Montgomery Aims to Fill In Gaps for Teen Immigrants

By Daniel de Vise

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 27, 2007; B01

Gerber Lisama started school at age 6. At 7, he was working in Salvadoran cornfields. Toiling in the morning, studying in the afternoon, he needed three years to complete first grade.

Now 17, Lisama is a freshman at Gaithersburg High School. But after a year in the United States, he speaks almost no English, writes choppily in Spanish and cannot compute beyond simple arithmetic.

Yesterday, Montgomery County school officials announced a pilot program tailored to the specific needs of students such as Lisama: recent immigrants who have had little formal education although they are reaching the age when most native-born Americans graduate from high school.

"Over there, people don't think school is a big deal," Lisama said. "Even if people get their degree, there's no work."

The program, Students Engaged in Pathways to Achievement, would begin this summer at Wheaton High School, a campus serving a large immigrant population, and focus initially on about 15 students in their late teens. Students would be taught functional English, with an emphasis on career-specific vocabulary. Other classes would explore careers, including horticulture, cosmetology and hospitality. Students also would be taught to read and write fluently in their native Spanish.

The program confronts the realities facing teenage immigrants who escape poverty and upheaval in El Salvador and other Latin American nations for a better life in the Washington suburbs. They arrive unable to speak much English, unable to read or write well even in Spanish, with vast gaps in their formal education and too near adulthood to make up for lost schooling.

Lisama, who lives with a brother and a cousin in Montgomery Village, counts on his fingers the number of times he repeated the first, third and fifth grades in his Salvadoran village. He recalls odd lapses in his patchwork of an education; for one thing, he does not remember taking a social studies class, because the village school didn't offer one. He lived 10 months in the United States before enrolling in school, working full time as a mechanic to cover the cost of his journey.

He would like to earn a diploma and go to college. "I have to be positive," he said. But a more pressing goal is to learn enough English to move beyond fixing cars.

Hispanic leaders and parents approached the school board last spring with a request for three broad changes to address the achievement gap that has separated Hispanic students from whites and Asians, especially in high school. One was to better serve immigrants who arrive as teens with a limited formal education; the others were to increase Latino parent involvement and to improve the "competency" of school-system staff and programs in handling the Spanish language and the Latino culture.

Immigrants who enter U.S. schools with sparse English skills are typically steered into such programs as English for Speakers of Other Languages, where the goal is to teach students enough English to function in school and society.

This model falls apart, Hispanic leaders say, with older immigrants who have had little formal education. There isn't time for them to compensate for years of lost schooling, and the students know it. So they tend to focus on more practical goals.

"They want to get a job, they want to learn English, and they want a better life," said Michael Cohen, director for instructional programs in the Montgomery schools.

Antonio Quintanilla, 17, was an eighth-grader on paper when he left El Salvador for the United States last year. But his education was fraught with interruptions. His aunt held him back in the first and second grades to keep him in the same classes with a struggling cousin. He lost a year of schooling at age 12 to care for his dying father and tend the family's cattle. Upon his arrival at Gaithersburg High last year, Quintanilla tested at the second-grade level in math. He has since progressed to fourth grade.

Cohen and other Montgomery educators said they searched the nation's immigrant-rich school systems and found few examples of programs designed specifically for older teenage immigrants such as Lisama and Quintanilla.

The closest equivalent in Montgomery is called Multidisciplinary Education, Training and Support, or METS. About 340 students ages 9 and older are taught in small classes -- the goal is about 15 students -- by teachers who specialize in basic literacy, in lessons that employ simple terms, visual cues and body language. They also get help adjusting academically and socially to the school setting.

Fairfax County schools offer a similar program, and schools in the District offer a battery of courses to new immigrants that focus on life skills and interpersonal communication.

But immigrant leaders are dissatisfied with METS. Classes are too large and serve too broad a range of ages and educational attainments, said Candace Kattar, executive director of Identity Inc., a Gaithersburg nonprofit group serving the immigrant community. She faults the program, too, for accepting only students who report, in conversations or through school records, that they have missed two or more years of school.

An independent analysis of the program last year by the Latino Education Coalition, a new collaboration among local groups, found students enrolled in METS were dropping out at a rate of 40 to 50 percent in a single year at some schools.

"Basic things, like how to function in a school, overwhelm them," said Margaret Van Buskirk, an ESOL teacher at Gaithersburg High who is writing curriculum for the pilot program.

The $155,000 pilot program was approved as part of the school system's nearly $2 billion budget request for the fiscal year that begins in July and will go forward unless cut from the final spending plan. If successful, it would be expanded to other high schools, such as Gaithersburg, with large concentrations of Latin American immigrants.

"We don't rule out any options," said Karen Woodson, director of ESOL programs in the county school system. A high school diploma, she said, "is our ultimate goal. But let's keep some things in perspective. There may be cases where we know a high school diploma is not reasonable. So we want to provide meaningful options to them as well."

© 2007 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/26/AR2007032601813.html

Labels: immigration

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

I'm glad to see that this very important story appeared in the Chicago Tribune. I'm so glad that this is getting exposed. But how tragic for these children and their families. -Angela

TRIBUNE UPDATE
Texas reviews scandal-plagued juvenile prison system
By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent

March 26, 2007, 8:02 PM CDT

HOUSTON -- The sentences of many of the 4,700 delinquent youths now being held in Texas' juvenile prisons might have been arbitrarily and unfairly extended by prison authorities and thousands could be freed in a matter of weeks as part of a sweeping overhaul of the scandal-plagued juvenile system, state officials say.

Jay Kimbrough, a special master appointed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry to investigate the system after allegations surfaced that some prison officials were coercing imprisoned youths for sex, said he would assemble a committee to review the sentence of every youth in the system.

The goal, Kimbrough said, is to release any youth whose sentence was improperly extended without justification or in retaliation for filing complaints. In his initial review of sentences, Kimbrough said, he had found many questionable extensions, adding that some experts estimate that more 60 percent of the state's youthful inmates might be languishing under wrongful detention.

Such a mass emptying of a state's juvenile jails would be unprecedented, experts said.

Among the leading candidates for early release is Shaquanda Cotton, a 14-year-old black girl from the small east Texas town of Paris, who was sent to prison for up to 7 years for shoving a hall monitor at her high school while other young white offenders convicted of more serious crimes received probation in the town's courts.

Shaquanda's story was the subject of a March 12 Tribune article that triggered hundreds of Internet blog articles and thousands of message board postings and led to a nationwide letter-writing campaign to the Texas governor decrying perceived racial discrimination in her case.

Cotton, now 15, has been incarcerated at a youth prison in Brownwood, Texas, for the last year on a sentence that could run until her 21st birthday. But like many of the other youths in the system, she is eligible to earn earlier release if she achieves certain social, behavioral and educational milestones while in prison.

But officials at the Ron Jackson Correctional Complex have repeatedly extended Shaquanda's sentence because she refuses to admit her guilt and because she was found with contraband in her cell--an extra pair of socks.

"I do have an interest in that case," Kimbrough said. "Based on what I've already seen and heard, that's exactly the kind of thing I want to know more about, if that typifies in some way why sentences are being extended."

Will Harrell, executive director of the Texas chapter of the ACLU, attended a meeting in Austin on last Friday where Kimbrough outlined his sentence review plan and invited civil rights groups to nominate members to the special review panel.

"Everybody in the room thought we should take Shaquanda's case first," Harrell said, because of its high profile.

But if the teenager is released, Kimbrough noted, the decision will have nothing to do with whether she was the victim of racial discrimination in the schools and courtrooms of Paris, as civil rights groups have alleged. Instead, it will be based on whether she has been treated arbitrarily by prison officials since she has been incarcerated.

Texas' juvenile prison system, known as the Texas Youth Commission, was first rocked by scandal last month after revelations surfaced that two administrators at a youth prison in west Texas had allegedly coerced sex from inmates for years and that prison officials and local prosecutors chose not to pursue the cases.

Since then, the scandal has widened as reports surfaced of cover-ups and alleged sex abuse by guards and administrators at other prisons. More than a thousand investigations have now been opened. Meanwhile, Kimbrough discovered that 111 employees of the youth agency had felony arrests or convictions and another 437 had misdemeanor arrests or charges.

The top leadership of the youth commission was forced out, the board overseeing the agency resigned and Perry essentially placed the commission into receivership when he appointed Kimbrough to clean up the mess.

Texas state legislators are rushing to pass bills to overhaul the juvenile prison agency.

Civil rights advocates have long been concerned that Texas' system of indeterminate sentences for youths places too much discretion in the hands of prison authorities, who retain the power to hold or release youths at will. Now the sex scandal--and the concern that some victimized youths may have been threatened with longer detentions to keep them quiet--has prompted Kimbrough to examine the entire practice.

Nearly 90 percent of juveniles incarcerated inside Texas youth prisons were sent there on indeterminate sentences that could run as long as their 21st birthdays. But many of those inmates become eligible for release after serving only nine months, if prison authorities are satisfied that they have completed all the steps, or "phases," of an elaborate behavioral modification program.

"The system is wide open for abuse and corruption," said the ACLU's Harrell. "How difficult would it be for a 12-year-old kid to file a complaint on an assistant superintendent of a facility when that assistant superintendent is actually the one who is sexually abusing her and that same person gets to decide when she gets out? Basically the official gets to say, 'Comply and keep quiet or I'll keep you here until you're 21.' "

Harrell, who will serve on Kimbrough's sentence review panel, said the members intend to be careful not to release truly violent youths who ought to remain behind bars.

"If kids have behaved violently, then those are the ones that may very well have a justification for their sentence extension," Harrell said. "But most of the cases I have heard about have to do with petty instances, like Shaquanda's contraband socks."

The "phases" system also contains a built-in Catch-22 for youths, like Shaquanda, whose legal appeals are still making their way through the courts. One of the first phases that must be satisfied is a requirement that youths admit their guilt--an admission that would instantly compromise their appeals.

For his part, Kimbrough says he feels a sense of urgency about his review.

"As fast as we can do this, that's my goal," said Kimbrough, a former deputy attorney general. "Any time the government is holding somebody that ought not be held, that's urgent to me."

hwitt@tribune.com
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-070326juveniles,1,1122206.story?coll=chi-news-hed

Labels: abuse, prison

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:16 PM 0 comments Links to this post

"Although Swinford didn't elaborate on measures unlikely to make it out of his committee, he said he expects the House to consider two: a concurrent resolution telling the federal government to shape up on immigration enforcement and his House Bill 13, which in part would allow the governor to help law enforcement agencies pay for personnel, equipment and support for homeland security.

A 2001 state law allowing certain illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition at state universities could also be revisited."

-Angela

State lawmaker: Leave most immigration issues to the feds
Most bills might not pass constitutional muster.

By Juan Castillo, W. Gardner Selby
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Although once it seemed almost certain that the Texas Legislature was headed for a bruising showdown over illegal immigration, a key lawmaker signaled Monday that the place for that battle is a national stage.

Texas is "not in the immigration business. We don't have any authority," said Rep. David Swinford, R-Dumas.

Swinford is the chairman of the House State Affairs Committee, which will decide the fate of most of the 30-plus immigration bills filed in the 80th Legislature. He said he was briefed Friday by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's staff on the "parameters of what we need to be worried about" regarding immigration-related legislation.

What he learned, Swinford said, is that federal law pre-empts state law.

"When you put that screen over that, there's a lot of (bills) that don't make it through," Swinford said.

Although Swinford didn't elaborate on measures unlikely to make it out of his committee, he said he expects the House to consider two: a concurrent resolution telling the federal government to shape up on immigration enforcement and his House Bill 13, which in part would allow the governor to help law enforcement agencies pay for personnel, equipment and support for homeland security.

A 2001 state law allowing certain illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition at state universities could also be revisited. Everything else is unresolved, Swinford said.

In February, Swinford asked Abbott's office to review immigration bills referred to his committee, saying he didn't want to pass anything that didn't clear a constitutional bar.

Reacting to Swinford's comments Monday, Rep. Rick Noriega, D-Houston, who wrote the tuition law, said Swinford recognized that state leaders need to focus on things they can change. "I think people also recognized that a lot of the emotion for this issue was predominantly a carryover from the election season," Noriega said. "It was just a campaign hot button."

With congressional inaction on how to confront the issue, state lawmakers have filed legislation making it harder for illegal immigrants to live in Texas.

One of the most prominent, House Bill 28, would deny state services to U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. Its author, Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, hopes it becomes a test for the U.S. Supreme Court to interpret the 14th Amendment, which provides birthright citizenship.

Another Berman bill would tax money transfers to Mexico and Latin America, and other measures, including Swinford's, would enable local law officers to enforce federal immigration laws.

The State Affairs and Border and International Affairs committees will meet Wednesday to hear invited testimony on immigration.

On Monday, a coalition of political, civil rights and business leaders called on lawmakers to consider immigrants' contributions to society and the economy when evaluating legislative proposals.

"We really need to understand what (the immigrant) population means to our economy and how our economy could collapse without this much-needed labor force," said Rep. Jessica Farrar, D-Houston, a member of the State Affairs Committee.

Farrar appeared at a Capitol news conference by a group calling itself TRUST, Texas Residents United for a Stronger Texas. The coalition includes members of the Texas Association of Business, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Texas Apartment Association and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The coalition issued 15 principles it said lawmakers should consider in evaluating immigration bills, including creating accountability measures for border security programs and rejecting efforts to require employers, landlords, businesses or private individuals to, in effect, be immigration agents.

Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business, said the Legislature "should take no action with immigration unless and until Congress acts on this very important issue."

Hammond also sought to underscore the importance of immigrants to the economy, noting a Texas comptroller's report last year that found undocumented immigrants added $17.7 billion to the gross state product in 2005.

Hammond said many businesses, particularly agriculture, depend on immigrant labor to function.

jcastillo@statesman.com; 445-3635

wgselby@statesman.com


Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/03/27immigration.html

Labels: immigration

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:21 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This is consistent with the research. -Angela

Bilingual classes 'raise results'

March 15, 2007

Bilingual children who learn in their family's language as well as English do better at school, research suggests.

Even second and third generation immigrant children with English as their stronger language could benefit.

A team from Goldsmiths, University of London, analysed some primary school children in England using two languages in maths and English lessons.

They found that, far from confusing them, having two languages deepened their understanding of key concepts.

Grasping concepts

Lead researcher Dr Charmian Kenner said children who led bilingual lives could access their lessons through both languages.

"Learning a mathematical concept in Bengali and English, for example, deepens understanding as ideas are transferred between languages.

"Or children can compare how metaphors are constructed in a Bengali poem and its English equivalent.

"The children in our project expressed a strong desire to use their community language in school and teachers were able to tap into their pupils' full range of cultural knowledge."


It is very important that parents continue to talk to their children in their first language and then they can transfer the key ideas they learn to their new language
Dr Charmian Kenner
Dr Kenner worked with four small groups of children aged between six and 10 at two primary schools in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

She watched them learning their mother tongue in community language classes, after school or at weekends, and observed them in bilingual activities in mainstream classes.

When the children were allowed to use their mother tongue as well as English they seemed to grasp mathematical concepts such as division and multiplication more easily, she said.

A separate research project carried out by Tower Hamlets community language unit found children who attended mother tongue classes did better in their national curriculum tests.

Britishness

Schools which have a high proportion of children with English as a second language are generally expected to do worse than those that do not.

But this research suggests that bilingual pupils do better than those with just one language.

Dr Kenner warns that many second and third generation children are in danger of losing their bilingual skills if they do not have the chance to develop their mother tongue through their schoolwork.

She now wants multilingual children to be allowed to use their mother tongue in mainstream classes.

Her call comes soon after the government urged schools to ensure Britishness was at the heart of citizenship lessons.

Distortion

The argument that classes should be only in English is based on assumptions that run contrary to all the research findings, Dr Kenner said.

"The other thing is that people think that, in order to be British, children of immigrants have to distort parts of their identity ... but we found it was the other way round.

"The children wanted to be able to use Bengali at school as it was part of them. For them being British included being Bangladeshi. They are British Bangladeshi."

The Department for Education and Skills has recently funded a research project aimed at spreading best practice from bilingual schools.

'Missed opportunity'

Dr Kenner said: "The advice has changed quite a lot. When the first wave of people arrived in the 1960s and 1970s people were told only to speak English to their children.

"But we can see that it is very important that parents continue to talk to their children in their first language and then they can transfer the key ideas they learn to their new language which would be English at school."

The findings come after the centre for languages, Cilt, found bilingual pupils do better at GCSE.

Cilt patron Sir Trevor McDonald said: "In our haste to ensure they acquire good English, we frequently miss the opportunity to ensure they maintain and develop their skills in their other languages too.

"Rather than thinking in terms of an 'English-only' culture, we should be promoting 'English plus'."

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/education/6447427.stm

Published: 2007/03/15 10:26:52 GMT

© BBC MMVII

Labels: bilingual education

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:48 PM 1 comments Links to this post

This builds on my previous post on slavery. This is an incredible story. -Angela

March 22, 2007 edition - Once a slave in the US, still fighting for her freedom

María Suárez survived life as a sex slave for five years in Los Angeles. There are thousands more like her.

By Jane Lampman | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
For María Suárez, a young Mexican, America turned out to be anything but the land of opportunity. When the 15-year-old came to the United States legally in 1976 to stay with her sister in Los Angeles, she was full of dreams. But those dreams turned into a nightmare within two weeks, when the teen was sold into slavery.

Thirty years later, the courageous woman is still confronting the consequences of that domestic servitude and is fighting for the freedom and opportunity to remain in America, where all her family resides.

Ms. Suárez became the sex slave of an older man who had bought other young girls before her. Thousands of women are living in similar circumstances in the US today, often invisible though sometimes in plain view. Yet Suárez's story is unique in that her five years of violation and beatings led to a longer incarceration.

The young girl arrived from her village in Michoacán a bit overwhelmed by the new country. Her sister, Rita, had lived in Los Angeles for years, but María knew no English and admits she was naive "and ignorant."

"A [Spanish-speaking] woman approached me on the street – she was very friendly – and offered me a job cleaning house and answering phones," Suárez says in a telephone interview. "It sounded like a good idea, and I was very happy."

Since her sister wasn't home at the time, she agreed to the woman's urging that she just come see the house where she would work. But the drive took more than an hour, and María never went home again.

At the house of Anselmo Covarrubias, a man in his late 60s, she was allowed to call her sister to say she had a job and would be back later. But a lock was then put on the phone, and she learned otherwise.

"He told me he had paid $200 for me and that I was his slave," Suárez says. She was shown a tiny room with a bed and an altar with a picture of Jesus Christ above it but many other strange items on it. He then raped her.

"He told me he was a witch, that he knew where my family lived, and I'd better not tell anyone or he would kill my family, burn down their house," she adds. "From then on, my hell started. He abused me mentally, emotionally, physically, and sexually."

Suárez's ordeal began in the '70s, but such ordeals continue today. Some 17,000 people are trafficked into the US each year – many of them teenagers and children – for purposes of forced labor or sex, says the US Justice Department. An untold number are picked up and trafficked domestically, as Maria was. The government is just beginning to get a handle on the problem.

During those five tragic years, Suárez was not wholly confined to the house. Covarrubias got her a factory job on an electronics assembly line and drove her to and from work each day. On Fridays, he would take her paycheck from her when she got into the car. Yet, terrified and superstitious, she told no one. "People asked me about who picked me up, but I was afraid for my family," she says. He would take her to secondhand stores for clothes.

For those not familiar with such situations, it may be difficult to grasp why someone would not just run away. "It speaks to the psychological coercion, the way people are controlled by fear," says Kay Buck, executive director of the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), in Los Angeles. "People are told over and over that if they tell anyone, they will be killed, or worse, family members will be killed. Coupled with violence on a regular basis, it wears down self-esteem."

CAST has worked with hundreds of slavery survivors in the past decade. The group was created after the 1995 case in El Monte, Calif., where 72 garment workers were found in an apartment complex where they'd been held captive for seven years. The workers had been trafficked from Thailand, yet when freed, were treated as illegal aliens and thrown in jail.

Community groups came together to try to help with services; CAST was formally created in 1998 and began pushing for appropriate legislation. Today it provides a range of services for slavery survivors and serves on a metropolitan trafficking task force with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and others, to make the police and public more aware of the growing trafficking problem.

Capt. Kyle Jackson of LAPD says the police never thought about the problem since they had no authority until the state penal code changed last year.

