LA Daily News
04/23/2008

Dump school and kiss your car goodbye.

If two bills working through the California Legislature come to pass, this could be the newest slogan in the ongoing struggle to keep teens in school.

The two bills, AB2107 and AB2414, would deny provisional driver's licenses to 16- and 17-year-olds if they drop out of high school.

While it's nice to see state leaders taking an interest in California's dropout crisis, these bills only offer double trouble to kids already hurt by the failure of schools. Life without basic education and reduced career opportunities is already punishment enough for dropping out.

Besides, the bills ignore that there are many reasons students leave high school, and not all of them are related to laziness or delinquency. Indeed, it could simply be that they don't feel safe in increasingly dangerous schools, or they're uninspired by what passes for education on too many of our campuses.

In Los Angeles, students sometimes leave because of family financial hardship. How does it benefit anyone to deny a license to a teen who suddenly needs to support her family by getting a job, not allowing her to drive to work?

If legislators want to improve the dropout rates, which are particularly appalling in the Los Angeles Unified School District - as much as 50 percent - they would do more by threatening the driver's licenses of school administrators and bureaucrats.

The prospect of a commute on the bus filled with current and ex-students they failed would probably do more for improving the dropout rate than this misguided legislation.

Labels: Dropouts

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:48 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By EDWARD B. FISKE
April 25, 2008

TOMORROW is the 25th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk,” a remarkable document that became a milestone in the history of American education — albeit in ways that its creators neither planned, anticipated or even wanted.

In August 1981, Education Secretary T. H. Bell created a National Commission on Excellence in Education to examine, in the report’s words, “the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” Secretary Bell’s expectation, he later said, was that the report would paint a rosy picture of American education and correct all those widespread negative perceptions.

Instead, on April 26, 1983, the commission released a sweeping 65-page indictment of the quality of teaching and learning in American primary and secondary schools couched in a style of apocalyptic rhetoric rarely found in blue-ribbon commission reports.

“The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people,” it warned. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

To his credit, Secretary Bell, a moderate Republican who had been hoping for some political relief from critics on his right, stood by these unexpected words from his commission — and thereby became the unwitting father of the modern school reform movement.

Secretary Bell’s boss, President Ronald Reagan, was also taken aback by “A Nation at Risk,” although for different reasons. He took office in 1981 with a three-fold agenda for education: abolishing the Department of Education, promoting tuition tax credits and vouchers and restoring voluntary prayer in the schools. Using the bully pulpit and purse of the federal government to promote “excellence” in teaching and learning was not on the list.

When members of the White House staff saw an early copy of “A Nation at Risk,” they were distressed to find no mention of their political agenda and threatened to cancel the ceremony in which the president would receive the first copy. Secretary Bell and commission members replied that such topics were at best tangential to their assigned topic of excellence in teaching and learning.

Eventually a compromise was reached. The president agreed to receive the commission and accept the first copy of “A Nation at Risk” at a White House ceremony, and he used his remarks to reaffirm his political objectives — none of which were mentioned in the report. Several members of the commission later confided that they left Washington that day in a depressed mood, convinced that they had been “used” and were destined to be ignored.

Then came the biggest twist of all. “A Nation at Risk” resonated with Americans, who seemingly agreed that there was indeed something “seriously remiss” in their schools. White House pollsters picked this up. The president began visiting schools all over the country, usually in the company of Secretary Bell, who until then, as head of a department scheduled for elimination, had never seen the inside of Air Force One.

The most important legacy of “A Nation at Risk” was to put the quality of education on the national political agenda — where it has remained ever since. The last 25 years have seen a succession of projects and movements aimed at increasing the quality of American primary and secondary schools: standards-based reform, the 1989 “education summit” that set six “national goals” for education, the push for school choice and, most recently, the No Child Left Behind legislation. Proponents of each have taken pains to portray themselves as the heirs of “A Nation at Risk.”

The apocalyptic rhetoric of the opening section of “A Nation at Risk” isn’t the only element of the report that has had a lasting impact. One of the main ideas enshrined in the document — that quality of schooling is directly linked to economic competitiveness — has also shaped the way Americans think about education. This particular theory, however, hasn’t been borne out by history.

In 1983, the causal connection between education and the economy seemed obvious. Americans were living in awe of the Japanese “economic miracle” and assumed that it was made possible by a school system whose students consistently routed ours on all those comparative international achievement tests. But then the Japanese economy soured — even though it still had the same education system — and we began asking ourselves another question: If American schools are so bad, why is our economy doing so well?

With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the link between educational excellence and economic security is not as simple as “A Nation at Risk” made it seem. By the mid-1980s, policymakers in Japan, South Korea and Singapore were already beginning to complain that their educational systems focused too much on rote learning and memorization. They continue to envy American schools because they teach creativity and the problem-solving skills critical to prospering in the global economy.

Indeed, a consensus seems to be emerging among educational experts around the world that American schools operate within the context of an enabling environment — an open economy, strong legal and banking systems, an entrepreneurial culture — conducive to economic progress.

To put it bluntly, American students may not know as much as their counterparts around the Pacific Rim, but our society allows them to make better use of what they do know. The question now is whether this historic advantage will suffice at a time when knowledge of math, science and technology is becoming increasingly critical. Maybe we need both the enabling environment and more rigor in these areas.

But while the theory behind “A Nation at Risk” may no longer hold (mediocre education inevitably leads to a weak economy), the report’s desperate language may be more justified than ever, for American education is in turmoil.

Most troubling now are the numbers on educational attainment. One reason that the American economy was so dominant throughout the 20th century is that we provided more education to more citizens than other industrialized countries. “A Nation at Risk” noted with pride that American schools “now graduate 75 percent of our young people from high school.”

That figure has now dropped to less than 70 percent, and the United States, which used to lead the world in sending high school graduates on to higher education, has declined to fifth in the proportion of young adults who participate in higher education and is 16th out of 27 industrialized countries in the proportion who complete college, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

The striking thing about the performance of American students on international comparisons is not that, on average, they are in the middle of the pack — which was also true in 1983 — but that we have a disproportionate share of low-performing students. We are failing to provide nearly one-third of our young people with even the minimal education required to be functioning citizens and workers in a global economy.

This is particularly distressing news at a time when the baby boomers are aging and a growing proportion of the future work force comes from groups — members of ethnic and racial minorities, students from low-income families, recent immigrants — that have been ill served by our education system. The challenge today is to build access as well as excellence. That’s the new definition of “a nation a risk” — and ample reason for a new commission to awaken the nation to the need to educate all our young people.

Labels: Democracy at Risk

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:23 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Ongoing crackdowns driving some supporters underground, organizers fear.

By Juan Castillo | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Two years ago, millions marched for legal rights for unauthorized immigrants in coordinated events across the country. The massive turnouts stunned even supporters,but they also inflamed some opponents of illegal immigration.

A year later, the crowds thinned. Now, as they prepare for another round of May Day demonstrations in support of more liberal laws, some Austin organizers say fear and fatigue have sapped some of the marches' vigor.

"When year after year you fight and you fight without any kind of real attention and concern by our legislators, it's only logical that people might wear themselves out and maybe get discouraged from coming out again," said Luissana Santibañez of Familias Unidas por la Esperanza (Families United for Hope).

"The enthusiasm has diminished," said Josefina Castilloof the American Friends Service Committee. "I think people are really fearful of coming out as they did in 2006 because they know about (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and how every immigrant is threatened by being not only detained and deported but being put into jail, and that is pretty harsh."

Organizers with the Austin Immigrant Rights Coalition are planning rallies and marches in downtown Austin on Thursday, which is International Workers' Day.

The events coincide with demonstrations across the country in support of what is often called comprehensive immigration reform, which generally includes securing the border, creating paths to legalization for illegal immigrants already in the United States, and expanding the number of available visas so that more people can enter the U.S. legally.

With Congress failing to enact immigration reforms, federal immigration officials have dramatically stepped up raids and arrests, detentions and deportations. The crackdowns and increased presence of immigration agents in the Travis County Jail are a prominent focus of Thursday's local events, which begin with a 4:30 p.m. rally at the Capitol.

Protesters plan to walk past the jail during the march, which starts at 5:30 at the Capitol and ends with a rally at Austin City Hall.

Thousands marched last year, though fewer than in 2006, when police estimated that 8,500 people protested in Austin. (Organizers said the turnout was closer to 40,000.)

Omar Angel, a 31-year-old former day laborer from Mexico, said crackdowns and the presence of agents in the jail checking inmates' immigration status are fostering distrust and fear of law enforcement among undocumented immigrants and their family members, many of whom are citizens or legal permanent residents and fear separation from their loved ones.

Despite such fears, some will march because they believe it's important to speak out against the crackdowns, said Angel, who works with Proyecto Defensa Laboral (the Workers Defense Project).

Declining participation in the marches may also be due to a feeling among immigrants that the demonstrations haven't accomplished much and that they are powerless to make a difference, organizer Antolin Aguirre said.

Immigrant advocates hailed the 2006 demonstrations for helping block legislation that would have made living in the U.S. illegally a felony. But opponents of illegal immigration decried the protests, calling them brazen displays by immigration lawbreakers.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:04 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out the Report: "Democracy at Risk: The Need for a New Federal Policy in Education" a MUST read. Excellent work! -Patricia

A panel of well-known education experts today called on the federal government to take a much bigger role in overhauling elementary and secondary education, partly by establishing large new training programs for teachers and principals and by pumping much more money into education research.

In a report timed to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the issuance of the landmark “A Nation at Risk” study, the panel of educators, who call themselves the Forum for Education and Democracy, argues that the nation’s schools are farther behind now than they were when the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued that widely publicized 1983 document calling for sweeping education reform.

“While other countries have made strategic investments and transformed their schools to produce results, we have demanded results without investing in or transforming schooling,” Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University and co-author of the report, said in a news release.

The report urges the federal government to adopt a sweeping plan for training educators, to include new scholarships for prospective teachers, the establishment of the equivalent of a West Point for principals and other school leaders, and the creation of new professional-development schools that would work with universities to ensure that both prospective and veteran teachers learn new skills.

“For an annual investment of $4-billion, or less than what we are currently spending per week in Iraq, the nation could underwrite the high-quality preparation of 40,000 teachers annually (enough to fill all the vacancies that are filled by unprepared teachers each year), seed 100 top-quality urban teacher-education programs, ensure mentors for every new teacher hired each year, provide incentives to bring expert teachers into high-need schools, and dramatically improve professional-learning opportunities for teachers and principals,” the report says.

The report calls for the share of the federal research budget devoted to education research to rise from 0.2 percent to 1 percent, with much of the additional money to be spent ensuring that educators know of promising new practices.

Among the leading members of the forum are John Goodlad, president of the Institute for Education Inquiry; Sharon Robinson, president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education; Ted Sizer, founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools; and Angela Valenzuela, the University of Texas at Austin’s associate vice president for university-school partnerships. —Peter Schmidt

Labels: Democracy at Risk

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:43 PM 0 comments Links to this post

To check out the full report: "What We Think" -Patricia

The NSBA’s Council of Urban Boards of Education
Releases In-Depth Research Study on Parent Views of Urban School Climate

Alexandria, Va. – April 30 – The National School Boards Association’s Council of Urban Boards of Education (CUBE) released findings today of a major research study, What We Think, which surveyed how parents feel about their urban school environments. This survey is a followup to two previous school climate surveys by CUBE, Where We Learn, which surveyed how students feel about their urban school climate, and Where We Teach, which surveyed teachers and administrators. The Parent Teacher Association (PTA) collaborated on the study’s recommendations.

Dr. Brian K. Perkins, principal investigator and Professor of Education Law and Policy of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Southern Connecticut State University, conducted the survey which examined the responses of 10,270 parents in 112 urban schools from 17 states. The survey questions gauge parent perceptions about bullying; expectations of student success; influence of race; parental involvement; safety; and trust, respect, and ethos of caring. Particularly striking was the number of male parents participating, nearly 30 percent of the respondents.

“The results of this study, as well as the two previous studies, emphasize the importance school climate plays in our children’s education,” Perkins said. “The affective dimension of the school day is just as important as the cognitive/academic dimension.”

“NSBA has made it a priority to understand school climate, especially in urban school districts,” NSBA Executive Director Anne Bryant said. “The results of this report are extremely encouraging, with such a strong and positive response from parents, because their engagement in the schools is critical to student achievement and success.”

Warlene Gary, chief executive officer of the PTA national organization, noted, “This project helps to underscore the critical link between the parents, the school, and student achievement. PTA has worked to develop National Standards for Family-School Partnerships to specifically reinforce what parents, schools, and communities can do together to support student success. It is essential that all elements of the community are invested and aware of what is going on in our schools.”

MAJOR FINDINGS:

• Parents believe their child’s school to be a safe place. The majority of parents surveyed viewed their child’s school as a safe place. However, only 42 percent of parents surveyed disagreed that students fight at lot at school. Forty percent of parents were not sure about safety levels when asked about students carrying guns or knives to school.

• Parent views vary about the degree of safety in their neighborhoods. The majority of parents (49%) indicated that there had not been violent crimes within their immediate neighborhoods in the past six months, while a quarter of them indicated that there had been.

• The majority of parents are actively involved in their child’s school. Three quarters of parents agreed that they visited their child’s school to support activities.

• Parents’ believe that their children can achieve and are proud of their accomplishments. The vast majority of parents agreed that their children were capable of performing very well on standardized exams. Additionally, the majority of parents agreed that their children would pursue opportunities in higher education at the community college or university level. Ninety-seven percent of parents were proud of their children.

• Teachers and administrators have gained parents’ trust and make them feel respected. The majority of parents (84%) felt that they could trust the teachers at their child’s school. The majority (87%) also felt respected by the teachers. Parents agreed that they felt respected by administrators at their child’s school (83%).

• Bullying continues to be an issue at school. Little more than half of the parents surveyed felt that teachers had the ability to stop bullying; with close to 30 percent not sure if this was possible. More than 25 percent of parents have spoken to an administrator about bullying. Parents with students in the middle grades (6-8) were the largest group (nearly 11 percent) to report that their child was bullied during the school day at least once per month.

• Racial differences are not viewed to have an impact on a child’s success at school. Race is not a factor in the success of children in their child’s school, according to the majority of parents of urban school children (70%).

Labels: Parent Involvement

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

An analysis finds that they and their children could make up almost 30% of the state's electorate by 2012.

By Teresa Watanabe | Los Angeles Times
April 29, 2008

In the first detailed analysis of potential immigrant
voters and their children in California legislative
districts, a study to be released today shows they
could constitute nearly one-third of state voters by
2012.

The analysis, commissioned by a Bay Area immigrant
support group, is seen as a political road map to
maximize the state's pro-immigrant vote. It also
undergirds efforts to intensify political and civic
action to help immigrants better integrate into
society and win comprehensive legislative reforms,
long stalled in Congress.

"We hope policymakers will look at this data to see
who is in their district and how to best serve their
interests," said Daranee Petsod, executive director of
Grantmakers Concerned With Immigrants and Refugees, a
Sebastopol, Calif.-based organization.

"With these numbers, immigrants can invigorate our
democracy."

Los Angeles County dwarfed all others with about 2.7
million potential pro-immigrant voters -- naturalized
U.S. citizens, legal immigrants eligible for
citizenship and their children ages 12 to 17 --
followed by Orange, Santa Clara and San Diego
counties. Statewide, the total was nearly 7.7 million.

In the Los Angeles area, the San Gabriel Valley had
the highest number of such potential voters.

The immigrant voters and their teenage children, who
are overwhelmingly Latino and Asian American, made up
about one-third of the electorate in state Assembly
and Senate districts held by Democrats and about
one-fifth of Republican districts.

The analysis was conducted by Rob Paral, a Chicago
demographer who charted a similar political road map
in Illinois. It was based on 2006 data from the U.S.
Census Bureau and Department of Homeland Security.

Joshua Hoyt of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant
and Refugee Rights said Paral's work there has enabled
immigrant advocates to launch targeted political
action that has helped swing seven state legislative
districts and one congressional district from
Republican to Democratic since 2002.

Statewide, the Republican district with the largest
number of potential pro-immigrant voters is held by
state Sen. Bob Margett of Glendora. Nearly one-third
of his 29th District, which includes much of the San
Gabriel Valley, is made up of such potential voters.

But Margett co-sponsored efforts to create a state
border police force and voted against bills to give
driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants and to
recognize the contributions of immigrants by declaring
May 1 as "The Great American Boycott 2006 Day."

In an interview, Margett said the number of potential
immigrant voters and their children in his district
were higher than he had imagined. But he said that
would not change his positions. He described himself
as a "law-and-order guy" who would support English
classes, naturalization assistance and other services
for legal immigrants but continue to oppose most
non-emergency services for illegal immigrants.

"I don't want to bend to the winds of political change
if it's a right-and-wrong issue, if it's a legal
issue," Margett said.

Advocates said the report underscores the need for
programs to help integrate immigrants into society,
such as English-language instruction and help
attaining citizenship. But state funds to support
naturalization programs have been cut by half in the
last decade to $3 million and are facing proposed cuts
of an additional 30%, said Reshma Shamasunder,
director of the California Immigrant Policy Center in
Los Angeles.

Aside from supporting more immigrant-friendly
policies, the state's rising immigrant voting force
also could boost efforts to increase funding for
schools, roads and other public services because
surveys show that they are more willing to accept tax
hikes to pay for them, said Louis Di- Sipio, a UC
Irvine political science professor.

DiSipio said immigrant voters already are influencing
local elections, such as the Los Angeles mayoral race,
but it would take time for them to become a decisive
vote statewide because they are still underrepresented
in the electorate. In 2004, for instance, non-Latino
adult whites were 47% of the state population but 65%
of voters.

One new immigrant voter is Rebeca Canales, a
26-year-old El Salvador native and UC Davis law
student. The independent voter said immigration is a
key issue for her; one reason she backs Democratic
presidential candidate Barack Obama over Hillary
Clinton is that he supports driver's licenses for
undocumented immigrants and she does not.

The new political road map is one of the tools that
immigrant advocates plan to use in intensifying
campaigns to win legal status for illegal immigrants,
more family and work visas, and other measures to
comprehensively reform the immigration system.

In addition to more robust civic and political action,
they said they plan to better highlight immigrant
contributions to the nation and more aggressively
"name and shame" anti-immigrant ideologues.

"The implication is that all California policymakers,
regardless of political parties, will need to
understand that a growing share of their constituents
are U.S. citizen taxpayers who are foreign-born, and
demonizing the population does no one any good," said
Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National
Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials
Educational Fund in Los Angeles.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:54 PM 0 comments Links to this post

BY FRANZ BROTZEN | Rice News
April 25, 2008


Houstonians are increasingly concerned about immigration and its effects on the region, according to the latest annual Houston Area Survey. This finding comes, however, as the same survey finds Latino immigrants are quickly assimilating into U.S. society.

The results of the 2008 survey, conducted by the Center for Public Policy at the University of Houston between Feb. 15 and March 5, were released this week. The survey is designed and directed by Stephen Klineberg, professor of sociology at Rice, and his students.

The number of respondents who described the arrival of large numbers of illegal immigrants as a “very serious” problem for Houston rose from 43 percent in 2006 to 61 percent this year. By far the most frequently cited reason for this concern was the perceived strain on public services caused by illegal immigrants. The negative attitudes have spread beyond undocumented immigrants: The proportion of area residents who favor taking action to reduce the number of new immigrants (legal and otherwise) who are coming to America grew from 48 percent in 2004 to 63 percent today.


A majority still backs granting illegal immigrants a path to legal citizenship, if they speak English and have no criminal record, but that majority has slipped to 56 percent from 68 percent in just the last 12 months.

“No matter how you ask the question,” Klineberg said, “every measure shows growing anti-immigrant sentiment.” The public seems increasingly to believe that the nation is being swamped by a rising tide of unassimilable foreigners that it cannot absorb.

The data on the actual experiences of Latino immigrants in Houston, meanwhile, reveal a steady and rapid assimilation into the American mainstream. The proportion of the immigrants who report household incomes above $35,000, for example, grows from 16 percent for those who have lived in the U.S. for nine years or less to 22 percent and to 42 percent among the immigrants who have been in America for more than nine and more than 19 years; the numbers rise to 52 percent in the second generation (U.S.-born Latinos with immigrant parents) and to 57 percent in the third generation.

Similarly, the proportion of the Latino respondents who conducted the interviews in English rather than Spanish grows from 17 percent among the most recent immigrants to 49 percent of those who have lived in the U.S. for 20 years or more, and to 98 percent of the third-generation Latinos. Similarly, the proportions who think of themselves as “primarily Hispanic” drop progressively from 85 percent among the most recent immigrants to 17 percent in the third generation.

Perhaps the most interesting of the findings with regard to Latino attitudes was their perspectives on future immigration. Thirty-nine percent of the Latino immigrants who have been in the United States for fewer than 10 years said the U.S. should admit more immigrants. That number drops to 29 percent among those who have lived in America for 20 or more years, to 25 percent among second-generation Latino immigrants and to just 14 percent in the third generation.

The Houston Area Survey has been measuring relations among ethnic groups since its inception in 1982, and the data revealed a significant negative trend in the last two years. This year’s survey found a mild reversal of that trend. The percentage of Anglos, blacks and Latinos who rated "the relations among ethnic groups in the Houston area" as "excellent" or "good" rose over the past year after dropping sharply between 2005 and 2007. Moreover, a solid majority (65 percent) of the survey respondents now agree with the statement, “The increasing ethnic diversity in Houston will eventually become a source of great strength for the city,” up from 60 percent in 2006.

No comparable reversal has occurred with regard to perceptions of immigration. The increasingly negative attitudes of the past two years have become more negative in this year’s survey, and the mounting concerns about the press of immigrants on public services has also affected evaluations of the Katrina evacuees.

When asked to assess “the overall impact of the Katrina evacuees on Houston,” a growing majority considers the impact to have been a “bad thing” for the city, rising from 47 percent in 2006, to 65 percent in 2007 and to 70 percent this year. Despite such concerns, however, two-thirds of area residents said the Houston community should respond to the evacuees with the same amount or more assistance if another hurricane like Katrina hit in 2008. Only 28 percent thought the community should offer less assistance.

Some part of the anti-immigrant attitudes uncovered in the survey may be related to the overall economic downturn, Klineberg suggested. Four years of an upward trend in positive ratings of local job opportunities turned south in this year’s survey. When asked to name the biggest problem facing Houstonians today, the economy crept up from 10 percent last year to 12 percent this year. On that same question, mentions of crime dropped to 24 percent from 38 percent, while the numbers citing traffic congestion jumped from 25 percent last year to the top spot at 35 percent today.

The new salience of traffic concerns may be partly due, Klineberg thought, to the public’s growing recognition that another one million people will likely be added to the Harris County population during the next 20 years. The surveys document powerful support for efforts to guide that growth in the years ahead. Fully 61 percent of the survey respondents agreed that more land-use planning would “improve the region’s quality of life and long-term prosperity.” Only 23 percent believed instead that such planning “will slow economic growth and increase the cost of housing.” And 83 percent were in favor of a “general plan to guide Houston's future growth,” with fewer than 11 percent opposed.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:41 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is awesome! A wonderful example of the talent in our communities.

"There is enough love and good will in our movement to give energy to our struggle and still have plenty left over to break down and change the climate of hate and fear around us." That's for you Luis! - la Paty

-Patricia

Donna Jones | SJ Mercury News
04/26/2008

In sixth grade, Magge Rodriguez was the youngest member of the activist Watsonville Brown Berets.

By seventh grade, she was traveling to Sacramento to lobby for education issues.

As a junior at Watsonville High School, she helped organize the first homecoming parade through the downtown in decades.

This year, as a senior, she was named Watsonville High's student of the year.

She's political, she's got tons of school spirit and now the 18-year-old is the winner of a prestigious Gates Millennium Scholars Award, a scholarship funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that will pay for her education through a doctoral degree.

