By Joey Gomez and Steve Taylor
Rio Grande Guardian
December 21, 2007

EDCOUCH, December 21 - The Delta area of the Rio Grande Valley may be one of the most impoverished parts of the nation but its record in sending students to Ivy League universities is the envy of many.

Many give credit to the pioneering work of the non-profit Llano Grande Center for Research and Development, which has worked to increase educational opportunities and expectations of young people in Edcouch-Elsa by developing effective, culturally relevant teaching methods and practices.

Llano Grande, which runs evening tutoring and mentoring in local high schools, believes students become better prepared for college by first becoming community-minded leaders and so teachers and students at the center organize a variety of community-based projects.

It has developed a college prep program based on four major pillars: academic support, understanding the application process, leadership development, and identity building.

“Our students have continued to expand their horizons, develop new skills, graduate with superior records, gain entry to America’s finest colleges and universities, and return to the Rio Grande Valley to pursue their lives and careers,” said Delia Pérez, program director at Llano Grande.

Pérez was one of the first students involved in establishing the annual East Coast college trips at Edcouch-Elsa High School. The project has led to more than 50 Delta area students attending Ivy League schools.

Pérez graduated from Yale University in 1997, returning to teach at Edcouch-Elsa High School. She later went on to earn her master's degree in public policy at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.

“Enter Room A-1 at Edcouch-Elsa High School and you will not find your typical high school students,” Pérez said.

“Instead, you will encounter world travelers, entrepreneurs, park designers, movie producers, event planners, grant writers, and socially-conscious adults in the making.”

Pérez said the non-traditional teaching and learning experiences Llano Grande students actively participate in teaches civic responsibility and strengthens the fabric of the local community.

“Because students grow to understand the relevance of their learning to the world around them, students become motivated to set personal goals to do well in school and pursue a higher education,” Pérez added.

Francisco Guajardo is assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership in the College of Education at the University of Texas-Pan American. Before that he was a teacher and administrator at Edcouch-Elsa High School. He also directs the Llano Grande Center.

“At the Llano Grande Center, our mission is to give underprivileged students every opportunity to excel, and to change the way students, parents, and teachers think about college readiness,” Guajardo said.

While test-taking skills, rigorous classes, and good grades are important to students, Guajardo said, so is intellectual and social development through an exploration of self and community.

Guajardo won a “Heroes Among Us” award in November 2003 by People magazine, was named Southwest Region Teacher of the Year by Time Magazine for Kids in 2001, and was honored as finalist for National Teacher of the Year by Hispanic Magazine in 1998.

Corporate America is starting to acknowledge the work of the Llano Grande Center. In August, the AT&T Foundation, the corporate philanthropy organization of AT&T, awarded a $25,000 grant to the organization to purchase new technology.

Sergio Contreras, AT&T’s external affairs manager in the Rio Grande Valley, said the technology equipment will allow students to learn computer skills and use advanced equipment that will aid them in pursuing higher education or entering the workforce.

“The Llano Grande Center has such a rich history of helping students in the area to have the best opportunities for success, and we are proud to assist the center in this endeavor,” Contreras said.

This week, the Llano Grande received another $25,000 grant, courtesy of State Farm Insurance. State Reps. Veronica Gonzales, D-McAllen, and Aaron Peña, D-Edinburg, were present for the check presentation.

Roel Villanueva, State Farm Insurance Agent, said his company’s donation would help Llano Grande continue its services to students and families of Edcouch-Elsa.

“State Farm Insurance is proud to award Llano Grande's service learning program and open this opportunity of service-learning to more people in the community,” Villanueva said. “Programs such as these allow the youth to learn civic responsibility and develop meaningful leadership and workplace skills. We applaud these students for their leadership and dedication to their future.”

Guajardo thanked the corporations for their generosity. He said the funding would help Llano Grande in its mission to develop new alliances in order to revitalize the Delta community and expand educational horizons.

Labels: college readiness, Region 1, teachers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 3:52 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Debra Viadero | Teacher Magazine
October 25, 2007

Back in the early 1990s, when Amy C. Orr started her teaching career in the Rockwood, Mo., school district, her colleagues dreaded the professional development workshops they had to attend.

“It was a lot of what we would call ‘sit and git’ workshops,” said Orr, now a reading specialist in the district’s Wild Horse Elementary School. “It was very fragmented, and there was no understanding that staff development could lead to student achievement.”

More than a decade later, the take on professional development has changed—and not just among Orr’s co-workers. Now many national policymakers and experts believe that professional development, if done purposefully and given greater allotments of time, can be an important tool for improving student learning.

As often happens in education, the research on such programs is still catching up with the rhetoric, but scholars are beginning to agree in broad terms on the kinds of professional development efforts that might translate into improved student learning.
Common Visions

Some of the current attention to professional development grows out of several studies in recent years that have highlighted the central role that teachers play in student learning.

A study of Texas districts in the early 1990s by Harvard economist Ronald Ferguson suggests, for example, that teacher expertise accounts for 40 percent of the difference in students’ scores on math and reading tests.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act reflects that recognition. Besides calling upon schools to staff classrooms with “highly qualified” teachers, the law says schools should annually increase the percentages of teachers in their buildings who receive “high quality” professional development.

The federal law defines high-quality professional development broadly, calling for programs that are “sustained, intensive, classroom-focused … and are not one-day or short-term workshops or conferences.” While that definition lacks specifics, it tracks closely with what researchers are discovering.

Experts know, for instance, that programs focused on the academic content that teachers must cover and on how students learn that content are more effective than those that impart generic teaching techniques.

They know that longer-lasting professional development tends to produce better results. They also know that such programs work best when they link to teachers’ daily classroom work—the tasks their students will have to do, for example, or the texts they will use.

To a lesser degree, researchers also have a hunch that it’s important for teachers to engage in learning sessions collectively—maybe with other teachers from the same department or grade—so that they can meet later to reflect on what they learned.

Agreement on many of these components is widespread enough that the Washington-based American Educational Research Association published them in a 2005 research guide for education leaders and policymakers.
Research Questions

Researchers can also point to particular models—such as the National Writing Project, a federally supported network based at the University of California, Berkeley, or Cognitively Guided Instruction, a program for teaching mathematics developed by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison—that have shown some success in changing classroom practices.

But they know less about particular aspects of staff development that might have more general applications. For instance, does it help for schools to have full-time “learning coaches” to work with teachers? Research on that fast-growing innovation is inconclusive, according to experts. The same goes for lesson-study teams, online professional development, and a myriad of other approaches.

Studies have been difficult to do because real classroom change is slow, expensive, and complicated to measure. And with multiple school-improvement strategies often taking place at once, experts say, the direct link between professional development and student achievement is not always clear.

Still, a number of reputable studies have identified links between certain types of professional development practices and positive changes in both teachers’ instruction and students’ achievement. While differing in scope and methodology, such studies tend to have some common themes—to the point that they seem to build on one another.
Time and Effort

In one prominent study, David K. Cohen, a researcher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and his research partner Heather C. Hill studied 559 California teachers learning to use a new state-approved math framework and new math curricula in the early 1990s that departed from practices then in use in the state. The teachers had participated in various kinds of professional development, from one- day workshops on cooperative learning to longer institutes where teachers worked with new curriculum units that state officials had developed.

Cohen and Hill found that teachers who had attended lengthier sessions that focused more on academic content tended to embrace curricular change more completely than those who hadn’t. More importantly, their students scored higher on state math exams than those of other teachers in the study. While the study could not prove cause and effect, the researchers ruled out some other explanations for the improvements, such as differences in classroom demographics or in teachers’ attitudes toward the new curricula.
Revamping Staff Development

Some research suggests that devoting adequate time to professional development may be the key.

In 1998, for example, a team of researchers led by Michael S. Garet of the American Institutes for Research in Washington surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,027 teachers on their staff development in math and science over the previous year. When teachers spent about the same amount of time in such activities, the study found, they made about the same progress in improving their knowledge and in making changes in their own classrooms. The improvements occurred regardless of whether the teachers had taken part in a workshop or in more innovative approaches, such as mentoring or study groups. The newer approaches, however, tended to be more sustained.

Indeed, a 2001 study by the Consortium of Chicago School Research found that professional development programs in Chicago public schools that were characterized by “sustained, coherent study; collaborative learning; time for classroom experimentation; and follow-up” had a significant effect on teachers’ instructional practices. The study also identified a reciprocal relationship between these types of professional development offerings and a school’s overall “orientation toward innovation,” suggesting the two feed off each other.

A 2000 study by the National Staff Development Council, meanwhile, examined the award-winning professional development programs at eight public schools that had made measurable gains in student achievement. The study found that in each of the schools, “the very nature of staff development [had] shifted from isolated learning and the occasional workshop to focused, ongoing organizational learning built on collaborative reflection and joint action.” Specifically, the study found that the schools’ professional development programs were characterized by collaborative structures, diverse and extensive learning opportunities, and an emphasis on accountability and student results.

Amy Orr’s district, the 22,000-student Rockwood school system outside St. Louis, adopted some of the newer approaches when it revamped its own staff-development practices several years ago.

Now, teachers at her school meet in teams regularly to analyze the school’s test results. Through the analyses, they pinpoint students’ knowledge gaps and what the teachers need, as a team, to fill the holes.

The teams might visit classrooms where students score better in a targeted area; recruit speakers; consult district specialists; study available research; and try new approaches and reflect on how they worked.

“If something interrupts our staff-development time now, we are not happy,” Orr said.

She believes this kind of training has had an impact both on student achievement and teacher satisfaction.

Some researchers warn, however, that new strategies are only as good as the content they incorporate.

The problem, says Thomas B. Corcoran, a co-director of the Consortium for Policy Reesearch in Education, is that fads, ideology, or charismatic staff-development “gurus” often dictate content choices.

Instead, he said, educators should look for programs grounded in solid research and tempered by clinical knowledge. When the research base comes up short, he says, schools should systematically study and evaluate their own efforts.

The Write Stuff

Researchers have cited the National Writing Project, a federally supported network based at the University of California, Berkeley, as one effective model of professional development. Here are the group’s core principals:

•Teachers are the agents of reform; universities and schools are partners for investing in that reform through professional development.

•Professional development programs provide opportunities for teachers to work together to understand the full spectrum of writing development across grades and across subject areas.

•Effective professional development programs provide frequent and ongoing opportunities for teachers to write and to examine theory, research, and practice together systematically.

•Teachers who are well informed and effective in their practice can be successful teachers of other teachers as well as partners in educational research, development, and implementation.

•A reflective and informed community of practice is in the best position to design and develop comprehensive writing programs.
SOURCE: The National Writing Project (www.nwp.org)


Points for Policy

In 2005, the American Education Research Association published a research guide on teacher professional development directed at policymakers. The guide offers the following recommendations:

•Make sure that professional development focuses on the subject matter that teachers will be teaching.

•Align teachers’ professional development activities with their work experiences, using actual curriculum materials and assessments.

•Provide adequate time for professional development and include opportunities for observing and analyzing students’ understanding of the subject matter.

•Make sure that districts have reliable systems for evaluating the impact of professional development on teaching and learning.
SOURCE: American Education Research Association


Debra Viadero is an associate editor of Education Week. This article was originally published, in a different version, in Education Week.
Vol. 01, Issue 01, Pages 15-17

Labels: teacher development

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:16 AM 0 comments Links to this post

New York Times, Dec. 29, 2007

No debate: the No Child Left Behind Act has not
worked.

“Democrats Make Bush School Act an Election Issue”
(front page, Dec. 23) notes that “policy makers debate
whether the law has raised student achievement.”

There is no debate among those who have looked at the
data. The law has not produced improvements on state
or national reading tests, nor have achievement gaps
been narrowed. There has also been no change on
American fourth graders’ scores on the Progress in
International Reading Literacy Study tests from 2001
to 2006. (No Child Left Behind was introduced in the
2002-3 school year.)

Despite huge increases in instructional time and
billions of dollars spent, there have been no
improvements.

Stephen Krashen
Los Angeles, Dec. 23, 2007
The writer is professor emeritus of education at the
University of Southern California.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:29 AM 0 comments Links to this post

In many Delaware districts, the gifted are left behind
State offers no funding to teach brightest students
By ALISON KEPNER, The News Journal

Posted Thursday, December 20, 2007

Sofia Romanoli shows amazement at a set of nested dolls in a class for gifted first-graders at Mount Pleasant Elementary School. In the Brandywine district, gifted kindergarten through third-grade students attend Mount Pleasant, then move on to Claymont Elementary. (Buy photo)The News Journal/ROBERT CRAIG
Noah Hann-Deschaine looks at a bulletin board for information to answer a question posed by teacher Ellen Forbes in a class for gifted first-graders at Mount Pleasant Elementary School.(Buy photo)The News Journal/ROBERT CRAIG
They are bored -- so much so that they may not pay attention in class or will act out in frustration.

Some make poor grades, either because they no longer care or because they have spent so many of their younger years unchallenged that when they suddenly face a rigorous course in middle or high school, they don't know how to study.

They are the nation's gifted children, those with abilities beyond other children their age. Too many of their abilities, advocates argue, remain untapped by U.S. schools that don't serve them as they focus instead on lifting low-achieving students to meet the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Statistically, 20 percent of U.S. school dropouts test in the gifted range, said Jill Adrian, director of family services at the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a nonprofit founded by philanthropists Bob and Jan Davidson out of a concern that the nation's most gifted and talented children largely are neglected and underserved.

"Clearly there's a problem there," Adrian said. "If we don't meet the needs in the classrooms, they often tune out."

Delaware is one of six states that neither mandates gifted instruction nor provides gifted education funding, a Davidson review found.

No Child Left Behind, now up for reauthorization, requires all students to be proficient in core school subjects by 2014. While supporters and critics alike credit the law for forcing needed attention on underperforming children, an oft-cited flaw is the lack of incentives for educators to boost advanced students.

NCLB "just teaches to the minimums, so it leaves behind the average and the above-average students," Adrian said.

Even schools that offer some services, such as weekly pull-out enrichment classes, need to do more, she said: "Gifted students are gifted 24/7. They are not just gifted one hour a week."

Only 10 of the state's 19 school districts and one of its 17 charter schools offer gifted education: Appoquinimink, Brandywine, Capital, Caesar Rodney, Christina, Colonial, Indian River, Lake Forest, Red Clay Consolidated, Smyrna and The Charter School of Wilmington. The models and extent of their programs differ greatly, ranging from schoolwide enrichment for all students to pull-out classes to full-time, self-contained gifted programs.

"As we follow local control on so many other issues, we've deferred to local districts to develop programming," said Mike Stetter, Delaware's director of curriculum. "Other states have enacted programs funded by state dollars. Delaware has not done that. Instead, it has gone by way of [gifted teacher] certification and support out to the district."

A November Delaware Public Policy Institute report estimated the cost of an elementary-level gifted program at $3,000 to $4,000 per participating student.

Even without state funding, some Delaware districts are trying to meet gifted students' needs.

In Brandywine, gifted elementary school students attend cluster buildings where they are placed in all-gifted classrooms. Kindergarten through third-grade students attend Mount Pleasant Elementary, then move on to Claymont Elementary for fourth to sixth grades.

About 215 of Mount Pleasant's 541 students are in gifted classes. They follow the same curriculum as those in regular education classes but often study more in-depth and at a faster pace. Gifted students also do more project work.

Thinking differently

On a recent morning in Christine Szegda's third-grade gifted class at Mount Pleasant, students split into three groups to sort individual packs of word cards. Szegda, who previously assessed the children in their related skills, grouped them according to their needs. Some looked at vowel sounds, noting what determines whether words have long or short "e" sounds. Others looked at what effect syllables coming together have on vowel sounds. A third group studied base words and what happens when adding suffixes and prefixes, with an emphasis on Greek and Latin roots. Later, the groups would share what they learned with classmates through a game similar to "Jeopardy!"

"Gifted children, they just think differently. They think outside the box," Principal Joyce Skrobot said. "They are able to assume more responsibility and independence for what they are learning. We as a school district have a responsibility to meet the needs of all our students."

To ensure that all students are challenged -- and that regular and gifted students interact more -- the school recently started a schoolwide enrichment program, offering students classes ranging from cricket and karate to jewelry making and cooking.

Mount Pleasant mother Kate Tullis said she appreciates the education her daughter, Tully Liu, is receiving in Kim Griffith's first-grade gifted class.

"She's challenged by the other kids, by the level of conversations and interaction," Tullis said. "It's not just zooming ahead, but it's making bigger, longer, [more diverse] stories."

Students whose schools don't have gifted programs still have some options available to them, particularly in high school. Some schools offer dual enrollment programs, allowing students to take college classes for high school credit. Advanced Placement programs also offer college-level courses, and the state Governor's School of Excellence offers summer enrichment opportunities.

What, if any, effect NCLB is having on advanced students is hard to determine: Few states have tests that show the growth of students working above grade level. Delaware has no such testing program.

Stetter points to some good news for Delaware's highest-achieving students, noting that the number of Advanced Placement courses offered in schools across the state has about doubled since NCLB went into effect. State testing results indicate some growth, too, he said. In 2001, the percentage of 10th-graders who scored 5 in math -- the top mark -- was 7.5 percent. By 2007, the percentage had almost doubled.

The effect on gifted-program funding is easier to see, according to a Time magazine report earlier this year. In 2003 -- a year after NCLB became law -- Illinois cut its gifted education by $16 million and Michigan's funding dropped from $5 million to $500,000. Meanwhile, federal commitment has shifted from $11.3 million in 2002 to $7.6 million today, Time found.

Parents and other advocates for gifted student across the country are pushing for more resources and better testing. In Utah, the Utah Association for Gifted Children wants state lawmakers to devote $5 million next year to training teachers in gifted instruction. The Davidsons founded the Davidson Academy of Nevada in Reno, a public, tuition-free school chartered by the state to serve "profoundly gifted" students. Students must have SAT, ACT or IQ scores in the top tenth of 1 percent and perform academically at the middle or high school level.

Same content, varying levels

Historically, gifted children were pulled out of classrooms for enrichment activities or advanced instruction. But out of concern for equality in education, many educators shifted to differentiated instruction, meaning teachers present the same content to all students but with lessons or activities geared for multiple levels. That is Appoquinimink's approach.

"In language arts, teachers may have one group reading a particular book that others were not ready to handle," said Debbie Panchisin, Appoquinimink's director of elementary curriculum.

Gifted and talented classes are offered building-wide through enrichment electives in the elementary and middle schools.

"We believe that all students have the potential, they have their gifts and their talents. So through our Talent Development Program, we try to expose them to things they might be interested in," Panchisin said.

Offerings range from quilting and dance to German lessons and Delaware wetland study. Most classes meet one day a week for 60 to 75 minutes.

Although teachers already are strapped for time to prepare students for state testing in core subjects, they make time for the enrichment, Panchisin said.

"If you are reinforcing writing through storyboarding, through claymation, they are not sitting in a writing class but we are coming through the back door and reinforcing those skills," she said. "We aren't doing something 'instead of,' we are enhancing what we are doing."

Contact Alison Kepner at 324-2965 or akepner@delawareonline.com.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:52 AM 1 comments Links to this post

A letter on this piece by Dr. Stephen Krashen. -Angela
Sent to the New York Times, Dec. 23, 2007
No debate: NCLB hasn’t worked

Sam Dillon (“Democrats make Bush school act an
election issue,” Dec 23) notes that “policy makers
debate whether [No Child Left Behind] has raised
student achievement.”

There is no debate among those who have looked at the
data. NCLB has not produced improvements on state or
national reading tests, nor have achievement gaps been
narrowed. Also, there has also been no change on
American fourth graders’ scores on the international
PIRLS reading tests between 2001 and 2006 (NCLB was
introduced in 2002-2003).

There has been no improvement, despite huge increases
in instructional time and billions spent.

Stephen Krashen





Democrats Make Bush School Act an Election Issue
By Sam Dillon, NY Times, December 23, 2007


WASHINGTON — Teachers cheered Senator Hillary Rodham
Clinton when she stepped before them last month at an
elementary school in Waterloo, Iowa, and said she
would “end” the No Child Left Behind Act because it
was “just not working.”

Mrs. Clinton is not the only presidential candidate
who has found attacking the act, President Bush’s
signature education law, to be a crowd pleaser — all
the Democrats have taken pokes. Gov. Bill Richardson
of New Mexico has said he wants to “scrap” the law.
Senator Barack Obama has called for a “fundamental”
overhaul. And John Edwards criticizes the law as
emphasizing testing over teaching. “You don’t make a
hog fatter by weighing it,” he said recently while
campaigning in Iowa.

This was to be the year that Congress renewed the law
that has reshaped the nation’s educational landscape
by requiring public schools to bring every child to
reading and math proficiency by 2014. But defections
from both the right and the left killed the effort.

