Just came across this important piece. Too much to read. -Angela

States Found to Vary Widely on Education
Posted by Dad on 6/08/07

June 8, 2007
States Found to Vary Widely on Education
By TAMAR LEWIN

Academic standards vary so drastically from state to state
that a fourth grader judged proficient in reading in
Mississippi or Tennessee would fall far short of that mark
in Massachusetts and South Carolina, the United States
Department of Education said yesterday in a report that,
for the first time, measured the extent of the
differences.

The wide variation raises questions about whether the
federal No Child Left Behind law, President Bush’s
signature education initiative, which is up for renewal
this year, has allowed a patchwork of educational
inequities around the country, with no common yardstick to
determine whether schoolchildren are learning enough.

The law requires that all students be brought to
proficiency by 2014 in reading and math and creates
sanctions for failure. But in a bow to states’ rights it
lets each state set its own standards and choose its own
tests.

The report provides ammunition for critics who say that
one national standard is needed. “Parents and communities
in too many states are being told not to worry, all is
well, when their students are far behind,” said Michael J.
Petrilli, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham
Foundation who served in the Education Department during
Mr. Bush’s first term.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a
statement, “This report offers sobering news that serious
work remains to ensure that our schools are teaching
students to the highest possible standards.” Still, in a
conference call with reporters, she said it was up to the
states, not the federal government, to raise standards.

The report for the first time creates a common yardstick
to measure the results on state tests against the National
Assessment of Educational Progress, considered the gold
standard of testing.

The report examines the minimum score a student would have
to get on each state’s reading and math tests to be deemed
proficient — or at grade level — and then determines what
the equivalent score for that level of competency would be
on the national test. Results on the national test are not
used to judge schools under No Child Left Behind.

The national test divides students’ scores into three
achievement levels, basic, proficient and advanced. Grover
J. Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education
Sciences at the Education Department, said the achievement
level that many states called proficient was closer to
what the national test rated as just basic. And the report
shows that not a single state sets its reading proficiency
levels as high as the national test.

Although results were not available for all states, the
Education Department report based on tests given in the
2004-5 school year illustrated starkly the variations in
standards.

For example, an eighth grader in Missouri would need the
equivalent of a 311 on the national math test to be judged
proficient. That is actually more rigorous than the
national test. In Tennessee, however, a student can meet
the state’s proficiency standard with a 230, a score well
below even the basic level on the national exam.

And while a Massachusetts fourth grader would need the
equivalent of a 234, or just below the proficiency mark on
the national test, to be judged as proficient by the
state, a Mississippi fourth grader can meet the state’s
standard with a state score that corresponds to a 161 on
the national test.

Such score differences represent a gap of several grade
levels. New York ranked 9th in grade 4 reading, in terms
of the rigor of its standards. Its proficiency standards
corresponded to 207 on the national test. It ranked third
in grade 8 reading. But it was toward the bottom, 29th
among 33 states in grade 4 math. And it was 13th in grade
8 math.

New York has since approved new math standards. “The
results in reading are positive for New York relative to
other states, but math is mixed,” State Education
Commissioner Richard Mills said. “The comparison reminds
us of the need over time to keep raising standards and
providing extra help to students.”

The report found that eighth graders in North Carolina had
to show the least skill to be considered proficient
readers while those in Wyoming had to show the most skill.
Tennessee set the lowest bar on grade 4 math while
Massachusetts set the highest one.

The differences between state proficiency standards were
sometimes more than double the national gap between
minority and white students’ reading levels, which
averages about 30 points on the national test, Mr.
Whitehurst said.

Many education experts criticize No Child Left Behind,
saying it gives states an incentive to set low standards
to avoid sanctions on schools that do not increase the
percentage of students demonstrating proficiency each
year. Those experts argue that uniform national standards
are needed.

But Congress is unlikely to go that far. Ms. Spellings
said, “It’s way too early to conclude we need to adopt
national standards” and added that it is also too early to
conclude that state standards are too low.

On Tuesday, a survey of state scores in reading and math,
released by the Center on Education Policy, an independent
Washington group, found that since the passage of No Child
Left Behind in 2002, student achievement had increased and
the racial achievement gap narrowed in many states.

Ms. Spellings said the results showed the law has “struck
a chord of success.” Her department’s report, though,
raises doubts about just how much progress has been made.

Mr. Petrilli said, “Even if students are making progress
on state tests, if tests are incredibly easy, that doesn’t
mean much.”

Labels: academic standards, assessment, NCLB

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:02 PM 0 comments Links to this post

I just got this analysis from Gerald Bracey. It's worth posting. -Angela

New York, Dayton, Washington, D. C., Cleveland, Milwaukee, Florida, and now Washington again. Kids who use publicly or privately funded vouchers to attend private schools don’t do any better in school than matched groups of public school children. You wonder how many at bats these guys are going to get. I guess when the club owners are people like George W. Bush, John Boehner, and James Leininger the answer is “infinite” (Leininger spent millions trying to influence voting in Texas to stack a legislature that would give him the vouchers he’s been chasing for 20 years. See Chapter 2, James Leininger, Sugar Daddy of the Religious Right in The Anatomy of Power: Texas and the Religious Right in 2006. Put the title in Google).

I guess if the names are George F. Will, Paul Peterson, or Joe Bast (Heartland Institute), the answer is also infinite simply due their infinite hatred for the National Education Association. Freud would have a field day with these guys.

The latest Washington debacle has to be especially disappointing to voucher proponents simply because it’s the latest. You’d think they would have learned something from all those earlier tryouts I named earlier.

Maggie Spellings was her usual inelegant self: “The report’s findings are in step with rigorous studies of other voucher programs which have not typically found impacts on student achievement in the first year. We know that parents are pleased with the success of the program in providing effective education alternatives.” And just how might you be defining “effective” Ms. Spellings?

Paul, when-the-going-gets-tough-the-Right-gets-Peterson, Peterson echoed Spellings “Kids lose ground when they change schools. Even if they may be in a better school, they’re not going to adjust right off the bat.” Well, Paul, live and learn, I guess. This is the first time I’ve heard you or any other voucher vulture invoke adjustment as an excuse for the poor showing.

And he and Maggie are wrong. Peterson’s own data show them wrong. Peterson claimed sizeable first year gains in Cleveland. Of course, he used fall-to-spring testing and had no control group so it wasn’t exactly a randomized field trial. Later, better studies by Kim Metcalf and a team from Indiana University found the public school kids starting out behind and catching up even though white students were overrepresented in the voucher groups.

In Peterson’s studies in Dayton and DC, Peterson got a “significant” effect in math—at the .10 level, a level not used by most researchers. By the second year, math had moved up to .05. Reading never showed any gain and by the third year everything had washed out.

Amit Paley’s article in the Washington Post says the Bush administration will attempt to expend vouchers nationwide in the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. No doubt. Bush had them in there to start with, lost them to Kennedy, and was unable to get them reinserted despite six old college tries by Boehner.

But, hey, in a faith-based administration (see Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt”, New York Times Magazine October 17, 2004) what’s a little negative data among prayer-mates?

Amit Paley, “Voucher Students Show Few Gains in First Year.” Washington Post, June 22, 2007, p. B1.

Labels: Vouchers

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:36 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Voucher Use in Washington Wins Praise of Parents

By SAM DILLON / June 22, 2007 / NYTimes

Students who participated in the first year of the District of Columbia’s federally financed school voucher program did not show significantly higher math or reading achievement, but their parents were satisfied anyway, viewing the private schools they attended at taxpayer expense as safer and better than public schools, according to an Education Department study released yesterday.

The students themselves painted a picture different from that of their parents, though, feeling neither more satisfied nor safer than did students attending public schools.

“The program had a substantial positive impact on parents’ views of school safety, but not on students’ actual school experiences with dangerous activities,” the study said.

A Republican-controlled Congress established the voucher program, for Grades K through 12, in 2004. Over the last three years it has provided scholarships of up to $7,500 annually to cover tuition, fees and transportation expenses for each of about 1,800 poor children to attend private school. About 90 percent of the participating students have been African-American, and an additional 9 percent Hispanic, according to the Congressionally mandated study.

The results were eagerly awaited, because studies of similar programs elsewhere, in cities including Cleveland, Milwaukee and Dayton, had not produced definitive conclusions about whether vouchers significantly increased the academic achievement of students who previously attended public schools.

The new research found that in the Washington program’s first academic year, 2004-5, it “generated no statistically significant impacts, positive or negative, on student reading or math achievement.”

But Grover J. Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the Education Department agency that oversaw the study, told reporters yesterday that it was too early to tell whether the program would significantly affect student achievement. The students had been attending private schools for an average of less than a year when they were tested for the study, not much time for their new academic environment to affect performance.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said in a statement, “The report’s findings are in step with rigorous studies of other voucher programs, which have not typically found impacts on student achievement in the first year.”

Because the number of students who have applied for the program exceeds the number of available scholarships, or the number of seats available to them in the 58 participating private schools, eligible students have been chosen by lottery. As a result, researchers were able to study two randomly selected groups: one of scholarship recipients and another of students rejected by the lottery who continued to attend public schools. The researchers, led by Patrick J. Wolf, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas, compared the academic outcomes of the two groups, as well as their perception, and that of their parents, toward their schools.

About two-thirds of the participating students attended parochial schools operated by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington; the rest attended other private schools. The $7,500 scholarship that families spent was about half the average public expenditure per student in the District of Columbia public schools.

Parents of students using the vouchers were significantly more likely to give the school their child attended a grade of A or B than were parents of students rejected by the lottery, the study found.

Joseph P. Viteritti, a professor of public policy at Hunter College, said those findings were consistent with studies of other voucher programs.

“To me,” Mr. Viteritti said, “it just means that parents are happy to have a choice.”

But Clive R. Belfield, an economics professor at the City University of New York who has studied voucher programs, noted the new report’s finding that of the 1,027 students who entered the Washington program in the fall of 2004, only 788 remained in it by the fall of 2006.

“That’s quite a bit of attrition,” Mr. Belfield said. “If parents are so satisfied, why have about 20 percent of the students left the program?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/22/washington/22vouchers.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1182818280-M+G1NV2DZVgjK77HrVoniQ

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Labels: Vouchers

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

Voucher Students Show Few Gains in First Year
D.C. Results Typical, Federal Study Says
By Amit R. Paley and Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 22, 2007; B01

Students in the D.C. school voucher program, the first federal initiative to spend taxpayer dollars on private school tuition, generally performed no better on reading and math tests after one year in the program than their peers in public schools, the U.S. Education Department said yesterday.

The department's report, which researchers said is an early snapshot, found only a few exceptions to the conclusion that the program has not yet had a significant impact on achievement: Students who moved from higher-performing public schools to private schools and those who scored well on tests before entering the program performed better in math than their peers who stayed in public school.

The results are likely to inflame a national debate about using public money for private education. Many Democrats, who have long opposed such programs, seized on the study as evidence that vouchers are ineffective.

"Vouchers have received a failing grade," said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.). "This just makes the voucher program even more irrelevant."

But Republicans and other voucher supporters said it is too soon to judge.

"The report's findings are in step with rigorous studies of other voucher programs which have not typically found impacts on student achievement in the first year," U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a statement. "We know that parents are pleased with the success of the program in providing effective education alternatives."

A Republican-led Congress created the $14 million-a-year program in 2004. The five-year initiative provides $7,500 vouchers each year to 1,800 students, from kindergartners to high school seniors, who attend 58 private schools, most of them Catholic schools. Participants must live in the District and come from low-income families. Advocates say the program offers an alternative to the troubled D.C. public schools.

Known as the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, the initiative is one of the few government-run voucher systems in the country. Milwaukee and Ohio have similar plans, and Florida and Arizona offer vouchers to special education students.

In studies of those programs and others funded with private money, researchers tended to find little improvement in test scores after one year, said Paul Peterson, director of Harvard University's program on education policy and governance. He said it takes time for students to adjust to new surroundings.

"Kids lose ground when they change schools. Even if they may be in a better school, they're not going to adjust to that right off the bat," he said. "It doesn't happen overnight. It's a slow process."

Former D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) and former Ward 7 D.C. Council member Kevin P. Chavous, early advocates of the program, reiterated their support.

"We welcome the release of this 'early look' at the program's performance," they said in a statement signed by community and business leaders. "Although these findings reflect just seven months of schooling -- typically far too short a time period to see any significant academic progress -- there is an early indication of gains in math, particularly for students who had less academic ground to make up."

The report, released by the Education Department's Institute of Education Sciences, examined test scores from more than 2,000 students who entered a lottery for admission to the voucher program. Scores from students accepted in the program were compared with scores from those who weren't. The study followed two groups of students in their first year in the program, 2004-05 and 2005-06.

The study also found that parents like vouchers. Those whose children are in the program were significantly more likely to rate their school with a grade of A or B than their public school counterparts.

Tiesha Lawrence said the voucher program has been a boon for her 7-year-old son, Nickquan.

Lawrence, 27, an administrator for the federal government who lives in Anacostia, said Nickquan had been targeted for special education at the public Orr Elementary School in Southeast because he had trouble finishing assignments.

Using voucher money, Lawrence enrolled him at Ambassador Baptist Church Christian Academy in Southeast. She kept him back in first grade because he knew some words but couldn't read, she said. Since then, there has been a sea change.

"He loves to read, and he does his work on his own," said Lawrence, who hopes to send her 3-year-old son to Ambassador. "It's just really been a great help. It's like [Nickquan] really cares about school, and they are going to make sure that each child gets what they need before they go on to the next grade."

The report also found no evidence that students in the program were safer than their counterparts, even though their parents thought they were.

Nikia Hammond, 30, who has four children in the program, said she thinks the private schools her children attend are safer than public schools.

"It means something to me, as a single parent, not being able to afford private school, to be a part of the scholarship program," said Hammond, an eyewear specialist. "Without the scholarship fund, I'd probably be back at square one, thinking about where I'm going to be putting them in a public school. I think if they were to take this away, I'd be out of luck."

The Bush administration wants to expand vouchers nationwide through revisions in the No Child Left Behind law. But Democrats said the new report will make it easier for them to kill such proposals.

"This report offers even more proof that private school vouchers won't improve student achievement and are nothing more than a tired political gimmick," Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House education committee, said in a statement.

Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, which supports vouchers, said she is confident that future reports on the program will show greater gains. But she said the study should be viewed as validation of the program.

"Does it help kids? Does it help families?" she said. "I think the answer from this report is clearly yes."

Staff researcher Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.

Labels: Vouchers

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:26 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Hmmm. A new awakening or re-awakening of the religious right? Quote: "“It’s evangelicals reclaiming their birthright and their historical legacy as reformers, in the 19th-century sense of the term,” he said, noting that evangelicals in 19th-century America and Britain often were at the forefront of progressive political movements. They led fights against slavery, for women’s rights and for child welfare, for instance." Read on.

-Angela

RENDER TO CAESAR: Some Baptists feel ‘caught in the middle’

By Robert Marus / Associated Baptist Press / 6/22/07

It may look dead, but it’s really just evolving—even though its members might not like that word. And it may be developing into something its founders wouldn’t recognize.

That’s what some experts say about the future of the Religious Right as a political movement. And even many very conservative Southern Baptists are part of the trend.

The recent death of Virginia Baptist pastor and political activist Jerry Falwell put an exclamation point on months’ worth of media attention to the ever-more-evident fissures within conservative Christian ranks over how to proceed in secular politics.

Although his influence had waned in recent years, Falwell widely was regarded as a godfather of the Religious Right. Historians of religion and politics regard his launch of the Moral Majority in 1979 as seminal in unifying conservative Christians as a voting bloc.

But now Falwell is dead, and his peers in the “Big Three” of the Religious Right—Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson and Focus on the Family head James Dobson—are advanced in years.

The movement they launched, meanwhile, seems to have passed the apex of its power. In 1994, Christian conservatives helped elect a Republican Congress dominated by their own kind; it stayed in power more than a decade. They twice helped provide the margin of victory for a president—George W. Bush—who not only spoke their theological language, but also provided at least lip service to their favorite legislative goals. And they, with the elevation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, finally were within reach of having a reliable socially conservative majority on that powerful body.

But Democrats won the 2006 congressional elections handily, and the current top contenders for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination don’t inspire in Religious Right leaders the same kind of trust that Bush did—to put it mildly.

At the same time, many younger evangelicals are rethinking which issues influence their voting. Some are beginning to assert that protecting the environment, supporting international human rights and avoiding war are “pro-life” issues just as much as efforts to stop abortion. And polls show homosexuality and government-sanctioned prayers don’t get young evangelicals nearly as exercised as those old “wedge issues” do their elders.

Is it time to break out the dirges and the black veils for a political movement?

“No,” says Barry Hankins, an expert on Christian conservatives who teaches at Baylor University, noting it’s not the first time some prematurely have declared the Religious Right dead.

“It came up in about 1989 or so when Jerry Falwell shut down the Moral Majority,” he recalled. Another flurry of eulogies for the Religious Right appeared in the press in the late 1990s, after the Moral Majority’s successor—the Christian Coalition—began to flounder.

Several years ago, Hankins proposed the notion the Christian Right wasn’t dying; it was maturing. Rather than existing as a single, highly visible organization, it was becoming a movement with diverse influences.

Such maturation could be happening to the Christian conservative movement again, Han-kins said—but it might end up looking fundamentally different as a result.

“I think you have this new kind of wider segment of evangelicals who are publicly oriented and politically conscious, but they’re not tied to the old Christian Right machinery,” he said.

Randall Ballmer, a Columbia University historian and expert in American evangelicalism, agreed. “The younger folks are worried about the environment, they’re worried about climate change, they’re worried about global warming,” he said.

Younger evangelicals also focus on international human rights, poverty and healthcare. Southern Baptist mega-celebrity Rick Warren, for instance, has adopted alleviating the AIDS crisis in Africa and other Third World concerns as a major emphasis of his California church’s ministry.

The divide between the Religious Right power structure and new leaders who want to adopt a broader set of causes as core emphases has been laid bare by well-publicized intramural battles in recent months.

One was a long-simmering dispute over the chief public-policy officer for the National Association of Evangelicals. In March, a group of conservative Christian luminaries—including Dobson and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council—sent a letter to NAE board members asking them to rein in or fire Richard Cizik, the organization’s vice president for governmental affairs. Dobson and his colleagues were upset with Cizik for his outspokenness on confronting global warming.

He and other environmentalist Christians have argued that, if the scientific consensus is right that global warming is real and human-induced, millions of the world’s poor people’s lives and livelihoods are threatened by rising sea levels and changing weather patterns. Therefore, Cizik has said, drastic action to reverse global warming’s effects is necessary.

Not so fast, said the letter writers, who echoed the view of many pro-business conservatives that whether global warming is human-caused still is an open question—as is the question of whether drastic efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions would end up having a more detrimental economic effect than climate change itself.

Just as importantly, they argued, Cizik was “using the global-warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage, and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children. In their place has come a preoccupation with climate concerns that extend beyond the NAE’s mandate and its own statement of purpose.”

They released the missive to news outlets in an effort to mount a public-relations campaign against Cizik, but NAE board members rebuffed the ouster attempt.

Ballmer hopes a broadening of the evangelical agenda reflects the movement coming back to its past.

“It’s evangelicals reclaiming their birthright and their historical legacy as reformers, in the 19th-century sense of the term,” he said, noting that evangelicals in 19th-century America and Britain often were at the forefront of progressive political movements. They led fights against slavery, for women’s rights and for child welfare, for instance.

“What I hope is happening is that evangelicals are beginning to wake up to that, to recognize that evangelical activism in the 19th century—particularly in the antebellum period—was oriented toward those on the margins of society,” he said.

Whether it’s a departure from the Religious Right or an evolution of it, the trend is evident even within the Southern Baptist Convention. Some blogging Southern Baptist pastors have included, among their complaints about the SBC leadership, critiques of its close relationship with the right wing of the Republican Party.

“While I’ve been a card-carrying member of the so-called ‘Religious Right’ since I first voted for Pat Buchanan in the 1996 Presidential primaries, I’m sick and tired of the Religious Right,” said Texas pastor Benjamin Cole, in a post on his blog (baptistblog.wordpress.com) written prior to Falwell’s death.

“I can no longer stand to see Southern Baptist leaders pander to Republican politicians, and I’m ready for a man to occupy the White House who won’t shun evangelical voters on the one hand, or flirt with them on the other.”

Cole, pastor of Parkview Baptist Church in Arlington, said merely opposing legalized abortion doesn’t make someone 100 percent pro-life. For example, messengers to the SBC annual meeting watered down an already-mild resolution about global warming after some objected the resolution encouraged too much government involvement in the issue.

“Our predecessors in the Southern Baptist Convention, the most ardent supporters of the conservative resurgence, somehow see global warming and … ecological concerns among young evangelicals (as) somehow apart from any Christian concern,” he said. “But they think the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is very much an issue of religious liberty.”

Cole said pastors like him find a dissonance in such views. “I think there’s a lot of young, emerging, arising—whatever you want to call it—evangelicals who watch that and go, ‘There is no coherent political philosophy of the Religious Right. There is no unifying theme except for support for the Republican Party,’” he said.

Paul Littleton, an Oklahoma pastor who operates the “Caught in the Middle” blog (middlekid.typepad.com) said in a December post that he—a Republican—is nonetheless tired of evangelicalism’s close association with the GOP.

“I’m conflicted because I am a part of an American evangelical Christianity that is almost entirely and uncritically in bed with the Republican Party—who will support them as long as they support capitalism and oppose abortion and homosexual marriage. Do that, and we’ll vote for you, we’ll go to war with you, we’ll let you spend the country into oblivion, and we’ll be silent when you make sexual advances toward minor pages. And I don’t go for any of that stuff,” said Littleton, pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Sapulpa, a suburb of Tulsa.

Baylor’s Hankins said the SBC’s leaders getting closely involved with the Republican Party was an understandable part of the “ebb and flow” of Southern Baptist life.

