If you are aware of Lou Dobbs anti-immigration stance, then the irony here in this piece is that what gave impetus to legislation in Texas (and now 9 other states) that led to immigration-tuition waivers from having to pay out of state tuition, was the fact that close of half of valedictorians and salutatorians in Houston over a 10-year time period were immigrants, the very same group that he opposes.

When one considers the tremendous costs of NOT educating them, denying them this opportunity does no one any good. Plus, this legislation capitalizes on an important resource that demography has placed in our hands. My thoughts for today (smile).

I'm in Mexico right now. The elections are on July 2. The big question here is whether Mexico will vote left of center with the election of Lopez Obrador like other Latin American nations that have done so. We'll see....

Angela

No summer vacation for our failing schools
By Lou Dobbs
CNN

Wednesday, June 28, 2006; Posted: 6:53 p.m. EDT (22:53 GMT)
Editor's note: Lou Dobbs' commentary appears every Wednesday on CNN.com.


Lou Dobbs says we've failed a generation of public school students.


NEW YORK (CNN) -- School's out in nearly every part of the country, and students are delightfully spilling into their summer vacations with little, if any, thought of what September will bring.

But for just about a third of all high school students in this country, summer brings no respite from the failure of our public education system. Those students have already dropped out of high school, and they have left behind nearly all hope of furthering their education and assuring individual prosperity.

The failure is not theirs alone, and we all bear responsibility for failing an entire generation of students in our public school system. We must understand that our educational crisis will have long-lasting and profound effects on our national future.

Our elected representatives and educational administrators all but refuse to acknowledge that high school graduation rates for American public schools were higher nearly 40 years ago than today. And while one-quarter of white high school students drop out of high school, the problem is magnified for blacks and Latinos, about half of whom drop out of high school, according to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and the Urban Institute.

There's no question the economic fallout of these astonishing dropout rates will be devastating. High school dropouts have much higher rates of poverty, imprisonment and welfare enrollment. Even if these dropouts can get a GED and a job in our increasingly credentialed workforce, today's high school dropouts will make at least 35 percent less than high school dropouts of a generation ago. Worse, of those who are fortunate enough to graduate, too many lack the skills to enter college.

But a high-school diploma or college degree is as important as ever in our society, where our federal government and corporate America have combined to launch a full-scale attack on the middle class. Workers without so much as a high-school diploma earn on average $18,734 a year, according to the Census Bureau, about $9,000 less than their counterparts who have graduated high school. Armed with a bachelor's degree, the average worker earns nearly three times as much as a high-school dropout.

Those numbers indicate the critical need to mount a national attack on the crisis that is far worse than administrators and educators have reported. Whether schools and their administrators are lying or cheating, or they're simply incompetent, matters little. Without independent educational studies, we would have no idea as to the depth of the crisis that faces our public school students in this country.

These so-called educators and administrators may be trying to keep the graduation numbers high so that they can meet the high standards of the No Child Left Behind initiative. While that initiative has not shown nearly as much success as its proponents and advocates had promised, it's done better than most of its critics and opponents would have you believe. In any event, the program offers far too little and lacks urgency in dealing with this crisis.

And we're not talking only about money. Ironically, the United States spends a larger percentage of its total GDP on educating its students than just about any other country in the world. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development statistics also show that we expend more money per student for primary and secondary education than almost any other nation. And while the Bush administration has changed the formula for Pell Grants, leading to negative cutbacks for prospective students, more than $60 billion in federal student loans will be distributed this year. That's why it's so difficult to solve this systemic problem.

But we do have reason to hope. There is a growing movement to hire quality teachers and pay those teachers what they deserve. Voters in Denver, Colorado, last November approved a dramatic change in the way teachers' pay is structured, opting to boost their own property taxes by $25 million in order to offer bonuses for improvement in classroom performance and incentive pay for teaching in the city's under-performing schools. Already, it's having a measurable impact, and other cities like Chicago, Illinois, and New York are planning initiatives.

And a bold new educational program called the Kalamazoo Promise has begun in Michigan. Under this plan, students will receive free tuition at Michigan's state-funded universities and community colleges if they enter the Kalamazoo school system at kindergarten and remain in that school system through the 12th grade, maintaining certain established grade levels. Other students will receive substantial help with their college tuition as long as they enter the public school system by the ninth grade. Incredibly, it's all being funded by anonymous donors, and they need to be commended for their efforts.

Certainly none of us has all the answers to fixing our failing schools. But here are a few thoughts, just to add to what I hope becomes a national effort to assure the quality education of the next generation:

It is time to restore absolute discipline to our public schools and classrooms to eliminate every extraneous program in kindergarten through eighth grade that does not focus on reading, literature, writing, American history and civics, mathematics and natural sciences.
We should begin to redress the compensation of all public school teachers to ensure that we have the very best and brightest educating our next generation. For me, that means paying teachers far more and demanding far more of them.
The role of the federal government should be to provide, no matter what the cost, a scholarship program that provides a family stipend to economically disadvantaged students who demonstrate exceptional intellect and talent.
All graduating seniors in the top 10 percent of their class should be assured federally funded national scholarships to pursue university educations in mathematics, science and English. And stipend programs should be instituted, conditional on an educational commitment to teach in our public schools after their college graduation.
With the July Fourth holiday weekend approaching, restoring quality education to our public schools will help assure that every American celebrates every day as Independence Day.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:04 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out these news: "The real story is not bad news about boys doing worse," the report says, "it's good news about girls doing better. Guess it doesn't have to be zero-sum.... -Angela

Study Casts Doubt On the 'Boy Crisis'
Improving Test Scores Cut Into Girls' Lead
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 26, 2006; A01

A study to be released today looking at long-term trends in test scores and academic success argues that widespread reports of U.S. boys being in crisis are greatly overstated and that young males in school are in many ways doing better than ever.

Using data compiled from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally funded accounting of student achievement since 1971, the Washington-based think tank Education Sector found that, over the past three decades, boys' test scores are mostly up, more boys are going to college and more are getting bachelor's degrees.

Although low-income boys, like low-income girls, are lagging behind middle-class students, boys are scoring significant gains in elementary and middle school and are much better prepared for college, the report says. It concludes that much of the pessimism about young males seems to derive from inadequate research, sloppy analysis and discomfort with the fact that although the average boy is doing better, the average girl has gotten ahead of him.

"The real story is not bad news about boys doing worse," the report says, "it's good news about girls doing better.

A number of articles have been written over the past year lamenting how boys have fallen behind. The new report, "The Truth About Boys and Girls," explains why some educators think this emphasis is misplaced and why some fear a focus on sex differences could sidetrack federal, state and private efforts to put more resources into inner-city and rural schools, where both boys and girls need better instruction.

"There's no doubt that some groups of boys -- particularly Hispanic and black boys and boys from low-income homes -- are in real trouble," Education Sector senior policy analyst Sara Mead says in the report. "But the predominant issues for them are race and class, not gender."

Black and Hispanic boys test far below white boys, the report notes. The difference between white and black boys in fourth-grade reading last year was 10 times as great as the improvement for all boys on that test since 1992. Still, the report notes, the performance of black and Hispanic boys is not getting worse. The average fourth-grade reading scores for black boys improved more than those of whites and Hispanics of both sexes.

Craig Jerald, an educational consultant who has analyzed trends for the federal government and the newspaper Education Week, said that "Ed Sector is right to call foul on all the crisis rhetoric, and we should stop using that word, though there are a few troubling statistics and trends that deserve further investigation." He noted a huge gap in writing skills between girls and boys, bad results in reading among older boys, and a sharp drop in high school seniors' positive feelings toward school that is worse among girls than boys.

Michael Gurian, a best-selling author who says boys are in trouble, said in reaction to the report: "I truly don't mind if everyone took the word 'crisis' out of the dialogue." But he said he thought the report "missed the cumulative nature of the problems boys face." The federal education data it cites, he said, are "just a small piece of the puzzle."

According to the report, reading achievement by 9-year-old boys increased 15 points on a 500-point scale between 1971 and 2004, and girls that age increased seven points, remaining five points ahead of boys. Reading achievement for 13-year-olds improved four points for boys and three points for girls, with girls 10 points ahead. Among 17-year-olds, there was almost no change in reading achievement, with girls up one point, boys down one point and girls 14 points ahead.

In mathematics achievement between 1973 and 2004, 9-year-old boys gained 25 points and girls gained 20 points, with boys ending up three points ahead. Thirteen-year-old boys increased 18 points and girls 12 points, with boys three points ahead. Among 17-year-olds, boys lost one point, girls gained four and boys were three points ahead.

The report notes that boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities. Two-thirds of students in special education classes are male. But, it notes, "the number of girls with disabilities has also grown rapidly in recent decades, meaning this is not just a boy issue."

To some, however, it's all about the boys. "At every level of education, they're falling behind," Newsweek reported.

Esquire proclaimed: "We're faced with the accrual of a significant population of boys who aren't well prepared for either school or work."

The Detroit News said that "every year, women increase their presence on campuses nationwide, while men do not."

Some of today's focus on boys might be backlash to legal remedies such as the 1972 Title IX law set up to ensure equality in education for girls, critics say. For several decades, school systems have worked to steer girls into more skilled math and science classes. Now girls in high school appear to be better prepared for college than boys, the report said. But, it adds, both sexes are taking more college-level courses, such as calculus, than ever.

More men are enrolling in college, and the share of men ages 25 to 29 with a college degree, 22 percent, is significantly higher than that of older men. The study did note that women are enrolling and graduating from college at higher rates than men.

The "boy crisis," the report says, has been used by conservative authors who accuse "misguided feminists" of lavishing resources on female students at the expense of males and by liberal authors who say schools are "forcing all children into a teacher-led pedagogical box that is particularly ill-suited to boys' interests and learning styles."

"Yet there is not sufficient evidence -- or the right kind of evidence -- available to draw firm conclusions," the report says. "As a result, there is a sort of free market for theories about why boys are underperforming girls in school, with parents, educators, media, and the public choosing to give credence to the explanations that are the best marketed and that most appeal to their pre-existing preferences."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/25/AR2006062501047.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:56 PM 0 comments Links to this post

I read a really good conceptual piece on the politics of this kind of situation in a book by Jim Wallis titled, God's Politics : Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. Ultimately, the poor and the marginal pay the price. -Angela

The birth control divide
Poor and uneducated women have higher rates of unplanned pregnancy. But why?
By Stephanie Simon
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 26, 2006

The students were giggling, trading gossip, but they stopped when Maria Elena Chavez dumped her stash of teaching aides on the table: Cola-flavored condoms. A cervical cap. An IUD. A diaphragm.

As the room quieted, Chavez unrolled a condom and stretched it over her hand.

"Many men will say they don't fit, but you can see how much this can stretch," she said. The students nodded, murmuring in surprise. One hand shot up, then another.

"Do they come in different sizes?"

"Should we put water in them first, to test them?"

"Can you use two at once for extra protection?"

These students in East L.A. were not inexperienced teens. They were women in their 30s and 40s, many of them married, all of them mothers — and, yet, still uncertain how to protect themselves from pregnancy.

They are far from alone.

A new statistical analysis, published this month, shows that poor and uneducated women have fallen farther behind their more affluent peers in their ability to control fertility and plan childbearing.

The nation's overall rate of unintended pregnancies held steady from the mid-1990s through 2001, the most recent year such data is available. But that stability masked huge disparities between demographic groups, according to the new analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a research group affiliated with Planned Parenthood.

Teenagers, college graduates and women in the middle or upper class dramatically reduced unintended pregnancy and abortion rates. Among poor women, though, the unplanned pregnancy rate jumped nearly 30%.

As a result, poor women are now four times more likely to face an unintended pregnancy than those who are better off. They're also three times more likely to get an abortion.

Analysts at the Guttmacher Institute blame the problem largely on a lack of access to affordable contraception. Prominent Democrats echo that theme, arguing that the nation has a moral responsibility to improve access, both to ensure women's health and to bring down the abortion rate.

"We have to make sure families have more options," said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). "If you don't have the resources … they don't get the services."

But public health experts say more funding is not necessarily the answer.

California spends $124 on family planning for every woman in need, more than any other state except South Carolina and Alabama. The state's Family PACT program offers teens and low-income couples easy access to free or affordable birth control. Yet California has one of the highest abortion rates in the country — the same rate as Nevada, which spends only $32 per woman in need, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Nebraska presents the opposite scenario. The Guttmacher Institute ranks it worst in the nation at helping poor women avoid unintended pregnancies. Yet Nebraska has one of the country's lowest abortion rates.

On a national level, the jump in unplanned pregnancies came even as the federal government began offering to cover 90% of the cost if states would subsidize birth control for low-income women through Medicaid. At least 23 states, including California, have set up such programs. Details vary, but most offer exams and contraception to women earning up to twice the federal poverty level.

Former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher applauds such subsidies, but warns that free birth control alone won't bring down the unintended pregnancy rate. He calls instead for broad social change: Low-income women must build self-esteem and confidence in a better future. Only then, he said, will they be motivated to protect themselves. "To gain control of these issues, you really have to get beyond sex," said Satcher, who worked in the Clinton administration. "You have to dig deep and look at what's happening in their lives, their relationships and their minds."

Laura Gaydos came to a similar conclusion after holding recent focus groups with low-income women of all ages and races in cities across Georgia. A health researcher at Emory University in Atlanta, Gaydos said many of the women she interviewed simply didn't see the urgency in going out of their way to prevent pregnancy. "There's never going to be a perfect time to get pregnant," she heard again and again. And: "Might as well let what happens, happen."

Even when low-income women take the initiative to pick up birth control, they are often ambivalent about using it — or too disorganized to remember. Nearly half of all women who get abortions say they used birth control at some point during the month they conceived. In some cases it failed. In many others, they just didn't use it correctly or consistently.

"To get people to use contraceptives is an effort," said Cynthia Harper, an assistant professor at the Center for Reproductive Health Research and Policy at UC San Francisco. "It's really hard for people to take care of themselves in the area of sexuality."

They fear the birth control pill will make them fat, so they stop taking it. The patch irritates their skin, so they peel it off. They put a half-hearted faith in one of the many urban myths that pass from friend to neighbor: If a man drinks enough Mountain Dew before sex, his sperm will die. If a woman takes a bath, or jumps around, or douches with vinegar, she won't conceive.

Chavez runs through several of those myths during her two-hour class in an East L.A. elementary school. It's part of a six-month program — Promotoras Comunitarias — sponsored by Planned Parenthood. Taught in Spanish, the class trains Latinas to be health educators for their neighborhoods, with sessions on domestic violence, prenatal care and sexuality. The idea is to empower the women to push for healthier habits in their families and their communities.

During the session on contraception, Alicia Mendoza, 32, understood for the first time why she had conceived her son just a few months after giving birth to her daughter.

She had figured she couldn't get pregnant again so soon, but her teacher told her firmly that wasn't true; even nursing a baby would not fully protect her. "No one told me I had to be careful," Mendoza said.

