Click here to get a New CPPP Study that Examines Texas' Dropout Challenge


This report examines Texas' dropout issue. Among the report's findings:
If every 9th grader in Fall 2000 graduated from the Texas public school
system in Spring 2004, it would have cost Texas an additional $1.7 billion
over four years, just for the Class of 2004. At the same time, if every 16-19 year
old who is not in school and does not have a high school diploma simply graduated,
the state's combined earnings would increase by about $3 billion over four years. In
order to help you assess these economic consequences on your community, we
have compiled a supplemental county-by-county data spreadsheet.



Dropping Opportunities (below) just appeared in the Texas Observer.

As you may have heard, there's a special session going
on, and the elected types up at the Capitol continue
to fight about how to cut property taxes and pay for
public schools. We?ve heard a lot of talk the past few
weeks about tax rates, teacher pay raises, local
enrichment, school-funding equity, and the importance
of educating our future work force. Yet one of the
gloomiest and most widely misunderstood problems
facing our education system the number of kids
dropping out isn't getting much play.

Part of the problem is a lack of agreement on how many
kids are actually dropping out. According to official
state figures, we don't have much of a dropout
problem. The Texas Education Agency reports that only
0.9 percent of students in seventh through 12th grades
drop out of public school. No, that's not a misprint.
The high school dropout rate, the TEA maintains, is
3.9 percent. (Very few middle school students drop
out, which partly accounts for the watered-down 0.9
figure.)

Back on planet Earth, any teacher or principal and
most public interest groups will tell you that the
dropout rate is much higher. Even TEA officials admit
some of their numbers can be misleading. Other groups
say the statewide dropout rate is between 20 and 40
percent. Texas ranked 43rd nationally in 2001 in the
percentage of teens dropping out of high school?a rate
one-third higher than the national average, according
to a report by the Austin nonprofit Center for Public
Policy Priorities.

TEA officials contend, in their defense, that they
have to report dropouts as defined by law. Instead of
harping on the high dropout rates, TEA officials often
point to the cheerier four-year graduation rate,
which, the agency says, was 84.6 percent in 2004. (To
arrive at this figure, officials don?t count students
getting high school equivalency certificates, students
who claim to transfer to another school, or students
who spend extra years in high school.) But even the
graduation rate is inaccurate, according to some
reports. The conservative Manhattan Institute recently
reported that only about 70 percent of Texas high
school students are graduating. Another recent report,
by the more progressive Economic Policy Institute, put
the graduation rate at about 80 percent. Minorities
are much less likely to graduate than white
students?the Manhattan Institute says about 50 percent
of blacks and Latinos graduate. Not surprisingly, the
TEA offers a rosier view on this one, too, contending
that the minority graduation rate is about 80 percent.

Don't expect much action on these issues out of the
special session. The lone proposal dealing with
dropouts was buried in the text of a bill recently
passed by the Senate. If it survives the legislative
process, the provision would allow schools to
establish stronger anti-dropout programs. The effort,
though relatively weak, has been the Legislature's
only real attempt in recent years to stem the number
of kids leaving school without a diploma.

In the Lege's defense, it's hard to enact a policy
solution when you don't really know how extensive the
problem is or what the causes are. As with most
problems, understanding is the first step. That won?t
happen until lawmakers focus on the issue and direct
the TEA to use an agreed-upon method that accurately
counts the number of students who drop out.

Nothing will improve unless we're straight with
ourselves about how many students are really dropping
out. No matter how much money we put into schools, we
can?t help kids who aren't there.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:41 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is an interesting piece. I wonder how much race/ethnicity and segregation (beyond ethics, belief, and creed--as well as public school characteristics) contribute to this pattern of religious school attendance and homeschooling. -Angela

EDITORIAL
Where Do Southern Baptist Leaders Go to School?

Robert Parham
05-26-06
If you want to know what Southern Baptist Convention leaders really think about public education, follow them to school.


The most visible nominee for the presidency of the SBC is Ronnie Floyd, pastor of First Baptist Church in Springdale, Ark. His church has its own school, Shiloh Christian School. On his blog, Floyd lists the school as one of his three favorite Web sites.

The school has some 650 students from pre-kindergarten through the 12th grade. Shiloh Christian School estimates that half of its students belong to First Baptist and its mission, the Church at Pinnacle Hills. Only 3 percent of its students are children of color, compared to the Arkansas classroom average of 10 percent.

The once-rumored presidential candidate, Wade Burleson, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church, has one son at Oklahoma Bible Academy and another one at Emmanuel Christian School in Enid, Okla.

A number of SBC presidents serve or served at churches with Christian academies.

The 2002-2004 president, Jack Graham, is pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas, which has a ministry named Prestonwood Christian Academy. The school has over 1,400 students enrolled in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade with 7 percent students of color, compared to 30 percent average in Texas schools.

Another SBC president (1994-1996), Jim Henry, pastor of First Baptist Church in Orlando, Fla., started The First Academy as a church ministry in 1987.

Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and SBC president 1998-2000, joined the staff of First Baptist Church in Dallas shortly after it started First Baptist Academy in 1972.

During Pattersons presidency at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, he bragged that over 100 faculty, staff and students were homeschooling their children.

The chief officer of the SBC's publishing house, Thom Rainer, sent his children to Christian Academy of Louisville, when he was on faculty of Southern Seminary. The organization he now leads, LifeWay Christian Resources, produces homeschool curriculum, a new product line begun by Jimmy Draper, who was the 1982-1984 SBC president.

At least two of the 10 members of the 2006 SBC resolutions committee have Christian academies connected to their churches.

Forrest Pollock, pastor of Bell Shoals Baptist Church in Brandon, Fla., has the Bell Shoals Baptist Academy as a church ministry for students from kindergarten through 8th grade. The academy’s mission statement says that “The Bible is the basic textbook.”

Darrell Orman, pastor of First Baptist Church in Stuart, Fla., has the First Baptist Christian School that runs from preschool through the 8th grade. Orman is a graduate of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and Liberty Baptist Seminary.

Started in 1978, Grove Avenue Christian School is a ministry of Grove Avenue Baptist Church in Richmond, Va., where many International Mission Board employees attend. Mark Becton, the church's pastor, is first vice president of the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia and on the 2006 SBC committee on committees.

Emmanuel Christian School is a ministry of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Manassas, Va., another member of the SBCV. The church’s pastor, Rodney Autry, has been nominated to serve on the powerful SBC Executive Committee.

Stephen Rummage, associate pastor of Hickory Grove Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., is also a 2006 nominee to the SBC Executive Committee. His church houses the Hickory Grove Baptist Christian School.

Calvary Baptist Church started Calvary Baptist Day School with a first grade class in 1971, under the leadership of pastor and SBC leader Mark Corts.

More names could be added to the above list.

Layer after layer discloses that the SBC leadership puts its backing behind Christian academies and homeschools, the de-facto exit-system for fundamentalists from public schools.

Robert Parham is executive director of the Baptist Center for Ethics.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:35 PM 0 comments Links to this post

May 26, 2006, 1:38AM
School finance mandate dissolved
Chance of funds being lost as of June 1 now gone

By JANET ELLIOTT
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN - A state district judge Thursday dissolved an injunction in a five-year-old school finance case, removing the threat that schools could lose funding June 1.

Judge John Dietz of Travis County signed the order in response to a motion filed by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott. The motion said the Legislature fixed constitutional deficiencies in the school finance system during the special session that ended this month.

"This is the end of the road for the injunction," said Mark Trachtenberg, who represents 47 districts that sued the state over its funding system.

The districts did not oppose the motion to halt the injunction. But they warned that their position "should not be construed as a wholehearted endorsement of the legislation or an admission that the school finance system is on firm constitutional footing going forward."

The Legislature finished work earlier this month on a package of bills that will replace one-third of local school property taxes with money from a new business tax, higher cigarette taxes and budget surplus.

The case is known as West Orange-Cove after a property-rich consolidated school district in East Texas. The lawsuit was launched in 2001 by West Orange-Cove and three other school districts that had reached the state-mandated property tax cap of $1.50 for maintenance and operations.

More than 300 districts ultimately joined the lawsuit.

Dietz ruled in 2004 that the system amounts to a state property tax prohibited by the Texas Constitution and also that the overall funding was inadequate. He initially set a deadline of Oct. 1, 2005. The Texas Supreme Court upheld Dietz's ruling on the property tax issue only and set a new deadline.

The June 1 deadline was key to lawmakers reaching agreement on new taxes this year, after four previous failed attempts over the past two years.

The school districts in their motion warned that restrictions lawmakers put on their tax rates could harm the financial "breathing room" they will have in the coming school year. They also expressed concern that the new tax revenue was dedicated to property tax relief.

"The primary focus of the legislation was property tax relief, not putting the school finance system on firm financial footing," the districts said.

janet.elliott@chron.com

http://chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/3898638.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:32 PM 0 comments Links to this post

A good use of computerized systems would be digital portfolios that would follow children from grade to grade, enabling truly holistic and authentic systems. -Angela

Data analysis helping teachers tailor lessons
High-tech systems comb test results to try to boost students' skills

Tuesday, May 30, 2006
By ANDREW D. SMITH / The Dallas Morning News

Stacy Kimbriel has been teaching kids to read for more than a decade. But only this year – with the help of a computer – could she quickly discern which skills were eluding which students at Meadows Elementary School in Plano.

And after receiving the year's first round of TAKS results, she reported a success not only for most of the 27 students pulled aside for extra help but also for the new data-management system that combed through test results to single them out for tutoring.

Such systems, according to the U.S. Department of Education, have the potential to help improve education across the nation.

"Schools can analyze student performance today in ways they couldn't have dreamed of a couple of years ago," said Tim Magner, the department's director of education technology. "More importantly, these systems often allow them to analyze data in real time, so they can solve problems as soon as they arise."

School districts across the country are working to roll out new technology. Locally, new systems are being discussed in Coppell, installed in Mesquite and used in Frisco, Highland Park, Irving, Plano and Richardson. Allen, McKinney and Dallas are expanding their systems.

"None of what we do now would have been possible just five years ago," said Jim Hirsch, Plano's assistant superintendent for technology.

"No one was selling the sort of data storage and data analysis systems that schools need to spot trends or to provide customized instruction for each student."

In addition to keeping long-recorded information such as attendance and grades in a single, accessible place, some new systems note each standardized-test question, the skill it measures and each student's answer. By matching student errors with skills tested, the systems show who knows what. Systems can also spot classwide weaknesses, so teachers know when they are underteaching, or misteaching, particular topics.

Individualized teaching

Kathy Hargrove, associate dean of the school of education at Southern Methodist University, said that ideally, improved test scores would be a byproduct, rather than the goal, of more individualized teaching.

And though there is the potential for data misuse, such as teaching to the test, she said she would have relished such a program during her 15 years as a classroom teacher.

"It would make things much more efficient than having whole-class instruction," she said. "You can group and regroup" students according to what they have mastered.

Joan Herman, co-director of the national Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA, said data systems are as good as the tests they analyze.

"Does that slicing and dicing give you a reliable result?" she said. "The first question should always be the caliber of the test."

For example, an awkwardly worded question might trip up students who know the material, she said. But if such traps are avoided, she said, data analysis systems can be an invaluable tool.

System vendors make no claim that data analysis systems can replace good teaching or hard work by students.

"Data systems are not a magic bullet," said Jonathan Harber, CEO of the system vendor SchoolNet. "Our systems are tools. They help teachers and schools measure what kids need and what strategies work. But measuring ... is only the first step down a long road toward improvement."

Computer programs designed to handle high-level math and statistics first became commercially available in the early 1990s. Then it took nearly a decade before companies started selling products tailored for schools. Widespread use of the products is newer still; several vendors sold more systems last year than in all previous years combined.

The systems still are not able to do anything that people cannot do for themselves. Teachers and administrators can track achievement skill by skill, student by student and school by school. They can also give benchmark tests – and many Texas districts long have – to figure out which kids are ready for tests such as TAKS.

Without computers, however, the process is slow. Ms. Kimbriel, the literacy specialist from Plano, used to spend several weekends a year holed up with calculator and graph paper, analyzing test scores. It took her weeks to compile fairly basic information.

The Dallas school district decided two decades ago to compile data and use computers to analyze each school's effectiveness, but only now is it parsing all its data at the individual student level.

"We're working now to bring our system into individual classrooms, so that teachers can view all the data for the kids in their classes," said Bob Mendro, assistant superintendent for research and evaluation.

After testing this spring, the system should go districtwide in the fall, he said: "Teachers should have immediate access to benchmark tests. As time goes by ... and we transfer more data from our old Microsoft storage programs to our new Oracle system, the teachers will be able to see more and more."

With achievement-tracking technology still in its infancy, few districts have used it long enough to gauge its impact.

The largest and longest case study comes from Philadelphia. In 2002-03, just 22 of the district's schools met federal standards for making adequate yearly progress. Last year, after two years of using data analysis to guide teachers' efforts, 132 schools met the mark.

"We have obviously made a lot of reforms recently, but I think our data management is easily the most important," said Gregory Thornton, Philadelphia's chief academic officer.


$17.88 per pupil

To finance its system, which soon will let parents monitor their children's progress, Philadelphia spends $17.88 per pupil. "I think we spend more money on bathroom supplies," said district CEO Paul Vallas.

Basic models can cost less than $2 per student per year, and the most elaborate 10 times as much. But at that price, when new test scores come out, the vendor types them in.

Plano just switched from a system that costs $340,000 a year – about $6 a student – to one that costs $260,000 upfront and $87,000 a year going forward.

Mesquite will pay $342,000 this year to set up its system and $150,000, or just under $5 per student, going forward. Coppell expects to go with a larger system that would cost $15 to $18 a year per student.

Despite the systems' potential, some see peril as well.

"With so many vendors and such rapidly evolving products, school districts are naturally quite nervous about committing to what turns out to be the wrong system," said James Rusk, a former science teacher who oversees Mesquite's installation.

Still, even skeptics are optimistic about computerized student evaluation.

"Things will go wrong," said Todd Oppenheimer, author of The Flickering Mind: Saving Education From the False Promise of Technology. "Some districts will waste millions on lousy systems. Others will use these systems as an excuse to focus even more narrowly on skills that can be measured by standardized testing.

"But these systems are fundamentally different from most of what has preceded them. They don't promise to change the learning process and make life easy for the student. They promise to make life easy for the teachers, to show teachers where students need help and give teachers more time to provide that help. It's hard to argue with those goals."

E-mail asmith@dallasnews.com


THE CANS AND CANNOTS OF DATA ANALYSIS

Given sufficient data, analysis systems can:


Quickly determine which skills individual students have and haven't mastered.

Spot classwide trends such as a consistent problem with certain skills.

Enable administrators to see the strengths and weaknesses of various teachers.

Evaluate the efficacy of textbooks and teacher training programs.

Allow parents to track their kids and measure them against their peers.

Data analysis systems cannot:

Grade essays or short-answer questions.

Devise questions to measure student ability.

Determine why students are struggling or how to help them.

Guarantee success on the TAKS or the SAT or any other test.

Do anything that a person could not do, given time, with the same data.


DATA MANAGEMENT IN LOCAL SCHOOLS

Districts using data management systems:

Frisco

Highland Park

Irving

Plano

Richardson

Expanding their systems:

Allen

Dallas

McKinney

Installing a new system:

Mesquite

Discussing a new system:

Coppell

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-schooldata_30met.ART.North.Edition1.1354bd38.html

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

This is a novel approach. Binational cooperation for mutually shared concerns and goals like this should be pursued more frequently. -Angela

May 29, 2006, 10:52PM

Mexican classes offered in S. Texas

Online science and math courses in Spanish may aid immigrants

By JANET ELLIOTT
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN - Some South Texas students soon will be taking online courses from Mexican high schools and could even receive Mexican diplomas under a groundbreaking program designed to help immigrant students succeed.

ADVERTISEMENT

The program beginning this fall in two Hidalgo County school districts is the result of collaboration between the University of Texas and Mexican federal education agencies.

It is designed to reduce dropouts by allowing Spanish-speaking students to use computers to study math and science courses in Spanish, while they learn English and social studies in their Texas schools.

"Generally they drop out because they can't pass courses and get frustrated not knowing the language and sitting in classrooms. This is an incentive for them to at least see something they're passing," said Felipe Alanis, a former Texas education commissioner who helped UT design the program.

Proponents say the program will help not only immigrants, but students whose families are migrant workers or who move back and forth across the border as well, as American students from Spanish-speaking homes.

The students will be able to use the Spanish-language curriculum to supplement courses they are taking in English or even to complete a course, although they must take the final exam in English to receive Texas credit.

Some students could even receive their diplomas from Mexico, which would allow them to attend a community college in Texas.

Alanis said this option likely will only be used by students who are 17 or 18 when they enter a Texas school and have substantial credits in Mexico.

Signed compact

Ofelia Gaona, bilingual director for Donna Independent School District, said the language barrier is particularly difficult for older students entering Texas schools for the first time.
"So what happens is they end up dropping out of school and end up with jobs that pay minimum wage or below," she said. "A lot are very, very intelligent, they are very hardworking and they want to go to college."

William Powers Jr., president of UT-Austin, signed the educational compact earlier this month with Jorge Gonzalez Teyssier, director general of the Colegio de Bachilleres, a high school program offering online courses; and C.P. Ciro Adolfo Suarez Martinez, director general of the National Institute for Adult Education.

Witnessing the ceremony was Tony Garza, the United States ambassador to Mexico.

"This is the culmination of about nine months of intensive talks," said Alanis, associate dean of UT's Division of Continuing Education.

The talks included painstaking work to align Texas and Mexican curriculum in math and science. The alignment was necessary so students will be able to work with online resources from Mexico, as well as Mexican teachers who will help the students in computer labs.

Another key feature of the agreement will help Texas educators place older students in the proper grade by considering their transcripts from Mexico. Alanis said high school-age immigrant students are routinely placed in the ninth grade even though they may have enough academic credits to enter a higher grade.

The districts piloting the program this fall are Donna, where one-third of the 13,000 students are migrants, and neighboring Edcouch-Elsa, with 5,600 students. Each received a $500,000 federal grant to buy computers, pay for the online programs and train teachers.

The Donna district purchased laptop computers so students can study at home or while they are traveling with their families doing farm work. Edcouch-Elsa concentrated its funds on 40 desktop computers that will be placed in labs at several schools and hiring four Mexican teachers to help students with the online course work.

Different learning styles

Minerva Guerra-Gonzalez, special populations director for Edcouch-Elsa, said she believes students will be drawn by the technology.
"We have a lot of children that have very different learning styles," she said. "This program will give them access to the translation of the language. The barrier of the language is what keeps them behind sometimes."

Officials at UT's Center for Hispanic Achievement Program hope that the program will eventually expand to larger districts, such as Houston ISD, with its large population of English-language learners.

Alanis said it is coincidental that the program is launching at a time of great national debate about immigrants. Helping students who are in Texas schools complete their educations will boost the state's economy, he said.

"This is not to encourage immigration," Alanis said. "These kids are in our schools now and schools are needing help with this population."

janet.elliott@chron.com

This article is: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/3913768.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:55 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Check out Professors Jim Crawford's and Stephen Krashen's response (below) to Rothstein submitted to the Times. -Angela

May 29, 2006
Connections
In the U.S. and Europe, Tensions Between a National and Minority Languages
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
After the Senate's recent vote to make English the "national language" of the United States, an avalanche of accusations accumulated, suggesting much illiberal villainy. The Senate's enshrinement of English in the immigration bill it approved last week was cautious: the proposed law says the government must " preserve and enhance the role of English," but it leaves intact federal laws requiring multilingual materials and services. Yet some critics immediately attacked it as xenophobic, even racist.

But perhaps, to put things in a broader perspective, it may help to step outside the United States' debates about English and look at a situation that is its precise opposite. A few months ago officials from the European Union scrutinized Germany's compliance with the 1992 European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, a counterweight to the very idea of official languages. It stresses what it calls "the value of interculturalism and multilingualism." It demands that treaty participants "promote regional or minority languages," encourage their use, create political links among their speakers, guarantee access to them in criminal and civil proceedings, and encourage their presence in television and radio. Procedures were established for monitoring compliance with this project.

In March a European Union "committee of experts," as they are officially called, issued a 168-page report (available at www.coe.int/t/e/legal_affairs) after examining Germany's compliance. The gist of it is that in Germany "more determined measures are needed to encourage the use of regional or minority languages in economic and social life." Germany is, for example, asked to "remedy the existing shortage of Lower Sorbian-speaking teachers," to "develop and implement the educational model for North Frisian proposed by the North Frisian speakers" and "reverse the decline in study and research opportunities for Low German, Sater Frisian and Lower Sorbian." Germany's response in a 50-page appendix did little to mitigate the righteous sentiments of the final verdict.