"You might look at a two-bedroom apartment with 20 people in it and think they're undocumented individuals – which local law enforcement doesn't get involved in – whereas it might in fact be trafficking," he says. Now they're training all LAPD officers and providing resources for other departments in the state.

Human trafficking is fast approaching drugs and the illegal arms trade as the most profitable criminal activities globally. In 2000, Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), to enlist the government in prosecution of traffickers and provision of victim services. At least 22 states have passed laws, but law enforcement is scrambling to train their people about the problem and how to identify situations correctly.

The failure to do so was extremely costly for Suárez. Her captor had rented an apartment in his garage to a young couple. But he began bothering the young woman, Suárez recalls. "One morning, I heard him screaming outside," she says. As she tells it, when she rushed out, she found the young man had hit Covarrubias with a piece of wood and killed him. When the man told her to wash the wood and put it under the house, she did what he said. Soon, they were all arrested.

In shock and still not understanding English, Suárez had what was later acknowledged to be terrible representation by a lawyer who was eventually disbarred. At 21, she was convicted of first-degree murder and sent to prison for 25 years to life, even though the man who committed the crime said she was not involved. Remarkably, she made the best of it – learning English, getting her GED, leading counseling sessions, and running marathons in prison for charity.

"She's an amazing person," says Charles Song, CAST's legal services director. "I expected to meet a bitter, angry woman who hated men, but she was totally different, very forgiving. She refused to sue anyone and said she just wanted a little justice."

Released from prison in 2003 after 22 years, Suárez's tribulations did not end. She was immediately placed in federal detention. Immigration law mandates the deportation of any noncitizen convicted of certain crimes, regardless of whether they were wrongly convicted. A judge ordered her deported, but Suárez was saved when she received a "T visa."

The TVPA provides special visas to trafficking victims for three years, after which they may apply for a green card. But regulations governing that transition have never been completed by the Department of Homeland Security. Her T visa expires in May, and unless she can win a pardon from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, she is again threatened with deportation.

Mr. Song is seeking a meeting with the governor and is also filing a writ challenging her conviction. Both police and the lawyer who represented her have supported efforts to change the conviction.

Meanwhile, Suárez has taken college courses with the aim of becoming a social worker and has a part-time job counseling domestic violence cases. She's also learning to drive. But what means most to her right now is time with her family, who visited her regularly in prison.

"The most beautiful thing is to be free – just to wake up and take my shower ... and go visit with them in the park, have a hamburger – that's what I treasure."

She also works with CAST, speaking at conferences to educate law-enforcement officials and community groups about slavery.

"It's very painful when you feel you are in a cage.... And so many people are still going through what I went through," she says.

Yet until she wins a pardon and gets a green card, she's still in a cage of sorts, reporting to a parole officer. "The only thing I want is for them to let me be free and to let me do something good for this country," Suárez adds.

How many slaves live in the United States? Estimates range widely.

Trafficking in persons is one of the modern forms of slavery andacrime that frequently targets teenagers and children. SincetheTrafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, the United Stateshascommitted to fighting it globally and domestically.

Some 800,000 to 900,000 people are forced across borders eachyear,the US State Department says, with about 17,000 trafficked intothe USfrom elsewhere.

As for home-grown trafficking, no one has "any hard numbers tobasean estimate on," says Mark Motivans of the Department ofJustice'sBureau of Statistics. The department has begun research todevelopdata-collection methods for victims and perpetrators.

Others organizations working on the issue suggest anywherefrom50,000 to 200,000 people are now enslaved in the US. A 2004 studybyFree the Slaves, in Washington, D.C., and the Human Rights Centerofthe University of California, Berkeley, said that in the US,anenslaved individual stays in slavery for three to fiveyears.(Captivities ranged from one month to 27 years.) Kevin Bales,presidentof Free the Slaves, says a conservative estimate based on the17,000annual arrivals and the lower three-year figure suggests thereareabout 50,000 people enslaved here.

Yet that doesn't take domestic trafficking into account and isbasedon already freed individuals, says David Batstone, author of "NotforSale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade and How We Can Fight It."Heargues for a much higher figure since freed slaves aren't likely toberepresentative and prosecutions in the US remain very low.

The 2004 study found that forced-labor operations had beenreportedin at least 90 US cities in the previous five years.California,Florida, New York, and Texas had the largest incidence ofslavery.

Forced labor was most prevalent in five sectors of the USeconomy:prostitution and sex services (46 percent), domestic service(27percent), agriculture (10 percent); sweatshop/factory work (5percent),and restaurant and hotel work (4 percent).

The Justice Department is trying to ramp up prosecutions. InJanuary,it created a new human trafficking prosecution unit. Last yearitobtained 98 convictions.

As states pass laws, local communities and police are alsobecomingmore active. In Los Angeles, for the next five years, all cityvehicleswill carry bumper stickers calling attention to humantrafficking.

Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0322/p13s01-usju.html

Copyright © 2007 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

Labels: immigration, slavery

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:03 AM 0 comments Links to this post

March 21, 2007
www.counterpunch.org

The Billionaires and How They Made It:
Meet the Global Ruling Class
By JAMES PETRAS

Even as the world's billionaires grew in number from 793 in 2006 to 946 this year, major mass uprisings became commonplace in China and India. In India, which has the highest number of billionaires (36) in Asia with total wealth of $191 billion, Prime Minister Singh declared that the greatest single threat to 'India's security' were the Maoist-led guerrilla armies and mass movements in the poorest parts of the country. In China, with 20 billionaires with $29.4 billion net worth, the new rulers, confronting nearly a hundred thousand reported riots and protests, have increased the number of armed special anti-riot militia a hundred fold, and increased spending for the rural poor by $10 billion in the hopes of lessening the monstrous class inequalities and heading off a mass upheaval.

The total wealth of this global ruling class grew 35 per cent year to year topping $3.5 trillion, while income levels for the lower 55 per cent of the world's 6-billion-strong population declined or stagnated. Put another way, one hundred millionth of the world's population (1/100,000,000) owns more than over 3 billion people. Over half of the current billionaires (523) came from just 3 countries: the US (415), Germany (55) and Russia (53). The 35 per cent increase in wealth mostly came from speculation on equity markets, real estate and commodity trading, rather than from technical innovations, investments in job-creating industries or social services.

Among the newest, youngest and fastest-growing group of billionaires, the Russian oligarchy stands out for its most rapacious beginnings. Over two-thirds (67 per cent) of the current Russian billionaire oligarchs began their concentration of wealth in their mid to early twenties. During the infamous decade of the 1990's under the quasi-dictatorial rule of Boris Yeltsin and his US-directed economic advisers, Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar the entire Russian economy was put up for sale for a 'political price', which was far below its real value. Without exception, the transfers of property were achieved through gangster tactics ú assassinations, massive theft, and seizure of state resources, illicit stock manipulation and buyouts. The future billionaires stripped the Russian state of over a trillion dollars worth of factories, transport, oil, gas, iron, coal and other formerly state-owned resources.

Contrary to European and US publicists on the right and left, very few of the top former Communist leaders are found among the current Russian billionaire oligarchy. Secondly, contrary to the spin-masters' claims of 'communist inefficiencies', the former Soviet Union developed mines, factories, energy enterprises were profitable and competitive, before they were taken over by the new oligarchs. This is evident in the massive private wealth that was accumulated in less than a decade by these gangster-businessmen.

Virtually all the billionaires' initial sources of wealth had nothing to do with building, innovating or developing new efficient enterprises. Wealth was not transferred to high Communist Party Commissars (lateral transfers) but was seized by armed private mafias run by recent university graduates who quickly capitalized on corrupting, intimidating or assassinating senior officials in the state and benefiting from Boris Yeltsin's mindless contracting of 'free market' Western consultants.

Forbes magazine puts out a yearly list of the richest individuals and families in the world. What is most amusing about the famous Forbes magazine's background biographical notes on the Russian oligarchs is the constant reference to their source of wealth as 'self-made' as if stealing state property created by and defended for over 70 years by the sweat and blood of the Russian people was the result of the entrepreneurial skills of thugs in their twenties. Of the top eight Russian billionaire oligarchs, all got their start from strong-arming their rivals, setting up 'paper banks' and taking over aluminum, oil, gas, nickel and steel production and the export of bauxite, iron and other minerals. Every sector of the former Communist economy was pillaged by the new billionaires: Construction, telecommunications, chemicals, real estate, agriculture, vodka, foods, land, media, automobiles, airlines etc..

With rare exceptions, following the Yeltsin privatizations all of the oligarchs quickly rose to the top or near the top, literally murdering or intimidating any opponents within the former Soviet apparatus and competitors from rival predator gangs.

The key 'policy' measures, which facilitated the initial pillage and takeovers by the future billionaires, were the vast and immediate privatizations of almost all public enterprises by the Gaidar/Chubais team. This 'Shock Treatment' was encouraged by a Harvard team of economic advisers and especially by US President Clinton in order to make the capitalist transformation irreversible. Privatization led to the capitalist gang wars and the disarticulation of the Russian economy. As a result there was an 80 per cent decline in living standards, a devaluation of the Ruble and the sell-off of invaluable oil, gas and other strategic resources at bargain prices to the rising class of predator billionaires and US-European oil and gas multinational corporations. Over a hundred billion dollars a year was laundered by the mafia oligarchs in the principle banks of New York, London, Switzerland, Israel and elsewhere ú funds which would later be recycled in the purchase of expensive real estate in the US, England, Spain, France as well as investments in British football teams, Israeli banks and joint ventures in minerals.
The winners of the gang wars during the Yeltsin reign followed up by expanding operations to a variety of new economic sectors, investments in the expansion of existing facilities (especially in real estate, extractive and consumer industries) and overseas. Under President Putin, the gangster-oligarchs consolidated and expanded ú from multi-millionaires to billionaires, to multi-billionaires and growing. From young swaggering thugs and local swindlers, they became the 'respectable' partners of American and European multinational corporations, according to their Western PR agents. The new Russian oligarchs had 'arrived' on the world financial scene, according to the financial press.

Yet as President Putin recently pointed out, the new billionaires have failed to invest, innovate and create competitive enterprises, despite optimal conditions. Outside of raw material exports, benefiting from high international prices, few of the oligarch-owned manufacturers are earning foreign exchange, because few can compete in international markets. The reason is that the oligarchs have 'diversified' into stock speculation (Suleiman Kerimov $14.4 billion ), (Mikhail Prokhorov $13.5 billion ), banking (Fridman $12.6 billion ) and buyouts of mines and mineral processing plants.

The Western media have focused on the falling out between a handful of Yeltsin-era oligarchs and President Vladimir Putin and the increase in wealth of a number of Putin-era billionaires. However, the biographical evidence demonstrates that there is no rupture between the rise of the billionaires under Yeltsin and their consolidation and expansion under Putin. The decline in mutual murder and the shift to state-regulated competition is as much a product of the consolidation of the great fortunes as it is the 'new rules of the game' imposed by President Putin. In the mid 19th century, Honoré Balzac, surveying the rise of the respectable bourgeois in France, pointed out their dubious origins: "Behind every great fortune is a great crime." The swindles begetting the decades-long ascent of the 19th century French bourgeoisie pale in comparison to the massive pillage and bloodletting that created Russia's 21st century billionaires.

Latin America
If blood and guns were the instruments for the rise of the Russian billionaire oligarchs, in other regions the Market, or better still, the US-IMF-World Bank orchestrated Washington Consensus was the driving force behind the rise of the Latin American billionaires. The two countries with the greatest concentration of wealth and the greatest number of billionaires in Latin America are Mexico and Brazil (77 per cent), which are the two countries, which privatized the most lucrative, efficient and largest public monopolies. Of the total $157.2 billion owned by the 38 Latin American billionaires, 30 are Brazilians or Mexicans with $120.3 billion . The wealth of 38 families and individuals exceeds that of 250 million Latin Americans; 0.000001 per cent of the population exceeds that of the lowest 50 per cent. In Mexico, the income of 0.000001 per cent of the population exceeds the combined income of 40 million Mexicans. The rise of Latin American billionaires coincides with the real fall in minimum wages, public expenditures in social services, labor legislation and a rise in state repression, weakening labor and peasant organization and collective bargaining. The implementation of regressive taxes burdening the workers and peasants and tax exemptions and subsidies for the agro-mineral exporters contributed to the making of the billionaires. The result has been downward mobility for public employees and workers, the displacement of urban labor into the informal sector, the massive bankruptcy of small farmers, peasants and rural labor and the out-migration from the countryside to the urban slums and emigration abroad.

The principal cause of poverty in Latin American is the very conditions that facilitate the growth of billionaires. In the case of Mexico, the privatization of the telecommunication sector at rock bottom prices, resulted in the quadrupling of wealth for Carlos Slim Helu, the third richest man in the world (just behind Bill Gates and Warren Buffet) with a net worth of $49 billion . Two fellow Mexican billionaires, Alfredo Harp Helu and Roberto Hernandez Ramirez benefited from the privatization of banks and their subsequent de-nationalization, selling Banamex to Citicorp.

Privatization, financial de-regulation and de-nationalization were the key operating principles of US foreign economic policies implemented in Latin America by the IMF and the World Bank. These principles dictated the fundamental conditions shaping any loans or debt re-negotiations in Latin America.

The billionaires-in-the-making, came from old and new money. Some began to raise their fortunes by securing government contracts during the earlier state-led development model (1930's to 1970's) and others through inherited wealth. Half of Mexican billionaires inherited their original multi-million dollar fortunes on their way up to the top. The other half benefited from political ties and the subsequent big payola from buying public enterprises cheap and then selling them off to US multi-nationals at great profit. The great bulk of the 12 million Mexican immigrants who crossed the border into the US have fled from the onerous conditions, which allowed Mexico's traditional and nouveaux riche millionaires to join the global billionaires' club.

Brazil has the largest number of billionaires (20) of any country in Latin America with a net worth of $46.2 billion , which is greater than the new worth of 80 million urban and rural impoverished Brazilians. Approximately 40 per cent of Brazilian billionaires started with great fortunes ú and simply added on ú through acquisitions and mergers. The so-called 'self-made' billionaires benefited from the privatization of the lucrative financial sector (the Safra family with $8.9 billion ) and the iron and steel complexes.

How to Become a Billionaire
While some knowledge, technical and 'entrepreneurial skills' and market savvy played a small role in the making of the billionaires in Russia and Latin America, far more important was the interface of politics and economics at every stage of wealth accumulation.

In most cases there were three stages:

1. During the early 'statist' model of development, the current billionaires successfully 'lobbied' and bribed officials for government contracts, tax exemptions, subsidies and protection from foreign competitors. State handouts were the beachhead or take-off point to billionaire status during the subsequent neo-liberal phase.

2. The neo-liberal period provided the greatest opportunity for seizing lucrative public assets far below their market value and earning capacity. The privatization, although described as 'market transactions', were in reality political sales in four senses: in price, in selection of buyers, in kickbacks to the sellers and in furthering an ideological agenda. Wealth accumulation resulted from the sell-off of banks, minerals, energy resources, telecommunications, power plants and transport and the assumption by the state of private debt. This was the take-off phase from millionaire toward billionaire status. This was consummated in Latin America via corruption and in Russia via assassination and gang warfare.

3. During the third phase (the present) the billionaires have consolidated and expanded their empires through mergers, acquisitions, further privatizations and overseas expansion. Private monopolies of mobile phones, telecoms and other 'public' utilities, plus high commodity prices have added billions to the initial concentrations. Some millionaires became billionaires by selling their recently acquired, lucrative privatized enterprises to foreign capital.

In both Latin America and Russia, the billionaires grabbed lucrative state assets under the aegis of orthodox neo-liberal regimes (Salinas-Zedillo regimes in Mexico, Collor-Cardoso in Brazil, Yeltsin in Russia) and consolidated and expanded under the rule of supposedly 'reformist' regimes (Putin in Russia, Lula in Brazil and Fox in Mexico). In the rest of Latin America (Chile, Colombia and Argentina) the making of the billionaires resulted from the bloody military coups and regimes, which destroyed the socio-political movements and started the privatization process. This process was then even more energetically promoted by the subsequent electoral regimes of the right and 'center-left'.

What is repeatedly demonstrated in both Russia and Latin America is that the key factor leading to the quantum leap in wealth ú from millionaires to billionaires ú was the vast privatization and subsequent de-nationalization of lucrative public enterprises.

If we add to the concentration of $157 billion in the hands of an infinitesimal fraction of the elite, the $990 billion taken out by the foreign banks in debt payments and the $1 trillion (one thousand billion) taken out by way of profits, royalties, rents and laundered money over the past decade and a half, we have an adequate framework for understanding why Latin America continues to have over two-thirds of its population with inadequate living standards and stagnant economies.
The responsibility of the US for the growth of Latin American billionaires and mass poverty is several-fold and involves a wide gamut of political institutions, business elites, and academic and media moguls. First and foremost the US backed the military dictators and neo-liberal politicians who set up the billionaire-oriented economic models. It was ex-President Clinton, the CIA and his economic advisers, in alliance with the Russian oligarchs, who provided the political intelligence and material support to put Yeltsin in power and back his destruction of the Russian Parliament (Duma) in 1993 and the rigged elections of 1996. And it was Washington, which allowed hundreds of billions of dollars to be laundered in US banks throughout the 1990's as the US Congressional Sub-Committee on Banking (1998) revealed.
It was Nixon, Kissinger and later Carter and Brzezinski, Reagan and Bush, Clinton and Albright who backed the privatizations pushed by Latin American military dictators and civilian reactionaries in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's . Their instructions to the US representatives in the IMF and the World Bank were writ large: Privatize, de-regulate and de-nationalize (PDD) before any loans should be negotiated.

It was US academics and ideologues working hand in glove with the so-called multi-lateral agencies, as contracted economic consultants, who trained, designed and pushed the PDD agenda among their former Ivy League students-turned-economic and finance ministers and Central Bankers in Latin America and Russia.
It was US and EU multi-national corporations and banks which bought out or went into joint ventures with the emerging Latin American billionaires and who reaped the trillion dollar payouts on the debts incurred by the corrupt military and civilian regimes. The billionaires are as much a product and/or by-product of US anti-nationalist, anti-communist policies as they are a product of their own grandiose theft of public enterprises.
Conclusion
Given the enormous class and income disparities in Russia, Latin America and China (20 Chinese billionaires have a net worth of $29.4 billion in less than ten years), it is more accurate to describe these countries as 'surging billionaires' rather than 'emerging markets' because it is not the 'free market' but the political power of the billionaires that dictates policy.
Countries of 'surging billionaires' produce burgeoning poverty, submerging living standards. The making of billionaires means the unmaking of civil society ú the weakening of social solidarity, protective social legislation, pensions, vacations, public health programs and education. While politics is central, past political labels mean nothing. Ex-Marxist Brazilian ex-President Cardoso and ex-trade union leader President Lula Da Silva privatized public enterprises and promoted policies that spawn billionaires. Ex-Communist Putin cultivates certain billionaire oligarchs and offers incentives to others to shape up and invest.

The period of greatest decline in living standards in Latin America and Russia coincide with the dismantling of the nationalist populist and communist economies. Between 1980-2004, Latin America ú more precisely Brazil, Argentina and Mexico ú stagnated at 0 per cent to 1 per cent per capita growth. Russia saw a 50 per cent decline in GNP between 1990-1996 and living standards dropped 80 per cent for everyone except the predators and their gangster entourages.

Recent growth (2003-2007), where it occurs, has more to do with the extraordinary rise in international prices (of energy resources, metals and agro-exports) than any positive developments from the billionaire-dominated economies. The growth of billionaires is hardly a sign of 'general prosperity' resulting from the 'free market' as the editors of Forbes Magazine claim. In fact it is the product of the illicit seizure of lucrative public resources, built up by the work and struggle of millions of workers, in Russia and China under Communism and in Latin America during populist-nationalist and democratic-socialist governments. Many billionaires have inherited wealth and used their political ties to expand and extend their empires ú it has little to do with entrepreneurial skills.