Many of the students had never heard of newer forms of birth control such as the ring and the patch. Even more common methods drew quizzical stares: When Chavez held up a vaginal suppository filled with spermicide, one student looked at the large white capsule with alarm. "Where do you put it?" she asked.

"You don't swallow it, if that's what you mean," Chavez said, laughing. Patiently, she explained — then took question after question:

"Does it hurt?" "Does it protect you from disease?" "If you use it often, does it make you infertile?"

Planned Parenthood runs similar programs in Arizona, Colorado, New York and Texas. Overall, however, the organization and its affiliates devote just 30% of a $49-million educational budget to women 20 and older. The rest is aimed at teens.

The federal government too, focuses most of its sex education resources on teens, with a strong emphasis on abstinence.

Though women 20 and up account for nearly 80% of all unintended pregnancies, "you'll find almost no intervention or prevention programs targeted at older women," Gaydos said.

In part, that's because such programs tend to get tangled in ideological disputes. Though liberals urge more classes and cheaper birth control, some conservatives warn that expanded access will only encourage reckless behavior.

This spring in Missouri, for instance, state Rep. Susan Phillips shot down a proposal to subsidize birth control for low-income women. That would be like subsidizing promiscuity, she argued.

Phillips, a Republican, explained by e-mail: "It is my hope that reducing access to contraception for recreational users and those not prepared to parent will give them time to consider the consequences" of having sex.

That "sex has consequences" message is pushed on teens through TV shows, magazines, movies and schools; some experts say it's time to extend that campaign to adults as well.

"People don't worry about problems they don't know exist," said Sarah Brown, director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Unintended pregnancy rate

Rate per 1,000 women*

1994 2001
INCOME AS RELATED TO POVERTY LEVEL
Below poverty line 87* 112*
Poverty level to less
than twice poverty level 65 81
At least twice poverty level 37 29
EDUCATION
Less than H.S. diploma 71 76
H.S. diploma/GED 47 54
Some college 43 47
College graduate 33 26
RACE/ETHNICITY
White 37 35
Black 101 98
Hispanic 78 78
AGE
15-19 82 67
20-24 105 104
25-29 66 71
30-34 38 44
35-39 21 20
Over 40 7 6


Source: Alan Guttmacher Institute. (Published in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, Vol. 38, No. 2, June 2006


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

Article licensing and reprint options


Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:16 PM 0 comments Links to this post

The US Supremes will decide on this soon. Interesting how all of this is happening at the same time that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act is being deliberated. Whatever the court decides will have far-reaching implications.
-Angea

Redistricting Ruling Imminent

Supreme Court's Decision
Could Be Felt Far Beyond Texas
By JESS BRAVIN and BEN WINOGRAD
June 22, 2006; Page A10

WASHINGTON -- Republican Texas lawmakers didn't like the electoral map that a federal court adopted after the 2000 census, so they redrew it -- and gained six seats in the state's delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives.

As early as today, the U.S. Supreme Court could say whether that mid-decade redistricting, which former Rep. Tom DeLay orchestrated to solidify control of the House, is constitutional. If the answer is yes, the implications could be felt far beyond Texas as Democrats and Republicans rush to embrace the technique of strategically reallocating voters among congressional districts after each election.

"If the Supreme Court decides that it's legal, not doing it would constitute a unilateral surrender," says Howard Wolfson, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "Democrats see the necessity of fighting fire with fire."

BATTLEGROUNDS

1
Battleground States Poll:2 Good news for the White House in June hasn't had much impact for GOP candidates in tight Senate races.
At the same time, Republicans could themselves export the tactic to other states they control. In Georgia, Republicans already have used mid-decade redistricting to dilute Democratic strength in the university town of Athens.

"If we win, it will affirm there's no ban on mid-decade redistricting and there's no serious constraint against partisan gerrymanders," says Michael Carvin, a Republican lawyer involved in the Texas case. But while Democrats have "made noises" about retaliating in their states, he says they will run into a problem peculiar to their own membership: Squeezing more Democratic-leaning districts from a map would almost certainly require splitting minority voters into multiple districts, undercutting their strength as a voting bloc. "They would really have to violate the Voting Rights Act to change the map," Mr. Carvin says.

Of course, Republicans can't be sure of a win at the Supreme Court. The court could rule the DeLay map unconstitutional on one-person, one-vote grounds, forcing a remapping in Texas that would almost certainly benefit Democrats.

Even if the court finds no constitutional bar to the DeLay map, it could strike it down for violating the Voting Rights Act. At oral arguments, Justice Anthony Kennedy -- who is emerging as the court's new swing vote -- seemed sympathetic to arguments that the DeLay plan had diminished Hispanic voting strength in South Texas.

The Constitution requires that congressional seats be reapportioned among the states after each decennial census. Under Supreme Court rulings dating to the 1960s, congressional districts must be equal in population. The federal Voting Rights Act protects minority populations from diminution of their electoral strength.

Some states have their own provisions to deter repeated partisan remaps. New Jersey and Washington state, for instance, have independent commissions that redraw lines. Others put limits on the legislature: Colorado Republicans redrew their lines in 2003, but the Colorado Supreme Court said repeat redistricting violated the state constitution.

Federal law has been silent, however, on the question of repeated redistricting of congressional seats -- largely, perhaps, because it was such a rare occurrence. Mr. DeLay's innovation may have changed that.

Outraged by the DeLay maneuver, in 2003 some Democrats openly pondered redrawing electoral maps to boost their candidates' chances in states they controlled. But party leaders urged that such plans be shelved, for fear of undercutting legal arguments against Mr. DeLay's mid-decade redistricting.

That concern would vanish if the Supreme Court upholds the technique. Still, there are only a handful of states where conditions are ripe for a possible Democratic retaliation.

"You need a place where the Democrats are fully in control and where there are more seats to be squeezed out if the districts are redrawn," says Richard Pildes, a New York University law professor who filed a brief against the Texas plan. The states that best fit the target, Mr. Pildes says, are Illinois, Louisiana and New Mexico, all of which have more Republican representatives than their population's partisan breakdown would suggest.

Still, even as national Democratic leaders might seek to play tit for tat, local conditions could interfere with plans to redraw maps. In California, Democrats controlled both the Legislature and the governorship in 2001 -- but declined to squeeze the map for maximum partisan advantage.

"In California, it was a bipartisan conspiracy that involved both Democrats and Republicans to solidify the lines so that all incumbents were safe," says Garry South, a Democratic political consultant in Santa Monica, Calif.

Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@...3 and Ben Winograd at benjamin.winograd@...4

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115093590788687012.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:27 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This piece below and responses to it--as summarized by Boggs below--are getting circulated. I concur that insufficient attention is accorded to education and spirituality. I appreciate how spirituality is front and center in a lot of American Indian Studies' examination of education.

Nel Noddings in her book, THE CHALLENGE TO CARE IN SCHOOLS also finds an appropriate place for spirituality in schools. I, too, advocate in my own work that caring authentically for youth involves both socially and politically conscious awareness and also a thoughtful and sincere disposition toward youth. These connect both to social justice and our children's right to be treated humanely and with dignity.

I've been really busy and so I've not posted much these days so forgive me if you sent me something to post that I somehow overlooked. I'm the director of a new education policy studies center at UT called the Education Policy Alliance and it's been a time-consuming, creative endeavor. The best part is the wonderful team of students and faculty who are associated with "The Alliance," as we call ourselves. We inaugurate in the Fall. More on this later.

Sinceramente,

Angela



ChickenBones: A Journal
for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes
http://www.nathanielturner.com/moralandspiritualmiseducationofamericasyouth.htm
The Moral & Spiritual Miseducation of America's Youth

By Grace Lee Boggs

A reader recently sent me an article with this title by Svi Shapiro who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I reprint it (slightly edited for length) in the hope that it will generate widespread discussion and struggle.

"A colleague of mine," Shapiro writes, "often asked his students two questions. What do you consider some of the most serious issues facing human beings today? To what extent are students in schools being prepared to address such concerns?

"Typical answers to the first question included violence, the materialistic culture, inequitable distribution of wealth and opportunity, sense of powerlessness among ordinary people, emphasis on celebrity, fame and exploitation of sexuality in every part of our society, and the environmental crisis.

"The second question brought the collective acknowledgement that schools offer little to prepare young people to make the critical decisions that face us all in this century.

"While liberals argue that schools ought to be places that provide a value-neutral space for young people, conservatives have, correctly I believe, recognized that schools are places that transmit a powerful agenda of values. These views remain deeply imprinted in our identities long after we have forgotten how to solve quadratic equations, the words of a poem or the dates of a battle.

"What schools relentlessly teach is a belief in the importance of personal success, individual achievement, the competitive race for recognition, the inequitable distribution of human worth, the belief that only things that 'can be counted count' and that education's true importance is as a vehicle to sort and select winners and losers.

"What schools do is compare and search for winners and losers. Education becomes more rote and increasingly shallow. What matters is the well-rehearsed performance on the test, not about the curiosity awakened or the joy of discovery released. A shallow and instrumental conformism is substituted for a willingness to think imaginatively and to question boldly and critically.

"The real crisis of education is the withering of our children's souls inside our classrooms. Put aside the divisive banner of religion for a moment. It is surely a spiritual crisis when education offers young people little that might direct them towards a meaningful or purposeful life. Schools increasingly fail to contribute to a moral vision of a worthwhile existence beyond grubbing for better grades and playing the grade-point average game. It's not surprising that cheating and cutting corners are so pervasive among our most 'successful' students as they learn to work the system to their best advantage.

"Do we need an alternative moral and spiritual vision for the way we educate our young? The prophetic impulse that is found in our great religious teachings might be a good place to start. We need human beings who learn to see all human beings as made in the image of the divine; human worth is intrinsic to us and not something that depends
on our success in the marketplace or in how much we can impress others.

"An authentic existence is found in our service to others and in the improvement of our world, not in consumerism and materialism. A full human life means both agency and responsibility--the capacity to think about and question needless suffering, indignity and injustice, and the commitment to make changes where needed. And beyond the debates on evolution and intelligent design we surely can agree that Creation--the earth and life in all its forms--is a source of awe and wonder. In acquiring this reverence for creation we ensure the next generation's concern with a planet that can sustain and nourish the extraordinary chain of existence.

"Our challenge is to ask ourselves what kind of vision we want schools to offer our children. Of course in our culturally divided society this no easy task. Yet in spite of all our apprehensions and suspicions there is one thing that stands out; we as a society are increasingly aware of the shallowness and shabbiness of our dominant culture. There is growing alarm at the degrading and callous egotism that shapes our kids world and whether we call it spirituality, religion, morality or wisdom--there is increasing recognition that our children need and deserve an education that awakens them to a life of greater purpose and meaning than the one schools currently offer."

Source: Michigan Citizen, June 18-24, 2006

posted 16 June 2006

LIVING FOR CHANGE
Honoring our Children's Souls
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, June 25-July 1, 2006
http://www.boggscenter.org/ideas/fresh-ideas/fi-06-24-06.shtml

The responses to last week's column in which I reprinted Dr. Svi
Shapiro's article on "The Spiritual and Moral Miseducation of America's
Youth " suggest that the escalating crisis of our public schools may
finally be forcing more people to honor the "souls" of our children, as
Dr. DuBois once honored "the Souls of Blacks Folks."

"The real crisis of education is the withering of our children's souls
inside our classrooms," according to Shapiro.

One reader who works with young people at the Rosa Parks Institute for
Self-Development called the article "excellent" and promised to "share
it with as many people as I can."

Another, who teaches education at the University of Michigan, found
the piece "provocative " and intends to share it with "the graduate
and undergraduate students that I will be working with this year."

At the same time the response from a Wayne State University
professor of education deserves closer examination because I suspect it is
more typical. "While I do not disagree with what you or Shapiro says, "
he wrote, "good public schools do teach values such as hard work,
responsibility, clear thinking and often ask students to reflect on what is
happening around them. The problem of directly bringing spirituality into
schools is the question of whose spirituality (religion) and do we have to
believe it or practice it to get a good grade in the class. After all, one
may privately pray in public schools and teach about religion."

This professor has no difficulty in acknowledging conventional
values like hard work and responsibility. But he seems reluctant to
encourage discussion among his students of more spiritual (and more
controversial) questions like striving for a more cooperative, less
competitive and less unequal society or whether achieving success justifies
any means to that end. This is in part because he assumes (in my
opinion, mistakenly) that only religious people believe questions like
these matter, and like other public employees, he is (justifiably)
fearful of being drawn into discussions or arguments about religion.

Yet it is impossible to educate children without recognizing that,
like all human beings, they consist not only of minds and bodies but of
souls. In other words, they are constantly faced with making choices or
decisions that stem from competing values. For example, despite the
large number of inner city youth who sell drugs, the great majority do
not - not only because they fear the consequences to themselves but
because they reject involvement in an activity that is so destructive of
human lives.

Meanwhile, sixteen freshmen were recently expelled from a
prestigious suburban school for hacking into the computerized grading
system and changing their own and other students' grades. Isn't this Enron
in the making a byproduct of too much testing, and not paying enough
attention to children's souls?

If , on the other hand, we acknowledged and honored our children's
souls, our schools would engage them in community-building activities with
the same audacity with which the civil rights movement engaged them in
desegregation activities 40 years ago: planting community gardens,
recycling waste, organizing neighborhood arts and health festivals,
rehabbing houses, painting public murals. By giving our children and young
people a better reason to learn than just the individualistic one of
getting a job or making more money, by encouraging them to exercise their
Soul Power, we would get their cognitive juices flowing. Learning would
come from practice which has always been the best way to learn.

Instead of trying to bully young people to remain in classrooms
organized to prepare them to become cogs in the existing economic
structures, we need to recognize that the reason why so many young people
drop out from inner city schools is because they are voting with their
feet against a system which sorts, tracks, tests, and rejects or certifies
them like products of a factory. They are crying out for another kind of
education that values them as human beings and gives them opportunities to
exercise their Soul Power.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:43 PM 3 comments Links to this post

Hmm. So there's a debate in Congress from at least two Texas representatives on whether there is any "racial bias" or discrimination in Texas. Never mind our segregated schools or our racially/ethnically stratified occupational structures. Why was the voting rights act necessary in the first place? -Angela

June 22, 2006, 9:09AM

Criticism from Texas Republicans halts renewal of Voting Rights Act
The lawmakers decry pivotal law's extra oversight of states with history of discrimination
By SAMANTHA LEVINE
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - The House abruptly dropped plans Wednesday to vote on a renewal of the Voting Rights Act, a seminal law from the civil rights era, after criticism from Republican lawmakers from Texas.

A bill to extend the law for 25 years has support from the White House, top legislative leaders of both parties and a key, GOP-controlled committee that passed it 33 to 1.

But the bill was delayed after objections from the Texas lawmakers to the requirement that the state must get permission, or "preclearance," from the Justice Department or a federal court before making changes to voting standards, practices or procedures.

