Even as families feel the economic pinch, many eligible students don't take advantage of free or low-cost breakfasts served at schools. Why?

By Ric Kahn
Globe Staff / January 4, 2009

Anisha Bates tries to shake her two oldest children out of bed at 5 a.m. to make it to school on time for the free breakfast served before classes. But it can be a chore.

They're young girls, 12 and 15. So they steal more snooze time. They dawdle. They primp their hair. They listen to "bachata," slow romantic Spanish music. At least the older one, Shaquia, does. Michaela waits around to go to school with her sister.

If they are running late, Bates, 35, feeds them cereal or knows they have money to grab something at the corner store to boost their half-hour trip, by bus and foot, from the Faneuil public housing development in Brighton to the Edison Middle School, in the same neighborhood.

Shaquia might choose the young person's breakfast of champions: chips and soda. Michaela sometimes goes the healthier route: Gatorade and chips.

Bates has been preaching to them forever that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, because she knows how they act without it. Yet she figures there are days when they miss the morning meal - and suffer for it.

"Doing school work and having gym class, they're going to be cranky and sluggish," says Bates, a quality-assurance technician at a pharmaceutical company.

The Bates sisters are not the only ones who may be skipping school breakfasts that are on the house.

The free breakfast seems to be the poor stepchild of federal nutrition programs. A recent study by Harvard researchers found that while almost 18 million low-income children nationally received free or reduced-price school lunches, only about 8 million of them also participate in the marked-down breakfast program.

Statewide, all public schools must offer free lunch to kids who qualify, but only those with the neediest student bodies - or 48 percent - have to serve free breakfast. Another 22 percent of schools choose to give it. Still, according to the antihunger organization Project Bread, only 34 percent of disadvantaged students in the Commonwealth are taking advantage of bargain school breakfasts.

In the city, according to numbers provided by Project Bread, only about half of its indigent students are eating cut-rate breakfasts in the Boston public schools, though officials say every principal or headmaster presents the option. Boston administrators say they are meeting with students to try to raise the turnout.

Beyond the schools that don't dish out the meal - with some saying they are unable to absorb the leftover costs that may not be picked up by the federal government - there are numerous barriers blocking student participation, nutrition and education advocates say.

Some parents don't know the meal program exists. Some students travel far to school and don't get there in time for the breakfast.

And then there are children who feel looked down on for taking their corn muffins, and the like, for free. Despite evidence showing that obstacles of stigma and scheduling dissolve when breakfast is served after the bell rings - often in homeroom - there are schools that won't surrender precious minutes to anything they don't feel will satisfy educational mandates.

"Nutrition hasn't historically been seen as a major school responsibility, like teaching math," says Ellen Parker, executive director of Project Bread, a group best known for its annual Walk for Hunger but that has been working for years to expand the reach of school-nutrition services.

Yet the pedagogical price of ignoring early-morning hunger pangs is enormous, the Harvard researchers say.

"In terms of producing good outcomes for kids, it's hard to find a better investment than the school breakfast program," says J. Larry Brown, visiting scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health and senior author of the November report, "Impact of School Breakfast on Children's Health and Learning."

The study cites the far-ranging benefits of having students show up for classes with their bellies full: increased attendance, standardized test scores, and grades; decreased classroom disruptions and trips to the school nurse.

"It's as close to a magic bullet as you'll see for educational preparedness," Brown says of the school breakfast program.

At the Higginson Elementary School in Roxbury, 11-year-old Estefany Fernandez knows in her gut the same thing that the Harvard researchers concluded after they analyzed more than 100 scientific articles on the relationship between undernutrition and learning: She'd be lost in class without her school's whole-grain cereal in her stomach.

"I'd sit there for 10 minutes trying to figure out the question," says the Jamaica Plain resident. "My belly would be grumbling while waiting for lunch."

Her fellow fifth-grader, Ijahleel Reid, agrees. "I'd be out of it," says the 10-year-old from Hyde Park.

The Higginson is one of 115 schools statewide in the past five years that have won $1,000 awards from Project Bread for increasing the numbers of students eating free breakfast by shifting the starting time until after classes begin.

Principal Joy Oliver made the switch when she came aboard in 2001. She'd seen firsthand how hard it was for children to be drawn into lesson plans with their heads drooping on their desks. She figured that a 15-minute breakfast served in homeroom could offer a significant jolt to learning.

"You can't be the best student you can be if you're not focused," says Oliver.

To further erase chasms between haves and have-nots, many schools with a majority of less-well-off kids - such as the Higginson - have adopted a policy of furnishing a free breakfast to every student, regardless of home income. For some, there is state funding available to cover costs not met by standard federal reimbursements.

Those who ignore the benefits of school breakfasts - designed to meet federal nutrition standards and help guard against obesity and diabetes - are incurring a heavy hidden tax, the Harvard researchers warn. They say America's annual bill for things like illness and lost productivity due to hunger is $90 billion. Of that, nearly $10 billion is related to educational troubles, according to the study. It was commissioned by the Sodexo Foundation, the charitable arm of Sodexo Inc., which provides food and facilities management to customers ranging from corporations to retirement centers to schools, including the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Otilia Ortiz is not one of the apathetic. She has a full plate for a 16-year-old: classes, homework, and after-school and weekend activities that include working at a community-action group; fighting substance abuse with other young people; and learning the basics of medicine from health professionals to feed her desire to become a doctor. Some days she doesn't get to sleep until 1 a.m.

Yet every school day Ortiz rises from her bed at the Mary Ellen McCormack housing development in South Boston at 5:30, showers and dresses, and rides two buses so she can get to the free breakfast at Boston Latin Academy in Roxbury before 7.

"When I eat," says the sophomore, "I feel more energized. I actually do my work and stay awake."

For struggling residents who qualify - those with yearly incomes at or below $27,560 for a family of four - putting free breakfast on the menu can mean less bite out of their household budgets. Project Bread estimates that a family with two young children who eat breakfast and lunch at school can save about $1,450 a year.

Anisha Bates says the money her two oldest daughters shell out for junk food before school could be better spent on healthier items. Her three kids are asthmatics, she's a diabetic, and her bills for those medicines alone, she says, can run up to $260 a month.

Which is why she tells her children to hurry up and get to school, and quit complaining about the taste of the breakfast food there.

"Money is tight," says Bates, "and it's free."

Ric Kahn can be reached at rkahn@globe.com.

Labels: poverty

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:48 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By JAMES PINKERTON
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Jan. 4, 2009

With more than a dozen bills on the issue already filed, immigration promises to be a hot topic during this year's state legislative session. And Houston lawmakers are sure to be key players on both sides.

The battle is part of a growing effort by state legislatures across the nation to tackle contentious issues related to immigration.

"It's definitely going to be an issue," said state Sen. Mario Gallegos, D-Houston.

But Gallegos said the proposed legislation, filed mostly by Republican lawmakers, will be scrutinized — and perhaps scrubbed — by Hispanic legislators to ensure that bills are not aimed only at Latino immigrants. The legislative session begins Jan. 13 in Austin.

"We are going to have to see what kind of wording is in these bills — that it's fair for everybody and not just targeting one ethnicity — which is what it looks like they're trying to do," Gallegos said.

Last year, 13 states passed laws related to employment of immigrants, and 16 states passed legislation relating to driver's license regulations governing illegal immigrants, according to a report by the National Conference of State Legislatures. In all, 1,305 bills related to immigration were proposed last year, and 205 were enacted.

"The economy is the No. 1 issue affecting states, but immigration remains a hot-button topic debated in many legislatures across the country," said William T. Pound, the organization's executive director.

"Coincidentally, several states commissioned studies to investigate the economic and fiscal impacts of immigration, including state remedies to recover money owed to the state by the federal government," he said.

Louise Whiteford, president of Texans for Immigration Reform, based in Houston, said tough economic times are forcing state leaders to examine closely the costs of services provided to Texas' illegal population.

"The problem has become more intense with the cost of illegal immigration to the state being so high," Whiteford said. "With the economy tanking, people are going to object more to picking up the costs."

Last month, a state survey estimated Texas and local hospital districts spent an estimated $677 million to provide health care to illegal immigrants in the fiscal year that ended August 2007.

Texas' last legislative session in 2007 was expected to be roiled by immigration-related debates. But after an attorney general ruling noted the supremacy of the federal government's role in immigration enforcement, a number of bills addressing immigration were assigned to a single legislative committee and not brought up for discussion.

Historically, anti-immigrant measures have gained little traction in Texas, a state where cultural and commercial ties with Mexico and Latin America are close and long-standing.

Wider hearing predicted

This year, the bills will get a wider hearing, say a number of anti-illegal immigration activists and legislators.

"We believe it is the No. 1 issue in Texas and one that Texans want dealt with by this legislative session," said state Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler.

Berman has filed a bill for the new session challenging the automatic citizenship conferred to those born in the U.S. and a bill to authorize an 8 percent fee on remittances sent to Mexico by undocumented workers.

He is also attempting to pass a law to repeal existing legislation granting in-state tuition rates to undocumented college students.

Berman said after legislatures in Arizona, Oklahoma and Tennessee passed laws barring employment of illegal immigrants, thousands of undocumented workers poured into Texas.

"Now, we have almost 2 million illegal aliens," Berman said.

"They are costing Texans $4 billion a year to support ... by providing them free public school, free health care, and we just happen to be incarcerating 25,000 of them in our state and county prison systems," he said.

Punishing cities, counties

Republican state Sen. Dan Patrick, whose district includes northwest Harris County, has filed two bills.

One would deny state grants to cities or counties that have "sanctuary" policies against full cooperation with immigration authorities.

"He believes it's going to be a big issue because the public has grown kind of weary of the total disregard for our border laws and for the billions of dollars in public services that go to people in this country illegally," said Court Koenning, Patrick's chief of staff.

Koenning said Patrick intends to introduce four immigration-related laws, including one that would remove the personal information of federal immigration agents from public databases.

"They've had a big problem with their agents being intimidated" by drug traffickers, Koenning said.

State Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, has proposed a bill giving Texas law officers the authority to arrest persons for trespassing on private or public property. The proposed law essentially seeks to make the federal offense of unlawful presence in the U.S. a state trespassing charge.

Danger of racial profiling

Local immigration experts say legislators will have a better chance of getting a hearing on their bills if they don't apply to law enforcement.

Because of the complexity of immigration laws, untrained officers could mistakenly detain legal residents, resulting in discrimination suits filed against cities and counties, noted Houston immigration lawyer Lawrence Rushton.

"What I've seen recently is those local law officers who are inquiring about immigration status are doing a lot of racial profiling," Rushton said. "They are stopping Hispanics who happen to be passing through their jurisdictions without having any other reason to stop them."

Nestor Rodriguez, an immigration expert and professor of sociology at the University of Texas in Austin, believes a lot of the proposed legislation is simply posturing by conservative lawmakers.

"My sense is nothing dramatic will happen," Rodriguez said. "These (bills) seem to be more symbolic, and I think the legislative representatives are trying to impress their constituents."

james.pinkerton@chron.com

Labels: immigration, Texas legislature

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:45 PM 0 comments Links to this post

FROM STAFF REPORTS
Sunday, January 11, 2009

Budget and taxes

Texas has been in an enviable economic position compared with other states, boasting almost $12 billion in reserves and available revenue going into the 2010-11 budget. But the double blow of the national financial collapse and Hurricane Ike has darkened the state's outlook. Budget leaders expect relatively little money to pay for new expenses. The state's revised business tax, collected for the first time in 2008, will be closely examined for its effect on small businesses and different industries. Lawmakers will be reluctant to make too many changes because it's an integral part of the 2006 deal to reduce school property taxes, and the first-year collections have been well short of projections.

Criminal justice

With the state budget tighter than tight, a primary goal will be to ensure funding for new prison treatment and diversion programs that were approved two years ago. More than half are still to be launched, with officials saying the initial programs have been successful. Look for the Texas Department of Public Safety to undergo a management makeover as part of its regular sunset review, with drivers' licensing and vehicle inspections likely to be moved to another agency. The proposed merger of the Texas Youth Commission and Texas Juvenile Probation Commission? There's a 50-50 chance, or another such effort is likely in two years. A push to allow Texans to openly pack pistols probably will produce a lively debate but might not pass.

Environment

More than a dozen bills have been filed, including ones that include incentives for homeowners and businesses to install solar panels, one calling for more monitoring of an air pollutant and one barring homeowner associations from prohibiting solar panels. Speaker-apparent Joe Straus cut his teeth last session on a successful proposal to encourage Texans to buy Energy Star appliances. With him at the House's helm, look for that program to expand and for incentives for solar power generation to get traction. Anything touching explicitly on global warming has little hope of getting on the governor's desk and even less of getting his signature. Water conservation, a big issue last session, may recede this time.

Gambling

The expansion of gambling, which never really got traction two years ago, is back. The state's tight finances won't hurt because proponents are sure to promise a hefty return if the state builds casinos, allows slots at racetracks and authorizes gambling on tribal reservations. But the opposition will argue that relying on gambling revenue is a bad bet. They say gambling brings more crime and social problems than it's worth. In the end, the legislative leadership would have to be convinced that there's enough support among lawmakers to give the issue a run.

Health and human services

Expect lawmakers to debate whether to close some of the state institutions for people with mental retardation, how to continue reforming the foster care system and whether to expand Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. Bills already filed would start a statewide workplace smoking ban, create a health insurance program for children in the child-support system, legalize needle-exchange programs, ban possession of the hallucinogen salvia and regulate laser hair-removal facilities. Abortion-related bills filed include one that would require women who seek an abortion to first get an ultrasound and another — backed by Gov. Rick Perry — that would issue a 'Choose Life' license plate.

Higher education

Several measures proposing limits on tuition increases at public universities have been filed. Prospects are uncertain; lawmakers have thus far declined to fiddle with the tuition-setting powers they ceded to the boards of regents in 2003. The University of Texas and its legislative allies will try once again to scale back a 1997 law that allows students in the top 10 percent of their Texas high school graduating class to attend any public university in the state. Also up for debate are proposals to boost funding for community colleges; establish a commission to prepare a long-range plan for higher education; designate one or more universities for flagship, or top-tier, status; increase financial aid, perhaps with more stringent merit standards; and provide health benefits for graduate students.

Immigration

Though the issue seems to have lost some steam, many conservatives still expect Republicans in the Legislature to show that they're cracking down on illegal immigration. Action could still be difficult because of resistance from business groups and Democrats and the fact that immigration is primarily a federal issue. Proposals are likely to include a reverse in the law allowing undocumented residents to pay in-state college tuition and crackdowns on businesses that hire unauthorized workers. Perry will seek more funding for crime-fighting along the border.

Insurance

On the griddle: How to continue the state program that is the hurricane-battered insurer of last resort for residential and commercial property along the Gulf coast. After exhausting other funding sources to pay claims, the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association last year told Texas property insurers to pony up $430 million for excess losses associated with Hurricane Ike, on top of $100 million levied earlier for damage caused by Hurricane Dolly. In the short term, the insurers can recover some of the money by taking state tax credits. In the long term, a key question is how the state continues the coverage method and whether it'll be harder for property owners to get insured.

Public education

The high-stakes Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills appears on its way out. In its place, legislators want to create a school accountability system that reduces the emphasis on a single test and focuses on a student's progress from year to year. How exactly that system would play out in the classroom is not clear.

Public information

Lawmakers may revisit legislation intended to protect journalists from revealing confidential sources and notes in certain circumstances. So-called shield laws exist in more than 30 states and the District of Columbia. In Texas, such proposals have fallen short of passage into law in six legislative sessions since 1989.

Transportation

Lawmakers will consider several strategies for pumping more money into transportation, including borrowing against the state's general fund, raising the gasoline tax and putting money in a rail relocation fund.Local governments want more authority to raise local taxes and fees for transportation as well. And with authority for private toll road leases expiring Sept. 1, the Legislature must decide whether to extend the state's ability to enter such agreements.

Labels: Texas legislature

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:35 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Jeannie Kever - Express-News

HOUSTON — Tuition. Textbooks. Financial aid.

Mention college, and most people focus on the price tag.

“It is nuts to make the cost of college so high that working-class kids can't go unless they take out large loans,” said state Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat.

So expect lots of debate about freezing tuition when the Legislature convenes in mid-January.

But with dozens of bills dealing with higher education already filed, it won't be the only topic under consideration. Other measures look to expand financial aid, cut the cost of textbooks, make schools more accountable and help veterans attend college.

At the University of Houston, administrators will be watching legislation to increase the number of nationally ranked research universities, an elite group the school seeks to join.

Renu Khator, UH chancellor and president of its central campus, said she will travel to Austin often during the coming months to support the cause.

“Texas has such a huge need” for additional top-ranked schools, she said. “That is how we're going to be able to keep Texas at the cutting edge.”

Legislators often pay lip service to higher education, but several say this year may be the tipping point, sparked by a middle-class outcry over tuition rates, national reports blasting lack of affordability and access, and a growing acknowledgment that Texas needs more and better universities to serve its growing population.

One bill already filed would freeze tuition at public universities for two years. Another would limit tuition and fee increases to 5 percent a year.

All sound good to cash-strapped families, who saw tuition at Texas' public, four-year schools rise an average of 53 percent in the first four years after legislators allowed them to set their own rates.

But changing the status quo may not be so simple.

Legislators deregulated tuition in 2003 in exchange for cutting state higher education funding during a budget crisis. Public universities rely on a mix of state funding and money from tuition and fees for their operating costs, along with money from endowments, donations and other sources.

State spending has increased since 2003 but hasn't kept up with enrollment growth and inflation.

“It's easy to say, ‘Freeze tuition,'” said Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, chairwoman of the Senate Higher Education Subcommittee. “I don't think it would be fair to freeze tuition without raising state funding.”

Welcome Wilson Sr., chairman of the UH board of regents, said he'd love to not raise tuition. “In order to do that,” he said, “we need (state) funding at the same level as this year, plus the inflation rate for higher education.”

Wilson's main priority, however, is additional money to help UH move into the ranks of nationally recognized schools.

UH is one of seven so-called emerging research universities that are candidates to join the state's three Tier 1 schools, known as nationally competitive institutions: the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University and Rice University, which is private. (California, by comparison, has nine Tier 1 universities; New York has seven.)

State lawmakers don't decide which schools have that status. The designation is based upon such factors as how much research money a school receives and the caliber of its students and faculty. But state money will be required to help any of the contenders meet those benchmarks.

That will cost millions of dollars over a number of years. Still, many legislators say they expect something to be done this year.

“I certainly hope so,” said Rep. Dan Branch, R-Dallas, chairman of the House Select Committee on Higher and Public Education Finance. “I think the future of the state hangs in the balance.”

More Tier 1 schools also could help with another issue: How to ease enrollment pressure at UT-Austin caused by a law allowing any student who graduates in the top 10 percent of his or her high school class to attend any public university in the state. Those students accounted for 81 percent of this year's freshman class at the Austin campus. (Top 10 percent graduates made up 46 percent of A&M's freshman class and about 18 percent of the freshmen at UH.)

Top high school graduates often want to attend a Tier 1 school, Zaffirini noted. With just two public options in Texas, thousands of the state's most promising students go elsewhere for college. Branch and state Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, have introduced legislation to limit the number of top 10 percent graduates guaranteed admission to the college of their choice.

More Tier 1 schools could be a longer-term solution. In addition to UH, the most likely contenders include Texas Tech University, the University of North Texas, UT-Dallas, UT-Arlington, UT-San Antonio and UT-El Paso.

Past efforts in the Legislature to designate one or more schools as worthy of additional state money haven't worked, because lawmakers from one part of the state didn't want to support a school in another region. No one is talking about that this time.

Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, has called for a commission to determine how the state should proceed. Zaffirini said she still is drafting legislation on the subject, aiming for a bill supported by the presidents of all seven contenders.

Branch's bill would allow schools to compete for funding, which could be used for such things as hiring faculty, upgrading facilities and increasing financial aid.

That's similar to the approach proposed by Khator and David Daniel, president of UT-Dallas, who have suggested the state match money raised by the universities.

That way, Khator said, all seven schools can compete: “Any way the Legislature can reward us for our performance, whether it's private fundraising, research grants or meeting our goals for student learning, I support it.”

Zaffirini also supports allowing all schools to aim higher, although she noted that reaching Tier 1 will take longer for some. “UTSA might take a longer time, 15 or 20 years,” she said. “It is still a worthy goal. UH might be in a better position to reach that status earlier.”

State Comptroller Susan Combs won't release the state's projected revenues until Jan. 12, the day before the Legislature convenes. Regardless of how much money is available, Zaffirini said she hopes legislators will agree on a process to help elevate the emerging research universities.

“We want to create a pathway, even if we don't have funding at this point,” she said.

Texas universities are unlikely to face the dire prospects of their counterparts in some other states, which already have cut higher education funding. Public universities in California and Florida, for example, have announced limits on enrollment, pushing students into community colleges or out of higher education altogether.

But Texas isn't immune to financial worries.

“We have to be very cautious in our spending,” Whitmire said. “Higher ed's got to compete with the highway department. Our social services are underfunded, particularly mental health. If you don't fund mental health at the proper levels, people end up in the criminal justice system.

“We've got our work cut out for us.”

Labels: higher education

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

Check out All Five Full Reports

-Patricia

A growing number of schools are entering the restructuring phase under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) but few are leaving according to the Center on Education Policy’s A Call to Restructure Restructuring: Lessons from the No Child Left Behind Act in Five States. The report points out that the five restructuring options in NCLB provide little effectiveness in turning-around these schools.

National Findings

• More than 3,500 Title I schools nationwide were in the restructuring phase in the 2007–2008 school year which accounts for about 7 percent of all Title I schools.

• The number of schools in restructuring has increased almost 50 percent between the 2006–2007 and 2007–2008 school years. In 2006–2007 just 2,302 schools—4 percent of Title I schools—were in restructuring.

• The vast majority of schools in the restructuring phase are located in urban districts in the five states studied.

• Just under one and five schools in the implementing restructuring phase made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in 2006–2007.

• Some schools within the five states studies have been in the restructuring phase for up to four years.

State-Level Findings

• Of the five restructuring options contained within NCLB, 9 in 10 districts choose the ‘any-other’ option where districts can taken any major action that would produce fundamental change in the schools’ governance. What constitutes major action varies greatly from state to state and even from school to school.

• The type of supports states offer schools in restructuring vary from:

• Sponsoring extra professional development focused on school improvement (four states).

• Providing on-site technical assistance with more intense support and monitoring to those schools in restructuring for multiple years (three states).

• Providing professional development for principals (two states).

• Providing on-site leadership coaches or facilitators (two states).

• A greater percentage of schools in restructuring in Michigan and Georgia made AYP than the other three states. However, there is no clear reason why these schools were able to exit the restructuring phase.

District-Level Findings

• Some of the common strategies used in most of the 42 schools examined:

• Using data for instructional decision making.

• Providing tutoring to struggling students.

• Employing some type of instructional or leadership coach.

• Schools that chose the ‘replacing staff’ option sometimes had negative consequences such as not being able to find qualified replacements.

• Schools that missed AYP due to a specific subgroup typically still directed resources to all students instead of concentrating on those students that did not make AYP.

Cautions about the data

Findings from these five states may not necessarily represent what other states are doing in the restructuring phase.

Conclusion

Since only one in five schools in restructuring are making AYP it is apparent that NCLB needs to be revised to help these schools improve. The CEP makes the following recommendations to do just that:

The federal policy options for restructuring should encourage states to create state-specific strategies.

States need to step up efforts to monitor restructuring implementation.

Policies need to be put in place to address those schools that remain in restructuring for multiple years.

Unless certain criteria are met, the ‘staff replacement’ option should not be used and states should not recommend this option.

States and districts should still provide support to those schools exiting restructuring to ensure gains in student achievement are sustained.

By incorporating these recommendations and providing more resources to educators at the district and school levels more schools will start making AYP. School board members can do their part by ensuring the resources that are available are allocated to the schools and students that need them most, while at the same time ensuring all other students are given the resources they need to succeed as well.

Labels: NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:49 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This article summarizes on of the main arguments in his recent book. For a review by FairTest of the book, see http://www.fairtest.org/improving-accountability-review-grading-education.

The book is very much worth a read.

Monty Neil of FairTest

Education Week

Published Online: January 23, 2009
Published in Print: January 28, 2009
Commentary

Getting Accountability Right

By Richard Rothstein

The federal No Child Left Behind Act has succeeded in highlighting the poor math and reading skills of disadvantaged children. But on balance, the law has done more harm than good because it has terribly distorted the school curriculum. Modest modifications cannot correct this distortion. Designing a better accountability policy will take time. We cannot and should not abandon school accountability, but it's time to go back to the drawing board to get accountability right.

The first step is to understand today's curricular distortion. It has arisen because No Child Left Behind holds schools accountable for only some of their many goals. When we demand adequate math and reading scores alone, educators rationally respond by transferring resources to math and reading instruction (and drill) from social studies, history, science, the arts and music, character development, citizenship education, emotional and physical health, and physical fitness.

Read rest of article here.

Labels: accountability, NCLB, NCLB reauthorization

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 12:15 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out this recent report titled, "2008 Comprehensive Annual Report on Texas Public Schools [pdf]," published by the Texas Education Agency.

Labels: government report

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:32 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Lindsay Kastner - Express-News


In one of the Bush administration's final education decisions, the U.S. Department of Education agreed to allow Texas to use a new method to assess public schools and districts.

Often pointed to as the administration's signature domestic policy, the No Child Left Behind Act calls for all students to reach proficiency in all subject areas by the 2013-2014 school year.

But under what is known as a “growth model” Texas will begin monitoring student progress over time, rather than determining whether a set percentage of students has passed state tests each year.

The U.S. DOE granted conditional approval of the Texas model last week, pending final approval of the TAKS-Alternate, a test for students with severe cognitive disabilities.

The federal government began a pilot of growth models in 2005, allowing all states to apply beginning in December 2007.

