Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas: June 2008

Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas

ABOUT US

Angela Valenzuela - Founder
Patricia D. Lopez - Contact

The Human Face of Budget Cuts

Teachers' trainers must make the grade, too

Crackpot schools

Districts Adopt Mexican Curriculum to Help Hispani...

Edwatch by Julia Steiny: ‘Merit pay’ costs more an...

Texas students struggle on early versions of end-o...

Retreat into Whiteness By Jeff Chang

School districts fight TEA laws

We May Be Born With an Urge to Help

In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap...

Class of 2006 exit exam passing rates (San Diego and statewide)

About 1 student in 10 statewide failed the test in 2006, the first year the exam was required - and this number improved only slightly last year.

	Passing rate
	San Diego	State
By grade 12
Overall passing rate by spring '06	90%	91%
By grade 10
Students who passed English section	76	75
Students who passed math section	74	74
English language learners
Students who passed English section	28	39
Students who passed math section	41	49

Sources: San Diego, authors' calculations; statewide data available at dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest.

Labels: California, high-stakes testing

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:14 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Ore. students set to get choice of graduation test

By JULIA SILVERMAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
June 21, 2008

PORTLAND, Ore. -- When Oregon education officials set out to devise a graduation testing requirement for high school students, they looked to other states for inspiration - on what not to do.

In neighboring California, dropout rates soared the first year the state required high schoolers to pass a test to get their diploma. In Texas, 40,000 disgruntled students were dispatched to summer school in 2007 after not passing the state test. And in Washington state, lawmakers simply canceled plans to require exiting students to pass a single, comprehensive math test, after fears surfaced that thousands wouldn't measure up.

"We didn't think any one test should determine whether someone gets a diploma," said Duncan Wyse, vice-chairman of the Oregon Board of Education.

So board members chose a different route. This week, they approved a a plan that lets students pick from three options: a national test, state assessments or a local version, such as a student portfolio, to show colleges and employers they have mastered reading, writing, applied math and speaking skills. Passage on any one of the three, along with fulfilling course requirements, would guarantee a diploma.

The plan makes Oregon one of several states moving past the "one-size-fits-all" high-stakes testing that became commonplace in many U.S. high schools in the 1990s. In Pennsylvania, the Board of Education is considering a three-pronged approach similar to Oregon's plan, while in Maryland, students who can't pass the state tests could be allowed to do a senior project instead.

But some say such choices allow some students - and states - to take the easy way out.

Daria Hall, assistant director for K-12 policy at Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for poor and minority children, points to New Jersey, where up to 80 percent of students at high schools in poor cities like Newark and Camden receive alternative diplomas after not passing the state tests. The number falls to about 3 percent in wealthy areas like Princeton, N.J., she said.

In most states, she said, the exit exams test skills students learned in ninth and tenth grades. That's basic enough, she said, that there should be no need for the safety net of alternate assessments, which can be put in place for political cover.

"These young people want to walk across the stage with their friends and their classmates," she said. "But why isn't there the same level of outrage that students were not able to pass these basic competency assessments in the first place?"

Oregon school board members, though, say they'll work hard to ensure that the local option, with local teachers judging their own students, doesn't become an easy way out.

"We will provide a common scoring guide, and review students' work to make sure there is consistency," with periodic spot-checks, Wyse said.

The trend is definitely moving away from a single, high-stakes test, said Jack Jennings, president of the Center for Education Policy in Washington, D.C., especially in states that have long traditions of local control for school districts.

There's also the No Child Left Behind factor, he noted. That's the Bush administration's education reform law, which has required yearly testing from grades 3-8 and in grade 10, with consequences for schools where enough students don't make progress. The law is unpopular with many teachers and principals, and has sparked a backlash against testing that didn't exist a decade or so ago when most states were considering exit exams, he said.

That's not to say that high stakes tests are totally out of fashion. Twenty-three states required the class of 2008 to pass tests to graduate from high school. Most states give students multiple chances to take the tests and many, including California, have set aside millions of dollars to pay for remedial coursework aimed at getting more students to pass the tests.

Still, John Warren, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, who has done extensive research on exit exams, said his research has proved few tangible benefits and suggested that testing requirements will result in more dropouts.

"There is no empirical evidence about whether alternate formats will result in better outcomes than one-size-fits-all," he said. "Unless there are additional resources for things like summer school, you are still relying on motivation alone."

Labels: graduation rates, high-stakes testing

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:09 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Ohio education grant to study alternatives to standardized testing

State will study alternative assessment
Monday, June 16, 2008
Scott Stephens
Plain Dealer Reporter

Put down that No. 2 pencil and grab a paint brush. Or design a research project. Or go to work in a homeless shelter.

A growing number of people in Ohio are asking whether one-size-fits-all standardized tests - the cheapest and most efficient way to meet federal No Child Left Behind accountability requirements - are the best and fairest way to measure academic progress.

In April, Ohio education officials secured a $1.3 million grant to explore alternative assessments, such as portfolios, senior projects, journals, small-group collaborations or teacher observation. The idea: Give students an assessment that requires them to accomplish complex or significant tasks rather than forcing them to choose from multiple-choice responses.

And earlier this month, a statewide student group, Ohio Youth Voices, asked Gov. Ted Strickland to consider alternatives to the Ohio Graduation Test. Currently, Ohio students have to pass the five-part exam by the end of their senior year to get a diploma.

"Schools once renowned for their unique learning programs are becoming nothing more than soulless factories that churn out those that can excel at standardized tests while discarding those who can't," the leaders of the group, Shaw High School senior Jonathan Lykes and Federal Hocking High School senior Mason Pesek, wrote to the governor.

"We'd really like to talk to the governor and work to come up with another system," Pesek said in an interview. "Essentially, the current system is really failing Ohio's students."

Strickland spokesman Keith Dailey said the governor's office was reviewing the letter.

"The governor is aware that concerns have been raised about the Ohio Graduation Test," Dailey said. "He is open to exploring other types of assessments to address those concerns as part of the education reform process."

The exploration will begin in September when teams of educators from districts across the state will gather in Columbus and be asked to choose from a smorgasbord of alternative assessments and field-test them during the coming school year. The theory: Since students learn in different ways, shouldn't they also be tested in different ways?

"Our current tests are just one measure of learning, just like in medicine, a blood test is one measure," said State Superintendent Susan Tave Zelman.

"We see this as giving kids multiple ways to demonstrate their competence and still have academic rigor," she added. "I think we can do this in Ohio and lead the rest of the country."

While Ohio might be positioning itself as a trend-setter in alternative assessments, the concept is hardly new. In the early 1990s, Vermont required all eighth-graders to complete a portfolio assessment in both English and math. Kentucky overhauled its testing program in 1998 and used an assessment that combined essays, multiple-choice questions and a writing portfolio.

"It was a very hot topic," said Ron Dietel, assistant director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Stan dards and Student Testing at UCLA. "There was a general concern that standardized tests really didn't show what students know."

Cincinnati was among the most progressive districts in the country on alternative, or performance-based, assessment. Students demonstrated their grasp of history by taking on a character from the past. They learned about Reconstruction by reading the diaries of white teachers sent to the South. They wrote letters to local newspapers, or gave public speeches.

"I've seen it as energizing rather than depressing," said veteran teacher Diana Porter. "It's assessment that is still standards-based, but students get to shape it a little, too."

But alternative assessments had their problems. They could be difficult to score and costly to implement. Political pressure grew to find something more efficient, a pressure that eventually led to the standardized test- oriented No Child Left Behind law in 2002.

With reauthorization of the federal law stalled in Congress, some see an opportunity to incorporate alternative tests into the federal mandate. Rhode Island lawmakers, for instance, have integrated alternative assessments into their state's testing system.

But Dietel warns that the easy lure of simple test scores has not disappeared.

"I wouldn't necessarily expect states to jump back on the alternative-assessment bandwagon," he said. "Even though a lot of states and a lot of schools would like to do it, a lot of people like looking at those regular test scores to see how their schools are doing."

And when teachers and principals are judged solely by the test scores of their students, there will be little time for portfolios and letters to the editor, Porter said.

"It's harder now to get teachers to stick their toe in the water and give it a try," she said.

Labels: high-stakes testing

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:06 AM 0 comments Links to this post

2 New Coalitions Seek Influence on Campaigns

By David J. Hoff | Ed Week
June 18, 2008

Washington

Should schools be held primarily responsible for improving student achievement, or do they need help from health and social programs to ensure their students’ success?

Two sets of prominent educators and policy leaders released statements last week emphasizing different answers to that question. But both groups acted with the same purpose: to inform and highlight the debate over education in the 2008 presidential campaign and to influence the future of the No Child Left Behind Act and other policies of the next president.

The Education Equality Project, formally launched last week by New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist, plans to organize events at the Democratic and Republican national conventions to promote its message that “public education today remains mired in the status quo” and “shows little prospect of meaningful improvement” without significant changes in the ways schools are structured, its statement said.

Read on...

Labels: NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:02 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Graduation rates declining in L.A. Unified despite higher enrollment, study finds

Check out the full report: " What Factors Predict High School Graduation in the Los Angeles Unified School District?"

-Patricia

Experts say the exit exam is having a huge effect on dropouts. The UC-led report showed that middle school experiences and teacher quality were also major factors.

By Mitchell Landsberg | Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 21, 2008

The number of students graduating from Los Angeles public schools has declined for two straight years even as enrollment in the 12th grade has been rising sharply, new state data show. The graduation slump began when California started requiring students to pass an exit exam before they could receive a diploma.

The data caught educators by surprise after they were quietly posted on the state Department of Education website. Separately, new research released this week indicated that only 48% of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District graduate on time.

The latest figures are sure to stir new concerns about the ability of Los Angeles schools to serve the needs of the majority of their students, and revive a debate about the wisdom of mandating an exit exam, even one that has been described as requiring only about an eighth-grade education to pass.

The Los Angeles Unified School District officially declared a 64% graduation rate in 2005-06, the most recent year for which a rate is available. District leaders have long disputed studies that have shown the rate to be under 50%.

But district officials did not reject the findings of the latest study, released Thursday by the California Dropout Research Project at UC Santa Barbara. Perhaps the most in-depth study ever done of Los Angeles dropouts, it examined individual student transcripts for the class that began ninth grade in September 2001 and should have graduated in June 2005.

"It's a good methodology," said Esther Wong, L.A. Unified's assistant superintendent for planning, assessment and research, who reviewed a draft of the study. "It's certainly better than trying to calculate it and do a best estimate."

Wong did question whether the study might have understated the graduation rate by not accounting for students who transferred to other districts. But Jeannie Oakes, a professor of education at UCLA who oversaw the research, said such students were removed from the count of incoming ninth-graders, so they could not have tainted the findings.

The study concluded that the low graduation rate for L.A. Unified can be explained in large measure by the quality of students' middle school experience and the quality of teachers at their high schools.

"We've learned from this that middle school is just hugely important," said Oakes, who runs UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education & Access. Although the dropout project is based at UC Santa Barbara, it relies on researchers at several institutions, and the study was conducted at UCLA.

The study found that differences among schools -- for instance, the percentage of highly qualified teachers, the percentage of English learners and the status of the school as a magnet -- played a stronger role in predicting whether a student would graduate than "student factors," such as race and socioeconomic status.

Magnet schools had a major effect on success. Nearly three-quarters of the students attending an L.A. Unified magnet high school graduated on time, compared with just 45% of those who didn't. Magnet schools typically offer specialized, theme-based instruction and were mandated by a court order to attract students of different races.

The dropout study and the recently released state data foreshadow the release of new and potentially explosive statistics on the state dropout rate that are expected in mid-July. Because California has begun assigning new, statewide identification numbers to all public-school students, the dropout data are expected to be far more accurate than in the past, when there was near-universal acknowledgment that the numbers vastly understated the problem.

Statewide, 12th-grade enrollment has been rising for several years, the result of a baby boomlet in the late 1980s. Meanwhile, the number of high school graduates has stayed stagnant.

In Los Angeles Unified, the rise in enrollment has been steeper than for the state overall, yet the number of graduates declined from 29,744 in 2005 to 27,438 in 2007.

The high school exit exam, often referred to by its acronym, CAHSEE, became a requirement for a diploma beginning with seniors who graduated in 2006. State and local officials widely agreed that it was the most likely cause for a decline in graduates.

"I can't think of any other reason," said Keric Ashley, director of data management for the California Department of Education. "The CAHSEE does have some impact, not as much as some people thought it would."

John Rogers, a UCLA professor who has studied the exit exam's effect on graduation rates, said he believes the state has downplayed its impact. The exam will hit the class of 2008 especially hard, he said, because for the first time, special education students had to pass the test.

"In 2008, far fewer students will graduate than probably any year over the last 25 years," Rogers said.

Figures for 2008 graduates aren't expected until next spring.

Debra Duardo, the director of dropout prevention and recovery for Los Angeles Unified, said there were no surprises in the new data, and the dropout project study confirmed what district officials have assumed about the barriers that keep students from graduating.

For instance, as others have done previously, the researchers pointed to algebra as a tripwire for many students.

Seventy percent of students who passed Algebra 1 by the end of ninth grade went on to graduate on time.

But the majority of students did not pass it in eighth or ninth grades, and roughly two-thirds of them failed to graduate on time.

The study found that students who changed schools during either middle or high school had much lower graduation rates, including students who switched between the sixth and seventh grades.

Duardo said the district is responding to those problems.

She also said the study overlooked the district's recent success in keeping students in school, and on track to graduate, after they miss their normal graduation date.

"If they don't do it in four years, maybe they can do it in five years," she said.

Labels: California, graduation rates

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:25 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Advocates Say NCLB’s ‘Comparability’ Provision is in Need of Fine-Tuning

Check the full report "Ensuring Equal Opportunity in Public Education How Local School District Funding Practices Hurt Disadvantaged Students and What Federal Policy Can Do About It" that includes the section "What If We Closed the Title I Comparability Loophole?" cited here by Roza.

-Patricia

By David J. Hoff | Ed Week

Washington-
When Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, it rewrote much of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, increasing the amount of testing required and demanding that states hold schools accountable for results on those tests.

Although the changes were intended to hold school officials accountable for the educational experiences of disadvantaged children, Congress left intact a short clause in the main K-12 education law that, in practice, has failed to ensure that money from the federal Title I program only supplements state and local money, researchers and advocates said at a conference here last week.

“Title I is not having its intended effect,” Marguerite Roza, a research associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, said at the one-day conference sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank. “It’s filling in the holes left by state and local funds.”

Differences in School Spending

Researchers looking at a sample of California school districts have documented that the districts spend more on teacher salaries and other expenditures in low-poverty schools than in high-poverty schools.

Read On...

Labels: California, High-poverty schools, high-stakes testing, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:38 PM 0 comments Links to this post

State Testing Mandates Swell Summer School Ranks

Thousands in Georgia, elsewhere take classes to help gain promotion.

By Linda Jacobson | Ed Week
June 18 2008

Thousands of incoming middle and high school students in Georgia will spend some of their summer vacations sitting at desks in hopes of earning a passing score when they take another crack at a challenging state math test.

The disappointing scores of 5th and 9th graders on tests they must pass before moving to the next grade are an example of the struggle some states are having as they try to meet the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act while raising their academic standards.

And Georgia is among a number of states where students often end up attending district-administered summer school programs because they didn’t meet academic standards set by the state.

Texas is one of several states in which summer remediation programs are specifically targeted to elementary school pupils who have not met reading targets by the end of 3rd grade.

Read on...

Labels: high-stakes testing

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:32 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Attitude Determines Student Success In Rural Schools

To check out the full report: "What Determines Student Success in Rural Schools?"

-Patricia

ScienceDaily (June 19, 2008) — While most of the country focuses on ACT scores, student-teacher ratio and rigorous curriculum to increase student success, it may be the commitment to excellence that determines student achievement in rural schools. This is an overlooked, yet critical, factor when considering nearly half of American school districts are in rural areas, educating nearly 21 percent of all students.

Perri Applegate, a researcher at the University of Oklahoma K20 Center, recently investigated the qualities that differentiate a high-achieving school and low-achieving rural high school, focusing on high-poverty high schools with at least 51 percent of the population eligible for free or reduced lunch.

Applegate compared the scores on Oklahoma's Academic Performance Index, the state's annual school report of 367 Oklahoma high schools ranging from large, urban to small rural schools. She found no significant difference in achievement of rural schools and those in other settings.

Surprisingly, the top factors that did impact student achievement in urban high schools, ACT scores and dropout rates, did not determine student success in rural schools. Community involvement and the school's commitment to student excellence were the determining factors in whether a rural school was high- or low-achieving.

"In small-town America, the school and the community are dependent upon each other for success," said Applegate. In rural areas, schools tend to be the center of the community, acting as a gathering place and often social services. In larger towns, students have access to resources and support outside of their schools.

"Rural schools in the study listed the same factors as impacting student achievement: poverty, parental support, community, extracurricular activities and a caring school culture," said Applegate. "The difference between a high- or low-achieving rural school was how they -- both the school and the community -- met those challenges."

High-achieving schools had educators that embraced the role of being a rural teacher, which typically means wearing many hats and being creative with necessary resources. The schools had shared and supportive leadership, empowered stakeholders to take leadership roles and did not accept the idea that students were destined to fail based on their address. As one rural teacher pointed out, "Intelligence isn't geographically based."

Other factors included parents and community members who support the teachers, or if necessary, the school enacted programs to increase support. Another key factor was high-achieving schools gave students many opportunities to connect their learning to the well-being of the community, reinforcing the school-community bond.

While affected by the same variables, low-achieving schools felt that being a rural school was a handicap for student achievement and the lack of resources was a burden to school administration and the community. This attitude reflected in the educational approach of the school and in the student's probability to go to college.

According to Applegate, these finding have serious implications beyond education. Research shows that schools can save communities. The success of one can determine the success or failure of the other.

"We can't assume that student success in all schools, large and small, is impacted by the same issues," said Applegate. "So the question becomes how do we help schools in their environment become successful?"

For rural schools, Applegate suggests preparation programs need to provide specialized training for those who will serve in this setting. Policymakers need to acknowledge that rural schools have particular strengths and weaknesses. Finally, reform programs aimed at improving rural schools need to be tailored to meet their unique needs.

Labels: Rural schools

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:18 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Report Sees Cost in Some Academic Gains

I think Wilkins makes a good point in stating: “My concern is that this report makes it seem like we have to choose between seeking equity and excellence,” she said. “We need to strive for both.”

Here's the link to the full report: "High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind"

-Patricia

By SAM DILLON | NY Times
Published: June 18, 2008

A new study argues that the nation’s focus on helping students who are furthest behind may have produced a Robin Hood effect, yielding steady academic gains for low-achieving students in recent years at the expense of top students.

The study, to be released on Wednesday, compared trends in scores on federal tests for the bottom 10 percent of students nationwide with those for the top 10 percent and said those at the bottom moved up faster than those at the top.

In tests of fourth-grade reading from 2000 to 2007, for instance, the scores of the lowest-achieving students increased by 16 points on a 280-point scale, compared with a gain of three points for top-achieving students, according to the study, by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a research organization in Washington.

The period of big gains for low achievers and minimal ones for high achievers coincides with the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, which took effect in 2002. The study said that while it was impossible to know whether the law caused those scoring patterns, such a result would hardly be surprising, since the law made it a goal to reduce the gap separating low-scoring, poor and minority students from higher-scoring white students.

Under the law, schools are required to bring increasing percentages of students to proficiency in reading and math each year or face sanctions that can include the firing of staff members. As a result, many schools organize instruction around helping low-performing students reach minimal proficiency.

In the debate over the law, little attention has been paid to the languid growth among high-achieving students, a trend with troubling implications for the nation’s economic competitiveness.

“This is like sports,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., the institute’s president, who served in the Education Department under President Ronald Reagan. “If the only goal of a sports program is to get people over a three-foot hurdle, why would anybody be coached to get over a four-foot hurdle? They wouldn’t. So those who can already sail over a three-foot hurdle have no incentive to do anything except to sleep late.”

The report included results of a survey of a nationally representative sample of 900 teachers. Seven in 10 teachers said their schools were more likely to focus on struggling students than average or advanced students when tracking achievement data and trying to raise test scores. And about three-quarters of the teachers surveyed said they agreed with this statement: “Too often, the brightest students are bored and under-challenged in school — we’re not giving them a sufficient chance to thrive.”

Amy Wilkins, a vice president at Education Trust, which lobbies for policies to help close the achievement gap, said the gains by low achievers should be applauded. “My concern is that this report makes it seem like we have to choose between seeking equity and excellence,” she said. “We need to strive for both.”

Susan Traiman, director of education policy at the Business Roundtable, a group that represents business executives, said the challenge was to improve the ability of schools to educate students across a range of levels.

“We’re producing progress at the bottom, and we need to maintain that,” Ms. Traiman said, “but we need to ratchet up the performance of students at every achievement level if we’re going to be competitive.”

Labels: NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:53 AM 0 comments Links to this post

New SAT is A) Better, B) Same, C) Longer?

Definitely check out Fair Test's response to the "'NEW' SAT Validity Study".

-Patricia

Study Shows Exam Has Similar Results Regardless of Essay

ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 18, 2008; Page D6

The writing section added to the SAT in 2005 has done very little to improve the exam's overall ability to predict how students will do in college, according to research released Tuesday by the test's owner.

Critics of the SAT seized on the College Board's findings, which came three years after the revamped, nearly four-hour exam made its debut.

"After all their ballyhoo about how the new test was going to be a better tool for college admissions, it's not," said Robert Schaeffer, director of the group FairTest. "It's longer and more expensive. That's all you can say about it."

The College Board defended the SAT, saying that no predictor of college success is perfect but that the exam is a remarkably good one.

It emphasized the finding that the writing test actually does a slightly better job of predicting freshman-year college grade-point average than do the math or critical reading sections, both of which are multiple choice.

"Both tests are very valid -- the old one and the new one," said Laurence Bunin, the senior vice president who oversees the SAT program. "What's important here is that the new SAT places an emphasis on writing" and offers a valid test of another skill that is "critical to college success."

The SAT runs three hours, 45 minutes -- 45 minutes longer than the old version -- and will cost $45 this year and next, up from $29.50. The ACT, the other leading college-admissions exam, has an optional writing section.

The College Board added the writing test, including a 25-minute essay, in order to help colleges make more-finely tuned decisions concerning students' skills.

College admissions officers can even download and read the students' essays. The multiple-choice sections were also changed somewhat in 2005.

The College Board, a not-for-profit group, claimed the test would elevate the place of writing in high school classrooms.

It backed up that argument last year with a survey reporting 88% of teachers said writing had become a bigger priority in their schools.

From the start, however, some teachers criticized the exam, arguing it encouraged formulaic writing and was susceptible to coaching.

The findings released Tuesday are the most comprehensive study yet of the new exam, covering about 150,000 students.

The analysis measured the connection between SAT performance for the high-school class of 2006 and college grades.

The correlation scale ranges from minus 1 to 1.

A correlation of zero would indicate no connection between scores and grades, and 1 would show a perfect correlation -- basically, showing that students with high scores on the SAT are guaranteed to earn high college grades.

The study found high-school GPA had a .54 correlation with college grades, which is considered fairly strong.

Individually, all three SAT sections had lower correlations, but taken together they were .53.

Combining high-school GPA with the three SAT scores was stronger still -- .62. But that was just .01 higher than if the writing exam weren't included.

Copyright © 2008 Associated Press

Labels: high-stakes testing, higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:41 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Report Finds Little Gain From Vouchers

By Maria Glod and Bill Turque | Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 17, 2008; Page B06

Students in the D.C. school voucher program, the first federal initiative to spend taxpayer dollars on private school tuition, generally did no better on reading and math tests after two years than public school peers, a U.S. Education Department report said yesterday.

The findings mirror those in previous studies of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, passed by a Republican-led Congress in 2004 to place the District at the leading edge of the private school choice movement. It has awarded scholarships to 1,903 children from low-income families, granting up to $7,500 a year for tuition and other fees at participating schools.

The report comes at a politically perilous moment for the program. Congressional Democrats, led by D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, want to phase it out, arguing that it drains money and other resources from public schools. Most scholarship recipients have enrolled in Catholic and other faith-based private schools.

Voucher supporters assert that Democrats, who now control Congress, should not deny poor families the kind of choices available to the well-to-do to satisfy such anti-voucher interest groups as teachers unions.

This afternoon, a House Appropriations subcommittee will consider President Bush's request for $18 million to continue the program.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings renewed her call yesterday to preserve the program, stressing that it has shown promising achievement trends. Researchers found gains in reading among some groups of scholarship recipients, although they said the bump could be due to statistical chance.

"No one in a position of responsibility can sever this lifeline right now and leave these kids adrift in schools that are not measuring up -- not when they have chosen to create a better future for themselves," Spellings said.

The congressionally mandated study, conducted through the Institute of Education Sciences, the department's research arm, compared the performance and attitudes of students who had scholarships with those of peers who sought scholarships but weren't chosen in the lottery.

Both groups took widely used math and reading tests, such as the Stanford Achievement Test. Overall, there was no statistically significant difference in performance.

But some groups of voucher recipients showed improvement. For instance, among students who earned relatively high reading scores before the program started, those with scholarships progressed faster and are now about two months ahead of their peers.

Students who previously attended struggling schools -- a group the program is designed to help -- showed no boost in test scores compared with their peers. Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, director of the institute, said one possible explanation is that those children lagged far behind academically and had trouble adjusting to what may be a more demanding classroom.

Parents of students with scholarships were more satisfied with their children's new schools and were less likely to worry that schools could be dangerous, the report found. Students showed no difference in their level of satisfaction.

Labels: Vouchers

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

'Two Million Minutes' suggests it's time to improve U.S. education

Some good points made in response to the documentary. Check out the trailer to the film here

-Patricia

A Memphis entrepreneur's documentary compares high-achieving students from India, China and America. It has drawn mixed reactions from academics.

By Mitchell Landsberg | Los Angeles Times
June 16, 2008

It was over dinner in Bangalore that Bob Compton began to suspect something was deeply amiss in the way America educates its young.

Compton, a successful venture capitalist, was meeting with some of the Indian software engineers he employed. He soon found himself engaged in "the most interesting conversations I've ever had."

He had expected math and science nerds. But they also knew more about history, geography and literature than most Americans he knew.

"I said to them, 'How'd you get this way?' " he recalled. "They said, 'Well, at school.' "

That conversation launched Compton, 52, of Memphis, Tenn., on a mission. As both an entrepreneur and the father of 14- and 16-year-old girls, he wanted to know what schools in other countries were doing that American schools weren't, and why the United States performed so miserably on international student comparisons.

The result was "Two Million Minutes," a one-hour documentary comparing the educational experiences of six students: two Americans, two Indians and two Chinese.