“I think part of what we’ve seen over the last quarter-century is that, as the Southern Baptist conservative movement gained ascendancy and gained control of the denomination, it was a heady experience to be aligned with political power. But, on the other hand, it was genuinely a way of having an influence in the culture,” he said.

“And as these things go, the avenue to Southern Baptists exercising influence in the culture can also work the other way around, with the Republican Party utilizing the power and influence of Southern Baptists for Republican ends. So, you had a nice symbiotic relationship there.”

Cole hopes his generation is beginning to “regard partisan politics as the ‘tar baby.’ You know, you can punch at it, but you’re going to get stuck in it,” he said.

“As a Southern Baptist, I don’t want to wake up any more in the morning and look on the pillow beside me and find an elephant.”



News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.

http://www.baptiststandard.com/postnuke/index.php?module=htmlpages&func=display&pid=6501

Labels: Baptists, religion and politics, religious right

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:21 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Schools call roll at a border crossing
Students routinely walk from homes in Mexico to attend public institutions in the U.S. In Arizona, one district has chosen not to ignore the violation.
By Nicholas Riccardi / Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 25, 2007

San Luis, Ariz. — ROBERT Villarreal, standing at his post behind the customs officers at the border crossing station, knew he was being watched. A slim teenage boy wearing a green T-shirt was furtively peering at him from behind a pillar on the Mexican side.

"I know who it is before he even comes in," Villarreal said, ducking into an alcove.

Minutes later, perhaps thinking Villarreal had left, the boy and another teen breezed through customs. Villarreal sprang out of hiding and called the teens by name. "If you hide like that," he said, "you're just going to make things worse." Villarreal is not a border agent. He is a school attendance officer whose assignment is to catch students who live in Mexico but attend public school in the U.S.

Children who are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants but live in Mexico cross every morning to get a better education for free in Arizona, breaking the law that requires them to live within the boundaries of the district. To many of their parents, who have ties in both countries, not living in the district is the educational equivalent of jaywalking.

"I pay taxes. I work over here," said a 31-year-old corrections officer who would not give his name as he walked his son from Mexico to elementary school in San Luis. "What's the difference?"

There are no hard statistics on the number of children who break the residency requirement, but some people opposed to U.S. immigration policy have seized on the issue as another example of how they say migrants exploit the U.S. They contend that most school districts do not enforce the law because they risk losing state funding, which is based on the number of enrolled students.

"The whole thing's outrageous. We're not the school district for northern Mexico," said state Rep. Russell K. Pearce.

Two years ago, the state superintendent, fed up with the practice, hired a private investigator to videotape schoolchildren coming from Mexico. At an Arizona border town with a population of 65, a school bus regularly picked up 85 students at the crossing.

Amid the resulting publicity, that school district stopped the pickups, but it's unclear whether any other districts changed their policies.

In nearby Calexico, Calif., taxpayers' complaints about building schools within walking distance of Mexico led the local district last year to hire someone to watch border crossings and check student addresses.

But in Arizona, no district appears to have taken as aggressive a stance as Yuma Union High School District, which serves San Luis. In the early 1990s, it hired a full-time attendance officer to verify residency for students at its six schools.

Part truant officer, part detective, Villarreal spends his mornings noting names of high school students arriving from Mexico and listening to explanations for why they crossed: They were visiting a sick relative. They were staying with a friend. Their parents divorced and one lives in Mexico, the other in the U.S.

He lets the children, including the teens he spotted hiding from him, continue to school, then checks their stories.

A soft-spoken man with a full face and the hint of a mustache, Villarreal, 37, is a San Luis native and the son of Mexican immigrant farmworkers. But he has little sympathy for parents who avoid paying the property taxes that support the district by living in Mexico, where the cost of living is lower and houses sell for about $30,000, compared with the median price of $179,000 in San Luis.

"They want the American services," he said, "but they don't want to be part of the American system."



SAN Luis, 20 miles south of Yuma, lies in Arizona's far southwestern corner, bordered by Mexico to the south and west. For decades it was a sleepy agricultural town where workers in the surrounding lettuce and broccoli fields entered from Mexico and occasionally settled down in mobile homes or modest stucco houses.

Cesar Chavez was born in this region and sometimes returned to San Luis to support strikes by local agricultural workers. He died in a crumbling apartment complex here with a dirt courtyard a stone's throw from the border.

In the 1990s, the population began to boom, as migrants from other parts of the U.S. were lured by cheap real estate and persistent sunshine. Illegal immigrants from Mexico began dashing across the border, bringing an influx of border patrol and National Guard posts to town. Now, with 15,000 people and growing, the town is spilling into the desert. New subdivisions abut farmland that exudes the bracing odor of fresh cabbage.

Villarreal keeps a rolled-up map of the town in the trunk of his district-

issued white Ford Escort. After scanning it one recent evening, he cut through a subdivision onto a modest residential street.

"OK," Villarreal said, "we're looking for Manuel and Blanca Carranza."

An hour earlier, Villarreal had spotted their 16-year-old son walking after school on Main Street, past the bargain clothing stores and toward the crossing. Where are you going? Villarreal asked. Home, the student answered.

Months earlier the family had been added to Villarreal's list after he spotted the son walking across the border. Villarreal had been unable to find the parents' home on prior visits to the U.S. address the school had on file.

The boy's offhand remark on his way to Mexico wasn't enough to take official action — Villarreal had to find his parents. He drove to a rundown, single-story, white clapboard house. Children's clothes dangled from a clothesline stretched along the rutted driveway, and cardboard covered a cracked front window. He knocked on the door three times before a male voice answered.

Villarreal asked for the Carranzas. They're not in, the voice said. When are they coming back? "Later." After 8 p.m.? "Later."

Shaking his head, Villarreal returned to his car. "This is the same person I've talked to before and the same answer," he said. (The district later sent a letter to expel the teenager; families have the right to appeal.)

San Luis is a small town, and Villarreal has run into uncomfortable situations. Once, an elected official — whom Villarreal wouldn't identify — covered for a parent from behind a closed door. Other times, employees at nearby school districts were involved in deceptions.

Villarreal tries to keep a low profile because, between early-morning patrols and evening door-knocks, he's a teacher's assistant at a middle school in another local district. Mindful of how some in town may view his work, he asks his family not to discuss his attendance officer job with anyone.

The Yuma Union High School District was forced to confront the residency issue after a bond measure to build a high school in San Luis was rejected in 1992. Voters believed the school would serve mostly students who lived in Mexico. The district decided it needed to prove to voters that its students were attending legally, and created the position of attendance officer.

Villarreal is the second person to hold the job. When he started eight years ago, he intercepted hundreds of high school students entering every day from Mexico. Parents were accustomed to sending their children to U.S. schools without a hassle. Now word is out that the six Yuma Union high schools check residency, and the numbers crossing have dropped significantly.

In contrast, about 100 younger children were seen one recent day coming from Mexico to attend elementary and middle schools. Villarreal does not check on these students. Some were going to Catholic schools that can educate students from any locale, but dozens were headed to the eight elementary and middle schools run by the Gadsden Elementary School District. That district does not patrol the border. Instead, it requests utility bills to prove residency and sends staffers to check if a student's parents don't return calls on routine school issues such as repeated absences, said spokeswoman Rosy Ballesteros.

Villarreal prides himself on knowing the names and histories of the high school students who cross; most attend the high school in San Luis.

"This kid is OK; his legal guardian lives here," Villarreal said as one boy trudged past him. "That girl's up for withdrawal," he said, nodding at one who passed a moment later.

He stopped another girl, who showed her U.S. passport and said she'd spent the night with an aunt in Mexico while her father, who lives in San Luis, worked late. Villarreal made a note and let her pass. He'd already seen the father at a house in San Luis but would check again. "You never know," he said.



VILLARREAL usually gathers several dozen cases after a few days of patrolling. He typically finds about 150 students each year who should be withdrawn, out of a district of 10,000. He and his boss, Assistant Supt. Gerrick Monroe, advise those students' parents to either move across the border or make a U.S. resident the legal guardian for the child. Most make the adjustment.

The district allows parents who live outside its boundaries to pay $5,300 annually for their children to stay in school, but only eight families do so.

Villarreal's investigation of the two teens who tried to dodge him at the

border forced one of them to pay tuition to continue in school; the other withdrew.

By enforcing the law, Monroe said, the district loses money — it receives $5,000 in state funds for every pupil enrolled. He said he understood why parents thought they could send their children to U.S. schools. "To people who live along the international border, it's similar to a county line," he said. "People don't think much about [crossing] it."

Certainly not Carla Molina, who walked her two children, 11 and 8,

to school in San Luis one recent morning.

"We're planning to move back here anyway," Molina said. She lived in San Luis years ago, and her children, born in Yuma, are U.S. citizens. She wants them to learn English. "It's important they learn it when they're young," Molina said.

Villarreal said it was also important to follow the law. The people who pay U.S. rents and taxes, he said, are the ones who deserve the benefits of the school system.

A couple of nights earlier, he had knocked on the door of the address one student crossing from Mexico had given him. The child's mother, Marta Andrade, answered, confirmed her residency and told Villarreal she was glad he had checked.

"I like that you do this," she told him.

Andrade, 47, described how she rose at 3 a.m. to take the two-hour trip to a remote field, where she worked all day to pay rent and ensure a legal education for her 16-year-old daughter. It would have been easier to stay in Mexico,
work less and cheat, but Andrade only has contempt for people who do that.

"Coming here is a sacrifice," she said. "They should have to do what I do."

nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-schools25jun25,0,4508519.story?coll=la-home-center

Labels: immigration and education

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:59 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is really fantastic. Children have such un-tapped capacities to learn language. Wish this could be tested somewhere in the U.S. as well. -Angela

Children to try out six languages before they start secondary school
By Richard Garner, Education Editor/ The Independent
Published: 23 June 2007

Primary school children are learning six different languages from the
age of nine under a pioneering new plan.

The idea is to give them a taste of all six so they can then decide
for themselves which language to opt for when they transfer to
secondary school.

The scheme is being piloted in three local education authorities -
Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Derbyshire - and is being backed
by secondary school headteachers. The children study French, German,
Spanish, Japanese, Punjabi and Latin for a term each before they leave
primary school. The project is being evaluated by the University of
Manchester with a view to promoting it nationally if it is successful.
The report will be published by the end of the year.

Peter Downes, a former president of the secondary school headteachers'
union and a languages teacher himself, who is managing the project
with cash backing from the Esme Fairbank Foundation, said: "It is
educationally better for the children. We're living in a modern world
- where children all learning French and going into France for a day
is no longer relevant. We will need a much wider language base in
future."

Ministers are insisting that every child should have the right to
learn a foreign language from the age of seven by the end of the
decade. Some primary schools have introduced the subject while others
have not - leaving secondary schools facing an enormous ability range
when the children arrive at 11.

"It is really difficult putting them all in the same class," said Mr
Downes. "If you start from scratch for the beginners those who have
been learning for years will get bored ... This way they will all have
been taught to the same level by the time they transfer." The ideal,
he said, is for clusters of primary schools feeding the same secondary
school to get together to teach the project.

One school which has seized on the initiative is the 320-pupil Cavalry
primary school in March, Cambridgeshire - in the largely white
Fenlands. "We didn't have any language teacher here at all," said
headteacher Val Spriggs.

"The children really have taken to this. Our children in this area
have very little experience of other cultures. It has been a lovely
way of introducing them to different ways of doing things."

Catherine White, the teacher in charge of delivering the project,
admits to having had a sketchy knowledge of languages - especially
Japanese - herself when she started the scheme.

"You don't have to be a linguist to teach it," she said. "After all, I
gave up on art when I was 14 or 15 - but I still have to teach it."

The proof of the pudding lies with the pupils. Alex Saunders, 11, who
has taken to signing his name "Alexus" after learning Latin, said: "I
like it."

http://education.independent.co.uk/news/article2697802.ece

Labels: multilingual education

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:45 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This case is of tremendous significance because it upholds children's rights as human beings (i.e., human rights) to an education, particularly since this is not guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. -Angela

Tyler case opened schools to illegal migrants
06:35 PM CDT on Thursday, June 14, 2007

By KATHERINE LEAL UNMUTH / The Dallas Morning News
kunmuth@dallasnews.com
TYLER – All Jose Lopez wanted for his children was the education he did not receive in Mexico.

But when he and his wife, Lidia, tried to enroll them in elementary school here in 1977, they were turned away.

Also Online
People on both sides of Plyler v. Doe share their memories of the case

Two years earlier, Texas lawmakers had changed the education code to prohibit using state funds to educate illegal immigrants. Some districts banned the students outright; others charged tuition.

Risking deportation, the Lopez family joined three others to fight Texas law. This week marks 25 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in their favor.

The landmark Plyler vs. Doe decision guaranteed illegal immigrants a free public education and established their civil rights and equal protection of the law under the 14th Amendment.

The case is sometimes mentioned in the same breath as Brown vs. Board of Education, but it enjoys none of the same fame. It is absent from Texas history lessons. People in Tyler rarely speak of it.

Yet the Plyler case has been used as a defense against countless proposals aiming to deny rights to illegal immigrants.

It was among the reasons that a federal judge threw out California's Proposition 187, which voters approved in 1994 to prohibit public services, including education, for illegal immigrants.

It explains why bills introduced in the Texas Legislature to ban illegal immigrants from public schools never go anywhere.

Attorneys with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund even cited the case this year in contesting the controversial Farmers Branch ordinance to ban illegal immigrants from renting apartments in the city.

"It's a moral guide," former Tyler civil rights attorney Larry Daves said. "It says this country still stands for having an open door to children and creating opportunities. That we're going to be true to that longstanding notion in this country that education is the great equalizer."

The nation finds itself once again amid rising tensions over illegal immigration. Congress is searching for a solution.

Also Online
People on both sides of Plyler v. Doe share their memories of the case

This past legislative session, state Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, sponsored a bill that would have denied education benefits to illegal immigrants. He says filing that bill was a "mistake" because he can't change the precedent set by Plyler.

"I think it's outrageous the federal government has imposed on us free education and free health care – the largest unfunded mandate in the history of our nation," he said.

No one knows the exact costs, though the state comptroller estimated in December that Texas has 1.4 million illegal immigrants.

Federation for American Immigration Reform spokesman Ira Mehlman said nobody wants to see kids thrown out of school, but "we want to see a policy that convinces parents not to bring their kids here in the first place."

He said local ordinances such as the one in Farmers Branch show cities and taxpayers are feeling overburdened. Because they can't bar children from school, they try to make them leave town.

Whether they have that right is still being played out in the courts.

'They should be equal'
Mr. Lopez crossed the Mexican border illegally to work in a foundry in Tyler in 1969. Later, he brought his wife and four children (all are now citizens or permanent residents) and enrolled the oldest ones in school.

But in July 1977, district trustees voted to charge $1,000 tuition to illegal immigrant children. The Lopez family could not afford it.

"I am illiterate – I am a person that doesn't know anything," Mr. Lopez said in Spanish in an interview this month. But he believed what the district did was wrong.

"School is very important for all children, and they should not be discriminated against because they are Mexican or white or black," he said. "They should be equal."

On the first day of school in 1977, Tyler officials targeted children who could not speak English.

"It was a complete and total chaotic situation," recalled Michael McAndrew, a Catholic outreach worker who helped local Hispanics. "If you looked poor, you were put out of school."

Mr. McAndrew turned to Mr. Daves, who contacted MALDEF for help. They found four families willing to sue Superintendent Jim Plyler and the school board in federal court over the tuition policy. The families were known collectively in the case as "Doe" to protect their identities.

At 8 years old, Alfredo Lopez knew only that "they wouldn't let us go to school."

He remembers heading to the courthouse in the dark for the 6 a.m. hearing.

"It was early in the morning to keep the media away," said Mr. Lopez, who speaks with an East Texas twang. "My parents knew we could be deported. We had everything we owned waiting in the car."

The situation was grim, Mr. Daves said. A smattering of challenges to the law had already failed in state court.

But the attorneys were relying on the reputation of U.S. District Court Judge William Wayne Justice, known for ruling in favor of the poor and minorities.

Judge Justice issued a preliminary injunction and ordered the children back to school in Tyler just days after they were barred. He issued a permanent injunction against the district in 1978.

Sitting in his chambers in Austin recently, the 87-year-old judge said the case's facts were unprecedented.

"I think it's the most important case I ever decided," he said.

His ruling prompted more than a dozen similar challenges across the state. In Dallas, lawyers sued over the school district's policy of not admitting illegal immigrant children. In Houston lawyers challenged the district's tuition policy.

In some places, illegal immigrant children stayed out of school for years as the cases played out in court.

Ana Coca, 39, a bilingual education program administrator at the University of North Texas, spent two years out of school in Houston before her mother enrolled her in a private Catholic school. Her older siblings never finished high school.

"I can tell you why they dropped out," she said. "They were never able to close the gap. It was too late for them."

The situation was so dire that in 1980 a group of Dallas faith and business leaders set up a network of schools to educate the illegal immigrant children in churches.

In Fort Worth, children attended clandestine night schools led by schoolteachers who volunteered their time.

Private Catholic schools also took in illegal immigrants.

Marti Brooks volunteered to teach some of the classes in Dallas. She recalls the backlash from co-workers at her second job as a hotel hostess. They asked why she was helping illegal immigrants.

"Why wouldn't I? Why was it OK to hire them for pennies but not educate their children?" she asked. "I loved the kids. They were so eager to learn."

'A subclass of illiterates'
Many of the state's arguments against enrolling illegal immigrants were economic – that the children caused crowding in schools, that they were costly to educate through bilingual education and that they hurt the learning of American children.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, himself the son of Irish immigrants, rejected those arguments when he wrote the majority opinion on June 15, 1982: "It is difficult to understand precisely what the State hopes to achieve by promoting the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare and crime."

Today, Mr. Plyler is happy the school district didn't win. That's a different view from the one he expressed after the high court's ruling, when he called illegal immigrant children a "burden."

"It would have been one of the worst things to happen in education – they'd cost more not being educated," the retired superintendent said. "Right after we let those youngsters in, I was pleased. Then more and more came, and now we have schools with a lot of Hispanics all over the district."

Tyler ISD attorney John Hardy – who argued the case before the Supreme Court – said the biggest change has been a lot of money spent on bilingual education and special programs for children.

While the Plyler decision guarantees their education and the state grants them in-state tuition and financial aid in college, nothing addresses what happens once they graduate. Their status locks them into low-wage work cleaning houses or doing construction.

"It's very frustrating," Dallas superintendent Michael Hinojosa said. "We inspired them to go to college, and the irony is that now they cannot go to work legally."

The Lopez family offers hope.

The parents and their four children benefited from the 1986 amnesty offered to illegal immigrants who could prove, among other things, that they had lived in the country since before Jan. 1, 1982. Nine of the 10 Lopez children graduated from high school.

Jose Lopez wants to see his grandchildren go "mas arriba" – much higher – than his children, whose high school graduation photos are displayed prominently in his living room.

His grandchildren speak of college and becoming pediatricians and music producers. They are involved in National Honor Society, soccer and drama.

"Hopefully the younger generation can benefit twice as much as we did," Alfredo Lopez said.

KEY DATES
Sept. 1, 1975 –The Texas Legislature changes the Texas education code to entitle only citizens and legally admitted immigrants to a free education. It prohibits school districts from using state funds to educate illegal immigrant children.

Feb. 7, 1977 –State District Court Judge James R. Meyers in Austin rules that children of illegal immigrants cannot attend Texas schools unless they pay tuition. The Texas Supreme Court later upholds the decision.

July 21, 1977 –Tyler ISD trustees vote to charge illegal immigrant children $1,000 a year in tuition.

Sept. 6, 1977 –A lawsuit challenging the tuition policy is filed on behalf of four families with 16 illegal immigrant children by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund against Tyler superintendent Jim Plyler and school trustees. The families are listed collectively in the lawsuit as Doe to protect their identities.

Sept. 11, 1977 –U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice issues a preliminary injunction in the Tyler case and orders the children to be readmitted to schools free of charge. A year later, he issues a permanent injunction, saying that the school district cannot deny a free education to children based on their status as illegal Mexican immigrants.

Oct. 16, 1978 –In a separate lawsuit involving Port Arthur ISD, U.S. District Judge Joe Fischer rules illegal immigrant children must be readmitted to school. But none of the 56 children show up – because the judge also ordered the district to send their parents' names to immigration officials.

April 9, 1979 –The parents of 19 illegal immigrant children sue the Dallas school district over a policy that requires proof of legal status to enroll.

Jan. 22, 1980 –In Dallas, an interfaith effort known as Proyecto Educacion, or Project Education, opens three temporary schools at churches for more than 100 illegal immigrant children.

July 21, 1980 –U.S. District Judge Woodrow Seals rules the Texas law unconstitutional and orders the illegal immigrants readmitted. His ruling involves a consolidation of cases challenging the state statute in 17 school districts.

Aug. 12, 1980 –Judge Seal's order is stayed by a three-judge federal appeals panel for the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and illegal immigrant children once again are barred from enrolling tuition-free.

Sept. 4, 1980 –U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell orders Texas schools to admit illegal immigrant children immediately, unless districts can demonstrate their resources are too limited to accommodate them without hampering the education of all students.

Sept. 11, 1980 –U.S. Judge Robert Hill orders the Dallas school district to drop its policy against admitting illegal immigrant children.

Oct. 1, 1980 –The Texas Education Agency says 10,387 illegal immigrant children have enrolled in Texas schools – far fewer than the 120,000 the state had projected. Dallas has 1,043, and Houston 3,000.

Oct. 20, 1980 –The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules school districts cannot deny children an education and the Texas law is unconstitutional.

May 11, 1981 –The Texas House tentatively approves a repeal of the 1975 law, but the issue dies after a Senate committee fails to report the measure to the floor.

Dec. 1, 1981 –Plyler vs. Doe is argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.

June 15, 1982 –In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court finds the 1975 Texas law authorizing school districts to deny a free education to illegal immigrant children and to withhold funding for their education violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

May 16, 1984 –President Ronald Reagan releases $30 million in aid to help educate illegal immigrants in border school districts in Texas.

