Will Latino voters stand and be counted?

Dave Mann | Texas Observer
February 22, 2008

It seems every election in Texas is accompanied by big talk from political pundits that, at long last, the slumbering Latino vote will become a decisive force at the ballot box. So far, it’s been more promise than reality.

But this year may finally be different. No, really. The campaigns for Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have streamed into Texas ahead of the state’s critical primary on March 4. Both campaigns are convinced that the Latino vote, which will likely comprise a third of the Democratic primary electorate, will be the key to Texas.

For Clinton, the calculus is simple. The Latino vote has been an indispensable segment of her coalition. She carried that vote in Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. In California on February 5, Latinos probably saved Clinton’s candidacy by delivering a critical win in the nation’s largest state. Despite polls showing Obama surging ahead there, Clinton secured an impressive 10-point victory. Latinos made up 30 percent of the vote, a record turnout, and 67 percent went for Clinton, according to exit polls.

The Clinton campaign hopes to duplicate that scenario in Texas. Much of the credit for the Latino turnout in California went to Clinton’s field director, Mike Trujillo, a former staffer for Los Angeles Mayor and Clinton supporter Antonio Villaraigosa. Clinton sent Trujillo to Texas to rerun the California playbook.

Moreover, the Clintons have a long history in South Texas, dating to the early 1970s, when Hillary helped register Latino voters along the border for the McGovern campaign. She and Bill are friends with some of South Texas’ best-known politicians, including former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros.

Garry Mauro, the longtime Clinton friend who’s working on her Texas campaign, has helped with the Clintons’ appeal to Latinos in the past. In fall 1992, Mauro, then-land commissioner, designed a South Texas strategy that forced George H.W. Bush to invest money in the state he called home.

Even Obama’s supporters concede that Clinton has considerable appeal among Latinos. “That Clinton name still has a lot of currency, and Bill Clinton especially is still very much well liked among Latinos in Texas,” said Rafael Anchia, a Dallas state representative who’s helping the Obama campaign reach out to Latino voters. The question is not whether Clinton will poll well with Latinos, but how well.



To have any chance of winning in Texas, Obama will probably have to keep Clinton’s share of the Latino vote under 60 percent. His camp believes he can nibble away at Clinton’s edge in the weeks before primary day. Anchia said that voters in general like Obama more as they get to know him. Obama ads have debuted on Spanish language radio and television stations.

Anchia says the campaign believes that while older Latinos may remain loyal to Clinton, the younger Latino voters in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio will flock to Obama, who’s proven popular with the youth vote. Several young Latino state representatives from urban areas have endorsed him, including Anchia, Trey Martinez Fischer (San Antonio), Norma Chavez (El Paso), Ana Hernandez (Houston), and Eddie Lucio III (Brownsville). And Anchia points out that North Texas has more Latinos than South Texas.

The question is how many of those urban Latinos can vote and will vote in the Democratic primary. Those numbers are difficult to discern — after all, voters don’t mark their ethnicity on the ballot. In an effort to understand the potential Latino impact on the primary, the Observer asked Leland Beatty, an Austin political consultant who specializes in voter identification, to analyze recent Democratic primaries and make an educated projection of Latino turnout [see graphic page 10].

Beatty qualified his analysis by saying that the 2008 primary may attract so many voters that it could be difficult to model. It’s possible the Democratic primary turnout will be double that of 2004. With so many new voters flooding the polling stations, predicting how many will be Latino and how many will be African-American is tough. Based on past primaries, Beatty’s computer models projected that Latinos would comprise 31 percent of the vote. The largest group lives in South Texas, where the more than 183,000 Latino voters make up more than 75 percent of the electorate.

The Latino vote will be the story to watch and could determine who wins the most important Texas primary in two decades.

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

9th Circuit finds flaws with instruction but upholds ruling that set deadline for revisions

The Arizona Republic
Feb. 23, 2008 01:13 AM
A federal appeals panel ruled Friday that English-language instruction law is so flawed that it "may well retard or reverse whatever progress has been" made in the instruction of more than 134,000 Arizona children who are struggling to learn English.

But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said two changes in the measure could bring Arizona's long-running dispute over English-language instruction to a conclusion.

"There is reason, then, to hope . . . that this dispute, which has been in the courts longer than it takes a student to go from kindergarten to college, may finally be nearing resolution," Judge Marsha S. Berzon, writing for the three-judge panel, concluded.

The court upheld a ruling by U.S. District Judge Raner Collins of Tucson, who determined that a law passed by the Arizona Legislature in 2006 failed to comply with a previous court ruling requiring improvements in instruction for English-language learners in the state's public schools. Most are children of immigrant parents who speak Spanish.

Collins has set a March 4 deadline for the state to come up with a workable plan or face potential fines of up to $1 million a day. Evidence so far this session suggests lawmakers have not made much progress toward that goal, although the deadline is less than two weeks away.

The 2006 law would spend an additional $14 million a year on English learners. Legislators face a deficit of more than $1 billion in the budgets for fiscal 2008 and 2009, and have balked at spending more money for English-learner programs.

Legislators have repeatedly said they believe their approach to English-education funding is correct, fair and equitable, and that the 2006 law took the necessary steps to solve the problem.

Some state officials have said they would appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

The court indicated Friday that changes in policy rather than more money would be the key to resolving the case.

Collins had ruled that the law didn't meet federal standards for providing equitable education opportunities. He specifically criticized two components of the state law: that students could only benefit from English-learner funds for two years, and that the state could use federal dollars earmarked for poor students to supplant the state's investment in English learning.

The appellate panel agreed that the Legislature needs to change those two aspects of the law.

In the 91-page ruling, Berzon wrote that a solution is important in part because Arizona's English-learner students continue to lag behind statewide average test results.

"If anything, after 2000, when Arizona moved away from bilingual education and required most courses to be taught in English, regardless of students' language abilities, these challenges have become greater: A 10th-grader, for example, who speaks no English but must pass a biology course taught entirely in English will require considerable assistance," Berzon noted.

The court found that the state law, House Bill 2064, "does not sufficiently address the inadequacies of

Arizona's ELL funding system and, in fact, introduces new problems."

"In short, despite considerable efforts, and some improvements in outcomes, Arizona, as a state, does not appear to have turned the corner on ELL education," the ruling stated.

The case of Flores vs. Arizona, which originated in the Nogales Unified School District, has been continuing for 15 years.

The appellate panel heard arguments on the appeal of Collins' decision in December.

The panel concluded that state officials could resolve the case by abandoning the two-year funding cutoff and declining to consider federal funds in the grant-making process.

Labels: English language learners

posted by Patricia Lopez at 4:52 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Central Texas school districts losing principals to students' peril.

Raven L. Hill , Bob Banta | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
February 11, 2008

Geneva Oliva estimates conservatively that she saw seven principals come and go while her children attended Johnston High School in East Austin from 1994 to 2003. The faces changed with such regularity that she says she didn't recognize the principal from year to year.

"Every time a new principal came in, they'd come up with a new program," she says, "but the new program was never completed because the principals left. What good is it to have good ideas if they aren't there to finish it off?"

School districts nationwide are finding it harder to hold on to principals as standards get tougher and the list of demands from the state and federal governments gets longer.

Statewide, high turnover is particularly apparent in high schools. About 61 percent of high school principals leave their schools or the field within three years; by the fifth year, that figure increases to 76 percent. Austin's turnover rates are slightly higher: 64 percent after three years and 82 percent after five years.

The district's annual high school principal turnover rate is just over 25 percent, a figure that is on par with other urban districts, where yearly turnover tends to average 18 percent to 25 percent.

When the principalship is a revolving door at a school, experts say, it trickles down to teacher retention efforts and school reform initiatives, which have vast implications for a district like Austin, where the 11 traditional high schools are in various stages of reform, with middle schools soon to follow. Local changes have included redesigning high schools to resemble colleges.

"We know that school reform takes time — much more than one year's time," said Ed Fuller, associate director of the University Council for Educational Administration at the University of Texas. "If a principal leaves within three to five years, the principal's vision for reform is left incomplete. Over time, teachers become jaded and simply ignore the reform effort. ... Teachers believe the principal will leave and all of their efforts will be wasted."

Principal flight at some campuses has been extreme: Johnston High went through 11 principals in 12 years before Celina Estrada-Thomas arrived in 2005, the same year that Reagan High in Northeast Austin had four principals in one year.

Education experts, principals and parents say the challenges of urban schools, combined with high-stakes testing demands, are driving the trend.

Nelson Coulter, principal of Hendrickson High School in Pflugerville, remembers when principals only had to be successful politicians to keep their jobs.

Now, Coulter says, they have to be like coaches. "You have to win," said Coulter, a 30-year veteran educator.

More pressure

The accountability system has changed expectations.

"While principals put stress on teachers to improve outcomes, teachers often do not lose their jobs over low accountability ratings," said Fuller, who has analyzed cumulative state turnover rates. "Principals do."

It's not always clear when principals leave whether they chose to walk out or were forced out, but what is certain is that in high-pressure situations at low-performing schools, they often don't last.

Consider the five Austin campuses that have appeared on the state's list of low-performing schools multiple times since the accountability system was enacted four years ago: Johnston and Reagan high schools, Pearce and Webb middle schools, and Pecan Springs Elementary School. Pecan Springs and Webb are no longer on the list.

There have been nine principal changes among them since 2003-04.

"I'm not saying we want to hold on to someone who is doing a bad job for the sake of stability, but I am really concerned about the pressure that is on principals," said Louis Malfaro, president of Education Austin, which represents 4,000 teachers and staff members. "I think it's crowding a lot of people out of school leadership."

Even high-achieving suburban districts, where turnover is generally expected to be lower, have not been shielded from the tumult.

Round Rock lost five of eight middle school principals in 2006 and four last year.

Rosena Malone was among the five who changed positions in 2006, receiving a promotion to assistant superintendent for secondary schools after serving less than eight months as Hopewell Middle School's principal. "We had an unusually high turnover that year in middle school positions due to promotions," Malone said.

Schools that traditionally do well on the state achievement test present their own challenges for a principal.

"The difficulty with running a campus noted for its top test scores is that the bar has been raised very high. You have to get your teachers behind you in order to maintain those expectations," said Linda Watkins, former principal at Westwood High School in the Round Rock district. "You also have a group of parents who ... expect their kids to be ready for college, and many of them are aiming for Ivy League universities. The rigor of the curriculum expected in a school like that is very stressful."

Michael Houser, Austin's human resources director, said the turnover rates reflect increased accountability in the education system. "The job is extremely demanding and even more so with redesign, high-stakes testing and ranking of schools," he said.

Michael Garrison, principal of McCallum High School in the Austin district, said principals aren't alone in feeling pressured to produce.

"It's a challenging job anywhere in the system," he said. "But the benefits are huge."

Experts: Support a must

To improve retention, school districts must provide leaders with adequate support, researchers say, in the form of well-qualified teachers, autonomy, solid mentoring and protection from community and political pressures.

When Brenda Burrell took over Austin's LBJ High School in 2000, some expected her toughest task to be getting the school off the state's low-performing list, which she did in her first year. More difficult to manage were what she called the three P's: "politics, pollutants and parasites."

The former principal recalled the arduous task of balancing the concerns of magnet parents and neighborhood parents and dealing with "sacred cows ... people and programs that are dead but keep hanging on."

Burrell was removed as principal in 2004 in the wake of a school restructuring plan.

Experts say superintendents must be more protective of their principals if they want them to stay. "Just like good principals buffer their teachers from outside pressures, good superintendents buffer their principals from outside influences," Fuller said.

Others say aspiring principals must become more knowledgeable about the realities of the position.

LBJ High Principal Patrick Patterson works six, sometimes seven days a week. That's the only way he can stay ahead of the 75-hour-per-week job that requires him to be building manager, teacher mentor, parent liaison, community builder, cheerleader, disciplinarian and fundraiser.

"If the individual is not willing to work the long hours, if they don't have a family to support them, if the individual is not willing to be at the top — and at the top, you're alone — then this is not the job for them," Patterson said.

The Austin district has for several years partnered with the University of Texas' Principalship Program, a master's degree program that provides training in campus leadership. The district has also raised salaries 15 percent to 20 percent over the past three years. Pay for high school principals ranges from $100,000 to $110,000, middle school principals make $90,000 to $100,000 and elementary school principals earn $70,000 to $80,000.

When principals stay, the difference is obvious, said Oliva, the Johnston parent.

Johnston's teacher turnover has been considerably lower since Estrada-Thomas' stint began, district figures show.

"I tell her, 'At least we know that you are here and that you care about our students.' Even the parents are finally coming out after 13 years," Oliva said.

Labels: principal

posted by Patricia Lopez at 4:42 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out the "California Dropout Research Project" site for the data and briefs.

Also, check out the SF Gate story "Dropout data show most kids stay in school," and comments made by Dr. Rumberger on Bay Area students. -Patricia

A UC Santa Barbara study shows 25 sites, many are charter campuses, account for a fifth of dropouts in the state. The findings are criticized.

By Mitchell Landsberg | LA Times
February 21, 2008

Just 25 of California's 2,462 high schools account for more than a fifth of the state's dropouts, with the problem heavily concentrated in charter and alternative schools, according to a study being released today by UC Santa Barbara.

However, a UCSB researcher said it wasn't clear whether the schools were responsible for the problem or were simply the recipients of a disproportionate share of troubled students. And some educators and school advocates criticized the report -- either for relying on questionable data or for releasing potentially explosive statistics without context.

The report, issued as part of the California Dropout Research Project, used readily available state data to compile a list of every high school in the state ranked by the number of students listed as dropouts last year.

It showed that, of the 10 schools that reported the highest numbers of dropouts, only one was a traditional, comprehensive high school -- and the principal of that school said it ranked so high because of a data error. The rest were alternative schools, most of them charters and all specializing in education for high-risk students who couldn't make it in conventional schools.

Russell Rumberger, a professor of education at UC Santa Barbara and director of the dropout project, said Wednesday that the report wasn't intended to answer questions about why the schools had so many dropouts but rather to give educators a snapshot they could use to map out future research.

"Is the school doing a bad job, or are the kids at risk anyway no matter what setting they're in?" Rumberger asked in a conference call with reporters. Either way, he said, the value of the study is in telling the public, "This is where we should be concerned."

Rumberger stressed that he wasn't judging the individual schools at the top of the list, but added, "If that many kids are dropping out, it's unlikely that you're doing a good job."

That comment angered Buzz Breedlove, director of John Muir Charter School, a Sacramento-based organization that operates programs for at-risk students at 43 locations throughout California. It was No. 1 on the UC Santa Barbara list, with 1,856 dropouts -- more students than are enrolled at the school.

"To reconfigure numbers and come up with a dropout rate of 149%, which on its face is ludicrous, doesn't suggest to me that very much thought went into these numbers," said Breedlove, a former nonpartisan policy analyst for the California Legislature.

More than half a dozen of the schools on the list had dropout rates over 100% because enrollment is based on the number of students attending classes on a single day in October, but alternative schools typically have students arriving and leaving throughout the year.

According to Breedlove, the typical John Muir student is 19, has already dropped out of school two or three times and has completed only 75 of the required 210 credits for high school graduation. The school serves students who are enrolled in several organizations, including the California Conservation Corps.

"I would submit to you that one reason that our students drop out the way they do is that, absent our program, they wouldn't be in school at all," Breedlove said. "They would be terminal dropouts."

Much the same story came from the No. 2 school on the list, SIATech (School for Integrated Academics and Technologies), a San Diego-based alternative charter with seven campuses. SIATech works with the Job Corps to reclaim students who have already dropped out.

Spokeswoman Linda Leigh said a high dropout rate "is one of the pitfalls of trying to recover students who are really high-risk individuals."

The only conventional, comprehensive school among the top 10 was Madera High North in the San Joaquin Valley, listed at No. 9 with 539 dropouts. But the school's principal, Ron Pisk, said that figure was wrong, the result of a coding glitch that occurred when the Madera Unified School District recently switched data systems.

"It's absolutely driving us crazy," he said. "I've been losing sleep over this." The true figure, he said, is about half what is listed in the report.

Four of the schools in the top 10 are charters run by the same couple, John and Joan Hall. Their nonprofit charter, Options for Youth, has campuses ranked sixth, seventh and eighth, and their for-profit charter, Opportunities for Learning, was ranked third. The schools, which allow students to work independently, were the subject of a Times article in 2006 that found they had a poor record of keeping students until graduation.

A spokesman for the organization, Stevan Allen, issued a statement saying it was "not at all surprising that schools specializing in dropout recovery have a high number of dropouts -- just as obesity clinics have higher incidences of diabetes and heart disease among their patients. By definition, we are dealing with a population highly inclined to drop out."

