Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas: September 2007

PRESS RELEASE

Dr. Monty Neill (617) 864-4810
or Bob Schaeffer (239) 395-6773
for immediate release, Tuesday, September 25, 2007

NAEP DATA CONTRADICT BUSH ADMINISTRATION EDUCATION CLAIMS;
“NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND” HAS NOT LED TO FASTER SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

    Bush Administration claims about the controversial “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) law are undermined by data from its own Department of Education, according to an analysis of newly released National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores by the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest). “NAEP shows educational improvement across the nation slowed significantly since NCLB went into effect,” said FairTest co-Executive Director Monty Neill. “This happened despite the fact that curriculum narrowed in many schools to little more than test preparation in reading and math”
     “Gains from 2000 to 2003, before NCLB went into effect, were significantly greater than they were from 2003 to 2007, when NCLB was the law,” Neill continued. “That deflates the administration’s claims that federal law is driving school improvement. For example, black students’ 4th grade math scores jumped from 203 to 216 in the three years before NCLB took effect, then edged up to 222 from 2003 to 2007.”
     FairTest also cited today's National Assessment Governing Board news release on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) score trends, which acknowledges:
- “[Mathematics] gains made since 2003 are . . . not as large as those realized during some earlier period.”
- “The average 8th-grade reading score . . . remains below the level of achievement shown in 2002.”
    “The administration continues to cherry-pick test scores to defend its deeply flawed education policy,” said Neill. “There are much better ways to improve educational quality and equity. Congress should listen to the more than 140 national education, civil rights and religious organizations that have come together to call for an overall of this damaging federal law."
- - 3 0 - -
The multi-organizational statement calling for an overhaul of “No Child Left Behind” and other assessment reform materials are available at http://www.fairtest.org

Monty Neill, Ed.D.
Co-Executive Director
FairTest
342 Broadway
Cambridge, MA 02139
617-864-4810    fax 617-497-2224
monty@fairtest.org
http://www.fairtest.org

Labels: NAEP, NCLB, press release

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:11 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Voucher 'threat' sparks debate

Voucher 'threat' sparks debate

By Bob Bernick Jr.
Deseret Morning News

Published: September 25, 2007
A high-powered group of Utah businessmen and health experts put forward Monday a plan providing affordable health insurance to an estimated 360,000 Utahns, while GOP legislative leaders are accused of saying that the plan may fail in the 2008 Legislature if leading businessmen don't support vouchers on November's ballot.
"I find this highly offensive — tying health insurance for needy people to education vouchers," said Rep. Phil Riesen, an East Millcreek Democrat who sits on a United Way/business health care subcommittee that put together the comprehensive health insurance plan. GOP Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. is studying the plan to see if he will support it in the 2008 Legislature.
Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Dave Clark, R-Santa Clara, said his comments before the United Way subcommittee — on which both Clark and Riesen sit — were misinterpreted.
"It was not my intent to tether those two issues together," said Clark, the second most powerful Republican in the Utah House.
"I've never had (such) a conversation with a colleague. It has not been a part of any (GOP) leadership conversation — tying health care and vouchers together," said Clark Monday. And he personally does not tie the two issues together, Clark added. "But I do think that those are all relevant issues for discussion."
However, another person at the meeting said he took Clark's comments not as a threat but the GOP leader's candid assessment of the possible political realities in the Legislature — as unpleasant as they may be.
Huntsman spokeswoman Lisa Roskelley said the governor supports both an expanded health-insurance plan to insure more Utahns and the Legislature's voucher program. "But he believes the issues should be vetted and decided on their own merits" and not politically tied together, she said.
Riesen said the implied threat — as he took it — was made in August, just as GOP legislative leaders put together their pro-voucher political issue committee, called the Informed Voter Project. Clark is among the GOP leaders who set up the PIC.
The PIC's aim, as detailed in a Sunday Deseret Morning News report, is to raise at least $300,000 to push the private-school, voucher-tuition plan that goes before voters Nov. 6. The PIC is holding town meetings across the state, with GOP legislators and others trying to inform residents about vouchers and what they will do, GOP legislative leaders say.
According to Riesen, Clark, when asked about the political chances in the Legislature of the broad health-insurance plan, told the health subcommittee that if local businesses don't support the voucher plan, there would be little chance of the health-insurance plan passing the GOP-dominated Legislature.
"Dave said that the Legislature had been very supportive of Utah business in the past, but that given that the business community was not supporting vouchers, he didn't see (the health-insurance plan) passing at all," said Riesen, a former Utah TV newscaster.
"So, 360,000 Utahns are not going to get health insurance" because businessmen won't give money to pro-voucher GOP legislators, said Riesen, who like every Democrat in the 2007 Legislature voted against private school vouchers.
Clark said he never intended to tie together the Legislature's support of business — or support of vouchers several years ago by a group of businessmen — and the current lack of support for vouchers in the November election.
"I don't recall exactly" what he said at the subcommittee, but no connection was meant, Clark added.
GOP leaders admit that they met with local business lobbyists this summer to ask for financial contributions to the pro-voucher PIC.
Rep. Greg Hughes, R-Draper, who helped form the PIC, said GOP leaders brought together lobbyists and government liaison officials from businesses and/or trade associations that had previously backed a public education reform plan, which included vouchers. Because the businesses had backed vouchers previously, GOP leaders figure they should now put their money where their mouths are.
But Riesen said Clark's comments upset several members of the United Way subcommittee. "It was very offensive to hear that" from Clark, Riesen said. And some subcommittee members walked out after Clark's political analysis, Riesen added.
Vouchers "are a very emotional issue," Clark said. And he personally finds the anti-voucher ads "deeply disturbing and very disingenuous" — an inaccurate description of vouchers and their intent, he added.
The health-insurance plan — which would help businesses provide health insurance for their employees — is so large and far-reaching that Clark said he doesn't see it passing in the 2008 Legislature. "We hope to move the ball forward. But it will take time to educate people" about the health insurance proposal.
Legislative Republicans adopted a private school voucher law this past session that would provide $500 to $3,000 per child — depending on family income — for parents who send their children to private schools. The schools receive the voucher tuition money, not the families.
Pro-public education groups gathered enough voter signatures last spring to put the measure on this year's ballot.
If voters reject vouchers, most GOP legislators would face re-election in 2008 with voters opposed to one of their major legislative efforts. And a number of Republican lawmakers are apparently taking the voucher issue personally, working hard to get it approved in November.
Huntsman says he will not actively work in favor of vouchers before the vote, although he ran in 2004 on a pro-voucher platform and signed the lawmakers' bill into law last spring.

E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com

© 2007 Deseret News Publishing Company | All rights reserved

Labels: health care, Vouchers

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:58 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Voucher 'threat' sparks debate

Labels: health care, Vouchers

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:58 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Monday, September 24, 2007

Neil Bush link to federal funds questioned

Neil Bush link to federal funds questioned
Group seeks inquiry into purchases of educational equipment sold by Austin company.

Click-2-Listen
By Larry Lipman
WASHINGTON BUREAU
Saturday, September 15, 2007

WASHINGTON — A nonpartisan ethics watchdog group has urged the Education Department's inspector general to investigate why federal money has been spent on educational products sold by a company founded and headed by Neil Bush, President Bush's younger brother.

The company, Ignite! Learning, based in Austin, has sold curriculum-loaded projectors worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to school districts around the country, partially funded through the federal No Child Left Behind Act promoted by the president, according to a letter sent Wednesday from the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Over the past five years, Austin has spent $70,940 for the units, of which nearly $42,400 was federal money, according to documents filed with the letter to the inspector general. Longview has spent $126,400 for the units, of which $94,060 was federal money, according to documents.

In its letter, the watchdog group said there is no evidence the units meet standards in the No Child Left Behind Act.

"It is astonishing that taxpayer dollars are being spent on unproven educational products to the financial benefit of the president's brother," said Melanie Sloan, the group's executive director. "The IG should investigate whether children's educations are being sacrificed so that Neil Bush can rake in federal funds."

Devon Price, director of marketing for Ignite! Learning, confirmed that Neil Bush is the company's founder and chief executive. Bush could not be reached for comment.

The company "has no control over how school districts choose to spend federal funds," a statement said.

It also claimed that the group's letter contains inaccurate statements about the Ignite curriculum, which it said is used in 22 states.

"What we can say is that Title I and other federal monies have been used to purchase Ignite products, just as they have been used to purchase products from every other educational publisher and provider," the statement said.

larryl@coxnews.com

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/nation/09/15/0915ignite.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:04 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Sunday, September 23, 2007

New position aims to raise attendance rates

By KATHERINE CROMER BROCK
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

GRAPEVINE -- As a member of a family of migrant workers, Marina Flores grew up all over the country -- Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, California, Arizona, Texas.

"It was hard," said Flores, now 47. "We didn't realize how hard it was at the time."

But that helps her relate to some students she meets in her new job as Grapevine-Colleyville's attendance interventionist.

"I was a student who moved around and knew what it was like to be all over the country," Flores said. "But you can overcome a little bit of harshness. I do feel that I can relate, especially to the kids who feel that they're a square peg being pushed into a round hole."

The district created Flores' job, which has a salary of $54,390, to help students who are at risk of dropping out or not graduating.

"It's providing additional support for our kids who are struggling," said Superintendent Kay Waggoner. "The greatest focus will be at the high school level. That's where the need will be the greatest."

Flores started work in August. She's rarely in her office, often racing between schools and visiting students at home.

Her priority is to find fifth-year seniors, those who did not graduate last year with the rest of their class. She has a list of 15 to 20. If they're not in school by Sept. 28, they're considered dropouts by the state, and can count against the district's state accountability rating.

Flores said the district will do whatever it takes to help these students finish their coursework, pass required classes or pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

She expects to coordinate with social service agencies and schools to get students the tools they need to achieve those goals. They need their diploma, she said, regardless of the hardships they face.

"That one little piece of paper makes a huge difference in their lives," Flores said. "They don't see that right now."

Flores said she will also help younger students who struggle with attendance. The district's overall attendance rate is 97 percent.

Most area districts don't have a similar position. Some, like Birdville, Arlington and Fort Worth, have truancy officers who are current or former police officers.

"My job is not the truancy officer," said Flores. "I am not out here to police anything. I am an educator."

Flores has a degree in history and elementary education from the University of Texas at Arlington and a master's degree in education administration. She was a teacher's assistant at St. John the Apostle Catholic School in North Richland Hills for six years, and taught in the Hurst-Euless-Bedford district for 11 years.

In H-E-B, she taught first and third grades and worked with special-education students.

Flores is excited about what her new job can become, especially working hand-in-hand with Sharon Greene, the district's social worker.

"What we're doing is helping students to understand how we can do this together," Flores said. "It will help us, but it will ultimately benefit them and help the students be successful in the long run."

Flores said support from the community is key to the success of her mission.

"Put children first," she said, as a message to anyone in the community who has regular contact with children. "Always have respect for education. We're striving to teach and raise our children and to help society as a whole."

Labels: caring

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:45 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Top 10 percent gives equal access to flagship schools

Time to work on upping capacity and preparation
By STEPHEN BROWN II
Houston Chronicle
Sept. 19, 2007

As we begin another school year, now is the time to remember what saved Texas' top 10 percent rule was the awakening of members in the state House who could not bring themselves to vote against a rule that has achieved its initial purpose in most districts. It's equally important for the general public to understand its benefits, as well. In reality, the top 10 percent rule is not where the system is broke. In fact, it's been one of the true successes in achieving a merit-based system that gives all Texas students access to our state's flagship universities.

This past session, in large part based on the urgings of one university — the University of Texas at Austin — the Texas Legislature was well on its way to drastically limiting the impact of the top 10 percent rule by capping the number of students enrolling under it to 50 percent. UT officials failed to appreciate the overwhelming benefit of enrolling a diverse, competitive field of incoming freshmen. In one of the session's more dramatic moments, legislators representing mostly rural and inner city schools defeated attempted modifications to the top 10 percent rule.

What has been the impact of Top Ten? African-American enrollment has almost doubled at the University of Texas, from 266 in 1996 to 400 in 2006. Similarly, Hispanic enrollment at that university grew from 932 to 1,300.

A substantial amount of growth can be attributed to this rule change, as 75 percent of incoming African Americans and 80 percent of incoming Hispanics were top 10 percent students.

These students have demonstrated the ability to not only meet the expectations of academic excellence but in most cases to exceed them.

According to UT Austin's own data, top 10 percent students outperform non-top 10 students in GPA, retention and graduation rates. Despite some of these students not coming out of premier high schools, they are nevertheless capable of making the necessary adjustments at the college level. That is, exceptional students will perform exceptionally in almost any environment that they are placed.

All students in poor performing schools and school districts deserve a better pipeline of opportunity throughout their public school careers.

Instead of punishing the top 10 percenters from underperforming high schools by limiting their access to UT, why not focus on rebuilding these schools with the resources, tools and teachers needed to improve its performance? Our state can't afford the disparity gap that exists within our public school system. That's an issue of college preparedness that has shown to be distinctly different from the ability of top 10 percenters to perform (or even outperform) their contemporaries in our state's elite universities.

While UT clamors about diminishing capacity and an inability to attract talented nontop 10 percent students, the question remains why UT Austin continues to fill the nontop 10 percent spaces with the traditional suburban students that meant over 50 percent of UT's student body came from 65 schools prior to the enactment of the top 10 percent plan. Capping the top 10 percent plan would result in fewer talented students from rural, inner-city and border high schools and more students from a select few suburban high schools. Further, the capacity issue that exists at UT-Austin is one that can be addressed without limiting top 10 percenters. Members of the House Education Committee questioned if UT-Austin is experiencing a capacity problem why does it only have a 47 percent classroom utilization rate?

Maximizing existing space to meet the needs of all who are qualified and eligible to attend should be UT's first priority. The increased revenue that the school would receive by enrolling the students to fill those empty rooms would more than offset any additional faculty costs. If UT Austin still remains overbooked after addressing classroom utilization, incentives could be offered to students willing to volunteer to attend other state universities.

The answer lies with creative solutions to open the doors of access to higher education and not closing them on students who have proved themselves worthy at every opportunity given.

Brown is the managing director of Capitol Assets, a Houston-based public affairs firm and volunteer advocate for the Houston Area Urban League.

Labels: top ten percent plan

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:40 PM 0 comments Links to this post

A kind of double talk

By LISA FALKENBERG
Houston Chronicle
Sept. 17, 2007

The candy-colored classroom full of pre-kindergarten students at Cedar Brook Elementary School seems typical, except that half of the 22 cross-legged 4-year-olds, mostly the blond ones, seem lost.

As the teacher leads the class through early morning songs and drills on colors, numbers and months of the year, some children exclaim answers and belt out lyrics. Some move their mouths but make no sounds. Still others make sounds but make no sense.

All that's to be expected. Every child in the class, regardless of his or her native language, is being taught in Spanish. After lunch, they'll get some instruction in English.

The method of instruction is known as a two-way form of "dual language," a twist on traditional bilingual instruction that combines native English speakers and native Spanish speakers in one class, with the goal of helping both become bilingual.

Praised, criticized
The immersion technique has been around for decades and has been implemented in schools across Texas. There are plenty of challenges in implementing the program, such as finding enough native English speakers to balance out the classes. But, generally, educators and researchers sing its praises, especially in regards to helping children from Spanish-speaking homes learn English while keeping pace with their peers academically.

Still, a Republican state lawmaker caught hell several months ago when he passed a bill setting up a six-year, dual-language pilot program in 30 campuses in 10 public school districts across the state.

Rep. Rob Eissler of The Woodlands, who is chairman of the House Public Education Committee, said his plan to expand the successful dual-language model got all tangled up with the immigration debate. "The only controversy is that it's being tied to illegal immigration,'' Eissler says.

"The negative stuff I hear is that 'you're bending over for these kids, for illegal immigrants,' that it's more for illegal kids than for native kids. And that's not the case. It's a more effective way to teach English. And, on a voluntary basis, English speakers get to learn another language."

Eissler said he's still waiting to see if the Texas Education Agency will fund the dual-language pilot program.

One of the leading naysayers, Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, said supporters were "worshipping at the feet of diversity." She said Texas students should focus on mastering English, period, and claimed a dual-language pilot would turn Texas students into guinea pigs.

Perhaps Riddle was unfamiliar with humankind's ability to learn many languages and the cognitive, social and economic benefits of doing so. Perhaps she was unaware of programs like the one at Cedar Brook in Spring Branch ISD, which began dual language a decade ago with apparently shining results.

The voluntary dual-language program is so popular, the school holds a lottery to determine who gets in and its participants make up about two-thirds of the 580-student body, said program coordinator Susan Eyre.

I visited a pre-K class and a class of fifth-graders nearing the end of several years of dual-language instruction at Cedar Brook.

Learning the language

In the pre-K class, a teacher used signs and body language to convey meaning as she instructed in Spanish. After only a few weeks, some English speakers had begun to understand her. One little girl, asked in Spanish if she wanted to write her name on another page, responded, albeit in English, "No, we can't do another page."

During a game teaching body part vocabulary, an English-speaking boy exclaimed, "Ears! Escucha!" the Spanish word for "listen."

Others learned at their own pace.

During Spanish song time, one boy in Spider-Man sneakers played with the drawstring on his pants and rubbed his eyes. In the middle of a verse, a little blond girl struggling through a song of salutations finally stuck out a twisted, tuckered-out tongue. The teacher, asking another what color she was wearing, encouraged the silent girl to respond, "Habla, mami. Rojo!" she said.

It's usually around Christmas when the students start verbalizing in their non-native language, Eyre said. Through first grade, the students are taught 90 percent in Spanish and 10 percent English.

"Some parents say, 'You mean you're going to teach my child to read in Spanish first?' " Eyre said. She said others ask, "How am I going to help my child when I don't speak Spanish?"

Eyre assures them that the process of language acquisition is the same, no matter the language, and that English skills would be incorporated into social studies, science and math, which are taught in English. By second grade, classes are taught in 80 percent Spanish, then 70 percent in third grade, 60 percent in fourth, until fifth grade, when students get an even 50/50 exposure to both languages.

The results are impressive. A diverse classroom of fifth-graders, Hispanic, white and black, worked on word problems and answered a teacher's questions in fluent Spanish.

When given a chance to talk amongst themselves, however, nearly every group chose the language of the land: English.

The only shortcoming of Cedar Brook's dual-language students seems to be the dreaded task of learning quirky English grammar. Because they don't have language arts in English until the fifth grade, they sometimes stumble over tricky spelling words, contractions, sentence structure and letter combinations that don't exist in Spanish.

"They're awesome Spanish writers, but everything is in English now," said teacher Jim Garrett. "The first week they were spelling 'with' like 'w-i-t.' They were just trying to imagine how to spell it because there's no 'th' sound in the Spanish language."

Not to worry. Garrett said the students catch up when standardized tests roll around.

Cedar Brook Elementary gets the highest possible rating by the state: exemplary.

Labels: dual language education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:18 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Friday, September 21, 2007

Debate on Ending SAT Gains Ground

This piece also provides fodder for those seeking portfolio-based assessment as part of the re-authorization of NCLB. It's interesting that it's Charles Murray behind this, author of THE BELL CURVE. -Angela

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

September 19, 2007
Debate on Ending SAT Gains Ground

By PATRICIA COHEN
The social scientist Charles Murray has a knack for noisily tapping into cultural preoccupations. In his 1984 book, “Losing Ground,” he argued that welfare perpetuated dependency and should be eliminated. In “The Bell Curve” (1994), which he wrote with Richard J. Herrnstein, he argued that those who get ahead in America (mostly whites) are genetically endowed with more intelligence than those who do not (disproportionately African-Americans).

Now Mr. Murray is at it again, proposing in a recent article to abolish the SAT. This position cannot help but provoke a double-take. After all, while making his arguments about genes, race and intelligence, Mr. Murray promoted the I.Q. test as a reliable measure of aptitude. Yet he is suggesting that one of the most widely used assessment tests be eliminated.

With so many college officials and parents dissatisfied with the SAT, even those who think Mr. Murray’s other theories are misguided or offensive could find themselves agreeing with him on this issue.

Unlike other critics of the SAT, Mr. Murray does not see the test as flawed, nor does he think that the wealthy have an unfair advantage because they can buy expensive coaching. But he recognizes that most people do not agree with him and believe the test is rigged to favor the rich. “It is a corrosive symbol of privilege,” he said.

And so, he concludes that college admissions offices should reject the SAT and substitute other standardized tests: subject or so-called achievement tests that gauge knowledge in specific disciplines like history or chemistry.

“This is really a hot topic,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard University. Mr. Fitzsimmons, who is chairman of a commission on testing organized by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said, “We’re going to be talking about these issues” when the commission meets next week at the association’s annual convention in Austin, Tex.

Mr. Fitzsimmons said he sent every panel member a copy of “Abolish the SAT,” an article Mr. Murray wrote this summer in which he outlined his new idea.

The article appeared in The American magazine, published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, where Mr. Murray is a scholar.

During a recent visit to New York from his home in Burkittsville, Md., Mr. Murray called his views on the SAT “a direct follow-up to ‘The Bell Curve.’ ”

His doubts about the exam started after he read a 2001 study and follow-up done at the University of California finding that the combination of high school grades and standardized subject test scores predicted success in college just as well as the SAT.

“I read that and said, ‘This can’t be right,’ ” said Mr. Murray, who has long credited the SAT with revealing his own aptitude in 1961, when he applied to Harvard from an obscure high school in Newton, Iowa. But after further study, he decided the research was right.

Mr. Fitzsimmons said subject tests were the best predictor of good grades at Harvard, high school grade point average was second and the SAT was third. Although few colleges ask for subject tests, Harvard requires applicants to take three as well as the SAT, to give students more ways to show their abilities, he said.

The College Board, which administers both the SAT and the subject tests, not surprisingly said both were important. Although many more students take the SAT than the subject tests, Laurence Bunin, the board’s vice president of operations, said, “For kids who take both, 30 percent do differently on them.” Black students in this group, he added, more often do a bit better on the SAT than on the subject tests.

Where Mr. Murray and some other SAT skeptics may part company is in explaining why students from wealthy, highly educated families are overwhelmingly the high scorers.

Mr. Murray said this had nothing to do with being able to afford coaching because short-term test preparation had an insignificant impact on results. Both Mr. Fitzsimmons and the College Board agree that research shows that commercial coaching affects scores only marginally. “The urban legends about test preparation hurt the face validity of the test,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “If we do nothing else in this commission except get out that information about test preparation, then it would be worthwhile.”

Although coaching would no doubt continue if subject tests replaced the SAT, at least students would be focused on content as much as test-taking strategies, Mr. Murray said. There would also be pressure to improve local high school curriculums so that students were prepared, he wrote.

These arguments make sense to Mr. Fitzsimmons, who said, “People are going to prepare anyway, so they might as well study chemistry or biology.” He added that “the idea of putting more emphasis on the subject tests is of great interest” to his group.

But Mr. Murray takes his argument a step further. “The children of the well educated and affluent get most of the top scores because they constitute most of the smartest kids,” Mr. Murray wrote. “They are smart because their parents are smart.”

It is in the genes, he believes, rejecting the notion that wealth, privilege and cultural familiarity might be responsible for success instead.

This is the same point made in “The Bell Curve.” Although the brief sections of the book devoted to genes and race dominated debates, the authors’ overarching theme was about the widening gap between the successful, wealthier “cognitive elite,” who are marrying each other and passing on their talents and smarts to their children, and the impoverished underclass, who are leaving their children a legacy of weakness.

“We are cognitively stratified in a very worrisome way,” Mr. Murray said over coffee. “It is meritocracy with a vengeance. We now have increasing isolation from each other that is different from the old socioeconomic stratification.”

Mr. Murray said he had been thinking about these issues for a book he is working on about higher education, titled “Simple Truths.” He has four of them: Ability varies; half of all children are below average; too many people go to college; and the future depends on how the gifted are educated. At the moment, he said, “our college system is broke.”

On one hand, a proposal to abolish what is arguably the single most influential criterion for admission to college sounds pretty radical. On the other, Mr. Murray is simply suggesting that admissions officers replace one kind of nationally standardized test administered by the College Board with another kind.

Yet wouldn’t the subject tests eventually fall prey to the same failings of the SAT? No, said Mr. Murray, arguing that tests in subject areas studied in school lack the mystique of the SAT.

“A low-income student shut out of opportunity for an SAT coaching school has the sense of being shut out of mysteries,” he wrote. “Being shut out of a cram course is less daunting. Students know that they can study for a history or chemistry exam on their own.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Labels: aptitude, I.Q., intelligence testing, SAT, subject testing

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:29 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Debate on Ending SAT Gains Ground

September 19, 2007
Debate on Ending SAT Gains Ground

By PATRICIA COHEN
The social scientist Charles Murray has a knack for noisily tapping into cultural preoccupations. In his 1984 book, “Losing Ground,” he argued that welfare perpetuated dependency and should be eliminated. In “The Bell Curve” (1994), which he wrote with Richard J. Herrnstein, he argued that those who get ahead in America (mostly whites) are genetically endowed with more intelligence than those who do not (disproportionately African-Americans).

Now Mr. Murray is at it again, proposing in a recent article to abolish the SAT. This position cannot help but provoke a double-take. After all, while making his arguments about genes, race and intelligence, Mr. Murray promoted the I.Q. test as a reliable measure of aptitude. Yet he is suggesting that one of the most widely used assessment tests be eliminated.

With so many college officials and parents dissatisfied with the SAT, even those who think Mr. Murray’s other theories are misguided or offensive could find themselves agreeing with him on this issue.

Unlike other critics of the SAT, Mr. Murray does not see the test as flawed, nor does he think that the wealthy have an unfair advantage because they can buy expensive coaching. But he recognizes that most people do not agree with him and believe the test is rigged to favor the rich. “It is a corrosive symbol of privilege,” he said.

And so, he concludes that college admissions offices should reject the SAT and substitute other standardized tests: subject or so-called achievement tests that gauge knowledge in specific disciplines like history or chemistry.

“This is really a hot topic,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard University. Mr. Fitzsimmons, who is chairman of a commission on testing organized by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said, “We’re going to be talking about these issues” when the commission meets next week at the association’s annual convention in Austin, Tex.

Mr. Fitzsimmons said he sent every panel member a copy of “Abolish the SAT,” an article Mr. Murray wrote this summer in which he outlined his new idea.

The article appeared in The American magazine, published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, where Mr. Murray is a scholar.

During a recent visit to New York from his home in Burkittsville, Md., Mr. Murray called his views on the SAT “a direct follow-up to ‘The Bell Curve.’ ”

His doubts about the exam started after he read a 2001 study and follow-up done at the University of California finding that the combination of high school grades and standardized subject test scores predicted success in college just as well as the SAT.