This is a bizarre situation: treating languages as possessing inalienable rights and entitlements, meriting artificial life-support seemingly in inverse proportion to their importance. The charter justifies this explicit promotion of these languages as a means of preserving cultural legacy but also intends it to be a form of recompense, asserting that these minority languages are victims of "unjustified distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference" once intended to "discourage or endanger" them.

On a larger scale, this view was elaborated upon in 1996 in a Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, in which the International PEN club and other organizations, supported by Unesco, affirmed principles like "Everyone has the right to carry out all activities in the public sphere in his/her language."

There are, to be sure, reasons for the accusatory tone of these reports. Minority languages suffered grievous indignities as nation-states came into being. In France, for example, where French has been the official state language since 1539, there were periods when even other native languages, like Breton, were barred from the classroom and treated as obstacles to the nation's unity.

The French language is so central to the idea of France that its status is affirmed in its constitution, which is one reason France signed the European Union minority-language charter but never ratified it. Other nations did the same, selecting remedies they could comfortably endorse. (Twenty nations have ratified the charter; 12 others have signed without ratification.) They know what is at stake. So does the European Union: it seeks to weaken the idea of the nation-state.

But many of these debates are only incidentally about immigration. Low German is not being championed to support immigrant rights; even the challenges posed by Europe's radical Islamic immigrants have little to do with language. Instead, as the European Union language charter shows, linguistic issues grow out of a perception of some social and historical wrong and skepticism about the power of the nation-state.

To a certain extent the issues are very different here, where claims have been made not in the name of linguistic rights but identity rights. The group speaking the minority language feels subject to "unjustified distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference." Here too, though, this sense of a wronged past has helped spur linguistic change, including bilingual education (which has proved to be far from the promised panacea). There has also been pressure to expand language education here, not to right historical wrongs, but because the United States isn't considered multilingual enough.

The challenge to the state has also been different here. In the United States national identity has only accidentally been tied to the dominance of English. Slavery and the American Indian past aside, this is a nation of immigrants. While immigration did spur waves of resentment and opposition, the United States offers a profound example of successful integration of immigrant populations, aided by the traditional immigrant desire to adopt the dominant language rather than to insist on alternatives. It is only in the last 30 years, with the onset of identity politics, that there were efforts to promote an opposing view.

But it is ideology, not immigration, that is the deciding issue. In March a poll by Zogby International of 1,007 Americans found that the establishment of English as the "official language" has widespread support among diverse groups, including 71 percent of Hispanics and 82 percent of Democrats. Another Zogby poll, in 2005, found more than 80 percent of first- and second-generation Americans supporting the idea.

So the effort is not a matter of xenophobia. It is an attempt to take a position in the vexing debate over the future of the nation-state: What are the forces that hold it together, and what are the forces that threaten to split it apart? What sacrifices are asked for the sake of unity? And what sacrifices should not be asked for that purpose? These are the same issues that are causing citizenship tests to be scrutinized throughout the Western world. The coherence of the state can no longer be taken for granted when divisions within it are so enthusiastically endorsed; the European Union language charter reflects a problem, not a solution.

But establishment of a national language doesn't provide the solution either. A shared language doesn't promise unity any more than multiple languages promise disunity. France, with perhaps the longest and most established national language, is facing some of the most serious multicultural schisms. The United States has had one of the world's most successful experiences with immigration without having had a national language. Many states have more than one official language without suffering ill effects; others boast multiple languages that reflect persistent schisms, as in Cyprus (between Turkish and Greek), and Sri Lanka (between Tamil and Sinhala).

The outrage over the Senate vote is out of proportion. Meanwhile important discussions about the nation-state, and how it might evolve in the midst of diversity, are barely heard in the din, almost drowned out by the shouting between the nation-state and Babel's growing tower.

Connections, a critic's perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
__________________________________________________________
Sent to the New York Times, May 29, 2006

To the Editor:

For Edward Rothstein and others worried about 'Babel's
growing tower' in the U.S., we have two words of advice: study
history. German Americans, from Colonial times until the early
20th century, were far more aggressive, and more
successful, in maintaining their language and culture
than any ethnic group today. Pursuit of Deutschtum
(German "identity politics") was combined with loyalty
to an American nation-state based on democratic
values.

Linguistic diversity is now on the increase, thanks to
increasing numbers of immigrants. But immigrants today
are learning English--and sadly, losing their native
languages--more rapidly than ever before.

The 1890 census reported that 4.6 percent of New York
State residents did not speak English. The comparable figure in 2004
was 1.8 percent, according to the Census Bureau's American Community
Survey. These numbers are about average for the nation as a whole.
Babel's tower is crumbling in America, now more than
ever.

James Crawford
Institute for Language and Education Policy

Stephen Krashen
Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California

Note: We are both directors of the Institute for
Language and Education Policy, a newly formed
nonprofit organization.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/29/arts/29conn.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:58 PM 0 comments Links to this post

It's no secret. There IS money to be made in education. Read on.... Angela

Moses busy in private sector
Ex-DISD leader works on education ventures, sits on corporate boards

Monday, May 29, 2006
By JOSHUA BENTON / The Dallas Morning News


For Mike Moses, the business world is not foreign territory. He worked for several private companies during his later years in top public education jobs.

But now the former Dallas superintendent and state education commissioner has made a full-time leap into the world of for-profit education, both as an employee and as an investor.

"Is every problem in education going to be solved within the system?" Dr. Moses asked recently. "When I was superintendent, I thought it was my job to try. But I knew there were people on the outside who can help us."

Also Online
Entrepreneur pursues dream of educational empire


Dr. Moses is chairman of the board of the American College of Education, the new for-profit teacher-training effort founded by Dallas businessman Randy Best. He's also an investor in the company and chairs the operating committee that runs its day-to-day activities. He also sits on the boards of two publicly traded companies.

"I'm doing the same work I've been doing, working with teachers and educators," Dr. Moses said of his new position with ACE. "The perspective has changed maybe a little bit. But I'm still working on things I like to work on."


In demand

When Mr. Best hired Dr. Moses to run ACE, it wasn't the first time he had sought his services. Mr. Best said he had tried to lure Dr. Moses to Voyager Expanded Learning, his previous education company, when Dr. Moses resigned as state education commissioner in 1999. In the end, Dr. Moses decided not to move to Voyager, instead becoming deputy chancellor of the Texas Tech University System.

Dr. Moses' relationships with private companies date back to his days in public education. Since the growth of the for-profit education industry in the 1990s, public superintendents doing side work with for-profits have become increasingly common. Many districts ask that superintendents disclose potential conflicts of interest, and Dr. Moses said he always did so.

Although he did not become a full-time Voyager employee, Dr. Moses did work as a consultant for the company while at Texas Tech. He said his role included helping Voyager develop its strategy for reading instruction. "I was paid a nominal consulting fee for that," he said of the Voyager work. "It was on a very limited basis. It was fully disclosed."

But it was a point of contention in December 2002, when some Dallas Independent School District trustees raised questions about a new district contract with Voyager. At that point, DISD's associate superintendent for curriculum was Carmyn Neely, who had spent five years at Voyager.

Dr. Moses responded tersely to the concerns in a memo to trustees. He said both he and Dr. Neely had recused themselves from making any recommendation on the Voyager contract.

"Frankly, if trustees do not want us to avail ourselves of these kinds of materials, I can live with that," he wrote. "However, any inference that we have not acted properly, legally and ethically in this regard is inaccurate."

He included with that letter to trustees a memo from district lawyers defending the Voyager purchase. Dallas officials refused to release a copy of that memo, citing attorney-client privilege.

Along with Voyager, Dr. Moses disclosed to trustees four other companies he had worked for while at Texas Tech: the textbook publisher Harcourt, the Internet company Academic Planet, the Texas Association of School Administrators and the financial firm William R. Hough & Co.

"When I left being commissioner of education, I was fortunate that there were a number of people who asked me to serve in different capacities," he said in a recent interview.


Lucrative work

That outside work gave Dr. Moses a substantial income. Hough, for instance, paid him more than $70,000 over 15 months, according to public filings, to assist "in developing business relationships throughout the State of Texas." Later, during Dr. Moses' time as superintendent, DISD hired Hough to sell a portion of about $30 million in tax notes for the district.

His employment contract as superintendent allotted him 10 days a year to work for outside companies. Among his clients was the Houston law firm Bracewell & Patterson, which along with its legal work helps Texas districts find new superintendents.

Bracewell & Patterson had done about $7,500 worth of legal work for DISD in the late 1990s. Days after taking office in January 2001, Dr. Moses recommended that trustees give more work to the firm because of its expertise in special-education law and school finance. Over the next three-plus years, DISD paid the law firm about $718,000.

At the time, Dr. Moses denied any conflict of interest regarding either Bracewell or Hough. He ceased his work with Bracewell once The Dallas Morning News wrote about it.

Dallas trustee Hollis Brashear said that Dr. Moses did not hide his business relationships from the board. "Dr. Moses had a pretty illustrious career, and it would make sense for him to be sought out as a consultant," he said. "That would not raise a flag for us."

Dr. Moses declined to say what he was being paid in his new role as chairman of the ACE board.

As a private citizen, his compensation is his own business, so it is difficult to know how it compares with the $341,000 he earned as one of the highest paid superintendents in the country.

Along with his work at ACE, Dr. Moses now sits on the boards of two publicly traded companies.

Dr. Moses joined the board of Trammell Crow, a commercial real estate company, four weeks after leaving the superintendency. Dr. Moses is paid about $80,000 in cash and stock for his work each year, according to public filings. A Dallas spokesman said the district has no business relationships with Trammell Crow.

Dr. Moses also gets paid at least $17,000 for sitting on the board of SWS Group, which, primarily under the name Southwest Securities, helps school districts, including DISD, sell construction bonds.

Southwest Securities began doing work for DISD well before Dr. Moses joined the district in 2000, and that work has continued.

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/052906dnmetmosesside.d93a04a.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:27 PM 0 comments Links to this post

High School Exit Exam Reinstated
By Jesus Sanchez, Staff Writer / Los Angeles Times
May 24, 2006

Tens of thousands of California high school seniors who have failed the state exit exam will not receive their diplomas after the state Supreme Court today reinstated the test as schools statewide prepare for graduation ceremonies.

The state high court granted a request by the state education department to lift a nearly two-week old injunction that had blocked the use of the tests to determine whether students could graduate. An estimated 47,000 students have failed the exam.

The case was sent to the state appellate court for further action.

"School districts can continue their graduation exercises as planned before this litigation began," said State Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell during a press conference this afternoon.

"We will not give up on the students who are still struggling to pass. They will continue to be given every option to master those skills they will need in order to succeed beyond high school," he said.

The Supreme Court justices stayed a May 12 decision by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Robert B. Freedman, who issued a preliminary injunction against the mandatory testing requirement, ruling that it places an unfair burden on poor and minority students who attend low-performing schools.

The challenge to the exit exam was filed by attorney Arturo Gonzalez on behalf of a group of students and their parents.

Gonzalez today said his clients would continue to fight the test in court.

"The Supreme Court did not say that Judge Freedman was wrong," Gonzalez said in a statement. "Four justices simply questioned whether allowing our clients to graduate was the appropriate remedy. We intend to demonstrate that the relief was proper. If the constitutional rights of our children are violated, we cannot punish them further by depriving them of a diploma that they have rightfully earned by passing all required courses."

The legal battle has loomed over many of the 46,700 seniors statewide -- roughly 1 in 10 -- who have failed the two-part test. This year's 12th-graders were the first class to face the testing requirement, which includes a section on eighth-grade math and another on ninth- and 10th-grade English. Students are required to answer little more than half the questions correctly and can take the test multiple times. Students with learning disabilities are exempted from the test.

Originally slated for students in the class of 2004, the test was postponed for two years because of low passing rates. In January, O'Connell, who wrote the legislation mandating the exam in 1999, rejected calls from civil rights groups and others to consider alternatives to the test.

In issuing the injunction, Freedman said he was swayed by Gonzalez's argument that many impoverished and minority students -- particularly those learning English as a second language -- attend low-performing schools that do not prepare them for the test.

Of the 46,700 seniors who have failed the test, 20,600 are designated as limited English learners and 28,300 are poor.

Some of those students have retaken the tests, but it is not known how many may have passed.

— Times staff writers Joel Rubin and Seema Mehta contributed to this story.

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-052406exam_lat,0,4961108.story?coll=la-home-headlines

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:25 PM 0 comments Links to this post

There is mention herein of new book by Lani Guinir titled, "Meritocracy, Inc." I'm glad that she has taken these issues of standardized testing and ideology into account. -Angela

IRA* Hall of Fame Speech
By Patrick Shannon
Chicago, May 2006

NCLB is the meeting place for several of America’s most cherished biases. Perhaps, this is why so many find fault with the particulars of the law and its delivery but stop at some point during their criticism to affirm its rhetorical goals. We accept at face value NCLB’s commitment that all children can learn, that what we teach them is necessary for their futures in an increasingly uncertain world, and that schools should be institutions that render predictable results to enable equal opportunities within our democracy. Personal learning with social consequences for our economy and democracy seem to be worthy goals, and we appear to validate them, even when we argue that NCLB could be more effective and efficient in addressing them. But schools and America have never offered equal opportunities to all students and citizens. In the time allotted to me, I’ll argue that Americans do not act as if they value equal opportunity and that schools are designed to provide scientific evidence that inequalities in America are legitimate, justified, and natural. NCLB is not the problem-rather it is but one iteration of that design which frames the project of American inequality in the language of equal opportunity.
In the August 2005 issue of the Teachers College Record, David Berliner surveys the impact of economic inequality in America upon school achievement. He begins with the fact that Americans accept the highest level of child poverty of any industrialized country in the world. Scandinavian countries have 2 or 3 percent, Germany 10; but in the United States, nearly 22 percent of children live in poverty. Over 1 in 5 children lives in a family below the poverty line. Let me remind you that the poverty line for a family of four is $19,000. Living below the poverty lines means that these children have inadequate housing, lack nutritional meals, and receive spotty health care. Berliner links each of these factors with lower achievement in schools. Tired, hungry and ill students don’t score as high on standardized tests as their rested, regularly fed, and healthy peers regardless of what the school programs might include. Well before the advent of NCLB we accepted these scores as indicative of what children have learned and what they are capable of learning in the future. We reward the students who score higher with more opportunities, and we repeat the past opportunities until the lower scoring students jump over the proficiency bar. We call this closing the achievemen t gap and rest on the premise that we are making decisions according to merit.

But as Lani Guinier argues in her new book, Meritocracy Inc., these scores have less to do with merit and more to do with social class status. Here’s Guinier:

I am arguing that many of the criteria we associate with individual talent and effort do not measure the individual in isolation but rather parallel the phenomena associated with aristocracy; what we’re calling individual talent is actually a function of that individual’s social position or opportunities gained by virtue of family and ancestry. So although the system we call meritocracy is presumed to be more democratic and egalitarian than aristocracy, it is in fact reproducing that which it was intended to dislodge. Dollars and Sense 2006 Feb. 3.

Over half a century ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Southern schools’ segregation was unconstitutional and “inherently unequal”. During the last two decades, resegregation has been occurring across America despite an increase in diversity within the student population. Over the last 30 years, the Black student population has increased by nearly six million, the Latino population has increased by four million and three million for Asian students. Six million fewer white students attend public schools. In his 2001 report Schools More Separate, Gary Orfield states that racially resegregated schools offer vastly unequal educational opportunities and that gaps in achievement and graduation rates began to expand in concert with growing segregation of schools. These gaps had been closing substantially between the 1960s and the mid 1980s. Those who remain unconvinced about the effects of resegregated schools might consult Jonathan Kozol’s 2005 The Shame of A Nation. Both Orfield and Kozol argue that the resegregation of schools results directly from a continued segregation of housing in an America. in which racial minorities in the North and Midwest are steered toward inner city neighborhoods and rings of older suburbs and white families in the South and West isolate themselves behind gates and in exburbs.

Continued and growing poverty and segregation make a mockery of the NCLB commitment that all children can learn. Of course they can and do learn daily, but what are poor and minority children learning when American adults stand by silently in the face of these inequalities? Despite the hard work of some researchers and teachers who struggle diligently to lessen the blows of poverty and segregation, the lesson is clear. In America, equal opportunity means that middle and upper class white students are born on third base and think they’ve hit a triple. That is, the American education system continues the advanta ges that these students enjoy outside of school by writing and performing school standards, curriculum and tests that do little more than confirm these existing social advantages. This is not pessimistic talk or the subtle bias of low expectations. Rather my analysis is based on 100 years of test results that offer zip code as the best predictor of achievement or intelligence test scores and the continued misguided reform practices of seeking the proper science in order to discover the one best system that will teach all students to read, calculate and think efficiently. The intellectual and academic consequences of poverty and segregation are not problems for science to solve through experimentation and technology that isolate the individual as the unit of learning. Rather, these consequences are politic al issues to be decided by moral commitment to a democracy based on social, economic and political equalities.

What would be a commitment to real equal opportunity among all American students? While more and better teachers, useful curricula, and better facilities are important to be sure, they do not and cannot overcome the effects of systematically enforced poverty and segregation. They are not and cannot be sufficient to provide equal opportunity among American students. Berliner advocates that as we call for better teachers, curricula and facilities, we must also work for universal medical insurance, an increase in the minimum wage, and more jobs in inner cities and rural areas. Children who come from homes with employed adults, health care, and realistic hope for their future score higher on tests. Berliner estimates that raising a poor family’s income by $13,000 improves children’s IQ significantly and reduces bad behavior. Such a program implemented nationally would be much cheaper than Head Start, learning disabilities programs or prison. Stop the American wars of aggression overseas and fund it today. In order to increase equal opportunities, Guinier suggests the elimination of standardized testing as a measure of merit and more direct attention to social programs like affirmative action that add to democratic practices and outcomes. Orfield recommends that we explore federal housing policies to promote desegregation of existing housing patterns and to develop new policies in o rder to prevent further resegregation of inner suburbs. Berliner, Guinier, and Orfield are not wild-eyed radicals spouting utopian dreams. Rather, they are tenured professors, who seek to invigorate American democracy through social programs that acknowledge seriously the complex social contribution to learning.

Why don’t we follow their suggestions? My fear is that too many Americans equate democracy with capitalism – that we fear equality or even equal opportunity because we seek every advantage in the race to sustain ourselves and prosper in an environment of savage competition. Outside our families, we understand others through relations of exchange – the money nexus if you will – and we know that their gain can only mean our lost. Daily announcements of job layoffs and outsourcing evince this fear. Read Louis Uchitelle’s The Disposable American for a new account of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Fear of Falling. Americans look out for number one and cling to the myth that we are self taught and responsible for all the good or bad fortune that comes our way. With our standards, curricula, and tests, we’ve built over time and continue to maintain the educational structures that make the myth appear to be reality. We foster competition at every turn. We open every aspect of life to the market and believe that these markets are free despite every indication that participating businesses and entrepreneurs seek protection from competition in each. Think oil, sugar and steel. We swallow the rhetoric of tax relief as if taxes weren’t what make any cooperative venture for mutual benefit pos sible. Think Medicaid, social security, and public schools. Simply, we turn our backs on ways to create equal opportunities for the poor and minorities because it is not in our best interests to do so. NCLB is not the problem because it is nothing but a rhetorical gloss to cover over American inequalities, while offering the illusion that the federal government is doing all it can to further economic opportunity and political power for every citizen.

What do we lose by continuing to participate in NCLB and by our silences perpetuating poverty and segregation in America? John Dewey answered this question more than a century ago.when he wrote about America’s transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. Then, too, we faced an uncertain world which demanded new social knowledge to negotiate against the continuous fragmentation of our lives. The parallels are many because the differential treatment at schools then was also justified by reference to personal learning for general economic and democratic benefit. Dewey wrote, “ in the name of democracy and individual freedom, the few as a result of superior possessions and powers had in fact made it impossible for the masses to realize personal capacities and to count in the social order.” The casualty, then as now, is what Dewey called true democracy. Far more than a form of government, true democracy should be an associated method of living together that breaks down social barriers among people. According to Dewey, true democracy is the “free and mutual harmonizing of different individuals with every person sharing in the determination of the conditions and aims of his own and collective actions” (Dewey, 1910, 268). Dewey, Berliner, Guinier, Orfield and Kozol lament the silence of educators on matters of poverty and segregation because they are manifestations of our alienation from one another and prevent us from realizing democracy. Each separately and all collectively implore us to act on these larger social issues – these progressive dreams.
NCLB insults us by replacing teachers with the technologies of scripted instructional systems, by privatizating public education through for profit schools and tutorial companies, and by identifying vulnerable social groups for failure through disaggregated test scores. If we are to make a difference in the lives of our students, then we must look past NCLB in order to join with other individuals and groups to demand that American government provide programs which ensure the basic human rights of housing, health care, food and jobs for all citizens. Only then will we end poverty and segregation and position schools to contribute to the potential of a true democracy. Let NCLB be our catalyst to think these thoughts and to take these steps. And to quote lyrics from Rage Against the Machine-

These are all American dreams.
These are all American dreams,
These are all AMERICAN dreams…

Thank you.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:46 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Austin searches for ways to improve teacher quality
Poor, minority schools at disadvantage

By Raven L. Hill
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, May 22, 2006

Interstate 35 essentially divides the 80,000-student Austin school district in
two.

