Sara Hebel and Jeffrey J. Selingo | The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 26, 2009

Before President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, the White House compared the purpose of the event to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats during the Great Depression. But for higher education, Mr. Obama was more like John F. Kennedy when he issued the challenge in 1961 to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

This president’s goal was equally daunting: for the nation to have the world’s highest proportion of college graduates by 2020. “That is a goal we can meet,” he said to applause in the chamber.

But is it?

College and university leaders were clearly delighted that Mr. Obama dedicated so much time in his speech to higher-education issues, which had for years taken a back seat to elementary and secondary education in presidential addresses. But, by Wednesday, the enormity of the task that has long been on college administrators' wish list became evident again.

“It’s absolutely achievable, but it’s ambitious,” Hilary Pennington, director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s postsecondary program, said in an interview. “It’s a stretch goal.”

In November, the Gates foundation announced that it would spend several hundred million dollars over the next five years to double the number of low-income young people who complete a college degree or certificate program by age 26 (The Chronicle, November 21). Recognizing the difficulty of the task, the Gates foundation set a slightly longer time frame for its goal than the president did for his—2025 instead of 2020.

Ms. Pennington said President Obama’s speech might have helped in one of the biggest hurdles to achieving the foundation's goal of doubling college-completion rates: first, recognizing that a problem exists.

“The American public thinks that if you go to college, you finish,” she said. “The president has the unique ability to make sure we break through the noise and make people realize that many more countries are taking this more seriously than we are.”

Spotlight on an Issue

Efforts that have been under way to bolster the country’s educational attainment are now likely to get a lot more attention, thanks to Mr. Obama. For the Lumina Foundation for Education, the president’s challenge on Tuesday night was a perfect prologue to a 131-page document that the group is set to release today detailing steps institutions and the federal and state governments must take to increase the proportion of Americans with “high quality” degrees and credentials to 60 percent by the year 2025. It was a goal the foundation set about a year ago to guide its work.

“When we started the journey of our big goal, we knew that it would be seen as audacious,” Jamie P. Merisotis, president and chief executive of the foundation, said. “After hearing President Obama’s commitment in his speech … we see the positive energy and drive to move America in this direction.”

The foundation’s new report lays out an action plan that urges governments to bolster community colleges by focusing on improving completion and transfer rates and aligning their programs to meet the most critical work-force needs. It also advises states and the federal government to do more to increase educational opportunities for returning veterans and recent immigrants, and to increase need-based student aid.

To help begin to “turn the tide” fairly quickly, the Lumina report says, policy makers and leaders can focus first on finding residents who have some college experience but have not earned a degree and help them go back to complete their program.

One idea, Mr. Merisotis said, might be for more institutions and states to begin accelerated programs for associate degrees so adults and other students who are ready can complete their studies at less cost and in less time.

Leaders in Washington, he said, also need to motivate states and be a “driver” to help them adopt programs and policies that move them toward the specific national goal.

A Difficult Goal to Track

One stumbling block to reaching the goal—whether it is the one established by the president, Gates, or Lumina—is knowing when it has actually been accomplished. Ms. Pennington said data systems that track students must be improved. “It’s very hard to achieve a goal if you can’t measure your progress,” she said.

For now, the data set everyone seems to be using in establishing a goal is that of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. According to the Paris-based organization, 39 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds in the United States have an associate degree or higher, ranking the nation 10th among 30 countries. In the top-ranking country, Canada, 55 percent of adults in that age group hold an associate degree or higher.

But if a larger pool of Americans are included, the United States actually performs much better. The nation is ranked fifth among 30 countries for the percentage of the population between 25 and 65 years old with an associate degree or higher.

Complicating the problem, said Joseph L. Marks, director of education-data services at the Southern Regional Education Board, is that the United States has a higher proportion of educated older people than do other countries. “It’s going to be challenging for us to move these numbers,” Mr. Marks said, "because the student groups that are growing the fastest [Hispanic students] currently have the lowest participation rate in higher education."

Even so, Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, said the goal of putting the United States back on top is doable. For one thing, he said, the nation has enough institutions to educate greater percentages of its residents.

To reach the president’s objective, Mr. Callan said it will take more fundamental changes than adding more dollars to the Pell Grant or increasing income-tax credits for tuition costs. But it won’t necessarily require more money. The United States, he said, spends about 3 percent of its gross domestic product on higher education, roughly twice the percentage of virtually every other developed country.

“Sort of like the health-care system, we can’t spend our way out” of the problems, Mr. Callan said.

Labels: higher education

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

Some really good points brought up by Orfield. I can't stress it enough for all of us in Texas to become well informed on the state accountability reforms being pushed this session. In Texas NCLB produces added pressures especially upon low-resourced and diverse schools. So we need to think about what/how we change the current state accountability system and become well informed on what's being advocated for this session.

Check out two previous posts on this blog:
Bad Education Bills Have Been Filed in the Texas Legislature That Will Reduce Math and Science Graduation Requirements

For the first time, Hispanic children are the majority in Texas’ first-grade classrooms

-Patricia

On Feb. 18, UCLA professor Gary Orfield visited UNH to discuss the No Child Left Behind federal education policy.

With an audience of students, educators and community members, Orfield covered topics such as the origin of the policy, signed by the Bush administration in 2001, its loopholes and the aspects of the policy which have not improved the overall standard of education in America's public schools the way it was meant to.

"No Child Left Behind teaches to the test, and that's the measurement of student learning," said Alison Rheingold, a doctoral student studying education. "I'm excited to hear about a more reasonable concept of reaching student equality."

The major point Orfield stressed was that the most crucial elements that affect a child's ability to learn and succeed in school begin before they ever set foot inside a classroom. Orfield pointed out that for students who are forced to move often, this causes them to have their education interrupted and that can cause serious issues.

Children who come from poverty are often moving homes and do not have a chance to settle in one location. This affects the success of students in school which is then reflected in their poor test scores.

"No Child Left Behind is an extreme ideology that is difficult to meet," said Orfield. "The policy assumes that schools have vast power and that inequality has little or nothing to do with external conditions and that equality can be achieved through testing, sanctions and market competitions."

Orfield stressed that schools cannot be expected to have their students do well without other types of support, yet this is the pressure put on them by No Child Left Behind.

In needy districts where excellent teachers are sought out the most, many are leaving as a result of the extreme pressure put on them to have their students meet the policy's irrational standards. These standards require high math and reading scores. With the emphasis on only these two subjects, other subjects such as science and social studies are being pushed aside for the sake of the school gaining high-test scores.

Any subjects outside the box, such as studying United States democracy, would not be considered because it is not on the test.

For the increasing number of students whose first language is not English, meeting the reading requirement is particularly difficult. The fear is that if the standards of a curriculum are raised too quickly, the students may fail. The schools then take the hit, and many schools are losing courses and funding.

"These kids are being forced to ignore their background and are expected to become proficient in English after a short period of time," said Orfield. "Testing is being used to fix problems rather than diagnose them."

What can be done to fix the problem and what will the Obama administration do?

Some solutions presented by Orfield included high school transition effort, dropout title funding and dropout counselors.

In the end, it all boils down to funding. The dropout rate has increased drastically since the 1980s and Orfield feels that bringing the country's rate down by 1,000,000 high school dropouts within President Obama's four years is a realistic goal. At this time President Obama has not made his position on No Child Left Behind known.

The core requirement of No Child Left Behind is to "provide students with a good education in order to make it in life. The policy seeks to ensure that all students be treated equally," according to Orfield's presentation.

The glitch with the policy is that while all students should be treated equally regardless of their backgrounds, not all students learn at the same pace or through the same methods. The No Child Left Behind policy does not take into account the specific struggles of what goes on within a classroom on a daily basis.

"I think the policy needs to be modified," said Mallory Sawyer, a senior Spanish and speech and language pathology major. "It's a utopian idea and theory but in reality it's ridiculous. It's a good idea, but it just doesn't work."

President Obama has promised additional funding for college scholarships through a $13 billion federal education stimulus. This would allow more students who struggle financially to continue their education at the post-secondary level.

Orfield stressed that with the high poverty levels in a growing non-white population, there needs to be more funding to keep these students motivated to stay in school and an incentive to keep excellent teachers in these schools.

Labels: accountability, NCLB

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:39 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This is awful. You can listen to the full story here
-Patricia

BOSTON - February 24, 2009 - The Massachusetts Board of Education today takes a look at the state's graduation rate standards.

The Commissioner of Education is asking for an increase in the minimum graduation rate for each high school. Mitchell Chester's proposal would also require school districts to lower the dropout rate for minority groups.

A state Department of Education report shows that only half of Hispanic male students graduate from high school in four years.

Professor Ronald Ferguson directs the Achievement Initiative at Harvard University. He spoke to WBUR about what's causing higher drop out rates for minority students -- particularly Hispanic males.

Labels: Dropouts

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:25 AM 0 comments Links to this post

As stated in an earlier post, the "Common Ground"proposal mentioned in this press release is full of subtle and not-so-subtle prejudice. For example, on page 13, immigrants are referred to as “largely illiterate in both English and their native language.”

I would also alert you that there are discussions about revising the Texas Grant from needs-based to merit-based.

These changes would mean that eligibility would change from fulfilling one of the following criteria: a 2.5 GPA, Distinguished or Recommended track, SAT or ACT score)to TWO of the following four (revised) criteria:

a) 3.0 GPA
b) Top 1/3 of class
c) SAT Score (1070) / ACT (23)
d) Distinguished diploma

So this would mean that only ONE of the three diploma tracks proposed by the authors of Common Ground would provide eligibility for Texas Grant aid. Supporters of this change have also confirmed that African American and Latino youth WILL be negatively impacted.

-Patricia

PRESS RELEASE

For immediate release
2009 February 21

Contact:
Steven Schafersman
Texas Citizens for Science
tcs@texscience.org
http://www.texscience.org
432-352-2265

Bad Education Bills Have Been Filed in the Texas Legislature That Will Reduce
Math and Science Graduation Requirements

Report link:
http://www.texscience.org/reports/highschool-graduation-curriculum-2009Feb18.htm

Texas Citizens for Science, the advocacy organization that defends the accuracy
and reliability of science education in Texas, has published a new investigative
report on the attempt of six prominent Texans to reduce the high school science
and math graduation requirements for approximately 80% of Texas students. The
six gentlemen are Sandy Kress, Don McAdams, Mike Moses, David Thompson, Jim
Windham, and Bill Ratliff. Some of these gentlemen have in the past performed
outstanding services for Texas education and its improvement, but their new
proposal will damage math and science education for Texas high school students.

Currently, the Texas high school Recommended and Distinguished Graduation
Programs require a 4x4 curriculum, that is, four courses of English Language
Arts, Social Studies, Mathematics, and Science. The six gentlemen have proposed
a multiple graduation curricula plan that creates three curricula for the
Recommended and Distinguished High School Graduation Programs. The three
curricula are for students who wish to concentrate in humanities and liberal
arts, career and technology education, and math and science. Two bills filed in
the Texas House, HB 1216 and 1503, by Representatives Fred Brown and Marc
Veasey, contain the details of the proposed multiple curricula plan. Only the
math and science curriculum retains four years of math and science courses. The
humanities and career and technology curricula will go back to the pre-2006
graduation curriculum, three courses each of math and science. Texas Citizens
for Science believes about 20% of Texas students will choose the math and
science option.

The Texas Legislature originally passed the 4x4 curriculum in 2007 with great
bipartisan support. The Texas State Board of Education was also in favor of the
4x4 curriculum and implemented it in 2008. Math and science curriculum experts
and educators, mathematicians, and scientists were in favor of the 4x4
curriculum so that Texas high school graduates would be better prepared for
college and university success upon high school graduation. Curriculum
specialists who wrote the College Readiness Standards specified the curriculum
necessary for high school graduates to be prepared for postsecondary work. The
recommended curriculum requires four years of math and science. Also, students
need to take math and science courses during their senior year to prevent a gap
in learning which will affect their performance in college.

Steven Schafersman, President of Texas Citizens for Science, says, "If the
new legislation becomes law, Texas high school graduation requirements will
revert back to inadequate math and science curricula that have long been
ineffective in preparing students adequately for postsecondary academic
achievement. Student success in colleges and universities will continue to be
low in Texas as proved by the large numbers of students who require remediation,
drop out of college, and perform poorly in courses that require scientific and
quantitative skills. Texas students cannot continue to be shortchanged by
irresponsible meddling that lowers high school graduation requirements,
especially when we are facing immense global competition in industries that
require scientific and quantitative knowledge and skills. Texas is too wealthy
to not prepare our students better for higher education."

The full story of the House bills, the graduation requirements, and the
proposal to change the math and science curriculum to the detriment of Texas
student achievement is contained in an investigative report available on the
Texas Citizens for Science website at the address above.

Labels: 81st Lege, accountability

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

Senate panel approves bill for greater oversight of state schools
Parent tells state senators about teen with mental disabilities who was abused by staff.

By Jim Vertuno
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Karen Yeaman's autistic teenage son lived in the Austin State School for six months. That was long enough for her to see things that she didn't like and hear stories from parents worried that their children had been abused or neglected by staff in Texas' large homes for people with mental disabilities.

"You're treating them like dirt," Yeaman told state senators Tuesday, relaying stories of one teenager whose parents said he was yelled and screamed at and was smacked on the head.

Texas lawmakers are considering several bills to fix a system racked by reports of abuse and neglect. A federal Department of Justice report released in December found 53 deaths from preventable conditions in the past year.

On Tuesday, the Senate Health and Human Services Committee passed a bill to create greater oversight, better investigations and training and deeper background checks into staff.

Texas houses nearly 5,000 residents with mental disabilities in facilities known as state schools, and Gov. Rick Perry has declared the need to fix the problems a legislative emergency.

"They need our protection, our oversight and our compassion," said Sen. Jane Nelson, the Flower Mound Republican who chairs the committee and sponsored the bill.

The bill now goes to the full Senate for debate. It does not include a moratorium on admissions, a call to close any state schools or bans on the use of restraints, which some advocates for the disabled have sought. Some of those issues are in other bills.

"This bill is a good start," said Garth Corbett, an attorney for Advocacy Inc., a group that has pushed to drastically reform the state schools. "It doesn't go far enough."

