Debates similar to ours in the area of bilingual education in Africa. -Angela

29 November 2006
In a language children can understand
Marco MacFarlane

EDUCATION Minister Naledi Pandor recently announced that her department was working on a plan to teach children in their mother tongue. Mother tongue will now be the language of instruction for the first six years of primary education, as opposed to the current policy of three years. Given the importance of English as the “international language of business”, critics of mother-tongue education have argued that children should be immersed in English as early as possible. They worked on the assumption that the longer children are exposed to the English language, the better their outcomes would be when tested in this language.

To teach learners exclusively in English (or any second language) is known as “immersion” teaching. There is a huge body of evidence that shows that this form of teaching actually has deleterious effects on the first language and hinders progression in the second. Immersion teaching is now well known to cause a condition known as “subtractive bilingualism”, in which the first language is actually eroded by the learning of the second, and both languages remain relatively underdeveloped.

If children who are still grappling with the complexities of their mother tongue are educated almost exclusively in a language that they do not understand, the first few years of instruction in this new language have little educational value other than to force them to acquire this new lexicon. Maths taught in English means little to a child who speaks only Xhosa, and the lesson at best teaches the child something about English but nothing about mathematics.

Worse still, the basic language manipulation skills of children who have not yet mastered their mother tongue are retarded, and they may leave the educational institution with reduced proficiency in all languages.

There are, broadly, two types of language use, basic communication and academic communication. Basic communication is mostly oral, and incorporates gestures, facial expressions, changes in intonation, and is rich in contextual meaning. Academic communication is mostly textual, relies almost solely on the written word, and operates in a context- reduced setting in which the language alone must convey meaning. Thus when children are observed as they communicate with peers and teachers, it can seem as if they understand English very well. When their academic results are examined, however, it is usually immediately clear that the second-language learners are at a severe disadvantage when compared with their first-language peers. It seems that a generalised type of language proficiency needs to be attained before those developed language skills can be transferred to a second language.

In other words, for English-speakers to learn Zulu effectively, they need to be proficient in their mother tongue first. As people learn a second language, they construct thoughts in their home language, and then substitute words of the second language as and when they learn them. So we begin wanting to say: “Today I’m going home.” We then substitute Zulu words for the English. “Namhlanje I’m going home.” Then: “Namhlanje I’m going ekhaya.” And later: “Namhlanje ngiyahamba ngiya ekhaya.”

The point is that without the mother tongue framework to build upon, I could never have constructed the sentence in Zulu. Without my mother tongue, I cannot hope to successfully learn a second language.

A growing body of research indicates that this relationship goes even deeper, as it seems there is a direct correlation between the level of proficiency in the mother tongue and the subsequent level of proficiency that can be attained in a second language.

So if a child has not attained proficiency in its mother tongue, it is immediately crippled when trying to cope academically with a second language.

The minister’s plan of more comprehensive mother-tongue education is thus a good one, and fits in exactly with the accumulated knowledge on language learning. Ironically, the best way to teach Zulu kids to speak English is to teach them in Zulu.

‖MacFarlane is a researcher at the South African Institute of Race Relations. This article is based on research conducted during his masters degree.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:15 AM 3 comments Links to this post

Significant ruling in case you missed this. -Angela

Ruling: Classes divided by race
At Preston Hollow, principal tried to appease affluent parents, halt white flight, judge says
09:14 AM CST on Saturday, November 18, 2006
By KENT FISCHER / The Dallas Morning News
For years, it was an open secret at North Dallas' Preston Hollow Elementary School: Even though the school was overwhelmingly Hispanic and black, white parents could get their children into all-white classes. And once placed, the students would have little interaction with the rest of the students.
The result, a federal judge has ruled, was that principal Teresa Parker "was, in effect, operating, at taxpayer's expense, a private school for Anglo children within a public school that was predominantly minority."
Judge Sam Lindsay's opinion paints an unflattering picture of the elementary school and a principal who was so desperate to appease the school's affluent white parents that she turned back the clock on school desegregation 50 years.
In April, Hispanic parents sued, claiming illegal segregation. The three-week trial concluded in late August. On Thursday, Judge Lindsay declared that the school's principal violated the rights of minority children by assigning them to classrooms based on race.
The judge ordered Mrs. Parker to pay $20,200 to Lucrecia Mayorga Santamaría, the lone named plaintiff, who sued on behalf of her three children.
Although the judge did not find the Dallas school district liable for Mrs. Parker's actions, he strongly criticized DISD administrators for being "asleep at the wheel."
"The court is convinced that several of the area superintendents knew, or should have known, about the illegal segregation at Preston Hollow," the judge wrote in his 108-page ruling.
The district has until Jan. 17 to remedy the segregation at the school. Mrs. Parker did not return messages left at her home and school Friday.
District spokesman Celso Martinez said Mrs. Parker would remain the school's principal "until further notice."
Mr. Martinez said the school has undertaken steps to comply with the court order, namely relying on student language scores to place students.
"The truth is we have initiated quite a few changes at the school already," he said. "We need to compare those changes with the court order. We may well be in total compliance."
However, when asked if there are still classes at Preston Hollow containing only white students, Mr. Martinez replied: "That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that."
Desegregation plan
In 2003, a federal judge released the district from its court-ordered desegregation plan. That plan, however, focused on the allocation of resources and treatment of black students. In the 30 years the district operated under the order, whites fled and Hispanics have grown to become the majority. Blacks make up less than a third of the district; whites about 6 percent.
Preston Hollow's unwritten policy of clustering whites together was known for years among parents and teachers, according to testimony. In fact, Mrs. Parker's subordinates ˆ including teachers and her assistant principal ˆ raised concerns about it multiple times. One even wrote a letter to Superintendent Michael Hinojosa about it. Those complaints fell on deaf ears, the judge wrote.
"I began to see something very strange," Ms. Santamaría said in Spanish. "The difference was that the Anglo students would go to lunch together while the Latinos went with the Asians and the African-Americans." That, she said, raised a question in her mind "because the children don't know what segregation is."
Once the Hispanic families sued, Mrs. Parker tried to cover her tracks, according to testimony. For example, on the day an investigator was to observe classes at the school, Mrs. Parker "reshuffled" the student's classroom assignments, according to assistant principal Robert McElroy.
Mrs. Parker also asked members of her staff to sign confidentiality agreements about how students were assigned to their classes, and paperwork detailing the classroom assignments was destroyed under mysterious circumstances, according to the judge's ruling.
Principal uncooperative
The judge also took exception to Mrs. Parker's apparent unwillingness to cooperate with the court. At one point during the trial, the judge noted, Mrs. Parker testified that she didn't know whether Preston Hollow is a predominantly white neighborhood.
"The court finds it astounding that Principal Parker, who has served at Preston Hollow for five years, would testify that she knows nothing about the ethnic makeup of the immediate neighborhood surrounding her school."
The school's attendance zone is mostly north of Northwest Highway, east of Preston Road, south of Royal Lane, and just east of North Central Expressway. It includes affluent, mostly white single-family homes, as well as middle-class homes and apartments that are predominantly minority.
The judge also had sharp words for the district's attorneys, who argued that segregation would cause no harm to the minority students because their teachers used the same curriculum as those teaching white students.
"The court is baffled that in this day and age, that [DISD relied] on what is, essentially, a 'separate but equal' argument," the judge wrote.
Mr. Martinez, the district spokesman, said the district doesn't believe Mrs. Parker was segregating students, but he acknowledged that classrooms at the school need to be better integrated.
"It's our opinion that we were not segregating students at all," Mr. Martinez said. "In fact the judge found that we were not violating the constitutional rights of anybody. Do we need to integrate the classrooms? Yes, and we're doing precisely that."
Although the judge ruled against the school's principal in her personal capacity, he did not find the district, its trustees or Mrs. Parker liable in their "official capacities."
David Hinojosa, the parents' attorney from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said he apparently didn't convince the judge that the district knew the segregation was happening.
"You just have a certain legal standard you have to meet, and unfortunately, the court didn't find that," he said. "We might appeal the issue if need be ... but we got the ultimate relief we wanted. The parents wanted to stop the segregation that was going on there."
PTA chief criticized
Judge Lindsay also criticized Meg Bittner, the school's PTA president, who wanted to lure more affluent white families out of private schools and back to Preston Hollow.
More white families would result in a healthier PTA, she testified, bigger fundraisers and, ultimately, more money for the school. The best way to lure back white families, teachers and others testified, was to put white children together in the same classrooms.
Teacher Janet Leon told the court that "neighborhood classes" were predominantly made up of white students because "the people who live in the Preston Hollow neighborhood, who are the majority being white, would want their children grouped together."
To aid in the recruitment of more affluent whites, the school's PTA created a brochure for parents that featured almost all white students. Hispanic parents had shown up at the school the day photos were being taken for the brochure, but the principal blocked their entry into the classroom where the photos were being taken, the judge's ruling states.
Additionally, the PTA, in conjunction with the school, held separate open houses and kindergarten recruitments for white parents. And when PTA members gave prospective parents tours of the school, they were never taken down the "Hispanic halls" where the minority classes were housed, teachers testified.
Mrs. Bittner and other PTA officers did not respond to phone messages seeking comment.
Sergio Chapa of Al Día contributed to this report.
E-mail kfischer@dallasnews.com

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:52 PM 1 comments Links to this post

"Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and President Bush's homestate of Texas weighed in, saying in filings to the Supreme Court that the state of Maine is unconstitutionally discriminating against religion.." -Angela

Court Rejects Maine School Vouchers Case
By PETE YOST 11.27.06

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to take up the issue of school choice in Maine, where a state law bars the use of public funds to send students to private religious schools.

The case could have provided a platform for a court battle over school choice and the separation of church and state.

In Maine, school districts in 145 small towns with no high schools offer tuition for 17,000 students to attend high schools of their choice, public or private, in-state or out-of-state. But religious schools are no longer on the list.

Asking the court to take the case, a conservative group, the Institute for Justice, is representing eight Maine families who would receive public tuition funds but for the fact that their children attend religious schools.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and President Bush's homestate of Texas weighed in, saying in filings to the Supreme Court that the state of Maine is unconstitutionally discriminating against religion.

Vouchers are championed by the president. And many conservatives who call them a ticket out of dismal and dangerous public schools, while champions of public education, say that vouchers divert already-scarce resources from a system badly in need of repair.

Copyright 2006 Associated Press.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:43 PM 0 comments Links to this post

November 26, 2006
What It Takes to Make a Student

By PAUL TOUGH
On the morning of Oct. 5, President Bush and his education secretary, Margaret Spellings, paid a visit, along with camera crews from CNN and Fox News, to Friendship-Woodridge Elementary and Middle Campus, a charter public school in Washington. The president dropped in on two classrooms, where he asked the students, almost all of whom were African-American and poor, if they were planning to go to college. Every hand went up. “See, that’s a good sign,” the president told the students when they assembled later in the gym. “Going to college is an important goal for the future of the United States of America.” He singled out one student, a black eighth grader named Asia Goode, who came to Woodridge four years earlier reading “well below grade level.” But things had changed for Asia, according to the president. “Her teachers stayed after school to tutor her, and she caught up,” he said. “Asia is now an honors student. She loves reading, and she sings in the school choir.”

Bush’s Woodridge trip came in the middle of a tough midterm election campaign, and there was certainly some short-term political calculation in being photographed among smiling black faces. But this was more than a photo opportunity. The president had come to Woodridge to talk about the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation his administration had enacted after almost six years in office: No Child Left Behind. The controversial education law, which established a series of standards for schools and states to meet and a variety of penalties for falling short, is up for reauthorization next year in front of a potentially hostile Congress, and for the law to win approval again, the White House will have to convince Americans that it is working — and also convince them of exactly what, in this case, “working” really means.

When the law took effect, at the beginning of 2002, official Washington was preoccupied with foreign affairs, and many people in government, and many outside it too, including the educators most affected by the legislation, seemed slow to take notice of its most revolutionary provision: a pledge to eliminate, in just 12 years, the achievement gap between black and white students, and the one between poor and middle-class students. By 2014, the president vowed, African-American, Hispanic and poor children, all of whom were at the time scoring well below their white counterparts and those in the middle class on standardized tests, would not only catch up with the rest of the nation; they would also reach 100 percent proficiency in both math and reading. It was a startling commitment, and it made the promise in the law’s title a literal one: the federal government would not allow a single American child to be educated to less than that high standard.

It was this element of the law that the president had come to Woodridge to talk about. “There’s an achievement gap in America that’s not good for the future of this country,” he told the crowd. “Some kids can read at grade level, and some can’t. And that’s unsatisfactory.”

But there was good news, the president concluded: “I’m proud to report the achievement gap between white kids and minority students is closing, for the good of the United States.”

This contention — that the achievement gap is on its way to the dustbin of history — is one that Bush and Spellings have expressed frequently in the past year. And the gap better be closing: the law is coming up on its fifth anniversary. In just seven more years, if the promise of No Child Left Behind is going to be kept, the performances of white and black students have to be indistinguishable.

But despite the glowing reports from the White House and the Education Department, the most recent iteration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test of fourth- and eighth-grade students commonly referred to as the nation’s report card, is not reassuring. In 2002, when No Child Left Behind went into effect, 13 percent of the nation’s black eighth-grade students were “proficient” in reading, the assessment’s standard measure of grade-level competence. By 2005 (the latest data), that number had dropped to 12 percent. (Reading proficiency among white eighth-grade students dropped to 39 percent, from 41 percent.) The gap between economic classes isn’t disappearing, either: in 2002, 17 percent of poor eighth-grade students (measured by eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches) were proficient in reading; in 2005, that number fell to 15 percent.

The most promising indications in the national test could be found in the fourth-grade math results, in which the percentage of poor students at the proficient level jumped to 19 percent in 2005, from 8 percent in 2000; for black students, the number jumped to 13 percent, from 5 percent. This was a significant increase, but it was still far short of the proficiency figure for white students, which rose to 47 percent in 2005, and it was a long way from 100 percent.

In the first few years of this decade, two parallel debates about the achievement gap have emerged. The first is about causes; the second is about cures. The first has been taking place in academia, among economists and anthropologists and sociologists who are trying to figure out exactly where the gap comes from, why it exists and why it persists. The second is happening among and around a loose coalition of schools, all of them quite new, all established with the goal of wiping out the achievement gap altogether.

The two debates seem barely to overlap — the principals don’t pay much attention to the research papers being published in scholarly journals, and the academics have yet to study closely what is going on in these schools. Examined together, though, they provide a complete and nuanced picture, sometimes disheartening, sometimes hopeful, of what the president and his education officials are up against as they strive to keep the promise they have made. The academics have demonstrated just how deeply pervasive and ingrained are the intellectual and academic disadvantages that poor and minority students must overcome to compete with their white and middle-class peers. The divisions between black and white and rich and poor begin almost at birth, and they are reinforced every day of a child’s life. And yet the schools provide evidence that the president is, in his most basic understanding of the problem, entirely right: the achievement gap can be overcome, in a convincing way, for large numbers of poor and minority students, not in generations but in years. What he and others seem not to have apprehended quite yet is the magnitude of the effort that will be required for that change to take place.

But the evidence is becoming difficult to ignore: when educators do succeed at educating poor minority students up to national standards of proficiency, they invariably use methods that are radically different and more intensive than those employed in most American public schools. So as the No Child Left Behind law comes up for reauthorization next year, Americans are facing an increasingly stark choice: is the nation really committed to guaranteeing that all of the country’s students will succeed to the same high level? And if so, how hard are we willing to work, and what resources are we willing to commit, to achieve that goal?


In the years after World War II, and especially after the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, black Americans’ standardized-test scores improved steadily and significantly, compared with those of whites. But at some point in the late 1980s, after decades of progress, the narrowing of the gap stalled, and between 1988 and 1994 black reading scores actually fell by a sizable amount on the national assessment. What had appeared to be an inexorable advance toward equality had run out of steam, and African-American schoolchildren seemed to be stuck well behind their white peers.

The issue was complicated by the fact that there are really two overlapping test-score gaps: the one between black children and white children, and the one between poor children and better-off children. Given that those categories tend to overlap — black children are three times as likely to grow up in poverty as white children — many people wondered whether focusing on race was in fact a useful approach. Why not just concentrate on correcting the academic disadvantages of poor people? Solve those, and the black-white gap will solve itself.

There had, in fact, been evidence for a long time that poor children fell behind rich and middle-class children early, and stayed behind. But researchers had been unable to isolate the reasons for the divergence. Did rich parents have better genes? Did they value education more? Was it that rich parents bought more books and educational toys for their children? Was it because they were more likely to stay married than poor parents? Or was it that rich children ate more nutritious food? Moved less often? Watched less TV? Got more sleep? Without being able to identify the important factors and eliminate the irrelevant ones, there was no way even to begin to find a strategy to shrink the gap.

Researchers began peering deep into American homes, studying up close the interactions between parents and children. The first scholars to emerge with a specific culprit in hand were Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published the results of an intensive research project on language acquisition. Ten years earlier, they recruited 42 families with newborn children in Kansas City, and for the following three years they visited each family once a month, recording absolutely everything that occurred between the child and the parent or parents. The researchers then transcribed each encounter and analyzed each child’s language development and each parent’s communication style. They found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children’s I.Q.’s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.

When Hart and Risley then addressed the question of just what caused those variations, the answer they arrived at was startling. By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child’s home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child’s vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” — anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy — to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.

What’s more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of “discouragements” a child heard — prohibitions and words of disapproval — compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another — all of which stimulated intellectual development.

Hart and Risley showed that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with I.Q. and academic success later on in a child’s life. Hearing fewer words, and a lot of prohibitions and discouragements, had a negative effect on I.Q.; hearing lots of words, and more affirmations and complex sentences, had a positive effect on I.Q. The professional parents were giving their children an advantage with every word they spoke, and the advantage just kept building up.

In the years since Hart and Risley published their findings, social scientists have examined other elements of the parent-child relationship, and while their methods have varied, their conclusions all point to big class differences in children’s intellectual growth. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a professor at Teachers College, has overseen hundreds of interviews of parents and collected thousands of hours of videotape of parents and children, and she and her research team have graded each one on a variety of scales. Their conclusion: Children from more well-off homes tend to experience parental attitudes that are more sensitive, more encouraging, less intrusive and less detached — all of which, they found, serves to increase I.Q. and school-readiness. They analyzed the data to see if there was something else going on in middle-class homes that could account for the advantage but found that while wealth does matter, child-rearing style matters more.

Martha Farah, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, has built on Brooks-Gunn’s work, using the tools of neuroscience to calculate exactly which skills poorer children lack and which parental behaviors affect the development of those skills. She has found, for instance, that the “parental nurturance” that middle-class parents, on average, are more likely to provide stimulates the brain’s medial temporal lobe, which in turn aids the development of memory skills.

Another researcher, an anthropologist named Annette Lareau, has investigated the same question from a cultural perspective. Over the course of several years, Lareau and her research assistants observed a variety of families from different class backgrounds, basically moving in to each home for three weeks of intensive scrutiny. Lareau found that the middle-class families she studied all followed a similar strategy, which she labeled concerted cultivation. The parents in these families engaged their children in conversations as equals, treating them like apprentice adults and encouraging them to ask questions, challenge assumptions and negotiate rules. They planned and scheduled countless activities to enhance their children’s development — piano lessons, soccer games, trips to the museum.

The working-class and poor families Lareau studied did things differently. In fact, they raised their children the way most parents, even middle-class parents, did a generation or two ago. They allowed their children much more freedom to fill in their afternoons and weekends as they chose — playing outside with cousins, inventing games, riding bikes with friends — but much less freedom to talk back, question authority or haggle over rules and consequences. Children were instructed to defer to adults and treat them with respect. This strategy Lareau named accomplishment of natural growth.

In her book “Unequal Childhoods,” published in 2003, Lareau described the costs and benefits of each approach and concluded that the natural-growth method had many advantages. Concerted cultivation, she wrote, “places intense labor demands on busy parents. ... Middle-class children argue with their parents, complain about their parents’ incompetence and disparage parents’ decisions.” Working-class and poor children, by contrast, “learn how to be members of informal peer groups. They learn how to manage their own time. They learn how to strategize.” But outside the family unit, Lareau wrote, the advantages of “natural growth” disappear. In public life, the qualities that middle-class children develop are consistently valued over the ones that poor and working-class children develop. Middle-class children become used to adults taking their concerns seriously, and so they grow up with a sense of entitlement, which gives them a confidence, in the classroom and elsewhere, that less-wealthy children lack. The cultural differences translate into a distinct advantage for middle-class children in school, on standardized achievement tests and, later in life, in the workplace.

