I urge all to read a piece by Jim Crawford that lays all of this out.
http://www.elladvocates.org/documents/englishonly/OfficialEnglishFAQ.pdf

-Angela

More South Florida parents choosing bilingual education for their children
By Georgia East

South Florida Sun-Sentinel

May 27, 2008


Nine-year-old Bianca Herlory can strike up a conversation in French, Portuguese, Spanish or English, and recently expressed an interest in learning Mandarin.

"It's a gymnastic of the mind," said her mom, Stephanie Herlory, who introduced her daughter to foreign languages at a young age. "Once they're immersed, it comes very quickly."

As demands increase for a global work force, a growing number of South Florida parents are taking steps to make sure their children learn a second language. Many moms and dads have declared their homes "No English" zones. Some opt to send their kids to language immersion schools.

Bilingual parents are not the only ones driving the trend. Parents who speak only English are getting in on it as well.

John Melnick, of Pompano Beach, enrolled his sons, Daniel, 6, and Jonny, 4, in the Lycée Franco-Américain in Cooper City, a private, K-8 school that teaches all classes in French. His wife had done research on the school and liked the French system.

"I thought at first that there would be serious disadvantages to putting my children into a school where they speak in another language," Melnick said. "I'm getting quite an education."

Melnick is learning phrases by watching some of the French shows with his sons. His wife, who doesn't speak much French, often helps the children with their homework.

Experts agree that it's easier to introduce children to a second language when they're toddlers because their brains are able to pick up different phonetic sounds faster.

It's a misconception to think that introducing children to multiple languages at a young age will delay their language development, said Mileidis Gort, an expert in bilingual education at the University of Miami.But raising a bilingual child is not easy in a country where English is dominant.

Kim Thomasson, the dual language specialist for the Palm Beach County School District , formed a support group with neighbors who speak Spanish after she enrolled her son, now 10, in a Spanish immersion program at his public school, New Horizons Elementary.

"I knew that unless we spoke exclusively in Spanish and compensated for the overwhelming English in their lives, it would be difficult," said Barry Silver, of Boca Raton, who makes it a point to speak to his sons Ari, 6, and Brandon, 3, in Spanish only.

There are hurdles. Parenting in one language can be difficult enough.

As children advance in language programs, their skills sometimes surpass their parents'. Some Palm Beach County public schools with dual language programs have parent support groups. The teachers send homework instructions in both English and the foreign language so the moms and dads can help if need be.

The challenges haven't reduced interest. North Grade Elementary School in Lake Worth has offered a dual language program for 10 years. In that time, the number of kindergarten classes participating in the program has grown from two to six, said Diana Perez, the school's dual language coordinator.

Palm Beach County offers language immersion programs at 22 schools. Broward County offers similar programs at three schools.

At the Lycée in Cooper City, Principal Jacquelyne Hoy said the private school is becoming more popular among parents who don't speak French.

The local interest mirrors what experts say is happening on a national level.

The Center for Applied Linguistics is getting more calls about foreign language preschool, according to staffers who track it informally.

"We've definitely seen a surge," said Nancy Rhodes, director of foreign language education at the center. "This is the 21st century. We're living in a global society. We have got to learn languages if we want to negotiate with other countries and get along."

Now that well-heeled parents are making another language a priority for their kids, some say they hope it will encourage more Americans to appreciate bilingual skills.

"Bilingualism has always been a phenomenon of immigrants," said Gort. "Until we get over the notion that English is the only language worth learning, we're not over the hump."

Asta Oskarsdottir of Sunrise, who moved here about a year ago from Iceland, said she continues to speak to her 4-year-old son, Oskar, in Icelandic. "I know how important it is to know your roots," she said.

Oskar is also learning Spanish and speaks English pretty well, she said.

Marie Ramirez of Weston was losing her Spanish until she decided to speak it and teach it to her 5-year-old daughter, Laura.

Ramirez was born here, but her mother, who was born in Cuba, spoke to her in Spanish and French Creole, she said. Ramirez didn't speak much Spanish to her three older children, and as a result they didn't pick it up. When she married her second husband, Alan, who is from Guatemala, she decided to make speaking in Spanish a priority.

"My daughter speaks better Spanish than I do," Ramirez said.

When her daughter responds in English, Ramirez's automatic response these days is, "Dígame en Español": "Tell me in Spanish."

Georgia East can be reached at geast@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4629.

Copyright © 2008, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:54 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is a very important debate. I side on decreasing the statistical chances that kids will fail according to our present conventional grading scheme. I also fall on the side of something not mentioned in this piece, nor perhaps in this specific debate: We should concern our selves more with evaluation than with grading. Grading is part of something much larger that involves evaluation, meaning providing youth with evaluative feedback—even without necessarily having to grade them as such.

-Angela

At some schools, failure goes from zero to 50

By Steve Friess, Special for USA TODAY
In most math problems, zero would never be confused with 50, but a handful of schools nationwide have set off an emotional academic debate by giving minimum scores of 50 for students who fail.
Officials in schools from Las Vegas to Dallas to Port Byron, N.Y., have proposed or implemented versions of such a policy, with varying results.

GREAT DEBATE: Is 'minimum-F' grading an unfair penalty or unfair boost?
Their argument: Other letter grades — A, B, C and D — are broken down in increments of 10 from 60 to 100, but there is a 59-point spread between D and F, a gap that can often make it mathematically impossible for some failing students to ever catch up.

"It's a classic mathematical dilemma: that the students have a six times greater chance of getting an F," says Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center, a Colorado-based educational think tank who has written on the topic. "The statistical tweak of saying the F is now 50 instead of zero is a tiny part of how we can have better grading practices to encourage student performance."

But opponents say the larger gap between D and F exists because passing requires a minimum competency of understanding at least 60% of the material. Handing out more credit than a student has earned is grade inflation, says Ed Fields, founder of HotChalk.com, a site for teachers and parents: "I certainly don't want to teach my children that no effort is going to get them half the way there."

Schools have taken a variety of approaches:

• In Hillsboro, Ore., the school district is planning to roll out such a policy slowly. School board member Hugh O'Donnell says he hopes it is implemented within a couple of years "once we educate the teachers."

• The Dallas Independent School District has a policy not to allow semester grades below a 50. One principal's decision to disallow grades below a 70 in certain instances drew protests this spring and was rescinded.

• At Lehn Middle School in Port Byron, N.Y., the teachers turn in numerical averages from zero to 100 for report cards, and a computer program rounds up anything below a 50, following principal Sally Feinberg's policy. "An F is an F, and 50 is still not passing," Feinberg says. "The point is motivation and to give kids the opportunity to pass a grade."

A top proponent of a minimum-50 policy, Thomas Guskey of Georgetown College in Kentucky, acknowledges that there are no studies he knows of that examine whether such approaches increase passing rates.

"Oftentimes, when schools go to this policy, a major component of doing so is a significant parent training program," Guskey says. "That makes it hard to tell if it's anything the school did, or maybe by informing parents, they become more conscientious."
Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:22 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Friday, May 30, 2008

The Texas Education Agency has just released results from the 2008 .
The agency reports that 29 percent of Texas 11th graders this year failed at least some portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, a must-past test for graduation. Students who failed either the reading, math, science or social studies sections will have four more opportunities to pass between now and the end of their senior year.
The following is the release from TEA: "2008 TAKS scores show steady progress at most grades"
2008 TAKS scores show steady progress at most grades
May 30, 2008

AUSTIN – Consistent with their past performance, the vast majority of Texas’ eighth-
grade students met state promotion requirements with 95 percent passing the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) reading exam and 75 percent passing the mathematics test.

This is the first year that eighth-grade students must pass the math and reading TAKS to be promoted to ninth grade. But this represents the third time this group of students have been required to meet promotion requirements that are part of the state’s Student Success Initiative. They were required to pass the third-grade reading exam and the fifth-grade reading and mathematics TAKS tests in order to move to the next grade.

Results from the second administration of the eighth-grade math exam are expected soon
and should raise the cumulative passing percentage on that test above the current 75 percent before the school year’s end. The reading results reported are cumulative totals for the first and second administration.

“We have set high expectations for this group of students and each year they meet or
exceed them. A high percentage of the students have passed the reading test and we expect the math passing rate to rise substantially when results from the second test administration are reported, if past trends are any guide,” said Commissioner of Education Robert Scott.

One more testing opportunity exists for those students who are still trying to master the exams. The eighth-grade math test will be given again on July 1 and the reading exam will be given on July 2.

Additionally, 90 percent of the eighth-grade class passed the social studies TAKS while 68 percent passed the science TAKS. These figures includes results from both the standard TAKS and TAKS (Accommodated), which is a form of TAKS for students served by special education who meet the eligibility requirements for certain specific accommodations.

TAKS (Accommodated), as required by federal law, tests students served by special
education on material at the grade level in which they are enrolled. Test results reported today include both TAKS and TAKS (Accommodated) results. TAKS results reported in 2003-2007 are for TAKS only because TAKS (Accommodated) was not a testing option until 2008.

Third grade and fifth grade

Ninety-three percent of third-grade students have passed the reading TAKS on their first or second try. This is the exam, available in English or Spanish, that they must pass to meet the state’s promotion requirements.

Results released today show that 83 percent of the 314,376 third graders who took the
mathematics test in English passed on the first administration. Seventy-seven percent of the 26,769 students who took the math test in Spanish passed it.

Fifth-grade students must pass both the reading and math exams in order to be promoted. During the first or second test administration, 90 percent passed the reading exam in English or Spanish. During the first administration of the mathematics TAKS given in English, 83 percent of the students passed. Among the 5,233 students who took the math test in Spanish, 48 percent passed.

Any third or fifth-grade student who has not yet passed the reading test may retake it July 2. Any fifth-grade student who has not passed the mathematics test may retake it July 1.

Under Texas law, any student who has not met the promotion requirements in grades 3, 5
and 8 is retained, unless his or her family appeals the retention to a Grade Placement Committee made up of the principal, teacher and parent. Parents should contact their local school to begin the appeal process.

Along with math and reading, fifth-grade students also take a TAKS science exam, which
81 percent mastered. Thirty-seven percent performed so well on the test that they earned a Commended Performance notation.

Among the students tested in Spanish, 35 percent passed the science exam.

Fourth grade

Overall, 83 percent of fourth-grade students passed either the TAKS or TAKS
(Accommodated) reading test. Eighty-four percent of the students passed the math TAKS or TAKS (Accommodated), while 91 percent met the passing standard on the TAKS or TAKS
(Accommodated) writing exam.

When only the scores on the standard TAKS are considered without including scores on
TAKS (Accommodated), scores appeared very stable with 84 percent of the students passing the reading test in both 2007 and 2008 and 86 percent passing the mathematics test both years.

Passing rates on the writing test rose to 93 percent, compared to 91 percent last year.

The passing rates for students who tested in Spanish were 75 percent for reading, 74
percent for mathematics and 90 percent for writing. When just TAKS scores in Spanish are examined, the passing rates this year were within two points or less of last year’s passing rates.

Sixth grade

Sixth-grade students showed strong performance with 91 percent of the 315,668 students
passing the reading test in English and 45 percent of the student earning Commended
Performance.

Eighty percent of students passed the mathematics test, with 37 percent achieving
Commended Performance.

When just TAKS results are compared between this year and last year, passing rates on
the math test rose from 79 percent to 83 percent. There was a one percentage point increase on the reading exam on the standard test.

Many students have already graduated from bilingual or English as a Second Language
programs by sixth grade so only 1,370 students took the sixth-grade reading test in Spanish. This group had a 50 percent passing rate and a 21 percent Commended Performance rate on the reading test. Of the 1,246 students who took the math test in Spanish, 38 percent passed and 11 percent achieved Commended Performance. Sixth grade is the last year that a state test is
offered in Spanish.

Seventh grade

Seventh-grade students were most proficient on the writing exam, with 90 percent
passing and 33 percent receiving Commended Performance. Eighty-four percent of the students passed the reading test and 76 percent passed the mathematics exam.

When TAKS (Accommodated) results are excluded, passing rates increased by 2
percentage points on TAKS reading and by 3 percentage points on the math test as compared to last year, while passing rates declined by one percentage point on the writing examination.

Ninth grade

Eighty-four percent of high school freshmen mastered the reading test but just 60 percent passed the math test. When 2007 and 2008 results for TAKS only are compared, results on the reading test increased from 86 percent to 87 percent, while the mathematics passing rates rose from 60 percent to 63 percent.

Tenth grade

Sophomores take TAKS tests in four subject areas. Their passing rates were 86 percent
in English language arts, which is a combined reading and writing test; 63 percent in
mathematics, 88 percent in social studies and 64 percent in science. A greater percent of students - 32 percent - achieved Commended Performance on the social studies test than on the other three subject-area tests.

When TAKS test results only are compared from year to year, this class showed strong
improvement. The passing rates on English language arts rose from 84 percent in 2007 to 89 percent this year. Math passing rates increased from 63 percent to 65 percent. Social studies passing rates improved from 86 percent last year to 90 percent in 2008, while science passing rates went from 58 percent last year to 66 percent this spring.

Eleventh grade

Texas students must pass four exit-level tests, which are first given in 11th grade, along with their classes, to be eligible to earn a state diploma. The Class of 2009 is well on its way to meeting its testing requirements.

Ninety percent of the students passed the English language arts exam, while 95 percent
met the standard on the social studies examination. Eighty percent of the students passed the science test and 79 percent passed the mathematics test.

When standard TAKS results are compared excluding the new TAKS (Accommodated)
test, this year’s 11th grade students had passing rates that were one to five percentage points higher on the four tests than did last year’s high school juniors.

Overall, 71 percent of the 11th graders passed all the TAKS or TAKS (Accommodated)
exams they took this year. Those who failed one or more tests will have four more opportunities to take the tests between now and the end of their senior year. “Our test results show that this has been a year of strong and steady growth for millions
of our students. I’m thankful for all the effort the students, their teachers, administrators and parents have put into making this a successful and productive year,” Scott said.

Detailed summaries of state-level results may be found at:
http://www.tea.state.tx.us/student.assessment/reporting/.

The Texas Education Agency does not yet have results for school districts or campuses.

Labels: TAKS

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:46 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Here is a parent involvement study to look out for:

“Parental Effort, School Resources and Student Achievement,” (with Andrew Houtenville), Journal of Human Resources, This website provides this synopsis:

Parental Effort, School Resources, and Student Achievement

Andrew J. Houtenville and Karen Smith Conway
This article investigates an important factor in student achievement—parental involvement. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), we estimate a value-added education production function that includes parental effort as an input. Parental effort equations are also estimated as a function of child, parent, household, and school characteristics. Our results suggest that parental effort has a strong positive effect on achievement that is large relative to the effect of school resources and is not captured by family background variables. Parents appear to reduce their effort in response to increased school resources, suggesting potential "crowding out" of school resources.

Labels: Parent Involvement

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:35 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Important to remember that MA, similar to TX, is a state that requires high school exit exams in ELA and Math to receive a diploma, and in theory suggests college readiness.

Here's a link to check out the MA statewide report, and < a href="www.doe.mass.edu/research/reports/s2c.html."> the local school reports -Patricia

For Immediate Release
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Contact:Heidi Guarino 781-338-3106 (ESE) or Eileen O'Connor 617-994-6903 (DHE)

MALDEN - The state's public high schools have received the first-ever reports detailing the performance of graduates attending a Massachusetts public college or university.

Individual "School-to-College" reports for 297 high schools were distributed last week, providing details on how graduates from the class of 2005 fared in college, whether they needed remediation when they got there and whether they re-enrolled for a second year.

The report contains information on students who graduated from a Massachusetts public high school in spring 2005 and enrolled in a Massachusetts public postsecondary institution in fall 2005. Students who chose to enter the military, not enroll in college, attend college out of state, or attend a private institution in Massachusetts are not represented.

"These reports will be critical as we move toward our goal of better aligning the work of our secondary schools with that of our colleges," said Paul Reville, chairman of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and Secretary of Education designate. "This information should prompt our secondary schools to re-evaluate whether they are properly preparing their graduates for college."

Acting Education Commissioner Jeffrey Nellhaus agreed.

"This is data we've never had before, and will be vitally important as we move into this next phase of Education Reform," he said. "Our graduates should enter college well prepared, not in need of remedial help. These local reports will give our schools the information they need to make sure this trend does not continue."

"Now more than ever, postsecondary education and training is a necessity in today's new economy. Even entry-level positions demand ever-increasing levels of skill and knowledge," said Patricia F. Plummer, Commissioner of the Department of Higher Education. "The School-to-College project will help educators and policy makers develop sound policies and practices for increased college readiness for all students."

Data for the School-to-College reports was drawn from a new database that links public K–12 and higher education data, and is a joint initiative of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Department of Higher Education.

According to the statewide School-to-College report, which was released in February, more than 19,000 students (33 percent) of the class of 2005 chose to enroll in a state public postsecondary institution in fall 2005, comprising the fall 2005 School-to-College cohort. Of these students, 45 percent enrolled at a community college, 25 percent enrolled at a state college, and 30 percent enrolled at one of the University of Massachusetts campuses.

According to the state report:

* Among public high school graduates in the class of 2005 who attended a public college or university in Massachusetts, 37 percent enrolled in at least one developmental (remedial) course in their first semester in college.

* Of students enrolled at community colleges, 65 percent of students enrolled in a community college took at least one developmental course, as did 22 percent of students at state colleges and 8 percent of students at state university campuses.

* Fifty percent of students who scored in needs improvement on the Grade 10 Math MCAS exam enrolled in developmental math in college.

* More than 80 percent of first-time, full-time degree seeking students reenrolled for a second year of college in fall 2006.

The class of 2006 reports will be released later this year. Future reports will be released each spring, approximately two years after each cohort's high school graduation.

Labels: college readiness, high-stakes testing

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:13 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Hmmm. This is worth paying attention to. -Angela

May 27, 2008, 10:45PM
TEA's dropout plan under fire
State officials deny critics' claims that the grants are a voucher program
By GARY SCHARRER
San Antonio Express-News

AUSTIN — The Texas Education Agency is opening the back door to school vouchers with a plan to use state money to help both public and private groups educate dropouts, critics charged Tuesday.

Texas lawmakers set aside about $50 million last year for a more aggressive response to school dropouts, which experts say has reached the crisis level in Texas. An estimated one-third of high school freshmen in Texas do not graduate.

The resulting High School Completion and Success Initiative Council advocates multiple approaches to address the dropout problem, including "alternative delivery systems," which some believe is code for school vouchers.

Universities, school districts and private organizations could compete for funds to return dropouts to school.

Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott chairs the council.

Critics complain it is an effort to create the state's first publicly funded private school voucher program.

Vouchers allow parents to send children to private and religious schools with tax money paying at least a portion of the tuition. Attempts to pass such a program have failed repeatedly in the Texas Legislature.

Scott denied the voucher claim.

"The Dropout Recovery Pilot Program is not a voucher program. It is an effort to bring dropouts back into the schoolhouse," Scott said. "It uses state grant funds. It does not divert a penny of Foundation School Fund money from school districts. In fact, school districts are eligible to apply for this grant, as are universities, charter schools, county departments of education, regional education service centers and nonprofit organizations."

'Loose rules' under fire

The Legislature has repeatedly made it clear that tax dollars should be used to fund public schools, not private schools, said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, which advocates for public education, religious freedom and individual liberties.

"Even worse, this program's loose rules would make it relatively easy for parents to simply withdraw their children from public schools and have them identified as 'dropouts' so that the state pays for their private school tuition," Miller said. "That was clearly not the intent of lawmakers last year who sought innovative ways to help public schools reduce dropouts."

The Texas State Teachers Association also opposes the idea.

Earlier this spring, Scott indicated that using tax dollars to send dropouts to private schools would be appropriate as "some kind of second chance."

Scott also noted the plan would not give money for parents "to shop around" like under a traditional voucher program.

"I respectfully disagree with the positions taken by the Texas State Teachers Association and the Texas Freedom Network," Scott said. "I had hoped they would join me in making every effort to bring dropouts back to school."

gscharrer@express-news.net

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5804723.html

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

Check out the following link with a map that further breaks down regional trends. -Patricia

High School Attrition Rates across Texas Education
Service Center Regions, 2006-07, Released by IDRA

“With the magnitude of this loss, what is needed is a seismic shift
from dropout prevention to graduation for all;and all must mean all,” says IDRA president & CEO

San Antonio (May 22, 2008) – Eight of 20 regions in Texas have higher high school attrition rates than they did 22 years ago. Overall, Texas schools are losing one-third of their students. The Intercultural Development Research Association released detailed findings today showing that eight Texas regions have persistently high rates of losing students from public school enrollment. In 2006-07, attrition rates ranged from a low of 20 percent in ESC Region 17 (Lubbock) to a high of 46 percent in ESC Region 1 (Edinburg), compared to the state average of 34 percent.

Eight of the 20 service center regions (40 percent) had lower attrition rates in 2006-07 than in 1985-86, and four (20 percent) had rates that remained unchanged.

In early April, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings called for consistent formulas for states to calculate the number of students who graduate from high school on time. IDRA has been releasing attrition data each year for Texas schools using the same methodology since its inaugural statewide study in 1986, making year-to-year comparisons meaningful.

Directed by Dr. María “Cuca” Robledo Montecel, IDRA is now releasing attrition data at the Texas regional level based on Texas education service center regions. Trend graphs of high school attrition in each Texas county and region are available online.

IDRA research shows that between 1985-86 and 2006-07, more than 2.6 million secondary students have been lost from public school enrollment in the state. Other key findings from the regional study include:

* Education service center (ESC) regions with traditionally high attrition rates include: ESC Region 1 (Edinburg), ESC Region 4 (Houston), ESC Region 10 (Richardson), ESC Region 13 (Austin), ESC Region 19 (El Paso), and ESC Region 20 (San Antonio).
* The total number of students lost from public high school public enrollment has increased from 86,272 in 1985-86 to 134,646 in 2006-07.
* Statewide, the attrition rates of Hispanic students and Black students have either remained unchanged or have worsened since 1985-86

“We must move from a low and archaic expectation that only some of our country’s students can successfully graduate from high school to a guarantee that all of our students will graduate,” said Dr. Robledo Montecel.

“Since this problem is systemic, the solutions must address schools as systems,” she added. IDRA’s Quality School Action Framework shows how communities and schools can work together to strengthen public schools’ capacities to improve the holding power of schools.

To turn things around, schools and communities in Texas and around the country are looking to new ways to understand the obstacles to school success and to work together to address them. For example, IDRA and Texas education service centers have been collaborating to present a series of interactive video conferences for parents and parent educators on working with schools to improve education of all students.

The main IDRA web site lists vital components for successful dropout prevention based on a review of research and IDRA’s 22 years of experience with its highly-successful dropout prevention program, the Coca-Cola Valued Youth Program.

Attrition rates are an indicator of a school’s holding power, or ability to keep students enrolled in school and learning until they graduate. IDRA conducted Texas’ first-ever comprehensive statewide study of high school dropouts using a high school attrition formula to estimate the number and percent of students who leave school prior to graduation. The study in 1986 was the state’s first major effort to assess the school holding power of Texas public schools. IDRA’s annual attrition studies since then include county-level data by race and ethnicity.


See http://del.icio.us/IDRA for related articles and studies.

IDRA is an independent, private non-profit organization, directed by María Robledo Montecel, Ph.D., dedicated to creating schools that work for all children. As a vanguard leadership development and research team for more than three decades, IDRA has worked with people to create self-renewing schools that value and empower all children, families and communities. IDRA conducts research and development activities, creates, implements and administers innovative education programs and provides teacher, administrator, and parent training and technical assistance.

Labels: attrition rates, IDRA

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:43 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Teachers College Press Room Article
Published: 5/21/2008

Around the world, the consensus is that bilingualism is a strength. It’s time the U.S. caught on

At Flushing International High School in Queens, Humanities teacher Kevin Hesseltine recently kicked off a class on imperialism by scribbling the following direction on the blackboard: “Free Write: Has your native country experienced Imperialism? By who? Was it economic, political, social or all of the above? Give examples.”

At a table of ninth and tenth graders, one boy, whose family had recently emigrated from China, appealed to his seatmates to clarify the question.

“Was your country ever invaded,” explained a girl from Pakistan.

“Yes,” the boy replied. “Japan.”

He then called out, in Chinese, to several other Chinese boys, who suggested—in English—another possible invader: Mongolia.

And so it goes at Flushing International and its sister schools (eight in New York City and one in Oakland, California). Language is seen both as a tool of communication and as a way to draw on other strengths of the school’s largely immigrant student population.

“Their language is a part of who they are as people, not just as learners,” says Principal Joseph Luft. “You don’t deny students a part of who they are or prevent them from using skills and abilities they have to learn. If someone sent you and me off to China but said, ‘You can’t speak to each other in English’—well, I think you can see the absurdity of it.”

Rising Tide

The number of U.S. students classified as English language learners (ELLs) has at least doubled over the past 25 years, and now accounts for more than 10 percent of total public school enrollment. Collectively ELLs speak more than 460 languages, with the most common being Spanish, Vietnamese, Hmong, Korean, Arabic, Haitian Creole and Cantonese. The U.S. has 10,000 young native speakers of Urdu alone. Overall, ELLs are enrolling in American public schools at a rate seven times the national average for all students.

Yet according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 4 percent of these “English language learners” in the eighth grade are proficient in reading and only 6 percent in math. Seventy-one percent of ELLs scored below “basic” on the eighth grade NAEP reading and math tests. ELLs trail English-proficient students by 39 points in reading and 36 points in math on a 500-point scale nationally. And a survey in 2003 revealed that 50 percent of ELLs fail their graduation tests, compared with 24 percent of English-proficient students.

To TC faculty members Ofelia García and Jo Anne Kleifgen and doctoral student Lorraine Falchi, authors of the Equity Matters research review “From English Language Learners to Emergent Bilinguals,” those failures stem from a fundamentally close-minded approach to language—and one that is very much at odds with mainstream thinking in other countries. In fact, while it may seem counter-intuitive, research has shown that using a child’s first language is the most effective way to help her achieve a higher level in an English language school system. “The benefits of such practices are explained by the concept of linguistic interdependence—the notion that two languages bolster each other and the student’s ability to acquire knowledge,” the TC authors write.

That’s very much the thinking—and practice—at the Twenty-First Century Academy for Community Leadership, a predominantly Hispanic pre-k–8 school located in Washington Heights. Beginning in kindergarten, where Margaret Blachley also uses sign language to help kids remember words, classes are taught in English one day, Spanish the next.

“We have signs to go with all of our routines, so the children become more comfortable with them,” says Blachley who hit upon the sign language idea with a fellow teacher. “I don’t have a scientific article to prove it, but I see them able to produce more language.”

And where bilingual children at most U.S. schools typically abandon Spanish at the third or fourth grade, “that’s where our kids flourish, because they have the power of Spanish to keep helping them,” says Principal Evelyn Linares. She adds that her students not only go on to take New York State’s Spanish regent exam, “but pass it and pass it with distinction.”

To Ofelia García—a native Spaniard who, despite her multiple degrees and her flawless English, says she still sometimes feels intimidated walking into American schools—this is merely common-sense thinking.

“Throughout the world, bilingualism is the norm,” says García, who heads TC’s Center for Multiple Languages and Literacies. “But here, bilingualism is the elephant in the room. In viewing non-native speakers simply as people who ‘don’t yet speak English’ we’re focusing only on the elephant’s tail.”

Paradigm Shift

It wasn’t always that way. In the 1960s, the Bilingual Education Act established a federal goal of assisting limited English speaking students in the quick acquisition of English. In the early 1970s, in Lau v. Nichols, a group of Chinese-American parents brought a judicial case against the San Francisco school board that eventually went before the U.S. Supreme Court, successfully arguing that, by being thrown into English-only classrooms, ELLs were being (in the words of the Court’s majority opinion) “effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education.” The Court instructed school districts to take “affirmative steps” to address these inequities, but left the mode of instruction up to the educators.

Things began to change in the 1980s, when the focus of the Bilingual Education Act began to shift toward supporting programs that used only English in educating ELLs and that imposed time limits on participation in transitional bilingual education. In the 1990s, the use of children’s native language to support learning came under political siege, perhaps best typified by Proposition 227, a California initiative that prohibits the use of native language instruction and mandates the use of sheltered English immersion programs, where students are mainstreamed into regular classrooms after just one year. And under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed in 2002, the pressure to bring all students to reading and math proficiency by 2014 has led districts in many states to minimize the number of ELLs per grade in order to avoid having to report data on these students and sustain penalties if they haven’t made sufficient average yearly progress.

García, Kleifgen and Falchi believe that these policy shifts have amounted to a “silencing of bilingualism and bilingual education.” They argue that the very term “English language learner” reflects all the failings in the U.S. approach and call instead for “emergent bilingual” as a preferable term for students in this population. “Calling them ELL is erasing who they are,” García says. “They already contribute to our society with divergent thinking, a facility with languages—skills that we can use in the classroom and beyond.”

At Flushing International High School, Kevin Hesseltine agrees. Earlier in the day, his students, asked to split into groups with different flags and divide up the classroom under their respective banners, spontaneously propose a diplomatic conference.
Later, Hesseltine, a Peace Corps graduate who speaks Ukrainian, says the benefits of the system are evident. “For me, this is the most interesting place to be teaching,” he says. “American kids would never have gotten it. These guys can pull off what they know about their own countries. It’s much more interesting to me. Every kid is so different.”

Labels: bilingual education, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:31 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Bush's "crackdown" in "maintaining the integrity of the immigration system" appears to be seriously undermining the integrity of the judicial system. -Patricia


Immigration officials lined up illegal immigrants on Thursday at the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo, Iowa.