The rule was aimed at states with a history of discrimination in voting. Six states were targeted when the law was originally passed in 1965: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia. Texas, Arizona and Alaska were added in 1975, when the law was expanded to protect people who have limited knowledge of English.

"I don't think we have racial bias in Texas anymore," said Rep. John Carter, R-Round Rock.

"It would be dumb to discriminate," said Rep. Henry Bonilla, R-San Antonio. "That is the last thing anyone is trying to do."
If Texas must still get pre-clearance, the lawmakers feel that all states should have to do the same. They were angered when House leaders declined Tuesday to allow a debate on an amendment to that effect, which was introduced by Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler.

Some lawmakers are also seeking an amendment allowing the Justice Department to decide every year whether states need preclearance.

The lawmakers also pressed the leadership to delay renewing the law until the Supreme Court finishes its review of the disputed Texas congressional district lines that were drawn in 2003.

Democrats and some minority groups allege that the GOP-friendly lines violated the Voting Rights Act's prohibitions on discriminating against minority voters. The court could hand down its decision as early as today.

Several Texas Republicans also objected to the law's requirement that jurisdictions print ballots in other languages if 5 percent or more of their voting-age populations have limited English skills.

"I simply believe you should be able to read, write and speak English to be a voter in the United States," Carter said.

'Committed' to act

House Republican leaders said they "have time to address (lawmakers') concerns" and are "committed to passing the Voting Rights Act legislation as soon as possible."

The Senate has not voted on it yet.

House lawmakers are mistaken if they think bilingual aid is meant only to help immigrants, said Peter Zamora, a legislative attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The provisions were designed to help native-born, U.S. citizens who did not receive adequate schooling in English reading comprehension, he said. Zamora added that it is harder to understand a ballot than demonstrate the English-language proficiency required of naturalized citizens.

Congressional Democrats and civil rights leaders lashed out at the House delay.

"Those members who held up today's vote represent retrogressive forces that America hasn't seen at this level since the 1960s," said Wade Henderson, the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He noted that the bill was introduced by a large bipartisan group of lawmakers.

"It is shameful what they are doing," said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, which approved the bill last month by the vote of 33-1.

She added that she opposes the idea of applying the preclearance rules to all 50 states. It would inevitably result in several states suing for relief from the provisions, she said, leaving the law to languish in the courts.

Effect on voters

The actions of Texas Republicans are unlikely to cause them problems at the polls, said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University.

"Republicans in Texas recognize that they get elected on Anglo votes, a few Hispanic votes, and almost no black votes," he said.

samantha.levine@chron.com

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/3991488.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:47 PM 0 comments Links to this post

by SIDHANT KHANNA
India Post News Service


"America's high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don't just mean that
our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded-though a case
could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that
our high schools-even when they're working exactly as designed-cannot
teach our kids what they need to know today. This isn't an accident or a
flaw in the system; it is the system."
- Bill Gates

Even as Indian American kids continue to amaze the world with their
dominance in education and the 'Bee' competitions, a simultaneous drop
in Native American education has reached alarming proportions.
About 30 years ago, American educationists would have sworn by the
system and its products. Their students were the best, making their mark
worldwide. They were a source of pride for USA.

The scenario today is however not satisfactory. According to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the
world's richest country's students are ranked 24th for math. Not only
are they placed lower than advanced countries like Canada, Germany,
France and South Korea but also under developing and poorer countries
like Poland, Slovakia and Hungary.

The question arises, what purpose does an educational curriculum
designed in 1956 serve students passing out in 2006.
On the Oprah show, Bill Gates said, "Millions of kids are dropping out.
Of minorities, half drop out. Overall it's about a third (of the total
number)."

This should be a bigger concern than Iraq for the Americans. What good
is fighting for your people in foreign lands if you cannot be sure they
can take over that responsibility from you?

A dropout is bound to face some serious problems of unemployment. As
Gates put it, "There won't be jobs for those kids. It's a bad thing for
them. It's a bad thing for the country." His wife, Melinda Gates
reiterates that America's standing in the world will slip with an
undereducated workforce. Overall, it's not a concern for just USA; other
countries like India, Israel, China and Russia will face a bigger
disaster. India and Israel look to the US for enhancing trade and
regional security. A fallow American workforce and leadership will not
be able to prevent the propagation of fundamentalism and anarchy in most
developing nations since they, too, depend largely on the US for
stability, security and finance. The part of the world that currently
despises America's 'policeman attitude' will swear they were better off
with it.

Even those making it to college are involved in some kind of 'remedial
work'. They account for over 40 percent of total college students. They
are ill prepared for college and have their basics wrong.

A Time magazine report underlines some alarming facts. More than one
million American students drop out of school per annum which means one
student drops out every nine seconds!

According to an Oprah Show poll, 62 percent of the respondents said the
government should forbid students who are under 18 from dropping out. In
most states, 16-year-olds are legally permitted to dropout. To counter
dropout rates in the state of Indiana, a new law will strip driver's
licenses and work permits of children under the age of 18, who dropout
unless they have legitimate health, financial or legal reasons for
leaving school.

In Oprah's report, Russlynn Ali, director, Education Trust West, warns
that factory jobs (the biggest availability for dropouts) won't be
around much longer. Many companies are moving their factories to foreign
countries and outsourcing jobs because American workers are lacking
basic job skills. "Poorly trained workers and high school dropouts are
products of the "cycle of low expectations" in America's public
schools," Ali says. "Students rise to expectations, and they fall to
expectations."

Schools with leaky roofs, exposed steam pipes, crumbling ceilings and
inoperable bathrooms might be something Americans expected to find only
in a third world country. CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper, reported
from a school where these deplorable conditions are commonplace. This
school is just minutes from the White House. The sign in front of this
Washington, D.C., high school reads 'The Pride of Capitol Hill'. An
'American Story', is this? Certainly not the one that Brad Pitt mentions
in 'The Devil's Own'.

"I believe, just as I know all of you watching believe, that every
American child deserves the best school," Oprah says. "If you've watched
this show today, and you realize that your child is one of the children
who is not getting the best that this nation has to offer or if you are
concerned about what's happening to other kids in this country, go to
StandUp.org."

Jonathan Kozol, an author, educator and activist, is one of public
education's most vocal critics. In his book, The Shame of the Nation,
Kozol compares the current state of the American school system to South
African apartheid.

"We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated
than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King," he says.
"Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance."
Going by Kozol, the average African-American and Latino 12th grader
currently reads at the same level as the average white seventh grader.

The blame game has started. The poll suggests no clear consensus on who
is most to blame. About 24 percent blame lack of funds. About 21 percent
put the blame on parents.

The movement to defeat the 'silent epidemic' may has gathered momentum
due to the efforts of Oprah and Bill Gates but the real results depend
on the federal government's action. This is a problem that needs to be
solved soon enough since the new generation might be getting ready to
ride the horses that lead the American arrangement.

http://www.indiapost.com/members/story.php?story_id=5313

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:51 PM 1 comments Links to this post

June 21, 2006

Only 67% of eligible Texans graduated in '03, study says
Education Week report contradicts TEA's 83% claim
By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

Only two-thirds of Texas' eligible students earned a high school diploma in
2002-03, 16 percentage points lower than the 83 percent graduation rate
touted by the Texas Education Agency that year, according to a study
released Tuesday by Education Week magazine.

Like much of the dispute over dropout and graduation rates, discrepancies
arise because of the different formulas used to calculate the percentage.

Each state counts and tracks students differently; this report uses numbers
from the U.S. Department of Education and uses a "cumulative promotion
index," which estimates the probability that a ninth-grader will earn a
standard diploma in four years.

According to the study, Texas' graduation rate of 67 percent lagged just
behind the national average of 70 percent.

Texas students are 20 percent more likely to live in poverty and 60 percent
more likely to be English-language learners than national averages,
according to the report.

The study, Diplomas Count, shows that 1.2 million U.S. students failed to
graduate with their classmates in 2006.

"This is a virtually universal thing we're seeing here," said Christopher
Swanson, director of editorial projects at the Education Research Center.

Most dropouts leave school in the ninth grade, including 40 percent of
dropouts in low-income districts including Houston, officials said.

Texas measured up well in other standards.

The state requires students to earn 22 credits to graduate, slightly higher
than the national average.

It's one of 23 states that requires student to pass an exit-exam to
graduate, and Texas also requires students to attend school until they're
18, a year longer than the national average.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/3988173.html

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

June 21, 2006

A Third of U.S. Dropouts Never Reach 10th Grade
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO New York Times

WASHINGTON, June 20 — More than a third of high school dropouts across the
nation leave school without ever going beyond the ninth grade, according to
a report released here on Tuesday.

The report, "Diplomas Count: An Essential Guide to Graduation Rates and
Policies," by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center of
Education Week newspaper, also estimated a 39 percent graduation rate for
students in New York City, 25 percent lower than the city has publicly
reported.

The report found that nationwide, 69.6 percent of the students who enter
ninth grade graduate in four years with a regular diploma. It found both the
most and least successful states in the New York metropolitan region, with
New Jersey, at 84.5 percent, having the highest graduation rate in the
country, and Connecticut, with 79.3 percent, coming in fifth. New York
State, which demands that students pass exams in five subject areas, had the
ninth lowest graduation rate, at 62.5 percent.

Education researchers as well as state and local officials vary widely in
their assessments of graduation rates and even who counts as a graduate. For
example, a report earlier this year from the Economic Policy Institute,
estimated that 82 percent of all students nationwide graduated from high
school. The Education Week study, with some of the lowest graduation rates
ever reported, will likely fuel the debate. The Education Week study used
data from the 2002-3 school year. Its figures for states were slightly lower
than figures the federal Education Department also released here on Tuesday,
which found that nationally, 73.9 percent of high school students made it to
graduation that year. The following year, the federal report said, 75
percent of students graduated.

Both reports relied on figures that the department collects from states,
known as the Common Core of Data. The newspaper's report, however, tracked
promotions by grade to also estimate the probability of graduation on time
with a regular diploma.

Lori Mei, the head of testing for New York City's schools, defended the
city's figures, saying New York tracked individual students and so did not
rely on estimates, but produced actual graduation figures. In 2003, the city
reported a 54.3 percent graduation rate.

But she also said that New York counted students who received high school
equivalency diplomas as graduates. Excluding them would have produced a
graduation rate of about 50 percent, she said. She said that in New York,
virtually all the students who drop out never get past 9th or 10th grade,
largely because of poor preparation in the lower grades.

In the coming days, the study, posted at edweek.org/dc06, will provide
graduation rates for every school district in the country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/21/education/21report.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:46 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Tue, Jun. 20, 2006

CHANGES IN EDUCATION
Charter schools joining mainstream
HIGH SCORES, SPECIALIZED CURRICULUM DRAWING INTEREST IN AFFLUENT SUBURBS
By Dana Hull / San Jose Mercury News

A decade ago, charter schools existed largely on the fringes. Many were start-ups operating out of rented church basements -- alternatives to failing urban schools that struggled to teach the basics.

Now more than 200,000 California students are enrolled in 574 charters -- independently operated public schools that have wide latitude in what they teach and how they teach it.

While charters are still most popular in big cities and among low-achieving students, they're starting to take root in bedroom communities and affluent suburbs, creating stiff competition for regular public schools and drawing students from highly regarded private schools as well.

``We shop around to find the right mechanic for our car, but a lot of time we don't take the same approach when it comes to choosing schools,'' said Wanny Hersey, a skilled pianist and principal of Bullis Charter School in Los Altos. ``Once parents realize that school choice is out there and that one size doesn't fit all, they can evaluate different programs.''

Bullis was founded three years ago by parents outraged after their neighborhood elementary school was closed during a budget crunch.

The K-6 school lacks a permanent campus; it's housed in a dozen portable trailers on the parking lot behind Egan Middle School. But families are flocking to the young school's small classes, rich drama and instrumental music programs and individual learning plans for each student.

One measure of parent interest: 180 students applied for 40 kindergarten slots available this fall. Sustainable cooking, public speaking and conflict management are among the electives. Numerous projects, including an environmental education partnership with Hidden Villa, a 1,600-acre wilderness preserve in Los Altos Hills, are in the works.

For Steve Johnson, moving his daughter Sophia, 12, from a private school to Bullis last year was like moving from a house to something that really feels like home. Sophia graduated from sixth grade last week.

``She has learned faster and better here,'' he said. ``It's challenging, but she's rising to the occasion. I wish they would expand.''

Charter schools are by no means a magic bullet for the numerous challenges of public education. Some stumble, fail to meet community expectations, lose students and ultimately close. The California Charter Academy, a statewide chain of schools, fell to pieces in 2004, and a state audit found millions of dollars in questionable spending.

Some schools never make it through the approval process. RAICES, a proposed K-8 charter school in San Jose's Alum Rock neighborhood, recently had its petition rejected by the Santa Clara County Board of Education.

``The curriculum hadn't been thought through, and it felt slapped together,'' said Bill Evers, who serves on the county board and is generally supportive of charter schools. ``The charter didn't look ready, and I couldn't in good conscience approve it.''

The research on charter schools is also mixed. A May report by EdSource found that charter elementary and middle schools were more likely than non-charters to reach their goals when it came to improving test scores, but that charter high schools lagged.

There are 18 charter schools in Santa Clara County serving more than 5,400 students. Roughly half were founded to help struggling students from low-income families. Two more are scheduled to open this fall, and others are in the planning stages.

Downtown College Prep in San Jose got enormous statewide attention when its standardized test scores shot up 90 points in 2004-2005. It focuses on students who would be the first in their families to go to college; the vast majority speak Spanish at home. Entire classes go on field trips to colleges and universities.

But charters are also drawing families who are frustrated with the teach-to-the-standardized-test pressure facing many public schools, as well as parents shopping for specific programs.

``With No Child Left Behind, many schools are focusing just on reading, writing and arithmetic,'' said Caprice Young, president of the California Charter Schools Association. ``Parents of all kinds are looking for schools that still offer music and science and a diverse, enriched curriculum. Charter schools are a direct response to that.''

In Silicon Valley, the charter school movement has largely grown by word of mouth -- parents talking to other parents at soccer games and birthday parties.

However, local school districts, which can approve or deny charter school proposals, are not always as enthusiastic as parents.

``The fact is that getting a charter approved is still difficult, and a number of districts have signaled `Over my dead body,' '' said Eric Premack, co-director of the Charter Schools Development Center in Sacramento.

Other districts are wholeheartedly in favor: Cambrian School District in west San Jose converted four of its five elementary schools to charters so each could have more autonomy. Charter schools are governed by their own boards, have fewer regulations and work rules and have greater flexibility when it comes to raising and spending money, hiring staff and developing curriculum.

The first years of a charter school are reminiscent of dot-coms in the early days: It's a mad scramble to find classroom space, and charters often outgrow their facilities within weeks. There's enormous energy and excitement, along with near-constant retooling.