With the most explosive issues left out of Nelson's bill, Tuesday's testimony didn't touch on the abuses detailed in the federal report.

Though some families said their loved ones were treated well, Yeaman described an atmosphere of intimidation for a young man who was subjected to cursing, threats and theft. She said the boy's parents asked her to tell lawmakers about their son.

She said that the parents told her that staff routinely cursed and screamed at their son to get up in the mornings, threatened to flip his mattress if he moved slowly and flicked him on the head. Yeaman's son now lives in a smaller community home.

Adelaide Horn, commissioner of the Department of Aging and Disability Services, told lawmakers the agency has a "no tolerance" policy when it comes to confirmed cases of abuse.

"I would consider it abuse if they said 'shut up,' " Horn said.

Susan Payne, vice president of the Parent Association for the Retarded of Texas Inc. and a defender of the state schools, said families welcome the bill's safeguards.

Her 47-year-old sister lives in the Denton State School, and she thinks most residents are treated well. Additional training will help, but even that might not be enough, she said.

"I'm not sure any amount of training can prepare people for the type of work they will be doing," Payne said.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:06 AM 0 comments Links to this post

February 19, 2009
This study examines the No Child Left Behind Act system and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) rules for 28 states. We selected 36 real schools (half elementary, half middle) that vary by size, achievement, diversity, etc. and determined which of them would or would not make AYP when evaluated under each state's accountability rules. If a school that made AYP in Washington were relocated to Wisconsin or Ohio, would that same school make AYP there? Based on this analysis, we can see how AYP varies across the country and evaluate the effectiveness of NCLB.

National report:
Executive Summary | Foreword | Preface | Introduction & Methodology | Findings & Limitations | Discussion | Appendices | References

http://edexcellence.net/accountability_illusion/Nutshell_AccountabilityIllusion.pdf

Press Release

http://www.edexcellence.net/flypaper/index.php/2009/02/the-accountability-illusion-an-interview-with-checker/

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:24 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Many U.S. children start school with weak math skills, and there are differences between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds--those from poor families lag behind those from affluent ones--and these differences grow over time. The federal Title I program provides financial assistance to schools with a high number or percentage of poor children to help all students meet state academic standards. Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), Title I schools must make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in bringing their students to state-specific targets for proficiency in math and reading.

NCLB emphasizes the importance of adopting scientifically-based educational practices; however, there is little rigorous research evidence to support one math instructional theory or curriculum over another. The purpose of this large-scale study is to determine whether some early elementary school math curricula are more effective than others at improving student math achievement, thereby providing educators with information that may be useful for making AYP. A small number of curricula dominate elementary math instruction (seven math curricula account for 91 percent of the curricula used by K-2 educators), and the curricula are based on different theories for developing student math skills.

The Achievement Effects of Four Early Elementary School Math Curricula: Findings from First Graders in 39 Schools reports on the relative impacts of four math curricula on first-grade mathematics achievement. The curricula were selected to represent diverse approaches to teaching elementary school math in the United States. The four curricula are Investigations in Number, Data, and Space (published by Pearson Scott Foresman); Math Expressions (Houghton Mifflin Company); Saxon Math (Harcourt Achieve); and Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley (SFAW) Mathematics (Pearson Scott Foresman). The relative effects of the curricula are based on the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K) math assessment, which is an adaptive test tailored to a student's achievement level.

This report contains the following key findings:

Curriculum Implementation
All teachers received initial training from the publishers and 96 percent received follow-up training. Training varied by curriculum, ranging from 1.4 days for Saxon to 3.9 days for Investigations.
Nearly all teachers (99 percent in the fall, 98 percent in the spring) reported using their assigned curriculum as their core math curriculum, and about a third reported supplementing their curriculum with other materials.
Eighty-eight percent of teachers reported completing at least 80 percent of their assigned curriculum.
On average, Saxon teachers reported spending one more hour on math instruction per week than did teachers of the other curricula.
Achievement Effects
Student math achievement was significantly higher in schools assigned to Math Expressions and Saxon, than in schools assigned to Investigations and SFAW. The average adjusted spring math achievement of Math Expressions and Saxon students was 0.30 standard deviations higher than Investigations students and 0.24 standard deviations higher than SFAW students. For a student at the 50th percentile in math achievement, these effects mean that the student's percentile rank would be 9 to 12 points higher if the school used Math Expressions or Saxon instead of Investigations or SFAW.
Math achievement in schools assigned to the two more effective curricula (Math Expressions and Saxon) was not significantly different, nor was math achievement in schools assigned to the two less effective curricula (Investigations and SFAW). The Math Expressions-Saxon and Investigations-SFAW differentials equal 0.02 and –0.07 standard deviations, respectively, and neither is statistically significant.
This study is the largest of its kind ever to use an experimental design to study a variety of math curricula. This report is based on the math achievement of first-graders in 4 districts and 39 schools during the 2006-07 school year. The 39 schools in this report are in four districts that are geographically dispersed in four states and in three regions of the country. The districts also fall in areas with different levels of urbanicity—two districts are in urban areas, one is in a suburban area, and the other is in a rural area. However, this is not a representative sample of districts and schools in the U.S., because interested sites are likely to be unique in ways that make it difficult to select a representative sample. Eligible districts were willing to use all four of the study’s curricula and allowed the curricula to be randomly assigned to their participating schools.

A second report will be based on the math achievement of first- and second-graders in all 12 districts and 110 schools participating in the study-—another 71 schools joined the study during the 2007-08 school year (the year after the 39 examined in this report joined). The second report will also include information from classroom observations of fidelity to each curricula, as well as classroom practices across the curricula.
Browse to http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20094052/index.asp

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:20 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Governors Endorse 'Common Core' of Standards, Leave Debate for Later
Posted: 24 Feb 2009 05:34 AM CST
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/NclbActIi/~3/546433729/governors_endor...
At the National Governors Association's winter meeting this weekend, most news organizations focused on some governors' reluctance to take portions of the stimulus money. (For examples of the coverage, see here and here.)
But the NGA took one significant vote that went unnoticed elsewhere. Its members approved a policy statement that could lead to a set of national standards.
The statement hasn't been released to the public yet. But governors told me that it advocates putting state leaders in charge of a national effort to establish a "common core" of standards defining what students should know.
The statement dovetails with the report released in December by the NGA, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve Inc., a group of governors and business leaders. That report called for a process of benchmarking the standards of high-achieving countries to determine what content they consider most important.
"We want states to improve their standards, and one way to look at that is through international benchmarking," Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican, told me.
But he insisted that the process shouldn't "federalize education."
The setting of standards has "got to be done by the state and local governments," he said.
While the NGA statement is no surprise, given the organization's work with the CCSSO and Achieve. But it is noteworthy because:
1.) It adds momentum to the move toward national standards. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been saying national standards will be a priority for the Obama administration. "What I want to do is be the catalyst," Duncan said on C-SPAN this weekend on an interview show with my colleague Michele McNeil and Libby Quaid of the Associated Press. "I want to take all of the hard work and make it happen." Also last week, AFT President Randi Weingarten endorsed national standards in an op-ed in The Washington Post.
2.) The policy sailed through the NGA without any controversy or significant debate. Thirteen years ago at a summit of governors and business leaders, the biggest debate was whether states should volunteer to set their own standards. (See the Ed Week story on the meeting.) Now, all governors are willing to endorse a project that could lead to national standards.
After the NGA adjourned, I walked over to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute for a panel featuring former Secretary of Education Rod Paige, former Massachusetts Commissioner of Education David Driscoll, historian and commentator Diane Ravitch, and Bruno Manno of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. They were convened to comment on Fordham's recent report documenting variability in states' expectations under NCLB's accountability rules. The panelists disagreed on exactly how to fix the accountability system. But they all agreed that our country should have national standards.
But don't be lulled into a false sense of security by the consensus, Fordham President Checker Finn told me afterword. If you scratch "a millimeter below the surface" on national standards, significant differences emerge on who should set the standards, what should be in them, and other hot-button issues.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:08 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Children very widely, too. As do schools, districts, demographics, etc. etc.

-Angela


Study: No Child Standards Vary Widely From State To State
The Associated Press

Some schools deemed to be failing in one state would get passing grades in another under the No Child Left Behind law, a national study found.

The study underscores wide variation in academic standards from state to state. It was to be issued today by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which conducted the study with the Kingsbury Center at the Northwest Evaluation Association.

The study comes as the Obama administration indicates it will encourage states to adopt common standards, an often controversial issue on which previous presidents have trod lightly.

"I know that talking about standards can make people nervous," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said recently.

"But the notion that we have 50 different goal posts doesn't make sense," Duncan said. "A high school diploma needs to mean something, no matter where it's from."

Every state, he said, needs standards that make kids college- and career-ready and are benchmarked against international standards.

The Fordham study measured test scores of 36 elementary and middle schools against accountability rules in 28 states.

It found the schools failed to meet yearly progress goals in states with more rigorous standards, such as Massachusetts. But they met yearly progress goals in states with lower standards, such as Arizona and Wisconsin. Under No Child Left Behind, states have a patchwork of rules that vary from state to state, the study said.

No Child Left Behind is misleading, said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the nonprofit Fordham Foundation.

"It misleads people into thinking that we have a semblance of a national accountability system for public schools, and we actually don't," Finn said. "And it's produced results I would call unfair from one state to the next."

No Child Left Behind was championed by President George W. Bush and passed with broad bipartisan support, though it has since become hugely unpopular.

The law prods schools to improve test scores each year, so that every student can read and do math on grade level by the year 2014. It is up to states to set yearly progress goals — "annual yearly progress," or AYP — and each state has its own standards and tests.

It is unlikely the Obama administration or Congress will try to force states to adopt the same standards.

Rather, they favor a carrot-and-stick approach that offers states funding to develop new standards and tests or offers more flexibility under No Child Left Behind.

The House Education Committee chairman, Democratic Rep. George Miller of California, called for incentives when Congress prepared to rewrite the law in 2007, an effort that subsequently stalled.

In the Senate, Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander pushed legislation that offered to waive the rigid annual yearly progress structure in exchange for raising standards to national or international benchmarks.

And in the newly enacted economic stimulus bill, there is a $5 billion incentive fund for Duncan to reward states for, among other things, boosting the quality of standards and state tests.

Several states are moving in that direction; for example, 16 of them working with Achieve, a nonprofit founded by governors and corporate leaders, have adopted common math and English standards.

Any effort toward common standards is likely to have support from teachers' unions.

Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers, wrote an op-ed piece Monday in The Washington Post arguing for national standards.

Like Duncan, she used a football analogy, comparing the patchwork of standards to a Super Bowl where the Pittsburgh Steelers must move the ball a full 10 yards but the Arizona Cardinals must go only 7.

"Every other industrialized nation has national standards," Weingarten said in an interview. "When you start thinking about how are we going to create a school system throughout the United States that helps enable kids to be prepared for college, prepared for life and prepared for work, you have to start with common standards," she said.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:39 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Early Launch for Language
Young Children Have Advantage, but Linguists Say Lessons Benefit All
By Valerie Strauss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 16, 2009; B02

One in an occasional series comparing two takes on teaching popular subjects.

Can kids learn anything if they are exposed to a subject for only half an hour a week, with no homework?

When it comes to learning another language, educators say yes.

"The kids getting it for 30 minutes won't become fluent, but that's not the point of those programs," said Julie Sugarman, research associate at the nonprofit Center for Applied Linguistics in the District. "It's to give them exposure to the language. Just because kids aren't able to do calculus in sixth grade doesn't mean we shouldn't teach math in elementary school."

Foreign language instruction is considered more important than ever as the nation's demographics and national security issues change and the world's economies become intertwined.

Although new brain research is revealing secrets about how people acquire language, complex questions remain about what constitutes effective teaching. In the No Child Left Behind era, which has focused on basic reading and math skills, some educators say time for teaching foreign languages is scarce. That means aiming for a goal short of fluency.

Spanish teacher Lisa Vierya emphasizes basic conversational skills in the half-hour a week she has with a second-grade class at Evergreen Mill Elementary School in Loudoun County.

Vierya wheels in a big cart packed with books, word cards and other materials. From start to finish, she speaks Spanish, even when the students don't understand her.

"¿Cuál animal es?" ("What animal is this?"), she asked her students after teaching them how to say "horse," "pig" and other farm animals. The students answered correctly until one confused a horse ("caballo") with the color gray, answering "gris."

"They eventually pick it up," she said later. No homework is required, but students are encouraged to practice. First- and second-graders receive 30 minutes of instruction a week; children in grades 3 through 5 have two 30-minute classes weekly.

Assessments in fifth grade, she said, show that the program gives students a grounding in the language that allows them to converse.

"Yes, I'd like more time. But there is value in this," she said.

A different approach is used in Susanna Winebrenner's second-grade classroom at César Chávez Spanish Immersion Elementary School in Prince George's County.

There, students receive instruction in Spanish and English virtually every day; subjects taught in Spanish are Spanish language arts and social studies.

It's called partial immersion, although down the hall in the kindergarten and first-grade classes, instruction is all in Spanish.

In immersion classes, students learn subjects in the target language through a variety of techniques. They differ from traditional methods, which emphasize vocabulary and grammar and often fail to produce proficiency.

"We are teaching literacy," said Principal José A. Taboada II. " We are not talking just about learning Spanish. When you learn a second language, you are also learning how to learn other languages, and not just the spoken language -- the language of mathematics, the language of computers. Your mind opens."

Asked about the chief obstacle to learning Spanish, Evergreen Mill's Vierya cited lack of time. At César Chávez, Taboada mentioned parents who fear that their own culture will be devalued.

"At the first open house of the year," he said, "I told the parents, 'Get out of the way.' "

Both programs aim to engage students at an early age.

"The younger they are, the more comfortable they are in acquiring language," Taboada said.

But parents who fear their child will miss the chance if they don't start by third grade can stop worrying.

Sugarman, of the linguistics center, said research shows that middle- and high school students often make faster progress learning languages than younger ones who are not cognitively ready for grammar rules and similar tasks.

Young children do well with language instruction, she said, not just because their brains are sponges but also because the material is the very stuff of elementary school: greetings, numbers, seasons, weather, days of the week and so on.