Source: Dallas Morning News research

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/061107dnmetplyler.3a34e2f.html#

Labels: immigrant children, Plyler v. Doe

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:52 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Studies find salary gap at Austin schools
Austin among Texas school district with largest differential among teachers of high and low minority and income schools.

By Laura Heinauer
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, June 21, 2007

The Austin school district pays teachers at schools with high degrees of poverty and large percentages of minority students less than what teachers earn at the district's wealthier, more diverse schools. And according to a pair of recent reports, the wage gap is wider in Austin than in most other large Texas school districts.

The reports are based on a salary study of the state's 10 largest school districts by University of Texas education researcher Ed Fuller and were paid for by Washington-based think-tank Education Trust. Across the nation, issues related to teacher quality have gotten increased attention as schools struggle to meet the demands of the No Child Left Behind Act.

The national report released Wednesday singled out Austin as having some of the largest gaps in pay between schools in a single district.

Fuller said the wage gap in Austin exists because less experienced teachers tend to be concentrated at schools with higher numbers of minority and low-income students. Austin district officials criticized the reports, saying they don't acknowledge that Austin is doing more than many districts in Texas to recruit and retain teachers, particularly at low-performing schools.

Mandating assignments would spur teacher flight to nearby districts that offer higher salaries and lower-cost housing, Austin officials have said.

Austin is unusual among the state's large urban districts. With relatively more schools at both ends of the spectrum — both high- and low-income — the reported wage gap is more dramatic, Fuller said.

The average annual teacher salary at Casis Elementary School, which serves a predominately white population, was $2,402 more than that of the average teacher at Winn Elementary, where 97 percent of students are black or Hispanic, the report said. A $3,819 gap was found between Summitt Elementary, where less than 35 percent of students are considered low-income, and Wooten Elementary, where 97 percent of students qualify for free or reduced price lunch.

Although salary isn't necessarily an indicator of overall teacher quality, it is an indicator of teacher experience, Education Trust President Kati Haycock said. And she said research shows that "no matter how good new teachers will eventually become, they are not as good in their first year of practice."

"When you look at the data this way, it helps people see how the current patterns of teacher assignment and transfer actually result in a draining off of resources," Haycock said. She said that her organization is recommending changes to the No Child Left Behind Act, which is up for reauthorization this year, that would ensure local funding is more evenly distributed among schools.

"What you're seeing in these numbers is that (federal dollars are) coming on top of a very uneven base," she said.

Fuller said that although supplemental programs such as tutoring can be beneficial, studies have shown that money spent on teachers is the most effective way to improve student performance.

"If you look at the East Austin schools, you'll see they just constantly churn teachers year after year," Fuller said. "Hopefully with the strategic compensation plan that's being piloted, we'll actually see that those pay and experience gaps reverse."

Starting this fall, Austin will provide stipends and professional support to teachers who agree to work at the district's highest-need schools.

District officials also criticized the report for focusing on salaries without mentioning that per-pupil spending is actually higher at lower-income and minority schools.

For instance, $7,340 in local money was spent per student at Johnston High School, compared with $4,932 at Bowie High School in 2004-05, the most recent year for which such data are available.

District officials also acknowledged, however, that the per-pupil information has its drawbacks. Smaller schools, for instance, appear to spend more per pupil because they are less efficient to run. "Any of the numbers, you can look at them a different way," said Julie Lyons, the district's director of state and federal accountability.

lheinauer@statesman.com; 445-3694

Race-based analysis

Negative figures mean the average teacher salary at schools with more minority students was lower than that at schools with fewer minority students. Positive figures mean the salary was higher.

Income-based analysis

Negative figures indicate the average teacher salary at high-poverty schools was that much less than those at low-poverty schools.

Salary gap comparison

Researchers compared average teacher salaries in two categories. They looked at the number of students from low-income households and at the number of minority students at schools in Texas' 10 largest districts. Researchers said Austin is unusual among the state's urban districts. With relatively more schools at both ends of the income spectrum, the wage gap is more dramatic. In Dallas, for example, 83 percent of students come from low-income households, compared with 60 percent in the Austin school district.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/06/21/21gap.html

Labels: AISD, teacher salary gap

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:40 AM 1 comments Links to this post

This report is worth checking out. -Angela

2006-07 Travis County Immigrant Assessment
Executive Summary

Between 1990 and 2005, Travis County experienced a 230% increase in its foreign-born
population (from approximately 45,000 to 148,000 people). In 2005, foreign-born residents
made up 17% of the county’s population. Change of this magnitude underscores the need for a
better understanding of the community conditions that affect the diverse immigrant
populations in Travis County.

In late 2005, community partners, observing the significance of these trends, made a commitment to examine, identify, and report the current conditions and needs of immigrants in Travis County. The Research & Planning Division of Travis County Health and Human Services & Veterans Service stewarded this project, with support from an assessment Steering Committee and community volunteers.

The main product of this effort is the 2006-2007 Travis County Immigrant Assessment — a report intended to provide a balanced, accurate, and useful picture of foreign-born residents in Travis County. Recognizing that foreign-born residents are integral to our community, the Assessment also identifies overarching community goals expressed by local authorities and examines the experience of foreign-born residents within the context of these goals. To provide context for this discussion, the Assessment highlights notable differences and similarities between foreign-born and native-born residents as well as those between foreign-born populations with differing legal statuses and other characteristics.

This assessment drew from both primary and secondary research. The primary research
included: (1) a forum of local service providers, and (2) 18 focus groups with immigrant
residents of Travis County. The secondary research was based primarily upon an analysis of
existing research, public policy, and data derived from existing data sources, including the
American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, Texas Education Agency, Texas
Health Department of Vital Records, and the Decennial Census.

This document serves as a supplement to the 2006-2007 Travis County Immigrant Assessment and
is intended to summarize some of the highlights from each section of the report. Please refer to
the full report for a more detailed discussion of these issues, their associated citations, and
related analytical methodologies. The full report also offers contact information for the authors
and a list of contributors to this project.

An electronic copy of the 2006-2007 Travis County Immigrant Assessment is available to view and
download at: full report (pdf)

Labels: immigration, Travis County

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:20 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Here is the Texas Residents United for a Stronger Texas (TRUST) report generated by Luis Figueroa at MALDEF regarding anti-immigration bills—the majority of which were defeated. -Angela

THE TRUST REPORT
Texas Residents United for a Stronger Texas

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

The Session In Review

Bill Breakdown

Due to the sheer volume of bills relating to anti-immigration, it is difficult to construct a complete summary of what happened to all anti-immigrant legislation from the session. Despite possible omissions, this breakdown of filed anti-immigrant bills confirms the overall success of the TRUST coalition efforts in preventing such legislation from being passed. Chairman Swinford held to true to his promise of not letting his committee turn into a circus by not allowing unconstitutional anti-immigrant bills an opportunity to be heard.

· Number of anti-immigrant bills (or bills including anti-immigrant provisions) and resolutions filed in both houses: 60 +

· Bills never set for a hearing: 30

· Bills set for a hearing before a house committee, but not heard: 5

· Bills heard by committee and left pending: 13

· Bills voted out of House State Affairs and died in calendars or on the house calendar: 8

· Bills that died on the house floor: 3 (HB 855, HB 1274, HB 159)

· Bills that were amended to remove all immigration-related provisions while they moved through the process: 2 (HB 13 and SB 47)

· Bill voted out of house but not heard by senate committee: 1 (HB 1997)

· Bill voted out of senate but not heard by house committee: 1 (SB 1464)

· Bills sent to the governor, amended to limit negative impact on immigrants: 1 (HB 1196)

Immigration Legislative Round-up

· Of the over 60 filed bills and resolutions that included anti-immigrant provisions, three-quarters died in committee and almost half were never set for a hearing. Five were set for hearings but not heard by committee and 13 others were heard by committee and left pending. The successful prevention of anti-immigrant legislation from being passed testifies to the efforts of the TRUST coalition.

Bills Voted out of Committee

Three bills with an anti-immigrant impact died on the house floor.

· HB 855 would have expanded the offense of failure to identify so that individuals who were not yet under arrest could be charged for refusing to provide identifying information to a peace officer.

· HB 1274 would make it a requirement for commercial drivers in Texas to speak English. Chairman of Transportation Mike Krusee (R-Round Rock), when asked why he would allow such a bill out of his committee responded that, "You don't have to agree with every bill that you let out."

· HB 159 would remove the provision in current law that permits long-time Texas residents to attend Texas public universities and community colleges at the in-state tuition rate regardless of immigration status.

Bills that Passed Out of the House

· HB 13, which relates to homeland security issues, including border security issues and law enforcement and SB 47, were amended during the legislative process to remove all immigration-related provisions.

· In the end, only one immigration-related bill, HB 1196, which requires businesses who commit the federal offense of engaging in a pattern or practice of hiring individuals who are ineligible to work to repay any public subsidy they have received, was sent to the governor.

Positive Bills

· In terms of affirmative legislation, HB 1121, a bill that assists immigrant victims of human trafficking and other severe crimes, has been sent to the governor.

In the News and Highlights from the Session:

Editorial: Bills on immigration just fruitless gestures

http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/editorials/stories/MYSA051607.01O.legislatures1ed_.262c828.html

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

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

The Death and Rebirth of HB 13

http://www.offthekuff.com/mt/archives/009346.html

MALC Awards Rep. Farias, Rep Swinford, and Rep. Davis

http://capitolannex.com/2007/05/28/farias-named-malac-freshman-of-the-year/

Now it's Time For Congress to Act

http://www.riograndeguardian.com/rggnews_story.asp?story_no=26

Thank you all for your heroic efforts in making this session a tremendous success in terms of protecting the rights of all Texans. I would also like to present a special thank you to Rebecca Bernhardt and the ACLU of Texas for their tireless energy and work on behalf of the TRUST Coalition.

Luis Figueroa

MALDEF
Legislative Staff Attorney
110 Broadway
Suite 300
San Antonio, TX 78205
LFigueroa@maldef.org
210-224-5476

Labels: immigration

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:24 PM 0 comments Links to this post

June 18, 2007
Long Reviled, Merit Pay Gains Among Teachers

By SAM DILLON

MINNEAPOLIS — For years, the unionized teaching profession opposed few ideas more vehemently than merit pay, but those objections appear to be eroding as school districts in dozens of states experiment with plans that compensate teachers partly based on classroom performance.

Here in Minneapolis, for instance, the teachers’ union is cooperating with Minnesota’s Republican governor on a plan in which teachers in some schools work with mentors to improve their instruction and get bonuses for raising student achievement. John Roper-Batker, a science teacher here, said his first reaction was dismay when he heard his school was considering participating in the plan in 2004.

“I wanted to get involved just to make sure it wouldn’t happen,” he said.

But after learning more, Mr. Roper-Batker said, “I became a salesman for it.” He and his colleagues have voted in favor of the plan twice by large margins.

Minnesota’s $86 million teacher professionalization and merit pay initiative has spread to dozens of the state’s school districts, and it got a lift this month when teachers voted overwhelmingly to expand it in Minneapolis. A major reason it is prospering, Gov. Tim Pawlenty said in an interview, is that union leaders helped develop and sell it to teachers.

“As a Republican governor, I could say, ‘Thou shalt do this,’ and the unions would say, ‘Thou shalt go jump in the lake,’ ” Mr. Pawlenty said. “But here they partnered with us.”

Scores of similar but mostly smaller teacher-pay experiments are under way nationwide, and union locals are cooperating with some of them, said Allan Odden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies teacher compensation. A consensus is building across the political spectrum that rewarding teachers with bonuses or raises for improving student achievement, working in lower income schools or teaching subjects that are hard to staff can energize veteran teachers and attract bright rookies to the profession.

“It’s looking like there’s a critical mass,” Professor Odden said. The movement to experiment with teacher pay, he added, “is still not ubiquitous, but it’s developing momentum.”

Some plans still run into strong opposition from teachers and their unions, as in Texas and Florida this year, where skeptical teachers rejected proposals from school districts. An incentive-pay proposal by Chancellor Joel I. Klein of the New York City public schools has stalled, with city officials and the teachers’ union blaming each other.

Minnesota’s experience shows, however, that an incentive plan created with union input can draw teacher support.

Merit pay, or compensating teachers for classroom performance rather than their years on the job and coursework completed, found some support in the 1980s among policy makers and school administrators, who saw it as a way to encourage good teachers to work harder and to weed out the bad ones. But teachers saw it as a gimmick used by principals to reward cronies based on favoritism.

How thoroughly unions will embrace merit pay remains unclear, said Chester E. Finn Jr., an education scholar who served in the Reagan administration. In some cities where unions have agreed to participate in merit pay programs, they have consented only after reshaping the programs so thoroughly that student achievement is one of many factors by which teachers are judged, reducing the programs’ effectiveness, Mr. Finn said.

The rewards teachers receive for outstanding performance range from a few hundred dollars to $10,000 or more in a few districts.

The Department of Education is encouraging schools and districts to try merit pay. [Last week it awarded 18 new federal grants, building on 16 others distributed last November. That makes a total of $80 million that the Bush administration has given to schools and districts in 19 states that have incentive pay plans.] Private groups are also involved; the Milken Family Foundation of Santa Monica, Calif., for instance, which helped create the Minnesota program, has channeled money and expertise into similar plans that include incentive pay at 130 schools in 14 states and the District of Columbia.

The positions of the two national teachers’ unions diverge on merit pay. The National Education Association, the larger of the two, has adopted a resolution that labels merit pay, or any other pay system based on an evaluation of teachers’ performance, as “inappropriate.”

The American Federation of Teachers says it opposes plans that allow administrators alone to decide which teachers get extra money or that pay individual teachers based solely on how students perform on standardized test scores, which they consider unreliable. But it encourages efforts to raise teaching quality and has endorsed arrangements that reward teams of teachers whose students show outstanding achievement growth.

Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents teachers in New York, said the union was willing to talk further with the city about “schoolwide bonuses for sustained growth in student achievement.”

Some recent experiments have run into the same opposition that doomed merit pay in the 1980s. In Houston, an incentive plan drafted at school district headquarters over union opposition stirred up a firestorm when the first checks were written earlier this year and The Houston Chronicle put teachers’ bonuses on its Web site, making public which teachers the district had rewarded and embarrassing those it had not.

In Florida, the Legislature last year rushed to approve a merit pay plan before Gov. Jeb Bush left office in January. But many teachers rejected it this spring because it limited bonuses to the top 25 percent of teachers in any school, identified primarily by students’ test scores; they said that was an artificial cap. This year Gov. Charlie Crist and the Legislature scrapped the plan in favor of one that allows teams of teachers, not just individuals, to get bonuses.

In Minnesota, some experiments with new teacher pay systems got under way during the last decade at the initiative of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, whose leaders feared that their Democratic state legislators, on whom the union had long relied to obtain financing for teacher raises, were losing power to suburban Republicans.

“We realized we were going to have to embrace some things that would get money into teachers’ pockets in nontraditional ways,” said Louise Sundin, the federation’s president from 1984 until last year.

In 2004, the union worked with Mr. Pawlenty to bring a Milken Foundation initiative to three Minneapolis schools, including Seward Montessori, where Mr. Roper-Batker is one of about 50 teachers. He received a bonus of $2,131 after the first year, partly because he taught English in an intensive team effort that raised student scores. Student achievement has risen even more sharply at other schools participating in the program, officials said.

Mr. Roper-Batker said the bonus was welcome but not remotely as powerful a motivation as his own ambitions for his students. Several of his colleagues expressed similar views.

In 2005, Mr. Pawlenty modeled his own statewide teacher incentive plan, Q Comp, on the Minneapolis program. Of Minnesota’s 340 districts, about 40 have adopted Q Comp, and about 140 have submitted letters declaring their intent to join, he said. Allowing teachers to vote to participate is crucial, he said.

“This is a complex process of changing a culture, and it will fail if teachers don’t support it,” Mr. Pawlenty said.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Labels: merit pay

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:11 PM 0 comments Links to this post

June 19, 2007
Civil Rights Groups Press for NCLB to Focus on High Schools
By Lesli A. Maxwell /EdWeek.org

Washington
Nine major civil rights organizations today called on Congress to make reforming America’s high schools and improving graduation rates for minority students the most urgent priority as it moves forward on renewing the No Child Left Behind Act.
Driven by escalating concerns that African-American, Latino, American Indian, and some Asian-American students make up the majority of the nation’s dropouts every year, the coalition unveiled its “Campaign for High School Equity,” a document that spells out clear policies it believes Congress should pursue to reverse that trend. The group partnered with the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based advocacy group that pushes for high school improvements, to devise the recommendations.
More than 1.2 million students did not graduate with their high school class in the 2006-07 school year, and the majority of them were students of color, according to the group.
“We are united on this issue,” said John Trasviña, the president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, one of the nine groups. “We all know that students of color are four times more likely to attend high schools that have become dropout factories.”
It has been rare for such a diverse group of civil rights organizations to form an alliance around a single issue, Mr. Trasviña said.
The coalition outlined dozens of specific policy priorities, including providing rigor in core subjects, especially in high-poverty communities, and requiring states to report publicly on students’ access to college-preparatory courses and course-taking patterns at the high school level by income, race, and ethnicity.
“We can’t continue to provide the least education to the most rapidly growing part of our population,” said Wade Henderson, the president and chief executive officer of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
Seeking Accountability
The coalition also called for holding individual high schools accountable for the performance of students, suggesting that new requirements be added to the NCLB law that would make improving high school graduation rates for groups of students a condition for meeting accountability measures. Federal funding for secondary schools needs to be increased, the group said, and proposed that Congress establish a new fund that would help pay for improvement strategies in low-performing middle and high schools. And the long tradition of relying on local property taxes to finance schools must also be addressed, the coalition said.
“We have some real resource-equity issues,” said Michael Wotorson, the director of national education for the NAACP. “Imagine going to a school where the toilets don’t work … or the difference between a school in southeast Washington and one in Bethesda, Md.,” he said referring to an inner-city area and an affluent suburban one. “Kids get it. When they see a system that devalues them, they lose interest.”
The members of the coalition pledged today to send their recommendations to every member of Congress, and promised to organize their own constituencies to lobby for the changes as the debate over reauthorizing the law proceeds. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, a Democrat who represents Baltimore, thanked the group for offering specific policies for adoption, but challenged it not to let the recommendations “collect dust.”
Bob Wise, a former governor of West Virginia and the president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, said he is certain that Congress will not be able to ignore the coalition and the pressing need to address the nation’s high school dropout problem among minority students.
“I think people are finally focused on this issue,” he said. “I think people finally understand what’s at stake here if we don’t do something to address this.”
The organizations that make up the coalition include the League of United Latin American Citizens, in Los Angeles; the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund in Washington; the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Los Angeles; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Baltimore; the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in Los Angeles; the National Council of La Raza in Washington; the National Indian Education Association in Washington; the National Urban League in New York City; and the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center in Washington.
Vol. 26

Labels: Civil Rights, NCLB reauthorization

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

Very interesting analysis of the 2007 legislative session. -Angela

A Fish Rots from the Head: With these three in charge, the session was a stinker
by Jake Bernstein / June 15, 2007

When all was said and little done, the gavels dropped, and adjournment let lawmakers escape from the political implosion that was the 80th Legislature. Like high schoolers who had just blown up the science lab, Texas’ three leaders stood dazed and giddy at having survived.
Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, and House Speaker Tom Craddick entered the session with grand ambitions. Looking to fortify his legacy as the state’s longest-serving governor, Perry seemed to have his eye on the history books or national office. Dewhurst was eyeing Perry’s job and wanted a legislative portfolio to undergird an expected gubernatorial bid in 2010. Craddick’s sights, as always, were fixed on the exhilarating exercise of raw power and the rewards it brings to friends and supporters.

What’s remarkable is how quickly it all fell apart. As leadership dissipated, chaos rushed in to fill the vacuum.

PERRY’S SELF-INFLICTED PREDICAMENT
The governor seems to have awakened to this year’s session in a fit of hubris. Few saw it coming. After all, if ever a situation called for humility, it was Perry’s. He had barely squeaked to re-election, winning as the least unpopular choice in a crowded field. Before the session, he had infuriated parts of the electorate by trying to speed up state approval of 11 coal-fired power plants, and to ram through his sweeping plans for superhighways and toll roads. Legislators were wary of Perry’s agenda from the day they arrived.

Nonetheless, in January, he issued an executive order requiring that Texas girls be vaccinated against a cause of cervical cancer, human papillomavirus, before entering sixth grade. The unprecedented mandate made headlines across the country. More significantly, it startled Republican legislators who might have been Perry’s allies had he bothered to give them advance notice. Then Perry proposed selling the state’s lottery to a private company, using the cash to make Texas the nation’s unrivaled leader in cancer research.

Backlash against the HPV vaccine mandate was swift. Conservatives in and out of the Legislature argued vaccination would encourage promiscuity. They complained that government was usurping an important decision rightly belonging to parents. More cynical critics saw evidence of pay-for-play: Merck & Co., the only maker of HPV vaccine, stood to make millions from Perry’s mandate. One of the company’s lobbyists was Mike Toomey, Perry’s former chief of staff.

To many, Perry’s failure to seek legislative input was more offensive than the HPV order. Questions about a governor’s authority to issue such a mandate led to an informal ruling by Attorney General Greg Abbott, who said Perry’s order had no legal weight. (Abbott’s reasoning also threatened to undercut a previous Perry order fast-tracking state permits for the 11 new coal plants.)

Angleton Republican Rep. Dennis Bonnen quickly introduced House Bill 1098, which not only overturned Perry’s HPV executive order, but also prohibited state agencies from requiring the vaccine for school enrollment. When the bill was heard in committee, opponents attacked the science behind the vaccine, arguing its safety was suspect and testing incomplete. Rep. Jessica Farrar, a Houston Democrat who agreed with Perry on the vaccine’s merit, called it a “campaign of misinformation.”