``It's like a full-time start-up job. This is pretty much my obsession,'' said Barbara Eagle, a parent who has helped drive Discovery Charter School, scheduled to open this fall in Campbell with a student body drawn from 25 public and private schools. ``It's really hard, but I knew we could do it.''

Contact Dana Hull at dhull@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-2706.



© 2006 MercuryNews.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.mercurynews.com

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:09 PM 1 comments Links to this post

by Marta Donayre, New America Media, Jun 08, 2006

EDITOR'S NOTE: A green card, even U.S. citizenship, is no guarantee from harassment by immigration authorities, because the current controversy isn’t really about immigration but about race.

OAKLAND -- I've developed a pet peeve lately. I get antsy with statements like "I have no problem with legal immigrants, it’s the illegals that I have a problem with."

Marta Donayre

Phrases like this raise the hair on the back of my neck. How can someone on the street tell the difference between an undocumented alien and me, a legal resident?

Is it through my English-language skills? I don't think so. I've met undocumented immigrants with far better English than mine.

Could it be the way I look? But I've known way too many blond, blue-eyed Latinos and non-Latinos who are undocumented.

Maybe it's because I act more "American" than recent immigrants? Nope. There are undocumented immigrants who seem like they were born and raised here. They've absorbed American fashion and ways much better than I have.

There's really no accurate way to tell the difference just by looking at us or listening to the way we speak.

To really figure it out, an inquisitor would have to open my wallet to see my green card, which I'm required to carry with me at all times. It looks pretty much like a driver's license, but with a much thicker magnetic strip. If I were to lose it, I'd be in very serious trouble. The thought of losing my wallet terrifies me.

The mere thought that this piece of plastic differentiates me from someone so many deem unwanted, exploitable and deportable lets me know how vulnerable I am. At times I imagine what it must've been like for a freed slave to lose his or her freedom papers, or to have someone take them away.

Deportation is nothing like being sent to a plantation to be whipped and exploited, but I can't help but imagine an empathy across time for those freed slaves. I too need to carry my "free to live in the U.S." card with me all the time. I also risk losing it, having it stolen, or snatched out my hands.

Ironically, my green card provides little protection in an anti-immigrant environment, because people and authorities DO judge your legal status often by your looks and accent, no matter how inaccurate these standards are.

At a Mother's Day event in San Francisco, I heard a woman tell her story. She was a naturalized American citizen, in her 60s, married to an American, and she was nearly deported to Mexico. She wasn't even Mexican. Her near-deportation was caused solely by the fact that she was a Latina. As a full-blown citizen she wasn't protected from deportation. She's not alone.

A decorated war veteran told me that when he was 12 years old, immigration authorities came out of nowhere and seized a friend he was playing with and speedily deported him to Mexico. Unable to speak Spanish, with no money and no family in Tijuana, the American-born Latino child had a really hard time contacting his family and returning home. He was lucky his experience didn't end tragically.

These stories were a rude wake-up call for me. If U.S. citizenship didn't protect these people, having a green card won't protect me either. Which brings me back to the question, how do they know by looking at me if I'm here legally or illegally?

Should I wear a green rectangle on my clothing? During World War II Jews, Czechs, Polish people, political enemies, criminals, gays and lesbians, men and women who "defiled" their race and religious minorities had to wear identifiable badges in concentration camps.

Should I now visibly identify myself as "legal" in order to protect myself from our current state of immigration fascism? How else would they know not to deport me?

In reality, the green badge will protect me just as much as citizenship has protected my friends. The reason is that this hot debate is not really about immigration status but about race relations. If one is brown, one is unwanted. This is why there is a well-documented history of the deportation of Americans to Mexico.

This is why I shudder when I hear people say that it is not "legal immigrants" that they have a problem with. From where I am standing, the "problem" is with all of us.

It moves me to hear anti-immigration advocates arguing that it's unfair to me, a legal immigrant, that lawbreakers cut in line. I appreciate your indignation on my behalf, but if I weren't able to see right through this "divide and conquer" tactic I would be inclined to believe that you're really concerned about me when you're not.

Sorry guys, your tactics won't work. You're not pitting this immigrant against any other. After all, it's not really about immigration, is it?

Marta Donayre, a co-founder of Love Sees No Borders and member of the Leadership Council of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition. She can be reached at www.martadonayre.com or www.loveseesnoborders.org.

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=0cc40235442e4c21d4b525530d3acd3d

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

This is a positive move since most people who take the GED do so because they've dropped out. -Angela

Sun, Jun. 18, 2006

Those taking GED to count as dropouts
The new policy is likely to increase the official dropout rate and could
result in lower rankings for many schools in Texas

By TERRY WEBSTER, and EVA-MARIE AYALA
FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITERS

Texas has broadened its definition of high school dropouts to include
students who take the GED and those who can't pass the TAKS exit exam.

The change will take effect when the dropout rate for the Class of 2006 is
calculated. It is part of the Texas Education Agency's effort to pressure
school districts into keeping more students in the classroom and seeing to
it that they succeed. The change is likely to increase the state's high
school dropout rate and could pull down school ratings.

The rule change puts Texas in line with federal standards for counting
dropouts, and it also recognizes the differences in the success of high
school graduates and those who obtain a General Educational Development
certificate.

"Getting a GED is not the same as getting a diploma, and we know that
because outcomes for students are dramatically different," said Daria Hall,
a senior policy analyst for Education Trust of Washington, D.C., an
independent nonprofit organization concerned with improving education.

"That's why it's important to hold schools accountable for making sure that
students get a regular diploma," Hall said.

Test pressure

In recent years, a considerable number of Texas teens have sought a GED
rather than a high school diploma. Of those taking the GED between 2000 and
2004, 144,337 -- about 40 percent -- were teens, according to the latest
data available from the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C.,
which administers the exams.

State officials acknowledge that in recent years, as standardized tests have
become more difficult, there have been reports of school officials
encouraging students to drop out rather than drag down test scores. The new
rules are meant to deter this.

Students who quit high school, can't pass the TAKS or opt for a GED will all
be considered dropouts, or "non-completers." To earn an "acceptable" rating
from the state, 75 percent of a district's or a school's students must
complete high school.

"There's no question that there's more pressure on the schools," said Chuck
Boyd, a secondary schools management director in the Fort Worth district.
"I'm not trying to diminish the good qualities of the GED, but it's more
important for students to get their diplomas. We're working very hard with
our students to get that idea across."

Critics of the state's approach say it places too much emphasis on passing
the TAKS rather than on overall performance and gives struggling students
little incentive to stay in school.

"There's going to be more and more kids dropping out because they know they
can't pass the test," said Bob Kimball, a professor at the University of
Houston-Clear Lake. The former Houston school district administrator made
national headlines in 2003 by saying that the district under-reported its
dropouts.

David Holland, director of accountability and testing for the Birdville
district, notes that the TAKS exit exam, which is first given in the 11th
grade, trumps four years of class work.

"If I'm a student and in four years I complete all of my credits, and the
only thing keeping me from graduating is passing the TAKS, and I don't pass
it over the summer, then in the following fall I'll be counted as a
non-completer because I'm not enrolled," Holland said.

In May, the Texas Education Agency reported that 89 percent of seniors in
the state, or 201,491, have passed all portions of the TAKS exit exam.

"About 25,000 students still need to pass it," said DeEtta Culbertson, a TEA
spokeswoman.

Graduating seniors who don't pass the test by August will be counted as
dropouts under the 2007 state ratings. The state rates schools and districts
as exemplary, recognized, acceptable or unacceptable.

Schools can also boost their student completion rates by factoring in
students who return to school for a fifth year, even if they take only a
single class, state officials said.

GED pros and cons

The GED provides a way for people who didn't graduate from high school to
get into college or get a better-paying job, according to the American
Council on Education.

For years, passing the battery of tests has been considered the equivalent
of earning a high school diploma. It consists of 7 1/2 hours of exams on
subjects such as mathematics, science, social studies, writing, and
interpreting literature and the arts.

During trial runs, six out of 10 high school seniors could not pass the GED
exams, according to the council. But some local teens said the GED program
is less demanding than high school.

"It's pretty easy," said Tiffany Lundgren, 17, who dropped out of Richland
High School in the Birdville district and earned a GED certificate. "You can
finish it in four to five weeks if you try. It's basically just practice
tests."

But the same problems that limited a student's success in high school don't
just go away because they enter a GED program.

"There are barriers with child care, transportation, illness in their
families or even their own illness," said Sofia Zamarripa, an Adult Basic
Education supervisor in the Fort Worth school district.

On average, just 35 percent of students who enter Arlington's GED program
receive a certificate, according to district data.

Sometimes students' reading levels are too low for the test, and they get
frustrated and quit, said John DeMore, principal of Venture High, one of
Arlington's alternative high schools.

"To keep kids in this class, they have to really believe that the teacher
cares about them and that they are getting a credit that is useful so they
can go to work or go to a junior college," DeMore said.

The odds for success are stacked against students who earn a GED.

Just 1 percent of GED recipients will go on to earn bachelor's degrees, and
about 2 percent will earn associate's degrees, said Hall, the senior policy
analyst for Education Trust.

By contrast, about 36 percent of high school graduates go on to earn
bachelor's degrees and 6 percent will earn an associate's degree, Hall said.

High school graduates will earn more money than dropouts. And college
graduates are far more likely to earn more money over their lifetimes than
those who go no further than high school.

"I hope we never hold a GED in as much regard as a high school diploma,
which should have more weight and be more valuable," said state Sen.
Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, who has served on state and national education
committees. "In today's society, you can't get a job and raise a family, or
participate in the business world, without it."

Defining a dropout

In Texas school ratings, dropouts refer to seventh- and eighth-graders who
don't return to school, a figure that is typically less than 1 percent and
has little impact on ratings.

Completers are students who join a freshman class and graduate four to five
years later.

In 2004, the Texas Education Agency reported that 84.6 percent of seniors
graduated and 3.9 percent -- equal to 9,627 students -- dropped out. Other
students received GEDs or continued high school for a fifth year.

If GED students are added in, the figures grow to 8.1 percent, or 19,995
dropouts. Starting in 2007, students who drop out and take their GEDs will
be considered dropouts.

Some studies cite even higher dropout numbers. The Alliance for Excellent
Education in Washington, D.C., estimates that more than 124,000 students
failed to graduate on time from Texas high schools in 2004. In their
lifetimes, the dropouts will cost the state some $32 billion in lost wages,
taxes and productivity, according to the study released in March.

SOURCES: Texas Education Agency, the Alliance for Excellent Education

Who is more likely to drop out

Those with low grades.

Those who miss or skip classes.

Dropouts tend to be older than other students in their grade.

Boys are at a higher risk. Girls are likely to drop out because of
pregnancy.

Risk is higher for students from low-income or single-parent families or
families with unemployed parents.

Rates are higher for blacks, Hispanics and American Indians.

Rates are also higher for non-native English speakers.

Dropping out is more likely to occur in the southern or western United
States.

Frequent use of suspension and increasing academic standards without
providing support can increase the risk.

SOURCE: The National Center on Secondary Education and Transition


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terry Webster, 817-685-3819 twebster@star-telegram.com Eva-Marie Ayala,
817-548-5534 eayala@star-telegram.com

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/local/14848027.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:00 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Some folks in Denver are calling for pulling kids out of the regular academic program for one year. There is no research base for this kind of intervention. If anthing, this will put kids on an even slower track relative to their peers who have learned only in their firs language. I hope that this proposal doesn't get any further. -Angela

English initiative advances
LANGUAGE: A group proposes immersing non-English-speaking students in English classes for a year, with no other area of study.
By Karen Rouse / DenverPost.com

Immigrant advocates who celebrated a major victory before the Colorado Supreme Court on Monday suffered a lesser-known defeat on another ballot issue, this one affecting English learners in public schools.

The state's highest court - which ruled Monday that a proposal to ban state services to illegal immigrants would not go before voters in November - also gave the green light to another group that has been pushing a measure to accelerate English language instruction for non-English-speaking students.

English for Colorado, a group of Weld County citizens that includes Commissioner William Jerke, is promoting proposed ballot issue No. 95, the "Education of English-Language Learners."

Under the proposal, students who are not proficient in English would get to spend up to one year in English-instruction classes before they are returned to a regular mainstream classroom.

During that year of English instruction, students would primarily be taught in English, and they would not participate in other content areas such as math, science or social studies, said Bill Garcia, a lawyer from Weld County who is backing the measure.

"The kids would focus on learning English first, and they would be able to get back and focus in classes," said Garcia, who also is seeking election to the Weld County Commission. The proposed initiative is not an "English-only" measure, he said.

"It's not English only. It's English primary," Garcia said. "There probably needs to be some assistance provided" in the foreign language.

Manolo Gonzales-Estay, campaign manager for English Plus - the group that in 2002 led the defeat of Amendment 31, an English-only ballot initiative, and is now fighting No. 95 - said the proposal takes away choice from school districts.

"We now have multiple choices parents can take," said Gonzales-Estay, who works for a political consulting firm, Welchert & Britz Inc. "There's English immersion. There's dual language. Not every child is the same."

English Plus last month challenged the initiative, saying its language did not make clear enough to voters how restrictive it is.

But on Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the state's Title Board, which oversees ballot language, acted properly last month when it approved the language.

Proponents of No. 95 now have until Aug. 7 to collect 67,829 signatures, said Dana Williams, spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office. Under the proposal, some students - such as those who are 10 or older or have special needs - could apply for waivers to get bilingual instruction.

Also, if 20 or more students in the same grade at one school get waivers, the school would have to provide those students with a bilingual-education option, he said. If there are fewer than 20 students, the district could offer its own bilingual program for students but would not be required to. If there is no bilingual program, students could transfer to another school or district - at district expense if the alternative is more than 2 miles away.

There are about 98,000 students in Colorado public schools identified as English-language learners, said Barbara Medina, director of the state's English Language Acquisition Unit.

Instruction can range from mainstreaming, where students are in a class with other English- fluent students, to pull-outs, where students are pulled out for a portion of the day for instruction in English or instruction in English and Spanish, officials said.

Medina said there are students representing 143 languages in Colorado schools, but 86 percent come from a Spanish-speaking background.

Richard Garcia, executive director of the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition, a student advocacy group, said the English proposal would segregate students.

"So you segregate them for one year, and you teach them English, and what happens to that content area," he said. "They're going to lose ... content."

Bill Garcia, the initiative's proponent, said students need to master English first so that they can grasp content in other subjects. "Children are not able to fully engage in the classwork and engage in the teaching if they don't have a grasp of the language," he said.

Jane Urschel, associate executive director of the Colorado Association of School Boards, is concerned the proposal interferes with the right of districts to local control. "It is very restrictive, and kids learn differently, and it's a disservice to kids to say this can be accomplished" in a year.

The proposal also would require that the students be tested annually in English.