She's also won the 2008 Princeton Prize on Race Relations and will travel to Princeton University on May 1 to pick up the award.

She's been accepted to UCLA, and has been put on the waiting list at Yale.

Her plan: Study hard, earn a law degree and come back to Watsonville to defend farmworker rights.

"I watched my parents come home from work tired and in pain," said Rodriguez, whose parents worked in the fields when they first emigrated from Mexico more than 20 years ago. "They gave me the opportunity to go to school so I feel it's my duty to educate myself and give back to the farmworkers so they have a better life."

Rodriguez, a petite teen with long, wavy dark hair, credits the Brown Berets for putting her on her current path. She knew she wanted to get involved, but the Berets helped her find a way, she said. With the group, she's advocated for education and immigrant rights, against gangs and violence and worked on election campaigns.

In particular, activist lawyer Luis Alejo, a founder of the Berets, is a mentor. Rodriguez said he not only helped her find ways to be active politically, but also helped her prepare for college.

"I cannot say how proud many of us are of Magge, who has dedicated herself to improving our schools and community," Alejo said in an e-mail. "She is an exemplary role model to the youth of Watsonville, especially young Latinas."

Watsonville High School Principal Murry Schekman is a fan, too. He said when he came to the school last year he kept hearing about this group, the Brown Berets.

The group, which dates to the mid-1990s, has ruffled feathers in the town, as much for members' sometimes militant expressions as for their politics.

Schekman said people told him he needed to meet Magge. He was impressed. He said, for example, when students wanted to walk out over immigrant rights, she helped keep the focus on immigration without losing class time.

"It doesn't get better than Magge Rodriguez," Schekman said. "She's an athlete. She's a leader on campus."

Of her accomplishments as a school leader, Rodriguez said she's most proud of pushing to get all classes, instead of just seniors, active in homecoming to bring the school together.

But she said her most important work was on the Williams lawsuit, a class action suit filed in 2000 that forced the state to address inequities between schools and to ensure every school was clean and safe and that students were provided with proper materials.

That, she said, she didn't do for herself, but for future generations, in particular, her 7-year-old brother Emmanuel.

"He's already saying he's going to Yale," she said. "He's the big reason I'm work so hard."

Labels: California

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

This is crazy! Looks like school-centered goals are undermining student-centered goals. I'm glad the Bee included the voice of a parent, shows how NCLB is effecting all stakeholders. Check out graphs demonstrating schools' classification breakdowns. -Patricia

By Laurel Rosenhall and Phillip Reese | Sacramento Bee
Sunday, April 27, 2008

Will C. Wood Middle School faced a vexing situation when last year's test results came out in August. Most students had met the mark set by No Child Left Behind. But African American students' math scores fell far short of it, bringing the school into failing status in the eyes of the federal law.

One hundred students were categorized as black when they took the test last spring. But if the school had fewer than 100 students in that group, their low scores wouldn't count. So Principal Jim Wong reviewed the files of all the students classified as African American on the test, he said, and found that four of them had indicated no race or mixed race on their enrollment paperwork. Wong sent his staff to talk to the four families to ask permission to put the kids in a different racial group.

"You get a kid that's half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?" Wong said. "If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble."

Over the past two years, 80 California schools got "out of trouble" with No Child Left Behind after changing the way they classify their students, a Bee analysis has found. The changes nudged their status from failing to passing under the federal law.

The state allows school officials to comb through test results every August, changing students' demographic information to correct mistakes that can happen, for example, when clerks register new students or when districts swap student files.

Thousands of schools make demographic corrections, and the majority have no bearing on their No Child Left Behind status. But the correction process may allow some schools to escape the scrutiny intended by No Child Left Behind, The Bee found.

The state doesn't verify whether the changes schools make accurately reflect the students they serve. And the point of No Child Left Behind lies in separating test scores by race – then demanding educators bring all children to the same level. The law says all major demographic groups – categorized by race, income, English fluency and disability status – must meet test score targets that increase over time. If one group doesn't meet the target, the entire school faces the stigma of low performance and a series of consequences.

Advocates see the consequences as extra help for struggling students – from after-school tutoring to more time in the classroom to a change in teachers. Many educators, however, view them as punishment.

Parents approved switch

The Will C. Wood parents agreed to put their children in a different racial group. Two were reclassified as white, and two as American Indian.

Sacramento City Unified officials say they have documentation proving the parents were on board with the racial reclassifications. But they would not share it with The Bee.

"With our data corrections, we're not looking for the numbers in the subgroup, we're looking at the accuracy of the data," said Associate Superintendent Mary Hardin Young. "We're looking for the accurate information first."

When the school's corrected test data came out in February, Will C. Wood appeared to have met all No Child Left Behind requirements. The school reported 96 African American students, instead of 100. Although math scores remained low in the smaller pool of black students, the school was not punished for their performance because the group had become statistically insignificant.

Even when a group is small enough to fall off the radar, its students still count toward a school's overall test scores. But lumping students of all backgrounds together has allowed schools to camouflage the scores of students they have under-served. For decades, schools were given a pat on the back as long as their overall test scores looked good – even though the scores of black and Latino children were typically far below those of whites. That's exactly what was supposed to change when No Child Left Behind became law in 2002.

"The accountability and responsibility inherent in that law, it's about having to teach kids, not reaching an arbitrary number," said Russlynn Ali, executive director of Education Trust West, a Bay Area group that advocates rigorous academics for disadvantaged students.

She said schools are violating the spirit of No Child Left Behind when they take advantage of ambiguous situations and change student demographics in their favor.

"This is deliberate gaming of the system, finding a way to shirk the responsibility to close the achievement gap," Ali said.

Wong said Will C. Wood is doing everything it can to help low-performing students learn math. About 100 kids a day attend free after-school tutoring, he said. If they stop showing up, the school calls home. Teachers have gotten extra training; students more computer help.

Many educators welcome the attention No Child Left Behind has brought to the performance of individual racial groups and say they strive every day to close the gap. But they also feel the system hammers them with arbitrary numbers: Even if student test scores improve – as they have at Will C. Wood – schools are punished if they don't meet specific targets each year.

"You're threatened that you're going to get fired, that your staff is going to get fired," said Wong, the Will C. Wood principal, explaining why he changed his students' demographic data. "It's very, very stressful."

There's a different stress for parents – worrying if their kids are getting the attention they need. Robbinceta Harris' son was one of the black students at Will C. Wood whose scores became irrelevant after the race reclassifications.

She said the school should be doing more to help students learn, not looking for ways to avoid the spotlight of No Child Left Behind.

"If they did it the right way, somebody from the outside would have been looking in and saying, 'Why aren't they passing?' " Harris said.

"They needed something."

Different stories told

The Bee analyzed two years of test data for roughly 6,000 California schools subject to No Child Left Behind – those that receive federal Title 1 funds for serving poor children. Eighty schools initially fell short of the law's test targets but met them after making demographic corrections. Of those:

• 12 schools changed students' race classification.

• 50 schools reclassified English learners as fluent in the language – or vice versa.

• Seven schools changed which students are considered disabled or economically disadvantaged.

• 11 schools changed student demographics in a way that rendered an entire group statistically insignificant, as Will C. Wood did.

All told, these schools reclassified 985 students, resulting in increased math and English proficiency rates. By making some demographic groups numerically insignificant, the scores of an additional 815 students were not counted as part of a demographic category.

Not all schools that made demographic changes end up doing better under No Child Left Behind. Compared with the 80 schools that improved their standing after demographic corrections, another 33 California schools saw their status drop from passing to failing after their changes.

Each school that made beneficial corrections had a different story.

In 2007, Main Avenue Elementary in Robla added one high-scoring student to the Latino category, boosting that group's score just past the proficiency benchmark.

Principal Ruben Reyes said the boy had erroneously been marked as living in the country less than a year, which meant his score wouldn't count at all. Reyes knew he had been here longer and filed a correction that added his score to the pool of Latino students.

The correction took the percentage of Latinos scoring proficient in English from 24.1 to 25.4, inching it past the 24.4 percent proficient necessary to satisfy the law.

Herndon-Barstow Elementary in Fresno reduced the number of English learners from 72 to 70, making that group statistically insignificant in 2007. Principal Melody Burriss said a few students were reclassified as fluent in English before spring testing, but the paperwork hadn't caught up with them.

Burbank changes defended

Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento made corrections to its English learner category two years in a row.

In 2006, Burbank went from 306 English learners to a corrected total of 304, raising the percentage of those students scoring proficient in English from 22.2 percent to 22.4 percent. The No Child Left Behind target was 22.3 percent proficient.

In 2007, Burbank lowered the number of English learners from 289 to 275, moving some students out of the category and adding in some high-scorers. The percentage of English learners scoring proficient in English increased from 19 percent to 22.5 percent. The No Child Left Behind requirement was that 22.3 percent be proficient.

Principal Ted Appel said most of the corrections were necessary because a large number of Hmong refugees had been put in the wrong grade when they arrived at Burbank as newcomers to the country. No Child Left Behind looks at high school students' test scores only in the 10th grade.

In other cases, clerks at Burbank had mistakenly failed to label some students as English learners even though documentation from their parents shows the kids spoke Mien, Hmong, Farsi, Spanish or Tongan at home.

Schools like Burbank that serve large numbers of immigrants are likely to correct their demographic data because those students can move in and out of various categories. Over the course of a school year, students can master English and move out of programs for non-native speakers.

Private firm checks changes

At many schools, students move in and out of special education. Electronic records become outdated. For those reasons, California will always need to allow schools to correct demographic information, said Rachel Perry, director of accountability for the state Department of Education.

Changes to students' ethnic categories are much less common, The Bee's analysis shows. But when it happens, state education officials don't check to see why, Perry said. They leave it up to a private contractor – Educational Testing Service – which performs minimal checks.

Appel, the Burbank principal, said the important thing is not whether schools are correcting data but whether they are helping students learn more.

At his school, test scores have gone up over the past five years – steeply in math, more gradually in English. After making data corrections this year, Burbank was removed from the list of schools facing No Child Left Behind's consequences.

"The way to get out is not by making data corrections," Appel said. "The way to get out is to improve student achievement."

Labels: California, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:20 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Multiculturalism is a basic American concept. We value the beliefs, traditions, customs, arts, history, and folklore of the diverse cultures reflected throughout our nation. All this is being put at risk in Arizona, where last week the Appropriations Committee passed an amendment to a routine homeland security bill, SB 1108 that would prohibit students at the state's public universities and community colleges from organizing groups based on race (ie: groups such as MEChA, the Black Business Students Association, Native Americans United, etc.)

Please take action today. This bill could reach the Arizona House floor as early as this week.

According to newspaper reports, Rep. John Kavanagh (R-Scottsdale), a supporter of the measure called these campus organizations, "'self-defeating' and 'self-destructive' for students."

Self-defeating? Multiculturalism doesn't limit students. It gives them pride in who they are and enhances their being fuller people by fostering the concept of America being the land of opportunity. As Cesar Chavez said, "Preservation of ones culture doesn't mean contempt for others'."

These student groups are like any other school club or fraternity. They bring students together so they can achieve academic success. They offer a place to meet, make friends and support one another. Their goal is to help students succeed. For example, the members of the University of Arizona's MEChA chapter visit high schools to encourage students to attend college. They hold events and fundraisers to spread the message that education is the key to success.

The bill goes one step further. It also would ban public schools or colleges from including race-based classes or school sponsored activities. Officially the language says it would ban any activity "deemed contradictory to the values of American democracy or Western civilization." However, the language is so broad, who knows what could be prohibited? Certainly Chicano studies, African-American studies & other ethnic studies programs will be put at risk.

Studies show that students who learn about their race and culture have a lower drop-out rate. In truth, if this bill passes it could cause a huge set back in our educational system.

Please take immediate action. If you live in Arizona, e-mail your representatives immediately as well as the Speaker of the House. If you live outside Arizona, please e-mail the Arizona Speaker of the House today and let him know the eyes of the nation are on Arizona.

Labels: Diversity, race

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:50 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Double digit percentage point gains in passing rates for Pearce Middle School and Johnston High School will be required to meet tougher passing standards.

By Laura Heinauer | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, April 16, 2008

For the two Austin schools most in need of improvement this year, the path to meet the new TAKS passing standards finalized this week by the state won't be easy.

Pearce Middle School in East Austin, where the district held a planning forum Tuesday evening, will have to show double-digit percentage-point gains in the passing rate for this year's science test. Students will take the test for the first time this year on May 1.

Campuses must meet state standards within all student groups on all subjects on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills or risk closure. Pearce, now entering its third year of "unacceptable" status in the accountability system, could be closed by the state this year.

State officials said passing rates at Johnston High School would have to show significant gains on both the math and science portions of the tests, which students take at the end of this month and in May, to keep that campus open.

Superintendent Pat Forgione thanked parents at the forum and said their support for helping students and keeping the campus open is critical.

"This is like preparing for a hurricane. Tonight, we have a storm warning," he said.

In recognition of the uphill battle Pearce faces, several East Austin advocates have been pitching in to help. Michael Lofton, a local talk-show host who organizes monthly conferences for African American men and boys, said he and members of other groups, including churches and local neighborhood associations, have met to coordinate mentoring and social services for Pearce students and their families.

"I know this is kind of at the 99th hour," Lofton said. "But if all goes well, I think we can make a lot of headway by the end of the year."

Most observers agree that meeting the state's new 2008 passing standards will be difficult for schools like Pearce and Johnston. This year, the minimum passing rate for English has been increased from 65 percent to 70 percent. In math, 50 percent of students must pass, up from 45 percent, and in science it went from 40 percent to 45 percent.

Both schools could get a reprieve by getting just to the "acceptable" standard. Johnston would have to improve performance in 20 areas to meet that so-called required improvement standard. Pearce would have to do it in 16 areas. Reaching that standard is what got Webb Middle School in North Austin off the state's low-performing list and saved it from the threat of closure last year.

Labels: failing schools

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:33 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Sharon Noguchi | Mercury News
04/28/2008

One student designed a palm tree with the dots on the answer sheet. Another breezed through 60 questions in five minutes. Others answered questions based on the quintessential teen attitude: whatever.

As schools across the state hunker down for annual tests that determine their fate and reputation, high school teachers face the daunting challenge of motivating students who may not know - or care - about the high stakes involved.

Already cramming for exit exams, SATs and advanced-placement tests, many teens think they have nothing to gain by acing, or even trying much, on the Standardized Testing and Reporting - STAR - tests.

STAR test season culminates now with a week of multiple-choice exams given from grades 2 through 11. And while elementary school teachers have little trouble cajoling students to "do their best on the test," some high schoolers see it as a chance to take a weeklong breather.

"There are people who show up late every day and do half the test," said senior Mike Laccabue of Monta Vista High in Cupertino. And while he himself never completely blew off the test, "I never cared if I got something wrong."

Mostly, he said, students "try to do it as quickly as possible." Then they catch up on class reading or listen to MP3 players.

Local educators emphasize that the overwhelming majority of students take the STAR tests seriously - and the comparatively high scores at South Bay schools indicate that they're right. But they worry about those who don't.

While the tests have no bearing on students' grades or what college they get into, it matters hugely to schools and districts.

The state compiles students' results into a single score that indicates how the whole school is doing. That number helps determine whether the campus is honored as a "blue-ribbon" school or whether the state takes it over for "failing."

"It's important for students to realize that this is how schools are actually judged, and that they're honoring their teachers," said Donna Hope, principal of Leigh High in San Jose.

How much student effort counts was vividly illustrated two years ago, when students at Downtown College Prep deliberately flubbed the test to protest the layoff of four popular teachers. The school's score plunged 203 points, the second-biggest drop in the state. Last year, seeing how their anger had hurt the school's reputation and ranking, students applied themselves and the school bounced back 173 points.

Educators have resorted to carrots and sticks - ranging from parties to threats of remedial class - to get the kids motivated.

Among the sticks, students who perform abysmally on the state test may have to enroll in a remedial math or English class - and sacrifice an elective, said John Najac, principal of Independence High in San Jose.

At other schools, students may be denied enrollment in AP or honors classes if their state test scores are too low.

Among the carrots is less homework and, at some schools, minimum days. The Santa Clara Unified School District provides granola bars and water to all test-takers, and a barbecue and pool party for top scorers. At the district's New Valley High, test-takers get a chance to win passes to Great America or Golfland.

Nearly all schools enlist support from home by sending letters asking that students be prepared and well-rested. Hope at Leigh High tells students their parents' property values will increase with higher scores.

At all schools, juniors who do well in math and English may qualify to skip basic English or math at California State University campuses.

Then there's school spirit. At Branham High School in San Jose, Vice Principal Mike Posey promises to dye his hair blue, one of Branham's colors, if the school gains more points than rival Leigh High does.

At San Jose High Academy, student body President Korie Benavidez has become an academic cheerleader. In his morning announcements, he chants "680 is the name of the game," a slogan painted on banners strung in hallways. That means the school is hoping to achieve at least a 680 on the 1,000-point scale.

Educators insist that getting students engaged is half the battle and point to steadily rising scores as evidence that their boosterism is succeeding.

"Given the right information about the exam, students want to do well," said Deborah Sigman, director of the Department of Education's standards and assessment division for the state.

Student response is mixed.

Junior Leena Suleiman of San Jose High Academy has studied intensely for the two international baccalaureate tests she'll take next week. And although she says she'll try hard, she admits that STAR "is not my No. 1 priority."

Sophomores Alex Barrera and Jaskaran Sohi both said they intend to try hard, but they know not all of their friends will. "They say, 'We don't really care; we don't want to go to college,' " Jaskaran said.

That's why serious students try to pump up their classmates. Kids at some schools actually study for the exams.

"We want to be able to say that we graduated from a good school," said Claudia Flores, 17, a San Jose Academy senior headed to Santa Clara University next year, who knows that the student body's collective score reflects on her. "But many students don't take it seriously."

The STAR test does have pluses for students.

"There's this advantage that your teachers don't give you that much homework," Monta Vista's Mike said. And seniors, who are exempt, really like test time. "This year I'm blessed, 'cause I don't have to take them."

Labels: California, teachers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:30 PM 0 comments Links to this post

SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES | ABCNews
Friday, April 25, 2008

When it's time each spring for Carl Chew to give his Seattle sixth-graders the federally required standardized tests, he can feel their anxiety.

They complain about stomachaches, they get sick and some of them just start to cry. Even the straight-A students.

For both teachers and young children, the annual Washington Assessment of Student Learning test creates an atmosphere "rife with fear," the science teacher at Nathan Eckstein Middle School told ABCNEWS.com.

"The WASL is presented in a secretive, cold and inhuman fashion," he said. "The teacher is not allowed to read the questions, or help, and the kids have to maintain silence for hours and hours. They are only allowed a bathroom break once in a while."

But after agonizing about the detrimental effects of standardized testing for several years, Chew did something about it last week. He refused to administer the test, which is the key measure of academic progress under the federally mandated No Child Left Behind law.

The WASL is just one of numerous high-stakes tests that now dominate the curricula of elementary schools across the country. A growing number of teacher and parents are rejecting these kind of tests, which have increased in frequency and gravitas after No Child Left Behind.

They rebel at their own peril, however. Chew was suspended for nine days without pay by his principal. But today --- sitting at home while a substitute teacher takes his place -- he is a rock star among parents and teachers who have blamed the testing for stamping out the love of learning in children.

Harmful to Students

"I have let my administration know that I will no longer give the WASL to my students," Chew wrote in an e-mail to national supporters. "I have done this because of the personal moral and ethical conviction that the WASL is harmful to students, teachers, schools and families."

The e-mail was circulated by Mothers Against the WASL, a group of activist parents who oppose the test. Chew received hundreds of letters from as far away as Hawaii and Canada, some of them from students.

"They have all said 'thank you, Mr. Chew, for standing up against WASL,'" he said.

One e-mail came from Beth Hovee of Vancouver, Wash., whose 8-year-old granddaughter Zoe fears reading because of a battery of repetitive speed tests.

"Drill and kill is the motto of the WASL," Hovee said. "She's a smart kid, but the pressure tests and teaching techniques make her hate school."

Zoe took her first WASL this week. "It gets really quiet in the room and the door is closed," she told ABCNEWS.com. "When you get stuck on a question, the teacher can't help. You don't know what to do and you have to figure it out."

Her 10-year-old brother Jonah -- a stellar student -- was traumatized by the WASL last year.

"They have this big rule about not going to the bathroom," his mother, Andrea Logue, said. "In the middle of testing he asks to go and the teacher said she was sorry, but we he couldn't leave. Much to his mortification, he wet his pants."

Incidents like these reassure Chew that his protest is important, but Seattle Public School spokesman David Tucker defended the suspension.

"Our expectation is that all schools will administer any and all state-required tests," he told ABCNEWS.com. "I am a parent as well. I think accountability is something we should definitely stress within the school district. We need to know where the children are academically and ensure that they reach levels they need to reach to move forward."

Teacher Is Hero

The popular Washington teacher is now a hero among national critics of the controversial 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which has faced numerous court challenges and has been actively opposed by state teacher unions and many school districts.

President Bush's sweeping education reform law, which is up for reauthorization, aims to narrow the achievement gap between disadvantaged and other students and to make schools more accountable. It requires states to set standards and assessments and mandates annual testing in reading and math for grades 3 through 8.

"Some children handle these tests well and some are sent over the edge," said Walter Gilliam of the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine. "What we need is good research."

Gilliam said No Child Left Behind places the wrong emphasis on accountability.

"It's one thing if we have tests for the sake of improving instruction for children," he told ABCNEWS.com "But it's quite another thing to give a test for the sake of holding adults accountable. What I would rather see is observing teachers as they teach, rather than shouldering it on children."

The WASL is given each spring to students in grades 3-8 and grade 10, and covers reading, writing, math and science. Starting this year, students had to pass reading and writing on the 10th-grade exam to graduate from high school. Students are graded as "below, meeting or exceeding" standards

"The teachers really play it up," said the father of a fourth-grader in the Lake Washington School District. He didn't want to be identified for fear of reprisals against his daughter.

"About three weeks ago we started getting e-mails from the other parents about bringing in brain food to support the kids through this tough period," he told ABCNEWS.com. "I thought it was pathetic to put 9-year-olds into that kind of test environment."

Test 'Serves No Purpose'

His district in Redmond serves highly competitive parents, many of whom work for Microsoft, which is headquartered there.

"They put pressure on kids to perform well," he said. "But the test serves no purpose. It's nothing more than a benchmark for the state. It's connected to money and teachers, who are clearly ranked. It does nothing for children."

Donald C. Orlich, professor emeritus of education at Washington State University and author of "School Reform: The Great American Brain Robbery," agrees the WASL is a "dreadful" test.

"It's a very poorly constructed test," he said. "There is a very high correlation between how well a student can read and do math. For those who are economically disadvantaged, they don't even have the vocabulary."

Orlich's research echoes one of Chew's complaints: that the WASL unfairly uses "white, upper-middle class language."

"I want to nominate him for teacher of the year," Orlich said. "In my book I call for that kind of behavior. We need nonviolent strikes against WASL."

One such teacher was Robert Allen, a middle school teacher in Arlington County, Wash., who was asked to resign after telling parents they could opt out of the WASL test.

"I was stunned there was no focus on basic skills," he told ABCNEWS.com. "The testing was never about facts or any real learning. It was very airy and fuzzy."

"It's not a standardized test at all," said Allen, 39, who now teaches in Tennessee and has "no problem" with achievement tests.

A Good Tool

But Joe Willhoft, assistant superintendent for assessment and student information in the Seattle Public Schools, told ABCNEWS.com that the WASL is a good tool for measuring student achievement.

Only half the questions on the test require a written response, and experts make sure they have no "unfair and biasing features," Willhoft said. "For example, we don't use the words 'tennis' or 'golf.'"

Willhoft admits that some districts and teachers may exert undue pressure on children to perform.

"I don't think we are getting an overabundance of pressure from parents," he said. "But I do think teachers feel the need to overmotivate students, and it's my hunch some comes from principals."