The western half has more affluent and higher- achieving campuses with a
relatively stable corps of veteran teachers. The east is filled with poorer,
low-performing schools that struggle to keep their teachers, mostly novice,
from year to year.

Schools in East Austin, many with large minority and low-income populations,
often have trouble hiring and keeping teachers. At LBJ High School in East
Austin, Principal Patrick Patterson is proud of senior Charles Walker's good
grades.

Lynne Lively, a bilingual teacher at Odom Elementary in Southwest Austin, says
that she has taught primarily low-income students and that teachers must
sometimes also be nurses and social workers.

Almost uniformly, the schools on the east rank near or at the bottom of district
schools on state test results.

It's not geography causing students to fail.

Teachers, second perhaps only to parents, have a profound impact on student
success.

Their effectiveness is greatly influenced by academic preparation, certification
exam scores and years of experience. When a teacher fails to connect with
students ˜ whether it's due to inexperience or attrition because of intolerable
working conditions ˜ students suffer.

In Austin, students on the city's east side appear to suffer the most.

This is an old issue that's getting new attention as the district wrestles with
closing the achievement gap between white and minority students, as well as
among different income levels.

Though experts caution that having a stable staff of veteran teachers doesn't
guarantee good test scores, they say it definitely influences them.

According to a report issued this spring by a district task force of teachers,
principals, parents and representatives of education organizations:

-Students at struggling schools are twice as likely to see their teachers leave.

The three high schools with the greatest percentages of white students had a
cumulative five-year turnover rate of 33 percent. The three high schools with
the greatest percentages of minority students had a rate of more than 60
percent.

Overall, officials estimate that 16 percent of Austin teachers leave the
district annually. It costs the district almost $10 million a year to replace
them.

-The gap between average teacher experience levels at predominantly minority and
poor schools and white, wealthier campuses has increased to almost five years
since 2000.

In 2005, the average teacher at predominantly minority schools had about 10
years of experience, virtually unchanged from five years earlier. At
predominantly white schools, teachers had almost 15 years of experience, up
from 13 years in 2000.

-Teachers with full state certification, who score high on the instruction
portion of their certification exams and have more than three years'
experience, tend to be more effective in the classroom.

Poor and minority Austin schools tend to have fewer teachers with such
achievements. About 11 percent of the faculty on elementary campuses failed an
instructional skills certification test at poor schools, compared with less
than 3 percent at their wealthier counterparts.

Ed Fuller, a researcher at the Chapel Hill, N.C.-based Center for Teaching
Quality, led the task force's study.

Fuller said Austin's gaps were surprising: "No matter what measure you look at,
there's just pretty wide disparities between the two sets of schools. Not
surprisingly, we see large disparities in student achievement."

Superintendent Pat Forgione said he plans to raise salaries in next year's
budget and make performance-based incentives part of the district's
compensation plan to help lure and retain experienced and specialty teachers.

"I believe in being very specific in your investment," Forgione said. "I would
like to find a way to incentivize doing the hard work, but I want to see
evidence of doing the hard work."

Why teachers leave

The impact of high teacher attrition rates is reflected in passing rates on the
Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

Johnston High School lost 80 percent of its faculty last year in the wake of a
state-mandated restructuring; 20 percent of the student body passed all
sections of the state's achievement exam that year. Less than 3 percent of the
faculty at Blackshear Elementary chose to stay at the school last year; about
60 percent of students passed the TAKS.

By comparison, Kiker and Patton elementary schools retained 75 percent of their
staffs. At Patton, 85 percent of students passed the test; 92 percent passed at
Kiker. At Anderson High School, where the turnover rate was 33 percent, more
than 80 percent of students passed the TAKS.

For the district to close the achievement gap between east and west, white and
minority students, poor and wealthy ones, it will have to ensure that the
neediest students get ˜ and keep ˜ the best teachers, researchers say.

"Novice teachers have good hearts, good heads and good intentions," said Louis
Malfaro, president of Education Austin, which represents 4,000 teachers and
support staff members. "But they're not as good as those more experienced
teachers."

The district's task force found that schools serving high percentages of
minority and low-income students were harder to staff because they are
generally perceived as having fewer resources, more disciplinary problems, weak
school leadership, lower test scores and higher dropout rates.

The report noted, "The students most in need of well-qualified teachers who know
the students and community well . . . and high-quality instructional resources
are the least likely to receive them."

For many teachers, the opportunity to work with the neediest students is the
reason they got into education. But even the most devoted among them are
challenged to stay.

Lynne Lively, a bilingual teacher at Odom Elementary in Southwest Austin, has
taught primarily low-income students her entire career.

Lively said teachers sometimes must be nurses and social workers as well.

"Often kids from low-income homes come from chaotic situations. You don't have
as much parent involvement. Our moms are poor. Our dads are holding down two
jobs. They may not be working," she said. "Their parents are struggling, and
they're doing the best they can."

Jo Mikels came from Mendez Middle School in Southeast Austin to teach at Small
Middle School in Southwest Austin when it opened in 1999.

Mikels said working with poor children can be overwhelming for new teachers who
expect a child to have had certain shared experiences, like going to the beach,
the zoo or restaurants that don't serve fast food.

"There may be no reference point," she said. "You have to build those
experiences in somehow. It's more challenging."

Mikels, who has been a teacher for 32 years, said she worries about teachers not
going to schools where there is the greatest need and how that contributes to
the achievement gap.

When she decided to leave Mendez, it was purely to work closer to home, she
said. "I really identify with the east side a lot. I taught just as hard there
as any other school."

An advantage of working at a school with little turnover is that teachers can
build relationships with one another, which can only help students, Mikels
said: "You know exactly what a child learns in sixth grade that can be built on
in seventh grade and eighth grade. You have time to have those discussions.
That's huge for the continuum of learning."

Can tide be turned?

Many urban districts nationwide are grappling with ways to reduce the
achievement gap and teacher turnover. Some have successfully implemented
solutions.

The Wake County school system in North Carolina, which includes Raleigh and
nearby suburbs, redrew its attendance boundaries to reduce large pockets of
poor students and ensure that no school's population is more than 40 percent
economically disadvantaged. All schools became equally attractive to teachers.

Last spring, 80 percent of black students in Wake County elementary and middle
schools scored at grade level on state tests, up from 40 percent a decade ago;
91 percent of Hispanic students scored at grade level, up from 79 percent a
decade ago.

Economic integration might prove difficult to replicate in Austin, where many
parents vehemently oppose busing and the school system is citywide, not
countywide. Almost 60 percent of Austin students come from low-income families.

Forgione said mandating assignments would only spur teacher flight to nearby
districts that offer higher salaries and more affordable housing.

"I can't restrict where teachers will go," he said. "Our plan is to recruit
talent, hire them early and get them focused on going to the neediest schools."

Financial incentives and good working conditions can keep good teachers in poor
East Austin schools, said Fuller, an adjunct professor at the University of
Texas.

The task force recommended officials give teachers a substantial pay raise next
year, on a par with fast-growing suburban competitors; give stipends to retain
veteran and in-demand teachers in math, science and bilingual education, as
well as those who work in "hard-to-staff" schools; enhance mentoring programs;
and work with principals to improve working conditions.

LBJ High School Principal Patrick Patterson said he was lured to the school last
year by a stipend.

"Were it not for that piece of it, I probably would have stayed at Lanier," he
said. "In schools like LBJ and others that are filled with traditionally
hard-to-reach kids, I'm sure that it would be an incentive for teachers."

Though he has plenty of applicants for openings, Patterson said a stipend would
help: "The quality of my applicant pool would be greatly enhanced with a
stipend. All of them aren't experienced, nor do all have experience working
with hard-to-reach populations."

rhill@statesman.com; 445-3620

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/nation/05/22teachers.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:43 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Dropout Data Raise Questions on 2 Fronts
One Side Says Problem Isn't as Dire as Thought, but Others Doubt Research
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 23, 2006; A08

Economist Larry Mishel was troubled by high school graduation statistics that contradicted what he thought was good research. That was particularly true of data used by many politicians and pundits to bemoan a 30 percent dropout rate in American high schools.

"This picture was radically different from what I knew from labor market data I regularly examined in my studies of wage and job trends," said Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. His research indicated that only about 12 percent of the workforce lacked a high school diploma or its equivalent, so how could the dropout rate be so large?

Political scientist Jay P. Greene also had trouble with the data, but for a different reason. He found many school systems were claiming low dropout rates, even though their ninth grades were bulging with restless students eager to be elsewhere and many had disappeared by graduation time. Working as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and as head of the education reform department at the University of Arkansas, Greene reported that graduation rates seemed to be worse than many people thought, as low as 50 percent in low-income urban neighborhoods.

A collision of those two views by prominent scholars was inevitable, and in the past several weeks it has hit the education policy world in an explosion of articles, e-mails and public debates, some quite heated. Experts disagree over who is right, and some say the truth may be somewhere in between. But the argument has aggravated a widespread feeling that information on how many children are disappearing from public schools is not nearly as accurate as it should be.

"Jay Greene and Larry Mishel have performed the valuable service of exposing the huge inadequacies in the way we measure the percent of students who achieve a regular high school diploma -- inadequacies not attended to in over two decades of education reform," said Paul E. Barton, senior associate in the Educational Testing Service's Policy Information Center.

Such congratulatory words have not ended the scholarly strife. Mishel and Greene continue their sometimes testy exchanges, and the argument has broken into disputes over lost diplomas, growth computation mistakes, uncounted immigrants and other issues loved only by people whose livelihoods depend on population data.

The major event has been the publication of a book by Mishel and Economic Policy Institute economist Joydeep Roy, "Rethinking High School Graduation Rates and Trends." It is only 100 pages, many of them full of charts, but it takes a big swing at powerful forces, particularly the National Governors Association and its recent report that said high schools are in crisis.

"About a third of our students are not graduating from high school," the association declared in a 2005 report by a task force that used Greene's data. "About three-fourths of white students graduate from high school, but only half of African American and Hispanic students do."

Mishel and Roy say that is wrong. Using U.S. Education Department data that follow student experiences and results of Census Bureau household surveys, they get very different numbers: an overall high school graduation rate with a regular diploma of 80 to 83 percent, a black student graduation rate of 69 to 75 percent and a Hispanic graduation rate of 61 to 74 percent.

They say that in the past 40 years, the high school completion rate, including graduates and those passing General Educational Development diploma tests, has gone up substantially and that the black-white gap has shrunk, except in the past 10 years, when there has been little improvement. Only graduation among Hispanics increased during the past 10 years.

Greene and Manhattan Institute research associate Marcus A. Winters have quickly counterattacked. They say the Mishel-Roy book is too dependent on Education Department longitudinal studies that follow a representative sample of students over several years and on census surveys that depend on people telling the truth about their success in school. If, for example, there were as many high school graduates in 2003 as Mishel and Roy said, they would number 476,442 more than the number of students school systems reported that year, Greene and Winters said.

Russell Rumberger, a University of California at Santa Barbara education professor, said he carefully checked the longitudinal survey used by Mishel and Roy and found that it appeared to "generate very accurate population estimates confirmed by published data." Greene struck back with a political analogy. He said the "assertion that we should believe the results of a survey over population counts is a little bit like the people who asserted that Kerry really won the 2004 election because the exit polls showed him winning even though the vote count gave the victory to Bush."

Daniel J. Losen, senior education law and policy associate at the Harvard University Civil Rights Project, said he agreed with Greene that the dropout problem is severe. "There is a consensus that this crisis is real and particularly severe for Latinos, African Americans and Native Americans," he said.

Researchers say this is not just an academic question; there are consequences for many children. "If Larry Mishel is right that the graduation rates have been improving, then some of the radical reforms for high schools being proposed may be misguided or dangerous," said Richard Rothstein, a former New York Times columnist and a research associate at Mishel's think tank.

"It may seem that we are talking about just a few percentage points here and there," said John Robert Warren, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota who agrees with Greene, but "five percentage points would be 175,000 young people annually."

No matter who is right, Barton said, it is embarrassing for educational research to have scholars as reputable as Mishel and Greene be so dubious about the value of major sources of dropout data.

Barton said census officials told him that there had been no field or validity studies of the census question on high school completion rates -- so experts cannot be as confident about that data. By contrast, he said, "tens of millions of dollars have gone into getting the questions right in that survey that gives the monthly unemployment rate."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/22/AR2006052201187.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:32 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Here we go again. This is reminiscent of the 1999 TAAS erasure-marks-cheating scandal. Clearly, this stuff is systemic in terms of the (perverse) incentives that motivate this behavior in adults. -Angela

Analysis suggests cheating on TAKS
TEA consultant cites suspicious scores in 1 in 12 Texas schools in '05

12:15 AM CDT on Tuesday, May 23, 2006

By JOSHUA BENTON / The Dallas Morning News

About one in 12 Texas schools had unusual TAKS results that suggest cheating occurred last year, according to a consultant hired by the Texas Education Agency.

The consultant, a Utah test security firm named Caveon, was hired after a Dallas Morning News series found suspicious scores in nearly 400 schools statewide, based on 2003 and 2004 testing results.

Caveon's analysis, using 2005 TAKS results, found even more: 609 schools, or 8.6 percent of the state's campuses.

But state officials say even those numbers are not a sign of cheating in Texas schools.

"Given the size of this program and the size of this state, yes, we had 600 campuses identified," said Gloria Zyskowski, TEA's director of test administration. "But we have over 5,000 campuses where the test was administered.

"While we take very seriously any allegations of cheating – we don't take any of that lightly – I believe that for the most part these tests are being administered according to the guidelines provided by the state."

The report, obtained using the Texas open records act, reopens a debate about the validity of results on the state's top test, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. TEA has traditionally left investigations into allegations of cheating to the districts, and few teachers or students are ever disciplined for wrongdoing.

Caveon's report, like The News' analysis, is based on an extended statistical analysis of student answer sheets. For example, it would flag a classroom where every student answered all the test's questions in exactly the same way, or a classroom where very weak students made seemingly impossible gains in one year.

It would also catch classrooms in which an adult erased a large number of student answers after the test was completed.

The analysis found "statistical inconsistencies" in 609 of the 7,112 Texas public schools where testing was conducted last year. In many of those schools, only one classroom was found to have suspicious activity; in all, 702 classrooms statewide were identified.

Caveon's report emphasizes that the statistical measures are not, by themselves, proof of cheating. In some cases, there may be another explanation for the unusual data patterns.

But the report says Caveon used "a very conservative statistical approach" that means "reasonable explanations of these inconsistencies by referring to normal circumstances become improbable."

TEA does not plan to investigate each of the 609 campuses identified, and Dr. Zyskowski said the agency may not even release their names to school districts. "You want to be pretty cautious about releasing something like that," she said. "As soon as something like that is posted, you have to be very cautious that it is as accurate as it can be."

Instead, agency officials will compare the list with incident reports from 2005. Those reports are generated whenever an educator witnesses something improper during testing at his or her school. If no such report exists for a school on the Caveon list, Dr. Zyskowski said, it's unlikely there would be any further investigation.

Self-investigation
If further investigation is warranted, TEA typically asks districts to investigate themselves. Dr. Zyskowski said the agency does not have the resources to look into many allegations of cheating.

"That's sort of why we tend to be a little judicious, because we are limited in our resources," she said. "So we can only look at a certain number of issues, and we try to look at those that appear to be most serious."

The Caveon report also recommended increasing the number of staffers who monitor the testing process in suspicious schools. But Dr. Zyskowski said TEA does not have the staff to do that; additional personnel would have to come from school districts.

She defended the state testing system as fundamentally sound. State and federal government school accountability systems are based on test scores, which are a major driver of nearly everything in Texas public schools. "I really think that overall that it's not as big of an issue as it sometimes is portrayed to be," Dr. Zyskowski said.

The Caveon report did not name any of the schools it found, but it did provide examples without identifying them.

In one elementary school, 45 of the 262 answer sheets were exact duplicates of one another. An additional 29 students had perfect scores. In all, 141 answer sheets were flagged by the analysis, and Caveon says the chances of such a pattern happening naturally would be less than 1 in 1 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion – a 1 followed by 72 zeros.

The results also indicate the prevalence of cheating on the TAKS test with the highest stakes of all: the 11th-grade test, which students must pass to graduate.

The Caveon report does not break out suspicious incidents by grade level. But while it examined math and reading scores in grades three through 11, it looked at science and social studies scores only in 11th grade.

The study found suspicious scores in 4.8 percent of all 11th-grade science classrooms and 4.2 percent of 11th-grade social studies classrooms. Those figures are much higher than the 0.7 percent of math classrooms and 0.3 percent of reading classrooms flagged.

If those 11th-graders cheated on the TAKS test last year, they are probably graduating this month.

The News' series on cheating was prompted by unusual scores in Wilmer-Hutchins ISD, the much-troubled district on Dallas' southeast side. A News analysis found strong evidence of cheating in the district's elementary schools.

For example, it found that Wilmer Elementary had Texas' highest raw scores on the third-grade reading test in 2003 – despite the school's abysmal academic track record and having one of the state's most disadvantaged student bodies. Nearly every student at Wilmer had a perfect score on the exam.

The News' findings prompted a state investigation into Wilmer-Hutchins that found evidence that two-thirds of the district's elementary school teachers were helping students improperly on the exams, in some cases creating and distributing answer keys on test day.

As a result of those findings, the Wilmer-Hutchins school board was removed from office and the district is being dissolved. Later stories led to investigations, which led to educators being disciplined in Houston and Dallas.

The state's reaction
In response to the News stories, state Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley said she did not think cheating was a significant problem. "If we have cheating on one campus, or in one classroom, that's unacceptable," she said in February 2005. "But I just don't think it's quite the widespread problem that it's been reported to be."

Still, her agency hired a test security firm as part of the renewal of its overall testing contract last year. That company is Caveon, which is led by former state and national testing officials.

Proving a cheating allegation after the fact is very difficult. Typically, discipline is not pursued against a cheating teacher unless there is eyewitness evidence of wrongdoing – something that can be hard to obtain. As of 2005, only two teachers had lost their teaching license because of cheating allegations in the previous decade.

That problem is compounded by the Caveon report's long lag time – which covers alleged irregularities more than a year old. Dr. Zyskowski said she hopes the company's analysis of 2006 data will arrive more quickly. Having two years of data will also make it easier to see patterns, she said.

E-mail jbenton@dallasnews.com

RAISING SUSPICION
An example of one unidentified high school whose scores the Caveon report found suspicious:

• 91 students took the 11th-grade math TAKS test.

• 55 percent of test takers got an unusual number of hard questions right but an unusual number of easy questions wrong. (Statistically expected number: 4 percent)

• 98 percent of answer sheets were identical or nearly identical to another answer sheet in the group. (Statistically expected: 6 percent)

• 49 percent of students showed unusually high gains from the previous year's test. (Statistically expected: 5 percent)

• The report: "The probability value that these identical answer sheets occurred by chance is so small as to approach the realm of impossibility." Caveon says that chance is less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

SOURCES: Caveon report, Texas Education Agency

SPOTTING THE PROBLEMS
Caveon's analysis of Texas test scores looked for four types of irregularities:

• Answer sheets with unusual numbers of wrong responses that have been erased and replaced with correct ones

• Inexplicably large jumps in students' test scores from the previous year

• Students who answer the harder questions on a test correctly but miss the easy ones

• Answer sheets that are unusually similar to those of other students in the same classroom

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/052306dnmetcheating.125e559b.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:15 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Carlos, thank you for sharing. -Angela

Carlos Munoz, Jr. Keynote Speech
Chicano/Latino Graduation
Greek Theatre, UC Berkeley
May 20, 2006

It's a pleasure and an honor for me to be here with you to celebrate your graduation. You have been blessed with the intelligence, the love of familia, friends, and community. Most of all, you have been blessed with the work ethic of your parents and the legacies of struggle waged by our ancestors.