Taken together, the conclusions of these researchers can be a little unsettling. Their work seems to reduce a child’s upbringing, which to a parent can feel something like magic, to a simple algorithm: give a child X, and you get Y. Their work also suggests that the disadvantages that poverty imposes on children aren’t primarily about material goods. True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey. However you measure child-rearing, middle-class parents tend to do it differently than poor parents — and the path they follow in turn tends to give their children an array of advantages. As Lareau points out, kids from poor families might be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite — but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.


What would it take to overcome these disadvantages? Does poverty itself need to be eradicated, or can its effects on children somehow be counteracted? Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on? Is it enough simply to educate poor children in the same way that middle-class children are educated? And can any school, on its own, really provide an education to poor minority students that would allow them to achieve the same results as middle-class students?

There is, in fact, evidence emerging that some schools are succeeding at the difficult task of educating poor minority students to high levels of achievement. But there is still great disagreement about just how many schools are pulling this off and what those successful schools mean for the rest of the American education system. One well-publicized evaluation of those questions has come from the Education Trust, a policy group in Washington that has issued a series of reports making the case that there are plenty of what they call “high flying” schools, which they define as high-poverty or high-minority schools whose students score in the top third of all schools in their state. The group’s landmark report, published in December 2001, identified 1,320 “high flying” schools nationwide that were both high-poverty and high minority. This was a big number, and it had a powerful effect on the debate over the achievement gap. The pessimists — those who believed that the disadvantages of poverty were all but impossible to overcome in public schools — were dealt a serious blow. If the report’s figures held up, it meant that high achievement for poor minority kids was not some one-in-a-million occurrence; it was happening all the time, all around us.

But in the years since the report’s release, its conclusions have been challenged by scholars and analysts who have argued that the Education Trust made it too easy to be included on their list. To be counted as a high-flier, a school needed to receive a high score in only one subject in one grade in one year. If your school had a good fourth-grade reading score, it was on the list, even if all its other scores were mediocre. To many researchers, that was an unconvincing standard of academic success. Douglas Harris, a professor of education and economics at Florida State University, pored over Education Trust’s data, trying to ascertain how many of the high-flying schools were able to register consistently good numbers. When he tightened the definition of success to include only schools that had high scores in two subjects in two different grades over two different years, Harris could find only 23 high-poverty, high-minority schools in the Education Trust’s database, a long way down from 1,320.

That number isn’t exhaustive; Harris says he has no doubt that there are some great schools that slipped through his data sieve. But his results still point to a very different story than the one the original report told. Education Trust officials intended their data to refute the idea that family background is the leading cause of student performance. But on closer examination, their data largely confirm that idea, demonstrating clearly that the best predictors of a school’s achievement scores are the race and wealth of its student body. A public school that enrolls mostly well-off white kids has a 1 in 4 chance of earning consistently high test scores, Harris found; a school with mostly poor minority kids has a 1 in 300 chance.


Despite those long odds, the last decade — and especially the last few years — have seen the creation of dozens, even hundreds, of schools across the country dedicated to precisely that mission: delivering consistently high results with a population that generally achieves consistently low results. The schools that have taken on this mission most aggressively tend to be charter schools — the publicly financed, privately run institutions that make up one of the most controversial educational experiments of our time. Because charters exist outside the control of public-school boards and are generally not required to adhere to union contracts with their teachers, they have attracted significant opposition, and their opponents are able to point to plenty of evidence that the charter project has failed. Early charter advocates claimed the schools would raise test scores across the board, and that hasn’t happened; nationally, scores for charter-school students are the same as or lower than scores for public-school students. But by another measure, charter schools have succeeded: by allowing educators to experiment in ways that they generally can’t inside public-school systems, they have led to the creation of a small but growing corps of schools with new and ambitious methods for educating students facing real academic challenges.

In the early years of the charter-school movement, every school was an island, trying out its own mad or brilliant educational theory. But as charter-school proponents have studied the successes and learned from the mistakes of their predecessors, patterns, even a consensus, have begun to emerge. The schools that are achieving the most impressive results with poor and minority students tend to follow three practices. First, they require many more hours of class time than a typical public school. The school day starts early, at 8 a.m. or before, and often continues until after 4 p.m. These schools offer additional tutoring after school as well as classes on Saturday mornings, and summer vacation usually lasts only about a month. The schools try to leaven those long hours with music classes, foreign languages, trips and sports, but they spend a whole lot of time going over the basics: reading and math.

Second, they treat classroom instruction and lesson planning as much as a science as an art. Explicit goals are set for each year, month and day of each class, and principals have considerable authority to redirect and even remove teachers who aren’t meeting those goals. The schools’ leaders believe in frequent testing, which, they say, lets them measure what is working and what isn’t, and they use test results to make adjustments to the curriculum as they go. Teachers are trained and retrained, frequently observed and assessed by their principals and superintendents. There is an emphasis on results but also on “team building” and cooperation and creativity, and the schools seem, to an outsider at least, like genuinely rewarding places to work, despite the long hours. They tend to attract young, enthusiastic teachers, including many alumni of Teach for America, the program that recruits graduates from top universities to work for two years in inner-city public schools.

Third, they make a conscious effort to guide the behavior, and even the values, of their students by teaching what they call character. Using slogans, motivational posters, incentives, encouragements and punishments, the schools direct students in everything from the principles of teamwork and the importance of an optimistic outlook to the nuts and bolts of how to sit in class, where to direct their eyes when a teacher is talking and even how to nod appropriately.

The schools are, in the end, a counterintuitive combination of touchy-feely idealism and intense discipline. Their guiding philosophy is in many ways a reflection of the findings of scholars like Lareau and Hart and Risley — like those academics, these school leaders see childhood as a series of inputs and outputs. When students enroll in one of these schools (usually in fifth or sixth grade), they are often two or more grade levels behind. Usually they have missed out on many of the millions of everyday intellectual and emotional stimuli that their better-off peers have been exposed to since birth. They are, educationally speaking, in deep trouble. The schools reject the notion that all that these struggling students need are high expectations; they do need those, of course, but they also need specific types and amounts of instruction, both in academics and attitude, to compensate for everything they did not receive in their first decade of life.


It is still too early in the history of this nascent movement to say which schools are going to turn out to be the most successful with this new approach to the education of poor children. But so far, the most influential schools are the ones run by KIPP, or the Knowledge Is Power Program. KIPP’s founders, David Levin and Michael Feinberg, met in 1992, when they were young college graduates enrolled in Teach for America, working in inner-city public schools in Houston. They struggled at first as teachers but were determined to figure out how to motivate and educate their students. Each night they would compare notes on what worked in the classroom — songs, games, chants, rewards — and, before long, both of them became expert classroom instructors.

In the fall of 1994, Levin and Feinberg started a middle school in Houston, teaching just 50 students, and they named it KIPP. A year later, Levin moved to New York and started the second KIPP school, in the South Bronx. As the KIPP schools grew, Levin and Feinberg adhered to a few basic principles: their mission was to educate low-income and minority students. They would emphasize measurable results. And they would promise to do whatever it took to help their students succeed. They offered an extended day and an extended year that provided KIPP students with about 60 percent more time in school than most public-school students. They set clear and strict rules of conduct: their two principles of behavior were “Work Hard” and “Be Nice,” and all the other rules flowed out of those. At the beginning of each year, parents and students signed a pledge — unenforceable but generally taken seriously — committing to certain standards of hard work and behavior. Teachers gave students their cellphone numbers so students could call them at night for homework help.

The methods raised students’ test scores, and the schools began to attract the attention of the media and of philanthropists. A “60 Minutes” report on the schools in 1999 led to a $15 million grant from Doris and Donald Fisher, the founders of the Gap, and Feinberg and Levin began gradually to expand KIPP into a national network. Two years ago, they received $8 million from the Gates Foundation to create up to eight KIPP high schools. There are now 52 KIPP schools across the country, almost all middle schools, and together they are educating 12,000 children. The network is run on a franchise model; each school’s principal has considerable autonomy, while quality control is exercised from the home office in San Francisco. Feinberg is the superintendent of KIPP’s eight schools in Houston, and Levin is the superintendent of the four New York City schools.

KIPP is part of a loose coalition with two other networks of charter schools based in and around New York City. One is Achievement First, which grew out of the success of Amistad Academy, a charter school in New Haven that was founded in 1999. Achievement First now runs six schools in New Haven and Brooklyn. The other network is Uncommon Schools, which was started by a founder of North Star Academy in Newark along with principals from three acclaimed charter schools in Massachusetts; it now includes seven schools in Rochester, Newark and Brooklyn. The connections among the three networks are mostly informal, based on the friendships that bind Levin to Norman Atkins, the former journalist who founded North Star, and to Dacia Toll, the Rhodes scholar and Yale Law graduate who started Amistad with Doug McCurry, a former teacher. Toll and Atkins visited Levin at the Bronx KIPP Academy when they were setting up their original schools and studied the methods he was using; they later sent their principals to the leadership academy that Levin and Feinberg opened in 2000, and they have continued to model many of their practices on KIPP’s. Now the schools are beginning to formalize their ties. As they each expand their charters to include high schools, Levin, Toll and Atkins are working on a plan to bring students from all three networks together under one roof.


Students at both KIPP and Achievement First schools follow a system for classroom behavior invented by Levin and Feinberg called Slant, which instructs them to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and track the speaker with their eyes. When I visited KIPP Academy last month, I was standing with Levin at the front of a music class of about 60 students, listening to him talk, when he suddenly interrupted himself and pointed at me. “Do you notice what he’s doing right now?” he asked the class.

They all called out at once, “Nodding!”

Levin’s contention is that Americans of a certain background learn these methods for taking in information early on and employ them instinctively. KIPP students, he says, need to be taught the methods explicitly. And so it is a little unnerving to stand at the front of a KIPP class; every eye is on you. When a student speaks, every head swivels to watch her. To anyone raised in the principles of progressive education, the uniformity and discipline in KIPP classrooms can be off-putting. But the kids I spoke to said they use the Slant method not because they fear they will be punished otherwise but because it works: it helps them to learn. (They may also like the feeling of having their classmates’ undivided attention when they ask or answer a question.) When Levin asked the music class to demonstrate the opposite of Slanting — “Give us the normal school look,” he said — the students, in unison, all started goofing off, staring into space and slouching. Middle-class Americans know intuitively that “good behavior” is mostly a game with established rules; the KIPP students seemed to be experiencing the pleasure of being let in on a joke.

Still, Levin says that the innovations a visitor to a KIPP school might notice first — the Slanting and the walls festooned with slogans and mottos (“Team Always Beats Individual,” “All of Us Will Learn”) and the orderly rows of students walking in the hallways — are not the only things contributing to the schools’ success. Equally important, he says, are less visible practices: clear and coherent goals for each class; teachers who work 15 to 16 hours a day; careful lesson planning; and a decade’s worth of techniques, tricks, games and chants designed to help vast amounts of information penetrate poorly educated brains very quickly.

Toll and Levin are influenced by the writings of a psychology professor from the University of Pennsylvania named Martin Seligman, the author of a series of books about positive psychology. Seligman, one of the first modern psychologists to study happiness, promotes a technique he calls learned optimism, and Toll and Levin consider it an essential part of the attitude they are trying to instill in their students. Last year, a graduate student of Seligman’s named Angela Duckworth published with Seligman a research paper that demonstrated a guiding principle of these charter schools: in many situations, attitude is just as important as ability. Duckworth studied 164 eighth-grade students in Philadelphia, tracking each child’s I.Q. as well as his or her score on a test that measured self-discipline and then correlating those two numbers with the student’s G.P.A. Surprisingly, she found that the self-discipline scores were a more accurate predictor of G.P.A. than the I.Q. scores by a factor of two. Duckworth’s paper connects with a new wave of research being done around the country showing that “noncognitive” abilities like self-control, adaptability, patience and openness — the kinds of qualities that middle-class parents pass on to their children every day, in all kinds of subtle and indirect ways — have a huge and measurable impact on a child’s future success.

Levin considers Duckworth’s work an indication of the practical side of the “character” education he and Toll and Atkins are engaged in: they want their students to be well behaved and hard-working and respectful because it’s a good way to live but also because the evidence is clear that people who act that way get higher marks in school and better jobs after school. To Toll, a solid character is a basic building block of her students’ education. “I think we have to teach work ethic in the same way we have to teach adding fractions with unlike denominators,” she told me. “But once children have got the work ethic and the commitment to others and to education down, it’s actually pretty easy to teach them. ”


The schools that Toll, Atkins, Levin and Feinberg run are not racially integrated. Most of the 70 or so schools that make up their three networks have only one or two white children enrolled, or none at all. Although as charter schools, their admission is open through a lottery to any student in the cities they serve, their clear purpose is to educate poor black and Hispanic children. The guiding principle for the four school leaders, all of whom are white, is an unexpected twist on the “separate but equal” standard: they assert that for these students, an “equal” education is not good enough. Students who enter middle school significantly behind grade level don’t need the same good education that most American middle-class students receive; they need a better education, because they need to catch up. Toll, especially, is preoccupied with the achievement gap: her schools’ stated mission is to close the gap entirely. “The promise in America is that if you work hard, if you make good decisions, that you’ll be able to be successful,” Toll explained to me. “And given the current state of public education in a lot of our communities, that promise is just not true. There’s not a level playing field.” In Toll’s own career, in fact, the goal of achieving equality came first, and the tool of education came later. When she was at Yale Law School, her plan was to become a civil rights lawyer, but she concluded that she could have more of an impact on the nation’s inequities by founding a charter school.

The methods these educators use seem to work: students at their schools consistently score well on statewide standardized tests. At North Star this year, 93 percent of eighth-grade students were proficient in language arts, compared with 83 percent of students in New Jersey as a whole; in math, 77 percent were proficient, compared with 71 percent of students in the state as a whole. At Amistad, proficiency scores for the sixth grade over the last few years range between the mid-30s and mid-40s, only a bit better than the averages for New Haven; by the eighth grade, they are in the 60s, 70s and 80s — in every case exceeding Connecticut’s average (itself one of the highest in the country). At KIPP’s Bronx academy, the sixth, seventh and eighth grades had proficiency rates at least 12 percentage points above the state average on this year’s statewide tests. And when the scores are compared with the scores of the specific high-poverty cities or neighborhoods where the schools are located — in Newark, New Haven or the Bronx — it isn’t even close: 86 percent of eighth-grade students at KIPP Academy scored at grade level in math this year, compared with 16 percent of students in the South Bronx.

The leaders of this informal network are now wrestling with an unintended consequence of their schools’ positive results and high profiles: their incoming students are sometimes too good. At some schools, students arrive scoring better than typical children in their neighborhoods, presumably because the school’s reputation is attracting more-engaged parents with better-prepared kids to its admission lottery. Even though almost every student at the KIPP Academy in the Bronx, for example, is from a low-income family, and all but a few are either black or Hispanic, and most enter below grade level, they are still a step above other kids in the neighborhood; on their math tests in the fourth grade (the year before they arrived at KIPP), KIPP students in the Bronx scored well above the average for the district, and on their fourth-grade reading tests they often scored above the average for the entire city.

At most schools, well-prepared incoming students would be seen as good news. But at these charter schools, they can be a mixed blessing. Although the schools have demonstrated an impressive and consistent ability to turn below-average poor minority students into above-average students, another part of their mission is to show that even the most academically challenged students can succeed using their methods. But if not enough of those students are attending their schools, it’s hard to make that point. North Star’s leaders say this problem doesn’t apply to them: the school’s fifth-grade students come in with scores that are no higher than the Newark average. At KIPP, Levin and other officials I talked to say that their schools do what they can to recruit applicants who are representative of the neighborhoods they serve, but they also say that once a class is chosen (and at all the charter schools, it is chosen by random lottery), their job is to educate those children to the best of their ability. Dacia Toll is more focused on the issue; she says that she and her principals make a special effort to recruit students from particularly blighted neighborhoods and housing projects in New Haven and Brooklyn and told me that it would “absolutely be a cause for concern” if Amistad seemed to be attracting students who were better-prepared than average.


The most persistent critic of KIPP’s record has been Richard Rothstein, a former education columnist for The New York Times who is now a lecturer at Teachers College. He has asserted that KIPP’s model cannot be replicated on a wide scale and argues that the elevated incoming scores at the Bronx school make it mostly irrelevant to the national debate over the achievement gap. Although Rothstein acknowledges that KIPP’s students are chosen by lottery, he contends in his book “Class and Schools” that they are “not typical lower-class students.” The very fact that their parents would bother to enroll them in the lottery sets them apart from other inner-city children, he says, adding that there is “no evidence” that KIPP’s strategy “would be as successful for students whose parents are not motivated to choose such a school.”

In some ways, the debate seems a trivial one — KIPP is clearly doing a great job of educating its students; do the incoming scores at a single school really matter? But in fact, KIPP, along with Uncommon Schools and Achievement First, is now at the center of a heated political debate over just how much schools can accomplish, and that has brought with it a new level of public scrutiny. Beginning in the late 1990s, KIPP, Amistad and North Star were embraced by advocates from the right who believed in the whole menu of conservative positions on education: school choice, vouchers, merit pay for teachers. In 2001, the Heritage Foundation profiled the KIPP schools in a book called “No Excuses: Lessons From 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools,” which set out to disprove “the perennial claims of the education establishment that poor children are uneducable.” Two years later, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, the well-known conservative writers about race, borrowed the Heritage Foundation’s title (which was itself borrowed from a slogan popular at KIPP and other schools) for their own book on education, “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning”; the book used the success of Amistad, North Star and, especially, KIPP to highlight the failings of the public-school system in serving poor children. If KIPP can successfully educate these kids, the Thernstroms asked, why can’t every school?

The Thernstroms argue that if we can just fix the schools where poor children are educated, it will become much easier to solve all the other problems of poverty. The opposing argument, which Rothstein and others have made, is that the problems of poor minority kids are simply too great to be overcome by any school, no matter how effective. He points to the work of Hart and Risley and Lareau and argues that the achievement gap can be significantly diminished only by correcting, or at least addressing, the deep inequities that divide the races and the classes.

Levin and Toll sometimes seem surprised by the political company they are now keeping — and by the opponents they have attracted. “I’m a total liberal!” Toll said, a little defensively, when I asked her recently about this political divide. Many charter advocates claim that the views of Democratic politicians on charter schools are clouded by the fact that they depend for both money and votes on the nation’s teachers’ unions, which are skeptical of charter schools and in some states have taken steps to block them from expanding. In Connecticut, the state teachers’ union this year lobbied against a legislative change to allow for the expansion of Amistad Academy (it later passed), and the union’s lawyers filed a Freedom of Information Act request that required Amistad to turn over all of its employment and pay records. The union’s chief lobbyist told reporters in April that the state’s charter law was intended only “to create incubators of innovation. It was never to create a charter-school system.” Amistad was acceptable as a small experiment, in other words, but there was no reason to let it grow.

Even if schools like KIPP are allowed to expand to meet the demand in the educational marketplace — all of them have long waiting lists — it is hard to imagine that, alone, they will be able to make much of a dent in the problem of the achievement gap; there are, after all, millions of poor and minority public-school students who aren’t getting the education they need either at home or in the classroom. What these charter schools demonstrate, though, is the effort that would be required to provide those students with that education.

Toll put it this way: “We want to change the conversation from ‘You can’t educate these kids’ to ‘You can only educate these kids if. ...’ ” And to a great extent, she and the other principals have done so. The message inherent in the success of their schools is that if poor students are going to catch up, they will require not the same education that middle-class children receive but one that is considerably better; they need more time in class than middle-class students, better-trained teachers and a curriculum that prepares them psychologically and emotionally, as well as intellectually, for the challenges ahead of them.

Right now, of course, they are not getting more than middle-class students; they are getting less. For instance, nationwide, the best and most experienced teachers are allowed to choose where they teach. And since most state contracts offer teachers no bonus or incentive for teaching in a school with a high population of needy children, the best teachers tend to go where they are needed the least. A study that the Education Trust issued in June used data from Illinois to demonstrate the point. Illinois measures the quality of its teachers and divides their scores into four quartiles, and those numbers show glaring racial inequities. In majority-white schools, bad teachers are rare: just 11 percent of the teachers are in the lowest quartile. But in schools with practically no white students, 88 percent of the teachers are in the worst quartile. The same disturbing pattern holds true in terms of poverty. At schools where more than 90 percent of the students are poor — where excellent teachers are needed the most — just 1 percent of teachers are in the highest quartile.


