By Jonathan Kozol
August 29, 2007
Article was originally published in Education Week.

The truth about the flight of teachers from our public schools has been obscured by lack of clear distinctions between schools of very different kinds. The loss of first-year teachers from suburban schools is not particularly high. In inner-city neighborhoods, by contrast, on the basis of my conversations with at least 200 of these young recruits, I would estimate that upwards of one-half decide to leave the school in which they’re placed by the end of their third year.

This is why, in my newest book, which represents a year of correspondence with a highly motivated 1st grade teacher whom I call Francesca, I try to share with her the strategies I’ve learned from other urban teachers who have managed to resist the inclination to throw up their hands and leave their jobs, no matter what frustrations they experience.

In these letters, I take issue with the common explanation, one I hear repeatedly from those who do not seem to know too many of these bright young people, that the major cause of their frustrations is an inability to relate successfully to children of minorities. At least in the case of the better-educated and more idealistic teachers—and there are more of them than ever nowadays—who come into the classroom steeped in civil rights traditions and the values of their frequently progressive parents, they enter public education with a purposeful and even preferential option for the children of the black and brown and poor.

The most frequently reiterated reason for discouragement that they express has nothing to do with “relating to their students,” with whom they tend to strike an almost instantaneous rapport. Instead, it has to do with the systematic crushing of their creativity and intellect, the threatened desiccation of their personalities, and the degradation of their sense of self-respect under the weight of heavy-handed, business-modeled systems of Skinnerian instruction, the cultural denuding of curriculum required by the test-prep mania they face, and the sense of being trapped within “a state of siege,” as one teacher puts it, all of which is now exacerbated by that mighty angst machine known as No Child Left Behind.

The challenge for such teachers, as they convey it to me in our conversations, is: (1) to hold fast to the pedagogic principles they value and the tenderness of their attachment to young people that has brought them to the classroom in the first place, (2) to do so in a way that will not isolate them in their schools and leave them feeling all the more discouraged as a consequence. I urge these teachers, for example, not to turn their backs on veteran instructors in their schools, a common error made by inexperienced idealists. Although, in any given school, there are bound to be some older teachers who may not be helpful allies or ideal role models for beginning teachers, the best among them bring a sense of personal stability and of assimilated selflessness into a school and, when younger teachers treat them with respect and turn to them as friends, typically respond with the protective kindness that can be a salvatory comfort for a novice teacher under stress.

I also urge these teachers: Reach out as quickly as you can to the parents of your students, especially those parents who initially are least responsive. Give them your cellphone number. Visit them in afternoons or evenings. And, in the case of young white teachers serving children of minorities, learn to cross the lines of race and class in sensitive but determined ways that lower the barriers between your classroom and your children’s homes. Winning the solidarity of parents is one of the best ways, in my own experience, of building a structure of defense against potential critics in the upper levels of bureaucracy who may not appreciate a youthful teacher’s healthy instinct for dissent.

Most of all, I encourage in these teachers a sense of what I like to call “enjoyable and mischievous irreverence” in the course of navigating those mandated miseries introduced by federal pressure into many inner-city schools but, at the same time, a mature sophistication and respectfulness in dealing with their principals, who often view the policies they must enforce with the very same distaste their younger teachers do. Many good principals, while they’d seldom say this openly at school, tell me in private that the burden of anxiety about the threat of sanctions that hang constantly like sharpened swords above their heads is leading them to foist upon their teachers practices they pedagogically abhor. Some tell me that they secretly applaud those teachers who are not afraid to undermine the stern intentionality of these mandated practices with thinly veiled lightheartedness, so long as they can teach the skills their students need and have a sensible regard for classroom management. They know these are the teachers who will not quit in despair.

In Francesca’s case, none of this proved difficult, in part because she’d been superbly grounded both in educational techniques and in the critical consciousness derived from her immersion in political science and the other areas of liberal arts and sciences during her college years. She was also blessed with the kind of incandescent personality that won the adoration of her children almost from the minute that they walked into her room.

Firm when she needed to be, she quickly learned that look of earned authority that, with a single glance, could bring a slightly wild and rambunctious little boy out of his periodic episodes of orbiting the room and get him back into his chair to work, reluctantly, at putting vowels in between his consonants, as 6-year-olds quite stubbornly refuse to do at first. But she never sacrificed the sheer aesthetic merriment of being with small children, and she built her literacy lessons not out of a scripted text of grunts and chants but, as much as possible, out of the words her children actually selected and enjoyed (“wiggly” and “wobbly,” when teeth were coming loose) or sometimes very big words, like “bamboozle” or “persnickety,” the sounds of which had stirred their curiosity when they had heard them spoken by their grandma, for example.

Even when she spoke to me about the most draconian requirements “aligned”—to use a mechanistic piece of jargon she deplored—with state exams, her voice still had that energetic sound of somebody who never lets herself be beaten down but keeps on coming back with a nice sense of lively combat and delicious bits of irony about the contradictions that she had to deal with. I tell young teachers, “You are going to need a good big helping of Francesca’s sly, subversive sense of humor in the face of state-ordained absurdities like being told to write across your chalkboard the ‘official number’ for each mini-chunk of amputated knowledge you’re obliged to teach, in case a clipboard bureaucrat walks into your room and wants to know which ‘state proficiency’ you are ‘delivering’ at that specific minute of the morning.”

Francesca, I am glad to say, refused to put those numbers on her wall because, she said, their only purpose was “to cover my rear end—they have zero value to my children.” And although her students mastered all the skills they needed to do well on their exams, she refused to turn her class into a test-prep factory or allow the fear of failure to be substituted, as a motivating principle, for the natural rewards of learning for its own inherent sake alone.

She also refused to genuflect before the business-driven values that have penetrated many inner-city schools, where I routinely see embarrassing and mawkish posters telling kids the “mission” of their school is to “produce” the “workers” that our nation needs in order to “compete in global markets.” Upper-middle-class suburban schools, she scathingly observed, would “never stoop to put that kind of gibberish on the wall.”

Inspired teachers of young children, like Francesca, ardently refuse to see themselves as servants of the global corporations or drill sergeants for the state. They disdain to be regarded chiefly as technicians of utilitarian proficiency. And they stalwartly refuse to see their pupils as so many future economic units for a corporate society, into whom they are expected to pump “added value,” as the number-crunchers who determine much of education policy demand.

Few of these technocrats appear to recognize much pre-existing value in the young mentalities of children or, indeed, to be acquainted closely with the personalities and character of children. Rarely, if ever, do they ask if children ought to have some opportunity for happiness during the hours that they spend with us in school. (I cannot find that word in any sentence of the No Child Left Behind Act.)

Faced with these pathogenic pressures, teachers of young children in particular need to learn not only to prevail in the quite literal respect of keeping their jobs and staying in their schools, but also to retain their sense of playful energy and fascination in the unexpected offerings of all those pint-sized packages of whim and curiosity who are entrusted to their care. This is why I fervently encourage them, even in the most decrepit and depressive-looking of our urban schools, to fight with every bit of courage they command to defend the right to celebrate each perishable day and hour in a child’s life, which, in the current climate of opinion, may be one of the greatest challenges they have.

Schools can probably survive quite well without their rubrics charts, their AYPs, and their obsessive lists of numbered categories and containers, reminiscent of the lists severe psychotics make in efforts to control the uncontainable and, for healthy people, wonderful disorder of reality. They can’t survive without excited teachers who take satisfaction in the beautiful vocation they have chosen. Keeping young teachers in our schools is of immense importance, but keeping them there with spirits strong and souls intact is more important still. If we lose this, we lose everything.

Jonathan Kozol is a National Book Award-winning author of 12 books on education. His newest work, Letters to a Young Teacher, was released this week by Crown. The supportive network he recently created for teachers in the public schools may be reached at EducationActionInfo@gmail.com.

Labels: teachers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:57 PM 0 comments Links to this post

I've personally seen this work well for friends proficient in Spanish who are trying to learn English. By reading the same book in both languages they were able to not only build vocabulary, but it was a good way to also understand the meaning and context (semantics) of how to use their second language. -Patricia

By: Andy Kenney, Staff Writer / The Daily Reel
August 29, 2007

Students in the kindergarten classes at Carrboro Elementary School walked away from their first day of school Monday with some interesting reading material.

"La Oruga Muy Hambrienta" might not ring a bell, but perhaps "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" does. Each student received both an English and Spanish edition of Eric Carle's children's book, which has sold 12 million copies since 1969.

"If you get presented with a Spanish book that you're not fluent enough to read, it opens up a whole new world," said parent Kirsten Barker, who first brought the idea to the school last spring.

Barker has two students at Carrboro Elementary and is on the school-improvement team.

The book program is part of the school's continuing efforts to raise literacy test scores and is typical of the school's bilingual culture, where the automated phone service helps visitors in both English and Spanish. Most signs in the school are posted in both languages.

Principal Emily Bivins said about one-third of the school's population speaks Spanish at home.

Data from Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools indicate that at the start of the last school year, 96 of the 532 students were Hispanic.

One of the school's most notable efforts is its 227-student dual-language program, where a mix of native Spanish- and English-speaking children learn in both languages.

The program, which just added a fifth-grade component, has equal amounts of teaching done in Spanish and English.

"They're learning in the language, not just learning the language," said Shawn Williams, a kindergarten-level dual-language teacher.

The school's focus on literacy and bilingualism has another driving force. In past years the school has not met certain requirements mandated by No Child Left Behind.

"We're held extremely accountable," Bivins said.

Bivins said that part of the reason for the school's problems is that the tests do not take into account a child's native language. In fact, they set benchmarks for minority groups, and if they are not met, the school can be considered "failing."

Eighty-nine percent of Carrboro Elementary students were considered proficient by the English language comprehension test, but only 62 percent of Hispanic students at the school achieved proficiency.

"I think you have to have accountability for children's progress, but you have to look at the demographics of the school," Williams said.

"When you know that language acquisition takes five to seven years, I think that must be taken into account," Williams added.

But dual-language programs might help improve literacy scores.

"Research indicates that kids that learn in two languages have higher academic skills than their peers," said Miriam Casimir, a veteran teacher of the Carrboro dual-language program.

Dual-language students may lag behind other classes at first, but by the third year they tend to equal and surpass their peers, even on end-of-year tests, Casimir said.

"The Very Hungry Caterpillar," which delighted students and parents alike, might just be the crest of the wave.

"They learn to appreciate another culture and language," Williams said. "What a powerful thing in our society, to be multilingual."

Labels: dual language education, English language learners

posted by Patricia Lopez at 3:18 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This may also be a great way to also help Spanish-speaking parents engage in their children's education at home, if it can be made accessible. -Patricia

New Curriculum Product Receives Award for One-to-One, Hand-Held Instruction With Spanish Audio Support for English Language Learners
August 29, 2007

EMERYVILLE, Calif.
LeapFrog Enterprises, Inc. , today announced the release of Leapster(R) Story Explorers. Designed primarily for early-proficiency students in grades K-3, the award-winning program is the first curriculum for English Language Learners (ELLs) developed for an interactive handheld platform. Multiple learning levels, tailored tutorials for usage and curriculum, and a wide variety of engaging learning activities enable students to develop essential skills in language and story comprehension as well as basic early reading skills.

Leapster Story Explorers offers instruction and skill practice in vocabulary, phonemic awareness, language structures, and comprehension at English language proficiency levels 1-2. The program integrates English language content with Spanish audio support, ensuring that students can proceed through the program even if their teacher is not fluent in Spanish. Additionally, the program enables teachers to track each student's progress to maintain accountability, and adjust the curriculum for a more customized learning experience.

After reviewing Leapster Story Explorers just prior to launch, Children's Technology Review bestowed their Editor's Choice Award on the product, an honor that is presented to the highest quality children's products in interactive media, as judged by a team of parent/teacher testers. According to Children's Technology Review, these award-winning solutions are "no fail" products, worthy of their cost, and able to keep children engaged for days at a time.

Leapster Story Explorers expands the family of Leapster Portable Technology Centers (PTCs), which also includes grade-level kits that provide instruction and practice in reading, math, spelling, and critical thinking curriculum for students in grades K-2. Leapster software delivers leveled skill practice in engaging formats with tutorials and structured hints for students, adapting to a student's abilities so the lesson avoids being too easy or too difficult. The Leapster PTC allows educators to add affordable, easy-to-use technology centers that encourage small-group instruction or individual student-directed learning. The basic Leapster PTC kit supports up to 21 students with five Leapster handheld units, seven Leapster cartridges, headphones, AC adapter, and a power strip. Kits also include 21 Student Practice Books to expand upon the software content and provide additional opportunities for practice and skill mastery.

"Our growing, award-winning curriculum on the Leapster handheld offers one of the most engaging instruction options available to students today," said Mike Lorion, president of LeapFrog SchoolHouse. "Leapster Story Explorers enables English Language Learners to become engaged, work on important academic objectives, and gain more confidence in their school experience."

A 2007 study conducted in Richmond, CA showed that the Leapster PTC significantly enhanced student performance on key early literacy and comprehension skills. In the study, second grade English Language Learner (ELL) students used Leapster Story Explorers for a period of 33 instructional days. Students at beginning and early intermediate language proficiency levels were tested before and after program use, demonstrating significant growth in comprehension skills (30% gain) and phonemic awareness skills (22% gain) over the 6-week implementation.

"Leapster Story Explorers is a wonderful tool for students and teachers," said Natalia Del Pozo, a teacher who participated in the study. "After spending 20 minutes a day with the program, my students' oral and phonics skills improved a great deal. With Leapster, I can easily track my students' progress and focus on the skills that need improvement."

Leapster Story Explorers is the latest addition to the LeapFrog SchoolHouse suite of solutions designed for English Language Learners, which includes: the English Picture Dictionary for Spanish Speakers, the Language First!(TM) Program, and the English Learner's Family Involvement Kit.

Labels: English language learners

posted by Patricia Lopez at 3:11 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Mary Ann Zehr / EdWeek
August 27, 2007

The nation’s public schools are poised to welcome an unprecedented 49.6 million pre-K-12 students as the school year opens, but whether individual school districts see an increase in students depends a great deal on where those districts are located.

The increase—a projected rise of 1 million this fall from the 2005-06 school year, the most recent national numbers available from the federal government—continues a 10-year trend, with statisticians predicting that schools in the West and the South will receive more students, while schools in the Midwest and the Northeast will experience a decline.

“Immigrants are moving to the West and South. Minority populations of American-born people are very heavy in the West and South— and these are people with more children per household than the rest of the country,” said Harold L. Hodgkinson, an Alexandria,Va., demographer who studies the impact of population trends on education.

In particular, he added, the rising number of Hispanic youngsters in the United States is fueling overall growth in enrollment and is expected to do so for at least two more decades.

But when it comes to particular school districts, those broad patterns can play out very differently; administrators in some districts that have already started classes report enrollment that doesn’t match national trends.

While enrollment is on the upswing in the South, for example, the Atlanta public schools and the Dougherty County schools in Albany, Ga., are losing students to suburban districts.

And while enrollment is generally declining in the Northeast, Superintendent Sal V. Pascarella, of the 10,000-student Danbury, Conn., school system, reports that his district has just completed a study projecting that enrollment will increase by a few hundred students over the next five years.

“The individual districts do have markedly different patterns,” said Tom D. Snyder, the director of annual-report programs for the National Center for Education Statistics, in a word of caution about understanding national statistics.

Breaking Records

The country has been breaking new records each year in pre-K- 12 public school enrollment since 1997, when a record of 46.1 million students was set, according to Mr. Snyder. Before that, the previous record was set in 1971, with 46 million students, as the children born in a “baby boom” following World War II got their education. In the 1970s, enrollment declined and didn’t start steadily increasing again until the mid-1980s.

This fall, Mr. Snyder said, the number of public prekindergarten and elementary school pupils will increase by 0.6 percent over projected enrollment for the previous school year, and the number of secondary school students will increase by 0.2 percent over the previous year. He added that while elementary school students make up a slightly larger share of the projected increase for this school year, that bulge will likely grow in the next few years as larger groups of children are expected to enter elementary school.

The NCES, an arm of the U.S. Department of Education, uses U.S. Census Bureau data and its own statistical methods to project enrollment. The organization usually releases actual enrollment figures about 1½ years after the schools collect the data.

The NCES doesn’t project the ethnic and racial makeup of student enrollment, but actual figures for that makeup through the 2005-06 school year illustrate patterns that some demographers say are likely to continue.

Those figures show that the share of enrollment for Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander students grew rapidly, while that of non-Hispanic whites declined. In the 2005-06 school year, for example, 19.8 percent of the student body nationally was Hispanic, up from 13.5 percent a decade before.

The proportion of student enrollment that was Asian or Pacific Islander increased to 4.6 percent, from 3.7, in those same years. The share of non-Hispanic black students grew slightly, to 17.2 percent from 16.9 percent.

Meanwhile, the percentage of non-Hispanic white students decreased to 57 percent from 64.7 percent in that same 10-year period.

The Pew Hispanic Center projects that the number of schoolage children will increase by 4.8 million by 2020, and that 4.7 million of those children will be Hispanic, meaning that Hispanic children will account for 98 percent of the growth.

But such growth is not evenly distributed, according to Richard Fry, a senior research associate at the center, a Washington-based organization that studies the impact of Latinos on the nation. He conducted a study showing that 10 percent of the nation’s schools absorbed about 75 percent of all Hispanic growth from the 1993-94 school year to the 2002-03 school year.

His current research also shows that that 86 percent of Hispanicstudent enrollment took place within 100 metropolitan areas.

Booming Districts

One of the fastest-growing school districts in the country, Nevada’s Clark County system, which encompasses Las Vegas, reflects the national trend of growth in Hispanic enrollment.

“There has been a booming housing market. We do have an influx of immigrants,” said Jaime L. Lea, a public-information specialist for the Clark County school system, which has grown by about 12,000 students a year for at least a decade. She said that for the 2007-08 school year, enrollment is expected to be 314,400 students, up from about 302,800 last year.

The district was to open nine new schools and two replacement schools on Aug. 27, the scheduled first day of school. Ms. Lea said the district hires some 2,000 to 2,500 teachers a year, and as of last week, still had vacancies for 393 classroom teachers.

In other growing areas, administrators say factors such as economics and even school test scores account for the increased enrollment.

Lawrence T.Walters, the superintendent of Lee County, Ga., school system, which started school Aug. 10, said the district’s enrollment of 6,100 is up by about 200 from the 2006-07 school year. Most of the growth is coming from middle-income white families moving to the area because of its “quality of life and schools,” he said.

He believes families have chosen to move to Lee County, in part, because the word has gotten out that every school in the district has made adequate yearly progress every year under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Meanwhile, Georgia’s Dougherty County—a neighboring district to Lee County that has 16,500 students this school year—has been losing 50 to 100 students each school year for several years, according to Brenda Horton, the public-information director for the school district. She said the middle- income population of Albany, which is in Dougherty County, is tending to move out of that city to more rural counties around it.

The 18,900-student Beaufort County district in South Carolina, by contrast, has seen student growth both from middle-income families and lower-income Hispanic households.

“We are a very popular destination,” said Tom F. Hudson, a communications specialist for the district, which is located in a resort area. “We’re right on the coast around Hilton Head.We’re seeing an increase of residential housing. We see growth among people who work in that industry, … so we’re seeing a rise in our Hispanic population as well.”

Financial Planning

In South Carolina, school systems such as the Beaufort County district and the Richland 2 school district near Columbia have been successful in persuading their communities to pass bond referendums to pay for new schools.

But in other parts of the country where enrollment is declining, administrators are trying to figure out how to pay for basic operations.

Mary Stadick Smith, the communications director for the South Dakota Department of Education, said the nature of agriculture is changing, and young people are not staying in the state’s rural areas. Enrollment is declining in South Dakota except for a few urban areas such as Sioux Falls, she said.

South Dakota’s enrollment has dropped by about 1,000 students every year for the past several years, said Rick Melmer, the secretary of education for the state, which the NCES categorizes as part of the Midwest. For a state that now has 120,000 students in K-12 schools, that’s a significant decline.

“It’s been difficult because our funding formula is on a per-pupil basis,” Mr. Melmer said. “With declining enrollment, you’re filling that financial hole every year.”

Enrollment changes—in either direction—put pressure on school financial officers, facilities directors, and others who plan for the future of schooling in a community. But Mr.Walters, of the Lee County schools in Georgia, said he considers the growth to be “a compliment.”

“We’d rather work on problems associated with people wanting to move here,” he said, “than problems of consolidating and people moving out.”

Labels: immigration and education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:55 PM 0 comments Links to this post

The draft includes a bill that calls for states to set up longitudinal-data systems, which may also help to address student dropout and "disappearance". -Patricia

By Alyson Klein/ EdWeek
August 30, 2007

The leaders of the House education committee issued a highly anticipated draft bill last week to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act. But dozens of other lawmakers beat them to the punch.

Members of Congress have introduced more than 100 bills to amend the main federal law in K-12 education, according to Joel Packer, the chief NCLB lobbyist for the National Education Association. While some of those bills would revise one or more provisions of the 5½-year-old law or add new programs, a handful would go much further by comprehensively reworking its accountability system.

The breadth and diversity of the legislation point to the challenges that confront Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the chairman of the Senate, Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, in crafting reauthorization plans that will be able to garner enough support in both chambers.

Rep. Miller on Aug. 28 released a “discussion draft”Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader of a reauthorization bill that includes many significant proposed changes.

The other members’ measures range from a bill introduced last month by Sen. Richard M. Burr, R-N.C., and Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., that would keep much of the current law intact, to a bill sponsored by Rep. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., that would allow states to opt out of the federal accountability plan entirely. If a state chose to opt out, under Rep. Garrett’s bill, the federal government would set aside the money allocated for its federal K-12 education programs to be provided to state residents in the form of tax credits.

“If you look at these bills on a policy spectrum, not a political spectrum, you get a clear idea of how fragmented each caucus is,” said David L. Shreve, the senior education committee director for the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures. “It gives some insight into how contentious the process is going to be when the chairmen come out with their committee bills.”

While lobbyists who lent a hand in crafting some of the reauthorization measures acknowledge that Sen. Kennedy and Rep. Miller are best positioned to put their stamp on the next version of the NCLB law, they say bills introduced by other members of Congress can help shape the broader debate.

Getting the bills out there “gives you an opportunity to build coalitions around big ideas,” said Gary M. Huggins, the director of the Washington-based Aspen Institute’s Commission on No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan panel which in February released 75 recommendations for revamping the law.

‘Fractured Consensus’

Education lobbyists say many of the bills reflect a burgeoning consensus around some policies, including allowing states to measure achievement gains using so-called growth models, which give schools credit for individual student progress instead of comparing one cohort of students with its predecessors.

But while that proposal may seem “noncontroversial at the 3,000-foot level,” it’s important to note how different bills would implement a growth-model policy, said Amy Wilkins, a vice president at the Education Trust, a Washington-based organization that advocates educational improvements for poor and minority children.

For instance, the bill introduced by Sens. Burr and Gregg, both members of the Senate education committee, would allow all states to take part in the Department of Education’s growth-model pilot project, which has set strict rules for how states can measure student growth. Other bills, such as a measure introduced by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., aren’t specific about how the growth models would be structured.

Another reauthorization measure, sponsored by Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., Norm Coleman, R-Minn., and Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., would call for the National Assessment Governing Board to develop a set of voluntary national standards and tests. NAGB would also create assessments for English-language learners and students in special education, which would be provided to any state that wanted to use them.

The measure would also call for states to set up longitudinal-data systems that track individual student progress, and link that performance to teachers and programs. States would be required to develop a definition of highly effective teachers that relies chiefly on student achievement. Once states had such systems in place, they would be able to opt out of the law’s “highly qualified teacher” requirements.

Mr. Huggins of the Aspen Institute’s NCLB panel, whose recommendations influenced the Lieberman-Coleman-Landrieu bill, said that “for NCLB to hold on to its foundational principles and to actually build on that foundation with additional needed reform, congressional leaders are going to have to rebuild the since-fractured bipartisan consensus that came together to pass it the first time.”

He said it is helpful that the three senators’ bill offers centrist coverage for that approach.

But other lawmakers have taken a significantly different tack. Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., a member of the House education committee, introduced a measure, similar to Rep. Garrett’s bill, that would let states decide not to participate in the NCLB accountability system. The bill, which was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., has garnered more than 60 co-sponsors across both chambers.
Local Tests?

On the Democratic side of the aisle, Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin plans to introduce a bill next month that would allow states and school districts to use locally created assessments, portfolios, and end-of-course projects, such as research papers, to demonstrate student progress.

The measure, which is still being fine-tuned, would permit states that used “more innovative” assessment measures to gauge student progress in just three different grade spans, rather than every year from grade 3 through grade 8, and once in high school, as under current law, an aide to Sen. Feingold said.

A number of relatively similar bills, meanwhile, would allow states to use growth models, as well give states more flexibility in meeting the law’s provisions on highly qualified teachers and in measuring the progress of English-language learners and students in special education.

Rep. Lee Terry, a Nebraska Republican, has introduced a bill that would include those elements, and would allow states to use locally created tests for accountability. His bill also would establish a tiered system for labeling schools, grading them on a scale of A through F, rather than stamping schools as making adequate progress under the law, or not.

At least five Democrats are among the 10 co-sponsors of Rep. Terry’s bill, including Reps. Carolyn McCarthy of New York and Donald M. Payne of New Jersey, who are members of the House education committee.

That a conservative Republican like Mr. Terry can team up with Democrats on a measure for overhauling the law “speaks to the fact that the problems with NCLB have been universal,” the Nebraska congressman said in an interview.

Such bills give committee chairman a chance “see where members of their own caucus are,” said Mr. Packer of the NEA. “I think they’ve already had an impact.”

Labels: NCLB reauthorization

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:08 PM 0 comments Links to this post

If anyone has trouble accessing the pdf files of the draft summary please let me know, I'd be happy to email a copy. -Patricia

By David J. Hoff and Alyson Klein / EdWeek
August 28, 2007

The leaders of the House education committee today released a draft of a plan for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act, outlining proposals that would revise how adequate yearly progress is calculated and overhaul the interventions for schools failing to meet achievement goals.

In releasing the long-awaited plan, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., said that they were inviting comments from educators so that they can incorporate their ideas into the bill they hope to introduce shortly after Labor Day.

“This draft is a work in progress, subject to change over the coming weeks as the committee moves a bill through the legislative process,” Reps. Miller and McKeon wrote in a letter to education stakeholders.

“The committee has not endorsed this staff discussion draft,” adds the Aug. 27 letter, which was also signed by Rep. Dale E. Kildee, D-Mich., and Rep. Michael Castle, R-Del., the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Education and Labor Committee's key subcommittee on K-12 education. “However, we believe it represents a starting point from which to receive input.”

An 11-page summary of the draft bill details many of the ideas Rep. Miller previously said would be included in his reauthorization proposal, such as using so-called growth models to calculate AYP, adding measures other than statewide tests to allow schools to reach their progress goals, and differentiating interventions based on schools’ achievement levels.

In outlining the use of growth models, which track individual student progress instead of comparing different cohorts of students, the document says that states would need to measure schools’ and districts’ progress toward the goal of universal proficiency in reading and mathematics by the end of the 2013-14 school year. That’s the goal set in the current No Child Left Behind Act, which President Bush signed into law in January 2002.

The draft adds a clause that could extend the deadline, saying that students in all the demographic, racial, and ethnic subgroups that the current law tracks would need to at least be “on a trajectory” toward proficiency for a school or district to be determined to be making AYP.

Although reading and mathematics scores on statewide tests would remain the key indicator for AYP purposes, under the draft plan states could choose to allow their schools and districts to earn credit for improvement on other measures. States could, for example, choose to consider a school’s or district’s results on science and social studies tests; passing rates on high school end-of-course exams; and graduation and college-enrollment rates, according to the document.

The draft also proposes a 15-state pilot project that would allow districts to create their own assessments that are “rigorously aligned with state standards to augment the adequate yearly progress determination.” If the pilot project proved successful, the U.S. Department of Education would have the authority to allow other states to adopt locally developed tests for AYP purposes.