“I read that and said, ‘This can’t be right,’ ” said Mr. Murray, who has long credited the SAT with revealing his own aptitude in 1961, when he applied to Harvard from an obscure high school in Newton, Iowa. But after further study, he decided the research was right.

Mr. Fitzsimmons said subject tests were the best predictor of good grades at Harvard, high school grade point average was second and the SAT was third. Although few colleges ask for subject tests, Harvard requires applicants to take three as well as the SAT, to give students more ways to show their abilities, he said.

The College Board, which administers both the SAT and the subject tests, not surprisingly said both were important. Although many more students take the SAT than the subject tests, Laurence Bunin, the board’s vice president of operations, said, “For kids who take both, 30 percent do differently on them.” Black students in this group, he added, more often do a bit better on the SAT than on the subject tests.

Where Mr. Murray and some other SAT skeptics may part company is in explaining why students from wealthy, highly educated families are overwhelmingly the high scorers.

Mr. Murray said this had nothing to do with being able to afford coaching because short-term test preparation had an insignificant impact on results. Both Mr. Fitzsimmons and the College Board agree that research shows that commercial coaching affects scores only marginally. “The urban legends about test preparation hurt the face validity of the test,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “If we do nothing else in this commission except get out that information about test preparation, then it would be worthwhile.”

Although coaching would no doubt continue if subject tests replaced the SAT, at least students would be focused on content as much as test-taking strategies, Mr. Murray said. There would also be pressure to improve local high school curriculums so that students were prepared, he wrote.

These arguments make sense to Mr. Fitzsimmons, who said, “People are going to prepare anyway, so they might as well study chemistry or biology.” He added that “the idea of putting more emphasis on the subject tests is of great interest” to his group.

But Mr. Murray takes his argument a step further. “The children of the well educated and affluent get most of the top scores because they constitute most of the smartest kids,” Mr. Murray wrote. “They are smart because their parents are smart.”

It is in the genes, he believes, rejecting the notion that wealth, privilege and cultural familiarity might be responsible for success instead.

This is the same point made in “The Bell Curve.” Although the brief sections of the book devoted to genes and race dominated debates, the authors’ overarching theme was about the widening gap between the successful, wealthier “cognitive elite,” who are marrying each other and passing on their talents and smarts to their children, and the impoverished underclass, who are leaving their children a legacy of weakness.

“We are cognitively stratified in a very worrisome way,” Mr. Murray said over coffee. “It is meritocracy with a vengeance. We now have increasing isolation from each other that is different from the old socioeconomic stratification.”

Mr. Murray said he had been thinking about these issues for a book he is working on about higher education, titled “Simple Truths.” He has four of them: Ability varies; half of all children are below average; too many people go to college; and the future depends on how the gifted are educated. At the moment, he said, “our college system is broke.”

On one hand, a proposal to abolish what is arguably the single most influential criterion for admission to college sounds pretty radical. On the other, Mr. Murray is simply suggesting that admissions officers replace one kind of nationally standardized test administered by the College Board with another kind.

Yet wouldn’t the subject tests eventually fall prey to the same failings of the SAT? No, said Mr. Murray, arguing that tests in subject areas studied in school lack the mystique of the SAT.

“A low-income student shut out of opportunity for an SAT coaching school has the sense of being shut out of mysteries,” he wrote. “Being shut out of a cram course is less daunting. Students know that they can study for a history or chemistry exam on their own.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:44 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Support Grows for Teacher Bonuses

More Schools Offer Performance Pay as House Debates Issue

By Michael Alison Chandler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 18, 2007; Page A01

A movement gaining momentum in Congress and some school systems in the Washington region and beyond would boost pay for exceptional teachers in high-poverty schools, a departure from salary schedules based on seniority and professional degrees that have kept pay in lockstep for decades.

Lawmakers are debating this month whether to authorize federal grants through a revision of the No Child Left Behind law for bonuses of as much as $12,500 a year for outstanding teachers in schools that serve low-income areas.

National teachers unions denounce the proposal for "performance pay," saying it would undermine their ability to negotiate contracts and would be based in part on what they consider an unfair and unreliable measure: student test scores.

Debate over the proposal has exposed unusual fissures between the influential unions and longtime Democratic allies. Some education experts say the unions are out of step with parents and voters who support the business-oriented idea of providing financial incentives for excellent work.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said that the teaching workforce is leaking talent and that his proposal would help rejuvenate it. Young teachers watch their friends "go off and get paid for their time and ingenuity" in other fields, Miller said. "In teaching, you go as fast as the slowest person."

Miller's proposal, building on recent federal steps to encourage incentive pay, would provide grants to school systems that choose to pay bonuses to teachers who excel in high-poverty schools, worth up to $10,000 in most cases and $12,500 for specialists in math, science and other hard-to-staff subjects. Decisions on who gets extra pay would be based on student test gains and professional evaluations. Miller's aides said they had no cost estimate for the measure.

Advocates of performance pay have seen similar initiatives fail, and many take pains to avoid the term "merit pay" and its association with past mistakes. But with fresh support from foundations and new tools that enable student achievement data to be linked to individual teachers, many experts said the idea is gaining favor. Performance pay efforts are underway in school systems in Denver and Minnesota, and some local administrators are planning to establish fast tracks for financial rewards for top teachers.

The Prince George's County school system has a five-year, $17 million federal grant to develop a program that will reward teachers for student test gains, positive classroom performance evaluations, and professional activities such as mentoring other teachers or becoming certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Participation by teachers at the selected schools will be voluntary.

Expected to start next year in 30 schools that serve low-income areas, the initiative could add as much as $12,000 to a teacher's annual salary, making it possible for a top-rated fourth-year teacher to make as much as one with 14 years of experience, Superintendent John E. Deasy said. Salaries for starting teachers in Prince George's and elsewhere in the area are a little more than $40,000 a year.

"We need to pay our best and brightest more, particularly in places where it's most difficult to work," Deasy said.

In the District, a five-year, $14 million federal grant is fueling a pilot program to reward teachers and principals in a dozen high-poverty public schools each year that achieve the strongest gains in test scores and share successful strategies with others. Details are being worked out by the city school system, the local teachers union and a partner organization, New Leaders for New Schools.

The approach is also being tried in a dozen charter schools with help from a private grant. Charter schools are publicly funded but independently operated.

The D.C. Preparatory Academy, a charter in Northeast Washington, adopted another performance pay plan designed by the national foundation-funded Teacher Advancement Program. Its model pairs teacher evaluations with professional development and training.

One day last week, math teacher and mentor MaryKate Hughes observed how another math teacher set goals and expectations for his students. In another classroom, Hughes made notes on a science teacher's pacing and preparation. Newer teachers can receive bonuses of as much as $2,000 based on test score improvements and evaluations by master teachers and principals.

"Our goal is to find good teachers who can become great teachers," Hughes said.

In Arlington County, the school system is starting an initiative that offers teachers three opportunities to skip a step on the pay scale, an increase worth as much as 5 percent in salary each time.

This school year, teachers can qualify for the pay increase through national board certification. In coming years, they will be able to apply by submitting a portfolio of work demonstrating professional development in such areas as leadership and parent outreach. The portfolios would be reviewed anonymously by a panel of peers and supervisors.

Arlington officials stressed that evaluations would not hinge on test scores, although teachers could submit them as evidence of success. Officials with the school system and the county teachers association, who designed the program together, said relying on test scores would fail to capture the complexity of teaching and discourage teachers from working with challenging students.

"If I'm only going to be evaluated on the test scores of my kids, I'll take the gifted kids," said Lee Dorman, president of the Arlington Education Association.

There is controversy over using standardized tests to rate schools. Tying test results to teacher pay would raise the stakes. But performance-pay advocates say it's only fair to evaluate teachers the same way schools and children are measured.

The idea of merit pay gained popularity in the 1980s. But some attempts then to implement the concept failed amid teacher complaints that evaluations were too subjective. Critics said principals were given leeway to give bonuses to favorite employees. Fairfax County began a program in 1986 that paid teachers as much as $4,000 in annual bonuses. But by the early 1990s, the program fell out of favor with many teachers. It was abandoned in 1992 as the Fairfax School Board grappled with budget cuts.

The new performance pay movement is rife with experiments that have yielded few definitive national studies showing gains in student achievement. Union leaders are urging lawmakers to hold off on Miller's proposal. National Education Association President Reg Weaver called the proposal an "unprecedented attack" on collective bargaining rights.

Antonia Cortese, executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, rejected the argument that performance pay would lure teachers into hard-to-staff schools. "I would think it would be a disincentive to take on something when you don't know how it will work," she said.

Still, schools in many places are plunging ahead. Systems across Minnesota have adopted performance pay measures, prompted by an $86 million initiative. After a long study, the Denver public school system began a district-wide incentive pay program in recent years.

As debate over performance pay unfolds, Miller said he is sure about one thing: "The demand is there."

Labels: merit pay

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:43 PM 0 comments Links to this post

UC Irvine rehires Chemerinsky as dean

The school's chancellor flies east to re-recruit the legal scholar, whom he had earlier fired.
By Garrett Therolf and Richard C. Paddock, Los Angehttp://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-uci18sep18,0,6932646.story?coll=la-tot-topstories&track=ntothtmlles Times Staff Writers
September 18, 2007

UC Irvine's chancellor tried to salvage the reputation of his fledgling law school Monday by announcing that he had reinstated Erwin Chemerinsky as its founding dean, but his own troubles persisted as faculty members continued to question why he had sacked the liberal scholar and contemplated taking action against their university's leader.

The agreement with Chemerinsky, made five days after the deanship was rescinded, came after Chancellor Michael V. Drake and his wife flew to Durham, N.C., over the weekend so the two men could speak face to face.

The talks began Sunday morning over pastries at Chemerinsky's home and continued late into the night.

"Many issues were addressed in depth," the two said in a joint statement, "including several areas of miscommunication and misunderstanding. All issues were resolved to our mutual satisfaction."

Drake still faces crucial meetings this week when the UCI Academic Senate holds an emergency meeting to consider his actions and the UC Board of Regents meets in Davis, where some members will probably ask why Chemerinsky had been dropped.

"People at the regents level will be asking what really happened," said Richard Blum, chair of the regents. "At the end of day, the whole thing was a little awkward."

According to Chemerinsky, Drake had said he was pulling back the job offer because of pressure from conservatives over his outspoken liberal politics. The chancellor denied it.

In a conference call with reporters, the chancellor and new dean agreed that Chemerinsky would enjoy absolute academic freedom and would continue to write opinion articles on a wide range of issues, not just legal education as Drake suggested last week.

"Chancellor Drake reaffirmed in the strongest possible way the academic freedom that I would have, as all deans and faculty members do," Chemerinsky said. He later noted that he was aware that his role as dean also would require him to build a broad base of support. Before he was ousted, the dean had sought conservatives for some slots on his board of advisors.

Drake declined to discuss his decision to drop Chemerinsky, and he was vague on the reasons behind his turnaround. "Circumstances change; knowledge comes in," Drake said.

Before the agreement, brokered with the help of a small group of influential Orange County attorneys, both men said their conflict left them feeling bruised. On Monday, however, both professed to have a strong relationship that would not hinder the law school.

Chemerinsky, a professor at Duke University, said he hoped Drake was not so politically damaged that he could not continue as chancellor. "I never would have accepted this position if I didn't think I would have the chance to work with Michael Drake," he said.

Some faculty at UCI were not so supportive.

Business Professor Richard McKenzie did not think the chancellor could keep his job. "I personally do not see how [Drake] can be effective going forward given the opposition across campus to what he did. I've never seen the faculty so unified."

The cabinet of UCI's Academic Senate met in closed session Monday to consider a response to the furor.

The panel has sway over the university's curriculum and has played a critical role at pivotal moments in university controversies. In 1983, UCI was the prime candidate to house Richard Nixon's presidential library, but the sponsoring foundation dropped the university as a prospect after the Academic Senate voted to place restrictions on it.

The panel's current vice chairwoman, Jutta Heckhausen, said: "I think that Chancellor Drake did an excellent job as chancellor for UCI until the Chemerinsky hire. . . . All the more perplexing it is to see him be so secretive and vague about the reasons for rescinding the offer."

She declined to say what proposals were drafted in Monday's closed-door meeting, but an emergency meeting open to all faculty members will be held Thursday to discuss "concerns about academic freedom and the chancellor's leadership on campus," according to Timothy Bradley, a biology professor who is the senate chairman.

Some faculty members said one proposal to be presented would be to investigate whether Drake caved in to pressure from political conservatives when he decided last week to drop Chemerinsky.

Others have pushed for a no-confidence vote.

This week, Drake is expected to be at UC Davis for the meeting of the regents, who must approve Chemerinsky's $350,000 salary. The regents do not have veto power over Chemerinsky's appointment, only his salary. They must approve any salary greater than $205,000.

Some regents are likely to ask Drake informally to explain the controversy.

Blum had been traveling in the Middle East when the crisis over Chemerinsky began. He said he looked into the matter on his return and found no indication that any of the regents were involved in the decisions to fire the law professor or to rehire him.

Blum said he had yet to talk to Drake.

"As to what happened, your guess is as good as mine," said Blum, a behind-the-scenes Democratic Party advisor and husband of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). "I think he was left pretty much on his own to do whatever he wanted to do. The call was up to him to straighten it out or not straighten it out."

The ousting of the law school dean quickly shot through academic and legal circles, fast becoming a national story about academic freedom.

"I do not believe that Chancellor Drake realized how this could become an issue of national importance," said Joan Irvine Smith, a Chemerinsky supporter who has donated $1 million to the new Donald Bren School of Law through her foundation.

Drake originally offered Chemerinsky the job of dean Aug. 16, the same day his opinion article appeared in The Times, criticizing then-Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales' death penalty policy. Chemerinsky signed his contract Sept. 4 and was fired a week later.

UC President Robert C. Dynes, who heads the 10-campus system, said Monday that he conferred with Drake as the controversy unfolded but that the decisions on Chemerinsky were Drake's alone.

Dynes said he continues to have complete confidence in the chancellor.

"The decision regarding Professor Chemerinsky's employment or that of any other administrator at UCI rests with Chancellor Drake, and it would have been inappropriate for me to intervene," Dynes said. Dynes noted that under UC's bylaws, hiring and firing deans rest with the chancellor.

Chemerinsky said last week that Drake had cited a likely "bloody battle" for his confirmation by the regents. That seemed unlikely, since it was listed on the consent calendar, where items usually are approved without debate.

In addition, The Times reported that Drake was "disturbed" when the state Supreme Court questioned the accuracy of Chemerinsky's article about the death penalty. Chemerinsky stands by the article.

UC Provost Wyatt R. Hume, who is the system's chief operating officer, said that he also was unaware of involvement by any regent. "That was an unfortunate perception and a misperception. We have seen no evidence of any kind of pressure," he said.

Labels: California, higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:31 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Alabama Plan Brings Out Cry of Resegregation

By SAM DILLON / NY Times
September 17, 2007

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.

Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind law, which gives students in schools deemed failing the right to move to better ones.

“We’re talking about moving children from good schools into low-performing ones, and that’s illegal,” said Kendra Williams, a hospital receptionist, whose two children were rezoned. “And it’s all about race. It’s as clear as daylight.”

Tuscaloosa, where George Wallace once stood defiantly in the schoolhouse door to keep blacks out of the University of Alabama, also has had a volatile history in its public schools. Three decades of federal desegregation marked by busing and white flight ended in 2000. Though the city is 54 percent white, its school system is 75 percent black.

The schools superintendent and board president, both white, said in an interview that the rezoning, which redrew boundaries of school attendance zones, was a color-blind effort to reorganize the 10,000-student district around community schools and relieve overcrowding. By optimizing use of the city’s 19 school buildings, the district saved taxpayers millions, officials said. They also acknowledged another goal: to draw more whites back into Tuscaloosa’s schools by making them attractive to parents of 1,500 children attending private academies founded after court-ordered desegregation began.

“I’m sorry not everybody is on board with this,” said Joyce Levey, the superintendent. “But the issue in drawing up our plan was not race. It was how to use our buildings in the best possible way.” Dr. Levey said that all students forced by the rezoning to move from a high- to a lower-performing school were told of their right under the No Child law to request a transfer.

When the racially polarized, eight-member Board of Education approved the rezoning plan in May, however, its two black members voted against it. “All the issues we dealt with in the ’60s, we’re having to deal with again in 2007,” said Earnestine Tucker, one of the black members. “We’re back to separate but equal — but separate isn’t equal.”

For decades school districts across the nation used rezoning to restrict black students to some schools while channeling white students to others. Such plans became rare after civil rights lawsuits in the 1960s and ’70s successfully challenged their constitutionality, said William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights.

Tuscaloosa’s rezoning dispute, civil rights lawyers say, is one of the first in which the No Child Left Behind law has become central, sending the district into uncharted territory over whether a reassignment plan can trump the law’s prohibition on moving students into low-performing schools. A spokesman, Chad Colby, said the federal Education Department would not comment.

Tuscaloosa is not the only community where black parents are using the law to seek more integrated, academically successful schools for their children.

In Greensboro, N.C., students in failing black schools have transferred in considerable numbers to higher-performing, majority-white schools, school officials there said. A 2004 study by the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights documented cases in Florida, Indiana, Tennessee and Virginia where parents were moving their children into less-segregated schools.

Nationally, less than 2 percent of eligible students have taken advantage of the law’s transfer provisions. Tuscaloosa, with 83,000 residents, is an hour’s drive west of Birmingham. During court-ordered desegregation its schools roughly reflected the school system’s racial makeup, and there were no all-black schools.

But in recent years the board has carved the district into three zones, each with a new high school. One cluster of schools lies in the east of the city; its high school is 73 percent black.

Another cluster on Tuscaloosa’s gritty west side now amounts to an all-black minidistrict; its five schools have 2,330 students, and only 19 are white. Its high school is 99 percent black.

In contrast, a cluster of schools that draw white students from an affluent enclave of mansions and lake homes in the north, as well as some blacks bused into the area, now includes two majority-white elementary schools. Its high school, Northridge, is 56 percent black.

At a meeting in February 2005, scores of parents from the two majority white elementary schools complained of overcrowding and discipline problems in the middle school their children were sent to outside of the northern enclave.

Ms. Tucker said she, another board member and a teacher were the only blacks present. The white parents clamored for a new middle school closer to their homes. They also urged Dr. Levey to consider sending some students being bused into northern cluster schools back to their own neighborhood, Ms. Tucker said. Dr. Levey did not dispute the broad outlines of Ms. Tucker’s account.

“That was the origin of this whole rezoning,” Ms. Tucker said.

Months later, the school board commissioned a demographic study to draft the rezoning plan. J. Russell Gibson III, the board’s lawyer, said the plan drawn up used school buildings more efficiently, freeing classroom space equivalent to an entire elementary school and saving potential construction costs of $10 million to $14 million. “That’s a significant savings,” Mr. Gibson said, “and we relieved overcrowding and placed most students in a school near their home. That’s been lost in all the rhetoric.”

Others see the matter differently. Gerald Rosiek, an education professor at the University of Alabama, studied the Tuscaloosa school district’s recent evolution. “This is a case study in resegregation,” said Dr. Rosiek, now at the University of Oregon.

In his research, he said, he found disappointment among some white parents that Northridge, the high school created in the northern enclave, was a majority-black school, and he said he believed the rezoning was in part an attempt to reduce its black enrollment.

The district projected last spring that the plan would move some 880 students citywide, and Dr. Levey said that remained the best estimate available. The plan redrew school boundaries in ways that, among other changes, required students from black neighborhoods and from a low-income housing project who had been attending the more-integrated schools in the northern zone to leave them for nearly all-black schools in the west end.

Tuscaloosa’s school board approved the rezoning at a May 3 meeting, at which several white parents spoke out for the plan. One parent, Kim Ingram, said, “I’m not one who looks to resegregate the schools,” but described what she called a crisis in overcrowding, and said the rezoning would alleviate it. In an interview this month, Ms. Ingram said the middle school attended by her twin seventh-grade girls has been “bursting at the seams,” with student movement difficult in hallways, the cafeteria and locker rooms.

Voting against the rezoning were the board’s two black members and a white ally.

Dan Meissner, the board president, said in an interview this month that any rezoning would make people unhappy. “This has involved minimal disruption for a school system that has 10,000 students,” he said.

But black students and parents say the plan has proven disruptive for them.

Telissa Graham, 17, was a sophomore last year at Northridge High. She learned of the plan last May by reading a notice on her school’s bulletin board listing her name along with about 70 other students required to move. “They said Northridge was too crowded,” Telissa said. “But I think they just wanted to separate some of the blacks and Hispanics from the whites.”

Parents looking for recourse turned to the No Child Left Behind law. Its testing requirements have enabled parents to distinguish good schools from bad. And other provisions give students stuck in troubled schools the right to transfer. In a protest at an elementary school after school opened last month, about 60 black relatives and supporters of rezoned children repeatedly cited the law. Much of the raucous meeting was broadcast live by a black-run radio station.

Some black parents wrote to the Alabama superintendent of education, Joseph Morton, arguing that the rezoning violated the federal law. Mr. Morton disagreed, noting that Tuscaloosa was offering students who were moved to low-performing schools the right to transfer into better schools. That, he said, had kept it within the law.

Dr. Levey said about 180 students requested a transfer.

Telissa was one of them. She expects to return this week to Northridge, but says moving from one high school to another and back again has disrupted her fall.

One of Telissa’s brothers has also been rezoned to a virtually all-black, low-performing school. Her mother, Etta Nolan, has been trying to get him a transfer, too.

“I’m fed up,” Ms. Nolan said. “They’re just shuffling us and shuffling us.”

Labels: race, resegregation

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:17 PM 0 comments Links to this post

No Child Left Behind: the dropout problem

By Wade Henderson and Bob Wise
San Jose Mercury News
09/17/2007

Now that their summer vacations are over, students have traded their beach towels for textbooks and members of Congress have returned to Washington after spending August in their districts and states. Already, Congress has started work on a revised No Child Left Behind Act, but if it doesn't include high school reform in the next version, the nation will continue to suffer from a dropout crisis that claims over 1 million students every year - 7,000 students every single school day.

Although the dropout crisis affects students from every race and income level, it disproportionately affects low-income students and students of color. According to independent estimates, only 57.8 percent of Latino, 53.4 percent of African-American, and 49.3 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native students in the United States graduate with a regular diploma, compared with 76.2 percent of white students. Unfortunately, the public rarely hears about these low graduation rates because states are not required to report the graduation rates for minority students.

At the same time, low graduation rates for minority students should be of critical concern to every state, especially California, which has large percentages of these children. Between now and 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau expects the white population in the United States to only grow by 1 percent. Meanwhile, the Hispanic population is projected to increase by 77 percent and the African-American population by 32 percent.

If the country cannot better educate minority students and ensure that they graduate from high school, the national graduation rate, already only a paltry 70 percent, will fall even further as growing numbers of minority students are left behind.

Alternatively, if the nation's high schools and colleges were to raise the graduation rates of minority students to the levels of white students by 2020, the potential increase in personal income across the country would add more than $310 billion to the U.S. economy. California alone would see $101 billion of this total.

But rhetoric and facts alone can't change the status quo. So our organizations have joined with several other groups (the League of United Latin American Citizens, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, National Council of La Raza, National Indian Education Association, National Urban League, and the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center) to launch the Campaign for High School Equity. This marks the first time that so many prominent civil rights organizations have agreed to collaborate specifically on the needs of our nation's high school students.

The campaign will underscore the importance of graduating all children from high school with diplomas that guarantee that each is prepared for success in college, the workforce and life. Not only do our students deserve an excellent start toward a productive and fulfilling life, but our communities and nation also depend on a fully educated workforce to remain competitive in an increasingly global economy.

Unfortunately, we're still a long way from this goal. Since enactment in 2002 of No Child Left Behind, we've seen higher test scores among the nation's elementary school students, but secondary school students continue to flounder. In part, this lack of progress is because the law was primarily written with earlier grades in mind. In fact, President Bush's original proposal only used the phrase "high school" twice.

This month, Congress can fix that oversight by addressing the needs of high schools as part of a revised law. Were Congress to enact significant reforms and make targeted new investments in the nation's middle and high schools, the economic return would be sizable. For example, if the nearly 1.2 million high school dropouts of the nation's class of 2006 had instead earned their diplomas, the U.S. economy would have seen an additional $309 billion in wages over these students' lifetimes.

The time to act is now. For every school day that Congress fails to act, another 7,000 kids will drop out of school.

WADE HENDERSON is counselor for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund. BOB WISE is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education. They wrote this article for the Mercury News.

Labels: Dropouts, NCLB

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

Teachers train to help students with English

By KATHLEEN CARROLL / The Record
Sunday, September 16, 2007

New Jersey is preparing a corps of educators with a new specialty: helping immigrant students master English during regular academic classes.

Non-native speakers have reached a critical mass. Districts focused on boosting their test scores are including more students in mainstream classes. So the state Education Department is aiming to prepare 200 regular classroom teachers for the challenge, by expanding teacher training at three state universities this fall.

"The students are in regular classes with regular kids," said Raquel Sinai, coordinator of bilingual and English as a Second Language instruction at the state Department of Education. "All teachers should have the training, the knowledge and the skills to work effectively with them."

One in five New Jersey students does not speak English at home. These students no longer are concentrated in large cities: non-native speakers were enrolled at two-thirds of school districts during the 2006-07 school year. Although the state has embraced bilingual education and offers plenty of programs in Spanish and Korean, New Jersey students account for 167 languages, a significant barrier to offering bilingual classes in every academic subject.

The state has turned to "sheltered instruction" to prepare teachers for their evermore inclusive classrooms. New Jersey has trained 400 teachers so far, in districts such as Glen Rock, Wallington, Passaic and Bergenfield, during summer sessions at Rowan, Kean and New Jersey City universities.

By following a structured method called Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol, or SIOP, teachers learn to incorporate language-learning goals in subjects such as math, science or social studies, often by writing them on the blackboard. They measure whether students have achieved both the academic and language objectives, and incorporate visual cues, hands-on activities and group discussion to promote language development.

"It is a structured approach to help people who aren't really able to draw on a deep understanding of second language acquisition," said Carolyn Adger, director of the language education and academic development division at the Center for Applied Linguistics, which helped develop the program a decade ago.

The techniques benefit mainstream students as well, because they promote sophisticated language development and communication skills, educators say.

A national focus on improving academics for traditionally low-performing students has spotlighted English language learners' performance on annual tests. Schools are forced to report their scores separately, and many have responded to low scores by including more students in regular academic classes led by teachers with subject expertise.

"There is a strong push for English language learners to perform at the level of native speakers, because of No Child Left Behind," said Janina Kusielewicz, supervisor of bilingual education and basic skills instruction in Clifton, among the state's most linguistically diverse communities.