The billionaires' and the White House's anger and hostility toward President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is precisely because he is reversing the policies which create billionaires and mass poverty: He is re-nationalizing energy resources, public utilities and expropriating some large landed estates. Chavez is not only challenging US hegemony in Latin America but also the entire PDD edifice that built the economic empires of the billionaires in Latin America, Russia, China and elsewhere.
The primary data for this essay is drawn from Forbes Magazine 's "List of the World's Billionaires" published March 8, 2007.
James Petras most recent book is The Power of Israel in the United States .(clarity 2006 third printing)

His essays in English can be found at petras.lahaine.org And in Spanish at rebellion.org

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

Amazing statistic: "Attorneys from the U.S. Department of Justice have prosecuted 91 slave-trade cases in cities across the United States and in nearly every state of the nation." This means that this is only the tip of the ice berg as this article suggets. -Angela

From Sex Workers to Restaurant Workers, the Global Slave Trade Is Growing
By David Batsone, Sojourners
Posted on March 15, 2007, Printed on March 15, 2007

This article is an excerpt from David Batstone's new book, Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade -- and How We Can Fight It. Learn more about the book and the campaign it has launched .

Twenty-seven million slaves exist in our world today. Girls and boys, women and men of all ages are forced to toil in the rug loom sheds of Nepal, sell their bodies in the brothels of Rome, break rocks in the quarries of Pakistan, and fight wars in the jungles of Africa.

Go behind the façade in any major town or city in the world today and you are likely to find a thriving commerce in human beings. You may even find slavery in your own backyard. For several years my wife and I dined regularly at an Indian restaurant located near our home in the San Francisco Bay area. Unbeknownst to us, the staff at Pasand Madras Indian Cuisine who cooked our curries, delivered them to our table, and washed our dishes were slaves. Restaurant owner Lakireddy Reddy and several members of his family had used fake visas and false identities to traffic perhaps hundreds of adults and children into the United States from India. He forced the laborers to work long hours for minimal wages, money that they returned to him as rent to live in one of his apartments. Reddy threatened to turn them into the authorities as illegal aliens if they tried to escape.

The Reddy case is not an anomaly. As many as 800,000 are trafficked across international borders annually, and up to 17,500 new victims are trafficked across our borders each year, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. More than 30,000 additional slaves are trans-ported through the U.S. on their way to other international destinations. Attorneys from the U.S. Department of Justice have prosecuted 91 slave-trade cases in cities across the United States and in nearly every state of the nation.

Like the slaves who came to America's shores 200 years ago, today's slaves are not free to pursue their own destinies. They are coerced to perform work for the personal gain of those who subjugate them. If they try to escape the clutches of their masters, modern slaves risk personal violence or reprisals to their families.
President George W. Bush spoke of the global crisis of the slave trade before the United Nations General Assembly in September 2003. "Each year 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold, or forced across the world's borders," he said. "The trade in human beings for any purpose must not be allowed to thrive in our time." Of those individuals extracted out of impoverished countries and trafficked across international borders, 80 percent are female and 50 percent are children, according to the U.S. Department of State's "2005 Trafficking in Persons Report."
The commerce in human beings today rivals drug trafficking and the illegal arms trade for the top criminal activity on the planet. The slave trade sits at number three on the list but is closing the gap. The FBI projects that the slave trade generates $9.5 billion in revenue each year, according to the U.S. Department of State's "2004 Trafficking in Persons Report." The International Labour Office, in the 2005 report "A Global Alliance Against Forced Labor," estimates that figure to be closer to a whopping $32 billion annually.
"Ten Million Children Exploited for Domestic Labor" -- this title for a 2004 U.N. study hardly needs explaining. The U.N.'s surveys found 700,000 children forced into domestic labor in Indonesia alone, with staggering numbers as well in Brazil (559,000), Pakistan (264,000), Haiti (250,000), and Kenya (200,000). The U.N. report indicates that children remain in servitude for long stretches of time because no one identifies their enslavement: "These youngsters are usually 'invisible' to their communities, toiling for long hours with little or no pay and regularly deprived of the chance to play or go to school." UNICEF estimates that 1 million children are forced today to sell their bodies to sexual exploiters. In a single country, Uganda, nearly 40,000 children have been kidnapped and violently turned into child soldiers or sex slaves.

We may not even realize how each one of us drives the demand during the course of a normal day. Kevin Bales, a pioneer in the fight against modern slavery, expresses well those commercial connections: "Slaves in Pakistan may have made the shoes you are wearing and the carpet you stand on. Slaves in the Caribbean may have put sugar in your kitchen and toys in the hands of your children. In India they may have sewn the shirt on your back and polished the ring on your finger."
Widespread poverty and social inequality ensure a pool of recruits as deep as the ocean. Parents in desperate straits may sell their children or at least be susceptible to scams that will allow the slave trader to take control over the lives of their sons and daughters. Young women in vulnerable communities are more likely to take a risk on a job offer in a faraway location. The poor are apt to accept a loan that the slave trader can later manipulate to steal their freedom. All of these paths carry unsuspecting recruits into the supply chains of slavery.
"The supply side of the equation is particularly bleak," says Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas. "While there are 100,000 places in the developed world for refugee resettlement per year, 50 million refugees and displaced persons exist worldwide today. This ready reservoir of the stateless presents an opportunity rife for exploitation by human traffickers."
During the era of the American plantation economy, the slaveholder considered slave ownership an investment. The supply of new recruits was limited. The cost of extracting and transporting the slave, and ensuring that they would be serviceable by the time they reached their destination, was considerable. In the modern slave trade, the glut of slaves and the capacity to move them great distances in a relatively short period of time drastically alters the economics of slave ownership. Kevin Bales' description of modern slaves as "disposable people" profoundly fits: Just like used batteries, once the slave exhausts his or her usefulness, another can be procured at no great expense.
Notwithstanding these emerging trends in global markets, traditional modes of slavery also persist. Bonded labor has existed for centuries and continues to be the most common form of slavery in the world today. In a typical scenario, an individual falls under the control of a wealthy patron after taking a small loan. The patron adds egregious rates of interest and inflated expenses to the original principal so that the laborer finds it impossible to repay. Debt slaves may spend their entire lives in service to a single slaveholder, and their "obligation" may be passed on to their children. Of the 27 million people worldwide held captive and exploited for profit today, the Free the Slaves organization estimates that at least 15 million are bonded slaves in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal.
In my journey to monitor the rise of modern global slavery, I had prepared myself to end up in the depths of depression. To be honest, I made some unpleasant stops there. But my journey did not end at despair. The prime reason: I met a heroic ensemble of abolitionists who simply refuse to relent. I felt like I had gone back in time and had the great privilege of sharing a meal with a Harriet Tubman or a William Wilberforce or a Frederick Douglass. Like the abolitionists of old, these modern heroes do not expend their energy handicapping the odds stacked against the antislavery movement. They simply refuse to accept a world where one individual can be held as the property of another.
Kru Nam is one of those abolitionists who operate on the front lines in the fight against sex slavery. She is a painter with a university degree in art who launched a project to reach street kids in Chiang Mai, the second largest town in northern Thailand. Once she turned the kids loose with paintbrushes, they created a series of disturbing images that added up to a horror story.
Kru Nam soon realized that most of the kids did not come from Thailand. Most came from Burma, with a sprinkling of Laotians, Vietnamese, and Cambodians tossed in the mix. The Burmese boys spoke of a well-dressed Thai gentleman who had visited their village in the south of Burma. Accompanying him was a 14-year-old Burmese boy who wore fine-tailored clothes and spoke Thai fluently. The man told parents that he was offering scholarships for young boys to attend school back in Thailand. "Look how well this child from your region is doing," he said, pointing to his young companion. "If you let me take your son back to Chiang Mai, I will do the same for him." Many families agreed to let their sons go with the Thai man. Once they reached Chiang Mai, the Thai man immediately sold them to owners of sex bars and brothels.

The boys living on the streets were the lucky ones; they had escaped. They told Kru Nam that many more boys remained captive. Her blood boiled. She could not stand by and do nothing.
Kru Nam did not exactly have a plan when she marched into the sex bar for her first raid. Only her mission was clear: rescue as many of the young boys as she could find. One by one she approached a table where a boy sat and calmly said, "Let's go, I'm taking you out of here." Several moments later, she was leading six little boys out the door and to her safe house in Chiang Mai.
Kru Nam made several more impromptu raids. Eventually, owners put the word out that they would kill her if she walked into their bars. Deploying a fresh strategy, she organized street teams to scour the night market of Chiang Mai and connect with young children recently off the bus from the northern Thai-Burmese border. Recruiters for the sex bars also trolled the streets on the hunt for vulnerable kids. It became a life-and-death contest to find them first.
One day it struck Kru Nam that if she moved upstream before the kids hit Chiang Mai she would have an edge over the recruiters. So she moved about 40 miles north to the border town of Mae Sai, a major thoroughfare for foot traffic between Burma and Thailand.
In Mae Sai she set up a shelter to take in kids on the run. Nearly 60 boys and girls today find safe refuge each night at Kru Nam's shelter. She has had to move her safe house several times. Neighbors on each occasion have forced her out; they do not want "these dirty kids" living on their block. So Kru Nam purchased a block of land some 15 miles outside of Mae Sai. She does not have the money she needs to buy a proper residence, so for the time being Kru Nam and the children will live on the land in temporary shelters.
Kru Nam is irrepressible. She does not have a large organization standing behind her -- a skeletal staff of three assists her and she receives modest funding from a tiny nongovernmental agency based in Thailand. What she does have is a burning passion to rescue young boys and girls so that they do not fall into the treacherous control of slaveholders. Her passage from a single act of kindness to fighting for justice on a grander scale is the quintessential story of the abolitionist.
The abolitionists working today are truly extraordinary, but they cannot win the fight alone. They are overwhelmed and beleaguered. The size and scope of Kru Nam's project is about the norm for abolitionist organizations. They sorely need reinforcements, a new wave of abolitionists, to join them in the struggle.

All of us wonder how we would have acted in the epic struggles of human history. Imagine we lived in rural Tennessee in 1855 and Harriet Tubman came to our door, asking us to join the Underground Railroad. Would we have stood up and been counted among the just?
There are times to read history, and there are times to make history. We live right now at one of those epic moments in the fight for human freedom. We no longer have to wonder how we might respond to our moment of truth. Future generations will look back and judge our choices, and be inspired or disappointed.
This article is adapted from David Batsone's new book Not For Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade -- and How We Can Fight It (HarperSanFrancisco, © 2007).

David Batsone is a Sojourners contributing editor.

http://www.alternet.org/story/48951/

Labels: slavery

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:13 PM 0 comments Links to this post

What a nightmare for these women, mothers, and daughters, and their families. -Angela

March 17 / 18, 2007
www.counterpunch.org
"Mothers are Rounded Up in Massachusetts and Sent to a Texas Jail Without Saying Goodby to Their Families"
Jailing Immigrant Mothers in El Paso
By GREG MOSES
"We are drawing attention to a humanitarian crisis," says Penny Anderson, speaking from a Saturday morning protest outside the El Paso immigrant jail (March 17). She is the first person to take the cell phone being passed around by activist Amber Clark.
Among the prisoners in the nearby 800-bed jail are about one hundred women flown in from New Bedford, Massachusetts following an immigration raid at a manufacturing shop. Immigration authorities have reported that 116 of the women, believed to be mostly from Guatemala, were brought here to the El Paso Service Processing Center (EPC) on Montana Street. Another 90 were reportedly taken to another immigrant jail in Texas.
"We have heard horror stories of women rounded up at work in Massachusetts and sent to jail in Texas without being given a chance to say goodbye to their families--children coming home from school and not knowing where their mothers were," says Anderson who is president of the El Paso Borderlands Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW).
Word of the raid reached the Borderlands Chapter from NOW national offices, explains Anderson. And several news reports have followed the response of Massachusetts officials. Last Saturday, Massachusetts social workers visited both jails in Texas and managed to get nine mothers released on humanitarian grounds.
Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy visited New Bedford and described the situation as Katrina-like, with family members missing and nobody knowing where they were or if they were okay. The response of Massachusetts state workers and elected officials is an embarrassing contrast to the silence and inactivity that has accompanied news of Texas families rounded up by immigration authorities in recent years.
On Montana Street in El Paso Saturday morning, 20 protesters drew most of the local media, along with honks of support from passing cars, says Anderson. "The larger picture shows that current immigration system is broken," she says. "The Bush administration claims to be pro family, but when they allow this to happen, it shows they are tearing families apart."
Joining the protest is Kathy Staudt of the Coalition against Violence toward Women and Families at the US-Mexico Border (CAV). "We see this as part the structural problem of violence against women," she says. "Many of the families affected by the immigration raid in Massachusetts were in the US for five or ten years working at the factory. All of a sudden there was this raid. Women were sent away. And people were frantic to find out what happened to them."
CAV was formed in 2001 to address the issue of femicide in Juarez, where 370 women were killed between 2000 and 2003. "They think in Mexico there has been some limited institutional response to the issue, but many killers remain on the loose," says Staudt. "And Mexico is only recently taking violence against women as a serious issue at the national level."
Staudt says the problem of stopping violence against women in Mexico is made more difficult by a widespread distrust of police, because of a feeling that police are corrupt and can act with impunity.
As Staudt speaks we think of 20-year-old Suzi Hazahza and her sister Mirvat, two immigrant women rounded up with their family at gunpoint by Dallas immigration authorities in early November, 2006, now serving hard time at the Rolling Plains prison in Haskell, Texas, for the crime of allegedly missing an appointment-an appointment they claim not to have known about.
"There is a whole structure of violence and lack of respect for women that transcends borders," says Staudt. It is a structure that the militarized posture of border enforcement will only continue to make worse.

Next at the cell phone is John Boucher of El Paso's Annunciation House. "We are a house of hospitality," he explains. "We work with undocumented immigrants in the area and with student groups in the USA. We have Catholic origins. I'm just a volunteer."
For Boucher, the treatment of Massachusetts workers is connected to what he sees closer to the border, "from the economic policies that force people to be displaced, continued in our country by a lack of acknowledgement that people who work cheap subsidize our lives." Boucher sees fewer undocumented workers crossing the border these days, but he sees evidence that "people are being forced into more desperate situations."
As the border is militarized, migrants are relying on paid help to get across. "Coyotes and smugglers are in the family reunification business, too," explains Boucher. "And their involvement makes crossing the border more dangerous for everyone."
With her cell phone returned, Amber Clark promises to email photos and media links.
"The treatment of the factory workers differs sharply from the treatment of the factory owner who had abused undocumented workers for years by underpaying and overworking them while reaping profits from lucrative government contracts," says a press release circulated by Clark. "The factory owner is free on bail and was allowed to take a trip to Puerto Rico."
If an image of corrupt and arbitrary law enforcement is not actually what immigration authorities are trying to convey by their recent activities in Texas and Massachusetts, you'd be hard pressed to say why.

Labels: detention centers, immigration, women

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:07 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Legislators proposed legislation that would institute English language immersion in Texas. To read the scoop on how this was averted, read Jesse Romero’s notice below. Kudos to the Texas Association for Bilingual Education (TABE) for their successful efforts. -Angela

Educators split on bilingual classes
Irving dilemma: English immersion or both languages at once?

03:31 PM CDT on Sunday, March 18, 2007

By KATHERINE LEAL UNMUTH / The Dallas Morning News
kunmuth@dallasnews.com

IRVING – In a school district with the region's highest percentage of children with limited English skills, a rift has emerged over the best way to educate them.

Last fall, Irving school board president Randy Stipes proposed a pilot program in English immersion. But his idea – pitched at a board meeting – was quickly shot down. Superintendent Jack Singley told him it was against the law. The state requires bilingual education.

That seemed to be the end of it. Then word of the exchange reached state Rep. Linda Harper-Brown, R-Irving. She filed a bill this legislative session that would give school districts the option to offer English immersion or ESL programs for students learning the language.

"I'm trying to make something happen that the superintendent was unsure could happen," Ms. Harper-Brown said.

When she asked Mr. Singley for his support in a letter, he wrote back that she shouldn't propose the change on his behalf or the school district's unless the trustees requested it.

"I told her I know of no research of immersion working, but if she has some research to please share it," he said. "I never got a response."

Mr. Singley said he takes no position on immersion but noted that bilingual classes succeed if a child enters the system early.

Mr. Stipes said he didn't know about Ms. Harper-Brown's bill, "but I'm glad she did it."

Since 1973, Texas has required bilingual education whenever 20 or more children in a grade share another language. While bilingual programs instruct children partly in their language and partly in English so they can understand the content, immersion programs use only English.

The tensions in Irving illustrate the ongoing controversy over bilingual education, despite its long-standing use in the state. The state's population of students with limited English skills continues to grow rapidly. They made up nearly 16 percent of students last year.

This legislative session, Rep. Bill Zedler, R-Arlington, has also filed a bill that would do away with requiring bilingual education. On the other side, Rep. Roberto Alonzo, D-Dallas, filed a bill supporting more scholarships for bilingual teachers in training, and Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, sponsored a bill promoting the growth of dual-language programs.

But perhaps no school district in North Texas faces the issue to the degree of Irving, where 36 percent of children are classified as limited English proficient – a higher percentage than even Dallas public schools. Most of these students are Hispanic.

The district, under pressure to improve lagging test scores and slow the high dropout rate, is in search of remedies.

"It's just another option ... to reach some kids we aren't reaching now to keep them from falling behind or dropping out," Mr. Stipes said of English immersion. "What works for one student might not work for another."


Results in California

Ms. Harper-Brown simply points to successes in California. Since voters eliminated bilingual education in 1998, children spend a year in structured English classes before being mainstreamed. Test scores for English-learning children have since increased, although all scores have risen.

"California has shown that the test scores are getting better for those students who go into total immersion," Ms. Harper-Brown said. "I think this is a first step to see if it works in Texas."

But a five-year study commissioned by the California Legislature found no conclusive evidence that English immersion is more effective than bilingual education or vice versa.

The report, released in February 2006, found that the performance gap between English language learners and native speakers remained constant. Student performance depended on the quality of instruction, not the language of instruction, it stated.

Irving primarily uses the transitional model for bilingual education, in which younger children learn mostly in Spanish and then use more English as they progress into the upper grades.

"They do learn English," Irving's bilingual director Dora Morón said. "But they're also learning the content so they don't fall behind."

But a growing number of Texas school districts are moving toward dual-language education, in which children learn for half the day in English and half in Spanish. The goal is to develop literacy in both languages. The Dallas school district switched its program last fall. Irving has a pilot dual-language program.

"We try to read as much as we can about the programs in California," Carrollton-Farmers Branch Superintendent Annette Griffin said. "But research right now shows our best efforts need to be in two-way dual language."

Texas has never seen a significant challenge to its bilingual education program. The chairman of the House's Public Education Committee, Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, said there doesn't seem to be much support for a major change, but he could see a pilot English immersion program.

State Rep. Jim Jackson, R-Carrollton, said he supports the English immersion bill but acknowledged it might not get very far. "I'd like to see it tried at least in a pilot case," he said.

But Rep. Rafael Anchía, D-Dallas, noted that parents already have the right to opt out of bilingual education and put their children in regular classes.

"That decision should be made by parents," he said.

Some Hispanics see the bill as part of the rising sentiment against illegal immigrants among some conservative legislators who have also proposed denying birthright citizenship and want to withhold social services for illegal immigrants.

"We don't expect them to be taken too seriously," said Luis Figueroa, a legislative staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.


Conservative allies

Ms. Harper-Brown is allied with some of the most conservative Republicans in the state. She served as immigration chair of the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute.

In a speech available online that she gave last year, she spoke of illegal immigrant children being a drain on the education system and said that the 1982 Supreme Court decision giving illegal immigrant children the right to public education should be reconsidered.

"Our children must either share their schools with scores of illegal aliens – most not English-speaking – or parents must take on the double burden of sending their children to private school," she said in the speech.

Though Mr. Figueroa opposes the English immersion bill, he conceded that there are problems with the current bilingual system. MALDEF is awaiting a ruling on a lawsuit that alleges that the state has failed to monitor the quality of bilingual programs and that students are failing the TAKS at unacceptably high rates as a result.

Critics of the system also point out that some children still aren't proficient in English by the time they advance to middle school.

Nationally, children who learn English fail standardized tests at much higher rates than native speakers. In Irving, although the district passing rate for fifth-graders taking the reading TAKS test in English was 72 percent, for limited English proficient children it was 52 percent. Statewide, 81 percent of fifth-graders passed reading in English, and 48 percent of limited English proficient children passed.

There's also a severe shortage of qualified bilingual teachers. According to the Texas Education Agency, 167 school districts asked to offer ESL instead of bilingual education in certain classes because they couldn't find teachers.