Now, as lawmakers say they will try again, the
unceasing criticism of the law by Democratic
presidential contenders and the teachers’ unions that
are important to them promises to make the effort even
more treacherous next year.

“No Child Left Behind may be the most negative brand
in America,” said Representative George Miller of
California, the Democratic chairman of the House
education committee.

“And there’s no question about it,” Mr. Miller added.
“It doesn’t help to have people putting themselves
forward as leaders of the party expressing the same
disenchantment they hear from the public, saying ‘Just
scrap it.’ Congressmen read the morning papers just
like everybody else.”

Democrats had long dominated the issue of education
until Mr. Bush seized it in his first presidential
campaign, making frequent stops at schools to condemn
the “soft bigotry of low expectations” for minority
children and to pledge that schools in poor areas
would improve test results or face federal sanctions.
The No Child law passed in his first year of office
with the support of a strong centrist coalition.

Seven years later, policy makers debate whether the
law has raised student achievement, but polls show
that it is unpopular — especially among teachers, who
vote in disproportionate numbers in Democratic primary
elections, and their unions, which provide Democrats
with critical campaign support.

“There’s a grass-roots backlash against this law,”
said Tad Devine, a strategist who worked for the past
two Democratic presidential nominees. “And attacking
it is a convenient way to communicate that you’re
attacking President Bush.”

These political realities are making it extremely
difficult to rebuild the bipartisan majorities that
first approved the law during Mr. Bush’s first year in
office, when he worked on the legislation with Mr.
Miller and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts
Democrat who is now the chairman of the education
committee. Mr. Miller, a passionate advocate of school
accountability, took the lead this year in trying to
draw up a bill that would change troublesome
provisions but preserve its core goals.

He faced obstacles from the start, including
opposition from many Republican lawmakers, who say the
law intrudes on states’ rights, and from Democrats,
who say it labels schools as failing but does too
little to help them improve. And by all accounts Mr.
Miller worked doggedly to build consensus.

But virtually every proposed change in the law ignited
fierce battles, and when Mr. Miller released a draft
bill for comment in late August, it pleased no one.

“His bill got creamed,” said Amy Wilkins, a vice
president of Education Trust, a group that advocates
for disadvantaged children, who has worked closely
with Mr. Miller’s staff.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings also threw
herself into the effort, meeting with scores of
congressmen and barnstorming through Ohio and Indiana
in a school bus, seeking Republican support.

“I killed myself,” Ms. Spellings said. But she
acknowledged that the effort now faces tremendous
obstacles. “It’s a minefield. If I were George Miller,
I’d be saying, ‘How can I put Humpty Dumpty together
again?’”

Mr. Kennedy now plans to take the lead with the bill
early next year. “We have to convince people that the
bill we introduce, that this will not be a rubber
stamp of the current law,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Kennedy tried to clear the air last month by
quietly inviting Mr. Miller and the presidents of the
two largest teachers’ unions to a meeting on Capitol
Hill. All four pledged to strive for agreement, but
both union presidents said later that it remained
unclear whether Congress could produce a bill
acceptable to union members.

“I don’t think you recognize the magnitude of the
anger that’s out there,” said Reg Weaver, president of
the National Education Association. “My members are
driving me, and if they think I’m not doing everything
I can to change this law, they’ll take me to the
woodshed.”

What is not acceptable to union members is unlikely to
be acceptable to Democratic presidential candidates.
The teachers’ unions have little influence with
Republicans, and several Republican presidential
candidates, including Mitt Romney, Rudolph W. Giuliani
and John McCain, have voiced support for the law. But
the Democratic candidates can hardly ignore unionized
teachers in Iowa and New Hampshire, who are calling
for sweeping change.

Alan Young, president of the National Education
Association affiliate in Des Moines, got some
television exposure about a year ago when he addressed
Mrs. Clinton during a town-hall-style meeting.
Pointing out that she was on the Senate education
committee, Mr. Young urged her “not to be too quick to
reauthorize the law as is,” but rather to rework its
basic assumptions.

In the months since, Mr. Young said he has spoken
about the law personally at campaign events with Mr.
Richardson, John Edwards and Senators Barack Obama and
Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“We want them to start over with a whole new law,” Mr.
Young said.

Three of the Democratic presidential candidates, Mrs.
Clinton, Mr. Obama and Senator Christopher J. Dodd,
are on the education committee. Mr. Kennedy
acknowledges that campaign criticism of the law could
complicate his effort, but pointed out that even
though the candidates have criticized the law, most
have also expressed support for its core goals.

Mr. Obama, for instance, in a speech last month in New
Hampshire denounced the law as “demoralizing our
teachers.” But he also said it was right to hold all
children to high standards. “The goals of this law
were the right ones,” he said.

When Mr. Edwards released an education plan earlier
this year, he said the No Child law needed a “total
overhaul.” But he said he would continue the law’s
emphasis on accountability.

And at the elementary school in Waterloo, Mrs. Clinton
said she would “do everything I can as senator, but if
we don’t get it done, then as president, to end the
unfunded mandate known as No Child Left Behind.”

But she, too, added: “We do need accountability.”

Even though the candidates hedge their criticism of
the law with statements supporting accountability, it
is hard to imagine their accepting revisions that fall
short of a thorough overhaul — and that could be
difficult for Mr. Bush to stomach, said Michael J.
Petrilli, a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham
Foundation. Even Mr. Bush’s catchy name for the law is
likely to disappear in any rewrite, he said.

“I can’t imagine that Democrats could write a bill
that would satisfy their caucus but not be vetoed by
President Bush, at least in the current environment,”
Mr. Petrilli said.

Labels: NCLB reauthorization

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:40 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Immigrant secondary students will learn subjects in Spanish

By STELLA M. CHÁVEZ | The Dallas Morning News
December 26, 2007

When Rogelio Teran's English as a Second Language teacher asks her class if dinosaurs are extinct, he is stumped at first.

Is it, he asks in Spanish, the same as extinción?

New to this country, Rogelio, 15, is like many newly arrived immigrants. He struggles to understand basic concepts presented to him in English.

But what if those concepts were taught in Spanish?

Beginning in January, Rogelio and other students in the Dallas Independent School District will be able to take courses such as algebra, biology, geometry, chemistry and world history online and in Spanish.

The approach is unlike anything tried before in Texas school districts, which traditionally teach older immigrant students in English. Bilingual education and the use of Spanish has long been the practice in elementary schools, but the dearth of qualified bilingual teachers has made it nearly impossible to replicate those efforts at the secondary level.

The problem with the current system, some educators say, is that students aren't learning new material quickly enough – if at all – because they don't understand English, the instructional language. The result: Students fall behind or drop out.

"They've had nothing like this before," said Felipe Alanis, associate dean for the division of continuing education at the University of Texas at Austin, which is spearheading this initiative dubbed LUCHA, the Spanish word for fight. "It's either sink or swim, so it's very difficult" for immigrant students.

Exams in English

Students will continue to learn the material in English and eventually must take exams on the courses in English.

"You can kind of think of LUCHA as an online tutoring class," said Marianne Martin, director for secondary English as a second language programs in DISD.

Angel Noe Gonzalez, a bilingual education expert, said the concept sounds promising and historic" but he is concerned about how and when students would be tested. He is in favor of students learning in their native language. Otherwise, they sit lost in class, he said.

But he argues that students won't do well on the English version of an exam soon after having learned the material in Spanish.

"It doesn't make sense to be taught in Spanish and then take an exam in English," he said. "All of the research I have ever read or understand is that it takes five to seven years to gain proficiency enough to learn English."

Ms. Martin said that the district is still hammering out details and that adjustments likely will occur along the way.

So far, about 10 Texas school districts, including Houston and Austin, have signed up to participate in LUCHA. Oregon, Washington, California and other states have implemented similar efforts under a partnership with Mexico's Colegio de Bachilleres and National Institute for Adult Education.

Educators around the country are struggling to come up with new and innovative ways to address the growing dropout rate among Latino immigrant students. According to a 2003 Pew Hispanic Center study about dropout rates among Hispanic youths, about 20 percent of Mexican immigrant students educated in U.S. schools drop out. A lack of English-language skills is a prime characteristic of Latino dropouts.

Tim King, director of Clackamas Web Academy and Clackamas Middle College in Oregon, said he is not convinced that offering courses in Spanish is enough to keep immigrant students in school. So his school supplements the Spanish online instruction with English-language learning software and programs that teach core courses such as math and science in English.

The Web academy launched its pilot program in the fall for 27 students who had either dropped out or not enrolled in school.

"It is pretty early [to know the results], but one thing that is clear to us is that we have groups of young people – all of whom were not in school before – who appear to be excited. They appear to be motivated," he said. "They're completing a significant amount of work."

Mixed reaction

Reaction to Oregon's pilot program has been mixed. Critics, including numerous bloggers, have blasted it for catering to immigrants, arguing that students should learn only in English.

Mr. King disagrees.

"The problem with that particular argument ... is that it's already been tried with these kids and that's what failed the first time," he said.

Ms. Martin said she believes students will eventually have a better grasp of English.

"The goal of our program is to help these students transition into our general ed classes, and I think this will expedite this process," Ms. Martin said. "In my opinion this is going to make a big difference in their English acquisition."

DISD has selected 10 schools that have a high percentage of limited-English proficient students to participate in LUCHA.

In the 2006-2007 school year, DISD had 49,503 students who were classified as limited English proficient, or about 31.2 percent of the district's entire student body. While that number includes students from various countries, the majority of students are Spanish-speaking.

UT-Austin is offering different components of the program and districts can elect to participate in one or all of them. For example, Dr. Alanis' staff will coordinate with districts to administer diagnostic tests to students who are planning to take the online courses. The tests will help determine the academic level of a student.

In addition, the university will help districts obtain and interpret transcripts from a student's school in Mexico in order to place students in the appropriate grade level.

The program is not cheap. It can cost a district anywhere from $30 to $500 per student, depending on the services.

DISD has designated $175,000 for the pilot project. The money will come from Title III funds, which are dollars allocated for limited English proficient students.

Sonya Gilb, ESL department chair for DISD, said she's excited about trying something new with her students, many of whom have difficulty with math or science.

"We have them in an algebra class where they don't really understand what is going on and the teacher is doing his best to modify [instruction] so they can understand," she said. "I feel so sorry for them. It's not that they're not smart. They are smart. It's just the language barrier."

After class, Rogelio explains he's eager to learn English so he can move on to more advanced classes.

"Everything that I'm learning, I learned in Mexico," he said. "I need to learn English more quickly."

THE LUCHA PROGRAM: FIGHTING TO LEARN

What: Beginning in January, DISD students identified as limited English proficient will be eligible to take classes such as algebra and biology both online and in Spanish. Students will continue to learn the material in English and must eventually takes exams in English.

Who: Ten schools and about 200 students will participate in the pilot program called LUCHA, which means "fight" in Spanish. It's also an acronym, Language Learners at the University of Texas at Austin's Center for Hispanic Achievement.

Why: The idea is that recent immigrant students will learn concepts more easily and not fall behind if taught in their native language.

How: The University of Texas at Austin is administering the program under a partnership with Mexico's education agencies. Similar efforts are underway in other Texas school districts, Oregon, Washington and California.

For more information: http://www.utexas.edu/cee/dec/lucha/

Labels: English language learners

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:46 PM 0 comments Links to this post

What a wonderful story. A part of this also seems to be a result of the school's support for teachers. This could benefit more students if our public school teachers were also afforded similar experiences. -Patricia

By SUSAN ENGEL | NY Times
December 26, 2007

THE PROBLEM When Andrew Coburn, a teacher at the Met High Schools in Providence, R.I., met his new ninth grader, a Cambodian immigrant, she spoke fluent English but read at a third-grade level. Her slender frame seemed to radiate depression. School, Mr. Coburn thought, seemed a place she wanted to get away from as soon as she could. Even if she lasted for four years of high school, she would have nine years of academic ground to cover. But first the teacher needed to get her to stay in school.

THE SOLUTION Mr. Coburn, who has taught for eight years at the Met, a network of six small public high schools that serve primarily a low-income and minority population, said many of the students lack academic skills, and just as many hate school. But figuring out how to help has to be tackled student by student.

This ninth grader had come to the United States as a baby with her mother and five siblings. “My sisters and I take care of our brothers,” she said in class one day. “My mother’s not really there. Let’s just say, she’s not really mother material.”

The Met schools encourage strong relationships between teachers and students, on the theory that these can help underachieving students succeed. Mr. Coburn, like all the teachers, has the same students from ninth grade until graduation.

Mr. Coburn’s first step was to make sure that within the first 30 minutes of each day, he had either a brief conversation with the girl or a look at her work. She would often answer in angry monosyllables. He didn’t give up. He included her in the jokes, plans and reviews that occurred during the group morning meeting, even if she seemed unwilling to contribute and uninterested in interacting with other students. She remained angry and tuned out. She often kept her iPod in her ear, as if to let everyone know she did not want to talk.

By early spring, Mr. Coburn realized this wasn’t enough. The girl would not budge.

“At some point, when nothing was changing,” he said, “I knew I had to do more to connect to her. I discussed it with the other teachers. Together we decided I’d have to cover her with love. I started to talk to her in the evenings. I talked to her like I was a teenage girl — 11 at night on the phone I was like: ‘Your aunt said that to you? She did what?’ I had to build trust with her.”

Although it may seem an unusual approach for a teacher, it fit in with the philosophy of the Met schools. Still, Mr. Coburn said, it wasn’t always convenient for him to make time for those calls. He’s married with young children. After he and his wife put their kids to bed, he would grade papers and call his student while his wife sat nearby reading.

The calls seemed to work. Within a few weeks, Mr. Coburn felt sure the girl would return to school each day. Although he continued the calls in her sophomore year, he began focusing more on improving her academic skills. He decided that a key was to persuade her to learn more about her birth country, which she never seemed to want to talk about but which he thought was something she could connect to.

“Cambodia just seemed like this big closed door for her,” Mr. Coburn said. “I felt that her reluctance to talk about Cambodia was part of her problem. Her curiosity and longing to know about her birth country would be part of the solution.”

So during her junior year, Mr. Coburn suggested that for her senior project, a graduation requirement, she should plan her first trip to Cambodia. He hoped her curiosity about Cambodia offered a path to her mind.

In the spring of her junior year, the girl studied a map and read about Cambodia. In the fall of her senior year, she tracked down an aunt who still lived there and arranged to stay with her on a visit. She called a travel agent to find out about flights, and she made plans to raise money for the trip by running in the annual all-schools marathon. She raised $1,300 in pledges, and began running with Mr. Coburn in preparation. The running also transformed her mood, the teacher said. Three months after she ran her first mile, she was running nearly every day, and inexplicably suddenly reading almost every day as well.

By her senior year, at age 18, she read at a ninth-grade level. “She’s not able to write a 15-page research paper,” Mr. Coburn said. “But now she’s willing to try. She wants to go to college. Once they trust you, they open up to you. And that’s when the work really begins.”

Susan Engel is a psychology professor and director of the teaching program at Williams College. Contact her at e-edu@nytimes.com if you have a teaching problem to share.

Labels: caring, teachers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:52 PM 1 comments Links to this post

San Antonio Express-News | Commentary
December 21, 2007

Some political decisions just make no sense.

Such is the case with Gov. Rick Perry's veto this summer of $500,000 to fund a Bexar County-based pilot program to monitor the transition of high school students to college.

Parents of school-age children will be glad to learn that despite Perry's veto of the higher education funding, the study will commence as planned.

The Higher Education Coordinating Board is funding the project for up to $200,000 to get it started in 2008.

The Bexar County pilot is being modeled after the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success, or Cal-PASS. Florida has also had great success with a similar program.

If successful, this important program could result in savings of thousands of dollars to future college students who graduate from public schools in Texas.

Regrettably, the state is not doing a very good job of graduating high school students who can step into a college level course and succeed.

Too many students, even some graduating at the top of their high school class, are finding themselves in need of remedial classes before enrolling in their first college credit course.

It shouldn't be that way, and the pilot program that the higher education board is funding will attempt to find out what can be done about this decades-long problem.

State Rep. Ruth Jones McClendon, who sponsored the legislation to fund the pilot program, was caught by surprise when the governor vetoed it. She plans to bring the issue back up in the 2009 session for the full funding.

The pilot program will be carried out by the Alamo Community Colleges in partnership with the Northside, North East, Judson, Edgewood and San Antonio school districts and the University of Texas at San Antonio.

The project is an important step in the state's goal to close education achievement gaps.

The Texas Education Agency and Higher Education Coordinating Board both spend a lot of time and money collecting data.

TEA has a wealth of information on student performance and accountability. The higher education board has large databases on retention rates and graduation.

Unfortunately, a lot of this data is never used collectively to determine what is happening to students as they transition to college or as they go from a community college to a four-year university.

One of the primary goals of the local research will be to identify gaps in the high school curriculum that will improve student success.

Academics are calling this a vertical alignment, but in simple terms it just means making sure students graduate high school with the skills necessary to allow them to immediately start taking college level courses.

For many students, the first semester or two of college are spent in noncredit development courses.

The longer a student spends in remedial classes, the less likely he or she will ever graduate from college.

Aligning high school courses so they coincide with what is needed for college sounds simplistic. One would think this would have been addressed long ago, but it is not surprising that it has not been. Up until a few years ago, TEA and higher education board folks did not visit with each other very much.

That entire culture is changing, and that is a positive step.

It was refreshing to see new Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott and State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy at the higher education board's meeting in October.

Each rung of the education ladder is dependent on each other, and success requires major communication among the parties.

If the state is going to develop a college-going culture where families' thoughts are about where the children will attend college — not if they will go — the work needs to start early.

Accountability in education cannot be just about making sure a student passes from one grade to the next and gets through the exit exams.

gpadilla@express-news.net

Labels: college readiness, vertical alignment

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:29 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Plan would redirect freshmen in need of remedial work to community college

By MATTHEW TRESAUGUE | Houston Chronicle
December 10, 2007

CORRECTION: A proposal before the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board would not require high school graduates who are unprepared for university-level work to attend community colleges. A description of the proposal in a story on Page A1 Monday was unclear. Correction published 12/11/07.

AUSTIN - For the first time, Texas is making elaborate plans to reduce the embarrassingly high number of freshmen who arrive at the state's colleges and universities needing remedial work.

A 104-page proposal, which is scheduled to come before the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board next month, outlines what students should learn before enrolling at one of the state's public universities. Those who do not meet the standards will be directed to community colleges (SEE CORRECTION), where they can get extra help at a lower cost to themselves and the state.

As it stands, more than half the entering freshmen at Texas colleges and universities need remedial classes, which don't count toward a degree. Educators are optimistic the collaborative effort ultimately will ensure more students earn bachelor's degrees, and in less time.

"This would be the Texas equivalent of putting a man on the moon," said Raymund Paredes, the state's higher education commissioner.

The dismaying lack of preparation prompted the state Legislature to order the new standards during a special session in 2006. Since then, teams of high school teachers, university professors and education experts have worked to draft the sweeping proposal, which defines necessary skills to do college-level work in English, math, science and the social sciences.

Still, the plan has exposed fissures over how much high school graduates should be expected to know, based on comments submitted to the coordinating board.

Divided expectations

One high school teacher said the proposed standards are so high that graduates should get a Ph.D. with their diplomas. A university professor said, however, that students should master the proposed set of skills by the eighth grade.

Some educators explained the divide as one of expectations. For years, the nation's high schools pushed most students toward graduation, not college. Though state law requires students to take certain classes to graduate, the requirements don't necessarily prepare them for higher education.

"Being college-eligible doesn't mean you're college-ready," said Paula Roe, scholarship programs coordinator for Project GRAD, a nonprofit school reform group that works with about 5,000 Houston students.

She considers the proposed standards "a good beginning" toward preparing more students for college.

"We've lost sight of what is acceptable," Paredes said. "Readiness is about rigor. You can require schools to teach Faulkner and Hemingway, but the question is: What do you expect students to say about those works?"

What they should know

Under the proposed standards, students would be expected to understand such subjects as quadratic equations, the laws of thermodynamics and the effects of an author's choice of style and words.

The proposal does not specify whether the standards are meant to prepare students for a community college or a research institution. Paredes said he wants students prepared to attend a mid-level member of the Association of American Universities, the prestigious clique of 62 schools that includes Rice University, Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin.

"If we did that," Paredes said, "every student in Texas would be prepared to succeed."

In anticipation of the new standards, Texas Southern University is taking steps to increase the number of students transferring from community colleges. TSU has a long-standing commitment to accept anyone who wants to pursue higher education, but roughly 70 percent of first-time freshmen arrive without the skills needed to do college-level work. More than half do not make it to their sophomore year.

Once the college readiness plan clears the coordinating board, the state Board of Education will consider corresponding changes in the curriculum, working backward from 12th grade to kindergarten. Those talks could lead to big debates.