More than half of Clifton's 11,000 students are non-native speakers, representing 68 primary languages. About 10 percent of Clifton teachers are trained in SIOP, particularly those working with older students. In middle and high school, students are more likely to have graduated from English as a Second Language classes but are still working at language mastery, said Kusielewicz.

The program is also popular in Ridgefield Park, where 2,000 students account for 36 different languages, such as Spanish, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Albanian, Turkish and Arabic.

"Our population is distributed so unevenly," said Louise Chaker, supervisor of bilingual, ESL and basic-skills programs. "We have so many ethnicities ... I felt there was a tremendous need for having teachers be a little more sensitive to the needs of the English as a Second Language student."

During an eighth-grade science class there last week, about two dozen students were assigned a short project on identifying physical properties. Students were required to discuss the properties they found in a bag of everyday items in small-group discussion and a short writing assignment.

In the center of the room, four students -- three mainstream, one ESL -- rifled through their bag, which was filled with standard office supplies. Teacher Melody Go prompted them to use descriptive language to explain the contents to someone who couldn't see them.

"And what do they all have in common?" she asked.

"Work," said Arianna Meza, a 13-year-old ESL student.

She caught herself, and repeated more robustly: "That they are all used for work."

Later, when the groups were sharing their findings with the class, Arianna repeated her finding in the more complex phrase. A bright, motivated student, she spoke only scattered English when she moved to New Jersey from Ecuador last year.

After the lesson, she ably described Go's class as fun and a comfortable challenge. She had already mastered every English word she wanted, except one.

"She explains so easily that I can understand what she says," she said. "She gives me confianza that I can ask whatever I want. What does that mean? Oh right. Confidence."

Labels: SIOP

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

Schools can't be colorblind

Narrowing the achievement gap in schools requires acknowledging race, not ignoring it.

LA Times Opinion Page
September 16, 2007

The achievement gap between African American and Latino students and their white peers is stark and persistent. It has existed for decades, and it's growing more pronounced. The data refute what would be reassuring explanations. The gaps in reading and math test scores are not due to income disparities, nor are they attributable to parents' educational levels. The simple fact is that most black and brown children do not do as well in school as most whites.

The data also show, however, that African American and Latino children are excelling in schools scattered throughout California and the nation, suggesting that the achievement gap is not intractable. Rather, there is a profound disconnect between what we say are high expectations for children of color and the quality of education delivered to them in the classroom.

All of which leads to an uncomfortable but important conclusion: If a less-stratified society is desirable, we must be prepared to design educational programs that explicitly take race into account, that address African American and Latino students specifically and that openly recognize that we are not a single society when it comes to the needs of our children.

That is not easy, and it runs against America's desire to move beyond a preoccupation with racial differences. In its last term, the Supreme Court struck down school integration programs in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., engaging in legal and moral sophistry to suggest that race no longer matters. And California Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell set off a tremor last month when he called on the state's schools to help Latino and African American students close the gap.

The court is wrong and O'Connell is right: Race does matter, and schools are better off realizing it. Ironically, one of those who implicitly recognizes that fact is President Bush, whose No Child Left Behind Act requires states to set the same performance targets for all students and to report those results by race, among other categories, revealing the truth of racial disparities in learning.

There was a time when the gap seemed on its way to obsolescence -- a relic that Brown vs. Board of Education and school integration would remedy. From 1970 through the late '80s, the gap between blacks and Latinos and white students narrowed exponentially. Then, in the '90s, improvement leveled and the gap began to grow.

Assigning causes is difficult, but there are striking examples of success amid a sea of failure. Why does Ralph J. Bunche Elementary School in gang-plagued Compton have an Academic Performance Index score of 866, almost equal to those of elementary schools in Beverly Hills and higher than many in Santa Monica or Torrance? After all, the school is 100% minority, and 40% of the students are non-native English speakers. Why do 81% of the students at Edison Elementary in Long Beach, where 90% of the students are Latino, 72% of whom are learning English, score as proficient or above in mathematics?

There are a few answers. In schools that help all children excel, the focus is squarely on instruction. The "teacher quality gap" runs almost parallel to the achievement gap. In math and science, for example, only about half the teachers in schools with 90% or greater minority enrollments meet minimum requirements to teach those subjects -- far fewer than in predominantly white schools. Early intervention in reading is key, as is truly ending "social promotion" -- the practice of promoting students to the next grade even when their skills lag behind significantly. And at great schools, teachers and students talk. They talk about expectations for themselves and for each other.

Do we honestly believe all children can achieve? Yes, we do. It therefore follows that strategies tailored to African American and Latino students must be integrated into the schools they attend. That requires developing programs based on race and devoting special resources to minority children, an approach that may offend the Supreme Court and those who wish for a society in which this is not needed. To them, we say: It is fair to wish for the day when we may cease to talk about race; in the meantime, it is inexcusable to ignore it.

Labels: achievement gap, race

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:25 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Segregation in U.S. schools rising

Wisconsin ranks high in separation, studies find
By ALAN J. BORSUK / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
September 15, 2007

Mix two parts population growth (among Latino and African-American students) and one part population decline (white students). Fold in a continuing pattern in which whites, blacks and Latinos generally live separately from each other. Let the mixture steep in a much cooler climate - legal, political and social - toward integrating schools.

This recipe for re-segregation is the subject of two new national studies.

Both say the tide of desegregation that roiled America from the 1950s through the 1970s has turned, and the reduction in racial separation that often came via court order and school bus is being reversed.

But there is a twist: Largely because there are so many more minority students than in the past, fewer whites are going to schools that are all-white or close to it.

At the same time, the numbers of all-minority schools are increasing.

Within several years, for the first time, fewer than half of the nation's kindergarten through 12th-grade students will be white.

In each of the studies, Wisconsin was listed as one of the states where segregation, particularly for African-American students, is strong.

The findings come at the same time as the 50th anniversary of the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., a milestone in efforts to end legal segregation of schools.

And they come in the aftermath of a 5-4 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in June that overturned voluntary desegregation efforts in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle, and cast doubt on the constitutionality of remaining school assignment efforts based on race.

"Nearly 40 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we have now lost almost all the progress made in the decades after his death in desegregating our schools," writes Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The data in the UCLA report and in the report from the Pew Hispanic Center show that the level of racial integration still is much higher now than 40 years ago, by most measures, but the trends in the last couple of decades have been toward segregation, especially in the South, the region where legal segregation was the most overt and efforts to change it the most sweeping.

In its report, the Pew Center says the percentage of white students attending schools that were at least 95% non-Hispanic white dropped from 34% in 1993-'94 to 21% in 2005-'06, but the percentage of Latino students in schools that were at least 95% minority rose from 25% to 29%.

For black students, the totals increased from 28% to 31%.

The UCLA report lists Wisconsin as having the 16th highest percentage (72%) of black students attending schools that are more than 50% black and the 11th highest percentage (41%) of black students attending schools that are more than 90% black.

It also puts Wisconsin among a half-dozen states where the percentage of black students attending schools that are more than 90% black at least doubled from 1991 to 2005.

Wisconsin has the 16th highest percentage (17%) of Latino students attending schools that are more than 90% Latino, the UCLA report says.

Using slightly different definitions, the Pew report says Wisconsin had the fifth-largest decline over 12 school years ending in 2005-'06 in the percentage of white students attending nearly all-white schools (from 58% to 31%) but had the second-highest increase in the percentage of black students attending nearly all-minority schools (17% to 32%).

No figures were released in either report for the Milwaukee area specifically, but it appears highly likely the national trends are true here.

While nearly-all-black or all-Hispanic schools are found frequently in the city and suburban schools remain predominantly white, it is much rarer to find, even in the suburbs, schools that have few, if any, minority students.

At the same time, the momentum behind school integration has faded. Little is being done to try to diversify the student bodies of individual schools in the city - the Milwaukee Public Schools system is less than 13% white - and participation in the voluntary city-suburban integration program known as Chapter 220 has decreased.

The voice on the issue heard most prominently in recent times in the African-American community was that of the African American Education Council, which called for reduced busing to be included as a goal for the new strategic plan for MPS.
Suburban schools

In the meantime, the state's open enrollment law is allowing an increasing number of students from the city, about two-thirds of them white, to go to predominantly white suburban schools.

"There are many parents who just don't see the value of (desegregation)," said Jerry Ann Hamilton, president of the Milwaukee chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The organization, a key player in school integration efforts here going back to the 1960s, continues to support the idea.

"We see the value of people learning to live together at an early age," Hamilton said.

But, she said, "there's been a lack of interest on the part of everybody on whether (schools) should be integrated" and court-ordered school desegregation in Milwaukee, starting in 1976, did not turn out the way advocates hoped.

Black children bore a disproportionate share of the busing, which rubbed many African-Americans wrong, while thousands of white people moved out of the city.

Hamilton said in the South, there was great excitement about school integration when it first occurred because African-Americans thought their children would have the same educational opportunities white children had.

When that hope wasn't fulfilled, she said, "much of the glamour of integration diminished."

Orfield, who has spoken often in favor of school integration, writes, "Resegregation . . . is continuing to grow in all parts of the country for both African-Americans and Latinos and is accelerating the most rapidly in the only region that had been highly desegregated - the South."

Orfield writes that the evidence supporting the argument that integration boosts educational success for minority students is becoming clearer just as the practice is becoming rarer and as the connection between segregation and low educational outcomes remains strong.

Other efforts to increase minority student achievement, including the federal No Child Left Behind law, have much weaker track records or chances of succeeding, he argued.

"As the U.S. enters its last years in which it will have a majority of white students, it is betting its future on segregation," he wrote.

The Pew Hispanic Center report
The Civil Rights Project report

Labels: desegregation

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:17 AM 0 comments Links to this post

LEXINGTON ‘PORTFOLIOS’ REPORT LACKS RESEARCH, RELEVANCE

Mathis exposes the agenda behind this so-called research report that comes out against portfolio assessment in time to influence the NCLB re-authorization. Good to get the word out on this. -Angela

****NEWS RELEASE--FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE****

LEXINGTON ‘PORTFOLIOS’ REPORT LACKS RESEARCH, RELEVANCE
Reviewer cites faulty generalizations and ignored research
in report’s support of standardized testing under NCLB

Contact: William J. Mathis, (802) 247-5757; (email) WMathis@sover.net
Kevin Welner, (303) 492-8370; (email) kevin.welner@gmail.com

TEMPE, Ariz and BOULDER, Colo. (Sept. 19, 2007)—A Lexington Institute report released earlier this month, and the institute’s subsequent press release of September 17, 2007, criticized the use of student portfolios to assess school performance. A new review of that report, however, finds it is ill-founded and of little value for research or policy development.

The Lexington report, called “Portfolios – A Backward Step in School Accountability,” is intended to influence the debate over the direction of the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, offering a defense of the current test-based accountability system against the inclusion of “multiple measures.”

The report appears to have been written in anticipation of a “discussion draft” concerning NCLB changes, released by the leadership of the House Education Committee. The draft proposes allowing states to use “multiple indicators” – for example, graduation rates and percent of students taking advanced courses – to assess educational outcomes rather than depend so heavily upon standardized test scores.

The Lexington report was reviewed for the Think Tank Review Project by University of Vermont professor William Mathis. He concludes that the report more closely resembles a political polemic than a research report. It provides no new data, examines only two studies, and includes only results favorable to the report’s conclusions.

As Mathis notes, the House Committee’s summary lists a broad list of various alternative multiple indicators, but portfolio assessment is not on that list. Nonetheless, the Lexington report erroneously generalizes findings about portfolios to all non-test-based multiple indicators. The report also ignores a body of research with findings that present portfolios in a more favorable light.

In fact, Mathis’ review explains that the Lexington report’s focus on portfolios is particularly misguided because portfolios for statewide accountability purposes have received only scant attention since the turn of the millennium. Although Lexington’s press release emphasizes “dusting off” the use of portfolio assessments as a key part of NCLB accountability, the only group seriously discussing the subject appears to be Lexington itself. Given the absence of portfolio assessment from such agendas as well as from the House Committee’s list, it is troubling that the Lexington Institute report offers portfolios as the most notable of what it calls “multiple measures” and then uses that straw man to argue against adopting any instruments other than standardized tests.

In his review of the Lexington report, Mathis concludes that its “selective use of research suggests the author either intentionally slanted the evidence or was unacceptably cursory in his analysis.” The report’s failure to discuss contradictory research undermines its conclusions, and its attempt to “generalize all multiple measures from this questionable base completely discredits [the report].”

Find William Mathis’s review on the web here.

About the Reviewer

William Mathis is an adjunct professor of school finance at the University of Vermont and a local school superintendent. By training, Mathis is a psychometrician and served as Director of New Jersey’s state testing program and as a consultant for the National Assessment of Educational Progress as well as for other states’ testing programs.

About the Think Tank Review Project

The Think Tank Review Project (http://thinktankreview.org), a collaborative project of the ASU Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) and CU-Boulder’s Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC), provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think tank publications. The project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

Kevin Welner, the project co-director, explains that the project is needed because, “despite their garnering of media attention and their influence with many policy makers, reports released by private think tanks can be of very poor quality. Too many think tank reports are little more than ideological argumentation dressed up as research. We believe that the media, policy makers, and the public will greatly benefit from having qualified social scientists provide reviews of these documents in a timely fashion.” He adds, “We don't consider our reviews to be the final word, nor is our goal to stop think tanks’ contributions to a public dialogue. That dialogue is, in fact, what we value the most. The best ideas come about through rigorous critique and debate.”

CONTACT:
William J. Mathis, Adjunct Professor
University of Vermont
(802) 247-5757
WMathis@sover.net

Kevin Welner, Professor and Director
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder
(303) 492-8370
kevin.welner@gmail.com

**********

###

The Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) conducts original research, provides independent analyses of research and policy documents, and facilitates educational innovation. EPRU facilitates the work of leading academic experts in a variety of disciplines to help inform the public debate about education policy issues.

Visit the EPRU website at http://educationanalysis.org

###

The Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder seeks to contribute information, analysis, and insight to further democratic deliberation regarding educational policy formation and implementation.

Visit the EPIC website at http://education.colorado.edu/epic

The following physical address is associated with this mailing list:

EPIC
School of Education
249 UCB
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0249

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

Revisiting the Canon Wars

I came across this article in the NY Times book review & thought I'd pass it along. The comment criticizing Ethnic Studies was disturbing but I think it's a common opinion within academia and of importance to those of us who are advocates for Ethnic Studies to see how others are speaking out against it. -Patricia

By RACHEL DONADIO / NY Times
Published: September 16, 2007

Twenty years ago, when Reagan and Gorbachev were negotiating the end of the cold war and college cost far less than it does today, a book arrived like a shot across the bow of academia: “The Closing of the American Mind,” by Allan Bloom, a larger-than-life political philosophy professor at the University of Chicago. Subtitled “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students,” it spent more than a year on the best-seller list, and today there are more than 1.2 million copies in print. Saul Bellow, who had urged his brilliant and highly idiosyncratic friend to write the book in the first place, wrote the introduction. (Bellow later cast Bloom as the main character in “Ravelstein.”)

Bloom’s book was full of bold claims: that abandoning the Western canon had dumbed down universities, while the “relativism” that had replaced it had “extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life”; that rock music “ruins the imagination of young people”; that America had produced no significant contributions to intellectual life since the 1950s; and that many earlier contributions were just watered-down versions of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud and other Continental thinkers. For Bloom, things had gone wrong in the ’60s, when universities took on “the imperative to promote equality, stamp out racism, sexism and elitism (the peculiar crimes of our democratic society), as well as war,” he wrote, because they thought such attempts at social change “possessed a moral truth superior to any the university could provide.”

“The Closing of the American Mind” hit the scene at a time when universities were embroiled in the so-called canon wars, in which traditionalists in favor of centering the curriculum on classic works of literature faced off against multiculturalists who wanted to include more works by women and members of minorities. In early 1988, students at Stanford held a rally with Jesse Jackson, where they shouted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go,” to protest a required Western civilization course. (The faculty quickly voted to replace it with a requirement including more works by women and minorities.) Bloom’s book shared space at the top of the best-seller list with E. D. Hirsch’s “Cultural Literacy” (1987), which argued that progressive education had left Americans without a grasp of basic knowledge. It also inspired further conservative attacks against the university, including Roger Kimball’s “Tenured Radicals” (1990) and Dinesh D’Souza’s “Illiberal Education” (1991).

Although it had great popular appeal, “The Closing of the American Mind” did not go over well among academics. Bloom’s detractors criticized everything from his interpretation of the Greeks to his views on youth culture and feminism, which he saw as corrosive influences. “The amazing thing about Allan Bloom’s book was not just its prodigious commercial success ... but the depth of the hostility and even hatred that it inspired among a large number of professors,” John Searle, the Berkeley philosophy professor and former proponent of the ’60s radical Free Speech Movement wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1990. Searle also noted a “certain irony” that the Western canon, from Socrates to Marx, which had once been seen as “liberating,” was now seen as “oppressive.” “Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude,” Searle wrote, “the ‘canon’ served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. ... The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.”

Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation. However polarizing Bloom may have been, many of the issues he raised still resonate — especially when it comes to the place of the humanities on campus and in the culture.

Debates over what an educated person should know go back to the 19th century in America, when teaching any literature beyond the Greek and Roman classics was still controversial. But today, there’s widespread concern that the humanities are losing ground — as well as intellectual cachet, students and financing — to the hard sciences on the one hand and business on the other. A 2006 report on higher education commissioned by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, which raised hackles with its proposal to introduce No Child Left Behind-style standards testing in universities, hardly mentioned the humanities. At the same time, several state legislatures have debated an “academic bill of rights” that would provide a grievance procedure against “political discrimination” on campus — a measure proposed by David Horowitz, a Marxist-turned-conservative critical of what he sees as academia’s left-wing bias.

All this reflects what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum today describes as a “loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy.” Nussbaum, who panned Bloom’s book in The New York Review in 1987, teaches at the University of Chicago, which like Columbia has retained a Western-based core curriculum requirement for undergraduates. But on some campuses, “the main area of conflict is trying to make sure that the humanities get adequate funding from the central administration,” Nussbaum wrote in an e-mail message, adding, “Our nation, like most nations of the world, is devaluing the humanities vis-à-vis science and technology, so constant vigilance is required lest these disciplines be cut.” Louis Menand, a Harvard English professor and New Yorker staff writer who serves on Harvard’s curriculum reform committee, concurs: “The big question for humanists is, How do we explain why what we do is important for people who aren’t humanists? That’s been tough, really tough.”

But when college costs run as high as $50,000 a year, it’s harder to ignore questions like “What will this major do for my career prospects?” While humanities departments thrive at elite institutions (at Yale, for example, history has long been the most popular major, with English usually beating out economics for second place), the high cost of college today exacerbates a utilitarian strain that’s always made it hard for the liberal arts to make a case for themselves in practical-minded America. According to the Department of Education, in the 2003-4 school year, only 1.6 percent of America’s 19 million undergraduates majored in English and 1.3 percent in history, compared with 20 percent in business, 16 percent in health, 9 percent in education and 6 percent in computer science.

Not all academics object to raising market questions. For Alan Wolfe, a political science professor at Boston College and the director of its Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, “the introduction of economic criteria into the university is a good thing.” During the canon wars of the late ’80s, he said, scholars had an “imperious” idea that “if we want to argue about the curriculum we’re free to do that.” But now, most realize “we have obligations to the students and the parents and the taxpayers.”

According to Stanley Fish, a law professor at Florida International University and an occasional New York Times columnist, the conservative critique of academia connects to an economic one. “The message the neoconservatives were putting out, that universities are hotbeds of atheism, sexual promiscuity, corrosive relativism and a host of suspect philosophies being imported from France and Germany, actually took quite strongly with the intended audience,” said Fish, who was embroiled in these debates as chairman of Duke’s theory-oriented English department from the mid-’80s to the early ’90s. “It’s easier for a state legislature to cut university funding when there is an unflattering view” of academia, he said.

But Fish thinks humanities professors bear some blame for their diminished standing. He’s at work on a new book, “Save the World on Your Own Time,” which argues that academics should teach, not proselytize. In his view, “the invasion of political agendas” into the classroom in the ’60s and ’70s was “extremely dangerous,” since it meant classrooms could become battlegrounds for political demagoguery.

The invasion of politics has been particularly notable in the literature curriculum. On campus today, the emphasis is very much on studying literature through the lens of “identity” — ethnic, gender, class. There has also been a decided shift toward works of the present and the recent past. In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars, an organization committed to preserving “the Western intellectual heritage.” In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison. The most-assigned living authors were Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. (Roth himself may not be so pleased with the company. His forthcoming “Exit Ghost” includes a character’s rant about a library display: “They had Gertrude Stein in the exhibit but not Ernest Hemingway. They had Edna St. Vincent Millay but not William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens or Robert Lowell,” the character says. “Just nonsense. It started in the colleges and now it’s everywhere. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, but not Faulkner.”)

But many scholars see these changes as part of a necessary evolution. To Michael Bérubé, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University and the author of “What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?” (2006), the changes have been particularly beneficial in American literature, which has seen the most canon revision in part because it never had a very stable canon to begin with. “The old guard had very little to offer in the way of serious intellectual argument against the reading and teaching of ... Olaudah Equiano or Djuna Barnes or Zora Neale Hurston, so the canon of the past two or three centuries got itself revised in fairly short order,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Only the Department of Surly Curmudgeons still disputes that we’re dealing with a usefully expanded field.”

Reading lists, though, are a zero-sum game: for every writer added, another is dropped. One can debate the changing fortunes of writers on the literary stock market, but it’s clear that today the emphasis is on the recent past — at the expense, some argue, of historical perspective. As Alan Wolfe puts it, “Everyone’s read ‘Things Fall Apart’ ” — Chinua Achebe’s novel about postcolonial Nigeria — “but few people have read the Yeats poem that the title comes from.”

For John Guillory, an English professor at New York University and the author of “Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation” (1993), “The major fact that the discipline is confronting today is global English, which is a cultural corollary of economic globalization.” At the same time, postcolonial Anglophone culture is only half a century old. “I’m often impressed by this scholarship, but I’m also concerned that this new field seems to be so disconnected from the history of literature and scholarship that goes before it,” Guillory said. “I see too many scholars in the field who know very little about anything before the 20th century, and that concerns me.”

Elaine Showalter, a feminist literary scholar and a former president of the Modern Language Association, who retired from Princeton in 2003, today urges a reconsideration of some of the changes made in past decades. “This period of discovery and recovery (for example, of women writers) has been stimulating, exciting and renewing,” Showalter wrote in an e-mail message. “But now it’s time for a period of evaluation and consolidation.”

To some, another question is how to get students to read critically in the first place. “What does it profit progressives to get minority writers like Walker and Black Elk into the syllabus if many students need the Cliffs Notes to gain an articulate grasp of either?” asked Gerald Graff, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has written on the canon wars.

The historian Tony Judt, a self-described “old leftist” and the director of the Remarque Institute at N.Y.U., which examines Europe and European-American relations, said undergraduates often arrive unprepared from high school and seeking courses “in what we might have thought of as the old-fashioned approach” — broad surveys. But many young professors aren’t interested in teaching outside their narrow specialties, nor are they generally prepared to do so. And colleges are loath to reinstate the core curriculums they abandoned in the ’60s. “Because we lack cultural self-confidence, we’ve lacked the ability to say, ‘This is a good book and should be taught, this isn’t and shouldn’t,’ ” said Judt, who was dean of the humanities at N.Y.U. in the early ’90s.

Judt also denounces the balkanization created by interdisciplinary ethnic studies programs. Multiculturalism “created lots and lots of microconstituencies, which universities didn’t have the courage to oppose,” he said. “It’s much more like a supermarket — kids can take pretty much any courses they like: Jewish kids take Jewish studies, gay students gay studies, black students African-American studies. You no longer have a university, but a series of identity constituencies all studying themselves.”

Some say this kind of identity-based thinking is at odds with the true purpose of education — something canon traditionalists can misunderstand as badly as their multiculturalist opponents. “What Americans yearn for in literature is self-recognition,” said Mark Lilla, a professor of political philosophy and religion who just left the University of Chicago for Columbia. “That’s where the conservatives went wrong. The case for the canon itself isn’t a case for book camp and becoming a citizen in the West.” Wrestling with difficult, often inaccessible works is “the most alienating experience possible,” he continued. “When you read Toni Morrison, there’s no alienation. It affirms your Americanism.”

Bloom believed education should be transformative — that it should remove students from the confines of their own backgrounds to engage with books that open up new realms of meaning. “He told students that they had come to the university to learn something, and this meant that they must rid themselves of the opinions of their parents,” Bellow wrote of Ravelstein/Bloom in his novel. “He was going to direct them to a higher life, full of variety and diversity, governed by rationality — anything but the arid kind.” In “The Closing of the American Mind,” Bloom himself wrote that a liberal education should provide a student with “four years of freedom” — “a space between the intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate.” Whether students today see college as a time of freedom or a compulsory phase of credentialing is an open question. From Bloom’s perspective, “the importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization’s only chance to get to him.”

Labels: academic freedom, higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:04 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

UTPA, STC seeing drop in remedial students

Daniel Perry / The Monitor
September 15, 2007
McALLEN — The number of students taking remedial courses at the University of Texas – Pan American this fall has decreased from this time last year.

South Texas College’s remedial figure should be finalized Monday, but President Shirley A. Reed anticipated the number lower than last fall’s 4,708 students out of 18,460 students in remedial courses.

English, reading and mathematics remedial classes are covered by financial aid and are included on transcripts at both institutions. But, they do not count toward degrees at either campus.

Depending on with what students have difficulty, both campuses can prevent them from signing up for classes like history, college algebra and English, which heavily emphasize the remedial subject areas.

UTPA counted 1,355 students — mostly freshmen — taking remedial subjects this fall. The university’s student enrollment on Wednesday stood at 17,418 students. The remedial figure is a drop from the fall 2006 total of 1,496 students.

Richard Treviño, the university’s director for student support services, credits the drop to increasing the minimum ACT score for admission. For fall 2005, the university required an ACT score of 15; that number will rise for every two years until fall 2011 to top out at 18.

Many students are in remedial courses because there is a disconnect between the state required Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and college placement tests, like the THEA and Accuplacer, Treviño said.

“Once you go above and beyond TAKS requirements, then you are getting in the college-level type of preparation,” he said. “But, we will always have remediation until we align a test that measures high school preparedness and college equality all in one.”

A lot of the students entering STC have other challenges, Reed said: They might be older than the average incoming freshman or not taken mathematics courses in recent years.

“All of that contributes and I personally just don’t think it’s fair to criticize students because they are not ready for college,” she said. “It’s based on a (college readiness) test and we are at the mercy of the validity of that test.”