Perry turned to public relations, bringing in a woman with terminal cervical cancer for press briefings and photo opportunities. But Bonnen’s bill passed early enough in the session that lawmakers had time to overturn a potential Perry veto. The governor harshly criticized legislators and announced that he would let the bill become law without his signature. Debate on the merits of Perry’s idea, Farrar observed, got lost amid his ill-conceived tactics. “It was the first time I’ve seen him abuse his power to do good for somebody,” she said.

Perry’s notion of selling the lottery sank almost as quickly as it surfaced. But lawmakers did agree to let voters decide in November if they want to issue $3 billion in bonds to fund the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Another Perry priority—capping increases in property tax appraisals—met a similar fate, which rankled many longtime GOP members, including Tom Pauken, the former state party chair who headed a task force Perry appointed to gin up the plan. “The Republicans have squandered a majority,” Pauken told the Houston Chronicle. “We could have gotten a lot more done if we’d had strong Republican leadership. We’ve got to quit simply saluting because they are Republicans.”

By midsession, Perry had begun to turn his situation around. Capitol wags agree that most of the credit goes to a Democrat—Perry’s legislative director, former Victoria Sen. Ken Armbrister. Despite overwhelming support for a toll road moratorium, the governor emerged with a compromise that did little damage to his vision of privatized roadways. While an ambitious homeland security agenda foundered, Perry managed to expand his authority in this area as well. After he threatened to veto the entire higher education budget, legislators coughed up $100 million in incentive funds for colleges and $145 million more for financial aid.

“The last 140 days reminded me of watching an old Clint Eastwood movie. It was a session that featured the good, the bad, and the ugly,” Perry told reporters at session’s end without a hint of irony. “If Texans have a bad taste in their mouth from the session, I would say that I couldn’t blame them. Not because progress wasn’t made, but because there was way too much acrimony.”

At press time, Perry had 12 days to use his veto pen. There is still time for a little more acrimony.

DITHERING DEWHURST
Remarkably, among the cognoscente Lt. Gov. Dewhurst is known for his ability to master policy. His political ineptitude often obscures this talent. This session will be remembered as the one in which Dewhurst’s political instincts trumped all else—with disastrous results.

Dewhurst ran the Senate like a man about to hit the campaign trail. Senators groused that the agenda, which catered almost exclusively to Republican primary voters, was driven by polls rather than policy. How else to explain Dewhurst’s focus on child predators and voter fraud? The lieutenant governor forced votes on issues the senators would have happily avoided. What made it worse, some said, was that it’s probably all for naught. Many assume U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison will join the race for governor in 2010 and obliterate Dewhurst in the primary.

Dewhurst pushed something he calls his “Texas Children First” program. If you think that means investing in worthwhile initiatives like the Children’s Health Insurance Program, you’re mistaken. Dewhurst spent most of the session resisting a proposal that would allow kids to stay on CHIP for a year instead of having to renew every six months. He focused on steroid testing for high school athletes, better access to defibrillators in schools, criminal background checks for school workers, and the death penalty for violent child predators. Those all passed, though it wasn’t always pretty. The sentence enhancement for child predators, known as Jessica’s law, was rushed through the House with “emergency” status from the governor. Then it sat for months while Dewhurst petulantly refused to address concerns of senators and even prosecutors. He eventually agreed to changes, and the bill was approved unanimously.

Requiring voters to show photo IDs at the polls wasn’t one of Dewhurst’s initial goals, but the GOP is vertically integrated, and Karl Rove, at the top of the pyramid, has made voter fraud a priority. Democrats had just enough votes to block the bill in the Senate, but one of them happened to be deathly ill. Dewhurst’s threat to bring the bill up kept Houston Democratic Sen. Mario Gallegos on the Senate floor against his doctor’s orders.

The lieutenant governor saw his chance when San Antonio Democratic Sen. Carlos Uresti missed a morning roll call because he was home sick with the flu. Then Dewhurst bungled the opportunity. He called the vote without all Republicans present. Short one, he tried to invalidate the vote of Houston Democratic Sen. John Whitmire, the Senate’s longest-serving member, on a technicality. Finally, he caved and allowed a second vote, but let senators stall long enough for Uresti to rush to the chamber and restore the stalemate.

The next day, Dewhurst’s office released an angry letter calling Senate Democrats un-American and saying Whitmire “tried to make himself a victim.” Dewhurst then insisted he hadn’t authorized the letter and that a staffer had written it. The Senate took a day off so they could caucus privately. Members sent three delegates to Dewhurst’s office for an airing of grievances.

For the next week or so, the lieutenant governor avoided the dais in the Senate chamber. In a meeting with reporters after the session, Dewhurst claimed victory for everything positive that came out of it. But with a pained look on his face, he carefully explained that he’d just “rather not get into” the voter ID debacle. Freshman Republican Sen. Dan Patrick, the conservative Houston radio host who also might challenge Dewhurst for the governorship in 2010, was less reserved. “If you’re going to run a play, you’d better make sure you run it right,” he told the Observer. “We’re the ones in charge. We have no excuses.”


CONTROLLING CRADDICK’S CRASHES
Even in the best of times, Speaker Craddick looks uncomfortable: reserved, shoulders rounded, at most a thin, impermanent smile traced across his face. But in the last hours of this legislative session, Craddick was downright joyful, sporting a broad, lopsided grin as he backslapped and joked the final minutes away. A near-death experience will do that.

At the beginning of the session in January, Craddick may well have thought the unpleasantness was over after he survived the first floor challenge to a sitting speaker in 40 years. Few in Texas are as adept as he at the insider game of politics. Craddick skillfully divided the opposition, in all likelihood seeding it with at least one double agent, while winning the allegiance of an unlikely group of mostly minority Democrats. With a slim majority in place, a somewhat contrite Craddick then promised members he had heard their complaints and would do better in this, his third session.

“It’s hard for a leopard to change his spots,” said Houston Democratic Rep. Senfronia Thompson at the time.

Remarkably for an institution that produces so much bad policy, the main complaints against Craddick were about process. Under past speakers, controversial legislation that could become campaign fodder was handled in committee to avoid potentially damaging floor votes. Committee chairs were given a fair amount of leeway to run their committees and reach consensus. The knock against Craddick was that he holds too tight a leash, often on behalf of special interests, limiting what his chairs can do and forcing members to take bad votes. The result was that policy was created, even entire bills written, on the House floor. It was here that the speaker ruled with absolute authority, at times through a capricious interpretation of the rules. Craddick didn’t change his modus operandi much during the session. When it started to fall apart is hard to pinpoint. An event in early May seems to have been key. One way that Craddick controlled the chamber, and punished enemies, was by deciding which bills could be heard for a vote. Since he had many enemies this session, a number of them couldn’t get their local bills onto the calendar. Local bills matter most to constituents. For this reason, when a local bill of a Craddick lieutenant, Rio Grande City Democrat Ryan Guillen, received special treatment by jumping ahead on the calendar, many members were upset. Thompson raised a point of order that the bill’s appearance on the calendar violated House rules. The speaker overruled her. Then something happened that hadn’t occurred since 1973. Craddick’s ruling was challenged, and after much discussion, a vote of the House overturned it. Suddenly, Craddick looked vulnerable again. The insurgency rebounded.

Removing Craddick depended on the Republicans. Democrats could deliver a bloc of votes, but not enough to elect one of their own. Republicans who wanted Craddick gone faced the same problems they had in January. Each of the rebellion’s leaders wanted to be speaker, so no consensus candidate emerged. And they couldn’t trust each other. Some on the team seemed to waver between the two sides.

This uneasy status quo might have continued until the end if not for a question asked of the speaker on the Friday before the end of session. The insurgents had speculated on how a sitting speaker could be removed. Euless Republican Rep. Todd Smith asked Parliamentarian Denise Davis whether Craddick would have to recognize a member for a motion to vacate the chair. Davis apparently told him that while Craddick didn’t have to recognize, the ruling could be appealed. Enough confusion remained that Waco Democrat Rep. Jim Dunnam, head of the House Democratic Caucus, decided to ask the speaker himself from the back microphone of the chamber.

Dunnam posed a parliamentary inquiry on whether he or someone would be recognized on a motion to vacate the chair. At this point, Craddick could have said he would not rule until the motion was made, and that would have been the end of it. The insurgents probably didn’t have the votes, and the challenge would have likely fizzled. Instead, Craddick responded no. Dunnam then asked whether that ruling could be appealed. Craddick again responded no. The answer sent shock waves through the chamber. Craddick—ruling against his own parliamentarian—was saying there was no way he could be deposed during the session. It was an incredible demonstration of raw power and steely resolve.

Parliamentarian Davis and her deputy promptly quit. Craddick took a hurried recess as they were escorted from the building. The speaker returned hours later with two new parliamentarians—former Reps. Terry Keel and Ron Wilson—who had been privately advising him for at least a week. The rest of the session was akin to a mouse in a box sniffing out each side to determine the shape of its confinement. As it became clear that the box was solid, the antics of the insurgents grew more theatrical, culminating on the session’s last Sunday night with an aborted roll call to remove Craddick, and then an impromptu walkout.

While Craddick survived, it may have been a Pyrrhic victory. Even his stalwarts doubt he will be re-elected in 2009. The only way to change that dynamic would be to elect new, Craddick-friendly members to the House. This will make for an interesting election cycle.

David Pasztor, Matt Wright, and Patrick Michels also contributed to this report.

http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2519

Labels: political analysis, Texas legislature

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:18 PM 0 comments Links to this post

States Revamping Policies on Virtual Schools
By Erik W. Robelen

Published in Print: June 13, 2007

It has been an active spring when it comes to state policymaking targeting online schools.

In the wake of a Colorado audit finding insufficient oversight of the state’s online schools, for example, Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. has signed a legislative compromise that would tighten the reins with new demands and a newly created state division of online schools.

In South Carolina, Republican Gov. Mark Sanford signed a measure expanding a state-sponsored virtual pilot program into a full-fledged state online school, even as plans in Indiana to launch two new virtual schools have been shelved amid legislative wrangling over funding.

In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, a bill to change how the state’s 11 cyber charters are funded has sparked considerable debate.
And in Kansas, state officials are responding to a state report in April that found that despite rigorous policies for overseeing the state’s cyber schools, the state department of education’s actual oversight of them has been “weak.”

“A lot of states are wrestling with these issues,” noted John F. Watson, a national expert on virtual schooling and the founder of Evergreen Consulting Associates in Evergreen, Colo.

‘Cooler Heads’ in Colorado

The Colorado measure creates a new division of online learning within the state department of education to oversee virtual education. The division will certify the authorizers of online programs that serve students across district lines, with an eye towards ensuring quality.

Also, authorizers of online programs will now have to give the state annual reports on each program they oversee, with details on how the programs have met quality standards, data on students and teachers, and other information.

“We actually think Senate Bill 215 is a very good compromise,” said Jane Urschel, the associate executive director of the Colorado Association of School Boards. “We now have a law that will keep online schools out of the headlines.”
Mr. Watson added that the new law “puts Colorado right at the forefront of thoughtful responses to the challenges of developing appropriate online education policy.”

In December, a state auditor’s report in Colorado drew wide attention with its conclusion that state and local districts had given virtual schools lax oversight. ("Colo. Online Charters Need More Oversight, Auditor Says", Dec. 20, 2006.)
Afterward, some virtual school advocates said they worried that the state might seek to overregulate virtual learning and discourage its expansion. But they suggested that in the end, state lawmakers’ reaction was measured.

“Cooler heads prevailed in the state,” said Mickey Revenaugh, the vice president for state relations at Connections Academy in Baltimore, a company that provides virtual school curriculum, technology, and school management services, including for Denver Connections Academy.

She said the new law helps to ensure “you have good oversight without micromanaging. … There was a moment where it looked like it was going to be overly prescriptive.”

South Carolina’s expanded virtual school will start with high school-age students and eventually expand to cover the full K-12 spectrum.

“This bill will not only open up choices that wouldn’t normally be available to students, but it also provides an important opportunity for more students to interact via the Internet,” said Gov. Sanford.

The legislation sparked a heated debate among lawmakers on the question of access to online course offerings by students in private schools and home-schooled students, with some members seeking to charge them fees and to give enrollment priority to public school students.

Indiana 'Heartbreak'

In the end, no such restrictions were included in the law. However, the measure instructs the state board of education to develop guidelines and regulations on how to prioritize student eligibility and to examine the appropriateness of charging tuition and fees.

At the same time, the legislation makes explicit that virtual charter schools are permissable in South Carolina and sets parameters for how they should operate. The state has no such schools now.

In Indiana, Ball State University was getting ready to launch two new virtual charter schools next school year, which would have been the first in the state. In final wrangling by lawmakers, however, the funding was stripped from the state budget bill and Ball State officials say plans to open the schools have been scrapped for now.

Critics of the virtual schools, including the Indiana State Teachers Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association, argued that the money was needed to pay for other education priorities, such as funding for full-day kindergarten.

But virtual school advocates sharply criticized the move.

“That was a heartbreak, it really was,” said Ms. Revenaugh of Connections Academy, which was to operate one of the two new virtual charters. “Parents were on fire, they wanted this so badly.”

Funding Fight in Pa.

In Pennsylvania, state Rep. Karen Beyer, a Republican, introduced a measure earlier this year that would require the state to directly pay for cyber charters, rather than taking the per-pupil funding from district coffers.

The legislation also would set what backers of the schools consider unreasonably low limits on how much money they may receive. The schools would get between $3,000 and $5,000 per student, depending on their enrollment.

The state teachers’ union and school boards association have rallied behind the measure, arguing that the cyber schools cost less to run than brick-and-mortar schools. But cyber charter advocates say the measure as drafted would put the schools out of business.

Committee hearings on the bill in the Pennsylvania House were expected to occur this summer.
In Kansas, this spring’s report by a state legislative audit committee says the state education department often hasn’t carried out the policies it has established .

For instance, the report found that the state agency had lost track of which virtual schools were registered, had failed to conduct required on-site visits for some of the schools, and lacked reliable data to monitor the schools.

The report also raised concerns about potential risks with online schooling that it said were not being adequately addressed, such as the manipulation of enrollment data for financial gain.

The committee noted that virtual schooling is growing rapidly in the state, with the number of virtual schools and students doubling over the past two years, to 28 schools serving more than 2,000 students.

Karla S. Denny, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Education, said her agency does not dispute the report’s core findings.
“A corrective action plan has been developed and will be fully implemented before school begins in August,” she said.
Vol. 26, Issue 41, Pages 18,22

Labels: virtual schools

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

School gym doubles as juvenile courtroom

Daniel Perry
June 13, 2007 - 10:35PM
EDINBURG — The bleachers at Edinburg North High School’s gymnasium were crowded Wednesday afternoon as families waited their turn to appear before Justice of the Peace Mary Alice Palacios and her staff.

It was the second consecutive week she had her weekly afternoon court session at the school to deal with Edinburg school district-related cases.

During the recently completed school year, Palacios had court at her North 12th Avenue offices near the Museum of South Texas History, the Hidalgo County Courthouse and the district’s transportation building. Court has been moved from all these places because there was not enough room.

Palacios’ case load for the district begins at about 80 cases at the start of the academic year and rises into the hundreds as the months wear on. Because of this, she is looking to the Edinburg district instead of the county for help in the form of a case manager, two clerks and a larger court space.

She has 16 county and school district-assigned workers in her office and is projected to pay them about $230,000 this year, according to county budget information. Employee budgets for other county justice of the peace offices range from $109,000 to $150,000. The average number of staff in other justice of the peace offices was not immediately available late Wednesday afternoon.

Palacios said the Edinburg district has an obligation to provide additional work space.

“It’s their cases in my courtroom,” she said about the district. “We are handling 500 cases a day.”

Mario Salinas, Edinburg’s assistant superintendent of administration, said finding space is not a problem during the summer, because classes are not in session. He said the challenge is during the school year, when campuses are being used from dawn to dusk for classes and activities and there is just no room available to accommodate large groups for court.

The county is responsible for renting, buying or constructing buildings and providing employees for its nine justices of the peace, county public information officer Cari Lambrecht said. Palacios could seek more space for all of her work if she requests it through the county’s budget process, which is going on now, Lambrecht said.

Court started at Edinburg North about noon Wednesday and was not expected to end until about 8 p.m. People walked through a metal detector at one side of the gymnasium, checked their names on the docket with court staff and took their places in the bleachers to wait for their names to be called. The cases ranged from first-time offenders to repeat offenders, with violations ranging from truancy and fighting to using abusive language and other offenses.

Palacios also takes on school district-related cases from Donna, Edcouch-Elsa, La Villa, Monte Alto, the South Texas Business, Education & Technology Academy in Edinburg, Mid-Valley Charter School in Weslaco and the county’s Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Program.

She said Donna, Edinburg and Edcouch-Elsa provide clerks, while the other schools and districts provide office supplies. And Donna and other districts provide more than ample space at campuses to have court.

Edinburg school district staff are scheduled to meet Monday about her situation, she said.
“We are trying to help,” said Salinas, the assistant superintendent of administration. “I know as of recently we added two staff members to her staff. But we want to help and we recognize that what she does is valuable. She’s part of our team. We don’t pay her salary, but she does a lot for us.”

———

Daniel Perry covers education and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4454. For this and other stories, visit www.themonitor.com.

http://www.themonitor.com/news/school_3037___article.html/county_district.html

Labels: discipline, zero tolerance

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:52 PM 0 comments Links to this post

June 9, 2007

By JULIE BOSMAN

Roland G. Fryer, a 30-year-old Harvard economist known for his study of racial inequality in schools, is back in New York to again promote a big idea: Pay students cash for high scores on standardized tests and their performance might improve. And he has captured the attention of Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Across the country, educators have been experimenting with cash incentives. A program in Chelsea, Mass., gave children $25 for perfect attendance. Some Dallas schools pay children $2 for each book they read.

But the idea is controversial. Many educators maintain, among other objections, that children have to learn for the love of it, not for cash.

Until now, Professor Fryer’s idea of cash for performance has had no serious takers. Three years ago, he tried to implement a pilot program in New York City charter schools that would have given students cash in exchange for good test scores.

“They kicked us out,” Professor Fryer said of the schools that first considered the program. And some Department of Education officials were not enthusiastic, either, he said. “They laughed in my face.”

But Mr. Bloomberg has recently shown interest in using payments, raised from the private sector, as a way to change behavior and reduce poverty.

In September, he proposed giving cash to poor adults to encourage them to do everything from keeping their children in school to seeking preventive medical care. And so, he said yesterday at a news conference, he was receptive to Professor Fryer’s idea. “If we aren’t looking at everything,” he said, “shame on us.”

This week, Professor Fryer met with a group of school principals who are considering participating in his incentives program. Information about the program was first reported yesterday in The Daily News.

Education Department officials said that putting the program into effect has a long way to go. “We are still at a preliminary stage,” Debra Wexler, a department spokeswoman, said yesterday. “Neither the mayor nor the chancellor have approved any program details.”

Professor Fryer said that under his program, fourth graders and seventh graders who take the new round of mandatory standardized tests that the city is introducing in the fall would be rewarded with at least $5. They would get more money for high scores, with a cap of $25 for fourth graders and $50 for seventh graders. In addition, each participating school would receive $5,000.

Money for the payments will come from private backers, Professor Fryer said, because there would be no public money available for them.

The prospect of cash introduced into the classroom has made some local educators uneasy.

“It makes me really nervous,” said Maggie Siena, the principal of Public School 150 in TriBeCa. “I suspect paying kids for achievement in any way tends not to work.”

Ernest Logan, the president of the principals’ union, also expressed concerns. “We are troubled by additional pressure being placed on children to achieve perfection,” he said. “What really matters in education is continued student progress, not perfect test scores.”

Professor Fryer and other educational scholars have argued that some children, especially those from impoverished backgrounds, lack the foresight and role models to be self-motivated.

“The fundamental problem with education and motivating kids to learn what they need to learn is that the payoffs are so distant,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning research organization. “So it’s very hard to motivate students to do well. Good students get that motivation from somewhere — from peers, their parents, how they’re raised — but the kids who are unmotivated have a very hard time understanding that what they do today pays off decades from now.”

Eric Nadelstern, the chief executive of the school system’s empowerment initiative — which gives principals more autonomy to run their schools — lauded Professor Fryer in a recent e-mail message to principals. “He has my enthusiastic support,” Mr. Nadelstern said. “I encourage you to give the program serious consideration.”

Professor Fryer, who is black, has explored racial issues in education extensively. He has written studies on the gap in test scores between black children and white children, the economic effect of “acting white,” how the mental ability of young children differs by race, and the causes and consequences of attending historically black colleges and universities.

Professor Fryer, on his Web site, americaninequalitylab.com, calls the program “Incentivising: An Experiment in NYC Public Schools.”

In a near-empty cafeteria at Frank Sinatra High School of the Arts in Queens on Wednesday, Professor Fryer promoted the plan to a dozen principals with an informal speech about poverty, the test score gap, his professional experience and personal history and his grandmother’s suggestions for the plan.

He persuaded at least one principal to change her mind about the program. “Prior to going into the meeting, I wasn’t in favor of it,” said Crystal Simmons, the principal of the Academy for Social Action in Harlem. “But now I think it could work if it is established in the right way. There should be some financial-literacy element, for instance.”

After the meeting, Professor Fryer said in an e-mail message to the principals that more than half the available spots in the proposed incentive program had been filled.

Mr. Loveless of Brookings said that though cash-incentive programs tend to make people uneasy, he believed the proposal was worth considering. “I would take it seriously,” he said. “I don’t think we should let our queasiness over directly awarding kids with cash prevent us from experimenting. We need to find out if this works or not.”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:44 PM 1 comments Links to this post

by southernstudies.org/facingsouth (June, 2007)

It's no secret that the demographics of the South are rapidly changing. Here at Facing South we have been closely following the new, more racially and ethnically diverse South that is emerging -- and shifting more quickly than anywhere else in the country.