He estimated that the true dropout rate at the four schools ranges from 15% to 35%, rather than the 42% to 49% shown in the report.

Gary Larson, a spokesman for the California Charter Schools Assn., also criticized the UC Santa Barbara report and said it could be interpreted as painting charter schools -- particularly those that specialize in educating troubled youth -- in a bad light.

Charters are independently run but publicly funded campuses that are free from many state and local regulations in exchange for boosting achievement.

Daria Hall, assistant director of the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit dedicated to improving education, complained in an e-mail that the report was based on "state-reported dropout figures that are wildly inaccurate."

As an example, she said that John C. Fremont High School in Los Angeles, ranked No. 16 in the report, has an official dropout rate of 9%, yet it has more than 1,900 students entering as freshmen but fewer than 500 enrolled as seniors.

"Unless almost 70% of the entering class transferred out, and no one transferred in, this school loses more than 9% of its students to dropout," Hall wrote.

Rumberger, the dropout project director, said the data were accurate but conceded that the state's method of calculating dropouts leaves a great deal to be desired.

"I don't think the data are flawed," he said. "I think the data give an incomplete picture."

Labels: California, Dropouts

posted by Patricia Lopez at 4:19 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is worth reading. Different students have different needs in learning academic English. -Patricia


Students speaking vernacular dialects fare worse
By Naush Boghossian | LA Daily News
02/17/2008

Hands shot up even before third-grade teacher Tammi Berman had finished reading a sentence in "Flossie and the Fox," a book written in the dialect of the rural South.

"Yo'self," she read, and eager students waved their hands. "You ain't," she continued, as even more hands shot up.

"You a real fox," she read as more students clamored for her attention.

"I think in academic English, it's `You are a real fox,"' one student chimed in.

For the 21 students in Berman's West Hills Nevada Elementary School class - four African-Americans and 17 Latinos - the lesson emphasizes the differences between "home language" and the classroom.

And it's at the heart of a growing urgency at Los Angeles Unified School District that after more than 15 years of quiet awareness, more now needs to be done to meet the challenges faced by students whose native language is English but who speak vernacular dialects at home.

"Until you tackle language, you will not have academic achievement," LAUSD Superintendent David BrewerIII said.

"I don't care about the politics behind this. I want to make sure children learn standard English."

Rough estimates indicate at least 100,000 of LAUSD's 695,000 students are "standard English learners," comprising the lowest-performing group in a district already struggling with achievement-test scores that lag far behind the state and nation.

While the district's estimated 224,000 English-language learners are usually blamed for the district's low scores, the hidden truth is that students whose native language is English but who speak vernacular dialects at home - such as African-American English, Chicano English, Hawaiian Pidgin English and American Indian language - are, in fact, at the bottom.

These students, also called "SELs," make up a large portion of the district's early dropouts, have the highest dropout rates, and perform far below even English-language learners, said Noma LeMoine, who oversees LAUSD's Academic English Mastery Program.

"We're becoming a little more cognizant of them as a language-learning population, and we're acknowledging them more," LeMoine said.

"We see more and more SEL students aren't doing as well as they should be doing."

Linguists say the question of why children born in the United States into families who haven't spoken a foreign language for generations still struggle with standard English is at the heart of the challenge.

Controversy about the issue flared in Oakland more than 10 years ago after the school board there proposed officially recognizing Ebonics as a language of African-Americans and incorporating it into classrooms to help students learn standard English.

Although unanimously approved by one board, the proposal was abandoned when a new board majority - with different political views - stepped in.

Aside from the political and cultural sensitivities, there also is no simple test or scientific way to determine who needs to learn standard English.

While SELs demonstrate perfectly correct Chicano-English or Hawaiian-Pidgen English, for example, they don't have a mastery of the grammar and syntax of standard English, LeMoine said.

"You see this cycle of failure at school primarily because they're not viewed as language-different," LeMoine said.

With few districts in the nation more developed than LAUSD, Los Angeles school officials now find themselves at the forefront of reopening a potential national debate on the politically and culturally sensitive issue.

LAUSD has implemented an Academic English Mastery Program in 81 schools for students. But so far, LAUSD is one of the few districts in the nation that even has a name for such category of students, indicating "the extent to which people don't want to talk about it," said Carolyn Adger, director of the Language in Society Division at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C.

"LAUSD's program has been out in front for a long time..., and (it) is very well-known," Adger said. "It has the support of the district, and has had for a long time, and in other places you don't have that."

But without provisions in the federal government to provide special funds for SEL students, it's up to district leadership to aid the students.

LeMoine's department has a $3million budget, but professional training for teachers is not mandatory.

School board President Monica Garcia said she's glad the district is finally discussing what it will take to boost all students' proficiency.

"The politics of language in California are something fierce," Garcia said. "This district culturally needs to move away from one-size-fits-all ...

"And we are challenged in developing an instructional program that is coherent and consistent throughout the district and includes the awareness of different needs of students."

Education experts said Standard English simply has to be treated as another language for students to acquire - and that requires professional development for teachers, high expectations for students, reinforcing students' cultural values and building students' academic English vocabulary.

"When we hear students who grow up in families who speak `English,' we expect them to speak standard English, not fully understanding the historical impact," Brewer said.

And teaching cultural sensitivity is a key component since the four populations identified as SEL are "involuntary minorities" or "involuntary immigrants" - groups that were either conquered, colonized or subordinated in the United States, LeMoine said.

Their ancestors generally learned to speak English without the benefit of school - and that's the home language they passed on to their children, experts say.

Pedro Noguera, a professor in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, said the issue is one mired in political controversy and will take money and a sustained effort to address.

"When there isn't the law, then you need advocacy groups, and because parents of these kids also tend to be marginalized, there aren't many effective advocates for these students," Noguera said.

"Linguists have encouraged educators not to treat the language they speak as `bad English' because if the language students speak at home with their families is stigmatized, it makes it more difficult for them to learn Standard English."

Brewer held a summit of educators and linguists on the issue in December, with recommendations including creating course work and certification for SEL teachers.

But the issue also will require political will, LeMoine said.

"We have to come up with strategic ways to help these young people to access the core curriculum," LeMoine said. "If they don't have mastery of the language of school, Standard American English, they will have limited ability accessing the core instructional curriculum."

But Adger said there is little data on programs for teaching standard English throughout the country, making it difficult to assess which approaches are effective.

Teachers at Nevada Elementary said their goal is to validate and embrace the "home language," and that has produced big gains.

Students recognize the differences and frequently catch themselves if they switch to their home language in class.

"When they recognize it, they're not going to write it," Berman said.

"We want them to know that their home language is perfect. Often ... students might feel that their language is being put down."

Although Nevada Elementary does not have a large SEL population - such students make up about 8percent of the school's 600 students - teacher Roseann Harrison pushed to join the program four years ago.

In her 21 years at the school, she had noticed that African-American students scored below the English learners.

"It was something I questioned, but I didn't do anything about it until I heard Dr. LeMoine speak," she said.

Since opting into the program, Nevada Elementary has seen a steady improvement in the test scores of its approximately three dozen African-American students.

From 2004 to 2007, the percentage of African-American students who reached the goal of proficient and advanced in English Language Arts on state tests rose from 27percent to 36percent.

Thirteen teachers at Nevada Elementary now meet three times a month to discuss lesson plans and analyze teaching techniques to meet the needs of SEL students.

And being open and supportive is key, the teachers say, recalling a conversation with teachers from a larger school - with 1,300 students - where only three teachers were participating in the program.

LAUSD trains 4,000 to 5,000 teachers in methodologies to master the language of school, LeMoine said. A conference is scheduled in April to train 2,000 more, she said.

But the struggle of Standard English Learners needs to be a part of a broader national discussion, linguists said, with the understanding that dialects are a way to preserve a cultural identity.

"We always project in how we speak something about our social identity, and that's true of these speakers of these vernacular dialects," Adger said.

"Part of the reason why vernacular dialects persist is because they're very important attributes of social identity."

Brewer agrees about the cultural significance and says that while he speaks standard English - and grew up in a family that spoke standard English - he also can adapt to various situations.

"I can go into a different environment and speak another version of English," he said. "I didn't realize what I was doing."

And that ability is what all students should have, Adger said.

"Being able to shift is quite, quite valuable, and we want to strengthen students' ability to shift like that, so standard English is in their repertoire," Adger said.

"We want them to be just as proficient and comfortable in switching as the superintendent is."

Labels: English language learners

posted by Patricia Lopez at 3:54 PM 0 comments Links to this post

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Feb 21, 2008

Contact:
Laura Anduze
Erica Beltran
(202) 785-1670

Washington, DC – – The National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the National Black Child Development Institute (NBCDI), and Representative Hilda Solis (D-CA) will hold a briefing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, February 26 to urge Congress to provide more support for dual-language programs. Despite the promising results of high-quality dual-language programs, they are increasingly unavailable to low-income students, including English language learners (ELLs) and children of African descent. Representative Solis will discuss the “Providing Resources to Improve Dual-Language Education (PRIDE) Act,” a bill she introduced last fall, and how it aligns with the goals of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Dual-language programs have great potential to prepare students for the changing global job market and to eradicate the achievement gap between high- and low-income children. These programs successfully educate native English speakers and ELLs in the same classrooms by developing students’ linguistic and literacy abilities in two languages while at the same time promoting high levels of academic achievement and cognitive ability.

Labels: bilingual education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:44 PM 0 comments Links to this post

We can learn so much from listening to our youth and how they see the world. -Patricia

By SARA RIMER | NY Times
February 17, 2008

BOSTON — Jinzhao Wang, 14, who immigrated two years ago from China, has never seen anything like the huge mansions that loomed over Long Island Sound in glamorous 1920s New York. But F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, “The Great Gatsby,” with its themes of possibility and aspiration, speaks to her.

She is inspired by the green light at the end of the dock, which for Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire from North Dakota, symbolizes the upper-class woman he longs for. “Green color always represents hope,” Jinzhao said.

“My green light?” said Jinzhao, who has been studying “Gatsby” in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. “My green light is Harvard.”

Some educators say the best way to engage racially and ethnically diverse students in reading is with books that mirror their lives and culture. But others say that while a variety of literary voices is important, “Gatsby” — still required reading at half the high schools in the country — resonates powerfully among urban adolescents, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, who are striving to ascend in 21st-century America.

“They all understand what it is to strive for something,” said Susan Moran, who is the director of the English program at Boston Latin and who has been teaching “Gatsby” for 32 years, starting at South Boston High School, “to want to be someone you’re not, to want to achieve something that’s just beyond reach, whether it’s professional success or wealth or idealized love — or a 4.0 or admission to Harvard.”

The novel had fallen into near obscurity by the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, said Charles Scribner III, whose great-grandfather signed the author with the family publishing company in 1919. It was revived in the 1950s and ’60s when Mr. Scribner’s father, Charles Scribner Jr., started publishing a paperback version and a student edition for colleges and high schools.

Its popularity soared after Robert Redford played Gatsby in the movie in 1974. In more recent years, a musical version made its debut at the New York Metropolitan Opera and the novel has been turned into a hip hop movie, “G,” set in the Hamptons. The book now sells more than half a million copies a year, with high schools and colleges making up the biggest share of the market, Mr. Scribner said.

Jinzhao’s teacher, Meredith Elliott, and other teachers at Boston Latin and other urban schools, say their students see in “Gatsby” glimmers of their own evolving identities and dreams. The students talk about the youthful characters — Gatsby; Daisy Buchanan, the married woman he loves; Tom, Daisy’s husband and a onetime Yale football star; and the narrator, Nick Carraway — as if they were classmates or celebrities.

“I see Tom as this really mean jock,” said Vimin To, a 15-year-old Boston Latin sophomore who is in Kay Moon’s American literature class. “When he was in high school, he was king of the hill. He had it all. He was higher than everyone, even the teachers.”

As for Daisy, in Vimin’s view: “She’s turned into an empty person. Like Paris Hilton.”

Vimin’s father works in a restaurant — “not very glamorous,” Vimin said — and came to the United States as a refugee from Vietnam. Vimin relates to the story of Gatsby’s rise from the backwoods of North Dakota to New York. “It’s a very inspirational tale, especially when you’re from a background such as Mr. Gatsby,” he said.

His version of Gatsby’s dream: “My goal is to make my parents proud of me. I’ve always been told to succeed, to take advantage of the opportunities they’ve given me — just to be financially stable, to be able to support your family.”

At the nearby Fenway School, some of Fran Farrell’s seniors, who read “Gatsby” this year as part of their study of the American dream, found different lessons in Gatsby’s life and violent death.

“I think this American dream is an interpretation of a white poor man’s dream,” Nicole Doñe, 17, whose family is from the Dominican Republic, said during a lively class discussion. “For me the American dream is working hard for something you want. It’s not about having money. My dream is to get an education that I can’t get in the Dominican Republic, to live comfortably.”

Several of her classmates disagreed. “The American dream has a lot to do with money,” said Harkeem Steed, 17, who compared Gatsby to his hero, Jay-Z.

“Everything in this life is about money,” said Melanie Nunez, whose family is from the Dominican Republic. “How are you going to get to college?”

These teachers take pains to present the book with a great deal of social and historical context, and they say it crystallizes for many students questions about both the materialism of Gatsby’s dream and the possibility of attaining their own versions of the dream, especially in today’s highly stratified economy.

“Here’s Gatsby out of nowhere in this mansion, having these lavish parties and really and truly fulfilling the American dream, and that’s very compelling for them,” Ms. Moran said. “But it’s a cautionary tale, too.

“The culture sells the American dream so hard and so relentlessly, but they’re wary, and they should be,” she continued. “One reason students appreciate the book is that there is a level of honesty that they value. They need these honest stories to perhaps balance what is otherwise presented as this shining possibility for everyone.”

During a recent discussion with several other students in Ms. Moon’s class, Will Murphy, 16, whose father works two jobs as a firefighter and an E.M.T., was relating Gatsby’s accumulation of enormous wealth to his own chances of hitting it big in today’s economy. “Getting rich seems so far out of the picture,” said Will, who has a part-time job scooping ice cream. “Everybody thinks about it, but the older you get, the less possible it seems.”

“In other countries, people say, ‘Oh, if you go to America, everything is going to be better,’ ” Will went on. “It’s better, but it’s not as good as you think it will be. You won’t instantly become rich.”

One of Will’s classmates, Ashley Waters, 16, who helps her father with his antique consignment business, agreed. “The American dream is possible, but it’s just really hard,” she said. “Everything is so expensive — the price of college, housing. Look at the price of gas. The economy is going down.”

Shauna Deleon, 16, whose family is from Jamaica, nodded. “The American dream is not open to everyone,” she said. “There are certain pathways, certain gateways.”

For Shauna’s parents, as for the parents of her classmates, one of those gateways is the four-century-old Boston Latin, with its rigorous entrance exams and alumni who include five signers of the Declaration of Independence.

As a sophomore working to meet the school’s demands, Shauna sometimes feels as if her mother’s green light is her. “She puts all her hopes in me,” said Shauna, who talks about becoming a thoracic surgeon. “I have all this weight and responsibility. Sometimes I can’t live up to it.”

A couple weeks later, Ms. Moon and Ms. Elliott wrapped up “Gatsby” and, with “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “The Joy Luck Club” and “Ethan Frome” also behind them, moved on to the next novel on the sophomore list: “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston.

Jinzhao Wang, meanwhile, has been reflecting more deeply about the meaning of the green light. “I’m not an American citizen, so when I apply to college I will be competing with all the top students in Asia,” said Jinzhao, whose parents are teachers and who lives in the Allston neighborhood, across the river from Cambridge and the red brick buildings of Harvard. “I have to set an even higher standard.”

Here, too, she had found inspiration in “Gatsby.” “The Dutch settlers went all the way across the ocean to this new land — America,” Jinzhao said, referring to Nick’s bittersweet reflections that end the book. “America appears to the Dutch settlers as Daisy appears to Gatsby. Gatsby’s hopes and dreams are American ideals. His effort is the real ideal of the American dream.”

“I really want to go to Harvard,” she said. “But if I don’t get into Harvard, I will not die, right?”

“The journey toward the dream is the most important thing,” she said.

And, she added, “There is a green light beyond the green light.” For her that green light is China, where she hopes to use a Harvard education to help the country develop even faster.

Labels: achievement

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:09 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By ERIK ECKHOLM | NY Times
February 20, 2008

Economic mobility, the chance that children of the poor or middle class will climb up the income ladder, has not changed significantly over the last three decades, a study being released on Wednesday says.

The authors of the study, by scholars at the Brookings Institution in Washington and sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, warned that widening gaps in higher education between rich and poor, whites and minorities, could soon lead to a downturn in opportunities for the poorest families.