STC student Giselle Medina, 19, of McAllen is taking a remedial reading course this semester. The pharmacy technician major said being in the remedial program has helped her adapt to college-level work.

“A lot of the stuff you learn in high school is just to pass that,” Medina said about TAKS.

Reed said some students do not realize the importance of Accuplacer, which the college has converted to using because it provides quicker results for staff and students. STC has started four-hour review sessions for students to attend before they take Accuplacer. The college had used the THEA in the past.

STC has also gathered area business, government, education and economic development leaders the last two years to discuss the need to work together for college readiness. Reed said the gatherings were held to change the environment of blame she sensed people in these subject areas laid down when it came to high school graduates making the college transition.

Daniel Perry covers education and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4454.

Labels: college readiness

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:21 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Monday, September 17, 2007

A way to drop back in school

Texas is now paying up if districts will allow young adults another chance to get a diploma

By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE / Houston Chronicle
September 14, 2007

A sweeping reform designed to curb Texas' high dropout rate could give students at some high schools an extra five years to earn their diplomas.

Under the new law, school districts that enroll students who were older than 21, but younger than 26 as of Sept. 1 can collect an average of $30 per student, per day. That funding level previously applied only for students under 21.

"There are a lot of kids that leave, for good or bad reason, during their teenage years and then realize as young adults that they really need that diploma," said Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, who sponsored the legislation in this year's session. "It's really all about the person who wants to come back to school."

Some national research indicates that up to 45 percent of the Houston school district's students fail to graduate from high school in four years.

The law means that Texas now has the highest upper age limit among states that specifically cap the age of traditional public school students.

Most states set the limit at 22. Washington, D.C., and Vermont don't cap students' ages and a few other states don't address upper age limits in their laws, according to the Education Commission of the States. The commission is a Denver-based nonprofit group.

"Bless their hearts for making accommodations for students to come back," Kathy Christie, a vice president with the commission, said of Texas lawmakers.

The law doesn't obligate districts to enroll older students. Nor does it affect the cutoff age for special-education students, who are eligible for service until age 22.

Districts that choose to enroll older students are not required to continue serving those who become discipline problems. And the law requires them to keep older students who have been out of school for three or more years separate from students who are 18 or younger.

Helps older immigrants

Officials with the Houston Independent School District said they are thrilled about the change, which was designed to help students such as the older immigrants who attend Liberty High School, formerly called the Newcomers Charter School.

The HISD board of trustees adopted a policy Thursday allowing the district to take advantage of the law. The district already was footing the bill for some older students to get their diplomas.

"We'll be able to expand the scope of the folks we're able to serve," Liberty High principal Monico Rivas said. "I think it's going to have a significant impact on helping members of the community continue to reach their goals."

Eighteen of Liberty High's nearly 200 students are at least 22, including Abraham Velasquez, who will be 23 when he graduates in May.

Velasquez, who sells fertilizer by day, said he's grateful to have the chance to attend night classes.

"High school diplomas are very important," said Velasquez, who quit school to work as a 14-year-old in Guatemala. "Without that, you can't do anything. You don't have many chances to have a better job."

'This is a big chance'

Once he has his diploma, he said, he hopes to study to be a nurse, or maybe even a doctor.

"It's not easy, but this is a big chance that they're giving us," said Velasquez, who attends classes on Saturdays and from 5 p.m. to at least 10 p.m. on weekdays.

Alief school district officials said they are enrolling some older students in a new night-school program that began this year. Students are selected on the basis of their desire and past academic performance.

"We have some 21-year-olds who are like ninth-graders," said Rodney Johnson, principal of the S.O.A.R. Evening High School program.

"A kid that is a dropout is not necessarily not intelligent. Life challenges happen to everyone; they just happen to these kids sooner. We have to remove the barriers."

Starting out small

Galena Park is creating a TAKS tutorial program for older students who still haven't passed the exit-level exam, but officials there don't yet plan a full-fledged high school program, said Elizabeth Lalor, director of research, district compliance and special projects.

"We're trying to start small and see how it goes," she said.

Lalor said the district probably will need to enroll at least six students in each of its four classes to cover the cost of the certified teachers. That doesn't include the expense of the utilities and security needed to keep the campuses open late.

"Some districts might not be biting on this tortilla right now," Lalor said. "It's a tough job. It's not a moneymaker, by any means. It's an opportunity."

$1.7 million estimated cost
State officials said there's no way to know how many districts or students will take advantage of the law.

Last year, when districts had to cover the cost, Texas enrolled 259 non-special-education students age 21 and older.

Under the new law, officials say, those numbers could grow exponentially. They have estimated that the change will cost Texas about $1.7 million a year.

"It's a win for the districts because they can recover more students and it provides funding," Texas Education Agency spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said. "It's a win for the students, who will, hopefully, take advantage of this and complete their diplomas."

BY THE NUMBERS

$30 - The amount school districts can now collect, per day, for students older than 21 but younger than 26

22 - The age limit most states set for students

18 - Number of Liberty High's nearly 200 students who are at least 22

$1.7 million - Estimated cost, per year, for Texas under new law

jennifer.radcliffe@chron.com

Labels: Dropouts

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:44 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Dumped over an Op-Ed

Erwin Chemerinsky, unhired as UC Irvine's founding law school dean, says his
ordeal is a lesson in academic freedom.

By Erwin Chemerinsky / Los Angeles Times

September 14, 2007

After so many years of commenting on the news, it is strange to be the news.
But, in a sense, this story isn't really about me, it's about academic freedom
in our deeply polarized times.

As has been widely reported, on Aug. 16 I was asked to be the founding dean of
the new law school at the University of California at Irvine. After a couple of
weeks of negotiations, I formally accepted the position and signed a contract
on Sept. 4. It always was understood that the job was contingent on approval of
the University of California Board of Regents, and it was to be on the agenda
for the regents' meetings on Sept. 18-20. I was tremendously excited about the
possibility of being part of starting a new law school at an excellent
university.

On Tuesday, Sept. 11, however, the chancellor at UC Irvine, Michael V. Drake,
withdrew the offer. He told me that I had proved to be "too politically
controversial." Those, by the way, were the exact words that he said I could
use to describe the reason for the decision. He told me that he had not
expected the extent of opposition that would develop.

What was it about my views that was too controversial? Only one example was
mentioned: an Op-Ed article I wrote on these pages criticizing a proposed
regulation by then-Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales to shorten the time death row
prisoners have to file their habeas corpus petitions. There are more than 275
individuals on death row in California without lawyers for their post-
conviction proceedings. The effect of the new rule would be that many
individuals, including innocent ones, would not get the chance to have their
cases reviewed in federal court.

The Op-Ed article was written and published before I was offered the position
as dean. More important, the whole point of academic freedom is that
professors -- and, yes, even deans -- should be able to speak out on important
issues. It would never have occurred to me that arguing against a proposed
federal regulation on behalf of those on death row would be deemed
objectionable. On the ideological spectrum, it is not radical.

Some people, in speaking to me, have compared this to McCarthyism, but in an
important way that analogy is not apt. I did not lose my job. I am a tenured
law professor at a terrific university, and I can continue to teach and write
and handle legal appeals, as I have for the last 28 years. I have received
nothing but support over this from my university president, provost, dean and
colleagues. During the McCarthy era, some faculty members lost their jobs for
what they wrote and said.

A key lesson learned from those tragic times is that academic freedom matters.
Tenure has many costs, but it exists so that academics will feel free to
express themselves without fear of reprisal. It is based on the idea that
everyone benefits from the free exchange of ideas. Without academic freedom,
the reality is that many faculty members would be chilled and timid in
expressing their views, and the discussion that is essential for the
advancement of thought would be lost.

This is not a liberal or conservative proposition. I said to Chancellor Drake
that if I were conservative and my appointment had been blocked by liberals,
the right would be justifiably outraged that "political correctness" had done
me in. The truth is that a person's politics should play no role in the
decision to hire them for a faculty or administrative position. All that
matters is that the individual be committed to creating an institution where
all viewpoints will be respected and flourish. That is what academic freedom is
all about.

My concern is that the message from this episode, especially for my more junior
colleagues who may aspire to be deans someday or, for that matter, judges, is
that if you speak out -- liberal or conservative -- you may lose your chance at
a position that you really want.

That's why I decided to answer questions about what happened and to accept the
invitation to write this article. Chancellor Drake initially asked that I
simply say that we had mutually agreed to end my prospective deanship. I
refused and said that all I wanted was that the truth be told. We live in such
ideologically polarized times. It is important for those on both sides of the
ideological spectrum to realize that their common commitment to academic
freedom is far more important than blocking a particular faculty or dean
candidate based on ideology.

What now? I have enormous fondness for the many wonderful people I met at UC
Irvine, and I hope they find a terrific dean and create a great law school -- a
school that, like all schools, should be committed to a rich diversity of ideas
and views.

Erwin Chemerinsky is a professor of law and political science at Duke
University.

Labels: academic freedom, higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:42 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Austin moves forward with teacher performance pay plan

Nine schools selected to be in pilot group this year.

By Raven L. Hill / AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, September 14, 2007

Earnings will be tied to learning at nine Austin schools this year.

Principals and teachers at six elementary schools, two middle schools and Lanier High School will have an opportunity to earn performance bonuses as part of the school district's strategic compensation plan

The compensation plan will include high-achieving campuses with high teacher retention rates as well as those that struggle to raise student performance and keep staff so officials can compare the plan's effect, if any, on student achievement.

As in some other school systems, Austin officials hope to use the bonuses as a way to recruit, retain and reward quality educators.

Officials started looking at performance pay three years ago, laying the groundwork for the $4.3 million plan launching this fall. Twenty campuses will be eligible to participate in the 2008-09 school year, and all campuses will be eligible in 2012.

"We're trying to see if paying teachers results in changed behavior not only on the part of teachers, but also in the way that the district supports teachers," said Louis Malfaro, president of Education Austin, which represents more than 4,000 teachers and staff members.

The plan excludes assistant principals and instructional coaches this year, which has caused some grumbling.

However, district officials think that crafting their plan alongside area teacher groups, earmarking funds to ensure its long-term sustainability and phasing it in slowly will ensure its success.

Under the plan, teachers and principals at high-needs schools can earn the largest stipends. Teacher stipends at those campuses range from $8,400 to $13,400, and principals can earn up to $15,500.

Novice teachers at those campuses will also receive full-time mentors, who can earn up to $5,000.

Teachers at each school will develop their own student learning objectives, two goals for the semester or school year, such as improving the scores of 85 percent of students by two or more levels on an Advanced Placement test. By meeting their goals, teachers can earn up to $1,500.

This will allow teachers to be recognized in ways that go unnoticed under federal and state accountability systems, district officials said.

State achievement tests will be used as schoolwide growth measures, but the learning objectives will be closely tied to classroom instruction.

With greater emphasis on high-stakes testing, Malfaro said, many teachers have wondered how they can reclaim their classrooms. "Part of the promise of strategic compensation is focusing on the training, support and professional development," he said.

Jon David Saucedo, a bilingual third-grade teacher at Sims Elementary School, a pilot campus, said he expects other staff to be included later. Incentives are needed at schools like Sims, he said.

"Although they are great kids, they have different needs, and it can be difficult to serve that every day. But we don't use that as an excuse."

Collins Van Nort, a sixth-grade teacher at Barton Hills Elementary, a pilot campus, said that he likes certain aspects of the plan, such as the retention bonuses, but that it is lacking in other ways.

"It's not a good substitute for an across-the-board pay increase," said Van Nort, who has worked in the district for 25 years. "I don't like the competitive aspect of it, (the implication) that we need to be like the business world and have incentives for performance. I think everyone is working to their fullest at this point."

rhill@statesman.com; 445-3620

Strategic compensation plan highlights

Nine Austin schools, five of them high-needs campuses, will be in the pilot group this year:

Barton Hills, Hart, Menchaca, Rodriguez, Sims and Sunset Valley elementary schools

Dobie and O. Henry middle schools

Lanier High School

At a high-needs school, teachers can earn $8,400 to $13,400 in bonuses. Principals can earn $6,000 to $15,500. At other campuses, the bonuses are up to $7,000 for teachers and $11,000 for principals.

Retention: A retention stipend will be phased in next school year at high-needs campuses. Teachers can earn $1,000 to $3,000 depending on their years of experience, and up to $6,000 in future years. Principals can receive $3,000.

Mentoring: Novice teachers will receive a part-time or full-time mentor, who can earn up to $5,000.

Teachers can receive up to $400 in stipends if they pursue National Board Certification. Educators who mentor teachers through the certification process will receive a $1,000 stipend.

State achievement tests: Teachers can receive up to $4,000 if math and reading objectives are met on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Principals can earn up to $8,000.

Classroom learning objectives: Teachers can earn up to $3,000 depending on the campus and the number of objectives met.

Labels: merit pay

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

The Postsecondary Picture for Minority Students (and Men)

Inside Higher Ed
September 13, 2007

The newest report from the National Center for Education Statistics is, as its title (”Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Minorities“) suggests, designed to provide a comprehensive look at how members of minority groups are faring in the American educational system, from top to bottom. But while the data it offers on that subject are decidedly mixed — showing significant progress over time for all groups, but wide gaps remaining in access to and success in college — the report’s most provocative (and potentially troubling) numbers may be about gender, not race.

Most of the data in the report from the Education Department’s statistical arm have been released in earlier or narrower reports. But by bringing together reams of statistics over 30 years on the full gamut of educational measures, from pre-primary enrollment of 3- to 5-year-olds to median incomes for adults over 25, the study aims to provide a broad-based look at “the educational progress and challenges that racial and ethnic minorities face in the United States.”
Progress and challenges are both evident; virtually every category contains good news and bad news. In the higher education realm, for instance, the report shows that where black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native students made up 17 percent of college undergraduates in 1976, their share of that total had risen to 32 percent by 2004. And each of those groups saw their raw numbers at least double over that time, with some groups showing significantly greater proportional increases, as seen in the table below:

Black
1976: 943,355
2004: 1,918,465
%Change: 103%

Hispanic
1976: 352,893
2004: 1,666,859
%Change: 372%

Asian/Pacific Islander
1976: 169,291
2004: 949,882
%Change: 461%

American Indian/Alaska Native
1976: 69,729
2004: 160,318
%Change: 130%

Representation in graduate education changed along roughly the same lines, the study finds, with minority group members making up 25 percent of the graduate school population in 2004, up from 11 percent in 1976.

In addition, the proportion of all 18- to 24-year-old Americans who were enrolled in college rose sharply for all racial groups between 1980 and 2004, in most cases increasing by at least 50 percent.

But those positive developments aside, the research shows that members of underrepresented minority groups badly lag their white and Asian peers in college going. By 2004, 60.3 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in college, as were 41.7 of white Americans in that age group. The numbers were lower for other groups: 31.8 for black Americans, 24.7 for Hispanics, and 24.4 percent for American Indian/Alaska Natives.

Similarly, the proportion of degrees awarded to most racial minority groups fell well short of their representation in the population. Slightly less than 10 percent of all college degrees awarded by U.S. degree-granting institutions in 2003-4 — and 9.3 percent of bachelor’s degrees, and 6 percent of doctorates — went to African-Americans, who make up 12 percent of the population. Hispanics fared worse, earning 7.3 of all degrees, 6.8 percent of baccalaureate degrees, and 3.4 percent of doctorates, despite making up 14 percent of the U.S. populace.

Concerning as those numbers might be to advocates for minority education, the most striking data in the report are probably those related to the educational outcomes of men, of all races and ethnicities.

By virtually every measure used in the report, male students have fallen far behind their female counterparts. That development isn’t new, but the federal report lays out the situation starkly. For instance, the study finds that the gender gap in undergraduate enrollments expanded generally and for all races between 1976 and 2004, as seen in the table below:

The Gender Gap in Undergraduate Enrollments, 1976 to 2004

Proportion of undergraduates who were male, 1976

All 52.0%
White 52.4%
Black 45.7%
Hispanic 54.3%
Asian/
Pacific Islander 53.8%
American Indian/
Alaska Native 49.9%

Proportion of Undergraduates Who Were Male, 2004

All 42.9%
White 44.1%
Black 35.7%
Hispanic 41.4%
Asian/
Pacific Islander 46.2%
American Indian/
Alaska Native 39.1%

% Difference Between Female and Male Enrollment, 2004

All 14.2%
White 11.8%
Black 28.6%
Hispanic 17.1%
Asian/
Pacific Islander 7.5%
American Indian/
Alaska Native 21.8%

Similarly, the proportion of male 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in college in 2004 had fallen to 34.7 percent, compared to 41.2 percent for women. Six to 10 percent gaps existed for all racial groups, too, with the exception of Asian/Pacific Islanders; for them, men were more likely to be enrolled in college by a 63 to 58 percent margin.

Women are also outperforming men as degree recipients, as seen in the table below:

Degrees Conferred by Gender and Race, 2003-4

Demographic Group / All degrees
White men / 818,690
White women / 1,121,646

Black men / 87,728
Black women / 184,183

Hispanic men / 78,775
Hispanic women / 122,784

Asian/Pacific Islander men / 75,435
Asian/Pacific Islander women / 93,335

American Indian/Alaska Native men / 8,476
American Indian/Alaska Native women / 14,255

Labels: gender, higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:01 AM 1 comments Links to this post

An Interview with Delia Stafford: About Alternative Certification

September 11, 2007
Education News

An Interview with Delia Stafford: About Alternative Certification

In the past, teachers have generally arrived at the schools after four years of a liberal arts education, with some pedagogy courses, and a major and perhaps minor or endorsement area. These teachers have typically been 22 or 23 year old largely developmentally late adolescents who were fresh out of college. This approach to procuring teachers had been in place for many years until a teacher shortage struck America, and many school systems were forced to re-think how to procure teachers and began examining the "alternative certification" route. This paradigm shift was spearheaded by Delia Stafford who implemented a Texas state department mandate, an entirely new approach that provided a new type of teacher that was uniquely suited to work in the urban schools with at-risk students in the Houston Independent School District. She was assigned as Director of Alternative Certification by then Superintendent Dr.Billy Reagan. Coupled with Martin Haberman's Star Teacher interview, her efforts were successful and later recognized by the first President Bush. She was awarded the "Commendation for Meritorious Service Award" by Dr. Rod Paige.Her efforts have increased exponentially the number of alternatively certified teachers for thousands of schools across the nation. Her combination of careful selection and district based on-site training has made this paradigm shift of alternative certification possible. Her courage, persistence and insight have challenged the decades old approach to teacher training and certification. Currently, she heads the Haberman Educational Foundation. Inc. and in the last thirty years she has touched the lives of more children, teachers, principals and schools in her work than any other leading pedagogist in America. In this interview, she responds to questions about the domain of alternative certification, it's history and importance, and reflects on her challenge to the status quo in American education.

1) In a sense, alternative certification has "challenged the status quo". In terms of teacher certification, why do you feel it important to "challenge the status quo"?

Over the decades we learned from experience that a teaching certificate did not predict how an individual would perform in the classroom. And it still doesn't. So challenging the status quo via alternative certification, simply put, was an initiative to solve a teacher shortage at the time, by developing programs with little or no input from the universities; minimal amounts coursework, while matching mature adults with master teachers mentoring individuals who were engaged in on the job training. That is the way it began and certainly not without the nay sayers. But today, we may have to challenge the altcert. routes since at least half reside in the universities. Should we say, not much has changed, but everything has changed.

2) Over the years, what have you learned about alternative certification?

I know first hand that altcert. programs must be carefully crafted, using discretion in selecting individuals to teach in order to ensure that the children do not become victims of a system of teacher training. In the beginning, all programs in Texas were constantly scrutinized, especially in the area of selection, training, testing; today there are few regulations to ensure quality.

That goes for traditional programs as well. I can say truthfully, that as a pioneer in alternative certification having produced quality teachers, I do feel some disappointment in the lack of "quality control"for the programs. The only criteria that I know exist now for all programs, is that all alternative and traditionally certified teachers must pass the required test for a teaching certificate; there are classes provided to help them pass the test. Not so in the beginning. For now however, "anything goes"as long as it has the name alternative certification connected. Some programs are good, some not so good. What separates may be a fine line of what is best for the children. Accountability for student learning should be the criteria for earning a teaching certificate both at the traditional and alternative certification levels.

3) Why should school systems be looking at alternative certification, and particularly older teachers with more maturity?

In my mind, maturity is the ability to control our impulses, to think beyond the moment, and consider how our words and our actions will affect others and ourselves before we act. In schools, especially urban districts, maturity is not an option if we intend to make a difference for students. Alternative certification candidates lean towards maturity, with few exceptions. However maturity doesn't necessarily come with age. There are many 23 year olds from our traditional education programs who are very mature and can do the job.

4) What do you see as the some of the main causes of the teacher shortage?

There is no teacher shortage; there is a shortage of teachers willing to teach in large urban districts. Most young graduates from our traditional teacher education programs know they can't do it and they do the districts and the children a favor and never apply. That is not an indictment, it is just a fact. Perhaps experience over a period of years would better qualify them to teach in urban areas, if they choose to do so.

5) Do you find that older more mature teachers do not burn out as rapidly as younger teachers?

I am sure they feel the heat of the beauocracy, but they are generally are more interested in teaching the children than bothering with the politics of the local district. There are many causes for burnout, one of which is the mundane requirements sent down by central office. Good and great teachers handle the paperwork, attend meetings and then get back to the business of teaching, always keeping in mind that the clients in every school district are the children and youth being served.

6) Are teachers who go through alternative certification programs just as well prepared to deal with the wide diversity of special education students that seems to constantly be growing?

I would say absolutely, yes. Alternative certification programs can and do specifically prepare teachers for that population of students. As director of the HISD alternative certification program and time progressed, we teamed with the universities to develop programs for the emotionally disturbed and autistic, severe and profoundly handicapped, diagnosticians, resource teachers. The program work very well then and to my knowledge, the programs continue today.

7) Why do you think we will continue to have to explore the realm of alternative certification?

That is just what we do in education. The concept of alternative certification and its' success is not going away. Alternative Certification Programs that once were "just New Jersey and Texas" have now spread to almost every state. The programs are needed, or they wouldn't be operational in so many sites across the states. There is always a call for more research. We have been accused of not having enough research on alternative certification teachers. I would say 20 plus years of success may be research enough. When we begin focusing the research on student achievement as the ultimate goal for traditional and alternative certification, the research issue will be moot. This goes for traditional and alternative certification.

8) Are there school systems or states that seem to prefer alternative certification and teachers who have gone that route?

Texas and California probably have the most programs, and they are thriving.
It would be a guess on my part to say which states prefer one over the other since all states have both traditional and alternative certification teacher education programs.

9) What challenges are faced by those teachers who certify through alternative methods?

In the beginning, they were faced the ire of the traditional university teacher education programs, mentors who did not want to be bothered, and in general were viewed as a"group of those who went through a shortcut or back door to teaching".They faced the same challenges that every other teacher had and more because they were required to do so much more because of the training program requirements.

Today, alternative certification interns are viewed by their peers and administrators as individuals who really have a desire to teach and want what is best for students. Individual trainees that I worked with and for, always had the childrens'best interest in the forefront. We selected the candidates very carefully. The Texas Education Agency, now the Texas State Board for Educator Certification, introduced the new alternative certification directors to Dr. Haberman. He taught us his Star Teacher Selection Interview. We selected Haberman Star Teacher candidates, many of whom, were selected by their peers for the school districts teacher of the year award.

10) In your experience, are alternatively certified teachers more concerned about classroom management, or curricular issues?

Probably both, which is the reason programs must be carefully crafted to ensure that the students do not become the victims of teacher training programs. The candidates need to be given ample time to learn the craft of teaching because most know the content. I would never advocate "learning to teach at the children's' expense".The focus should be this; does the person understand the value and need for engaging students in professional relationships and finding interesting activities to make learning the primary goal. If the relationships with students are not apparent or present, neither content nor management procedures will work.Programs should select candidates early and provide ample lead time fortraining. No practicing on the students!

11) Are alternatively certified teachers better prepared to cope with parents, principals and the beauracacy?

If they are mature adults and have the children's interest first ,they can they be successful in the school community and its' systems approach. Dealing with parents, principals and other teachers is part of the job. Problems are an expected part of the job. All good teachers know what is expected and are not afraid to inquire if they have problems in any area of the profession.

12) What tools and skills have you developed over the years in terms of working with and training alternatively certified teachers?

One memory stands out. Those selected individuals for our program were so willing to learn and be successful, so as school educators training potential classroom teachers, we tried to be patient, caring trainers, because we knew the challenges they would be facing in our schools.We knew it was not going to be easy. We were always extremely supportive, and tried to ensure that were trained and ready to teach so that they could experience success early in their career. We were very strict however, in observations and on-going development of the interns. We held each potential teacher to a very high standard. They had to be better in order to survive, especially when the programs first evolved.

13) What programs have you been involved with over the years, and what have you learned about them?

I was involved with the first school-based teacher education program in the states for ten years. Teach for America had their first co-hortas a part of the Houston ISD alternative certification program and Troops to Teachers participate in altcert programs as well. Today we have Transition to Teaching programs. They all appear to survive and produce teachers, and since the movement is nearing two decades, like anything else, some are good, some not so good. There are training programs providing teachers that are not alternative certification programs. They are simply teacher training organizations. Alternative Certification hasbecome "bandwagon" approach to teaching. Jump on!

14) A bit of history lesson here. When did the alternative certification movement begin and who was at the forefront?

It began in the early eighties in New Jersey under the leadership of Dr. Leo Klagholtz, who later became Commissioner of Education in that state. Texas was next, and the language was crafted for alternative certification by Ross Perot with the state department in Texas and implemented in Houston Independent School District by then Superintendent Dr.Billy Reagan. During the first year of the program, 6000 individuals applied for the program. Four-hundred-fifty were selected, and I feel safe in saying about two hundred sixty survived.Today, about fifteen hundred or more a year are hired via the alternative certification program. Retention rates are very good. Today,Texas alone has twenty-eight programs across the state, including school based, university programs and education service centers that serve school districts. To those who said it wouldn't work, I would say,"never underestimate the power of an idea from those who seek solutions to better the lives of children".

15) What question have I neglected to ask?

You didn't ask about when and where the National Association of Alternative Certification was chartered.

That happened April 1991, when the Texas Alternative Certification Association, composed of the Directors of Alternative Certification and alternative certification intern members, there were five directorsby then, decided to host the first national conference. We invited every state department of education and others who were involved in the research the first programs. I was naive enough to invite then Vice President Al Gore to speak; he didn't speak or respond, but the conference was a success! Dr. Martin Haberman, Distinguished Professor UWM, and Dr. C.Emily Feistritzer, Bill Smith, U.S. Department of Education were the main speakers for the500 participants gathered at South Padre Island for the first annual conference. At that conference , The Houston Independent School District Alternative Certification Program won the "Trail Blazer Award".