"Frankly, kids do well if they are somewhat motivated, but there is such a thing as being overmotivated," he said. "If students are taught state standards, the best we can do for the students is say, 'Here is the test, go ahead and do the best you can.'"

Meanwhile, he said teachers like Chew must comply with federal and state law. "We are disappointed this teacher made those particular choices," Willhoft said.

Chew, who is 60, said his act of civil disobedience will cost him about $1,000 over his nine-day absence. He knows it will go on his permanent record and he could ultimately be fired.

"It took me a few moments before I decided to do this," he said. "I did protesting around the Vietnam War and marched for civil rights in the '60s. But this was the first time I did something against a seemingly huge machine."

"I feel so strongly about this -- that it's bad for the kids and I have to do it," he said. "But I know from my own experience, I have to accept the consequences."

Labels: teacher protests

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:24 PM 0 comments Links to this post

But where does anger over view of 'world' come from?

REVEALING VIEWS
By RAUL RAMOS | Houston Chronicle
April 19, 2008

Earlier this month, the makers of Absolut Vodka issued a public apology for running an ad with an early 1830s map of North America with the words "In an Absolut world" emblazoned across the front. The retraction came as a result of a threatened boycott initiated by conservative talk radio and Web sites. Who was Absolut apologizing to and why?

The ad itself ran in Mexican magazines and was aimed at an international audience. I would never have even come across it had it not been brought to my attention by this controversy. The complaints seem to range from concern the ad legitimizes undocumented immigration to fear Absolut is advocating an invasion of the American Southwest by Mexico.

These objections tell us more about the viewer than the map. Conspiracy theorists circulate the idea that Mexico is slowly reconquering the land through immigration. I was once asked what I knew about la Reconquista, as it is termed. I told them I never got the memo from central command.

As a history professor, I find these public discussions revealing of popular thinking about Mexico and Mexican origin people. For me, it was good timing, too. The map appeared on the same week I lectured on the American invasion of Mexico in 1846.

Over the years I have observed ignorance or reluctance to discuss the war and the resulting appropriation of almost half of Mexico's territory. Most of my students didn't know that American troops occupied Mexico City. All one needs to do is hum the first line of the Marines' Hymn to remember.

More importantly, Mexicans have not forgotten. Mexico's foreign policy is still defined against American intervention.

Recent politics also remind Mexican-origin people of a time when traversing this territory didn't mean harassment or having to prove you belong. Instead, the border has become normalized in American culture. It's as though it has always been there since time immemorial. Or, at least that is the way it was always intended to be.

The apology by Absolut has turned history around. Bringing up the old map and recalling this history is now an affront to some Americans.

Much of the rhetoric around immigration positions residents as "victims" and American culture as under attack. It is no wonder that an eighth-grade student in Athens, Texas, recently invented the story of having been attacked by three Latino kids when she brought an anti-immigration sign to school. Even if it didn't happen, that's how kids are taught to feel about Latinos.

Yet the Absolut ad does have some kernel of truth to it. One student in my class said that the ad was probably meant to reveal the thoughts of a vodka drinker after a few rounds.

There is a public memory within the Mexican-origin community about the period before 1848. That memory is of a fundamental connection to this land despite being made to feel like outsiders or visitors.

The flash of controversy around the map made me think about the perspective raised by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in his recent speech on race. While disavowing his preacher's message, he asked Americans to acknowledge that alternative racial perspectives do exist within our various communities.

Mexican resentment about 1848 comes from the discrimination experienced in the years afterward. The conflict escalated from its start as a border dispute over Texas annexation.

The fact of the matter is the invasion of Mexico had its American detractors in 1846 and many then were deeply ambivalent about the way this territory was acquired. Rep. Abraham Lincoln voted against the war and Henry David Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience because of it.

But we as a nation still can't go there, yet.

As a historian, I always note that the border was not always as it is now. The map (used in the Absolut ad) reminds us of that past. It also means that the border will continue to change. Presently, the border is hardening as the Department of Homeland Security bulldozes private property, nature preserves and federal regulations to quickly build a fence.

The pendulum may eventually swing in the other direction. With the euro at an all time high against the dollar, the European Union serves as an alternative model of borders that might one day apply to NAFTA members.

In that case, the "Absolut world" map might not have any borders at all.

Ramos is assistant professor of history at the University of Houston and author of Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821-1861.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:22 PM 0 comments Links to this post

At Least 300 Workers Taken From Chicken Factories, Company Not Facing Any Charges


MOUNT PLEASANT, Texas, April 17, 2008

(CBS/AP) Federal agents arrested hundreds of people in raids at Pilgrim's Pride chicken plants in five states, the latest crackdown on illegal immigrant labor at the nation's poultry producers.

In separate sweeps Wednesday, authorities also arrested dozens of workers at a doughnut factory in Houston and the operators of a chain of Mexican restaurants in upstate New York.

The arrests at Pittsburg, Texas-based Pilgrim's Pride Corp., the nation's largest chicken producer, included charges of identity theft, document fraud and immigration violations. The company worked with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents ahead of the raid, said Ray Atkinson, a company spokesman.

"We knew in advance and cooperated fully," Atkinson said.

Julie Myers, homeland security assistant secretary for ICE, confirmed the company is cooperating, though she said the raids grew out of an investigation that produced arrests last year at the company's plant in Mount Pleasant.

No criminal or civil charges have been filed against Pilgrim's Pride, which has about 55,000 employees and operates dozens of facilities mostly in the South, Mexico and Puerto Rico, supplying the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant chain and other customers.

ICE said nearly 300 were arrested, but Pilgrim's Pride officials said about 400 hourly, non-management employees were arrested.

"We have terminated all of the employees who were taken into custody and will terminate any employee who is found to have engaged in similar misconduct. We are investigating these allegations further," Atkinson said in a statement.

Forty-five people, all illegal immigrants, were arrested in Mount Pleasant on charges of false use of Social Security numbers, ICE said. More than 100 people were arrested on immigration violations in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and they could face criminal charges related to identity theft, the agency said. Another 100 were arrested on immigration charges in Moorefield, West Virginia.

More than 25 people face immigration violation charges in Live Oak, Florida. They will also face identity theft or document fraud charges, ICE said. More than 20 were arrested in Batesville, Arkansas, on federal warrants for alleged document fraud or identity theft.

A statement sent Wednesday by ICE to CBS News said "those arrested on federal criminal charges will be in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service pending the outcome of their case. Others administratively arrested for immigration violations will be interviewed by ICE, and by the Department of Health’s Division of Immigration Health Services, to determine if they have medical, caregiver, or other humanitarian issues."

Pilgrim's Pride has had previous trouble with employees in Arkansas. In January 2007, police arrested a manager at the company's De Queen plant who rented identification documents for $800 to get a job there.

The company has said its policy has been to fire employees who cannot clear up discrepancies in their documentation.

Wednesday's coordinated raids began at 5:30 a.m., said John Ratcliffe, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas. He said agents went to homes as well as the plants.

Ratcliffe said authorities were working to ensure that any children of detained workers were getting proper care. Texas Child Protective Services spokeswoman Shari Pulliam said the agency was notified about the raid but has not had to take custody of any children.

"I hope that the message from today's operation is clear," Ratcliffe said. "We are intent on stopping immigration fraud and identity theft and we will aggressively prosecute anyone who uses another person's name or Social Security number for the purpose of working illegally in this country."

Those whose identities were stolen were denied benefits, told they owed taxes and even arrested as a result of the crime, Myers said.

DJs on a Spanish-language radio station told listeners to be careful Wednesday after reporting news of the raid. After the arrests, many of the dozens of businesses in town that cater to Latino immigrants had few customers or none at all.

"It's sad and scary," said Sheita Delacruz, who works at her mother's dress and gift shop.

It was at least the fourth round of raids at U.S. poultry plants in the past three years. Agents arrested about 160 illegal immigrants in Fairfield, Ohio, last May. Separate raids three months apart in 2005 netted about 120 arrests each in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and Stillmore, Georgia.

The poultry raids were the largest of several immigration enforcement actions across the country Wednesday.

Agents arrived before dawn at a Houston doughnut plant and arrested almost 30 workers suspected of being in the country illegally. Robert Rutt, the agent in charge of the Houston ICE office, said some of the people arrested lived at the Shipley Do-Nuts dough factory, a four-block plant that includes a dormitory for workers.

In Buffalo, New York, federal law enforcement officials announced the arrest of a local businessman and 10 restaurant managers accused of employing illegal Mexican immigrants in seven restaurants in four states. Authorities also arrested 45 illegal immigrants during raids in western New York; Bradford, Pennsylvania; Mentor, Ohio; and Wheeling and New Martinsville, West Virginia.

Authorities said the workers were forced to staff the Mexican restaurants for long hours with little pay to work off smuggling fees and rent.

The restaurants' owner, Simon Banda, who also uses the name Jorge Delarco, of Depew, New York, is charged with conspiring to harbor illegal aliens. He appeared in court without a lawyer Wednesday and was given until Friday to hire one. Magistrate Judge Hugh Scott ordered him detained until then.

In Atlanta, a federal grand jury indicted 10 people from suburban Atlanta employment agencies on charges they placed illegal immigrants in jobs at Chinese restaurants and warehouses in six states. The agencies are accused of developing a network to "recruit and exploit" undocumented workers, said Kenneth Smith, special agent in charge of the ICE office in Atlanta.

Between October 2006 and April 2008, the agencies advertised their services and charged immigrants a fee for finding a job, without requiring any proof that the workers were allowed to work in the U.S, prosecutor David Nahmias said.

Authorities accuse the restaurants in Kentucky, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Florida and Alabama of providing housing and paid workers in cash to avoid taxes, Nahmias said.

The charges are not related to the Pilgrim's Pride raids.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:17 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Pretty controversial line in this article: "Texas' growing population, fueled by an increase in young Hispanics, will make it harder for students vying for a limited number of seats and scholarship dollars in their home state" -- leave it to the media to suggest that Hispanics will be to blame for shifts in white students' college-going rates. -Patricia


By KAREN AYRES / The Dallas Morning News
Thursday, April 17, 2008

High school seniors applying to college this year are facing the stiffest competition ever seen, leaving many top students shaking their heads in disappointment and others waiting until the last minute to make up their minds.

The application ordeal is about to get a little easier for high school seniors across the country – but not for kids in Texas.

The number of graduating seniors is expected to decline from this year's high of 3.3 million students nationwide over the next several years, but it is projected to grow by 20 percent in Texas, according to figures from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

Texas' growing population, fueled by an increase in young Hispanics, will make it harder for students vying for a limited number of seats and scholarship dollars in their home state.

"The national picture is almost 180 degrees of what you can expect to see in Texas on the total numbers side," said Brian Prescott, a senior research analyst at the Western commission. "You're going to see a great deal of competition over scarce slots."

Boosting their odds

Population growth explains only part of the national pinch. The crunch is compounded by a growing number of students applying to a large number of schools – in some cases more than 10 – in hopes of boosting their odds of acceptance.

That phenomenon helped push acceptance rates to an all-time low at several elite national universities this year. Harvard, for example, accepted only 7 percent of applicants.

In Texas, the top 10 percent law, which guarantees admission to state universities for top students, provides assurance for some seniors, but makes it even tougher for others to score seats in the strongest schools.

About 81 percent of Texas students accepted at the University of Texas at Austin this year were admitted through the top 10 percent law.

"If you're not in the top 10 percent, then the competition you face to get into UT-Austin can be as intense as for an Ivy League school," said Gary Lavergne, the school's admissions research director. "It's very, very tough."

The competition has also helped prompt application surges at several other Texas schools.

At Southern Methodist University, the acceptance rate has dropped to an estimated 49 percent this year from 89 percent 10 years ago, university officials say. The number of applications has doubled to 9,000 during that time.

Facing rejection

This year's admissions race surprised many students who were rejected by their first and second choices.

Gabrielle Solis, 16, found out two weeks ago that she was not admitted to her top choice, Harvard. Gabrielle said she is ranked 12th in her class of nearly 700 seniors at Duncanville High School.

"Since second grade, I have wanted to go there," said Gabrielle, who will be the first in her family to go to college. "I had skipped two grades, so I thought that would help. It was a shocker to me."

Also rejected at Rice University, she now hopes to go to Dallas Baptist University.

The high rejection rates at top-tier schools have also put a damper on senior year for many students.

Kim Rose, director of guidance in the Highland Park district, said many students got into top schools, but they don't appear as excited as seniors in previous years. She suspects that's because they feel badly for friends who were rejected by their top choices.

"We haven't seen the level of enthusiasm, and I think that is because of the stress factor," she said.

Guidance counselors in Highland Park used to recommend that students apply to five to seven schools. Now, they suggest seven to 10 schools.

Common application materials and electronic filing have made it far easier for students to file multiple applications.

That application increase – multiplied by a few million students – makes it harder for colleges to predict how many of the accepted students will enroll. Many schools require students to put down a deposit by May 1.

"This is a very nervous time of year for us," said Alice Reinarz, an assistant provost at Texas A&M University. "We've sent out a lot more letters than we have seats."

Going forward, college officials in Texas and other high-growth states will need to review whether they have the buildings and staff to handle the boom, said John Barry, a vice president at Baylor University.

National projections represent overall averages. Demographers expect many southern states to grow, while declines are expected in the Northeast.

"The system only supports so many faculty members, so many students and so much housing," Mr. Barry said. "A boom in population will really tax those systems."

More than ever before, students who want to be competitive will have to do their research in the coming years. Students should no longer assume they will automatically get into a school because they appear to meet the average requirements, counselors say.

"We never use the word 'safety' anymore," said Veronica Pulido, director of college counseling at St. Mark's School of Texas. "Nothing is a secure shot anymore."
COUNSELORS' ADVICE

The growing number of high school graduates in Texas will make it harder to get into selective colleges in the coming years. High school counselors and college admission officials offer these tips to students and parents:

•Research college options early in your high school career.

•Apply to a range of schools, including at least one that's likely to accept you.

•Do not assume you'll get into the school your parents attended.

•If you're in the top 10 percent of your class, apply to at least one public university.

•Consider attending a community college before transferring to a four-year school.


ACCEPTANCE RATES AT ELITE SCHOOLS

Even more selective
Acceptance rates at some elite national universities:
2003 2008
Harvard University 10% 7%
Yale University 11% 8%
Princeton University 10% 9%
Stanford University 13% 10%
University of Pennsylvania 20% 16%
Note: Acceptance rates are rounded to the nearest whole number.

SOURCE: Dallas Morning News research

Labels: higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:01 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Bradley Campbell | Cleveland Scene
April 16, 2008

Kathy Francescani sits inside a library storage closet at Joseph Gallagher School on West 65th. It's a small, rectangular space with glass walls and the feel of a bunker. Stacks of textbooks reach from floor to ceiling, bindings bright in blues, yellows, and reds, making the place feel like a fortified rainbow. This is her office.

Francescani is one of 12 literacy coaches who work at Cleveland schools that are deemed failing by the state. And Joseph Gallagher may be the worst: It hasn't met yearly progress goals for six years.

Francescani's blond hair dances across her shoulders, and she has soft blue eyes, almost like a doe. Before landing her current job, she taught primary grades for 20 years. It's apparent in the way she speaks. Her words are clear and melodic, spilling out like a sugary bedtime story.

But this is the first time she's worked in a school full of kids who barely speak English.

Their lack of language skills is evident in the stacks of test data that sit behind her desk. They're filled with statistics and scores for all 822 students in the Pre-K-8 school. And what they say isn't good: Joseph Gallagher is teetering on the edge of failure yet again.

The designation comes from the No Child Left Behind Act. It's that one-size-fits-all law passed by Congress, decreeing that every child's test scores must improve. And when they fail to as repeatedly as they have at Joseph Gallagher, the state has the right to kill the school. It's tough love to the max.

But Congress didn't seem to have Joseph Gallagher in mind when it passed the law. Inside the school's brick halls is a miniature gathering of the United Nations. Bosnian students walk in single file to gym class with Puerto Ricans and Albanians, while Ukrainians and Burundians take sips off a drinking fountain.

Many don't speak English. The ones who do don't do it well enough. It's like asking the children of Strongsville to suddenly become conversant in Farsi.

So due to a simple law, the entire staff at Joseph Gallagher may soon be fired because some 11-year-old named Nzeyimana can't use the word "prowl" in a sentence.

Joseph Gallagher rests between a row of ornate Victorian houses on Franklin and a row of beat-up colonials on Bridge. It's a three-story hunk of brick, with crisp angles and few exterior windows.

Surrounding the school is Detroit Shoreway, where multi-bedroom homes with cheap rent are ideal for immigrants and refugees. It's close to the bus lines, and up the street, there's a mosque where Turks and Somalis worship.

Among the refugees at Joseph Gallagher is Sheikhabdi Aweys, a petite 22-year-old who grew up in refugee camps in Somalia and Kenya.

When the teacher's aide was a teenager, Catholic Charities offered his family the chance to come to the United States. They boarded a plane without knowing what city it would land in. "Then we were given four months to find work, learn basic English, and find a place to live," he says. "It was frustrating."

As Aweys walks through the halls with soft steps, kids ask him questions. In one 20-second period, he talks to three different students in three different languages.

Whenever a new refugee parent comes into the school, Aweys is pulled from his classroom duties to translate. Depending on the family, the language of the day may be Maay-Maay, Swahili, or Somali. And within those languages are numerous dialects. The difficulty of such translations makes Sunday Times crossword puzzles seem like a game of Bop the Gopher.

At 10:30 in the morning, after math tutoring, he heads to the second floor and into a class for students who are newcomers to the United States. He greets the teacher, Holly Morell, and sits down to one-on-one reading lessons.

For Morell, a woman with a smile that could soothe an angry bull, every day is a fight. A gold cross hangs from her neck to provide hope.

Morell gives out her home number to every student, in case they have any questions about their schoolwork or what to do on a snow day. If there is something comforting about America, it's her.

The program she leads is designed to help the immigrant and refugee students, who pour steadily into the school each year. Morell gives them a crash course in survival English, teaching them things as simple as saying "Hello." In another lesson, she explains that "Sam" — SSAAAAMM — is a name, just like Muzamil, Congera, Npaweni, and Kapa are names.

This year, her students are a mix from Somalia and Burundi. They wear their poverty on their shirts, which were once white, but now tinged yellow. Like every student in the school, they're on the free lunch program. Many are forced to communicate like mutes, tapping and pointing to express something as minor as needing a pencil.

Along with language, Morell teaches simple customs. This year, she finds herself trying to break the students' habit of holding each other's hands. It's something she feels uncertain about, but knows that if they continue, they'll open themselves up to ridicule in the neighborhoods.

Fourteen-year-old Abdikadir is her unofficial aide-de-camp. He's about to finish the program and move into the English-as-a-second-language classroom. He's a round kid who wears a Shawn Marion jersey beneath his white shirt and airbrushed images of Tupac stenciled on his shoes.

Abdikadir functions as the school's interpreter when Aweys is away. He's the only kid who can speak Swahili, Maay-Maay, and Somali, and translate them to English. It's a ridiculous feat for a 14-year-old, but he'll get no acknowledgment from the state. The Ohio Achievement Test, on which the school's fate rests, does not give points to pint-size boys who've mastered multiple languages. The only language that matters is English.

He acts as the classroom interpreter. This afternoon, he has to explain to Morell that one student hit another student with a bag of potato chips. He relays the information quickly, annoyed at being forced to do their tattling. Then he gets back to the word-find puzzle sitting in front of him. All he needs is the word "puddles," and he'll be finished with his assignment. It's the one word that separates him from computer time.

Puddles.

Time is something Gallagher Principal Jennifer Rhone lacks. She spends her day jumping from academic maelstroms to administrative maelstroms, without much hope of getting free. Pinned to her door is her daily schedule, right down to the minute.

A Canadian flag hangs behind her desk. She came to Ohio from Ottawa, but Rhone looks as Canadian as Barack Obama looks like a typical kid from Kansas. Her hair is dyed auburn, and she can pull off large hoop earrings.

This is her first full year at Joseph Gallagher. And today is like any other. A Kenyan family sits outside her office. They came this morning to enroll their kids, which will push Gallagher's numbers to capacity. But she can't help them until she finds an interpreter. Few of these new families speak English.

Before she can do that, an aide shows up at her door with two students caught roughhousing during gym class. Then the phone rings; a teacher needs her in another part of the building. Meanwhile, staticky voices chirp from her walkie-talkie, her computer beeps out e-mail notifications, and a secretary pops in to relay a meeting reminder.

"My days are pretty full," she says.

Every day, Rhone parks her Pontiac Sunfire in the staff lot at around 6:30 a.m. If there are no meetings outside of the school to attend, it stays there until 5:45. She used to spend the first hour planning her day and catching up on unaccomplished tasks. Now she spends it ushering kids through the newly installed metal detector. She has to convince herself that it is what's best for the school, even though it was the district's idea.

It was also a district plan to convert Joseph Gallagher from a middle school to a Pre-K-8 school back in 2005. As a result, it's become one of the largest primary schools in Cleveland, leaving teachers like Francescani working out of storage closets. The school has simply run out of space.

Joseph Gallagher is full of students who are considered "subgroups." Fifty-five percent speak English as their second, third, or fourth language. Another 30 percent are special ed. This means that just 15 percent are normal in the eyes of the state.

Still, all but two students last year made enough progress to fend off No Child Left Behind, according to Vice Principal Sandra Velazquez. But that was two students short. "Two students," she says. "Two. That's how specific No Child Left Behind gets."

Back in 2000, No Child was designed to stop the "soft bigotry" of public education. President Bush wanted to raise the expectation level for minority students. So he ordered testing to make sure they were improving. And if test scores of every kid in the school didn't go up, it was the fault of the school. It matters not if the previous year, the kids were living in rural Romania or the tribal lands of Africa.

No Child gives students the opportunity to transfer out of schools decreed to be failing. And if such schools don't make adequate yearly progress, the state has the right to shut them down.

In Ohio, April is the make-or-break month. Principal Rhone knows that Gallagher needs to pass this year. Failing again could lead to the belching out of a thunderclap of pink slips.

They call it reconstitution — a rather polite term for dealing with schools that chronically suffer from low test scores, discipline problems, or poor attendance. By firing the entire staff and replacing it with new blood, the theory goes, a school can magically solve all the problems. So schools from San Francisco to New York have issued mass dismissals.

It's been known to work. But it's a hard argument to make in Cleveland, where the district has been wedded to deterioration for decades. The assumption is that new teachers will somehow be able to outperform the old. But since the replacements are usually young and inexperienced, it's akin to stocking a baseball team with rookies and then expecting it to make the playoffs.

In Cleveland, Paul Revere Elementary School was the last to be reconstituted, back in 1997. Outgoing Cleveland Teachers Union President Joanne Demarco says it did little if anything to change the place. Since then, there have been many threats, but no school has faced complete reconstitution.

There have been plenty of "semi-reconstituted" schools. Joseph Gallagher is one of them. It happened when the district combined its middle and elementary schools, which led to a massive overhaul of staff. In 2005, according to one teacher, about three quarters of Gallagher's staff changed. The almighty test scores say it hasn't made a difference.

Across the hall from Morell's room is a regular sixth- and seventh-grade class. This is where Tracy Radich teaches math.

Her voice booms into the hallways, even when her door is closed. It's intense and energetic, similar to the voice of a high-school basketball coach. She's the newly elected sergeant at arms for the Cleveland Teachers Union and loves politics. If Anderson Cooper had a 12-hour election special, she'd watch all 12, then stay tuned for extra helpings of Wolf Blitzer.

Radich is up front about Joseph Gallagher's deathwatch. "It's a constant threat hanging over your head," she says. "It's very difficult."

In her mind, testing creates students who are jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none. If her class has trouble grasping a concept like mean, median, and mode, she doesn't have the extra time to spend. The test forces her to push on to the next unit. She has to make sure that her students have at least seen the material.