The latest evidence comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, which released their latest report yesterday The Condition of Education. The report charts trends in public schools from 1972 to 2005, when the latest data is available.

Here are some highlights on the changing racial trends in schools:

* Nationally, 42% of public school students were considered part of a racial or ethnic minority group in 2005, an increase from 22% of students in 1972. The growth of Latino students has been the biggest factor in this increase.

* 47% of the South's K-12 public school students are now "ethnic/racial minorities," up from 30% (mostly African-American) in 1972. The West is the only more diverse region, with 54% students of color.

* While the West has the highest number of students identified as "Hispanic" (37%), the South has seen the fastest growth: the proportion of Latino students has more than tripled in the South from 1972 to 2005, from 5% to over 18%.

Of course, the report doesn't look at private schools, making it an imperfect snapshot of the South's overall demographics. As studies have found, the South has seen the greatest growth in private education -- especially among white families attempting to escape public schooling, a factor in the re-segregation of Southern education.

But the overall picture is clear: the new generation of the South will look less and less like the old one.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:36 PM 0 comments Links to this post

New Report: Latinos Online: Hispanics with Lower Levels of Education and English Proficiency Remain Largely Disconnected from the Internet,"
By Susannah Fox and Gretchen Livingston
Pew Hispanic Center
March 14, 2007

In the Pew Hispanic Center's [23-page] report, "Latinos Online: Hispanics with Lower Levels of Education and English Proficiency Remain Largely Disconnected from the Internet," researchers Susannah Fox and Gretchen Livingston profile Internet usage among Latino adults. The authors found that more than one-in-two Latinos (56%) goes online, a lower rate than among non-Hispanic whites (71%) and non-Hispanic blacks (60%); 78% of Latinos who are English-dominant and 76% of bilingual Latinos use the Internet, compared with 32% of Spanish-dominant Hispanic adults; and Mexicans, the largest national origin group in the U.S. Latino population, are among the least likely to go online. According to the authors, several socio-economic characteristics that are often intertwined, including low levels of education and limited English ability, largely explain the gap in internet use between Hispanics and non-Hispanics.

(...Download the complete report (pdf) by clicking on the hot link above.

Labels: digital divide

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:14 AM 2 comments Links to this post

"Critics say states are more worried about creating the appearance of academic progress than in raising standards." Reference is made herein to a 2006 report titled, Are They Really Ready to Work?". It's obvious that simply raising standards without dealing with all of the other gaps (economic, housing, criminal justice, etc.) is going to be a limited strategy ultimately. -Angela

The report may be downloaded for free here. -Angela

Data suggest states satisfy No Child law by expecting less of students
By Ledyard King, Gannett News Service

WASHINGTON — Almost every fourth-grader in Mississippi knows how to read. In Massachusetts, only half do.
So what's Mississippi doing that Massachusetts, the state with the most college graduates, isn't? Setting expectations too low, critics say.

The 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law was designed to raise education standards across the country by punishing schools that fail to make all kids proficient in math and reading.

But the law allows each state to chart its own course in meeting those objectives.

The result, according to a Gannett News Service analysis of test scores, is that many states have taken the safe route, keeping standards low and fooling parents into believing their kids are prepared for college and work.

On Thursday, federal education officials plan to release a report that is expected to reach the same conclusion: Many states hold students to a relatively low standard.

Critics say states are more worried about creating the appearance of academic progress than in raising standards.

"Ironically, No Child reforms may have the exact opposite effect they were intended to have," said Bruce Fuller, an education and public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

The GNS analysis found that relying on state test scores to judge students' performance is misleading.

For example, 89% of Mississippi fourth-graders passed the state's reading test in 2005, but only 18% passed the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. That gap of 71 percentage points was the widest in the nation.

Massachusetts had one of the smallest gaps, with 50% of fourth-graders passing the state reading test and 44% passing the NAEP test.

The national test is taken only by a small percentage of students in each state and often includes questions on material that schools haven't covered yet.

Fuller's research indicates the gap between state test scores and NAEP scores has actually widened in many states since the federal law took effect.

States that don't push students to meet higher standards risk sending them into the work world unprepared — even as global competition increases. More than half of 250 employers surveyed in 2006 said high school graduates are deficient at writing in English, foreign languages and math skills.

"The future U.S. workforce is here — and it is woefully ill-prepared," concluded the report called Are They Really Ready to Work?"

States: Comparisons to NAEP unfair

State education officials deny critics' claims that they're gaming the system by making their tests easier. And they say it's unfair to compare state tests to NAEP.

They also say any changes in testing policies came after careful review and were designed to make sure children learn what state standards require them to know. And they note that federal officials signed off on the changes.

"We didn't game anything," said Tom Horne, superintendent of public instruction in Arizona, which lowered passing scores on several tests in 2005. "We called together a task force and the state (school) board decided to follow their recommendation."

No Child Left Behind requires states to test students in math and reading from third through eighth grade and once in high school. Every child must be proficient in those subjects by 2014.

Schools that don't make "adequate yearly progress" toward that goal risk being flagged as underperforming. Students at those struggling schools may transfer to a better school or the local school district could be forced to use its federal education money to pay for tutoring.

States use a number of "cheap tricks" to create the illusion that students are doing better than they really are, said Dan Koretz, a Harvard University testing expert.

Those include designing tests easy enough for almost all students to pass or lowering passing scores to make sure most students make the grade.

"We fuss all the time about getting parents involved," said former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes, who co-chaired a national commission that looked at ways to improve No Child Left Behind. "Well, we've got to tell the truth to parents so they can get involved."

Philadelphia schools chief Paul Vallas thinks the answer is national standards. Every grade in every state would teach the same material and administer the same test.

Vallas, who will run New Orleans schools starting in July, said students who fled the hurricane-devastated Gulf Coast in 2005 were stunned to find much more rigorous education standards elsewhere.

"The shocker ... is how poorly the kids have done in another state," he said. "It was probably a wake-up call."

President Bush and lawmakers say the punitive elements of No Child Left Behind have prompted states to re-examine standards and focus on long-neglected groups of students, notably minorities and students with disabilities.

On Tuesday, the independent Center on Education Policy issued a report saying student achievement on state tests has risen since 2002.

But it said "it's very difficult, if not impossible" to credit those gains to No Child Left Behind because states and districts already were making improvements before the law took effect.

Test-taking trauma

Critics of the law say it has forced schools to drill kids and emphasize testing at the expense of other learning.

Tiffany Collins, 12, a seventh grader at Robert Frost Middle School in Fairfax, Va., knows May is test time.

"When you think about the test, it's like, 'Oh, it's a big test, and, oh, am I going to be ready for it?'" she said. "I just think it's really a lot of pressure."

States and some independent experts say comparing scores on the federal and state tests isn't valid.

The national exam, they say, was never designed to compare standards from state to state. It's administered only to a sample of students, each of whom takes only a portion of the test.

And teachers and students are far more focused on the state tests because those tests determine whether their schools make adequate progress and, in some cases, whether seniors receive a diploma.

In Maryland, 58% of fourth-graders passed the state reading test in 2003, compared with 32% who passed NAEP. Two years later, 82% passed the state test while the percentage scoring proficient on NAEP stayed the same.

"If it doesn't count for kids, they're not going to take it seriously," said Dixie Stack, director of curriculum at the Maryland Department of Education.

Some states are taking the issue seriously.

In 2005, Tennessee reported the largest difference in the nation between eighth-grade student scores on the state's math and reading tests and scores on NAEP.

The state looked at its standards and found them largely in line with NAEP standards, said Rachel Woods, spokeswoman for the state Department of Education. But the Tennessee tests focused on a multiple-choice format as opposed to NAEP, which demands more essay responses.

Now, Tennessee is rewriting its tests and increasing requirements for high school graduation. That will almost certainly lower the number of kids scoring in the proficient range and increase the number of schools flagged as poor performers, Woods said.

But she said, "What's important is having more kids graduate with the skills they need to succeed in life."

Contributing: Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-06-06-schools-main_N.htm

Labels: achievement gap, NAEP, NCLB, report

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:29 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Jim Crawford couldn't be more correct. With NCLB, the ideals of the left have been appropriated by the right and passed off as civil rights. -Angela

A Diminished Vision of Civil Rights
No Child Left Behind and the growing divide in how
educational equity is understood.
By James Crawford
Education Week, June 6, 2007


At the core of today’s debates over school
accountability lies a contentious question: Does the
federal No Child Left Behind Act represent a historic
advance for civil rights, or a giant step backward for
the children it purports to help?
This argument has divided the civil rights community
itself, along with its traditional allies in Congress.
One side supports stern measures designed to force
educators to pay attention to long-neglected students
and enable all children to reach “proficiency” in key
subjects. The other side argues that the law’s tools
of choice—high-stakes testing, unrealistic achievement
targets, and punitive sanctions—have not only proved
ineffective in holding schools accountable, they also
are pushing “left behind” groups even further behind.

Disagreement is especially acute among advocates for
English-language learners, known in the shorthand of
K-12 education as “ELLs.” These students pose a
fundamental challenge for the No Child Left Behind
accountability scheme, owing to the near-total absence
of valid and reliable assessments of their academic
achievement. Usually tested in English, a language
they have yet to master, ELLs tend to perform poorly
in both reading and math. Indeed, the law defines them
as students who have difficulty meeting state
standards because of the language barrier.
Nevertheless, under every state NCLB plan,
English-language learners’ scores on invalid tests
must be included in “adequate yearly progress”
calculations, and, where they fall short of AYP
targets, schools must undergo “corrective action.”
In other words, high-stakes decisions about the
education of these students are being made on the
basis of data generally acknowledged to be inaccurate.
Schools with an ELL “subgroup” are being labeled and
punished for failure—not because of the quality of
instruction they provide, but because existing tests
are unable to measure what ELLs have learned.
While acknowledging this reality, the Mexican American
Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National
Council of La Raza have emerged as uncompromising
defenders of the No Child Left Behind law. They oppose
exempting English-language learners from standardized
tests, regardless of the tests’ validity, for more
than the one year that is currently allowed by federal
regulations. In the words of a MALDEF lobbyist,
leaving English-language learners out of No Child Left
Behind’s accountability system would mean “removing
the incentive to teach them.” The two organizations
favor increased funding to develop appropriate
assessments, hardly a controversial idea. In the
meantime, however, they insist on the continued use of
flawed assessments to judge schools and, by
implication, to make flawed decisions about
educational programs.
Critics of NCLB-style accountability—who now include a
substantial majority of educators working with
English-language learners—cannot see how such a blunt
instrument could produce academic benefits. More
importantly, they point to the law’s harmful impact on
minority students generally and on ELLs in particular.
The perverse effects are well-documented: excessive
class time devoted to test preparation, a curriculum
narrowed to the two tested subjects, neglect of
critical thinking in favor of basic skills, pressure
to reduce or eliminate native-language instruction,
demoralization of teachers whose students fall short
of unrealistic cut scores, demoralization of children
who are forced to take tests they can’t understand,
and, perhaps worst of all, practices that encourage
low-scoring students to drop out before test day.
No one questions that, because of the No Child Left
Behind law, English-language learners are receiving
more “attention” than ever before. But, as many
educational researchers and practitioners can testify,
results in the classroom have been far more negative
than positive. Supporters of the law have generally
declined to respond to what educators are reporting,
and instead have accused the law’s critics of opposing
accountability or believing that minority children
“can’t learn.”
How could civil rights advocates disagree over such
fundamental issues? The only plausible answer is that
there is a growing divide in how educational equity is
understood. Some clues can be found in the changing
terminology used to discuss school reform.
Once upon a time, civil rights advocates were united
in pursuing the goal of equal educational opportunity.
They fought against racial segregation in public
schools and demanded equitable resources for all
students. Their focus was on “inputs,” pushing state
and local officials to provide adequate school
facilities, well-designed instructional programs,
effective teachers, and attention to the effects of
poverty—such as parental illiteracy, poor health, and
malnutrition—that pose obstacles to learning. In those
days, the enemy was clear: a two-tier system that
provided an inferior education to many children on the
basis of skin color, language background, class
status, and place of residence.
But in the No Child Left Behind era, the words equal
educational opportunity have largely faded from the
public discourse. In their place, there is talk of
eliminating the “achievement gaps” between various
groups of students.
The latter term was seldom heard in the 1980s or
1990s, as is shown by a quick archive search of major
newspapers, including The New York Times, The
Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, The Boston
Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Education Week.
Then, around 1999, “achievement gap” suddenly burst
into the popular lexicon. The credit is largely due to
then-Gov. George W. Bush of Texas and his political
guru, Karl Rove, who were planning a presidential
campaign in which school reform would figure
prominently.
Their strategy—which ultimately proved successful—was
to seize an issue traditionally “owned” by Democrats
and give it a “compassionate conservative” spin. By
stressing the achievement gap, candidate Bush
redefined civil rights in the field of school reform:
“Some say it is unfair to hold disadvantaged children
to rigorous standards. I say it is discrimination to
require anything less—the soft bigotry of low
expectations.” Retiring the Republican theme of
dismantling the U.S. Department of Education, he
called instead for an enhanced federal role based on
the Texas model of high-stakes testing.
In 2001, key Democrats in Congress, including Sen.
Edward M. Kennedy and Rep. George Miller, encouraged
by certain liberal advocacy groups, joined forces with
the Bush administration and with Republican leaders in
Congress. The result was bipartisan passage of the No
Child Left Behind Act late that year.
Eliminating achievement gaps is paramount among the
law’s goals; equal educational opportunity is not. In
fact, the latter term—which had been prominent in
previous versions of the federal Elementary and
Secondary Education Act—appears nowhere in NCLB. (No
doubt an anonymous congressional staffer performed a
search-and-delete operation on the bill, just as one
did with the word “bilingual,” which was also
expunged.)
What’s the significance of this shift in terminology?
Achievement gap is all about measurable
“outputs”—standardized-test scores—and not about
equalizing resources, addressing poverty, combating
segregation, or guaranteeing children an opportunity
to learn. The No Child Left Behind Act is silent on
such matters. Dropping equal educational opportunity,
which highlights the role of inputs, has a subtle but
powerful effect on how we think about accountability.
It shifts the entire burden of reform from legislators
and policymakers to teachers and kids and schools.
By implication, educators are the obstacle to change.
Every mandate of No Child Left Behind—and there are
hundreds—is designed to force the people who run our
schools to shape up, work harder, raise expectations,
and stop “making excuses” for low test scores, or face
the consequences. Despite the law’s oft-stated
reverence for “scientifically based research,” this
narrow approach is contradicted by numerous studies
documenting the importance of social and economic
factors in children’s academic progress. Yet it has
the advantage of enabling politicians to ignore the
difficult issues and avoid costly remedies. If
educators are the obstacle, there’s no need to address
what Jonathan Kozol calls the “savage inequalities” of
our educational system and our society.
In other words, despite its stated goals, the No Child
Left Behind law represents a diminished vision of
civil rights. Educational equity is reduced to
equalizing test scores. The effect has been to
impoverish the educational experience of minority
students—that is, to reinforce the two-tier system of
public schools that civil rights advocates once
challenged.
English-language learners, for example, are being fed
a steady diet of test-prep, worksheets, and other
“skill building” exercises from a menu mostly reduced
to reading and math. Their language-learning needs are
increasingly neglected by the marginalization of
bilingual and even English-as-a-second-language
instruction to make time for English language arts
items likely to be on the test. Meanwhile,
more-advantaged students are studying music, art,
foreign languages, physical education, science,
history, and civics, getting to read literature rather
than endure phonics drills, and participating in field
trips, plays, chess clubs, and debate tournaments—all
“frills” that are routinely denied to children whose
test scores have become life-or-death matters for
educators’ careers.
Ironically, in numerous ways, No Child Left Behind is
increasing the achievement gap, if academic
achievement is understood as getting an all-round
education and, with it, an equal chance to succeed in
life. True civil rights advocates cannot and must not
ignore the reality behind the rhetoric.

James Crawford is the president of the Institute for
Language and Education Policy (www.elladvocates.org ),
a nonprofit advocacy group in Takoma Park, Md. He can
be reached at bilingualed@starpower.net .
Vol. 26, Issue 39, Pages 31,40

Labels: Civil Rights, NCLB

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:11 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Hmmm. These results are questionable. "Increases in achievement recorded by many state tests had not been matched by results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, nationwide reading and math tests administered by the federal Department of Education." Read on.

-Angela

June 6, 2007
New Study Finds Gains Since No Child Left Behind

By SAM DILLON
Student achievement has increased and test score gaps between white students and black and Hispanic students have narrowed in many states since President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind law in 2002, according to a new survey of state scores in reading and math.

But the study, released yesterday by the Center on Education Policy, an independent Washington group that closely monitors the law, cautioned that “it is difficult if not impossible to determine the extent to which these trends in test results have occurred because of N.C.L.B.”

“In most states with three or more years of comparable test data, student achievement in reading and math has gone up since 2002,” the study found, even as it warned repeatedly against concluding that the federal law alone produced the results.

In the decade before the law was passed, many states had adopted policies aimed at raising achievement, like broadening access to early childhood programs, that could also be responsible for gains.

The study also acknowledged that the increases in achievement recorded by many state tests had not been matched by results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, nationwide reading and math tests administered by the federal Department of Education.

Those results have been mixed. For example, on the national tests given in 2005, fourth-grade math scores showed an important increase over the previous test administration in 2003, and eighth-grade math scores rose slightly. But fourth-grade reading scores were the same on the nationwide test in 2005 as in 2002, and eighth-grade reading scores declined.

Despite its caveats, the new report is likely to be closely studied as Congress debates whether to reauthorize the law this year, partly because the report may be the most comprehensive study of state test scores in many years. The law is widely considered President Bush’s most important domestic policy achievement.

“This study confirms that No Child Left Behind has struck a chord of success with our nation’s schools and students,” Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said yesterday.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who worked closely with the administration on the law, said the report “proves that the goals at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act — a dedication to accountability and standards, a commitment to closing the achievement gap and a pledge to improve public schools — are still the right ones for moving America forward.”

Merely collecting the test data from 50 states proved to be a complex and frustrating task because many states’ education departments are overworked and their test archives are flawed by missing or inconsistent data, the report said. “The house of data on which N.C.L.B. is built is at times a rickety structure,” it said.

Those and other limitations notwithstanding, Jack Jennings, the center’s president, said state test scores “remain a more accurate barometer of what kids know” than the national assessment, often referred to as the NAEP (pronounced nape).

“The NAEP shouldn’t be taken as the gold standard,” Mr. Jennings said.

Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has compared state and federal achievement scores, said the report “displays methodological weaknesses which lead to exaggerated inferences” about student progress.

In analyzing state scores, the researchers who carried out the study did not consider all recent data from all states because, the report said, new tests and other factors in some states made it impossible to compare scores from one year with others. But Professor Fuller said the researchers appeared to have eliminated testing periods in some states that showed predominantly falling scores after 2002.

“It’s like calculating the annual rate of economic growth over the past century after excluding the Great Depression years,” Professor Fuller said. “It upwardly biases their estimate of annual growth in test scores.”

Robert L. Linn, an education professor emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a frequent critic of the law, served on a panel of five prominent testing and educational policy experts who advised the center on the study.

“I was a little surprised that things were generally as positive as they were, so it may be that I would say that N.C.L.B. is contributing more positively than I had given it credit for,” Professor Linn said. But he urged readers to pay attention to the report’s many caveats.

“The reason for all the caveats is that it is impossible to reach the conclusion that if scores go up, it is because of N.C.L.B.,” he said. “There are so many other factors that could lead to rising scores, including state efforts to raise achievement, and also, some of these gains may be artificial. So my worry is that people who come at it and don’t read the caveats will come away with an exaggerated impression.”

Laura S. Hamilton, a senior behavioral scientist for the Rand Corporation who also served on the panel of experts, said, “Most people want to know if N.C.L.B. as a policy has resulted in improved student achievement,” but added, “It’s a question that isn’t answerable.” She explained, “To test whether some policy is effective, you’d want to compare what happened under that policy to what would have happened if the policy hadn’t been enacted, and we can’t do that with N.C.L.B. because all public schools in the nation were subject to its provisions.”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Labels: gains, NCLB

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:52 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Here is the last of the three parts. -Angela

Efforts to stop TAKS cheating often fall short
More emphasis has been placed on test, not on catching copiers
11:47 PM CDT on Monday, June 4, 2007

By JOSHUA BENTON and HOLLY K. HACKER / The Dallas Morning News
jbenton@dallasnews.com and hhacker@dallasnews.com
Last of three parts

In 1975, a social scientist named Donald Campbell came up with the idea that would eventually be called Campbell's Law. He wrote like an academic, but you could boil the concept down to this:

The higher the stakes, the more likely people are to cheat.

It makes intuitive sense. The Dallas Morning News' analysis of TAKS scores found that cheating is almost twice as common on the 11th-grade test – which is required for graduation – as on the 10th-grade test.

But experts say that Texas has missed the lesson of Campbell's Law. Over the past two decades, the state's tests have become the dominant force in Texas education. But they say the state's test-security system – the rules and tools officials use to prevent cheating – hasn't kept up with the increasing importance the TAKS test now has in students' and educators' lives.

Also Online
Interactive: See test score results, see where the cheating schools are and take a quiz

Graphic: A pattern of cheating (.pdf)

Part One: Analysis shows TAKS cheating rampant

Part Two: Cheating's off the charts at charter schools

Archive: More coverage of TAKS cheating

As a result, they say, the TAKS is given in a far more permissive environment than other high-stakes tests like the SAT, bar exams or graduate-school admissions tests. And much of the cheating on the TAKS could be prevented with a series of reforms based on what those other tests do.

"It seems to me like terribly bad leadership," said Robert Frary, a professor emeritus at Virginia Tech who has studied cheating for more than 30 years. "The people in charge have to make it their priority."

Testing in Texas is leagues away from where it was in the late 1970s, when statewide tests first came into prominence.

Back then, results weren't filtered into school ratings or published in the newspaper. Tests were only given in a few select grades. Realtors didn't pitch houses based on how the neighborhood elementary school had fared.