The researchers found that Hispanic and black Americans were falling behind whites and Asians in earning college degrees, making it harder for them to enter the middle class or higher.

“A growing difference in education levels between income and racial groups, especially in college degrees, implies that mobility will be lower in the future than it is today,” said Ron Haskins, a former Republican official and welfare expert who wrote the education section of the report.

There is some good news. The study highlights the powerful role that college can have in helping people change their station in life. Someone born into a family in the lowest fifth of earners who graduates from college has a 19 percent chance of joining the highest fifth of earners in adulthood and a 62 percent chance of joining the middle class or better.

In recent years, 11 percent of children from the poorest families have earned college degrees, compared with 53 percent of children from the top fifth.

“The American dream of opportunity is alive, but frayed,” said Isabel Sawhill, another author of the report, “Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Mobility in America.”

“It’s still alive for immigrants but badly tattered for African-Americans,” said Ms. Sawhill, an economist and a budget official in the Clinton administration. “It’s more alive for people in the middle class than for people at the very bottom.”

The report and planned studies constitute the most comprehensive effort to examine intergenerational mobility, said John E. Morton of the Pew Trusts, who is managing the project. It draws heavily on a federally supported survey by the University of Michigan that has followed thousands of families since the late 1960s.

A chapter of the report released last fall found startling evidence that a majority of black children born to middle-class parents grew up to have lower incomes and that nearly half of middle-class black children fell into the bottom fifth in adulthood, compared with 16 percent of middle-class white children.

The Pew-sponsored studies are continuing with the involvement of research organizations and scholars. Another report expected in the spring by the more conservative Heritage Foundation will focus on explanations for the trends described in the current report.

Stuart Butler, vice president for economic studies at the Heritage Foundation, said, “It does seem in America now that for people at very bottom it’s more difficult to move up than we might have thought or might have been true in the past.”

Mr. Butler said experts were likely to disagree about the reasons and, hence, on policies to improve mobility. Conservative scholars are more apt to fault cultural norms and the breakdown of families while liberals put more emphasis on the changing structure of the economy and the need for government to provide safety nets and aid for poor families.

“We may well have an economy that rewards certain traits that are typically passed on from parents to children, the importance of education, optimism, a propensity to work hard, entrepreneurship and so on,” he said.

To the extent that the economy rewards those traits, he added, “you’d expect the incomes of children to track more with that of their parents.”

The small fraction of poor children who earn college degrees are likely to rise well above their parents’ status, the study showed.

More than half the children born to upper-income parents, those in the top fifth, who finish college remain in that top group. Nearly one in four remains in the top fifth even without completing college.

Evidence from model programs shows that early childhood education can have lasting benefits, Mr. Haskins said, although the Head Start program is too uneven to produce widespread gains.

In addition, he said, studies show that many poor but bright children do not receive good advice about applying for college and scholarships, or do not receive help after starting college.

“If we did more to help them complete college,” Mr. Haskins said, “there’s no question it would improve mobility.”

Labels: higher education

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

On February 13, College Board President Gaston Caperton and AP Program Vice President Trevor Packer announced findings from the 4th Annual AP Report to the Nation, which include participation and performance data for each state within the context of its population and racial/ethnic demographics. The report also announced that a greater percentage of the nation's students are taking and succeeding on AP Exams, which research shows are predictors of success in college.

Also, check out this EdWeek article by Scott J. Cech titled, AP Trends: Tests Soar, Scores Slip
Gaps between groups spur equity concerns.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:26 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Homeland Security won’t say why the border wall is bypassing the wealthy and politically connected.

Melissa del Bosque | The Texas Observer
February 18, 2008

As the U.S. Department of Homeland Security marches down the Texas border serving condemnation lawsuits to frightened landowners, Brownsville resident Eloisa Tamez, 72, has one simple question. She would like to know why her land is being targeted for destruction by a border wall, while a nearby golf course and resort remain untouched.

Tamez, a nursing director at the University of Texas at Brownsville, is one of the last of the Spanish land grant heirs in Cameron County. Her ancestors once owned 12,000 acres. In the 1930s, the federal government took more than half of her inherited land, without paying a cent, to build flood levees.

Now Homeland Security wants to put an 18-foot steel and concrete wall through what remains.

While the border wall will go through her backyard and effectively destroy her home, it will stop at the edge of the River Bend Resort and golf course, a popular Winter Texan retreat two miles down the road. The wall starts up again on the other side of the resort.

“It has a golf course and all of the amenities,” Tamez says. “There are no plans to build a wall there. If the wall is so important for security, then why are we skipping parts?”

Along the border, preliminary plans for fencing seem to target landowners of modest means and cities and public institutions such as the University of Texas at Brownsville, which rely on the federal government to pay their bills.

A visit to the River Bend Resort in late January reveals row after row of RVs and trailers with license plates from chilly northern U.S. states and Canadian provinces. At the edge of a lush, green golf course, a Winter Texan from Canada enjoys the mild, South Texas winter and the landscaped ponds, where white egrets pause to contemplate golf carts whizzing past. The woman, who declines to give her name, recounts that illegal immigrants had crossed the golf course once while she was teeing off. They were promptly detained by Border Patrol agents, she says, adding that agents often park their SUVs at the edge of the golf course.

River Bend Resort is owned by John Allburg, who incorporated the business in 1983 as River Bend Resort, Inc. Allburg refused to comment for this article. A scan of the Federal Election Commission and Texas Ethics Commission databases did not find any political contributions linked to Allburg.

Just 69 miles north, Daniel Garza, 76, faces a similar situation with a neighbor who has political connections that reach the White House. In the small town of Granjeno, population 313, Garza points to a field across the street where a segment of the proposed 18-foot high border wall would abruptly end after passing through his brick home and a small, yellow house he gave his son. “All that land over there is owned by the Hunts,” he says, waving a hand toward the horizon. “The wall doesn’t go there.”

In this area everyone knows the Hunts. Dallas billionaire Ray L. Hunt and his relatives are one of the wealthiest oil and gas dynasties in the world. Hunt, a close friend of President George W. Bush, recently donated $35 million to Southern Methodist University to help build Bush’s presidential library. In 2001, Bush made him a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, where Hunt received a security clearance and access to classified intelligence.

Over the years, Hunt has transformed his 6,000-acre property, called the Sharyland Plantation, from acres of onions and vegetables into swathes of exclusive, gated communities where houses sell from $650,000 to $1 million and residents enjoy golf courses, elementary schools, and a sports park. The plantation contains an 1,800-acre business park and Sharyland Utilities, run by Hunt’s son Hunter, which delivers electricity to plantation residents and Mexican factories.

The development’s Web site touts its proximity to the international border and the new Anzalduas International Bridge now under construction, built on land Hunt donated. Hunt has also formed Hunt Mexico with a wealthy Mexican business partner to develop both sides of the border into a lucrative trade corridor the size of Manhattan.

Jeanne Phillips, a spokesperson for Hunt Consolidated Inc., says that since the company is private, it doesn’t have to identify the Mexican partner. Phillips says, however, that no one from the company has been directly involved in siting the fence. “We, like other citizens in the Valley, have waited for the federal government to designate the location of the wall,” she says.

Garza stands in front of his modest brick home, which he built for his retirement after 50 years as a migrant farmworker. For the past five months, he has stayed awake nights trying to find a way to stop the gears of bureaucracy from grinding over his home.

A February 8 announcement by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the agency would settle for building the fence atop the levee behind Garza’s house instead of through it, which has given Garza some hope. Like Tamez, he wonders why his home and small town were targeted by Homeland Security in the first place.

“I don’t see why they have to destroy my home, my land, and let the wall end there.” He points across the street to Hunt’s land. “How will that stop illegal immigration?”

Most border residents couldn’t believe the fence would ever be built through their homes and communities. They expected it to run along the banks of the Rio Grande, not north of the flood levees—in some cases like Tamez’s, as far as a mile north of the river. So it came as a shock last summer when residents were approached by uniformed Border Patrol agents. They asked people to sign waivers allowing Homeland Security to survey their properties for construction of the wall. When they declined, Homeland Security filed condemnation suits.

In time, local landowners realized that the fence’s location had everything to do with politics and private profit, and nothing to do with stopping illegal immigration.

In 2006, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, authored by Republican Congressman Peter King from New York. The legislation mandated that 700 miles of double-fencing be built along the southern border from California to Texas. The bill detailed where the fencing, or, as many people along the border call it, “the wall,” would be built. After a year of inflamed rhetoric about the plague of illegal immigration and Congress’s failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform, the bill passed with overwhelming support from Republicans and a few Democrats. All the Texas border members of the U.S. House of Representatives, except San Antonio Republican Henry Bonilla, voted against it. Texas Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn voted for the bill.

On August 10, 2007, Chertoff announced his agency would scale back the initial 700 miles of fencing to 370 miles, to be built in segments across the southern border. Chertoff cited budget shortages and technological difficulties as justifications for not complying with the bill.

How did his agency decide where to build the segments? Chad Foster, the mayor of Eagle Pass, says he thought it was a simple enough question and that the answer would be based on data and facts. Foster chairs the Texas Border Coalition. TBC, as Foster calls it, is a group of border mayors and business leaders who have repeatedly traveled to Washington for the past 18 months to try to get federal officials to listen to them.

Foster says he has never received any logical answers from Homeland Security as to why certain areas in his city had been targeted for fencing over other areas. “I puzzled a while over why the fence would bypass the industrial park and go through the city park,” he says.

Despite terse meetings with Chertoff, Foster and other coalition members say the conversation has been one-sided.

“I think we have a government within a government,” Foster says. “[This is] a tremendous bureaucracy—DHS is just a monster.”

The Observer called Homeland Security in Washington to find out how it had decided where to build the fence. The voice mail system sputtered through a dizzying array of acronyms: DOJ, USACE, CBP, and USCIS. On the second call a media spokesperson with a weary voice directed queries to Michael Friel, the fence spokesman for Customs and Border Protection. Six calls and two e-mails later, Friel responded with a curt e-mail: “Got your message. Working on answers…” it said. Days passed, and Friel’s answers never came.

Since Homeland Security wasn’t providing answers, perhaps Congress would. Phone conversations with congressional offices ranged from “but they aren’t even building a wall” to “I don’t know. That’s a good question.” At the sixth congressional office contacted, a GOP staffer who asked not to be identified, but who is familiar with the fence, says the fencing locations stemmed from statistics showing high apprehension and narcotic seizure rates. This seems questionable, since maps released by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers showed the wall going through such properties as the University of Texas at Brownsville—hardly a hotbed for drug smugglers and immigrant trafficking.

Questioned more about where the data came from, the staffer said she would enquire further. The next day she called back. “The border fence is being handled by Greg Giddens at the Secure Border Initiative Office within the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office,” she said.

Giddens is executive director of the SBI, as it is called, which is in charge of SBInet, a consortium of private contractors led by Boeing Co. The group received a multibillion dollar contract in 2006 to secure the northern and southern borders with a network of vehicle barriers, fencing, and surveillance systems. Companies Boeing chose to secure the southern border from terrorists include DRS Technologies Inc., Kollsman Inc., L-3 Communications Inc., Perot Systems Corp., and a unit of Unisys Corp.

A February 2007 audit by the U.S. Government Accountability Office cited Homeland Security and the SBInet project for poor fiscal oversight and a lack of demonstrable objectives. The GAO audit team recommended that Homeland Security place a spending limit on the Boeing contract for SBInet since the company had been awarded an “indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract for 3 years with three 1-year options.”

The agency rejected the auditors’ recommendation, saying 6,000 miles of border is limitation enough.

In a February 2007 hearing, Congressman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat and the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, had more scathing remarks for Giddens and the SBInet project. “As of December, the Department of Homeland Security had hired a staff of 98 to oversee the new SBInet contract. This may seem like progress until you ask who these overseers are. More than half are private contractors. Some of these private contractors even work for companies that are business partners of Boeing, the company they are supposed to be overseeing. And from what we are now learning from the department, this may be just the tip of the iceberg.”

Waxman said of SBInet that “virtually every detail is being outsourced from the government to private contractors. The government is relying on private contractors to design the programs, build them, and even conduct oversight over them.”

A phone call to Giddens at SBI is referred to Loren Flossman, who’s in charge of tactical infrastructure for the office. Flossman says all data regarding the placement of the fence is classified because “you don’t want to tell the very people you’re trying to keep from coming across the methodology used to deter them.”

Flossman also calls the University of Texas at Brownsville campus a problem area for illegal immigration. “I wouldn’t assume that these are folks that aren’t intelligent enough that if they dress a certain way, they’re gonna fit in,” he says.

Chief John Cardoza, head of the UT-Brownsville police, says the Border Patrol would have to advise his police force of any immigrant smuggling or narcotic seizures that happen on campus. “If it’s happening on my campus, I’m not being told about it,” he says. Cardoza says he has never come across illegal immigrants dressed as students.

Flossman goes on to say that Boeing isn’t building the fence, but is providing steel for it. Eric Mazzacone, a spokesman for Boeing, refers the Observer to Michael Friel at Customs and Border Protection, and intercedes to get him on the phone. Friel confirms that Boeing has just finished building a 30-mile stretch of fence in Arizona, but insists other questions be submitted in writing.

Boeing, a multibillion dollar aero-defense company, is the second-largest defense contractor in the nation. The company has powerful board members, such as William M. Daley, former U.S. secretary of commerce; retired Gen. James L. Jones, former supreme allied commander in Europe; and Kenneth M. Duberstein, a former White House chief of staff. The corporation is also one of the biggest political contributors in Washington, giving more than $9 million to Democratic and Republican members of Congress in the last decade. In 2006, the year the Secure Fence Act was passed, Boeing gave more than $1.4 million to Democrats and Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

A majority of this money has gone to legislators such as Congressman Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who championed the Secure Fence Act. In 2006, Hunter received at least $10,000 from Boeing and more than $93,000 from defense companies bidding for the SBInet contract, according to the center. During his failed bid this year for the White House, Hunter made illegal immigration and building a border fence the major themes of his campaign.

In early February 2008, Chertoff asked Congress for $12 billion for border security. He included $775 million for the SBInet program, despite the fact that congressional leaders still can’t get straight answers from Homeland Security about the program. As recently as January 31, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee members sent a letter to Chertoff asking for “greater clarity on [the Customs and Border Protection office’s] operational objectives for SBInet and the projected milestones and anticipated costs for the project.” They have yet to receive a response.

Boeing continues to hire companies for the SBInet project. And the congressional districts of backers of the border fence continue to benefit. A recent Long Island Business News article trumpeted the success of Telephonics Corp., a local business, in Congressman King’s congressional district that won a $14.5 million bid to provide a mobile surveillance system under SBInet to protect the southern border.

While Garza and Tamez wait for answers, they say they are being asked to sacrifice something that can’t be replaced by money. They are giving up their land, their homes, their heritage, and the few remaining acres left to them that they hoped to pass on to their children and grandchildren.

“I am an old man. I have colon cancer, and I am 76 years old,” Garza says, resting against a tree in front of his home. “All I do is worry about whether they will take my home. My wife keeps asking me, ‘What are we going to do?’”

Besides these personal tragedies, Eagle Pass Mayor Foster says there is another tragedy in store for the American taxpayer. A 2007 congressional report estimates the cost of maintaining and building the fence could be as much as $49 billion over its expected 25-year life span.

“They are just going to push this problem on the next administration, and nobody is going to talk about immigration reform, and that’s the illness,” Foster says. “The wall is a Band-Aid on the problem. And to blow $49 billion and not walk away with a secure border—that’s a travesty.”

Labels: border

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:16 PM 0 comments Links to this post

February 14, 2008

Texas Study Suggests 'No Child Left Behind' Could Hurt High-School Graduation Rates

A recent study of the impact of Texas’ public-school accountability system, which served as a model for the federal No Child Left Behind Act, found that it directly contributed to lower graduation rates in the large urban districts examined by creating incentives for schools to welcome the early departure of academically troubled students.

The study, by researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin, found that the loss of growing numbers of students actually led to improvements in how public schools were rated by the state. That’s because most of the students who left schools were low-achieving — and a disproportionate share were black or Hispanic, or spoke English as a second language — which meant that their departure led to an increase in the schools’ average test scores and created the appearance that the school was closing the test-score gap between white and minority students.

As school personnel became increasingly focused on the potential positive or negative impact students would have on their institutions’ ratings, they took steps, such as holding back students, which helped raise test scores but also increased the likelihood the affected students would drop out, the study found.

“High-stakes, test-based accountability doesn’t lead to school improvement or equitable educational possibilities,” Linda McSpadden McNeil, director of the Center for Education at Rice, said in a news release announcing the study’s results. “It leads,” she said, “to avoidable losses of students.”