Based upon their scores from the previous year, students are broken down into five groups: limited, basic, proficient, advanced, and accelerated. If they move up one level, the school is okay. If they don't, teachers can consider themselves screwed.

"The tests are still given one week out of the year, and that determines everything," says Radich. "It's like if someone came to your work and watched you for one to two hours, and judged you and everything you do at work based upon those two hours. That's essentially what it comes down to — success or failure in two hours."

But those are the rules they play under. So teachers like Radich are forced to concentrate on the borderline students. They're the most important kids in the classroom, since the school's fate hinges upon their improvement. Everyone else takes a back seat. Think of it as the NBA determining its post-season seedings by how well teams can get players like Dwayne Jones to perform.

One subgroup that plays a critical role is the special-education kids. At Gallagher, 250 students have some sort of disability, ranging from mild autism to severe mental retardation. Fifty take an alternative test to measure their progress, which doesn't affect the school's rating. Another hundred or so aren't yet in the third grade, the year when their scores begin to count. This leaves around 75 who must take the state test.

Teacher Keri Waring speaks like the daughter of a college president, because, well, she's the daughter of a college president. Her biggest complaint is that the test is geared for the kind of children congressmen know — those raised with money whose parents read to them at night and enforce lights-out at a reasonable hour. It's not geared for refugees on 65th Street in America's poorest city.

What frustrates her is how others see Gallagher as the typical Cleveland school — rough, overcrowded, and failing. She cringes every time a new initiative comes down from on high. No plan can fix the endemic problems of poverty, parenting, and kids who don't understand the language you speak.

"But all of this is political talk," she admits. "We still have to pass the test in April."

At 2:30, students swell out of class and make their way home. Francescani returns to her storage closet to plan the next day. Aweys sits in the faculty lounge and dreams about affording classes at Tri-C. Radich sprints off to the union office. Morell switches around her seating chart, experimenting to find the perfect fit.

Outside the building, buses and cars swing in and out of the parking lot. Rhone waves goodbye and politely reminds students that it's not okay to bomb each other with snowballs.

Time before the test is short. But Joseph Gallagher has made it through another day.

Labels: English language learners, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:55 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Sent to the Houston Chronicle, April 21, 2008 by Dr. Stephen Krashen

Missing from the discussion (“Texas educators split
over teaching English basics,” April 21) of how to
improve students’ writing and speaking is the role of
reading: Research consistently shows that those who
write better have done more self-selected reading. In
fact, in some studies, the amount of free voluntary
reading done is the only factor that is associated
with better writing. In contrast, direct teaching of
grammar has consistently failed to improve writing
ability.

Teaching grammar to older students has value, to fill
in gaps that nearly all well-read writers have, and as
an introduction to linguistics. But there is no
substitute for reading, the basis of our ability to
read well and write well, the source of much of our
vocabulary and spelling knowledge, and the source of
our ability to handle complex grammatical
constructions.

Wide, self-selected reading is barely mentioned in the
proposed standards, and neither side in the debate, as
portrayed by the Chronicle, appears to be aware of the
research showing the power of reading, which has
appeared regularly and consistently in professional,
scientific journals for the last 100 years.


Texas educators split over teaching English basics


By Gary Scharrer

AUSTIN — The inability of many Texas students to write
and speak good English is like a dreadful disease
requiring aggressive treatment, say some education
advocates who want to use different teaching
approaches.

Social conservatives on the State Board of Education,
influenced in part by a retired teacher, are backing a
new curriculum that increases the focus on basics,
including grammar.

They've met fierce resistance from teachers and
educators who warn this emphasis will prepare students
for the 1950s, not the 21st century, and embarrass
Texas in the process.

They fear the state's proposed new standards for
reading and English language arts contradict
established research and will only make things worse.

"The results will be bloody," predicted one of those
language experts, former English professor Joyce
Armstrong Carroll.

A fight over the board's perceived exclusion of
Hispanic experts from development of the curriculum
has overshadowed this larger struggle.

A public comment period on the proposed curriculum
will end May 18, and the 15-member board is to take
final action on May 22. If approved, it will guide how
the state's 4.7 million public schoolchildren learn
English and reading over the next decade.

Much of the debate focuses on grammar and reading
comprehension. The controversy is being fanned, in
part, by Donna Garner, a retired English and Spanish
teacher in Hewitt. Garner writes education-related
e-mails and contributes to My StudyHall.com.

Students must learn precise communication skills, and
grammar requirements must be spelled out with explicit
language, she argues.

"We have a disease in Texas — our students do not know
how to write and speak English well," Garner said. "We
need to treat the disease aggressively.

"The skills need to build upon each other as the
student progresses from one grade level to the next.
Learning the basics of the English language will
provide students with a strong foundation upon which
to write sophisticated papers and upon which to base
clear communication," she said.

The integration of grammar with writing has been
taught in Texas for the past 15 years without much
success, Garner said, citing statistics showing half
of Texas college freshmen are in need of remedial
education, compared to only 28 percent nationally.

Teachers, parents and employers are appalled by the
lack of speaking and writing skills, she said.

Ignoring research
But some experts warn of dire consequences of teaching
grammar separately from writing and skimping on
reading comprehension.

Standardized tests like TAKS and the SAT don't examine
grammar skills in isolation — they test comprehension,
said Carroll, a former professor of English and
writing at McMurry University, author and co-director
of Abydos Learning International in Texas.

Carroll was part of a professional educators'
coalition that offered input during the three-year
process of writing standards for the state's proposed
English curriculum.

Some coalition members take a dim view of State Board
of Education Chairman Don McLeroy, a Bryan dentist,
and board member David Bradley of Beaumont, who have
helped lead the push for a back-to-basics approach.

"Would anyone believe that the coalition's research is
bogus, but a dentist from Bryan is right ... and a man
without a degree from Beaumont is right?" Carroll
said.

Bradley says he and McLeroy "are eminently qualified
because, first of all, we're parents, we're
businesspeople and we're taxpayers."

Many parents, he said, complain that the current
curriculum standards are "so confusing, so vague, so
mushy that nobody can understand them, so we have this
industry to help people interpret and explain and
develop strategies and techniques to teach this mush."

The proposed standards ignore at least 50 years of
research on grammar instruction, counters Kylene Beers
of The Woodlands, president-elect of the National
Council of Teachers of English and a senior reading
adviser to secondary schools in the Reading Writing
Project at Teachers College at Columbia University.

People who yearn for a return to the basics usually
attended school in the 1950s, and by the end of that
decade only 20 percent of the best paying jobs
required at least some college, she said, in contrast
to today's figure of 56 percent.

"When we talk about getting back to the basics in
literacy education, the first thing that smart people
have to do is to realize that literacy demands have
shifted. What's basic now isn't the same as what was
basic when middle-aged adults of today were in
school," she said.

Both sides view the fight over reading comprehension
as bigger than the one over grammar.

"They have renamed 'whole language' as comprehension.
It's down to the classic debate of phonics versus
whole language," Bradley said.

Keeping it professional
Decades of research into how children learn shows that
drilling the basics does not achieve desired results,
said Alana Morris, language arts program director of
the Aldine school district and president of the
Coalition of Reading and English Supervisors of Texas.

"If you drill the basics on handouts and worksheets,
then that's where kids will be able to apply them,"
she said. "The bottom line is that drilling doesn't
transfer into solid writing."

Teaching grammar is important, "but we want to teach
it clearly so that kids can actually transfer it into
their writing," Morris said. "Teaching grammar in
drills makes no sense, whatsoever, to them."

The proposal calls for students to learn how to infer
the importance of a setting in a story in one grade
level, visualize the setting in the next grade and
then summarizing the setting two grade levels later,
she said.

"It's the most ludicrous thing I have ever seen in my
entire life," Morris said. "Each year with higher
level text you should learn how to draw inferences,
how to ask questions, how to synthesize information,
how to summarize."

Teachers will remain professional if the State Board
of Education approves the pending document, Morris
said.

"Teachers are not the type that will march on Austin,"
she said, adding that experienced teachers will simply
ignore the new English textbooks.

gscharrer@express-news.net

— Gary Scharrer
Houston Chronicle
2008-04-20

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:44 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Link between discipline, incarceration is intolerable

By VERONICA GARCIA | Houston Chronicle
April 19, 2008 Editorial

While Texans agonize over high school graduation rates and dropout rates and falling standardized test scores, another crisis looms, one that may underline some of these other systemic educational problems.

The Texas Education Agency reports that statewide at every single grade level African-American students are overrepresented in the number of students who public schools suspend to disciplinary alternative education programs (DAEP). Latinos are overrepresented in 6th through 11th grades.

For example, while first grade, African-American students made up 14 percent of the general student population, they made up 47 percent of those sent to DAEPs in the 2005-2006 school year. Despite the fact that there are no data to support the assumption that these groups of students misbehave more than others, research by the American Psychological Association states that African-American students may be more severely punished for less serious or subjective reasons.

Also, while students receiving special education account for about 12 percent of the general student body population, they make up 22 percent of the DAEP population, raising concerns of potential violations of federal disability laws.

In the Katy Independent School District, 9 percent of the students are receiving special education, 31 percent are part of the DAEP population. African-Americans make up 9 percent of the student population yet they are 24 percent of the alternative programs.

Last month, when a United Nations committee urged the United States to make sweeping reforms to policies and laws affecting racial and ethnic minorities, one of the specific problems to which they referred was the school-to-prison pipeline, the intersection between our education and criminal justice systems. It's the criminalization of student behavior through zero tolerance policies that embrace punishment over education.

These practices disproportionately target minority students, as well as students with disabilities, for nonviolent, noncriminal behavior.

To be sure, schools have a duty to maintain discipline and order to ensure a safe environment and promote learning. The contradiction is that the discipline practices through which some schools attempt to achieve these goals ultimately funnel students out of our schools and place them at risk of future involvement with the criminal justice system.

A 2006 report by the U.S. Department of Justice cites a consistent decrease in juvenile crime since 1994; yet, between 1995 and 2006 Texas increased the number of juveniles in custody. Also, in 2005, Texas had the third highest adult incarceration rate in the country.

Such high rates of incarceration have a greater impact on people of color and are not sound policy decisions considering the high rates of recidivism and the economics of maintaining these facilities.

In tracing the roots of these problems, many advocates and researchers are finding that these trends begin from within our school systems. About 13 years after the inception of DAEPs, in answer to legislation passed last year, TEA is now drafting minimum standards for DAEPs.

Currently the standards are so minimal that schools are not even required to run these programs a full school day.

Improvements in school discipline must happen at the individual campus level.

We must address and change the reasons Texas students are removed from the classroom.

The ACLU of Texas calls on our state leaders to act on the U.N. recommendations to address the systemic discrimination and injustice that exists in our own back yard.

Garcia is a litigation fellow with the ACLU of Texas Foundation and has spent the past year studying the school-to-prison pipeline in Texas.

Labels: alternative ed programs, incarceration rates

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:12 AM 0 comments Links to this post

April 20, 2008, 11:15PM
Texas educators split over teaching English basics

By GARY SCHARRER
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN ˜ The inability of many Texas students to write and speak good English is like a dreadful disease requiring aggressive treatment, say some education advocates who want to use different teaching approaches.

Social conservatives on the State Board of Education, influenced in part by a retired teacher, are backing a new curriculum that increases the focus on basics, including grammar.

They've met fierce resistance from teachers and educators who warn this emphasis will prepare students for the 1950s, not the 21st century, and embarrass Texas in the process.

They fear the state's proposed new standards for reading and English language arts contradict established research and will only make things worse.

"The results will be bloody," predicted one of those language experts, former English professor Joyce Armstrong Carroll.

A fight over the board's perceived exclusion of Hispanic experts from development of the curriculum has overshadowed this larger struggle.

A public comment period on the proposed curriculum will end May 18, and the 15-member board is to take final action on May 22. If approved, it will guide how the state's 4.7 million public schoolchildren learn English and reading over the next decade.

Much of the debate focuses on grammar and reading comprehension. The controversy is being fanned, in part, by Donna Garner, a retired English and Spanish teacher in Hewitt. Garner writes education-related e-mails and contributes to My StudyHall.com.

Students must learn precise communication skills, and grammar requirements must be spelled out with explicit language, she argues.

"We have a disease in Texas ˜ our students do not know how to write and speak English well," Garner said. "We need to treat the disease aggressively.

"The skills need to build upon each other as the student progresses from one grade level to the next. Learning the basics of the English language will provide students with a strong foundation upon which to write sophisticated papers and upon which to base clear communication," she said.

The integration of grammar with writing has been taught in Texas for the past 15 years without much success, Garner said, citing statistics showing half of Texas college freshmen are in need of remedial education, compared to only 28 percent nationally.

Teachers, parents and employers are appalled by the lack of speaking and writing skills, she said.

[It is ironic to me that the Coalition constantly states that I am out of the Dark Ages and know nothing about the age of technology. The fact is that I am the lead writer for an online tutorial -- MyStudyHall.com. What our small start-up company has done is to create a way for students (ages 10 - 100) to use technology to learn in-depth grammar modules and other important English / Language Arts / Reading skills. We have included graphics, animation, drawings, charts, cartoons, flash technology, color coding, and frequent audio clips to help students to internalize the content. Our site can be utilized in the privacy of a person's home or in a school setting. Even adults can benefit since many adults also struggle with their English communication skills.

The difference between us and Dr. Joyce Armstrong Carroll, Alana Morris, and Kyleen Beers (mentioned in Scharrer's article) is that MyStudyHall.com is incredibly inexpensive on purpose. We are not trying to "rip off the taxpayers' dollars." Our site costs $35 per year/per student for a school site license, and only $49.95 for individual subscriptions per student/per module/per ELAR level. We charge nothing extra for staff development, initial set-up, updates, or maintenance. How is that for "cheap"?

Readers really need to compare the cost of MyStudyHall.com to those of Alana Morris, Kyleen Beers, and Dr. Joyce Armstrong Carroll and her husband Edward Wilson. The latter even hold TAKS Blitz Retreats at very expensive resorts to which teachers come at taxpayers' expense, and the money these vendors/consultants are making on their commercial products and staff development is costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

What have been the results of these vendors'/consultants' products? The ACT, SAT, and NAEP scores are going DOWN instead of UP. Businesses are having to spend upwards of $3 billion a year to retrain their employees to use good English communication skills. Only 19% of our Texas high-school graduates are college ready in the core subjects, and 50% of our graduates have to take remedial courses when they go to college. If 50% of the brightest and best students have to be remediated, what about the skills of the other 50% who do not even go to college?

If what the Coalition has been doing for the last ten to fifteen years is not working -- and it clearly is not -- we must determine a new path for Texas' public schools. Please contact members of the Texas State Board of Education (go to Texas Education Agency web site) and express your strongly held views. -- Donna Garner]

Ignoring research
But some experts warn of dire consequences of teaching grammar separately from writing and skimping on reading comprehension.

Standardized tests like TAKS and the SAT don't examine grammar skills in isolation ˜ they test comprehension, said Carroll, a former professor of English and writing at McMurry University, author and co-director of Abydos Learning International in Texas.

Carroll was part of a professional educators' coalition that offered input during the three-year process of writing standards for the state's proposed English curriculum.

Some coalition members take a dim view of State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy, a Bryan dentist, and board member David Bradley of Beaumont, who have helped lead the push for a back-to-basics approach.

"Would anyone believe that the coalition's research is bogus, but a dentist from Bryan is right ... and a man without a degree from Beaumont is right?" Carroll said.

Bradley says he and McLeroy "are eminently qualified because, first of all, we're parents, we're businesspeople and we're taxpayers."

Many parents, he said, complain that the current curriculum standards are "so confusing, so vague, so mushy that nobody can understand them, so we have this industry to help people interpret and explain and develop strategies and techniques to teach this mush."

The proposed standards ignore at least 50 years of research on grammar instruction, counters Kylene Beers of The Woodlands, president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English and a senior reading adviser to secondary schools in the Reading Writing Project at Teachers College at Columbia University.

People who yearn for a return to the basics usually attended school in the 1950s, and by the end of that decade only 20 percent of the best paying jobs required at least some college, she said, in contrast to today's figure of 56 percent.

"When we talk about getting back to the basics in literacy education, the first thing that smart people have to do is to realize that literacy demands have shifted. What's basic now isn't the same as what was basic when middle-aged adults of today were in school," she said.

Both sides view the fight over reading comprehension as bigger than the one over grammar.

"They have renamed 'whole language' as comprehension. It's down to the classic debate of phonics versus whole language," Bradley said.

Keeping it professional
Decades of research into how children learn shows that drilling the basics does not achieve desired results, said Alana Morris, language arts program director of the Aldine school district and president of the Coalition of Reading and English Supervisors of Texas.

"If you drill the basics on handouts and worksheets, then that's where kids will be able to apply them," she said. "The bottom line is that drilling doesn't transfer into solid writing."

Teaching grammar is important, "but we want to teach it clearly so that kids can actually transfer it into their writing," Morris said. "Teaching grammar in drills makes no sense, whatsoever, to them."

The proposal calls for students to learn how to infer the importance of a setting in a story in one grade level, visualize the setting in the next grade and then summarizing the setting two grade levels later, she said.

"It's the most ludicrous thing I have ever seen in my entire life," Morris said. "Each year with higher level text you should learn how to draw inferences, how to ask questions, how to synthesize information, how to summarize."

Teachers will remain professional if the State Board of Education approves the pending document, Morris said.

"Teachers are not the type that will march on Austin," she said, adding that experienced teachers will simply ignore the new English textbooks.

gscharrer@express-news.net

Labels: Texas State Board of Education

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:16 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Double digit percentage point gains in passing rates for Pearce Middle School and Johnston High School will be required to meet tougher passing standards.

By Laura Heinauer | American-Statesman Staff
Wednesday, April 16, 2008

For the two Austin schools most in need of improvement this year, the path to meet the new TAKS passing standards finalized this week by the state won't be easy.

Pearce Middle School in East Austin, where the district held a planning forum Tuesday evening, will have to show double-digit percentage-point gains in the passing rate for this year's science test. Students will take the test for the first time this year on May 1.

Campuses must meet state standards within all student groups on all subjects on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills or risk closure. Pearce, now entering its third year of "unacceptable" status in the accountability system, could be closed by the state this year.

State officials said passing rates at Johnston High School would have to show significant gains on both the math and science portions of the tests, which students take at the end of this month and in May, to keep that campus open.

Superintendent Pat Forgione thanked parents at the forum and said their support for helping students and keeping the campus open is critical.

"This is like preparing for a hurricane. Tonight, we have a storm warning," he said.

In recognition of the uphill battle Pearce faces, several East Austin advocates have been pitching in to help. Michael Lofton, a local talk-show host who organizes monthly conferences for African American men and boys, said he and members of other groups, including churches and local neighborhood associations, have met to coordinate mentoring and social services for Pearce students and their families.

"I know this is kind of at the 99th hour," Lofton said. "But if all goes well, I think we can make a lot of headway by the end of the year."

Most observers agree that meeting the state's new 2008 passing standards will be difficult for schools like Pearce and Johnston. This year, the minimum passing rate for English has been increased from 65 percent to 70 percent. In math, 50 percent of students must pass, up from 45 percent, and in science it went from 40 percent to 45 percent.

Both schools could get a reprieve by getting just to the "acceptable" standard. Johnston would have to improve performance in 20 areas to meet that so-called required improvement standard. Pearce would have to do it in 16 areas. Reaching that standard is what got Webb Middle School in North Austin off the state's low-performing list and saved it from the threat of closure last year.

Labels: failing schools

posted by Patricia Lopez at 5:08 PM 0 comments Links to this post

April 14, 2008

Austin, Texas (KXAN) -- Parents and school officials plan to meet Tuesday night to dicuss the future of Pearce Middle School.

The Texas Education Agency is threatening to shut down Pearce Middle School because of bad test scores.

Despite the academically unacceptable rating, parents said closing the school is not the answer.

"The best thing to do is to keep the building open," said Pearce PTA President, Charlotte Dotson. "Find out what the problem is and handle it there instead of threatening the closure because the kids think it's their fault, when it's not."

Tuesday's community conversation kicks off at 6 p.m. at Pearce Middle School, located at 6401 North Hampton Drive.

The Aiustin Independent School District superintendent, board of trustee members and other AISD officials will be at the meeting to listen to community concerns and answer questions.

Labels: failing schools

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:48 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Number of African American and Latino students admitted increases
By
Claudia Luther
| 4/14/2008 10:00:00 AM
UCLA, the most popular campus in the nation, with 55,397 freshman applicants, announced today that it had admitted 12,579 prospective freshmen for fall 2008. Of these students, 18.1 percent, or 2,164, were underrepresented minorities — a 1.5 percentage-point increase over last year.

The number of African American freshmen admitted rose to 440 (3.7 percent), up from 407 (3.5 percent) last year, while the number of Latino/Chicano admitted freshmen increased to 1,682 (14.1 percent), from 1,474 (12.7 percent) in 2007. Native American freshmen numbered 42 (0.4 percent), compared with 45 (0.4 percent) last year.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said that the university is especially pleased that the number of African American and Latino/Chicano freshmen who applied to UCLA and were admitted increased again this year.

The chancellor said that university administrators, along with students, alumni, faculty and staff, are now working to encourage the talented students who were admitted to enroll at the university for the fall quarter.

"We were very impressed with the academic qualifications of all the applicants, and we look forward to an outstanding group of freshmen this fall," Block said. "Every student who was admitted is not only extremely qualified academically but also demonstrates special talents and interests that will enhance both their own college experience and the quality of campus life at UCLA."

Janina Montero, UCLA's vice chancellor for student affairs, praised the involvement of the African American community, alumni, students and faculty in helping to assure that many highly qualified African American students applied to UCLA, which helped boost the number of African American freshmen who were admitted. As with last year, prominent alumni and friends of the university are providing funds for scholarships to African American freshmen who elect to attend UCLA in the fall.

"Their participation has been invaluable," Montero said of all those who stepped forward. "While there is still work to be done in terms of encouraging these students to decide to come to UCLA next fall, we are extremely grateful for the interest and dedication of the broader UCLA family."

This is the second consecutive year that UCLA has used a "holistic" process for evaluating applications, in which each application is read and considered in its entirety by two trained readers; in previous years, two readers reviewed student academic records while a third reviewed life challenges and other personal achievements. The UCLA Academic Senate made the change because the faculty believed a more individualized and qualitative assessment of each applicant's entire application would better achieve the University of California Regents' goal of comprehensive review. The holistic approach emphasizes students' achievements in the context of opportunities available to them and how students have taken advantage of those opportunities.

Reflecting an increase in the overall number of applications, the university was able to admit 22.7 percent of all those who applied, compared with 23.6 percent last year. Those admitted must file a Statement of Intent to Register (SIR) by May 1. The university expects a class of approximately 4,700 to begin their studies in September.

Academically, UCLA's admitted freshmen were again very strong. The overall grade-point average was 4.34, compared with 4.29 last year. The average composite score for the SAT reasoning test remained steady at 2,000, out of a possible 2,400. The average math score was 683, the average reading score was 653 and the average writing score was 664 — all approximately what they were last year. Admitted freshmen took an average of 19.9 honors courses and completed nearly 50.9 college preparatory semester courses — far above the minimum of 30 that is required.

Of the admitted students, 4,804, or 40.2 percent, were Asian American — approximately the same level as the last four years. Asian Americans made up 42.8 percent (4,975) of the admitted freshman class in 2007, 45.6 percent (5,390) in 2006, 42.5 percent (4,710) in 2005 and 42 percent (4,049) in 2004.

The percentage of whites/Caucasians was approximately the same as last year: 33.1 percent (3,953), compared with 33.2 percent (3,860) in 2007. That compares with 32.1 percent (3,791) for 2006, 33.6 percent (3,723) for 2005 and 33.5 percent (3,230) for 2004.

In other categories, admissions data show that 7.4 percent (885) of admitted applicants declined to state their race or ethnicity and that 1.2 percent (138) identified themselves as "other."