Diana Shaw teaches second-graders at John R. Good Elementary in Irving. Most of her students are children of immigrants from El Salvador and Honduras who often lack formal education.

So the children are learning to read in their native language only at school. Bilingual theory says that if children become literate in their first language, they will have an easier time learning the second.

Ms. Shaw, who is Hispanic, attended parochial school in South Texas, where she wasn't allowed to speak any Spanish.

"Do we really want to put that fear in children?" she asked. "It doesn't have to be so harsh."

 -----Original Message-----
From: romero.jesse@sbcglobal.net
Sent: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 9:24 AM
Subject: Fwd: TABE Legislative Brief
Note: forwarded message attached.
Attached Message
From:

romero.jesse@sbcglobal.net

Subject:

TABE Legislative Brief

Date:

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 9:15 AM
Members of the Board, the 80th Regular Session has seen the filing of many anti-immigrant / anti-Latino legislation.  From trying to gut Bilingual education, denying citizenship to babies born in the U.S. to immigrant parents, restricting college admissions, ending in-state tuition for students not yet citizens, to denying food stamps and medical care to those who can not provide original copies of birth certificates, this was going to be one of the worst anti-Latino sessions ever.  The intention for the Conservatives was to make this their strategy for the 2008 elections.  A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum, however, and other events have forced them away from their intentions.  Events like the Governor's executive order on the pamploma virus, the whole accenture contract disaster where a private company based in the Bahamas collected hundreds of millions of dollars to deny Texans chip and other social benefits, and most recently, the horrible scandal of child sexual abuse at the Texas Youth Commission, just to name a few.
 
Amidst all this TABE began to quietly and under the Radar work with key House members and Rep. Rob Eissler who chairs House Public Education to keep anti-Bilingual bills from even getting a hearing and therefore dying in committee.  At this writing, I am happy to inform you that the strategy has worked and we do not anticipate that any of the anti-Bilingual bills will even get a hearing.  Just yesterday, Rep. Linda Harper-Brown's chief of staff, whose grandfather is a close friend with Dr. Izquierdo's father (I know, small world), informed us that they will not be asking for a hearing on their Immersion bill and recently we were told the same from Rep. Zedler's staff on their bill to make Bilingual "permissive" and not required as is current law.
 
I also write to say that we have been also busy in the Senate.  Just yesterday, TABE President-elect, Dr. Elena Izquierdo testified in favor of Sen. Shapleigh's Dual Language pilot program bill, SB 553.  Let me just say that it was an eye opening experience for Dr. Izquierdo when Sen. Dan Patrick (R-Houston) went off on the bill and Latinos in general.  In his anti-Latino monologue, he actually said that one Mexican told him "what you gringo Americans do not understand is that as a people and a culture, Hispanics do not value education"!  Well, this set off alot of words and Sen. Patrick back peddling.  Still, the hearing was very positive for us as Sen. Shapiro (R-Plano) who chairs Senate Education, vowed to explore Dual Language in an interim study and this would pave the way for a committee recommendation for the 81st Legislature in 2009.
 
As I report all this, I will also say we are still very active with the coalition of civil rights groups, businesses and chambers of commerce, and the religious community that we helped put together at the start of this session to combat all the anti-latino legislation.  We  still advise them and help them on strategy, talking points and tactics to employ on bills, while testifying and with Legislators and their staffs (shouldn't there be a contract in here somewhere?).
 
Oh, and we've also been talking to our allies in the press about all this as background information for the San Antonio Express-News, the Dallas Morning News and the El Paso times and on stories that are being developed by El Diario, the Texas Observer and Amarillo Globe-News.
 
Bottom line:  I don't think we'll have to worry about any anti-Bilingual bills, but we still have much work to do in trying to pass the Dual Language bill, the Bilingual monitoring bill by Sen. Zafirini and Sen. Van de Putte's bill to correct the mistake Legislators made during the last special session in allowing exiting in the 1st grade.
 
"We have come a long way, but still have far to go" (an original quote from your humble narrator).  As your legislative consultant, all I've ever known is attack, and continue the progress forward, and that is what I / we will continue to do.  Peace out, homies.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:05 PM 0 comments Links to this post

School vouchers lose champions with Bush's exit
By S.V Date
Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau
Saturday, March 17, 2007

TALLAHASSEE — A year ago: After a state Supreme Court ruling struck down school vouchers, Republican leaders moved heaven and earth in an attempt to revive them with a constitutional amendment, all to please a governor who considered them his personal legacy.

Without the strong personality of former Gov. Jeb Bush pushing a particular policy in the Capitol, "school choice," as proponents call it, is generating much less enthusiasm this year than it has in the previous eight.

A handful of pro-voucher bills have been filed in both chambers, but nothing as sweeping as Bush's proposal - ultimately unsuccessful - to insert wording into the state constitution specifically permitting the spending of public money at private schools.

The Florida Supreme Court in January 2006 struck down Bush's first voucher plan, the Opportunity Scholarship Program. When he pushed the idea through the legislature during his first months in office in 1999, it became the first statewide voucher plan in the country and gave parents of students at failing public schools state money to send their children to private schools, including religious schools.

While most participants in the issue expected the court to rule on the basis of language in the state constitution prohibiting public money from going to religious institutions, justices deciding the Bush vs. Holmes lawsuit instead found that the state had no authority to set up an education system outside of the system of free public schools specifically mandated in the constitution.

That broad approach appeared to immediately threaten the two other statewide voucher programs created after the Opportunity Scholarships - the McKay Scholarships for disabled children and the Corporate Tax Credit Scholarships for poorer children - but no lawsuits challenging those programs have been filed. The two remaining programs enroll a total of 34,513 children, compared with 734 getting the Opportunity vouchers at the time of the court ruling.

Bush's proposed constitutional amendment had strong support in the House but failed to get the three-fifths support it needed in the Senate by a single vote after Sen. Alex Villalobos, R-Miami, and two of his allies bucked Bush and voted with the 14 Democrats in the chamber.

This occurred even after Bush and his staff tried in their final year to install their supporters and allies in positions of influence in the legislature, the Department of Education and outside interest groups in hopes of continuing his education politics. A new position at the Education Department was even described as a "protect legacy issues" job in an e-mail to Bush.

But since taking office in January, Republican Gov. Charlie Crist has aggressively put his own stamp on state government through new appointments to executive branch jobs and advisory panels, new budget recommendations and new policy priorities.

During his campaign for governor, Crist said he supported vouchers - a stance he repeated last week. But he said the court ruling makes the issue much more difficult to address.

"The courts have weighed in on that," he said. "What I'm trying to do now is, number one in education, pay our teachers more.

"There's only so much time and only so much energy. And I'm trying to do things that are as productive as possible to improve education, public education."

House Speaker Marco Rubio, R-West Miami, the state leader who many assumed would be Bush's ideological heir, said he still supports vouchers but has his own battles to win.

"I'm a tax cutter. I'm doing property taxes," Rubio said.

"It's always a priority," he said of school choice. "It's just that other issues have kind of captured the attention. Property tax is an all-consuming deal, you know, and it's taking up a lot of our time."

Legislative leaders said privately that voucher proponents and Bush harmed their own effort by aggressively trying, but failing, to unseat Villalobos in his Republican primary bid last September.

Further, the most vocal supporters of vouchers in the House supported Crist's primary opponent, Tom Gallagher, last summer, thereby losing potential leverage with the new governor.

Bills that would expand the corporate income tax voucher program to 500 foster children and the disabled school voucher to children with a diagnosis of autism have sponsors in both chambers, although neither bill addresses the more fundamental question of how these programs square with the January 2006 Supreme Court ruling.

"There seems to be some bills that expand vouchers as though there were no Bush vs. Holmes," said Ron Meyer, the teachers union lawyer who successfully shepherded the nearly six-year lawsuit through the various courts.
The lack of any further lawsuits challenging the remaining two programs could be a reason, he said.
"Perhaps they're feeling emboldened by that," Meyer said.

Voucher proponents and their legislative allies acknowledge the threat of additional lawsuits, however, in their bills. Included in the proposal to expand the corporate tax credit vouchers is a section protecting corporate donors who receive credits from the state from having to give them up in the event the program is struck down.

And former Senate President Jim King, who after three years managed to impose some oversight and safeguards on the remaining two programs after a string of publicized abuses, has sponsored a bill creating an 18-year "transition" program to pay for the continued schooling of children in the McKay program, should it be struck down.

Webster, R-Winter Garden, pushed a bill last spring that would have created a new tax credit program to pay for failing school vouchers in lieu of the Opportunity Scholarships, but he was unable to win House approval. He has refiled the bill this year but so far lacks a House sponsor.

Meanwhile, Democrats said they are aware of the voucher proposals and will be on the lookout for attempts to dramatically expand the programs by using the usual legislative tactic of filing amendments on the chamber floors in the frenzied final days of the spring session.

"I'm not sure how that succeeds," said Sen. Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton, citing the tight budget year as well as the Supreme Court ruling. "We'll be watching."

Find this article at:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/state/content/state/epaper/2007/03/17/m1a_XGR_vouchers_0317.html

Labels: Florida, Jeb Bush, Vouchers

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:04 PM 0 comments Links to this post

BBC News

Bilingual classes 'raise results'

Bilingual children who learn in their family's language as well as English do better at school, research suggests.
Even second and third generation immigrant children with English as their stronger language could benefit.

A team from Goldsmiths, University of London, analysed some primary school children in England using two languages in maths and English lessons.

They found that, far from confusing them, having two languages deepened their understanding of key concepts.

Grasping concepts

Lead researcher Dr Charmian Kenner said children who led bilingual lives could access their lessons through both languages.

"Learning a mathematical concept in Bengali and English, for example, deepens understanding as ideas are transferred between languages.

"Or children can compare how metaphors are constructed in a Bengali poem and its English equivalent.

"The children in our project expressed a strong desire to use their community language in school and teachers were able to tap into their pupils' full range of cultural knowledge."


It is very important that parents continue to talk to their children in their first language and then they can transfer the key ideas they learn to their new language
Dr Charmian Kenner
Dr Kenner worked with four small groups of children aged between six and 10 at two primary schools in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

She watched them learning their mother tongue in community language classes, after school or at weekends, and observed them in bilingual activities in mainstream classes.

When the children were allowed to use their mother tongue as well as English they seemed to grasp mathematical concepts such as division and multiplication more easily, she said.

A separate research project carried out by Tower Hamlets community language unit found children who attended mother tongue classes did better in their national curriculum tests.

Britishness

Schools which have a high proportion of children with English as a second language are generally expected to do worse than those that do not.

But this research suggests that bilingual pupils do better than those with just one language.

Dr Kenner warns that many second and third generation children are in danger of losing their bilingual skills if they do not have the chance to develop their mother tongue through their schoolwork.

She now wants multilingual children to be allowed to use their mother tongue in mainstream classes.

Her call comes soon after the government urged schools to ensure Britishness was at the heart of citizenship lessons.

Distortion

The argument that classes should be only in English is based on assumptions that run contrary to all the research findings, Dr Kenner said.

"The other thing is that people think that, in order to be British, children of immigrants have to distort parts of their identity ... but we found it was the other way round.

"The children wanted to be able to use Bengali at school as it was part of them. For them being British included being Bangladeshi. They are British Bangladeshi."

The Department for Education and Skills has recently funded a research project aimed at spreading best practice from bilingual schools.

'Missed opportunity'

Dr Kenner said: "The advice has changed quite a lot. When the first wave of people arrived in the 1960s and 1970s people were told only to speak English to their children.

"But we can see that it is very important that parents continue to talk to their children in their first language and then they can transfer the key ideas they learn to their new language which would be English at school."

The findings come after the centre for languages, Cilt, found bilingual pupils do better at GCSE.

Cilt patron Sir Trevor McDonald said: "In our haste to ensure they acquire good English, we frequently miss the opportunity to ensure they maintain and develop their skills in their other languages too.

"Rather than thinking in terms of an 'English-only' culture, we should be promoting 'English plus'."

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/education/6447427.stm

Published: 2007/03/15 10:26:52 GMT

© BBC MMVII

Labels: bilingual education

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

Bush Claims About NCLB Questioned
Data on gains in achievement remain limited, preliminary.
By David J. Hoff and Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

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Is the No Child Left Behind Act working?
President Bush says it is, pointing to student-achievement results from a single subsection of the National Assessment of Educational Progress and tentative Reading First data. But the evidence available to support his claim is questionable.
"Fourth graders are reading better," the president said during a March 2 visit to a school in New Albany, Ind. "They’ve made more progress in five years than the previous 28 years combined."

In mathematics, he said, elementary and middle school students "earned the highest scores in the history of the test."
The data Mr. Bush cited at that event are from just the "long-term trend" NAEP in reading and math, researchers say. All available data, they add, show modest improvements that can't be attributed to the 5-year-old law. Instead, progress in achievement is more likely a continuation of trends that predate the law.

"There’s not any evidence that shows anything has changed," said Daniel M. Koretz, a professor of education at Harvard University’s graduate school of education.

Other researchers suggest that the standards and accountability system of the NCLB law is drawing attention to achievement gaps and other inequalities and is causing educators to change their practice. But it's too early to say whether the federal law will result in achievement gains, they contend."

The law's "mechanisms are just coming into play, and not enough time has passed to establish a trend," said Adam Gamoran, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

'I'm Lobbying Congress'

Portraying the No Child Left Behind law as a success is a critical element in President Bush's argument that Congress should renew it on schedule this year. The president signed the legislation, an overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, with much fanfare in January 2002 and has cited it as his most important accomplishment in domestic policy.

"I'm not only speaking to you, I'm lobbying," Mr. Bush said at the Silver Street Elementary School in New Albany earlier this month. "I'm lobbying Congress. I'm setting the stage for Congress to join me in the reauthorization of this important piece of legislation."

Congress is laying the groundwork for reauthorizing the measure. This week, the Senate education committee held a hearing on the law's teacher-quality requirements. Next week, the House and Senate education committees plan to hold a joint session on an overview of the law.

Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the chairmen of the education committees and two of the architects of the bipartisan law, say they hope to renew it this year. But many observers expect the process will be delayed until next year or even after Mr. Bush leaves office in 2009.

At the New Albany school, Mr. Bush highlighted the gains on the national assessment's long-term-trend tests in reading and mathematics. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings pointed to the same NAEP data on the law's fifth anniversary in January, and during several other recent speeches.

Citing One Set of Numbers ...

President Bush likes to cite the "long-term-trend" NAEP as proof that the No Child Left Behind Act is working. The gains are significant only for 9- and 13-year-olds in math and 9-year-olds in reading. What's more, the gains fall into a five-year testing window, and only two of those years occurred after the law took effect.


Between 1999 and 2004, the reading scores of 9-year-olds climbed from 212 to 226 on the test’s 500-point scale. The gap between African-American and white students that age narrowed to 26 points in 2004, compared with 35 points five years earlier. The gap between Hispanic 9-year-olds and their non-Hispanic white peers tapered from 24 points to 21 points in that same time period.

... While Relying Less on Another

On the "national" NAEP, meanwhile, researchers say the advances in math reflect a continuation of student-achievement progress since 1990. Fourth graders are dead-even with where they were in reading when the law took effect in 2002. The slight decline in 8th grade reading scores is not statistically significant.

On the math test, 9-year-olds' scores rose by 9 points, and the gaps between Hispanics' and African-Americans' scores and whites' scores narrowed slightly as well.

Although the results for 9-year-olds on the reading test are positive, researchers say they can't be linked to the law. The testing window extends back to 1999--three years before President Bush signed the NCLB legislation into law and even before he was president.

"With some of the claims that Spellings has made, for most of the time period there was no NCLB, so she can’t really say [any improvement] is because of the law," said Gerald W. Bracey, the author of Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered,who runs a LISTSERV, or e-mail forum, tracking what Mr. Bracey calls the administration's "disinformation."

Mr. Bracey, a frequent critic of testing programs, points out that implementation of the law began in 2002, but didn’t start to fuel significant change in schools until the 2003-04 school year. "So I guess [the Bush administration] should be sharing some of the credit with the Clinton administration," he said.

In math, the gains since 2002 are the extension of an upward trend that dates back more than 20 years, researchers say.
“They just pay attention to what happened after NCLB,” said Jaekyung Lee, an associate professor of education at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “Part of it is just a continuation of a trend from pre-NCLB.”

The administration appears to ignore other data that suggest the law has had little or no positive effect on achievement.
On a different NAEP exam, gains haven’t been as significant, Mr. Lee said. What is known as the “national” NAEP, as distinguished from the long-term-trend tests, shows 4th grade reading scores the same in 2005 as three years earlier, when the law was signed. Math scores rose 1 point between 2003 and 2005. While that increase was statistically significant, it was smaller than the 9-point gain between 2000 and 2003.

The scores on the “national” NAEP demonstrate that the NCLB law’s impact is incomplete, said Katherine McLane, the U.S. Department of Education’s press secretary.

“The secretary is the first to say we have more work to do,” Ms. McLane said in response to the criticisms. “That is one of the issues we have to look at in education.”

Regardless of whether NAEP scores go up or down, it’s almost impossible to link those changes to the NCLB law without a well-designed research study, said Mr. Koretz of Harvard. That would compare a group of students who were exposed to NCLB policies against one that hadn’t participated in the testing and accountability measures in the law.

Those are the types of studies that the Bush administration says must be presented as evidence to select reading materials for the Reading First program and to win approval for research grants from the department.

Also, scores in the upper grades on both versions of the national assessment are for the most part unchanged from before the law’s passage.

NAEP is given to a sampling of students nationwide. Scores on states’ own tests, however, are used to determine whether schools have made adequate yearly progress under the federal law. Mr. Gamoran of the University of Wisconsin said the debate over NAEP scores is probably irrelevant. Even in 2005, the law’s most significant policies weren’t fully phased in. Those include the requirements that all teachers be “highly qualified” and that all states annually assess math and reading achievement in grades 3-8 and once in high school, said Mr. Gamoran, the director of the university’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
‘Reading First’ Results
In addition to speeches citing the NAEP long-term-trend data, members of the Bush administration have lauded the success of the $1 billion-a-year Reading First program, the largest new initiative in the NCLB law.
In the administration’s blueprint for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, unveiled in January, the Education Department described Reading First as “the largest, most focused, and most successful early-reading initiative ever undertaken in this country.”
Few disagree that it is the largest and most focused. The initiative, which requires that participating schools use “scientifically based” materials and assessments, includes more than 5,600 schools in 1,600 districts. An estimated 100,000 teachers have had some kind of professional development associated with the program, according to the blueprint.
But there is scant empirical evidence showing the program’s effect on student achievement. An independent interim study on Reading First implementation, released last year, included survey results from state officials. It showed that the program had led to significant increases in the time participating schools spent on reading instruction, as well as more substantive professional development and support for teachers, and the use of assessment data to inform instruction.
A later survey, conducted by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, indicated that states were generally pleased with the program, with most claiming some improvement in student scores on state tests.
President Bush’s blueprint includes preliminary results showing some gains in students’ reading fluency. “For the 2004-05 school year, students in Reading First schools demonstrated increases in reading achievement across all performance measures,” Education Department officials wrote in the blueprint.
“The percentage of 2nd grade students who met or exceeded proficiency in reading on Reading First outcome measures of fluency increased from 33 percent in 2003-04 to 39 percent in 2004-05 for economically disadvantaged students; from 27 to 32 percent for [limited-English proficient] students; from 34 to 37 percent for African-American students; from 30 to 39 percent for Hispanic students; and from 17 to 23 percent for students with disabilities,” the document adds.
Those gains, however, are based on a compilation of all test results in annual state reports for Reading First.
That compilation includes results from the DIBELS assessment, or Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, developed by researchers at the University of Oregon and used in more than 35 states to monitor student progress on fluency and other measures. But they also include results from a variety of other assessments, including the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and Terra Nova.
“The results show that more kids in the early grades are making great progress on learning the basic components of reading under Reading First,” Ms. McLane, the department’s press secretary, said of the data reported in the blueprint.
Although such an assemblage of test scores can provide a general view of student progress, some researchers question whether the compilation says much about reading proficiency.
“If the goal is just to see if students are improving, I think there is nothing wrong with using different tests as long as it is established that the tests are reliable and valid, and reasonably comparable,” Stephen D. Krashen, an education researcher and linguist at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, wrote in an e-mail. However, “many [researchers] feel that DIBELS is not valid.”
Critics of DIBELS cite the tendency of some educators to teach to the tests or give the measures too much weight in judging reading ability. They also question whether a test that gauges how many words a student can read accurately in a minute, as DIBELS does, is a valid indicator of their proficiency. ("National Clout of DIBELS Test Draws Scrutiny," Sept. 28, 2005.)
According to Mr. Bracey, fluency—the ability to read a text accurately and quickly—is not a good indicator of reading mastery, which requires comprehension.
“Kids can be very fluent and not have a clue about what they just read,” he said.
Success of Standards
While most researchers say it’s too early to measure the NCLB law’s impact on achievement, many are beginning to see evidence that educators are changing their behavior as a result of both the federal law and policies that took root in the 1990s at the onset of the movement for higher standards and greater accountability in education.
“The big success of No Child Left Behind so far is to galvanize attention to the challenges we face, particularly the challenges of inequity,” Mr. Gamoran said.
But critics of the law question, in any case, the central place it gives to test scores. They say it puts too much emphasis on the negative consequences of failing to meet annual student-performance targets and glosses over the professional development and other interventions needed to improve struggling schools and get to the heart of elevating student achievement.
“What’s troublesome about it is the idea that you can eliminate [achievement] gaps by putting pressure on schools and nothing else,” said Gary A. Orfield, the director of the Civil Right Project at Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s making a bad situation worse.”
Vol. 26, Issue 27, Pages 1,26-27

Labels: achievement, NCLB, testing

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:35 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Career classes make a comeback
High-tech centers, expanded programs fuel enrollment boom
06:06 PM CDT on Monday, March 12, 2007

By JAY PARSONS / The Dallas Morning News
jparsons@dallasnews.com
After almost two decades flirting with a one-size-fits-all dose of liberal arts instruction, school districts are bringing back – and vamping up – vocational classes.