The news release said the study had “serious implications” for the schools around the nation covered by the No Child Left Behind Act. —Peter Schmidt

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:29 AM 0 comments Links to this post

from the TFN Daily News Clips:

"I ask you to please network with other educators so that everyone starts paying attention to what is going on at the State Board of Education. If we do not, the right-wingers will continue to interject their narrow and extremely conservative ideas into all aspects of education."

-- Texas State Board of Education member Mary Helen Berlanga, D-Corpus Christi, in a letter to teachers and others this week about the far right's increasing power on the state board. The full letter is reproduced at the end of today's News Clips.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LETTER FROM STATE BOARD MEMBER MARY HELEN BERLANGA
State Board of Education member Mary Helen Berlanga, D-Corpus Christi, has released the following letter to teachers and others who opposed efforts this week by far-right board members to scrap a new language arts curriuclum that educators and experts had been developing for two years. The state board's chairman, Don McLeroy, had said he wanted to replace that curriuclum with an alternative offered at the last minute by far-right activist/education gadfly Donna Garner. TFN received permission to publish this letter in News Clips.

February 14, 2008

I want to thank all the teachers, educators, parents, and citizens of Texas for taking the time to give public testimony before the State Board of Education regarding the revision of the state’s English-language arts-reading (ELAR) curriculum standards on February 13. I was very proud of each and every presenter who supported the formal ELAR document that teachers and experts have been crafting and the continuation of work towards its realization.

Now, we must continue to be vigilant. The members that were promoting Donna Garne’s alternative document and that was a part of the substitute motion introduced by the Chairman of the Board, Don McLeroy, are planning their next move. A subcommittee was selected by the Chair, so we must watch what they do. I am sure of one thing. They will not rest until they have the contents of the alternative document well-entrenched into the body of the work that the English teachers of Texas have been carefully and meticulously developing for the past two years.

What you saw at that meeting is what the other seven moderate board members have been up against since the right-wing members came to power. Know them by what they believe and who they are supposed to represent. Those right-wing board members are: Don McLeroy, Chair (College Station), David Bradley, Vice-President (Beaumont), Rick Agosto, Secretary (San Antonio), Barbara Cargill (The Woodlands), Cynthia N. Dunbar (Richmond), Terri Leo (Spring), Gail Lowe (Lampasas), Ken Mercer (San Antonio). It is not a fight among Democrats or Republicans, but the reckless idea of the right-wing members of the board trying to impose their social agenda into the fabric of education in Texas. Many of these individuals are home-schoolers who do not even support or believe in public education. They believe in promoting charter schools and vouchers, and that is an agenda that undercuts the work of public education.

I ask you to please network with other educators so that everyone starts paying attention to what is going on at the State Board of Education. If we do not, the right-wingers will continue to interject their narrow and extremely conservative ideas into all aspects of education. In a few months we will be discussing the science and biology textbooks. Their goal is to put Intelligent Design in the same science books with the theory of evolution. I think that these two philosophies have merit, but neither belong in the same textbook nor should they be taught as such. Please alert your science teachers of this fact and join the thousands of scientists from around the country who have signed off against this idea. It is not the will of one person or one group that should be heard but rather the will of the people who live in a free and Democratic society.

I want to thank you once again for your dedication and your willingness to hold fast to the courage of your convictions. I congratulate you and wish you all the best in the hard work that you do every day with this precious resource you work with on a daily basis, the children of the state of Texas.

Yours truly,

Mary Helen Berlanga
mhberlanga@bonilla-chapalaw.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Education, the Way It Ought To Be"
by Donna Garner
8.1.07

Excerpts from this article:


RECOMMENDATIONS AND ORGANIZATIONAL PLAN FOR THE NEW ELAR/TEKS
Donna Garner
8.1.07


GENERAL STATEMENTS

The standards in the ELAR/TEKS must be understandable to the general public -- to the typical student, parent, classroom teacher, and administrator.

The ELAR/TEKS need to be specific for each grade level so that true accountability for teaching and learning is clearly established. Under No Child Left Behind, grade-by-grade objectives are required to be established from Grades 3 - 8. Because the Texas Legislature passed SB 1031 (effective 9.1.07) and the Governor has signed it into law, high-school students in Grades 9 - 12 will be taking a series of twelve end-of-course tests. The new ELAR/TEKS standards must be grade-level specific so that the new end-of-course tests can be built on the standards.

The Texas State Board of Education has determined that the new ELAR/TEKS are to be (1) measurable, (2) grade-level-specific, and (3) explicit.

FORMATTING OF EACH PAGE

Because there are two entities in every classroom (the student and the teacher) and each has a different point of view, I recommend that each page in the standards document be formatted into two columns. The left column should tell teachers what elements shall be taught at each grade level according to the curriculum requirements adopted by the Texas State Board of Education. Teachers, however, should not be told how the curriculum requirements should be taught. That decision needs to be left to the creativity of each teacher. The right column should tell students and their parents what the students should learn.

With this simple format, teachers can look down the left column to see what it is that they need to teach; and students and their parents can look down the right column to see what students should learn. By having a simple, easy-to-understand format, stakeholders throughout the state will know what the goals at each grade level are; and the chances of bringing about widespread education reform in our public schools will be dramatically increased.

RECOMMENDED STRANDS

LISTENING AND SPEAKING (Pre-K - Grade 12)

To meet the SBOE mandate, the elements in this strand must be measurable (assessable), grade-level-specific, and explicit.

Because all teachers need to stress good listening and speaking skills to their students, it is my recommendation that the responsibility for teaching these skills should be shared across the curriculum.

I recommend that in Pre-K through Grade 2, listening and speaking should be a part of the language arts in general. In Grades 3 - 12, the emphasis in English classes should be limited to group discussion processes and oral presentation skills. To graduate, all Texas high-school students must take a speech course where they learn and practice the fundamentals of good speech communication; therefore, English teachers (Pre-K through Grade 12) should not be charged with a heavy emphasis on the teaching of listening/speaking skills since students will receive this instruction in their speech communication class before they graduate.

BEGINNING READING AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS (PRE-K - GRADE 2)

Reading should be the umbrella under which the following should be taught directly and systematically in Pre-K through Grade 2:

Children's literature, retelling, singing of rhymes, telling of stories, syntactic awareness (grammar), phonemic awareness, decoding, phonics, fluency, word analysis for purposes of word identification, beginning of general comprehension, penmanship, print concepts, spelling, independent reading, alphabetic knowledge, composing and editing of writing, literary emphasis, inquiry strategies, literary terms, listening skills, speaking skills, word attack skills, narrative writing

IMAGINATIVE/LITERARY TEXTS (GRADES 3-12)

This strand should address fiction, poetry, and dramatic literature. It is important for children to learn to read in Pre-K through Grade 2 and then begin to move toward reading to learn as they move into Grade 3. By Grade 3 students should be reading the great pieces of children's literature for themselves and in large quantities so as to build automaticity, fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, and textual knowledge.

Students need to be taught higher-level reading skills such as drawing conclusions, inferences, fact/opinion, predicting outcomes, making generalizations. The emphasis in the classroom should be on the printed word.

I suggest that each grade level should focus on a specific literary emphasis and on specific literary terms taught in conjunction with the literary selections. For instance, this could mean that in Grade 3, students would read about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. In Grade 4 the emphasis might be on myths and legends from around the world. In Grade 5 the emphasis could be on famous people; Grade 6 could be on classical mythology. Grades 7 - 10 could emphasize literary terms and devices as used in great pieces of American and world literature. English III should emphasize American literature, and English IV should emphasize British literature.

Particularly in Pre-K through English II, English teachers should emphasize what is actually in the literary work and should not attempt to spend too much time on the historical context in which the selection was written.

By English III, however, English teachers should place more emphasis on the historical context of a selection and its influence on the culture. Students in English III and IV should be taught to compare and contrast various works, research the accuracy of information presented by the author, analyze and synthesize information from a variety of sources, and recognize styles and characteristics of major works. Students should be taught to determine the true intent of the author without imposing the subjective interpretations and judgments of the reader.


INFORMATIONAL/EXPOSITORY TEXTS (GRADES 3-12)

This strand should address expository, persuasive, and practical texts (e.g., business letters and envelopes, written instructions, bus schedules, etc.) in written form. Students should also learn the differences between paraphrasing and summarizing. They should learn about quoting and plagiarizing, critical thinking, and critical reading.

VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT (GRADES 3 - 12)

This strand should scaffold vocabulary skills so that they increase in depth and complexity from one grade level to the next and so that they connect with the specialized vocabularies presented in the literary selections.

SPELLING (GRADES 3 - 12)

This strand should emphasize significant spelling rules, word families, similarities and differences in the spellings of groups of words, and specialized spelling lists. A strong emphasis on the spellings and meanings of homophones should be taught at each grade level.

COMPOSITION (GRADES 3-12)

This strand should address expository, persuasive, practical, and "creative" writing with grade-by-grade development of the elements of composition. Students should be taught a steady progression of skills which move learners from writing correct words to correct phrases, sentences, paragraphs, compositions, and research papers.

Before students are taught how to write multi-paragraph compositions, they need to learn the fundamental parts of a good paragraph (e.g., audience, topic sentence, supportive ideas, conclusion, transitional devices, coherence, and point of reference when appropriate). Then they need to be taught how to progress from a good paragraph into a multi-paragraph composition, making sure students understand how a topic sentence in a paragraph transitions into a thesis statement in a composition.

Students must be taught the four writing genres (i.e., narrative, descriptive, expository, and persuasive) and their distinctive characteristics, helping students to develop facility to utilize each of the four types at will.

Under the narrative genre, students should learn such concepts as author's point of view, theme, audience, narrator, dialogue, development of characters, structure of paragraphs, outlining, plot, setting, foreshadowing, chronological order, and sequencing.

Under descriptive writing, students need to learn the use of vivid verbs, mood, order of importance, gathering details, chronological/spatial/logical order, figures of speech, similes/metaphors, descriptive adjectives, the use of sensory details, and logical order.

Expository writing must be text-based (i.e., reading-based) with evidence provided from something a person has analyzed (e.g., factual phenomena in science or history). Students must be taught the differences between expository and persuasive writing so that they do not insert their personal feelings, emotions, and/or opinions into expository writing. They also must learn to use third-person pronouns in their expository compositions.

Under expository writing, students need to learn to establish the credibility of sources, fact/opinion, source attribution, plagiarizing, paraphrasing/summarizing, and supportive details. Learners also need to learn a step-by-step progression of research skills which can start with simple steps in Grade 3, culminating in the literary criticism/analysis research paper in English IV.

Under persuasive writing, students need to learn the persuasive writing strategies such as sensory images/explicit words, action verbs, descriptive adjectives and adverbs, defining terms, giving accurate information, exaggeration, drawing attention to similarities and differences, examples, metaphors, personification, indirect references, description of personal qualities, personal stories, dialogue, and comparison of two sets of ideas/situations/things.

GRAMMAR AND USAGE (GRADES 3 - 12)

This strand should address a competency-based, formal study of grammar and usage (e.g., punctuation, capitalization, spelling, syntax) which increases in depth and complexity from one grade level to the next.

Because of its tightly sequenced elements, I recommend the use of the grammar strand found at http://www.educationnews.org/Curriculum/TAD/tad_download_area.htm . (Please scroll down to Subchapter D, Teachers' Supplementary Guide, 110.55. Grammar, Grades 4-12.) Since the writers of this grammar strand have claimed no authorship or copyright privileges and the strand is free for the taking, the writers of the new ELAR/TEKS should import this grammar strand directly into the new standards.

RESEARCH PROCESS AND PRODUCT (GRADES 3-12)

I am torn about naming this a separate strand. I really believe the skills taught here should go under expository writing and should build at each grade level until students are finally able to write a well-written research paper.

The problem with having a separate Research strand is that the ELAR/TEKS writers will have to make sure the Research strand elements are aligned exactly with the Composition strand elements. If they do not align exactly, students might find themselves being required to write something for which they have not had suitable prerequisite instruction.


LINK TO RECOMMENDED LITERARY SELECTIONS (TEXAS ALTERNATIVE DOCUMENT)

Please see the list of recommended literary selections (Pre-K through Grade 12) at http://www.educationnews.org/Curriculum/TAD/tad_download_area.htm . (To see the complete list, please go to Subchapter D, Teachers' Supplementary Guide, 110.52. Reading Pre-Kindergarten - Grade 3 AND to 110.53. Reading and Literature, Grades 4 - 6.)

The only changes I would make would be to add pieces of Biblical literature at each grade level which would prepare students for literary allusions and themes which are so common in classical pieces of literature and on college-readiness tests (e.g., Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, ACT, SAT, CLEP exams): David and Goliath, The Parable of the Good Samaritan, Noah's Ark, The Tower of Babel, Joseph and His Coat of Many Colors, The Parable of the Prodigal Son, Jonah and the Whale, The Parable of the Lost Sheep, selections from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), New Testament, King James Bible.

Students must also know these Biblical allusions to be equipped for college courses: The Journey in Canterbury Tales; The Fall in Paradise Lost; The Quest in Idylls of the King; the battle between Good and Evil in Paradise Lost; Heaven vs. Hell in The Divine Comedy; Fire vs. Ice in Dante's Inferno; the archetype of the Hero as seen in Joseph, Moses, Elijah, Jesus Christ; the Devil Figure called Satan; The Woman Figure (The Platonic Ideal) inspired by the Virgin Mary; The Trinity, The Cross, Temptation/Sin, Forgiveness/Redemption, Obedience/Punishment, Creation, God as a Power, Angels/Devils, Heaven/Hell, Twelve Tribes and Apostles, Self-sacrifice, Forbidden Knowledge, Courage in the face of great danger, Value of Suffering, Prejudice (racial, political, and religious), Human Nature, Faith in Human Nature, Triumph from Adversity, Poetic Justice, and other Biblical archetypes and themes.

Labels: far right, Texas State Board of Education

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:47 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Click the link above to check out the coverage and interview. I also strongly encourage reading the full article: "Avoidable Losses: High-Stakes Accountability and the Dropout Crisis." Very thoughtful and well supported research. Personal props to Dr. Heilig. -Patricia

By Carolyn Campbell / 11 News
February 14, 2008

Keyla Aguilar is working harder in all of her classes these days.

Joshua Tenorio is doing the same.

Why?

Well, they’re both getting a second chance to graduate from high school.

You see, before coming to Raul Yzaguirre School for Success, Keyla had dropped out of the public high school she was attending, and Joshua was close to it. “The school was overcrowded like a lot of classes were 30, 40 students.”

Joshua says he wasn’t able to get the personalized help he needed.

Teenage complaint perhaps, but his claim is supported in a new study by Rice University and the University of Texas.

The study links Texas’ high dropout rate to the states’ accountability system “No child left behind.”

So, the very program designed to make sure kids perform better may actually be pushing them out.

“The system as its constructed doesn’t provide incentives for keeping them in because these are the very kids who are gonna score the lowest on the tests,” said Eileen Coppola with Rice University.

According to the study, every year, Texas public high schools lose at least 135,000 students before graduation.

“We get a lot of those kids because they need a smaller campus, smaller classroom so that more attention ca be provided them,” said school principal Richard Farrias.

Researchers hope this new report will help educators do more to make sure all students are successful.

Labels: Dropouts, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 3:15 PM 0 comments Links to this post

The study appears to be restating what other research has shown in terms of less experienced teachers serving high poverty schools of color. I was a little upset that the report doesn't make any mention to the teaching needs of English language learners or Special Ed students. Check out the report: “Their Fair Share: How Texas-Sized Gaps in Teacher Quality Shortchange Low-Income and Minority Students” -Patricia


Jennifer L. Berghom | The Monitor
February 14, 2008

Students attending schools with higher poverty rates and minority populations are more likely to have less experienced teachers, according to a statewide study.

Five Rio Grande Valley school districts — Brownsville, Edinburg, La Joya, McAllen and Pharr-San Juan-Alamo — were included in the study from The Education Trust, which compared teacher experience and pay at 50 of the state’s largest school districts.

But area officials wonder how the study can decipher which campuses are “low poverty” or “high minority,” because their districts are homogeneous. The vast majority of students attending schools in the Valley are Hispanic and most school districts serve high percentages of low-income students.

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” said Brownsville schools Assistant Superintendent Susan Fox.

The study — “Their Fair Share: How Texas-Sized Gaps in Teacher Quality Shortchange Low-Income and Minority Students” — compared the average income among teachers working in schools with the highest and lowest poverty rates, as well as those with the highest and lowest percentages of minority students. It also looked at teacher turnover rates over a five-year period.

And it looked at how many children in each school of each district received free or reduced lunch or other public assistance to determine the lowest to highest poverty schools. Student populations at each school were also reviewed to determine which ones served the highest and lowest percentages of minority students.