Government spending on education does not tend to compensate for these inequities; in fact, it often makes them worse. Goodwin Liu, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has compiled persuasive evidence for what he calls the country’s “education apartheid.” In states with more poor children, spending per pupil is lower. In Mississippi, for instance, it is $5,391 a year; in Connecticut, it is $9,588. Most education financing comes from state and local governments, but the federal supplement for poor children, Title 1, is “regressive,” Liu points out, because it is tied to the amount each state spends. So the federal government gives Arkansas $964 to help educate each poor child in the state, and it gives Massachusetts $2,048 for each poor child there.

Without making a much more serious commitment to the education of poor and minority students, it is hard to see how the federal government will be able to deliver on the promise contained in No Child Left Behind. The law made states responsible for turning their poorest children into accomplished scholars in a little more than a decade — a national undertaking on the order of a moon landing — but provided them with little assistance or even direction as to how they might accomplish that goal. And recently, many advocates have begun to argue that the Education Department has quietly given up on No Child Left Behind.

The most malignant element of the original law was that it required all states to achieve proficiency but then allowed each state to define proficiency for itself. It took state governments a couple of years to realize just what that meant, but now they have caught on — and many of them are engaged in an ignoble competition to see which state can demand the least of its students. At the head of this pack right now is Mississippi, which has declared 89 percent of its fourth-grade students to be proficient readers, the highest percentage in the nation, while in fact, the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that only 18 percent of Mississippi fourth graders know how to read at an appropriate level — the second-lowest score of any state. In the past year, Arizona, Maryland, Ohio, North Dakota and Idaho all followed Mississippi’s lead and slashed their standards in order to allow themselves to label uneducated students educated. The federal government has permitted these maneuvers, and after several years of tough talk about enforcing the law’s standards, the Education Department has in the past year begun cutting one deal after another with states that want to redefine “success” for their schools. (When I spoke to Spellings this month, she said she would “appeal to the better angels of governors and state policy makers” to keep their standards in line with national benchmarks.)

The absence of any robust federal effort to improve high-poverty schools undercuts and distorts the debate over the responsibility for their problems. It is true, as the Thernstroms write in their book, that “dysfunctional families and poverty are no excuse for widespread, chronic educational failure.” But while those factors are not an excuse, they’re certainly an explanation; as researchers like Lareau and Brooks-Gunn have made clear, poverty and dysfunction are enormous disadvantages for any child to overcome. When Levin and Feinberg began using the slogan “No Excuses” in the mid-1990s, they intended it to motivate their students and teachers, to remind them that within the context of a KIPP school, there would always be a way to achieve success. But when the conservative education movement adopted “No Excuses” as a slogan, the phrase was used much more broadly: if that rural Arkansas public school isn’t achieving the success of a KIPP school, those responsible for its underachievement must simply be making excuses. The slogan came to suggest that what is going wrong in the schools is simply some sort of failure of will — that teachers don’t want to work hard, or don’t believe in their students, or are succumbing to what the president calls “the soft bigotry of low expectations” — while the reality is that even the best, most motivated educator, given just six hours a day and 10 months a year and nothing more than the typical resources provided to a public-school teacher, would find it near impossible to educate an average classroom of poor minority students up to the level of their middle-class peers.

The evidence is now overwhelming that if you take an average low-income child and put him into an average American public school, he will almost certainly come out poorly educated. What the small but growing number of successful schools demonstrate is that the public-school system accomplishes that result because we have built it that way. We could also decide to create a different system, one that educates most (if not all) poor minority students to high levels of achievement. It is not yet entirely clear what that system might look like — it might include not only KIPP-like structures and practices but also high-quality early-childhood education, as well as incentives to bring the best teachers to the worst schools — but what is clear is that it is within reach.

Although the failure of No Child Left Behind now seems more likely than not, it is not too late for it to succeed. We know now, in a way that we did not when the law was passed, what it would take to make it work. And if the law does, in the end, fail — if in 2014 only 20 or 30 or 40 percent of the country’s poor and minority students are proficient, then we will need to accept that its failure was not an accident and was not inevitable, but was the outcome we chose.

Paul Tough is an editor at the magazine. He is writing a book about the Harlem Children’s Zone, a community organization.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:21 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Check out Wayne Wright's recent publication titled, "A Catch-22 for Language Learners." His pieces urges us to reconsider NCLB by focusing on its effects on a population whose needs are at best, unfortunately not very well addressed in current policy, and at worst, is regarded in a dismissive fashion. To read article, click here.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:55 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This piece by photojournalist, David Bacon, identifies the source of migration: "Because of the political and economic crisis they create, free trade policies produce more migration to the United States, while more production leaves at the same time, looking for low wages across the border. Through bailout and loan conditions, the US government enforces a low-wage policy on the Mexican economy, with the Mexican government's active cooperation, in order to encourage maquiladora construction." I recommend reading Bacon's new book COMMUNITIES WITHOUT BORDERS.

Also worthy of note, "HR 2092, has been introduced by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and Congressional Black Caucus members. It would legalize people already here, and outlaw discrimination based on migrant status."

-Angela


t r u t h o u t | Perspective www.truthout.org

Tuesday 21 November 2006

In 1998, workers at the Han Young factory started the most famous strike on the border in the twelve years NAFTA has been in effect. After firings, wildcat work stoppages, and a campaign in cooperation with activists here in the US, they won legal recognition for their union. In Mexico and Central America, during a legal strike, workers can put up flags across the doors, and the company must remain closed until the strike is over. No one can go in to work. The problem, of course, is that it's very difficult for most workers to get legal status for their unions and strikes.

In the US, unions don't have to be registered with the government, and anyone can form one. But there's no real legal protection for unions, and we have few rights. A company can legally break a strike.

Behind these differences are different conceptions of rights. In the US, property rights are paramount, and overrule labor rights. In Mexico, the legal and political tradition of the Revolution still means something. Labor has important legal and social rights, at least on paper, and the state is supposed to honor and uphold them. Unfortunately, those rights often remain on paper, unenforced in real life.

There's a right to food and housing, but people go hungry and have no place to live. There's a right to strike effectively, but that right is unenforced, and in practice, independent and democratic unions are repressed.

Despite winning legal status for their union and the legal right to strike, Tijuana authorities brought in strikebreakers. A federal judge ruled the strike was legal, but authorities ignored the decision.

Because of the existing development policy of encouraging foreign investment at all cost, authorities were unwilling to allow the existence of an independent union at Han Young. The same thing has happened time after time along the border - Duro Bag, Sony, Compania Desarmadora, AutoTrim/CustomTrim, ITAPSA, Sara Lee are just some of the factories where workers have had the same experience. The number of workers fired in these efforts count in the hundreds, and many have been beaten.

The rule of law, as it has protected workers' rights in the past, has been undermined.

Because of the political and economic crisis they create, free trade policies produce more migration to the United States, while more production leaves at the same time, looking for low wages across the border.

Through bailout and loan conditions, the US government enforces a low-wage policy on the Mexican economy, with the Mexican government's active cooperation, in order to encourage maquiladora construction.

From the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1920 through the early 1970s, the Mexican government encouraged economic development by Mexican producers, making products for sale in Mexico. Foreign investment was strictly limited.

But under pressure from an accumulating foreign debt, the Mexican government created an investment climate that depends on a vast number of low wage earners. This sacrifices the ability of people to buy what they produce.

Well before NAFTA's passage, the disparity between US and Mexican wages was growing. Mexican salaries were a third of those in the US up to the 1970s. They are now less than an eighth, even a 12th or 15th, even during a period in which US wages have declined in buying power.

Over the last two decades, the income of Mexican workers has lost 76% of its purchasing power. Under pressure from foreign lenders, the Mexican government has ended subsidies on the prices of basic necessities, including gasoline, electricity, bus fares, tortillas and milk, which have risen dramatically. It estimates that 40 million people live in poverty, and 25 million in extreme poverty.

What happened in the same time in the US? By 2002, the US Department of Labor had received claims for NAFTA-related unemployment assistance from 507,000 workers. President Bush ordered the Department of Labor to stop counting, since the job loss figures were an embarrassment as he was trying to get Congress to give him fast track authority to negotiate CAFTA and FTAA.

NAFTA accelerated the export of capital, not the export of goods and services. These economic reforms transformed the Mexican economy and were imposed on Mexico by the International Monetary Fund, backed up by conditions on US bank loans and bailouts.

The CONASUPO stores, which purchased corn at higher prices from farmers to help them stay on the land, and sold tortillas, milk and food to poor urban consumers, were discontinued. Meanwhile, the ejido land reform system itself was abolished, allowing the reconcentration of land and rural wealth. Government businesses were sold to private investors. US companies were allowed to own land and factories anywhere in Mexico, without Mexican partners.

Mexico was a laboratory for economic reforms that have transformed the economies of developing countries, away from policies encouraging national development, toward ones opening up the economy for transnational investors.

This is the same plan being implemented in Iraq, enforced through war and occupation. The Bush administration sees Iraq as a beachhead into the Middle East and south Asia, a chance to transform the state-dominated economy of what was once one of the region's wealthiest countries. A free-market Iraq will then set new ground rules for the rest of the area, much as Mexico's economy became a prototype for the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

On September 19, 2003, the CPA published Order No. 39, which permits 100% foreign ownership of businesses, and repatriation of profits. The CPA set a new salary schedule for Iraqi workers - Order 30 on Reform of Salaries and Employment Conditions of State Employees. This lowered the bottom wage rate from $60 a month to $40, and eliminated all previous house, food, family, risk and location subsidies.

With 70% unemployment, the economic policies of the occupation create more hunger among Iraq's working people, transforming them into a pool of low-wage, semi-employed labor, desperate for jobs at almost any price.

In 1987, Saddam Hussein issued a law declaring that workers in state-owned enterprises (which includes most Iraqi workers) had no right to organize unions or bargain. Today the Iraqi government, under US occupation, is still enforcing that 1987 law. If workers have no right to bargain, privatization and huge job losses will face much less organized resistance.

In countries like Mexico and Iraq, with mixed economies, a large percentage of workers historically were employed by state enterprises. Unions had their greatest strength in the state sector.

Over the last ten years, most important Mexican labor struggles have been fought over the privatization of that sector, by workers at airlines, railroads, the telephone system, and many other industries. In February of 1998, one battle was fought by the copper miners in Cananea, one of Mexico's oldest mines and site of the historic battle that initiated the Mexican Revolution. Hundreds of miners lost their jobs after the mine was privatized, and the threat of military occupation was used to end their strike.

Since there's almost no other work in Cananea, a small mountain town, the jobless miners had to leave. Many of them crossed the border, just fifty miles north, to find work and a new economic future in the United States.

They're not alone.

Migrant Rights International estimates that over 170 million people today live outside of the countries in which they were born. They're not just moving from Mexico to the US, but from developing countries to developed ones all over the world.

What do they find when they arrive with dreams of a better life?

They become part of an immigrant workforce with conditions and wages at the bottom, denied the most basic rights - no unemployment insurance, no medical care, no social benefits of any kind.

They have no right to a job. Not only can they be fired at a moment's notice, like most workers, but for them the very act of working is a crime. They are denied the right to be a resident of a stable community, to live here at all.

And the irony is that they often wind up working for the same corporations whose operations in their countries of origin are part of the reason why they're here to begin with.

Transnational corporations want to invest in the developing world, moving production to whatever area the wages are lowest. And in developed countries, they seek the migrants who have been displaced by high unemployment and falling wages they themselves cause.

In this system, corporations are aided by US immigration laws. While they're are always presented in the media as a means of controlling borders, and keeping people from crossing them, for the last hundred years, they've been the means of regulating the supply, and consequently the price, of immigrant labor.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 made the very act of working illegal for undocumented immigrants. This was a gift to employers - when working becomes a crime, it becomes very difficult for workers to organize unions, go on strike, and fight for better conditions.

Immigration agents now check documents workers must fill out to get a job, and require employers to fire those whose documents are in question. In Washington State, they did this in the middle of a union drive among apple workers, and fired 700 people. That effort was broken.

There has always been a conflict in US labor about immigration. Some sought to restrict unions to the native born, to whites and to men, and saw immigrants as the enemy. Others, however, from the IWW through the CIO to many unions today, see the labor movement as inclusive, with a responsibility to organize all workers, immigrant and native-born alike.

In 1986, the AFL-CIO supported IRCA and employer sanctions. Fourteen years later, in 1999, that position was changed by grass-roots immigrant rights coalitions and labor councils around the country. The AFL-CIO called for an end to employer sanctions, and for a new amnesty program to legalize workers already here.

Immigrant workers make up an increasing percentage of the work force in building services, health care, manufacturing and food processing, construction, and hotel and restaurant work. This change is going on everywhere, including in states that historically haven't had many immigrants.

Today most immigration is spontaneous, but there are many visa categories employers use to bring workers to the US as contract laborers, often called guest workers. They have programs for high tech and health care workers, farm workers, garment workers, and others. And often the workers displaced by these programs, or threatened with displacement, as in Silicon Valley, are other immigrants and people of color who lose jobs with higher wages and job security.

Workers often have to go thousands of dollars into debt to come to the US under contract. To repay the debt, they work long hours and take dangerous risks.

When any worker stands up for better conditions or organizes a union, she or he can be easily fired, immigrant or not. But when contract workers are fired, they lose not only their jobs but their ability to stay in the country. That effectively gives the employer the power to deport as well as fire workers, and makes people in these programs vulnerable.

That's why employers are making proposals for new programs. Congress is now debating an enormous expansion, in which employers would recruit hundreds of thousands of contract laborers every year. Behind these proposals are some of the largest industries in the US - the National Association of Chain Drugstores (think Wal-Mart) and the American Meat Institute. Democrats and Republicans both propose new guest worker programs

These industry-based visa programs are all based on the idea that immigration law should be used to supply workers to employers. This was the same logic behind the old bracero program, which Ernesto Galarza and Cesar Chavez fought for 22 years to end. Bush says that there will be no amnesty for the undocumented. Only one bill in Congress, by the Congressional Black Caucus, would grant real amnesty to people here without papers.

The work of migrants is indispensable to many industries, from agriculture to construction. But so is the work of people born here. Everyone needs a job.

Deporting or denying work to migrants does not create a single job for anyone else. When sanctions are heavily enforced, union organizing is undermined and employers use the law to push income down and threaten those who demand workplace rights.

No matter how many walls are built on the border, no matter how many troops or National Guardsmen or helicopters patrol it, workers will still cross it looking for a future.

The dislocation of communities worldwide, forced to migrate in search of work, has never been a voluntary process. But the migration of people is as much a product of the global economy as the migration of capital.

Another product is inequality. Washington's current immigration proposals all assume that immigrants should not be the equals of those around them, or have the same rights. The proposals fly against a 400-year history of struggle in the US to expand the rights of all people.

The roots of this inequality lie in slavery. Even the current concept of the "illegal" person has its roots in the Black Codes, used to define who could be enslaved and who couldn't. Chinatowns and Manilatowns owe their existence, not simply to the desire for community and group identity, but to a century of social segregation.

US immigration policy doesn't deter the flow of migrants across the border. Its basic function is defining the status of people once they're here. A policy based on supplying workers to industry, at a price it wants to pay, has inequality built into it from the beginning. It denies community. It undermines workplace rights. It inhibits the development of families and culture.

Other alternatives are urgently needed. In 1999, the AFL-CIO proposed a freedom agenda that included legalization, repeal of employer sanctions, increased availability of family reunification visas, and enforcement of workplace rights. Community coalitions around the country have proposals that advance immigrant rights without tying them to guest worker or enforcement schemes.

The last amnesty, in 1986, legalized over 4 million people, who are now active members of our communities. A similar proposal, HR 2092, has been introduced by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and Congressional Black Caucus members. It would legalize people already here, and outlaw discrimination based on migrant status.

Piling guest-worker programs and increased enforcement on top of unemployment and job competition is an explosive mixture, producing insecurity and low wages. Instead of promoting a bitter fight over jobs, Congress should make reducing unemployment federal policy. Common ground means fighting for jobs for everyone. People will still cross the border, looking for work. Increasing the number of green cards, or resident visas, would ease the pressure to cross illegally, and give migrants a status more equal to everyone else. People could reunite families without waiting decades.

Meanwhile, changing US trade and economic policies abroad would decrease the pressure for migration. Treaties like NAFTA promote poverty and low wages as incentives for corporate investment. In Hong Kong, the WTO even proposes a new international guest worker program, to exploit the workers free trade displaces.

Instead, to keep small Mexican farmers on the land, the US could provide rural credit, and stop cheap NAFTA-facilitated corn exports. US policy could stop boosting privatization of manufacturing and services, which lead to declining wages and huge layoffs. When the US promotes dumping, privatization, and unemployment, where do we think those affected will go?

Congress will never consider pro-immigrant, pro-labor proposals if its current push for guest workers and increased enforcement isn't defeated first. A strong coalition between immigrants' rights groups, churches, unions, civil rights organizations and working families can build a movement powerful enough to win legal status and rights for migrants - and jobs and better wages for everyone. It can not only stop the rightward push, but also win something much better.

It's time to fight for what we want.

--------

David Bacon, Photographs and Stories.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:48 PM 4 comments Links to this post

BERKELEY
Activist encouraged by Latino voter turnout
- Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, November 18, 2006


The immigration debate has unified Latinos politically, and last week's election results shows they were mobilized, the head of the nation's oldest Latino civil rights group said Friday.

"I see a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of people wanting to get involved," said Rosa Rosales, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens.

Rosales stopped in Berkeley as part of a nationwide tour she began after the Nov. 7 election. She credits the polarizing debate over illegal immigration with motivating more Latinos to go to the polls, and said the results were a repudiation of many Republicans' enforcement-only approach to immigration reform.

Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz., and Republican congressional candidate Randy Graf of Arizona "all made an issue of immigrants, a very punitive type of thing, and they all lost," Rosales said in an interview before she addressed several dozen students and faculty at UC Berkeley's Center for Latino Policy Research. "It sent a strong message to them that immigrant-bashing is not the way to go."

A pre-election poll by the National Council of La Raza and the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials found that immigration was energizing Latinos to vote, though they ranked education, the economy and the war in Iraq as their biggest concerns.

A national exit poll by the William C. Velasquez Institute in Los Angeles found that almost 6 million Latinos cast ballots, fewer than in the 2004 presidential election but 1.1 million more than in the last midterm election in 2002.

After Republicans lost ground among Latino voters, President Bush recommended Florida Sen. Mel Martinez to be chairman of the Republican National Committee. Rosales applauded the move but added, "I think both parties need to move a lot more Latinos into power positions. We're not to be taken for granted."

Like most national Latino organizations, Rosales' group, known by its acronym LULAC, favors comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

An equally urgent priority for the group, however, is education, said Rosales, a flamboyant 62-year-old labor organizer from San Antonio.

"We are in a state of crisis," she told the UC Berkeley audience. "Graduation rates for Latinos are dismal. It's so important as college students for you to go and reach out to high school students."

Rosales said her own path to college, which didn't begin until she was a 30-year-old mother of three, transformed her from a timid housewife into an outspoken activist.

The 77-year-old LULAC has a history of fighting discrimination and racial segregation. Its legal challenges included the 1946 Mendez vs. Westminster decision, in which the federal courts banned school segregation in California, paving the way for the Brown vs. Board of Education case in the U.S. Supreme Court eight years later.

But the group's membership has been declining in recent years. Young Latinos these days are likely to think, "Why would I join LULAC? That's my grandparents' organization," said Maria Echaveste, a lecturer at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law who was deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.

"It's the only real membership organization in the Latino community and it's got a great history," Echaveste said. "There's a lot of hope that with Rosa's leadership it can re-energize itself."

Rosales said she aims to triple the group's membership of 150,000, and credited a recent appearance on CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight" for a burst of publicity. Dobbs is known for his antagonism toward illegal immigrants.

"Lou Dobbs did me a favor," she said. "They're calling me every day and asking to join."

E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.

Page B - 1
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/11/18/BAGVAMFAOD1.DTL

©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:29 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Just Whose Idea Was All This Testing?
Fueled by Technology, Nation's Attempt to Create a Level Playing Field Has Had a Rocky History
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 14, 2006; A06

Second in a series of occasional articles on testing.

In ancient Greece, Socrates tested his students through conversations. Answers were not scored as right or wrong. They just led to more dialogue. Many intellectual elites in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. cared more about finding the path to higher knowledge than producing a correct response. To them, accuracy was for shopkeepers.