Meanwhile, the plan would establish a maximum “N” size, or the minimum subgroup size that counts toward schools’ and districts’ accountability, of 30 students. Currently under the law, states have set, and the Department of Education has approved, N sizes ranging from 5 to 75 students.

More Details Coming

The Education Committee plan also proposes to create two separate systems for targeting interventions for schools in need of improvement.

One would be for “priority schools,” defined as those that miss AYP for one or two student subgroups and need only targeted assistance. The other would be for “high-priority schools,” which would include schools that fail to meet the law’s targets for most, if not all, subgroups and need substantial help.

High-priority schools would choose at least four improvement strategies from a menu of options that includes employing proven instructional programs, adopting formative assessments, offering school choice and free after-school tutoring, and providing extra support to families, such as counseling services. Schools could also make changes to their learning environments, such as introducing dropout-recovery and credit-completion programs and 9th-grade-transition programs.

Priority schools would be required to develop a three-year plan, implementing at least two such improvement measures. The interventions could be targeted to subgroups that weren’t making AYP.

The draft released today outlines changes to Part A of the Title I program, which covers the largest appropriation under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The NCLB law is the latest version of the 42-year-old ESEA.

Later, Rep. Miller will outline his proposals for issues addressed in other sections of the law, such as teacher quality, impact aid, safe and drug-free schools, and the Reading First program.

The House education committee is expected to release its reauthorization bill in September. It plans to hold a hearing on NCLB reauthorization on Sept. 10, said Thomas Kiley, a spokesman for Rep. Miller.

The House Education and Labor Committee is collecting responses to the draft plan until Sept. 5 via e-mail at ESEA.Comments@mail.house.gov.

Labels: NCLB reauthorization

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:45 PM 0 comments Links to this post

"School officials around the state are right to be concerned that this ill-conceived legislation could prove disruptive. It promises to foment the very religious intolerance it purports to guard against. " Read on. -Angela

Aug. 27, 2007, 8:00AM
A captive audience / Editorial HOUSTON CHRONICLE

A new Texas law that's supposed to protect students' religious freedoms likely will spark only discord.

By its nature, lawmaking is a messy business. It is impossible for every lawmaker to read or fully grasp every bill that comes up for a vote, especially in the end-of-session crush.

It's not clear why legislators voted to pass the insidiously named Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act. Passed at the close of the legislative session that ended in May, the law forbids school districts from interfering with students who wish to use school events, and their captive audience of peers, staff and community, to express their religious views.

The law, also called the Schoolchildren's Religious Liberties Act, requires districts to adopt a policy under which certain student leaders must be given opportunities to speak at all school events at which students speak publicly, including graduation, football games and morning announcements.

As long as students do not engage in "obscene, vulgar, offensively lewd or indecent speech," they will be permitted an open mic to express their religious beliefs. The law attempts to get around the constitutional prohibition against state promotion of religion by requiring schools to provide disclaimers stating that the students' speech is not school or district sponsored.

According to Houston Independent School District spokesperson Norm Uhl, HISD has yet to vote on a religious speech policy.

Proponents of the law say it protects students from discrimination for expressing religious viewpoints verbally or in their schoolwork. But to what anti-religious biases are these advocates referring?

Rather than protecting students from religious discrimination, the law's true accomplishment will be the creation of state-sanctioned forums for students who wish to pray and proselytize to captive audiences. With that comes the potential to offend everyone, including the Christian activists who championed this bill's passage.

Students could cite their religious convictions to condemn gay and lesbian students. They could promote their faith as the only true religion. They could pray for the conversion of specific students. They could even promote atheism, Satanism or paganism.

School officials around the state are right to be concerned that this ill-conceived legislation could prove disruptive. It promises to foment the very religious intolerance it purports to guard against. It would allow students to hector nonbelieving children over schools' public address systems and encourage bullying of nonconforming peers. It promises to offend many across a wide religious spectrum, including audiences at graduations, where no one should involuntarily endure proselytizing speeches during these milestone-marking occasions.

In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against student-led prayer at football games in a lawsuit involving nearby Santa Fe Independent School District. Spring Branch school trustee Theresa Kosmoski worries that school districts will face expensive litigation no matter how they implement the law. "That's money that could be spent educating children."

Students already have the federally protected right to voluntary prayer and discussion of their religious convictions. The 1984 Equal Access Act allows public school students to form special-interest clubs, including faith-based clubs, and to meet on campus. Texas' Religious Viewpoints law is a pernicious endeavor to foist what were once voluntary activities on others who might not share their peers' faith.

Labels: Religion and schools

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:41 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Nancy Zuckerbrod
ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 28, 2007

WASHINGTON – Lawmakers rewriting the No Child Left Behind law want to loosen testing rules for students with limited English skills.

Senior lawmakers on the House Education Committee circulated a proposal Tuesday that would change the way students who are learning English are tested.

The law requires all students to be tested in reading and math in grades three through eight and once in high school. Schools face increasingly tough consequences if students fail to meet annual progress goals.

The proposal being circulated would allow states to measure how well students first learning English are doing at acquiring language skills instead of judging them on standard reading tests. The substitute test would only be allowed, however, for two years after the law is enacted.

During that time, states would be expected to develop alternative tests for limited-English speakers – such as tests using simplified English.

The proposal would encourage states to develop foreign-language reading and math tests, and it would allow students to be tested in their native language for five years instead of three.

School officials nationwide have complained it makes no sense to give subject-area tests in English to students who don't know how to read English well.

However, not everyone likes the proposed change.

That would take the pressure off schools to get kids up to speed quickly in English, says Amy Wilkens, vice president of the Education Trust, a nonprofit that advocates for poor and minority kids.

“It's too long,” she said. “That seems to me a terrible disservice to those kids and these families.”

The House proposal also would be changed to treat schools that fail to meet annual goals by a little differently from those that fail to meet such goals by a lot.

And schools would get some credit toward annual progress goals for tests other than those in reading and math. For example, schools could get credit for student performance on history, civics and science exams as well as for graduation rates.

The House bill is expected to formally be introduced in the next few weeks.

The proposal was circulated Tuesday by Education Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., and the committee's ranking Republican, California Rep. Buck McKeon.

Labels: English language learners, NCLB, testing

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:36 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is a great piece with a lot of great points. I think the use of the Milgrim experiment was a great cite to use but I think the experiment might have been focused more on obedience. Milgrim showed that people’s negative actions (such as those mentioned here) are a consequence of their reassurance that the responsibility of the outcomes will lie on the shoulders of someone else, not them. Many of the participants during the experiment continued when they were reassured that the “doctor” was responsible for the outcome, and following the experiment many stated they were simply “following orders.”

I think this ties in well with what Kozol (2005) calls the “rote and drill curriculum" that most disadvantaged students receive. These students aren’t taught to engage in their learning but rather are taught to listen, take orders and respond to questions in ways that will benefit the measures in which they are tested. Again, in agreement with Spence, this socialization process greatly serves those in power positions; we can’t foster leadership when all we’re promoting is obedience. - Patricia


A Critique Of US Public Schools
By Emily Spence

08/26/07 "ICH' --- - For years, liberals have pointed out the huge gap between funding for military ventures and US public education. Indeed, a motto, floating around for a decade or more, sums it up well: "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber."

While its a bit overstated, the saying gets the case across and no one can dispute that our federal government spends an inordinate sum for our armed forces, armaments and other military provisions while many needs back in the US get short shrift. Aside from New Orleans never being put back together right, there are the problems of the worn out US infrastructure, the low income housing deficit, the high rate of homelessness and the migration of jobs overseas such that one in seven is expected to disappear over the next ten years. At the same time, there exist many other serious problems needing an immediate infusion of cash and workers (for which returned US military troops could be employed) to provide national relief. Moreover, education, is woefully under funded and could certainly used any help available for its improvement both in terms of building upgrading and many other sorts.

All of the above in mind, the cost of the War in Iraq, alone, has been close to half a trillion dollars [1]. The overall military budget for 2008 is 51 % ($1,228 billion) of US governmental revenue whereas ALL other expenditures amounts to 49 % ($1,159 billion). Meanwhile, Human Resources provisions (from which education receives a modest amount) is set at $748 billion while General Government spending is set at $295 billion from which interest on the government debt commandeers 20 % of funds and Homeland Security another 17 %. Furthermore, Physical Resources (out of which transportation related and environmental needs are funded) receives $116 billion from which another 17 % goes to the physical needs (such as buildings, etc.) for Homeland Security [2].

When the above funding decisions are assessed all together, it is no wonder that the US Department of Education received only $68,084,800 in 2007. It is also not surprising that President Bush wants this amount pared down to $60,220,138 for 2008 [3]. At the same time, this spending is being requested to be all together removed from the US Budget in order to try to help balance the huge debt load, almost nine trillion dollars (approximately $30,000 per US citizen), that our government has driven into place [4]. The totality, certainly, staggers the imagination [5].

Basically. is it any revelation, then, that the quality of education varies vastly from community to community based on the relative wealth that each has? Likewise, is it incredulous that the breach is widening?

All considered, there is no equality in educational provision. For example, current per pupil annual cost in Greenwich, CT is $15,166. In 2004, the average amount spent annually per student in the US was $8,287. with the low at $5,008 (Utah) and the high at $12,930 (New York). In other words, the range is amazing and one can expect that ghetto schools in each state receive less than the average sum whereas more affluent communities get more than ample funding. All considered, property tax valuations, as the primary measure to assess the amount of money that school districts obtain, are bound to create a wide range of highly significant disparities [6].

Furthermore, local school boards further compound this problem by having a large say over the curriculum used in schools. This, too, impacts the quality of education capable of being delivered.

For instance, we can have intelligent design theory taught along side of evolution, no trigonometry or foreign language classes offered, no computers available (as they are too costly to provide when assessed along side of other needs, such as books on the history of the evangelical movement at the exclusion of one focused on the history of minority group contributions to society, and so on). Yet, how much more agreeable would be education as delivered in Canada wherein every teacher in every school uses the same materials (supplemented by ones of local choice) for its core curriculum and every student is on the same page with the same academic expectations regardless of whether they live in British Columbia or Montreal?!

All of these factors taken en toto, education, overall, is poorly delivered in the US. This has been well documented by innumerable educational watchdogs, such as Jonathan Kozol and John Gatto, whose conclusions are both highly alarming and disgraceful.

For example, Jonathan Kozol has construed, after countless studies conducted at a large number of diverse schools, that our educational system creates extreme discrimination based on economic class. On account, those who are advantaged (to receive quality public education) are accorded an unfair advantage in terms of obtainment of money, power privilege, class status, along with other tangible and intangible benefits [7].

As a result, many students, throughout the United States, have no chance of succeeding through no fault of their own. Under the circumstances, the loss to the individual and the society at large is staggering. For a nation that, supposedly, treasures equal opportunity, this is nothing short of intolerable.

In relation, John Gatto elucidates on the findings of a 1990's ETS conducted national literacy survey:

"Ninety-six and a half percent of the American population is mediocre to illiterate where deciphering print is concerned. This is no commentary on their intelligence, but without ability to take in primary information from print and to interpret it they are at the mercy of commentators who tell them what things mean. A working definition of immaturity might include an excessive need for other people to interpret information for us.

"Certainly it’s possible to argue that bad readers aren't victims at all but perpetrators, cursed by inferior biology to possess only shadows of intellect. That’s what bell-curve theory, evolutionary theory, aristocratic social theory, eugenics theory, strong-state political theory, and some kinds of theology are about. All agree most of us are inferior, if not downright dangerous. The integrity of such theoretical outlooks— at least where reading was concerned—took a stiff shot on the chin from America. Here, democratic practice allowed a revolutionary generation to learn how to read. Those granted the opportunity took advantage of it brilliantly." (To have access to more of this assessment, please go to the eighth "[8]" citation below.)
The ramifications of both Kozol's and Gatto's finding are multifold. For example, the general workforce, derived from many HS and college graduates, is ill prepared to do much beyond almost thoughtless, menial labor. The disparity between those who've been provided a sound education and those who have not will be huge in terms of mental and many other kinds of capabilities. The value of a HS or a college degree, in and of itself, will hold no meaning as the bottom line involves from where the degree originated. The income disparity between those who have sufficient funds and those who do not will increase. Even more awful than these other factors is that the next generation will be poorly prepared, for the most part, to lead America into the next century in any meaningful fashion.

In addition and equally disturbing is the fact that thinking is, thus, curtailed to the most rudimentary types for a large number of Americans. In short, many individuals simply are not able to understand whatever they are not trained to comprehend. In this sense, the lack of knowledge concerning science (i.e., the facts of evolution) and rudimentary mathematics (necessary to balance a check book), language usage (needed to communicate basic information on the job) and much more is predictable.

Indeed, obvious educational shortfalls in the US, in large measure, appear responsible for many people's inability to grapple with the more complex ethical issues, diminished capacity for critical analysis (i.e., to undertake synthesis and extrapolation to generate clarifications and accurate models of "reality" as, for instance, are the ones posed by transitional frames of reference) limited hermeneutical understandings, incapacity to differentiate logical VS. illogical pattens, etc. Meanwhile TV shows are one of the most popular methods to gain information on the parts of many, it would seem, and simply aren't set up to impart much of value beyond a fleeting entertainment factor and superficial news coverage of selective topics.

All told, John Gatto, Jonathan Kozol and other critics, repeatedly and disparagingly, point out that public education (in the US and elsewhere across the globe) is guaranteed to keep economic classes in their relative placement and trapped in a basic inability to apply higher level cognitive skill sets to written and heard accounts. Thus, many individuals absolutely have to rely on commentators (i.e., authority figures for the most part) to form their understandings of events. Alternately put, students, in many school districts, are not taught to think independently, nor question the opinions provided by the status quo. How convenient for those in powerful leadership positions! How easy, then, it becomes to keep corrupt systems in operation as many people cannot even conceive of alternatives let alone figure out ways to put them in place!

The results, then, are clear. For example, one in five American adults, supposedly, do not know who the US VP is. Mainstream news commentators and governmental leaders seem credible even when spouting the most audacious lies, and so on [9]. (Stanley Milgram carried out some interesting studies, which indicate that it is easy to influence people to conform to the attitudes and commands of those in power even when these involve injuring or killing another person.[10] How much easier such outcomes must be to achieve when people lack some essential mental skills to form autonomous conclusions.) Lastly, it is hard for people to stand against the underlying norms (i.e., that you will be contented if you just buy this X product that you deserve to have and on which your self-esteem depends) as they cannot see through the propaganda.

All in all, it is easy to quell any discontent with "the way things are" when people cannot conceive of better alternatives, nor question the currently prevalent standards and practices. Thus, the current inequities in schools and society at large will likely continue unchallenged and uncorrected.

At the same time, the current income disparity amongst classes is all but assured to continue such that most members of the lower and upper economic classes will keep in their relative positions, as will their children. After all, who can afford to pay ~ $140,000 dollars for an undergraduate education and ~ $180,000 for four years of graduate school except for the relatively rather wealthy? Who can even meet minimal standards for studies at a school of higher education after learning at one of the glaringly inferior schools?

Moreover, taking on this cost as a student loan is particularly ludicrous in many circumstances in that the Federal minimum wage (currently set at $5.85/ hour) all but assures that many jobs available to new graduates will not be able to be provide sufficient income for them to pay back borrowed money (which, nonetheless, keep accruing interest over time). All considered, is it any wonder that the default rate on student loans is over ten percent, while amounting to many millions of dollars? Is it not assured that myriad related problems for former students, who were unable to repay loans, will subsequently transpire -- such as inability to take out a mortgage due to a bad credit rating or, even worse, bankruptcy [11]?

At the same time, the jobs available to the graduates are disappearing. It has been alleged that one in seven US jobs will disappear over the next ten years on account of industrial globalization. The majority of the ones that will be left will be the types that are impossible to outsource -- types like food service delivery at fast food chains, construction jobs, clerk positions at mega-malls, health care provision, teaching and the likes.

A further consideration concerns the sort of quality in educators that can be expected with the salaries that many teachers command. For instance, someone with a Ph' D in education can expect a starting salary of $22,000 in some public school systems. Even if someone with a doctoral degree were to consider accepting such a low income, what sort of person would he be?

It would seem likely to be someone who is either highly dedicated to humanitarian service or, due to some sort of serious flaw, were unable to "make it" in the business world. After all, what other rationale could explain someone willingly taking such a pitiful salary? Who can consider supporting a family or even renting a home with such a ridiculous wage?

All in all, we are a land that supposedly supports "liberty and justice for all" (or so our Pledge of Allegiance, that school children recite every day, states). In practice, though, we have an educational caste system of the worst sort imaginable. It is just one more scandal (along with the treatment of the victims from Hurricane Katrina, our military invasion of Iraq without sufficient provocation and evidence of myriad other woes) plaguing our so-called great country.

Emily Spence resides in Massachusetts and deeply cares about the future of our world.
Click Here to View Part 2: "Down In The Trenches, Anecdotal Evidence From The Classroom"

[1] To see the total cost for the War in Iraq, please refer to information provided at: http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182.
[2] To review US budgetary figures, please see: The Federal Pie Chart (http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm).
[3] This data derives from: U.S. Department of Education Budget News
(www.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/news.html).
[4] An overview can be obtained at: Cutting the Federal Budget to Prevent U.S. Bankruptcy: Part ...
(http://www.lewrockwell.com/grichar/grichar38.html).
[5] Debt figures and similar provisions are located at: U.S. National Debt Clock (http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/).
[6] This and related information is reviewed at: US Census Press Releases.
[7] A summation of Kozol's findings can be found at: Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Aparthe... (http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/American-Apartheid-Education1sep05.htm).
[8] Please refer to: The National Adult Literacy Survey - John Taylor Gatto (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3j.htm).
[9] At these sites, the ease with which this trickery can be executed is shown: Bill Moyers Journal . Buying the War . Watch the Show | PBS (www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html) and Bill Moyers’ “Buying the War” Exposes the Media’s Failure to... (www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/24/730/).
[10] To learn more, please go to: Stanley Milgram - The Stanley Milgram Website (www.stanleymilgram.com/references.html) and, for an extensive analysis, Obedience to Authority (1960-63) (www.humanresearch.msu.edu/training/Milgram_Paper_by_H).
[11] Please check information at these links to see definitions of business and personal bankruptcy, as well as number of cases in US for 2005: Bankruptcy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy) and http://www.uscourts.gov/bnkrpctystats/bankrupt_f2table_dec2006.xls.

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:04 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is such a positive benefit for the students who are still in school, a definite sign of caring. -Patricia

CCISD officials hope to enroll 100 in Horizons

By Adriana Garza (Contact)
August 28, 2007

About 100 CCISD high school students who are more than two grade levels behind are getting a new chance at academic success through the district's new Horizons Program.

Corpus Christi Independent School District trustees received an update on the district's newest program based on smaller classrooms and individualized instruction at the Solomon Coles High School and Education Center at Monday night's regular school board meeting.

The program focuses on providing students, many repeating one grade level more than twice or several grade levels once, with the opportunity to catch up on course work through accelerated and condensed individualized instruction.

Once the students are caught up, the goal is to get them to graduate, possibly with their originally assigned graduating class, said Bernadine Cervantes, assistant superintendent for school leadership.

"Solomon Coles will shine like a beacon of hope for these students who need a change," Cervantes said.

This spring school administrators reviewed enrollment information to identify ninth- and 10th-grade students who were between 17 and 18 years old -- the age of an average graduating senior.

For the majority of the students, earning high school credits hasn't been easy. Most have earned fewer than five, Cervantes said.

As of Monday, the first day of school for CCISD, about 70 of the 100 students identified were enrolled at Coles.

"We are the last hope, last option, for many of these students," said Monica Bayarena, principal at Coles.

Students in the Horizons program can expect different, hands-on instruction, with an emphasis on reading, writing and math.

Students also will have a smaller student-to-teacher ratio, which will allow teachers and counselors to have a better understanding of individuals needs.

Other goals include improving Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills scores, increasing attendance rates and making key connections to local colleges.

"We want to make our students feel welcome and give them an education environment where everyone knows their names," Bayarena said.

Labels: caring, graduation rates

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:47 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Not necessarily a bad sign. I quote from below: "The officials trumpeted the size of the group that took the SAT — nearly 1.5 million seniors — and the expanded diversity of the test-takers. Hispanic, black and Asian-American students accounted for 39 percent of the seniors who took the test, representing the largest proportion of minority test-takers since the SAT was introduced in 1926. In all, 35 percent of those taking the exam would be the first in their family to attend college." While representing a democratizing of the SAT, it's nevertheless hard to separate out how the results are impacted by teacher/school quality and the high-stakes testing environment itself. Note the discussion below on the unprecedented, historic declines in scores. -Angela

August 29, 2007
SAT Scores Dip Slightly in a More Diverse Field

By ALAN FINDER

Average reading and math scores on the SAT test declined slightly this year, as the number of high school students taking the standardized exam grew larger and more diverse than ever, according to a report released yesterday by the College Board on the high school class of 2007.

The average score on the critical reading part of the SAT, which used to be known as the verbal test, was 502 out of a possible score of 800 — a decline of one point from last year, but also the lowest showing in reading in 13 years.

In math, the average score for the class of 2007 declined by three points, to 515. And the average score on the SAT writing test, which was introduced two years ago, was 494, a three-point drop.

It is the second consecutive year that the College Board, the nonprofit organization administering the SAT, reported declines on the college entrance exam.

The declines for the class of 2007 were not caused by a single factor, College Board officials said. But the increase in the number of traditionally underrepresented minority and low-income students taking the test played a role, they said. So did a new requirement in Maine that all high school seniors take the exam, including those who would not in the past have viewed themselves as college bound.

Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, said in a news conference, “The larger the population you get that takes the exam, it obviously knocks down the scores.”

Wayne Camara, vice president for research and analysis at the College Board, described the declines from 2006 to 2007 as statistically insignificant.

The officials trumpeted the size of the group that took the SAT — nearly 1.5 million seniors — and the expanded diversity of the test-takers. Hispanic, black and Asian-American students accounted for 39 percent of the seniors who took the test, representing the largest proportion of minority test-takers since the SAT was introduced in 1926. In all, 35 percent of those taking the exam would be the first in their family to attend college.

Officials of the College Board noted that, in some instances, the traditional gaps in scores between minority students and all test-takers had narrowed.

“More minority students took the SAT than ever before, and they are holding their own,” said Laurence Bunin, senior vice president for operations at the College Board.

But the data also showed most minority and low-income students continuing to lag significantly behind white and affluent students. The average score for students who planned to apply for financial aid in college was 501 in critical reading and 508 in math; the average score for those who did not intend to apply for aid was 530 in critical reading and 548 in math.

Black students on average scored 433 in critical reading and 429 in math; the averages for Puerto Rican students were 459 and 454; and those for white students were 527 and 534.

Many factors account for these differences, including the quality of local schools, parents’ and students’ expectations, the rigor of coursework, and access to tutors and special classes to prepare for the SATs and other standardized tests.

Seppy Basili, senior vice president at Kaplan Inc., the education and test preparation company, said in an interview that the overall results “really foreshadow what the future will look like” as the nation’s student population diversifies and college attendance rises.

Three years ago, only a third of the students taking the SAT were members of minorities, he said, compared with 39 percent this year. “Within 10 years, we are likely to see no majority group taking the SATs,” Mr. Basili said.

Even with recent declines in average scores, the broad trend is healthy, Mr. Basili said. More students are being encouraged to go to college, which prepares them for the more sophisticated jobs being created in the economy.

In New York, Richard Mills, the state education commissioner, said the number of Hispanic students taking the SAT in the state had increased by 15 percent and the number of black students by almost 10 percent from 2006 to 2007. The average scores among New York State students in the class of 2007 were also moderately lower than in 2006: 491 in critical reading and 505 in math.

“One never wants to see the scores go down,” Mr. Mills said, “but I think the more important story here is the rapid increase of participation of children who in the past did not think they were going to college, did not aspire to it and did not take the SATs so they could get in line.”

While applauding the expansion in students’ aspirations, some educators said that the national results showed local schools were not adequately preparing poor and minority students.

“Right now we’re making progress at a glacial pace,” said Ross Wiener, vice president for program and policy at the Education Trust, a Washington group that advocates for broader access to higher education. “We need a paradigm shift on how we are preparing our students for college.”

Others questioned the College Board’s explanations for the decline in scores this year, along with a more significant drop last year. Average scores for the class of 2006, the first group to take the new three-part test that includes a writing section, showed the largest decline in 31 years: five points in critical reading and two in math.

“The 10-year trend shows math scores steadily rising and critical reading scores moderately rising until the new test was introduced, and suddenly they plunged,” said Robert Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, which opposes the broad use of standardized testing.

Since the diversity of students taking the SAT was also increasing as scores advanced over the last decade, Mr. Schaeffer said it made no sense to argue that diversity was the cause of the recent declines. He said also that the new test might have been more difficult in recent years.

“The answer they are giving doesn’t fit the data,” he said.

Figures released this month by ACT, a rival college entrance exam that is more popular in the Midwest, showed a slight performance increase for the class of 2007.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/education/29SAT.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:33 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Anthony Cody /Teacher Magazine, Aug. 21, 2007


I started teaching at a middle school in Oakland, Calif., about 20 years ago. My first year was pretty rough. I was prepared to teach science, but my first semester I was given two periods of beginning Spanish, one of English, and two of science. My credential program had not really dealt much with behavior issues. The idea was to deliver a rich curriculum, and the management would take care of itself. If you are already teaching, you know this does not always work.
As part of a new partnership, teachermagazine.org is publishing this regular column by members of the Teacher Leaders Network, a professional community of accomplished educators dedicated to sharing ideas and expanding the influence of teachers.

I floundered a bit the first year or two, and took help wherever I could find it. My best resources came from my colleagues down the hall. They had been at the school a few years and passed along valuable ways to make things work.
Here are a few of the things I learned:

I learned to post a short list of clear, unambiguous rules and enforce them consistently. This is much harder to do than it sounds, and it took me many years to master.

I learned how important it was to phone parents early in the year, with positive news if at all possible. Then the first phone call would not be one from me complaining about their child's behavior. One parent I phoned in September told me that mine was the first positive call she had ever received about her child. When I had to call about some problems a few months later, she was there to back me up 100 percent.

I learned to balance a negative phone call with a positive one. The days after I would make phone calls, the students would often come in and ask me, "Why did you call my house?" It was great to be able to point out that I was working with their parents in their best interests, and that I would make positive calls when behavior improved. I also found that my own disposition greatly improved after I made a positive call.

I learned to keep a record of student behavior, along with any referrals to the office, so that the problems I had with a few students were clearly documented. I kept a record of phone calls home in the same book.

I learned how easy it was to get into entertaining but fruitless dialogues with students when I was trying to enforce rules. It took me a while, but eventually I learned the best method was to give a warning or consequence clearly, and allow for discussion only after class.

I learned it was important for students to understand that I cared about their well-being, and that I was on their side. This was done through caring communication and showing an interest in them as individuals by giving attention to their interests and abilities. And also through developing assignments that gave them more than one way to demonstrate their knowledge. Some students shine when speaking to the class, others excel at creative projects that illustrate what they've learned.

I tried using the textbook quizzes and tests, but found my students were performing miserably. These tests featured 40 multiple-choice questions that required memorization. My students refused to memorize the textbook facts—they were bored with that, and their behavior reflected their boredom. So I began to think about the main points I was trying to get across and looked for engaging ways to make those main points stick. Then I made my tests reflect those main points and found the students did much better. I also looked for different ways for students to demonstrate their understanding through more creative projects, and I found the students became even more engaged.

For example, when learning about states of matter, I had students team up and design their own experiments focusing on dry ice. They came up with ideas like measuring the amount of time the dry ice took to turn to vapor in different liquids; attempting to measure the temperature of the dry ice; or collecting and testing the vapor that the dry ice produced. After a review process, the teams carried out their experiments. Then, each team created a display and presented their results to their classmates. In the process, they all learned about the properties of dry ice—that it turns to vapor much more quickly in water than in air, that frozen carbon dioxide is much colder than water ice, and that the vapor is heavier than air and puts out a candle. Their findings led us into other explorations of the states of matter. They were having too much fun to misbehave!