In the early 1970s, a young man named Jim Impara helped develop Florida's first statewide testing program. He started attending national conferences on the subject, and there was one subject that was almost never discussed.

"I can't remember security ever being a topic," he said. "There wasn't really any incentive to cheat."

But in the decades since then, Texas, Florida and the entire nation have begun to take tests much more seriously. Texas' alphabet soup of tests – first TABS, then TEAMS and TAAS, and now TAKS – evolved into the dominant force in public education. Some teachers' salaries are now tied to their students' performance on test day. School ratings are a mark of public pride or shame. And decisions like whether a teen graduates or a third-grader gets promoted now hinge on test scores.

As Campbell's Law would predict, with higher stakes came a greater temptation to cheat, at all levels of the system. (As Dr. Campbell himself originally put it: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, 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.")

There are a variety of potential penalties on the books for cheating in Texas, all the way up to an entire school being shut down. But punishments are exceedingly rare.

Teachers bear burden
The security of the TAKS depends, in large part, on the many thousands of teachers and other school staffers who handle the exams. For the vast majority, of course, honesty isn't an issue. But recent years have shown there are exceptions.

"You can't have the same kind of control you have when you have everyone come to a neutral location and have outside proctors," said H.D. Hoover, a testing legend who was the primary overseer of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.

Texas sets no standards for the physical arrangement of students on test day. It has no rules for how far apart students should sit from one another. It also has no rules on seating arrangements, so that in many schools, best friends are allowed to sit within easy view of each other's answer sheets. (Some school districts voluntarily set tighter rules.)

During tests with higher levels of security, such as the SAT, there are usually firm standards on the distances between students, and students are generally not allowed to choose where they sit. Would-be cheaters are sentenced, at least, to eyestrain.

Texas also does not require schools to keep charts recording where students sit. If two students have identical and highly unlikely answer sheets – but there is no way to know whether they sat near each other – it can be difficult for an investigation to proceed. Texas doesn't even require schools to record what classroom a student was in when he or she took the TAKS.

"Knowing where they sit can take the evidence from a statistic and make it stronger," said Dr. Frary, a retired professor of educational measurement.

Some local students said their teachers let them sit pretty much wherever they wanted during TAKS testing. Others said their teachers were more aggressive about assigning seating. But even when teachers take preventive steps, students find ways around them.

Priscilla Ramirez, a student at DISD's Adamson High School, said that on one test day in her class, students were assigned numbers as they walked in. Each number corresponded to a desk, which was intended to randomize seating. But, she said, some students just traded their numbers to sit next to their friends.

Cheating "is sort of like an epidemic," she said. "It's not going to stop unless you really, really, really try."

Perhaps the single most effective cheating-prevention move the state could make, experts say, would be to produce multiple forms of the TAKS. Currently, on each TAKS test, every student gets all the same questions in the same order. That makes cheating easy, since one child's Question 12 is also his neighbor's Question 12.

Scrambling the order of questions in each test booklet makes copying much harder. Many high-stakes tests produce four different versions of exams and distribute them in such a way that no test-taker is seated next to anyone with the same version of their exam.

Diane Birdwell, a teacher at Bryan Adams High in Dallas, said she started producing multiple versions of her classroom tests when she realized kids in her first-period class were sharing answers with their friends in her third-period class.

"It's a great deterrent," said Ms. Birdwell, a board member of the teachers' group NEA Dallas. "You tell the kids, look, there's no point in looking at Johnny's No. 14 because his isn't going to look like your No. 14."

When engineering professor Charles Bernardin first started teaching at the University of Texas at Dallas, he wasn't particularly proactive about preventing cheating on his exams. But he quickly noticed that some of students were taking advantage of his lax security.

"If you leave a hundred dollar bill on the floor, people are going to pick it up," said Dr. Bernardin, who is also the university's director of academic assessment. "There's going to be a temptation."

But then he started producing multiple versions of his exams and mandating where students sit. Now, he said, "I never have any cheating problems."

Switching to multiple forms does come with a few drawbacks.

For example, printing different versions of test booklets can cost more money and make the test harder to administer. But Texas already prints multiple versions of its TAKS test booklets. Each TAKS contains a number of "field test" questions that don't count toward a student's score, but are instead evaluated for inclusion on future editions of the TAKS. Those questions differ from student to student. Only the questions that are identical in every test booklet count toward a student's score.

For Texas, state officials said, the primary concern would be the added expense and complication. More versions of a test would slow down the grading process and increase the chance, however small, of a grading error.

"Certainly we have the ability to make things more and more complex and generate more forms of the test," said Criss Cloudt, a TEA associate commissioner who oversees the state's testing program. "But there's a price you pay in complication."

Scrambled versions of the same test would also have to be statistically equated so officials can ensure they are all of equal difficulty. That can take precious time, considering that in Texas, a legislative mandate requires TEA to score the entire TAKS within 10 days of test day.

Still, Dr. Impara said that despite the potential difficulties, he recommends multiple forms for statewide assessment programs. So does the company he helped found, years after he left Florida – Caveon, the test-security firm TEA hired last year to examine the veracity of its TAKS scores.

"It has drawbacks, but the one benefit is better security," he said.

Dr. Cloudt – who has overseen testing only since February – and other TEA officials defended the state's test-security system. Traditionally, the state has seen its role as providing training to district testing coordinators through manuals, seminars and other avenues. Those district coordinators are then left to define many of the specific rules for test day. That leaves some districts – like, as of this year, Dallas – with relatively strict rules about things like adult supervision and who can proctor tests. Other districts can have less stringent standards.

"We feel we do a lot to keep testing secure," Dr. Cloudt said. "We're certainly open to looking at other ideas."

A role model for Texas?
When it comes to security on state tests, Mississippi is one of the gold standards. It requires at least two adults in the testing room at all times – and in some cases, even more. Violators of state test-security rules can, in the most extreme cases, be fined or face jail time.

State auditors make at least one unannounced visit to every school district each year on testing days to inspect the security procedures in place. If students are seated too close together to meet state guidelines, for instance, schools are told to spread them out. Seating students at cafeteria tables so they face each other – which is allowed in Texas – is prohibited in Mississippi.

And each year, before scores on the graduation test are released, the state runs statistical checks to look for suspicious scores. One method, similar to The News', looks for pairs of students with too-similar answer sheets. School districts are told to investigate the most unusual scores; in about half of those cases, according to state testing director Cindy Simmons, the suspicious scores are invalidated. If state officials disagree with a district's findings, the state Board of Education can overrule the decision.

"There are big consequences attached to these tests, and we want to make sure they're fair for all students and that no one has an unfair advantage," Ms. Simmons said. School districts have been cooperative, she said. "It's not, 'We're trying to catch you.' It's, 'We want you to know.' "

Mississippi officials have discussed switching to multiple forms of the test to increase security even more, she said. But so far, the state has decided not to, citing the cost. "We are not a state that is very wealthy," Ms. Simmons said. "We feel good about our security system as it is."

Little to gain
What keeps state exams from having a system as secure as other big-time tests? For cheating researcher George Wesolowsky, the key question is one of will.

With so much to gain from high test scores, it's not always in a school's or district's best interest to find cheating, he said. Reports of cheating bring schools embarrassing negative publicity. Students and parents become upset.

"Instructors have no encouragement or incentives to actively look for cheating, and prosecuting cheaters is a time-consuming and unpleasant activity," said Dr. Wesolowsky of McMaster University, who worked with The News on its analysis of TAKS scores.

Among researchers who have devised methods of detecting cheating, the biggest roadblock often is resistance from school officials who either deny that cheating exists or think it's not a problem worth fighting.

Dr. Wesolowsky said he's given his cheating detection program to several private and governmental testing organizations. But those groups are also aware of the negative consequences of discovering cheating.

"Usually when they get the program up and running, an iron curtain goes up," he said. Concerns about falsely flagging individual students can lead educators to ignore the even more important evidence a statistical analysis can provide: information on which schools have serious test-security problems.

Dr. Frary has faced similar obstacles. "It's so difficult to institutionalize it," he said. "It's a very hard, uphill battle to convince people to go after the problem."

Even with the wide availability of security measures, some researchers are pessimistic that cheating can ever be completely eliminated as long as someone has something to gain from a high score.

"The basic ground rule is, whatever security measures go in, somebody is going to find out how to evade them," said David Berliner, a professor of education at Arizona State University and a critic of high-stakes testing. "Banks are still broken into."

In any event, Dr. Hoover – father of the popular Iowa test given in many Texas schools – has a different recommendation for how to stop cheating: Reduce the high stakes attached to tests.

"That's what leads to the problems with security: the pressure to raise scores," he said. "It's led to cases where teachers, rightly or wrongly, feel that they are being judged on the basis of these instruments. And some of them cave in and do things they shouldn't."

POSSIBLE REFORMS
MULTIPLE FORMS

Print slightly different versions of the TAKS for different students, keeping all the same questions and answers but arranging them in slightly different orders.

Pro: Would almost completely eliminate casual cheating, where one student sneaks glances at the bubble pattern on a neighbor's answer sheet. Would make it much harder for a teacher or another adult to doctor answer sheets after an exam.

Con: Added complication could increase the time and cost of grading exams. Could raise the risk of grading errors. Would require a statistical procedure to make sure all versions of the test are equally difficult.

PHYSICAL STANDARDS

Require schools to maintain adequate space between students on test day; require students to be seated in some set order with a chart showing where each student sits.

Pro: Reducing a student's ability to sit next to a best friend would make cooperative cheating more difficult. Keeping students farther apart would make casual cheating more difficult. Seating charts would aid investigations into suspected cheating.

Con: TEA officials say some schools don't have facilities big enough to avoid seating students close together.

PROCTORS

Prohibit teachers from proctoring the exams of their own students.

Pro: Would reduce incidence of teachers helping their own students improperly on test day or doctoring their answer sheets after the fact.

Con: Would do little to prevent the much more common phenomenon of students cheating off of one another. Could be logistically difficult in smaller schools.

SOURCE: Dallas Morning News research

State may switch to online tests
One possible path to cutting cheating on exams is digital: switching to computerized testing.

The state has conducted several experiments with online tests, and officials have said some state tests – although probably not the TAKS – could be administered solely online within two years.

Without a physical answer sheet, copying answers from a neighbor would be substantially harder. Officials could easily reorder questions or answer choices for each student – or even slightly alter the important numbers in math problems.

That's how the national exam for certified public accountants is administered, according to Joel Allegretti, spokesman for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Questions are selected for each test taker from a pool of thousands of possible items – meaning no one sees the same questions as his neighbor.

On a computerized TAKS, results would be reported instantly to state servers, giving adults no opportunity to change student answers after testing. And without statewide shipments of test booklets, ill-intentioned teachers wouldn't have access to questions before test day.

"A lot of these security issues become nonproblems with computer testing," said Jim Impara, senior director of test security at Caveon, the Utah firm Texas hired to examine its test scores.

Of course, computerized testing would also open up new avenues of cheating. Most schools don't have enough computers to test an entire grade at once, which could mean testing some students on different days. That could allow answer swapping if questions aren't tweaked from day to day.

To beat cheats, mix up seats, tests
David Harpp, a chemistry professor at Montreal's McGill University, was alarmed when he first discovered that around 5 percent of his students were cheating on his final exams. He and a colleague named Jim Hogan devised a method for detecting the dishonest, but his primary goal wasn't detection – it was prevention.

So he began creating multiple versions of his exams and started a mandatory seating system. The result: Answer copying almost completely vanished. And when McGill instituted his policies universitywide in 1990, detectable cheating dropped to almost imperceptible levels.

Researchers have found there is a magic solution to answer copying by students. It's the cocktail of two specific reforms: defined seating patterns and multiple test versions.

The McGill reforms would stop all but the most determined cheater. A student would have to find a way to communicate with a friend whom he was not seated next to – since all of his neighbors would have a different version of the test.

And if he can get in touch with that distant friend – perhaps via text messaging – he would have to hope the friend had the same test version he did. That would only be a one in four chance.

"It makes cheating more difficult in a dignified way," Dr. Harpp said.

© 2007 The Dallas Morning News Co.

Labels: Cheating, TAKS, testing

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:40 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Here is the second of three parts. -Angela

FAKING THE GRADE
Loosely regulated schools among state's worst offenders on TAKS
12:00 AM CDT on Monday, June 4, 2007

By JOSHUA BENTON and HOLLY K. HACKER / The Dallas Morning News
Last year, 53 sophomores took the math TAKS test at Houston's Jesse Jackson Academy. Two stood out from the crowd.

They were the only two whose answer sheets don't show evidence of cheating.

Jackson – a Houston charter school with a long record of trouble with authorities – is home to the most extreme cheating in Texas, according to an in-depth analysis of test scores by The Dallas Morning News.

The cheating spans years, grades and subjects, and it's on a scale that shocks even veteran hunters of educational fraud. And its existence is the latest black eye for the state's efforts to regulate its patchwork of charter schools.

"Mind-boggling," said David Harpp, a Canadian cheating expert who examined the school's scores. "Total corruption."

At Jesse Jackson, TAKS passing rates have had big, unlikely swings – like dropping from 100 percent in 2005 to 5 percent in 2006.

Even with rampant cheating, many of its scores are still very poor. One possible explanation, experts say: School staff members are doctoring students' answer sheets – but can't always answer test questions themselves.

And most perplexing of all: A state investigation into the allegations is about to clear the school of all charges – without examining a single student answer sheet. Instead, a state employee interviewed school staff and asked whether they had cheated.

"This is ludicrous," Dr. Harpp said. "That's not an investigation. That's just looking around."

Not far behind Jesse Jackson in the ranks of the biggest cheaters is another charter school operated by the same family, Theresa B. Lee Academy in Fort Worth. Both schools have had a long series of run-ins with state officials and almost a decade of bad academic performance.

Yet both schools remain open. They continue to receive a stream of taxpayer dollars – more than $11 million so far.

And three years ago, despite the schools' problems, the Texas Education Agency chose to extend their right to operate for another decade. The agency has been repeatedly criticized for allowing sub-par charter schools – even those that have trouble keeping track of their public money – to stay open.

"It's a very difficult process to close a charter school," agency spokeswoman Debbie Graves Ratcliffe said. "That's why we try to get them to turn in their charter voluntarily. Otherwise, it takes thousands of hours of work and years to do it."

The News' analysis of TAKS data from 2005 and 2006, which was done with help from George Wesolowsky, a professor at McMaster University in Canada, found that by far the most extreme cases of cheating were in the state's lightly regulated and privately run charter schools.

Of the 50 most egregious cases of cheating The News' study found, 37 took place in charter schools. In each of those instances, a quarter or more of all the answer sheets on a particular test had many more answers in common than experts say would happen by chance.

That's despite the fact that charter schools make up only 2 percent of the state's campuses.

"Unfortunately, it's not surprising," said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, a nonprofit group that often spars with policies supported by conservatives, including charter schools. "The story of charters in Texas has been all about broken promises."

Contacted by The News last week, Superintendent Jesse Jackson at first said he was confident there was no cheating at the school he named for himself. "That school is fine – I'd put it up against any charter in the state," he said.

But when the newspaper informed him of the extreme patterns found on his school's answer sheets, his tone shifted: "I'm going to have to look into it."

Unprepared schools?
There are two important things to know about Jackson and Lee.

First: No, it's not that Jesse Jackson. The Jesse Jackson in question is a Houston resident with experience in curriculum and nonprofit work and a doctorate from Vanderbilt University. He is not the civil rights leader and political activist.

Second: If the staff of the Texas Education Agency had gotten its way, there never would have been a Jesse Jackson Academy or a Theresa B. Lee Academy – or, for that matter, many of the other charter schools with cheating problems.

In 1998, state officials decided to increase the number of charter schools and requested applications from entities interested in sponsoring a school. Applications poured in; a charter school could generate millions of taxpayer dollars a year for even a small organization.

In all, 84 proposals were submitted for a specific type of charter school that would target students at risk of dropping out or failing. Two came from the husband-and-wife team of Jesse and Artie Jackson. They proposed a Houston school named for Dr. Jackson and a Fort Worth school named for Ms. Jackson's mother. (On the first page of the Jesse Jackson proposal, Dr. Jackson is listed as the school's "principle.")

TEA staffers were asked to evaluate each of the applications, and they were not impressed with what the Jacksons had to offer. In the ranking system they created, the Jesse Jackson proposal ranked 67th of the 84 applications. Theresa B. Lee ranked 79th.

"We were really trying to find out who was really ready to open a school and who wasn't," said Brooks Flemister, who was at that time the agency's senior director for charter schools.

The schools had the support of a number of legislators in their hometowns. Houston Reps. Harold Dutton Jr., Garnet Coleman and Ron Wilson wrote letters of support. So did Sens. Mike Moncrief of Fort Worth and John Whitmire of Houston.

But reviewers of the two schools' applications had numerous issues with the proposals, ranging from the schools' lack of a "clear written vision statement" to problems with the way they planned to teach their curriculum.

In the end, though, those concerns didn't matter. On Sept. 10, 1998, at a now infamous committee meeting of the State Board of Education, dozens of angry charter-school applicants demanded that their proposals be approved. Several argued that the state was being racially discriminatory when it rated some proposals from minority-led organizations lower than some from white-led ones.

Under pressure from the audience, the board committee voted to reject TEA staff recommendations and to give every applicant a charter. That decision has haunted the Texas charter movement since, as a number of the schools approved that day have gone on to have serious financial and management problems.

"That was the worst day in my professional life," Mr. Flemister said. "You either have a selection process that is precise, or you just open up the gates and let everybody come in. By opening up the gates, we got some that just weren't ready to run a school."

At-risk students
The Jacksons had been operating their two campuses as private schools before getting state charters. They had contracts with the Fort Worth, Houston and Everman school districts to take on some of those districts' toughest cases. Many of their students were in trouble with their previous schools or the law.

"The kids we were dealing with were the kids that Fort Worth was kicking out of school," Ms. Jackson said. "We were turning these kids around and sending them back to their regular schools. We received commendations. We reduced the crime rate in the southeast quadrant of Fort Worth, because we were dealing with these kids as if they were our children."

But tax records show that money was tight before the public dollars came in. In 1997, the year before their charters were approved, the Jacksons' nonprofit corporation had debts totaling $26,000 and an empty bank account.

The problems at Jesse Jackson Academy started almost the day it became a charter school. State officials have, over the years, reprimanded the schools for a long line of problems, including reporting false dropout data, ignoring accounting requirements and keeping records poorly.

In 1999, an on-site review by state officials flagged the school for needing improvement in governance and "compliance with applicable laws and regulations." Despite having bragged in its application about its "in-house staff of certified teachers" that was "among the best," two of Jackson's five faculty members had no college degree at the time of the review. None of the five teachers were certified by the state, and all had fewer than five years' experience teaching.

Jackson's TAKS scores were weak, as might be expected from a school designed to target dropouts and the disadvantaged. The school got the state's lowest rating – "low performing" or "unacceptable," depending on the year – five times. In 2003, no Jackson student passed the math, science or English language arts sections of the TAKS. The school has only earned an "acceptable" rating once.

Lee has had its share of problems as well. It has received the state's lowest rating twice, including in 2006. State officials have repeatedly complained about nepotism. Along with the husband-and-wife team in charge, Lee was previously run by the Jacksons' daughter and son-in-law, Maria Jackson Branch and Loring Branch. Two brothers-in-law, a nephew, and a nephew's wife have also been on the payroll.

The schools have also run into repeated financial problems. The most recent annual audit of the Jacksons' nonprofit – which oversees both schools – expressed uncertainty about the schools' "ability to continue as a going concern." The previous year's audit reported that "inadequacies in the Corporation's accounting records" had left auditors unable to evaluate some of the school's expenses. The nonprofit group has also paid at least $119,000 in IRS penalties.

It is difficult to know how much the Jacksons have made from their schools in the years since. State records list Dr. Jackson as drawing a $72,000 salary. Tax records over the past decade show his wife Artie as receiving annual salaries up to $122,000. In at least one tax year, she also rented a building to the family's nonprofit for $55,000 a year.

Records also show that, at least through the late 1990s, the largest vendor for the nonprofit was a separate for-profit firm named Jesse Jackson & Associates.

But despite the school's problems, Dr. Jackson paints a rosy picture. "We got the school in Houston turned around," he said. "It's doing very well." He said Lee had struggled a bit, but that he expected it would improve also. As for finances, he said "there's always going to be enough money to pay the bills."

Similar answer sheets
It is one of the strange quirks of the cheating at Jesse Jackson and Theresa B. Lee that copying answers often doesn't appear to have helped many students pass. Students whose answer sheets were filled with responses identical to their classmates' still didn't manage to get enough questions correct to do well.

Take last year's 11th-grade science test, for example. The News' analysis flagged 46 of Jackson's 51 juniors for cheating. Their answer sheets are all identical or remarkably similar to the others, as if all 46 students got their answers from the same source – albeit a bad one. But only two of those students actually passed the exam because the shared answers were mostly wrong.

Contrast that with the school's performance on the 10th-grade social studies test. Not only did every student pass – nearly every student got a near-perfect score. Jackson's average score was the highest of any school in the state – exceeding the scores of even the state's most elite magnet schools.

The News' analysis can't determine how, exactly, cheating took place. But experts say the data do suggest a number of possibilities.

It is possible that students are, en masse, copying answers from one of their less-bright peers. That would likely require a near collapse of test-security procedures. A school official – usually a teacher – is supposed to supervise every moment of test administration. It is difficult to imagine how 46 students could copy answers off a single source without an honest teacher noticing.

Another possibility: Teachers or other school officials are actively helping, perhaps by preparing answer keys ahead of time or by doctoring answer sheets after the fact. Both of those phenomena have been reported on the TAKS before, such as in the now-defunct Wilmer-Hutchins school district.

But one might also expect a cheating teacher to get more TAKS answers right than Jackson's students did.