Including Texas, 15 states now have permission to use a growth model. The 2014 proficiency goal remains in place for those states.

Educators tend to favor growth models, but they require tracking individual student progress over time, and not all states have the capability to tackle the more complex measurements.

Texas had the technical ability to follow individual students over several years before many other states.

North East Independent School District Superintendent Richard Middleton sat on a committee that recommended Texas begin using a growth model.

“We still want accountability. We still want the tests to be rigorous and challenging,” Middleton said. “But we want to gauge how students are doing over time, to give schools credit for growth.”

He said the current system provides educators with little useful information, taking a snapshot of student performance each year without tracking progress.

“You really weren't watching the growth of those same students. So it really wasn't a fair or legitimate measure of anything,” he said.

Texas' growth model uses test scores from one year to predict performance in future years and will allow schools and districts to receive credit for students who failed state tests but are projected to pass in the future.

Called the Texas Projection Measure, it is modeled in part on a system used by the Dallas Independent School District.

If Texas had been using a growth model last year, an additional 136 school districts (11 percent) and 411 schools (5 percent) would have met federal standards, according to Texas Education Agency estimates.

David Francis, director of the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation and Statistics at the University of Houston, favors the differentiated approach despite the possibility that they could be perceived as an easier route toward meeting federal standards.

“That's always a concern,” Francis said, adding, “If our real goal is to have students graduate from high school proficient ... then schools should get credit for moving students toward that goal, rather than meeting standards along the way.”

The state also plans to incorporate the Texas Projection Measure into the state accountability system, said Criss Cloudt, an associate commissioner at the Texas Education Agency.

The growth model will begin to be applied this year with the TAKS, or Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, and TAKS-Accommodated reading and math tests.

It will be added in 2010 to newer tests for students with special needs, because the state lacks sufficient data to begin earlier with those tests.

Labels: accountability, growth models

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

Important quote: "Teachers should not be blamed for out-of-field teaching, the report said. It can happen anywhere there is a teacher shortage in a particular discipline. It can also happen where there is no shortage but where school administrators have planned poorly."

Much research reveals that this is commonly the reality of many low-resourced school struggling under accountability policies.

A few other important points to mention is that Texas' definition of highly qualified is based on the following indicators:
1) must hold a high school diploma or equivalent,
2) completed at least 2 years of higher education,
3) obtained an associates degree or higher,
4) can demonstrate knowledge of and ability to assist in instructing reading, writing and mathematics or
5) assist in instruction reading readiness, writing readiness and mathematics readiness as measured through state or federal assessment.

Additionally, each year TEA will randomly audit campuses using a "yes" / "no" checklist indicating whether or not the school has met or failed to met the minimum number of qualified teachers. The minimum number for each campus is determined by the number of math and ELA courses the school has on its schedule. The number of qualified teachers in a school must be equal to the number of math and ELA courses the school is offering to students.

Some important things to consider when trying to make recommendations for reform.

-Patricia

Source: TEA's information on paraprofessional qualifications can be downloaded at: http://www.tea.state.tx.us/... cs/Brochure_English_11by25.pdf

Math can be hard enough, but imagine the difficulty when a teacher is just one chapter ahead of the students. It happens, and it happens more often to poor and minority students. Those children are about twice as likely to have math teachers who don't know their subject, according to a report by the Education Trust, a children's advocacy group.

By LIBBY QUAID

AP Education Writer
WASHINGTON —

Math can be hard enough, but imagine the difficulty when a teacher is just one chapter ahead of the students. It happens, and it happens more often to poor and minority students. Those children are about twice as likely to have math teachers who don't know their subject, according to a report by the Education Trust, a children's advocacy group.

Studies show the connection between teachers' knowledge and student achievement is particularly strong in math.

"Individual teachers matter a tremendous amount in how much students learn," said Ross Wiener, who oversees policy issues at the organization.

The report looked at teachers with neither an academic major nor certification in the subjects they teach.

Among the findings, which were based on Education Department data:

-In high-poverty schools, two in five math classes have teachers without a college major or certification in math.

-In schools with a greater share of African-American and Latino children, nearly one in three math classes is taught by such a teacher.

Math is important because it is considered a "gateway" course, one that leads to greater success in college and the workplace. Kids who finish Algebra II in high school are more likely to get bachelor's degrees. And people with bachelor's degrees earn substantially more than those with high school diplomas.

The teaching problem is most acute in the middle grades, 5-8, the report said. That's a crucial time for math, said Ruth Neild, a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University.

"This is a time when kids are making a really important transition from arithmetic to mathematics," Neild said. "It takes careful instruction, and if kids can't get that, and really get it, they're not going to succeed in math in high school."

Yet it can be tougher to find qualified teachers for middle schools, especially in low-income areas, said Neild, who studied the problem in Philadelphia public schools. She did not work on the Education Trust report.

Teachers should not be blamed for out-of-field teaching, the report said. It can happen anywhere there is a teacher shortage in a particular discipline. It can also happen where there is no shortage but where school administrators have planned poorly.

Congress tried to fix the problem in the sweeping 2002 No Child Left Behind Law. The law insisted that all teachers in core academic subjects be "highly qualified" by 2006.

But the most well-known aspect of No Child Left Behind is its requirement for annual state tests in reading and math, and the penalties it imposes on schools that fail to make progress.

The teacher requirement is less well-known, and also less onerous. States were allowed to come up with their own definitions of "highly qualified." As a result, most teachers in the U.S. today are deemed highly qualified.

When it comes to out-of-field teaching, state officials may be understating the problem, the report said.

Researchers compared two different sets of Education Department data, reports from state officials and a survey of teachers themselves. Teachers said out-of-field teaching happens far more often than states reported for highly qualified purposes.

For example, in Arizona in 2004, the state said 94.4 percent of core classes were taught by highly qualified teachers. But Arizona teachers told the federal government in 2004 that 58.4 percent of core classes were taught by someone certified in the subject he or she was teaching. That was the most recent year in which the teacher data was available.

The report found a similar gap in 16 other states.

The report also called attention to places where people are trying to fix the problem.

Boston and Chicago have teacher residency programs much like medical residencies, with aspiring teachers working alongside mentor teachers before they are assigned their own classrooms.

The University of Texas at Austin, the University of North Carolina system and the university system of Georgia all are trying to develop strong teachers who will teach in local schools.

Louisiana is overhauling its teacher-preparation programs. And Denver and Guilford County, N.C., schools offer financial incentives to attract the best teachers to schools and subjects that are hard to staff.

Wiener, the Education Trust official, said teaching is the key to fulfilling the goal of No Child Left Behind - that every student will be able to read and do math on grade level by 2014.

"We cannot meet our goals for increasing student achievement unless and until we focus on improving teaching quality and the effectiveness of teachers in front of the classroom," Wiener said.

Labels: NCLB, teachers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:29 AM 0 comments Links to this post

For Immediate Release: January 16, 2009

Contacts: Lydia Camarillo SVREP Vice-President - 800--404-VOTE
Patricia Gonzales, WCVI Senior Vice President - 210- 922-3118

SVREP and WCVI Call on the Texas Senate to Reverse 2/3 Rule

Rule Change Made to Allow Partisans to Pass Disenfranchising Voter ID Law San Antonio, Texas - Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP) and the William C. Velasquez Institute (WCVI) call on the Texas State Senate to reverse the 2/3 rule it passed to move the Voter ID legislation. The Senate, in its first act, voted to deny the minority legislative opinion, a rule suspended only when applied to the voting of the Voter ID legislation. "The Texas State Senate is acting counter to America's principles by adjusting their voting rules," said Antonio Gonzalez, SVREP and WCVI President. "The Senate is changing its rules to blatantly disenfranchise citizens with the discriminatory Voter ID legislation and silencing minority opinions in the legislative process." The Senate majority has made its main focus of this legislature the passage of the Voter ID bill. SVREP, WCVI, and many other national and statewide civil rights organizations, oppose Voter ID laws as they create extra barriers for citizens to participate in elections, and would disproportionately affect minority voters. SVREP and WCVI further oppose the rule change as it creates dangerous precedent for future Senate deliberations. Any Texas State Senate majority could use this example to override the rules on important legislation rather than force Senators to work together, compromise, and form laws that are inclusive of more Texan representatives. "Today's action by the Texas State Senate is a mockery to democracy", said SVREP Vice President Lydia Camarillo. "The Senate sent a message to Texas and the nation that it planned to play dirty-partisan politics by voting to suspend the 2/3 rule to promote the Voter ID legislation, which dilutes the voting rights of Latino and other communities of color. SVREP calls on the Senate to reverse the rule and work towards representing all Texas citizens." SVREP is a national, nonpartisan organization committed solely to the political empowerment of Latino communities. SVREP was established in 1974 by the late Willie Velásquez to encourage civic and political participation in Latino and other underrepresented communities. Since its inception, over 2.3 million Latino voters throughout the southwest and Florida have been registered. The William C. Velásquez Institute (WCVI) is a tax-exempt, non-profit, non-partisan public policy analysis organization chartered in 1985. The purpose of WCVI is to: conduct research aimed at improving the level of political and economic participation in Latino and other underrepresented communities; To provide information to Latino leaders relevant to the needs of their constituents; To inform the Latino leadership and public about the impact of public policies on Latinos; To inform the Latino leadership and public about political opinions and behavior of Latinos.

This message was sent to valenz@mail.utexas.edu by:
William C. Velasquez Institute
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COMMENTARY: ARNOLD GARCIA

Garcia: State senators should tackle the real problems facing Texas

Arnold Garcia Jr., EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR, AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Sunday, January 18, 2009
Now that the Texas Senate has shown strength and resolve in fixing a nonexistent problem, let's see how they handle real ones.

On Wednesday, Texas senators, led — in the loosest sense of the term — by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, spent the second day of the session rearranging the rules to bulldoze through a voter identification bill. The bill died last session only to be resurrected this go-around by the hand of state Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands.

Before we go any further, let's note for the record that voter fraud is a bad thing. That's why existing statutes prohibit it. Let's also note that after spending most of a $1.4 million grant and investing two years at investigating voter fraud in Texas, Attorney General Greg Abbott and his crew came up with a whopping 26 cases of voter irregularity — 18 of them involving ballots legally cast but improperly handled.

Williams declared with all seriousness that voter fraud is a top concern of the state's voters. Maybe it's a top concern with the voters he talks to, but I'd wager that many more are worried about paying for their tickets to the economic horror show now in progress.

Some of the more visionary voters might even worry about how Texas can regain the economic vigor Gov. Rick Perry and other Republican leaders brag about if post-secondary education gets so expensive that working families can't afford it.

Education is a proven escape hatch from poverty or portal between economic classes, so broadening rather than restricting access to learning would seem to be a prudent economic development strategy. Democrats tried to amend the bill to put that concern on the same footing with voter fraud, but the Republican majority wouldn't hear it.

Voters who aren't multi-millionaires might also be concerned about their access to health care. But you only need health care if you're sick, so what's the problem?

The fact that one out of two Texas men will be diagnosed with cancer in his lifetime, according to health experts, takes a back seat to voter identification. The leading cause of death of Texas women between the ages of 35 and 74 is cancer, but that can wait. Cancer is the leading killer of Texas children ages 1 through 14 who die of a disease. But why rush to do something about that when Texas senators have this epidemic of voter fraud to wrestle to the ground?

No doubt that the last words to cross the dying lips of Texans in the final throes of cancer will express gratitude that voter fraud is now history in Texas or soon will be if House members rush to the ramparts to join their Senate colleagues in this epic battle.

According to the Republican majority in the Senate, voter fraud is more important than Texas veterans, Texas health care, higher education tuition costs or even the estimated $9 billion drop in revenue.

Given that, Texas senators may well turn their attention to prostitution — if there's any left after the state's officialdom shut down the famous Chicken Ranch in La Grange back in the 1970s.

The debate on Wednesday reminded me of Larry L. King's "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," the hit play and move inspired by that episode. When the governor is breathlessly informed that "Texas has a whorehouse in it," he springs into action to correct that stain on the state's honor.

Critics of the voter ID bill note that asking voters to present photo identification at the polling places can be used to intimidate older and minority voters, and that may be true.

But speaking as a voter who has used a driver's license to vote in all of last year's elections — I never got my voter registration card — it wasn't that big a deal. Of course, I'm not easily intimidated.

I question why senators of one of the most important states in the union spent an entire day and stepped all over a history of bipartisanship fixing a roof that the state's Republican attorney general says doesn't leak.

I asked a Republican friend of mine to explain the wisdom of this maneuver. His reply? "There is no wisdom in a stupid act."

agarcia@statesman.com; 445-3667

Labels: disenfranchising, Voter ID

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:51 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Quality Counts 2009 provides you with the nationwide report card on the continual push for K-12 school improvement you have come to rely on. In addition, the special focus of this year’s report is how English-language learners are putting schools to the test. Here, you may find a state-by-state analysis, as well.

Specifically, you’ll learn how:

· Immigration transforms communities challenged by changing demographic patterns, straining the capacity of school districts.
· English-learners pose a policy puzzle for states and school districts as they push to boost student achievement overall.
· The rights of ELLs and the case law and statutes to provide them quality education continue to evolve.
· And much more!

Use this sneak preview and Open House to review all of the statistics for your state, and compare them to the rest of the nation. If you would like, you can even download a PDF of your complete State Highlights Reports for the low price of $4.95. You can also purchase copies of the print report Quality Counts 2009: Portrait of a Population for $10.00.

If you would like to participate in more discussion about Quality Counts 2009: Portrait of a Population, there are three opportunities to do so over the next week. Mark your calendar now!

Jan. 8, 2 p.m. EST: Online chat on the report’s findings with EPE Research Center Director Christopher B. Swanson and Education Week Assistant Editor Mary Ann Zehr (submit questions here).

Jan. 13, 2 p.m. EST: Live Webinar on the major findings with Chris Swanson, Mary Ann Zehr, and Quality Counts Project Director Amy M. Hightower. (register here).

Jan. 15, 3 p.m. EST: Online chat with leading experts on English-language learners on the future of ELL education.

Enjoy this sneak preview and your Open House access. I look forward to our conversations on this vital topic.

Best regards,

Virginia B. Edwards
Editor and Publisher

P.S. Pass the word along about Quality Counts 2009 and the Open House to your colleagues!

Quality Counts 2009 is sponsored online by CDW-G.

Editorial Projects in Education, Inc., 6935 Arlington Road, Suite 100, Bethesda, MD 20814. EPE is the publisher of Education Week, Digital Directions, Teacher Professional Development Sourcebook, edweek.org, teachermagazine.org, DigitalDirections.org and TopSchoolJobs.org. Copyright © 2008 Editorial Projects in Education.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:51 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Open Letter to President-elect Obama [FROM FAIRTEST]
On the 7th Anniversary of the “No Child Left Behind” Law
“Keep Your Promises to Fix NCLB”

January 7, 2009

Dear President-elect Obama:

The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) congratulates you on your historic victory and endorses your message of uniting all Americans to work for positive change.

During your campaign, you spoke with power and clarity about the serious challenges facing our schools due to the flaws of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. On the seventh anniversary of NCLB being signed into law by George W. Bush, we urge you and secretary of education nominee Arne Duncan to keep your promises to America’s children and work quickly to address NCLB’s flaws through the reauthorization process.

Today, a growing majority of Americans across the political spectrum recognize that NCLB has failed to live up to its promise to close learning gaps between racial groups and raise the performance of the nation’s schools. Most agree it has transformed too many schools into mind-numbing test-prep centers.

According to a recent Gallup/Phi Delta Kappa poll, eight in ten Americans believe that NCLB must be completely revamped in order to succeed. In addition, the federal government’s own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows that student academic performance rose more rapidly before NCLB was adopted than after it went into effect.

NCLB needs a fundamental overhaul to ensure that all students learn up to their potential. That’s why FairTest initiated an alliance of 150 national civil rights, education, religious, parent, labor, children’s, and civic organizations which have signed a statement calling for a new direction for federal education policy (see list at http://www.edaccountability.org/Joint_Statement.html). We were heartened by your statements on the campaign trail about NCLB’s shortcomings and want to support your efforts to create a new, beneficial law.

President-elect Obama, please heed your strong statements and promises concerning NCLB as you move to make positive change in the nation’s education policy. For example, you said:

“We should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests.” We agree and recommend that NCLB end its overreliance on simple-minded tests, which have dumbed down both teaching and learning in the quest for higher scores, and reduce the amount of mandated testing.


We need to use “a broader range of assessments that can evaluate higher-order skills, including students’ abilities to use technology, conduct research, engage in scientific investigation, solve problems, present and defend their ideas.” We agree and recommend that a reauthorized NLCB incorporate multiple measures of student learning and school quality that promote educational excellence. These can include real-world performance tasks, collections of student work that can be independently reviewed, evaluations by inspection teams, and standardized tests. To make this work, there needs to be a proper balance of local and state assessments.

“Labeling a school and its students as failures one day and then throwing your hands up and walking away from them the next is wrong.” We agree. Researchers have concluded that NCLB will label 70 to 100 percent of the schools in the nation as 'failures.' A new law should stop this massive over-labeling and start helping schools improve. That means providing adequate funding for a broad range of educational services and developing better assessment tools. It means giving teachers themselves ongoing opportunities to learn, as all professionals must, so they can do their jobs better. It means holding schools, districts and states accountable for meeting reasonable rates of progress and taking positive steps toward improved teaching and learning.

“Forcing our teachers, our principals, and our schools to accomplish all of this without the resources they need is wrong.” We agree. Sadly, the law was not designed to provide the resources or the help to make schools better. Instead, it requires actions that do little to strengthen teaching and learning. Some of them, such as the tutoring provision, divert resources from schools serving low-income children and give those resources to private test preparation firms, with little evidence of benefit to the tutored students. The federal government needs to fully fund the overhauled law and meet its obligations to children and communities.

Educators, parents, and students across the country trust that you will keep these important promises and that your inauguration will be a step toward bringing desperately needed change to our schools. Red state and blue state, urban and rural, rich and poor Americans all want a federal education law that actually helps children learn, instead of just testing, labeling, and punishing them. FairTest and our allies in the Forum on Educational Accountability would be honored to be among the first to support your efforts to bring such a law into being.

Sincerely,

Jesse Mermell
Executive Director

Cc: Arne Duncan

Labels: accountability, assessment, high-stakes testing, NCLB

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

Check out this report by the NCLR on Immigration Raids and Children

-Patricia

A new report from the National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute, explores how workplace raids by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), raids aimed at identifying and deporting undocumented adults, affect the children in those families and the institutions that serve those children. The report profiles three raids, in Grand Island, Nebraska; Greeley, Colorado; and New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Labels: immigration and education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:57 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out this piece titled "Education Accountability Policy in the New Administration" by Richard Rothstein and Pedro Noguera

http://www.epi.org/policy/EPIPolicyMemorandum137.pdf

Angela

Labels: accountability

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:33 PM 0 comments Links to this post

University of Texas wants legislature to modify top 10 percent rule
05:56 PM CST on Wednesday, January 7, 2009
The Associated Press
AUSTIN – The University of Texas at Austin has "lost control" of its admissions policy and wants to change the law that guarantees automatic entry to students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class, UT President William Powers said Wednesday.

Powers said a record 81 percent of the Texas freshmen entering the university this fall gained admission through the so-called "top 10 percent rule." Unless the Legislature changes the policy during its upcoming 2009 session, Powers said the state's premier university soon would have no room to admit any Texas student who does not meet that standard.

"We've lost control of our entering class because we don't have any discretion on the admissions," Powers said a legislative preview meeting hosted by the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors. Powers said the university supports some form of automatic admission based on high school grades but wants to modify existing law so that high achievers who happen to fall short of the top 10 percent can gain entry.

Powers suggested that one solution would be to adopt a more "aggressive" program allowing students to transfer to the university from community colleges.

The automatic admissions law was adopted a decade ago after a federal appeals court decision made affirmative action illegal in Texas college admissions. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed universities to use race as one of many decision-making factors.

Efforts to change the top 10 percent law, or place a cap on the number of students being admitted under it, have fallen apart in past legislative sessions. Many Democrats have argued against modifying it, saying the law has improved ethnic and geographic diversity at major universities over the past decade.

Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, who serves on the Senate panel that oversees higher education, agreed Texas has a "capacity problem" but he said any modifications to the top 10 percent law should contain a "sunset provision" that ensures the Legislature could revisit admissions policy if it's not producing the intended results. West also said studies have shown that students admitted under the provision do better than those who aren't.

"The top ten percent (rule) is working," West said.

The 81st session of the Texas Legislature begins Tuesday at noon and runs for 140 days.

AP-WS-01-07-09 1812EST

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 1:21 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Some informative charts from this article:

A Distinctive Population

English-language learners of school-going age tend to be younger than members of the non-ELL population. That pattern may result from high birth rates among language-minority populations, high immigration rates among the youngest ELL youths, and the tendency to acquire proficiency with the English language over time.

SOURCE: EPE Research Center, 2009. Analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2005-2007).

Family Income and Education

The families of school-age English-language learners are consistently more socioeconomically disadvantaged than those of their peers. ELL youths are half as likely to have a parent with a two- or four-year college degree and much more likely to live in a low-income household. While two-thirds of ELL youths have a parent who holds a steady job, their parents typically earn much less than those of non-English-language learners.

SOURCE: EPE Research Center, 2009. Analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2005-2007).

Immigration Generation

Slightly more than one-third of ELL youths in the United States are foreign-born, compared with 4 percent of their non-ELL peers. Nearly half of all English-language learners are second-generation Americans, meaning they are native-born with at least one parent born outside the United States or its territories. Seventeen percent of ELLs are third-generation Americans with both parents born in the United States. Ninety-six percent of non-ELL youth are native-born.

SOURCE: EPE Research Center, 2009. Analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2005-2007).

Race and Ethnicity

Most English-language learners from the ages of 5 to 17 are Hispanic, while 14 percent are white and 13 percent are of Asian or Pacific Islander descent. The majority of the school-age non-ELL population is non-Hispanic white.

SOURCE: EPE Research Center, 2009. Analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2005-2007).

Spanning the Globe

Foreign-born English-language learners of school age hail from more than 200 countries that span every corner of the globe, according to an original analysis by the EPE Research Center. Mexico is the largest single country of origin, accounting for nearly 54 percent of all ELL youths born outside the United States or its territories. Large groups also immigrate from elsewhere in the Americas and from Asia. However, about two-thirds of all English-language learners are native-born.

SOURCE: EPE Research Center, 2009. Analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2005-2007).

-Patricia

The task of ensuring that millions of children learn English—and succeed academically—is putting pressure on states and school districts as they push to boost student achievement overall.

By Mary Ann Zehr | Ed Week
January 8, 2009

New York

Here, in the nation’s largest school system, the face of the typical student is, increasingly, that of a child whose parents were born somewhere other than the United States—and, in many cases, someone who enters school speaking little or no English.

More than half of New York City’s nearly 1 million public school students have at least one foreign-born parent. This school year, 148,000 students are classified as English-language learners, or ELLs—up from 109,000 in the 1990-91 school year. By the end of this school year, about 30,000 more such students will have enrolled, the city education department projects.

Given such demographics, New York City offers a barometer of the pressures facing school systems nationally—whether urban or rural—in working to educate English-language learners amid the push for standards-based school reform.

The forecast, across the country, is cloudy at best.

Read On...

Labels: English language learners, immigration and education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:42 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This full article is a wonderful resource. The following are the cases highlighted:

Meyer v. Nebraska (1923)
Mendez v. Westminster (1947)
Bilingual Education Act (1968)
Serna v. Portales Municipal Schools (1972)
Lau v. Nichols (1974)
Equal Educational Opportunities Act (1974)
Plyler v. Doe (1982)
Flores v. Arizona (2008)

Not mentioned is the recent court case in Texas: USA and LULAC GI-Forum v. Texas (2008)

Check out the Press release and court documents

-Patricia

By Mark Walsh | Ed Week
January 8, 2009

Case law and statutes involving the right of English-learners to a public education—and the responsibilities of state and local governments to provide it—stretch back decades and continue to evolve. These are among the cases and laws that scholars and advocates consider landmarks in the area of the rights of language-minority and immigrant students:

Read on...

Labels: bilingual education, English language learners

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:21 AM 0 comments Links to this post

By Lesli A. Maxwell | Ed Week
January 8, 2009

Jim D. Rollins had been superintendent of the Springdale public schools in northwest Arkansas for almost a decade when the mostly white community began its dramatic transformation into a booming gateway for immigrant families and their non-English-speaking children.

In 1990, the district, with just under 8,000 students, had virtually no English-language learners, or ELLs. By last fall, its English-learner population alone stood at 7,000 children—roughly 40 percent of the total enrollment of 17,400 students. A thriving economy in and around Springdale over the past 15 years, driven mostly by job growth at Tyson Foods, the world’s largest poultry producer, and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, had attracted thousands of immigrants from Mexico, as well as a significant number of families from the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific.

Read On...

Labels: immigration and education

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

New York Times | Editorial
November 27, 2008

New York City and its teachers’ union took an important step when they agreed to abandon a rule that allowed senior teachers to transfer into any school they wished, often bumping younger teachers from their jobs. The new policy, which allows principals to reject unwanted applicants, has put an end to disruptive transfers and made it easier for schools to build coherent teams.

The new system is not perfect. It has unfortunately created an incentive for principals to pass over the most experienced teachers — who can earn $100,000 a year — in favor of new teachers who cost about half that much. The passed-over teachers, whose jobs are guaranteed under the union contract, end up in a “reserve pool,” where they typically work as substitutes, while the central administration budget pays their full salaries. The cost to the city is estimated at $74 million a year.

The city and the union have now agreed on a new initiative that should cut costs while helping the best reserve pool teachers find permanent positions. Under the new rules, schools that fill vacancies from the pool will receive a small bonus and a significant salary subsidy that holds them harmless for up to eight years.