Today, educators often hold up the Socratic method as the best kind of teaching.

So how did we go from that ideal to an educational model shaped -- and perhaps even ruled -- by standardized, normed, charted, graphed, regressed, calibrated and validated testing? Students in the Washington area are likely to know more about the MSA (Maryland School Assessments), the SOL (Virginia's Standards of Learning) and the D.C. CAS (D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System) than they do about Socrates and his illustrious student Plato.

Critics say standardized testing has robbed schools of the creative clash of intellects that make Plato's dialogues still absorbing. "There is a growing technology of testing that permits us now to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn't be doing at all," said educational psychologist Gerald W. Bracey, research columnist for the Phi Delta Kappan education journal.

Historians call the rise of testing an inevitable outgrowth of expanding technology. As goods and services are delivered with greater speed and in higher quantity and quality, education has been forced to pick up the pace.

Standardized exams have many sources. In imperial China in the A.D. 7th century, government job applicants had to write essays about Confucian philosophy and compose poetry. In Europe, the invention of the printing press and modern paper manufacturing fueled the growth of written exams.

By 1845 in the United States, public education advocate Horace Mann was calling for standardized essay testing. Spelling tests, geography tests and math tests blossomed in schools, although they were rarely standardized.

At the outset of the 20th century, educators began to experiment with tests that took shortcuts around the old essay methods. French psychologist Alfred Binet developed an intelligence test about 1905. Frederick J. Kelly of the University of Kansas designed a multiple-choice test in 1914. Scanning machines followed. Many Americans accepted these tests as efficient tools to help build a society based on merit, not birth or race or wealth.

Still, modern testing had a clumsy start as psychologists experimented with exams to help employers, schools and others rate applicants. In one early case, testing expert H.H. Goddard identified as "feeble-minded" 83 percent of Jews, 80 percent of Hungarians, 79 percent of Italians and 87 percent of Russians among a small group of immigrants assessed at Ellis Island.

"Consider a group of frightened men and women who speak no English and who have just endured an oceanic voyage in steerage," Harvard University science historian Stephen Jay Gould wrote of the Goddard study. "Most are poor and have never gone to school; many have never held a pencil or pen in their hand." Yet Goddard's interviewers expected them to sit down with a pencil and "reproduce on paper a figure shown to them a moment ago, but now withdrawn from their sight."

Eventually, testing experts focused on standardizing the measure of learning, not of innate intelligence.

The College Entrance Examination Board, founded in 1900, played a huge role. Now called the College Board, it "created the best, most consistent and most influential standards that American education has ever known," New York University educational historian Diane Ravitch wrote in March in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The board's early exams were written and graded by teachers and professors and had no multiple-choice questions. These essay exams, Ravitch wrote, led "everyone who went to high school, whether they were the children of doctors or farmers or factory workers . . . to study mathematics, science, English literature, composition, history and a foreign language, usually Latin."

Many educators who value depth and rigor lament what followed. In 1926, the multiple-choice SAT was introduced as a much faster way of testing college applicants. On Dec. 7, 1941, several members of the board, during a previously scheduled lunch, decided that the outbreak of world war would require faster decisions and less leisurely testing. They eventually canceled the board's old exam format. The SAT ruled.

Essay questions, however, made a comeback in 1955 when Advanced Placement exams began.

The launch of Sputnik, the Soviet space satellite, in 1957 fueled a space race and increased pressure on U.S. schools to show improvement. But rating schools through tests did not advance much until the mid-1970s, when the College Board revealed that average SAT scores had been falling since 1963. Then, in 1983, a national commission declared in the report "A Nation at Risk" that public school standards were too low. Over the next two decades, testing took off.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, several governors argued that they had to test all their students to raise school standards and improve their economies. Among them were Democrats Bill Clinton of Arkansas and Richard W. Riley of South Carolina, who would soon become president and U.S. education secretary, respectively. (Later in the 1990s, Republican Gov. George W. Bush of Texas also was a big proponent of testing.)

Some educators said a better way to improve schools was to spend more on teacher training, salaries and smaller classes. They dwelled on educational inputs; the politicians, on outputs.

The politicians prevailed. In 1988, Congress created the National Assessment Governing Board. It established new standards for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test that has been given to a sampling of students since 1970. In 2002, President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind law. For the first time, it required annual testing of all public school children in certain grades and required states to use results to help rate schools.

The National Education Association and other teacher organizations argue that it is unfair to rate schools through such tests when teachers lack adequate training and pay. In a 2004 essay for the Hoover Digest, Ravitch wrote that the advocates of inputs and the champions of outputs "are in constant tension, with first one and then the other gaining brief advantage."

"How this conflict is resolved," she wrote, "will determine the future of American education."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:07 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Sent by Stephen Krashen to the New York Times, November 20

Re: "Schools Slow in Closing Gaps Between Races," Nov.20

Assistant Sec. of Education Johnson claims that "as a
whole student performance is improving" thanks to No
Child Left Behind (NCLB). The claim is based on an
increase in fourth grade reading scores on the NAEP
test from 1999 to 2004. As the Times notes, in 2004
NCLB had been in effect only one year.

It should also be pointed out that children taking the
tests were fourth graders, and few, if any, had been
subjected to NCLB's Reading First instruction. Also,
the 1999-2004 analysis is based on "trend" scores,
equivalent tests given in 1999 and 2004. A look at the
regular NAEP tests suggests that the jump occurred
between 2000 and 2002, before NCLB and Reading First.

The administration has wasted over $100 billion on
NCLB, and now they want to waste more and extend NCLB
to high schools. This is good news for test and
workbook publishers, but bad news for students and for
taxpayers.

Stephen Krashen

November 20, 2006
Schools Slow in Closing Gaps Between Races

By SAM DILLON
When President Bush signed his sweeping education law a year into his presidency, it set 2014 as the deadline by which schools were to close the test-score gaps between minority and white students that have persisted since standardized testing began.

Now, as Congress prepares to consider reauthorizing the law next year, researchers and a half-dozen recent studies, including three issued last week, are reporting little progress toward that goal. Slight gains have been seen for some grade levels.

Despite concerted efforts by educators, the test-score gaps are so large that, on average, African-American and Hispanic students in high school can read and do arithmetic at only the average level of whites in junior high school.

"The gaps between African-Americans and whites are showing very few signs of closing," Michael T. Nettles, a senior vice president at the Educational Testing Service, said in a paper he presented recently at Columbia University. One ethnic minority, Asians, generally fares as well as or better than whites.

The reports and their authors, in interviews, portrayed an educational landscape in which test-score gaps between black or Hispanic students and whites appear in kindergarten and worsen through 12 years of public education.

Some researchers based their conclusions on federal test results, while others have cited state exams, the SATs and other widely administered standardized assessments. Still, the studies have all concurred: The achievement gaps remain, perplexing and persistent.

The findings pose a challenge not only for Mr. Bush but also for the Democratic lawmakers who joined him in negotiating the original law, known as No Child Left Behind, and who will control education policy in Congress next year.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative George Miller of California, who are expected to be the chairmen of the Senate and House education committees, will promote giving more resources to schools and researching strategies to improve minority performance, according to aides.

"Closing the achievement gap is at the heart of No Child Left Behind and must continue to be our focus in renewing the act next year," Mr. Kennedy said in a statement.

Experts have suggested many possible changes, including improving the law’s mechanisms for ensuring that teachers in poor schools are experienced and knowledgeable, and extending early-childhood education to more students.

Henry L. Johnson, an assistant secretary of education, said: "I don't dispute that looking at some comparisons we see that these gaps are not closing--or not as fast as they ought to. But it's also accurate to say that when taken as a whole, student performance is improving. The presumption that we won’t get to 100 percent proficiency from here presumes that everything is static. To reach the 100 percent by 2014, we'll all have to work faster and smarter."

The law requires states, districts and schools to report annual test results for all racial and ethnic groups, and to show annual improvements for each. It imposes sanctions on schools that do not meet the rising targets.

Many experts and officials, including the president's brother, Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, have supported the goal of raising all students to academic proficiency, but they have also called it unrealistic to accomplish in a decade.

But President Bush, who put education at the center of his 2000 campaign, has been insisting that it is not only feasible but that the gaps are already closing.

"There are good results of No Child Left Behind across the nation," Mr. Bush said last month at a school in North Carolina. "We have an achievement gap in America that is--that I don’t like and you shouldn’t like."

"The gap is closing," he said.

The researchers behind the reports issued last week in Washington, D.C., New York and California were far more pessimistic, though.

"The achievement gap is alive and well," said G. Gage Kingsbury, an author of the report issued in Washington by the Northwest Evaluation Association, a nonprofit group based in Oregon that administers tests.

Examining results from reading and math tests administered to 500,000 students in 24 states in the fall of 2004 and the spring of 2005, the study found: “For each score level at each grade in each subject, minority students grew less than European-Americans, and students from poor schools grew less than those from wealthier ones.”

Minority and poor students also lost more academic ground each summer, the study said.

Ross Wiener, a principal partner at the Education Trust, a group that works to close achievement gaps and has consistently supported the federal law, called those findings “profoundly disturbing” and said it showed that schools continued to be a “significant source of disadvantage for minority students.”

“The Bush administration wants to hang a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner over N.C.L.B., but a fair assessment is that progress thus far in closing achievement gaps is disappointing,” Mr. Weiner said. He pointed to financing and teacher assignment systems that lead to schools with mostly poor and minority students getting less money, offering fewer advanced courses and having weaker teachers.

The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a battery of reading and math tests administered to thousands of students in every state, showed some rising scores for all ethnic groups, and the black-white score gap narrowed in a statistically significant way for fourth-grade math. But on fourth-grade reading, and on eighth-grade reading and math, the black-white and Hispanic-white gaps were statistically unchanged from the early 1990s.

Over the past three decades, the gaps narrowed steadily from the 1970s through the late 1980s but then leveled out through 1999. Since then, some have narrowed again, but at a rate that would allow them to persist for decades. That picture showed up in a separate National Assessment test devised to measure long-term trends, administered in late 2003 and early 2004.

That test showed that regardless of race, scores increased a bit over three decades for 9- and 13-year-old students, with the best gains coming between 1999 and 2004.

Test administrators warned against attributing those gains to the federal law, because it had been in effect for about only a year when the 2004 test was given. Prekindergarten programs, higher standards and increased testing carried out by many states during the 1990s also contributed, they said.

But Bush administration officials have routinely credited the law for the improved scores on that test.

A group that has supported the federal law, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, whose leaders include former officials from the Reagan and the current Bush administrations, conducted a review of state exams and other indicators and issued a report this month. It found that none of the 50 states had made widespread progress in narrowing the gaps, and that eight states, including New York and New Jersey, had made “moderate gains.”

Chester E. Finn Jr., the foundation president, said, “Poor and minority students are doing very poorly, and in most states are not making significant gains — and this in spite of N.C.L.B. and all the other reforms of the last 15 years.”

Suggestions abound for ways to narrow the score gaps faster. Since scholars have documented that minority children enter kindergarten with weaker reading skills than white children, some experts advocate increased public financing for early education programs.

No Child Left Behind provides money for tutoring in schools where students are not succeeding, but critics say it does not provide sufficient financing to help states and districts turn the schools themselves around.

Several of the new reports urged better provisions to ensure that poor and mostly minority schools have quality teachers, to reward teachers who help struggling students improve, and to keep good teachers from leaving city schools for higher-paying suburban ones.

“If I’m in a bad school and make serious progress, I need a reward,” Dr. Nettles said. “If you perform on Wall Street, you get a bonus.”

But the news is not all bad. Individual schools in some states have made progress in narrowing the gaps between black and white, Hispanic and white, and the poor and more affluent, according to a Standard & Poor’s unit that analyzes school performance.

The unit credited Morgan County Elementary School in Madison, Ga., with significantly raising the scores of black fourth and fifth graders. The principal, Jean Triplett, attributed that success in part to after-school tutoring by volunteers in black churches.

Edwin E. Weeks Elementary School in Syracuse was singled out for narrowing the gap between black and white students. Dare Dutter, the principal, credited a prekindergarten program and a school health clinic that helped keep poor students from missing class.

Standard & Poor’s has sifted test data from 16,000 schools in 18 states, identifying 718 schools making significant progress toward the national goal.

"They are the classic diamonds in the rough," said Paul Gazzerro, director of analytics at Standard & Poor’s School Evaluation Services. “But in general, schools are not closing achievement gaps.”

One of the exceptions, the unit said, is Hoover Middle School in Lakewood, Calif., a community in Los Angeles County where the aircraft manufacturing industry has been hit by job losses. The school has raised Hispanic scores so much that in the spring of 2005 Hispanic students outperformed whites, said the principal, Michael L. Troyer. He said the progress resulted from focused instruction, frequent diagnostic testing and several tutoring programs.

“Some of it’s after school, teachers do it at lunch, and we have people who tutor in the morning before school, too,” Mr. Troyer said.

Across California, however, achievement gaps have not narrowed, and in some cases they have widened since 2001, according to a study of California test results released last week by Policy Analysis for California Education, a research center run jointly by the University of California and Stanford.

“Not only have all boats stopped rising, but the boats that are under water are sinking further down,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who contributed to the study.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:13 AM 0 comments Links to this post

I am happy to announce our recent inauguration of the Texas Center for Education Policy that I direct at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Gary Orfield of the Harvard Civil Rights Project at Harvard University delivered our inaugural Texas Faces the Future Distinguished Lecture. The title of his talk was "Betraying the American Dream: Closing the College Gate."

Dr. Orfield’s presentation examined the changing social and political contexts for access to higher education from the late 1960s and early 1970s and forward. He then examined present disparities in Texas and the nation that should concern educators, policy makers, and the public.

The Civil Rights Era created openings and financial opportunities for the poor. It was also a time of boomer-driven growth of college campuses with open admissions to four-year campuses and affordable tuition rates.

In contrast, today's higher education context may be characterized in terms of declining state and federal resources to ensure access to higher education. For example, there have been significant reductions in monetary amounts for Pell Grants that do not offset the ever-increasing tuition and fees, resulting in unprecedented levels of indebtedness by the poor and middle class. This has resulted in increased access to college aid for middle, rather than lower class families.

Dr. Orfield also emphasized the vast transformation of our population, particularly in Texas. There is a shrinking of the school-age White population coupled with the soaring significance of a highly segregated Latino population and their high dropout and low college-going rates. He cited high-stakes, standardized tests at the high school level as culprits in the reconstitution of racially and economically defined patterns in educational attainment because of their specific correlation to the racial and economic backgrounds of the students that take them.

At the national level, African Americans register 8.8%, 8.1% and 5.6% of all bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees, respectively. Similarly, Latinos register 6.3%, 4.7% and 3.2% of all bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees, respectively. Dr. Orfield also emphasized gender disparities among those degrees that are awarded. There are significantly fewer men who complete degrees in higher education than their female counterparts. Among African Americans, 66.7%, 71% and 65% of bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees, respectively, went to women. Among Latinos, 60.7%, 64.0% and 54.2% of all bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees, respectively, went to Latina females.

He closed by underscoring the striking underpresentation of Blacks and Hispanics in higher education. "If this gap is not closed, Texas will have proportionately fewer college graduates." An under-educated public will lead to continued under employment and slowed economic growth in Texas.

More from me/us on all of this. It has been a very time-consuming and worthwhile endeavor. We have big dreams and we feel that we're off to a great start so stay tuned!

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:33 AM 1 comments Links to this post

"He is losing the war. The body armor he supplies to his troops in political warfare – money money money – is ineffective against the enemy's ideological fervor for better public schools. The more he flouts his assets – James Leininger, Bob Perry – the more the enemy regards him as a symbol of decadence and is determined to rise up against him. He is responsible for the largest casualty rate his troops have suffered in decades."


– Paul Burka on TexasMonthly.com, calling for Republican Rep. Tom Craddick to resign as Texas House Speaker

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:28 AM 0 comments Links to this post

by ELLIOT SPAGAT
Associated Press Writer
SAN DIEGO — A federal judge temporarily blocked the city of Escondido on Thursday from enforcing a law that punishes landlords for renting to illegal immigrants.

U.S. District Judge John Houston said that he had serious questions about whether the law would survive legal scrutiny and that it may inflict "irreparable harm" on tenants and landlords.

The law had been scheduled to take effect Friday in the suburb 30 miles north of San Diego, where Hispanics make up 42 percent of the 142,000 residents.

Houston did not say how long his order would last, but said he would schedule a hearing within four months.

The lawsuit was filed this month on behalf of two Escondido landlords and two women who live in the country illegally but whose children are U.S. citizens and attend school in the city. The suit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, alleged the law illegally punishes landlords.

One of the landlords, Roy Garrett, welcomed the decision.

"(Illegal immigrants) are there, it's reality, it is immoral to force them to leave," Garrett said.

An attorney for the city declined to comment.

The City Council voted 3-2 last month to require landlords to submit documentation of their tenants' immigration status to the city, which would then verify that information with the federal government.

If tenants are found to be illegal immigrants, landlords would be given 10 days to evict them or face suspension of their business licenses. Repeat offenders could face misdemeanor charges and fines.

Last month, the ACLU persuaded a federal judge to temporarily block the city of Hazleton, Pa., from enforcing a crackdown on illegal immigrants. More than 50 municipalities nationwide have considered, passed or rejected laws to crack down on illegal immigration.

___

November 16, 2006 - 10:45 p.m. CST


Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared-gen/ap/National/Illegal_Immigrants_Housing.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:06 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Nov. 15, 2006, 12:26PM
Will more math, science classes add up?
State's assignment: Prepare seniors for college but keep curriculum flexible

By JANET ELLIOTT
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN — Pre-calculus and physics. Those two classes strike terror in the hearts of many high school students, though both can be avoided by college-bound youths. But that could change as state education policymakers implement a new rule requiring students on the recommended graduation plan to take a fourth year of math and science.

A battle about the rigor of the courses that will count toward the so-called "4-by-4" curriculum rages anew at today's State Board of Education meeting.

In September, the board gave a tentative nod to a plan that would allow students to choose from a variety of courses, including some lower-level math and science classes, for their fourth credit. But many in the business community and some concerned parents are stepping up pressure on the board to require more-difficult courses for seniors.

About 60 school superintendents, educators, business leaders and parents have signed up to address the board, which has been struggling since July to implement the Legislature's mandate. The board must make a decision by Friday.

"A lot of key occupations like engineering and nursing are suffering because we've taken our eye off the prize and watered down the curriculum so much that it builds very little skills in students by the time they've graduated from high school," said George Edwards Jr., a former trustee of Cypress-Fairbanks ISD who favors requiring challenging courses such as physics and pre-calculus.

Edwards, a certified public accountant with Exxon Mobil Corp., represents the 160-member Cy-Fair Minority Parents Association in his demand for tougher standards. That position is at odds with district Superintendent David Anthony and others who want more flexibility in course selection.

Many in the education community say it will be difficult to find qualified teachers for high-level math and science. And they worry that too-tough requirements will drive students to opt out of the recommended graduation plan for a minimum plan that might not prepare them for college.


'Different abilities'

About two-thirds of Texas students follow the recommended diploma track, which the Legislature has designated as the default graduation plan. Students must have their parents' permission to opt for the minimum plan, which requires three years of math and two of science.
The board wants to increase the number of credits required for graduation from 24 to 26 so the extra math and science won't cut out electives. The new recommended plan will apply to students entering high school next year.

John Folks, superintendent of Northside ISD in San Antonio, hopes that the State Board will let districts count a variety of math and science courses for the fourth year.

"The bottom line is, kids have different skills, different abilities, different interests," said Folks, a former math teacher. "We don't need to put every kid in the same box."

Board member David Bradley, R-Beaumont, said he thinks the 15-member elected board will go with the tougher standards. He said something has to be done because half of entering college freshmen require remedial instruction in math or English.

"We don't want seniors taking fluff courses because when they enter college, they're behind," he said.

Students on the recommended plan now take algebra 1, geometry and algebra 2.

Bradley favors limiting the fourth year of math to a course that requires algebra 2 as a prerequisite. There are only a few such classes now available, including pre-calculus and advanced placement statistics.


Tailored tracks

Terri Leo, a Republican board member from Spring, plans to propose a two-track recommended plan that would allow students who are interested in math and science to take the most-challenging courses. Those who are inclined toward liberal arts could choose from a variety of math and science courses for their additional credit.
"It satisfies the Legislature's demand for more rigor as well as school districts' need for flexibility," she said.

