blind, income-blind and religion-blind. We support every student in every way possible."

Sally Sachar, president and chief executive of the Washington Scholarship Fund, declined to comment on Simmons's case. But she said the organization takes confidentiality breaches and conflicts between parents and the schools seriously.

Sachar said the organization added language this year to its contract with private schools that specifically calls for them to follow the confidentiality policy. She said the scholarship fund also has established a citywide "parent empowerment group" to help voucher parents resolve problems at schools.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:36 PM 0 comments Links to this post

by Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 21, 2005; A07

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), long a champion of liberal causes, has infuriated longtime allies by introducing what advocacy groups are deriding as a voucher measure to assist Catholic schools in Louisiana.

The bill, which was introduced in the Senate yesterday, calls for both public and private schools hosting students displaced by Hurricane Katrina to receive $6,000 in aid per student. Most of the private schools in Louisiana are Roman Catholic.

Although the money would be distributed by the school districts, liberal advocacy groups say the bill sets a bad precedent, and does not offer enough anti-discrimination safeguards required of public institutions that receive federal money.

"This is a voucher -- it walks likes a voucher and quacks like a voucher. There's just no way to get around it," said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "The money ends up in the treasury of religious schools. And religious schools are religious all the time. It's not only bad policy. It violates the Constitution."

Various advocacy groups are pressuring Democratic senators to put the brakes on the measure, which is part of larger emergency recovery bill. Kennedy, the ranking minority member on the Senate Education Committee, introduced the bill with Chairman Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) and Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.).

The senators had hoped to have the bill passed by unanimous consent no later than next week, but a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid said yesterday that Reid will take time to review the bill and "talk to his colleagues about whether and how to proceed."

Republicans and Democrats have long been at odds over school vouchers, which essentially provide public money for students to attend private schools. Kennedy has historically taken a strong stand against vouchers.

The Massachusetts senator's staff insisted yesterday that the measure is not a voucher but a "pragmatic" way to get much-needed funds to private schools that have taken in many victims of Katrina.

"This bill puts the interests of the children victimized by Katrina ahead of politics and ideological battles," Kennedy said in statement. "It puts in place an efficient and temporary system to get the necessary aid to the schools without further delay."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/20/AR2005102001961.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:42 AM 0 comments Links to this post

I knew this was coming. -Angela

October 19, 2005

GOP plan would end 14 education programs, but savings would be small.
By Michelle R. Davis

Congressional Republicans have proposed cutting some education programs to free up federal money for hurricane relief for schools. But Congress didn’t get any closer last week to approving a federal aid plan, so school districts continue to wait for such aid to flow to their schools.

Rep. John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, the chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, this month proposed eliminating 14 Department of Education programs—not just declining to fund them, but repealing them outright. The $250 million in funding for the same programs was eliminated in the fiscal 2006 appropriations bill for the Education Department that the House passed in June. A press release from Republicans on the House education panel called the programs, which range from literacy instruction for prisoners to arts in education, inefficient and duplicative.

“We have a responsibility to help those in need in the aftermath of two devastating hurricanes, but we also have a responsibility to cut unnecessary federal spending elsewhere to pay for it,” Rep. Boehner said in a statement. Though Mr. Boehner’s cuts would be significant, they would barely make a dent in the billions of dollars being proposed for hurricane-related school aid.

Congress has passed $62 billion in general federal hurricane relief, but none of that money has been allocated specifically for schools. Though several lawmakers have proposed bills that would provide direct school aid, those bills hadn’t made much progress as of last week.

Bush Plan Introduced
Last week Sens. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., the former chairman of the Senate education committee, and Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the committee’s ranking minority member, proposed creating a new federal agency to oversee hurricane rebuilding, including education efforts.

And in the House on Oct. 7, Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Texas, introduced a bill modeled on an education relief package President Bush announced last month. The Hurricane Education Assistance Act includes nearly $1.9 billion for school districts taking in more than 10 students displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The bill proposes to provide public schools with as much as 90 percent of their states’ per-pupil expenditures, to a maximum of $7,500 per student. The bill also calls for $488 million that could be used by parents who want to send their children to secular or religious private schools, with the same $7,500 limit.

The same day, Rep. George Miller of California, the ranking Democrat on the House education committee, introduced a bill that would provide up to $8.2 billion for one year to public schools damaged by the hurricanes, including charter schools. Some of the money would be for direct aid to schools so they could rebuild facilities and pay teachers and other staff members. It would also provide $8,314 per student to districts taking in students displaced by the hurricanes and provide money for after-school programs serving those children.

As Republicans looked for education cuts, Democrats in Congress pressed hard for immediate aid to schools affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, particularly for those in the storm-damaged states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas. Districts were closed, schools were damaged or destroyed, and thousands of students were displaced by the August and September storms on the Gulf Coast.

In a late-night floor speech on Oct. 6, Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., urged lawmakers to pass direct aid for hurricane-ravaged states before leaving for a weeklong recess. She requested that $15 billion of the money already approved be used for schools.

“Please don’t abandon the people of Louisiana again, the people of Mississippi again, and the people of Alabama again by leaving before we do something to help them in a direct and concrete manner,” she said.

But Congress left town for a Columbus Day recess that lasted all last week without taking final action on any aid plan for schools.

Rep. Boehner’s proposed elimination of 14 programs includes the $42 million Parental Information and Resource Centers, which help educate parents about their rights under the No Child Left Behind Act; the $35.6 million Arts in Education program; and $21.8 million in state grants for incarcerated youths.

To groups like the Council of Chief State School Officers, the proposed cuts would go too deep.

“We understand the budget issues that are facing Congress, but we’re alarmed that the ongoing debate is about cutting education funding,” said Scott S. Montgomery, the Washington-based group’s chief of staff.

The Budget Resolution
Most of the programs proposed for elimination by Mr. Boehner are funded in the fiscal 2006 appropriations bill for education awaiting a vote by the full Senate, said Joel Packer, a lobbyist for the 2.7 million-member National Education Association. The likelihood that the programs will actually be eliminated is slim, he said.

“A lot of the programs that could potentially be cut are related to those [programs] that need increases to help victims of the hurricane,” he said. “It seems counterproductive to say let’s provide more aid to education, and then cut it.”

House Republican leaders, including the Budget Committee’s chairman, Rep. Jim Nussle of Iowa, have also proposed reopening the fiscal 2006 budget resolution passed earlier this year, which provides an outline for funding mandatory programs, and making severe cuts there.

“That’s a huge concern for us,” said Tom Kiley, a spokesman for the House education committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. George Miller of California. “We would strongly oppose” reopening the budget resolution and making significant cuts there, he said.

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

The NAEP scores are out. To say the least, they're underwhelming—as you can see from Feller's summary below. The results do reveal the results of failed reform. I bet our states could manage these results at least as well without the mind-numbing high-stakes tests that children are forced to take. We need bold leadership to recognize the failures of current policy and to suggest, at minimum, more holistic forms of assessment. We also need to re-visit culturally and linguistically relevant pedagogies and approaches, late-exit bilingual education and dual language education included. -Angela

By Ben Feller, AP Education Writer | October 19, 2005

WASHINGTON --Black and Hispanic students are narrowing the achievement gap with whites in reading and math, but overall the nation's progress is small or slipping.

The 2005 scores for grades four and eight come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the most respected measure of how students perform nationwide. The results are noted in both academic and political circles because they cover math and reading -- the two building-block subjects that schools are scrambling to improve.

Across the country, math scores were up in grades four and eight. In reading, fourth-graders virtually held steady and eighth-graders declined.

The strongest results came in math, where black and Hispanic students in both grades posted their highest scores since the test began in the early 1990s. In reading and math, blacks and Hispanics either shrank their test-score gap with whites or lost no ground.

That's significant because schools face unprecedented pressure to improve achievement by minorities under President Bush's No Child Left Behind law. Black and Hispanic students lag behind whites in access to quality teaching, college degrees and other measures of success.

"This is an encouraging report," Bush declared from the Oval Office on Wednesday. "It shows there's an achievement gap in America that is closing."

In perspective, minorities still fall behind by sizable margins. Based on their average score in math, for example, many black fourth-graders don't have the skills to classify numbers as even or add, or to determine the next number in a given pattern.

"The absence of really bad news isn't the same as good news," said Ross Wiener, policy director for The Education Trust, which advocates for poor and minority students. "If you're concerned about education and closing achievement gaps, there's simply not enough good news."

The goal of the test is for students to show they can handle challenging subject matter and apply it to real-life situations, a skill level known as proficient. Less than four in 10 students in both grades have reached at least that level in either math or reading.

In reading, almost no state improved its performance significantly in either grade, and some states saw declines. In math, several states got better, especially at fourth grade.

"Congratulations to the states that showed progress," said John Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, an association of corporate executives that is campaigning to improve math and science education. "But don't break out the champagne yet."

A total of 36 percent of fourth-graders were at least proficient in math, up 32 percent from 2003. Among eighth-graders, 30 percent were proficient or better, up from 29 percent.

In reading, the news was less promising, if not deflating.

The fourth-graders essentially held steady, as 31 percent scored at or above proficient, the same as last time. Their average test score did increase by one point.

Meanwhile, eighth-graders got a little worse in reading -- 31 percent showed mastery over challenging work, a one-point drop from 2003.

Much higher numbers of students in both subjects showed at least basic skills.

The results in reading mirror a long-term trend in which 9-year-olds posted their best scores ever in 2004 but 13-year-olds and 17-year-olds showed no improvement.

Schools must do more to teach older students sophisticated skills, such as taking ideas from different places and drawing a conclusion, said Cathy Roller, director of research and policy for the International Reading Association. "We need to put as much emphasis on that as we are basic comprehension skills," she said.

As usual, the numbers left much room for interpretation. Education analysts said the country's focus on early math and reading was paying dividends. But "there's no dancing around the flat eighth-grade performance in reading," said Darvin Winick, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, the bipartisan panel that oversees the test.

Scores for minorities rose. Among blacks, 13 percent of fourth-graders were proficient in math, up from 10 percent in 2003, when the test was last given. A total of 9 percent of black eighth-graders successfully handled challenging math, up from 7 percent.

Hispanic children showed a similar trend, with 19 percent of Hispanic fourth-graders reaching a proficient level or better in math, up from 16 percent; and 13 percent of Hispanic students in grade eight showing solid math skills, up from 12 percent last time.

Schools reported whether students were white, black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander or American Indian. Students who identified with more than one group were listed as "Other."

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said the core principles of federal education law, including annual testing and reporting of scores for all groups of students, were working.

In math, students tackled measurement, geometry, data analysis and probability and algebra. The reading test measured whether students could form a general understanding, develop an interpretation, make connections to the text and examine content and structure.

------
On The Net:

Nation's Report Card: http://nationsreportcard.gov/

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

October 19, 2005
Analysis Finds Gains in Edison Schools, But Model Is No Quick Fix
By Karla Scoon Reid
Edison Schools Inc., the nation’s largest for-profit manager of public schools, is posting achievement gains that are on par with, and sometimes exceed, the gains made by students attending comparable district-run schools, a study released last week concludes.

But the study, conducted for Edison by the Santa Monica, Calif.-based RAND Corp., found that it took Edison schools at least four years to match or exceed those average achievement gains in reading and mathematics.

For More Info
"Inspiration, Perspiration, and Time: Operations and Achievement in Edison Schools" is posted by RAND Corp.
And for “conversion schools”—previously run by a district and turned over to the company to manage—student achievement dropped during the inaugural year. It took five years, RAND found, for conversion Edison schools to post test-score gains that at least matched those of comparable schools.

Founded in 1992 by the entrepreneur Christopher Whittle, Edison runs both charter schools and what it calls “partnership” public schools under contracts with districts seeking to turn around low-performing schools. Its whole-school improvement design emphasizes research- based curricula, collaborative leadership, and the use of data to track student performance and hold teachers accountable.

The company managed 103 schools in the 2004-05 school year, enrolling roughly 65,000 students. About 60 percent of those schools were regular public schools converted to Edison schools; most of the others were charter schools, while a few were managed under contracts with states.

“Inspiration, Perspiration, and Time: Operations and Achievement in Edison Schools” is the most comprehensive evaluation to date of the New York City-based education management organization’s school improvement model. RAND, an independent think tank, began the $1.4 million review in 2000. Its researchers evaluated state test scores in reading and math in nearly all schools the company has operated and visited 23 elementary schools to see how the model was working.

John Chubb, Edison’s chief education officer, said that the report shows that under the right conditions—clear lines of responsibility for the company and the school district and a supportive partnership—Edison can improve student achievement.

“A district needs to understand that it could be very successful or very unsuccessful, depending on how they do the contract,” he said.

Fidelity a Plus
The study, released Oct. 11, looked at data on reading and math for nearly all Edison schools and a sample of schools identified by the researchers as comparison schools.

It found that achievement gains in some schools managed by the company were ahead of those in comparison schools. The study relied on school-level data, rather than data on individual students, because student-level information wasn’t available for most of the districts included in the analysis.

From 2002 to 2004, the study found, the average proficiency rates in Edison schools increased by 11 percentage points in reading and 17 percentage points in math, while a matched set of comparison schools serving similar student populations saw gains of 9 percentage points in reading and 13 percent in math. The Edison schools’ advantage was statistically significant only in math, the report says.

The researchers say that the challenges faced by schools under the first year of Edison’s management appeared, in some instances, to be partly attributable to local opposition to Edison.

According to the authors, the schools that were more faithful to the Edison model, with a broad curriculum that included fine arts and foreign languages, tended to get better results. Edison schools also were more successful if they operated free of constraints such as teachers’ union contracts, the report says.

“Given sufficient time, achievement trends in Edison schools generally move upwards, particularly when the approach is faithfully followed,” said Laura S. Hamilton, a co-author of the report.

Yet the report concludes: “We cannot make strong predictions for prospective clients about whether they will achieve better long-term results with Edison or with an alternative approach. Nevertheless, Edison’s improving trends are encouraging, and some schools have clearly done well under Edison management, making it clear that Edison is capable of producing favorable results.”

Nancy Van Meter, the director of the American Federation of Teachers’ Center on Privatization, said the study shows that Edison schools have produced unimpressive results.

Edison has billed itself as “the complete product” to boost achievement in struggling schools, she said, but the report shows that its model is inconsistently implemented and falls victim to common problems in education—the difficulty of hiring dynamic leaders and creating a positive culture for learning.

The RAND report’s findings put another “nail in the coffin” of the education-management-organization improvement model, said Marc Dean Millot, the editor of School Improvement Industry Weekly, a Web-based trade publication that favors the introduction of market forces in education.

Vol. 25, Issue 08, Page 6

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:50 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This is interesting. My sense is that this stuff is purposefully contrived. -Angela

Task force working on classroom spending is e-mailed a link to pro-voucher organization
Agency says e-mail doesn't indicate support for political group

By Jason Embry

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Tuesday, October 18, 2005
The state education commissioner's office suggested last week that educators crafting a controversial new rule for classroom spending consult the Web site of a political group that quietly promotes private-school vouchers and creating chasms between teachers and administrators.

Commissioner Shirley Neeley's executive assistant told the educators to check the site of a group called First Class Education before meeting to discuss Gov. Rick Perry's recent mandate that schools spend at least 65 percent of their budgets on instruction.

Neeley asked superintendents and representatives of education groups to help her hammer out the specifics of the new rule after some school officials grumbled that Perry's August order could cause spending cuts in non-classroom areas, such as transportation and counseling.

The school officials' first meeting is scheduled for Wednesday.

"So that you might have resource materials prior to the meeting, the commissioner asked that I provide you with the following websites," Patti Foster, Neeley's assistant, wrote in a Friday e-mail to a few dozen officials from school districts and education groups.

Foster included in the e-mail links to the Web sites of First Class Education and the National Center for Education Statistics, which is part of the U.S. Department of Education.

First Class Education is a political organization pushing states to adopt a 65 percent law. Its Web site includes spending data for each state and footage from television commercials calling for the law in Minnesota and Arizona.

Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Suzanne Marchman said that the message from Neeley's office was not an endorsement of First Class Education; she was trying to provide any background information that she could.

"It wasn't any indication she supports or advocates their political movement," Marchman said. "It's my understanding that the list of Web sites was not advocating any particular direction for the committee to go in, it was just for-your-information."

In August, the Austin American-Statesman obtained a political memo from the group that shows it touts the 65 percent rule as a conduit to other, more controversial changes. That information is not included on the group's Web site.

The memo touts the political benefits of putting the 65 percent rule up for consideration on public ballots. Chief among those benefits, it says, is the "splitting of the education union." Proponents of school vouchers and other education proposals championed by conservatives are often at odds with unions and other groups representing educators.

"The First Class Education proposal naturally pits administrators and teachers at odds with one another with monies flowing from the former to the latter with its passage," the memo says. It says that will hurt education unions because most have teachers and administrators as members.

The memo also says the adoption of the proposal can help make charter schools and private-school vouchers more palatable to voters since it could increase Republicans' credibility on education issues. Public school officials largely oppose vouchers, saying public money should not go to private schools.

The group's Arizona-based political consultant, Tim Mooney, has declined to elaborate on the memo's contents or describe its audience. "I'm sure the opposition has political memos as well," he said Monday.

Richard Kouri of the Texas State Teachers Association called the e-mail from Neeley's office "strange."

"I'm not sure how anything on that Web site helps the conversation about how the rule gets defined," Kouri said.

Doug Rogers, executive director of the Association of Texas Professional Educators, said: "I don't think (the e-mail) was bad judgment. There are other information sources that probably could have been included, and hopefully we're going to hear some of those on Wednesday." Rogers and the heads of other professional groups are part of the task force working on the rule.

Mooney has said he talked to Perry's office before the governor announced the 65 percent proposal, but he said it was Perry's idea.

Perry named Neeley, a former superintendent in the Galena Park district in the Houston area, to the commissioner's post last year.

Mooney said Monday that it makes sense for the educators working on the rule to read up on his group. "The plan originated because of the work that we've been doing, so it's natural that you would link to our Web site," Mooney said. "I didn't know that it was linked to our Web site, but I'm pleased that it is."

Texas schools spend 60.4 percent of their budgets on instruction, according to the federal center's definition. That definition will be the starting point for officials writing the rule in Texas.


Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/metrostate/content/metro/stories/10/18neeley.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:40 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out his Harper's piece as well. The book should be great, too. -Angela
By Nick Anderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 17, 2005; B06


In a Connecticut Avenue bookstore, a bespectacled white man sounded an alarm yesterday evening about the public schools that serve black children in Washington and elsewhere. Segregation, he said, is alive and well a half-century after Brown v. Board of Education , depriving many urban black children of opportunities routinely afforded white students.

This divide, he said, compelled him to write "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America."

Jonathan Kozol, a former Boston schoolteacher, has written 11 books over four decades in a crusade to help inner-city children that government policymakers gently label "disadvantaged." His critiques of their policies are anything but gentle, as one of his better-known titles, "Savage Inequalities," suggests.

His latest has a new target. In "Shame," Kozol, 69, denounces the No Child Left Behind education law that President Bush pushed through Congress in 2001 with help from such Democrats as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.). The law prescribes too much testing, he writes, and not enough learning.

Plenty of Democrats and Republicans still support No Child Left Behind, which requires annual reading and math testing of public school students in grades 3 through 8. But the parties split on whether Bush has given schools enough money to fix problems that the test results spotlight.

Kozol's message, apparently, has a following. At Politics & Prose, he drew a crowd of hundreds last month for a promotional event just before the book's publication. He made an unusual encore visit yesterday at the store's invitation, drawing another standing-room audience. C-SPAN cameras were on hand to transmit the talk on cable television.