You came here prepared to work hard in your studies and to survive whatever obstacles were placed in your path. It was not easy, but you have persevered. You have every right to feel extremely proud of yourself. I know your parents are. And so are those who love you.

Some of you are immigrants. Others of you, like me, are children of immigrants. In particular, children of poor working class immigrants. Like me, some of you are the first in your families to graduate from college. No doubt some of you never thought it possible to get a college education. I remember that my immigrant father simply wanted me to finish high school!

Thanks to the Chicano/Chicana Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and in particular to the student activists of that generation who struggled to open the doors to these previously all white institutions, you are here tonight. In particular, if it were not for the 1969 "Third World Strike" that was organized by Chicano/Chicana and other students of color, I and the rest of the Latino faculty and staff on this stage, would also not be here tonight.

In the process of working and studying hard to get the knowledge you now have, you have also become more critically aware of the harsh realities and tragedies that regretfully exist throughout our nation and the world at large.

You witnessed the terrorism of 9/11. And more tragically, the even more tragic response by the President and the Congress to wage a war of destruction against a sovereign nation that had nothing to do with 9/11. The war in Iraq has taken its toll of thousands of Iraqi innocent lives. Hundreds of lives of U.S. soldiers, including young Latino and Latina soldiers, your age, or younger, have also died and continue to die today in the streets of Iraq. They should have been here or at another university instead of the streets of Iraq where they met their death.

You have also witnessed another kind of war here at home. It is the war waged against hard working Latino undocumented immigrants and their familias who everyday contribute to the U.S. culture and the economy. At the time when Latino blood is being spilled in the battle fields of Iraq, the Republican controlled House of Representatives wants to criminalize them by making it a felony crime for entering the U.S. without papers. That is what the Sensenbrenner Bill (HR 4437) is all about.

Latino undocumented workers have courageously come out of the shadows by the millions to make clear they, like everyone else, deserves equality and human rights. Their struggle has generated a passion for social justice throughout the nation that has not happened since the 1960s when the farm worker movement led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. And the Black and Chicano Civil Rights movements, and the anti-Vietnam War made a similar impact.

I am extremely proud of those of you graduating tonight who have joined me in taking a strong stance against the injustice of the Sensenbrenner Bill HR 4437 here on this campus and who have marched in the streets of Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and elsewhere in solidarity with our undocumented hermanos y hermanas.

The millions of Latinos marching for immigrant

Rights in the streets of cities across this nation has

Also generated fear among those who are committed to preserving the status quo. They are the same ones who have framed Diversity as "un-American" and a source of division in our society. They are the same ones who oppose immigrant rights.

They have made Latinos the main target. For example, Samuel Huntington, a political scientist at Harvard, has argued in his writings that Latinos are the most serious threat to the White dominant culture. He fears that our nation will lose its single national language and its core WASP culture. As he put it, "In this new era, the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico."

A new Latino leadership must emerge from your ranks to take on the responsibility of developing a new politics that can build on the positives of our diversity. We need a leadership that has a vision of the future that is based on the multicultural and multiracial reality of what our nation has become. A leadership that is dedicated to the process of building bridges between all the different races and cultures.

You have proven thus far that you have the intellectual and the critical thinking capacity to become this kind of leader for the 21st century.

The task will require new vision of Democracy that must include people of all colors. We are not islands unto ourselves. Latino liberation is not possible without making possible the liberation of people of all colors, including white folks who are not part of the white supremacy structure of power.

In reality, as Latinos we represent everybody. We know we are an indigenous people. But we must also know that we are African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and European. We are Christian, but we are also Muslim and Jewish. We own the original meaning of an authentic Diversity. We are America!

I have been marching for social justice, peace, and Democracy since the 1960s. And I won't stop until the day I die. I know that your generation, and those of you in this graduating class in particular, will continue marching long after I'm gone.

I want to share my Vision for an authentic Multiracial Democracy that I have kept in mind throughout my life of struggle and activism. It is my graduation gift to you to keep in mind as you develop into our nation's leaders.

My vision is that Americans of all colors, religions, sexual preferences, men and women will give birth to an authentic Multiracial Democracy.

A Democracy that will promote a true racial and ethnic diversity and equality in everyday life.
A Democracy that honors its immigrant legacies and values as equal all immigrant workers whether they are documented or undocumented.
A Democracy that will promote social justice, religious tolerance, non-violence, and peace at home and abroad.
A Democracy with a government that will include a representative of every diverse group at the table of political power on behalf of the people, not the military-prison-corporate complex.
A Democracy with a national political multiparty electoral system where candidates for election include the poor and working class, not just those who are rich or middle class. With an electoral system where every vote will in fact be counted. No more Florida's, no more Ohio's, no more Bushes.
A Democracy where human needs are prioritized and not the needs of the rich and the corporations. Where health care and education are defined as Human Rights.
A Democracy that prioritizes youth as the most important Investment for the future of our nation and builds more schools instead of prisons.

THIS VISION WILL TAKE A LONG TIME TO MAKE COME TRUE.
But What I have learned in my lifetime is that struggle is life and life is struggle. But most importantly, that victory is in the struggle!

Congratulations to each and every one of you. Love, Peace, and Justice to you all!

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:17 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Lawmakers willing to work on No Child law
By Stephen Ohlemacher, Associated Press Writer | May 18, 2006

WASHINGTON --Lawmakers said Thursday they were willing to make the No Child Left Behind law more flexible, but warned there won't be a lot of extra federal money to help pay for it.

And don't expect the law to go away, members of the House Education & the Workforce Committee said as they kicked off a series of hearings in preparation for renewing the sweeping education law next year.

Since it was passed in 2001, teachers, parents and state education officials have complained about various aspects of the law, which requires schools to meet goals for student performance or face a variety of penalties.

Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, a California Republican who chairs the House committee said he's willing to listen to the complaints, but he's more interested in how to solve any problems.

"I'd like to hear the proposed solutions," McKeon said in an interview.

Under the law, all children must be proficient in reading and math by 2014. Some educators have complained that the law's emphasis on math and reading has detracted from other subjects.

Thursday's hearing featured examples of how schools can offer broad curriculums in science, physical education and the arts, while still meeting the law's requirements on reading and math.

Garrett Lydie, a physical education teacher from Laurel, Del., explained how he integrated math and reading into his classes, having elementary school students spell words and solve math problems while climbing a wall.

"During many of our physical activities, students apply the concepts they are learning in areas such as math, science, writing, reading and social studies to achieve a goal," said Lydie, the 2006 teacher of the year in Delaware.

But the issue of money kept creeping into the discussion.

"Without adequate and stable funding ... I can't get the needs met," Mickey Garrison, an elementary school principal from Roseburg, Ore., told the committee.

Democrats have long complained that the law has not been fully funded, while Republicans argue that federal spending on education has increased significantly since the law was passed.

"I think that when you talk to people, no matter what we give them, it's not enough," McKeon said. "We have backed this up with resources and we will push for more resources. But it's not all about resources."

Rep. George Miller of California, the education committee's top Democrat, said funding will be a critical issue as Congress works to renew the law.

"Where is education on the priority list of this government?" Miller asked.

The House narrowly passed a 2007 budget early Thursday that calls for cutting federal spending on education by more than $5 billion, about 7 percent.

McKeon said he has no specific plans for changing the law's requirements. "I don't have any ax to grind, other than to improve the law," he said.

Both McKeon and Miller said the committee plans to review the entire law before reauthorizing it, hearing from critics and supporters alike.

However, Miller said, it would be a waste of time for critics to argue that the law should be scrapped.

"I don't think the basic principles of the act are going to go away," Miller said.

Rep. Michael Castle, R-Del., agreed, saying, "One thing is for sure: It's here to stay."

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2006/05/18/lawmakers_willing_to_work_on_no_child_law/

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:38 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is a very important piece for all of us in higher education to read very closely in terms of its possible implications. What is proposed below was tried unsuccessfully within the UT system around 5 years ago. Here are some related sources:

UT regents considering standardized testing plan
Testing would be part of system-wide accountability plan
By Ryan D. Pittman

4/11/01
UT Regents consider standardized tests
System officials report need for basic skills testing despite opposition from students and faculty
By Ryan D. Pittman


-Angela



May 20, 2006
Future of Higher Education Is Divisive Topic for Panel
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/education/20education.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1148231738-gdnght6pCU82Guc7Zd2iJQ

By SAM DILLON
WASHINGTON, May 19 — At one end of the table was the chairman of Kaplan Inc., complaining that he could not get Kaplan's for-profit, Internet-based law school accredited because it has no law library. At the other end was former Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. of North Carolina, white-haired and distinguished, pleading for more federal aid for needy students.

The two are members of the Bush administration's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which concluded a two-day meeting here on Friday. And the person keeping them all laughing was Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist who suggested that some college students who take six years or more to graduate from college might be too lackadaisical to deserve government aid at all.

"They're climbing rock walls, they're playing, they're drinking — and they're getting Pell grants?" Dr. Vedder said.

The 19 members of the commission represent disparate opinions and interests, and finding common ground is not easy. Refereeing was the chairman, Charles Miller, a private investor and former head of the University of Texas Board of Regents, who wondered aloud how to build consensus among this cacophony of views.

"We may have to duke it out, or have a jump ball," Mr. Miller said.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings established the commission last fall to study how to increase access, affordability and accountability in higher education. Its recommendations on these issues could be critically important for the country's 17 million college students and their parents.

In an interview during the meeting, Mr. Miller said he hoped the commission's report would galvanize the Bush administration and Congress to legislate broad reforms in the nation's system for financing and regulating higher education. If it is punchy and well-written, he said, it could be as influential as "A Nation at Risk," the 1983 report commissioned by President Ronald Reagan that inspired a movement for higher standards and accountability in America's 90,000 public schools.

The commission includes representatives of wealthy private colleges, underfinanced public universities, overcrowded community colleges and for-profit trade schools, as well as private industries that want colleges and universities to concentrate on preparing students for the workplace. The members have discussed thorny issues, including how to control skyrocketing tuition, the proper role in higher education of Internet-based classes, and whether government should use its leverage as a provider of billions in federal aid to require private universities to administer standardized tests.

Mr. Miller's frequent mention during the commission proceedings of "A Nation at Risk," which excoriated the sorry state of America's elementary and secondary education, has left some members nervous.

"We've talked in private to him about that," said David Ward, a commission member and president of the American Council on Education, the largest association of colleges and universities. "If he means that 'A Nation at Risk' had a rhetorical flair that got people's attention, that's certainly true. But the pathology of the public schools in the 1980's is not comparable to higher education today. Our colleges and universities are successful — just not successful enough to confront the challenges of globalization without significant change."

After eight months of meetings and hearings, the commission is to begin writing its report, Mr. Miller said, hoping to get it to Ms. Spellings's desk by mid-September.

The members have a congenial working style that has often masked profound differences. Mr. Hunt argued to his colleagues that to help more needy students attend college, the commission must ask for more government money, because Congress will not simply reallocate financial aid away from middle-class families to the poor.

"If you think you're going to go out there and take those tax credits away from middle-class families, you ought to re-enroll in Politics 101," Mr. Hunt said.

Dr. Vedder said in an interview that his priorities were controlling costs and raising productivity.

"If the report argues, front and center at the top, for large increases in government spending on higher education, then some of us will have trouble signing," Dr. Vedder said.

Perhaps the commission's deepest conflict has been about how to measure student learning and compare it across institutions, a goal Mr. Miller has endorsed frequently.

Charles M. Vest, president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that some on the commission would like it to recommend one or several national tests to measure what postsecondary students have learned. Others, Mr. Vest said, would have the commission ask that every institution state its educational goals, and how it will measure progress toward meeting them. Using a single test to compare students at a community college with students at an Ivy League institution would be of little use, he said.

"We mustn't fall into the trap of 'one size fits all,' " Mr. Vest said. "This is a critical moment for this nation. As the forces of change and globalization accelerate, I want this report to be a call to leadership and effectiveness, not an indictment of the current system. There's a difference in tone."


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:47 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This national debate always brings to mind the comedy routines of the late Jose Antonio Burciaga, muralist, artist, poet, writer and community leader. He had a wonderful comedy routine on how now (with English-only laws) we’re going to have to change the names of our cities. Focusing on California, he said that "Los Banos" is now "The baths," "Los Angeles" is now "The Angels," "San Francisco" is now "Saint Francis," "Los Gatos" is "The Cats," Palo Alto is now "Big Stick," "Manteca" is now "Lard," etc. With humor, he acknowledged such great ironies that present themselves to us today.

Also, NCLR’s response appears below. -Angela

National Language Dominates Senate Debate
Bush Backs New Fencing During Visit to Border Hot Spot
By SUZANNE GAMBOA, AP
5/19/2006

WASHINGTON (May 19) - Whether English is America's "national language" or its national "common and unifying language" was a question dominating the Senate immigration debate.

The Senate first voted 63-34 to make English the national language after lawmakers who led the effort said it would promote national unity.

But critics argued the move would prevent limited English speakers from getting language assistance required by an executive order enacted under President Clinton. So the Senate also voted 58-39 to make English the nation's "common and unifying language."

"We are trying to make an assimilation statement," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of two dozen senators who voted Thursday for both English proposals.

Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., disputed charges that making English the national language was racist or aimed at Spanish speakers. Eleven Democrats voted for his measure.

Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo, offered the alternative. The only Republican to vote solely for Salazar's "common and unifying" language option was Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, whose home state's constitution prohibits discrimination on basis of inability to speak, read or write English or Spanish.

Both provisions will be included in an immigration bill the Senate is expected to pass and send to conference with the House, where differences will be resolved.

President Bush, who often peppers his speeches with Spanish words and phrases, had little to say about the Senate votes while visiting the Arizona-Mexico border. "The Senate needs to get the bill out," the president said.

Bush toured an unfortified section of the border in the Arizona desert Thursday, where he endorsed using fences and other barriers to cut down on illegal crossings. The Senate on Wednesday voted to put 370 miles of fences on the border.

Bush's border visit was part of his efforts to win over conservatives balking at his support for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and a new guest worker program.

Bush asked Congress for $1.9 billion Thursday to pay for 1,000 Border Patrol agents and the temporary deployment of up to 6,000 National Guard troops to states along the Mexican border.
His request was not warmly welcomed by some key senators.

Sen. Judd Gregg, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, delayed a vote on Bush's promotion of U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman to White House budget director to show his displeasure. He said Bush's request calls for using money for proposed for border security equipment to pay for operational exercises.

Sen. Robert Byrd, the Senate Appropriations Committee's top Democrat, complained that he had offered amendments providing for border security nine times since 2002, only to have the Bush administration reject them as extraneous spending or expanding the size of government.

"If we had spent that money beginning in 2002, we would not be calling on the National Guard today," Byrd said.

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers supporting the immigration measure continued to hold through the week. The group was able to reverse an amendment that denied temporary workers the ability to petition on their own for legal permanent residency, a step to citizenship.

Bill supporters restored the self-petitioning with the condition the federal government certifies American workers were unavailable to fill the jobs held or sought by the temporary workers.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.


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

Equity wins the day in California. Good news for those who support fair, valid, and authentic assessment.
-Angela

New Exit Exam Suit Rejected
Judge rules the state did not violate the law when it required high school students to pass the test.
By Jill Leovy
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

May 17, 2006

An Alameda County Superior Court judge Tuesday dealt a defeat to activists hoping to further weaken the embattled state high school exit exam.

Judge Robert B. Freedman, who last week handed a major victory to opponents of the exam by clearing the way for thousands of seniors who failed the test to graduate, rejected another lawsuit with similar aims.

The basis of the two suits differed, however. Unlike the plaintiffs involved in last week's decision, who had argued their case on the basis of the state Constitution, Californians for Justice Education Fund, a grass-roots advocacy group, argued its case on the basis of state laws.

They contended the state had violated its own laws in adopting the exam. A California statute required the study of alternatives before adopting the exam, but the state only belatedly attempted to make such a study, the suit said.

Freedman "did not agree that the state was late. He didn't feel the timeline was that clear," said Solomon Rivera, spokesman for the plaintiffs.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell applauded Tuesday's ruling, even while expressing continued frustration with the judge's previous decision.

In a written statement released Tuesday afternoon, O'Connell said that the latest decision allows the state to focus on trying to keep the exam as "a cornerstone of California's school accountability system." But he remained "concerned about the disruption to school districts and the mixed message sent to students as a result of last week's ruling," it said.

The state plans to appeal that ruling, in which Freedman decided in favor of a group of students and parents who had argued for eliminating the test on behalf of impoverished and minority students who they said don't have an equal chance to pass it because they attend low-performing schools.

Californians for Justice Education Fund still believes the exam violates state statutes and may consider an appeal, Rivera said.

Tuesday's decision has no effect on Freedman's ruling last week. The fate of tens of thousands of California public high school seniors who have failed the exam this year, the first year it was required for graduation, remains in question.

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times |

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

High School Exit Exam Tossed
A judge says the test, required for graduation for the first time this year, places an unfair burden on students in low-performing schools.
By Joel Rubin and Seema Mehta /Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

May 13, 2006

A California judge struck down the state's controversial high school exit exam Friday, potentially clearing the way for thousands of seniors who have failed the test to graduate with their class next month.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Robert B. Freedman issued a preliminary injunction against the mandatory testing requirement, ruling it places an unfair burden on poor and minority students who attend low-performing schools.

"With the bold stroke of a pen, Judge Freedman has given 47,000 students an opportunity to walk the stage with their classmates and to receive their high school diplomas," attorney Arturo Gonzalez said in a statement. Gonzalez filed the challenge to the exit exam in February on behalf of a group of students and their parents.

With graduation ceremonies weeks away, the decision throws into question the fate of many of the 46,700 seniors statewide - roughly one in 10 - who have failed the two-part test. It is certain to reignite national debate over the fairness of such exams.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, who wrote the legislation mandating the exam in 1999, expressed deep frustration over the ruling and reiterated the state's plans for a speedy appeal.

"I am greatly disappointed in today's court decision," he said. "It's a setback for students and for hard-fought school accountability in our state.. It's a decision that should not be allowed to stand."

Freedman rejected a request by state lawyers Friday to stay his decision until an appeals court can rule on the case. Hoping to quell confusion among students, parents and school districts, state lawyers said they would seek the stay from a higher court as they pursue their appeal.

"The most immediate concern is the chaos this decision creates in high schools all over the state. There are students who are within days of graduation. They are left with uncertainty about whether or not they will be granted a diploma," O'Connell said at a news conference at Burbank High School. "How are these students and schools supposed to plan for their immediate future?"

This year's 12th-graders were the first class to face the testing requirement, which includes a section of eighth-grade math and another of ninth- and 10th-grade English. Students are required to answer little more than half of the questions correctly and can take the test multiple times. Students with learning disabilities were exempted from the test.

Originally slated for students in the class of 2004, the test was postponed for two years because of low passing rates. In January, O'Connell rejected calls from civil rights groups and others to consider alternatives to the test.

Friday's ruling marks a serious setback for O'Connell and other advocates of the exam. They have strongly defended it as an important gauge to assure students leave high school with a basic level of knowledge.

Next week could bring further problems for the state when Freedman will hear arguments in another exit exam lawsuit. Filed last month, the suit alleges that the state Board of Education and O'Connell reviewed exam alternatives too late for lawmakers to meaningfully consider them.

In issuing the injunction, Freedman said he was swayed by Gonzalez's argument that many impoverished and minority students - particularly those learning English as a second language - attend low-performing schools that do not prepare them adequately for the test.

Of the 46,700 seniors who have failed the test, 20,600 are designated as limited English learners and 28,300 are poor.

Freedman added that $20 million allocated by state lawmakers to bolster schools' test preparation efforts had not been fairly distributed, with more than 160 needy schools receiving none of the money.

Anticipation among state politicians, educators and others had risen since Monday when the judge indicated in a tentative ruling that he was inclined to issue the injunction.

State Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) applauded the decision. "The judge's decision strips away the facade of claims that equal education is being provided in every one of our state's schools," she said in a statement.

Russlynn Ali, director of the advocacy group Education Trust-West, echoed the judge's concerns about unequal schools, but said without the test it will be harder to "ensure that all students master the basic skills they will need to succeed in college and in the workforce."

The judge rejected the state's argument that the decision should apply only to the students who filed the case. Any senior who has completed all other graduation requirements but failed the exit exam is affected, he wrote.

It is unclear how many students are affected by Friday's ruling. Some may have recently passed the test and others may fail to graduate for other reasons.

Nationwide, 19 other states with about half of the country's students require seniors to pass an exit exam, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Education Policy. Six more states are developing exams.