If all goes as planned, principals will seek out the best teachers from the reserve pool, no matter how high their salaries. That still leaves a crucial question unanswered: what to do with reserve teachers whose records of poor performance make it unlikely that they will be hired.

Within a year or so, the city should know which teachers were passed over for salary reasons and which ones have languished in the reserve pool because of poor performance. Once the data is in, the city and the union will need to negotiate a plan for ushering the inadequate teachers out of the system.

Labels: teacher shortage

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:30 AM 0 comments Links to this post

By Kimberly S. Wetzel, Contra Costa Times
Posted: 11/26/2008 05:17:19 PM PST

One of President-elect Barack Obama's big challenges next year will be to restructure the No Child Left Behind Act, a bipartisan effort launched six years ago as a way to improve America's struggling public schools.

But how and when the discussion will begin on the issue is up in the air, as Obama so far has provided skimpy details on his plans for it, and the economic crisis looks to dominate domestic policy for a while.

Still, educators and academics are eager to see how lawmakers will handle NCLB and change what many call a broken system that puts too much pressure on schools without funding to implement changes.

"No Child has helped to shine a spotlight on the problems facing the public schools; now we need a president and congress that can craft motivating remedies, supporting and not punishing local educators," said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at UC Berkeley. "What's required is a careful rethinking how Washington can play a productive role, not a punitive one."

No Child Left Behind — signed by President George W. Bush in early 2002 — is a standardized-test system for tracking achievement. The law expired in 2007 and sits idle in Congress awaiting reauthorization.

Under the law, a minimum number of students must score proficient or better in math and reading on state standardized tests. Schools that do not have enough children who meet the benchmarks and other criteria are deemed in need of improvement and placed on state and federal watch lists. Schools and school districts that fail to make "adequate yearly progress" two years in a row can face sanctions such as having money withheld or be forced to restructure.

Many educators agree that NCLB is a good start to overhauling the system, but the law should be reshaped to give schools credit for improvement and be adequately funded. Others say the mandate, which also calls for all students in the United States to be proficient in math and reading by 2014, is unrealistic and sets schools up to fail.

"Pressure and humiliation are not successful strategies to use," said Nia Rashidchi, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning in the West Contra Costa school district, where some schools have been deemed in need of improvement. "When schools and school districts don't meet all the targets but have good growth, the focus is still, 'But you did not meet the targets.' That's not a good incentive for staffs to keep doing the hard work that they are doing."

Obama has remained somewhat vague about his plans to reform the law, other than to say that fixes need to be made. He often refers to the need for a "growth model" that will give schools credit for progress, and he has stressed increased funding for things such as teacher training.

"We must fix the failures of No Child Left Behind," Obama said during a campaign rally in Ohio in September. "We must provide the funding we were promised and give our states the resources they need, and, finally, meet our commitment to special education."

When Obama might take up the issue is anyone's guess, however, as education was largely a back-burner issue in the election campaign, and Obama told CNN in late October that education was fifth among his priorities, behind the economy, energy independence, health-care and tax cuts for the middle class.

But educators and others say that America's students, continuously slipping further behind their peers in other countries, cannot wait for reform. The public largely agrees: a poll done by the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup in August showed that 67 percent of Americans think the law should be significantly changed or scrapped.

Congressman George Miller, D-Martinez, chairman of the powerful House Education and Labor Committee and one of the chief sponsors of NCLB, said he looks forward to discussing the matter with Obama. Miller hopes to incorporate teacher performance and school dropout rates, and he wants to take the pressure off schools by "making sure they can go into school improvement without turning it upside down."

Miller said he thinks that Obama — who has stated repeatedly that education is an issue close to his heart — will make NCLB a priority upon taking office in January.

"The bottom line is, everybody envisions pretty significant changes to No Child Left Behind," Miller said.

"We've learned a lot in the last five years, we've seen a lot of things that are working, and it's very, very exciting. I think that one thing President-elect Obama has made very clear is that education is very much a part of our economy, as is a bailout for Citicorp or the automobile companies. We cannot fall behind on education just because the economy is in a downturn."

Reach Kimberly S. Wetzel at 510-262-2798 or at kwetzel@bayareanewsgroup.com.

Labels: NCLB reauthorization

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:24 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This is crazy. Check out the previous post showing the growth of the detention center industry across the U.S. Couching these expenditures under the auspices of national security should concern us all.

-Patricia

By Hernán Rozemberg | San Antonio Express-News
November 27, 2008

Facing increased pressure to keep an organized system for the growing number of unauthorized immigrants kept in detention, the federal government is about to pump millions into a new tracking network.

The agency responsible for the arrest, detention and deportation of unauthorized migrants, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement within the Homeland Security Department, will spend as much as $44 million over the next four years for the new program.

Tasked to develop the new Web-based detention management system is Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman, which won the contract. The tech giant, a traditional hub for military contracts, will team up with nine other companies, including Dell in Austin.

Northrop Grumman said the wireless network will allow ICE, which manages about 33,000 detainees in more than 300 prisons around the country, to keep better track of movement of detainees from one prison to another and how much bed space is available at each location. It also will be able to link the information to other databases.

The company said in a news release that the new system “will significantly increase safety and security, reduce processing time, minimize network and cellular traffic and provide a common interface for (homeland security) agents.”

The government hopes the new technology will help manage the immigration detention system, which has dramatically expanded with yearly budget increases in the wake of the post-9-11 security boost.

“Ultimately, our goal is to continue to look for improved efficiencies, and use new technologies to that end,” said Carl Rusnok, regional spokesman for ICE in Dallas.

Northrop Grumman's contract calls for $14 million for one year, with up to three annual renewals totaling more than $44 million.

Labels: detention centers, immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 1:08 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out the full report "Recent Immigration to Philadelphia: Regional Change and Response".

Here are some key findings from an analysis of the growth and characteristics of the foreign-born in the Philadelphia metropolitan area between 1970 and 2006:

• Among its peers, metropolitan Philadelphia has the largest and fastest growing immigrant population, which now stands at over 500,000, comprising 9 percent of the population. Between 2000 and 2006, greater Philadelphia’s immigrant population grew by 113,000, nearly as many as had arrived in the decade of the 1990s.

• Metropolitan Philadelphia has a diverse mix of immigrants and refugees from Asia (39 percent), Latin America and the Caribbean (28 percent), Europe (23 percent) and Africa (8 percent). The 10 largest source countries are India, Mexico, China, Vietnam, Korea, Italy, Ukraine, Philippines, Jamaica, and Germany.

• Immigrant growth in suburban Philadelphia has outpaced the city’s growth, but numerically, the city has the largest population of all local jurisdictions. Outside the city, Montgomery County had the earliest post- World War II suburban settlement of the foreign born and has the largest number of immigrants among jurisdictions, while Chester County saw the fastest growth during the 1970-2006 time period.

• Nearly 60 percent of the foreign-born living in metropolitan Philadelphia arrived in the United States after 1990. Although their naturalization rates and educational levels reflect their recentness of arrival, on the whole, greater Philadelphia’s immigrants are doing well on these measures as compared with some other U.S. metropolitan immigrant populations.

• Nearly 75 percent of greater Philadelphia’s labor force growth since 2000 is attributable to immigrants. Immigrants’ contributions to the labor force are considerably higher in this period than in the 1990s, when just 36 percent of the growth was due to immigrants.

-Patricia

by Athena D. Merritt
Friday, November 28, 2008

About 220 businesses, employing 900 workers, occupy the six-block stretch of 52nd Street between Arch and Spruce streets in West Philadelphia.

Overwhelmingly, they are immigrant-owned, reported the Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians, which hopes a study released this month will bring attention to the contributions being made by immigrants to the city’s struggling commercial corridors.

Immigrants have accounted for nearly 75 percent of the area’s labor growth since 2000 and, when compared to native born, more are employed (73 percent versus 71.5 percent) and self-employed (10.7 percent versus 7.9 percent), according to a new Brookings Institution study, “Recent Immigration to Philadelphia: Regional Change in a Re-Emerging Gateway.”

The city can’t afford to overlook the area’s immigrant population, which at more than 500,000 is the largest and fastest-growing of its peer regions, said Anne O’Callaghan, executive director of the Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians.

“They go into what we would call at-risk neighborhoods that are in decline and suffer from lack of resources,” O’Callaghan said of businesses being started by immigrants. “You look at the commercial corridors over the past few years, immigrant businesses have been the base upon which the corridors have been able to survive.”

Sixty-five percent of the businesses on the six-block stretch of 52nd Street are owned by immigrants, she said. Immigrants also own 39 of the 56 businesses on Baltimore Avenue between 45th and 50th streets, 70 percent of the dozen businesses on Moore and Morris streets from Broad Street to 16th and 60 percent of the businesses on North 5th between West Summerville and West Chew avenues, according to a study by the center in 2004.

“They don’t do it because they were born entrepreneurs, often necessity is the mother of invention, they do it because they can’t find jobs,” O’Callaghan told those gathered for the release of the Brookings study this month.

The businesses are being opened by immigrants despite a number of obstacles, including language barriers, limited business training and challenges navigating resources, if they are able to access them at all, O’Callaghan said. None of the businesses from the corridors the center studied were able to procure bank loans. Nearly half owned the properties and had made improvements and planned to do more in the future. Nearly half of the businesses had also been started in properties that had been vacant or abandoned.

The presence of immigrant businesses is felt, said Audrey Singer, lead researcher on the Brookings study. “In some neighborhoods you can see places that have been declining for some time being perked up by immigrant businesses,” Singer said, pointing to West Philadelphia’s 52nd Street as an example.

The Center for New Pennsylvanians opened Welcoming Center West on 246 S. 52nd Street this year to support the corridor’s immigrant and native-born entrepreneurs. This summer, the center also launched the pilot program English for Entrepreneurs, which teaches foreign-born business owners basic English to help improve their customer service, business development and customer engagement skills.

Additionally, in September, the center became a partner with the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education in a new program that connects students to foreign-owned businesses. The students get skills in interpreting and community organizing and class credit, while the businesses get help accessing resources that language barriers have kept them from doing in the past, Fatimah Muhammad, manager of Welcoming Center West, said. The efforts only scrape the surface; more are needed, Muhammad said.

“If you want them to stay you need to remove these barriers,” she said.

Labels: immigrant labor, immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:58 AM 0 comments Links to this post

As the population of high school graduates declines nationwide, Midwest and East Coast colleges are hoping to attract California students to keep their enrollment numbers steady.

By Larry Gordon | LA Times
November 29, 2008

Dory Streett didn't beat around the bush when she spoke to students recently at a high school near downtown Los Angeles about Colby College, a liberal arts school in Maine. It's 3,000 miles from home, there's snow for long stretches and its community of Waterville has only 16,000 residents.

"It's almost as far as you can get," the recruiter told a dozen seniors at Gertz-Ressler High School. The photos she showed of Colby's bucolic campus did seem a galaxy away to many of the mainly low-income students whose school sits beside the Santa Monica Freeway.

But Streett, who also emphasized Colby's small classes and generous financial aid, urged students to consider a college outside Southern California: "It's for kids who want something different . . . who know they will be in urban areas most of their lives and want to try something different for four years."

It's a message heard more often in California these days, as East Coast and Midwest colleges face an anticipated drop in their local applicant pools and cast a wider net for prospective students.

After a decade of campus-crowding growth, the size of the nation's high school graduating class has begun to decline with this year's seniors, and is projected to drop 4.5% by 2014. Then, modest growth is expected to resume.

The change, however, is uneven across the country, with the deepest dips -- up to 20% over the next few years -- forecast for New England and Upper Midwest states, home to numerous colleges.

Schools from those regions are boosting recruiting in California and other populous states, including Texas, Florida and Arizona, and looking for more students overseas, especially from China and India.

The population trend "certainly concerns schools in the Midwest and the Northeast. And it will force many . . . to start recruiting outside of their traditional regions," said Tony Pals, a spokesman for the National Assn. of Independent Colleges and Universities.

Another trend may further reduce the collegegoing population, experts say. A growing portion of U.S. high school graduates are Latinos, who traditionally have lower rates of college attendance than whites. Unless that changes, the drop in potential freshmen may be even steeper.

Uncertainty about the economy and families' abilities to pay also is forcing colleges, especially private ones, to scramble to make sure enough qualified students apply.

"Postsecondary institutions accustomed to filling entering classes with relative ease will likely face greater competition for fewer traditional-age students," declared an influential report, "Knocking at the College Door," released this year by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

Felema Yemane, a senior at Los Angeles' Pilgrim School, says she is nervous about applying to college but hopes the demographic decline will boost her chances.

"Just the fact that it's a little bit smaller gives us a little more chance," said Yemane, who is applying to private and public schools on the East Coast and in California.

Admissions officials say the change is unlikely to make it easier to get accepted by the most prestigious universities, such as Harvard and Princeton, which reject 90 percent of applicants. Nevertheless, those schools say they want to keep up their West Coast recruiting and let potential students know of the sweetened financial-aid deals wealthy colleges can offer.

"I think we are all very aware of the demographics and the changing nature of our applicant pool," said Janet Lavin Rapelye, dean of admissions at Princeton.

But for the next few years, students applying to colleges a notch below the top tier may find it a bit easier to land a spot.

Local high school counselors say they are hearing from more schools around the country that want to send representatives. "We are finding schools recruiting in California that we haven't seen in the past," said Helene Kunkel, a college advisor at Palisades Charter High School.

However, Kunkel said Southern Californians may not be attracted to those campuses if they are far away or lack a familiar brand name. "They do have an uphill battle with some of the kids here," she said.

Even so, this year for the first time, Central College in Iowa and Quinnipiac University in Connecticut are sending envoys to Southern California. Others, including Northeastern University in Boston and the Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York, have established California offices or placed full-time recruiters here.

Still others, including the University of Vermont, the University of Connecticut, Michigan's Kalamazoo College and Minnesota's College of St. Benedict-St. John's University are coming more often and visiting more schools.

Kalamazoo is boosting recruiting outside the Midwest because of demographics and because Michigan's economic decline makes it difficult for some local families to attend, said Eric Staab, dean of admissions. "It is no longer a time to be a regional college," he said.

The University of Connecticut, where a third of undergraduates are out-of-staters, has sharply increased the time its recruiters spend in California. "As we looked at that receding tide, we decided to have a strategy in place and build our name brand," said Lee Melvin, director of undergraduate admissions.

Central College in Iowa anticipates what admissions dean Carol Williamson calls "incredibly tight competition" from other Iowa schools for students. So she is sending a representative to California for two weeks this fall and again in the spring.

Williamson concedes that Iowa might be an unusual spot for a Los Angeles student, but said the school wants young people who are "willing to step outside their normal box and say, 'I want a different experience.' "

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of high school graduates in the U.S. peaked this spring with about 3.35 million "Echo Boom" youngsters, offspring of Baby Boomers. The number is projected to drop by about 18,000 next spring and continue to decline for the next five years.

New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania are projected to have significant dips while states such as Texas, Florida and Arizona are slated for growth.

California is in a universe of its own. The "College Door" report estimates that the number of California students graduating from high school peaked at 423,615 in 2008. The state projects a slight decrease for 2009 and a nearly 7% decline by 2017.

However, California's population of young people will remain the largest by far -- about double that of Florida and New York -- and will continue to draw recruiters.

That's one reason Colby College, which enrolls half its 1,870 students from New England, sent Streett to California this fall to visit more than 40 schools in two weeks. At a college fair last month at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with representatives of other East Coast colleges, including Middlebury, Mount Holyoke and Bates.

Southern California is a good place to look for ethnic and geographic diversity, Streett told the Gertz-Ressler students, who were mainly Latino and black. "We want that," she said. "That is very attractive to us and that's why we spend a couple weeks out here."

That was good news to Carlos Ramos, a Gertz-Ressler senior who attended recent presentations by several East Coast schools and expects to apply to some of them. Ramos, 17, said he heard a clear message from the out-of-state colleges:

"They definitely want L.A. kids to be there," he said.

Gordon is a Times staff writer.

Labels: California, higher education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:40 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

The Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., was built on the hope that it would revive the city’s economy.

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: December 26, 2008

CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.

Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse.

After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt — only blocks from home, but in a separate world.

In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime — people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest.

If anything, the people of Central Falls saw Wyatt as the economic engine that city fathers had promised, a steady source of jobs and federal money to pay for services like police and fire protection. Even that, it turns out, was an illusion.

Wyatt offers a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work.


Click here for the interactive map of detention centers across the U.S.

Last spring, The New York Times set out to examine this small city of 19,000 and its big detention center as a microcosm of the nation’s new relationship with immigration detention, which is now sweeping up not just recent border-jumpers and convicted felons but foreign-born residents with strong ties to places like Central Falls. Wyatt, nationally accredited, clean and modern, seemed like one of the better jails in the system, a patchwork of county lockups, private prisons and federal detention centers where government investigations and the news media have recently documented substandard, sometimes lethal, conditions.

But last summer, a detainee died in Wyatt’s custody. Immigration authorities investigating the death removed all immigration detainees this month — along with the $101.76 a day the federal government paid the jail for each one. In Central Falls, where many families have members without papers, a state campaign against illegal immigrants spread fear that also took a toll: People went into hiding and businesses lost Latino customers in droves. Slowly, the city awoke to its role in the detention system, and to the pitfalls of the bargain it had struck.

In a sinking economy, immigration detention is a rare growth industry. Congress has doubled annual spending on it in the last four years, to $2.4 billion approved in October as part of $5.9 billion allotted for immigration enforcement through next September — even more than the Bush administration had requested.

Seeking a slice of that bounty, communities like Farmville, Va., and Pahrump, Nev., are signing up with developers of new detention centers. Jails from New England to New Mexico have already made the crackdown pay off — for the private companies that dominate the industry, for some investors and, at least in theory, for places like Central Falls, a city so strapped that the state pays for its schools.

Here, a specially created municipal corporation built the jail in the early 1990s to hold federal inmates, and last year more than doubled its size. As the City Council president, William Benson Jr., put it, “The more inmates they have, the more money we get.”

Yet in a community whose 1.3 square miles are said to be too small for secrets — “If you sneeze on Washington Street, someone on Pine Street says, ‘Gesundheit,’ ” Mr. Benson said — city officials, overwhelmingly non-Latino, seemed uninformed about who those inmates were. “Nobody knows exactly who’s down there,” he said. “I hear some are Arab terrorists.”

The mystery is in some ways understandable. Though immigration detainees made up one-third of the daily population and a majority of the 4,200 men and women who moved through Wyatt’s 722 beds in a year, most were from other states, and those from Rhode Island did not remain long: Immigration and Customs Enforcement typically transferred them within a week.

Some were legal immigrants who had served time for serious crimes. But increasingly they were the kind of people who in the past would not have been arrested — people without papers, similar to some of the people who play, cheer and live in Wyatt’s shadow. Sometimes the same people.

Anthony Ventetuolo Jr., one of Wyatt’s developers and now the jail’s chief executive, said that who the inmates were made no difference to the jail, which was run like a business, under strict standards. “I’m not interested in getting involved in the politics of immigration,” he said. “All we do is detain people that our clients tell us to detain.”

Swallowed by the System

Over 10 years, Maynor Canté, 26, hardly glanced at the jail he passed as he hurried between home, two jobs and St. Matthew’s Church, where he led a prayer group.

He was 15 when he left Guatemala in 1997, sneaking across the Mexican border to join seven older siblings, legal residents who had spent years scraping new lives out of the industrial ruins of Rhode Island’s Blackstone Valley. Caught in Texas, the teenager was quickly let go pending a hearing, like so many arrested under the “catch and release” policy that prevailed while the nation’s boom times demanded cheap immigrant labor. When he failed to show up in court, a deportation order was issued.

A decade later, Mr. Canté spoke near-fluent English, and had spent thousands of dollars trying to legalize his status. Mornings, he cleaned a factory for $8 an hour. Evenings, he worked at his nephew’s new clothing shop on Dexter Street, one of several Latino businesses that had revived a bleak stretch of vacant storefronts.

Then, early one morning in October 2007 when he headed out the door for his cleaning job, five immigration agents hustled him into a van. That night, as frightened relatives tried to find him, he was delivered to Wyatt in chains.

Inside, a plaque declares that the detention center’s mission is “to protect the public from people who pose a threat to society.” One corridor, waxed to an immaculate shine, leads to a darkened control room where correction officers watch a dozen video monitors fed by 200 cameras. A guard can scan an entire unit housing 72 detainees in two- to four-man cells; zooming in on a card game, he can see that one player is holding hearts.

The jail was built for inmates awaiting trial on federal charges — drug possession, child pornography, political corruption. But to help pay off $106 million borrowed for its recent expansion and refinancing, Wyatt was now counting on prisoners like Mr. Canté: administrative detainees not charged with a crime, but held while the government tries to deport them.

Now he found himself slated for deportation without a hearing — or even any way to make a phone call.

“I was scared,” he said, recalling how he prayed the rosary and stared out the tiny window of his cell to watch a freight train pass at 6 a.m.

Outside, his sister Emma, 33, was distraught. Since their mother’s death in 2006, she had felt more responsible for protecting Mr. Canté, a big-shouldered man who was still her little brother. “Three days passed and we didn’t know where he was,” she said.

On the fourth day, after calls to many jails, a high school friend located Mr. Canté, and members of his prayer circle flocked to Wyatt. His priest, the Rev. Otoniel J. Gomez, had never visited the jail in the eight years since he was sent to Central Falls from Colombia. He spoke to his weeping parishioner through a thick plexiglass barrier.

“I thought, ‘This is like a horror movie, talking with a criminal,’ ” he said.

Yet the priest soon realized that Mr. Canté was lucky. “Most of these people didn’t have any relatives or friends near them,” Father Gomez said, “not even a lawyer.”

The official list of free legal help was largely a dead end. Wyatt’s expensive inmate telephone service was often useless, because it took days to set up an account, and it could not be used to call cellphones. Desperate, other detainees passed Mr. Canté phone numbers on scraps of paper, begging him to ask his visitors to call and tell where they were.

Out of Sight, Out of Reach

Plucked from communities from Maine to New York, some had already been transferred through several jails; many would soon be moved again, as the federal immigration agency improvised to make space for detainees from new roundups.

“It’s like having a room with five bathtubs and water coming in and out of each one to maintain an equilibrium,” explained Todd Thurlow, acting deputy director of the Boston field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which contracts for about 1,000 beds in dozens of jails across New England.

Wyatt had a reputation as one of the most professionally run. But for newcomers without help, it could be rough.

One complaint, echoed by former jail employees, was that detainees in pain from illness or injury often went without adequate treatment. Other detainees spoke of going hungry, like Edgar Bocce, 25, a Guatemalan cleaner who said two muscular inmates took away his first dinner tray — rice, beans and spaghetti — while guards did nothing. Spartan meals could be supplemented with food from the jail’s commissary, but only if relatives sent money, or detainees stayed long enough to earn some; on the cleaning crew that kept the jail so spotless, starting pay was 40 cents a day.

Though officials said detainees were housed according to their history of violence, only one unit was dedicated to immigration detainees, and the rest were mixed in with criminal suspects and convicts.

Perhaps the greatest frustration, inmates said, was their inability to make sense of what was happening to them.

“Why am I here in jail?” asked one, a Central Falls mechanic who had been seized at immigration headquarters in Providence when he went to check why his green card application was taking so long. Wyatt guards had no answers. “They tell me, ‘Sorry, guys, but we’re not Immigration.’ ”

Mr. Canté’s sisters borrowed money and hired him a lawyer. But a day after the lawyer’s first visit, their brother was gone — transferred to a Boston jail. That week, he was shackled and bused with 60 other men to detention in York, Pa., then put on a government plane with 300 chained immigrants.

He ended up one of 2,000 detainees packed into a windowless tent city that had sprung up only a year earlier in Raymondville, Tex. — the nation’s largest immigration prison camp, run for profit and still growing.

For weeks after his lawyer reopened his case for a hearing in Boston, she could not locate him. He was on the verge of deportation by the time she managed to persuade the government to fly him back from Texas, two days before last Christmas.

Mr. Canté finally appeared before an immigration judge on Jan. 2, after three months in the detention maze. Because his case fell under the more lenient laws in force before 1997, he not only was released on bond, but allowed to work until his immigration hearing in December 2009. He is now trying to pay back thousands of dollars in loans and legal fees.


A Market for Inmates

Mr. Canté, whose time in detention cost federal taxpayers about $10,000, was part of what many call an “immigrant gold rush” that turned the private prison industry from bust to boom.

Across the country, starting in Texas in the 1980s, prison companies built jail cells on speculation as they rushed to cash in on the war on drugs. They overbuilt; abuse scandals and escapes soured many states on private prisons, and by the late 1990s, as competition for inmates increased, the companies’ stock was suffering.

Yet given the lure of easy financing and big fees for constructing deals, developers of prison space did not hold back on growth. Instead, big companies like the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) and the Cornell Companies added more beds and lobbied harder at the source of the most lucrative inmates, the federal government.

The payoff came after 9/11 in an accelerating stream of new detainees: foreigners swept up by the nation’s rising furor over illegal immigration.

Central Falls was similar, in its poverty, to more remote communities that had hitched their hopes to jails. Set in the river valley where America’s industrial revolution was born, its textile mills had hired large immigrant families — French Canadians and Poles, followed by Syrians and Portuguese — and squeezed them into triple-decker tenements. Even after the work moved away, the mills’ cheap housing continued to draw immigrants, mostly from Latin America.

The city was nearly bankrupt in 1990 when developers made a proposition: Build a profit-making jail for two or three hundred nonviolent federal detainees, and guarantee a steady stream of money and jobs for Central Falls.

But the deal that emerged, like many elsewhere, proved better at paying private investors than generating public revenue. The municipal corporation borrowed $30 million through a state bond issue to build Wyatt, and hired the Cornell company to run it. Six years later, the municipal body borrowed $38 million to refinance, buying back most of the bonds at a premium that gave the original bondholders a lump-sum return of 28.5 percent on their investment in addition to 9 percent annual interest.