"Sorry to be so grim tonight," Kozol said as he launched into a plea for "elemental racial justice." He added: "In the inner-city schools I visit, I never see white children. Segregation has returned with a vengeance."

In the Washington area, many public schools serve populations that are mostly white or mostly black, a split typical of what Kozol describes in his book through observations of 60 schools in 11 states. In Prince George's County, for example, 77 percent of students are black, 12 percent are Latino and 7 percent are non-Hispanic white. In many of the county's schools, the racial and ethnic gaps are far wider. That is also true in the District's public schools.

Kozol notes that some of the most segregated schools in the country are named for civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall, 51 years after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown that separate educational facilities are "inherently unequal."

Few educators would dispute Kozol's central contention: that many mostly black schools are in worse shape, physically and academically, than their counterparts in mostly white neighborhoods.

"The main reason I wrote this book," Kozol said in an interview yesterday, "is to inspire Americans to look very hard at the virtually complete apartheid in increasing numbers of our school districts -- including in Prince George's County -- and to address it courageously. They should ask themselves honestly: Is this the kind of country they want to live in?"

To those who point out that segregation today is not imposed by law, Kozol replied: "Whether the causes of school segregation are residential, social factors, economic factors, whatever they may be, segregated schooling is the oldest failed experiment in American social history. It didn't work in the past century. It's not going to work in the century ahead."

Kozol's solution -- not likely, he conceded, to be enacted soon -- is to repeal No Child Left Behind, establish universal public preschool for needy children, drastically reduce class sizes in schools that serve the poorest children (to 18 or fewer students per teacher) and give white suburban schools financial incentives for a new racial integration initiative with massive, but voluntary, systems of crosstown transportation.

Kozol said he wanted to spark an urban-school uprising. "We need a movement by people who actually get chalk dust on their hands every day because they spend their lives with children," he said.

One woman at the bookstore last night said she was already enlisted. Mary Findley, a music teacher active in programs for D.C. youths, clutched a copy of "Savage Inequalities" as she waited for Kozol's talk. "He changed my life with this book," she said.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:06 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is a good, short piece for contemplating the role of race vs. class in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The author is Univ. of Pennsylvania Professor Adolph Reed Jr. He is a New Orleans expatriate, as well as a member of the interim national council of the Labor Party. He maintains that a race-based critique is limited and suggests that we direct our attention instead to the shared, corporate political orientations across both major parties. -Angela

Class-ifying the Hurricane
by ADOLPH REED JR. / October 3, 2005— The NATION

I was in New Orleans visiting my mother and other relatives less than a week before Katrina hit. Even though we already had an eye on the approaching hurricane, I had no thought, when I boarded the plane to leave, that the city I've known all my life would never be the same again.

I don't have space or words to catalogue the horrors and outrages associated with the plight of New Orleans and its people. In any event, the basic story is now well-known, and we're entering the stage at which further details mainly feed the voyeuristic sentimentalism that will help the momentarily startled corporate news media retreat gracefully to their more familiar role as court heralds. The bigger picture will disappear in the minutiae of timelines and discrete actions.

What will be lost is the central point that the destruction was not an "act of God." Nor was it simply the product of incompetence, lack of empathy or cronyism. Those exist in abundance, to be sure, but they are symptoms, not ultimate causes. What happened in New Orleans is the culmination of twenty-five years of disparagement of any idea of public responsibility; of a concerted effort--led by the right but as part of a bipartisan consensus--to reduce government's functions to enhancing plunder by corporations and the wealthy and punishing everyone else, undermining any notion of social solidarity.

I know that some progressives believe this incident will mark a turning point in American politics. Perhaps, especially if gas prices continue to rise. I suspect, however, that this belief is only another version of the cargo cult that has pervaded the American left in different ways for a century: the wish for some magical intervention or technical fix that will substitute for organizing a broad popular base around a clearly articulated, alternative vision that responds to most people's pressing concerns. The greater likelihood is that within a month Democratic liberals will have smothered the political moment just as they've smothered every other opportunity we've had since Ronald Reagan's election. True, Nancy Pelosi and others finally began to bark at the Bush Administration's persisting homicidal negligence. But my hunch is that, as with Iran/contra, the theft of the 2000 election and the torrent of obvious lies that justified the war on Iraq, liberals' fear of seeming irresponsibly combative and their commitment to the primacy of corporate and investor-class interests will lead them to aid and abet the short-circuiting of whatever transformative potential this moment has.

This will also obscure the deeper reality that lies beneath the manifest racial disparities in vulnerability, treatment and outcome. The abstract, moralizing patter about how and whether "race matters" or "the role of race" is appealing partly because it doesn't confront the roots of the bipartisan neoliberal policy regime. It's certainly true that George W. Bush and his minions are indifferent to, or contemptuous of, black Americans in general. They're contemptuous of anyone who is not part of the ruling class. Although Bush and his pals are no doubt small-minded bigots in many ways, the racial dimension stands out so strikingly in part because race is now the most familiar--and apparently for many progressives the most powerful--language of social justice. For roughly a generation it seemed reasonable to expect that defining inequalities in racial terms would provoke some remedial response from the federal government. But for quite some time race's force in national politics has been as a vehicle for reassuring whites that "public" equals some combination of "black," "poor" and "loser"; that cutting public spending is aimed at weaning a lazy black underclass off the dole or--in the supposedly benign, liberal Democratic version--teaching blacks "personal responsibility."

To paraphrase historian Barbara Fields, race is a language through which American capitalism's class contradictions are commonly expressed. Class will almost certainly turn out to be a better predictor than race of who was able to evacuate, who drowned, who was left to fester in the Superdome or on overpasses, who is stuck in shelters in Houston or Baton Rouge, or who is randomly dispersed to the four winds. I'm certain that class is also a better predictor than race of whose emotional attachments to place will be factored into plans for reconstructing the city.

Of course, in a case of devastation so vast as this, class position provides imperfect insulation. All my very well connected, petit-bourgeois family in New Orleans are now spread across Mississippi and south Louisiana with no hint of when they will return home or what they'll have to return to. Some may have lost their homes and all their belongings. But most of them evacuated before the storm. No one died or was in grave danger of dying; no one was left on an overpass, in the Superdome or at the convention center. They were fortunate but hardly unique among the city's black population, and class had everything to do with the terms of their survival.

Natural disasters can magnify existing patterns of inequality. The people who were swept aside or simply overlooked in this catastrophe were the same ones who were already swept aside in a model of urban revitalization that, in New Orleans as everywhere else, is predicated on their removal. Their presence is treated as an eyesore, a retardant of property values, proof by definition that the spaces they occupy are underutilized. And it's not simply because they're black. They embody another, more specific category, the equivalent of what used to be known, in the heyday of racial taxonomy, as a "sub-race." They are a population against which others--blacks as well as whites--measure their own civic worth. Those who were the greatest victims of the disaster were invisible in preparation and response, just as they were the largely invisible, low-wage props supporting the tourism industry's mythos of New Orleans as the city of constant carnival. They enter public discussion only as a problem to be rectified or contained, never as subjects of political action with their own voices and needs. White elites fret about how best to move them out of the way; black elites ventriloquize them and smooth their removal.

Race is too blunt an analytical tool even when inequality is expressed in glaring racial disparities. Its meanings are too vague. We can see already that the charges of racial insensitivity and neglect threaten to divert the focus of the Katrina outrage to a secondary debate about how Bush feels about blacks and whether the sources of the travesty visited upon poor New Orleanians were "color blind" or racist. Beyond that, a racial critique can lead nowhere except to demands for black participation in decision-making around reconstruction. But which black people? What plans? Reconstruction on what terms? I've seen too many black- and Latino-led municipal governments and housing authorities fuel real estate speculation with tax giveaways and zoning variances, rationalizing massive displacement of poor and other working-class people with sleight-of-hand about mixed-income occupancy and appeals to the sanctity of market forces.

The only hope we have for turning back the tide of this thuggish Administration's commitment to destroy every bit of social protection that's been won in the past century lies in finding ways to build a broad movement of the vast majority of us who are not part of the investor class. We have to be clear that what happened in New Orleans is an extreme and criminally tragic coming home to roost of the con that cutting public spending makes for a better society. It is a shocking foretaste of a future that many more of us will experience less dramatically, often quietly as individuals, as we lose pensions, union protection, access to healthcare and public education, Social Security, bankruptcy and tort protection, and as we are called upon to feed an endless war machine.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051003/reed

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

A helpful distinction that I make in my own work that I think would help here is distinguishing between students’ rejection of, and antipathy toward, schooling and not education or achievement. By this, I refer to how children, esp. children of color and the poor, are objectified, treated like objects. Why should they bear the burden of change for their institutionally imposed isolation in pre-AP classes or in classes that otherwise accentuate their minority status? -Angela

Published: Oct 12, 2005
By PATRICK WINN, Staff Writer

CHAPEL HILL -- Fears of being mocked for "acting white" don't cause many black students to avoid good grades or advanced classes, according to a new study.
But too often, the study says, educators use the "acting white" excuse as a cop out, an explanation for why black students don't score as well on average as whites.

Straight-A students of all races are equally susceptible to the "geek" or "stuck-up" label, according to the report, published in August in the American Sociological Review.

"This is a society that puts social pressure on high achievers to put their halo under a rock," said William Darity, a UNC-Chapel Hill professor who helped conduct the study. "That's not unique to black kids."

With UNC-CH professor Karolyn Tyson and Duke University researcher Domini Castellino, Darity studied interviews with 120 students of different races from eight North Carolina schools.

They chose schools from urban, suburban and rural settings. Some were mostly black, some mostly white, and others roughly equal.

The labels sometimes varied. High-achievers might be called "preps" in one town and "high and mighty" in another.

But the researchers found only two black students -- both in the same school -- who feared that academic success would get them accused of "acting white."

"What kids talk about is not wanting to be called 'brainiacs,' " Darity said. "It's not as much about race ... but whether kids are seen as thinking they're better than everyone else."

Advanced classes

Though most black students interviewed were not afraid of the "acting white" insult, for some, advanced classes still brought on fear.

Fear of being overwhelmed by tough material. Fear of being the only black student in class.

Last year, Chapel Hill High School senior Al Mask was the sole black face in an Advanced Placement U.S. history course. Roughly 13 percent of the high school's students are African-American.

"Basically, black students feel alienated by that traditionally white environment," Mask said. "It's an issue of comfort. That's just human."

The "acting white" explanation, he said, is society's way of pointing fingers back at students instead of school leaders.

At Durham's Hillside High School, which is roughly 90 percent black, Principal Eunice Sanders said accusations of acting white "aren't an issue" for students.

Belonging to the school's rigorous International Baccalaureate program -- which puts students on a college-prep track -- is a source of pride, not shame, she said.

"We have kids who really jockey to be the top one in the class," Sanders said. "And there's nothing better than being known as both a good student and a good athlete."

1986 study

The "acting white" hypothesis was widely accepted by educators after a 1986 study called "Black Students' School Success: Coping with the 'Burden of Acting White,' " Darity said.

But the scientists who conducted that study, published in The Urban Review, didn't adequately back it up, Darity said, nor has anyone else.

"Our position is not that it never occurs," Darity said. "It's just that the context in which it occurs has never been looked at."


The study outlines three types of resistance to high achievement.

* A general fear of being called "dork" or "nerd" that crosses race and class boundaries.

* A race-driven "acting white" version of that fear, in which successful black students are afraid of being seen as traitors.

* A class-driven version, in which successful students fear lower-income peers will see them as "snobby."

The second version, according to the study, has "captured the sociological imagination." But it's far less common than most educators think, Darity said.

Mask, who is college-bound, agreed.

"We're not afraid of someone saying, 'He's acting white,' " Mask said. "That's not the issue. It's just a way for everyone to ignore the bigger problem."

Staff writer Patrick Winn can be reached at 932-8742 or pwinn@newsobserver.com.
© Copyright 2005, The News & Observer Publishing Company,
a subsidiary of The McClatchy Company

http://newsobserver.com/news/education/story/2815307p-9261346c.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:51 PM 2 comments Links to this post

This is one of those rare instances in which a community in Alhambra, California, actually has an in-depth discussion on the racial/ethnic test gap in their own school. The Steinberg study that is mentioned, by the way, was based on statistical survey data that included schools that I was researching in California way back when.... By design, it was limited in its capacity to address deep institutional issues surrounding race and class as implied in this account—not the least of which involves access to pre-AP classes for minority youth. -Angela

Search for solutions is born out of anger over a student newspaper piece about the Latino-Asian academic gap at Alhambra High School

By Jia-Rui Chong
Times Staff Writer

October 12, 2005

It was presented as good news.

In front of a group of student leaders at Alhambra High School, Assistant Principal Grace Love spoke in February about the school's recent gains on state tests.

Alhambra, she said, had narrowed the gap in test scores between Asian and Latino students. Overall, Latino test takers had improved their composite scores on state tests faster than any other group over the last four years.

Robin Zhou, an 18-year-old columnist for the Moor, the school newspaper, listened skeptically. He had trouble seeing any reason to celebrate.

To him, the real news in Love's statistics wasn't the small gains she was pointing out, but rather the wide gulf that still existed between Asians and Latinos.

The composite scores for Asians at Alhambra High were still far above those of Latinos. According to Love's presentation, 57% of Asian ninth-graders passed the state's English Language Arts standards test, but only 28% of Latino ninth-graders passed. It was even worse in algebra, with only 12% of Latinos passing the test as compared to 49% of Asians.

To Zhou, the data raised a question: "Why was the gap there in the first place?"

With the next round of state tests looming, Zhou decided to examine the subject in his newspaper column. He said he did so out of a desire to get people to focus on solutions. That's not what happened — at least not at first.

That there are gaps in test scores among racial and ethnic groups is an uncomfortable truth in modern day education.

The achievement gap, as racial disparities in test scores are known in education circles, exists at schools throughout the nation. It also exists across class lines.

Examining the issue requires traversing a political and cultural minefield. Every possible explanation is likely to offend, which may be why the subject rarely provokes the kind of discussion that might eventually lead to change.

Using test scores as a measure, Latino students are "not pulling their weight," the article said.

Zhou then went on to try to explain the gap. The first reason, he wrote, was largely cultural, in that Asian parents were more likely to "push their children to move toward academic success, while many Hispanic parents are well-meaning but less active."

The editors and reporters in the room crowded around co-editor-in-chief Lena Chen to read the draft. They understood that Zhou's article touched on dangerous ground; they agreed that he needed to tone down his language, even though many of them thought he had made some valid points and had thoroughly researched the subject.

"My first reaction? Robin's gonna get beat up," recalled Sara Martinez, a 16-year-old Latina, who was the only non-Asian student to read the article that day.

The paper's advisor, Mark Padilla, agreed that the story could use some qualifying. But he reminded the editors that this was a column, and therefore offered more leeway. It was important, he reminded them, for journalists not to shy away from sensitive but important subjects.

No one could accuse Zhou of that.

'Racist'

On March 22, the paper was distributed.

Anastasia Landeros, 18, was in her first period English class when a friend turned to her and asked, "Did you hear about the article about how Latinos are not pulling their weight?"

She hadn't. She got a copy and started reading.

Zhou's article seemed to suggest to her that Latinos were slackers whose parents didn't care about their children's education.

Who was this guy, she wondered. If Zhou thought Latino parents didn't push their children, he ought to come to her house and listen to her mother nag her about homework.

And how could he say Latinos weren't achieving? She was getting A's in music and drama, and B's and C's in her other classes.

For days students talked about the article, often angrily.

Some teachers tried to use it as a tool for teaching cultural sensitivity. Other teachers were simply incensed. One math teacher scrawled "racist" across the article and posted it on the blackboard.

Heading home on the day the article came out, Landeros wondered what her mother, a 45-year-old nurse and certified diabetes educator, would think.

Rosa Linda Landeros had always told her three children to be proud of their Mexican heritage and prove that stereotypes about lazy Latinos were wrong.

As soon as Linda Landeros walked through the door that evening, Anastasia handed her the school newspaper.

"Mom, you gotta read this article," she said.

'Hecho en Mexico'

In the days that followed, Zhou's friends told him that Latino students he didn't even know were talking about beating him up or pelting him with paintballs at graduation.

The dean and the principal called him in to discuss his reasons for writing the article. They reassured him that they would look out for any hint of trouble.

On March 30, those who disagreed with Zhou made a show of solidarity. Almost all the Latino students and a few white and black students wore shirts that were brown or made statements of Latino pride, including "Hecho en Mexico." Landeros wore a T-shirt with the words "Stay Brown Chicanas"

Zhou walked onto the stage that week at an assembly for an academic award. He heard boos.

"I did some soul searching as the controversy continued — whether it was right to have confronted the issue head-on like that," he said.

Different Expectations

Researchers who study the issue of racial disparities in academic performance say that even they have to be careful how they present data.

Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, and his colleagues wanted to look at factors, including race, that affected student achievement several years ago. "We were nervous about how people would react, that we'd be accused of being prejudiced," he said. "There's nothing nice you can say about this that's going to make people feel good."

Steinberg and his colleagues found that even after economics were controlled for, Asian and Asian American students performed better on tests than any other racial group. Latinos and African Americans performed the least well.

Steinberg's research further suggested that an "attitudinal profile" influenced academic success, and that Asians tended to have the most students that fit the profile.

The first variable wasn't parental involvement, as Zhou concluded, but something more subtle: parental expectation. Steinberg asked students what was the worst grade they could get without their parents getting angry. For Asian children, it was a B-plus; for Latino and African American children, it was a C.

Another factor was that Asian children in the study were more likely to associate with peers who valued high marks in school, whereas Latino and African American students were more likely to have friends who put less stock in good grades.

Steinberg found two other differences that seemed linked to success. Asian children were much more likely to attribute their grades to hard work rather than aptitude. They also were more likely to believe that doing poorly in school would harm their chances for success in life.

"If you have these four things, it doesn't matter what ethnic group you're from, you'll do well in school," Steinberg said. "It's just more common among Asian kids and less common among black and Latino kids."

Pedro Noguera, a sociologist at the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education at New York University, believes class plays more of a role than Steinberg does. He points to a mostly Asian high school in San Francisco with a high dropout rate. "They're not dropping out because they're not sufficiently Chinese, but mainly because their parents put an emphasis on work."

Noguera also suggested that Latino parents may be less adept at navigating the American school system and advocating on their children's behalf.

"It's not that they don't value education," Noguera said. "They're putting too much trust in the schools. That's a big mistake."

Noguera wasn't surprised to hear that Zhou's article created a stir. "If Asian and Latino students are not communicating with each other, or if there were already strained relations," he said, "then there was no context for a thoughtful discussion, and the article merely served as a catalyst for more conflict."

'Another Attack'

As Landeros' mother read through Zhou's column, she thought: "Here's another attack on my people. Here's another person stepping on our neck."

She knew that average test scores for Latino students at Alhambra High School were lower than average test scores for Asian students. But she hated how Latino students were hit with a constant stream of news reports about how badly they performed in school. That wasn't making things better, just lowering expectations.

Linda Landeros was proud of the letter her daughter sent to the school newspaper. It was published April 12.

"As if it weren't enough to worry about academics, the entire Latino student body apparently also has to worry about racial profiling by our school newspaper," Anastasia Landeros wrote.

"My issue is not with the 'facts' that are present, but with the facts that are missing regarding a community and a culture he apparently has no knowledge of," she wrote. The article was "inflammatory" in singling out one ethnic group based on a stereotype.

"It would be wrong to write, 'Because of Asian drivers, insurance rates in Alhambra are high,' " Anastasia wrote. "Wouldn't the article be seen as a one-sided, non-researched piece?"