Jack Jennings, the center's president, said similar legal challenges to the one filed by Gonzalez were tried unsuccessfully in many of the other states. If it does not prevail on appeal, Jennings added, California's defeat could have a chilling effect on other Western U.S. states such as Washington, Arizona and Idaho that are considering an exit exam.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, 5,280 seniors - nearly 18% of the class - must still pass either one or both parts of the exam. Calling the test an "important accountability measure," Schools Supt. Roy Romer urged students in a statement to continue with classwork as graduation nears.

But administrators of large urban school districts across Southern California praised the ruling.

"I am relieved," said San Bernardino City Unified Supt. Arturo Delgado. "I don't want to see any student leave our system after a full 13 years and not have a diploma, especially if we've said they are capable of doing the work year in, year out."

Assistant Supt. Lewis Bratcher of the Santa Ana Unified School District said the purpose of the exam is noble, but its methods are flawed.

"Everyone wants accountability," he said. "The issue with this exam is it's one-size-fits-all."

Six hundred of the 2,200 seniors in Santa Ana have not passed one or both parts of the exam.

Santa Ana Supt. Al Mijares added that while he was heartened for this year's seniors, he believed the two-year delay and Friday's ruling send confusing messages to students.

"I think they either have to put it aside for good, or create a moratorium and put this under serious study," he said.

Ashley Daigle, 18, was relieved. The senior at Chino Hills High School passed the English portion of the test on her first try, but has failed the math section three times. Daigle is awaiting results from the March test, which would have determined whether she could receive a diploma in June.

"It takes the pressure off," said Daigle, who hopes to become a Hollywood makeup artist. "I'm going to get a diploma!"

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-exit13may13,0,1240661,full.story

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:39 PM 0 comments Links to this post

The second article below included in this post connects up the loss of recess to the focus on standardized testing. Glad to see that the Cartoon Network is getting involved. -Angela

Some Schools Are Leaving Recess Behind
By BEN FELLER, AP Education Writer Tue May 16, 6:21 PM ET

One sure way to get parents exercised is to take away recess, the playful part of the school day when their kids can run wild. In some places, it no longer exists.

The proportion of schools that don't have recess ranges from 7 percent for first and second grades to 13 percent by sixth grade, new government figures show.

Put in perspective, the overwhelming majority of elementary schools still offer recess each day, usually for about 25 minutes. Most children get one recess a day, if not two or three.

What troubles parents, though, is a sense that recess is under siege, so much that the Cartoon Network and the National PTA have launched a "Rescuing Recess" campaign. Kids are leading the huge letter-writing effort to school officials with one theme: Let us play.

"The reason I get riled up — and that most parents do — is we see recess as an opportunity for children to play," said Diane Larson, a mother of four in Tacoma, Wash. "It's a time for children to be imaginative, to show innovation on the playground. And it's one of the times when kids actually get to interact with their friends."

Larson and other parents in her district want elementary schools to offer separate recess periods each day, but students often get only their lunch periods to let loose. The recess drop-off is most noticeable in third grade, she said, when preparation for testing kicks in.

Where recess is in decline, school leaders usually blame academic pressures. Under federal law, schools must test and show progress in reading and math starting in third grade.

But how schools manage their time is a local decision. Recess competes with many other activities for schedule time, from music and arts to gym classes and computer classes.

At Rivers Edge Elementary outside Richmond, Va., children get only one gym class a week, which makes their daily recess period even more important, said PTA President Wendy Logan.

"The kids study all day, and they need some time for social activities," Logan said. "And those kids who struggle sitting the whole day — they're the ones who need it the most."

Nationwide, 99 percent of elementary schools schedule time for physical education apart from recess. More than half, though, offer those gym classes only once or twice a week.

Elementary schools in poor communities offer less recess, and less overall time for exercise during the school week, than other schools, the government study found.

The 2005 school figures, released Tuesday, come from the Education Department's first study on food and exercise in public elementary schools. It includes no data from previous years to determine, for example, whether recess has been declining over time.

Local disputes over the elimination of recess have popped up in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Miami and other communities. Such local stories, not the national picture, worry parents.

To them, recess is an institution — how could an elementary school not have it? When are kids supposed to yell with their friends, play tag or kickball, just have some fun?

"It's how I believe they start building their social structure," said Sandi Hocker, a mother of two in San Antonio, Texas. "Their P.E. classes are organized, and they are activity related. I think (children) need recess just for the socialization."

In an informal survey by the National PTA of its state leaders, more than half said daily recess is at risk. Only 9 percent were confident recess would not be reduced in their school.

The Cartoon Network has pledged more than $1.3 million to save recess. That includes more than $300,000 in grants to PTA chapters for participating in the ongoing letter campaign.

Mark Schneider, commissioner of the National Center of Education Statistics, presented the government findings on recess and exercise. He declined to draw conclusions from them.

But given the obesity rates among children, he said: "I think we should all be concerned about any schools that aren't providing sufficient physical activities."

___

On The Net:

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=519&e=1&u=/ap/20060516/ap_on_re_us/school_recess_2

Education Department report: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid2006057

Rescuing Recess: http://www.rescuingrecess.com/

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Parents, TV network rally around recess

St Louis Post Dispatch
Wednesday, May. 17 2006

One sure way to get parents riled up is to take away
recess, the playful part of the school day when their kids can run free. In
some places, it no longer exists.

Students who don't have recess range from 7 percent
for first and second grades to 13 percent by sixth grade, new government figures
show.

Put in perspective, the overwhelming majority of
elementary schools still offer recess each day, usually for about 25 minutes. Most
children get one recess a day, if not two or three.

What troubles parents, though, is a sense that recess
is under siege, so much that the Cartoon Network and the National PTA have
launched a "Rescuing Recess" campaign. Kids are leading the huge letter-writing
effort to school officials with one theme: Let us play.

"The reason I get riled up - and that most parents do
- is we see recess as an opportunity for children to play," said Diane Larson,
a mother of four in Tacoma, Wash. "It's a time for children to be
imaginative, to show innovation on the playground. And it's one of the times when kids
actually get to interact with their friends."

Larson and other parents in her district want
elementary schools to offer
separate recess periods each day, but students often
get only their lunch periods to let loose. The recess drop-off is most
noticeable in third grade, she said, when preparation for testing kicks in.

Where recess is in decline, school leaders usually
blame academic pressures. Under federal law, schools must test and show progress
in reading and math starting in third grade.

Elementary schools in poor communities offer less
recess, and less overall time for exercise during the school week, than other
schools, the government study found.

The 2005 school figures, released Wednesday, come from
the Education Department's first study on food and exercise in
public elementary schools. It includes no data from previous years to determine, for
example, whether recess has been declining over time.

The Cartoon Network has pledged more than $1.3 million
to save recess. That includes more than $300,000 in
grants to PTA chapters for participating in the
ongoing letter campaign.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:48 PM 2 comments Links to this post

School 'fix' plan: Is it sufficient?
Experts see good step, but it may not satisfy court or long-term goal

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, May 14, 2006

By CHRISTY HOPPE / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – The school finance plan being stacked like so many term papers on the governor's desk beats the Supreme Court deadline and assures the schools will open in August. But the plan leaves enough unanswered questions that many experts believe the state could be back in court fighting another crisis in as little as two years.

The new state business tax doesn't raise enough money to pay for promised property tax cuts – in fact, it falls $5 billion short. Lawmakers are counting on a booming economy to make up the difference, but if it turns sour, the crisis could be more immediate.

Plus, the Supreme Court warned that current education funding levels were barely adequate.

But the Legislature is putting a modest amount of new money into education programs. Within a few years, the "drift towards constitutional inadequacy" warned of by the court could be pushed by the low tide of dollars in the plan.

And finally, as homeowners are again finding this month, property appraisals are spiraling in many parts of the state. That and gradual increases in the property tax rate could push the state back to the brink of homeowner revolt.

Despite all that, most experts gave an appreciative nod to the Legislature, which is expected to finish work on the historic tax-swap package Monday. The plan, they noted, taps new revenue sources – chiefly a new business tax and added tobacco taxes – that allow a one-third cut in school property taxes while achieving an historical level of funding equality among the state's 1,037 school districts.

"It's a very promising first step, and if it hadn't occurred, they couldn't have fixed anything else downstream," said John Brooks, a lecturer on education at the University of North Texas and a former superintendent in the Northwest and Bridgeport districts.

In that first step, the Legislature also has diminished the Robin Hood system, whereby property-rich districts were forced to give away their tax dollars to equalize the dollars given to poorer districts. In addition, teachers received a $2,000 pay raise and high schools will receive additional funding to beef up curriculum and lower dropout rates.

But downstream are whitewater questions about whether this step is enough to satisfy the state's constitutional mandate on education.

Most of the emphasis of the Legislature was on lowering property taxes to $1 per $100 valuation – a drop of one-third from the current cap. Most of that tax money will be replaced with a new state business tax.

But the Supreme Court also told the state that school districts had to have "meaningful discretion" in the money they could raise. To give them that discretion, the plan allows districts to raise their tax rate 4 cents the first year. If they want more, they must go to their voters.

"Is that enough?" Dr. Brooks asked. "The answer is no."

That money, over time, will not produce the "vibrant curriculum that most people want."

Scott McCown agrees. The director of the progressive Center for Public Policy Priorities, a former state district judge who presided over a key school finance lawsuit, said that the 4-cent range provided by the Legislature doesn't put sufficient money into the school system.

"It's like you took your son and said, 'You have meaningful discretion to drive the car whenever you want, but there won't be any gas in it,' " Mr. McCown said.

If voters in many districts start turning down requests for tax hikes, then any wiggle room to provide curriculum, additional teachers and technology starts to disappear, he said.

"The whole session has been about cutting taxes. This is a net tax cut of about $2.5 billion a year," Mr. McCown said. "There will be less money for education down the line, not more."

He expects that "adequacy, equity and meaningful discretion will all be back in play," he said. "I think they'll be back in court in a year."

David Thompson, a lead attorney for school districts in the lawsuit that resulted in the Supreme Court's ruling, said that the plan will definitely require monitoring on issues of adequacy and equity. Still, he said, the Legislature has "done something that is very significant, and I personally applaud them."

Currently, transportation, teacher pay and other costs – such as fuel and utilities – are underfunded, the Houston lawyer said, and school districts might have to use their "local discretion" dollars to pay for services the state should be providing. All of these things bear careful scrutiny, he said.

"But my initial reaction is that if the Legislature hasn't reached the ultimate destination, they've taken a significant step along the journey in the right direction," Mr. Thompson said.

Another attorney in the court case, George Bramblett of Austin, indicated he still has some major concerns and plans to meet with his client districts in the near future.

"Obviously, it helps, but it doesn't solve the problem," he said.

The state has been operating an unconstitutionally funded system for at least the past four years, based on court rulings, he said, and that will take time to correct.

"This might solve the property tax issue, but it does not solve the adequacy issue," Mr. Bramblett said.

He said he couldn't speculate on what might happen with future litigation.

Clayton Downing, whose Texas School Coalition represents 140 property-rich districts, said he believes the legislation has bought at least a year of breathing room on school finance. The problem, he said, remains whether districts have enough discretionary funding.

"It won't help the schools and the teachers," Mr. Downing said, but at the same time, "equity is going to be the highest it's ever been, ever. You're going to reduce recapture statewide."

Within two years, fewer than 50 school districts will probably be subject to giving up their tax dollars to Robin Hood, he said. "It's a great, great start," Mr. Downing said.

Wayne Pierce, director of the Equity Center, which speaks for 600 low- and medium-wealth school districts, said transportation, bilingual education, teacher salaries and other basics are not funded well enough by the state in this plan.

And yet, he said, "This is the best structure that we've had."

Still, it is only the framework, he said. If schools can't raise tax money, if the state doesn't provide the funding to keep the schools on equal footing, and if the business tax doesn't raise enough money, then the school districts might have to return to the courts to seek relief.

"When you're building a house, you have to get that foundation in good. You wouldn't put up the walls, floors, windows without that," he said.

The test, he said, will be raising the roof – providing more money for education overall.

"Now they have to look at teacher salaries and money for education programs," Mr. Pierce said.

E-mail choppe@dallasnews.com

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/politics/local/stories/DN-schoolfix_14tex.ART.North.Edition1.90acb7d.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:11 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This should concern us. "About 1,750 U.S. schools have been ordered into radical "restructuring," subject to mass firings, closure, state takeover or other moves aimed at wiping their slates clean." We knew this was coming.... -Angela

By Ben Feller, AP Education Writer | May 9, 2006

WASHINGTON --Falling short of requirements under President Bush's education law, about 1,750 U.S. schools have been ordered into radical "restructuring," subject to mass firings, closure, state takeover or other moves aimed at wiping their slates clean.

Many are finding resolutions short of such drastic measures. But there is growing concern that the number of schools in serious trouble under the No Child Left Behind law is rising sharply -- up 44 percent over the past year alone -- and is expected to swell by thousands in the next few years.

Schools make the list by falling short in math or reading for at least five straight years.

In perspective, the total amounts to 3 percent of roughly 53,000 schools that get federal poverty aid and face penalties under the No Child Left Behind law.

"It's just a matter of time before we see upwards of 10,000 schools in restructuring," said Michael Petrilli, a former enforcement official at the Education Department.

"Unless all of these schools suddenly turn themselves around, or the states continue to find ways to finagle the system, you're going to see the numbers accelerate," said Petrilli, now vice president for policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a school change advocate.

The Associated Press reported last month that schools were deliberately not counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students, mostly minorities, when they measure progress by racial groups. Those exclusions have made it easier for schools to meet their yearly goals.

Still, more than a quarter of the nation's schools have failed to make adequate yearly progress for at least one year. Many will keep moving along the law's penalty timeline. A district must choose an overhaul plan for a school by year five, then act on it in year six.

For example, in Tucson, Ariz., the Lawrence Intermediate School for five years has failed to show enough reading progress among its students. So the district has ordered a total overhaul. All employees, from the teachers to the janitors, must reapply for their jobs.

The school's plan also calls for a longer school day, expanded tutoring, and bonus pay for instructors deemed to be master teachers.

"It's actually a positive, something to be excited about," said Ross Sheard, a supervisor of principals for the Tucson Unified School District. "We're not being dictated to. We're being told, 'You come up with a solution.'"

Assistant Education Secretary Henry Johnson said he's not encouraged by the growing number of schools ordered to make a drastic change. But the trend also shows the law is working, he said, by identifying schools that have underserved their poor and minority kids.

When a school reaches the end of the line, its district has five choices:

-- Hire an outside organization to run the school.

-- Reopen the school as a charter school, with new leadership and less regulation.

-- Replace most or all of the school staff with any ties to the school's failure.

-- Turn operation of the school over to the state, if the state agrees.

-- Choose any other major restructuring that will fundamentally reform the school.

Most districts are opting for the last choice, a wide-open category. It allows for approaches that are easier to pull off than firing teachers or opening under new management.

"Most schools are not doing radical things," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, which has studied restructuring efforts in California and Michigan.

"They are offering professional development, rethinking the curriculum, bringing coaches in, and trying to improve the school without wiping the slate clean," he said.

In Michigan, many schools improved their test scores by using a mix of strategies, a good lesson for other states, Jennings said.

The Education Department monitors whether districts are restructuring schools and aims to help them assist. But it does not get involved in how they do it.

"I don't know that we have a preferred way," said Johnson, the Education Department official. "Whatever way that works is the preferred way."

Yet some see an enormous loophole. Free to choose "any other major restructuring," districts have opted for milder remedies that won't turn schools around, Petrilli said.

"This is a credibility issue," he said. "If parents get information that their school is failing for six straight years, and everyone keeps their job, how is that a restructuring?"

Maryland tried a get-tough approach. The state schools chief ordered a state takeover of 11 struggling schools in Baltimore, invoking the federal law. But Democratic state lawmakers halted the plan, then overrode the Republican governor's veto when he intervened.

The law requires schools to test students in reading and math in grades three to eight and once in high school. The schools must show overall improvement and yearly progress among poor children, minorities and other groups. Missing even one target means the whole school falls short.

Each year, the consequences grow, from letting students transfer to offering tutoring to installing a new curriculum or some other major step. Then comes the order to restructure.

Nationwide, the number of schools in the final penalty phase varies widely because states started the countdown at different times.

The law has been in effect for four school years. Yet some states list schools as failing for five or six years based on testing and data reporting that began before the law.

Seven states -- California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania -- account for almost 70 percent of all schools ordered to restructure.

Eight other states and the District of Columbia list no schools in critical trouble. In many cases, their school systems do not have five straight years of test data, the amount needed to determine whether an overhaul is required.

Education Department officials caution that the current numbers are still being verified.

----

On The Net:

Education Department: http://www.ed.gov


© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:57 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By JESSE McKINLEY / New York Times
May 10, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO, May 9 — In two setbacks for high school exit exams, a judge in Oakland said Tuesday that he was inclined to ban such tests as a graduation requirement in California and a Massachusetts school board voted to issue diplomas to students who had failed such tests despite a state law prohibiting that.

In California, Judge Robert Freedman of Superior Court in Alameda County said in a preliminary ruling on Monday that the exams, standardized math and English tests that high school seniors have to pass to graduate, discriminated against impoverished students and students learning English.

On Tuesday, as thousands of students took a late round of tests, Judge Freedman heard arguments in favor of them, but indicated the state's lawyers faced an uphill fight.

"The court is basically resolute in its original decision," the judge said. He said he would issue his final decision on Friday.

The tentative ruling shocked the state superintendent of public instruction, Jack O'Connell, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Both favor the exams as a way to raise standards. California has the largest public school system in the country, with 6.3 million students, but mediocre rankings.

Mr. O'Connell said the state would immediately appeal any injunction.

"We're prepared for the long haul," he said in a telephone interview. "I'm convinced there will be some more turns in the road."

Officials said they had done everything they could to help students adjust to the requirement, including delaying the California High School Exit Exam for several years. The law was passed in 1999, but the class of 2006 is the first to have to pass it to graduate.

A ruling against the exams could allow nearly 47,000 seniors who did not pass — more than 10 percent of the class — to graduate next month.

Opponents of the exams, which more than 20 states require, hailed the developments.

"It is a major victory, both substantial and symbolic," said Robert A. Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a watchdog group in Cambridge, Mass. "It sends a message to other states that they should reconsider one-size-fits-all graduation tests."

Such reconsideration is under way in New Bedford, Mass., south of Boston. On Monday, the school board there voted to issue diplomas to students who had fulfilled academic requirements but had not passed the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, which evaluates math and English skills at the 10th-grade level.

Gov. Mitt Romney called the decision a "gross mistake" and illegal.

"New Bedford is going to take corrective action," Mr. Romney said, adding that the state could withhold more than $100 million in school money earmarked for the city.

Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting from Oakland, Calif., for this article, and Katie Zezima from Boston.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:54 PM 0 comments Links to this post

They dare to dissent on education 'reform'
By Joan Vennochi | May 14, 2006

NEW BEDFORD Mayor Scott W. Lang is unafraid to put unpopular thoughts on the table.

Good for him.

In defiance of state law, Lang and the New Bedford School Committee want to grant high school diplomas to students who have met all requirements of high school graduation but did not pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test. Currently, students who fail one or both of the MCAS English and math tests are only entitled to a ''certificate of attendance." New Bedford wants to issue two types of diplomas -- a state-approved diploma for students who do pass the MCAS and a general high school diploma for those who successfully completed their course work but did not pass the MCAS.

The response is predictable and patronizing: How dare New Bedford challenge the sacred cow of education reform with a threat of civil disobedience?

Well, the president of the United States appears to be telling the country it's OK to selectively disobey laws. Why can't the mayor of New Bedford reach the same conclusion, in pursuit of a legitimate debate about public education?

Thousands of Massachusetts students already receive high school diplomas without passing MCAS tests. They attend private and parochial schools across the state. No one presumes they are undeserving or uneducated because they never had the privilege of being drilled in the art of taking a state-administered, standardized test. Yet, that is precisely the presumption in Massachusetts public schools.

In New Bedford, Lang is challenging that presumption. ''It comes down to this. Public school administrators and teachers are not trusted to accurately assess and pass a kid onto the next grade or course. The law is based on it," said Lang.

Always seeking the next easy headline to pitch to the national media, Mitt Romney is threatening to cut off $103 million in state funding if New Bedford pursues its plan to issue two types of diplomas. Frankly, the governor is irrelevant to this local discussion. He has no interest in understanding what is happening on the ground in Massachusetts classrooms. All he wants is the ability to tout Massachusetts ''ed reform," as he flies across the country on the presidential campaign trail.

As Lang notes, ''Bludgeoning New Bedford into submission doesn't solve the problem."

The problem is not a commitment to education reform. The problem is that too many politicians want to believe that education reform did everything necessary to ''reform" public education -- and now it's simply a matter of making sure students, teachers, and administrators get with the program, stay with it, and reform themselves. They don't want to get to the next level of debate -- how to close the achievement gap between mostly white, suburban public school kids and their counterparts in diverse, low-income, urban school systems.