"If students start younger, it is much easier to match the language level with the student's development level," Sugarman said. "In kindergarten, you do colors and numbers and 'My name is.' That's what you do in early stages of foreign language learning. Student are doing things interesting and relevant to them.

"One of the reasons foreign language is less effective in upper grades is that students aren't able to do things at their cognitive ability, so they may be bored."

New research has yet to prove how the brain handles language, but many linguists agree that children and adults learn and retain second languages differently because the brain changes over time with knowledge and experience. Children learn inductively, by example and by interacting with the environment around them, and adults tend to learn analytically and deductively.

But people at both age levels can learn to speak. What a focused, older language student probably won't be able to do is pass as a native speaker; the ability to adopt a new accent appears to be age-related, experts say.

Ultimately, experts say, the real key is not the instructional method but the instructor.

"The quality of the teacher is the single biggest factor in foreign language learning," said Catherine Ingold, director of the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Sticking with it is also crucial. Research shows that becoming proficient in a second language can take four to seven years. And skills not sharpened become dull.

"If you don't use it, you lose it," said Taboada.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:38 PM 0 comments Links to this post

*Contact:* Robert D. Meckel, Office of Public Affairs,
512-475-7847, rmeckel@mail.utexas.edu.

*Date:* February 16

*Spring 2009 Total Enrollment at The University of Texas at
Austin Increases for Hispanic, African American and Foreign
Students*

AUSTIN, Texas --- Total enrollment in spring 2009 increased
slightly for Hispanic, African American and foreign students
compared to the 2008 spring semester at The University of
Texas at Austin, a preliminary report shows.

Kristi D. Fisher, associate vice provost and director of
the university's Office of Information Management and
Analysis, said the data are preliminary 12th class day
numbers. The report shows total enrollment for the spring
2009 semester is 47,334, a decrease of 234 students (-0.5
percent) from spring 2008. Fisher said the decrease is
primarily due to fewer continuing students at the
undergraduate level.

The number of Hispanic students for spring 2009 is 7,484, a
1.5 percent increase over spring 2008. African American
student enrollment for spring 2009 is 2,093 (up 4.2 percent)
and the foreign student total is 348 (up 1.5 percent).
Enrollment decreased for white students to 25,757 (a 1.9
percent decrease), for American Indian students to 197 (a
4.8 percent decrease) and for Asian American students to
7,199 remained about the same, with only two fewer students
than in spring 2008.

Fisher said proportional representation on campus for the
spring 2009 semester, based on the preliminary figures,
includes: white students, 54.4 percent compared to 55.2
percent in spring 2008; American Indian students, 0.4
percent unchanged; African American students, 4.4 percent
compared to 4.2 percent last year; Asian American students,
15.2 percent compared to 15.1 percent; Hispanic students,
15.8 percent compared to 15.5 percent; and foreign students,
9.0 percent compared to 8.8 percent. Students whose
ethnicity was not known remained unchanged at 0.7 percent.

The preliminary report also shows an increase in the
proportion of female students on campus. Preliminary figures
show that of the 47,334 students this spring, 51.1 percent
are female (up 0.2 percent) and 48.9 percent are male (down
0.2 percent). The figures do not reflect a pattern since the
proportion of male students had increased in spring 2008
compared to spring 2007 while the proportion of females had
decreased.

The proportion of students from Texas remained relatively
stable at 80.8 percent in spring 2009 compared to 81.0
percent in spring 2008. Out-of-state students remained
stable at 10.2 percent.

New undergraduate enrollment is up by 41 students (4.9
percent) from spring 2008 totals, primarily due to an 11.5
percent increase in transfer enrollment. Fisher said there
was a decrease of 41 students (-34.7 percent) in first-time
freshman enrollment. She said the number of undergraduate
continuing students decreased by 215 (-0.6 percent) and
re-entering students decreased by 9 students (-1.1 percent).

Graduate enrollment (including special professional)
decreased by 51 students (-0.4 percent) and new graduate
student enrollment increased by 16 students (7.3 percent,
excluding special professional). There was a 14-student
(-0.1 percent) decrease in continuing graduate students
(excluding special professional) and a 10-student (9.9
percent) increase in re-entering students (excluding special
professional).

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:41 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Hmmm. One wonders about this rather scary prognosis. Something to think about. If this perspective is even partially correct, policymakers should take care to really develop policies that address the health, educational, and housing needs (etc.) of the general public lest these difficult times turn into unrest.

-Angela


U.S. Intel Chief's Shocking Warning: Wall Street's Disaster Has Spawned Our Greatest Terrorist Threat

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on February 17, 2009, Printed on February 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/127252/

We have a remarkable ability to create our own monsters. A few decades of meddling in the Middle East with our Israeli doppelgnger and we get Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida, the Iraqi resistance movement and a resurgent Taliban. Now we trash the world economy and destroy the ecosystem and sit back to watch our handiwork. Hints of our brave new world seeped out Thursday when Washington's new director of national intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He warned that the deepening economic crisis posed perhaps our gravest threat to stability and national security. It could trigger, he said, a return to the "violent extremism" of the 1920s and 1930s.

It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists. We will see accelerated plant and retail closures, inflation, an epidemic of bankruptcies, new rounds of foreclosures, bread lines, unemployment surpassing the levels of the Great Depression and, as Blair fears, social upheaval.

The United Nations' International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. The collapse has already seen 3.6 million lost jobs in the United States. The International Monetary Fund's prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent--the worst since World War II. There are 2.3 million properties in the United States that received a default notice or were repossessed last year. And this number is set to rise in 2009, especially as vacant commercial real estate begins to be foreclosed. About 20,000 major global banks collapsed, were sold or were nationalized in 2008. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S. companies expected to shut down this year. Unemployment, when you add people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers who cannot find full-time employment, is close to 14 percent.

And we have few tools left to dig our way out. The manufacturing sector in the United States has been destroyed by globalization. Consumers, thanks to credit card companies and easy lines of credit, are $14 trillion in debt. The government has pledged trillions toward the crisis, most of it borrowed or printed in the form of new money. It is borrowing trillions more to fund our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And no one states the obvious: We will never be able to pay these loans back. We are supposed to somehow spend our way out of the crisis and maintain our imperial project on credit. Let our kids worry about it. There is no coherent and realistic plan, one built around our severe limitations, to stanch the bleeding or ameliorate the mounting deprivations we will suffer as citizens. Contrast this with the national security state's strategies to crush potential civil unrest and you get a glimpse of the future. It doesn't look good.

"The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications," Blair told the Senate. "The crisis has been ongoing for over a year, and economists are divided over whether and when we could hit bottom. Some even fear that the recession could further deepen and reach the level of the Great Depression. Of course, all of us recall the dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent extremism."

The specter of social unrest was raised at the U.S. Army War College in November in a monograph [click on Policypointers' pdf link to see the report] titled "Known Unknowns: Unconventional 'Strategic Shocks' in Defense Strategy Development." The military must be prepared, the document warned, for a "violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States," which could be provoked by "unforeseen economic collapse," "purposeful domestic resistance," "pervasive public health emergencies" or "loss of functioning political and legal order." The "widespread civil violence," the document said, "would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security."

"An American government and defense establishment lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly divest some or most external security commitments in order to address rapidly expanding human insecurity at home," it went on.

"Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD [the Department of Defense] would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance," the document read.

In plain English, something bureaucrats and the military seem incapable of employing, this translates into the imposition of martial law and a de facto government being run out of the Department of Defense. They are considering it. So should you.

Adm. Blair warned the Senate that "roughly a quarter of the countries in the world have already experienced low-level instability such as government changes because of the current slowdown." He noted that the "bulk of anti-state demonstrations" internationally have been seen in Europe and the former Soviet Union, but this did not mean they could not spread to the United States. He told the senators that the collapse of the global financial system is "likely to produce a wave of economic crises in emerging market nations over the next year." He added that "much of Latin America, former Soviet Union states and sub-Saharan Africa lack sufficient cash reserves, access to international aid or credit, or other coping mechanism."

"When those growth rates go down, my gut tells me that there are going to be problems coming out of that, and we're looking for that," he said. He referred to "statistical modeling" showing that "economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period."

Blair articulated the newest narrative of fear. As the economic unraveling accelerates we will be told it is not the bearded Islamic extremists, although those in power will drag them out of the Halloween closet when they need to give us an exotic shock, but instead the domestic riffraff, environmentalists, anarchists, unions and enraged members of our dispossessed working class who threaten us. Crime, as it always does in times of turmoil, will grow. Those who oppose the iron fist of the state security apparatus will be lumped together in slick, corporate news reports with the growing criminal underclass.

The committee's Republican vice chairman, Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri, not quite knowing what to make of Blair's testimony, said he was concerned that Blair was making the "conditions in the country" and the global economic crisis "the primary focus of the intelligence community."

The economic collapse has exposed the stupidity of our collective faith in a free market and the absurdity of an economy based on the goals of endless growth, consumption, borrowing and expansion. The ideology of unlimited growth failed to take into account the massive depletion of the world's resources, from fossil fuels to clean water to fish stocks to erosion, as well as overpopulation, global warming and climate change. The huge international flows of unregulated capital have wrecked the global financial system. An overvalued dollar (which will soon deflate), wild tech, stock and housing financial bubbles, unchecked greed, the decimation of our manufacturing sector, the empowerment of an oligarchic class, the corruption of our political elite, the impoverishment of workers, a bloated military and defense budget and unrestrained credit binges have conspired to bring us down. The financial crisis will soon become a currency crisis. This second shock will threaten our financial viability. We let the market rule. Now we are paying for it.

The corporate thieves, those who insisted they be paid tens of millions of dollars because they were the best and the brightest, have been exposed as con artists. Our elected officials, along with the press, have been exposed as corrupt and spineless corporate lackeys. Our business schools and intellectual elite have been exposed as frauds. The age of the West has ended. Look to China. Laissez-faire capitalism has destroyed itself. It is time to dust off your copies of Marx.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.

© 2009 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/127252/

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 2:30 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This piece critical of Dr. Linda Darling Hammond pays no attention to the opportunity to learn standards that she and others call for. Since the achievement gap correlates so highly with other gaps, real reform needs to incorporate these, and yes, hold the state accountable for the inputs.

-Angela

A repackaged education proposal
by Kathleen A. Madigan | February 14, 2009

A DEBATE is raging about the future of academic standards in American
public education. On one side, University of Virginia Professor E.D.
Hirsch and organizations like Democrats for Education Reform are
working to extend standards-based reforms. On the other side is
Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, once
considered a top candidate to be President Obama's education
secretary. She blames detailed standards testing and their focus on
discrete facts for wide achievement gaps and the nation's failure to
perform better on international assessments. Instead, she proposes
allowing teachers to interpret broad curriculum guidelines and develop
their own student assessments.

Darling-Hammond's approach largely reflects where Massachusetts was
prior to the enactment of education reform in 1993. The only statewide
high school graduation requirements were a year of American history
and four years of physical education. State SAT scores were barely at
the national average.

Today, the picture is much brighter. Bay State students were the
country's best on "the nation's report card" - the National Assessment
of Educational Progress - the last two times the tests were given.
They shook up the education world when results released in December
showed the Commonwealth outperforming most of the international
competition on the Trends in International Math and Science Study
(TIMSS) tests.

Massachusetts achieved success by following the rich academic content
and objective testing espoused by E.D. Hirsch and Democrats for
Education Reform.

Research on reading comprehension test results shows that knowledge of
the subject referenced in a passage is the key to students'
understanding. Similarly, the most effective way to get students to
master important "real-world" skills is to teach them the knowledge
that is prerequisite to those skills.

Just a decade ago, Massachusetts had lower reading scores than
Connecticut. But while the Commonwealth's reading scores improved more
than any state's between 1998 and 2005, Connecticut experienced some
of the nation's most significant declines.

Leaders in Hartford chose to focus on "how to" skills like critical
thinking and problem-solving over academic content; Massachusetts
chose rich content and objective assessments. Connecticut has recently
seen the error of its ways. It has discarded the focus on how-to
skills and joined the growing number of cities and states adopting
Massachusetts' academic standards as their model.

Importantly, research also shows a strong correlation between raising
verbal scores and narrowing achievement gaps. The states that saw the
most significant gains in reading scores during the 1998-2005 period -
Massachusetts, Delaware, and Wyoming - also made the most progress at
narrowing achievement gaps. Conversely, achievement gaps widened in
states like Connecticut and West Virginia that saw the largest reading
score declines.

According to Hirsch, that's because the achievement gap is really a
knowledge gap. Advantaged students have access to far more of it
outside school than do less-fortunate ones. Massachusetts' focus on
exposing all students to the same rich liberal-arts content is the
surest way to narrow the knowledge gap.

We still need to do better. That means introducing more specificity to
the grade-by-grade academic content students learn in core subjects,
particularly in the early grades.

Further narrowing achievement gaps will also require urban districts
to align their curricula with state frameworks. A sobering 2006 study
from the Pioneer Institute found that more than a decade after
education reform, curriculum in a majority of the Commonwealth's urban
districts still wasn't aligned with the frameworks, which means urban
students are being tested on content they haven't been taught.

At a recent event that featured Professor Hirsch, former Senate
president and co-author of education reform Thomas Birmingham sounded
the alarm, saying he is worried that Patrick administration proposals
to shift the focus from clear standards and objective assessments to
how-to skills threaten to "drive us back in the direction of vague
expectations and fuzzy standards." He added that he fears "a watering
down of clear expectations with vague aspirations."

Darling-Hammond's proposals repackage the skills-over-content approach
Massachusetts employed for decades prior to 1993. Fifteen years of
moving in a different direction have yielded historic academic gains.
By passing over Darling-Hammond as education secretary, Obama has
correctly decided not to turn his back on standards-based reform. In
Massachusetts, Governor Patrick would be wise to follow that lead.

Kathleen A. Madigan, founder and former president of the American
Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, is a member of the
Pioneer Institute's Center for School Reform Advisory Board.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:32 AM 0 comments Links to this post

This is a good piece worth reading. One of the many good points made here is for us all to think about who will be making decisions for the growing number of Latina/o (mainly Mexican) youth in Texas schools.

