All so curious. Wonder why the rigor was taken out of the standards to begin with? More specificity would help here. -Angela .

Teachers' outcry puts Texas English, reading standards on hold
State delays approval as thousands of teachers say standards incomplete
10:19 AM CDT on Friday, July 20, 2007

By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News
tstutz@dallasnews.com
AUSTIN – English teachers from across the state gave an "incomplete" to new curriculum standards for English and reading classes in Texas schools Thursday, prompting the State Board of Education to delay approval of the proposal until November.

After hearing complaints from a coalition of 16 groups representing thousands of English and reading teachers, board members agreed to send the proposed standards – specifying the knowledge and skills students are supposed to learn in school – back to the drawing board.

Although Texas Education Agency officials initially said they wanted to submit final standards to the board at its next meeting in September, several board members balked at that idea, citing the criticism from so many teachers.

"We need more time on this project," said board member Pat Hardy, R-Fort Worth. "To say we are going to [take action] on a document that has so many flaws in it right now is crazy.

"We should leave it to the people who know what they're talking about – the English, language arts and reading people – to come back to us after we give them a chance to study these proposals."

Board member Bob Craig, R-Lubbock, agreed that a delay was needed.

"Let's do it right," he said, suggesting that the board postpone action until its November meeting. Board members will hear further testimony on the standards at their next meeting in September.

Among several people who testified Thursday were members of a group of educators and experts who worked on the new curriculum standards for English, language arts and reading.

Most said more time was needed to work on the standards, which several described as incomplete.

Cindy Tyroff, secondary English supervisor for the Northside school district in San Antonio, said 16 organizations representing nearly 9,000 teachers and administrators were united in their assessment that the proposed English standards needed to cover more skills.

"Not all of us in the coalition agree on all the details of how to teach reading and writing, but we have come together around the importance of ensuring a rigorous curriculum for our students," she said.

"We ask that you allow ample time for quality work."

In rewriting the curriculum standards, the working group appointed by the state board was instructed to consolidate the skills students are expected to learn in English and reading – eliminating all redundancies in the old standards.

But Ms. Tyroff and others who testified said too many skills – or "student expectations" – had been eliminated, leaving teachers, particularly those new to the profession, without the guidelines they need to educate their students.

Carol Revelle, a parent from Carrollton, told the board she was disappointed with the reduction in critical skills and the "ambiguous" expectations laid out in the proposed standards for middle schools. Her daughter is a seventh-grader at Blalack Middle School.

"We are selling our students short unless we add the rigor back into these expectations," she said. "Our students can do so much more than this."

When the English and reading curriculum standards are set, board members will turn their attention to the standards for science classes next year.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:16 PM 0 comments Links to this post

From Georgina Gonzalez at TEA:

Please see the link below for a new resource on effective literacy and English language instruction for English language learners from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance

This "practice guide" is the first in a series of Institute of Education Sciences guides developed by a panel of experts. The guides are intended to bring the best available evidence and expertise to bear on the types of systemic challenges that cannot currently be addressed by single intervention or programs. This first guide addresses the challenge of providing effective literacy instruction for English learners in the elementary grades. Although the target audience is a broad spectrum of school practitioners such as administrators, curriculum specialists, coaches, staff development specialists and teachers, the more specific objective is to reach district-level administrators with a practice guide that will help them develop practice and policy options for their schools. The guide offers five specific recommendations for district administrators and indicates the quality of the evidence that supports these recommendations.

A link to this guide will also be available on the Department's LEP Partnership website

Angela

Labels: English language learners

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:34 PM 0 comments Links to this post

On the subject of the Presidential candidates and where Latinos fall into all of this, this is a really good story, analysis. -Angela

Latino leaders lean left for ... Hillary?
By: Gebe Martinez

July 26, 2007 05:35 AM EST /from Politico.com

As New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson began the first-ever
presidential campaign by a Hispanic, Latino leaders faced a
dilemma.

Is it acceptable, they wondered -- especially at a time
when Latinos are feeling attacked on the civil rights
front -- to skip this historic moment and endorse a
candidate besides Richardson for the Democratic nomination?

The answer came swiftly when New York Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton announced early on that she had won the highly
coveted endorsement of Raul Yzaguirre, the former president
of the National Council of La Raza, a long-standing Latino
advocacy group.

She also got the backing of the controversial but
influential mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, New
Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez and dozens more.

While the value of endorsements by other politicians is
often questioned -- especially in this presidential
election season, in which big-name backers of Democrats and
Republicans have been accused of drug trafficking, using
prostitutes or being unfaithful in marriage -- they still
matter among the growing, Democratic-leaning Hispanic
electorate.

And so far, Clinton is leading the fierce race for Latino
endorsements. Well-known and well-financed at the start of
her campaign, she aggressively sought Hispanic support
before Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois surged in the polls
and before Richardson's bid became sure-footed.

"One (endorsement request) that was very difficult to turn
down was from my very good friend, Bill Richardson,"
acknowledged Yzaguirre, a co-chairman of Clinton's
campaign. "(Clinton) made it clear she wants to reach the
Latino vote," he said. Former President Bill Clinton was
intellectually tuned in to the Latino electorate,
but "Hillary gets it emotionally and intellectually."

And Latinos want to be wanted. After being largely ignored
in the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and John F. Kerry,
Latinos are getting far more attention than an "En Espanol"
tab on candidates' websites.

The Clinton campaign has drawn notice for its multifaceted
strategy, which includes bringing on the first Hispanic
woman to manage a major presidential campaign, the hiring
of a Latino pollster and community networking in Florida
and Southwestern states where Latinos could be the swing
vote in the general election.

Using the 21-member Congressional Hispanic Caucus as a
yardstick, Clinton has seven members backing her, while
Richardson, the son of an American father and a Mexican
mother, has three.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards has two
endorsements from Latino lawmakers, and Obama and Sen.
Chris Dodd of Connecticut each have one.

In a Gallup/USA Today poll conducted last month, 59 percent
of Hispanic voters surveyed said they supported Clinton
over Obama, Richardson and then Edwards, with the rest of
the field barely registering.

"The (Clinton) campaign clearly is thinking about the
Hispanic vote, and it didn't happen by accident," said
Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center. "It's a
measure of the fact that the campaign has determined that
they need to have some approaches to this population."

But as Richardson inches into the top tier of candidates,
he remains a formidable competitor for the Latino vote. His
list of supporters highlights community activists in key
states, even beyond his home region.

The governor probably will not win the Democratic
nomination, but he will do well enough "to hold serve with
Latino voters," predicted Antonio Gonzalez, president of
the William C. Velasquez Institute, which studies Latino
voter and economic trends.

"If Richardson is perceived as a viable candidate and he
has enough money to get the message out, that's going to
cancel out the Latino endorsements of Hillary," he
maintained.


First, however, Richardson must become better known by
Latinos who do not know his ethnic or political background,
which includes serving as a congressman for 14 years, then
as U.N. ambassador and energy secretary for President
Clinton.

Latino endorsements are not just an introduction of the
candidate to voters. They carry an extra layer of trust
because the leaders and their constituents often have
similar cultural and economic origins.

"They can be useful when the voters are relatively
inexperienced, like first-time voters who maybe are not
that crystallized on their self-interests," Gonzalez said.
That is why, despite personal issues, Villaraigosa's
support for Clinton remains significant.

At the same time, Latinos want to be taken seriously, not
just to have a seat at the power table but also to bring
the campaigns into their neighborhoods, where issues such
as immigration, health care and education are key.

One reason little was spent on the Latino vote by recent
presidential campaigns is that the Hispanic population is
concentrated in California, New York, Texas and other
states that were not major battlegrounds. They will be in
play next year.

And in the wake of the testy immigration debate, civil
rights activists are stepping up citizenship and voter
registration drives even in nontraditional Hispanic states
where the Latino population has shot up. The 2008 Latino
vote is expected to total 9.5 million, an increase of 1.9
million over 2004.

Candidates and their supporters are courting Latinos in
serious and not-so-serious ways.

Dodd speaks Spanish. Richardson inaugurated his campaign in
Los Angeles with a bilingual speech. Supporters of Obama
have launched a Latino website with the message: "Tu voto
tiene swing!" ("Your vote has swing!")

Clinton has a bilingual "social networking" Web page that
includes her confession that she is not a very good cook.

Before choosing a candidate, Democratic Rep. Hilda L. Solis
of California said she wanted to make sure the outreach to
Latinos is "not just tokenism." California, she
emphasized, "is a big prize."

Illinois Democratic Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, who led House
efforts for a broad immigration measure, said it was more
than home-state loyalty that drove him to Obama. "We talked
early about his campaign and I know the issue of
immigration is very dear to him, and it is the pivotal
issue which I looked at," Gutierrez said.

Texas Democratic Rep. Charles Gonzalez signed on with
Edwards long before Richardson came calling.

As a member of the powerful House Energy and Commerce
Committee, Gonzalez said he wanted to help refine Edwards'
cornerstone anti-poverty agenda. "If we get in early enough
to give some guidance on some issues, that's good for
Latinos," he said.

Richardson, whose endorsement list includes longtime
friends like House Intelligence Committee Chairman
Silvestre Reyes of Texas, often reminds Latinos that he
knows them best.

"I know firsthand about the work that you do, not because
I'm reminded every four years about the importance of the
Latino vote. I know because I have been in the trenches,"
he recently told a Hispanic group in Los Angeles.

One thing is clear about endorsements, Latino or otherwise,
said Gonzalez of the Velasquez Institute. The winner will
reward those who jumped on board at the start, not at the
end. "Make no mistake," he said. "This is hardball
Democratic politics."

Gebe Martinez is a longtime journalist in Washington and a
frequent lecturer and commentator on the policy and
politics of Capitol Hill.

TM & © THE POLITICO & POLITICO.COM, a division of
Allbritton Communications Company

Labels: presidential race/election

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:56 PM 0 comments Links to this post

See this report on the economic impact of immigrants. Listed here are key findings in the report. -Angela

Key Findings
1. On average, US natives benefit from immigration. Immigrants tend to complement (not
substitute for) natives, raising natives’ productivity and income.

2. Careful studies of the long-run fiscal effects of immigration conclude that it is likely to
have a modest, positive influence.

3. Skilled immigrants are likely to be especially beneficial to natives. In addition to
contributions to innovation, they have a significant positive fiscal impact.

General Points

• Immigrants are a critical part of the U.S. workforce and contribute to productivity
growth and technological advancement. They make up 15% of all workers and even larger
shares of certain occupations such as construction, food services and health care.
Approximately 40% of Ph.D. scientists working in the United States were born abroad.
(Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics; American Community Survey)

• Many immigrants are entrepreneurs. The Kauffman Foundation’s index of
entrepreneurial activity is nearly 40% higher for immigrants than for natives. (Source:
Kauffman Foundation)

• Immigrants and their children assimilate into U.S. culture. For example, although 72%
of first-generation Latino immigrants use Spanish as their predominant language, only 7% of
the second generation are Spanish-dominant. (Source: Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family
Foundation)

• Immigrants have lower crime rates than natives. Among men aged 18 to 40, immigrants
are much less likely to be incarcerated than natives. (Source: Butcher and Piehl)

• Immigrants slightly improve the solvency of pay-as-you-go entitlement programs such
as Social Security and Medicare. The 2007 OASDI Trustees Report indicates that an
additional 100,000 net immigrants per year would increase the long-range actuarial balance
by about 0.07% of taxable payroll. (Source: Social Security Administration)

• The long-run impact of immigration on public budgets is likely to be positive.
Projections of future taxes and government spending are subject to uncertainty, but a careful
study published by the National Research Council estimated that immigrants and their
descendants would contribute about $80,000 more in taxes (in 1996 dollars) than they would
receive in public services. (Source: Smith and Edmonston)

Labels: immigration

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

Want to Be Good at Science? Math Is Key
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer
Thursday, July 26, 2007
(07-26) 11:10 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --

Students who had more math courses in high school did better in all types of science once they got to college, researchers say.

On the other hand, while high school courses in biology, chemistry or physics improved college performance in each of the individual sciences, taking a high school course in one science didn't result in better college performance in the others.

Philip M. Sadler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Robert H. Tai of the University of Virginia surveyed 8,474 students taking introductory science courses at 63 U.S. colleges and universities. Their findings are reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Science educators debate the effect of the order in which students take science courses. Since the 1890s biology has tended to come first, followed by chemistry and then physics.

Some educators argue that physics should be taught earlier because it will help students understand the other two science areas; others say having chemistry first will help in learning biology.

But in this study neither was the case.

Using a scale of 0-to-100 points, Sadler and Tai found that every year of high school math a student took added 1.86 points to their grade in college chemistry. Taking chemistry in high school added 1.72 points to the college grade, but taking biology or physics in high school had no significant impact on the college chemistry grade.

Likewise, students taking college biology got a 1.84 point boost for each year of high school math. Taking high school biology got them an extra 1.35 points, but high school chemistry and physics had no significant effect.

And for physics, each year of high school math added 1.28 points, high school physics gave a 1.32 point boost, while high school biology and chemistry had no impact.

"I was surprised," Sadler said in a telephone interview. "I had a very open mind about whether this kind of early preparation would pay off."

"The most important thing for high school science teachers is to make sure there is lots of math in whatever science course they teach," Sadler said. "Math is so important in college science."

The paper does note that other variables not measured in their study may also have an impact, such as a student's interest in a particular subject and their parents' occupations.

Gerry Wheeler, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, welcomed the paper as a source of new data for making decisions on science teaching.

"The correlation with math makes sense," he said.

But Wheeler, who was not part of the research group, cautioned that a correlation isn't necessarily the same as cause and effect.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

___

On the Net:

Science:

www.sciencemag.org

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/07/26/national/w111044D35.DTL

Labels: math and science

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:33 PM 0 comments Links to this post

EDITORIAL

Doing right by students shouldn't be like pulling teeth

EDITORIAL BOARD

Click-2-Listen
Sunday, July 22, 2007
The best we can say about Gov. Rick Perry's decision to appoint Don McLeroy as chairman of the State Board of Education is that the Bryan dentist was not the worst choice — given the list of candidates on the board.

While we're not enthused about Perry's selection, McLeroy has an opportunity to demonstrate that he can rise above ideology to represent the broad interests of Texas' 4.5 million public school students. He should grab that opportunity and make the most of it.

McLeroy will fill a term that expires in 2009. He replaces Geraldine Miller of Dallas. Both are Republicans.

The 15-member elected board has been so dysfunctional in recent years that the Legislature wisely curbed much of its authority over Texas public schools. For more than a decade, the board has indulged in culture wars, and Texas schoolchildren have been the casualties.

Established by the Texas Constitution to oversee, among other things, the Permanent School Fund, the board still wields clout in decisions regarding the school fund and its investments, textbook selection for all school grades and curriculum standards for public schools. The board also is the state licensing entity for charter schools.

As chair, McLeroy leads a board of 10 Republicans and five Democrats. Divisions on the board aren't just partisan. McLeroy, a self-described social conservative, is one of eight Republicans who vote as a bloc on nearly all issues. He has a reputation for civility even while casting votes that are based more on ideology than on science or facts.

In 2001, McLeroy and a majority of the board rejected the only Advanced Placement textbook for high school environmental science because its views on global warming and other events didn't comport with the beliefs of the board majority. The book wasn't factual and was anti-American and anti-Christian, the majority claimed. Meanwhile, dozens of colleges and universities were using the textbook, including Baylor University, the nation's largest Baptist college.

In 2003, McLeroy voted against approving biology textbooks that included a full-scale scientific account of evolutionary theory. The books were approved.

McLeroy seems stranded in a Beaver Cleaver universe that is light years from the reality of today's schools. A majority of Texas public school students is minority, and they are largely from lower-income households. Many students don't speak English and are living in homes headed by single parents.

Schools today are tackling issues such as teenage pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse, gang violence and harassment of female and gay students. That's the environment in which students learn to live and work in a global economy.

McLeroy's votes and sentiments might well represent a majority of folks in his district. But Perry should press him to act broadly as chairman so that individual school districts can acquire the best textbooks, instruction and curricula for students. As a board member, McLeroy deserted a conservative principle of local control. Instead, he and other GOP board members have sought to consolidate power and force their ideological agenda on all school districts.

Those tactics continue to spawn public feuds over textbook selection and curriculum content. All of that has left the board more marginalized and has diminished its role in shaping public schools.

But the board still is capable of significant mischief.

McLeroy's elevation to chairman comes as the board begins a revision of science standards for public schools. That could prove embarrassing for Texas if McLeroy pushes for standards that push theology over science. If McLeroy wants to restore the board's credibility, he should promote standards — and textbooks — that educate, not preach.

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/07/22/0722education_edit.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:01 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Dr. Linda McNeil and I were saying this back in 2001 under the Texas accountability system that provided the impetus for NCLB. We even lobbied our legislators in DC about this before the passage of NCLB. Someone in Congressman George Miller's office told us that it was too late and that the "train had left the tracks and unless there were dead bodies on the track, it was going to happen." We said that the bodies were on the tracks with all the students who had been pushed out of the system. It's tragic that all of this could have been avoided.

Check out mine and Linda's co-authored chapter if you like.

-Angela

July 25, 2007
Focus on 2 R’s Cuts Time for the Rest, Report Says

By SAM DILLON
Almost half the nation’s school districts have significantly decreased the daily class time spent on subjects like science, art and history as a result of the federal No Child Left Behind law’s focus on annual tests in reading and math, according to a new report released yesterday.

The report, by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington group that studies the law’s implementation in school districts nationwide, said that about 44 percent of districts have cut time from one or more subjects or activities in elementary schools to extend time for longer daily math and reading lessons. Among the subjects or activities getting less attention since the law took effect in 2002 are science, social studies, art and music, gym, lunch and recess, the report said.

The report, based on a survey of nearly 350 of the nation’s 15,000 districts, said 62 percent of school districts had increased daily class time in reading and math since the law took effect.

Within a year of the law’s implementation, teachers and their associations were reporting that schools and districts were suggesting or requiring that they spend more time on reading and math to improve test scores, and that they cut back time spent on other disciplines.

The narrowing of the nation’s elementary school curriculum has been significant, according to the report, but may not be affecting as many schools as previously thought.

A report that the center issued in March 2006, based on a similar survey, gave one of the first measures of the extent of the narrowing trend. It said 71 percent of districts had reduced elementary school instruction in at least one other subject to make more time for reading and mathematics. That finding attracted considerable attention, with many groups opposed to the law decrying the trend.

The law’s backers, including Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, argued that the intensification of English and math instruction made good sense on its own because, they said, students who could not read or calculate with fluency would flounder in other subjects, too.

The center’s new report raises the question of how to explain the considerable discrepancy between last year’s finding, that 71 percent of districts had reduced instructional time in subjects other than math and reading, and this year’s, which gives the number as 44 percent.

Jack Jennings, the center’s president, said in an interview that the discrepancy was a result of a change in the wording of the questionnaire. Last year’s survey asked districts to say whether they had reduced instructional time in subjects other than reading and math “to a great extent,” “somewhat,” “minimally” or “not at all.” Districts that reported even minimally reduced instructional time on other subjects were included in the 71 percent, along with districts that carried out more substantial changes, Mr. Jennings said.

This year, the center listed English/language arts and math as well as social studies, art and music, science and other subjects on the survey, and asked districts whether class time in each had increased, stayed the same or decreased since the law’s enactment. In a second column, the survey asked districts to indicate the number of minutes by which instructional time had increased or decreased.

Districts that made only small reductions this year, 10 minutes a day or less, in the time devoted to courses other than reading or math, may have chosen to report that instructional time had remained the same, Mr. Jennings said. On last year’s survey, the same districts may instead have acknowledged reducing the time, while characterizing the reduction as minimal, he said.

According to the new survey, the average change in instructional time in elementary schools since the law’s enactment has been 140 additional minutes per week for reading, 87 additional minutes per week for math, 76 fewer minutes per week for social studies, 75 fewer minutes for science, 57 fewer minutes for art and 40 fewer minutes for gym.

In a statement, Secretary Spellings said the report’s scope was “too limited to draw broad conclusions.”

“In fact,” she said, “there is much evidence that shows schools are adding time to the school day in order to focus on reading and math, not cutting time from other subjects.”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Labels: NCLB

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:44 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out this downloadable pdf document to get a sense of how the immigrant community in Travis County (that includes Austin) is faring. -Angela

s are 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: http://www.co.travis.tx.us/health_human_services/research_planning/

Labels: immigration

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:17 PM 0 comments Links to this post

David Bacon is great writer, photojournalist and leader. Check out his books as well—Communities Without Borders and Children of NAFTA. -Angela

TIME FOR A MORE RADICAL IMMIGRANT RIGHTS MOVEMENT
By David Bacon
The American Prospect, web edition, 7/24/07

In Worthington, Iowa, a federal prosecutor gets a grand jury indictment against Braulio Pereyra-Gabino, union vice-president at the local Swift meatpacking plant. He's accused of not turning his undocumented members in to Homeland Security. In Arizona, Gov. Janet Napolitano signs a draconian immigration enforcement bill, criminalizing work for those without papers and ordering state agents to enforce the prohibition with a vengeance. Since Congress wouldn't pass the recent Senate bill with the same sanctions, she says Arizona has no choice.

The Senate's failure is used as well in Prince William County, Virginia, to justify a local ordinance ordering all public officials to check immigration papers, even teachers, nurses and librarians. They're forbidden to help anyone lacking them. Meanwhile, immigration agents continue detaining and deporting people by the hundreds in workplace and community raids around the country.

Some DC supporters of the recent Senate bill are still floundering about what to do in the wake of its failure. Outside the beltway, though, the immediate need is obvious. Organize and fight back.

Outside Washington a movement capable of doing that is growing. You can see it, not just in the million people who marched in Los Angeles twice in one day. Last May Day in tiny Bridgeton, NJ, and Kennett Square, PA, unions and progressive activists walked alongside immigrant mothers wheeling children in strollers, fighting down the fear that deportation might separate their families.

Everywhere in this country immigrant communities are growing, defying the raids intended to terrorize them - organizing and speaking out. This movement is a powerful response to Congress' inability to pass a pro-immigrant reform bill. It can and will resist and stop the raids, but its potential power is far greater. Like the civil rights movement four decades ago, the political upsurge in immigrant communities makes a profound demand - not simply for visas, but for freedom and equality.

It questions our values.

Will local communities share political power with newcomers? Will workers be able to organize to turn low-paying labor into real jobs? Will children go to school knowing their teachers value their ability to speak two or three languages as a mark of their intelligence, not their inferiority?

Those who fear change are right about one thing. Once we answer these questions, we will not be the same country.

Social change requires a social movement. Rights are only extended in the United States when people demand it. Congress will pass laws guaranteeing rights for immigrants as it did for workers in 1934, or African Americans in 1966 - when it has no choice but to recognize that movement's strength.

In the south of the 1960s, courageous civil rights activists stopped lynching and defied bombings, while registering people to vote and going to jail to overturn unjust Jim Crow laws. They won allies, from unions to students to artists, who helped give the civil rights movement its radical, transformative character. They led our country out of McCarthyism.

Today the movement for immigrant rights and equality confronts choices in strategy and alliances that recall those of the civil rights era. As SNCC and CORE had to move past the accommodations of Booker T. Washington, the immigrant rights movement has to move past the failed strategy of the last three years.

Washington lobbyists have treated local communities as troops to back up conservative beltway legislation. They've promoted a strategic alliance with corporations, whose main interest was converting the flow of migrants into a regulated source of cheap labor, and with an administration using raids to pressure immigrant communities and bust unions. DC strategists tried to appease the right by agreeing to anti-immigrant provisions that robbed their bill of the support of those communities they claimed it was supposed to benefit.

Pointing in a different direction, many community-based coalitions and grassroots groups outside the beltway have made proposals that start from a human and labor rights perspective. They would give the undocumented real residence rights, as the Immigration Reform and Control Act did in 1986. New migrants would be able to live as normal community members, rather than as exploited guest workers. A demilitarized Mexican border would look like the one with Canada. Immigrants would regain due process rights, which after eight years of George Bush, everyone else needs too. Work would be decriminalized, and labor rights enforced for all workers, immigrants included. Families could reunite in the U.S. without waiting years. U.S. policy would stop reinforcing poverty abroad as an inducement for corporate investment, especially in those countries sending migrants here.

The mainstream press amplifies the voices of a small anti-immigrant minority, and a conservative Congress kowtows to them. But most polls show that immigrants and non-immigrants alike believe in basic fairness and equality, and are willing to consider these and similar ideas. The problem is that without a powerful movement they remain just that - ideas.

Building that movement in communities, churches and unions requires a change in alliances as well as program. Its natural allies include African Americans, whose experience of racism and economic desperation is similar to that of immigrants. Unions are already important allies, and most opposed the Senate bill. Immigrant workers are already more active in union drives than most sections of the workforce.

Displaced and unemployed workers can also be allies of immigrants, instead of competitors in the job market. Today many are manipulated by the anti-immigrant hysteria of right wing talk show hosts like Lou Dobbs, because Washington lobbyists won't antagonize their corporate sponsors by criticizing the free market agenda. Yet hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers are victims of the same free trade agreements that cause migration. NAFTA and CAFTA create poverty in Mexico and Central America to benefit corporate investors. That poverty drives people to migrate north. Opposing the offshoring of jobs goes hand in hand with defending the rights of the migrants free trade produces.

The DC strategy pitted immigrants against unemployed workers through guest worker schemes, raids and criminalizing work. Coalition building brings people together in an anti-corporate alliance based, not in Washington where lobbyists dominate the agenda, but in communities with a different set of interests.

Rights for immigrants at work and in neighborhoods can be paired with the right to jobs and federal employment programs. Since 2004 Houston Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee has proposed this kind of tradeoff - real legal status for 12 million undocumented people together with federal support for job creation and training in Black and Chicano communities with high unemployment. She's rejected guest worker programs as a corporate giveaway, hurting both immigrants, who are denied normal rights, and low-wage workers forced into competition with them. Some unions, like UNITE HERE Local 2 in San Francisco, are building alliances by demanding that employers hire more African Americans, while defending the rights of immigrants already in the workforce.

Similarly, workers in unions, immigrants included, need labor law reform and enforcement. Many May Day marchers demanded not just legal immigration status, but the right to organize to raise their poverty-level wages. Immigrant janitors sitting in the streets of Houston, hotel housekeepers enforcing living wage laws in Emeryville, CA, and meatpacking workers organizing against company terror tactics at Smithfield Foods in Tarheel, NC, are as much a part of the immigrant rights movement as those marching for visas.

A coalition that can fight for these demands has its roots in immigrant rights groups, local unions, church congregations and college campuses. The Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, representing Wal-Mart, Marriott and other corporate giants, will not fight for these demands. Nor will the rightwing Manhattan Institute. But many national organizations will. The AFL-CIO and most unions in the Change to Win Federation will support these demands. So will the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, the Mexican American Political Association and the American Friends Service Committee.

National groups can provide resources, but to build a movement on the ground, we might study the experience of the young activists in the south in the 1960s, and the radicals in the industrial workplaces of the 1930s. Could students be organized to go to Hazelton, Tucson and Prince William County, to provide support for communities challenging raids and local anti-immigrant laws? Could civil disobedience be as important to their tactics as it was to those who sat in at lunch counters or organized illegal unions at the Ford Rouge plant?

Immigrant communities don't need another bad Congressional compromise. They need a freedom agenda. It can be a program like the Freedom Charter of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement - a vision to fight for. It can be a bill in Congress, like Sheila Jackson Lee's, forcing politicians to consider an alternative to guest workers and more raids. And it can be a mobilizer, drawing people to picket lines in front of the ICE detention centers holding their family members.
There people can sing new Spanish or Arabic words to the old anti-slavery anthem: "Let my people go."

For more articles and images on immigration, see http://dbacon.igc.org/Imgrants/imgrants.htm

See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US, Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006) http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575

See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
__________________________________

David Bacon, Photographs and Stories http://dbacon.igc.org

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=time_for_a_more_radical_immigrantrights_movement

Labels: immigration

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:13 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Coming to America through children's eyes
Austin Children's Museum exhibition tells stories of flight from Vietnam.

By Huong Le
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, July 05, 2007

Inside her wooden story box, Kimberly Do put an American passport, a family picture and a lucky money envelope. She painted the box with red and yellow stripes, the colors of the former South Vietnam flag.

"That's the flag that my parents like more, because they didn't like the one with the star," Kimberly said. Her family came to America in 1981, six years after the communist takeover. "The South Vietnam flag was the one with these stripes. My parents wanted more freedom. They liked that flag better."

The box contains what Kimberly, 11, understands about her Vietnamese heritage and the story of how her family immigrated to America and Austin. It is part of the art exhibition, "We are from Vietnam: Family Immigration Stories from Austin, Texas," on display at the Austin's Children Museum through July 20.

The artwork was created by American Vietnamese second- and fifth-graders enrolled in the Vietnamese Culture Program at Walnut Creek Elementary School in North Austin. After interviewing their grandparents and parents, second-graders retold their family stories through drawings. Fifth-graders created story boxes and wrote about why their families immigrated and the hardships that they endured to reach America and build new lives.

Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees have found sanctuary in the United States, many in the 1970s and 1980s by perilous sea escapes in tiny, overcrowded boats. In Texas, Vietnamese immigrants generally settled in larger cities, including Houston, Dallas and Austin, and in coastal areas. Austin is home to about 20,000 Vietnamese, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.

Born in Austin, Kimberly visited Vietnam for the first time when she was 4 during a family trip to Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City.

"My family wanted to immigrate because they wanted to escape the great danger of the Vietnam War," Kimberly wrote in her story for the exhibition. "They were transported here by boats, so they had to leave many valuables behind."

"If they got caught, they would get killed," she later added to her parents' story. Her mother told her there were 1,000 people and little food on the small boat that brought her family to asylum.

Chat Thiet Tran, founder of the Walnut Creek program, said the project helps American Vietnamese students find and preserve their identities.

"Some of the parents still feel the pain of having to leave your country, to live in another country without knowing when they can come back," Tran said. "Sometimes, they don't talk about it to their children."

In the program, which started in 1983, students receive additional instruction in math and reading. On Fridays, they take Vietnamese cultural classes that include studying the language and Vietnamese history and traditions. About 18 percent of Walnut Creek's 1,100 students are of Asian decent, giving the school one of the largest Asian enrollments in the Austin district.

"I think it's beautiful to grow up in two cultures," said one of the program's teachers, Thuan Tang, who left Vietnam when he was about 18 months old. "The whole idea of bilingual (education) is (for the students to) grow up learning English and retaining their native language."

In her story box, 10-year-old Thy Tran put a note worth 50,000 dong, the currency of Vietnam, family pictures and a lucky money envelope. The envelopes are traditionally given to children during Tet, the Vietnamese new year celebration. Thy has never been to Vietnam, though she's curious about seeing her mother's country.

In her story for the exhibition, Thy wrote that her mother left Vietnam with "a small hope to be free."