Information about admitted California freshmen at University of California campuses is available at www.ucop.edu/news/factsheets/fall2008adm.html. More than 60,000 high school seniors were offered admission at UC campuses.

UCLA is California's largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 37,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university's 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer more than 300 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Four alumni and five faculty members have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

NOTE: Fall 2008 figures are extracted from March 31 files and do not reflect final figures. The data used reflect information about domestic students, except for the total numbers of applicants and admits, which include international students. This year's figures are compared with official data from 2007. Admissions numbers will change slightly, with final official data available in October 2008. Data provided by the University of California Office of the President are for California residents only.

Labels: California, higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:41 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Monica Campbell | SF Chronicle Foreign Service
Sunday, April 13, 2008

San Isidro Tilantongo, Mexico --

On a recent morning, Jesus Leon maneuvered his pickup along a rugged dirt road toward a small pine forest in one of the most barren regions of southern Mexico.

From a distance, the patch of bright green pines and seedlings seemed like an oasis in contrast to the vast stretches of eroded terrain stained with red soil. But for 25 years, Leon and his environmental nonprofit have worked to make such oases possible, promoting soil conservation, sustainable agriculture and irrigation to improve the livelihoods of the Mixtec Highlands' 350,000 inhabitants.

On Monday, Leon will be honored as one of this year's seven winners of San Francisco's Goldman Environmental Prize, a $150,000 award for pioneering environmental activists.

"I never imagined that we would win a prize like this," he said during an interview at his bare-bones office in the small town of Nochixtlan. "Now, we hope our work will be recognized and hopefully grow even stronger."

To Leon, the prize reflects the ability of a small group of self-taught ecologists to organize more than 1,500 small farmers in 12 communities to reverse hundreds of years of environmental damage.

"There's nothing like seeing an entire community coming together to improve the land," said Leon, a 42-year-old farmer who grew up in the Mixtec region of Oaxaca state, one of the nation's poorest agricultural areas, where farmers earn about $4.50 a day.

Capturing rain, growing trees

Although Leon and his colleagues at the Center for Integral Small Farmer Development of the Mixtec, or CEDICAM, have little formal education, they are experts in building rainwater storage structures and organic composting systems. They have also revived pre-Hispanic contour ditches designed to catch rainfall and replenish aquifers, which have doubled spring levels. The tree nurseries have yielded more than 2 million new trees and have reforested more than 2,471 acres.

"What's impressive is that they did this all from scratch," said Miguel Altieri, a professor of entomology at UC Berkeley's College of Natural Resources. "Money is not the crucial factor here. It's their ability to work bottom-up, creating farmer-to-farmer networks and promoting low-tech solutions that tap local knowledge."

International support for CEDICAM comes from such U.S. charities as Bread for the World, Maryknoll Lay Missionaries and Mexico's National Forestry Commission in Oaxaca.

Up the road from the pine nursery, farmer Canuto Cruz, 60, stood over a new contour ditch that is helping his small bean and corn crop to flourish. Cruz also tapped CEDICAM's seed bank for a native variety of corn seed that is intended to keep the Mixtec Highlands free from genetically modified crops.

"We have to turn things around here," said Cruz. "If the land goes, so do we." His four children have abandoned the family farm to work in Mexico City.

Area losing people, soil

Leon knows his group cannot stop migration to large cities or the United States - California is a popular destination for Oaxacans. The Mixtec Highlands has one of Mexico's highest migration rates with 4 out of 10 residents living outside the state, according to government statistics.

But CEDICAM'S work is an important step, he says, particularly in a region where mostly Mixtec Indians suffer from periodic droughts, razor-thin incomes, poor roads that isolate communities and competitive demands by the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mixtec farmers are competing with cheaper corn from the United States, where farmers still receive state subsidies. U.S. imports have also driven down the prices of local fruits and grains.

The United Nations Development Program says the Mixtec Highlands has one of the highest rates of soil erosion in the world, affecting 83 percent of its land. Severe soil erosion dates back to colonial times, when Spain introduced small livestock, deforested wide areas and disregarded pre-Hispanic terracing systems. In all, CEDICAM says, more than 15 feet of topsoil has been lost.

Without adequate soil, rainwater runs off and groundwater aquifers disappear. The erosion lowers crop yields, sending farmers to work elsewhere or feed the nutrient-poor earth with chemical fertilizers that further erode soil.

Hooked on conservation

The idea for CEDICAM came to Leon as a teenager after he met a small group of visiting Guatemalan environmentalists, who told him about efforts to conserve their endangered rain forests.

"I was hooked," Leon said in an interview at his home in San Isidro Tilantongo, a 15-family farming community. "It was all new information to us, but we knew we could use it immediately to improve our own land."

The need for change became even more apparent after his eight siblings left to work in Mexican cities. Leon was determined to remain on the family farm.

Soon, he had organized other like-minded farmers and co-founded CEDICAM in 1983. Planting trees was an obvious first step toward tackling the region's three major deficiencies: soil, water and wood. More trees stop rainwater runoff and eventually provide firewood, which has become harder to find across the region. Leon was also troubled to see many farmers shifting in the 1980s to chemical-intensive agriculture and nonnative seeds that require expensive fertilizers.

"Part of our work is to convince people that traditional ways can be smarter," said Leon. "It's not always easy, but once farmers see their neighbors able to change, they are willing to do the same."

Leon says it's totally "backward" for farmers to abandon Mexico's traditional milpa system, which mixes a diversity of crops that provide a balanced diet and work well with inexpensive, organic fertilizers.

"We can't save the whole region," Leon said. "This is only our small example of what's possible."

Online: The Goldman organization profiles Jesus Leon in a video. Go to www.goldmanprize.org/2008/northamerica.

E-mail Monica Campbell at foreign@sfchronicle.com

Labels: Mexico

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:23 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is exciting! It's also important to note that there are many organizations and community efforts that are also empowering our young future leaders to be critical political participants. We should all seek out those efforts and contribute to them. -Patricia

By Brandi Grissom | El Paso Times
04/12/2008

AUSTIN - An online reality-TV-style contest is about to create the next Latino political reporter in a presidential election season that itself has seemed at times like a wacky competition.

The new online contest created by Sí TV and Voto Latino is about more than beautiful young people getting their 15 minutes of fame, though. It's one of several efforts nationwide designed to inspire young Hispanic voters to engage in the political process.

"In this presidential election, interest in the young Latino vote is higher than ever, and we want to bring the community's voices to the forefront," said Michael Schwimmer, Sí TV CEO.

In Texas, overall voter participation increased dramatically in the March primary elections. More than 4.2 million voters cast their ballots in the Republican and Democratic primaries, breaking a record set 20 years earlier.

And the heated presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama are expected to keep voters coming back to the polls for the general election in November.

"It's been a lot easier in this election cycle simply because of the presidential race and the fact that the contest still is going on, and it's caught a lot of interest," said University of Texas at El Paso political science Professor Greg Rocha.

The Latino vote nationwide is expected to top 9 million, an increase of 23 percent compared to 2004, according to the Tomas River Policy Institute at the University of Southern California. Increased citizenship rates and Latino youth coming of age would drive growth of about 1.7 million voters, institute President Harry Pachon said in December.

Schwimmer said many Latinos began to recognize the size and potential strength of their community in 2006 during nationwide protests against anti-immigration proposals in Congress.

"It helped raise their level of consciousness that in fact they do have political power," he said.

The Sí TV-Voto Latino contest allows young voters to submit their own sort of campaign video explaining why they should be a reporter at the Republican and Democratic national conventions this summer.

Online viewers will pick the top 10 candidates. Then, a panel of judges, including actress and Voto Latino co-founder Rosario Dawson, former U.S. Rep. Henry Bonilla and CNN's Rick Sanchez, will choose two winners to cover the conventions for Sí TV.

The contest is meant to engage both reporter hopefuls who send in videos and viewers who watch their peers and listen to their ideas about politics and issues.

"Young people, of any ethnicity quite frankly, want the freedom to express their opinions and do it in way they can share that opinion with others in a sort of nonjudgmental way," Schwimmer said.

The Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, based in San Antonio, is also working to get young Latino voters excited about voting.

Working with high schools in eight states, including Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, project Vice President Lydia Camarillo said, the group's goal is get more than 100,000 young Latino registered to vote this year.

Already, she said, more than 18,000 Latino high schoolers have registered.

But more than registering, Camarillo said, the group is urging students to make sure they vote.

"It's just trying to figure out what's the best way to capture their imagination about why it's important for them," she said.

Florida-based Democracia U.S.A. is hoping to push young Latinos to the polls, too, hosting voter registration drives, citizenship classes and leadership courses in Florida, Arizona, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Michael Apodaca, past president of the Texas Young Democrats, said efforts targeting El Paso's young Latino voters would likely ramp up as the November election draws closer.

Voting is a civic duty, an obligation, said UTEP sophomore Frank Rodriguez, 20, who was an election judge during the runoff contests this week. While he has long considered politics important, Rodriguez said, this year he has seen more of his peers become interested, too.

"A lot of my friends are like, 'Yeah, I went to vote today,' and I'm like, 'Good, you're supposed to vote,' " he said.

UTEP junior Julie Cruz, 21, said issues that concern her most in the presidential race are ones that affect her life, like the suffering economy and federal plans to build a fence on the border.

The candidates themselves and their fights with one another are also a lightning rod for her and many of her friends.

"It's kind of suspenseful," she said.

UTEP Professor Rocha said in a presidential election cycle as colorful as this one, getting young Latino voters, or any other voters, to the polls is not a big challenge.

The tougher task, he said, will be getting them to come back for contests in local elections that may not be as exciting but could have a bigger impact on their daily lives.

"It's going to be something that's just going to take a while," Rocha said. "It won't be done overnight."

Brandi Grissom can be reached at bgrissom@elpasotimes.com; (512) 479-6606.

Labels: Texas politics, voting

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:30 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This is a really insightful interview. I encourage anyone interested in this subject to check out some of the work being done at UCSC's New Teacher Center. -Patricia

Ed Week Interview
March 1, 2008

There have been countless studies—not to mention legislative initiatives—on how to improve the teaching profession. But what do educators themselves think? What do they say they need to excel in their jobs? And what obstacles do they commonly face?

Eric Hirsch, director of special projects with The New Teacher Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, wants to know. Since 2004, he has been conducting statewide surveys of teachers and principals on how they view the working conditions in their schools. Hirsch is now working with eight states to assess, as he puts it, what teachers “want and need,” and how their perceptions of various aspects of their jobs correlate with student achievement and teacher retention. His aim is to help schools create “environments where teachers can thrive.“

Read on...

Labels: teachers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:52 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Here are the links for both studies. The Economic and Social Implications of theGrowing Latino Population in South Carolina and Breaking the Piggy Bank: How Illegal Immigration is Sending Schools Into the Red It's no surprise to see FAIR perpetuating negative images of immigrant children as costing the country money, and providing no analysis of the amount of money parents and families contribute to the economy.

-Patricia

Are illegal immigrants' children draining educational resources?

Much depends on individuals' attitudes toward educating all children and the best allocation of tax dollars.

In the study "Breaking the Piggy Bank: How Illegal Immigration Is Sending Schools Into the Red," the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national anti-immigration group, estimated based on 2004 data that educational expenditures for illegal immigration were costing S.C. taxpayers $143.5 million dollars annually.

This cost was partially for educating students who were themselves illegally in the country ($59.8 million) and in part for the education those born in the United States to illegal residents ($83.7 million).

A University of South Carolina study, "The Economic and Social Implications of the Growing Latino Population in South Carolina," acknowledges that some people fear Hispanic students increase education costs because they lack English skills, but English language learners represent only 2 percent of the total school population.

In 2006, Hispanic students represented about 3.7 of the total S.C. school population, mostly in kindergarten and lower elementary grades, according to the study. Horry County had the fourth-largest number of Hispanic students in the state at that time.

Like all students in S.C. schools, the study notes, Hispanic students require base student costs and funds for special programs. The average per-pupil expenditure in South Carolina is about $7,800.

A study by the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flager Business School found that immigrants - both legal and illegal - are dramatically changing the state's demographic landscape, including its schools.

From 2000-2004, Hispanic enrollment accounted for more than 57 percent of total N.C. enrollment growth. More than half are concentrated in 20 N.C. counties.

Hispanic students in Brunswick County accounted for less than 0.4 percent of total enrollment. Any money going to N.C. schools, of course, would be educating these children. The average per-pupil costs in 2005-2006 were about $7,600. In addition, the federal government provides funds to school districts that serve English language learners and migrant students.
From staff reports

Labels: immigration and education

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

Associated Press
April 6, 2008

AUSTIN — Nearly half of the charter schools in Texas have incorrectly reported student attendance, resulting in $26 million in undeserved payments that the state is trying to recover, according to state records.

The Texas Education Agency probably will never recover at least $9 million of the debt because 20 schools went out of business before repaying the state.

Gulf Shores Academy, a Houston charter, owes the state more than $8 million. The school has owed TEA money for attendance reporting mistakes for several years. TEA filed a court motion to revoke the school's charter in 2006, but the case is tied up in court and the state hasn't gotten any money back.

Lynacre Academy in Dallas owed the state about $800,000 when it abruptly closed two months ago, according to TEA records.

TEA officials say that while traditional schools make errors, mistakes are more common at charters because they typically lack experienced staff or strong oversight and can't generate revenue through property tax hikes or bond elections like other public schools.

"There is a kind of perverse incentive for a charter school in financial distress to look at (attendance inflation) as a way to get more money," Lisa Dawn-Fisher, deputy associate commissioner for school finance, told The Dallas Morning News. "If they can't get the warm bodies in the building, they may feel an incentive to falsify records."

TEA officials say they look for suspicious attendance figures at charters, but their regulatory system relies on self-reporting by the schools. TEA puts monitors at schools only after serious problems are identified.

The $26 million debt comes from 93 of the 211 charter operators in Texas. The amount equals the average state funding for about 4,800 students at roughly $5,400 per student.

State funding for charter schools has grown from just under $10 million to more than $646 million in 11 years.

Advocates say most charter schools are run by dedicated employees providing a good choice for students who don't fit into traditional school systems

"Unfortunately, the public just hears about a very small percentage that's done something poorly, just like with public schools," said Katie Howell, executive director of the Resource Center for Charter Schools.

When legislators first approved charters in 1996, many supporters argued that relaxing regulations for schools would spark innovation in the classroom. The competition was supposed to make regular schools better.

The TEA recently launched a new program to train charter employees on school accounting procedures.

Labels: charter schools

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:03 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is outrageous. I want to mention that the articles portraying Bowers as a victim flooded the news yesterday, though today's articles exposing her lie are fewer in comparison.

Here is a link to one of the many articles written yesterday entitled: "Student hurt after taking ant-illegal immigration sign to school." how and why the school is still suspending three Hispanic students is beyond me.

-Patricia

Athens, TX (KLTV) - A Texas student's story about being beaten by a group of Hispanic students is being called a hoax. And school officials say surveillance video blew the lid off the Texas tall tale.

Melanie Bowers and her father had told the public that Bowers was attacked by a group of Hispanic students because of an anti-illegal immigration sign she'd made.

The Athens Independent School District says the video shows Bowers walking calmly through the hall of Athens Middle School just moments after she says she was attacked by a group of students. They say at one point, you can see her scratching herself, time after time, in the face and in the neck.

"The video surveillance allowed us to go back and look at the incident to watch her as she moved throughout the hallway," says Fred Hayes, the Athens Independent School District Superintendent.

You can see Bowers walking with her friends, displaying her sign through the hallway--the sign she says sparked the attack.

"Basically, the stories...there were some inconsistencies in the story," says Hayes.

The district says that what actually happened was one student, after seeing the poster, ran up behind her. Off camera, he takes her poster, runs off, and later throws it in the trash--no fighting, no harrassment, no threats.

What the camera also doesn't show is several staff members at the school would have seen the assualt if it happened where Bowers said it did.

The location of the alleged incident was in direct sight of the front office.

"We're glad right now that the truth came out," says Hayes. "We're not glad that this student
had charges filed against her....it brings us no joy whatsoever but it certainly brings us satisfaction that we did not have a severe assault on this campus."

Now, administrators are hoping to put the whole situation behind them.

Three Hispanic students had been suspended for the incident. School officials say their punishment stands because they helped take the
poster.

Labels: immigration

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

By Daniel Weintraub | Sacramento Bee
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Story appeared in FORUM section, Page E1

There was good news and bad news for California in the results from a national writing test given to eighth-grade students last year.

First the bad news: California students performed worse than students in all but four other states, and students here in just about every demographic category did worse than similar students elsewhere.

The good news is that California's students have not gotten any worse since 2002, they have improved a bit since 1998, and the gap between the achievement of minority students and whites has shrunk significantly in the past eight years.

And one neutral observation: California's scores on these national tests are dragged down by the high percentage of students who are still learning English. Twenty percent of California students fall into that category, compared with just 6 percent nationwide. California's English learners actually perform on par with students elsewhere who are still learning the language. But they do so much worse than fluent English-speakers that the gap makes California's scores far worse than they would be if the state had fewer immigrants.

But among all California students, just 25 percent of eighth-graders were proficient or better on this test of writing skills. And that's not good enough.

The test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is not the kind of multiple-choice exam on which performance depends on the "drill and kill" methods so many teachers say they oppose. In this case, "teaching to the test" would mean requiring students to write short narrative, informative or persuasive essays in response to a prompt.

The disappointing results should be further motivation for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature to begin talks now on how to change the way the state governs schools, rather than waiting, as the governor has suggested, until he and lawmakers have fixed California's nagging budget problems. That could take years.

Schwarzenegger recently released a far-reaching set of recommendations from a bipartisan group of 18 education experts he asked to examine education policy and suggest changes. That panel, led by former Occidental College President Ted Mitchell and Dede Alpert, a former school board member and state legislator from San Diego, offered a blueprint that should prompt a serious discussion of how to improve student performance.

Their fundamental conclusion was that California's schools are so bound by rules and regulations ordered from Sacramento that they lack the flexibility to do what they need to do to succeed. Schools that do perform well do so in spite of the system, not because of it.

"Currently in California we have a completely convoluted governance system that puts everybody in charge and nobody in charge," Alpert said last month. "Therefore, everybody can just point fingers when they talk about who is responsible for what's happening."

Alpert said the state has a "culture of compliance" rather than a focus on results.

That system, the report said, does not ensure that sufficient resources reach the students who need them, fails to provide teachers with proper training or support, and has no incentives to reward achievement "at any level." Instead, it creates "reverse incentives" that reward low performance and punish excellence by giving failing schools more money and then taking it away when performance improves.

The committee suggested building on California's strength – widely praised academic standards that give students, teachers and parents a clear idea of what is expected in each subject at each grade.

The most successful schools use those standards as the basis for their curricula. They also set high expectations for students, have top-notch teachers and principals, use data to drive decision-making in the classroom and give teachers time to collaborate.

The schools need more money, the report said, but "just pumping more money into a system that structurally impedes success" will not deliver results.

Instead, the report said the state should streamline governance by creating a system where the money follows the student to his or her school and is adjusted to meet the different needs of students from different backgrounds. Principals at the school sites would be given more power over how to spend that money, given more authority over personnel, and, in the end, be held accountable for their results.

None of this can happen, the governor's experts said, without a state-of-the-art data system that collects information on student performance and ties it back to the kind of teaching to which each student was exposed.

Ultimately, Mitchell said, the key will be to make teaching a "true profession" with advancement opportunities, on-the-job mentoring, professional standards, evaluations linked to student achievement – and compensation to match the responsibility.

Much of this can be done at little or no cost. Even the financing side will take years to phase in once it is adopted. So there is no use wasting time. The students are not getting any younger. And, at least according to the latest test scores, their performance is not getting much better. Nothing will be gained by waiting another year.

Labels: California, NAEP, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 5:27 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Alvaro Huerta, photographed last year in the East Los Angeles neighborhood where he grew up, standing before a mural entitled Ghosts of the Barrio. The longtime community activist earned an M.A. from UCLA before coming to Berkeley, where he is now a graduate student in city and regional planning.

Opinion by Alvaro Huerta
20 March 2008

When things go bad, many Americans commonly blame someone else for their problems.Historically, immigrants have been convenient scapegoats: They not only “take away” jobs from “hard-working” American citizens and deplete the country’s resources, the argument goes, they are criminals who have entered this country illegally and must be punished with jail or deportation.

There is nothing like a presidential election to raise the volume on this xenophobic rhetoric.Television talk-show hosts and politicians quickly jump at the opportunity to bash Mexican immigrants like a piñata at a kid’s birthday party, especially in a time of political and economic crisis. These same voices suffer from selective amnesia, purposely forgetting the contributions Mexican immigrants have made to this country, both historically and in the present, and focusing instead on the “costs” associated with our presence here.

As a son of Mexican immigrants, I commonly ask myself, “What about the costs that immigrants incur to come here?” I find myself pondering this basic question even more frequently lately, since I recently migrated here to pursue my doctoral studies in the Department of City and Regional Planning, temporarily leaving my wife, Antonia, and 8-year-old son, Joaquin, behind in Los Angeles. While such arrangements are made regularly by graduate students everywhere, regardless of their ethnicity or citizenship status, I can’t help but feel as though, in a meaningful way, I’m following in the footsteps of my immigrant father, who came to El Norte more than half a century ago to pick fruits and vegetables as part of the U.S.-Mexico guest-worker plan, the Bracero Program.

Although being a doctoral student at a prestigious university cannot compare to being a farm worker (or a domestic worker, like my mother), it gives me some idea of how my father felt when he, like many other Mexican immigrants, left his community and family to work in El Norte. The sacrifices I’m now making, while temporary, seem very real to me: I worry about how my wife will manage to keep her teaching job and attend graduate school herself while caring for our son. Will she be able to take him to his chess tournaments? What about baseball season? Can she volunteer at the snack stand and see him hit a home run at the same time? Will I be able to make his third-grade parent conference? How can I focus on Foucault while my son cries himself to sleep because I’m not there to kiss him goodnight?

And yet I want to be careful not to overstate the similarities, for those immigrants faced much harsher challenges than I face today. Between 1942 and 1964, the Bracero Program provided the U.S. with hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers as a way to meet the labor shortages of World War II and beyond. By 1945, more than 62,000 Mexican immigrants were working in the railroad industry while another 58,000 toiled as agricultural laborers — among them my grandfather, father, and uncles. These workers, for the most part, lived in substandard housing, worked long hours under terrible conditions for poor wages, and experienced racism and abuse from American employers and local citizens.

Things haven’t changed much in a half-century for many Mexican immigrants in this country. Too often they continue to live in substandard conditions, occupy the most difficult jobs, work long hours, and experience employer harassment on a regular basis. The predicament of undocumented immigrants is even more precarious, since many do not report work-related cases of abuse. In many cases, undocumented immigrants do not go to the police or a hospital during an emergency because they fear they may face deportation. This is hardly fair compensation for the many sacrifices many Mexican immigrants make to come to this country, beginning with their efforts to save or borrow enough money to cross the treacherous U.S.-Mexico border.

When I think about the challenges that millions of undocumented workers make to get by in this country, I realize that I’m in a privileged situation: I’m giving up an office job to return to graduate school, not bidding my family goodbye for months or years while I struggle to make enough money to send back to them. Whereas the undocumented come north with only the desperate hope of a better life, I know that my own sacrifices will almost certainly pay off in the future, as I and my wife both secure positions in academia, giving my son more opportunities than I had growing up in East Los Angeles’ Ramona Gardens housing project.

In short, my dilemma represents a minuscule sacrifice compared to the plight of many Mexican immigrants who leave their families behind without knowing when they’ll see them again. It’s amazing what many of them will tolerate in order to survive in such a hostile environment, confronted for the most part by only the bleakest opportunities. What will it take for their offspring to attend a prestigious university like Berkeley? Based on my own experiences at both UCLA and Berkeley, I must say that only rarely do I come into contact with others who look like me or come from a similar socio-economic background.