Brock Gregg, director of governmental relations for the Association of Texas Professional Educators, said teachers are concerned that the state will prescribe a one-size-fits-all curriculum. "Teachers want students to have multiple pathways to college," he said. "They want access to courses that allow them to show the required skills in a different way."

Labels: college readiness, higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 3:37 AM 0 comments Links to this post

I don't know too much about PIQE but this sounds like a great method for providing parents access to useful tools for college readiness. Maybe the UC system will follow and offer guaranteed admissions as well. -Patricia

J.M. BROWN | SENTINEL STAFF WRITER
December 8, 2007

SANTA CRUZ -- Mexico-born handyman Hugo Palafox knew the best way to prepare his teenage children for college was to go back to school himself.

"I wanted to give them something better that I never had," said the father of four, who was among 29 others to graduate Thursday night from Harbor High School's first-ever class designed to help multicultural parents navigate the transition to college.

The nine-week Parent Institute for Quality Education, or PIQE, which Harbor High officials launched primarily to reach out to Latino families, taught parents how to prepare their students for college-placement exams and weave through the complicated college financial aid and admissions processes.

Parents who graduate from the course guarantee admission for their student into the California State University system if they meet the entrance requirements, Michel said. The guarantee is helpful when students apply at CSU campuses made competitive by popularity.

"The main thing is to get kids in schools," said Palafox, who works as a maintenance man at an apartment complex.

Assistant Principal Henry Michel implemented the PIQE program -- taught in English and Spanish -- as a way to make parents whose primary language is not English "feel more welcome to the school and just being more involved in the education process." The class also taught parents and some of the students who attended how to resolve conflicts at high school and excel at reading.

The tab for the class was $15,000, which Michel said the school paid through a mix of corporate donations and state funds. There were several Caucasian parents, and one Vietnamese parent who also participated.

Even though she didn't speak Spanish, parent Huong Bui said she felt like she fit right in.

"Many students in this class are so nice and friendly," she excitedly told fellow graduates. "I will never forget this class."

To appeal to a wide variety of parents, Marisa Escalera, an instructor with the San Diego-based PIQE program, said the company can teach classes in 10 languages. "We give them the confidence they need because of the language barrier," she said.


Santa Cruz City Schools Superintendent Alan Pagano told the parent graduates that they had made an important commitment toward helping their children succeed. In Spanish, he exclaimed, "Tonight, you are the stars."

Labels: higher education, Parent Involvement

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:49 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Judge Supports Arizona Law on Immigrants
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: December 22, 2007

A new Arizona law considered among the nation’s toughest against employers who hire illegal immigrants will go into effect on Jan. 1 after federal judges on Friday refused to block it.

Both a United States district judge in Phoenix and a federal appeals court in San Francisco, ruling on separate lawsuits by business and civil rights groups, declined to stand in the way.

The law calls for suspending the license of an employer found to have knowingly hired an illegal worker, and revocation for a second offense.

First, Judge Neil Vincent Wake of Federal District Court in Phoenix issued a sharp defense of the rights of lawful workers and said the law would not burden businesses in the short run.

Then on Friday night, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit deferred a decision on an injunction until after a hearing by Judge Wake on Jan. 16, provided a “decision is reached with reasonable promptness.”

Julie A. Pace, a lawyer for the groups challenging the law, said they accepted the decisions and would now focus on Judge Wake’s hearing, but she predicted that having the law go into effect, with the possibility it could later be rejected, would cause more confusion.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:26 PM 0 comments Links to this post

In my experience this has been a growing opinion among many education researchers and even some practitioners for quite some time. -Patricia

By Margot Pepper | The Berkeley Daily Planet
December 21, 2007

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was signed into law in 2001 by President George Bush, backed by both Democrats and Republicans. The backbone of the program, allegedly designed to hold schools accountable for academic failure, is standardized state testing for students and educators. Rather than improve public education, however, there is now ample evidence that NCLB testing is part of a systematic effort to privatize diverse urban public schools in the United States. The objectives of privatization have been threefold: first, to divert taxpayer money from the public sector to the corporate sector; second, to capture part of the market, which would otherwise be receiving free education; and third, to drive out middle class accountability, leaving behind a disposable population that won’t have a voice about the inappropriate use of their tax dollars, nor the bleak outlook on their futures.

“As a for-profit venture, public education represents a market worth over $600 billion,” notes Dr. Henry A. Giroux, in Z Magazine.

“The emergence of HMOs and hospital management companies created enormous opportunities for investors. We believe the same pattern will occur in education,” observes Mary Tanner, managing director of Lehman Brothers.

“Bush’s proposal for national standardized testing is helping to pave the way for these EMO’s,” says Project Censored in their annual collection of most censored stories. “While the aptly named Educational Management Organizations are being promoted as the new answer to impoverished school districts and dilapidated classrooms, the real emphasis is on investment returns rather than student welfare and educational development.”

For over a century, norm-referenced test results have been misinterpreted in the United States to support racist campaigns. IQ tests were used as an argument against integration of schools, the passage of the Civil Rights Law of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1969, Arthur Jensen used his so-called “findings”—that average African-American IQs were significantly lower than those of Euro-American or white children—to attack educational programs which benefit the poor, like Head Start.

An influential study by Elizabeth Peal and Wallace Lambert in 1962 found that the higher the subjects’ economic status, the higher scores would be on norm-referenced tests. Similarly, higher achievement scores on the NCLB tests have been predicted according to zip codes, used by economists to sort by economic status.

Randy L. Hoover and Kathy L. Shook note that a study of 593 Ohio School Districts show the district’s high stakes tests “to correlate with Social Economic Status to such a high degree as to virtually mask any and all actual academic achievement claimed to be measured by these tests.”

They observe that students were “visible victims of sorting by socio-economic status… by high stakes tests that fail to meet recognized, scientific standards of test validity.”

Now, the standardized tests that are part of the NCLB campaign are being used to lend legitimacy to policies that lead to a cheap, uneducated labor pool and increased profits in the private sector. The effect of NCLB has been to dismantle public education by funneling public tax dollars directly to corporations through penalties, private tutoring companies, and vouchers. Once more, the populations paying for this policy are students of color and the poor, since the poorest schools with limited resources comprised primarily of such students perform the worst on the tests. The schools are then reconstituted by the school district, outsourced to private companies like Edison, or a portion of their federal funding is diverted to “parental choice” tutoring programs. According to Ben Clarke in a Corpwatch.org article entitled “Leaving Children Behind,” public school money was thus diverted to the company Educate, which runs the Sylvan Learning Centers, whose revenues, Clarke states, “grew from $180 to $250 million in the past three years [2001–04] and whose profits shot up 250 percent last year.” And, writes Clarke, since the introduction of NCLB, sales of printed materials related to standardized tests nearly tripled to $592 million, money that was drained from the public schools, since Bush provided no funding for the increased costs.

False Reports of NCLB Success

A 2006 study by Harvard University Civil Rights Project found that the successes reported by NCLB proponents “simply do not show up on an independent national test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the ‘nation’s report card.’”

A comparison of public high-school graduation rates over the course of the implementation of NCLB seems to confirm that the policy is actually damaging students of color. The public high school graduation rate for African Americans and Latinos nationwide has sunk from 56 percent and 54 percent respectively in 1998—before NCLB policies took their toll—to about 50 percent in 2005, according to a March 2005 report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. The authors, Dan Losen and Johanna Wald, point out that “because of misleading and inaccurate reporting of dropout and graduation rates, the public remains unaware of this educational and civil rights crisis.”

In California, looking at the inverse—or dropout rates—according to statistics provided by the California Department of Education and published by Ed-Data, from 2000 to 2005, the four-year dropout rate for California went from 11.1 percent to 12.7 percent, with dropout rates for African Americans increasing nearly four percentage points from 18.1 percent to 21.8 percent. Latino dropout rates also increased from 15.3 percent to 16.6 percent during that same period.

Middle Class Flee to Private Schools

The dismantling of the public schools is forcing those who can afford to pay for private schools to give up their right to free, equal education. Driving the entitled middle class out of the public schools furthers yet another goal of privatization, namely that of decreasing accountability, reports Dr. Giroux.

Dr. Giroux points out, that while an increasing number of students of color may not graduate under NCLB, their failing public schools are more than willing to provide them with “the appropriate attitudes for future work in low-skilled, low-paying jobs.”12 Pat Wechsler reported in Business Week that thanks to partnerships with businesses, such as McDonald’s, in under-funded schools, students “learned how a McDonald’s works, and how to apply and interview for a job at McDonald’s.”

It is no coincidence that one of the largest contributors to President Bush’s drive to institute vouchers, tuition tax credits, and charter schools is the Walton family—founder of Wal-Mart—who has dedicated at least $250 million to such efforts over the past six years, according to USA Today. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the United States, with more than one million workers. Wal-Mart’s wages and benefits are significantly below retail industry standards, according to a report entitled, “The Hidden Cost of Wal-Mart Jobs,” by Dr. Arindrajit Dube, Ph.D. and Ken Jacobs. According to Anthony Bianco, who wrote a 2006 biography of the man, Walton “preferred uneducated workers.” Such workers are unlikely to question low pay, or unionize.

School failure is a product of “the political, economic, and social dynamics of poverty, joblessness, sexism, race and class discrimination, unequal funding, or a diminished tax base,” summarizes Dr. Giroux.

NCLB Requirments Lower Quality of Education

An illustration of class and race discrimination leading to school failure is the use of McGraw-Hill’s Open Court program by schools afraid of NCLB penalties, even though the phonics program has been proven to damage students. According to a study by Margaret Moustafa and Robert E. Land at California State University in Los Angeles, “schools using Open Court are significantly more likely to be in the bottom quartile of the SAT 9 [state] assessment than comparable schools using non-scripted programs.”

The president’s educational program mandates any district wishing to qualify for government funding to implement “approved” reading curricula. It is not surprising that McGraw-Hill’s Open Court has a majority of these contracts, given the fact that the McGraw-Hill and Bush family connections go back three generations, notes Stephen Metcalf in the Nation: “The McGraws are old Bush friends, dating back to the 1930s, when Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed began to establish Jupiter Island, a barrier island off the coast of Florida, as a haven for the Northeast wealthy.”

Similarly, Neil Bush, George W.’s brother, also used his political influence to solicit contributions for his educational software company, Ignite. “In February 2004, the Houston school board unanimously agreed to accept $115,000 in charitable donations from businesses and individuals who insisted the money be spent on Ignite. The deal raised conflict of interest concerns,” reported Cynthia Leonor Garza in the Houston Chronicle. More recently, former first lady Barbara Bush donated to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, with specific instructions that the money be spent on Ignite.

Perhaps a more apt name for Bush’s NCLB is, No Corporation Left Behind, particularly if that corporation has strong ties to the Bush family—though we must be careful not to confuse the Bush “dynasty” with a long-term, systemic illness. Ronald Bailey, a former fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and Chicano Scholar Guillermo Flores have identified these deliberate historic campaigns to exclude people of color from the political and educational system as a product of “internal colonialism.”

“Internal colonialism,” they write, “is nothing more than the domestic face of world imperialism.... The use of racial minorities brought surpluses to white society that contributed to the growth of monopoly capitalism.” In other words, cheap labor and raw materials led to huge profits for monopolistic firms, which today have become supra-national corporations. These larger forces are the real source of legislation like NCLB. Educators and activists who want real change must recognize and address this fundamental reality if they are serious about winning equal access to education for all.

Margot Pepper is a Mexican-born writer published frequently in journals such as Utne Reader, Monthly Review, Z-net, Counterpunch, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. You can find links at www.margotpepper.com.

Labels: Privatization, Vouchers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:33 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is from a forwarded email. If you're interested in downloading the report click here -Patricia

News: U.S. House of Representatives
EDUCATION & LABOR COMMITTEE
Congressman George Miller, Chairman
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Press Office, 202-226-0853

New GAO Report Examines College Enrollment among Minority Students Report Also Looks at Tuition Increases by Type of College

WASHINGTON, D.C. - College enrollment among minority students has grown rapidly since the 2000-01 school year, though African-American and Hispanic students are increasingly likely to enroll in two-year colleges rather than four-year colleges, according to a new report prepared for U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA).

The report, from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, found that overall, college enrollment among Hispanic students grew by 25 percent between 2000-01 and 2006-07; among African-American students, it grew by 15 percent; among Asian-American/Pacific-Islander students, it grew by 15 percent; and among white students, it grew by 3 percent.

Last year, African-American and Hispanic college students were more likely to attend two-year public colleges than they were ten years ago. According to the report, between the 1995-96 and 2006-07 school years, Hispanic student enrollments in two-year schools increased by four percentage points, while enrollments in four-year schools declined by two percentage points. During the same time, African-American student enrollments in two-year schools increased by three percentage points, while enrollments in four-year schools decreased by three percentage points.

Today, nearly 60 percent of all Hispanic students are enrolled in two-year colleges, as are 50 percent of African-American students and 43 percent of white students.

"These significant increases in minority college enrollment are welcome news. But whether they choose to attend a two-year or four-year-college, we must ensure that qualified students are able to afford the tuition," said Miller, the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. "Already this year, we have enacted legislation to help students pay for college and succeed there. And we are working on additional legislation to ensure that college prices are within reach of all qualified students."

Miller expressed concerns about whether college tuition prices were leading to this distribution shift. "Students should be free to choose the college that best suits their needs - whether two-year or four-year - irrespective of the price," said Miller. He also said that the Committee intends to hold hearings on this topic next year.

Report Looks at Tuition Increases

According to the GAO, while tuition and fees rose among all institutions of higher education over the past twelve years, tuition and fees at two-year public colleges increased by the smallest dollar amount, while tuition at two-year private colleges increased by the smallest percentage.

The report also found that between the 2000-01 and 2005-06 school years, private colleges and universities spent more on average on education-related expenses than did public schools. At private institutions, tuition increases correlated with higher expenditures on education-related services, such as academic and instructional support, student services, and administrative needs. At the same time, spending on education-related services lagged behind tuition increases at public institutions.

"This report further highlights the need for fair and full information about increases in college prices and where those tuition hikes are being spent," said Miller. "Students and their families deserve to know whether or not price increases are justified, and whether they are getting the best possible education for their investment."

Miller is the author of legislation that would address rising college prices by encouraging colleges to rein in price increases, ensuring that states maintain their commitments to higher education funding, and providing students and families with consumer friendly information on college pricing and the factors driving tuition increases. That bill, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act (H.R. 4137), is expected to be considered by the House early next year.

He is also the author of a recently-enacted law that helps more low-income and minority students go to college. Among other things, the law increases the maximum Pell Grant scholarship by $1,090 over the next five years; makes need-based student loans more affordable; and restores critical funding for the Upward Bound program, which helps low-income and first-generation students access and complete college.

For a copy of the GAO report, please email Rachel.Racusen@mail.house.gov

Labels: higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:21 AM 0 comments Links to this post

I think it's possible that situations similar to this are occurring in struggling schools but few instances have written documentation. Very sad. -Patricia

By ETHAN ROUEN and ERIN EINHORN | DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
December 13th 2007

The principal of an East Harlem high school last month stunned his staffers by suggesting they dumb down their classes.

"If you are not passing more than 65% of your students in a class, then you are not designing your expectations to meet their abilities," Principal Bennett Lieberman wrote in a Nov. 28 memo to teachers at Central Park East High School. "You are setting your students up for failure, which in turn, limits your success as a professional."

The memo, obtained by the Daily News, urges teachers to review their homework and grading policies, and reminds them that "most of our students ... have difficult home lives, and struggle with life in general. They DO NOT have a similar upbringing nor a similar school experience to our experiences growing up."

One teacher who received the memo said she and her colleagues were "outraged," especially because the school is one of 200 where teachers will receive $3,000 bonuses if their schools improve.

"It's like bribery," she said. "It's not the achievement. It's just the grades."

Lieberman, a graduate of Mayor Bloomberg's elite Leadership Academy, defended the memo and denied he was advocating lower standards.

"I pretty confidently stand by my words and don't expect my teachers to dumb things down at all," he said. "The goal is to find where a student is at and work with them from that point forward."

His school was in danger of being closed several years ago but has bounced back after showing improvement on test scores. "Really good things are happening here," he said.

Students shown the memo Wednesday were insulted.

"Why are they going to let some pass who don't deserve it? It's not fair to those who want to work," said Estevan Cruz, 16, an 11th-grader.

Senior Richard Palacios, 17, said 65% of his classmates don't even show up for school. "It's already too much of an easy ride," He said. He estimated that only three or four of the 15 kids in his math class routinely appear.

Teaching experts said he should be ashamed.

"I'm just appalled," said Deborah Meier, the educator who founded Central Park East High School in 1985 as an alternative school where, she said, "our expectations for all our children were the same."

Back when Meier ran the school, she said, "We would have used the example of the letter you are quoting as exactly what we were trying to fight against. I'm horrified."

Now a New York University professor, Meier said she's worried the memo came as a response to the city's new A-to-F grading system, which factors how many credits students accumulate per year. If more kids pass their classes, the school, which got a B this year, will get a higher grade.

"This is so wrong, I could cry," Meier said. "What's embarrassing ... is that he could have put that in writing and not understood what he was saying."

Labels: curriculum, failing schools

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

Susan Sandler | SF Gate
December 13, 2007

What grade would you give a student who has all the knowledge he or she needs to succeed but repeatedly fails to act on that knowledge? California's government is that kind of student when it comes to making our school system work for students of color. The knowledge is there, but policy makers don't act on it.

Now is the right time to issue grades on the job our policy makers are doing in serving students of color. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has dubbed 2008 the Year of Education. Major studies have been completed, and the governor's Committee for Education Excellence will soon be issuing recommendations for how to fix our broken school system.

We actually know what it takes to provide a high quality education to students of color that enables their success in college, career, and community leadership. Some schools are already doing it. Justice Matters, a research and policy organization focused on racial justice in education, recently collaborated with the Stanford University School Redesign Network on a study of such schools. High Schools for Equity: Policy Supports for Student Learning in Communities of Color examines five California high schools that successfully provide students of color with high quality learning. In the words of a student at one of these schools, they are learning "how to learn, not just what is in the textbook." "I developed into an intellectual at this school," explained another student. These schools provide students with an engaging, relevant learning experience that is intellectually rigorous, and they give students the support they need to succeed. They send more than 80 percent of their students to college, more than twice the state average.

Unfortunately, there are very few such schools. Our research sheds light on the reason why. Educators in the High Schools for Equity schools have to contend with a policy environment that provides them with little support and creates many obstacles to the kind of work they are doing. The state's uneven teacher preparation system turns out too few teachers with the skills to carry out these school's sophisticated teaching practices. Once teachers get to a school, they are not given the time to do the kind of quality planning and ongoing learning that is needed to provide learning that is exciting, challenging, and supports the success of all students. The standardized high-stakes tests do not get at the more challenging skills the schools are teaching, and preparing for the tests takes a lot of time away from quality learning. The schools do not have enough funding to implement the practices they know will make the most difference for their students. And on and on.

The discussion of California policy needs to be informed by knowledge of what it takes to provide high quality learning. This is a general issue for California schools, and it is also a racial justice issue. When policy makers talk about the education of students of color, they often set the bar especially low - if students of color develop minimum competency in basic skills, that is good enough. It is thought to be too much to ask that students of color have an opportunity to think deeply, find the connections between academic subject matter and relevance to their lives, or learn the problem-solving skills that will make a difference in addressing the complex challenges our society faces.

Justice Matters has developed a Racial Justice Report Card on California Education Policy based on the High Schools for Equity study. We will be issuing grades for the recommendations of the Governor's Committee on Education Excellence. We will also be grading what both the governor and state Superintendent Jack O'Connell propose to do in 2008. We need to see whether their rhetoric about improving education translates into the kind of bold action that we need to give California students of color the education they deserve but have not had.

Susan Sandler is president of Justice Matters.

Labels: California, race

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:30 AM 0 comments Links to this post

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: December 19, 2007
HOUSTON — A Texas higher education panel has recommended allowing a Bible-based group called the Institute for Creation Research to offer online master’s degrees in science education.

The action comes weeks after the Texas Education Agency’s director of science, Christine Castillo Comer, lost her job after superiors accused her of displaying bias against creationism and failing to be “neutral” over the teaching of evolution.

The state’s commissioner of higher education, Raymund A. Paredes, said late Monday that he was aware of the institute’s opposition to evolution but was withholding judgment until the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board meets Jan. 24 to rule on the recommendation, made last Friday, by the board’s certification advisory council.

Henry Morris III, the chief executive of the Institute for Creation Research, said Tuesday that the proposed curriculum, taught in California, used faculty and textbooks “from all the top schools” along with, he said, the “value added” of challenges to standard teachings of evolution.