At the second annual national conference April 1992, we gave President Bush his teaching certificate from the state of Texas. He wanted to teach when he returned from the arm services andliving in Midland, Texas. He wasn't allowed a teaching positionbecause he didn't have a teaching certificate. The Texas directors of alternative certification requested and received from Texas State Department of Education a teaching certificate for President Bush.He sent Dr. Charles E.M. Cobb,his Senior Policy Advisor, to speak to the conferees and bring the certificate back to Washington DC.

I have a picture of President Bush in the oval office looking at his Texas teaching certificate and a note thanking me for getting him his teaching certificate. This coming year 2008, in Atlanta, the association will hold its' Annual Conference. I will be there. I have attended every conference, to date, and in Washington D.C.2007, I was honored asFounder of the National Association of Alternative Certification.

Delia Stafford is the President and CEO of the Haberman Educational Foundation, Houston, Texas. http://www.habermanfoundation.org

Labels: teachers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:54 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Thursday, September 13, 2007

AAUP Newsletter: Freedom in the Classroom

The following is from a forwarded email from the American Association of University Professors. All links to mentioned articles are included.-Patricia

The intellectual independence and integrity of higher education’s classroom faculty have been under attack for some time—by the press, by conservative commentators, and by politicians. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is convinced that it is time take back the classroom on behalf of academic freedom. In a clear and carefully reasoned historic new report, we counter these attacks and lay out the principles of responsible college pedagogy. The full report, Freedom in the Classroom, is available in the September–October issue of Academe , our journal of record, and online.

The report differentiates instruction from indoctrination. It addresses demands for “balance” in the classroom and offers a very specific and limited disciplinary rationale for the relevance of balance. It argues forcefully that college instructors have the right—and, some would argue, the responsibility—to challenge their students’ most cherished beliefs.

The report also takes up the most controversial issue, politics in the classroom, and offers an analysis for your consideration. We adapt an example from a 2007 New York Times column: “Might not a teacher of nineteenth-century American literature, taking up Moby Dick , a subject having nothing to do with the presidency, ask the class to consider whether any parallel between President George W. Bush and Captain Ahab could be pursued for insight into Melville’s novel? Might not an instructor of classical philosophy, teaching Aristotle’s views of moral virtue, present President Bill Clinton’s conduct as a case study for student discussion?”

No matter what the discipline, no matter what subject matter or historical period a course description defines, we suggest, the field of contemporary culture and politics is available for comparison, analogy, and contrast. To say this is to reaffirm the life of the mind, to assert that in human culture anything may potentially be connected to anything else.

See Michael Bérubé’s essay "Why the AAUP’s New Statement ‘Freedom in the Classroom’ Matters" online in the September 11 issue of Inside Higher Ed.

Labels: higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:40 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Mass. Tells Districts Not to Rush Changes in Student-Assignment Plans

By Catherine Gewertz / Ed Week
September 13, 2007

Massachusetts is examining all 22 of its school districts’ state-approved desegregation plans, and a multidistrict desegregation program, to see if they are legally viable in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that restricts the ways districts may use race to achieve diversity in school enrollments.

The Bay State is urging districts not to rush into changing their student-assignment plans for this school year, but to hold their course until the state’s attorney general, its education department, and the governor’s office complete their joint review.

For the rest of this story click here

Labels: desegregation

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:25 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Proposed NCLB Rule on 'Salary Comparability' Draws Scrutiny

By Bess Keller / Ed Week
September 12, 2007

A draft provision for the No Child Left Behind Act that would provide more money to schools with the least experienced teachers at the expense of schools with more senior ones is likely to face stiff opposition if the proposed change becomes part of the bill that goes before Congress.

Organizations representing teachers, state legislatures, and district administrators have already voiced opposition, saying such a policy would be a poor way to address the so-called teacher gap.

For the rest of this article click here

Labels: NCLB reauthorization, teacher salary gap

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:48 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Education Panel Chairman Spars With Union Over Merit Pay for Teachers

By The Associated Press
September 22, 2007

The head of the nation's largest teacher's union and a top House Democrat had a testy exchange Monday over the inclusion of merit pay in an updated version of the No Child Left Behind education law.
California Rep. George Miller, chairman of the House education committee, criticized National Education Association President Reg Weaver for rejecting the merit-pay proposal.

For the rest of the story click here

Labels: merit pay

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:41 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Schools changing to meet students' interests

Daniel Perry / The Monitor
September 11, 2007

The challenge looms as large as the steel school initials at the front of their campuses: changing the high school atmosphere to provide more courses tailored to students’ interests and providing additional information for teachers to do their jobs.

Six high schools in the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo, Weslaco and Zapata school districts are doing this with the help of the Region One Education Service Center in Edinburg and nationwide education organizations. The schools started last month their first year of the High School Redesign Project, which breaks up student bodies, teachers and counselors into small learning communities geared toward specific topics. The districts planned for a year before launching the project.

The McAllen school district is also in the planning stage and will implement it at its three high schools and Lamar Academy for the 2008-09 school year.

The idea is to have 18 high schools revamped in a five-year period. The money to do this will come from the U.S. Department of Education, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Texas Education Agency. Also partnering in the effort are the Institute for School Excellence and the Institute for Reform and Research in Education, both national entities providing project research and guidance.

Leaders at the districts said they hope redesigned schools can improve student completion rates, lower drop-out rates and improve academic performance.

In the PSJA district, PSJA North High School had the lowest completion rate among its three high schools with 78.2 percent. But, PSJA High School had the largest number of dropouts with 93 students. Both figures are from 2006, according to the state education agency.

In the Weslaco district, Weslaco East High School had the highest number of dropouts with 27 and the lowest completion rate with 91.5 percent for 2006, according to the education agency.

The participating high schools must still abide by state education guidelines and have students pass required standardized tests to graduate. The number of learning communities is contingent on the size of campuses and the range of student interests. Zapata High School only has three communities for law, criminal justice and government; health sciences and business and engineering and technology.

PSJA Memorial High School has eight communities in subjects ranging from performing arts to legal professions and public service. Some new courses in music theory, medical microbiology, sociology and courts and criminal procedures were added to give students more themed courses to take in their junior and seniors years.

“That area of interest can hopefully be articulated in their senior year when you are looking at dual enrollment, concurrent enrollment, project-based learning,” said Claudia Rodriguez, Region One’s administrator for the division of instructional support. “I think the intent is more to go that route and the schools, like in PSJA, creating some classes you can see in college. We applaud their efforts.”

PSJA Memorial junior Francisco Gonzalez, 16, is in the business and technology community. Some of his classes this year include introductory computer maintenance, geometry and orchestra. He is looking forward to learning about Web design and software repairs this year.

“They (teachers) do get you ready for what you will be used to in college, but now, I don’t really feel like they are doing that,” Gonzalez said.

Dalila Garcia, PSJA Memorial’s school improvement facilitator, said staff is still tweaking some student schedules because of some classes either having not enough or too many students. She said staff will start thinking about the next school year’s scheduling in November.

PSJA Memorial junior Dulce Gonzalez, 16, is in the health science track and is taking orchestra, second-year Spanish, medical microbiology and third-year English. She is not related to Francisco Gonzalez.

“I thought we were going to stay in one wing and not see our friends,” she said.

PSJA North has also dealt with scheduling issues the first few days of school.

”From my perspective, we didn’t put enough time and effort in the planning stage,” said Barbara Mahan, an English dual credit teacher at the school. “I’m not saying it can’t work, but it was sort of my perception we needed another year to plan.”

Weslaco East added Advanced Placement physics and debate courses this year along with block scheduling. Principal Sue Peterson said more courses will be added in upcoming years along with opportunities for students to graduate with professional certifications. The school already offers a nursing assistant certification.

“What has made it work is the extreme amount of teamwork and support by everyone,” Peterson said.

The school has not had to add mathematics and science classes because there were already enough for students to take for each year of high school. This year’s freshmen class is the first to be required by the state to take and pass four years of mathematics and science courses.

The traditional homeroom and advisory periods at the participating schools are being transformed into advocacy time for teachers and small groups of students, depending on the campus size, that will meet weekly. The teachers will keep these advocacy students for the duration of their high school careers.

PSJA North is expected to begin advocacy periods each Wednesday starting this week. The high school had not had regular homeroom-style classes the last few years, school staff said.

Advocacy time will also be an opportunity to study student progress, with academic and behavioral profiles being compiled for each student. The profiles detail absences, test score information, grades and other information and can be accessed online by teachers.

“You want to build relationships,” said Alban Benavides, a junior and senior American history and psychology teacher at PSJA North. “You want to know what you’ve got.”

Labels: career education, Region 1

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

Kindergartners learning both Spanish and English

By Carolyn G. Schatz, Staff Writer
September 12, 2007

The earlier you start, the easier it is to learn a second language. And you don't have to be afraid of monsters.

The kindergartners in Brenda De La Vega's class eagerly took in that lesson one morning last week as they listened to their teacher read "Luna, Lunita Lunera," the story of a little girl who's afraid to go to school until she realizes that no monsters live there.

De La Vega read the story in Spanish as murmurs of "Monster! Monster!" and "Monstruo! Monstruo!" rippled among her rapt listeners.

As De La Vega asked her class in English what they liked best, little hands shot up.

"I liked when she was crying," said one. "I liked when she was going to school," said another - both in English.

Par for the course, De La Vega had read the same story in English - "Moony Luna" - to her class last week.

And so, the kindergartners at Ruth Grimes Elementary School in Bloomington are getting a head start by learning two languages at once - English and Spanish.

Thirty-nine percent of the school's students are native English speakers.

Most of them are Spanish speakers, though students at the school also speak Indonesian, Arabic, Filipino, Vietnamese and Punjabi.

t is the first year that a school in the Colton Joint Unified School District is offering a dual-immersion program.

But it is not as difficult as it sounds. The kids in De La Vega's class made it look easy, as they sat huddled at their tables, drawing colorful fish and learning their numbers and letters - core principles that are the same in both languages.

"Uno, dos - and how many is that?" asked Adela Guillen Coke as she stood over a student's shoulder, interspersing the two languages in a perfect blend. Guillen Coke is a teacher on assignment who coordinates the program.

The mix of Spanish and English flowed effortlessly throughout the day's lesson plan, with the students unhesitatingly responsive - no matter which language they spoke. Both Spanish and English were welcomed warmly.

The goal of the program, said Bertha Arreguin, director of language support services for the district, is for students to become completely bilingual and biliterate.

The way to achieve that is to start them in both languages in kindergarten and build from there.

Ruth Grimes is using a 90-10 program, in which two of the five kindergarten classes are being taught in 90 percent Spanish and 10 percent English.

Next year, the program at Ruth Grimes will be expanded to the first grade, and students will be learning 80 percent Spanish and 20 percent English.

Each year, a new grade level will be added at Ruth Grimes - with 10 percent more English and 10 percent less Spanish taught - so that by the fourth or fifth grades, students will be learning equally in English and Spanish.

"By sixth grade, we want them to be ready to continue on through middle school and high school," Arreguin said.

Parents must make at least a six-year commitment to the program, she said, to make it work.

Pulling them out is a no-no. Parents are required to sign a waiver, promising to keep their child in the dual-immersion program through the fifth grade.

The parental role is key, and language classes will be offered to parents, beginning in October, Arreguin said.

"The need to know two languages is increasing," she said.

"All you have to do is look throughout the world. In almost every country besides the USA, children study or know more than one language."

"It's unheard of in Europe not to know three languages," said Guillen Coke.

The 4- and 5-year-olds at Ruth Grimes are actually doing double the learning.

All of the curriculum in the dual-immersion classes is aligned with state standards.

But while it may seem that those who speak solely English when they enter class may seem to be at a disadvantage by being taught primarily in Spanish - all students in the kindergarten class learn to read in Spanish - research shows otherwise.

Both English- and Spanish-speaking children benefit, administrators say.

The principles for learning to read are the same in both languages, Guillen Coke said.

Research shows that learning another language aids critical thinking, and even improves test scores, Arreguin said.

"Research shows that students in bilingual programs can develop academic skills on a par with or superior to the skills of comparison groups of their peers educated in English-only classrooms," she said.

Moreover, there is no danger in immersing English speakers in another language, because they are not at risk of losing English, Arreguin said.

"Two-way immersion programs are not replacing English with another language," she said, "but providing students the opportunity to acquire a second language at an early age."

The second language is acquired while retaining the first language.

And the best time to learn another language is when children start to speak, up until about age 10, Arreguin said.

It's not just the parents of English learners who want to enroll their children in dual-immersion classes.

The greatest demand comes from high-income professionals who appreciate the advantages of knowing another language in a global economy, Arreguin said.

Amy Norris said she wanted her son, Alexander, 4, to participate in the Ruth Grimes program "because it's good for him to learn a second language. ... Students who take a second language tend to do better throughout their academic career."

The small class size and more individualized instruction are also attractive, she said.

Norris, a full-time nursing student at San Bernardino Valley College, said she only regrets that her 8-year-old is "too old" for the program. But depending on how Alexander performs, she'll be gladly enrolling her 1-year-old when the time comes.

There are no monsters, after all, in Ruth Grimes' kindergarten class.

Labels: language immersion

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:01 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Teachers and Rights Groups Oppose Education Measure

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO / NY Times
September 11, 2007

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 — The draft House bill to renew the federal No Child Left Behind law came under sharp attack on Monday from civil rights groups and the nation’s largest teachers unions, the latest sign of how difficult it may be for Congress to pass the law this fall.

At a marathon hearing of the House Education Committee, legislators heard from an array of civil rights groups, including the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, the National Urban League, the Center for American Progress and Achieve Inc., a group that works with states to raise academic standards.

All protested that a proposal in the bill for a pilot program that would allow districts to devise their own measures of student progress, rather than using statewide tests, would gut the law’s intent of demanding that schools teach all children, regardless of poverty, race or other factors, to the same standard.

Dianne M. Piché, executive director of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, said the bill had “the potential to set back accountability by years, if not decades,” and would lead to lower standards for children in urban and high poverty schools.

“It strikes me as not unlike allowing my teenage son and his friends to score their own driver’s license tests,” Ms. Piché said, adding, “We’ll have one set of standards for the Bronx and one for Westchester County, one for Baltimore and one for Bethesda.”

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, who is chairman of the committee, countered that district tests would have to be approved by the federal Education Department, which he said would safeguard against any watering down of standards.

The law, a signature initiative of the Bush administration that passed in 2001 with bipartisan support, requires schools to test all students annually in reading and math in grades three to eight and to show all students progressing toward 100 percent proficiency regardless of background. Schools in high poverty areas that fail to show sufficient gains face potentially harsh penalties, including possible closing.

The proposals for changing the law, which has so far tagged 10,000 high poverty schools for state and district intervention, move away from relying solely on test scores in math and reading as a gauge of school progress. They would allow schools to include test results in other subjects, as well as indicators like attendance, promotion, performance in advanced placement courses and graduation rates to demonstrate academic strength.

The draft has also come under criticism from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and Congressional Republicans.

Mr. Miller said he was not discouraged by the opposition, and indeed, many witnesses praised the proposals as offering much-needed flexibility to the law.

“I think we’re doing well,” Mr. Miller said after the hearing. “It’s not easy, but that’s not a surprise.”

Leaders of the teachers’ unions — Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, and Toni Cortese, executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers — told the committee that they would not support the bill in its current form and that they objected to a proposal to count student test scores in granting pay bonuses.

Mr. Weaver’s testimony produced the sharpest exchange of the day, when Mr. Miller accused the unions of reneging on an earlier agreement to support the measure when it was incorporated into a 2005 bill proposed by Democrats and that was never adopted by Congress, which was then controlled by Republicans.

But Mr. Weaver and Ms. Cortese disputed that account, saying that while they supported the 2005 bill over all, they had expressed concerns about any provisions that would mandate test scores be included in determining pay.

Labels: NCLB reauthorization

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

Why I am Fasting: An Explanation to My Friends

As the U.S considers the re-authorization of NCLB, this is an important read. -Angela

by JONATHAN KOZOL

Why I am Fasting: An Explanation to My Friends
Posted September 10, 2007 | 09:58 AM (EST)
The Huffington Post -- September 11, 2007

This morning, I am entering the 67th day of a partial fast that I began early in the summer as my personal act of protest at the vicious damage being done to inner-city children by the federal education law No Child Left Behind, a racially punitive piece of legislation that Congress will either renew, abolish, or, as thousands of teachers pray, radically revise in the weeks immediately ahead.

The poisonous essence of this law lies in the mania of obsessive testing it has forced upon our nation's schools and, in the case of underfunded, overcrowded inner-city schools, the miserable drill-and-kill curriculum of robotic "teaching to the test" it has imposed on teachers, the best of whom are fleeing from these schools because they know that this debased curriculum would never have been tolerated in the good suburban schools that they, themselves, attended.

The justification for this law was the presumptuous and ignorant determination by the White House that our urban schools are, for the most part, staffed by mediocre drones who will suddenly become terrific teachers if we place a sword of terror just above their heads and threaten them with penalties if they do not pump their students' scores by using proto-military methods of instruction -- scripted texts and hand-held timers -- that will rescue them from doing any thinking of their own. There are some mediocre teachers in our schools (there are mediocre lawyers, mediocre senators, and mediocre presidents as well), but hopelessly dull and unimaginative teachers do not suddenly turn into classroom wizards under a regimen that transforms their classrooms into test-prep factories.

The real effect of No Child Left Behind is to drive away the tens of thousands of exciting and high-spirited, superbly educated teachers whom our urban districts struggle to attract into these schools. There are more remarkable young teachers like this coming into inner-city education than at any time I've seen in more than 40 years. The challenge isn't to recruit them; it's to keep them. But 50 percent of the glowing young idealists I have been recruiting from the nation's most respected colleges and universities are throwing up their hands and giving up their jobs within three years.

When I ask them why they've grown demoralized, they routinely tell me it's the feeling of continual anxiety, the sense of being in a kind of "state of siege," as well as the pressure to conform to teaching methods that drain every bit of joy out of the hours that their children spend with them in school.

"I didn't study all these years," a highly principled and effective first-grade teacher told me -- she had studied literature and anthropology in college while also having been immersed in education courses -- "in order to turn black babies into mindless little robots, denied the normal breadth of learning, all the arts and sciences, all the joy in reading literary classics, all the spontaneity and power to ask interesting questions, that kids are getting in the middle-class white systems."
At a moment when black and Hispanic students are more segregated than at any time since 1968 (in the typical inner-city school I visit, out of an enrollment that may range from 800 to 4,000 students, there are seldom more than five or six white children), NCLB adds yet another factor of division between children of minorities and those in the mainstream of society. In good suburban classrooms, children master the essential skills not from terror but from exhilaration, inspired in them by their teachers, in the act of learning in itself. They're also given critical capacities that they will need if they're to succeed in college and to function as discerning citizens who have the power to interrogate reality. They learn to ask the questions that will shape the nation's future, while inner-city kids are being trained to give prescripted answers and to acquiesce in their subordinate position in society.

In the wake of the calamitous Supreme Court ruling in the end of June that prohibited not only state-enforced but even voluntary programs of school integration, No Child Left Behind -- unless it is dramatically transformed -- will drive an even deeper wedge between two utterly divided sectors of American society. This, then, is the reason I've been fasting, taking only small amounts of mostly liquid foods each day, and, when I have stomach pains, other forms of nourishment at times, a stipulation that my doctor has insisted on in order to avert the risk of doing longterm damage to my heart. Twenty-nine pounds lighter than I was when I began, I've been dreaming about big delicious dinners.

Still, I feel an obligation to those many teachers who have told me, not as an accusation but respectfully, that it was one of my books that diverted them from easier, more lucrative careers and brought them into teaching in the first place. Some call me in the evenings, on the verge of tears, to tell me of the maddening frustration that they feel at being forced to teach in ways that make them hate themselves.

I don't want them to quit their jobs. I give them whatever good survival strategies I can. I tell them that the best defense is to be extremely good at what they do: Deliver the skills! Don't let your classroom grow chaotic! A teacher who can keep a reasonable sense of calm within her room, particularly in a school in which disorder has been common, renders herself almost inexpendable.

At the same time, I always recommend a healthy dose of sly irreverence and a sense of playful and ironical detachment from the criticisms of those clipboard bureaucrats who come around to check on them. (Teachers call them "the curriculum cops" or "NCLB overseers.") I urge them to develop mischievous and inventive ways to convince these gloomy-looking people that whatever they are teaching at that moment, no matter how delectably subversive it may be, is, in fact, directly geared to one of those little chunks of amputated knowledge, known as "state proficiencies," they are supposed to be "delivering" at that specific minute of the day.

But I've also felt the obligation to bring this battle to its source in Washington. I've tried very hard to convince a number of the more enlightened Democrats who serve on the Senate education panel to introduce amendments that will drastically reduce our government's reliance upon standardized exams in judgment of a child, school, or teacher, and attribute greater weight to factors that are not so simple-mindedly reducible to numbers.

Sophisticated as opposed to low-grade methods of assessment would not only tell us whether little Oscar or Shaniqua started out their essays with "a topic sentence" but would also tell us whether they wrote something with the slightest hint of authenticity and charm or simply stamped out insincere placebos. (A child gets no credit for originality or authenticity under No Child Left Behind. Sincerity gets no rewards. Endearing stylistic eccentricity, needless to say, is not rewarded either. That which can't be measured is not valued by the technocrats of uniformity who have designed this miserable piece of legislation.)

On a separate battlefront, I've also tried to win support for an amendment to the law that will take advantage of one of the loop-holes in the recent segregation ruling, an opening that Justice Kennedy has offered us by his insistence that criteria that are not race-specific may be used in order to advance diversity in public schools.

There is a provision in No Child Left Behind that permits a child in a chronically low-performing school to transfer to a more successful school. Up to now, it hasn't worked because there aren't enough successful schools in inner-city districts to which kids can transfer. The Democrats, I've argued, have the opportunity to make this option workable if they are sufficiently audacious to require states to authorize a child's right to transfer across district lines, and provide financial means to make this possible, so that children trapped in truly hopeless schools could, if their parents so desired, go to school in one of the high-spending suburbs that are often a mere 20-minute ride from their front door.

I was surprised that none of the senators with whom I spoke rejected this proposal as too controversial or politically unthinkable. More than one made clear that they enjoyed the notion of helping to "improve" a flawed provision that the White House had included in the law for reasons that most certainly were not intended to enable inner-city kids to go to beautiful suburban schools with 16 or 18 children in a room, instead of 29, or 35, or 40, as in many urban systems.

It was, however, on the testing issue that I received the most explicitly unqualified and positive response. Several of the senators made a lot of time available to think aloud about the ways in which to get rid of that sense of siege so many teachers had described and to be certain that we do not keep on driving out these talented young people from our schools.
The only member of the Democratic leadership I have been unable to get through to is the influential chairman of the education panel, Senator Ted Kennedy, who, one of his colleagues told me flatly, will ultimately "call the shots" on this decision. I've asked the senator three times if he'll talk with me. Each time, I have run into a cold stone wall. This has disappointed me, and startled me, because the senator has been a friend to me in years gone by and has asked for my ideas on education on a number of occasions in the decades since I was a youthful teacher and he was a youthful politician.
Senator Kennedy is, of course, a very busy man and has many other issues of importance he must deal with. But it's also possible, aides to other senators suggest, that he does not wish to contemplate dramatic changes in the law because he co-sponsored the initial bill in a deal with the Republicans. He is also renowned as a gifted builder of consensus in the legislative process. Lending his support to either of the two proposals I have made would almost surely guarantee a knockdown battle with conservative Republicans and, perhaps, with some of the Democratic neoliberals as well.

Still, Senator Kennedy has displayed a genuine nobility of vision in defense of elemental fair play for low-income children many times before. Is it possible that he may rise to the occasion once again? If he does, I may finally listen to the worries of my friends and decide it's time to bring this episode of fasting to an end. If not, I'll keep slogging on. It's a tiny price to pay compared to what so many of our children and their teachers have to go through every single day.

Labels: NCLB reauthorization

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:18 AM 0 comments Links to this post

NCLB Reauthorization DATABASE

Here's a useful site for reading up on the recommendation summaries for the NCLB reauthorization. -Patricia

Who's saying what about NCLB Reauthorization?

The intense interest in No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the upcoming reauthorization have prompted several national organizations to offer recommendations for improving the far-reaching federal law. To better inform the national debate on NCLB reauthorization, ECS collected and analyzed these recommendations and created a one-stop source that allows you to easily find out who’s saying what about revising the law.

Click here to go to site

Labels: NCLB reauthorization

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:17 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Getting Up to Speed: Schools add learning hours

Here's a follow-up to what approaches the schools in HMB are taking to as a result of the 5-day Reader's Workshop in collaboration with Columbia's Teachers College last month. Click here for more information. -Patricia

By Neil Gonzales, STAFF WRITER San Mateo Times
09/10/2007

MARITZA VELASQUEZ doesn't mind getting to class way before most of her fellow students arrive at Cunha Intermediate School in Half Moon Bay.

"I'm used to waking up early," the 13-year-old said. "I wake up at 6. I take a long time to get ready. You know girls."

Maritza is among those taking Cunha's new "zero period" class, which starts at 7:42 a.m. It's an additional 43 minutes of instruction to her regular school day, which typically goes from 8:30 a.m. to 3:05 p.m.

Cabrillo Unified district officials decided to add zero period this year to help English-language learners catch up on their reading skills.

Increasingly, districts and schools across the nation are exploring expanded instructional time to speed up children's learning and close a persistent achievement gap among students of different races.

That strategy could gain greater traction as 2014 approaches. That's the deadline the federal No Child Left Behind Act has given educators to have all students reading and doing math proficiently.

"We are seeing more schools take it upon themselves to expand the school day, week or year," said Elena Rocha, co-author of the recent report "Choosing More Time for Students," released by the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan research and educational institute based in Washington, D.C.

Rocha partly attributed that increased interest in adding instructional time to NCLB's pressures.

"But we are also hearing from the field that there are principals and administrators trying to think outside the box," she said.

She said educators are seeing additional instruction as a good strategy to use at low-performing, high-poverty schools and to narrow the achievement gap.

According to a 2004 study by the Washington, D.C., based nonprofit Education Trust, minority children nationally were about three years behind other students by the time they reached eighth grade.

Also, 17-year-old African-American and Latino students showed skills in reading and math similar to those of 13-year-old whites, according to Education Trust.

Elizabeth Schuck, Cabrillo assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, believes adding the zero-period reading class at Cunha will help bridge the achievement gap there.

"We're understanding that more time on task and greater exposure to specific instruction will accelerate the learning rate of students," Schuck said.