Food for Thought

It was obvious that Zhou's article polarized students and parents. But it also got them thinking and talking about race, culture and achievement at Alhambra High.

Several Latino students said they were nervous when they walked into Advanced Placement classes and saw a sea of Asians. But this turned to disappointment when some teachers seemed to expect less from them.

"When we answer a question wrong, they say, 'It's OK. You're really trying hard,' " said Perla Trejo, 17. "It's like, OK, but what's the answer?" Trejo said teachers don't treat Asian students the same way in her class.

Saul Pineda, 16, said he almost quit one of his AP classes last summer because it was difficult and he felt uncomfortable. But now that the article has come out, he said, "I want to try harder."

"Mostly just to prove them wrong," Trejo added.

Russell Lee-Sung, 41, who was principal of the school at the time, says he felt torn about the turmoil Zhou's article sparked.

Lee-Sung had not only thought about the issues raised in Zhou's column, he had lived them. Lee-Sung's father, who is half Mexican, grew up poor in Texas. His mother was born in China and grew up wealthy.

In his own home, he had seen cultural differences in attitudes toward education. His father, he said, "was very encouraging about what [grades] I got. If I tried my best, that would be fine.

"My mom, on the other hand, said, 'You need to get good grades. You need to go to a good school.' If I came home with all A's and a B, she'd question me. 'What's the problem?' "

But it would be a mistake to say his father cared less about his schoolwork, Lee-Sung said. "They both valued education," he said. "They just communicated in different ways."

Lee-Sung knows the subject is difficult to discuss. "This is one of those issues in education that is so taboo to talk about," he said.

But talking about it was what he had to do in the weeks after Zhou's column. He said more than 30 parents contacted him. Some commended Zhou for bringing up a point that needed to be addressed. But most were critical of the student, the newspaper advisor and even the principal.

Lee-Sung tried to use the controversy as a teaching tool. He held several discussions with the school staff. He created an "Action Planning Committee" of parents, students, teachers and administrators.

Lee-Sung also invited students who were upset by the article to the first of several "student committee" meetings so they could meet Zhou and other newspaper staffers.

At the meeting, students had a lot of questions for Zhou: Why had he used such offensive language? Why was he stereotyping people? What business did he have talking about the Latino community when he was not Latino?

Zhou told them he was trying to be straightforward with his words. He explained that he grew up in Echo Park, with mostly Latino friends and that his baby-sitter was Latina.

Some students weren't satisfied, and one Latina student said the conversation didn't make her feel any better about the article.

But near the end of the first meeting, which lasted about an hour and a half, the students started coming up with ways to close the gap, Lee-Sung said. Their questions were trying to clarify, not accuse.

Suggestions included holding periodic student-moderated dialogues on topics including students' relationships with teachers and administrators, and cultural assemblies to discuss historical differences, not just food and dancing.

At the second meeting a few weeks later, more solutions were proposed.

The school should expand a program, which has benefited mostly Latino students, that prepares students to attend a four-year university and take some AP and honors classes. Latino students should be encouraged to join more after-school clubs and to take more AP and honors classes.

In the May 10 issue of the school newspaper, Zhou wrote a letter about what he had learned from the experience. "I realize that pointing out a disparity between two of the major student groups on campus has the potential to divide us, to turn students against classmates and neighbors against each other," he wrote.

He went on to offer "my deepest regrets to those who have been hurt," saying that "it was not my intent to make anyone feel they are inferior or unable to succeed, but rather to address an issue in desperate need of attention."

He didn't apologize for the points he made in his article.

A Lasting Change?

It remains to be seen whether the controversy will result in lasting change.

Most of the key students have graduated. Zhou left for Stanford University. Landeros is studying at East Los Angeles College. Lee-Sung accepted a job as principal of Walnut High School.

But Lee-Sung still has hope.

By the end of the school year, more Latino students had applied for AP classes, though he couldn't say how many. Students founded a chapter of the Mexican American student group MEChA. And Latino parents formed an organization to support their children.

When the state released scores from the spring 2005 standardized testing, the percentages of Latino students passing the English Language Arts exam and all but one of the math tests had improved from last year. Lee-Sung thinks the awareness spurred by Zhou's article played a role.

"I think some students who may have had the thought that nobody cares and nobody looks at these scores realized that people do look at them," he said.

"I would imagine for some students, there was a sense of pride. 'Know what? I don't want people to think this way about me, and I'll work harder on the test than in the past.' "

Linda Landeros says she and her daughter are still angry about the article. But she acknowledges that it may have spurred her daughter on as well. Near the end of the school year, Anastasia Landeros wasn't doing well in her high-school math class.

Her mother brought up Zhou's column, saying, "See, he's right in this article."

The daughter blew up, but her mother's taunt made her pull up her grade.

Zhou is philosophical about what happened. "You can't expect to write something like this without taking a few lumps," he said. But, he added, "If nothing happened, I'd be feeling even worse."

If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-me-alhambra12oct12,0,7449669,full.story

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:49 PM 0 comments Links to this post

I just came across this old piece by Janet Elliott and Salatheia Bryant titled, With scoring standards lowered, more passing TAAS. It's deja vu all over again. Doesn't this show that this system really isn't one that results in providing or seeking to provide the best possible instruction that we can to children? Shouldn't we be able to see through all of this to see that this is really harmful to children and anti-democratic? The problems as shown across the two pieces reveal themselves to be deeply systemic rather than idiosyncratic, reducible to a peculiar problem particular to a specific district. Remedy? Fundamental overhaul beginning with an honest discussion in our country over fundamental aims behind public schooling and just as importantly, who controls (or should control) our public schools. -Angela

October 5, 2005
One Secret to Better Test Scores: Make State Reading Tests Easier

By MICHAEL WINERIP
PARENTS are delighted when state test scores go up. Obviously, their children are getting smarter and the teachers are doing better. Politicians are ecstatic; their school reforms must be working. Indeed, during his re-election campaign, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has repeatedly cited the rise in the city's 2005 fourth-grade test results (up 10 percentage points in English to 59 percent at grade level, and up 9 points in math to 77 percent) as proof that his school programs are a success. "Amazing results," he said, that "should put a smile on the face of everybody in the city."

However, those in the trenches, the teachers and principals, tend to view the scores differently. While they would rather be cheered than booed, they know how much is out of their control.

Take Frances Rosenstein, a respected veteran principal of Public School 159 in the Bronx. Ms. Rosenstein has every right to brag about her school's 2005 test scores. The percentage of her fourth graders who were at grade level in English was 40 points higher than in 2004.

How did she do it? New teachers? No, same teachers. New curriculum? No, same dual-language curriculum for a student body that is 96 percent Hispanic and poor (100 percent free lunches). New resources? Same.

So? "The state test was easier," she said. Ms. Rosenstein, who has been principal 13 years and began teaching in 1974, says the 2005 state English test was unusually easy and the 2004 test unusually hard. "I knew it the minute I opened the test booklets," she said.

The first reading excerpt in the 2004 test was 451 words. It was about a family traveling west on the Oregon Trail. There were six characters to keep track of (Levi, Austin, Pa, Mr. Morrison, Miss Amelia, Mr. Ezra Zikes). The story was written in 1850's western vernacular with phrases like "I reckon," "cut out the oxen from the herd," "check over the running gear" for the oxen, "set the stock to graze," "Pa's claim."

Ms. Rosenstein said such language was devastating for her urban Hispanic children. "They're talking about a 'train' and they mean wagon train," she said. "Our kids know the subway. I walked into a class and there was a girl crying. I took the test booklet and read it. I thought, 'Oh, my God, we're in trouble.' "

In contrast, the first reading in the 2005 test was 188 words about a day in the life of an otter. A typical sentence: "The river otter is a great swimmer." Ms. Rosenstein said: "The otter story was so easy, it gave our kids confidence. It was a great way for them to start the test."

She said the pattern continued throughout the two tests. In 2004, on the "hard test," the second passage was about the Netherlands thanking Canada for its support during World War II by sending 100,000 tulip bulbs to Ottawa. The third story was about a photographer, Joel Sartore, who embedded himself in Madidi National Park in Bolivia to get rare nature shots.

"These were very sophisticated pieces," Ms. Rosenstein said. "We teach our kids when reading to make a connection to themselves. These stories were foreign to their experience. You didn't have anything like this on the 2005 test."

In 2005, on the "easy test," the second passage was about hummingbirds. The third was about a boy who thought he won a real horse, but it was a china horse. The story was told mainly in dialogue that read like the old Dick and Jane primers:

" 'What's going on?' asked Beth.

'I just won a horse,' said Jamie."

"What a difference from the 2004 test," Ms. Rosenstein said. "I was so happy for the kids - they felt good after they took the 2005 test."

In an e-mail message, Jonathan Burman, a state education spokesman, said there was no cultural bias on the 2004 test. He said the 2004 and 2005 tests were extensively field-tested. "We found that the passages could be understood by all students, including urban students," he wrote.

He acknowledged that the 2004 test was harder but said the state compensated by using a tougher scale to score the 2005 test. "Students had to answer a few more questions correctly in 2005 and get more raw points in order to get the same scaled score as in 2004," he said. But even if the 2005 test was scaled, scores still soared statewide, with 70.4 percent at grade level, up 8.2 percentage points from 2004 and with several cities - Yonkers, Syracuse, Rochester - posting increases even higher than New York City's.

Ms. Rosenstein does not believe the scaling made the two tests equivalent. "If a child can't follow the passages, a few points won't make a difference," she said. "They give up."

P.S. 159 has just 242 students from kindergarten to fifth, with 28 fourth graders taking the state test in a typical year. As a result, the performance of a handful of students can cause a big scoring swing. P.S. 159's test results followed the ups and downs statewide; they're just amplified. For example, on the 2004 "hard test," 62.2 percent of students statewide scored at grade level, down 2 points from 2003. At P.S. 159, 17.9 percent were at grade level, down 46 points from 2003.

BUT at a small school it's easier to examine the variables at play. For example, all three years, as scores fluctuated, Yehonela Ortiz taught fourth grade. Her principal called her an outstanding teacher, a nine-year veteran who is bilingual.

Ms. Ortiz said she could not take credit for the big jump this year nor the blame for last year's big drop. "So many things go into it," she said. "They've had a lot of teachers since pre-K. I feel it's a collaboration of all the many teachers since."

A few years ago, 64 percent of her fourth graders scored at grade level in English, her best results. "It wasn't me," she said. It was a class that happened to have a large number of Hispanic parents speaking English at home. "They came to me more academic. I don't think it was anything we did."

She said that there were yearly fluctuations, but that test scores would generally rise over time because the state has been using the same format for seven years.

"We know the test now," Ms. Ortiz said. "We start preparing them in September. When I go through a lesson, I always connect it to what's in the exam. We know there's always letter-writing, so we give more of that. We know there's nonfiction, so we make sure we do it before the test." When she gives a writing assignment, she now sets a timer for 10 minutes, to simulate testing conditions.

Does it mean students are getting smarter and teachers better?

"I don't know," said Ms. Ortiz.

E-mail: edmike@nytimes.com

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:55 PM 1 comments Links to this post

This is a thoughtful piece that comments on the present moment and where Mexicans and Latin Americans, generally—all descendents of a corn-based culture—find themselves. Unfortunately, it is a time period of harsh, anti-immigrant sentiments where they're being scapegoated for all manner of reasons. There's a deeper story of the corn, by the way, and how agribusinesses (corporate botanists and engineers) in Mexico are genetically re-engineering corn, resulting in an altering and ultimately loss of the original seeds and thusly, tastes and associated health that native people have enjoyed for centuries.

Another thought, I don't think I'm wrong about this, but I saw so little coverage on the English-speaking channels this past week on the massive flooding in Chiapas, Quintana Roo (2 states in Mexico), and the area of Mexico that borders Guatemala this past week as a result of Hurricane Stan. These aren't remote islands on the South Pacific. This is our neighboring country with whom we have amazingly strong and historic ties. I can't help but feel that this reaction by the press is related to what Rodriguez and Gonzales offer below. -Angela

COLUMN OF THE AMERICAS
By Roberto Rodriguez & Patrisia Gonzales
RELEASE DATE: October 10, 2005

Not long ago, a reader commented that as a result of our research regarding origins & migrations, that we had gone in search of Aztlan and instead found a cornfield.

We did find a cornfield… and the ants of Quetzalcoatl - from where our sacred maize comes from.

The truth is, we never actually went looking for Aztlan -- the purported homeland of the Aztec/Mexica. What we did was research a map that indicated that the Aztecs had once lived north of the Hopi and that the Hopi had never surrendered their sovereignty. We've previously detailed this collaborative and groundbreaking research that involves historic maps, chronicles, codices and oral traditions - all speaking to the entire continent, not just one corner of the United States.

The context was California's post-Proposition 187 era in which the nation's anti-immigrant fervor coalesced into not simply xenophobic legislation, but a rabid fear and hatred of immigrants… particularly against Mexicans and Central Americans (South Americans and peoples from the Caribbean also).

Ten years later, that fear and hatred has not simply been exported nationwide, but post-911, it has now been conflated with terrorism.

It's difficult to fathom that the atmosphere nationwide could have gotten worse - yet with the rise of the anti-immigrant Minuteman movement -- it has. Also, as a result of deteriorating economic and political conditions caused by the ill-conceived Iraqi war, the administration's tilt to the rich, and its disastrous response to Katrina - all point to an even more and forthcoming virulent anti-immigrant movement.

The attitude seems to be: If we could only wall the border and drive out the Mexicans, all the nation's problems would be solved and we'd win the war against terrorism also. And if they would just assimilate and learn English…

And a new twist: The Blacks had to fight for their rights. Why should illegal immigrants be handed everything on a silver platter?

The rantings of extremists? Not uniquely so. It's actually part of mainstream discourse in which immigrants now equal a threat to the U.S. middle class. Fear and scapegoating are fast becoming the national pastime, though the notion that anti-immigrants are not really anti-immigrant does indeed have some merit. Hispanics - like Cameron Diaz and Daisy Fuentes -- don't bother them. Of course not. It's the dark, ominous Mexicans and Central Americans that do -- the ones that have at least a 7,000 year-old corn-based culture and perhaps a 40,000 year-presence on this continent. Why? No doubt they are seen as inassimilable mongrels or as Indians attempting to reclaim the continent.

No, they say. They simply want the nation's laws enforced, even if it means erecting impregnable walls, Gestapo raids, internal checkpoints, national ID cards and racial profiling.

The problem of immigration can easily be fixed (through an agreement), though keeping migrants in states of criminality or modern slavery is not a solution. Despite this, and despite the death of several thousand migrants in the desert, there will always be politicians who cater to peoples' basest instincts.

And thanks to Katrina, racism against African Americans is also back [in the spotlight]. As such, conservative William Bennett feels he can openly claim that aborting all Black babies would reduce crime, this while Republicans can claim that New Orleans will cease being as Black as it was. Couple that with the never-ending attempts to de-indigenize the continent and this is our new poisoned atmosphere in which we're all also pitted against each other.

The reason we conducted our research is not because of a fascination with historic maps, but because our humanity and our existence continue to be questioned.

… And about that ancient cornfield - the corn, beans, squash and the chile found throughout the continent -- indeed proves both the indigeneity of Mexicans/Central Americans and the continued centrality of that indigenous diet to their daily lives. Despite this, we've also encountered the attitude that because many of us are mixed (what peoples aren't?) or because our indigenous cultures were forcibly taken from us, that we're no longer truly indigenous. Translated, this means that colonization is purportedly irreversible, that we are “bastards,” and that the continent has ceased being indigenous. Not quite.

The collective findings of our recently completed Amoxtli San Ce Tojuan documentary show that indigenous peoples on the continent continue to be connected by language (particularly Uto-Nahuatl peoples), stories, trade, food, medicines and spiritual traditions. And they - we - are connected because we choose to be connected, not just to the continent and its peoples, but to all humanity. Most importantly, the accompanying values -- and way of life -- that teach us that all life is sacred is what makes us most human.

© 2005 Column of the Americas

http://hometown.aol.com/xcolumn/myhomepage/

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:35 PM 1 comments Links to this post

This is an excellent analysis of the Houston dropout scandal. I can't see either why a data-tech person would change the numbers on his own. What would have been HIS investment in the system in doing so??? It strikes me as quite untenable that he would have done this when HE'S not the one who's accountability in this system. In any case, he appears to be in deep trouble, particularly in the absence of a paper trail. No, he shouldn't have cheated, by neither should he be the fall guy, paying for the sins not only of his superiors, but also of a system that creates perverse incentives to cheat, genreally.

-Angela

Oct. 8, 2005, 7:29PM
by RICK CASEY / Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

I guess we should be glad the district attorney's office persuaded a grand jury to indict Ken Cuadra on Friday.

He's the clerk at Sharpstown High School who is alleged to have doctored records to indicate that the school had no dropouts.

If he did the crime, he should do the time, right?

And it's good, I suppose, to make an example of a public employee who cheats in order to keep others from doing it.

Maybe he deserves a felony on his record and up to 10 years in prison, as the law provides.

Still, if voters were ever foolish enough to elect me district attorney, I don't think I would have sought this indictment.

Even if the evidence were overwhelming that he did it.

I was unable Friday to reach either Terese Buess, the special crimes prosecutor who presented the case to the grand jury, or her boss, DA Chuck Rosenthal.

Maybe they have their reasons for seeking the indictment shortly before the three-year statute of limitations runs out.

Here's why, absent any more information, I wouldn't.

I can't figure out why Cuadra would doctor the records unless one of his bosses wanted him to.

Bosses got credit

A lowly bank clerk might make funny numbers to embezzle money.

But Cuadra was a computer-network technician at a school. If he went into the computer and made dropouts disappear — and there's considerable evidence he did — it's not like it put money in his pocket.

He didn't even get credit for improving the school's performance any more than the janitors or cafeteria workers.

It was teachers and administrators who got the credit. Administrators had bonuses tied to such matters, although the dropout rate was just one of a large number of factors, 14 for the principal, for example.

Cuadra's bosses received no bonuses that year. The school, filled with low-income students, did not meet enough criteria.

According to a report by the prominent law firm Rusty Hardin & Associates, which was hired by the school district to investigate the matter, Cuadra had told a varying succession of stories to different people.

'You are great!'

On the advice of his lawyer, Cuadra did not talk to Hardin's staff. Anything he said to them could be turned over to prosecutors (as their report eventually was), and they could not offer him immunity or any other deal as a prosecutor could.
Cuadra has said he was asked to cook the books on dropouts by his superiors, but Hardin's staff could find no evidence of it.

If they told him to do it only in verbal instructions with no witnesses present, which is quite possible, then Texas law makes it impossible to convict the superiors of the crime.

Unlike laws of the federal government and many states, Texas law says if two people are involved in a crime, you can't convict one solely on the testimony of the other.

So unless Cuadra had e-mail or other documents showing he was told to alter the records, he had nothing to offer the district attorney.

There are, however, plenty of e-mail messages and documents showing the pleasure of his superiors at the patently unrealistic numbers Cuadra was producing.

One example: On Oct. 25, 2000, Cuadra sent a dropout roster to two bosses showing only three dropouts. One of them returned the memo with a note: "You are great!"

By 2002, Cuadra made dropouts disappear altogether, going from 30 on Oct. 22 to zero on Oct. 23. The number is so ridiculous that it raised flags both among faculty and in the HISD central office. Yet his bosses made no serious inquiry.

They might as well have been told that all their students had made perfect scores on TAKS and figured that the Genius Fairy had visited all the kids.