The secret to behavior management is really about having the students fully engaged in the learning process, and it involves more than just rules and office referrals. After all, the whole point of getting the class to focus is to do some meaningful work—to reach new understandings, to create new expressions of their knowledge, and to build new skills. But we have to know how to manage our teacher-student relationships in order to get there.

An awarding winning middle school science teacher, Anthony Cody is now the secondary science content coach for the Oakland, Calif., Unified School District, where he is also a leader in the Partnership for Oakland Science Inquiry Teaching (Project POSIT), which improves science instruction for grades 4-8 in partnership with local science agencies.

Labels: effective teaching

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:34 AM 0 comments Links to this post

August 27, 2007
With Turnover High, Schools Fight for Teachers

By SAM DILLON / NY Times

GREENSBORO, N.C. — The retirement of thousands of baby boomer teachers coupled with the departure of younger teachers frustrated by the stress of working in low-performing schools is fueling a crisis in teacher turnover that is costing school districts substantial amounts of money as they scramble to fill their ranks for the fall term.

Superintendents and recruiters across the nation say the challenge of putting a qualified teacher in every classroom is heightened in subjects like math and science and is a particular struggle in high-poverty schools, where the turnover is highest. Thousands of classes in such schools have opened with substitute teachers in recent years.

Here in Guilford County, N.C., turnover had become so severe in some high-poverty schools that principals were hiring new teachers for nearly every class, every term. To staff its neediest schools before classes start on Aug. 28, recruiters have been advertising nationwide, organizing teacher fairs and offering one of the nation’s largest recruitment bonuses, $10,000 to instructors who sign up to teach Algebra I.

“We had schools where we didn’t have a single certified math teacher,” said Terry Grier, the schools superintendent. “We needed an incentive, because we couldn’t convince teachers to go to these schools without one.”

Guilford County, which has 116 schools, is far from the only district to take this route as school systems compete to fill their ranks. Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit policy group that seeks to encourage better teaching, said hundreds of districts were offering recruitment incentives this summer.

Officials in New York, which has the nation’s largest school system, said they had recruited about 5,000 new teachers by mid-August, attracting those certified in math, science and special education with a housing incentive that can include $5,000 for a down payment.

New York also offers subsidies through its teaching fellows program, which recruits midcareer professionals from fields like health care, law and finance. The money helps defer the cost of study for a master’s degree. The city expects to hire at least 1,300 additional teachers before school begins on Sept. 4, said Vicki Bernstein, director of teacher recruitment.

Los Angeles has offered teachers signing with low-performing schools a $5,000 bonus. The district, the second-largest in the country, had hired only about 500 of the 2,500 teachers it needed by Aug. 15 but hoped to begin classes fully staffed, said Deborah Ignagni, chief of teacher recruitment.

In Kansas, Alexa Posny, the state’s education commissioner, said the schools had been working to fill “the largest number of vacancies” the state had ever faced. This is partly because of baby boomer retirements and partly because districts in Texas and elsewhere were offering recruitment bonuses and housing allowances, luring Kansas teachers away.

“This is an acute problem that is becoming a crisis,” Ms. Posny said.

In June, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a nonprofit group that seeks to increase the retention of quality teachers, estimated from a survey of several districts that teacher turnover was costing the nation’s districts some $7 billion annually for recruiting, hiring and training.

Demographers agree that education is one of the fields hardest hit by the departure of hundreds of thousands of baby boomers from the work force, particularly because a slowdown in hiring in the 1980s and 1990s raised the average age of the teaching profession. Still, they debate how serious the attrition will turn out to be.

In New York, the wave of such retirements crested in the early years of this decade as teachers left well before they hit their 60s, without a disruptive teacher shortage, Ms. Bernstein said.

In other parts of the country, the retirement bulge is still approaching, because pension policies vary among states, said Michael Podgursky, an economist at the University of Missouri. California is projecting that it will need 100,000 new teachers over the next decade from the retirement of the baby boomers alone.

Some educators say it is the confluence of such retirements with the departure of disillusioned young teachers that is creating the challenge. In addition, higher salaries in the business world and more opportunities for women are drawing away from the field recruits who might in another era have proved to be talented teachers with strong academic backgrounds.

“The problem is not mainly with retirement,” said Thomas G. Carroll, the president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. “Our teacher preparation system can accommodate the retirement rate. The problem is that our schools are like a bucket with holes in the bottom, and we keep pouring in teachers.”

The commission has calculated that these days nearly a third of all new teachers leave the profession after just three years, and that after five years almost half are gone — a higher turnover rate than in the past.

All the coming and going of young teachers is tremendously disruptive, especially to schools in poor neighborhoods where teacher turnover is highest and students’ needs are greatest.

According to the most recent Department of Education statistics available, about 269,000 of the nation’s 3.2 million public school teachers, or 8.4 percent, quit the field in the 2003-4 school year. Thirty percent of them retired, and 56 percent said they left to pursue another career or because they were dissatisfied.

The federal No Child Left Behind law requires schools and districts to put a qualified teacher in every classroom. The law has led districts to focus more seriously on staffing its low-performing schools, educators said, but it does not appear to have helped persuade veteran teachers to continue their service in them.

Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a group that helps urban districts recruit teachers, said attrition often resulted from chaotic hiring practices, because novice teachers are often assigned at the last moment to positions for which they have not even interviewed. Later, overwhelmed by classroom stress, many leave the field.

Chicago and New York are districts that have invested heavily and worked with teachers unions in recent years to improve hiring and transfer policies, Mr. Daly said.

“But most of the urban districts have no coherent hiring strategy,” he said. Many receive thousands of teacher applications in the spring but leave them unprocessed until principals return from August vacations, when more organized suburban districts have already hired the most-qualified teachers, he said.

“There isn’t any maliciousness in this,” Mr. Daly said, “it’s just a conspiracy of dysfunction.”

In Guilford County, Washington Elementary School, which serves students from a housing project, had churned through several principals and most of its teachers several years ago, and had repeatedly failed to make federal testing goals, said Dr. Grier, the superintendent.

“Teachers were worried it was becoming a failing school,” Dr. Grier said. To rebuild morale, he recruited a principal from Chicago, Grenita Lathan. Her first year at Washington was a nightmare, Ms. Lathan said, because her predecessors had been so panicked to fill classroom vacancies that they had hired “just anybody.”

“All they wanted was warm bodies in the classroom,” she said. At job fairs, qualified teachers she tried to hire shunned her, she said.

Under Guilford County’s incentive program, math or reading teachers who sign on at any of 29 high-poverty schools receive bonuses of $2,500 to $10,000. They can earn additional bonuses if they raise achievement.

Those incentives helped Ms. Lathan recruit solid teachers last year, she said, and after much tutoring and hard work, students met federal testing targets. This summer all but one teacher signed up for another year.

Other Guilford County schools have also used the incentives to hire promising people.

Rebecca Rheinheimer moved from Indiana this summer, attracted by a $2,500 bonus to teach at Oak Hill Elementary, where the teaching staff has been strengthened by the use of such bonuses. The school, in High Point, met its federal testing targets this spring for the first time in several years.

Margaret Eaddy-Busch, a veteran math teacher, moved from Philadelphia this summer to teach at Dudley High, which had become known as a hard-to-staff school. She will receive a $10,000 bonus for teaching Algebra I.

“If I survived in Philly for 10 years,” Ms. Eaddy-Busch said, “I’ll do just fine here.”

But it remains unclear whether the incentive program will retain good teachers as effectively as it attracts them.

“It’s challenging to teach in these high-needs schools,” said Mark Jewell, president of the local teachers union. “These new teachers will have a trial by fire, and then it’ll be a revolving door.”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/education/27teacher.html?th&emc=th

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:54 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Thursday, August 23, 2007 7:55 PM

While governor of Texas and initiator of the so-called "Texas education miracle" aimed at helping poor and minority children succeed academically, George W. Bush had an opportunity to use a large budget surplus to provide affordable health care for 250,000 poor children. Instead, he called a special legislative session. Declaring "people are hurting out there," Bush pushed through a $45 million tax break for oil well owners.

Fast-forward to 2007 and we find the No Child Left Behind president responding similarly to poor children's needs by threatening to veto a bipartisan bill, the State Children's Health Insurance Plan (SCHIP), that would extend health insurance to millions of uninsured children. Bush worries that the program would be too expensive and (worry of worries!) that it would "encourage more people to go on government health care." Instead, he proposes a federal plan that would remove about one million children currently receiving health insurance and increase the number of uninsured children from nine to ten million. While proclaiming to be making education policy that keeps "a historic commitment to our children," the president apparently sees no connection between children's academic achievement and their health.

Of course the connection is no news for teachers, who see its critical importance everyday in their classrooms, or to researchers who have studied it. For example, Stephanie M. Spernak and colleagues examined health and academic achievement in former Head Start children. They found that children's health status when beginning school predicted third grade achievement scores and "children in poor general health had significantly lower achievement scores than children in good general health in third grade." Similarly, Brenda Needham and colleagues found that self-reported physical health problems were associated with school failure, mostly because health problems contribute to school absenteeism, trouble with homework, and student-teacher bonding. Asthmatic children in the United States miss approximately 14 million days of school, but the rate of school absenteeism is twice as high among poor and minority asthmatic children living in urban areas.

And health insurance makes a difference! A California study showed that after obtaining health care, children who had been in poor health improved their school attendance, attention in class, and the extent to which they kept up with school activities. Of course these changes contributed to improved academic performance. A University of Missouri study found that children who enrolled in the state's health insurance program had 39% fewer school absences. Uninsured children with asthma miss more school days.

Bush's threat to veto the SCHIP legislation illustrates what is often omitted in discussions of NCLB and its chief instructional mandate, Reading First. Besides being an attempt to wreck the public schools, replace a full education with mindless skills training, and increase control over teachers' work and power, NCLB serves as cruel ideological instrument by which to focus the nation on a pretense of helping poor and minority children while making war on them by slashing every federal policy initiative critical to their lives and educational success.

Again, a look back at Texas reveals the template for this policy. While focusing on the so-called "Texas education miracle," which has been soundly debunked by several independent studies, Bush was indifferent to poor children. For example, while he was governor, Texas ranked second highest among states in the percentage of people - especially children - who went hungry. Yet he vetoed a minimal step to help the malnourished, i.e., a bill to coordinate hunger programs in Texas. As governor he slashed the state's food stamp payments, support essential for poor children, by $1 billion. When a reporter asked him about hunger in the state, the governor answered, "Where?" As president, he has cut or attempted to cut federal support for countless programs, such as affordable housing, food stamps, lead decontamination, urban pollution reduction, and Head Start that would better poor children's lives and contribute to their academic success.

Right now educators can make a difference in taking one important step to help poor children's health and education. Go to the Campaign for Health Care at http://www.childrenshealthcampaign.org/. There you'll be able to sign a petition to Congress and the President that calls for health coverage for all children. You'll also find information on how to call your senators and urge them to support SCHIP and how to recruit family and friends in this effort. Both the House and Senate bills would provide additional funds to provide health insurance for millions of poor children. These bills are inadequate in that they would not cover all uninsured children, but are the best the Democrats can do right now in order to get sufficient Republican support to override a presidential veto.

Given the grim realities of current domestic policy, both bills and the final compromise bill will be a critical victory for many poor children. By voicing support for these bills, educators can help defeat one aspect of the war on poor children's education.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:37 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By TEA / North Texas eNews
Aug 26, 2007



AUSTIN - After successful meetings in Austin, Houston, Arlington, and Midland, the Commission for a College Ready Texas (CCRT) will hold meetings in Harlingen and San Antonio during September.

The Harlingen regional meeting is scheduled for Sept. 11 from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Harlingen Independent School District Administration Building at 407 N. 77 Sunshine Strip, Harlingen.

The San Antonio meeting, originally scheduled for Friday, has been rescheduled for Sept. 14 at a location to be determined.

Recognizing the importance of broad, diverse public engagement, Gov. Rick Perry appointed the Commission in March to provide a forum to exchange views on aligning high school curriculum with college standards. The goal of the CCRT is to provide support to the statutorily-created vertical teams and to the State Board of Education (SBOE) regarding the requirements of House Bill 1.

Passed and signed into law in 2006, House Bill 1 requires the vertical teams of educators to define college readiness and the SBOE to re-align high school curriculum and develop online instructional resources for students and professional development for educators. The activities of the CCRT aim to provide a forum for Texans to share their views on college-readiness, to facilitate the work of college readiness across the state, and to provide research and support to the vertical teams and to the SBOE in fulfilling the requirements of HB 1.

The Commission is chaired by Austin attorney and education policy leader Sandy Kress, and ex-officio members of the CCRT include acting Commissioner of Education Robert Scott, Texas Education Agency, and Commissioner of Higher Education Raymund Paredes, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

At the Harlingen and San Antonio meetings, the Commission will solicit public testimony on college readiness at the meeting on the following topics: the importance of preparing students for college and career, specific ideas about the definition or measures of college readiness, and actions the State of Texas can take to ensure students are prepared to succeed in higher education.

© Copyright 2002-2006 by North Texas e-News, llc

Labels: HB 1

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:26 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Ernesto Nieto and Michael Soto
Special to the Star-Telegram
August 26, 2007

For most Fort Worth 5-year-olds, this week marks the beginning of kindergarten and the start of an academic career in the Texas public school system. It's a week of brilliant promise and not a few tears, of trepidation mixed with hopes and dreams.

But if our public schools don't change, dramatically and quickly, too many among this fresh-faced bunch will be left behind by a system that's well-equipped with rhetoric yet woefully short on results.

Urban, predominantly Latino schools such as those in Fort Worth have fared especially poorly of late. The Texas Education Agency has reported that only 81 percent of the Fort Worth school district's Class of 2005 actually graduated with their classmates. Last fall, the Harvard University Civil Rights Project -- using Christopher B. Swanson's Cumulative Promotion Index -- reported that the number of Fort Worth students who completed a high school degree was actually closer to 49 percent.

By either account, we are all failing Fort Worth's children, and it will take an assiduous, sustained and (most of all) collective effort to address their educational needs and our civic and leadership needs as a society.

No one would begrudge a 5-year-old the time, energy and financial resources needed to succeed in kindergarten. That's precisely the kind of investment that all of our kids require.

Teachers and administrators have much to contribute to our children's educational success, but at the beginning of this school year, we'd like to suggest three ways that you might get involved:

If you are part of a local business (from a mom-and-pop store to a multimillion-dollar enterprise) or a community organization (from a church to a neighborhood crime watch to a political interest group), explore how you might alter the culture and thinking of low-income neighborhoods, build community vision and engage youths and their families in reconstructing their perspectives on education and its value to their future success.

Simple incentives -- a free meal for a month's perfect attendance or financial support for a summer enrichment program -- can go a long way. The important thing is to get students, families and institutions involved in a community effort, to initiate dialogue and produce trust and momentum.

Encourage school administrators and teachers to build strong, positive relations with low-income and immigrant families to address their concerns and creativities. This will require the simultaneous cultivation of students' and parents' organizational abilities -- leadership training for the entire family -- and a coordinated array of community-based organizations collaborating with schools and families directly.

Traditional barriers to educational success must be seen not as excuses but rather as challenges to face head on and opportunities to enrich lives.

Be prepared to hold leaders accountable in public forums and at the ballot box. At the same time, recognize that the path to increased educational access and improved educational outcomes is long and sometimes thorny; when leaders speak candidly and make tough decisions, offer your vocal support.

To the proud parents of the newest kindergarten class, we say: Congratulations and best wishes. Like you, we truly believe that your child is meant to change the world for the better, and we want you to beam with pride as he or she crosses the stage, high school diploma in hand, in 13 short years. We hope that your child ponders not whether to go to college but where.

Together, let's change the world one school district, one neighborhood, one school, one classroom -- one kindergartener -- at a time.

Ernesto Nieto is president and founder of the National Hispanic Institute. Michael Soto is associate professor of English at Trinity University and trustee of the National Hispanic Institute. www.nhi-net.org

Labels: immigrant children, Parent Involvement

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:13 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Class of 2012 on front lines of high-stakes tests, but effect of stress raises concerns

By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle
August 26, 2007

Kirby Middle School eighth-grader Eddie Maxwell practices the same ritual every night before a high-stakes test: He takes a warm bath and says lots of prayers.

It's a recipe he'll have to rely on again this year as eighth-graders statewide are required to pass the reading and math parts of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills before they can start high school.

The Class of 2012, now the poster children for standardized testing in Texas, was the first required to pass the test to be promoted as third-graders in 2003 and as fifth-graders in 2005.

Texas' 13-year-olds are on the front lines of high-stakes testing, sitting for more must-pass tests than any class before them. Though the full impact of the state's extensive testing won't be known for some time, experts worry that the extra stress may have ill effects on this class, including increased anxiety and higher dropout rates.

"They're certainly the guinea pigs for Texas' latest experiment in high-stakes testing," said Bob Schaeffer, public education director for the nonprofit National Center for Fair & Open Testing.

"I'm used to it," said Maxwell, a student in the North Forest district who runs track and hopes to be a doctor. "I just do my best and I pray before I take the test."

His mother, Lashanda Curtis, paints a different picture of her son's coping abilities. She worries that his nervousness before every exam is fostering his dislike of school. "It kind of makes him upset and he says at times he wishes he wasn't in school," Curtis said.

Schaeffer says it's more difficult for this group "because none of the teachers or students know what they're in for."

Yet, Curtis and others hope the extra attention will equate to a better education. They know the federal No Child Left Behind law, and the testing it requires, motivates students, teachers and administrators.

"It pushes the kids and it makes them strive harder," Curtis said. "There's a time and a place for work and study, but kids also need that time to play. At times, I feel like they're just pushing them a little bit too hard."

Illnesses at test time

Indeed, parents and school nurses report increased instances of headaches and stomachaches during testing season. Some children have trouble sleeping and eating. And there always are a few who get sick to their stomachs on testing day.

"This is an enormous amount of pressure and, for some children, at least, it's an unhealthy amount of pressure," said Ed Miller, co-director for programs for the Alliance for Childhood, a Maryland-based nonprofit. "It's pretty logical that kids who struggle with this kind of test are going to have a lot of anxiety, especially when the consequences are not being promoted, which is the most traumatic one for kids."

Texas Education Agency officials say they hope students and teachers aren't getting too stressed by the tests, which were required by state legislation to end social promotion. The law was adopted when these kids were kindergartners.

The state's mantra is that if educators teach to the curriculum, the results will follow, said Muffet Livaudais, director of special projects for TEA. She said there's no need to put extreme pressure on children.

To help students meet the higher standards, the state has invested millions of dollars training educators how to better teach reading.

"These kids had such a good foundation, and that's half your battle," Livaudais said.

But some experts say that, with the shortcomings of the public school system so well documented, educators should spend their time and energy on teaching, not testing.

"If a child is starving, you don't just keep weighing them over and over again," Miller said. "You give them food."

Finding the cause of stress

Poor test-takers or students from low-performing schools are especially stressed by these types of tests, particularly if they're struggling with other issues at home or school, health experts say. They say teachers must try to figure out the reasons behind the stress, whether they be academic shortcomings or personal issues.

"If they're just being told 'You've got to achieve or else' and there's no support system in place, that's going to be the biggest stressor. It's mainly breaking it down into small, doable steps," said Cathy Harris, president of the Texas School Nurses Organization.

For the most part, this class has risen to the challenge.

Ninety-six percent of the students, for example, passed the reading portion of the TAKS test as third-graders in 2002-03. And the number held back has always been low, including 2.5 percent of third-graders in 2003 and less than 1 percent of fifth-graders in 2005.

"Definitely, they know there's a lot at stake here," said Linda Macias, assistant superintendent for elementary instruction in the Cypress-Fairbanks school district. "Our teachers and our administrators are very good about motivating students and pumping them up."

Some Houston-area campuses take the exams so seriously that principals conduct tutoring sessions themselves or even promise to dye their hair a bright color if students score high enough. They use pizza, parties and relaxed dress codes as incentives.

'It's kind of cool'

Facing a high-stakes test again as eighth-graders will be old hat for most of these kids. Educators say the spotlight should help bolster achievement.

"Our middle-school scores aren't where we want them to be. We're a little bit excited about the opportunity these kids will have," said Laurence Binder, Cy-Fair's assistant superintendent for secondary instruction.

Kirsten Mamaux, an eighth-grader at Spillane Middle School in Cy-Fair, said she doesn't mind being in the first wave of students subjected to so many high-stakes tests.

"I really never thought about it. It's kind of cool," said the 13-year-old, who always strives to earn a "commended" performance on the test. "I guess I kind of feel special, since I did it all three times."

Labels: TAKS

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:08 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By ANABELLE GARAY Associated Press Writer
© 2007 The Associated Press

DALLAS — A trial set to open Monday questions whether the federal government broke court-sanctioned rules by detaining immigrant children in a former central Texas prison while their families await decisions on immigration cases.

Testimony and evidence presented in Austin will scrutinize the T. Don Hutto family residential facility, a former prison in Taylor that houses families seeking asylum or awaiting deportation or other outcomes to their immigration cases.

Advocates contend conditions at Hutto don't comply with Flores v. Meese, a federal settlement agreement that calls for immigration authorities to house children in nonsecure, licensed programs such as shelters or foster homes.

Hutto houses some 400 illegal immigrants and asylum seekers — half of them children.

None of those at the facility have criminal records or violent histories. Yet current and former Hutto detainees allege they live under prison-like conditions.

Uniformed, handcuff-toting correctional officers called "counselors" threatened children with separating them from their families, who live in tiny cells with bunkbeds and a toilet, advocates say. Families living within Hutto's walls eat, shower and turn in on schedule and undergo a head count four times a day. After lights out, a system alerts staff in the control room if anyone leaves their cell. Advocates say children received inadequate classroom instruction, lost weight and had limited access to health care.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, who oversee Hutto, deny the allegations and say they've made improvements such as removing concertina wire and expanding the time for residents to consult with their immigration attorneys. They point to Hutto's computer lab, playground and educational programs as offerings that soften the facility. Immigration officials have described Hutto as a residential, nonsecure environment that keeps families together.

"ICE is committed to the humane treatment of minors in our care and will continue to work with Williamson County, Texas. to ensure improvements are made as warranted," ICE has said previously.

U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks in Austin was critical of the Hutto facility, previously writing that federal officials should have spent more time researching how to properly care for children in detention. Hutto also hasn't been subjected to Texas standards for housing children, Sparks wrote.

Attorneys have spent weeks in mediation trying to come up with a settlement and avoid trial. The American Civil Liberties Union, who represents the children along with Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, declined to speak about the negotiations. ICE spokesman Richard Rocha said Sunday he had no information to release.

A trial also would examine the ICE policy of expedited removal, in which immigrants are detained at Hutto or other facilities while they are processed for deportation. After opening in May 2006, Hutto began housing families who are candidates for expedited removal — an immigration policy that came after the terrorist attacks of 2001.

Officials say the facility is meant to end the "catch and release" practice that in the past permitted families in the United States illegally to remain free while awaiting a court hearing. Many never showed up in court; some borrowed other people's children and posed as families to avoid detention, ICE officials say.

Labels: Hutto Detention Center, immigrant children

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:07 PM 0 comments Links to this post

EDITORIAL BOARD
Sunday, August 26, 2007

When Texas students go back to class this week, there is likely to be confusion about the quality of their schools because of recent state and federal report cards grading those schools.

In Conroe, students who attend Oak Ridge Elementary are in an exemplary school, according to the state. But look at the federal No Child Left Behind report card and the school gets a failing grade. Austin students have a similar dilemma.

They'll be attending schools, such as Austin High, the alma mater of President Bush's twin daughters, that consistently make a passing grade or better on the state report card. But this year, the high school made a failing grade on the federal No Child Left Behind report card.

If we are to believe the federal government's evaluation, nine of 13 Austin high schools are failing, including McCallum with its acclaimed Fine Arts Academy. But on the state report card, just three high schools failed (Reagan, Travis and Johnston). Which should we believe?

The confusion is a product of systems that don't match up. The No Child Left Behind law and Texas' accountability system grade public schools, but they use different criteria. Both are mandated by law and both are released in the same month — August. It's not uncommon for schools to be rated exemplary or acceptable by the state, the equivalent of an A or C, but at the same time those schools might not meet federal standards, the equivalent of an F.

This is no way to run grading systems. Instead of providing parents, educators and taxpayers credible information about their schools, the conflicting report cards released within weeks of each other generate confusion and doubts just days before school begins. Parents then have to make hasty decisions about whether to transfer their children or let them stay put. In Austin, 10 schools must offer parents transfers to schools of their choice because they failed the federal standards.

Though the two systems are based on the state's Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exams, they use different passing standards. What is considered passing on the state system might not be high enough on the federal system. That makes the federal system superior, right? Not when you consider that the state system assesses students on more subjects, including social studies and science, which are not included in the federal system.

The two systems create more confusion by treating special education students and kids who speak limited English differently. And while the state system evaluates three grades of high school, including 11th-graders, the No Child Left Behind law uses only 10th-graders' scores to grade high schools.

We've repeatedly called for an overhaul of the state's testing system that has become so rigid and burdensome over the years that, among other things, it unfairly penalizes schools that educate low-performing students.

We applaud the Legislature for mandating a comprehensive review of the state accountability system. Those findings are due by December 2008. That review also should be used to study how to merge the state and federal accountability systems. It should not be that a school can pass on one report card and flunk on another. Our schools deserve a reliable report card that awards ratings we can trust.

Failed federal standards

Ten Austin district schools got a passing grade on the state report card, but received a failing grade on the federal No Child Left Behind report card. Both report cards were released in August.

High schools: Akins, Austin, Crockett, International High, Lanier and McCallum,

Middle schools: Bedichek, Dobie and Porter

Elementary school: Jordan

Labels: assessment, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:00 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Struggles with language affect other areas of study

By Julia Scott, STAFF WRITER / Inside BayArea.com
08/26/2007

PESCADERO — In a school district where half the students are classified as English-language learners and more than 70 percent count English as a second language, classrooms throughout the La Honda-Pescadero Unified School District have had to evolve to accommodate students with different levels of language ability.

And with the start of a new school year, the district has a new plan in place to raise English language test scores and encourage classroom participation by students whose parents have often just arrived from Mexico.

Pescadero is partly a migrant community, and children of farm workers often arrive at schools with little English and are shy about speaking up in class, said Tim Beard, district superintendent.

In time, the district's English Language Development classes get those students up to speed, but their comprehension in other core areas, such as math and science, also is influenced by the initial language barrier.

The students' struggles to learn English has affected the school district's overall academic performance in recent years. The district has been placed on "program improvement" status under the No Child Left Behind Act for its failure to meet academicbenchmarks in English-language performance over the past five years, said Beard.

"This is a larger issue of low performance. Students are falling behind," he said.

Patty Able, principal of both Pescadero Elementary and Middle schools, is putting a plan in place for a more rigorous, and more personalized, classroom learning environment for students learning English. In addition to attending a week's worth of English Language Development training for those who haven't yet received it, teachers will hold regular meetings to discuss the progress of English-language learners in their classrooms and the specific challenges they face.

To ensure that teachers have data to work from, the schools will install a new system of "benchmark" tests for English-language learners four times a year.

"Teachers will have some way of knowing whether students are progressing or not, rather than wait for the state data to show up at the end of the year," said Able.

"The goal is for teachers to know the students really well," added Beard. "You've got a spread of language abilities in the classes, so a teacher will need to use different strategies of instruction."

Some of those strategies include a move to incorporate English vocabulary words into daily classes and the use of small groups, called "peer coaching" to help young English learners feel more comfortable expressing themselves. Bilingual students often translate for Spanish speakers if necessary, which allows both languages to become incorporated in the learning process.

This classroom fluidity is something parents of native English speakers enjoy about the district, said Beard.

"We have parents who are very capable of taking their student to a private school. The reason they don't is that they want to expose their child to the other culture and to the other language."

The La Honda-Pescadero Unified School District isn't unusual in its high percentage of students classified as English learners. About 50 percent of students enrolled in the Redwood City Elementary District are so designated. The main difference is in the size of its student body.

Redwood City Elementary schools have just over 8,500 students; the La Honda-Pescadero Unified School District has a total of 400 students and nearly 200 of them are English learners, according to the California Department of Education.

Part of the problem is that many of the students who struggle in English go home to parents who speak only Spanish and can't help them with their homework, said Beard.