By JULIA PRESTON
Published: May 24, 2008

WATERLOO, Iowa — In temporary courtrooms at a fairgrounds here, 270 illegal immigrants were sentenced this week to five months in prison for working at a meatpacking plant with false documents.

The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants arrested in a May 12 raid. Until now, unauthorized workers have generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations and rapidly deported.

The convicted immigrants were among 389 workers detained at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in nearby Postville in a raid that federal officials called the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for northern Iowa, who oversaw the prosecutions, called the operation an “astonishing success.”

Claude Arnold, a special agent in charge of investigations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said it showed that federal officials were “committed to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws in the workplace to maintain the integrity of the immigration system.”

The unusually swift proceedings, in which 297 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in four days, were criticized by criminal defense lawyers, who warned of violations of due process. Twenty-seven immigrants received probation. The American Immigration Lawyers Association protested that the workers had been denied meetings with immigration lawyers and that their claims under immigration law had been swept aside in unusual and speedy plea agreements.

The illegal immigrants, most from Guatemala, filed into the courtrooms in groups of 10, their hands and feet shackled. One by one, they entered guilty pleas through a Spanish interpreter, admitting they had taken jobs using fraudulent Social Security cards or immigration documents. Moments later, they moved to another courtroom for sentencing.

The pleas were part of a deal worked out with prosecutors to avoid even more serious charges. Most immigrants agreed to immediate deportation after they serve five months in prison.

The hearings took place on the grounds of the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, in mobile trailers and in a dance hall modified with black curtains, beginning at 8 a.m. and continuing several nights until 10. On Wednesday alone, 94 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced, the most sentences in a single day in this northern Iowa district, according to Robert L. Phelps, the clerk of court.

Mr. Arnold, the immigration agent, said the criticism of the proceedings was “the usual spate of false allegations and baseless rumors.”

The large number of criminal cases was remarkable because immigration violations generally fall under civil statutes. Until now, relatively few immigrants caught in raids have been charged with federal crimes like identity theft or document fraud.

“To my knowledge, the magnitude of these indictments is completely unprecedented,” said Juliet Stumpf, an immigration law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., who was formerly a senior civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. “It’s the reliance on criminal process here as part of an immigration enforcement action that takes this out of the ordinary, a startling intensification of the criminalization of immigration law.”

Defense lawyers, who were appointed by the court, said most of the immigrants were ready to accept the plea deals because of the hard bargain driven by the prosecutors.

If the immigrants did not plead guilty, Mr. Dummermuth said he would try them on felony identity theft charges that carry a mandatory two-year minimum jail sentence. In many cases, court documents show, the immigrants were working under real Social Security numbers or immigration visas, known as green cards, that belonged to other people.

All but a handful of the workers here had no criminal record, court documents showed.

“My family is worried in Guatemala,” one defendant, Erick Tajtaj, entreated the federal district judge who sentenced him, Mark W. Bennett. “I ask that you deport us as soon as possible, that you do us that kindness so we can be together again with our families.”

No charges have been brought against managers or owners at Agriprocessors, but there were indications that prosecutors were also preparing a case against the company. In pleading guilty, immigrants had to agree to cooperate with any investigation.

Chaim Abrahams, a representative of Agriprocessors, said in a statement that he could not comment about specific accusations but that the company was cooperating with the government.

Aaron Rubashkin, the owner of Agriprocessors, announced Friday that he had begun a search to replace his son Sholom as the chief executive of the company. Agriprocessors is the country’s largest producer of kosher meat, sold under brands like Aaron’s Best. The plant is in Postville, a farmland town about 70 miles northeast of Waterloo. Normally it employs about 800 workers, and in recent years the majority of them have come from rural Guatemala.

Since 2004, the plant has faced repeated sanctions for environmental and worker safety violations. It was the focus of a 2006 exposé in The Jewish Daily Forward and a commission of inquiry that year by Conservative Jewish leaders.

In Postville, workers from the plant, still feeling aftershocks from the raid, said conditions there were often harsh. In interviews, they said they were often required to work overtime and night shifts, sometimes up to 14 hours a day, but were not consistently paid for the overtime.

“We knew what time we would start work but we did not know what time we would finish,” said Élida, 29, a Guatemalan who was arrested in the raid and then released to care for her two children. She asked that her last name not be published because she is in this country illegally.

A 16-year-old Guatemalan girl, who asked to be identified only as G.O. because she is illegal and a minor and was not involved in the raid, said she had been working the night shift plucking chickens. “When you start, you can’t stay awake,” she said. “But after a while you get used to it.”

The workers said that supervisors and managers were well aware that the immigrants were working under false documents.

Defense lawyers, who each agreed to represent as many as 30 immigrants, said they were satisfied that they had sufficient time to question them and prepare their cases. But some lawyers said they were troubled by the severity of the charges.

At one sentencing hearing, David Nadler, a defense lawyer, said he was “honored to represent such good and brave people,” saying the immigrants’ only purpose had been to provide for their families in Guatemala.

“I want the court to know that these people are the kings of family values,” Mr. Nadler said.

Judge Bennett appeared moved by Mr. Nadler’s remarks. “I don’t doubt for a moment that you are good, hard-working people who have done what you did to help your families,” Judge Bennett told the immigrants. “Unfortunately for you, you committed a violation of federal law.”

After the hearing, Mr. Nadler said the plea agreements were the best deal available for his clients. But he was dismayed that prosecutors had denied them probation and insisted the immigrants serve prison time and agree to a rarely used judicial order for immediate deportation upon their release, signing away their rights to go to immigration court.

“That’s not the defense of justice,” Mr. Nadler said. “That’s just politics.”

Christopher Clausen, a lawyer who represented 21 Guatemalans, said he was certain they all understood their options and rights. Mainly they wanted to get home to Guatemala as quickly as possible, he said.

“The government is not bashful about the fact that they are trying to send a message,” Mr. Clausen said, “that if you get caught working illegally here you will pay a criminal penalty.”

Robert Rigg, a Drake University law professor who is president of the Iowa Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said his group was not consulted when prosecutors and court officials began to make plans, starting in December, for the mass proceedings.

“You really are force feeding the system just to churn these people out,” Mr. Rigg said.

Kathleen Campbell Walker, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that intricate issues could arise in some cases, for example where immigrants had children and spouses who were legal residents or United States citizens. Those issues “could not be even cursorily addressed in the time frame being forced upon these individuals and their overburdened counsel.”

Linda R. Reade, the chief judge who approved the emergency court setup, said she was confident there had been no rush to justice. In an interview, Judge Reade said prosecutors had organized the immigrants’ detention to make it easy for their lawyers to meet with them. The prosecutors, she said, “have tried to be fair in their charging.”

The immigration lawyers, Judge Reade said, “do not understand the federal criminal process as it relates to immigration charges.”

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:26 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Leah Fabel | The Examiner
May 23, 2008

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - High participation rates on standardized tests in Montgomery and Prince George’s County earn the school districts a passing grade under No Child Left Behind, but hide the fact that at the margins, almost all of the students who don’t take the test are poor and labeled with special needs.

In Montgomery, where low-income students made up 26 percent of the district’s 2007 test-takers, they made up 43 percent, or 68 students, who didn’t take the reading test and 39 percent, or 78 students, who didn’t take the math test. Participation rates for the current testing season are due out later this summer.

In Prince George’s County, the actual numbers were higher — 189 low-income students didn’t take the reading test and 227 didn’t take math, but the percentages held true to the about 50 percent of low-income test takers in the county.

Students with special needs fared no better. While they made up 12 percent of total test takers in both districts, they made up 23 percent, or 45 math non-participants in Montgomery County, and 26 percent, or 116 non-test takers in Prince George’s.

Overall, both districts had nearly all of their students take the tests, but in an era where test scores can determine a school’s fate, some worry the lowest performers are subtly encouraged not to show up on test day.

“It’s about transparency and how the most marginalized groups are doing in our public schools,” said Victoria-Maria MacDonald, an education professor at University of Maryland. “If schools embrace No Child Left Behind, that does have to include every single child.”

MacDonald’s research in Florida and Texas schools found that in addition to those kids who didn’t take the test, many low-performing students were “hidden” by loopholes in the law, rendering the number of actual nonparticipants even higher.

Montgomery County school officials take issue with the idea that any student is marginalized and explain the numbers as unable to be helped due to issues like surgery, uncooperative parents and homelessness.

“158 non-test takers with more than 70,000 kids?” said Grace Chesney, the district’s testing supervisor. “That’s such a small number.”

Labels: high-stakes testing

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:22 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Vocational education war erupts
05.26.2008
The Sacramento Bee
By Dan Walters
dwalters@sacbee.com

The old axiom about evil thriving when good people do nothing has a political corollary in the law of unintended consequences.
Single-purpose, shortsighted political decisions made by voters and/or their elected officeholders often interact with each other to create negative impacts that no one really intended.
One of California's more egregious examples has been the erosion of job-oriented high school teaching, what used to be called "vocational education" but more recently has been updated to "career technical education" or CTE.
Educators' professional bias toward college, parents' natural desires for their offspring to have white-collar careers, fears among minorities about discriminatory "tracking," and the political mania for academic testing combined to create a negative atmosphere for continuing to teach high schoolers auto repair, carpentry, metalworking and other skilled crafts. The state's high school dropout rate soared even as employers began experiencing acute shortages of skilled workers.
The good news is that after years of neglect, CTE has become trendy, thanks in large measure to having a champion in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had high school job training in Austria. The state even had a brand new set of CTE curriculum standards.
The bad news is that a bitter, three-sided political war has erupted over what path renewal should take, threatening to stall progress on an issue that's vital to the state's economy and to countless thousands of at-risk students who might remain in school if given educations that match their interests and aptitudes.
Sensing, it would seem, that popular support for technical education is growing, the education establishment has created a glossy, foundation-supported "Coalition for Multiple Pathways" to push the superficially appealing notion that CTE can be combined with academics to qualify graduates for both jobs and admission to four-year colleges.
Jack O'Connell, the superintendent of public instruction and the embodiment of the establishment, kicked off the coalition's official launch last week by declaring that it embraces "a new philosophy" of instruction that eliminates the divide between vocational and college-prep curricula. "The two are not mutually exclusive," he said.
The coalition is pushing its concept on a broad front, including legislation, and that alarms the advocates of traditional vocational classes, who contend that "Multiple Pathways" will bypass students who aren't interested in and/or capable of college-prep academics.
As Multiple Pathways was being launched, the California Industrial and Technology Education Association issued a bulletin denouncing the pending legislation as "scary stuff" and worrying that if it's passed, O'Connell would complete the destruction of traditional vocational classes by redirecting money to the establishment's new framework.
The group says that Assembly Speaker Karen Bass' Assembly Bill 2648 would "turn CTE into delivery models that can focus on college prep at the expense of CTE programs that really prepare students for careers they can enter after high school."
A third technical education advocacy group called "Get Real," created by business and labor groups, is caught in the middle of the crossfire. Its co-chair, Jack Stewart, says there's nothing wrong with Multiple Pathways for many students but it's "too narrow" to deal with the entire problem. "We don't think Multiple Pathways is the right way to go," says Stewart, president of the California Manufacturers and Technology Association.
Stewart and Get Real make a valid point that Multiple Pathways could love vocational education to death. It's an issue Schwarzenegger is in a unique position to resolve, and he should do it as a legacy for his otherwise so-so governorship.


© 2007 California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley

Labels: career education, pathways, tracking, vocational education

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:00 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Very interesting research. So I wonder how things get sorted out in the brain and in terms of word associations, feelings, etc. when children have their languages subtracted from them at or around the age of five (or even at later ages) to where their native language becomes the non-dominant one? -Angela

We think differently in our native language
Study of translators shows brain's special tie to mother tongue

Ariel David, Associated Press

Sunday, May 25, 2008

No one can read our thoughts, for now, but some scientists believe they can
at least figure out in what language we do our thinking.

Before we utter a single word, experts can gauge our mother tongue and the
level of proficiency in other languages by analyzing our brain activity while
we read, scientists working with Italy's National Research Council say.

For more than a year, a team of scientists experimented on 15 interpreters,
revealing what they say were surprising differences in brain activity when
the subjects were shown words in their native language and in other languages
they spoke.

The findings show how differently the brain absorbs and recalls languages
learned in early childhood and later in life, said Alice Mado Proverbio, a
professor of cognitive electrophysiology at the Milano-Bicocca University in
Milan.

Proverbio, who led the study, said such research could help doctors
communicate with patients suffering from amnesia or diseases that impair speech. It
could also be of use one day in questioning refugee applicants or terror
suspects to determine their origin, she said.

The interpreters who took part in the study were all Italians working for
the European Union and translating in English and Italian.

"They were extremely fluent in English," Proverbio said in a telephone
interview earlier this month. "We didn't expect a big difference in brain
activity" when they switched from one language to another.

The subjects were asked to look at a screen that flashed words in Italian,
English, German as well as nonsensical letter combinations. They were not
aware of the purpose of the study and were simply tasked with pressing a button
when they spotted a specific symbol, Proverbio said.

Meanwhile, researchers monitored them using an electroencephalograph, or
EEG, which measures the brain's electrical activity through electrodes placed on
the scalp. The EEG readout was fed into a computer program that pinpointed
the time, intensity and location of the responses evoked in the subjects'
brains by each word.

About 170 milliseconds after a word was shown, the researchers recorded a
peak in electrical activity in the left side of the brain, in an area that
recognizes letters as part of words before their meaning is interpreted.

These brain waves had a much higher amplitude when the word was in Italian,
the language the interpreters had learned before age 5.

"The research suggests the differences between the two languages are at a
very fundamental level," said Joseph Dien, a psychology professor at the
University of Kansas who was not involved in the study.

Proverbio attributed the differences to the fact the brain absorbs the
mother tongue at a time when it is also storing early visual, acoustic, emotional
and other nonlinguistic knowledge. This means that the native language
triggers a series of associations within the brain that show up as increased
electrical activity.

"Our mother tongue is the language we use to think, dream and feel emotion,"
Proverbio said.

Offering an example, she said that an English-speaking child would associate
the word "knife" with a sharp, cold object that is dangerous and should only
be used by adults, while these links would be much weaker and indirect once
that person learned the same word in another language later in life.

The only exception would be for those bilingual individuals who learn an
extra language before age 5.

The findings by Proverbio's team were published earlier this year in the
Biological Psychology journal and have surprised some scientists, particularly
because the differences in brain activity show up at a point in the thought
process when the brain hasn't yet interpreted the meaning of the words.

"I didn't expect such differences at the very beginning of the process,"
Dien said in a telephone interview.

"They emerge at a very early level of comprehension," he said. "It will take
a lot more work to work out the implications of that."

Dien said further research in the area could help understand and treat
learning disabilities like dyslexia.

The Italian study also showed links between brain activity and proficiency
in other languages. The differences showed up when the translators were shown
words in English and in German, a language they knew at a more basic level,
Proverbio said.

In this case, the differences in intensity and duration of the brain's
activity were seen some 250 milliseconds after a word was shown, and were traced
to areas of the brain used to understand the meaning of words.

This phenomenon had been already discovered by previous studies which,
however, had not spotted any difference between the mother tongue and other
languages spoken with high proficiency. This had suggested that with some effort
"we could all become perfectly bilingual," Proverbio said. "Unfortunately,
that's not true."

This article appeared on page A - 16 of the San Francisco Chronicle

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:49 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Texas education board passes new standard with 'no
opportunity to review it'

02:50 AM CDT on Saturday, May 24, 2008

Associated Press

AUSTIN ˆ The State Board of Education's debate on new
English and reading standards took another rowdy turn
Friday as members approved a never-before-seen version
of the lengthy document which materialized less than
an hour before the board was to take a final vote.

After a wacky and terse debate on the new curriculum,
the board voted 9-6 in favor of the new version, which
will remain in place for the next decade and sets
standards for state tests and textbooks, as well as
classroom teaching.

Experts and teachers have been working on the new
curriculum standards for two and a half years.

"I find it's really wild that we can work for three
years on a project and then the board is so qualified
they can pull it out of their hat overnight," said
board member Pat Hardy, a Fort Worth Republican who,
like other board members, received the substituted
document when it was slipped under her hotel door less
than an hour before their meeting was set to convene
Friday morning.

Some social conservatives on the board prepared the
latest version overnight.

"I'm appalled by the process that we've taken part
in," said board member Bob Craig, a Republican from
Lubbock. There's been "no opportunity to review it, no
teacher group is involved, not even the (Texas
Education Agency) staff was involved or had seen it."

A day earlier, the board gave tentative approval to a
version of the curriculum created largely by
StandardsWork, a company hired to facilitate the
revision process. The move angered teachers and more
moderate board members who preferred a version crafted
by a working group of teachers appointed by the board.

The primary disagreements between the two factions
were on how grammar and reading comprehension should
be taught in schools.

The new version was presented to board members as a
compromise, which addressed some of the teacher's
concerns. Still, critics on the board were reticent to
accept the explanation.

"How am I supposed to vote on a document when I've had
it in my hands for slightly over an hour?" asked
angered board member Mary Helen Berlanga, a Democrat
from Corpus Christi. "How are we supposed to reply to
our constituents? I don't understand that. I can't
support a document that I haven't had a chance to
read."

Teacher groups complained that the curriculum was a
patchwork and poorly written, but largely withheld
judgment.

"It's really hard to say since nobody has seen it,"
said Jennifer Canaday, a lobbyist for the Association
of Texas Professional Educators. "They were rushed by
the chairman through a review of the changes. We were
told by the authors of the document that it is
supposed to contain sections from the teachers work
group version and others from the Standardswork
version ... but again nobody's seen it, so it's hard
to say for sure what's in there."

After first saying he would not give board members
time to go over the new document during the meeting,
Chairman Don McLeroy, a Republican from College
Station, eventually relented, allowing a quick run
through of the new document with an explanation of the
changes.

But the squabbling did not end there.

"Mr. Chair you're going so fast ... you're moving so
fast we can't find it in the other document," Berlanga
said, shortly after the page-by-page explanation
began.

After more complaints, McLeroy declared that he would
continue at the fast pace.

"The ruling is you're being dilatory in dragging this
out," McLeroy said.

"I'm voting against it. I'm sick of this," replied
board member Mavis Knight, a Democrat from Dallas,
moments after the discussion started.

Critics said Friday's display illustrated
long-simmering dysfunction on the board.

"The state board is split between members who respect
the opinions of teachers and education experts and ...
other members who clearly don't," said Kathy Miller,
president of the education watchdog group Texas
Freedom Network. "So this board is increasingly unable
to complete tasks with efficiency and a respect for
informed debate and expert opinion.

"This is not how you develop smart education
policies."

Conservatives lauded the new curriculum.

"It is obvious that too many Texas public school
students aren't learning the basics with our current
curriculum," said Brooke Terry, education policy
analyst for the conservative Texas Public Policy
Foundation. "We are glad the new curriculum will
emphasize grammar and writing skills."

Science curriculum, which includes the divisive
teaching of evolution, is next up for review by the
board.

"It does not bode well for any of us with the science
(curriculum) review coming up," Canaday said.
"Everyone I spoke to about this week's meetings asked
me why on earth would English be considered a
controversial subject. If it's this difficult to
change the English curriculum, it's just going to be a
war when it comes time for them to try to agree on
science standards."

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 7:31 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Dallas Morning News - Editorial
Sunday, May 18, 2008

Gary Schepf, Irving ISD:

No matter how bad the day has been, just a little "thank you" from one of my students is all it takes to erase the "yuck" of the day. While higher pay would be nice, public respect and employee benefits would be better.

Carl Garner, Mesquite ISD:

Respect is what I need to keep me coming back. The Legislature shows a lack of respect for teachers as a whole with the incentive pay program. Teachers will always be underpaid, but being underappreciated is much more detrimental. I am blessed to work on a wonderful campus where we are a family of teachers who respect and collaborate. I would love more money because most teachers are worth it, but dangling the carrot of extra money for test scores is demeaning.

Diane Berry, McKinney ISD:

Teachers want to be treated like the professionals they are. This not only means to be paid well, but also to be given a voice in the processes that affect them. Teachers are not lazy. Grading papers, writing lesson plans, keeping up with current methodologies and their certifications require preparations that extend well beyond their normal workday. Many work close to 60- to 80-hour weeks, uncompensated! Teachers are only paid for the 188 days that they are assigned to teach. This payment is usually stretched out over 12 months, but, despite appearances, teachers are not getting paid to do nothing. If anything, there is no other profession that requires its professionals to do so much for free.

Susan Rollins Creighton, Lewisville ISD:

I completely concur with Diane Berry about the loss of respect given to the profession of teaching, and I point to administrations and school boards of Texas for not creating career paths for teachers the way they have for administrators. Teachers are the single most important element in a student's success in school, yet we are forever treated like the low man on the educational totem pole. Encourage us to get more education, help us pay for it, pay us according to our abilities and our students' successes, then respect our abilities and let us help those teachers who aren't as competent yet.

Osley Cook Jr., Dallas ISD:

• I want to be paid for the actual hours that I work. It is normal for fine arts teachers and coaches to work 14- to 16-hour days. There are even core teachers who give extra time to help with academics. The stipends that we get are just a drop in the bucket to the actual hours we put in.

• Treat me like a parent to more than 1,000 kids. Those are the numbers of children for whom I have had to buy shoes, shirts, baseball equipment, musical instruments, paper, pencils, bus passes and food. I want to be able to claim some of these children on my tax return. Some of them spend more time with me than they do with their own parents.

Kathy Brodaski, Richardson ISD:

I may not be performing open-heart surgery or creating new laws, but I am educating people who might do those things someday. I'm not a teacher because I'm not capable of doing something else, but because I chose to teach. It's hard work, it's frustrating, it's heart-breaking, it's extremely rewarding, but it's not for everyone. So please treat me like a professional.

Carey Carpenter, Alba-Golden ISD:

I continue to maintain that teachers do 12 months worth of work in nine months. By May, we're exhausted. My summer begins by getting rested. Then I sign up for classes targeted at teacher improvement. I spend countless hours planning ways to present my curriculum in an improved way the following year. I resent those who think we teach just so we can have a three-month holiday.

Sue Warriner, Lewisville ISD:

I'm not here for the pay. I left a high-paying job to teach, and it was the best thing I have ever done. However, right now the Texas Education Agency is rewriting the ELA TEKS (English/Language Arts state standards) and making a mess of it. They have not taken the teachers' viewpoints into consideration at all. Why is a bureaucrat telling me what to teach? The state needs to have respect for our professionalism and allow us to have a say in what is important to teach our students.

Labels: teachers

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

Berkeley Rep presents Obie Award-winner Nilaja Sun in No Child, the stunning solo show about Americas schools that became the breakaway off-Broadway hit of the year. ( Melissa Friedman )

This looks really cool and politically powerful. While Sun mentions doubt that it will change the minds of politicians and decision makers I think it can potentially make an impact on educating voters who appoint them. -Patricia

'NO CHILD . . .' PLAYWRIGHT DRAWS FROM EXPERIENCE
By Karen D'Souza | Mercury News
05/18/2008


Society gets a flunking grade in "No Child . . . "

A barrage of metal detectors and armed guards greet students on the way to class at the fictional Malcolm X High School in the Bronx. The distinct resemblance between entering an inner-city school and getting into a maximum-security prison was not lost on Nilaja Sun.

"God bless teachers. I could never do it," says the actress-playwright, her voice a little raggedy from running through the 17 characters in her breakthrough hit play. "I really wanted to shine a light on that feeling of being in prison, of kids going from one institution to another."

Sun draws on her time as a "teaching artist" in New York City public schools where she saw the harsh reality of the fallout from No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal law that holds public schools accountable for improving student test scores. She uses those experiences in her critically hailed 70-minute solo show, which runs through June 8 at Berkeley Rep.

" 'No Child . . . ' strikes me as a particularly important piece of theater because it offers a window into a world that is terribly important to so many of us, but which we are unable to experience (again) ourselves," says Susie Medak, managing director of Berkeley Rep. "Nilaja allows the audience to eavesdrop on our public schools."

Here we witness the trials and tribulations of a generation of students imprisoned by expectations as low as budgets. Simply clad in a white shirt and dark pants, Sun plays all the parts in this hardscrabble inner-city universe, the anti-"Disney High School Musical," as it were, from janitors to teachers to parents and students.

"I really wanted to break down what's going on with the politics of public education, but I realized that many audience members have never been in (today's) public schools, and they are scared of inner-city kids. So they won't be able to absorb statistics and dogma," she says. "My goal here was to try to open up people's hearts, so that when they hear about the No Child Left Behind law, they don't just hear words in their brain; they have emotion in their hearts."

The Obie-winning Sun projects her gallery of characters from within. Hopscotching through personas without benefit of elaborate costumes and props, she has emerged on the national scene as a quick-change artist whose technical mastery impresses even other solo artists.

"She is an amazing performer, jaw-droppingly fast and precise at the same time," says Dan Hoyle, who just won the Glickman Award for "Tings Dey Happen," which recently ran off-Broadway. "And she does it all without costumes, just our collective imagination, which is the essence of the magic of theater."

Beyond her fierce facility with the craft, it's Sun's blend of personal and political and her use of the solo form to speak to the state of society at large that most impresses Medak.

"Nilaja is much more than a solo performer. She is an insightful observer of social conditions, in the tradition of Anna Deavere Smith," Medak says. "She's created a piece that stands on its own as art but that also has the value of being powerful social commentary."

Sun also has scored straight A's with critics. The New Yorker called the show "an object lesson in what should not be missing from any life curriculum: hope." The Los Angeles Times raved that "what may sound like a predictable journey from hard knocks to triumph shifts into something electric through Sun's stunning, disciplined performance."

The playwright-actress weaves together strains of experiences from almost 50 public schools, where she staged productions of everything from "Antigone" to "Raisin in the Sun." Though originally commissioned by New York's Epic Theater, a company with a sharp political aesthetic, "No Child . . . " pops with warmth and wit as much as satire and analysis.

"If you bash people over the head, they will just turn the page," Sun notes. "I wanted to let everyone know that, even though these kids are in tremendous circumstances in our inner cities, and I'm not saying they love their circumstances, but there's a lot of joy there, a lot of joking around. And I don't think a lot of people know that.

"I wanted to shine a light on the real humor the kids have," she says. "Humor is so important in the journey of hope."

Snap and strut are hallmarks of a classroom where smart-mouths rule and weakness is not an option. Indeed, in "No Child . . . " - when the teacher tells her class she wants to make them all thespians - semantic potshots abound. When she tells them she wants to stage Timberlake Wertenbaker's "Our Country's Good," a play about convicts in an Australian penal colony, one young fellow enthuses: "Yo, Justin Timberlake done wrote himself a play!"

Sun, who comes from a family of teachers, admits she would love to change the state of the public schools, but failing that she'll settle for giving teachers a voice in the public discourse.

"A lot of people may have given up hope, but the teachers never have and they never will."

She sees the play as a political act but not necessarily in the sense of lobbying lawmakers and pushing for reforms. Rather, Sun hopes to sing the praises of the unsung heroes. She hopes the show gives teachers a sense that their daily battles have not gone unnoticed.

"I don't know if I can change the politicians, but I know that tens of thousands of teachers have seen the show, and they go back to their kids just a little bit changed, a little bit lighter," Sun says. "They are able to breathe a little bit, to just get a little bit more oxygen. That's the revolution for me."

As Wertenbaker put it, this is theater as an expression of civilization. In the process of putting on the play, the class delves into its sense of identity, from the coarseness of hip-hop culture to the politics of language.

"The N-word - that's No. 1 with me," says Sun. "I have to tell them I don't want to hear it. Then we have to have the whole N-word conversation. And sometimes they don't get it, but there's no way you can be open if you are afraid of being called a name, of being taunted."

Fans of the play say "No Child . . . " speaks to the power of the arts to reach out to students languishing in a school system in crisis.

"Here in California, it has been 30 years since many of our public schools programmed arts as a regular part of the curriculum," Medak says. "So it is refreshing to be reminded, in 'No Child . . . ' of some of the values of teaching the arts: learning the capacity to imagine, the capacity for empathy, the pleasure of being recognized for accomplishment, the value of personal risk-taking for the purpose of achieving new skills."

Yet for all its heartwarming motifs, there are no happy endings here. Crime may well be one of the few booming industries for young people without footholds for scaling the cliffs of a shaky economy. Shortly after Sun completed one of her school theater projects, a star pupil was arrested for petty theft and sent to Rikers Island jail.

"He was the prince of the classroom; he was very much like the character of Jerome in the play. It was so disappointing. It was crazy," she says. "Of course, a lot of my students have gone on to good things. My hope is that they become good people, good citizens."

Introspection darkens her thoughts as she comes to the end of her journey with "No Child . . . " after two years of performing it almost non-stop.

"Oh boy. Don't get me started. I'm trying not to get emotional," says Sun. "Berkeley is going to be the last stop, the last city of the run."

Letting go of "No Child . . . ," which has been the center of her life for so long, also means passing the torch to other actresses.

"I can't wait to see other people do the show, because really in the end, it's about the story; it's not about me. There are a lot of teachers all over the country, and this is the story of their lives. It's not just my story, so I'll gladly give it up."'No Child . . . '

Written by and starring Nilaja Sun

mercurynews

Where: Thrust Stage, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison St.

When: 7 p.m. Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturdays (no matinee May 24), 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Through: June 8

Labels: California, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:14 AM 0 comments Links to this post

If chronically low performing East Austin school fails to meet academic standards this year, state could close it or put it under alternative management.