And from its opening party in November 1993, Wyatt ran into the same problem as its competitors: finding enough inmates. For a time it imported murderers and rapists by the busload from North Carolina’s crowded prisons. When city residents objected, they learned that Central Falls had no control over who was housed at Wyatt and would get no money unless it was full.

At best, Wyatt paid Central Falls $2 to $3 a day for each detainee — less than $400,000 in the good years — to offset its use of city services. At times when the flow of inmates faltered, payments slowed to a trickle. Yet, following the strange logic of prison growth, Cornell and Wyatt officials were soon pushing to refinance yet again and expand.

Thomas Lazieh, the mayor who had championed the deal that built Wyatt, defended it as the best the city could get. His successor, Lee Matthews, took a darker view and sued to stop the expansion. “The city was sold a bill of goods,” he said.

Wyatt doubled in size anyway, with the backing of the current mayor, Charles D. Moreau. Convinced that it could wrest more revenue from the jail as immigration enforcement boomed, the municipal corporation took full control in August 2007. The budget it approved late that year included $6,000 a month for a Washington lobbyist to seek more detainees at higher rates.

A Recession, and Raids

By then, as in many parts of the country, people in Rhode Island were looking at Latino immigrants as prime suspects in a dismal economy. A polarizing immigration debate had converged with a huge state budget deficit and high unemployment. As this year began, resentment flared.

The catalyst was an ordinary New Year’s feature in The Providence Journal about the first baby born in Rhode Island in 2008. Mother and newborn were still in the hospital when federal agents, spurred by the publicity, raided their apartment in Providence and took away the father on immigration violations. Afterward, the police said, the mother discovered that a roommate from Guatemala had hanged himself behind his locked bedroom door, apparently during the raid.

The baby’s father, initially held in secret at Wyatt, was eventually deported. A Guatemalan landscaper with two misdemeanor convictions, he had been ordered to leave the country in August 2007, but stayed, his lawyer said, because his fiancée, a United States citizen, was pregnant with their second child.

To some, the case illustrated how illegal immigrants, who make up less than 4 percent of Rhode Island’s population, drained public services.

“Rhode Island taxpayers are the real victims!” declared Alice Losasso of West Warwick, in a letter to The Journal. “I’m tired of paying for interpreters so that immigrants can take their driver’s test in whatever language they speak. I’m tired of finding that their girlfriends and children are on welfare.”

Her words echoed a major theme of the governor, Donald L. Carcieri, a Republican. In March, he issued an executive order directing the State Police to help federal authorities round up illegal immigrants, saying that they depressed wages and strained services.

Public approval for that order reached 75 percent in one poll after an illegal immigrant from Guatemala was charged with carjacking and raping a woman outside a mall. He had been arrested twice before by the Providence police, and already had an outstanding order of deportation. The governor appeared on the Bill O’Reilly program to accuse the Providence mayor of sheltering criminals.

In Central Falls, the crackdown sowed panic. At the public charter school two blocks from Wyatt, parents, already afraid to be photographed at school events, were now reluctant to drive to meetings, said Sarah Friedman, a founder of the school.

An 8-year-old girl, one of the school’s high-scoring students, stopped speaking in class when her father disappeared into detention, the girl’s mother said. Without his income, mother and daughter, United States citizens, were almost evicted from their apartment.

At Central Falls High School, some students stopped coming to class because their families had gone into hiding, said Margie Cruz, a school-home liaison: “The child was born here, the child is legal. But the family has to hide because the father will be deported.

“I’ve seen students stopped for a traffic violation and the whole family got deported,” she added. “Children that were here for years. I watched them grow up.”

One longtime Little League mother said she used to worry that child molesters could be watching from the jail windows. Now, she said, she worried that her sister’s children would end up inside — the niece who had just graduated from high school with no path to legal status; the nephew who had been taught that local Quakers hid fugitive slaves, and asked his aunt to hide him if his parents were detained.

They were part of a generation of Central Falls teenagers born abroad who were coming of age as outlaws in their own town. Some had already lost relatives, like the 14-year-old whose older brother had made a left turn on red and ended up in a detention odyssey that led to deportation.

“My mother’s afraid the same thing that happened to my brother could happen to me, because I play soccer, I’m out there,” he said.

A few blocks from Wyatt, Police Chief Joseph P. Moran III praised the jail as “a great neighbor — it keeps things under control.” But he went on to tell about the difficulty of investigating the killing of a Dominican cabdriver, because witnesses had not come forward for fear of deportation. He talked of the blurring line between police work and immigration enforcement.

One domestic violence call by a husband illustrated the new reality. After a routine computer check, both he and his wife were taken into police custody, and her 8-month-old baby was handed to a friend. The man had an outstanding bench warrant; his wife had a deportation warrant issued by immigration authorities — something not included in the police database a few years ago.

“We work hand in hand with ICE,” Chief Moran said. At the same time, he added: “I have friends from Honduras, Ecuador. My kids went to school here. It makes it very, very difficult.”

Profit and Loss

For defenders of the jail, the bottom line has always been the bottom line: Wyatt’s growth meant more federal money for the city.

“They’re going to detain them somewhere,” said the manager of Mr. Williams True Styles Barbershop, on the struggling Dexter Street commercial strip. “It’s a billion-dollar business. Unless we’re going to free them, what difference does it make?”

But at least in Central Falls, the incarceration economy was not delivering on its promise.

In late June, Mayor Moreau, a big man with a florid face and a police siren in his car, offered up a budget that laid off firefighters — and told angry city employees to get used to it.

“We’re at the end of the financial rope for Central Falls,” he told the City Council, citing more than 200 boarded-up homes, foreclosures at the rate of 25 a week, and cuts in state and federal aid that required a 4 percent property tax increase and an 8 percent spending cut in the new $17.4 million budget.

Outside, past the defunct factory where Hasbro once made G. I. Joe, beyond the rusty hulk of the downsized Sylvania plant, the summer twilight gleamed on Wyatt’s new facade.

What had happened to the windfall of money and jobs it had offered?

The jail’s annual revenue had almost doubled in a year, to $21 million, mainly from increasing immigration detention. But the city budget projected revenue of only $525,000 from Wyatt, which is exempt from taxes.

That was not even enough to cover its share of city services, according to an estimate by the city’s finance department. It was certainly nothing like the $2 million a year that Mr. Benson, the City Council president, had mentioned to a reporter in April. The mayor, he said, predicted the city would get that much in profits formerly reaped by the Cornell Companies, now that the local board had taken over. Neither the mayor nor the board members, unpaid mayoral appointees, would talk about Wyatt.

As for jobs, only 10 of about 200 Wyatt employees lived in Central Falls. The jail’s board was even declining to make the $1,500 donations to local groups it once supported, like a scholarship fund and youth football.

Mr. Ventetuolo, the Wyatt chief executive, would not say how much had been saved by dispensing with Cornell’s for-profit services, maintaining that it had all gone toward keeping prices low for the federal government. Wyatt was still in transition, he said, striving to fill new beds to meet soaring payments to bondholders, now up to $8.4 million yearly from $2.7 million under the terms of the latest refinancing.

Yet Mr. Ventetuolo’s consulting company had won a raise, to $230,000 from $156,000. And as the number of detainees increased, so did revenue from surcharges on their collect calls to relatives, under a contract with Global Tel Link that gave Wyatt a cut of about $564,000 a year. That arrangement had survived a state ban on phone surcharges at prisons, thanks to lobbying that gave Wyatt a loophole.

Other large fees went to lawyers and financiers, as Mr. Matthews, the former mayor, pointed out. “There just happens to be a lot of money made by folks other than the people of the City of Central Falls,” he said.

Out in the Open

City officials in Central Falls — mostly descendants of earlier immigrants — were mindful that they presided over a community at least 60 percent Latino, where fear of the immigration crackdown was widespread.

At the same time, the city had built its hopes for economic stability on a jail that was helping to make that crackdown possible. The combination created a local immigration politics that sometimes verged on denial.

But last summer, Wyatt itself was suddenly caught in the glare of the state’s crackdown.

On the evening of July 15, a dozen State Police officers and 50 immigration agents swept into six courthouses across the state. They arrested 31 cleaners on suspicion of immigration violations, people paid $7.40 an hour to vacuum floors and scrub toilets in Rhode Island’s halls of justice. All worked for two large state contractors, one owned by the brother of a state legislator allied with Governor Carcieri.

In the uproar that followed, experiences that had been private in cases like Mr. Canté’s were put on public display: the difficulty of locating those in custody; the distress of relatives, many of them legal residents or citizens; the absence of basic legal protections familiar to anyone who watches “Law & Order.” Advocates eventually located most of the cleaners. Four were at Wyatt, including a 29-year-old single mother detained in its new women’s unit.

Two days after the raids, as city officials raised the Colombian flag over City Hall to honor that nation’s Independence Day, Mayor Moreau criticized the roundup, and chided Governor Carcieri for spending law enforcement resources on it.

“We have better things to do,” he said, “than chasing the lady that cleans the attorney general’s office.”

A reporter asked how he squared that criticism with Wyatt’s role in holding illegal immigrants, including the cleaning woman locked up there.

“One has nothing to do with the other,” he retorted. “It has nothing to do with the City of Central Falls.”

Soon, a case that drew national attention made that distinction harder to maintain.

On Aug. 6, Hiu Lui Ng, 34, a Chinese computer engineer from New York who had overstayed a visa, died in Wyatt’s custody after a year in various detention centers and months in pain.

The Times reported a week later that despite his repeated pleas for help, his fractured spine and extensive cancer had gone undiagnosed until shortly before his death. Officials at Wyatt, where he spent his last month, said he had received plenty of medical attention, and immigration authorities started an internal investigation. But local pastors and Latino advocacy groups gathered outside Wyatt on Aug. 15 to demand an independent inquiry.

A guard who watched the demonstration, who asked that his name not be published for fear of losing his job, voiced the ambivalence toward Wyatt that seems to shape the attitudes of many in Central Falls.

He spoke with sympathy of “good, hard-working people” detained there, and with distaste of the rookie guards — a result of low pay and high turnover — “who talk to people with no respect, like they’re dogs.”

But he added: “Immigration and all that, that has nothing to do with us. We’re just the prison.”

Even in the Latino population, the new awareness of Wyatt stirred little resistance.

“If the Spanish were all registered to vote they could take the city in one election,” observed Councilman Benson. “A lot of them don’t vote because they don’t trust the government, and a lot of them are illegal, so they can’t.”

In contrast, Mr. Canté, who finally had proper papers, said he felt like part of Central Falls for the first time.

“In all these years I’ve been here illegally, everywhere I went, everything I used to do, I used to feel like a reject,” he said. “Now I feel like I’ve been accepted for the community. I don’t feel afraid anymore. I feel, like, free.”

Just how closely Central Falls was entwined in the business of locking up people like Mr. Canté became more obvious this month, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, citing their continuing investigation into Mr. Ng’s death, abruptly removed all immigration detainees from Wyatt, scattering them to other jails in New England, Texas and Louisiana.

With Wyatt’s solvency, if not its survival, uncertain, the mayor lobbied the state’s Congressional delegation to get back a share of the growing market in immigration detainees. Meanwhile, jail officials hunted for deals like the one they narrowly lost last spring, to house 80 Vermont inmates judged criminally insane for crimes like murder and rape.

Mr. Lazieh, the former mayor who first championed Wyatt, called the government’s immigration policies immoral, arguing that “the system has gone overboard — we’ve turned to criminalizing all immigrants.”

But he had no regrets about his city’s part. “If it’s not in Central Falls,” he said, “then this facility would be someplace else.”

Labels: detention centers, immigration

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

The dependence of a Salvadoran town on remittances from emigrants in the United States mirrors the worry in much of Latin America.

BY LIZA GROSS | Miami Herald
November 30, 2008

INTIPUCA, El Salvador -- For almost two generations, residents of this rural community who emigrated to the United States have sent back tens of millions of dollars to support their families and bring prosperity to their once impoverished town.

Officials of Intipucá, 120 miles east of San Salvador, were so grateful for those remittances that they built a park to honor migrants, with a statue representing the first resident to leave for the United States back in 1967.

''Remittances have transformed Intipucá,'' said Omar Chávez, a town leader and himself the beneficiary of funds sent by his brother Pedro, who has lived in Maryland since 1979. Thanks to those remittances, the Chávez family was able to cover basic needs, like food and clothing, and educate its children.

Now, the slowdown in the growth of remittances caused by the U.S. economic crisis threatens the welfare of residents of this town of 10,000 and towns throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

The 2008 Inter-American Development Bank survey of remittances from the United States to Latin America shows that remittances, flat for much of last year, might even begin to fall this year.

The survey added that while the total of remittances from the United States to Latin America will probably reach overall levels comparable to those of the past two years, the number of migrants sending remittances may fall by up to 25 percent during 2008, compared with 2006.

Such a slowdown ''would negatively impact the standards of living of millions of families in the region who depend on the remittances migrants send home,'' according to IDB officials.

CLOUDY OUTLOOK

In a report on the outlook of remittance flows from 2008 to 2010, the World Bank said that remittances to Latin America will remain flat next year in the best-case scenario, but that in the worst-case scenario, they will decline to $58 billion from $61 billion.

''The crisis is now in the advanced markets, and it will have an impact in the emerging markets,'' said Massimo Cirasino, a World Bank economist.

Cirasino said that all Latin American governments should be worried about a decrease in the flow of remittances, but that countries with weak economies will be more negatively affected.

''Some countries have a certain leeway,'' he said. ''In a country like Brazil, for example, there will be pressure on politicians to activate programs'' to stimulate the economy. But, he added, ''there are other countries that don't have the financial resources.'' Those countries, Cerasino said, will have to turn to the IDB or other international institutions for help.

In El Salvador, remittances account for 18 percent of the country's gross domestic product. They are the equivalent of 126 percent of El Salvador's total exports and of 242 percent of all direct foreign investment.

Last year, $70 of every $100 of El Salvador's income from abroad came from remittances, while only $5 of every $100 came from traditional agricultural exports, such as coffee and cotton. Back in 1978, $81 of every $100 of income from abroad came from agricultural exports.

Eighty percent of the remittance revenue comes from Salvadorans in the United States. The numerous roadside billboards advertising remittance-related businesses frequently feature stars and stripes or other red, white and blue themes.

Many worry that maybe the worst impact is yet to come. An actual decrease may occur early next year, said economist William Pleytez, with the United Nations Development Program.

The slowdown in remittances affects all social levels, but particularly the poor, Pleytez said.

The slowing growth of remittances should be a red flag for businesses and governments, said Katharine Andrade Eekhoff, a professor at Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas and an expert on remittances and migration. ''It could all fall like a house of cards if the recession deepens,'' she said.

Not everyone has such a grim view. Miguel Lacayo, a former minister of economy and a Harvard MBA graduate, sees hard times ahead but not catastrophe. Lacayo does not predict a reduction in remittances. At worst, he said, ``perhaps they will continue to grow in the single digits for the next two years.''

Three times more remittances go to the province of San Salvador than to any other part of the country, Andrade Eekhoff said.

María Isabel Contreras, a 25-year-old law student in San Salvador, said the $600 she gets monthly from her mother pays for her education.

''This support is key to my future,'' said Contreras, whose mother has lived in Los Angeles for seven years. ``I can't repay all the effort she puts in day after day to give me what she is giving me.''

But it is in the rural areas, where the proportion of households receiving remittances is higher than in urban areas, that the impact of remittances is most dramatic.

''It's changing the local economy,'' Andrade Eekhoff said.

In Intipucá, modest clapboard houses and food stalls with straw roofs coexist with two-story concrete homes featuring intricate wrought-iron fences, ornate moldings and other architectural details. Late-model pickup trucks, some sporting decals of the American flag or the bald eagle, are common.

LOCAL BETTERMENT

In addition to providing for their families, former Intipucá residents abroad have helped underwrite community projects, such as water wells, cobblestones for the streets, and improvements to the municipal stadium, said Mayor Enrique Méndez.

About 50 percent of the population has moved to the United States and sends remittances.

Méndez is fiercely proud of the help his town has received from remittances, but he acknowledges evidence of trouble and is worried. ''The crisis in the U.S. is affecting remittance,'' he said. ``For some families, the frequency and quantity have diminished.''

According to Méndez, remittances have reached $2 million a month in the past, but ``that has come down considerably in recent months.''

Arnoldo Portillo, manager at the local Banco Agrícola, where residents pick up their remittances, said he began to notice a change about six months ago.

''If before they sent $100, now they are sending $60,'' he said. ``There is movement, but the proportion is smaller.''

Portillo, who has relatives in Los Angeles and Dallas, said the bank serves about 80 customers on a heavy day and about 50 on light days, almost all picking up remittances.

José Guevara, 22, worked in construction in Virginia and sent $250 a month to his mother, an insulin-dependent diabetic. But he was deported last November after immigration officials picked him up during a raid. He left behind his income and a 2-year-old son and has been unable to find work in El Salvador.

''We paid for the medicine and for the rent'' with remittances, said his mother, Ada Isolina Sánchez, an agricultural laborer. She said she must now resort to credit to cover those expenses.

At the local travel agency, Yudith Escobar is selling far fewer plane tickets to the United States. They are typically paid for with remittance money or extra funds meant specifically for the fare.

''The change is dramatic,'' Escobar said. ``I have seen a reduction of 30 to 40 percent in ticket sales.''

"I have a friend who has completely stopped receiving remittances because of the economic situation that has deteriorated in the U.S. and the rising prices here. She had to give up her studies," said Contreras the law student.

She hopes for the best but is afraid. ``I have a year to go at school. I am worried this could happen to me when I am about to finish. It's scary for young people.''

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 3:11 PM 1 comments Links to this post

BY ALFONSO CHARDY | Miami Herald
November 30, 2008

Part 1

Malaquías Gaspar left his farm village in southern Mexico when the economy soured in the mid-1990s. He headed north illegally and found the proverbial better opportunity in South Florida, where he made a decent living by picking fruit and building homes.

But the U.S. economic crisis has disrupted his life and the lives of countless other illegal immigrants who are now planning to leave or have already left.

Gaspar recently returned to Zimatlán de Alvarez in Oaxaca state, primarily to care for his ailing mother -- but also to plan for the future should the economy worsen in South Miami-Dade County, where his wife and four children remain.

''If we can't feed our children, we'll come back,'' said Gaspar, 40, as he sat at his family home -- upgraded with money he had sent from South Florida.

Gaspar is among millions of undocumented immigrants facing new challenges brought on by slim prospects for legalization, more aggressive federal enforcement and a worsening economy. Now, fewer immigrants are caught while trekking through the dangerous Sonoran Desert or risking their lives aboard makeshift boats in the Caribbean, indicating that fewer are trying. Those who make it through can find themselves on one of several daily federal charter flights that return deportees.

The ripple effects are already being felt. Communities in Latin America and the Caribbean report a reduction in remittances -- money sent home from the United States. That money is critical to the survival of families and the success of local civic projects. Border communities that once thrived as way stations for those heading north are now little more than ghost towns.

SMUGGLING RECEDES

Even on the tiny Bahamian island of Bimini, long a hotbed of eager smugglers willing to transport human cargo to South Florida, the mood is grim.

''The large groups are not coming as much as they used to, but . . . people who want to make money nefariously still view this as an opportunity,'' said Jeff Dubel, public affairs officer for the U.S. Embassy in Nassau, the Bahamian capital.

The Center for Immigration Studies, in a report published in July, was the first to note that undocumented immigrants were leaving the United States. But the report, ''Homeward Bound,'' attributed departures to increased enforcement.

Later, the Pew Hispanic Center, a research group in Washington, suggested that fewer immigrants were arriving because of the economic slowdown and stricter enforcement. The report said that the illegal population had stopped growing and that it now stood at about 11.9 million, down by about 500,000 from a year earlier.

While the potential ramifications of a reduced flow of immigrants may not be evident in a recession, labor shortages could emerge once the economy improves.

''In a bad economy, U.S. workers may temporarily take those jobs that undocumented workers do, but once things turn around, we may see labor shortages if too many foreign workers leave,'' said Tammy Fox-Isicoff, a Miami attorney who specializes in business-related immigration.

Illegal immigrants not leaving the country are traveling to any city, town or region where jobs might be more plentiful. Businesses that depend on foreign labor are already seeing an impact.

PRESSURE ON FARMERS

John Alger, of Alger Farms in Homestead, said South Miami-Dade farmers are not hiring as many migrant workers because the economy is forcing them to reduce the size of the fields they plant.

''Farm owners are planting less because they are selling less, since people are buying less,'' said Alger, whose business is one of South Florida's largest growers of sweet corn and trees for landscaping. ``Nurseries are dying because of the real-estate crisis.''

Last year, at the height of the immigration reform debate, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez warned that without enough foreign workers, landscaping, farms and healthcare companies would suffer.

''We will see rotting fruit,'' Gutierrez said in June 2007. ``We will see lawns that don't get cared for. We will see patients who don't get cared for.''

IMMIGRANTS' STORIES

From Homestead to Fort Lauderdale to West Palm Beach, the stories of undocumented immigrants confirm the findings of immigration experts that an increasing number of illegal workers are leaving and a decreasing number are arriving.

''The economy is no longer working,'' said William, a 28-year-old Guatemalan who seeks work daily at a laborer pickup site on U.S. 441 near Interstate 595 in Broward County.

He was one of about two dozen undocumented workers interviewed over the past two months in South Florida.

William, who asked that his last name not be published because he feared discovery by authorities, said he was saving money to buy a plane ticket home.

So was Lázaro Rodríguez, of the Mexican border town of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas.

''I used to send about $500 every two weeks home when work was good, but now I send $50 here or $100 there,'' said Rodríguez, 46, who stands at a laborer pickup site in West Miami-Dade, on Bird Road near Florida's Turnpike.

LIMITED INCOME

Rodríguez said he doesn't earn enough to send money to his wife and children because he can't find work as easily as when he arrived after crossing the Rio Grande on a smuggler's boat two years ago.

As Gaspar contemplates future possibilities, Tina Reyes -- his wife -- remains in South Miami-Dade with their four children, two born in Mexico and two in Miami.

Reyes hopes that the economy will improve and that President-elect Barack Obama will resurrect immigration reform after taking office.

''For now, all we have is hope,'' she said.

Reyes, who works in a South Miami-Dade nursery, said the economic crisis has eroded her family's income -- from about $800 a week six months ago to less than $300.

''I still have my job, but managers have cut hours,'' Reyes said in an interview at her home, two weeks after her husband had left for Zimatlán de Alvarez.

Jobs started to vanish six months ago.

''Until then, I worked every day,'' she said. ``In recent months, I was only able to work once or twice a week.''

While the case of Gaspar and his family offers only a microscopic example of a larger trend, the departure of foreign workers could further weaken an already ailing economy.

''It's not just the undocumented who are returning home, but also the documented, investors, entrepreneurs and managers of international companies,'' Fox-Isicoff said.

FEAR OF DISCOVERY

Gaspar intends to return to South Florida, but he is not sure that he could sneak across the border as easily as he did in 1996, when he used a migrant smuggler to enter the United States west of Sasabe, across from Arizona.

''My greatest fear is getting caught by immigration authorities after crossing the border,'' he said.

Like Gaspar and his family, most of the undocumented immigrants interviewed had crossed the border with the help of a smuggler, sneaking in near Sasabe.

Gaspar worked in Oregon, picking strawberries, before heading to Florida in 1997.

Within two years, he had saved enough money to bring his family to this country.

INCOME DOUBLED

Life was hard at first. But problems in adapting to South Florida were outweighed by an increase in family income.

''Back then, there was a lot of work,'' Gaspar recalled. ``When I was by myself, I earned about $300 per week, and when my wife arrived, we doubled our income.''

Residential developments, part of a hot real-estate market, began to swallow farmland.

''The first to disappear were the lemons,'' Gaspar said. ``Then other vegetables vanished. Now, we barely make $150, or less than $300 a week between the two of us.''

By October, Gaspar was back in Zimatlán de Alvarez, taking care of his mother -- and scouting the local job market in case the situation in the United States does not improve.

''If we can no longer make ends meet, we'll come back,'' Gaspar said. "The idea would be to have a plot of land and plant corn, beans or flowers to sell, while my children, who speak English well, work in the tourist hotels."

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 3:06 PM 0 comments Links to this post

BY ANDERS GYLLENHAAL | Miami Herald
November 11, 2008

Introduction

A lmost everywhere that Miami Herald reporter Frances Robles and photographer John VanBeekum traveled along the southwest border with Mexico, they found the same ghost-town feel in what once were crowded villages built mostly on the illegal immigration trade.

''Nobody's there,'' said Frances.

Two thousand miles to the east, the tiny Bahamian island of Bimini is equally vacant of the immigrants who once congregated for the short trip to South Florida.

''It's completely empty, like tumbleweeds,'' said reporter Casey Woods, who visited with photographer Charles Trainor Jr.

From one end of the country to the other, one of the longest and most profound immigration flows is experiencing a quiet reversal. The combination of stepped-up border enforcement, aggressive prosecution of illegal immigrants and a weakening U.S. economy has done what decades of debate could not.

A team of Herald reporters and photographers traveled to four countries and throughout the United States to explore the many sides of this story. They followed immigrants as they returned to their home countries, flew on deportation flights that have become a kind of daily airline returning immigrants, and trekked through the farmlands of South Florida and deserts of Arizona to document the impact of this slowdown.

''What they found was, either by their own decisions or by force, many undocumented immigrants are changing course,'' said John Yearwood, The Herald's world editor who directed the project. ``It's the biggest shift we've seen in a long time.''

It's an important story for a country built on immigration and yet often ambivalent about its impacts. Over a generation, new arrivals from Mexico, the Caribbean and throughout Latin America have reshaped this country. Nowhere is that more the case than in South Florida, where millions of legal immigrants and nearly one tenth of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States have settled.