The study shows students attending schools serving low-income families and a large percentage of minorities are more likely to employ less experienced teachers, as well as those who are not certified in the subjects they teach. It also indicates teachers working in those schools, on average, earn less than their counterparts at more affluent schools with fewer minority students.

The data proves that school districts throughout the state continue to assign newer teachers to schools where there are more low-income and minority students, said Heather Peske, director of teacher quality at The Education Trust.

“It’s not a good strategy to assign new teachers (to schools) with students who need experienced teachers the most,” Peske said. “It’s not doing anything to close the achievement gaps.”

Local school leaders said they don’t assign new teachers to schools. Instead, individual campus principals hire new teachers based on their open campus positions.

There are teachers who want to stay in some schools and others who want to transfer out once an opening is available at another campus, said Edinburg schools Personnel Management Systems Supervisor Margarita Oyervides.

Teaching slots are based on student populations, so schools with more students will have more available teaching positions. Every April teachers are given a two-week window to request a transfer to another school. The principals of the schools where they currently teach have to approve the transfer and teachers have to apply and interview with the school where they want to work, Oyervides said.

“What we do not want to see at a campus … (is) for them to have teachers wanting to leave,” she said.

To help teachers and schools, the district offers gas stipends for teachers who have to travel farther to the schools where they work. It also started a district-wide mentoring program for new teachers to encourage them to stay in the teaching field, Oyervides said.

“We’re trying to give teachers what they need,” she said.

Labels: Region 1, teacher quality

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

Wow! This is amazing. This is really great news. The battle over vouchers in the legislature probably gets to take a break. Not that the battle isn't worth fighting, but rather that it has consumed way too much time and effort over the past decade when attention can and should be given to other issues. On the positive side, though, I would say that if there's any issue that unites everybody—lay public, teachers, civil rights groups, and teacher and administrator associations—it's vouchers. This means that at least to some degree, these divergent strands of the community have come together, face to face. All need to take a bow—and be on guard....

Angela

Jenny LaCoste-Caputo / 02/13/2008
Express-News
San Antonio parents who send their kids to Catholic schools using privately funded vouchers are reeling from a sucker punch they didn't see coming.
Quietly, and with little fanfare, the Children's Education Opportunity Foundation of San Antonio began notifying parents a few weeks ago that the program would end with this school year.

CEO San Antonio is the sister program to Horizon, a voucher program for kids in the Edgewood Independent School District. Both are funded by San Antonio businessman James Leininger, arguably the state's biggest support of school vouchers.

Jessica Almanza has sent her daughter Jenna to St. Leo the Great Catholic School with a CEO voucher for the past five years. She said she'd find a way to keep her daughter there.

"My first thought was, 'What are we supposed to do now?' This is our choice. Are we supposed to abandon our choice?" Almanza said. "I'm not saying public schools are bad, but this is what's right for my daughter."

Horizon, the better known of the two programs, was billed as a decadelong experiment to prove that vouchers not only will help students who use them to go to private schools, but also improve public schools by providing competition. It currently serves 1,703 Edgewood students and is scheduled to end this year.

But CEO, which serves almost 700 students, has been available for students all over San Antonio and pays up to $1,500 a year in tuition assistance — just under half of the cost of most Catholic schools' tuition on the South Side. The program wasn't scheduled to end this year and it left parents, and Catholic school leaders, surprised.

"We thought CEO was going to continue indefinitely," said Carol Johnson, principal of St. Leo's, where 43 of 186 students use CEO vouchers. "Parents have considered it a blessing that CEO was there for them. Otherwise a private-school education would be beyond their means."

Jessica Sanchez, CEO director, said the scheduled end of the Horizon program had a huge influence on the decision to close CEO. She said rising operating costs also were a factor.

Voucher critics speculate that shuttering CEO and Horizon might mean the end of the voucher debate in Texas. Leininger, who has spent $50 million funding the programs, long has lobbied for a publicly funded voucher program.

During the 2005-06 election cycle, Leininger spent nearly $5 million, targeting five Republican lawmakers who voted against taxpayer-funded vouchers, and supporting their challengers in primary elections. Two of those five lost their seats.

But Ken Hoagland, a spokesman for Leininger, said they're not giving up. They'll continue to lobby for a publicly funded voucher program at the grass-roots level as well as reach out to legislators that represent inner-city districts, Hoagland said.

"Dr. Leininger's hope was that when state legislators saw the results of letting parents choose any school they wanted for their child that they would see this is a reasonable solution to the high drop-out rates in public school," Hoagland said, pointing out that more than 90 percent of students in the Horizon and CEO programs not only graduated from high school but went on to college. "Even those results were not enough to convince the legislators of the virtues of school choice."

Hoagland said Democrats in other states are beginning to warm to the idea of school choice — a broad spectrum that includes charter schools and voucher programs. He still hopes to convince lawmakers, Democratic and Republican, that vouchers are a good idea.

"We're just going to keep trying and not make this a partisan issue," Hoagland said. "Really, his (Leininger's) passion is for the children not the politics. Dr. Leininger has tried to win this by putting lots of money in the election process."

Now the focus is on a more grass-roots effort, he said.

Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network that opposes school vouchers, said there's no indication Leininger's experiment made things any better for students left in public schools. She said the steady academic improvement in Edgewood ISD over the past decade began before the voucher programs were launched.

"All along, Dr. Leininger intended his privately funded vouchers to spur a publicly funded program and all of those efforts have flopped in legislative sessions," Miller said. "I think it's clear that Texans don't want vouchers, and it's been clear in every legislative session for a decade."

jcaputo@express-news.net

Labels: Vouchers

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:09 PM 0 comments Links to this post

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/351030_schoolreform13.html

Teachers key to school reform
Last updated February 12, 2008 5:12 p.m. PT

MICHAEL HUREAUX AND ROBERT FEMIANO
GUEST COLUMNISTS

The trouble with education, we are told by school reform pundits, is the teachers. Often composed of business and legislative leaders, these "reform" platforms begin by claiming the teacher is the most predictable factor of student success. From this they infer the reverse to be true: If students do not succeed, it is the teacher who needs fixing. One high-profile example of this thinking is the No Child Left Behind Act, which calls for "highly qualified" teachers in every classroom. If a school does not "perform" under NCLB, eventually all teachers can be replaced. The euphemism is "reconstitution."

But the feds are not alone in placing the blame on teachers. Educational consultants argue similarly, including the company recently hired by the Gates Foundation for Seattle Public Schools, McKinsey and Co. In their 2006 Report to Ohio Board of Education, (also funded by Gates) the consultants focused their proposals to "address the single-most important factor affecting student achievement: teacher quality." The teachers' union, the Seattle Education Association, recently voted against participating in the audit.

If teachers are the problem, logical suggestions for fixes include market driven solutions, such as merit pay and demotions. Other remediation might require district training, instructional coaches, teacher-proof curricula and tougher evaluations. These fixes assume teachers are lazy, uncaring and incompetent and ignore the fact that most teachers want the best for their students and are motivated out of concern and professionalism, not fear and money.

What about the role of curriculum? Can its impact on student achievement be minimized?

Teacher wisdom would echo the garbage in, garbage out parlance. For example, if a district mandates a curriculum that is a mile wide and inch deep (as in many exploratory math programs), is it reasonable to expect a thorough understanding? Some curriculums go further and dictate the method of teaching as well as content. More and more districts are adopting scripted programs for reading and math and even science kits. Under such circumstances where a teacher's professional judgment is usurped by the publisher's lesson plan, or a district's pacing guide, it would seem illogical to insist the teacher is the most important catalyst in student achievement.

Teachers long have asserted the most significant factor in helping students is class size. In a classroom of 27 second-graders, some are just learning English, some have special education requirements, some qualify for gifted programs, some have unresolved emotional issues resulting in periodic disruptive behaviors or withdraws, one is homeless and another is awaiting the provision of free eyeglasses. With such a caseload, just how effective can one teacher be in challenging each student to reach his fullest potential?

Contrary to what reformers suggest, there is reliable research in support of the adage "as the twig is bent, so grows the tree." The most important study, the Tennessee STAR project, followed the effect of small classes in the first three grades. The findings suggest small classes (17 pupils) are more effective academically than larger classes (22+) overall with the greatest advantage seen for urban minority students. This 12-year longitudinal study show that the early gains lasted through the high school years. Similarly, a 1999 federal education publication What do we know about class size? notes, "a consensus of research indicates that class size reduction in the early grades leads to higher student achievement."

Gov. Chris Gregoire's recent Washington Learns Commission report also placed emphasis on lowering class size for K-3 grades. In Seattle, the philanthropic funding of the district's "New School" has created Washington Learns class sizes and both test scores and parent demand show it is working. Last month, the SEA passed a motion urging the governor's Funding Review Commission to identify the funding stream to implement the class size reductions in this upcoming biennium, as directed by the 2007 Legislature.

It is time to stop blaming and start trusting teachers. Along with the prescription of Washington Learns for smaller class sizes in the early years of schooling, give us the ability to tailor curriculum to the learner and watch families flock back to public schools.

Michael Hureaux has taught in public and private schools in numerous urban areas. Robert Femiano, Washington State Presidential Math Teacher of Year 2002, has taught in Seattle public elementary schools for 24 years.

© 1998-2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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

What a sad day for both Austin and the greater Activist community. The following is from an email. -Patricia

"A Tender Warrior Fell Today..."
Saludos desde Resistencia Bookstore, Casa de Red Salmon Arts,

It is with great sadness we inform all of our community supporters,
comrades, familia and colegas about the passing of our elder, teacher,
father, chicanindio, and poeta revolutionario raúlrsalinas.

As you may know, for the past couple of years, raúl has been struggling with
his health. We understand that it's difficult for us to let him go, but
since the beginning of the year his health continued to be a major
challenge. Unfortunately, his body just could not take the strain and was
deteriorating at a rapid pace. Even though he has left this realm and it's a
great loss para nuestro pueblo, his spirit is strong and lives on in all of
us.

As his family provides more information, we will share it with everyone. For
now this is just a notification of the passing of our brother. We will
notify you about where you can send condolences, flowers, and cards as we
get more information. An altar has been created in front of the bookstore
on South First St. in Austin, Texas for now. We thank everyone for their
good energy and support and prayers in this time of loss and mourning.

CON RESPECTO Y EN LUCHA,

Rene Valdez


Long-time teacher impacted Austin.

By Omar L. Gallaga
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Austin poet and activist Raúl Salinas has died.

The author and longtime fixture at South Austin's La Resistencia Bookstore wrote several influential books of Chicano poetry, including "East of the Freeway: Reflections de mi Pueblo," and "Un Trip Through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions."

His most recent book, "raúl salinas and the Jail Machine: Selected Writings of raúl salinas" was published in 2006 by University of Texas Press.

The bespectacled, pony-tailed writer, born in 1934 in San Antonio, aligned himself with the Beat poets and had used stints in prison that began in 1957 on drug-related charges in California, as fodder for his work.

The poet said he was reborn in prison, where he said he got in touch with his "Native spirituality and indigenous self."

He would go on to teach many writing and social activism classes, whether it was at schools such as St. Edwards University or at juvenile detention centers across the country.

Salinas was actively involved in city politics and also played host at La Resistencia, which opened in 1981, to art and spoken-word events. The cultural group he created, Red Salmon Arts, continues to host performances and artist events.

He told the Spanish newspaper ¡ahora sí! in 2005, "This is my world," Salinas says, "I have to navigate it. I've always combined my art, my politics, my spirituality, as part of my total being."

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:57 PM 1 comments Links to this post

**NEWS RELEASE**

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 12, 2008

CONTACT: Gary Orfield (310) 267-5562 or Cynthia Valenzuela (213) 629-2512

CRP-MALDEF MANUAL TO HELP LEGALLY PROMOTE DIVERSITY AND AVOID
INCREASING SEGREGATION OF LATINO STUDENTS IN OUR NATION?S PUBLIC SCHOOLS

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and
the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (CRP/PDC) announce
the release of Preserving Integration Options for Latino Children: A
Manual for Educators, Civil Rights Leaders, and the Community. Both
groups plan to help educators and communities find ways to preserve
integration options consistent with the limitations imposed by the
Supreme Court in last June's decision in the cases from Louisville and
Seattle. The Manual outlines the history of segregation and racial
isolation that Latinos have experienced, the legal struggles they have
waged, and the consequences for children and communities. Its goal is
to provide valuable guidance about how school districts and
communities can promote racial diversity and protect educational
opportunities for Latino children in schools nationwide. This
resource is being issued on the heels of the Supreme Court's June 2007
decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School
District No. 1(PICS), which limited the ability of school districts to
take race into account in providing options for integrated education.

The Manual addresses the practical questions of what educators, civil
rights leaders, and communities can now do to promote diversity and
address the harms of racial isolation in their schools. The guide
includes:

• The history of educational discrimination in the Latino Community;
• The educational consequences of segregation and racial isolation for Latinos;
• The main issues involved in the Supreme Court's Parents Involved decision;
• How the Supreme Court?s ruling affects schools nationwide, and
• Viable options for promoting diversity and avoiding racial isolation
in K-12 students assignment plans after the Seattle/Louisville cases.

This is a critical time for communities and school districts seeking
to move forward after the Parents Involved decision. The Manual
recommends that communities now under court orders remain under them
until there has been complete and successful compliance with the court
order. School districts under court order to desegregate are not
affected by the PICS decision. For communities not under court
orders, it outlines both what is still clearly authorized and what is
clearly forbidden in terms of race-conscious policy. It also points
out that communities have clear rights to use any factor other than
race or ethnicity in assigning schools, and that some factors, such as
language, could offer substantial benefits. The Manual proposes that
communities consider ways to not only review the options in light of
local conditions but also to think about plausible opportunities using
other criteria. An example cited in the Manual is the dual-immersion
language program that provides both English- and Spanish-speaking
students a fluent knowledge of two languages in integrated classes,
rendering a powerful educational program that incorporates both
diversity and clear educational advantages for all children.

The Manual provides accurate and up-to-date information along with a
step-by-step guide for how schools can strengthen diversity and expand
opportunity for schoolchildren. It was produced with generous support
from the Open Society Institute.

To download the Manual or for additional information, please visit the
CRP/PDF website at www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu or email
crp@ucla.edu.

MALDEF attorneys are available to consult with school
authorities, community members and parents.
Call (213) 629-2512 or visit www.maldef.org.

Labels: Civil Rights, segregation

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:51 PM 0 comments Links to this post

It's so nice to read pieces like these in these times of rancorous debate over immigration.

-Angela

February 5, 2008
Pride and Prejudice
By Laura Reasoner Jones

It was a crisp cold fall day. At 8:40 a.m., I waited in front of the school on morning bus duty. Eduardo, one of the 5th grade safety patrols, walked down the sidewalk with his clipboard and stopwatch, ready to note the bus arrival times. He stopped in front of me, smiled, and pulled his neon green safety patrol belt out of his jacket. “Look!”
My eyes locked on the gold-colored safety patrol badge on his belt. I was instantly transported back in time 40 years to a high-ceilinged gritty green elementary classroom in Indianapolis, and the memory of my younger brother Mark.
The announcement came over the ceiling PA system on Friday afternoon:

“The gold badge will be worn next week by (long pause) Mark Reasoner.”

Applause from the classrooms and glances my way—he was my brother after all, and he had won it again. In our large K-8 elementary school, two boys (girls were not allowed to be patrols) earned the gold badge every week. They had to show exemplary behavior and responsibility on their patrol posts. To those of us not privileged or male enough to be patrols, it was a big mystery, sort of like a lodge membership.
When Eduardo shyly asked me the next day why I was so impressed by his gold badge, I told him about the memory of my “little brother” and what an honor earning the gold badge had been for him. Eduardo asked, “Did you ever earn the gold badge?”

I tried hard to keep the scorn out of my voice as I said, “Girls were not allowed to be patrols.” I could see the puzzlement in his face — and the questions: You were young? Teachers have brothers? Girls couldn’t be patrols?
I observed Eduardo’s quiet pride as he showed the badge to other teachers, and I took pride in his joy and his shy pleasure. Eduardo came to our school in the 1st grade, fresh from Mexico and didn't speak or understand one word of English. He is now in the 5th grade gifted/talented classroom, the patrol captain, a trombone player, a star Lab Lunch participant and one of the most responsible and friendly children in this school.

Later, I asked my brother Mark what the gold badge meant to him as a child. Now 53 and living in Florida, Mark works in the computer software field doing training as a national consultant. An avid bicyclist, he racks up miles and miles every week on the flat roads of northern Florida. He had much to say about the feelings that earning the gold badge still engender in him. He wrote:

Your student Eduardo indeed has reason to be proud. Back in the day, those on the school safety patrol were special. We had extra responsibility and with it went extra privileges. We got to leave school early and had a valid excuse for being a few minutes late. It was great.