"When the moment broke out of the comonist coming to claim South Vietnam, my mom was in panic," Thy wrote. "She was only 16. . . . My mom found kind Chinese people which created a plan to travel on a boat to go to a different country."

That country was America.

If you go

The 'We are from Vietnam: Family Immigration Stories from Austin, Texas' exhibit at the Austin Children's Museum is part of an upcoming exhibit developed by the Texas State History Museum on historical immigration through Galveston. The exhibition ends July 20.

Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Wednesday, 5 to 8 p.m., admission by donation; Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.

Admission: $5.50 for adults and children older than 2; $3.50 for children 12 months to 23 months. Free admission for children younger than 12 months and on Sundays from 4 to 5 p.m.

hle@statesman.com; 445-3601


Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/07/05/0705exhibition.html

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

Law on religion in school spurs fear

Jenny Lacoste-Caputo
Express-News Staff Writer

Evangelical Christians point to 1963 as the year God
was kicked out of school. That's when the U.S. Supreme
Court upheld Madalyn Murray O'Hair's argument and
abolished the practice of students reciting prayers
and Bible passages in public schools.

Since then, there have been scores of legal battles
over when, or if, religion can coincide with the
school day.

This year, the Texas Legislature added more fuel to
the decades-old debate by passing a law that could
leave the spiritual conscience of a school up to the
captain of the football team.

Lawmakers approved that law and two others that could
ease the way for more religion in public schools. The
changes will take effect when students return to
classrooms in August.


One of the measures adds the phrase "under God" to the
Texas pledge, which schoolchildren say each day right
after the pledge to the U.S. flag. Another directs the
State Board of Education to come up with a curriculum
for elective Bible classes to ensure that such classes
across the state are being taught in uniform manner.
Neither measure sparked much controversy.

The third new law, dubbed the Religious Viewpoints
Anti-Discrimination Act, has superintendents nervous
as they figure out how to implement it in the coming
weeks.

It requires public school districts to adopt policies
specifically allowing spontaneous religious expression
by students. A so-called model policy included in the
law states that upperclassmen who are student leaders
˜ such as student council officers, class officers or
the captain of the football team ˜ should be
designated as speakers.

The law does not address concerns that such a
selection process could wind up leaving out minority
faiths.

"This mandate is going to create a collision of ideas
that should really take place outside of the school,"
Superintendent Richard Middleton of North East
Independent School District said. "Our lawyer fees are
going to go up because of this."

The new law creates a "limited open forum" that gives
students the opportunity to speak about religious
issues. It states that if a student speaker at a
sports event, a school assembly or a graduation
ceremony elects to express a religious viewpoint while
addressing an otherwise permissible topic, school
officials must treat the religious content the same as
they would the secular content.

Jonathan Saenz, an attorney and director of
legislative affairs for Free Market Foundation, helped
draft the bill. He said it doesn't limit districts to
the model policy.

Saenz's Plano-based group serves as the statewide
public policy council associated with Dr. James
Dobson's Focus on the Family organization.

"It is up to the discretion of the school district to
decide who those people are as long as they're using
neutral criteria," Saenz said. "The law says they can
choose those in leadership positions or other students
holding positions of honor."

But Doug Laycock, a law professor at the University of
Michigan who has represented the American Civil
Liberties Union on First Amendment issues, said the
new law attempts to "create school prayer with
plausible deniability."

"This is so irresponsible," Laycock said of the law.
"It's going to cause legal problems for districts
across the state, and they're going to be stuck with
the lawsuits."

The law also requires schools to allow religious
expression in artwork, homework or other assignments
and allow religious clubs or prayer groups to meet in
school facilities on the same basis as other student
groups ˜ something that was already taking place in
San Antonio school districts.

Brian Woods, assistant superintendent for secondary
administration at Northside ISD, said he'll have to
figure out what counts as a limited public forum. Is
it just graduation ceremonies and school assemblies,
or does it include morning announcements, usually
delivered by a student over a school's public address
system?

In a diverse district such as Northside, where
students speak more than 30 languages, ensuring that
every view is represented and no one feels
marginalized will be a challenge, Woods said. He also
worries about the potential for conflict.

"If a kid on the football team expresses a religious
message that is not in keeping with everyone in the
room, will there be protests? That school principal
will have to deal with that," Woods said. "What if
someone wants their time to respond then and there? If
we allowed a Christian to express a religious
viewpoint, and then a Wiccan wants equal time, how
could we prevent them from doing the same?"

The bill's author, Rep. Charlie Howard, R-Sugar Land,
said the new law is consistent with the Constitution
and U.S. Supreme Court rulings. He said the law does
not give students any new rights or take any away, but
makes it clear to school districts that religious
discrimination is against the law and guards students
against censorship, he said.

Prayer and religion were never taken out of public
schools, but teachers and principals have to walk a
fine line to ensure that everyone's rights are
protected. Many districts across the country ˜
including North East ISD and Austin Independent School
District ˜ offer Bible classes as electives in high
school. The classes are strictly academic and study
the Bible as literature.

Schools also must allow Bible study or prayer meetings
on their campuses on the same basis as other student
groups, and students can organize so-called "See you
at the Pole" prayer groups.

At an April news conference, Gov. Rick Perry
championed the legislation.

Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network,
a religious freedom group, said Texans would have been
better served if lawmakers simply required school
district personnel to be trained on students' existing
rights.

The new law will create more problems and more
lawsuits, she said.

"I don't believe it really gives students any more
rights to express their faith than they already had.
It denies input from community members and parents and
supersedes local control," Miller said. "I think
Texans should be nervous when the government tries to
tell their kids how and when to pray and what to
believe about God."

But Saenz of Free Market Foundation said the law
clarifies a student's right to religious expression in
public schools.

"The beauty of this legislation is to make it clear to
schools that they can't discriminate based on belief,"
he said.

The Texas Association of School Boards' legal
department offered guidance to school districts in a
newsletter last month. The article pointed out that
even offensive speech is protected and made it clear
that the new law means hate speech and other
discriminatory speech will now have a forum in public
schools.

Texas Freedom Network's Miller said that's a problem.

"We could hear the lawyers knocking at the schoolhouse
door when this bill passed," she said. "It plays
politics with people's faith."


New Rules From the Legislature
The Texas Legislature approved three new laws
involving religion in public schools:
Elective Courses: The State Board of Education is
given the task of adopting curriculum standards for
courses on the Bible. The standards would have to be
approved by the state attorney general to ensure
constitutionality. The classes will focus on the
history and literature of the Bible.

The Texas Pledge of Allegiance: The words 'under God'
have been added. The new pledge will be: 'Honor the
Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one
state under God, one and indivisible.'

The Religious Viewpoints Anti-Discrimination Act:
Requires public school districts to adopt policies
specifically allowing spontaneous religious expression
by students. The provision would create a 'limited
open forum' ˜ an opportunity for students to speak
about religious issues on the same basis as they're
allowed to speak about other topics.


jcaputo@express-news.net

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:05 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This is an update on the Ward Churchill Firing this bodes poorly for academic freedom in this country for tenured professors. He is filing suit against UC Boulder and so it's not over 'til it's over. -Angela

July 26, 2007: On Ward Churchill Firing

Five pieces in this email:
1) Call for Op-eds and letters to the editor from
National Project to Defend Dissent & Critical Thinking
in Academia
2) Report from Daniel Kim, Assistant Professor,
Department of English, University of Colorado
3) Message of thanks to supporters from Natsu Saitta
and Ward Churchill
4) Transcript of coverage from Democracy Now!
5) Beneath the Surface interview with Tom Mayer and

Ward Churchill
_______________________________________________

>The outrageous decision to fire Ward Churchill comes
>on the heels of the denial of tenure to Norman
>Finkelstein by the administration at DePaul. Taken
>together, it is clear that “purge” is not too strong a
>term to describe what we are witnessing against
>dissenting and critical thinking scholars in academia
>today, and in particular those whose work challenges
>the “official narratives” about this country’s history
>and international policy that powerful forces in this
>society are determined to maintain and restore. What
>is called for at this moment is to seize the
>opportunity to bring forward as significant a response
>as possible. One way to do this is in the form of Op
>Ed pieces and letters to editors. These could register
>a significant, even unexpected, response that signals
>to faculty, scholars, students and the broader public
>that this decision represents a danger, not just to
>academia but to society at this time in history, that
>cannot and will not be allowed to stand. Most of the
>media coverage of the decision gives no hint of the
>growing opposition to this attack on critical thinking
>and dissent among this country’s faculty, scholars and
>public intellectuals expressed in the Open Letter that
>we published in the NYRB in April; by the powerful
>statements sent to the Regents and to the April
>Emergency Forum that have appeared at the
>wardchurchill.org and defendcriticalthinking.org,
>sites; the articles at Counterpunch,
>Insidehighered.org and many, many more.
>
>Please forward any op-eds and letters you write
>(published or not) to criticalxthinking.

_______________________________________

>Dear Friends, Comrades and Allies,
>
>On Tuesday, after two and a half years of struggle,
>the Univ of Colorado fired our colleague Prof Ward
>Churchill, one of the most prominent scholars in
>American Indian Studies, whose distinguished work over
>the past 25 years has deeply exposed COINTELPRO and
>the history of American Indian genocide.
>
>There has been a lot of media coverage but little that
>reflects what is truly at stake in the case. We, the
>faculty, staff and students who have been fighting on
>the ground here in Boulder, held our own joint press
>conference with Prof. Churchill and his attorney to
>respond to the firing. Our voices and analysis have
>not been represented in the coverage.
>
>I don't know how long this video will be available on
>the web, but here it is from a local TV station
>
>
>
>Our speakers are:
>
>Prof. Emma Perez of Ethnic Studies
>Prof. Margaret LeCompte of Education
>Prof. Tom Mayer of Sociology
>Hadley Brown, UCSU Tri-Exec, Student
>Ann-erika White Bird, Students for True Academic
>Freedom, Student
>
>You can also see Ward and his attorney, David lane,
>speaking at our joint press conference.

>The ramifications for academic freedom are clear to
>most but one important point that our speakers are
>addressing needs special emphasis. A key part of the
>"academic" case used to fire Prof. Churchill is that
>he supposedly "falsified" and "fabricated" the history
>of indigenous genocide--namely, that he lied when
>asserting that the US Army intentionally spread
>disease (e.g. via blankets), and that he lied when
>asserting that the US Government created the "eugenics
>code" of blood quantum (in the Dawes Act). The Right
>is crowing about how these "lies" about the US
>responsibility for indigenous genocide have been
>confirmed by Tuesday's firing. This firing is, as
>ACTA has declared, D-Day for a war on Ethnic Studies,
>Women's Studies, and every other scholarly institution
>of critical thinking that was carved into the
>University by the social movements of the 60s and 70s.
>
>You can also find links to the press conf by the
>neocon CU President Hank Brown and Regents' Chair Pay
>Hayes at the 9News page

>One of the better local newspaper articles from that
day is here.
>
>Finally, there is no way to thank you enough for your
>support from across the country and beyond. It has
>been a hard and uphill road and we know that so many
>of you have been with us from the beginning over two
>years ago. Because we have faced so much isolation,
>hostility and betrayal here in Boulder, your
>solidarity, your letters, your funds, your research,
>your organizing have been so crucial to the survival
>and persistence of our work in Boulder. We are glad
>and proud to know you'll be with us as the struggle
>moves ahead.
>
>In solidarity,
>Daniel Kim, on behalf of the faculty, students and
>staff at CU-Boulder fighting at "ground zero" Boulder
>
>Assistant Professor,
>Department of English,
>University of Colorado
>
>____________________________________
>
>
>Dear Friends,
>
>Thanks to all of you for your continuing support and
>recent e-mails. We are energized and encouraged to
>see how many people realize that yesterday's 8-to-1
>decision of the University of Colorado Regents to fire
>Ward Churchill was not about a few footnotes, but
>instead about suppressing historical truths and
>dissenting speech. (For a fairly good recap, see
www.democracynow.org ;
>there will be updates at wardchurchill.net.

>Some have said it was a sad day for academic freedom.
>It is sad when Cindy Carlisle becomes the lone
>courageous Regent for saying that the faculty review
>panel's recommendation shouldn't have been overridden
>by CU President Hank Brown. But did anyone really
>expect an elected body in Colorado to suddenly
>manifest backbone, when they had been instructed to
>fire Ward by Governors Owens and Ritter and the state
>legislature, and were under tremendous pressure from
>CU's big donors?
>
>For me, the bad days are when we sit by and let the
>attorney general intimidate us into a collective
>silence; when we allow torture, disappearances and
>arbitrary detentions to become routine; when we insist
>that this is a democracy, but refuse to accept any
>responsibility for the actions of the government.
>The sad days are when our kids are punished or
>humiliated in school for refusing to celebrate this
>country's genocidal history; when we get glimpses of
>other people's children being reduced to "collateral
>damage."
>
>In Ward's case, any pretense of academic freedom, to
>say nothing of due process, evaporated when the
>charade of a "research misconduct" investigation was
>allowed to proceed, with the apparent sanction of so
>many "liberal" academics like the National AAUP. It
>was long gone by last week, when CU refused to
>investigate the numerous charges of falsification and
>plagiarism in the very report upon which Ward's
>dismissal was based.
>
>Yesterday that charade was consummated and today our
>amazing attorney David Lane filed suit. We look
>forward to the day when a jury can decide whether the
>citizens of Colorado are as willing as the University
>to sacrifice the First Amendment for the status quo.
>
>Ward and I appreciate your support in this small piece
>of the struggle to keep critical thinking alive, and
>look forward to working with you on this and many
>other fronts.
>
> Natsu & Ward, July 25, 2007
>
>
>_________________________________________________
>
>Democracy Now!
>Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
>Professor Ward Churchill Vows to Sue University of
>Colorado Over Controversial Firing
>
>The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado in
>Boulder voted 8-to-1 Tuesday evening to fire tenured
>professor of Ethnic Studies Ward Churchill on charges
>of research misconduct. But Churchill maintains that
>the allegations were a pretext to remove him for his
>controversial political views. One day after his
>firing, Churchill calls the charges a sham and vows a
>suit against the school. [includes rush transcript]
>
>The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado in
>Boulder voted 8-to-1 Tuesday evening to fire tenured
>professor of Ethnic Studies Ward Churchill on charges
>of research misconduct. But Churchill maintains that
>the allegations were a pretext to remove him for his
>unpopular political views. Churchill has written a
>number of books on genocide against Native Americans
>and the US government's COINTELPRO program. After
>yesterday's verdict Churchill said he planned to sue
>the university.
>
>Churchill has written a number of books on genocide
>against Native Americans and the US government's
>COINTELPRO program. After yesterday's verdict
>Churchill said he planned to sue the university.
>
>The controversy dates back to early 2005 when a
>college newspaper reprinted Churchill's three-year old
>essay on the attacks on the World Trade Center. He
>described the attacks as a response to a long history
>of US abuses and called those who were killed on 9-11
>as "little Eichmanns" who formed a “technocratic corps
>at the very heart of America’s global financial
>empire."
>
>Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi bureacrat convicted for war
>crimes who political theorist Hannah Arendt famously
>described as embodying the "banality of evil." Fox
>News commentator Bill O’Reilly repeatedly attacked
>Churchill for his comparison. Soon after, Colorado
>Governor Bill Owens wrote a letter to the university
>calling for Churchill’s resignation.
>
>A special panel at the university immediately
>conducted an investigation into Churchill’s comments.
>They concluded that he could not be fired for his
>statements, which were protected by the First
>Amendment. However, another panel later determined
>that Churchill plagiarized and fabricated material in
>his scholarship and recommended his dismissal.
>
>Supporters of Ward Churchill organized a rally before
>the Regents delivered their decision to fire Churchill
>at 5.30 pm. They had been deliberating behind closed
>doors all day.
> • Churchill supporter Ann Erika Whitebird.
>Ward Churchill joins us on the phone from Boulder,
>Colorado.
>
> • Ward Churchill. He was just terminated from his
>tenured post as Professor of Ethnic Studies at the
>University of Colorado, Boulder. Churchill is an
>activist and author of a number of books on genocide
>against Native Americans and the US government's
>COINTELPRO program.
>
>RUSH TRANSCRIPT
>This transcript is available free of charge. However,
>donations help us provide closed captioning for the
>deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank
>you for your generous contribution. ?Donate - $25,
>$50, $100, more...
>
>AMY GOODMAN: The Board of Regents of the University of
>Colorado in Boulder voted 8-to-1 Tuesday evening to
>fire tenured professor of ethnic studies Ward
>Churchill on charges of research misconduct, they
>said. But Professor Churchill maintains the
>allegations were a pretext to remove him for his
>unpopular political views.
>Churchill has written a number of books on genocide
>against Native Americans and the US government's
>COINTELPRO program -- that’s Counter-Intelligence
>Program. After yesterday's verdict, Churchill said he
>planned to sue the university.
>
>JUAN GONZALEZ: The controversy dates back to early
>2005, when a college newspaper reprinted Churchill's
>three-year-old essay on the attacks on the World Trade
>Center. He described the attacks as a response to a
>long history of US abuses and called those who were
>killed on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns” who formed a
>“technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s
>global financial empire.”
>
>Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi bureaucrat convicted for war
>crimes, who political theorist Hannah Arendt famously
>described as embodying the “banality of evil.” Fox
>News commentator Bill O'Reilly repeatedly attacked
>Churchill for his comparison. Soon after, Colorado
>Governor Bill Owens wrote a letter to the university
>calling for Churchill's resignation.
>
>A special panel at the university immediately
>conducted an investigation into Churchill’s comments.
>They concluded that he could not be fired for his
>statements, which were protected by the First
>Amendment. However, another panel later determined
>that Churchill plagiarized and fabricated material in
>his scholarship and recommended his dismissal.
>
>AMY GOODMAN: Supporters of Ward Churchill organized a
>rally before the Regents delivered their decision to
>fire Churchill at 5:30 last night in Boulder. They had
>been deliberating behind closed doors all day.
>Today we'll be joined by Ward Churchill on the phone
>from Boulder, but first to a clip of yesterday's
>rally. We turn now to Ward Churchill, his lawyer David
>Lane, American Indian Movement activist Glenn Morris,
>and one of Churchill's students.
>
> • ANN ERIKA WHITEBIRD: And the decision to fire Ward
>Churchill is really sad for me. He's the only
>professor that I’ve taken a class, where I really felt
>empowered as an Indigenous person. And our history,
>the history of genocide against our people, the
>history, the policy, the US policy of extermination
>against our people, the forced sterilization of our
>women -- that was found out as early as the ’70s -- it
>was all something that Ward talks about in his books.
>So I’m not just talking about the class that he’s
>offered, the FBI at Pine Ridge, but, you know, other
>classes that he teaches and then the books that he's
>written is really affirming as a Native person.
>
> • The history that we hear growing up about the
>smallpox blankets, it's not something that you
>question. It's something that is part of our oral
>history. And it's part of the history of other
>indigenous peoples. So when I’m here at CU Boulder and
>I talk to other students who are Dene or from other
>nations, it's a common understanding.
>
>AMY GOODMAN: That was a student talking about Ward
>Churchill. Now, we turn to the ethnic studies
>professor, who joins us on the phone from his home in
>Boulder. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ward Churchill.
>
>WARD CHURCHILL: Thank you.
>
>AMY GOODMAN: Your thoughts today on the morning after
>your firing?
>
>WARD CHURCHILL: Well, a period of glaciation, which
>was this process of creating the illusion of research
>misconduct to cover a firing for political speech, has
>come to an end. That process has now run its course,
>so there's a new phase that's begun, which is, I
>suppose, for lack of a better way of putting it, my
>period of defensive posture has come to an end and the
>offense has begun, kicks off this morning with the
>filing of a suit.
>AMY GOODMAN: Who will you be suing?
>
>WARD CHURCHILL: Regents of the University of Colorado
>for accepting, in full knowledge at this point, a
>non-scholarly sham of an investigative report,
>creating the pretext. And I say “non-scholarly”
>because the university has withdrawn the entire
>investigative report from any scholarly scrutiny. They
>refuse to allow it to be subject to scrutiny by
>competent scholars. And there are research misconduct
>complaints in place at this point against the members
>of the investigative committee for serial plagiarism,
>wholesale falsification, outright fabrication -- in
>other words, fraud. It's a fraudulent finding.
>
>So there is no defensible scholarly conclusions that
>anything I’ve said in my writing is even inaccurate,
>much less fraudulent, or that I committed the
>so-called plagiarism. All they've got is public
>outrage in the form of very well-organized rightwing,
>active-style lobbying blocks, and the statements of
>public officials, and so on, saying I should be
>removed as the basis for removing me.
>
>JUAN GONZALEZ: The amazing thing about this is that
>the so-called -- the investigation focused on
>everything but the apparent reason why there was such
>a determination to investigate you. The essay having
>to do with 9/11, that wasn't even a subject,
>supposedly, of this investigation, was it?
>
>WARD CHURCHILL: No. And a point to be made there is
>that while I was a target, was a target that would
>serve as a sort of conduit, in a way, they considered
>me to be, and said so, considered me to be kind of at
>the forefront of a sort of critical line of analysis,
>historically speaking. And they wanted to roll back
>that line of analysis altogether, to discredit it, so
>that you basically have a return to that triumphalis,
>celebratory white-supremacist interpretation of
>American history with all of the denial and
>falsification that that is known to entail. That's the
>reason, in part. And it's in large part for the
>charade that they have acted out over the last
>two-and-a-half years, the going after the historical
>analysis, as well as a purveyor of it. And so, this
>goes way beyond me. I’m intended to symbolize the cost
>and consequence of challenging orthodoxy in certain
>critical domains, at least.
>
>JUAN GONZALEZ: And what has been the response of the
>press in Colorado? Have any of the newspapers or any
>of the press defended your right to speak your mind?
>
>WARD CHURCHILL: Well, yeah. They've created this false
>dichotomy, in a way: Well, it's reprehensible, we
>disagree with it, blah, blah, blah, but he had a right
>to say it, however repugnant it may have been. On the
>other hand, he did all these things that constitute
>research misconduct. Basically he's pedaling lies to
>the public that cause discontent with the status quo.
>And that's what the issue is. The specific acts of
>research misconduct has nothing to do with that
>speech.
>
>The press was instrumental in framing that. There's
>been a symbiotic relationship between the
>administration at the university and the press all
>along. The press really took the lead in drumming up
>furor. There were 400 feature articles on my case, or
>what is supposed to be my case, in the Denver metro
>area newspapers in barely sixty days. Pope died; I had
>the front page of the Rocky Mountain News. The Rocky
>Mountain News was at the very forefront of creating
>the appearance that there was scholarly impropriety
>involved in my work and to be able to separate that
>set of issues then, the scholarly impropriety from the
>speech issues.
>
>AMY GOODMAN: Ward Churchill, we have to go. But in
>addition to the lawsuit you're filing, what are your
>plans now?
>
>WARD CHURCHILL: Well, my plans now are to continue to
>do what it is that I’ve always done: I mean, being a
>professor at the University of Colorado hardly defines
>the nature of my life. In fact --
>
>AMY GOODMAN: We're going to have to leave it there. I
>want to thank you for being with us from Boulder, Ward
>Churchill, just fired by the University of Colorado.
>
>_____________________________________________
>
>Michael Slate, host of Beneath the Surface on KPFK,
>dedicated his show on Tuesday on Churchill. He
>interviewed Ward Churchill and Tom Mayer by phone, and
>played an excerpt from a ""Balance" Is The Wrong
>Criterion – And A Cover for a Witch-hunt – What We
>Need is the Search for the Truth: Education, Real
>Academic Freedom, Critical Thinking and Dissent by Bob
>Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist
>Party.
>
>Audio of the program can be listened to here:
>
>

Labels: academic freedom

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

Natalie Cerda, a former student who will be going to Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons this fall on a full-tuition scholarship is going to run in the NYC Marathon. All wonderful news! She is raising funds for the Armory Foundation. Here is what she has to say about this at this website, She is raising funds for a worthy cause. I'm very proud of you, Natalie. Thanks for staying in touch.

-Angela

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:08 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This is an interesting piece about Latino identity on Capitol Hill in D. C. I'm curious to see how all of this translates into political identity.

-Angela

Rising Voices of America
On the Hill, Latino Interns Have Much to Say About Who They Are and What We All Should Be
By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 26, 2007; C01

This land is your land, this land is their land, and they hail from California to the New York island -- 34 of the best and brightest Latino college students, sojourning in Washington to do the congressional summer intern thing.
They arrived just in time to witness the spectacular flameout of the Senate's immigration reform bill in June, then to read about attempts to deny services to illegal immigrants in Prince William and Loudoun counties, then to immerse themselves in a project to provide services to one and all in Columbia Heights.

Washington makes them mad. And it inspires them.

It also has made them think deeply about who they are, and where they fit into this turbulent feat of political imagination and plain winging-it called America.

Such existential ruminations spark other considerations: Whom do you date? How good (or bad) is your Spanish? How comfortable are you with your skin tone? (Too dark? Too light?) Are you American enough? Is the reputation of la Raza riding on your every move -- or is that perpetual feeling of being watched just an illusion?
One of the first things they did upon arriving was question authority, as represented by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, host of the internship program, which is providing transportation, lodging and a $2,000 stipend for eight weeks. Why, the interns demanded to know, do the members of the caucus insist on calling it the Hispanic caucus? Don't they realize Hispanic is an oppressive, colonial term that emphasizes the Spanish (European, white) part of their identity? To them, Hispanic belongs in the same lame purgatory of embarrassing cultural artifacts as the Macarena and Speedy Gonzales.
The correct term, the interns informed the adults, is Latino, which, to the students, better embraces the three rivers of blood that cascaded together to form a People. White blood, African blood, Indian blood: Hispanic, Latino. Mexican, Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Venezuelan, Colombian, Peruvian. . . . South American, North American . . . American?
Esther Aguilera, president of the institute, responded to her young charges by saying, well, yes, good point, but a few decades ago when the organization was forming, the U.S. census had gone with Hispanic, making it the official term. And thus the potent undertow of federal bureaucratic logic became another fact of Washington for the interns to experience.
Now, a few weeks after that baptismal rebellion over nomenclature, as the languid liberation of summer twilight settles over a plaza on the George Washington University campus, a group of the interns is sitting under a sculptural clock, sipping iced coffee and talking about identity. They're not who they were just a few years ago, but neither are they who they will become.
"I will never say I'm Hispanic," says Israel García, 22, a senior at the University of Colorado at Boulder. On his mother's side, his roots in a rural Colorado valley date back six generations, grafted with Apache stock. His father was an undocumented migrant lettuce-cutter from Baja California, Mexico, now a legal resident applying for citizenship.
García calls himself a Latino, an American citizen, but it's not that simple.
"I don't underestimate the power of us being allowed to name ourselves," he continues. "And to be able to say 'this' is who we are."
Beyond the Ethnic Cul-de-sacs
The immigration debate has forced Latinos to ponder who they are, or risk having that answer imposed by others.
"The media tends to portray the mexicano standing in front of Home Depot, as if that is what the Latino population is made of," says Ricardo Zavala, 27, a senior at Texas State University, whose family came to Texas from Mexico five generations ago.
"We're finding our voice," says Cristina Seda, 20, half Puerto Rican and half Jamaican, from the Bronx, a junior at Trinity College in Connecticut. "We're realizing, okay, this is one way people have perceived us, and they've generalized us in a lot of ways in order to make a voter bloc and create a group of consumers, and to sell to us and market to us -- and to market us to the greater society: 'This is salsa, buy this, Americans, look at this culture, it's really exotic!' And we're seeing there are a lot of us, and people are recognizing us, and now we're trying to shape it for ourselves, instead of having our identity shaped from the outside."
There's a contradiction in how the interns want to be understood. On the one hand, they're tired of the diversity of the Latino community being ignored. The interns' families together claim roots in eight Latin American countries. When students from Caribbean cultures cook in the little campus kitchens, students from the American Southwest don't recognize the names of the dishes.
And yet, unlike their parents and grandparents -- who found solace and strength in Chicano power, Puerto Rican power, Dominican power -- this generation feels free to move beyond those ethnic cul-de-sacs. Historians say this is the first time a pan-Latino identity is emerging, a banding together forced by the immigration debate.
"I used to get offended when people would say, 'You must be Mexican,' " says Carmen Mendoza, a junior at the University of Wisconsin, whose parents fled the civil war in Guatemala. "Now I don't get mad because you know what? . . . At the end of the day I look Mexican, even though I'm not Mexican, and my people are having the exact same struggle as the Mexicans are having."
"Our generation is the first generation to grow up with accessibility to each other," García says. "We have such instant means of communication, like the Internet, like cellphones . . . that our parents and grandparents didn't have. The only means they had when they came to this country was to survive with one another, was to be proud of la patria."