The district introduced an after-school program last year to help kids with homework. One of Beard's long-term goals is to introduce a "parent training" program that will teach parents how to support their children through the learning process.

Staff writer Julia Scott can be reached at 650-348-4340 or jscott@angnewspapers.com.

Labels: English language learners, immigrant children, Parent Involvement

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:39 AM 0 comments Links to this post

By Anthony Cody / Teacher Magazine
August 21, 2007

I started teaching at a middle school in Oakland, Calif., about 20 years ago. My first year was pretty rough. I was prepared to teach science, but my first semester I was given two periods of beginning Spanish, one of English, and two of science. My credential program had not really dealt much with behavior issues. The idea was to deliver a rich curriculum, and the management would take care of itself. If you are already teaching, you know this does not always work.

I floundered a bit the first year or two, and took help wherever I could find it. My best resources came from my colleagues down the hall. They had been at the school a few years and passed along valuable ways to make things work.

Here are a few of the things I learned:

• I learned to post a short list of clear, unambiguous rules and enforce them consistently. This is much harder to do than it sounds, and it took me many years to master.

• I learned how important it was to phone parents early in the year, with positive news if at all possible. Then the first phone call would not be one from me complaining about their child's behavior. One parent I phoned in September told me that mine was the first positive call she had ever received about her child. When I had to call about some problems a few months later, she was there to back me up 100 percent.

• I learned to balance a negative phone call with a positive one. The days after I would make phone calls, the students would often come in and ask me, "Why did you call my house?" It was great to be able to point out that I was working with their parents in their best interests, and that I would make positive calls when behavior improved. I also found that my own disposition greatly improved after I made a positive call.

• I learned to keep a record of student behavior, along with any referrals to the office, so that the problems I had with a few students were clearly documented. I kept a record of phone calls home in the same book.

• I learned how easy it was to get into entertaining but fruitless dialogues with students when I was trying to enforce rules. It took me a while, but eventually I learned the best method was to give a warning or consequence clearly, and allow for discussion only after class.

• I learned it was important for students to understand that I cared about their well-being, and that I was on their side. This was done through caring communication and showing an interest in them as individuals by giving attention to their interests and abilities. And also through developing assignments that gave them more than one way to demonstrate their knowledge. Some students shine when speaking to the class, others excel at creative projects that illustrate what they've learned.

• I tried using the textbook quizzes and tests, but found my students were performing miserably. These tests featured 40 multiple-choice questions that required memorization. My students refused to memorize the textbook facts—they were bored with that, and their behavior reflected their boredom. So I began to think about the main points I was trying to get across and looked for engaging ways to make those main points stick. Then I made my tests reflect those main points and found the students did much better. I also looked for different ways for students to demonstrate their understanding through more creative projects, and I found the students became even more engaged.

For example, when learning about states of matter, I had students team up and design their own experiments focusing on dry ice. They came up with ideas like measuring the amount of time the dry ice took to turn to vapor in different liquids; attempting to measure the temperature of the dry ice; or collecting and testing the vapor that the dry ice produced. After a review process, the teams carried out their experiments. Then, each team created a display and presented their results to their classmates. In the process, they all learned about the properties of dry ice—that it turns to vapor much more quickly in water than in air, that frozen carbon dioxide is much colder than water ice, and that the vapor is heavier than air and puts out a candle. Their findings led us into other explorations of the states of matter. They were having too much fun to misbehave!

The secret to behavior management is really about having the students fully engaged in the learning process, and it involves more than just rules and office referrals. After all, the whole point of getting the class to focus is to do some meaningful work—to reach new understandings, to create new expressions of their knowledge, and to build new skills. But we have to know how to manage our teacher-student relationships in order to get there.

An awarding winning middle school science teacher, Anthony Cody is now the secondary science content coach for the Oakland, Calif., Unified School District, where he is also a leader in the Partnership for Oakland Science Inquiry Teaching (Project POSIT), which improves science instruction for grades 4-8 in partnership with local science agencies.

Labels: California, caring, teachers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:35 AM 0 comments Links to this post

State results shed new light on wealth vs. poverty debate.
By Laurel Rosenhall - Bee Staff Writer
Last Updated 6:38 am PDT Thursday, August 16, 2007
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A16

Whether they are poor or rich, white students are scoring higher than their African American and Latino classmates on the state's standardized tests, results released Wednesday show. And in some cases, the poorest white students are doing better than Latino and black students who come from middle class or wealthy families.

The so-called achievement gap -- the difference in performance between groups of students -- has long been chalked up to a difference in family income. It makes sense that -- regardless of race -- students whose parents have money and speak English would do better in school, on the whole, than students whose families struggle with employment, food and shelter.

But this year's test scores show that the difference in academic achievement between ethnic groups is more than an issue of poverty vs. wealth.


On the standardized math tests that public school students take every year from second to 11th grade, 38 percent of white students who qualify for subsidized lunch scored proficient or above, compared with 36 percent of Latino students and 30 percent of black students whose families made too much money to qualify for school meals. On standardized English tests, poor white students did about the same as non-poor Latino and African American students.

"These are not just economic achievement gaps," state Superintendent Jack O'Connell said in announcing the test scores from an elementary school in Inglewood.

"They are racial achievement gaps, and we cannot continue to excuse them."

It's a new twist on what has become a common theme for O'Connell -- the danger the achievement gap poses for California's economic future. About 56 percent of the state's public school students are Latino or black, so their academic performance now will have a big influence on the work force of the future.

"I've been pounding this drum and am going to continue to do so, not just for the moral imperative that we have, but for the economic imperative," O'Connell said.

"We're going to focus on (the achievement gap) like a heat-seeking missile during my last three years here as the state superintendent."

In general, test scores were flat compared with last year, but up from five years ago. Forty-one percent of students were proficient in math this year, while 43 percent were proficient in English. Even though students are doing better than five years ago -- when 35 percent were proficient in math and English -- the achievement gap between racial groups has remained a constant, with white and Asian American students scoring higher than their Latino and African American peers.

O'Connell said little Wednesday to explain why the achievement gap persists.

"That is the $50 billion question," said Francisco Estrada, public policy director for the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, one of several Latino and African American activists who lauded O'Connell for drawing attention to the issue, even while they criticized the state government for not doing enough to improve education for students of color.

"Superintendent O'Connell should be commended for not just simply saying, 'We're doing great and let's keep doing what we're doing,' which is what we've heard in other years," Estrada said.

Russlynn Ali, director of Education Trust West, said state policymakers are responsible for the achievement gap that has kept black and Latino students behind because they've done little to put experienced, well-trained teachers and rigorous high-level courses in schools that predominantly serve those groups.

"Our system takes poor kids and kids of color -- not just the students of color who are poor -- and provides them less of everything research says makes a difference," she said.

"That is the underlying cause of the achievement gap."

While Ali blamed the government for distributing resources inequitably, others said the gap is due to teachers' expectations.

"The expectations are not as high for African American students as they are for other students," said Anita Royston, an education consultant who used to work for the Sacramento City Unified School District.

Labels: achievement gap, ayp

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:54 AM 0 comments Links to this post

GERALDA MILLER / RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
Posted: 8/23/2007

More than 16,000 students in Washoe County School District speak 52 languages other than English as their primary language.

Some can speak English proficiently as a second language while others cannot speak English and also are illiterate in their primary language.

The challenge for Mary Ann Robinson, English as a Second Language and world language coordinator for the district, is to make sure that the 10,276 students at varying levels of English proficiency grasp the language and are prepared academically to graduate and achieve their goals.

"I want them to have the equal opportunity that others have," Robinson said.

For English language learners (ELL) to become proficient in English and garner that parity, Robinson said it is going to take a districtwide commitment to training. Also needed, she said, is a commitment -- districtwide -- to teaching the students and funding to purchase an English language curriculum for elementary schools.

However, Robinson will have to wait for federal funding since she lost 31 percent of her Title III funds, money she had planned to use for a structured language program.

"We need a curriculum written for English language learners," she said. "The school district gives me textbook funds."

The first task she said she tackled 3½ years ago when given the position was to join a district initiative to focus on high schools by making sure each had the ESL staff it needed and developed a common curriculum.

As a former elementary school teacher, Robinson recognized that the majority of English language learners attended elementary schools. She said she would have preferred beginning with them and moved up to high school. Instead, the opposite is happening.

"Our high schools are set as far as the number of ESL teachers," she said. "And middle schools, they are set."

More trained teachers

Although every school in the district has English language learners, there are 10 elementary schools in the district that do not have endorsed ESL teachers. The district has 134 endorsed teachers. Teachers must take 12 credit hours at a college to be endorsed as ESL teachers.

In addition, paying attention to the current rate of growth in the district, Robinson estimated that she will need almost 38 more teachers on her staff next year and 47.98 more in 2008 to maintain the ideal student/ESL teacher ratio of 60 to 1.

Robinson is realizing that cannot happen, and she is planning alternatives.

"We can't have that many ESL teachers," she said. "We have to train our regular teachers. Our content area teachers, our classroom teachers, have to be trained."

While ESL teachers instruct the English language learners for 45 to 90 minutes a day, Robinson said it is the classroom teacher who works with them the rest of the day that must know how to effectively work with the children.

If a school does not have an ESL teacher, the district will provide transportation for the student to attend a program in another school.

However, Robinson said at some point, that option will be unrealistic.

She has introduced two training programs for all teachers to acquire the skills necessary to teach English language learners.

The development programs -- Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) and Guided Language Acquisition Design (GLAD) -- also are part of the district's diversity action plan.

Barbara McLaury, senior director of Title I, ESL and Area V schools, headed the professional development committee for the diversity plan and stressed the importance of the training programs as a part of developing cultural competency.

"We really believe that they are a central part to teacher's understanding of the teaching strategies necessary to support ELL at all levels," she said. "They give teachers a really strong framework. It is another piece of support to deal with all of the diversity they have in the classroom."

About 250 middle and high school teachers have received SIOP training and about 522 teachers have gone through the five-day GLAD training.

Two schools where all the teachers have been trained in SIOP and seen positive results are Traner Middle School and Hugh High School, Robinson said.

This year was the first that Hug passed the Limited English Proficiency tests in all categories.

"He had already seen SIOP in Washington and knew that it was a wonderful product," she said of Hug Principal Andy Kelly. "He went in and said 'this is the best model I've seen and if you have another one that you think works for all kids, tell me. They didn't.'"

Monitoring curriculum

Robinson has been spending a great deal of time evaluating the dozen schools that did not pass the Limited English Proficiency (LEP) test.

She and her staff now will spend time at each school, talking with teachers and administrators about how to make improvements.

Robinson said she must remain positive and tell them: "We can do it! We're very close."

She will make certain they are following the curriculum and look at the individual needs of each student.

The needs of each teacher also must be discussed, Robinson said. Also, she said she will be strongly encouraging those teachers not trained in GLAD or SIOP to plan on doing so.

"We are at a critical point right now," she said. "We can't wait for schools to decide that they want to have training."

Evaluation

Because of No Child Left Behind requirements, the parent of every child that enrolls in the district must complete a home language survey.

The survey asks whether the child speaks a language other than English and if there is a language other than English spoken in the home.

If the parent answers yes to either of the questions, the district is required to assess the child within 30 days at the beginning of the school year and 10 days in the remainder of the year.

"Right now, we have over 2,000 kindergartners, and we have to give them our little placement test," she said.

She said she sympathizes with the children who have never taken a test before.

"I told them, 'You won't be able to do this. Next year, you'll be able to do a little bit," she said. "And we had two students who passed the English and three that passed the math, so shame on us for trying to protect them."

Depending upon their literacy, the students are placed in one of five levels from entry to proficient.

"Then, every year, we have to give an assessment -- the English Language Proficiency Assessment, ELPA," she said. "We have to show that our children are increasing. They should be increasing. We're doing a good job with that now with the proficiency increasing."

NCLB also requires students not only be proficient in English but approaching standards on the high school proficiency or criterion-referenced tests, state's standardized tests given in the third through eighth grades.

"You can't just know English," Robinson said. "You have to know math, science and social studies. And if you do not, then you're still in ESL."

Labels: English language learners, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:59 AM 0 comments Links to this post

By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo / EdWeek
August 23, 2007
Washington

State-by-state data on the federal Reading First program were released with fanfare this past spring by the U.S. Department of Education as evidence that the initiative was fueling “tremendous progress” among students and teachers. The Reading First Advisory Committee, a federal panel that met for the first time here this week, found that information on student achievement in participating schools far less definitive and has asked for more time and technical assistance in evaluating the data from the $1 billion-a-year program.

“It seems like there are no standards anyone can interpret,” said committee member Frank R. Vellutino, a prominent reading researcher from the State University of New York at Albany.

He was referring to the variations among states in the assessments used to gauge students’ reading skills, as well as differences in cutoff scores used to determine whether children are on track toward becoming “proficient” readers.
See Also
Read more stories on the Reading First program.

“It’s going to be a job and a half to come to any conclusion whether states are meeting their responsibilities” in improving achievement in Reading First schools, Mr. Vellutino said.

The committee was given a thick binder filled with test-score data from grantees, which states are required to submit to the department each year. The information is based on the assessments and proficiency benchmarks set by each state as part of its Reading First plan.

Some Results ‘Impressive’

Members assigned to a subcommittee to review the information more closely described some of the data as “impressive.” But they also questioned whether the goals set by each state are appropriate, particularly those states that appear to have low expectations for student proficiency.

“I’ve never seen any test where 40 percent was considered proficient,” said Susan Brady, an early-reading expert at the University of Rhode Island and Haskins Laboratory in New Haven, Conn. “One needs to scrutinize what these levels are and what are the skills behind these cut scores.”

In measuring fluency, many states are consistent. Nearly 40 of the 54 states and other jurisdictions, for example, use the same test and the same cutoff score. But there are more differences in how states gauge comprehension skills. Arkansas and Idaho, for example, deem students to be proficient if they rank at the 40th percentile on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. Other states, such as Georgia and Michigan, define the 50th percentile as proficient.

The data include test results for 1st through 3rd graders from 2002 to 2006. Results are broken down into subgroups by race and socioeconomic status, as well as for English-language learners and students with disabilities.

The committee, which met Aug. 20-22, has asked the Education Department to assign a statistician to the task of reviewing the data and suggesting ways to analyze the information and compare results across states.

A more rigorous analysis of student achievement in participating schools commissioned by the department’s Institute of Education Sciences, is under way, and results are expected later this year.

Reading First has been under scrutiny by federal auditors, who have been responding to complaints from several commercial vendors that federal program officials and consultants favored particular reading textbooks, assessments, and approaches over others and directed states to use certain products, a level of federal prescriptiveness that the NCLB law prohibits.

The Education Department’s inspector general largely substantiated those claims, as did a separate review by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. The House Education and Labor Committee held two hearings on the matter last spring. And a Senate investigation is continuing. ("Senate Report Cites ‘Reading First’ Conflicts," May 16, 2007.)

Puerto Rico Grant Review

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings formed the advisory committee in response to the inspector general’s reports. The committee will make recommendations to the department, but they are not binding.

In other business from the panel’s discussions:

• Puerto Rico may be closer to getting funding under the Reading First program, but the commonwealth will have to make some additional changes to its proposal based on the committee’s recommendations. The self-governing U.S. territory is the last eligible jurisdiction still awaiting its grant award under the program, which was designed to improve reading instruction in the United States’ most disadvantaged school districts. The committee reviewed Puerto Rico’s latest proposal for its $35.6 million Reading First grant, which has been revised about a dozen times. An earlier version was approved in 2003, but allocation of the funding was held up when new leaders of Puerto Rico’s school system rejected some of the tenets of the plan. ("Puerto Rico Still Has No Reading First Funds," Nov. 30, 2005.)

• Targeted-assistance grants totaling more than $2 million will be split by Massachusetts and Virginia to help them expand their Reading First models beyond participating schools. The grants were given to states that had increased students’ test scores in Reading First schools in grades 1, 2, and 3, and for all subgroups. Tennessee received one of the grants last year.

• The committee agreed to meet again this fall to discuss the data further and take up any other business determined by department officials.

Labels: assessment, NCLB, Reading First

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:41 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Julian Cavazos / The Monitor
August 24, 2007

MISSION — The Mission school district is working to keep students from falling through the cracks.

The district received a new grant of $570,000 over the next three years for its mentorship program for at-risk students.

The program, about to begin its second year of full implementation, serves students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

“It provides guidance by mentors so they’ll develop better relationships with their peers, teachers and family members,” said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, who helped the district get the grant. “It will also help reduce the dropout rate.”

Though some school districts may disagree, Hispanics in Texas are said to have a high school dropout rate of 49 percent, much higher than the 27 percent for Anglos and 34 percent for blacks, Cuellar said.

At Alton Memorial Junior High School in Mission, mentors help students who failed the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test.

“I meet with mine during advisory period and we discuss the challenges of the test,” said Norma Vento, a testing strategist at the school. “We also do lessons on decision-making, conflict resolution and confidence building. I also review their attendance, grades and behavior.”

However, the district doesn’t want people to get the wrong idea about who needs mentorship.

“We aren’t saying they all come from bad homes,” Vento said. “Many come from wonderful homes. They just may have some things they’re struggling with academically.”

The district prefers the mentors be campus personnel such as elective teachers, coaches or counselors, who can provide the students with guidance and personal attention, said Superintendent Oscar Rodriguez Jr.

Each student has a mentor who stays with him through elementary school, a second one who follows him through middle school, and a third one who stay with him through graduation. The school district’s 1,200 to 1,500 mentors each have between one and five mentees, Rodriguez said.

Vento, who has five, said she has seen a difference in the students since she began working with them.

“It’s really had an impact on them,” she said. “There’s been an overall improvement of attendance and less failure overall in their classes.”

The simple display of caring on the part of the mentors toward their students makes all the difference to the children, Rodriguez said.

“If done correctly, we’ll see a difference in their child behavior,” he said. “They’ll be good students, citizens and productive, ready college graduates. We all like for people to care about us.”

Labels: caring, Dropouts, testing

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:25 AM 0 comments Links to this post

"Texas has become the first state to rate preschools, day-care centers and Head Start programs on how well they prepare children for kindergarten." -Angela

State creates ratings for early childhood centers
Texas first in nation to assess how well pre-kindergarten programs teach kids
05:36 AM CDT on Friday, August 24, 2007

By STACI HUPP / The Dallas Morning News
shupp@dallasnews.com

VERNON BRYANT/DMN

Pam Flentroy teaches Adalia Loredo, 3, how to use scissors at the Bock ChildCare Group Center in Dallas, one of 19 area centers to get state certification.

Texas has become the first state to rate preschools, day-care centers and Head Start programs on how well they prepare children for kindergarten.

State officials hope the new School Readiness Certification System will transform a parent's search for a good preschool from a game of chance into more of a science. The system was launched under an education law sponsored by state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Also Online
Report: See a list of certified classrooms (.pdf)
ABOUT THE SYSTEM
BACKGROUND: The ratings system grew out of a state law sponsored by state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo. The law directed the Texas State Center for Early Childhood Development to develop a certification system with grant money from the Texas Education Agency.

WHO PARTICIPATES: Public and private preschools, day-care centers and federal Head Start programs

HOW IT WORKS: Pre-kindergarten programs apply for voluntary certification for each classroom. Classrooms that make the grade get a certificate and one-year stamp of approval.

THE MEASURING TOOL: Ratings rely on scores from the Texas Primary Reading Inventory, a test for kindergartners. Children also are graded on a scale of one to five in social skills. A classroom passes if at least 80 percent of its children fare well on both tests.

COST: $4 million in state money to start the system; about $1 million a year to run it
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The goal is to improve teaching in public and private pre-kindergarten programs and boost the odds that children will enter kindergarten ready to learn.

"We are the only state in the nation that now links the certification or rating of an early childhood classroom to what's happening in that classroom and how it predicts kindergarten readiness," said Susan Landry, director of the Texas State Center for Early Childhood Development, which created the certification system using about $4 million in state money.

Critics worry that the system may lead to burdensome pressures on young children and say that because the program is voluntary, it doesn't go far enough in making schools accountable.

The early childhood development center, a branch of the University of Texas, did a test run on about 1,000 pre-kindergarten classrooms across Texas this year. According to results released Thursday, 450 of them – including 19 in the Dallas area – earned the state's seal of approval.

About 300 classrooms were disqualified because of various problems, including paperwork glitches, state officials said. The rest of the classrooms didn't measure up.

The certification system is voluntary. Once the system is up and running statewide, an online database will tell parents whether a pre-kindergarten classroom has the state seal of approval, which is valid for one year.

That information would have come in handy for D'Rinda Randall, who scouted preschools for her 3-year-old son this year.

"That way, you know what you're getting into," said Mrs. Randall, a mother of three in Plano. "At this age, I don't want a day care. I want somebody that loves him, but I want somebody who cares about teaching him."

The certification system tracks children from preschool to kindergarten. It then uses kindergartners' scores on reading and social skills tests to determine whether the pre-kindergarten classrooms they were in the year before prepared them.

Children unprepared
Children should come into kindergarten able to identify some letters of the alphabet and read basic words, such as "cat," Dr. Landry said. They also should get along with other children and follow directions.

In Dallas, educators say too many children show up for kindergarten never having picked up a pencil.

"It's a challenge for those who've not had a lot of experience with books," said Beth Steerman, director of early childhood education for the Dallas school district.

Unlike the state's ratings system for public schools, early childhood programs that don't make the grade won't face penalties. Instead, the system sets aside money for teacher training. Initially, the system will cost about $1 million a year to operate.

Most children under 5 are in day care, which is why those programs are included in the new system. But many day-care centers have low standards and poor employee pay.

Workers at licensed child-care centers are required to have only a high school diploma and eight hours of training. That compares with 1,500 hours of training needed to become a licensed barber in Texas, said Susan Hoff, president and chief executive officer of ChildCareGroup, a Dallas nonprofit that is helping to implement the new certification program.

"There's a lot of disparity," Ms. Hoff said. "It's pretty frightening when you know how much happens in terms of brain development in those first five years, and you know what the system is currently like."

Day-care centers already are subject to state licensing and inspection laws that focus on health and safety. The certification system deals only with education-related issues.

While the program is voluntary, Dr. Landry predicts that most preschool, day-care and Head Start programs will apply for certification of their classrooms if enough parents start looking for seals of approval.

"That will make it competitive," she said. "I think it can be very effective because parents are going to be basing their decisions on, 'Who's got this?'"

The certification system does have its share of skeptics.

Lyn Voegeli, who runs private preschools in Richardson and Frisco, worries that the pressures tied to accountability in public schools will trickle down. She doesn't want to see preschoolers poring over worksheets instead of a puzzle or a book.

"It shouldn't be the constant drill of information that unfortunately too many kindergartens are becoming," Ms. Voegeli said.

Others say the system lacks enough accountability to make it a catalyst for change.

"There's no force of law to make a preschool participate," said state Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano. "The most value that it brings is informational. It is a good tool for parents, but will parents avail themselves to the tool? That's the question."

State officials expect about 3,500 classrooms to sign up for the certification system this fall and 1,000 more to join later in the school year. Most of the classrooms judged in the system's test run were from public schools, but day-care and Head Start programs were well represented, state officials said.

A good foundation

Bock ChildCareGroup Center in Oak Cliff was among the programs that made the cut.

Esmeralda Salinas didn't need the state stamp of approval to know that Bock has helped her 4-year-old daughter, Destiny. Ms. Salinas went to the Bock center as a child.

Ms. Salinas said she has seen her daughter evolve since starting at Bock. Destiny showed up at the center a year ago with few basic skills and a lot of attitude, her mother said. Today, she knows the alphabet, knows that the skirt she wore Thursday was purple and understands who's in charge when Mom and Dad aren't around.

"It was difficult for me to put her in somebody else's hands," Ms. Salinas said. "But I know that they actually teach the children. That way she'll be prepared for what kindergarten has in store for her."

States are pumping more money into pre-kindergarten programs because research shows an early start can narrow the educational gap between poor and wealthier students.

But Texas is ahead of the curve in holding the programs accountable, said Jonathan Plucker, an educational psychologist who heads Indiana University's Center for Evaluation and Education Policy.

"It makes perfect sense that we put some of these things in place for accountability purposes and for parents," Dr. Plucker said.

Labels: preschools

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:25 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is an interesting piece, but more should have been said about issues associated with hiring teachers from Mexico. -Angela♥

Foreign teachers fill a need at LAUSD
BY NAUSH BOGHOSSIAN, Staff Writer
Article Last Updated: 08/19/2007 11:57:01 PM PDT

Four hours after arriving at her Los Angeles hotel from the Philippines, a jet-lagged Lolita Magno was thrown into a nonstop schedule of orientations, training sessions, paperwork and getting documents both for her new life in America and her new job teaching science at a Los Angeles Unified school.

Despite pangs of homesickness and the uncertainties of a foreign environment, Magno knows she's begun a three-year journey that will offer her invaluable experience and knowledge she'll take back to her students in the Philippines.

She thought it an ideal match: She'd bring her degree in science where it's needed and gather experience working with a diverse student population to help achieve her goal of advocating for multicultural education at home.

"It's mutually beneficial. It's a symbiotic relationship. We share our knowledge, a little of our positive culture, and they share a little bit of their culture," Magno, 36, said. "And we make students academically, globally and socially focused. It makes sense, doesn't it."

Magno is one of 115 teachers recruited by the LAUSD from abroad for hard-to-fill positions of math, science and special education - comprising about one-seventh of the new hires for the 2007-08 school year.

While LAUSD has recruited from other countries for well over 20 years, this year's is the largest group ever from abroad, fueled by a national shortage in qualified teachers in the three subject areas.

Aggressive national recruiting, efforts to lure professionals from business and industry to enter the teaching force and working with local colleges and universities to attempt to produce more teachers, have not been enough to fill the district's vacancies.

And with districtwide initiatives to reduce class sizes and offer more rigorous, college-preparatory classes, LAUSD is looking anywhere it can to find qualified math and science teachers.

"We are like Baltimore, New York City, Atlanta, Chicago and other large districts who recruit out-of-country because there are not enough qualified American teachers who have gone to school to become math, science and special education teachers," said Deborah Ignagni, who oversees the recruitment, selection, placement and credentialing of teachers at LAUSD.

Ignagni doesn't see the district's reliance on foreign teachers subsiding anytime soon, but she hopes efforts to recruit highly qualified teachers will translate into lower turnover, reducing the need to recruit from abroad.

But in addition to the 100 teachers from the Philippines - about the same number hired from the country last year - LAUSD had to turn to India this year to fill the need, hiring 15 teachers.

Another 10 teachers came from Spain as well as a handful from Canada, she said.

The trend of looking abroad for teachers is not likely to ease anytime soon, said B.J. Bryant, executive director of the American Association for Employment in Education.

As baby boomers continue to retire, high turnover compared to years when teaching was a lifelong career, and the 25-year shortage of math, science and special education teachers persisting, the problem will not go away soon, Bryant said.

"We see nothing on the horizon that says it will not continue," she said.

The district turned to international recruitment for the first time in the 1980s from Mexico and Spain, at a time when their elementary schools were growing, the need for teachers was rising and it was the height of the bilingual program.

Now, there is a surplus of elementary school teachers and the focus has shifted to math, science and special education.

The Philippines, India, Spain and Canada are popular targets for LAUSD because experience has shown that based on the comparable nature of programs offered in those countries, the teachers will have no trouble qualifying for California credentials, Ignagni said.

Also, America's relationships with those governments allows them to bring in teachers on exchange visas, she said.

But in addition to a rigorous application and hiring process, the district does not offer perks to foreign teachers.

The only recruitment incentive and reimbursement is up to $7,000 to teach math, science and special education at low-performing schools - a sum offered to all credentialed teachers.

Foreign teachers also make the same as American teachers make under the bargaining unit scale.

Imelda Fruto, foreign recruitment specialist for LAUSD, has already gone to the Philippines twice to interview prospective teachers in the past two years and is getting ready for her third trip in October.

"I think the program is very effective because we're able to fill the vacancies that would otherwise be unfilled," Fruto said. "We would prefer to hire Americans, but it's not generating enough interest to fill those positions here.

"The international teachers are highly qualified, and it's a long process for them."