Maritza feels the early-morning class will help her. "I like it because it gets you to meet state standards better," she said. "I also noticed my reading has gotten faster."

Fellow zero-period student Vicente Ortiz, 14, said he is also seeing improvement already.

"I feel I'm getting better in my reading and writing," he said.

Schuck said district officials are also planning to continue an intervention program for Hatch Elementary students who are at least two years below grade level in reading. That program could be incorporated within the regular instructional day or go after school as it did the past year, she said.

She believed the program helped Latino and other groups of students at Hatch make gains in the Academic Performance Index, a NCLB program measuring achievement based on state standardized tests.

Latino students, for instance, scored an API of 637 this year — up from the previous 605, according to the district.

The API ranges from 200 to 1000 and sets the benchmark goal at 800.

The La Honda-Pescadero district has also expanded learning times. La Honda-Pescadero Superintendent Tim Beard said the district a few years ago changed kindergarten from a half-day to full-day program.

The district is also using a $75,000 state grant to run after-school programs to help struggling students at Pescadero School improve their reading and math, he said.

"We have a lot of English-language learners," he said, "so we need to give them extra (instructional) time and targeted focus in English and math."

Rocha said funding is "definitely an issue" for schools trying to add instructional hours.

Besides grants, she said some schools tap federal Title I money for that purpose. Title I funds are given to schools serving a large number of low-income students.

Some financial relief may be on the way in the near future.

Rocha said the proposed reauthorization of NCLB could include additional money for expanded learning times.

Another concern involves labor issues.

"We support what needs to be done to bring students (up) academically," said Fred Glass, spokesman for the California Federation of Teachers. "But if teachers are asked to teach more than they need to, they should be compensated."

He said the state education code requires a minimum 180 days of instruction and three days for staff development in a year.

"Any time a district wants to expand a school day or year beyond the minimum, that's subject to labor negotiations," he said.

Cunha Principal Michael Andrews said some teachers receive extra pay from Title I for the zero period class. Others are able to fit the class as part of their regular schedule, he said.

U.S. Department of Education spokeswoman Rebecca Neale said expanding instructional times is a state and local decision.

"But we are for whatever helps get all students reading and doing math at grade level by 2014," she said.

Labels: achievement gap, California

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:35 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Schools aim to meet standards

By Israel Saenz (Contact)
Sunday, September 9, 2007 / Caller Times

CORPUS CHRISTI — As Moody High School instructor Michelle Donahue gave stern graphing instructions using a classroom overhead during the first week of school, Laura Estrada knelt by the desk of one student, troubleshooting his difficulties understanding the lesson.

The math students weren't seeing double -- they had two teachers. It's an image that will be much more common this year in CCISD schools.

Starting this academic year, administrators answered the district's failure to meet federal progress standards with several strategies to decrease the number of students taking alternate standardized tests.

One of those is the co-teaching model, now conducted at 38 of the district's 62 schools. The model will involve a regular instructor and a co-teacher who will supplement math or reading lessons by helping students one-on-one during the class.

At Moody, the only Corpus Christi Independent School District high school to meet federal standards this year, Estrada said the co-teaching model will help keep more students learning at their grade level and keep some from being classified as special-education students. The school missed federal standards for the 2005-06 academic year.

Along with cutting down the student-instructor ratio in the classroom, the co-teaching model is meant for one instructor to act as an in-class tutor, so children leave the class understanding the lesson and avoid falling behind.

"We work off each other," Estrada said. "We both work with students, monitor them and assess them."

The district missed federal Adequate Yearly Progress standards, which rate schools based on students' performance on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, for the second consecutive year based on reading scores at the special-education level. The district's emphasis will be on how it tests the approximately 4,380 special-education students, Superintendent Scott Elliff reported to district school board members last month.

The district's TAKS scores are rated at the federal level with the annual Adequate Yearly Progress report and at the state level when the Texas Education Agency releases preliminary TAKS scores. The state rated the district academically acceptable when test scores were released early last month, exposing a rift in how the two levels of accountability measure success.

Special-education students make up about 11 percent of the district's nearly 39,000 students this year -- but the district's goal is to not exceed the 3 percent federal cap of students taking alternative assessment exams. Federal guidelines classify students beyond that 3 percent mark as failures.

Last year 1,900 of the district's students -- 5 percent of the district's population last spring -- took the State Developed Alternative Assessment II instead of the TAKS.

The district's second consecutive failure to meet federal standards puts it under the first stage of sanctions that require implementation of a districtwide strategy to improve performance in failing areas. The co-teaching model, along with progress exams for all students in October, January and March, are part of the strategy.

The co-teaching model was introduced during the 2004-05 academic year with only a handful of volunteer campuses taking part, said Special Education Director Jacquelene Turner. Turner said 16 campuses took part in the 2006-07 academic year.

Turner said that to date, 255 district instructors have been trained in the co-teaching model. It has not involved hiring extra personnel, Elliff said.

In addition to the co-teaching model, Elliff said district schools will be required to conduct benchmark testing to check students' progress throughout the year.

"In the new world of high-stakes testing, it's a challenge for teachers to know the strengths of all students," Elliff said. "But the truth is it really gets down to teachers having support on campus."

Twelve percent, or 149, of the state's school districts did not meet federal standards this year.

"We see quite a few schools and districts that missed AYP because of special-education students," said Suzanne Marchman, Texas Education Agency spokeswoman. "At this point, the state is at the mercy of federal rules."

Federal progress standards are set under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

Special-education students -- usually first classified as such in middle and elementary school levels -- can be students with disabilities ranging from dyslexia, speech and hearing problems to severe mental disorders. They are individually reviewed each year to assess whether they must remain in that classification.

Special-education students are not required to take alternative tests, but Elliff said the district has started to review schools' procedures for identifying students as special-education students.

"We are carefully analyzing how many campuses are being referred for special education and what steps are done before students are referred," Elliff said.

Special education

The Corpus Christi Independent School District missed federal progress test standards because of the number of special-education students who took alternative tests or failed tests. Preliminary numbers of special-education high school students in the district, as of Aug. 27

292

Carroll High School

303

King High School

324

Moody High School

254

Miller High School

307

Ray High School

Source: Corpus Christi Independent School District

Labels: co-teaching model

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:09 AM 0 comments Links to this post

State's exemplary schools not judged on all criteria

Campuses with less racial, socio-economic diversity judged on fewer criteria
September 9, 2007
By KATHERINE LEAL UNMUTH / The Dallas Morning News

The Divide Independent School District fits comfortably into a two-room schoolhouse.

Its 13 students make up the smallest district in the state. According to the Texas school accountability system, it is also one of the best – one of just 19 rated exemplary.

Three years into the TAKS system and more than five years into the federal No Child Left Behind law, those rewarded with the best performance remain a largely homogeneous group.

The state's exemplary districts tend to be small and rural, like Divide, or wealthy and suburban, like the four in North Texas: Southlake Carroll, Highland Park, Lovejoy and Sunnyvale.

That leaves some questioning whether school ratings have more to do with a district's demographics than the quality of its teaching.

The ratings system uses 36 accountability measures, the majority tied to performance on the TAKS exams. But most exemplary districts are judged on 10 or fewer measures because they don't have enough poor and minority students to count toward their rating. Both groups tend to score lower than their white and wealthier counterparts.

Divide's small size means that it had to perform well in only three subjects last school year. Highland Park had the distinction of having no poor students.

Overall, of the students attending exemplary districts last year, 5 percent were poor and 88 percent were white. Most exemplary districts have only several hundred students. And rarely do they have any with limited English skills.

In contrast, 55 percent of Texas public school students were poor and 36 percent were white. The largest student group is Hispanic.

Education officials now recognize that taking a snapshot in time of children at a certain grade level does not fully reflect how well school districts are educating children – especially those who are most vulnerable.

On both the state and federal level, educators are examining ways to rework the accountability system to measure whether a child's performance is improving from year to year. Texas legislators recently approved putting such a growth model into place by 2009.

"How do we acknowledge districts that do a really good job of advancing students, particularly disadvantaged students?" said Sandy Kress, a former education policy adviser to President Bush who helped design the state and federal accountability systems. "That is something that we probably as a state and a country need to keep working on in terms of refinements in our accountability system."

How it works

Mr. Kress was a Dallas school board trustee when he first pushed to examine the test scores of poor and minority students. Breaking out those scores exposed the achievement gap.

In 1992, the test-based accountability system was born in Texas. It served as the model for No Child Left Behind, which was signed into law in 2002.

The legislation forced schools to be accountable for the performance of disadvantaged children and increase their efforts to help them, instead of ignore them.

But many question how much progress has been made.

"The whole point of the education reforms was to change that situation and create a system where demography would not be destiny," said Michael Petrilli, vice president for national programs at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. "But we clearly haven't reached that day yet."

His group, which focuses on education reform, found Texas was one of only five states to show progress in the scores of poor children.

Under the Texas accountability system, districts are judged on the performance of children in math, reading, writing, science and social studies. In each subject, they are also rated on the subgroup performance of poor, black, Hispanic and white children.

Each year, the standards are raised. This year, 90 percent of students in each subgroup had to pass for the district to become exemplary. Poor scores by just a few students in one category can lower a district's entire rating.

Some parents and educators have complained that the system makes it much more difficult for diverse districts to earn high ratings because they have more hurdles to overcome.

The disparity between Divide and Dallas school districts is telling. Divide's 19 students last school year were rated on three measures – reading, writing and math scores for all students. Dallas, which last year had 159,144 students, 84 percent of whom are poor and 95 percent of whom are minority, was rated on all 36 measures.

Don Van Slyke, who follows education in Irving, argues school districts should be judged against those with similar demographics.

"Is the TEA comparing apples and oranges? No, it is more like grapes and watermelons," he wrote.

Some fear changes to the system could mean less focus on educating poor and minority children.

Texas Education Agency associate commissioner Criss Cloudt said similar complaints were made under the earlier TAAS tests. But she said expectations should not be lowered just because the higher ratings are difficult to earn.

"We had a lot of superintendents across the state saying it is absolutely impossible," she said. "Years later, we had a number of large districts recognized. I have no reason to think that something similar won't happen with the current [TAKS] system."

Exemplary districts

The top-rated districts tend to have similar traits.

Most are not rated on the performance of poor and minority children or on tougher subject areas such as science.

"We're a small, predominantly German Catholic community," said Dennis Holt, superintendent of Lindsay ISD, which had 512 students last school year. "We are small enough where the numbers don't come into play. We don't have all the different subgroups."

Some other patterns emerge:

• Only three of the 19 exemplary districts serve more than 1,000 students, according to enrollment data from last school year. All are in North Texas – Carroll, Highland Park and Lovejoy.

• Only six of the 19 districts are rated on the performance of poor children in any subject. Only five are rated on the performance of black or Hispanic students in any subject. Three are not rated on science scores.

• Only seven districts are rated at the high school level, where some of the highest failure rates occur on TAKS.

• The exemplary district with the highest number of measures to meet? Carroll, at 19.

While a number of individual schools with lots of poor and minority students have earned exemplary ratings from the state, the top tier is often more difficult to achieve on a districtwide level.

Southlake's Carroll ISD became the largest district to earn an exemplary rating this year after focusing intensely on math and science scores. The district had been recognized the previous year.

The exemplary rating is "a benchmark people use to tell the quality of our schools," superintendent David Faltys said. "But we try to address the TAKS, then move on to higher-level thinking as quickly as we can because that's what our community expects."

In tiny Divide, superintendent and teacher Bill Bacon said he believes his small classes mean children are less likely to be overlooked. But his exemplary district still has challenges.

With only two classrooms, he must teach to third- through sixth-graders and handle ESL and special education

"Sometimes, you just kind of feel like one of those guys on The Ed Sullivan Show trying to spin plates and keep all of them moving," he said. "If I have a child that doesn't pass, I still get rated on that. I almost have to have 100 percent passing to thrive."

Richardson's success

This year, TEA officials singled out Richardson schools as some of the best in the state when they held onto their recognized rating. Many districts, including Carrollton-Farmers Branch, Frisco and Plano, dropped this year from recognized to academically acceptable in part because standards were raised.

Richardson ISD was the largest diverse district to earn the recognized rating. With nearly half of its students last year economically disadvantaged – 16,797 – and with a majority of its students being minority, the district more closely reflects Texas schoolchildren than any exemplary district.

"You've got to look at who they have to work with," said Chrys Dougherty, the director of research for the National Center for Educational Accountability. "It's a whole lot harder for them. In a Highland Park, you would expect them to be exemplary even if the school system isn't adding any value to the kids."

Richardson superintendent David Simmons said his district's success involved including frequently analyzing test data to determine instruction and providing teacher training and mentoring.

"The more student populations you serve and the more subject areas tested, the more opportunities you have not to meet the standards," Dr. Simmons said. "Larger districts with large percentages of economically disadvantaged and limited English-proficient children have greater challenges. That's the reality we operate in."

Looking ahead

Increasing discontent with the accountability system is prompting policy experts and legislators to look at alternatives.

Earlier this year, legislators did away with longstanding exit exams required to graduate in Texas. In that same law, they created a committee to examine the current accountability system.

The goal is also to align it better with national standards. For example, Richardson is recognized this year under the Texas system, but it failed to make adequate yearly progress under the federal program.

The committee will also focus on developing a growth model to measure how much progress children make in a year.

"The accountability system is going to have to change," said state Sen. Florence Shapiro, who authored the legislation. "I think schools will be much more willing to be held accountable for the growth of the student as a result of the instruction that was provided by that school rather than factors that are beyond their control."

Dr. Dougherty said a growth model would better gauge whether districts are advancing children.

Instead of looking at "this year's third-graders versus last year," he said, "they're talking about looking at this year's third-graders and then looking at [them] next year in fourth grade – did they move up?"

A number of states are moving forward with pilot programs to measure growth. Dr. Cloudt said Texas will begin piloting several models next month.

Richardson's Dr. Simmons said looking at students' growth is more "labor intensive," but it is possible.

"We're still perfecting that," he said. "It's an evolving process."

Labels: TAKS

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:03 AM 0 comments Links to this post

The Mind Trust’s Education Entrepreneur Fellowship

For Immediate Release
September 10, 2007

Contact:
David Harris, 317-822-8102 x100

The Mind Trust launches Education Entrepreneur Fellowship; makes $900,000 initial investment in program. Fellowship is a nationally unique opportunity for entrepreneurs with great ideas to transform public education

INDIANAPOLIS – The Mind Trust, a new education nonprofit focused on promoting education entrepreneurship in Indianapolis, is now accepting applications for its flagship program, the Education Entrepreneur Fellowship. The Fellowship will provide the nation’s most promising education entrepreneurs with the support they need to develop and launch initiatives that focus on wholly new ways of confronting public education’s most vexing problems. Fellows will target underserved or disadvantaged students with solutions that attack the root problems in the delivery of public education.

“The Fellowship is designed for leaders who envision entirely new approaches in public education.” said David Harris, President and CEO of The Mind Trust. “We are looking for the most capable entrepreneurs from around the country with the most innovative ideas to transform public education.”

Each Fellowship will last two years, with the first fellows beginning their work in spring or summer of 2008. Fellows’ annual salaries will be $90,000. Each fellow will also receive $20,000 for customized training and travel over the term of their Fellowship. The Mind Trust’s initial investment in the Education Entrepreneur Fellowship is approximately $900,000.

Fellows will be based at The Mind Trust in Indianapolis. While Indianapolis will be a focus of fellows’ work, it is expected that some fellows will launch statewide or national initiatives.

“This concentration of high quality entrepreneurial talent devoted to improving public education will be enormously beneficial to Indianapolis,” Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson said. “Not only will The Mind Trust’s Fellowship make Indianapolis a national hub for effective education reform efforts, but the ventures launched will help the students in our city who need it most.” Mayor Peterson is the chair of The Mind Trust’s board of directors.

Fellowship application materials and additional information, including commentary about the Fellowship by national experts, are available on The Mind Trust’s website at www.themindtrust.org. The deadline for the first stage of the application process is January 15, 2008.

The Mind Trust has already helped launch in Indianapolis Public Schools two of the nation’s most successful education initiatives – The New Teacher Project and College Summit.

The Mind Trust’s mission is to attract, support, and empower the nation's most effective and promising education entrepreneurs to transform public education outcomes for children in Indianapolis and beyond.

Labels: ed fellowships

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:11 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

U.S. Deports Parents of Dead Soldiers

One tenth of the U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq have been immigrants. But not all of their parents have qualified for green cards.
By Domenico Maceri, New America Media. Posted September 5, 2007.

Three years after U.S. Army Private Armando Soriano, 20, died fighting in Haditha, Iraq, his father is facing deportation. Soriano is now buried in Houston, Tex., his hometown, where his parents, undocumented workers from Mexico, are currently living.

Before his death Soriano had promised his parents he'd help them get green cards. He only succeeded partially before losing his life. Although his mother was able to obtain a green card, his father did not qualify and is on the verge of being deported.

Enrique Soriano, Armando's father, is not the only person to have lost a son or daughter in the Iraq war and face deportation. There are more than three million people born in the U.S. with parents who came into the country illegally. Those born in the U.S. are automatically citizens and have all the rights and duties enjoyed by Americans. That includes military service with the possibility of losing one's life.

Losing a son or a daughter is always tragic. To try to compensate the families the U.S. government makes efforts to help. In the case of individuals with family members needing immigration help, officials assist them to obtain green cards. That's what happened with Soriano's mother. But in spite of governmental flexibility, certain rules prevent some people from qualifying.

Enrique Soriano had been formally deported in 1999 when he returned to Mexico for a brief visit. That makes him ineligible for any immigration benefits. Enrique Soriano is not alone.

Although exact figures are difficult to come by, many parents with sons and daughters who died in Iraq have been deported.

Official statistics show that more than 68,000 foreign-born military individuals are serving the U.S. How many of these individuals have relatives who do not have a legal right to be in the United States is not known. Figures from the National Center for Immigration Law show that one in 10 U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq have been immigrants.

One estimate claims that five percent of those serving in the American military are illegal immigrants who joined with false papers. The military does not recruit illegal immigrants. Yet, given the shortages of volunteers, meeting quotas may put pressure to close some eyes. Illegal immigrants may feel that joining the military will help them and their families obtain legal papers in addition to other benefits.

Inevitably, some die in the process. The first soldier to die for the United States in the Iraq war was in fact Marine Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala.

Enrique Soriano's case is also complicated by the fact that the rest of his family has a legal right to be in the U.S. His wife has a green card, three of their four kids are U.S. citizens, and another born in Mexico has applied for a green card. If Enrique is deported, the family will have to make the hard choice of going back or separating.

"I think it would be a travesty for these parents to be deported after their son died in Iraq fighting for his country," stated Congressman Gene Green, D-Houston. The congressman introduced a bill in the House, which would help Enrique Soriano obtain a green card. Nothing has happened yet.

Earlier this year President George Bush commuted the sentence of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff. In so doing, the President spared Libby two and a half years in prison for his conviction for lying to federal investigators. The President cited Libby's "exceptional public service" and prior lack of a criminal record as explanation for his action. He concluded that Libby's sentence was "excessive" and the punishment "harsh."

In light of the sacrifice made by Armando Soriano, one wonders whether deporting his father is a far more "excessive" and "harsh" punishment?

Domenico Maceri, Ph.D, teaches foreign languages at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, California.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:59 PM 0 comments Links to this post

NCLB Fails Our Schools by Bill Richardson

Wow! Richardson says that as president, he I will fight for national average starting pay for teachers of at least $40,000 a year and invest in pre-K. He sounds on target in terms of promoting necessary (though not fully sufficient) reform. This is a start nevertheless. -Angela

NCLB Fails Our Schools
By Bill Richardson
USA Today, Sept 7, 2007

I have a one-point plan for No Child Left Behind:
Scrap it.

NCLB has failed. It has failed our schools, it has
failed our teachers and it has failed our children.

The Bush administration claims victories, but upon
closer scrutiny it becomes clear that the White House
is simply dressing up ugly data with fancy political
spin. Far from leaving no child behind, President Bush
seems to have left reality behind.

Just look at the facts. The National Assessment of
Educational Progress shows a slight narrowing of the
racial achievement gap over the past three years. This
narrowing, however, is due to a decline in overall
reading scores, not to improvements in minority
student performance.

This is not progress.

Review the figures, and you will see that our schools
are not failing NCLB; the program is failing our
schools. In some grades, reading and math scores have
actually declined for Hispanics, African-Americans and
others. The current pass-fail rating system is worse
than meaningless ˜ it's counter-productive. If a
school needs help, we should help that school. We
shouldn't punish it, as NCLB mandates.

We need to move beyond the empty rhetoric of No Child
Left Behind. We must provide our public schools with
what the National Education Association refers to as
the three R's ˜ Responsibility, Respect and Resources.

The key to this improvement is respecting teachers. I
signed a law in New Mexico that pays teachers a
professional salary. As president, I will fight for
national average starting pay for teachers of at least
$40,000 a year.

Teacher salaries are just the beginning. Quality pre-K
programs allow children to show up in first grade
ready to learn. These programs must be available to
all children.

Finally, we need strong academic standards aligned
with the needs of today's workforce. America's schools
were designed for the 20th century economy ˜ this is
no longer sufficient. Our children need to graduate
ready to engage with the New Economy, not the old one.

True education reform requires more than a set of
unfunded mandates and a list of failing schools. It
requires a vision for success, the state and federal
funding to match, and the experience to bring real
reform to America's failing schools.

Bill Richardson is the governor of New Mexico. He is
seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for president.

Labels: NCLB

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:43 PM 1 comments Links to this post

In the know

This important topic of college readiness was the topic of a College-Readiness convening last November hosted by the Texas Center for Education Policy at UT. Feel free to download a pertinent report generated on the basis of a statewide conversation that combined the input of various stakeholders. -Angela

Tuesday, Sep 11, 2007
Posted on Sun, Aug. 26, 2007
In the know
Star-Telegram

The statistics sound dire:

About half of the freshmen in Texas public colleges need remedial reading courses because they finished high school without proper tools for the next step in their education.

The rate at which Hispanic and African-American students are catching up to their white peers in the fourth and eighth grades is so slow that it will take 63 years to close the achievement gap.

Fifty-two percent of Texas college and university students graduate within six years -- the nation's fifth-lowest rate.
But haven't students' results on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills steadily improved, even as the passing bars move higher?

Aren't Texas students scoring at or above the national average on most parts of the National Assessment of Educational Progress?

Isn't the state on target to meet many of its goals for boosting college enrollment and graduation by 2015?

Despite that progress, something's amiss when so many graduates require so much patchwork, as if they've brought home a new car only to find the fuel lines clogged.

Disturbing evidence about college preparation and completion, plus concerns from the business community about deficiencies in new graduates' skill levels, have persuaded a core of Texas movers and shakers that our high schools don't adequately prepare students for higher education and beyond.

It's a nationwide issue that has spawned many a research report and advocacy group.

The Legislature also wrote into law requirements that "vertical teams" of educators develop a more cohesive K-16 approach, instead of letting K-12 and higher education largely go their own ways.

It's an economic issue as well: A more educated work force translates into almost $200 billion a year in incremental gross product for the state by 2030 and more than 1 million jobs, according to a study by the Perryman Group.

On a more personal level, college graduates earn an average of twice as much as workers with only a high school diploma. And students are more likely to enroll and continue in college if they're prepared for it.

The disconnect between high school and college in Texas might be the result of standards that aren't demanding enough. It could be that universities haven't communicated their expectations sufficiently to feeder schools. It could be that increasingly complex technologies simply call for increasingly sophisticated instruction. It could be what happens when some schools are more rigorous, wealthier or better staffed than others.

A key roadblock for those studying the problem: There isn't agreement on what constitutes "college readiness."

That's what the Commission for a College Ready Texas is supposed to define.

What's the commission's purpose?

Austin lawyer Sandy Kress, who heads the governor-appointed panel, said the goal is to prepare "a fairly detailed description of the knowledge and skills that are important" for students to know as they prepare for higher education or the work force.
But if Texas educators don't already know that, what is it they're teaching?

Kress, who advised George W. Bush on education in Texas and Washington, believes the menu known as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills is too vague and gap-filled to properly define what Texas high school graduates should be expected to master.

One presentation to the commission suggested that what high school teachers believe prepares students doesn't necessarily correlate with what college instructors want to see in incoming freshmen.

Other witnesses have challenged notions of what courses are important: For example, are students better served by memorizing the prologue to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English or by learning technical writing?

Texas already is ratcheting up graduation standards, requiring this year's entering freshmen to complete four years of English, math, science and social studies.

Kevin Foster, a University of Texas education professor who has not testified before the commission, said college readiness involves "a lot more than the just the classroom." It includes having counselors who can guide students toward the right classes; "folks who believe in kids"; broad extracurricular support; and even university outreach programs that introduce high schoolers to college-level work.

What should it accomplish?

The commission has a short time frame for putting together recommendations for the State Board of Education.

Hearings started in April and are scheduled into September, with a preliminary report to follow.

The commission won't be able to definitively map out college readiness, but it can help focus debate, particularly if it comes up with practical ideas for bridging existing gaps.

But it's crucial to remember that students' transition to college and the rest of their lives starts long before high school -- with well-prepared teachers, equipped with adequate resources, enforcing high expectations and getting reinforcement from administrators, families and communities. Texas still requires a lot of work to reach that ideal.

Labels: college readiness

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:23 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Monday, September 10, 2007

Report: Segregation in U.S. Schools is Increasing

By Matthew Bigg
From Washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, August 29, 2007

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Public schools in the United States are becoming more racially segregated and the trend is likely to accelerate because of a Supreme Court decision in June, according to report published Wednesday.

The rise in segregation threatens the quality of education received by non-white students, who now make up 43 percent of the total U.S. student body, said the report by the Civil Rights Project of the University of California in Los Angeles.

Many segregated schools struggle to attract highly qualified teachers and administrators, do not prepare students well for college and fail to graduate more than half their students.

In its June ruling the Supreme Court forbade most existing voluntary local efforts to integrate schools in a decision favored by the Bush administration despite warnings from academics that it would compound educational inequality.

"It is about as dramatic a reversal in the stance of the federal courts as one could imagine," said Gary Orfield, a UCLA professor and a co-author of the report.

"The federal courts are clearly pushing us backward segregation with the encouragement of the Justice Department of President George W. Bush," he said in an interview.

The United States risks becoming a nation in which a new majority of non-white young people will attend "separate and inferior" schools, the report said.

"Resegregation ... is continuing to grow in all parts of the country for both African Americans and Latinos and is accelerating the most rapidly in the only region that had been highly desegregated -- the South," it said.

The trend damages the prospects for non-white students and will likely have a negative effect on the U.S. economy, according to the report by one of the leading U.S. research centers on issues of civil rights and racial inequality.