Shared Experiences
The summer sky is deepening, darkening. Identity also comes in colors, but colors are deceptive.
"I'm sure this has happened to all of us," García begins. As he elaborates, the group sitting beneath the sculptural timepiece chuckles in recognition.
"People will say, 'Where are you from?' I'll say Colorado. No, but where are you from? I was born and raised in Colorado. But where are you from? Well, my family is from Mexico. And that's the answer they're looking for. It's like, you're obviously not like us. You're obviously not an American. Colorado is not a good enough answer for you."
García speaks English without an accent. His hair is short, stiff and black. His skin is bronze.
Listening and laughing with the others is Yuri Castaño. He could give what García calls "the answer they're looking for." He's from Mexico City.
But Castaño is hardly ever asked. His skin is white, his hair brown and tousled.
"I have all the privileges of any white-skinned person in this country," says Castaño, 19, who immigrated with his mother about 10 years ago. He's a junior at the University of Pennsylvania. "Of course, it's beneficial to me in that sense, but in another sense, within the Latino community there's a little bit of a struggle to be recognized as Latino."
At Penn, he says, there are students who are known as Latin Americans who are richer and whiter. And there are Latinos who are poorer and browner.
"I could never identify with the Latin Americans, even though I was born and lived for 10 years in Mexico City, because I'm poor. But on the other hand, there's some tension with me and Latinos, because in terms of racial identity, they see me as white and not brown. . . . My identity has been evolving, to some extent. My sister is much darker, she looks much more indigenous than I do. I have felt shame about being light-skinned. The same way people have felt shame about being dark-skinned."
"I always wanted to look like my [lighter-skinned] sister, and my sister wanted to look like me," says Mendoza, who has grown past that longing and now proudly calls herself "la negrita indita" -- the dark Indian -- because of her Mayan heritage. Color is a head game, she says, and "You're never going to be satisfied."
Zavala, the fifth-generation Texan, is as light-skinned as Castaño. When he was growing up, Latino children would sometimes teasingly call him white. Now Zavala is dating an African American woman. He has realized that among the charms he appreciates in a woman is darker skin. "When I have children, I want them to have a darker tint because I don't want them ridiculed for being lighter," he says.
But identity is more than skin deep. Mendoza dated a white guy for six years. They had strong religious convictions in common. But he was from a more well-to-do family than hers, and she felt some cultural pressures.
"When I was around his family I would make sure I didn't wear my hoop earrings that day," she says. "I would make sure I didn't wear my hair big and curly like it really is, I would make sure that I straightened it. I would make sure I was on my best, best behavior because I wanted to prove I wasn't one of 'those' Latinos."
It didn't work out, not simply because he was white and she was brown, but because of all the strands of identity tied to those skin colors.
"I've dated Latinos, my boyfriend now is Native American," Mendoza says. "It's so much easier to date somebody who is Latino or a minority because you can just identify with them on a different level. There are certain things I could not express or get him to understand. No matter how much he loved me, no matter how great we got along, he was never going to understand, we didn't have that common bond."
Language Matters
A smattering of Spanish echoes in the brick building on F Street NW where the interns live in spartan suites. Many are fluently bilingual, but most conversations are in English, and group meetings are conducted in English.
Are you the language you speak?
Born in San Antonio, Krizia Martinez, 20, was spoken to in Spanish by her Puerto Rican parents. She started learning English in a bilingual class. At home she would play teacher with her brother, two years younger. "I would tell him, 'No, don't say it in Spanish, say it in English,' " she recalls. Now she is a bilingual senior at the University of Texas at San Antonio. But her brother can't speak Spanish, and he good-naturedly blames her. Martinez feels a little sheepish about her role.
"A good assimilator," she says ironically. "It's hard for him. A lot of people assume if you're of Latino background, you speak Spanish. . . . He's still very proud of being Puerto Rican. . . . As we try to shape our identity, we're trying not to lose what's important to us."
Zavala's great-great-grandfather was a vaquero, one of the early Texas cowboys. His father is a file manager for a law firm, his mother a mortgage loan processor. "My parents grew up in a time period where in the school system, if you spoke Spanish in class you got hit by your teacher," he says. "So when they had me and my younger brother, they felt that it would be hindrance to teach us Spanish. I'm really trying my best to learn it. And I definitely want to teach my children Spanish."
This tall, white, fifth-generation English-only Texan could melt completely into the big American pot. But that's not who he thinks he is. He can't fully explain why.
"I always felt that's who I am and I'm going to stay who I am," Zavala says. "A lot of mexicanos who are first-generation, they sometimes look at me and they go, 'How come you don't talk Spanish, or how come you don't eat certain foods every day like we do? How come your mother doesn't make homemade tortillas every morning?' My mom doesn't because she's fourth-generation and she doesn't know how to make tortillas. We grew up eating pizza pockets and corn dogs and spaghetti and Ramen noodles."
Job Experiences
Wearing smart dark suits, bunkered in cubicle warrens, they answer the telephones, catalogue mail from constituents, research legislation, attend hearings. In this epoch of the immigration wars, they've been on the receiving end of a lot of passion and venom blasted into Washington from the voters. The charged environment on the Hill has made the issue fresh and raw for the students, all of whom are legal residents or citizens, as the program requires.
Martinez, working in the office of Rep. Rubén Hinojosa (D-Tex.), went home one night and kept hearing the angry voice of a caller outraged about her taxes paying for school lunches for children of illegal immigrants.
García, a campus activist who helped organize a large immigrant rights march in Denver last year, is picking up tactical pointers from his perch in the office of Rep. John Salazar (D-Col.). Seeing the flow of communication coming in from advocates and voters, he concludes the most persuasive voices appear to be the ones anchored on a bedrock of usable fact. "I will never contact my representatives the same way again," he says. "Public policy is shaped by information."
Mendoza, assigned to the office of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), goes to a Senate-side cafeteria and notices many of the workers are Latinos. They immediately spot the Latina in the suit, rare enough on Capitol Hill.
"It's funny the sense of appreciation I get from them, and I give them," Mendoza says. "They speak to me in Spanish, they smile at me a little bit extra. It just feels good to see them, and they see me."
Mendoza's mother used to tell her, "No seas una Latina fea." Don't be a bad example. Don't disgrace the community. And if there have been times that directive feels like a burden, it also helps explain why many middle-class Latinos feel connected to working-class Latinos, why many with documents joined marches to support those without.
"We're Latinos and we share a common struggle," says García, who, like several of the others, grew up poor and feels privileged to be in college, when Latinos have the nation's highest high school dropout rates.
Some nights, the interns gather in the basement of their building to plan their community service project. It's going to be a health and education fair Saturday at the Mary's Center in Columbia Heights.
It's aimed at high school students and their parents. The education component will "demystify the college process," García says, "helping people understand college is not a place in the clouds."

Identity Questions
What is an American?
Sometimes they feel the vertigo of existing between identities. Mendoza, despite being born in the United States, suspects that because of her Mayan copper skin color, she will never be perceived as American enough. Or is that just a perception in her own head? When she visits Guatemala, her cousins have no doubt: She is "the American."
Other times she thinks: "I'm Latina, I'm Guatemalan, you cannot take that away from me. I also feel that I'm more American than others, too. What is the purpose of America? The way I see it, I'm fitting that mold of what our founding fathers wanted, which was for someone to come, have a new beginning and fight oppression."
"I refuse to accept that idea that we will never be 'American enough,' " says Seda, the Bronx-born daughter of a Puerto Rican father and a Jamaican mother. "I think it's our job to redefine, and define, what America is."
The conversation beneath the clock is ticking down, and it's going to be a warm night.
"The thing that we're refusing to do is become just like the white population of this country, because we're not and we never will be," García says. "The American Dream is the simple idea that you can come and work and get something back and make your life better than what it was before. When we don't feel access to that dream anymore, we lose our stake in it, and we're not American anymore. But when we go back to our countries of origin, when we see, well maybe I've worked hard and look what I've gotten, and it's a lot more than what I had here, that's when again we're, like, maybe the dream is still alive. Maybe I am American."

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

Yovanna Berges of Lawrence, who is a Spanish-speaking Peruvian immigrant, wants her 7-year-old son, Jordy, to retain her native tongue, though he also speaks English. (Jodi Hilton for The Boston Globe)

Immigrant parents struggle to keep their children bilingual
By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff | July 22, 2007

LAWRENCE -- After a lunch of hot dogs and rice, Jordy Berges blasted a ball off the wall of the lunchroom at his mother's office, his stomping grounds for the summer.

"No juegues aquí," Yovanna Berges scolded her 7-year-old son, telling him in Spanish to stop.

"Sorry," he answered her, in English.

Berges, an immigrant from Peru, is growing accustomed to such conversations with her son. She is struggling to raise him to speak English and Spanish fluently, which might not seem like a big challenge in the city with the highest proportion of Latinos in Massachusetts. But researchers say Berges and immigrant parents nationwide are confronting a difficult truth: Their children are losing their languages.

According to research presented to Congress in May, even the children of immigrants prefer to speak English by the time they are adults.

Rubén G. Rumbaut, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine, and his team of researchers looked at 5,700 adults in their 20s and 30s in Southern California from different generations to see how long their language survived. A key finding centered on 1,900 American-born children of immigrants. The shift toward English among them was swift: While 87 percent grew up speaking another language at home, only 34 percent said they spoke it well by adulthood. And nearly 70 percent said they preferred to speak English.

"English wins, and it does so in short order," said Rumbaut, who presented his findings to the US House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration in May. "What we're talking about is a real phenomenon."

It is difficult for children to sustain their parents' languages amid the tidal wave of American pop culture, including movies and television, coupled with societal pressure to speak only English. Most schools and communities do little to preserve bilingualism, Rumbaut said. Even bilingual education programs, which Massachusetts voters dismantled in 2002, were commonly designed to help students make the transition to English-only classrooms.

Generations of immigrants have seen their languages fade, but Rumbaut said the cost is higher now as businesses expand overseas, the United States is more diverse, and national security agencies are clamoring for people who speak foreign languages. The children themselves are losing a skill that could give them an edge in the job market.

The erosion of language cuts across all backgrounds, Rumbaut said. In his study, less than 25 percent of the US-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese immigrants said they spoke their parents' languages well. Chinese is one of the languages President Bush declared a priority for national security last year.

Spanish was found to survive longer, largely because Southern California is a high-immigrant area and Spanish is ubiquitous on television and radio and in newspapers.

Still, gaps emerged. Almost all second-generation Mexican- Americans were raised speaking Spanish, but only 60 percent spoke it well by early adulthood, and half preferred English. By the third generation, barely 10 percent spoke Spanish well, according to the study; almost all preferred English.

While Rumbaut's study did not include Massachusetts, he said it was even more likely that language loss would occur here, because immigrants make up only 14 percent of the population, about half the percentage in California, meaning that children here have more exposure to English.

Until now, much of the debate over language has focused on the successful campaigns in Massachusetts, California, and Arizona to end bilingual education in public schools. Bilingual education was still strong in California when the participants in Rumbaut's study were young, but Rumbaut said English still prevailed.

In 2002, Massachusetts voters declared that all instruction must be in English, except for children on waivers that allow them to take bilingual classes and in a small number of schools that teach two languages simultaneously. Those programs, for example, teach English and a language such as Chinese, to native speakers of both.

Many Massachusetts parents and advocates say they are scrambling to keep children's native languages from slipping away. In Boston, advocates are pushing for more two-way schools. At Brockton High, children of Cape Verdean and Brazilian immigrants sign up for Portuguese lessons.

Even Rosalie Porter, an author of the Massachusetts initiative that dismantled bilingual education in schools, said she favors expanding two-way schools as long as parents want them.

Berges, who is married to an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, is raising Jordy in Lawrence, a majority Latino city, where 83 percent of schoolchildren speak another language at home.

Along Essex Street, one of the main thoroughfares, there are signs in Spanish advertising a store selling "Ropa para Caballeros," or men's clothing. Spanish-language newspapers abound.

But her son is fascinated by all things American, including Spiderman and hamburgers, and his communication with her reflects that. The other day he complained of a headache and said, "I have a pain in my cabeza."

"I'm afraid he's going to stop speaking Spanish," said Berges, an outreach worker at the community service center run by Greater Lawrence Community Action Council Inc.

Julia Sigalovsky of Sudbury, a scientist from Russia who arrived here in 1989, said she was stunned when her 11-year-old son suddenly refused to speak Russian after a few months in this country.

When she and her husband chatted in Russian at the supermarket, he was mortified. "Speak English," he told them.

With her second son, she tried harder. She sang him lullabies in Russian, hired a Russian-speaking babysitter, and inundated him with movies in her native tongue, like the Russian version of "Winnie the Pooh."

Now 14, he hardly speaks Russian, either. At home, the parents speak Russian and their sons respond in English. Even the family dog, answers to English. "We speak two languages," Sigalovsky said. "It looks totally insane for somebody who is watching."

While researchers and advocates agree that children of immigrants are losing languages, they disagree about what to do about it.

Porter, though she favors two-way programs, said English should be the priority of public schools. Parents can teach another language at home, she said.

"It is an economic advantage, but every single child does not want to keep two languages," said Porter, who still speaks the Italian she learned from her immigrant parents. "Some kids will become professors of language. Some kids will become international bankers. Some kids will not bother with any of that, and they'll become successful in their own way."

Samuel Hurtado is coordinator of the Latino Education Action Network in Boston, where 39 percent of students speak another language at home, according to the state. Hurtado said the city should expand two-way programs so that children can maintain both languages. Many parents cannot afford luxuries such as tutors or trips abroad, said Hurtado, who plans to teach his 1-year-old son English and Spanish at home and enroll him in a Chinese immersion program in school.

"We talk so much about globalism, and we're missing a lot of opportunities for our children to be raised bilingual," he said. "This is becoming more of a class thing. When you go to the suburbs, parents get the value that it is to be bilingual."

Some parents say they are more concerned their children learn English than their native language. But Juanita Garcia of Methuen said she wants her children to learn Spanish so they can speak to their grandmother, who is visiting from Puerto Rico.

One day last week, all three generations went out for hamburgers. The parents and grandmother sat at one table and spoke Spanish; the teenagers sat at another and spoke English.

"I want them to have two languages," Garcia said in Spanish. "But all the time, they speak English."

Maria Sacchetti can be reached at msacchetti@globe.com.


© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Labels: bilingualism

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:22 PM 5 comments Links to this post

Textbooks may be on school desks for a decade
With funds held up by lawmakers, state tries to replenish shelves

12:00 AM CDT on Thursday, July 19, 2007

By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News
tstutz@dallasnews.com
AUSTIN – Texas students will have to use the same textbooks for a few more years while the state braces for a big jump in costs within a few years, largely because of a series of postponed purchases ordered by the Legislature.

State Board of Education members were told Wednesday that they will have to consider a new strategy to handle massive textbook buys with limited funds. Among the options they will have to look at is using more classroom sets of books rather than giving all students their own books.

It also means that students will be using some texts – such as U.S. history books – for longer than a decade, even though state policy calls for a six-year replacement cycle for textbooks in the public schools.

"It's a big concern for us," said state board member Geraldine Miller, R-Dallas. "We are raising enough money every year to buy the books we need, but we have to depend on the Legislature to actually appropriate the money – and they have not always done so.

"We're caught in a Catch-22, and as a result, some books will be kept in classrooms longer than we would like."

Textbooks are paid for out of earnings from the state's $26 billion Permanent School Fund, which is overseen by the education board. But the Legislature decides every two years how much money to appropriate for textbooks.

Budget-conscious lawmakers have scaled back board requests for textbook funding and have ordered in two of the last five years that the board not adopt any new books.

As a result, the state will spend only $255 million over the next three years on new textbooks – a fraction of what state education officials proposed.

The postponed purchases – as well as increased costs because of student enrollment growth and rising prices on textbooks – will hit the state budget hard in three years, when the estimated cost of books needed by the 2010-11 school year will be nearly $1 billion, according to a report from the Texas Education Agency.

Most of the books scheduled to be replaced – including English and reading textbooks for elementary grades – will be nine years old by then.

Textbook costs will continue to soar after that, according to the TEA report, as schools catch up on book replacements.

Board member Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi complained that students would be using U.S. and world history books for at least 10 years, leaving big gaps in their learning of those subjects.

"We can't afford to have textbooks in our schools that are 10 years old," she said, urging other board members to juggle scheduled book adoptions so that history and other social studies books can be replaced sooner.

Board members were presented with a series of options to handle the backlog of textbook purchases, and they will choose from those options over the next few months.

Among the steps the board could take would be to reduce the number of books that school districts could order each year – districts can now order books for up to 110 percent of their enrollment. The board could also reduce the annual price adjustment publishers are allowed for their books – now set at 5 percent.

Texas has historically been one of the largest textbook purchasers in the nation, giving the state enormous influence over the content of books marketed across the country.

Labels: textbooks

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:00 PM 0 comments Links to this post

At this Irvine school, that sound you hear is Chinese
Startalk, a national security program to develop Chinese and Arabic speakers, is being tested at the nation's largest Chinese cultural center.
By David Kelly
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

July 20, 2007

Slater Stanley is only 14 but already has big plans. He intends to have mastered Chinese by the time he finishes high school, then wants to head to Beijing for college.

"I don't know why I'm interested in Chinese culture," said Slater, of Newport Beach. "I think I was just born with it."

As a student at the Irvine Chinese School, he has certainly come to the right place. A national security effort is underway to create more Chinese and Arabic speakers, and the Irvine school is a focus of that effort.

Irvine has become a growing center of Chinese culture in Southern California. There are about 30,000 residents of Chinese descent here, city officials say. There are Chinese supermarkets, plays, operas, Buddhist temples and a cultural center that is one of the largest in the U.S. More Chinese Americans live in Irvine than any other city in the county.

The school, at the newly opened, $12-million, 44,000-square-foot South Coast Chinese Cultural Center, is the country's largest site for the Startalk program. Funded by the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Startalk aims to lure students into learning languages deemed critical to national security and the economy.

About 250 students are enrolled in Chinese immersion classes in Irvine. Representatives of the Startalk program visited the site Thursday to check on its progress.

"In the U.S., foreign languages have always taken a back seat to other disciplines, and we want to change that," said Betsy Hart, associate director of the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland and head of Startalk. "This is a pilot year, and we are testing to see which models will be most effective."

In one room, beginning students were learning basic characters, in another more advanced children were typing in Chinese. A few weeks ago, one class debated abortion in Chinese.

The difference between immersion classes and regular courses is the intensity. Some classes are held entirely in Chinese.

The students, who are mostly in high school, have various reasons for studying the language.

"I took Chinese because we adopted a Chinese girl and I wanted to help her keep her language," said Timothy Johnson, 15, of Mission Viejo. "I learned a lot more here compared to high school because in high school my teacher barely spoke Chinese."

Cynthia Wang's Chinese teacher wouldn't let her speak English, which she said has improved her conversational skills.

"The teacher doesn't talk to us like we are little kids," she said.

The Irvine site was chosen after David Wu, who heads the Southern California Council of Chinese Schools, and representatives from the Chinese cultural center heard about the program and applied for a federal grant. They were awarded $193,000 and set about devising a one-month, intensive curriculum.

"This is the first time we have seen a federal grant program come along to teach Chinese," said Tim Cheng, manager of the cultural center and vice chairman of the Irvine Community Services Commission. "We used to have to beg our kids to learn Chinese, and now it has become very popular."

Shuhan Wang, executive director of Chinese Language Initiatives for the Asia Society, accompanied Hart and said that unlike Arabic, there is a large infrastructure of Chinese language schools in the U.S. and far more Chinese speakers.

"We want to dispel the notion that these languages are difficult to learn," she said. "They are different but learnable, and when students do learn the alphabet or characters, they feel very smart."

Startalk, which ends in Irvine on July 26, could continue next year if it gets another grant. Hart's reaction indicated it seems quite possible.

"I was blown away by the advanced level of what was going on in the classrooms, even in the beginning classes," she said. "We ask, 'Are the students happy? Are they learning?' And from what we see, it seems to be very successful."

david.kelly@latimes.com

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

Labels: language immersion

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:58 PM 2 comments Links to this post

Interesting read from colleague David Weiner here in Austin. -Angela

This is my hypothesis for hopefullness.

DW


Education for Sanity and a Reason for Hope

David Weiner
July 21, 2007

We can't save the world with hype and hyperbole -- religious,
ethical, political or otherwise. We can only save the world through
education. Here's why.

PART I

1

Contrary to popular belief, most of us are neither biologically nor socially inclined to care deeply about all people and all creatures. We are hard-wired for altruism, but on a limited scale that includes loved ones and friends, kith and kin -- an in-group. Altruism towards out-groupers only kicks in when we perceive a pragmatic need for it. In order for us to become universally humane this awareness must assume the highest priority among us. People must first understand logically why expanded altruism enhances survival and then integrate their inferences emotionally.

If some are further advanced along this “evolutionary highway than others, all of us, possess the unique capacity to embark upon it. The history of our species is the history of a creature bereft of instinct, but driven to discover useful strategies to fill its needs. Though no instinct compelled humans to love their culturally distant neighbors, genetic tools did compel us to recognize environmental patterns impacting our survival -- including patterns indicating that an out-group’s power may spell trouble. We could negotiate and cooperate with adversaries as well as fight or flee from them. This ability rationally to select among coping strategies, rather than gut-level emotionally to react, was a genetically endowed capacity maximally developed among our species. It grew when we suffered the consequences of strategies that didn’t work well. We could expand our definition of who belonged in our in-group, of who merited compassion, when we learned that our own survival was thus enhanced..

Psychologists recognize the ability to embrace people outside of our in-groups to be an advanced adaptive strategy, engaging us emotionally as well as cognitively. We think, feel and behave differently when we do it. It begins, however, at the cognitive level, which is why education is the proper motivator for change.

2

It was only predictable, given how natural selection works, that homo sapiens sapiens, Earth's eventual top predator would possess precisely our penchant for ruthlessness. Archeology reveals how like other predators humans have always strived to eliminate out-group competition for essential resources. Whether tribes or nations, our forbears removed or enslaved weaker competitors, and negotiated only when they had to. When weaker, people have found ways to become stronger and overcome repression, often creating environmental havoc in the process. Based on this evidence alone, our intra-species dance of death may seem destined to engulf the entire planet, instinct providing us little protection from the self-destructive ramifications of our intelligence. The near substitution of reason for instinct would seem to have made us both the king of predators and an ecological disaster all at once.

Fortunately, other evidence indicates that we are not intransigently bound to behave in such fashion. As technology advances, our ability to perceive complex patterns and trends increases. The very intellectual coldness that allows us to kill without mercy also allows us to perceive waste and warfare as practices inimical to our long term survival. Recent work in neuro-psychology reveals how reason and emotion interact to define our adaptive capabilities. Thus, we can behave more cruelly than other predators, such as lions, but we behave more adaptively as well. Lions kill only when hungry, not out of anger or sadism. However, when still unsatiated they cannot opt to kill fewer Wildebeests, even when reason would indicate the wisdom of such a course in order to ensure a future food supply. Our application of reason under such circumstances constitutes a genetically motivated urging, not merely a cognitive choosing. Whether or not human groups make functional enough, foresightful enough decisions at any given time, we have the unique capacity to do so. More importantly, we have the ability to evolve in this capacity. As it turns out, it would seem that we do possess some protective instinctive equipment.

Anthropology tells us that natural selection “directed” homo sapiens sapiens to prioritize empathetic altruism among in-groups. The best explanation for why we have such a big brain is that it allows us to form large in-groups of around a hundred and fifty peers (termite and ant colonies are much larger of course, but they lack our flexibility). Chimpanzees can manage in-groups of about fifty. Hominids are not the only creatures capable of altruism. Many birds and mammals (but not reptiles) have been observed to self-sacrifice for fellow creatures. Altruism can preserve group integrity; which enhances the propagation of species genes; which is how natural selection works.

Within our in-groups we learn that kindness pays off. Our personal and collective security is enhanced when we individually restrain and modify powerful drives generated by the most ancient and primitive segment of our brain. The old brain, called the R-complex, or sometimes reptilian brain, because we inherited it from them, urges us to simplify life to the max: to kill out of craving or anger, to flee out of fear, to procreate when filled with lust. A newer, but still very old brain segment, the limbic system, provides more complex emotions: sadness, desire, joy, love etc. The youngest part of our brain, the part that makes us unique, is called the neocortex. It is, essentially, the seat of reason and competes with the R-complex in determining how we deal with feelings generated by the limbic system. Only our nearest relatives, the great apes, appear to possess the special neurological equipment, called spindle cells, that enables the neo-cortex to trump powerful R-complex urges ; to prioritize rational strategizing over non-rational reaction. But great apes possess this skill in tiny measure compared us. Alone among earth's creatures, we possess the capacity to self-regulate emotions and behavior to a significant degree. When we do it right, we feel self-actualized. Therefore, ironically perhaps, it appears that we are strongest as a species when we strive to be happy rather than merely safe.

Neuroscience remains a pioneering field, however, and a full understanding of how R-complex impulses and neo-cortexical strategizing interact to frame human behavior remains sketchy. Nevertheless, theories predicting our neo-cortexical ability to grow and mature emotionally, culturally as well as individually, are now more solidly based on empirical evidence than the belief that man is intransigently savage (the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and to some degree Freud as well, visualized man as hopelessly enslaved to primitive drives and emotions). No fundamental drives doom us to treat one another monstrously if we choose not to do so.

3

Neanderthals, and other homo sapiens too much governed by the primitive parts of their brains, succumbed to homo sapiens sapiens in the race for natural selection's brass ring. We beat them out in the evolutionary struggle for dominance largely because of our greater ability to behave altruistically, resulting in the greater functionality of our in-groups. As a result of this competence, we have become our own greatest threat. Humans now have the ability to globally self-destruct, taking most of life on the planet with us. No evidence indicates that our capacity to universalize social altruism constitutes more than a hypothesis, however evidence does exist that when warfare posed a lose-lose proposition our ancestor adeptly formed new combinations ­ across in-groups.

Anthropologists tell us that if horses, dogs, goats and pigs had existed in the Neolithic Western hemisphere as well as in Eurasia, or if life had been as difficult in Eurasia as it was on most of the planet, global conflict might be far less extreme than at present. Eurasians became immune to the diseases spread by the animals that made them prosperous. Agriculture came easily, and hard metals for weapons were plentiful. Communities quickly over-populated. Horses were plentiful and warfare became a useful strategy for finding new territories to exploit. When Eurasian warrior hordes used up the human and natural resources of a region they simply moved on.

In the Western Hemisphere things were different. Life was hard, and it took great concentration to eke a decent living out of unfertile plains, un-nourishing jungles, and arid mountains. In Meson-America, occasional conquering tribes often starved to death trying to rebuild what they had destroyed. Aztecs did indeed practice horrible cruelties, as did other empires of the Western Hemisphere from time to time. Nevertheless, Aztecs, Incans, Mayans, Toltecs, and Olmecs among many others invented methods of city and regional planning, of political coordination, and social integration far beyond anything witnessed in Europe. They were masters of genetic engineering before Mendel, created maize (not discovered it, as is commonly thought), transformed the Amazon forests into plentiful gardens and much more. European writers understood none of this, describing Indians as noble savages living effortlessly off of nature's bounty. In North America, the constant migration of tribes southward from the Bering Straits created ripe conditions for perpetual warfare. A growing literature reveals how among the great Indian confederations, such as the Iroquois, warfare was rare and highly controlled.

If Europeans were fine warriors and poor negotiators, it wasn't their military skills that brought the New World to its knees in the fifteenth century. It was the diseases they brought with them. The many millions thriving in North and South America lacked immunity and their devastation was beyond measure.. Guns and swords only briefly provided the Spaniards some advantage, and then mainly when they wielded them from horseback. With the invention of the bolo (a weapon made by attaching two balls to the ends of two ropes bound at one end, and then whirled and thrown at an animal's legs) even this advantage evaporated.

But for the diseases, the clash of European and American cultures might have moved quickly beyond conflict to an entirely new kind of cooperative society. The vision of just such a renaissance motivated Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to borrow from the Iroquois in attempting to fashion models for their own peers to consider, with all too limited success..

4

How does this basic information concerning who we are and might conceivably become apply to what is happening today? Does a world of perpetually clashing civilizations not seem more inevitable now than ever? The United States, arguably the world's most powerful aggressor ever, apparently assumes this to be the case. In order to survive in a world of gangs, or civilization size tribes according to Neocon thinking, the United States must remain the toughest gang/tribe on Earth. President Jimmy Carter’s chief Middle Eastern advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski ( in The Grand Chessboard, and his equally prestigious colleague Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations state this thesis clearly and concisely. These works constitute cornerstones of the ideological edifice of the Right, and find extensive acceptance on the Left as well.. Within the United States, and by default everywhere given the U.S. military superiority, warfare as gang/tribe (in-group) strategy appears to be on the rise, not the decline.

Growing evidence tells us that besides seeming inhumane (and numbingly depressing to many of us), Neocon gang-warfare strategy constitutes poor reasoning. It is no longer probable, much less guaranteed, that Machiavellian policies adopted by U.S. leaders and their mirror images abroad can continue, as in the past, to guarantee in-group security. Quite apart from the awful moral and ethical implications of such behavior, the ruthless conquering and oppression of opponents without considering negotiation (thin gesturing to the contrary fooling no one) appears no longer a feasible goal. Only a thorough examination of such questions can determined whether our leaders presently operate rationally.

PART II

1

History tells us that while the species at large seems to operate rationally, isolated groups and individuals have not always done so. Elites in particular can easily lose their way. History tells us that power does indeed corrupt. The powerful tend to shut out news of reality in favor of what they want to hear. Witness the failure of post WWII Western powers to acknowledge Islam’s rapid modernizing trend until Brzezinski spelled it out in the 1960s, insisting in The Grand Chessboard that unless it could be halted Western economic control of the world would be in dire peril. In today's world, unfortunately, when powers-that-be bent on global conflict become socially lost, the predictable consequence is universal devastation.. Our world is so interconnected that this time the certain chaos produced by the decline of the ruling empire promises to engulf all life on the planet. Nor can we envision a simple circulation of elites, where a new, more rational if no less ruthless ruling class seamlessly replaces the old. A true clash of civilizations could well mean the end of civilization..

If addressing the question of aggression’s feasibility seems cold blooded it also seems the most rational way out of the trap of endless in-group vs out-group aggression. Because we are not innately compelled to act humanely toward “others,” we must elect to do so based upon evidence of its survival value. Because we possess the capacity to assimilate such evidence rationally, and then to integrate it emotionally, we should be able to achieve the level of moral and ethical behavior that we envision but cannot yet fully embrace. The true function of education is to ensure this logical/emotional process by enabling us to gather and analyze evidence pertaining to the question of whether warfare can any longer guarantee the survival of anyone.

2

In this context it would seem that the absence of debate concerning whether our nation's leaders can carry out their Machiavellian goals should be of the greatest concern. Whether or not U.S. citizens deplore their Vice President’s undisguised readiness to conquer, torture and enslave when "necessary" is indeed a crucial question, but it is not the same question. Passionately deploring the violence of leaders who can presumably keep one safe is not the same as vigorously rejecting leaders who can clearly not keep one safe. At this stage of our cultural evolution, U.S. citizens are still unlikely to challenge their leaders for being ruthless, but might well do so if they perceive them to be irrational and inept. Therefore, it is crucial to ask if our leaders can, with a reasonable degree of certainty, annihilate masses of poor Africans and Asians, and kill and oppress "expendable" Americans as well, with impunity?

The absence of this debate constitutes perhaps the strongest indication of the need for a powerful education initiative. Much of the success of the Civil Rights Movement depended upon replacing common assumptions about the biology of race with facts contradicting those assumptions. The threat of nuclear warfare was nullified worldwide as hard evidence of its devastating consequences became widespread. Predicting the inability of our leaders to prevail is counterintuitive for most people. Our leaders, and those before them have indeed prevailed, for as far back as we can recall. Subjugation of the weak by the strong has been the norm. Powerful evidence tells us that this may well no longer be true. In important ways the world has changed.

Economists inform us that the gross national products of the very group of nations most exploited by Western imperialism, the Have-Nots, has grown faster than any other economic sector. Have-Nots have increasingly demonstrated resilience, imagination and adaptive skill at dealing with imperial Haves. For decades ranking members of our own State Department and intelligence community have acknowledged Arabic peoples to be highly adept modernizers even as the public is encouraged to view Arabs as backward, religious fanatics. The Islamic Fundamentalist Movement has demonstrated a remarkable ability to manage finances electronically, to create effective combatant units operating like tiny islands connected only to a central command post, and to present well armed and powerful nations with an efficient enemy difficult if not impossible to eliminate. Like tiny-hornets, they fly too fast to be swatted and deliver lethal bites, repeatedly

History tells us that the world of warfare has always changed. In today's world, conventional warfare is passé. Today’s wars are not waged between armies and navies and air forces so much as between the former and small groups of very sophisticated guerilla fighters. No guerilla band can defeat any nation’s army or police force, but no nation’s army or police force can protect its own citizenry from being ravaged by guerillas. The tiniest, most backward village has access to the Internet, affording people detailed information about how to obtain and use biological and chemical weapons. When "little people" willing to die to deliver such weapons are managed and orchestrated by sophisticated organizations operating as easily from London, Calcutta, Buenos Aires or Los Angeles as from a foxhole in Afghanistan; and when these leaders use small forces to accomplishing their goals, not hesitating to sacrifice masses of their own people in order to create chaos amongst stationary communities surrounded by vast virtually un-policeable borders and avenues of access (our government's claims to the contrary notwithstanding); then attacks by "little people" seem likely to achieve a high degree of success. Powerful nation-states possess vastly superior arms, but the inferior weapons of the scattered riff-raff who oppose them can surely deliver socially devastating havoc.