Nearly 66 percent of students in New Bedford come from low income families versus 26 percent statewide. According to recently reported information, 91 percent of the 631 member senior class at New Bedford High had passed the MCAS.

But a third of New Bedford students drop out over the course of high school, compared with 13 percent statewide. Lang believes students decide to drop out when they fear they will not be able to pass the MCAS. What is more important, he asks, ''To be socialized and involved in a school community or to sit in a seat one day and go through a standardized test?" What about those kids who stay in school, pass the course work, but don't pass the MCAS? Should we just tell them, ''Thanks for coming, we appreciate it, take care?" asks Lang.

Several other Massachusetts communities, including Cambridge and Falmouth, tried to implement the same type of proposal as New Bedford. They backed down when threatened with the loss of state funding. Lang said he does not want to put New Bedford or the schools at risk; but he wonders why the law is considered sacrosanct and why politicians like Romney are so willing to hold money hostage to their definition of education reform. ''To say, 'We're not going to fund your school system,' is absurd," said Lang.

One size rarely fits all, in clothes or education. The challenge is figuring out how to tailor learning to children, wherever they live, whatever their family backgrounds. Public education is not ''reformed" until it is. Public officials who have the spine to point that out deserve praise, not condemnation.

Joan Vennochi's e-mail address is vennochi@globe.com.


© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:04 PM 1 comments Links to this post

There's clearly going to be a hole in the budget that the next legislative session is going to have to address. A higher (and regressive) sales tax along with cutting other social services will end up making up for the shortfall. It's going to be hard just to buy down the promised property tax cuts. Also, Recapture (or "Robin Hood") is effectively "reigned in," meaning that the 10% of existing wealthy districts get to hold on to more of their money. This is a decision that this top 10 percent has made on behalf of the remaining 90%.

The editors of the Austin American-Statesman today expressed their on-going support for a state income tax. Click here.
Without this, we will keep relying on property and sales taxes to the detriment of the middle- and low-income families. -Angela

79th LEGISLATURE: SPECIAL SESSION

Bills for schools may slow spending

Newest tax cuts could force Legislature to trim Texas' finances

By Jason Embry, Laylan Copelin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, May 14, 2006

A school finance proposal poised to emerge from the Legislature cuts more in taxes than it raises and restricts the use of some new dollars coming into the state, setting up a slowdown in government spending that many Republicans have long sought.

The plan has been criticized by some fiscally conservative Republicans because it raises taxes on many businesses. But the legislation may actually do as much to implement their vision of a slimmer state government as anything in years, starting with the need to reduce spending to pay for the property tax cuts. As it's gained momentum, talk of cutting services has returned in force to the halls of the Capitol, even as the state enjoys an $8.2 billion surplus and prepares to spend some of that on schools.

"It is almost as if the majority of the Legislature has mass anorexia," said Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso. "They look in the mirror and think they're too fat, when in fact Texas has enormous challenges in education and health that are being unmet every day."

Texas already spends less money per capita than most other states on services, including public education and health care.

The plan also limits growth in local tax bills caused by rising home appraisals and scales back the amount of tax revenue that property-wealthy districts must share with the rest of the state.

Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, predicts that the tax cuts will spur economic growth, and he said it's appropriate to be cutting taxes when there is surplus money available.

"I think it's an important commitment that we're not just going to increase spending as a result of this, that we're going to use the money for what we said we were — a tax cut," Williams said.

As for paying for the state budget in the future, "I have no doubt that we're going to be able to meet our essential services," he said.

Tuesday is the last day of the Legislature's 30-day special session that was called to respond to the Texas Supreme Court's order that lawmakers give local school boards more room to change their tax rates.

Gov. Rick Perry and lawmakers have set out to address the issue by cutting school property tax rates by one-third over two years and replacing that money with an expanded business tax, higher tobacco taxes, a revamped method of reporting sales taxes on used cars and money from the state's surplus. Most of those measures have been sent to Perry, and lawmakers are working out final differences on the others.

An overall tax cut

Though the business tax expansion was the most politically delicate piece of the puzzle coming into the session, it's House Bills 1 and 2 that could most affect how government operates.

House Bill 1 supplies the property tax cuts and boosts education spending by almost $1.5 billion per year, including a $2,000 teacher pay raise.

House Bill 2, which has been passed in similar form by each side, says money raised from the new taxes must go toward replacing lost property tax revenue until the one-third cut is achieved.

On the whole, the Legislature's plan is expected to cut taxes by $6 billion over the first three years, according to Perry's office. Once the tax cuts are fully phased in, the new taxes will raise about $2.5 billion less each year than what's needed to pay for the property tax cut, officials with the Legislative Budget Board told senators at a recent committee meeting. The state will rely heavily on surplus funds to implement the plan in the first year, before the tax increases take full effect.

Because the Legislature is cutting more taxes than it's raising, there may never be enough money from the tax increases to pay for the full one-third cut, which means the Legislature will have to use other state revenues to get there — or cut from other areas of the state's two-year budget, which includes $72 billion in state funds.

Some Democrats have warned that the only place lawmakers will be able to turn for new money is higher sales taxes, which they say disproportionately hurt the poor.

Dick Lavine with Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates more government spending on programs that aim to help low- and middle-income families, said supporters of smaller government will use deficits created by the plan as an argument to cut state services.

"The likely losers won't be just the usual victims — poor children who need health insurance," Lavine said. "It's going to run throughout state government. We could see more tuition increases, an inability to house prisoners, less money for higher education."

Before senators voted to cut taxes by a full one-third, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst expressed concerns about how quickly the state could pay for a reduction of that size.

"That's something we're going to be monitoring very, very closely, at the same time looking for any area in state government that's fat and that we can eliminate to go ahead and fund our priorities, which obviously include public education," Dewhurst said.

Even as the proposal seeks to limit taxes, it contains one costly provision that was key to drawing support from Democrats and some Republicans in the Senate.

House Bill 1 increases the minimum amount of money that each district is guaranteed for each penny in its tax rate, and it increases the number of school districts that will receive the same funding.The Legislative Budget Board estimates that it could cost the state $940 million per year by 2009 to make sure districts have largely the same per-student funding when their tax rates begin to inch back up.

"When I voted for that bill, I recognized that there could be some problems in the future beyond 2008," Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden said. "But I thought that they would all be manageable in some way, and so I said, 'Let's go.' "

Giving voters power

Ogden touted three aspects of the bill: It shifts some of the burden of funding education from local school districts to the state; it cuts property taxes more than ever before; and it increases equity among schools.

Specifically, the legislation cuts school district tax rates for operations from $1.50 to $1.33 this fall and to $1 in fall 2007. School boards will be able to tack about 4 cents back onto their tax rates, and they can go higher than that with voter approval.

Local school boards have, for all practical purposes, been handcuffed in their ability to raise money for several years because they've had tax rates at or near the state's maximum rate. The Legislature's plan gives them more room to raise money by putting their tax rates well below the maximum.

But they'll need voter approval to access most of that money, which reflects an effort by lawmakers to prevent property taxes from shooting back up with rising appraisals.

"A lot of the Republican members of the Legislature — not all of them, but a lot of them — are truly committed to lasting property tax relief," said William Lutz, managing editor of the Lone Star Report, a newsletter that champions smaller government. "They believe that government should not grow faster than the economy grows, unless the voters give their permission for that growth."

House Bill 1 also reduces from about $1.8 billion per year to $1.1 billion the amount of money that districts with high property values per student must share with the rest of the state. The amount of money the Austin school district must share will decrease from $154 million per year to $66 million.

"Everything I campaigned on — reining in 'Robin Hood,' less reliance on property taxes, more money for schools — is happening," said Rep. Dan Branch, R-Dallas. "We've gotten into the red zone before, but we'd never crossed the end line."

jembry@statesman.com; 445-3654

Additional material from W. Gardner Selby


http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/legislature/05/14finance.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:53 AM 0 comments Links to this post

May 12, 2006 5:37 PM

IN PERSONAL PRIVILEGE SPEECH, CHERI ISETT DECRIES TRANSFORMING EDUCATION INTO LITTLE MORE THAN EXERCISE IN TEST TAKING
www.quorumreport.com

Refers to "tyranny of the standardized test"

Cheri Isett (R-Lubbock) is filling in for her husband Carl during this special session. Her husband is a naval reservist and has been called up.

This afternoon, the current Rep. Isett gave a personal privilege speech to the Texas House in which she praised the intellectual firepower of the membership but decried what she considered to be an over-reliance on standardized testing and mandated curricula.

She observed that other cultures can mass produce more technicians than can America, but she observed that what makes this country unique is the creativity, imagination and courage of its people.

Isett worried that we are crushing those values out of public education and subverting blossoming young minds in the name of checking off the right box in a standardized test.

She asked "Who gives merit to one body of knowledge over another" and who has the right to, "praise one kind of learner and condemn another."

She told her colleagues, "...Quit trying to cookie cutter students and let their God given excellence to flow out."

Although she varied somewhat from her prepared remarks, Isett's office forwarded a copy of her speech.

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

Cheri Isett's (R-Lubbock) Speech

I recognize that I am the most junior members of the House and for me to speak in this manner, I know, is highly unusual. However, this may be the only opportunity I have to address this body on a matter that I feel is of utmost importance and lies deep within my heart. In fact, what I’m about to say to you, I believe, is so important that I’m going to read it rather than speak freely as I’m accustomed to doing.

HB1 is a good bill. I am wholeheartedly behind reducing and restraining the growth on the egregious burden of property taxes in Texas. I was glad to vote for it. Carl stayed up way past his bedtime to watch the passage of HB1 and be a part of this historic legislation which you all have worked so hard on.

But there is something in this bill which grieves my heart. Something I believe we will pay dearly for in generations to come. That is the education reform measures which, although well meaning, will be to the detriment of Texas children. I am eager to see Texas children grow and increase in knowledge and education. My goodness, I have seven of them. I earnestly desire for the generation being raised up now to have greater opportunities than there were for the generation before them. But I believe we are on a misguided path with increases in standardized testing and mandated course work.

I know, we all know, the utter frustration from parents and teachers and students over increased regiments and standardized testing. I believe we would all agree that studying to a test and regurgitating is not a true education. We would all agree that the minds of Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, Samuel Morse, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell would never have tolerated such infliction upon them. They would never have allowed their creativity and their courage to step into unknown territories to be held back by the boxes that we force our school children to conform into.

These children were created by God to be unique individuals with unique gifts and talents. They are aching to break free from the tyranny of standardized tests and curriculum “scope and sequence” and express those gifts and talents. But we have legislated them out. We have told the artist that he has to pull back and cut back on blossoming in his chosen art because he doesn’t have time. He has to take another math and science class. We have told the very, very bright entrepreneur that his pursuits are worthless because he is not a good test taker and pulls our school ratings down. We have told our teachers that they are not good teachers and don’t deserve merits for their efforts because the artists and entrepreneurs in their classes don’t deliver the goods in test results.

There is a whole world of knowledge and all of history to study. We could never impart all of it to every child. There’s just too much of it. So who has the right to determine what body of knowledge has merit. Who was it anyway that said “every seventh grader needs to know all the parts of the cell and their function.” Why is that more important than, say, the intricacies of weather systems. And why are either of those more important than any other body of knowledge which delights the heart of a child. Who gives merit to one body of knowledge over another. And yet, through our essential skills and standardized tests, we praise one type of learner and condemn another. We tell our classroom teachers that it doesn’t matter that you want to reach the heart of a child . We want you to mold his mind to conform to what we believe is a productive, college-prepped student.

I challenge you, Members, in sessions to come as you discuss these crucially important matters, to break out of the box. We can no longer afford to measure education success in terms of test results and rigorous curriculum. In that arena, countries like China clearly have us beat. They are disciplined, they are structured, they can produce multiples of what we can produce cheaper – not better, but more of it and cheaper.

The one thing other cultures lack which we possess and which we must fight to hold on to is creativity, imagination, and courage. These are the things which we must foster in education if our children and our nation are to survive. We need minds that are nurtured in discovery, not rote memorization. We need individuals who are able to muster the courage to go where others have never gone. We need to quit trying to cookie cutter every child in Texas schools and let the God given, God led creativity and excellence flow out. We need to trust teachers to do what they have been called to do and quit micro-managing them. When it comes to accountability measures in exchange for state funding, we need to hold school administrators responsible for their stewardship of those monies, not place the onerous burden of performance on the shoulders of those who at this point are victims in this debate, the students and their teachers. We need to quit telling parents that their child is a failure because he’s not raising our school’s ratings with his test results.

What I’m challenging you with will in itself require creativity and courage to do. In the sessions to come, I’m challenging you to trust that children are naturally curious and creative. Trust that if we as adults get out of their way, they will discover and grow in their world every bit as much between the ages of 6 and 18 as they did from birth to age 5. We need to give the teachers in their classrooms the support and discretionary funding to explore and discover with their students. Not funding for more bureaucracy, but funding to buy state of the art equipment to learn on, funding to backpack over Guadalupe Peak, funding to build a boat from scratch and sail it across a big lake. We need to appreciate the value of apprenticeships and accordingly, to loosen child labor laws enough to provide for them. We need to stop burdening children with standardized testing which we would all have to honestly agree is not the measure of a true education.

Members, this is a big challenge. I’ve seen more intellectual firepower in this room in the last three weeks than I’ve ever seen in one place before. For the sake of our children, for the sake of our nation let’s use that firepower to find a better, more creative, more productive way to approach education reform than the road we’ve been on.

Thank you for allowing me to speak from my heart.

Mr. Speaker.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:47 PM 0 comments Links to this post

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Ben Hallmark
May 12, 2006 (512) 463-0524

HB1 Shortchanges Our Children's Schools
Gives Big Oil and Big Business a $400 Million Tax Holiday

(Austin)//-- State Rep. Garnet Coleman (D-Houston) said today that House Bill 1, which was approved today by the Texas House, cut $400 million in funds promised to Texas school children last year and used that money to pay for a tax holiday for big oil and big business. Under the tax plan, businesses will have their property taxes cut in 2007 but will not pay the new business tax until 2008, resulting in a windfall of $400 million for the big oil, insurance, and utility industries alone.

"Today, a Texas House majority sent Texas voters a message that giving a big tax break to Exxon is a higher priority than keeping a promise made to provide $1.8 billion for our children's schools," Coleman said.

"Fifty-eight House Members voted to send HB1 to a conference committee with the hope that we would put our children's schools first, but Exxon snagged a $400 million tax holiday almost as quickly as gas shot up to $3 a gallon," he added.

Coleman explained that last summer, the House voted for an Appropriations Bill that included a rider that locked away $1.8 billion for education. House Bill 1, as passed today, rescinded that $1.8 billion commitment and provided only slightly more than $1.4 billion for public education.

"Even with an $8.2 billion surplus and a $4 billion Perry tax plan, HB 1 cut $400 million from the amount the House promised to use for our children's schools just last year," Coleman explained.

Coleman explained that in 2003, the Legislature cut over $3 billion from proven educational improvement initiatives that prevent dropouts and enhance basic classroom instruction.

"Texans were told that this special session was about improving our children's schools, but instead, this session cut $400 million from education funds approved in 2005 and never bothered to address $3 billion that has been cut from education since 2003," Coleman said.

Coleman explained that schools and other critical state needs will suffer from the HB1 and HB2 tax scheme that will shoot a $5 billion "hole" in the budget for 2007-2208 and even larger potential deficits in the future.

"Our children's schools should be our highest priority, but this special session had everything to do with a tax cuts for the powerful special interests and gave our children's schools a little candy for one year while cooking up a recipe for long term starvation and failure," Coleman concluded.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:45 PM 0 comments Links to this post

I hadn't posted this and it lays out who is affected by Gov. Perry's proposed business tax. The rub right now is with recapture (or "Robin Hood") with wealthy districts not wanting to share the wealth. Another problem is with some legislators wanting most or all of the funding from the business tax to go to lowering property taxes rather than to schools (see previous post). -Angela

79TH LEGISLATURE: SPECIAL SESSION

Sorting out winners, losers in business tax plan

Proposed changes would shift burden from capital- to labor-intensive industries

By Corrie MacLaggan, Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, April 30, 2006
In the past 13 years, prices on the menus at Maudie's Tex-Mex have risen just twice.

But items such as Skinny Sheryl's enchiladas ($6.50) soon could cost more at the five popular Austin restaurants because of a state business tax now working its way through the Texas Legislature.

The tax wouldn't automatically initiate price increases, but it would cause menu prices to go up sooner, said Joe Draker, owner-operator of Maudie's.

"You add this to the rising cost of energy . . . you tack a couple of these together, and you have to go up on prices," Draker said.

As legislators work on the details of the tax plan pushed by Gov. Rick Perry, some Texas businesses say the new tax penalizes them, while other businesses predict they'll come out ahead. The levy would replace the corporate franchise tax and require restaurants, retailers and wholesalers to pay one-half percent of most of their revenue; other businesses would pay 1 percent.

Capital-intensive industries such as oil and gas, manufacturing and utilities stand to benefit most because the new levy will be offset by large cuts to property taxes — a tax that has hit them particularly hard. Most major business organizations in the state are supporting the plan.

Labor-intensive businesses, such as law firms, engineering firms, hotels and barber shops, are more likely to pay higher taxes under the plan. And because the tax is based on total revenue, not profit, some owners of businesses with low profit margins fear it could hurt them.

"Frankly, there could be winners, and I've already heard from the losers," said Will Newton, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, whose 34,000 small and independent businesses in Texas are divided on whether to support the tax plan. "Small-business owners are starting to wake up to what's going on, and a bunch of people out there are really upset."

The business tax is part of Perry's larger effort to raise enough money to reduce school property tax rates by about one-third.

The plan, already approved by the House and sent to the Senate for consideration, is a response to the Texas Supreme Court's order that the Legislature give local school boards more leeway in the property tax rates they set.

The court has given lawmakers until June 1 to change the tax system or else it will cut off state money for schools; lawmakers are about halfway through a 30-day special session to respond to that order.

A higher cigarette tax and money from the state's budget surplus are also part of the plan.

A panel of business leaders from across the state wrote the Perry plan. Its supporters have never shied away from the fact that businesses, including some that actively lobby at the Capitol and support Republican candidates, had substantial input.

"Some of the language in the bill reflects the unique situation of certain industries," said Dale Craymer, a former official in the comptroller's office who is now with the business-backed Texas Taxpayers and Research Association. "But, generally, those provisions were to prevent the tax from being too burdensome relative to their profit level."

Craymer said the capital-intensive industries that would benefit from the plan currently pay about two-thirds of all business taxes yet represent about one-third of economic activity.

Extending tax's reach

Not all businesses would pay the new tax. Juan in a Million, for example, a Mexican restaurant in East Austin, would be exempt because it's a sole proprietorship.

General partnerships and sole proprietorships would be exempt, as would businesses that gross less than $300,000 a year. General partnerships and sole proprietorships do not receive lawsuit liability protection from the state, the common thread among businesses that would pay the new tax.

The plan would replace the state's corporate franchise tax, which exempts even more types of businesses. About 150,000 of the state's 2.4 million businesses pay that tax, and many more have restructured to avoid it.

About 50,000 additional businesses would pay the new tax, so about 2.2 million businesses would still be exempt, largely because they are small businesses and sole proprietorships.

Although some major corporations have organized themselves as partnerships to avoid the current franchise tax, that would be less likely to happen under the Perry proposal, Craymer said. Businesses that avoid this tax will lose some state protection from lawsuits, and Craymer said that protection is fairly valuable.

"This tax is so broad that the planning opportunities are few and far between," Craymer said. "There may be some small businesses that will convert to sole proprietorships, but those are not businesses that account for much of the state's economic activity. In general, this tax is going to capture over 90 percent of the economic activity in the state."

By comparison, he said, the current franchise tax applies to about 75 percent of economic activity.

Perry has vigorously touted the support of business groups — including those representing restaurants, nurses, airlines, retailers and manufacturers — as proof that his plan will not hurt the economy.

"You can't make a perfect tax plan," Perry said. "And to those that would criticize it for not being perfect, I guess we'll stand up and say, 'We are not perfect, but this is the closest to perfect that the vast majority of the business community and these legislators have ever seen.' "

Several large companies declined to discuss how the plan would affect their tax bill and instead spoke in general terms.

"We've long advocated a fair and broad-based tax, and we think the House bill accomplishes that," said Colleen Ryan, a spokeswoman for computer maker Dell Inc.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. spokeswoman Lisa Elledge said, "We do realize more of a tax burden (under the plan). But at the same time, we realize it's important for the state to move in this direction."