Here's a bit of insight:

Recently, the proposal "Common Ground" was released calling for reforms to the current state accountability system. This report that is riddled with grammatical errors and vague sentence constructions, as well as subtle and not-so-subtle prejudice. For
example, on page 13, immigrants are referred to as “largely illiterate in
both English and their native language.”

Anyone concerned about this should seriously take the time to read the Common Ground proposal as well as the following accountability proposals that have been made public:

Texas AFT's "Beyond TAKS (and NCLB): Putting Texas School Accountability Back on Track

"Creating a New Vision for Public Education in Texas"

"The Texas Star System: An Improvement Model For Public School Accountability

TPPF's Texas Accountability Standards 101

Texas Institute for Education Reform (TIER) "Creating the Schools We Need for the 21st Century: The Next Generation of Accountability

-Patricia

BUD KENNEDY | Fort Worth Star-Telegram
bud@star-telegram.com
Monday, Feb 16, 2009

We have known for years that Texas will soon again be predominantly Hispanic.

What we have not known so clearly — until a couple of recent reports — is that the white population is dwindling.

In a new report on population trends in public schools, the Texas Education Agency reports that Texas now enrolls 130,000 fewer white children than 10 years ago.

For the first time, Hispanic children dominate first-grade classes, adding about 4,000 children last year to become the outright majority with 50.2 percent of students.

But Hispanic children would have become dominant without even one new student, because white first-grade enrollment dropped by about 2,000.

White children are now fewer than one-third of the first-graders in Texas.

If this is a surprise to us, it’s not one to Karl Eschbach of the University of Texas-San Antonio, appointed by Gov. Rick Perry as the official state demographer.

"What people don’t realize is the sheer inevitability of this change," Eschbach said Friday.

It isn’t about immigration, he said. It’s about native-born Texan and American children growing up.

Some white conservatives — not all of them but certainly all the ones with radio shows — fear the "Latinization" of Texas. No reason to fear.

"It’s already happened," Eschbach said.

In a separate new report on population projections, Eschbach and the Texas State Data Center now predict that Texas will become predominantly Hispanic within 10 years, and that the current white population of about 11.5 million is near its peak and will begin shrinking as baby boomers die out between 2020 and 2040. (The African-American population will grow, but more slowly.)

If you’re wondering why all this is important, it’s because aging white Texans will face decisions about taxes and education for a generation of mostly minority children.

"If the state is going to be healthy, we have to invest in children," Eschbach said, repeating part of the presentation he gives across the state. "We have to invest in education. We have to invest in preparing children for a global economy."

In other words, Texas’ future depends on how well we prepare today’s minority children.

Eschbach was blunt.

"The children who don’t 'look like us’ will have the greatest say in the state’s future success," he said.

If Texas were surrounded by a wall tomorrow and all illegal immigrants were removed, the result would be the same.

(According to federal estimates, only 1 in 4 Hispanic schoolchildren in Texas is the child of an illegal immigrant, and only a small percentage are illegal immigrants themselves.)

"If you live your life in the Anglo-majority-dominated world" — like suburban North Texas, one of the whitest parts of the state — "then you might not see the change," Eschbach said.

"But it would be tough to find a schoolchild who thinks of Texas as Anglo. With every passing year, Texas is going to be more Hispanic."

This isn’t about how we teach the Texas Revolution, or whether our 4.7 million schoolchildren learn more than one language.

It’s about our shared future as Texans.

Labels: accountability

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:49 PM 0 comments Links to this post

There is a policy move in Texas to impact opportunities for immigrant youth in higher education as follows:

HB 50 by Riddle - Relating to information required to establish resident status in connection with tuition and fees charged by public institutions of higher education.
HB 255 by Berman - Relating to prohibiting admission by public institutions of higher education of applicants who are not lawfully authorized to be present in the United States.
HB 262 by Berman - Relating to information regarding the citizenship status of students.
HB 418 by Brown, Betty - Relating to the determination of resident status of students by public institutions of higher education.
HB 577 by Sheffield - Relating to requiring public institutions of higher education to notify the federal Student Exchange and Visitor Information System (SEVIS) regarding the withdrawal or nonattendance of certain foreign students.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:25 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Below is Dr. Stephen Krashen's response to the Kristoff piece. The short answer is that reducing poverty improves education, strongly pointing to the limits of the educational system itself in turning poverty around. Not that the school is entirely helpless since we already know that a good or great teacher can make an enormous difference in children's lives. Here's where equitable public policies related to health, housing, school finance, and a more expansive opportunity structure in general, can make all the difference in the world. -Angela

Sent to the New York Times, Feb 15, 2009

Does improving education reduce poverty or does reducing poverty
improve education?

Nicholas Kristoff thinks that education is the key to reducing
poverty and that our schools are "Our greatest national shame" (Feb
15). There is, however, strong evidence that poverty is the major
cause of low academic achievement.

US schools with fewer than 25% of children in poverty outscore all
countries in the world in Math and Science (Gerald Bracey, Huffington
Post, July 22, 2007). US children only fall below the international
average when 75% of more of the students in a school are children of
poverty. Studies also show that poor diet and lack of reading material
seriously affect academic performance.

There is room for improvement in education, but when all our children
have the advantages that children from high-income families have, our
schools will be considered the best in the world.

Susan Ohanian puts it this way: Instead of No Child Left Behind, how
about No Child Left Unfed?

Stephen Krashen

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:17 AM 0 comments Links to this post

I urge all of you to critically read the full proposal Common Ground.

-Patricia

Together We Can Create World-Class Schools for All Texas Children

By Sandy Kress, Don McAdams, Mike Moses, David Thompson, and Jim Windham

Many education leaders have lamented the lack of consensus and sharp disagreements that have characterized Texas education policy discussions in recent years. In December 2007, the five of us, though we have different views on significant policy issues and have shared in some of these sharp disagreements, agreed to begin the search for common ground and set a different tone for discussion.

Many meetings and many drafts later, we have reached consensus. We are now placing before state education leaders and all Texans interested in world-class public schools Common Ground: A Declaration of Principles and Strategies for Texas Education Policy. We hope our compromise document will serve as a starting point for conversations among a wide range of education leaders and that from these conversations Texans can reach common ground on core education policy issues for the next session of the Legislature and beyond.

What are we proposing? First, we determined to not produce just another laundry list, but rather answer the question: "What is at the heart of the state's responsibility to provide a free, efficient public education for all children?"Four issues stand out: standards, accountability, capacity, and control.

Standards define the goals: "What should a high school graduate (and children at each grade level) know and be able to do?" Accountability defines the methods by which taxpayers know to what extent schools are reaching these goals and prescribes consequences that are appropriate to foster improvement. Capacity describes the resources, technical support, and policymaking structures and processes that the state provides so that schools can do what they have been asked to do. And control clarifies what decisions are made at the state level and what decisions are left to local school boards, schools, and parents.

We have made recommendations in these four areas, attempting to link them together in a coherent policy framework that balances standards with resources and accountability for results with local control. Our paper shows how all these elements must be aligned to promote high student achievement.

Specifically, we are recommending the following to make Texas schools the best in the nation:

Texas must establish college/workplace readiness as the standard for all high school graduates, with three diplomas and multiple curriculum paths within the recommended diploma.Texas high schools must recognize the varied interests of students and meet the needs of the workplace. However, all diplomas and curriculum paths must be rigorous and all high school graduates must be prepared for postsecondary success without remediation.

Legislators must adopt an accountability system with easily understood principles that fairly evaluates and promotes greater effectiveness in school districts and schools toward reaching high standards.The focus of the accountability system should be college and workplace readiness.

The statemust provide adequate resources to cover enrollment growth and inflation plus new funds for high-leverage investments as well as supportive state systems for policymaking, technical assistance, and information management.Standards are linked to capacity.High standards require commensurate resources, financial and other.

State policy should promote a shared partnership between the state and local districts in which the districts have the primary authority and responsibility for implementing the state's system of public education.State oversight must be balanced with local control.

Our paper examines these issues in some depth, but it is not a blueprint for legislation.It sets forth principles and strategies as a framework for dialogue.We hope that it will stimulate wide discussion among policymakers, educators, and citizens and that from this discussion a statewide consensus can be reached on next steps for building in Texas the best public school system in the nation.

Compromise is the essence of democracy.The future of Texas depends on education leaders working together to reach common ground.Students can't afford to have their education and future stymied by acrimonious fighting. We can deliver solutions for their futures by realizing the promise of our common ground.

Published December 20, 2008

Labels: accountability

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:42 PM 0 comments Links to this post

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Campaign for High School Equity (CHSE) acknowledges the necessity of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and commends President Obama and Congress for moving quickly to address the nation's economic challenges. The civil rights coalition is pleased that the Act provides much-needed relief for states to help all students, including students of color and youth from low-income neighborhoods, stay on the path to high school graduation.

Notably, the House-passed and Senate committee-passed bills contain requirements that move toward holding schools, school districts and states accountable for student achievement. The provisions that require states to develop and use longitudinal data systems and improve assessments for English language learners (ELLs) and children with disabilities are important steps. We are pleased to see that the Senate bill included a provision to encourage states to align their state standards with college- and work-ready expectations. We are also pleased that both bills recognize the importance of ensuring that low-income and minority students are taught by effective teachers at the same rate as high-income students. However, the House-passed bill takes a stronger approach to solving this problem.

On their own these policies do not fully address America's education crisis. Of incoming ninth graders, only one-third will graduate with the skills they need to be successful in college and work.(i) Among high school graduates, students of color and low-income students are underrepresented, with some subgroups achieving a lower than 50 percent graduation rate. And as students of color and ELLs continue to grow as a proportion of the total student population, improving their educational outcomes must be a national priority.

CHSE is concerned that states will not target sufficient stimulus funds to the communities where help is needed most. The group is also "disappointed by the omission of funding for high schools, Title III, Title VII, TRIO, GEAR UP, and other programs that directly support students of color and ELLs," according to Michael Wotorson, CHSE's executive director. "To improve student outcomes," Wotorson continued, "we need long-term funding and policy solutions to ensure that all students have the support they need to succeed."

Even more dramatic improvements in federal support for education are needed to restore long-term economic viability. Too many American high schools fail to engage, educate and develop the young adults who should soon assume roles as business and community leaders. If we set ambitious goals for education and raise the graduation rates of students of color to the levels of white students by the year 2020, and if these new graduates go on to postsecondary education at similar rates, the potential increase in personal income would add more than $319 billion to the American economy.(ii)

Our nation's long-term economic health requires structural reforms to public education. U.S. education policy must change now, and a prime opportunity exists through the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. A full NCLB reauthorization process during the 111th Congress is necessary to guarantee students of color and youth from low-income neighborhoods access to a high-quality high school education that prepares them for college and the workplace. It is critical that we maintain our focus on improving educational opportunities for all students, or we risk long-term economic decline and the creation of a permanent underclass.

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.

Labels: English language learners, NCLB reauthorization

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:47 AM 0 comments Links to this post

by John Young, WACO TRIBUNE-HERALD

Friday, February 13, 2009

It shouldn't take a Ph.D like David Berliner to tell us what's wrong with the way we do accountability in schools. He sees parallels in baseball, too, and he's no Joe Dimaggio.

Sporting analogy: When you put too much emphasis on home runs, he points out, you strike out more.

When you put too much emphasis on anything at the exclusion of other things, players adjust in ways that make them one-dimensional.

Berliner isn't an expert on baseball. A regents' professor at Arizona State University, he is an expert on education. With University of Texas-San Antonio professor Sharon Nichols, he wrote "Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts American Education."

Berliner recently spoke at Baylor University, his theme being how high-stakes testing makes America less competitive.

"Any time you invest a lot of value in an outcome measure you get a corruption of the measure," said Berliner, in a true academician's phrasing.

Texas being a proving ground for high-stakes testing and the federal No Child Left Behind law, it's notable that its schools have become poster children for "gaming the system to lie," Berliner said.

This includes not just outright cheating, but any number of maneuvers to make sure low-achievers aren't tested.

Beyond that is the problem of "narrowing the curriculum" to meet the task of passing a test on core subjects.

In Texas and across the country, we've seen schools with low math scores become slaves to computation at the exclusion of everything else.

"If you are going to gauge a school based on a test, then you're going to prepare kids for the test," he said.

Yeah, we need a Ph.D. to tell us this. Even Berliner sees the absurdity therein.

"What you get is really boring curriculum heavily favoring reading and math, and a drop in (emphasis of) almost everything else" — recess, music, arts, social studies, science.

Berliner said this problem is most pronounced in urban schools with more than their share of poverty cases, and with low-low test scores.

For many students in those situations, education is drained of its Technicolor in favor of dry work sheets and test-based drills.

Once again, it shouldn't take a Ph.D. to tell us this, but:

"Anyone who looks at the future of the American work force knows it needs to be more adaptable than it is today. We're developing a curriculum that's very narrow, a one-size-fits all approach.

"Instead, we need a broad approach, one that's wide so we have lots people who can adjust quickly when (economic) shifts happen."

Success demands that schools emphasize such traits as creativity, collaboration and problem-solving, he said.

Back to Berliner's warning about a too-boring curriculum. Some traditionalists would consider that a weak complaint of the "touchy-feely" crowd that doesn't want to crack the whip.

Well, Berliner cites a study in which 47 percent of those who dropped out cited boredom as the reason. It wasn't that they couldn't do the work. It was that they didn't see any reason.

I know that the martial-law crowd can't understand this, but: You know, schools ought to give children a reason to want to learn — other than passing a test.

It doesn't take a graduate degree to see that we need to stop examining our measuring cups and examine what we're putting in them. One idea would be to treat teachers as educators and not as vessels.