It seems that that an outcome of modernization predictable for nearly a century has now materialized: No matter how well-armed one nation or confederation, international conflict is now a lose-lose proposition. With a high degree of probability, in the twenty-first century any population's survival depends upon the survival of all.

3

Daily reports from the Middle East reveal how little imagination is required to envision devastating attacks upon random schools, small towns, church picnic's and crowded streets, changing the United States into a place of fear, depression, and outrage at leaders who add to our torment in order to preserve their control. This is what U.S. citizens can rationally anticipate if we fail accurately to assess the rationality, if indeed the sanity, of our leaders. These include ­ not merely the Incumbency, but the more elusive, shadowy group who no longer earn but simply own money. The men who sit on the boards of major corporations, who manage the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who fund the great Neo/liberal Neo/conservative think tanks, and who decide which candidates We The People will be allowed to select amongst. Even as their/our government proclaims that only they can protect us from ethno-centric enemies bent upon our destruction, history firmly rejects this argument. In-groups have defined themselves based upon ethnicity, religion and ideology, but wars have been waged when people thought they could win them, or when their backs were so far to the wall they found death preferable to the life they faced. Only the insane pursue warfare likely to produce only chaos. Until this point, somehow sanity has managed to prevail in a world torn by warfare for what hopefully will turn out to be a brief period of human history.

Evidence that our government bears a rich tradition of subjugation, enslavement and the extermination of inconvenient and easily disposed of out-groupers is abundant. Evidence that those we subjugate constitute threats to our way of life is scarce. Contrary to the propaganda citizens receive, the State Department’s own chief advisors since the 1950s have characterized Arabs in particular as people eager to join us at our table of prosperity, not to replace us. They need our expertise and hope we need their labor. They seem motivated not by hatred of our lifestyle, but by optimism that they too can attain the skills of production and marketing and planning that we have achieved. Their history indicates that they are, however, as capable as we of ruthlessness, and are no less strategically adaptive. Having not occupied the seat of power for centuries, they may be less corrupt and less insane than we.. If we will not accept them, they will surely do all possible to change our minds.

4

Education for sanity might begin with this lesson: that social conflict is not an inevitable product of human nature. Growing evidence affirms that human conflict has more to do with social context than with genes or personality or primitive instincts and drives.

The second lesson, perhaps, might be that ethics and morality, ­ our commitment to decency, ­ constitute the most practical political basis for our continued existence. Extending the concept of in-group to include all humans, and then all beings, would seem to be a necessary, and perhaps even sufficient step toward saving the world.. At large we are wise enough, probably, to grasp and act upon these facts. Should we, on the other hand, allow power-corrupted leaders, people who seem truly ill by any reasonable definition of the term, to nullify our collective wisdom, our suicide seems predictable ­ and puzzling. It would amount to a profound and strange reversal of the adaptive driving forces of natural selection.

The third lesson might describe how change could occur. As people grasp essential facts and patterns, some of which have only come into sharp relief during the past few decades, there will surely be tipping points and groundswells and upheavals, and a new renaissance of social organization. This might include revamping high school un-history courses, creating people's media, and forming "churches" that deplore addictive religion. It also might mean selecting political candidates compelled to deal in truth whomever this might discomfit. It might mean offering people currently choosing the false safety of fascism, a real choice.


SELECTED REFERENCES

Besteman, Catherine and Hugh Gusterson (eds.). Why America's Top
Pundits are Wrong: anthropologists talk back. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005.

Bibby, Geoffrey, Four Thousand Years Ago : a panorama of life in the
second millennium B.C. New York: Knopf, 1962.

Blaut, James M., The Colonizer's Model of the World : geographical
diffusionism and Eurocentric history. New York: Guilford Press, 1993.

Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. New York: Basic Books 1969

Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard : American primacy and its
geostrategic imperatives. New York: BasicBooks, 1997.

Chomsky, Noam. Hegemony or Survival : America's quest for global
dominance. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003.

Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs, and Steel : the fates of human
societies. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999.

Eisler, Riane T. The chalice and the Blade: our history, our future.
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987.

Fonagy, Peter, .Gyorgy Gergeley, Elliot L. Jurist and Mary Target
(eds.) Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of Self.
New York: Other Press, 2002.

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: the power of thinking without thinking. New
York: Little, Brown and Co., 2005.

Gladwell, Malcolm.The Tipping Point : how little things can make a big
difference. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, 2002.

Goleman, Daniel. Social Intelligence : the new science of human
relationships. New York: Bantam Books, 2006.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. The age of Extremes: a history of the world,
1914-1991. New York: Pantheon Books,1994.

Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Johnson, Chalmers A. Blowback : the costs and consequences of
American. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000.

LaFeber, Walter. Inevitable Revolutions : the United States in Central
America. New York: W.W . Norton, 1984.

Lattimore, Owen.The situation in Asia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1949.

Labeviere, Richard. Dollars for Terror : the United States and Islam.
New York: Algora Publishing, 2000.

Mann, Charles C. 1491 : new revelations of the Americas before
Columbus. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Nutting, Anthony. The Arabs; a narrative history from Mohammed to the
present. New York, C.N. Potter,1964.

Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate : the modern denial of human nature /
Steven Pinker. New York: Viking, 2002.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Schore, Allan N. Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self : the
neurobiology of emotional development. Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum
Associates, 1994.

Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and its Discontents. New York: W.W.
Norton, 2002.

Stone, Merlin. When God was a Woman. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1976.

Surowiecki, James. The wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor Books, 2005.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:53 PM 1 comments Links to this post

From colleague Roberto Calderon. -Angela

Nota: See, U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education
Statistics. (2007). _The Condition of Education 2007_ (NCES 2007-064).
Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Each major catetory contained in this annual report responds to
individual indicators or subcategories that provide a detailed sketch or
analysis of the major national and regional trends supported by a short
brief containing the principal data arranged in two or three tables.
This is valuable data and is pertinent to all levels and types of public
(and to some extent private) education, and policymaking generally.
Listed below are some of the subcategories that may be of interest to
readers. Please share the information with others whose own work may be
supported by this readily available body of publicly-accessed knowledge.
Though issued annually, the current report charts trends in public
schools from 1972 to 2005 due to the data's availability.

Of significance to Latinos of course is that as a group they are the
major reason why "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" (see,
southernstudies.org/facingsouth, June 2007). In addition, the report
found that: "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." Finally, 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%." Altogether, whether we see
what's going in Texas as part of larger national and regional trends in
either the South or West, as this report arranges its data, the numbers
are significant and help explain and contextualize what's going on in
our individual cities, campuses, and so forth, K-20. Local or regional
trends are part and parcel of national trends where ethnicity is
concerned in education.

In K-12 education, for instance, between 1972 and 2005, the total
number of students enrolled changed considerably. Whites decreased from
being 78% of the total in 1972, and stood at 58% in 2005. Blacks for
their part remained relatively stable across the 33-year-period, a
generation's worth, since their numbers went from 15% to 16% of the
national total. The significant increases came in Latino and "Other"
enrollments, where the numbers went from 6% to 20% of the total for
Latinos, and Others, which includes Asians, American Indians, students
of more than one race, and so forth, increased from 1% to 7%.

Attached PDFs Provide Sample of the Data: In the section following the
"Table of Contents" are copied the brief analyses made of the data
pertaining to two separate Indicators. These include "Racial/Ethnic
Distribution of Public School Students" (Indicator 5) and "Undergraduate
Education," Indicator 8. These indicators and policy briefs correspond
to the part of the Table of Contents called "Participation in
Education." You will also find the PDFs for these policy briefs.

The overall link to the National Center for Education Statistics,
Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education is:
. Be sure and bookmark the
site.

Adelante.

Roberto R. Calderón
Historia Chicana [Historia]

Labels: government report

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:50 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Utah tells feds how much it costs to teach immigrants
State wants its money back for 'failed immigration policy'
By Nicole Stricker

The Salt Lake Tribune

Article Last Updated:07/19/2007 12:20:07 AM MDT

Utah legislators frustrated by illegal immigration are finished being nice - they're sending a strongly worded letter to the feds.
Armed with a legislative audit estimating the cost of educating undocumented immigrants, members of the Education Interim Committee voted Wednesday to send the audit to Utah's congressional delegation and the U.S. departments of Immigration and Education.
An accompanying letter will request "reimbursement to the state from the federal government of costs resulting from their failed immigration policy."
"I doubt they'll pay it," said Rep. Steve Urquhart, R-St. George, who made the motion to send the letter. "But I think it's important that they hear from the state."
The audit, which was released in May, estimated Utah spends between $63 million and $98 million educating undocumented immigrants. Its narrow scope considered neither the U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants nor the taxes contributed by such workers.
The audit estimated costs to educate undocumented immigrants by roughly estimating their numbers - somewhere between 11,000 and 17,000 - and figuring the state spends the per-pupil average, plus low-income and English-language learner funds on them.
Democratic Reps. Carol Spackman-Moss of Holladay and Mark Wheatley of Murray, and Sen. Ross Romero, D-Salt Lake City, voted against the motion.
nstricker@sltrib.com

Labels: immigrant children, immigration and education

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:42 PM 0 comments Links to this post

As Mexico's schools go, so goes its economy: And the number of migrants headed north
by William McKenzie / Tuesday, July 24, 2007 / Dallas Morning News


CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – At barely 10 in the morning, gangly, smiling school kids already were lugging desks onto a concrete slab in the barren playground of the Socorro Rivera elementary school.


Graduation day was at hand. There were desks to line up, dances to practice and a sound system to erect before Socorro Rivera's sixth-graders could walk across a makeshift stage, shake their principal's hand and collect their certificates.


When dusk settled in, a glorious red sunset nestled up against the surrounding mountains. About 500 parents and siblings filled the dusty lot. (That included "Snakeman," whose command of a desert-looking yellow snake crooked around his neck drew many eyes.)


That so many parents attended graduation was a good sign. Educators anywhere will tell you that committed parents are a modern key to a good school.


Socorro Rivera has many miles to go before it's a pipeline to Stanford. But it has grown the last five years from a campus of two cream-colored buildings to about 10 one-room, green, boxy buildings.


It's a work in progress, drawing on the labor and finances of Texas churches (including mine in Dallas) and the state of Chihuahua, which oversees Juárez's schools. But where once stood nothing in a colonias about a half-hour outside this border metropolis now stands a campus with a computer lab of 12 Internet-connected Dells. Across from the lab is a library of books, DVDs and a flat-screen TV that students use to learn.


Rich Mackey of Arrow Outreach, who coordinates the work of churches building the Socorro Rivera campus, says more and more parents come to graduation ceremonies each year. The number of sixth-graders going to the next level is increasing, too. Thirty-three of the little school's 34 graduates say they will attend Mexico's equivalent of middle school – up from 21 of 27 the year before, Mr. Mackey says.


Moving kids up the educational pipeline is Mexico's big challenge, and Americans have more than an academic interest in the outcome. As Mexico's schools go, so goes its economy. As its economy goes, so goes migration across the U.S. border.


In fact, now that conservatives and liberals alike have torpedoed immigration reform, the plight of Mexico's schools is even more important. If they're not producing enough workers to attract and generate better-paying jobs, Mexico will be left behind in the global economy. If that happens, expect Mexican immigrants to keep heading north searching for better jobs.


To get a better sense of how well this point is understood in Mexico, I visited Guillermo Narro Garza, who oversees Juárez's schools. A tall, eloquent professor, he readily admits that Juárez and the surrounding state of Chihuahua cannot grow better-paying jobs without good schools. For the city to attract an aerospace plant, say, it needs a ready workforce.


The challenge is steep.


•Education is compulsory in Mexico only through our equivalent of ninth grade. It's hard to get kids doing more than roofing and busing tables with that level of schooling.


•Unions strongly influence schools. For proof, see how striking teachers have shut down Mexico City's schools.


•Education spending can vary widely. Mr. Narro says Chihuahua can invest about half its budget in schools; poorer states spend as little as 5 percent.


Yes, the federal government picks up part of the slack. (There are both federal and state schools in Mexico.) But the plain truth is, Mexico needs a Marshall Plan for its education system, including American participation. It might smack of Yankee paternalism, but President Bush could make a mark on immigration before he leaves by holding a bilateral summit with Mexican President Felipe Calderón on the subject.


Mexico would have plenty to gain from a big-deal educational exchange. Competitors like India and China are pole vaulting from backwaters to economic engines. For every sign of progress like Socorro Rivera, there's the reality that Mexico is just behind. The progress just isn't deep enough, as Edwin Flores, a Dallas schools trustee educated in Mexico City, told me last week.


The "deepening" will require compulsory school the equivalent of high school, adequate investments nationwide and holding schools accountable. These reforms are essential to Mexico – and to us, if we hope to slow the flow of immigration.

Labels: Mexico

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:32 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Here is a report on Affirmative Action done by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA that is worth looking at.


"The right of universities to take race-conscious action to diversify their student bodies rested for a quarter century on a U.S. Supreme Court decision in the 1978 Bakke case, which left almost no one satisfied and many conservatives convinced that an increasingly conservative Supreme Court would outlaw affirmative action. After a huge national mobilization over two crucial cases against the University of Michigan which were decided in 2003, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, it seemed likely that the surprisingly positive decision from the Court’s majority in Grutter would set a relatively clear path for the next quarter century. . . . "

-Angela

Labels: affirmative action, higher education

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:46 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Inside Higher Education

July 24, 2007

Better Than Expected, Worse Than It Seems

By Gary Orfield, Erica Frankenberg and Liliana M. Garces

There was a national sigh of relief on campuses in June when an
altered U.S. Supreme Court left standing the historic 2003 Grutter v.
Bollinger decision supporting affirmation action in admissions. There
had been widespread fear among civil rights advocates that a more
conservative Supreme Court would seriously undermine or even reverse
the 5-4 Grutter decision with its author, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor,
no longer on the Court. The voluntary school integration decision in
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1
and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education was, indeed, a
serious reversal for desegregation in K-12 schools but while divided
on the constitutionality of the school plans at issue in the cases,
all nine justices agreed that the decision had no impact on the
Grutter precedent. The rights of colleges to use race in admissions
decisions for student body diversity had survived scrutiny by the most
conservative Supreme Court in more than 70 years. Since the Supreme
Court rarely takes such cases, the Grutter precedent might last for a
while. While a bullet was dodged, optimism should be restrained. The
dike protecting affirmative action has held but the river that brings
diverse groups of students to colleges may be drying up as a result of
the latest decision.

Colleges and universities, especially selective institutions, tend to
draw their successful minority applicants from interracial schools and
their admissions offices know well that many of the segregated
minority high schools fail to prepare their students well enough to
succeed in college. Research by the Civil Rights Project has shown
that too many segregated urban high schools are “dropout factories”
where the main product is dropouts and successful preparation for
college is rare. Conservative economist Eric Hanushek found that the
damage was worst for the relatively high achieving black students, the
very students likely to comprise the college eligible pool. So making
segregation worse cuts the number of well prepared students. In
addition to academic preparation, students from segregated backgrounds
are also often not ready to function socially on a largely white,
affluent campus. It also means of course, that the most segregated
group of students in American schools, whites, also have less
preparation to deal successfully with diversity. So colleges may have
won, but also lost.

Even before the new decision, segregation had been on the rise for
almost two decades in American public schools, partially as a result
of three decisions by the Supreme Court limiting desegregation in the
1990s (Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell, Freeman v. Pitts
and Missouri v. Jenkins). Because this new decision struck down the
most common methods of creating integrated schools in districts
without court orders to desegregate, it will likely precipitate
further increases in segregation. Since 1980 the tools most commonly
used to create integrated schools combine parental choice of schools
with magnet programs and racial diversity guidelines. Now the
limitations that prevented transfers and magnet choices that increased
segregation are gone and districts have to decide whether to do
something more complex and multidimensional or abandon their
integration efforts. It remains to be seen what will happen in various
districts, of course, but the experience of other districts that have
ended the consideration of race as a criteria in their student
assignment policies suggests that race-neutral methods will lead to
resegregation and growing inequality.

Research thus suggests that there are two significant implications for
higher education to consider. First, rising segregation is likely to
bring a rise in educational inequality and less prepared black and
Latino students. Second, all incoming students are likely to have
fewer interracial experiences prior to attending college meaning they
will be less prepared for effective functioning in an interracial setting.

The Seattle and Louisville cases produced an outpouring of summaries
of a half century of research by a number of groups of scholars. A
subsequent review of the briefs by the non-partisan National Academy
of Education confirms the central premise of Brown v. Board of
Education that racially isolated minority schools offer students an
inferior education, which is likely to harm their future life
opportunities, such as graduation from high school and success in
college. Racially isolated minority schools are often unequal to
schools with higher percentages of white students in terms of tangible
resources, such as qualified, experienced teachers and college
preparatory curriculum, and intangible resources including low teacher
turnover and more middle-class peers ­ all of which are associated
with positive higher educational outcomes.

Although colleges and universities differ in their criteria and
process for admissions, common elements to their admissions decisions
for students include 1) whether a student has or will graduate from
high school, 2) standardized test scores, and 3) number of advanced
and Advanced Placement courses. Research consistently finds that
minority students graduate at significantly lower rates in racially
isolated minority schools; in fact, minority isolation is a
significant predictor of low graduation rates, even when holding
constant the effects of other school performance indicators. Academic
achievement scores of students are also lower in segregated minority
schools, and this effect can cumulate over time for students who spend
multiple years attending segregated schools. Finally, many
predominantly minority schools do not offer as extensive advanced
curricular opportunities and levels of academic competition as do
majority white or white and Asian schools.

In addition to offering different opportunities for academic
preparation, research has also found that integrated schools offer
minority students important connections to competitive higher
education and information about these options. There are strong ties
between successful high schools and selective colleges. Minority
students who graduate from integrated schools are more likely to have
access to the social and professional networks normally available to
middle class white students. For example, a study of Latino students
who excelled at elite higher educational institutions found that most
students had attended desegregated schools ­ and gained academic
confidence as well as critical knowledge about what they need to do to
accomplish their aspirations (e.g., which courses to take from other,
college-going students).

White students also lose if schools resegregate. Desegregation
advocates assert that public school desegregation is powerful and
essential because desegregated schools better prepare future citizens
for a multiracial society. A critical component of this preparation is
gaining the skills to work with people of diverse backgrounds.
Segregated schools in segregated neighborhoods leave white as well and
nonwhite students ill-prepared for what they will encounter in
colleges and university classes or in their dorms.

Over 50 years ago, Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport suggested that
one of the essential conditions to reducing prejudice was that people
needed to be in contact with one another, particularly under
appropriate conditions. Research in racially integrated schools
confirms that, by allowing for students of different races and
ethnicities to be in contact with one another, students can develop
improved cross-racial understanding and experience a reduction of
racial prejudice and bias. Importantly, research suggests that other
interventions such as studying about other groups are not as effective
or as long-lasting as actually being in contact with students of other
racial/ethnic backgrounds.

Research on graduates of racially integrated elementary and secondary
schools has also found that students who graduated from these settings
felt their integrated schooling experiences had better prepared them
for college, including being more interested in attending integrated
higher education institutions. The Civil Rights Project has surveyed
high school juniors in a number of major school systems around the
country and students in more diverse schools report feeling more
comfortable living and working with others of different backgrounds
than did their peers in segregated high schools.

As schools become more segregated, it will become more incumbent on
colleges and universities to intensify their outreach and retention
programs to improve access for all students, and to consider the extra
burdens borne by the victims of segregation who have done nothing to
deserve unequal opportunities. In particular, it will be critically
important for colleges and universities to continue to use race in
their outreach and retention programs. As colleges and universities
that have sought to defend affirmative action policies have long
understood and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy recently wrote, “The
enduring hope is that race should not matter, the reality is that too
often it does.” Further, the need to help students understand how to
productively live with others from diverse backgrounds will fall to
higher education. As other institutions retreat from mirroring the
racial diversity of our country, this may increasingly become a
responsibility universities must shoulder.

Our incoming students already have more limited interracial
experiences than the last generation of students, a trend that is
likely to only get worse. We hope that many school districts will
continue to value integration and seek more comprehensive policies
under the new guidelines set forth in Justice Kennedy’s controlling
opinion, but it is very likely that segregation will worsen. We
believe that university faculty and researchers who may have expertise
to assist local school districts find legal and workable solutions to
maintain diversity should offer support at this critical time.
Universities can also take a public leadership and education role in
continuing to argue for the importance of integrated educational
settings. These actions could help limit some of the ill effects of
the resegregation of local schools and help keep alive the legacy of
Brown in a period of judicial retreat.

Gary Orfield is a professor at the University of California at Los
Angeles and co-director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos
Civiles. Erica Frankenberg and Liliana M. Garces are doctoral
candidates at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education and
research assistants at the Civil Rights Project. Orfield and
Frankenberg are co-editors of a recently published book, Lessons in
Integration: Realizing the Promise of the Racial Diversity in American
Schools (University of Virginia Press). Garces, formerly a civil
rights lawyer, served as counsel of record in the 553 Social
Scientists brief submitted in support of the desegregation plans in
the Seattle and Louisville cases.

Labels: desegregation

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:24 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Children's insurance debate moves from Austin to D.C.
State leaders downplay immediate impact of impasse between Bush and Congress.

By Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, July 18, 2007

The battle over how much money Texas can spend on the Children's Health Insurance Program, a landmark issue at the state Capitol this year, has shifted to Washington.

State lawmakers decided this year to add more than 120,000 children to the program by restoring cutsthey made in 2003 during a budget crunch.

Now congressional leaders and the White House are at odds over how much federal money to put into the program, which combines state and federal dollars to provide health insurance for children whose families are considered poor but make too much money to qualify for Medicaid. The White House has threatened to veto legislation that substantially increases spending on the program.

"They're going to have those debates in D.C.; that's just the nature of D.C.," said state Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, who pushed for the CHIP expansions this year. "But I think when the clouds clear, I think there will be a CHIP program, and this program will move right in line with that. So I'm not dissuaded at all."

Turner and other lawmakers gathered with Gov. Rick Perry on Tuesday for a ceremonial signing of House Bill 109, the legislation that expanded CHIP coverage by easing enrollment restrictions enacted four years ago. It takes effect Sept. 1.

A spokeswoman for the state Health and Human Services Commission downplayed the immediate effect of the Washington debate on CHIP funding in Texas, even though the federal government pays 70 percent of the cost.

Stephanie Goodman said that states have three years to spend each year's federal CHIP budget and that Texas has spent less than its annual allotment the past three years.

"The state has a significant federal carry-forward balance that we can use to fund the HB 109 changes for the next two-year budget cycle," Goodman said. "A reduction in federal funds could become a problem for the state in future years."

Members of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee have proposed adding $35 billion to the program over the next five years with help from a 61-cent increase in the federal excise tax on a pack of cigarettes. That would come on top of the current spending of $25 billion.

But a White House spokesman said Saturday that senior administration advisers would push for a veto of such legislation, saying it would expand the program beyond its original intent of covering poor children and encourage many people to drop private plans for government-funded coverage. Bush wants $5 billion added to the program.

The debate over how much to put into the program comes as its Sept. 30 expiration nears. But Goodman said Congress typically makes sure that federal dollars keep flowing into a program until it decides what action to take.

Anne Dunkelberg of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin-based group that advocates more spending on programs to help low-income families, said CHIP spending increases in Washington are vital to keeping up with population growth and inflation and helping states cover eligible children. She said Bush's proposal jeopardizes the changes state leaders enacted.

"Texas probably needs it more than any other state," she said, citing a high number of children who qualify for the program but are uninsured.

But even if Washington increases funding significantly, don't expect a big jump in coverage. Goodman said it would be up to state lawmakers on whether to further expand the program.

jembry@statesman.com

Additional material from The Associated Press and Cox Newspapers.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/07/18/0718chip.html

Labels: CHIP--Children's Health Insurance Program

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:13 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Published Online: July 16, 2007
NCLB Seen as Curbing Low, High Achievers’ Gains
By Debra Viadero

Washington
A new study of Chicago students suggests that the federal No Child Left Behind Act may indeed be leaving behind students at the far ends of the academic ability spectrum—the least able students and those who are gifted.
The study by University of Chicago economists Derek A. Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach lends some empirical support to the common perception that schools are focusing on students in the middle—the so-called “bubble kids”—in order to boost scores on the state exams used to determine whether schools are meeting their proficiency targets.
“The whole point is that the details of how you calculate `adequate yearly progress’ matter for how teachers will allocate their effort across students,” said Mr. Neal, who presented his paper today at a conference hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank based here. “Anytime you keep score by looking at the number of kids who pass some proficiency standard, that will shape whom teachers teach.”
But Doug Mesecar, the acting assistant secretary in the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Education, said it’s too soon to conclude that the law’s accountability mechanisms aren’t working as they were intended.
“I don’t think it tells enough of the whole story to support the generalizations that were made,” said Mr. Mesecar, who was part of a panel formed by the AEI to discuss the report. “We need to know more, to continue to study, and have more data to do these kinds of analyses, and then, if we do find it is a problem, we need to go in and rectify it.”
‘The Irony’
For their study, the Chicago researchers zeroed in on two time periods during which the 421,000-student school system was changing its testing-and-accountability system. The most recent period was 2002, when the school system, seeing that passage of the NCLB law was imminent, made the Illinois Standards Achievement Test a high-stakes exam and set proficiency cutoffs that students would be expected to meet.
The earlier period was 1998, after city school officials tried much the same approach with the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. While the ITBS cutoff points were considered lower, the 1998 accountability system also upped the stakes in a slightly different way by requiring 8th graders who did not pass the tests to attend summer school.
To measure the impact of the new systems, the researchers compared reading and mathematics scores for students in 5th, 6th, or 8th grades in the year, or years, after the changes had taken place with those made by similar cohorts of students a few years earlier. The idea was to determine whether the changes in students’ tests scores were larger or smaller than what might have been expected had the school system conducted business as usual.
The post-reform pattern, in all cases, was consistent: Students in the middle of the pack made the largest test-score gains, compared with students in previous years. The bottom 20 percent of students made the least progress and, in some cases, even lost ground. The top 10 percent of students made either no academic gains or improvements that were smaller than those of students in the middle, depending on the subject matter.
For the least-able students, the situation was only slightly better in the post-1998 reform period. Those students’ scores improved more then, the researchers believe, because the standards had been set at lower levels. They speculated that teachers may be more likely to write off low-achieving students when the likelihood that they will ever meet the achievement target is more distant.
Also, while the federal law mandates that schools ensure that all students reach proficiency levels by the 2013-14 school year, “there’s no evidence to show that schools are taking that seriously,” Mr. Neal said.
"This is the irony of the `soft bigotry of low expectations,`” he added, quoting a line from President Bush. “Having lower standards is actually beneficial to low-advantage children."
Teaching to the Middle
Another panelist, Charles Murray, AEI’s W.H. Brady scholar, said he found Mr. Neal’s finding “persuasive.”
“This strikes, I hope, a major blow to the chest of proficiency counts as a measure of progress in education,” added Mr. Murray, who recently published studies suggesting that achievement gaps between children of different races may be immutable. “To ask children to perform at levels at which they are incapable is one of the cruelest things you could ask a child to do.”
A more pointed critique of the study, however, came from Susan L. Traiman, the director of education and workforce policy at the Washington-based Business Roundtable and a supporter of the NCLB law. Like Mr. Mesecar, she said more years of data are needed to determine if the patterns Mr. Neal found in the early years of testing-and-accountability changes are consistent.
“Teaching to the middle is nothing new,” she added. “It’s what most beginning teachers do.”
While the law requires most states to gauge students’ academic progress by counting the number of students who reach proficiency targets, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in recent years began to allow some states and districts to experiment with other accountability models. Currently, for example, nine states have waivers to try so-called “growth models,” which typically give schools credit for gains that students make toward proficiency.
A better variant on that model, Mr. Neal said, might be one that takes into account previous achievement differences among students, their peers, and other factors in the same way that golfers are assigned handicaps to account for differences in golf courses or in their ability levels.
“You need some handicapping system that allows you to say that teacher A had a bad year or teacher B had a good year, regardless of whether they taught in New Trier, Ill., or some inner-city school in New Jersey,” he said.
The new study, “Left Behind by Design: Proficiency Counts and Test-Based Accountability,” has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Vol. 26, Issue 43

Labels: NCLB

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:56 PM 0 comments Links to this post

July 12, 2007

Seeking solutions to dropout crisis
By Russell W. Rumberger / The Sacramento Bee/ Thursday, July 12, 2007

Figures released by the Department of Education last month show California's high school graduation rate in 2006 was the lowest in 10 years. The estimated 170,000 students who failed to graduate from the 2006 class will cost the state $46 billion in lost earnings and $2 billion in lost state taxes. Clearly the state must act to address its growing dropout crisis.

To do so, we first need to understand the causes of this crisis. The sharp decline in the graduation rate from 2005 to 2006, which produced an estimated 20,000 additional dropouts, was most likely due to the requirement that students had to pass the California High School Exit Exam in order to receive a diploma. While the merits of this exam continue to be debated, it nonetheless represents an additional hurdle for California's public high school students.

But the roots of California's dropout crisis form well before students enter ninth grade. In fact, they begin before students enter kindergarten.

The high proportion of students from non-English-speaking backgrounds, the large rates of childhood poverty and the lower participation rates in quality preschools mean that many students in California begin school at a considerable disadvantage. For instance, socioeconomically disadvantaged students begin kindergarten about 3 1/2 months behind middle class students in math, and 2 1/2 months behind in reading. Low achievement in elementary school is an early predictor of dropping out in high school.

Early behavior problems and negative attitudes toward school also predict dropping out. At the end of fifth grade, one in five California students shows low perceived ability and interest in math, or problems with social behavior, such as fighting or arguing with other students. And one in 11 students is below grade level, one of the strongest predictors of dropping out.
Although existing research reveals some of the factors that may explain California's high dropout rate, additional research is needed. That is why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation and the Walter S. Johnson Foundation have joined together to support the California Dropout Research Project (lmri.ucsb.edu/dropouts). The project will synthesize existing research and undertake new research to inform policymakers and the larger public about the nature of -- and potential solutions to -- the dropout problem in California.

The project has commissioned 15 research studies that are examining the causes, costs and potential solutions to the state's dropout crisis. It has also established a policy committee comprised of state legislators, researchers and educators who will use this research to draft a policy agenda to address this critical educational problem.