Classes such as wood shop and auto mechanics began disappearing from traditional high schools in the 1980s, but they're reappearing at district-run trade schools alongside new classes such as advertising design, computer repair, engineering and health sciences.

Three area districts – Denton, Irving and Mansfield – opened stand-alone career and technology schools in recent years. Birdville, Frisco and Grand Prairie have plans to build them.

And Lewisville ISD, with long waiting lists at its career center, hopes to build a second. Others, including Dallas, have added career magnets to traditional high schools.

"There's been a real resurgence in opening career centers," said Alan Strong, principal of Lewisville's Dale Jackson Career Center. "They're finally realizing that not all kids go to college, but all kids go to work."

Statewide, vocational enrollment jumped 170 percent from 1996 to 2006 – three times the rate of enrollment in bilingual courses and nine times the overall enrollment growth, according to a state report.

"That's pretty significant," said Karen Batchelor, the Texas Education Agency's director of career and technology education. "School districts are offering more engaging CTE programs, ones where students can see the benefit of education."

School officials said the concentrated setup helps kids find their niche and understand practical uses from core classes – a combination they say lowers dropout rates.

But the concept is still not widely accepted, as proponents of vocational education fight to make over an image of stitch-and-stew blow-off classes.

"Even when I was in high school in the '80s, those vocational programs were thought to be just for the dumb kids who weren't going to college," said Lisa Karr, Hurst-Euless-Bedford ISD's director of career and technology education.

"It's not like that anymore," she continued. "They're great, industry-focused programs in state-of-the-art buildings. You're not just going to bang a hammer anymore."

Some of the changes spurring growth are cosmetic. Educators have pushed away from the vocational label, re-branding as career and technology education. Wood shop is now referred to as construction systems, and auto mechanics as auto technology.

But the changes go deeper. Modern vehicles require mastering numerous small computers – often more than 20 – and that means learning advanced math in auto technology.

And no longer is vocational education only for those not headed to college. Districts have added classes such as media tech, health sciences, law, finance, engineering, electronics and computer maintenance.

How do those information-age careers fit alongside traditional vocational classes that don't require college degrees? They're all jobs in demand.

For kids not heading to a four-year college, schools offer credits toward an associate's degree and professional trade certifications that lead to better-paying jobs.

In cosmetology, students earn certifications through two classes – an education that private trade schools charge thousands of dollars for.

"I'm not going to college," said Laura Fuentes, a Lewisville senior and cosmetology student. "This is what all my family does, and this is what I want to do."

The classes help students get jobs with high-end salons that pay $45,000 a year and more, according to industry data.

Irving goes so far as to tailor its core curriculum to students' career focus. For example, a health sciences student takes science and math classes customized for the practical demands of nurses and doctors. Students attend The Academy of Irving ISD full time. In most districts, students are bused to and from career centers for classes.

But even in districts without customized core classes, educators said, students perform better once engaged in a career track with clear expectations of what it takes to get a job.

"We have fewer students who drop out if they see a purpose to why they're in school," said Marty Thompson, dean of Denton's $22 million Advanced Technology Complex, which opened last fall. "TAKS performance is better because it makes sense. They know how to apply it."

Mansfield ISD officials said students taking at least two classes at its Ben Barber Career Tech Academy, which opened in 2005, outperformed their peers at traditional high schools in math and language arts.

The career schools hire teachers with work experience in the fields they teach. That makes it tough to find good teachers willing to give up higher salaries, but districts make do by finding professionals tired of long hours or just eager to teach.

The centers also give students real-world experience. Many offer haircuts and manicures and vehicle tune-ups. Mansfield culinary students will soon open a restaurant.

And in Lewisville, media tech students film and produce programming for the city's cable station.

Michael Garza, a Lewisville senior, plans to go to a one-year trade college next year in Houston to pursue a career as an auto technician, where salaries average $58,000 – significantly more than the salary for a starting teacher with a bachelor's degree.

"I didn't know what an engine was, and you really do learn everything here," he said. "I saw I could make money doing it, and now my future is set on it."

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-vocational_12met.ART.State.Edition1.44989e0.html#

Labels: career education, vocational education

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:22 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Also consider getting Nichols’ and Berliners’ recently published book titled, Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools. -Angela

Published: March 12, 2007
Commentary
High-Stakes Testing is Putting the Nation At Risk
By David C. Berliner & Sharon L. Nichols

In his 2007 State of the Union address, President Bush claimed success for the federal No Child Left Behind Act. “Students are performing better in reading and math, and minority students are closing the achievement gap,” he said, calling on Congress to reauthorize this “good law.” Apparently, the president sees in No Child Left Behind what he sees in Iraq: evidence that his programs are working. But, as with Iraq, a substantial body of evidence challenges his claim.

—Peter Lui
We believe that this federal law, now in its sixth year, puts American public school students in serious jeopardy. Extensive reviews of empirical and theoretical work, along with conversations with hundreds of educators across the country, have convinced us that if Congress does not act in this session to fundamentally transform the law’s accountability provision, young people and their educators will suffer serious and long-term consequences. If the title were not already taken, our thoughts on this subject could be headlined “A Nation at Risk.”
We note in passing that only people who have no contact with children could write legislation demanding that every child reach a high level of performance in three subjects, thereby denying that individual differences exist. Only those same people could also believe that all children would reach high levels of proficiency at precisely the same rate of speed.
Validity problems in the testing of English-language learners and special education students also abound, but we limit our concerns in this essay to the No Child Left Behind law’s reliance on high-stakes testing. The stakes are high when students’ standardized-test performance results in grade retention or failure to graduate from high school. The stakes are high when teachers and administrators can lose their jobs or, conversely, receive large bonuses for student scores, or when humiliation or praise for teachers and schools occurs in the press as a result of test scores. This federal law requires such high-stakes testing in all states.
More than 30 years ago, the eminent social scientist Donald T. Campbell warned about the perils of measuring effectiveness via a single, highly consequential indicator: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking,” he said, “the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” High-stakes testing is exactly the kind of process Campbell worried about, since important judgments about student, teacher, and school effectiveness often are based on a single test score. This exaggerated reliance on scores for making judgments creates conditions that promote corruption and distortion. In fact, the overvaluation of this single indicator of school success often compromises the validity of the test scores themselves. Thus, the scores we end up praising and condemning in the press and our legislatures are actually untrustworthy, perhaps even worthless.
The scores we end up praising and condemning in the press and our legislatures are actually untrustworthy, perhaps even worthless.
Campbell’s law is ubiquitous, and shows up in many human endeavors. Businesses, for example, regularly become corrupt as particular indicators are deemed important in judging success or failure. If stock prices are the indicator of a company’s success, for example, then companies like Enron, Qwest, Adelphia, and WorldCom manipulate that indicator to make sure they look good. Lives and companies are destroyed as a result. That particular indicator of business success became untrustworthy as both it and the people who worked with it were corrupted.
Similarly, when the number of criminal cases closed is the indicator chosen to judge the success of a police department, two things generally happen: More trials are brought against people who may be innocent or, with a promise of lighter sentences, deals are made with accused criminals to get them to confess to crimes they didn’t commit.
When the indicators of success and failure in a profession take on too much value, they invariably are corrupted. Those of us in the academic world know that when researchers are judged primarily by their publication records, they have occasionally fabricated or manipulated data. This is just another instance of Campbell’s law in action.
We have documented hundreds of examples of the ways in which high-stakes testing corrupts American education in a new book, Collateral Damage. Using Campbell’s law as a framework, we found examples of administrators and teachers who have cheated on standardized tests. Educators, acting just like other humans do, manipulate the indicators used to judge their success or failure when their reputations, employment, or significant salary bonuses are related to those indicators.
The law makes all who engage in compliance activities traitors to their own profession. It forces education professionals to ignore the testing standards that they have worked so hard to develop.
We found examples of administrators who would falsify school test data or force low-scoring students out of school in their quest to avoid public humiliation. We documented the distortion of instructional values when teachers focused on “bubble” kids—those on the cusp of passing the test—at the expense of the education of very low or very high scorers. We found instances where callous disregard for student welfare had replaced compassion and humanity, as when special education students were forced to take a test they had failed five times, or when a student who had recently suffered a death in the family was forced to take the test anyway.
Because so much depends on how students perform on tests, it should not be surprising that, as one Florida superintendent noted, “When a low-performing child walks into a classroom, instead of being seen as a challenge, or an opportunity for improvement, for the first time since I’ve been in education, teachers are seeing [that child] as a liability.” Shouldn’t we be concerned about a law that turns too many of the country’s most morally admired citizens into morally compromised individuals?
We also documented the narrowing of the curriculum to just what is tested, and found a huge increase in time spent in test preparation instead of genuine instruction. We found teachers concerned about their loss of morale, the undercutting of their professionalism, and the problem of disillusionment among their students. Teachers and administrators told us repeatedly how they were not against accountability, but that they were being held responsible for their students’ performance regardless of other factors that may affect it. Dentists aren’t held responsible for cavities and physicians for the onset of diabetes when youngsters don’t brush their teeth, or eat too much junk food, they argue.
Teachers know they stand a better chance of being successful where neighborhoods and families are healthy and communicate a sense of efficacy, where incomes are both steady and adequate, and where health-care and child-care programs exist. So the best of them soon move to schools with easier-to-teach students. This is no way to close the achievement gap.
Dozens of assessment experts have argued eloquently and vehemently that the high-stakes tests accompanying the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act are psychometrically inadequate for the decisions that must be made about students, teachers, and schools. Furthermore, the testing standards of the American Educational Research Association are being violated in numerous ways by the use of high-stakes tests to comply with the law. The law, therefore, makes all who engage in compliance activities traitors to their own profession. It forces education professionals to ignore the testing standards that they have worked so hard to develop. We wonder, would the federal government treat members of the American Medical Association or the National Academy of Sciences with such disdain?
In reauthorization hearings for the law, members of Congress should abandon high-stakes testing and replace it with an accountability system that is more reasonable and fair.

What might such a system look like?

A move to more “formative” assessments and an abandonment of our heavy commitment to “summative” assessments would be welcome. Assessment for learning, as opposed to assessment of learning, has produced some impressive gains in student achievement in other countries, and ought to be tried here. Likewise, the use of an inspectorate—an agency that sends expert observers into schools—has proved itself useful in other countries, and could also help improve schools in the United States.

End-of-course exams designed by teachers, as some states are now offering, increase teachers’ commitment to the testing program and, if the teachers get to score the tests, can also be a great professional-development opportunity. There are other alternatives to high-stakes testing, as well.

Our research informs us that high-stakes testing is hurting students, teachers, and schools. It is putting the nation at risk. By restricting the education of our young people and substituting for it training for performing well on high-stakes examinations, we are turning America into a nation of test-takers, abandoning our heritage as a nation of thinkers, dreamers, and doers.

David C. Berliner is the Regents’ professor of education at Arizona State University, in Tempe, and a past president of the American Educational Research Association. Sharon L. Nichols is an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. They are the co-authors of Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools, published this month by Harvard Education Press.
Vol. 26, Issue 27, Pages 36,48

Labels: testing

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

Glad to see that the Miami-Herald is making a statement. Check earlier post--horrible things are happening in New Bedford, MA with parents getting separated from children as a result of aggressive immigrant hunts and raids. -Angela
Posted on Wed, Mar. 07, 2007
Don't punish children for acting their age

Families in immigration custody shouldn't be treated like criminals. Yet this is how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement now treats families routinely picked up at the border or elsewhere. The families are held in prison-like settings, and children are separated from parents as a form of punishment, according to a recent report by the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.
Cake confiscated

Families, especially children, shouldn't be detained when no one has committed a crime. Less expensive, more humane alternatives exist. Congress already has told ICE to stop separating families and to find alternatives to penal detention. Lawmakers should send a stronger message to end the mistreatment.

The new report, Locking Up Family Values, describes the conditions of families at two ICE facilities -- and particularly at the euphemistically named T. Don Hutto Residential Center. Located in Texas, Hutto is a former prison now operated for ICE by Corrections Corporation of America, which specializes in prisons. Hutto still has razor wire, prison cells and punitive treatment, even for children.

One former detainee, a 28-year-old Honduran, spent three months in Hutto with her daughters, ages 4 and 9. The pregnant detainee was released after a doctor determined that her baby wasn't developing, according to a report in The Houston Chronicle. The woman was constantly hungry, and her girls didn't go outside to play for weeks. When a guard brought a birthday cake for the 4-year-old, the cake was confiscated and the guard suspended. Why such cruelty?

Locking Up Family Values cites other examples of rigid, punitive treatment: children punished for behaving their age, parents stripped of their authority. Entire families traumatized. This is inhumane. ''The penal model of family detention leads to babies in uniforms with name tags, cribs inside prison cells, parents losing the ability to discipline their children and families unable to live as a normal family unit,'' the report said.

Less-costly alternatives

For these results, taxpayers currently pay about $200 a day per detainee in one of ICE's family-detention centers. The report recommends better, less-costly alternatives: ICE must stop locking up families in penal settings and close Hutto altogether. Asylum seekers should be released, as ICE policy directs. Families facing immigration proceedings should not be separated. Most should be released, adults under supervision and with ankle monitors, if needed. Worst case, families should be held in ''nonpenal, homelike'' settings.

Congress must ensure that ICE treats such families humanely.


© 2007 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miamiherald.com

http://www.miamiherald.com/454/story/33657.html

Labels: Hutto Detention Center, immigration

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:16 AM 0 comments Links to this post

MADISON, Wis. — Surrounded by five first graders learning to read at Hawthorne Elementary here, Stacey Hodiewicz listened as one boy struggled over a word.


March 9, 2007

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

“Pumpkin,” ventured the boy, Parker Kuehni.

“Look at the word,” the teacher suggested. Using a method known as whole language, she prompted him to consider the word’s size. “Is it long enough to be pumpkin?”

Parker looked again. “Pea,” he said, correctly.

Call it the $2 million reading lesson.

By sticking to its teaching approach, that is the amount Madison passed up under Reading First, the Bush administration’s ambitious effort to turn the nation’s poor children into skilled readers by the third grade.

The program, which gives $1 billion a year in grants to states, was supposed to end the so-called reading wars — the battle over the best method of teaching reading — but has instead opened a new and bitter front in the fight.

According to interviews with school officials and a string of federal audits and e-mail messages made public in recent months, federal officials and contractors used the program to pressure schools to adopt approaches that emphasize phonics, focusing on the mechanics of sounding out syllables, and to discard methods drawn from whole language that play down these mechanics and use cues like pictures or context to teach.

Federal officials who ran Reading First maintain that only curriculums including regular, systematic phonics lessons had the backing of “scientifically based reading research” required by the program.

But in a string of blistering reports, the Education Department’s inspector general has found that federal officials may have violated prohibitions in the law against mandating, or even endorsing, specific curriculums. The reports also found that federal officials overlooked conflicts of interest among the contractors that advised states applying for grants, and that in some instances, these contractors wrote reading programs competing for the money, and stood to collect royalties if their programs were chosen.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has said that the problems in Reading First occurred largely before she took over in 2005, and that her office has new guidelines for awarding grants. She declined a request for an interview.

Madison officials say that a year after Wisconsin joined Reading First, in 2004, contractors pressured them to drop their approach, which blends some phonics with whole language in a program called Balanced Literacy. Instead, they gave up the money — about $2 million, according to officials here, who say their program raised reading scores.

In New York City, under pressure from federal officials, school authorities in 2004 dropped their citywide balanced literacy approach for a more structured program stronger in phonics, in 49 low-income schools. At stake was $34 million.

Across the country — in Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maine and New Jersey — schools and districts with programs that did not stress phonics were either rejected for grants or pressured to change their methods even though some argued, as Madison did, that their programs met the law’s standard.

“We had data demonstrating that our children were learning at the rate that Reading First was aiming for, and they could not produce a single ounce of data to show the success rates of the program they were proposing,” said Art Rainwater, Madison’s superintendent of schools.

Both the House and the Senate are laying the groundwork for tough hearings on Reading First, which is up for renewal this year.

Robert Sweet Jr., a former Congressional aide who wrote much of the Reading First legislation, said the law aimed at breaking new ground by translating research into lesson plans. Under the law, the yardstick of a reading program’s scientific validity became a 2000 report by the National Reading Panel.

That panel, created by Congress, with members selected by G. Reid Lyon, a former head of a branch of the National Institutes of Health, set out to review the research and tell Americans what worked. It named phonics and related skills, vocabulary, fluency and reading comprehension as the cornerstones of effective reading instruction.

Mr. Sweet firmly believes that phonics is the superior method of instruction; he is now president of the National Right to Read Foundation, a pro-phonics group. His e-mail address begins phonicsman.

With Reading First, he said, “we felt we could put education on a new path.”

Dr. Lyon, another architect of the legislation, also strongly favors phonics. Teaching children to read by reason and context, as Parker did in Madison, rather than by sounding out letters to make words, is anathema, he said in an interview, suggesting that teachers of the whole language approach be prosecuted for “educational malpractice.”

Mr. Sweet agreed. “You’ve got billions used for the purchase of programs that have no validity or evidence that they work, and in fact they don’t, because you have so many kids coming out of the schools that can’t read,” he said.

But educators in Madison and elsewhere disagree about the effectiveness of phonics, and say their results prove their method works.

Under their system, the share of third graders reading at the top two levels, proficient and advanced, had risen to 82 percent by 2004, from 59 percent six years earlier, even as an influx of students in poverty, to 42 percent from 31 percent of Madison’s enrollment, could have driven down test scores. The share of Madison’s black students reading at the top levels had doubled to 64 percent in 2004 from 31 percent six years earlier.

And while 17 percent of African-Americans lacked basic reading skills when Madison started its reading effort in 1998, that number had plunged to 5 percent by 2004. The exams changed after 2004, making it impossible to compare recent results with those of 1998.

Other reading experts, like Richard Allington, past president of the International Reading Association, also challenge the case for phonics. Dr. Allington and others say the national panel’s review showed only minor benefits from phonics through first grade, and no strong support for one style of instruction. They also contend that children drilled in phonics end up with poor comprehension skills when they tackle more advanced books.

“This revisionist history of what the research says is wildly popular,” Dr. Allington said. “But it’s the main reason why so much of the reading community has largely rejected the National Reading Panel report and this large-scale vision of what an effective reading program looks like.”

Under Reading First, many were encouraged to use a pamphlet, “A Consumer’s Guide to Evaluating a Core Reading Program Grades K-3,” written by two special education professors, then at the University of Oregon, to gauge whether a program was backed by research.