On the science side, students now need three credits, generally biology, chemistry and either physics or an integrated chemistry and physics course called IPC. Leo wants to phase out IPC, which is a middle-school-level course, and require the fourth-year credit to be physics or another lab-based science.

Sarah Winkler, vice president of the Alief ISD's Board of Trustees, said she is concerned that the new curriculum could crowd out vocational and technology internships in hotels, businesses and hospitals that the district has developed. Students can get college credit at Houston Community College and the University of Houston under the program.

"I'd hate to see those doors close," she said.

janet.elliott@chron.com

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4335548.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:08 PM 0 comments Links to this post

CITY OF FARMERS BRANCH
ORDINANCE NO. 2892
AN ORDINANCE AMENDING CHAPTER 26, BUSINESSES, ARTICLE IV APARTMENT COMPLEX RENTAL, MANDATING A CITIZENSHIP CERTIFICATION REQUIREMENT PURSUANT TO 24 CFR 5 ET SEQ.; PROVIDING FOR ENFORCEMENT; PROVIDING A PENALTY; PROVIDING A SEVERABILITY CLAUSE; PROVIDING AN EFFECTIVE DATE; AND DECLARING AN EMERGENCY.

WHEREAS, in response to the widespread concern of future terrorist attacks following the events of September 11, 2001, landlords and property managers throughout the country have been developing new security procedures to protect their buildings and residents; and

WHEREAS, the Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, and familial status in most housing related transactions and further makes it unlawful to indicate any preference or limitation on these bases when advertising the sale or rental of a dwelling; and

WHEREAS, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development regulations stipulate that rental tenants must submit evidence of citizenship or immigration status consistent with 24 CFR 5, et seq.; and

WHEREAS, the Fair Housing Act does not prohibit distinctions based solely on a person’s citizenship status; and

WHEREAS, 24 CFR 5, et seq. provides for a uniform and non-discriminatory certification process for citizenship and immigration status; and

WHEREAS, the HUD certification process has been in place for many years, and is currently in use; and

WHEREAS, the City was previously dismissed from the Walker litigation upon agreeing to participate in HUD’s Section 8 housing program; and

WHEREAS, the HUD certification process for citizenship and immigration status applies to HUD’s Section 8 program; and

WHEREAS, the City Council finds and determines that the benefits and protections provided through the HUD citizenship and immigration status certification processes would also benefit the City; and

WHEREAS, the City of Farmers Branch is authorized to adopt ordinances
pursuant to its police power to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its citizens; and

WHEREAS, the City of Farmers Branch has determined that it is a necessity
to adopt citizenship and immigration certification requirements for apartment complexes to safeguard the public, consistent with the provisions of 24 CFR 5, et seq.; and

WHEREAS, the City intends to adopt these provisions on a pilot basis for apartment complex rentals; and

WHEREAS, Section 26-118 of the Code of Ordinances provides for an appeal process that provides adequate due process; and

WHEREAS, the City will evaluate the success of these provisions within 180 days of the date this Ordinance goes into effect to consider their revision and/or expansion, including but not limited to the coverage of single family rental units and non-rental residential units; and

WHEREAS, the provisions adopted herein shall be applied uniformly and in a nondiscriminatory manner, and the application of these provisions must not differ based on a person's race, religion, or national origin; and

WHEREAS, the City of Farmers Branch is authorized by law to adopt the
provisions contained herein, and has complied with all the prerequisites necessary for the passage of this Ordinance; and

WHEREAS, all statutory and constitutional requirements for the passage of
this Ordinance have been adhered to, including but not limited to the Texas Open Meetings Act; and

WHEREAS, the purposes of this Ordinance are to promote the public health,
safety, and general welfare of the citizens of the City of Farmers Branch.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT ORDAINED BY THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF FARMERS BRANCH, TEXAS:
That the following ordinance shall be approved and passed into law and duly codified in the City’s Code of Ordinances:
Section 1: That all matters stated hereinabove are found to be true and correct and are incorporated into the body of this Ordinance by reference as if copied in their entirety.
Section 2: Chapter 26, Businesses, Article IV, Apartment Complex Rental, is hereby amended as follows:
A. Section 26-116(d)(3)is hereby amended by the addition of the following:
“(c) Proof of compliance with the provisions of 26-116(f).”
B. Section 26-116, License Standards, is hereby amended by the addition of the following:
“(f). Citizenship or Immigration Status Verification
(1) Definitions
The following definitions, consistent with 24 CFR 5.504, are hereby adopted as part of this subsection:
Citizen means a citizen or national of the United States.
Evidence of citizenship or eligible status means the documents which must be submitted to evidence citizenship or eligible immigration status.

Head of household means the adult member of the family who is the head of the household for purpose of determining income eligibility and rent.

Noncitizen means a person who is neither a citizen nor national of the United States.

(2) The owner and/or property manager shall require as a prerequisite to entering into any lease or rental arrangement, including any lease or rental renewals or extensions, the submission of evidence of citizenship or eligible immigration status for each tenant family consistent with subsection (3).

(3) Evidence of citizenship or eligible immigration status.
Each family member, regardless of age, must submit the following evidence to the owner and/or property manager.
i. For U.S. citizens or U.S. nationals, the evidence consists of a signed declaration of U.S. citizenship or U.S. nationality. The verification of the declaration shall be confirmed by requiring presentation of a United States passport or other appropriate documentation in a form designated by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department (“ICE”) as acceptable evidence of citizneship status.

ii. For all other noncitizens, the evidence consists of:
a. A signed declaration of eligible immigration status;
b. A form designated by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department (“ICE”) as acceptable evidence of immigration status; and
c. A signed verification consent form.
(4) General.

i. The owner and/or property manager shall request and review original documents of eligible citizenship or immigration status. The owner and/or property manager shall retain photocopies of the documents for its own records and return the original documents to the family. Copies shall be retained by the owner and/or property manager for a period of not less than two (2) years after the end of the family’s lease or rental.

ii. For each family member, the family shall be required to submit evidence of citizenship or immigration status only once during continuous occupancy. The owner and/or property manager is prohibited from allowing the occupancy of any unit by any family which has not submitted the required evidence of citizenship or eligible immigration status under this Section.
iii. These provisions shall be applied uniformly and in a nondiscriminatory manner. The owner and/or property manager’s application of these provisions must not differ based on the person's race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or familial status .

iv. These provisions shall not impair any existing lease or rental agreement, and shall apply only to a lease or rental agreement or extension entered into after the effective date of this ordinance.

v. A rebuttable presumption is hereby created that the tenant is either a citizen or a documented alien upon the tenant presenting either signed Declaration of U.S. Citizenship or U.S. Nationality and a United States passport or other appropriate documentation in a form designated by ICE as acceptable evidence of citizenship status, or by a non-citizen presenting a signed Declaration of Eligible Immigration Status and a form designated by ICE as acceptable evidence of immigration status.”

Section 3: If any section, paragraph, subdivision, clause or phrase of this Ordinance shall be adjudged invalid or held unconstitutional, the same shall not affect the validity of this Ordinance as a whole or any part of any provision thereof other than the part so decided to be invalid or unconstitutional. The sole intention of this Ordinance and the exercise of the police power of the City is for the purposes of assisting the United States Government in its enforcement of the Federal Immigration Laws and not an attempt or effort to promulgate new and additional Immigration Laws or to conflict in any manner with the Federal Government’s promulgation and enforcement of Immigration Laws.

Section 4: Penalty: That any person violating any of the provisions of this ordinance shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction thereof shall be fined in a sum not to exceed $500 and a separate offense shall be deemed committed upon each day during or on which a violation occurs or continues.
Section 5: The City shall distribute a copy of this Ordinance to the owner and/or property manager of all existing apartment complexes in the City. The ordinance shall become effective on the 12th day of January, 2007, sixty (60) days from the date of approval.

Section 6. The fact that the present ordinances and regulations of the City of Farmers Branch, Texas are inadequate to properly safeguard the health, safety, morals, peace and general welfare of the public creates an emergency which requires that this ordinance become effective as provided for herein, and it is accordingly so ordained.
ATTEST: APPROVED:
Cindee Peters, City Secretary Bob Phelps, Mayor

APPROVED AS TO FORM:
John F. Boyle, Jr., City Attorney






RESOLUTION NO. 2006-130
RESOLUTION DECLARING ENGLISH AS THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE OF THE CITY OF FARMERS BRANCH.
WHEREAS, the English language is the common language of the City of Farmers Branch, of the State of Texas and of the United States; and
WHEREAS, the use of a common language removes barriers of
misunderstanding and helps to unify the people of Farmers Branch, this State and the United States, and helps to enable the full economic and civic participation of all of its citizens, regardless of national origin, creed, race or other characteristics, and thus a compelling governmental interest exists in promoting, preserving, and strengthening the use of the English language; and
WHEREAS, proficiency in the English language, as well as in languages other than the English language, benefits Farmers Branch both economically and culturally and should be encouraged; and
WHEREAS, in addition to any other ways to promote proficiency in the English language, the City of Farmers Branch can promote proficiency in English by using the English language in its official actions and through activities such as supporting and enhancing English language usage, grammar, and literature programs and studies in its public library and other programs of the City; and
WHEREAS, in today’s society, Farmers Branch may also need to protect and preserve the rights of those who speak only the English language to use or obtain governmental programs and benefits; and
WHEREAS, the City of Farmers Branch can reduce costs and promote efficiency, in its roles as employer and as a government accountable to the people, by using the English language in its official actions and activities.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF FARMERS BRANCH, TEXAS THAT:
SECTION 1. ADOPTION OF FINDINGS
That all matters stated hereinabove are found to be true and correct and are incorporated herein by reference as if copied in their entirety.
SECTION 2. OFFICIAL ENGLISH DECLARATION
a. The English language is hereby declared the Official Language of the City of Farmers Branch, Texas.
b. The City Council of Farmers Branch, the City Manager and the employees of the City of Farmers Branch shall take all steps necessary to ensure that the role of English as the common language of Farmers Branch is preserved and enhanced.
c. The City Council of Farmers Branch, the City Manager and the employees of the City of Farmers Branch shall make no ORDINANCE or adopt any POLICY which diminishes or ignores the role of English as the common language of Farmers Branch.
d. Except as otherwise allowed herein, or required by law or business efficiency, official actions of the City of Farmers Branch which bind or commit the City of Farmers Branch or which give the appearance of presenting the official views or position of the City of Farmers Branch shall be taken in the English language, and in no other language. Unofficial or non-binding translations or explanations of official actions may be provided separately in languages other than English, if they are appropriately labeled as such and reference is made to a method to obtain the official action; unless otherwise required by federal or state law, no person has a right to such an unofficial or non-binding translation or explanation, and no liability or commitment of the City of Farmers Branch shall be based on such a translation or explanation.
e. No ordinance, decree, program, or policy of the City of Farmers Branch or any of its subdivisions, shall require the use of any language other than English for any documents, regulations, orders, transactions, proceedings, meetings, programs, or publications, except as provided in Section 3.
f. A person who speaks only the English language shall be eligible to participate in all programs and opportunities, including employment, provided by the City of Farmers Branch and its subdivisions, except when required to speak another language as provided in Section 3.
g. No law, ordinance, decree, program, or policy of the City of Farmers Branch or any of its subdivisions shall penalize or impair the rights, obligations or opportunities available to any person solely because a person speaks only the English language.
SECTION 3. EXCEPTIONS
The City of Farmers Branch and its subdivisions may use a language other than English for any of the following purposes, whether or not the use would be considered part of an official action:
a. To teach or encourage the learning of languages other than English;
b. To protect and promote the public health, sanitation and public safety;
c. To teach English to those who are not fluent in the language;
d. To comply with the Native American Languages Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Voting Rights Act, or any other federal or state law;
e. To protect the rights of criminal defendants and victims of crime;
f. To promote trade, commerce, and tourism;
g. To collect payments, fines, or other financial obligation due and payable to the City;
h. To create or promote mottos or designations, inscribe public monuments, and perform other acts involving the customary use of a language other than English; and
i. To utilize terms of art or terms or phrases from other languages which are commonly used in communications otherwise in English.
j. Printed materials, signage, or other materials or documents of the City printed in languages other than English at the time of the adoption of this resolution and not otherwise excepted in this Section 3 shall not be discarded or reprinted in English only at the additional cost and expense of the taxpayers of the City until the materials have been exhausted or until they have become otherwise obsolete.
SECTION 4. PRIVATE USE PROTECTED
The declaration and use of English as the official language of the City of Farmers Branch should not be construed as infringing upon the rights of any person to use a language other than English in private communications or actions, including the right of government employees and officials (including elected officials) to communicate with others.
SECTION 5. SEVERABILITY
If any provision of this resolution, or the applicability of any provision to any person or circumstance, shall be held to be invalid by a court of competent jurisdiction, the remainder of this resolution shall not be affected and shall be given effect to the fullest extent practicable.
SECTION 6. FEDERAL AND STATE PREEMPTION
Nothing in this resolution shall be interpreted as conflicting with the statutes of the
United States or the laws of this State.
PASSED AND APPROVED BY THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF FARMERS BRANCH, TEXAS, THIS 13th day of November, 2006.
ATTEST: APPROVED:
City Secretary Mayor

APPROVED AS TO FORM:
City Attorney

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:45 PM 0 comments Links to this post

LARA SOLT / DMN
Protesters gathered at Farmers Branch City Hall hours before Monday night's City Council meeting. Shouting matches periodically erupted outside the council chambers between supporters and opponents of the ordinances.
Some Hispanic activists said they will sue the city over the decisions.

Council approves restrictions on rentals, language measure
08:45 AM CST on Tuesday, November 14, 2006

By STEPHANIE SANDOVAL / The Dallas Morning News

Farmers Branch on Monday adopted strict measures against illegal immigrants, requiring apartment renters to provide proof of citizenship or residency and making English the city's official language.

The City Council also unanimously agreed to let police apply to participate in a federal program that would enable them to check the residency status of suspects in custody and initiate deportation proceedings in certain cases.

The measures, believed to be the first of their kind in Texas, brought cheers from supporters but sparked anger among some Hispanics and other opponents that the action will cause further racial tension in the city.

"Tomorrow in the courts. I'm winning tomorrow," said Jorge Rivera, an Irving community activist. When he addressed the crowd after the decision, he said in Spanish, "Don't worry, we are going to win."

Dallas activist Domingo Garcia also vowed to sue.

Representatives of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, however, said the language of the resolutions and ordinances approved Monday are different from what other cities have adopted – and over which they have sued. They said they will have to review the language before deciding whether to pursue legal action against Farmers Branch.

"It's hard for us to have firm, specific legal opinions, but we're all disappointed they chose to pursue this divisive path," said Rebecca Bernhardt, immigration, border and national security policy director for the ACLU of Texas.

Luis Figueroa, legislative staff attorney for MALDEF, said he, too, was disappointed.

"Farmers Branch will likely feel the negative effects of this measure in its economy, as well as with increased racial tensions," he said.

Farmers Branch resident David McKenzie rejoiced at the city's decision.

"I'm happy, very happy," he said. " 'Surprised' is the word. I think it gets it going in the right direction. It's a start. ... I think it will be symbolic. I really do."

The English as the official language resolution means that the city generally will not provide documents any longer in Spanish but does not affect the use of Spanish by businesses or individuals.

"This is not meant to keep anyone from speaking Spanish or any other language in their home, at their workplace, in public or anywhere else," City Council member Tim O'Hare said.

A separate resolution calls for the Police Department to apply to enter into an agreement with ICE to essentially train a jail officer and give that person access to a federal database to check the immigration status of people in custody for crimes.

Under the rental restrictions, apartment owners and managers would be required to obtain papers showing citizenship or eligible immigration status from each member of a family planning to live there.

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

The ordinance will go into effect Jan. 12 and will not affect anyone with an existing lease or rental agreement.

Violations are a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500, with each day a separate offense.

Wylie resident Sherry Wilkinson said earlier Monday that she wants her city to do the same thing.

"As soon as it happens here, I'm taking it to Wylie," she said. "The key is to get it done here."

Hundreds of people crowded into City Hall earlier Monday, filling the council chambers and spilling over into the lobby.


LARA SOLT / DMN
Billy Bruce of Duncanville was among those making his views known at Farmers Branch City Hall on Monday night.
Outside, nearly two hours before the meeting, dozens of protesters stood outside waving American flags and chanting, "People united will never be divided," and "What do we want? Justice. When? Now."

They bore signs asking, "Mr. O'Hare, What would Jesus do?" and saying, "In God We Trust, O'Hare is unjust."

Mr. O'Hare thrust Farmers Branch into the national spotlight in August with suggestions that the city emulate cities in other states that had adopted local ordinances making it harder for illegal immigrants to live and work there.

Earlier O'Hare suggestions that were not addressed by the council Monday were to penalize businesses that hired illegal immigrants and to curtail city subsidies for children of illegal immigrants in some city youth programs.

The council debated the merits of those proposals and the legal issues surrounding them behind closed doors Monday, citing state open meetings laws that allow governmental bodies to meet privately for consultation with their attorneys regarding pending litigation.

Moments before closing the doors, representatives of MALDEF briefed the council on the legal and financial ramifications of adopting such ordinances.


LARA SOLT / DMN
Farmers Branch police told resident Gerald Colgrove, who supported the limitations on illegal immigrants, that he'd have to leave during the shouting outside the council meeting.
During the meeting, a flurry of shouting matches periodically erupted outside, the two sides separated by a few feet and exchanging slogans and accusations of racism.

Police escorted one woman off the property, and another was taken into custody for disorderly conduct.

Mr. Rivera led opponents with a megaphone, appealing for calm during moments of tension as more than a dozen police officers monitored the situation.

As members of Hispanic and civil rights groups led their followers in chants of "We are Americans," one woman shouted back, "No you're not."

Chants of "U.S.A." by opponents of the proposals were met by shouts of "Enforce the law" by a small group of supporters.

"We understand we have some big problems. We don't support illegal immigration," said Luis de la Garza, a Farmers Branch resident and secretary for foreign relations for LULAC's national organization.

Staff writers Paul Meyer and Katherine Leal Unmuth contributed to this report.

E-mail ssandoval@dallasnews.com

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

Interesting how increased social mobility doesn't find its way into these arguments. Women simply have fewer children when they are socially mobile. That is, their productive and their reproductive years overlap, making it difficult to have children. So if we want to expand women's rates of reproduction, they need family-friendly policies and work places--in short, a major reorganization of work. Female faculty on the tenure track need paid leaves and these decisions should not be held against them whenever they take them. Conversely, if we want to lower women's rates of reproduction, we need to educate women and make them socially mobile. Reduced rates of reproduction is thus generally good news for women and their offspring.

The immigration piece does involve pull factors (like the pull of jobs that need to be filled in places like Missouri); however, push factors related to economic dislocations in Mexico and Latin America are equally, if not more powerful, factors in immigrants deciding to migrate.

-Angela

Mo. Panel's Report Links Immigration To Abortion
By David A. Lieb
Associated Press
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo., Nov. 13 -- A Republican-led legislative panel says in a new report on illegal immigration that abortion is partly to blame because it is causing a shortage of American workers.
The report from the state House Special Committee on Immigration Reform also says that "liberal social welfare policies" have discouraged Americans from working and have encouraged immigrants to cross the border illegally.

The statements about abortion and welfare policies, along with a recommendation to abolish income taxes in favor of sales taxes, were inserted into the immigration report by Rep. Edgar G.H. Emery (R), the panel's chairman.

All 10 Republican committee members signed the report, while the six Democrats did not. Some of the Democrats called the abortion assertion ridiculous and embarrassing.
"There's a lot of editorial comment there that I couldn't really stomach," Rep. Trent Skaggs said Monday. "To be honest, I think it's a little delusional."
Emery, who equates abortion to murder, defended the assertions.
"We hear a lot of arguments today that the reason that we can't get serious about our borders is that we are desperate for all these workers," he said. "You don't have to think too long. If you kill 44 million of your potential workers, it's not too surprising we would be desperate for workers."
National Right to Life estimates that there have been more than 47 million abortions since the Supreme Court established a woman's right to an abortion in its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. The immigration report estimates that there are 80,000 fewer Missourians because of abortion, many of whom now would have been in a "highly productive age group for workers."
The statement connecting abortion to illegal immigration was listed under the report's recommendations on federal social policies and potential state legislative action on illegal hiring.
"Suggestions for how to stop illegal hiring varied without any simple solution," the report states. "The lack of traditional work ethic, combined with the effects of 30 years of abortion and expanding liberal social welfare policies have produced a shortage of workers and a lack of incentive for those who can work."