Although the committee will not release its final report until January, two important issues have already been identified. One concerns the need for a better student data system. The state is now creating a longitudinal student data system that can be used to track students' progress through school. But the existing system will not be sufficient to address the dropout problem without tracking students' mobility in and out of the public system during elementary and secondary school, as well as their educational and labor market experiences after leaving high school.

The other issue concerns how to solve the problem. A frequent policy response to any educational problem is to create a targeted categorical program to address it. But as the recent Stanford-led school finance study showed, California suffers from too many categorical programs that limit the flexibility of schools to effectively address the needs of their students. The solution to California's dropout crisis must involve more than a new categorical program, and it must focus on the preschool, elementary and middle school levels as well as high schools.

Solving California's dropout crisis is a formidable challenge that will require a long-term, comprehensive strategy to not only improve the state's public schools, but to strengthen the other social institutions that contribute to student educational success.


_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Here are my previous columns on this this issue. My June 17th column cites Rumberger's research.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel, July 8, 2007

OPINION
Let's keep better track of high school dropouts
By Luis A. Alejo

I was pleased to see some response by school administrators and community members regarding the high numbers of students disappearing from my alma mater, Watsonville High School. It is often the issue that so many like to ignore or sweep under the rug.

But also troubling is the denial of the very serious nature of the crisis by Watsonville High Principal Murry Schekman in his recent column. That is why there continues to be much inaction; administration tries to console the public by saying the problem is really not that bad or the costs are not as high as I project.

In my previous column, I intentionally referred to disappearance rates instead of dropout rates, because the current dropout data is completely flawed. For instance, the dropout data for WHS states that there was a zero percent dropout rate for the class of 2004 when in fact 48.9 percent disappeared and never graduated from WHS.

In addition, the PVUSD does not know what has happened to all these students who have disappeared from Watsonville High. Even Schekman had to contact a couple of fellow principals to know how many students went to those schools or graduated. That's a major part of the problem. The PVUSD does not track students to know exactly where they end up.

For instance, Schekman cites 55 students who graduated from New School and about another 288 from Renaissance High in an attempt to account for some of the 2,290 students who did not graduate from Watsonville High from 2001 through 2006. But what happened to the other 1,947 students who are unaccounted for?

Moreover, there seems to be an equally serious problem at those other schools. For instance, statistics from the California Department of Education show that out of all 111 seniors who enrolled at New School Alternative Program between 2001 through 2006, only 45 graduated, not 55. And what happened to those other 66 students, or 60 percent, who did not graduate from that school?

Instead of denying the severity of the crisis, I would like to see more being done at the school. Here are some other strategies that could help.

Longitudinal student tracking system: The PVUSD should create a pilot longitudinal student computer tracking system that will significantly help the district know what is happening to students who disappear. About 270 school districts have already piloted similar tracking programs with a single life-time school identification number. Besides knowing what is occurring with WHS students, the tracking system should be developed to allow the various student support programs and services to better communicate and know what each is doing for a particular student.

Increase guidance counselors: In 2004, there was only one counselor for about every 600 students at Watsonville High. This is a very limited number of guidance counselors to assist students with course selection, the A-G college requirements, personal issues, or college applications, among many other vital services. The American School Counselor Association recommends a counselor-to-student ratio of 1:250 in order to achieve maximum program effectiveness. An extremely high number of WHS students are not fulfilling the A-G college requirements and there are hundreds of students who begin 12th grade but are not graduating. In all six years, there were a total of 838 high-school seniors who began 12th grade at WHS but did not graduate.

Replicate successful models: The PVUSD must look to successful models to replicate in Watsonville. One model to look into is San Jose Downtown College Prep, which targets low-achieving urban students. A significant number of its students are also Latino, economically disadvantaged and are English learners. Their primary goal is to ensure that "at-risk" students are able to matriculate into four-year universities. Its first graduating class in 2004 resulted in 94 percent of them attending universities.

More intervention programs in early years: More alternative and intervention programs must be created for the middle and elementary students to help prevent students from dropping out once they enter high school. In addition, the district should work to ensure that as many children as possible enroll in quality pre-school programs.

One-stop center for student services: There are many different types of student service programs in the PVUSD. However, there is almost no coordination between all these services. One possible way to address this problem is to house all these student services in one building in order to create a one-stop student services center that will allow for coordination among the different programs and a comprehensive case management approach to serving students.

District-wide school improvement plan: There continues to be no district-wide school-improvement strategy despite the fact that almost all schools in Watsonville are in program-improvement status under the No Child Left Behind Act. There are only piecemeal reforms that are not part of any larger comprehensive plan that has the buy-in and support from teachers, parents, students and community members.

Of course, there are many other strategies and interventions that should be considered. Dealing with the serious crisis at Watsonville High School will require a comprehensive, multi-strategy approach, and efforts must be ongoing throughout the next several years as a community-wide effort.

Luis A. Alejo is a local public interest attorney and the director of the Student Empowerment Project.

You can find this story online at:
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2007/July/08/edit/stories/05edit.htm

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


The Santa Cruz Sentinel, June 17, 2007

OPINION

Dropout crisis continues in Watsonville
By Luis Angel Alejo

Last week, high school graduation ceremonies took place throughout the Pajaro Valley, where students celebrated with classmates, family and friends.

But a close look at the most recent graduation statistics of Watsonville High School reveals an ever-worsening dropout crisis where 50 percent of all students who enter as freshmen do not graduate by senior year. Out of all the public high schools in Santa Cruz County, Watsonville High has the lowest graduation rates and the highest disappearance rates.

The current graduation and dropout data used statewide, based on the National Center for Education Statistics NCES formula, is completely flawed as reported by the Harvard Civil Rights Project and the Education Trust. The inaccurate NCES data only reports an 8.8 percent dropout rate for the Watsonville High School class of 2006. However, when the more accurate Cumulative Promotion Index CPI is used to longitudinally track students starting in ninth grade, actually 49.1 percent disappeared and never graduated by 12th grade.

Most parents are unaware of how many students are disappearing from the educational pipeline. The longitudinal data for six cohorts of students at Watsonville High, 2001 through 2006, shows an alarming 2,290 students disappeared and did not graduate by the 12th grade.

The PVUSD has no way of knowing what has happened to these students since there is no system to track where these students have gone. The graduation rates of our students are the ultimate measure of high school accountability and the numbers of Watsonville High continue to be dismal.

The costs

When students fail to graduate from high school, there are profound social and economic consequences on their lives and those of their future children. Both the Harvard Civil Rights Project and Education Trust reported that students who drop out face higher unemployment rates, earn lower wages, have poorer health and are more likely to be incarcerated or rely on public assistance.

The U.S. Census estimates that students who drop out will earn $270,000 less than a high school graduate over their lifetime. In addition, young adult Latinos who finish high school earn 36 percent more than those who drop out according to a 2002 Census Bureau report. There are also huge societal costs by students who are ill-prepared to enter the work force and participate in civic life. For our state, there is higher unemployment, increased crime and billions of dollars in lost tax revenue.

According to renowned education researcher Russell Rumberger of UC Santa Barbara, the 66,657 students who dropped out statewide from California public schools in 2002-03 will cost the state $14 million in lost wages over their lifetimes and add 1,225 inmates to our state's prisons at a cost of $73 million.

Undoubtedly, our children, community and society suffer tremendously. Increasing the numbers of students who graduate reduces crime and increases the productivity of students throughout their life time.

Millions still being lost

In addition, the Pajaro Valley Unified School District continues to lose millions of dollars in lost revenue each year as a result of students disappearing from the educational pipeline. For each student who is not in school, PVUSD loses at least $5,216 in average daily attendance funding in base-limit revenue each year. When hundreds of students in a cohort are tracked over four high school years, the amount in lost revenue is enormous.

For the Watsonville High School class of 2006 alone, PVUSD lost a potential of more than $3 million as a result of 439 students disappearing over four years. The PVUSD would make substantial financial gains by keeping local students in school and establishing strategies and interventions that will retain and bring students back into the PVUSD.

Problem will get worse
This serious crisis will only be exacerbated with the new policy approved in January by the current PVUSD board of trustees that prohibits students from participating in graduation ceremonies if they have not passed the California High School Exit Exam, despite completing all other graduation requirements.

The majority of students at Watsonville High who have yet to pass the exam are English-language learners. These students face additional barriers and are being severely punished for not passing a single test. It is devastating to deny them the day that all high school students look forward to and is only causing more to drop out.

The recent report by expert Norm Gold on English learners in the PVUSD demonstrated that the district has been failing to provide its EL students with a quality education and yet, the board of trustees found it acceptable to take harsh, punitive action against these students at the end of high school for its own abysmal failings.

The PVUSD board should change its graduation policy to allow students who earn a "certificate of completion" to participate in the graduation ceremonies as were permitted before. This proposal would be a strong incentive to keep students from dropping out, complete all their other graduation requirements, and to take the exit exam one last time. Last year, many PVUSD students did just that by later passing the exam without having lost out on their big day.

The bottom line is that much more must be done for los desaparecidos, those students who disappear from the education pipeline. However, very little has been done by the PVUSD to address this crisis despite the fact that this issue was brought to its attention in 2005 along with possible ways to address the problem.

Luis A. Alejo is a local public interest attorney and the director of the Student Empowerment Project.

Watsonville High School
9th 10th 11th 12th Graduated Disappeared
grade grade grade grade
Class of 2006 895 867 751 637 456 (50.9%) 439 (49.1%)
Class of 2005 837 796 706 594 485 (57.9%) 352 (42.1%)
Class of 2004 946 906 772 643 483 (51.1%) 463 (48.9%)
Class of 2003 994 954 834 702 532 (53.5%) 462 (46.5%)
Class of 2002 795 792 704 610 467 (58.7%) 328 (41.3%)
Class of 2001 783 733 668 612 537 (68.6%) 246 (31.4%)
SOURCE: California Department of Education

You can find this story online at:

santacruzsentinel.com

Labels: California, Dropouts

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

No Child law's authors work on a revision
Respond to complaints

By Susan Milligan, Boston Globe |  July 16, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The landmark No Child Left Behind law, which has drawnimpassioned criticism from educators and parents unhappy with itsstringent requirements for public schools to raise students' testscores, is being rewritten on Capitol Hill to fix what the bill'sauthors now acknowledge are flaws.

Lawmakers say they will not abandon the basic tenets of thelegislation, which requires yearly testing of elementary and somesecondary school students, and holds schools and districts accountablefor poor test scores.

But after five years of complaints -- followed by sit-downs inrecent months with teachers, administrators, and civil rights leaders-- Congress and the Bush administration are ready to change the wayschools and students are rated.

They say the changes will help states and school districts identifymore clearly which students need extra help, while avoiding labelingentire schools as failing because they have students who are harder toteach, such as those with learning disabilities or limited Englishskills.

The original authors of the bill, Senator Edward M. Kennedy andRepresentative George Miller, are looking at a slew of changes,including expanding the way "adequate yearly progress" is calculated,so schools that barely miss the testing thresholds are not put in thesame failing category as schools with across-the-board learningproblems.

Other proposals include giving schools more time to improve testscores before schools are forced to take corrective action.

"Everything's up for review," said Miller , Democrat of Californiaand chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. "I've alwayssaid I was the proud co author of No Child Left Behind. . . . Now, I'mdetermined to be the proud author of a No Child Left Behind that works."

Kennedy, who worked closely with President Bush in writing the law,has for years said the much-reviled measure would work if theadministration provided the money schools need to develop good testsand help struggling students, especially those in poorer schooldistricts.

But the Massachusetts Democrat said in a Globe interview that he nowbelieves the law itself must be changed as well. Many of thepresidential candidates in both parties have called for changes in thelaw, and several -- including Democratic Senators Chris Dodd ofConnecticut, Hillary Clinton of New York, and Barack Obama of Illinois-- have introduced legislation.

"We still have to have the concept of accountability," said Kennedy,who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, andPensions. But "what we need to do is get away from labeling, get awayfrom the punitive aspects, and give help and assistance to the neediestschools.
We're now on a pathway to make some sense on this."

Miller and Kennedy said they hope to begin work this month onwriting the revised version of No Child Left Behind. The law is up forreauthorization this year, which means Congress must vote on whether toextend it.

Miller said he was pessimistic only six weeks ago that he couldrally his Democratic colleagues to extend the controversial law, buthas recently convinced fellow lawmakers that the law can work well ifit is rewritten to address the complaints from constituents.

The law requires yearly testing in math and reading for students ingrades 3 through 8; students are also tested once in high school togauge their academic progress. Schools can be labeled as in need ofimprovement -- and eventually, as a failing school -- if students'scores do not meet what the law calls "adequate yearly progress."

The law provides for additional help for students needingassistance, and parents can also send their children to another publicschool if a school is deemed unsuccessful. In extreme cases, a schoolcan be closed for poor performance.

Educators have complained mightily about the law, saying the testingrules do not fully measure whether a student is learning. Schooladministrators say they are being wrongly punished for lower testscores from students with learning difficulties, and some parents areunhappy with schools' decisions to curtail art and music education tofocus on meeting testing thresholds in math and reading.

Funding, too, is a major complaint from both educators andcongressional Democrats, who say that No Child Left Behind has neverbeen given all the money authorized in the law by Congress. The Bushadministration said that funding for elementary and secondary schoolshas increased each year since Bush took office, often by more than itdid under President Bill Clinton -- a fact Kennedy acknowledges.

But states are still not getting the money they need to developappropriate tests and provide the extra help students need to make thetest-score improvements demanded in the law, Kennedy said.

Nonetheless, complaints from teachers have been so strong that somesay it is unclear whether the changes under consideration will appeaseeducators, and some political leaders, unhappy with No Child LeftBehind.

While teachers say they share the goals of providing a high-qualityeducation to all children, regardless of race, economic background, ordisability, many fear that the rules might undermine public educationand send more students fleeing into private schools.

"The Bush administration was setting up the public schools to fail,and to undermine public confidence" in them, said Kevin Fleming , ateacher at Winnacunnet High School in Exeter, N.H.

At a conference late last month for the National EducationAssociation, candidates for president slammed the law, saying thetesting requirements force educators to "teach to the test" and stiflecreativity in the classroom.

Further, the testing structure -- which holds schools accountablefor the progress of an entire class, instead of individual students --is unrealistic, said NEA president Reg Weaver. "Not all children learnat the same rate, at the same speed," Weaver said in an interview.

Dodd is author of the most sweeping package on Capitol Hill tooverhaul No Child Left Behind. Dodd annoyed some of his colleagues whenhe introduced his proposal several years ago, when the education lawwas still new. He is now drawing support for some of the alterationshe's seeking. They include easing certification requirements forteachers and giving schools more ways to show they are making studentsbetter at math and reading.

"Test scores obviously have value, but if it's the only thing you'redoing, you're not making a coherent and substantial judgment of how anindividual is doing or how a school is doing," Dodd said in aninterview.

More than 30 pieces of legislation to alter No Child Left Behindhave been introduced on Capitol Hill, by the NEA's count -- some ofthem from Republicans.
S
enators Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and Richard Burr of NorthCarolina -- both Republicans -- introduced legislation last week aimedat keeping the accountability and testing concepts while giving moreleeway to schools. For example, the bill would give schools more timeto achieve test standards among children just learning English, andtreat schools with small populations of low-achieving students lessharshly than those with widespread problems.

The Bush administration is also ready to make some changes in thelaw.

The Department of Education has launched a limited program allowingseveral states to use different ways of calculating a school's progressin boosting test scores."We shifted our national education dialogue from how much we arespending to how much children are learning," Education SecretaryMargaret Spellings said in a statement. "Today, we need a newconversation about how to strengthen and improve this law."

***************************************************************************

Changes under consideration

July 16, 2007

Avoid labeling entire schools as failing because they havestudents who are harder to teach, such as those with learningdisabilities or limited English skills .

Give schools more time to bring up test scores before theyare forced to take corrective action.

Ease certification requirements for teachers.

Give schools more options for showing they are makingstudents better at math and reading.

Treat schools less harshly if they have small populations oflow-achieving students compared with those with widespread problems.

Allow different ways of calculating a school's progress inbringing up test scores in select locations.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/07/16/no_child_laws_authors_work_on_a_revision/

Labels: NCLB

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

I'm so glad to see that the editors of the HOUSTON CHRONICLE decided to respond to the earlier post titled "Dual-language classes in Texas stir debate" as this piece was highly problematic. I encourage folks to read Carlos Blanton's book, "The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas." He demonstrates, among other things, that bilingual schools were a stepping stool to Europeans that traveled to history. Texas very much has a bilingual schooling history, albeit within a context of educational anarchy for so much of our history as a states. So, it's not the case that Texas is "doing for" a particuarl community (read: Mexicans), but rather that bilingual education has been important to assimilation for all immigrants (or at least the Swedes, Czechs, and the Poles) in Texas and this is a past about which we are regrettably myopic. It has disappeared from much of our public memory though there are silos is in the Central Texas Hill Country, where it remains a collective source of identity and history.

Angela

July 13, 2007, 8:11PM
More is more: Dual language education strengthens children in two idioms.

Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Given time, every immigrant family in this country will end up with English speakers. Adults may not speak the language, but most of their children will, and their children might not speak anything else. In the process of learning English, though, first- or second-generation children miss other key elements of education. Often, they drop out.

Texas can't afford to waste another generation — which is why the Legislature was so enlightened when it launched a pilot project for young children with low English skills.

The six-year program will bring "dual language" learning to 30 Texas schools. The results will likely be those that all Texans want: immigrant children speaking fluent English; native and non-native speakers with equal achievement scores; and native English speakers who are bilingual, with all the cognitive edge that comes with that, by middle school.

Unlike bilingual education, which separates native and non-native speakers, with mixed results, dual language unites English- and non-English-speaking children in the same classroom.

Students start with 90 percent instruction in the minority language, ending with 50-50 instruction by 5th grade, or they may start with 50-50 instruction.

It would sound like hype if dual language hadn't been so deeply tested. Used widely in Canada since the 1960s, dual language training was found by two separate San Antonio school commissions to be the best way to bring Spanish-speakers up to their peers' achievement levels.

Closing the achievement gulf is urgent not only for the well-being of the children themselves, but also for Texas' economy, which hinges on educated, competitive workers.

Perhaps most persuasive, principals who have used dual language, from Utah to Houston, love the results.

Yet a few leaders seem willfully to misunderstand both the approach and its goal. "They are in America," Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, said of non-native speakers. "They need to master the English language."

Well — yes. And in the area's existing dual language programs, students are doing just that. Starting with major English deficits, the students by sixth grade equal or outscore their peers in most subjects. Meanwhile, their native-speaker classmates — whom Riddle calls "guinea pigs" — also thrive. For native English speakers, immersion in a second language actually enhances their English and other academic subjects. In addition to learning their subjects, the native speakers are completely bilingual.

For the 16 percent of Texas public school students who need English, dual language has delivered fluency. The families of English-speaking children might see dual language as just a luxury.

They shouldn't, though. To students around the world, the very act of learning a second language hones their cognitive edge, and language skills are a competitive tool. Praise should go to Texas legislators, of both parties, who refuse to see our children left behind.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/4967346.html

Labels: bilingual education, dual language education, editorial

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:17 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is a really interesting piece on the hurtfulness of words and a school's positive response to this possibility (not all were affected in the same way). No one should ever be marginalized or alienating in an instructional setting and it should be remembered that particular words carry with them a certain potency that need to be acknowledged—as they can affect existing relations and the instructional process itself. I wonder if this discovery and agreement on things is more the exception or the rule? -Angela


Montgomery Finds Racial Slur Offends, No Matter the Context
By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 13, 2007; A01

Montgomery County educators are replacing a lesson that called for students to read about and discuss a racial epithet against African Americans as a precursor to reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" in ninth-grade English classes.

The lesson, called "Questionable Words," focused on two reading selections, an essay and a poem, each dealing with the epithet and how the author was hurt by its use. Curriculum officials reexamined the lesson after an African American student told the school board in the fall that the class had upset her.

"What we heard from enough community members and some teachers is that it's sensitive, it's emotionally charged," said Betsy Brown, curriculum director for Montgomery schools. "And if we have a lesson that could be misused and cause real hurt to a few or to a whole classroom of kids, then maybe we need to change it."

The complaint from Maya Jean-Baptiste, a 15-year-old at Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg, marks a departure from the usual protest of racially insensitive language in classroom literature. Most often, someone seeks to ban a book; Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is a perennial target. In this case, the student objected to an introductory lesson whose purpose was to prepare her for the racist language in the book.

Maya said she walked into English class one day in the fall to find the desks arranged in a semicircle. The teacher passed out copies of an essay called "The Meaning of a Word," by the African American writer Gloria Naylor, which recounted the first time the author heard a young classmate use the "N-word." Maya's class was preparing to read Harper Lee's coming-of-age saga.

The teacher, who is white, read aloud from the essay and asked students to mark the word each time it appeared. She imitated stereotypical African American body language and elocution, Maya told board members, "moving her neck and pointing her finger."

"She has a different style of teaching things," Maya said, "and we knew she was a little over the top on some lessons. But this was not a lesson to be over the top about."

An official of the county NAACP accompanied Maya to a school board meeting in November and asked that the board "immediately abstain" from teaching the lesson.

School system officials would not say whether the teacher was reprimanded.

The Montgomery school system's decision comes at a time of heightened attention to racial insensitivity, largely after talk-show host Don Imus made racist and sexist comments about a college women's basketball team in a broadcast in the spring. On Monday in Detroit, NAACP leaders had a mock funeral for the "N-word" and other racial epithets, symbolically retiring them from use. Delegates to the group's annual convention marched through downtown with a ceremonial pine coffin and a bouquet of artificial black roses, according to the Associated Press.

Each year brings fresh attempts by parents and civic groups to challenge racially insensitive literature in the public schools. The most common target, education leaders say, is not Naylor's provocative essay, which isn't widely taught in high schools, or even Lee's novel, but rather "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Both books are standard fare in high school English classes. Twain's book, peppered with epithets, is considered more inflammatory.

National Cathedral School, an Episcopal institution for girls in the District, made national headlines 12 years ago when it pulled the Twain book from its shelves. The book was reintroduced in an elective, upper-grade course and is widely taught in the school today. More than a decade earlier, a black administrator at Fairfax County's Mark Twain Intermediate School led a nationally publicized effort to remove the book. It failed.

Education scholars recommend that teachers prepare students for books such as "To Kill a Mockingbird" with historical images and writings that explain the time and place in which the works are set. This can -- and should -- be done without dwelling on racial slurs or reading inflammatory material aloud, said Jocelyn A. Chadwick, a Twain scholar and former Harvard University professor who works in the education division of Discovery Communications.

"All of those speeches, those texts, those novels are placed into a contextual period, and students have to understand the period before reading the text," Chadwick said in a telephone interview. Undue focus on epithets, she said in a subsequent e-mail, "unnecessarily stresses students."

Approaches to racially charged literature vary among local school systems.

D.C. parents may opt not to have their children read Lee's book, which is taught after a preparatory lesson on Jim Crow, civil rights and the justice system, according to John White, a spokesman for the school system. "Huckleberry Finn" is not taught in the school system. Arlington students read "Mockingbird" and "Huckleberry Finn," prefaced by lessons on epithets and "why the words are no longer used," said Linda Erdos, a spokeswoman for the school system.

The Twain book is taught, although not required, in Fairfax high schools. Instructional materials call for students to "examine the cultural and political impact of language" in books of that era.

Montgomery students read "Mockingbird" two years before "Huckleberry Finn." In the past three years, they have prepared for Lee's book by reading Naylor's essay and the poem "Incident," by Harlem Renaissance figure Countee Cullen.

After Maya's complaint, Montgomery curriculum officials surveyed teachers and students on the lesson. Some students "expressed, in hindsight, some discomfort and some concerns" about the selections, Brown said, but most deemed it worthwhile. She noted that the lesson, as written, did not call for teachers or students to read aloud Naylor's essay. No complaints arose at other schools.

"It's about the word," Brown said, "but it's not actually going through the essay and reading the word aloud again and again."

An alternative lesson, to be taught in the fall, replaces the essay and the poem with a piece by the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. called "What's in a Name," which tells of the disparaging treatment of his father by a white man, who refers to all black men as "George."

Students also will study a pair of Library of Congress photographs depicting the Jim Crow era: a girl drinking at a segregated fountain and a man entering the "colored-only" section of a theater.

It's "an easier lesson to use," Brown said, and it accomplishes the same goal of preparing students for the book they are about to read.
.
© 2007 The Washington Post Company

Labels: racial epithets or slurs, racism

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

July 15, 2007

School Diversity Based on Income Segregates Some

By JONATHAN D. GLATER and ALAN FINDER

SAN FRANCISCO — When San Francisco started trying to promote socioeconomic diversity in its public schools, officials hoped racial diversity would result as well.

It has not worked out that way.

Abraham Lincoln High School, for example, with its stellar reputation and Advanced Placement courses, has drawn a mix of rich and poor students. More than 50 percent of those students are of Chinese descent.

“If you look at diversity based on race, the school hasn’t been as integrated,” Lincoln’s principal, Ronald J. K. Pang, said. “If you don’t look at race, the school has become much more diverse.”

San Francisco began considering factors like family income, instead of race, in school assignments when it modified a court-ordered desegregation plan in response to a lawsuit. But school officials have found that the 55,000-student city school district, with Chinese the dominant ethnic group followed by Hispanics, blacks and whites, is resegregrating.

The number of schools where students of a single racial or ethnic group make up 60 percent or more of the population in at least one grade is increasing sharply. In 2005-06, about 50 schools were segregated using that standard as measured by a court-appointed monitor. That was up from 30 schools in the 2001-02 school year, the year before the change, according to court filings.

The San Francisco experience is telling because after the recent United States Supreme Court decision restricting the use of race-based school assignment plans, many districts are expected to switch to economic integration plans like San Francisco’s as a legal way to seek diversity. As many as 40 districts around the country are already experimenting with such plans, according to an analysis by Richard D. Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy research group.

Many of these experiments are modest, involve small districts or have been in place only a few years. But the experiences of these districts show how difficult it can be to balance socioeconomic diversity, racial integration and academic success.

Only a few plans appear to have achieved all three goals. Others promote income diversity but not racial integration while still other plans are limited and their results inconclusive. Those who have studied them say a key to that outcome is how aggressively a plan shifts students around and whether there are many schools that can lure middle-class students from their neighborhoods into poor ones.

“Systemwide programs are more effective than piecemeal programs,” said Mr. Kahlenberg, who has studied plans like these.

The purpose of such programs is twofold. Since income levels often correlate with race they can be an alternate and legal way to produce racial integration. They also promote achievement gains by putting poorer students in schools that are more likely to have experienced teachers and students with high aspirations, as well as a parent body that can afford to be more involved.

“There is a large body of evidence going back several years,” Mr. Kahlenberg said, “that probably the most important thing you can do to raise the achievement of low-income students is to provide them with middle-class schools.”

Economic integration initiatives differ from each other, and from many traditional integration efforts that relied on mandatory transfer of students among schools. Some of the new initiatives involve busing but some do not; some rely on student choice, while some also use a lottery. And so it is difficult to measure how far students travel or how many students switch schools.

The most ambitious effort and the example most often cited as a success is in the city of Raleigh, N.C., and its suburbs.

For seven years the district has sought to cap the proportion of low-income students in each of the county’s 143 schools at 40 percent.

To achieve a balance of low- and middle-income children, the district encourages and sometimes requires students to attend schools far from home. Suburban students are attracted to magnet schools in the city; children from the inner city are sometimes bused to middle-class schools at the outer edges of Raleigh and in the suburbs.

The achievement gains have been sharp, and school officials said economic integration was largely responsible. Only 40 percent of black students in grades three through eight in Wake County, where Raleigh is located, scored at grade level on state reading tests in 1995. By the spring of 2006, 82 percent did.

“The plan works well,” said John H. Gilbert, a professor emeritus at North Carolina State University in Raleigh who served for 16 years on the county school board and voted for the plan. “It’s based on sound assumptions about the environment in which children learn.”

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, North Carolina’s largest, has also tried an economic integration plan, but with less success.

Students were once assigned to schools in Charlotte and its suburbs based in part on achieving racial balance, but that system was struck down in federal appeals court in 2001.

The school board then created an assignment plan based on income and choice; a low-income student could transfer to a middle-class school if he came from a high-poverty, low-performing school. But such transfers could occur only if there was room, and there seldom was. “There are not a whole lot of seats available and so there is not a lot of choice available,” said Scott McCully, the district’s executive director of planning and student placement.

Within several years, said Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, “the schools became markedly more segregated.”

In the smaller school system in Cambridge, Mass., children apply to the city’s 12 elementary schools and socioeconomic status is an important factor in ultimate assignments. The system has been phased in gradually since the fall of 2002.

Last year, 75.8 percent of Cambridge’s low-income third graders were judged to be progressing toward reading proficiency. That was higher than the statewide average for low-income students, 71.3 percent, and better than the rate in more than a dozen other cities in the state.

Other districts have not seen such results. One district in San Jose, Calif., switched to using family and neighborhood income instead of race for assignments two years ago, giving a preference to students in low-income areas who try to transfer to schools in higher income areas, and vice versa.

But in the first year, the number of students switching schools declined significantly and has only begun to recover in the last year.

San Francisco had been under a court order to desegregate for more than 20 years, with no school allowed to have a majority of students from one racial or ethnic group. But after Chinese-American parents whose children were kept out of certain elite schools sued, the district switched in 2002-03 to a plan that sought socioeconomic diversity.

Students apply to the schools they want to attend, and the district uses a “diversity index” for assignments when a school is oversubscribed. The index considers the language spoken at home, whether a child qualifies for free lunch or is in public housing, a child’s academic performance and the quality of a child’s prior schools. But it has not resulted in racial integration.

“We were hopeful that the diversity index would work,” said Stuart Biegel, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was the district’s court-appointed monitor. “No one was rooting against it. But it didn’t work.”

Officials say one problem is that many students apply to neighborhood schools, which do not recruit enough students from outside their area. Another problem is demographics. Mr. Biegel said public school students in San Francisco were relatively low income over all, whatever their race or ethnicity, so the diversity index produced less mixing than hoped.

The wide ethnic diversity in San Francisco’s schools, which are about one-third Chinese, also introduces calculations among parents that make it easier to get income diversity without racial or ethnic diversity.

At Willie L. Brown Jr. College Preparatory Academy, a fourth- through sixth-grade school in the predominantly black neighborhood of Bayview, 75 percent of the students are black. Most are poor.

Tareyton D. Russ, the principal, said students from other neighborhoods did not seek to go there so the diversity index did not even apply. “Poor Chinese kids don’t want to go to school with poor black kids,” Mr. Russ said flatly.

Conversely, one white parent interviewed as she dropped her child off at summer school said some white parents avoided schools with a heavy Chinese concentration, like Lincoln, believing they would be too high-pressure for their children. She declined to be quoted by name.

David Campos, the general counsel to the school district, said the resegregation was so disappointing that the school board might try to test whether Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion in the recent Supreme Court case left open the possibility of using race if other methods of integration fail.