By Laura Heinauer
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, May 19, 2008

The Austin school district is hoping to create a new vision for Johnston High School that will allow the district to retain some control of the academic programs and follow state education officials' requirements for dealing with chronically low-performing schools that fail to improve.

However, it is unclear whether trustees can agree on a new vision for the East Austin school and whether such a plan would be acceptable to state Education Commissioner Robert Scott and allowable under state law.

Under the state's accountability system for schools, Johnston could be closed if it again fails to meet testing and attendance standards.

But with the help of state Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin , school district officials have sketched out a rough plan, without specifics, to create an unconventional instructional program at Johnston that could be modeled after the technology program at Akins High School or the alternative self-paced program at Garza High School. District administrators plan to come up with a more specific plan in the next few weeks after having Johnston parents visit such programs.

Whether the entire school board and the Johnston community will back the administration's new vision plan is uncertain, however.

Some say the timing is too short. Scott is expected to make a decision about the future of the school by mid-June, after seeing the results of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exam.

Others question whether the district's plan will be different enough from, or more effective than, what has already been tried. Two years ago, Johnston underwent a state-approved redesign of its academic programs that divided the campus into small learning academies that allowed students to choose electives that focus on science, such as engineering, and the arts, such as filmmaking. Since then, the school has made another shift, to the First Things First program, which focuses on establishing stronger relationships among students and their families and school staff members.

Despite those programs, state figures show that fewer than one of every five of Johnston's 711 students passed all portions of the TAKS in 2007.

Furthermore, state law appears to leave Scott with little leeway. The Texas Administrative Code outlines the rules for how the state should deal with campuses that have been deemed "unacceptable" under the Texas accountability system, which considers achievement test scores and dropout rates. Johnston has failed to meet the acceptable standard for the past four years. If the students fail again this year, Scott must either close the school or put it under alternative management.

"While I can appreciate the community's concerns about the future of Johnston High School, as commissioner of education, I am bound by the law," Scott said. "I will continue to work with Sen. Watson, the district and the community to provide a quality education for these students."

Johnston would be among the first schools in the state — others include campuses in the Houston, North Forest and Waco districts — subject to the most extreme censure possible under the state's accountability system.

If closed, Johnston could be reopened with the commissioner's approval. However, it would be required to have a new name and principal and a mostly new teaching staff, and it would have to either serve entirely new grade levels or not serve more than 50 percent of the same students. Under alternative management, another school district or a nonprofit organization such as a charter school would take over instructional programs. The law stipulates that the commissioner can put Johnston under new management only if there is a reasonable expectation that the school will be rated "acceptable" again in three years.

Johnston Principal Celina Estrada-Thomas and trustees said they would prefer the school to remain open to children in the neighborhood and under the district's control, and Watson, a former Austin mayor, said he has hope that Scott will consider other options.

"In my conversations with the commissioner, I have been impressed with his willingness to listen to concerns that I've had, and that the school district has had, related to the potential closure of Johnston," Watson said. "The law requires certain things. However, we will continue to work with the commissioner to see how within the law we can meet the specific needs of the community and the district."

Superintendent Pat Forgione said he was confident as well. "I believe our commissioner and our state agency is looking to partner with us," Forgione said.

The trick is coming up with a proposal to present to Scott that parents and trustees support.

Roxanne Perez, a Johnston parent, said she isn't convinced that another program is the best answer and questioned the district's commitment to meaningful parent involvement.

"I feel like the wheels are already in motion," she said.

After parents and administrators visit programs at schools in Austin, Manor and possibly other cities, the district intends to compile community recommendations and collect letters of intent from groups that would help set up such programs to submit to the Texas Education Agency in early June.

Trustee Vincent Torres said he has reservations about the lack of thought and time that administrators are putting into the new vision and warned that he would be a tough sell with the clock counting down to June.

"Right now, I think the thing you guys are lacking is credibility," he said at a board meeting last week. "I don't want those kids to be another experiment. You think you folks can come up with what you need in three weeks?"

District administrators, meanwhile, have not identified exactly which programs they will look at during the site visits and admit that they won't be able to put any new plan in place before the 2009-10 school year. Patti Everitt, the district's director of redesign, said administrators hope to stay in control at Johnston for one more year and plan to continue some of the more successful programs that were started this year at the school, including one to help boost attendance that involved having parents patrol neighborhoods.

District officials have noticeably refrained from talking about visiting charter schools or about exploring the alternative management option.

Trustee Karen Dulaney Smith said board members don't want to be presumptive about their options but do want to send the message that the district isn't ready to give up.

"I do have confidence that there isn't anyone out there that's going to come up with options that are better than what we will explore."

Labels: failing schools

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

Karen Tapia-Andersen / Los Angeles Times
From left, Hanna Sarajian, Gia Alamanza and Grace Pak learn about force and motion by working on a ski ramp made of foam rubber at the Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana. At a time of shrinking school budgets and increased emphasis on standardized testing, field trips are becoming increasingly rare, according to educators and site operators.

Visits to art, nature and science exhibits are rare as more hours are devoted to studying for required English, math tests. But some venues are adapting their offerings.
By Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 19, 2008

Scores of second-graders scrambled through the airy Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, huddling inside simulators to feel the shaking of an earthquake, building mini-ski jumps to learn about speed and shaping wet sand into riverbanks to observe erosion. The hands-on experiences allowed them to test theories they had only read about in textbooks or heard about from teachers.

"A couple of kids have asked me, 'Is this really science?' " said Kathleen Carney, a teacher at Deerfield Elementary School in Irvine.

At a time of shrinking budgets and increased emphasis on standardized testing, such class visits to science centers, museums and zoos are becoming increasingly rare, according to educators and site operators.

Sixty percent of teachers surveyed across the nation reported decreased funding for field trips in recent years. In California, that could get worse as school districts grapple with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed budget, which would cut about $4.8 billion in education funding this year and next.

Field trip coordinators, school principals and teachers attribute the decline in student visitors to increased classroom hours devoted to the high-stakes English and math testing required by the No Child Left Behind Act, as well as budget cuts.

'Money is a huge issue'

"Everything is geared toward that testing," said Linda Kahn, a vice president at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana. "And money. Money is a huge issue for each and every school."

Between the 2005-06 and the 2006-07 school years, student visits to Bowers' "First Californians" exhibit about mission life dropped nearly 50%, to 880 students, she said.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has seen a sharp decline every year since 2004-05, when 241,075 students visited. Last year, the number dropped to 172,764, which museum officials attribute squarely to increasingly crowded school days and concerns about funding.

"It makes me terribly sad," said Carl Selkin, the museum's vice president for education, who grew up in New York City. "I still remember when I was a kid in school how exciting field trips were. I just grew to love museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also the American Museum of Natural History. Those are images I still carry with me."

Because it does not charge admission, the National Zoo in Washington does not keep track of student visitors. But teachers routinely tell officials about the obstacles they face in taking trips to the 163-acre zoo.

"We've heard from many teachers the same sorts of problems -- it's cost-prohibitive, they have to test to the standards so there's not time for field trips, there are not enough chaperons. We hear that all the time," said Elise Bernardoni, an education specialist with Friends of the National Zoo. "A lot of schools just flat out can't pay $300 for a bus, and frankly, there's nothing we can do about that."

Myra Ruedal and two other fifth-grade teachers at Emperor Elementary in San Gabriel received a grant to take their students on field trips last year -- a priority, not a luxury, the teacher said.

"Because of the low economic [level] of our students, they don't get to go anywhere," Ruedal said. "We're taking them beyond the borders of Temple City and San Gabriel. They get to see there's life outside of this community."

As part of a spending freeze, the Riverside Unified School District in January ordered its schools to reevaluate the necessity of any field trip not funded by donations.

Teachers were told to "ask yourself if the expenditure is absolutely necessary for the well-being of kids," said Dianne Pavia, a district spokeswoman.

In Moreno Valley, one of Supt. Rowena Lagrosa's first tasks when she took over in 2006 was to scale back field trips. Some were not educational, such as end-of-the-year excursions to amusement parks, she said. Others no longer fit in schools' crammed schedules, she said. The district takes 40% to 60% fewer trips than it once did.

The 37,351-student district has been named a "program improvement district," which means it is struggling to meet math and English goals under No Child Left Behind. The standardized testing has already been blamed for decreased arts and music education in some districts across the nation.

"Time is our most valuable asset," Lagrosa said. "Our school years are just not long enough, and our school days are just not long enough. We want to ensure that when parents send students to school, it's for instruction."

In February, a charter school in Watts canceled a trip to a screening of "The Little Red Truck," a documentary about a touring children's theater, because of the $400 transportation cost.

"Buses are incredibly expensive," said Dinah Consuegra, principal of Animo Locke Tech Charter High School. "The funding just wasn't available for us to go."

The filmmakers responded by bringing the film to the school. But Consuegra fears that future experiences, as well as arts education, simply will be eliminated because of the governor's proposed budget cuts.

"If those kinds of resources get cut from our school, I think our dropout rate will be much higher," she said.

Getting in alignment

Some museums and other institutions are responding by aligning their programs with state and federal standards.

After the 1998 opening of the Discovery Science Center, 84,781 students visited on field trips during its first fiscal year. But the numbers began to dip, and within three years it had lost 23,000 field trip visitors annually. So center officials redesigned the exhibits to emphasize their link to California science standards, which dictate what concepts students must be taught at each grade level. The museum also focused on a specific grade level each month. "We upgraded the field trip experience," said Leslie Perovich, vice president of the center. "We use large-scale exhibits to teach science concepts tied into the grade level."

It worked. The numbers began climbing, and in the fiscal year that ended in June, 83,949 students visited the center.

Kahn said Bowers held a workshop for elementary school teachers in April to show how the museum could tie into their lesson plans and expects to hold more in the fall.

Schools that continue to take trips increasingly rely on parental fundraisers and grants. Some turn to city councils for help in paying for buses.

The Anaheim City School District paid for field trips at every grade level until budget cuts about five years ago, according to spokeswoman Suzi Brown. Today, the nearly 20,000-student district spends about $19,000 annually to pay transportation costs for a kindergarten trip to a farm and a third-grade trip to an Anaheim history museum. (PTAs, fundraisers and donations pay for a limited number of trips at other grade levels.)

To deal with Schwarzenegger's budget, district officials are discussing eliminating the kindergarten and third-grade trips. "It's scary," Brown said.

Laura Magana of Anaheim says she is worried that her year-old daughter, Katelyn, will not have the field trip experiences her older children enjoyed. Magana fondly remembers her 15-year-old daughter Briana's fourth-grade trip to Upper Newport Bay, where she learned about the Native Americans who once lived there, native plant life and the birds who forage in the water.

"Kids get bored of being taught constantly out of a book," she said.

The Target Corp. began offering grants after a 2007 survey of 400 U.S. teachers revealed that nearly two-thirds reported field trips had been reduced in their school budgets.

"I was stunned, quite frankly," said Laysha Ward, Target's vice president of community relations. "There's a huge need."

The company responded by offering 800 grants of as much as $1,000 each in the last school year. Some 16,000 teachers applied, without advertising. This year, the company doubled the offer to $1.6 million.

Last spring, Ruedal at Emperor Elementary used an $850 grant from Target to take about 100 students to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. It was one of five field trips the teachers took last year.

"That one day," Ruedal said, "they learn so much more than what a textbook can show them."

Labels: California, high-stakes testing, NCLB

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

NPR - Politics and Society
May 6, 2008
New census data shows that about a quarter of children younger than five in the U.S. are of Hispanic decent. Pedro Noguera, professor of education at New York University; and Jeffrey Passel, from the Pew Hispanic Center, discuss the rising number of Latino children and what it means for America.

Go to Audio Clip

Labels: English language learners

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:12 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Susan Carlson | Special for the Arizona Republic
May. 12, 2008

Members of the Arizona Business & Education Coalition, or ABEC, recently joined other Arizona residents for the 92nd Arizona Town Hall focused on the teaching profession.

We also conducted our own "Crash Course on Teacher Quality" last week for members of the business and education communities.

Four recommendations are of particular interest to ABEC:

• Raising the status of the profession.

Defining and promoting teaching as a distinguished profession is a primary recommendation. Indeed, top-performing systems worldwide consistently attract more able people into teaching because of the elevated status of the profession. These systems recruit from the top 10 percent in their university systems.

Promoting teaching as a profession is a task for all of us and starts with the language we use every day when discussing teachers. How do we attract the top 10 percent if we don't demonstrate by word and deed that we value the profession?

A top demonstration of the value we place on that profession is compensation. The recommendation is to provide teachers with professional pay linked with systemic education reform.

Arizona should establish a statewide competitive-pay structure. ABEC agrees this should be accompanied by a well-developed performance-pay system that includes student achievement as a component. Base pay should provide a professional, competitive wage for all teachers. Performance pay should be significant, focus on teaching conditions, individual student growth and provide accountability measures at the teacher level. And non-performing teachers should be removed from the classroom.


• Improving the outcomes.

As the top performers know, the only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction. The town hall recommends the implementation of a statewide data-driven professional-development system with a strong mentoring component. Professional development should be required over a career span and either made affordable or subsidized by the state.

We also must provide alternative pathways into teaching that enable content area experts to be effective with students. Teachers need be certified in multiple disciplines and should be able to be qualified in high-need areas.


• Systemic reform and restructuring.

Two recommendations reference "systemic education reform" and restructuring the system for school funding. But the bigger questions are: Are we ready? Are key leaders ready to design a system of funding schools that is transparent, equitable, and fully funds the needs of public schools? Do we have the political will to cast aside old models and create a new future? We believe it's possible.


• Businesses play several vital roles.

Firms advocate policy change and develop, recruit and support those drawn to teaching - at whatever point in their careers. For example, they can validate teaching as a profession by increasing awareness of the importance of the link between teacher quality and 21st century competitiveness; draw the link between education and economic development; and take a leadership role in developing tax policy to ensure that resources are not subject to political whim.

ABEC will lead the charge on school finance redesign, high school reform, and closing the achievement gap with our "World Class - What Will it Take?" conference on June 2 and 3 at the Orange Tree Golf Resort in Phoenix.

Labels: teachers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:15 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Education News
May 16 2007

PHOENIX - A coalition of parent, education and civic organizations is lauding a decision today by the Arizona Court of Appeals, which ruled that tax-payer funded vouchers that subsidize private school tuition are unconstitutional.

The decision resulted from a lawsuit filed by the coalition on Feb. 20, 2007, in response to two statutes enacted by the Arizona Legislature in spring 2006. The statutes authorized the state to give public tax-dollars to religious and other private schools through tuition vouchers.

Lawyers for the coalition argued that the programs violate the state's Constitution by appropriating funds for religious instruction and directing aid in advance of religion. The two provisions, found in Arizona's Constitution, are distinct from and more expansive than the U.S. Constitution's religion clauses of the First Amendment.

Public education advocates in Arizona and throughout the nation have long criticized private school vouchers as a threat to the basic right of every child to an excellent public education.

"Vouchers are not sound education policy," said Panfilo H. Contreras, Executive Director of the Arizona School Boards Association. "They divert funds from an already strapped system and channel them to private organizations that, unlike public schools, are not required to be accountable for how the money is spent or the level of achievement that results. Vouchers also create inequities for students, particularly those who live in rural areas, where few private schools exist.
"

"Today's decision strikes another blow against the ineffective and misguided policy of school vouchers. We applaud the court's decision and the leadership shown by Arizona's public schools coalition, including the Arizona School Boards Association," said Anne L. Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association, which filed a friend of the court brief in this case.

In addition, vouchers lack support of the voting public. Since 2000, voters in three states (California, Michigan and Utah) have overwhelmingly rejected vouchers as an unnecessary choice for parents and students in their states.

John Wright, President of the Arizona Education Association, said, "Just like voters in other states who have declined vouchers, Arizonans understand that public schools are our pathway to great public schools that serve every child equally and that vouchers only divert funding and attention away from public schools."

Coalition partners in this legal challenge are the Arizona School Boards Association, the Arizona Education Association, the Arizona School Administrators, the Arizona Association of School Business Officials, American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, Arizona Federation of Teachers, Arizona Parent-Teacher Association and the Arizona Rural Schools Association.

Labels: Vouchers

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

Check out a short video clip discussing the demands of migrant workers leading up to the gathering. Also, read a previous post on this blog "Acuerdo migratorio, única alternativa para mexicanos" addressing the need for an alternative migration agreement. -Patricia

Sonia Pena | ColorLines Blog
May 14, 2008

This week, Racewire contributors will be blogging from the Transnational Assembly of Remitters and their Families, a global gathering of more than 200 people from more than 22 countries and 22 U.S. states being held in Mexico City.

We’ll be blogging more on the workshops and sharing the stories that we are so lucky to be able to hear first hand, but I wanted to share two things to give you a flavor of the tone and sentiment behind the gathering and the people that are here. The first is a short video clip of Francis Calpotura from the Press Conference held to open the convening and the second (below) are the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Principles, drafted by Kim Fellner and read out loud at the opening Assembly of the gathering by Javaid Tariq of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. Delegates at the Assembly will be giving feedback for changes to the declaration this week. The full text of the final declaration will be posted on the TIGRA website next week.


Declaration of Principles: Global Assembly of Remitters and their Families, Mexico City, May 13, 2008

We are an assembly of united migrant remitters who sustain our families, communities, and countries with the proceeds of our labor and the power of our love.

Our story is written in our bodies, in the words of the poet, “a condition of our age.” It is a chronicle of separation, driven by need, and fueled by the yearning to make a better life for our loved ones. It is about the places we left behind and those where we now live, the cultures we bring with us—and the ones we have learned to embrace. It is a story we whisper to ourselves in the lonely nights, shout out in frustration at hateful ignorance, share with each other to heal our spirits, and pass on to our children as a testimony of endurance and hope.

We are among the millions in motion across the globe who provide desperately needed sustenance for many millions who remain behind. But our conditions make us vulnerable to the unscrupulous practices of companies and governments that feed off our modest harvest, snatching the fruits of our labor to garner their wealth by the billions, which we have purchased with our sacrifices. And that is a blow against our humanity and a transgression against our children.

Today, we form the first–ever assembly of remitters to build a better future for our families and communities everywhere. As the assembly of La Liga de Sustentadores de la Communidad Mundial/The Global League of Community Sustainers, we believe that a new vison of globalization is necessary and possible……

Labels: migration

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

Here's a link to download presentations from the UC LMRI's 2008 Annual conference. -Patricia

Mary Ann Zehr | Ed Week
Sacramento, Calif.
May 14, 2008

Preliminary findings from new research suggest that in three states where voters decided to replace bilingual education with structured English immersion as the default method for teaching English-language learners, the new approach may be producing less-than-stellar results.

The studies were commissioned by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Linguistic Minority Research Institute at UC-Santa Barbara, as well as the University ofCalifornia’s All Campus Consortium on Research for Diversity, or UC ACCORD. The findings were presented here in California’s capital city during the institute’s annual conference on May 2-3, which focused on “restrictive language policies.”

Read on...

Labels: bilingual education, English language learners

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:56 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Edición 15021 martes 20 de mayo de 2008 Publicación de Hoy
Acuerdo migratorio, única alternativa para mexicanos

Para los mexicanos residentes en Estados Unidos, la única alternativa viable para solucionar conflictos como la inseguridad jurídica, la confrontación social y la discriminación es un acuerdo migratorio.

De acuerdo con líderes de varias agrupaciones de mexicanos que viven en diferentes estados de la Unión Americana, la oleada antiinmigrante que se vive en entidades como Arizona y California, lejos de resolver el problema, lo avivan.

En entrevista por teléfono, Gloria Saucedo, de la Hermandad Mexicana, señaló que las medidas antiinmigrantes perjudican más de lo que benefician, pues provocan disgregación familiar y conflictos económicos en las comunidades.

Refirió que, según un estudio del Centro de Políticas de Inmigración de California, independientemente de su calidad migratoria, las personas provenientes de otros países aportan cuatro mil 500 millones de dólares anuales de impuestos a ese estado.

El vocero de la Alianza Nacional de Comunidades Latinoamericanas y Caribeñas (NALACC, por sus siglas en inglés), Jorge Mario Cabrera, desmintió a su vez las afirmaciones de las autoridades locales de Los Angeles en torno del “costo” de los indocumentados.

Recordó que recientemente el supervisor Mike Antonovich, del Distrito 5, aseveró que el condado de Los Angeles “gasta” al año 220 millones de dólares en seguridad pública, 400 millones en salud y 432 millones de dólares en ayuda a los indocumentados.

Cabrera indicó que esas cifras son falsas, pues es bien sabido que los inmigrantes, lejos de representar un gasto para la ciudad, contribuyen de manera importante con sus impuestos y el consumo local.

En tanto para Marco Amador, de la Cadena Nacional de Organizaciones de Jornaleros, la situación en Estados Unidos es grave, pues al amparo de las medidas antiinmigrantes, muchos patrones han dejado de pagar a sus trabajadores.

Las leyes que obligan a los empleadores a revisar el estatus migratorio de sus trabajadores antes de contratarlos -y que ya están vigentes en varios estados, entre ellos Arizona- se usa como pretexto para dejar de pagar sus salarios.

Esta situación provoca problemas económicos a las familias de los jornaleros, quienes dejan de recibir remesas desde Estados Unidos.

Una encuesta publicada por el Tomás Rivera Policy Institute

(TRPI), con sede en la Universidad del Sur de California en Los

Angeles, muestra la preocupación por la seguridad en el envío de

dinero.

Debido a las medidas antiinmigrantes, los mexicanos que reciben

dinero de sus familiares en Estados Unidos muestran una creciente

preocupación por la certeza de que esos recursos lleguen completos y

a tiempo.

De acuerdo con el Informe sobre la Inflación de enero-marzo de

2008 del Banco de México, “a lo largo de 2007 el ingreso de recursos

al país por remesas familiares mostró una desaceleración, la cual se

acentuó en el presente año”.

El año pasado, el monto de las remesas ascendió a 23 mil 979

millones de dólares, mientras que “en el primer trimestre de 2008,

esa entrada de recursos fue de cinco mil 350 millones de dólares, lo

que implicó una caída anual de 2.9 por ciento”.

La encuesta del TRPI levantada en 10 entidades de México revela

que, en promedio, 51 por ciento de las personas tiene preocupación de que el dinero llegue con seguridad. Pero desglosada por estado, la

cifra es grave.

Por ejemplo, en Jalisco la preocupación es compartida por 61 por

ciento de los encuestados, en Puebla por 57 por ciento, en Guanajuato

por 56 por ciento, y en el Distrito Federal y el estado de México por

39 por ciento.

Al respecto, el director del Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior, Carlos González Gutiérrez, señaló que hay una preocupación importante porque los mexicanos recurren cada vez más a medios

clandestinos para el envío de dinero.

A pesar de los esfuerzos de autoridades mexicanas para “bancarizar” a los migrantes, las medidas tomadas en Estados Unidos los ahuyentan de las sucursales bancarias y de las oficinas de envíos regulares de dinero, lo que genera riesgos económicos.

El director ejecutivo de NALACC, Oscar Chacón, ha señalado en

repetidas ocasiones que las redadas que se han llevado a cabo en

varios estados provocan descalabros económicos.

Los casos se han documentados en Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia,

Kentucky, Florida, Nueva York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas y Virginia Occidental, donde la expulsión de indocumentados ha dejado vacantes y desintegración de familias.

Los dirigentes consultados coinciden en que la única manera de

resolver esos conflictos, que afectan más a la de por sí debilitada

economía estadounidense, es lograr un acuerdo migratorio que

regularice el flujo de personas.

Sin embargo, el panorama es poco alentador. Dennis Bixler y

Márquez, director del Centro de Estudios Chicanos de la Universidad

de Texas en El Paso, asegura que nunca se firmará tal acuerdo.

En su opinión, ni las autoridades, ni los representantes de la

política estadounidense, es decir los diputados y senadores, tienen

el menor interés de llegar a un acuerdo migratorio con México.

En ese sentido, advirtió que la lucha seguirá siendo larga y la

presión contra los inmigrantes dependerá de las circunstancias

políticas y económicas que se vivan cada momento.


Copyright :Diario de Mexico

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:59 PM 0 comments Links to this post

More teens quit school to help financially needy families

By Emily Richmond | Las Vegas Sun
May 15, 2008

The number of Clark County teens dropping out of high school so they can work has jumped dramatically, and officials suspect the economic downturn is to blame.

The Clark County School District talked to 502 teens who dropped out of high school after the 2006-07 academic year and 120 of them — 24 percent — said they had given up their educations to take jobs. In contrast, when the district tracked down 1,171 dropouts after the 2005-06 academic year, only five of them — not even 1 percent — said they had quit school in order to work. The many others gave other reasons for dropping out, including being unable to pass the proficiency test, falling too far behind in class credits, or simply disliking school.

Additionally, the percentage of dropouts from low-income households more than tripled, to 8.2 percent last year from 2.5 percent in 2005-06.

“Some families are really on the edge,” said Sandra Ransel, principal of Desert Rose Adult High School in North Las Vegas. “They depend on the group to keep them afloat. If they have a younger teen who can work, they sometimes make that choice.”

Studies indicate that the chances of a student’s dropping out of school increase when he works more than 15 hours per week.

“It’s very difficult to get up for a 7 a.m. class if you were working until 10 p.m. the night before,” Ransel said. “Once kids are spending almost as much time at work as they are in school, it competes. Something usually has to give.”

Nationally, dropout rates are typically tied to a community’s economic picture, said John Ball, executive director of the Southern Nevada Workforce Investment Board. The group oversees millions in federal dollars from the U.S. Labor Department, including $1.2 million that will be used to target students at risk of quitting school, as well as individuals who have already dropped out.

“The good news is we have more resources,” Ball said Wednesday. “The bad news is that our economy is trending downward more rapidly than other labor markets in the country.”

Ball said he was glad to learn that the district was taking a closer look at its dropout statistics, which are often the most difficult to quantify and qualify.

“You can see that somebody is trying to identify the issues and figure out strategies to go after them,” Ball said. “They are into problem-solving, which is exactly what we want.”

But is there really anything a school district can do to retain students whose families are desperate for more household income?

School officials figure they can at least try to convince the students and their families that if they can hold on long enough for the teen to graduate from one of the district’s vocational programs, the teen should be able to get a better job and make more money.

Karlene McCormick-Lee, the district’s deputy superintendent who coordinated the dropout study, said it’s painfully clear that some students need help balancing the demands of school with employment. New career and technical academies will be one way to expand existing internship programs so that more students can sign up and potentially avoid having to hunt for work on their own, McCormick-Lee said.

“If there are ways to provide opportunities for children to continue their education and earn some dollars, we should support that,” McCormick-Lee said. “Especially if it means they’re doing something they’re interested in and are learning from the experience.”

The district has two dedicated career and technical academies, as well as programs and specialized classes at dozens of additional high schools. The Southeast Career and Technical Academy, formerly known as Vo-Tech, has one of the district’s lowest dropout rates and highest passing rates on the statewide proficiency exam. The Northwest Career and Technical Academy opened in the fall, and already has a waiting list for the upcoming academic year.

Four more academies are scheduled to open in the next three years — in the east, Summerlin, the central Las Vegas Valley and the southwest.

The increase in dropouts from low-income households is evidence of the challenges many students are facing even before they set foot in the classroom, she said.

“That’s why it’s going to take all of us, a full community effort, to address these issues,” McCormick-Lee said. “When all of us come together, our students succeed.”

The dropout report, which she presented to the Clark County School Board on Monday, noted that the overall dropout rate was 6 percent, up slightly from the previous year’s 5.6 percent.

The latest survey did yield some good news, including that 111 former dropouts are enrolled in the district’s adult education program.

Nineteen-year-old Angel Lee is one of them. She was in the 10th grade when her mother became disabled and unable to work, so Lee dropped out of school, finding a job as a classroom assistant at an early childhood development center.

Three years later, she is back in classes at Desert Rose Adult High School.

She’s working part time at night now, but in a few weeks she is to start a new job as a shoe store clerk.

“I think I need to change my schedule a little bit so it’s easier on me,” said Lee, who wants a career in criminal justice.

Desert Rose’s principal estimated a third of her students work, and some hold down multiple part-time jobs.

Another Desert Rose student, Cindy Pena, was 16 when she dropped out of Rancho High School four years ago, after her mother went through a divorce.

“My mom was having a lot of trouble and I was the only other one in the family working,” Pena said. “To get more hours at my job you had to be flexible about the schedule. Work had to come before school.”

Pena had an easier time finding work than her mother did. “When you’re young, you can start off and they let you work your way up,” she explained. “When you’re older and have no experience, it’s harder to find a good-paying job.”

Her mother wasn’t too happy about her decision to drop out. “But I’m stubborn and independent,” Pena said. “She couldn’t stop me.”

Within two years of getting hired at a movie theater, Pena was promoted to supervisor and then assistant manager. She moved on to a casino, where she now works as an assistant manager in food and beverage services.

Pena attends class from 11

a.m. to 2 p.m. before heading off to work, and she is on schedule to graduate within a few months.



(Editor's Note: This story has been modified. In an original version, the word "doubled" was used to describe the amount of dropouts this past year compared with the 2005-06 year. It has been replaced with the word, "tripled.")