What you emphasize you'll get, or at least lunging efforts at it. In the age of test-driven "accountability," we are getting training and conditioning, but not education.

jyoung@wacotrib.com

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:00 AM 0 comments Links to this post

The challenges of a “giant, young Hispanic population”

By Juan Castillo | Tuesday, January 27, 2009, 12:00 PM

In sports, coaches are fond of saying that statistics are for losers. In government, numbers carry considerable weight, often driving policy-making decisions. Whether the wealth of data to emerge from City Demographer Ryan Robinson’s analysis of socioeconomic indicators for Hispanics in Austin will lead to new government policies remains to be seen. But even Robinson, who cranks out numbers for a living, thinks some of the findings are stunning. Like this one: Hispanic youths now comprise 50 percent of all persons younger than 18 in Austin. That Austin’s soaring Hispanic population is young has been known for some time, but the new census estimates that form the basis of Robinson’s analysis convey a greater sense of urgency. “If you have a giant, young Hispanic population here, you need to educate them, prepare them to be fully integrated into the workforce and to participate economically,” Robinson said. “If you don’t, you’re selling the city as a whole short.”



Robinson prepared his 35-page analysis for the city’s new Hispanic Quality of Life Initiative, which will explore whether socioeconomic gaps exist for Latinos in Austin, and what if anything the city can do.


http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/shared-blogs/austin/somosaustin/upload/2009/01/in_sports_coaches_are_fond/Hispanic_Quality_of_Life_Analysis.pdf

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:46 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE | Houston Chronicle
Feb. 8, 2009

The embarrassing high school dropout problem that HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra inherited and that he fought to rectify will almost certainly be passed along to his successor, the outgoing schools chief acknowledges.

In a one-on-one interview after last week’s surprise announcement that he will step down by spring 2010, Saavedra claimed significant victories in raising test scores, narrowing the achievement gap and installing an aggressive performance pay system for teachers. But Saavedra also acknowledged that his inability to stem Houston’s dropout problem after nearly five years on the job is his biggest disappointment.

“We’ve saved a lot, but the flow is so great, we’re barely make a dent,” Saavedra said Friday, two days after he announced his plan to resign. “That’s probably the major regret I would have.”

Saavedra’s first major initiative as interim superintendent in 2004 aimed to coax dropouts back to campus. He spearheaded the now annual and highly publicized Reach Out to Dropouts Walk. He hired 10 specialists who work full time convincing students that they should stay in school.

Still, as many as 40 percent of Houston Independent School District freshmen don’t graduate on time.

School board President Larry Marshall agreed that HISD’s next superintendent needs to make major strides at its high schools.

“We have go to refocus at the secondary level,” he said. “We need a new vision for the district. He gave it a shot. He gave us five years, and five years is a long time.”

As he works until the school board finds his replacement, Saavedra said he will look for ways to help struggling students keep up with their peers.

The most common characteristic shared by HISD dropouts is that they’re older than their classmates by an average of 1.6 years. Rather than making fifth-graders who failed math repeat all subject areas, Saavedra suggested, HISD needs to offer such children extra help in math while promoting them to the next grade level with their peers.

The district’s push to create a college-bound culture may have impeded progress with dropouts, he said.

“It’s a question of so many hours in the day and what you can do,” said Saavedra, who admits to regularly clocking 14-hour workdays.

Saavedra contends that dropout prevention and college-readiness efforts compliment one another. He has emphasized programs that allow students to simultaneously earn high school and college credit and encouraged the creation of several unique high schools, including a campus for new immigrants and an international school.

“When you lift the ceiling, the floor comes up with it,” Saavedra said.

HISD leaders tout huge increases in the number of students who are considered college-ready based on their Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills scores.

In 2008, 38 percent of students scored high enough on both the reading and math tests to earn that designation, up from 17 percent in 2006.
Parents express thanks

In many cases, HISD’s black and Hispanic students pulled ahead of their peers statewide.

That progress hasn’t gone unnoticed by parents and community members.

“Dr. Saavedra and actually the school board of the last five or 10 years deserve thanks from the Houston community because of the academic achievement in HISD,” said West University parent Burt Ballanfant.

Saavedra aggressively expanded full-day prekindergarten and beefed up science instruction at elementary schools with an emphasis on teacher training and by installing science labs at every elementary school. He trimmed the district’s mid-level management and reorganized HISD’s career and technology department.

Like administrators across the nation, though, Saavedra has struggled with high school reform.

“From the ages of 4 to 11, over the last five years, the Houston Independent School District has not only held their own, but probably moved forward to be competitive with like districts,” said Scott Van Beck, a former Westside High School principal and regional superintendent who now heads a non-profit school reform group called Houston A+ Challenge. “From ages 12 and forward, I think that is for the next superintendent the big challenge.”
Legacy of bonus pay

Van Beck and others expect incentive pay to become Saavedra’s legacy. Last month, HISD paid out a record $31.4 million in bonuses, including awards of up to $8,580 to teachers who improved student test scores.

While HISD leaders credit incentive pay with increasing student achievement and fostering a college-bound culture, Van Beck said there is no definitive proof that scores wouldn’t have risen without such a pay plan in place.

Districts nationwide, however, are following HISD’s lead to reward teacher performance.

“It’s an incomplete puzzle,” Van Beck said. “But at least he has started that conversation. I think that’s where his legacy is going to be.”

University of Houston professor Augustina Reyes, a former HISD board member, credited Saavedra for taking the heat as details of the controversial performance pay plan were hammered out and as he championed an $805 million bond that was strongly opposed by the black community.

“This is probably the first superintendent that I know in Houston ISD who sees kids first,” she said. “He brought HISD out of the dark ages and out of the dark ages where all we did was play games with how you hide the scores, how you hide the dropout rates.”

When Saavedra took over, HISD was still reeling from a national embarrassment caused by the disclosure that previous administrators had manipulated figures to make the dropout rate appear much lower than it really was.

Saavedra said that aside from his lack of progress on the dropout rate, he has few regrets. He doubts he’d even change how he handled a number of proposals ­— including tax-rate increases, the bond, school closures and magnet school cuts — that upset trustees and community members.

“There is a balance in the urgency of change and better opportunities for kids with how long you take to get buy in,” he said. “I erred on the side of getting results as quickly as possible.”

Saavedra said he knows without a doubt that his next job will not be in politics. Meanwhile, he remains focused on the task at hand: lowering the dropout rate.

“Frankly, it’s not over,” he said. “I’ve got a year left. That will be one of the things I really will focus on.”


SAAVEDRA’S TRACK RECORD

Here are some of the highlights from Saavedra’s four years as superintendent:

SAT: The percentage of students taking the test increased from 65 percent in 2004 to 74 percent in 2007. The mean score increased from 934 to 953 in that span.

Community : $16.9 million was raised from community partners since 2004

Four-year high school completion rate: HISD’s rate fell from 75.8 percent in 2004 to 64.3 percent in 2007.

Sources: HISD and Texas Education Agency

Labels: Dropouts

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:36 PM 0 comments Links to this post

I think that what this piece demonstrates is how arguments for inclusion are made. There's always a degree of mystery of how this happens from the outside looking in. One might be tempted to think that opportunities simply trickle down. The history of minority-majority relations demonstrates something else. On the one hand, you need good, qualified candidates. On the other, you need good politics that additionally may include (though certainly not always), persons from within who can do the advocating and make the arguments and in so doing, structure the outcomes they and others seek. Welcome to UT, Dr. Cigarroa.

-Angela


Web Posted: 12/20/2008

UT pick good news for excluded groups

by Carlos Guerra - Carlos Guerra

The Obama team has provided three weeks of great news for women and minorities, who have long complained about being systematically excluded from top leadership posts. In the next administration's highest levels will be five women, four blacks, three Hispanics and two Asian Americans.

Closer to home, the great news is that Francisco Cigarroa will be the next chancellor of the University of Texas System.

In a sense, the globally recognized pediatric and transplant surgeon has been preparing for this for most of his adult life.

But some doors didn't start opening for him — and others like him — until 2000, when the UT regents were looking for a new president of the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio. When Laredo businessman Tony Sánchez — one of two Latino UT regents at the time — learned about who was on the search committee, he said, “I became very alarmed.”

In a letter he fired off to the board's then-Chairman Don Evans, he detailed his concerns: “One glance at the makeup of the Presidential Search Advisory Committee ... convinced me that this institution, founded as the medical school of South Texas, will never — of its own accord — provide the opportunity for a Hispanic to become (its) president,” he wrote.

“In addition to the flagrant personal prejudice, (a) more subtle and effective institutional discrimination prevents inclusiveness through ... policies, guidelines, job descriptions and committee assignments.

“After almost 30 years, no Hispanic has earned a permanent seat on the UTHSCSA Executive Committee and none of the school deans are Hispanic,” he continued. “No qualified Hispanic has been found to head a department, and even non-health related executive positions seem barred to Hispanics (who) comprise 70 percent of the (center's) service area and over 90 percent of the population of its outreach efforts in the (border region).”

The regents' rules, he pointed out, dictated that the search committee be made up of two regents, two community leaders of the regents' choosing, two students, two presidents of other UT health science centers, three faculty members, one administrator, one alumnus and one “classified employee.”

As a result, the 14-person committee included only two Hispanics — the alumnus and the classified employee.

Shamed after the letter became public, Evans added more Latinos to the committee. And Cigarroa went from being a midlevel med school faculty member (where he had been denied several promotions) to becoming the nation's first Hispanic to head a medical school.

He wasn't exactly unqualified. The third-generation surgeon graduated from Yale and the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where he began to build his stellar credentials in the operating room. At Harvard's primary teaching hospital, he was chief surgery resident, and he became a fellow at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital.

But questions arose about Cigarroa's lack of administrative experience. These were answered after he took the helm in San Antonio and started overhauling the center's institutional culture with such changes as conducting deans meetings while making hospital rounds, expanding the center's reach into underserved border areas, and emphasizing academic medicine and original research.

For those who recall whenall Texas medical schools admitted fewer than a dozen Latinos students each year, it is encouraging that Cigarroa will now head a UT System where minorities are still significantly underrepresented among the 194,000 students and 81,000 employees. And his promotion is a hopeful sign that our state will better prepare a wider array of young Texans for the 21st-century challenges they will face.

And there are two lessons in Cigarroa's long journey: One is that nothing will change until people speak up. And the other is that there is no substitute for sterling qualifications.

cguerra@express-news.net
© 2009 San Antonio Express-News.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:33 AM 0 comments Links to this post

The Texas Star System: An Improvement Model For Public School Accountability, was presented to the Select Committee on Public School Accountability by Raise Your Hand Texas in Dallas on June 16, 2008.

http://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/site/PageServer?pagename=program_starsystem

Download here [pdf] a report titled, "The Texas Star System: An Improvement Model For Public School Accountability.

Labels: accountability

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:14 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Posted on US News website by Professor Emeritus Stephen Krashen in response to "What Arne Duncan thinks of
No Child Left Behind" Feb. 6:

Arne Duncan's view of what needs to be done (better tests, better
tracking systems, rigorous and uniform standards, earlier start,
better teachers) is based on the assumption that there is something
seriously wrong with American education.

The only thing wrong is poverty. When you control for the effects of
poverty, American children do quite well compared to children in other
countries. US schools with fewer than 25% of children in poverty
outscore all countries in the world in Math and Science (see Gerald
Bracey's column on the Huffington Post, July 22, 2007). US children
only fall below the international average when 75% of more of the
students in a school are children of poverty.

The obvious solution is to reduce poverty. When all children have
proper diets, are surrounded by good reading material, and have the
other advantages that children from high-income families have, our
schools will be considered the best in the world.

For a description of the devastating (but often reversible) effects
of hunger, see Gerald Coles: "Hunger, academic success, and the hard
bigotry of indifference" Rethinking Schools, vol 23, 2, 2008/2009.
Available at:
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_02/hung232.shtml

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 11:08 PM 0 comments Links to this post

This is scary and unfortunate.

Angela

Study links children's lead levels, SAT scores
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Could a decades-long drop in the concentration of lead in children's blood help explain rising SAT scores?
A Virginia economist who pored over years of national data says there's an "incredibly strong" correlation, which adds to a growing body of research on lead's harmful effects.

TOXIC SCHOOLS: Health risks stack up for students
DATABASE: Search for air quality at your school
The findings, to be published this winter in the journal Environmental Research, suggest that from 1953 to 2003, the fall and rise of the average SAT math and verbal score has tracked the rise and fall of blood lead levels so closely that half of the change in scores over 50 years, and possibly more, probably is the result of lead, says economist Rick Nevin.

He controlled for rising numbers of students taking SAT prep courses and for rising numbers of students who speak a foreign language at home — that would depress verbal scores.

Nevin estimates that lead explains 45% of the historic variation in verbal scores and 65% in math scores.

His analysis compared national snapshots of children's blood-lead test results with SAT scores 17 years later. As lead levels dropped, scores rose — and vice versa.

He also found that over a 56-year time frame, the drop in lead levels tracked consistently with decreases in mental retardation 12 years later.

The average amount of lead in children's blood dropped sharply in the 1970s and later, mostly because of a phaseout of leaded gasoline in the 1970s; at the same time, paint manufacturers phased out lead house paint.

Nevin made a splash a few years back with another provocative thesis: He found that unleaded gas probably did more to reduce crime in the 1990s than did any crime prevention strategy, such as higher concentrations of police on city streets.

Over 30 years, a large body of evidence has shown that lead is a potent neurotoxin, affecting IQ, impulsivity and other factors that determine academic achievement. Nevin's study is the first to tie lead to national SAT scores.

Bob Schaeffer of FairTest, a non-profit watchdog that tracks testing, says Nevin's study "makes a very strong case" for the role lead plays — and suggests how non-school factors affect poor kids' achievement.

"It shows that these kids are mentally handicapped from the start," and criticizing the kids and their teachers isn't going to solve the problem, Schaeffer says.

The study, which is planned for an upcoming Environmental Research issue, is available here.


Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 6:14 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Here's an editorial piece from today's Statesman. Pretty concerning if you ask me...

-Patricia

For me, a concern here is whether developing the other tracks will equate to large investments by the state of Texas producing resource-rich tracks. It also seems that it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. You could have Voc-Tech tracks that also prepare students for college. Finally, stratification by race, class, and gender will be another hardly trivial consideration that should be taken into account should this move forward.

Plus generally, how many students really know at age 14 what they want to do for the rest of their lives? Very likely only a small minority. Lots and lots of children are late bloomers and so it's good to prepare for this type of student in a non-restrictive manner, and ideally, in a way that exposes them to a range of opportunities.