The Miami Herald's series, entitled ''Illegal Immigration: Changing Course,'' explores how this trend plays out in different parts of the country for the many groups of people affected.

Today's stories, the first of four parts that run over two weeks, look at two important issues: departing immigrants and remittances. One story follows a family from Mexico who settled in south Miami-Dade 12 years ago to live off of the farm work that has slowly diminished. The other tracks the slowdown in the flow of money from the United States back to the home countries of immigrants.

This coming Wednesday, a package focuses on changes coming to the country's southwest border. Next Sunday, the story looks at impacts across the Caribbean through the lens of Bimini, which for so long served as the last stop on the way to the United States.

The final piece, running Dec. 10, takes you along on one of the daily deportation flights to Latin America. It's a view that's rarely seen by outsiders.

Much has yet to come clear about the ebbing of immigration. Statistics are hard to document and are often rough estimates. One of the hardest places to measure any slowdown is South Florida. Although changes are already evident in industries like construction and farm work, the influx of immigrants from Haiti and Cuba is driven by factors beyond the economy and continues regardless of the job outlook.

It's almost impossible to keep track of the number of people leaving the United States, although the anecdotal evidence holds that it's a significant development among both illegal and legal immigrants looking for better economic conditions.

But even before the breadth of what's happening is nailed down, the trends raise all sorts of questions that will play out in the near future: How will a major shift in immigration affect a region like South Florida that has been built on the flow of newcomers? How will these changes affect the still-simmering debate over the country's immigration laws? Will immigration pick up again as the U.S. economy improves?

On that last question, interviews across the hemisphere confirm what common sense suggests: The lure of this country's opportunity is still very strong, and many immigrants -- legal and not -- hope to pursue the dream that has fueled the decades of arrivals.

''But it's not going to be a quick turnaround,'' said Nancy San Martin, assistant world editor/Americas, who helped direct the project. ``The people who are leaving, I think we're looking at two to three years before they try again. I think people are very aware the risk of coming here may not have long-term benefits anymore, so they may as well stay home. That's very interesting and very different than it has been for a long time.''

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 3:04 PM 0 comments Links to this post

For more data on Texas youth check out CPPP's links to "The State of Texas Children: Texas KIDS COUNT Annual Data Book 2008-09".

-Patricia

Star-Telegram Ediorial
December 26, 2008

Sick kids are likely to be absent from school.

Hungry kids have trouble focusing.

And kids whose families are struggling to stay afloat financially might not get the attention or support they need at home to keep up with homework.

Is it any wonder that economically disadvantaged students lag behind on key measures of academic progress?

The latest Kids Count report highlights how factors such as poverty and lack of proper healthcare push kids into a perilous cycle: economic disadvantage hurts them educationally, which then makes it harder for them to advance economically.

Kids Count is an annual assessment done by the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities, with support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

The center reports that across Texas, 75 percent of low-income students passed the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in 2008, while 89 percent of other students passed.

Tarrant County showed a similar gap: 78.3 percent of low-income students passed TAKS reading, compared to 92.3 percent of other students; and 63.8 percent of low-income students passed math, compared to 82 percent of other students.

"Schools can — and have — reduced some of the gaps caused by social and economic disadvantage between families. But schools alone cannot substantially close these gaps," the public-policy center says. "By focusing almost exclusively on what schools do, policymakers miss the opportunity to make meaningful changes and investments in other public systems and programs that could more effectively and efficiently close the gaps."

Some key indicators show conditions getting worse for Texas children. For instance, almost a quarter of them live in poverty in 2005, up from 20.7 percent in 2000. And 24 percent of kids lived in families receiving food stamps in 2006, up from 9.2 percent in 2000.

Of the more than 400,000 children in Tarrant County, 18.5 percent fell below the federal poverty line in 2005, the report said, and 17.7 percent were receiving food stamps in 2006. But both were increases from 2000.

Along with that, more than 22 percent of Tarrant County kids are uninsured, higher than the statewide average of 21 percent.

When the Legislature convenes in January, school districts will be asking for more money to meet rising costs and growing challenges. But if lawmakers really want to improve the chances of educational success, they’ll have to be willing to invest more in healthcare, jobs and other support systems for Texas’ children and families.

Labels: health care, poverty, school finance

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:43 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is wonderful. Sounds like an ideal way to engage parents. States and districts should invest in ensuring that schools and teachers have the capacity to use this approach.

-Patricia

STREAMWOOD, Ill. — For years attendance was minimal at Tefft Middle School’s annual parent-teacher conferences, but the principal did not chalk up the poor response to apathetic or dysfunctional families. Instead, she blamed what she saw as the outmoded, irrelevant way the conferences were conducted.

Roughly 60 percent of the 850 students at Tefft, in this working-class suburb some 30 miles northwest of Chicago, are from low-income families. Many are immigrants, unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the tradition of parents perched in pint-size chairs, listening intently as a teacher delivers a 15-minute soliloquy on their child’s academic progress, or lack thereof.

“Five years ago, the most important person — the student — was left out of the parent-teacher conference,” Tefft’s principal, Lavonne Smiley, said. “The old conferences were such a negative thing, so we turned it around by removing all the barriers and obstacles,” including allowing students not only to attend but also to lead the gatherings instead of anxiously awaiting their parents’ return home with the teacher’s verdict on their classroom performance.

Recently, 525 parents attended parent-teacher-student conferences, Ms. Smiley said, compared with 75 parents in 2003. No appointments were needed, and everyone was welcome at the conferences this year, spread over two days that school officials called a Celebration of Learning.

Student-led conferences are gaining ground at elementary and middle schools nationwide, said Patti Kinney, an associate director for middle-level services at the National Association of Secondary School Principals in Virginia.

Although researchers have long hailed the benefits of such conferences — anointing students as the main stakeholders in their education, accountable for their performance during the school day and responsible for their academic future — their popularity appears to be increasing in part because of the rapidly shifting demographics at public schools nationwide. The classrooms, after all, are where a community’s changing cultural identity is often first glimpsed.

“I think we’re learning that every school has its own DNA, and there is not a prescription for conferences that works for every school,” Ms. Kinney said. “There is such an increasingly diverse population at our nation’s schools, the one-size-fits-all model conference just doesn’t work anymore.”

At some schools, not only are students on hand for conferences, but their siblings are also welcome, as are grandparents, aunts and uncles, even family friends.

When Mark Heller accepted a job as an assistant principal at the middle school in his hometown of Plano, Ill., he discovered that the community had changed a lot in the eight years he had been a teacher in Iowa. The population had nearly doubled to 10,000 residents, and 37 percent of the students at Plano Middle School were now from low-income families.

Bolstered by the success of student-led conferences at his Iowa school, Mr. Heller also realized that changing the model was not enough to accommodate families with limited English proficiency, many of whom work shifts at area factories.

The traditional parent-teacher conferences without a student present are always available by appointment, and sometimes necessary, for example, to discuss a private matter concerning a noncustodial parent, a family crisis the child is unaware of or a special education diagnosis.

Still, Mr. Heller is convinced that a true dialogue concerning a student’s academic progress is impossible without both the child and the parent engaged and present, and with the teacher on hand to share impressions and answer any questions the parents have about homework, standardized test scores, behavior and other issues.

First, Mr. Heller made sure to schedule the student-led conferences when as many children, parents and teachers could attend, which turned out to be over two days in late October.

“We looked to our community to define what time we needed to hold our conferences,” said Mr. Heller, who scheduled the first conference day from noon to 8 p.m., followed by an 8 a.m.-to-noon schedule the next day.

Mr. Heller’s staff arranged meetings for 93 percent of their 300 seventh and eighth graders, and 82 percent of the families attended the conferences. Now, the principal and his staff members are reaching out to the families who did not attend; their goal is a 100 percent rate of teacher-parent contact.

“Our veteran teachers who have been around for a while and have seen our town grow see this weird correlation,” Mr. Heller said. “It might be more difficult to get a hold of parents these days, but we are seeing more people at our student-led conferences than we ever had in the past.”

At the C. L. Jones Middle School in Minden, Neb., parental involvement has never been a problem. The principal, John Osgood, describes the rural community in south central Nebraska as tight-knit with mainly middle-class residents — the kind of place where students are apt to sit down for supper with their families every night, sharing stories of their school day at the kitchen table.

Nonetheless, Mr. Osgood is convinced that its student-led conferences, which he started 10 years ago just as they were taking root across the country, are crucial to the school’s continued success.

In 2007, a newly elected school board strongly questioned the practice’s efficacy and led a campaign to return to the traditional conferences of their own youth. But the critics were deterred after a survey that Mr. Osgood championed found that 93 percent of parents approved of conferences that included their children.

“I can remember attending the old-style conferences with my own children, some of whom had a few problems with a particular class from time to time,” Mr. Osgood recalled. “We’d get back home, and try to talk to our kids about something we heard, and it would end up with me getting angry and yelling, and the kids telling me what I heard wasn’t true. It always turned into, ‘Who’s the liar here?’ ”

That is a far different experience than Cierra Turks, 13 and a seventh grader at Tefft Middle School, shared recently with her mother, Scheree Issa. Cierra was all smiles as she started off her conference sharing the details of a typical school day with her mother.

Inside her math classroom, Cierra, an honor roll student who dreams of attending Georgetown University, used a portfolio of her assignments — homework, quizzes and even standardized test scores — to deliver a quantitative and qualitative snapshot of her progress and her goals. Above all, she had the chance to introduce her mother to her favorite teacher, Patricia Pluchrat.

“At the student-led conferences, our children are learning to be organized and capable adults someday,” Ms. Issa said. “When I was growing up, my parents went to my conference, and I waited at home, scared they would come back with some concerns. With this new kind of conference, there are no secrets.

“My daughter is learning that the teacher is not responsible for her learning. Cierra knows that she is responsible for her own success.”

Labels: Parent Involvement

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:36 PM 0 comments Links to this post

State must invest now in science and math education

By WILLIAM BRINKLEY, ROBERT CURL and KURT SWOGGER | Houston Chronicle
Dec. 20, 2008

American demand for scientists and engineers is expected to grow four times faster than all other professions over the next decade, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet today, only 5 percent of U.S. college undergraduates earn degrees in science and engineering, whereas in China, 42 percent of students do. In Texas, we rank second in total population of the 50 states, but 29th in the number of scientists and engineers in our work force, and first in the number of high-tech jobs lost between 2000 and 2005.

If Texas is to lead the next frontier — an increasingly technologically advanced, global marketplace — then we must produce a work force prepared to compete, and that begins with world-class math and science education in our state's public schools.

Our first priority must be recruiting, retaining and rewarding teachers, who make the single biggest difference in academic achievement. Not only are highly qualified Texas science and math teachers in short supply today, but we're losing literally thousands each year. In 2007 alone, approximately 4,000 math and science teachers left Texas classrooms, costing our state an estimated $27 million to replace them.

Fortunately, there are programs already proven successful in preventing the loss of highly qualified math and science teachers, such as UTeach (http://uteach.utexas.edu), a teacher training and support program launched at The University of Texas at Austin in 1997. UTeach employs master teachers from around the state to provide real-life experience, guidance and inspiration for science and math majors on the road to becoming teachers both while they're in and once they're out of college.

UTeach is making a quantifiable difference: almost half of UTeach graduates teach in high-need schools, and 80 percent — compared with only 50 percent nationally — are still teaching after five years.

Successful teachers mean successful students, and fortunately, the University of Houston is among three Texas universities preparing to replicate this exceptional program. But Texas should implement proven programs like UTeach — recommended in a 2005 National Academies report for nationwide adoption — at the statewide level, to give our math and science teachers the training and support they need to succeed and stay with teaching.

Secondly, well-designed, effective curricula are necessary to pique and hold students' interest in science and math. Today, not quite one in four Texas high-school graduates is ready for college-level science. Curricula must be relevant and rigorous enough to adequately prepare and inspire students for college. Incentive programs, such as Advanced Placement (AP) Strategies (http://www.apstrategies.org), are also preparing high-school students to enter college and earn a degree by reinforcing strong student and teacher performance with monetary stipends.

The program's success has been dramatic: Here in Houston, participating high schools — with minority enrollment of 93 percent — have experienced a 97 percent increase in passing AP math, science and English scores since the program began two years ago, with passing scores by minority students almost doubling. Texas should expand funding to deliver AP Strategies to all school districts, and to provide the tools needed to help make math and science real for our children.

Third, accountability is key to improving Texas' public education. Our current accountability system is frustratingly complex, using 36 academic measures — many of which don't align with state education goals — to rank districts and schools. A poor use of time for beleaguered school administrators, the current system should be modified so it is not punitive but rather rewards student and school growth and improvement. Texas' accountability system should also recognize schools with students who advance to magnet schools, as well as students who earn commended status — the state's most accurate measure of college-readiness.

Additionally, making educational information systems more transparent will help create a higher level of accountability and, ultimately, better-performing schools.

Finally, implementing a few improvements and then regarding the problem as solved won't do. We need an entity at the state level charged with continuing the process of improving math and science education. A statewide science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) advisory council made up of classroom teachers, school officials, higher-education representatives and industry and governmental leaders from across Texas would continue the work by guiding the implementation of these recommendations, by proposing further improvements, and by advising policymakers and education agencies. Creating a statewide council would not only demonstrate Texas' real commitment to bettering math and science education, but also help coordinate such efforts and produce measurable results.

Texas' public education system has helped develop engineers, scientists and other technology professionals who today help lead highly successful companies here in Texas. In the Houston region, engineering-based corporations such as Dow Chemical understand their future depends upon Texas' next generation of innovators. They continue to be committed to improving science and math education in Texas, and consistently partner with the nonprofit and public sectors to support effective science and math programs. But for public-private collaborations to continue to make a difference, our public schools' math and science education must stay strong, too. The issue is bigger than just business — increasing engineering degrees alone by only 25 percent would add $6 billion to the Texas economy within 15 years.

Next month, Texas legislators will begin deliberating and determining our state's priorities for future funding and support. Our state's success in the next frontier — global competition — centers on world-class math and science education. We urge Texas lawmakers to take this opportunity to raise the bar high in these critical areas. We must invest now, or later pay the price of being left behind.

The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas — made up of Texas' Nobel Laureates and National Academies members — has proposed four practical, actionable recommendations for state leaders to adopt, putting Texas on the path to world-class math and science education for our children, and a prosperous future for our state. For more information, visit www.tamest.org/education.

Brinkley is senior vice president for graduate sciences/dean, Graduate School of Biomedical Science, Baylor College of Medicine; Curl is the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor of Natural Sciences, university professor emeritus, Rice University; and Swogger is executive vice president, Planned Innovation Institute.

Labels: 21st Century Ed, technology

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:29 PM 0 comments Links to this post

I think it's important to recognize that these hostile laws and policies don't just impact the immigrant community, but all workers. When the country undermines the human rights of any one group the rights of all are in jeopardy at some level.

-Patricia

Marcelo Ballvé | New America Media, News Report
Dec 22, 2008 Review it on NewsTrust

Editor's Note: Realizing that the immigration wars have trickled down into state legislatures and even county boards, those who advocate for immigrants have begun weaving together coalitions to have their voices heard. These groups may include business, civil rights, labor or faith-based organizations. New America Media contributing editor Marcelo Ballvé is based in New York.

JACKSON, Miss. -- Ever since the harshest immigration law in the country went into effect in this state July 1st, activists on the ground have mobilized a diverse coalition-- including civil rights, church and labor leaders-- to build opposition to it.

The "Mississippi Employment Protection Act," which passed the legislature with overwhelming support, requires that businesses use the federal E-Verify program to check workers' immigration status and most notably-- makes it a felony for an undocumented worker to accept work in the state, authorizing penalties of up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. U.S. residents may also sue businesses if they are fired and replaced by an unauthorized worker.

Mississippi's state capitol isn't alone in legislating a crackdown. Even as Washington D.C.'s immigrant advocates organize to push for comprehensive immigration reform in president-elect Barack Obama's term, the bitterest immigration battles are being waged on the state level. This is happening not only in states like California that are familiar with contentious immigration debates, but also in states once on the sidelines.

Although other state capitols stopped short of creating felony charges for undocumented workers, laws similar to Mississippi's legislation gained approval this year in South Carolina, Oklahoma, Missouri, Utah and West Virginia.

The state laws can be seen as stopgap measures. Only the federal government has the power to address the immigration system and change the way it works. But after the last effort at immigration reform-- the McCain-Kennedy bill-- failed in the U.S. Senate in 2007, many states decided to take what matters they could into their own hands.

"They have done the one thing in their power: crack down harder, with more aggressive enforcement, new restrictions, new more punitive penalties," reads a June 2008 report by ImmigrationWorks USA, a national organization of state-level business coalitions supporting immigration reform.

Sometimes the new zero-tolerance approach to illegal immigration is not embodied in legislation, but in agreements of varying formality that bind local and state agencies to cooperate with Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).

The most well-known of these is a program called "287(g)" , which delegates immigration enforcement authority to state troopers, county sheriffs or local police. Though 287(g) programs have been running since 2003 ICE documents show that half the 63 partnership agreements currently active were signed in the last 16 months-- after immigration reform's failure in mid-2007.

ICE's roster of 287g agreements reads like a map to hotspots in the immigration wars, places where activists say relations between immigrants and the larger community are particularly strained.

According to ICE, Virginia has nine law enforcement agencies participating in 287g, North Carolina eight and Arizona seven, including Maricopa County, known for Sheriff Joe Arpaio's media-grandstanding against illegal immigrants.

ICE also chose North Carolina for four of its seven "Secure Communities" pilot programs, high-tech linkages of local detention facilities to federal fingerprint databases, so that all arrestees' immigration histories can be checked. Immigration-related laws can also be enacted on the county level, as they were in Suffolk County on Long Island, New York. That county's chief executive, Democrat Steve Levy, has also recently come under fire for his outspokenness on illegal immigration after the November hate killing of an Ecuadorean.

This cascade of immigration-related laws and programs, and the political battles being waged over them, will not disappear if an Obama administration fulfills its promise of pushing through comprehensive reform, says A. Elena Lacayo, who tracks legislation for the National Council of La Raza. "It won't necessarily solve all the issues that have been coming about on the state and local level."

Realizing that the immigration wars have trickled down into state legislatures and even county boards, those who advocate for immigrants have begun weaving together coalitions to have their voices heard. These groups may include business, civil rights, labor or faith-based organizations.

A protest in Jackson on Dec. 4 included a Catholic priest, a black state representative, labor leaders, and several veterans of 1960s-era Civil Rights struggles. "Working is not a crime," read one of the banners carried by the protesters as they marched on the state capitol, demanding a repeal of the "Mississippi Employment Protection Act." Bill Chandler of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance called the legislation "wrongheaded and bigoted." Its intention, he said, "is to scare Latinos out of the state."

Chris McDaniel, a Republican state senator and one of the bill's co-authors, debated Chandler the day after the protest on local public radio. "We are not talking about immigrants here, we're talking about illegal immigrants, and there is a huge difference," said McDaniel. "It's not a bigoted bill."

Repeal seems unlikely anytime soon. The bill passed with 52 votes in the state Senate, and none against.

But even in Mississippi, some 200 bills targeting illegal immigrants failed in the past, according to Chandler. And the outcome of other states' battles shows that immigrant advocates can be effective when they push back against punitive legislation.

In Arizona, an outcry from businesses helped win passage this year of a scaled back version of an employer-sanctions law passed in 2007. In Tennessee, 65 bills deemed anti-immigrant by the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition were defeated in the 2008 legislative session, including an "English-Only Divers Act" that would eliminate all translations of written driver's license exams.

And just as immigration restrictionists have linked up across state lines to share templates for legislation and media messaging, immigrant advocates have begun to do the same.

The Jackson protest coincided with a three-day meeting here of the Southeast Immigrant Rights Network. Federal immigration reform was discussed, as were ICE raids like the massive Aug. 25 sweep on an electronics plant in southern Mississippi. But most activists seemed more absorbed with the barrage of immigration-related bills in state capitols and the ICE partnerships with state and local law enforcement they say sow distrust between crime-fighters and immigrants.

In the conference rooms, advocates from places like Kentucky; Savannah, Georgia; and Polk County in northern Florida traded stories on how elected officials, from sheriffs to state representatives to governors, had recently staked their claim on the issue of illegal immigration. In the trenches of state legislatures and county houses, immigration battles are increasingly hard-fought and narrowly won by one side or the other.

Describing the fight over one bill, Stephen Fotopulos, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition said, "we got too close on this one."

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:21 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By George B. Sánchez | LA Daily News Staff Writer
Updated: 12/30/2008

Kindergarten classes could grow to nearly 40 children. Some 45 million meals for poor students might not be served. Art classes will likely be history. And hundreds of teachers could lose their jobs.

That's the bleak outlook for the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2009 as officials face $400 million in cuts next month and further reductions in state funding. The $400 million comes on top of a series of other cuts, taking the total to nearly $1 billion this school year.

While districts across the state have managed to avoid a large number of layoffs so far, LAUSD officials say job losses are almost inevitable because salaries and benefits account for more than 80 percent of the district's $12billion budget. And most educators expect bad news to continue coming from Sacramento well into the new year.

"We are looking at hundreds, possibly thousands, of job cuts next year," said Megan Reilly, the LAUSD's chief financial officer.

District officials have been tightening belts for months as the state - hammered by steep declines in tax revenue from the withering economy - increasingly cuts back funding to public agencies.

A.J. Duffy, head of United Teachers Los Angeles, said the district's proposed cuts might be exaggerated, but he worries that not enough teachers understand the extent of the local and state financial crisis.

Threats of teacher and other staff layoffs have been made in the past, but have rarely come to pass. In fact, the last round of mass layoffs was more than a decade ago, Duffy said.

"The writing is on the wall," Duffy said. "The fiscal crisis is going to last for a couple years."

Los Angeles charter schools face the same loss of funds as the result of the state's tough financial position and must also explore how to scale back costs.

"It's going to affect everyone," said Gary Larson, spokesman for the California Charter Schools Association.

"Do we anticipate schools closing? No, not really, because of the demand. As long as the state continues to fund based on enrollment, charters should be able to hang in there."

In the fall, LAUSD officials began to describe how Sacramento's budget crisis will impact the district. Initially cuts were planned for the district's bureaucracy, with no clear impact on classroom instruction.

But in the past two weeks, that has changed.

By one district estimate, the LAUSD is now deficit-spending at a rate of about $70,000 an hour. The $400 million in cuts proposed for next month is designed to get the district through the 2008-09 school year, which ends in June. But at least $200 million in cuts is expected for the 2009-10 school year.

Earlier this year, the district cut $472 million from its budget and eliminated 680 positions, many through attrition.

Incoming Superintendent Ramon Cortines, who will replace Superintendent David Brewer III on Jan. 1, oversaw many of the previous budget cuts. While working as senior deputy superintendent under Brewer, who was ousted by the board earlier this month after it agreed to buy out the remainder of his contract for $500,000, Cortines ran the LAUSD's day-to-day operations.

Since Brewer's contract buyout, Cortines has already presided over three budget-cutting meetings.

The school board will meet for the first time in the new year Jan. 13, when it's expected to take up the dire economic crisis facing the district.

In his first official report to the board as superintendent, Cortines will present a budget update.

In November, Cortines and Reilly announced 50 percent budget cuts for local districts and 30 percent cuts for departments at district headquarters.

Duffy said the recent promotion of Cortines will likely prompt midlevel managers and district headquarters bureaucrats to leave before layoff notices go out - and will hopefully spare severe teacher layoffs.

"We've got Cortines, who believes in decentralizing the district and returning money and accountability to the classroom," Duffy said.

Meanwhile, board members Tamar Galatzan, who represents part of the San Fernando Valley, and Yolie Flores Aguilar have proposed the Full Accountability to Taxpayers resolution, which calls for detailed information on the hiring of costly consultants.

Class sizes

The district is preparing for the possibility of no state funding past February 2009, which would force it to cancel its 20-student-per-classroom limit in kindergarten through third grade, Reilly said. The state pays for a majority of the program - $200 million - while the LAUSD covers an additional $80 million. To save money, the district is asking the state to allow class sizes to extend to 25 students.

While union officials doubt that state funds will entirely dry up in February, Reilly said raising the class-size limit would allow the district to cut 1,667 teaching positions.

If the district loses all its $280 million to pay for small class sizes, more than 5,500 teaching jobs could be cut and K-3 classes will likely jump to 37 students per teacher.

Meals

On Dec. 22, Cortines sent a letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger stating that the state's budget disaster means the district's free and reduced-price meal program will be cut nearly in half.

The state's subsidized meal funds could be slashed by $31.1 million; about one-third of that fund now goes to the LAUSD. The potential loss means eliminating breakfast, laying off cafeteria staffers and reducing healthy-food options. The annual number of meals served under the program would fall to 55 million from 100 million, according to Cortines.

Arts

Earlier this month, district officials issued a procurement freeze, meaning many contractors and vendors working with the district would no longer be paid. At the time, art programs taught by working artists and musicians who teach LAUSD classes through the Arts Community Partners Network were shut down until further notice.

Jobs

The district's biggest expense, Reilly said, is employees, who account for 83 percent of the budget. To avoid layoffs, district officials are also looking at making early retirement offers to some employees.

By law, layoff notices must go out by March 15 for certificated employees, while classified staffers must get a 45-day warning. Earlier this month, the UTLA organized protests that drew more than 12,000 teachers to demonstrate against the district's bureaucracy ranks, proposed cuts to health-care benefits and what they have called "upside-down priorities," including use of outside consultants.

"The deficit is not going away and it's getting bigger," Reilly said.

Labels: budget cuts, California

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:16 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By MARY LOU PICKEL

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Monday, December 29, 2008

The nation’s population is projected to reach 305,529,237 on New Year’s Day, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

That’s nearly a one percent increase from last Jan. 1.