The process includes being assessed by an independent agency to see if they're qualified to be interviewed for a job; there's a rigorous review of their transcripts as well as oral interviews; they must have three years of teaching experience; they must be fluent in English; they must have a degree and teaching license in their country; and they must pass the mini-CBEST with the requirement of passing the CBEST here within one year of employment.

The California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) was developed to meet requirements of laws relating to credentialing and employment.

Only then could they get jobs and only in math, science and special education. Other applicants are turned away.

"Most of these people are graduates from UP or the University of the Philippines, which is the Harvard of the Philippines, and Ateneo, which is considered the Stanford. They're from the Ivy League of the Philippines," Fruto said. "It's not like we're taking any person off the street. These people are very well educated and they have to meet our requirements."

But foreign recruitment has raised the ire of some American teachers applying for the high-demand positions, saying the slots are being taken by their overseas counterparts.

But district officials insist that they are resorting to overseas hiring because they simply do not get enough qualified applicants from the U.S.

Barbara Burnett, LAUSD's assistant director of special education certificated employment operations, insists Americans with general teaching credentials are generally not pursuing those options that will allow them to teach in math, science and special education.

"People get a little indignant, saying why do you hire teachers from other countries?

"Unfortunately, it's true, there are many qualified Americans having trouble finding a teaching job," Burnett said, but they are credentialed as general subject teachers, which is a saturated field.

The key is that those teachers need to go back to school and get certificated in the shortage-filled areas, "and they'll easily find a job," she said.

"So there are options, but obviously Americans are not availing themselves of those opportunities because there are still vacancies," Burnett said.

Special education teacher Maria Nunag, 33, is about to begin the second year of the exchange program and shared her experiences with the newcomers at their orientation at LAUSD headquarters Thursday.

She is hoping to use what she learns at her job at 20th Street Elementary in South Los Angeles to open her own learning center in the Philippines.

"I would like to gain more knowledge of my craft since special education is limited in the Philippines," she said.

It is that future payoff in her career that pushed her through the challenges of adjusting to a new place and a different culture the first year.

In a culture where family is very important, some of the newcomers found themselves crying at the orientation. Most foreign teachers live together to help ease the adjustment to a new country, a different culture, different people and the pressures of a new job.

As Magno prepared her green "Pilipinas" passport to show officials from U.S. Social Security Administration Thursday, she said she is focusing on the big picture - what she'll learn and how she'll be able to take her new knowledge to benefit her students and her country to make them prepared for a global economy.

"We're global. We have to go out of our comfort zone, we have to reach out. It doesn't matter what race you are - once a teacher, always a teacher. Anywhere," Magno said. "They move lives, they inspire, they create change."

naush.boghossian@dailynews.com

(818) 713-3722

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

This piece appeared on Aug. 1 in the Rio Grande Guardian. It is time to make bold statements such as those below. Check out the e-newspaper, too, if you get the chance. Steve Taylor, formerly with the QUORUM REPORT is doing an excellent job.

-Angela

Perryman recognizes contribution of undocumented immigrants
8/1/2007

McALLEN, August 8 - Top Texas economist Ray Perryman told a workforce summit Wednesday that undocumented workers are an integral part of the state's economy.

"We have built a huge part of the economy on the undocumented workforce, and until now we have been quiet about it," said Perryman, in the keynote speech at Hidalgo County's first ever Building Future Talent Workforce Summit.

"I tell you, if you took them (undocumented workers) out today our economy would look pretty ugly. Our construction industry would fall apart, our agricultural industry would fall apart, the hospitality industry would fall apart."

Perryman, president of the Perryman Group, is an active participant on the state, national, and world economic scenes, as well as a member of dozens of state, federal, and international task forces. He is often described as the most quoted person in Texas and has been honored by the Texas Legislature for his "tireless efforts in helping to build a better Texas."

Perryman said the “nice thing” about a market economy is that when something has to happen, it happens. He said the way things are, Texas has to have a large immigrant population.

"We also need the undocumented workforce ...it's a vital part of our economy, and we need to figure out a way that's legal,” Perryman said.

"We have built an economy around that (immigrant) workforce. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But, I think we need to bring it out in the open and talk about it, and get a process to make it more efficient and make it legal.”

According to a U.S. Census Bureau survey, there are more than 28 million immigrants living in the United States, the largest number of immigrants ever recorded in the nation’s history. There has been an increase of 43 percent since 1990.

Immigrants account for 10.4 percent of all residents, the highest percentage in 70 years, according to the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, chaired by U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colorado. CIRC says more than 1.2 million legal and illegal immigrants combined now settle in the United States each year.

To loud applause from the audience, Perryman voiced his displeasure at the prospect of the federal government building a border wall. He said he was concerned about the immediate and long term effects a wall would have on the region.

"I don't like the idea of building a wall on the border," Perryman said. "Who do you think is going to build that wall,” he asked, jokingly. "Don't you think they would have enough sense to build a couple of holes in it? But seriously, we need the workforce, and we need the free flow of workers back and forth.’

Perryman said the free flow also includes the need for goods to move very efficiently across the border. That is now in danger, he said.

"If you just add 30 seconds to the time it takes a truck to get across the border, the 100th truck in line loses an hour," Perryman said. "If, all of a sudden the maquiladora-type plants, instead of getting seven deliveries a day got four, they wouldn't build a warehouse for more inventory - they would move to Asia."

Perryman acknowledged that border security was crucial, particularly because of the need to control illegal drug trafficking. “We need to deal with those issues, and there is a lot of technology that can be utilized to deal with those issues," he said.

Perryman also said that the Rio Grande Valley has a great opportunity to make economic advances. "It's at a crossroads of the local economy, enormous opportunities, all types of manufacturing opportunities, but there's a lot of challenge ahead,” he said.

"The growth and the change have to be there, but I can tell you the main character is alive and well, and right here with this group," he told the audience.

The "Building Future Talent" workforce summit was organized by Hidalgo County Judge J.D. Salinas. The other keynote speakers were U.S. Reps. Rubén Hinojosa, D-Mercedes, and Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo.

Panelists included Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Chairman Bob Shepard, Texas Workforce Commission Executive Director Larry Temple, University of Texas at Pan American President Blandina Cardenas, South Texas College President Shirley Reed, Education Service Center Region One Executive Director Jack Damron, Workforce Solutions CEO Yvonne "Bonnie" Gonzalez, and PSJA ISD Superintendent Danny King.

http://www.riograndeguardian.com/archives_results.asp

Labels: immigration

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

Great news for UT's Charter School headed by UT Ph.D. recipient, Ramona Treviño! Great leadership always fits into the mix of explanations, too. -Angela

-----------------------------------------------
UT Elementary hooks top ranking
By Laura Heinauer American-Statesman Staff

Not much can compare to the excitement of the first day of school, as evidenced by the smiles at the University of Texas Elementary School last week. Save maybe finding out that your campus has been rated exemplary by the state.

"It is our Rose Bowl," said Ramona Treviño, principal of UT Elementary, a four-year-old, university-run charter school that this month earned the highest rating under the state's accountability system for the first time.

The school, which primarily serves a low-income, mostly minority population, is the only campus in East Austin to achieve the rating under the current requirements, which are largely based on performance on state achievement tests.

School officials credit several factors in their success, including the latest research on effective teaching, small class sizes and motivated parents. It's a feat that only 8.6 percent of 7,385 campuses rated statewide achieved; it's particularly surprising given the school's large at-risk enrollment.

More than 90 percent of UT Elementary third- and fourth-grade students who took the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in the spring passed each subject to earn the rating. Furthermore, more than 90 percent of students in all ethnic and economic groups passed in all subjects.

In the Austin school district, seven schools earned an exemplary rating, but all are west of Interstate 35 and have significantly fewer economically disadvantaged students.

"I feel very confident that my girls are getting a good education here," said Pedro Reyes Jr., father of Yulissa and Jessenia, both of whom are UT Elementary students. "They're raising little Longhorns. It's kind of cool. It's a special school, and we're very proud of it."

The campus uses a "three-tier" model for helping struggling students, based on research from the UT Vaughn Gross Center for Reading and Language Arts, in which teachers use intervention strategies typically reserved for special education students in regular classroom settings.
As a result, 20 percent to 30 percent of UT Elementary students receive additional in-class instruction, and 5 percent to 10 percent get after-school tutoring and attend summer school.

The interventions, Treviño said, are combined with other social and emotional practices, like motivational school-wide assemblies every morning and "peace tables," where students can meet to sort out their differences. Nurses and psychologists often team up to deal with problems from home.

"Creating a culture of caring is very important to what we do," Treviño said. And that includes making students and their families feel part of the UT family: All students wear burnt orange-and-white uniforms.
Teachers said they have more freedom to add research-based teaching techniques to their curricula than they would in public schools. And small class sizes - there are 40 students per grade and 20 per class - allow teachers and administrators to have close relationships with parents.

Another key to the school's success is parental involvement. Parents have made a choice to have their children attend, Treviño said, so she can have higher expectations for them as well.

"I expect 100 percent participation in the science fair, and I actually get it," she said. "The idea truly is for these kids to feel like they are on track for college. ... It's that whole 'We're UT' thing."

Choice is just part of what makes it difficult to compare the performance of charter schools with that of public schools. Families have to go through the extra step of applying to charter schools, so there is often a higher level of engagement from the beginning. On the flip side, many charters specialize in serving at-risk students, which can be reflected in their test scores.

Although students reap the benefits of university-based research, the University of Texas has made it a point not to throw large amounts of money into the charter campus; it has a $1.6 million operating budget, of which $1.3 million is state money, said Marilyn Kameen, senior associate dean at UT's College of Education.

The elementary campus is simply a collection of portable buildings with no real gymnasium. Enrollment is limited to five East Austin ZIP codes, and acceptance is based on a lottery.

"The intent was always to create a real school with real kids who have all the issues that kids in urban settings have," Kameen said.
As the plans for a UT charter school were being laid out in 2002, Austin school district officials offered to work with UT as an alternative to the charter, but UT declined.

At the time, school vouchers were a hot topic in the state Legislature, and Charles Miller, a friend of President Bush's and a charter proponent, chaired the UT Board of Regents. Before voting to create the school, he quoted the Austin district as saying, "We can do it better."

"It has not adversely affected us or any of the schools in that area," Austin school district spokesman Andy Welch said.

Struggling charters in Texas outnumber those that are doing well. This year, 16 percent of 317 charter campuses rated statewide were rated unacceptable, compared with 4 percent of Texas public schools.
In Travis County, their performance has been mixed. In addition to UT Elementary, the NYOS charter school, which serves preschoolers through third-graders, was rated exemplary this year, but six other charter schools were rated unacceptable.

Critics argue that charter schools, which are funded with public tax dollars, should not be supported to the detriment of the traditional system.

"The last thing we want to do is talk about expanding the system before we fix the mess we've already got," said Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that supports public schools.
Amid the debate, UT Elementary parents are so satisfied with how their school is performing that many are trying to get a middle school created.

Officials at UT say that a charter middle school is not part of their plans, but several other ambitious plans are in the works.

This year, UT Elementary will begin a $19 million capital campaign to build a permanent facility at its location on East Sixth Street. The school also plans to launch a pilot program to strengthen teacher preparation.

There's also talk of testing some new research in physical education and publishing a teacher training manual that can be used by other schools.

Treviño said she plans to reach out more to the Austin school district.
"I know we can do more," she said.

Labels: charter schools

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:59 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Learning a second language

When simple solutions and anecdotes collide with the facts

By John Moore and Ana Celia Zentella
June 28, 2007

Invoking simple solutions to complex problems is an easy and effective rhetorical device. No need to do research, check facts, consider complexities – just assert the solution and, as long as it is close enough to what people already believe, the argument is won.

It works even better if you can add a personal anecdote. This was the case with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's recent suggestion that Spanish-speaking families turn off their Spanish television programs and watch English-language TV instead. Unfortunately, the governor's suggestion, based on his own subjective experience, belies a number of misconceptions about language demographics, second-language acquisition and pedagogy.

From media discussions, one would think that Latino communities are Spanish-only language ghettos where no one is willing to learn English. However, the facts are otherwise. More than 70 percent of Spanish-speakers in the United States are also fluent in English, and a very large number of U.S. Latinos can only speak English.

Those who do not attain fluency in English are almost exclusively first-generation immigrants who came to the United States as adults. Anyone who has tried to learn a second language as an adult knows how difficult it is. Nevertheless, even these first-generation Spanish-speakers are learning English in greater numbers than has ever been the case in our history as an immigrant nation, and many of their children are learning little or no Spanish. (Readers may have witnessed a Spanish-speaking mother talking to her child in Spanish, while the child answers in English.)

Research shows that the loss of an immigrant language once took three generations but that it is now common for a transition from Spanish to English to happen in two. The perception that Spanish-speakers won't speak English is simply false – they do and they do so faster than earlier immigrants did.

This is not to say that there are no problems. California does have a large number of limited-English proficiency students who struggle to pass the English Language Arts, or ELA, section of CAHSEE, the state high school exit exam, which was first required for graduation in 2006. These students are typically first-generation Latinos, often arriving in their teens. They quickly become fluent in spoken English, but may fail to develop the English needed in academic contexts because acquiring those reading and writing skills can take more than five years.

The evaluators of the 2006 CAHSEE found that “recently enrolled students performed less well.” Students in the 10th grade, who had enrolled since 2000, “had significantly lower ELA passing rates (below 40 percent) compared to students who had been enrolled for longer periods.” This percentage decreased to 30 and 15 for students who enrolled in 2004 and 2006, respectively. Interestingly, these same students had less difficulty with the math test; between 40 percent and 50 percent of them passed it. Clearly, recent arrivals are capable students, but many run out of time before they can learn enough English to pass the exam upon which their diploma hinges, despite having passed all other state and course requirements.

The issues are complex and are, unfortunately, not amenable to simple solutions. The journalist who asked the governor's opinion about the CAHSEE results was posing a serious question about a major problem confronting immigrant adolescents that turning off their parents' telenovelas will not solve. Because these students are generally fluent in English, they are already watching English-language TV.

Although watching TV may help in acquiring some aspects of spoken language (e.g., vocabulary and pronunciation), programs such as “American Idol” (or even “Terminator” movies) will be of little help in developing the literacy skills needed to pass the ELA portion of the CAHSEE. In fact, wouldn't it be better for all students to turn off the TV altogether? The governor's suggestion is an unhelpful and flip response to a difficult pedagogical situation.

Rarely do politicians think to consult language researchers when dealing with linguistic problems. The governor seems to think that his recollection of his own experience with learning English is enough evidence to know how to deal with complex issues of second-language acquisition and literacy among poor immigrants under very different circumstances. However, we still harbor hope that research and facts might occasionally trump a facile appeal to personal anecdotes, so often invoked in political discourse.

Moore is a professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics, and Celia Zentella is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies, both at the University of California San Diego.

Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20070628/news_lz1e28moore.html

Labels: English language learners, language learning

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:03 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Very good analysis of our misguided immigration policies together with a critique of the media. -Angela
Friday, August 17, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
On Dogs and Illegals
by Joseph Nevins


The public outcry and debate surrounding the July 17 indictment of football star Michael Vick for dogfighting raises many questions. Among them-given the widespread, simultaneous silence surrounding the growing migrant death toll along the
U.S.-Mexico boundary-is how concern for the well-being of dogs compares to that for human beings.

On the day following Vick's indictment, U.S. authorities found a ten-year-old Mexican boy wandering the southern Arizona desert. Border Patrol agents located his mother's corpse in the vicinity. The next day, officials in the area stumbled on another 10-year-old boy-from Guatemala-and soon recovered the body of his mother nearby.

The two were among the latest casualties in the ever-expanding quest for "security" along the U.S.-Mexico divide. Since the mid-1990s when the federal government began amassive increase in boundary enforcement, migrant deaths have become a way of life in the borderlands. Well over 4,000 bodies have been recovered since 1995, with Arizona the proverbial "ground zero." Fiscal year 2007 is on track to be the deadliest year in the state''s history: authorities found 199 migrant bodies between Oct. 1, 2006 and July 31, 2007.


In ruling circles-in comparison to Vick's alleged activities-however, there is little to no outrage, nor even a reaction to the carnage. On the day the Border Patrol found the Guatemalan mother, Senator Robert Byrd denounced dogfighting, shouting "How inhuman, how dastardly!" The next day, Senator John Kerry wrote to the National Football League's
commissioner, characterizing dogfighting as "one of society's most barbaric and inhumane activities" and calling for Vick's suspension.


While Byrd and Kerry worked to reduce dog abuse, they and their colleagues agreed to intensify Washington's bipartisan war on unwanted migrants by strengthening the very factors that have increased the death toll.


On July 26, by a vote of 89 to 1, the Senate authorized $3 billion to build 700 miles of additional walls and fences along the Mexican boundary, and to almost double the size ofthe Border Patrol to 23,000 agents by 2009. Underlying this effort is a vacuous notion of security in the face of a "threat" that U.S. policies have helped to engender.


In the case of Mexico, for instance, Washington's and Wall Street's encouragement of neoliberal restructuring has greatly contributed to illicit migration. According to a 2003 Carnegie Endowment study, to cite one example, a NAFTA-related trade deficit, one favoring the United States, contributed significantly to the loss of about 1.3 million jobs in Mexico's agricultural sector in 1994-2002, thus encouraging many to migrate across the boundary.

As for Guatemala, U.S. support for violently antidemocratic elements underlies the country's pervasive poverty and instability. From the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically-elected Arbenz government in 1954 to U.S. backing of the country's military as it engaged in genocidal acts in the 1970s and 1980s, Washington has helped
make life nonviable for many in Guatemala.

But rather than acknowledging and accepting responsibility for such migration-inducing developments, politicians from both major parties and many in the society at large rail against "illegals," emptily pledge allegiance to the law, and proclaim the need to uphold it-as if law and justice were one and the same.

From a perspective that privileges justice, immigration reform's recent defeat in the Senate provides an opportunity: rather than cause for embracing a "security-first" politics, it offers a chance to rethink our very approach to immigration and the boundaries that separate and bring together the United States and the rest of the world. This requires-among other things-a recognition that migrants are first and foremost human beings, ones deserving of human rights regardless of which side of the boundaries that divide the privileged from the disadvantaged they come from.

The effect of immigration and boundary enforcement is to force unwanted migrants to subsist where there are not enough resources to provide sufficient livelihood or, in order to overcome their deprivation and insecurity, to risk their lives trying to overcome ever-stronger boundary controls in wealthy countries. And if they do succeed in crossing the increasingly militarized divides between the relatively rich and poor, they still have to deal with all the indignities and hazards associated with being "illegal"-from sub-standard wages, to divided families, and the risk of arrest and deportation.

Such a world is not worthy of a dog or a human being.

Joseph Nevins is an associate professor of geography at Vassar College. He is the author of ANot-so-distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor (Cornell 2005). City Lights Books will publish his latest book, Dying to Live: A Story of U.S.

Immigration in An Age of Global Apartheid, in 2008.

Labels: immigration

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

My experience is that Latinos are very practical in their decision making. These data should not be used, however, to suggest that Latinos do not want or need expanded access to elite, privileged schooling opportunities as this was not a survey of political attitudes regarding access. -Angela

Friday, August 17, 2007

Why High-Achieving Hispanic Students Go to Hispanic U.: Report Sheds
Light on Their Choice of Colleges


By ELYSE ASHBURN

High-achieving Hispanic students often focus on location, cost, and
campus atmosphere, not prestige, in selecting their colleges, according
to a report due out today.

"The level of pragmatism these college students had in making decisions
was impressive," said Deborah A. Santiago, the report's author and vice
president for policy and research at Excelencia in Education, a
nonprofit policy group.

The report, "Choosing Hispanic-Serving Institutions: A Closer Look at LatinoStudents' College Choices [pdf]," is based on interviews with about 100
students and is not nationally representative. But it provides a window on why Hispanic undergraduates are heavily concentrated in the country's small cohort of Hispanic-serving institutions.

In 2003-4 those institutions [pdf] made up only 6 percent of American colleges and universities, but served almost half of Hispanic undergraduates.

Hispanic-serving institutions tend to be located in areas with large
Hispanic populations, are relatively inexpensive, and often have open
admissions. That makes them an appealing option for Hispanic students,
like those Ms. Santiago interviewed, who want to attend universities
that are close to home, relatively cheap, and accessible.

However, students said they were not attracted by the Hispanic-serving
designation, and few even knew that the distinction existed. An
institution is classified as Hispanic-serving, under federal guidelines,
if at least 25 percent of its students are Hispanic and 50 percent of
those are from low-income families.

The students interviewed for the report mostly received A's and B's in
high school, and now attend either Hispanic-serving or mainstream
universities. Many are the first in their families to go to college.

Flouting conventional wisdom, the students at Hispanic-serving
universities interviewed by Ms. Santiago often did not choose the most
selective institution that accepted them. Instead they were heavily
influenced by the sticker price of an education.

"A quote that really stuck with me, and we heard it over and over, was
this impression that, 'College is college, and as long as I'm motivated,
I can get a good education anywhere,'" Ms. Santiago said.

In contrast, Hispanic students at mainstream institutions were swayed by
academic reputation and were more likely to focus on financial-aid
packages than on the sticker price. Students at mainstream universities
also were more willing to take on debt.

While many Hispanic-serving institutions are excellent colleges, Ms.
Santiago said, higher-education officials must do a better job of making
sure Hispanic students consider the full range of options available to
them. In particular, prestigious institutions interested in attracting
top Hispanic students need to better explain financial-aid policies and
improve outreach.

Dr. Frank Talamantes
Texas Tech Medical School at El Paso
El Paso, Texas 79902

Labels: Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs)

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:34 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Drugs are key here. Good schools are a powerful antidote to this disturbing trend. -Angela

Too many Latino men are living in prison
By RYAN S. KING and ANGELA MARIA ARBOLEDA in Modesto Bee
July 30, 2007

King is a policy analyst with The Sentencing Project. E-mail him at rking@sentencingproject.org . Arboleda is associate director, criminal justice policy, with the National Council of La Raza. E-mail her at aarboleda@nclr.org .


Largely obscured by the rancorous debate surrounding U.S. immigration policy is the emergence of a trend that should be a cause of concern to all Latino communities: the explosion of the number of Latinos in prison.

There were 55,000 Latinos doing prison time in the United States in 1985. That figure has increased by more than 400 percent in 20 years, a substantially steeper rate of increase than for whites or blacks.

Currently, there are more than 450,000 Latinos in U.S. prisons or jails.

With one-in-six Latino males born today expected to spend some time in prison during their lives, the future portends devastating consequences for Latino communities.

This incarceration data stands in stark contrast to a growing body of research suggesting that Latinos, who now make up more than one of every five persons held behind bars, are less likely than other groups to commit crime and that the immigration of the 1990s may have been partially responsible for the historic declines in crime.

Causes for rising Latino incarceration are complex, but an important explanatory factor is the "war on drugs." Despite using drugs at a rate proportionate to their share in the general population, Latinos are twice as likely as whites to be sentenced to a state prison on a drug charge. Nearly one in four Latinos sitting in prison has been convicted of a drug offense.
Differential patterns in law enforcement -- where the police choose to pursue the war on drugs -- play a greater role in determining who is arrested and sentenced to prison than general trends in drug use.

Add to that the collateral consequences from a felony conviction.

These can include barriers to employment, denial of certain licenses, lack of access to education and housing aid, loss of voting rights, and, in some cases, deportation.

Such "invisible punishments" create substantial obstacles to a successful re-entry to the community and increase the likelihood of recidivism.

Despite this spate of distressing news, there are efforts that can be undertaken to stem the tide of disproportionate Latino incarceration.

First, lawmakers should heed the growing chorus of public officials, including high-ranking criminal justice practitioners, and revisit the wisdom of our current drug control strategy. This "lock 'em up" approach has resulted in a half-million people behind bars.

It takes a toll on communities of color while doing little to address the underlying causes of drug abuse. Investing in proven prevention and treatment strategies is far more productive than warehousing people. It's a much more effective tool to enhance public safety.

Secondly, state legislatures should expand upon the reforms implemented in 22 states since 2004 and reconsider such punitive sentencing provisions as mandatory minimums that expose individualsto punishments grossly disproportionate to the conduct for which they have been charged.

Restoring discretion to sentencing judges would permit full consideration of the circumstances of the offense. This could prevent the reoccurrence of cases like that of first-time offender Weldon Angelos, who, because of inflexible sentencing enhancements, was sentenced to prison for 55 years.

His offense? Three marijuana sales while possessing a weapon he never used.
The criminal justice system does not exist in a vacuum. Crime and its associated costs generally reflect a failure to provide equal access to resources such as education, employment, housing and health care. Inequalities in the criminal justice system extend far beyond policing, courts and corrections.

True reform can be achieved only when we seek to bring a broad range of community stakeholders to the table, and invest not merely in police and prisons but in neighborhoods and people.

http://www.modbee.com/opinion/national/story/28696.html

Labels: prison

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:32 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Controversial Arabic program just 1 of 70

BY ERIN EINHORN / NY DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Tuesday, August 21st 2007

The Khalil Gibran Arabic school has attracted headlines, but it's not the only foreign-language public school opening in New York this year.

The city has a long history of mingling English-speaking kids with students who speak another language in schools where classes are taught in two tongues, but none sparked a debate like the one that triggered the hasty resignation early this month of Khalil Gibran International Academy's founder, Debbie Almontaser.

The city's first dual-language French elementary schools will open this fall in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. A new Chinese school is planned for Queens, and several other schools are in the works.

These additions mean the city has more than 70 public school programs designed to turn every kid, regardless of what's spoken at home, into someone who can speak English, plus Spanish, Creole, Russian, Chinese or French.

Khalil Gibran won't formally be a dual-language school this year, but the Education Department hopes it will become one soon. For now, it will teach Arabic as a second language.

Dual-language schools teach core subjects in two languages - sometimes on alternating days, sometimes with one language in the morning and the other in the afternoon. The schools help immigrant kids learn English while giving English-speaking kids a chance to learn another language.

"Whenever I say, 'My kid speaks fluent Spanish,' we'll be at cocktail parties and every head in the room turns and they all say, 'I wish I had thought about doing that for my child,'" said Carolyn Blackburn whose son, Henry, is a fifth-grader at Amistad Dual Language School in Washington Heights. "The advantages are just unbelievable."

So many parents are trying to get their kids into the Shuang Wen School in Chinatown that Principal Ling Ling Chou says she soon may have to limit admissions to kids from lower Manhattan's District 1.

Paul Gamble, a seventh-grader at Shuang Wen, said his Chinese improved dramatically when he was assigned to help newly arrived Chinese students with English.

Supporters of Khalil Gibran, which is named after a Lebanese Christian poet, say an Arabic school is crucial at a time when the country needs Arabic translators, but some right-wing critics claim the school has an Islamic agenda.

Objections have also come from Michael Meyers of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and former New York Civil Liberties Union Director Norman Siegel.

They say they're considering a legal challenge to schools like Khalil Gibran, as they once did to single-sex schools and a planned Latino leadership school.

Dual-language schools strive for a balance of kids, with half coming from English-dominant homes and the rest from homes where the school's second language is spoken.

Meyers called that a quota system, saying, "It's wrong-headed, racist ethnocentrism and racial breast-beating."

Dual-language schools tend to celebrate the culture of countries where their language is spoken, but advocates say they also teach the subjects required in all schools.

"God forbid they should be more educated than anybody else," said Luis Reyes, coordinator of the Coalition for Educational Excellence for English Language Learners.

Maria Santos, who heads the Education Department's office of English language learners, said her office is committed to the schools.

"We have [people] coming new to New York who are very much connected to their homelands ... and they want their children to develop in their home language," Santos said.

Labels: dual language education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:26 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Vaishali Honawar / EdWeek
August 21, 2007

A group of California parents, students, and community groups is suing the U.S. Department of Education for allowing alternative-route teachers who are not yet certified to be designated as “highly qualified” under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Under the federal law, to be highly qualified, teachers must have full state certification or licensure, in addition to a bachelor’s degree and evidence that they know each subject they teach. But Education Department regulations allow uncertified candidates who are in alternative-route programs to teach for up to three years while still seeking certification.