The coolest part was that the principal announced your name over the PA on Friday afternoon with the end-of-the-week announcements. You got to go to the principal’s office, get a handshake and the badge, and then walk out early with your patrol colleagues to your corner post feeling “oh so important.” It was the one time you really enjoyed being called to the principal's office.

I think I had the badge for about 40% of my time on the safety patrol. I can even remember a few times when I forgot to turn it back on Friday morning and ran to the office on Friday afternoon before the announcements, only to be told “Don’t worry. You got it again.” One teacher told me they were going to retire the badge when I went to high school.

Congratulate Eduardo for me. Safety patrols are vastly under-rated on the scale of cool in schools.

To me, Eduardo is the personification of the immigration questions facing my local area and our nation today. He and his family live in a small apartment, and he and his sister qualify for free lunch. But his family cares deeply about his education and his behavior, and they support him in all that he does in school.

I don’t know if they are here in the U.S. legally, and I really don’t care. He is a very intelligent young man who has a bright future, and who has all of the characteristics and values that pundits describe as “American.” He is honest, hardworking, kind, thrifty, and goal-driven. He deserves to get a good education, and he will make a huge contribution to this country.

Many legislators in my town, my commonwealth, and the U.S. Congress are determined to stop the immigration of people who are not fluent in English. But I see this as a people issue—an issue about the individual hard-working families and children who are trying to make better lives. We cannot afford to put barriers in the way of children whose parents have made the choice to come here, even though they may have not come through regular channels.

Just as our country realized years ago that slavery was morally wrong, and much later, that women deserved equal voting rights and representation (and the opportunity to serve on safety patrol), we must recognize and value and encourage full participation and biculturalism by our newest residents. We can’t afford to lose the contributions and the potential of other Eduardos.

Laura Reasoner Jones was a public preschool special education teacher for many years and served as a teacher in residence at the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. She is now a school-based technology specialist in a Northern Virginia elementary school.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:41 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This is an issue that committed activists in SC have been trying battle for years. My good friend and fellow activist Tony Madrigal gets a LOT of backlash from politicians and city officials for being outspoken and committed to fighting these types of inequality. Adelante! -Patricia

By Cody-Leigh Mullin
City on the Hill Press

“They said it couldn’t be done. They said that the workers in UC Santa Cruz would not come out. They said that the students would not come out, and we are here!”

Jose La Luz was one of roughly 2,700 protesters UC-wide who demonstrated against the university’s long-running contract negotiations with American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). La Luz, an international labor-rights activist and keynote speaker for Saturday’s Labor Studies conference in Santa Cruz, addressed UCSC workers and students Jan. 31 at a rally in front of Kerr Hall:

“This is not an accident—we have been working hard to make this moment happen and we are getting ready for the big moment when we say, ‘We are going to stop this University!’”

On January 31, AFSCME’s contract with the UC came to an end, which prompted the march at UCSC from Quarry Plaza to Kerr Hall last week. Protesters gathered to support the union, as the new contract will affect roughly 9,000 UC workers statewide. The protest followed a meeting between AFSCME and the UC Jan. 30, when the two parties discussed the UC’s newest contract proposal.

According to an economic analysis impact model, if UC workers employed at UC-run schools and medical centers earned the same wages as those who do the same work at state hospitals and California Community Colleges, they would receive, on average, a 25 percent raise.

At one point during the UCSC protest, Santa Cruz City Councilmember Tony Madrigal addressed the crowd of workers and students: “I’m very proud to get out here with every single one of you. A fight against you is a fight against me—we’re in this together. Are you guys gonna back down?”

UC employee Maria Padilla knows that AFSCME is up against a fierce contender, but she said that the union’s demands are not extreme. “We’re just asking for normal things, to be able to live everyday, especially since it’s an expensive city,” she said from within the crowd of protesters. “[Our] wages aren’t enough to live in Santa Cruz.”

Organizers created a list of New Years Resolutions to give to Chancellor Blumenthal. The list was sent to all 10 campus Chancellors, as well as to the UC medical centers’ CEOs. The list, created by AFSCME members, their relatives and UC students, outlined steps for the UC system to take in order to fulfill its duty to its employees.

Protesters demanded a written response from the Chancellor.

They also demanded that the UC draft a fair contract to cover affordable health care premiums, yearly bonuses and higher wages, urging the UC to take better care of all its workers.

Tony Madrigal believes the university needs to step up. “These workers live in Santa Cruz, they shop in Santa Cruz, they pay rent in Santa Cruz, they donate in Santa Cruz, and their children go to school in Santa Cruz,” he said. “The University needs to [support] the people with the same commitment that it shows when it invests in its projects up on campus.”

AFSCME and the UC system have been bargaining for a fair contract with market rate standards and benefits protections since October 2007. Since then, the AFSCME local chapter 3299 — composed of over 500 UCSC workers — has organized multiple demonstrations on campus.

During the Wednesday meeting between AFSCME members and the UC, Human Resources Communications Coordinator Nicole Savickas said that AFSCME presented the university with a proposal to extend the contract by five months and pass wage increases for a number of service workers in the union, which would total about $2.8 million. “The union rejected that proposal and they let us know of their intent to file for impasse—which is the next step in bargaining—with the Public Employment Relationship Board (PERB),” Savickas said. “To declare impasse is saying that the two parties can not reach any further progress.”

If PERB declares impasse, it will appoint a third party mediator to meet with the union.

Savickas continued, “Both parties have passed a number of proposals and we have discussed our demands back and forth. So I believe both parties have a pretty good idea of where we stand.”

As of now, the contract issue has no definite solution. Yet after witnessing and participating in the rally, Padilla said with confidence, “We’re going to keep fighting no matter what.”

Labels: workers rights

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:14 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Let's face it. Things are so out of whack that we focus excessively on test scores, acting as if all schools are the same. This means that we fail to address the underlying inequalities that contribute significantly to the achievement gap. Teacher quality--and its impacts--is one factor that cannot be underestimated in the least. We should focus our policies on what in some sense may be characterized as a crisis but which we know to be a historically chronic and pervasive problem in our state and nation. Regardless this info is important and it is a sad testament to either inadequate or ineffective leadership and corollary policies in Texas.

What will it take...?

-Angela

Low-income, minority Texas students less likely to have experienced teachers
Austin, Leander and Round Rock cited in statewide report for 'teacher quality gaps.'

By Raven L. Hill
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, February 08, 2008
Achievement gaps between low-income and minority students and their
peers in Austin and Round Rock can be attributed in large part to gaps
in teacher quality and experience, according to a statewide report
released Thursday.
An analysis of the 50 largest Texas school districts by The Education
Trust, a Washington-based think tank, concluded that African American,
Hispanic and low-income students almost without exception lack "the
very resource that matters most to their academic success: strong teachers."
The report examined teacher credentials, experience levels, turnover
rates and teacher pay for 2005-06. Researchers found that 42 districts
across the state, including Austin and Round Rock, had
disproportionate numbers of novice teachers ­ those with less than
three years of experience ­ at predominantly minority and low-income schools.
Leander was included in the report, but it had more balanced numbers.
In Austin, predominantly minority and low-income schools were two or
three times more likely than campuses with more affluent, mostly white
students to have larger numbers of inexperienced teachers.
District officials said Thursday that its new bonus and merit pay
initiative, which was praised in the report, should help to eliminate
such disparities by improving salaries and working conditions.
"What we're trying to do ... (is) provide all teachers with supports
to be successful," said David Lussier, a member of the district's
strategic compensation task force.
Louis Malfaro, president of Education Austin, which represents 4,000
teachers and staff members, said the focus should be on retaining teachers.
"This idea that if we just forced good teachers to go to the hard
schools, everything would be OK really misses the point," Malfaro
said. "Those young, energetic, good-hearted teachers that haven't
quite gotten as good as our more experienced teachers, if given the
support, will become the master teachers and the expert teachers."
In Round Rock, about 16 percent of teachers at predominantly minority
schools were inexperienced compared with 8 percent at less diverse campuses.
Round Rock Superintendent Jesús Chávez defended the quality of his
teaching corps.
"I think the report does point to teachers in general seeking to work
in better environments and less challenging conditions," Chávez said.
"That is an issue we face not only in Round Rock but in school
districts across the state and across the nation."
Statewide, researchers found particularly egregious discrepancies at
campuses that were predominantly African American: 49 percent of
beginning English teachers and 42 percent of algebra teachers lacked
certification in those fields.
Passing rates on state exams in part reflect those disparities,
according to the report; less than half of African American and
Hispanic ninth-graders passed the math section of the Texas Assessment
of Knowledge and Skills in 2006.
Paul Ruiz, a senior adviser at the Education Trust's Southwest office,
said, "Many people are quick to attribute a school's performance to
the home lives of its students, but the reality is that what schools
do matters a lot."
rhill@statesman.com; 445-3620
Teaching in high-need schools
The terms 'highest-poverty' and 'highest-minority' refer to schools in
the highest quartile of low-income (students qualifying for the
federal free or reduced-price lunch program) and minority enrollment
in their district.
Low-income and minority student populations
Enrollment Percentage of Percentage of
2005-06 minority students low-income students
Austin 81,003 72.1 60.3
Leander 21,985 28.3 21.1
Round Rock 37,767 43.9 24.9
The teacher experience gap
Percentage of teachers with fewer than three years of teaching
experience, 2005-06
Lowest-poverty Highest-poverty Lowest-minority Highest-minority
schools schools schools schools
Austin 7.9 22.7 8.2 20.9
Leander 19.6 17.3 19.6 17.8
Round Rock 9 14.2 8 16.4
The teacher stability gap
Five-year average teacher turnover rates, 2001-02 to 2005-06
Lowest-poverty Highest-poverty Lowest-minority Highest-minority
schools schools schools schools
Austin 12.6 28.7 13 28
Leander 25.6 24.4 25.6 23.9
Round Rock 15 24.7 14.6 26
Sources: The Education Trust, Texas Education Agency

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:23 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Appeal of Challenge to ‘No Child’ Law

NATIONAL BRIEFING | EDUCATION
Appeal of Challenge to ‘No Child’ Law

By SAM DILLON
One month after a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court revived a legal challenge to the federal No Child Left Behind law, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said she would ask the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, to convene a larger panel to reconsider that ruling. In its 2-to-1 ruling on Jan. 7, the Sixth Circuit said that school districts in Michigan and several other states had been justified in their 2005 suit that argued the law required them to pay for testing and other programs without providing sufficient federal money.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:44 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Here's the link to the Plaza Comunitaria website if you'd like to read more on the program. -Patricia

Adult immigrants can complete their basic education in Spanish at one of 13 centers across L.A. County.

By Anna Gorman | Los Angeles Times
January 11, 2008

Florentino Vidal began working on his family's ranch in Mexico at age 7, forgoing grammar and high school for a childhood spent growing lettuce, carrots, watermelon and tomatoes.

Vidal, 47, said he knows the Spanish alphabet and can read some, but gets confused writing much more than his name. Now he will have the opportunity to resume his studies and earn his Mexican diploma here in the United States.

The Mexican government opened its latest Plaza Comunitaria, or Community Plaza, Thursday at San Fernando Middle School, minutes from Vidal's house. There are 13 such centers throughout Los Angeles County, aimed at helping Mexican nationals complete their basic education. The centers offer free classes, in person or through video and the Internet, to Mexican nationals living in the U.S.

"They are leaving our country without that education," said Mario Velazquez, acting consul general at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles. "We have failed in giving education to those Mexicans. We must try our best to give that education, even if they are abroad."

More than 40% of Mexican nationals over age 25 living in the U.S. had less than a ninth-grade education, according to 2005 data compiled by the Pew Hispanic Center.

Consular officials said the Spanish-language classes improve immigrants' self-esteem and enable them to help their children with schoolwork. The education in their native tongue also better prepares immigrants to learn English and encourages their assimilation. Hundreds of Mexican nationals have taken classes since the first local center opened in 2003. There are similar programs elsewhere, including San Jose and San Bernardino.

Vidal, a legal permanent resident who arrived in the U.S. in 1979, said he and his wife raised their four children to value education and not to take anything for granted. The eldest now attends Cal State Northridge.

"We would tell them to study, study, study, until we got mad," he said.

Vidal wanted to study but said he was busy working construction to support his family. At the opening of the San Fernando center Thursday, Vidal flipped through a third-grade Mexican geography book. He said he was interested in learning about the history of his country so he could pass that culture along to his children.

Jose Palmillas, 34, who also attended the opening, started high school in Mexico but dropped out after one year to work in Mexico and then to come to the United States. Palmillas, a naturalized U.S. citizen, said he has earned the same salary in his maintenance job for many years and believes that finishing his education will enable him to advance in his career.

"I feel like something is missing," Palmillas said. "I couldn't attend school when I was young, but now I am going to study to get ahead."

Palmillas said he also wants to be a good role model for his children, ages 1, 11, 13 and 18.

Laura Gonzalez, a parent community facilitator for the Los Angeles Unified School District, works with about 70 students at a Plaza Comunitaria near Roscoe Elementary School in Sun Valley. Many come to her unable to read or write.

That illiteracy affects people in all aspects of their lives, including their ability to get apartments and jobs, said Daryabuth Martinez, program assistant at the Plaza Comunitaria at Cerritos College. Many parents have enrolled in classes at her center so they can learn to read to their children or grandchildren, or so they can more easily learn English and move past low-wage cleaning and restaurant jobs.

Space for the program is provided by schools and community centers, and the Mexican government supplies the textbooks. Students work at their own pace with the help of mostly volunteer teachers or tutors.

"They don't just learn how to read and write but how to grow as people," Martinez said.

San Fernando Middle School Principal Rafael Balderas said his goal is to build a "college-going culture."

"Remind your parents that we are pushing you through high school to graduate, not to be a dropout," Balderas told young students on hand for the opening Thursday. "But you know what? Your parents need to do the same thing. They now have the opportunity to go and get their GED, to become a United States citizen, to vote and to make a difference in the country."

Marisela Soto, 32, stopped going to school after sixth grade in Mexico but enrolled in classes at a Plaza Comunitaria in Los Angeles. Before taking the classes, Soto said, she was embarrassed to speak in public and worried about her inability to help her children with their homework.

Since enrolling, Soto said, "My self-confidence grew a lot."

On Thursday, she stood before a crowded auditorium at San Fernando Middle School and invited parents to follow her lead and go back to school.

Labels: Mexico

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:31 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out this piece. It deals with a very successful Texas superintendent who builds on children’s strengths. I’ve heard good things about him over the years. We need more leaders like him.

-Angela


Hector Montenegro
56, superintendent, Arlington

Hector Montenegro
Illustration by Andy Friedman


Green buildings, awesome movie theaters, and high-speed semiconductors won’t be worth much if we fail to educate our kids, more and more of whom can’t speak English when they enter the school system. Good thing this California native, who was picked by the League of United Latin American Citizens as its 2005 Educator of the Year, has risen to the challenge. After stints at schools in Austin, Dallas, and San Marcos, Montenegro took charge of the Ysleta Independent School District, the least affluent of El Paso’s three ISDs, in 2003. Ninety-one percent of Ysleta’s 46,036 students are Hispanic, and its schools faced chronic problems with test scores and dropout rates. Montenegro was able to effect a remarkable turnaround—between 2005 and 2006, the number of campuses in the district recognized by the Texas Education Agency for their scores on the TAKS test rose from 9 to 23. In November the Arlington Independent School District, a larger, more ethnically diverse ISD (35 percent white, 33 percent Hispanic, 24 percent black), named Montenegro as its superintendent. His first day on the job is February 1. Someone get this man an apple.

How were you able to get the results you did at Ysleta?
We took a more systemic approach to addressing academic issues, with a special focus on strengthening bilingual, dual language, and ESL programs. We standardized our curriculum and set up protocols for quality control on instructional standards. We created a new professional-development department, which didn’t exist before, and introduced the principles of Professional Learning Communities, which require higher levels of collaboration between faculty, staff, and administrators. In our experience in YISD, dual language has been very successful because it is very inclusive. But it’s also very controversial.

Where does the controversy come from?
The school of thought that says we have to transition children into English as soon as possible. The research in Ysleta shows that the students enrolled in dual-language programs that include monolingual English students excel far beyond those students in ESL and bilingual programs. It does have a maintenance component, in which their dominant language is reinforced, but it also has a transition component, meaning that once you strengthen the native language, then it’s easier to transition to English. We found that to be the case, and also, we have blond-haired, blue-eyed youngsters that are very fluent in Spanish before they even get out of the eighth grade.
That’s impressive.