Alvaro Huerta last year received the first-ever Thomas I. Yamashita Prize, a $2,500 award given annually to a scholar-activist by the campus Institute for the Study of Social Change.

Labels: higher education, migration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:32 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Download the entire article here -Patricia

Won-Pyo Hong and Peter Youngs
Michigan State University

Citation: Hong, W.-P., & Youngs, P. (2008). Does high-stakes testing
increase cultural capital among low-income and racial minority students?.
Education Policy Analysis Archives, 16(6). Retrieved [date] from
http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v16n6/.

Abstract
This article draws on research from Texas and Chicago to examine whether
high-stakes testing enables low-income and racial minority students to
acquire cultural capital. While students' performance on state or district
tests rose after the implementation of high-stakes testing and
accountability policies in Texas and Chicago in the 1990s, several studies
indicate that these policies seemed to have had deleterious effects on
curriculum, instruction, the percentage of students excluded from the tests,
and student dropout rates. As a result, the policies seemed to have had
mixed effects on students' opportunities to acquire embodied and
institutionalized cultural capital. These findings are consistent with the
work of Shepard (2000), Darling-Hammond (2004a), and others who have written
of the likely negative repercussions of high-stakes testing and
accountability policies.

Keywords: cultural capital, high-stakes testing, accountability, K-12
schooling in the U.S.

Labels: high-stakes testing

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:02 AM 0 comments Links to this post

I still can't get over the shock of articles like this. Shows there is still SO much work to be done in the quest for Civil Rights. The line: "Bilingualism and multilingualism are inherently divisive," and the example that follows is very distorted. -Patricia

By Mike McCarville | Tulsa Times
Wednesday, 02 April 2008

Oklahoma voters could soon decide if English will be the official language of state government in Oklahoma.

Senate Bill 163, by Reps. Randy Terrill and George Faught, was amended Wednesday to put the English question to a statewide vote next November.

The proposed constitutional amendment would make English the official language of state government in Oklahoma.

"This has been a long time coming," said Terrill, R-Moore. "We need to focus on what unites us, not what divides us. English is a common bond that we can all agree upon."

"The man on the street wants this," said Faught, R-Muskogee. "It's a no-brainer. In this country, we have a common currency, common law, and a common language that everyone needs to learn."

Senate Bill 163 was amended in the House General Government and Transportation Committee to include the "official English" proposal. The legislation passed out of the committee on Wednesday and now proceeds to the floor of the House.

Under the provisions of the bill, private individuals and businesses would still be allowed to use whatever language they choose. The bill also contains exemptions for the languages of Oklahoma's 39 federally recognized Native American tribes and allows the use of both Braille and sign language in government services. The legislation also contains a number of other specific, narrowly tailored exceptions for things like public health and safety, as well as trade, commerce and tourism.

Terrill and Faught said there are three compelling reasons to make English the official language of Oklahoma. First, the bill will prevent the state from being compelled to provide taxpayer-subsidized services in any language other than English. "There is currently no legal basis for denying someone's request that the state provide services in another language, creating significant potential problems for the state," Terrill said. For example, he noted a recent Associated Press story indicating the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety has been threatened with a lawsuit because the state does not provide the written portion of a driver's license test in Farsi.

Second, the two lawmakers said making English the official language "avoids all of the cost, burden and conflict" associated with bilingualism and multilingualism.

"Bilingualism and multilingualism are inherently divisive," Terrill said. "Just look at the Canadian province of Quebec for a case study. In Quebec, you have a cultural and linguistic minority that routinely threatens to separate from the rest of the nation."

There are approximately 120 separate languages spoken in Oklahoma, Terrill said, and only 21 of those languages are spoken by more than 1,000 individuals. Research indicates more than 100,000 people in Oklahoma (age 5 and up) have limited English proficiency.

"If we don't make English the official language, the state could be forced to hire translators fluent in all 120 languages and insufficient numbers to staff all state offices," Faught said. "That would be an enormous financial burden that provides minimal benefit. And every dime spent on translators would be a dime taken away from our classrooms, law enforcement or highway projects."

Most importantly, the lawmakers said making English the official language of state government would promote assimilation for all immigrants.

"The government should encourage immigrants to assimilate and Americanize - and becoming fluent in English in a cornerstone of that process," Faught said.

Terrill noted that English proficiency provides enormous financial benefits for immigrants. Individuals working full time who cannot speak English earn an average $15,196 per year. Those who work full time who do not speak English in their home but possess an intermediate level of English proficiency earn an average $26,004 per year. Full-time workers who speak another language at home but are proficient in English earn an average $30,691 per year.

That may be why a national poll conducted by Zogby International found that 65 percent of Hispanics support making English the official language. That poll found support was even higher among first- and second-generation Americans.

If approved by voters, the official English law would have three main impacts, the legislators said.

First, there would no longer be any bilingual or multilingual driver's license tests. Second, when citizens call a state agency, they will no longer be greeted by a "press 1 for English" prompt. Finally, there would no longer be any official state forms or signage in any language but English, unless covered by one of the specifically enumerated exceptions previously noted.

On February 7, they said, the Tulsa World reported that its poll found 88 percent of Oklahomans surveyed believe English should be made the state's official language. A separate Wilson Research Strategy poll showed 82 percent of all Oklahomans support making English the official language.

Labels: language discimination

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:03 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Here's a link to download the entire study "Immigration in Arkansas" -Patricia

New Fraternity Reaching Out to Hispanic High Schoolers

By Dan Craft | The Morning News
April 3, 2008

FAYETTEVILLE - Daniel Diaz and Alejandro Aviles weren't surprised to hear Thursday that children of immigrant families sometimes struggled with access to education.

After all, they've been trying to get information about the value of college to Hispanic families around the region for several months.

"Immigrants generally have incredibly high educational aspiration for their children, but other factors can make attaining that education difficult," said Donald Hernandez, a sociology professor at State University of New York-Albany. "Many children of immigrants struggle with the English language, but if we can make them proficient, their bilingual skills give them a huge potential."

More than eight in 10 children of immigrants have at least one parent with limited English skills, while about half those kids are proficient in both English and their native language, Hernandez said.

That's where Aviles and Diaz hope to make a difference. Last fall, they helped found the University of Arkansas chapter of Phi Iota Alpha, a national Hispanic fraternity.

Much of the groups outreach work involves meeting with high school students and their parents to encourage kids to enroll in college, Diaz said.

"We can tell them how it went for us, answer their questions," Diaz said. "Sometimes, it's as simple as translating, because we're bilingual and a lot of this paperwork doesn't come in Spanish."

Educating immigrants and their children could also help society in an economic sense, said Hernandez, who co-authored "Immigration in Arkansas," a comprehensive study of the state's immigration trends funded by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation.

While immigrants end up contributing more in taxes than they take in services, the biggest single cost immigrants place on the state is in education, Hernandez said. He estimated Arkansas spent $186 million on educating immigrant children in 2004.

"I'd argue that this isn't really a cost, but an important investment in Arkansas's future workforce," Hernandez said. "As more of them gain higher education levels, they're also going to contribute more, and be less likely to commit crimes or otherwise cost in other areas."

By 2030, half of all children in the U.S. will be non-whites, and 'a healthy percentage" of those children will be first- or second-generation immigrants, Hernandez said.

"Immigration is changing the demographics of America," he said. "We're all immigrants some number of generations ago, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that these are our children, America's children."

Hernandez served as study director for the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine's Committee on the Health and Adjustment of Immigrant Children and Families, and has been a special assistant to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Labels: immigration and education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:47 PM 0 comments Links to this post

BY CINDY TOOPES COURIER STAFF WRITER

OTTUMWA — Removing illegal immigrants from a work site sounds like a good, simple move to some people.

For those actually involved in such a raid, it’s anything but good or simple and changes need to happen.

State agencies and officials are still sorting out the impact of the immigration raid Dec. 12, 2006, at the Swift meatpacking plant in Marshalltown, according to Sandra Sanchez.

She presented “The Impact of Immigration Raids” Friday during the Fourth annual Diversity Conference at Indian Hills Community College.

“What happened was so irregular from a legal, moral and human perspective that a national commission is doing hearings,” she said.

The raid affected not only illegal workers but also their employer, the school district, the business climate and housing opportunities.

“Employment in general was depressed,” she said.

In many families, both parents worked at the Swift plant.

“What happened to their kids who were in school or in daycare? The parents weren’t allowed to make calls and the schools didn’t know what to do with the kids,” she said.

Former Gov. Tom Vilsack guided changes so the Department of Human Services can now intervene on behalf of children. The local community helped, too, through churches and other volunteers.

“Even if it’s a raid, people have the right to a phone call and the right to legal representation,” Sanchez said. “They took the workers to Camp Dodge, which is a military facility. Lawyers and [priests] can’t get in, not even for a few hours.”

Sanchez said there was a “major change” in immigration agencies in 2003. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) used to handle immigration but was split into Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“Immigrants are afraid of ICE. They won’t go to the police,” she said. “ICE can be seen as bad but people need to stay in communication with police.”

If the immigration process isn’t finished, they do have the right to send you out, she added.

CIS adjudication officers used to have a lot of discretion. For example, someone’s green card application could include “something that’s a red flag.”


“In the past, the officials would give you an appointment to discuss this. Now, more often than not, they will call ICE,” she said.
Sanchez illustrated the impact of immigration-related policies on immigrant families. She offered the example of an immigrant family living in Iowa for 13 years.

In the family, the father is a permanent resident for four years but his wife is undocumented. They have one undocumented child, age 16, and two citizen children, ages 12 and 9.

The family will need money so someone has to work. The father can but the mother and the teen can’t, and if they do, they often face low pay, no benefits, as well as risking exploitation and discrimination.

“This is negative for the entire family and eventually for the community,” Sanchez said.

Most people need a car and that means a driver’s license. The father can get a license but the mother and the teen can’t. They “can hardly get car insurance” and that’s another negative impact, Sanchez said.

As for raids and the ICE Law Enforcement, the mother and the teen could face ICE raids, incarceration and removal at any time.

Sanchez distributed a chart showing all these policies, as well as health care, education, public benefits and “unwelcoming environment and stress.”

She recommended prevention before and after a raid. Prevention could include a massive campaign of “Know Your Rights Plus” presentations, ongoing advocacy for immigration reform and ongoing education targeting voters, legislators and other potential allies.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:37 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Rick Nahmias follows his food to the fields and documents the journey on with Nikon.

By Sean Mitchell, Special to The Times
April 2, 2008

RICK NAHMIAS was at cooking school in an affluent ZIP Code of the Napa Valley, a mouth-watering abundance of fruit and vegetables arrayed for his instruction every day, when it occurred to him to wonder at the hidden source of this bounty. "It astounded me," he says, "that nobody there talked about where all this food was coming from."

A screenwriter, photographer and then researcher for political columnist Arianna Huffington, Nahmias had gone to Napa with the thought of maybe getting into the restaurant business. But his curiosity sent him in another direction altogether: on a mission to document through photographs the lives of contemporary farmworkers in California.

The result of his six-month immersion in the fields, "The Migrant Project," is on exhibit at the Museum of Tolerance through April 25, one stop on a national tour. The exhibit's 40 black-and-white images offer a glimpse into the seldom-acknowledged reality of the labor force necessary to provide food for the nation's supermarkets and dinner tables. These photographs of farmworkers and their families are not overtly political, yet taken as a whole, they raise unavoidable questions about the wages and living conditions of the people who make the state's $32-billion-a-year agricultural industry possible.

The poverty and drudgery of the estimated 1.1 million California farmworkers (nine in 10 of whom are Latino) are not news, except that Nahmias' photographs provide fresh evidence that their long-lamented hardships and indignities remain much the same as they were when César Chávez began organizing in the Central Valley in the 1960s.

"I think it's a fallacy if anyone thinks that documentarians don't have an objective, a point of view," Nahmias says. "I'm not trying to disguise the fact that I come to the subject with sympathy for the people I'm photographing. But I want to believe I'm putting the information out there and allowing the audience to form their own opinions."

New mission

After that week in Napa Valley in 2002, Nahmias, now 42, returned with a new passion that compelled him to quit his job with Huffington and begin investigating where his tomatoes and strawberries came from and who picked them. Versed in the ways of Hollywood as a writer with projects in development, he briefly considered making a documentary film but rejected the idea in favor of doing something that would require only himself and a camera, his old Nikon FE, "the one thing in my hands that I knew I could count on," he says.

A native of the San Fernando Valley and graduate of New York University (with a double major in film and religious studies), Nahmias wasn't a professional photographer and wasn't even sure how he was going to go about the assignment he had given himself. "I left with a lot of uncertainty about where my next paycheck was going to come from, but I felt I had to take a chance and do this."

He started applying for grants and didn't get any, meanwhile reading anything and everything about the history of farmworkers in California. He deliberately avoided the "iconic imagery" in such work by photographers Dorothea Lange and Horace Bristol, who traveled the same fields during the Great Depression, or in the more recent political protest photographs of Richard Steven Street.

After he was underway, at a friend's insistence, Nahmias did allow himself to look at the James Agee-Walker Evans book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," an exploration of the lives of sharecroppers in the American South, published in 1941.

"There's a photo in the book of a pair of migrant's shoes, and it connected directly in my mind with a shot I had of a dozen pair of shoes, representing the shoes of people sharing one bedroom," he says. "It was an 'aha' moment," carrying the message that not a lot had changed for migrant workers in 70 or 80 years and that the symbols of their backbreaking labor were eerily identical.

But Nahmias also began to see how his work might be different from that of photographers who had gone before. "I found gay farmworkers, farmworkers with HIV, women and children, reflecting issues in our current society."

Though the issue of immigration is a popular backdrop for images of Latino laborers today, Nahmias tried to avoid that in "The Migrant Project." "I wanted to capture more intimate moments," he says, "that might help the mainstream Middle American identify with these human beings."

The cover of the book that accompanies the exhibit is a shot of buckets of tomatoes carried by a line of workers who disappear out of the frame and remain faceless. Another favorite shot of the author's is of a small white cross marking the grave of an unidentified worker. It's one of dozens in a bare dirt field, stenciled with the words No Olvidado (Not Forgotten). In another photo, a man stands beside towering stacks of strawberry flats, evoking the legend that workers fill between 30 and 120 flats a day.

Nahmias started with a single contact in Oxnard and made his own way behind the scenes and into the lives of the migrants. "One person led to the next," he says. Over the six months he made eight trips in all, three to five days at a time, to the Central Valley, the Coachella Valley and the Imperial Valley. "I slept at Motel 6s, stayed with family and friends," he says. Farmworkers also invited him to share their modest, crowded quarters.

He carried only black-and-white film (Kodak Tri-X and Ilford), used available light and tried not to be limited by what he didn't know. "There was a certain naivete that kept me more open to what I was doing. I didn't come to this as an expert. But I did come with my own sensibility. Experts in photography could criticize some of these images from a technical point of view -- the lighting certainly."

One thing he did know and felt strongly about was that he wanted to shoot with film rather than with a digital camera, as well as in black and white. "There's a purity to black and white that gets to the essence of a composition, clearing everything else away. The faces might not be as strong if not in black and white. If you use color, you have to know the whole palette and how every element is going to reflect on the others."

As for preferring film, he says, "There's a certain disposability with a digital frame that is endemic of our society. Every time you click that shutter, a statement is being made or should be made. There's a texture to the human face that I see in film more clearly."

Drawing attention

Before he was through, Nahmias did win some grants. Libraries and public schools helped support his work. Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, wrote an introduction for his book. And he went on to get paying jobs as a professional photographer, documenting, in one project, a liver transplant at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

And the Museum of Tolerance booked his show. "The theme of the migrant workers touches on human dignity and human rights which resonate in our museum every day," says Director Liebe Geft, explaining why she decided to display "The Migrant Project" in a museum devoted chiefly to memories of the Holocaust. "These faceless, nameless people, we are the beneficiaries of their labor."

"I don't think 40 images is going to change anything," Nahmias says, "but I hope it might invite a conversation, drop something into the head of a 12-year-old that resurfaces 10 years later in a way you can't foresee."

The biggest payoff for him, he says, was witnessing the reactions of farmworkers and their families standing in front of his framed photos, some of them crying, simply because "it was the first time, they told me, they had seen themselves represented with dignity. I didn't know what to do with that. It was a gift, humbling."

Labels: migration, workers rights

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:25 PM 0 comments Links to this post

TEXAS AFT LEGISLATIVE HOTLINE--WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, 2008
(copyright 2008 Texas AFT)

Last year the state legislature directed the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to establish a uniform, statewide standard for measuring high-school students' grade point averages. The idea is to make sure all students admitted automatically to Texas colleges and universities based on their "top 10 percent" grades are being judged by the same yardstick. Supposedly the new standard would apply to first-time freshmen applying to enter "general academic teaching institutions" in the fall of 2009.

The Coordinating Board on March 28 asked the state attorney general to interpret what the 2007 law means. Conflicting views have emerged as to whether it actually requires school districts to use whatever statewide method of calculating GPA that the Coordinating Board adopts. The attorney general's advisory opinion on this question may not be forthcoming for six months or more.

Meanwhile, the rule-making machinery of the Coordinating Board grinds onward, with a meeting just this morning of an advisory group on uniform GPA. Texas AFT monitored today's discussion and came away convinced that any consensus on a uniform GPA methodology is a long way off, calling into serious doubt whether the legislature's fall 2009 deadline can be met.

One superintendent in attendance pointed out that his district has found it a struggle just to establish a common calculation of GPA across four campuses. You can imagine, he suggested, how much more difficult it will be to impose a uniform GPA calculation on every high school in the state.

At this point, there's not even a consensus on methodology between the commissioner of higher education, Dr. Raymund Paredes, and the GPA advisory committee. They differ on which courses will count for purposes of the "top 10 percent" rule. They disagree on how much extra weight to give for Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and Dual Credit courses, and on whether to give any extra weight at all for Pre-AP, Pre-IB, or Honors courses. The commissioner wants to give credit for high-school courses taken in middle school; the advisory committee does not. The advisory group says out-of-state grades should not count; the commissioner says they should if they're on the student's transcript. The commissioner and these Coordinating Board advisers cannot even agree on how many places after the decimal should be used in calculating the uniform GPA; they say at least three, he says no more than three.

Commissioner Paredes also wants the legislature to revisit this statute and put off the effective date of the uniform GPA standard from the fall of 2009 until the fall of 2012, "so that high-school freshmen beginning in 2008 are aware of the new method for university admissions." However, even the commissioner's proposed new time line would require adoption of that new GPA methodology by this summer. In fact, if Paredes means what he says about including high-school work completed in middle school, then shouldn't the Coordinating Board really have adopted the uniform GPA standard by the fall of 2006, when the senior class of 2012 entered seventh grade?

To top things off, Commissioner Paredes insists that the statewide, uniform GPA "is designed for use in college admissions and is not meant to infringe on a school district's right to establish its own method for determining GPA" or "to impact local district policy." Taken at face value, this assertion suggests that a district GPA could be used to determine which students to honor for top grades locally, while a separate state-mandated GPA calculation would decide if these students really deserved "top 10 percent" recognition and thereby earned automatic college admission. Lawsuits, anyone?

So let's take stock of the situation: An advisory opinion requested from the attorney general is months away. Any rational consensus statewide on the specifics of GPA calculation apparently is even further away. No provision has been made by the legislature to cover the acknowledged local costs of compliance with the new GPA requirement. (Picture not just the software modifications but also the poor counselors and other staffers trying to keep two sets of books on students' GPA--in their spare time from administering TAKS exams.)

In view of all these complications, we have a suggestion. The commissioner has already recommended that lawmakers next January should change the effective date of the new GPA calculation. The commissioner and the Coordinating Board also should politely inform the authors of this GPA legislation that the current rule-making time line is unrealistic, and they should seek at least tacit approval for holding off on rule adoption until the legislature has had a chance to revisit the question.

Labels: top ten percent plan

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:46 AM 1 comments Links to this post

This is outrageous! -Patricia

Associated Press
Thu Mar 27, 2008

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. - A judge known for creative sentencing has ordered three Spanish-speaking men to learn English or go to jail.

The men, who faced prison for criminal conspiracy to commit robbery, can remain on parole if they learn to read and write English, earn their GEDs and get full-time jobs, Luzerne County Judge Peter Paul Olszewski Jr. said.

The men, Luis Reyes, Ricardo Dominguez and Rafael Guzman-Mateo, plus a fourth defendant, Kelvin Reyes-Rosario, all needed translators when they pleaded guilty Tuesday.

"Do you think we are going to supply you with a translator all of your life?" the judge asked them.

The four, ranging in age from 17 to 22, were in a group that police said accosted two men on a street in May. The two said they were asked if they had marijuana, told to empty their pockets, struck on the head, threatened with a gun and told to stay off the block.

Attorneys for the men said they were studying the legality of the ruling and had not decided whether to appeal. One of the attorneys, Ferris Webby, suggested that the ruling was good for his client, Guzman-Mateo.

"My client is happy," Webby said. "I think it's going to help him."

The judge sentenced the four men to jail terms of four to 24 months. But he gave the three men, who already had served at least four months, immediate parole. Reyes-Rosario remains imprisoned on an unrelated drug charge.

Olszewski ordered the three to return with their parole officers in a year and take an English test. "If they don't pass, they're going in for the 24 (months)," he said.

Olszewski is known for outside-the-box sentencing.

He has ordered young defendants who are school dropouts to finish school. He often orders defendants to get full-time employment. But he also has his staff coordinate with an employment agency to help them find the jobs.

Labels: incarceration rates

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:38 AM 0 comments Links to this post

April 4, 2008
U.S. Students Achieve Mixed Results on Writing Test

By SAM DILLON
About a third of the nation’s eighth-grade students, and roughly a quarter of its high school seniors, are proficient writers, according to nationwide test results released Thursday.

That proportion of students demonstrating writing proficiency is about the same as in 2002, when a similar exam was last given.

But the results of the latest test, administered last year, also found modest increases in the skills of lower-performing students. Nearly 9 students in 10 can now demonstrate at least a basic achievement in writing, defined as partial mastery of the skills needed for proficient work.

As in the past, girls outperformed boys by far, most decisively at the eighth-grade level, where 41 percent of them achieved proficiency, compared with 20 percent of boys. The racial achievement gap narrowed slightly, with black and Hispanic students’ writing improving a bit more than did whites’.

The results for eighth graders, though not for seniors, were broken down by states, the top performers of which were New Jersey, where 56 percent of students scored at or above proficiency levels, and Connecticut, where the number was 53 percent. Nineteen states ranked above New York, where it was 31 percent.

That a third of the nation’s eighth graders can write with proficiency may not sound like much, but it is the best performance by eighth-grade students in any subject tested in the national assessment in the last three years. Only 17 percent of eighth graders were proficient on the 2006 history exam, for example.

Though some experts questioned whether the writing test, which requires students to compose only brief essays in a short time, was an accurate measure of their ability, officials of the government’s testing program said they were encouraged by the results.

“I am happy to report, paraphrasing Mark Twain, that the death of writing has been greatly exaggerated,” said Amanda P. Avallone, an eighth-grade English teacher who is vice chairwoman of the board that oversees the testing program, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as “the nation’s report card.”

The results were released at the Library of Congress in Washington. The host, James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, drew laughs when he expressed concern about “the slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought — the sentence,” as young Americans do most of their writing in disjointed prose composed in Internet chat rooms or in cellphone text messages.

“The sentence is the biggest casualty,” Mr. Billington said. “To what extent is students’ writing getting clearer?”

Ms. Avallone sought to allay his concern.

“I know that the sentence has not been put to rest as a unit of communication,” she said.

Ms. Avallone also said the difference in scores between girls and boys might result in part from lower literacy expectations for boys in the public schools.

“These days I seldom if ever hear the message that math and science do not matter for girls,” she said, “yet I do still encounter the myth that many boys won’t really need to write very much or very well once they leave school.”