The movie, in (very) limited release, begins with the premise that the high school years span roughly 2 million minutes.

How is that time spent?

Compton discussed the film, partially funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation, over breakfast recently in Beverly Hills.

Although the documentary has not been picked up for TV or broad release, he was upbeat about the effect it was having, mostly through college screenings and DVD sales.

But something was bugging him. It was a discussion that had taken place after he screened his film at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

"I took a brutal beating," he said.

Compton, who has run or founded several technology and medical firms, has an MBA from Harvard and thought he was on home turf.

Academics resist

But one faculty member, Compton recalled, told him that "we have nothing to learn from Third World education." Another, renowned education theorist Howard Gardner, took him to task for comparing the U.S. with China.

"His point was: How can you have a great educational system when you don't have freedom of speech?" Compton said. Compton saw the remark as missing the point: America may not have anything to learn from China's one-party political system, but it might want to know why Chinese students do better in math and science.

Gardner, best known for his theory of "multiple intelligences" -- which holds that different people learn in different ways -- declined to be interviewed but sent an e-mail saying that the contrast among students in the three countries is "well worth pondering."

"On the other hand," he wrote, "the movie's view of what education is, and . . . what it should be, is limited and deserves a response. While excellence in science, engineering and technology are worthy goals, it is equally important to learn about history, citizenship and the arts."

"Two Million Minutes" focuses on high-achieving students from top schools in Bangalore, Shanghai and Carmel, Ind., a suburb of Indianapolis. All are impressive, but the American students come across as slackers by comparison.

As the film begins, we hear the voice of Neil Ahrendt, an affable, well-spoken young man and a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist, saying: "Occasionally, I do homework."

Then classmate Brittany Brechbuhl talks about the importance of balancing schoolwork and social life.

Such balance appears rare in Indian and Chinese schools.

Hu Xiaoyuan, one of the Shanghai students, wants to study biology in college but also excels at ballet and violin. Her schoolmate, Jin Ruizhang, is a math whiz who says he began pulling all-nighters in junior high.

One of the Indian students, Apoorva Uppala, is a vivacious girl whose goals are to have a stimulating career in engineering and a happy family life. In the film, she outlines a weekend day, which includes studying with a tutor:

"Yesterday -- that was Saturday -- I got up in the morning at 5:45, got dressed . . . and then had two hours of tuitions; after that did a bit of math and physics and then went to breakfast with my friends; then after that straight to school, and . . . we had classes for three hours after that -- without a break."

The clear message is that the Indian and Chinese students work a lot harder. The movie doesn't spend much time on curriculum or "rigor and relevance," the kinds of issues that dominate U.S. education discussions.

The film quotes Vivek Wadhwa, a tech entrepreneur on sabbatical at Duke University, explaining why American students are slipping behind in math and science.

"The hunger isn't there; the desire isn't there," he says. Chinese and Indian kids "are a lot more motivated to get into these fields and succeed, because they're fighting starvation, they're fighting hunger."

How to compete with that? It isn't easy.

Ahrendt, now at Purdue University studying computer graphics, and Brechbuhl, now at Indiana University, recently met in Washington with the two Indian students and found that they had a lot in common, including pop-culture tastes, and comparable goals. Still, Ahrendt said, "I think they just have more incentive to work harder. . . . You know, we have that incentive here, but it's not the same driving force."

Hitting a nerve

That is beginning to worry corporate America.

Raytheon Co., for instance, recently launched a website, MathMovesU.com, aimed at exciting middle-school students about math.

"We're very concerned about the technical competency of our future workforce," said Taylor Lawrence, a Raytheon vice president. The company, like others with sensitive government contracts, is required to hire U.S. citizens for many of its high-tech jobs.

"There's a sense that if you look out 10, 15, 20 years, you don't have a very robust pipeline," he said.

Tony Wagner, a Harvard education professor, was among those who watched Compton's film at its Cambridge screening and one of the few whose reaction was positive. Wagner studies innovation in U.S. education and has written a book due out this summer called "The Global Achievement Gap."

Wagner said Compton hit a nerve at Harvard because he was confronting an implacable divide between the American business community and the education establishment.

He agrees with Compton's central thesis.

"We don't challenge kids in schools," he said. "We don't challenge them to think; we don't challenge them to create. We challenge them to get good enough grades to get into a good enough college."

Wagner believes the solution is an overhaul of American education to emphasize innovation and critical thinking, not simply working harder at math and science.

"I'm suggesting that Bob is right, but not that the answer is the Chinese or Indian model," he said. "In this country, it's a different challenge."

Labels: achievement gap

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:24 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert's focus on schools seen as plus

By KENT FISCHER / The Dallas Morning News
Saturday, June 14, 2008

Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert acknowledges that his public education projects won't by themselves slash the city's dropout rate or dramatically boost literacy.

But by creating city-sponsored programs focused on specific high-need areas, Mr. Leppert has joined mayors around the country who are increasingly involved in education reform, even though their offices have little authority over city schools.

Their reasoning is simple: A high-quality public school system is fundamental to urban renewal, to creating jobs, to keeping families from fleeing to the suburbs.

In launching his four education projects – scholarships, summer jobs, early literacy and sprucing up old schools – Mr. Leppert has created programs that complement reforms under way in the Dallas Independent School District. And, if those are successful, more city-school ventures could be on the horizon.

"In good communities, everybody works together," Mr. Leppert said. "Just this week, [DISD Superintendent] Michael Hinojosa and I were talking about some other problems we need to tackle."

In some cities – Chicago and New York, for instance – mayors have actually wrested control of schools away from school boards and are now operating their city's schools out of city hall. But such instances are still relatively rare.

By contrast, the efforts of Mr. Leppert and other mayors depend on their ability to marshal civic resources and to recruit corporate leaders to address specific problems that schools have identified.

Mr. Leppert is relying on grants and corporate donations to fund his initiatives, and he's using his bully pulpit to call attention to the district's needs.

"He's using his office to raise the public attention to the needs of children, and he's not working at cross purposes" with the school district, said Kenneth Wong, a professor at Brown University who has studied mayoral involvement in public education. "I would say he's right on track with what's going on nationally."

Dr. Wong said he sees more school district/city government cooperation across the country.

Children's issues – especially public education – play well with parents, and voters generally expect different government agencies to work together to solve big problems, he said.

Parents "don't understand why mayors shouldn't be part of the [education] solution," Dr. Wong said. "Mayors are playing an important role – a more formal role – because voters see it as the mayor's obligation" to improve the health of the city, and that includes good public schools.

Dr. Hinojosa said he does not expect Mr. Leppert's programs to work in isolation. He said the mayor's efforts were designed to complement DISD's Dallas Achieves! reforms.

"[Former mayor] Laura Miller and I – we didn't talk on a regular basis," Dr. Hinojosa said. "... [Mr. Leppert] was the only candidate for mayor who came to visit me and ask what it was we needed."

The two continue to meet regularly.

But the work of mayors in other cities suggests that Mr. Leppert could go further.

In St. Louis, for example, the mayor has successfully backed a slate of reform-minded school board candidates – twice. Denver's mayor helped negotiate a teacher contract and advocated for a controversial teacher pay-for-performance plan.

In Stamford, Conn., City Hall oversees purchasing, payroll and IT for the school district.

Dallas has dipped its toe in that water. As part of the 2002 school district bond campaign, DISD and the city built two city libraries on the campuses of two new schools. The facilities serve both as city libraries and as the schools' media centers.

Mr. Leppert and Dr. Hinojosa said there have been no discussions about a further blurring of the administrative lines between City Hall and DISD, although Mr. Leppert said he is "open to anything."

For now, both the mayor and superintendent seem content to build the mayor's initial four programs into successes, and then use them to launch more partnerships.

"These programs are complementary right now," Dr. Hinojosa said. "We're going to see how these [programs] roll out. Will they work? We don't know, but they'll make for an interesting study."

Mayor's education initiatives:

Mayor Tom Leppert has concluded his first year in office. Here are the education initiatives he's unveiled:

Summer internships: Corporations provide eight-week paid summer internships for above-average students from Adamson, Carter, Madison and North Dallas high schools. The program is designed to show students a "realistic view" of the corporate workforce and the education needed to be successful in it.

College scholarships: $1.45 million available to students at North Dallas, Madison and Adamson high schools. Students must agree to mentoring, learning life skills and to maintaining at least a 3.0 grade point average. The scholarships, funded by corporate and private donations, pay the "gap" between the student's financial aid package and the cost of college.

Operation Front Door: Corporations provide landscaping, beautification and other building improvements at 23 Dallas schools. Companies can pledge to projects ranging from $3,000 to $50,000.

Ready to Read: Dallas public libraries provide early literacy programs for toddlers and preschoolers, such as story hours and phonics, as well as workshops for parents on how they can teach children the skills needed to learn how to read.

Labels: after-school programs, community partnership

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:59 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Monday, June 16, 2008

Mandated Tutoring Not Helping Md., Va. Scores

This is really interesting, especially when considering another study recently posted to this site entitled "Students likely to fail high school exit exam can be identified as early as 4th grade, study says" suggesting that more tutoring money should be invested in lower-grades as a means of improving student test performance.

Interesting comment made in this article regarding spending on tutoring: "All it's doing is taking money out of classrooms and putting it into the hands of private companies."

-Patricia

Several States Find 'No Child' Provision Does Little to Improve Test Results

By Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 13, 2008; Page B01

Free tutoring that federal law prescribes to help students at struggling schools has yielded little or no positive effect on student test scores in Virginia, Maryland and several other states, according to early evaluations.

Under the six-year-old No Child Left Behind law, certain schools in which too many students fail math or reading exams must use federal funds to offer after-school or weekend tutoring to students from low-income families. In the 2006-07 school year, $595 million went to the fast-growing industry of for-profit and nonprofit tutoring providers. But it remains unclear whether or how much those extra lessons are boosting student performance, even though the law envisions them as a key way to narrow achievement gaps.

In Virginia, researchers compared the performance last year of students with identical or very similar math scores in 2006 and found that those who were tutored did no better than their peers, according to an analysis the state Department of Education released in April. In a similar comparison of reading scores, students who were tutored lagged behind those who weren't.

Studies in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Michigan and Kentucky also showed that the mandated tutoring, known as "supplemental educational services," didn't bump up test scores.

"This isn't helping poor kids," said Jack Jennings, president and chief executive of the Center on Education Policy in the District, which monitors implementation of the federal law. "All it's doing is taking money out of classrooms and putting it into the hands of private companies."

Jennings said that states don't have the capacity to monitor tutors effectively and that too many lessons aren't designed to build on the skills students learn in school.

In Maryland, students served by most of the state's tutoring providers in 2006 did not outperform students with similar academic profiles who weren't tutored. But students in three of the 29 state-approved programs did make bigger gains.

Steven M. Ross, executive director of the Center for Research in Educational Policy at the University of Memphis, which is conducting evaluations in Virginia, Maryland and several other states, said parents and educators generally give tutors good ratings. But, he said, "we're not seeing a big blip on the radar screen of raising standardized test" scores.

Ross cautioned that the assessments involve a relatively small sample of students. He said that tutoring might be helping them learn but that the help might not immediately translate into higher test scores. Some students who have fallen far behind, he said, could make progress but still fail grade-level tests. Or students might need more time with tutors.

"If I pour one gallon of gasoline in my car . . . I don't say it doesn't work if I don't go 100 miles," Ross said.

Turning to private tutors when public schools fall short is a key provision of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law. Under the law, schools that don't meet test performance goals for two consecutive years must allow students to transfer to higher-performing schools. Schools that fail to make progress for three years must offer private tutoring to children from low-income families. Those that continue to fall short face further sanctions.

As Congress considers revamping the law, the evaluations will fuel debate over whether tutoring is a wise investment.

Doug Mesecar, an assistant deputy secretary of education, said that officials remain confident of the value of the tutoring program but that more needs to be done to ensure quality.

"I think some providers are very effective as they work with students every day," he said. "The challenge we have is to figure out which ones they are."

Education Department officials point to a Rand Corp. study last year that found tutoring programs improved reading and math performance significantly in several large urban school systems.

In April, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced that she will use her administrative authority to promote participation in tutoring. Schools will have to improve outreach to parents about tutoring, and states will have more responsibility for ensuring that lessons meet students' needs.

Spellings also wants to require schools to prove that they've made an effort to recruit students into the tutoring before spending those funds elsewhere.

Nationwide, nearly 530,000 students -- 14 percent of those eligible -- participate, officials said. About 16,000 are in Maryland, Virginia and the District.

As schools work toward a goal of having every student proficient in reading and math by 2014, the number of children in tutoring is expected to rise. The number of providers has tripled, to more than 3,000, since 2003. Kaplan Inc., a subsidiary of The Washington Post Co., operates such tutoring programs in Maryland, Virginia and other states.

States have been slow to develop systems to gauge the effectiveness of companies and nonprofit organizations that work with students. Many schools report poor student attendance at tutoring sessions.

Some school officials say that even with those challenges, tutoring is making a difference. Chicago public schools found that students who were tutored outperformed peers in reading and math. Tutoring in Hawaii and Colorado has been linked to gains in math.

The District has not formally evaluated its tutoring programs, according to the office of State Superintendent of Education Deborah A. Gist. Evaluations are planned or underway in California, Texas, Florida and several other states.

In Maryland, where about 11,000 students were enrolled in tutoring programs in 2006-07, school officials say they support the effort even if it isn't producing big swings in test scores. The state spent more than $10 million in federal funding on tutoring last year.

"We see this is an opportunity for students to get ahead," said Maria Lamb, director of the Maryland State Department of Education's program improvement and family support branch. Lamb stressed that early evidence shows some students made gains.

Mrs. Dowd's Teaching Service was one of two Maryland tutoring providers linked to higher 2006 reading scores. (Another was linked to higher math scores.) Eileen Dowd, a former Cleveland schoolteacher, said her tutors work with, at most, three students at a time. Children who struggle, she said, get one-on-one attention.

Dowd's tutors work on campuses in Prince George's and Baltimore counties, enabling them to have close contact with teachers, she said. "It's collaborative," she said. "They will come and say: 'Tim is having a hard time focusing. What do you think?' "

Dianne M. Piché, executive director of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights, which supports No Child Left Behind, said the law gives low-income families access to a service that middle-class and wealthy families often use to give their children an edge.

Piché said that schools and tutors should work together more closely and that after-school help should be offered in places accessible to children.

"We need to push the schools and the providers to get it right," she said.

Labels: NCLB, testing

posted by Patricia Lopez at 4:33 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Budget shortfall forces L.A. Unified to cut 500 jobs

The school board approves $400 million in cuts while avoiding teacher layoffs. But the action also includes forcing employees to take a four-day unpaid leave.

By Jason Song and Howard Blume | Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
June 11, 2008

The Los Angeles Board of Education voted Tuesday to slash about $400 million from the state's largest school system by cutting 507 administrative staff and clerical workers and requiring that all employees take a four-day unpaid leave. The board's action avoids the heavy teacher layoffs and class-size increases that are facing smaller school districts throughout the state.

Based on the current state budget, the Los Angeles Unified School District would have to make more than $700 million in cuts over the next three years, barring restored state funding, and could be forced to pack more students in classrooms after next year, board members said.

"I'm concerned about the viability of doing business on a day-to-day basis" in the future, said Richard Vladovic, one of six board members who voted to approve the budget reductions.

Board member Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte abstained out of concern that programs targeting minority, low-achieving students would be adversely affected.

The cuts are a result of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest proposed budget, which provides a $193-million increase in state education funding over last year but does not provide a cost-of-living increase and does not fully fund certain programs, which will have to be paid for with unrestricted general fund money.

Last week, L.A. Unified estimated that it would still face a nearly $370-million shortfall in its $6-billion budget, but because of lower than expected revenues, the district had to cut $402.5 million Tuesday.

District administrators and board members said they wanted to keep cuts as far from classrooms as possible. As a result, the majority of reductions will come from such actions as reducing payments to injured workers and delaying textbook purchases.

The board voted to eliminate a total of 680 jobs, including 65 math and reading coaches, 19 school nurses and 19 counselors. One hundred and seventy-three of those positions are vacant, and many affected employees have "bumping" rights, meaning they could still be employed but would take pay cuts and displace less senior workers.

District officials did not issue preliminary layoff notices to any teachers earlier in the year, although the district is not legally required to notify probationary teachers that they could be let go. But Roger Buschmann, the district's chief human resources officer, said teachers are safe.

"I do not anticipate releasing any teachers. Zero," he said.

Districts throughout the state, including Santa Ana, San Diego and Rialto, have been issuing preliminary pink slips to balance their books.

The majority of non-classroom jobs targeted for layoffs -- about 240 -- come from the California School Employees Assn., which primarily represents clerical and technical employees.

"Some of the cuts made sense, but the ones in human resources and personnel are going to have devastating effects. . . . There will be a trickle-down effect to schools because people won't know who will answer their questions," said Connie Moreno, a union representative.

Supt. David Brewer acknowledged that "services that matter are being cut."

Three divisions were spared the budget ax, including the Innovation Division, Brewer's signature academic reform initiative.

The school police department will not be trimmed, and neither will the budget of recently hired Senior Deputy Supt. Ramon Cortines, who has made enhancing student safety a top priority.

The board also only trimmed $3 million from the janitorial program, about half the originally proposed amount. "Clean bathrooms were an important thing we needed to preserve," said Chief Financial Officer Megan K. Reilly.

The board also approved a mandatory four-day furlough that would save $54.4 million over the next year. Officials have not worked out details but Cortines said he hoped to target the district's best compensated employees for the unpaid leave program.

"The lowest paid are the ones who can least afford that kind of situation," he said.

United Teachers Los Angeles President A.J. Duffy vowed to fight any forced unpaid leaves. Over district objections, the union successfully staged an hourlong teacher protest last week during school hours and has threatened to schedule further actions.

"I don't care what they do, they can sell [headquarters] for all I care. If they impose furlough days, we will mobilize against that," he said.

If the district cuts more from their downtown offices on Beaudry Avenue, Duffy said the union would back down.

The board authorized nearly $55.4 million in cuts from central offices.

"That's just not enough," Duffy said.

The board could authorize further cuts this summer. "We've done a lot of shaving," Cortines said. "You can shave to a point where a program is no longer meaningful, which means you might have to look at elimination."

LaMotte said that some of the cuts would unfairly target programs that help minorities, including the Ten Schools Program aimed at the lowest-performing schools mostly in South Los Angeles, and said she was concerned that racism played a role in the decision.

"I hate to put the big 'r' word on the table . . . [but] the darker the skin, the deeper the cuts," said LaMotte, who is African American.

Board member Tamar Galatzan, whose San Fernando Valley district includes some affluent neighborhoods, took issue with the suggestion that schools serving poor students were unfairly targeted.

"This doesn't just have to do with some high-needs schools," Galatzan said. "This is kind of a lose-lose for everybody . . . regardless of the color of your skin and how much money your parents may have."

Brewer headed off a possible argument over whose schools fared worse. "This is a forced budget. Obviously, when a family comes under attack, it's time to pull together, not fall apart."

Labels: California

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:25 AM 0 comments Links to this post

The Texas Border Wall Can't Separate Latinos From Their Memories and Culture

By Michelle García, The Washington Post. Posted June 14, 2008.

"The land is our birthright in this place now called Texas, and its history contains our Gettysburg, our Trail of Tears, the seeds of our culture."

Under a lavender canopy of jacaranda blossoms within sight of the embattled frontier, Luis Pea imagines an unintended and comical use for the future border wall.

"If anything, it will be a new sport. People will pole-vault," says the biology student with thick black hair. He kicks up a long leg and shouts, "Salto con garacho!" ("a high leap to garacho music"). Cue the Mexican violins!

Laughter erupts from his fellow nature lovers from the Gorgas Science Society. They are here, after all, to chant "Don't fence us in" in protest of the 60-foot-high wall that will slice straight past their border-side campus -- which combines the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College -- and right through the Rio Grande Valley borderlands.

I laugh weakly. I'm feeling dejected. Jokes about pole-vaulting, about lizards doomed by the wall, aren't what I expected when I trucked down to the very tip of my home state. I'd expected indignation about the border wall. I expected people to take it as personally as I did, like a slap at my identity, my South Texas culture, the Mexicanness in my Americanness.

I imagine my ancestors felt the same way oh so long ago, in 1848, after the newly drawn border cut through their lands, marooning them in a netherworld with Mexico on one side, the United States on the other. In the 21st-century version of that alienation, the new border wall may transform once-private lands into a de facto DMZ complete with spotlights and armed patrols.

Land, you see, is everything to us. Our culture is tied to the land. It is passed down as our inheritance, as my father did for me and my siblings, fulfilling his long-held pledge. In these borderlands, the fates of families like mine have hinged on the land. And so my instincts insist this wall is not just about illegal border-crossers, not just about Mexicans. It is, in a deeply historic way, about people like me, people whose identity was forged in generations of struggle over land.

Pea invites me to see a campus monument marking the old war between Mexican and gringo: an old cannon standing erect along the Rio Grande. Check it out, he says. "This might be your last chance before the wall goes up." The cannon sits on the wrong side of the planned wall.

Pea and I stroll through the campus, with its buildings of somber desert browns and reds and its sky-blue tile domes of Spanish-Moorish influence. This once was Fort Texas (later renamed Fort Brown), erected in 1846 when the United States charged the original southern border at the Nueces River and invaded Mexico to push the frontier 123 miles south to the much-coveted Rio Grande. What once was Mexico suddenly became the United States.

As we walk toward the river, it's jarring to see the bullet-riddled walls of the campus's buildings -- a reminder of the old border battles. "All of this is battleground," says Pea, his playfulness quieting to philosophical musing. "These are bloody grounds."

"They fought for it," he says of the United States. "But it's 'the enemy' that's left," he adds ironically.

First, in that original war of conquest, the Mexican was the enemy. Then, it was the newly minted U.S. citizens, the Texas Mexicans, branded as bandits when they rebelled against colonial subjugation after their families were annexed with the territory.

The war might have ended, but people like us, like Pea and I, still are regarded as the enemy by some.

We are the outsider with a Spanish-infused drawl, with a song of love and valor in our hearts; the pickup-driving, boot-wearing, Stars and Stripes-waving Tejano. But Texans sometimes refer to us as "Mexicans" even now, when you can find a military veteran in nearly every family, and many of our families in these parts are as old as the mesquite tree.

"We have American flags, we recite the national anthem. But what do we have to do to be plugged in?" Antonio N. Zavaleta, a vice president at the university, asks effusively. He is a great-great-grandson of Juan Cortina, who led an armed rebellion in 1859 against Manifest Destiny and the new Anglo social order that aimed to subjugate the Tejano.

"And this border wall," Zavaleta continues, "is further indication that the world ends from a line from Corpus Christi to Laredo and everything down is a buffer" between the United States and Mexico.

Betwixt and Between

With my pickup truck radio tuned to country and old-school rock, I ride the highways of the South Texas brush country pursuing the roots of the resistance heard now along the borderlands. My journey takes me north on U.S. Highway 281, where I pass fields of sunflowers bowing under a relentless sun like mourning widows. The mesquite and brush rustle under the massive sky and here, gazing across the vast chaparral, I'm overwhelmed by the historic resilience embedded in the terrain unfolding before me.

This was Nuevo Santander to the Spaniards, Tamaulipas to the Mexicans, and Wild Mustang Desert to the Texas ranchers, both Anglo and Tejano.

This was the region where my family -- and countless others -- defended their land more than 150 years ago and have fought for a place under the new flag hoisted above them.

When I arrive at a family reunion in the San Antonio Hill Country where my paternal grandmother's clan has gathered at an uncle's ranch retreat, it is family and land that my elderly tias (aunts) are talking about.

"The rumor was that he had been poisoned," says one tia, Berta Guerra, retelling the story of the early demise of my great-grandfather, Mauricio Gonzalez, who mysteriously died after attending a political meeting.

"This was my grandfather and my great-grandfather," Tia Berta croaks into the microphone, standing before picnic tables filled with a young generation of teachers, lawyers and journalists. "They were big-time ranchers," she says. "They had cattle drives to Kansas, just like a John Wayne movie."

The Gonzalezes owned massive acreage on both sides of the Rio Grande and did a good job of holding onto it -- until they, along with other wealthy Tejanos, bankrolled a coup attempt in 1891 against the Mexican dictator Porfirio Daz. Catarino Garza, my great-great-uncle, a journalist who married into the family, led the would-be revolution.

Anglo Texans branded him a social agitator for stirring up trouble with Mexico, a key trading partner, and for firing off missives to newspapers criticizing Anglo "racists." United against him, Mexican and U.S. forces put down the rebellion, and Garza fled to Latin America.

But the story does not end there. I follow the Garza paper trail up to the Texas State Archives in Austin, adjacent to the plantation-like state capitol and its assemblage of statues honoring Confederate and Alamo fighters. Sifting through handwritten Ranger reports penned with flourish and suffused with panic, I find this: "Garza was imported to cause race feelings and contests and it may result in a desperate state of affairs, as in a war of races if not stopped in time."

It was as if the Ranger who penned this 1892 report could not comprehend that Garza gave voice to the growing frustration of Tejano ranchers and cowboys at the land-grabbing Anglos; that they might be just a little sick of being treated like a "mongrel race," to use a common insult of that era.

'Border Bandits'

A short walk from the state capitol, at the Hideout Theater, the film Border Bandits is upending some of the tall tales from that era of revolution -- tales like the looming race war -- and replacing them with a bloody history most folks don't know about. The film centers on the recollections of Rio Grande Valley ranch hand Roland Warnock, who in 1915 witnessed Texas Rangers shoot two unarmed Tejano ranchers -- both U.S. citizens -- in the back.

During a Ranger-led border crackdown to root out so-called Mexican bandits and suspected sympathizers, meaning anyone with a Spanish surname and two good legs, lawmen and vigilantes killed 5,000; thousands more abandoned their ranches and fled to Mexico. A postcard memorializing the border crackdown flashes across the screen, featuring three mounted Rangers with their lassos tied around dead "Mexicans."

But were they really "bandits"? About midway back to the border, at a converted ranch house with creaky wood floors that now is the Kenedy Ranch Museum, historian Homero Vera fills me in on the back story for the "Border Bandits" film.

"They were revolutionaries, they had their ideals," Vera explains. "They called them bandits because they were hostile, because they did kill some Anglos."

The struggle, of course, was over land. Tejano landowners rebelled against the strong-arm land seizures by Anglos that robbed them of their ranches. Between 1900 and 1910, some 187,000 acres went from Tejano to Anglo hands in just two border counties. Suddenly, Tejano ranchers and proud vaqueros (cowboys) became landless farm laborers.