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:09 AM 0 comments Links to this post

News release from the Willie Velasquez Southwest Voter Institute. -Angela
November 8, 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact Michael Bustamante
916.425.0839

OVERWHELMINGLY DISSATISFIED, LATINOS VOTE FOR CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS ON ELECTION DAY
Want Troops Home Next Year

LOS ANGELES, CA - Nearly two-thirds of Latino voters are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time and nearly seventy percent of them voted for a democratic congressional candidate, according to a national exit survey conducted yesterday by the William C. Velasquez Institute (WCVI), a non-partisan public policy organization chartered in 1985.

For whom did you vote in your Congressional District race?
National Topline:
Democratic Candidate 68.9%  
Republican Candidate 26.5%
Other Candidate 4.6%

"Latinos are not happy with the way things are going right now and they spoke up forcefully at the polls yesterday for change," said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the WCVI.  "Latinos want our U.S. troops home now."

Do you favor keeping a large number of U.S. troops in Iraq until there is a stable government OR bringing most of our troops home in the next year?
National Topline:
Wait for a Stable Government 25.8%
Bring Home Next Year 61.0%
Unsure 13.3%

In addition to voicing their dissatisfaction with the way things are going (66.3%), Latinos overwhelmingly support bringing most of our troops home within the next year (61%), compared to only 25.8% who believe that we ought to keep a large number of troops in Iraq until there is a stable government.

Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?
National Topline:
Satisfied 20.9%
Dissatisfied 66.3%
Unsure 12.8%

Across the country, 68.9% of Latinos voted for a democratic congressional candidate while only 26.5% voted for a republican.  In California the results were similar to the national findings.  Fully 64.9% voted for a democratic congressional candidate while only 28.1% voted for the republican.  Both Florida and Texas were similar to California in their votes, with 64.5% voting for democrats and 33.2% voting for republicans in Florida and 63% of democrats receiving support to 33.2% for republicans in Texas.

About the Exit Survey
The William C. Velasquez Institute conducted exit surveys of 3,138 respondents among Latino voters from 53 precincts in 8 states, which comprise 82% of all registered Latino voters. States included Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Texas, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.  Simultaneously, WCVI also conducted separate exit surveys of Latino voters in California, Florida and Texas. WCVI Pollsters conducted 1,013 exit interviews in California, 763 exit interviews in Florida, and 572 exit interviews in Texas.  The national margin or error is about +/- 2% while the state samples are between 3.5% for CA and FL and 4.5% for TX.

About the William C. Velasquez Institute
Chartered in 1985, The William C. Velásquez Institute (WCVI) is a non-profit, non-partisan Latino-oriented research and policy think tank with offices in San Antonio, Texas, Los Angeles, California and Miami, Florida. For more information regarding WCVI, please visit our website at www.wcvi.org

#   #   #
William C. Velasquez Institute
National Office
206 Lombard, 1st Floor
San Antonio, TX 78228
(210) 922-3118
California Office
2914 N. Main St., 1st Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90031
(323) 222-2217
Florida Office
2646-A NW 21st Terrace
Miami, FL 33142
(305) 635-6965

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:49 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Posted on Sun, Nov. 12, 2006

With election over, lawmakers turn their attention to 2007 agenda
LIZ AUSTIN PETERSON
Associated Press

AUSTIN - The election dust has barely settled, but Texas lawmakers are already working on bills they'll push in the legislative session that begins in January.

Property appraisal caps, crackdowns on child predators and border security are among the major issues expected on the legislative agenda. The perennial proposals to allow casino gambling and to use taxpayer money for private school vouchers also are likely to pop up.

Lawmakers get their first chance to file bills on Monday, and clerks at the Texas House and Senate expect at least a few sponsors will be waiting in line when their offices open.

State representatives usually submit about 125 to 150 bills on the first filing day, said Robert Haney, chief clerk of the House. State senators typically submit about 100 bills that day, said Linda Hopkins, the Senate's assistant calendar clerk.

The 80th Legislative Session begins Jan. 9 and lawmakers will have until March 9 to submit most bills.

But some legislators, such as state Rep. Frank Corte, like to get an early start. The Republican from San Antonio has submitted as many as 13 bills on the first filing day every session for a decade.

Bills are assigned numbers in the order they're received, and Corte said he believes having low numbers on his proposals gives him a psychological edge.

"A low bill number a lot of times has the feeling to a lot of members that it's an important issue," Corte said. "It's something that was thought out way in advance. It wasn't something that you filed at the last minute."

The Legislature does not operate on a "first come, first served" basis, however. Once the session starts, the bills will be read in the House or Senate and assigned to a committee, whose chairperson then decides what to tackle first.

About 5,400 bills were filed in the House and Senate last year, but only a fraction of those were adopted and became law.

Even the earliest bills often take a back seat to proposals laid out by legislative leaders, such as Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who presides over the Senate.

Dewhurst campaigned for re-election on a promise to get tough on child molesters. Under his plan, a person convicted once of molesting a child under 14 would be jailed for no less than 25 years. A second conviction would carry the death penalty.

Dewhurst spokesman Rich Parsons said he wasn't sure when that legislation would be filed. The lieutenant governor, who may not file bills himself, is working with senators to draft that proposal and other measures on drug testing and defibrillators in public schools.

y

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:34 PM 0 comments Links to this post

In light of the recent election results, a window for changes to NCLB has opened. A good place to go for beginning to think about this is the Forum on Educational Accountability: Joint Statement on No Child Left Behind. Whether it goes far enough should be our collective concern. It thus merits a close read. -Angela

We the Undersigned, will work for the adoption of these recommendations as central structural changes needed to NCLB at the same time that we advance our individual organization's proposals. Jan 2, 2006

********************
Advancement Project
American Association of School Administrators
American Association of School Librarians, a division of American
Library Association
American Association of University Women
American Counseling Association
American Dance Therapy Association
American Federation of School Administrators
American Federation of State, County, and Municiple Employees
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
Annenberg Institute for School Reform
Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund
ASPIRA
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development
Association of School Business Officials International (ASBO)
Big Picture Company
Center for Community Change
Center for Expansion of Language and Thinking
Center for Parent Leadership
Children's Aid Society
Children's Defense Fund
Citizens for Effective Schools
Coalition of Essential Schools
Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism
Communities for Quality Education
Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders
Council for Exceptional Children
Council for Learning Disabilities
Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform
Disciples Home Missions of the Christian Church
Division for Learning Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children (DLD/CEC)
FairTest: The National Center for Fair & Open Testing
Forum for Education and Democracy
General Board of Church and Society, The United Methodist Church
Hmong National Development
International Reading Association
International Teaching Education Association
Japanese American Citizens League
Learning Disabilities Association of America
League of United Latin American Citizens
Ministers for Racial, Social and Economic
Justice of the United Church of Christ
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund
National Alliance of Black School Educators
National Association for Asian and Pacific American Education
National Association for Bilingual Education
National Association for the Education of African American Children with Learning Disabilities
National Association for the Education and Advancement of Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese Americans
National Association of Pupil Services Administrators
National Association of School Psychologists
National Association of Social Workers
National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development
National Coalition for Paren Involvement in Education
National Conference of Black Mayors
National Council for the Social Studies
National Council of Churches
National Council of Jewish Women
National Council of Teachers of English
National Down Syndrome Congress
National Education Association
National Federation of Filipino American Associations
National Indian Education Association
National Indian School Board Association
National Korean American Service & Education Consortium
National Mental Health Association
National Ministries, American Baptist Churches USA
National Reading Conference
National Rural Education Association
National School Boards Association
National Urban League
Native Hawaiian Education Association
People for the American Way
Presbyterian Church (USA)
Rural School and Community Trust
Service Employees International Union
School Social Work Association of America
Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund
Social Action Committee of the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations
Southeast Asia Resource Action Center
Stand for Children
Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages
United Black Christians of the United Church of Christ
United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries
Women's Division of the General Board of Global Ministries, The United Methodist Church
Women of Reform Judaism

Forum on Educational Accountability
A network of 80 national education and civic organizations

Joint Organizational Statement on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act
The undersigned education, civil rights, children's, disability, and citizens' organizations are committed to the No Child Left Behind Act's objectives of strong academic achievement for all children and closing the achievement gap. We believe that the federal government has a critical role to play in attaining these goals. We endorse the use of an accountability system that helps ensure all children, including children of color, from low-income families, with disabilities, and of limited English proficiency, are prepared to be successful, participating members of our democracy.

While we all have different positions on various aspects of the law, based on concerns raised during the implementation of NCLB, we believe the following significant, constructive corrections are among those necessary to make the Act fair and effective. Among these concerns are: over-emphasizing standardized testing, narrowing curriculum and instruction to focus on test preparation rather than richer academic learning; over-identifying schools in need of improvement; using sanctions that do not help improve schools; inappropriately excluding low-scoring children in order to boost test results; and inadequate funding.

Overall, the law's emphasis needs to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement.

RECOMMENDED CHANGES IN NCLB

Progress Measurement

Replace the law's arbitrary proficiency targets with ambitious achievement targets based on rates of success actually achieved by the most effective public schools.
Allow states to measure progress by using students' growth in achievement as well as their performance in relation to pre-determined levels of academic proficiency.
Ensure that states and school districts regularly report to the government and the public their progress in implementing systemic changes to enhance educator, family, and community capacity to improve student learning.
Provide a comprehensive picture of students' and schools' performance by moving from an overwhelming reliance on standardized tests to using multiple indicators of student achievement in addition to these tests.
Fund research and development of more effective accountability systems that better meet the goal of high academic achievement for all children
Assessments

Help states develop assessment systems that include district and school-based measures in order to provide better, more timely information about student learning.
Strengthen enforcement of NCLB provisions requiring that assessments must:
Be aligned with state content and achievement standards;
Be used for purposes for which they are valid and reliable;
Be consistent with nationally recognized professional and
technical standards;
Be of adequate technical quality for each purpose
required under the Act;
Provide multiple, up-to-date measures of student
performance including measures that assess higher order
thinking skills and understanding; and
Provide useful diagnostic information to improve
teaching and learning.
Decrease the testing burden on states, schools and districts by allowing states to assess students annually in selected grades in elementary, middle schools, and high schools.
Building Capacity

Ensure changes in teacher and administrator preparation and continuing professional development that research evidence and experience indicate improve educational quality and student achievement.
Enhance state and local capacity to effectively implement the comprehensive changes required to increase the knowledge and skills of administrators, teachers, families, and communities to support high student achievement.
Sanctions

Ensure that improvement plans are allowed sufficient time to take hold before applying sanctions; sanctions should not be applied if they undermine existing effective reform efforts.
Replace sanctions that do not have a consistent record of success with interventions that enable schools to make changes that result in improved student achievement.
Funding

Raise authorized levels of NCLB funding to cover a substantial percentage of the costs that states and districts will incur to carry out these recommendations, and fully fund the law at those levels without reducing expenditures for other education programs.

Fully fund Title I to ensure that 100 percent of eligible children are served.
National School Boards Association contact on this Joint Statement:
Reggie Felton, federal relations director at 703-838-6782 or rfelton@nsba.org.



© 2006 National School Boards Association
1680 Duke Street, Alexandria, VA 22314
Phone: (703) 838-6722 Fax: (703) 683-7590 E-mail: info@nsba.org

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:24 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Mon, Nov. 06, 2006 / FT. WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM

This year, the biggest names in the gubernatorial race aren't necessarily the ones on the ballot. Some of the bigger names may be the donors who are putting big bucks behind the candidates.

Here are some of the major candidates' top contributors and how much they had given as of late September. (Democrat Chris Bell's contributions from billionaire lawyer John O'Quinn came in October.) Libertarian James Werner is also running for governor.

REPUBLICAN RICK PERRY

Bob and Doylene Perry, a Houston home builder and his wife who made headlines for giving millions of dollars to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, known for its opposition to John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee. More than $680,000.

AT&T. More than $270,000.

Thomas Dan Friedkin, Houston car dealer and Texas Parks and Wildlife commissioner. More than $215,000.

Alice L. Walton, a Mineral Wells heiress to Wal-Mart. At least $185,000.

Other notable donors include James R. Leininger, a San Antonio millionaire and school voucher supporter, and billionaire Lee Bass of Fort Worth.

DEMOCRAT CHRIS BELL

John O'Quinn, a Houston lawyer who helped the state win a $17.3 billion settlement with tobacco companies in 1998. At least $2.5 million.

Ricardo Weitz, a Houston auto dealer. More than $420,000.

Harold W. Nix, a Daingerfield lawyer who worked on the tobacco case. At least $250,000.

Terralynn Swift, widow of Houston energy executive Earl Swift. At least $170,000.

Other notable donors include billionaire Robert Bass of Fort Worth, lawyer Robert Patton Jr. of Fort Worth and oil company executive Lee Fikes of Dallas.

INDEPENDENT KINKY FRIEDMAN

John Herschel McCall, a shampoo magnate from Spicewood. More than $850,000.

Jimmy Buffett, singer. More than $215,000.

Barbara Bowman, San Antonio rancher and oil and gas producer. More than $150,000.

Mark Friend Shurley, a Central Texas lawyer. More than $110,000.

INDEPENDENT CAROLE KEETON STRAYHORN

Ryan & Co., a tax-consulting firm. More than $700,000.

George and Amanda Ryan of Dallas. More than $580,000.

John Eddie Williams Jr., a Houston lawyer involved with the tobacco settlement. More than $500,000.

Walter Umphrey, a Beaumont lawyer involved with the tobacco settlement. More than $500,000.

Other notable donors include W.A. Moncrief Jr. of Fort Worth's Moncrief Oil and Charles C. Butt of San Antonio, CEO of the H-E-B grocery stores.

SOURCES: Texans for Public Justice, Star-Telegram research

-- Compiled by staff writer Anna M. Tinsley

© 2006 Star-Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.dfw.com

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:59 PM 0 comments Links to this post

"There is little doubt that 2006 will be remembered not only for some of the most massive marches in US history but as the year marking the Al Qaeda-ization of immigrants." -Angela

by ROBERTO LOVATO / THE NATION

[from the November 13, 2006 issue]

While standing next to a large wreath of white carnations in front of Ground Zero on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Simeón Yañez was reminded that one can be both an advocate for and a threat to freedom. "Our friends are not recognized," said Yañez, speaking of the undocumented workers who perished in the Twin Towers but have not been counted among the dead. "We're the only ones making sure they're not forgotten."

As he gazed up at the gigantic Stars and Stripes on a building next to the "Tribute in Light"--two rays of light piercing the dusk-hour clouds from the ground he and thousands of other immigrants helped to clean immediately following 9/11--his contemplation was interrupted by a woman who walked past and said, "F--ing immigrants." The 48-year-old Yañez, who survived death threats from death-squad operatives claiming to defend freedom in wartime El Salvador, kept his cool.

"She's ignorant and doesn't know what she's doing. I have to deal with this a lot," said the brawny, soft-spoken immigrant-rights activist, who organized hundreds of other Long Islanders to join the historic marches earlier this year. Only minutes later, a bald man wearing a corduroy sport coat with a US flag pinned on the lapel pushed through the small crowd of candle-bearing immigrants, many of whom bore flags of their native countries as well as the flag of their new home. As he got to the front, the man yelled, "You should not be here! You're here illegally! You're a threat to our security!" A calm Yañez countered, "We're here to remember our dead, our injured," as he stepped between the man and agitated Ecuadoreans, Dominicans and other men and women standing in front of the wreath. "They should have come through the front door!" screamed the man before being escorted away by nearby Port Authority Police.

Lowering and then shaking his head in disbelief, Yañez said, "Some of us have lived terrorismo here--and in our countries. This hatred only gives us more reason to keep organizing."

This dynamic, of immigrant activism and native backlash, mirrors a larger pattern that has emerged in the past year. While the Republicans (and Democrats) have de-emphasized immigration and re-emphasized national security, immigrants themselves have been not so subtly linked to the terrorist threat. There is little doubt that 2006 will be remembered not only for some of the most massive marches in US history but as the year marking the Al Qaeda-ization of immigrants.

In this context, the Bush Administration's immigration policies have become increasingly militarized. Halliburton/KBR was awarded $385 million in government contracts for the construction of migrant detention centers along the US-Mexico border. The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security just handed major contracts to Boeing, General Electric and other military-industrial companies for the production of drones, ground-based sensors, virtual fences and other surveillance technology for use in the Arizona desert that were originally designed for war zones like the deserts of Iraq. In May the Administration announced the deployment of 6,000 additional National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border. That same month, and under the radar of most people outside the immigrant community, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, now "the largest arms-bearing branch of the U.S. government, excluding the military," according to a Cato Institute report) along with the FBI carried out hundreds of raids in neighborhoods and workplaces across the country. The ICE's "Operation Return to Sender" program captured more than 8,400 immigrants between late May and August in what DHS officials hail as "the largest operation of its kind in U.S. history." It is no coincidence that this same historical moment has witnessed the passage of the Military Commissions Act, which denies the habeas corpus rights of even legal residents who are suspected of providing "material support" to terrorist groups.

The immigrant-rights movement, meanwhile, has been declared all but dead by the mainstream media. In fact, it is regrouping in response to the national security panic gripping the country. The strategy questions raised by this climate dominated recent meetings in Chicago, Juarez (Mexico), Washington and the National Latino Congreso in Los Angeles, where more than 2,000 leaders gathered in early September. Historians like Eric Foner draw parallels between the national security pressures that shaped (and divided) the civil rights movement during the cold war in the 1950s and the situation facing movimiento leaders at the front end of the war on terror. "The danger is that criticism of American society will be taken as aiding an outside enemy, and that the range of allowable discussion will be sharply narrowed," says Foner. "Another danger is the splintering of a movement as one group turns on another, to prove its patriotism."

Today, as many black leaders did in the 1960s, a number of movimiento leaders attack the politics of national security fear with their ultimate weapons: faith and familia.

"With God as my witness, I am not a criminal. I am not a terrorist. I am a mother who doesn't want to be separated from her son," said Mexican immigrant Elvira Arellano from the makeshift room she calls home and shares with her 7-year-old US-citizen son, Saul, on the second floor of her church on Chicago's West Side. Arellano, who made national headlines after taking refuge in Adalberto United Methodist Church instead of reporting to the DHS for deportation, provides moral, spiritual and political inspiration to a movimiento trying to redefine itself. "What is most important is that we, the inmigrantes, lead the struggle; we have to ask pastors, churches and other citizens to support us as we find a way to stop deportations and struggle for legalization," said Arellano.

The 31-year-old mother says she drew her own inspiration from the Central American immigrants she recently met during visits to California and Boston. They shared with her, she said, their experiences in building the sanctuary movement of the 1980s, when refugees who were denied political asylum after fleeing US-backed governments in Guatemala and El Salvador persuaded US citizens of many denominations to declare their churches sanctuaries. Elected officials in places like Los Angeles and Madison, Wisconsin, made their cities sanctuaries, prohibiting law enforcement cooperation with immigration officials, and many of these sanctuary ordinances are still in force. Arellano has had to face numerous death threats, hate letters and anti-immigrant protesters who believe she is a lawbreaker and should be deported. But this has only strengthened her resolve.

"We're watching the birth of a new sanctuary movement, and many are drawing inspiration from Elvira," says Angela Sanbrano, president of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC), a network of more than seventy-five immigrant-led organizations in twelve states. "A lot of the repressive local and national policies against immigrants use a national security and anti-terrorist framework," adds Sanbrano, who herself received death threats from Salvadoran paramilitary operatives and whose offices were infiltrated by FBI agents during the Central America sanctuary movement. "They use these strategies to develop fear, to create a chilling effect."

In such a climate, says Sanbrano, who is also a leader in several national coalitions, including the Latino Congreso and the We Are America Coalition, "priority number one is challenging this fear by helping people understand their rights, by letting them know about this thing called the Constitution that says we can speak out and question immoral laws. Priority two is changing those laws." Sanbrano attends weekly meetings with church and other Los Angeles groups planning to continue the sanctuary tradition started in churches like the late Father Luis Olivares's La Placita church, where immigrants received food, housing and protection from immigration officials. During her travels across the country, Sanbrano says, she has encountered numerous church and community members who are preparing for the possibility that, rather than reform laws and legalize the more than 12 million undocumented immigrants like Arellano, Congress will create laws that further facilitate their exploitation. And some believe even worse things may transpire.

Nativo Lopez, head of Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, a California-based association engaged in advocacy and organizing as well as legal and social services, says he already sees the effects of the more repressive immigration policies. "Since the marches, our offices are getting calls daily from people whose homes have been raided, from the families of workers who've been captured," says Lopez, who is also one of the key members of the recently formed National Alliance for Immigrant Rights, a grouping of more than 400 organizations calling for an end to deportations and roundups and for full legalization of all immigrants.