From none to some

Maudie's, which has 240 employees, grosses about $10 million a year, Draker said. A tax on gross receipts (about $35,000 under the formulas laid out) probably would be considerably higher for the business than what it pays in franchise taxes now, he said.

Businesses such as Maudie's could pass the tax increase on to customers, but doctors don't have that option, said Dr. Bruce Malone, an Austin orthopedic surgeon.

Malone estimates that his six-doctor practice, Austin Bone & Joint Clinic, which currently pays no franchise tax as a professional corporation, would pay about $17,800 per year under the 1 percent tax that physicians would pay.

That would be an increase in overhead costs that the practice couldn't charge patients because insurance companies and government programs usually foot health care bills and set the rates, he said. To compensate, the practice could decrease employee benefits or put off buying computer equipment.

Doctors should pay taxes to support public schools, Malone said, but he wants to see exemptions for charity care — free care for uninsured patients — remain in the tax plan.

The clinic, which sees about 1,400 patients each month, provides about $40,000 to $50,000 in charity care each quarter out of a sense of community obligation, he said.

"Not many other professionals are required to give their products to people," said Malone, who used a calculator on the Texas Medical Association Web site to estimate his tax liability. "It's a little different if you're the Exxon Corporation and you have gasoline and in order for someone to take the product, they have to pay."

The Texas Medical Association initially came out against Perry's plan but then endorsed it after the governor tweaked it to allow doctors to exclude from their tax base the government money they get for uncompensated care, Medicare, workers' compensation and military insurance programs, as well as 150 percent of reimbursements provided under Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program.

The version of the business tax that passed the House this week does not contain all those tweaks.

A shift with no change

Dry cleaners, barber shops, pest control or lawn services and other service businesses could see sharply higher taxes under the tax plan, Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn has said.

That's because those firms, unlike retail businesses, would pay the higher 1 percent rate and may own little or no property, so they wouldn't benefit from property tax breaks.

But Democrat John Sharp, a former comptroller Perry appointed to draft the tax plan, said he doesn't think such firms would see the tax increase Strayhorn predicted. "I've long ago since given up trying to figure out where the comptroller comes up with things," he said.

Bobby Jenkins, president of the ABC Pest and Lawn locations in Austin, San Antonio and College Station, said he's still calculating how the tax could affect his business but thinks his tax bill might be similar to what he already pays in the franchise tax. "On first blush, we're hoping it's going to be about a wash," he said.

Bob Landreth, an independent oil and gas producer who operates about 80 wells in West Texas, is a sole proprietor, so he would not be subject to the new tax. But he said many in his business who would pay the tax worry that the tax rate will increase in the future or that the property tax cuts will soon evaporate.

The House changed Perry's proposal to say any increases in the tax must be approved by the public in the future, but many have questioned whether that provision is legal.

Newton, of the National Federation of Independent Business, said his state group is asking lawmakers to add a provision protecting businesses in hard times. "They have to put in that if some business is going out of business that the tax liability is mitigated in some way," Newton said. "You don't want to kick a man while he's down."

As for Maudie's, Draker said he's "certainly willing to pay my share." But he's relieved that the full 1 percent tax won't apply since Maudie's, like other restaurants, has a relatively low profit margin.

If he had to pay the 1 percent tax?

"Oh, I think I'd have to get out of the restaurant business," he said.

cmaclaggan@statesman.com; 445-3548

jembry@statesman.com; 445-3654

Additional material from staff writer W. Gardner Selby.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/stories/04/30biztax.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:49 AM 1 comments Links to this post

By LIZ AUSTIN and APRIL CASTRO
Associated Press Writers
AUSTIN — Tempers are flaring. Negotiations are crumbling. Could it be the beginning of the end for the fourth special legislative session on Texas school funding?

Senate leaders say there's still time for compromise, but a raucous disagreement over wealth sharing Friday threatened to derail attempts to meet a court deadline to find another source of money for schools.

The day began with a meltdown in a Senate committee that had been set to approve a key component of the school finance plan. The bill, which would use part of the state's budget surplus to reduce school property taxes, ultimately was adopted by a 9-2 vote of the committee, with three present but refusing to vote. It next goes before the full Senate.

"We did not play well together today, and I would have preferred otherwise," said Sen. Steve Ogden, R-College Station, chairman of the Senate Finance committee. "But I think you need to appreciate the pressure that everybody's under ... sometimes people need to blow off steam."

A short time after the Senate rumble, the House rejected the Senate's version of another key bill that would dedicate most of the tax revenue generated from a new business tax system to property tax cuts.

Both bills are crucial elements in the Legislature's attempt to answer a Texas Supreme Court ruling that called the state's school funding method unconstitutional. Lawmakers are in the third week of a 30-day special session. The court set a June 1 deadline to fix the problem, or money to public schools would be frozen.

Sen. Florence Shapiro added education reforms, including a $2,000 teacher pay raise, to the surplus bill. But committee members argued over how much property-tax money wealthy districts should be required to share with poorer districts.

Shapiro and five other senators walked out after the committee's chairman wouldn't let her scrap the education reforms rather than accept a change, which would increase the amount of money poor schools are guaranteed from the state.

"What this amendment does is it takes that money from all the schoolchildren and it only gives it to a certain number of schoolchildren," said Shapiro, a Republican from Plano. "I'm opposed to that. That is not why we're here."

The amendment eventually was adopted, but Shapiro said she plans to block the measure from being considered by the full Senate.

"All this did was go through a meaningless process because it will not come up to the (Senate) floor," Shapiro said. "I have the votes to block it."

The committee also adopted a $1 increase in the cigarette tax, to take effect in 2007.

Earlier in the day, the walkout left Ogden without enough senators to vote on the legislation. So, he ordered the sergeant-at-arms to round them up and bring them back, a tactic that hasn't been used in the Legislature since the dramatic 2003 redistricting battle.

Ogden delayed the meeting for about an hour before any of them returned. All but one of the committee members were present when the meeting resumed.

Meanwhile, Republican House Speaker Tom Craddick ruled the Senate violated legislative rules when it changed the tax dedication bill to give a portion of future revenue to education, instead of keeping it all for property tax cuts, as the House had wanted.

The current 30-day special session ends May 16. Republican Gov. Rick Perry could call another session if necessary.

Perry's re-election bid this year could rest on the outcome of the special session. He has spent months working to round up support for a new business tax proposal.

"We're not dead yet," Ogden said. "At the end of the day, (school finance legislation) has to pass and cooler heads will prevail."

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/gen/ap/TX_XGR_School_Finance_Meltdown.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:31 AM 0 comments Links to this post

The discourse on these marches tends to frame matters in terms of legality/illegality. Democracy, or pro democracy could offer more affirming angle. I appreciate the voices of children in this account. -Angela

MARCH FOR IMMIGRATION RIGHTS: SCHOOLS
Kids skip class to rally, be part of a life lesson

By Stephanie Banchero and Diane Rado, Chicago Tribune staff reporters. Tribune staff reporters Hal Dardick, Mary Ann Fergus, Jamie Francisco, Deborah Horan, Jo Napolitano and Andrew Wang contributed to this r

Published May 2, 2006

Students across the Chicago area skipped school Monday to march for immigrant rights, taking lessons in a giant outdoor classroom that they say went far beyond anything they could learn from a book.

"I can sit in class and read textbooks all day, but I don't think I understood how America works until I came here," said Bianca Crespo, 17, a senior at Chicago's St. Benedict High School who joined marchers at Ashland Avenue and Division Street. "Now I see it's a melting pot and this is democracy."

Students said they came for their parents, who struggled to make a better life in this country, and for their own futures. And they spoke in awe of the unprecedented experience.

"This is the most important thing I've ever done in my life," said Daisy Lopez, 16, a sophomore at Blue Island's Eisenhower High School who rode a bus for 2 1/2 hours Monday morning to participate in the march.

Mainly Latino schools in Chicago reported 30 percent to 50 percent of students were absent. But at Farragut Career Academy and Benito Juarez Community Academy, about 80 percent of the high school students didn't show. Suburban schools also were affected.

Classrooms and lunchrooms were noticeably thinned out, and school hallways were unusually quiet.

Public and parochial schools alike considered the student absences unexcused, but most administrators took an understanding view, citing the rally's educational value.

"This is alive and real and in your face. You can see a movie or read a book, or you can participate," said Sandra M. Fontanez-Phelan, principal of Chicago's Kelvyn Park High School, where nearly all students are Hispanic.

Even schools with very young children saw significant drops in attendance. At the pre-K through 2nd grade Ortiz De Dominguez school in Chicago, about a third of the pupils didn't come in Monday, assistant principal Silvia Saucedo said.

Many children knew about a similar rally held in Chicago in March, she said, because their parents and siblings attended.

"A lot of people think because [the children] are so young, they don't understand, but they know what's going on," she said.

In Evanston, 111 children were reported absent at Washington Elementary School, more than 20 percent of the school population.

"I hope parents were able to turn it into a civics lesson for the kids, possibly a historic lesson," interim Principal Karen Evans said.

Absences rose in suburban schools with large Latino populations, such as Oak Terrace Elementary in Highwood and Round Lake District 116 schools.

About 400 students were absent from Romeoville High School and about 800 from Bolingbrook High School, more than 20 percent of the student bodies.

Students at the march said they understood the consequences; too many unexcused absences could mean detentions, suspensions or even worse, but that didn't matter.

Sarah Marabillas, a senior at St. Benedict, said skipping school might mean a drop in her grade and the possibility of not being able to walk across the stage and pick up her diploma.

"What is walking with your class vs. walking with your people?" she said. "I'd rather risk not being able to walk across the stage to support this cause."

Other students believed they could make a difference as well.

"I think it's good for kids to march because I think they will listen to us," said Erik Martinez, 11, who skipped 5th grade at Bateman Elementary School in Chicago. "We didn't do anything wrong, so maybe those men in Washington will listen to us and do what's good for us and all the immigrants."

For some children, the march was a personal mission.

"I'm afraid my mommy will get sent back home," said Arturo Vaca, 11, a 5th grader at Eli Whitney. "If they kick out the Mexican people, my mom will have to leave. I want to help her so she can stay here."

Arturo's 8-year-old brother, echoed those sentiments but said walking 3 miles from Union Park to Grant Park was a lot to ask of a little kid.

As he marched down Jackson Boulevard clutching a red flag, Diego Vaca said, "I want to help my mom, but I'm tired too."

----------

sbanchero@tribune.com

drado@tribune.com

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0605020115may02,0,6304922.story?coll=chi-news-hed

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:26 PM 7 comments Links to this post

Unfortunately, not all of the sacred cows are on the table.... -Angela
Austin - In the opening hours of the latest
special session of the Texas Legislature, State
Representative Eddie Rodriguez (D-Austin) wasted no
time in filing a bill (House Bill 20) to create a
state Education Income Tax.

“This is the only proposal that resolves the
State’s legal issues, provides new funding for
education and promises a long standing resolution of
our school finance crisis,” said Rodriguez.

Most of the opening day was devoted to a dialogue
regarding the Governor’s Commission proposal. “Once
the rubber hits the road, it becomes ever more obvious
that this is a short term fix,” Rodriguez said. “Using
the surplus might work for this year, but we have to
make up that money in the very next year … and that
usually means an increase in sales taxes.”

According to Rep. Rodriguez, “Appraisals increase,
enrollments increase and the Governor’s plan actually
allows future increases in the property tax rate.
That’s not real property tax relief and it’s not a
solution beyond this year.”

“House Bill 20, the Education Income Tax, sets up
a simple and equalized source of revenue that will
grow with the educational needs of our state. It will
provide approximately $5 Billion in new funding for
classrooms and teacher’s salaries, and at the same
time it permanently cut the school property tax from
$1.50 to zero,” said Rodriguez.

“That’s a real solution and real property tax
relief.”

Eddie Rodriguez
State Representative, District 51
512-463-0674

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:12 PM 2 comments Links to this post

Tue, May. 02, 2006

School vouchers killed by one vote; senate majority leader asked to resign

BY GARY FINEOUT AND MARY ELLEN KLAS
gfineout@MiamiHerald.com

TALLAHASSEE - In a stinging loss for Gov. Jeb Bush's education legacy, the state Senate narrowly defeated a plan to ask voters to protect and expand his voucher program that sends public money to private schools.

The Republican-controlled Senate killed the proposed constitutional amendment by a single vote, with four Republicans -- including Majority Leader Alex Villalobos of Miami -- rejecting a hard sell from the governor that the measure was needed to reverse a recent state Supreme Court decision that ruled his 1999 voucher program unconstitutional.

Villalobos, whose wife is a schoolteacher, paid a steep price: Senate President Tom Lee stripped him of his post as majority leader minutes after the vote, saying he no longer viewed the Miami senator as a team player.

The proposal before senators would have exempted vouchers from language in the Florida Constitution that bans using public money for religious education and from language that requires a uniform system of free public schools.

The measure needed a three-fifths vote -- 24 of 40 senators -- to go on the November ballot, but died when it could muster only 23.

It was the second time in as many votes that the Senate rejected putting an education amendment prized by the governor before voters. On Friday, six Republicans also broke ranks with Lee and the governor to kill a proposal to loosen the class-size caps voters approved in 2002. Among the six: Villalobos.

''Not only did I not get organized support, unfortunately at times I received organized opposition,'' Lee said of Villalobos. ``It's a very unpleasant thing for me. It's a very sad thing for me.''

Villalobos defended what he said was a vote of conscience intended to do what was best for his district.

''I never asked anyone to vote against the president and I never would,'' he said. ``I serve at the pleasure of the president. He giveth. He taketh away.''

Villalobos has been a pivotal player in internal Senate politics all session, after a group of disgruntled colleagues decided in February to remove him as the designated Senate president in 2008.

As Senate sergeants removed Villalobos' nameplate from his desk on the Senate floor late Monday and replaced it with that of the new majority leader -- Sen. Dan Webster, a Winter Garden Republican -- Villalobos' supporters crowded into his office to blast Lee's move.

''This is a shock and disappointment in the president,'' said Sen. Evelyn Lynn, a Republican from Ormond Beach. ``There has never been any question Sen. Villalobos has been a team player . . . I'm very disappointed in the action that was taken today. I never thought it would come to this.''

Webster, the sponsor of the vouchers amendment, said the Senate will immediately move to mend the damage for the governor and take up an alternative voucher bill today.

The bill, which does not require voter approval, attempts to protect vouchers for the 733 students using them in private schools by putting them into the voucher program paid for by corporate sponsors, which was not struck down by the courts. But senators are unsure that will pass legal muster. The high court ordered the private-school vouchers to end when the current school year is finished.

The vouchers -- called Opportunity Scholarships -- were offered to students in schools that received failing grades in accountability measures in two years out of four. The voucher could be used in another public school or a private one that would take it.

In a terse statement, Bush said it was wrong that voters would not get to decide the fate of voucher programs.

''I am disappointed that the citizens of Florida were not given an opportunity to be heard,'' Bush said, accusing ''individual senators'' of ''turning their backs'' on voters.

The vote late Monday capped a tense day when it was evident that Republicans were trying hard to muster the needed votes. Twice the Senate recessed as attempts were made to count votes.

Before the vote, Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings chatted with senators during a recess. The governor deployed top education aides to talk to senators. And Webster spent time talking with some of the Republican holdouts.

Amid the turmoil, some of Villalobo's GOP supporters and a number of Democrats began suggesting that Webster would be a better man to lead the chamber starting this fall than incoming Senate president Ken Pruitt. The Port St. Lucie Republican failed Friday to get colleagues to pass the governor's class-cap scale-back, which he had sponsored. It was a sign of weakness at the time he is supposed to be assuming the ultimate reins of power in the Senate.

On Monday, other voucher supporters focused on trying to persuade black senators, whose constituents, they said, benefit most from the voucher program.

Tampa venture capitalist John Kirtley -- a large contributor to the state GOP and a firm believer in vouchers -- and a group he helped found, Florida Committee for Educational Freedom, brought 65 parents, activists and educators to the Capitol on Monday to meet with at least six swing senators.

Kirtley said the campaign has raised enough to pay for radio ads in the predominantly black districts of two senators from Orlando and Jacksonville, which have the highest concentration of voucher schools.

''I wouldn't be against school choice when I have all those those kids and all those parents in my district who want school choice,'' Kirtley said.

Herald staff writers Evan S. Benn and Marc Caputo contributed to this report.

© 2006 MiamiHerald.com and wire service sources.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/email/news/breaking_news/14476228.htm

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:22 PM 1 comments Links to this post

May 3, 2006, 2:38PM

SPECIAL SESSION

Senate sends tax bill to Perry

Lawmaker from La Porte stalls the measure after constituents call

By JANET ELLIOTT and R.G. RATCLIFFE
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN - The Senate voted 16-14 Tuesday to send a business tax bill to the governor, after a Houston-area senator jeopardized passage of the bill with last-minute opposition.

Sen. Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, ended up casting the key vote that allowed Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst to bring the bill up for a final vote. Four hours earlier he had stalled action by voting against bringing the bill to the floor.

At issue was a Senate rule requiring two-thirds of senators present to allow a bill to be debated. The rule is designed to get bipartisan consensus on legislation being brought before the Senate.

Jackson said he has had hundreds of calls from his district and decided to vote against bringing up the tax bill for debate because he thought it would have little permanent impact on reducing property taxes while raising new taxes on businesses.

"I started looking at calculating how little people would receive from the first stage of this property tax cut," Jackson said. "If school districts were able to raise their property tax rate 6 cents without a vote and then we have appraisal creep ... you come out with a wash in the first year."

Jackson said he used his ability to block the bill to gain "concessions" from Gov. Rick Perry and Dewhurst on having language to limit growth in school district spending put into another bill.

He said the restriction should limit the growth in property taxes unless a school district holds a vote of the people.

Jackson voted against final passage of the bill.

Passage means that the state's Republican leadership may finally have come to a school finance agreement that has eluded them in four attempts over the past two years.

Last chance at leadership

Senate Finance Chairman Steve Ogden, who sponsored the business tax, said with a June 1 deadline set by the Texas Supreme Court, this is the last chance for the governor and legislative leaders to show the public they are capable of leading the state.

"This special session will not only be declared a success but will be viewed a success by the people of Texas," said Ogden, R-Bryan.

House Bill 3 is key to Perry's plan to cut local property taxes. It would generate about $3.4 billion in new funds when it is first collected in May 2008.

The Senate also gave final passage to two other bills. One dedicates most of the revenue from the business tax and other new taxes to property tax relief, and the other collects more sales tax from used car sales by basing the tax on 80 percent of the vehicle's blue book value.

The Senate made changes in those bills, so they will go back to the House, which can concur or ask for a conference committee.

The Finance Committee still has to act on bills hiking cigarette taxes and another using budget surplus for property tax cuts and teacher raises.

'Gold mine' for Strayhorn

Harris County Republican activist Steven Hotze, who has been working against the business tax, said passage of the bill was "disappointing."

He said it would be a "gold mine" for one of Perry's re-election challengers, independent Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn. He said Republicans in general will suffer at the ballot box after the business tax takes effect in 2008.

"I believe it's going to be a disaster and a calamity in the long run for the Republican Party," Hotze said.

Hotze denied rumors that he got Jackson to change positions by promising him the nomination for the congressional seat held by U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land. DeLay has said he plans to resign by June.

"I don't even live close to that district. I don't have any influence there," Hotze said. "There's no way I could promise anyone that I could help them."

Jackson said he is interested in running for DeLay's seat, but he said he and Hotze never discussed it in relation to the tax bill.

janet.elliott@chron.com

r.g.ratcliffe@chron.com

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/3836573.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:21 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is an interesting piece that appeared today. I would hope that rather than there being divisions between African Americans and Latinos, that a struggle premised on a shared sense of fate would exist. Although there has been throughout history great collaboration between the two communities, divisions have also occur--almost always around divide and conquer strategies. This article makes the excellent point that many African Americans were pleased with Chinese exclusion in favor of European-origin immigration. Yet, African Americans then suffered at the hands of the latter. These are important matters for all of us to discuss in our homes, schools, and churches. -Angela

May 4, 2006
Growing Unease for Some Blacks on Immigration

By RACHEL L. SWARNS
WASHINGTON, May 3 — In their demonstrations across the country, some Hispanic immigrants have compared the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle to their own, singing "We Shall Overcome" and declaring a new civil rights movement to win citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants.

Civil rights stalwarts like the Rev. Jesse Jackson; Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia; Julian Bond and the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery have hailed the recent protests as the natural progression of their movement in the 1960's.

But despite some sympathy for the nation's illegal immigrants, many black professionals, academics and blue-collar workers feel increasingly uneasy as they watch Hispanics flex their political muscle while assuming the mantle of a seminal black struggle for justice.