Backers of the lawsuit, Renee v. Spellings, which was filed today in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco,said they are concerned because many of those teachers end up in schools that are low-performing and enroll higher concentrations of students of color.

“These are teachers who have come through one month of boot camp in an alternative program and are thrown into classrooms as full-time teachers,” said Wynn Hausser, a spokesman for Public Advocates, a San Francisco public-interest law firm and advocacy group that is representing the plaintiffs.

He contended that the loophole was intended to give Congress “a rosier picture of how close schools are to meeting the standards” of the No Child Left Behind law, which requires every classroom to be staffed by a highly qualified teacher.

Mr. Hausser’s group claims there are currently 100,000 teachers in the nation’s classrooms, including 10,000 in California, who are labeled as “highly qualified” even though they are still in training and have not received certification.

Obscuring the Truth?

The lawsuit drew support from members of the teacher education community, who pointed out that the NCLB law is intended to reduce the number of out-of-field teachers and uncertified teachers in public school classrooms.

“Yet the Department of Education has created this large loophole to allow uncertified teachers who haven’t completed a preparation program to receive a highly qualified designation,” Jane West, the vice president of government relations for the Washington-based American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, said in a statement. “Parents are not being fully informed of the real status of these teachers who are not yet credentialed to serve as teachers.”

"Consistent with the department's practice, we are not able to comment on a complaint that has not been served, but we will, of course, review it closely when we do receive it," said Samara Yudof, the acting press secretary for the Education Department.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare as void the department’s regulation allowing teachers in alternative routes to be designated as “highly qualified.”

“Parents have a right to know the qualifications of their child’s teacher,” said Maribel Heredia, a parent in Hayward, Calif., and one of the plaintiffs.

“My son’s 1st grade teacher is still taking classes necessary to obtain her full teaching credential,” Ms. Heredia said in a statement. “I think it’s wrong that she is called highly qualified. I feel like I am being lied to.”

Labels: California, NCLB, teacher protests

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:04 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Linda Jacobson / EdWeek
Published Online: August 20, 2007

A Los Angeles school with a reputation for violence is embroiled in another type of controversy—this time involving some of its teachers and highest-achieving students.

The storm erupted in mid-July when, according to students and teachers, Vincent Carbino, the principal of Santee Education Complex, dropped or changed numerous courses—including some Advance Placement offerings—in the middle of the semester, even though some students will need those classes in order to graduate.

Teachers allege that the principal cancelled the courses without warning in advance of a scheduled inspection required by state legislation known as the Williams settlement, because textbooks for the courses had never been ordered and teachers had not been trained.

Morale is now so bad that some teachers are considering filing a petition with the district’s board of education to convert to a charter school, said Jose Lara, a history teacher at Santee and a union representative for United Teachers Los Angeles, an affiliate of both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

Tracy Mallozzi, a spokeswoman at Green Dot Public Schools, a Los Angeles-based charter schools organization, confirmed that preliminary conversations with Santee teachers have taken place.

Earlier this year, some teachers at Locke Senior High School, another low-performing high school in Los Angeles, signed petitions asking the school board to have Locke converted to a charter under Green Dot, which is opening small high schools in Watts, the neighborhood served by Locke. ("L.A. District Faces Mounting Pressure Over High Schools,", July 18, 2007.)

“If things don’t get better soon, many teachers are going to go that route,” said Mr. Lara. “It’s been a roller coaster ever since.”

A former police officer, Mr. Carbino was brought in a year after the school opened in 2005 to address safety concerns as well as academic performance. He refused to be interviewed for this article.

But Los Angeles Unified School District officials say they are trying to work with students and teachers to calm the situation. The district also denies charges that the number of AP courses at Santee has been reduced. Instead, they say that Mr. Carbino increased AP offerings from two last school year to 13 this year.

“It’s a fairly small group of teachers and students who are engaging in these protests,” said Hilda Ramirez, a spokeswoman for the 708,000-student district.

Troubled Campus
antee opened two years ago under then-Superintendent Roy Romer and was supposed to be a symbol of educational renewal in a low-income community. Instead, the campus has been known for fighting, crime, and teacher turnover.

“It’s been a disaster from day one,” said Jordan Henry, an English teacher and a union official.

The latest controversy appears to stem from inspections required under the 2004 settlement that ended a lawsuit called Williams v. California, in which plaintiffs argued that many schools, particularly those in low-income neighborhoods, were lacking basic necessities such as textbooks, clean and safe facilities, and properly credentialed teachers. ("Improvements Seen to California Schools As Result of Williams Case Settlement," Aug. 13, 2007.)

The mandated inspections, conducted by county offices of education throughout the state, include a textbook audit to make sure students have the books they need.

Mr. Lara said no one was alerted to the course changes made in advance of the Williams inspections. Teachers found out, he said, when they logged on to their computers to take attendance and saw that the names of the courses they were teaching had changed. In some cases, AP courses were replaced with regular courses, he said.

Police escorted one teacher who complained about the unexpected changes from the building, according to Mr. Lara. Since then, dramatic photos and videos of students protesting in the auditorium and outside the building, chanting “Fire Carbino,” have shown up in local news reports and on Web sites. And this week, students and parents were planning a march through the neighborhood to voice their concerns.

“I’m not going to receive [AP] credit,” said 12th grader Araceli Aca, who says her AP English class was changed to a course called Writing Seminar. “My mom is really furious because she hasn’t been able to get any answers.”

District Response
The district denies claims that the number of AP courses at Santee has been reduced. In a written statement, Carmen Schroeder, the superintendent of Local District 5, which includes Santee and is located in South Los Angeles, said the principal added the writing courses to help students pass AP exams.

The school also is part of a new partnership with Los Angeles Trade Technical College and the University of California, Irvine that allows students to graduate with both a diploma and college credit, or even an associate’s degree. Ms. Schroeder called the arrangement “a wonderful opportunity for the South Los Angeles community that has traditionally had very little access—or financial means—to college.”

But Mr. Lara argues that students at the school—which has three academic calendars, or tracks—don’t have equal access to AP courses. Most of the new AP courses, he said, are available only to those on the A track, which most closely follows a traditional school calendar. The students that started school July 2, before the changes were made, are on the B track.

A chart he has compiled shows that 35 classes, primarily English classes, have been changed, and more than 850 students have been affected.

In spite of the latest controversy, Ms. Schroeder expressed support for Mr. Carbino.

“I believe that everyone at Santee has the same goal: providing students with a rigorous and relevant education that will prepare them for college and careers,” her statement said.

Ms. Ramirez, the district spokeswoman, also said the principal has worked with students on conflict resolution and peer-to-peer counseling. And a profile of the principal published last year in the Los Angeles Times discussed his determination to keep the school from being taken over by the state because of low test scores.

But A.J. Duffy, UTLA’s president, said he doesn’t blame Santee’s staff for talking to charter school operators about leaving the district.

“Do I want that? No. Do I understand? Yes,” he said, adding strong words for Los Angeles Unified Superintendent David Brewer III. “If he doesn’t remove and fire [Carbino], he’s going to have another Green Dot school, and he’s going to be superintendent of nothing.”

Labels: Advanced Placement courses, California, charter schools

posted by Patricia Lopez at 5:53 PM 0 comments Links to this post

American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education Statement

Email from: Jade Floyd
August 21, 2007
12:10pm cst

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 21, 2007

Statement by Dr. Jane West, Vice President of Government Relations & Advocacy for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education on the Filing of Renee v. Spellings

Washington, D.C. (August 21, 2007) Today, a coalition of parents, students, community groups, and legal advocates sued the United States Department of Education and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings for violating the teacher quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. In the first lawsuit of its kind, the coalition argues that a Department regulation has created a major loophole in NCLB that defies the will of Congress and harms students nationwide by defining teachers still in training as “highly qualified.” The following is a statement by Dr. Jane West, Vice President of Government Relations & Advocacy, for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education on the Filing of Renee v. Spellings.

NCLB is intended to ensure that all students have highly qualified teachers. Yet, paradoxically, the Department of Education allows uncertified candidates in alternate route preparation programs to assume the functions of a teacher for up to three years while they are seeking certification. NCLB is intended to reduce the number of out-of-field teachers and uncertified teachers in the P-12 classrooms, yet the Department of Education has created this large loophole to allow uncertified teachers who haven’t completed a preparation program to receive a highly-qualified designation. There is nothing “highly-qualified” about being unprepared and uncertified. It is the students with the greatest need who are disproportionately affected by this travesty, with more of these not-yet-certified teachers in their classrooms. Parents are not being fully informed of the real status of these teachers who are not yet credentialed to serve as teachers.

The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education believes that all teachers should be prepared in a high quality preparation program and complete that program prior to being designated as “highly-qualified”. There are five components that we know are essential to any high quality preparation program. These include having selective admissions standards, a curriculum that addresses the essential knowledge and skills needed to be an effective teacher, preparing teachers to teach a diverse range of students, a supervised internship, and a performance assessment that gauges the candidates’ knowledge of subject matter and ability to convey that knowledge effectively. That we would put anyone in the classroom who has not completed a rigorous preparation such as this is not in keeping with the true mission of NCLB.

AACTE supports this law suit because it addresses a basic tenet of NCLB, every child deserves a good teacher. The federal government needs to close this loophole that allows unprepared and uncertified teachers to enter the classroom and be called highly-qualified.

For more information click here

Jade Floyd
Communications Manager
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education
1307 New York Ave, NW Suite 300
Washington, DC 20005
Main Phone: 202.293.2450
Main Fax: 202.457.8095
Email: jfloyd@aacte.org

Labels: NCLB, teacher protests

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:11 PM 0 comments Links to this post

What, if anything, is the problem with the quality of teachers in the LAUSD, and what can be done about it? All this week, former LAUSD board member David Tokofsky and a group of Los Angeles high school students debate the future of the school district.

August 20, 2007 / LA Times

Today, Tokofsky and five L.A.-area high school students who have researched student disengagement at Crenshaw High School discuss teacher motivation. Later in the week, they will debate class sizes, bogus grade-promotions and more.

Credentials can't cause caring
By Carla Hernandez

Thank you, Mr. Tokofsky, for having this debate with youth. Nobody ever really listens to our opinion, when in fact we do have some important things to say.

Most teachers in our schools don't know, or want to learn, how to change the problems in our communities.

More than 60% of students in schools like ours — mostly black and brown — are dropping out (or, are being "pushed out" systemically) of school and relying on their streets to provide answers. Teachers are not trying hard enough to prevent students in our communities from falling into these traps.

If you look at it, most of our teachers can't make a subject interesting. (They're boring!!!) And to make it worse, most of us are learning from uncaring teachers who don't support us in our learning. Seeing life through the students' eyes, you'll see that they find what they don't get in school in the streets. When this happens, you have students interested in a life that has nothing to do with what they learn in school. This results in students falling into the school-to-prison pipeline.

This is our reality! Because of this, we need teachers who can create activities that involve their students, their communities and their problems. This will attract the students' attention instead of causing them to daydream in classrooms over-packed with unqualified and overworked teachers.

The No Child Left Behind Act and its definition of a highly qualified teacher does not work well in our communities. The act defines a teacher as "highly qualified" when he or she has subject-matter qualifications and university teaching credentials. But how about communication qualifications and culturally empowering credentials? If you don't have credentials we can respect, then you don't have the quality we need.

We need teachers who can prepare us to resist failure and transform our communities. A qualified teacher can go beyond teaching us how to read and write. Quality teachers can empower us to make a change. According to our research in the Crenshaw High School community, a highly qualified teacher can also 1) motivate students, 2) care about the problems in students' lives and 3) have a passion for teaching students of color.

Our community wants teachers who care about us. We are struggling in our communities and we need teachers who can understand that. Most teachers in our schools don't have that quality. Teachers need to take time out of their schedule to share ideas with their students, and to be able to encourage us when we are in need of support. Teachers should worry about problems beyond the school, helping their students feel safe with them and one another, prove to us that they are people we can rely on when everything in our world seems wrong. As Crenshaw High School teacher Monique Lane said, we need to "replace teachers with people who care!" Do you think it's fair for students to go through schools where no one seems to believe in them? Or seems to care? We don't! Would that motivate you, or your children, to keep striving for more, when all you see is failure and poor teaching around you?

Carla Hernandez is a 10th-grader at King/Drew Medical Magnet High School, and an active member of the Watts Youth Collective.

The teacher challenge
By David Tokofsky

Carla, thank you very much for being involved in school and community issues. You are to be commended for your engagement, and I respect your feelings, thoughts and research. Above all, you are right to focus on the quality of teachers as the core issue for P-12 education.

You are lucky to attend King/Drew Magnet. We can be proud of its successes. The recent closing of the county government's King/Drew Hospital reminds us that although challenges in public education are numerous, in many ways the school system is doing better than other areas of government service.

Let me start with a few key facts. California has had tremendous population growth over the last 20 years. With population growth comes a requirement to find a sufficient number of teachers. When I first came to L.A. Unified as a teacher in 1983, the pay was $13,000 a year and the district needed to find 12,000 new teachers for that year alone (the state of California as a whole was short 150,000 teachers). At that pay, and the low pay over the last 20 years, we have not been able to attract enough new -- let alone quality -- teachers. While the search for a massive quantity of teachers is not an excuse for the quality question, we must be aware of the magnitude of the problem.

Your references to No Child Left Behind are misplaced on the local level. These are federal regulations and rules. We in the local school boards have opposed such laws from afar as they do not take into account local circumstances. Yet we locals embrace the higher standards and increased accountability of NCLB. We also know that NCLB is really the same federal involvement that brings Title I money and other entitlements that we use in our urban schools.

School districts can do a lot to excite teachers to teach passionately, but ultimately that goal rests with the adult teachers themselves. Now that we only have a need for 2,000 new teachers a year, you are right to ask all L.A. County school boards to raise the requirements to become a teacher in urban and inner-city settings.

But students also need to shoulder a lot of the responsibility for learning. You casually say that 60% of kids drop out or get pushed out. First of all, that figure is inaccurate. Many students in L.A. County's overcrowded system fall into a variety of categories such as continuation schools, independent study, community day schools, adult schools, and so on. They also move frequently from district to district, making their status harder to measure.

Students may in fact have too many alternative choices for schooling in California, which is the conclusion that the State Legislative Analyst reached in February of this year. Students want choices, but much of schooling requires discipline.

While money is not the answer to all these recruitment, retention and training issues, we must remember that California ranks in the bottom third of states in funding. Recently, education activists passed SB 1133, which took money from good schools and gave it to some of the state's lowest performers. This transfer of the limited existing monies exacerbates the funding problems at quality campuses like King/Drew, a school with the highest API in the inner-city southern parts of L.A. County.

We need this extra money to pay all teachers more, and to establish higher standards and training for content instruction. I think you are right that teachers should know more about students' communities, but they ought to know Science, Literature, Math and Social Students first and foremost. Good teachers will know their subject matters well; great teachers will, as you rightly say, will also know their students well.

David Tokovsky is a former board member of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Labels: California, caring, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:49 AM 0 comments Links to this post

by Ibram Rogers / Diverse Issues in Higher Education
Aug 20, 2007

A new curriculum is set to launch this upcoming school year at Columbia University, Teachers College, based on Spike Lee�s HBO documentary, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts."


A team of Teachers College (TC) faculty members, students, graduates and staff have created "Teaching The Levees: A Curriculum for Democratic Dialogue and Civic Engagement" to serve as a public education campaign to help adolescents, educators and community leaders promote dialogues about race and class in America. The curriculum is built on the grim realities of the racial and class dynamics portrayed in Lee�s film, which aired on HBO in August 2006 and showcased the painful experiences and aftermath of the tragedy of Katrina.

Teachers College Professor Margaret Crocco headed the team that designed the curriculum that was supported through a $975,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

"While 'Teaching The Levees' clearly originates from a sense of bewilderment and even outrage at the unaided suffering associated with Katrina, it does not preach," says Crocco, a professor of social studies and education at TC. "There is enough ambiguity in the film to engage people in a dialogue that will lead to debates and different points of view. The teacher�s obligation is to create a climate in which that is possible."

The curriculum will officially be launched at a special event titled, �Teaching The Levees: Lessons from Katrina,� on Sept. 6 at the TC Cowin Center at 4 p.m. in New York City. Panelists will include Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, Wisconsin education professor Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, Princeton professor Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. and New Orleans City Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell. This discussion, which will be moderated by New York Times Columnist Bob Herbert, will seek to answer the questions: �Who are we as a country?� and �Who do we want to be?�

The curriculum will be distributed by the TC Press free of charge to 30,000 high school, college and community educators, and civic and religious groups before the second anniversary of Katrina at the end of this month. It will include the DVD set of Lee�s film, a 100-page curriculum book that is supported by the Web site, http://www.teachingthelevees.org/, which is, among other things, a collection center for the names of people who want to receive the package.

"We developed 'Teaching The Levees' not as a text-only effort but as something thats also online, interactive, community-oriented [and] media-enhanced," says Maureen Grolnick, a TC consultant who is the manager of the project. "Eventually, teachers will be able to upload lesson plans, classroom projects and video clips related to their work with this curriculum."

"They will also be able to participate in the Web site discussion board and comment on the blog," she added. "All these are resources that can be shared and that will give this work a more robust and timeless impact. And that sharing process itself will mirror the democratic discourse that our curriculum seeks to stimulate."

The curriculum is divided into five categories of lessons: economics, civics, history, geography, and media literary. Some of the lesson topics include whether the low-lying areas should be rebuilt; a session on the convergence of space, race and poverty in the tragedy; New Orleans and its sense of place and home; the media's coverage of the tragedy; and the issues relating to disaster preparedness or the lack thereof.

These lessons are designed to generate a reasoned discussion of divergent ideas that will ultimately lead to some action to advance the nation's communities, Crocco says.

Labels: curriculum, higher education, race

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:08 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Jack O'Connell earns praise for his candor on a sensitive subject.
By Mitchell Landsberg and Howard Blume / LATimes.com
August 19, 2007

Jack O'Connell, the state superintendent of public instruction, turned heads in education circles last week with the message that race, not poverty, helped explain why African American and Latino students lagged behind their white and Asian counterparts.

It wasn't what he said that was remarkable. It was the fact that he said it at all.

"These are not just economic achievement gaps, they are racial achievement gaps," O'Connell said after his annual release of California's standardized test scores. "We cannot afford to excuse them; they simply must be addressed."

That message was old news to many educational researchers, who have been writing about the issue with increasing urgency for years. But policymakers, particularly white policymakers like O'Connell, have generally been reluctant to discuss race as a factor in student achievement for fear of inflaming racial passions and being seen as racially insensitive.

O'Connell's comments were generally applauded by leading educators, who said it was about time that someone in public life took on a crucial, and hitherto muffled, part of the educational debate.

But some cautioned that there were dangers in beginning such a conversation -- and that, in any case, talk about race was useless without carefully calibrated action to encourage higher achievement by black and Latino students.

"It's tricky to figure out how to introduce it in public," said Ron Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University and author of a forthcoming book on the subject. He said he worried that such discussions could lead not to constructive changes but to "blame and responsibility and maybe even genetics."

Jeannie Oakes, a professor in the graduate school of education at UCLA who has sometimes been critical of O'Connell, praised him for raising the issue. "It's a new level of candor, I think, about the combination of factors that seem to relate to low achievement," she said.

But Oakes added: "When you go down this path, then we have to be very careful about what we choose to talk about and examine, because it's very easy to fall into stereotypical views, and historical views, of people with darker skin being less intelligent . . . or people from immigrant families and African Americans not valuing education."

O'Connell drew his conclusions from the latest round of standardized test results for California schools. They showed, once again, the stubborn persistence of an achievement gap -- the difference in academic performance separating African American and Latino students from their white and Asian American counterparts. All groups have been making dogged upward progress, but at such similar rates that the gap has not budged.

In the past, the differences between groups have sometimes been "explained away," O'Connell said, by the fact that black and Latino students are more likely to be poor.

"The results show this explanation not to be true," he said.

The test results reveal that, in math, poor white and Asian students outperform black and Latino students whose families are not poor. In English, non-poor Latino students barely outperform poor whites, and non-poor African Americans lag further.

The findings are based on fairly crude measures of poverty. "Poor" students are those who have applied for free or reduced-price meals at school. "Non-poor" students are those who haven't applied, even though some of them might, in fact, come from low-income families.

Nevertheless, the data are in line with various studies over the last decade showing that African American students in particular fare worse than whites or Asians on various measures of achievement, even when they come from middle-class families.

Simply raising the issue brings up several uncomfortable questions: Are there cultural reasons why African Americans and Latinos lag? Do they come from families, or communities, that don't value education highly enough? Do they learn differently from white and Asian students? Are they more likely to go to bad schools with less-experienced teachers? Do teachers hold them to lower standards?

"If you don't acknowledge a problem, there's no way to address it," said Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York and coauthor, with her husband, Stephen, of "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning."

But, she said, "Once you say that and once you mean it, then you have to ask yourself what is going on with these kids and you've got to address not only the problems of reading, writing and arithmetic, but all the habits that make for an absence of internalized discipline when it comes to schoolwork, and . . . all the habits of life that make for the possibility of social mobility."

Thernstrom, who is white, has long been willing to suggest that educators and minority families need to confront their own attitudes and habits that, she concludes, are undermining academic achievement.

Kimberly Bush, the white mother of six biracial children, said she witnessed parent attitudes transform as Bunche Elementary, a nearly all-minority, all-low-income school in Compton, became a high-achieving school under Principal Mikara Solomon Davis.

Initially, Bush said, some parents complained about having to sign their child's homework every day. They also objected to mandatory suspensions when a student was rude to a teacher, part of the school's efforts to ensure that classroom time was not wasted on discipline. Teachers also worked after school to provide tutoring to students, among other strategies.

Solomon Davis, the former Bunche principal, put blame for the achievement gap squarely on poverty, combined with the subtle racism of low expectations. She acknowledged that multigenerational poverty, among African Americans, for example, might lead to counterproductive attitudes about education. But this should not be misread as a fundamental characteristic of black culture, she said.

As to needed remedies, she put responsibility squarely with educators.

"It is what we are doing as adults incorrectly that is resulting in these students not learning," she said. "The parents want the best for their children. What we brought to Bunche is showing them the picture of what the best can look like, providing college as the goal. Everybody jumped on the bandwagon, but it was a first for a lot of people in our community."

In raising race, O'Connell spotlighted his own inability to narrow the achievement gap during nearly five years as the state's top education official and raised expectations that he will propose a plan of action. He has called a summit on the issue in November.

O'Connell said he had tried to tighten the gap with policies that included a high school exit exam, an emphasis on "rigor" and "relevance" in education and increased funding for impoverished schools. However, his spokesman, Rick Miller, said of last week's shift in emphasis to race: "Part of this is an acknowledgment that what we've been doing at the state level isn't working."

In an interview, O'Connell added that part of the problem is "institutional bias or racism" in the public school system. "The system does treat some people differently, and race does have a role to play," he said.

O'Connell added he will wait to hear from an advisory body he created before deciding what changes in policy are needed. Asked if he will advocate differentiated instruction and learning materials for different racial groups, he said, "I think so." He also said he intended to "look at strategies that go beyond just education" and involve businesses, churches and the community.

David L. Brewer, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, said he welcomed O'Connell's heightened attention to the issue, and said that he, too, has been looking for ways to raise the performance of African American and Latino students.

There are strategies that are known to be effective, and schools, some in his district, can be used as case studies of what works, he said.

"The key is personalized instruction and teachers who don't allow students to fail," he said. "And then you get the results you expect to get. We know what works; it's making everybody do what works."

In that respect, he said, he'll talk to employee unions about modifying work rules to allow for longer school days and more flexible schedules within the school day.

Brewer said that although L.A. Unified had made strides in academic achievement at elementary schools, "after the fourth grade, something is happening with African American and Latino students."

And the solution does not entirely lie in the schools, Brewer said. Responsibility also lies with the family: "We're going to have to make sure parents understand this is a problem," he said. "Our black and brown children can do math and science: We want that message loud and clear in your homes. We want parents to make sure they're holding their children accountable."

Labels: achievement gap, California, NCLB, Parent Involvement

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:08 PM 0 comments Links to this post

State, federal guidelines too confusing
El Paso Times 08/17/2007

It has become too difficult to understand if one's child is receiving a good public-school education.

State standards are different than national standards and, guess what, even educators are confused.

Here are two El Paso questions:

How come Chapin High fell short of accountability standards, as reported by the Texas Education Agency on Aug. 1, but is not among the 37 El Paso County schools to have missed national Adequate Yearly Progress guidelines (No Child Left Behind) as reported Wednesday?

How come Socorro High is OK in Texas, but not in the nation?

And the two reports showed El Paso County schools did better in the state assessments over last year, but had more failing schools nationally than last year.

Surely somebody can explain this, but surely there are far too many people who just plain don't understand. That shouldn't be.

Parents who think they are alone in not understanding what's going on need not feel education standards are over their heads -- too intellectual for the common working stiffs. Don't worry, parents. Even those who do the teaching are confused.

El Paso school district Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia points out: "The multiple measures created some confusion. I have been a proponent for the federal and state governments to give us a common report card that looks at similar indicators."

As it is, both state and federal accountability agencies have been using the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS test). But they use different aspects of that test when making out their separate report cards that are sent to the individual school districts.

Does your child know his addition and subtraction, or not? Does your child know the name of the state's governor, or not?

State may say yes. The feds may say no.

Just as with taxing jargon, so goes confusion in education. Quite a few citizens have admitted their confusion when a taxing entity lowers a tax-rate, but it doesn't necessarily mean a person pays fewer taxes than the previous year. Now there are those -- parents and their teachers -- who are confused because their child's school may be adequate in the eyes of the state, but not in the eyes of the federal government -- and visa versa, as we have seen in some El Paso schools.

Perhaps testing measures can't be as easy as your ABCs, but it shouldn't take a genius to figure out if one's children are receiving a good education.

Labels: ayp, NCLB, Region 19

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:01 AM 0 comments Links to this post

12:00 AM CDT on Friday, August 17, 2007
By KAREN AYRES / The Dallas Morning News

One by one, Texas school districts are abandoning the bilingual education model that has been used to teach English to Spanish-speaking kids for the past 35 years.

Comprende usted?
Léalo (Do you understand? Read this).

Last month, a federal judge ruled that the state's bilingual programming complies with federal law and has achieved some success, allowing public schools to continue to teach students with poor English skills the same way they always have.

But school administrators and teachers, backed by education researchers, have decided there is a better way.

They call it dual language.

Advocates say it's superior to the old model because it helps students develop skills in both English and their native Spanish. Traditionally, Texas schools have transitioned students from Spanish to English in elementary school, forcing them to abandon their native language at a young age.

This past year, the Dallas Independent School District launched a dual model in the younger grades at its elementary schools. Many other North Texas districts, including Irving and Grand Prairie, have started pilot programs. Some programs will launch in the fall.

"With Dallas making the decision to go this direction, it's a major shift for the state of Texas," said Virginia Collier, a prominent national researcher on dual language programming.

Dual programs are configured many ways, but DISD has chosen the most popular model.

Here's how it works: Spanish-speaking kids receive about half their lessons in English and half in Spanish through fifth or sixth grade. The goal is for students to become bilingual while they develop math, science and other skills.

Some of the programs allow English-speaking kids – those whose parents want them to learn Spanish – in half the classroom.

The old bilingual model works quite differently: Teachers start Spanish-speaking kids almost entirely in Spanish in pre-kindergarten and gradually increase English lessons. The goal is for students to learn English quickly so they can enter a regular classroom as early as second grade.

Some educators and researchers worry that focusing on two languages in the dual programs could hurt basic skills in the long run. Still others believe English is the only language that belongs in a Texas classroom.

But many teachers and parents believe dual language will forever change bilingual education.

"It's not a politically charged issue, not when you're with the kids," said Stephanie Bunch, academic coordinator at Rosemont Elementary School in Dallas. "We're just trying to help them find their place in the world. We're in a global society now."

Need is there

The number of Texas students identified as limited English proficient, or LEP, grew by 48.3 percent between 1995-96 and 2005-06 to 711,000. It is expected to increase in the coming decades.

Those students perform well below their peers.