The sober Hardin report concluded that "it was completely unrealistic to believe the high school had no dropouts to report for the 2001-02 year."

The report went on: "Despite their doubts regarding the accuracy of the dropout information, none of the administrators did anything to confirm for themselves that the data transmission to the Texas Education Agency was supported by research and proper documentation. None of the administrators did anything to stop it."

So at the very least, Cuadra worked in a leadership culture that more than tacitly celebrated the unreality he is alleged to have created.

Some of his superiors were punished, as was Cuadra. He was docked two weeks' pay and reprimanded. He was publicly humiliated, and he resigned.

Now, three years after the action and two years after the controversy erupted, he and only he is indicted.

The district attorney's office certainly has the power to do that. But should they?

Based on what we know, I say if they can't indict the higher-ups, leave the disgraced underling be.

You can write to Rick Casey at P.O. Box 4260, Houston, TX 77210, or e-mail him at rick.casey@chron.com.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/casey/3387551

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:59 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Read the Rick Casey analysis (next post) for his view on how unjust this indictment is. I happen to agree with him as well. -Angela

Oct. 8, 2005

Former HISD employee indicted over dropout flap
Prosecutors say computer records link him to the falsified data
By SALATHEIA BRYANT
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

A Harris County grand jury indicted a former Sharpstown High School computer
network specialist Friday on a charge of tampering with a governmental
record so that it would appear the school had no dropouts during the 2001-02
year.

Kenneth Cuadra, who resigned from the Houston Independent School District in
August 2004, faces a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in
prison and a $10,000 fine.

It is likely the first-ever indictment of a public school staff member
accused of criminal misconduct relating to dropout reporting, a spokeswoman
for the Texas Education Agency said.

"This should close the books on the whole episode," DeEtta Culbertson said.
"Houston ISD took steps to tighten up their data reporting. That was a good
thing."

Chris Tritico, Cuadra's attorney, said the criminal charge was the result of
shoddy investigative work forwarded to the district attorney's office by
HISD, not misconduct on the part of his client.

The charge against Cuadra comes three years after widespread problems were
uncovered with how the state's largest school district accounted for
students who left school.

The underreporting of dropout data brought national scrutiny to Texas'
system of grading schools and to HISD's highly acclaimed educational gains
under former Superintendent Rod Paige.

The state had routinely used dropout statistics to rank high schools. Those
results, in turn, were used by many district officials to dole out
performance bonuses to administrators. The state now looks at graduation
rates — rather than dropout rates — to determine how a high school should
rank.

No motive established

In making her case to the grand jury, Assistant District Attorney Terese
Buess, of the Public Integrity Division, said evidence showed that Cuadra's
computer identification number was used on or about Oct. 22, 2002, to change
the school's dropout numbers from 30 to zero.

She declined to speculate on why Cuadra made the changes, since no motive
was established. She added that she didn't have to prove a motive to support
an indictment.

Buess said there wasn't enough evidence to support charges against any other
school administrators, even though several others were implicated in the
scandal at the time. Principal Carol Wichmann lost two weeks' pay from her
retirement benefits, and the school's three assistant principals, Robert
Kimball, Marmion Dambrino and Andrew Monzon, were reassigned and received
letters of reprimand.

Kimball, however, later filed a lawsuit accusing HISD of retaliating against
him for questioning the district's handling of the scandal. In a settlement
last year, HISD paid Kimball $90,000 and withdrew the reprimand. Kimball
also sent letters to Harris County prosecutors in 2003 asking for a criminal
investigation.

On Friday, Buess did not rule out future indictments should evidence warrant
them, but said: "There was evidence only on Mr. Cuadra."

"That information goes to Austin, and decisions are made based on that
information," Buess said. "My office is going to continue to investigate
every shred of information."

An independent investigation funded by HISD in 2003 found that Sharpstown
administrators fostered a climate that tolerated unrealistic dropout numbers
and encouraged Cuadra to alter records. HISD later turned that report over
to Harris County prosecutors.

The state's investigation reached a similar conclusion, and prompted the TEA
to strip HISD of its "acceptable" accountability rating amid doubts about
the accuracy of dropout figures at high schools districtwide.

The TEA restored HISD's rating a year ago, after determining HISD had
cleaned up its data-reporting practices. Twelve high schools, including
Sharpstown, and two middle schools with flawed dropout numbers were forced
to keep their "low performing" ratings.

Tritico said he and his client were disappointed by the indictment.

"He's dismayed about the indictment," he said. "This is such a sad turn of
events after all this time — now he has to put his life on hold and battle
HISD."

Cuadra did not want to comment, Tritico said, and he added that: "We look
forward to 12 citizens of Harris County looking at the facts."

Reactions mixed

HISD officials declined to comment on the indictment beyond a one-page
written statement that included: "HISD dealt effectively with the Sharpstown
issue and also used the experience to improve the way it tracks and prevents
dropouts."

Karla Cisneros, one of nine school board trustees, said she thinks the
district acted "appropriately" in its handling of the dropout investigation.

Three other trustees did not return calls seeking comment by early Friday
evening.

Kimball, however, an outspoken critic of the district's handling of
Sharpstown, questioned why the criminal investigation hasn't gone farther.

"It makes me angry. There's a lot more people who should be indicted," said
Kimball, who teaches at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. "They're going
after the one that's the easiest to prove. I'm very disappointed people in
higher leadership weren't indicted."

salatheia.bryant@chron.com

RESOURCES
A LOOK BACK AT SHARPSTOWN

Key events in the dropout reporting scandal uncovered in 2003:
• February 2003: Reports surface that Sharpstown High School administrators
knew dropout information provided to the Texas Education Agency was false.

• March 2003: The Houston Independent School District disciplines Robert
Kimball and Kenneth Cuadra while it investigates the dropout reports.

• August 2003: An investigation by Rusty Hardin and Associates determines,
as did an earlier HISD investigation, that Cuadra changed the dropout
records in a school computer. Documents are turned over to the Harris County
District Attorney's office.

• June 2004: HISD agrees to pay $90,000 to settle the whistle-blower lawsuit
of former Sharpstown Assistant Principal Robert Kimball. He accused school
officials of retaliating against him for pointing out the falsely reported
numbers.

• October 2004: HISD agrees to spend $435,000 to hire 10 dropout-prevention
specialists as part of a push to keep students in school.

• Oct. 7, 2005: A Harris County grand jury indicts Kenneth Cuadra, a former
computer technician at Sharpstown, on a charge of falsifying government
computer records so that it appeared the school had no dropouts in 2001-02.
The second-degree felony is punishable by two to 20 years in prison and up
to a $10,000 fine.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:23 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Wanted to let you know about this report. It’s a good companion to the Kozol and Berliner pieces that I've posted on this blog. Also, I've been getting a lot of spam but I think that all of this has been fixed.

Personally, I've been thinking a lot lately about poverty and race with the Katrina disaster and the re-integration and continuing segregation of New Orleans' schools. Segregation as an issue probably has more currency now than pre-Katrina and the authoritative source(s) on this is the work put out by the Harvard Civil Rights Project. You can download this full report and many other excellent ones at the HCRP website.

I'll be looking to post pieces of that sort.

-Angela

January 16, 2005


By Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee

RESEARCH
Dropouts in America

On December 7, 2004, CRP published a new book entitled Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis. This book provides information essential to stemming the dangerously large numbers of students--
disproportionately poor and minority--who flee our nation's schools before obtaining high school diplomas.

Introduction
Much of the discussion about school reform in the U.S. in the past two decades has been about racial inequality. President Bush has promised that the No Child Left Behind Act and the forthcoming expansion of high stakes testing to high schools can end the “soft racism of low expectations.” Yet a disproportionate number of the schools being officially labeled as persistent failures and facing sanctions under this program are segregated minority schools. Large city school systems are engaged in massive efforts to break large segregated high poverty high schools into small schools, hoping that it will create a setting better able to reduce inequality, while others claim that market forces operating through charter schools and private schools could end racial inequalities even though both of these are even more segregated than public schools and there is no convincing evidence for either of these claims. More and more of the still standing court orders and plans for desegregated schools are being terminated or challenged in court, and the leaders of the small number of high achieving segregated schools in each big city or state are celebrated. The existence of these schools is being used to claim that we can have general educational success within the existing context of deepening segregation. Clearly the basic assumption is that separate schools can be made equal and that we need not worry about the abandonment of the movement for integration whose history was celebrated so extensively last year on the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision even as the schools continued to resegregate. There has been a continuous pattern of deepening segregation for black and Latino students now since the 1980s.

What if this basic assumption is wrong? What if the Supreme Court was correct a half century ago in its conclusion that segregated schools were “inherently unequal”? What if Martin Luther King’s many statements about how segregation harms both the segregator and the segregated, drastically limits opportunity, and does not provide the basis for building a successful interracial society are correct? What if the Supreme Court’s sweeping conclusion in the 2003 University of Michigan case that there is compelling evidence that diversity improves the education of all students is true and applies with even greater force to public schools?

If, however, it is wrong to assume that segregation is irrelevant and policies that ignore that fact simply punish the victims of segregation because they fail to take into account many of the causes of the inequality, then current policy is being built on the foundation that it cannot produce the desired results and may even compound the existing inequalities. We believe this to be true. Segregated schools are unequal and there is very little evidence of any success in creating “separate but equal” outcomes on a large scale.

One of the common misconceptions over the issue of resegregation of schools is that many people treat it as simply a change in the skin color of the students in a school. If skin color were not systematically linked to other forms of inequality, it would, of course, be of little significance for educational policy. Unfortunately that is not and never has been the nature of our society. Socioeconomic segregation is a stubborn, multidimensional and deeply important cause of educational inequality. U.S. schools are now 41 percent nonwhite and the great majority of the nonwhite students attend schools which now show substantial segregation. Levels of segregation for black and Latino students have been steadily increasing since the l980s, as we have shown in a series of reports. Achievement scores are strongly linked to school racial composition and so is the presence of highly qualified and experienced teachers. The nation’s shockingly high dropout problem is squarely concentrated in heavily minority high schools in big cities. The high level of poverty among children, together with many housing policies and practices which excludes poor people from most communities, mean that students in inner city schools face isolation not only from the white community but also from middle class schools. Minority children are far more likely than whites to grow up in persistent poverty. Since few whites have direct experience with concentrated poverty schools, it is very important to examine research about its effects.

Evidence of the Multidimensional Nature of Segregation in Education

Race is deeply and systematically linked to many forms of inequality in background, treatment, expectations and opportunities. From an educational perspective, perhaps the most important of those linkages is with the level of concentrated poverty in a school. These differences start at an early age. A comprehensive federal study of children across the country entering kindergarten shows very large differences in the acquisition of skills invaluable for school success long before the children ever enter a schoolhouse. Schools where almost all of the students come with these problems obviously face very different challenges than schools where some of the kindergarteners come better prepared.

Our study of metro Boston shows a strong relationship between segregation by race and poverty and teacher quality, test scores and dropout rates. In the entire metro region, 97 percent of the schools with less than a tenth white students face concentrated poverty compared to 1 percent of the schools with less than a tenth minority students. These differences were strongly related to the results on the high stakes MCAS state examinations.

The nation’s dropout problem is concentrated in segregated high poverty schools. In our new book, Dropouts in America, we report that half of the nation’s African American and Latino students are dropping out of high school. The most severe problems are in segregated high poverty schools. For the high school class of 2002 almost a third of the high schools that were more than 50 percent minority graduated less than half of their class. Among schools that were 90 percent or more white, only one school in fifty had this kind of record. Half of the majority-minority schools had dropout rates over 40 percent as did two-thirds of the schools with less than a tenth white students. Nationally the gap in graduation rates between districts with high and low proportions of low income students was 18.4 percent in 2001, even higher than the gap between majority white and majority-minority districts.

Richard Rothstein’s important 2004 book, Class and Schools, reviews a wide array of studies that have shown for decades strong links between individual poverty, school poverty, race and educational inequality. Studies show that poverty is strongly related to everything from the child’s physical development to the family’s ability to stay in a neighborhood long enough so that a school might have an effect on the student. His analysis suggests that we tend to provide weaker education in highly impoverished schools and that the major claims about successful reforms in these schools are wrong. He argues that it is unrealistic to expect to change schools in any deep way without dealing with some of the issues that arise with poverty.

Further, a major 2005 report from the University of North Carolina explored the increasing concentration of poverty in metropolitan Charlotte following the end of desegregation. By the 2004-2005 school year, more than a fifth of the metropolitan district’s schools had poverty levels over 75 percent. Many studies over four decades have found a strong relationship between concentrated school poverty and low achievement. The study found that between 2003 and 2004 the largest achievement test score gains were reported by low income students attending middle income schools. These students gained 10 points on the test compared to just 4 points for similarly low income students in high poverty schools; 82 percent of poor children in middle class schools were at grade level compared to 64 percent of poor children in concentrated poverty schools. The high poverty schools were performing much worse than schools in nearby Wake County (metro Raleigh) which had socio-economic desegregation to end poverty concentrations.

High poverty schools also tend to have a less stable and less qualified teaching staff. A 2004 U.S. Department of Education report showed that in schools where “at least 75 percent of the students were low-income, there were three times as many uncertified or out-of-field teachers in both English and science…” Teachers tend to become more effective with experience, and building an effective team in a school takes years of collaboration. In Charlotte’s highest poverty schools, almost a third of the teachers left each year. The North Carolina study recommended that the school district limit the number of high poverty schools and use districting and choice policies to create economically diverse schools.

A 2004 study by researchers at the University of Miami and the University of South Florida explored the relationship between segregation, integration and success of students in passing the state’s demanding high stakes tests. Florida is one of the states that achieved the greatest increase in desegregation in the l970s and has been losing those gains ever since. After controlling for other possible factors such as expenditures, poverty levels, teaching quality, class size, and mobility of students, the study showed that segregation was clearly related to lower pass rates on the state test for black students in racially isolated schools and that black students in integrated schools did about as well as the rare black students in overwhelmingly white schools. The authors concluded that segregated schools can be viewed as institutions of concentrated disadvantage and that policies “that attempt to resolve the achievement gap by funding equity or classroom size changes” would probably fail if the segregation issue were not addressed.

These and many other inequalities do not mean that racial or socioeconomic integration is a magic bullet that can cure all the inequalities rooted in the broader society, but they clearly suggest that it is foolish to ignore the damage of segregation and to accept policy changes that may make it worse. Those who argue that because there are segregated schools that succeed we need not worry about segregation are engaged in a fallacy of using exceptions to the rule to prove a relationship.

Martin Luther King understood the nature of racial inequality and campaigned against segregation, discrimination and poverty. Dr. King died more than a third of a century ago and with his death the civil rights movement lost its central voice and focus and faced a strengthening movement toward preservation of the status quo. With the passage of time and changing political leadership we have seen sweeping policy reversals, rising segregation, especially in the South and West, and a loss of understanding of the reasons for Dr. King’s crusades against racial separation. Certainly there was nothing about Dr. King that held that black institutions were bad—he was the proud pastor of an overwhelmingly black church of great influence and power and a proud graduate of the preeminent black college for men, Morehouse in Atlanta. Segregation was evil in his mind not because of skin color but because it almost always led to unequal opportunities, given the realities of American society, and because it produced both ignorance and damaging racial stereotypes in the minds of both the segregated and the segregators. Segregation was a basic structure that subordinated and limited opportunities for nonwhite children. Dr. King advocated not only plans that brought minority children into previously segregated white schools but much deeper transformations in which segregated schools became truly integrated with equal treatment and respect for all groups of students.

Segregation was never just a black-white problem, never just a Southern problem, or never just a racial problem, but in the initial struggle in the South of the mid-twentieth century that was clearly the focus. By the time Dr. King organized his last movement, the Poor Peoples Campaign, his approach was clearly multiracial, with a deepening emphasis on poverty as well as racial discrimination. Speaking ten days before he died, King spoke of his conviction that it was “absolutely necessary now to deal massively and militantly with the economic problem…. So the grave problem facing us is the problem of economic deprivation, with the syndrome of bad housing and poor education and improper health facilities all surrounding this basic problem.” Had he not been assassinated shortly before that movement came to Washington, perhaps the link between racial and economic isolation would be better understood as would the profound impact of double segregation (often triple segregation for immigrant children who are also isolated by language in their schools.)

The civil rights movement was never about sitting next to whites, it was about equalizing opportunity. If high poverty schools are systematically unequal and segregated minority schools are almost always high poverty schools, it is much easier to understand both the consequences of segregation and the conditions that create the possibility of substantial gains in desegregated classes. At a time when the racial achievement gaps remain substantial and desegregation orders are being challenged, it is particularly important to understand the pattern that is developing and to think seriously about how to address it.

This report examines the changing nature of segregation and integration in a society that has now become far more profoundly multiracial than it was in the past and explores some of the connections between segregation by race, segregation by poverty, and unequal opportunity. It has several basic goals—to help people understand some of the mechanisms of educational inequality by looking at segregation of schools and students by poverty, discussing the massive research literature showing the ways in which high poverty schools are systematically unequal, and then exploring the racial consequences of the fact that concentrated poverty schools have a vastly larger impact on black and Latino students than on their white and Asian counterparts. Another basic goal of the paper is to show how different relationships between race and poverty in differing parts of a nation in rapid demographic transition challenges the traditional black-white description of segregation. Unlike our earlier studies, this one gives central attention to the issue of segregation by poverty and shows how it relates to racial inequality.

To view the COMPLETE REPORT and study conducted by The Civil Rights Project go to:

Why Segregation Matters: Poverty and Educational Inequality (in PDF Format)

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:10 PM 0 comments Links to this post

I've mentioned this piece but haven't posted it. It's a powerful piece on poverty by Jonathan Kozol. -Angela

JONATHAN KOZOL / Harper's Magazine v.311, n.1864 1sep2005

Many Americans who live far from our major cities and who have no firsthand knowledge of the realities to be found in urban public schools seem to have the rather vague and general impression that the great extremes of racial isolation that were matters of grave national significance some thirty-five or forty years ago have gradually but steadily diminished in more recent years. The truth, unhappily, is that the trend, for well over a decade now, has been precisely the reverse. Schools that were already deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less segregated now, while thousands of other schools around the country that had been integrated either voluntarily or by the force of law have since been rapidly resegregating.

In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.

Even these statistics, as stark as they are, cannot begin to convey how deeply isolated children in the poorest and most segregated sections of these cities have become. In the typically colossal high schools of the Bronx, for instance, more than 90 percent of students (in most cases, more than 95 percent) are black or Hispanic. At John F. Kennedy High School in 2003, 93 percent of the enrollment of more than 4,000 students were black and Hispanic; only 3.5 percent of students at the school were white. At Harry S. Truman High School, black and Hispanic students represented 96 percent of the enrollment of 2,700 students; 2 percent were white. At Adlai Stevenson High School, which enrolls 3,400 students, blacks and Hispanics made up 97 percent of the student population; a mere eight tenths of one percent were white.

A teacher at P.S. 65 in the South Bronx once pointed out to me one of the two white children I had ever seen there. His presence in her class was something of a wonderment to the teacher and to the other pupils. I asked how many white kids she had taught in the South Bronx in her career. "I've been at this school for eighteen years," she said. "This is the first white student I have ever taught."

One of the most disheartening experiences for those who grew up in the years when Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall were alive is to visit public schools today that bear their names, or names of other honored leaders of the integration struggles that produced the temporary progress that took place in the three decades after Brown v. Board of Education, and to find out how many of these schools are bastions of contemporary segregation. It is even more disheartening when schools like these are not in deeply segregated inner-city neighborhoods but in racially mixed areas where the integration of a public school would seem to be most natural, and where, indeed, it takes a conscious effort on the part of parents or school officials in these districts to avoid the integration option that is often right at their front door.