But the guide also rewards practices, like using thin texts of limited vocabulary to practice syllables, for which there is no backing in research. Dr. Allington said the central role Washington assigned the guide effectively blocked from approval all but a few reading programs based on “made-up criteria.”

Deborah C. Simmons, who helped write the guide, said it largely reflected the available research, but acknowledged that even now, no studies have tested whether children learn to read faster or better through programs that rated highly in the guide.

Fatally for Madison, the guide does not consider consistent gains in reading achievement alone sufficient proof of a program’s worth.

In making their case, city officials turned to Kathryn Howe of the Reading First technical assistance center at the University of Oregon, one of several nationwide paid by the federal Education Department that helped states apply for grants. But early on, they began to suspect that Dr. Howe wanted them to dump their program.

At a workshop, she showed them how the guide valued exposing all children to identical instruction in phonics. Madison’s program is based on tailoring strategies individually, with less emphasis on drilling.

Dr. Howe used the Houghton Mifflin program as a model; officials here believed that approval would be certain if only they switched to that program, they said.

In interviews, Dr. Howe said she had not meant to endorse the Houghton Mifflin program and used it only for illustration, and had no ties to the company. She added that she might have been misunderstood.

“I certainly didn’t say, ‘You should buy Houghton Mifflin,’ ” she said. “I do remember saying: ‘You can do this without buying a purchased program. It’s easier if you have a purchased program, so you might think about that.’ ”

Dr. Howe said Madison’s program might have suited most students, but not those in the five schools applying for grants. “Maybe those students needed a different approach,” she said.

Mary Watson Peterson, Madison’s reading chief, said the city did use intensive phonics instruction, but only for struggling children.

After providing Dr. Howe extensive documentation, Madison officials received a letter from her and the center’s director, saying that because the city’s program lacked uniformity and relied too much on teacher judgment, they could not vouch to Washington that its approach was grounded in research.

Ultimately Madison withdrew from Reading First, said Mr. Rainwater, the superintendent, because educators here grew convinced that approval would never come. “It really boiled down to, we were going to have to abandon our reading program,” the superintendent said.

A subsequent letter from Dr. Howe seemed to confirm his view. “Madison made a good decision” in withdrawing, she wrote, “since Reading First is a very prescriptive program that does not match your district’s reading program as it stands now.”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/education/09reading.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Labels: phonics, whole language

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:40 PM 1 comments Links to this post

MSNBC.com
Slavery: Trying to atone, but why now?
Politics, history help explain groundswell of apology for ‘peculiar institution’
ANALYSIS
The Associated Press
Updated: 7:11 a.m. MT March 9, 2007
America is once again struggling to atone for slavery and its aftermath.

In a nation with an unquenchable need to analyze its racial past, there is now a fresh flow of contrition from public officials for the many wrongs of U.S. history.

Inspired by a resolution apologizing for slavery that Virginia legislators passed last month, black lawmakers in Georgia said Thursday they plan to introduce a similar measure there. Maryland and Missouri also are discussing an apology. And so far, a white Memphis congressman has gathered 36 co-sponsors for a bill that, if passed, would bring an apology to the federal level.

The FBI announced last week it is actively reinvestigating about a dozen cases of blacks slain in the 1950s and '60s as possible civil rights violations. As many as 100 more cases are being considered for similar treatment....

Click title to read rest of story. -Angela


URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17522875/from/ET/

© 2007 MSNBC.com

Labels: Dred Scott, slavery

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:17 PM 0 comments Links to this post

A child was held by her mother at a news conference in New Bedford the day after her father was among 327 employees of Michael Bianco Inc. who were detained by immigration officials. (Peter Periera/The New Bedford Standard Times via Associated Press)

This is very disturbing. I’ve compiled several reports for you (below). This is a humanitarian crisis indeed. How can our policies and our nation be so cruel to children?

A way to think about immigrants—a much more positive way—is that Americans are outsourcing their labor needs no differently than is currently being done with India and China. The difference is that Latina/o immigrants remain as a domestic population in the U.S. which means that they re-invest in our economy. I credit this re-articulation to John Guerra, President of the Texas Association of Mexican American Chambers of Commerce.

-Angela

US immigration system at its worst
By Ali Noorani in the Boston Globe, March 9, 2007

Ali Noorani is executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition
NEW BEDFORD

"HAS ANYONE seen my wife? She left for work yesterday and never came home. Our newborn baby is hungry and crying. Can someone please help?" asks a young father in the basement of a crowded church, one clear voice above the din of the hundreds gathered. The fear is palpable in the young man's eyes. He implores the listener to offer solace, hope, and encouragement.
There were hundreds of people searching for news about their loved ones, fighting back nervous tears. They found no information and no answers. Only chaos. And pain. And fear.
For the past three days, this has been the scene at St. James Church in New Bedford.
This is the result of failed immigration laws. This is the nation's immigration system at its worst.
On Tuesday, more than 500 armed homeland security officers descended upon Michael Blanco Inc. The owner of the factory, and a few of his senior staff, were arrested for hiring undocumented workers and creating false documents. They were out on bail and home with their families that night.
Approximately 350 employees, mostly mothers with young children, were swept up in the raid, shackled together in groups of three by their wrists and ankles and marched to buses bound for Fort Devens, 100 miles away. Without any legal representation or due process, these workers were asked for their immigration documentation and encouraged by immigration officers to choose voluntary deportation regardless of whether an immigration application was in process.
The irony of the story is that these employees were manufacturing the materials that keep US soldiers in Iraq safe from harm. Their skills as craftspeople served our country at a time of great need. Yet instead of being treated like heroes for their role in the war effort, they and their families are treated like traitors.
President Bush and his administration have decided to prioritize the detention and deportation of young mothers at taxpayer expense, and at the expense of our troops.
These families in New Bedford escaped severe poverty and oppressive governments because they dared to believe in the American Dream. Ineligible for public benefits, they work every day and pay taxes in hopes of providing a better future for their children and their communities.
These families are victims of unscrupulous employers and an ad hoc set of laws.
Immigration laws today are unjust not only for those yearning to be free, but also for everyone struggling for a better future for their children.
Now, New Bedford manufacturers and fish cutters feel the impact. In the days ahead, it will reverberate throughout Southeastern Massachusetts and the rest of the state.
The immigration reform debate will again emerge in the weeks ahead as legislation is introduced in Congress. We hope for the best but fear the worst. We hope our elected officials show the courage to make sure immigrant families, our families, are protected; we fear our officials and the politics of hate will let us down.
How can we look into the eyes of a young mother who has fled the repressive government and economic perils of Guatemala to stitch safety vests for our troops and tell her to leave? How can we look into the eyes of a young father of an eight- month old baby dehydrated because his mother has been detained and tell him he doesn't belong here?
If we allow this to continue, we will turn our backs on liberty and the American Dream. Irrational fears will only drive us to the wrong side of history. Let us live up to the dreams of every immigrant of every generation that had the courage to come to this country to make a better life for their families.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Workers, families unsure of next step after raid
>By BECKY W. EVANS, New Bedford (MA) Standard-Times staff writer
>March 8, 2007
>
>New Bedford is facing a "humanitarian mess," with children separated from
>their parents and hundreds of illegal immigrants almost certain to be sent
>to out-of-state detention facilities, advocates charged yesterday.
>"Families are totally being torn apart," said Carly Burton, a policy
>associate with the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition.
>"Kids don't know where their parents are. It's a humanitarian mess."
>
>"We are extremely concerned about the effect on these people's rights if
>they are shipped out of the area to a place they don't know and have no
>community," said Nancy Kelly, a managing attorney for the immigration unit
>at Greater Boston Legal Services.
>
>Meanwhile, Bay State congressional leaders yesterday called for changes to
>U.S. immigration policy, and Gov. Deval Patrick mobilized the Department of
>Social Services to provide emergency support for children and families
>affected by the raid.
>
>Tuesday's massive sweep by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at
>Michael Bianco Inc. in the South End resulted in the detainment of 320
>illegal immigrants, of which 275 were taken by bus to Fort Devens in Ayer.
>The illegal workers include illegal immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador,
>Honduras, Guatemala, Cape Verde, Portugal and Brazil. They were hired by
>Francesco Insolia, owner of Michael Bianco, and paid minimum wage without
>health benefits.
>
>Mr. Insolia and three of the company's managers were arrested during the
>raid and charged in connection with the alleged hiring of illegal
>immigrants. A fifth person was arrested on charges that he provided factory
>workers with false identification documents.
>
>The detainees spent Tuesday night in dormitories at Fort Devens, a former
>Army base. One New Bedford man said his Brazilian friend reported that she
>was placed in a room with five other people.
>
>The man, fearful of giving his name, stood outside the brick factory
>yesterday waiting to see if his friend would be released back to New
>Bedford. He was joined by family and friends who also waited for the return
>of their loved ones.
>
>At the plant yesterday, employee Grace Melo said she was worried about
>keeping her job.
>
>She said she was told by a supervisor to come to work, but said "I have no
>idea what will happen."
>
>She described yesterday's raid as "scary."
>
>"It was a shock to all of us."
>
>Legal employees of Michael Bianco returned to work yesterday, but many
>seemed unsure of what to do.
>
>Administrative assistant Nancy Franco said the plant was open, but that
>nothing was being done.
>
>She said she had yet to speak to the company's owner.
>
>Some employees said they were concerned about keeping their jobs given the
>uncertainty of the company's future.
>
>At Fort Devens, federal agents began a second round of interviews with
>detainees, ICE spokesman Richard Rocha said.
>
>He said the majority will be flown to detention facilities outside of
>Massachusetts, where they will appear before an immigration court judge for
>deportation proceedings.
>
>Depending on the judge's decision, the detainees will either be deported to
>their home countries or allowed to return to New Bedford, he said.
>
>The length of stay at the detention facilities depends on where the
>immigrants are from, Mr. Rocha said. Deportation to Mexico is quicker than
>those to other countries such as El Salvador and Honduras, he said.
>"Every country has a different type of immigration policy," he said.
>He estimated that the average stay at detention facilities in Texas is 18
>days. If detainees appeal, they could stay longer, he said.
>
>If deported, immigrants will face poverty and political unrest when they
>return to countries that many left for the same reasons, said Corinn
>Williams, director of the Community Economic Development Center of
>Southeastern Massachusetts.
>
>"Guatemala is one of the most violent countries," she said.
>
>Rev. Marc Fallon of Catholic Social Services spoke during a press conference
>yesterday at Our Lady of Guadelupe Parish at St. James Church. He said most
>of the detainees are "refugees of civil war" who suffer from post-traumatic
>stress disorder.
>
>He blamed federal enforcement agents for increasing their stress by raiding
>the factory and surrounding it with helicopters. He said the focus of the
>operation should have remained on the owners of the factory, not the illegal
>immigrants who worked there.
>
>"The detainees are being punished for the sin of corporate perpetrators," he
>said.
>
>When the detainees will leave Fort Devens and where they will go remained
>uncertain yesterday, but Mr. Rocha noted that there are facilities along the
>U.S.-Mexico border equipped to hold detainees.
>
>Once the detainees are moved out of Massachusetts it will be more difficult
>for family and friends to arrange and pay for legal services, said Ms.
>Kelly, an attorney with Greater Boston Legal Services.
>
>"This raid happened in Massachusetts, and even the ability to rally lawyers
>for pro bono cases will be affected" if the detainees are sent out of state,
>she said.
>
>Ms. Kelly spent Tuesday night at Fort Devens offering free legal counsel to
>the detainees. She was joined by seven colleagues from GBLS and one attorney
>from ACLU Boston.
>
>The lawyers provided counsel to 10 detainees - mostly women with children,
>Ms. Kelly said.
>
>"They were frantic," she said. "We tried to figure out what was going on
>advise them of what rights they have and figure out if there was a mother
>with a child so we could bring it to the attention of ICE."
>
>Many of the Fort Devens detainees have children, Ms. Kelly said.
>"I can say anecdotally that a lot of people hesitate to tell immigration
>agents that they have children, because they don't know what is going to
>happen to them," she said. "They don't want DSS to take them, and they fear
>what is going to happen."
>
>During the press conference, immigrant advocates estimated that between 70
>and 210 children were missing a parent who had been caught in the raid.
>Mr. Rocha reported that 45 detainees were released from the factory Tuesday
>after the raid for humanitarian reasons, which included medical problems and
>family and childcare issues.
>
>An additional 15 detainees - all women - were released yesterday from Fort
>Devens, also for humanitarian reasons, ICE spokeswoman Paula Grenier said.
>The women were transported to New Bedford.
>
>Mr. Rocha said those who have been released are "not free from immigration
>laws."
>
>If they fail to appear for their court hearing, they "will be a fugitive
>from the law," he said.
>
>Mothers and fathers with children who are U.S. citizens will face a
>difficult choice if they are deported, Mr. Rocha said.
>
>They can either take the child with them or leave them in the United States
>under the care of a family member or friend, he said.
>
>He said those who are deported usually opt to take their children with them.
>The office of Rep. William Delahunt, who serves on the House Judiciary
>Committee which has oversight over federal policies on immigration, was
>working with ICE yesterday to allow Department of Social Services staff to
>gain access to detainees.
>
>Gov. Deval Patrick contacted Rep. Delahunt yesterday and also mobilized DSS
>staff to assist families.
>
>"The Department of Social Services needs to have staff on site at Fort
>Devens to provide support for the detainees and coordinate support for their
>children," Gov. Patrick wrote in a letter to Rep. Delahunt.
>
>In the meantime, DSS is working with local officials and community activists
>to help the families.
>
>The department has found 29 foster homes for children affected by
>yesterday's actions, has matched at least 35 children to families being held
>at Fort Devens and is checking with local schools to determine if students
>who are absent are affected by the ongoing events.
>Bay State congressional leaders cited Tuesday's raid as one reason to change
>U.S. immigration policy.
>
>"People see how disruptive this is," said U.S. Rep. Barney Frank. "To think
>you can do this 10,000 times is a mistake.
>
>U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who is co-sponsoring an immigration reform bill
>with Arizona Sen. John McCain, said the best way to end the exploitation of
>undocumented workers is to put them on a path to earn legal status.
>The Kennedy-McCain bill, which would allow immigrants to earn legal status
>by fulfilling requirements over a number of years, is scheduled to be
>introduced by mid-March.
>
>Elsa Maldonado, a New Bedford resident and U.S. citizen, weighed in on the
>immigration debate while standing yesterday outside the factory.
>"They should give them amnesty," Ms. Maldonado said. "These people are not
>bothering anybody. They are just working. There is no such thing as illegal
>humans."
________________________________________________________________________________________
Children stranded after immigration raid in New Bedford, MA
A.P., March 7, 2007
Dozens of young children were stranded at schools and with baby-sitters after their parents were rounded up by federal authorities who raided a leather goods maker suspected of hiring illegal immigrants, authorities said Wednesday.
About two-thirds of the 500 employees of Michael Bianco Inc., mostly women, were detained Tuesday by immigration officials for possible deportation as illegal aliens.
As a result, about 100 children were stuck with baby sitters, caretakers and others, said Corinn Williams, director of the Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts.
"We're continuing to get stories today about infants that were left behind," she said. "It's been a widespread humanitarian crisis here in New Bedford."
The state Department of Social Services was working Wednesday to make sure the children receive proper care. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Julie Myers said eight pregnant women were released and women who were sole caregivers of children would also be released, but it takes time to verify people's accounts.
During the federal raid Tuesday, company owner Francesco Insolia, 50, and three top managers were arrested. Authorities allege Insolia oversaw "sweatshop" conditions so he could meet the demands of $91 million in U.S. military contracts.
U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan accused Insolia of exploiting the illegals to maximize his profits on the military contracts for production of backpacks and safety vests for soldiers. A fifth person was arrested on charges of helping illegals obtain fake identification.
Investigators described dingy conditions and said the illegal workers faced onerous fines, such as a $20 charge for talking while working and spending more than two minutes in the bathroom.
"They were given no options. It's either here, or the risk of no income at all," U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan said, comparing the plant to sweatshops from the early 1900s. "Clearly, they were exploited because of the fact they were here illegally."
Insolia's lawyer, Inga Bernstein, said: "The whole story will come out, and at that point it will be a very different scenario."
Michael Bianco Inc., founded in 1985, specialized in manufacturing high-end leather goods for retailers including Coach Inc. and Timberland Co. before landing a $9.4 million military contract in 2003 to make survival vests.
From 2004 and 2006, it won $82 million in military contracts to make products including lightweight backpacks. An Army spokesman did not return a call seeking comment about the status of the contracts.

Labels: immigration

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

Friday, March 9, 2007

Bill to improve math, science teaching loses pay provisions
KEA opposed salary differential
By Tom Loftus
tloftus@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal

FRANKFORT, Ky. -- A bill that is a top priority for Senate Republicans -- aimed at improving math and science teaching -- was approved yesterday by a House committee but only after it removed provisions to boost pay for top teachers in those subjects.

The budget committee sent to the House floor a new version of Senate Bill 1. It retains many of the original provisions, including cash incentives to schools to begin advanced-placement courses.

But gone from the bill is language that would authorize pay increases of up to $10,000 a year for the best chemistry, physics and calculus teachers -- an incentive that would be based on scores achieved by their students on advanced-placement tests.

The committee took no action on a second Senate priority bill, which would have raised the salaries of chemistry, physics and calculus teachers who get top scores on teacher-certification tests.

That bill, SB 2, is stuck in the budget committee, which plans no more meetings this session.

Sen. Ken Winters, a Murray Republican and sponsor of the bills, said he hopes SB 2 and the deleted parts of SB 1 can be revived in a conference committee that will reconcile differences between the House and Senate versions.

"Until the conference activities are over, you never give up on anything," Winters said.

Rep. Frank Rasche, a Paducah Democrat who is chairman of the House Education Committee, said the provisions giving additional pay for science and math teachers "had to come out" or the bill couldn't have passed the House.

Those provisions were strongly opposed by the Kentucky Education Association, the state teachers' union.

KEA President Frances Steenbergen said the organization believes salaries should be based on levels of experience, education and professional training "but not on the subject" being taught.

Rep. Harry Moberly, D-Richmond, chairman of budget committee, said he supports differential pay for teachers of subjects such as math and science, where the demand is great but the supply short. However, he said House Democratic leaders would not let the bill move without the KEA's support.

Besides providing cash incentives to schools to start advanced-placement classes, the current version of SB 1 also would pay the fees charged students to take advanced-placement tests.

Reporter Tom Loftus can be reached at (502) 875-5136.

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Labels: math and science, teacher incentive pay

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:12 PM 0 comments Links to this post

March 9, 2007, 3:20PM
99 teachers told to repay part of bonus
HISD blames a computer glitch for overpayments

By ERICKA MELLON
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Ninety-nine HISD teachers who received performance bonuses are being told this week they have to pay back an average of $745 because the district accidentally overpaid them.

HISD officials said a computer programming error led them to overpay about $73,700. The mistake caused the 99 part-time teachers and other instructional personnel to be paid as though they were full-time employees.

The affected teachers should receive a form from Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra this week giving them the option of having all the money deducted from a single paycheck or spread out over 10 pay periods.

The amounts range from $62.50 to $2,790.

"Although this affects less than 1 percent of HISD's 12,500 teachers, the error should not have been made," HISD spokesman Terry Abbott said in a written statement. "We regret it and apologize to those instructional staff members."

The head of the HISD's largest teachers union, however, is advising her members to keep the money.

"If it's the district's error, then the district should bear the loss," said Gayle Fallon, whose Houston Federation of Teachers represents about 6,500 employees.

"If you tell someone they deserve money and put it in their bank account, you've got a helluva nerve taking it back."

Fallon said she is encouraging teachers not to sign the form authorizing the district to deduct the money from their paycheck. Without the signed form, the district can't take back the money, Fallon said.

"And if they direct them to sign it, we'll see them in court," she added.

Asked to respond to Fallon's comments, Abbott said simply, "The money will need to be returned."

Principals at 52 schools are meeting with employees in person this week to explain and apologize.


Series of missteps for HISD

This is the third time Saavedra has been forced to admit an error since the district doled out $14 million in bonuses in January.
His first apology came after he referred to the teachers who received top bonuses as "the cream of the crop," drawing criticism and angry e-mail from offended employees who didn't get bonuses.

Later, the district realized it overlooked several hundred teachers in the initial payout, so it cut an additional $1 million in checks.

Abbott also said officials have corrected the programming error, and he added that HISD officials remain committed to the incentive pay plan, which seeks to hold individual teachers accountable for how much their students improve each year on standardized tests.