“We stopped using race at some point,” Mr. Campos said. “And then for a number of years we have tried to use a number of race-neutral factors to achieve racial diversity, which methods haven’t worked. Should the board decide to use race, and they may or may not, we are a very good test case.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/education/15integrate.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Labels: segregation, socioeconomic integration

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:56 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This piece tells the story behind Plyler v. Doe that successfully resisted a challenge to deny education to undocumented children in Texas. This is worth reading as it sheds light on an issue that unfortunately remains contentious today. Great going, Barbara!

-Angela


July 13, 2007 — Features

A Lesson in Equal Protection: The Texas cases that opened the schoolhouse door to undocumented immigrant children

by Barbara Belejack / Texas Observer

Early in the morning one long ago September, Laura Alvarez was awakened, bundled up, and piled into the family station wagon with her brothers and sisters. Her father hadn’t driven far when he was stopped by the Tyler police.
Humberto Alvarez was a jack-of-all-trades who knew a little about plumbing, carpentry, and electricity, and figured that was enough to support a growing family. He had left Mexico City and crossed the border in 1974, ending up in Tyler, the self-proclaimed “Rose City of America” 99 miles southeast of Dallas. Wife Jackeline and the children followed two years later.

Compared with the noise and chaos of the Colonia Rio Blanco, a working class neighborhood in the Mexican capital where even the parks were gray and concrete, Tyler was another world: deceptively tranquil and generously green. Laura and her siblings began learning English and enrolled in public school. But in the summer of 1977, as the new term rolled around, they were told they could no longer go. They stayed home—first one day and then another and another, until that morning when they all woke up early, packed into the station wagon, and drove off.

Still half asleep, Laura tried to listen as her father explained to the police where the family was headed. Suddenly they were moving again, driving the brick streets of downtown preceded by a police escort. It was still dark when they got to the courthouse; 10-year-old Laura fell back to sleep. Several days later she returned to school.

Many years later Laura learned what happened that day, after she was hustled into the courthouse through a back door.

It was this: After the state of Texas decided it would no longer pay to educate undocumented children, the Tyler Independent School District started charging $1,000 a year in tuition for students like Laura. The children of Humberto Alvarez, who worked at a local meatpacking plant, could no longer go to school. Along with three other families, Humberto and Jackeline filed suit in federal court against Superintendent James Plyler and the local school board. On that September morning, U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice held a hearing on their case. He would ultimately rule that the Texas statute and local policy were unconstitutional. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed his decision, and the case, along with a similar one from Houston, eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 15, 1982, the court ruled 5-4 that the Texas law effectively barred undocumented children from attending public schools, a violation of the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.


The sleepy girl in the station wagon, known as L. Loe in court papers, was a protagonist in a quintessential Texas story that has profoundly affected families and school districts throughout the country for the past 25 years.

Because of Plyler v. Doe, hundreds of thousands of children have gone to school who otherwise would not have, says Justice, adding that Plyler is the case he’d like most to be remembered for after nearly four decades on the federal bench.

Despite feverish efforts to overturn the ruling in the mid-1990s, it remains the law of the land, and continues to play a role in the nation’s never-ending, increasingly rancorous debate over immigration.

Thirty years ago, attorney Larry Daves recalls, “The atmosphere was very similar to what we have now. There was a hysteria about undocumented workers.” Now practicing in southern Colorado, Daves spent much of the ’70s and ’80s doing civil rights and labor law in East Texas. There was more than enough work—particularly for someone not averse to occasionally being paid in kind. In the summer of 1977, a Catholic lay worker contacted Daves at his Tyler office, desperate for someone to represent a group of children who were being told they could no longer go to school.
Until 1975, Texas required school districts to admit students without regard to their immigration status. But in the waning hours of the 1975 legislative session, the Texas Education Code was amended to prohibit spending state funds on students who were not U.S. citizens or legally admitted to the country. The amendment, which also authorized school districts to exclude undocumented students, passed by voice vote, with no debate and no legislative history—no numbers, no studies of how many students would be affected or the amendment’s financial impact. To some it was prejudice, pure and simple. Others saw it as one more step in a complex dance involving school finance reform and the state’s efforts to obtain federal funding for overcrowded schools, especially along the border. Years later, when questioned by attorneys, a majority of legislators would say that they had no idea what they were voting for.

At first, Tyler school officials ignored the law. “I guess I was soft-hearted and concerned about the kids, not wanting to penalize them for something the parents had done,” Superintendent Plyler testified. But fearing that the district would become “a haven” for families moving in to get an education, on July 21, 1977, the board of trustees began requiring parents to pay $1,000 tuition for each undocumented child. “We weren’t rich enough that we could enroll youngsters that the state would not reimburse for everyday attendance,” Plyler later explained. At the time, fewer than 60 students, out of a total enrollment of 16,000, were undocumented.

After agreeing to represent the families, Daves called the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Peter Roos, a MALDEF lawyer specializing in education cases, was already spinning out legal theories for a potential court challenge. He and Daves began preparing a case on behalf of four undocumented families from Mexico: Jose and Rosario Robles, Jose and Lidia Lopez, Felix Hernandez, and Humberto and Jackeline Alvarez. The families had lived in Tyler for between three and 13 years, working in agriculture, meatpacking, foundries, and the city’s world famous rose industry. They had rent receipts and car titles; some had income tax statements. The Robles family had bought a house. All had at least one child who was a U.S. citizen. “The main thing I remember,” Daves says, “was we were just really terrified these folks were going to get deported.”

Judge Justice allowed the plaintiffs to be identified by pseudonyms—Doe, Roe, Boe, and Loe—but made it clear that he was obligated to release information about their identities if the Immigration and Naturalization Service asked him to do so. To ease concerns about media attention and courtroom spectators, however, Justice set the hearing for a preliminary injunction for 6 a.m. on September 9.

Before the hearing, Daves reminded his clients that they were doing something terribly important. There were no guarantees. The law had already been unsuccessfully challenged in state district court; they were going in at their own peril. The families knew that, and had prepared for the possibility that they would be deported that day. They did not know that the U.S. Justice Department had already decided it was more interested in having the case heard then sending the INS to round up a few families in Tyler. In fact, as long as former President Jimmy Carter was in office, attorneys from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division filed briefs and appeared in court on the side of the immigrant families.

After the hearing, Justice issued a preliminary injunction directing Tyler schools to admit all children living in the district, regardless of their immigration status. He also ordered the Texas Education Agency to release state funds to the Tyler school district for each undocumented child. A two-day trial was held in December, and on September 14, 1978, Justice issued his final ruling. “Already disadvantaged as a result of poverty, lack of English-speaking ability, and undeniable social prejudices,” he wrote, “these children, without an education will become permanently locked in the lowest socioeconomic class.”

Justice chided the state for using the children to deal, in a backhanded way, with longstanding problems caused by a school finance system based on property taxes. No one disputed that school districts were overburdened and that there were many poor, Spanish-speaking, immigrant students, particularly along the border, he wrote. But testimony indicated that most of them were legal immigrant children. “Bent on cutting educational costs and unable constitutionally to exclude all such ‘problem’ children, the state has attempted to shave off a little around the edges, barring the undocumented alien children,” he wrote. “The expedience of this state’s policy may have been influenced by two actualities: children of illegal aliens had never been explicitly afforded any judicial protection, and little political uproar was likely to be raised in their behalf.”

Justice had entered new territory in applying the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Part of the Reconstruction-era legislation passed by Congress after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was designed to officially do away with slavery and caste-based laws. It confers citizenship on those born in the United States and provides that, “No State shall make or enforce any laws which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

There was no INS, no Border Patrol, no restrictions on immigration when the amendment passed. The Supreme Court later ruled that the due process clause applied to illegal immigrants. But when Justice issued his opinion in Plyler, no high court decision had addressed whether the equal protection clause also applied. The case was immediately appealed to the Fifth Circuit.

While Justice’s decision applied only to Tyler schools, it inspired a slew of similar cases throughout the state, most brought by young, fairly inexperienced attorneys working with federally funded legal services programs. In Houston, a group of young lawyers from the Centro para Inmigrantes, a legal clinic then operated by Gulf Coast Legal Services, became overwhelmed responding to the increasingly chaotic situation. At best, well-meaning principals were flummoxed by the complexity of immigration law. What were they supposed to do, for example, with a girl who had been brought to the country illegally as a baby, whose parents—one a U.S. citizen, the other a permanent resident—had been waiting for two years to obtain birth records from the Yucatan so they could complete their daughter’s file?

Church groups, Chicano graduate students, and even the government of Mexico tried to set up makeshift, alternative schools for students denied access to public schools. But the reality for many families of mixed immigration status was that some children could go to school, while siblings were forced to stay home. Centro attorneys were convinced it was time to take the issue statewide. Seventeen lawsuits that had been filed throughout the state were consolidated into a single case known as In re: Alien Children Litigation.

Centro lawyers tried to convince MALDEF and Roos to join them in making a statewide case. But the Tyler case was moving swiftly through the appellate system, and Roos was wary of another trial where the state would have a chance to present a stronger case. He discouraged the idea, and tension grew between MALDEF and the statewide team. “MALDEF said ‘Don’t do this. You’re going to mess it up’” recalls former Centro attorney Isaias Torres. “We were saying ‘No, we’re going to be fine.’”

As Justice’s ruling in Plyler made its way up the appellate process, the statewide case was set for trial in February 1980 before U.S. District Judge Woodrow Seals in Houston.


Born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, Seals came to Texas for law school after serving in what he would always describe as “the second Great War.” He settled in Houston and, like his friend Wayne Justice in Tyler, was appointed to the federal bench by Lyndon Johnson at the recommendation of the late U.S. Sen. Ralph Yarborough, patron saint of a generation of Texas liberals. Like Justice, Seals presided over several landmark school desegregation cases. Unlike Justice, whose ostracism by the local community was almost as legendary as the rulings that prompted it, Seals was a gregarious participant in a wide range of community activities. During the trial of the alien school case, he occasionally baffled attorneys with off-the-cuff remarks prompted by outside reading: for instance, engaging a Rice University professor in a discussion of the Cantos of Ezra Pound. Most baffling of all was a remark Seals made when a witness was trying to describe how a classroom could be designed so that English-speaking students learned Spanish as Spanish-speakers learned English. Why should English-speaking students want to learn Spanish, Seals asked, when they ought to be learning German, Russian, Chinese, or Japanese? “I don’t read the Spanish-language newspaper,” he continued, “but I read international reviews that review books that are published in all languages, and I never see anything worldwide published in Spanish of importance.” Among the angry letters he received was one from Sister Margaret Rose of Our Lady of Guadalupe church, reminding him that “were it not for the famous (or infamous!) Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848—written in Spanish,” he would probably not be presiding over a trial about undocumented school children “in our midst.” Seals responded by reading a lengthy, unprecedented mea culpa letter in open court.
The linguistic and literary diversions were somehow in keeping with what became a freewheeling trial about immigration history, demographics, school finance, international law, and federal education programs. Peter Schey, an attorney working with an immigrant rights project in Los Angeles brought in to direct the plaintiffs’ case, sought to not only challenge the constitutionality of a portion of the Texas Education Code, but to raise larger issues about federal immigration law and the history and context of Texas’ influence on labor and migration patterns. Seals let virtually everything into evidence.

Sociologist Gilbert Cardenas described a long-standing practice of extending employment to Mexican workers, precisely so they could be sent back across the border whenever it was convenient. Leonel Castillo, a former head of the INS, testified that inadequate INS staffing created a “de facto amnesty” because it was unlikely that children kicked out of school would ever be deported. Catholic Bishop John McCarthy likened the law to “the public policy after the Civil War, when we said, we will keep certain people poor in order that we will have somebody to bring the cotton in.”

Texas Assistant Attorney General Susan Dasher, working with what she would later describe as “a horrible statute to have to defend,” countered with school officials from Dallas and Houston, who decried the lack of bilingual teachers. Brownsville school Superintendent Raul Besteiro described his district’s rush to build portable classrooms for increasing numbers of legal immigrant students. Taking the nautical metaphor so often used in the context of immigration (inevitably described in terms of a “flood” or a “wave”) to the extreme, state education official Robert Tipton compared the total population of students “to the people on an ocean liner.” Imagine we are in a storm, he said, and the liner has gone down. “I am in charge of the lifeboat, and lifeboat holds 40 people,” Tipton said. “And there are already 50 people on the lifeboat. ... Do I allow some of those people out there in the water to drown so that I can save these 50 that I already have in the boat?”

The trial lasted nearly six weeks. On July 21, 1980, Seals issued an 87-page opinion that began with a tribute to the public school—“the most important institution in this country” and, like Justice before, concluded that Section 21.031 of the Texas Education Code was unconstitutional. Absent sufficient justification, he concluded, “the Constitution does not permit the states to deny access to education to a discrete group of children within its border.” He ordered the state to stop enforcing the law, and all local school districts to admit students without regard to their immigration status. “Texas v. Children,” was the headline the next day in the opinion page of the Dallas Times-Herald, while the rival Morning News declared, “Illegal Aliens Win Case.”

For the next few weeks, the staff in Seals’ office learned to ignore the phones during lunch. “It is people like you who will cause the ultimate breakdown of the system of law under which we live and the subsequent return to the law of the jungle,” charged one angry letter writer. Another proclaimed that Seals had “placed a socialistic albatross around the necks of the citizens of the United States.”

Replying to a congratulatory letter from Yarborough, Seals wrote: “These children still have a long way to go.” With an eye toward the upcoming presidential election, he added, “I hate to think what will happen to my decision if Governor Reagan wins the election and appoints four new justices to the Supreme Court. I do not think those children would have much of a chance.”

In his first year, President Reagan appointed just one new justice—Sandra Day O’Connor, the Arizona Republican who became the first woman on the court. On the morning of December 1, 1981, the gallery was packed as O’Connor participated in oral argument in one of her first major cases. She sat at the far end of the judicial panel, surrounded by stacks of books. From his vantage point at the counsel table, attorney Isaias Torres was almost close enough to touch her.
The court had combined the Plyler and In re: Alien Children Litigation cases. Schey and Roos divided their argument time, while Richard Arnett, a Texas assistant attorney general, and John Hardy, the Tyler school attorney, divided theirs. Arnett began with a geography lesson: Texas sat “right on top of the hub” of Mexico’s population and was the most vulnerable to an influx in population from Mexico. The Texas Education Code had been amended to protect the Mexican American population along the border, he said. As Torres listened to O’Connor pepper Arnett with questions, he began to think that she just might vote on the side of the children.

Then-Justice William Rehnquist occasionally looked off-kilter, slurring his words as he asked hypotheticals about the law of domicile and Louisianans moving to Texas for an education. Justice Thurgood Marshall, who led the 20-year battle that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education before becoming the first black justice, seemed ready to pounce. He asked Hardy, could Texas deny fire protection to illegal aliens?

“Deny them fire protection?” Hardy responded.

“Yes, sir. F-I-R-E. Could Texas pass a law and say they cannot be protected?”

Hardy didn’t think so. “Why not?” Marshall shot back. “Somebody’s house is more important than his child?”

Much of oral argument revolved around the minutiae of immigration—What was a green card and how did you get one? What was a work permit?—as well as questions about the law of domicile in Texas. What about a Virginian who moved to Texas, intending to stay less than a year? What about a professor from Mexico who moved to Texas to teach? At one point, an exasperated Marshall asked Roos when somebody was going to start arguing the 14th Amendment and equal protection.

If oral argument was lively, the court’s private deliberations proved even livelier. In a series of articles published last January in Slate, author Jim Newton provided insight into how lively. For decades, Justice William Brennan compiled a series of case memos, chatty and informal summaries of the mood and the meat of weekly deliberations. The memos are archived in the Library of Congress; many had never been made available to the public. A selection of Brennan’s case memo for Plyler v. Doe was posted online:

TM took sharp exception to WHR’s reference to illegal aliens as “wetbacks.” When WHR sought to defend his use of the terms as one still having currency in his part of the country, TM reminded WHR that under that theory he used to be referred to as “nigger.” But warmer feelings prevailed and TM and WHR returned to the matter at hand.

The Chief began the discussion by arguing that illegal aliens should not be entitled to receive welfare (as if that was the issue), but I was pleased when he conceded that aliens were “persons” within the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause. Still, he continued, whatever level of scrutiny was appropriate it did not entitle illegal aliens to receive welfare or an education.

The swing vote would not be O’Connor, as Torres and others had predicted. Brennan and Chief Justice Warren Burger would be courting Lewis Powell for the fifth vote. Brennan drafted and redrafted the opinion to emphasize the innocence of children and the importance of education. Powell, Harry Blackmun, Marshall, and John Paul Stevens joined Brennan in the majority opinion upholding the rulings by Justice and Seals.

“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,” Brennan wrote. “It is thus clear that whatever savings might be achieved by denying these children an education, they are wholly insubstantial in light of the costs involved to these children, the State, and the Nation.”

In his dissenting opinion, which O’Connor, Justice Byron White, and Rehnquist joined, Burger scolded the majority for spinning a “theory custom-tailored” to fit the facts. “I would agree without hesitation that it is senseless for an enlightened society to deprive any children—including illegal aliens—of an elementary education,” he wrote. But the “Constitution does not constitute us as ‘Platonic Guardian.’”

The New York Times editorialized that “the 5-4 vote was too close and the legal rule too narrow to make the case one of liberty’s landmarks, yet any other result would have been a national disgrace. It was intolerable that a state so wealthy and so willing to wink at undocumented workers should evade the duty—and ignore the need—to educate all of its children.”

The day the opinion was issued, a little-known Department of Justice lawyer co-wrote a memo chastising the U.S. solicitor general for not filing a brief taking Texas’ side. Had such a brief been filed, future Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts suggested, Powell might have voted differently.

That’s me,” says Laura Alvarez, flipping through the pages of the Alcalde, her yearbook from John Tyler High School class of ’87. She points to a photograph of a slender young woman with a thick cascade of dark brown hair, pensive in her cap and gown. “I really liked school.”
The children of Plyler are now approaching middle age—“fixin’ to be 40,” as Alvarez described herself last spring. A surprising number—including all her six siblings—remained in the Tyler area, working and raising families. Two years ago, Alvarez married Juan Reyna, a high school classmate who had also migrated to Tyler illegally from Mexico as a child. They’re now the parents of a baby boy, Juan Jr. Juan Sr. is a musician whose band plays at Mexican dances throughout East Texas and sometimes travels as far as Kansas.

Although she liked school, what was supposed to happen afterward for undocumented children like her was a little vague. In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, providing for increased border security and sanctions on employers of illegal immigrants. It also created an amnesty program that eventually led to the legalization of about 3 million undocumented immigrants. Among them were Alvarez and other Plyler plaintiffs. But legalization—and a green card—was still down the line when Alvarez graduated from high school. She never thought about college. She worked as a teacher’s aide with the Tyler Independent School District for 10 years, in charge of Spanish-speaking students. She usually juggled a part-time job and occasional class at Tyler Junior College, thinking she would become a teacher. Discouraged by the low pay, she found a job with the Smith County district attorney, where she worked in victims services until a few months before Juan Jr. was born.

Alvarez had never heard of Plyler v. Doe, much less her own role in it, until 1994, when she was contacted by a Los Angeles Times reporter. Her parents, who divorced during the case, didn’t raise their children to “get into the adult business,” she recalls.

But in the mid-1990s, Plyler was in the news again. A severe budget crunch and recession caused by massive layoffs in the California’s defense industry had combined with a growing sense of alarm over the state’s changing demographics. Gov. Pete Wilson needed a winning issue for his flagging re-election campaign. The answer was the “Save Our Schools” ballot initiative, attempting to do what Texas had done nearly 20 years before—and more. The initiative, Proposition 187, passed easily at the polls, but was blocked the next day and suffered a slow death in court. While it wended its way through the state and federal courts, Republican Congressman Elton Gallegly attempted to add an amendment to an immigration reform package, giving states the same option that Texas had offered school districts in 1975 and essentially overturning Plyler v. Doe. President Clinton threatened to veto legislation if the so-called “Gallegly Amendment” were attached; Texas’ two Republican senators, Phil Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchison, also spoke out against it, as did then-Gov. George Bush. Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 without the Gallegly Amendment.

Since then, the right of undocumented children to a free public elementary and secondary education has been settled law, despite the best efforts of critics. School officials may not ask students for Social Security numbers or otherwise question them—or their parents—in ways that have a “chilling effect” and discourage school attendance. Although the statistics are murky, an estimated 65,000 undocumented students graduate every year from U.S. high schools.

Still unresolved is the fate of those students after they graduate.

Several high court justices posed that very question to former MALDEF attorney Roos back in 1981. Would Texas have to open the doors to state colleges to undocumented immigrants? Should it admit undocumented students to its graduate or medical schools at in-state tuition? Roos tried to respond with opaque answers. From the beginning, his strategy had been to define the case as narrowly as possible, to assuage the fears of those who saw Plyler as the beginning of a host of rights for undocumented immigrants. Finally, he conceded, “You would be dealing with people above the age of majority.” The “innocent factor” would not be the same.

By 2001, a steady trickle of stories about undocumented immigrant valedictorians unable to attend college began appearing in the media. That year Texas—the first state to try to exclude undocumented students from its public schools—became the first to offer them in-state tuition at its colleges and universities, provided they attended a Texas high school for three years and earned a diploma or obtained a GED. Since 2001, there have been bipartisan efforts in Congress to pass the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, which would offer a path to legalization to students who grow up in the United States and attend college or join the military. The most recent version of the DREAM Act died last month, along with the vast stew of proposals that went into the Senate immigration bill.

Immigration itself, of course, is never “settled,” despite the rhetoric of those who speak about “solving immigration,” as if they were discussing a quadratic equation rather than the complex set of forces that cause people to migrate. In increasing numbers, state legislatures and city councils throughout the country have attempted to get into the immigration business. Some proclaim themselves sanctuary cities; others attempt to adopt schemes, such as the one approved last May by voters in Farmers Branch, Texas, that would require landlords to verify the immigration status of their tenants—a variation of what Texas tried to ask principals to do more than 30 years ago and a roundabout method of doing away with Plyler v. Doe. If you make them miserable, the theory has it, they will just go away.

Not long ago Laura Alvarez was asked if she followed the immigration debate. “A little bit,” she said. “I kind of see it from both sides.” But she was certain of one thing: “Don’t try to take away education.”

Former Observer editor Barbara Belejack is a 2007 Racial Justice Fellow of the Institute for Justice and Journalism at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, which provided funding for this article. To listen to the oral argument of Plyler v. Doe before the U.S. Supreme Court, read the transcript or the decision in the case, see http://www.oyez.org/cases.

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Labels: immigrant children, immigration and education, Plyler v. Doe

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:58 PM 0 comments Links to this post

July 15, 2007
The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age

By LOUIS UCHITELLE
The tributes to Sanford I. Weill line the walls of the carpeted hallway that leads to his skyscraper office, with its panoramic view of Central Park. A dozen framed magazine covers, their colors as vivid as an Andy Warhol painting, are the most arresting. Each heralds Mr. Weill’s genius in assembling Citigroup into the most powerful financial institution since the House of Morgan a century ago.

His achievement required political clout, and that, too, is on display. Soon after he formed Citigroup, Congress repealed a Depression-era law that prohibited goliaths like the one Mr. Weill had just put together anyway, combining commercial and investment banking, insurance and stock brokerage operations. A trophy from the victory — a pen that President Bill Clinton used to sign the repeal — hangs, framed, near the magazine covers.

These days, Mr. Weill and many of the nation’s very wealthy chief executives, entrepreneurs and financiers echo an earlier era — the Gilded Age before World War I — when powerful enterprises, dominated by men who grew immensely rich, ushered in the industrialization of the United States. The new titans often see themselves as pillars of a similarly prosperous and expansive age, one in which their successes and their philanthropy have made government less important than it once was.

“People can look at the last 25 years and say this is an incredibly unique period of time,” Mr. Weill said. “We didn’t rely on somebody else to build what we built, and we shouldn’t rely on somebody else to provide all the services our society needs.”

Those earlier barons disappeared by the 1920s and, constrained by the Depression and by the greater government oversight and high income tax rates that followed, no one really took their place. Then, starting in the late 1970s, as the constraints receded, new tycoons gradually emerged, and now their concentrated wealth has made the early years of the 21st century truly another Gilded Age.

Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution — currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics.

Such concentration at the very top occurred in 1915 and 1916, as the Gilded Age was ending, and again briefly in the late 1920s, before the stock market crash. Now it is back, and Mr. Weill is prominent among the new titans. His net worth exceeds $1 billion, not counting the $500 million he says he has already given away, in the open-handed style of Andrew Carnegie and the other great philanthropists of the earlier age.

At 74, just over a year into retirement as Citigroup chairman, Mr. Weill sees in Carnegie’s life aspects of his own. Andrew Carnegie, an impoverished Scottish immigrant, built a steel empire in Pittsburgh, taking risks that others shunned, just as the demand for steel was skyrocketing. He then gave away his fortune, reasoning that he was lucky to have been in the right spot at the right moment and he owed the community for his good luck — not in higher wages for his workers, but in philanthropic distribution of his wealth.

Mr. Weill’s beginnings were similarly inauspicious. A son of immigrants from Poland, raised in Brooklyn, a so-so college student, he landed on Wall Street in a low-level job in the 1950s. Harnessing entrepreneurial energy, deftness as a deal maker and an appetite for risk, with a rising stock market pulling him along, he built a financial empire that, in his view, successfully broke through the stultifying constraints that flowed from the New Deal. They were constraints not just on what business could or could not do, but on every high earner’s take-home pay.

“I once thought how lucky the Carnegies and the Rockefellers were because they made their money before there was an income tax,” Mr. Weill said, never believing in his younger days that deregulation and tax cuts, starting in the late 1970s, would bring back many of the easier conditions of the Gilded Age. “I felt that everything of any great consequence was really all made in the past,” he said. “That turned out not to be true and it is not true today.”

The Question of Talent

Other very wealthy men in the new Gilded Age talk of themselves as having a flair for business not unlike Derek Jeter’s “unique talent” for baseball, as Leo J. Hindery Jr. put it. “I think there are people, including myself at certain times in my career,” Mr. Hindery said, “who because of their uniqueness warrant whatever the market will bear.”

He counts himself as a talented entrepreneur, having assembled from scratch a cable television sports network, the YES Network, that he sold in 1999 for $200 million. “Jeter makes an unbelievable amount of money,” said Mr. Hindery, who now manages a private equity fund, “but you look at him and you say, ‘Wow, I cannot find another ballplayer with that same set of skills.’ ”

A handful of critics among the new elite, or close to it, are scornful of such self-appraisal. “I don’t see a relationship between the extremes of income now and the performance of the economy,” Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve Board chairman, said in an interview, challenging the contentions of the very rich that they are, more than others, the driving force of a robust economy.

The great fortunes today are largely a result of the long bull market in stocks, Mr. Volcker said. Without rising stock prices, stock options would not have become a major source of riches for financiers and chief executives. Stock prices rise for a lot of reasons, Mr. Volcker said, including ones that have nothing to do with the actions of these people.

“The market did not go up because businessmen got so much smarter,” he said, adding that the 1950s and 1960s, which the new tycoons denigrate as bureaucratic and uninspiring, “were very good economic times and no one was making what they are making now.”

James D. Sinegal, chief executive of Costco, the discount retailer, echoes that sentiment. “Obscene salaries send the wrong message through a company,” he said. “The message is that all brilliance emanates from the top; that the worker on the floor of the store or the factory is insignificant.”

A legendary chief executive from an earlier era is similarly critical. He is Robert L. Crandall, 71, who as president and then chairman and chief executive, led American Airlines through the early years of deregulation and pioneered the development of the hub-and-spoke system for managing airline routes. He retired in 1997, never having made more than $5 million a year, in the days before upper-end incomes really took off.

He is speaking out now, he said, because he no longer has to worry that his “radical views” might damage the reputation of American or that of the companies he served until recently as a director. The nation’s corporate chiefs would be living far less affluent lives, Mr. Crandall said, if fate had put them in, say, Uzbekistan instead of the United States, “where they are the beneficiaries of a market system that rewards a few people in extraordinary ways and leaves others behind.”

“The way our society equalizes incomes,” he argued, “is through much higher taxes than we have today. There is no other way.”

The New Tycoons

The new Gilded Age has created only one fortune as large as those of the Rockefellers, the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts — that of Bill Gates, according to various compilations. His net worth, measured as a share of the economy’s output, ranks him fifth among the 30 all-time wealthiest American families, just ahead of Carnegie. Only one other living billionaire makes the cut: Warren E. Buffett, in 16th place.

Individual fortunes nearly a century ago were so large that just 30 tycoons — Rockefeller was by far the wealthiest — had accumulated net worth equal to 5 percent of the national income. Their wealth flowed mainly from the empires they built in manufacturing, railroads, oil, coal, urban transit and mass retailing as the United States grew into the world’s largest industrial economy.

Today the fortunes of the very wealthiest are spread more widely. In addition to stock and stock options, low-interest credit has brought wealth to more families — by, for example, facilitating the sale of individual businesses for much greater sums than in the past. The fortunes amassed in hedge funds and in private equity often stem from deals involving huge amounts of easy credit and vast pools of capital available for investment.

The high-tech boom and the Internet unfolded against this backdrop. The rising stock market multiplied the wealth of Bill Gates as his software became the industry standard. It did the same for numerous others who financed start-ups on a shoestring and then went public at enormous gain.

Over a longer period, the market lifted the value of Mr. Buffett’s judicious investments and timely acquisitions, and he emerged as the extraordinarily wealthy Sage of Omaha, in effect, a baron of the new Gilded Age whose views are strikingly similar to those of Carnegie and Mr. Weill.

Like them, Mr. Buffett, 78, sees himself as lucky, having had the good fortune, as he put it, to have been born in America, white and male, and “wired for asset allocation” just when all four really paid off. He dwelt on his good fortune in a recent appearance at a fund-raiser for Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is vying for Mr. Buffett’s support of her presidential candidacy.

“This is a significantly richer country than 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago,” he declared, backing his assertion with a favorite statistic. The national income, divided by the population, is a very abundant $45,000 per capita, he said, a number that reflects an affluent nation but also obscures the lopsided income distribution intertwined with the prosperity.

“Society should place an initial emphasis on abundance,” Mr. Buffett argued, but “then should continuously strive” to redistribute the abundance more equitably.

No income tax existed in Carnegie’s day to do this, and neither Mr. Buffett nor Mr. Weill push for sharply higher income tax rates now, although Mr. Buffett criticizes the present tax code as unfairly skewed in his favor. Like Carnegie, philanthropy is their preference. “I want to give away my money rather than have somebody take it away,” Mr. Weill said.

Mr. Buffett is already well down that path. Most of his wealth is in the stock of his company, Berkshire Hathaway, and he is transferring the majority of that stock to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation so the Gateses can “materially expand” their giving.

“In my will,” he has written, echoing Carnegie’s last wishes, “I’ve stipulated that the proceeds from all Berkshire shares I still own at death are to be used for philanthropic purposes.”