Inspired in part by this Tejano-Anglo conflict, Tejano rebels launched their Plan de San Diego. The 1915 plot called for the defeat of U.S. rule in Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and California, the formation of a new republic for Mexicans, blacks and Indians, and the killing of every Anglo male over age 16.

Bands of rebels burned bridges, derailed trains and wreaked havoc throughout the Rio Grande Valley. It was the nightmare scenario Rangers had anticipated. And though 80 years had passed since that seminal border battle, the Ranger crackdown evoked that old battle cry of the Texas Anglo: Remember the Alamo!

Spurred by the film, state Rep. Aaron Pea (D) proposed a bill in 2005 to teach this largely ignored Ranger history in Lone Star schools. The bill died in session. Pea never revived it.

Faced with the outcry over 21st-century Mexican immigrants, Texas, he said, wasn't ready to look back at injustices committed against Mexican Americans in the distant past. "It's a less tolerant environment -- a xenophobic political environment -- that we exist in today because of the immigration debate," he says.

But the 1915 Ranger campaign wasn't directed at immigrants, I say. It was directed at Tejanos, meaning: U.S. citizens. Fear, said Pea, made such distinctions irrelevant to Anglos of that era.

A few years ago, as part of a push to get a veterans' hospital built in the region, Pea joined Rio Grande Valley vets on a march to the Alamo. But theirs was far from a hero's welcome at that Texas landmark of freedom.

Says Vietnam veteran Max Balmadez, "They said we were trying a Mexican takeover of the Alamo."

As if they were foreign. As if they didn't belong.

Roots

I'm preparing to leave Texas, and Homero Vera and his wife, Letty, invite me to dinner at a steakhouse, where Homero hands me a thin book, El Mesquite, written by Elena Zamora O'Shea, one of our cousins, in 1935. Narrated by a wise old mesquite tree, it is the story of our ancestral roots in this region and how we came to be marooned in our own country.

"If they were Spaniards when governed by Spain and Mexicans when governed by Mexico, why can they not be Americans now that they are under the American government?" O'Shea wrote.

I've experienced what O'Shea describes, like when a border patrol agent once saw me in my pickup and pulled me over. "Are you a citizen?" were the first words out of his mouth. It's even happened to a couple of Tejano judges who were deemed suspicious and detained.

But I am like the old mesquite tree: My identity has grown from this embattled yet glorious land and the cultures rooted here.

I remember one of my last conversations with my father three years ago, in the quiet of a Corpus Christi night as he lay in his hospital bed. He repeated his sacred promise. "I'm leaving you kids the ranch," he said quietly. "It's yours to do with what you want." And with his passing, he did just that, bequeathing a history that transcends borders.

The land is our birthright in this place now called Texas, and its history contains our Gettysburg, our Trail of Tears, the seeds of our culture. The land proves we've been here, we belong here. On these treasured memories, these beloved bones, that dreaded wall will rise.

Michelle García, a native Texan, recently completed a Knight fellowship in El Salvador with the International Center for Journalists. She is based in New York.

Labels: immigration

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

Few options offered for Texas schools facing closure

By ERICKA MELLON | Houston Chronicle
June 13, 2008

Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott faced a historic decision this month: What should he do with four schools that had failed for so long that the law required drastic action?

Legislators had given him two options: Close the schools or let an outside group — either a nonprofit or another school district — take them over.

The catch: No nonprofit had applied to the Texas Education Agency for a shot at the task.

"It would have been nice to have had that option," said Scott, whose agency first solicited applications via the Internet last July.

Instead, Scott found another option: Using little-known rules written by TEA officials, he announced last week that the Houston and Austin school districts could have a chance to redesign the schools they had repeatedly failed to raise to acceptable levels.

This week, Scott waived the harsh sanctions against a Waco middle school after it barely missed the acceptable mark. He has yet to say whether Oak Village Middle School in North Forest cleared the bar.

The long-troubled campuses, including Sam Houston High School in the Houston Independent School District, are the first in Texas to reach the end of the line in the state's accountability system, falling short of minimum academic standards since at least 2004.

Many more schools could land in a similar fix in coming years, raising questions about the state's ability to better serve students when outside groups are unable to help and when displacing thousands of children by closing a neighborhood school is not practical.

"There isn't the capacity on the part of states or private groups to bring about large-scale change," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, which studies reform efforts nationwide. "The hopeful thing is that states and school districts are taking this task much more seriously than in the past."

Meeting standards
One driver is the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which like Texas' accountability system, orders escalating sanctions against schools each year they fail to meet standards.

In Texas, schools that have unacceptable test scores and dropout rates for five straight years must be closed or put under alternative management.

State Sen. Florence Shapiro, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, defended the state's school accountability system, which lawmakers toughened in 2006.

"For the first time in quite a long time, we're no longer just talking with an idle threat; we're actually acting," the Plano Republican said.

HISD and Austin officials said they appreciate the flexibility that allows them to reinvent their own schools.

Under the TEA's rules, the new schools must have a different academic program, a new name and principal, plus at least 75 percent of the instructional staff and 50 percent of the students must be new.

"We tried to make rules that allowed the building to be used, or repurposed, but would still result in the children getting a better quality of education," Scott said.

HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra said he is thrilled Sam Houston likely will remain under his control, especially because the school would have made the acceptable mark this year had about a dozen more students passed the math exam.

"I don't think we ever as a staff felt we would turn our back on that school," Saavedra said.

Unreasonable action
Closing schools, based on a few students' test scores at a campus that is making progress, is unreasonable, he said. Half the students at Sam Houston passed the math exam this year, compared with 41 percent five years ago.

"No Child Left Behind says, by 2014, every school in this country is going to meet a level of proficiency in every (student) subgroup," Saavedra said. "Is the nation ready to close every single school that doesn't meet that? I can tell you the answer is, 'No way.' The system's got to be fair and recognize progress."

HISD's $3.4 million plan for reforming Sam Houston would split the school in two. Ninth-graders would have their own school on the same campus and would remain in class for an extra hour a day. The school for upperclassmen would encourage students to focus on careers in engineering, information technology or the automotive industry.

State Rep. Rob Eissler, who chairs the House Public Education Committee, said he was only slightly surprised the state has not received any applications from nonprofit school managers.

"Often, alternative managers want to come in, and they want to be successful so they kind of size up what those chances would be," said Eissler, R-The Woodlands. "Maybe that is part of their reticence."

After striking out last summer, the TEA posted another request for proposals in November. Two undisclosed entities have expressed interest, said agency spokeswoman Suzanne Marchman, and have until July 2 to apply.

Labels: failing schools, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:36 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Students likely to fail high school exit exam can be identified as early as 4th grade, study says

Check out the full report: "Predicting Success, Preventing Failure: An Investigation of the California High School Exit Exam".

I'm a little concerned with how this study places an emphasis on providing additional resources (tutoring) at earlier grades as a solution and also by its analysis that downplays the statistically significant evidence showing an association between unqualified teachers and the passage of CAHSEE, calling it "very small". I think it warrants a closer look.

Also, there's a section stating: "A student who is still an English Learner in grade 9 is indeed less likely than other students to pass the CAHSEE. But EL students in grade 4 are, on average, no less likely than others to pass the CAHSEE by grade 12. Thus, teachers should be quite concerned about a student who is still an English Learner in grade 9, for there is not much time to catch up. " -- what does this say for English learners who enter California High Schools for the first time beginning in the 9th grade?

-Patricia

The authors use the findings to question the wisdom of spending millions to tutor older students struggling with the test.

By Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 11, 2008

As early as fourth grade, students who will be at risk of failing the high school exit exam -- a state requirement to earn a diploma -- can be identified based on grades, classroom behavior and test scores, according to a new study released Tuesday.

The findings, based on an extensive study of student achievement in San Diego schools, call into question the effectiveness of aiming significant efforts and tens of millions of dollars at struggling high school seniors and older students to help them pass the exam.

"From a political standpoint, such spending seems necessary. However, our results strongly suggest that these 11th-hour interventions by themselves are unlikely to yield the intended results," according to the report by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Instead, the authors suggested, "moving a portion of these tutoring dollars to struggling students in earlier grades -- when the students are still in school -- could be a wise choice. An ounce of prevention could indeed be worth a pound of cure."

Assemblyman Pedro Nava (D-Santa Barbara), who wrote legislation that provides more than $72 million annually for two years to tutor seniors who couldn't pass the exam, said it would be unfair to reduce support for older students to pay for increased support for younger ones.

"I suppose they should sit down with the parents of these kids who are looking at failing the [exit] exam and persuade these parents that they don't need the money," Nava said. "Inherent in the conclusion of the report is that education needs help at all levels. We shouldn't be put in a position where we are pitting the outcomes of seniors against the future of preschoolers. That makes no sense."

State Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell said school districts ought to have greater flexibility in how they spend such funds.

"We need to have comprehensive intervention and not wait till 12th grade," he said.

Additionally, he said, the study underscored the need for universal preschool, as well as expanding the state's class-size reduction efforts.

The exit exam was created by state legislators in an effort to standardize the achievement of high school graduates across the state's 1,053 school districts. Students in the class of 2006 were the first who were required to pass the exam to receive diplomas.

From their sophomore through senior years, students have six chances to take the exam, which includes math and English. Students must score at least 55% on the math portion, which is eighth-grade level, and 60% on the English part, which is ninth- or 10th-grade level. More than 93% of students pass the exam by the end of their senior year.

Educators said the study results are buttressed by earlier research that shows early academic achievement, the mastering of basic math skills and reading comprehension, is a building block for future success.

"We've recognized for a long time that performance in the earlier grades is one of the best indicators of success later in school and in life," said Chris Eftychiou, spokesman for the Long Beach Unified School District.

At Pasadena High School, guidance counselor Allison Steppes said she worried that social promotion and lack of parental involvement led to some students passing through elementary schools without mastering basic skills.

"I don't think we're doing enough at the elementary stages because it's ridiculous to get to 12th grade, take the [exit exam] six times and still not pass it," she said.

But she questioned the validity of a student retaking the test after failing it half a dozen times. Steppes said she advised students who repeatedly failed the exam but finished 12th grade to get their high school degree at a community college, which does not require students to pass the exam.

"I want the student to move on with life," she said.

Labels: California, English language learners, high-stakes testing

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:50 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Most struggling Texas kids are veterans of U.S. classrooms

By KATHERINE LEAL UNMUTH / The Dallas Morning News
June 10, 2008

Educators often point out the obstacles new immigrants face in graduating on time. But they aren't the only kids learning English who are struggling to graduate.

Statewide, about 60 percent of high school students classified as having limited English proficiency – called LEP in education circles – have been in U.S. schools five years or more, according to a Dallas Morning News analysis of state test data.

Most were born in the United States, often to immigrant parents, or immigrated at an earlier age. While some do well in school, others struggle for years.

Experts say this can happen for several reasons. Some children get poor bilingual or English as a second language instruction in early grades. Some students change schools often because their families move around. They may get classes taught mostly in Spanish at one school, mostly in English at the next and bilingual classes at a third.

Such students get to high school way behind. In Irving, several hundred LEP high school students are taking reading classes because they still read at an elementary level. "They can say the words, but they don't know what it means," reading coordinator Paula Dugger said.

Many LEP students can speak conversational English without having mastered the vocabulary necessary to understand textbooks or to pass the graduation TAKS exams. "It's not that they don't know English," said Isabella Piña-Hinojosa, bilingual director in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district. "They need a teacher to help them understand the academic language."

Because that puts LEP students at risk of dropping out, advocates say more services focused on English literacy are needed.

Texas opens high school ESL classes only to immigrants. The state sets no restriction on how long they have lived in the U.S., though some districts limit the classes to recent arrivals. Most other students classified as still learning English, including those born in the U.S., take regular courses.

Schools are supposed to supplement those regular classes with services designed to make sure students understand the work. But those services can vary widely from school to school.

"One problem is the programs are all so different," said Yvonne Freeman, a bilingual education professor at the University of Texas-Brownsville.

David Freeman, a bilingual education professor at UT-Brownsville, said principals and all teachers should be trained to work with students learning English.

"Biology or math teachers don't really pay as much attention to the language needs of the kids," he said. "They don't see themselves as reading or writing teachers."

Dr. Piña-Hinojosa tracks students in her district who have been in the country more than four years separately from those who arrived more recently to assess how each group progresses academically. She believes the state should use a similar approach.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund lost a federal lawsuit last year in which it argued that the state often provided an inferior education for students with limited English, particularly in middle and high schools. Plaintiffs also argued that the state failed to monitor programs adequately for quality.

"Many students have been in the program for a number of years and are still performing at very low levels," MALDEF attorney David Hinojosa said. "That's where the tragedy truly lies."

Georgina Gonzalez, bilingual director at the Texas Education Agency, said the state is trying to provide more training for secondary teachers. But she acknowledges TEA has not closely analyzed data based on when students arrived. She said officials are working on a new data system.

"If we find out how they are doing," she said, "then we could address their needs and bring attention to how many students we have in that situation."

Labels: English language learners, immigration and education

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

No Child Left Behind: Doomed to Fail?

Check out the full report: "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education and listen to the conference call with Task Force co-chairs Helen F. Ladd, Pedro Noguera, and Tom Payzant. -Patricia

By CLAUDIA WALLIS | Time.com
June 8, 2008

There was always something slightly insane about No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the ambitious education law often described as the Bush Administration's signature domestic achievement. For one thing, in the view of many educators, the law's 2014 goal — which calls for all public school students in grades 4 through 8 to be achieving on grade level in reading and math — is something no educational system anywhere on earth has ever accomplished. Even more unrealistic: every kid (except for 3% with serious handicaps or other issues) is supposed to be achieving on grade level every year, climbing in lockstep up an ever more challenging ladder. This flies in the face of all sorts of research showing that children start off in different places academically and grow at different rates.

Add to the mix the fact that much of the promised funding failed to materialize and many early critics insisted that No Child Left Behind was nothing more than a cynical plan to destroy American faith in public education and open the way to vouchers and school choice.

Now a former official in Bush's Education department is giving at least some support to that notion. Susan Neuman, a professor of education at the University Michigan who served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education during George W. Bush's first term, was and still is a fervent believer in the goals of NCLB. And she says the President and then Secretary of Education Rod Paige were too. But there were others in the department, according to Neuman, who saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda — a way to expose the failure of public education and "blow it up a bit," she says. "There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization."

Tensions between NCLB believers and the blow-up-the-schools group were one reason the Bush Department of Education felt like "a pressure cooker," says Neuman, who left the Administration in early 2003. Another reason was political pressure to take the hardest possible line on school accountability in order to avoid looking lax — like the Clinton Administration. Thus, when Neuman and others argued that many schools would fail to reach the NCLB goals and needed more flexibility while making improvements, they were ignored. "We had this no-waiver policy," says Neuman. "The feeling was that the prior administration had given waivers willy-nilly."

It was only in Bush's second term that the hard line began to succumb to reality. Margaret Spellings, who replaced Paige as Secretary of Education in 2005, gradually opened the door to a more flexible and realistic approach to school accountability. Instead of demanding lockstep, grade-level achievement, schools in some states could meet the NCLB goals by demonstrating adequate student growth. (In this "growth model" approach, a student who was three years behind in reading and ended the year only one year behind would not be viewed as a failure.) "Going to the growth models is the right way to go," says Neuman. "I wish it had come earlier. It didn't because we were trying to be tough."

Neuman also regrets the Administration's use of humiliation and shame as a lever for school reform. Failure to meet NCLB's inflexible goals meant schools would be publicly labeled as failures. Neuman now sees this as a mistake: "Vilifying teachers and saying we are going to shame them was not the right approach."

The combination of inflexibility and public humiliation for those not meeting federal goals ignited so much frustration among educators that NCLB now appears to be an irreparably damaged brand. "The problems lingered long enough and there's so much anger that it may not be fixable," says Neuman. While the American Federation of Teachers was once on board with the NCLB goals, she notes, the union has turned against it. "Teachers hate NCLB because they feel like they've been picked on."

Is there a way out of the mess? Neuman still supports school accountability and the much-maligned annual tests mandated by the law. But she now believes that the nation has to look beyond the schoolroom, if it wishes to leave no child behind.

Along with 59 other top educators, policymakers and health officials--including three former surgeon generals, she's put her name to a nonpartisan document to be released on Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. Titled "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education," it lays out an expansive vision for leveling the playing field for low-income kids, one that looks toward new policies on child health and support for parents and communities. The document states that much of the achievement gap between rich and poor "is rooted in what occurs outside of formal schooling," and therefore calls on policymakers to "rethink their assumptions" about what it will take to close that gap. Neuman says that money she's seen wasted on current programs, including much of the massive Title 1 spending should be reallocated according to this broader approach. "Pinning all our hopes on schools will never change the odds for kids."

Labels: NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:36 PM 1 comments Links to this post

Study of Small High Schools Yields Little on Achievement

Download the full report here.

Some of the Implementation Findings:

* The most prevalent SLC structures were freshman and career academies.
* Most participating schools chose to implement one or more SLC strategies, with block scheduling and teacher teams the most popular choices.
* Smaller Learning Community-related professional development, although provided by nearly all schools, was not very extensive.
* Most schools reported they applied for SLC funds to increase overall student academic achievement, academic achievement of at-risk students and student motivation.
* Schools reported a number of factors limiting effective SLC implementation, including scheduling and logistical issues, physical space, lack of teacher SLC professional development, and school staffing needs, especially in terms of core academic teachers and guidance counselors.

Additional outcomes from the Annual Performance Reports:

* The data suggest an upward trend in student extracurricular participation before and after program participation.
* There was a statistically significant positive trend in the percentage of 9th-grade students being promoted to 10th grade during the post-grant period.
* There was also a downward trend in the incidence of violence in SLC schools over time.
* The data suggest increases in the percentage of graduating students who reported they planed to attend either two- or four-year colleges.
* There were no significant trends observed in academic achievement, as measured by either scores on statewide assessments or college entrance exams over the short period of the study.

-Patricia

By David J. Hoff | Ed Week
May 16, 2008

High schools receiving $80 million in annual federal funding to support “smaller learning communities” can document that they are taking steps to establish learning environments more intimate than found in the typical comprehensive high school.

But, according to a federal study, such smaller schools can’t answer the most significant question: Is student achievement improving in the smaller settings?

The evaluation of the 8-year-old program found that schools participating in it show signs of success. In the schools, the proportion of students being promoted from 9th to 10th grade increases, participation in extracurricular activities rises, and the rate of violent incidents declines.

But the evaluation found “no significant trends” in achievement on state tests or college-entrance exams, says the report, which was prepared by a private contractor and released by the U.S. Department of Education last week.

Read On...

Labels: small learning communities

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

Saturday, June 14, 2008

$6 million state grant aims to move students from dropout to graduate

$6 million state grant aims to move students from
dropout to graduate

By Kate Alexander
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, June 14, 2008

A Texas Education Agency grant program may open the
door for private schools to get public dollars to help
dropouts finish high school.

The $6 million grant, part of an effort to improve the
state's high schools, will provide money for programs
tailored to students who have dropped out of Texas
public schools. The objective is to help the students
earn a diploma or meet an alternative standard of
showing "college readiness."

The grant is open to public school districts, charter
schools, colleges and other education providers as
well as nonprofit organizations with experience in
providing educational programs.

That last category of eligible applicants allows for
nonprofit private schools to compete for the public
grant and has made the relatively small program the
focus of intense scrutiny. Religious schools are
eligible to apply, but the money cannot be used for
religious instruction.

As much as $150,000 in startup money is available for
each grantee, and additional money will be disbursed
based on each student's progress.

A private school, for example, could get as much as
$6,000 per student after the student passes certain
benchmarks, such as earning the credits to advance a
grade or getting a diploma, according to rules
proposed this week by the Texas Education Agency.

A public hearing on the proposal will be held at 9
a.m. June 25 at the Capitol Extension Auditorium.

Robert Aguirre, a San Antonio businessman who was a
founder of a $50 million privately funded voucher
program in San Antonio, said that private schools
should have a chance to compete but that they might
not jump at the opportunity.

He was asked by the state to pull together some
private schools and nonprofit organizations that might
want to apply for the grant.

Although the schools were interested in helping the
students, they could not make the financing work
because the money would come too late, he said.

"It was so bureaucratic and tenuous in terms of the
funding," Aguirre said. "It was a huge missed
opportunity by the State of Texas to really do
something meaningful to help some kids."

Public school advocates say that taxpayer money should
remain in schools with public accountability and that
the inclusion of private schools is an effort to
circumvent the Legislature's repeated rejection of
school voucher plans.

State Education Commissioner Robert Scott "has
basically thumbed his nose at the Legislature," said
Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston.

He questioned why the state should put public money
toward unproven private school programs when "we have
districts and schools who are successful that are
crying out for money to enroll additional students."

Districts have only recently been given more
flexibility to work with dropouts by holding
after-hours classes and serving older students,
Hochberg said.

Scott, who has dismissed critics' contentions that he
is trying to slip through a voucher program, said at a
recent legislative hearing that private schools and
nonprofit groups bring more people to the table to
address a dire situation.

"We have a tremendous dropout problem, and we need all
hands on deck to try to fix it," Scott told the House
Public Education Committee.

Scott noted that the dropout program is different from
a voucher program because the money goes to the
school, not to the student or his or her parents, and
does not reduce money going to the student's public
school district.

The Texas Education Agency is tackling a new and
complicated challenge by focusing on students who have
dropped out of school, and the state needs to corral
all resources and expertise to succeed, said Jan
Lindsey, the agency's senior director for college and
career readiness initiatives.

About 20 potential grantees have indicated that they
intend to apply for the one-year pilot program.

The application deadline is July 1.

Lindsey did not know if any of the likely applicants
were private schools. She said the agency is looking
at how to address the private schools' desire to have
the money made available earlier while also requiring
proof that progress is being made.

The Rev. Jayme Mathias, president of San Juan Diego
Catholic High School in Austin, said his school would
not apply for the grant. Though the grant's mission
fits well with that of his school, Mathias said, it
would be difficult to make it work with the school's
required theology curriculum and its work-study
program.

kalexander@statesman.com; 445-3618

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:47 PM 0 comments Links to this post

$6 million state grant aims to move students from

by Kate Alexander
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, June 14, 2008

A Texas Education Agency grant program may open the
door for private schools to get public dollars to help
dropouts finish high school.

The $6 million grant, part of an effort to improve the
state's high schools, will provide money for programs
tailored to students who have dropped out of Texas
public schools. The objective is to help the students
earn a diploma or meet an alternative standard of
showing "college readiness."

The grant is open to public school districts, charter
schools, colleges and other education providers as
well as nonprofit organizations with experience in
providing educational programs.

That last category of eligible applicants allows for
nonprofit private schools to compete for the public
grant and has made the relatively small program the
focus of intense scrutiny. Religious schools are
eligible to apply, but the money cannot be used for
religious instruction.

As much as $150,000 in startup money is available for
each grantee, and additional money will be disbursed
based on each student's progress.

A private school, for example, could get as much as
$6,000 per student after the student passes certain
benchmarks, such as earning the credits to advance a
grade or getting a diploma, according to rules
proposed this week by the Texas Education Agency.

A public hearing on the proposal will be held at 9
a.m. June 25 at the Capitol Extension Auditorium.

Robert Aguirre, a San Antonio businessman who was a
founder of a $50 million privately funded voucher
program in San Antonio, said that private schools
should have a chance to compete but that they might
not jump at the opportunity.

He was asked by the state to pull together some
private schools and nonprofit organizations that might
want to apply for the grant.

Although the schools were interested in helping the
students, they could not make the financing work
because the money would come too late, he said.

"It was so bureaucratic and tenuous in terms of the
funding," Aguirre said. "It was a huge missed
opportunity by the State of Texas to really do
something meaningful to help some kids."

Public school advocates say that taxpayer money should
remain in schools with public accountability and that
the inclusion of private schools is an effort to
circumvent the Legislature's repeated rejection of
school voucher plans.

State Education Commissioner Robert Scott "has
basically thumbed his nose at the Legislature," said
Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston.

He questioned why the state should put public money
toward unproven private school programs when "we have
districts and schools who are successful that are
crying out for money to enroll additional students."

Districts have only recently been given more
flexibility to work with dropouts by holding
after-hours classes and serving older students,
Hochberg said.

Scott, who has dismissed critics' contentions that he
is trying to slip through a voucher program, said at a
recent legislative hearing that private schools and
nonprofit groups bring more people to the table to
address a dire situation.

"We have a tremendous dropout problem, and we need all
hands on deck to try to fix it," Scott told the House
Public Education Committee.

Scott noted that the dropout program is different from
a voucher program because the money goes to the
school, not to the student or his or her parents, and
does not reduce money going to the student's public
school district.

The Texas Education Agency is tackling a new and
complicated challenge by focusing on students who have
dropped out of school, and the state needs to corral
all resources and expertise to succeed, said Jan
Lindsey, the agency's senior director for college and
career readiness initiatives.

About 20 potential grantees have indicated that they
intend to apply for the one-year pilot program.

The application deadline is July 1.

Lindsey did not know if any of the likely applicants
were private schools. She said the agency is looking
at how to address the private schools' desire to have
the money made available earlier while also requiring
proof that progress is being made.

The Rev. Jayme Mathias, president of San Juan Diego
Catholic High School in Austin, said his school would
not apply for the grant. Though the grant's mission
fits well with that of his school, Mathias said, it
would be difficult to make it work with the school's
required theology curriculum and its work-study
program.

kalexander@statesman.com; 445-3618

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:16 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Bush Loyalist Fights Foes of ‘No Child’ Law

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: June 12, 2008

NEWPORT, Ky. — Margaret Spellings is not running for office — at least, not yet. But in the waning days of the Bush presidency, she is running one last campaign.

On a cold and soggy morning in March, Ms. Spellings, the relentlessly cheery and sometimes sassy United States secretary of education, turned up here, at a little brick elementary school across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. She had been on the road for months, promoting President Bush’s beleaguered education initiative, No Child Left Behind, delivering one sales pitch after another.

“I’m pretty sure that the new president, whoever it is, will not show up and work on George Bush’s domestic achievement on Day 1,” she told a group of civic leaders and educators, promising to do “everything in my power” to improve the law before the White House changes hands.

For Ms. Spellings, a longtime and exceedingly loyal member of the Bush inner circle, it was a startling, if tacit, admission that the president’s education legacy is in danger. No Child Left Behind — the signature domestic achievement, beyond tax cuts, of the entire Bush presidency — has changed the lives of millions of American students, parents, teachers and school administrators. Yet its future is in grave doubt.

Adopted by Congress on a wave of bipartisan unity that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the law imposed unprecedented testing requirements and tough expectations on the nation’s nearly 99,000 public schools. But despite rising test scores, there is no hard-and-fast evidence, most experts say, that it is actually improving student achievement.