“Where the difference is, we provide both sides of the story,” Mr. Morris said. On its Web site, the institute declares, “All things in the universe were created and made by God in the six literal days of the creation week” and says it “equips believers with evidences of the Bible’s accuracy and authority through scientific research, educational programs, and media presentations, all conducted within a thoroughly biblical framework.”

It also says “the harmful consequences of evolutionary thinking on families and society (abortion, promiscuity, drug abuse, homosexuality and many others) are evident all around us.”

Asked how the institute could educate students to teach science, Dr. Paredes, who holds a doctorate in American civilization from the University of Texas and served 10 years as vice chancellor for academic development at the University of California, said, “I don’t know. I’m not a scientist.”

He said he had no ready explanation for the panel’s recommendation. “I asked about the decision,” Dr. Paredes said Monday in a phone interview from Austin. “I got a three-inch-thick folder an hour ago. We’re going to give it a full review.” But, he said, “If it’s approved, we’ll make sure it’s of high quality.”

Approval would allow the institute, which moved to Dallas this year from near San Diego, to offer the online graduate program almost immediately while seeking accreditation from national academic authorities like the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges within two years.

In California, the only other state where Mr. Morris said the institute was offering degrees, it won recognition from the state superintendent of public instruction in 1981 but was denied license renewal in 1988. The institute sued and in 1992 won a $225,000 settlement that allowed it to continue offering degrees; it now operates under the California Department of Consumer Affairs. Dr. Morris said his program was accredited by the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, which is not recognized by Texas.

Last month, in a sign that Texas was being drawn deeper into creationism controversy, Ms. Comer, 57, was put under pressure to resign as science director after forwarding an e-mail message about a talk by a creationism critic, Barbara Forrest, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana State University.

Lizzette Reynolds, a deputy commissioner who called for Ms. Comer’s dismissal, later told The Austin American-Statesman she was surprised she resigned. Ms. Reynolds did not respond to a message left at her office.

The Texas Education commissioner, Robert Scott, told The Dallas Morning News that Ms. Comer was not forced out over the message, adding, “You can be in favor of science without bashing people’s faith.” He did not return phone calls to his office.

Ms. Comer said the commissioner should show her where she was bashing anyone’s faith. “He just doesn’t get it,” she said.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:02 PM 0 comments Links to this post

The sentence: "We've constructed a polarized culture that gives teenagers edifice, not education" stuck out to me while reading, and I was reminded of a wonderful discussion between Dr. Patricia Zavella and Dr. Michelle Fine on the missing discourse of sexuality and desire. You can find it in Chicana Feminisms: A Reader (Arredondo, 2003). -Patricia

By Courtney E. Martin, AlterNet
December 20, 2007.

Why teenagers are so screwed up about sex and their bodies.

As the middle-aged gym teacher in a track suit stands in front of the class and reads a health book out loud in a monotone voice -- "Intercourse can lead to unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, such as ..." -- a couple of girls swap the latest issue of US Weekly and a Gossip Girls novel, all the juicy parts underlined in pink pen. Welcome to contemporary American adolescence, where sexuality is either up for sale or moralized into nonexistence.

On the one hand we have a hypersexualized and pornified pop culture -- thongs marketed to tweens, Victoria's Secret ads with models who don't look a day over 13, and reality shows like A Shot at Love on MTV, where both men and women will do anything -- including jump in vats of chocolate and discuss their sexual histories on national television -- all for instantaneous love with a petite model. The message to young women is loud and clear: Your body is your power. Flaunt it. Use it. Get attention. The message to young men is also unmistakable: Your gaze is your power. Your role is to judge and comment on women's bodies. As a man, you are inevitably obsessed -- sometimes stupidly so -- with the female form.

On the other hand, we have a federally funded (over $1 billion thus far) abstinence-only sex education program in this country. According to the Guttmacher Institute, nearly half (46 percent) of all 15- to 19-year-olds in the United States have had sex at least once. According to the government's most comprehensive survey of American sexual practices to date, more than half of all teenagers have engaged in oral sex -- including nearly a quarter of those who have never had intercourse. Regardless of this reality, health teachers from Nacogdoches, Texas, to Newark, N.J., are taught to emotionlessly repeat -- as if pull dolls of the Bush administration -- "The only guaranteed way to avoid pregnancy and STDs is abstinence. The only guaranteed way to avoid pregnancy and STDs is abstinence. The only guaranteed way to avoid pregnancy and STDs is abstinence."

Here, the message to young women is also resolute: Your body is dangerous. Control it. Ignore it. Don't ask any questions. Teen girls are cast as asexual princesses happily trapped in towers, guarded by their Bible verse-spouting fathers. The message to young men is more subtle. In this fairy tale written, produced and directed by abstinence-only advocates, teenage guys are both potential villains -- the oversexed, hormone-crazed young men who must be refused continuously by good girls -- or potential knights in shining armor -- saving enough money from their summer jobs to buy sparkling rings that will save their sweeties from the hell of slutdom.

In between pornified culture and purity balls, in between the slut and the virgin, the stupid, lascivious dude and the knight in shining armor, in between the messages directed at young women -- your body is your power vs. your body is dangerous -- and young men -- your gaze is your power vs. your gaze is dangerous -- are real young people trying to develop authentic identities and sexual practices. And they are struggling mightily.

Too many of them are diseased, disordered, and depressed -- participating in inauthentic performances of sexual bravado, cut off from their bodies' true appetites and desires, and hurt because they can't seem to identify or communicate their own boundaries.

How could we be surprised? We've constructed a polarized culture that gives teenagers edifice, not education. We've sent them out into the wildly complex country of contemporary adolescence without the essential weapons -- sexual literacy, communication strategies, self-reflection exercises, and at the very least, accurate information about anatomy and contraception.

We've let the increasingly conglomerated raunchy mass media pollute the visual world with plastic, codified images of "sex" and the increasingly out-of-touch, religious and righteous federal government play Pollyanna -- deaf, dumb and blind. As the schools relinquish responsibility for educating American teens about sex, the advertisers and networks step in, providing an airbrushed, inauthentic, unrealistic view of sex and the bodies that are "doing it." They're happy to play sexy nanny while our government officials and educators are out to lunch; it guarantees ratings and the next generation eager to fork over cash on products marketed to their effectively socialized inadequacy.

And what kind of education do we provide to help negotiate this onslaught of messages? A curriculum based on three little empty words: "Just say no." Even federally funded studies of abstinence-only sex education confirm that it is ineffective. Half of those who have abstinence-only sex ed end up having sex by the time they're 15 years old. Multiple peer-reviewed studies also confirm that purity pledges actually lead teenagers into having more oral, anal and unprotected sex. Another longitudinal study of 13,000 teenagers found that 53 percent of those who commit to purity until marriage have sex out of wedlock within the year.

The consequences are devastating, diverse and rampant. According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, every two and a half minutes, somewhere in America, someone is sexually assaulted. About 44 percent of rape victims are under age 18, and 80 percent are under age 30. According to the Guttmacher Institute, of the 18.9 million new cases of STDs each year, 9.1 million (48 percent) occur among 15- to 24-year-olds. Seven million girls and women in this country have eating disorders; clinicians estimate that as many as 80 percent of those with anorexia, bulimia and binge-eating disorder are victims of sexual assault.

And harder to pin down with numbers, most college (and some high school) students experience campuses characterized by random, unsatisfying hookups, stunted emotional growth and the private hell of loneliness, guilt and shame. So many young adults don't know how to deal with the messiness of sex without being sloppy drunk.

We could make such a difference by doing so little. First and foremost, we must replace abstinence-only sexual education with comprehensive curriculum that teaches teenagers accurate, useful and wide-ranging information. They are welcome to save intercourse for marriage, of course, and should certainly be taught that -- indeed -- it is one of only two ways to absolutely prevent pregnancy, though not STDs. (The method of sexual exploration that guarantees both no STDS and no pregnancy is, of course, masturbation!) But they must also be given the tools -- informational, emotional, communicative -- they need should they choose otherwise. We need to teach both young women and men about sexual desire -- that it varies widely and is not shameful but can be overwhelming.

We must also provide our kids with the media and consumer literacy needed to face the pornified culture that we live in and advocate -- through letter writing, boycotts, and public pressure -- that schools, playgrounds, and other public spaces remain advertising-free. As artists, filmmakers, writers, actors, producers etc., we must strive to provide a more enlightened and inspiring view of human sexuality, to create work that involves love and sex without codifying both into unreality. Think Jane Campion.

And finally, we must stop treating teenagers as if they are either dangerous or idiots. When I was recently on The O'Reilly Factor with conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, she shouted, in response to my apparently blasphemous idea that girls deserve to be educated about their bodies: "Twelve-year-olds can't even pick out what color shirt they want to wear in the morning!" It made me wonder if Laura had ever met a 12-year-old, ever had a real conversation with one about her dreams, her thoughts, her desires.

I've had the pleasure of interacting with many teenagers -- 12 years old and older -- and I'm continually amazed at their insight, maturity and earnest need for more information. They aren't adults yet -- sure -- but they are aching in that direction. They need those of us who are done with the journey to provide some fundamental tools on how to make it through. We need to ask them about what they're experiencing and how we can be helpful as they make their way. Instead of luring them in, selling them out, condemning or indoctrinating them, we need to meet them face to face with compassion and information.

Labels: sexuality

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:35 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is an interesting approach. Take note that this is happening in a private school where class size averages are 17 students. Not at all representative of most California pubic schools. -Patricia

J.M. BROWN | Santa Cruz Sentinel
December 20, 2007

Kaia Huseby is convinced students learn better when they know how they learn. The new third-grade teacher at Gateway School in Santa Cruz has been showing her students the simple basics of what she learned in a Harvard University graduate program that studies how the brain learns and stores information.

The idea is that if children get a little insight into how the brain works, they will be all the more invested in the idea of filling their heads with a lot of good stuff. New material is more likely to be lost "if you're not emotionally engaged in learning," Huseby said.

The Vermont native and Bryn Mawr alumna, who taught in Mexico and Connecticut before coming to Santa Cruz this summer, entered the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Mind, Brain and Education Program because she wanted to know how students comprehend math.

She thought if she better understood how her students process new information, she could better "bridge the cognitive with the practical," as she said the Harvard program seeks to do.

The former textiles designer largely spares the students a complicated explanation about neurons and synapses, and opts instead for a white rope with knots. As she holds the rope up like a net, she explains how learning happens when the gaps in the net are filled through messages sent between the knots along the rope.

"They get it when they see the model," she said.

Huseby recently explained the Mind, Brain and Education Program concept to faculty colleagues. Head of School David Peerless said he supported Huseby incorporating details about brain functioning into the classroom because it fits with the 37-year-old independent school's mission to encourage students to be inquisitive "self-advocates."

"We want them engaged in their learning, not in pleasing the teacher," Peerless said. "Here they are learning for themselves."

Huseby said that when she began the Harvard program, "I thought of the brain more as an engine." She said she didn't realize that the brain actually changes as experiences, information, images and emotions pass through it.

"Learning actually changes the structure of the brain," she said.

Huseby learned that there are three major functions of the brain important to learning: recognition, visual and emotional, the latter of which she said has not been as highly linked to learning capability as the others.

Although most brains look the same from the outside, they are shaped by cultural experiences, childhood growth and other emotional factors on the inside. With various levels of student capabilities, teaching children that brains process information in varied ways helps them "understand and respect individual differences in learning."

"Every brain is different," she said.

Lauren Tobin, whose 10-year-old son Jonah is a student in Huseby's classroom, said the teacher has taken what could have been a complicated notion and made it "very accessible" for the children.

"It's taught in a way they will remember it," Tobin said. "She has made it interesting and engaging for the kids."

Labels: teachers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:08 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Adults can't ever seem to find enough ways to hurt children. -Angela

By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
Published: December 14, 2007
MONTVILLE, Conn. — Children at the Oakdale School here in southeastern Connecticut returned this fall to learn that their traditional recess had gone the way of the peanut butter sandwich and the Gumby lunchbox.

No longer could they let off their youthful energy — pent up from hours of long division — by cavorting outside for 22 minutes of unstructured play, or perhaps with a vigorous game of tag or dodgeball. Such games had been virtually banned by the principal, Mark S. Johnson, along with kickball, soccer and other “body-banging” activities, as he put it, where knees — and feelings — might get bruised.

Instead, children are encouraged to jump rope, play with Hula Hoops or gently fling a Frisbee. Balls are practically controlled substances, parceled out under close supervision by playground monitors.

The traditional recess, a rite of grade school, is endangered not only in the Oakdale School here in Montville, a town of 18,500. From Cheyenne, Wyo., to Wyckoff, N.J., recess — long seen as a way for children to develop social competence, recharge after long lessons, and resist obesity — is being rethought and pared down.

In the face of this, a national campaign called Rescuing Recess, sponsored by such organizations as the Cartoon Network, the National Parent Teacher Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Education Association, has taken hold at many schools where parents and children fear that recess will go the way of the one-room schoolhouse.

At Oakdale, Mr. Johnson finally relaxed some prohibitions after a parade of parents complained. Now, twice a week when a parent or grandparent is present, fourth and fifth graders are allowed to play a modified version of kickball as long as the score is not kept. Many parents are still not satisfied, however, saying that such coddling fails to prepare children for adulthood.

“Life is competitive,” said Shari Clewell, the mother of a fifth grader. “Kids compete for attention. They compete for grades. You compete for a job. You compete from the time you’re little all the way to the end.”

Pretending otherwise is pointless, she said. “They’re kids. They are competitive. They can play jump rope and jacks and make it competitive.”

But the principal is determined. “I’m honestly one of the most competitive guys in the world, having coached sports for a long time,” said Mr. Johnson, who has coached youth basketball and softball. “But I honestly don’t believe this is the place for that.”

Acknowledging that the changes caused “quite an uproar,” he defended his policy as a way to build skills and camaraderie rather than competition and conflict, and said that it had nothing to do with insurance costs. He said he had seen too many recesses where children “want all the good kids on one side and they want to win at all costs, and kids are made to feel badly.”

Children are still encouraged to move about, he said, and are free to walk the grounds with the school nurse, or depending on the day, sing in the chorus, play chess or pick up litter. And he insisted that children could still play competitive games in their weekly gym classes or in extracurricular programs.

But Ms. Clewell was dismissive of the alternatives. “I’m not having my son pick up trash around the school,” she said. “This is recess.”

For now, the superintendent of schools, David Erwin, has not intervened in the dispute, although he acknowledges that the public outcry has caught his eye.

Connecticut is one of only a handful of states that require some type of break, or recess, but its law does not spell out how long they should be or what pupils should be doing. Because of the free hand that schools have across the country, some pinch minutes once used for recess to prepare students for standardized tests. Others, citing liability concerns, have banned sports like dodgeball, where children are the targets.

In Cheyenne, Wyo., one school has banished tag from the playground as being too rough but allows other contact sports, like touch football. Several schools in Colorado have banned tag for the same reason.

There are also financial reasons for the changes in recess. In Broward County, Fla., one of the nation’s largest school systems, to comply with expanded phys ed requirements that the state mandated but did not provide extra money for, the time “is being transformed into a structured activity,” said Elly Zanin, a district official. She said she wished that were not so.

In Wyckoff, N.J., freestyle recess has become a “midday fitness” class. Student have fewer options for activities and are told to keep moving. By applying recess to the gym requirement, the schools have freed up time for academics.

Such changes worry educators like Joe Frost, a professor emeritus of education at the University of Texas, who has spent 30 years researching children’s play. He defended the traditional recess as a way to give children the freedom to make their own choices and said that it was “terrible, ill-advised and damaging” to inject so much structure and oversight.

“Children need to engage in games such as this in order to develop social skills, to learn to handle themselves, to avoid obesity, and to get the activities they need, and these are traditional games, going on for centuries,” Dr. Frost said. “It’s just difficult to imagine how a person in education could come up with such a bad idea.”

As for playground bullies, he said: “There are ways for teachers to handle bullying without stopping the play for all the children. This is a teacher problem. This is not a child problem.”

But to Mr. Johnson, who has been a school principal for five years, it is the lack of structure that places recess out of sync with the educational and moral instruction provided the rest of the day. “We’re really responsible for what kinds of people these kids will be,” said Mr. Johnson, who has raised two children. “We can produce lots of kids who are skilled academically, but they aren’t skilled as people.”

The approximately 400 pupils at Oakdale in grades one through five seem to have adjusted to the redefined recess better than their mothers and fathers have.

“Parents are in disbelief,” said Jill Santacroce, the mother of an avid soccer player who, she says, now spends too many recesses bored or wandering around. And although one playground monitor, a part-time employee, said in a letter to the editor of The Day, a newspaper in New London, that only a fraction of the parents were upset, Ms. Santacroce insisted, “It’s a lot of parents, not just a few.”

She said her son was scolded while playing Frisbee. “They were throwing it too hard at each other and they were too close together,” she said.

Mr. Johnson said the game “had an edge to it.”

Mr. Johnson, who insists that students are having fun despite the constraints, was offered hugs as he strolled through the playground recently. Just as often, he jumped in to make sure that the play did not get rough.

Did one second grader call another a mean name? he asked a reporter.

First graders who were engaged in what he called a punching game assured him, “We’re just pretending.”

“Someone might get hurt,” he warned.

Michael Lopez, a fifth grader who misses his soccer game, is making do. “At first,” he said, “it wasn’t fun, because no one had anything to do.” Things improved once the school bought inflatable hurdles and other equipment, he said.

Don Twitty, a father in nearby Groton critical of the retooled recess, said children should not have to be Bubble Wrapped before they could have fun.

“Bumps and bruises are part of any activity that you do,” he said.

Labels: children's recess/play

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:38 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Expertos señalan que la inmersión total no ofrece los mejores resultados


Rubén Moreno | La Opinión
Viernes, 14 de diciembre de 2007

A casi 10 años de que los votantes de California aprobaran la Proposición 227, los expertos en educación hacen hincapié en que la fórmula de aprender todas las materias sólo en inglés no ofrece los resultados esperados en organismos educativos. Esto vale sobre todo para el Distrito Escolar Unificado de Los Ángeles (LAUSD), que alberga a un alto porcentaje de alumnos clasificados como aprendices del idioma.

"Los datos nos dicen que la forma en cómo ha afectado a los estudiantes no ha sido la mejor. Antes sólo el 29% de los alumnos estaba en programas bilingües", dijo a La Opinión Patricia Gándara, codirectora del Proyecto de Derechos Civiles de la Universidad de California en Los Ángeles (UCLA), después de participar en un panel durante la cumbre que el Distrito Escolar celebra hasta hoy sobre inglés y rendimiento académico.

En la actualidad, más de 250 mil estudiantes de secundaria en California son aprendices de inglés, y el 83% de ellos habla español como primera lengua. En el LAUSD, el 38% de los alumnos está adquiriendo aún el idioma y otro 20% adicional habla un inglés considerado como no académico.

"La diferencia entre el inglés estándar es que los alumnos sólo hablan un lenguaje donde el vocabulario es en inglés, pero que es una combinación que ha recibido la influencia de otros idiomas, mientras que los aprendices lo hablan como segunda lengua", explicó Norma LeMoine, directora de la división encargada de cerrar la brecha académica en el LAUSD.

De acuerdo con LeMoine, partiendo del ejemplo de un estudiante inmigrante recién llegado sin ningún conocimiento sobre el inglés, "a ese alumno le toma dos años adquirir la habilidad para poder comunicarse, pero le lleva de cinco a siete años aprender el idioma de una forma competente".

"Sería una ventaja para los estudiantes estar en una clase bilingüe. Para ellos sería más fácil aprender el inglés, pero estamos también robándoles el lenguaje cuando sabemos que toda persona tiene una capacidad increíble de poder desarrollar varias lenguas, incluso tres o cuatro al mismo tiempo", agregó Gándara. "Estamos pisando la riqueza que tiene este país impidiendo que crezca el español".

La Proposición 227 requiere desde hace una década que las instrucciones en los salones de California se desarrollen completamente en inglés y que, en el caso de quienes no comprenden nada del idioma, no exceda de un año el tiempo de inmersión en el que deben adquirirlo. Sólo en esos casos se facilita la enseñanza en su idioma natal para enfrentarse a la educación exclusivamente en inglés un año después.

"Falta una política adecuada del aprendizaje del inglés por parte del estado, que es el que nos limita los materiales y los métodos que se pueden utilizar para enseñar el inglés académico en las escuelas", señaló Mónica García, presidenta de la junta directiva del LAUSD. "Como distrito no hemos puesto la presión, pero tiene que haber más conciencia a nivel estatal y un mayor enlace con los expertos para que nos informen".

Al igual que muchos analistas, García coincidió en que también "faltan maestros preparados" que sean conscientes del tipo de alumnado al que tienen que enseñar.