A Pew Hispanic Center study released in June shows there was a 60 percentage point gap between the limited-English students and white students in Texas who met the minimum requirements on eighth-grade math tests in 2005.

That difference jumped to 61 percentage points on the eighth-grade reading test.

It comes down to basic brain science, researcher Wayne Thomas says. The old bilingual model stops students' growth in their native language and interrupts the development of their thinking skills.

The students may learn English, but they don't pick up basic skills such as addition and subtraction. That problem resurfaces in later grades.

"The price of doing it that way and having the political satisfaction of having these kids speak English is that you slow them down cognitively," Dr. Thomas said. "They never catch up from that slowdown period. There is always going to be a gap because you forced there to be one."

How it works

That gap has prompted many districts to look at dual language.

Drs. Collier and Thomas – the most prominent researchers in the field – say dual programs boost test scores with about twice as much power as other types of programs for limited-English students.

This is how dual language is often set up:

Schools divide up the languages by subject area. Math lessons can come in English; science in Spanish. Once a child learns to add in one language, experts say, he can transfer those skills to his newly acquired language.

"You only learn to add one time," said Leo Gomez, a bilingual advocate who worked on Dallas ISD's program. "You don't learn to add again. What you need is the language to be able to express what you need."

To make dual work, teachers have to stick with the assigned language – no starting sentences in English and ending them in Spanish. And they can't favor the child's native language either.

"A child's ability to wait for the language that they're comfortable in is almost infinite," said Terrie Armstrong, who started dual programs in Houston ISD. "If they know their language is coming, they'll almost tune out the second language."

Most dual programs have only native Spanish speakers, but some districts are letting native English speakers fill half the class. Educators say the "two-way model," as it's known in education circles, has two benefits: Both groups pick up an extra language, and the students teach one another.

"The two-way model is like the Cadillac of dual language programming," Ms. Armstrong said.

But some question whether the limited number of bilingual teachers should be used to teach native English speakers.

"If you don't have enough teachers, how can you justify diluting the services to those children so other children can learn a second language?" asked Angel Noe Gonzalez, a longtime bilingual advocate.

Dallas ISD started seven two-way programs last year and plans to launch even more this school year.

Nora Ferrusca's kindergartners worked in pairs – one English speaker and one Spanish speaker – to color a map of the United States at Rosemont Elementary in Dallas this past year.

In the beginning, it was awkward, she said. One student's lápiz was another student's pencil. By the spring, English and Spanish voices filtered through the air in her classroom as her students played on the carpet.

"They're just used to it," Ms. Ferrusca said.

Stacy Caldwell enrolled her son Alex in the program so he could learn about another culture and pick up Spanish. She and Alex now check out Spanish books at the library. Some of his best friends are Spanish speakers.

"They don't always know exactly what each other is saying, but they are somehow able to communicate because they're kids," Ms. Caldwell said.

Still, Christine Rossell, a professor at Boston University, says learning a second language takes time away from learning basic skills for native speakers and non-native speakers alike.

"I'm willing to believe there are ways it makes you smarter, but it definitely makes a difference with the ordinary stuff you have to learn like grammar and spelling," Dr. Rossell said. "It's really as simple as time on task."

Court ruling

Last month's court ruling touched emotional territory in Texas.

U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice rejected arguments from Hispanic groups that contend the state's bilingual programming provides an inferior education to students with poor English skills.

Arguments over inferiority date back to the early 1900s, when English-only laws made it a crime for most teachers to use Spanish in the classroom and Mexican-American children often attended segregated schools.

The climate changed in 1973, when lawmakers approved a bill requiring districts to offer bilingual instruction if there are enough students who need it.

State lawmakers have encouraged schools to pursue dual language. In July, the state issued guidelines for schools that want to implement dual language, but the law still allows districts to choose whether to pursue it or stick with traditional programming.

Educators say it's often hard to get teachers and parents on board with a new dual program, especially a two-way model.

"If it's not looked at as an enrichment opportunity, it's not going to fly," said Gilda Evans, Dallas' director of bilingual programming.

Many North Texas districts are already talking about taking dual language to middle and high schools. Others are waiting to see how the programs go before deciding to expand.

"We can't just do it across the board and hope for the best," said Dora Moron, director of bilingual education for Irving ISD, which has a handful of dual programs. "We need to learn from the mistakes and the challenges and the celebrations."


Link to Pew Hispanic Center Study

Labels: dual language education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:22 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle
Thursday, August 16, 2007

A frustrating and persistent achievement gap between black and Latino students and their white and Asian American peers shows no sign of abating in the latest state test results for nearly 5 million students across California.

Overall, students of all backgrounds made minimal progress in English during the past year and no progress in math.

State schools chief Jack O'Connell said he was not surprised by the leveling off of improvement across the state, noting similar trends across the country that have followed growth spurts, as California had.

But it was the difference in achievement among ethnic groups that O'Connell said was most evident - and most disturbing - about the new test results.

"We cannot afford to accept this, morally, economically or socially," O'Connell said.

The results of the 2007 California Standards Test - taken by 4.8 million students in grades 2 through 11 last spring - are not scores but are percentages of students in every school and district who scored at or above grade level in each subject. Results were released Wednesday.

In English, 43 percent of students scored at grade level, up from 42 percent in 2006.

In math, 41 percent of students scored at grade level in both 2006 and 2007.

In the Bay Area, students are improving more in English than in math.

Among more than 170 Bay Area districts, 95 increased the percentage of students proficient in English since last year, compared with 55 improving that rate in math.

Statewide, more black and Latino students have scored at grade level in the core subjects in recent years, but they still lag far behind other ethnic groups.

O'Connell said the skill gap can't be explained by differences in family income. He noted that black and Latino students who weren't enrolled in the federal free- and reduced-price lunch program - the poverty indicator used by the state Department of Education - scored only about as well as white students who are enrolled in the lunch program.

Slightly more than 40 percent of middle-income black and Latino students scored at grade level in English- about the same as low-income white students. About 67 percent of middle-income white students did as well.

In math, 30 percent of middle-income black students scored at grade level, as did 36 percent of middle-income Latinos. About 38 percent of low-income white students scored at grade level.

The disparity raises serious questions about who might be failing these students of color and what can be done about it.

"For decades, our education system has provided kids of color less of everything that research says makes a difference in public education - even to middle-income kids of color," said Russlynn Ali, executive director of Education Trust West, an Oakland think tank. "Whose fault is that? Everyone who makes up the system."

O'Connell said he will invite experts to Sacramento on Nov. 13 and 14 to figure out what to do about the problem.

"We'll focus on that like a heat-seeking missile," he said.

On the brighter side, progress over the past five years has been steady among all groups.

In English, the percent of students scoring at grade level is eight points higher than it was in 2003, from 35 to 43 percent. That translates to about 442,000 additional students doing well.

The percent of low-income students scoring at grade level in English improved even faster since 2003, rising by nine points, from 20 to 29 percent.

In math, the percent of students scoring at grade level rose six points since 2003- from 35 to 41 percent. In higher-level math, skills declined by two points each in geometry and algebra 2, remaining under 30 percent.

But that slide could be explained by an increase in the number of students enrolled in the tougher math courses, O'Connell said. Geometry enrollment rose by 99,560 students, and algebra 2 added 68,209 more students to its rolls last year.

California's top-scoring school in English was a tiny high school with just 34 students in Nevada County called Ghidotti High. Every one of them scored at grade level or above.

The state's best in elementary math was Faria Elementary in the Cupertino Union District, Santa Clara County, a perennial winner. All but a couple of students scored at grade level.

In the Bay Area, the top-scoring district in English was Hillsborough City Elementary in San Mateo County, which came in second in math. The Bay Area's first-place district in math was Lakeside Joint School District in Santa Clara County, which placed 20th in English.

No student in either district was enrolled in the federal lunch program, and most had parents who were college graduates.

But the results also revealed some Bay Area schools doing unexpectedly well, given their students' challenges.

At San Francisco's Bret Harte Elementary - where 71 percent of students were in the federal lunch program and nearly two-thirds of students were black or Latino - more than half of the pupils were proficient in English.

They had also progressed by a stellar 12 points, so 53 percent of students were at grade level in English, up from 41 percent last year.Bret Harte fared less well in math, with 48 percent proficient - about the same as last year.

Vidrale Antoinette Franklin, who became principal four years ago after years as a Bret Harte teacher, credits not only her school's attention to academic skills - kids take diagnostic tests every six weeks - but her staff's attention to individual children.

"Expectations are high for students," Franklin said. "Teachers have to believe that students can learn."

For example, it would be easy to impose a zero-tolerance policy for acting up in class. But Bret Harte teachers have learned that it's more effective to figure out what's bothering children than to punish them.

"Most of the time, we give them something to eat, and they're back in class," Franklin said.

In Oakland, Think College Now Elementary also belied state trends and strongly raised its scores, though three-quarters of students are Latino and poor.

In math, 60 percent of students scored at grade level, up from 52 percent last year. And 49 percent did as well in English, up from 31 percent.

Principal David Silver credited his school's unique culture with raising students' scores.

Consider "Data Night." While other urban schools have trouble drawing parents to school even with a grand pasta feed, Silver said all he has to do is to promise a rousing evening looking at test scores.

"There's a philosophy," he said. "We set a big goal, set high expectations, and work hard to get the strongest teachers, strongest support staff. And we do whatever we can to support them."

Silver said he isn't allowed to choose his own teachers. But he said he recruits heavily and then works with the district to let him to hire the staff his team wants.

In addition, Silver said the school does not teach students the curriculum favored by the Oakland district, which has not performed as well as Think College Now, overall. Instead, the school teaches the subjects endorsed by the state - which are tested on the California Standards Test.

"Oakland is going more in that direction, too," he said.

Given that Think College Now is apparently doing a good job closing the achievement gap, would Silver consider sharing his secrets with the experts who will attend state Superintendent O'Connell's achievement gap summit in November?

"Sure," Silver said. "If I'm invited."

Labels: ayp, California, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:09 AM 0 comments Links to this post

The leveling off spurs concern. Also troubling are lagging results by the state's black and Latino students.
By Joel Rubin and Seema Mehta
The Los Angeles Times
August 16, 2007

California public school students posted small or no gains on standardized test scores last spring, raising concerns about a leveling off of previous achievement increases and continuing debate about the disparities between black and Latino students and their white and Asian peers.

Statewide, 41% of students reached the "advanced" or "proficient" level in math and 43% in English on standardized tests -- scores that marked no movement from last year in math and only a one-point rise in English, according to results released Wednesday by the state Education Department.

By contrast, students' scores had jumped 7 percentage points in both subjects in the previous two years. The results, researchers said, could be the beginning of a plateau in achievement levels that often comes after initial gains.

State officials had hoped the latest round of scores would provide more strong evidence to support their efforts to raise educational standards and accountability through testing. Sounding a more subdued note than in previous years, state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell turned particular attention on the comparisons between racial groups.

"This year's results offer both encouragement and reason for serious concern . . . But the data also show the persistent achievement gaps in our system that California simply cannot afford to accept -- morally, economically, or socially," O'Connell said.

The learning chasm that separates white and Asian students from Latinos and blacks is not new -- or unique to California -- and stands as one of the most troubling issues facing the country's public school systems. In California, white students cross the proficiency threshold at about twice the rate as Latinos and blacks in math and English -- a gap that has remained virtually unchanged over the last five years, since the current assessment program began.

But O'Connell ratcheted up the debate Wednesday. Educators and civic leaders, he said, must break the commonly held assumption that Latino and black students' low scores are due largely to the effects of poverty. For the first time, O'Connell compiled statistics that showed black and Latino students who are not designated as poor are performing below white students who are at or near the poverty level.

"These are not just economic achievement gaps; they are racial achievement gaps," he said. "We cannot afford to excuse them; they simply must be addressed."

O'Connell emphasized the economic toll that the growing ranks of poorly educated minorities could have on California. "I really do believe that the biggest threat to our ability as a state to remain the sixth- or seventh-largest economy in the world is to make sure is that these [groups of students] are prepared to become contributing members in our workforce."

Russlynn Ali, executive director of Education Trust-West, a public policy group that focuses on school reform, praised O'Connell for making the distinction between race and economics, saying she hopes it will lead to reforms aimed at improving resources and instruction for minority students regardless of their economic class.

Studies on teacher quality conducted by the group, for example, found that poor white students often have better access to more experienced, educated teachers than wealthier black and Latino students, Ali said.

"So often people think this is about poverty, but it's not just about the damage that poverty inflicts," she said.

The standardized tests, which include science and history in some grades, are aligned to the state's curricular goals and given to students in grades two through 11. Individual student scores will be sent to their homes.

The scores will be used later this month to help determine the ranking of every school in the state under the Academic Performance Index, which forms the foundation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Under that education measure, California must raise all students to the proficient level or above by 2013.

The 710,000-student Los Angeles Unified, by far the state's largest district, produced a muddied, mixed set of gains and setbacks among various grades and demographic groups.

Ninth-graders, for example, posted strong gains, with 25% more students scoring at proficient or higher and 40% fewer students than last year languishing in the "far below basic" category in English. But in grades six and seven, English scores declined after several years of slow improvements. The only unequivocal success came in the early elementary grades, where the district made progress -- albeit meager in places -- across the board.

Girls, meanwhile, performed several percentage points better than boys and, broadly speaking, L.A. Unified fared similarly to other urban districts such as San Francisco and Oakland.

The performance of the nearly 265,000 students in L.A. Unified who are struggling to learn English as a second language remained troubling, with most of them scoring either "below basic" or "far below basic" on language arts tests.

The district's weak track record in teaching these English learners has become a matter of sharp scrutiny. Last month, school board President Monica Garcia and board member Yolie Flores Aguilar sponsored a measure ordering district staff to redesign how these students are taught and their teachers are trained.

Overall, L.A. Unified improved at a faster clip than the state as a whole but remained well below California averages. Fewer than one out of every three Los Angeles students scored at or above proficient in English and only 28% did so in math. And hundreds of thousands of students in the district remained stuck at the bottom ranks of the exams.

"We've still got some real heavy lifting to do," Supt. David L. Brewer said. Along with improving instruction for English learners, Brewer emphasized that the district needs to better support failing schools, but it must also set clear, strict goals and hold school staffs responsible for meeting them.

The year's results present Brewer with a starting point of sorts. A retired Navy vice admiral, Brewer took over the district about nine months ago and is under considerable pressure to improve instruction, especially at middle and high schools. Any improvements or declines next year will be laid at Brewer's feet.

Capistrano Unified, a high-achieving Orange County district, showed spotty gains, flat lines and small dips over various grades in English and math proficiency between. In earlier years, students had made far larger gains. Similarly, in Santa Ana Unified, the state's fifth-largest district, growth at early grade levels outpaced the state but were slower than previous years' results.

Michelle Benham, Capistrano's executive director for assessment and research, compared the slowdown to a young child's learning curve.

"I have a toddler. The concepts she's gaining right now are huge," Benham said. "I wish she could continue to learn as much in the next 10 years of her life that she's learned in the first three."

Researchers said it would not be surprising to see this year's leveling-off of statewide results continue in coming years. The earlier gains came about partly as teachers grew more familiar with the tests and so better prepared their students, but replicating the significant jumps year after year becomes increasingly difficult, said Christy Kim Boscardin, a senior researcher at UCLA's National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing.

Such a trend would mirror what is occurring in other states, said Bruce Fuller, an education and public policy professor at UC Berkeley who led a recent national study on education accountability systems.

"California's consistent with what we're seeing around the country; nationwide, state test scores have begun to level off," he said. "The good news is we saw marked progress in [prior years] but the bad news is that the earlier buoyancy has largely faded."

Labels: ayp, California, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:05 AM 0 comments Links to this post

EdWeed Report Roundup, Published Online: August 9, 2007

Students who attend rural schools are more likely to demonstrate proficiency on national assessments of mathematics and reading than their urban peers, but do not do as well as those in the suburbs, a federal status report on rural education concludes.

Rural high schools also tend to have lower dropout rates than those in cities, but see a greater proportion of students abandon their education early than suburban schools do.

The report, the first conducted under a new classification system designed to more accurately classify schools by geographic factors, is based on data from the 2002-03 school year. It was released last month by the National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the U.S. Department of Education.


Full Report Here

Labels: Comparative Stuff, Rural schools

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:12 PM 0 comments Links to this post

More schools fail federal standards

Web Posted: 08/16/2007 12:08 AM CDT

Jenny LaCoste-Caputo
Express-News
Thirty-three San Antonio schools failed to meet the federal government's standards for the 2006-07 school year, up from 26 last year.
The schools failed to make adequate yearly progress — the key measure of overall academic performance under President Bush's sweeping public school overhaul, No Child Left Behind.

Several schools missed the mark for multiple years in a row, triggering sanctions ranging from allowing students to transfer to higher-performing schools to replacing school staff or extending the school year.

Twelve schools in the San Antonio Independent School District failed to make adequate yearly progress, the most of any of the city's school districts. The SAISD schools failed for a variety of reasons, including reading and math performance, percentage of students tested and graduation rates.

Sam Houston High School missed the mark for a fifth year in a row, so officials must now come up with a plan to restructure the school, as the federal law requires.

Options include reopening Sam Houston as a charter school, replacing staff or turning the school over to the state. If the school fails again for the same reason next year, the district would have to put the plan into effect.

A district spokeswoman said SAISD plans to appeal the federal rating for five of the schools, which were dinged because of their graduation rates. Superintendent Robert Durón did not return phone calls seeking comment.

The federal results come just two weeks after the state released school ratings under its accountability plan. The vast majority of the San Antonio schools that failed the federal standard were ranked academically acceptable under Texas' system. At least one was ranked "recognized," the state's second-highest rating.

Richard Middleton, superintendent of North East ISD where two schools — MacArthur High and Nimitz Middle — did not make adequate yearly progress, said the incongruence between the state and federal systems is confusing and misleading.

Nimitz, for example, is a recognized campus under the state's system for a second year in a row and won a grant from the state last year to create a new science, math and engineering magnet program.

"No wonder there's such confusion and disillusion among the public and educators," Middleton said. "The state of Texas and the federal government really need to come up with a common system that gives us one message."

Ten other local schools face federal sanctions because they have failed to make adequate yearly progress for a second, third or fourth time: Memorial High in Edgewood ISD; Tejeda Academy in Harlandale ISD; Fox Tech High, Navarro Academy and Wheatley Middle in San Antonio ISD; Somerset High in Somerset ISD; South San Antonio High West Campus and Dwight Middle in South San Antonio ISD; Southside High in Southside ISD; and McAuliffe Junior High in Southwest ISD.

The schools will be required to allow students to transfer to another school in the district and also may have to provide tutoring for low-income students. Depending on how many years the schools have missed the mark, they may be subject to additional sanctions.

Harlandale High School, which failed the federal standard last year, made drastic improvement this year and moved off the so-called "needs improvement list" — the U.S. Department of Education's term for the list of schools operating under sanctions.

Kathy Bruck, Harlandale's executive director of curriculum and instruction, said a new administrative team focused on struggling students, holding tutoring sessions on weekends and during school breaks and meeting with faculty twice a week.

Bruck said Harlandale High's principal, Rey Madrigal visited classrooms 1,300 times last school year and gave teachers feedback within 24 hours. Teachers came in during Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks and over Spring Break to tutor students.

"They were incredible," Bruck said. "They did whatever it took to get these kids where they needed to be."

Both the state and the federal rankings are based on scores from the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, the state's mandatory standardized test. But the two accountability systems measure success differently.

The federal law requires that schools make yearly progress, not just in their overall populations, but also in subgroups based on race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, learning disabilities and English-language ability.

Schools also can fail the federal standard if their graduation or attendance rate is too low or if less than 95 percent of students — in the overall population or in the smaller groups — are tested. The performance of a handful of students can sink an entire school.

The percentage of students that must pass math and reading tests for a school to meet the federal standard goes up each year. By 2014, the federal government expects 100 percent of public school students to pass.

Northside Superintendent John Folks said Stevens High School failed the federal standard because paperwork for six special education students' tests wasn't turned in properly. He plans to appeal.

Folks said the federal goal of getting 100 percent of children to the proficient level is setting schools up for failure.

"It's going to get harder and harder (to meet the federal standard)," he said. "We're going to do what's right for the individual child."


jcaputo@express-news.net

Labels: ayp, failing schools, NCLB

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

PRESS RELEASE
Media contact:
Bunnie Jackson-Ransom
404-505-8188

For Immediate Release:

Dr. Asa Grant Hilliard, III, Pan-Africanist, Educator, Historian and Psychologist, Has Passed From This Life
A Lifetime Teacher of African and African Diaspora History

"I am a teacher, a psychologist and a historian. As such, I am interested in the aims, the methods and the content of the socialization processes that we ought to have in place to create wholeness among our people."
--Dr. Asa G. Hilliard III

Atlanta, GA (8-14, 2007) Dr. Asa Grant Hilliard, III, world renowned Pan-Africanist educator, historian, and psychologist, passed from this life on August 13, 2007 in Cairo, Egypt. Dr. Hilliard was in Egypt to deliver a keynote lecture at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization (ASCAC), an organization he helped found. He was also lecturing for a study trip led by Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago. The cause of death is attributed to complications from malaria. “Dr. Hilliard was in his favorite place, with his favorite person – our mother, when he died,” said his daughter, Robi Hilliard Herron.
Dr. Hilliard was married for nearly 50 years to the Honorable Patsy Jo Hilliard, former mayor of East Point, GA and former school board member for the South San Francisco Unified School District.
Born in Galveston, TX on August 22, 1933 to Asa G. Hilliard II and Dr. Lois O. Williams. Dr. Hilliard graduated from Manual High School (1951) in Denver, CO. He received a B.A. from the University of Denver (1955) and taught in the Denver Public Schools before joining the U.S. Army, where he served as a First Lieutenant, platoon leader, and battalion executive officer in the Third Armored Infantry (1955-1957). He later received his M.A. in Counseling (1961) and Ed.D. in Educational Psychology (1963) from the University of Denver. In pursuit of his education, Dr. Hilliard worked in many occupations including as a teacher in the Denver Public Schools, as a railroad maintenance worker, and as a bartender, waiter and cook.
The professional career of Dr. Hilliard spans the globe. He was on the faculty at San Francisco State University; consultant to the Peace Corp in Liberia, West Africa; superintendent of schools in Monrovia, Liberia; and returned to San Francisco State as department chair and Dean of Education. At the time of his death, Dr. Hilliard was the Fuller E. Calloway Professor of Urban Education at Georgia State University in Atlanta where he held joint appointments in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and the Department of Educational Psychology and Special Education.
Dr. Hilliard was a Board Certified Forensic Examiner and Diplomate of both the American Board of Forensic Examiners and the American Board of Forensic Medicine. He served as lead expert witness in several landmark federal cases on test validity and bias, including Larry P. v. Wilson Riles in California, Mattie T. v. Holliday in Mississippi, Deborah P. v. Turlington in Florida, and also in two Supreme Court cases, Ayers v. Fordice in Mississippi, and Marino v. Ortiz in New York City. Dr. Hilliard has lectured at leading universities and other institutions throughout the world, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Geographic Society.
As a distinguished consultant, Dr. Hilliard has worked with many of the leading school districts, publishers, public advocacy organizations, universities, government agencies and private corporations on valid assessment, African content in curriculum, teacher training, and public policy. Several of his programs in pluralistic curriculum, assessment, and valid teaching have become national models. Dr. Hilliard designed the approach and selected the essays that appeared in The Portland Baseline Essays (Portland, OR) which represent the first time that a comprehensive global and longitudinal view of people of African ancestry has been presented in a curriculum.
In 2001, Dr. Hilliard was enstooled as Development Chief for Mankranso, Ghana and given the name Nana Baffour Amankwatia, II, which means “generous one.” Dr. Hilliard spent more than thirty years leading study groups to Egypt and Ghana, as part of his mission of teaching the truth about the history of Africa and the African Diaspora. He co-chaired the First National Conference on the Infusion of African and African- American Content in the School Curriculum in Atlanta. Dr. Hilliard was a founding member and First Vice President of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and a founding member of the National Black Child Development Institute. Dr. Hilliard was also a key advisor for the African Education for Every African Child Conference, held in Mali and sponsored by the government of Mali.
Research & Writings
Dr. Hilliard has authored more than a thousand publications including journal articles, magazine articles, special reports, chapters in books, and books. Some of his publications include The Maroon Within Us: Selected Essays on African American Community Socialization (Black Classic Press 1995); SBA: The Reawakening of the African Mind (Makare Publishing 1997),: and African Power: Affirming African Indigenous Socialization in the Face of the Cultural Wars (Makare Publishing, 2002), to name a few. He also co-wrote The Teachings of Ptahhotep, the Oldest Book in the World by Asa G. Hilliard, III. Williams, Larry. Damali, Nia Hilliard (Paperback - 1987) Blackwood Press and Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African American Students (Beacon Press, 2004). Additionally, he edited Testing African American Students, Nos 2 and 3: Special Issue of the Negro Educational Review Julian Richardson Assoc. Pub. (December 1990).

Awards
He has received hundreds of awards and recognitions from many prestigious organizations and institutions including the Morehouse College "Candle in the Dark Award in Education," National Alliance of Black School Educators "Distinguished Educator Award," American Evaluation Association, President's Award, Republic of Liberia Award as Knight Commander of the Humane Order of African Redemption, New York Society of Clinical Psychologists Award for Outstanding Research, Scholarly Achievement, and Humanitarian Service, Association of Black Psychologists Distinguished Psychologist Award, Association of Teacher Educators Distinguished Leadership Award, an award from the Kappa Delta Pi Honor Society Laureate Chapter, American Educational Research Association Committee on the Role & Status of Minorities in Education, Research & Development Distinguished Career Contribution Award, American Association of Higher Education Black Caucus, Harold Delaney Exemplary Educational Leadership Award, American Association of Colleges for Teacher Thurgood Marshall Award for Excellence, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary observance of the Brown v. Board of Education Topeka decision. Dr. Hilliard was a fellow with the American Psychological Association and has received honorary degrees from DePaul University, Doctor of Humane Letters; and Wheelock College, Doctor of Education.

Family
He is survived by his wife, Patsy Jo Hilliard and four children: Asa G. Hilliard, IV, Robi Hilliard Herron, Dr. Patricia Hilliard-Nunn and Michael Hakim Hilliard and seven grandchildren.
For those friends and colleagues who wish to give comments and expressions about the life and works of Dr. Asa G. Hilliard or to give remembrances to the family, you may do so at www.asaghilliard.com.
Dr. Hilliard’s family is requesting that in lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Per Maat Foundation, Inc., P. O. Box 357171, Gainesville, FL 32635. The Per Maat Foundation is a non-profit public foundation created to educate people about African and African Diaspora history and culture. All contributions are tax deductible.
# # #
Funeral Arrangements:
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Lay in state: 12:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Acclamation of Legacy & Community: 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Location: Martin Luther King, Jr. International Chapel

Thursday, August 23, 2007
Celebration of Life: 11:00 a.m.
Location: Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:11 PM 2 comments Links to this post

By Linda Jacobson / Ed Week (Vol. 26, Issue 45) August 13, 2007

The settlement of a lawsuit focused on basic learning conditions in California’s schools is resulting in significant improvements, according to a report from two of the organizations that filed the challenge.

posted by Patricia Lopez at 4:44 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is an interesting account of the condition of L.A. schools in the voices of the students themselves. Students really do need to have a voice and exercise it if we are to bring about constructive change. -Angela

Students teach educators about schools
Teens research some of L.A.'s most troubled schools and report to the mayor's team.
By Duke Helfand / Los Angeles Times

August 11, 2007

Educators and politicians who fret about Los Angeles' high school dropout crisis might want to heed the advice of 15-year-old Carla Hernandez: Hire more teachers who care. Slash overcrowded classrooms. Stop sending failing students to the next grade.

Hernandez and nearly two dozen other teenagers spent part of the summer studying several of the city's most troubled high schools with the guidance of a UCLA research program. On Friday, they delivered their findings to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's education advisors at City Hall.

Much of what the students found mirrors data reported by professional researchers -- namely, that half or more students at some schools drop out before graduation.