Today, roughly 11 percent of schools do not meet the law’s standards — a figure that is expected to climb sharply as more schools struggle to meet the demand that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014. The bill is so deeply unpopular that Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who was its chief sponsor, often calls No Child Left Behind “the most negative brand in the country.”

The White House had hoped Congress would revisit the bill this year, but on Capitol Hill, prospects for updating the legislation are virtually dead. On the presidential campaign trail, the presumptive Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, vows to overhaul it. The presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, supports the law, though Ms. Spellings knows his priorities are elsewhere.

“It’s not his passion,” she said. “It’s George Bush’s passion.”

And so, the education secretary has hit the road. She has visited more than 20 states this year, testifying in capitals from Tallahassee to Topeka, trying to gin up support for the measure while announcing administrative changes intended to make it more palatable — an insurance policy, of sorts, to help it withstand an assault after Mr. Bush leaves office.

She carts her own roller bag, changing into blue jeans in airline frequent-flyer lounges, so as not to rumple her business suits. She has slogged through inclement weather, flight delays and bad airport food.

“This is my child, my baby,” she said over dinner in Maysville, Ky., referring to the No Child law.

And with seven months left to go, she is not prepared to let it slip away.

A Triumph

The story of how No Child Left Behind morphed from a bipartisan legislative triumph into a laugh line on the Democratic campaign trail is, in part, the larger story of the Bush domestic policy agenda, of a Texas governor who came to Washington vowing to be “the education president” and wound up consumed with fighting terrorism and two wars.

But it is also the story of “little old Margaret Spellings,” as she sometimes calls herself, and her personal journey with Mr. Bush.

They met in the early 1990s — a mutual friend, the political strategist Karl Rove, introduced them — when Mr. Bush was toying with running for governor and she was still Margaret LaMontagne, the chief lobbyist for the Texas Association of School Boards. She helped run the campaign, became a top aide in Austin and, after a divorce, followed Mr. Bush to Washington, a single mother raising two daughters with a big new title: chief of domestic policy.

Today, Secretary Spellings (she married Robert Spellings, an Austin lawyer, in August 2001, and became education secretary in January 2005) is one of a handful of the so-called original Texans still working for Mr. Bush. At 50, she is viewed as a potential candidate for Texas governor and is also one of several determined women, among them Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who count Mr. Bush as a boss and a friend.

“She and Bush have a special relationship, a camaraderie,” Mr. Spellings said of his wife, adding, “She trusts him, and she loves him.”

Perhaps more than any other adviser, Ms. Spellings helped shape the Bush education philosophy: a strict emphasis on standards and accountability, intended to close the “achievement gap” between black and white, rich and poor. While other Republicans talked of dismantling the federal Department of Education, Mr. Bush cast education as a civil rights issue, challenging “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

These were the foundations of No Child Left Behind. The law’s cornerstone is its requirement that states set targets and issue detailed reports on student performance. Schools must improve the performance of subgroups, including minority, low-income and disabled students. Schools that repeatedly fail to report progress are deemed “in need of improvement,” the law’s term for failing. Students may transfer out of failing schools, and the schools risk being shut down.

On a wall in a hallway outside her office in Washington — a spacious affair with huge glass windows overlooking the Capitol and paintings on loan from the Smithsonian — Ms. Spellings keeps framed mementos of the passage of the bill: The Senate vote roster, 87 to 10; a congratulatory note from Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, a key Republican sponsor; a schedule from Mr. Bush’s bill-signing tour, a bipartisan road show featuring Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat.

Ms. Spellings was still so new to Washington, so green, that she did not realize how extraordinary it all was — or how quickly the relationship between the Bush White House and Congress would sour.

“We were used to doing business like that in Texas,” she said. “We just thought that’s how it was done.”

The Criticism

The backlash was swift.

States that did not use annual tests to assess progress scrambled to meet the law’s requirement for testing students in third through eighth grades every year. Even states that did rely on testing, like Kentucky, protested what officials saw as the heavy hand of the federal government.

Kentucky already had what its education commissioner, Jon Draud, calls a “high-stakes accountability program.” But meshing the two “was like putting a slightly round peg into a slightly square hole,” said Lisa Gross, a spokeswoman for Mr. Draud’s agency.

Kentucky assessed student achievement every two years; No Child demanded it every year. Kentucky tested seven subject areas; the federal law required just reading and math. Kentucky marked progress based on a school’s growth; under No Child Left Behind, a school either passed or failed.

So schools could pass by Kentucky’s standards, but fail by Washington’s. The state pushed back, to no avail. “We said, ‘What you’re proposing is very similar to what Kentucky is already doing, and we have found that it is a much stronger, more reliable system if you do two years’ worth of data as an average, and give schools a little more flexibility,’ ” Ms. Gross said. “They say, ‘Well, that’s not how we want to do it.’ ”

Back in Washington, the Education Department, under Secretary Rod Paige, struggled to issue the regulations states needed to put the law into effect, said Gene Hickok, a former deputy secretary. Mr. Hickok remembers “an ongoing sense of tension” between Mr. Paige and Ms. Spellings, who from her perch at the White House pushed for faster action. Mr. Hickok said both he and Ms. Spellings urged a firm stand against states seeking exemptions — a rigid approach that critics say helped undermine support for the law.

To make matters worse, Mr. Hickok said, the department had no public relations strategy to counter the burgeoning opposition. (The strategy it ultimately adopted — secretly paying Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator, to promote the bill — backfired badly. The Government Accountability Office concluded it violated federal law.)

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Boehner was up in arms.

“There was just silence coming out of the department, the regulations were slow in coming and there wasn’t as much discussion with the states as there should have been,” he said, calling the department’s efforts “a fiasco.”

As the law identified schools in trouble, Democrats like Mr. Kennedy began accusing Mr. Bush of reneging on a promise of more federal money to help struggling schools right themselves. “We had reform,” the senator said. “What we needed were resources.”

In 2003, the National Education Association, one of the nation’s two biggest teachers’ unions, surveyed its members, laying the groundwork for a major message campaign that would denounce No Child Left Behind as “a one-size-fits-all approach to learning.” The union’s president, Reg Weaver, said, “We needed to galvanize our members as well as the public around a law that was not doing what it was intended to do.”

By the time Mr. Bush replaced the much-criticized Mr. Paige with Ms. Spellings in 2005, thousands of schools were being declared failing, and states were in open rebellion. Utah threatened to opt out. Connecticut eventually sued.

“No Child Left Behind, as implemented, has not passed the common sense or the fairness test,” said Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota. “It did not make sense to citizens or legislators to say that this school is going to have to be closed or reorganized because kids who may have been disabled are not achieving standards.”

It was against such opposition that Ms. Spellings arrived at the Fourth Street Elementary School, the little brick building in Newport, on that soggy March day.

The school is a showcase, a model of a thriving urban school. Roughly 85 percent of pupils at Fourth Street received free or reduced meals — a barometer of economic disadvantage that can indicate poor performance. But through aggressive efforts to hire math and reading specialists, Fourth Street is making the grade under No Child Left Behind.

On the day Ms. Spellings visited, a 28-year veteran math teacher named Lynn Roberts was teaching first-graders about money — not an easy task when students rarely see money at home.

“I want you to see if you can make 28 cents,” Ms. Roberts announced brightly, as little hands began sifting through piles of coins.

A little boy named Tahj shot his arm up in the air. “Two nickels, two dimes and three pennies,” Tahj declared, for a total of 33 cents. The teacher gently corrected him; Ms. Spellings left impressed.

“These are not people who are sitting around whining about No Child Left Behind,” Ms. Spellings said. “These are people who are hard at work.”

In fact, Ms. Roberts and other Fourth Street teachers have serious concerns about No Child Left Behind. “My concern is that there is such pressure on assessment,” Ms. Roberts said in a later interview, “that oftentimes people are working hard to pass the test, and not to gain real understanding.”

Ms. Spellings often says the bill requires just one test a year, and here in Kentucky, the same test is used for both state and federal assessments. But Doug Alpiger, the Fourth Street principal, said tests beget more tests, because school districts want proof their students are on track.

At Fourth Street Elementary, the signs are everywhere. Classroom doors are posted with pie charts and bar graphs showing test results, though not by name. Hallways are lined with hand-made posters exhorting students to “Try your best!” on standardized tests.

“Assessments are very important, and I said that to the secretary,” Mr. Alpiger said. “It’s important for us to use data to drive our instruction. But the emphasis appears to be so much on assessment that, I’m telling you, at times during the year, our kids are being formally assessed for a month straight.”

Repair Efforts

As she travels the country, Ms. Spellings talks up efforts to use her executive powers to address concerns like Mr. Alpiger’s. For instance, she has begun a pilot program allowing certain states to measure progress using a “growth model,” a technique similar to the one that Kentucky was forced to abandon.

As to whether the law has truly narrowed the achievement gap, the secretary promotes studies showing math and reading scores improving. “I like to say we are pleased, but not satisfied,” Ms. Spellings said here in Newport.

But the Center on Education Policy, a research organization in Washington, concluded in a 2007 study that it is “very difficult, if not impossible” to draw a cause-and-effect relationship, in part because scores were going up before the bill was passed. The center’s director, Jack Jennings, says Ms. Spellings’ initiatives are too narrowly written to make real change, and faults her spending more time being “a political operative” than listening to teachers.

“All these complaints aren’t silly,” Mr. Jennings said. “There’s substance to them.”

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Miller complains that he proposed similar fixes, but was rebuffed by the White House. “They sabotaged the reauthorization,” he said, “and now she’s running around trying to salvage a legacy that can’t be salvaged.”

Yet others, like Gene Wilhoit, a former Kentucky education commissioner who now runs the Council of Chief State School Officers, praise Ms. Spellings for trying to repair relations with states.

“My question,” Mr. Wilhoit says, “is: ‘Is it too late?’ ”

For Ms. Spellings, it may not be; her travels have raised her profile, building a network of connections that could prove useful if she runs for public office. She says she views the churning around No Child Left Behind as “a badge of honor,” the price Mr. Bush had to pay for making what she calls “powerful and profound” reform.

Both supporters and detractors of No Child Left Behind agree that when the history of the Bush administration is written, the president will have succeeded, at least, in changing the American conversation about education.

As Mr. Wilhoit said, accountability “is now anchored into the process.”

Yet many say Mr. Bush’s promise to be “the education president” has gone unfulfilled.

To Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Bush squandered an opportunity to have “a legacy as great as Medicare.” Mr. Weaver, the union official, gives Mr. Bush a D. Jim Hunt, the former Democratic governor of North Carolina, who is close to Ms. Spellings and backs the law, blames the president for the erosion in support.

“He didn’t stick with it,” Mr. Hunt said. Ms. Spellings, upon hearing this, drew in a deep breath.

She was sitting in her Washington office, the one with the Smithsonian paintings, drinking coffee from a porcelain cup, a long way from Texas. She paused a moment and then, in her own loyal way, effectively conceded Mr. Hunt’s point.

“Well, you know, obviously, absent 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think the whole domestic agenda would have been different,” she said. “He ended up being a wartime president and as such has devoted — appropriately so — time and energy to those issues. But with respect to how education fares compared with other domestic priorities, I think we’ve done well.”

Labels: NCLB reauthorization

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:07 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Democrats Offer Plans to Revamp Schools Law

By SAM DILLON | NY Times
June 12, 2008

Democrats are dividing into camps as they debate a new course for education policy after President Bush leaves office.

On Wednesday, a group of a dozen prominent educators and lawmakers, led by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein of New York and the Rev. Al Sharpton, said the United States’ public schools shortchanged poor black and Latino children in a way that was “shameful,” and urged Washington to squeeze teachers and administrators harder to raise achievement among minorities.

On Tuesday, about 60 prominent educators and academics issued another manifesto, which criticized the federal No Child Left Behind law and argued that schools alone could not close a racial achievement gap rooted in economic inequality. They urged a new emphasis on health clinics and other antipoverty programs that could help poor students arrive at school ready to learn.

The groups issuing the statements were composed overwhelmingly of Democrats.

Mr. Klein and Mr. Sharpton’s statement argued that federal policy should continue to hold schools accountable for raising the achievement of poor African-American and Latino youths, which is a focus of the federal law, but should also seek to assign more effective teachers to the nation’s neediest classrooms. This is an area where the statement said the law had been weak.

Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark, the president of the Colorado Senate and the leaders of the Washington and Baltimore school systems also signed the statement.

The statement included a passage labeling teachers union contracts a significant obstacle to increasing the achievement of poor students.

“We must insist that our elected officials confront and address head-on crucial issues that created this crisis: teachers’ contracts and state policies that keep ineffective teachers in classrooms and too often make it nearly impossible to get our best teachers paired up with the students who most need them,” it said.

The other manifesto was signed by two schools superintendents, Beverly L. Hall of Atlanta and Rudy Crew of Miami-Dade County, and Thomas W. Payzant, the former superintendent in Boston, as well as the civil rights leader Julian Bond and former Attorney General Janet Reno, among others.

It criticized the No Child Left Behind law, Mr. Bush’s signature domestic initiative, as narrowing instruction in some schools to little more than reading and math, and called for a “broader, bolder approach” that would increase investment in health and other services in poor communities and rely less exclusively on schools to solve the nation’s social problems.

“Some schools have demonstrated unusual effectiveness,” said the statement, published on Tuesday in paid space in The New York Times and The Washington Post. “But even they cannot, by themselves, close the entire gap between students from different backgrounds.”

“Reducing social and economic disadvantages can also improve achievement,” it said.

Neither document mentioned the presidential campaign, but signers of both said the documents were being made public now in hopes of generating more debate about education policies in the general election campaign than what had occurred during the primaries.

“With the Democratic primary ending and the general campaign starting, there’s the sense that now is the time to lay out different visions of what our education policy should be,” said Andrew Rotherham, a Democrat who is co-founder of Education Sector, a research group in Washington, and who co-signed the statement of principles issued by Mr. Klein and Mr. Sharpton. “Presidential campaigns are in many ways national conversations, so now is the time to lay out a new agenda."

An effort last year to reauthorize the federal law, which Congress passed in Mr. Bush’s first year with bipartisan majorities, fell apart. Congress is unlikely to try again to rewrite the legislation, the most important statement of federal policy toward public schools, until well after a new president takes office.

Labels: NCLB reauthorization

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

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Rural schools left behind federal mandate

Check out the entire report: "Some Perspectives from Rural School Districts on The No Child Left Behind Act" -Patricia

Federal mandate impossible to meet

Scott Stephens | Plain Dealer Reporter
June 11, 2008

Fresh air. Wide-open spaces. Inexpensive housing. Little crime.

The bucolic lures of teaching in a rural school district are considerable.

But there can be a down side: low salaries, larger class sizes and a greater likelihood of teaching a subject other than the one you were trained to teach.

The six-year-old federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires reading and math proficiency for all students by 2012 and a highly qualified teacher in every classroom, has had scant influence on the nation's rural schools, according to a report released today.

The report is significant in developing policy in states such as Ohio, which has the fifth-largest rural student population in the nation. It's also significant because enrollment in rural schools nationally is up 15 percent, including a 55 percent increase in rural minority students.

Even so, rural schools seem to get less attention than urban schools, which are in big media centers, and affluent suburban districts, which have vocal parent support.

And because they tend to be smaller, less racially and ethnically diverse, and generally post better test scores than urban districts, they are less influenced by the federal law.

"Rural districts do have problems," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center for Education Policy, the public school advocacy group that issued the report. "But the problems are quieter."

Among the report's findings:

Federal highly qualified requirements have little impact on teacher recruitment and retention in rural districts. Often because their salaries are not competitive, rural districts have trouble keeping good teachers, especially in hard-to-fill areas such as math and science.

Rural schools are struggling with academic achievement gaps between students from low-income households - as well as disabled students - and their peers.

Rural school leaders rated their own policies and programs more significant than No Child Left Behind regulations in raising student achievement. One exception: Reading First, the federally funded program designed to get children reading well by the end of third grade.

Not all rural school districts agreed with the report's findings. Maxwell Shoff, superintendent of the Firelands Local School District, said teachers in his district are highly qualified and often spend their entire careers in the southern Lorain County system.

"I don't agree with the notion that rural schools can't attract good teachers," Shoff said. "We're not losing them - they stay."

Others have struggled. George Wood, principal of Federal Hocking High School in Stewart, Ohio, said rural schools are often unable to pay the competitive salaries needed to retain the good teachers the federal law requires.

Wood's own district, in the tax-depleted Appalachian hills of southeast Ohio, is on the state's fiscal emergency list. The starting salary in the district is $26,000, and the top salary is $53,000 - even for teachers who have been there 30 years.

Wood said he lost one of his best, young science teachers last year because the teacher's debt from student loans was twice what he was making.

"The problem with No Child Left Behind is that it suddenly demanded highly qualified teachers, but didn't put any support in place to make that happen," Wood said.

Still, every senior at Federal Hocking who graduated this spring and who wanted to go to college was accepted. And the graduating class grossed about $900,000 in scholarships.

"Nothing in No Child Left Behind has helped us with the success of our students," Wood said.

Labels: NCLB, Rural schools

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:11 PM 0 comments Links to this post

2 new schools proposed at Johnston site

District's plans emphasize technology, early college start.

By Molly Bloom
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, June 07, 2008

A proposal to be submitted to the Austin school board Monday calls for two new high schools on the campus of the former Johnston High School, which the state closed this week for failing to meet state academic standards for five years in a row.

Under the proposal, Johnston students would see few major changes during the 2008-09 school year. The new school would operate much as Johnston High did, with the addition of various support systems and an increased focus on individualized instruction. Significant changes would come the following year, when the new schools would open at the Johnston campus.

District officials say the two models that seem to best suit Johnston students are a technology-focused high school, in which students learn by working on projects rather than through lectures, and an "early college start" high school that allows students to earn college credits.

If trustees approve the proposal, the district will submit it to state Education Commissioner Robert Scott. District officials say they will flesh out the plan's details in the coming months.

Johnston was closed for repeatedly failing to meet state standards based on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and dropout rates. Scott said Thursday that he hoped to rule on the plan by the end of the month. Under the law, Scott also had the option of placing the school under alternative management. If Scott turns down the district's plan for reopening, the district can either let the campus sit vacant or open a school with different grade levels, such as elementary, at the site.

"We believe we have to get this right," said Patti Everitt, the district's director of operations and community engagement. "We have to match what we do to the needs of the students."

The district plans to ask struggling Johnston students and incoming freshmen who didn't do well on the TAKS in middle school to attend summer programs to bring them up to grade level. A college and career support center would help students plan their futures beyond high school graduation, according to the plan.

The district also could hire a contractor to run the schools, similar to the "in-district" charter school arrangements in Houston and San Antonio.

At such schools, an outside entity would act as the principal while the district paid for day-to-day operations and salaries.

Under state law, at least 75 percent of Johnston teachers must be reassigned; district officials have said that they will find other positions for teachers not returning to Johnston who want to stay in the district.

State law also requires that at least 50 percent of the students at any new schools on the Johnston campus must have not been previously served by the school.

However, the Austin school district has not proposed a dramatic change to the school's student body, and district officials say students who want to attend Johnston will not be reassigned to other schools.

The proposal does not specify how the district would be able to accomplish that and still meet state requirements.

In past years, less than half of students in Johnston's attendance zone chose to attend the East Austin school.

The district also plans to try to recruit students districtwide to attend the new schools on the Johnston campus.

On Thursday, Scott declined to say what type of plan would address the enrollment requirement but said he didn't "want to punish the district for having an open enrollment policy."

Labels: failing schools

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:43 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Hispanics suffer highest US workplace death rates

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) - Hispanic workers in the United States are killed at work at a 25 percent higher rate than other U.S. workers with many deaths coming in construction, federal health officials said on Thursday.

Hispanics disproportionately take dangerous jobs like construction. Some may hesitate to speak up about safety hazards and may accept risky tasks for fear of being fired, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The most common causes of death were falls at construction sites and roadway incidents including crashes or being hit by a car while working on a road crew, the CDC said. Deaths from workplace falls increased about 370 percent from 1992 to 2006.

The report tracked Hispanic workplace fatalities of U.S. citizens, legal immigrants or illegal immigrants.

Immigration has become a potent political issue in the United States where about 12 million illegal immigrants live, many from Mexico, Central America and South America.

In 2006, the death rate for Hispanics was 5 per 100,000 workers, compared with 4 per 100,000 for all workers, 4 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic whites and 3.7 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic blacks, the CDC said.

Hispanics are the nation's fastest-growing minority. There were 19.6 million Hispanic workers in the United States in 2006, 56 percent of them foreign born.

They have become an increasingly important source of labor in U.S. construction.

An analysis of construction deaths found that Hispanic workers had higher rates than non-Hispanics in the same occupations such as laborers or roofers, the CDC said.

Dr. Sherry Baron of the CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health said inadequate training and supervision of workers, often made worse by language barriers or literacy problems, were factors behind this trend.

From 1992 to 2006, 11,303 Hispanic workers -- 95 percent of them men -- died due to workplace injuries, accounting for about 13 percent of overall such deaths in the United States.

The CDC said 67 percent of Hispanics killed in job injuries were foreign born, almost three quarters from Mexico. It said the work-related injury death rate for foreign-born Hispanic workers is about 70 percent higher than U.S.-born Hispanics.

The highest job fatality rates for Hispanics were in South Carolina (22.8 per 100,000 Hispanic workers), Oklahoma, Georgia and Tennessee, the CDC said. (Editing by Alan Elsner and Maggie Fox)

Labels: labor rights

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:17 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Climate of fear? Illegal immigration bill draws debate in R.I. Senate

This is terrible, not only the language used in this article but the discrimination in these bills.

Read the full text of immigration bills before Senate committees

S2556, S2762: Bills that would restrict inquiries into immigration status and protect employers from fallout from unlawful employment practice suits

S2076: Senator Maselli&rsquos so-called Taxpayer and Citizens&rsquo Protection Act

S2689: A bill that would require appropriate interpreters

-Patricia

May 22, 2008
By KAREN LEE ZINER | Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE — A sweeping bill to control illegal immigration in Rhode Island will create “a climate of fear for documented and undocumented immigrants,” an opponent of the proposed “Rhode Island Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act of 2008” testified yesterday.

Proponents told the Senate Health and Human Services Committee that the bill will alleviate the “economic hardship” of illegal immigration.

“This legislation really fosters an environment of hostility based on language and accent,” said Daniel Bass of the Ocean State Action coalition of community and environmental groups, professional associations and labor unions. Bass said immigration reform belongs at the federal level.

“It’s time we start taking care of the legal residents and citizens of this state,” said Sen. Christopher Maselli, D-Johnston, one of the sponsors of the bill. “I’m not walking in here saying this is the answer to all our woes. But based on the outpouring of support — the e-mails and phone calls — there are a lot of people from all communities who support this bill,” he said.

Key components of the legislation would require state agencies “to cooperate with federal immigration authorities in enforcing federal immigration laws,” would deny driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, and would criminalize renting to illegal immigrants, and hiring or harboring illegal immigrant workers. The bill reflects many of the measures in Governor Carcieri’s recent executive order to curb illegal immigration.

“This bill doesn’t hurt anyone. It only helps the citizens of Rhode Island,” said Terry Gorman, president of Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement.

“If you’re illegal, get out,” Gorman said.

Michael Evora, executive director of the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights, said that creating criminal penalties for renting in “knowing or in reckless disregard” of the fact that a tenant is an undocumented immigrant, will likely lead to increased racial profiling, by “creating an incentive for people to avoid risk.”

“If I don’t want to run the risk” of facing criminal penalties, said Evora, “guess what. I’m not going to rent to someone of color or with an accent.” He added, “… We’re concerned about there being more victims [of discrimination].”

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:49 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Hurdles Remain High for English-LearnersHurdles Remain High for English-Learners

School sees strong progress, but says credit proves elusive under federal law.

By Mary Ann Zehr | Ed Week
June 2, 2008
Sacramento

Ong Vue’s very first day of school came when she was 15 and was enrolled in 9th grade at Luther Burbank High School after arriving here as a refugee from Thailand.

The Hmong teenager says her family couldn’t afford to send her to school in Thailand. When she started at Luther Burbank, she spoke Thai and Hmong, but no English.

Four years later, Ms. Vue is a senior at the 1,970-student school and has passed the math section of California’s high school exit exam. She plans to attend community college in the fall, and hopes to become an elementary school teacher.

Despite her clear academic progress, Ms. Vue’s showing on standardized tests has been a handicap in her school’s quest to meet the yardstick for adequate yearly progress, or AYP, under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Read On...

Labels: English language learners, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:34 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Varying data leave incomplete picture of immigrants' progress

By HOLLY K. HACKER / The Dallas Morning News
June 9, 2008

Researchers have a good idea how many school-age children were born outside the U.S.

As for how these young immigrants fare in classrooms – how quickly they learn English; how often they repeat a grade; how many graduate on time – details are murky. That's because, across the country, school districts vary widely in the information they collect, making it very hard to draw useful comparisons or study the progress of students.

"The data collected by schools is simply not particularly nuanced, especially for immigrants," said Richard Fry, a researcher at the Pew Hispanic Center, a national nonprofit. "You don't know where they were born. You don't know how long they've been here. You don't know anything about their parents."

The U.S. Census gives an overview of the immigrant population by counting foreign-born residents, no matter how long they've been in the U.S. Its most recent survey, from 2006, found that 7 percent of Texas school-age children – some 325,000 kids – are foreign-born. The rate is around 9 percent in Dallas-Fort Worth. Most come from Mexico.

But if you want details, good luck. School districts aren't required to ask students what country they were born in or when they moved to the U.S.

Dallas ISD, for one, voluntarily collects that information through an intake center for new immigrants and refugees. The center also asks families how much schooling their children have had to help place them academically.

Dallas also tracks the total number of students born outside the U.S., but all districts don't keep such detailed records.

There are other problems. For example, not everyone defines "immigrant" the same way.

The Texas Education Agency uses the federal Education Department's definition: a foreign-born student who has attended U.S. schools less than three years. Once that student hits year four, the immigrant label disappears.

So what? Well, it matters if you care how many foreign-born students graduate or drop out from Texas public schools.

The state reports that of 3,165 immigrants in the Class of 2006, just half graduated in four years, and nearly a third dropped out.

But those statistics don't tell the whole story.

Take two Mexican-born students who enroll in Texas schools in ninth grade. The first graduates four years later – but doesn't count as an immigrant because she has exceeded the three-year mark. The second student drops out after ninth grade – and because he was still considered an immigrant, he shows up as an immigrant dropout.

Another problem is that some immigrants, especially teenagers, never enroll in a U.S. school. The census counts them as dropouts. Schools don't, because they never "dropped in" to begin with.