In January 2009, one birth is expected to occur every eight seconds and one death every 12 seconds.

Immigration is expected to add one person every 36 seconds in January.

Overall, between birth, death and people entering and leaving the country, the U.S. population is expected to increase by one person every 14 seconds in January, according to the census.

At that rate, it will probably take another 33 years before the country adds another one hundred million people.

The U.S. is expected to reach the 400 million mark somewhere between 2038 and 2039, according to the latest Census Bureau population projections.

Labels: demographics, immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:15 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Legislature to weigh bills that address tuition, accountability, cafeteria food

By ERICKA MELLON | Houston Chronicle
Dec. 30, 2008

Texas lawmakers plan to tackle a range of education issues when they convene next month, from slashing the fat in cafeteria food to overhauling the school accountability system.

While rising college tuition is likely to dominate much of the conversation in the upcoming Legislative session, school districts are lobbying for an overhaul of the K-12 funding system as well. Lawmakers aren't making any promises.

"Are we going to start school finance from the ground up? I don't think so," said Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, who chairs the House Public Education Committee. "But we'll certainly look for a way to be more effective."

In 2006, the Legislature revamped the school funding system when it ordered districts to lower their property tax rates. While the move granted relief to some homeowners, school officials complain they are strapped for cash since the state essentially capped their funding.

Rep. Dan Branch, a primary author of the 2006 legislation, said he has several bills in the works that would bring more money to school districts. One proposal, which he has yet to file, would raise the minimum level of per-student funding that districts receive. Under the current system, some districts end up with around $12,000 per student while others get closer to $3,000.

Branch, who chairs a special committee that has spent the last year studying school finance, said his per-student funding change would affect between 200 and 250 of the state's 1,000-plus school districts.

The Dallas Republican also is working on a plan that would give all districts more money for middle school reform.

Two years ago, the Legislature targeted the upper grades, giving districts an allotment of $275 for each high school student.

"We're doing well in the elementary grades. There's evidence of that all over the state," Branch said. "Where are we slowing down? Middle school."

Robin Hood formula
The state's two largest districts, Houston and Dallas, also would get relief under Branch's bill to slightly revise the so-called Robin Hood formula, which redistributes money from property-wealthy districts to poorer ones. His plan would remove the two districts, which serve large numbers of poor, at-risk students, from the wealthy category.

State Sen. Florence Shapiro, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said she expects that any financial fixes adopted this session will be "a bridge to get to that major overhaul that's necessary."

"It does need to be restructured," she said of the state's school funding system, "but that is a very large undertaking. You prepare for that change a year-and-a-half before you go into a Legislative session."

After the 2009 session, lawmakers aren't scheduled to meet again until 2011.

Congressional redistricting
Jacqueline Lain, the lead lobbyist for the Texas Association of School Boards, said districts are worried about short-term fixes, especially since lawmakers have another hot topic to consider in two years: congressional redistricting.

"School districts are facing huge financial stresses and see it only getting worse," Lain said. "With redistricting looming, we know if we don't get something done this session, it's going to be at least two sessions."

Besides finance, another major issue on the 2009 education agenda is redoing the school accountability system, which primarily is based on student test scores. The bill still is being worked on, but a special legislative committee released a report earlier this year recommending significant changes.

The committee, co-chaired by Shapiro and Eissler, called for a system that rates districts based on their academics and their finances. In addition, schools would be given credit for student improvement on standardized tests, even if students didn't meet the passing standard.

'Post-secondary readiness'
Lawmakers also could call for a broader and more relevant test to replace the oft-maligned Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, Shapiro said. And even the ratings — currently, "exemplary," "recognized," "acceptable" and "unacceptable" — could change.

"I think you will see a system that is more about rewards and less about sanctions," said Shapiro, R-Plano. "And I think you will find a structure that will emphasize post-secondary readiness."

Lain, the school board lobbyist, said districts support the general concepts being discussed about a new accountability system but are waiting to see the details.

Dozens of other bills involving K-12 education already have been filed:

Ken Paxton, R-McKinney, has proposed eliminating the cap on the number of charter schools the state allows. The state reached its limit of 215 last month. The bill already is generating resistance from some school districts, but it has "promise" to pass, Eissler said.

However, Alief school board President Sarah Winkler said: "I'm not real happy with that bill. There are some good charter schools, but if you open that door, is there somebody that's going to be there to check if they're operating appropriately?" said Winkler, who also is president-elect of the state school board association.

Another bill, filed by Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, would require schools to stop serving foods with trans fat. He's also proposed that school board candidates be required to post their campaign finance reports on the Internet, which the state already requires of most other elected officials.

"I've noticed quite a few unfunded mandates," Winkler quipped.

Labels: accountability, Texas legislature

posted by Patricia Lopez at 2:13 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Case could set precedent on in-state tuition laws

The Oklahoman Editorial
Published: December 28, 2008

THE future of Oklahoma’s law allowing undocumented students to attend college at in-state tuition rates may rest in unlikely hands: the California Supreme Court.

Advocates and opponents of California’s law expect to know within the next several weeks if that state’s high court will take up the issue of whether granting in-state tuition to students who aren’t legal residents violates federal law. A lower court first dismissed the 2005 lawsuit brought by a group of out-of-state students. Earlier this year, an appellate court disagreed with that decision and sent it back to the lower court.

If it takes the case, California’s top court won’t have a final say on the constitutionality of Oklahoma’s law. Decisions in other state courts aren’t binding here. But it could establish a precedent for whether in-state tuition laws throughout the country will withstand legal challenges. A defeat of the law in California would undoubtedly encourage legal action elsewhere.

In addition to Oklahoma and California, eight states have laws that grant in-state tuition to undocumented students if they meet certain requirements. Opponents of the laws have argued that undocumented students should receive that rate only if it’s available to all students — including those who traditionally must pay out-of-state rates.

Until last year, Oklahoma even allowed undocumented students access to financial aid at state expense although few participated. House Bill 1804, the state’s landmark immigration reform bill, changed that. Students already receiving state-funded scholarships and tuition waivers were grandfathered in, but the changes cut off help for future students who couldn’t prove legal residency.

That was a step backward for higher education in Oklahoma. But it was better than what happened in Arkansas, where officials disbanded the in-state rate for illegal immigrants and raised tuition even for current students. Private fundraising efforts are seeking to cushion the blow for affected students so they’ll be able to finish their educations.

Some states have gone so far as to ban undocumented students, according to stateline.org. Illegal immigrants can’t enroll at public universities in South Carolina or Alabama community colleges.

The country came to this potluck of policies regarding undocumented students in part because the federal government has been incredibly absent in reforming immigration laws. But there’s also a fair question about whether the feds have any business telling states how to go about college admissions and setting tuition rates.

Meantime, we’ll wait to see whether high courts at the state and federal levels wade into the issue and decide whether this land of opportunity will deny that hope to young people who became illegal immigrants only through the actions of their parents.

Some states have gone so far as to ban undocumented students, according to stateline.org.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:20 PM 6 comments Links to this post

Press Release
Dec. 5, 2008

SAN DIEGO, Dec 05, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Civil rights coalition releases white paper emphasizing inequities in education; high school accountability, data reporting, and student performance among policy reform priorities
The Campaign for High School Equity (CHSE), a coalition of leading civil rights groups working for education reform, today gathered education and civil rights leaders at a policy briefing to discuss recommendations from its white paper, "High School Policy Reform: A Plan for Success."

At the briefing, held to coincide with the California School Boards Association's annual education conference, CHSE sent an urgent message to state legislators and Congress: Education policies that hold high schools accountable and give schools the resources to adequately prepare students for college and the modern workforce are necessary to improve graduation rates, reverse dropout trends, and strengthen the economy.

The California dropout crisis has reached epidemic proportions, which is reflective of national trends. Ten percent of California's high schools are considered dropout factories --- schools where more than 60 percent of the freshman class fails to graduate in four years. And while 70 percent of all California students graduate, two out of every five African American and Latino students do not, and more than 50 percent of California's Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong students did not graduate in 2000 according to the California Department of Education. Nationwide, only 50 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native, 55 percent of African American, and 57 percent of Latino students graduate from high school each year compared to more than 75 percent of white students.

"The economic crisis that is looming large in California and across the country is inextricably connected to education policy," said Michael Wotorson, CHSE executive director. "A high-quality high school education represents real dollars and employability, especially vital to the financial health of California, a state that has one of the world's largest economies. We can't afford to wait any longer for education policies that hold high schools accountable for graduating every student and preparing them for college and the 21st century workplace."

According to the Alliance for Excellent Education, the nearly 162,000 non-graduates from California's class of 2008 will forgo more than $40 billion in lifetime earnings. If California can raise the graduation and college enrollment rates of students of color to the levels of their white peers by 2020, the state would see more than $101 billion injected into its economy. Nationally, the same increase in graduation rates would add, conservatively, more than $310.4 billion to the U.S. economy.
Jack O'Connell, superintendent, California Department of Public Instruction; Ramon Miramontes, dean of Academic Affairs, Los Angeles Southwest College and Los Angeles district director, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC); Ray King, president and CEO, Urban League of San Diego County; Phoumy Sayavong, PhD, senior researcher, Oakland Unified School District; and Carmen Iniguez, statewide campaign director, Californians for Justice, joined Wotorson and political, education, and civil rights leaders from across California at the briefing, where they emphasized the importance of high school reform.

"High School Policy Reform: A Plan for Success," offers specific policy recommendations to eliminate the achievement gap and increase graduation rates for every student. These recommendations include:

-- requiring the public reporting of data broken down by racial and ethnic
background in order to highlight subgroups of students;
-- holding high schools accountable for increasing graduation rates for all
student subgroups and considering graduation rates on an equal footing
with high-quality assessments aligned to college and work readiness;
-- improving student reading and math skills without sacrificing access to
high-level academic subjects;
-- giving students excellent teachers, and helping parents play a greater
role in their children's education; and
-- ensuring that federal policy provides sufficient resources to serve the
needs of all students, including English language learners.



"The No Child Left Behind Act and other legislative vehicles provide systems to improve educational opportunities for every student, especially students of color," said Brent A. Wilkes, executive director of LULAC, a CHSE partner. "For example, California can ensure that students of color in high-need schools have access to the same quality instruction as students in affluent areas by gathering and openly reporting school data that show differences in achievement and graduation rates by race, ethnicity, and income."

CHSE is a coalition of leading civil rights organizations representing communities of color that is focused on high school education reform. Members include the National Urban League, National Council of La Raza, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, League of United Latin American Citizens, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, Alliance for Excellent Education, National Indian Education Association, and Southeast Asia Resource Action Center.

CHSE is a special project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
SOURCE Campaign for High School Equity

Copyright (C) 2008 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

Labels: California, Dropouts

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:14 PM 1 comments Links to this post

By Gregorio Solano | SA Express-News Editorial
November 19, 2008

For more than 50 years, bilingual education has been faced with the growing problem of educating all bilingual learners appropriately.

For this reason, organizations such as the National Association of Bilingual Education (NABE) and the Texas Association of Bilingual Education (TABE) have taken on the role of advocating for the rights of language minority children, particularly Spanish- speaking students.

It is through advocacy groups like NABE and TABE that we aim to achieve the appropriate implementation of educational policies and effective bilingual-bicultural programs that promote equal educational opportunities and academic excellence for language minority students.

The team of bilingual teachers I work with at Kelly Elementary School in Pharr — including Beatriz A. Perez and Cynthia R. Palacios — believe it is extremely important that parents, educators, administrators and legislators become knowledgeable in this field to enhance bilingual programs in our schools and maximize student performance nationwide.

Research indicates that it is through dual-language enrichment education that students will have the opportunity to add one or more languages while fully developing their native language.

As the national bilingual study conducted by Wayne P. Thomas and Virginia P. Collier shows, dual-language enrichment programs demonstrate promise for closing the academic achievement gap between bilingual learners and native English speakers.

It is our opinion that we must acknowledge this fact and approach this issue in a sensitive way. Even though we know that this is a phenomenal challenge, it should not be used as an excuse to hide behind it.

With a positive attitude as our driving motivator, we must face this problem by preparing all children to become bilingual and bicultural students who will one day become the leaders of tomorrow.

As teachers in a district that implements dual-language instruction in the elementary level, we commit ourselves to the belief that ethnicity, income and language are challenges rather than obstacles in our student’s education.

This is why we ask all parents, educators, administrators, and legislators to take on a “no excuse” approach in education.

We must remember that when our children are taught through enrichment dual-language programs, they will not only gain powerful literacy skills in their second language, but will continue to develop these same skills in their first language.

As a result, their bilingualism and literacy will allow them the flexibility to attend college, work across borders and communicate successfully in a wide range of communities.

Gregorio Solano has worked as a fifth grade teacher in the Hidalgo Independent School District in the Rio Grande Valley for five years.

Labels: editorial, English language learners

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:09 PM 0 comments Links to this post

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 19, 2008

PORTLAND -- The federal government plans to legalize certain unauthorized immigrants who applied for a 1986 amnesty program but were unfairly excluded or never received a response to their request.

It is thought that about 10,000 may qualify, said Sharon Rummery, a Citizenship and Immigration Services spokeswoman in the San Francisco regional office.

It was not immediately clear how many live in the Northwest.

CIS officials said the one-year period to reapply will begin Feb. 1. CIS is the government agency that oversees lawful immigration into the United States.

"It's a pretty narrow category," Rummery said.

The reincarnated 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA, follows a class-action lawsuit settlement reached in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in September.

It was brought by the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project on behalf of individuals who were unable to apply or who were deemed ineligible for legalization under IRCA because of issues on whether unlawful status was known to the government, the lawsuit states.

The process is disliked by groups who oppose granting legal status to those who are in the nation illegally.

"Why in the world would our federal government do that when 22 years later, it still doesn't have the ability to process applications filed in the 1986 amnesty program?" asked Jim Ludwick, the president of McMinnville-based Oregonians for Immigration Reform, which lobbies against illegal immigration.

"Our Social Security Administration is already overburdened. How would they deal with the possible millions who might apply?"

He said it is "sheer idiocy" to encourage people to stay here when so many already are out of work.

But Francisco Lopez, director of CAUSA, an immigrant-advocacy group in Woodburn, sees it differently.

"It's about time there was a resolution for the over 10,000 immigrants who were in immigration legal limbo because of the inefficiencies of the immigration office," he said.

"Hopefully this will be the beginning not only for those who were not allowed to apply in 1986, but also any future legalizations for the millions that still have not been able to adjust their immigration status."

CAUSA and other immigrant groups across the nation will be pushing for a moratorium on immigration raids in the first 100 days of the Obama administration.

The latest settlement is the third class-action lawsuit filed against the CIS, previously known as the office of Immigration and Naturalization Services.

A settlement four years ago gave about 2,000 illegal immigrants legal status. IRCA resulted in roughly 2.7 million undocumented immigrants becoming legal permanent residents in 1986.

About 250,000 applications were rejected because applicants had temporarily left the U.S. during the designated grace period and had not lived here continuously.

But groups of undocumented immigrants successfully challenged the disqualifications.

Among the requirements for reapplying is proof of having entered the country legally on a temporary visa before 1982 and overstaying it.

Applicants must have no criminal history and had to have applied between May 5, 1987, and May 4, 1988.

Those who were wrongly rejected and who meet the qualifications will have to pay $585 to reapply. Those who never applied but who may still qualify will have to pay $1,130.

Though legalization is not guaranteed, the government cannot deport those who apply even if their applications are declined.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:04 PM 0 comments Links to this post

November 14, 2008

John Podesta
Co-Chair
Presidential Transition Team
Washington DC 20270

Dear Mr. Podesta,

We appreciate this opportunity to share with you a single and simple recommendation for the 2008 presidential transition. Unlike some requests that may be submitted for your consideration, this one would require immediate action in order to have the desired effect.

We are asking your transition team to intervene to save "Friendship Park" - a place of great historic and cultural significance to the people of the U.S. - Mexico border region. By seeing to it that the Department of Homeland Security halts construction of supplemental border fencing near Friendship Park, the transition team can make a powerful and symbolic gesture of bi-national goodwill that will be hailed by people on both sides of the border.

"Friendship Park" is a half-acre plaza overlooking the Pacific Ocean at the southwest-most corner of the continental Unites States. The plaza sits atop Monument Mesa, a six-acre mesa within the bounds of California's 800-acre Border Field State Park.

At the center of Friendship Park stands a monument marking the first meeting of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission in 1848. For generations residents of the United States have gathered around this monument to visit through the border fence with family and friends in Tijuana, Mexico. When Border Field State Park was formally inaugurated as a California State Park in 1971, then-First Lady Patricia Nixon presided over a bi-national dedication ceremony at the monument. Clearly the idea of the monument as an international meeting place lies at the very heart of the park's design.

On April 1, 2008, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Michael Chertoff waived dozens of environmental and other regulations to expedite construction of 670 miles of supplemental fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. Operating under the Chertoff waivers, DHS contractors are now beginning construction of a second security wall across the heart of Monument Mesa. This wall will eliminate routine public access to Friendship Park - this despite the fact that illegal border crossings and drug smuggling at Friendship Park are well controlled by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) thorough the current practice of monitoring the area through visual observation and advanced surveillance technology.

As is the case with other construction projects along the length of the border, DHS intends to erect the new barriers atop Monument Mesa by year-end 2008. For this reason immediate intervention is required to save Friendship Park. We are encouraged by the recent announcement that CBP has decided no to move forward this year on the construction of three proposed border fence segments in Texas. We feel this cherished part of the California landscape should receive similar consideration.

The plan to eliminate public access to Friendship Park has become for the peoples of the U.S.-Mexico border region a tragic symbol of the "enforcement only" approach to U.S. - Mexico border policy. For two examples of the widespread news coverage which the case of Friendship Park has been receiving, please see the attached stories from the New York Times (10/22/08) and from the Christian Century magazine (10/7/08). Coverage in the Mexican press has been even more extensive, communicating the dismay of the Mexican people that the U.S. government would eliminate routine public access to this historical gathering place.

Direction to DHS contractors halting all border fence construction on Monument Mesa would send a powerful message to the peoples of the U.S. - Mexico border region. It would also give a new staff at DHS time to solicit new proposals for the re-design of security measures that will ensure continued public access to Friendship Park.

Were such directions given by President Bush, it could be celebrated as a noble gesture reaffirming his lifelong commitment to good relations between the peoples of Mexico and the United States. Were such direction insisted upon by the Obama transition team, it would signal the incoming administration's understanding that our national security is enhanced, not diminished, by the promotion of friendship with the people of Mexico.

Should you have any questions about Friendship Park, please do not hesitate to contact us. With best wishes for a successful transition, we thank you for your time and consideration. (signed)

Sincerely,
Susan Davis, Member of Congress
Bob Filner, Member of Congress
Denise Ducheny, California State Senator
Christine Kehoe, California State Senator
Mary Salas, California Assemblymember
Lori Saldana, California Assemblymember
Donna Frye, San Diego City Councilmember
Ben Hueso, San Diego City Councilmember
John Garamendi, Lt. Governor of the State of California

Labels: border

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:25 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By MARYCLAIRE DALE | Associated Press
January 2, 2009

Parents cannot sue to force school districts to comply with the No Child Left Behind Act, a federal appeals court said Thursday in a precedential ruling.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit case concerns the Newark (N.J.) Public Schools, which the parents say had 51 'failing' schools under the federal law _ among its 81 schools _ in 2006-07.

The parents say the district failed to notify them, as required, of NCLB provisions including their right to transfer their children to non-failing schools or to seek supplemental services. Other parents say they sought but were denied such services.

"Congress did not intend to give individuals a right to enforce the notice and supplemental educational services provisions of the Act," but instead left enforcement to state educational agencies, Circuit Judge Maryanne Trump Barry wrote.

The 3rd circuit is the first federal appeals court to address the issue of individual enforcement, but each district judge asked to review the question has reached the same conclusion, Barry said. Thursday's ruling upholds a decision by District Judge Susan D. Wigenton.

Emily Goldberg, a lawyer for the parents, said her clients must now pressure the state to enforce the law's educational promises.

"Obviously, the courts are no longer an option, so it really puts pressure on the political process," she said.

The parents won't appeal because they do not believe the Supreme Court would be "more hospitable" to their cause than the 3rd Circuit, Goldberg said. However, they hope another circuit will rule differently, setting up a conflict between circuits which might interest the high court.

School district lawyer Adam S. Herman did not immediately return calls from The Associated Press.

Labels: NCLB, Parent Involvement

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:08 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By SUSAN CARROLL | Houston Chronicle
Dec. 19, 2008

A record-setting, nearly $21 million settlement that allowed a Houston-based pallet company to avoid criminal prosecution for hiring illegal workers should send a clear message to employers tempted to break immigration laws, federal officials said.

Prosecutors who handled the case against IFCO Systems North America said it "severely punishes" the nation's largest pallet manufacturing company, which was caught with more than 1,100 illegal immigrants on its payroll in spring 2006.

The settlement agreement announced Friday should send a "powerful message that ICE will investigate and bring to justice companies which hire illegal workers," said John P. Torres, a top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official.

The agreement between ICE and IFCO easily eclipsed the next-largest settlement on record for a company accused of knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. In 2005, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., paid $11 million to avoid prosecution for employing undocumented workers.

ICE has grown increasingly aggressive in pursuing proceeds from businesses that benefit from illegal labor, collecting more than $60 million in workplace-related criminal fines and forfeitures in the last two years, including IFCO's settlement. In 2003, the agency collected $37,500 in workplace fines and seizures, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

ICE's strategy of hitting employers in the pocketbook appears to be working, said Don Kerwin, vice president for programs for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Businesses pay attention to the bottom line, he said.

Can't write it off

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington D.C., called the size of the IFCO settlement significant.

"It's clearly not something they can just write off as the cost of business," said Krikorian, whose organization promotes stricter immigration controls. "It's likely to prompt them to re-engineer their labor practices so they're less likely to hire illegal (immigrants). And that's the goal."

In fiscal year 2007, ICE secured fines and forfeitures of more than $30 million in worksite enforcement cases. ICE also arrested 863 people in criminal cases and made more than 4,000 administrative arrests during that timeframe — a tenfold increase over a span of five years.

More than 87,000 companies have signed up for the federal government's electronic employment verification system, known as "E-Verify." According to immigration officials, the number of employers registered in the program is growing by more than 1,000 per week.

"The enforcement that's been going on over the past year or two has already had a significant effect on employer behavior," Krikorian said. "A lot of companies are trying to make sure they don't end up in the same hot water."

Kerwin said the IFCO case is not only significant in terms of the size of the settlement, but also because ICE targeted an employer accused of other labor-related crimes. The settlement includes $2.6 million dollars in back pay and penalties from IFCO's overtime violations impacting about 1,700 pallet workers.

For employers who knowingly hire significant numbers of illegal immigrants, and are violating not just immigration laws, but also labor laws, the IFCO settlement "shows them that somebody out there is watching — and that the kind of risks they're running may not be cost-effective," Kerwin said.

The agreement effectively resolved the company's criminal liability in connection with what was at the time one of the biggest workplace enforcement raids in the nation's history.

The government began investigating IFCO following a tip to ICE in February 2005 that illegal immigrants at an IFCO plant in Albany were seen ripping up their W-2 forms. On April 19, 2006, ICE agents arrested 1,187 illegal immigrants at more than 40 locations nationwide including Texas.

7 have pleaded guilty

Seven IFCO managers were charged with crimes including knowingly hiring illegal aliens and transporting and harboring illegal aliens. All seven have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing. Five additional IFCO managers were indicted in February for similar crimes and are awaiting trial.

The federal government's analysis of payroll information IFCO submitted to the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration suggest that from 2003 through April 2006, as many as 6,000 illegal immigrants worked at IFCO plants, according to federal prosecutors.

The settlement agreement concerns only the liability of the corporation and does not address any pending or possible future criminal charges against individual employees.

In a statement released Friday, the firm said it cooperated with the government's probe.

"Over the last 32 months, we at IFCO have significantly upgraded our compliance procedures to go well beyond what the law requires," said IFCO President Dave Russell.

susan.carroll@chron.com

Labels: immigrant labor

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:05 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Improvements are doomed without practitioner support

By ROD PAIGE | Houston Chronicle
Dec. 18, 2008

T'S been 25 years since the landmark report, "A Nation at Risk" sounded the warning alarm that America was slipping into educational mediocrity and a troubled future.

Those years have seen a lot of money spent, a lot of theories advanced and a lot of new requirements at the local school — but not much progress.

As the Obama administration takes office promising sweeping change, I have a suggestion for the new secretary of education: Get our best teachers involved in policy making. Years of working for improvements have taught me that without their involvement, changes in the local school too often won't take root.

When we actually began measuring student performance with the No Child Left Behind Act, it revealed the unacceptable achievement gap between our minority, low-income and special needs students and the mainstream population of students.

We confirmed that dropout rates were dangerously higher than previously understood and that too many American schools were in desperate need of fundamental improvement.

Hopeful exceptions exist that demand attention. When we find schools that really work well — like the outstanding KIPP charter schools or the nationally recognized Carnegie Vanguard middle school in Houston — we find teachers deeply involved in setting education policy.

At Carnegie Vanguard, for example, teachers determined that the school district's accepted social study texts were too elementary for these very bright students and that reading subject requirements were too lax. They adjusted the course material to fit the students and the school enjoys a 100 percent graduation rate and is considered one of the top 100 public schools in the country.

Teachers at our most successful schools create policies that fit their student population because they understand the students at these schools and because they understand what will actually work in the classroom.

But education policy at the state and national level is largely missing the local practitioner's perspective. Sadly, teaching has become as much a matter of compliance with new ideas, developed far away, as connecting with students or focusing on a curriculum that will actually resonate in the classroom.