Staff writer Karen Rouse can be reached at 303-820-1684 or krouse@denverpost.com.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:31 AM 2 comments Links to this post

I primarily take issue with Professor Armor's statement that "We have racially imbalanced neighborhoods and cities based on where people choose to live. What's wrong with racially imbalanced schools?" For poor, and even middle-class families on a fixed income, there are limits to the choices that they can make. -Angela

June 11, 2006

Ideas & Trends
Perhaps Not All Affirmative Action Is Created Equal
By JEFFREY ROSEN --NEW YORK TIMES

Washington

NOW that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases challenging racial
balancing in public schools, some conservatives hope the end of affirmative
action is near.

After all, they say, why would the Supreme Court suddenly agree to hear
cases about racial balancing in Seattleand Louisvillewhen the court ? with
Sandra Day O'Connor still serving ? refused last December to hear a similar
case from Massachusetts? It must be, the thinking goes, that the court,
with two new and more conservative justices, John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel
A. Alito Jr., wants to overturn affirmative action.

That optimism may be premature, and not because there is a hidden liberal
streak on the court. Instead, there is a vigorous debate among prominent
Republican judges and legal scholars about whether racial balancing in
public schools is an acceptable form of affirmative action. Some
conservatives believe that racial balancing plans, while not colorblind,
are still constitutional.

The unexpected fissures among conservatives about how colorblind the
Constitution should be suggest that certain forms of affirmative action
might be more acceptable to conservatives than liberals had feared.

The Seattleand Louisvillecases, which the Supreme Court will hear next
fall, involve challenges to plans known as "managed choice" or "open
choice." In Seattle, parents can apply to send their children to any public
high school in the district.

If a school is oversubscribed, students are chosen based on a number of
"tie-breakers," including racial targets designed to ensure that each
school's racial makeup doesn't differ by more than 15 percent from the
racial composition of the Seattle public schools as a whole.

Last October, no one was surprised when the famously liberal United States
Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the Seattleplan. It cited a
2003 Supreme Court opinion, by Justice O'Connor, which held that classroom
diversity was a compelling governmental interest for law schools and
universities.

But it was eye-opening that Judge Alex Kozinski, a conservative libertarian
on the Ninth Circuit, wrote an unexpected concurring opinion. "That a
student is denied the school of his choice may be disappointing, but it
carries no racial stigma and says nothing at all about that individual's
aptitude or ability," he wrote.

And Judge Kozinski quoted the opinion of Chief Judge Michael Boudin of the
United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, another Republican
judge, who upheld the use of racial balancing in a Massachusettsschool
choice plan. Unlike "modern affirmative action," Judge Boudin had written,
these plans do not "seek to give one racial group an edge over another."

Some conservative scholars suggest that there may be significant
differences between racial balancing for public elementary and high schools
and racial preferences for competitive public universities.

"When you're talking about public schools, everybody's got to go somewhere,
and it's not as if some schools are necessarily better than others," said
Charles Fried, a conservative law professor at Harvard. "At some point, the
government has to have some basis for breaking the tie."

Professor Fried said he had not made up his mind on the issue. "I think
Roberts and Alito are both men who are open to arguments, and I would trust
them to think long and hard about this," he said.

Conservatives have also long emphasized the importance of deferring to
local school officials, a reaction in part to judicially imposed busing
programs.

In the Seattleand Louisvillecases, the plans were designed by local
politicians.

"This is not the result of some liberal master plan; it was adopted from
the ground up, " said Samuel Issacharoff, a liberal legal scholar at
Columbia LawSchool. Judicial deference is as deeply held a conservative
principle as the importance of a colorblind society, and conservative
judges and activists are conducting a vigorous internal debate about how
these principles should be reconciled.

Last year, for example, the Supreme Court, in another opinion by Justice
O'Connor, struck down California's policy of racially segregating new
prisoners to prevent gang violence. Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice
Antonin Scalia, ordinarily fierce champions of colorblind policies, argued
that an exception should be made in this case because of the importance of
deferring to the expertise of local prison officials.

Opponents of affirmative action don't buy conservative arguments that
racial balancing is acceptable. Parents don't view all public schools as
equal, they argue, so racial tie-breakers force some parents to send their
children to worse schools farther from home because of their race.

"In some ways, the damage may be greater than in the university context,
since this may limit the ability of black families to escape inferior
schools by transferring to schools where the authorities deem there to be
too many blacks," says Peter H. Schuck of Yale Law School, author of
"Diversity in America," a prominent critique of affirmative action.

In the Seattlecase, the conservative dissenting judges wrote that the
educational benefits of diversity for university students were less obvious
for lower-school students. The dissenters quoted David J. Armor, a George
Mason professor who has reported finding little connection between racial
integration and student achievement.

"Where we have had very substantial long-term desegregation, we did not
find the achievement gap changing significantly," Mr. Armor said in an
interview. "I did find a modest association for math but not reading in
terms of racial composition and achievement, but there's a big state
variation."

Professor Armor estimated that "at least dozens or maybe hundreds of school
districts still use race in some way" and said he hoped that the Supreme
Court would put an end to all race-conscious assignment plans. "We have
racially imbalanced neighborhoods and cities based on where people choose
to live. What's wrong with racially imbalanced schools?"

IF the court agrees with him, it might require districts to consider
"race-neutral alternatives," like a lottery, to decide which students gain
admission to popular schools. But given segregated housing patterns, that
might mean the end of integration.

Chief Justice Roberts, in his first term, has shown a skill in persuading
his colleagues to join unanimous opinions decided on narrow grounds. The
race cases may test his leadership abilities more than any he has
confronted so far. And the fact that conservatives disagree so vigorously
about how to apply the principle of colorblindness in different contexts
makes the outcome especially hard to predict.

Jeffrey Rosen's latestbook is "The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts
Serve America."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/weekinreview/11rosen.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:30 AM 0 comments Links to this post

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


CONTACT:
Claire Campbell (202) 293-1217 ext. 351
Charis Granger (202) 293-1217 ext. 361


TEACHING INEQUALITY: HOW POOR AND MINORITY STUDENTS ARE SHORTCHANGED ON TEACHER QUALITY

(Washington, D.C.) – A report out today from the Education Trust provides new information on the impact of teacher quality on student achievement and offers specific steps states should take to remedy the persistent practice of denying the best teachers to the children who need them the most.

The report, Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality, comes as states prepare their plans to ensure that low-income students and students of color receive their fair share of experienced, qualified teachers. Those equity plans must be delivered to the U.S. Secretary of Education by July 7 -- and mark the first time that the federal government has demanded that states confront and fix the unfair distribution of teacher talent in their states.

The report also offers some key findings of soon-to-be released research in three states – Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin – and major school systems within them. Funded by The Joyce Foundation and conducted with policymakers and researchers on the ground, the research project reveals that schools in these states and districts with high percentages of low-income and minority students are more likely to have teachers who are inexperienced, have lower basic academic skills or are not highly qualified -- reflecting troublesome national teacher distribution patterns.

Among the most alarming evidence in the project came from Illinois, where researchers developed an index of teacher-quality. This index, based on factors like teachers’ performance on college-admissions tests, the selectivity of the college they attended and the percentage of teachers in a school who failed the state’s certification exam on the first try revealed a painful truth: Illinois students in the highest-minority and highest-poverty schools are assigned teachers of significantly lower quality than their counterparts in schools that serve few low-income students and students of color.

The Illinois research also demonstrates the clear link between teacher quality and student achievement. In the highest-poverty high schools with high teacher-quality indices, twice as many students met state standards as did students in other similarly high-poverty high schools with low teacher-quality indices.

Researchers also found stunning differences in students’ readiness for college depending on the quality of teachers in their schools. Students in Illinois who attended schools with average teacher quality and only completed math up to Algebra II actually were more ready for college than their peers who completed calculus but went to schools with the lowest-teacher quality.

"For a very long time, we've allowed the public to believe that poor and minority children are performing below other children simply because they enter school behind,” said Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust. “As the data in this report make clear, however, much of the achievement gap is not about the kids and their families after all.

“Rather, we take the children who come to us with less and give them less in school, too--including less of the very resource they need the most: high-quality teachers," Haycock said.

Among other selected findings from the Midwest research:
· In Chicago, one out of every eight teachers in the highest-poverty schools failed the test of basic skills at least once – twice the rate of teachers at low-poverty schools.
· In Wisconsin, low-performing schools have approximately twice the percentage of novice teachers as high-performing schools.
· At high-minority elementary schools in Ohio, one in eight teachers are not “highly qualified” compared to one in 50 teachers at elementary schools serving the smallest proportion of students of color.

“This research shows once again that good teachers can have an enormous impact on student achievement,” said Ellen Alberding, President of the Joyce Foundation. “Midwest states and districts have taken a courageous first step by documenting the inequities in the way our schools are staffed. Now we need to implement strategies that promise to attract and retain strong teachers for our highest-need schools.”

The Ed Trust report recommends a range of strategies to end the unfair distribution of teacher talent, including:
Scaling back prerogatives that allow experienced teachers to pick their assignments.
Providing salary incentives to attract high-quality, experienced principals to work in schools that serve high concentrations of poor and minority students and linking their pay to improved conditions and improved achievement.
Identifying effective teachers and paying them more to teach in schools with shortages.
Taking a cue from professional sports and start using a “draft strategy,” which would put high-poverty, struggling schools at the head of the hiring line, allowing them to have the first pick of teaching talent.
Giving teachers who work in the poorest communities fully paid sabbaticals.
Reserving tenure for those teachers who demonstrate effectiveness at producing student learning.
Banning unfair budgeting practices that allow the most advantaged schools to “buy” more than their share of the most highly paid teachers.
The equity plans that states will submit to the U.S. Department of Education must describe the specific steps policymakers will take to ensure that poor and minority students are not taught disproportionately by inexperienced, unqualified or out-of-field teachers.

“This step is long overdue and reflects growing recognition that we can’t close achievement gaps without also addressing gaps in teacher quality,” said Heather Peske, who co-authored the report and coordinated the research project. “Accountability by itself doesn’t improve student achievement. Expectations and standards are important, but nothing is more important than the quality of the classroom teacher.”

The need for equity plans is evident in both state-reported numbers on the distribution of highly qualified teachers and the most recent and reliable federal data. A state-by-state chart in the report highlights these disparities.

“These persistent inequities in teacher quality mock this nation’s commitment to equal opportunity,” said Ross Wiener, policy director of the Education Trust. “Instead of organizing our schools to close achievement gaps, we have created a caste system that metes out opportunity based on wealth and privilege and ignores the needs of students.

“Educators and policymakers must confront these destructive practices and work to give low-income students and students of color equal access to effective teachers,” Wiener said.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:20 AM 1 comments Links to this post

This big question is whether there is an accountability system that can't get gamed. -Angela

Exclusive: DISD, other districts unlikely to look into suspicious scores
Saturday, June 10, 2006


By JOSHUA BENTON / The Dallas Morning News

An alarming number of students who graduated from Texas high schools last month probably cheated to get there – and state education officials are in no hurry to catch them.

A state-sponsored analysis found thousands of suspicious scores on the 11th-grade TAKS, the test students must pass to graduate.

The study found 96 Texas high schools where groups of last year's 11th-graders turned in unusually similar answer sheets – suggesting they may have been copying each other's answers. Scores in almost every Dallas neighborhood high school raised red flags.

Eleventh-grade classrooms were more than eight times more likely to have suspicious scores than those in other grades, researchers found.

The study's results don't surprise experts. "Levels of cheating in high school are at astronomical levels," said Tim Dodd, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University.

But in Texas, state and local officials say that these unusual patterns in data – even those that researchers say are millions of times less likely to occur than your being struck by lightning tomorrow – are not enough to trigger scrutiny.

The result is that many of the most egregious cases of likely cheating will go uninvestigated.

"Yeah, kids cheat," said Devin Gustafson, 2006 valedictorian at Seagoville High School, one of the 18 Dallas schools that made the list.

"If you want to cheat on the TAKS, it's not hard."

The findings are the result of a comprehensive analysis performed, at the state's request, by a Utah company called Caveon. It was hired last summer after a series of Dallas Morning News stories found evidence of educator-led cheating in many Texas schools.

The Texas Education Agency paid Caveon more than $500,000 to examine test scores and search for the sort of statistical anomalies that could indicate cheating on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. The analysis looked for a variety of patterns, such as a classroom where students made performance gains of unlikely size, or where students answered very difficult questions with ease but struggled with more simple ones.

But the most common anomaly Caveon found was what it called "very similar test responses." That means, in a particular classroom or grade, an unusual number of students answered all or nearly all questions in the same way – including both wrong and right answers.

In its report to Texas officials, Caveon said it only flagged cases with "a low probability of occurring by chance." While it acknowledges that statistics alone are not conclusive proof of cheating, the report says Caveon used a "very conservative statistical approach."

"The conservative approach ensures that while not every potential instance of a statistical inconsistency is identified, those that are identified will be so anomalous that reasonable explanations of these inconsistencies by referring to normal circumstances become improbable," the report states.


'Anomalies'

State officials say that just because a large number of a classroom's students had identical answer sheets doesn't necessarily mean it's worthy of investigation.

"Caveon is pretty much the national expert on this sort of thing," said Shirley Neeley, the state's education commissioner. "But I look at that list and think these are anomalies. I didn't immediately think the worst."

Is it cheating? Perhaps the key piece of supporting evidence is how much more common the "very similar" anomalies are in 11th grade than at other grades.

Caveon found 486 Texas classrooms with an unusual cluster of "very similar" answer sheets.

If those findings were not the result of cheating – if they were just statistical background noise – one might expect them to be evenly distributed among the nine grades in which Texas tests.

But that's not what Caveon found. In grades three to 10, it identified an average of 29 classrooms where test scores suggest answer copying.

In 11th grade, Caveon found 253.

"That's exactly what you would expect: The higher the stakes, the more likely you're going to have some kind of dishonest behavior," said Jason Stephens, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut who studies high school cheating.

The "very similar" answer sheets were concentrated in the two school districts that have faced the most cheating allegations in the past: Dallas and Houston. Both urban districts had 18 high schools earn the "very similar" flag at 11th grade.

Of Dallas' 21 traditional neighborhood high schools, 17 made Caveon's list. So did one magnet school, the School of Education and Social Services.

That's the district's school for aspiring teachers.

In contrast, none were found in San Antonio or El Paso, and only one was found in Austin, again suggesting the pattern is not random.

Only one school in the Dallas suburbs – McKinney North – had an unusual cluster of similar test scores. Four Fort Worth high schools also had the pattern.

But state and local officials insist there must be some explanation for the 11th-grade scores – something other than cheating.

"We are not going to speculate on the reason that that number occurred," said Susan Barnes, the state's associate commissioner for standards and programs.

"I just believe there's a logical explanation somewhere," Dr. Neeley said. She added that she did not know what that explanation might be.


Inquiries unlikely

It's unclear whether an explanation will ever be found, because many of the schools will probably go uninvestigated.