But Hernandez and her friends were able to articulate the crisis in the most personal terms, explaining, for example, how students lose interest in school because they don't get a chance to learn about their own heritage. Or how even the best students struggle to learn in unruly and overcrowded classrooms. Or how others give up and disappear when they fall behind in credits.

The young researchers painted a grim picture of the downward spiral that often haunts dropouts: They said 80% of California's prison population did not graduate from high school, a statistic that has appeared elsewhere in published reports. "You're all sitting here listening to the research, but if you don't do anything about it, then you're part of the problem," Hernandez, who researched Crenshaw High in South Los Angeles, told Deputy Mayor Ramon Cortines and other members of Villaraigosa's education team, which pledged to incorporate the students' ideas into plans for partnering with schools.

Hernandez and the other students from Los Angeles-area high schools conducted their research through UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education and Access.

During the five-week program that included classes at UCLA, the teenage investigators conducted surveys and interviewed students, teachers and administrators at several Los Angeles schools, including Locke High near Watts and Wilson High in El Sereno. They also spoke to Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. David L. Brewer and school board President Monica Garcia.

Two of the groups explored Crenshaw High and Roosevelt High in Boyle Heights, two campuses now under consideration by Villaraigosa as he prepares to announce a partnership with the district later this month that will allow him to play a role in running some schools.

They presented their findings Friday in PowerPoint computer presentations and video documentaries.

"It's hard to concentrate at school when you're thinking about the rival gangs surrounding Jordan [High] and Locke," said Earl Moutra, 17.

"It's taking a risk just to walk to school."

Moutra was part of a group that studied Locke High.

The four students on his team spoke about the influence of violence and broken families, called for greater collaboration between teachers and schools and urged instructors to listen more to students.

Notably absent from the City Hall meeting were L.A. Unified leaders, who had been invited.

A spokeswoman for Brewer said the superintendent was attending a meeting in San Diego. A spokesman for Garcia said she had a family commitment that could not be avoided.

Still, at least one school administrator said she welcomed the students' feedback. Roosevelt Principal Sofia Freire cited many of the same concerns raised by the students when ticking off the factors that lead to dropouts.

She said her campus of 5,200 students has been carved into 12 academies of 350 to 400 students so that teachers can get to know their students better.

"I believe that creating small learning communities is a way to personalize education for our students and make sure they don't fall through the cracks," Freire said.

Villaraigosa missed the five presentations, held on the top floor of City Hall. He showed up at the end for about 15 minutes and gave the students a pep talk, reminding them that he had dropped out of Roosevelt but returned, graduated on time and eventually made it to UCLA and law school.

"Who is better to ask about why kids drop out than young people," he said.

Seventeen-year-old Raquel Castellanos, who researched Roosevelt High, said she appreciated Villaraigosa's words but suggested that he spend more time in the schools to fully understand the depth of the crisis.

"He needs to go see for himself . . . from the students' perspective and the teachers' perspective," Castellanos said.

"He needs to get involved."

duke.helfand@latimes.com


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

Article licensing and reprint options

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

Labels: caring, Los Angeles

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:34 PM 0 comments Links to this post

The debate on the Top 10 Percent Plan is interesting so I'll also share this recent development. -Angela


Complaint Filed Against University of Texas With U.S. Department of Education Over Admissions Policy

WASHINGTON, July 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the Project on Fair
Representation (POFR) announces the filing of a complaint against the
University of Texas at Austin with the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S.
Department of Education. POFR asserts UT-Austin violated the law when race
and ethnicity were reintroduced in the undergraduate admissions process.
(see attached letter)
Edward Blum, director of POFR, said "UT's recent reintroduction of
racial preferences in undergraduate admissions is illegal, to say nothing
of being unfair and polarizing. The U.S. Department of Education needs to
end this practice before the next round of freshman applications is
submitted."
In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a pair of cases from the Univ.
of Michigan that under certain circumstances, and for a period of only 25
years, colleges and universities could use racial and ethnic preferences in
their admissions process in order to create a more "diverse" student body.
However, the Court wrote that before resorting to preferences, a school
must make a good faith effort to use race-neutral means to accomplish this
goal.
Following the Hopwood v. State of Texas court decision in 1996, the
Texas Legislature passed the Top 10% Plan in 1998. The Top 10% Plan is
facially race-neutral because it grants automatic college admissions to any
student graduating in the top-10 percent of his or her class. Under the Top
10% Plan, racial diversity at UT is higher today than it was when UT
employed a race-based quota system. In spite of this, the University of
Texas reintroduced racial and ethnic preferences into the admissions
process of the UT system, unlike Texas A&M which correctly rejected
reintroducing preferences in their admissions considerations.
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court repeated its warning to schools like
UT-Austin in its decision in Parents Involved In Community Schools v.
Seattle School District No. 1. In this case, the Court invalidated overt
racial discrimination, holding that the schools there "failed to show that
they considered methods other than explicit racial classifications to
achieve their stated goals."
The mission of the Project on Fair Representation (POFR) is to
facilitate pro bono legal representation to political subdivisions and
individuals that wish to challenge government distinctions and preferences
made on the basis of race and ethnicity.
Office for Civil Rights
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue, S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20202-1100

VIA FACSIMILE (202) 245-6840


Dear Sir or Madam:
Please accept this letter as a formal complaint against the University
of Texas at Austin (the University).
Beginning in 2005, the University of Texas at Austin reintroduced race
and ethnicity as factors for admissions at the undergraduate and graduate
school levels. We believe that the law prohibits them from considering
these factors at the undergraduate level for the following reasons:
1. Beginning in 1996, the University was prohibited from using a student's
race or ethnicity in the undergraduate and graduate admissions process
as a result of Hopwood v. State of Texas, 78 F. 3d 932 (5th Cir.),
cert. denied, 116 S. Ct. 2581 (1996).

2. In response this decision, the Texas legislature passed HB588 (1998),
widely known as the top-10 percent plan. This plan grants automatic
admission to the University (or any undergraduate program at any Texas
public institution) to any student graduating in the top-10 percent of
his or her graduating class.

3. Testimony during the debate on this legislation, and subsequent
speeches, writings, and testimony from University officials recognize
that HB588 is a race-neutral system designed to achieve greater racial
and ethnic diversity at the University without racial or ethnic
considerations.

4. UT's own records show that from 1996 to 2005, the top-10 percent plan
was just as effective as or even more effective in enrolling minority
students to the University than were race-based preferences. See
http://www.utexas.edu/student/admissions/research/HB588-Report9.pdf.

5. In 2003, in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), and Gratz v.
Bollinger 539 U.S. 244 (2003), the U.S. Supreme Court, while allowing
the narrow consideration of race and ethnicity in university
admissions, wrote that "Narrow tailoring does, however, require
serious, good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives
that will achieve the diversity the university seeks." The Court
repeated its warning to schools like UT in its decision last week in
Parents Involved In Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1
551 U.S.___(June 28, 2007). There, the Court invalidated overt racial
discrimination, holding that the schools there "failed to show that
they considered methods other than explicit racial classifications to
achieve their stated goals." (Slip op. at 27) (Emphasis added.)

6. The University has not only considered race-neutral means to achieve
diversity, but they have been effective as well. The law prohibits them
from re-introducing race and ethnicity as a factor in undergraduate
admissions.

We look forward to your response to this complaint.

Sincerely yours,


Edward Blum, Director

David Bissinger, Counsel


SOURCE Project on Fair Representation


Copyright © 1996-2007 PR Newswire Association LLC. All Rights Reserved.
A United Business Media company.

Labels: top ten percent plan

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

Data are important to look at here. Check out this link from the UT admissions research website for the racial and ethnic backgrounds of Top 10 Percenters. -Angela

Top 10 percent rule
I'm proud to have supported retention of admissions law, says Rep.

by Roberto Alonzo / Dallas Morning News

08:59 AM CDT on Friday, August 3, 2007

As the old adage goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." That is exactly how I feel about the top 10 percent automatic admissions rule that was left intact by state policymakers at the end of the 80th regular session of the Texas Legislature in May.

As a member of the House Committee on Higher Education and staunch supporter of fair and equal access to higher educational opportunities for all students, I celebrated proudly on May 27. Along with 74 House colleagues – Democrats and Republicans alike – we soundly defeated SB 101 on a 75-64 vote hours before the legislative session ended.

We preserved the 1997 law authored by the late state Rep. Irma Rangel of Kingsville – the first Latina state representative in Texas – and I am convinced that we will continue to make a college education accessible and affordable to more students in Texas. Rangel proudly authored this law in 1997 when she served as chair of the House Higher Education Committee, passing it convincingly.

Since the top 10 percent rule was adopted more than 10 years ago, Texas has been able to recruit and retain more students than ever before and give them the opportunity to obtain a college education, including many from low-income families, rural communities and small high schools as well as thousands from larger urban areas of the state.

To say that I am thrilled with the defeat of SB 101 is an understatement, because, as I have advocated consistently, our current law as written will continue to work and make a post-secondary education accessible and affordable to many young Texans who choose to go to college.

The research and statistical data is replete with evidence that the current law is working. I never supported the idea of capping or altering by any means the top 10 percent rule in Texas, especially when you consider the fact that Latino enrollment to Texas colleges and universities has increased by over 56 percent since the law was implemented in 1997.

Furthermore, the current track record that top 10 percent students outperform non-top 10 percent students in grade point averages, standardized tests scores, retention rates, percent graduating, length of time to graduate and percent needing remedial course work adds more significance to that important measure.

Finally, according to U.S. News & World Report, it should come as no surprise that nearly 90 percent of the entering freshmen at the best universities graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class. And this holds true for the best public universities, as well.

After all the personal testimonials I heard from college students speaking before the Higher Education Committee, the statistics and data I examined, coupled with the hundreds of e-mails, letters, telephone calls and faxes I received during the five months of the session, I can confidently say that the current top 10 percent rule has done a good job of increasing diversity – ethnic and geographic alike – on our college campuses and does not need fixing. It may not be a perfect law, but we need to give it a chance to work.

State universities still have work to do recruiting and retaining students from all walks of life, especially minority and rural students. Teachers, counselors and administrators must nurture and encourage students to be in the top 10 percent of their high school class, too.

I could not have been prouder as a state lawmaker to have helped preserve Ms. Rangel's legacy.


Roberto Alonzo represents House District 104, which includes parts of Dallas and Grand Prairie. His e-mail address is Roberto.Alonzo @house.state.tx.us.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/city/collin/opinion/stories/DN-central_alonzo_0702edi

Labels: top ten percent plan

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:47 AM 0 comments Links to this post

I want to dispute this comment by the editors of the Austin American-Statesman: " the real story of Johnston — as well as the keys to its success — lies in the data behind the test scores. State officials are finally paying more attention to that."

First of all, the story of Johnston was known long before the test score data became apparent. Moreover, if the theory of action were true that knowing about data results in effective responses, then Johnston shouldn't have been allowed to reach this level of crisis to begin with. Moreover, the structured silences in the data speak loudly, namely, all the kids who have been lost or disappeared from the school over the years who do not find their way into the test score count because they've already dropped out--los invisibles.

Finally, and at least a part of this is suggested below, reform really needs to be comprehensive and involve serious and not token investment. This involves investing in young people's social and emotional health and well-being. Teacher quality issues, as mentioned, is key. What is not mentioned is a need to invest infrastructurally in the school and surrounding neighborhood in order to remedy the blighted, urban reality that children experience in that area of Austin everyday. Businesses need to invest there. EVERYTHING, from curriculum, instruction, technology, youth development, leadership, university-school and school-community partnerships need to be re-thought.

-Angela

Stability key to ensuring Johnston's improvement

EDITORIAL BOARD, Austin American Statesman

Friday, August 03, 2007

It is easy to condemn Austin's Johnston High School, easy to write it off and easier to shut it down. Acting Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott might have won praise from some for a pass-or-perish approach.

Scott should instead be praised for drilling beneath the surface to determine that Johnston deserves time — at least another school year — to turn around failing performance. It is a more difficult road for Johnston and the families who rely on the school, but it is the right road.

This is the fourth straight year that Johnston High, in East Austin, failed to meet state standards on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exams. As a result, the school was again rated "academically unacceptable" on the 2007 state report card released this week.

As we have stated previously, the real story of Johnston — as well as the keys to its success — lies in the data behind the test scores. State officials are finally paying more attention to that.

It's encouraging that Scott pledged to help failing schools rise to meet state standards rather than washing his hands of their problems.

Schools such as Johnston, where nearly nine of 10 students are at risk of failing, should be judged as much on yearly progress as on basic test scores. When that is done, it's clear that Johnston earned the reprieve Scott granted this week.

Since 2003, Johnston students have shown improvement in all core subjects — math, science, social studies and English-language arts. In reading, for instance, overall passing rates increased by 38 percentage points from 2003 to 2006. But even when this year's decline is factored in, reading scores are up 28 percentage points over five years.

Another building block can be found in data that show what happens when students stay in school at Johnston for more than a year: Seventy-nine percent of students who entered as ninth-graders passed the English-language arts TAKS at the end of their 10th-grade year; and 52 percent of freshmen passed math as sophomores. But gains were greatest for students who stayed at Johnston for three years. Students have to be in school to learn and parents must assume a greater role in ensuring that their children go to school and stay in school.

Austin schools Superintendent Pat Forgione and his staff have put together a solid plan, called "First Things First," to address academic deficiencies and chronic absenteeism. We also commend state Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, for getting involved with Johnston. He has requested that Forgione, Scott and Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes help in developing a campus improvement plan for Johnston. But no one should ignore perhaps the biggest challenge facing Johnston: recruiting and retaining experienced teachers.

Up to this year, Johnston basically turned over half its teaching staff every year. Those inexperienced teachers were replaced by other inexperienced teachers. This year, the school, under Principal Celina Estrada-Thomas, has held on to 80 percent of its teachers. That's a start. But Johnston never will get the quality and experienced teachers it needs to do the tough job of educating at-risk students until Forgione, the district and the state are willing to pay for experienced teachers. The district is offering $1,000 stipends to teachers who work at Johnston and eight other schools with high needs.

The job is tougher at such schools, where teachers must be instructors, counselors, advisers and after-school tutors, not to mention truancy monitors. The amount is too stingy to lure good teachers from more comfortable positions in higher-performing schools. If we pay them, they will come — but they won't come for that money, and we don't blame them.

Finally, Forgione and Scott are being unrealistic if they think they can turn around Johnston in a year. Instead, they should look for more modest academic gains, improvements in attendance, stability in leadership and teaching staff, and yearly progress from students.


http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/08/03/0803johnston_edit.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:31 AM 0 comments Links to this post

The Heritage Foundation supports English as the
national language, attacks bilingual education.



Published: 08.01.2007

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE

Immigration reform: the need for upholding our
national language

MATTHEW SPALDING and ISRAEL ORTEGA


With the most expansive immigration and naturalization
overhaul in the past 40 years languishing in Congress,
it is worth pausing to reflect on the wise words of
Alexis de Tocqueville: "The tie of language is perhaps
the strongest and the most durable that can unite
mankind."
Lost in the immigration reform talk is a declaration
of English as our national language in both principle
and practice.
A common-sense amendment offered by Sen. James Inhofe,
R-Okla., would give every senator the opportunity to
affirm the importance of declaring, preserving and
enhancing the role of the English language in the
United States.
American history shows the nation's remarkable
resiliency in forging "Out of Many, One."
As opposed to other countries, where geography and
racial composition are requisites for citizenship, the
United States is rooted in a conscription of ideas,
among them are equality, liberty, democracy, freedom
of religion and self-government.
The United States affords people of any creed or color
the opportunity to become Americans.
Former President Ronald Reagan once remarked that
someone could spend an entire lifetime in China, speak
fluent Chinese, follow Chinese customs and yet never
truly be Chinese.
Critical to that success has been the role of a
unifying and singular language. The ability to
converse, interact, trade and communicate in a common
language is key in order for newcomers to assimilate
into the nation's unique fabric and become active
participants in - and valuable contributors to -
society.
History is scattered with examples of newcomers who at
first resisted learning a new language, only to
realize that without a firm understanding of English,
the American dream is effectively out of reach.
Unlike the past, however, when language assimilation
was strongly encouraged, multilingualism is now more
promoted. The problem is that multilingualism leads to
separatism, which works against assimilation. The
facts are staggering:
• One in 25 American households are linguistically
isolated, meaning that no one in the household older
than age 14 can speak English.
• 21.3 million Americans are classified as "limited
English proficient," a 52 percent increase from 1990
and more than double the 1980 total.
• The total annual cost for the California Department
of Motor Vehicles to provide language services is $2.2
million. Providing the same level of DMV translation
services nationwide would cost approximately $8.5
million per year.
Beyond the fiscal and bureaucratic nightmare of
multilingualism is the inherent danger of driving a
spike between English- and non-English-speaking
citizens.
Immigration tests the bonds of country and citizenship
unlike any other force because it involves a
fundamental change of allegiance.
A common language is the best way to ensure
assimilation among the citizenry; it assuages concerns
and sets forth a unifying medium for immigrants and
new citizens to pursue happiness and prosperity. In
return, assimilation encourages patriotism and a
deeper appreciation for the community and homeland.
Legislators must rise above the simple rhetoric of
purporting the significance of a common language, and
mandate the use of English in all federal functions
and capacities.
Sen. Inhofe's amendment establishes that " . . . no
person has a right, entitlement or claim to have the
government of the United States or any of its
officials or representatives act, communicate, perform
or provide services, or provide materials in any
language other than English . . . ."
This does not necessarily require that English be the
official or exclusive language of the nation. But it
does mean that English needs to be the primary and
authoritative language, particularly in public and
political discourse, as well as the laws, records and
proceedings of government.
In contrast, the Senate's immigration proposal would
have codified Clinton Executive Order 13166, which
requires the government to provide services in any
language on demand. This policy discourages immigrants
from learning English by effectively requiring
official multilingualism.
The empirical data in favor of English immersion - the
opposite of multilingualism - are overwhelming, with
even its most vociferous opponents conceding its
merits.
Among them is Ken Noon, the founder of the California
Association of Bilingual Educators.
Two years after leading the march against Proposition
227 (ending bilingual education), he stated, "I
thought it would hurt kids. The exact reverse
occurred, totally unexpected by me. The kids began to
learn - not pick up, but learn - formal English, oral
and written, far more quickly than I thought they
could."
Simply encouraging someone to learn English is not
enough. Immigration reform is a good vehicle to give
teeth to the long-held notion that English is the
"unofficial" language of the land.
If legislators are serious about fashioning one out of
many, then a unifying language requirement is both
sensible and necessary.
Americans must demand that their legislators act on
the principle described by Alexis de Tocqueville as
"the strongest and the most durable that can unite
mankind."

Matthew Spalding is director of the B. Kenneth Simon
Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation
(www.heritage.org). Israel Ortega is senior media
associate at The Heritage Foundation.

What I posted:

The empirical data is not in favor of English
immersion. In fact it is “overwhelmingly” in favor of
bilingual education. Study after study shows that
children in bilingual programs consistently do better
than children in English immersion programs on tests
of English reading. In addition, a number of studies
have shown that dropping bilingual education did not
increase English proficiency in California. Here are
some references:

Krashen, S (1999). Condemned without a trial: Bogus
arguments against bilingual education. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann.

Krashen, S. and McField, G. (2006). What works?
Reviewing the latest evidence on bilingual education.
Language Learner 1(2): pp. 7-10, 34.

Parrish, T.B., Linquanti, R., Merickel, A., Quick,
H.E., Laird, J., & Esra, P. (2002). Effects of the
implementation of Proposition 227 on the education of
English learners, K-12: Year 2 report. Palo Alto,
CA: American Institutes for Research, and San
Francisco: WestEd.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:27 PM 2 comments Links to this post

Hmmm. This starts off well. Probably a good read. -Angela

THE HISPANIC EXPERIENCE
Perspective on the Frontier

Houston Institute for Culture
SPECIAL FEATURE
Stolen Birthright: The U.S. Conquest and Exploitation of the Mexican

By Richard D. Vogel

A ghost from the past is haunting America. But this ghost is no phantasm
-- it is the emergence of millions of Mexicans and Mexican Americans,
descendants of the people who were dispossessed of their land and denied
their birthright in the southwestern United States, who are growing in
power and hungering for justice.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I: Conquest - Land and Wealth

U.S. Imperialism in the South and Southwest

The U.S. War on Mexico

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Part II: Exploitation - Capital and Labor

World War I and the Demand for Mexican Labor

The Great Depression and Mass Deportations

World War II and the Bracero Program

The Maquiladora Industry

Boomtowns and Busted Workers

The Impact of NAFTA on Mexico

Part III: Exodo - Reclaiming the Mexican Birthright

Essential Workers for U.S. Capitalism

Another 50 Years of Mass Migration

THE HISPANIC EXPERIENCE

The present population of Mexico is about 105 million people with a full
40 percent living in poverty. There are an additional 23 million
residents of Mexican origin (including 8.8 million Mexican-born) in the
United States. Almost 73 percent of them live in the border states of
California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas -- originally Mexican
territory. Beginning in the late 1980s, and continuing into the 1990s
there has been a significant migration of Mexicans into new areas of the
U.S. as the demand for their vital labor power has grown. In the past
twenty years, nearly 9 million Mexicans have migrated, both legally and
illegally, to the United States in search of a better life. The current
estimate of undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. is between 3 and 4 million
with another 300,000 to 400,000 crossing the border each year. And there
is no end of the migration in sight. Mexico's National Population
Council predicts that the Mexican-born population in the U.S. will at
least double by 2030, reaching 16 to 18 million.

Mexican immigrants work the most dangerous and lowest paid jobs in
America. Seventy-two percent of all legal Mexican immigrants and 91
percent of all illegal Mexican immigrants work in low-paying blue-collar
or service occupations. Despite their thrift and hard work, 61 percent
of all legal Mexican immigrants and their U.S. born children and 74
percent of all illegal Mexican immigrants and their U.S. born children
live at or under the U.S. poverty level. The current average annual
income for legal Mexican immigrants is 57 percent that of white
Americans, while illegal immigrants have to live on only 41 percent.
Even after 20 years of working in the U.S., the income of Mexican
immigrants is less than 60 percent that of white workers. But despite
their economic status in America, year after year they continue to send
a significant share of their earnings back to relatives in Mexico.

Mexican citizens who cross the border legally every day to work, shop,
or visit family line up at checkpoints on the militarized border that
partitions their original homeland: Tijuana/San Diego, Mexicali/Calexio,
Nogales/Nogales, Agua Prieta/Douglas, Ciudad Juárez/El Paso, Ciudad
Acuña/Del Rio, Piedras Negras/Eagle Pass, Nuevo Laredo/Laredo,
Reynosa/McAllen, and Matamoros/Brownsvil
le. An estimated 1 million
people a day legally cross the border in both directions. The largest
border crossing in the world is at Tijuana/San Diego where an estimated
50,000 people live on one side of the international boundary and work on
the other. The Ciudad Juárez/El Paso crossing is almost as busy.
Presently, 12 million people live along the Mexico-U.S. border, and the
population is expected to double in the next ten years.

Between official points of entry, the U.S. Border Patrol, the U.S. Coast
Guard, occasional units from the U.S. Army and Air Force, numerous state
and local police agencies (including the notorious Texas Rangers), gangs
of Anglo vigilantes, and armed landowners patrol the international
border to check the flow of desperate Mexican migrants.

Mexicans who attempt illegal crossings also face formidable man-made and
natural obstacles. Miles of concrete and steel barriers erected to block
their passage have diverted the flow of immigrants from the safer areas
near civilization into the wastelands of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan
deserts and deserted stretches of the broad and treacherous Rio Grande.
Though the border is monitored 24 hours a day by surveillance cameras,
night-vision scopes, and seismic sensors, the migrants get through.
Unknown numbers of Mexican immigrants die of heat exposure or drowning
every year. Scores more die or are injured in traffic and railroad
accidents. The toll taken on the travelers by traffickers, vigilantes,
and common criminals goes unreported. Over a million Mexicans are turned
back annually, but, because there is little economic opportunity in
Mexico, many return to try again. American border watchers estimate that
it would take an army of 20,000 Border Patrol Agents and an expanded
system of formidable fences and other barriers to stem the flow of
Mexicans who brave illegal crossings.

The unstoppable migration from Mexico to the U.S. is one the largest
movements of workers and their families in the modern age. This mass
migration from the underdeveloped South to the affluent North is the
specter from the past that is haunting America.

To be sure, there are other ghosts of history still lingering the U.S.
There are the shades of the Native American nations -- people
exterminated or driven to the edge of extinction for their land and
exiled to the wastelands of America. And there are the African American
people, mostly descendents of the survivors of slavery, some
assimilated, even prospering, and many, their cheap labor no longer
needed by U.S. capitalism because of its global runaway shops,
ghettoized in the cities or incarcerated in the vast prison system of
America. These people, too, hunger for justice. But it is the Mexican
people who present a unique challenge to American capitalism, a system
of exploitation that has historically targeted national minorities in
its unrelenting quest for profit.

Two elemental factors have affected the history of Mexicans in the U.S.:
first, unlike both the African American and Native American people, they
have had sanctuaries -- the borderlands of the American Southwest and
Mexico itself -- places to recuperate from the relentless exploitation
and regenerate, and, second, their labor power remains essential to
American capitalism. These two factors have saved the Mexican people
from the dismal fate of so many Native and African Americans.

Mexicans and Mexican Americans have endured over a century and a half of
exploitation and oppression and are emerging as a powerful force -- a
force that is already changing the social, economic, and political
landscape of North America. Stolen Birthright: The U.S. Conquest and
Exploitation of the Mexican People is a history of the expropriation of
over one half of the landmass of the republic of Mexico by the United
States and the historic and continuing exploitation of that country and
its people. Contrary to the official histories written on both sides of
the border, this inquiry leads to an affirmation of the Mexican people.


Copyright © 2004 by Richard D. Vogel.

----------------------------------------------------------
Richard D. Vogel is a retired teacher who writes about current social
and political issues. Other articles by the author are available at
monthlyreview.org .

HOUSTON INSTITUTE FOR CULTURE

THE HISPANIC EXPERIENCE

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:11 PM 0 comments Links to this post

August 2, 2007
A Study Finds Some States Lagging on Graduation Rates

By JENNIFER MEDINA

Dozens of states accept any improvement in high school graduation rates as adequate progress, and several set a goal of graduating fewer than 60 percent of their students, according to a study released yesterday by the Education Trust in Washington.

While the No Child Left Behind law has created a national focus on reading and math proficiencies, it has done little to raise expectations for the number of students graduating from high school, the report said.

Because the law allowed states wide latitude, the goals for graduation rates vary widely. Nevada, for example, says its goal is to graduate 50 percent of its students; Iowa sets a target of 95 percent.

Under the federal law, states must also set targets for annual improvements, but several states say that any progress at all — even just one more diploma — is good enough, according to data collected from the Department of Education.

The report found that state-set goals for raising graduation rates are “far too low to spur needed improvement.”

“The high school diploma is the bare minimum credential necessary to have a fighting chance at successful participation in the work force of civil society,” it said. “Yet current high school accountability policies represent a stunning indifference to whether young people actually earn this critical credential.”

But the report also found that the states’ goals are too modest to raise frequently mediocre rates of graduation. In Wisconsin, a high school can be considered to be making enough progress even it improves to just 60.01 percent, the report said.

The expectations for improvement “serve as an alarming indicator of an unwillingness to address the critical need of our high schools,” wrote Daria Hall, the author of the report. “We need targets that provoke action on behalf of the students, not ones that condone the status quo.”

In a speech this week, Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, chairman of the House Education Committee and an architect of the original No Child Left Behind legislation, said reauthorization of that law should include changes so that graduation rates were used as a key measure of performance.

The report praised New York City schools for making sizable improvements in the past three years. But while New York has raised its graduation rate by six percentage points over the last three years, it still hovers around 50 percent. For the class of 2006, just 41 percent of Latino students graduated in four years.

Ross Wiener, vice president for policy and practice at the Education Trust, a research group in Washington, said that states should aim to have 90 percent of students graduate in four years and that schools that did not meet that goal should improve their graduation rate by five percentage points over two years.

The report criticized states as not doing enough to track low-income and minority students.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Labels: graduation rates

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:07 PM 0 comments Links to this post