-Angela

High school diplomas should prepare students for future - which may or may not include college.
Thursday, February 05, 2009

Former Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff asked this question during a recent discussion with us about public schools: Which is more difficult to find, a doctor or an electrician?

With that, Ratliff pointed out a glaring deficiency in Texas public education. Public schools aim at preparing all children for college and university courses that lead to careers in white-collar professions such as medicine, engineering, business, teaching, law, science, politics or high tech.

There is no doubt that public schools must prepare students for college. We live in an information age in which ideas and innovation are our most valuable commodities. Texas public schools are conveyor belts that move high school students into college preparatory diploma programs.

But that approach leaves very little room for fine arts, electives or any other field of study. And it ignores the need for workers to fill good-paying jobs as electricians, auto mechanics, plumbers, medical technicians, firefighters, police officers, carpenters and more recently, jobs in an emerging green energy sector.

Ratliff and former Texas Education Commissioner Mike Moses are lobbying the Legislature on behalf of Raise Your Hand Texas to secure changes for public schools that are relevant to today's job market. Should high school students pursuing a fine arts program be required to pass calculus? Or is that best suited for students pursuing science and math programs? What is best for students headed for community college or jobs directly after high school?

Relevancy is the driving force behind the Raise Your Hand proposal, which would create three paths to earning high school diplomas. It is a realistic approach the Legislature should adopt.

Under the proposal, students could choose a traditional college preparatory curriculum that includes four years of math, science, English and social studies (including history and economics). That would be similar to the current Recommended High School Program that requires students to pass upper-level math courses, including precalculus or calculus, physics and advanced science courses, and economics.

Currently, all incoming ninth-graders are steered to that curriculum no matter what their future plans. If Ratliff and Moses are successful, there would be two other pathways to earn a diploma in Texas public schools. One would be a college preparatory curriculum that emphasizes fine arts. The third would be a career and technical curriculum that would prepare students for community college or jobs upon graduation.

The proposal offers flexibility, and all programs would be rigorous. Parents and students would select the diploma program best for them. The cost to change the current high school diploma program would be minimal. However, the cost of not changing it could be enormous in two years when high school dropouts are counted.

The unwise decision to steer all students to the Recommended High School Program (with some exceptions) won't be fully felt for another two years, when those students are seniors. Texas should brace for a potentially huge spike in the number of students who drop out of school because they fail to pass calculus and advanced science courses.

Also, many students who do stay in school might be denied diplomas because they fail to pass advanced math or science exit-level exams. Certainly it is sensible and beneficial for students seeking careers in medicine and engineering to undergo such preparation. But for students who want a career in politics or those who want to become electricians, such courses are superfluous.

Multiple diploma pathways that are relevant to students as well as the job market make sense. The Legislature can — and should — lead in making that a reality.

Labels: tracking, vocational education

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 3:51 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Parents would get $5,000, also could switch to different public institution. Democrats call idea a bait and switch.

By Laura Diamond, Mary Lou Pickel

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Georgia would be the first state to offer vouchers to all public school students under a Republican plan introduced in the state Senate on Monday.

The bill from Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) would allot parents about $5,000 in taxpayer money to use toward private school tuition. Senate Bill 90 also would allow parents to switch their children from one public school to another.

Georgia’s education ranking is “near the bottom,” Johnson said. While the bill is not a “silver bullet,” he said, “Georgia is a conservative state that understands the free market.”

Voucher supporters say parents have the right to choose where their children attend class and that competition from private schools will make public schools stronger.

But public school groups have fought vouchers, saying lawmakers should fix struggling public schools rather than send taxpayer money to private schools.

Democrats quickly attacked Johnson’s bill and described it as a threat to public schools.

“Basically, it’s a bait and switch,” state Senate Minority Leader Robert Brown (D-Macon) said. “It really doesn’t address the problems in public schools. What you have to do is fund them more adequately.”

Under Johnson’s proposal, students who want to switch schools would have to qualify for admission at the new campus first and their parents would have to provide transportation, he said. Johnson estimated about 5 percent of parents would use the vouchers.

Johnson sponsored another voucher bill last year to allow children who attend failing public schools to go to other schools, but the measure stalled. He was more successful with a bill passed in 2007 to provide vouchers for students with disabilities.

Some public school advocates said the new voucher bill is unreasonable considering school systems face about $275 million in cuts next year.

“It is ludicrous to be trying to divert resources from our public schools,” said Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, an advocacy group with about 75,000 members. “How much more battered down and beaten can they get?”

Nine states, including Georgia, offer vouchers, but those programs focus on low-income students or children with disabilities. Voters in Utah defeated a universal voucher referendum in 2007.

Johnson says Georgia has a chance of passing such a measure now because the state’s public education record is abysmal and people are sick of it. “We’re at the bottom year, after year, after year,” he said.

Labels: Vouchers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:46 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Sometimes the most basic things can make the biggest impacts.
-Patricia

by Beth Loechler | The Grand Rapids Press
Monday February 02, 2009

Bobbie Fletcher, a science teacher at Chandler Woods Charter Academy in Belmont, is part of a growing trend at area districts where teachers and other school staff put an emphasis on "Capturing Kids' Hearts."

Fletcher greets each student at the door of her seventh-grade classroom. A smile. Eye contact. A firm handshake.

"Hey, Nicole."

"How ya doin', Trevor?"

"Megan, you have your hair pulled back. It almost threw me off."

Mostly, they respond with a handshake and a few words of their own.

"I'm noticing when they get haircuts or new outfits," Fletcher said. "If they are having a really bad day, you can see it on their little faces."

Fletcher believes that even the greatest teachers won't get through to students unless they establish a personal connection with each and every one.

"It's not just what we teach, it's how we teach," she said.

Ditto in Kentwood, where every teacher, bus driver, paraprofessional, administrator and board of education member has been similarly trained in "Capturing Kids' Hearts."

The Texas-based program also is used by teachers in Jenison, Thornapple Kellogg, several National Heritage Academy charters and other area schools.

"I think we were falsely under the impression that if I'm just a master of my subject matter I'm a good teacher," said Kentwood Superintendent Scott Palczewski. "You need buy-in from students. If you have a relationship and know someone cares about you, you work harder. You don't want to disappoint them."

Teachers and students share good news at the beginning of each class period and then, when the bell rings again, they exit with a high-five or some words of inspiration.

In addition to the connections made through one-on-one contact, students sign "social contracts" vowing to treat each other with respect. They learn to "self-manage" their behavior and remind their friends to do the same, Fletcher said.

Put down a classmate and you'll quite likely be "fouled," which means you'll have to say two nice things for every negative one uttered. If a friend flashes you a thumbs-up signal, that means you're not following directions and need to get back on track.

"We check each other so the teacher doesn't have to tell us," said Kevin Nguyen, a seventh grader at Chandler Woods. "It makes our class more bonded," added classmate Abby Carlson.

The difference has been dramatic at Townline Elementary in Kentwood, where teachers were trained last summer, said Principal Karen Friberg. She has seen an 85 percent reduction in the number of suspensions and detentions

"We're fostering stronger relationships, teacher to teacher, teacher to student and home to school," she said. "As a teacher you know these things, but we do them now as part of a daily routine. Then the children embrace it and start doing it with one another."

The cost of the three-day training is about $500 per teacher, according to the Capturing Kids' Hearts Web site. Districts have funded it both through grants and general fund dollars set aside for teacher training.

"In the beginning, it takes a lot of time, there's a lot of stopping," Fletcher recalled her introduction to the philosophy three years ago. "But after a while it starts to run smoother because students are checking and self-managing each other."

All this managing of behavior and boosting of self-esteem doesn't automatically make kids better learners, Palczewski said, but it does create a better environment for learning.

"If teachers aren't dealing with students in the hallway or referring them to the office, they can devote more time and energy to what they do best, which is teaching kids," he said.

Labels: caring, teacher development

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

The Associated Press
Feb. 5, 2009

McALLEN, Texas — A federal appeals court has delayed an overhaul of bilingual and English-as-a-second-language programs in Texas schools.

Last year, U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice had ruled that Texas schools had failed middle and high school students with limited English. He ordered Texas to submit proposals for a new way of tracking and educating those students by Jan. 31.

But the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, responding to a requested delay from the state, ruled last week that "a wide variety of concerns including funding, personnel changes and legislative authority" must be addressed first.

"This gives the Legislature a chance to take a look at any laws they might want to pass to address the issue before we're forced to make decisions," Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Suzanne Marchman told The McAllen Monitor.

Originally, the new system of educating the estimated 140,000 students was supposed to be implemented for the 2009-2010 school year.

But the appellate panel said, "If (the state's) failure is as severe as the district court has described, (it) will need to create a new plan for monitoring over 1,000 school districts in Texas and a new language program for secondary students in those districts."

The delay disappointed David Hinojosa, an attorney whose lawsuit against the state spurred the original court order.

"Texas has a monitoring issue that allows thousands and thousands of failing students to fall through the cracks," Hinojosa said. "Unless things change, they'll continue to be lost in a system that fails them."

Texas students receive bilingual education through sixth grade then switch to ESL classes, but the state lacks clear standards to evaluating the ESL programs.

State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo has filed a bill that would require the state to produce data on ESL students at a campus level, reporting high school and middle school dropout rates separately. It would also require school districts with consistently underperforming limited-English students to submit a detailed improvement plan.

Labels: bilingual monitoring

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:31 PM 1 comments Links to this post

New America Media, Commentary,
Roberto Lovato
Jan 15, 2009

NEW YORK-The buzz filling Blackberrys, busy halls and spacious deal-making rooms in Washington appears to signal that spring arrived early this year for immigrants. In the last week alone, several prominent figures-outgoing President Bush, incoming President Obama, Mexican President Calderón, Los Angeles Cardinal Mahoney, to name a few-have discussed the possibility of comprehensive immigration reform. And, as in the previous failed attempts at reform in 2006 and 2007, legalization for the more than 12 million undocumented among us occupies the center of forums, speeches and other public statements of Democratic and civic leaders in the beltway.

"Immigrants must be brought out of the shadows so they can fully contribute to our nation's future economic and social well-being," declared Archbishop Mahoney during a recent teleconference.

While laudable in its intent, the legalization-centered approach of Mahoney and others may not be the best way to deal with the tragic legacy of failed immigration reform: spikes in anti-immigrant, anti-Latino hate crimes, deaths in decrepit immigrant prisons, thousands of families separated, children and families terrorized by heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raiding their homes.
These efforts are inadequate because, contrary to the new Washington consensus on immigration, the greatest single need in immigration reform is not legalization. Rather, what is most needed is moral imagination.

The predominance of the "practical" considerations - "immigrants are good for the economy," "we need tough and smart enforcement," etc.- framing the arguments in favor of comprehensive reform should be balanced by a simple, but now elusive fact that smashes any of the discursive frames prevailing on either side of the immigration debate: undocumented immigrants are first and foremost human beings whose lives are as sacred as that of any other being.

Although all advocates surely believe this, not all voice it as much as they used to.
Thankfully, the possibilities of the political moment reflected in the election of Barack Obama and a new, more Democratic Congress offer us the best opportunity to return morality to the center of an immigration debate that has reached dangerous levels of absurdity, if the spate of murders of immigrants here in "liberal" New York and other cities are any indicator.

Although Mahoney, Bush and other backers of immigration reform have included some moral arguments as part of their case, the Washington, D.C., realpolitik of the past decade has pushed moral considerations into the shadow of the legalization-centered approach. Consider, for example, how Mahoney, Bush and other backers of the failed McCain-Kennedy immigration reform package of 2006 to 2007, were willing to "trade off" the more than 700 pages of punitive immigration policy-increased incarceration, deportation, militarization of the border-for less than 100 pages of punitive approaches to legalization contained in the bill.

While morality cannot be legislated, moral considerations can and must be part of immigration legislation. This is the way it was before the mid-1990s, the period when Washington decided to de-emphasize moral arguments in favor of the realpolitikal legalization approach provided by high-powered pollsters and public relations consultants. This was when the now familiar immigration reform jargon-"smart and tough," "practical" and "comprehensive"-entered our national discourse on immigration reform. I still remember how uncomfortable I felt during teleconferences organized by the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the National Immigration Forum (NIF) and other Washington groups at the time. Hearing pollsters and advocates tell us, "Moral arguments don't work with the voters," made me nervous. Hearing them then call for "necessary tradeoffs" (code for accepting even more punitive immigration policies in exchange for legalization) as part of "comprehensive immigration reform" scared me.
Then-after the failure of immigration reform in 2006 and 2007-NCLR, NIF and other members of the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform produced a confidential report, "Winning The Immigration Debate," in January 2008 advising Democratic candidates to adopt a "get tough" immigration message. This message made me wonder if some were blind to the anti-immigrant violence infecting the cultural climate like a virus. The report calls for a message that "places the focus where voters want it, on what's best for the United States, not what we can/should do for illegal immigrants."
It made me realize how far we had strayed from the halcyon days when moral frames of the immigration debate prevailed among most advocates.

While the responsibility for the surge in anti-immigrant hatred, violence and even murder goes to the GOP, right-leaning Democrats, right-wing media personalities and well-funded hate groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and NumbersUSA, many of us in the advocate community must come to grips with a disconcerting fact: We allowed the humanizing and protective shield of morality to be eviscerated from the discussion about human beings who happen to be immigrants.
There's no malicious intent behind the political strategy of the "get tough and smart" approach to immigration reform. But it is problematic that, with few exceptions, none of the high-profile advocates of immigration reform has publicly admitted any errors of judgment with regard to either accepting punitive policies or enabling the evisceration of the moral frame from the immigration debate.

Rather than point fingers after the fact, it is best to put political energy and resources into doing for detention, raids and other immigration policies what many advocates are already doing around detention and torture in Guantanamo: reigniting the moral imagination that must inform the debate.

Such an approach to immigration reform will do much to address what is now a deep cultural problem in a country that has come dangerously close to normalizing hatred of immigrants in its media, in its legislatures and in its streets. If we have learned anything from the civil rights struggle we are about to commemorate on Martin Luther King, Jr. day, it is that sometimes we have to go against what pundits and pollsters say and simply do what is right.

--

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:52 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out the full report "Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge" by the CRP.