Part of the reason for the resegregation is the rapidly expanding number of black and Latino children and a corresponding fall in the number of white children, it said.

Contrary to popular belief, the surge in the number of minority children in public schools was not mainly caused by a flight of white students into private schools.

Instead, it said, the post-"baby boom" generation of white Americans are having smaller family sizes.

"During the desegregation period there was a major decline in the education gap between blacks and whites and an increase in college entry by blacks .... That gap has stopped closing," Orfield said.

TRIPLE SEGREGATION FOR LATINOS

The record of successive administration reforms such as the Goals 2000 project of former President Bill Clinton and Bush's "No Child Left Behind" in 2001 "justifies deep skepticism," the report said.

Those changes focused pressure and resources on making the achievement of minority children in segregated schools equal to children in schools that were fully integrated.

School desegregation is a sensitive issue in the United States because of resistance to it from white leaders in the decade after a 1954 Supreme Court decision saying segregated public schools were unconstitutional.

One of the chief complaints of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was that black-only public schools were inevitably starved of resources by local government with the result that black children received inferior education.

Latinos are the fastest growing minority in U.S. schools and for them segregation is often more profound than it was when the phenomenon was first measured 40 years ago, according to the report, "Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation and the need for new Integration Strategies."

"Too often Latino students face triple segregation by race, class and language," it said.

Labels: Civil Rights, race

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:40 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Is there room for principle in today’s GOP?

Rove liked fuzzy standards, because if we had high ones students wouldn’t measure up, and that would hurt the George W. Bush presidential machine. The education community likes low standards, because it’s easier to get more taxes out of the public when they think the system does a good job." Suggests how the agenda of the business right concurs with that of centrist education groups. Something to think about. -Angela

Interesting quote: "Is there room for principle in today’s GOP?
by William Lutz / Special to East Texas Review

When I first started following Texas politics closely, back in 1991 as a college student, the Republican Party stood for something — lower taxes, property rights, moral values, honest representation, accountable government.

Sure, some lawmakers were better than others, but the party’s elected officials were free to vote their consciences and their districts.

When I came to work for LSR a few years later, the party had been Roved.

Elected officials were no longer free to do what they thought was best. Some disagreement was tolerated behind closed doors, but in public the Rove machine encouraged GOP elected officials to act like mindless Bush automatons. Violators were dealt with harshly. The machine’s priorities were the presidential parade first, power politics second, and principle — at best — a distant third.

Things are different now. Karl Rove has left the world of political consulting. Most conservatives nationally have finally recognized his machine for what it is — or was. Many of his key lieutenants, such as Al Gonzales, have had to leave public service under a cloud of scandal.

Looking at the state GOP right now, I have one question: Is there room once more for principle in the Texas Republican party?

Education provides perhaps the best example of what Rove did to the Texas GOP. Rove knew voters in swing states wanted to see a president who “cared” about education and could produce results. But actually improving the public schools measurably is a complex process that takes time and requires challenging established special interests that have government-funded lobbyists and a loud public relations machine.

So Rove created an illusion.

Rove and Commissioner of Education Mike Moses made sure the new curriculum standards were vague, repetitive, and difficult to measure. Rove liked fuzzy standards, because if we had high ones students wouldn’t measure up, and that would hurt the George W. Bush presidential machine. The education community likes low standards, because it’s easier to get more taxes out of the public when they think the system does a good job.

Once vague standards were in place, Rove and Moses could ensure that the state’s test — the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) was ridiculously easy. That ensured large numbers of students would pass the test, which Rove, his allies in the Legislature, and his allies in Washington, D.C., touted as “the Texas miracle.”

Of course, Texas still has a problem with dropout rates and the passing rate on college entrance exams, but Rove could spin that into oblivion.

These policies put Rove on a collision course with the real reformers in Texas education — conservative members of the State Board of Education (SBOE). One of them, Richard Neill, helped expose what a joke the TAAS was. After the cat got out of the bag, Moses and Rove agreed to changes — that took effect after Bush had left the governor’s mansion.

Rove tried everything to shut these folks down. He got major donors to make phone calls. SBOE conservatives were lampooned in the press. Conservative Bob Offutt was the target of several unfair and mean-sprited mailers sent by a shady outfit called Americans for Job Security — which does not disclose the identity of its donors — after Offutt went to New Hampshire to tell the truth about the Bush machine.

Fortunately for Texas, the State Board of Education still has many conservatives, working hard to improve Texas public schools. In fact, right now, they are leading the charge to undo Rove’s damage and create English standards that actually work for Texans — standards based on phonics and grammar, not spin and public relations.

The bad news for Rove is, the rest of the country finally caught on to his act. Americans don’t want a party that won’t cut spending, supports illegal immigration, is obsessed with spin, panders to special interests, and is devoid of principle.

Rove justified his support for illegal immigration, claiming it would help the party appeal to Hispanics and prosper in the face of changing demographics.

But what’s really going on here is many of the businesses that fund the Bush political machine make money off cheap, exploitable illegal labor.

The real problem Texas Republicans face is much more immediate than the long-term demographic changes painstakingly chronicled in the press. Republicans are in danger of losing the confidence of the party’s middle class and rural base.

Look where Republicans lost Texas House seats last year — North Dallas, Southwest and Northwest Austin, Arlington, West Houston. They lost in the suburbs.

Suburban voters want a party that addresses their concerns — a party that is honest and ethical and puts public service above spin, fundraising, and power politics.

There are two types of statewide power players in today’s GOP — those who see a place for principle and those who don’t.

But it’s also true that some of the rising stars in the GOP really do want to put public service first.

The GOP’s survival may well depend on the top brass’ letting these new stars shine, and leaving Rove’s brand of politics in the past, where it belongs.

http://www.easttexasreview.com/story.htm?StoryID=4806&now=45427

Labels: political analysis

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:40 PM 0 comments Links to this post

English learners left behind

The current No Child Left Behind Law sets up non-native speakers for failure.
By David Brewer, Monica Garcia and Yolie Flores Aguilar
LA Times.com
September 7, 2007

California Rep. George Miller recently said what educators have known for years: Congress "didn't get it all right" when it passed the No Child Left Behind Act five years ago.

As the debate about reauthorizing No Child Left Behind gets underway, there are promising signs for reform, such as Miller's call for serious changes and a recently released discussion-draft of the bill. It's important to Los Angeles, which is severely affected by NCLB, that we review and fix this flawed law.

We share NCLB's goal of educating every student to become an active, productive citizen. The law's insistence on measurable academic achievement standards and steady gains -- not just for students but for schools -- can spur change in our under-resourced educational system.

Indeed, the Los Angeles Unified School District has made gains under NCLB. Our teachers are highly qualified, students are making incremental improvements, and we are committed to ensuring that every student graduates college prepared and career ready.

Despite its good intentions, however, No Child Left Behind did not provide the resources or the flexibility to turn vulnerable schools around. By emphasizing standardized testing, NCLB has created an incentive to practice "teaching to the test." At best, such testing offers a one-dimensional measure of achievement, not necessarily indicating the student's true level of mastery.

The greatest challenges are faced by our most vulnerable population: English learners, or "EL" students. Of the more than 700,000 students in district schools, more than 40% don't speak English as their native language. Of those, 94% are Spanish speakers, and the vast majority are native-born U.S. citizens. The NCLB's ill-conceived mandates have set up these students and their schools to fail together. Under the law, if any demographic group in a given school isn't making "adequate yearly progress," the entire school is subject to a list of unproven and inefficient "corrective actions" that could ultimately result in a state takeover of the facility.

In L.A. Unified, 297 out of 1,000 schools were judged to be not making adequate yearly progress in 2006, and the district as a whole did not make adequate yearly progress because, among other reasons, EL students were challenged to meet achievement targets that are unfair and unrealistic.

Students who don't speak English as a first language need three to five years to become fluent. Achieving the fluency to understand subject-matter tests may take several more years.

But No Child Left Behind requires that EL students be tested in English or in their native language to "the extent practicable." Congress and the Department of Education do not define what's "practicable," and many states, including California, have dropped the ball on developing reliable assessments of EL students' academic achievement.

Schools are also hamstrung by the failure of our universities to train future urban teachers in the fundamentals of language development and second-language acquisition. Teachers are trained to teach content alone and often don't know how to instruct those whose first language is not English.

Congress will reauthorize NCLB this year, which gives lawmakers a chance to fix what's broken. At the top of the list: Congress should require and fund states to develop content-based standardized tests for EL students in their native languages. These students should continue to be tested, and schools should be held accountable for how well they're taught. But their test scores shouldn't be factored into decisions about a school's proficiency until solid native-language tests are developed or EL students have time to learn the English they need to perform well.

Finally, Congress should allocate resources to train teachers in second-language acquisition and content-based instruction for English learners. Educators need to develop a repertoire of strategies to incorporate English language skills-building into every lesson plan -- no matter the subject.

Congress didn't get it all right with NCLB -- but it didn't get it all wrong either. Some simple improvements can make a good law better and more fair for all our students.

David Brewer is superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Monica Garcia is president of the LAUSD board, and Yolie Flores Aguilar is an LAUSD board member.

Labels: California, English language learners, NCLB reauthorization

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:01 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Friday, September 07, 2007

Performance-based Pay For Teachers?

Performance-based Pay For Teachers?

Science Daily — Teacher performance pay is a frequently discussed and controversial topic among kindergarten through 12th-grade educators. Recent findings by economics professors at the University of Missouri-Columbia and Vanderbilt University suggest that states and school districts in the United States begin developing programs that examine the effects of linking teacher pay to student achievement.

The study was a collaborative effort between Michael J. Podgursky, professor of economics at Mizzou's College of Arts and Science, and Matthew G. Springer, research assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt's Peabody College. The researchers critiqued previously published studies which evaluated the effectiveness of school district and state-sponsored merit pay systems throughout the United States, as well as programs in Israel, Africa and the United Kingdom. They found that student achievement mostly improved when teachers received financial incentives.

As a result, school districts should at least consider the idea, Podgursky said, by experimenting with performance-based systems, which require flexibility and only become effective through "trial and error."

"We can't say, 'Do this; or this is the right way to do it,'" he said. "However, the preponderance of evidence, when you look at a variety of sources, including the limited number of evaluations and the evidence we have on the variation of teacher effectiveness, suggests that it really is something school districts should be exploring or piloting. Every one of the evaluations has been virtually positive. They all suggest there's a positive response in terms of outcome measures -- including test scores."

Podgursky and Springer's position differs from opponents who argue that unlike sales by a salesman or billable hours for an attorney, teacher performance can't be measured or monitored or, that incentives result in competition and less teamwork by teachers.

Traditionally, teacher pay is based on a salary schedule -- years of experience and education level. Nationwide, there are roughly 3.1 million teachers. Podgursky and Springer said the current salary system increases expenditures without directly impacting student achievement. In the study, he and Springer advocate school districts to emulate private sector employers which "understand that strategic pay policies are a very important lever in raising firm performance." They said in the long run, merit pay systems result in success -- for teachers and students alike.

"The system isn't passive; the evidence certainly suggests when you offer incentives, you're likely to get better results," Podgursky said. "It suggests that the actors do respond to the incentives."

The study, "Teacher Performance Pay: A Review," will be published in the September issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Missouri-Columbia.

Labels: merit pay, Performance-based Pay, teacher incentive pay

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:07 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Secretary of Education Criticizes ProposalSecretary of Education Criticizes Proposal

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO / NY Times
WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 — Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Wednesday criticized a Congressional proposal to soften provisions of President’s Bush signature education law, saying it would severely weaken the federal effort to raise achievement among poor and minority children.

In a speech before a business group and at a news conference, Ms. Spellings said that a series of proposals in draft legislation circulated by Democrats and Republicans on the House education committee, taken together, would allow states to remove children from testing regimes and tutoring services, and would make it too difficult for parents to know whether students and schools are making progress.

“It’s just too darn confusing,” Ms. Spellings said of the draft bill. “To make it more complex, less transparent, more obfuscated I think would be a huge mistake, particularly when we’re on the run, we’re on the move.”

The No Child Left Behind Law, passed in 2002, requires schools to report annual test scores in reading and math for all children in grades three to eight, broken down by race, ethnicity and other factors. The law requires all students to reach proficiency in reading and math by 2014, and singles out schools that fail to make sufficient progress toward that goal for progressively more severe penalties.

Ms. Spellings weighed in as the House and Senate prepare to push the law to renewal this month. The House draft would preserve the goal of bringing students to proficiency by 2014 but would broaden the ways schools could demonstrate student progress.

Rather than relying solely on reading and math scores, schools could include tests in other subjects, attendance and graduation rates. It would also distinguish between schools that broadly fail to meet annual goals and those that fall slightly short.

Ms. Spellings complained that proposals to change various provisions of the law “could be a significant retreat from accountability.”

Passing no bill at all this year, she added, would be preferable to passing one that dilutes the law’s power because the current version stays in force until Congress passes a new law.

Still, Ms. Spellings, who has been campaigning all year for the law’s renewal, avoided attacking the draft directly in her formal talk before an audience of business leaders and education advocates, and did so only in response to questions from reporters afterward. She also sent a letter detailing her criticisms to Congressional leaders.

In the letter she also criticized a provision of the draft, sought by states with large immigrant populations, that would allow schools to test non-English speakers in their native language for up to five years, instead of the current three. “That’s simply too long,” she wrote, “this would allow a third-grade student to reach the tenth grade before ever being tested in English.”

Speaking to the same group minutes before the education secretary, Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who is chairman of the education committee, said that he remained “strongly committed” to the principles of No Child Left Behind, but he said that the law needed more flexibility.

Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, the ranking Republican on the education committee, said he and other Republicans shared many of the secretary’s concerns. “Things that weaken accountability and make the bill less than what it is right now, I don’t think we’re interested in supporting,” Mr. McKeon said.

The education committee will hold hearings on the draft in the coming weeks and is trying for the full House to vote on a bill by month’s end.

The Senate is also planning to release a bill updating No Child Left Behind this month.

Labels: NCLB reauthorization

posted by Patricia Lopez at 3:20 PM 0 comments Links to this post

The Supreme Court's School Desegregation Ruling: Research, Advocacy, and the Future of Race-Based Assignment Policies

The following link is the transcription of yesterday's chat with Gary Orfield and Lorrie Shepard. I was especially drawn to Orfield's response to race-based assignment policies and English language learners. -Patricia

The Supreme Court's School Desegregation Ruling: Research, Advocacy, and the Future of Race-Based Assignment Policies
Ed Week
September 6, 2007
Full transcript

Labels: race, segregation

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:27 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Holes Found in U.S. Rules on Teachers

‘Highly qualified’ definitions differ broadly across states.
By Debra Viadero / EdWeek
September 4, 2007

New reports looking at how the teacher-quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act are playing out in the nation’s classrooms suggest that, while compliance with the 5½-year-old federal law is widespread, problems and inequities persist and, in the end, labeling a teacher “highly qualified” is no guarantee of effectiveness.

To read the rest of this story click here

Labels: NCLB, Rural schools, teacher quality

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:54 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Tighter Link Sought Between Spending, Achievement in N.Y.

By Michele McNeil / EdWeek
September 4, 2007

As states look for ways to hold school districts accountable for how they use big increases in K-12 funding, New York’s experience may offer a test case in directing the flow of that new money.

Under the state’s ambitious “Contracts for Excellence” program, 55 of New York’s 705 districts will share $430 million in extra aid this school year, but are required to file detailed plans that limit the spending to five strategies intended to raise student achievement.

To read the rest of this story click here

Labels: achievement, NY, school finance

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:17 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Peyton Wolcott's investigation of Sandy Kress...

Peyton Wolcott's investigation ) of Sandy Kress who is under consideration by Gov. Perry to be the next Texas Education Commissioner (www.peytonwolcott.com Peyton Wolcott's investigation )

Millions of questions: at least $64 million of them
Questions which might be on the table in any consideration of Pearson or other lobbyists (including Sandy Kress) as Texas' next edu-missioner

By Peyton Wolcott

Updated Thursday, September 6, 2007 - 7:48 a.m.

The following are checks paid to Pearson/NCS Pearson by Texas taxpayers via the Texas Education Agency from September 2006 through May 2007; these checks are posted on TEA's website. The Texas Ethics Commission lists Sandy Kress as Pearson's paid lobbyist.

Many thanks once again to Gov. Rick Perry and to Interim Commissioner of Education Robert Scott for posting TEA's check register online earlier this year -- the first and only state department of education to do so in the U.S.!

(Please go to www.peytonwolcott.com to read the rest of the story.)

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:48 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Too young for school?

This article really demonstrates how high-stakes testing is affecting children even before they enter school. Quite sad. -Patricia

Some parents say 5-year-olds not ready.

By Raven L. Hill / AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, September 04, 2007

In Suzanne Ashby's kindergarten class at Linder Elementary School in Southeast Austin, the topic of the day is pigs.

Students pair up, shake hands and chat. "I like the pigs when they go snort," says Elijah Hernandez, snorting and scrunching up his face. His partner, Santiago Vasquez, mimics a pig's snout with his hands and says, "They're like this — oink, oink."

When Ashby started teaching kindergarten almost four decades ago, she didn't assign chat partners, who help students learn to focus, feel comfortable expressing their thoughts and absorb concepts in language and science.

But kindergarten has changed a great deal in that time, as have expectations for kindergartners.

Higher expectations — in preparation for high-stakes testing that starts in third grade — can leave parents facing a difficult choice about when to enroll their child in kindergarten if the youngster's birthday is close to the cutoff date.

A child's fifth birthday no longer means that he or she automatically will be enrolled in kindergarten.

Some parents across the state are opting to "redshirt" their children, either enrolling them in kindergarten at age 6 or keeping them in kindergarten an extra year. The term "redshirt" comes from school athletics and is used to describe team members who don't play for a year so they can physically mature; traditionally, they wore red jerseys to distinguish them from regular team members.

Many educators say an extra year will give students an advantage later, in the classroom or on the athletic field.

But other educators say the practice creates its own set of problems because older children can become bored learning at the slower pace of a 5-year-old.

In Texas public schools, a child must be 5 by Sept. 1 to enter kindergarten, which is not a prerequisite for first grade.

Statewide, kindergarten retention rates — an indication of how often parents and teachers determine that students aren't ready for first grade — have stayed relatively consistent since 2000 at less than 4 percent.

In the Austin school district, 119 students, less than 2 percent, were retained in kindergarten last year.

The percentage of redshirted children across the country has remained relatively steady since the 1980s, the New York Times Magazine reported in June.

The number of redshirted children tends to be higher in more affluent districts, where many parents can afford to stay home with their children or pay for day care.

Last school year, 4 percent of about 8,000 Austin kindergartners were enrolled at 6 years old, compared with 6 percent in the wealthier Lake Travis school district.

And Austin elementary schools in some higher-income neighborhoods, including Baranoff, Casis, Highland Park and Mills, had more students who enrolled in kindergarten at 6.

This year, 13 percent in the higher-income Eanes district were enrolled at 6.

But Ashby said 6-year-olds are too advanced for kindergarten, which she said is not a "watered-down first grade."

Six-year-old kindergartners are typically larger than younger peers, have more refined motor skills and should face tougher demands, she said.

"If you have a truly well-matched kindergarten environment that's designed for (5-year-olds), that environment is so tailored to their needs that a 6-year-old will be bored," Ashby said. "To me, it's such a mismatch."

Even children who have learning disabilities can do well in first grade, she said, recalling a former student who was dyslexic. If he'd been retained, "he would have lost being with his friends," she said. "Being part of that group is so important for their confidence."

Julia Fannin decided this fall was too soon to enroll her son Braeden in kindergarten. He turned 5 in June.

She remembers kindergarten as a place where children played and socialized, where they learned to tie their shoe laces.

But spurred in part by high-stakes testing demands, kindergartners now are expected to be reading by the end of the school year.

Fannin enrolled her son in a transitional kindergarten class at Tarrytown Children's Center in West Austin that has a shorter school day and less of an emphasis on academics.

"He does have some friends that were born in May and June that are going on to kindergarten," she said. "We've talked about it a lot. He'll tell people he's not ready for kindergarten and that some people choose to do kindergarten when they are 6."

Cristina Feldott runs several local Gymboree Play & Music sites, which offer a weekly class focusing on the social skills children may need before starting school.

"It seems like the stakes are so much higher today," Feldott said. "We hear about the testing that takes place in elementary school. When I look at my 5-year-old right now, I hope she can do it."

rhill@statesman.com; 445-3620

Labels: testing

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:26 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Editorial: Science class not for 'creationism light'

Editorial: Science class not for 'creationism light' WACO TRIBUNE-HERALD

Saturday, September 01, 2007

One of the hard-to-swallow slurs of modern times is the assertion that if one endorses the evolution model in describing human origins, one is rejecting God’s role.

Comment on this story
One so devout as Pope John Paul II said that evolution does not conflict with Christianity. Unfortunately, some people set up a false conflict between science and religion. They then seek to insert religion into science class under the terms “creation science” and “intelligent design.”

Recently, when questioned by the Dallas Morning News, a solid majority on the State Board of Education, including some members who call themselves creationists, said that they do not support intelligent design in science class.

That is a credit to people who see the distinction between science and religion.

Science is based on empirical research. Though theses can be challenged and debunked, it is the evidence that leads the conclusion, not assumptions of divine inspiration.

Intelligent design, aptly called “creationism light” by some scientists, employs statistical probabilities to assert that only an “intelligent designer” — God — could be behind all that we see in the earth and universe.

That’s a reasoned assertion backed by very serious study and writing. But it’s not science. It is theology.

People who promote “creation science” in school wish to take the round pegs of Genesis and try to hammer them into the square holes of the scientific method. (A key point: As intelligent design doesn’t necessarily employ Genesis to explain creation, is it anti-Christian just as some brand evolution to be?)

It is legitimate to discuss some of the gaps in scientific knowledge about human origins. It is not legitimate scientific discourse to insert material backed only by faith as an “alternative” to what science generally accepts.

Evolution, natural selection, is a fact demonstrated in many species. How exactly it bears on the development our species still has some theory attached, but most of it is indisputable.

It is reassuring to know that for the purposes of science classes, even creationists on the state school board are firmly in the corner of science over theology.

Find this article at:
http://www.wacotrib.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2007/09/01/09012007waceditorial.html

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:37 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Monday, September 03, 2007

Llano Grande gets big grant

Jared Taylor
September 3, 2007 - 3:36PM

EDCOUCH — The Llano Grande Center recently received a big financial boost.

Presented during a reception Thursday, the AT&T Foundation donated $25,000 to the center, which focuses on helping high school students in the Delta region develop skills necessary to enter post-secondary education.

“The grant … is a grant to help local kids build skills,” said Francisco Guajardo, Llano Grande’s executive director.

The money will be used for Llano Grande’s programs, which include sending students on visits to colleges outside of the Valley, helping students develop computer skills and study abroad programs, Guajardo said.

State Rep. Aaron Peña said State Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. spoke at the reception.

Peña said centers like Llano Grande help area youth develop skills necessary to succeed after high school.

“The future of this community is not in picking grapefruit, although some still do that, it’s an honorable profession,” Peña said. “It’s in educating our kids for this new century.”

With more than 40-percent of people in the area living below the poverty line, Lucio said quality education is the foundation to improve the quality of life.

“I want it down significantly, and that can happen through education,” he said. “That is our key out of that poverty cycle and our key for our future.”

Guajardo said the donation represents about 10 percent of Llano Grande’s annual operating budget.

AT&T Foundation spokesman Sergio Contreras said Llano Grande provides help for students in the Delta region that they otherwise would not have.

“This [donation] gives a lot of pride [for the Foundation] to give back where it’s really needed, and we’ll be back,” Contreras said.

Jared Taylor covers Edinburg, the Delta Region and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4439.

Labels: higher education, Region 1

posted by Patricia Lopez at 5:31 PM 0 comments Links to this post

How schools' racial achievement gap can be bridged

This is a great article. Looks like these young students of Color aren't asking for any more than most other students whose voices have been documented: caring, respect, belonging, resources and support. -Patricia

By Susan Sandler / San Jose Mercury News
09/02/2007

The release of the latest test results from California schools highlights the persistence of the racial achievement gap for California students. These results clearly show that race is a factor in education. Race matters, and it's not going away.

Over the years, the California school system has undertaken a series of steps to eliminate achievement gaps, setting goals, applying sanctions, implementing tightly specified curriculum packages, calendars, and other guidelines. Most school staffs are now very focused on achievement gaps. But with all this attention, the racial achievement gap is not budging. And it won't - until policy addresses race.

It's time to take a step back and see what's missing from how California has attacked this problem. One vital perspective has been consistently overlooked: the student's. What does the school system look like through the eyes of students of color? Does it foster learning and belonging, or alienation and failure?

When Justice Matters, a research and policy institute focused on racial justice in education, has asked students of color about what is important in supporting their success in school, here is what they have told us. First, they need to be comfortable at school, which means that the school is a welcoming, caring place where they are respected, and which takes their education seriously. This means having both the tangible resources of quality books, materials, computers and adequate facilities and the less tangible resources of teachers and leaders who value them, see their talents and support their aspirations.

Second, the learning experience needs to engage their interest and curiosity and also to challenge them. This requires a curriculum that is rigorous and relevant - that engages them in authentic problems and meaningful work - and teachers who are knowledgeable and skilled in how to teach their content to their students.

Third, they need to see that they have a place in the school system - that their culture, language and history are recognized and included in the learning experience.

Finally, students learn best when they have close, positive relationships with their teachers and when their families do, too. This means not only having teachers and leaders who are caring but also the sort of environment - small classes, advisory systems and multi-year assignments - that allows teachers to know students well.

Seeing schools through the eyes of students of color makes it pretty clear that California's efforts to eliminate the racial achievement gap haven't focused on many of the policies that would most support their success.

Justice Matters will soon be releasing a study conducted by a team of researchers at Stanford University that details these policies. "High Schools for Equity: Policy Supports for Student Learning in Communities of Color" examines five California public high schools that have attributes such as those described above and that send nearly all of their graduates to college. The study focuses on which policies would be needed to enable all California schools to do what these schools are doing. These policies include:

• More equitable distribution of resources in California schools and better alignment of resources to support the practices that are most important for the education of students of color.

• Deeper investments in teacher education so that teachers can provide rigorous, culturally rich, relevant and responsive classrooms.

• Testing and accountability policies that better support high-quality learning experiences for students of color.

As state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell said when speaking about the racial gaps in student learning, "We cannot afford to accept this, morally, economically or socially." He's right. We need to do more than wring our hands; we need to make major policy changes so that California schools can provide students of color the education they deserve.

SUSAN SANDLER is president of Justice Matters. She wrote this article for the Mercury News.