Labels: Dropouts

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

Elizabeth Redden | Inside Higher Education
May 13, 2008

Last week, the North Carolina attorney general’s office released an advisory letter suggesting that, in light of federal law, the state’s community colleges should return to a former systemwide policy barring students who are undocumented immigrants from college-level courses. The letter said that the earlier ban “would more likely withstand judicial scrutiny” in the absence of either state legislation clarifying the ability of illegal immigrants to enroll or of guidance from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Such guidance arguably came Friday, albeit indirectly. In a statement prepared in response to a Raleigh News & Observer reporter’s question, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said, “It is left for the school to decide whether or not to enroll” illegal immigrants.

“The Department of Homeland Security does not require any school to determine a student’s status.”

UPDATE: Regardless, citing the advice of the state attorney general’s office, the North Carolina Community College System announced Tuesday that it would immediately cease admitting illegal immigrants to degree programs, reversing its current policy, issued in November, requiring that all 58 colleges admit undocumented students. The system said it has asked the state attorney general to seek clarification from the federal government.

Outside North Carolina, the focus of the undocumented student debate nationally has been the question of extending in-state tuition rates to illegal immigrants — what Michael A. Olivas, a law professor at the University of Houston and expert in immigration and higher education law, calls “a second-order question.... Even the federal statute that says a state may or may not either grant or withhold resident tuition assumes, logically, that the students may enroll.”

Yet, on occasion, state policymakers have argued otherwise on this first-order issue of admissions.

“We’ve seen this actually come up in other states as well,” said David Hawkins, director of public policy and research at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “Obviously, states have the ability to set their own admission policy.... Where we think there’s a flaw in the logic is that the state attorneys general are basing their opinions and directives on an interpretation of federal law that just doesn’t exist. There is no federal restriction to admitting an undocumented student to a postsecondary institution. The real restriction is about the awarding of aid.”

Critics of the North Carolina attorney general’s office letter — an office spokeswoman said there would be no further comment beyond the letter — pointed to what they call an overly broad interpretation of the “benefits” that illegal immigrants are restricted from receiving under federal law. The word “benefits” is understood in the North Carolina letter to include public college admissions, whereas others argue it includes only monetary benefits (like welfare payments).

But, beyond that, they also pointed in surprise to a ceding of discretion over college admissions decisions to the federal government.

“At some point, if there’s any kind of decision-making principle here that ought to be a tie-breaker, one potential tie-breaker is that states traditionally have control over education,” said Hiroshi Motomura, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specializes in immigration and citizenship law.

States have attempted to assert control relative to the question of undocumented student admissions periodically, including in 1994 when California passed Proposition 187. That limited illegal immigrants’ access to state services, including college education, but was struck down on the basis that it preempted existing federal law on immigration, said Stephen Yale-Loehr, who teaches immigration law at Cornell University.

In Missouri, House Bill 1463, which would bar illegal immigrants from attending public universities in the state, passed the House of Representatives in March with 112 in favor and 39 against, and was sent to the State Senate. “We’re accountable to the people of this state to spend their tax dollars primarily to educate Missouri students and those lawfully present. We need to focus on Missouri families trying to educate their children,” State Rep. Jerry Nolte, a Republican, said then in a statement. “While we are obligated to educate children K-12 regardless of legal status, there is no requirement to provide postsecondary education.”

A House bill in Iowa requiring state college students to submit proof of their legal status — and docking state assistance for colleges that enroll students without proper documentation — was introduced in early March and referred to committee. In Virginia in 2002, the office of the then-attorney general Jerry W. Kilgore issued a memo urging that public colleges exclude undocumented students, while still acknowledging institutional discretion: “There is no federal or state statute that precludes an institution from admitting an applicant known to be an illegal alien,” the memo said. “Moreover, unlike the area of employment law, there is no statute that requires proof of United States citizenship or proof of immigration status in order to apply to a college or university. Thus, as strictly a legal matter, institutions have broad discretion to decide what documentation they will request of applicants, and how they will treat applicants who are not lawfully present in the United States. As a matter of policy, however, the Attorney General is strongly of the view that illegal and undocumented aliens should not be admitted into our public colleges and universities at all, especially when doing so would displace a competing applicant who is an American citizen or otherwise lawfully present here.”

“Unlike Plyler v. Doe,” a 1982 Supreme Court decision affirming the right of illegal immigrants to attend public K-12 schools, “there’s nothing that explicitly says that all people have a right to go to college. Postsecondary education is left up to the states, in determining if they’re going to have public institutions at all and who they’re going to admit,” said Cornell’s Yale-Loehr.

But, from a policy perspective, “I think it’s short-sighted to deny postsecondary education to undocumented students because we need these people,” Yale-Loehr said. “It’s cutting off your nose to spite your face to not allow them to go to college.”

Labels: immigration and education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:01 AM 0 comments Links to this post

These findings speak directly to Texas high schools and students as it is one of the states that requires such exit-level exams to receive a diploma. -Patricia

By PETER SCHMIDT | The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 15, 2008

A new study has found that state requirements that students pass exit tests to graduate from high school appear to do nothing to improve achievement on federal reading and mathematics tests.

The study, the results of which have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Educational Policy, compared the reading and math scores of children in states with exit examinations to the scores of children elsewhere in the United States and concluded that there was no evidence that requiring passage of such tests improved academic achievement in those subject areas.

Even the most rigorous versions of the exit tests failed to produce significant improvements in the reading and math performance, according to the report on the study's findings written by Eric Grodsky, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Davis, with Demetra Kalogrides, a graduate student in sociology at that campus, and John Robert Warren, an associate professor of sociology and a director of undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

The researchers derived their conclusions from an analysis of the scores of 13- and 17-year-olds on a version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress used to measure long-term trends in student achievement. In addition to looking at average scores on the federal tests, they examined trends at various score thresholds to make sure the state exit tests were not, for example, resulting in fewer students doing very poorly or very well on the national assessment.

Their report is one of a series in which Mr. Grodsky and Mr. Warren have questioned the benefits of the high-school exit examinations that have been adopted by 23 states, accounting for about two-thirds of the nation's high-school seniors.

In study results published in January in the journal Sociology of Education, the two researchers and Jennifer C. Lee, an assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University at Bloomington, found that people who earned their diplomas in states with high-school exit tests did not earn higher incomes than people who earned their diplomas elsewhere, and were no more likely to complete college or be employed. The analysis was weighted to exclude the effects of class, race, state education spending, and other potentially confounding variables.

Taking that study into account, along with other research finding that such tests result in declines in high-school graduation rates, the latest report takes the bottom-line view that the tests "produce adverse outcomes for educational attainment for a substantial minority of students while providing no estimable labor market or achievement benefits for others."

The report says, "The cumulative evidence on these policies is clear: They should either be substantially revised to provide the benefits supporters claim they provide, or they should be abandoned."

In a videotaped interview distributed on Monday along with his latest studies' findings, Mr. Warren says the failure of the tests to produce marked increases in learning may be due the states' decisions to make the tests easier in response to the political resistance triggered by high failure rates.

"It is a double-edge sword," Mr. Warren says. "If you raise the standards, you risk lots and lots of kids not getting diplomas. If you don't raise the standards, you risk kids not learning much more."

Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a Washington-based group that promotes high academic achievement, said in an interview on Monday that high-school exit exams have never really been widely regarded as "good vehicles to promote high achievement or college-ready achievement."

Labels: high-stakes testing

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:20 AM 0 comments Links to this post

A full transcript and video footage can be seen here.

In addition check out the PBS report "Immigrant Detainees: A New Profit Center?" -Patricia

May 9, 2008
Corporations are running many Americans prisons, but will they put profits before prisoners?

A grim new statistic: One in every hundred Americans is now locked behind bars. As the prison population grows faster than the government can build prisons, private companies see an opportunity for profit.

This week, NOW on PBS investigates the government's trend to outsource prisons and prisoners to the private sector. Critics accuse private prisons of standing in the way of sentencing reform and sacrificing public safety to maximize profits.

"The notion that a corporation making a profit off this practice is more important to us than public safety or the human rights of prisoners is outrageous," Judy Greene, a criminal policy analyst, tells NOW on PBS.

Companies like Corrections Corporation of America say they're doing their part to solve the problem of inmate overflow and a shortage of beds without sacrificing safety.

"You don't cut corners to where it's going to be a safety, security or health issue," Richard Smelser, warden of the Crowley Correctional Facility in Colorado tells NOW. The prison is run by Corrections Corporation, which had revenues of over $1.4 billion last year.

The Crowley prison made headlines back in 2004 after a major prison riot caused overwhelmed staff to run away from the facility. Outside law enforcement had to come in to put down the uprising.

"The problems that were identified in the wake of the riot are typical of the private prison industry and happen over and over again," Green tells NOW.

This week NOW travels to Colorado, where the controversy over private prisons is boiling over. The hot question: should incarceration be incorporated?

Labels: detention centers, prison

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:22 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Also view the following short clip entitled "Detention In America: 60 Minutes And The Washington Post Report On Detainee Medical Care." -Patricia


Beset by Medical Problems as She Fights Deportation, A U.S. Resident Struggles to Get the Treatment She Needs

by Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest | Washington Post Staff Writers
Page A1; May 12, 2008

FLORENCE, Ariz. -- Underneath her baggy jail-issue pants, Yong Sun Harvill feels the soft lump just below her left knee. Sometimes it tingles. Sometimes it is numb. Like her cancer felt when it arrived behind the knee a few years ago.

She noticed the lump under the thin, blue cotton in August, five months after federal immigration officers, to her amazement, took her into custody to try to deport her for buying stolen jewelry more than a decade ago. The lump grows slowly. It is now three inches across. And though she keeps asking, no one has done a test to see whether her sarcoma has come back.

Her leg is painful and swollen from hip to foot, damaged by past surgeries and radiation treatments. Some nights, liquid seeps through cracks in her distended skin. Her left ankle is three times as big as her right. For years, she relied on a leg pump to boost her circulation and keep the swelling in check. But as an immigration detainee in this desert prison town, Harvill, 52, has been unable to persuade anyone to get her a pump, or to let her family back in Florida send hers from home.

Nor has she gotten the biopsy that a doctor has told her she needs to determine whether the spots on her liver might be tumors. And it remains uncertain whether her frequent crying spells are part of bipolar disorder, as some records suggest, or a flare-up of old anxieties -- heightened now by chronic pain, bewildering medical problems, and the fact that, three decades after she arrived from South Korea as a teenage Army bride, she is in a jail far from home with the government trying to eject her from the United States.

Harvill is one of 33,000 immigration detainees in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, on any given day. They are locked up in a patchwork of out-of-the-way federal detention compounds, private prisons and local jails. This unnoticed prison system was built for a quick revolving door of detainees -- into custody, out of the country. But often, people linger in detention for months or years.

These detainees, like other prisoners, are by law and regulation entitled to medical services if they are sick. But Harvill's journey through immigration detention provides a glimpse into a medical system that often fails those who need it most. It is an upside-down world where patients have no say, doctors and nurses on site have little power to administer timely treatment, and a managed-care system in Washington operates from a rulebook that emphasizes what is not covered rather than what is.

Two months after ICE agents seized Harvill in Florida, they transferred her to Arizona last May, saying a federal compound called the Florence Service Processing Center was better suited to handle her medical care. Four weeks later, they moved her, without explanation, a few miles down a cactus-lined highway to a county jail that hasn't had a full-time staff doctor since she arrived.

At Pinal County Jail, Harvill is 2,132 miles from her family outside Tampa, and even farther from her Miami lawyers. To see her, they crowd around a closed-circuit TV in an immigration courtroom in Miami, where the judge to whom her case is assigned convenes "video hearings" about once a month.

Seated at a scuffed oak table in a small courtroom in Florence for one recent hearing, facing a television screen with a video camera on top, Harvill looked older than her age. Her thick, long hair was streaked heavily with gray. Her brown eyes, sparkling in a 1999 wedding photo, were now dull. Arthritis had bent her fingertips.

On days when her hands are too stiff, Harvill dictates as other detainees write her entries in the journal that her lawyers have asked her to keep, as best she can, with the five pieces of paper the jail doles out each week. The entries tell of her leg pain, of missing her husband and her Florida cancer doctors, of wondering whether God still loves her. One entry tells of a dream in which she peered into a coffin and saw herself inside.

Her medical records, inches thick, document countless visits to jail nurses and to a public hospital in Phoenix. But many of the visits have been frustrating and unproductive. One morning in late February, she was led from her cell at 5:15 a.m. and driven the 66 miles to the hospital to have an operation to remove polyps that were causing bleeding in her uterus. When she arrived, three workers in green scrubs told her that the doctor couldn't perform the surgery because the hospital was out of hot water.

Even with hot water, they said, she couldn't have had the procedure that day: As usual, no one at the jail had told her ahead of time that she would be having a medical appointment, so she didn't get the instructions not to eat or drink after midnight the day of surgery. When the guards woke her at 5 a.m., she ate a honey bun, a treat she had been saving from the jail canteen.

In response to questions from The Washington Post, ICE officials said last week that, "based on standard medical protocols," Harvill's records document that she has been "appropriately diagnosed and treated."

"I feel like I'm on a merry-go-round, round and round and you don't really get nothing done," Harvill said, her voice husky with just a trace of an Asian accent, during one of three interviews she gave The Post by telephone and in person, without the knowledge of federal officials. "I feel like an animal in a cage here. Sometimes I'm afraid I'm not going to wake up."

At night, to anyone driving southeast from Phoenix through the dark Sonoran Desert, the sky over Florence glows white with prison floodlights.

This county seat, once a center of copper mining and cotton, greets motorists today with road signs that say "State prison. Do not stop for hitchhikers." Every February, motorcyclists roar through town for the Hells Angels Florence Prison Run. And the first business along Butte Avenue, the main street leading into the small downtown, is E&E Outfitters, with its "UNIFORM" sign in the window and, inside, racks of guards' outfits in khaki, black and olive green. "Detention polo shirts from $28.50," says the sale sign over one circular rack.

Of the 25,500 people who live in Florence, about 17,000 are behind bars. The incarcerated included an average of more than 700 immigration detainees in fiscal 2007, divided among a federal compound, two private prisons and the county jail. An additional 1,500 were housed nearby in a compound outside the town of Eloy, giving Pinal County the largest concentration of foreign detainees in the nation.

At the town's northern edge, just beyond an RV park for retirees, rows of concertina wire surround the federal Florence Service Processing Center. During World War II, it was the site of a prison camp for Italian and German POWs. Now it is a tidy brown-brick compound with cactuses and giant crests of the Department of Homeland Security out front. This is where Harvill arrived last May after a flight from Florida, panicky, her nose bleeding, her stomach upset, an officer on each side.

The day after she arrived, Harvill saw a nurse and a doctor for a checkup that all new detainees are supposed to have, but don't always get. "Numerous issues," they wrote in her medical chart. History of sarcoma. Hepatitis C. High blood pressure. The nosebleeds. Panic attacks. "Borderline bipolar." And lymphedema, painful fluid buildup in her left leg.

Elizabeth Fleming, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Public Health Service who was Florence's clinical director, showed concern about Harvill. She noted that Harvill needed a leg pump -- a compression device that inflates and deflates -- to help the circulation in her leg. She also requested records from Harvill's longtime cancer doctors in Tampa. And she managed to persuade administrators in Washington to let Harvill have three outside consultations at Maricopa Medical Center, the public hospital in Phoenix.

"Will likely need to order . . . pump and may require transfer to [another immigration detention center] with infirmary," the doctor wrote in her patient's chart.

The pump never arrived. Still, Fleming saw Harvill a dozen times over the next month, records show. By mid-June, the doctor wrote, her patient was "smiling, cheerful," and her nausea and leg pain were "much improved."

Harvill did not know that would be the last time Fleming would treat her. The next day, Harvill was moved down the road to the county jail. The government never explained the move, although she and her lawyers have asked repeatedly.

Last week, ICE officials told The Post: "Florence is not well equipped to provide long term medical care for female detainees. Female detainees are transferred from Florence to Pinal because of its better capability to provide long-term medical care to women. Ms. Harvill received appropriate medical care at Pinal with physician oversight."

Harvill lives in Cell 323 in Pod E300, part of a wing built for an eventual 600 detainees whom the federal government pays the county to house.

Her isolation at the county jail is almost complete. Her lawyers cannot call. Family members, if they came to visit, would not be allowed to see her in person, not even through plexiglass. The jail allows only "video visits," with visitor and detainee in separate parts of the building. Harvill, while longing for her family, has told them it is not worth the trip. She hasn't seen her husband in a year.

Most of her moments outside come when immigration officers take her in a white van on a three-minute ride to a little courtroom at the Florence federal compound for video hearings with her Miami immigration judge, and when they take her to the public hospital, an hour and 20 minutes away, where, as likely as not, little will get done.

Harvill gets shuttled back and forth to the hospital in Phoenix because the jail does not have a doctor on its staff. There is no hospital within 30 miles of Florence, despite its thousands of prisoners. The Central Arizona Medical Center, on the city's outskirts, has been closed since 1999, and the small hospital building is empty. On a white sign out front, the blue lettering that says "clinic" has almost faded away.

One morning last summer, Harvill was taken up the road to the Florence compound for a repeat session to take photographs and fingerprints that immigration officers told her had gotten lost. Before she went inside, she later put in her journal, she noticed Fleming, the doctor who had treated her when she first arrived, going by "in a little golf cart."

I was glad to see her I had so much to ask her. Nurse here says that she is still my doctor and that all that happens to me goes to her. . . . I asked to talk to her for a minute. She told me that she was very busy, that she would try to talk to me later. I knew she wouldn't talk to me because she has not seen me for the last 2 months I was so sad. . . . Actually I felt as though she was angry with me. I stood there with tears in my eyes, but I had to go with the officer to get my fingerprints done.

The fleeting encounter with Fleming disturbed Harvill. The closest thing to a doctor she has seen at the jail during her 11 months there -- apart from a psychiatrist who has prescribed lithium and other drugs, but has not really diagnosed her -- was a physician assistant.

Fleming resigned days later.

According to internal government documents, one-third of the 29 medical positions at the Pinal County Jail were vacant as of February. The jail, the Florence compound and the large compound in nearby Eloy each had no full-time doctor.

In such an environment, complaints sometimes surface about the shortages and their effects. Last summer, two Eloy nurses sent a memo to headquarters in Washington, laying out the working conditions that were leading them to resign.

The checkups required for all arriving detainees were "never staffed with enough people," wrote the nurses, Catherine Rouse and Patricia O'Brien. Nurses would be told to expect five new arrivals, "but that could easily change to greater than 100 non-English speaking sick and injured frightened people," they wrote. The nursing shortage was particularly severe on nights and weekends. And one pharmacist and an assistant "process over 4,000 prescriptions a month. They try their best to have thing[s] complete before they leave on Friday. However, serving 1,500 people is an impossible task."

Last year, the Arizona State Board of Nursing heard that nurses at Eloy were being required, without enough training, to take the chest X-rays that new detainees are supposed to get to check for tuberculosis. The board sent ICE a terse, two-sentence letter. "Nurses are not radiologists," it said. "Taking X-rays is out of the scope of practice for a nurse, and a nurse who does so is violating the Nurse Practice Act and will be subject to discipline on his/her license." The response from Washington: "Nurses working in federal government facilities are not subject to state licensing requirements."

At first, Harvill would get excited on the mornings of her trips to Maricopa Medical Center, but she learned soon that the visits usually were disappointments.

On July 26, she rode in the van to the hospital's cancer clinic. That same day, by coincidence, a doctor from the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, where she had been treated for more than a decade, wrote a letter at the request of Harvill's lawyers, warning that she "will need continued care at a facility familiar with [her] types of tumors, as they will continue to recur and progress. If not treated properly, they can become life-threatening."

It was from the Moffitt Center that Fleming had gotten records of Harvill's three previous episodes of cancer and her treatment. But no one had sent copies to Maricopa Medical Center. Starting from scratch, a doctor there ordered a CAT scan of her pelvis and her swollen left leg. The test, according to a radiology report, found a mass in an ovary and a cyst on her cervix, but there is no indication that her leg was scanned.

By late July, her records show, another Maricopa doctor had ordered a biopsy to determine whether unexplained "densities" on her liver might be tumors. But when Harvill went for the procedure a few weeks later, the records show, someone in the radiology department did an ultrasound as a first step and, when he saw cysts on her liver, canceled the biopsy. "Liver Biopsy report received. . . . Biopsy not done," says a notation from a few days later in her jail records.

A month later, when Harvill saw the doctor who had ordered the biopsy, he asked whether it had been done.

I told him no because they told me it was just a cyst not a tumor. He was upset. . . . He still wanted a biopsy, she wrote in her journal.

By now, the soft lump had begun to grow under her knee, and her abdomen had started to swell and become hard. As an officer drove her to the hospital one day in mid-August, she hoped the appointment would address one of those problems. As it turned out, she was there to see a gynecologist, who wanted to do a Pap smear.

Harvill pointed out that she'd had one a month before.

I showed him my stomache, he told me he could not take care of that, that I needed to see a GI doctor. I told him about my leg swollen, and also he told me I had to see another doctor for that.

Still another runaround began when a different doctor said Harvill urgently needed a biopsy of her uterus lining to find out why, well after menopause, she was bleeding heavily. In early October, when an immigration officer took her back to the hospital for that test, a receptionist said it had been canceled and rescheduled for a month later. The officer, Harvill put in her journal, was stunned and told the receptionist that he "had the order for today." Instead, hospital workers did a CAT scan of her uterus.

She had already had a CAT scan of her uterus. I told them I had a lump on my knee, if they could do a scan on that and they said they didn't have an order for that. . . . We got out of hospital and the ICE officer said he felt bad for me, because he has taken me to the hospital 4 or 5 times and they never do anything for me.

It was early November when Harvill had the biopsy of her uterus, three months after it was ordered. She was told to come back for the results in two weeks, although the lab report was ready the next day, according to her medical records. Yet it wasn't until late January that she learned what was wrong: The bleeding was being caused by polyps that needed to be removed. The surgery, she was told, would be within two or three weeks. Four months later, it has not been done.

Late last week, after her attorneys gave them authorization to talk about her case, Maricopa hospital officials said that medical privacy law prohibited them from even confirming, without Harvill's personal consent, that she has been a patient. But she could not give consent because neither her attorneys nor anyone else is allowed to telephone her in the jail.

Over a weekend in mid-April, Harvill was told not to eat solid food for two days in preparation for a colonoscopy to try to find out why she had blood in her stool. First thing that Monday, she again boarded the van for the 66-mile drive to the hospital, where she was told that the procedure had been rescheduled.

Ten days later, she went to the hospital and had the test. It found a growth in her colon. The doctor said there was a chance it is cancerous and sent a sample for a biopsy. She does not know the result.

The liver biopsy still has not taken place. And no one has tested the lump below her knee.

* * *

Whether the gaps in Harvill's treatment are by accident or by design is difficult to discern. Yet it is clear that the obscure federal agency that oversees detainees' medical care, the Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS), operates with a top priority of limiting care and saving money. Its medical mission is only to keep people healthy enough to be deported.

At Harvill's jail, and everywhere else immigration detainees are held, doctors and nurses must get permission from the agency's headquarters before treating patients. Except in emergencies or for the most routine care, they must send written requests to Washington, where, for the entire system of 33,000 detainees across the country, four managed-care nurses in a downtown office building decide what treatments to allow.

These care managers rule on what are known in the bureaucratic lexicon as treatment authorization requests, or TARs. In a recent month, they had to rule on 3,000 requests. They work five days a week, not on weekends, and are unavailable to handle requests that come in later than 4 p.m. Washington time, even though many large detention centers are in other time zones.

The agency touts this as an efficient form of managed care, similar to health plans familiar to patients in the outside world. But a 36-page manual that describes the "detainee covered services package" underscores how unusual it is, with rules designed to prevent people from getting too much help.

The health services division, the manual says, allows treatment mainly for emergencies that are "threatening to life, limb, hearing or sight." If a detainee has medical problems that "would cause deterioration of the detainee's health or uncontrolled suffering affecting his/her deportation status," treatment is not guaranteed. Instead, the manual says, the detainee "will be assessed and evaluated for care."

Instead of listing, as most health plans do, the services available to patients, the manual specifies services that are "usually not covered" for allergies, heart problems and other illnesses. Cancer is not mentioned at all.

Internal government documents obtained by The Post show that most requests are approved. But the documents also show that, when requests come in for people with serious problems, there can be pressure to cut costs. One chart, covering October 2005 to September 2006 -- seven months before Harvill became an immigration detainee -- is labeled "TAR Cost Savings Based on Denials."

The agency, the chart shows, saved $129,713 by denying 17 medical requests for people with HIV, $36,216 by denying seven requests for people with various forms of psychosis, $91,926 by denying 27 requests for people with chest pain and $9,545 by denying treatment for a case of blood in stool, one of the problems Harvill has had for months.

Asked about the chart, an immigration spokeswoman said that the vast majority of medical requests eventually are granted. Usually, she said, denials are "due to lack of information."

The supervisor of the managed-care nurses who rule on treatment requests sent a note once to a senior official about a 33-year-old detainee seen at a Nashville hospital for a recurrence of sarcoma, the same kind of cancer Harvill has had. "The process of re-diagnosis and treatment will be extensive and costly," that nurse wrote. She said she seconded the idea of releasing the detainee so the government would not have to pay for his care.

These sorts of machinations prompted the deputy warden at York County Prison in Pennsylvania, which houses many immigrant detainees, to fire off an angry letter about the health services division. "[I]n my opinion, they have set up an elaborate system that is primarily interested in delaying and/or denying medical care to detainees," the warden, Roger Thomas, wrote in late 2005. "There is nothing easy about working with DIHS. If something can be delayed, it is delayed. If it can be denied, it is denied. If it can be difficult, it is made difficult. Most importantly, if there is some bureaucratic procedure that will delay/deny treatment to a detainee . . . you can be assured that DIHS will do it."

Harvill's lawyers have tried to find out how many requests for treatment have been sent from Pinal County Jail on her behalf and how Washington has ruled on each one. They filed a Freedom of Information Act request last summer and, after two months, got an incomplete answer. In January, they left a phone message for the division's medical director. No one has called back.

But one page in Harvill's thick medical file hints at an answer. In late August, slightly more than a month before she would arrive at the hospital for a biopsy, only to be told it had been rescheduled, a jail nurse wrote this note: "TARs not approved for endometrial biopsy and lab draws. . . . Will continue to work on approvals and provide additional documentation as needed."

Finally, in early February, Harvill had a big week, riding in the van to the hospital three mornings in a row. A cancer doctor told her, yet again, that she needed a biopsy on her liver and one on the growing lump beneath her knee. A gynecologist talked with her about the surgery she needs on her uterus. A gastroenterologist spoke with her about the colonoscopy she should have.

Yet, after many months in immigration custody, Harvill understood that doctors' orders do not automatically produce tests. "It doesn't matter what the doctor says," she said in an interview.

Back at the jail after her three hospital trips, she asked a nurse what would be done with the doctors' requests. "She said she is going to send it up" to Washington, Harvill recounted at her next court hearing. "But she doesn't know when or how it is going to get approved. She doesn't know if it is going to get approved. She just said, 'Let's hope for the best.' "

* * *

Leon Harvill sat at his mother's kitchen table in Plant City, Fla., on a Sunday night, cradling the phone to his ear. "Baby, don't cry," he said softly into the receiver. "Come on, baby. Quit crying, all right?"

He had gone to an evening service at the Church on the Rock, the first time he had been in months. He hadn't felt much like reading the Bible lately. "I just don't understand it right now," he said. "I just can't understand things that are going on that are hard to believe. Her medical care -- I just can't understand that."

The thing that makes perhaps the least sense to him is that his wife is covered under a good health insurance policy that he gets through his union, the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, and she and her lawyers have asked whether she could use that policy to pay for her treatment by private doctors while she is detained. They have been told no.

One more problem in a life full of them.

Yong Sun Harvill's immigration troubles began in March 2007, as she was finishing 13 months in prison on a drug-possession charge. One day, a prison official summoned her to his office and handed her a phone. On the line was a man who worked in Orlando for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She would not be going home, he told her. She would be handed over to ICE agents, who planned to send her back to South Korea, a place she had not seen for 32 years.

Harvill had been barely 19 when she came to the United States in 1975, the new wife of an American soldier who had been stationed in Seoul. Within a year, she had a baby son and her first cancer diagnosis.

She divorced her first husband -- who hit her sometimes when he drank, according to Harvill, her lawyers, two friends and her medical records -- and then her second one, who hit her sometimes when he was high on drugs.

Nine years ago, she married Leon Harvill, a childhood friend of her second husband. He isn't much of a talker. She is loud and chatty. She felt protected by him. He loved how she cared for children and how her smile lighted up a room.

After all her years in Florida, she would still drive to Tampa once a month to buy rice at a Korean grocery, but she also loved collard greens and black-eyed peas, was a die-hard Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan, and knew the lyrics to all of Brooks & Dunn's country tunes.

In 2004, while she was riding with a friend, police stopped them for driving with expired tags. The car belonged to her friend, but the marijuana and methamphetamine on the floor were Harvill's.

She pleaded guilty to drug possession and served her time. Ordinarily, that would have been that. But ICE had begun scouring jails and prisons nationwide for people it might be able to deport, and a check of Harvill's criminal history turned up a decade-old felony conviction for buying stolen jewelry. Her lawyer insisted she'd had no idea it was stolen. A judge suspended the sentence and put her on probation, which was terminated early for good behavior.

A 1996 law had given the government new leverage to deport foreigners, including people living in the country legally as U.S. residents, if they had committed a crime at any time in the past, and the Bush administration was wielding that power aggressively. The law expanded the list of crimes defined as "aggravated felonies" that are grounds for deportation. It also for the first time required people to be locked up during their deportation cases -- including permanent legal residents such as Harvill, who is not a citizen but has had a green card ever since she came to the United States.