Steve Antley, a Marshall Middle School teacher who serves as president of the Congress of Houston Teachers, called the overpayment mistake "unbelievable."

"It's just another example of how poorly thought out and planned the whole program was, so it's not surprising these kinds of mistakes are being made," said Antley, who did not receive a bonus.

ericka.mellon@chron.com


http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4614930.html

Labels: teacher incentive pay

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:22 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Friday, March 2, 2007
English-only rule leads to firing
Hairstylist said she was fired after language dispute.
By AMY TAXIN
The Orange County Register
SANTA ANA – A bilingual Santa Ana hairstylist was fired after a dispute with her supervisor over rules requiring her to speak English at a retirement community salon.
Gloria Maldonado, 51, said she had worked at the salon at Town and Country Manor for four years, cutting hair for senior citizens who lived at the complex. She also styled hair for a handful of outside customers, including a friend who spoke little English.
Maldonado, who came to Santa Ana 35 years ago from Mexico, said she argued with the salon manager in February after she was asked not to speak Spanish in front of Town and Country residents.
"I said to her, if someone comes in speaking Spanish, do I have to refuse them service? I'm here to make a living like everyone else," Maldonado said. "Right now, I feel like this is discrimination."
Beauty salon manager Gwen Neveu, who leases space from Town and Country, said she fired Maldonado over what she called her "threatening" reaction to the English-only rule – not because of the rule itself.
But for Town and Country – a nonprofit run by the Christian and Missionary Alliance that offers independent and assisted living as well as nursing care – the issue of language hasn't been simple. In 2004, the Santa Ana center was cited by the California Department of Health Services after residents complained they didn't like staff speaking in foreign languages while providing nursing care.
The department required Town and Country staff to have training about when English should be spoken because "the facility must promote care for residents in a manner and in an environment that maintains or enhances each resident's dignity and in full recognition of his or her individuality," state papers show.
Town and Country's director, Dirk DeWolfe, said employees could speak to each other on breaks in any language, just not in front of the residents. He said the rule is laid out in the complex's employee handbook.
"All we do is try to abide by what the Department of Health Services tells us. We're stuck that way," he said.
DHS spokeswoman Norma Arceo said there is no law requiring nursing homes to operate in English but any service a resident receives – ranging from dialysis to a bath – should be provided in the resident's language.
"The bottom line is if the patient is in the same room, you want to be speaking English because we want the patient to understand," Arceo said.
She said DHS only oversees nursing care at Town and Country – not its assisted living facilities.
Federal civil rights experts said English can be required in the workplace for safety reasons or in the face of a "business necessity," citing examples ranging from a hospital emergency room to a factory that uses toxic chemicals. The state applies a similar rule, said Paul Ramsey, chief counsel for California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing.
"An employer may have a rule requiring only English," Ramsey said. "But business necessity is a pretty high standard in the state."
Anna Park, attorney for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Los Angeles, said companies need to be careful to apply the same rules to all languages. She also said they can't require English in every area of operations if safety is only a concern in a particular department.
"You can't have a blanket rule," Park said.
In Santa Ana, Maldonado rented a chair in one of several salons owned by Neveu that cater to residents in both the assisted living and nursing care facilities at Town and Country. Maldonado said that until last month she was never told English was required at the salon, which did not serve nursing care patients.
She said she never expected to find such a rule in Orange County, where 40 percent of residents speak a language other than English.
"I'm still in shock. I still don't believe it," she said.

Contact the writer: 714-704-3777 or ataxin@ocregister.com

http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/news/local/article_1596271.php

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:41 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Wed, Mar. 07, 2007

Education policy leaders, teachers at odds on bonuses
LEGISLATION IS INTENDED TO PRODUCE MORE SCIENCE AND MATH GRADUATES
By Raviya H. Ismail
HERALD-LEADER EDUCATION WRITER
FRANKFORT - Two bills that would give monetary rewards to physics, chemistry and math teachers have solid support from University of Kentucky President Lee T. Todd Jr. and Bob Sexton, executive director for the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence. But there's strong opposition from the Kentucky Education Association, whose members say the proposal would give preferential treatment to select teachers.

The House Appropriations and Revenue Committee yesterday listened to testimony from both sides about the bills. The legislation would reward teachers whose students score high on Advanced Placement exams, provide incentives to poor students who score well on those exams, and give bonuses to teachers of those subjects. The Senate previously approved the bills, but the House has not acted on them.

Chairman Harry Moberly, D-Richmond, said House Appropriations and Revenue Committee leaders would decide whether to vote on the bills.

The measures are in response to what many education advocates contend is a critical need to produce more science and math graduates to be competitive in the global economy.

"It's time to take some action," Todd testified. "We need to put the stake in the ground to say we are ready to take on this problem."

Todd is chairman of a task force aimed at finding strategies to improve the state's performance in these subjects. He said India and China each create 400,000 engineers a year, while the United States produces only 70,000 annually, many of them foreigners who return home.

Senate Bill 1, sponsored by Sen. Ken Winters, R-Murray, would create an incentive fund to help schools offer Advanced Placement courses in calculus, chemistry and physics.

The incentive fund would be used for two-year $10,000 grants to individual schools. Money the first year would go toward teacher training and planning. Money in the second year would be used to purchase textbooks and other materials for the courses.

The bill also provides a financial incentive for students who do well on Advanced Placement exams in the subjects. A student scoring well could receive up to $300 a course. The program also would offer teachers up to a total of $10,000 in incentive pay each year, based on how well their students perform in these math and science courses.

SB 2, sponsored by Senate Majority Floor Leader Dan Kelly, R-Springfield, would offer a $6,000 stipend to any high school chemistry and physics teacher who majored in the subject in college -- or went through the state's certification program -- and achieved a high score on a subject test that all teachers must take. High school and middle school math teachers would receive $3,000 stipends under the same terms.

But KEA President Frances Steenbergen said: "There should not be a differentiation of pay for a few teachers in a few subject areas." She said the proposal is "demoralizing to the vast majority of teachers."

Brent McKim, an Advanced Placement physics teacher at duPont Manual High School in Jefferson County, said that, although he'd benefit from the legislation, he doesn't agree with bonus pay for advanced science and math teachers.

"There is a very important place for AP courses in the high school curriculum, but at the same time, they are not for everyone," McKim testified. "They are not a magic bullet to solve all the problems in math and science."

KEA representatives have three dozen suggestions on ways to address the math and science crisis. They include offering full tuition for teachers in kindergarten through eighth grade acquiring minor degrees in math or science, and paying student fees for Advanced Placement exams.

Although some representatives voiced their concerns on the bills, specifically that teachers hadn't been involved in crafting them, most favored moving the initiatives forward.

"If we don't do something about the crisis that faces us with engineering, in the next couple decades ... we'll become a second-rate nation," said Rep. Jon Draud, R-Edgewood.

"I don't believe in trying to fix things if they're not broken, but when things aren't working it seems to me that you have to try something differently."

Reach Raviya H. Ismail at (859) 231-3342; 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3342; or rismail@herald-leader.com.

© 2007 Lexington Herald-Leader and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/16849072.htm

Labels: math and science

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:13 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out this ACLU website. The children's drawings in the Hutto Detention Center are gripping.

-Angela

Labels: Hutto Detention Center, immigration

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:50 PM 0 comments Links to this post

CALIFORNIA: Study says immigrants vie with earlier arrivals
Newcomers not taking jobs from U.S.-born workers

Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Immigrants do not compete with U.S.-born workers for jobs in California, and their presence actually has boosted the wages of all but the least-educated American-born workers, according to a study released Tuesday by the Public Policy Institute of California.

How immigrants affect American-born workers and the domestic economy has been a major element of the debate over immigration reform since Congress began tackling it in 2005.

Some past studies have found that less-educated U.S.-born workers compete with immigrants, and the new study found only an insignificant positive impact from immigration on the earnings of people who didn't finish high school.

But UC Davis economist Giovanni Peri reported Tuesday that immigration increased U.S.-born workers' wages an average of 4 percent between 1990 and 2004 in California, with the greatest benefit -- 6.7 percent -- going to those who attended college for a while.

The people losing out are earlier immigrants, according to Peri, who reviewed 40 years' worth of California wage and employment data. Their wages fell 17 percent because of increased immigration, legal and illegal, according to his research.

Two main factors are at work, Peri said. The state's economic pie has grown -- in some measure due to the immigrants' own role as consumers -- and native and foreign-born workers have generally filled complementary niches in the labor market rather than compete for the same jobs.

"Most of the immigrants -- because of skills that are different from U.S.-born workers -- take different jobs than American workers take," said Peri. "There's not one labor market for everybody, but different markets for different skills and tasks. The overall effect could be more productivity and higher wages."

Peri's findings don't conflict with the stagnation of the lowest-income Americans' wages, said Pia Orrenius, a research economist at the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve Bank. He's just saying immigrants are not responsible.

"Since the late 1970s, we've seen a large, sustained decline in the real wages of blue-collar men," said Orrenius. "Immigration turns out not to be the main driver. ... The main reason is a shift away from demand for low-skilled workers, relative to high-skilled workers."

With federal immigration reform possibly including a guest worker program, it made sense to focus on California, Peri said, because the state has so many immigrants -- one-third of the workforce -- that their positive or negative effects are more pronounced in the state.

American-born workers with some college education reaped the greatest benefit because they don't compete directly with the majority of immigrant workers, who have much less education, or with immigrant workers who are highly educated, he said.

If a computer engineer immigrates to California and starts a high-tech company here, for example, that company will need accountants, attorneys and other workers familiar with U.S. laws and regulations and able to communicate with American suppliers, said Peri. And those people are most likely to be U.S.-born.

"Complementarity" also seems to play out in the low-skilled agricultural sector, where immigrants with little education and English proficiency tend to go into tasks that emphasize manual skills, while native workers, who possess greater English and communication abilities, move into managerial roles, he said.

Orrenius said the demand for low-skilled workers is increasingly being filled by immigrants -- legal and illegal -- because the supply of U.S.-born workers without a high school education is falling. In California, 8 percent of workers lacked a high school degree in 2004, down from 9.2 percent in 1990, according to the U.S. Census.

She said Peri's assessment of the complementarity between immigrants and natives -- and his allowance for economic growth with the arrival of immigrants -- distinguishes his report from the analysis of Harvard economist George Borjas, who has done the most significant research showing negative effects of immigrants on U.S.-born workers.

Borjas was unavailable for comment Tuesday.

Ira Mehlman, California media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an advocacy group that favors restricting immigration, sees the shift less favorably.

"Employers get the most benefit" from hiring cheaper immigrant workers, said Mehlman. "Most of the rest of the population doesn't really benefit. They may see (lower prices) in certain goods and services, but they end up subsidizing these workers. We're paying for their education and health care."

In addition, the impact of immigrants on wages in California may not be typical, he said. U.S.-born workers who held low-wage jobs have left the state in part because their wages are stagnating, he said.

Peri said he found no correlation between native workers leaving California and the arrival of immigrants, and that a similar national study he conducted last year produced similar results.

Eliseo Medina, vice president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents primarily low-skilled workers, both native and foreign-born, said the degree to which workers are organized is a better predictor than immigrant status of their wages.

"Quite honestly, the economy needs more workers," said Medina, who favors allowing low-skilled immigrant workers to come to the United States legally. "What it doesn't need is more workers without the power to defend themselves."

Peri's finding that foreign-born workers' wages dropped 17 percent as a result of direct competition with newer immigrants suggests there may be more than enough low-skilled immigrant workers competing for jobs, said Frank D. Bean, a UC Irvine sociologist.

"The fact that there are negative effects on immigrant workers implies that there's a little bit of crowding for these crummy jobs," said Bean. "The question is, how big should a guest worker program be and even if you have one, does that stop unauthorized immigration?"

Peri's study, titled "How Immigrants Affect California Employment and Wages," analyzed U.S. Census Bureau data on wages, employment, education level and nativity of workers from 1960 to 2004. He broke down the California workforce by level of education and age, which roughly corresponds to level of experience, and compared native and foreign-born workers in each category.

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

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/28/BAGJ9OCI0F1.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 12 of the San Francisco Chronicle


© 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:38 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is a really great piece. -Angela

Don't immigrants deserve homes, too?
By Jorge A. Aguilar
03/03/07 04:21:18

My wife and I recently moved into a new home. The experience of building a home is not for the faint of heart -- nor for a compulsive or impatient personality type. The process -- from beginning to end -- lasted 21/2 years.
Although we followed the construction plans pretty closely, the house seemed to get bigger and bigger as time passed: More windows were added; more tile was laid than we had anticipated; more cement was poured; more grass and bigger and more mature trees were planted.

The cost of materials and labor rose, as did interest rates on our loans. In the end, we spent more than we had planned.

But on the day our home passed its final inspection and the contractor handed us our keys, none of this mattered. My wife and I were ecstatic because we had achieved our dream.

Throughout construction, I asked our contractor for information about his subcontractors. I wanted to know their identities, the length of time that he had worked with them and their qualifications and capabilities. Then I made it a point to get to know each of them as they labored on our future home.

After seeing an early pattern of subcontractors with immigrant backgrounds, I jokingly asked our contractor whether he planned to hire any subcontractors or subcontractor employees who were not immigrants for our home.

Immigrant labor top to bottom

From beginning to end, the only non-immigrants to work on our home were a couple of 20-somethings who laid the tile. Every other subcontractor and subcontractor employees -- from those who laid the foundation, to the framers, plumbers, roofers, electricians, cabinet makers, painters and landscapers, were individuals with immigrant backgrounds.

I had never thought about The American Dream in quite the way that I did the day we first entered our finished home. Not when my wife and I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, or when she received a master's degree, or when I received a juris doctor, or when we had our daughter.

And then I thought about all of the individuals who built our home. That evening, I thought about the cruel irony of my emotions earlier that day: We experienced The "American Dream," thanks to immigrants who themselves were working toward the exact same dream. And then I thought about other homeowners who experienced the same "dream," thanks to the same subcontractors and subcontractor employees.

Yet as difficult as it was to accept, I knew that some of those homeowners resent and even deny the reality of the contributions that immigrants make to this country once their homes pass their final inspection and they receive their keys.

As the new Congress prepares to convene under an entirely different leadership, I have heard increasing talk about the real possibility of an immigration reform package being passed.

I have even heard analysts say that this is an area where President Bush and Democratic leaders actually have a good chance of reaching a bipartisan solution.

Even Governor Schwarzenegger discussed the need to focus on immigration reform during his recent visit to Mexico. Our governor is quoted as saying that "the planned $1.2 billion, 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border is an incomplete way of solving the problem."

I am no expert in immigration reform, nor are most politicians. However, I am a humanist and so I try my best to treat others as humanely as possible. But I am not so naïve that I would claim that the immigration debate would be solved if politicians were more humane in their approach, because I am a realist as well. Today's politics are driven more by financial and other lobbying interests than by the human element.

Where's their opportunity?

My point is that there is a human element to this debate that needs to be taken into greater consideration. As a San Joaquin Valley native, I see the labor needs that immigrants fill. In all my years living in this region, I had never seen a sign reading "Se buscan piscadores de uva" (Grape pickers wanted) until last summer. While I have many fond memories of picking grapes as a young man myself, none of them are fond enough to motivate me to return to the same rows of grapes that I grew up picking.

Just ask my dad, who still is a farm worker and reminds me who really performs hard labor when I complain about stress from my job in which I get to wear a coat and tie every day.

Most importantly, I see the dedication of the workers who are building the homes of my future neighbors by laying the cement leading to their front door, landscaping their new yards, and cleaning them prior to -- and after -- final inspection. I am certain that many of these immigrants hope for the day that they, too, can build their own homes, lay cement leading to their own front doors, landscape their own new yards, and turn the keys to their own new homes.

Do they not deserve the opportunity to experience the same dream that they bring to life for so many of us day after day?

Jorge A. Aguilar is a special assistant to the chancellor and director of the Center for Educational Partnerships at the University of California, Merced.

Labels: immigration

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:35 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Rocky Mountain News

Critics assail private prisons
Companies cut dangerous corners for profit, some say

By Alan Gathright, Rocky Mountain News
March 7, 2007

Critics say Colorado's private prisons are driven by shareholder profits and that, ultimately, society pays when businesses "cut corners" on staffing costs and inmate rehabilitation.

The result is incidents such as a 2004 riot at a CCA prison in Crowley County, witnesses told a House Judiciary Committee hearing on private prisons Tuesday.

State Department of Corrections officials had to come to the rescue of 33 private prison officers who lost control of 1,112 inmates.

The state fined CCA $126,000 in June for short-staffing at Crowley and another facility after the state auditor blasted CCA for having a staff-to-inmate ratio that was one-seventh of a state prison at the time of the Crowley riot.

"That's a direct result of you get what you pay for," testified Ryan Sherman, an official for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which is crusading nationally against private prisons. He cited a U.S. Department of Justice report saying that private prisons have a 50 percent higher violence rate than their public counterparts.

Officials for CCA, the nation's biggest private prison operator, didn't make excuses for the Crowley riot.

"Frankly, we hadn't done enough homework," said CCA Vice President Tony Grande, acknowledging that the firm hadn't assessed the risk of transferring about 200 Washington state inmates to the Colorado prison population.

But officials said that CCA strives to learn from mistakes and improve its performance.

CCA's Josh Brown estimated that the firm has saved Colorado $492 million of prison construction during the past decade by providing nearly 4,000 in-state and 480 out-of-state private prison beds. He also cited 900 workers in the state and a $40 million annual payroll that boosts the economy in rural areas where prisons often locate.

But critics said that private prisons don't serve the public interest by constantly squeezing profits. They cited CCA's shipping Colorado prisoners hundreds of miles to Oklahoma. Critics say the prisoners can't receive family support or maintain community ties critical to successfully re-entering society.

"It has proven to be dangerous, and it is immoral to introduce a for-profit motive into the incarceration of human beings," said Christie Donner, of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition.

Rep. Rosemary Marshall, D-Denver, pointed out the disparity between starting pay for CCA guards, $24,000, and state prison guards, who earn $31,000.

By the numbers

Corrections Corporation of America is the biggest private prison provider in the U.S. and Colorado.

$82 million in annual state payments were made to CCA for providing Colorado prisoners with 3,850 private prison beds in-state and 480 beds in Oklahoma

$51.91 is the daily rate per prison bed

70,000 is CCA's total inmate population in the U.S.


gathrighta@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5486

Copyright 2007, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/government/article/0,2777,DRMN_23906_5399656,00.html

Labels: immigration

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:14 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Colorado to use inmates to fill migrant shortage
Tough laws passed last year against illegal immigration have created a need for farmworkers.
By Nicholas Riccardi
Times Staff Writer

March 1, 2007

DENVER — Ever since passing what its Legislature promoted as the nation's toughest laws against illegal immigration last summer, Colorado has struggled with a labor shortage as migrants fled the state. This week, officials announced a novel solution: Use convicts as farmworkers.

The Department of Corrections hopes to launch a pilot program this month — thought to be the first of its kind — that would contract with more than a dozen farms to provide inmates who will pick melons, onions and peppers.

Crops were left to spoil in the fields after the passage of legislation that required state identification to get government services and allowed police to check suspects' immigration status.

"The reason this [program] started is to make sure the agricultural industry wouldn't go out of business," state Rep. Dorothy Butcher said. Her district includes Pueblo, near the farmland where the inmates will work.

Prisoners who are a low security risk may choose to work in the fields, earning 60 cents a day. They also are eligible for small bonuses.

The inmates will be watched by prison guards, who will be paid by the farms. The cost is subject to negotiation, but farmers say they expect to pay more for the inmate labor and its associated costs than for their traditional workers.

Advocates on both sides of the immigration debate said they were stunned by the proposal.

"If they can't get slaves from Mexico, they want them from the jails," said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which favors restrictions on immigration.

Ricardo Martinez of the Denver immigrant rights group Padres Unidos asked: "Are we going to pull in inmates to work in the service industry too? You won't have enough inmates — unless you start importing them from Texas."

Farmers said they weren't happy with the solution, but their livelihoods are on the verge of collapse.

"This prison labor is not a cure for the immigration problem; it's just a Band-Aid," farmer Joe Pisciotta said.

He said he needed to be sure he would have enough workers for the harvest this fall before he planted watermelons, onions and pumpkins on his 700-acre farm in Avondale. But he's not thrilled with the idea of criminals working his fields.