The national writing test was given to 140,000 eighth graders and 28,000 12th graders selected to form a representative sample of all students nationwide in the two grades. Each student wrote two 25-minute essays intended to measure skills at writing to inform, persuade and tell stories.

Thirty-three percent of eighth graders scored at or above the proficiency level, which the test designers defined as competency in carrying out challenging academic tasks. Eighty-eight percent scored at or above the basic level, up from 85 percent in 2002.

“These results pleased and encouraged me,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents the nation’s 60 largest urban districts. “A lot of cities have introduced explicit writing programs. You go into urban schools and you see hallways lined with samples of student writing. Writing programs have gotten better.”

If Mr. Casserly was encouraged, some others were not, particularly in light of other indicators of Americans’ writing prowess. A survey of 120 corporations conducted by the College Board in 2003, for instance, concluded that a third of employees in the nation’s blue-chip companies, including many recent college graduates, wrote poorly.

“American students’ writing skills are deteriorating,” said Will Fitzhugh, founder of The Concord Review, a journal that features history research papers written by high school students.

Mr. Fitzhugh expressed skepticism that the national assessment accurately measured students’ overall writing skills, because, he said, it tested only their ability to write brief essays jotted out in half an hour.

“The only way to assess the kind of writing that students will have to do in college,” he said, “is to have them write a term paper, and then have somebody sit down and grade it. And nobody wants to do that, because it’s too costly.”


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 8:09 AM 0 comments Links to this post

John C. Gamboa | SF Gate Open Forum
Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Thanks to Assemblyman Joe Coto's "sunshine" bill, The Foundation Diversity and Transparency Act, the public has heard more about diversity and accountability on philanthropic foundation boards in two months than it has in two decades. This bill, which my organization sponsored, would require large foundations to disclose their board and grant-giving diversity. Information of this type is already provided by every major bank and regulated utility in the state. What we did not realize, though, is how this issue would ignite a firestorm of controversy and condemnation from major foundations. Almost every week there is a new charge that the proposed law would unleash "diversity police" or promote "reverse racism."

The strongest argument against AB624 has not been raised by anyone in the philanthropic world, and there is good reason why. If the $700 billion of foundation assets were truly private in nature, then the Legislature has no right to require transparency as to the uses of these funds. But the taxpayers subsidize through tax exemptions to the foundation world between $40 billion and $80 billion a year.

These taxpayer subsidies were awarded in order to encourage the foundations to assist the poor and under-served communities. They were not intended, for example, to subsidize the opera or the symphony, which throughout the United States receive more than $1 billion in assistance from foundations and wealthy donors. As Robert Reich, a former U.S. secretary of labor and currently a public policy professor at UC Berkeley, has written, "These aren't charitable contributions. They're often investments in the lifestyles the wealthy already enjoy and want their children to have."

For the past three years, the Greenlining Institute has published an annual report that looks at philanthropic foundation giving to minority community nonprofits. Our last unrefuted study found that only 3.6 percent of giving went to these organizations, despite the fact that people of color make up more than half of the state. Of this, only 3/10ths of 1 percent went to African Americans. Our reports have also found that only 10 percent of total giving goes to low-income communities. Many community leaders feel this low level of giving to the needy does not make sense, considering how much foundations receive every year in tax subsidy.

What foundations may fear the most is not the Coto transparency bill, but where it may eventually lead. Today, foundations spend only a quarter, on the average, of their annual income on philanthropy. Included in this sum are grants to wealthy universities that already have huge endowments, an example of which is the Koret Foundation's $3 million dollar gift to Stanford in 2006. Foundations could be doing far more to address the immediate crisis, particularly during a recession, if they spent a larger portion of their annual income on philanthropy. For example, foundations today spend only half their income every year. If they were to spend 80 percent of their annual income, that number would rise to more than $100 billion a year.

To further support Assemblyman Joe Coto's bill, Greenlining has asked the chairman of the congressional Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Charles Rangel, to request a GAO study of the dollar amount of annual federal, state and local tax subsidies to the foundation world. And, the governor, facing a major budget crisis and substantial cuts in health, education and other social services to low-income families, may wish to ask the State Franchise Tax Board to report on the dollar amount of California taxpayer subsidies. Greenlining estimates it at $4 billion a year. This may be enough to avoid cuts in education and health care for low-income families.

In the spirit of compromise and maximizing impact, Greenlining invites all foundations, including the Koret Foundation, to join us in a venture which will have profound and long-lasting benefits for our state's underserved families. We have written Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to request that half of the annual income of the state's foundations be devoted to helping low-income victims of the recession for the next two years. In a time of recession, we hope that foundations will be vocal supporters of this idea.

John C. Gamboa is executive director of the Greenlining Institute. The opposing view by Jeffrey A. Farber of the Koret Foundation ran in Open Forum on March 25. To read it, go to sfgate.com

Labels: California

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:34 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Fair Test Issue: Apr 2008

The papers collected in Holding NCLB Accountable: Achieving Accountability, Equity, & School Reform point out the deep flaws in the accountability structure of No Child Left Behind. They describe how the law is failing to improve schools and analyze the lack of state and local capacity to improve ill-funded schools serving very needy populations. Finally, the authors propose useful steps to overhaul the law.

For example, Willis Hawley's "NCLB and Continuous School Improvement" focuses on needed changes in assessment and capacity building. Rather than judging schools on standardized test scores, Hawley suggests gathering information on a variety of important outcomes, using such sources as portfolios. This approach will require construction of new assessment systems, for which the federal government should provide funding. This richer information, in turn, should support coherent improvement approaches rather than merely labeling and then sanctioning schools.

Here's the link to check out the papers on-line. -Patricia

Labels: NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:42 PM 1 comments Links to this post

From an email
April 2, 2008

Dear Friends,

Many of you have told me that you are concerned about the Top 10% Law and its effect on admissions at UT Austin. We're concluding the admissions cycle here on the 40 Acres, and I'd like to share some figures with you.

We received 29,626 applications for the fall 2008 freshman class. Our target enrollment for that class is 7,200. We have already admitted more than 9,100 Texas applicants who graduated in the top 10% of their high school class. Those figures clearly demonstrate the problem we face.

Of course, not all the Top 10% admitted students will attend UT. But we estimate that 81-85% of our freshmen from Texas high schools will be automatically admitted under the Top 10% Law, and it could reach 100% within the next two years. After all, last year's figure was 71%, so we've experienced a substantial increase in only 12 months.

The law penalizes many well-rounded students. Furthermore, we are unable to admit many students with extraordinary skills in music, art, mathematics, or leadership because we are required to select so many students according to a sole criterion, class rank. When our children come to us and ask for advice, we properly tell them to do well in school, but also to be well rounded by getting involved in their community. Then when they want to come to UT, they find out only one thing matters. That's a terrible message to send to our young people.

In addition, only one in four of our top 10% students is Hispanic or African American. We are running out of room to recruit minority students who, for example, are in the 15th percentile and who have other indices of leadership. We can do a better job diversifying our class if we have more flexibility. When the Top 10% Law was originally passed, about 41% of our Texas students came in under it. All we are asking is to return to that original model.

In testimony before the Legislature on many occasions, I have stated that if we granted automatic admission to half the freshman class and considered all admissions criteria for the other half, we could accomplish the goals of the Top 10% Law while building a diverse and well-rounded student body. In my travels across Texas, I will continue to try to educate the people of our state and our elected representatives about the effects of the Top 10% Law on educational opportunities at The University of Texas at Austin. I hope you will join me.

Thanks for all you do for the University.

Bill Powers
President
The University of Texas at Austin

Labels: top ten percent plan

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:15 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Cindy Von Quednow | Daily Sundial
April 2, 2008

About 400 students from 20 middle and high schools visited CSUN on Saturday for the 10th Annual Raza Youth Conference organized by MEChA.

The theme for the daylong event was "The empowerment of our community begins with you."

"Our purpose is to inform students of the process of higher education," said sophomore Spanish major Angelica Amezcua, one of the main organizers of the event.

"Unfortunately, sometimes youth are disadvantaged and counselors don't tell them anything about the help they can receive once they're in college. We tell them that they are not alone and there is a lot of help out there," Amezcua said.

Monica Garcia, president of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education, and Eddie Torres, a CSUN graduate and community activist, were the keynote speakers. There was live entertainment from local bands and dance groups.

The conference was broken down into three workshop sessions that were conducted in English and Spanish by current and former CSUN students, CSUN professors and staff, MEChA members from other universities and community activists.

The workshops took place at classrooms inside Jerome Richfield and Sierra Hall. The issues discussed included financial aid, the Educational Opportunity Program, academia, culture, nutrition, immigration and sexuality.

Rosa Furumoto, assistant professor of Chicano/a studies, who conducted workshops on military recruitment, said, "For a lot of students in high school, this is their first experience for going to college. Counselors don't necessarily hear all students. Parents need to know their rights and their children's rights."

Since parental attendance and participation was encouraged, Nancy Menjivar, a senior psychology major, said the conference focused on the strong family structure prevalent in Latino homes.
"Having these events involves (parents) and that's the key to succeeding in college and succeeding in life," said Menjivar, who led a discussion on gang prevention and intervention.

Luis Gonzalez and his 14-year-ol daughter Arlyne, a student at Belvedere Middle School, agreed and said they enjoyed the conference. Arlyne said she would like to apply to CSUN in the future.

Belvedere was one of the four middle schools invited to the event. Some high school students thought it was a good idea to have students visit the university at a young age.

Nabitle Ibarra, 17, a student at Lincoln High School, said she thought it was important for middle school students to become aware of college.

"When I was in middle school, I didn't know that much about college," Ibarra said. "I just knew I had to go."

Steven Perez, 14, another Lincoln student, said, "This is a really good opportunity to see what college really looks like. I didn't have the chance to come here when I was in middle school, so it's good for students to come now."

Suzuky Silva, 17, said she found out about the different programs offered at CSUN and was informed about useful information on how to receive help in college.

"(The presenters) let people know about our culture and how we have struggled to get our education and the importance of continuing our education through middle school, high school and college."

Carlos Flores, a senior engineering major, who presented on immigration rights, said it is imperative that students take advantage of what they have available to them.

"We are here to teach students the proper path to follow to get the education they deserve and to inspire them because their stories are our stories," Flores said. "It is in our interests to outreach to young people and other people in the community...They are probably evaluating other students in similar situations, and they view us, if not as role models, as an inspiration."

Amezcua said MEChA started planning the event before the semester began during the winter break. Free breakfast and lunch was offered to students, parents and teachers.

Labels: higher education, Parent Involvement

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:36 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By SAM DILLON | NY Times
Published: April 1, 2008

Moving to sweep away the tangle of inaccurate state data that has obscured the severity of the nation’s high school dropout crisis, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will require all states to use one federal formula to calculate graduation and dropout rates, Bush administration officials said on Monday.

The requirement would be one of the most far-reaching regulatory actions taken by any education secretary, experts said, because it would affect the official statistics issued by all 50 states and each of the nation’s 14,000 public high schools.

Ms. Spellings will announce her action at a so-called dropout prevention summit in Washington on Tuesday, the officials said. The summit is organized by a group beginning a national campaign intended to reduce dropout rates.

“In the coming weeks, I will take administrative steps to ensure that all states use the same formula to calculate how many students graduate from high school on time — and how many drop out,” Ms. Spellings said in remarks prepared for delivery on Tuesday and made available to The New York Times.

Ms. Spellings’s statements underline the rising urgency among policymakers and corporate leaders to address the nation’s dropout epidemic, as well as the administration’s growing sense that efforts in Congress to rewrite the law this year may not succeed.

The adoption of a federal graduation formula would correct one of the most glaring weaknesses of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Although the law requires states and high schools to report their graduation rates to the federal government, it allows states to set their own formulas for calculating them. As a result, most states have used formulas that understate the number of dropouts, and official graduation rates are not comparable from state to state. The No Child law establishes no national school completion goal.

Michael Cohen, who was an assistant secretary of education under President Clinton, said the proposed measure would be considerably more important than most Department of Education regulations.

“This is a huge deal, in terms of its impact, because it will basically affect every high school in the country,” Mr. Cohen said.

Senior Education Department officials said Ms. Spellings would publish the proposed graduation formula requirement in the Federal Register, opening a period of public comment that often lasts several months, before issuing the final regulation later this year.

On Tuesday, Ms. Spellings is not expected to outline the specific graduation rate formula that she intends to require states to adopt. But in her remarks, she noted that all 50 governors in the National Governors Association signed a compact in 2005 agreeing to eventually calculate their graduation rates according to a common method.

Under that formula, graduation rates are calculated by dividing the number of students who receive a traditional high school diploma in any given year by the number of first-time ninth graders that entered four years earlier. The governors’ agreement lacks the force of law, and a few states have moved to enact the governors’ formula more vigorously than others.

Many states still use dozens of other graduation rate formulas that vary in reliability.

New Mexico, for example, has defined its graduation rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who receive a diploma, a method that grossly undercounts dropouts by ignoring all students who leave school before 12th grade. North Carolina until last year used another formula that so exaggerated graduates that when the state adopted a more accurate method last year, its rate plummeted to 68 from 95 percent.

New York has reported a 77 percent graduation rate to comply with the No Child law. But the federal department uses a formula that closely approximates the governors’ formula to estimate a graduation rate for all 50 states, and using that method, New York’s graduation rate is 65 percent.

The dropout summit scheduled for Tuesday has been organized by former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his wife, Alma, who is the chairwoman of the America’s Promise Alliance, the group beginning the national campaign.

“We Americans can’t afford to have a third or more of our kids not getting through high school — how can we have this?” Mr. Powell said in an interview. “Some places have a 70 percent dropout rate. We can’t have this.”

According to a report issued by the alliance for Tuesday’s summit, 1.2 million American teenagers drop out of high school every year. Christopher B. Swanson, the report’s author, said that to use the governors’ graduation formula, a state must have a statewide school record system capable of tracking each student through four years of high school.

Many states have made progress toward building such systems, Dr. Swanson said, but some have not, raising questions about how the Department of Education could require states to calculate a rate that is beyond their technological capacity, he said. The department might have to establish an interim graduation rate formula for use by some states until they can develop their tracking systems, and that could mean that graduation rates might for a time still not be comparable across states, he said.

Amy Wilkins, a vice president at Education Trust, a group that has pushed for more accurate reporting of graduation rates, said Ms. Spellings’s action “shows that she is impatient for changes in N.C.L.B. that she knows are commonsensical.”

“Reauthorization is taking longer than she wants to wait,” Ms. Wilkins said. “She’s tired of seeing flaws in the law limit its effectiveness. She has the power to make changes, and so she is.”

Labels: Dropouts

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:33 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Jeremy Walsh
04/03/2008

If New York City is regarded by many as a city of immigrants, Queens is a borough of immigrants, many of whom marched last week in Manhattan in the March for Immigrant New York.

More than 70 immigrant rights groups came out from the five boroughs to call for improved access to housing services, school improvements, immigrant services funding and health care access. Queens, whose population was 48.5 percent foreign-born in a 2006 U.S. Census survey, was represented by New Immigrant Community Empowerment from Jackson Heights, Queens Community House in Forest Hills and the Haitian American Unity Project, which has an office in Cambria Heights.

Shouting "Si, se puede" (Yes, we can) and other chants, the crowd of between 1,000 and 1,500 marched from Battery Park up to City Hall.

NICE Deputy Director Valeria Treves said 13 people involved with her group came out to march.

"There's been a lot of rhetoric about helping immigrant students, and we want to make sure something backs that up," she said.

According to the New York Immigration Coalition, which organized the rally, one in seven children in city schools is an English language learner. The group wants $500 million in education funding restored, including $15 million for teachers of English as a second language.

Chung Wha Hong, the coalition's executive director, hailed Mayor Michael Bloomberg for promising more resources to help these students last year, but said he and the Education Department are trying to ignore those promises.

"The mayor and City Council can do better," she said.

At least one Queens high school student took the podium to demand school improvements.

"We care about education," said Daniel Torreo, a student at Flushing International High School. "Our message to the mayor is keep the promises."

For Jackson Heights resident Matias Calihua, a Mexican immigrant who works on construction jobs, getting funding for English classes is crucial.

"We need to learn to speak English so we can get better jobs," he said, through an interpreter, of the day laborers on Roosevelt Avenue. "I know people who have been on Roosevelt for nine years. Many of them can't progress because they can't speak English."

One in four adult New Yorkers is not proficient in English, according to the immigration coalition,

Some construction bosses take advantage of the language gap to deny day laborers a decent wage, Calihua said. "Some offer us a lot less than we're worth."

Borough elected officials also came out to show their support.

"I, too, am a child of immigrants," said City Councilman Leroy Comrie (D-St. Albans), whose parents came from the Caribbean nation of Jamaica. "If you're working in the city and you're paying taxes, you should have equal rights and protection," he said.

City Councilman John Liu (D-Flushing) emphasized the importance of English language classes. As a child, he said, he had to translate for his Taiwanese parents once he learned the language.

"How many people here want to learn English?" he asked to loud cheers.

City Comptroller William Thompson said 40 percent of the city's population are first-generation immigrants.

"They play an important part in making New York City strong," he said.

Labels: immigration and education

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

This is even more interesting given the previous post "Texas ranks low in child well-being," which shows that the number of incarcerated youths in Texas equaling 7,662. This article shows a total of 2,400 held in TYCs making me question if the other 5,262 are in adult penitentiaries?? -Patricia

As costs spiral, legislators look for more frugal alternative.

By Mike Ward | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, April 04, 2008

After spending a year trying to reform the Texas Youth Commission, some legislative leaders are discussing a new possibility: a drastic restructuring — and perhaps even shutting it down.

State Sen. John Whitmire, who co-chairs a special legislative committee overseeing the Youth Commission reforms after allegations surfaced last year of sexual abuse of youths, confirmed Thursday that he and several other lawmakers are actively discussing plans to drastically restructure the troubled agency.

One concept under discussion: lock up the most violent, most troubled offenders in a reduced number of lockups, run by a new incarnation of the Youth Commission or perhaps by a new youth division of Texas' adult prison system, and house the rest in locally based treatment and rehabilitation programs.

"We're spending $110,000 a kid now — about $250 million for 2,400 kids — and you could do the new concept for half of what we're spending now, maybe less," Whitmire said. "I've gotten nothing but encouragement from anyone who's been briefed on this so far.

"It makes so much sense, it'll be hard for anyone to argue against this — except maybe the rural counties where the TYC facilities are located."

Most other states have juvenile corrections agencies, though several use them mainly to oversee community-based programs.

Youth Commission Conservator Richard Nedelkoff, who has previously predicted the agency will face changes, said he cannot fathom that the Youth Commission would be abolished, even though it may face drastic restructuring.

"I can't imagine a day that we would not have an agency with authority over troubled youth," he said. "But there is a dialogue going on about what is the ideal juvenile corrections system for Texas, and how to we create that ... what does it look like.

"Dialogue is what we're having at this point. There is no plan yet."

In recent months, some legislative leaders have grown increasingly impatient with the progress of reforms at the Youth Commission, still reeling from the sexual-abuse scandal and subsequent management changes. In addition to frustrations with the slowness of implementing reforms, they have grown tired of perceived administrative miscues — including three shakeups of top management in a year.

Gov. Rick Perry appointed Nedelkoff the latest conservator in December.

State Rep. Jerry Madden, Whitmire's co-chair on the special panel, said he does not favor "shutting anything down or drastically changing anything until we know what we're replacing it with.

"But I think everyone knows the agency may look much different in the future than it does now," he said. "This is a work in progress."

In all, the Youth Commission now holds about 2,400 offenders, about half what it did a year ago. The number of employees: roughly 4,600 approved positions, about the same.

The Youth Commission's top eight or so officials earn $1.8 million a year, a much higher total than a year ago, according to Whitmire.

"Once we got the worst, most violent youth offenders in secure facilities, we could take the rest and let the state funding follow them to programs in their communities, so Houston and San Antonio and the (Dallas-Fort Worth) Metroplex could keep their own kids," Whitmire said.

"This concept is in the initial stages of discussion now, but I think you'll see something coming together on it pretty soon. Where we've been going with this agency makes no sense in the long run."

One big criticism of the agency is that lockups are in remote, rural areas of the state, far from the major cities that most of the youths call home.

On Wednesday, Whitmire said he asked Nedelkoff during a Wednesday meeting to come up with a conceptual plan for the alternatives. Nedelkoff said he is working on several concepts about what the agency could look like in coming years.

Whitmire, Madden and others familiar with the discussions said the possible changes would emphasize community-based programs rather than the institutionalization of troubled youths who are doing time for relatively minor crimes. They might also pay for many of the programs through counties rather than through the Youth Commission — a change that California has recently embraced.

"We have high schools with more kids in one place than what TYC has locked up in a dozen or so facilities, several (of) which we're going to have to spend a lot of additional money on to bring them up to standard," Whitmire said.

"Why spend money like that when there's a less expensive, smarter way to do this?"

Labels: incarceration rates

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:20 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Steve Wiegand - Sacramento Bee
April 3, 2008
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A3

Republican legislators trotted out the first parts of their anti-illegal immigration package of bills Tuesday, and things went about as well as could be expected.

Which is to say, not well at all.

In case you missed it, the Reeps have determined that illegal immigrants are to blame for most of the state's gaping budget deficit. (Democrats are to blame for the rest of it.)

To remedy this problem (the illegal problem, not the Democrat problem), GOP lawmakers put together what they call a "border security" package of "20 common-sense measures" they said "would help the state secure the border and better protect Californians."

Two of the "common-sense" measures went toe to toe with reality, in the form of the Assembly Public Safety Committee.

One of the bills was AB 1882, by Assemblyman Martin Garrick, R-Solana Beach.

What the bill would do is require cops who arrest a drunken driver, after an accident that involves an injury or does more than $600 worth of property damage, to determine whether the drunk is legally in the United States.

If the drunk couldn't prove to the cop's satisfaction his legal right to be on U.S. soil, the cop would be obligated to contact federal immigration officials about it.

Garrick asserted that his bill would "dramatically reduce the number of unnecessary DUI deaths and injuries in California." (I don't think he meant to imply that there are necessary DUI deaths and injuries.)

But he didn't produce any statistical data that show illegal-immigrant drunken drivers are any more of a problem than legal resident drunken drivers. And the idea of asking cops to determine citizenship status without resorting to racial profiling is a pretty tall order.

Plus, a committee analysis raised a host of constitutional questions about the state's limited role in enforcing federal immigration laws.

So Democrats on the committee killed the bill on a party-line vote, although they did extend Garrick the courtesy of having his bill reconsidered, which means he will have the opportunity to have it killed again at a later date.

They also killed, and granted reconsideration to, a bill by Assemblyman Van Tran, R-Garden Grove, that would require state prison officials to determine the immigration status of any new prisoner.

The apparent purpose of AB 2141 is to give the state a firm illegal immigrant inmate count so it can seek reimbursement from the feds for housing illegals.

But prison officials already count illegals, and the state already demands the feds pay up, and the feds already ignore the demands.

These two bills not only exemplify the likely fate of the rest of the GOP package, but what's wrong with it.

There are some questions related to illegal immigration and California on which legislators could and should spend some time and energy.

Should, for example, a person who comes to California illegally at the age of 2 or 3 be allowed to pay the same tuition rates at state colleges as the person who comes here legally at the age of, say, 16?

Are we better off giving illegals driver's licenses if they learn the driving laws, pass the tests and get insurance, or refusing to grant them licenses until they obtain legal residency?

Those kinds of issues strike me as legitimate areas for debate.

It seems like Reeps could accomplish more in this area if they focused more on real problems and less on trying to score political points with the faithful by demonizing illegal immigrants.

Of course, accentuating the negative is what GOP legislators are pretty much relegated to these days.