-Patricia

Wed Jan 14, 2009
By Matthew Bigg

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Black and Latino students are educated in U.S. schools that are increasingly segregated, said a report Wednesday that undercuts optimism about race in America surrounding the presidency of Barack Obama.

Blacks and Hispanics are more separate from white students than at any time since the civil rights movement and many of the schools they attend are struggling, said the report by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California.

A 2007 Supreme Court decision on voluntary desegregation is likely to intensify the trend because it reduces pressure on local authorities to promote school desegregation, said the report, which called on Obama to address the issue.

Obama, who will take the oath of office Tuesday, will be the county's first black president.

"It would be a tragedy if the country assumed from the Obama election that the problems of race have been solved, when many inequalities are actually deepening," said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project.

Orfield said these trends were "the result of a systematic neglect of civil rights policy and related educational and community reforms for decades."

Part of the reason is demographic. As the percentage of white students shrinks -- they now make up 56 percent of the school population -- they are more integrated with students who are nonwhite.

Another factor is that residential segregation, on the rise in many parts of the country, increasingly determines the racial composition in schools in the absence of measures by education authorities to create and maintain integrated schools, Orfield said.

At the same time, Orfield said little had been done in recent years to prosecute violations of the Fair Housing Act, which forbids discrimination in the allocation of housing and was set up to foster equality in the housing market.

As a result of the trend, 39 percent of black students and 40 percent of students from the fast-growing Latino minority are increasingly isolated in schools in which there is little racial mixing, the report said.

Evidence that U.S. schools are becoming less racially integrated is politically charged because school integration was a basic goal of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King in the 1950s and 1960s.

That movement was in part triggered by a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1954 that decreed school segregation in the South was inherently unequal, did irreversible harm to black students and violated the constitution.

The report also found that the average black and Latino student is now in a school that has nearly 60 percent of students from families who are near or below the poverty line.

Schools marked by racial segregation and poverty tend to have weaker teaching forces, more student instability and a higher percentage of students from homes where English is not spoken -- factors that militate against academic achievement.

Labels: segregation

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:45 AM 0 comments Links to this post

New York Times
Published: February 5, 2009
Letter to the Editor:

“Another Jail Death, and Mounting Questions” (news article, Jan. 28) reports yet another detainee death in a facility that contracts with the federal government to hold immigrants facing deportation.

On Jan. 16, you reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had ordered an end to their contract with a Rhode Island detention facility where Hiu Lui Ng, a computer engineer from China, died last year.

The circumstances of these deaths reflect a pervasive problem within the American immigration detention system. A federal investigation into Mr. Ng’s death uncovered a system in which lack of oversight, combined with negligence and hostility toward noncitizens, led to deadly consequences.

This investigation echoes the stories of the more than 80 other immigrants whose deaths have been documented in the last year. Immigrant advocates have long recognized that the system is dysfunctional and dangerous. The National Immigrant Justice Center routinely responds to detainee complaints of lack of access to health care.

It is clear that the failures of the current immigration detention system are widespread and not merely isolated incidents. Congress and the Obama administration must make reform of this broken detention system a priority.

Mary Meg McCarthy
Executive Director
Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center
Chicago, Jan. 28, 2009

Labels: detention centers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:37 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Patricia Yollin | SF Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, February 6, 2009

A lot more young people will have a shot at getting into the University of California under new eligibility rules, approved by the UC Board of Regents today, that represent the most sweeping changes in admission standards in almost 50 years.

"The bottom line is that it will be more diverse and more fair," said UC President Mark Yudof.

The board approved these changes today:

-- SAT subject tests will no longer be necessary.

-- The pool of applicants who will be considered will widen, but the number guaranteed entry into one of the university's nine undergraduate campuses will shrink.

-- The top 9 percent of high school graduates statewide will be ensured entry, compared with 12.5 percent previously, as well as those in the top 9 percent of their graduating class - up from 4 percent in the past.

Taken together, the two groups will constitute 10.1 percent of California's graduating class, based on projections by the university.

The revised requirements will affect the freshman class of 2012.

The changes will allow students to be considered - and granted a full review of their application - who complete by the end of junior year at least 11 of 15 college prep courses required by UC, achieve a weighted 3.0 grade-point average, and take either the ACT with Writing or SAT Reasoning Examination.

UC was the only public education system in the country that made students take two SAT subject tests. The result: 22,000 high school graduates in California were disqualified in 2007 from applying to the university who otherwise would have been eligible.

Members of the UC Academic Senate, who spent almost four years putting together the eligibility proposal, based this estimate on 2007 data from the California Postsecondary Education Commission.

That data also made them conclude that 21.7 percent of high school graduates in the state would have been entitled to a comprehensive review of their applications in 2007, compared with the 13.4 percent who were actually eligible for UC in that period.

On Wednesday, the issue of eligibility was thoroughly discussed at the regents' meeting before the Committee on Educational Policy approved the changes.

"This proposal will give us a chance to look at those (kinds of) lost students," said Regent Eddie Island . "They might not get in, but we'll look at them as individuals."

The promise of UC admission to the top 12.5 percent of graduates goes back to the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education. A few regents worried about deviating from such a venerable road map.

"I feel like I got out my lantern like Diogenes looking for the master plan," Yudof said.

He emphasized that he had talked to legislators, California State University chief Charles Reed and community college leaders.

"They were all simpatico with this," Yudof said.

To avoid a perception that the university was lowering its standards, Yudof had asked the creators of the proposal to raise the required GPA to a weighted 3.0 instead of an unweighted 2.8. That change was reflected in the plan the regents' committee voted for on Wednesday.

Although eligibility changes had been discussed in four earlier regents' meetings, there was still much confusion.

"Now I can see why I was not UC eligible," said Regent Norman Pattiz. "How are we going to get this in a little pamphlet and hand it to parents to see what it takes?"

Some people saw the shift - endorsed by the University of California Student Association - as a way to get around Proposition 209, which was approved by voters in 1996 and ended race- and gender-based anti-discrimination programs in state, county and city hiring, contracting and school admissions.

Yudof said he supported affirmative action but would obey Prop. 209 because it was the law of the land. He was sure the new rules would increase diversity, but said it was too early to know the specific impact.

"We want to change the behavior of applicants and admissions officers," he said.

And by looking at the "whole file," as he put it, colleges can find out if a student did volunteer work or overcame a hardship or wrote the Great American Novel or climbed Mount Everest.

Although the changes dominated the meeting Wednesday, few members of the public addressed them. Most, instead, were angry about having to contribute to their retirement fund - a change approved by the regents today - without being represented on the pension board.

"We won't pay without a say," they chanted.

One protester was Ellie Corley, 72, an administrative assistant in the UC controller's office who has worked at the university for 33 years and makes $35,000 a year.

She got laid off in January and will leave in March.

"The university talks about equity and inclusion," Corley said. "I've never seen it."

Labels: California, college admissions

posted by Patricia Lopez at 9:27 AM 0 comments Links to this post

These detention centers are a total violation of human rights! Here's the full report of the study:"Unseen Prisoners: A Report on Women in Immigration Detention Facilities in Arizona"

-Patricia

We wouldn’t expect life at immigration detention centers to be rosy, but it turns out that these centers may be hazardous to women’s health.

A new study by the Southwest Institute of Research on Women and the James E. Rogers College of Law, both at the University of Arizona, says about 300 women held at such centers in Arizona face dangerous delays in health care and widespread mistreatment – including lack of prenatal care, cancer treatment and treatment of ovarian cysts.

Federal immigration officials say the study is unsubstantiated, too narrow and that the complaints can’t be corroborated, but nonetheless, the study shows that among the 3,000 women being held nationwide awaiting deportation hearings, many are living in conditions far from acceptable.

"We were pretty shocked to learn about all the ways in which life is made endlessly difficult for these women," especially those who were pregnant or had recently given birth, the director of border research for the Institute on Women, Nina Rabin, told The New York Times.

This is just the latest report blasting conditions at federal immigration centers. Here’s hoping that, if the allegations are true, these women end up places where they can receive proper care.

Labels: detention centers, women

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:56 PM 1 comments Links to this post

For a copy of "Creating a New Vision for Public Education in Texas," go to the Texas Association of School Administrators Web site: http://www.tasanet.org/files/visioning/visioningfinal.pdf

By LINDA STEWART BALL | The Associated Press
Jan. 26, 2009

DALLAS — Skip the piecemeal education reform. A group of Texas school superintendents are calling for a complete transformation of public schools to better prepare students for the future in ways that aren't boring.

They've laid out the framework in a 48-page report called Creating a New Vision for Public Education in Texas.

Nearly two years in the making, the document spells out school leaders' thoughts on six key issues, including the use of digital technology, abuse of standardized testing and designing accountability systems that inspire excellence instead of punish perceived shortcomings.

The 35 superintendents from Dallas, Cypress-Fairbanks, Fort Worth, San Antonio and numerous rural and suburban school districts are responsible for educating about a quarter of the state's 4.7 million schoolchildren.

"We came together to say 'Stop this train that's going in the wrong direction,' " said Coppell school Superintendent Jeff Turner.

Keith Sockwell, chief executive officer of Cambridge Strategic Services, an education consulting firm, conceived of the initiative after visiting with frustrated Texas school superintendents.

"When we look at our public schools today, I'd say they're doing a dadgum good job of preparing our kids for the 20th and 19th Century," Sockwell said. "It's almost like we need to blow it up and start over."

The superintendents say part of the problem is that state and federal politicians, business leaders and their policy advisers have set education's current course.

The school administrators want to return control to principals, teachers, parents, school board members and others at the local level — or at least create a better balance.

"It's going to have to be a joint collaborative effort with parents, educators and legislators," said Plano school Superintendent Doug Otto. "None of us can do it alone. Certainly, the business community has to be part of it, too.

"I'm optimistic," Otto added. "People are ready for a change, to see if we can't devise a much better system for our kids."

To do that, he and others said there needs to be a grassroots discussion about what needs to change and how. The report opens the door for such a dialogue.

Much of the research behind it came from national experts who met with the superintendents and challenged their thinking.

"They really stretched us," Dallas superintendent Michael Hinojosa said of the process. "To get 35 superintendents with a bunch of egos to agree on where we ought to go, was really inspiring. I think this is long overdue."

Although completed last summer, the document has been quietly making its way onto some school board agendas and has become the focus of town hall meetings.

"We're asking for comment," said Stephen Waddell, Birdville school district superintendent. "We want people to read it and respond."

Some 3,500 school administrators from across the state_ including about 800 superintendents — are expected to weigh in on the report this week during a three-day Texas Association of School Administrators conference that began Monday in Austin.

"It's a work in progress," said Johnny Veselka, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators. "It's not a document that will reach its full fruition during this legislative session. But it gives us a lens through which we can look at legislative proposals."

Otto said a major overhaul in education — using the report as a roadmap — probably couldn't happen before the 2011 legislative session. However, there's plenty that school districts can start addressing now.

"I think the hardest thing to do is change what goes on in the classroom," Otto said. "School can be a very boring place for a student sitting at a desk all day."

He said students come to traditional school settings with a mastery of iPods, Wii game systems, cell phones and other devices that must be "powered down" in class. The challenge is finding a way to use gaming techniques and other technology to enhance the curriculum and create a more relevant and engaging learning environment, he said, citing one of the report's guiding principles.

Otto said "parents and educators are tired of high-stakes testing that limits what is taught and emphasizes sanctions rather than rewards.

Dawson Orr, Highland Park's superintendent agreed.

"By no means are we suggesting that we don't need assessments or all testing is bad," Orr said. "What we're saying is it's become disproportionate."

The superintendents say there are other ways to measure the quality of schools.

Sockwell, who has recently shared the report with educators in Georgia and Virginia, said if Texas is able to make such changes, other states will follow.

Cara Mendelsohn, president of the Plano school district's Council of PTAs, said she plans to present the report to her council in March.

She particularly appreciates the superintendent's quest to move from a "one size fits all education" model to a more personalized approach, recognizing the many ways students learn.

"I think it's what we need," Mendelsohn said. "When we start teaching things in a relevant way, kids will succeed."

Dr. Jon H. Fleming, chairman of the board of The Texas Education Reform Foundation, said the document is important.

"Do I agree with everything in there?" he asked. "No."

But it sparks a conversation that needs to be had, he said.

Labels: accountability

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

Nanette Asimov, SF Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 28, 2009

An economic stimulus package working its way through Congress could provide $10 billion in federal relief over the next two years for California's public schools, raising optimism among educators that it might ease cutbacks caused by the state's budget crisis.

The money is part of an $825 billion stimulus package the House of Representatives is expected to vote on today. It contains about $140 billion for schools nationwide.

The package would provide millions of dollars to most school districts in the Bay Area and across the state for construction, special education and help for low-income students.

"This does not solve the fiscal crisis, but it does throw us a lifeline," state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell said Tuesday.

Although no package has been approved, California educators are salivating over what could be the largest infusion of one-time federal cash for schools in the state's history.

To put it in context, in 2007, the federal government spent $54 billion on education nationwide, an amount dwarfed by the $140 billion in the stimulus bill. California's share would be about $10 billion - more than $1 billion of it for the huge Los Angeles Unified School District.

The Senate is expected to take up its version of a stimulus package next week, and a compromise is likely to be approved by both houses in mid-February.

"We've never seen numbers this big from the feds - ever," said Bob Wells, executive director of the Association of California School Administrators.

Wells is among several California educators - school board members, principals, parents and teachers - who have lobbied Washington since before President Obama took office.

"We wanted to make sure they were aware of just how deep the proposed cuts are in California," Wells said.

Keeping the money local

And they asked for language in the bill that would ensure schools could keep the new federal money rather than allow the state to siphon the money away by reducing its school funding by the same amount.

It's a danger that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's spokesman, H.D. Palmer, acknowledges could happen - at least to some extent - unless the federal money were specifically earmarked for certain purposes.

California is facing a $42 billion budget gap over the next 18 months, and state lawmakers have yet to agree on how to close it. With the state on the brink of running out of cash, California hopes to borrow money to keep short-term cash flowing, Palmer said.

But if money came in from the stimulus package "with no strings attached," he said, "our priority would be to use the money to reduce or eliminate that borrowing."