"Los maestros no tienen el entendimiento de que los alumnos son nativos. Este problema tiene raíces históricas", dijo María Brenes, directora ejecutiva de La Lucha del Pueblo, al referirse a que el inglés que hablan los estudiantes está contagiado por muchas culturas, implicando que los niños fallen en la gramática y la sintaxis.

Otro de los argumentos expuestos durante la jornada de ayer apunta a que los niños que proceden de familias de bajos recursos o donde sus padres no hablan el inglés también tardan más en tomar confianza con el idioma, aunque la raíz de la situación sea mucho más grande que una simple cuestión racial.

"Muchos dicen que es un problema cultural, pero eso sólo es una parte. Los estudiantes blancos y los que son más saludables [económicamente] también están por detrás de las estadísticas respecto a otros estados", expresó Jeanne Oakes, profesora del Instituto para la Democracia, Acceso y Educación de UCLA.

La cumbre, en la que participan más de 200 expertos tanto locales como a nivel nacional, concluye hoy y servirá al LAUSD para evaluar las necesidades escolares de cara a mejorar el rendimiento del alumnado que está aprendiendo el inglés o que aún no es proficiente, en un Distrito Escolar donde se hablan 93 idiomas diferentes.

Labels: California, English language learners

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:06 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Sounds like 4.5 million new reasons to promote teaching to the tests. -Patricia

$4.5 million to help train teachers new way to analyze student test scores

By ERICKA MELLON | Houston Chronicle
December 7, 2007

The Houston school district's push to grade teachers on their students' progress got a $4.5 million boost Thursday from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The grant, the second multimillion-dollar award the district has received for this effort in recent months, will help fuel what school and foundation leaders call a major reform plan to improve teaching and ensure that all students are prepared for college.

"This project is about helping teachers help kids perform at their highest rates," said Steven Seleznow, an education director for the Seattle-based foundation started by the Microsoft Corp. chairman and his wife.

The district plans to use the grant mostly to train teachers on a different way of analyzing test scores. The "value-added" method evaluates how much progress individual students are making on standardized tests year after year — or whether teachers are adding value to students' education.

Value-added models
Under the performance-pay plan, unveiled amid controversy last year, teachers, principals and even Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra are eligible for bonuses based on this student growth.

This year, the district has revised its program and contracted with William Sanders, the pioneer of value-added models, to crunch the numbers. The school board approved paying his company no more than $473,000 this year.

Some teachers, however, say the bonus program still is unfair and too complicated. Various education researchers also question whether value-added models truly identify the best teachers and whether bonuses should be linked to them.

"I'm a skeptic because these are not perfect measures of teacher performance," said Dale Ballou, an associate professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "It doesn't mean it's a bad idea to try this. The question is whether we get something out of this that is good enough that it motivates teachers."

Sanders developed his model in Tennessee, where it has been part of the school accountability system since the early 1990s.

The Houston district also has hired Battelle for Kids, an Ohio-based nonprofit, to train employees about the data and create user-friendly online charts showing which schools are making progress and which aren't moving students along fast enough.

Parents and the public will have access to some of the color-coded charts, which could be a helpful, if confusing, tool to evaluate a school's performance. The district plans to use some of its grant money to produce documents to help parents understand the system, which confounds even veteran educators.

Traditionally, parents could find out only the percentage of students at a given school who passed the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

"Parents don't simply want their child to pass, and yet the existing systems — No Child Left Behind, the state accountability system — are all about passing," said school board vice president Harvin Moore. "When schools are judged on what percentage of the children passed, people focus on the 'bubble' kids, kids that are just under passing and the ones that are just over passing, to make sure they don't slip back. It's not that anybody intends to do this."

The board approved paying Battelle a maximum of $10.4 million over three years, with grants funding most of the tab.

The district has named its latest reform effort ASPIRE (Accelerating Student Progress, Increasing Results and Expectations).

Lisa Auerbach, who teaches at Herod Elementary, supports the new focus on student growth. She typically tries to calculate her students' progress on the national Stanford test.

"I have kids who may not yet be on grade level, but, by gosh, I've taken them further than a year's growth," she said. "I call that success because, if the next teacher can do the same thing, then over time that gap is going to narrow."

Complexity 'biggest flaw'?

Steve Antley, a social studies teacher at Marshall Middle School, said that even after attending training on the value-added system, he finds it too complicated to be helpful.

"It reminded me of being in a statistics class during graduate school," said Antley, who is president of the Congress of Houston Teachers. "I think the complex nature of the plan is its biggest flaw in terms of using it for performance pay. To create a performance-pay model, teachers should be able to clearly understand how the money's being awarded."

Sanders makes no apologies for his complex formula, though he wouldn't say whether he supports HISD's decision to award bonuses based on it.

"I'm not going to trade simplicity of calculations for the reliability of the information," he said. "Before groups of teachers, I often hold up a cell phone and I say, 'I don't have a clue what's inside this, but I have to have trust that when I punch the numbers, it's going to call the right number.' "

Labels: teachers, value-added

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:17 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Dec. 13, 2007, 4:51AM
Program allows students to transfer from 831 deficient schools

© 2007 The Associated Press

AUSTIN — Students at 831 Texas public schools will be allowed to transfer to other campuses next school year because their schools were among the lowest rated in the state, the Texas Education Agency said.

Schools on the list had more than 50 percent of their students fail the TAKS in any two of the last three years or had an "academically unacceptable" rating in any one of the last three years.

Under the Public Education Grant program, schools that accept transfer students receive an extra 10 percent in funding per pupil.

Houston led all districts with 89 schools on the list, while Dallas came in second with 74. More than 10 percent of the state's schools made the list, but the total number decreased from 924 last year, according to the TEA.

Education officials said tougher performance standards implemented in recent years have caused problems for some schools. This is the third year in a row that least 10 percent of schools made the list of low performers.

"Math and science were the most common reasons for a school to be unacceptable," said Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the TEA.

Education officials estimated that as many as 500,000 students are enrolled at the 831 schools.

The number of students who take advantage of the transfer option is expected to be low, because the program doesn't provide funding for transportation to a new school. Fewer than 3,000 students have used the program to move to transfer since it was implemented in the late 1990s.

The Senate Education Committee has called on lawmakers to encourage participation in the transfer program by funding transportation.

Officials have said transportation is a major obstacle for students and parents who are considering transferring under the program.

___

On the Net: Texas Education Agency list of eligible schools, http://www.tea.state.tx.us/taa/perfreport121207a.pdf

___

Information from: The Dallas Morning News, http://www.dallasnews.comhttp://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5374790.html

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

This is an important, but actually very long, unending battle. -Angela

Calls Grow for a Broader Yardstick for Schools
By Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 16, 2007; A11

For nearly six years, the federal government has defined school success mainly by how many students pass state reading and math tests. But a growing number of educators and lawmakers are pushing to give more weight to graduation rates, achievement in science and history and even physical education.

The debate over the formula for rating the nation's public schools has stalled efforts in Congress to revise the No Child Left Behind law. At issue: What's the best way to measure whether schools are doing their job?

Unlike questions on the state math and reading tests taken by millions of children, this one has no clear answer. Reaching consensus in the coming election year is expected to be difficult. Without congressional action, the 2002 law will stay as it is.

"Lots of stakeholders have different answers to this question," said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a D.C.-based coalition of urban school systems. "The tug of war is over, if not state assessments, then what? You're ultimately going to get as many answers to the question as there are people to answer it."

The American Society of Civil Engineers wants science tests added to the mix. The NAACP and other groups say schools should get credit for achievement in subjects other than reading and math, as well as for improvement in graduation and college admission rates. Some want to give schools points for progress on locally developed tests and for increasing the number of students who excel in Advanced Placement classes.

Reps. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), Ron Kind (D-Wis.) and Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) say the law should push children to exercise more than their brains. They introduced a bill to give schools points if students spend more time on physical education.

Advocates for "multiple measures" say that learning is too complex to be judged by annual tests and argue that spontaneity and creativity in classrooms are being lost to test preparation and drills.

"There ought to be more in determining students' success than just one test score," said Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union. "Preparing a child for the 21st century means reading and math. But it also means science; it means civics; it means art."

But the Bush administration and some civil rights, education and business groups say that too many tweaks would weaken a law credited with revealing pockets of struggling students, especially among poor children, minorities and those with disabilities. In their view, an overly complex rating system would mask problems in schools with many students who haven't mastered basic reading and math, skills they call the building blocks to success.

"Proponents of multiple measures say it will give a richer, fuller view of a school, but this isn't about a rich view of a school. It's about failures in fundamental gate-keeping subject areas," said Amy Wilkins, a vice president of the Education Trust, a D.C.-based advocate of better schools for the disadvantaged. "Parents know, 'My school is in trouble because it's not teaching reading and math.' "

At Charles H. Flowers High School in Prince George's County, where test scores in reading and math have usually met state benchmarks, the principal, Helena Nobles-Jones, said: "It's okay to add other factors, but they can't replace reading and math." The two subjects, she said, "are so very critical to any career a child would choose."

The law requires annual reading and math tests in third through eighth grades and once in high school. Schools and subsets of students -- including ethnic minorities and students from poor families -- must make gains over time. High schools also must reach target graduation rates, but the state goals have been criticized as weak and inconsistent.

Certain schools that don't meet standards are required to allow students to transfer or face other sanctions. The law aims to have 100 percent of children proficient in reading and math by 2014. But the ratings are more about identifying struggling schools than rewarding excellence.

George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House education committee, has been trying to craft a definition of school success that goes beyond standardized tests. In a draft bill he circulated last summer, math and reading scores would remain the biggest factors in rating schools. But schools also could gain points for raising science, history, civics or writing scores or increasing the number of students who succeed in college preparatory courses. The proposal would establish a national system to measure graduation rates, and high schools could be rewarded for progress.

Miller said such changes would encourage schools to lower dropout rates, broaden the curriculum and encourage more disadvantaged students to enroll in challenging classes. He said he aims to provide a "better, fairer picture of what's happening in schools."

But some GOP leaders say the picture would only become murkier. Under the law, parents can see how their school stacks up against others across town or across the state on the same exams. If some groups of students struggle, it shows.

Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (Calif.), the top Republican on the education committee, said the law lets parents "cut through the clutter and see clearly how their children's schools are performing." Add too many measures, he said, and accountability would be lost.

Many advocates for children with disabilities agree. Ricki Sabia, associate director of the National Down Syndrome Society's Policy Center, said the law has forced schools to focus more on children with special needs. "What we've seen in the past five years is kids with disabilities are doing better than anyone expected," Sabia said. "We are very wary of seeing things roll back."

Likewise, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund applauds the law for drawing attention to Latino student achievement. The organization isn't opposed to adding measures, said Peter Zamora, a regional counsel for the group, as long as the system "can't be easily gamed."

But many educators report increasing pressure to tailor lessons to annual state exams, leading students to miss out on other educational opportunities.

"The fear is you have this narrowing of the breadth and depth" of the curriculum, said Elizabeth Burmaster, Wisconsin's state superintendent. Burmaster, president of the Council of Chief State School Officers and a former music and drama teacher, supports using local assessments together with state tests. "It's much more complicated," she said. "But it's more accurate."

Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, said the challenge is creating a rating system that includes a range of measures and provides a clear picture of a school's effectiveness.

"Most schools people -- and a lot of people who think about schools -- think school is about a bunch of different things, not just reading and math," Loveless said. "The problem is . . . as you list all those things, suddenly it's not as clear-cut what's a successful school and what's a failing school."


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/15/AR2007121501747.html

Labels: multiple criteria/measures

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

To read the entire survey entitled: "English Usage Among Hispanics in the United States" click here. -Patricia

By JULIA PRESTON | NY Times
Published: November 30, 2007

Most children of Hispanic immigrants in the United States learn to speak English well by the time they are adults, even though three-quarters of their parents speak mainly Spanish and do not have a command of English, according to a report released yesterday by the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington.

Only 23 percent of first-generation immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries said they spoke English very well, the report found. But 88 percent of the members of the second generation in Latino immigrant families described themselves as strong English speakers, a figure that increased to 94 percent for the grandchildren’s generation.

“The ability to speak English and the likelihood of using it in everyday life rise sharply from Hispanic immigrants to their U.S.-born adult children,” the survey reported.

The Pew Hispanic Center is a nonpartisan research organization that does not take a position in the contentious immigration debate. The new report is based on an analysis of six surveys the center conducted from April 2002 to October 2006, covering more than 14,000 Latino adults over 18 years old.

The findings address rising worries among some voters that immigrants arriving from Latin America in the last two decades have resisted learning English and are failing to assimilate into American society. Advocates of tighter borders and reduced immigration have said that Spanish may be competing for dominance with English in states like Texas and California with large Latino populations.

At least one state, Kansas, adopted a law this year declaring English its official language and eliminating requirements that official documents be produced in Spanish as well as English, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Measures favoring English have also proliferated in counties and towns.

The Pew report found that Hispanics are generally eager to master English, believing it is “necessary for success in the United States.”

Many Hispanics believe they will face discrimination if they speak Spanish and lack strong English skills, according to the report. In the analysis, 46 percent of Latinos cited poor English skills as the leading cause of discrimination against them, a far more significant cause than race or immigration status. In a survey this year, 54 percent of Latinos said they saw discrimination as a major obstacle to their progress.

The report sought to measure English skills as “a marker of attachment” to American society, said D’Vera Cohn, a Pew center researcher who wrote the report with Shirin Hakimzadeh, another Pew researcher.

The English skills of recently arrived immigrants varied widely depending on the countries they came from. Among Mexicans, who are by far the largest national group among recent immigrants, 71 percent said they spoke little or no English. Of Hispanics born outside the 50 states, Puerto Ricans were the most likely to speak English well.

Even as many Latinos learn English, they continue to retain and use Spanish. According to the report, 44 percent of Latino adults, whether born abroad or in the United States, said they were bilingual, while 41 percent said they spoke mainly Spanish. Only 15 percent of Latino adults said they were “largely English speakers.”

Labels: immigrant children

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:10 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Editorial: Science, not faith, belongs in schools

Web Posted: 12/10/2007 12:26 AM CST

San Antonio Express-News

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently released the results of a test that assesses science and math skills of students in 30 industrialized countries. The results showed American students scored in the bottom half — worse than their peers from 16 other countries, and better than only those from Italy, Portugal, Greece, Turkey and Mexico.

U.S. students do not reach "the baseline level of achievement ... at which students begin to demonstrate the science competencies that will enable them to participate actively in life situations related to science and technology," the report says. The comparative results for math were even worse.

Many explanations exist for the lagging performance in science by American students. One that cannot be avoided is that some of the adults who are responsible for their science educations don't take science seriously enough.

Christine Comer was a science teacher for 27 years. And for nine years until last month, she was the Texas Education Agency's director of science. She says she was forced to resign because — hold on to your monkey trials — she failed to show impartiality in the debate between advocates of intelligent design and evolution.

Specifically, the Austin-American Statesman reported, she forwarded an e-mail to a pro-evolution group announcing a speech by Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University. Forrest served as a key witness in a Pennsylvania court case that found intelligent design lacked sufficient evidence to be included in a scientific curriculum.

That puts Forrest and Comer at odds with some members of the State Board of Education. "Employees have to be able to work with all the members in a fair way without the perception that they are siding with one group or another," spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe told the newspaper. "That's why it's important for us to be neutral on issues and just to say what the policy is and not to create it ourselves."

Ratcliffe obviously didn't catch the irony of the "create it ourselves" line. The real issue, however, is not group dynamics. There's a place for faith, and a place for science. And the two shouldn't mix in public school classrooms.

Do Texans truly want their educators to be neutral on the teaching of religious faith versus science in schools? If so, then the State Board of Education and the Texas Education Agency are well on their way to making students in Italy, Portugal, Greece, Turkey and Mexico feel proud.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:16 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Could another scientific illiterate replace Bush?
By Robyn Blumner
Tribune Media Services
Article Last Updated: 12/08/2007 12:48:25 PM MST

What happened to Christine Comer makes me wonder whether America is really emerging from its Age of Unenlightenment.
Comer was forced to resign her position as director of science at the Texas Education Agency because she forwarded an e-mail about a lecture on the fallacy of "intelligent design" and creationism as a scientifically grounded alternative to evolution. Comer, who spent 27 years as a science teacher and had been in her post at the agency for nine years, was told that the agency must remain "neutral" on the subject.
Neutral? Are they kidding? On the one hand you have a theory that has been successfully tested using the scientific method for more than 100 years and whose accuracy has been repeatedly affirmed by the vast fields of biology and genetics. On the other hand you have a hypothesis that relies on supernatural intervention for which there has been no legitimate scientific testing or objective proof.
Florida is also now in a dust-up because the teaching of evolution has been included in its proposed science standards. Donna Callaway, a member of the state Board of Education - appointed by former Gov. Jeb Bush - said she'll oppose the new standards because of it.
Really folks, in this information age, when scientific innovation is the key to our nation's future, we don't have the time to be mucking around in this tired debate. You don't produce doctors and
Advertisement

scientists by teaching science from the Bible. Period.
Not surprisingly, a former advisor to George Bush as Texas governor, who also worked in his federal Department of Education, provoked the Comer witch hunt. Lizzette Reynolds, deputy commissioner for statewide policy and programs, complained about Comer's e-mail and called for her termination.
These are the kinds of dim-witted people that have been elevated to key posts in the Bush administration, marking it as one promoting loopy religiosity over fact and evidence.
Think about some of the administration's policies that have emanated from President Bush's radical religious views:
The suspension of most federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. (Bush to Parkinson's patients: Drop dead!)
The spending of hundreds of millions of dollars on demonstrably useless abstinence-only sex education. (Why Johnny has herpes.)
The effort to prevent emergency contraception from being sold over the counter. (How to guarantee increased abortions.)
And the retraction of appropriated international family planning money. (Ditto.)
Bush's Iraq "crusade" is perhaps the most disturbing example of his Christian Manichaeism, but even his administration's long-standing antagonism toward the evidence of manmade global warming has religious overtones, with a hint of The-End-Times-Are-Nigh lack of interest in its consequences.
Yet in every case where the administration ignored objective fact or science in favor of religion, Bush took this country down the wrong path, harming people's lives and endangering health.
The "salvation" for those of us in the reality-based community is that the Bush administration is soon looking at its last year in office, and maybe, finally, the war on science is also coming to an end.
But maybe not.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is gaining as a GOP presidential contender. He may be a friendly face, but the ordained Baptist minister is no friend to reason. In the Republican primary debate last May, he was one of three in the field to raise his hand to proclaim that he does not believe in evolution.
In a later debate, Huckabee rejected for himself the belief that we are "descendants of a primate," magnanimously suggesting that it was OK if others chose to believe it. Gee, thanks.
Pretty much all the presidential candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, are freely spouting off about the centrality of faith in their lives (with Mitt Romney promising that his is not too weird), but it is only Huckabee who is the dogma-driven real deal - a man who as president would follow in Bush's anti-science, anti-intellectual footsteps, a man who would feel "chosen" for the job and licensed by a power higher than the will of the voters.
The mission-zeal with which Bush has arrogated power and his maniacal unwillingness to compromise is packaged righteousness, pure and simple. Remember that Bush said he appealed to a "higher father" for strength when journalist Bob Woodward asked him if he'd consulted his father before invading Iraq.
Who needs information grounded in experience when you have prayer and prophesy?
And Huckabee would be Bush redux.
Here is something scary-ignorant. Last week, the Web site ChristiaNet.com, which bills itself as "the world's largest Christian portal," cheered the results of a survey it took finding that half of its 1,400 Christian respondents said that dinosaurs and man roamed the Earth at the same time.
Putting aside that the schoolteachers of these people should be slapped silly, these are Huckabee's peeps. We can't afford to put this kind of backward thinking and scientific illiteracy in the driver's seat again.
---
You can respond to Robyn's column at blumner@sptimes.com.

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

New Research Report from Texas Education Agencyþ

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is pleased to
announce the publication of the 2007 Comprehensive
Annual Report on Texas Public Schools (Publication No.
GE08 601 04). The Comprehensive Annual Report
describes the status of Texas public education, as
required by Texas Education Code §39.182. The report
contains an executive summary and 15 chapters on the
following topics: state performance on the academic
excellence indicators; student performance on the
state performance assessments and a study of the
correlation between course grades and state
assessments; students in alternative education
settings; performance of students at risk of dropping
out of school; student dropouts; grade-level retention
of students; district and campus performance in
meeting state accountability standards; status of the
curriculum; deregulation and waivers; school district
expenditures and staff hours used for direct
instructional activities; district reporting
requirements; TEA funds and expenditures; performance
of open-enrollment charters on the academic excellence
indicators, accountability measures, and student
performance, in comparison to the performance of
school districts; character education programs; and
student health and physical activity.

The report is available on the
TEA website.

Additional information about the report may be
obtained by contacting the Division of Accountability
Research at (512) 475-3523.