Revisionist History

The new tycoons describe a history that gives them a heroic role. The American economy, they acknowledge, did grow more rapidly on average in the decades immediately after World War II than it is growing today. Incomes rose faster than inflation for most Americans and the spread between rich and poor was much less. But the United States was far and away the dominant economy, and government played a strong supporting role. In such a world, the new tycoons argue, business leaders needed only to be good managers.

Then, with globalization, with America competing once again for first place as strenuously as it had in the first Gilded Age, the need grew for a different type of business leader — one more entrepreneurial, more daring, more willing to take risks, more like the rough and tumble tycoons of the first Gilded Age. Lew Frankfort, chairman and chief executive of Coach, the manufacturer and retailer of trendy upscale handbags, who was among the nation’s highest paid chief executives last year, recaps the argument.

“The professional class that developed in business in the ’50s and ’60s,” he said, “was able as America grew at very steady rates to become industry leaders and move their organizations forward in most categories: steel, autos, housing, roads.”

That changed with the arrival of “the technological age,” in Mr. Frankfort’s view. Innovation became a requirement, in addition to good management skills — and innovation has played a role in Coach’s marketing success. “To be successful,” Mr. Frankfort said, “you now needed vision, lateral thinking, courage and an ability to see things, not the way they were but how they might be.”

Mr. Weill’s vision was to create a financial institution in the style of those that flourished in the last Gilded Age. Although insurance is gone, Citigroup still houses commercial and investment banking and stock brokerage.

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 outlawed the mix, blaming conflicts of interest inherent in such a combination for helping to bring on the 1929 crash and the Depression. The pen displayed in Mr. Weill’s hallway is one of those Mr. Clinton used to revoke Glass-Steagall in 1999. He did so partly to accommodate the newly formed Citigroup, whose heft was necessary, Mr. Weill said, if the United States was to be a powerhouse in global financial markets.

“The whole world is moving to the American model of free enterprise and capital markets,” Mr. Weill said, arguing that Wall Street cannot be a big player in China or India without giants like Citigroup. “Not having American financial institutions that really are at the fulcrum of how these countries are converting to a free-enterprise system,” he said, “would really be a shame.”

Such talk alarms Arthur Levitt Jr., a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who started on Wall Street years ago as a partner with Mr. Weill in a stock brokerage firm. Mr. Levitt has publicly lamented the end of Glass-Steagall, but Mr. Weill argues that its repeal “created the opportunities to keep people still moving forward.”

Mr. Levitt is skeptical. “I view a gilded age as an age in which warning flags are flying and are seen by very few people,” he said, referring to the potential for a Wall Street firm to fail or markets to crash in a world of too much deregulation. “I think this is a time of great prosperity and a time of great danger.”

It’s Not the Money, or Is It?

Not that money is the only goal. Mr. Hindery, the cable television entrepreneur, said he would have worked just as hard for a much smaller payoff, and others among the very wealthy agreed. “I worked because I loved what I was doing,” Mr. Weill said, insisting that not until he retired did “I have a chance to sit back and count up what was on the table.” And Kenneth C. Griffin, who received more than $1 billion last year as chairman of a hedge fund, the Citadel Investment Group, declared: “The money is a byproduct of a passionate endeavor.”

Mr. Griffin, 38, argued that those who focus on the money — and there is always a get-rich crowd — “soon discover that wealth is not a particularly satisfying outcome.” His own team at Citadel, he said, “loves the problems they work on and the challenges inherent to their business.”

Mr. Griffin maintained that he has created wealth not just for himself but for many others. “We have helped to create real social value in the U.S. economy,” he said. “We have invested money in countless companies over the years and they have helped countless people.”

The new tycoons oppose raising taxes on their fortunes. Unlike Mr. Crandall, neither Mr. Weill nor Mr. Griffin nor most of the dozen others who were interviewed favor tax rates higher than they are today, although a few would go along with a return to the levels of the Clinton administration. The marginal tax on income then was 39.6 percent, and on capital gains, 20 percent. That was still far below the 70 percent and 39 percent in the late 1970s. Those top rates, in the Bush years, are now 35 percent and 15 percent, respectively.

“The income distribution has to stand,” Mr. Griffin said, adding that by trying to alter it with a more progressive income tax, “you end up in problematic circumstances. In the current world, there will be people who will move from one tax area to another. I am proud to be an American. But if the tax became too high, as a matter of principle I would not be working this hard.”

Creating Wealth

Some chief executives of publicly traded companies acknowledge that their fortunes are indeed large — but that it reflects only a small share of the corporate value created on their watch.

Mr. Frankfort, the 61-year-old Coach chief, took home $44.4 million last year. His net worth is in the high nine figures. Yet his pay and net worth, he notes, are small compared with the gain to shareholders since Coach went public six years ago, with Mr. Frankfort at the helm. The market capitalization, the value of all the shares, is nearly $18 billion, up from an initial $700 million.

“I don’t think it is unreasonable,” he said, “for the C.E.O. of a company to realize 3 to 5 percent of the wealth accumulation that shareholders realize.”

That strikes Robert C. Pozen as a reasonable standard. He made a name for himself — and a fortune — rejuvenating mutual funds, starting with Fidelity. In one case, he said, the fund he was running made a profit of $1 billion; his pay that year was $15 million.

“In every organization there are a relatively small number of really critical people,” Mr. Pozen said. “You have to start with that premise, and I made a big difference.”

Mr. Weill makes a similar point. Escorting a visitor down his hall of tributes, he lingers at framed charts with multicolored lines tracking Citigroup’s stock price. Two of the lines compare the price in the five years of Mr. Weill’s active management with that of Mr. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway during the same period. Citigroup went up at six times the pace of Berkshire.

“I think that the results our company had, which is where the great majority of my wealth came from, justified what I got,” Mr. Weill said.

New Technologies

Others among the very rich argue that their wealth helps them develop new technologies that benefit society. Steve Perlman, a Silicon Valley innovator, uses his fortune from breakthrough inventions to help finance his next attempt at a new technology so far out, he says, that even venture capitalists approach with caution. He and his partners, co-founders of WebTV Networks, which developed a way to surf the Web using a television set, sold that still profitable system to Microsoft in 1997 for $503 million.

Mr. Perlman’s share went into the next venture, he says, and the next. One of his goals with his latest enterprise, a private company called Rearden L.L.C., is to develop over several years a technology that will make film animation seem like real-life movies. “There was no one who would invest,” Mr. Perlman said. So he used his own money.

In an earlier era, big corporations and government were the major sources of money for cutting-edge research with an uncertain outcome. Bell Labs in New Jersey was one of those research centers, and Mr. Perlman, now a 46-year-old computer engineer with 71 patents to his name, said that, in an earlier era, he could easily have gone to Bell as a salaried inventor.

In the 1950s, for example, he might have been on the team that built the first transistor, a famous Bell Labs breakthrough. Instead, after graduating from Columbia University, he went to Apple in Silicon Valley, then to Microsoft and finally out on his own.

“I would have been happy as a clam to participate in the development of the transistor,” Mr. Perlman said. “The path I took was the path that was necessary to do what I was doing.”

Carnegie’s Philanthropy

In contrast to many of his peers in corporate America, Mr. Sinegal, 70, the Costco chief executive, argues that the nation’s business leaders would exercise their “unique skills” just as vigorously for “$10 million instead of $200 million, if that were the standard.”

As a co-founder of Costco, which now has 132,000 employees, Mr. Sinegal still holds $150 million in company stock. He is certainly wealthy. But he distinguishes between a founder’s wealth and the current practice of paying a chief executive’s salary in stock options that balloon into enormous amounts. His own salary as chief executive was $349,000 last year, incredibly modest by current standards.

“I think that most of the people running companies today are motivated and pay is a small portion of the motivation,” Mr. Sinegal said. So why so much pressure for ever higher pay?

“Because everyone else is getting it,” he said. “It is as simple as that. If somehow a proclamation were made that C.E.O.’s could only make a maximum of $300,000 a year, you would not have any shortage of very qualified men and women seeking the jobs.”

Looking back, none of the nation’s legendary tycoons was more aware of his good luck than Andrew Carnegie.

“Carnegie made it abundantly clear that the centerpiece of his gospel of wealth philosophy was that individuals do not create wealth by themselves,” said David Nasaw, a historian at City University of New York and the author of “Andrew Carnegie” (Penguin Press). “The creator of wealth in his view was the community, and individuals like himself were trustees of that wealth.”

Repaying the community did not mean for Carnegie raising the wages of his steelworkers. Quite the contrary, he sometimes cut wages and, in doing so, presided over violent antiunion actions.

Carnegie did not concern himself with income inequality. His whole focus was philanthropy. He favored a confiscatory estate tax for those who failed to arrange to return, before their deaths, the fortunes the community had made possible. And today dozens of libraries, cultural centers, museums and foundations bear Carnegie’s name.

“Confiscatory” does not appear in Mr. Weill’s public comments on the estate tax, or in those of Mr. Gates. They note that the estate tax, now being phased out at the urging of President Bush, will return in full in 2010, unless Congress acts otherwise.

They publicly favor retaining an estate tax but focus their attention on philanthropy.

Mr. Weill ticks off a list of gifts that he and his wife, Joan, have made. Some bear their names, and will for years to come. With each bequest, one or the other joins the board. Appropriately, Carnegie Hall has been a big beneficiary, and Mr. Weill as chairman was honored at a huge fund-raising party that Carnegie Hall gave on his 70th birthday.

The Weills — matching what everyone else pledged — gave $30 million to enhance the concert hall that Andrew Carnegie built in 1890 in pursuit of returning his fortune to the community, establishing a standard that today’s tycoons embrace.

“We have that in common,” Mr. Weill said.

Amanda Cox contributed reporting.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:50 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out this essay review [pdf] titled "NCLB Blue: An Essay Review," by
Mark Fetler. -Angela

Labels: essay, NCLB

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:15 AM 0 comments Links to this post

I'm glad to see that growth models are being taken seriously. -Angela

Published Online: July 3, 2007
U.S. OKs Pilot ‘Growth Models’ for Last 2 States
By Alyson Klein

The U.S. Department of Education announced today that it will permit two more states—Arizona and Alaska—to use so-called growth models to measure student progress for the 2006-07 school year.
Six other states—Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, and Tennessee— have already been fully approved to participate in the department’s growth model pilot project. Beyond Ohio, which has received conditional approval, no additional states will be considered for approval to participate in the pilot project, said Rebecca Neale, a spokeswoman for the department.
Growth models allow states to receive credit under the 5-year-old No Child Left Behind Act for improving individual students’ academic performance over time.
By contrast, states adhering to the standard accountability requirements under the federal law compare test scores of groups of students against those of students in the same grade during the previous year, to gauge whether they are making progress toward bringing all students to proficiency by the 2013-14 school year.
‘Many Different Routes’
The department announced in 2005 that as many as 10 states could be permitted to participate in the pilot project, which U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings initiated to gauge whether growth models can be reliable indicators of student progress.
If lawmakers are satisfied with the results of the project, they could choose to expand the use of growth models during the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, scheduled for this year. The department will also evaluate the results of the project and consider next steps, Ms. Neale said.
Ms. Spellings outlined a set of “bright line” principles that all states interested in participating in the pilot project must meet.
For instance, the accountability plans must adhere to the 2013-14 target for having all students achieving at the proficiency level on state tests. Like standard state accountability plans approved under the NCLB law, acceptable growth models also must hold schools accountable for the performance of student subgroups, such as racial minorities.
“There are many different routes for states to take, but they all must begin with a commitment to annual assessment and disaggregation of data,” said Secretary Spellings in a statement. “And, they all must lead to closing the achievement gap and every student reaching grade level by 2014. We are open to new ideas, but when it comes to accountability, we are not taking our eye off the ball.”
Vol. 26, Issue 43

Labels: growth models, NCLB

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

Without knowing much here as so little info is provided, one can only surmise that at issue is the purpose of this assessment. If used to terminate rather than provide needed resources, the reaction to this apparent reform is understandable. Also, reasons for test failure among teachers really merits greater explication. -Angela

July 6, 2007
Peru Teachers Strike to Protest Competency Testing
By The Associated Press

Lima, Peru
Peruvian public school teachers walked off the job Thursday to protest an education reform proposal that would require them to pass periodic competency exams.
February test results showed almost half of public school teachers cannot solve basic math problems and one-third are deficient in reading comprehension.
Congress began debating a bill Thursday that would fire teachers who fail the test three times, a move the teachers' union, Sutep, says will lead to "arbitrary" firings.
Protesting teachers surrounded the regional education building in the central Junin department, and threw stones, burned tires and blocked roads, state news agency Andina reported.
Education Minister Jose Antonio Chang called the effort a failure, saying only 15 percent of Peru's approximately 350,000 teachers failed to show up for work in the country, where it is winter and the middle of the school year.
The government has declared the strike illegal.
President Alan Garcia has promised to revamp the country's ailing public education system, widely looked down upon for its poor infrastructure and untrained staff.
Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Vol. 26

Labels: Latin America, teacher testing

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:05 AM 1 comments Links to this post

This piece published on September 1, 2004 provides additional context for the militancy among teachers in Latin America. Of interest is their reaction to neoliberal reforms and school privatization. -Angela


Teachers’ Unions in Latin America Take Militant Tack
By John Gehring

Teachers’ strikes throughout Latin America have left millions of students out of school this year, and in some cases, even sparked violent clashes between militant protesters and police forces.
The demands made by the teachers—better salaries, more resources, a rejection of school privatization—in many ways mirror the seminal issues raised by teachers’ unions in the United States. But the aggressive, confrontational public acts embraced by many labor organizations in Central and South America as a way to sway government policies reveals a type of militancy rarely seen in teachers’ unions in the States.
Some experts, in fact, believe that teachers in Latin America are becoming more radical.
"Public-sector unions have become very militant," said Victoria Murillo, an associate professor of political science and international affairs at Columbia University. "There’s a lot of variation in union organizing in Latin America, but by the 1990s, the public-sector unions in most of these countries were characterized by militancy because most of them really suffered a reduction in wages."
What’s more, said Ms. Murillo, who has written about teachers’ unions in Argentina, "in both Peru and Honduras, there’s a centralized teachers’ movement with a single union representing all teachers, which makes them relatively strong compared to other countries."
Looting and Burning
In Honduras, teachers shut down major highways and called for the resignation of President Ricardo Maduro during a strike that began in June, when about 60,000 teachers walked off the job, demanding better pay and more government funding for education.
During one march to the national Congress in the capital of Tegucigalpa, teachers carried wooden sticks and rocks as they joined several thousand striking workers. Banks and other businesses shut down during the march, and the military was called in to set up barricades. About 2 million students missed classes during the 35-day strike that ended in July, after the government agreed to wage concessions.
Peruvian teachers went on a nationwide strike for three weeks that same month, calling on embattled President Alejandro Toledo to live up to his campaign promise of raising teachers’ salaries and improving education in a country where most teachers struggle on the $200 they make a month.
Striking teachers were mobilized by Peru’s influential teachers’ union, known in Spanish as the Sindicato Unico de Trabajadores Educación del Peru, or SUTEP, which represents about 145,000 teachers countrywide. A more radical faction of SUTEP unionists was joined by other workers July 1 in the city of Ayacucho, where more than 300 teachers occupied a municipal building, set fire to a hotel belonging to the mayor, looted automatic teller machines, and clashed with military forces and the police.
The strike ended in July after the government agreed to small wage hikes.
Last year in Guatemala, about 60,000 public school teachers went on strike for more than a month, calling for salary increases, as well as more textbooks and repairs to crumbling school buildings. At the height of the walkout, students, families, and indigenous groups joined teachers in shutting down the main airport and border crossings for several days.
The frequent teachers’ strikes and level of populist anger against some governments in Latin America is being driven in part, some observers say, by a broader convergence of social movements resisting "neoliberal" economic policies.
Those policies are adopted by governments that follow the blueprints of international lending institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Critics say the economic models encouraged by those organizations favor the privatization of public services and the paying down of a nation’s debt at the expense of funding for social programs like education.
"Teachers do not have enough money to live on, and government support for education is eroding," said Bob Arnove, an Indiana University professor who specializes in comparative education and has written about education in Latin America. "In the context of this neoliberal agenda, education is being privatized and decentralized, and teachers in many of these countries are some of the most unionized professionals so they can speak out collectively against these economic policies."
David Dorn, the director of international affairs for the American Federation of Teachers, says the perspective of teachers’ unions in South America are shaped by the legacy of politics and history in the region. Although some unions have evolved to the point where they can work pragmatically with governments, said Mr. Dorn, who has worked with South American labor groups, many others still view any relationships with their governments from a "class warfare" perspective.
"While historical ties between teachers’ unions, political parties, and leftist ideologies waned after the fall of Soviet communism, many traditions and instincts linger on," he said.
Targets for Persecution
Unions in some Latin American countries have faced decades of harassment for their political activity.
Teachers in Colombia, in particular, often have been targeted and killed by paramilitary groups, as well as terrorists involved with drug trafficking during the country’s 4-decades-old civil war.
Last year alone, 41 teachers were murdered in Colombia, many in retaliation for their union activism, according to the Federación Colombiana de Educadores, or FECODE, the nation’s largest teachers’ union. Many of those killings go unpunished.
"In Colombia, there is great intolerance of unions," said Max Correa, a union leader for FECODE in Bogotá, during an interview in Washington. "Our unions are immersed in this history of violence in Colombia. Many of us have been threatened and have suffered physical attacks. I have received death threats. The majority of union leaders have been threatened. Because of this, the unions have been debilitated. People are scared," he said.
Mr. Correa recently visited the United States, along with other FECODE members, at the invitation of the AFT, the AFL-CIO, and the U.S. Department of Labor.
The AFL-CIO runs a Washington-based Solidarity Center that helps workers around the world build independent unions, and officials asked the Colombians to meet with members of local and state unions in several U.S. cities.
Laura Henao, the secretary of women and family affairs for FECODE, said schools located in rural areas of Colombia are often in territory where paramilitary groups and leftist guerrillas are fighting. "The violence in Colombia has an enormous effect on the quality of education, and on Colombian families and teachers," she said.
Links to Terrorism?
In some South American countries, such as Peru, government officials have accused factions of teachers’ unions of having links with terrorist groups bent on destabilizing or overthrowing the government.
When a faction of striking Peruvian teachers joined other workers to occupy a municipal building in Ayacucho this summer, Peru’s prime minister, Carlos Ferrero Costa, claimed the union was influenced by a Maoist-inspired terrorist group, Sendero Luminoso. The terrorist group, which had its birth in Ayacucho, was infamous in Peru during the 1980s and 1990s for brutal murders, torture, and kidnappings of government officials.
But Mauricio Quiroz Torres, a Lima-based coordinator for SUTEP, Peru’s main teachers’ union, calls that allegation a lie perpetuated by the government to divert attention from the real issues: declining teachers’ wages, diminishing levels of government support for public education, and the increased contracting of temporary teachers who can be fired without cause.
"The accusation is unfounded, a tale conceived of by the government to discredit our national union, and to take away the support we have from the people," Mr. Torres said in an e-mail interview. "Teachers peacefully occupied various public localities. The national police of Peru used unusual violence even though the teachers had already signed agreements with the authorities to dialogue about the issues."
Coverage of cultural understanding and international issues in education is supported in part by the Atlantic Philanthropies..
Vol. 24, Issue 1, Page 8

Labels: Latin America, teacher protests

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:01 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Interesting commentary in the WALL STREET JOURNAL on where the state is trending politically and why. -Angela

CROSS COUNTRY
The Troubled Texas GOP
Will Lone Star Republicans blow it on immigration like the California party did?


BY JONATHAN GURWITZ
Sunday, July 8, 2007 12:01 a.m.

SAN ANTONIO--In 1994 George W. Bush delivered the coup de grâce for the Republican revolution in Texas by defeating incumbent Gov. Ann Richards. The GOP then went on to complete its ascendancy in the state.
But is Texas now slipping away from the GOP? The answer is more than a little surprising, and it's not just because of the president's sagging approval ratings.

Democrats haven't won a statewide contest since 1994, and Republicans hold comfortable majorities in the state House and Senate. Both U.S. senators are Republicans. And even with the loss of two tight congressional races last year, Republicans hold 19 of 32 congressional districts.

There are, however, signs of trouble for the GOP. While Gov. Rick Perry won re-election in November, he achieved only a plurality in a four-way race that featured a Democrat and an independent as well as a former Republican turned independent (State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn). And Republicans lost two heartbreaking races in the past year. Rep. Henry Bonilla, a seven-term incumbent and the only Mexican-American Republican in Congress, lost to Democrat Ciro Rodriguez, who ran a haphazard campaign. George Antuna, a rising star who had worked for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Mr. Perry (when he was lieutenant governor under Mr. Bush), lost a race for an open state legislative seat.

In Dallas, moreover, Republicans imploded. Democrats ended decades of GOP dominance last fall by winning the county judge's seat, the district attorney's office and 41 out of 42 contested judicial races--election results the Dallas Morning News dubbed a "Democratic deluge."

Perhaps the biggest shoe to drop on Republicans came in the legislature. In January a clutch of disgruntled members tried to depose House Speaker Tom Craddick. They failed, but in May, tried again and this time the fight turned very ugly when Republican members were blocked from calling for the speaker's ouster by the speaker himself, who refused to grant them time to speak on the floor.

The result was raw politics: When members tried to force the issue, Mr. Craddick declared that his power to decide which members can bring motions to the floor was "absolute." In response, the House parliamentarian along with her deputy resigned in protest, and two Republican committee chairmen have appealed to GOP Attorney General Greg Abbott. His decision will likely come later this year. This is just the kind of parliamentary fight that most voters never understand, but will nonetheless perceive as evidence that Republicans can't be trusted with the levers of power.





Don't believe that voters would ever draw such a conclusion in Texas? In June several national polls found younger voters are turning away from the GOP. One of them, conducted by CBS News, the New York Times and MTV, found that 54% of 17- to 29-year-olds would vote for a Democratic candidate for president, while only 32% would vote Republican.
Many Republicans would like to believe that they are only experiencing a temporary downdraft caused by the unpopularity of the Iraq war and President Bush--conventional wisdom that seems to forget that Mr. Bush's success in gubernatorial and presidential elections is a large reason why the GOP completed its domination of state politics. It was only in 2002 that the party won control of the Legislature.

Not everyone, however, is buying this assessment. Royal Masset, a political consultant and longtime political director for the Republican Party of Texas--who played a key role in organizing the grassroots support that took the GOP from marginality to an overwhelming majority--has been predicting a reversal for years.

"There's a certain inevitability in demographics," he told me. "We knew that if we could win 40% of the Hispanic vote," as Mr. Bush did in 2004, "we'd control Texas until 2030." But in 2006, the number of Texas Hispanics who voted Republican fell to between 30% and 35% (depending on the poll).

This shift alone spells trouble for Republicans. Many conservatives may not want to hear it, but Mr. Masset puts the blame on talk radio and cable TV reaction to immigration reform. He says an uncompromising attitude toward comprehensive reform and appeals to fear sometimes carry a whiff of racism that alienates Hispanics. "Houston is no more than six years behind Dallas," he warns.

And if the demographic shift continues to gain momentum, there's a real possibility that Democrats could achieve a majority in the Texas House by 2010. In 2003, Tom DeLay helped redraw the state's congressional districts to give Republicans six new seats in Congress. In just a few years, Democrats could turn the tables. Mr. Masset sums it up this way: "This thing with the Latino vote is deadly serious."





Last month, an Austin-based polling and political consulting firm decided to quantify the GOP's standing in the state. "We were frustrated by people talking about how bad things are for Republicans in Texas," says Marc DelSignore, vice president of Baselice & Associates Inc. What his firm found dovetailed with the national polls and Mr. Masset's political forecast. Older and white voters who predominate in suburban and rural communities continue to have positive impressions about the Republican Party, but there's an image problem among the state's growing number of younger voters and Hispanic voters, who are more numerous in urban centers. "When we looked at the numbers," Mr. DelSignore says, "this grew into a compelling narrative."
And why not? A similar flip happened in California in the 1990s. What was once Reagan Country became a Democratic stronghold. GOP Gov. Pete Wilson's get-tough approach to immigration was an undeniable factor.

If there's a silver lining for Republicans, it's that the Democrats haven't been improving their own image. As Mr. Masset puts it, "There's still a chance the Democrats can screw this up royally." But depending on voters to reject the other party is a losing strategy. To maintain their position, Republicans will have to overcome the sense that they are more interested in warring with each other than in governing. They'll also need to come to grips with this reality: Even Texans don't have to vote Republican. Absent compelling reasons to support the GOP, Texas could become the new California.

Mr. Gurwitz is a member of the editorial board of the San Antonio Express-News.

Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Labels: immigration, Texas politics

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:51 AM 0 comments Links to this post

From Roberto Rodriguez, Column of the Americas. This sounds marvelous and wonderfully educational and spiritual, to traverse the lands of the indigenous ancestors. Before there was a Mexico or a U.S. How liberating can that be?

-Angela

Readers of Column of the Americas:

Last year I had the honor of joining up with Hopi runners in
Tenochtitlan and throughout southern and Central Mexico.

The sacred water run began in Hopi and made its way south where they
were greeted all along the way by elders and ceremonial leaders from
Pueblos, villages and calpullis. The run itself was a ceremony. And
yet, as the Hopi runners made their way south, they were greeted with
more ceremonies and prayers.

The impact of the run and the ceremonies reverberates to this day. It was truly
historic.

This year, runners from Tenochtitlan have begun a return Atlachinolli
Fire-Water Ceremonial Run from Mexico City. It is scheduled to arrive
on July 28 in Hopi.

As with any major endeavor, funds are always appreciated. Truly, some
of the organizers were left with some debt last year. Please consider
supporting the run this year.

Below is a letter that more fully explains the run, plus info and a
website on how to support it.

Please post and pass along.

Thanks & sincerely

Roberto Rodriguez
Column of the Americas
PO BOX 41552
Tucson, AZ 85717

XColumn@gmail.com

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

Dear relatives,

The Sacred Water-Fire Run will begin this year on July 7th, 2007. The
runners will be leaving from Mexico City arriving in Hopi Land Arizona
on the 28th of July. They will be passing through or near your Pueblo
during these dates.

Last year a group of forty Hopi ran from their homeland in Arizona to
Mexico City the heart of the Aztec Nation. Carrying water from their
Sacred springs they brought forth a prayer for the whole world, and a
statement of the need and importance to respect and preserve the Water
to insure our children a future.

Now in return the Aztec people will run 1,800 miles to Hopi Land
carrying their Sacred Fire. The bringing together of the Water and
the Fire represents the Prayer they will carry of New Life for All
People. The significance of these runs between the peoples of North
and South America is a response to the prophecies and recognition of
the need to rebuild the Confederacy of the Eagle and Condor for the
benefit of all beings.

Last year the Hopi's were honored to be received and cared for by many
of the Pueblo's in the New Mexico Area and Texas as they journeyed to
Mexico City. We are happy that again the Pueblos of Isleta del Sur,
Isleta, Laguna, Acoma and Zuni have agreed to provide shelter and
food.

We are still in need of financial support for Van Rentals, Gas, and
other related expenses, so we are personally asking for your help.
All donations are Tax Deductible through GAYA-Global Alliance of Youth
and Adults in Action. Your generous donation would support these
courageous runners in fulfilling their commitment, and insure them a
safe and rewarding journey.

Please feel free to me call, Siri Martinez at 303-440-8016 or
303-325-1470 so that we can speak in detail regarding your support.
We thank you in advance and we look forward to hearing from you soon.
We have attached the short proposal with details of the run and route
we will be taking if you haven't had a chance to review it. We would
also be honored if you participate in the ceremonies that will take
place in your area.

Sincerely,

Siri Martinez

783 Silver Lake Ave Boulder Co. 80304 (303) 440-8016 painamitl@hotmail.com
Kalpulli Kuauhilama


Information/website for donations

Atlachinolli Fire-Water Ceremonial Run July 7th through July 29th,
2007 Last year a group of forty Hopi ran a Sacred Run from their
homeland in Arizona to Mexico City the heart of the Aztec Nation.
Carrying water from their Sacred springs they brought forth a prayer
for the whole world, and a statement of the need and importance to
respect and preserve the Water element to insure our children a
future. Now in return the Aztec people will run 1,800 miles to Hopi
Land carrying their Sacred Fire. The bringing together of the Water
and the Fire represents the Prayer they will carry of New Life for All
People. The significance of these runs between the peoples of North
and South America is a response to the prophecies and a recognition of
the need to rebuild the Confederacy of the Eagle and Condor for the
benefit of all beings. The runners could use your help. They are still
in need of donations to cover the costs of food and support vehicles
during the run as well as running shoes. To donate directly, please go
online and pledge a donation via credit card:
http://gayainternational.org/donate.html#natural. Also, please send
your prayers and moral support to the fulfillment of the dream to
unify native peoples in protection of Mother Earth.

Labels: indigenous

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:36 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Geez. This merits a response. Where does one begin...? Actual research on dual language education is helpful.

-Angela

 http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4952081.html

Dual-language classes in Texas stir debate
By GARY SCHARRER

AUSTIN — Here's the plan: Put young children who struggle with English
in a classroom with English-speaking students and teach in two
languages.

Soon, both groups of children will become bilingual and bi-literate
with the youngsters helping each other develop two languages, say
supporters of the dual language immersion program.

But others are balking at the experiment that Texas lawmakers approved
this spring, contending it's turning classrooms into laboratories.

With House Bill 2814, legislators created a six-year pilot program that
will test a dual language plan in up to 10 Texas public school
districts and 30 campuses.

English was not the first language for more than 731,000 children
attending Texas public schools last year.

Those children, identified as "limited English proficient," spoke
hundreds of foreign languages, although Spanish was spoken by 92
percent.

"We know that dual language works, but we have failed to articulate the
benefits of placing native English speakers in dual language programs,"
said Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, sponsor of the Senate
version of the bill. "They will learn Spanish or some other language,
becoming bilingual and bi-literate. When they are little, you can do
that."

Learning multiple languages should always be encouraged, said Rep.
Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, although she opposes the pilot project
approach.

"I think the purpose behind this is to help bring up to speed
Spanish-speaking kids and turning other kids into guinea pigs," she
said.

Seven of her own nine grandchildren are younger than 6, she said: "They
are grandchildren, not grand-guinea pigs."

Children in her suburban school district northwest of Houston speak
more than 70 languages, Riddle said.

"I don't care what they are speaking," she said. "They are in America.
They need to master the English language. This is not a dual-language
country. We speak English in this country."


On the national stage

"The bottom line of life is that we don't all speak the same language,"
House Public Education Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, said,
acknowledging that national debate over immigration has triggered
deep-seated antagonism.

The Senate voted 28-2 for the pilot project, while the House approved
it 106-34. No Democrat opposed the bill.

Riddle said she fears the project will dilute the need to master
English.

"I think we are worshipping at the feet of diversity," Riddle said.
"There's nothing wrong with diversity, but to minimize English as the
primary language of this nation is a mistake, and I think it's a
mistake for our kids. Kids need to master the English language,
period."