Some blacks bristle at the comparison between the civil rights movement and the immigrant demonstrations, pointing out that black protesters in the 1960's were American citizens and had endured centuries of enslavement, rapes, lynchings and discrimination before they started marching.

Others worry about the plight of low-skilled black workers, who sometimes compete with immigrants for entry-level jobs.

And some fear the unfinished business of the civil rights movement will fall to the wayside as America turns its attention to a newly energized Hispanic minority with growing political and economic clout.



http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/04/us/04immig.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:23 AM 2 comments Links to this post

May 3, 2006
Small Schools' Ripple Effects Debated
As N.Y.C. and Chicago close failing high schools, district officials encounter criticism.
By Erik W. Robelen
Major initiatives in New York City and Chicago to close unsuccessful schools and create small schools in their wake are stirring criticism from some community activists, local politicians, and others.

Beyond the resistance that school closures often generate, some critics charge that the growing scale of the efforts is producing negative ripple effects on other schools in the cities.


Natalie Wagner, an English teacher at the new Bronzeville Scholastic High School, housed in the former DuSable High School building in Chicago, prepares her syllabus last September. The building now contains four small schools. Chicago opened 22 small schools last fall under its Renaissance 2010 initiative.
—File photo by Charles Rex Arbogast/AP
In Chicago, the chief concerns appear to be whether the policies are leading to a rise in school violence, as well as causing academic disruption for students shifted to other schools. In New York, two of the biggest complaints are that the move to small high schools has caused an influx of special-needs students to other city high schools and has exacerbated overcrowding in some schools.

District officials in both cities counter at least some of those charges. For instance, New York officials insist that the small-schools effort is now easing overcrowding, not increasing it.

Also, while achievement data on many of the new schools are still in short supply, advocates are quick to note one powerful indicator: The schools are getting more applicants than they can handle.

“Every new school we’ve opened has a waiting list,” said Arne Duncan, the chief executive officer of the 426,000-student Chicago school system. “[Families] are desperately looking for better options.”

Still, the reactions to the rapid pace of change in New York, the nation’s largest school district, and Chicago, the third-largest, present reformers with the challenge of building public support for the closures, observers say.

“To the foundation leaders and maybe district leadership, it looks like they’re saving people by shutting down their schools and replacing them with a privately managed charter school,” said Michael Klonsky, the director of the Chicago-based Small Schools Workshop. “To the people on the ground, it seems like something [is] being done to them. … But it’s not just a school they’re losing. The school is often the anchor in the community.”

James H. Shelton, an education program director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is supporting the small-schools efforts in both cities, said he is mindful of the central role schools serve, especially in low-income communities.

“If the institution is no longer preparing kids for life, then you’re contributing to the degradation of the community by leaving it in place,” he said. “When you change it, you have to do it respectfully, but you have to change it.”

Concerns About Violence
Earlier this year, a member of the Chicago City Council put forward a resolution—discussed at a hearing but never acted upon by the council—calling for a moratorium on further school closings in Chicago until the academic progress of all students whose schools were closed or reconstituted could be evaluated.

Some state legislators representing Chicago have challenged closings, and the Illinois House of Representatives passed a bill in March that would impose new requirements for public review before the district could close a school.

The city’s Renaissance 2010 initiative, unveiled in 2004 by Mayor Richard M. Daley, aims to create 100 small schools—both elementary and secondary—by the end of the decade. About two-thirds of the schools are to be operated by outside entities, either as charter schools or “contract” schools; the others will be district schools that receive some freedom from district rules.

Part of the effort involves converting the district’s underenrolled and low-performing elementary and secondary schools into new schools. Typically, such schools are closed for a year, so students must attend other schools, at least temporarily.

“We know transfers set children back academically,” said Julie Woestehoff, the executive director of the Chicago-based advocacy group Parents United for Responsible Education. “The problem is the payoff is not necessarily going to be a better school. Chicago Public Schools has just thrown the net out and pulled in every fish in the sea.”

The Chicago Teachers Union and other critics of the initiative cite a recent Chicago Sun-Times article noting increases in incidents of violence at some schools that had taken in students from schools closed under Renaissance 2010. Since they began admitting those students in the fall of 2004, all eight schools studied have posted an increase in reported violence that is at least twice the average for similar city high schools, the newspaper said.

“There is growing violence in the schools, particularly the high schools, that are receiving new students,” said Rosemaria Genova, a spokeswoman for the Chicago union. “Chicago Public Schools needs to quit experimenting” and focus its resources on improving existing schools, she argued.

But Mr. Duncan questioned the Sun-Times analysis, noting that overall incidents of school violence have declined by 5 percent this academic year.

Asked whether he saw any connection between the school transfers and violent incidents, he said: “On a balanced look, in some cases there was, and in others it’s gone down. … The issues are very, very complex.”

Spec. Ed. at Issue
In New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a Republican, has been pushing an aggressive small-schools program for the 1.1 million-student district since 2003. Already, nearly 200 small schools have been opened, and another 100 such schools are expected over the next few years.

Given extreme limits on available real estate, the city’s department of education has opted to locate many of the new schools within existing ones, whether in large high schools that are being phased out or in separate schools that will remain open.

In March, the Citywide Council on High Schools, a parent-advisory board to New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, unanimously passed a resolution urging the district to “substantially delay” implementation of new small high schools.

“The main concern really has to do with how the small schools are impacting the general school system, and the students who aren’t in the small schools,” said David Bloomfield, a member of the council and vocal critic of the small-schools movement.


Sean Gibbs, 18, studies a tilapia fish during a class in aquaculture at Wingate High School in Brooklyn. The New York City school, which is sharing its building with four new, small high schools, accepted its last freshmen in 2002 and will be phased out after the class of 2006 graduate.
—File photo by Bebeto Matthews/AP
“That seems to be an area that the Gates Foundation and the New York City public school system didn’t think about when they were starting to scale up the small schools,” said Mr. Bloomfield, who heads the educational leadership program at the Brooklyn College campus of the City University of New York.

Specifically, critics say many high schools have seen their enrollments swell substantially as 16 large high schools are being phased out and replaced with smaller schools housed in those facilities and elsewhere. They suggest that, if one large school is replaced by several smaller schools in the same facility, it usually won’t accommodate as many students. Many existing schools also are feeling squeezed, they say, as small schools are added to their campuses.

But Garth Harries, the head of the city’s office of new schools, said the new small schools are actually easing overcrowding by adding 5,000 seats to the system.

“It’s an unfortunate conflation of separate factors to say that small schools have crowded existing schools,” he said. “If you look at the data, … the creation of small schools has added capacity, added seats to the school system.”

One development sure to help is the $11.2 billion in school construction aid approved last month by the state for New York City.

Critics also blame the small-schools initiative for what they say is an increase in the number of students with disabilities and those who are English-language learners enrolled in some regular high schools. The district grants the new, small schools a temporary waiver from having to accept students who require self-contained classrooms for the schools’ first two years of existence.

Jill S. Levy, the president of the Council of Supervisors and Administrators, which represents principals and other administrators in New York City, said the influx is a real problem. “They get clustered into the larger schools, and that has a huge effect [under] No Child Left Behind,” she said of special-needs students, “and on the kinds of services that the school has to gear up.”

The district agrees that the new, small schools are serving fewer students with disabilities and limited English skills than average, although they note those schools took in a higher proportion of such students this school year than the year before.

For this school year, 10.7 percent of high school students citywide were special education students, compared with 7.5 percent in the new, small schools. For English-language learners, the citywide average was 11.5 percent, compared with 10 percent at the new, small schools.

“Part of the problem we’re combating is the warehousing of those students in some of those large high schools,” Mr. Harries said. He argues that over time, the new, small schools will serve comparable proportions of special-needs students, and deliver them a far better education.

Mr. Shelton of the Gates Foundation said that while he’s found Gates-backed small schools are serving a proportionate number of low-income and minority students, the concern about special education students in New York was consistent with some of what he’s been hearing in other places.

“We’re disturbed by the fact that our special education representation is not as high as we would like it,” he said. “But over time, that’s going to normalize.”

Mr. Shelton noted that the foundation has begun making grants to help local groups raise awareness about new schools, including among parents of students with disabilities.

‘Getting Better’
Norm Fruchter, the director of the community-involvement program at New York University’s school of education, called the small-schools effort in New York “extraordinary, just in terms of its scale, scope, and timing.” But while applauding its goals, Mr. Fruchter sees reasons for concern, given the zeal for opening so many school so rapidly. One is finding enough skilled leaders to run them. Another is space.

“They’re sometimes forced into makeshift solutions,” he said, “which oftentimes don’t play out in a way that maximizes meeting kids’ needs.”

“You saw them put small schools into high schools that couldn’t handle them,” agreed Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city’s affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers. “Things are getting much better, but you still have a lot of schools saying, unless you have space, don’t create schools within schools.”

“I think that there’s been legitimate concerns expressed, but I don’t think there’s been a massive pushback,” said Robert L. Hughes, the president of New Visions for Public Schools, which has helped develop small schools in New York. “I think we’ve learned a lot. … We’re a lot more effective with community engagement. We can show people what the change is about.”

Coverage of district-level improvement efforts is underwritten in part by grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Vol. 25, Issue 34, Pages 1,20

© 2006 Editorial Projects in Education
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2006/05/03/34backlash.h25.html?levelId=1000

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

A reported 8,500 people marched in Austin, meaning according to some informal estimates, perhaps around 10,000. A lot of people stayed away because of recent scares of rumored roundups in such places at HEB (supermarket) and other work places. I heard from several teachers who said that children went to school crying out of fear that their parents would get deported. Lots of folks stayed home yesterday. I was happy to see a number of students and UT faculty out in the sun sweating it with the marchers. -Angela


May 3, 2006
News Analysis
After Immigration Protests, Goal Remains Elusive

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON, May 2 — The nascent immigrant rights movement showed on Monday that it could build an organization, mobilize hundreds of thousands of people across the country and wield economic power.

But the protesters do not appear to have achieved their primary goal: changing votes in Congress. And some critics say the demonstration may have generated a backlash, hardening positions on Capitol Hill.

The protests, which began in March and resumed on Monday with a boycott of work, school and shops, have clearly grabbed the nation's attention when the issue of illegal immigration is high on the agenda in Washington.

The heightened attention will make it difficult for Congress to duck the question of what to do with the estimated 11 million to 12 million people living illegally in the United States. Although the outpouring has drawn comparisons to the civil rights movement of the 1960's, questions remain about whether the protesters can translate their passion into political results.

Some companies closed on Monday, yet it is too early to assess the economic effects of the boycott. The effects were diminished because many workers notified their employers ahead of time that they planned to take the day off.

"This was a one-day deal," said Randel Johnson, vice president of the United States Chamber of Congress, which supports bills to legalize immigrants. "If immigrants decided to abandon their jobs for two weeks, that would definitely have an impact."

Some advocates who support "comprehensive immigration reform," the idea that illegal workers should be put on a path to citizenship, say the protests have given that concept an important lift in the debate on Capitol Hill.

Even some immigrant rights backers say few if any minds were changed and called the marches a Rorschach test in which people simply saw their own view reflected in the sea of mostly Latino marchers.

"I have no effective data on this, but it has probably hardened positions and maybe done a little bit of wedging," said Gov. Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey, a Democrat and former senator who said he supported the protesters' cause. "I think that the people that were really fired up about this still are, and the position that they had to start with, they still carry."

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said: "The protest, I don't think, changes votes on the floor of the Senate. I think what changes votes is coming down, sitting down, talking about it, as opposed to students' staying out of school. I happen to think that students' staying out of school is counterproductive."

The protesters have discovered that there is a thin and potentially dangerous line between promoting national pride and pushing opponents' buttons. They used tactics — flying the Mexican flag, recording "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Spanish — that have left even some supporters feeling a bit queasy.

"I have a great respect for a lot of the people that did the protesting, but I think their message is all confused," said Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, whose sympathy dates from his childhood, when his mother, an Italian immigrant, was nearly deported. "The flag, the anthem, all that, it got everybody all mixed up. 'Take off work' — it sounded wrong to some people, right to others."

The public is deeply divided on illegal immigration. A survey in March by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, found that 53 percent of respondents said people who were in the United States illegally should be required to go home and that 40 percent say the immigrants should be granted some kind of legal status that allows them to stay here.

"What buttons were pressed?" Roberto Suro, the director of the center, asked, wondering aloud about what Americans saw when they looked at the protesters. "Was it that there are so many people here outside of government control or was it the hard-working family types? I think that's really imponderable."

That divide is reflected among Republicans on Capitol Hill. The House opposes giving citizenship to illegal immigrants, and it has passed a bill aimed only at controlling the borders, while a more comprehensive Senate bill is backed by Republicans like Mr. Domenici, as well as Senators Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, John McCain of Arizona, and Mel Martinez of Florida.

Some say the protests have given the Senate approach a boost. "While you could never point to a specific vote, they moved the tone and the thrust where now a balanced bill has the upper hand, and it's in part because of the protests," Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said.

The Senate bill collapsed last month amid partisan bickering on procedure, but the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, says he wants to resume the debate this month. On Tuesday, the minority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, offered to limit the debate to 10 amendments a side. Mr. Frist did not accept that, and they continued talks. The Republican split is complicated because not just the immigrants are weighing in. Among their biggest allies are employers, large and small, who want assurances that they will continue to have that labor pool. Business groups are important for the Republican base, and many employers gave immigrant employees the day off on Monday in solidarity with the marchers.

With Republicans so divided, reaching consensus will be difficult.

"Obviously, there's tremendous pressure on lawmakers to fix the problem," said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy group. "The marches in the street, the public opinion polls that show immigration is one of the top two or three issues in the country.

"But the crosscurrents of politics and policy are such that it's going to take a tremendous push from President Bush and from Democratic and Republican leaders to get this done."

It is clear that the protests have raised some hackles. After the March rally, Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, said he was deeply offended by marchers' waving the Mexican flag.

"I want to be sensitive to human concerns, why they're here and how they're here. But when they act out like that, they lose me," Mr. Lott said.

He suggested a risk of deportation and said, "We had them all in a bunch, you know what I mean?"

Julia Preston contributed reporting from New York for this article, and Rachel L. Swarns from Washington.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:08 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Check out the photos from the NYTimes website. This is historic indeed. -Angela
Immigrants Take to U.S. Streets in Show of Strength
Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Thousands of people marched on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. More Photos >

NEW YORK TIMES
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: May 2, 2006

Truck drivers gathered in a park in Los Angeles, Calif. More Photos >

The demonstrations did not bring the nation to a halt as planned by
some organizers, though they did cause some disruptions and conveyed
in peaceful but sometimes boisterous ways the resolve of those who
favor loosening the country's laws on immigration.

Originally billed as a nationwide economic boycott under the banner
"Day Without an Immigrant," the day evolved into a sweeping round of
protests intended to influence the debate in Congress over granting
legal status to all or most of the estimated 11 million illegal
immigrants in the country.

The protesters, a mix of illegal immigrants and legal residents and
citizens, were mostly Latino, but in contrast to similar
demonstrations in the past two months, large numbers of people of
other ethnicities joined or endorsed many of the events. In some
cases, the rallies took on a broader tone of social action, as gay
rights advocates, opponents of the war in Iraq and others without a
direct stake in the immigration debate took to the streets.

"I think it's only fair that I speak up for those who can't speak for
themselves," said Aimee Hernandez, 28, one of an estimated 400,000
people who turned out in Chicago, the site of one of the largest
demonstrations. "I think we're just too many that you can't just send
them back. How are you going to ignore these people?"

But among those who favor stricter controls on illegal immigration,
the protests hardly impressed.

"When the rule of law is dictated by a mob of illegal aliens taking to
the streets, especially under a foreign flag, then that means the
nation is not governed by a rule of law – it is a mobocracy," Jim
Gilchrist, a founder of the Minutemen Project, a volunteer group that
patrols the United States-Mexico border, said in an interview.

While the boycott, an idea born several months ago among a small group
of grass-roots immigration advocates here, may not have shut down the
country, it was strongly felt in a variety of places, particularly
those with large Latino populations.

Stores and restaurants in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York closed
because workers did not show up or as a display of solidarity with
demonstrators. In Los Angeles, the police estimated that more than
half a million people attended two demonstrations in and near
downtown. School districts in several cities reported a decline in
attendance; at Benito Juarez High School in Pilsen, a predominantly
Latino neighborhood in Chicago, only 17 percent of the students showed
up, even though administrators and some protest organizers had urged
students to stay in school.

Lettuce, tomatoes and grapes went unpicked in fields in California and
Arizona, which contribute more than half the nation's produce, as
scores of growers let workers take the day off. Truckers who move 70
percent of the goods in ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif.,
did not work.

Meatpacking companies, including Tyson Foods and Cargill, closed
plants in the Midwest and the West employing more than 20,000 people,
while the flower and produce markets in downtown Los Angeles stood
largely and eerily empty.

Israel Banuelos, 23, and more than 50 of his colleagues skipped work,
with the grudging acceptance of his employer, an industrial paint
plant in Hollister, Calif.

"We were supposed to work," Mr. Banuelos said, "but we wanted to close
down the company. Our boss didn't like it money-wise."

The economic impact of the day's events was hard to gauge, though
economists expected a one-day stoppage to have little long-term
effect. In large swaths of the country, life went on with no
noticeable difference. But protesters in numerous cities, many clad in
white and waving mostly American flags in response to complaints that
earlier rallies featured too many Latin American ones, declared
victory as chanting throngs shut down streets.

Most of the demonstrators' ire was directed at a bill passed by the
House that would increase security at the border while making it a
felony for an illegal immigrant to be in the country or to aid one.
The marchers generally favored a plan in the Senate, for which
President Bush has shown signs of support, that would include more
protection at the border but offer many illegal workers a path to citizenship.

Still, the divide among advocates over the value and effectiveness of
a boycott resulted in some cities, including Los Angeles and San
Diego, playing host to two sizable demonstrations, one organized by
boycotters and the other by people neutral or opposed to it.

That split played out across the country. While many business owners
warned employees about taking the day off, many others also sought to
negotiate time off or other ways to register workers' sentiments.

Las Vegas casinos reported few disruptions, partly because many of
their owners announced their support for workers at a news conference
last week. On Monday, more than 40 casinos set up tables in employee
lunchrooms for workers to sign pro-immigration petitions.

Leaders of Local 226 of the Culinary Workers Union also urged members
to go to work. The union is Las Vegas's largest hospitality union,
representing 50,000 workers, of which 40 percent are Hispanic.

Smaller businesses in Las Vegas, where tens of thousands of
demonstrators gathered on the Strip, also took a hit. Javier Barajas
said he closed his family's four Mexican restaurants in Las Vegas
because members of his staff warned him they would not show up,
costing him more than $60,000 in revenue.

"I cannot fire anybody over this, but I would have liked to see some
other way to express themselves," said Mr. Barajas, who was once an
illegal immigrant from central Mexico but became a United States
citizen. "It's the small businesses that are hurt by this."

For many immigrants, however, it was just another workday.

At a Home Depot in Hollywood, day laborers as always crowded parking
lot entrances, hoping for work. At a car wash in the Echo Park
neighborhood of Los Angeles, employees buzzed, with workers vacuuming,
buffing and drying cars. People lined up at markets, though some
reported slower business.

"I was thinking about not buying things, but then I needed to buy
stuff," said Alex Sanchez, 28, a construction worker buying an
avocado, chilies and beer.

The boycott grew from an idea hatched by a small band of grass-roots
advocates in Los Angeles, inspired by the farmworker movement of the
1960's led by Cesar Chavez and Bert Corona. Through the Internet and
mass media catering to immigrants, they developed and tapped a network
of union organizers, immigrant rights groups and others to spread the
word and plan events tied to the boycott, timed to coincide with
International Workers' Day.

The Los Angeles organizers said some 70 cities held boycott activities.

The day spawned all manner of supportive actions here. A department
store chain offered space for lawyers to give legal advice to
immigrants; in Hollywood, the comedian Paul Rodriguez appeared at the
comedy club the Laugh Factory to promote a daylong health care fair
for immigrant workers.

In Chicago, there was solidarity in diversity, as Latinos were joined
by immigrants of Polish, Irish, Asian and African descent. Jerry
Jablonski, 30, said he had moved to Chicago from Poland six years ago,
flying to Mexico and then crossing the border. He now works a construction job.

"Poland is my old country," Mr. Jablonski said. "This is my new
country. I can make everything happen here."

Reporting for this article was contributed by Cindy Chang from Los
Angeles, Steve Friess from Las Vegas, Carolyn Marshall from
Watsonville, Calif., and Gretchen Ruethling from Chicago.

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