The rate of immigration has slowed in the Dallas area in recent years, because, experts speculate, of greater border enforcement and a decline in construction jobs. Schools also have seen that slowing. Dallas, for example, added 2,240 immigrants this school year, down from 4,730 new immigrants in 2001-02.

Dallas ISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa agrees that tighter border controls have probably had an effect, along with crackdowns on illegal immigrants in Farmers Branch, Irving and other places. But he questions whether the drop is really as steep as the data show. School records – such as Census Bureau surveys – rely on self-reporting, and he suspects some families aren't identifying themselves as immigrants, regardless of their legal status. He predicts that will continue.

"I think people are going to be more scared of being deported," he said.

Labels: immigration and education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:25 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Education a challenge in small Mexican community with strong ties to Dallas

Monday, June 9, 2008
by MACARENA HERNÁNDEZ and GARY JACOBSON | The Dallas Morning News

LOMA ALTA, Mexico – Just down the dirt road from several small adobe houses, past a cat keeping silent watch under a street lamp, past two lounging dogs, 16 students line up outside their one-room concrete school.

The tiniest kid holds the Mexican flag. It's early March, and during a weekly patriotic ceremony the teacher tells her students about Mexico's beloved former president, Benito Juarez, whose birthday is later in the month.

"He was an Indian from Oaxaca and a sheepherder just like you," Maria Gloria Martínez says. "Imagine that, one of you could be president."

As she speaks, nine kids watch from the yard of a nearby house. Mexico requires that children attend school through junior high, but there is often little enforcement. Many of those watching are old enough to be in Ms. Martínez's elementary school, but their parents don't send them.

Ms. Martínez, 69, wears glasses, has short gray hair and does needlework to earn extra money. She also has the voice of a drill sergeant. Earning the equivalent of $170 a month, she lives at the school during the week, sleeping on a cot by the door. Village families bring her food.

In this arid region of Mexico's central highlands, nearly 1,000 miles from Dallas and 7,000 feet above sea level, the elementary and middle schools are, in effect, feeder schools for Adamson High School in Oak Cliff.

Adamson principal Rawly Sanchez has never met Ms. Martínez. But the success of his job is partly linked to her. Many of his students come from rural areas in Mexico such as this, pushed north by powerful economic forces that sometimes hinder schooling.

One of the Loma Alta students who now attends Adamson is Juan, a teen who saved enough money after coming to America to buy a house a short walk from the rural school. He moved to Dallas with his family in 2006 to work construction after dropping out of junior high in Mexico.

"If my children get an education, maybe they won't have to leave because they'll be able to find work," says Juan's aunt, Carmela, who lives in Loma Alta with her 10 kids. "But without an education what can you do? Maybe herd animals, but even those jobs are almost gone."

Loma Alta is one of the smallest of a dozen rural settlements surrounding the town of Ocampo in the state of Guanajuato. Ocampo is the largest community in the municipality (similar to a county in the U.S.) of the same name. The town has 6,000 residents, the municipality 21,000.

Stop anyone in Ocampo and chances are they have a relative in Dallas. If not, that's usually because the relative lives in Chicago, the second most popular destination.

Casa Guanajuato, an organization that helps new immigrants in Dallas, estimates that more people from Ocampo live in Dallas than in the municipality. Personal connections provide a built-in support network, adding to the job allure of Dallas. For a century, Guanajuato has supplied a steady flow of immigrants to the U.S., working on railroads, farms and in well-paying construction jobs.

The connections go both ways. During a 10-day period in Ocampo, two reporters and a photographer from The Dallas Morning News saw many signs of North Texas: a minivan with a Southlake Dragons bumper sticker in front of an elementary school, a first-grader wearing a Trinity Christian Academy jacket, a junior high student wearing a Boswell High School shirt, a woman in a Molina Jaguars T-shirt, and a young boy wearing a "Kahn Elementary Field Day 2002" shirt. Kahn, in Oak Cliff, feeds into Sunset High School. Molina is a Dallas high school.

On Friday and Saturday nights on Ocampo's main square, dreams of El Norte loom large. At the Ciber Cafe, teenage boys pay 10 pesos, about $1, an hour to cruise the Internet. Wearing Dallas Cowboys jerseys and Nikes, they slouch in their chairs as they click through MySpace and watch rap videos on YouTube. It takes only a few minutes of questioning to find someone who has either worked in Dallas, or wants to. For many, earning money is more important than school.

The culture shock of moving north is great. The education shock can be greater.

There was no elementary school in Loma Alta when Juan's mother grew up there. "I was 12 years old when they opened the school," says Maria, 38. "My mother says that before that a lady, on her own, would teach kids at her home."

The average schooling level for municipality residents is fourth grade, according to government statistics. Fifteen percent don't read or write; only 12 percent have finished high school. The municipality didn't have a high school until 1993.

"When we built the high school, the thinking was that people would stop leaving for the U.S.," says Francisco "Pancho" Pedroza, president of the municipality. They didn't.

José Juan Salazar, an Ocampo education official who works with Mr. Pedroza, believes the U.S. educational system is better at encouraging entrepreneurial spirit in kids. "In Mexico," he says, "they educate you as if you are always going to work for someone else."

Before moving to Dallas, Mr. Pedroza's niece, Gabby, and nephew, Luis Adrian, both attended Ocampo's only private school, Instituto Mexico, long the choice of better-off residents. Now, they attend Adamson with Juan.

In the United States, Mr. Pedroza would be called "mayor." Born in 1945, he completed the sixth grade at Instituto Mexico and started working. There were no junior highs in Ocampo then.

He moved to Dallas in 1966, unloading produce for a year at the Farmers Market. Immigration officials caught up with him, he says, so he moved to Chicago and worked at a meatpacking plant. He returned to Ocampo in 1985.

Mr. Pedroza, who has a full head of gray hair and a ready smile, says he is trying to expand the area's agribusiness opportunities and attract a shoe factory. Eventually, he hopes a branch of a university will open in town. Mainly, he wants to give residents an economic reason to stay home and kids a better chance at an education.

"We know we can't stop them from leaving," he says. "But if they're going to leave at least they'll have more education."

Next to agriculture, brick making is Ocampo's top industry, employing about 100 workers, Mr. Pedroza says. One of those workers is a sweat-and-dirt streaked 14-year-old named Luis Cortés. He wears a red "Tommy" cap and a Chevrolet T-shirt that says "The Heartbeat of America." He explains how he quit going to school in the fourth grade to help shovel and mix the mud that becomes bricks and tiles.

"Why should he sit in school bored, not learning anything, when he can be making $10 a day?" says his uncle, José Zuñiga, also a brick maker. The uncle, in his mid-20s, says he did not finish primary school, either. The average worker in Ocampo earns about $70 a week, municipality officials say.

Classroom challenges

The quality of education in Mexico ranges widely, from big urban centers to remote rural areas, like Loma Alta. Those from urban areas tend to be better prepared academically.

Educators in Guanajuato say there has been progress in the last 15 years. Even rural schools are now equipped with computers. There is a standard interactive curriculum for fifth- and sixth-graders that former President Vicente Fox supported.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for Mexico is improving opportunities for students in rural areas, where economic pressures often force families to choose work over school. For decades, Mexico has experimented with ways to reach these students. Some Adamson students attended telesecundarias, junior highs that offer the same televised lesson at the same time nationwide. Between broadcasts, classroom teachers supplement the on-screen instruction with discussions and workbook assignments.

"I see so many kids with so much potential here, but we need to change the culture, and we need more government support," says Carlos Rosales, a regional high school director.

As families move back and forth across the border, more kids from Dallas schools are showing up in Ocampo schools. There is some evidence, municipality officials say, that students from the U.S. are helping improve achievement scores in primary grades.

That's not true for older students coming from America. Complaints of Mexican educators sound much the same as complaints of Dallas teachers talking about students from Mexico. The kids don't know the language well enough, and their math skills are weak.

Students from the United States bring with them some American attitude.

That was evident in an advanced English class at Instituto Mexico. Located behind double metal doors at the rear of a Catholic church a few blocks from the town square, the Instituto offers classes from preschool through ninth grade, charging the equivalent of $35 a month in tuition. Its resources are limited, but its community tradition strong.

That tradition doesn't mean much to Jorge Rangel, who was born and raised in Dallas and moved to Ocampo with his family just before the start of school last summer.

"Oh, man, I want to go back," he says. "This school is a waste."

The big 16-year-old bulges out of his small one-piece desk and chair. The laces on his white athletic shoes are untied. He pronounces his name George. His mom calls him Jorge.

In a class of 13, he is one of three students who attended Dallas schools. Jorge and one friend decided they didn't need to buy the class textbook. They act as if they already know more English than the teacher.

María Guadalupe López, the teacher, was born in Mexico and has lived in Chicago and Dallas. She says the kids who have been in American schools don't like being told what to do and are behind in math. She wonders if those who go back and forth between the countries will ever master one language to an academic level. That echoes concerns Adamson teachers have about Mexican immigrant students mastering enough English to pass the state TAKS exams.

"That's not what I wanted," Ms. Lopez tells Jorge about a class assignment, handing it back. "I said write what you saw, what you learned." The class had taken a field trip to the pyramids of Teotihuacan near Mexico City.

"It was cool but boring at the same time," Jorge had written in English.

Before moving to Ocampo, Jorge attended St. Cecilia Catholic School in Oak Cliff and then Greiner Middle School, where he played football. His father and uncle run a bus company that transports people and cargo to and from the U.S. His mother, Norma Rangel, a U.S. citizen and graduate of Sunset High School, admits some of Jorge's teachers think he is "sassy." Mrs. Rangel thinks he is having trouble adjusting to his new life. "As time goes by, I think he'll like it here," she says.

The next school stop for Jorge, his mother says, is Ocampo's high school, a modern two-story campus near two junior highs and the agricultural experiment station. Municipality officials say that of the nearly 600 students who graduate from Ocampo's junior highs every year, about 150 go on to high school. That includes students at two small high schools in other towns.

The decision to attend high school often depends upon economics. Does a kid have to work to help support the family?

Looking at enrollment figures for the 2006-07 school year, high school principal César Rangel (no relation to Jorge), says 332 students started the year in the school's three grades, and 272 were enrolled at the end of the year. Most who left went to the U.S., Dr. Rangel says.

Is it a brain drain for Mexico?

"Absolutely," Dr. Rangel says. "It's a shame for us that we're not able to retain our people. But it's because at the national level, we're not giving them employment opportunities."

The high school offers specialties in three technical careers: industrial maintenance (repairing machines, electrical, plumbing), information systems (software) and administration (office work). At the same time, some students take college prep classes.

Dr. Rangel says the school has 20 teachers, counting part-timers. They earn the equivalent of about $8 an hour and average about 32 hours a week. Each student pays an enrollment fee equal to about $45 a semester. Many have scholarships.

Dr. Rangel has some advice for the American teachers of Mexican immigrants.

"Really understand that these kids don't know English and they are going into a new culture," he says. "It's going to be little by little that they learn the language." The primary predictor of academic success is the same on both sides of the border, he says: the educational level of the parents.

In an industrial arts class at the high school where the students are wiring lights, instructor Sergio González says he worked construction in Atlanta but returned to Mexico about three years ago, just before he turned 30.

"I love being a teacher," he says. "You become a father to these kids. ...When they fail, I fail, too." Based upon his experience, he gives his students three rules for attaining success in the United States: 1. Learn English. 2. Work every day. 3. Don't get in trouble with the law.

Dreams of America

Back at Loma Alta, Ms. Martínez says this is the most difficult assignment she has had. Two teachers had already come and gone from the school this year before she arrived. The kids were not used to doing schoolwork and were out of control.

The preschool didn't open this term because enrollment was just two students short of qualifying for a teacher through CONAFE, the federal agency that places teachers such as Ms. Martínez in hard-to-fill jobs in poor rural areas. If all the families in town had enrolled their kids, there would have been enough students to unlock the preschool.

Some CONAFE teachers have completed only ninth grade, but they get government assistance to continue their studies. Ms. Martínez says her schooling would be equivalent in the U.S. to two years of college.

Her small classroom building has modern touches: a satellite dish, an IBM computer, an interactive "smart board" and a Lexmark printer. Yet, outside, the common restroom is an adobe wall around a hole in the ground. Students wash their hands from a spigot at the water tank. Ms. Martínez bathes near the front door of the classroom and throws the used water outside.

One day during class, the conversation turns to what her students expect to do in the future. Ms. Martínez listens to their dreams of making money in America. One girl says she's going to work in a restaurant. Another boy says he's going to slaughter pigs. The oldest of the class says he's going to work construction.

"Ay, what crazy dreams we sometimes have," Ms. Martínez says. "You know what? I am so happy here in my homeland."

Labels: immigration and education, Rural schools

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:21 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Report Takes Aim at ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype of Asian-American Students

Here's a link to check out the full report: "‘Model Minority’ Stereotype Obscures Reality of Asian American and Pacific Islander Educational Experience".

Also, check out a report from an earlier post entitled: "Asian American Students Struggling under NCLB" it further adds to the discussion of homogenizing Asian American students.

-Patricia

By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: June 10, 2008

The image of Asian-Americans as a homogeneous group of high achievers taking over the campuses of the nation’s most selective colleges came under assault in a report issued Monday.

The report, by New York University, the College Board and a commission of mostly Asian-American educators and community leaders, largely avoids the debates over both affirmative action and the heavy representation of Asian-Americans at the most selective colleges.

But it pokes holes in stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, including the perception that they cluster in science, technology, engineering and math. And it points out that the term “Asian-American” is extraordinarily broad, embracing members of many ethnic groups.

“Certainly there’s a lot of Asians doing well, at the top of the curve, and that’s a point of pride, but there are just as many struggling at the bottom of the curve, and we wanted to draw attention to that,” said Robert T. Teranishi, the N.Y.U. education professor who wrote the report, “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight.”

“Our goal,” Professor Teranishi added, “is to have people understand that the population is very diverse.”

The report, based on federal education, immigration and census data, as well as statistics from the College Board, noted that the federally defined categories of Asian-American and Pacific Islander included dozens of groups, each with its own language and culture, as varied as the Hmong, Samoans, Bengalis and Sri Lankans.

Their educational backgrounds, the report said, vary widely: while most of the nation’s Hmong and Cambodian adults have never finished high school, most Pakistanis and Indians have at least a bachelor’s degree.

The SAT scores of Asian-Americans, it said, like those of other Americans, tend to correlate with the income and educational level of their parents.

“The notion of lumping all people into a single category and assuming they have no needs is wrong,” said Alma R. Clayton-Pederson, vice president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, who was a member of the commission the College Board financed to produce the report.

“Our backgrounds are very different,” added Dr. Clayton-Pederson, who is black, “but it’s almost like the reverse of what happened to African-Americans.”

The report found that contrary to stereotype, most of the bachelor’s degrees that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders received in 2003 were in business, management, social sciences or humanities, not in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering or math. And while Asians earned 32 percent of the nation’s STEM doctorates that year, within that 32 percent more than four of five degree recipients were international students from Asia, not Asian-Americans.

The report also said that more Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders were enrolled in community colleges than in either public or private four-year colleges. But the idea that Asian-American “model minority” students are edging out all others is so ubiquitous that quips like “U.C.L.A. really stands for United Caucasians Lost Among Asians” or “M.I.T. means Made in Taiwan” have become common, the report said.

Asian-Americans make up about 5 percent of the nation’s population but 10 percent or more — considerably more in California — of the undergraduates at many of the most selective colleges, according to data reported by colleges. But the new report suggested that some such statistics combined campus populations of Asian-Americans with those of international students from Asian countries.

The report quotes the opening to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 classic “The Souls of Black Folk” — “How does it feel to be a problem?” — and says that for Asian-Americans, seen as the “good minority that seeks advancement through quiet diligence in study and work and by not making waves,” the question is, “How does it feel to be a solution?”

That question, too, is problematic, the report said, because it diverts attention from systemic failings of K-to-12 schools, shifting responsibility for educational success to individual students. In addition, it said, lumping together all Asian groups masks the poverty and academic difficulties of some subgroups.

The report said the model-minority perception pitted Asian-Americans against African-Americans. With the drop in black and Latino enrollment at selective public universities that are not allowed to consider race in admissions, Asian-Americans have been turned into buffers, the report said, “middlemen in the cost-benefit analysis of wins and losses.”

Some have suggested that Asian-Americans are held to higher admissions standards at the most selective colleges. In 2006, Jian Li, the New Jersey-born son of Chinese immigrants, filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department, saying he had been rejected by Princeton because he is Asian. Princeton’s admission policies are under review, the department says.

The report also notes the underrepresentation of Asian-Americans in administrative jobs at colleges. Only 33 of the nation’s college presidents, fewer than 1 percent, are Asian-Americans or Pacific Islanders.

Labels: higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:52 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Expert Task Force Charges School Reform Alone Will Fail in Closing Achievement Gap

For Immediate Release
Contact: Katie Reardon
Katie.Reardon@widmeyer.com
202.667.0901
Expert Task Force Charges School Reform Alone Will Fail in Closing Achievement Gap
Diverse Bipartisan Group Launches Campaign for ‘Broader, Bolder’ Policies
to Improve Education, Bridge Achievement Gaps

Washington, DC, June 10, 2008 – A new task force of national policy experts with diverse religious and political affiliations, in public policy fields including education, social welfare, health, housing, and civil rights today launched a campaign calling for a “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education” to break a decades-long cycle of reform efforts that promised much and have achieved far too little.
Co-chaired by Helen Ladd, a Duke University professor of public policy studies, Pedro Noguera, a sociologist at New York University and an expert on educational policy, and Tom Payzant, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a former Boston schools superintendent and U.S. assistant secretary of education, the Task Force’s framework points to the many flaws in the approach of the current No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law and charges that the nation's education and youth development policy has erred by relying on school improvement alone to raise achievement levels of disadvantaged children.
According to the Task Force, multitudes of children are growing up in circumstances that hinder their educational achievement. Statistics suggest the rhetoric of leaving no child behind has trumped reality. As the Task Force’s ads in today’s New York Times and Washington Post note, “Some schools have demonstrated unusual effectiveness. But even they cannot, by themselves, close the entire gap between students from different backgrounds in a substantial, consistent and sustainable manner on the full range of academic and non-academic measures by which we judge student success.”
The timing of the release of a “Broader, Bolder Approach” comes after months and months of gridlock in Washington tied to the reauthorization of NCLB. The statement signed by more than 60 leaders provides a fresh way of thinking about education and youth development policy for governors, state legislators, and a President and Congress who are now running for election in November.
The signatories to “Bolder Approach” reads like a Who’s Who of diverse national leaders from all political and policy spectrums, who have come to agree that the policy embodied in NCLB has failed. The list includes former officials of the current administration, including Susan B. Neuman, who served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education when NCLB was first enacted; John DiIulio, who was President Bush's first director of faith-based programs; and Dr. Richard Carmona, U.S. Surgeon General until last year. It also includes education, health, and human services officials from the Clinton Administration, such as Marshall Smith, who was Undersecretary of Education; Peter Edelman, who was Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Joycelyn Elders, U.S. Surgeon General.
Although some supporters of NCLB call it a "civil rights law," the signatories include civil rights advocates such as Julian Bond, Chairman of the NAACP; Hugh Price, former President of the National Urban
1
League; John Jackson, President of the Schott Foundation and former Chief Policy Officer at the NAACP; Julianne Malveaux, President of the Bennett College for Women; the noted sociologist William Julius Wilson; Ernie Cortes, director of the Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation; and Karen Lashman, Vice-President for Policy of the Children's Defense Fund.
The list includes well-known conservatives, such as Nobel economist James Heckman; Diane Ravitch, who served as Assistant Secretary of Education in the administration of President George H.W. Bush; and Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist. Also included are progressives such as Linda Darling-Hammond, an education advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama; Debbie Meier, founder of the Central Park East schools, and authors John Goodlad and Ted Sizer.
Other notable signatories include Robert Schwartz, the founding president of Achieve, the education reform organization of the nation's governors and leading corporate executives; Milton Goldberg, the executive director of the commission that produced the report, A Nation At Risk in 1983; Richard Kazis, Vice-President of Jobs for the Future, the high school reform organization; and Bella Rosenberg, formerly the assistant to the late Albert Shanker of the AFT. Although many of the signers are known for their concern about the education of urban youth, the Task Force also includes Rachel Tompkins, one of the nation’s leading experts in the problems of rural education.
The statement's diverse group of religious leaders include the Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches; Richard Mouw, president of the Fuller Theological Seminary, the nation's leading evangelical seminary in Pasadena, California; and Joseph O'Keefe, S.J., Dean of the School of Education at Boston College.
Prominent academic scholars of child development and the economics of education, including James Comer, David Grissmer, Christopher Jencks, Sharon Lynn Kagan, and Jane Waldfogel, are also members of the group, as are urban schools superintendents Rudy Crew (Miami-Dade), Arne Duncan (Chicago), and Beverly Hall (Atlanta).
“After six years, it has become clear that No Child Left Behind has not succeeded in improving the quality of education available to America's neediest children. This Task Force is united around the need for a more comprehensive approach to federal policy that specifically responds to the needs of children and schools in low-income areas,” said Co-Chair Pedro Noguera. "Our 'Bold Approach' identifies critical community support systems that can effectively work to narrow the disheartening achievement gap that exists in America."
“Schools can’t do it alone,” said Co-Chair Helen Ladd. “Accountability is a pillar of our education system, but schools need the support of the community – both before children arrive at school and during their school years – for all children to achieve high standards.”
“‘A Bold Approach’ calls for a broader partnership and a sturdier bridge across schools, public health, and social services,” said Co-Chair Tom Payzant. “When we ensure our children are provided their most basic needs, then we can work toward the highest of standards applied to all of our students.”
“A Broader, Bolder Approach” applies equally to federal, state and local policy and acknowledges the centrality of formal schooling, but also focuses on the importance of high quality early childhood and preschool programs, after-school and summer programs, and programs that develop parents’ capacity to support their children’s education. Specifically, “A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education” calls for:
1.
Continued school improvement efforts. To close achievement gaps, we need to reduce class sizes in early grades for disadvantaged children; attract high-quality teachers in hard-to-staff schools; improve teacher and school leadership training; make college preparatory curriculum accessible to all; and pay special attention to recent immigrants.
2.
Developmentally appropriate and high-quality early childhood, pre-school and kindergarten care and education. These programs must not only help low-income children
2
3
academically, but provide support in developing appropriate social, economic and behavioral skills.
3.
Routine pediatric, dental, hearing and vision care for all infants, toddlers and schoolchildren. In particular, full-service school clinics can fill the health gaps created by the absence of primary care physicians in low-income areas, and by poor parents’ inability to miss work for children’s routine health services.
4.
Improving the quality of students’ out-of-school time. Low-income students learn rapidly in school, but often lose ground after school and during summers. Policymakers should increase investments in areas such as longer school days, after-school and summer programs, and school-to-work programs with demonstrated track records.
“We are pleased to support the ‘Broader, Bolder Approach to Education’ campaign,” said Nicholas C. Donohue, President and CEO of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, New England’s largest philanthropy that focuses exclusively on education. “The Task Force reminds us that proper health care and a safe and nurturing environment are keys to learning. We are hopeful their initiative will promote a new conversation about the next stage of education reform."
The release of “A Broader, Bolder Approach for Education” marks the beginning of a long-term effort to persuade federal, state and local policymakers to consider a more enriching framework as they work to support every child’s education.
The Task Force
Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, convened the Task Force to consider the broader context of the NCLB law in the nation's approach to education and youth development policy. The Task Force drafted a statement adopted unanimously to articulate the theme that the nation has erred by attempting to rely on school improvement alone to raise the achievement of disadvantaged children. To read the full statement and view the list of signers with their biographical information, please visit www.boldapproach.org.
###

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:24 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Higher Education Is in Flux as Demographics Change, Federal Report Shows

You can access the entire report "The Condition of Education 2008" here.

-Patricia

By PETER SCHMIDT | Chronicle of Higher Ed
May 30, 2008

For-profit colleges are serving a bigger a share of a market that includes an increasing number of women and minority students, according to report released on Thursday by the U.S. Education Department.

The report, a compendium of data published annually by the National Center for Education Statistics, confirms several significant changes in higher education over recent years. It found that women and minority students accounted for a large proportion of enrollment growth at colleges and universities in the decade leading up to the 2005-6 academic year.

Despite the growing diversity at colleges, however, the nation's minority populations continue to face major educational obstacles, cautions the report, titled "The Condition of Education 2008." Compared with other minority groups, Hispanic students remain underrepresented in colleges and universities, largely because many of them are immigrants who have poor English skills and attend schools in low-income areas.

In a statement released with the report, Mark S. Schneider, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said the document shows that the nation had made some gains, such as increased college enrollment and higher reading and mathematics scores among fourth and eighth graders. "But," he said, "persistent challenges remain in educating a growing and increasingly diverse population."

The Girls Are All Right

The report's findings show that women made great strides relative to men over the 10 years leading up to 2005-6. Women account for nearly two-thirds of the increase in the number of bachelor's and master's degrees and 85 percent of the increase in the number of doctorates awarded by higher-education institutions.

Women's share of total undergraduate enrollment has risen to 57 percent and will most likely remain at that level for the next decade, according to the report.

Men continue to outnumber women among recipients of bachelor's degrees in mathematics, the physical sciences, and engineering, but women earn a larger share of degrees in nearly every major field of study than they did in the mid-1990s. The glaring exceptions are in math, statistics, and computer and information sciences, which men dominate even more than they did before.

Since the 1980s, women have earned more bachelor's degrees than men in the biological and biomedical sciences, and women have nearly caught up in the social sciences, business, and history. And women have increased their lead over men in bachelor's degrees awarded in fields such as education, psychology, and journalism.

Women were still earning fewer doctorates than men as of 2005-6, but just barely, having increased their share of all doctorates received to 49 percent from 40 percent over the past decade.

Tough Transitions

Hispanic students have made the least progress of any group, largely because of problems assimilating, according to the report.

Hispanics born outside the United States account for 7 percent of the nation's population ages 16 through 25, but they make up 28 percent of all U.S. residents in that age group who are not enrolled in high school and have not earned a high-school diploma. They are three times as likely to lack such a credential as Hispanic people whose families have lived in the United States a generation or more.

Of the one-fourth of children in the United States who speak a language other than English at home, more than 70 percent speak Spanish, the report says.

As of 2007, just 34 percent of the nation's Hispanic population in the 25-to-29 age bracket had completed at least some college, compared with 66 percent of white and 50 percent of black U.S. residents in the same age group.

Although Hispanic people have made some gains in this area since the early 1970s, their progress has been slower than that of other groups. Now they are even less likely than white students to enter college the fall after they graduate from high school.