On March 22, 2007, instead of going home, Harvill was handed an orange uniform at the Palm Beach County jail to await deportation. Her parents are dead. She lost track of her sisters long ago. She has no idea where or how she would live in South Korea, particularly because she has not held a job for years because she cannot put weight on her leg for too long.

She has been fighting the deportation with the help of Cheryl Little and Kelleen Corrigan, lawyers at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami. They have applied for a visa available to foreigners with firsthand knowledge of crimes -- in Harvill's case, the abuse by her first two husbands. Meanwhile, they have repeatedly asked federal officials to let Harvill go home on bond because she is so ill.

Corrigan has a postcard on her office door with the words "Free Yong!" over a photo of a younger, happier-looking Harvill.

At church that Sunday night, Leon Harvill did not open the prayer book. But during the silent prayer, he leaned forward, his hands resting on the pew in front of him, and closed his eyes. He prayed for his wife to get medical treatment, to find peace, to come back.

He raced home after church, knowing she would call.

At 9:14 p.m. the kitchen phone rang. "I love you, too, baby," her husband said. "Things are going to get better. Come on, baby. Something is going to happen soon."

Before dawn the next morning, he would leave the house of his mother, Margaret Kersey, with whom he had been staying to save money, for the Tampa airport and a flight to Hawaii, where he had found a welding job with better pay. It had been hard lately to save, with work scarce in central Florida and money flowing out for his wife's phone cards and canteen treats, and for the "Free Yong!" postcards he'd printed so friends could mail them to the government. Most of all, he thought, he needed to save money so he would have some to send her if someday she were deported to South Korea.

Deportation had been on Yong Sun Harvill's mind, too. Sometimes, she is so depressed that she thinks about quitting her fight and signing the papers that would let the government send her out of the country. And she has been missing the one real friend she made in a jail, a younger Korean woman who would rub menthol ointment, when she could get some, on Harvill's swollen leg and write the journal entries when Harvill's hands stiffened too much.

A few weeks before this January night, her friend was deported.

But on this night, Harvill listened to her husband describe the path he would take to Hawaii the next day. "I have a layover in Phoenix," Leon Harvill said into the phone.

She told him to look at the desert as he landed.

"I'll get a look at it tomorrow," he told her. "We'll be that close."

Labels: detention centers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:51 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Click here for additional multimedia information as well as a look at where deaths occurred in ICE facilities between 2003 and 2008. -Patricia

by Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein | Washington Post Staff Writers
Page A1; May 11, 2008

Near midnight on a California spring night, armed guards escorted Yusif Osman into an immigration prison ringed by concertina wire at the end of a winding, isolated road.

During the intake screening, a part-time nurse began a computerized medical file on Osman, a routine procedure for any person entering the vast prison network the government has built for foreign detainees across the country. But the nurse pushed a button and mistakenly closed file #077-987-986 and marked it "completed" -- even though it had no medical information in it.

Three months later, at 2 in the morning on June 27, 2006, the native of Ghana collapsed in Cell 206 at the Otay Mesa immigrant detention center outside San Diego. His cellmate hit the intercom button, yelling to guards that Osman was on the floor suffering from chest pains. A guard peered through the window into the dim cell and saw the detainee on the ground, but did not go in. Instead, he called a clinic nurse to find out whether Osman had any medical problems.

When the nurse opened the file and found it blank, she decided there was no emergency and said Osman needed to fill out a sick call request. The guard went on a lunch break.

The cellmate yelled again. Another guard came by, looked in and called the nurse. This time she wanted Osman brought to the clinic. Forty minutes passed before guards brought a wheelchair to his cell. By then it was too late: Osman was barely alive when paramedics reached him. He soon died.

His body, clothed only in dark pants and socks, was left on a breezeway for two hours, an airway tube sticking out of his mouth. Osman was 34.

The next day, an autopsy determined that he had died because his heart had suddenly stopped, confidential medical records show. Two physicians who reviewed his case for The Washington Post said he might have lived had he received timely treatment, perhaps as basic as an aspirin.

Privately, Otay Mesa's medical staff also knew his care was deficient. On Page 3 of an internal review of his death is this question:

Did patient receive appropriate and adequate health care consistent with community standards during his/her detention ...?

Otay Mesa's medical director, Esther Hui, checked "No."

Osman's death is a single tragedy in a larger story of life, death and often shabby medical care within an unseen network of special prisons for foreign detainees across the country. Some 33,000 people are crammed into these overcrowded compounds on a given day, waiting to be deported or for a judge to let them stay here.

The medical neglect they endure is part of the hidden human cost of increasingly strict policies in the post-Sept. 11 United States and a lack of preparation for the impact of those policies. The detainees have less access to lawyers than convicted murderers in maximum-security prisons and some have fewer comforts than al-Qaeda terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But they are not terrorists. Most are working-class men and women or indigent laborers who made mistakes that seem to pose no threat to national security: a Salvadoran who bought drugs in his 20th year of poverty in Los Angeles; a U.S. legal U.S. resident from Mexico who took $50 for driving two undocumented day laborers into a border city. Or they are waiting for political asylum from danger in their own countries: a Somali without a valid visa trying to prove she would be killed had she remained in her village; a journalist who fled Congo out of fear for his life, worked as a limousine driver and fathered six American children, but never was able to get the asylum he sought.

The most vulnerable detainees, the physically sick and the mentally ill, are sometimes denied the proper treatment to which they are entitled by law and regulation. They are locked in a world of slow care, poor care and no care, with panic and coverups among employees watching it happen, according to a Post investigation.

The investigation found a hidden world of flawed medical judgments, faulty administrative practices, neglectful guards, ill-trained technicians, sloppy record-keeping, lost medical files and dangerous staff shortages. It is also a world increasingly run by high-priced private contractors. There is evidence that infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and chicken pox, are spreading inside the centers.

Federal officials who oversee immigration detention said last week that they are "committed to ensuring the safety and well-being" of everyone in their custody.

Some 83 detainees have died in, or soon after, custody during the past five years. The deaths are the loudest alarms about a system teetering on collapse. Actions taken -- or not taken -- by medical staff members may have contributed to 30 of those deaths, according to confidential internal reviews and the opinions of medical experts who reviewed some death files for The Post.

According to an analysis by The Post, most of the people who died were young. Thirty-two of the detainees were younger than 40, and only six were 70 or older. The deaths took place at dozens of sites across the country. The most at one location was six at the San Pedro compound near Los Angeles.

Immigration officials told congressional staffers in October that the facility at San Pedro was closed to renovate the fire-suppression system and replace the hot-water boiler. But internal documents and interviews reveal unsafe conditions that forced the agency to relocate all 404 detainees that month. An audit found 53 incidents of medication errors. A riot in August pushed federal officials to decrease the dangerously high number of detainees, many of them difficult mental health cases, and caused many health workers to quit. Finally, the facility lost its accreditation.

The full dimensions of the massive crisis in detainee medical care are revealed in thousands of pages of government documents obtained by The Post. They include autopsy and medical records, investigative reports, notes, internal e-mails, and memorandums. These documents, along with interviews with current and former immigration medical officials and staff members, illuminate the underside of the hasty governmental reorganization that took place in response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The terrorist strikes catapulted immigration to a national security concern for the first time since World War II, when 120,000 Japanese residents and their American relatives were locked away in desolate internment camps.

After Sept. 11, the Bush administration transferred responsibility for border security and deportation to the new Department of Homeland Security, which gave it to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) -- a reconfiguration of the decades-old Immigration and Naturalization Service -- in 2003, the year the Post used as the starting point for counting detainee deaths. Each year since, the number of detainees picked up for deportation or waiting behind bars for political asylum has skyrocketed, increasing by 65 percent since July 2005.

Government professionals provide health care at 23 facilities, which house roughly half of the 33,000 detainees. Seven of those sites are owned by private prison companies. Last year, the government also housed detainees in 279 local and county jails. To handle the influx of detainees, ICE added 6,300 beds in 2006 and an additional 4,200 since then. They too are nearly full.

These way stations between life in and outside the United States are mostly out of sight: in deserts and industrial warehouse districts, in sequestered valleys next to other prisons, or near noisy airports. Some compounds never allow detainees outdoor recreation; others let them out onto tiny dirt patches once or twice a week.

Detainees are not guaranteed free legal representation, and only about one in 10 has an attorney. When lawyers get involved, they often have difficulty prying medical information out of the bureaucracy -- or even finding clients, who are routinely moved without notice.

The burden of health care for this crush of human lives falls on an obscure federal agency that lacks the political clout and bureaucratic rigor to do its job well. The Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS), housed in a private office building at 13th and L streets NW several blocks from ICE headquarters, had a budget last year of $61 million. ICE spent an additional $28 million last year on outside medical care for detainees.

Medical spending has not kept pace with the growth in population. Since 2001, the number of detainees over the course of each year has more than tripled to 311,000, according to ICE and the Government Accountability Office. Meanwhile, spending for the DIHS and outside care has not quite doubled, ICE figures show. ICE's conflicting population and budget numbers make the trends difficult to determine.

The agency is responsible for managing and monitoring detainee medical care, about half of which is provided by U.S. Public Health Service professionals and the rest by contracted medical staff. When doctors and nurses at the immigration compounds believe that detainees need more than the most basic treatment, they have to fax a request to the Washington office, where four nurses, working 9 to 4, East Coast time, five days a week, make the decisions.

A proud Statue of Liberty replica stands just beyond the glass doors of DIHS headquarters to remind visitors of the Public Health Service's historical role in screening and treating European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island at the turn of the last century. Its new role is to keep detained immigrants healthy enough to be deported.

The mission is accompanied at times by a sense of panic and complicity. Many documents obtained by The Post make clear that the people in charge know that the system is in trouble and that piecemeal fixes are not enough.

"The onus is on us if it hits the fan," one official complained during a high-level headquarters meeting about staff shortages late last summer, according to records of the conversation. "We're going to be responsible if something happens, because it's well documented that we know there's a problem, that the problem is severe."

"We are putting ourselves and our patients at risk," another official said.

Doctors express concerns about violating medical ethics and fear lawsuits. In July, Esther Hui at Otay Mesa sent a memo to DIHS medical director Timothy T. Shack, saying her colleagues were worried that they might be sued because of the substandard care they were giving detainees. The agency's mission of "keeping the detainee medically ready for deportation" often conflicts with the standards of care in the wider medical community, Hui wrote. "I know in my gut that I am exposing myself to the US legal standard of care argument. ... Do we need to get personal liability insurance?"

Nurses who work on the front lines see the problems up close. "Dogs get better care in the dog pound," said Catherine Rouse, a contract nurse at an Arizona detention center who quit after two months last year because she saw what she regarded as "scary medicine" in the prison: patients taken off medications they needed and nurses doing tasks they were not qualified to do. "You don't treat people like that. There has to be some kind of moral fiber," Rouse said.

In a statement responding to questions raised by The Post, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials pointed out that the federal government spent nearly $100 million in fiscal 2007 on medical care for immigration detainees. About one in four immigrants in the detainee population has a chronic health condition, the statement said.

"Among ICE's highest priorities is to ensure safe, humane conditions of confinement for those in our custody," the statement said. "We make every effort to enforce all existing standards and, whenever possible, to improve upon them. When we find standards that are not being met, we take immediate action to correct deficiencies and when we believe that the deficiencies cannot be corrected, we relocate our detainees to other facilities."

By their calculations, officials said, the mortality rate among detainees has declined since 2004 to a level that is lower than that in U.S. jails and prisons. The deaths, the statement said, "highlight the tremendous responsibility and potential liability the government faces in providing medical care to a population that often did not have access to adequate health care before coming into our custody."

To this end, the agency recently increased its inspections of facilities and is creating an inspection group at headquarters to review serious incidents, including deaths or allegations that standards are not being met.

ICE declined to comment on specific cases, citing internal policies on patient privacy or pending litigation.

Neil Sampson, who ran the DIHS as interim director most of last year, left that job with serious questions about the government's commitment. Sampson said in an interview that ICE treated detainee health care "as an afterthought," reflecting what he called a failure of leadership and management at the Homeland Security Department. "They do not have a clear idea or philosophy of their approach to health care [for detainees]," he said. "It's a system failure, not a failure of individuals."

A new director for health services arrived six months ago, following a stretch when the agency was run first by Sampson and then by a second interim director. The new boss is LaMont W. Flanagan, who brought with him the credential of having been fired in 2003 by the state of Maryland for bad management and spending practices supervising detention and pretrial services. An audit found that Flanagan had signed off on payments of $145,000 for employee entertainment and other ill-advised expenditures. His reputation was such that the District of Columbia would not hire him for a juvenile-justice position.

"Another death that needs to be added to the roster," Diane Aker, the DIHS chief health administrator, tapped out in an e-mail to a records clerk at headquarters on Aug. 14, 2007.

Juan Guevara-Lorano, 21, was dead.

Guevara, an unemployed legal U.S. resident with a young son, was arrested in El Paso for driving illegal border-crossers farther into the city. He was paid $50.

An entry-level emergency medical technician, with barely any training, had done Guevara's intake screening and physical assessment at the Otero County immigration compound in New Mexico. Under DIHS rules, those tasks are supposed to be done by a nurse.

After two difficult months in detention, Guevara had decided not to appeal his case. He would go back to Mexico with his family. But on Aug. 4, he came down with a splitting headache, what he called a nine on a pain scale of 10, his medical records show. The rookie medical technician prescribed Tylenol and referred Guevara to the compound's physician "due to severity of headache ... and dizziness," according to medical records.

But Guevara never saw a doctor. Eight days after the first incident, he vomited in his cell. The same junior technician came to help but was unable to insert a nasal airway tube. Guevara was taken to a hospital, where doctors determined an aneurism in his brain had burst.

His wife, pregnant at the time with their second child, recalled that she rushed to the hospital but ICE guards would not let her inside, until the Mexican Consulate interceded. Guevara's mother waited five hours before they let her in. By then he was brain-dead.

"My son is not coming back," sobbed Ana Celia Lozano months later, sitting in Guevara's small mobile home as her grandson played on the floor. "I want to know how he lived and died, nothing more."

What appears to be the most incriminating document in Guevara's case has been partially blacked out. Still, what is left shows that he did not receive adequate care. "The detainee was not seen or evaluated by an RN, midlevel or physician. . . . At the time of the incident on 8/12/2007, the detainee was seen and examined by EMTs."

Each immigration facility is allotted a different number of positions, and a shortage of doctors and nurses is not unusual at centers across the country. Records from February show that about 30 percent of all DIHS positions in the field were unfilled. ICE officials said last week that the current vacancy rate is 21 percent. Concern about the vacancies is voiced repeatedly at clinical directors' meetings. "How do we state our concerns so that we can be heard? . . . this is a CRITICAL condition. . . . We have bitten off more than we can chew," a physician wrote in the minutes of one meeting last summer.

In some prisons, the staffing shortages are acute. The Willacy County detention center in South Texas -- the largest compound, with 2,018 detainees -- has no clinical director, no pharmacist and only a part-time psychiatrist. Nearly 50 percent of the nursing positions were unfilled at the 1,500-detainee Eloy, Ariz., prison in February. At the newly opened 744-bed Jena., La., compound, nurses run the place. It has no clinical director, no staff physician, no psychiatrist and no professional dental staff.

Last August, Sampson, who was then DIHS interim director, warned his superiors at ICE that critical personnel shortages were making it impossible to staff the Jena facility adequately. In a vociferous e-mail to Gary Mead, the ICE deputy director in charge of detention centers, he wrote:

"With the Jena request we have been re-examining our capabilities to meet health care needs at a new site when we are facing critical staffing shortages at most every other DIHS site. While we developed, executed and achieved major successes in our recruitment efforts we have been unable to meet the demand."

The slow ICE security-clearance process forced many job applicants to go elsewhere, Sampson wrote. Of the 312 people who applied for new positions over the past year, 200 withdrew, he wrote, because they found other jobs during the 250 days it took ICE, on average, to conduct the required background investigations. Last week, ICE officials said the average wait had decreased recently to 37 days.

These shortages have burdened the remaining staff. In July 2007, a year after Osman's death in Otay Mesa, medical director Hui strongly complained to headquarters about workload stress. "The level of burnout . . . is high and rising," she wrote in an e-mail. "I know that I have been averaging approximately 2-6 hrs of overtime daily for the past 2 months. I will no longer be able to sustain this pace and will be decreasing the number of hours that I work overtime. This being said, more will be left undone because we simply do NOT have the staff."

The overcrowding has created a petri dish for the spread of diseases. One mission of the Public Health Service is to detect infectious diseases and contain them before they spread, but last summer, the gigantic Willacy center was hit by a chicken pox outbreak.

The illness spread because the facility did not have enough available isolation rooms and its large pods share recycled air, but also because security officers "lack education about the disease and keep moving around detainees from different units without taking into consideration if the unit has been isolated due to heavy exposure," noted the DIHS's top specialist on infectious diseases, Carlos Duchesne. The staff was forced to vaccinate the entire population in mid-July.

In one 2007 death, memos and confidential notes show how medical staff missed an infectious disease, meningitis, in their midst. Victor Alfonso Arellano, 23, a transgender Mexican detainee with AIDS, died in custody at the San Pedro center. The first three pages of Duchesne's internal review of the death leave the impression that Arellano's care was proper. But the last page, under the heading "Off the record observations and recommendations," takes a decidedly critical tone: "The clinical staff at all levels fails to recognize early signs and symptoms of meningitis. . . . Pt was evaluated multiple times and an effort to rule out those infections was not even mentioned."

Arellano was given a "completely useless" antibiotic, Duchesne wrote. Lab work that should have been performed immediately took 22 days because San Pedro's clinical director had ordered staff members to withhold lab work for new detainees until they had been in detention there "for more than 30 days," a violation of agency rules.

"I am sure that there must be a reason why this was mandated but that practice is particularly dangerous with chronic care cases and specially is particularly dangerous with . . . HIV/AIDS patients," Duchesne wrote. "Labs for AIDS patients . . . must be performed ASAP to know their immune status and where you are standing in reference to disease control and meds."

Given the frequency with which ICE moves people within the detention network, keeping track of detainees is critical to stopping the spread of infectious illnesses. The purchase of an electronic records system named CaseTrakker in 2004 was supposed to help. But according to internal documents and interviews, CaseTrakker is so riddled with problems that facilities often revert to handwritten records.

A study at one site found that it took one-third more time to use CaseTrakker than to use paper. Thousands of patient files are missing. Recorded data often cannot be retrieved. Day-long outages are common.

When detainees are transferred from one facility to another, their records, if they follow them, are often misleading. Some show medications with no medical diagnoses, or "lots of diagnoses but no meds," according to Elizabeth Fleming, a former clinical director at one compound in Arizona.

After Yusif Osman's death and the discovery of the problem with his computerized records, the DIHS ordered a review of all charts at the Otay Mesa center. During the review, auditors also found that 260 physical exams were never completed as required. The nurse responsible for the error in Osman's case was reprimanded, but the computer problem was not fixed.

The CaseTrakker system "has failed and must be replaced," Sampson, the DIHS interim director, wrote to his ICE supervisors in August.

In January 2008, medical director Shack told colleagues that CaseTrakker "is more of a liability than the use of paper medical record system," according to the minutes of a meeting. It "puts patients at risk."

ICE officials said last week that they are not satisfied with CaseTrakker and are working to replace it.

Along with being at the mercy of computer glitches, detainees suffer from human errors that deny or delay their care. And with few advocates on the outside, they are left alone to plead their cases in the most desperate ways, in hand-scribbled notes to doctors they rarely see.

"I need medicine for pain. All my bones hurt. Thank you," wrote Mexico native Roberto Ledesma Guerrero, 72, three weeks before he died inside the Otay Mesa compound.

Delays persist throughout the system. In January, the detention center in Pearsall, Tex., an hour from San Antonio, had a backlog of 2,097 appointments.

Luis Dubegel-Paez, a 60-year-old Cuban, had filled out many sick call requests before he died on March 14. Detained at the Rolling Plains Detention Facility in the West Texas town of Haskell, he wrote on New Year's Day: "need to see doctor for Heart medication; and having chest pains for the past three days. Can't stand pain."

Ten days later he went to the clinic and became upset when he wasn't seen. He slugged the window, yelled, pointed at his wristwatch. He was escorted back to his cell.

Another of his sick call requests said: "Need to see a doctor. I have a lot of symptoms of sickness ... as soon as possible!" The next was more urgent: "I have a emergency to see the doctor about my heart problems ... for the last couple days and I been getting dizzy a lot."

The next day, Dubegel-Paez collapsed and died. His medical records do not show that he ever saw a doctor for his chest pains.

Hanna Boutros, 52, who came to the United States 30 years ago, waited seven months for surgery after receiving a diagnosis of "high-grade" prostate cancer, which his urologist urged be treated immediately. ICE officials sent him to Krome Service Processing Center in Miami because, they said, it could best deal with his condition.

But he was seen by nurses, not a doctor, until he found an outside lawyer to threaten a suit. Boutros finally got surgery just before Christmas, before he was deported to Lebanon, leaving two children and a wife in the United States. "I was miserable. I was very, very scared. It was always burning," he said.

Juan Guillermo Guerrero, 37, was denied his seizure medication and given an ineffective substitute. Suffering from one or two painful seizures a week, he told his lawyer to drop his case, saying he preferred to be deported than to die inside an immigration prison. A few days after he returned to Mexico, Guerrero died of asphyxiation during a seizure, according to his lawyers.

Sometimes, to save money, the government releases detainees instead of treating them. Martin Hernandez Banderas, a 40-year-old Mexican, was released from custody last year while he was in the hospital following surgery to amputate his leg. An internal review found that the system failed him before the surgery: Nurses and doctors at Otay Mesa did not appreciate the severity of his diabetic foot wounds, did not properly treat them or prescribe the correct course of antibiotics, and did not bring in a qualified surgeon to evaluate the problem.

Simon Reyes-Altimirano, 25, a Honduran, was diagnosed with chicken pox and sent back to his cell with Benadryl, only to be hospitalized a day later and diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. He died two weeks later.

Shack, the medical director, found that Reyes-Altimirano's care at the El Paso detention center had been "appropriate and timely." But a nurse at the center poured out her remorse in a typed note placed in Reyes-Altimirano's medical file. "We always have to listen to the patient and the reason I say this is because" when he first reported his problems, "one of the nurses said, 'I think he is faking his illness' ... this is not just a medical learning experience but also an emotional one."

Three weeks after Reyes-Altimirano died, a nurse at the Krome Service Processing Center accused the Rev. Joseph Dantica of faking an illness, too. The 81-year-old Baptist minister had fled Haiti in the fall of 2004, fearing for his life after gangs set fire to the church overlooking Port-au-Prince where he ran a school, let people use computers for free and quietly handed out money to needy families.

As a younger man, Dantica listened to tapes to practice English every day, but he never wanted to live in the United States, said a niece, writer Edwidge Danticat, who was raised by him. He visited once a year, to see his brother in Brooklyn and raise money for his church.

But after U.N. peacekeepers and Haitian riot police seized the church to use as a base against gangs, and after the gangs retaliated by burning the altar, Dantica slipped on a woman's muumuu and wig and headed to the airport. He arrived in Miami with a valid visa but decided to seek asylum because he thought he might have to stay longer than his visa allowed. In an earlier time, Dantica would have been permitted to go on to New York while the government considered his claim. This time, he was detained.

Dantica and an immigration lawyer were sitting before an asylum officer when the minister began to vomit violently. The lawyer, John Pratt, said agents at the detention center had taken away his client's blood-pressure medicine.

Dantica "turned very cold. His eyes wandered around, and he appeared not to be conscious of his surroundings," the asylum officer, Miriam Castro, later told investigators, according to confidential documents. "Applicant assumed a rigid position with his legs stretched out and remained in this position."

Castro called for medical help. No one came for 15 minutes. When the public health nurse and a physician assistant arrived, the nurse said he believed that Dantica "was faking because Applicant kept looking at him randomly," Castro said. The nurse, Tony Palladino, "then went on to demonstrate that when he moved Applicant's head up and down, Applicant maintained his head rigid as opposed to limp, thus not allowing his head to fall back. [The nurse] stated that was another way he determined Applicant was faking symptoms."

Dantica died a day later in Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital, shackled to a bed. Pratt had called the hospital repeatedly, trying to get information about the minister's condition and permission for his family to see him. "They never said anything but they were doing tests," Pratt said. Security reasons, hospital officials told him, prevented visitors.

The government's internal medical records say Dantica died of pancreatitis. A one-page death certificate in his file has "VOID" stamped across it. Two outside doctors who reviewed his medical records for The Post said he probably died of heart problems.

Yusif Osman had been living in Los Angeles as a legal resident for five years when he was detained crossing back from Tijuana in 2006 with a passenger, also from Ghana, who had a false ID. Osman was arrested on a smuggling charge, which he denied and was fighting while locked up at Otay Mesa. He seemed healthy to his friends and family who visited him or spoke to him by phone.

His girlfriend, Dorothy Weens, was stunned when she picked up the phone in late June and a stranger broke the news. "Yusif Osman passed away," the man said.

When Osman's lawyer called the compound to verify what had happened, he was told only that his client was no longer there. Weens and a cousin of Osman's called immigration officials several times for answers. They were told that the matter was under investigation. Eventually they stopped calling.

Osman's belongings from the prison arrived at his cousin's house one day by mail. Pants. Socks. Scraps of paper with prayer verses written in Arabic. His birth certificate. A letter from Dorothy: "Hey Babe! Hang in there. I'm trying everything I can do, to get you out of there. I love you and God love you. And that all you needs. I'm sending you $100.00. Love, Dot."

There was also an inventory of the rest of his personal property on the day he died: "4 yellow envelopes. 1 writing pad. 1 religious beads. 1 Chap Stick. 14 Ramen soups. 1 grape jelly. 1 jar peanut butter. 1 hot cocoa mix. 1 box Q tips."

The mortuary received a preliminary death certificate from the coroner's office. It noted Osman's cause of death as "pending," enough to release the body. His mosque collected money for a burial in a Muslim cemetery in the Mojave Desert. Male friends dug the grave. They laid his corpse, wrapped in white cloth, into the open earth and covered it with rocky dirt.

The final death certificate arrived in the mail sometime later. Under cause of death, it still read "pending." Osman's passing remains a mystery to his grieving relatives in Ghana and his adopted African community in Los Angeles.

An uneven, blank concrete headstone marks Grave 26. The truth of Osman's death is also buried, thousands of miles away, past the Statue of Liberty replica near the front door, inside a cabinet at the Division of Immigration Health Services, in file #077-987-986.

Staff researcher Julie Tate and database editor Sarah Cohen contributed to this report.

Labels: detention centers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:43 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out the full report from Appleseed. -Patricia

By Liza Weidle | NBC17.com
Education Reporter
May 09, 2008

RALEIGH, N.C. -- A report on the impact of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation finds that parents are the ones being left behind.

Discuss This Story

Released during Friday’s town hall meeting with N.C. PTA leaders, the Appleseed Network findings show that parent involvement policies and initiatives are lacking in substance.

The report, “It takes a North Carolina parent: Transforming education under the No Child Behind,” focused on school efforts in parent involvement.

Educators said NCLB was considered “The single greatest issue in education today, followed by meeting the needs of all students and a lack of parent involvement.”

It has been six years since NCLB was created and educators wanted to know if it’s made the differences it could have.

NCLB places a legal obligation with school districts to “provide timely, accurate, clear and honest information and to establish sincere, precise, and convenient mechanisms for parents to contribute in a meaningful way to improvement efforts.”

The report found that while the opportunities “for laminating projects and taking up tickets at football games may have increased, the opportunities for parents to participate in a meaningful way have not been created.”

“Parents report that the law is frequently treated as a formality” said Edwin Darden, Appleseed director of education policy.

Researchers found that of the 115 districts in the state, most did have a parent involvement policy. Some districts including Chatham and Durham county only had guidelines for Title I schools.

Most school systems focus their efforts on schools that are in Title I status with children who generally come from families with low socioeconomic status.

“School systems need to develop a district-wide policy. The legislation indicates that schools need to be serious about parent involvement for all children. There must be a real expectation that parents are going to step up” said Darden.

Some parents are unsure of their rights under the law. Those who are aware find the NCLB reports untimely and unclear.

“I wasn’t aware that parent involvement is a required piece of NCLB,” said Trilby McClammy, Durham PTA Council president. “I don’t think principals believe parent involvement is important.”

The report also showed a lag time between the time a child sits for an exam and the time results come back. This is particularly true in North Carolina. This year, a new edition of the End-of-Grade test requires a new scale score range across grades 3 through 8 to be established and new achievement standards (cut scores) be set for each grade. The new standards will be presented to the State Board of Education in the fall. Once the standards have been set, the test reports can be created and given back to parents.

By the time test scores are released, the students have moved on to the next grade. For parents, this means the opportunity to address concerns that may be uncovered by the EOGs has long passed.

Major Findings to Parent Involvement

* External barriers are preventing parents from participating - especially parents of low socioeconomic status, limited English proficiency (LEP) and varying cultural expectations.
* Communication on student progress as well information on the school, district, and state parent involvement policy is limited.
* Information on NCLB legislation is unclear and untimely. Parents do not have information received in simple straightforward terms that allows them time to make choices offered by the law.
* Parents do not feel welcome in their child’s school. They believe they have little say in important educational decisions.