Lopez has several fears about what may happen if the crackdown intensifies. The DHS is poised to implement new regulations for so-called "no match" letters, which are sent to employers by the Social Security Administration, or the DHS informing them of inconsistencies between government records and the information provided by workers. These letters are commonly used by employers as grounds for dismissal or to deny workers their rights. Lopez and Hermandad have started laying the groundwork for workplace committees to defend against the threats posed by the new regulations.

Echoing concerns about the melding of migration and national security in Mexico and other parts of Latin America, activistas in the United States are cognizant of the unique problems posed to the movimiento by the rise of a national security state here. And like the millions of Mexicans organizing against what they consider fraudulent elections and increased government repression just a stone's throw across the militarized border, activistas here face colossal challenges. But rather than succumb to what they consider repression disguised as the defense of freedom since 9/11, Yañez, Arellano and many other leaders in the movimiento respond by opting to use hope, faith and good strategy in their own defense--in the process translating and defining "freedom" into and on their own terms.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061113/lovato

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:29 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is a wake-up call for more oversight over our unregulated testing industry. This pdf file presents a better image than what appears below.

-Angela

SATs Scored in Error by Test Companies Roil Admissions Process
By David Glovin and David Evans

Nov. 3, 2006 (Bloomberg) -- Jerry Lee Faine Elementary School in Dothan, Alabama, starts each day with two hours of reading and vocabulary. After that, there's arithmetic. "If you can read, you can do anything," says Principal Deloris Potter, a spry woman of 59 who has run the school since 2002.

Potter, trusting the work of her teachers, was confident of passing grades in April 2005 as students began two weeks of mandatory standardized testing in reading and math. That July, state education officials told Potter her school had failed the Alabama Reading and Mathematics Test. The state warned it might fire teachers if scores didn't improve, she says. A dozen students transferred after the substandard rating. Faculty morale plunged.

"We felt like dogs," says Charlotte Adams, a reading specialist at the school.

In February 2006, the state said Jerry Lee Faine Elementary had passed. Harcourt Assessment Inc., a unit of London-based Reed Elsevier Plc and one of the world's largest test companies, had improperly graded the exam.

The snafu is at least the 30th time since 2000 that San Antonio-based Harcourt Assessment, which also wrote the exam, has made errors such as improper scoring, faulty instructions and questions with more than one answer.

Harcourt isn't alone. Other companies are constructing flawed tests, administering them improperly and scoring them incorrectly, according to lawsuits and education department records in 15 states.
SAT Error
In March, Pearson Assessments, a unit of London-based Pearson Plc, the world's biggest educational publisher, had to explain to high schoolers across the U.S. that it had erred in scoring about 5,000 SAT college entrance exams because its scanners couldn't read answer sheets that had expanded from humidity.

The next month, education officials in Minnesota discovered a separate issue with answer sheets that Pearson Assessments had created for a state-mandated exam. At least 500,000 people taking tests from 2000 through 2006 -- from Nevada third graders to aspiring teachers in many states -- were victims of test company mistakes, documents show.

"The errors we've seen from testing companies are probably just the tip of the iceberg," says David Berliner, 68, Regents' Professor of Education at Arizona State University in Tempe, who has written more than 200 articles, books and book chapters about education and served as president of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association. "State education departments often lack the ability to adequately supervise these companies."

Millions of Tests
The U.S. is in a testing frenzy. Students in the 92,816 American public schools will take at least 45 million standardized reading and math exams this year. That will jump to 56 million in the 2007-08 school year, when states begin testing science as part of the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law, the most comprehensive education overhaul in half a century.
Beyond No Child, tens of millions of additional tests assess college hopefuls, certify future stockbrokers and even evaluate preschoolers. With the stakes for making the grade so high for so many, errors by test companies have dramatic consequences.

Joseph Conigliaro lost his Pennsylvania teaching job after Princeton, New Jersey-based Educational Testing Service, the world's biggest standardized test company, incorrectly scored three of his licensing exams. ETS, which will pay $11.1 million to 4,100 teachers who were falsely failed, called the error an "anomaly."

'Growing Catastrophe'
Ryan Beck & Co. asked Linda Cutler to resign from a senior associate job at the securities firm after she and 1,881 other test takers were scored incorrectly last year on the Series 7 licensing exam for securities representatives.

"It's an exponentially growing catastrophe," says James Popham, an emeritus professor of education at University of California, Los Angeles, and author of 25 books on education. "No one knows how bad it is, and it's going to get worse."
Deputy U.S. Education Secretary Raymond Simon says states must better oversee test companies. "The whole teaching system is based on the results of those tests," Simon, 61, says. "If the integrity of the testing process is called into question, that brings into question the whole accountability system."

The national obsession with performance and measurement means a booming business for test-producing and grading companies. In 2005, CTB/McGraw-Hill, Educational Testing Service, Harcourt Assessment, Pearson Assessments and smaller firms generated $2.8 billion in revenue from testing and test preparation, according to Boston-based research firm Eduventures LLC. No Child tests alone produced about $500 million in annual revenue in 2005-06.

'Real Profits'
Along with creating exams, Harcourt Assessment, Pearson Assessments and companies such as White Plains, New York-based Haights Cross Communications Inc. sell mass-produced workbooks, practice tests and computer software that teachers use year-round to prepare students for No Child and other tests.

The burgeoning test preparation industry generated $1.7 billion in annual revenue last year. The $1.1 billion testing market and the $1.7 billion test prep business will grow by a combined 30 percent by the 2009-10 school year, Eduventures predicts.

For test companies, pitching schools to buy preparation materials after receiving a No Child contract is routine, says Robert Schaeffer, public education director at the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based non-profit group.

"It's standard business practice, the equivalent of razor companies' giving away razors so they can make money selling blades," he says. "It's where the real profits are."

Test Prep
Profit margins in test preparation are as much as seven times higher than they are for No Child tests, partly because there are no requirements for high-quality questions on practice exams. States leave it to schools and school districts to decide whether the test preparation materials they're buying are sound.

Haights Cross, publisher of the Buckle Down test preparation workbooks, reported operating margins of 21 percent in its test preparation division for the first half of 2006.

In comparison, No Child tests, which must be custom designed for almost every state, have pretax profit margins as low as 3 percent, says Kurt Landgraf, chief executive officer of Educational Testing Service. He says his not-for-profit company lost $2.6 million on a $236 million four-year No Child contract in California.

'Cutting Corners'
Richard Rizzo, chief financial officer of Measured Progress Inc., a Dover, New Hampshire-based nonprofit firm that produces No Child tests, says he expects to earn margins triple those of No Child exams by selling practice questions and tests that schools use to gear up for the actual exams. Getting a foot in the door with a No Child contract can also lead to sales of achievement or psychological tests not related to No Child.

"Companies could conceivably low-ball the customized test because they know they could go in and sell the off-the-shelf products with a 40-50 percent margin," says Rizzo, 62, referring to tests that aren't specially designed for individual states.
Whether or not they low-ball, companies often scrimp when they bid on No Child contracts, Eduventures analyst Tim Wiley says. Getting a contract involves the same process as selling supplies or cafeteria food to a school: A company submits what it expects to be a winning package. ``As with any bidding situation, it definitely requires a lot of cost cutting," Wiley says. "Or, in some cases, cutting corners."

In Florida, CTB/McGraw-Hill won part of the state's testing contract for 3,800 schools in 2005. To grade the essay portion, the Monterey, California-based unit of McGraw-Hill Cos. hired $10-an-hour workers from Kelly Services Inc., the second-largest U.S. provider of temporary employees, and other companies.

'Layed Off'
Among the 2,947 graders was a person who won the job while he was employed packing bags of potato chips for PepsiCo Inc.'s Frito-Lay unit, applications compiled by the Florida state senate show. Kelly spokeswoman Renee Walker declined to comment.

Another grader was a cook in an Orlando, Florida, diner. One essay evaluator wrote he was "layed off" from a clerical job after working as a janitor. He graduated from Ambassador University, a Worldwide Church of God-run school in Big Sandy, Texas, in 1997. The school shut down that same year. Another said that he majored in ``Phylosophy/Humanity'' at Mount Angel Seminary in St. Benedict, Oregon.
Steven Weiss, vice president for communications at McGraw- Hill, said in an e-mailed statement that the company had performed extremely well in scoring more than 90 million documents with a total of more than 755 million essay and short- answer questions during the past five years.
Florida, Chicago

CTB/McGraw-Hill, Harcourt Assessment and Pearson Assessments don't break down their revenue from No Child tests and preparation materials in regulatory filings. Public records from the Wyoming department of education show the state is paying Harcourt, which has a $21 million, four-year No Child contract, more than $120 per student each year. Of that, about half is for No Child tests, and the rest is for preparation materials and other testing products.

Schools in Okaloosa County, Florida, pay $9.50 per student for a series of preparation tests called Stanford Learning First, which Harcourt Assessment renamed Learnia. By comparison, Harcourt received $4.93 per child from the state of Florida in 2005 to develop questions for its No Child-mandated annual Comprehensive Assessment Test.

Harcourt Assessment's experience shows how winning a No Child bid can be a prelude to more sales. In 2004, Harcourt got a four-year, $44.5 million contract to develop and score Illinois's No Child exams. Chicago schools then began purchasing Harcourt materials, testing director Xavier Botana says.

Tremendous Pressure

The preparation products included Stanford Learning First practice tests that measured student progress as they prepared for No Child exams. In the 2005-06 school year, the district spent $1.8 million on Harcourt's new Stanford Learning First product.

Christine Rowland, a former teacher of English as a second language who now trains colleagues at Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, New York, says her pupils didn't learn more because of increased testing. Still, she relied on test preparation materials to help students pass the math test. The cost of failure was too high, she says.

"If I know they are going to test six things six weeks from now, that's what I'm going to teach," Rowland, 46, says. "It puts a tremendous amount of pressure on. The real fear is that it turns students off from learning."

Test companies, aware that Rowland and other teachers are being judged by how students do on No Child exams, are inundating schools with ads for preparation products such as practice tests, software and banks of sample questions. Often they say their materials are designed specifically to help students pass the state's No Child test.

'Test Anxiety'
``I'm getting mail from companies I've never heard of,'' says Susan Friedwald, head of teacher training at Public School 48 in the Bronx.

At Cracker Trail Elementary School in Sebring, Florida, 11- year-old Alexis Szoka took dozens of practice exams last year leading up to the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. She wound up a nervous wreck. "My daughter has such test anxiety, she can't take a test anymore," says Alexis's mother, Carol Szoka.

One exam measured whether Alexis understood vocabulary and another checked her spelling. The school tested how well she read and whether she knew math. Some tests compared her reading and math skills with those of other fourth graders. Alexis was evaluated on phonics, writing and her understanding of text on a computer. Most tests were given two, three or four times a year. Teachers gave chapter tests in reading and math and benchmark tests throughout the year to see whether Alexis was progressing.

'Spray-And-Pray'
Andrew Lethbridge, Cracker Trail's vice principal, says one test gave fourth graders practice in filling in answer sheet bubbles on other tests. The materials came from divisions of Harcourt Assessment, Pearson Assessments and smaller, privately held companies.

"It was never like this," says Carol Szoka, who has two grown children who went through the same schools in Sebring, which is 85 miles (137 kilometers) south of Orlando. "They had an achievement test. They just took it. They weren't prepped."
Richard Demeri, Cracker Trail's principal, says test preparation materials have helped his students. Seven years ago, the school was given a grade of C by the state. Now, with test scores higher, the school has an A from the state and is no longer on probation.

"There's very little spray-and-pray teaching going on -- where you spray everybody and pray they get it," he says. The school uses test results to analyze each student's progress. ``It's much more individualized now,'' he says. Even if Demeri's students are prepared to take No Child tests, two Florida state senators question whether CTB/McGraw- Hill has qualified people to grade them.

Sports Science
Senators Walter "Skip'' Campbell and Leslie "Les" Miller Jr. sued the state education department and CTB/McGraw-Hill earlier this year to obtain applications of test graders. The department had refused to release the applications, citing confidentiality. CTB/McGraw-Hill settled the suit by providing copies of the scorers' personnel files with personal identifying information removed.

CTB/McGraw-Hill's $82 million, three-year Florida contract requires a scorer to have a bachelor's degree in mathematics, reading, science, education or a related field. On its Web site, the Florida Department of Education assures parents that graders of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test are professional, trained scorers.

Personal Trainer

Information the senate obtained shows one grader had an associate's degree, which is below a bachelor's, from the University of Delhi's School of Correspondence Courses and Continuing Education in Delhi, India.

She worked as a $7.50-an-hour cashier at a duty-free shop at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago before being hired to grade exams, according to the settlement documents. CTB/McGraw- Hill now says this person never scored exams.
A personal trainer with a degree in sports science from the University of Leipzig in Germany also graded essays, as did a convicted shoplifter who graduated from West Virginia University with a degree in physical education, the applications show. A person from Hungary wrote he was a ``pyshical education'' major. A physical education major from Methodist College in Fayetteville, North Carolina, wrote that she had attended "Methidist College."

McGraw-Hill's Weiss said its scorers from the University of Delhi met the requirements for a bachelor's degree. "Individuals must undergo a comprehensive training process before becoming qualified to score," Weiss wrote. "Scorers must maintain performance quality throughout the process."

Spelling Not a Requirement

CTB/McGraw-Hill spokeswoman Kelley Carpenter says the company subjects scorers to a rigorous three- to five-day training program. Next year, at Florida's request, the company will ensure that scorers have appropriate backgrounds for the subjects they grade, she says.

"They are constantly monitored,'' she says. ``And if they don't match the quality performance standards, they're not retained as scorers."
Carpenter says spelling errors on an application don't disqualify someone from being hired as a scorer. "Spelling in and of itself is not a requirement," she says.

When Deputy Education Secretary Simon is shown misspellings on applications of Florida scorers, he says he would demand excellence. "It's absolutely important that the integrity of the scorers is something the companies would be proud of and feel comfortable with," he says. "I can't imagine they would feel comfortable with a non-speller."

No Oversight
Cornelia Orr, head of the Florida Office of Assessment and Performance, says she reviewed about 25 percent of the grader applications. ``I felt like CTB had minimally met our expectations,'' she says. ``There are ways they can improve.''
One reason for the testing foul-ups and their dire effects is that there's no federal oversight of the testing industry. When the U.S. Congress authorized the No Child law it didn't create an agency to evaluate whether the companies making and selling the exams do an adequate job. Each state oversees its own test contractor.

Roderick Paige, who ran the No Child program as U.S. education secretary from 2001 to 2004, says the law is a good one. He says his concern is that testing may not be done accurately and competently. Paige, 73, says he summoned top executives from 20 testing companies to a conference room at the U.S. Department of Education on Feb. 20, 2003, and demanded better performance.

'Making Mistakes'
In 2005, the Education Department's inspector general announced plans to study whether there's a need for federal review to detect and prevent errors. The study isn't yet under way, spokeswoman Catherine Grant says.

"We've got to get better testing producers,'' says Paige, who's now chairman of Chartwell Education Group LLC, a Washington-based school consulting company. "They're making mistakes."

Harcourt Assessment is making the most errors, according to records in 15 state education departments. In addition to erroneously failing Jerry Lee Faine Elementary, Harcourt wrongly flunked three other Alabama schools because of its grading snafu. It mistakenly passed 10 Alabama schools that should have failed, the state said.

`Shortcuts'
In Connecticut, Harcourt Assessment reported the wrong reading test scores for 355 high school students in 51 districts last year. The state fined the company $80,000. In Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts and Virginia, Harcourt made errors on No Child tests and achievement tests given to measure how students compared with one another. States fined the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"Employees took shortcuts," Harcourt Assessment Senior Vice President Robin Gunn wrote in a May 28, 2004, letter to Hawaii school principals, promising stricter oversight. Gunn has since left the company.

Hawaii hired a not-for-profit firm, Washington-based American Institutes for Research, to develop and score the tests after discovering more errors on Harcourt's 2005 exams. Illinois also replaced Harcourt in the middle of its contract; Connecticut, Massachusetts and Virginia didn't renew their contracts with the company.

Nevada fired Harcourt in 2004, after the company mistakenly failed hundreds of students, gave inflated scores to thousands of others and produced tests with missing pages, misspellings and flawed instructions, according to Nevada Education Department records.

Fined and Fired
"It was errors, one after the other, and not to a single student but to a large number,'' says Karlene Lee, the assistant superintendent in Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas. "In education, we don't have the luxury to say that 2 percent doesn't matter. Every child has to be accurate."

Nevada fined Harcourt Assessment $425,000 in 2002, before firing the company.

Harcourt's approximately $290 million in revenue last year was 3 percent of Reed Elsevier's sales, according to company filings. Reed Elsevier reported its profit increased 62 percent in the six months ended on June 30 to 217 million pounds ($403 million) compared with a year earlier. The company's shares rose 7.7 percent this year to 588 pence on Nov. 2.
Harcourt Assessment hired a new CEO, Michael Hansen, who took over in July after serving as executive vice president for corporate development at Guetersloh, Germany-based Bertelsmann AG, Europe's largest media company. Hansen, 45, says his company won't slip up again. He blames errors on the enormous demand for made-to-order state tests.

'Sacred Obligation'
"You went from an industry that was largely standardized to an industry that was highly, highly customized,'' Hansen says during an interview in a conference room in his San Antonio office suite, which is adjacent to the test production work floor. "Our most sacred obligation is that the test results are accurate and that they are timely."

Last year privately held Measurement Inc., a Durham, North Carolina-based test development and scoring company, wrongly failed 890 students out of the 5,461 it tested on Ohio's high school graduation exams. The company says it scored the exams correctly and then erred when it determined the students' grades based on the number of questions they answered correctly.

"We had a really spotless reputation," Senior Vice President Mike Bunch says. "This was just devastating to us."
Pearson Assessments grades 40 million exams each year. The company has the high-profile job of scoring the SAT, which more than 3,000 colleges and universities use as a gauge for admitting students.

'Hard to Get Perfection'
Pearson discovered its SAT scoring error in January after two students asked that their results be hand-scored. Score changes affected about 1 percent of the October 2005 test takers, says the New York-based College Board, a nonprofit group that represents 5,000 colleges and oversees the exam. Before most college admission decisions were announced, the College Board re-reported the roughly 4,400 scores that had been underscored.

"When you do 12 million tests a year, a lot of people are involved in that,'' College Board President Gaston Caperton says. "It's very hard to get perfection."

Shane Fulton, a lean youth who played soccer and tennis at George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania, knows the pain of an incorrect score. Fulton had his sights on attending New York University or Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

'Something Was Wrong'

In June 2005, at the end of his junior year at the Quaker- run high school, he took his first SAT. He earned a score of 1,910 out of 2,400 on the three-part test, which assesses mathematics, reading and writing. Not satisfied with his performance on the math portion, he took the test a second time in October. He was shocked when the grade came back as a 1,330.
"I knew that something was wrong," says Fulton, 19, of Yardley, Pennsylvania. He asked to have his exam graded by hand. When the results were returned more than a month later, his score was actually a 1,720, or 390 points higher than initially reported.

By then, Fulton had suffered restless nights, sought sleeping pills from his parents and broken down in tears because of the uncertainty surrounding the scores and his future. Adding to his anxiety, he'd taken the SAT a third time because he didn't yet know his results on the second test. On that one, he earned an 1,850.

"Every year, there's more of an emphasis on how you do," says Fulton, who's attending Northeastern University in Boston and is suing Pearson Assessments and the College Board over the error. "I was thinking I wouldn't get into any of the colleges I applied to."

$50 Million Investment
Mistakes may soon cost Pearson Assessments and other test companies business. Educational Testing Service wants to bring scoring in-house to reduce the chance of errors. ETS's Landgraf has directed the company to invest $50 million so it can expand its scoring operation within three years. He estimates that will produce $33 million in new annual revenue. Pearson shares gained 12 percent this year as of Nov. 2, to 769.5 pence.

Having ETS grade his exam didn't help Pennsylvania teacher Conigliaro, one of the 4,100 false failures on the Praxis test. Forty-four states require the Praxis to evaluate teaching skill and knowledge in a particular field. ETS developed the Praxis and then, in Conigliaro's case, scored it incorrectly -- multiple times.