The issue should not focus on immigration because the law requires
Texas to educate all children living here, said Jesse Romero, a San
Antonio-based legislative consultant for the Texas Association For
Bilingual Education.

"If they are going to be educated, let's do it the right way," Romero
said. "If we don't educate the children, we're not going to have a
viable work force, and if we don't have a viable and educated work
force, we're not going to be attractive to the economic development
that our state leaders continue to say that Texas is all about."

Eissler said opponents of his bill believe immigrants need to bend to
us rather than us to them.

But he views the issue in terms of education.

"The more you know, the better off you are is my theory of life. The
more we can teach our kids, the better off we're going to be," Eissler
said. "The younger you are, the more adept you are in learning another
language, so why do we wait to high school to teach language?"


A growing problem

Previous studies have shown that it costs about 40 percent more to
educate limited English students, although the state funds school
districts by an extra 10 percent to teach them.

Only 8 percent of limited English proficient 10th-graders passed all
parts of the state's assessment test in the 2005-06 school year,
according to the Texas Education Agency, and the number of limited
English proficient students is increasing. While about 16 percent of
all public school children last year were limited-English proficient,
more than one-fourth of first-graders struggled with English.

In the state's largest urban school districts — Houston, Dallas and
Fort Worth — more than 40 percent of first-graders were limited-English
proficient.

"These school districts do represent a growing statewide trend, and it
does pose a significant challenge to our educators," Van de Putte said.
"The reality is that the numbers are increasing. We can wring our hands
and say the federal government needs to take care of this. But that
doesn't help us with outcomes."


One success story

The success of dual language immersion programs has been evident in
Cedar Brook Elementary in the Spring Branch school district.

Preliminary results show the school will be ranked exemplary following
two years of recognized ratings after a federal grant allowing Cedar
Brook to test a dual language program.

About half the school's children are limited English proficient, said
Catherine Robinson, the former principal at Cedar Brook.

"Most Texans probably are not aware of the challenges facing educators
with large numbers of limited English proficient students," she said.

They must learn academic content in addition to a new language.

"When students are acquiring and differentiating a language — when the
language is a language other than English — then the challenge of
learning in an academically rigorous setting in English is substantial
for these students," said Robinson, who is now executive director of
Spring Branch's Teaching and Learning program, which develops
curriculum and instruction for struggling students.

gscharrer@express-news.net

Labels: dual language education

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:32 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Ok, here's another story about the construction of our policy center, with a bit more detail than the version in the Houston Chronicle (just posted).

Again, thanks to Gary Sharrer for writing us up!

Angela

Judge's hope for research center on education policy becomes real

Web Posted: 07/11/2007 12:35 AM CDT

Gary Scharrer
Express-News Austin bureau

AUSTIN — The widow of Texas Supreme Court Justice Oscar Mauzy remembers the frustration that her husband encountered 18 years ago while writing the court's unanimous decision that the state's school funding system was unconstitutional.
He wanted research-based data to help amplify the ruling.

"He couldn't find any answers," Anne Mauzy said.

The Mauzys decided to help establish an education research and policy center, and Anne Mauzy will be one of the members for the Texas Center on Educational Policy board of directors, which will formally meet for the first time on Thursday.

"There's so much research going on, but there doesn't seem to be any clearinghouse for it," she said. "That's why we set up the policy center and waited around for years for anything to happen."

Oscar Mauzy, a longtime state senator before moving to the court, died nearly seven years ago.

Angela Valenzuela, an education professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is the director for the Texas Center on Educational Policy, based at the university. The center will connect education researchers and provide data for decision makers, including Congress, the Legislature, the State Board of Education and local school boards.

"We will strive to invigorate the discourse and facilitate the sharing of information that will direct the future of education in Texas and beyond our borders," said Valenzuela, who earned her doctorate in sociology from Stanford University. "We will be a leader in Texas with national and international reach."

The center will plunge into major issues affecting Texas education, including teacher quality, bilingual/immigrant education, college readiness, and school accountability and assessment.

"This center will be a bridge between decision makers and people who are doing the research — filling a necessary gap," Valenzuela said.

Any number of "think tanks" churn out position papers on education-related issues, she said, but "many have mercenary researchers ... generating studies that are very ideologically oriented."

Many of those studies typically align with the organization's agenda and are not subject to peer review.

"You won't have researchers (at the Texas Center on Educational Policy) who are hired to generate a particular result. But rather, you have scholars that dedicate their lives to certain research questions and under a peer review method that makes them accountable," Valenzuela said.

The education policy center also will provide research to better connect universities and business, she said.

John Guerra, president of the Texas Association for Mexican American Chambers of Commerce, said a week never passes without corporate leaders expressing anxieties to him about having a quality work force in the future.

"The Center for Education will have great influence in terms of assuring that we have a curriculum that meets the needs of business today and in the future," he said.

Valenzuela said she's mystified that the state of Texas had not created a center for education policy.

"Policy is one of those underdeveloped areas," she said. "As academicians, we really don't get trained to think of our work in those terms. We do our research, conduct our studies with the hope that someone will pick it up and will find it meaningful for progressive change. That's not the way it works."

Labels: TCEP Advisory Board

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:16 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is a happy day for the Texas Center for Education Policy (TCEP). Thanks to Gary Scharrer for writing this story about the inauguration of our fully constituted board. Check out our TCEP website for more information and news about the Center.

-Angela

July 10, 2007, 9:34PM
Texas education policy board will debut
Panel to oversee center dedicated to connecting research with decision makers

By GARY SCHARRER

Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN — The widow of Texas Supreme Court Justice Oscar Mauzy remembers the frustration her husband encountered 18 years ago while writing the court's unanimous decision that the state's school funding system was unconstitutional.

He wanted research-based data to help amplify the ruling and couldn't find any answers, Anne Mauzy said.

The couple decided to help establish an education research and policy center, and Anne Mauzy will be one of the members of the Texas Center for Educational Policy advisory board of directors that will formally meet for the first time Thursday.

"There's so much research going on, but there doesn't seem to be any clearinghouse for it," she said.

"That's why we set up the policy center and waited around for years for anything to happen."

Oscar Mauzy, a longtime state senator before moving to the court, died nearly seven years ago.

Angela Valenzuela, an education professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is the director for the Texas Center for Educational Policy based at the university. The center will connect education researchers to each other and provide data for decision makers, including Congress, the Texas Legislature, the State Board of Education and local school boards.

"This center will be a bridge between decision makers and people who are doing the research, filling a necessary gap," Valenzuela said.

"You won't have researchers (at the Texas Center for Educational Policy) who are hired to generate a particular result. But rather, you have scholars that dedicate their lives to certain research questions and under a peer review method that makes them accountable," Valenzuela said.

The 15-member advisory board, which includes liberal Waco philanthropist Bernard Rappoport, former Democratic state Sen. Carlos Truan and former Democratic Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, appears to skew left politically. Valenzuela explained she found it difficult to get any Republicans to serve, but the board won't be involved in peer-reviewing research.

Board member John Guerra, president of the Texas Association for Mexican American Chambers of Commerce, said a week never passes without corporate leaders expressing anxieties to him about having a quality future work force.

"The Center for Education will have great influence in terms of assuring that we have a curriculum that meets the needs of business today and in the future," he said.

gscharrer@express-news.net

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4958222.html

Labels: TCEP Advisory Board

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:10 PM 0 comments Links to this post

From UC Berkeley Professor, Carlos Muñoz: Dear All: I thought it apropos that we read on this 4th of July, the words spoken by Frederick Douglass back in 1852. It was a lengthy speech and I only selected a couple of paragraphs. You may read it in it's entirety on the link below. Peace, Carlos

==============
The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable-and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight....

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave's point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;" I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, their will I argue with you that the slave is a man!


http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=162

Labels: slavery

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:54 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This covers a very salient issue in our increasingly multicultural, multilingual world—language anxiety. Kudos to UT Professor Elaine Horwitz, whose research is featured.

-Angela


June 29, 2007
Overcoming Language Anxiety

The symptoms are familiar: a lack of confidence, a reluctance to speak, even insomnia in some cases. What appears to be a kind of anxiety attack or extreme phobia could become debilitating for a student’s well-being, let alone participation grade.

But this particular ailment isn’t listed in the DSM-IV.

What sounds like a case of chronic stage fright could be occurring on college campuses every day, according to a growing but contested body of research about foreign language classes.

It’s called “language anxiety.” The reasons people disagree about it are clear: students might not be aware of their problem, for example, and the number of factors that affect learning could cloud researchers’ analyses. And who hasn’t felt a little nervous learning a foreign tongue?

But scholars like Elaine Horwitz, a professor of foreign language education at the University of Texas at Austin, believe there’s a definite connection between what they’ve identified as language anxiety and performance in the classroom. Originally, when Horwitz began doing research in the virtually nonexistent field in 1986, she focused on extreme cases. But she found that the problems students described were more widespread, if milder.

“I did identify a small number of people who were just amazingly freaked out — how academic is that? — by their language class. But the real surprising thing was that I started finding that there was a reasonably large minority, and the number, about a third, keeps coming up,” Horwitz said.

When she started teaching at the University of Texas, Horwitz gained a reputation for being receptive to students with problems in language classes — especially those in the midst of the required four semesters of foreign language instruction for undergraduates. At that time, in the early 1980s, there was some interest in anxiety among students learning math and science. So it was startling when she began to meet students having the same problems with their Spanish or French classes.

“They were sleepless, they were unable to do anything else in their life but pay attention to this class. They were studying absolutely full-time and they were getting C’s,” she said.

That doesn’t mean the phenomenon is new, of course. But Horwitz speculates that in the ’80s, with an increased push for a focus on spoken language skills, as opposed to reading and writing, the problem may have become more acute.

Dolly Jesusita Young, a researcher at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville who studied under Horwitz in Austin, said she is also noticing a growing problem. “We see students who have gone to the learning disabilities center, or whatever the university calls that department or that unit. Students increasingly may have problems and they will be tested for some type of disability. That is more common, so we’re finding that there are more students than in the past with learning disabilities.”

And the issue, more likely than not, tends to manifest itself among students who are taking language as a graduation requirement, because those who major in foreign languages or take the classes as electives more likely have a natural interest or inclination toward language acquisition.

“This tends to be more of a problem at colleges and universities with a blanket language requirement,” said Michael E. Geisler, dean of language schools and schools abroad at Middlebury College, in an e-mail. “Where this is the case (and needless to say I think a blanket language requirement is generally a good idea!), some provisions are usually made for a few students whose fear of foreign languages reaches such a level of intensity that some special accommodation needs to be made for them. ...”

The Americans

Everyone’s heard the stereotype that Americans can’t learn foreign languages. To be sure, American students begin learning them later than their peers in Europe and Asia. But Horwitz has pointed out that language anxiety, as she has measured it, doesn’t confine itself to the United States.

While about a third of American students exhibit some form of the anxiety, she said, the European percentage is lower — 28 to 30 percent — which might justify a bit of that Old World snobbery. But in Asia, she said, there are actually more students with the problem, in the neighborhood of 40 to 43 percent.

Horwitz, who recently returned from a trip to Hong Kong where she was engaging with the issue of its native Cantonese speakers’ anxiety when learning Mandarin, said she sees a cultural component to the problem.

In America, meanwhile, learning difficult languages (like Chinese) calls into question one’s own perceptions about his or her language abilities — and how hard it is to acquire a second tongue. Cornelius C. Kubler, the Stanfield Professor of Asian Studies at Williams College and a member of the Modern Language Association’s Association of Departments of Foreign Languages executive committee, said part of the problem is a self-fulfilling prophecy that can transform students’ perceptions into reality.

“I don’t want to overgeneralize, [but] a lot of people literally believe that Americans can’t learn languages,” Kubler said, a belief that he said could lead to “a lack of confidence that they cannot learn this language.”

At the same time, Horwitz said, students are led to believe that it’s easier to learn a new language than it actually is — which can make the difficulties of the process that much harder to cope with. In one study, she found that 40 percent of undergraduates in French, Spanish and German classes at the University of Texas thought they could become fluent with an hour of study a day for two years or less.

“And I kind of understand that,” she said. “Why else would we have a two-year language requirement if you didn’t become fluent in two years?”

The Research, and Its Reach

The basic finding Horwitz cites to back her claims about language anxiety is a series of studies she conducted with colleagues — appearing in journals such as TESOL Quarterly, published by Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, and The Modern Language Journal — establishing a negative correlation between anxiety and achievement in language classes. The higher students’ ratings of anxiety (as indicated by a self-reported, standardized scale), the lower their test scores or final grades tended to be. The results, she said, suggested that about 25 percent of the variance in students’ achievement in foreign language classes could be accounted for by their level of language anxiety.

Of course, everyone can experience anxiety, but Horwitz said she believes there is a “range” of responses to a language learning environment. “I think that there’s some amount of inherent anxiety in language learning, because A, it’s just difficult, time-consuming and complicated, and B, I think that for some people it’s a threat to our self-concept. We can’t be ourselves when we speak the language. We have to be limited just to whatever it is that we can say.

“I use an analogy of when you have a bad haircut, you walk around going … ‘My hair will grow out, and I’ll be myself again.’”

And anxiety isn’t confined to low-performing students, either. “We see anxiety in highly advanced students, highly successful students who we’d presume to have high levels of aptitude as well,” Horwitz said, implying that the problem doesn’t necessarily manifest itself only in students who aren’t as good at languages or simply aren’t studying enough.

Several language experts contacted for this article had never heard of language anxiety as a research topic, while others had but weren’t familiar with the studies. “I have never run into this as a topic,” said Thomas E. Blair, chairman of the foreign language department at the City College of San Francisco and a member of the ADFL’s executive committee, in an e-mail. “I oversee a department with 250 language courses in 10 languages. I can’t say I’ve had it brought up by a faculty member.”

“It’s kind of a slow and steady wins the race kind of field. It’s not the hottest topic in second language acquisition going on now,” Horwitz conceded. “I would say that in some cases, there’s maybe more interest in some other countries than here.”

Still, the research has generated at least enough interest to attract critics. Richard Sparks, a professor of education at the College of Mount St. Joseph, has been one of the most prominent in questioning — in The Modern Language Journal and elsewhere — whether language anxiety is a separate phenomenon at all.

“There is little or no empirical evidence that there is an anxiety unique to foreign language learning,” he said in an e-mail. “Thus, we do not know whether it might be an impediment to learning.”

According to Sparks, the best way to predict how well a student will learn a new language is that student’s ability in his or her native language, a factor that he said is left out of many studies focusing on anxiety.

Still, Horwitz has doubts about some of the criticisms. For one, she said, there are language instructors exhibiting the same kind of anxiety.

“I can have a little bit of anxiety myself when I speak in front of an audience, so I think there was some personal interest,” said Young, who tends to take more of a synthesis approach to the issue. She said that the root of the problem could be a combination of lowered proficiency in students’ native languages — a la Sparks — and a perceived difficulty with languages, even if it isn’t true.

“This is a psychological phenomenon that is way too complex to say, ‘it’s only this,’” Young said.

Of course, getting over the self-esteem issues implied by perceived doubts requires more practice and participation, but that’s exactly what language anxiety blocks students from doing. “What it affects is their willingness to participate in class, which may ultimately affect their performance,” she added.

So how do language instructors get through to students who are anxious in their classes? Horwitz, Young and others have offered some suggestions, although Horwitz said none of them have been systemically tested yet.

Some of them — like not insulting your students — are blindingly obvious, yet perhaps still necessary. “Some language anxiety is a result of what teachers do. I’ve had people in my office who’ve had language teachers make fun of them in class. They weren’t anxious to begin with, but they developed this anxiety.”

On the other hand, there are some other practical guidelines, which mostly involve instilling more confidence in students. Kubler said that non-native-speaking role models can be an important part of building students’ self-esteem.

“Sometimes, for these super-hard languages that involve truly foreign cultures, most of the time you want most of the instructors to be native speakers. However, it can occasionally be useful to have a non-native … to come into your class, your students, and serve as a role model of what a non-Chinese person, in this case, can achieve, can prove to students what can be done,” he said. “Years ago, as a student … I found that kind of role model occasionally to be inspiring.”

At the end of the day, anxiety can be marshaled into a positive force. And if that’s done, students’ uncertainty can become a catalyst to learn even more. “My experience in the classroom has been that discomfort, in the most general sense, is a necessary aspect of language learning, both in the classroom and out,” said Downing A. Thomas, the chairman of the Department of French and Italian at the University of Iowa. “It is even to be encouraged, both in terms of coming into contact with that which is perceived as foreign or strange and in terms of getting up the nerve to speak when one has an accent or cannot follow strict textbook grammar when speaking. This is when real learning can take place.

“The trick is to convince the students that discomfort is a good thing.”

— Andy Guess

The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/29/language.

© Copyright 2007 Inside Higher Ed

Labels: language learning

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:11 PM 1 comments Links to this post

TEXAS RANCHER
Rancher fighting illegal immigration says fence not the answer
Leader of volunteer patrol group wants more money for local and state law enforcement.


By Juan Castillo
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, June 30, 2007

BROOKS COUNTY — Though he is not in law enforcement, Mike Vickers is a witness to the gruesome, tragic consequences of illegal immigration. He sees them in his "backyard" amid the vast, rugged ranches of South Texas.

Large processions of illegal immigrants and human and drug smugglers, sometimes in groups of 30 or more, regularly cut through his cattle ranch south of Falfurrias to skirt a Border Patrol checkpoint. The checkpoint off U.S. 281 is about four miles south of Vickers' home and 1,000-acre ranch, and about 70 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Many of the trespassers don't make it out alive.

Vickers, gleaning from figures compiled in Brooks and nearby counties, estimates that close to 200 people have died on private ranches during the past two years. He and his neighbors routinely find the cadavers, skulls and body parts.

The victims — many are unidentified — probably died of exposure.

Vickers thinks some might have been abandoned or murdered by smugglers; the bodies are too decayed to tell for sure.

With his bushy mustache and cowboy hat and boots, Vickers is a stern-faced fixture at public forums on illegal immigration.

He testified forcefully at the Legislature this year, advocating for state money for local and state law enforcement officers who have been drawn into the illegal immigration fight.

Though Vickers has become one of the public faces of frustration with illegal immigration, he thinks a border fence is not the answer.

"I think it's a waste of money," Vickers said.

The former head of the the Texas Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, Vickers now leads the Texas Border Volunteers, a group including fellow ranchers who own 1.5 million acres in 11 South Texas counties.

Usually once a month, armed and equipped with night vision and other equipment, the volunteers patrol around the clock for days at a time, reporting trespassers to the Border Patrol.

Vickers also owns about 160 acres of farmland off the Rio Grande, south of Pharr. He doesn't want a fence cutting off access to irrigation water.

A solution, he says, lies in more officers, more money and resources for local and state law enforcement, and a guest worker program. "There's no law and order out here," Vickers said.

jcastillo@statesman.com; 445-3635

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/07/01/0701fence_rancher.html

Labels: border, fence, Rio Grande

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:44 PM 0 comments Links to this post

THE VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE

In Mexico, a border fence is seen as insulting, ineffective

Click-2-Listen
By Juan Castillo
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, July 01, 2007

REYNOSA, Tamulipas — The flip side of the illegal immigration equation — that it's Americans who employ millions of illegal workers and consume enormous amounts of illicit drugs trafficked from Mexico — is rarely forgotten south of the U.S. border. It charges the undercurrent in any debate about beefed-up border enforcement, from the deployment of National Guard troops to building a border wall.

"The fence is an insult," said Jesus Garcia, 69, a Mexican native who, like many people here, has close ties and family in two countries.

Moments earlier, he had crossed the international bridge in the sticky afternoon heat to visit relatives in Reynosa. Garcia said he has been a legal permanent resident of the United States for 20 years, living in Edinburg, about 15 miles north of the river.

Garcia thinks a fence will harm U.S.-Mexico relations and won't prevent people from entering the United States illegally. He pointed out that 6 million of the estimated 12 million unauthorized immigrants currently in the United States entered legally with visas, which they overstayed.

"A fence surely won't stop them," Garcia said.

Efrén Zequera, a 24-year-old taxi driver, said a fence will create only enough obstacles that smugglers will jack up their prices.

"The U.S. will spend millions on a fence. Mexican hands will build it," said Zequera, who was waiting for fares coming home from their jobs north of the river or from shopping there.

At the downtown plaza nearby, Hector Rocha, a 37-year-old technician at one of the city's maquiladoras, or plants, said the key piece of a solution for illegal immigration is for Mexico to create more economic opportunities, ending the pull of jobs north of the border.

"The United States could help, too, if it resolved political differences and created more legal opportunities for illegal immigrants," Rocha said. "But the principal solution lies with Mexico."

jcastillo@statesman.com; 445-3635

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/07/01/0701fence_mexicans.html

Labels: border, Mexico, wall

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:42 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Great coverage in today's American Statesman of the fence/wall border debate. -Angela

A wall of discontent
Along the Rio Grande in South Texas, locals say a border fence will wreak havoc on lives

Click-2-Listen
By Juan Castillo
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, July 01, 2007

In the Texas and Mexican consciousness, the Rio Grande is a particularly fluid character in the epic sweep of history.

The lifeblood of arid flatlands in dozens of South Texas border communities such as Mission, the river yields bountiful harvests of sugar cane, corn, citrus, cotton and other crops. For centuries, the Rio Grande has also nourished a unique way of life.

In sister cities on both sides, residents embrace a transcultural identity in which the river does not divide so much as it unites. Many speak two languages, a reality captured cheekily in an area auto dealer's TV ads proclaiming "Aquí también se habla inglés!" ("English is also spoken here!") They have compadres and familia on either side of the river. People, commerce and goods flow freely in two directions, and always have.

But by the end of 2008, Washington plans to erect 70 miles of fencing in the Rio Grande Valley to deter illegal immigration. It will cut residents off from the river and from their Mexican neighbors, and it could separate farmers from their fields.

That prospect is creating an uproar in communities up and down the border, where much of the land is in private hands.

"It's an American Berlin Wall," said Mike Allen, an economic development booster in neighboring McAllen and a leader in the Texas Border Coalition, elected and economic development leaders from El Paso to Brownsville who oppose the fence.

Federal officials say they haven't decided on the design of the barrier, which they describe as a component of the Secure Border Initiative.

Like the Berlin Wall, its symbolic presence looms even larger than the physical reality, especially in Texas, which claims the longest stretch — 1,240 miles — of the roughly 2,000-mile long border with Mexico.

Less than 20 percent of the border — 370 miles — would be fenced, at a reported initial cost of $1.2 billion, or $3.3 million per mile. It will not be a continuous barricade but an intermittent one, totaling about 150 miles along the Texas side of the Rio Grande, mostly on more populous segments of the river.

Although the fence may have only modest impact on illegal immigration, it makes a powerful statement against the notion that borders are nothing more than inconveniences to be overcome, said Steven Camarota with the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based research group that advocates stronger enforcement of immigration laws. The vast majority of Americans don't see the border that way, he said.

"That fence reminds us of American national sovereignty," Camarota said.

But in the Valley, on the front lines of one of illegal immigration's busiest corridors, it's also a reminder of something else: the wasteful folly of outsiders who don't comprehend the region's economic, historical and cultural realities.

"If you want to stop (illegal immigration), fix it so that they can't get a job," said Charles Loop, a retired 72-year-old farmer in Brownsville, whose family has worked the land since the 1920s. "Haven't they always found a way to get in?"

Stemming the flow

The U.S. Border Patrol apprehended nearly 1.1 million illegal immigrants in 2006, 8 percent fewer than the year before, a decrease Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff attributed to tougher border enforcement deterring crossers.

But the benchmark does not measure the number of people who evade arrest. Since 2000 — despite more agents, more resources, money and technology poured into border enforcement — the unauthorized population in the U.S. has grown an average of more than 500,000 per year, to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. (Only half are thought to have entered the country illegally, however; the rest overstayed visas.)

About 75 miles of fencing and barriers already exist on the southwestern border with Mexico. Whether the most famous stretch, 14 miles of mostly solid wall separating San Diego from Tijuana, has been successful is a matter of dispute.

Built more than a decade ago, supporters hailed dramatic reductions in apprehensions and crime. But analysts said the fencing simply funneled immigrants to remote, dangerous crossings in the mountains and deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, where thousands have died.

South Texas landowners, farmers, and business and elected leaders prefer more border agents, cameras and sensors, as well as "more opportunities for immigrants to enter the country legally, so that the Border Patrol isn't spending all its time running after maids and dishwashers and gardeners," Allen said.

Angry that they have had little influence on the plans for the fence, they assert that it will harm the economy and business relationships with their Mexican neighbors, Texas' biggest trading partner, and that it will quash property rights and cut off farmers and ranchers from the precious Rio Grande.

Another serious concern is that a fence will destroy the area's treasured habitat and wildlife, which feeds a lucrative eco-tourism industry.

"This wall is stupid," said the Rev. Roy Snipes, a Catholic priest and pastor at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Mission. "It's going to be a tomb for the free, friendly, hospitable spirit."

But Joe Metz and his wife, Sharon, who farm on 1,100 riverfront acres about 10 miles west of Mission, think differently. They say more people would speak out in favor of the fence if they didn't fear being labeled racists.

The Metzes say immigrants regularly cut through their land, usually in large groups and with a smuggler. And drug runners unload marijuana and other drugs at landings just steps from the rows of grain sorghum Joe farms. A highway a quarter-mile away is their get-away route.

The Metzes don't feel safe anymore. They think a fence will help.

"You feel a certain amount of violation with people crossing your property all the time," 68-year-old Metz says with a flash of anger after pointing out a barbed-wire fence that someone — he presumes illegal immigrants — tampered with to gain access to his land.

Just downriver, joined by his two black Labradors and his friend Allen, Snipes pilots his flat-bottomed fishing boat, carving a smooth path in the Rio Grande's green waters.

On both sides of the river, the earliest settlers, indigenous Coahuiltecans, lived off the land for more than a thousand years. About half a century after their demise, the town of Mission took root on the same riverbanks in 1908.

Despite the Border Patrol's pervasive presence — in the air, in the water and on the riverbanks the Coahuiltecans once settled — the sun-kissed setting is lazy and serene.

Herons glide overhead. Turtles sunbathe, and horses cool off in the river, about a football field wide. Tall reeds sway in the gusty breezes. On the Mexican side, workers clearing brush for a park wave to Snipes.

"It's no war zone out here," Snipes says. "This is beautiful."

Virtual fencing

In 2006, Congress approved fencing along 700 miles of the border with Mexico, and President Bush signed the bill into law. The Homeland Security Department has since said that only 370 miles will be actual fence; the rest will be vehicle barriers and a "virtual" fence of agents, sensors, cameras and other technology.

The government says it hasn't decided exactly where the fence will go in the Rio Grande Valley or what it will look like but promises to consider the concerns of landowners.

It has disavowed a map of the fence, attached to a confidential U.S. Customs and Border Protection memo, which sparked local outrage when it was made public in May. Federal officials said the map was premature.

According to The (McAllen) Monitor, the Border Patrol's Rio Grande Valley spokesman said recently that about 70 miles of fence would be built in sections between Brownsville and Roma, and that they would be mostly in urban areas.

Texas' U.S. senators, John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, both Republicans, voted for the fence. Both say they are working to ensure that locals are heard.

Metz said a border agent met with him to ask his opinion about erecting a fence just north of the flood-control levee and the river. That would place Metz's home north of the barrier and much of his farmland south of it.

According to Metz, the agent said he would have access to his crops and the river through 30-foot-wide gates allowing his farm equipment to pass through.

"It's not going to affect our irrigation a bit," Metz said, scoffing at the idea that a fence will ruin farmers.

On that point and others, Metz gets plenty of argument.

One of opponents' biggest fears is that anything south of the border fence will become a virtual no-man's land, endangering properties up and down the Valley: ranchlands, farmlands, businesses, homes and vast acres of federally protected wildlife refuges.

John McClung, president of the Mission-based Texas Produce Association, said most of his members oppose a fence because they worry that it will cut them off from the irrigation pumps that suck water from the Rio Grandeto feed their crops. If forced to give up their farmland, they wonder whether the government will give them "genuine fair market value."

The co-owner of the iconic palapa-covered outdoor dining and dancing spot near Mission, Pepe's on the River, said a fence will put him out of business.

"What's it going to be called?" Maggie Trujillo asked rhetorically. "Pepe's on the Fence? Pepe's on the Levee?"

Waste of money?

Like the river, immigrants from Mexico — both legal and illegal — have flowed through the Valley for generations.

Snipes, whose church hosts youth camps on the riverbanks, described a back-in-the-day ritual that was equal parts humanitarian and neighborly: landowners leaving out food for immigrant Mexican families who occasionally crossed their property on their way north.

But some say that all began to change dramatically about 20 years ago. The small groups of four or five grew larger and larger. Mexicans were joined by foreigners from all over the world. Drug smugglers joined the processions.

Allen and other border leaders contend that the fence will undo years of work to build business relationships with Mexico and to lift the Valley out of economic morass.

The 69-year-old border coalition leader was a Catholic priest in one of the oldest and poorest churches in McAllen, the Valley's largest city and one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country, before changing careers to champion economic development. He founded the McAllen Economic Development Corp. in 1988 and is now on medical leave there.

Twenty years ago, about one in four workers in Hidalgo County was out of a job. Today, unemployment is less than 6 percent, and the Valley is riding the coattails of a surging maquiladora industry that Allen said has recruited more than 200 companies, creating more than 125,000 jobs in industrial parks south of the river in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, and another 25,000 in the McAllen region.

McAllen Mayor Ricardo Cortez said Mexican shoppers account for about 40 percent of the city's gross domestic product. Mexican entrepreneurs want to invest in Valley businesses and are buying second homes here, said Steve Ahlenius, president of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce.

But "the message we're sending to Mexico is 'Don't come, Don't bring your money. We don't want you.' It's crazy," Ahlenius said.

It's not unusual for business leaders on both sides of the river to think as one, said Nestor Rodriguez, a University of Houston sociologist who has done extensive research in sister cities on the river.

"If you're in Washington, you're not going to appreciate this, but the cities on the border, over centuries, built a community that transcends the border, and they feel this is one community," Rodriguez said.

Federal officials have given no indication that they will change their minds, asserting that they have a mandate from the American people and Congress to put up a fence.

"I think folks do need to understand that there are areas on the border where fencing would work and that in those areas, it will be constructed," said Brian Walsh, Cornyn's spokesman.

The border coalition isn't giving up.

"We're hoping we can convince the majority of people and Congress that this is a waste of money for America, not just the border," Allen said.

jcastillo@statesman.com; 445-3635

1,952 miles

Length of U.S. border

with Mexico

1,240 miles

Length of Texas border

with Mexico

150 miles

Estimated length of Texas border to be fenced

70 miles

Estimated length of fencing in Rio Grande Valley


http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/07/01/0701fence.html

Labels: border, Mexico, Rio Grande

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:38 PM 0 comments Links to this post