Yes. The program builds on the strengths of all children. It’s not a deficit model; it’s an enrichment model that not only teaches survival English but also academic language and socialization skills. It eliminates the stigma of social segregation that other programs create. We have a long, long waiting list of parents whose children only speak English that want to enroll.

Your home state of California is another that has a booming Hispanic population, overburdened school districts, and chronic money problems. How have the two states handled these educational challenges differently?
The systems are quite different. They have income tax, we have property tax. They’re very anti-bilingual, where we’re very bilingual-friendly. I will say that the demographics are similar. Educators have to be sensitive to that and prepare these children for a future that will include them in one way or another. There is among educators that I know in California and Texas a sense of urgency, and if there’s anything that’s going to stand out in my interview here it’s that we need to have a sense of urgency in preparing this generation of children to become responsible leaders in a very diverse and inclusive future. Our future is dependent on the success of all children regardless of background or primary language.

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

Interesting read. I love the line: "when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the 'disease' goes away." I think it's also important to note how historically our society has also resorted to incarceration to cure "deviance". -Patricia

By Bruce E. Levine | AlterNet
January 28, 2008.

Big pharma has some new customers. Not complying with authority is now, in many cases, labeled a disease.

For a generation now, disruptive young Americans who rebel against authority figures have been increasingly diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric (psychotropic) drugs.

Disruptive young people who are medicated with Ritalin, Adderall and other amphetamines routinely report that these drugs make them "care less" about their boredom, resentments and other negative emotions, thus making them more compliant and manageable. And so-called atypical antipsychotics such as Risperdal and Zyprexa -- powerful tranquilizing drugs -- are increasingly prescribed to disruptive young Americans, even though in most cases they are not displaying any psychotic symptoms.

Many talk show hosts think I'm kidding when I mention oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). After I assure them that ODD is in fact an official mental illness -- an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers -- they often guess that ODD is simply a new term for juvenile delinquency. But that is not the case.

Young people diagnosed with ODD, by definition, are doing nothing illegal (illegal behaviors are a symptom of another mental illness called conduct disorder). In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) created oppositional defiant disorder, defining it as "a pattern of negativistic, hostile and defiant behavior." The official symptoms of ODD include "often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules" and "often argues with adults." While ODD-diagnosed young people are obnoxious with adults they don't respect, these kids can be a delight with adults they do respect; yet many of them are medicated with psychotropic drugs.

An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than overt defiance is some type of passive defiance.

John Holt, the late school critic, described passive-aggressive strategies employed by prisoners in concentration camps and slaves on plantations, as well as some children in classrooms. Holt pointed out that subjects may attempt to appease their rulers while still satisfying some part of their own desire for dignity "by putting on a mask, by acting much more stupid and incompetent than they really are, by denying their rulers the full use of their intelligence and ability, by declaring their minds and spirits free of their enslaved bodies."

Holt observed that by "going stupid" in a classroom, children frustrate authorities through withdrawing the most intelligent and creative parts of their minds from the scene, thus achieving some sense of potency.

Going stupid -- or passive aggression -- is one of many nondisease explanations for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all ADHD-diagnosed children will pay attention to activities that they enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the "disease" goes away.

There are other passive rebellions against authority that have been medicalized by mental health authorities. I have talked to many people who earlier in their lives had been diagnosed with substance abuse, depression and even schizophrenia but believe that their "symptoms" had in fact been a kind of resistance to the demands of an oppressive environment. Some of these people now call themselves psychiatric survivors.

While there are several reasons for behavioral disruptiveness and emotional difficulties, rebellion against an oppressive environment is one common reason that is routinely not even considered by many mental health professionals. Why? It is my experience that many mental health professionals are unaware of how extremely obedient they are to authorities. Acceptance into medical school and graduate school and achieving a Ph.D. or M.D. means jumping through many meaningless hoops, all of which require much behavioral, attentional and emotional compliance to authorities -- even disrespected ones. When compliant M.D.s and Ph.D.s begin seeing noncompliant patients, many of these doctors become anxious, sometimes even ashamed of their own excessive compliance, and this anxiety and shame can be fuel for diseasing normal human reactions.

Two ways of subduing defiance are to criminalize it and to pathologize it, and U.S. history is replete with examples of both. In the same era that John Adams' Sedition Act criminalized criticism of U.S. governmental policy, Dr. Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry (his image adorns the APA seal), pathologized anti-authoritarianism. Rush diagnosed those rebelling against a centralized federal authority as having an "excess of the passion for liberty" that "constituted a form of insanity." He labeled this illness "anarchia."

Throughout American history, both direct and indirect resistance to authority has been diseased. In an 1851 article in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, Louisiana physician Samuel Cartwright reported his discovery of "drapetomania," the disease that caused slaves to flee captivity. Cartwright also reported his discovery of "dysaesthesia aethiopis," the disease that caused slaves to pay insufficient attention to the master's needs. Early versions of ODD and ADHD?

In Rush's lifetime, few Americans took anarchia seriously, nor was drapetomania or dysaesthesia aethiopis taken seriously in Cartwright's lifetime. But these were eras before the diseasing of defiance had a powerful financial ally in Big Pharma.

In every generation there will be authoritarians. There will also be the "bohemian bourgeois" who may enjoy anti-authoritarian books, music, and movies but don't act on them. And there will be genuine anti-authoritarians, who are so pained by exploitive hierarchies that they take action. Only occasionally in American history do these genuine anti-authoritarians actually take effective direct action that inspires others to successfully revolt, but every once in a while a Tom Paine comes along. So authoritarians take no chances, and the state-corporate partnership criminalizes anti-authoritarianism, pathologizes it, markets drugs to "cure" it and financially intimidates those who might buck the system.

It would certainly be a dream of Big Pharma and those who favor an authoritarian society if every would-be Tom Paine -- or Crazy Horse, Tecumseh, Emma Goldman or Malcolm X -- were diagnosed as a youngster with mental illness and quieted with a lifelong regimen of chill pills.

The question is: Has this dream become reality?

Labels: discipline

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:57 AM 1 comments Links to this post

JASON DePARLE | NY Times
February 4, 2008

WASHINGTON — It has an editorial staff of one and annual advertising revenues of less than $2,000. It charges its subscribers nothing and pays most contributors the same. Mapping the settlement of Latino poultry workers is its idea of a sexy piece.

But for a growing number of followers, it has become an important read.

Every moment has its magazine, and for the age of migration it is the Migration Information Source, a weekly (more or less) online journal followed worldwide by scholars, policy makers and the occasional migrant in distress. “My soul’s dying every moment,” an Iranian asylum seeker wrote last year in an e-mail message from Greece. “Give me an answer.”

Many readers discover the Source simply by googling the word “immigrant” and finding a link to migrationinformation.org among the millions of citations.

At the site’s helm is an American-born editor, Kirin Kalia, 32, who describes herself as “half Dutch, half Indian, 100 percent American and total migration geek.” Ms. Kalia thrives on hybridity — devouring Indian-American novels and Dutch-Moroccan films — and finds no migration topic too obscure. To know the fate of Latvian mushroom pickers in Ireland is, for her, to glimpse the world in a grain of sand.

“To move to a different country for whatever reason takes so much courage,” she said, interrupting an interview to play a song by a British-Indian rapper, Panjabi MC, stored on her hard drive. “The fact that so many people do it is just endlessly fascinating to me.”

With conflicts rising over immigration to the United States, interest in the Source has surged. Readership has doubled in the past three years, Ms. Kalia said, to about 140,000 unique visits each month. To stroll through the archives is to see the American debate freshly, as part of a global phenomenon.

If the Source has a unifying theme, it is that migration is a defining force nearly everywhere. There are about 200 million migrants in the world — probably a record, demographers say, in both relative and absolute terms — and more than 80 percent live outside the United States.

The Source has focused on Tajik construction workers in Russia, farmhands from Burkina Faso who pick Ghanaian crops and the Peruvians who take jobs left behind by Ecuadorean workers who have migrated to Spain.

Other themes of the coverage include the speed with which migration has grown (Spain’s immigrant population has risen nearly sixfold in 10 years) and the conflict it brings, within both nations and living rooms. Political parties rise and fall. Economic interests win and lose. Family relations change.

“None of this is easy,” Ms. Kalia said.

Nor is the process of tracking it, with migration studies a nascent field and data on many countries scarce. But the magazine has won praise from a roster of A-list scholars who read it, write for it and assign it to their students.

“It’s the best online source of information on migration that I have seen worldwide,” said Rubén G. Rumbaut, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine and a leading authority on the children of immigrants to the United States.

The magazine is published by a Washington research group, the Migration Policy Institute, that was started six years ago (with assistance from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation and the J. M. Kaplan Fund) to help fill the knowledge gap.

Does migration drive down domestic wages? Do guest worker programs always bring permanent settlement? Does “brain drain” hurt developing countries, or have critics overlooked indirect benefits, like the money the migrants send home?

“Heck! I don’t believe we have a consensus on a single thing in migration,” said Demetrios G. Papademetriou, the Migration Policy Institute’s president. “You have to build a knowledge base if you’re going to make progress.”

With a staff of 20, the institute reflects the mobility it studies. In addition to Mr. Papademetriou, a Greek immigrant, it includes a Moldovan demographer (Jeanne Batalova), a British analyst (Will Somerville), a Filipino-American with dual citizenship in Iceland (Dovelyn R. Agunias), and a refugee expert (Kathleen Newland, a co-director) who is American-born and married to a British journalist.

Some critics see a loose-borders tilt to the work. “They do some useful research,” said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that seeks lower immigration to the United States. “But their orientation is towards higher immigration and looser borders worldwide.”

But admirers said the work merely reflected the reality that migration is ubiquitous. “This is not something just going on inside the United States,” Mr. Rumbaut said.

One recent article charts the emergence of Tajikistan as a leading exporter of labor, with one in five Tajik adults leaving to work abroad each year. Another shows that at least 60 million migrants have left one poor country to live in another.

Yet another compares the incentives that draw Mexicans to the United States with those that lure Africans onto rickety boats bounds for Spain. American wages are about four times those in Mexico, a Norwegian scholar, Jorgen Carling, noted, while the wage differential between Spain and Senegal is “a staggering 15 to one.”

Even nonmigrants can be deeply affected by migration, at both ends of the stream. Studying a village in the Dominican Republic, Peggy Levitt of Wellesley College found that women prefer to marry men who have worked abroad “because they want husbands who will share in the housework and take care of the children the way men who have been to the United States do.”

Conflict is also a running theme, across cultures and time. The Dutch are so worried about assimilation they require migrants to pass a language test before they come. Aristede R. Zolberg of the New School, notes that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin “considered the German language to be the bearer of a culture incompatible with republican democracy.”

Professor Zolberg resists the term “age of migration” (coined by the scholars Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller) because people have been migrating since the beginning of time. Still, he sees migration growth as likely to continue, in an era of cheap travel and easy communication via cellphones and Web cams. And as incomes rise in the developing world, more people have the means to move.

“What’s new is it’s much easier now,” he said.

Financially, the Source may be a victim of its own success. Its initial supporters largely consider the site a core mission of the institute, to be financed from the broader institute’s $3.5 million budget. That leaves Ms. Kalia rattling the online cup for reader donations.

As for the difficulties that migration can bring, Ms. Kalia encountered them early when her uncle, who is Dutch and a Catholic priest, flew to California to baptize her baby brother. Her Hindu grandmother lived with the family, and locked herself in her bedroom, beside a Lord Krishna poster, until the uncle promised to desist.

Ms. Kalia has yet to write about the episode, but she does see a lesson. “It shows you just how difficult negotiating cultural differences can be,” she said.

Labels: migration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:30 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Christine Senteno | New America Media
February 1, 2008

Editor’s Note: The FBI reports a 25 percent increase in hate crimes committed against Latinos between 2004 and 2006, with many more crimes unreported. The National Council of La Raza is now pushing for presidential candidates and the mainstream media to stop affiliating themselves with fringe anti-immigrant groups such as the Minutemen.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – This week the National Council of La Raza called for presidential candidates and news media networks to “take the hate out of the debate” over immigration.

The organization contends that small but vocal groups that use hate speech in the immigration debate are moving out of the fringes of American society and into mainstream media. Hate is framing the political discourse.

Civil rights advocacy groups demand that three cable news networks – FOX, MSNBC and CNN – stop using extremists as messengers for their talk shows and put an end the rhetoric of hosts such as Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck and Pat Buchanan. They are also pushing for Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee to sever his ties and renounce his endorsement of Minutemen co-founder Jim Gilchrist.

Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Gilchrist and Chris Simcox, co-founders of the anti-immigration group the Minutemen Project, have appeared on national cable network television at least 110 times in the past three years.

FAIR was listed as a hate group by the internationally known civil rights law firm Southern Poverty Law Center located in Montgomery, Ala. SPLC noted that FAIR often compares immigrants to bacteria, has members of white supremacist groups working for them, and has accepted more than a million dollars from the Pioneer Fund, a racist foundation devoted to proving a connection between race and IQ.

In addition to the Minutemen Project’s controversial actions to police the Southern border, Gilchrist was once videotaped at an anti-immigration rally saying he was “proud to be a vigilante.” Simcox, the group’s co-founder, was convicted in 2003 of carrying a weapon into a national park while searching for undocumented immigrants, according to SPLC.

“This is all about free speech,” Gilchrist told New America Media. “La Raza has the right to free speech. Jim Gilchrist has the right to free speech.”

NCLR President Janet Murguía explained that, because the president and Congress have failed to address the immigration issue, the debate has moved to the states and now to the presidential debates.

“This debate is no longer about substantive policy approaches. This debate is about hate,” Murguía said. “ And if letting these people get on the air unchecked isn’t bad enough, many of the network talk show hosts parrot hate speech openly and abundantly on the air.”

On June 28, CNN’s Glenn Beck jokingly offered a one-step solution to the immigration and energy crises on his radio program. He read a proposed ad for a "giant refinery" that produces "Mexinol," a fuel made from the bodies of illegal immigrants coming here from Mexico to find work.

With this type of hate speech comes an increase in hate crimes, according to NCLR Vice President Cecilia Muñoz: The FBI reports a 25 percent increase in hate crimes committed against Latinos between 2004 and 2006. The statistics do not include crimes that go unreported by undocumented immigrants who fear being deported.

On Jan. 31, the National Council of La Raza, which includes nearly 300 affiliated organizations, launched a new initiative titled "We Can Stop The Hate," in partnership with MALDEF, the Anti-Defamation League of Washington, D.C., the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America.

The initiative includes a campaign to educate the public about the use of hate speech and the growing rise of violence against Latinos. NCLR has already written to FOX, CNN and MSNBC network executives about extremists appearing regularly on their programming. They are also asking candidates to pledge to reject hate speech in discussions on immigration.

Latinos have the power to change the debate, says Murguía.

“Latinos buy products from the advertisers supporting these programs. Latinos vote in primaries and in the general election. We need to make it clear to those who embrace hate that they do so at their own economic and political peril,” said Murguía.

For more information go to www.wecanstopthehate.org

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:24 PM 0 comments Links to this post

BY CARRIE MELAGO | NY DAILY NEWS
Sunday, February 3rd 2008

Less than 2% of the 181,000 children eligible to transfer to higher-performing schools under NCLB actually did this year, according to education department figures.

"In a city as large as New York, obviously the public school choice part of NCLB presents logistical challenges," said schools spokesman Andrew Jacob. "But we've been doing it several years, and I think we're improving."

Only 9,200 students even applied to leave their failing schools, and of those just 3,090 ultimately enrolled in a different school.

Some parents of kids in failing schools told the Daily News they weren't even aware they could transfer out, and some were turned away from better schools that are already overcrowded.

And still other parents like their children's schools just fine, even if they are labeled as failing, or think transferring kids will only make the institutions worse.

"I definitely don't think the NCLB system is fixing the problem. It's a band-aid, and it's a temporary band-aid," said Stephanie Pryor, who threw out the application to transfer her daughter out of P.S. 93 in the Bronx.

The controversial law was passed six years ago to sanction schools with low test scores and allow parents to transfer their children out. Critics, though, charge that the law punishes struggling schools and encourages educators to teach to the test.

As members of Congress wrangle over whether to reauthorize NCLB, President Bush declared it a success in his State of the Union address and called on legislators to strengthen it.

But while school choice has been held up as a hallmark of the law, the percentage of children transferring nationwide is just as low as it is in New York City. Last school year, only 120,000 kids transferred out of 5 million eligible - just 2%.

With 283 city schools deemed failing - about 20% of all schools - education officials acknowledge the difficulties faced by parents who may want to transfer.