'Too Embarrassed'
Conigliaro, 55, an engineer and former machine shop owner, started teaching seven years ago as an intern at Mountain View Junior/Senior High School in Kingsley, Pennsylvania. His employment there was contingent on his passing the Praxis to get final certification. He took the exam in April 2003 and was told he'd failed. He took it again and got a second failing score. He took it a third and a fourth time and again flunked.
``I was missing by one or two points each time,'' he says.

Conigliaro was fired from his teaching job and wound up working as a bartender. ``I didn't want to leave the house for a year and a half because I was too embarrassed,'' he says.

ETS notified Conigliaro in July 2004 that there were scoring errors on his tests and that he had actually passed. In a press release that month the company cited a ``statistical anomaly'' in the scoring of nine exams from January 2003 to April 2004 and apologized to test takers. ETS spokesman Tom Ewing declined to comment further.

According to court papers by teachers who later sued ETS in federal court in New Orleans, the firm didn't start an investigation of its scoring of short essays until an unnamed state challenged the results. In March, the company agreed to pay $11.1 million to the test takers to settle the lawsuit.

'I'm Bitter'
Conigliaro, who sued and was part of the settlement, says he would have succeeded on at least three of the four exams he was told he'd failed. ``Yes, I'm bitter,'' says Conigliaro, who, after passing the Praxis and getting his license, now teaches business and accounting at Blue Ridge High School in New Milford, Pennsylvania. ``I was just about to get tenure, and I had to start all over again."

Errors can occur in the earliest stages of the test-making process and then snowball. In 2003, the Minnesota Department of Education found flaws in questions proposed by Maple Grove, Minnesota-based Data Recognition Corp., a privately held firm that provides testing for eight states. Minnesota school officials reviewed some questions, which are known as items. About 6 percent had no correct answers or multiple correct answers.

'Undermine Credibility'
"There are other concerns about item quality with another 60-70 percent,'' testing director Reginald Allen wrote in 2003 after the company challenged the state's decision not to renew its contract. The flawed test questions didn't make it onto state exams.

Company lawyer Dwight Rabuse declined to comment except to say that the state later hired a Data Recognition staffer to replace Allen. Minnesota Education Department spokesman Randy Wanke declined to comment. Minnesota now contracts with Pearson Assessments to provide its state tests.

"When you have an education reform agenda that's relying so heavily on standard tests to ensure school quality, it doesn't take so many problems to undermine credibility," says Thomas Toch, co-director of Washington-based research firm Education Sector, who wrote a 2006 report on test errors.

Executives at testing companies say they strive for perfection in the face of state demands for new tests each year, in at least two different subjects and for seven different grades.

Potential for Errors
Stuart Kahl, president and founder of Measured Progress, says the industry uses dozens of quality checks as companies draft, edit, print and deliver exams; retrieve, scan and read papers; and calculate, compare and convert raw scores into test grades. The process may take two years from start to finish.

"There's no question there are tremendous demands placed on the industry,'' Kahl says. "Obviously, when you redo things every year, you have tremendous potential for errors."

Former Harcourt Assessment President Jeff Galt says state education departments are sometimes to blame for errors that they require their testing contractors to assume responsibility for. He points to Connecticut, which is using Measurement Inc., its third testing contractor since 2003. The state got rid of Harcourt and then parted ways with CTB/McGraw-Hill.
``You have to wonder, Is the problem with the testing company or with the department?'' says Galt, 50, who now teaches business at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio. Connecticut Education Department spokesman Henry Garcia declined to comment.

On Probation
Harcourt Assessment's inability to follow instructions from Alabama is what cost Jerry Lee Faine Elementary its good name.
After the school was notified of its failure to make the required adequate yearly progress, the state placed it in the category of School Improvement, as probation is called under the No Child program. Newspapers publicized the designation, and parents won permission to transfer children to other schools.

"People will not move into this community," says Alfreda Mays-Rogers, whose grandchild is in first grade at the school.
The Alabama Department of Education summoned principal Potter 100 miles north to Montgomery, she says. Officials demanded more teacher training and insisted on additional reading instruction. Potter says she researched curricula used by other schools and dissected years of test data to figure out why her pupils hadn't passed. Nothing stood out.
During Potter's crisis of confidence, Kirby Hubbard, the testing director in Etowah County, about 250 miles to the north, discovered that Harcourt Assessment had miscalculated his schools' No Child results.
'Mad, Mad, Mad'

Harcourt had tallied the scores of students who'd been absent during part of the exam week, failing to follow Alabama's instruction to count the scores of only students who took the entire multipart test, state Education Superintendent Joseph Morton said in a Nov. 8, 2005, letter to Harcourt. That same type of error affected Jerry Lee Faine Elementary.
When the state told Potter her school had actually passed on Feb. 9, 2006, she took to the school intercom and made the announcement. Teachers ran into the hallways, cheering.

``We were happy, happy, happy,'' Potter says. "But you turn to the other side, we were mad, mad, mad."
Along with Potter, educators in Florida, Nevada and across the U.S. have to live with test company mistakes every year. Boston College emeritus professor George Madaus and researcher Kathleen Rhoades say there should be independent oversight of crucial exams.

"There's so much error in these products,'' Rhoades says.

'Make Testing Better'

Madaus, co-author of a 2003 study on test errors, envisions an impartial federally financed panel that would monitor state testing programs to ensure they're well crafted and used correctly. Such a board would analyze why there are errors and how they can be minimized. It also may offer a seal of approval on the test preparation products flooding the market, which can generate such a big chunk of a test company's earnings.
``This is not anti-testing,'' Madaus says. ``This is an attempt to make testing better.''
Potter tries not to be bitter. She notes with pride how her school has now passed the state test for two consecutive years. She has a message for test companies. ``They're hurting students more than anything else,'' she says. ``Please don't make that mistake on students. That's a reflection on our school, on my students, on my teachers. That's a reflection on me.''
It's also a reflection on the $2.8 billion test industry, which profits from selling materials to prepare students for high-stakes exams it has a hard time getting right.

To contact the reporters on this story: To contact the reporters for this story: David Evans in Los Angeles davidevans@bloomberg.net David Glovin in New York at dglovin@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: November 3, 2006 00:05 EST

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:25 AM 1 comments Links to this post

“The development closes the chapter on the "Texas miracle," where six Houston Independent School District employees were reprimanded for underreporting at least 3,000 dropouts districtwide.” -Angela

Nov. 2, 2006, 9:30AM
Ex-HISD worker in dropout scandal cleared before trial
County admits it can't prove case, drops felony count

By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4304653.html

Harris County prosecutors drop charge in dropout case
By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE

Harris County prosecutors dropped their case Wednesday against a former
Houston ISD employee accused of falsifying Sharpstown High School's
dropout records, saying new details would make proving their case
difficult.

Two days before a jury was to be selected in the case against Kenneth
Cuadra, Assistant District Attorney Terese Buess asked state District
Judge Brock Thomas to dismiss the felony charge of tampering with a
government document.

"Our analysis concluded that it would be impossible to rebut Cuadra's
defenses," Buess said in a statement.

The development closes the chapter on the "Texas miracle," where six
Houston Independent School District employees were reprimanded for
underreporting at least 3,000 dropouts districtwide. Cuadra, the only
person criminally charged in connection with the scandal, was accused
of removing the names of 30 students — mostly Hispanic freshmen and
sophomores — from Sharpstown High School's dropout report.

Prosecutors will not seek any other charges.

"The statute of limitations ran out last October. ... It's over," Buess
said.

Cuadra, 33, could have faced up to 20 years in prison if convicted. He
sold his home to help pay legal fees that have accumulated since his
indictment a year ago.

"We're just so grateful," Cuadra said late Wednesday. "Mission
accomplished."

He referred other questions to his wife, Lorett Cuadra.

This lone criminal case may never had gotten so far if Cuadra had
testified to the grand jury last year, Buess said.

Conversations with the defense attorneys this week made the prosecution
doubt that they could prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, she
said. She would not provide details.

"There was new information that they sat down and provided," Buess said
in a telephone interview Wednesday. "This is the first time this
particular information had become available to us as far as timing on
what he claimed he had done."

Cuadra's statement

In a February 2003 statement included in the court file, Cuadra stated
that "some of Sharpstown's administrators approached him about cleaning
up the school's student data for a report to the district, and he went
along but then changed his mind and put the data back the way he found
it."

A few months later, Cuadra told a supervisor that "he did not change
the dropout data but that he gave his password to someone else who must
have done it." He later said he removed about half the names, but then
replaced the data the next day, according to court records.

In her written statement, Buess said rebutting Cuadra's defense would
be difficult, "particularly because the local database used in 2002 by
HISD at Sharpstown High School had no internal audit tracking system
that could conclusively document which user ID had altered the local
database information or to determine exactly when any such alterations
had been made."

Defense lawyer Matt Hennessy and his co-counsel John Parras praised
Buess' decision.

"I'm gratified that we had such a conscientious, hard-working
prosecutor who was willing to look at all the facets of the case,"
Hennessy said. "There are times when you should keep all your powder
dry for the battle to come. This was not one of those times. The
prosecutor saw the evidence and did the right thing."

Lorett Cuadra called Buess' decision to drop the case "bittersweet,"
adding that the family had been looking forward to their day in court.
Jury selection was scheduled for Friday; testimony was to begin Monday.

Name has been cleared

"It's going to be the first night in four years that Kenneth's going to
sleep without facing jail. His name has been cleared, and all the glory
goes to God," Lorett Cuadra said.

Cuadra rejected several deals that would have allowed him to avoid jail
time by pleading either guilty or no contest. Conceding to that — even
if it just carried one hour of community service — would be dishonest
and set a bad example for the couple's 6-year-old son and 8-year-old
daughter, Lorett Cuadra said.

"We could not go through life and have our kids ask us one day, 'Why
did you compromise if you were never guilty?' " she said. "It would
have been a lot easier for me to say, 'Bow down to this.' Easy is not
the way to go. So many people settle. So many people say, 'They're
stronger than me.' ... We couldn't do it."

Lorett Cuadra said her husband was never asked to testify against
higher-ranking HISD officials.

"They were just trying to get a scapegoat," she said.

Houston Federation of Teachers President Gayle Fallon said her group
will pay up to $35,000 of Cuadra's legal bills because the case was
dismissed.

It's a shame that the state forced the family to waste so much money
fighting the case, she said.

"I think that the DA never had a case and that it's just very sad that
Kenny had to go through this," Fallon said.

HISD spokesman Terry Abbott would not comment on the specifics. The
school district took action three years ago — suspending Cuadra without
pay for 10 days and transferring him to another department.

"We moved forward a long time ago," he said. "We used the awful events
of a few years ago at Sharpstown to galvanizing the public around the
idea that we all have to do something about the dropout problem."

The district has since launched an aggressive dropout recovery program
that has included a conference and annual walks through Houston
neighborhoods to find children who are not attending school.

"This certainly focused the public's attention on the dropout issue and
rightfully so," Abbott said.


'There's no victory here'

Robert Kimball, a former Sharpstown assistant principal who was
expected to testify in the case, said the decision is anything but a
victory.

"He suffered for 3 1/2 , four years. There's no victory here," he said.
"It's been really hard on his family and his children. He's been
suffering, and it's been emotionally draining on him and his family."

He said he admires the family's tenacity.

"If there's any victory, it's the Cuadras exposing the very poor
decisions of the school district," he said. "It was smart of Kenneth
Cuadra not to settle. ... He stood on principle. I support him 100
percent."

jennifer.radcliffe@chron.com

Brought to you by the HoustonChronicle.com

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

I just came across this report titled, "A Line in the Sand: Confronting the Threat at the Southwest Border (pdf)" prepared by the majority staff of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on investigations, Michael T. McCaul, Chairman.

Since it's figuring into deliberations at the federal level, it's definitely worth reading.

Angela

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

Seeing vouchers for what they are
by Steve Blow

05:27 AM CDT on Wednesday, October 4, 2006
To be honest, I'm not all that enthused about writing this column. Seems we've trod this ground before.

But when the opposition is so relentless and the stakes are so high, it's foolish to let tedium distract.

So let's take a moment to counter the $400,000 advertising campaign now aimed at you ˆ the one touting "school choice." And, of course, that's code for "private school vouchers."

Once again, this is the high-dollar handiwork of San Antonio vouchers proponent ˆ no, that's too mild ˆ let's say "vouchers zealot" James Leininger.

This fellow just won't take "no" for an answer. Over and over, the Texas Legislature has rejected his voucher schemes ˆ taking the wiser course of raising standards for public schools, not draining funds from them.

In the last legislative elections, you recall, Dr. Leininger tried an end run by pouring campaign money toward the defeat of five key voucher opponents.

His $2.5 million investment succeeded in ousting two of them.

The strategy this time is a little class warfare. In radio ads and on billboards, he's trying to stir up the wrath of poor folks.

I spotted one of the billboards on the edge of downtown yesterday. It shows a nice, upstanding black family and says: "All families deserve a choice, Not just the rich. Give parents a choice, Give children a chance."

That's the wedge Dr. Leininger and his Texans For School Choice hope to use in getting a voucher pilot project approved when the Legislature convenes in January. The plan would take money from public schools and give it to low-income families for private-school tuition.

But let's look at three significant issues overlooked by this latest campaign:

No. 1. Parents already have a choice. Every school district of any size offers a variety of options ˆ magnet schools, specialty career or arts schools, talented-and-gifted schools, etc. Add to that the 313 charter public schools across the state, which offer free, open enrollment to students, no matter where they live.

And on top of all that, by law, no student is trapped in a low-performing school. Districts are required to offer transfers from any school that failed to meet federal academic standards for two years.

No. 2. Parents have choices, but few exercise them. So why gamble on vouchers? Where is this competitive pressure that is supposed to create great schools?

Nationally, only 1 to 2 percent of eligible students transfer from low-performing schools. It was 1.1 percent last year in Dallas and less than 1 percent in Fort Worth.

The excellent, rigorous KIPP TRUTH Academy ˆ a free charter school in South Dallas ˆ began the school year with empty seats. Not enough parents applied to even fill the school.

No. 3. There is no magic to private schools. Voucher proponents love to deride "government schools" as hopeless and inept. They love to portray private schools as wholesome, sure-fire successes.

The truth is that, overall, there's very little difference. A huge federal study released this summer found that students of like economic backgrounds perform almost identically whether in public or private schools.

And those charter schools? They were supposed to be the magic solution, allowing private operation of tax-funded schools.

Results have been lackluster across the state. A few, like the KIPP schools, have been great. Most have been so-so. And far too many have been "academically unacceptable" ˆ 13 percent of them last year, compared to just 4 percent of traditional public schools.

Listen, there is always room for improvement in our public schools. And we shouldn't be afraid of innovation.

But don't buy the baloney that all of public education is in disarray. Or that there are miracle fixes.

Quality public education has been one of our nation's greatest achievements. It's part of what has made us strong, united and truly a land of opportunity.

Let's build on that success, not dismantle it.

E-mail sblow@dallasnews.com


Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/localnews/columnists/sblow/stories/DN-blow_04met.ART.North.Edition1.3dd078a.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:10 AM 0 comments Links to this post

More news about the for-profit Community Education Partners (CEP) group in Florida. -Angela
Turnaround school in district's control
By Christina DeNardo

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Thursday, October 12, 2006

The private company that runs an alternative school is turning over control
to the school district following complaints about student violence at the
Riviera Beach school.

Schools Superintendent Art Johnson had asked the board to take over Oak
Grove Academy earlier this week, but he rescinded the request Wednesday
after Community Education Partners agreed to terminate this year's $4
million contract.

Today, district officials will go to the school to meet with administrators
and begin assessing staff. CEP will leave the campus Oct. 19, the end of the
grading period.

It's unclear what the district plans to do with the school, the staff and
the 700-capacity school it is building to house Oak Grove next spring. It
could keep current programs intact, develop its own or send the school's 166
students to other alternative schools, including those run by another
private firm, White Hat Management.

District officials would not discuss the settlement, citing the agreement,
which prohibits both parties from commenting publicly.

CEP Chief Executive Officer Randle Richardson said the district's move
surprised him. The 10-year-old company has 13 clients nationwide. Only one
other terminated a contract.

"We believe the dispute arose out of misunderstanding and miscommunication
on both sides," he said. "We believe we are offering a good program and have
the results to show it, but it's their call."

Oak Grove Academy, a turnaround school for middle- and high-school students
with low FCAT scores and behavior problems, opened in January with great
optimism. The all-male school is designed to limit distractions, and
students wear uniforms. Backpacks are not allowed, and every student is
searched. Metal detectors ensure no one brings in weapons.

Alleged incidences of verbal abuse, staff turnover and violence - including
a student choking a teacher and a student beating a classmate - spurred the
district to seek a takeover.

The district's crime statistics show that many high schools report violence.
For the 2004-05 school year, there were 803 violent acts against people,
3,099 fights and 405 weapon possessions.

Oak Grove administrators say a few months isn't enough time to change
behavior.

Despite the students' troubled backgrounds, some parents say the school's a
godsend. Debra Upperman, a single mother who lives in West Palm Beach,
credits the teachers and the school's small classes for improving her son's
grades and confidence.

"The faculty made a connection with him. And if the kids feel a connection
with the teachers, they're better behaved," she said. "The school just
opened. How can you snatch the rug under them when they just started? I
don't think that's fair."

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/pbccentral/content/local_news/epaper/2006/10/12/s3b_skoakbridge_1012.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:41 PM 0 comments Links to this post

by John Young--Waco Tribune Herald
Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Diane Trautman is running for the statehouse. By appearances, Joe Crabb couldn't care less.

No, Crabb isn’t some voter who can't get his head off of "Dancing with the Stars." He's the incumbent.

I say "by appearances," because observers in his district say Crabb, R-Atascocita, hasn’t made many.

By contrast, Trautman, a career educator, has an army knocking on doors in the Houston-area district.

Why is she campaigning hard and he hardly campaigning? It’s probably because the seven-term Republican has one of those districts that is as gift-wrapped for his purposes like candied fruit. He won last time with nearly 70 percent of the vote. Yet now many observers consider Crabb's district in play.

Why? Because of a strong challenger, enthusiastic volunteers and a new creature called the Texas Parent PAC.

Two years ago, after beating heads against a wall of big campaign contributions, a group of PTA spouses, educators and others who support public schools decided to fight smart. The Parent PAC does what other PACs do. It seeks like-minded candidates and offers them resources and the weight of assembled interests.

The competition is stiff. James Leininger, the second-biggest political donor in Texas, has donated millions of dollars to candidates. Gov. Rick Perry tops the list. Leininger’s single-issue fixation: to siphon school dollars into vouchers to private and church schools.

Right out of the box this March in the primary, the Parent PAC had a huge smackdown with Leininger when he targeted incumbents like Republicans Tommy Merritt of Longview, Charlie Geren of Fort Worth and Delwin Jones of Lubbock. They've refused to play along with GOP leadership’s designs on school vouchers.

At the same time, the Parent PAC assisted in one of the biggest political upsets in recent years when Arlington educator Diane Patrick unseated state Rep. Kent Grusendorf, the GOP point man on all things educational.

Merritt, Geren and Jones survived the high-dollar hit job on them. Combined with the defeat of Grusendorf, it was a resounding opening salvo for Parent PAC.

This election, Parent PAC has endorsed a large slate of candidates — split evenly between Republicans and Democrats (www.txparentpac.com).

Contributions already are projected to lift it to within the state’s top 25 PACs. Though not on a par, it at least shares the rarefied air enjoyed by PACs like the Texas Medical Association, Texas Realtors and home builders.

Parent PAC board chairwoman Carolyn Boyle said funding from her organization helps with TV spots, campaign consultants, direct mail and live phone banks."

"But we’re not a corporate PAC that just writes a check," said Boyle, "We're providing people power."

That sounds suspiciously like the democratic process.

That vibrant process has been bled to ghoulish gray by big-dollar bidders and partisan machinations like redistricting.

Joe Crabb was the go-to man in the Texas House when Tom DeLay gave Perry and worker bees orders to redraw congressional districts a second time in a decade. Heck, he ought to be set for life. Why campaign?

Actually, he ought to because Trautman is the real deal — a former teacher and principal who most recently taught future administrators at Stephen F. Austin.

One of her major issues is how overemphasis on testing bleeds education of its vitality.

"I got the feeling that before we could make a difference for our children, we had to make a difference in Austin," she said by cell phone from an early voting location.

She may not win for all of the candied fruit stored up for the incumbent. But with the help of a newborn PAC, she will have reminded even him that people power still works.

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

Find this article at:
http://www.wacotrib.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2006/10/31/10312006wacyoung.html

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