Initially, TEA chose not to even tell districts that their schools had suspicious score patterns. Dr. Barnes said the agency informed schools only because The News had requested the testing data under open-records law.

"We would not have done it otherwise," she said.

Dr. Neeley informed the districts on Caveon's list in a May 31 letter. But the commissioner did not demand that they begin even a cursory investigation into the suspicious numbers. Instead, she asked districts only to "conduct any investigations you deem necessary to explain" the results.

Many districts are interpreting that to mean it's OK not to investigate Caveon's findings.

The Dallas school district is one.

"We have no investigations planned," said Donald Claxton, the district's spokesman. "This [the Caveon report] just identifies unusual patterns. It's nothing conclusive."

Dr. Barnes said that TEA did not feel comfortable asking districts to investigate Caveon's findings without any additional supporting evidence, such as eyewitness testimony of cheating.


1999 investigation

But TEA has done precisely that in the past. In 1999, a TEA analysis of the erasure patterns on student answer sheets identified 11 districts with one or more schools with questionable results over a period of three years. Based on that data, TEA demanded that all 11 launch investigations. Four concluded there had been cheating by teachers.

Districts on the Caveon list have been told the grade level and subject area in question and what type of statistical anomalies Caveon found.

But they haven't been told other crucial facts. How many students had answer sheets identical to their neighbors? Which students made unlikely gains on the test? Which patterns of answers are suspicious?

"We don't know the parameters that would cause us to be flagged," said Joe Miniscalco, McKinney's senior director of secondary education. "Is it two tests? 200 tests?"

Dr. Barnes said her agency does not plan to give all districts that extra information. "I do believe districts already have the information they would need," she said.

In any case, accurate investigations will be hard at this late date. The report examines scores on a test given more than a year ago. TEA officials said they had draft copies of the report as early as last fall but did not send findings to districts until a few days ago.

By then, most 11th-graders who might have cheated had already graduated.


Cheating common

Teenagers cheating on tests is nothing new.

In 2004, researcher Michael Josephson surveyed nearly 15,000 American high school students and asked whether they had cheated on a test in the previous year. Sixty-two percent said they had – roughly the same number who said they had had at least one beer over the same time span.

Researchers report that public school systems historically have not been particularly interested in uncovering cheating by students or teachers. Don McCabe, a Rutgers University professor who has studied cheating for 15 years, often surveys high school students on cheating. But when he approaches a public school, he usually runs into roadblocks.

"They don't want to know their students are cheating," he said. "They don't want the information, because then they have to deal with it."

Devin Gustafson, the Seagoville valedictorian, said he heard a number of his fellow students talking about cheating on the 11th-grade TAKS test. An example: "One girl, she snuck her cellphone into the test and was text messaging some of her friends to get answers," he said. "She said she only got one or two answers because it was too hard."

He said he didn't cheat, but if he had wanted to, it wouldn't have been hard. "I definitely could have. A couple of times, the teacher left the room and all you would have had to do is turn around and ask somebody for the answer."

Matthew Ramirez, who will be a senior at Skyline High School this fall, said it was easy for students to cheat there. Students who have to turn in their cellphones on test day, he said, are allowed to take them back after lunch – even if they haven't completed the test. "It's not hard to cheat," he said.

Researchers say school systems and state officials don't take their policing responsibilities seriously.

"It's making a mockery of the whole system," Dr. McCabe said. "You invest a lot of taxpayer money and a lot of teacher and student time in a test. And there's evidence there's a problem with the test. And they're not going to do anything about it? They're just going to say, 'Oh, it's just statistics; you can't trust that'?

"It's just going to get worse."

E-mail jbenton@dallasnews.com


Schools where answers were 'very similar'

At several area schools, answers on the 11th-grade TAKS test were similar enough to raise suspicions about cheating.
Math Science Social studies English language arts
Dallas ISD
Adamson X X X
Carter X X X X
Spruce X X X
Madison X X X
Kimball X X X
Pinkston X X
Lincoln X X X
Maceo Smith X X X
Molina X
North Dallas X X X
Roosevelt X X X
Samuell X X X
School of Education and Social Services X X X
Seagoville X
Skyline X X
South Oak Cliff X X X
Sunset X X X
Thomas Jefferson X X X
Fort Worth ISD
Arlington Heights X
Dunbar X X
Eastern Hills X X X
Polytechnic X X
McKinney ISD
McKinney North X
Charter schools
Theresa B. Lee Academy X X
Texans Can! Academy at Paul Quinn College X X X

SOURCE: Caveon
Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/061106dnmettakscheat.8606778.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:14 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Based on a new law (formerly SB2), "schools deemed academically unacceptable for four years must be shut down or be subject to management by a private, nonprofit company." I guess the private companies--and not the public schools--know better even though 9 of the 11 schools slotted for closure or radical alteration are charter schools. In any case, this is a punishing, rather than a supportive role, particularly in light of the fact that most charters target low-performing student populations. I'm not saying that these schools shouldn't get special attention. They should. It's just the kind of attention they get that concerns me. -Angela

06/10/2006
Jeanne Russell
Express-News Staff Writer

New legislation aimed at ridding Texas of failing public schools will have an outsized effect on charter schools.

While the numbers are small, the percentages make it clear that Texas charters are in for a blow. Nine of the 11 public schools ranked academically unacceptable for three years under the state's accountability system are charters.

The taxpayer-financed, privately managed campuses make up less than 4 percent of Texas public schools but represent 73 percent of the repeat failures.

Three of the schools facing the most serious sanctions — closure or being taken over by a nonprofit — are in San Antonio: the San Antonio School for Inquiry and Creativity, the Eagle Academy of San Antonio, and the Career Plus Learning Academy.

"The statistics speak for themselves," said Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, who designed the provision and is a charter school supporter. "We cannot fund in any way bad schools for our students. If they are not producing for our children, they need to be closed."

At risk schools

Recent legislation mandates that struggling schools in the state must either improve or risk closing permanently or coming under new management. The 11 schools at risk for sanctions are:

Career Plus Learning Academy in San Antonio
San Antonio School for Inquiry and Creativity
Eagle Academy of San Antonio
*Eagle Academy of Bryan
Eagle Academy of Fort Worth
*Eagle Academy of Dallas
Honors Academy in Dallas
Crossroad Community Education Center Charter
Gulf Shores High
Kashmere High in Houston
Sam Houston High in Houston
*Eagle Academies of Bryan and Dallas were closed by the operator.

Source: Texas Education Agency


The stringent new oversight measures were part of a school finance bill signed by Gov. Rick Perry in May. Now, schools deemed academically unacceptable for four years must be shut down or be subject to management by a private, nonprofit company.

The state will release new school rankings, based on this year's Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills scores, in August. Schools are ranked exemplary, recognized, academically acceptable and academically unacceptable based largely on test performance.

Because the law was just passed, Education Secretary Shirley Neeley can decide whether to close or take over the flagged schools immediately or give them a year's reprieve, said Suzanne Marchman, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency. Neeley is expected to make a decision by August.

This year's scores at San Antonio School for Inquiry and Creativity, which opened in 2000, appear good enough to earn an acceptable rating for the first time and avert state sanctions, said Debbie DeLeon, the school's principal and superintendent.

The school's 220 students in grades kindergarten through 12 were motivated to do well on the test in order to keep the school's doors open, DeLeon said.

"In 2004-2005 it was a 'whatever' attitude," said Shawn White, the school's vice principal and science teacher. "This year it was an uplifting experience."

The Eagle Academy of San Antonio serves about 140 students in grades six though 12. The San Antonio campus, one of four statewide in the chain, has been low-performing three times since it opened in 1999, though it performed better on the TAKS last year.

"Eagle Academy of San Antonio had an academically acceptable TAKS passing rate last year and we have seen a continued increase and even higher preliminary scores this year," said Julie Conde, a spokeswoman for the Lewisville-based Eagle Academies of Texas, which closed its low-performing campuses in Bryan and Dallas. "We are proud to report a continual increase in student performance."

At Career Plus Learning Academy, another repeat low-performer, phone calls seeking comment were not returned. The school opened in 1999 and serves about 40 students in grades six through 12, according to the Texas Education Agency Web site.

Charters grew out of a national movement to reform public education by lifting regulations to allow for innovation and competition. Since Texas awarded its first charter in 1996, lawmakers have struggled to balance oversight with maintaining the freedom that is the hallmark of charter schools.

Flexibility is credited with creative approaches such as those taken by the Knowledge Is Power Program, with which the Aspire Academy in San Antonio is affiliated, leading to impressive middle school achievement.

Mike Lopez, deputy superintendent of the John H. Wood Jr. Public Charter System, echoed other charter boosters who say uncurbed abuses have damaged the reputation and agility of well-run charter schools.

"If a school can't clean up its act in three years, there's something majorly wrong," said Lopez, who is also board president of the Association of Charter School Educators of Texas. "The state has cooperated with the charter school movement on not acting capriciously to close schools."


jeanner@express-news.net

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/education/stories/MYSA061006.01B.charter_woes.2fa37d1.html

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

Here's an analysis of the school finance legislation from last session. This should concern us. -Angela
By Peyton Wolcott
www.peytonwolcott.com

At the same time Texas Governor Rick Perry is circulating ads promoting property tax cuts ("Homeowners and businesses will save $15.7 billion on school property taxes") achieved during the 79th Legislature's third special session, called specifically to solve problems with constitutionality and funding in paying for Texas public schools, just emerging is that the special session actually created a $6.1 billion shortfall* for which there is no solution save an unrealistic forecast of an unprecedented ten-year cycle of boom--or the more realistic and plebian fixes of trimming government spending and increasing the state sales tax, at $.0625 already among the highest in the U.S.

Because Texas has no state income tax, schools are funded far less by the state (the Texas Permanent School Fund's disbursements are currently at $765 million) and much more by local property taxes ($18.6 billion). Under 1993's Robin Hood, many districts are approaching the $1.50 M&O and $0.50 I&S cap per $100 valuation, which scheme the Texas Supremes found unconstitutional as it amounted to an illegal state property tax, and gave the Legislature a June 1, 2006 deadline to find a cure; hence this last special session.

So the Lege has just passed a series of bills which will lower the maximum property tax to $1.00 in two years for districts already at $1.50 M&O, and make up the difference with a revised business franchise tax meant to close the business-friendly Delaware Sub loophole, with an additional $1.00 cigarette tax along with a new used car tax, all projected to yield a $4.2 billion* revenue stream by fiscal year 2009.

But at the same time, Lege appropriations are projected at $10.3 billion* by FY 2009 and include a $2.4 billion across-the-board teacher pay increase over the next three years, $600 million in teacher awards, and $275 per high schooler for reducing dropout rates and college prep.

Robbing Peter to pay the piper

When questioned about the $6.1 billion shortfall, the governor's spokesman Kathy Walt said yesterday, "The revenue sources you cite [above] represent only those bills passed during the special session. They do not reflect the surplus, nor do they take into account new revenue estimates that will be generated prior to the start of the 2007 regular session. The tax measures passed by the legislature will go into a property tax reduction fund to pay for future reductions of property taxes. Should additional revenues be needed beyond what these taxes generate and is available from surplus, general revenue (GR) funds could be used. The new tax measures represent only a small portion of revenue that flows into GR."

Huh? Public education to be funded by a $23 billion 'hot check'?

Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who is running as an independent against Perry in this November's gubernatorial election, said in certifying HB 1, the largest single piece of legislation this session, "Perry's entire plan is a massive increase in business taxes that will increase the state's budget by $6 billion a year [and] leave a $23 billion hot check."

Another state official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said yesterday, "All of this money, this surplus the governor's talking about, is already dedicated. And a $6.1 billion income spike is unrealistic, unless it comes from a combination of further cutting state government expenses and increasing the sales tax. The problem there is that you only get $2 billion per penny of tax, and our sales tax is already one of the highest in the nation. So the 10% budget cut the governor announced yesterday afternoon represents the first element of what we knew had to come in order to fund this boondoggle, and the next will be an increased sales tax. Even though right now we're awash in fuels tax money, how long will this continue? The governor's saying we've got to boom like this for the next ten years."

War of the Worlds

Put simply, while a major conservative premise is that cutting taxes will boost the economy, the corresponding liberal premise is that more money needs to be spent on governmental services. Perry's 79th Legislature's third special called session delivered both a tax cut and increased spending, and appears to not pass the mandated constitutionality threshold. While according to Governor Perry's press release "this is one of the most significant legislative accomplishments for Texas in a generation, because it is one of the most significant steps we have ever taken to improve opportunity for the next generation" and "because of House Bill 1, school finance is now out of the courthouse, and back on constitutional footing,” constitutional law experts such as Charles Rhodes of South Texas College of Law are expressing their reservations. Says Rhodes, "I have questions as to how long the new financing scheme is going to be considered to be constitutional. I think it's another short-term fix."

For the full version

* SOURCE: House Research Organization/Legislative Budget Board

The 79th's 3rd's legacy: You do the math

Appropriations by FY 2009 $ 10.3 billion
Revenues by FY 2009 $ 4.2 billion
Shortfall $ 6.1 billion*
Peyton Wolcott's new school reform website www.peytonwolcott.com has recently been named "The Smoking Gun of American education." She lives in Horseshoe Bay, Texas.

Copyright 2006 Peyton Wolcott - All rights reserved

http://www.educationnews.org/Commentaries/23_billion_hot_check.htm

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:48 PM 0 comments Links to this post

June 5, 2006
The Gilded Age of Home Schooling

By SUSAN SAULNY
In what is an elite tweak on home schooling — and a throwback to the gilded days of education by governess or tutor — growing numbers of families are choosing the ultimate in private school: hiring teachers to educate their children in their own homes.

Unlike the more familiar home-schoolers of recent years, these families are not trying to get more religion into their children's lives, or escape what some consider the tyranny of the government's hand in schools. In fact, many say they have no argument with ordinary education — it just does not fit their lifestyles.

Lisa Mazzoni's family splits its time between Marina del Rey, Calif., and Delray Beach, Fla. Lisa has her algebra and history lessons delivered poolside sometimes or on her condominium's rooftop, where she and her teacher enjoy the sun and have a view of the Pacific Ocean south of Santa Monica.

"For someone who travels a lot or has a parent who travels and wants to keep the family together, it's an excellent choice," said Lisa's mother, Trish Mazzoni, who with her husband owns a speedboat company.

The cost for such teachers generally runs $70 to $110 an hour. And depending on how many hours a teacher works, and how many teachers are involved, the price can equal or surpass tuition in the upper echelon of private schools in New York City or Los Angeles, where $30,000 a year is not unheard of.

Other parents say the model works for children who are sick, for children who are in show business or for those with learning disabilities.

"It's a hidden group of folks, but it's growing enormously," said Luis Huerta, a professor of public policy and education at Teachers College of Columbia University, whose national research includes a focus on home schooling.