"I've got young kids," he said. "It's something I've got to think about."

Pisciotta said he hoped the program highlighted what he viewed as the absurdity of Colorado's position — dependent on immigrant labor but trying to chase migrants away. He said the people leaving were not just those who entered the country illegally.

"Some of them have said, 'We think our paperwork is in order, but how about if it's not and we get caught on a glitch,' " he said.

Ever since the Democratic-controlled Legislature took a tough turn on immigration, the new requirements have worried those in the country legally and illegally.

Immigrant advocates allege that some sheriffs have authorized deputies to pull over Latino drivers on supposed speeding violations and ask them whether they are in the country legally.

And more stringent requirements put into effect last year made it harder to get a driver's license. Numerous U.S. citizens, including the daughter of a state legislator, were refused licenses because they lacked proper proof of citizenship. A judge has since ruled that the requirements must be revised.

Social service agencies say they have discovered few illegal immigrants on public assistance since the laws were passed.

Immigrant and business groups agree that the heated rhetoric has led to an exodus of Latinos — though no one is sure how many. Businesses including carwashes and construction firms have complained of a worker shortage.

"It's like, 'Don't go visit that house, there's a guy with a shotgun at the door,' " said state Rep. Rafael Gallegos, who represents a heavily Latino agricultural district in south-central Colorado. He voted against most of the legislation.

Farmers on Monday met with state officials at the Capitol here to discuss using inmate labor. The Department of Corrections expects to begin sending about 100 prisoners to work on farms near Pueblo this month.

Some of the state's 22,000 prisoners have agricultural experience. Convicts can participate in programs on prison grounds to break wild horses and grow crops. About 700 inmates work in other jobs outside prison, such as on fire crews.

Ari Zavaras, the executive director of the Department of Corrections, said he knew of no other prison system in the nation using convicts to fill agricultural labor shortages.

In California, where growers also have complained about a lack of workers, inmates have not labored in private fields since the 1940s. Prisoners then were used as farmhands while laborers were fighting in World War II, said Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections.

"The idea [of using prisoners on farms] has been floated before, but these are not unskilled jobs. They're jobs that require a lot of training and supervision," said David Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation. "It doesn't seem like a very practical alternative."

Krikorian, of the Center for Immigration Studies, said the Colorado prison experiment was "a sign that there are solutions other than importing foreign labor."

He said "ultimately they're going to have to improve the wages and working conditions" to attract legal workers, as well as to mechanize parts of their farming operations.

Colorado's experience shows that hard-line measures have an effect on illegal immigrants, Krikorian added, noting that arrests had dropped along the U.S.-Mexico border since security was increased last year.

"We're seeing enforcement work, not just in Colorado," he said, "but all over the country."

*

nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com



Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

Labels: immigration

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:00 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Here is a four-part story on immigration that has appeared in the Denver Post over the last several days: Fortress America Part 1; Building a Border: Part 2; Criminal crossing: Part 3; and Moving targets: Part 4. Very interesting and informative, especially the real profit in all of this. Note how the Corrections Corporation stock was way up yesterday. You may have seen as well (previous post) that Colorado is going to use inmates to fill migrant shortages as reported in this LA Times piece.

-Angela

Labels: immigration, series

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:43 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Austin delving deeper into performance pay for teachers

Houston educators urge Austin to tread with care; Denver's program a national model.

Click-2-Listen
By Raven L. Hill
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, March 03, 2007

As Austin school district officials craft a new compensation plan for teachers and officials, they are keeping a watchful eye on what worked in other school systems.

And what did not.

Starting in the fall, trustees plan to set aside $4.3 million annually to pay for performance-based bonuses as a way to recruit, retain and reward quality educators. Austin officials want to offer bonuses districtwide in the 2008-09 school year.

Austin is joining districts across the country that are exploring ways to better pay teachers and principals — and finding that more money doesn't always equal a better system.

Most efforts have historically failed for three reasons, experts say: They focused on financial incentives alone, lacked a systemic approach and were punitive in design.

The Austin school district has put discussions of strategic compensation in the broader context of the district's mission to raise student achievement, from providing better opportunities for professional development to more effective supervision and support.

"The efforts that have shown some of the most promise were those that realized you had to make many changes," said William Slotnik, founder and executive director of the Boston-based Community Training and Assistance Center, which is helping Austin with its plan. "You want to have a school system where all the pieces fit together."

In education, raises are often based on seniority or advanced degrees. An Austin teacher with a graduate degree is paid about $800 more on average. Salaries rise $200 with each additional year of experience. Though the district offers stipends in high-demand areas such as bilingual education and special education, it does not provide bonuses for reaching target education goals.

Denver's nationally recognized ProComp plan includes bonuses for teachers and principals who've completed continuing education courses, received satisfactory performance evaluations, met student growth objectives and work in "hard to staff" schools or specialized areas.

Austin started looking at performance pay about three years ago when it established a task force composed of educators, experts and parents. Now, the district sees the initiative as a key part of its efforts to better serve students. Ed Fuller, a University of Texas researcher who served as a facilitator, said the committee's subsequent reports and recommendations helped shore up "a foundation of understanding" about the district's perceived strengths and weaknesses.

"You have to look at the system holistically to make sure this particular policy effort fits in with the other work of the school district," Fuller said.

Austin is currently interviewing about 5,600 teachers and 400 campus administrators to see what they think of the idea.

The compensation initiative is being guided by a task force and steering committee of teachers, principals, and community and business representatives. The plan is to start paying performance bonuses at pilot schools in 2007-08 and expand to all schools the following year.

Jim Harrington, a former elementary school teacher and task force member who retired after 17 years in Austin schools, said he's encouraged that teachers will be better served in the future.

"The traditional pay system worked real well in the old traditional school system," Harrington said. "It's given me hope that we're moving toward more student achievement and teachers being adequately compensated."

Austin's measured approach is markedly different from that taken by Houston school district officials, whose $14 million performance pay plan tied teacher bonuses to student progress on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, the national Stanford 10 exam and the Spanish-equivalent Aprenda.

When the first round of bonus checks went out earlier this year, many of Houston's more than 15,000 teachers were furious, especially after the bonuses were made public.

They didn't understand how a school's Teacher of the Year wouldn't receive a bonus check or why teachers in subject areas such as reading, math or science wouldn't get the largest checks.

"We had teachers screaming at each other when the bonuses came out," said Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers. "We had one who walked off the job. What I would suggest to the Austin teachers and (Superintendent) Pat Forgione: Don't copy the Houston plan or your teachers will hate you."

Austin has laid the right groundwork, said Louis Malfaro, president of Education Austin, which represents more than 4,000 teachers and staff.

"In Houston, this was done to the teachers, not done with them, and done over their objections," Malfaro said. "Here in Austin, we have an opportunity to test some things, both to understand what teachers' goals and aspirations are, but also their fears and misgivings. When you're talking about people's pay, it's a politically charged area."

Austin officials plan to seek additional money for the bonuses from state and federal sources. Blackshear and Oak Springs elementaries and 20 other Austin campuses received state funds for incentive plans. Blackshear and Oak Springs devised plans that rewarded teachers based on passing rates, leadership and professionalism among other areas.

rhill@statesman.com; 445-3620

The Denver plan

•Teachers get bonuses of $342 to $3,070 depending on nine variables that include earning graduate degrees and professional development credits, satisfactory performance evaluations and student performance on the state achievement test.

•The $25 million plan was approved by voters in November 2005. Current teachers had seven years to decide whether to participate. Those hired after January 2006 were automatically enrolled.

•About 1,700 of more than 4,000 staff members had joined the plan by November.

The Houston plan

•Teachers can earn up to $7,000 in bonus pay based on student performance on standardized tests.

•The plan's goal was to focus on growth in student learning and make incentives more 'financially meaningful' to teachers.

•Started in January, the plan was roundly criticized by the Houston Federation of Teachers for being divisive and confusing.

Sources: Denver and Houston school districts, media reports



Find this article at: http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/03/03/3performancepay.html

Labels: teacher incentive pay, teachers

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:35 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Fourth grader Makenzie Pederson works on a mathematics test at Hayward Elementary School in Nebraska City, Neb., where teachers regularly meet in teams to review data from student assessments.
—James Colburn


February 21, 2007
Nebraska Swims Hard Against Testing’s Tides


Despite resistance, the Cornhusker State counts on its local assessments to meet federal mandates for school accountability.
By Rhea R. Borja

Elkhorn, Neb.

As the sky outside darkened in the face of a winter snowstorm, 3rd graders at Westridge Elementary School bent their heads over a paper-and-pencil test on electricity and magnetism. Then they walked into the hallway to take the test’s last part: connecting wires on an electromagnetic circuit board.
If students connected the wires correctly, a small motor on the board would turn on and a buzzer would sound. Their teacher watched from a few feet away as students, one by one, confidently took their places before the circuit board, their hands busily rearranging the wires. Every few minutes, the afternoon quiet was broken by a low but distinct buzz.
That kind of home-grown test of student performance—developed by educators here within the 4,200-student Elkhorn school district—is par for the course for Nebraska public schools. Not only do such assessments tell teachers what their students know, but they’re also integral to a learning-measurement system unique to the Cornhusker State.
Instead of relying on statewide standardized tests to comply with the accountability requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act—as is the case in the other 49 states—districts in Nebraska use their own academic standards and assessment systems. That’s about 264 systems, give or take a few.
“We’re a local-control state. It’s about local leadership,” said Doug Christensen, Nebraska’s plainspoken commissioner of education. “We’ve tried to preserve the integrity of what we have in this age of NCLB.”
The state’s localized assessment system is not universally admired. The state has struggled to get its system accepted by the U.S. Department of Education, for starters.
And late last month, the education committee chairman in Nebraska’s unicameral legislature introduced a bill that would replace the assessment system with statewide tests, mirroring what other states have done. A public hearing on the bill is scheduled for March 5.
Yet as more states experience battle fatigue amid struggles over accountability, some say Nebraska’s system—although challenging for educators to develop and implement—holds lessons for those looking for new options to measure K-12 performance.
The Elkhorn district was on the itinerary, for example, of a group of educators and leaders from education nonprofit groups from California, Hawaii, Minnesota, and Vermont who visited several Nebraska districts last month to pick up ideas for changing their own schools’ assessment systems. The Jan. 10-12 “study tour” was sponsored by the Forum for Education and Democracy, an Athens, Ohio-based nonprofit organization.
Another sign of such interest: Testing experts and some state education leaders met this month in New Orleans at a conference of the Washington-based Council of Chief State School Officers to discuss how federal policy could make it easier for states to create their own localized assessment systems. The Forum for Education and Democracy, which is opposed to relying on one set of tests for making such high-stakes decisions as students’ grade promotion and graduation or schools’ performance status under NCLB, was part of that Feb. 3 meeting.
“Any state can do this,” said George Wood, the director of the forum and the principal of Federal Hocking High School, in Stewart, Ohio. “It’s just a matter of whether they have the courage.”
Not that building a system of local assessments was easy. The learning curve was steep: Local educators practically had to become de facto psychometricians—experts in creating assessments and analyzing the resulting data.
“What we embarked upon was a massive mind-set change,” said Pat Roschewski, the director of assessment for the Nebraska education department.
Nebraska lawmakers set the wheels in motion in 2000, when they passed legislation requiring school districts to adopt academic standards in reading, writing, mathematics, science, and social studies. The standards had to be as hard as or harder than those the state had already adopted as a model.
Districts then had to create student assessments based on the local standards and report the results to the state. An exception exists for one subject: There is a statewide test for grades 4, 8, and 11 in writing, which state educators consider a cornerstone of learning.
At first, many teachers and administrators pushed back against the new system, called the School-based Teacher-led Assessment and Reporting System, or STARS. Some even wanted Nebraska to give a standardized test like those in other states, Ms. Roschewski recalled.

Teacher-developed assessments taken by students such as 4th grader Jacob Moyer are the linchpin of Nebraska's one-of-a-kind accountability system.
—James Colburn
“We spent more time trust-building than anything else to convince teachers that this is important,” she said. “It was messy. Chaotic.”
Teachers felt overwhelmed, agreed Cherie Larson, the director of instructional services for the 1,800-student Plattsmouth community school system. But gradually, with lots of summer, in-school, and weekend training, teachers got on board. “Creating your own assessments is a big responsibility,” Ms. Larson said. “But you can do it, and do it well.”
Seven years later, state education leaders say, teachers have been trained to analyze assessment data. Now they can do a more effective job at adjusting instruction to challenge students and collaborating to fine-tune their district assessments and standards.
“It’s not a test piled on top of your curriculum,” said Renee Jacobson, Plattsmouth’s superintendent of schools. “[The system] is woven into your curriculum. It’s part of your culture.”
One major challenge, though, has been finding ways to give local educators the time and tools they need to build reliable assessments. Nebraska’s 18 educational service units, or regional education agencies, provide the bulk of the training. ESU 4, for example, based in Auburn, some 68 miles southeast of Lincoln, trains 100 to 140 teachers at a time, said Mitzi Hoback, a co-director of the agency. Teachers gather in small groups for the weeklong summer sessions.
“What does a good multiple-choice question look like? If you write an open-ended question, what does the rubric look like to [ensure] consistency in scoring?” asked Ms. Hoback, describing the training.
Teachers are assigned different academic standards, and they collaborate to craft assessments measuring students’ mastery of them. Then they pilot the assessments in their classrooms, and meet again during the school year to talk about which ones worked and why.
At Papillion-La Vista South High School, for example, biology instructor Philip McBride pairs up students and gives each team note cards lettered A to D for pop quizzes that are part of the assessment system of the 9,000-student Papillion-La Vista district, outside Omaha. The teacher then asks questions on key biology concepts, and team members figure out the answers together and hold up the right card. After that, Mr. McBride calls on a team that answered correctly to explain its answer.
Federal Officials Lay Out Assessment To-Do List
After initially rejecting Nebraska’s assessment system as out of compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act, the U.S. Department of Education is now requiring the state to take certain steps by this school year to pass muster with the federal law. To win full approval, the department says the state must:
• Conduct peer reviews of each district’s standards and assessment system and determine which districts have not met NCLB requirements, in such areas as academic content and achievement standards, technical quality, and assessment and curricula alignment;
• Describe the range of sanctions that the state will impose on districts that fail to meet standards for NCLB compliance; and
• Give evidence of peer review and approval that the assessments for English-language learners meet NCLB requirements
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education
“It helps when you hear [the answer] from your peers instead of your teacher,” said 15-year-old Miles Kellett, one of Mr. McBride’s students.
Sometimes, assessments that work in theory fall apart in reality. In the Elkhorn district just northwest of Omaha, for example, 4th grade teachers Julie Sorensen and Troy Sidders taught their students the basic physics of sailing and then had them build a sail using six straws and a piece of paper to test their understanding of such concepts as velocity and lift. If built correctly, the sails would move forward at least one meter when students blew on them.
The problem, the teachers said, was that some students watched one classmate who quickly understood how to build an efficient sail. Then they just copied him.
“It would have been great if each kid was in a room with a closed door,” said Mr. Sidders. Now he and Ms. Sorensen are reconsidering their use of the performance test and are devising other tests.
That kind of teacher teamwork and time can be hard to come by in an already crammed school day. Still, neither teachers nor districts are entirely on their own.
The state gives districts $3.5 million a year in STARS grants for staff development in assessment.
Nebraska's Top Six 'Quality Criteria' for Assessment
1: The assessments reflect the state or local standards.
2: Students have an opportunity to learn the content.
3: The assessments are free from bias or offensive language or situations.
4: The level is appropriate for students.
5: There is consistency in scoring.
6: Mastery levels are appropriate.
SOURCE: Nebraska Department of Education
In Plattsmouth, for example, the district has shaved five minutes off the end of the school day so that teachers have at least 30 minutes to meet at the end of every sixth day. Educators in the 1,360-student Nebraska City district, 48 miles east of Lincoln, meet in teams to review assessments, curriculum, and data throughout the year.
The state also sets guidelines for local assessment systems through criteria developed by the Buros Center for Testing, an independent test-evaluation, -research, and -consulting group at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Districts must annually report to the state assessment data in reading and mathematics. Over the past six years, Nebraska’s annual report card shows gradual improvement in district-reported test data in reading, writing, and mathematics. Districts will begin reporting science data to the state in 2008, and social studies results in 2009. In addition, districts administer commercial nationally normed tests, such as the Stanford-10 achievement test and CTB/McGraw-Hill’s Terra Nova tests, as well as the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Mr. Christensen, the Nebraska schools chief, said that while many states’ school systems are like pyramids, with teachers at the bottom and a few state administrators at the top, Nebraska’s is a series of concentric circles, with teachers in the center as “instructional leaders.”
“Our system is classroom-centered,” he said. “It’s got to come from the classroom up, not the capital down.” That way, he added with a laugh, “when you have a leadership role at the local level, you don’t have to have as much leadership at the state level.”
Coverage of new schooling arrangements and classroom improvement efforts is supported by a grant from the Annenberg Foundation.
Vol. 26, Issue 24, Pages 32-34

Labels: authentic assessment, college testing, Nebraska

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:03 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Here's the link to the below-mentioned HB 2236 and SB 1031. It is good to tie the test to content offered in the semester/year that it is taught. My concern is that this doesn't eliminate the teaching to the test and narrowing of curricula that teachers complain about. I hear complaints from students that in many of their AP courses, all they do is test prep and this robs them of a good education. What we need to do is use the tests differently which in all fairness, these bills attempt to do. Authentic assessment within which tests are a part is still the way to go. Check out this link to the Nebraska assessment system because it implements a robust assessment system that they've had to get clearance from the DOE in order to do.

Angela

March 1, 2007, 9:12PM
Texas lawmakers want to replace TAKS test

By APRIL CASTRO
Associated Press

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AUSTIN — Instead of one exit-level test, some state lawmakers want Texas high school students to pass 12 tests before they can get their diploma.

The exit-level Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills would be replaced with end-of-course exams in the core subject areas under the proposal filed today in the House by Republican Rep. Rob Eissler, who leads the House Public Education Committee.

The high-stakes nature of the TAKS has been lambasted by teachers and parents, who argue that too much classroom time is spent on preparing students for the test. Criticisms of the TAKS also emerged as a common campaign issue during last year's gubernatorial election.

Replacing the high school TAKS with end-of-course exams would ease some of the most common complaints about the test, Eissler said.

"End of course exams will allow teachers to focus on content and not simply 'teach to the test,' " Eissler said. "Teachers will be able to focus on the deep content of each course."

Proponents of the measure argue that classroom time would not have to be wasted reviewing material that students might have learned in a class taken previously.

That results in "undermining the number of learning days, the academic days that go into a school year and this new testing regimen should put the emphasis back on learning, not on testing," said Sen. Kel Seliger, an Amarillo Republican.

Teachers groups, which have been among the most vocal critics of the TAKS, offered a tepid response to the proposal.

"The one concern that we have with any new assessment system is that it does not take on the high-stakes end all, be all that the TAKS test evolved into," said Cindy Chapman, a high school teacher in White Face who also serves as the state president of the Association of Texas Professional Educators.

One of the teachers' complaints about the TAKS has been that bonus pay for teachers is tied to student performance on the test in some qualifying schools.

"I think we can all agree that the TAKS has outlived it's welcome," said Sen. Florence Shapiro, who filed the measure in the Senate. "Make no mistake: This does not in any way take away any accountability."

The proposal would be phased in over several years, starting with students who are in sixth grade this year.

Students would be able to retake the tests if their first score was unsatisfactory.

To graduate, students will have to score at least 70 percent cumulatively on the tests. A cumulative score means that students don't necessarily have to score above 70 on each of the 12 exams, as long as they score higher on others.

That differs from the TAKS, in which a failing grade on any portion automatically means failure.

In addition to the end-of-course exams, the sweeping legislation also would:

— Institute safeguards to prevent cheating on the tests after widespread discrepancies were identified last year;

— Direct school districts to be prepared to administer the tests online;

— Require eighth- and 10th-grade students to also take a college-readiness test such as the PSAT as a diagnostic gauge;

— Allow 11th-grade students to take a college entrance exam like the SAT or ACT at state expense.

The bills are House Bill 2236 and Senate Bill 1031.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/4595286.html

Labels: authentic assessment, Nebraska, testing

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:47 PM 0 comments Links to this post