Labels: achievement gap, California, caring, race

posted by Patricia Lopez at 5:05 PM 0 comments Links to this post

PSJA partners with STC on dual enrollment program

Ryan Holeywell / The Monitor
September 1, 2007

PHARR — Anthony Torres didn’t know where else to turn, so he started praying.

He was a senior at Pharr-San Juan-Alamo High School, but he didn’t graduate because he failed the math portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and was short 2.5 credits to receive his diploma.

At the very moment he was thinking about his future, he got a call from a school district official asking if he would enroll in a new program that would let him complete his high school degree while starting college classes.

“I said, ‘Thank you, God.’” Torres recalled. “I ruined my chances, and God gave me another chance.”

Torres is one of more than 200 students expected to enroll in the partnership program between PSJA and South Texas College, called the College, Career & Technology Academy.

The program is geared toward students who narrowly missed graduating last year but want to get started with college.

STC President Shirley Reed said the school districts in McAllen, Hidalgo, La Joya and Mission have all expressed interest in similar programs, and Mercedes offered the program on a smaller scale this summer.

“We just think this is a marvelous way to transition (from) almost done with high school — get them through high school — and get them to begin college,” Reed said.

Those enrolled in the STC-PSJA program will be considered students of both institutions. The partnership helps students — who need a high school degree or equivalency to enroll in STC — while benefiting the school district, whose funding is tied to attendance and graduation rates.

“It’s very hard to get a lot of students back,” PSJA Superintendent Daniel King said of students who fall just a few credits short of graduating.

King expects 200 to 250 students to enroll in the program, which is set to launch this month. Students will likely take their classes at the Texas Workforce Solutions building on Business 83.

The partnership should be particularly helpful to students who failed to graduate due to TAKS scores and need more instruction before taking it again, King said. TAKS tests are scheduled to be given in October.

The program will initially focus on students who were seniors in 2007, but it could eventually expand to include students who were seniors two, three or even more years ago, King said. There will be no time limit for how long students can stay enrolled at the campus.

Those in the program would initially be part-time STC students taking about six hours of class in addition to their PSJA work.

Ramiro Benavidez, who attended PSJA High last year, said he didn’t graduate because he fell 10 points short on his TAKS math test. He said he wants to participate in the program so he can finish high school while starting his college-level study of criminal justice.

Pedro Ornelas, who also attended PSJA High last year, said he needs just two credits to graduate. He hopes to pursue a career in computer maintenance.

“It’ll help me go into college quicker,” he said of the new program.

Labels: dual enrollment, Region 1

posted by Patricia Lopez at 3:20 PM 0 comments Links to this post

A mixed report card for area schools

9 Modesto schools reach last stage of watch list

By MERRILL BALASSONE
mbalassone@modbee.com
September 01, 2007

When Kelli Redman asked her second-graders to name common jobs, some of the answers she got would surprise most elementary school teachers.

Milker was one. Then came farmer, servant and SWAT team member.

Those answers aren't out of place at Chatom Elementary School, a "little country school" of nearly 500 students west of Turlock. It's common for the children, most of whom are low-income and learning English, to bounce around as their parents follow jobs at area dairy farms.

Data released Friday by the state Department of Education show Chatom and Cloverland Elementary in Oakdale were the only two Stanislaus County schools earning their way off a federal list of underperforming schools. Five Merced County schools, including El Capitan Elementary in Delhi and Elim Elementary in Hilmar, also got off the list.

In Modesto City Schools, nine elementary and junior high schools have hit the fifth year of program improvement, the last stop for the federal system. They could be forced to implement special programs and state takeover, though the latter is unlikely.

The news wasn't all bad: the state measure of improvement, also released Friday, shows most area schools making gains.

To get off the federal program improvement list, schools must meet the federal government's improvement goals for all groups of students, including English learners, ethnic group members and disabled children.

"We didn't always function as smoothly in education," said Chatom reading coach Lisa Bos. "Teachers used to do their own thing, so a kid in the same grade could get a different experience from another (student)."

The changes haven't been comfortable at Chatom, but they've made a difference this year.

Over summer break, teachers attend seminars on reading instruction and teaching English learners. For six years, they've looked at student data to see who's falling behind and use it to place children in after-school tutoring programs. Teachers formed a book club focused on education and held family literacy nights to show parents ways to help their children learn to read.

"We ensure every child keeps growing throughout the whole year," Bos said.

Being in the fifth year of program improvement is no small thing. If test results don't improve, a school can be targeted for restructuring, replacing staff or losing students to other schools.

There are nearly twice as many Modesto schools in the last stage of program improve- ment as in the rest of Stanislaus County. The negative connotation has prompted changes in the district, said Pat Portwood, who oversees elementary education.

Three years ago, the district implemented benchmark tests to gauge student growth throughout the year.

More scrutiny needed

Superintendent Arturo Flores, who began in July, applauded those changes but said more scrutiny of the scores is needed to determine which tactics are working.

"It's a really arduous task to examine every single kid in your classroom, but we have to do that just a little bit better," Flores said. "At this point, you've got to really ask yourself as a district and have that courageous conversation about 'Are these interventions the right ones?' "

Portwood said intervention teams have made three elementary school visits since the school year began in mid-July. The teams visit campuses to coach teachers on classroom strategies and help principals make schoolwide improvements.

"It's done some good things," Portwood said. "With English learners, the spotlight has been on them, and they've had good growth. Our teachers have really gotten onboard."

The federal program improvement list hardly tells the full story in Modesto. Many of the schools on the list have improved by state measurements.

The state Department of Education on Friday handed each school its Academic Performance Index, or API score, which ranges from 200 to 1,000 and is based on standardized tests students take in the spring. Each school is expected to reach a score of 800.

All but two Modesto schools showed improvement on their API score in 2007. More than half improved their API by double digits; the statewide median growth was six points.

"We've never had this much growth before," said Craig Rydquist, associate superintendent of educational services.

Raising the bar for subgroups

For the first time, the state also asked for the same level of progress from traditionally low-achieving subgroups and from the school as a whole.

In the past, Latino and black students, among others, had to make 80 percent of the progress expected of the entire school.

The state Board of Education adopted the tougher standard last year based on the recommendation of Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell. He wants to close the achievement gap, which he has called the most pressing problem facing the state's schools.

O'Connell also acknowledged the confusion of having two school rating systems, one for the state and one for federal compliance.

He said he has talked to federal officials about how to change that, but nothing is likely to happen before the reauthorization of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, which Congress is expected to take up next year.

Nowhere is this conflict more evident than at Fairview Elementary in south Modesto. The school improved its state API from 678 to 700 this year. But the school must hit goals for all subgroups of students, including English learners and low-income students, to meet federal requirements.

The school missed meeting federal targets in those two groups by two students.

"What's difficult is you can be making growth, but it's easy to lose sight of that because of the system," said Susan Rich of Stanislaus County Office of Education. "The truth is, more kids are proficient than ever before."

Even at Chatom, the celebration is ex- pected to be short-lived.

In the coming school year, federal targets will rise steeply to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind. This year, about a quarter of elementary students had to be proficient in math and English to satisfy federal requirements. Next year, that benchmark rises to 35 percent.

"If we do what we did last year, it won't be enough," said Chatom Principal Chanda Rowley. "It makes it look like so many of the schools aren't good enough. I have to tell the teachers, 'You did a great job. Do that and more.' "

Labels: failing schools, Rural schools

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:50 PM 0 comments Links to this post

American schools go global _ in French, Chinese, Spanish, Creole

This program's use of "additive schooling" sounds very promising. -Patricia

By VERENA DOBNIK | Associated Press Writer
September 1, 2007

NEW YORK - Days before the start of the school year, Fabrice Jaumont walked out of the French Embassy's Fifth Avenue mansion, his arms filled with boxes containing books, DVDs and CDs in his native tongue.

He loaded them into the trunk of a car. Destination: the Bronx.

The 35-year-old diplomat was headed to a public school in one of the nation's poorest districts. On Tuesday, some of the students in the Bronx's Jordan L. Mott middle school will arrive for science and other classes _ taught in French.

Four new dual-language programs are starting in the city this fall for the first time: three in French, including one in Harlem, and one in Chinese.

"It's about time," says Jaumont, the education attache at the French Embassy in Manhattan, the cultural branch of the main embassy in Washington.

"This is a competitive country, and if Americans want to compete globally, they won't be first any more if their language skills are not good," says the energetic young diplomat, whose English is peppered with American jargon.

The new programs are part of a growing national trend to teach American children subjects like math, social studies and science in a foreign language. This fall, several hundred thousand youngsters across America are headed to taxpayer-funded classes taught in Spanish, Hebrew, Haitian Creole, Korean, Russian and other languages.

On Manhattan's Lower East Side, children at the public Shuang Wen Academy spend much of their school day in classes taught in Mandarin Chinese. The school is so popular among parents of non-ethnic Chinese children eager to prepare their offspring for a changing world that there's a waiting list for admission.

In each class, about half the students are fluent in Chinese, the other half in English; some are immigrants, others American-born. That fifty-fifty approach is applied to more than 10,000 other New York City children who voluntarily signed up for the city Department of Education's 67 dual-language programs (compared to 51 in 2004). Each child also starts with separate lessons in the language.

The students end up helping each other with a second language, while learning a subject together. "It's very organic," says Shimon Waronker, 38, principal at the Mott school.

The thought of taking a social science class in French excited 11-year-old Pamela Cruz, who is already fluent in English and Spanish.

"I didn't like school that much. Now I really want to go," says the sixth-grader, who also signed up for guitar classes in French, which she says "sounds kind of funny, but beautiful."

Her father, Enio Cruz, a Guatemalan immigrant who works as a housekeeper, is thrilled: "It's good for her future. She'll be able to meet more people, and have more chances to work better."

In a global economy where about 1 billion people speak Chinese, and almost 400 million Spanish, the two languages are at the top of the list of classes taught in a foreign language at more than 300 public schools nationwide.

More than two-thirds are in Spanish, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C., a private nonprofit organization that researches issues related to language in a society. About 14,000 children are taking classes in French _ including in Chicago, Miami, Boston and Washington, says Jaumont.

Not to be confused with controversial bilingual education designed to mainstream non-English speaking children, subjects taught in a foreign language are designed to make a child fluent in speaking and writing two languages. Most of the children start such classes already in elementary school, or even in kindergarten.

Compared to a decade ago, there are more than twice as many American public school students getting a multilingual education, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics.

U.S. government funding of such education is fueling a heated question: Does it make sense for American public school children to learn in foreign languages, at taxpayers' expense?

"Absolutely," says Waronker, 38, whose Bronx school population is 80 percent Hispanic and 20 percent black. Mott was once among New York's so-called "Dirty Dozen" schools, where drug-and-violence driven gangs ruled until Waronker arrived three years ago.

Of a total 700 students, 120 in the fifth and sixth grades have signed up for science and social studies classes taught in a foreign language _ 60 in Spanish and 60 in French. The school has a few dozen students who come from French-speaking Africa.

"What we've seen here is that students who take languages do better in other subjects, and they score better on standardized tests," says Waronker, a Chilean-born Orthodox Jew who was once a U.S. Army intelligence officer.

That's his answer to critics who argue the new approach comes at the expense of traditional teaching that prepares a student for mainstream American life.

At his school, the principal has added a little bonus: Physical education taught in German by an Austrian coach.

Maria Santos, who heads the Department of Education's office of English language learners, said research supports the conclusion that "the brain benefits from learning two languages. It gains much more flexibility, in any subject."

French is spoken by about 250 million people in more than 50 countries, but is no longer the most commonly used international language of diplomacy _ English is. Asked if French remains a good choice despite the rise of other languages, the polyglot Bronx principal smiles.

"When kids learn other languages, they start seeing connections and the mind develops faster _ it doesn't matter what language it is," says Waronker, who speaks English, Spanish and Hebrew. "The goal of such an education is to build confidence in a child, to make a better American citizen who can fit in anywhere."

Labels: additive schooling, dual language education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:38 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Judge stays rule requiring employers to fire illegal immigrants

More good news for immigrant, and worker rights. Let's stay hopeful that the October 1 outcome will be equally positive. -Patricia

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, September 1, 2007

A federal judge in San Francisco blocked the Bush administration Friday from imposing a rule requiring employers to fire workers identified as illegal immigrants in government records or face possible prosecution.

U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney granted a nationwide temporary restraining order sought by the AFL-CIO and affiliated unions to keep the government from sending letters to employers demanding that they clear up workers' citizenship status.

The order will be in effect until Oct. 1, when another federal judge will consider whether to grant an injunction that would block the rule until a trial on the unions' lawsuit against the government is held.

Chesney said there was a serious question about whether the Bush administration's planned crackdown on illegal workers was authorized by law. She also said the government would suffer little inconvenience from a delay, compared with the hardship to employees who might be improperly identified as illegal immigrants.

Officials had planned to send the first warning letters Tuesday and mail 140,000 letters to employers by Nov. 9.

Justice Department lawyer Daniel Bensing told Chesney that the government wants the issue resolved before Sept. 14, when the new rule was scheduled to take effect and objected to a delay until at least October. But he did not indicate any intention to challenge the judge's order.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced the rule Aug. 10 as a means of toughening the little-enforced 1986 law that subjects employers to criminal prosecution or civil penalties for knowingly employing illegal immigrants.

Employers now can satisfy the law if they obtain specified identification documents from newly hired workers. After that, the government notifies employers if the Social Security number on a worker's W-2 tax form doesn't match the number in the Social Security database. That employee might not have earnings credited for Social Security benefits, but no action is taken against the employer.

Under the new rule, employers receiving such a "no-match" letter would have to fire the worker or face possible civil fines and criminal penalties if the discrepancy isn't cleared up within 90 days. The change would be likely to have the greatest effect in California, where several industries employ large numbers of undocumented workers.

The unions argued that past experience with no-match letters shows that they are often sent mistakenly because of clerical errors by employers or the government in recording numbers or because of name changes after a marriage, divorce or other reasons.

The AFL-CIO also said Social Security was never intended to be a means of tracking down undocumented immigrants and is so cumbersome that legal employees will be unable to clear up discrepancies in 90 days.

The unions argued that the 1986 law, which prohibited employers from knowingly employing illegal immigrants, required only a document check for newly hired workers, and did not authorize the government to order additional verification after hiring.

Government lawyers said the new rule is consistent with the 1986 law, and merely gave employers an additional way to resolve uncertainties about their employees' immigration status and avoid liability.

The rule was drafted and circulated for comment more than a year ago and lay dormant until Chertoff's Aug. 10 announcement. Bensing, the government's lawyer, said Friday that the administration had held off while awaiting congressional action on a comprehensive immigration bill and activated the regulation only after the bill was defeated.

Chesney said her decision to block the rule didn't necessarily mean she thinks it is illegal. But she told Bensing that it would be important for the government to present evidence showing a connection between a no-match letter and "a reasonable inference that the person is here illegally."

Lawyers for the unions said they were encouraged.

"We're confident that the rule will be struck down," said attorney Scott Kronland.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:51 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Jailed Texan Mistaken for Immigrant

By ANGELA K. BROWN
August 31, 2007

ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) — Authorities threatened a Texas native with deportation after unpaid tickets landed her in jail and officers mistook her for an illegal immigrant with the same name and birthday.

Instead of resolving her arrest on the tickets within a few hours, Alicia Rodriguez spent 16 hours in custody and missed her children's first day of school. She was freed after an officer checked her birth certificate and Social Security number.

But she claims no one told her why she was being held until the morning after her arrest, when she was being transferred between jails.

"I was panicking at that point," the 29-year-old accountant said Thursday, three days after her release. "I was worried about my kids wondering where I was. And I can't even speak Spanish, and I was worried about being sent to a foreign country where I don't know anyone."

Arlington police acknowledged that officers should have checked her fingerprints after a criminal history check revealed that an Alicia Rodriguez, a Mexican citizen with several aliases and the same birthday as the jailed woman, had been deported.

The women were about the same height, but the Texas-born mother of three weighs about 25 pounds more. Still, police thought the women could be the same, because the illegal immigrant's information was from 1999.

"It was our mistake, and we apologize," Arlington police spokeswoman Christy Gilfour said.

Rodriguez said police didn't do enough to verify her identity and refused to believe her assertions that she is a U.S. citizen.

"I don't think it was an honest mistake," she said. "There were many steps they missed and didn't follow up on."

An Arlington officer pulled over Rodriguez on Sunday night after checking her license plates and discovering two warrants for her arrest in nearby Dalworthington Gardens. One warrant was issued because she was cited last year for driving without insurance, and the other because she failed to show up in court on that charge, she said.

After booking her into jail, Arlington police contacted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to check her citizenship status, which Gilfour said is routine for all suspects believed to be born in another country.

Rodriguez said she was then questioned over the telephone by an immigration official who warned her she could be charged with perjury for lying about her birthplace and other details. She was later told by a police officer that authorities didn't believe she was who she claimed to be — but no one said they thought she was an illegal immigrant.

"I thought somebody had committed a scary crime and had stolen my identity," Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez said she told the officers to check her fingerprints, which were taken when she was booked, as well as her voter registration card and voting history. Meanwhile, she spent the night in a two-person cell.

Rodriguez's sister, Deborah Evans, said she delivered a birth certificate and Social Security card Monday morning, first to Arlington and then to the Dalworthington Gardens station after her sister was transferred there. But Evans said officers at both stations told her repeatedly that her sister was going to be deported.

A Dalworthington Gardens officer checking the information discovered the mistaken identity, Sgt. David Henderson said.

When Rodriguez's information was verified, ICE dropped the hold placed on her and she was released Monday afternoon, agency spokesman Carl Rusnok said. She had paid her ticket fines earlier in the day.

By the time Rodriguez was freed, her sister had left and she had to walk about three miles to the impound lot to retrieve her car.

Rusnok said the agency acted appropriately, especially since the deported woman who had been deported three times also had claimed to be an American citizen.

"We had a very good reason to doubt her validity," Rusnok said of the Texan.

Marisol Perez, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said there have been at least five similar mix-ups this year nationwide.

"It demonstrates the dangers when people are perceiving immigrant status based on artificial reasons, and sometimes people do not have the training or expertise (to verify identities)," Perez said. "We're talking about everybody's individual rights."

Labels: immigration

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

Better Odds

The school's site doesn't indicate how it accepts or recruits students, so I'm not certain if this is accessible to undocumented immigrants in California. If anyone has information I'd love to know more. -Patricia

A New High School for Oakland's Newest Immigrants
Alex Gronke|August 31, 2007

Ms. Chang, a First Year Teacher at OIHS, Introduces Students to English

These students are the very lucky ones. The ones granted tickets out of refugee camps in places like Thailand, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, who now sit in a classroom at Oakland’s first and only high school catering to the city’s newest immigrants.

Nearly 40 of the roughly 65 students who make up the freshman class of Oakland International High School arrived in the United States this summer. Housed in the former Carter Middle School campus in tranquil, leafy Temescal, the small alternative high school is patterned after high schools in New York City that have been successfully serving immigrants there for more than two decades. It’s a wonder that it has taken Oakland this long to found a school on the New York model.

The pitfalls facing recent immigrant students at places like Oakland High School and Oakland Tech are no secret. Even by the bleak standards of Oakland Unified, where drop out rates are high across the board, statistics show that the numbers are even worse for the 13,000 students in OUSD that the California Department of Education classifies as English Learners, according to Carmelita Reyes, the new school’s principal. “These kids are getting held up, they are not graduating,” she says.

Just up the street from Oakland International High School is Oakland Tech, a big city high school with 1,600 students. It’s where some of Ms. Reyes’ students would be if it weren’t for the new small school she helped start. At Oakland's traditional high schools, Ms. Reyes says, immigrant students who aren’t fluent in English are given an hour of language instruction a day. The rest of the time, they are expected to keep up with their classmates in math, science and history. It’s a system that doesn’t work.

Some 20 years after the New York City public school system recognized that immigrants were having a tough time in traditional schools, research shows that the international high schools are a remedy. In New York City, the four-year drop out rate is less than six percent for students enrolled at the schools known as Internationals. The drop out rate for English Language Learners at other New York City schools is more than 30 percent.

For Edward Ankomahena, 17 years old and newly arrived this summer from Ghana, Oakland International offers better odds. On Thursday morning, he sits in a cluster with three other students. The science class focuses on the English words he and his classmates will need when it comes time to pass the state’s exit exam, which has become the chief stumbling block for immigrant students.

Oakland International High School should help students succeed, says Lauren Markham, a refugee assistant with the International Rescue Committee, an organization that’s placed 20 students in Oakland Unified since May. Despite its high cost of living, Oakland remains a popular destination for the U.S. State Department to resettle the refugees it allows into the country. Ms. Markham says that more than a dozen new refugees are Oakland-bound in September. Among them, the high school age students will likely enroll at Oakland International.

Labels: immigration and education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:52 PM 0 comments Links to this post

ACLU Challenges Prison-Like Conditions at Hutto Detention Center

Wow! This is a great victory by the ACLU. It will serve as a good precedent for future ICE-related incarcerations. -Angela

ACLU Challenges Prison-Like Conditions at Hutto Detention Center

Belkys Blanco (right) and her daughter Susana Rodriguez, prepare to depart from the Austin airport to stay with family or friends while they pursue their asylum claims. Belkys and Susana were detained at Hutto since early February 2007.

On August 27, the ACLU announced a landmark settlement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that greatly improves conditions for immigrant children and their families in the T. Don Hutto detention center in Taylor, Texas.

The settlement was the result of lawsuits brought earlier this year on behalf of 26 immigrant children detained with their parents at Hutto. The lawsuits contended that the conditions inside the detention center violate numerous provisions of Flores v. Meese, a 1997 court settlement that established minimum standards and conditions for the housing and release of all minors in federal immigration custody.

Since the original lawsuits were filed, all 26 children represented by the ACLU have been released. The last six children were released days before the settlement was finalized and are now living with family members who are U.S. citizens and/or legal permanent residents while pursuing their asylum claims.

Conditions at Hutto have gradually and significantly improved as a result of the groundbreaking litigation. Children are no longer required to wear prison uniforms and are allowed much more time outdoors. Educational programming has expanded and guards have been instructed not to discipline children by threatening to separate them from their parents.

In addition to making those improvements permanent, the settlement also requires ICE to provide, among other things:

allow children over the age of 12 to move freely about the facility
provide a full-time, on-site pediatrician
eliminate the count system which forces families to stay in their cells 12 hours a day
install privacy curtains around toilets
offer field trip opportunities to children
supply more toys and age- and language-appropriate books
improve the nutritional value of food

ICE must also allow regular legal orientation presentations by local immigrants’ rights organizations; allow family and friends to visit Hutto detainees seven days a week; and allow children to keep paper and pens in their rooms. ICE’s compliance with each of these reforms, as well as other conditions reforms, will be subject to external oversight to ensure their permanence.

Despite the tremendous improvements at Hutto, the facility retains its essential character: it was a medium security prison managed by the Corrections Corporation of America, a for-profit adult corrections company. The ACLU remains adamant that detaining immigrant children at Hutto is inappropriate and calls on Congress to compel DHS to find humane alternatives for managing families whose immigration status is in limbo.

http://www.aclu.org/immigrants/detention/hutto.html

Labels: ACLU, Hutto Detention Center

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:14 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Language Provision in NCLB Draft Plan Criticized

By Mary Ann Zehr / Ed Week
August 31, 2007

Educators and representatives of groups that follow issues involving English-language learners raised practical concerns last week about how a draft plan to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act would affect those students.

For the rest of this story click here

Labels: English language learners, NCLB reauthorization

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

Writing a new book

What an amazing ending quote by Reyes: "I represent every child that you somehow have not believed in." -Patricia

By Linda P. Campbell / Star-Telegram Staff Writer
August 30, 2007

In her fashionable black dress with the pleated hem and very-high-heeled pumps, Maria Reyes might be an advertising account saleswoman. A litigator. A motivational speaker.

What she doesn't resemble is the gang member and insolent juvenile offender who showed up for her first day of high school English wearing an ankle monitor.

"This is probably worse than being in juvenile hall," Reyes recalled thinking about her first encounter with teacher Erin Gruwell more than a dozen years ago at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif.

With all the naiveté of an idealistic new teacher, Gruwell tried to cut through the rude resistance of her underachieving students by having them read about Anne Frank and other young people under siege, then write about their own damaged lives.

A distrustful Reyes was not initially impressed.

Gruwell seemed to think that "she was going to pass out these journals and we were going to suddenly get it ... because this is how things happened in her world," Reyes said. "She was the epitome of everything we hated about the education system."

But Gruwell persisted -- so much that her students started calling her Jason, the murderous corpse who keeps resurfacing in the Friday the 13th movies.

And then Anne Frank's story of her family's days hiding from the Nazis during World War II provided "this light in my dark world," Reyes said. "For the first time, I allowed myself to care like I had never cared before."

And she found "the strength and courage to confront my own truth, my own reality."

Reyes became one of the Freedom Writers, Gruwell's students whose journals became a book and a Hilary Swank movie depicting the journey of teenagers with hopeless futures who grew into self-confident, college-bound graduates.

Gruwell, who spoke to Fort Worth teachers a year ago, returned to town recently for a tandem appearance with Reyes at the Girls Inc. of Tarrant County's "No Limits" luncheon. Reyes barely reaches Gruwell's chin -- and that's in heels -- but she packs infectious energy.

"I believed at a very early age that my story was already told," Reyes said.

Her grandmother wasn't sent to school because she'd be punished for speaking Spanish. Her grandfather joined a gang because people who looked like him got beaten up. Her father dreamed of being a boxer, but his parents couldn't afford training. Her mother got pregnant at 15.

But writing, Reyes discovered, "was really the tool, the key that opened up my world to see something different."

Now 27 and a graduate of California State University, Long Beach, Reyes helps raise money for the Freedom Writers Foundation, which trains teachers to use gritty novels and journaling to help inner-city students connect with education, improve their writing skills and reach for higher academic goals.

It's an intensive and innovative approach.

Dunbar Middle School teacher Sefakor Amaa, who started a Junior Freedom Writers program in the spring for students who've struggled with the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, says her seventh-graders benefited from the reading, discussion and writing, even though their activities had to move from class time to after school to accommodate TAKS preparation.

Of the 54 Freedom Writers, most of whom are African-American, 74 percent passed the reading TAKS, Amaa said. One girl who didn't pass nevertheless raised her raw score 300 points.Amaa says that many of the students are again ready to pick up their pens and "little book that could," and that administrators are trying to sustain the Freedom Writers techniques as a component of raising student achievement.

It's in line with Reyes' challenge to audiences: Adults must create opportunities for young people to find their potential.

"Education is the thing that liberates us to see what lies ahead of us," she said.

"I represent every child that you somehow have not believed in."

Labels: achievement,