The United States Department of Education last did a survey on home schooling in 2003. That survey did not ask about full-time in-home teachers. But it found that from 1999 to 2003, the number of children who were educated at home had soared, increasing by 29 percent, to 1.1 million students nationwide. It also found that, of those, 21 percent used a tutor.

Home schooling is legal in every state, though some regulate it more than others. Home-school teachers do not require certification, and the only common requirement from state to state is that students meet compulsory-attendance rules.

Scholars who study home-schooling trends, business owners who serve home-schooling families and abundant anecdotal evidence also suggest that private teaching arrangements are on the rise. Some families do it for short stints, others for years at a time.

Bob Harraka, president of Professional Tutors of America, has about 6,000 teachers from 14 states on his payroll in Orange County, Calif., but cannot meet a third of the requests for in-home education that come in, he said, because they are so specialized or extravagant: a family wants a teacher to instruct in the art of Frisbee throwing, button sewing or Latin grammar. A family wants a teacher to accompany them for a yearlong voyage at sea.

"Sailing comes up at least once or twice a year," Mr. Harraka said.

Parents say in-home teaching arrangements offer unparalleled levels of academic attention and flexibility in scheduling, in addition to a sense of family cohesion and autonomy over what children learn. To them, these advantages make up for the lack of a school social life, which they say can be replicated through group lessons in, say, ballet or sculpture.

Jon D. Snyder, dean of the Bank Street College of Education in New York, said his main concerns about this form of education were whether tutors and students were a good fit, and whether students got enough social interaction.

"From a purely academic standpoint, it goes back to a much earlier era," Dr. Snyder said. "The notion of individual tutorials is a time-honored tradition, particularly among the elite."

Think Plato, John Stuart Mill and George Washington. Philosopher kings and gentleman farmers. Because of the cost of in-home tutoring, the idea will probably not spread like wildfire, and just as well, Dr. Snyder said.

"Public education has social goals; that's why we pay tax dollars for it," he said. "When Socrates was tutoring Plato, he wasn't concerned about educating the other people in Greece. They were just concerned about educating Plato."

On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Krystal and Tiffany Wheeler earn high school credits in adjacent pastel bedrooms after breakfast. The teachers come to them.

Their mother, Charlene Royce, said she wanted her girls to experience the benefits of a personalized education but did not feel comfortable teaching herself.

"I feel that education is better this way, one on one," said Ms. Royce, whose expertise is in finding electronics companies in which to invest. "It was never an option for me to do it — I wouldn't know how."

For help, she turned to a Manhattan business, On Location Education, which took care of the logistics, providing her with curricula and teachers. Ms. Royce gets weekly progress reports and a visit every couple of months from a woman she calls "the mobile principal."

To meet their social needs — and for exercise — Tiffany and Krystal attend dance and piano classes, among other things, and belong to a gym.

Lisa Mazzoni takes acting and dance classes in Hollywood. She is also enrolled in a school for distance learning that provides a curriculum for her tutor, Rob Cox, of Professional Tutors of America, to teach.

"I do love the fact that instead of waking up at 5:30 every morning I get to wake up at 8:30," said Lisa, who is 17 and attended private school until this year.

"It makes life so much easier," Lisa continued. "I don't have to worry about missing tests and if I really wanted to, I could bring the work with me — because it's all in the computer — if I'm in Florida visiting my dad or going to a boat race."

When Nick Niell, an investment banker, and his wife, Sarah, moved to New York from East Sussex, England, for about a year in 2003, four teachers would come on weekdays to Mr. Niell's townhouse on 69th Street near Madison Avenue to teach his three school-aged children. Mr. Niell said he could not find a British school in the city and wanted his children to study the same things they would have studied in England. A floor of the house was converted into classroom space.

"It was quite good fun," said Mr. Niell, whose teachers came through Partners with Parents, a Manhattan in-home tutoring service.

The families embracing the one-on-one home-school model are turning the original concept on its head. Dr. Huerta said the popular notion is that home-schoolers leave schools they see as troubled, certain they can do better as teachers themselves. Hiring teachers for full-time instruction is not typical.

The new and more expansive definitions of home schooling irritate some traditionalists who want to keep the model simpler. "People use the term home schooling for all sorts of interesting things these days," said Celeste Land, a member of the board at the Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers. "Obviously it's not pure home schooling."

But the growing number of home-school support groups has made it easier for the new model to develop. And tutoring is more in the public consciousness these days in part because of the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, which includes a tutoring component, and the vast array of test prep tutoring services being pitched to an increasingly tested national student body.

Companies that supply teachers and curricula are abundant, also making it easier for families to step away from traditional schools, experts say. And though many who follow the new model are wealthy, increasing numbers of middle class families more sociologically and racially diverse have begun to school their children at home, according to education officials and tutor-service companies.

Laurie Gerber, president of Partners with Parents, said she started to get requests for in-home teachers about three or four years ago.

"Our tutoring business started to become a huge percentage of home-schooling clients, as opposed to tutoring," Ms. Gerber said. "We started a whole home-schooling wing."

The teachers who are hired to home school say the job is great.

"I love it; it's a dream come true," said Mr. Cox, who tutors Lisa Mazzoni. He is a former television and radio news reporter as well as an actor and a certified teacher.

"If you want to travel or have some other business to attend to, there isn't a school system dependent on you being there," he said. "It's your own individual school that operates according to your needs."

Tiffany Wheeler's tutor, Nancy Falong, retired a few years ago after 32 years as a teacher in the New Jersey public schools. Now she works for On Location Education. Sitting next to Tiffany last week, their two world history books turned to the same page on the Marshall Plan, she expressed a sense of delight. "This is pure teaching."

And Tiffany, looking relaxed with bare feet under her bedroom desk, said, "It's fun."


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:30 PM 1 comments Links to this post

By Seema Mehta
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 2, 2006

One in 10 California high school seniors will not receive a diploma this month because they failed the state's high school exit exam, according to data released Thursday by the state Department of Education. Students who are Latino, black, English learners or poor were disproportionately represented in the failure rates.

State Supt. Jack O'Connell urged the 41,758 seniors across the state who had not passed the exam to continue striving to receive their diploma, in summer school, independent study or community college.

"Their education is simply not complete, but they are still welcome and still part of the public-school family," he said. "We will find a place to help them prepare for their future."

Under state legislation approved seven years ago, the class of 2006 is the first that must pass the exam, which tests basic math and language-arts skills, to earn a diploma.

Beginning in their sophomore year, students have six chances to take the exam. A score of at least 55% on the math portion, which is geared to an eighth-grade level, and 60% on the English, which is ninth- or 10th-grade level, is required.

The passage rates released by the state Thursday include results for students who have taken the exam through March, but do not include May scores. Those results will be available this summer, but not before schools across the state hold ceremonies and award diplomas.

Some districts are allowing students who have not passed the exam to participate in commencement ceremonies if they meet other requirements. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the 2,564 seniors who have not yet passed the exam will be allowed to walk with their classmates if they meet all coursework requirements; took part in a remediation program; retook the exam their senior year; and enrolled in a summer program to prepare for the test in July or October.

About 86% of the district's seniors, or 25,779 students, have passed the exam, according to the district.

"I believe this is a test students should be able to pass," Los Angeles Supt. Roy Romer said in a written statement. "We will now make every effort to provide supplemental instruction in the summer months to those remaining students who will need to pass the [exit exam] to receive diplomas."

Statewide, white and Asian students were more likely than their Latino and black classmates to pass the exam. English learners had the worst rate of passage, with 1 in 4 unable to pass the exam.

"There is an achievement gap in California. We know this, we admit this," O'Connell said.

In Santa Ana, where 60% of the students are classified as English learners, 81% of seniors passed. Of the 529 seniors who haven't, more than four-fifths are English learners, according to district officials.

Supt. Al Mijares said it was vital to find ways to help struggling students.

"Telling your kids to run faster or jump higher or telling your staff to teach better — those are pat answers that are too simplistic and will never render effective results," he said. "If they don't have the right kind of programs in place, they're not going to make it…. It's incumbent upon adults to provide the resources, the time and the staff to help them be successful because the test will mark the rest of their lives."

Critics of the exam, such as attorney Arturo Gonzalez, who has sued the state on behalf of students, said the disparities showed the exam was unfair.

"Whether intended or not, the result is to deny diplomas to thousands of poor kids who have managed to overcome substantial barriers to staying in school and that is a travesty," he said.

The San Francisco attorney filed a lawsuit questioning the exit exam. A lower court initially struck down the exam on the grounds that it posed an unfair hurdle for poor and minority students in subpar schools, but in late May, a divided state Supreme Court reinstated the exam. An appeals court will consider the case in July.

That's too late for students like Ashley Daigle, an 18-year-old Chino Hills High School student who passed the English portion on her first try but learned last week that she failed the math portion for the fourth time. Her principal called her into his office to personally deliver the blow: She received a 346 on the exam, four points shy of passing.

"I bawled," said Daigle, who hopes to become a show business makeup artist or hair stylist. "I went straight home and cried for like an hour."

Daigle had been taking daily classes devoted to the math section of the exit exam, as well as studying at least half an hour every day on Internet coursework and a workbook.

She hasn't decided whether she will take the test again when it's offered in July. "I'm kind of just fed up with it," she said.

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Graduation gap

Almost 10% of the state's 436,200 high school seniors had not passed the California High School Exit Exam as of March.

Class of 2006 students who have passed the exit exam

By percent, as of March 2006

White: 96.9%

Asian: 95.2%

Economically

disadvantaged*: 84.5%

Latino: 84.3%

African American: 83.2%

English learners*:74.0%

All California seniors: 90.4%

*Includes students in ethnic-based categories

Source: California Department of Education


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Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:51 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This certainly impacts the representation of minorities in Colleges as the other piece (posted earlier) on startling African American enrollment at UCLA underscores. I just read a piece by Gary Orfield in his book titled, DROPOUTS IN AMERICA: CONFRONTING THE GRADUATION CRISIS, where he cites the following:

"52 percent of all African American male dropouts in their early thirties have prison records. A 2003 report on the Chicago job market shows that more than half of young adult male African American dropouts in that city have no jobs at all."

As a nation, we've got to stop using prisons as a "remedy" for the failures of our social systems. It's frightening and tragic to see what is happening to our youth and nation.

-Angela

L.A. Mayor Sees Dropout Rate as 'Civil Rights Issue'
By Mitchell Landsberg
Times Staff Writer

March 2, 2006
The high school dropout problem is "the new civil rights issue of our time," Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared Wednesday in a speech that drew a line from the efforts to desegregate the South a half-century ago to today's struggles over the performance of Los Angeles students, who are predominantly Latino.

Acknowledging that there is wide disagreement about how many students are leaving L.A. schools, Villaraigosa told a conference on dropout issues that "whatever that number is, we are in a crisis."

The mayor, who is campaigning to take over the Los Angeles Unified School District, insisted that he wasn't "throwing stones" at the school system, many of whose top administrators were in the audience at the Leadership Forum on High School Dropouts at USC. But his speech contained plenty of brickbats.

"Make no mistake: There's a culture of complacency in this school district that's got to change," Villaraigosa said.

Schools Supt. Roy Romer, who was not present for the speech, gave his own talk later, defending the district even as he said he welcomed the mayor's "aggressive" approach to the district.

Ticking off the school system's accomplishments during his tenure - the nation's largest school-construction program, a sharp rise in standardized test scores in elementary schools - Romer said: "That's not complacency, folks. That's change!"

He added: "We have real challenges going forward. But to deny what we have accomplished together would be foolish." He said the reforms the district has set in place would take years to roll out.

The dropout issue has been at the center of local school reform discussions since last March, when a study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University calculated that only 45% of students were graduating in four years from Los Angeles schools. The rate was even lower for Latino students, and much higher for white and Asian American students. African Americans were close to the districtwide average.

The school district cried foul, saying its figures showed that roughly 70% were graduating, a figure that has since risen. The district uses a different formula to calculate its graduation rate, one that the Harvard researchers and other critics say is deeply flawed.

In his repeated calls to take over the district, which is run by an elected school board, Villaraigosa has said more than half of the district's students drop out. District officials have protested, saying recently that the dropout rate had declined to 24.6% for the 2004-05 school year.

Villaraigosa said it doesn't matter; any of the figures being discussed is too high. Charging that more than 60% of Latinos and African Americans were failing to graduate, the mayor said, "These are numbers that should put a chill down your spine…. We have numbers that are every bit as insidious as the National Guard blocking the door in Little Rock" - a reference to the efforts by Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus in 1957 to stop black students from integrating all-white schools.

Villaraigosa is not the first person to frame the dropout problem as a civil rights issue. It has been a major thrust of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard and of other academic and public policy initiatives.

Gary Orfield, head of the Harvard project, told the standing-room-only conference that turnout for the event was evidence that the issue was being taken seriously, especially in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Unified recently proposed a series of changes designed to keep students in school, several of which matched recommendations made by scholars at the conference.

There is widespread agreement, for instance, that schools need to make more personal connections with students, that they need to keep better track of attendance, and that they need to do a better job of enlisting the help of parents.

Several of the L.A. Unified proposals are aimed at accomplishing those goals.

A new survey of dropouts, commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, bolsters some of the arguments behind the reforms, as well as the higher academic standards that California schools are mandating.

The national survey of 467 high school dropouts, scheduled for release today, found that a majority of those surveyed thought they would have worked harder if their schools had higher expectations of them, and that the most common reason given for dropping out was that "classes were not interesting."

"The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts" also reached some conclusions that challenge orthodox assumptions. For instance, nearly 90% of the dropouts reported that they had passing grades when they left school.

Orfield, who is considered one of the foremost scholars on the dropout issue, said that figure sounded wrong "by orders of magnitude."

"All the research suggests that academic failure is one of the basic forces" behind dropping out, he said, adding that high school dropouts are not always reliable informants.

John Bridgeland, president and CEO of Civic Enterprises, a Washington-based public policy firm that conducted the survey, said the researchers had confirmed with the schools that the majority of the dropouts had been passing their classes.

The survey was conducted among former students from schools in 25 cities, suburbs and small towns across the country. The respondents were not a nationally representative sample, the researchers said.

One year's class of high school dropouts will cost California $38.5 billion in lost wages, taxes and productivity over their lifetimes, another Washington-based public policy group estimated Wednesday.

"This is a very conservative estimate," said former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dropout2mar02,1,5830485.story

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:23 PM 1 comments Links to this post

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-me-ucla3jun03,0,5025758.story?track=mostviewed-homepage
A Startling Statistic at UCLA
At the school whose alumni include Jackie Robinson and Tom Bradley, only 96 blacks are expected in this fall's freshman class.

By Rebecca Trounson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 3, 2006

This fall 4,852 freshmen are expected to enroll at UCLA, but only 96, or 2%, are African American ˜ the lowest figure in decades and a growing concern at the Westwood campus.