Education policy is the mechanism federal and state officials use to improve student performance. It is usually developed in state capitals and Washington, D.C., and is heavily influenced by the work of education think tanks, education lobby organizations, politically astute advocacy groups and with everyone's eye on the political and funding realities of public education.

The most prominent teacher's voice in policy making almost always comes from union officials focused on employment issues and often at odds with any education policy reform. Those who actually teach children, manage schools, deal with the realities of poor health, poor nutrition, less-than-supportive home environments and widely diverse cultural norms in the classroom simply don't have much of a voice in setting policy. Their absence translates into policies that don't work, resentment by front-line practitioners and kids dropping out in numbers that threaten our economy, our society and our culture. And while they have little voice in setting policy, it is the teachers, school boards and principals left holding the bag when things don't work out as intended.

Improving student performance cannot be achieved alone by politicians, education think tanks, researchers, pundits, business groups or others, no matter their worthy goals, expertise, good intentions or resources. To get the enthusiastic involvement of those charged with making schools work, we need their help in crafting workable solutions. Our teachers, principals and school counselors understand the socioeconomic realities, the cultural differences and the motivation challenges they find every day in the classroom and they understand how to match policy goals with classroom realities so that our children come alive to the excitement of learning. Bring teachers together with those experts who focus on the long view and the equation for real and immediate improvement will begin to work.

Change is needed in the public school system but we must first close the policy/practitioner gap so that future reforms reflect both what we desire in educational outcomes and the means to achieve those results. The absence of such involvement leads to the absence of "ownership" by those tasked with implementation. Smart generals listen to smart sergeants because it is those in the field who translate policy into action. If we want all of our children to understand the world they have inherited and the world that is theirs to change, our education policies must reflect the wisdom and experience of those on the front lines with them.

Paige is a former secretary of education and former superintendent of the Houston Independent School System. He continues to work for educational reform and has authored "The War Against Hope" and the soon to be published "The Black-White Achievement Gap: Why Closing it is the Civil Rights Issue of Our Time," written with Dr. Elaine Witty.

Labels: NCLB, teachers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:00 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Middle schools add early release days

By Rachana Rathi | Globe Staff
November 16, 2008

Newton's school district says teachers need more time for professional development. Parents say their children need more hours in class.

A decision by the Newton district to add two early release days to the middle-school calendar has brought this long-simmering debate to the surface.

The change brings the total number of early release days for Newton's middle schoolers to six. In addition, every Tuesday, the students are released 45 minutes early.

Many parents contend increasing the days that students are let out early throws off work schedules, leaves many children who have working parents without supervision, and takes away from quality learning time.

"Educational research shows the community should push for longer school days and more time in learning, but we keep adding early release times instead of adding learning time," said Margaret Albright, a Newtonville resident with a fifth-grade son at Horace Mann Elementary School. "There's so much in the curriculum and there's so much to be done that it seems shameful they get home at 11:30."

But school officials say professional development time is essential to improving curriculum.

"In order to provide the kind of quality education we want to provide, we need to also provide the planning time for teachers," said Sharon DeCarlo, executive director of instructional programs in Newton. "This is not time when teachers are off doing their own thing; it's very organized in terms of professional development and moving the curriculum forward. The purpose is for teachers to be planning high-quality learning environments."

The state requires school systems to provide a 180-day school year, with 990 hours of instructional time for secondary school students and 900 hours for elementary school students. Early release days count toward the 180 days, and schools' adherence to the requirements is monitored in a review every six years. School districts have the freedom to decide hours and schedules.

Newton, in its review last year, met the time guidelines, with the exception of a quarter of an hour at Newton North High School.

Some Newton parents said they question how much time teachers need for professional development.

"Other districts accomplish the same thing without all the early release time," Albright said, echoing other Newton parents.

But an informal survey of neighboring districts suggests Newton's early release schedule is not unusual.

Newton's elementary students get out of school at 12:30 p.m. every Tuesday and have seven additional early release days. Middle schools are dismissed 45 minutes early every Tuesday and have six additional early release days. The high schools have five early release days.

Several other districts, including Wayland, Wellesley, and Maynard, have weekly early release days for at least some grades.

In Wellesley, elementary school students have weekly early release days, and secondary schools have at least nine early release days. In Wayland, all grades have weekly early release days. All Needham students have nine early release days a year.

Maynard increased the number of early release days this year, but releases students later on those days than it did previously, allowing shorter but more frequent meetings for teachers. Elementary students have weekly early release days, middle school students depart earlier on 11 days, and high school students leave early on 13 days.

"We looked at other high-performing districts and modeled it after their program," said Daniel Mayer, assistant superintendent for Maynard's school system. "The premise is the best way to improve performance at a school is to engage teachers in regular dialogue about their craft."

Giving teachers more professional development time without taking away instructional time requires negotiating longer hours - which means more pay - in teacher contracts, officials said. Economic conditions don't allow districts to pay teachers more, leaving them to perform a balancing act.

"It would be fair to say most administrators and teachers would like professional development to happen at the end of the school day, if we could afford to do that," Mayer said. "But we did the cost-benefit analysis and concluded the benefits in terms of instructional quality outweighed the costs in terms of shortening the duration of some school days."

But some parents contend their children are not getting quality classroom time on short days, particularly at the middle schools, where students begin the day at 8, eat lunch at 10:30, and head home an hour later.

Jo-Louise Allen, an Upper Falls parent of a Brown Middle School sixth-grader, said her son came home on an early release day this year and said his entire school day had consisted of discussing homelessness and watching an episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" on the subject.

"It's ridiculous, really," Allen said. "They can have an hour-and-a-half discussion on some topic and call it a school day."

DeCarlo said she couldn't speak to that specific instance, but "would be willing to wager that the great majority of students are in active learning during those days . . . and the great majority of teachers are providing high-quality instruction."

Several parents said they understand the need for professional development, but wish it could be arranged to be more convenient and less expensive in terms of after-school care.

In response, DeCarlo said, Newton Community Education, an arm of the school system, is developing a middle-school program for the four remaining release days this year.

"I understand the challenges parents face and the concerns they have," she said, "and we are working to address them."

Rachana Rathi can be reached at rrathi@globe.com.

Labels: instruction time

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:52 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Federal judge called for reforms in July, but state is appealing over cost

By JANET ELLIOTT Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau
Dec. 19, 2008, 10:49PM

AUSTIN — Federal Judge William Wayne Justice has ordered Texas officials to take immediate steps to improve bilingual education programs — even as the state fights to postpone what they call costly measures.

The judge ruled in July that the state is failing to provide an equal education to middle and high school students struggling with English. He ordered improvements by the 2009-10 school year.

The state has appealed and wanted to put off program revisions because it has not received enough money and authority from the Legislature. But Justice, in an order released Friday, said requests for additional resources, if needed, could be presented to the Legislature when it convenes in January.

The legal battle involves about 145,000 students in middle and high school grades who are considered deficient in English. Evidence from state-mandated tests showed large achievement gaps for those students in core subjects.

After first ruling in 2007 that Texas was meeting its legal obligations to students with limited English proficiency, Justice reconsidered the evidence and ruled this year that it is out of compliance with federal laws that require students to get equal education opportunities.

Texas Education Agency general counsel David Anderson said the agency must now meet a Jan. 31 deadline to submit a plan to the court.

"We are doing our best to meet the court's order within our existing resources," he said.

Lawyers who brought the class-action case on behalf of Mexican-American students applauded the judge's latest ruling.

"It sends a message to the state that they need to get to work on developing appropriate programs for the secondary students so they can learn English," said David Hinojosa, a San Antonio-based staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which developed the legal case on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens and the American GI Forum.

Improvements could include more professional development for teachers and more tutoring for students to enable them to graduate from high school, he said.

Labels: bilingual education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:41 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By David Nather, CQ Staff

A bit of congressional testimony from earlier this year provides an interesting window into how Arne Duncan, President-elect Barack Obama ’s choice to be the next Education secretary, might provide a counterpoint to Obama’s thinking on how much of the schools’ success is up to the parents.

Obama has been vocal about his belief that parents need to take more responsibility for making sure their kids take school seriously. “No education policy can replace a parent who makes sure a child gets to school on time or helps with homework, and attends those parent-teacher conferences,” Obama said at today’s press conference announcing the Duncan selection. “No government program can turn off the TV or put away the video games and read to a child at night.”

In testimony at a House Education and Labor Committee hearing in July about urban education, however, Duncan — currently the chief executive officer of the Chicago public schools — said policymakers are often too quick to blame the parents and that they should be focusing instead on finding ways to encourage the parents to get more involved in their kids’ education.

“I think so often it’s very easy to — to criticize parents and say they’re not engaged enough or that’s part of the problem,” Duncan said. When he directed a program that tried to improve inner-city education, Duncan said he found most of the parents actually were “extraordinarily interested in their children’s education.”

The real problem, he said, was that “historically we’ve had a culture in which, frankly, parents weren’t invited in. They were supposed to drop their children at the school door, you know, come pick them up at the end of the day, maybe come a couple of times a year for report card pick-up, but they were really kept outside, and what we’re trying to do is dramatically change that culture.”

One way to do that, Duncan said, is through the “community schools” Chicago has created, which offer classes not just for the kids, but for the parents as well — including computer classes, GED classes and family literacy courses. “The more we open our doors, the more we get a mindset in which parents are welcome and needed, I think we can reach the vast majority of parents,” Duncan said.

It’s a subtle point, and one that focuses on one of the factors that is hardest to address in national education policy. But even if Obama just intends to use the bully pulpit to appeal to parents’ sense of responsibility, Duncan’s influence might convince him to round out his message.

Labels: Parent Involvement

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:40 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out the full report

-Patricia


The Value of Expanded Learning Time for English Language Learners

Time is of the essence for children learning English. Kindergarten English language learners enter school with a vocabulary of 5,000 English words fewer than their native English-speaking peers. ELLs must not only learn a new language; they must keep pace with their English-proficient classmates who are continuing to rapidly grow their vocabulary and further develop their already advanced literacy skills. More than two-thirds (69 percent) of English language learners are citizens by birth or naturalization and begin their education in U.S. schools, but for those newcomers who enter the U.S. school system in later grades, time and the constraints of the traditional school day pose a particularly serious challenge.

Expanded learning time, a schoolwide strategy that entails redesigning and lengthening the school day and/or year to help support teaching and learning for all students, can be particularly beneficial for ELLs. Current efforts to promote the expansion of learning time suggest increasing the school day by two hours or lengthening the year by 360 hours—the equivalent of at least 30 percent more learning time. This additional time can be pivotal in closing both the academic and language gap for ELLs.

Time plays a unique role in the educational career of the English language learner. Time affects the facility of learning a new language and the likelihood of high school graduation, especially among immigrant ELLs in high school. This report reviews some of the relevant research findings as well as examples of existing initiatives that include this population. Surprisingly, only limited research examines the effect of expanded learning opportunities, including after-school programs, on English language learners’ educational success. Additional research is clearly needed given the growing presence of this population in our schools. The little evidence that does exist suggests that English learners have much to benefit from expanded learning time. And schools and districts that have incorporated more academic learning time appear to confirm these research findings.

While expanded learning time initiatives appear to hold significant promise for English language learners, it is important to have whole-school implementation. Unless all students in a school are involved, redesigning the school schedule to maximize the opportunities of additional time is unlikely and success will be limited. Both the research and schools’ experience incorporating expanded learning time suggest that more time is a necessity for ELLs, but all students benefit from expanded learning time.

This report will examine the role that time plays in their education and learning, and how the expansion of learning time can be a key strategy in improving educational outcomes for ELLs. Some schools and districts have already begun to recognize the valuable role that time can play in educating students who are learning English and are now offering before-, after-, or summer school learning opportunities to this population. This report will highlight some of these examples, providing insight into how a few districts and schools are approaching expanded learning opportunities for ELLs and lessons learned in the process.

Labels: English language learners, instruction time

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:36 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Teresa Watanabe
December 15, 2008

For two decades, Anaheim businessman Erkan Aydin has taken on a task unimaginable for most immigrants like himself: trying to convince the U.S. government that he was here illegally.

Aydin, 50, arrived in the United States from his native Turkey with a valid student visa in 1981, but fell out of legal status when he failed to enroll in school, he said.

The customer service representative has a powerful reason why he wants to be considered an illegal immigrant. It would make him eligible for the amnesty offered to 2.7 million illegal immigrants under the 1986 immigration reform law.

Thanks to a recent legal settlement, the chance to apply for amnesty is finally open to Aydin and tens of thousands of others who entered the country on a valid visa but fell out of legal status between 1982 and 1988. The settlement, approved this fall by a U.S. district court in Washington state, stems from a class-action lawsuit filed by attorney Peter Schey originally on behalf of an immigrant assistance program of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO.

"I have been born again, like a new baby," Aydin said last week in his Anaheim car dealership office. "I will start a beautiful life in this beautiful country."

The landmark reform law offered a one-time amnesty to immigrants who were in the United States unlawfully from before 1982 to about 1988.

But Congress was concerned that those who entered the country with a valid visa would argue that they fell out of legal status during that time simply to qualify for amnesty. As a result, Schey said, Congress created a rule requiring immigrants to show that their shift from legal to illegal status was "known to the government."

That rule, however, created a new problem: How to prove that the government knew about their violations?

Nigeria native Olaniyi Sofuluke, for instance, came to the United States in 1981 on a student visa to study banking and finance at Troy State University (now Troy University) in Alabama. But, lacking funds, he soon dropped out to work as a dishwasher in two Atlanta restaurants until he could earn enough for his tuition and living expenses.

That violated his visa conditions and threw him into illegal status. The university was required to send a notice to the U.S. government that Sofuluke had dropped out but was not able to provide him with a copy when he requested one five years later. So immigration officials rejected his amnesty application, saying his violations were not known to the government.

Schey, however, successfully argued that because schools were legally required to send the notices, it should be presumed that the government received them and therefore knew about the violations.

He also successfully argued that the government knew many immigrants had violated their status another way: by failing to furnish an address report every three months. The government's failure to produce the address reports showed that the immigrants had not filed them, violating the terms of their visa, he argued.

U.S. immigration officials accepted both arguments in the settlement. They have announced that immigrants whose cases involve violations known to the government may apply for amnesty between Feb. 1, 2009, and Jan. 31, 2010.

Although the settlement was announced in September, many immigrants are just learning about it. Sofuluke, now a Maryland administrator, just found out about it last week.

"I couldn't even eat dinner, I was so full of joy," he said. "I've been in the twilight zone all of this time."

As a banker in Nigeria, he said his colleagues would return from studying in the United States and regale him with stories about the land of opportunity.

He devoured news about the United States in Time and Newsweek, he said, and finally got his chance to study here in 1981.

He eventually earned an undergraduate degree in accounting and an MBA, started a dry cleaning business that employed 16 people, bought his own home and began doing volunteer work with the disabled. (He was given a work permit while his amnesty application was pending.)

"You can find the greatest opportunities here," he said in a phone interview. "That's why we call America 'the golden egg.' "

The settlement marks Schey's third and final class-action lawsuit over the 1986 amnesty law. The previous lawsuits, both settled in 2003, resulted in more than 150,000 immigrants being allowed to apply for amnesty.

In the first lawsuit, Schey successfully challenged U.S. policy that effectively barred from amnesty applicants who traveled outside the United States roughly between 1986 and 1988. Although Congress specifically allowed a "brief, innocent and casual absence" during that period for, say, holiday visits, immigration authorities at the time essentially declared that anyone who left and reentered illegally was not "innocent" and therefore became ineligible for amnesty.

In the second lawsuit, Schey argued against the rejection of amnesty applicants who had returned home and reentered with a valid visa. Immigration officials at the time held that the reentry was legal, breaking the continued illegal residency required for amnesty. Schey argued, however, that the reentry was illegal because the immigrants would have to have lied about themselves when they applied for the visa to return.

Schey said that amnesty will allow countless immigrants to report crime without fear of deportation, to visit ailing parents back home and to leave exploitative jobs.

"It will make an immeasurable difference in the lives of thousands of people," Schey said. "For many of them, it will be the first time since they entered the country 30 years ago that they will be able to move forward and end their underground existence."

For Aydin, the settlement will give him the chance to fulfill a long-held dream of serving his adopted country in law enforcement or the military.

Once he has his green card, he said, he plans to pursue a master's degree in criminal justice administration with an eye toward joining the Navy, Secret Service, FBI or CIA.

"For many years, I wanted to serve this country, but I haven't had the opportunity," Aydin said. "Now I'm happy I'll finally have the chance."

Labels: immigrant rights

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:34 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out the full report "DEPRIVED OF DIGNITY: Degrading Treatment and Abusive Discipline in New York City and Los Angeles Public Schools"

-Patricia


by Eleanor Bader

When Kara Gagnon was a high school senior in Dalton, Massachusetts, she didn’t give much thought to the fact that there were four guidance counselors for the 140 students in her graduating class. But moving from suburban Dalton to Brooklyn made her realize how privileged she and her peers were.

Gagnon is an AmeriCorp/VISTA volunteer at Youth Action Changes Things, an 18-month-old Sunset Park group for young Mexican-Americans and recent immigrants. She says that she is astounded and appalled by the misinformation and racism she sees students facing in Brooklyn schools.

“There’s just general ignorance,” the 23-year-old notes. “For example, the counselors don’t always know much about immigration laws: they can’t answer the students’ questions. Some of the girls think that if they have a baby they’ll become legal so they get pregnant only to find out that this doesn’t help their status.”

Gagnon says that the role of guidance counselors is key to not only help students resolve personal problems, but in keeping them on track to complete high school as well as formulate post-secondary plans. Some of Brooklyn’s 58 high schools have an array of support services from social workers and guidance counselors to college advisors and tutors, but some are seriously understaffed.

A March 2007 report compiled by the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative bears this out. The study evaluated the nation’s two largest school systems—New York and Los Angeles—focusing on the failure of guidance systems. Unlike Dalton, NESRI found that the ratio of students to guidance counselors in New York was 450-to-one. Furthermore, the report adds, demeaning comments from teachers and administrators were routine. Students were told: “You’ll end up in the ghetto like everyone else from this neighborhood.” “You can’t learn.” “You’re ugly and stupid.” Some New York City students reported being encouraged to drop out or pursue a GED rather than stay in school and receive a regular diploma.

Karla Sevilla, Y-ACT’s youth organizer, herself an immigrant from Mexico, hears statements like these from Y-ACT participants all the time. “Most of our students feel really alienated,” she begins. “Their parents usually don’t speak English and they feel that the schools keep them in the dark about alternatives, about tests they need to take to get into specialized schools and, later, college.”

What’s more, she is dismayed by Department of Education statistics that prove that the educational system is failing Latinos and Latinas: in 2007, the four-year graduation rate for Hispanics—Spanish speakers are lumped together so there are no figures specifically measuring Mexican-American progress—was 43 percent. By contrast, the rate for whites and Asians was 68.8 percent.

“If students are not emotionally strong, or can’t master the English language right away, they get frustrated.” Sevilla points out that the dropout rate for immigrant students is very high. “There are so many myths, that if you’re illegal you can’t go to college, or that you won’t be able to get a good job anyway, so you might as well quit school now,” she says. “When a student says they want to drop out, the school’s response is usually, ‘well, if you want to leave, the door is open.’”

Lack of English language proficiency amongst parents is another huge issue, Sevilla says. Although the Department of Education is mandated to provide translators at meetings with their teachers or counselors, when letters or report cards are sent home, the families have to fend for themselves. “One of our members got a note: ‘Your son is having problems in English Language Arts.’ Even when she had the message translated, how is she supposed to understand what that means?” Sevilla asks, her voice brimming with irritation and angst.

Based on their member’s experiences at six Brooklyn high schools—FDR, Fort Hamilton, Lafayette, James Madison, New Utrecht and Telecommunications—Y-ACT advocates for a counselor-student ratio of 250-to-1—a ratio championed by the National School Counseling Association—and thinks counselors should meet students regularly, not only when there are emergencies. “We also want counselors to be culturally aware, know about different ethnicities, and not be homophobic,” Sevilla says.

Adriana Mendoza, Y-ACT’s 16-year-old founder, helped formulate the group’s injunctions. A Mexican-American honors student at the High School of Telecommunications, she says that she has been encouraged by faculty and guidance staff to prepare for the SAT and other exams and then apply to college in her senior year but her cousin who is enrolled at a different school was recently told to drop out. “The counselor should have taken the time to help her, give her options to make things better,” Mendoza says.

She, Gagnon, and Sevilla are incredulous that students are written off at the age of 17, and that’s where Y-ACT comes in: helping parents and students find ways to advocate for themselves and their kids.

For its part, the Department of Education says that it is up to each school principal to determine how many days a week guidance services are available. Marge Feinberg, of the DOE Office of Communications and Media Relations, urges parents and students to direct complaints to the school principal or send them to respectforall@schools.nyc.gov. She adds that all schools with grades 7 to 12 are required to have a guidance program with a certified counselor who supports student academic, personal, career, and educational development. Feinberg claims, “guidance counselors do not tell students what to do or whether to go to college or the military or work. They guide them on options and provide them with information so the students can make informed decisions.”

Sevilla shrugs when she hears this response. “Most of our parents don’t have computers,” she says, so being told to send an e-mail is meaningless.

Gagnon also questions the city’s central control of the school system. “Change needs to happen from the bottom up. New York City is so diverse and neighborhoods are so different. Each community has its own unique needs. Having the Mayor and Chancellor control the educational system for the entire city doesn’t make sense.”

Gagnon believes that local control of the schools could address many of Y-ACT’s issues more effectively. “Bring in the people on the ground, parents, teachers, principals, students and community activists, to figure out how to meet local needs. It’s the best way to improve things,” she says.

She compares the New York leviathan with the school system in her hometown of Dalton: “You could see a counselor if you wanted to. If you needed help they were there for you. You didn’t have to chase after them.” Although the economic, social, and—most importantly—political realities of the two places are vastly different, small towns might teach the Department of Education ways to be more responsive to diverse communities’ unique needs.

Labels: Latinos, racism

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

Check out the full report "One Dream, Two Realities: Perspectives of Parents on America's High Schools"

-Patricia

Many parents of students in low-performing schools say they're not kept informed, a new report finds.



By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
October 27, 2008

If America is going to stem the dropout crisis, low-performing schools will have to do a better job of reaching out to parents.

That's the conclusion of a new report that found that, among parents with students in low-performing high schools, fewer than half said the schools did a fairly good job communicating about their child's academic progress.

The report's findings "counter the myth that many parents, including low-income parents, don't value education or don't want to be further engaged by the schools," says John Bridgeland, the report's coauthor and CEO of Civic Enterprises, a public-policy firm in Washington. "Parents with students in low-performing schools see the need for their involvement as advocates for their children," he says, "but they need schools to provide good information and more tools – from homework hot lines to [guidance on] how to help their child get into college."

The report, which was released last Thursday, is aimed at bringing the voices of the 25 million parents of high-schoolers into the dialogue on education reform.

Research shows a correlation between parental involvement and academic success, and young people themselves see the need for it: 71 percent of high school dropouts said better communication between schools and parents was one key to keeping students in school, according to the landmark 2006 "Silent Epidemic" study by Civic Enterprises. According to that study, nearly half said the school did not contact them or their parents when they were absent or dropping out.

The great majority of parents want their children to go to college. But they cite vastly different levels of engagement with high schools, according to the new report, "One Dream, Two Realities."

In schools considered high performing, 83 percent of parents say the school did a fairly good or very good job communicating about their child's academic progress. Just 43 percent say the same of low-performing schools. Only 51 percent of parents in low-performing schools say they've had good conversations with half of their child's teachers (versus 70 percent in high-performers).

The nationally representative survey included 1,006 parents of current or recent high-schoolers. A school was labeled "high performing" if parents said most students there go to college, "low performing" if most do not. Researchers also conducted focus groups. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation commissioned the report from Civic Enterprises and Peter D. Hart Research Associates.

The report aims to move the conversation beyond traditional tensions – with schools and parents sometimes blaming one another for low student achievement. It shows broad support for a number of steps that schools could take, including a single point of contact for parents and a way to check grades on the Internet. Six of 10 parents in low-performing schools say it would be extremely helpful to be notified when a student is cutting classes or having academic problems.

Too often, such communication doesn't come when "the parent and teacher can … help this child better his grade before it's too late," says Mary Najera, who helped found the Los Angeles Parents Union to educate parents about their rights and responsibilities. In some people's native countries, such as Mexico, it's not expected that parents will question teachers and play an active role, she says.

Ms. Najera was "a desperate mom" after her son got into trouble in junior high. But after he spent some time at a Green Dot charter high school in L.A., he joined a club for students with grades above 3.0, she says, and now he's in college. She saw his progress connected to the school's requirement that parents do at least 35 hours of service each year. "When you start to realize that the parent engagement makes such a difference in your child's education success – I can't explain it, it's a transformation," she says in a conference call with reporters.

School systems should create that welcoming culture, and high-achieving schools do, says Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators in Arlington, Va. "The least amount of parental involvement tends to take place at the high school…. That is where we really have to make the effort," he says, citing one estimate that about 7,000 US students drop out each day.

Labels: Parent Involvement

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:56 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Successful language program is a drag on campus' scores
By Kim Minugh
kminugh@sacbee.com
Published: Monday, Jun. 09, 2008 | Page 1A

Nine buses lumber up to Will Rogers Middle School each morning, carrying sleepy-eyed children who have spent as much as an hour on the road.

They are the children of immigrant families from Argentina, South Korea, Mexico and Ukraine – enrolled at the Fair Oaks school for an opportunity to quickly learn the language of their new country.

Will Rogers is one of the San Juan Unified School District's language centers, offering specialized lessons to any seventh- or eighth-grader who isn't fluent in English.

This year, almost one-fourth of the school's English-language learners have become fluent enough to shift into mainstream classes – some after just a year.

But Will Rogers is failing under No Child Left Behind.