Recommendations for N.C. school districts, N.C. department of public instruction, and the federal government:

* Implement outreach initiatives to engage parents in poverty and parents who have limited proficiency.
* Adopt a more proactive posture and more creative outreach in school-parent communications.
* Disseminate NCLB progress results in a clear and timely way, provide parents with child-specific progress and must inform parents of how to take action in response to the information.
* Cultivate a warm, welcoming, and collaborative school environment where parents feel confident in their ability to approach the school with questions or concerns.

Appleseed completed the research during March and April 2008.

Labels: NCLB, Parent Involvement

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

By STELLA M. CHÁVEZ / The Dallas Morning News
Friday, May 9, 2008

The morning that immigration enforcement agents raided a meatpacking plant in Cactus, Texas, a carpool of teachers called their superintendent to say they'd be late to school. A convoy of black Suburbans with flashing yellow lights was blocking their path.

Larry Appel, superintendent of the Dumas school district, which services Cactus, would soon discover that law enforcement had been directed to block some roads because of the raid.

Later that day, the superintendent conducted an unusual operation of his own: ensuring that every single child in his district had a home to go to that night. He said immigration agents were not unkind or rude, but he thinks "they really forgot about the children" on that day in December 2006.

Dr. Appel shared his story Thursday at a daylong conference at the University of North Texas on the impact of illegal immigration on education, the economy and social issues.

Rosa Castañeda, a research associate at the Urban Institute, said school districts should be prepared to deal with the repercussions of a raid or mass arrest in their area.

Ms. Castañeda recently co-wrote Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America's Children, which looks at three communities where immigration raids have taken place. She said schools often rely on standard emergency procedures, but that is not enough.

Schools should have a plan in place and be able to coordinate with social-service and public agencies, Ms. Castañeda said. Churches should work with them, too, to make sure children aren't forgotten in the hours and days that follow, she said.

"The most important system that has a bearing on the children's well-being and where the children ends up that night is the public school system," Ms. Castañeda said.

Tensions are rippling through many families as illegal immigration detentions increase in small towns and large urban centers.

As many as 3 million children are believed to live in mixed-status families, where a parent or both parents are in the United States illegally and other family members are there legally.

In Dumas, Dr. Appel said his staff was prepared to feed and house children overnight. His advice to other districts: obtain a list of more than two emergency contacts for every child.

On the issue of how immigration has affected education, Dallas schools Superintendent Michael Hinojosa shed a positive light on the subject.

"We don't want to apologize for our demographics," he said. "We're very proud of our students."

A native of Mexico who came to the United States as a child, Dr. Hinojosa said he doesn't know how many students in Dallas ISD are undocumented. The district has 50,000 students classified as limited English proficient.

"We see the challenges that are coming," he said of teaching students with limited English. "But we accept those."

Labels: immigrant children, immigration and education

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

This could end up having similar consequences to lase years fires in San Diego County where fear to seek help prevented some people from evacuating. No policy should place human lives at risk. - Patricia

Agents to watch those in the Valley who board buses to flee a hurricane

By LYNN BREZOSKY
San Antonio Express-News

BROWNSVILLE — Ending speculation about the fate of the Rio Grande Valley's undocumented immigrants during a hurricane evacuation, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has confirmed it will check the citizenship both of people boarding buses to leave the Valley and at inland traffic checkpoints.

Those determined to be in the country illegally will be taken to detention centers away from the hurricane's path and later processed for deportation.

"It's business as usual at the checkpoints," said Dan Doty, spokesman for CBP's Rio Grande Valley sector. "We'll still check everybody."

Locals responded with predictions of humanitarian disaster.

"We can't wait to see the helicopter photos of us sitting on roofs," said the Rev. Mike Seifert, a priest and activist based in a colonia outside Brownsville. The many area families with one or more undocumented members would just refuse to evacuate, he said.

"Imagine," Seifert said. "We're all in an uproar, everybody's in an enormous hurry, there's just a narrow window of opportunity and you get to the place with the buses and the Border Patrol's checking people. You're not going to go."

In the disastrous wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, officials in the Valley have pondered the politics of mass evacuation, illegal immigration and the checkpoints that filter northbound traffic every day.

After Hurricane Rita threatened the Houston area, clogging highways for miles, drying up gas pumps and creating chaos, emergency management officials set out to improve planning.

State Director of Homeland Security Steve McCraw in 2006 said the highway checkpoints should be closed if the Valley needed to evacuate. U.S. 77 parallels the coast and could be underwater once hurricane rains or flooding hit. Even if all the lanes on U.S. 281 are dedicated for northbound traffic, that's the main route for a population that now tops a million people.

Krista Piferrer, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry, said Thursday the state's stand on the issue had not changed.

"The governor's office prefers that the Border Patrol not use checkpoints during times of evacuation for obvious reasons," she said. "It will slow down traffic and create problems. ... During times of emergency our priority No. 1 is safety and we continue to hold on to the same belief."

At a recent discussion with reporters, Hidalgo County Judge J.D. Salinas said he didn't expect the Border Patrol to publicize a policy on the checkpoints for fear of inviting a free-for-all for illegal traffic.

The unofficial word, he said, was that agents recognized they'd have to be more lax amid a disaster.

But Tuesday, a reporter photographing a mock evacuation for the Rio Grande Guardian Web site saw Border Patrol agents rehearsing citizenship document checks of people boarding buses.

CBP's Doty confirmed this was the planned procedure and said those determined to be undocumented immigrants would be taken to separate shelters, likely detention centers in Laredo or San Antonio. He said the highway checkpoints would stay open.

Document checks are not mandatory at the checkpoints; it's up to an agent to assess travelers and determine whether to ask for papers. Doty said that even with the checks, 120,000 people could be evacuated within 80 hours.

"Our agents, they do it so often, they know what to look for," he said.

Doty could not say what would happen if children in a vehicle were citizens but parents were not, or if everybody but an elderly grandparent had a green card.

"We try to keep families together, but I can't put a U.S. citizen in a detention center," he said.

Cameron County Judge Carlos Cascos said locals would have to work with federal directives, but said document checks would hamper an evacuation.

Labels: immigration

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

By SEWELL CHAN | NY Times
Published: May 18, 2008

A decade-long study of adult children of immigrants to the New York region has concluded that they are rapidly entering the mainstream and doing better than their parents in terms of education and earnings — even outperforming native-born Americans in many cases.

But the study also warned of problems that could block upward mobility for members of the “second generation,” including persistent poverty and poor school performance among Dominicans and racial discrimination against black immigrants from the Caribbean.

The results of the $2 million study are detailed in “Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age,” published this month by Harvard University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation, which finances social science research.

It focused on five groups: Dominicans, Chinese, Russian Jews, South Americans (consisting of Colombians, Ecuadoreans and Peruvians) and West Indians, defined as immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean, including Belize and Guyana. The researchers also interviewed native-born whites, blacks and Puerto Ricans (those born on the mainland) in the New York area for comparison purposes.

The study identified broad similarities among adult children of immigrants. They were overwhelmingly fluent in English; were less occupationally segregated than their parents; lived longer with their parents than native-born Americans; and were firmly rooted in the United States, with fewer personal and financial ties to their ancestral homeland than their parents.

The Russian and Chinese second-generation adults had higher high school and college graduation rates than, and earned as much as, native-born whites their age. The other groups reported higher educational attainment and earnings than native-born blacks and Puerto Ricans their age. In almost all of the immigrant groups, women outperformed men in school, though men continued to earn more.

Family life varied considerably among the groups. Dominicans and South Americans tended to marry young, while the Chinese postponed marriage and children the longest. Caribbean immigrants had a high rate of single-parent households, but the disadvantages of being raised by a single parent were offset, in part, by close extended families and the heavy involvement of grandparents in child-rearing.

The study was based on 3,415 telephone interviews conducted between 1998 and 2000; 333 face-to-face follow-up interviews in 2000 and 2001; and a final round of 172 follow-up interviews in 2002 and 2003. The subjects of the study were 18 to 32 at the time of the initial interviews and were either born in the United States to at least one immigrant parent, or arrived in the United States by age 12. The study covered 10 counties: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Westchester and Nassau in New York and Essex, Hudson, Passaic and Union in New Jersey.

Three of the book’s authors — Philip Kasinitz, a sociologist at the City University of New York Graduate Center; John H. Mollenkopf, a political scientist at the Graduate Center; and Mary C. Waters, a sociologist at Harvard — presented their findings at a panel discussion on Wednesday at the Graduate Center. (This reporter served as moderator.) The fourth author was Jennifer Holdaway, who directs the migration program at the Social Science Research Council.

In 1992, Herbert J. Gans, a Columbia University sociologist, published an influential essay suggesting that members of the post-1965 second generation might do worse than their parents, refusing to accept low-level, poorly paying jobs and adopting negative attitudes toward school and work.

But the authors of the new study found that Professor Gans’s fears have not been realized. Most of the young people studied worked in white-collar clerical or service jobs in retail and major financial services and most had achieved “real, if modest, progress over their parents’ generation.”

One important reason why, according to the authors, is that even poor, uneducated immigrants have often “shown that they have the drive, ambition, courage and strength to move from one nation to another,” and transmit their determination to their children. And the new second generation is able to take advantage of civil rights programs, including affirmative action policies, in applying to universities and for jobs.

The authors acknowledged that it was hard in some cases to explain why some of the five groups studied appeared to do better than others. The relative success of Russian Jews seemed clear: They immigrated with high levels of education, benefited from government programs because they came as refugees and received aid from established Jewish organizations.

The authors said it was more difficult to explain why “Chinese youngsters have achieved the greatest educational and economic success relative to their parents’ often humble origins.” The Chinese have a fairly cohesive community with “a high degree of social connection between its better- and worse-off members,” the book argued, while ethnic newspapers, churches and media served as a link between middle- and working-class immigrants and helped share “cultural capital,” like information on how to get into the city’s best schools.

Finally, Chinese parents were less likely to divorce, and they encouraged their children to put off marriage and children until their education was completed.

West Indians tend to have high rates of homeownership and do well in school and in the labor market, even though many grew up in single-parent households. But they also reported high rates of discrimination, particularly at the hands of the police.

“In many ways they are assimilating into African-American neighborhoods and social networks,” Professor Waters said in a phone interview. “On the other hand, they tend to live on the outskirts of those neighborhoods.”

The authors found that Dominicans “probably present the clearest cause for concern.” Many second-generation Dominicans are black and face discrimination, and unlike Caribbean immigrants, few have parents who spoke English on arrival. Many live in neighborhoods that are poor and attend some of the city’s worst schools.

Nevertheless, the study found that second-generation Dominicans were much better educated than their parents.

Labels: immigrant children

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

“Leading indicators” in education — as in economics — can provide early signs of progress toward academic achievement and thus help district leaders and other stakeholders make informed decisions about efforts to improve student learning — before the test results come in. A new study by the Annenberg Institute, Beyond Test Scores: Leading Indicators for Education, looks at how four districts — Chattanooga, Montgomery County (MD), Naperville (IN), and Philadelphia — have used leading indicators for decision making and discusses the importance of difficult-to-quantify but important measures such as student engagement and central office practice.

Download pdf file here.

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

By JULIET WILLIAMS – May 10, 2008
Associated Press

THERMAL, Calif. (AP) — At Las Palmitas Elementary School, nestled between rundown homes and fields of grapes, peppers and dates in Southern California, 99 percent of students live in poverty and fewer than 20 percent speak English fluently.

Las Palmitas and other schools in the Coachella Valley Unified School District are just the type policy makers had in mind when Congress passed the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 to shed light on the disparities facing poor and minority children.

Nineteen of the district's 21 schools — including Las Palmitas — have not met the federal law's performance benchmarks for four years. Now the entire district faces sanctions for the first time.

"We have hardworking, dedicated, trained teachers like everybody else. They've got to teach a language, they've got to teach the content, and they've got to counter poverty," said Foch "Tut" Pensis, the district's superintendent. "We are the poster child for NCLB."

California has 97 school districts that failed to meet their goals under the law for four years, more than twice as many failing districts as any other state so far. Kentucky has the next highest number facing sanctions, with 47.

Nationwide, 411 school districts in 27 states now face intervention.

Over the next few years, hundreds more districts are destined to enter the next phase that California already has begun. The state has ordered districts to undergo everything from reporting how they are implementing the federal law to having a team of specialists assess every aspect of their operations. In the most extreme cases, California districts could be subject to a state takeover.

How California and the other states will turn around those struggling districts is unclear.

"No one, on a large scale, has figured out how to solve the achievement gap," Pensis said. "Everybody's looking for that answer."

If they need better teachers and administrators, it's not apparent where they will come from. Some federal money is available, but it's unlikely it will be enough to cover all the failing districts.

Many states already are losing revenue due to the sliding economy. California's budget deficit for the fiscal year that begins this summer is projected to be anywhere from $15 billion to $20 billion.

No Child Left Behind sought to shine a light on inequality in the nation's education system, where schools have been accused of setting lower expectations for poor and minority children. Nationwide, black and Hispanic students consistently lag behind their white and Asian peers in performance, a chasm referred to as the achievement gap.

The law also set tough goals for districts to demonstrate steady improvement.

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings says California is taking the right steps. It is the first state to take widespread action against all its districts that have failed to meet the achievement target set by No Child Left Behind.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state's elected Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jack O'Connell, proposed the sliding scale of punishment for the 97 districts — which are responsible for educating nearly a third of California's 6.3 million students.

Their approach reserves severe measures, such as replacing administrators or a takeover by the state, for districts that have shown the least improvement.

"He is the first governor to kind of embrace this law, to take it on himself, to be acting for it, and in keeping completely with the spirit of No Child Left Behind," Spellings said in an interview.

By taking action now, California can collect $45 million from the federal government. The districts facing the most severe sanctions each will receive $250,000 in federal money to pay for intervention teams and to start following their suggestions.

They will need to hire turnaround experts, new principals and coaches, and many more teachers to replace those judged to be ineffective. Where the districts will find those top-quality educators is unknown. California expects to face a shortage of as many as 100,000 qualified teachers in the next decade, even without changes to its existing school system.

"I think it's going to take leadership, commitment and expectations," she said. "It's just like with the kids: If you think you have a bunch of kids who can't get to grade level, that's what you have. If you think you have superstars, that's what you have."

With half the black and Hispanic students in the country dropping out before graduation, anything less than aggressive action to turn around the failing districts is unacceptable, Spellings said. Under some of the states' current improvement plans, it would take some districts more than 100 years to bring students' reading and math skills to grade level.

"The accountability — all the testing, all the data, all the stuff we do — are meaningless unless we have real consequences for failure," Spellings said.

Labels: California, failing schools

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:31 AM 0 comments Links to this post

By Roberto Lovato

This article appeared in the May 26, 2008 edition of The Nation.
May 8, 2008

Justeen Mancha's dream of becoming a psychologist was born of the tropical heat and exploitation that have shaped farmworker life around Reidsville, Georgia, for centuries. The wiry, freckle-faced 17-year-old high school junior has toiled in drought-dry onion fields to help her mother, Maria Christina Martinez. But early one September morning in 2006, Mancha's dream was abruptly deferred.

From the living room of the battered trailer she and her mother call home, Mancha described what happened when she came out of the shower that morning. "My mother went out, and I was alone," she said. "I was getting ready for school, getting dressed, when I heard this noise. I thought it was my mother coming back." She went on in the Tex-Mex Spanish-inflected Georgia accent now heard throughout Dixie: "Some people were slamming car doors outside the trailer. I heard footsteps and then a loud boom and then somebody screaming, asking if we were 'illegals,' 'Mexicans.' These big men were standing in my living room holding guns. One man blocked my doorway. Another guy grabbed a gun on his side. I freaked out. 'Oh, my God!' I yelled."

As more than twenty Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents surrounded the trailer, said Mancha, agents inside interrogated her. They asked her where her mother was; they wanted to know if her mother was "Mexican" and whether she had "papers" or a green card. They told her they were looking for "illegals."

After about five minutes of interrogation, the agents--who, according to the women's lawyer, Mary Bauer of the Southern Poverty Law Center, showed no warrants and had neither probable cause nor consent to enter the home--simply left. They left in all likelihood because Mancha and her mother didn't fit the profile of the workers at the nearby Crider poultry plant, who had been targeted by the raid in nearby Stilwell. They were the wrong kind of "Mexicans"; they were US citizens.

Though she had experienced discrimination before the raid--in the fields, in the supermarket and in school--Mancha, who testified before Congress in February, never imagined such an incident would befall her, since she and her mother had migrated from Texas to Reidsville. Best known for harvesting poultry and agricultural products, Reidsville, a farm town about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, is also known for harvesting Klan culture behind the walls of the state's oldest and largest prison. But its most famous former inmate is Jim Crow slayer and dreamer Martin Luther King Jr. His example inspires Mancha's new dream: lawyering "for the poor."

The toll this increasingly oppressive climate has taken on Mancha represents but a small part of its effects on noncitizen immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, and other Latinos. Mancha and the younger children of the mostly immigrant Latinos in Georgia are learning and internalizing that they are different from white--and black--children not just because they have the wrong skin color but also because many of their parents lack the right papers. They are growing up in a racial and political climate in which Latinos' subordinate status in Georgia and in the Deep South bears more than a passing resemblance to that of African-Americans who were living under Jim Crow. Call it Juan Crow: the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants. Listening to the effects of Juan Crow on immigrants and citizens like Mancha ("I can't sleep sometimes because of nightmares," she says. "My arms still twitch. I see ICE agents and men in uniform, and it still scares me") reminds me of the trauma I heard among the men, women and children controlled and exploited by state violence in wartime El Salvador. Juan Crow has roots in the US South, but it stirs traumas bred in the hemispheric South.

In fact, the surge in Latino migration (the Southeast is home to the fastest-growing Latino population in the United States) is moving many of the institutions and actors responsible for enforcing Jim Crow to resurrect and reconfigure themselves in line with new demographics. Along with the almost daily arrests, raids and home invasions by federal, state and other authorities, newly resurgent civilian groups like the Ku Klux Klan, in addition to more than 144 new "nativist extremist" groups and 300 anti-immigrant organizations born in the past three years, mostly based in the South, are harassing immigrants as a way to grow their ranks.

Meanwhile, a legal regime of distinctions between the rights of undocumented immigrants and citizens has emerged and is being continually refined and expanded. A 2006 Georgia law denies undocumented immigrants driver's licenses. Federal laws that allowed local and state authorities to pursue blacks under the Fugitive Slave Act appear to be the model for the Bush Administration's Agreements of Cooperation in Communities to Enhance Safety and Security (ACCESS) program, which allows states to deputize law enforcement officials to chase, detain, arrest and jail the undocumented. Georgia's lowest-paid workers, the undocumented, now occupy a separate, unequal and clandestine place that has made it increasingly difficult for them to work, rent homes or attend school.

The pre- and post-Reconstruction regional economic system centered on the stately Southern mansions that once graced Atlanta's storied Peachtree Street has given way to a more global finance-driven system centered on the cold, anonymous skyscrapers that loom over Peachtree today. And in a more hopeful sign, some veterans of the civil rights struggle against Jim Crow are joining Latino immigrants in what will likely be one of the major movements of the twenty-first century.

These and other facets of immigrant life in Georgia, the Deep South and the entire country are but a small part of the labyrinthine institutional and cultural arrangements defining the strange career of Juan Crow.

The immigrant condition in Georgia worsened in the wake of the failed immigration reform proposal last year. The national immigration debate had the effect of further legitimizing and emboldening the most extreme elements of the anti-immigrant movement in places like Georgia. Since the advent of what he terms "Georgiafornia," for example, D.A. King, a former marine and contributor to the anti-immigrant hate site VDARE, has leapfrogged into the national limelight to become one of the major advocates for deportation and security-only "immigration reform." Strengthened by the defeat of national reform, King, State Senator Chip Rogers and a growing galaxy of formerly fringe groups succeeded in getting some of the country's most draconian anti-immigrant laws passed. These new racial codes are disguised by the national security-infused bureaucratic language of laws with names like the Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act (GSICA).

Their efforts were egged on by the Bush Administration's implementation of the ACCESS program last August. ACCESS provided new excuses for state and local officials to pursue the undocumented in states like Georgia. In tandem with the federal government, King and Rogers led the push to pass GSICA, which requires law enforcement officers to investigate the citizenship status of anyone charged with a felony or driving under the influence. GSICA and federal efforts laid the foundation on which the other legal and social structures of Juan Crow grow.

Georgia's estimated 500,000 undocumented immigrants must think twice before seeking emergency support at hospitals or clinics because of laws that require them to prove their legal status before receiving many state benefits. "No-match letter" regulations requiring all employers to confirm the Social Security numbers of their employees have been issued by the Social Security Administration and have resulted in firings and growing fear among immigrants. But even without the no-match letters, undocumented immigrants in Georgia have many reasons to fear going to work. If they work at a company with more than 500 employees, for example (and most undocumented immigrants are employed in meatpacking, agricultural, carpet and other industries with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers), they must worry about laws that punish employers who knowingly hire undocumented immigrants and mandate that firms with state contracts check the immigration status of their employees. Similar laws denying or restricting housing, education, transportation and other aspects of immigrant life are also being instituted across Georgia.

For a firsthand look at how the interplay of state and federal policies fuels Juan Crow, one need go no further than the immigrant-heavy area surrounding Buford Highway in DeKalb County, near Atlanta. During the weekend of October 18, 2007, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) and other advocacy groups from across the state reported sharp increases in arrests of immigrants in the area. "This weekend alone we received more than 200 phone calls from people telling horrible stories of arrests," said GLAHR executive director Adelina Nicholls of Mexico City. "There are hundreds of Latinos who've been hunted down like animals, taken to jail, and they don't even know why or whether or not they'll be released," said Nicholls more recently.

Nicholls and other advocates are working feverishly in response to the exponential increase in official and extra-official profiling of immigrants. Last year there were forty-four reported armed robberies of DeKalb County-area Latino immigrants in August alone. One especially outrageous incident took place just west of Atlanta, in the rural town of Carrollton, last June. Emelina Ramirez, a Honduran immigrant, called local police to report that her roommates were attacking her, punching and kicking her in the stomach. Ramirez was pregnant. Locals say that when police got to Ramirez's apartment, officers handcuffed her, took her to jail and then ran her fingerprints through a federal database. After discovering that she was undocumented, they contacted federal authorities as stipulated under ACCESS and GSICA. Ramirez was then deported.

Nicholls says she and GLAHR staff exist in a perpetual state of exhaustion after having to expand their DeKalb County work to deal with cases like Ramirez's. Adding to their load is the situation in nearby Cobb County, where the local jail has 500 adults captured on streets, at work and in their homes. All of these people, says Nicholls, are awaiting deportation.

Beneath the growing fear and intensifying racial tensions of Georgia lies the new, more globalized economic system that sustains Juan Crow. At the core of the economy in Dixie are the financial dealings taking place in the shiny towers of Peachtree Street, buildings constructed atop the ashes of plantation houses.

Lining Peachtree today are SunTrust, Bank of America and other titans of global finance with major operations in downtown Atlanta. Along with the financial players of Charlotte, North Carolina, the companies occupying the towers on Peachtree are among the prime movers behind the transformation and restructuring of the Georgia economy--and of its race relations. On Peachtree you can find US banks and financial firms investing in companies doing business in post-NAFTA Latin America, where nonunion labor and miserably low wages drive immigration to Georgia and other states. The investment portfolios of many of these companies have grown fat with high-yield investments in the poultry, meatpacking, rug, tourism and other Georgia industries employing undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. The need to keep down the wages of these undocumented workers is fulfilled with the legal, political and psychological discipline of Juan Crow. Along with the most visible legacy of Jim Crow--Georgia's massive and growing population of black prisoners, housed in Reidsville and other, mostly rural prisons--the Peachtree State's undocumented immigrants find themselves at the bottom of the South's new political and economic order.

By keeping down wages of the undocumented and documented workforce, Juan Crow doesn't just pit undocumented Latino workers against black and white workers. It also makes possible every investor's dream of merging Third World wages with First World amenities. Promotional brochures put out by the state's Department of Economic Development, for example, tout Georgia's "below average" wages and its status as a "right to work" (nonunion) state. Georgia's infrastructure, its proximity to US markets and its incentives--nonunion labor, low wages, government subsidies, cheap land--allow the state to position itself as an attractive investment opportunity for foreign companies. While the fortunes of Ford, GM and other US companies have declined in the South, the fortunes of foreign automakers here are rising. Companies like Korean car manufacturer Kia, which plans to open a $1.2 billion plant by 2009, see in Georgia and other Southern states a new pool of cheap labor. Of the $5.7 billion of total new investment in Georgia in 2006, more than 36 percent was from international companies--companies that were also responsible for nearly half of the 24,660 jobs created by government-supported foreign ventures that year.

Also critical to the economic strategies formulated in the towers on Peachtree Street is another Latin-centered component: free trade with Latin America. "We are the gateway to the Americas," boasted Kenneth Stewart, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development. Stewart was among the more than 1,000 people, including three US Cabinet members and finance ministers, trade representatives, investors, corporate executives and politicians from thirty-three countries in the hemisphere, who attended the sold-out Americas Competitiveness Forum at the Marriott on Peachtree Street last June. As an organizer of the event, the gregarious Stewart, like many of the region's economic leaders, considers hosting the forum a critical part of Atlanta's bid to become the secretariat of the Free Trade Area of the Americas organization. Local elites support building a $10 million, privately financed FTAA headquarters complex, possibly in the area near Peachtree and the Sweet Auburn neighborhood.

Before being rapidly gentrified by the white-collar employees working in the Peachtree towers, Sweet Auburn, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., was one of the cradles of the African-American freedom struggle. Echoing the connection frequently made here between increased globalization and commerce and improved race relations, Stewart told me that free trade "will benefit citizens of Georgia and the citizens of Mexico and other Latin American countries." But when I asked him about the increased racial tensions, including the murders of some immigrants in Georgia, and about the growing repression of noncitizen Mexican workers, Stewart abruptly ended the interview.

For her part, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin--among the most recent in a long line of African-American Atlanta mayors that includes former Martin Luther King colleague and Wal-Mart consultant Andrew Young (who has an office in a Peachtree high-rise)--also linked local freedom struggles with global free trade. Before the Americas Competitiveness Forum, she and other regional elites distributed splashy brochures promoting the city's FTAA bid. Included in the brochure was a picture of the headstone of King's grave, which bears the inscription Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty I'm Free at last. The brochure promoting "the city too busy to hate" also paints a positive, global Kumbaya picture of the plight of Georgia's migrants: "With its attractive quality of life and rapidly expanding job market, Metro Atlanta draws thousands of newcomers every year and has growing Latin, Asian and African American communities."

"This is the home of Dr. King," said Franklin in her welcome speech at the packed forum. "It is in the spirit of peace, it is in the spirit of collaboration and it is in the spirit of fairness that we attack this issue of [economic] competitiveness," she told her audience in King-like cadences. But had Franklin taken her foreign visitors on the short stroll from their hotel to Sweet Auburn, they would not have found the racial harmony described in the glossy brochures and spirited speeches.

Documented and undocumented Latinos dealing with the economic and political effects of Juan Crow in Georgia (and across the country) find themselves unwitting actors in a centuries-old racial drama, which they must alter if Juan Crow is to be defeated. The major difference today is that Latinos also find themselves having to navigate a racial and political topography that is no longer black and white. Young Latinos, in particular, attend schools that teach them about Jim Crow while giving them a daily dose of Juan Crow.

High school senior Ernesto Chávez (a pseudonym) does not look forward to becoming one of the few undocumented students in Georgia to go to a university like Kennesaw State, which requires them to carry student IDs with special color coding, or to a college that denies them aid and forces them to pay exorbitant, nearly impossible-to-pay out-of-state tuition. He has already learned enough about Jim Crow--and Juan Crow--in high school.

Chávez, who sports a buzz cut and wears baggy clothes, said that when he studied Jim Crow in school, he identified strongly with the heroic generation of African-American youth who rebelled against it. "They couldn't ride in the same trains, they couldn't drink from the same fountains," he said during an interview in a classroom at Miller Grove High School in the Atlanta suburb of Lithonia. "I felt mad when I read about that, even though they weren't my people," said the soft-spoken Mexican, who is part of the small but growing minority of Latinos at Miller Grove (African-American students make up about 93 percent of the student body).

Chávez said he came to know the limits of his physical, social and psychic mobility, thanks to the Georgia law that requires people to show proof of citizenship or legal status in order to obtain a driver's license. "It's hard to describe what it feels like to be 'illegal' here in Georgia. It's like you can't move," he said, his voice cracking slightly. "It feels scary because you know that when you go out to a public place, you might never know if you're going to come back. I'm really scared because my mother drives without a license. She's scared too."

Chávez and other Latino students also expressed their shock and dismay at being discriminated against by some of the descendants of those discriminated against by Jim Crow.

"When I first got here, I was confused. I went to a mostly white school in Gwinnett County and started noticing the fifth-grade kids saying things to me, racial stuff, asking me questions like, 'Are you illegal?'" said Chávez as he fidgeted nervously in one of those ubiquitous and visibly uncomfortable school desks. "But when I was in seventh grade, I went to Richards Middle School, where it wasn't the white people saying things, it was black people. They didn't like Mexican kids. They would call us 'Mexican border hoppers,' 'wetbacks' and all these things. Every time they'd see me, they yelled at me, threatened to beat me up after school for no reason at all." Asked how it felt, he said, "It's like, now since they have rights, they can discriminate [against] others."