For several years, students, professors and administrators at UCLA have watched with discouragement as the numbers of black students declined. But the new figures, released this week, have shocked many on campus and prompted school leaders to declare the situation a crisis.
UCLA ˜ which boasts such storied black alumni as Jackie Robinson, Tom Bradley and Ralph Bunche, and is in a county that is 9.8% African American ˜ now has a lower percentage of black freshmen than either crosstown rival USC or UC Berkeley, the school often considered its top competitor within the UC system.

The 96 figure ˜ down by 20 students from last year ˜ is the lowest for incoming African American freshmen since at least 1973. And of the black freshmen who have indicated they will enroll in the fall, 20 are recruited athletes, admissions officials said.

"Clearly, we're going to have to meet this crisis by redoubling our efforts, which have not yielded the results we'd like to see," said Chancellor Albert Carnesale, who met Friday with a delegation of undergraduates upset about the situation.

In a telephone interview before the meeting, Carnesale described the preliminary numbers for black freshmen as "a great disappointment" and said that UCLA has been trying for years to boost those levels, within the limits allowed by law.

He and other officials at UCLA and elsewhere said the problem of attracting, admitting and enrolling qualified black students is found at competitive universities across the country and that its causes are complex. In California, the problem is rooted partly in the restrictions placed on the state's public colleges and institutions by Proposition 209, the 1996 voter initiative that banned consideration of race and gender in admissions and hiring.

Other factors include the socioeconomic inequities that undermine elementary and high school education in California and elsewhere, with minority students disproportionately affected because they often attend schools with fewer resources, including less-qualified teachers and fewer counselors.

Many students and professors also say the declining presence of blacks on campus discourages some prospective students from attending, thus exacerbating the problem. Some of those interviewed, including UCLA sociologist Darnell Hunt, said the campus could be doing more than it is.

Hunt, who heads UCLA's Bunche Center for African American Studies, and several colleagues have been studying the issue as part of a multiyear research project on the challenges facing black students in California universities.

In a draft of a report to be released this month, the researchers compared the admissions criteria and processes at UC's three most competitive campuses: UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC San Diego. (At the latter, the incoming black freshman class stands at 52 students, or 1.1%, even lower than the others.)

The report found that UC San Diego's admissions process relied most heavily on numbers, while UC Berkeley's was most "holistic," allowing a single reader to review all parts of an applicant's file, including academic and personal achievements or challenges.

At UCLA, in what admissions officials have described as an attempt to increase fairness and objectivity, applicants' files are divided by academic and personal areas, and read by separate reviewers. The researchers asserted that UC Berkeley's process may be the fairest, because it allows students' achievements to be seen in the context of their personal challenges.

In an interview, Hunt acknowledged the difficulty for a campus like UCLA, which received 47,000 applications this year. Yet he criticized the school for rejecting many black students based on what he described as factors of questionable validity, and that he said may be linked more to socioeconomic privilege than academic merit.

"There's a common misperception that this is a horrible problem but that black students just need to do better," he said. "But most of the black students who don't get in go to other top-notch schools ˜ Harvard, Duke, Michigan. We're losing students who could be here."

Ward Connerly, the conservative former UC regent who was an architect of Proposition 209, countered that the issue was not the law he helped create.

"The problem ˜ and this is an old song, I know ˜ starts with the small number of black students who are academically competitive," he said, pointing out that many also choose to attend historically black colleges or private schools. "But I don't think we solve this problem by tinkering with the admissions criteria to make it easier to get in."

No matter the cause, the effect is apparent on campus.

Karume James, 20, a graduating senior who led a recent student protest on campus over the issue, said he remembered the excitement he felt when he arrived at UCLA for student orientation in the summer of 2003.

Then just 17, James was preparing to transfer to the big-city campus from a community college in Riverside, his hometown. And he recalled what he felt when he looked around.

"That was a real shock. I spent about 14 hours at the campus, and I counted only about 12 black people. I guess I'd had this feeling that UCLA was going to be this truly diverse place, and it just wasn't," said James, who is now the chairman of UCLA's Afrikan Student Union. "Not for black students."

James, who was among half a dozen students who met Friday with Carnesale, called the session productive and said the UCLA chancellor was receptive to the group's views. Carnesale, who is preparing to step down as chancellor this month, promised to release a statement expressing concern about the issue and work with alumni, students and others to raise the numbers.

The new figures were part of an annual report showing that a record-setting 37,000 freshmen plan to enroll at UC campuses in the fall. Overall, across all nine undergraduate campuses, the new class shows a continued trend of slight increases in black, Latino and Native American students. These groups, which are still considered underrepresented at UC, will make up just under 20% of the 2006 freshman class, compared with just below 19% for the current class.

But the picture in the latest release varied by campus and by group, with the underrepresented minority numbers at the system's most competitive campuses ˜ UCLA and UC Berkeley ˜ drawing the most attention, as always.

At UC Berkeley, black, Latino and Native American students are expected to make up 15.9% of the freshman class, up from 14.4% this year. And 140 black students, 10 more than this year, have said they will enroll in the fall, making up 3.3% of the overall class of about 4,200. The number of Latino students also rose, from 449 to 509.

At UCLA, however, the numbers fell for both groups, and for the overall percentage of underrepresented students, despite an increase of more than 300 in the size of the total freshman class.

Of the freshmen who say they will enroll at UCLA this fall, 15.9% are from underrepresented groups, compared with 18.1% of the current freshman class. The figure for Latinos dropped from 683 to 659.

"The critical mass of our African American students is eroding, and we know the quality of our education experience is absolutely affected, as well as our obligation to the citizens of this state," said Janina Montero, UCLA's vice chancellor for student affairs.

Jenny Wood, UCLA student body president, belongs to a student committee drafting recommendations to revamp the admissions process.

"I think it's been really detrimental to see this decline in African American students and, overall, in the number of students of color on our campus," she said.

In Los Angeles County, blacks accounted for 11%, or 9,152, of the 84,677 public high school graduates. Statewide, blacks made up 7%, or 25,267, of the 343,481 students who graduated from California's public high schools in 2004, the most recent year statistics are available.

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Shortage of black freshmen

Ethnic and racial breakdown of UCLA freshmen*

1985 (peak year for black enrollment)

White: 49.7%

Asian/Filipino: 22.2%

Chicano/Latino: 14.8%

Black: 9.6%

Other**: 3.7%

--

2005

White: 33.3%

Asian/Filipino: 41.0%

Chicano/Latino: 14.8%

Black: 2.9%

Other**: 7.9%

Pie charts may not add up to 100% due to rounding.

*Excludes foreign students. **Includes Native Americans, other groups and those who declined to state.

Source: UCLA

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:05 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out this pdffile from the Republican Temporary Platform Committee in Texas. Among other things, it calls for identifying and expelling of undocumented immigrants. It's worth checking out. -Angela

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:42 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Poverty, segregation, violence, and low school performance are inextricably linked as this piece demonstrates. -Angela

School a combative place for minority students
Black and Hispanic students see school as tougher, rougher place to learn
The Associated Press

Updated: 7:51 p.m. CT May 30, 2006
WASHINGTON - Black and Hispanic students see school as a more rowdy, disrespectful and dangerous place than their white classmates do, a poll says.

The findings suggest that many minority kids are struggling in the equivalent of a hostile work environment, according to Public Agenda, a nonpartisan opinion research group that tracks education trends.

Minority children in public middle and high schools are more likely than white children to describe profanity, truancy, fighting, weapons and drug abuse as “very serious” problems.

The black and Hispanic children — under pressure to close their test-score gaps with whites — also see more pervasive academic woes, such as lower standards, higher dropout rates and kids who advance even if they don’t learn.

“There is so much discussion about the achievement gap, and we talk about teachers and curriculum and testing and money,” said Jean Johnson, Public Agenda’s executive vice president and an author of the report.

“We need to add something to that list — school climate. For these kids, it has become such a distracting atmosphere,” Johnson said.

Thirty percent of black students said teachers spend more time trying to keep order in class than teaching; 14 percent of white students said the same.

More than half of black students said kids who lack respect for teachers and use bad language are a very serious problem, compared with less than one-third of white students.

Hispanic students also reported worse social and academic conditions in school than white children, although the gaps were not as large as they were between blacks and whites.

Some positives across the board
On the plus side, the poll found positive results that cut across race and ethnicity.

Majorities of children said they are learning a lot in reading, writing and math classes. Most students said at least one teacher who has gotten them interested in a subject they usually hate.

The students agreed on matters of work ethic, too.

About eight in 10 said it is good for school districts to require higher standards, even if that means kids must go to summer school. Almost 60 percent of black students acknowledged they could try a little harder, compared to 53 percent of Hispanics and 46 percent of whites.

In perspective, most students said schools were meeting expectations on most measures.

Yet the minority children were more likely to see students struggling to get by in class, to see unfair enforcement of discipline rules, to say schools aren’t getting enough money.

“Students of color are correct in their understanding that their schools get less in the way of resources, and offer less in the way of high standards,” said Ross Wiener, policy director of The Education Trust, an advocacy group for poor and minority children. “It is a shame that a country dedicated to equal opportunity tolerates these inequities.”

Among students in public schools, 59 percent are white, 19 percent are Hispanic and 17 percent are black, according to Education Department numbers from the 2003-04 school year.

Wealthier schools, fewer problems
In the poll, students in wealthier schools reported fewer serious problems than students in poor schools, but results were not available for racial groups of different income levels.

Minority parents were more likely to see problems in schools, just as their kids did.

Black and Hispanic parents were more than twice as likely as white parents to call weapons and fighting a very serious problem. They reported bigger concerns about crowded classes and low standards.

Most teachers, meanwhile, said academic expectations for students were high regardless of the racial makeup of the school. Teachers in mostly minority schools reported less parental involvement, lower support from their superintendent and poorer grammar among their students.

The findings are based on phone interviews with a random sample of 1,379 parents of children now in public school, 1,342 public school students in grades six through 12, and 721 public school teachers. The interviews were conducted between Oct. 30 and March 7.

The margin of error for the sample was plus or minus 4 percentage points for the parents and teachers and 3 percentage points for the students. The poll was paid for by the GE Foundation, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation and the Wallace Foundation.

© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13053034/?GT1=8199

© 2006 MSNBC.com

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

Matters didn't go well with the protest in California. We'll see how New Bedford plays out. -Angela
June 01, 2006
Local rebellion over who gets a diploma

By Sara Miller Llana | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BOSTON - For students in Massachusetts, MCAS can be a four-letter word. It's the state's high school exit exam, and the rule is simple: If you don't pass it, you don't get a diploma.

But the mayor of New Bedford, Scott Lang, is threatening to disobey that policy by granting diplomas to students June 15, even if they fail the standardized test. In so doing, he's testing the state's will to withhold district funds for breaking regulations. And he's reviving a debate over education reform that's simmering in other states, too.

Last week, California's supreme court reinstated its graduation requirement, which had been invalidated by a lower court just a few weeks earlier. And an Arizona judge this month refused to suspend that state's exit exam for this year's graduating class, the first to be affected by the requirement.

Fueling the legal fights is a philosophical debate about how best to prepare students for the challenges of college and work. For supporters, the tests promote a rigorous academic experience and they provide accountability to teachers and schools. They also act as a guarantee, experts say, of competency.

"A diploma is about effort and achievement, not just attendance," says James Peyser, chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education. He says passing rates are high - about 94 percent statewide last year, according to the state Department of Education - with students getting multiple opportunities to pass the exam. He wants the state to raise the minimum score needed to pass the test.

But others say that such high-stakes tests intimidate some students, leading them to drop out of school. In New Bedford, for example, the percentage of students passing the MCAS is in line with the statewide rate, but its dropout rate is three times higher than the state average.

Detractors like Glenn Koocher, the executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, sees such exams as punitive. The Board of Education "think[s] that unless you instill the fear of God in students you won't have their attention," he says. "The culture is regulate and punish, regulate and punish."

A bid for two types of diplomas
Mayor Lang wants the schools to issue two types of diplomas: one for those who pass the state test, called the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, and an alternative for those who don't. But his effort may be in vain because the local superintendent has said he will not sign off on such diplomas.

But experts say the battles here and elsewhere could cause districts to improve access to options for proof of competency beyond a single test score. These could include incorporating grades from core classes or using portfolios to demonstrate knowledge. The battles, they say, could also help shift attention to remedial courses and tutoring to help slower students make progress.

The MCAS, which uses multiple-choice and open-ended questions to test proficiency in math and English, is administered to all Massachusetts high school sophomores.

While states have used competency exams for decades, says Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy (CEP) in Washington, many US schools have not traditionally withheld diplomas based on the results of exit exams until the 1990s.

Today, 26 states either require students to pass a standards test or have plans to put such requirements in place. By the year 2012, more than 70 percent of US public school students will live in states that require exit exams, according to CEP.

New Bedford joins a handful of other state communities, such as Cambridge and Falmouth, that have also attempted to grant alternative diplomas after the law went into effect for the class of 2003. But those towns backed down once the state threatened to withhold funding.

Criticism of such tests has most often occurred in wealthier communities, where parents tend to have faith in their schools and see exit exams as a distracting hurdle, says Mr. Jennings. "There is not as much opposition in poorer communities, because, generally, poor parents think schools aren't doing well enough and [see exit exams] as a way to improve that," he says.

In New Bedford, a working-class community, the school committee unanimously supported the mayor's resolution. Mr. Lang has said his protest serves to point out that his schools do not have adequate funding for remedial classes to help slower students pass the exam.

"Without a diploma you cannot go to college, you can't do any continuing studies," says state representative Antonio F.D. Cabral, a Democrat who filed legislation to legalize the alternative diplomas that New Bedford seeks to grant. "It creates a disadvantage for you throughout your life, even though you went through 13 years of school, passed all the courses, but happened not to pass one test."

The movement could have a wider impact if the mayor persuades the state to widen the alternative process, says Jennings. That is something Thomas Scott, the executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, would like to see. "We believe that there should be more than just the MCAS considered," he says.

Exam alternatives
Like many other states, Massachusetts has an appeals process in place, but it is not widely used. Nationwide, less than 1 percent of students use alternate routes to get diplomas.

In recent years, at least seven states have moved to give students who don't pass their exit exams more choices. In Arizona, students who earn high notes in core competencies can raise their standardized test score by up to 25 percent.

Washington state has developed a multitiered approach for alternatives. Students there can substitute their GPAs, portfolios, or SAT, ACT, or PSAT scores. CEP president Jennings says it could become a model.

Some 40 percent of Washington 10th- graders might have failed this year's test, but only a fraction of students can use those waivers, says Charles Hasse, head of the Washington Education Association. "They are not really, in a meaningful way, providing alternatives," he says.

His union's surveys show that 3 out of 4 Washington teachers disapprove of using the exit exam as a graduation requirement, he adds.

For Mr. Peyser of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Lang's plan "may make people feel better on graduation day, but they are kidding themselves if they think [those] diplomas will ensure lives that include meaningful opportunities."


www.csmonitor.com | Copyright © 2006 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0601/p01s01-ussc.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:11 PM 0 comments Links to this post