Because of its high concentration of non-English speakers, its scores on standardized English tests have come up short six years in a row, landing the school in the final stages of what the federal government calls "Program Improvement."

San Juan administrators find themselves in a quandary: Either continue a program they feel successfully serves English-language learners – and suffer the penalties of low test scores – or disband the program.

"It's a tough dilemma," said Vice Principal Karen Baum. "Technically, the district could get us out of Program Improvement by just not making us a (language) center. … Would that be the best thing for the kids? I don't know."

San Juan Unified officials will try to answer that question next year when they review the district's programs for English-language learners, including the language center model, said Tamra Taylor, the district's director of Program Improvement schools.

Taylor said the district will not "cower" from No Child Left Behind. The fate of the language center rests on what is best for English-language learners, she said, not pressure from the government.

"We pay attention to the law, we don't break the law, we try to make growth," she said. "But our impetus is not that there's a federal mandate called Program Improvement. Our impetus is there's an achievement gap, and we want to close it."

Schools are labeled Program Improvement when they fail to meet federal targets for two years in a row. Schools that continue to fall short of federal benchmarks for more than two years face additional sanctions and ultimately can be taken over by the state.

Culture of support

When Principal Monty Muller started at Will Rogers 18 years ago, the language center had only 40 students. Today, enrollment ranges from 160 to 280, and students speak 40 languages.

Grouping those students in language centers allows the district to save money on staffing, technology and other costs.

But perhaps the biggest advantage, administrators and teachers say, is a culture of support for students facing struggles in and out of the classroom.

Baum said many of her students are angry at their parents for bringing them to the United States against their will. Some act out.

Others have trouble focusing on school because their families are in turmoil while adjusting to a new country.

At the language center, teachers and administrators help students work through those emotional issues.

"I think it gives kids a feeling of comfort … and a feeling of safety," said teacher Michelle Bebout. "It gives them a million opportunities to relate to somebody."

Dariya Korzhuk, who came from Ukraine three years ago, appreciates being at a school full of other students like her – even if they don't share the same background.

"You already know how they feel because it's the same as you," the 13-year-old said.

Even after being in the United States two years, Korzhuk said she felt "shy to talk" when she came to Will Rogers.

"If I say something wrong, people would make fun," said the seventh-grader. "Now, I don't care. I know English."

Proper language required

During a recent lesson, Bebout asked her seventh-graders to write a letter to incoming students, giving them advice on how to succeed at Will Rogers and in her class.

She explained the instructions slowly, going over tough words and asking questions to make sure her students understood them.

Bebout paused when one student used the word "stuff" and talked to the class about the difference between slang and formal language.

"You are not employed by (Yo!) MTV Raps," she said, referring to the former hip-hop cable TV show. "What kind of language will you be avoiding?"

"Wazzup," the students shouted.

She wrote it on a whiteboard as students called out other forbidden words – "Cuz," "Shorty."

That language is OK for text-messaging, she told them. But Bebout wants her students to get in the habit of using proper language.

In a classroom across the hall, English teacher Laura Troppmann buzzed around the room in jeans and flats.

Her students were designing an imaginary camp for young children. The lesson was based on "The Acorn People," a book they'd read about physically disabled students who attended a camp without proper accommodations.

Troppmann has been at Will Rogers eight years, but this is her first year teaching English learners. She said there have been some unexpected challenges.

Her lesson about "The Acorn People" began with an explanation of what camp is; many of her students had never been.

When she asked them to design brochures for their imaginary camps, they stared back, blankly. No one knew what a brochure was.

"They're not dumb. They're brilliant," Troppmann said. "They just don't have the background."

Expectations unrealistic?

Critics of No Child Left Behind complain that the law's expectations for English learners are unrealistic and that punishing entire schools for those students' struggles is unfair.

The federal law holds schools accountable for their overall test scores as well as for the scores of groups of typically underperforming students – like non-English speakers or ethnic minorities. A whole school can be penalized if one group repeatedly falls short, like at Will Rogers.

As California's immigrant population grows, and the above scenario becomes more common, even No Child Left Behind advocates like Taylor question the law's deadline for all students to be proficient in math and English.

"Can all kids be proficient by 2014? Let's get real," she said. "Especially if someone just got to the country and doesn't speak the language."

Standardized test scores don't show everything, she said. Especially at schools like Will Rogers.

Since 2002, the school has grown according to the state's measures – its Academic Performance Index score jumped 77 points to 715 (the state's goal for schools is 800).

In California, non-English speakers are tested yearly, and their English fluency is scored on a scale of one to five. Some of Will Rogers' students are jumping as many as two or three levels in one year, Baum said.

"I don't consider them a school that is failing," Taylor said.

Eighth-grader Lucas Sugliano, who didn't know any English when his family arrived 3 1/2 years ago from Argentina, is now considered fluent.

He remembers greeting people by saying, "bye" instead of "hi."

"I mostly learned English here" at Will Rogers, he said. "Difficult English. Hard words and better phrases."

In the fall, Sugliano will enter high school as what one of his classmates calls a "regular student."

Labels: English language learners, immigration and education

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:54 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out more information on LUPE

-Patricia

By DAN BARKER, Times Staff Writer
Friday, December 12, 2008

One of the things OneMorgan County Coordinator Brenda Zion learned from a trip to Texas is to review just what immigrants want and need.

Zion made a trip to San Juan, Texas, near the very bottom tip of the state, to visit with LUPE, an organization known for its outreach to Hispanic immigrants and workers.

The OneMorgan County transition team is working to find out just how to financially and culturally support OMC, which will have its grant money run out at the end of next summer.

Zion went to see LUPE to find out how it works its membership program, which supports much of its efforts, she said.

LUPE is quite different from OneMorgan County, because LUPE sprang out of the Hispanic union founded by the famous Cesar Chavez, who championed the rights of agricultural workers, Zion said.

LUPE membership means being a part of a quasi-union, complete with benefits and political power, which is not what OMC has been about, she said.

Zion took part in a meeting with many other organizations which were interested in how LUPE works, she said. Most of those agencies were from around the Denver Metro area, but there were people from Boston and Los Angeles, too.

The thing all of the organizations took away was to realize — or remember — that they have to work on things that immigrants really need and want, Zion said.

That means finding out what they need, not just acting from the outside, she said.

“That really stood out,” Zion said.

OneMorgan County did a lot of that when it was founded, but it may be time to revisit that aspect of the mission, Zion said.

Some of that will happen when the transition team conducts community groups and forums to determine the future of OMC at the beginning of 2009, she said.

Zion is also conducting a survey of what immigrants need in order to be more successful, she said.

These are both opportunities to see what OMC should pursue, and should be done regularly, Zion said.

One of the strengths of LUPE is that it was built from the bottom up, by workers who had needs and organized to meet them, she said.

It is easier for LUPE’s members to know why they should be a part of the organization, Zion said.

LUPE offers specific benefits to its members — such as participation in a community loan fund — which offer innovative housing and economic development activities, she said.

Members can receive low-interest loans for housing or micro-loans to start businesses, Zion said.

LUPE does not give handouts, she said, because people should do for themselves.

For instance, the main office for LUPE stands on 10 acres on which homes are built for members. Like Habitat for Humanity, the members must put 500 hours of sweat equity into their own homes, as well as pay the cost of materials.

LUPE does help its 5,000 members to access outside social services resources for immediate needs with the support of state and local partners. Part of that is referrals to clinics and attorneys.

It also provides a prescription service for those who need medicines, including for asthma and diabetes, Zion said.

LUPE provides tax preparation and translation services and does leadership development, she said.

One of its strengths is that committees of members help direct the organization and bring up special needs, Zion said.

“So it really becomes their organization,” she said.

However, LUPE is not completely satisfied with where it stands, Zion said.

It wants to find a way to bridge the gap between immigrants and the receiving communities — which is the mission of OneMorgan County, Zion said.

This means there is a limit to how much LUPE can teach Morgan County, she said.

All of LUPE’s membership is individual, which is different than OMC’s vision of also having business memberships.

LUPE’s individual memberships cost $40 per year and $60 for a couple.

However, the trip was valuable for a couple of reasons, Zion said.

She had a chance to meet with other Colorado organizations, which may help in the long run, and she was reminded of the core value of meeting immigrants’ needs, she said.

— Contact Dan Barker at business@fmtimes.com.

Labels: immigrant rights, Region 1

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:46 PM 0 comments Links to this post

An Agenda for Improving Degree Completion in Postsecondary Education

By Louis Soares, Christopher Mazzeo | American Progress
August 12, 2008

Success in today’s knowledge and innovation economy depends on education and skills development beyond high school, generally via the completion of a postsecondary education credential. Postsecondary education is correlated with higher personal incomes, productivity increases, economic growth, and increased civic participation and quality of life. And in today’s economy, an effective postsecondary education system is a national competitive advantage. Built on a foundation of student empowerment, adaptable colleges and universities, and enabling public policies, an effective postsecondary education system delivers quality, flexible learning experiences leading to credentials that are a foundation for personal growth and career success.

Yet despite the growing importance of postsecondary education to our economic well being, America is falling behind on this crucial public policy issue. While the proportion of individuals enrolling in college in the United States has grown since the 1970s, the proportion of students receiving diplomas has declined slightly during the same period. Currently, fewer than 60 percent of students entering 4-year institutions earn bachelor’s degrees and barely one-fourth of community college students complete any degree within six years of college entry. According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, in 2005, the United States now ranks 10th in the college attainment of its 25- to 34-year-old population, down from 3rd in 1991. The OECD also notes that the United States now has the highest college dropout rate among developed countries.

In addition to the stagnation in degree production, employers are reporting that postsecondary graduates are not ready, with the requisite skills, for their roles in a knowledge-intensive, innovation economy. Technology use and team-based service delivery and practices necessary for innovation are compressing work and learning, requiring that students develop applied skills faster and are able to learn continuously on the job. Employers report that over 40 percent of graduates don’t have the necessary applied skills for success. The transition between work and learning is both an acute and ongoing challenge for today’s students.

What is driving these poor results in higher education? In March 2008, the Center for American Progress held a forum on higher education to explore this question. CAP commissioned six papers to study persistence and success in postsecondary education and convened over 40 policy experts, academics, and government leaders to discuss solutions. This policy agenda is based on the paper findings and proceedings from the forum, CAP’s proposed economic strategy for a new administration—the “Progressive Growth” series—and the extensive work of our education team on K-12 policy issues.

We believe America's higher education system has a readiness problem. Students are not ready for college, colleges are not ready for students, and public policy, long focused on making college more affordable, is not yet ready to take on the complex challenge of ensuring people successfully complete college degrees and transition into rewarding careers, as opposed to just getting in.

Students, whether because of a lack of academic preparation in high school; a lack of flexible financial tools to meet their education/work/life needs; or a lack of reliable information and support in making wise college decisions, are not ready for college, and wide disparities in readiness exist along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines. In short, as customers, America’s students are not now ready to fully and successfully participate in and manage their postsecondary experience.

America’s colleges, in particular its public two- and four-year institutions, are being asked to educate a far more varied group of college goers. Students come to college with widely divergent experiences in secondary schools and are more mobile, older, and more likely to combine work and school than ever before, thus reshaping the demand for postsecondary education with a drive for more customized experiences. With funding decreases and regulations and systems designed to meet a different era’s student needs, postsecondary institutions are not now student ready. As suppliers, postsecondary institutions are not fully ready to deliver quality, flexible education that leads to college and career success.

Lastly, while 40 years and billions of dollars of federal investment in making college more affordable via federal student financial assistance has helped millions of Americans, in particular 18- to 21-year-olds, gain access to college, federal policy has yet to focus sufficient attention on whether those with access actually complete their degrees.

To regain America’s global leadership in postsecondary education, especially among young adults age 25 to 34, the Center for American Progress recommends that federal policy be enhanced with a stronger focus on postsecondary completion and student and college readiness.

* College-ready students are prepared learners and empowered customers with reliable information and support in high school and college and flexible financial assistance, able to design a college experience leading to degree completion and successful education-career transitions.
* Student-ready colleges are those with faculty ready to teach a diverse group of young adults, measure learning outcomes to improve performance, and adapt practices and organizational structures to ensure that all students succeed.

To improve student and college readiness and degree completion, federal leaders must first set a bold goal of increasing the number of young adults with a postsecondary credential to 50 percent in 20 years. Roughly, this means producing 220,000 more degrees than we currently do each year.

This ambitious goal will require us to rethink our business models for postsecondary, secondary, and adult education as well as workforce development. Broadening the pathways students use to get a degree and managing these systems and providers as a network, rather than a pipeline, are the keys to success.

This will require engaging leaders in at the federal, state, and local levels; businesses; unions; two-year and four-year institutions; and community-based organizations across jurisdictions with a focus on creating public value in the form of enhanced human capital.

We can achieve this goal by focusing on the following six readiness strategies:

College-ready student strategies

1. Invest in preparation for college in high school and beyond.
2. Provide more flexible and transparent financial assistance through the federal student aid system.
3. Help develop better and more widely available information about college quality.

Student-ready college strategies

1. Build capacity to help institutions change practices and develop new approaches to improving student success in college.
2. Create more seamless alignment across secondary and postsecondary education and with other systems.
3. Enhance accountability by measuring learning and success in schools and colleges.

Labels: college readiness

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:09 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Amid urgent priorities, Latinos push overhaul

By Maria Sacchetti | Boston Globe Staff
November 17, 2008

Before a huge crowd in San Diego last summer, Barack Obama vowed to make fixing illegal immigration a top priority as president, and Latinos nationwide responded with massive support for him on Election Day. Now, they are pressing him to keep his promise.

"We voted in large numbers for Obama," said Juan Salgado, board president of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, a nonprofit based in Chicago, Obama's training ground for immigration issues when he was a senator. "If we're sitting here two and a half years from now and absolutely nothing's been done, people are going to start asking questions."

From Cape Cod to California, activists on both sides of the volatile issue are girding for battle. Supporters of the nation's 12 million illegal immigrants - most of whom are Latino - want Obama to press for a path to legal residency for them. Opponents say reform is impossible at a time when unemployment is soaring, and instead want tougher border security and less immigration to preserve Americans' jobs.

Many analysts are skeptical that Oba ma can navigate the political minefield of illegal immigration in his first year, while confronting the plunging economy and two wars. Still, groups on both sides are commissioning polls to gauge Americans' appetite for the immigration issue and assembling teams to file legislation for their cause next year.

"We're going to be fighting like crazy to keep it off the floor" in Congress, said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, the nation's largest group favoring immigration controls. "Now is not the time to be talking about this."

To start, many expect Obama to halt big immigration raids, such as last year's operation in New Bedford, and, perhaps later, push to allow illegal-immigrant students to pay resident tuition at colleges and universities.

Obama also must decide whether to ask Congress in March to reauthorize the e-verify program, a controversial worker database that is used to check employees' legal status. And he will possibly confront the deportation of his 56-year-old aunt, Zeituni Onyango, who is in the country illegally and who recently fled media attention in Boston for Cleveland.

Immigration advocates say Obama owes a debt to Latino voters, who voted 67 percent in his favor overall, according to a poll for America's Voice, a national communications campaign that favors legal residency for illegal immigrants. Latino support helped him capture such formerly Republican states as Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada. Immigrant voters gave Obama the highest support - 78 percent of Latino immigrants voted for him, compared with 61 percent of US born-Latinos.

More than any recent president, Obama has a unique vantage point on immigration.

He is the son of a former exchange student and the nephew of an illegal immigrant, both from Kenya. He is only the fourth known president - and the first since Woodrow Wilson - to have a foreign parent, according to Library of Congress historian Gerard Gawalt.

Yet, Obama has had conflicted feelings about immigration, according to his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope." He admitted to "nativist sentiments" - including a flush of patriotic resentment when Mexican flags are waved at pro-immigrant rallies - and frustration when he was forced to use a translator to speak to his car mechanic. He worried that low-wage immigrants would depress wages and drain the nation's safety net.

During the campaign, Obama and rival John McCain let immigration disappear from the radar in English, though they battled over it in Spanish-language advertisements on the Internet.

In his platform, Obama listed border security as the first point in his plan. But he said he would also raise the number of legal immigrants, to keep families together and to meet the demand for jobs, and would allow illegal immigrants to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line to apply for citizenship.

It remains unclear which of those policies Obama would tackle first, and while his office is still assembling a transition team, it would not comment. But observers expect disagreement over when to address them in Congress.

Representative Xavier Becerra of California, a Democrat who is the assistant to the speaker and the highest-ranking Latino in the US House, said in an interview that he was optimistic Obama would start to tackle immigration reform in his first year. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at a recent news conference that she wasn't aware of a timetable and that passing any measure would require a bipartisan effort.

Obama's incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said last year that an immigration bill couldn't pass during the first four-year term of a Democratic president. An aide for Emanuel said his priorities will match Obama's.

"Obama's going to have people in one ear who say, 'Wait wait, it's too controversial,' " said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice. "And in the other, people will be saying, 'But this is why you got elected.' "

For now, immigrants are anxiously awaiting word on whether Obama will keep his promise and try to tackle illegal immigration in his first year. On a rainy sidewalk in East Boston one recent day, two immigrants from Colombia, Jorge Pizarro, a 44-year-old US citizen, and his friend Juan, an illegal immigrant, were skeptical.

"We'll see," Juan, who spoke on the condition that his last name not be used, said as he fished restlessly in his bag for a cigarette. "We can all get things done. The question is, will he or won't he?"

Both men said they are news junkies - in Spanish -and could recite the details of Obama's plan to withdraw troops from Iraq. It is this sort of integration that led Obama, in his book, to conclude that America had nothing to fear from immigrants, who had come here for the same reasons as other families 150 years ago, with hope for a better life.

Obama wrote that the United States was creating a "hypocrisy of a servant class" by allowing illegal immigration to grow without a sensible plan to deal with it.

It is a difference visible between Pizarro and his friend Juan, 42, who left the same city, Medellín, for Massachusetts.

Pizarro, who voted for Obama, had sneaked across the border illegally, married an American, and now has a job packing hot dogs. But Juan is a day laborer who stands on a corner every day waiting for odd jobs. Sometimes bosses pay well, and sometimes they don't pay him at all. Sometimes they let him climb a ladder without a safety harness.

He does not complain.

Instead, he said, he is paying his income taxes, learning English, and staying out of trouble. He wants to be a good candidate if an immigration overhaul ever passes.

"Today I have nothing, but if I had my papers, the door would swing open for me," he said with a wide smile.

Then his cellphone buzzed with word of a roofing job in Framingham. He rushed off to catch the train.

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 6:03 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By Jay Mathews | Washington Post
Monday, November 17, 2008

For a while, the fight over how to improve public schools seemed to be quieting down. During the presidential campaign, Republican and Democratic education advisers happily finished each other's sentences on such issues as expanding charter schools, recruiting better teachers and, in particular, rating schools by how much students improve.

Moving to the growth model for school assessment, by measuring each student's progress, seems to be the favorite education reform of the incoming Obama administration. Up till now, we have measured schools by comparing the average student score one year with the average for the previous year's students. It was like rating pumpkin farmers by comparing this year's crop with last year's rather than by how much growth they managed to coax out of each pumpkin.

The growth model appeals to parents because it focuses on each child. It gives researchers a clearer picture of what affects student achievement and what does not. Officials throughout the Washington area have joined the growth model (sometimes called "value-added") fan club. The next step would be to use the same data to see which teachers add the most value to their students each year.

Of course, as often happens in education, that lovely consensus is proving too good to be true, mostly because of the teacher issue. The bad news was delivered recently by Education Week reporter Stephen Sawchuk, who has been checking how the growth model was actually being received by state politicians. It turns out some legislators have been building trapdoors under the welcome mats. California banned in 2006 any use of student growth data in teacher evaluations or compensation decisions. New York last year prohibited the use of such data for tenure decisions for at least two years. Other states are staying away from anything that ties student success to a teacher's pay or job security.

Go ahead. Blame the teacher unions. They make no apology for their opposition to this approach. But they have good arguments. Congress will have to revise the No Child Left Behind law to install the growth model, and most support for the idea there extends only to rating schools, not teachers. Assessing instructors by how much their students improve seems reasonable to people like me who have never taken a psychometrics course, but nobody has sufficiently tested the statistical devices for doing that, and they might prove to be expensive.

I asked two National Education Association officials, Joel Packer, director of education policy and practice, and Bill Raabe, director of collective bargaining and member advocacy, why we couldn't test students in September and May, calculate how much they improved and use that information in deciding whether to keep particular teachers and how much to pay them. Raabe said that would only work if the distribution of students in classes was randomized. I understood his point but did not see why good teachers couldn't show some progress no matter what sort of students they have. Raabe and Packer sent me more quotes from experts who weren't any clearer.

People who have studied the public schools that have significantly raised the achievement levels of impoverished students tend to accept the idea that teachers' salaries and jobs must eventually be tied to classroom results. "Of course," said Andrew Rotherham, an education think tank founder, blogger and Virginia Board of Education member who, at 37, is likely to be a major player on this issue for years to come.

But Rotherham hastened to add that his state is going to take it slow. A poorly planned system to fire teachers based on growth data could bring lawsuits. "We are never going to get to where we need to go without more research," he said. Nancy S. Grasmick, Maryland state superintendent of schools, agreed. "The decisions we make to strengthen schools should not be made by speculation or unproven theory, but on data." President-elect Barack Obama is likely to nod when he hears that.

I asked Raabe and Packer about an alternative approach -- rating schools, not teachers, and replacing the principal if students do not improve. The NEA is not comfortable with that, either. Making the principal responsible for creating the conditions for student growth works only if the principal has the power to hire and fire staff, and that is a no-no for the association.

Could Obama broker a compromise? Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told me that she wanted teachers to learn how to use growth data "and then see where we go from there." Would the unions agree to giving principals firing power in exchange for using not just tests but also the student work portfolios and public presentations that Raabe and Packer endorsed as authentic ways to judge how well kids have been taught?

Many Republican and Democratic policy experts want to try something like that. The growth model in some form will have its day, sooner or later.

But about those pumpkin farmers: It seems to me that the best measure of their work is not how much their big, orange vegetables grow but how well they stand up to my inexpert carving for Halloween and how many extra slices of pumpkin pie I eat on Thanksgiving.

The human equivalent to that kind of quality assessment is how well each school's students do in college, in jobs and in life. I don't think we have a growth model that measures that, but people are working on it.

Email: mathewsj@washpost.com

Labels: growth models, teacher incentive pay

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

Check out the full report by Pew Latino Workers in the Ongoing Recession: 2007 to 2008 .

-Patricia

Stephen Wall, Staff Writer Press Enterprise
12/21/2008

In a year when jobs have become scarce for everyone, the proportion of working-age Latino immigrants participating in the labor force has fallen, according to a new report.

The slowdown in the growth in the number of Latino immigrants who are employed or actively looking for work is a testament to the depth of the recession, according to the report issued last week by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center.

"Latinos are still an important source of workers to the U.S. economy," wrote Rakesh Kochhar, Pew's associate director for research. "However, this growth is now led more by native-born Hispanics and less by immigrant workers."

Latino immigrants, including many undocumented workers, had found plentiful job opportunities in the construction boom earlier this decade. It was a sector in the economy that grew even during the 2001 recession. But Latino immigrants aren't immune from the current economic disaster spell, which was triggered by the slump in housing markets.

"You've had hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in the construction industry. Immigrants are particularly hard hit because you have so many immigrants working in that industry," said Jose Calderon, a professor of sociology and Chicano Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont.

According to the Pew analysis, the decrease in the percentage of Latino immigrants in the labor force was 1.1 percent, from 72.4 percent in the third quarter of 2007 to 71.3 percent in the third quarter of this year. The drop was about twice as high among Mexican immigrants and among immigrants who arrived in the country since 2000. While slight, the decline is significant because there had been steady annual growth in the Latino immigrant workforce over the past decade, the report states.

Overall, the unemployment rate for Latino immigrants in the third quarter of 2008 was 6.4 percent, compared to 6.1 percent for the total workforce and 9.6 percent for Latinos born in the United States.

But workers who drop out of the labor force are not counted among the unemployed. If Latino immigrants had remained as active in the labor market in 2008 as they were in 2007, their unemployment rate would be much higher today, the report says. "I think the numbers are much larger than the statistics," Calderon said. "That's how deep this recession is."

The Pew report, based on the latest Census Bureau data, says it is not possible to conclude whether Latino immigrants who left the labor force have returned to their home countries.

But it is clear, according to another recent Pew report, that the number of illegal immigrants entering the country has decreased since 2005.

Calderon, who is on the board of directors of the Pomona Day Labor Center, said that many Mexican immigrants are realizing that economic conditions here "are as bad or maybe worse" than back home. "Either they have given up looking for jobs or they are returning back," he said. "At least back home they have a family and a place to stay and a community to support them."

Going back to Mexico has crossed the mind of Federico Galicia, a 56-year-old Colton resident who came to this country in 2002. When he arrived in the United States, Galicia said he quickly found a $9.50 per hour soldering job at a San Bernardino company that manufactured safe deposit boxes.

Nine months ago, he was laid off when the company moved its operations to Tijuana. He now provides for his wife and three children by trimming trees, doing yard work, cleaning garages and performing assorted odd jobs for friends and neighbors. His wife also earns $100 every weekend making tortillas at a Mexican restaurant.

But the couple is having a hard time paying the $650 monthly rent on its 1 1/2 bedroom home. Galicia said his children are divided about whether the family should return to Mexico. His 20-year-old daughter wants to leave, while his two younger kids, ages 18 and 15, want to stay.

Galicia said he has looked for jobs at several factories and construction companies, but to no avail. If he doesn't find work by March, he said he will have to decide whether to move.

"I didn't think this was going to happen," Galicia said in Spanish. "I thought it was going to be easier to get my children ahead in this country."

Labels: immigrant labor

posted by Patricia Lopez at 5:41 PM 0 comments Links to this post