What can be said, according to multiple experts, is that the scores at Jackson and Lee are largely determined by cheating, not the actual knowledge of students. The four most extreme cases of cheating found in The News' statewide analysis were all at Jesse Jackson Academy.

"I was shocked by the scale" of the answer copying at Jackson, said Robert Frary, a longtime cheating researcher and professor emeritus at Virginia Tech. In more than 30 years of study, he said, he had never seen test fraud so blatant and so total.

The cheating at Lee was not quite as extreme as Jackson's, according to The News' analysis, but it was still among the worst in the state. On the 11th-grade science test in 2006, for example, 19 of Lee's 37 answer sheets were flagged. That was the second highest rate detected on that test in Texas – behind only Jackson.

The News attempted to contact several dozen Jesse Jackson and Theresa B. Lee alumni and current students. A handful said they had no knowledge of cheating. The remainder did not return messages.

Jacksons' reaction
At first, the Jacksons told The News they were confident the scores at their schools were legitimate and attacked those who questioned them.

"Next month, my mother will make her 93rd birthday," Ms. Jackson said of the woman for whom Theresa B. Lee Academy is named. "And now they're going to slander her name? This cannot happen." She called accusations against the schools "speculation taking off in the air like a germ."

She pointed out that Lee had, only a year ago, qualified for a $60,000 Governor's Educator Excellence Award grant because of its test scores. It was one of only five charter schools statewide to be so honored.

"Why is it that after all these years where we have helped people, when we've made such an impact and we finally get recognized by the governor – then all of a sudden we're being attacked? Something is wrong with that."

After hearing more details from The News about the answer patterns on tests at Jackson and Lee, Ms. Jackson softened. "That does sound suspect."

Both Jackson and Lee were flagged as suspicious in the analysis of 2005 TAKS scores by Caveon, the test-security firm the TEA hired to look for cheating. As a result, both schools are under investigation by state officials.

Dr. Jackson said a state investigator had told him there might have been some problems at Lee. But Jesse Jackson Academy is poised to get off scot-free.

State investigators have completed their work and written a preliminary report clearing Jackson of all charges, according to a copy obtained by The News.

The state investigation of Jesse Jackson – like all of TEA's investigations into cheating – did not examine any data drawn from student answer sheets, despite the fact that the data prompted the investigations in the first place.

Had agency officials examined answer sheets for the 11th-grade science test that Caveon flagged, they would have seen the 21 students who had identical answer sheets. Each answered 49 of 55 questions correctly, and each missed the same six questions by giving the same wrong answers.

They would have noticed the kind of unusual answer patterns that decades of research have shown to be the tell-tale signs of cheating – like how 84 of 87 students wrongly answered "J" to Question 30, or how 53 students all answered the first 17 questions perfectly.

But the agency investigator instead focused his efforts on asking teachers how they had managed to earn, on that year's graduation test, a 99 percent passing rate in math and social studies and a 100 percent in science. Teachers reported they were the result of "extensive and intensive instructional interventions." As a result, the report states that the investigation "produced no evidence of purposive impropriety."

"When there's so much data and information they could look at, to not look at any of it is like having a bag on your head," said Dr. Harpp, a professor at McGill University who has studied cheating for nearly two decades. "It's an ostrich with his head in the sand."

The report does reveal that someone tried to contact TEA during TAKS testing in 2005, "an individual who identified himself as Mr. Johnson alleging cheating." But the report states attempts to reach Mr. Johnson "were unsuccessful."

Ms. Jackson took the report as confirmation of her school's innocence. "Jesse Jackson's been cleared of all of that," she said.

A TEA spokesperson said the agency would not comment on an ongoing investigation.

Last week, Lee principal William Powell said he hoped the state investigation at his school would find no wrongdoing. He said it was "a good possibility" that one or more of his teachers could have simply taught incorrect material that students then translated into wrong answers.

But when The News shared with Mr. Powell some of the answer strings from Lee's tests – which show large clusters of students giving up to 30 identical wrong answers – his reaction changed.

"Good Lord – I sure did not suspect this," said the five-year principal. "Facts and figures don't lie."

Because TEA had not provided answer-sheet data, he said, he had no idea what sort of student answers had triggered Caveon's suspicions until The News shared its data. State investigators also worked without benefit of Caveon data, since TEA chose not to request it from the company.

Having seen the evidence on his school's answer sheets, Mr. Powell said he would make a stronger effort to prevent it from recurring. "I'm sure you won't see that again," he said.

The next day, Dr. Jackson told The News that Mr. Powell had been fired for not ensuring "the test environment is secure."

Limited oversight
Through all of the difficulties at Jackson and Lee, state intervention has remained limited. That's been a common complaint about how TEA handles charter schools in trouble: Their behavior is tolerated, for years at a time.

"Before there's any talk about expanding charters, or vouchers, or turning schools over to for-profit companies, we clearly need to clean up the mess that already exists," said Ms. Miller, the charter critic.

In 2004 – despite the schools' problems – TEA agreed to give Jackson and Lee 10-year renewals of their charters. One year later, the agency decided to let both campuses expand, from 250 students to 300.

Ms. Ratcliffe, the agency spokesperson, said that trying to close a troubled charter school takes two years, on average – and has no guarantee of success.

"It is very resource intensive," she said. "In some cases, where a school has problems, we try to work them out. And if at some point, if the issues are resolved at the moment, we've ultimately renewed them."

Mr. Flemister, the former TEA official, said the borderline charter schools approved at that 1998 meeting swamped the agency's capacity to provide proper oversight.

"All of a sudden, every single office in the agency had 30 percent more work to do, with a lot of brand new schools that, to be honest, didn't even speak the language," he said.

And since Mr. Flemister left the agency, several rounds of budget cuts have left TEA with a substantially smaller staff.

A bill proposed in the recent legislative session, Senate Bill 4, would have made it easier to close certain under-performing charter schools. As originally written, it could have allowed the closure of Theresa B. Lee, but let Jesse Jackson Academy survive.

But, as has happened before with proposals to tighten regulations on charter schools, the Legislature concluded its session without passing it.

"Dealing with charter schools is like the proverbial herding cats," Mr. Flemister said. "They can be ornery. Working with ISDs [traditional schools] is like training a dog – eventually, they're going to get it.

"TEA was used to dogs, not cats."

jbenton@dallasnews.com; hhacker@dallasnews.com

© 2007 The Dallas Morning News Co.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/DN-charters_04.ART.State.Edition2.43206f6.html

Labels: Cheating, TAKS, testing

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:38 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Here is the first of three parts. See UT-Professor Julian Vasquez Heilig's recent publication titled "Urban Minority Students on the NCLB Bubble" in the TCEP Review. He critiques the theory of action undergirding the present accountability system. What these pieces refer to as "cheating," Vasquez Heilig treats more generally as "system gaming." In any case, systemic issues are advanced as the primary culprit.

-Angela

Analysis shows TAKS cheating rampant
State says it's addressed the problem, but News uncovers more than 50,000 cases
05:29 PM CDT on Sunday, June 3, 2007

By JOSHUA BENTON and HOLLY K. HACKER / The Dallas Morning News
jbenton@dallasnews.com; hhacker@dallasnews.com


Tens of thousands of students cheat on the TAKS test every year, including thousands on the high-stakes graduation test, according to an in-depth data analysis by The Dallas Morning News.

Also Online

See test score results, see where the cheating schools are and take a quiz

Estimated number of cheaters might be low

Bill would stop cheating by eliminating test

At TEA, years of inquiry, few concrete results

Common questions about analyzing tests for cheating

How the TAKS scores were analyzed for evidence of cheating

Read about comparing tests to find suspicious results

The analysis – among the first of its kind on this scale – found cases where 30, 50 or even 90 percent of students had suspicious answer patterns that researchers say indicate collusion, either between students or with school staff. Perpetrators go almost entirely undetected and unpunished by state officials.

The study contradicts the Texas Education Agency's stance that cheating on the TAKS is extraordinarily rare and that the agency has done a good job of policing it. Many schools with big cheating problems, including some in North Texas, have officially been cleared by recent state investigations – in most cases simply by proclaiming their innocence on a state questionnaire.

The findings also show that on a high-stakes test like the TAKS – which can determine a school's reputation, a teacher's salary and whether a student walks across the stage on graduation day – some people will seek whatever advantage they can find.

"What we have here in many of the schools, particularly charter schools, is rampant cheating involving many students," said David Harpp, a professor at Montreal's McGill University who studies cheating and reviewed the analysis.

What the study found

The study examined statewide scores from 2005 and 2006 on the all-important Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills – the state test given in grades three through 11. Some of the key findings:

PROBLEM SCHOOLS
Here are some of the Texas schools with the strongest evidence of substantial TAKS cheating, according to a Dallas Morning News analysis:

Forest Brook HS, North Forest ISD

Forest Brook High is in the long-troubled North Forest district, where eight of its 11 campuses have state ratings of unacceptable and state officials have appointed an overseer for the district's finances. Forest Brook had the highest rate of apparent cheating of any large noncharter school in the state. Across all grades, just over 13 percent of the school's answer sheets were flagged in 2005.

Forest Brook is also home to one of the most extraordinary performances in Texas: the 11th-grade science test in 2005. Half of the students' answer sheets were flagged for cheating: 93 of 186. Forest Brook's passing rate jumped from 54 percent the previous year to 95 percent in 2005.

Worthing HS, Houston ISD

The suspicious answer sheets are spread wide at Worthing. There were eight different TAKS subject tests on which more than 10 percent of Worthing's answer sheets were flagged as likely cheaters. The most suspicious: last year's 11th-grade science test, on which one-third of the school's answer sheets were flagged. That's 47 out of 141. Worthing's passing rate in that subject was up 23 percentage points from the year before.

Sam Houston HS, Houston ISD

In 2005, Sam Houston High had more suspicious answer sheets than any other school in Texas – 468 in all. Every version of the TAKS test taken at the school had at least a dozen answer sheets flagged for cheating. The school did better in 2006, with the number of suspicious answer sheets dropping to 161. But that still left it with the 15th-highest total in Texas.

South Oak Cliff HS, Dallas ISD

South Oak Cliff had 439 answer sheets flagged over the two years The News examined. That's almost one out of every 10. The cheating was greatest on the 11th-grade science and social studies exams, where 18 percent of the answer sheets were flagged.

Note: Charter schools are not included.

• The test scores of more than 50,000 students show evidence of cheating. Some of those students were the innocent victims of others copying their answers. But experts say most were likely either deliberately copying answers or had their answer sheets doctored by school staff.

• That total is a small percentage of all Texas students. (Two-thirds of Texas schools showed no evidence of cheating.) But the suspicious scores are focused on the state's 11th-grade tests. Those are the ones students must pass to earn a diploma.

At more than 100 high schools, at least one in 10 juniors was flagged for having extremely suspicious answer patterns on the TAKS graduation tests. Many of those students graduated last month.

• Cheating is concentrated in the state's two largest districts – Dallas and Houston – and in charter schools.

Even after accounting for their larger size, cheating is more than three times as common in Dallas and Houston as it is in the state's other large urban school districts. In Dallas, one out of every six high school juniors was flagged for cheating in 2006.

And in the state's lightly regulated charter schools – which are funded with tax dollars but run by private companies or groups – cheating was detected at almost four times the rate of traditional public schools. Cheating was more common at underachieving schools, where the pressure to boost scores is the highest.

• Most of the cheating appears to be driven by students copying off of each other, in pairs or small groups. But at a handful of the most flagrant schools, cheating is systemic. On several subject tests, one Houston charter school had 80 percent or more of its answer sheets flagged for cheating – a scale that seems difficult to contemplate without the passive or active involvement of an adult.

"The evidence of substantial cheating is beyond any reasonable doubt," said George Wesolowsky, a professor at McMaster University in Canada who studies cheating on multiple-choice tests like the TAKS. He worked with The News on the analysis, which used his methodology to identify pairs of student answers that were, statistically, too similar to each other to be the result of chance.

Officials at the Texas Education Agency have consistently argued that statistical analysis can't prove cheating and that they must rely on other forms of evidence – like getting teachers to confess to misbehavior – in their investigations. TEA decided not to use data drawn from student answer sheets – even with evidence of widespread copying in a classroom.

That approach has not been fruitful. The agency has cleared 98 percent of the schools in its recent round of investigations, in most cases because school officials did not volunteer knowledge of improprieties. Many of those schools were found to have widespread cheating in The News' analysis.

State officials have said they are willing to reverse course and consider using statistical methods in the future. "I'm certainly open to the idea," said Criss Cloudt, the TEA associate commissioner who recently assumed oversight over the state's testing program.

Different school officials had different reactions to The News' findings.

"I'm not going to dispute the methodology," Dallas Superintendent Michael Hinojosa said. "Your study came to the conclusions on what seem like reasonably objective measures."

He said that after suspicions were raised about TAKS cheating last year, Dallas instituted new test-security policies for this spring's tests. There must now be two adults in every classroom, and their doors must be kept open during testing. Extra monitors were assigned to schools with suspected problems. Those reforms and others, he hopes, will reduce incidents of cheating from the levels found in 2005 and 2006.

"We've had issues regarding our assessment program," he said. "That's why we decided to change our protocols."

Houston school officials, in contrast, issued a statement calling the analysis part of a "continued effort by The Dallas Morning News to dismiss the real academic progress in Texas schools." The statement said there is "absolutely no evidence" of cheating in Houston schools.

Researchers say The News' study raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the state's methods of evaluating schools, which in some cases have given public praise – and promised hard cash – to schools with major cheating problems.

They say that on a test with such high stakes – for every level of the educational system – confronting cheating honestly can be difficult. The incentives for improved scores are strong; those for vigorously fighting cheating are weaker.

"People often don't want to know what's happening," said Robert Frary, a professor emeritus of educational measurement at Virginia Tech who has studied cheating for more than 30 years.


Established methods

The News' analysis was based on a well-established method for detecting answer-copying developed by Dr. Wesolowsky. Research in these methods dates back more than 80 years; variations of them are used to detect cheating on tests like the SAT, the ACT and some college final exams.

"Some of the methods work better than others, but they all work pretty well," Dr. Frary said. "Wesolowsky's is one of the best, maybe the best." Dr. Frary is considered by some to be the modern godfather of the field, having studied it since the 1970s.

Methods like Dr. Wesolowsky's look for pairs of students who share unusually high numbers of uncommon answers. A few shared answers won't trigger any alarm bells. But extreme cases – when the run of identical and unusual answers stretches so long as to move past the boundaries of mere chance – lead to the pair of students being flagged.

Take the case of "Sara" and "Joe," two students at Dallas' South Oak Cliff High. (They're real students, but those aren't their real names.) In 2005, as juniors, Sara and Joe took the science portion of the graduation TAKS. Out of 55 questions, they answered 51 the same way.

That might not be unusual if they were answering them correctly. After all, the correct answer to a TAKS question is almost always the most popular response. But they consistently gave the same unusual wrong answers. In Sara and Joe's case, their answers are so unusually similar to each other that their pattern would appear naturally among the school's innocent students fewer than once in 277 million cases.

"I can't think of any other plausible explanation except cheating," Dr. Wesolowsky said. Dr. Harpp agreed, calling it "an extreme case of arrogant collusion."

Sara and Joe weren't the only South Oak Cliff juniors flagged for cheating on the science test. So were 31 others, The News' analysis found. In all, 77 answer sheets on the 2005 graduation tests were flagged. (The graduation test is also given in English language arts, math and social studies.)

Administrators at several Dallas high schools, including South Oak Cliff, referred questions to district headquarters. But students at South Oak Cliff and other area high schools said they definitely hear about cheating on the TAKS, especially by kids who haven't studied or have missed lots of classes. That's not shocking, since in national surveys a majority of teenagers routinely report they have cheated on tests in school.

"It actually makes me angry that they do that, because other people work hard and they study and all that stuff," said Alma Gonzalez, who just graduated from South Oak Cliff.

She said students would whisper answers to each other on TAKS day, especially when a teacher left the room for a moment. A few times when classmates asked her for answers, she said, she gave wrong ones on purpose.

"They think they can get their way through high school by just cheating, and they're not really learning anything," she said.


Caveon analysis

In 2005, after a series of articles in The News about TAKS cheating, TEA hired the test-security firm Caveon to analyze that year's test scores. Caveon identified 700 schools whose scores it considered suspicious for one or more reasons, including having too many students with answer sheets suspiciously similar to one of their schoolmates.

In that analysis, South Oak Cliff was one of the schools Caveon flagged. But TEA announced in December that it had cleared South Oak Cliff, along with nearly 600 other schools, of any wrongdoing. That decision was based on the contents of questionnaires filled out by each school's administrators about their test-security practices.

"It is with great pride and pleasure that we are now able to exonerate a large majority of the schools flagged by the Caveon report," state Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley said in a prepared statement at the time. "It is imperative that Texans trust our test results and have confidence that they are valid and reliable."

One member of the TEA panel that reviewed those questionnaires said they were not useful in determining whether cheating had actually taken place.

"That's basically what this questionnaire process was about: asking schools, 'Did you cheat or not?' " the panel member said. "We weren't given anything else to go on – no statistical data."

Currently, only 12 of the 700 schools Caveon identified remain under investigation. No schools, so far, have been cited for even a single incident of cheating.

Meanwhile, according to The News' analysis, cheating continued at South Oak Cliff. In 2006, 36 percent of the school's juniors had at least one answer sheet flagged as suspicious on the graduation TAKS.


Forest Brook

South Oak Cliff isn't the only school cleared by TEA despite an apparent cheating problem.

The school that Caveon found the most suspicious was Houston's Forest Brook High School, in the North Forest school district. Caveon's analysis flagged the school in 52 ways, in every TAKS subject area. In particular, Caveon flagged Forest Brook repeatedly for having lots of students with answer sheets very similar to those of their peers.

After site visits and a paperwork review, TEA cleared Forest Brook. The state's report on its investigation states that TEA did not examine any student answer sheets or use the data produced by Caveon's analysis. Instead, agency officials interviewed district officials about whether testing procedures were followed on test day. Forest Brook's leaders denied any wrongdoing.

TEA officials also accepted Forest Brook's explanation for drawing Caveon's attention: Teachers had made a "concentrated effort" to prepare students for the TAKS test, and the school had boxed student answer sheets in such a way that they believed it could have triggered a Caveon flag.

Caveon's work contract does not allow company officials to comment on their findings in Texas. But The News' analysis found rampant answer copying on the graduation test at Forest Brook – and on a scale unmatched in Texas.

On the 2005 science test, for example, 93 of the 186 answer sheets were flagged for copying. That's the highest number of tainted answer sheets on a single test at any school in the state. An additional 56 sheets were flagged on the graduation exams in the three other subjects tested.

Forest Brook – a historically poor-performing school – got a passing rate of 95 percent on the science test that year. That was up from 54 percent the year before.

Or, to put it another way: Forest Brook jumped from 23 percentage points below the state average to 14 points above it.

Dr. Harpp did his own analysis of the North Forest data – using a method different from Dr. Wesolowsky's. He said the data "clearly shows that massive collusion took place" and that North Forest's explanation was "completely unconvincing."

"To dismiss this mountain of evidence merely on the word of a few teachers saying they did everything by the book defies all logic," he said. "In effect, the TEA is certifying that it is more reasonable to believe that nature has completely deviated from its course than that someone has told a lie."

For some schools, TAKS scores mean money. In recent years, a number of state programs have begun to reward schools and their teachers for good test scores. Forest Brook received a $165,000 state grant this year; the school's eligibility depended in part on its 2005 TAKS scores.

North Forest representatives did not return multiple phone calls seeking comment last week.

In all, The News' analysis found 112 schools where at least 10 percent of the answer sheets on a 2005 TAKS test were flagged for cheating. Of those, four are still under investigation by state officials. Another 33 were never flagged by Caveon in the first place, and thus were not part of the TEA investigation. The remaining 75 have been declared cheating-free by state officials.


Sophisticated tactics

Not all cheating schools are created equal.

At many schools, the students identified in The News' analysis are in isolated pairs – the sort of pattern you might expect if the adults in a school are trying their best, but still don't keep a close enough eye on each student to prevent one from sneaking answers off a neighbor.

More serious is the pattern common in many Dallas and Houston high schools on the graduation test. In those schools, there still isn't the pattern one might expect if adults were actively doctoring answer sheets. But the amount of answer copying is large enough that it appears test proctoring is loose.

In 2006, for instance, 17.6 percent of Dallas juniors were flagged for cheating. So were 13.3 percent of Houston juniors. (The statewide average was 4.1 percent.)

"There's always cheating going on, even when it isn't the TAKS test," said Priscilla Ramirez, a rising senior at Adamson High School. She, like all the students interviewed, said she doesn't cheat. But she hears about students who do.

"It's crazy how smart people are about cheating," she said. "If it's not one way, it's another."

Many Dallas-area high school students said they knew of no cheating. But many others said the tools of prospective cheaters have grown beyond the traditional to include text messaging and other electronic forms. Some tactics sound like urban legends – such as kids signaling question numbers and answers with prearranged finger codes – but students swear they're real.

"It's getting good enough where the teachers don't notice it," said Krysha Bluitt, who just finished her sophomore year at A. Maceo Smith High in Dallas.

Students say there is enormous pressure to do well on the TAKS. Performance on the test can have major impacts on the lives of students, teachers, and administrators. For adults, it can mean bonuses or raises. For schools, too many bad scores can mean permanent closure.

"From day one, when you get there, you're there to pass the TAKS," said Ulysses Hauxwell, who just graduated from North Dallas High.

Stephanie Westbrook, acting principal at A. Maceo Smith High, said that the school takes test security seriously and that she knows of no cheating on the TAKS. "Honestly, we try to teach our students about integrity, and it is made very clear to our teachers that [cheating] does not happen under their watch," she said. District officials also send staffers to campuses on test days to provide "an extra set of eyes," she said.

Other Dallas principals contacted by The News either denied there was any cheating on their campuses or declined comment. A Fort Worth official said that district is unaware of any cheating at its schools flagged by The News' study.