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

Carol S. Dweck is right on target. This is a MUST read. -Angela

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids

Hint: Don't tell your kids that they are. More than
three decades of research shows that a focus on
effort-not on intelligence or ability-is key to
success in school and in life

By Carol S. Dweck
Scientific American

A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade
school. He completed his assignments easily and
routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of
his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he
had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however,
Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to
do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his
grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son's
confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But
their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan (who is a
composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork,
their son maintained, was boring and pointless.

Our society worships talent, and many people assume that
possessing superior intelligence or ability-along with
confidence in that ability-is a recipe for success. In
fact, however, more than 30 years of scientific
investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect
or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful
of challenges and unwilling to remedy their
shortcomings.

The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who
coast through the early grades under the dangerous
notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them
as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit
belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making
striving to learn seem far less important than being (or
looking) smart. This belief also makes them see
challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort
as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to
improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and
motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

Praising children's innate abilities, as Jonathan's
parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also
prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and
even marriages from living up to their potential. On the
other hand, our studies show that teaching people to
have a "growth mind-set," which encourages a focus on
effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make
them into high achievers in school and in life.

The Opportunity of Defeat

I first began to investigate the underpinnings of human
motivation-and how people persevere after setbacks-as a
psychology graduate student at Yale University in the
1960s. Animal experiments by psychologists Martin
Seligman, Steven Maier and Richard Solomon of the
University of Pennsylvania had shown that after repeated
failures, most animals conclude that a situation is
hopeless and beyond their control. After such an
experience, the researchers found, an animal often
remains passive even when it can affect change-a state
they called learned helplessness.

People can learn to be helpless, too, but not everyone
reacts to setbacks this way. I wondered: Why do some
students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas
others who are no more skilled continue to strive and
learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people's
beliefs about why they had failed.

In particular, attributing poor performance to a lack of
ability depresses motivation more than does the belief
that lack of effort is to blame. In 1972, when I taught
a group of elementary and middle school children who
displayed helpless behavior in school that a lack of
effort (rather than lack of ability) led to their
mistakes on math problems, the kids learned to keep
trying when the problems got tough. They also solved
many of the problems even in the face of difficulty.
Another group of helpless children who were simply
rewarded for their success on easy problems did not
improve their ability to solve hard math problems. These
experiments were an early indication that a focus on
effort can help resolve helplessness and engender
success.

Subsequent studies revealed that the most persistent
students do not ruminate about their own failure much at
all but instead think of mistakes as problems to be
solved. At the University of Illinois in the 1970s I,
along with my then graduate student Carol Diener, asked
60 fifth graders to think out loud while they solved
very difficult pattern-recognition problems. Some
students reacted defensively to mistakes, denigrating
their skills with comments such as "I never did have a
good rememory," and their problem-solving strategies
deteriorated.

Others, meanwhile, focused on fixing errors and honing
their skills. One advised himself: "I should slow down
and try to figure this out." Two schoolchildren were
particularly inspiring. One, in the wake of difficulty,
pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked
his lips and said, "I love a challenge!" The other, also
confronting the hard problems, looked up at the
experimenter and approvingly declared, "I was hoping
this would be informative!" Predictably, the students
with this attitude outperformed their cohorts in these
studies.

Two Views of Intelligence

Several years later I developed a broader theory of what
separates the two general classes of learners-helpless
versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different
types of students not only explain their failures
differently, but they also hold different "theories" of
intelligence. The helpless ones believe that
intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain
amount, and that's that. I call this a "fixed mind-set."
Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they
attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel
powerless to change. They avoid challenges because
challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart
less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the
belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think
intelligence is malleable and can be developed through
education and hard work. They want to learn above all
else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your
intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because
slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they
can be remedied by more effort. Challenges are
energizing rather than intimidating; they offer
opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth
mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater
academic success and were quite likely to outperform
their counterparts.

We validated these expectations in a study published in
early 2007. Psychologists Lisa Blackwell of Columbia
University and Kali H. Trzes-niewski of Stanford
University and I monitored 373 students for two years
during the transition to junior high school, when the
work gets more difficult and the grading more stringent,
to determine how their mind-sets might affect their math
grades. At the beginning of seventh grade, we assessed
the students' mind-sets by asking them to agree or
disagree with statements such as "Your intelligence is
something very basic about you that you can't really
change." We then assessed their beliefs about other
aspects of learning and looked to see what happened to
their grades.

As we had predicted, the students with a growth mind-set
felt that learning was a more important goal in school
than getting good grades. In addition, they held hard
work in high regard, believing that the more you labored
at something, the better you would become at it. They
understood that even geniuses have to work hard for
their great accomplishments. Confronted by a setback
such as a disappointing test grade, students with a
growth mind-set said they would study harder or try a
different strategy for mastering the material.

The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were
concerned about looking smart with little regard for
learning. They had negative views of effort, believing
that having to work hard at something was a sign of low
ability. They thought that a person with talent or
intelligence did not need to work hard to do well.
Attributing a bad grade to their own lack of ability,
those with a fixed mind-set said that they would study
less in the future, try never to take that subject again
and consider cheating on future tests.

Such divergent outlooks had a dramatic impact on
performance. At the start of junior high, the math
achievement test scores of the students with a growth
mind-set were comparable to those of students who
displayed a fixed mind-set. But as the work became more
difficult, the students with a growth mind-set showed
greater persistence. As a result, their math grades
overtook those of the other students by the end of the
first semester-and the gap between the two groups
continued to widen during the two years we followed
them.

Along with Columbia psychologist Heidi Grant, I found a
similar relation between mind-set and achievement in a
2003 study of 128 Columbia freshman premed students who
were enrolled in a challenging general chemistry course.
Although all the students cared about grades, the ones
who earned the best grades were those who placed a high
premium on learning rather than on showing that they
were smart in chemistry. The focus on learning
strategies, effort and persistence paid off for these
students.

Confronting Deficiencies

A belief in fixed intelligence also makes people less
willing to admit to errors or to confront and remedy
their deficiencies in school, at work and in their
social relationships. In a study published in 1999 of
168 freshmen entering the University of Hong Kong, where
all instruction and coursework are in English, three
Hong Kong colleagues and I found that students with a
growth mind-set who scored poorly on their English
proficiency exam were far more inclined to take a
remedial English course than were low-scoring students
with a fixed mind-set. The students with a stagnant view
of intelligence were presumably unwilling to admit to
their deficit and thus passed up the opportunity to
correct it.

A fixed mind-set can similarly hamper communication and
progress in the workplace by leading managers and
employees to discourage or ignore constructive criticism
and advice. Research by psychologists Peter Heslin and
Don VandeWalle of Southern Methodist University and Gary
Latham of the University of Toronto shows that managers
who have a fixed mind-set are less likely to seek or
welcome feedback from their employees than are managers
with a growth mind-set. Presumably, managers with a
growth mind-set see themselves as works-in-progress and
understand that they need feedback to improve, whereas
bosses with a fixed mind-set are more likely to see
criticism as reflecting their underlying level of
competence. Assuming that other people are not capable
of changing either, executives with a fixed mind-set are
also less likely to mentor their underlings. But after
Heslin, VandeWalle and Latham gave managers a tutorial
on the value and principles of the growth mind-set,
supervisors became more willing to coach their employees
and gave more useful advice.

Mind-set can affect the quality and longevity of
personal relationships as well, through people's
willingness-or unwillingness-to deal with difficulties.
Those with a fixed mind-set are less likely than those
with a growth mind-set to broach problems in their
relationships and to try to solve them, according to a
2006 study I conducted with psychologist Lara Kammrath
of Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. After all, if
you think that human personality traits are more or less
fixed, relationship repair seems largely futile.
Individuals who believe people can change and grow,
however, are more confident that confronting concerns in
their relationships will lead to resolutions.

Proper Praise

How do we transmit a growth mind-set to our children?
One way is by telling stories about achievements that
result from hard work. For instance, talking about math
geniuses who were more or less born that way puts
students in a fixed mind-set, but descriptions of great
mathematicians who fell in love with math and developed
amazing skills engenders a growth mind-set, our studies
have shown. People also communicate mind-sets through
praise. Although many, if not most, parents believe that
they should build up a child by telling him or her how
brilliant and talented he or she is, our research
suggests that this is misguided.

In studies involving several hundred fifth graders
published in 1998, for example, Columbia psychologist
Claudia M. Mueller and I gave children questions from a
nonverbal IQ test. After the first 10 problems, on which
most children did fairly well, we praised them. We
praised some of them for their intelligence: "Wow .
that's a really good score. You must be smart at this."
We commended others for their effort: "Wow . that's a
really good score. You must have worked really hard."

We found that intelligence praise encouraged a fixed
mind-set more often than did pats on the back for
effort. Those congratulated for their intelligence, for
example, shied away from a challenging assignment-they
wanted an easy one instead-far more often than the kids
applauded for their effort. (Most of those lauded for
their hard work wanted the difficult problem set from
which they would learn.) When we gave everyone hard
problems anyway, those praised for being smart became
discouraged, doubting their ability. And their scores,
even on an easier problem set we gave them afterward,
declined as compared with their previous results on
equivalent problems. In contrast, students praised for
their effort did not lose confidence when faced with the
harder questions, and their performance improved
markedly on the easier problems that followed.

Making Up Your Mind-set

In addition to encouraging a growth mind-set through
praise for effort, parents and teachers can help
children by providing explicit instruction regarding the
mind as a learning machine. Blackwell, Trzesniewski and
I recently designed an eight-session workshop for 91
students whose math grades were declining in their first
year of junior high. Forty-eight of the students
received instruction in study skills only, whereas the
others attended a combination of study skills sessions
and classes in which they learned about the growth mind-
set and how to apply it to schoolwork.

In the growth mind-set classes, students read and
discussed an article entitled "You Can Grow Your Brain."
They were taught that the brain is like a muscle that
gets stronger with use and that learning prompts neurons
in the brain to grow new connections. From such
instruction, many students began to see themselves as
agents of their own brain development. Students who had
been disruptive or bored sat still and took note. One
particularly unruly boy looked up during the discussion
and said, "You mean I don't have to be dumb?"

As the semester progressed, the math grades of the kids
who learned only study skills continued to decline,
whereas those of the students given the growth-mind-set
training stopped falling and began to bounce back to
their former levels. Despite being unaware that there
were two types of instruction, teachers reported
noticing significant motivational changes in 27 percent
of the children in the growth mind-set workshop as
compared with only 9 percent of students in the control
group. One teacher wrote: "Your workshop has already had
an effect. L [our unruly male student], who never puts
in any extra effort and often doesn't turn in homework
on time, actually stayed up late to finish an assignment
early so I could review it and give him a chance to
revise it. He earned a B+. (He had been getting Cs and
lower.)"

Other researchers have replicated our results.
Psychologists Catherine Good, then at Columbia, and
Joshua Aronson and Michael Inzlicht of New York
University reported in 2003 that a growth mind-set
workshop raised the math and English achievement test
scores of seventh graders. In a 2002 study Aronson, Good
(then a graduate student at the University of Texas at
Austin) and their colleagues found that college students
began to enjoy their schoolwork more, value it more
highly and get better grades as a result of training
that fostered a growth mind-set.

We have now encapsulated such instruction in an
interactive computer program called "Brain-ology," which
should be more widely available by mid-2008. Its six
modules teach students about the brain-what it does and
how to make it work better. In a virtual brain lab,
users can click on brain regions to determine their
functions or on nerve endings to see how connections
form when people learn. Users can also advise virtual
students with problems as a way of practicing how to
handle schoolwork difficulties; additionally, users keep
an online journal of their study practices.

New York City seventh graders who tested a pilot version
of Brainology told us that the program had changed their
view of learning and how to promote it. One wrote: "My
favorite thing from Brainology is the neurons part where
when u [sic] learn something there are connections and
they keep growing. I always picture them when I'm in
school." A teacher said of the students who used the
program: "They offer to practice, study, take notes, or
pay attention to ensure that connections will be made."

Teaching children such information is not just a ploy to
get them to study. People do differ in intelligence,
talent and ability. And yet research is converging on
the conclusion that great accomplishment, and even what
we call genius, is typically the result of years of
passion and dedication and not something that flows
naturally from a gift. Mozart, Edison, Curie, Darwin and
Cézanne were not simply born with talent; they
cultivated it through tremendous and sustained effort.
Similarly, hard work and discipline contribute much more
to school achievement than IQ does.

Such lessons apply to almost every human endeavor. For
instance, many young athletes value talent more than
hard work and have consequently become unteachable.
Similarly, many people accomplish little in their jobs
without constant praise and encouragement to maintain
their motivation. If we foster a growth mind-set in our
homes and schools, however, we will give our children
the tools to succeed in their pursuits and to become
responsible employees and citizens.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 5:17 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Dec. 11, 2007, 2:31AM
Texas biology professors voice support for evolution education

© 2007 The Associated Press

AUSTIN — Biology professors from across Texas stressed the importance of educating students about evolution in a letter to the state education commissioner and said Texas Education Agency employees shouldn't be required to stay neutral on the subject.

More than 100 faculty members from the universities of Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Texas State, North Texas, Houston, Rice and Baylor signed the letter. It was sent Monday to Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott.

"I'm an evolutionary biologist, and I and many others simply feel that good evolution education is key to understanding biology as a whole," said Daniel Bolnick of the University of Texas, who started collecting signatures last week.

The professors sent the letter in response to the departure of Chris Comer, who said evolution politics were behind her forced resignation last month as the state's director of science curriculum.

Comer said she came under pressure after forwarding an e-mail that her superiors felt made the agency appear to be biased against the instruction of intelligent design. Intelligent design holds that the universe's order and complexity is so great science alone cannot explain it.

UT integrative biology professor David Hillis said the Comer's ouster shows the country is slipping into "scientific illiteracy."

"It is extraordinarily unfortunate and inappropriate that religious views are dictating hiring and firing decisions at the Texas Education Agency," he said. "This is an enormous black eye in terms of our competitiveness and ability to attract researchers and technologies."

Education officials say Comer's resignation came after repeated acts of misconduct and insubordination. Scott and other officials declined to comment specifically, because they feared being sued.

"I am really frustrated with the issue, knowing the truth and not being able to talk about it," Scott said.

According to TEA documents, Comer's superiors recommended she be terminated because of comments she made about the agency's leadership and her failure to get approval for making presentations outside the agency.

The documents show that Lizzette Reynolds, the agency's senior adviser on statewide initiatives, notified Comer's superiors after Comer forwarded an e-mail announcing a presentation by an author who argues that creationist politics are behind the movement to get intelligent design theory taught in public schools

"This is something that the State Board, the Gov.'s Office and members of the Legislature would be extremely upset to see because it assumes this is a subject that the agency supports," Reynolds said in the e-mail to Comer's supervisors.

Comer said her only recent reprimand was in February after she attended a meeting of science educators without getting prior approval.

"Did I question them when they said things that I thought were wrong? Yes, I did that," Comer said Monday. "I did speak up for myself. I was not a shrinking violet. But then, as the director of science, I thought it was important to hear my expert opinions of what is going on."

Next year, the State Board of Education begins a review of the state science curriculum, which will set standards for classroom instruction and textbook selection.

___

Information from: Austin American-Statesman, http://www.statesman.com

Labels: curriculum, evolution, intelligent design

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:18 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Families just need guidance on how to take control of their lives, says Andrill Harris, dropout prevention coordinator at the Patricia R. Harris Education Center. (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)


Dropout-Prevention Program Sees to The Basics of Life
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 10, 2007; Page B01


Word was getting around about the new problem solver on campus. So the mother tracked her down one recent day in a makeshift office on the second floor of a Southeast Washington public school.

"I don't know if you are the right person to come to," the mother said, "but I have this situation. I haven't eaten in the last day and a half so that my children would have enough to eat."


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Families just need guidance on how to take control of their lives, says Andrill Harris, dropout prevention coordinator at the Patricia R. Harris Education Center. (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)
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Andrill Harris, dropout prevention coordinator at the Patricia R. Harris Education Center, knew what to do. She set up a food-bank delivery. For another parent in a tight spot, Harris found subsidized housing. The two families had a total of five children at the school. All, with help from Harris, were spared at least some of the stress that makes it hard for some inner-city students to concentrate on reading and math, hard even to stay in school.

In the struggle to improve schools in the poorest neighborhoods, experts say no problem is more challenging than the high dropout rate. Some educators have raised test scores. Others have repaired leaking roofs and gotten new computers. But the latest estimates this year indicate that only 58 percent of D.C. public school students graduate on time with a high school diploma.

Communities in Schools, the nonprofit organization that employs Harris, has gained a national reputation for reducing dropout rates since its founding in 1977. Based in Alexandria, the organization has nearly 200 affiliates in 27 states, reaching more than a million students in 3,400 schools. In the District, it operates in eight schools.

The organization confronts the dropout issue at its main source: impoverished families who need jobs, health care, housing, food, reading tutors and often simply a friendly ear. It sounds simple and obvious, but in many ways it is an innovation. School systems traditionally have depended on teachers and principals to connect with bored or troubled students and try to persuade them to stay. Few outside groups offer help to beleaguered school administrators.

"Many times, students don't have a caring adult in their lives at school," said Daniel J. Cardinali, president of Communities in Schools.

To be sure, other factors can lead students to drop out. Some adolescents or teenagers dislike sitting in classrooms and want to get out into the world as soon as possible. Some feel lost in humongous high schools or turned off by boring lessons.

Many educators in the Washington area and beyond are starting to recover from years of denial about dropouts. Often, statistics have buried the magnitude of the problem. For years, many school systems have reported dropout rates of 2 or 3 percent, using a formula for what is known as the event rate, or the percentage of students who leave school each year. Nationally, the event rate is 4.7 percent. It ranges from 6 to 10 percent in low-income communities.

But scholars have persuaded the National Governors Association to embrace a statistic known as the cohort rate, or the percentage of ninth-graders who graduate within four years. That, experts say, is a more depressing but also more realistic figure. Nationally, the cohort graduation rate is about 70 percent, declining to 50 percent in some urban areas. An analysis of data on the nation's 50 largest school systems, published by Education Week in June, shows that the graduation rate in Prince George's County is 67 percent and that Anne Arundel County's is 75 percent. Montgomery County and Fairfax County were virtually tied at about 80 percent.

In a new book, "The Last Dropout: Stop the Epidemic!," Communities in Schools co-founder Bill Milliken says he does not have enough data to calculate a cohort graduation rate for students helped by his program. But he reports that his event rate appears to be about 3.5 percent, roughly half of what low-income schools usually report.

Harris, 40, joined Communities in Schools in August after many years as a social worker in the District and Prince George's. She works on a laptop computer at a table in a small special-education classroom. She has no school phone extension yet, so she uses her cellphone to reach out to organizations that might help families at two Southeast schools: Patricia R. Harris, which serves students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, and Terrell Elementary, which serves students through sixth grade.

Communities in Schools focuses on what it calls the five basics: providing mentors, good health, safe places to grow and learn, opportunities to give back to the community and marketable skills. Harris's bible is a pocket-size volume, "The Emergency Food, Shelter and Health Care Directory," published by the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington.

That is just a start. Harris keeps a list of community groups and businesses that have offered help. She uses even the smallest gifts to build strong family relationships with her schools. Having received a donation of 100 children's books, she is organizing a "read-in" to give away books "with moms and dads in the morning, coffee and doughnuts," she said. She added: "We might have a reading night with the parents. Another option is having a book club."

Jeffrey Grant, principal of Patricia R. Harris, said the connection with Communities in Schools is "a partnership made in heaven."

All good principals, he said, try to do what Communities in Schools does: contact outside organizations that might help enrich student lives. Every D.C. school has a list of volunteer partner organizations, but the administrative and academic burdens on principals leave little time for the e-mails and phone calls needed to make the partnerships work. With Harris working for him, Grant said, his partners -- often reluctant to intrude without an invitation -- hear what he needs, when they can come and what they should bring.

Cardinali said Communities in Schools is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, federal grants and various other sources. The organization is working with four D.C. high schools -- Anacostia, Ballou, Eastern and H.D. Woodson -- but also sends coordinators to elementary schools because that is where problems begin. "We have done a bunch of research on the risk factors that correlated strongly with dropouts going back to the third grade, so we look for tutors, mentors and after-school programming," Cardinali said.

So far, smaller high schools, or small academies within larger high schools, have had the most success in increasing graduation rates. For example, 88 small high schools have opened in New York City since 2002 under the New Century High Schools initiative. They report that 78 percent of their students are graduating after four years, much higher than the citywide average. Some small charter high schools in the District report similar success, although scholars caution that the New Century and charter schools might benefit from attracting more motivated students, who are less likely to drop out wherever they go.