Maybe they're just sticking with what they're good at.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:12 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is really sad. Take a look at the full report, it breaks down state rankings across all indicators. Also, look closely at numbers rather than percentages especially in juvenile incarceration where both Texas and California don't rank the lowest but do have the greatest total number of incarcerations. -Patricia

Report by nonprofit evaluates states on 10 indicators

By Suzannah Gonzales
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, April 03, 2008

Texas ranks 46th among the states in terms of child well-being, according to a report released Wednesday by a nonprofit group that promotes adopting national policies for children, youth and families.

Infant, child and teen deaths were among the 10 indicators considered in the Every Child Matters Education Fund's report, titled "Geography Matters: Child Well-Being in the States."

Texas ranked the worst for births to mothers 15 to 19 years old per 1,000 teen girls, as well as for the percentage of uninsured children. New Hampshire and Rhode Island, respectively, were the top states for those categories.

A combination of poverty, race, education, state tax burdens and declining federal investments in children, among others, explains the differences in child well-being among states, according to the report. The report says there are wide gaps among states.

The states where children live shouldn't adversely affect them, said the report's author and Every Child Matters founder Michael Petit, "but they do."

sgonzales @statesman.com; 445-3616

The 10 bottom states for child well-being, according to an Every Child Matters Education Fund report:

41. Arizona

42. South Dakota

43. Nevada

44. Arkansas

45. South Carolina

46. Texas

47. Oklahoma

48. New Mexico

49. Mississippi

50. Louisiana

The 10 top states:

1. Vermont

2. Massachusetts

3. Connecticut

4. Rhode Island

5. New Hampshire

6. Hawaii

7. Iowa

8. Minnesota

9. Washington

10. Maine

Labels: incarceration rates, poverty

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:55 PM 0 comments Links to this post

In well-to-do districts, high-powered families can bolster schools or be too demanding.

By Bess Keller | Ed Week
April 1, 2008

Schools flush with students’ parents showing up and helping out have long been the envy of those where classrooms echo on back-to-school night. But in recent years, incidents reported in the news media have dabbed shadows on that glowing picture of parent involvement, raising issues about whether demanding adults have made teachers’ jobs harder and compromised learning.

In some cases, that’s true, educators acknowledge. Important cultural shifts that call not only for greater civility but also new understandings between educators and high-powered parents may be occurring.

Read on

Labels: Parent Involvement

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:55 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out this report [pdf] file on the graduation rate in our U.S. cities.

Angela

Labels: graduation rates

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:49 PM 0 comments Links to this post

UCLA report charts Chicano experience over four decades

By Letisia Marquez
3/20/2008

Second-, third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans speak English fluently, and most prefer American music. They are increasingly Protestant, and some may even vote for a Republican candidate.

However, many Mexican Americans in these later generations do not graduate from college, and they continue to live in majority Hispanic neighborhoods. Most marry other Hispanics and think of themselves as "Mexican" or "Mexican American."

Such are the findings from the most comprehensive sociological report ever produced on the integration of Mexican Americans. The UCLA study, released today in a Russell Sage Foundation book titled "Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race," concludes that, unlike the descendants of European immigrants to the United States, Mexican Americans have not fully integrated by the third and fourth generation. The research spans a period of nearly 40 years.

The study's authors, UCLA sociologists Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz, examined various markers of integration among Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas, including educational attainment, economic advancement, English and Spanish proficiency, residential integration, intermarriage, ethnic identity and political involvement.

"The study contains some encouraging findings, but many more are troubling," said Telles, a UCLA professor of sociology. "Linguistically, Mexican Americans are assimilating into mainstream quite well, and by the second generation, nearly all Mexican Americans achieve English proficiency."

"However," said Ortiz, a UCLA associate professor of sociology, "institutional barriers, persistent discrimination, punitive immigration policies and a reliance on cheap Mexican labor in the Southwestern states have made integration more difficult for Mexican Americans."

"Generations of Exclusions" revisits the 1970 book "The Mexican American People," which was the first in-depth sociological study of Mexican Americans and became a benchmark for future research. It found little assimilation among Mexican Americans, even those who had lived in the United States for several generations.

The earlier study had been conducted at UCLA in the mid-1960s by Leo Grebler, Joan Moore, and Ralph Guzman. In 1992, construction workers retrofitting the UCLA College Library found boxes containing questionnaires from the original study.

Telles and Ortiz pored over the questionnaires and recognized a unique opportunity to examine how the Mexican American experience had evolved in the decades since the first study. The researchers and their team then reinterviewed nearly 700 original respondents and approximately 800 of their children. The vast majority of the original respondents and all the children are U.S. citizens.

In the foreword to "The Mexican American People," researcher Moore had written that she was optimistic that a subsequent study would find much assimilation among Mexican Americans. Telles and Ortiz, like Moore, were surprised to find that the third and fourth generation in this current study had not achieved more gains, particularly in the educational arena.

Key findings from "Generations of Exclusion" include:

* The educational levels of second-generation Mexican Americans improved dramatically. But the third and fourth generations failed to surpass, and to some extent fell behind, the educational level of the second generation. Moreover, the educational levels of all Mexican Americans still lag behind the national average.

* Mexican Americans attained higher levels of education when they knew professionals as children, when their parents were more educated and when their parents were more involved in school and church activities. Those who attended
Catholic schools were much better educated than those who attended public schools.

* Economic status improved from the first to second generation but stalled in the third and fourth generation. Earnings, occupational status and homeownership were still alarmingly low for later generations. Low levels of schooling among Mexican Americans were the main reason for lower income, occupational status and other indicators of socioeconomic status.

* All Mexican Americans were English-proficient by the second generation. Spanish proficiency declined from the first to the fourth generation, showing that the loss of Spanish was inevitable. However, Spanish declined only gradually, and approximately 36 percent of the fourth generation spoke Spanish fluently.

* First-generation Mexican Americans were about 90 percent Catholic. By the fourth generation, only 58 percent were Catholic.

* Intermarriage increased with each generation. Only 10 percent of immigrants were intermarried. In the third generation, 17 percent were married to non-Hispanics, as were 38 percent in the fourth generation.

* Adult Mexican Americans in the third and fourth generation lived in more segregated neighborhoods than they did as youths. This was due to the high number of Latinos and immigrants moving into these neighborhoods, the researchers said.

* Most Mexican Americans identified as "Mexican" or "Mexican American," even into the fourth generation. Only about 10 percent identified as "American." Moreover, many Mexican Americans felt their ethnicity was very important and many said they would like to pass it along to their children.

* Third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans supported less restrictive immigration policies than the general population and generally supported bilingual education and affirmative action.

* In the 1996 presidential election, 93 percent of first-generation Mexican Americans voted Democratic. The percentage of Democratic voters declined in each subsequent generation. By the fourth generation, 74 percent voted Democratic.

Telles and Ortiz noted that some Mexican Americans were able to move into the mainstream more easily than other minorities. Mexican immigrants who came to the United States as children and the children of immigrants tended to show the most progress, perhaps spurred by optimism and an untainted view of the American Dream.

"A disproportionate number, though, continue to occupy the lower ranks of the American class structure," the sociologists said. "Certainly, later-generation Mexican Americans and European Americans overlap in their class distributions. The difference is that the bulk of Mexican Americans are in lower class sectors but only a relatively small part of the European American population is similarly positioned."

More than any other factor, Telles and Ortiz said, education accounted for the slow assimilation of Mexican Americans in most social dimensions. The low educational levels of Mexican Americans have impeded most other types of integration.

"Their limited schooling locks many of them into a future of low socioeconomic status," they said. "Low levels of education also predict lower rates of intermarriage, a weaker American identity, and a lower likelihood of registering to vote and voting."

Telles and Ortiz believe that a "Marshall Plan" that invests heavily in public school education will address the issues that disadvantage many Mexican American students.

"For Mexican Americans, the payoff can only come by giving them the same quality and quantity of education as whites receive," they said. "The problem is not the unwillingness of Mexican Americans to adopt Americans values and culture but the failure of societal institutions, particularly public schools, to successfully integrate them as they did the descendants of European immigrants."

The research was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; the Ford, Rockefeller, Russell Sage, and Haynes foundations; the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center; and various UC and UCLA sources.

The book can be ordered by calling the Russell Sage Foundation at (800) 524-6401 or visiting www.rsage.org.

Labels: assimilation

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:22 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Reading this made me think of the following comments made by Obama during the Texas primaries:

"it is absolutely critical that we tone down the rhetoric when it comes to the immigration debate, because there has been an undertone that has been ugly. Oftentimes it has been directed at the Hispanic community. We have seen hate crimes skyrocket in the wake of the immigration debate, as it’s been conducted in Washington, and that is unacceptable."

This article touches on the ugliness. -Patricia

Job Losses and Pr. William Law Hit Illegal Immigrants and Others

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 27, 2008; Page A01

A vibrant Latino subculture built in Prince William County over more than a decade is starting to come undone in a matter of months.

With Latinos fleeing the combined effects of the construction downturn, the mortgage crisis and new local laws aimed at catching illegal immigrants, Latino shops are on the brink of bankruptcy, church groups are hemorrhaging members, neighborhoods are dotted with for-sale signs, and once-busy strip malls have been transformed into ghost towns.

County officials who have campaigned for months to drive out illegal immigrants say they would be unhappy to see businesses suffer or legal immigrants forced out in the process.

"But I believe the benefits will far outweigh the drawbacks," said Corey A. Stewart (R-At Large), chairman of the Board of County Supervisors and a leading advocate of the new policy allowing police to check the immigration status of people stopped for other violations. "And there will continue to be . . . a thriving Latino community in the county into the future."

At least for the moment, however, to travel through Prince William's Latino enclaves is to witness scene after scene of a community's transformation.

It was just past noon, a time when dozens of Latino construction workers used to troop into Doris Sorto's Dale City restaurant.

Yet on this recent weekday, the only occupied table was the one where Sorto, 54, sat with the restaurant's disc jockey, sipping chicken soup as she worked up the nerve to tell him she would need to let him go. She had already laid off one cook and three waitresses.

A U.S. citizen, Sorto moved to Prince William from El Salvador in 1986, opening a mini-mart in 2001 when a construction boom and cheap housing were luring Latinos to the county. As their share of the population in Prince William grew from 4 percent to nearly 20 percent, so did Sorto's ambitions.

In 2006, she opened the restaurant, naming it El Rinconcito Latino, or Little Latino Corner. By last March, Sorto was doing so well she decided to sign a 10-year, $18,000-a-month lease on a cavernous mall space where she hoped to open a Latin American-themed supermarket.

But since October, she said, business at the restaurant has dropped by 60 percent. Last month, after Sorto had spent more than $100,000 on cabinets for the new market, her banker informed her that he could no longer approve the $950,000 loan they had been finalizing.

"If things keep going this way, I don't know how I'm going to survive," said Sorto, massaging a sore arm her doctor blames on stress.

The choir at Our Lady of Angels Catholic Church in Woodbridge broke into a final, spirited chorus signaling the conclusion of the Easter Sunday Spanish Mass. A 28-year-old Salvadoran woman named Nury Fuentes pulled a set of rosary beads from her purse and waved them at a woman a few pews back.

"To work!" Fuentes whispered with a grin.

As coordinator of the church's Spanish charismatic prayer group, Fuentes was in charge of rounding up members for a post-Mass recitation of the novena for divine mercy, a devotion modeled on the nine days of prayers said by the Apostles after Jesus's ascension to heaven.

Until recently, Fuentes said, she could have counted on nearly 40 people to join her at the front of the church. Members of the group call each other "brother" and "sister" and rarely miss a meeting.

But since October, more than two dozen have moved away.

Now only four women and seven men trickled forward.

As Fuentes watched them take their places beside her, she said afterward, she thought sadly of those not there: Brother William, the young Salvadoran carpet layer with a knack for guitar playing, who used to keep them all in tune; Sister Marta, the motherly Mexican who still had time to pray over everyone else's problems after she lost her job as a house cleaner.

"You feel their absence like a deep pain because we are like a family," she said. "Each one has their role."

The sun gleamed over Manassas out of a cloudless sky. A Guatemalan woman named Silda pulled a curtain across her living room window to block the glare on the television. Her 3-year-old daughter, Cynthia, careened past on a scooter, crashing into the couch.

Normally, Silda would have spent a day like this walking around the mall, or chatting on the stoop with her Salvadoran friend next door while Cynthia played with the Mexican children across the street.

But those neighbors are gone now, their homes vacant like so many others in the subdivision. And Silda, who is in the United States illegally, is too nervous to venture out for casual strolls.

"What if a policeman were to stop me and ask for identification?" said Silda, who asked that her surname not be published.

She checked the time on her TV screen: 3:30 p.m. -- the hour Silda used to start preparing dinner for her husband, his two brothers and two cousins, all likely to be hungry after a day erecting frames for houses. But that was before such work dried up in Prince William. Two weeks ago, all five men moved to take jobs in Pennsylvania.

Silda said her husband plans to send for her and the children as soon as he can find a suitable home, even though it will probably mean abandoning their current house to the bank. "There's no way we can sell it," she said.

She checked the TV clock again. Time to walk to the bus stop, where her 5-year-old son, Denilson, would be dropped off from kindergarten. Silda and Cynthia stepped into the eerie quiet of the street. They walked past several small houses with "For Sale" signs in front. In the driveway of another, a pickup truck was piled with chairs and a grill.

"Looks like they'll be the next to go," Silda murmured.

A police car drove by, and Silda quickly pulled Cynthia toward her body.

At last, the bus arrived. When school started last fall, she said, a dozen Latino kids used to get off. On this afternoon, Denilson was the only one. Silda let him and Cynthia race back to the house. The more energy they expended, the less they would complain about spending the rest of the day inside.

Once back in the living room, Silda handed her son the remote.

"Here," she said. "Why don't you watch some cartoons?"

The bell by the door to the 99 Cent Plus store in Woodbridge jingled as a stocky Latino man walked in.

Safi Ullah, the Bangladesh-born owner, perked up at the rare sight of a shopper.

"¿Hola, amigo!" he said encouragingly.

The man was a longtime customer who normally was accompanied by his wife and three children. This time, only his eldest daughter was with him.

"Excuse me," the girl asked Ullah in English. "Where is the candles?"

"You mean like birthday candles?"

"No. Candles for the light," she said.

Ullah pointed to a shelf, and the man returned with a box of 12 tapered candles and a plastic lighter.

The man, whose name is Mauricio and who is Salvadoran, zipped his jacket against the wind whipping across the dark, vacant parking lot as he walked out of the store toward a borrowed car.

That morning, his electricity had been cut off. The next day, he and 11-year-old Erica would be moving into the basement of a neighbor's house. On this night, they would make do with candles.

It was the latest blow in a year of calamities: In April, the interest rate on Mauricio's ill-advised mortgage suddenly spiked, more than doubling his monthly payments. In May, he lost his job as a house painter. In June, he had to sell his van. In July, his third child was born, and with no insurance, he started skipping mortgage payments to cover the hospital bills. In October, the bank began foreclosure proceedings. In November, he sent his wife and two U.S.-born children to El Salvador.

December brought the worst setback yet: Mauricio bounced a $460 check he had sent the Department of Homeland Security to renew his temporary legal status, transforming him from legal to illegal immigrant.

In January, he received notice to vacate his house. Two weeks ago, the water was cut off. A week ago, his Virginia driver's license expired, and without legal status, he can no longer renew it.

Mauricio and Erica turned onto a side street pocked with darkened, empty houses and pulled up to a brick house with mustard shutters. A plastic barrel stood under the gutter spout. Mauricio had been using it to collect rainwater to heat so Erica could take baths.

Inside, it was cold and pitch black. Mauricio lit a candle and handed it to Erica. She dripped the wax onto the kitchen table to make a candle holder.

Next, they went into Erica's bedroom. She hugged a stuffed dog to her chest as she watched her father stand a candle on her dresser.

Finally, they walked into Mauricio's bedroom. As he lit his candle, it illuminated a large, framed photograph of him and his wife embracing the children. Mauricio stood for a moment, looking up at their grinning faces, before walking out of the room.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:55 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out the full Latino Socio-Economic Study -Patricia

Staff Report | The Stamford Times
April 1, 2008

As Connecticut's largest minority group and the fastest-growing segment of the population here and nationwide, Latinos are an important barometer of the state of the state.

According to a comprehensive study released Wednesday, pessimism and concern permeate a population that sees itself as unable to afford the cost of living and are underrepresented in positions of power that lead to change.

The fourth Latino Socio-Economic Study in 10 years was presented by the Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission in conjunction with the Center for Research and Public Policy. The study included a survey of 800 adults, 50 students between 13 and 18 years of age, 200 people identified by the LPRAC as leaders in the Latino community, and three focus-group interviews in the state's three largest cities.

Nearly 23 percent of the respondents were from Fairfield County.

"It's very important that we're releasing this study," said LPRAC executive director Fernando Betancourt. "Perhaps even more important is what we're going to do with it."

Another apt question might be where to begin addressing the many aspects of inadequacy highlighted by Connecticut's Latinos. The biggest concerns among adults were taxes, health insurance, poor public education, and the cost of living.

Only 33.4 percent of participants said their quality of life was better now than two years ago, a significant fall-off from the 56.4 percent who said the same in 2002, the last time the study was conducted.

Betancourt said the LPRAC was surprised by the "dramatic drop in the overall quality-of-life perception that is reflected on every single page of that report."

He said health care and the cost of living, especially for housing, were his top priorities.

Just 51.5 percent of those surveyed said they thought housing was affordable, down from 74.5 percent in 2002.

Coming at the onset of talk of economic recession and the subprime mortgage crisis (the study was conducted in October and November of 2007), some of the feelings reflected in the survey might be a measure of discontent in the overall population. The 11.3 percent of the state population that considers itself Latino is more than enough to make it a statistically-significant sample, and Betancourt estimated that there is a further five percent that goes uncounted.

But LPRAC Commissioner Ed Rodríguez said the Latino experience is complicated by many issues, including the group's exclusion from decision-making positions, a phenomenon confirmed by a study released earlier this month by Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz, that showed severe under-representation of Latinos and other minorities on state boards and commissions.

"The implication of the exclusion is an inequality of life and standard of living. What happens when a community starts experiencing a decline in its standard of living and quality of life?" Rodríguez asked rhetorically. "They become more dependent on the state. Health care costs go up, they can't afford insurance, kids experience higher dropout rates from high school."

Rodríguez said the study was only as good as the action taken in its wake. Considering a more than 50-percent high school dropout rate among Latinos, immediate action is imperative, he said.

"We urge our legislators and our governor to please embrace this study," he said. "It lays the foundation to help our community. I know that we in the Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission will be using this as our foundation."

The dropout rate provides a curious juxtaposition with one of the positive results of the study — 88 percent of the middle- and high-school students interviewed said they were somewhat or very likely to attend college. Ninety percent said they were at least somewhat likely to get into the college of their choice.

Of course, getting in and being able to pay are two distinct barriers of tertiary education. Thirty percent of the youth respondents said college would not be affordable for them.

Though immigration status was not a qualifying factor for any of the surveys conducted, 16.7 percent of the youth participants and 23 percent of the adults said they were not U.S. citizens. This does not necessarily mean that they are undocumented, but Betancourt made mention Wednesday of the Dream Act, legislation that would allow students who attend and graduate from Connecticut high schools to receive in-state tuition at public universities regardless of their immigration status.

The bill, with LPRAC support, passed the General Assembly in 2007 but was vetoed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell.

In general, Latino leaders were more pessimistic in their analyses of the Latino community's perspective than the community was itself.

Regarding the state HUSKY health care program, for example, 85.5 percent of the adult respondents offered a positive rating while only 48.5 percent of the leaders said Latinos were satisfied with the program.

The complexity of the health care conundrum was demonstrated repeatedly in the study. The 85.1 percent of respondents who reported having health care coverage was an increase from the 78.2 percent who said the same in 2002. However, it was a decrease from the 87 percent who reported coverage in 1997, the first year of the study.

Respondents also said costs were prohibitive. Nearly 16 percent said there was a time in the past 12 months in which they needed to see a doctor but could not because of the cost, perhaps in part because the 57.9 percent that said they receive employer-based coverage was down from 68.3 percent in 2002.

"This is not hearsay," Rodríguez said. "This is not wishful thinking; this is not agenda-driven; this is not what we as the commission would want you to believe is important based on our understanding of the needs of our community. This is what 95 out of 100 Hispanics in the state are telling you is important to them," he added, in reference to the 95-percent confidence rating of the study sample.

On a positive note, Center for Research and Public Policy president Jerry Lindsley offered improved statistics on mammogram, blood pressure and cholesterol screenings as evidence that education programs on preventive care were working. Smoking was also down significantly, from 23.1 percent in 2002 to 15.9 percent last year.

The most cynical perspectives in the study were directed at the state's judicial court system. Just 41.5 percent of adult respondents offered a "positive trust rating" of the courts. Up from 22.4 percent in 2002, Betancourt said the survey showed there was work to do but also that LPRAC efforts to reach out to the judicial system were slowly taking effect. An increase in the number of trained court interpreters, though still insufficient, was one area of partial improvement, he said.

In reference to the courts, one of the focus group participants said, "I guess they are not fair with everybody, not just Hispanic [sic]," suggesting that the perception was more one of general mistrust than suspected discrimination.

Linguistic confidence was on the rise as well, with 65.5 percent saying they were equally comfortable speaking Spanish as English. Just 49.1 percent said the same in 2002.

Sixty-eight percent said they were registered to vote, a statistic of particular significance in an election year in which the Latino vote has been heavily courted. Almost half - 48 percent - were registered Democrats. The slight increase in unaffiliated voters from 27 percent in 2002 to 28.6 percent 2007 owed in part to a precipitous drop in the number of registered Republicans, from 16.1 percent in 2002 to ten percent in 2007.

There was a 3.5-percent margin for error.

Max Hadler can be reached at mhadler@thehour.com

Labels: Connecticut, Latinos

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:44 AM 0 comments Links to this post

By Zahira Torres / El Paso Times
03/30/2008

After at least a week of sleeping late and watching extra television programs, thousands of public school students, who are returning to school Monday, will begin preparing for next month's TAKS testing.

Students in grades third through 11th, and seniors who have yet to pass the exit level exam, in the county's nine school districts and charter schools will take at least one part of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test in April.

"Before we were leaving, we were already doing a lot of TAKS," Denise Gomez, an eighth grader at Clarke Middle School, said. "This past nine weeks, we've just been TAKS, TAKS, TAKS. Our math teacher, Mr. Quijano, he's actually been a lot of help because math is my worst subject, I don't know why, but he's been giving us TAKS practices from last year and he actually gave us a booklet for spring break to do."

Fifth and eighth graders, who will continue preparing for the test when they return to school, will initiate next month's TAKS testing by taking the math part April 8. Both grade levels must pass this part of the exam if they want to move on to sixth grade and ninth grade. If they fail, they will have two more chances to pass.

From April 29 to May 2, students in most grades will take TAKS tests in math, reading, science and social studies. Based on the scores, schools and districts will be rated academically unacceptable, academically acceptable, recognized or exemplary by the state.

Luz Garcia, the mother of two children, including Denise, said TAKS is a simple test and should not be feared by students, teachers or parents.

"It is good that they prepare them for the TAKS test but sometimes I wish they would focus on teaching other things that will be more helpful in real life than the TAKS test," Garcia said.

Canutillo Independent School District is one of many districts that have been vigorously preparing students for the test. Superintendent Pam Padilla said youngsters should have faith in what they have learned.

"Teachers are still working hard with individual students to nail down what their specific preparation needs to be in these last few weeks," Padilla said. "It's important to get the message to the students and the parents that the teachers know what is on this test. They are very adept at preparing the students and no one needs to be stressed at this point."

"You just keep working, and the students have been working all year for this, it's not just these last few weeks," Padilla said. "Everything they've done, the teachers have kept in the back of their minds that this test is coming up. So, it's important to kind of work against the tendency for stress to creep in and have confidence in your teacher and have confidence in what has been done so far."

Labels: TAKS

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:36 AM 0 comments Links to this post