In a Seattle neighborhood that I visited in 2002, for instance, where approximately half the families were Caucasian, 95 percent of students at the Thurgood Marshall Elementary School were black, Hispanic, Native American, or of Asian origin. An African-American teacher at the school told me—not with bitterness but wistfully—of seeing clusters of white parents and their children each morning on the corner of a street close to the school, waiting for a bus that took the children to a predominantly white school.

"At Thurgood Marshall," according to a big wall poster in the school's lobby, "the dream is alive." But school-assignment practices and federal court decisions that have countermanded long-established policies that previously fostered integration in Seattle's schools make the realization of the dream identified with Justice Marshall all but unattainable today. In San Diego there is a school that bears the name of Rosa Parks in which 86 percent of students are black and Hispanic and only some 2 percent are white. In Los Angeles there is a school that bears the name of Dr. King that is 99 percent black and Hispanic, and another in Milwaukee in which black and Hispanic children also make up 99 percent of the enrollment. There is a high school in Cleveland that is named for Dr. King in which black students make up 97 percent of the student body, and the graduation rate is only 35 percent. In Philadelphia, 98 percent of children at a high school named for Dr. King are black. At a middle school named for Dr. King in Boston, black and Hispanic children make up 98 percent of the enrollment.

In New York City there is a primary school named for Langston Hughes (99 percent black and Hispanic), a middle school named for Jackie Robinson (96 percent black and Hispanic), and a high school named for Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the great heroes of the integration movement in the South, in which 98 percent of students are black or Hispanic. In Harlem there is yet another segregated Thurgood Marshall School (also 98 percent black and Hispanic), and in the South Bronx dozens of children I have known went to a segregated middle school named in honor of Paul Robeson in which less than half of one percent of the enrollment was Caucasian.

There is a well-known high school named for Martin Luther King Jr. in New York City too. This school, which I've visited repeatedly in recent years, is located in an upper-middle-class white neighborhood, where it was built in the belief—or hope—that it would draw large numbers of white students by permitting them to walk to school, while only their black and Hispanic classmates would be asked to ride the bus or come by train. When the school was opened in 1975, less than a block from Lincoln Center in Manhattan, "it was seen," according to the New York Times, "as a promising effort to integrate white, black and Hispanic students in a thriving neighborhood that held one of the city's cultural gems." Even from the start, however, parents in the neighborhood showed great reluctance to permit their children to enroll at Martin Luther King, and, despite "its prime location and its name, which itself creates the highest of expectations," notes the Times, the school before long came to be a destination for black and Hispanic students who could not obtain admission into more successful schools. It stands today as one of the nation's most visible and problematic symbols of an expectation rapidly receding and a legacy substantially betrayed.

 

Perhaps most damaging to any serious effort to address racial segregation openly is the refusal of most of the major arbiters of culture in our northern cities to confront or even clearly name an obvious reality they would have castigated with a passionate determination in another section of the nation fifty years before—and which, moreover, they still castigate today in retrospective writings that assign it to a comfortably distant and allegedly concluded era of the past. There is, indeed, a seemingly agreed-upon convention in much of the media today not even to use an accurate descriptor like "racial segregation" in a narrative description of a segregated school. Linguistic sweeteners, semantic somersaults, and surrogate vocabularies are repeatedly employed. Schools in which as few as 3 or 4 percent of students may be white or Southeast Asian or of Middle Eastern origin, for instance—and where every other child in the building is black or Hispanic—are referred to as "diverse." Visitors to schools like these discover quickly the eviscerated meaning of the word, which is no longer a proper adjective but a euphemism for a plainer word that has apparently become unspeakable.

School systems themselves repeatedly employ this euphemism in describing the composition of their student populations. In a school I visited in the fall of 2004 in Kansas City, Missouri, for example, a document distributed to visitors reports that the school's curriculum "addresses the needs of children from diverse backgrounds." But as I went from class to class, I did not encounter any children who were white or Asian—or Hispanic, for that matter—and when I was later provided with precise statistics for the demographics of the school, I learned that 99.6 percent of students there were African American. In a similar document, the school board of another district, this one in New York State, referred to "the diversity" of its student population and "the rich variations of ethnic backgrounds." But when I looked at the racial numbers that the district had reported to the state, I learned that there were 2,800 black and Hispanic children in the system, 1 Asian child, and 3 whites. Words, in these cases, cease to have real meaning; or, rather, they mean the opposite of what they say.

High school students whom I talk with in deeply segregated neighborhoods and public schools seem far less circumspect than their elders and far more open in their willingness to confront these issues. "It's more like being hidden," said a fifteen-year-old girl named Isabel* I met some years ago in Harlem, in attempting to explain to me the ways in which she and her classmates understood the racial segregation of their neighborhoods and schools. "It's as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don't have room for something but aren't sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don't need to think of it again."

* The names of children mentioned in this article have been changed to protect their privacy.

I asked her if she thought America truly did not "have room" for her or other children of her race. "Think of it this way," said a sixteen-year-old girl sitting beside her. "If people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone, that we had simply died or left for somewhere else, how would they feel?"

"How do you think they'd feel?" I asked.

"I think they'd he relieved," this very solemn girl replied.

 

Many educators make the argument today that given the demographics of large cities like New York and their suburban areas, our only realistic goal should be the nurturing of strong, empowered, and well-funded schools in segregated neighborhoods. Black school officials in these situations have sometimes conveyed to me a bitter and clear-sighted recognition that they're being asked, essentially, to mediate and render functional an uncontested separation between children of their race and children of white people living sometimes in a distant section of their town and sometimes in almost their own immediate communities. Implicit in this mediation is a willingness to set aside the promises of Brown and—though never stating this or even thinking of it clearly in these terms—to settle for the promise made more than a century ago in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in which "separate but equal" was accepted as a tolerable rationale for the perpetuation of a dual system in American society.

Equality itself—equality alone—is now, it seems, the article of faith to which most of the principals of inner-city public schools subscribe. And some who are perhaps most realistic do not even dare to ask for, or expect, complete equality, which seems beyond the realm of probability for many years to come, but look instead for only a sufficiency of means—"adequacy" is the legal term most often used today—by which to win those practical and finite victories that appear to be within their reach. Higher standards, higher expectations, are repeatedly demanded of these urban principals, and of the teachers and students in their schools, but far lower standards—certainly in ethical respects—appear to be expected of the dominant society that isolates these children in unequal institutions.

 

Dear Mr. Kozol," wrote the eight-year-old, "we do not have the things you have. You have Clean things. We do not have. You have a clean bathroom. We do not have that. You have Parks and we do not have Parks.

You have all the thing and we do not have all the thing. Can you help us?"

The letter, from a child named Alliyah, came in a flit envelope of twenty-seven letters from a class of third-grade children in the Bronx. Other letters that the students in Alliyah's classroom sent me registered some of the same complaints. "We don't have no gardens," "no Music or Art," and "no fun places to play," one child said. "Is there a way to fix this Problem?" Another noted a concern one hears from many children in such overcrowded schools: "We have a gym but it is for lining up. I think it is not fair." Yet another of Alliyah's classmates asked me, with a sweet misspelling, if I knew the way to make her school into a "good" school—"like the other kings have"—and ended with the hope that I would do my best to make it possible for "all the kings" to have good schools.

The letter that affected me the most, however, had been written by a child named Elizabeth. "It is not fair that other kids have a garden and new things. But we don't have that," said Elizabeth. "I wish that this school was the most beautiful school in the whole why world."

"The whole why world" stayed in my thoughts for days. When I later met Elizabeth, I brought her letter with me, thinking I might see whether, in reading it aloud, she'd change the "why" to "wide" or leave it as it was. My visit to her class, however, proved to he so pleasant, and the children seemed so eager to bombard me with their questions about where I lived, and why I lived there rather than in New York, and who I lived with, and how many dogs I had, and other interesting questions of that sort, that I decided not to interrupt the nice reception they had given me with questions about usages and spelling. I left "the whole why world" to float around unedited and unrevised in my mind. The letter itself soon found a resting place on the wall above my desk.

In the years before I met Elizabeth, I had visited many other schools in the South Bronx and in one northern district of the Bronx as well. I had made repeated visits to a high school where a stream of water flowed down one of the main stairwells on a rainy afternoon and where green fungus molds were growing in the office where the students went for counseling. A large blue barrel was positioned to collect rain-water coming through the ceiling. In one makeshift elementary school housed in a former skating rink next to a funeral establishment in yet another nearly all-black-and-Hispanic section of the Bronx, class size rose to thirty-four and more; four kindergarten classes and a sixth-grade class were packed into a single room that had no windows. The air was stifling in many rooms, and the children had no place for recess because there was no outdoor playground and no indoor gym.

In another elementary school, which had been built to hold 1,000 children hut was packed to bursting with some 1,500, the principal poured out his feelings to me in a room in which a plastic garbage hag had been attached somehow to cover part of the collapsing ceiling. "This," he told me, pointing to the garbage bag, then gesturing around him at the other indications of decay and disrepair one sees in ghetto schools much like it elsewhere, "would not happen to white children." Libraries, once one of the glories of the New York City school system, were either nonexistent or, at best, vestigial in large numbers of the elementary schools. Art and music programs had  also for the most part disappeared. "When I began to teach in 1969," the principal of an elementary school in the South Bronx reported to me, "every school had a full-time licensed art and music teacher and librarian." During the subsequent decades, he recalled, "I saw all of that destroyed."

School physicians also were removed from elementary schools during these years. In 1970, when substantial numbers of white children still attended New York City's public schools, 400 doctors had been present to address the health needs of the children. By 1993 the number of doctors had been cut to 23, most of them part-time—a cutback that affected most severely children in the city's poorest neighborhoods, where medical facilities were most deficient and health problems faced by children most extreme. Teachers told me of asthmatic children who came into class with chronic wheezing and who at any moment of the day might undergo more serious attacks, but in the schools I visited there were no doctors to attend to them.

In explaining these steep declines in services, political leaders in New York tended to point to shifting economic factors, like a serious budget crisis in the middle 1970s, rather than to the changing racial demographics of the student population. But the fact of economic ups and downs from year to year, or from one decade to the next, could not convincingly explain the permanent shortchanging of the city's students, which took place routinely in good economic times and bad. The bad times were seized upon politically to justify the cuts, and the money was never restored once the crisis years were past.

"If you close your eyes to the changing racial composition of the schools and look only at budget actions and political events," says Noreen Connell, the director of the nonprofit Educational Priorities Panel in New York, "you're missing the assumptions that are underlying these decisions." When minority parents ask for something better for their kids, she says, "the assumption is that these are parents who can be discounted. These are kids who just don't count—children we don't value."

This, then, is the accusation that Alliyah and her classmates send our way: "You have ... We do not have." Are they right or are they wrong? Is this a case of naive and simplistic juvenile exaggeration? What does a third-grader know about these big-time questions of fairness and justice? Physical appearances apart, how in any case do you begin to measure something so diffuse and vast and seemingly abstract as having more, or having less, or not having at all?

Around the time I met Alliyah in the school year 1997-1998, New York's Board of Education spent about $8,000 yearly on the education of a third-grade child in a New York City public school. If you could have scooped Alliyah up out of the neighborhood where she was born and plunked her down in a fairly typical white suburb of New York,she would have received a public education worth about $12,000 a year. If you were to lift her up once more and set her down in one of the wealthiest white suburbs of New York, she would have received as much as $18,000 worth of public education every year and would likely have had a third-grade teacher paid approximately $30,000 more than her teacher in the Bronx was paid.

The dollars on both sides of the equation have increased since then, but the discrepancies between them have remained. The present per-pupil spending level in the New York City schools is $11,700, which may be compared with a per-pupil spending level in excess of $22,000 in the well-to-do suburban district of Manhasset, Long Island. The present New York City level is, indeed, almost exactly what Manhasset spent per pupil eighteen years ago, in 1987, when that sum of money bought a great deal more in services and salaries than it can buy today. In dollars adjusted for inflation, New York City has not yet caught up to where its wealthiest suburbs were a quarter-century ago.

Gross discrepancies in teacher salaries between the city and its affluent white suburbs have remained persistent as well. In 1997 the median salary for teachers in Alliyah's neighborhood was $43,000, as compared with $74,000 in suburban Rye, $77,000 in Manhasset, and $81,000 in the town of Scarsdale, which is only about eleven miles from Alliyah's school. Five years later, in 2002, salary scales for New York City's teachers rose to levels that approximated those within the lower-spending districts in the suburbs, but salary scales do not reflect the actual salaries that teachers typically receive, which are dependent upon years of service and advanced degrees. Salaries for first-year teachers in the city were higher than they'd been four years before, but the differences in median pay between the city and its upper-middle-income suburbs had remained extreme. The overall figure for New York City in 2002-2003 was $53,000, while it had climbed to $87,000 in Manhasset and exceeded $95,000 in Scarsdale.

 

There are expensive children and there are cheap children," writes Marina Warner, an essayist and novelist who has written many books for children, "just as there are expensive women and cheap women." The governmentally administered diminishment in value of the children of the poor begins even before the age of five or six, when they begin their years of formal education in the public schools. It starts during

their infant and toddler years, when hundreds of thousands of children of the very poor in much of the United States are locked out of the opportunity for preschool education for no reason but the accident of birth and budgetary choices of the government, while children of the privileged are often given veritable feasts of rich developmental early education.

In New York City, for example, affluent parents pay surprisingly large sums of money to enroll their youngsters, beginning at the age of two or three, in extraordinary early-education programs that give them social competence and rudimentary pedagogic skills unknown to children of the same age in the city's poorer neighborhoods. The most exclusive of the private preschools in New York, which are known to those who can afford them as "Baby Ivies," cost as much as $24,000 for a full-day program. Competition for admission to these pre-K schools is so extreme that private counselors are frequently retained, at fees as high as $300 an hour, to guide the parents through the application process.

At the opposite extreme along the economic spectrum in New York are thousands of children who receive no preschool opportunity at all. Exactly how many thousands are denied this opportunity in New York City and in other major cities is almost impossible to know. Numbers that originate in governmental agencies in many states are incomplete and imprecise and do not always differentiate with clarity between authentic pre-K programs that have educative and developmental substance and those less expensive child-care arrangements that do not. But even where states do compile numbers that refer specifically to educative preschool programs, it is difficult to know how many of the children who are served are of low income, since admissions to some of the state-supported programs aren't determined by low income or they are determined by a complicated set of factors of which poverty is only one.

There are remarkable exceptions to this pattern in some sections of the nation. In Milwaukee, for example, virtually every four-year-old is now enrolled in a preliminary kindergarten program, which amounts to a full year of preschool education, prior to a second kindergarten year for five-year-olds. More commonly in urban neighborhoods, large numbers of low-income children are denied these opportunities and come into their kindergarten year without the minimal social skills that children need in order to participate in class activities and without even such very modest early-learning skills as knowing how to hold a crayon or a pencil, identify perhaps a couple of shapes and colors, or recognize that printed pages go from left to right.

Three years later, in third grade, these children are introduced to what are known as "high-stakes tests," which in many urban systems now determine whether students can or cannot be promoted. Children who have been in programs like those offered by the "Baby Ivies" since the age of two have, by now, received the benefits of six or seven years of education, nearly twice as many as the children who have been denied these opportunities; yet all are required to take, and will be measured by, the same examinations. Which of these children will receive the highest scores? The ones who spent the years from two to four in lovely little Montessori programs and in other pastel-painted settings in which tender and attentive and well-trained instructors read to them from beautiful storybooks and introduced them very gently for the first time to the world of numbers and the shapes of letters, and the sizes and varieties of solid objects, and perhaps taught them to sort things into groups or to arrange them in a sequence, or to do those many other interesting things that early childhood specialists refer to as prenumeracy skills? Or the ones who spent those years at home in front of a TV or sitting by the window of a slum apartment gazing down into the street? There is something deeply hypocritical about a society that holds an eight-year-old inner-city child "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years earlier.

 

Perhaps in order to deflect these recognitions, or to soften them somewhat, many people, even while they do nor doubt the benefit of making very large investments in the education of their own children, somehow—paradoxical as it may seem—appear to be attracted to the argument that money may not really matter that much at all. No matter with what regularity such doubts about the worth of spending money on a child's education are advanced, it is obvious that those who have the money, and who spend it lavishly to benefit their own kids, do not do it for no reason. Yet shockingly large numbers of well-educated and sophisticated people whom I talk with nowadays dismiss such challenges with a surprising ease. "Is the answer really to throw money into these dysfunctional and failing schools?" I'm often asked. "Don't we have some better ways to make them `work'?" The question is posed in a variety of forms. "Yes, of course, it's not a perfectly fair system as it stands. But money alone is surely not the sole response. The values of the parents and the kids themselves must have a role in this as well you know, housing, health conditions, social factors." "Other factors"—a term of overall reprieve one often hears—"have got to be considered, too." These latter points are obviously true but always seem to have the odd effect of substituting things we know we cannot change in the short run for obvious solutions like cutting class size and constructing new school buildings or providing universal preschool that we actually could put in place right now if we were so inclined.

Frequently these arguments are posed as questions that do not invite an answer because the answer seems to be decided in advance. "Can you really buy your way to better education for these children?" "Do we know enough to be quite sure that we will see an actual return on the investment that we make?" "Is it even clear that this is the right starting point to get to where we'd like to go? It doesn't always seem to work, as I am sure that you already know," or similar questions that somehow assume I will agree with those who ask them.

Some people who ask these questions, although they live in wealthy districts where the schools are funded at high levels, don't even send their children to these public schools but choose instead to send them to expensive private day schools. At some of the well-known private prep schools in the New York City area, tuition and associated costs are typically more than $20,000 a year. During their children's teenage years, they sometimes send them off to very fine New England schools like Andover or Exeter or Groton, where tuition, boarding, and additional expenses rise to more than $30,000. Often a family has two teenage children in these schools at the same time, so they may be spending more than $60,000 on their children's education every year. Yet here I am one night, a guest within their home, and dinner has been served and we are having coffee now; and this entirely likable, and generally sensible, and beautifully refined and thoughtful person looks me in the eyes and asks me whether you can really buy your way to better education for the children of the poor.

 

As racial isolation deepens and the inequalities of education finance remain unabated and take on new and more innovative forms, the principals of many inner-city schools are making choices that few principals in public schools that serve white children in the mainstream of the nation ever need to contemplate. Many have been dedicating vast amounts of time and effort to create an architecture of adaptive strategies that promise incremental gains within the limits inequality allows.

New vocabularies of stentorian determination, new systems of incentive, and new modes of castigation, which are termed "rewards and sanctions," have emerged. Curriculum materials that are alleged to be aligned with governmentally established goals and standards and particularly suited to what are regarded as "the special needs and learning styles" of low-income urban children have been introduced. Relentless emphasis on raising test scores, rigid policies of nonpromotion and nongraduation, a new empiricism and the imposition of unusually detailed lists of named and numbered "outcomes" for each isolated parcel of instruction, an oftentimes fanatical insistence upon uniformity of teachers in their management of time, an openly conceded emulation of the rigorous approaches of the military and a frequent use of terminology that comes out of the world of industry and commerce—these are just a few of the familiar aspects of these new adaptive strategies.

Although generically described as "school reform," most of these practices and policies are targeted primarily at poor children of color; and although most educators speak of these agendas in broad language that sounds applicable to all, it is understood that they are valued chiefly as responses to perceived catastrophe in deeply segregated and unequal schools.