Maryland State Superintendent of Schools Nancy S. Grasmick said groups such as Communities in Schools provide promising short-term solutions. But she said she looks forward to long-term changes, including universal access to pre-kindergarten, that could reduce the dropout rate by raising achievement for students from the poorest families.

Harris said her work has convinced her that families want to take control of their lives and just need guidance on how to do that. The mother who sought help finding food, Harris said, first became aware of possible aid at a PTA meeting during which Harris led a discussion of what could be done to help neighbors. The mother offered to help on Thanksgiving. Days later, she asked for help herself.

"Everybody has circumstances," Harris said. "It is not necessarily something they have done intentionally to put themselves in that situation. It is not always your responsibility to know what to do at that time and how to fix the situation. So that's why you have others in the community who will help and support you."

Staff writer Jay Mathews sits on the board of directors of Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit publisher of Education Week.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:13 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press
James D. Watson, a discoverer of the structure of DNA.


In light of the earlier post, "All Brains Are the Same Color (see below)," this is pretty funny. Enjoy! -Angela

December 12, 2007
DNA Pioneer’s Genome Blurs Race Lines

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Now, this is awkward.

James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and winner of the Nobel prize, raised a storm recently when a British newspaper quoted him saying that black Africans are not as intelligent as whites. But his own brilliant DNA seems to blur the lines.

A new analysis of Dr. Watson’s genome shows that he has 16 times the number of genes considered to be of African origin than the average white European does — about the same amount of African DNA that would show up if one great-grandparent were African, said Kari Stefansson, the chief executive of deCODE Genetics of Iceland, which did the analysis.

“This came up as a bit of a surprise,” Dr. Stefansson said in an interview, “especially as a sequel to his utterly inappropriate comments about Africans.”

After the news of Dr. Watson’s genetic ancestry was published in The Times of London on Sunday, much of the British media played the news for a lark, with headlines like “Revealed: Scientist Who Sparked Racism Row Has Black Genes” and “DNA Pioneer James Watson Is Blacker Than He Thought.”

But the news, straddling the uncertain boundary of genetic science and society, is more than a Southern gothic drama of racial identity played out on the world stage.

“The irony is bigger, and broader, than his having made derogatory comments and having an ancestral relationship with the folks he insulted,” said Kathy Hudson, the founder and director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington. As people see what happens to Dr. Watson and others as they undergo what she called the “molecular Full Monty,” the inevitable surprises might “help people make the decision about whether they want their information for themselves, and to ask, Who will I share this with?”

Dr. Stefansson’s company is one of several marketing genome scans that promise to reveal anyone’s genetic propensities for disease, origins and more, for a price. Dr. Watson had already placed his own genome information online, as has another genetics pioneer, J. Craig Venter. Dr. Stefansson said he simply ran the data through his company’s analytical system.

Dr. Stefansson said that because his company had not produced the original data, “I am reluctant, personally, to make much of the analysis.” He added, however, that “on my face, it would elicit smiles.”

The controversy began with an article in The Times of London in October that quoted Dr. Watson, who was on a book tour, as saying that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

According to the article, he said that “there are many people of color who are very talented,” and he hoped people were equal, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

A publicity agent for Dr. Watson, Fraser Seitel, said that his client had no comment on the most recent turn of events, but noted that Dr. Watson, who is 79, “regrets very much what was attributed to him” in the original article and has repeatedly apologized for the comments while also disavowing them.

“Dr. Watson has never believed that the color of someone’s skin, or where they come from, or any other human quality gives any indication whatsoever of a person’s intelligence or potential to succeed in life,” Mr. Seitel said. While not stating explicitly that his client was misquoted in the original article, Mr. Seitel said, “he doesn’t have a recollection of it.”

George M. Church, a professor of genetics at the Harvard Medical School and the director of the Center for Computational Genetics, said he questioned the accuracy of any of the current scanning and analytical services.

Professor Church predicted that as the science of genetics advanced, fuzzy categories like race would become less important because genetic characteristics would point to factors like disease at an individual level.

Meanwhile, he said: “There are still a lot of bigots in the world. Maybe showing these things are more nuanced than they’d like it to be makes them think about it.”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:48 PM 0 comments Links to this post

For the study report and policy brief click here -Patricia

By Susan Sandler | California Progressive Report
November 21, 2007

Do you feel that enough attention is paid to racial justice in schools? Is education policy in touch with communities of color?

With so many inequities and problems in our school system, it is difficult to cut through to the policies that are most strategic to transforming the learning experience for students of color.

Justice Matters and Linda Darling-Hammond and Diane Friedlaender of the School Redesign Network at Stanford University have released a new study, and accompanying report card, that get to the heart of this issue. High Schools for Equity: Policy Supports for Student Learning in Communities of Color seeks to answer fundamental questions about how education policy can best bring about racially just schools.

High Schools for Equity starts by looking at five California high schools that are giving low-income students of color the kind of education they deserve. These schools interrupt the status quo by providing learning experiences for students of color that are intellectually rigorous, responsive to their cultures, and relevant to their lives, communities, and specific learning needs. These schools connect learning to students’ interests, passions, and concerns.

For example, June Jordan School for Equity in San Francisco offers a course that focuses on the literature surrounding immigration to the United States where students explore questions such as “When do immigrants choose to assimilate? When do they reject conforming to American standards?” Such courses combine college-prep level thinking and skills with content that addresses questions that students and their families confront on a daily basis.

It was important that the study selected schools that took a wide range of factors into account rather than just choosing schools by test scores alone. Test scores are not necessarily connected to the high quality learning experiences that students of color deserve.

After selecting the schools, the study then identifies the policies that are most important to enabling all schools to provide the education that students received in these exemplary schools. Researchers asked what supports were provided by the district and the state that enabled these schools to carry out their work. What aspects of the policy environment were obstacles that the schools had to overcome in order to carry out exemplary practices? What policies are needed to move from a tiny number of isolated schools who are doing good work in spite of the system, to having all schools do such work in part because of the school system?

The resulting findings lay out a policy agenda that can not only move us away from the deep problems in today’s schools, but that also moves us toward a system that is centered on a vision of what learning should be like for students of color and all students. Rather than tackling each isolated problem in our school system in a piecemeal fashion, this policy agenda lays out a coherent set of policies that are most important for getting us to the schools that we ultimately want to have.

Justice Matters has also created a vehicle for bringing the ideas from the High Schools for Equity study into current public discussions on California education policy. Governor Schwarzenegger has named 2008 the “Year of Education.” A clear opportunity for big change has been spotlighted in California education policy, and in response, policy makers, committees, and organizations will be issuing policy agendas. Justice Matters has translated the ideas and lessons from High Schools for Equity into a report card framework for grading these policy agendas.

It is important that policy makers be held accountable for how their actions help or hurt students of color. The Racial Justice Report Card does this. It also brings important ideas into the discussion that are often left out. Mainstream education policy is often disconnected from an understanding of what strong learning experiences for students of color really look like.

Last Wednesday, we gave our first grade using the report card. We gave a C- to Superintendent O’Connell’s draft recommendations for closing racial gaps in education. We plan to issue a grade for the forthcoming recommendations of the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Education Excellence, as well as other proposed policy agendas.

The ideas behind the Racial Justice Report Card grew out of what is happening in schools that are doing right by students of color, and they keep policy connected to how it affects on-the-ground learning experiences.

The report card and the study are two steps in our long-term plan to make education policy focus on racial justice and get connected to the on-the-ground learning experiences of students of color, which we believe is at the center of a better education for all students in California.

Susan Sandler is President of Justice Matters, a San Francisco-based organization that works for racially just schools by developing and promoting education policy rooted in community vision. Justice Matters conducts research, develops policy ideas, and carries out public education activities and campaigns for policy change.

Labels: California

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:14 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Read the report on the best high schools. This is great news for at least some Valley Schools.-Angela

"Students leave elementary school fluent in two languages"
4 schools on border among best in the U.S.
Web Posted: 12/01/2007 12:26 AM CST
Jenny LaCoste-Caputo
Express-News

Four public schools in one of the poorest regions in the country have been named among the top 100 high schools in the country by U.S. News & World Report.

The schools, all in Hidalgo County on the Texas-Mexico border, were recognized for high test scores, their success with at-risk students and college-level course work.

Ten Texas schools made the top 100, including Highland Park High School, located in an affluent enclave of Dallas. But the South Texas schools face unique challenges: Nearly 90 percent of the roughly 363,000 school-age children in the region come from poor homes, and 40 percent come to school speaking little or no English. Just 52 percent of students graduate from high school in four years.

"The lesson seems to be that lots of schools can be great," said Brian Kelly, editor of U.S. News & World Report.
Hidalgo Independent School District's lone high school was the highest-ranked Texas school on the list at No. 11.
"It's exciting," said Eduardo Cancino, Hidalgo's superintendent. "We work very hard every day to provide the best education for every single student, and it's nice to be recognized for that."
     
The other three schools are all part of South Texas ISD, a magnet district that covers three counties in the Rio Grande Valley. Three of the district's four schools — South Texas Business Education & Technology Academy in Edinburg; South Texas High School for Health Professionals; and the Science Academy of South Texas, both in Mercedes — also made the list.

The magnet schools are open to students who live in Cameron, Hidalgo and Willacy counties and provide a focused and rigorous education. South Texas Superintendent Marla Guerra said some students ride a bus three hours a day to attend the schools.

"We've found that our students rise to the occasion," Guerra said. "Our expectations are high. Students take calculus. They take physics. The rigor is there."

No San Antonio schools made the top 100.
U.S. News & World Report is known for its annual college rankings, but this is the first time the magazine has published a list of high schools.

Newsweek magazine ranks high schools each year based on student performance on advance placement and International Baccalaureate tests. Critics say that method doesn't reflect the quality of education for every student at the school.

Kelly said U.S. News & World Report looked at the broad mission of public schools.
"They need to serve the top kids and the at-risk kids and the average kids," Kelly said. "You can have a very good, wealthy school that brings in pretty smart kids and turns out pretty smart kids. They're doing their jobs but they're not exceeding expectations. That's what we were looking for."

The magazine profiled four of the top 100 schools, including the No. 1 ranked Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia, two schools in Boston and Hidalgo High School.

"It's truly important for us to make it known that every single child that enters our school has value and worth, and every single child has potential," said Edward Blaha, Hidalgo High's principal. "Our kids here are as capable as anyone else of success, given the opportunity."

Hidalgo has received national attention for its stellar test results and high college-going rates, despite the fact that it serves a mostly poor, minority population. Last year, H-E-B honored the district during the company's annual Excellence in Education awards, with a $100,000 prize.

The district, which serves roughly 3,200 students, is sandwiched between McAllen and Reynosa, Mexico. About seven out of 10 children begin school speaking no English and many walk to school from neighborhoods of shanty houses and camper trailers that hug the banks of the Rio Grande.

Still, district leaders have adopted a rigid "no excuses" mantra and accessed every resource possible to enhance their schools. Every 3-year-old in Hidalgo has access to free, full-day prekindergarten with a certified teacher.

Students leave elementary school fluent in two languages, and high school students earn up to 60 hours of college credit through a $1.2 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to start an early-college high school program.

South Texas ISD's schools also are unique to the Valley. The district is the only one of its kind in Texas and was created to give kids in the Valley an alternative to a traditional high school setting.

Guerra said South Texas limits its campuses to no more than 700 students. Students are already required to take four years of math and science — something the Texas Legislature recently mandated for all students beginning with this year's freshmen — and juniors and seniors have a chance to intern in professional settings, from engineering firms to hospitals.

"They get a lot out of their education," Guerra said. "It's truly college prep."

jcaputo@express-news.net

Labels: High-achieving, High-poverty schools

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:06 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Experience matters, even after taking degrees into account. -Angela

Last updated December 3, 2007 8:59 p.m. PT

By DONNA GORDON BLANKINSHIP
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS / SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Teacher experience, and not advanced degrees, has a greater effect on how well students succeed, a new state report says.

"In the first few years on the job, a teacher gains considerably in her or his ability to improve the academic performance of students," said the report, issued Sunday by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy.

Combining the results of 15 studies on teacher pay, the researchers found a dramatic improvement in student achievement between one and five years of teacher experience and a more gradual boost in the years following. Student achievement in these studies was mostly tracked through scores on standardized reading or math tests.

A similar analysis of studies concerning teachers getting graduate degrees found that the degrees seemed to have little or no effect on student outcomes.

The report makes a preliminary recommendation that any changes in the way teachers are paid should emphasize financial rewards for experience rather than higher pay for teachers with graduate degrees.

The report was made for a state task force looking at basic education funding. The Legislature assigned the task force to find the best way to pay for education that improves student achievement and graduation rates.

The task force has until early 2009 to make its recommendations, in part because that's when a state court plans to hear arguments on an education funding lawsuit brought by school districts and education organizations across the state.

Researchers at the Washington State Institute for Public Policy are still working on their analysis of the effectiveness of other financial incentives for teachers, such as bonuses for completing a national certification program; proposals for extra pay for teaching in high-poverty, low-performing schools; or higher pay for teaching certain subjects like math and science.

The institute also will study the effectiveness of voluntary all-day kindergarten, smaller classes, professional development for all staff members, focused instructional support and extended day and school year options.

Former state legislator Dan Grimm, chairman of the task force, said it will spend next year coming up with proposals for the 2009 legislative session.

"There are no guarantees, but I think it's a worthwhile effort or obviously I wouldn't be on the task force," Grimm said.

© 1998-2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Labels: teacher quality

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:55 PM 0 comments Links to this post

One would think it unnecessary to re-hash this "debate" all over again but here goes.... -
Angela

December 9, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
All Brains Are the Same Color

By RICHARD E. NISBETT
Ann Arbor, Mich.

JAMES WATSON, the 1962 Nobel laureate, recently asserted that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” and its citizens because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

Dr. Watson’s remarks created a huge stir because they implied that blacks were genetically inferior to whites, and the controversy resulted in his resignation as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. But was he right? Is there a genetic difference between blacks and whites that condemns blacks in perpetuity to be less intelligent?

The first notable public airing of the scientific question came in a 1969 article in The Harvard Educational Review by Arthur Jensen, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Jensen maintained that a 15-point difference in I.Q. between blacks and whites was mostly due to a genetic difference between the races that could never be erased. But his argument gave a misleading account of the evidence. And others who later made the same argument — Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in “The Bell Curve,” in 1994, for example, and just recently, William Saletan in a series of articles on Slate — have made the same mistake.

In fact, the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic.

The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia. This means that for the poor, improvements in environment have great potential to bring about increases in I.Q.

In any case, the degree of heritability of a characteristic tells us nothing about how much the environment can affect it. Even when a trait is highly heritable (think of the height of corn plants), modifiability can also be great (think of the difference growing conditions can make).

Nearly all the evidence suggesting a genetic basis for the I.Q. differential is indirect. There is, for example, the evidence that brain size is correlated with intelligence, and that blacks have smaller brains than whites. But the brain size difference between men and women is substantially greater than that between blacks and whites, yet men and women score the same, on average, on I.Q. tests. Likewise, a group of people in a community in Ecuador have a genetic anomaly that produces extremely small head sizes — and hence brain sizes. Yet their intelligence is as high as that of their unaffected relatives.

Why rely on such misleading and indirect findings when we have much more direct evidence about the basis for the I.Q. gap? About 25 percent of the genes in the American black population are European, meaning that the genes of any individual can range from 100 percent African to mostly European. If European intelligence genes are superior, then blacks who have relatively more European genes ought to have higher I.Q.’s than those who have more African genes. But it turns out that skin color and “negroidness” of features — both measures of the degree of a black person’s European ancestry — are only weakly associated with I.Q. (even though we might well expect a moderately high association due to the social advantages of such features).

During World War II, both black and white American soldiers fathered children with German women. Thus some of these children had 100 percent European heritage and some had substantial African heritage. Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference.

If European genes conferred an advantage, we would expect that the smartest blacks would have substantial European heritage. But when a group of investigators sought out the very brightest black children in the Chicago school system and asked them about the race of their parents and grandparents, these children were found to have no greater degree of European ancestry than blacks in the population at large.

Most tellingly, blood-typing tests have been used to assess the degree to which black individuals have European genes. The blood group assays show no association between degree of European heritage and I.Q. Similarly, the blood groups most closely associated with high intellectual performance among blacks are no more European in origin than other blood groups.

The closest thing to direct evidence that the hereditarians have is a study from the 1970s showing that black children who had been adopted by white parents had lower I.Q.’s than those of mixed-race children adopted by white parents. But, as the researchers acknowledged, the study had many flaws; for instance, the black children had been adopted at a substantially later age than the mixed-race children, and later age at adoption is associated with lower I.Q.

A superior adoption study — and one not discussed by the hereditarians — was carried out at Arizona State University by the psychologist Elsie Moore, who looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in I.Q. between the black and mixed-race children. Most telling is Dr. Moore’s finding that children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families. The environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as favorable for the development of I.Q. as those of middle-class whites.

Important recent psychological research helps to pinpoint just what factors shape differences in I.Q. scores. Joseph Fagan of Case Western Reserve University and Cynthia Holland of Cuyahoga Community College tested blacks and whites on their knowledge of, and their ability to learn and reason with, words and concepts. The whites had substantially more knowledge of the various words and concepts, but when participants were tested on their ability to learn new words, either from dictionary definitions or by learning their meaning in context, the blacks did just as well as the whites.

Whites showed better comprehension of sayings, better ability to recognize similarities and better facility with analogies — when solutions required knowledge of words and concepts that were more likely to be known to whites than to blacks. But when these kinds of reasoning were tested with words and concepts known equally well to blacks and whites, there were no differences. Within each race, prior knowledge predicted learning and reasoning, but between the races it was prior knowledge only that differed.

What do we know about the effects of environment?

That environment can markedly influence I.Q. is demonstrated by the so-called Flynn Effect. James Flynn, a philosopher and I.Q. researcher in New Zealand, has established that in the Western world as a whole, I.Q. increased markedly from 1947 to 2002. In the United States alone, it went up by 18 points. Our genes could not have changed enough over such a brief period to account for the shift; it must have been the result of powerful social factors. And if such factors could produce changes over time for the population as a whole, they could also produce big differences between subpopulations at any given time.

In fact, we know that the I.Q. difference between black and white 12-year-olds has dropped to 9.5 points from 15 points in the last 30 years — a period that was more favorable for blacks in many ways than the preceding era. Black progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows equivalent gains. Reading and math improvement has been modest for whites but substantial for blacks.

Most important, we know that interventions at every age from infancy to college can reduce racial gaps in both I.Q. and academic achievement, sometimes by substantial amounts in surprisingly little time. This mutability is further evidence that the I.Q. difference has environmental, not genetic, causes. And it should encourage us, as a society, to see that all children receive ample opportunity to develop their minds.

Richard E. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, is the author of “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why.”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:40 PM 2 comments Links to this post

For Immediate Release
11/27/2007
Contact: Meredith Brodbeck
NCRP
(202) 387-9177
mbrodbeck@ncrp.org

FOUNDATION GIVING LEAVES MARK IN THE SCHOOL CHOICE MOVEMENT

Report studies grantmakers’ strategies used to promote privatization of public education

Washington, D.C. – The nation’s school voucher movement suffered a set back when their effort in Utah was resoundingly defeated in the state’s recent referendum despite the support from the key republican officials, and the impressive amount of money from within and outside the state that bankrolled an all-out campaign. One of the donors is a D.C.-based foundation.

In a recent article that appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune, the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation reportedly contributed over $200,000 to the school voucher effort in Utah.

“The Friedman Foundation’s involvement in Utah isn’t unique,” said Rick Cohen, author of Strategic Grantmaking: Foundations and the School Privatization Movement and former executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP). “In fact, if you take a look at the numbers, you might be surprised at how much money from private foundations has been poured into building the school choice movement in the past few years.”

The latest report from NCRP, Strategic Grantmaking takes us behind the scenes of the school vouchers and tax credits movement to look at how their efforts are being funded by some of the country’s foundations.

In the study, Cohen identified over 1,200 foundations that gave more than $380 million to 104 school choice organizations associated with advocacy in favor of school vouchers and K-12 education tax credits from 2002 to 2005. The Walton Family Foundation dwarfed all other foundations funders, with $25 million in total grants to these organizations in 2005 alone. The other top five givers for that year include the Lynde and Harry F. Bradley Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. With the exception of the Gates Foundation, which supported these organizations for purposes other than the promotion of school vouchers, these foundations are generally considered to be ideologically conservative.

Some expect an infusion of considerable dollars into efforts to promote charter schools and private school vouchers from the estate of the late Helen Walton, widow of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton.

However, the effectiveness of foundation support for the privatization of public education goes beyond the amount of money being infused into the movement.

“What impresses me the most about these school choice funders is their movement-building strategy,” said Aaron Dorfman, executive director of NCRP. “They’re targeted. They’re organized. They utilize effective grantmaking practices that other foundations can learn from to more build support for other issues they care about.”