Chávez's family, along with many immigrant families in Georgia, will be watching closely to see how the state's justice system deals with the still-pending 2005 case of six Mexican farmworkers killed execution-style in their trailers, which were parked near the cotton and peanut farms they toiled on in Tifton. Pretrial motions began last July in the case, in which prosecutors allege that four African-American men bludgeoned five of the immigrants to death with aluminum baseball bats and shot one in the head while robbing them in their trailer home. Though the face of anti-immigrant racism in the Juan Crow South is still overwhelmingly identified as white by the immigrants I interviewed, some immigrants also see a black face on anti-immigrant hate.

Politically, a growing divide has emerged between pro- and anti-immigrant blacks in Georgia. The African-American face of Juan Crow is embodied by State Senator and probable Democratic Atlanta mayoral candidate Kasim Reed (he's also considering a gubernatorial bid). Reed proposed a five-year prison sentence for anyone caught trying to secure employment with a false ID. Local Latino and African-American activists have criticized Reed for what Bruce Dixon of the online Black Agenda Report called his "morally bankrupt attempt to outflank Republicans on the right."

Activists like Janvieve Williams of the US Human Rights Network, based in Atlanta, counter the anti-immigrant tide by elevating the tone of the debate and shifting the terms to human rights. As an Afro-Panamanian immigrant, Williams says she feels discrimination from many whites in Georgia, but she also experiences discrimination from mestizo immigrants. Her perception of anti-immigrant sentiments among African-Americans adds another layer to the complex racial dynamics unleashed by Juan Crow. "I'm caught between African-Americans who don't want to understand immigration and immigrants and Latinos who use words like 'moreno,' 'negritos,' 'los negros' and other terms that are not good," says Williams.

But rather than see her Afro-Latino identity and her Latin American political experience as a barrier between communities, Williams--who co-hosts Radio Diaspora, a weekly Afro-Latino program that helped promote the 50,000-plus immigrants' rights marches in 2006--uses Latin American media and organizing experience to cross linguistic and political borders. "We need to move from civil rights to human rights. We need to start using the language and tools of human rights around the issue of immigration. It's an international issue that needs an international framework," says Williams, whose organization co-sponsored the visit to Atlanta last May by the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants. Williams's organization brought together many groups who shared stories of Juan Crow with the special rapporteur, who took his report to the UN General Assembly.

In the same way that the concept of civil rights grew as a response to Jim Crow, the human rights framework advocated by Williams and other immigrants' rights activists in the South and across the country challenges traditional approaches to race and rights. "Some civil rights leaders here don't think human rights affects us in the United States," says Williams. "A lot of the [civil rights] elders of that movement are not linked to the human rights movement, and that also gets in the way of working together."

Not all of Georgia's civil rights elders fit thirtysomething Williams's description. The Rev. Joseph Lowery, the lieutenant to Martin Luther King Jr., says he did not perceive the threat that some whites and African-American Georgians felt from the massive immigrant marches of 2006; instead he sees in the millions marching in Atlanta and across the country "instruments of God's will to change this country." Reverend Lowery, who now leads the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda, has spoken eloquently and vociferously against what he considers "wicked" immigration policies and has attended pro-immigrant rallies. He believes that massive immigration to the United States came about because of the workings within the tall buildings like those in spitting distance of his office in the historic Atlanta Life building on Auburn Avenue. "We've globalized money, we've globalized trade and commerce, but we haven't globalized fairness toward work and labor. The solution to the 'problem' of immigration and other problems is globalization of justice," he said.

Speaking of the relationship between American blacks and Latino immigrants, Lowery said, "There are many differences between our experience and that of immigrant Latinos--but there is a family resemblance between Jim Crow and what is being experienced by immigrants. Both met economic oppression. Both met racial and ethnic hostility.

"But the most important thing to remember," said Lowery, as if casting out the demons of Juan and Jim Crow, "is that, though we may have come over on different ships, we're all in the same damn boat now."

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:53 AM 0 comments Links to this post

By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE | Houston Chronicle
May 13, 2008

Texas students should be measured on gains they make throughout the school year, rather than facing punitive measures if they fail to clear the hurdles set by the state's standardized test, educators and community leaders told legislators Monday.

Making progress on the test, they argue, is a more important indicator that students and teachers are trying their hardest. It would also take pressure off students, who can currently be retained or kept from graduating if they don't pass certain parts of the exam, educators told members of the Select Committee on Public School Accountability during a public hearing in Aldine.

About 100 people attended the hearing, one in a series being held by the 15-member panel on how the state's Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills testing system should be changed.

"We are mindfully listening and internalizing all the testimony," Brownsville ISD deputy superintendent Beto Gonzales said.

Legislators already opted to replace high school-level TAKS tests with end-of-course exams, a move they hope will provide a more accurate read of what students are learning.

Houston mother Thelma de la Cruz, whose son is a fourth-grader at Harvard Elementary, said TAKS testing has left her family "exhausted, pressured and embattled."

"Students bear the weight of testing on their shoulders all year," said de la Cruz, who said her son is in therapy because of TAKS stress.

Jefferson Davis High School senior Jesus Santoya said state testing puts him in a constant state of worry.

"It is scary to know that if I don't meet some certain standards, it makes me, my teachers, my school and my family look bad," the 18-year-old said.

Aldine Superintendent Wanda Bamberg told the panel that they need to reduce the number of tests given, measure districts against those with similar demographics and better align the state's accountability system with the federal No Child Left Behind law.

She also supports the idea of moving to a statewide "value-added" system — or looking at the growth students make over the school year.

"That's the layer of the onion we need to peel," she said.

Labels: value-added

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:24 PM 0 comments Links to this post

A van driver unloads luggage belonging to several passengers being detained by federal agents at the checkpoint just north of the border. The operations occur at random, unannounced times.


At random times in San Diego near the border, vehicles are searched. Most detainees without criminal records or numerous immigration violations are released in a few hours, officials say.

By Richard Marosi, LA Times Staff Writer
May 7, 2008

SAN DIEGO -- U.S. border authorities no longer apprehend illegal immigrants only as they enter the country. Now they're catching them on the way out.

At random times near the Tijuana-San Diego border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers have been setting up checkpoints, boarding buses destined for Mexico and pulling off people who don't have proper documentation.

The operation appears to be an expansion of a broader federal crackdown targeting illegal immigrants in jails, airports and workplaces across the country.

The checkpoints, which are not announced in advance, are set up on southbound Interstate 5 about 100 yards north of the border. Vehicles in all lanes must stop.

Vincent Bond, an agency spokesman, said departing immigrants are fair targets.

"If our officers come upon people who are here illegally . . . regardless of whether they're leaving the country, we detain them, make a record of the fact they were here illegally and return them to Mexico," Bond said.

Immigrant rights groups and other critics say the crackdown is a sad reflection of growing anti-immigrant sentiment in the country.

"The policies of the Bush administration are designed to make life so difficult for immigrants in the U.S. illegally that they're forced to leave. . . . Now they're arresting people who they are actually driving out of the country. . . . Unbelievable," said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a Washington-based immigration reform group.

But some GOP politicians and anti-illegal immigration organizations praise federal authorities for widening their enforcement efforts. A spokesman for Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) said agents were simply doing their job.

"Whether people are coming or going . . . checkpoints are just another line of defense that targets illegal behavior," Joe Kasper said.

Customs and Border Protection, which typically provides detailed statistics on apprehensions, would not disclose details of the checkpoint operation. Nor would they say how long it has been underway.

The checkpoints have been randomly deployed since the Sept. 11 attacks, with inspectors typically looking for fugitives, stolen vehicles, weapons, drugs and other contraband.

Illegal immigrants became targets for arrest at the checkpoints only a few months ago, according to immigrant rights groups and human rights organizations in Mexico. It is unclear how frequently the checkpoints have been set up.

But Enrique Morones, president of the Border Angels, a San Diego-based group, said he believes that hundreds of immigrants have been arrested since the crackdown began.

Over a half-hour period April 30, agents appeared to be pulling over every bus and van heading for the border. But any vehicle, including cars, that agents deem suspicious may be stopped and searched.

Inspectors detained five young men from one bus traveling from Los Angeles to Puebla, a city southeast of Mexico City. After the inspectors made their apprehensions, only two passengers remained onboard.

"Pobrecitos (poor people)," said Lily Lujan, who watched the immigrants being arrested as she walked to the border crossing. "They were almost home. If they're already leaving the country, what's the problem?"

Federal agents say the checkpoints are a productive way to stop dangerous criminals, drug shipments and money launderers.

The illegal immigrants they apprehend are typically turned over to the U.S. Border Patrol for processing. Unless they have serious criminal records or numerous immigration violations, most are returned to Mexico within a few hours, the agents say.

Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center of Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego, said he was not aware of similar crackdowns in the past. The checkpoints make sense for intercepting contraband, but targeting illegal immigrants voluntarily leaving the country is a "bizarre" way of handling the illegal immigration question, he said.

Other critics call it an enormous waste of resources and say it could be counterproductive and discourage immigrants from going home.

"There are people that want to go back, and even though they haven't done anything wrong, they might be intimidated from leaving," said Morones of the Border Angels. "It makes no sense."

But groups that fight illegal immigration praise federal authorities for showing more willingness to enforce existing immigration laws aggressively. Focusing on the criminality of people entering the country is only part of the job of border agencies, they say.

Rick Oltman, spokesman for Californians for Population Stabilization, said he hoped that the crackdown on departing illegal immigrants would be expanded to other exit points across the country.

He said apprehended immigrants who returned home to Mexico would become "ambassadors of enforcement" and might help deter illegal immigration.

"Each one of these people will then report increased enforcement to family and friends when they do get home, and that will give them second thoughts about sneaking back into the U.S.," he said.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:02 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Immigrants rights advocates cry foul, vow they will continue to fight

Leah Rupp | Clarion Ledger
March 18, 2008

Companies in Mississippi soon will be required to use a federal pilot program called eVerify to determine whether potential workers are legal U.S. residents, under a bill Gov. Haley Barbour signed into law Monday.

But shortly after he signed off on Senate Bill 2988, Barbour cautioned that the language needs some alterations, including adding more avenues for companies to check the residency status of new hires.

Key supporters of the legislation say any changes will have to wait until next year though. Immigrants rights advocates say they'll continue to fight the new law they call a racist attempt to drive Hispanics from the state.

Other critics maintain the bill, along with another one Barbour signed Monday enhancing the penalty for home invasions, could be costly as they will bloat the prisons.

"Any employer who knowingly hires an illegal alien should be held accountable," Barbour said.

But, he continued, "I have serious concerns ... the bill could have unintended negative consequences. I urge the Legislature to make the necessary technical changes to ensure this bill will have the intended effect."

Under the legislation, larger companies would be required to begin using the eVerify system first, with compliance deadlines as early as July.

Penalties for the employer could include the cancellation of state or public contracts.

Companies also could be prohibited from bidding on any such contracts for up to three years.

Those convicted of violating the new law could be sentenced to up to five years in prison or fined up to $10,000. The illegal immigrant also would be deported.

State Sen. Michael Watson, one of the principal authors of the bill, said he doesn't think lawmakers can grant Barbour's wishes for changes in the law this session. "Maybe next year," Watson, R-Pascagoula, said.

Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant - who has made cracking down on illegal immigration one of his key issues - agreed, saying in a statement that he would "work in future sessions to address (Barbour's) recommendations."

Changing the law at this point during the session would require suspending the legislative rules to bring up a new bill - which requires a two-thirds vote - then passing it in both chambers.

Immigrants rights advocates fear that the new law could lead to increased racial profiling and hamper economic development.

"The governor basically whines in the statement about all the problems with the eVerify system," said Bill Chandler, of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance. "Just on the face of that, he shouldn't have signed this bill into law. But he is silent on how racist this bill is, criminalizing people who are working."

The Washington-based Pew Research Center estimates there are up to 50,000 undocumented immigrants living in Mississippi. The Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, however, estimates the number to be 200,000. In 1990, Pew estimates there were about 5,000.

Six other immigration-related bills are expected to die in a House committee today.

Another bill signed by Barbour on Monday would increase the penalty from no less than three years in prison to no less than 10 years for breaking into a home where people are present.

Sen. David Blount, primary author of Senate Bill 2622, said the governor's support "sends a strong statement that Mississippians have a right to be safe in their homes."

In 2007, there were 2,563 reported house burglaries in the city, based on Jackson Police Department weekly crime data. In the past, officials at the department have said a "very minute" number of those would be considered home invasions.

In 2006, several home invasions in Jackson made headlines, causing concern among residents in the metro area.

Some worry that bill and others that increase the penalty for crimes, such as the immigration bill, will increase prison populations.

"(The Legislature) sometimes passes these feel-good things without thinking about what it's going to cost," said Ron Welch, a prisoners' rights attorney. "Somebody is going to have to pay - and that'll likely be public services across the board."

Blount said he hoped other bills, such as one that is pending that would grant some nonviolent offenders parole, would cut down on the number of people in prison.

"We need to keep people who are violent and a threat to public safety in prison," Blount, D-Jackson, said.

Going along with that, he said, "we need to give people who are not a threat to the public a chance to straighten out their lives."

Labels: immigration, labor rights

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:54 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Download the fact sheet from the Pew Hispanic Center's website. -Patricia

Pew Hispanic Center
May 8, 2008

Annual births to Hispanic women in the United States exceeded one million for the first time in 2006, and one-in-four children in the U.S. under the age of five is Hispanic, according to new reports from the U.S. Census Bureau. Hispanics now make up 15% of the U.S. population, and nearly two-thirds (62%) of their population growth in 2006-2007 came from births rather than immigration -- a reversal of the growth pattern in the 1990s, when immigration was the primary driver of Latino population increases in this country.

In order to illuminate these trends, the Pew Hispanic Center today releases "Hispanic Women in the United States, 2007," a statistical portrait of the demographic, social and economic characteristics of this country's 14.4 million Hispanic women.

Key findings from the report:

* Hispanic women are younger than non-Hispanic women. Their median age is 41, compared with a median age of 47 for non-Hispanic women.
* The fertility rate of Hispanic women is one-third higher than that of non-Hispanic women.
* Just over half (52%) of Hispanic women are immigrants. Their fertility rate is about 30% higher than that of native-born Hispanic women.
* Some 42% of Hispanic women who gave birth in 2005-2006 were unmarried, compared with 34% of non-Hispanic women. The share of out-of-wedlock births to Hispanic women immigrants was 35%; the share for native-born Hispanic women was 50%.
* Hispanic and non-Hispanic women are equally likely (54%) to be married. Hispanic women immigrants (63%) are more likely to be married than native-born Hispanic women (44%)-in part because the latter group is younger.
* Hispanic women are less educated than Non-Hispanic women; 36% have less than a high school education, compared with 10% of non-Hispanic women.
* The labor force participation rate of Hispanic women (59%) is similar to the participation rate for non-Hispanic women (61%). Native-born Hispanic women (64%) have a higher participation rate than Hispanic women immigrants (54%).
* Hispanic women who work full time earn a median weekly salary of $460; the equivalent figure for non-Hispanic women is $615.
* Hispanic women are more likely than non-Hispanic women to work in blue-collar occupations such as building and landscape services, food preparation and services, and manufacturing.
* Some 20% of Hispanic women live in poverty, compared with 11% of non-Hispanic women.

Labels: demographics

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:43 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is terrible. It shows how the hate that fuels ICE has no regard for the laws that protect ALL students enrolled in schools. These actions lead to incarceration-like consequences for families and communities that fear leaving their homes. What a violation of human rights! -Patricia

Editor's Note: Immigration raids near schools in Berkeley and Oakland have sent waves of panic in the communities and may keep undocumented students from attending class, writes NAM education reporter Amanda Martinez.

By Amanda Martinez, New American Media
May 8, 2008

OAKLAND, Calif. - Berkeley High senior Chase Stern said he was taking an Advanced Placement test May 6, when he noticed that his classmates were fidgeting in their seats and seemed distracted.

He soon found out that the Latino students were receiving text messages and phone calls from family members, warning them that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers were nearby, and that they should be cautious and find their way home because family members could not pick them up.

Scores of undocumented parents began to panic as early as 7: 30 a.m. May 6, as word got around that ICE vehicles were parked near schools in East Oakland and South Berkeley.

Parent liaison Isela Barbosa said she was swamped with phone calls all day. "Parents were so afraid to come to the school, they called family members and neighbors, whoever had papers, to pick up their children."

A community member contacted Mark Coplan, Berkeley Unified School District's public information officer to tell him that a Latino family from South Berkley had been detained at a house near Russell Street, and that neighbors had spotted ICE vehicles near school areas.

By noon, the district had received so many calls from concerned parents that they set up an automated voice message system, assuring parents that that there was no way they would allow ICE officers to pick up students from school campuses. These messages were sent out both in English and in Spanish.

At about the same time, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) officials were receiving similar calls from concerned parents and community members that ICE agency vehicles had been spotted near four Oakland schools, including Esperanza Elementary, where parents say they saw agents parked on International Blvd, 98th, 95th, and San Leandro Boulevard, a four block radius surrounding the school.

OUSD officials said they were hesitant to communicate with parents, so instead sent out e-mails to all school district staff about what was happening and reminding them that the school district's commitment was to educate all students, documented or otherwise. The e-mail also advised staff not to facilitate any immigration enforcement actions.

As word of the presence of ICE agents in the neighborhood spread, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums rushed over to Esperanza Elementary School, where a number of parents and community members had gathered.

Addressing them, the Mayor called the situation the "the ugly side of government."

He labeled the ICE actions "inappropriate and unnecessary" and reiterated that children needed education, not harassment. "There should be no raids in Oakland," he said.

"As a sanctuary city," Dellums said, "we're all in unison. We don't want this type of intimidation. Immigrants are human beings, and need to be dealt with respect."

Oakland Vice Mayor Larry Reid, who also showed up at the school, said there was no warning about the ICE raids. "ICE just rolls in and tells our police department after the fact," he said. "The students are upset and crying. The school's administration said some of the kids are very shook up."

ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said that the agency is mindful of the sensitivities associated with schools. She said there was no truth to the reports that ICE was targeting schools on this day, and that the two ICE fugitive operations teams based in the Bay Area go out virtually ever day seeking immigrant fugitives.

She confirmed that on the morning of May 6, ICE officers arrested four immigration violators who were from Mexico, and were living at a residence in Berkeley. A fifth person was arrested at a residence in Oakland, she said, noting that all five have been released, pending immigration hearings.

Sara Nuno of the Family and Community Office of the OUSD dismissed ICE's assertion that there was no targeting of any schools. "They are targeting schools and we are watching them do it," she asserted.

Ellen Murry, who had come to the school to pick up her grandnephew, said that she believed these types of government actions hurt all students, not just the undocumented ones. She said that if students stayed away from school out of fear, it could impact the school district's income, the bulk of which comes from student attendance.

Troy Flint, communications officer of OUSD, pointed out that such raids distracted students who were taking the state standardized test. He assured students that the OUSD would do everything it could to allow them to finish taking the tests.

Parents and local groups, including the Alameda Labor Council, sent out more than 900 e-mails letting parents know of what was taking place.

One parent liaison, who helped to make phone calls throughout the day to concerned parents, said he thought the fear of deportation was serious. If parents sought his advice, he said, he would tell them to keep their chidren at home, even though the OUSD has assured them that the students would be protected.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:20 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Jill Tucker,Jaxon Van Derbeken | SF Chronicle
Wednesday, May 7, 2008

(05-06) 19:24 PDT Oakland -- Immigration arrests at homes in Berkeley and
Oakland on Tuesday sent a wave of panic among parents in both cities, as
authorities mistakenly believed immigration agents were raiding schools.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were in both cities Tuesday,
performing routine fugitive operations, spokeswoman Virginia Kice said. Teams
go out virtually every day looking for specific "immigration fugitives," she
said.

Officers arrested four family members at a Berkeley home and a woman at an
Oakland residence. They were not at schools.

Yet, within the next few hours, rumors of raids circulated throughout the
communities.

In Berkeley, school district Superintendent Bill Huyet sent out an automated
phone message to all parents notifying them that a Latino family had been
picked up and assuring them that the district would "not allow any child to be
taken away from the school."

In Oakland, Mayor Ron Dellums and three school board members converged at the
end of the school day on Stonehurst Elementary School along with immigration
rights advocates, saying they believed ICE agents "would return."

"In my view, that is the ugly side of government," Dellums said. "No way
children should ever be treated to that kind of harassment and fear."

He said police officers will be posted at the campus Wednesday to ensure that
federal immigration officials don't come onto school grounds. He added that
federal officials have assured him they will not be at schools.

Initially, Oakland district officials said federal agents were at Stonehurst
and denied entry by school staff. By late afternoon, they rescinded that,
saying that an ICE vehicle was seen nearby. Berkeley officials also said no
agents were at local schools.

Still, state Sen. Don Perata, D-Oakland, got involved.

"There should be an immediate freeze on ICE raids directed at schoolchildren
while legislation aiming to fix immigration is considered," he said in a
statement.

Later, immigration advocates said they believed ICE vans were circling schools
and intimidating the community, noting that ICE officers accompanied a mother
onto an Oakland school campus in December before questioning her in a workplace
investigation.

Kice said Tuesday's rumors took on a life of their own.

In most cases, ICE fugitive operations take place at residences or sometimes at
places of employment, she said. "A school is not a place we would routinely
conduct an enforcement operation for a variety of reasons," Kice said.

The fear across the communities, however, was real.

"People are terrified," said Berkeley Unified spokesman Mark Coplan. "There is
a lot of speculation."

Larry Bensky's fifth-grade daughter came home from Berkeley's LeConte
Elementary School on Tuesday saying she had no homework because it was "ICE
week," which meant "they" were going after the families of the Latino children.

"She doesn't know what ICE is," Bensky said. "She doesn't know what targeted
is. You can imagine it's very disturbing for children that from one day to the
next that a child they sit next to could be kidnapped, arrested and deported."

Labels: immigration

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

Check out the entire study "Left in the Margins" it has some interesting findings. This is something that certain parts of California have dealt with for years, especially non-urban areas where the majority of the diverse Asian populations are refugee immigrants. Far too many Asians suffer from generalizations similar to Mexican/Chicano/Latino students in California. -Patricia

By David J. Hoff | Ed Week
May 8, 2008

Schools are failing to identify struggling Asian-American students under the No Child Left Behind Act and to get them the academic interventions they need, a report says.

“Contrary to stereotypes that cast Asian-Americans as model students of academic achievement, many Asian-American students are struggling, failing, and dropping out of schools that ignore their needs,” says the report, released last week by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Because the 6-year-old federal law fails to adequately track the academic achievement of all Asian ethnic groups, the organization contends, schools don’t need to publish test-score data that would highlight of the struggles of some groups of Asian-American students, particularly those...

Read on

Labels: English language learners, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:27 PM 0 comments Links to this post

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
May 1, 2008

LOS ANGELES, CA--(Marketwire - May 1, 2008) - Mexican Americans identify with their ethnic culture, and ethnic identification remains strong across generations, according to a report released Thursday, May 1, 2008, by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

The report -- based on the study and book titled "Generations of Exclusions: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race" (Russell Sage Foundation, 2008) -- concluded that ethnic assimilation among Mexican Americans is slow. The results, which are drawn from a longitudinal and intergenerational research study that updates "The Mexican American People" (1970), measured various markers of assimilation over a nearly 40-year time span.

"These findings support the view that Mexican Americans are part of an ethnic political community with a distinct ethnic and political sensibility," said the study's authors, UCLA sociology professor Edward E. Telles and UCLA associate sociology professor Vilma Ortiz.

For instance, when asked to name their ethnic identity, most respondents replied that they were Mexican or Mexican American. Smaller percentages identified as Chicano, Latino, or Hispanic. About 10 percent did not mention an ethnic group, preferring a term such as "American."

Sociologists also asked respondents about their racial identity and found that 38 percent of the first generation identified as white. White identity was markedly weaker among the children of original respondents and it declined with each successive generation.

The study also measured political party voting shifts among respondents and found that although a substantial majority of respondents did report voting for the Democratic candidate in 1964 and 1996, voting Republican increased in 2000.

By the 1996 presidential election, more original respondents -- 6 percent of the first generation and 17 percent of the third generation -- voted for the Republican candidate.

Although Mexican Americans in the study moved away from their traditional support for the Democratic Party, respondents agreed with Democratic positions on several controversial issues including immigration.

When asked in 2000 whether respondents agreed that Mexicans should be able to immigrate to the United States if they want to, a majority said yes.

Children of original respondents were less supportive than their parents, however, with just over half responding affirmatively. These numbers are, nonetheless, significantly higher than those reported by non-Hispanic whites and blacks.

"This intergenerational study suggests that Mexican American political participation has increased over time, but that a distinct ethnic and political sensibility remains in place," the study's authors noted.

The first study surveyed Mexican Americans living in Los Angeles and San Antonio in 1965 and 1966. From 1998 to 2002, nearly 700 of the original respondents were re-interviewed in addition to approximately 760 of their adult children.

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:20 PM 0 comments Links to this post

S.C. has nation’s largest increase in percentage of Hispanic population

By Anna Simon | Greenville Online
May 1, 2008

South Carolina leads the nation in the percentage increase in the Hispanic population, according to new U.S. Census information for 2007.

The state’s Hispanic population increased 8.7 percent, adding 13,569 residents from 2006.

Hispanics make up 3.83 percent of the state’s population, up from 3.59 percent a year ago and 2.37 percent in 2000.

The increase has led to a demand for new and expanded services ranging from bilingual classroom teachers to emergency room interpreters.

"A bilingual person is golden in any capacity," said Pat Mitchell, executive director of human resources for Greenville County Schools.

The influx in Hispanic students "places that much more demand on the need for teachers qualified to teach these students in a market that’s already tight," Mitchell said.

As a result, the district recruits Spanish teachers from nations including Spain and Costa Rica, Mitchell said.

Under an agreement between the state Department of Education and the Spanish government, 21 teachers from Spain are teaching foreign language courses in 11 South Carolina school districts this year, said Jim Foster, spokesman for the state Department of Education.

Greenville County School’s English for Speakers of Other Languages program also has grown -- tenfold -- from fewer than 500 students 10 years ago to more than 5,000 students today, and is the state’s largest in terms of enrollment, said Eve Diaz, program coordinator. Greenville has the most residents overall among the state’s 46 counties.

In 1998, the school district had fewer than 10 people designated to work only with English language learners. Today there are more than 100 personnel -- teachers and assistants -- who work at least part of a day, and some full time with the program, Diaz said.

The program’s growth is fueled by an expanding international population and also recent federal and state mandates such as No Child Left Behind that broaden the definition of who is served and for how long, Diaz said.

Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center also is actively recruiting bilingual employees.

The hospital is recruiting employees in registration and clinical areas in particular and also is increasing its language services staff to better serve the Upstate’s growing Hispanic communities, said Sandy Dees, a hospital spokeswoman.

"We are reaching out to minority vendors to help expand opportunities to work with GHS, and we are expanding our community outreach programming into the Hispanic community," Dees said. "We are covering a broader range of initiatives to better meet the needs."

While South Carolina has seen the nation’s largest percentage increase in Hispanic residents, the actual number of Hispanic residents -- 168,920 -- is relatively small compared to some other areas, according to the census figures.

The Hispanic populations of California and Texas grew by a larger number of people than South Carolina’s total Hispanic population. California’s Hispanic population grew by 267,779 people in 2007, and the Hispanic population in Texas grew by 307,782.

The increasing Hispanic population impacts personal life as well as professional life for Diaz, who came to Greenville in 1996 from the international climate of Miami, Fla. At that time she could spend an afternoon shopping at Haywood Mall and never hear a word of Spanish -- her own native tongue. Now she can hear Spanish spoken within minutes of entering the mall.

Diaz said Greenville’s growing foreign presence -- Hispanics and also people from other nations employed by companies, such as BMW and Michelin -- adds richness to life for all who live here.

"When we have students who speak another language at home, it can only enrich the overall classroom experience," Diaz said. "The world is shrinking with technology. It is even more important to be exposed to different cultures and people at a younger age. There is going to be a lot more sharing and diversity in the world that they grow up in."

At the same time, she’s aware that not everyone welcomes the growing numbers of Hispanic residents.

"Any time there’s any minority group that is different, there are always going to be incidents, things that occur that are reactionary," Diaz said. "I believe that the presence of foreign international population has helped Greenville and will continue to help Greenville."

Labels: bilingualism

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:14 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out the full report Californians and Education". -Patricia

Respondents fault the governor and Legislature for not providing more leadership over education.

Mitchell Landsberg | Los Angeles Times
May 1, 2008

Californians want their public schools protected from state budget cuts and are willing to tax the rich to make that happen. But despite the threat of schools taking a beating in next year's state budget, residents are sharply divided over whether they would support higher taxes for themselves, according to a statewide poll released late Wednesday.

The poll by the Public Policy Institute of California also turned up some interesting divisions among Californians -- by region, by political party, and by race and ethnicity.

Residents of Orange and San Diego counties were the happiest with their public schools, while residents of the San Francisco Bay Area were the grumpiest. Latinos and immigrants were far more likely than others to view public schools as primarily a springboard to college. And, not surprisingly, Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to support new taxes to pay for public schools.

The survey also found the public to be generally worried about the state of public schools and deeply dissatisfied with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature for their stewardship.

"I think today's report is very bad news for the governor," said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley and director of Policy Analysis for California Education. "It's not surprising that Californians would be confused about the tax issue, because this governor is politically weak, and he's weak because he isn't showing bold leadership."

Aaron McLear, Schwarzenegger's press secretary, countered that Fuller "would be hard-pressed to find anyone who's showing more leadership on education right now." He said the governor shares voters' concerns about cuts to education, but rejects tax increases to solve the problem.