"If you do what I tell you to do, how I tell you to do it, when I tell you to do it, you'll get it right," said a determined South Bronx principal observed by a reporter for the New York Times. She was laying out a memorizing rule for math to an assembly of her students. "If you don't, you'll get it wrong." This is the voice, this is the tone, this is the rhythm and didactic certitude one hears today in inner-city schools that have embraced a pedagogy of direct command and absolute control. "Taking their inspiration from the ideas of B. F. Skinner...," says the Times, proponents of scripted rote-and-drill curricula articulate their aim as the establishment of "faultless communication" between "the teacher, who is the stimulus," and "the students, who respond."

The introduction of Skinnerian approaches (which are commonly employed in penal institutions and drug-rehabilitation programs), as a way of altering the attitudes and learning styles of black and Hispanic children, is provocative, and it has stirred some outcries from respected scholars. To actually go into a school where you know some of the children very, very well and see the way that these approaches can affect their daily lives and thinking processes is even more provocative.

On a chilly November day four years ago in the South Bronx, I entered P.S. 65, a school I had been visiting since 1993. There had been major changes since I'd been there last. Silent lunches had been instituted in the cafeteria, and on days when children misbehaved, silent recess had been introduced as well. On those days the students were obliged to sit in rows and maintain perfect silence on the floor of a small indoor room instead of going out to play. The words SUCCESS FOR ALL, the brand name of a scripted curriculum—better known by its acronym, SPA—were prominently posted at the top of the main stairway and, as I would later find, in almost every room. Also frequently displayed within the halls and classrooms were a number of administrative memos that were worded with unusual didactic absoluteness. "Authentic Writing," read a document called "Principles of Learning" that was posted in the corridor close to the principal's office, "is driven by curriculum and instruction." I didn't know what this expression meant. Like many other undefined and arbitrary phrases posted in the school, it seemed to be a dictum that invited no interrogation.

I entered the fourth grade of a teacher I will call Mr. Endicott, a man in his mid-thirties who had arrived here without training as a teacher, one of about a dozen teachers in the building who were sent into this school after a single summer of short-order preparation. Now in his second year, he had developed a considerable sense of confidence and held the class under a tight control.

As I found a place to sit in a far corner of the room, the teacher and his young assistant, who was in her first year as a teacher, were beginning a math lesson about building airport runways, a lesson that provided children with an opportunity for measuring perimeters. On the wall behind the teacher, in large letters, was written: "Portfolio Protocols: 1. You are responsible for the selection of [your] work that enters your portfolio. 2. As your skills become more sophisticated this year, you will want to revise, amend, supplement, and possibly replace items in your portfolio to reflect your intellectual growth." On the left side of the room: "Performance Standards Mathematics Curriculum: M-5 Problem Solving and Reasoning. M-6 Mathematical Skills and Tools ..."

My attention was distracted by some whispering among the children sitting to the right of me. The teacher's response to this distraction was immediate: his arm shot out and up in a diagonal in front of him, his hand straight up, his fingers flat. The young co-teacher did this, too. When they saw their teachers do this, all the children in the classroom did it, too.

"Zero noise," the teacher said, but this instruction proved to be unneeded. The strange salute the class and teachers gave each other, which turned out to be one of a number of such silent signals teachers in the school were trained to use, and children to obey, had done the job of silencing the class.

"Active listening!" said Mr. Endicott. "Heads up! Tractor beams!" which meant, "Every eye on inc."

On the front wall of the classroom, in hand-written words that must have taken Mr. Endicott long hours to transcribe, was a list of terms that could be used to praise or criticize a student's work in mathematics. At Level Four, the highest of four levels of success, a child's "problem-solving strategies" could be described, according to this list, as "systematic, complete, efficient, and possibly elegant," while the student's capability to draw conclusions from the work she had completed could be termed "insightful" or "comprehensive." At Level Two, the child's capability to draw conclusions was to be described as "logically unsound"; at Level One, "not present." Approximately 50 separate categories of proficiency, or lack of such, were detailed in this wall-sized tabulation.

A well-educated man, Mr. Endicott later spoke to me about the form of classroom management that he was using as an adaptation from a model of industrial efficiency. "It's a kind of `Taylorism' in the classroom," he explained, referring to a set of theories about the management of factory employees introduced by Frederick Taylor in the early 1900s. "Primitive utilitarianism" is another term he used when we met some months later to discuss these management techniques with other teachers from the school. His reservations were, however, not apparent in the classroom. Within the terms of what he had been asked to do, he had, indeed, become a master of control. It is one of the few classrooms I had visited up to that time in which almost nothing even hinting at spontaneous emotion in the children or the teacher surfaced while I was there.

The teacher gave the "zero noise" salute again when someone whispered to another child at his table. "In two minutes you will have a chance to talk and share this with your partner." Communication between children in the class was not prohibited but was afforded time slots and, remarkably enough, was formalized in an expression that I found included in a memo that was posted on the wall beside the door: "An opportunity . . . to engage in Accountable Talk."

Even the teacher's words of praise were framed in terms consistent with the lists that had been posted on the wall. "That's a Level Four suggestion," said the teacher when a child made an observation other teachers might have praised as simply "pretty good" or "interesting" or "mature." There was, it seemed, a formal name for every cognitive event within this school: "Authentic Writing," "Active Listening," "Accountable Talk." The ardor to assign all items of instruction or behavior a specific name was unsettling me. The adjectives had the odd effect of hyping every item of endeavor. "Authentic Writing" was, it seemed, a more important act than what the children in a writing class in any ordinary school might try to do. "Accountable Talk" was some thing more self-conscious and significant than merely useful conversation.

 

Since that day at P.S. 65, I have visited nine other schools in six different cities where the same Skinnerian curriculum is used. The signs on the walls, the silent signals, the curious salute, the same insistent naming of all cognitive particulars, became familiar as I went from one school to the next.

"Meaningful Sentences," began one of the many listings of proficiencies expected of the children in the fourth grade of an inner-city elementary school in Hartford (90 percent black, 10 percent Hispanic) that I visited a short time later. "Noteworthy Questions," "Active Listening," and other designations like these had been posted elsewhere in the room. Here, too, the teacher gave the kids her outstretched arm, with hand held up, to reestablish order when they grew a little noisy, but I noticed that she tried to soften the effect of this by opening her fingers and bending her elbow slightly so it did not look quite as forbidding as the gesture Mr. Endicott had used. A warm and interesting woman, she later told me she disliked the regimen intensely.

Over her desk, I read a "Mission Statement," which established the priorities and values for the school. Among the missions of the school, according to the printed statement, which was posted also in some other classrooms of the school, was "to develop productive citizens" who have the skills that will be needed "for successful global competition," a message that was reinforced by other posters in the room. Over the heads of a group of children at their desks, a sign anointed them BEST WORKERS OF 2002.

Another signal now was given by the teacher, this one not for silence but in order to achieve some other form of class behavior, which I could not quite identify. The students gave exactly the same signal in response. Whatever the function of this signal, it was done as I had seen it done in the South Bronx and would see it done in other schools in months to come. Suddenly, with a seeming surge of restlessness and irritation—with herself, as it appeared, and with her own effective use of all the tricks that she had learned—she turned to me and said, "I can do this with my dog."

 

There's something crystal clear about a number," says a top adviser to the U.S. Senate committee that has jurisdiction over public education, a point of view that is reinforced repeatedly in statements coming from the office of the U.S. education secretary and the White House. "I want to change the face of reading instruction across the United States from an art to a science," said an assistant to Rod Paige, the former education secretary, in the winter of 2002. This is a popular position among advocates for rigidly sequential systems of instruction, but the longing to turn art into science doesn't stop with reading methodologies alone. In many schools it now extends to almost every aspect of the operation of the school and of the lives that children lead within it. In some schools even such ordinary acts as children filing to lunch or recess in the hallways or the stairwells are subjected to the same determined emphasis upon empirical precision.

"Rubric For Filing" is the printed heading of a lengthy list of numbered categories by which teachers are supposed to grade their students on the way they march along the corridors in another inner-city district I have visited. Some one, in this instance, did a lot of work to fit the filing proficiencies of children into no more and no less than thirty-two specific slots:

"Line leader confidently leads the class.... Line is straight....Spacing is right.... The class is stepping together... . Everyone shows pride, their shoulders high ...no slumping," according to the strict criteria for filing at Level Four.

"Line is straight, but one or two people [are] not quite in line," according to the box for Level Three. "Line leader leads the class," and "almost everyone shows pride."

"Several are slumping.... Little pride is showing," says the box for Level Two. "Spacing is uneven.... Some are talking and whispering."

"Line leader is paying no attention," says the box for Level One. "Heads are turning every way. ...Hands are touching.... The line is not straight. ...There is no pride."

The teacher who handed me this document believed at first that it was written as a joke by someone who had simply come to he fed up with all the numbers and accounting rituals that clutter up the day in many overregulated schools. Alas, it turned out that it was no joke but had been printed in a handbook of instructions for the teachers in the city where she taught.

In some inner-city districts, even the most pleasant and old-fashioned class activities of elementary schools have now been overtaken by these ordering requirements. A student teacher in California, for example, wanted to bring a pumpkin to her class on Halloween but knew it had no ascertainable connection to the California standards. She therefore had developed what she called "The Multi-Modal Pumpkin Unit" to teach science (seeds), arithmetic (the size and shape of pumpkins, I believe—this detail wasn't clear), and certain items she adapted out of language arts, in order to position "pumpkins" in a frame ofstate proficiencies. Even with her multi-modal pumpkin, as her faculty adviser told me, she was still afraid she would be criticized because she knew the pumpkin would not really help her children to achieve expected goals on state exams.

Why, I asked a group of educators at a seminar in Sacramento, was a teacher being placed in a position where she'd need to do preposterous curricular gymnastics to enjoy a bit of seasonal amusement with her kids on Halloween? How much injury to state-determined "purpose" would it do to let the children of poor people have a pumpkin party once a year for no other reason than because it's something fun that other children get to do on autumn days in public schools across most of America?

"Forcing an absurdity on teachers does teach something," said an African-American professor. "It teaches acquiescence. It breaks down the will to thumb your nose at pointless protocols to call absurdity `absurd.'" Writing out the standards with the proper numbers on the chalkboard has a similar effect, he said; and doing this is "terribly important" to the principals in many of these schools. "You have to post the standards, and the way you know the children know the standards is by asking them to state the standards. And they do it—and you want to he quite certain that they do it if you want to keep on working at that school."

In speaking of the drill-based program in effect at P.S. 65, Mr. Endicott told me he tended to be sympathetic to the school administrators, more so at least than the other teachers I had talked with seemed to he. He said he believed his principal had little choice about the implementation of this program, which had been mandated for all elementary schools in New York City that had had rock-bottom academic records over a long period of time. "This puts me into a dilemma," he went on, "because I love the kids at P.S. 65." And even while, he said, "I know that my teaching SFA is a charade ... if I don't do it I won't be permitted to teach these children."

Mr. Endicott, like all but two of the new recruits at P.S. 65—there were about fifteen in all—was a white person, as were the principal and most of the administrators at the school. As a result, most of these neophyte instructors had had little or no prior contact with the children of an inner-city neighborhood; but, like the others I met, and despite the distancing between the children and their teachers that resulted from the scripted method of instruction, he had developed close attachments to his students and did not want to abandon them. At the same time, the class- and race-specific implementation of this program obviously troubled him. "There's an expression now," he said. "'The rich get richer, and the poor get SFA."' He said he was still trying to figure out his "professional ethics" on the problem that this posed for him.

White children made up "only about one percent" of students in the New York City schools in which this scripted teaching system was imposed,2 according to the New York Times, [Fearing a Class System in the Classroom; A Strict Curriculum, but Only for Failing Schools, Mostly in Poor Areas of New York -  New York Times 19jan03] which also said that "the prepackaged lessons" were intended "to ensure that all teachers—even novices or the most inept"—would be able to teach reading. As seemingly pragmatic and hardheaded as such arguments may be, they are desperation strategies that come out of the acceptance of inequity. If we did not have a deeply segregated system in which more experienced instructors teach the children of the privileged and the least experienced are sent to teach the children of minorities, these practices would not be needed and could not be so convincingly defended. They are confections of apartheid, and no matter by what arguments of urgency or practicality they have been justified, they cannot fail to further deepen the divisions of society. 




2 SFA has since been discontinued in the New York City public schools, though it is still being used in 1,300 U.S. schools, serving as many as 650,000 children. Similar scripted systems are used in schools (overwhelmingly minority in population) serving several million children.




 

There is no misery index for the children of apartheid education. There ought to be; we measure almost everything else that happens to them in their schools. Do kids who go to schools like these enjoy the days they spend in them? Is school, for most of them, a happy place to be? You do not find the answers to these questions in reports about achievement levels, scientific methods of accountability, or structural revisions in the modes of governance. Documents like these don't speak of happiness. You have to go back to the schools themselves to find an answer to these questions. You have to sit down in the little chairs in first and second grade, or on the reading rug with kindergarten kids, and listen to the things they actually say to one another and the dialogue between them and their teachers. You have to go down to the basement with the children when it's time for lunch and to the playground with them, if they have a playground, when it's time for recess, if they still have recess at their school. You have to walk into the children's bathrooms in these buildings. You have to do what children do and breathe the air the children breathe. I don't think that there is any other way to find out what the lives that children lead in school are really like.

High school students, when I first meet them, are often more reluctant than the younger children to open up and express their personal concerns; but hesitation on the part of students did not prove to be a problem when I visited a tenth-grade class at Fremont High School in Los Angeles. The students were told that I was a writer, and they took no time in getting down to matters that were on their minds.

"Can we talk about the bathrooms?" asked a soft-spoken student named Mireya.

In almost any classroom there are certain students who, by the force of their directness or the unusual sophistication of their way of speaking, tend to capture your attention from the start. Mireya later spoke insightfully about some of the serious academic problems that were common in the school, but her observations on the physical and personal embarrassments she and her schoolmates had to under go cut to the heart of questions of essential dignity that kids in squalid schools like this one have to deal with all over the nation.

Fremont High School, as court papers filed in a lawsuit against the state of California document, has fifteen fewer bathrooms than the law requires. Of the limited number of bathrooms that are working in the school, "only one or two . . . are open and unlocked for girls to use." Long lines of girls are "waiting to use the bathrooms," which are generally "unclean" and "lack basic supplies," including toilet paper. Some of the classrooms, as court papers also document, "do not have air conditioning," so that students, who attend school on a three-track schedule that runs year-round, "become red-faced and unable to concentrate" during "the extreme heat of summer." The school's maintenance records report that rats were found in eleven classrooms. Rat droppings were found "in the bins and drawers" of the high school's kitchen, and school records note that "hamburger buns" were being "eaten off [the] bread-delivery rack."

No matter how many tawdry details like these I've read in legal briefs or depositions through the years, I'm always shocked again to learn how often these unsanitary physical conditions are permitted to continue in the schools that serve our poorest students—even after they have been vividly described in the media. But hearing of these conditions in Mireya's words was even more unsettling, in part because this student seemed so fragile and because the need even to speak of these indignities in front of me and all the other students was an additional indignity.

"The problem is this," she carefully explained. "You're not allowed to use the bathroom during lunch, which is a thirty-minute period. The only time that you're allowed to use it is between your classes." But "this is a huge building," she went on. "It has long corridors. If you have one class at one end of the building and your next class happens to be way down at the other end, you don't have time to use the bathroom and still get to class before it starts. So you go to your class and then you ask permission from your teacher to go to the bathroom and the teacher tells you, `No. You had your chance between the periods ...'

"I feel embarrassed when I have to stand there and explain it to a teacher."

"This is the question," said a wiry-looking boy named Edward, leaning forward in his chair. "Students are not animals, but even animals need to relieve themselves sometimes. We're here for eight hours. What do they think we're supposed to do?"

"It humiliates you," said Mireya, who went on to make the interesting statement that "the school provides solutions that don't actually work," and this idea was taken up by several other students in describing course requirements within the school. A tall black student, for example, told me that she hoped to be a social worker or a doctor but was programmed into "Sewing Class" this year. She also had to take another course, called "Life Skills," which she told me was a very basic course—"a retarded class," to use her words—that "teaches things like the six continents," which she said she'd learned in elementary school.

When I asked her why she had to take these courses, she replied that she'd been told they were required, which as I later learned was not exactly so. What was required was that high school students take two courses in an area of study called "The Technical Arts," and which the Los Angeles Board of Education terms "Applied Technology." At schools that served the middle class or upper-middle class, this requirement was likely to be met by courses that had academic substance and, perhaps, some relevance to college preparation. At Beverly Hills High School, for example, the technical-arts requirement could be fulfilled by taking subjects like residential architecture, the designing of commercial structures, broadcast journalism, advanced computer graphics, a sophisticated course in furniture design, carving and sculpture, or an honors course in engineering research and design. At Fremont High, in contrast, this requirement was far more often met by courses that were basically vocational and also obviously keyed to low-paying levels of employment.

Mireya, for example, who had plans to go to college, told me that she had to take a sewing class last year and now was told she'd been assigned to take a class in hair-dressing as well. When I asked her teacher why Mireya could not skip these subjects and enroll in classes that would help her to pursue her college aspirations, she replied, "It isn't a question of what students want. It's what the school may have available. If all the other elective classes that a student wants to take are full, she has to take one of these classes if she wants to graduate."

A very small girl named Obie, who had big blue-tinted glasses tilted up across her hair, interrupted then to tell me with a kind of wild gusto that she'd taken hairdressing twice! When I expressed surprise that this was possible, she said there were two levels of hairdressing offered here at Fremont High. "One is in hairstyling," she said. "The other is in braiding."

Mireya stared hard at this student for a moment and then suddenly began to cry. "I don't want to take hairdressing. I did not need sewing either. I knew how to sew. My mother is a seamstress in a factory. I'm trying to go to college. I don't need to sew to go to college. My mother sews. I hoped for something else."

"What would you rather take?" I asked.

"I wanted to take an AP class," she answered.

Mireya's sudden tears elicited a strong reaction from one of the boys who had been silent up till now: a thin, dark-eyed student named Fortino, who had long hair down to his shoulders. He suddenly turned directly to Mireya and spoke into the silence that followed her last words.

"Listen to me," he said. "The owners of the sewing factories need laborers. Correct?"

"I guess they do," Mireya said.

"It's not going to be their own kids. Right?" "Why not?" another student said.

"So they can grow beyond themselves," Mireya answered quietly. "But we remain the same."

"You're ghetto," said Fortino, "so we send you to the factory." He sat low in his desk chair, leaning on one elbow, his voice and dark eyes loaded with a cynical intelligence. "You're ghetto—so you sew!"

"There are higher positions than these," said a student named Samantha.

"You're ghetto," said Fortino unrelentingly. "So sew!"

Admittedly, the economic needs of a society are hound to be reflected to some rational degree within the policies and purposes of public schools. But, even so, there must be something more to life as it is lived by six-year-olds or six-year-olds, or by teenagers, for that matter, than concerns about "successful global competition." Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.

Very few people who are not involved with inner-city schools have any real idea of the extremes to which the mercantile distortion of the purposes and character of education have been taken or how unabashedly proponents of these practices are willing to defend them. The head of a Chicago school, for instance, who was criticized by some for emphasizing rote instruction that, his critics said, was turning children into "robots," found no reason to dispute the charge. "Did you ever stop to think that these robots will never burglarize your home?" he asked, and "will never snatch your pocketbooks. . . . These robots are going to be producing taxes."