The News' analysis found 67 cases where a Dallas ISD high school had at least 10 percent of its answer sheets flagged for cheating. Those cases included nearly all of the district's nonmagnet high schools. (A high school typically gives 10 TAKS tests, and The News looked at scores for two years.)

But in a small number of schools, the answer patterns were so off-kilter that Dr. Wesolowsky had to adapt his methodology to properly examine them, since his method is based on the assumption that most students are being tested honestly.

"This is completely outrageous," Dr. Harpp said of the most extreme cases. "This is so mind-boggling – it requires a new language to describe."


'A useful tool'

TEA officials said they did not feel comfortable evaluating The News' analysis without examining it more thoroughly. But they expressed somewhat less skepticism about the use of statistical analysis than agency officials have over the past year.

"Statistics can be a very useful tool to point you in the right direction," said Michael Donley, TEA's inspector general.

Despite that, he said he felt the agency had been correct to rely on interviews – and to exclude statistical evidence – from their recent investigations.

"I couldn't prove it," he said of accusations at Caveon-identified schools. "I tried. We talked to everyone we could think to talk to. Our investigators are pretty good at getting at when people are telling the truth."

But after repeatedly saying that statistical analysis was not a legitimate tool in investigating cheating, officials said they would now consider using a methodology similar to The News'.

"If it works, we would absolutely look at it," said Dr. Cloudt, the TEA associate commissioner. She assumed oversight of the state's testing program earlier this year after the state's assessment director, Lisa Chandler, was forced out.

No matter how the agency moves ahead, Dr. Harpp said there is no doubt in his mind that the cheating found in Texas is real and, in some places, systemic.

"At some point you have to stand up and say, 'This runs in the face of common sense,' " he said.

GLOSSARY
Accountability system: The state process that assigns ratings to Texas schools. Ratings are based almost entirely on test scores. From best to worst, those ratings are exemplary, recognized, acceptable and unacceptable.

Answer string: The responses a student gives to all of the questions on a multiple-choice test, such as the TAKS. On the TAKS, the answer choices alternate between questions: A, B, C or D, then F, G, H or J.

Caveon: A test-security firm that helps organizations improve the security of their exams. The Texas Education Agency hired Caveon in 2005 to analyze its TAKS scores; when Caveon identified 700 schools with suspect scores, agency officials said Caveon's results were unreliable.

Charter school: A publicly funded but privately run school. Charter schools face fewer regulations than traditional public schools.

Collusion: When students work together improperly during a test. There is strong support in the academic literature for the statistical detection of collusion; other types of cheating detection methods, such as those that count the number of erasures on answer sheets, have less support.

Flagged pair: Two students whom a statistical analysis has identified as having answer sheets extremely similar to one another. Cheating detection methodologies look for cases where the similarity is so great and so unlikely that the chances of it occurring naturally are very small.

Frary, Harpp, and Wesolowsky: Drs. Robert Frary, David Harpp, and George Wesolowsky, three cheating researchers who assisted with The News' analysis. Dr. Wesolowsky's methodology and computer program were used to perform the analysis. Dr. Harpp, using a different detection method, did a separate analysis of several dozen Texas schools. Dr. Frary examined the results.

© 2007 The Dallas Morning News Co.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/060307dnmetcheating.433e87c.html#

Labels: Cheating, TAKS, testing

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:36 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out this Educational Leadership piece that looks at student assessment through students' eyes. Authored by Rick Stiggins, here's how it starts. -Angela

May 2007 | Volume 64 | Number 8
Educating the Whole Child Pages 22-26

Assessment Through the Student's Eyes
Rick Stiggins

Rather than sorting students into winners and losers, assessment for learning can put all students on a winning streak.

Historically, a major role of assessment has been to detect and highlight differences in student learning in order to rank students according to their achievement. Such assessment experiences have produced winners and losers. Some students succeed early and build on winning streaks to learn more as they grow; others fail early and often, falling farther and farther behind.

As we all know, the mission of schools has changed. Today's schools are less focused on merely sorting students and more focused on helping all students succeed in meeting standards. This evolution in the mission of schools means that we can't let students who have not yet met standards fall into losing streaks, succumb to hopelessness, and stop trying.

Our evolving mission compels us to embrace a new vision of assessment that can tap the wellspring of confidence, motivation, and learning potential that resides within every student. First, we need to tune in to the emotional dynamics of the assessment experience from the point of view of students—both assessment winners and assessment losers. These two groups experience assessment practices in vastly different ways, as shown in “The Assessment Experience,” p. 24. To enable all students to experience the productive emotional dynamics of winning, we need to move from exclusive reliance on assessments that verify learning to the use of assessments that support learning—that is, assessments for learning.

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

Helpful quotes: "A recent extensive study of educational software by the federal Education Department, which looked at 15 reading and math courses used by nearly 9,500 students in 132 schools, found that computer-based instruction, while expensive, had no effect on student achievement. (Mr. Bush’s curriculum was not studied.)

Todd Oppenheimer, the author of a 2003 book, “The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved,” said the worth of computerized instruction depended on how it was used and how much it spurred inquiry."

Angela


May 30, 2007
On Education
A Bush Brother Spreads His Vision of Computerized Teaching Programs

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
SPOTSYLVANIA, Va.

To review with her class of fifth graders the tapestry of reasons Europeans came to America, Cheryle Hodges clicks on a mouse that brings a roly-poly disc jockey to a screen at the front of the classroom here at Harrison Road Elementary. He throws up his hands in time with the music, a move the children instantly mimic, as they call out the refrain he launches: “Money, Souls and Soil.”

In less than two minutes, the rap mentions cash crops of sugar and tobacco, the missionary drive and the push for land that propelled colonialism — all facts the children are expected to know for state standardized exams in social studies. The teacher picks up on another lyric, noting European powers that dominated exploration of North America — a point the children are also expected to know.

“The kids are so into the video games,” Ms. Hodges, a veteran teacher of 27 years, said as the children watched a cartoon character named Mr. Bighead, who switched hats rapid-fire to portray the British, French and Spanish perspectives on the colonies. “We have to entertain them, or we lose them.”

The clips emanate from a purple plastic box, known as a COW, for Curriculum on Wheels. They are the brainchild of Neil Bush, brother of the president, who is president of Ignite! Learning. The company has sold its science and social studies curriculums, aimed mostly at middle school grades, to 2,300 of the nation’s 85,000 public schools, and is seeking to expand its business to China, Japan, South Korea and the Middle East.

Mr. Bush’s curriculum coordinates with both the standards movement sweeping states and its national embodiment, No Child Left Behind, which requires all children in Grades 3 to 8 to be tested each year in reading and math, and once in science. Some educators have criticized Mr. Bush for using his brother’s No Child Left Behind law to market his product.

His mother, Barbara, also rankled some philanthropists last year when she donated an undisclosed sum to a relief fund for victims of Hurricane Katrina on the condition that some of the money be spent to buy COWs for the Houston schools that had taken in victims.

In a recent interview in Washington, Mr. Bush said he had not lobbied for business through his connections to President Bush. “We have a very strict policy of having no interface with any agency of the federal government,” he said.

To educators, though, a big question is whether a technology-based curriculum — Mr. Bush’s or any of a multitude of others — works.

Inside each COW is a hard drive containing a year’s worth of social studies or science lessons done in short cartoons, songs and occasional straight narration. The lessons are devised to match the standards in many states, and the company is working on a math curriculum.

Mr. Bush said his curriculum made social studies and science more accessible. “Middle schools use 19th-century technologies to teach 21st-century kids,” he said. “Textbooks honestly have failed middle school children. They rely on children’s ability to read, and they’re boring.”

Mr. Bush said he began the business with no experience in pedagogy or software development. His only real experience, he said, was as a boy with dyslexia. Teachers once told his mother that Neil, then in the seventh grade, would probably never graduate from St. Albans, the Washington prep school that he did, ultimately, complete.

A recent extensive study of educational software by the federal Education Department, which looked at 15 reading and math courses used by nearly 9,500 students in 132 schools, found that computer-based instruction, while expensive, had no effect on student achievement. (Mr. Bush’s curriculum was not studied.)

Todd Oppenheimer, the author of a 2003 book, “The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved,” said the worth of computerized instruction depended on how it was used and how much it spurred inquiry.

“To what extent does the software elaborate and open up academic exploration, and to what extent does it narrow it down, regiment it and standardize it?” he asked. “If it’s in the first category, it’s possibly good. If it’s in the second category, it’s more than likely bad.”

Classrooms here in Spotsylvania are participating in a study that will test whether children using the COWs do better on the state exams than those not using them.

On the company’s Web site, ignitelearning.com, are testimonials from teachers and school officials, some of whom say that they have been able to toss out their textbooks because the COW is so comprehensive. In Spotsylvania they have held on to their textbooks, and use the COW mostly to supplement lessons. Jean Young and Rebecca Mills, who head the county’s science and social studies instruction, said the COWs’ content did not completely match Virginia’s state standards in the two subjects, so had teachers tossed their textbooks, there would have been gaps in their teaching.

Back in Harrison Road Elementary, in a more crowded classroom across the hall from Ms. Hodges’s fifth-grade class, another fifth-grade teacher, Merilee Grubb, had a handful of students who seemed distracted, chatting with friends and ignoring her. But when Ms. Grubb clicked on the videos, the children quieted down and watched almost automatically, with some singing along.

Once the clip ended, though, the same scattered rumbles of distraction ran through the room, and Ms. Grubb had to remind the audience to pipe down. The clips seemed to change the classroom chemistry somehow, raising the expectation among students that their teacher should be just as funny and engaging as Mr. Bighead.

Jeremy Siefker, a middle school science teacher, used the machine a few times over the last year, but was struck by how passive it seemed. “As a review, it uses catchy phrases and tunes,” he said, “but as far as scientific investigation and inquiry, I don’t think it’s very good.”

Spotsylvania received the machines free this year in exchange for participating in the study. Usually, the cost is $3,800 for the machine and $1,000 a year after that. Alternatively, schools can pay a flat fee of $6,800 for the machine outright. But at a meeting of the county’s middle school science teachers last week, the cost was put in perspective; each school gets $1,000 to cover all the lab supplies, equipment and other expenses connected with science for an entire year.

Perhaps the moment of truth will come with the results of last Friday’s statewide exams. If the students using the COWs do better than those using textbooks alone, the findings will be heralded as a ringing endorsement of the approach’s success.

But perhaps those results are not all that matters.

Mr. Oppenheimer said that at the heart of learning was a mystery: a teacher who draws upon years of knowledge and experience to connect with a fresh mind, lighting the spark for a new, untried soul to find its way, going places the teacher could never have conceived.

And that may be nearly impossible to put in a box.

E-mail: schemo@nytimes.com.
Joseph Berger is on vacation.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Labels: Ignite Learning

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:14 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Wow! Looking at the dollars and who profits makes you think twice about this direction in public education. Major cities and states spend this outrageous amount when districts lack funding and when kids systematically do not have access to certified teachers in their classrooms. -Angela

May 31, 2007
New York City Expands Test Program in Schools

By JULIE BOSMAN
Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced yesterday that the city school system would spend $80 million over five years on a battery of new standardized tests to begin this fall for most of New York City’s 1.1 million public school students.

The contract awarded to the testing giant CTB/McGraw-Hill will involve a significant expansion of exams, known as periodic tests, which monitor students’ progress and are supposed to help predict how students will perform in the annual state exams. Mr. Klein’s announcement immediately rekindled the debate over whether such testing is emphasized too much or is even a useful tool for teachers.

Pupils in Grades 3 through 8 will be tested five times a year in both reading and math, instead of three times as they are now. High school students, for the first time, will be tested four times a year in each subject. In the next few years, the tests will expand to include science and social studies.

The test results will not be used for decisions on promoting teachers, whether they should be granted tenure, or how to grade schools, Mr. Klein said at an afternoon news conference. He called them a way to spot students who are falling behind.

“I don’t think it means more pressure,” Mr. Klein said. “I think it means more learning.” He said the present testing regime was “too intermittent” to help teachers judge progress.

The annual state exams in Grades 3 through 8 are used to measure a school’s performance in meeting requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Under the law, schools that fail to show adequate yearly progress face potential penalties.

Few major cities administer standardized tests as frequently as five times a year, several education experts said, and the move instantly drew criticism from the array of groups that have mobilized against the growing reliance on standardized tests that has accompanied the No Child Left Behind law.

“It’s certainly more than any other city than I know of,” said Monty Neill, an executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing in Boston, which is skeptical of standardized testing. “We’ve reduced schooling to preparing for bubble tests.”

Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in an interview that many teachers say they already spend at least one day a week preparing for standardized tests. “Our issue is, how much teaching time is this eating up?” she said. “You’re spending a lot of time doing test prep and doing paperwork associated with test prep instead of teaching.”

She added that it would be illegal for the city to use the tests to advance or slow the careers of teachers.

In Chicago, a city whose public schools rely heavily on periodic testing, students in Grades 3 through 8 are tested three times a year, said Linda Bendixen, a spokeswoman for the Chicago public schools. A small but expanding group of high schools are tested four times a year, she added.

Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools in Washington, a lobbying group for large urban school systems, said such testing of elementary schoolchildren has become more common. “It’s been a growing trend for at least the last five to seven years,” Mr. Casserly said. “But it’s more unusual for cities to use interim tests at the high school level. New York is breaking some new ground on that front.”

City Education Department officials said the exams would make teachers’ jobs easier, giving them the ability to produce instant results and help pinpoint which students are falling behind. The tests are devised to be taken in a typical 45-minute class period, either online or using the traditional pencil and paper. Teachers will be able to draw from a bank of questions to customize the tests to their own curriculum, choosing from a mix of multiple choice or open-ended questions.

The results for tests taken online will be available immediately, and for pencil and paper tests, the results will arrive in five days. Principals will then be able to analyze the data to better understand how students perform and what teachers can do to help them, city officials said.

James Liebman, the chief accountability officer for the Education Department, said, “This gives us the capacity to hone in and figure out where the problems are.”

Mr. Casserly, of the Council of the Great City Schools, said he has seen the tests used to good effect in some school districts. “They can be helpful and useful when they’re well designed, and when they yield good data that teachers know how to interpret, and where there’s follow-up and support,” he said.

He said, however, that he had also seen disastrous results.

Jane R. Hirschmann, of Time Out From Testing, a statewide group that has argued against standardized tests, said she believes that the curriculum in schools is being driven by the tests. “Now the whole city system is based on test prep and test taking,” she said.

CIT/McGraw-Hill is one of the major sources of standardized tests and is a provider of New York State’s standardized exams. Previously, the city had a contract for periodic testing with The Princeton Review, better known for preparing students for exams for college and graduate school admissions.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/education/31schools.html

Labels: testing

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:03 AM 0 comments Links to this post

David Bacon is a passionate and courageous journalist who writes on some of the toughest issues of our day. This recognition is well deserved. -Angela

Immigration Reporting Wins Project Censored Award

Two articles by David Bacon, "Which Side are You On?" published by Truthout, 1/29/07, and "Workers, Not Guests," published by The Nation, 2/6/07, have been included among the 25 Project Censored "Most Censored" News Stories of 2006-07. The award will be presented at the Media Conference and Award Ceremony in Northern California on October 26-27. A synopsis will appear in Chapter 1 of the book Censored 2008: Media Democracy in Action, scheduled for release in August from Seven Stories Press.

The stories can be read at the following links:

"Which Side are You On?"

"Workers, Not Guests"

"Workers, not Guests" describes the way that the Bush administration uses immigration raids to attack union organizing campaigns and efforts by immigrant workers to enforce basic workplace rights and protections. Further, the administration uses the raids to pressure Congress into adopting new, vastly expanded guest worker programs.

Which Side are You On? describe the way Washington DC-based lobby groups have abandoned opposition to contract labor programs, and instead have developed a political alliance with some of the country's largest corporations, with the objective of passing new guest worker legislation. This legislation includes provisions which will make future immigration raids much harsher and more widespread.

Since publication, the Bush administration and both Democratic and Republican senators have announced new proposals which go even further. They would end the ability of immigrant families to reuinte in the U.S., and instead institute a corporate-driven point system intended to supply skilled labor to big companies. Raids and enforcement would become even harsher, with huge detention centers built on the border. The proposals would allow corporations to recruite as many as 800,000 non-farm contract guest workers a year.

The use of immigration policy to funnel labor to corporate employers is growing at the same time that Congress is debating new corporate trade legislation, including the renewal of fast track negotiating authority for the administration, and four new trade agreements - with South Korea, Peru, Panama and Colombia. These bills would all increase the displacement of workers and farmers in other countries, sending many of them into the migrant stream to the U.S. This displacement is being coordinated with Congress' immigration proposals, which would then channel displaced workers into industries where their labor can be used profitably, and ensure that they can only remain in the U.S. in a status vulnerable to exploitation.

The mainstream press has carried many articles about the proposals and raids, but very little coverage of the corporate backing for the immigration bills in Congress. Many reporters refer to the guest worker bills as "pro-immigrant" and "left." This is not only inaccurate, but actually covers up the corporate domination of the immigration agenda in Congress. There has been virtually no coverage of the connection between U.S. trade policy and immigration policy.
For more accurate information, readers can contact the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, www.nnirr.org. Global Exchange organized a national speaking tour on trade and immigration policy by David Bacon and Juan Manuel Sandoval, a leading Mexican critic of NAFTA and US immigration policy. The presentations made during that tour are available on the Global Exchange website, www.globalexchange.org.

http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/mexico/politicaleconomyofmigration.doc

www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/mexico/migration.html

For more articles and images on free trade and migration, see http://dbacon.igc.org.

See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US, Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)

See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004)

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:57 AM 0 comments Links to this post

A significant no confidence vote against NCLB. -Angela

May 31, 2007
Most Americans want 'No Child' law left behind

President Bush has touted education law as a major achievement, but survey shows parents disagree.

A survey of 1,010 American adults reveals that nearly two-thirds of them want Congress to rewrite or outright abolish the landmark No Child Left Behind Act that mandates nationwide testing of elementary students to determine whether public schools are performing adequately.

Controversy about the law has grown in recent months as Congress begins the debate on whether to reauthorize the measure that President Bush has touted as one of the most important achievements of his administration.

Dissent against reauthorization has developed within Bush's own party. Fifty-two Republican House members and five GOP senators are calling for a repeal of the law in favor of a more flexible system of achievement standards.

"This expensive and largely unsuccessful legislation has broadened the scope of the federal government's role in education," Mich. Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Tipton, said in introducing his bill.

Only about a third of those queried in the Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University poll said they think the law has had a positive influence on public education, while slightly less than half said it has had a negative impact and a fifth were undecided.

Twenty-three percent said they want the law renewed in its current form, 14 percent want it abolished and 49 percent want it amended. Fourteen percent were undecided. Taken together, 63 percent want the law abolished or amended.

Labels: NCLB, survey

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

Good news in this report is that "The number of minority students taking Advanced Placement courses, for example, more than doubled from 1997 to 2005." -Angela

June 1, 2007
U.S. Data Show Rapid Minority Growth in School Rolls

By SAM DILLON
Driven mainly by an extraordinary influx of Hispanics, the nation’s population of minority students has surged to 42 percent of public school enrollment, up from 22 percent three decades ago, according to an annual report issued yesterday by the government.

The report, a statistical survey of the nation’s educational system, portrays sweeping ethnic shifts that have transformed the schools. The changes, with important implications for educators and policy makers, have been most striking in the West, where, the survey says, Hispanic, black and Asian students together have outnumbered whites since 2003. But all regions have seen growth in minority student enrollment, particularly by Hispanics, who accounted for one of five public school students in 2005, the last year for which data were available.

“The rapid increase in the Hispanic population in America’s schools is quite striking,” said Mark S. Schneider, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the data-gathering arm of the Department of Education.

The Congressionally mandated report, “The Condition of Education,” draws on data collected from state education agencies, schools and colleges by Mr. Schneider’s agency and the Census Bureau. Those data suggest significant challenges ahead for American education, partly because of the persistent math and reading test-score gaps that separate white students from blacks and Hispanics.

According to the survey, those gaps have remained largely unchanged since the early 1990s except in math at the fourth-grade level, where the black-white gap has narrowed somewhat. On average, the study shows, Hispanics score slightly better than blacks, but well below whites, in reading and math in both fourth and eighth grades. (In an interview, Mr. Schneider noted that the results of a national history test that were released in May did show a narrowing of the achievement gap in that subject.)

The most pronounced development in school demographics has been in Hispanic growth. Hispanic students accounted for just 6 percent of public school enrollment in 1972, but by 2005 their numbers had grown to 20 percent, the survey found. During the same period, white enrollment declined to 58 percent of school population, from 78 percent. African-American enrollment changed little: blacks were 14.8 percent of all students in 1972 and 15.6 percent in 2005.

The distribution of groups differs considerably by region. The Midwest remained the whitest region in 2005: 74 percent of students there were white, and 26 percent members of minorities. In the South, 24 percent of students were black, more than anywhere else. In the West, 46 percent of students were white, 37 percent were Hispanic, 7 percent were Asian, 5 percent were black, and the rest were Pacific Islanders, American Indians or students of more than one race.

At a news conference in Washington, Mr. Schneider focused much of his presentation of the report on statistics showing that more high school students, across racial and ethnic lines, had been taking advanced courses in recent years. The number of minority students taking Advanced Placement courses, for example, more than doubled from 1997 to 2005.

The report also found that many high school students were spending more time on homework than did students two decades earlier. In 1980, 7 percent of 10th graders reported spending 10 hours a week or more on homework, but by 2002 that number had risen to 37 percent, more than a fivefold increase. The number of boys who reported spending 10 hours or more increased to 33 percent from 6 percent. For girls, the number jumped to 41 percent from 8 percent.

In 2002, 19 percent of girls, and 26 percent of boys, reported spending three hours or less a week on homework.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/01/education/01educ.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Labels: Advanced Placement courses, demographics, minority enrollment

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:35 AM 1 comments Links to this post