Exploiting Growth

The report predicts that overall growth in degree-granting college programs will reach 15.6 million this fall. With the number of students entering the nation's elementary and secondary schools projected to continue rising through the coming decade—especially in the South—the Education Department does not project a slackening of demand for higher education anytime soon.

As of the 2005-6 academic year, the report says, the nation's higher-education institutions were awarding 28 percent more bachelor's and associate degrees, 46 percent more master's degrees, and 26 percent more doctorates than they had a decade earlier. Asian-Americans, especially, are far more prevalent in advanced-degree programs now than they were in the mid-1990s.

For-profit colleges have capitalized on that growth. As of 2005-6, they were awarding more than twice as many associate degrees than they had a decade earlier, having increased their share of all such degrees awarded to 15 percent from 9 percent. They were awarding six times as many bachelor's degrees and nearly 12 times as many master's degrees.

The report also described several major shifts in where students attended college from 2000 to 2006.

For instance, the share of part-time college students dropped to 37 percent from 40 percent in the first six years of the current decade, while full-time enrollments grew nearly three times as fast as part-time enrollments.

Enrollments at four-year colleges grew at nearly twice the rate of those at two-year colleges, and enrollments at private colleges grew more than twice as fast as those at public institutions.

Students in most Southern states were far more likely to attend in-state institutions than were students in most parts of the Northeast. But in four states—Alaska, Florida, Nevada, and New Mexico—the share of recent high-school graduates who chose in-state over out-of-state institutions rose by more than 10 percentage points in the decade after 1996.

Among the report's other findings:

* Young adults with bachelor's degrees earned 28 percent more than those with associate degrees and 50 percent more than those with just high-school diplomas in 2006. For the first time, however, there was no measurable difference in the earnings of young white, black, or Hispanic adults with master's degrees or higher, although Asian-Americans with such high levels of education earned more.
* Students with disabilities have made substantial strides in high schools. About 57 percent were earning regular diplomas as of 2006, up from 43 percent a decade earlier.
* The proportion of school-age children living in two-parent households remained fairly stable, at about 67 percent, over the decade studied, after falling throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.
* About one in three black and Hispanic children and one in four Native American children attended schools with high poverty levels, compared with one in 10 Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders and one in 25 white children.

Labels: higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:39 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Monday, June 09, 2008

Denver promise of free college is breaking some hearts

Illegal immigrants graduating from high school find that the 2004 pledge won't cover out-of-state tuition, and they're not entitled to Colorado resident prices.

By DeeDee Correll, Los Angeles Times
June 8, 2008

DENVER -- A lot of kids sat up and took notice the day the mayor showed up at Cole Middle School, offering to make a deal: If they'd study hard and stay in school, he'd find the money to pay for college. Four years later, the first of those students are ready to take him up on his offer -- and Mayor John Hickenlooper is ready to deliver.

But the deal has soured for some students in the group: those who are illegal immigrants. Because they would be required by Colorado law to pay out-of-state tuition, it would cost much more to pay for their college educations.

Although the mayor says he will give the students the same amount of monetary support that legal residents will receive, it's far less than what they will need to cover tuition. At least 10 of the 38 who graduated are affected, according to a private group helping the students.

Some now say the mayor has backed away from a commitment that boosted their hopes for the last four years. "We acknowledge the fact the mayor is giving us partial help, but that is not what he promised," said Yadira Zubia, 19.

But Hickenlooper's senior policy advisor, Katherine Archuleta, says the mayor has kept his promise. "The decision by the state Legislature [to charge out-of-state rates] was not in his control. He's doing everything he can."

The issue of whether illegal immigrants should receive the benefit of lower tuitions has been the subject of much debate in recent years. Advocates say that out-of-state rates put college out of reach for such immigrants and that children shouldn't be punished for their parents' decisions to enter the country illegally. Opponents argue that illegal immigrants should not receive the same benefits afforded legal residents.

In this case, the students shouldn't receive any aid at all, said Stan Weekes, director of the Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform. "Aiding and abetting illegal aliens is a felony, and it's my contention that His Honor would be guilty of a felony," he said.

A federal law passed in 1996 prohibits states from charging in-state tuition rates to illegal residents unless they offer the same rates to all citizens and legal residents of other states, said Grisella Martinez, an immigration policy analyst at the National Immigration Law Center.

Nevertheless, California and nine other states let illegal residents pay tuition at in-state rates -- an approach that two years ago survived a lawsuit aimed at ending the practice in California.

In 2006, Colorado lawmakers decided that people who could not prove their legal residency must pay out-of-state rates, which can be nearly four times the in-state rates. For example, in-state tuition at the University of Colorado-Boulder was $6,635 this year, while out-of-state students paid $24,797.

The university system does not track which students are in the country illegally, but officials said that over the past decade they knew of only two such students who enrolled at out-of-state rates. Neither was able to finish, said University of Colorado spokeswoman Deborah Mendez-Wilson. "It's a rare bird who can come up with the funds," she said.

Back in 2004, when the mayor made his offer to the 366 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders at Cole Middle School, it was to give them a reason to stay in school and to help them see college as something within their reach.

Today, many of the Cole students say that they never considered higher education an option until Hickenlooper made his announcement that day: He would raise the money to make up the difference between the cost of tuition and what they could earn in scholarships so that they could go to college.

"I was like, 'Yeah, right,' " said one student, now 18, who did not give her name for fear of deportation. "But as the years went by, I was like, 'Maybe this is true. I'm going to be able to go to college.' "

"Everybody started thinking about getting more education," said Zubia, 19, who was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, but was brought to the United States when she was 5.

"When the mayor made the pledge, he was speaking to a class of students. He wasn't analyzing who was documented or undocumented," Archuleta said.

At the time of the Cole offer, the Legislature had not yet decreed that illegal residents had to pay out-of-state rates, but the University of Colorado system already had a policy of charging the higher rates to students who could not prove their legal residency, Mendez-Wilson said.

Students took Hickenlooper's promise to mean he would pay whatever they needed him to pay.

However, the mayor's staff said it cautioned the illegal immigrants a year ago that they would not be eligible for more financial support than legal in-state students.

Patricia Lawless, an organizer with Metro Organizations for People, which is assisting the illegal immigrants, said city officials didn't tell the seniors specifically until several months ago that they would not receive enough to cover the gap.

It is unclear how many students will eventually be affected. In the first wave of high school graduates from Cole Middle School, at least 10 who want to go to college have realized that they can't afford to after all.

Some now entering their final year of high school are discouraged. "Our families can't afford to make up the difference," said a 17-year-old boy who wants to attend Colorado State University and become an engineer. Even if he worked three jobs, he said, he couldn't earn enough to pay for it.

One 17-year-old said she felt like giving up on school. "There's no way I'll be able to go to college," she said.

Illegal immigrants don't qualify for federal student aid.

Zubia's father, Catalino, is angry that the mayor raised the students' hopes in the first place. "This is not fair," he said.

Help for the Cole students is being routed through the Denver Scholarship Foundation, which Hickenlooper helped found.

It is also offering assistance to qualified students throughout the city's public high schools.

Last month, the Cole students and their supporters called on the mayor to meet his original promise, but they also appealed to the community to help them find a way to pay for college.

"It's a tough issue," said Archuleta, the mayor's advisor. "I think the kids really want to go to university or college or trade school, and I think the law has changed their access."

Labels: higher education, immigration and education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:05 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Math scores of a few were the death of Sam Houston

By ERICKA MELLON | Houston Chronicle
June 6, 2008

The closure of Sam Houston High School boiled down to math.

Officials with the Houston Independent School District say they tried to solve the problem — spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix it — but for five straight years, Sam Houston could not get a small group of black students to pass the state-mandated math exam.

Now, after state Education Commissioner Robert Scott forced the predominantly Hispanic school to close Thursday, some are criticizing Texas' accountability system as too harsh — mandating drastic action based on a few students. Others say the blame lies with HISD for letting the poor performance continue.

This year, only 29 percent of the black students at Sam Houston passed the math portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Half the Hispanic students passed, which would have been just good enough to qualify for the state's acceptable rating, if not for the black students' passing rate.

"In one sense, closing the whole school is a very heavy-handed response," said Ed Fuller, an education researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. "But then again, you have this five-year track record of poor math performance."

Numbers behind the scores
Among Sam Houston's 2,500 or so students, only about 110 are black. Most of the others are Hispanic, and about 65 white students attend.

For school officials, talking about the performance of one student group is tough, and raising test scores can be tougher.

"You have to be very careful with singling out groups of kids at the high school level," said Kelly Trlica, HISD's assistant superintendent over secondary curriculum and instruction. "Any group of students, to sort of single them out, is hard socially," she said

HISD might have another chance with Sam Houston, though. Commissioner Scott has said the district can submit a plan to reopen the school in the fall with a new principal, mostly new teachers, some new students, a different academic program and a fresh name.

As district leaders craft that plan, due to the school board Thursday, some are warning district leaders to learn from their mistakes.

"People of other races always feel like they have the best solution for the teaching and learning of African-American students when they don't even understand the total concept of African-American culture and the environment which these young people of today live in," said Carol Mims Galloway, a Houston school board member and president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Houston.

Valerie Hill-Jackson, an assistant education professor at Texas A&M University, said teachers need to learn how to connect with black students.

"We know this is a culture that is very vibrant, exuberant, likes to talk," said Hill-Jackson, who is black. "So, if I'm a math and science teacher, how can I use that to my advantage? I can have them get out of their seats."

Julia Guajardo, Sam Houston's executive principal, and Trlica said school officials made serious efforts to boost the test scores of all students, no matter their race. Teachers assessed which students were having difficulty with the same math concepts and then tutored them in small groups.

Working on a solution
The school also adopted a new computerized math program called Agile Mind and worked with consultants from the respected Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Still, only 17 of the 59 black students tested — or 29 percent — passed the math exam this year. That's up slightly from 24 percent last year.

The passing rate of Hispanic students increased from 46 percent to 51 percent.

Gloria White, managing director of the Dana Center, characterized the math gains at Sam Houston as "small forward progress." She emphasized that a major turnaround takes at least three years and that consultants only started working with Sam Houston teachers last year.

"You need collaboration time with the teachers," White said. "It's a process. It's not an event. Sometimes you see some movement in the first year, but it's not anything you can count on."

'Antiquated' system
Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra, when he announced the news of Sam Houston's closure Thursday, called the state's accountability system "antiquated," in part because it doesn't take into account the progress made by schools.

On the language arts test this year, for example, the passing rates of black students at Sam Houston jumped 17 points to 84 percent.

Marina Mendoza, the president of the parent group at Sam Houston, said she was shocked to hear some people, who weren't aware of the problems with black students' scores, suggest the campus performed poorly because of illegal immigrants at the school.

"I thought that was so unfair," said Mendoza, who has two children at the school. "We should never look at this as a racial problem. It's an educational problem."

Labels: failing schools

posted by Patricia Lopez at 5:56 PM 0 comments Links to this post

More colleges move toward optional SATs

By Elizabeth Landau | CNN.com

(CNN) -- Jen Wang of Short Hills, New Jersey, took her first SAT when she was in sixth grade, long before she would start filling out college applications.

"My family thought it was very important for me to do well on this test, and I basically obtained nearly every SAT study guide out there by the time I was a junior in high school," she said. "For Christmas one year, I received an electronic device that allowed me to practice the SAT's 'on-the-go.' "

After all that preparation, she ended up attending a school that has made the SAT Reasoning Test, generally known as the SAT, the most widely used college admissions exam in the United States, optional.

Her school, Connecticut College, is one of a growing number of colleges and universities that are making the SAT optional in the admissions process. In May, two highly selective schools -- Smith College in Massachusetts and Wake Forest University in North Carolina -- decided to drop the SAT and ACT, which some students take as an alternative to the SAT, as requirements for admission.

Wake Forest made the move as part of its efforts to increase socioeconomic, racial and ethnic diversity in the student body, said Martha Allman, director of admissions. Research has shown that SAT performance is linked with family income, and that the test by itself does not accurately predict success in college, she said.

Making the test optional "removes the barrier for those students who had everything else," like scholastic achievement and extracurricular activities, but who "maybe didn't do as well on a specific test," she said.

Smith College also cited the correlation between test scores and income as a motivation for making the exam optional, as well as a desire to take a more well-rounded view of applications. The changes at Smith and Wake Forest take effect for applicants seeking to enroll in the fall of 2009.

Several colleges and universities went test-optional in the 1990s amid concern that the test was a barrier to equal opportunity for minorities, women and low-income students, said Robert Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest. Some schools also dropped the test as a requirement with the explosion of test coaching, which gave upper-income kids an advantage.

Today, about 30 percent, or nearly 760 colleges and universities out of the approximately 2,500 accredited four-year institutions across America have made at least some standardized tests optional for some applicants, according to the nonprofit advocacy group FairTest.

Some of those schools, such as George Mason University in Virginia, still require the tests for prospective students who do not meet a particular GPA requirement in high school.

But Alana Klein, spokesperson for the College Board, which owns the SAT, said this is not a trend. While the news media have focused on recent moves to make the test optional, schools have been doing this for decades, and SAT test volumes are up 2 percent from last year, she said.

The poor performance of some low-income and minority students has to do with their lack of access to quality education, which is a national problem, but does not relate to the test itself, Klein said. The SAT is a fair test for all students, she said, and any test question that shows bias is removed.

"Not only is the SAT a critical tool for success in college, but also in the workforce and in life," she said.

At Bowdoin College, which hasn't required the SAT since 1969, the biggest benefit of the test-optional policy is the school's "unusually supportive community" where students don't compare scores, said William Shain, dean of admissions and financial aid.

But at this small liberal arts college in Maine, which admitted about 18 percent of applicants this year, more than 80 percent of applicants submit scores anyway, he said.

One of the downsides of keeping standardized tests optional is that it's harder to evaluate a large pool of candidates who all have high GPAs, he said.

Richard Atkinson, former president of the University of California, recommended in 2001 that the school system no longer require the SAT Reasoning Test for admission. He cited the concerns of African-Americans and Hispanics that these groups tend to perform worse on the exam than students of other ethnicities.

"The real basis of their concern, however, is that they have no way of knowing what the SAT measures and, therefore, have no basis for assessing its fairness or helping their children acquire the skills to do better," Atkinson said in 2001. The University of California system still requires the test today.

Several other schools dropped the test requirement for admissions after the revised SAT came out in 2005, after seeing that the new version did not address concerns about access and poor predictive value, FairTest's Schaeffer said.

Since spring 2005, 34 colleges and universities have made standardized testing optional for all applicants, according to FairTest. Four others made the requirement optional for students with a lower GPA, FairTest's data showed.

About 25 percent of liberal arts colleges have made a move in the test-optional direction, said Jack Maguire, chairman and founder of Maguire Associates. His consulting firm has advised certain colleges to become test-optional.

"I do think it improves a school's image," he said. "It shows what's important to schools, if they're really interested in increasing diversity."

Wang, who just finished her freshman year at Connecticut College, said she is torn on the SAT debate -- the test sharpened her vocabulary and test-taking skills, but preparation took up a lot of time that could have been spent doing other things.

"Applicants may take too much time on prepping for this test and their time can be better spent dedicating themselves to other activities that could show colleges what the applicants really find meaningful in their lives," she said.

Labels: higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 5:24 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Proposed ELL Guidelines Criticized as Too Rigid

Published Online: June 4, 2008
Published in Print: June 11, 2008
Proposed ELL Guidelines Criticized as Too Rigid
By Mary Ann Zehr

Education officials in several states with large English-language-learner populations are bristling at a proposal by the U.S. Department of Education that they say would curb their flexibility in deciding when children are fluent in English and if they still need special services for ells.

The comment period closed June 2 on the proposed “interpretation” of Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act, the main conduit of federal funds for English-language-acquisition programs, generating a two-inch stack of responses to the proposal published in the Federal Register on May 2. ("Consistent ELL Guides Proposed," May 14, 2006.)

Read on...

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:27 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Long-Term Payoff Seen From Early-Childhood Education

Premium article access compliments of Edweek.org.

Published Online: June 5, 2008
Published in Print: June 11, 2008

Long-Term Payoff Seen From Early-Childhood Education
By Linda Jacobson

The latest analysis of a long-running early-childhood-education program for children of low-income families in Chicago suggests economic payoffs from such services that continue well into adulthood.

Researchers looking at data from the study, which is now more than 20 years old, say that for every dollar spent on children who attended the Chicago Child Parent Centers, almost $10 is returned by age 25 in either benefits to society—such as savings on remediation in school and on the criminal-justice system—or to the participant, in the form of higher earnings.

“The study is significant, given it is the only one of a sustained public school program and one of the very few which go into adulthood,” Arthur J. Reynolds, a child-development professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and the lead researcher on the project, said in an e-mail.

He added that the benefits are probably underestimated because he has found some unexpected outcomes, such as participants’ being more likely than those in the comparison group to hold private health insurance and less likely to have mental-health problems. ("Chicago Data Bolster Case for Early-Childhood Programs," August 15, 2007.)

But some experts caution that the children served by the Chicago program and similar efforts were very disadvantaged, and that providing such services to middle-class families in universal preschool programs are unlikely to result in the same return on investment.

“The biggest argument against the Chicago economic data is that it is still largely a ‘boutique’ program that cost more and provided more services than most current universal and preschool programs,” said Lisa Snell, the director of education and child welfare at the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation, a free-market-oriented think tank. “It is hard to imagine that current programs will have the same kinds of economic payoffs as the Chicago program.”

The conclusions were presented late last month at a meeting in San Francisco of the Society for Prevention Research, based in Fairfax, Va.

Parent Involvement

The Chicago Longitudinal Study originally included 1,539 children from low-income African-American and Hispanic families who began in the early-education program run by the Chicago school system at 25 sites in either 1985 or 1986.

The Chicago program began in 1967 at sites in or near elementary schools. Similar to the federal Head Start program, the Child-Parent Centers provide comprehensive education, health, and family-support services to children ages 3 to 9.

Unlike in Head Start, all the teachers in the program have bachelor’s degrees and are paid at the same level as K-12 teachers.

In addition, parents are expected to participate in the classroom—a component that distinguishes the Chicago program from other early-intervention initiatives—and the children in the study received home visits from a “school-community representative.”

“The parents were expected to get involved, and there were 30 different ways [for parents to participate], so nobody said no,” Mr. Reynolds said.

While the study was not designed as a true randomized trial, a comparison group including children who were matched to the participants on socioeconomic factors and demographic variables, wsuch as family size and parents’ employment status, has been used to track the effectiveness of the intervention. Children in the comparison group took part in other early-childhood programs, such as Head Start, or full-day kindergarten.
Last year, Mr. Reynolds released findings in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, a monthly journal, based on study of participants at age 24. Those findings showed that the adults had acquired more education and were less likely to commit crimes than those who had not received the same level of service.

A Body of Evidence

Because of its evidence of lasting positive effects, such as lower special education costs and less welfare dependency, Mr. Reynolds’ study on the Chicago program is often used as one of three long-running research projects to argue for public spending on early-childhood education. The other two are the High/Scope Perry Preschool study, which ran in Ypsilanti, Mich., outside Detroit from 1962 to 1967, and the Carolina Abecedarian Project, in Chapel Hill, N.C., which provided services from birth through age 5 to 112 children from low-income families born between 1972 and 1977.

The Chicago study stands out, however, because it is not a demonstration program as are the others. It has been operated by a public school system and thus is likely more “generalizable to other similar and contemporary locations and contexts,” Albert Wat, a state-policy analyst at the Washington-based advocacy group Pre-K Now, wrote last year in the report “Dollars and Sense: A Review of Economic Analyses of Pre-K.”

The Chicago program “demonstrates that public schools can effectively implement high-quality pre-K programs that produce long-term positive gains,” he wrote.

Still, Mr. Reynolds concludes that the newest “evidence strengthens the findings of a high return on investment of public programs, if they follow the key principles of effectiveness.”

Mr. Reynolds’ new analysis, which will be released in a research paper later this year, also provides a comparison of the economic benefits of various types of preschool programs.

It uses an average of all the cost-benefit studies that have been conducted on other popular policies, such as full-day kindergarten, class-size reduction, and the federal Women, Infants, and Children, or wic, nutrition program.
The comparison shows that preschool programs have by far the highest return, $6.02 for every $1 spent, compared with $2.47 for small classes, $3.07 for wic, and nothing for full-day kindergarten.

Vol. 27, Issue 41, Page 8

Labels: early-childhood education

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:17 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Charter school shatters stereotypes

Charter school shatters stereotypes
Web Posted: 06/07/2008 12:23 AM CDT

By Jenny LaCoste-Caputo
Express-News

From the outside, it's just a decrepit old gymnasium sandwiched between Ashby Street and Fredericksburg Road in the shadow of the downtown skyline.

There are no windows, no signs, virtually no clues to what's taking place inside — a graduation ceremony of sorts, celebrating feats that could be described as barely short of miraculous.

On Tuesday, 70 eighth-graders gathered at the gymnasium on the campus of KIPP: Aspire Academy, a public charter school, to pledge to return in four years with high school diploma in hand and tell their principal what college they're heading to.

This class of eighth-graders, the second graduating class of the charter school that serves grades five through eight, has shattered stereotypes. Almost all the students are Hispanic and live within the boundaries of Loop 410. About 84 percent come from poor homes, and, for many, Spanish is the first language.

Yet this class has earned more than $500,000 in scholarships to private high schools, including exclusive boarding schools as far away as Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut.

Twenty students have full merit scholarships to attend prestigious private schools. Another 44 gained entrance into some of the city's most competitive magnet school programs.
EN Video
• KIPP: Aspire Academy school director Mark Larson and several students explain what makes them and their school unique.

Their scores on the state's Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test this year were among the highest in the city, beating out Alamo Heights Junior School and scoring on par with two of the richest middle schools in San Antonio — Tejeda and Bush in the North East Independent School District.

So how is this school, housed in a modest collection of buildings leased from the Archdiocese of San Antonio, managing to sail over hurdles that trip most urban school districts?

It's not rocket science, school director Mark Larson said. It's a mixture of discipline, commitment from teachers, 10-hour school days, Saturday school and three weeks of mandatory summer school.

(Bahram Mark Sobhani/Express-News)

Mark Larson is lifted by his students.

Family members watch their children during the eighth-grade recommitment ceremony.

“For every hour that kids in public school are in class, we do an hour and a half,” Larson said. “That means these kids have done six years' worth of work in the past four years.”

The model is working so well, Larson is spearheading a plan to expand KIPP in San Antonio. Plans call for opening a high school in 2009 and eventually operating 10 schools — four elementary, four middle and two high schools — by 2017, all serving inner-city kids. Houston is home to seven KIPP schools, the most in any one city.

The KIPP model is yielding results across the country. There are 66 Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) schools nationwide and all are showing consistent test score gains. On average, since 2001, students who were with KIPP for four years jumped from the 40th to the 82nd percentile in math and from the 32nd to the 60th percentile in reading on national tests. The success has made KIPP, which works mainly with disadvantaged children, a shining example in the charter school movement.

A new life

KIPP Aspire sends its students on class trips every year, expanding their horizons and visiting colleges. Fifth-graders usually stay in Texas, but the older students go to places such as California, Boston and Washington.

Jennifer Martinez never had been on an airplane before coming to KIPP and barely ventured beyond her native San Antonio. But now she's visited not just Texas schools, but also the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford, Boston College, Harvard, Georgetown, William & Mary and several more.

“All the trips were firsts for me,” said Jennifer, 15, who scored a high school scholarship to TMI-The Episcopal School of Texas. “We know more about colleges now than most people do when they get out of high school.”

George Gonzalez, who has two children at KIPP, said the class trips make college goals tangible for the students. Gonzalez went as a chaperone on this year's trip for eighth-graders to Washington.

“It just built the dream so much more,” he said. “It opened their eyes and now they see this as attainable.”

College prep is not just a slogan at KIPP — it's the specific goal and the theme is punctuated in everything students do. On Fridays, students who have earned the right can wear college T-shirts — shirts they've purchased at the school store with points they've earned for completing their work and behaving.

Students walk the halls with shirts from schools such as Stanford and Yale, as well as Texas A&M and the University of Texas.

Edith De La Rosa, 14, is working toward a goal that was unimaginable to her before coming to KIPP. Late this summer, Edith will leave for the Lawrenceville School, a boarding school in New Jersey. Her merit scholarship includes money for books, athletic equipment and a personal allowance, as well as a travel stipend so she can visit her family on school breaks.

Edith also was accepted at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. Her admission letter from Deerfield reads in part: “You are someone who has so much to offer a school, and I hope Deerfield will be the place where you continue to grow as a person and as a student.”

The preparation has been dizzying for Edith, not the least of which is preparing herself for the inevitable homesickness.

“My mom and I are really close. Some nights I would go to her room and we'd start crying, but we're better now,” Edith said, adding that the travel stipend calmed her fears. “The longest we'll go without seeing our parent is six weeks.”

After high school, Edith wants to go to UC-Berkeley or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to focus on math and engineering. And the plucky girl from San Antonio isn't intimidated by the level of work at the elite boarding school she's headed to.

“I think it will be pretty easy after four years of KIPP,” she said.

Rigorous schedule

It may sound like a flippant remark from a teenager, but Edith just might be right. The KIPP schedule is grueling by any standard. School starts at 7:30 a.m. and ends at 5 p.m. With two to three hours extra on the bus every day, that means a 12-hour day for most students.

“I hated it at first, but eventually you get used to it,” eighth-grader Nick Hooper said of the long days. “I have between an hour and an hour-and-a-half bus ride each way. You definitely sacrifice, but it's mostly gains, no losses.”

For Nick, the gain is a scholarship to Central Catholic High School in San Antonio, where he'll start in the fall. And, Nick pointed out, the day isn't strictly academics. Students have the chance to participate in band, athletics and drama. Nick starred last month in the school's production of Shakespeare's “Twelfth Night.”

Larson, the school's director, said watching the play was a touchstone moment for him.

“Listening to these kids, some of whom struggled with English four years ago, deliver these lines from Shakespeare perfectly, I just lost it,” said Larson, his eyes glistening with tears.

Advocates say KIPP's results are proof that there is a solution for struggling urban schools, but the difference in the experience in a KIPP school compared with a traditional public school is radical.

Students start school three weeks before traditional public schools for what Larson calls “culture setting.” The goal: no time wasted getting ready to learn. By the time most schools open their doors for the first day of class, KIPP students are well into their curriculum for the year.

Those first few days, the students aren't allowed to enter the classrooms or wear their school T-shirts, and they don't even have desks. Orientation into the KIPP school day takes place in the hallways. Kids have to “earn” the right to go to class and, when they do, they get a virtual paycheck, or points, for completing their work. They pay rent for their desks from their paychecks and also can purchase school T-shirts and college shirts from the school store.