"And that's why he's talking about budget reform: so we don't put the schools through this roller coaster of inconsistent funding year after year, and we're able to provide some stability," McLear said.

Education ranked as the second most important issue facing the state, well behind the sour economy but slightly ahead of immigration and gasoline prices.

Eighty percent of respondents said the quality of schools was a problem, and just over half said it was a big problem. Nearly 60% said the school system needs major changes.

More than half of those polled said they disapproved of Schwarzenegger's handling of education, and 61% disapproved of the Legislature.

The statewide survey of 2,502 California adults showed that attitudes about education have not changed significantly over the decade that the group has been conducting it.

"If anything, it was the consistency over time that struck me as being significant, especially in this strong economic downturn," said Mark Baldassare, president and chief executive of the nonpartisan think tank.

The poll revealed overwhelming agreement -- by nearly eight in 10 respondents -- that schools in poor neighborhoods have fewer resources than those in wealthier spots. Seven in 10 people said that if more money became available, a larger portion should go to schools in low-income areas. Most people agreed that more money would make schools better, although Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to hold this view. But there was near unanimity that schools could be improved through better use of existing state funds.

The survey revealed some fascinating differences in attitude among the state's ethnic and racial groups.

African Americans expressed the most concern about the quality of education, with 97% saying it was a problem and 72% saying it was a big problem -- far more than any other group. Blacks were the most concerned about the effect of budget cuts, whites the least.

Latinos were the most likely to support higher taxes on themselves to pay for education, whites the least. And when asked the primary goal of public schools, 61% of Latinos said it was to prepare students for college -- nearly triple the percentage of whites and double that of blacks and Asians. Those groups were more likely than Latinos to say the primary goal was to prepare students for the workforce, to teach them "the basics," or "life skills." There was a similar divide between immigrants and people born in the U.S.

"The belief that public education can provide a way to economic and social mobility is very strong among Latinos and immigrants," Baldassare said, "and among the native population and the white population, I think that K-12 schools are seen as providing a variety of different roles for different people."

Fuller said he was concerned that Latinos were less likely to worry about the quality of public schools.

He said he found that "troubling, because we know that on average, Latino students go to the lousiest schools in the state. . . . Latinos either don't understand the mediocre quality of their public schools or they're reticent to criticize public institutions."

The survey was conducted by telephone -- including, for the first time, cellphones -- between April 8 and April 22. For the total sample, the margin of error was plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Labels: California

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

WASHINGTON (April 26, 2008) – As we mark the 25th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk,” the spotlight is shining everywhere except where it is most needed. We need a clear-eyed accounting of the progress our schools and students have made over the past 25 years, and we need an honest assessment of the unfinished work required to protect the prospects of our young people and our nation into the future.

Instead of purposeful evaluation and planning, one group of commentators is furiously debating whether the Commission got it right when it claimed that the "tide of mediocrity" was getting “higher” back in 1983, as opposed to merely “high.” Meanwhile, another group argues that without fully and finally eliminating all of the outside-of-school challenges in children's lives, better schools won't make much of a difference.

These arguments distract us from attending to what we can and should do right now for our schools and for the students they serve. Yes, too many of our students are growing up under unconscionable conditions. And yes, we must commit ourselves and our nation to ensuring that no American child suffers under the burdens of poverty or racism. But we cannot allow gross inequities outside our schools to excuse gross inequities within our schools because the facts suggest that poor children and children of color can and do learn more when their schools are better.

Our schools now serve children with a more challenging array of needs than ever before. Yet virtually every group of those children—white, black, Latino, Asian, poor, rich—is achieving at higher levels in most subjects at most grade levels today than they were 25 years ago. In some cases, the achievement gaps which have plagued this country throughout our history are beginning to narrow. That’s solid evidence that strong and committed educators, unwilling to buy into the myths about what some kids can’t do, can make big differences for students, even in the face of daunting outside-of-school circumstances.

But while we’re doing better, it’s still not good enough. The rest of the world is outpacing us. Despite our gains, U.S. high school students now rank in the bottom quarter among industrialized nations in mathematics and in the bottom half in science. Our students are fleeing the very disciplines that are the foundation of the knowledge economy.

Even at the college level, where we’ve led the world for so long, our young adults have dropped to ninth place in attainment of associate’s and bachelor’s degrees. The gaps in college-going between black and Latino students and their white peers are wider now than they were 30 years ago. And for the first time in our history, American young adults are less likely to earn college degrees than are their parents.

We can’t afford to be distracted by other issues or satisfied with our progress. We can’t afford to do business as usual. We can’t afford to continue to ignore the fact that, in the great majority of cases, our schools continue to stack the deck against the success of low-income and students of color.

As Americans we know that education is the best route out of poverty and the surest weapon against racism. But instead of organizing our schools according to our values and the needs of our society, we undermine our most vulnerable students, giving them less of everything that makes for academic success—strong teachers, challenging courses, up-to-date textbooks, functional science labs and college scholarships.

Yes, our students have to work harder. As parents we need to work harder, too, instilling in our children the importance of persistence and effort. But we must also face the reality that schooling in America is out of sync with our long-held national values as well as with the urgent demands of the 21st century.

We strongly reaffirm the Commission’s original call for higher standards, and the efforts since that time to codify those standards and put them to work in American classrooms.
Those standards, however, must be for all students. As a country, we need all students to achieve at the highest levels. After all, poor and “minority” students together now comprise about half of our young people.

The Commission got it right when it said that “the twin goals of equity and high-quality schooling have profound and practical meaning for our economy and society, and we cannot permit one to yield to the other either in principle or practice.”

But in 25 years, our country hasn’t gotten this part right. Not even close.


Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights
The Education Trust
League of United Latin American Citizens
Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)
National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund
National Council of La Raza
Southeast Asia Resource Action Center

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:24 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Tuesday, May 6, 2008


Craddick: State should have a near $15 billion surplus going into next session

By Steve Taylor

House Speaker Tom Craddick speaks at the Lincoln Day Dinner in Pharr on Wednesday evening. (Photo: RGG/Steve Taylor)


PHARR, May 1 - Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick says the state should have about a $15 billion surplus going into the next legislative session.

“We went from a $10 billion deficit in four and a half years, to a $14.5 billion surplus,” Craddick said, of the period between 2003 and 2007. “We are going to go into session in January next year. We project we are going to have close to a $15 billion surplus.”

Craddick made the forecast during a speech at the Hidalgo County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner, held at the Nomad Shrine Club in Pharr. The speech focused on the achievements he believes Republicans have made during the six years they have controlled the House and the major tasks facing lawmakers in 2009. Craddick acknowledged that while rising oil prices have helped build the state's surplus, GOP policies have played a big part too.

“Your taxes have gone down. We’ve got a surplus and it just didn’t happen,” Craddick said. “Now, I didn’t create the price of oil and I know that’s helped a little but let me tell you right now, so did cutting spending, so did consolidating agencies, so did saying the word ‘no.’”

Having a surplus will allow lawmakers to bring more transparency to the budget process, Craddick said. For example, he said, the sales tax raised on sporting goods needs to go where it was intended, which is Texas Parks and Wildlife. An even bigger funding switch should happen with the gas tax, some of which currently pays for the Department of Public Safety, Craddick said.

“In the next session of the legislature, we need to quit funding DPS with highway money. We need to fund highways with highway money. It’s $1.6 billion. We need to move it (DPS) out of the highway fund and fund it in general revenue. We’ve got the money, now’s the time to do it. Let’s spend it on programs like that,” Craddick said.

Craddick said Republicans could be proud of the way they balanced the budget without raising taxes, brought in sweeping tort reform, and pumped more money into public and higher education.

Craddick became speaker in 2003, with the state facing a $10 billion budget deficit. The deficit was eliminated through cutting spending and consolidating agencies, Craddick said, pointing out that 13 health and human service agencies were consolidated into two. “Saved $1.2 billion a year in administration,” he said, of the HHS reforms.

Craddick said the new leadership came in with a different mindset. “We are going to treat this thing like a business, for the first time in years. We did. We ended up with a balanced budget at the end of the session. We funded schools. We didn’t have any new taxes,” he said.

Craddick said just changing the names of some of the state programs helped the state qualify for federal matching grants. In some cases, he said, the state could have been receiving $3 for every $1 it put towards a certain program. “Those federal dollars are dollars you paid into the federal budget. We weren’t getting our federal dollars back. Texas wasn’t participating,” he said.

Craddick said Republicans should also be proud about passing the largest property tax cut, not just in Texas but in the United States, $14.5 million. Property taxes went from $1.50 per $100 valuation to $1 dollar. “Many of you did not see all of that. That’s because your appraisals went up,” Craddick said. “We have got to get control of the appraisals in this state.” The audience clapped enthusiastically. “I know there is a lot of controversy over that but it’s a reality and we’ve got to do it,” Craddick added.

Craddick did not mention the new business margins tax that was brought in to replace funding lost through property tax cuts.

Another significant achievement for Texas, Craddick said, was the way it has led the nation in job creation and business start-ups these past five years. He said 200,000 new jobs were created in Texas last year. “We have created an Enterprise Fund that you all have used in this part of the state to bring in new business,” Craddick said, perhaps not realizing that the Rio Grande Valley has yet to benefit from the fund administered by the Governor's office.

Another huge improvement has been tort reform, Craddick said. He pointed out that in November 2002, just before he was elected speaker, he visited the Rio Grande Valley and learned how bad the situation was for doctors.

“It was interesting to me. Every chamber said, ‘Our major problem is medical malpractice. We have lost 100 doctors in the last 12 months. We can’t get doctors to practice here. They can’t find medical malpractice insurance. We’re Lawsuit Heaven USA, in South Texas,’” Craddick recalled.

“We went in and passed the greatest tort reform legislation that has ever been passed in the United States. You read any article in the country, they talk about Texas first. Mississippi, Georgia, Oklahoma, California, have all sent delegations to our office and said, ‘how did you do it?’”

Craddick said tort reform was passed by legislators meeting for 14 days straight, from 9.30 or 10 a.m. until four or five o’clock the next morning. The leadership fought off 750 amendments to the tort reform bill, he said. “What we did is we settle down and say, these are the things that have got to be done.”

Craddick said he remembers Gov. Rick Perry coming to his office in the early hours of the morning one day during the 2003 session and saying, “you’ve got to give,” on tort reform. Craddick said he handed Perry a note with one word on it. The note said: ‘No.’

“I said, ‘I’m not giving. People might think I’m hard-headed. They’re wrong. I just think we’ve got a task to do, we’re going to do it, and we’re going to stay here,” Craddick said, claiming Perry still carries the note.

Tort reform was achieved because Republicans “joined together in unity to do what was right and needed to be done in this state,” Craddick said. “That’s the reason we passed the budget with no new taxes. We can do it and we have done it in the past.”

As a result of tort reform, Craddick said, frivolous lawsuits have been reduced and 9,000 new doctors have come to Texas. “Look at other states, they are losing medical people. They are losing doctors and we are gaining them. Our hospitals have gone up in accreditation. Our programs have gone up more,” he said.

Craddick pointed to discipline, working long hours, and not reading the newspapers as key factors in the GOP’s legislative success. “None of these things were greeted with a lot of cheers. Change sometimes causes problems and change makes people upset. If you are in power and you lost power and changes are made, it even makes it more so. We did what we thought was right,” he said.

On the subject of public education, Craddick said everybody wanted better schools and more money for those schools. However, few people had any idea how to pay for it.

Craddick said Republicans were willing to put more money into schools and give teachers pay raises because they deserved it. Craddick said they did both, but with that had to come greater accountability.

“We want to know where they (school districts) are spending their dollars and what kind of return we are getting. What are the test scores? Today, I think if you talk to the school districts, they are very happy that came about,” he said.

“It took us a couple of special sessions, but we did that. We are now putting more dollars into teachers’ salaries and where it is needed, in the classroom, and not into administration.”

Craddick placed great emphasis on higher education and workforce training during his speech. He said Republicans had put more money into higher education in the last six years than was done throughout the 1990s. “I really believe, not only K through 12 but higher education, the junior college system and the four-year college system, is the backbone of this economy,” Craddick said.

Craddick said every region of the state wants to attract more businesses but in order to do that the state needs to do a better job of training its workforce. If not, he said, it is “all in vain.”

Craddick said he might not be popular for saying it but he does not subscribe to the view that every student needs to go to college or university. “Have you hired a plumber lately or an electrician lately?” Craddick asked, suggesting that greater emphasis needs to be placed on technical and service sector training.

“These people that get out of high school and then… to have to take millions of dollars that we are paying every year for remedial training to teach to get to a level where they can take a college course, it is ridiculous. We need to get rid of that,” Craddick said.

“There’s another side to that and the technical side and the service sector, we need to focus on these people, rather than have them drop out of school.” The audience applauded.

Reinforcing his belief that higher education and workforce training were key to the state’s future, Craddick told a story from a few years ago about the first time he met Michael Dell, founder of Round Rock-based Dell Computers. Dell explained that he was about to announce a new computer assembly plant and it was going to be in Georgia, rather than Texas.

“Unless you fix higher education and get more graduates and better graduates out of our four-year institutions the next time we add jobs we are moving out of Texas too,” Craddick said Dell told him.

Dell’s remarks said everything one needed to know about Texas’ approach to higher education in the 1990s, Craddick said. “We did not fund higher education. We have funded higher education. We spent $2 billion on tuition revenue bonds to build new facilities, to expand our medical schools, our law schools, our campuses here,” Craddick said.

Craddick concluded by saying that in the last six years the House had focused on education, tax cuts and jobs. “If you focus on those three it works and it has worked,” he said.


Write Steve Taylor

E-mail this article Printable version


OTHER STORIES

Salinas: We will defer to IBWC over height of concrete levee walls

Edcouch residents celebrate repeal of segregation ordinance

Galligan, Rio Grande Guardian, to be honored at HCBA Gala

Texas House members to visit Rapid Response Manufacturing Center

Superdelegate Gonzalez pledges for Clinton

Pérez: There's still time for Valley residents to testify against border wall

Hinojosa welcomes TXU's summer disconnections move

Remarks by Taylor, Tancredo, continue to draw criticism

Exhibit space sold out at McAllen Business Expo

TEIR promises a 'robust' Valley summit on immigration

Obama signs on as co-sponsor of Cornyn's Valley veterans' hospital bill

Researchers look for links between ancient populations and current Valley diseases

Craddick: State should have a near $15 billion surplus going into next session

CDF-RGV welcomes new campaign to insure every Texas child

Flores: Craddick has been great for the Valley

Elizondo sworn in as Hidalgo County Democratic Party chair

Reyes: Witness who claimed terrorists were crossing the Mexican border needs investigating

Escobar: I have not ruled out running again

Gallegos, Dewhurst differ on voter ID

Was Guerrero a victim of Mission Superfund site, ask local residents

Vitiello: Valley will benefit from failure of Arizona's 'virtual fence'

Craddick looking forward to Valley visit

JAG members to attend Elizondo’s swearing-in ceremony this evening

Foster to testify at Monday's border wall hearing in Brownsville

MIT professor to speak at Valley Interfaith’s Economic Conference tomorrow


© Copyright of the Rio Grande Guardian, www.riograndeguardian.com, Melinda Barrera, Publisher. All rights reserved.



© 2008 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 4:06 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Were more principals like this one.... -Dra. Valenzuela

ON EDUCATION
Principal Sees Injustice, and Picks a Fight With It

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: March 12, 2008
PHOENIX — One morning last August, Yvonne Watterson, the principal of GateWay Early College High School here, sat in her office, grimly scrolling through the database of its 240 students.

At the behest of a new state law she detested, she looked for which ones listed a Social Security number and which did not. Without a number, it was virtually certain that a child was in America illegally.

Ms. Watterson wound up with 38 names, many of them of boys and girls she had personally recruited to the school. Under the statute popularly known as Proposition 300, illegal immigrants could not receive in-state tuition at public colleges and universities in Arizona. Nor could school administrators like Ms. Watterson use state money to pay it.

GateWay’s students, while still in high school, are able to take courses at a community college in the same building, with in-state tuition paid by the high school. Ms. Watterson knew her students could not afford to pay the out-of-state rate, generally $280 a credit. And without the college classes, there would be less reason to stay in school.

So she made the list and sent letters home and began to call in the affected students one by one to tell them that their tuition was no longer subsidized. A girl named Karla crumpled to her knees in the principal’s office, and said, “But I’m a good person.” A few weeks later, Ms. Watterson heard, Karla was riding a bus back to Mexico.

Yvonne Watterson vowed to do something so she would not lose any more of her students. She made the vow because of what happened every July 12 back in Antrim, Northern Ireland, her hometown.

On that night, the local Protestants celebrated their forebears’ victory over a Catholic army three centuries earlier in the Battle of the Boyne. Even in the Arizona desert, Ms. Watterson remembered the sound of Loyalist anthems and the smell of burning tires and the sight of the pope being burned in effigy. Though she was a Protestant, even as a child she had always cringed imagining how July 12 felt to her Roman Catholic playmates up the block.

“I thought, ‘Here we go again, segregating kids, putting kids on a list,’ ” Ms. Watterson, 44, said recently in her office at GateWay. “It’s that hatred. It’s that separation. Not having to look someone in the eye. It’s a horrible, cowardly — I don’t know what to call it. I wouldn’t have believed I was in America.”

In her career as an educator, Ms. Watterson had been nothing if not decisive. When she became principal at GateWay in 2003, she threw out a progressive curriculum and replaced it with a traditional variety. She required all 10 teachers on the staff to reapply for their jobs and hired back just one. After visiting early-college high schools in New York City and Stockton, Calif., and seeing how well they served immigrant teenagers, she brought the model to GateWay.

So she went immediately into advocacy mode, giving an interview to The Arizona Republic, the daily newspaper in Phoenix. In the subsequent article, she was quoted describing the plight of her undocumented students and talking about her own experience as an immigrant after she came to America in the mid-1980s.

She mentioned Jose Razo, heading into his senior year, on track to accumulate more than 50 college credits in courses ranging from macroeconomics to video-game design. At home, he had a cologne box filled with certificates for the honor roll, perfect attendance, good citizenship. But he was not a citizen, and because of Proposition 300, he was already thinking about going to Mexico, a country he had left at age 2.

Ms. Watterson reaped the whirlwind of the blogosphere, as readers responded to The Republic’s article.

From Gilbert19: “These children are dishonest law-breakers; why do we want them going to our schools?”

From gbishop01: “You have totally destroyed your integrity.”

From AWhite: “All I have to say to these criminals is ‘DON’T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU ON THE WAY OUT’!!!!!”

The attacks attested to the vox populi. Proposition 300 had been approved with 71 percent of the vote. It won alongside three other ballot measures denying various rights to illegal immigrants and declaring English the official state language.

“In my heart of hearts,” Ms. Watterson said, “I thought, ‘Honestly, people can’t vote for something that would hurt kids who are taking college classes.’ I thought they just didn’t understand. Honest to God, that’s what I thought. But the overwhelming reply was, ‘That’s exactly what we intended.’ ”

Still, the response was not unanimous. A lawyer who doubled as a television host, José A. Cárdenas, called Ms. Watterson and arranged for Jose Razo to appear on his show.

About a week later, GateWay received an anonymous donation of $25,000 to help undocumented students pay their tuition. Mr. Cárdenas recommended that Ms. Watterson approach the Stardust Foundation in suburban Phoenix, and it gave $50,000.

Ultimately, Ms. Watterson received $83,000 from various donors. In January, she was named one of seven winners of a Phoenix-area award in memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After having her students write autobiographical thank-you notes to donors, she had the letters collected and published as a bilingual book, “Documented Dreams.”

Still, this ending is not quite happy. The donations came in too late for the affected students to take their college classes in fall 2007.

About $27,000 of it went toward their tuition for the spring semester of 2008, and the rest will cover next fall’s needs. Beyond that, there is only uncertainty.

“I don’t wake up every day to steal purses,” said Noemi Ariza, a 17-year-old student at GateWay. “I wake up to try my hardest to succeed. And for people to despise me, to tell me I have no right to be here, to look at me like a murderer — it’s so dehumanizing. All I’m trying to do is make something of myself.”

Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia University. His e-mail is sgfreedman@nytimes.com.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:21 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Reading First, according to this report, does increase the amount of time spent on reading but does not improve reading comprehension. Click here for full report [pdf].

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:31 PM 0 comments Links to this post

To read the press release, go to: http://www.forumforeducation.org/upload_files/files/pressrelease.pdf
.

A recording of the April 23rd press conference at the National Press Club is available here.

Portions of the event are available as video on John Merrow's site.

To read the Foreword, click here.

The full report, Democracy At Risk: The Need for a New Federal Policy in Education is available here.

-Angela



April 23, 2008 CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Prominent Educators Urge Greatly Expanded Federal Role in Improving Schools

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

Posted on Wednesday April 23, 2008

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:54 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Some seniors move to exam-free states to graduate

By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE | Houston Chronicle
May 3, 2008

Atascocita High School honors student Ashley Coxen wasn't about to let the state's high-stakes exam or severe test anxiety keep her from earning a diploma this June or from cashing in a promised college scholarship.

With her heart set on becoming a crime scene investigator, the 17-year-old figured a way around the science portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, which she's narrowly failed several times. A tearful Coxen flew last week to Denver, where she'll live with relatives until she earns her diploma from Colorado, a state that doesn't require students to pass an exit exam.

"I don't think a test should determine whether you graduate or not," Coxen said.

Texas is among about 20 states with high-stakes graduation exams. While researchers focus their efforts on identifying students who drop out because of these exams, no one collects statistics on the hundreds of other students who quietly exit Texas public schools to receive diplomas elsewhere. With just months or weeks left in their senior years, struggling students enroll in private schools or out-of-state campuses to skirt the TAKS. Others seek general equivalency diplomas or opt to be home-schooled down the final stretch.

As of March, 40,500 Texas high school seniors still needed to pass at least one portion of the four-part TAKS. Some of the students may have already dropped out, returned to their home country or moved out of state for issues unrelated to the TAKS, officials said. The majority, however, won't sport caps and gowns in June unless they passed the exam on their fifth attempt last week.

For some of these families, desperation is setting in.

"About mid-May last year, we got probably half a dozen or a dozen phone calls from public school seniors who were not able to graduate," said Tim Lambert, president of the Texas Home School Coalition."But that's not home schooling. You don't go to school, withdraw the last month and get a diploma."

Though the coalition and the state don't condone it, technically speaking, a parent could do just that. But it's up to each college or university to determine whether the home-school-issued diploma is sufficient to maintain any admission or scholarship the student earned while attending public school, Texas Education Agency spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said.

Otherwise, the state recognizes parents' rights to choose home schooling, private schools or out-of-state transfers, she said.

For the most part, Trevor Thorn, director of undergraduate admissions at Sam Houston State University, said officials usually don't question students who change schools late in their senior year.

"It may be personal," Thorn said. "It's really none of my business."

A few charter and private school campuses in Houston have earned reputations as diploma mills, he said. Students who transfer to those campuses subject themselves to extra scrutiny, he said, declining to name those schools.

More than 16,800 children left public school to be home-schooled in 2005-06 and 8,400 more left for private school, but the TEA couldn't pinpoint how many were high school seniors at the time, officials said.

Nija Higgins, who founded a private school in Dallas called T. Davis Independent School, saw her enrollment skyrocket last year when she started marketing her campus to high school seniors who were unable to pass the TAKS.

"We opened up Pandora's box," said Higgins, a former public school teacher. Though many private schools require students to enroll for a semester or two before they can earn a diploma, students can graduate from T. Davis in a matter of weeks.

About 100 students enrolled at T. Davis in January — the majority of whom are seniors, Higgins said. They all have to earn their class credits and complete a leadership class before they receive a diploma, Higgins said. Tuition starts at about $680, she said.

"I have a few that enrolled the last six weeks when they got their test scores," she said. "It just brings tears to your eyes when you hear all these parents."

Many are smart teens who will lose college scholarships if they don't graduate. Their parents are panicked, Higgins said.

State policymakers "don't realize that maybe they're just not good test takers. A lot of them just have anxieties," she said.

TEA officials aren't sure whether switching to end-of-course exams, which will be phased in for Texas high schoolers in 2011-12, could mean fewer students will face these types of tough decisions so late in their senior years.

Under that system, students will have to earn a combined score of 70 percent on their freshman, sophomore and junior level in each of the four main content areas. Each end-of-course exam also will count as 15 percent of a student's class grade.

Joan Herman, who directs a testing research center at the University of California, Los Angeles, said relying on a single assessment creates unintended consequences.

"That's the nature of blanket policies," Herman said.

If Coxen's parents weren't as aggressive, the teen could have become a dropout statistic, she said.

Coxen transferred from Colorado to Texas late in her sophomore year, which may be part of the reason she was tripped up by Texas' science test. She's also struggled with test anxiety throughout her academic career, said her mother, Shawna Coxen. Despite studying hard and working with a tutor, the teen failed by one question on the April retest.

"She's not a slacker. She didn't blow it off," Shawna Coxen said. "The poor kid's done everything she's supposed to do."

Labels: TAKS

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:22 AM 0 comments Links to this post

We truly can't afford not to... -Patricia

By Roberto Lovato, Of America | Alternet
May 1, 2008

As the Mayday marches approach, I hear the pattering of well-meaning, but worried hearts. Some have told me that they are worried that Mayday may become low-turnout day. Though normal and to be expected, especially in a climate so toxic with state and corporate media-sponsored hopelessness, such fears need to be recognized and dealt with, for such personal, internal negotiations in times of global crisis are the stuff that the best political dreams are made of.

So, as we ponder whether to move our bodies to march in an age when politics and, especially, "progressive" politics, have given way to the important, but largely disembodied politics of the web, here are a few things to consider:

1. Marching Matters - we might want to remember what ACTUP, Latin American and other activists taught and told us: silence=death. As the Pentagon propaganda scandal makes chillingly clear, the domestic war, the war within the borders is primarily psychological and symbolic. Elites know this and so should we. Add to the equation the physical war targeting migrants and you get a situation that demands that we demonstrate self-respect and courage in the face of such serious repression. Rather than simply absorb the messages of hopelessness and discouragement coming out of our TVs and computer screens (and even from some of our friends and families), let's move our bodies against the state and the elite interests controlling it. One of the best antidotes to the fear and isolation propagated by the media, government and other interests is to march with others. Marching helps us realize that, in a pathologically ill country, migrants and their supporters are, indeed, "aliens"; Marching reminds us that, yes, we are not alone. Regardless of how many of us march, it's critically important that those living in isolation and fear, especially our children and young people, need to see some of us raising our fists and heads before injustice. Next time someone tells you "marching doesn't matter", just ask them what marching might mean to those undocumented parents who've never participated in marches or anything political and who's small children watched them come out of the political closet of undocumented status for the first time in their lives.


2. The Government has Spent Billions to Attack Migrants and Destroy the Immigrant Rights Movement - in case you didn't realize it, in times of war and declining empire, immigrants and those who defend them become enemies of the state, useful enemies that help militarize life within the borders of the "nation". Just look at what happened after 9-11, especially after the marches of 2006: raids and home invasions by the thousands, massive deployments of thousands of heavily-armed ICE agents and national guard troops, billions spent on defensive walls, electronic surveillance and military equipment,..the list goes on and on. The exponential amounts of money, imprisonment rates and the state violence aimed at migrants should make abundantly clear what we're witnessing: a domestic war on immigrants. Local, state and federal governments have spent billions to destroy us, yet still we march.

3. The mainstream media is fatally ignorant of -and antagonistic towards- immigrants and immigration issues - you might remember that this is the same media that repeated mantra-like that the marchas of 2006 "came out of nowhere"; the same media that then proceeded to report on the marches without context, reporting as if Mojadopotli, the God of the Undocumented, magically moved DJ's as he/she rained millions of marchers down on hundreds of U.S. towns and cities. Rather than worry that your local and national media are already reporting on the marches as a failure because "far fewer" people are "expected" to show up, you might stop for a moment to consider that the media is simply doing its political job-and then march anyway. And there are much better, even funner ways to spend your Mayday than taking in gobs and gobs of messages from the most sophisticated and private sector-driven spin and propaganda system ever devised.


4. Movements have their ebbs and flows-and we're ebbing right now - if your political commitment depends on the fix of massive marches for you to feel good or inspired, you might consider checking into a political detox facility immediately. Such conjunctural logic fits perfectly into the "look, their marches have diminished" "reporting" that we even hear from the Spanish language and broken-Spanish-inflected reporting of some Latino surnamed reporters. Not to march means we further enable the diverse and cowardly interests aligned against migrants: Minutemen, the Bush Administration, the media, Democrats and Republicans and others. The moment we forget that the true measure of movements that inspire social and political change is what happens in the heart and mind is the moment we allow the whispers and hollers of our adversaries to crystallize inside of us. This dark, defensive moment will pass only if at least some of us continue to carry the candle of hope.

5. Immigrants Still Lead the Way - more than anything, Mayday should serve to remind us of the power of immigrants to alter history. It's because of immigrant workers that children (at least most working class children) no longer languish in factories; it's because of immigrant workers that there's an 8 hour workday; it's in no small part because of immigrants and other free, partially free and wholly unfree workers that any "freedom" exists in the cold heart of the most powerful and most rapidly declining empire ever.


So, in the face of the unholy alliance of interests aligned against us from above, let us march if only to connect to the tradition of freedom brought from below.

A marchar!


Roberto Lovato, a frequent Nation contributor, is a New York-based writer with New America Media.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:55 AM 0 comments Links to this post