Corporate leaders, when they speak of education, sometimes pay lip-service to the notion of "good critical and analytic skills," but it is reasonable to ask whether they have in mind the critical analysis of their priorities. In principle, perhaps some do; but, if so, this is not a principle that seems to have been honored widely in the schools I have been visiting. In all the various business-driven inner-city classrooms I have observed in the past five years, plastered as they are with corporation brand names and managerial vocabularies, I have yet to see the two words "labor unions." Is this an oversight? How is that possible? Teachers and principals themselves, who are almost always members of a union, seem to be so beaten down that they rarely even question this omission.

It is not at all unusual these days to come into an urban school in which the principal prefers to call himself or herself "building CEO" or "building manager." In some of the same schools teachers are described as "classroom managers."3 I have never been in a suburban district in which principals were asked to view themselves or teachers in this way. These terminologies remind us of how wide the distance has become between two very separate worlds of education.

 

It has been more than a decade now since drill-based literacy methods like Success For All began to proliferate in our urban schools. It has been three and a half years since the systems of assessment that determine the effectiveness of these and similar practices were codified in the federal legislation, No Child Left Behind, that President Bush signed into law in 2002. Since the enactment of this bill, the number of standardized exams children must take has more than doubled. It will probably increase again after the year 2006, when standardized tests, which are now required in grades three through eight, may be required in Head Start programs and, as President Bush has now proposed, in ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades as well.




3 A school I visited three years ago in Columbus, Ohio, was littered with "Help Wanted" signs. Starting in kindergarten, children in the school were being asked to think about the jobs that they might choose when they grew up. In one classroom there was a poster that displayed the names of several retail stores: J. C. Penney, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Sears, and a few others. "It's like working in a store," a classroom aide explained. "The children are learning to pretend they're cashiers." At another school in the same district, children were encouraged to apply for jobs in their classrooms. Among the job positions open to the children in this school, there was an "Absence Manager" and a "Behavior Chart Manager," a "Form Collector Manager," a "Paper Passer Outer Manager," a "Paper Collecting Manager," a "Paper Returning Manager," an "Exit Ticket Manager," even a "Learning Manager," a "Reading Corner Manager," and a "Score Keeper Manager." I asked the principal if there was a special reason why those two words "management" and "manager" kept popping up throughout the school. "We want every child to be working as a manager while he or she is in this school," the principal explained. "We want to make them understand that, in this country, companies will give you opportunities to work, to prove yourself, no matter what you've done." I wasn't sure what she meant by "no matter what you've done," and asked her if she could explain it. "Even if you have a felony arrest," she said, "we want you to understand that you can be a manager someday."

 

The elements of strict accountability, in short, are solidly in place; and in many states where the present federal policies are simply reinforcements of accountability requirements that were established long before the passage of the federal law, the same regimen has been in place since 1995 or even earlier. The "tests-and-standards" partisans have had things very much their way for an extended period of time, and those who were convinced that they had ascertained "what works" in schools that serve minorities and children of the poor have had ample opportunity to prove that they were right.

What, then, it is reasonable to ask, are the results?

The achievement gap between black and white children, which narrowed for three decades up until the late years of the 1980s—the period in which school segregation steadily decreased—started to widen once more in the early 1990s when the federal courts began the process of resegregation by dismantling the mandates of the Brown decision. From that point on, the gap continued to widen or remained essentially unchanged; and while recently there has been a modest narrowing of the gap in reading scores for fourth-grade children, the gap in secondary school remains as wide as ever.

The media inevitably celebrate the periodic upticks that a set of scores may seem to indicate in one year or another in achievement levels of black and Hispanic children in their elementary schools. But if these upticks were not merely temporary "testing gains" achieved by test-prep regimens and were instead authentic education gains, they would carry over into middle school and high school. Children who know how to read—and read with comprehension—do not suddenly become nonreaders and hopelessly disabled writers when they enter secondary school. False gains evaporate; real gains endure. Yet hundreds of thousands of the inner-city children who have made what many districts claim to be dramatic gains in elementary school, and whose principals and teachers have adjusted almost every aspect of their school days and school calendars, forfeiting recess, canceling or cutting back on all the so-called frills (art, music, even social sciences) in order to comply with state demands those students, now in secondary school, are sitting in subject-matter classes where they cannot comprehend the texts and cannot set down their ideas in the kind of sentences expected of most fourth- and fifth-grade students in the suburbs. Students in this painful situation, not surprisingly, tend to be most likely to drop out of school.

In 48 percent of high schools in the nation's 100 largest districts, which are those in which the highest concentrations of black and Hispanic students tend to be enrolled, less than half the entering ninth-graders graduate in four years. Nationwide, from 1993 to 2002, the number of high schools graduating less than half their ninth-grade class in four years has increased by 75 percent. In the 94 percent of districts in New York State where white children make up the majority, nearly 80 percent of students graduate from high school in four years. In the 6 percent of districts where black and Hispanic students make up the majority, only 40 percent do so. There are 120 high schools in New York, enrolling nearly 200,000 minority students, where less than 60 percent of entering ninth-graders even make it to twelfth grade.

The promulgation of new and expanded inventories of "what works," no matter the enthusiasm with which they're elaborated, is not going to change this. The use of hortatory slogans chanted by the students in our segregated schools is not going to change this. Desperate historical revisionism that romanticizes the segregation of an older order (this is a common theme of many separatists today) is not going to change this. Skinnerian instructional approaches, which decapitate a child's capability for critical reflection, are not going to change this. Posters about "global competition" will certainly not change this. Turning six-year-olds into examination soldiers and denying eight-year-olds their time for play at recess will not change this.

"I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations," said President Bush in his campaign for reelection in September 2004. "It's working. It's making a difference." Here we have one of those deadly lies that by sheer repetition is at length accepted by surprisingly large numbers of Americans. But it is not the truth; and it is not an innocent misstatement of the facts. It is a devious appeasement of the heartache of the parents of the black and brown and poor, and if it is not forcefully resisted it will lead us further in a very dangerous direction.

Whether the issue is inequity alone or deepening resegregation or the labyrinthine intertwining of the two, it is well past the time for us to start the work that it will take to change this. If it takes people marching in the streets and other forms of adamant disruption of the governing civilities, if it takes more than litigation, more than legislation, and much more than resolutions introduced by members of Congress, these are prices we should be prepared to pay. "We do not have the things you have," Alliyah told me when she wrote to ask if I would come and visit her school in the South Bronx. "Can you help us?" America owes that little girl and millions like her a more honorable answer than they have received.



Jonathan Kozol is the author of many books, including Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace. This article was adapted from The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, to be published this month by Crown.


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posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:06 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Star-Telegram
Texas is approaching a pivotal moment in its civic life: Another crucial ruling from the state Supreme Court on the status of funding for public schools is expected soon. As with anything this important, waiting is difficult.

The ruling could come this week. The court's normal practice is to issue such rulings on Fridays.

Just like at the ballpark when they tell you that you can't know the players without a program, a quick look at what's already known might help put the ruling in perspective when it comes.

The latest lawsuit (a slew of them went through Texas courts in the first half of the 1990s) was filed in April 2001 by four school districts, eventually joined by more than 300 others. Before testimony was even presented, the suit was thrown out at both the trial court and appeals court levels -- but, significantly, the state Supreme Court reversed those decisions in March 2003 and sent the case back for a full trial.

After hearing six weeks of testimony and arguments in the summer of 2004, Austin state District Judge John Dietz issued a ruling that faulted the school finance system on two major points:

He ruled the system unconstitutional because changing conditions over time, combined with a cap on tax rates to pay for school district maintenance and operations, had caused some local school property taxes to meet the legal definition of a state property tax.

In earlier school finance cases, the Supreme Court had ruled that even though local property tax rates are set by individual school boards in each of the 1,000-plus districts across the state, the taxes in reality are state taxes if state restrictions mean that the districts run out of "meaningful discretion" in deciding how much money to raise and how to spend it. The Texas Constitution expressly forbids state property taxes.

More than half of the state's school districts have set their maintenance and operations tax rates at the maximum. The districts in this case argued that this means they no longer have the local financial flexibility required under the constitution.

Dietz also ruled that funding for public education is inadequate and does not provide school districts with enough money to meet constantly increasing state and national education standards. He noted that the problems associated with adequacy in funding will worsen significantly as more low-income and limited-English students enter public schools.

So now what?

Many experts on both sides of the debate expect the court to agree with Dietz on the first issue -- the unconstitutional state property tax. Even if that's all the court does, it means that the Legislature will have to address school finance again very soon -- and do much better than its oft-repeated spectacular failures of the past two years.

But the real nail-biting tension in waiting for the court's decision comes from the other issue in the Dietz ruling: Will Texas be ordered to devote more money to public schools?

The state's more conservative lawmakers have shown that they can devise ways to give school districts what at least looks like more flexibility in spending without really giving them much more money. But if the Supreme Court agrees with Dietz on the issue of adequate funding, the Capitol's foundation will shake. Legislators would be forced to find that money, even if it means raising taxes.

Another crucial point to look for: How long will the court give the state to correct any problems?

The smart bet here is: until Sept. 1, 2006. After all, if a suit that was argued in mid-2004 has pointed out something that is unconstitutional, it means that schools must have already operated under those unconstitutional conditions during at least three academic years: 2003-04, 2004-05 and the current 2005-06 year. How could the court allow that condition to continue into another academic year?

What's so important about that timing? It would require another special legislative session before the regular 2007 session.

This is where the political waters in which this issue is immersed get considerably more murky.

It's already unlikely that another special session would be held until after the March 7 primary elections. Republican Gov. Rick Perry has named Democratic heavyweight John Sharp to head a commission to study ways to revamp Texas taxes -- the major stumbling block in the most recent regular and special legislative sessions. That commission probably won't have its work done at least until the election season is in full swing, if not later.

Already, two months before candidates officially begin filing for spots on the primary ballots, many contests are shaping up -- with many of them focused on the question of school finance. And there will be several open seats: At least nine House members (six Republicans and three Democrats) are known to be retiring, running for other offices or otherwise not returning.

Here's a key point: In Texas these days, elections are mostly settled in the March party primaries, not the November general election. So a special legislative session on school finance held next year after the March primaries will be a lame duck session.

What effect will those lame ducks, especially those in the House, have on the outcome? That's an unknown. What we do know is that more than once in the most recent sessions, crucial questions on education reform -- an issue that House leaders deem essential if school funding is to be changed -- have been decided by a one-vote margin. The question becomes whether some of those votes change during or after campaign season.

Many people who follow the school finance debate hope that the Supreme Court's ruling will give clear direction on how the issue should be settled.

But others know that where the Texas Legislature is concerned, clear direction is rare.


© 2005 Star-Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/12832207.htm

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:54 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Hispanics Getting Less Aid for College, Study Finds
Average Award is Lower Than for Other Groups

BY Dawn Nott
Contribution Writer
Tuesday, October 4, 2005
Hispanic students were found to receive the lowest federal financial aid awards of any ethnic group, according to a recent report by Excelencia in Education, Inc. and The Institute for Higher Education Policy.

According to the report, released in August, although more Hispanics nationally are receiving federal aid than previously, their average aid package is less than those awarded to students of other ethnicities.

Eighty percent of the Hispanic undergraduate population applied for financial aid in 2003-04, while only 63 percent actually received some form of aid. The report highlighted grants and loans, and did not include private sources.

The report showed that the average financial aid award for Hispanics in 2003-04 was $6,250, sitting below the national average of $6,890.

At UC Berkeley, however, 87 percent of Hispanic undergraduates received financial aid in 2003-04.

UC Berkeley does not track sizes of aid packages by ethnicity, since ethnicity is not a determining factor, said Richard Black, associate vice chancellor of admissions and enrollment.

"I feel that we're doing a good job. If a student fills out a FAFSA, they will receive the full package of aid," Black said. "The difference is in where students go to school. All groups showing similar need are getting similar packages at Berkeley."

According to the report, 85 percent of Hispanics were U.S. citizens, compared with 93 percent of all undergraduates. Hispanics were also twice as likely to be resident aliens as all undergraduates.

"Undocumented students need more information on private scholarships, since they are usually not eligible for federal or state financial aid," said Jesse Escobar, recruitment coordinator for Raza Recruitment and Retention Center, an on-campus group that provides outreach efforts to the Hispanic community.

Although citizenship status affects financial aid eligibility, there is a benefit to attending UC Berkeley, Black said.

"The good news is, you don't have to pay non-resident fees, but the bad news is that you don't qualify for federal, state or institutional financial aid if you're an undocumented resident," he said.

Excelencia's report shows that Hispanics had relatively lower family incomes compared to all undergraduates. This is consistent with Hispanic students at UC Berkeley, who had the lowest median family incomes for 2002 freshmen, as reported by the Office of Student Research.

"From what I understand, many (Hispanic) students are going to lower-cost colleges and therefore getting less aid. It could be that they don't believe the resources are out there," Black said.

The report supports his statement, showing that 41 percent of Hispanic students went to lower-cost institutions and paid tuition and fees of $1,000 or less in 2003-04, compared with 30 percent of all undergraduates.

Many Hispanic students are also faced with the challenge that comes with being first-generation college students. Almost half are the first in their families to attend college, compared to one third of all undergraduates, according to the report.

"Many students are disillusioned if they think the government can't pay for it, or their parents can't pay for it, they figure they might as well just find a job," said Daniel Montes, outreach coordinator at Raza. "They're basically going in with a blank slate. I tell them it's not difficult to go to college, but it's a process."

Contact Dawn Nott at dnott@dailycal.org.


(c) 2003 The Daily Californian
Berkeley, CA
dailycal@dailycal.org

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posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:37 PM 0 comments Links to this post

My concern here is that a system gets created with perverse incentives to not teach the more "difficult" children. Also, it becomes an fiscally cheap and politically expedient way to not advocate for higher teacher salaries which vary but are generally low nationwide. In Texas, the teacher associations have opposed such proposals. -Angela

October 4, 2005
by MICHAEL JANOFSKY /NYTimes

BOSTON, Sept. 29 - Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts has a bold plan to improve public education in his state. It involves new laptops for students, new science and math teachers and, the most ambitious component of all, merit pay tied to classroom performance that could add $5,000 or more to a teacher's annual salary.

"The ability to close the achievement gap is the civil rights issue of our generation," Mr. Romney said in an interview, noting concern over test scores as well as the country's lagging production of scientists and engineers. "This is the way to do it."

He is betting large sums that his plan can work. The overhaul package he announced last week calls for $46 million in new spending for the 2006 fiscal year and $143 million for 2007.

The part of the plan that raises salaries through merit pay is building on a nascent movement around the country to turn away from a salary structure based on the number of academic degrees and years of service.

Currently, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, New Mexico and North Carolina have systems that give teachers extra pay for classroom performance. Five other states - Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Oklahoma and South Carolina - use money from the Milken Family Foundation for teacher development programs that can lead to higher salaries.

But more efforts are under way, even with resistance from the nation's leading teacher unions, which have historically opposed merit pay programs as unfair and divisive.

Minnesota is moving toward a statewide effort with a plan to combine career advancement, professional development and extra pay, as much as $2,000 a year, all linked to student achievement.

In Denver, a ballot initiative next month will ask voters to approve raising property taxes $25 million a year to allow public school teachers to qualify for thousands of dollars in bonuses and salary increases. Polls say the measure will pass easily.

Further, the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, an education reform group, is working for the Bush administration to develop a national merit pay plan for the states that would help identify master teachers and get them bonuses or raises.

Each state program works in a different way, but they all share the basic concept of measuring classroom performance to determine how much extra a teacher can make.

Some involve substantial spending, like $884 million over 10 years in North Carolina; others spend much less, like $2 million over four years in Iowa. But no other state provides as much as Massachusetts would pay if the Legislature adopts Mr. Romney's plan, which draws on the state's current budget surplus.

Early response to it has been mixed. State lawmakers and union leaders have criticized it as inadequate to deal with the more entrenched problems of public education and as unfair for limiting the number of teachers who can qualify for a $5,000 bonus offered to teachers in three categories: those who teach Advanced Placement courses, those recruited to teach science and math, and the top one-third of teachers in each school district as measured by classroom improvement.

Under the program, a newly recruited teacher of Advanced Placement science who excels in the classroom could make an extra $15,000 a year.

Critics of the plan also view it as politically motivated.

As a telegenic, first-term conservative Republican, Mr. Romney is widely considered a presidential contender for 2008, playing to a wider audience with everything he does. Education overhaul that features a market approach to setting teachers' salaries has generally enjoyed much wider popularity with Republicans.

So here in Massachusetts, a liberal state served by Republican governors for the last 15 years, a clash is inevitable. The co-chairmen of the education committee in the Democratic-controlled Legislature, who are sympathetic to the state's teachers unions, say Mr. Romney's goals could be better achieved with a more fundamental approach to education overhaul, like building more classrooms, spending more for texts and raising salaries across the board.

Mostly, they object to his merit pay system, calling it exclusionary and potentially dangerous for pitting teachers against each other.

"It's more of a political statement," said Senator Robert R. Antonioni, a Democrat who shares the committee leadership with Representative Patricia A. Haddad, a former teacher who is also a Democrat. "It plays to those who feel the teaching profession is inadequate by trying to walk around the rank and file."

Mr. Romney insists that the current pay structure for teachers fails to meet new challenges facing the country, especially the need to produce more scientists and engineers. That is why critical parts of the plan, he said, are giving every student a laptop and recruiting new teachers for math and science.

"I'm looking for change, and I'll spend money for change on the potential that it'll make a difference," he said. "If something doesn't work, we'll try something else. But you can't keep spending more money the same way and expect different results. That's the definition of crazy."

Mr. Antonioni and Ms. Haddad said they would like some of Mr. Romney's ideas, including the laptops, if he could explain what would happen when one broke, one was stolen or they became obsolete. They also liked his goal of improving test scores in science and math.

But overall, they said, his approach to improving performance through merit pay seems better suited to a private school system.

"We're not saying we're not going to work with him, but let's talk about how he is going to support public education," Ms. Haddad said. "My fear is that he doesn't really believe in public education, and if that's the case, discussion will be stifled."

Paul Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation, a private community development group that helped create Mr. Romney's plan, conceded that the governor had a tough sell.

The key to change, Mr. Grogan said, is pulling together divergent constituencies, like business groups, minority communities and union leaders, to put pressure on the Democratic leaders of the Legislature.

It is unlikely to be easy, not least because of union resistance.

"His proposals are short on substance, long on politics," said Catherine A. Boudreau, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, a branch of the National Education Association. As for merit pay, Ms. Boudreau added, "They are inequitable, divisive and ineffective."

Kathleen A. Kelley, president of the Massachusetts Federation of Teachers, said that Mr. Romney's plan was developed with no one from the education community.

Mr. Romney dismissed the criticism, saying he had heard it all before.

"It takes time. You've got to sell it," he said. "It's hard to get the public to support everything, but this is a multiyear effort. We have to chip away, chip away, chip away."

He paused a moment.

"You know," he said, "I would just love it if you could just throw out all the special interests from education."

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:56 AM 2 comments Links to this post

HB 1531 that appears to be right now on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s desk mirrors our own struggle in Texas for multiple assessment criteria at both the exit level and other levels (grades 3, 5, and 8) affected by social promotion. This only impacts the evaluation of the students, and not the schools and districts as federal NCLB law requires. Based on information for the Campaign for Quality Assessment (CQA) in California, another piece of legislation, SB 517, is calling for a delay in the Exit Exam's diploma penalty until students in all high schools have access to un-crowded classrooms, the materials and technology that they need, the teachers they need, and access to counselors and other critical elements of a quality education. I’m unaware of the status of that legislation, however.

I hope that the governor acknowledges the importance of fair and valid assessment, and conversely, the harmful effects of high-stakes testing. This is not—or should not be—a partisan issue, the bills are neither Democrat nor Republican in nature. Instead, they’re pro-child and pro-assessment.