The education department received a $2.4 million federal grant to create a team of advisers that will help parents use the new report cards and other data to decide which school works best for their child.

"Ultimately, that decision is a personal one for parents," Jacob said.

Additionally, under the mayor's "fair student funding" formula, schools earn $2,000 for every child they accept under NCLB.

At some schools, the extra information is needed. Even though she's PTA president at Acorn High School in Brooklyn, Dawn Beckles didn't realize that she could transfer her three children out. She says, though, that she wouldn't have anyway.

"They have teachers that are there for them. For me, to just move them, it wouldn't be fair," Beckles said.

But for some parents who successfully transferred their children, NCLB has been a ticket to a better future.

Until she secured a transfer in 2005, Carol Boyd applied for charter school lotteries and variances to move her son out of failing P.S. 64 in the Bronx, which she said had no school yard and focused heavily on test prep to lift poor scores.

Boyd said she is thrilled with the school where her son, Zachary, landed - Ella Baker in Manhattan. The 13-year-old now walks to Central Park for science classes and plays percussion instruments during concerts at Columbia University's Miller Theater.

"I did a lot of research and I said, 'A-ha! This is the place for him,'" she said. "It makes for a difference."

Labels: NCLB reauthorization, Vouchers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:37 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Some really good comments in this article. Something it fails to mention regarding schools in highly affluent communities showing higher parent involvement (in the traditional sense) is how these parents are not as likely, if at all, to have many of the barriers that non-affluent parents have. You can also find the Nakamura and Agiesta in an earlier post. -Patricia

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 29, 2008

A Washington Post poll this month revealed, once again, that D.C. residents put the most blame for their failing public schools on apathetic and uninvolved parents. Many Americans feel the same way about the same school troubles in their areas. They are wrong, but in such a convoluted way that it is difficult for us parents to get a good grasp on what role we play in making our schools bad or good.

Do unsupportive parents create pathetic schools or do pathetic schools create unsupportive parents? It is the most frustrating of chicken-and-egg questions. Many education experts will say it is a bit of both, but that's a cop-out. Most of our worst schools are full of low-income children in our biggest cities. No one has yet found a way to revive those schools in any significant way by training the students' parents to be more engaged with their children's educations. It is too hard to do and too unlikely to have much impact on the chaotic school district leadership.

What has worked, again and again, is the opposite: Bring an energetic and focused leader into the school, let that person recruit and train good teachers and find ways to get rid of those who resist making the necessary changes. Great teaching makes great schools, and once you have a good school, parents become engaged and active.

This happens, if you think about it, not only in our most disadvantaged neighborhoods but in those places where the rich folks live. Why do parents moving to this area flock to the suburbs where the housing is most expensive? It is because they have the best schools. Why are those schools full of parent volunteers? Because those mothers and fathers know their children are being given the best possible instruction and realize that their extra efforts will enrich an already good product. Schools that reject parental help and are slow to rid themselves of inadequate teachers -- there are some even in wealthy neighborhoods -- are readily detected by parental radar and find their PTA meetings poorly attended.

Yet we still blame parents for bad schools, a vestige of the racism and classism that distorts popular opinion on education everywhere. Stroll down any street in America and ask the neighbors about the local school. If it is full of the children of affluent parents, they will say it is great place to learn. If the children are largely from low-income, largely minority homes, they will say it is not a good school, even if some of its teachers have made great strides in raising achievement. When I write stories praising such schools for confounding expectations, I invariably get e-mails saying I have to be wrong, that such kids with such parents just can't be doing what I am seeing them do.

The Washington Post survey proved this point in a vivid way. When asked what was the biggest of a list of problems in D.C. schools, the highest portion of respondents, 20 percent, said parental apathy. When asked to read a list of issues and check all that they thought were big problems in the schools, parental apathy at 76 percent came in a close second to condition of facilities, 78 percent. (That is also an incorrect answer. I have visited some terrific schools in creaky buildings, but that is an issue for another day.) The choice that got the lowest number of votes as a big problem was quality of the teachers. Only 47 percent picked that issue, even though it is clear to anyone who has seen a bad school change to a good one that the teaching is by far the most important factor. (To be fair to D.C. teachers, I am talking about the quality of the teaching, not the quality of the teachers, which in some circumstances may not be the same thing. Good teachers stuck in a badly run school rarely do their best.)

Parents, no matter how much money they have or how difficult their lives are, are often smart about schools. They can figure out which ones are adding value to their children's lives, which are not, and they act accordingly. Mount Vernon High School in Fairfax County was struggling to keep middle-class families from moving away in the early 1990s as low-income families moved into the Route 1 corridor and standards lapsed. A group of community leaders, including then-school board member Kris Amundson, former superintendent Robert R. "Bud" Spillane, then-assistant superintendent Nancy Sprague and former Mount Vernon principal Calanthia Tucker, introduced the International Baccalaureate program to the school and staffed it with exceptional teachers, like Betsy Calhoon and Bernie Glaze. Three years later, Amundson was hearing middle-class parents at cocktail parties brag about their children being admitted to IB at Mount Vernon.

Or consider an example in a New York City neighborhood much like the poorer parts of the District. Dave Levin and Frank Corcoran, both in their 20s, tried to start a middle school called the KIPP Academy in the South Bronx in 1995. Parents were not impressed. Some called them crazy for thinking they could make any headway in a school system that had disappointed them for so long. But Levin and Corcoran kept at it and succeeded in adding some first-class veteran teachers, such as Charlie Randall and Jerry Myers, who were decidedly not crazy. Five years later, KIPP test scores were the highest in the Bronx. When the local school board considered a plan to eject the school from its building, 200 parents showed up and chanted, "KIPP! KIPP! KIPP!" incessantly until the plan was shelved and the meeting adjourned.

The Jan. 21 Post story by David Nakamura and Jennifer Agiesta that accompanied the poll results indicated that D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee understands this dynamic. She said the school system cannot demand more of parents until it offers better services. "I have seen firsthand how parents are treated in our schools," she said. "I can't blame them if they do not jump to volunteer."

Nor, I think, can they be blamed if they protest when Rhee tries to close their neighborhood schools, having learned that change in the D.C. schools is rarely for the better. But Rhee has spent all of her professional life doing exactly what has to be done, finding ways to get the best principals and best teachers so parents will have a great school to rally around. It is always a risk for any D.C. parent to hope that school system leaders will finally do it right, but at least Rhee, unlike most D.C. residents, doesn't think the sorry state of education in the city is the parents' fault.

Labels: Parent Involvement

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:12 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out the Washington Post Poll that's mentioned in this article. -Patricia


By David Nakamura and Jennifer Agiesta
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, January 21, 2008; Page B01

So Say Residents, Who Cite Apathy

Seven in 10 D.C. residents believe the city's public schools are performing inadequately, with the lack of parental involvement still cited as the biggest problem facing the nearly 50,000-student system, a Washington Post poll has found.

Despite widespread concerns, however, 68 percent of those polled believe Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's takeover of the schools will help improve them, and 59 percent approved of the performance of his handpicked schools chancellor, Michelle A. Rhee.

The poll of 1,000 randomly selected adults took place from Jan. 3 to 8, before last week's public hearings on Rhee's controversial plan to close 23 schools this fall. A vocal group of parents and activists has called the plan insensitive and poorly thought out, and more than 200 boycotted the scheduled hearings Thursday, holding a counter-gathering instead.

Rhee, who said the closings will save money that can be invested in program enhancements, said she will make amendments. But she did not promise to remove schools from the list, as some critics of the closing plan have demanded.

Although relatively hopeful about the future of the education system under Fenty (D), residents remain skeptical of the mayor's performance on education after a year in office, with about half giving him good marks.

The poll also showed that views are divided sharply along racial and socioeconomic lines, and Fenty's approval ratings on school reform falls to 39 percent among parents with students in the public schools.

But little has changed in District residents' perceptions of the biggest problems facing the public schools since Fenty took office. As in July 2006, about three-quarters called the condition of buildings and other facilities, the lack of parental involvement, disruptive students, and the presence of violence or crime "big problems."

In a meeting with Washington Post reporters and editors last week, Rhee said she was not surprised that public school parents were the most frustrated.

"We've made a lot of improvements, but fundamentally we have not changed the things that matter most: the quality of instruction," said Rhee, who took over in June after Fenty downgraded the school board and took direct control of the system. "Until we do that, we will continue to hear that" frustration.

That might take a while: Rhee said she expects to see signs of academic improvement by the 2008-09 school year, but allowed that it could be eight years before the system is in good shape.

Fenty said his first year in charge of the schools was aimed at getting "controversial, aggressive" policy changes in place.

The mayor has successfully pushed through legislation that gives Rhee authority to fire central office employees more easily, and he has created a separate departme nt in charge of school renovations, headed by Allen Y. Lew. "It's about laying the foundations of change, creating the inertia so the system is set up to go 700 miles per hour and never stop," Fenty said.

Amy Kauffman, 44, a poll respondent who works in public policy and lives in Georgetown, said her three children, ages 5, 8 and 10, attend parochial school. But she will consider switching them to public high schools if things improve. "That's why I have to have faith in Adrian," Kauffman said.

But Jacqueline Yates, 37, whose 13-year-old daughter attends Hine Junior High, which is scheduled to close, is less optimistic.

"Since he's taken over, nothing has still been done about the school system," Yates, who lives in Congress Heights, said of Fenty. "By them closing these other schools, the [remaining] schools are going to get more packed."

Such frustration was on display at the hearings and protest meeting last week.

Chris Allen, who has two children at John Burroughs Elementary in Northeast Washington, said Thursday night that she joined the protest at the "People's Meeting" at the John A. Wilson Building because she felt "disrespected" that Fenty and Rhee were not including enough parent input in their decisions on the closings. "They can't be listening to us, they're not there," she said.

The racial and class division on the schools echoes similar divides reflected in Fenty's overall approval ratings and the outlook on the future of the city. White and more-affluent residents were generally more optimistic about the city and approving of the mayor than were black and poorer residents.

Whites more frequently mentioned schools as the city's top problem, while blacks called crime a bigger concern. Thirty percent of blacks gave the schools decent marks, more than twice the 14 percent of whites who did so.

At the same time, half of black residents and half of residents in wards 7 and 8, the poorest in the city, approved of Rhee's job performance; 71 percent of whites and 64 percent of those living in more affluent Northwest approved.

Rhee did not include a school from affluent Ward 3 on her closings list, saying that ward has the fewest schools and is not experiencing enrollment drops.

"Someone said to me that we have to close a school in Ward 3 as a symbolic gesture. I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard," Rhee said.

Asked whether she takes race and social class into consideration, she responded: "You have to be sensitive. It's a valid question people should ask. But I cannot allow it to dictate decisions. It should be what's best for kids first and foremost."

Many residents polled said part of what would be best for District students and schools is addressing parent apathy. Twenty percent of those surveyed called the lack of parental involvement the top problem"Many parents spend more time researching a new car than their school," said Bob Payne, a Capitol Hill computer consultant who plans to send his two young children to public school. "I also realize some of the economic realities where you've got some families with two parents working really hard to scrape by" with little free time.

Rhee said the school system cannot demand more of parents until it offers better services. "I have seen firsthand how parents are treated in our schools," said Rhee, whose two daughters attend Oyster Elementary in Ward 4. "I can't blame them if they do not jump to volunteer."

Crime and violence is what worries Ivana Williams, who lives in Ward 5's North Michigan Park neighborhood and has a 14-year-old son at Wilson High School in Ward 3. Her son's cellphone was stolen during gym class, she said.

Williams said she fears things could worsen with the school consolidation plan, which some activists have cautioned would bring together students from rival neighborhoods.

"I'm hopeful, but I've been hopeful for years," said Williams, who attended D.C. public schools through 11th grade in 1972. "I don't know what they can do to improve the schools and test scores and discipline. To me, it's not putting more kids together in one school."

Staff writers Robert E. Pierre, Nikita Stewart and V. Dion Haynes and polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this report.

Labels: Parent Involvement

posted by Patricia Lopez at 5:59 PM 0 comments Links to this post

The following is from an email newsletter. The link will take you to the site where you can download the ACLU's response to the Nevada School District. -Patricia

In Nevada, the Esmeralda County School District is blatantly discriminating against Latino students and violating their first amendment rights by forbidding students from speaking Spanish on school buses. The ACLU sent a letter to the superintendent requesting that the school district rescind the ban on Spanish immediately.

"During the bus ride to and from school there is no scheduled scholastic instruction,” said Lee Rowland, staff attorney with the ACLU of Nevada. “Yet while English-speaking students can carry on personal conversations that don’t further any educational goals, Spanish-speaking students must sit in silence."

By singling out and prohibiting the use of Spanish, the ACLU’s letter points out, the school district sends the message that Spanish-speakers, the majority of whom are Latino, are inferior. Because the language people choose to speak closely reflects their culture and where they are from, restricting the use of languages violates federal prohibitions against discrimination based on national origin.

The ACLU has requested to meet with the superintendent soon to resolve the matter of the school district’s policy that prohibits Spanish on the bus.

Labels: ACLU, language discimination

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:06 AM 2 comments Links to this post

From Democracy Now!:

In Mexico, up to 100,000 farmers and supporters marched through Mexico City Thursday to rally against the lifting of tariffs on U.S. imports. A Mexican tax on basic crops, including corn, beans and sugar, from Canada and the U.S. ended last month under the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. Critics say NAFTA has devastated Mexican farmers by forcing them to compete with government-subsidized American and Canadian goods. Farmer Armando Villegas was one of the protesters.

Armando Villegas: “The public policies of the North American Free Trade are wrong. The public policies of the NAFTA agreement have created a Frankenstein and as it is fed with bad public policies, this is disastrous for us. The government has created a Frankenstein in the countryside with its bad public policies. If these public policies weren’t so bad the NAFTA wouldn’t worry us.”

To read more (in Spanish): Mega marcha campesina contra el TLCAN

Labels: Mexico

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:59 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Important message on the effects of top-down policies on ELL students from the perspective of a school administrator. -Patricia


Opinion by Kathleen Bethel | Arizona Star
Tucson, Arizona
January 22, 2008

The Arizona Department of Education introduced the "new" plan for English Language Learners to principals and leaders in our district. But the informational meetings have been occurring around the state for many months. And the silence is deafening.
Many educators are in shock wondering how we could have come to this without a public outcry. But voters never even had a chance to express their approval or outrage.

Principals are being mandated to separate all students who are not deemed "proficient" in the English language from the rest of the population next year. They must be placed in separate classes from any child who is "proficient," or, any student who will never be tested due to the fact that their parents speak only English. The child must stay assigned to that class until they are deemed proficient.

It does not take much imagination to see how these classes will look. Arizona schools will have much the same feel as the historic "separate but equal" education. The psychological barriers will be firmly established from the beginning. Children will learn their place by being assigned to "that classroom." They will know who are the language "haves" and "have-nots."

Using Prop. 203, the English for Children initiative that passed in 2000, as the basis for an overhaul in the learning of English in Arizona, a task force of nine individuals was appointed to design this model. None of those appointed was an expert in the field of language learning, only two were educators and some had a political agenda.

The model was not based on any proven, successful plan. It will not be funded, although it will cause financial hardship to every district. Our Legislature quietly passed it as ARS 2064 in September 2006.

The plan's writers are quick to state their plan is not actually unconstitutional. Defending the segregated placements as "only temporary" until the child proves he is proficient in English, the writers claim that the plan is not a violation of civil rights. A child might be there for only one year. But the burden of proof is on the children. It is up to them to test out.

Testing out depends on proficiency not only in speaking English but also in reading and writing on the Arizona English Language Learner Assessment (AZELLA). Even native English speakers might have trouble passing, but we will never know. They will not be tested.

If the writers of the plan truly had English proficiency for all students as their primary motivation, they should have included the testing of all students to prove its intent is not discriminatory.

All logic is missing. To learn German, I would want to be immersed in a class with German language role models, and supported with instruction, not "held" in a separate class with others who speak at the same level I do.

The level of proficiency determines class placement and is obtained as a child registers. Even if a child has a baby-sitter after school who speaks another language, stating that will red flag that child as needing to test his proficiency. Imagine being a kindergartner or student new to a school, walking through the doors for the first time, only to be taken to another room by a stranger and given a test. How well would you do?

Unfortunately, the parents who should and would be most outraged at this new development will remain silent. They are the ones who also are not proficient enough to protest. And educators may be afraid they will be more closely monitored if they express their concerns.

So it is imperative that those of us who have witnessed the impact of separate but equal speak out. We must not be afraid. We must invite scrutiny and resist the temptation to let the injustice of this plan continue.

E-mail Kathleen Bethel at kathleenb@susd12.org.

Labels: English language learners

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:45 PM 2 comments Links to this post