In Strategic Grantmaking, Cohen identifies these strategies. One of these strategies is the use of unrestricted general operating support when giving to grantees at significantly higher rates than most foundations. These funders also tend to distribute more than the federally mandated 5 percent of assets, which means more money is getting into the hands of organizations that advance the agenda.

Cohen also found that the leaders of these foundations provide additional support to the privatization movement with personal contributions to candidates, political parties, political action committees and 501(c)(4) organizations.

Washington, D.C. and the states of Georgia, Florida and Vermont have school voucher programs already in place. Utah voters may have prevented their state from joining the list, but many expect other states to continue pushing for their own programs.

Strategic Grantmaking is available for free download on the NCRP Web site. Hard copies are also available at $5 for members ($10 for nonmembers). For media interviews or to obtain a press copy of the report, please contact Yna Moore.

NCRP is a national watchdog, research and advocacy organization that promotes philanthropy that serves the public good, is responsive to people and communities with the least wealth and opportunity, and is held accountable to the highest standards of integrity and openness. For more information on NCRP or to join, please visit www.ncrp.org or call (202) 387-9177.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:17 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This should be really BIG news everywhere. California may be in the balance for the upcoming presidential election based on possible changes to the way that the electoral college votes get counted. -Angela

Republicans form a new plot to rig the 2008 election
By JOHANN HARI
GUEST COLUMNIST
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/


In the long, hot autumn of 2000, the world was shocked by the contempt for democracy shown by the Republican Party. They knew their man had lost the popular vote to Al Gore by half a million votes. They knew the majority of voters in Florida itself had pulled a lever for Gore. But they fought -- amid the confetti of hanging chads -- to stop the state's votes being counted, and to ensure that the Supreme Court imposed George W. Bush on the nation.

Today, that contempt for democracy is on display again. In California right now, there is a naked, out-in-the-open ploy to rig the 2008 presidential election -- and it may succeed.

To understand how this works, we have to roam back to the 18th century and learn about the odd anachronistic leftover they are trying to use now to thwart democracy. Back then, America's Founding Fathers decided not to introduce a system where U.S. presidents would be directly elected, with the votes totted up in Washington, D.C., and the winner being the man with the most. Instead, they chose a complex system called the Electoral College.

This stipulates that American citizens do not vote directly for a president. Instead, they technically vote for 539 statewide "electors," who gather six weeks after the election to pick the president.

The founders designed it this way for a number of reasons. They wanted the smaller states to have a say, so they gave them a disproportionate number of Electoral College votes. They also believed that, in a country that was largely isolated and illiterate, voters wouldn't know much about out-of-state figures and would be better off picking intermediaries who could exercise discretion on their behalf.

It is the worst part of the Constitution, producing perverse results again and again. On four occasions there has been such a big gap between the national popular vote and the state-by-state Electoral College votes that the guy with fewer real supporters in the country got to be president. It happened in 1824, 1876, 1888 and -- most tragically for the world -- in 2000.

Today, the Republicans are trying to exploit the discontent with the Electoral College among Americans in a way that would rig the system in their favor. At the moment, every state apart from Maine and Nebraska hands out its Electoral College votes according to a winner-takes-all system. This means that if 51 percent of people in California vote Democrat, the Democrats get 100 percent of California's electoral votes; if 51 percent of people in Texas vote Republican, the Republicans get 100 percent of Texas' electoral votes.

The Republicans want to change this -- but in only one Democrat-leaning state. California has gone Democratic in presidential elections since 1988, and winning the sunny state is essential if the Democrats are going to retake the White House. So the Republicans have now begun a plan to break up California's Electoral College votes and award a huge chunk of them to their side.

They have launched a campaign called California Counts, and they are trying to secure a statewide referendum in June to implement their plan. They want California's electoral votes to be divvied up not on a big statewide basis, but according to the much smaller congressional districts. The practical result? Instead of all the state's 54 Electoral College votes going to the Democratic candidate, around 20 would go to the Republicans.

If this were being done in every state, everywhere, it would be an improvement. California's forgotten Republicans would be represented in the Electoral College, and so would Texas' forgotten Democrats. But by doing it in California alone, they are simply giving the Republicans a massive electoral gift. Suddenly it would be extremely hard for a Democrat ever to win the White House; they would need a landslide victory everywhere else to counter this vast structural imbalance against them on the West Coast.

You can see this partisan agenda if you look at who is behind the campaign. It was set up by Charles "Chep" Hurth III -- a Republican donor to Rudy Giuliani. It was drafted by Tom Hiltachk -- a Republican attorney. Its signature drive was coordinated by Kevin Eckery -- a Republican consultant.

Its funds were provided by Paul Singer -- a Republican billionaire and one of Giuliani's biggest donors. Its chief fundraiser is Anne Dunsmore, who went there straight from her post as national deputy campaign manager for Giuliani. Seeing a pattern yet?

Indeed, this bias is so blatant that the state Republican Party itself has now chipped in $80,000 to the campaign. Of course, the campaign is not marketing itself as a Republican rigging escapade. They insist: "This initiative is not about helping any one party or candidate. It simply ensures that every vote cast in our state counts in the Electoral College." But the best they can do to provide "balance" is to point to the fact that one of the men who has given them $20,000, Edward Allred, once also gave $2,300 to the campaign of Democratic contender Bill Richardson. Wow.

There is a real risk they could succeed. They are close to getting the number of signatures they need to secure a referendum in June. (The Los Angeles Downtown News claims to have witnessed signature-gatherers offering homeless people food in return for signing.) The turnout for the referendum is expected to be extremely low, because the statewide primaries usually held on that date have been moved forward to February. So the Republicans only have to activate a small part of their base to push it through -- and they have the cash to do it. California dreamin', on such a winter's day.

The Democrats in response shouldn't be trapped in the conservative position of defending the indefensible Electoral College. There is an alternative way to reform it -- one that would be fair to all parties. It used to be thought it was all but impossible to ditch the system because it would require a constitutional amendment, which needs the approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress, plus three-quarters of state legislatures.

But then constitutional scholars realized there was another way. The Constitution only requires that each state must "appoint" its presidential electors "in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct." That leaves a glimmer of hope. The Campaign for a National Popular Vote is campaigning for every state simply to commit its delegates to the Electoral College to vote 100 per cent for the candidate who wins the popular vote.

This would render the Electoral College a forgotten technicality. It's very revealing that when the California state Senate voted to introduce this genuinely democratic system last year, the Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, vetoed it, with the support of his party.

It shows that the Republicans' rhetoric of wanting "fairness" and "equal representation" in California is a honeyed lie. They want a system that retains their power, even if it subverts the will of the people. It risks becoming Florida Part II: Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the polling booth ... Fasten your seatbelts -- it's going to be a bumpy election.
Johann Hari is a columnist for The Independent in Britain.

Labels: California, electoral college votes

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:51 AM 1 comments Links to this post

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has just released the report "Numbers and Rates of Public High School Dropouts: School Year 2004-05"

This report presents findings on the numbers and rates of public school students who dropped out of school in school years 2002-03, 2003-04, and 2004-05, using data from the CCD State-Level Public Use Data File on Public School Dropouts for these years. The report includes high school dropout rates by state, region, school district size, and several student characteristics.

To browse this report and to view, download and print the report as a pdf file, please visit:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2008/hsdropouts/

Labels: Dropouts

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

The NYTimes editorial board has also responded to the unust firing of Ms. Comer. I'm glad her case is getting wide visibility. - Angela
December 4, 2007
Editorial /NYTimes
Evolution and Texas

Is Texas about to become the next state to undermine the teaching of evolution? That is the scary implication of the abrupt ousting of Christine Comer, the state’s top expert on science education. Her transgression: forwarding an e-mail message about a talk by a distinguished professor who debunks “intelligent design” and creationism as legitimate alternatives to evolution in the science curriculum.

In most states, we hope, the state department of education would take the lead in ensuring that students receive a sound scientific education. But it was the Texas Education Agency that pushed out Ms. Comer after 27 years as a science teacher and 9 years as the agency’s director of science.

As Ralph Blumenthal reported in The Times yesterday, Ms. Comer forwarded to a local online community an e-mail message from a pro-evolution group announcing a talk by Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University. Professor Forrest testified as an expert witness in a 2005 Dover, Pa., case that found intelligent design supernatural and theological and definitely not part of a scientific education.

An hour later, Ms. Comer was called in by superiors, pressured to send out a retraction and ultimately forced to resign. Her departure was instigated by a new deputy commissioner who had served as an adviser to George Bush when he was governor of Texas and more recently worked in the federal Department of Education.

It was especially disturbing that the agency accused Ms. Comer — by forwarding the e-mail message — of taking a position on “a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.” Surely the agency should not remain neutral on the central struggle between science and religion in the public schools. It should take a stand in favor of evolution as a central theory in modern biology. Texas’s own education standards require the teaching of evolution.

Those standards are scheduled to be reviewed next year. Ms. Comer’s dismissal and comments in favor of intelligent design by the chairman of the state board of education do not augur well for that review. We can only hope that adherents of a sound science education can save Texas from a retreat into the darker ages.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Labels: editorial

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:03 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Erich Schlegel for The New York Times
Christine Comer, the former director of science in Texas.

I guess there is a thought police.... -Angela

December 3, 2007
Official Leaves Post as Texas Prepares to Debate Science Education Standards

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
HOUSTON, Dec. 2 — After 27 years as a science teacher and 9 years as the Texas Education Agency’s director of science, Christine Castillo Comer said she did not think she had to remain “neutral” about teaching the theory of evolution.

“It’s not just a good idea; it’s the law,” said Ms. Comer, citing the state’s science curriculum.

But now Ms. Comer, 56, of Austin, is out of a job, after forwarding an e-mail message on a talk about evolution and creationism — “a subject on which the agency must remain neutral,” according to a dismissal letter last month that accused her of various instances of “misconduct and insubordination” and of siding against creationism and the doctrine that life is the product of “intelligent design.”

Her departure, which has stirred dismay among science professionals since it became public last week, is a prelude to an expected battle early next year over rewriting the state’s science education standards, which include the teaching of evolution.

Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the state’s education agency in Austin, said Ms. Comer “resigned. She wasn’t fired.”

“Our job,” Ms. Ratcliffe added, “is to enact laws and regulations that are passed by the Legislature or the State Board of Education and not to inject personal opinions and beliefs.”

Ms. Comer disputed that characterization in a series of interviews, her first extensive comments. She acknowledged forwarding to a local online community an e-mail message from the National Center for Science Education, a pro-evolution group, about a talk in Austin on Nov. 2 by Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University, a co-author of “Inside Creationism’s Trojan Horse” and an expert witness in the landmark 2005 case that ruled against the teaching of intelligent design in the Dover, Pa., schools.

“I don’t see how I took a position by F.Y.I.-ing on a lecture like I F.Y.I. on global warming or stem-cell research,” Ms. Comer said. “I send around all kinds of stuff, and I’m not accused of endorsing it.” But she said that as a career science educator, “I’m for good science,” and that when it came to teaching evolution, “I don’t think it’s any stretch of the imagination where I stand.”

Ms. Comer said state education officials seemed uneasy lately over the required evolution curriculum. It had always been part of her job to answer letter-writers inquiring about evolution instruction, she said, and she always replied that the State Board of Education supported the teaching of evolution in Texas schools.

But several months ago, in response to an inquiry letter, Ms. Comer said she was instructed to strike her usual statement about the board’s support for teaching evolution and to quote instead the exact language of the high school biology standards as formulated for the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills test.

“The student knows the theory of biological evolution,” the standards read, and is expected to “identify evidence of change in species using fossils, DNA sequences, anatomical similarities, physiological similarities and embryology,” as well as to “illustrate the results of natural selection in speciation, diversity, phylogeny, adaptation, behavior and extinction.”

The standards, adopted in 1998, are due for a 10-year review and possible revision after the 15-member elected State Board of Education meets in February, with particular ramifications for the multibillion-dollar textbook industry. The chairman of the panel, Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist and Sunday School teacher at Grace Bible Church in College Station, has lectured favorably in the past about intelligent design.

Ms. Ratcliffe, of the Texas Education Agency, said Dr. McLeroy played no part in Ms. Comer’s departure.

Ms. Comer said that barely an hour after forwarding the e-mail message about Dr. Forrest’s talk, she was called in and informed that Lizzette Reynolds, deputy commissioner for statewide policy and programs, had seen a copy and complained, calling it “an offense that calls for termination.” Ms. Comer said she had no idea how Ms. Reynolds, a former federal education official who served as an adviser to George W. Bush when he was governor of Texas, had seen the message so quickly, and remembered thinking, “What is this, the thought police or what?”

Under pressure, Ms. Comer said, she sent out a retraction, advising recipients to disregard the message.

But Ms. Comer, the divorced mother of a grown son and daughter and the supporter of an ailing father, was still forced out of the $60,000-a-year job, she said, submitting her resignation on Nov. 7. She and the agency said nothing about her departure until The Austin American-Statesman obtained a copy of the “proposed disciplinary action” and her resignation letter.

Ms. Comer said that Tom Shindell, director for organizational development, had told her to resign or be terminated for a series of unauthorized presentations at professional meetings and other reported transgressions.

“Tom,” Ms. Comer said she asked, “am I getting fired over evolution?”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/us/03evolution.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Labels: evolution, intelligent design, social science standards

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:18 PM 0 comments Links to this post

A Compilation of Articles from Rethinking Schools

Rethinking Schools Online presents a special collection of articles on one of the most critical issues facing public education today: the role of teacher unions.

This collection includes articles from past issues of Rethinking Schools as well as letters received in response to those articles. The listings provide a link to the online version when available. (If the article is not online, the link will take you to our Order Page, where you can buy paper copies of the back issue the article appeared in using our secure order form.)
Also . . .

Be sure to check out the RS book, Transforming Teacher Unions, a 144-page anthology that looks at exemplary practices of teacher unions from the local to the national level. The 25 articles weave together issues of teacher unionism, classroom reform, working with local communities, and social justice. (See the complete Table of Contents.)

Also see The New Teacher Book, a handbook ideally suited for new teachers, perhaps the only book for new teachers that addresses important issues of race, class, testing, and teacher unions. Teacher unions and school districts have found The New Teacher Book especially useful for new teacher orientation and inservices. For more info click the title.

Listings (updated 5/27/07)

General Background on Social Justice Unionism

Rethinking Teacher Unions: A lot has changed in the 20 years since Rethinking Schools was born, by Bob Peterson. Teacher union activist and Rethinking Schools editor Bob Peterson looks at the past two decades of teacher unionism. (Vol. 20, #3, Spring 2006)

What Will Be The Future of Teacher Unionism? by Bob Peterson A review of United Mind Workers: Unions and Teaching in the Knowledge Society by Charles Taylor Kerchner, Julia E. Koppich, and Joseph G. Weeres, and thoughts about the evolving role of teacher unions. (Vol. 12, #4, Summer 1998)

Social Justice Unionism: A Working Draft -- A Call to Education Unionists by the National Coalition of Education Activists Leading education activists spell out the key components of social justice unionism for teachers. (Vol. 9 #1, Fall 1994)

Which Side Are You On? A Look at Teacher's Unions by Bob Peterson How the historic dual nature of many unions -- on the one hand protecting the needs of poor and working people, and on the other undercutting the interests of some of those very people -- manifests itself in many teacher unions, and why democratic unionists must fight to overcome it. (Vol. 8, #1, Fall 1993)

Letters about "Which Side Are You On?" Readers respond.

Confronting Racism, Promoting Respect by Tom McKenna A program developed by a Canadian teachers union takes on racism, giving students new ways to confront their beliefs and the racial discord in their communities. (Vol. 13, #4, Summer 1999)

The Role of Education Unions in Advancing Public Education keynote speech by Bob Peterson to the Australian Education Union, January 15, 2005 (abridged version from AEU professional journal)


International Teacher Unionism

Teachers in Oaxaca Face Repression and Violence, by David Bacon. As protests against working conditions continue, the Mexican government responds with brutality (Vol 21, #2 Winter 2006/07)

Review of video Granito de arena by Lois Weiner. A film on Mexican teachers presents an activist, hopeful vision of unionism. (Vol. 21, #1, Fall, 2006)

We Are the World, by Mary Compton A call for solidarity among teachers around the world to combat forces of globalization and privatization (Vol. 19 #3, Spring 2005)

Australia Battles Privatization -- An interview with Angelo Gavrielatos, by Barbara Miner. An interview with Angelo Gavrielatos, deputy president of the Australian Education Union. Gavrielatos was recently in the United States to meet with union leaders. Barbara Miner of Rethinking Schools interviewed him on conservative education policies in Australia. They explored the issue of growing government funding for private schools. (Vol. 21 #2 Winter 2006/07 )

Australia New South Wales Teachers Federation (NSWTF) statement on the Iraq war. The NSWTF decision was adopted at that State Council which consists about 300 delegates on Saturday Feb 15, 2003

Australian Education Union statement adopted at the Federal conference of AEU January 17, 2003



Special Tribute to Union Leader Tom Mooney (1954 - 2006)

Tom Mooney - A Teacher First by Bill Bigelow (Vol. 21, #3, Spring 2007)

Ohio’s Children Lose a Labor Leader by Michael Charney who recalls Tom Mooney as "a champion who combined unionism with a passion for public education and the inherent worth of all children." (Vol. 21, #3, Spring 2007)

Union Power for Quality Schools by Mark Simon (Vol. 21, #3, Spring 2007)

An interview with Tom Mooney (Vol. 20, #2, Winter 2005/06)



Professional Unionism

Teacher Quality: Cincinnati's Teacher Union Tackles Quality by Barbara Miner. Despite complexities and shortcomings, the district's teacher quality initiatives are making a difference. (Vol. 20, #2, Winter 2005/06)

Teachers as Learners: How Peer Mentoring Can Improve Teaching Two teachers describe how evaluations by their fellow teachers gave them a valuable new perspective on their teaching practice. (Vol. 12#4, Summer 1998)

The Hows and Whys of Peer Mentoring by Marc Osten and Eric Gidseg. Practical nuts-and-bolts information on how the authors structured and maintained a peer mentoring program in their school. (Vol. 12 #4, Summer 1998)

Teachers Evaluating Teachers By Barbara Miner An earlier look at peer evaluation, the concerns raised about it by some educators and the praises sung by others. (Vol. 6, #3, Spring 1992)



Historical Background

What Happened to the Merger? By Ann Bastian A look at the NEA-AFT merger proposed this summer, why it didn't happen, and where we go from here. (Vol. 13, #1, Fall 1998)

NEA-AFT Unity: History in the Making A Rethinking Schools Editorial This Rethinking Schools editorial, written before the NEA and AFT voted not to merge, lays out some of the opportunities and challenges facing teachers and unions. (Vol. 12#4, Summer 1998)

The New NEA: Reinventing Teacher Unions for a New Era By Bob Chase Excerpts from a speech made by Chase, shortly after assuming leadership of the National Education Association, in which he called for teacher unions to shift their priorities and take more responsibility for the quality of teachers and learning environments. (Vol. 11 #4, Summer 1997)

The New Vision of Teacher Unionism By Bob Peterson Coverage of the controversy over Chase's remarks: Some Wisconsin teacher union leaders feared he was playing into the hands of anti-union forces. Also some thoughts on the evolving "social justice" vision of teachers as union members. (Vol. 11 #4, Summer 1997)

Letters about "The New Vision of Teacher Unionism" Readers respond to the above article.

Chase is Attacked Letters from two Wisconsin teacher union leaders criticizing Bob Chase's remarks. (Vol. 11 #4, Summer 1997)

Chase Responds Bob Chase responds to his critics. (Vol. 11 #4, Summer 1997)


Useful Links

USA links

American Federation of Teachers

National Education Association

TURN (Teacher Union Reform Network) is a union-led effort to restructure the nation's teachers' unions to promote reforms that will ultimately lead to better learning and higher achievement for America's children.

International Links

British Colombia Teachers Federation, a progressive teacher union that has a long history of militant trade unionism and social justice activism.

Education International, the federation of organizations representing over 30 million teachers and other education workers, through 384 member organizations in 169 countries and territories. As the Global Union representing education workers worldwide, Education International unifies all teachers and education workers. Be it a remote village or a cosmopolitan city, Education International promotes the rights of every teacher wherever they are, and the rights of every student they educate. Education International is the voice of education workers worldwide.

The New South Wales Teachers Federation has a long history of militancy and advocacy for social justice.

If you have another site to suggest to add to these links, please contact Bob Peterson at repmilw@aol.com\

© 2002 Rethinking Schools * 1001 E. Keefe Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53212 * Phone(414) 964-9646, or (800) 669-4192, FAX: (414) 964-7220 Email: rsonline@execpc.com

Labels: teacher unions

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