Each grade level's T-shirt has a different slogan, such as: “We work as a team and we have the same goal,” “We always do the right thing no matter who sees,” and “We believe.”

Students can lose points on their paychecks for misbehaving or failing to complete the copious amounts of homework, called “lifework” at KIPP, that they have each night. If they lose too much money from their paychecks over the course of the school year, they aren't allowed to go on the class trips.

They can also lose the right to sit at a desk if they misbehave. It's called “on the crate” and is KIPP's version of in-school suspension, better known in school lingo as ISS.

It's called on the crate because students literally sit on a milk crate instead of at their desk, they wear a shirt denoting their disgraced status and aren't allowed to talk to other students.

“We think ISS is stupid. Kids miss out on class and come back three days later behind,” Larson said. “That's not a rehabilitation program. We want them in class, learning.”

The school doesn't just ask a lot of its students, teachers have a heavy load. They, too, have a long school day, and must work two Saturdays a month and three extra weeks in the summer. They also are required to keep their cell phones on and be available to students nearly all the time.

It's not unusual for a KIPP teacher to get a call asking for help with homework well past 9 p.m.

Another strategy to help students focus is starting the day with an advisory time every morning. It's a chance for the kids to talk in a group, with teachers listening in and offering guidance.

“You never know what's going on in their lives that could affect the school day,” said Martin Acevedo, the school's director of development.

He recalled one boy who was upset because his father was in prison. The boy thought his dad was going to be released in time to celebrate his birthday. When he didn't, he was bitterly disappointed and shared it with the group.

“It turned out there were three other kids in that class that had a dad in prison, and they were able to talk about it,” Acevedo said. “These kids can't be focused if we don't allow them to deal with these very real problems they have, and that's what they do in advisory.”

On a recent school day in a fifth-grade advisory class, a student shared with her classmates that her young cousin had committed suicide over the weekend. School counselor John Boubel took note and made plans to meet with the girl later in the day.

“Normally we can see it on the kids' faces when something's wrong,” Boubel said. “That's the difference here. We know the kids that well. We get calls in the middle of the night when families are evicted or tragedy happens. We're a family.”

Sixth-grade teacher Pam Chambers agrees that though the school is strict and standards are high, the biggest reason her students are succeeding is because they feel they're part of a family.

“Children will perform if they feel loved, if they feel respected and if they feel that this is their home,” she said.

Next goal: College

This year's eighth-graders have surpassed even their teachers' expectations. At the beginning of fifth grade, these students posted poor to mediocre test results, scoring at the 31st percentile in reading and at the 51st percentile in math on a national test. Four years later, those same students are bound for some of the best private schools and the most selective magnet schools around.

KIPP doesn't call the eighth-grade event at the end of the year a graduation.

“The graduation that matters for you all comes in eight years,” Larson told the class, referring to their graduation from college. “Too many times in San Antonio, the eighth-grade gradation is the last one — not for you.”

The students came up one by one to sign a pledge that they would return to KIPP in four years, and tell Larson what college they're headed for. They received a medal and a hug from Larson.

“You guys, they make movies about people like you,” Larson told them. “That's how big a deal this is.”

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:34 PM 0 comments Links to this post

The resegregation of Seattle's schools

By Linda Shaw | Seattle Times education reporter
June 1, 2008

Nearly three decades after Seattle Public Schools integrated almost all its schools through busing, that racial balance is long gone.

Leschi Elementary, about evenly divided between white and minority students in 1980, has a nearly all-minority population once again. The same is true for Brighton Elementary, Dunlap Elementary, Van Asselt Elementary — and all but two of the 26 schools that, the year before busing started, were considered racially imbalanced. Today, a total of 30 schools — close to a third of the district's buildings — have nonwhite populations that far exceed the district's average of 58 percent. In 20 of them, nonwhite enrollment is 90 percent or more.

Seattle schools don't look exactly like they did before districtwide busing began in 1978. There are fewer nearly all-white schools. Minority students are not as concentrated as they once were in the central part of the city.

But Seattle Public Schools, like many districts across the nation, has slowly, steadily resegregated.

"We like to think of ourselves as these enlightened, liberal folks," says School Board member Harium Martin-Morris. "But the fact is our schools aren't the way that people really think they are."

The segregation is often the byproduct of who lives where. But other schools end up that way through the choices parents make.

The Seattle School Board is weighing what, if anything, to do about the situation. As the board plans a major overhaul of how it assigns students to schools, its members face conflicting desires.

Do they assign more students to schools close to their homes? That's what many parents say they want, and it's what the board (before last year's elections) voted to pursue.

Do they try to ensure racial diversity at every school? Many parents say they want that, too. But if a neighborhood is segregated, Martin-Morris points out, a neighborhood school will be, too.

The board is more limited than ever in what it can do, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court's closely watched desegregation decision a year ago. The court ruled that Seattle and Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky could no longer use a student's race in deciding where some students attend school.

Seattle School Board members may face pressure to do something. If they don't, said James Kelly, president and CEO of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, he'll recommend that the league's board of directors take legal action.

Segregated schools have never been equal, Kelly said, largely because high-minority schools are often high-poverty schools.

He favors allowing parents a wide choice of schools. He knows that's expensive, he says, but "we can't afford a segregated, unequal system either."

Busing worked on paper

Seattle never had the kind of laws that, in places such as Little Rock, Ark., forbade white and minority students from going to school together.

But Seattle did have housing covenants and other discriminatory practices that limited minority families to certain neighborhoods. The school segregation that those practices caused was what the district's busing plan, adopted in 1977, was designed to change. The district turned to busing after more than a decade of other efforts, including a voluntary transfer program that, at its peak in 1969-70, attracted just 3 percent of district students.

Mandatory busing involved about 12,000 of the district's 54,000 students. Three years after it started, the district reached its racial-enrollment goals.

By 1980, only one school — Cleveland High — still was considered "racially imbalanced" because its minority population was 20 percentage points or more above the district average.

But mandatory busing didn't create as much diversity as the numbers might appear to show. White enrollment dropped by 28 percent in the first three years of busing, with many students moving to the suburbs or private schools, according to a district history of its desegregation efforts. (Minority enrollment over the same period went up about 10 percent.)

More minority than white students ended up riding buses, despite careful planning to avoid that. And too many schools, integrated on paper, were still segregated in the lunchroom, and sometimes even the classroom.

Busing did not achieve one of its main goals, which was to raise academic achievement, said Dorothy Woods, who spent decades as a teacher, principal and instructional coach in Seattle schools.

It did not improve relationships between teachers and students, she said, or rigor, or instruction.

As the district reduced busing in 1989, then ended it entirely eight years later, the racial balance at many schools continued to unravel.

From 1970 to today, the district's enrollment dropped from 85,000 students to 45,000. The nonwhite enrollment nearly tripled, and is now 58 percent. The city's population, over the same time period, grew 8 percent, and its minority population more than doubled.

A year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the last, modest policy that Seattle used to increase diversity. Called the racial tiebreaker, it gave preference to students who would improve the racial balance at popular, racially imbalanced schools.

When last in use, it involved only about 10 percent of the district's 3,000 incoming freshmen.

The court's decision made it clear that school districts can't discriminate based on race when placing students in schools. (The ruling covered voluntary desegregation efforts, not court-ordered plans still in place in a few hundred districts.)

The court said that diversity in the nation's public schools also is important. Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested other ways to accomplish it. Some districts now are looking at basing some school assignments on family income.

That's something the Seattle School Board is considering, although not to a large degree.

"The hard truth," says School Board member Steve Sundquist, "is that the school district is hard-pressed to single-handedly overturn segregated housing patterns in the city."

Split is economic as well as racial

Today, black and Asian-American students each make up 22 percent of the mix in Seattle. The Latino population — at 12 percent — is growing the fastest, and there's one school — Concord in West Seattle — where the majority of students are Latino. Native Americans make up 2 percent.

About 60 percent of the district's schools have a mix of three or more ethnic groups in significant numbers, something that sets Seattle apart from cities where the racial divide is between black and white or Latino and white.

Different areas of the city, however, vary widely from the districtwide averages.

In the southeast, for example, 93 percent of the public-school, elementary-age students who live there are nonwhite. In Queen Anne and Magnolia, it's 27 percent.

In the north end as a whole (plus Queen Anne and Magnolia), minorities make up 40 percent of public-school students. In the south, they comprise 72 percent.

Parents Involved in Community Schools, the group that filed the lawsuit against the racial tiebreaker, argued in court that Seattle no longer needed the racial tiebreaker because the city's high schools already are racially diverse. The group looked at data from 2000-01, when only one high school — Rainier Beach — had a student body that was less than 10 percent white.

The picture has changed since then. Three high schools — Rainier Beach, Cleveland and Franklin — now have white populations under 10 percent. At the elementary level, some schools have just a handful of white kids, or just a few minority ones.

Wing Luke Elementary, for example, counted four white children among its 322 students last fall. At Dunlap, there are seven. At Loyal Heights Elementary in Northwest Seattle, there are 10 black students, 17 Asian-Americans, 27 Latinos, two Native Americans — and 323 whites.

The city's north-south split is economic as well as racial.

In the north, there is just one elementary school where three-quarters of students qualify for free or low-cost lunches. In the south, there are 14.

Housing and income patterns, however, don't explain everything about the racial mix in Seattle schools.

In one case, the district created a school designed for one ethnic group, the African American Academy. Parents and community leaders pushed to open that school as a place that would nurture African-American students and teach them about African-American culture and history.

But in other schools, the reasons for the racial mix aren't as clear.

Seattle has five elementary schools, for example, where the percentage of nonwhite students is far greater than the percentage of nonwhite students who live in the surrounding neighborhood.

"We say we want diversity, but it's not necessarily what we look for when we're looking for schools," says LaKesha Kimbrough, a black parent whose child used to attend John Muir Elementary (and now is home-schooled).

Challenge: foster, not mandate, diversity

Many stress the social benefits of diverse schools. In its brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, the American Education Research Association said studies clearly show that diverse schools contribute to improved cross-racial understanding, a reduction in prejudice and a willingness to live and work in diverse settings.

It also said that diverse schools lead to higher academic achievement, but Seattle schools ended busing in part because it found no evidence of that.

David Fukuhara, who went to Franklin High when it was equal parts white, black and Asian, says he's watched the diversity of Seattle schools decline as his children have grown, and he thinks they're missing something because of it.

Still, he wouldn't want his children on long bus rides every day. No one suggests that's the solution.

Gary Ikeda, Seattle Public Schools' general counsel, says busing "crippled us and diverted us from pursuing quality education."

"Was it the right answer?" he asks. "Yes, in 1972." But in 2008, he said, "it's clear under the law that mandatory assignments based on race are not appropriate."

The challenge now, he says, is to foster diversity without mandating it.

Seattle's history shows that's no easy task.

Labels: segregation

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:51 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Dropouts give reasons

Here's the link to the press release.
Other key findings include:

* Eleven percent of high school juniors or seniors plan to end their education with high school, will not graduate on time or will dropout. The number nearly doubles (21 percent) for those lacking job or career goals.
* While 4 percent of those polled haven’t completed high school, 10 percent of those who lacked guidance in high school haven’t graduated.
* While 25 percent of all respondents said they didn’t receive job or career direction in high school, 55 percent of dropouts said they lacked such help.
* Nearly 30 percent of all respondents said they didn’t have a role model in high school, but more dropouts and more individuals without job and career goals said they didn’t have role models (73 percent and 54 percent, respectively).
* Twenty-four percent of those with goals said they were unemployed compared to 45 percent of those who said they have no job or career goals.
* Survey participants identified parents, teachers or counselors and siblings as the most influential people in their lives.
* Two percent of those polled said they had actually dropped out of school; 6 percent said they had considered dropping out.

-Patricia

Polled students tell what they need to succeed

BY LORI HIGGINS and PEGGY WALSH-SARNECKI • FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITERS
May 30, 2008

Fewer students would drop out of high school if they took classes they found relevant, had help developing career goals and had strong relationships with adults they see as role models, according to a poll of 500 young adults in Michigan.

The poll, conducted May 12-21, was commissioned by the Michigan Education Association. Respondents ranged in age from 16 to 20. Results were released Thursday.

Educators have been trying to address these issues for years as they refocus schools on a new version of the three R's -- rigor, relevance and relationships. The state's largest teachers union said the poll provides numbers to back up that emphasis.

"There's a large number of young adults we can actually turn things around for without a great deal of effort," said Ed Sarpolus, MEA director of government affairs.

Among the findings:

• 25% said they didn't receive job or career direction.

• 55% of dropouts said they had no direction.

• Nearly 30% of respondents said they didn't have a role model. Among dropouts, that number was 73%.

The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

"The relationship between the students and the teachers is primary, and the schools often overlook that element of importance for the students," said Elsie Ritzenhein, principal of the Macomb Academy in Armada Area Schools.

Sarpolus and Ted Spencer of Detroit said the solution lies inside schools and communities. "We really need the village," said Spencer, who is raising three grandchildren in high school.

Lyndsey Eschenburg, 20, of Clinton Township said schools can help students build career goals by exposing them to volunteer opportunities or other work experiences.

"I think it's necessary to have goals and have expectations for yourself," she said.

Schools are working to expose students to careers, in accordance with the state mandates that beginning in middle school, every student must complete an education-development plan to help identify career goals. In Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, the three high schools that share a campus each have a career center.

"We'll go over and beyond what students need to make sure they leave ... with some sort of direction," said Vickie Bonner, career center coordinator at Salem High School.

Labels: Dropouts

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:27 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Sunday, June 08, 2008

S.F. schools take on racism, classism

Jill Tucker, SF Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 28, 2008

San Francisco Superintendent Carlos Garcia took a first stab at putting his mark on city schools Tuesday with a plan that pushes the district to face racism and classism head on.

The district's strategic plan adopted by the school board 6-0 Tuesday night focuses on reversing the typical academic outcomes for black, Hispanic and poor students.

Although that sounds almost like a reworked version of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, district officials say they are working off a corporate model that puts everyone - from school board members to custodians - under the microscope in different ways.

A new grading system will expose schools - even the popular, high-scoring ones - that are failing to address the institutional racial inequities within their walls.

"The issues we're dealing with are capital D Democracy issues," said Tony Smith, deputy superintendent of instruction, innovation and social justice, and the plan's architect.

The question, however, is how to solve those deep-rooted societal problems that are playing out in schools. So far, no urban district has bridged the achievement gap or created schools of equal quality for children regardless of their race or income.

The solution, according to the superintendent's plan, starts with a top-down acknowledgement that the schools are contributing to the inequities in society, Smith said.

Training will also be crucial, he said.

That means, Smith said, asking teachers some hard questions, including: "Do you have experience working with these kinds of kids?"

Each school will be judged by how well it "serves each and every student based on that school's ability to disrupt the historically predictive power of racial, ethnic, linguistic and socio-economic student attributes," according to the plan.

Successful programs would be identified and worked into other schools.

A scorecard will measure school and the district performance across a wide range of indicators including:

-- "Percentage of schools that are fully integrated racially, ethnically and socio-economically."

-- "Percentage of SFUSD teachers with a district supplied laptop that is functional and has current software."

-- "Number and percentage of students who drop out of school between grades 6-12."

-- "Number and percentage of students who vote in their local student government elections."

The scorecard is based on a business model created in the 1990s.

The district's plan has evolved over the last several months, with the involvement of 1,000 parents and students as well as community leaders and district staff, district officials said.

It comes about a month shy of a one-year anniversary for Garcia, who promised back in July that he wouldn't settle for the status quo.

Shortly after his arrival, he toured schools to see what was needed.

He said he remembers the shock he felt, walking into classrooms full of blackboards - not even the newer green ones - with erasers and chalk lined up neatly on the shelves below.

"I hadn't seen a chalkboard in some time," Garcia said some months into the job.

Before and after he took the job here, he told the board they were spreading money too thinly. They needed to set priorities, focus funding, let him do his job and then hold him accountable.

Garcia set to it, starting with some new hires.

Smith was one of his first - lured from Emery Unified, where the former professional football player earned a reputation for results.

Board members and district staff said Tuesday that adoption of the plan is the start of a long process that will include community input and the development of ways to create equity in the schools.

One of the next steps in implementing the plan will be to identify the schools succeeding and those still needing work, Smith said.

"It is the right of every child in the San Francisco school district to be educated well," board member Kim-Shree Maufas said. "And that's our charge in creating this new plan."

Labels: California, NCLB

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

Research questions quality of teachers' training

Sunday, May 25, 2008
Scott Stephens and Edith Starzyk
Plain Dealer Reporters

In "Putting Teachers to the Test," an occasional series, The Plain Dealer is taking a yearlong look at issues involving teachers and the quality of instruction. Today and Monday, we examine teacher-preparation programs. Future stories will explore what constitutes good teaching and bad teaching and how the profession is changing.

Imagine that commercial airline pilots were trained in schools where almost everyone who applied was admitted.

Imagine that their instructors had not been in a cockpit for decades and rarely spoke with active pilots about new equipment or cutting-edge techniques.

And imagine that those mythical training schools operated within an accreditation system that failed to ensure quality and rarely disciplined failure.

Fasten your seat belt.

That imaginary scenario is all too close to the way critics describe the training that America's teachers receive -- on average -- at the nation's 1,200 college- and university- based teacher education pro- grams.

A growing body of research argues that education schools -- despite some exemplary exceptions -- produce inadequately prepared teachers.

The issue is crucial because educators agree that having a quality teacher in the classroom is the single most important factor in a child's education.

In fact, research shows that students who have three ineffective teachers in a row will score as much as 50 percentage points lower on standardized tests than students who have three effective teachers in a row, said Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond.

"That's the difference between being ready to go to an Ivy League college and not finishing high school," said Darling-Hammond, one of the nation's top experts on teacher training.

So what are the odds of getting three bad teachers in a row?

Maybe not as slim as you think.

In a four-year study released 20 months ago, Arthur Levine, former dean of Teachers College at Columbia University, found that students who intend to major in education, as a whole, have lower scores on college entrance exams than other college-bound students.

And because universities often rely on education schools as "cash cows," low admissions standards are too often allowed because they help boost enrollments and revenues, he found. Some schools accept 100 percent of their applicants.

Education professors, often as a result of low publication records and lightly regarded research, receive tenure less frequently and are paid less than colleagues in other fields.

Far too often, those faculties and the curricula they teach are disconnected from real schools and real practitioners. The hours required for student teaching can vary anywhere from 300 hours to 30 hours, the study found.

Worse yet, teacher preparation programs are awash in a system of weak quality control, according to Levine's research. Programs are judged only by their students' success on certification exams, not on whether the teachers they produce help children learn.

Accreditation is rarely pulled. Despite myriad shortcomings, none of the 70 institutions involved in Levine's study lost accreditation.

"Teacher education is the Dodge City of the education world," Levine says. "It is unruly and chaotic."

Raising quantity, quality simultaneously

It's also a vital cog in the education system that is being asked - for the first time in the nation's history - to educate all children at the highest achievement levels ever.

High attrition rates of new teachers, the retirement of baby boomers and increases in student numbers because of immigration and other factors have conspired to soon create an estimated 200,000 teacher vacancies a year.

Recruiting and training replacements will cost the nation $4.9 billion annually. In Ohio alone, that annual cost is estimated at $206 million.

In business, you can increase quality by decreasing quantity. Or you can increase quantity if you sacrifice quality. Teacher education programs, which train more than 90 percent of the nation's 3 million teachers, are being asked to do both.

Their success is tested every day in areas like "classroom management," the education term for keeping students engaged and out of trouble.

"They get training in that at the university, but there's nothing like being in the classroom," said Kathy Sauchak, principal at William Cullen Bryant School in Cleveland's Old Brooklyn neighborhood. "The first day you're on your own, you're shaking in your boots."

What does it mean to be a teacher?

Defenders of education schools say the problem lies with a failure to define what it means to be a teacher. If you think that sounds easy, think again.

A 2002 Abell Foundation study, embraced by then-U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Page, advanced the idea that teaching is a craft and that teachers should be hired based on what they know about the subject they teach. College education courses, they said, should be optional.

Those who saw teaching as a profession hit back, arguing that rigorous preparation and pre-career course work were essential to classroom success. The trade newspaper Education Week reported that charges flew back and forth "like chairs on the 'Jerry Springer Show.' "

"In some cases, I think teacher education programs have taken a bum rap," said State Superintendent Susan Tave Zelman. "We cannot improve these programs until we are clear what we want the profession to look like in the 21st century, and we haven't done that."

But some suggest we're on our way. Stanford's Darling-Hammond said pressure for reform has spurred states and accrediting bodies to strengthen standards since Levine's study.

For example, close to 40 states - including Ohio - now require high school teachers to have a college major in the field they teach. Standards are generally very high in the Midwest and New England, Darling-Hammond said.

But how do universities know whether the teachers they produce are effective or ineffective? How do they know whether they are helping children learn?

The short answer: They generally don't.

Cleveland Heights-University Heights Superintendent Deborah Delisle was shocked when she received a survey from Ohio University asking how the teachers it graduated were performing.

"It was the first time here in seven years anyone asked that," she said.

Teachers' impact on students' success

Tom Lasley has been doing a lot of asking. Lasley, dean of the University of Dayton's School of Education and Allied Professions, is co-chairman of the Ohio Partnership for Accountability. The group, which includes all of the state's college schools of education, is studying how the preparation of new teachers affects the performance of their students.

The project, the first of its kind in the nation, will issue its initial report this September. It will track the performance of recent education school graduates by looking at the English and math scores of the children they teach.

The method: A groundbreaking formula called "value-added," a process that measures the value a teacher adds to a student's experience in the classroom.

The goal: Replicate what works, fix what doesn't.

"The good news for Ohioans and others is that there is very rapid progress in trying to use data to drive changes in teacher-preparation programs," Lasley said.

The bad news for Ohio is that teachers are an export crop. The state's teacher-preparation programs produce more teachers than there are jobs in this state.

Take Cassandra Sears, a Baldwin-Wallace College graduate who did her student teaching this spring at William Cullen Bryant School.

Last month, Sears was one of hundreds of local college students who lined up at the International Exposition Center for job interviews. Two Florida school districts gave her conditional offers on the spot.

She'll be teaching math this fall at a junior high school in the Clay County district outside Jacksonville, Fla.

Like others who have chosen to go south, she cited enticements like the weather and nearby beaches. But she also likes the fact that schools in that area are gaining 200 students a year and hiring lots of teachers - many of them from Ohio.

"It's exciting to come in with all the other new teachers - the new blood - and share that experience," she said.

Sears had applied to about a dozen Ohio districts but interviewed with only one.

"It's so competitive in Ohio - one opening gets 100 to 200 applicants," she lamented. "I have family here, but other than that, nothing's keeping me here."

Labels: effective teaching

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:53 PM 0 comments Links to this post

California's new teachers are ready but have no place to go

Newly minted educators are looking for jobs during a time of decreasing positions, school budget cuts and declining enrollment. Some are looking out of state, some overseas.

By Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 25, 2008
Diana Nguyen has dreamed of teaching high school since she was inspired by her ninth-grade world history instructor, who made the subject jump off the page. But when the UC Irvine student receives her teaching credential this summer, she plans to move to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, to teach English.

Why the change in plans? Simple, Nguyen, 23, said in her characteristic upbeat way. There are no jobs for a social studies teacher.

"Because of the education budget cuts, I decided to travel abroad before settling down in a district," said Nguyen, a Garden Grove resident and student teacher at Carr Intermediate in Santa Ana.

"This is a good chance to travel, build my resume up and relearn the Vietnamese language."

Nguyen is one of thousands of prospective teachers who are graduating in the coming weeks during a time of decreasing jobs, school district budget cuts and declining student enrollment.

New teachers hoping to find positions near their homes are being forced to seek work in other parts of California, across the United States, even overseas, and some are applying to private and charter schools.

Others are hoping to find work as long-term substitutes, typically receiving lower pay and no benefits.

"I can't remember a worse time. It's desperate," said John Eichinger, an education professor who has taught at Cal State L.A. for 16 years and had taught in public schools for 15 years. His students "are very excited and idealistic, and they can't wait to get out there, and there's no place to go."

California education officials worry that these graduates will leave the state, or the teaching field entirely, and that fewer students will enroll in teacher-preparation programs, as occurred five years ago when mass layoffs were threatened. This could gravely affect the state's ability to replace retiring teachers with well-trained understudies; one-third of the state's 308,000 teachers are expected to retire over the next decade.

"I'm worried," said Jack O'Connell, state superintendent of public instruction. "Many of these individuals have the potential to be outstanding teachers. Yet if they're not hired, or if there's not an economically viable option, they'll leave the teaching profession."

O'Connell said he was concerned, too, about other states poaching California teachers. School districts in Nevada, Texas, Hawaii and Virginia, among other states, have been recruiting in California. Fort Worth, Texas, school district officials placed billboards in San Diego reading "Your Future Is in Our Classroom" and held a three-day job fair earlier this month.

School districts issued layoff warnings in March to as many as 24,000 teachers, librarians, nurses and others in the wake of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's January budget proposal, which would have cut billions in education funding for 2008-2009. His revised budget proposal, unveiled May 14, improved education spending, although many districts still anticipate multimillion-dollar shortfalls.

Although the number of layoffs and job openings won't be known until this summer, the proposal has already had a chilling effect on the hiring process. UC Irvine canceled its annual spring job fair because so few California districts were interested in recruiting.

The website www.edjoin.org, a job clearinghouse, lists 14,145 statewide vacancies, about 2,000 fewer than at this time last year, said Rick Cornish, director of the Center for Educational Development and Research at the San Joaquin County Office of Education, which runs the site. Of those jobs, nearly 8,400 are teaching positions. California credentials roughly 25,000 teachers annually.

Cornish is confident that once the numbers shake out this summer, districts will resume hiring.

"This just delayed the start of the recruitment season," he said.

For students, that's little comfort.

Connie Morales, 28, wants to become an elementary school teacher, a career that would allow her to combine her love of children with a stable job that provides solid health and retirement benefits -- and summers off.

"I'm going to graduate and not have a job," said the Cal State L.A. student. "It's scary."

Administrators and professors at education departments are urging students to become credentialed in fields with shortages, such as science, math or special education.

Additionally, they are encouraging students to be flexible in looking for positions in other parts of the state and the nation that still are hiring.

"We really encourage students to consider not just the immediate area, at least as a way to get started, and they can move back at a later date if that's what they want," said Bonnie Crawford, director of the credential office at Cal State Northridge. "There are jobs in Hawaii! I look at some of our young people and say, 'If that works for you, go for it. Nothing is forever.' "

That's Nguyen's mantra. She hopes to land a social studies teaching job in Orange County once she returns from Vietnam, but fears that job prospects may still be dry -- because of the economy and a strong emphasis on English, math and science programs -- when she returns next summer.