-Angela

Exit exam might not be last word
State schools chief is looking at graduation alternatives

By Laurel Rosenhall -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PDT Saturday, October 1, 2005
Story appeared on Page A1 of The Bee

Get weekday updates of Sacramento Bee headlines and breaking news. Sign up here.

State schools chief Jack O'Connell said Friday he will consider "additional options" that would give the 90,000 seniors who have yet to pass the California High School Exit Exam a shot at graduation in June.
O'Connell said his decision does not waver from his long-standing belief that the state should not make special accommodations for students struggling to pass the exam, which is a graduation requirement this year for the first time.

But his comments drew sharp criticism from the test's supporters, who said the superintendent was sending a mixed message to students, teachers and parents.

"We're staying the course, but does that mean we should preclude every possible option?" O'Connell said. "We're going to look at (other options) very carefully, but it's not a change of position one iota."

Jim Lanich, president of California Business for Education Excellence, called O'Connell's announcement a retreat that threatened efforts to hold students of all racial and economic backgrounds to the same academic expectations.

"It's a sad day when the adults of the state will redraw targets before targeting the problem that kids are not being taught what they need to know," Lanich said.

O'Connell's comments followed the release Friday of a report by an independent consultant that said about 78 percent of the class of 2006 has passed the exam, which tests students on seventh-and eighth-grade math skills and ninth-and 10th-grade English skills. Students must pass both parts.

The report, by the Virginia-based Human Resources Research Organization, shows that African American, Latino and low-income students - who pass at lower rates than their white, Asian American and affluent peers - made big gains between 10th grade and 11th grade.

The report's authors recommend that California maintain the exam as a graduation requirement. But they suggest the state provide options allowing students who don't pass to receive a diploma. Those could include:

* A senior-year portfolio that contains a body of work showing a student has mastered the skills on the test.

* A ceremonial certificate that's not a diploma.

* Additional years of high school.

* A summer school class after 12th grade that allows students to earn a diploma if they pass.

* New community college programs focused on teaching skills tested on the exit exam.

O'Connell said his staff would examine the options in preparation for the Legislature's reconvening next year.

But educators who work with students say they are worried any changes could confuse students who have been told for years they must pass the exam to graduate.

"For most kids, it won't affect them substantially. They want to pass the exam," said Ted Appel, principal of Sacramento's Luther Burbank High School, where 201 seniors have yet to pass the test.

"But for some, it creates a mixed message. ... It will affect their commitment and our ability to send out a strong message that they need to be focused on getting better."

Russlynn Ali, director of Oakland-based Education Trust-West, said the improved passage rate among African American, Latino and low-income students shows the test is working.

"We need to be applauding that as a state today, not working backward" by creating other options, Ali said.

She said she was shocked at O'Connell's announcement.

Some of the suggestions in the report amount to small changes of options that already exist. For example, students who do not graduate from high school already can enroll in community college and earn a GED. And some districts now offer summer school classes targeted to exit exam skills.

Other suggestions would expand rights now granted to students in special education, who may stay in school until age 22 and earn a certificate of achievement that is not a diploma.

Allowing a portfolio of work to substitute for passing the exam, however, would be a departure.

John Rogers, an education professor at UCLA, said he supports creating options that allow more students to graduate.

But he said debating alternatives in January creates a troubling timeline.

"It puts all of these young people in this extraordinarily vulnerable position and puts the educators working with them in an uncertain position as well," Rogers said.

A bill on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk would create similar alternatives to the exam. Rogers said approval of AB 1531 would be the quickest way to start developing options.

But O'Connell said he remains opposed to the bill, and he has asked the governor to veto it.

So has Scott Himelstein, Schwarzenegger's deputy secretary of education. But Himelstein said Friday he was open to creating alternatives to the exam, as long as they require students to demonstrate the same skills.

Patty Sullivan, director of the Center on Education Policy in Washington, D.C., which studies exit exams in the 20 states that use them, said O'Connell's suggestion is rare. Changes usually aren't made within a school year, she said.

"At the same time you have to appreciate how politically sensitive high school exit exams are," Sullivan said. "So it's not unusual to see (politicians) trying to get the most students over the bar in a way that doesn't lower the standards."


Read the 2005 Evaluation Report of the California High School Exit Examination

About the writer:
The Bee's Laurel Rosenhall can be reached at (916) 321-1083 or lrosenhall@sacbee.com.

Copyright © The Sacramento Bee
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/education/story/13651560p-14493861c.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:59 AM 1 comments Links to this post

The number of 4-year-olds in bilingual pre-kindergarten classes funded by the state soared nearly 60 percent in six years, to 55,000 students during the last school year. Bilingual education is an effective dropout prevention program, but should also be viewed as a child-centered system that constructs youth as assets and not liabilities, as emanating from rich cultural heritages and backgrounds, rather than as culturally deficient as they are so often seen. This leads to their getting constructed as "liabilities" and "unteachable" and their language as a "barrier" to progress whey they are the population that is uniquely positioned to be truly global citizens with multiple literacies and competencies. My thoughts for today. -Angela

Monday, October 3, 2005
By KAREN AYRES / The Dallas Morning News


McKINNEY – Miriam Garcia's young students can't read the "Super Job" stamp in her hand, but they seek the mark of encouragement on their art projects.

Erika Meza teaches students in a bilingual pre-kindergarten class at Caldwell Elementary School in McKinney. The students, who primarily speak Spanish, get at least 15 minutes of English instruction throughout the day.
"I told them that it means muy buen trabajo, or very good job," Ms. Garcia said, laughing as 22 children flooded her with their latest creations.

Ms. Garcia and her assistant work with 43 4-year-olds every day and are used to being in high demand in their bilingual pre-kindergarten classroom at Caldwell Elementary School in McKinney.

"When I started six years ago, I had 15 kids," Ms. Garcia said, smiling as she gestured to her full classroom. "This is just beautiful."

State law requires that classes like Ms. Garcia's be available to preschool-age students who don't speak English. If there is the demand in a school district, schools are required to provide instruction.

That demand is growing quickly in Texas.

The number of 4-year-olds in bilingual pre-kindergarten classes funded by the state soared nearly 60 percent in six years, to 55,000 students during the last school year.

Also Online
En español: Programa pre escolar bilingüe se extiende

Suburban and urban districts are scrambling to hire bilingual teachers and open new classes. Many students still wait for open seats.

Some northern suburbs with historically little demand for bilingual pre-kindergarten are seeing the sharpest growth.

"I knew we would be bigger this year, but I never predicted it would grow this much," said Jennifer Hulme, the coordinator of special programs in Allen.

The Allen school district opened its first bilingual classes this year.

The two classes now hold a combined 36 students.

Frisco schools had 30 pre-kindergarten bilingual kids last year, and the district opened two additional classes this year.

Alicia Richmond, the district's director of special programs, said finding highly qualified teachers is a challenge.

"Having the early childhood and bilingual certification certainly is a rare find," she said.

In McKinney, the bilingual program reached capacity this year with 88 students, leaving several kids on a waiting list. Though the district plans to open another class soon, officials know they face a tough task finding a teacher.

"It's hard to find bilingual teachers anyway, regardless of what grade, but it's even harder to find teachers who are certified in early childhood and bilingual," said Sheila Sherman, director of bilingual services in McKinney. "It's nearly impossible."


Waiting in Dallas

Several hundred children remained on waiting lists for pre-kindergarten last year in Dallas. The Dallas Independent School District has opened 33 bilingual classes this year to accommodate those students.

But many children are still on waiting lists.

Beth Steerman, executive director of the district's early childhood center, said the staff is working to find spots for as many kids as possible.

"Will it be 100 percent? No. I couldn't tell you if it's going to be 100 or 300 [on the waiting list] right now. But I'm going to tell you it's much better than it has been."

The Dallas district's bilingual pre-kindergarten program has grown about 20 percent in four years, to nearly 4,500 kids.

While most districts operate half-day programs, Dallas runs many full-day classes under a grant program from the Texas Education Agency. Ms. Steerman said those grants have been cut twice in recent years, preventing the district from expanding its offerings.

Last year, the district received nearly $4.8 million for the full-day sessions. This year, it expects to take an $80,000 cut.

"We're getting there in terms of serving the children who are eligible," Ms. Steerman said.

The Arlington school district, which saw its bilingual pre-kindergarten program grow 60 percent in four years, hasn't applied for the full-day grants because it doesn't have the space, according to Carole Hagler, director of pre-kindergarten services.

Garland schools have opened two early childhood centers this year, partially to accommodate the district's 900 bilingual pre-kindergarten students.


Statewide growth

Bilingual pre-kindergarten programs are also expanding elsewhere across the state – in part because more people are finding out about them.

"Communities are becoming more aware that the earlier you introduce kids to school, the better," said Dr. Leo Gomez of the Texas Association for Bilingual Education.

In most programs, students spend practically all day learning in Spanish. The idea is to build the student's Spanish skills to help them learn English.

"A solid foundation in pre-k is going to help children get off on much better footing and be able to compete," said Ms. Steerman of DISD. "We approach it as dropout prevention in its truest form."


Critics and fans

Not everyone agrees with bilingual education.

Ron Unz of English for the Children, a group that successfully lobbied to end bilingual education a few years ago in California, said pre-kindergartners would learn better in English.

"The younger the child, the easier it is to learn English," Mr. Unz said. "If you teach them English in pre-k, they'll learn it even easier than they would at 6 or 7 years old."

Nonetheless, bilingual pre-kindergarten programs show no signs of stopping or slowing in Texas.

McKinney resident Linda Herrera said she could not imagine putting her children in an English program. Her son's skills, she said, improved tremendously after a year of bilingual pre-kindergarten.

"He learned a lot," Ms. Herrera said as she recently picked up her daughter from bilingual pre-kindergarten. "But mostly his vocabulary improved."

Serving these young students pays off in the future, said Dr. Joseph Lopez, the director of special programs for Garland ISD.

"We're trying to eliminate the student achievement gap, which is really the challenge before us," he said. "People who don't finish school successfully, they're not going to just roll up and die. They're going to exist one way or another. It's a very serious issue."

E-mail kayres@dallasnews.com

http://www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/DN-prek_03cco.ART0.North.Edition2.94d7451.html
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posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:05 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Immigration Advocates Face Challenges

IRC Americas Program Commentary
By Tom Barry
As anti-immigration sentiment rises, the voices advocating a liberal immigration policy confront new challenges.

The most obvious challenges—including new anti-immigrant legal measures, rising anti-immigrant bias in the media, and an expanding backlash movement against immigration—are not necessarily the most difficult ones.

More daunting are challenges facing pro-immigration groups and immigrant advocates as they seek to establish a framework for discussing immigration.

If immigrant advocates and immigrants themselves are to move from the sidelines to the center of the intensifying immigration debate, and by doing so help staunch the growing influence of the retrograde restrictionist forces, they must meet five major challenges.

The first challenge is to gain credibility as advocates for an immigration policy that considers the totality of U.S. national interests—not just the needs and problems of immigrants or the demands of business for new foreign sources of cheap and skilled labor. Marshalling the same facts and figures used by the Wall Street Journal and Corporate America, as pro-immigration advocates often do to describe the net economic benefits of immigration, falls far short of what is needed if immigration reformers are to gain the attention and support of the U.S. public. Macroeconomic figures that show immigrants boosting national economic growth provide little solace to workers who see immigrants holding jobs they or their parents once had, or who find themselves competing in a labor market where immigrant workers are willing to work longer, harder, and for substantially lower wages.

A second, closely related challenge is helping U.S. citizens realize that their communities are communities that include a wide variety of immigrants and that this mix is a healthy one. It’s likely that most U.S. citizens already know from personal experience that immigrants play a vital role in their communities, yet restrictionist groups and media personalities have convinced many that immigrants are not only a negative influence but are expendable—that the U.S. government could and should deport 10-11 million illegal residents with no ill effects. Part of the bill of goods that restrictionist voices offer is nostalgia for a society that never existed—one with full employment and where everyone shared the same culture and values.

The challenge, then, is to offer a progressive vision of a healthy, multiethnic, multicultural society. Such a society would collectively move forward with policies to assure full employment, protect labor rights, and provide basic social services to all, without unfairly burdening the middle class, while at the same time facilitating social integration and a sense of community through language instruction and good basic education.

The third challenge that immigration advocates face is overcoming their hesitation to describe the immigration problem as a class problem. The first step in injecting class analysis into their advocacy is to disentangle themselves from business—whether it be Fortune 500 corporations, the National Association of Manufacturers, agribusiness, high-tech firms that increasingly rely on skilled foreign workers, or even the strong lobby of immigration lawyers—which often support liberal immigration policies based on their vested professional interests.

Corporate, pro-immigration positions often coincide with those of immigrants and immigrant advocates. But failing to distinguish between immigration reform motivated by a desire for cheap labor and immigration reform advocated to attain a just society make the entire pro-immigration movement extremely vulnerable to the critique that it is an open borders lobby.

The fourth challenge is one faced by more than just immigrant advocates. It is the challenge of integrating legitimate concerns and demands into a new agenda for national economic development. As it is, U.S. economic development is defined almost exclusively in traditional macroeconomic terms such as rates of economic growth, productivity, inventory levels, retail sales, housing starts, etc.

If pro-immigration advocates are to stem the rising forces of anti-immigrant backlash that are sweeping the United States and gaining momentum throughout the world, they must ally themselves with other policy reformers who are beginning to make the case that development must be redefined to mean full employment, livable wages, an organized workforce, a highly educated society, and environmental protection and restoration. By failing to situate their demands within the context of a new national development policy that is not beholden to narrow business interests, immigrants and immigration advocates risk not only losing the immigration reform debate, but contributing to an ominous economic and political future—one that will likely be characterized by some mixture of harsh restrictionism and a cut-throat national economy where all workers, legal and illegal, compete for jobs that don’t offer a living wage or basic benefits.

The fifth main challenge is connecting the dots between immigration policy and foreign policy. In their advocacy and education, anti-immigrant forces don’t hesitate to describe the immigration problem as an international one—painting a picture of the United States beset by a non-stop invasion of the world’s poor, fleeing war, corrupt governments, and the lack of opportunity at home. The simplicity of their recommended solutions—walling the United States in and deporting all those without residency papers—appeals to those who believe that to retain the present standard of life, this country should be less connected to the rest of the world, creating a Fortress America.

Those who oppose the fear and hate politics coursing through the immigration debate cannot deny the reality that the United States still represents the “land of opportunity” for people of an increasing number of countries. But also true is that most of the would-be emigrants would prefer to live and work in their home countries if economic and social conditions improved.

This challenge, then, is also a challenge for U.S. foreign policy, other industrialized nations, and the international economic institutions—namely to support measures that contribute to broad and sustainable development in Mexico, the Central American nations, and other “sending” countries, rather than economic reforms that obstruct or undermine true development. What needs to be said, loud and clear, is that there is no existing or proposed immigration policy—whether highly restrictive or liberal—that will work, unless it works in conjunction with a foreign policy based on good neighbor principles and a deep appreciation of interconnectedness.

At the same time, though, the burden of addressing the immigration crisis, whether in the United States or any other receiving nation, is first the responsibility of the sending nations. Yes, nations such as Mexico should criticize abusive treatment of their nationals, but such complaints ring hollow if they are not backed by national development policies that aim to keep their own citizens at home rather than policies that directly or indirectly contribute to their expulsion from their homes.

Longer and higher border walls, amnesty, guestworker programs, and proposed earned citizenship programs are all temporary fixes. Immigration policy and border control strategies that ignore the power of the forces of supply and demand while at the same time narrowly framing immigration policy as only a U.S. domestic policy problem are doomed to fail.

Tom Barry is policy director of the International Relations Center (IRC), online at www.irc-online.org. This commentary is excerpted from a Special Report of the IRC Americas Program titled “The Class and Politics of the Immigration Debate.”

For More Information
Immigration Advocates Face Challenges
By Tom Barry (August 24, 2005)


The Immigration Debate: Politics, Ideologies of Anti-Immigration Forces
By Tom Barry (June 17, 2005)

The Immigration Debate: Whose Side Are You On?
By Tom Barry (June 1, 2005)


Right Web Profiles of Restrictionist Groups

Migration and Immigration Issues Index, IRC Americas Program

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed by HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com) without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:21 PM 3 comments Links to this post

Yet another blistering report by the GAO. -Angela

October 1, 2005
by ROBERT PEAR /New York Times
WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

The contract with Mr. Williams and the general contours of the public relations campaign had been known for months. The report Friday provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities.

Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, "The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education."

The auditors declared: "We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds."

The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush's education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.

When that arrangement became public, it set off widespread criticism. At a news conference in January, Mr. Bush said: "We will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet."

But the Education Department has since defended its payments to Mr. Williams, saying his commentaries were "no more than the legitimate dissemination of information to the public."

The G.A.O. said the Education Department had no money or authority to "procure favorable commentary in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition" in federal law.

The ruling comes with no penalty, but under federal law the department is supposed to report the violations to the White House and Congress.

In the course of its work, the accountability office discovered a previously undisclosed instance in which the Education Department had commissioned a newspaper article. The article, on the "declining science literacy of students," was distributed by the North American Precis Syndicate and appeared in numerous small newspapers around the country. Readers were not informed of the government's role in the writing of the article, which praised the department's role in promoting science education.

The auditors denounced a prepackaged television story disseminated by the Education Department. The segment, a "video news release" narrated by a woman named Karen Ryan, said that President Bush's program for providing remedial instruction and tutoring to children "gets an A-plus."

Ms. Ryan also narrated two videos praising the new Medicare drug benefit last year. In those segments, as in the education video, the narrator ended by saying, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."

The television news segments on education and on Medicare did not state that they had been prepared and distributed by the government. The G.A.O. did not say how many stations carried the reports.

The public relations efforts came to light weeks before Margaret Spellings became education secretary in January. Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for the secretary, said on Friday that Ms. Spellings regarded the efforts as "stupid, wrong and ill-advised." She said Ms. Spellings had taken steps "to ensure these types of missteps don't happen again."

The investigation by the accountability office was requested by Senators Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, both Democrats. Mr. Lautenberg expressed concern about a section of the report in which investigators said they could not find records to confirm that Mr. Williams had performed all the activities for which he billed the government.

The Education Department said it had paid Ketchum $186,000 for services performed by Mr. Williams's company. But it could not provide transcripts of speeches, articles or records of other services invoiced by Mr. Williams, the report said.

In March, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel said that federal agencies did not have to acknowledge their role in producing television news segments if they were factual. The inspector general of the Education Department recently reiterated that position.

But the accountability office said on Friday: "The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual. The essential fact of attribution is missing."

The office said Mr. Williams's work for the government resulted from a written proposal that he submitted to the Education Department in March 2003. The department directed Ketchum to use Mr. Williams as a regular commentator on Mr. Bush's education policies. Ketchum had a federal contract to help publicize those policies, signed by Mr. Bush in 2002.

The Education Department flouted the law by telling Ketchum to use Mr. Williams to "convey a message to the public on behalf of the government, without disclosing to the public that the messengers were acting on the government's behalf and in return for the payment of public funds," the G.A.O. said.

The Education Department spent $38,421 for production and distribution of the video news release and $96,850 for the evaluation of newspaper articles and radio and television programs. Ketchum assigned a score to each article, indicating how often and favorably it mentioned features of the new education law.

Congress tried to clarify the ban on "covert propaganda" in a bill signed by Mr. Bush in May. The law says that no federal money may be used to produce or distribute a news story unless the government's role is openly acknowledged.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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