Another option for new teachers is working as a long-term substitute. If a substitute performs well and has a good relationship with a school's principal and faculty, that familiarity could provide a foot in the door once the job market frees up. But pay is low, typically a little over $100 a day, without benefits.

"For someone with five years of education, a full year of graduate education, that's a pretty dismal salary," said Bruce Baron, principal at South Lake Middle School in Irvine and an instructor in UC Irvine's education department. Stacy Randolph has been working as a long-term substitute at private and public schools since she finished student teaching in December. She lives with her mother and is going without health insurance to make ends meet.

"Pray I don't break my arm or something," said the 26-year-old Glendora resident.

Randolph grew up in a large Italian family, with more than 30 first cousins. As one of the older children, she frequently tended the younger ones.

Her desire to be an educator came early: She recently found one of her kindergarten assignments in which she was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up.

She had written "teacher."

Labels: California, teachers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:42 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Despite high school algebra focus, more students need remedial college math

By Deb Kollars | Sacramento Bee

May 12, 2008
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A1

Five years ago, California took a bold step and began requiring algebra of every graduating high school senior. The grumbling ran deep. The work was hard. The underlying equation came through loud and clear:

More math in high school would equal more students prepared for college.

For many, it hasn't added up.

In a pattern that has area math professors scratching their heads, some community colleges are seeing an increase in the numbers and proportions of entering students who can't do algebra, or even basic arithmetic.

At Sierra College in Rocklin, for example, of the 199 sections of math being taught this year, 68 of them – 34 percent – are arithmetic, pre-algebra or beginning algebra. Most students seeking a two-year or four-year degree must master those levels of math and in many cases go beyond.

Five years ago, the percentage of remedial math courses at Sierra was 28 percent.

Last year at Cosumnes River College in Elk Grove, 40.8 percent of incoming students who took a math placement exam tested into arithmetic or pre-algebra, up from 38.1 percent two years earlier. The proportion of courses in beginning algebra, pre-algebra and arithmetic at Cosumnes has marched steadily upward, from 43 percent in 2003 to almost 52 percent this year.

"It's the million-dollar question," said Mary Martin, math department chair at Cosumnes. "We are asking more of our high school students, so why isn't it transferring over to college?"

Response falls short

California high schools have responded to the monumental task of getting students through algebra, Martin and other math professors say, but the push is falling short.

It has educators concerned because algebra is considered a key subject for developing critical thinking skills. It provides the language and foundation for numerous fields, from nursing to the sciences to architecture.

One of the biggest reasons for the large wave of college students behind in algebra is timing. If a student takes algebra as an eighth- or ninth-grader, it often means arriving at a community college or state college with several years separating their last encounter with x and y.

"You have to keep practicing your skills or they diminish," said Michael Kane, interim dean of sciences and mathematics at Sierra College. "The pipeline from secondary education to college can have such big gaps."

Even students who have worked through several years of higher math in high school can find themselves back at the algebra drawing board. Too often, high school standards do not run as high as college standards, professors said. The state's high school exit exam, required to graduate from public school, tests basic math and pre-algebra skills, but doesn't go deeply into algebra, they said.

In addition, if students earn C's or lower in high school math courses, or if teachers grade too softly, it can lead to wider gaps.

"If you get a C in a math class and you try to go on and build, you're going to have holes," said Cosumnes math professor Lora Stewart.

A mathematical truth

Jessie Bahn, 24, is a classic example. A 2001 graduate of Rocklin High School, she earned a C in algebra as a sophomore.

Now a sophomore at Sierra College, Bahn hopes to transfer to the University of California, Davis, to study environmental science. This semester, she is in her second go-round with beginning algebra, grappling with variables and difficult equations.

"Being put back in this class was frustrating," she said. "It's things you have already learned. You think you should know them, but you don't any more."

Bahn is among tens of thousands of young adults across California facing a mathematical truth: Algebra matters.

Community college students earning an associate's degree must pass beginning algebra or show they have proficiency – scoring high enough on a placement test or having passed advanced math in high school. Starting next year, two-year degrees will require either intermediate algebra or an equivalent course, Martin said. Community college students transferring to a four-year university must meet even higher math thresholds.

The California State University and University of California systems require three years of math – algebra 1, geometry and intermediate algebra – for admission.

A bachelor's degree requires a college-level math course. The courses vary, depending on the major, but for each, intermediate algebra is a prerequisite.

On the more selective UC campuses, college math requirements vary with the majors.

For students entering college, being behind in algebra can carry a big price, Kane said.

"It impacts a student in every possible way," he said. "The most important factor is time." Dropping back two or three levels in math can add extra semesters of work.

"You see every possible emotion in remedial math classes – tears, fears, frustration, embarrassment," Kane added. "The anxiety level in those classrooms is so high."

Patching the disconnect

The "disconnect" between high school and college algebra has educators reviewing teaching practices.

In the Sacramento City Unified School District, for example, a task force this year found inconsistencies at the fifth- and sixth-grade levels in the way essential skills such as fractions and decimals were being taught. If students don't get a solid grounding in such basic skills, they likely will have trouble in higher math courses, associate superintendent Mary Shelton said.

"We have been smoothing that out all year," she said. "We want our students to be ready for college."

The state's community college system began a $33 million-a-year "Basic Skills Initiative" last year to address remediation in math and English, said Carole Bogue-Feinour, vice chancellor for academic affairs.

At different campuses, anywhere from 60 percent to 80 percent of those tested need one or more courses in basic math and English before they can move into college-level work, Bogue-Feinour said.

At Cosumnes River College, the math department has begun using a new online program called "MyMathLab" that provides individualized support and active learning opportunities for students.

"I used to hate algebra," said Cosumnes student Stephen Rangel, 19. He took algebra twice at Galt High School, passing the second time. He's facing beginning algebra again at Cosumnes, but now he's using the new software. "I used to be in trouble. Now I can actually help other people."

The CSU system also is concerned, said Robby Ching, chair of the learning skills center at California State University, Sacramento. Statistics show the percentage of first-time freshmen who met entry requirements, but still needed remediation in math, rose to 37.2 percent last fall – up from 36.7 percent in 2003.

At CSUS, the percentage needing remedial math was higher, at 41.8 percent last fall, although that figure fell 2.8 percentage points over the past five years.

The state college system has been reaching out to high schools to find solutions, Ching said. Among the possibilities: Designing a senior year math course to help bridge the gaps.

Many high schools let math go by the wayside during the senior year, Ching said. The Elk Grove Unified School District is an exception. It requires all seniors to take a math course their last year of high school, said Associate Superintendent Christina Pena.

The goal: to better position students for success in college and maintain rigor in the senior year.

Labels: California, higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:53 PM 0 comments Links to this post

2 Colleges End Entrance Exam Requirement

By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: May 27, 2008

Smith College, a women’s college in Northampton, Mass., and Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., will no longer require prospective students to submit SAT or ACT scores as part of their applications.

At both institutions, the policies will take effect with the class entering in fall 2009.

The number of colleges and universities where such tests are now optional — mostly small liberal-arts colleges — has been growing steadily as more institutions have become concerned about the validity of standardized tests in predicting academic success, and the degree to which test performance correlates with household income, parental education and race.

Some schools that have made standardized tests optional have found that they have attracted a more diverse student body, with no decline in academic ability.

“By making the SAT and ACT optional, we hope to broaden the applicant pool and increase access at Wake Forest for groups of students who are currently underrepresented at selective universities,” said Martha Allman, Wake Forest’s director of admissions. Wake Forest will announce its change on Tuesday; Smith announced it on May 16.

While students will still have the option of submitting standardized test scores — and in fact, the majority of applicants still do so at many test-optional colleges — the most important criteria for admission will be high school curriculum and classroom performance, writing ability, extracurricular activities and evidence of character and talent.

Wake Forest, with 4,500 undergraduates, is ranked 30th among national universities by U.S. News & World Report, and is the highest-ranked on that list to have dropped its testing requirements. Smith, the nation’s largest undergraduate women’s college, with 2,600 students, received 3,771 applications this year, the most in its 137-year history.

Generally, only small colleges and universities with the resources to pay attention to recommendations, essays and extracurricular activities, as well as to a student’s grades and test scores, have been able to eliminate their testing requirements.

But some state universities, too, now admit most of their freshman class without regard to standardized test scores.

At the University of Texas, for example, most students are admitted under a state policy guaranteeing admissions for those in the top 10 percent of their high school class.

Labels: high-stakes testing, higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:47 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Faith-based group plans sanctuary for illegal immigrants

Associated Press
May 25, 2008

SAN ANTONIO — A group of faith-driven activists is trying to organize a network to help illegal immigrants who fear new local immigration-related laws and massive raids.

The advocates — all Catholic — hope to provide places to stay, food and health care for immigrants. They have a few families who have volunteered to host immigrants, but ultimately want to open a shelter.

If the project is successful, immigrants seeking sanctuary would simply need to ask for "Romo."

The name refers to Toribio Romo, a Mexican priest who was killed in the 1920s and later canonized as a saint. Many crossing the border illegally invoke Romo when praying for safe passage into the United States.

"We are the new Sanctuary Movement in San Antonio," said group member Victor Ruiz, 63, who works for the immigration division of Catholic Charities. "If immigrants need help, we will do all we can to help them out."

The original Sanctuary Movement was a religious effort started in the 1980s to help Central Americans fleeing the region's civil wars.

Similarly, New Sanctuary Movement coalitions have formed nationwide to offer refuge to parents whose pending deportations would split them from their U.S.-born children.

"What they're doing over there is incredibly powerful," said Kristin Kumpf, a national organizer with Interfaith Worker Justice in Chicago and a national spokeswoman for the New Sanctuary Movement. "I'm grateful that people of faith in San Antonio are welcoming our immigrant brothers and sisters."

Members of the Romo group in San Antonio point to an increasingly anti-immigrant atmosphere in the country and cite the New Testament's Matthew 25 as a religious requirement to help the stranger or outsider.

"Immigrants need to know that they're not alone, that not everyone in this country is their enemy," said Father Donald Bahlinger, 79, a priest at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church who spent nearly a decade in Central America in the 1990s.

For now, the group visits day laborers to offer them breakfast and small cards bearing a picture of Saint Toribio Romo on one side and a prayer and phone number on the other. The number connects people with a prepaid cell phone dubbed the "Romo line" that will be the contact point for immigrants seeking help and for supporters who want to volunteer or donate.

Authorities warn that while they support people acting on political and religious convictions, they can't ignore the breaking of immigration laws against transporting or harboring unauthorized immigrants.

"I'd caution them that good intentions could make them criminally liable," said Jerry Robinette, director of investigations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Antonio. "They have to make the decision whether they want to violate the law or not."

Even Archbishop Jose Gomez, who leads the Archdiocese of San Antonio, questioned the Romo group's stance, saying sanctuary for immigrants historically has been a political statement and not only religious charity.

"We respect the laws of this country," said Gomez, who's originally from Monterrey, Mexico. "We're not promoting illegal immigration or any kind of sanctuary movement."

Group members understand they're flirting with violating federal immigration laws. Some are more willing to risk arrest than others, but all say religious and moral tenets surpass what they think are unjust laws.

"We're accomplices if we don't speak out against this injustice," said Lee Theilen, who works at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:57 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

ACT Test-Prep Backfiring in Chicago, Study Finds

Check out the full report entitled "From High School to the Future: ACT Preparation--Too Much, Too Late"
-Patricia

Some of the key findings include:

* Low ACT scores reflect poor alignment of standards from K-8 to high school and from high school to college.

* Test strategies and item practice are not effective mechanisms for improving students’ ACT scores.

* ACT performance is directly related to students’ work in their courses.

* Incorporating the ACT into high school accountability is not an effective strategy for high school reform by itself, without accompanying strategies to work on instructional practice.

Christina A. Samuels | Ed Week
May 27, 2008

Hours of drilling on ACT questions in Chicago high schools may be hurting, not helping, students’ scores on the college-admission exam, according to a study released today by a university-based research organization.

The Consortium on Chicago School Research, based at the University of Chicago, found that teachers in the 409,000-student district would spend about one month of instructional time on ACT practice in the core classes offered during junior year. But the ACT scores were slightly lower in schools where 11th grade teachers reported spending 40 percent of their time on test preparation, compared with schools where teachers devoted less than 20 percent of their class time to ACT preparation.

The study examined surveys and test scores of high school juniors in 2005. Teachers were also surveyed as part of the study.
Read On...

Labels: high-stakes testing

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:17 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Sex education: Threatening to charge teachers makes no sense

The following sentence pretty much sums up this article: "Sex is one of the few topics in the curriculum in which ignorance is considered good policy." -Patricia

A group of Herriman parents is upset that a health teacher in a public middle school answered students' questions about homosexual sex, oral sex and masturbation. They say those topics are forbidden under state law, and they have persuaded Rep. Carl Wimmer to begin work on a bill that would provide criminal penalties for teachers who violate that law by saying too much.

Punitive legislation is exactly what sex education in Utah public schools does not need. This state's sex education curriculum already is so narrow that it discourages or forbids the comprehensive teaching that children need to make informed decisions and protect themselves from unintended pregnancy and disease.

Adding criminal penalties to the mix would only further intimidate teachers and prevent them from fully answering students' questions. That would leave students without a ready source of sound information, since many are too afraid or shy to ask their parents, who may not be fully or properly informed themselves.

Sex is one of the few topics in the curriculum in which ignorance is considered good policy. But it shouldn't be.

We do not know what the teacher is alleged to have said, so we cannot judge whether her statements were within the law or the bounds of good judgment. She has been placed on paid administrative leave during an investigation.

What we do know is that it would be ridiculous to try to teach students about HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases and how to prevent their spread without also discussing sexual practices. Apparently, the public is not fully informed, because health departments report that the rates of some sexually transmitted infections are growing alarmingly, particularly among young people.

We also know that middle schoolers are curious about masturbation. It makes sense to give them medically sound information rather than have them fall prey to anxiety from misinformation or popular myths.

State law prohibits promoting or encouraging sexual behavior, but it also requires teaching about the threat of diseases and how to prevent them. That's a distinction that may escape some students no matter how careful a teacher tries to be.

If the state is going to ask teachers to take on this delicate subject, it is not reasonable to place them under the sword of criminal prosecution.

Labels: sexuality

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:04 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Border schools get tough on Mexican students

Please check out the video attached to this article. The way that immigrants are treated in (and out of) schools should outrage anyone who advocates for human rights. These schools that are viewing immigrant students as liabilities and "taking from" an increasingly underfunded education system need to also be reminded that states' economies (California especially) have no problem collecting, or "taking from" the benefits that immigrant contributions AND binational agreements provide - both of which seem to suggest that there are no border restrictions for those with political power.

Current accountability policies that tie funds to test performance exacerbate the positions transnational students are placed in, something I'm glad was touched upon in this article. I highly doubt that if Santillan were to reduce the number of transnational students attending Calexico schools that the states governor wouldn't also be reducing spending and resources, something he's been known to do well -- but to acknowledge that would consist of blaming a system, rather than an individuals.

-Patricia

THE ENFORCER: Daniel Santillan, who works for the Calexico Unified School District in California, visited a local home to verify a student’s residency on April 28. He also photographs Mexican students at the border crossing whom he suspects are illegally attending school in the US. MARY KNOX MERRILL – STAFF

In Calexico, Calif., schools crack down on students who live across the border.
By Randy Dotinga | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
and Mary Knox Merrill | staff

from the May 23, 2008 edition

CALEXICO and SAN DIEGO, Calif. - If you cross the US-Mexican border at the town of Calexico you might run into a photographer named Daniel Santillan. But he's not likely to be shooting pictures of tourists. He only has eyes for Mexican schoolchildren who want an American education.

Mr. Santillan is a residency enforcer, assigned by local education officials to make sure students live in the US, not Mexico. When he's not tracking students on weekday mornings at the border crossing, he visits local homes to make sure children live where their parents say they do.

Santillan isn't thrilled about busting youngsters for living south of the border, but he accepts his job. "The bottom line is that these kids are taking up room," he says.

It's impossible to know how many Mexican students cross the border daily to attend school in the US, sent by parents who think they'll get a better education. Still, border communities have fretted over their presence for more than a decade.

Some schools are now doing more to enforce residency requirements under pressure from politicians and activists concerned about wasted taxpayer money.

Calexico's schools, however, have gone further than others by sending Santillan to photograph students at the border and requiring parents to provide proof of residency twice a year.

The school district, which serves 9,000 students in a poor southwestern California border town, wasn't overly concerned about Mexican students until about three years ago.

After all, Calexico schools didn't lose any money by accepting the students, since the state of California reimburses the district for each student it accepts. Also, Mexican students didn't necessarily stand out, since 95 percent of Calexico residents are Latino. And close relationships with Calexico's sister city in Mexico – the sprawling metropolis Mexicali – made cross-border trips easy.

District officials say they only began to take action because of complaints about overcrowding – some students had to be bused across town to schools that had room for them – and low test scores under the federal No Child Left Behind program.

Mexican students tend to produce lower test scores because their English skills are poor, says Gilbert Barraza, principal of Calexico High School.

"The elephant in the room is the [test-score] liability these kids bring to the table," he says.

Partly as a result of its crackdown, the Calexico district has lost 300 students and nearly $2 million in state funding that is based on the number of students in its schools. But Mr. Barraza says this has helped the overcrowded campuses.

"Enrollment was getting out of control and we had to address it," Barraza says.

Elsewhere along the border, schools pay varying levels of attention to Mexican students. In San Diego County, officials have had to tread carefully since the mid-1990s, when a video clip showing schoolchildren crossing the border in a rural area created a stir. The small school district serving the region ultimately had to expel a reported 325 of its students because they didn't live within its boundaries.

Under federal law, schools cannot ask students about their citizenship status. Even if they could ask, many Mexican children have American citizenship because they were born here. But schools can verify where students live.

The Sweetwater Union High School District, which serves 42,000 students in several San Diego-area border cities, requires parents to show proof of residency each year in person.

The proof can come in the form of documents such as water bills or mortgage papers. In addition, the district now requires documentation if a relative who lives in the district claims to be a child's guardian and a new computer system will allow school officials to immediately identify addresses that don't exist.

"We've really tried to close a lot of the loopholes," says spokeswoman Lillian Leopold. "We think we're pretty strict, but we're not a police agency."

The district does allow Mexican students to attend its schools if they pay annual tuition of $7,435, Ms. Leopold says. No one does that at the moment, however.

Students living across the border can attend some US colleges and universities if they pay tuition. An estimated 10 percent of the students at the University of Texas-El Paso are Mexican citizens, says linguistics professor Jon Amastae, former director of the university's department of inter-American and border studies. According to news reports, some of these students cross the border to attend school.

Meanwhile, so many schoolchildren come through the El Paso border that officials created a special pedestrian lane for them. The Houston Chronicle reported that about 1,200 used the lane during a single morning in 2007.

Some El Paso residents have complained about the influx of Mexican students. But Mr. Amastae thinks most residents are on his side. "Here along the border, most people share the idea that we all have an interest in raising education levels," in both countries, he says. "Doing so benefits all of us."

• Randy Dotinga reported from San Diego and Mary Knox Merrill reported from Calexico.

Labels: immigration and education

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

English standards head back to basics

Teachers bitter as divided board expected to alter curriculum today

By GARY SCHARRER | Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau
May 23, 2008

AUSTIN — A bitterly divided State Board of Education voted Thursday on new English language arts and reading standards that infuriated teacher groups whose recommendations were cast aside.

The board's social conservatives, joined by Republican moderate Geraldine Miller of Dallas and San Antonio Democrat Rick Agosto, prevailed, 9-6, for a plan that features a back-to-the-basics approach for grammar and reading comprehension. A final vote on the plan is scheduled for today.

The standards will dictate English language arts and reading textbooks starting in the 2009-10 school year and will last for about a decade.

"Most of the teachers in this state are going to be furious," said Alana Morris, past president of CREST (Coalition of Reading and English Supervisors of Texas).

"The kids in Texas won't have comprehension in their textbooks so they won't be taught the skills they need to comprehend text — so we will continue to have boards like this with people who can't comprehend simple things like teacher input," Morris said.

Board member Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi, said: "It's a very sad day in Texas when we support a document that has no input from teachers ... It's really a disgrace and sad for our children."

For some board members, though, it came down to process and a different educational approach. The prevailing side wants grammar taught separately instead of incorporating it in the context of writing.

"We believe you need to know those skills first, and then you can incorporate them into your writing," said member Terri Leo, R-Spring. "We feel the other side thinks that you are going to learn things by osmosis, by just writing."

The existing approach is not adequately preparing students for college, Leo said, noting the significant need for remedial work necessary before college students acquire basic writing skills.

Board Chairman Don McLeroy, R-Bryan, said neither approach is particularly wrong nor right. "But you are going to vote for the one you believe in," he said.

Leo said she and other board members represent more than teacher groups.

"My district, for the most part, supports going back to those basic skills," she said.

The board voted unanimously in March on a tentative plan, calling for teachers and others to improve a document published in the Texas Register, which serves as the official bulletin of state agency rule-making.

Was process tainted?
Some board members accused teacher groups of hijacking the process by pushing their own document instead of the one tentatively approved by the board.

"The process has become a joke and a mockery," said Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond , calling it "contaminated and a circus."

But the narrow vote should leave Texans without any confidence in the new curriculum, said Patricia Hardy, R-Fort Worth.

"I don't think it bodes well for the state board to be split on these issues. It's a really heavy ideological thing, and the frustrating thing is I don't know why," she said.

Educators from 17 literacy organizations representing 13,000 English language arts and reading teachers worked on the new curriculum standards.

"And, in the end, it was completely discounted," said Cindy Tyroff from San Antonio's Northside ISD and the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts. "Teachers are going to be offended."

Less comprehension
In addition to the problems with grammar instruction, teacher groups also object to the de-emphasis of reading comprehension in the proposed plan.

"There are few standards sprinkled throughout the reading portion of the document, but it's a very haphazard approach," she said.

Agosto, the lone Democrat voting for the plan, said the board could improve the document before the final vote today with amendments incorporating some of the teachers' recommendations.

"I'm just trying to salvage what work has been done with those teachers," he said, emphasizing that his was not the decisive vote. "We still have some more work to do."

Board Vice Chairman David Bradley, R-Beaumont, said he would offer amendments reflecting some of the suggestions by teachers and education groups.

But any changes are not likely to budge many members from their votes, said board member Lawrence Allen Jr., D-Houston

"If you are going to affect the educational process in the state of Texas, the most important people included in that should be the teachers of the state of Texas," Allen said. "We heard excellent testimony from a number of individuals from across the state, but it fell on deaf ears, I believe."

Labels: teachers, TEKS Standards

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:57 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Monday, June 02, 2008

Reading First Cronyism and Corruption...

Read the response to Rosita Johnson's article by Stephen Krashen below.
-Angela

No Child Left Behind’s reading program marked
‘failure’

Author: Rosita Johnson

A key education program created under George W. Bush's
No Child Left Behind Act has failed to produce
results, according to a recent study by the Institute
of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S.
Department of Education. The study concluded that
there was no difference in the reading comprehension
scores between students who participated in the
Reading First program and those who did not.

The Department of Education has spent more than $6
billion on Reading First since 2002, about $1 billion
a year. Reading First has been a core program of the
No Child Left Behind Act with 1.5 million students in
grades kindergarten to third grades participating in
5,200 schools in 13 states.

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), chair of the Senate
Education Committee, said, “The Bush administration
has put cronyism first and the reading skills of our
children last, and the report shows the disturbing
consequences.” Because of the criticism and
accusations of conflict of interest of Reading First
officials, congressional hearings were held in April
2007.

The hearings disclosed how those who implemented and
designed the $1 billion a-year Reading First program
profited from steering states and school districts to
purchase certain textbooks, tests and services.
Reading First was also charged with mismanagement.

Chris Doherty, former director of Reading First, sent
an email to a staff member which exposed his motives
when referring to a reading program he disapproved.
Said Doherty, “They are trying to crash our party and
we need to beat the [expletive] out of them in front
of all the other would-be party crashers who are
standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we treat
dirt bags.”

Doherty and other Reading First officials awarded
grants only when states and school districts used the
reading programs they favored such as McGraw-Hill’s
Direct Instruction and Voyager Expanded Learning. Even
when other programs such as Reading Recovery and
Success for All complied with the legal guidelines and
criteria, they were not approved to be used. They were
the “dirt bags.”

The Expert Review Panel did not function. Some grant
applications were funded without documentation, while
others were denied for no reason, the hearings
revealed.

During the hearings, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.),
chair of the House Education Committee, told a panel
of Reading First officials, “This sounds like a
criminal enterprise to me. You don’t get to override
the law. But the fact of the matter is that you did.”

Following the hearing, House Appropriations Committee
Chair Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc.) led the fight to cut
Reading First’s budget from $1 billion to $393 million
in 2008. Bush’s fiscal 2009 budget seeks to restore
funding to previous levels. Chris Doherty resigned
right before the Department of Education Inspector
General, John Higgins, published his Investigation
Report of Reading First.

Actually, the goals and purpose of the Reading First
program are laudable: "To assist States and local
school districts to establish reading programs for low
income students in Kindergarten to 3rd grade based on
scientific research resulting in these students being
able to read on grade level."

The tragedy of the Reading First Program, however, is
not the program itself but the officials who
mismanaged it and their total disregard for the laws
and guidelines under which the department was to
operate. Cronyism and corporate greed was allowed to
override the educational needs of the young children
the program was to serve.
------------------------------
The Tragedy of Reading First: More Than Corruption
Published in the People's Weekly World, May 24, 2008

In “No child left behind’s reading program marked
‘failure’,” author Rosita Johnson provides an accurate
description of the most recent failure of Reading
First and the extreme corruption connection to the
program. The article, however, concludes that the
goals of Reading First are “laudable” and seems to
accept their claim that it is based on “scientific
research.”

Reading First is based on the report of the National
Reading Panel, which has been thoroughly dismantled by
a number of respected scholars. Moreover, the recent
failure of Reading First is only the latest of a
number of failures. It has consistently failed on
state, national and international test, despite the
huge cost and extra time in reading instruction.
Example: The secretary of education consistently
claims that reading scores on the NAEP, a national
test, are at an all-time high. But nearly all the
increase occurred before Reading First was
implemented.

Yes, the cronyism and corruption of Reading First are
a tragedy, as the article concludes. But the tragedy
goes well beyond this. It is also the wrong approach
to helping children learn to read. The analogy with
the war in Iraq is striking: The reasons for both were
wrong, the implementation didn’t work, and Friends of
Bush are profiting (and continue to profit).

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California

Labels: Reading First

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:34 PM 1 comments Links to this post

This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level. Th