Under the House plan, the education stimulus money is largely earmarked. That might protect much of the cash from California lawmakers who want to use it to pay down debt, but it also restricts local educators from using it as they see fit - say, to retain teachers.

"Even this amount of money is not a silver bullet for all of our funding problems," said Mike Myslinski, spokesman for the California Teachers Association.

San Francisco is a case in point. The district would directly receive nearly $42 million over the next two years under the stimulus plan being voted on in the House. But the money is earmarked for special education, school construction and schools with low-income children.

"We're still going to have to put out layoff notices," said Superintendent Carlos Garcia, noting that the state's legal deadline for mailing out such notices each year is March 15. The notices can be rescinded later if the fiscal picture improves. But Garcia said that as of now, with no state budget and no certainty in how any incoming money might be spent, the notices are going out.

Schwarzenegger proposes to help close the budget gap by withholding about $5.2 billion from schools over two years. An additional $7 billion also could be lost to schools through an accounting procedure that the governor hopes to impose.

This is forcing schools to prepare for extensive teacher layoffs, ballooning class sizes and even the chance of a shorter school year

But the proposed $10 billion in federal funds is earmarked for specific purposes and is unlikely to prevent all the dire steps being planned.

San Francisco again provides an example. The district has to spend $31 million from its general fund to pay for special education costs that the federal government requires but does not fund. Under the stimulus package, the district would receive an additional $6.5 million specifically for special education.

"Obviously, this will help us," Garcia said. "But we have to look at this as one-time money."

Assemblyman Tom Torlakson, D-Antioch, who sits on the Assembly Education Committee, agreed.

"While we aren't out of the woods yet, the federal stimulus package is a promising leap in the right direction," Torlakson said. "It provides hope that our schools will be spared the worst of budget cuts that threaten the future of our children and our economy."

'Astonishing' figures

The figures in the stimulus package for schools "are astonishing," said Mike Kirst, former state Board of Education president and professor emeritus of education at Stanford University.

"(Former President George W.) Bush spent a little money for a brand-new program with enormous impact on public schools," he said, referring to the $1.2 billion spent each year on No Child Left Behind.

"By contrast, Obama is spending enormously more money on education than Bush - it intensifies the federal role but does not change the substance of what schools are doing. It's the reverse of Bush."

Labels: California, school finance

posted by Patricia Lopez at 10:15 PM 0 comments Links to this post

By SAM DILLON
Published: January 27, 2009

WASHINGTON — The economic stimulus plan that Congress has scheduled for a vote on Wednesday would shower the nation’s school districts, child care centers and university campuses with $150 billion in new federal spending, a vast two-year investment that would more than double the Department of Education’s current budget.

The proposed emergency expenditures on nearly every realm of education, including school renovation, special education, Head Start and grants to needy college students, would amount to the largest increase in federal aid since Washington began to spend significantly on education after World War II.

Critics and supporters alike said that by its sheer scope, the measure could profoundly change the federal government’s role in education, which has traditionally been the responsibility of state and local government.

Responding in part to a plea from Democratic governors earlier this month, Congress allocated $79 billion to help states facing large fiscal shortfalls maintain government services, and especially to avoid cuts to education programs, from pre-kindergarten through higher education.

Obama administration officials, teachers unions and associations representing school boards, colleges and other institutions in American education said the aid would bring crucial financial relief to the nation’s 15,000 school districts and to thousands of campuses otherwise threatened with severe cutbacks.

“This is going to avert literally hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Tuesday.

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the House education committee, said, “We cannot let education collapse; we have to provide this level of support to schools.”

But Republicans strongly criticized some of the proposals as wasteful spending and an ill-considered expansion of the federal government’s role, traditionally centered on aid to needy students, into new realms like local school construction.

And they were joined by some education experts from across the political spectrum in wondering how school districts could spend so many new billions so fast, whether such an outpouring of dollars would lead to higher student achievement, and what might happen in two years when the stimulus money ends.

Analysts were also turning up surprises in the fine print.

One provision, which was sought by the student lending industry and went unmentioned in early Congressional summaries of the stimulus package, would temporarily increase subsidies to banks in the guaranteed student loan program by tying them to a new index, partly because recent federal intervention in the credit markets has invalidated the previous index. A spokesman for Sallie Mae, one of the largest student lenders, said the change was needed to keep student loan markets fluid. Critics said it represented a potential new windfall for lenders.

“This just continues the well-established tradition of welfare for the student loan industry,” said Barmak Nassirian, an expert in student lending.

The formulas by which the stimulus money for public schools would be allocated to states and local districts are complex, but take into consideration numbers of school-age children in poor families. The level received per student would vary considerably by state, according to an analysis by the New America Foundation, a research group that monitors education spending. New York would be among the biggest beneficiaries, at $760 per student, while New Jersey and Connecticut would fall near the bottom, with $427 and $409 per student, respectively. The District of Columbia would get the most per student, $1,289, according to the foundation’s analysis.

The foundation contends, however, that the formula does not effectively allocate the most money to states with the greatest need.

In recent years the federal government has contributed 9 percent of the nation’s total spending on public schools, with states and local districts financing the rest. Washington has contributed 19 percent of spending on higher education. The stimulus package would raise those federal proportions significantly.

The Department of Education’s discretionary budget for the 2008 fiscal year was about $60 billion. The stimulus bill would raise that to about $135 billion this year, and to about $146 billion in 2010. Other federal agencies would administer about $20 billion in additional education-related spending.

“This really marks a new era in federal education spending,” said Edward Kealy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a coalition of 90 education groups.

The bill would increase 2009 fiscal year spending on Title I, a program of specialized classroom efforts to help educate poor children, to $20 billion from about $14.5 billion, and raise spending on education for disabled children to $17 billion from $11 billion.

Those increases respond to longtime demands by teachers unions, school boards and others that Washington fully finance the mandates laid out for states and districts in the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law, and in the main federal law regulating special education.

“We’ve been arguing that the federal government hasn’t been living up to its commitments, but these increases go a substantial way toward meeting them,” said Joel Packer, a lobbyist for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.

Frederick Hess, an education policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, criticized the bill as failing to include mechanisms to encourage districts to bring school budgets in line with property tax revenues, which have plunged with the bursting of the real estate bubble.

“It’s like an alcoholic at the end of the night when the bars close, and the solution is to open the bar for another hour,” Mr. Hess said.

The bill would, for the first time, involve the federal government in a significant fashion in the building and renovation of schools, which has been the responsibility of states and districts. It includes $20 billion for school renovation and modernization, with $14 billion for elementary and secondary schools and $6 billion for higher education. It also includes tax provisions under which the federal government would pay the interest on construction bonds issued by school districts.

Mr. Duncan said the bill’s school renovation provisions would create a “huge number of construction jobs,” because so many school buildings need repairs.

But Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California and the ranking minority member of the House education committee, said, “By putting the federal government in the business of building schools, Democrats may be irrevocably changing the federal government’s role in education in this country.”

In higher education, the bill would increase spending on Pell Grants, the most important federal student aid program, to $27 billion from about $19 billion this year.

“It’s a very good idea to increase Pell Grants in the stimulus,” said Terry Hartle, a senior vice president for public affairs at the American Council on Education, which represents colleges and universities.

But Mr. Hartle said that even he was having difficulty tracking all the new spending.

“A lot of things will go through, and only later will we know exactly what happened,” he said.

Labels: school finance

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

Also check out this policy brief co-authored by Rothstein entitled "Education Accountability Policy in the New Administration"

-Patricia

Commentary
By Richard Rothstein | Ed Week
January 28, 2009

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.

This shift has been most severe for the disadvantaged children the law was designed to help, because they are most at risk of failing to meet the math and reading targets. But they are also most at risk of losing curricular opportunities in other domains. In these other areas, NCLB has widened the "achievement gap."

President Barack Obama has vowed to correct this distortion. He has noted that NCLB "has become so reliant on a standardized-test model that ... subjects like history and social studies have gotten pushed aside. Arts and music time is no longer there. So the child is not having the well-rounded educational experience I benefited from and most in my generation benefited from." We must change No Child Left Behind, he has said, "so that the assessment is one that takes into account all the factors that go into a good education."

Although some Democrats and Republicans want to ignore the law's goal distortion, observers with varying policy perspectives share the new president's view that NCLB requires a radical reconsideration. The Center on Education Policy, headed by Jack Jennings (formerly an aide to Democrats on the House education committee), has publicized the loss of instruction in social studies, science, the arts, and physical education, especially for disadvantaged children. Chester E. Finn Jr. and Diane Ravitch, who served as federal education officials in Republican administrations, complain that present policy means only "top private schools and a few suburban systems will stick with education broadly defined." While rich kids study a wide range of subjects in depth, they write, "their poor peers fill in bubbles on test sheets." There is a "zero sum" problem, Finn and Ravitch say, because "more emphasis on some things ... inevitably mean[s] less attention to others."

Yet public discussion of the law's upcoming reauthorization focuses almost entirely on correcting flaws in math and reading measurement: substituting "growth models" for fixed levels, modifying the 2014 deadline for attaining student proficiency, standardizing state definitions of proficiency, modifying "confidence intervals" in reporting. While these steps may improve the sophistication of math and reading data, none addresses the goal distortion caused by exclusive accountability for basic skills.

Designing accountability tools that require satisfactory performance across a balanced set of outcomes requires a significant federal research-and-development effort, which could build on prior experience. When the National Assessment of Educational Progress was developed in the 1960s, it measured a broad range of cognitive and noncognitive knowledge and skills. NAEP abandoned that breadth when its budget was slashed in the 1970s, however, and never restored it.

To see whether students learned to cooperate, for example, the early NAEP program sent trained observers to sampled schools. In teams of four, 9-year-olds were offered prizes (such as yo-yos) for guessing what object was hidden in a box. Students could ask yes-or-no questions, but all team members had to agree on each question asked. NAEP rated the students on whether they suggested new questions, gave reasons for viewpoints, or otherwise demonstrated cooperative problem-solving skills. It then reported to the nation on the percentage of children capable of cooperative problem-solving.

For teenagers, NAEP assessors provided lists of issues about which young people typically had strong opinions. Students had to collaborate in writing recommendations to resolve them. For 13-year-olds, lists included topics such as whether they should have curfews for getting home, and for 17-year-olds, the age eligibility for voting, drinking, or smoking. NAEP rated students on whether they took clear positions, gave reasons for viewpoints, helped organize internal procedures, and defended another's right to disagree.

Early NAEP understood that teaching civic responsibility involved more than having students memorize historical facts. So in 1969, during the era of the civil rights revolution, the assessment asked teenagers what they felt they should do if they saw black children barred from entering a park. NAEP reported that 82 percent of 13-year-olds and 90 percent of 17-year-olds knew that they should do something constructive, such as tell parents, report it to a civil rights or civil liberties organization, write letters to the newspaper, or take social action such as picketing or leafleting.

The early version of NAEP also assessed 17-year-olds' ability to consider alternative viewpoints, by asking them to state arguments both for and against a heated public issue of the time, such as whether college students should be drafted. It asked 9- and 13-year-olds if something reported in a newspaper might be untrue. It also asked teenagers if they belonged to any nonschool clubs or organizations; interviewers followed up with questions to verify answers' accuracy.

To assess commitment to civil liberties, NAEP asked teenagers if someone should be permitted to say on television that "Russia is better than the United States," that "some races of people are better than others," or that "it is not necessary to believe in God." The assessment reported the discouraging result that only a small minority of the teenagers thought all three statements should be permitted.

The early NAEP program also assessed personal responsibility. Seventeen-year-olds were asked what to do if, when visiting a friend, they noticed her 6-month-old baby was bruised. The correct answer was "suggest that your friend call her baby's doctor." Incorrect choices included "ignore the bruises because they are none of your business." A follow-up prompt said that at a later visit, bruises remain and "you are now suspicious that your friend may have hurt the baby." Students were asked what to do now. The correct choice was "call the local child-health agency and report your suspicions."

Certainly, if school systems were evaluated by such results, not simply by math and reading scores, incentives would shift. National reporting of low scores on the civil liberties questions, for example, could spur demands that schools do a better job on citizenship; then, the incentive to drop cooperative learning in favor of test prep in math and reading would diminish.

Designing a new accountability system will take time and care, because the problems are daunting. Observations of student behavior are not as reliable as standardized tests of basic skills, so we will have to accept that it is better to imperfectly measure a broad set of outcomes than to perfectly measure a narrow set. We will have to resolve contradictory national convictions that schools should teach citizenship and character, but not inquire about students' (and parents') personal opinions. To avoid new distortions, we'll need to make tough decisions about how to weight the measurement of the many goals of education.

The time to start on these difficult tasks is now, but the new administration won't have to begin with a blank slate. Looking back at the early National Assessment of Educational Progress can start us on a better path.


Richard Rothstein (riroth@epi.org) is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute. This article summarizes an argument from his recent book, co-written with Rebecca Jacobsen and Tamara Wilder, Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (Teachers College Press).

Labels: accountability

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

Steve Taylor | Rio Grande Guardian
28 January 2009

Texas Higher Education Commissioner Raymund A. Paredes spoke at a Texas Association of Mexican American Chambers of Commerce reception on Tuesday evening.

AUSTIN, January 28 - Texas Higher Education Commissioner Raymund A. Paredes says he likes the emphasis Gov. Rick Perry placed on college affordability in his State of the State address on Tuesday.

“Although the economic circumstances are dire, as the governor indicated in his State of the State address, we should still invest in higher education,” Paredes said Tuesday evening.

Paredes made his remarks at a reception hosted by Direct Energy at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Austin. The reception was held in conjunction with a legislative dinner being hosted by the Texas Association of Mexican American Chambers of Commerce.

“We are at a point now where most of the kids that are coming up through K thru 12 and are likely to go to college are Latino and they are poor,” Paredes told the audience. “Over 70 percent of the college age students that will be considering attending community colleges and universities over the next ten to 15 years will be Latino and they will be poor.”

Paredes added: “We cannot build the economy we want in Texas; we cannot sustain the economic progress we have made in Texas over the past ten years unless we support those kids.”

In his State of the State address, Perry proposed increased funding for the Texas Grant Program. He noted that the program, which has disbursed almost $1.5 billion in tuition and fees to over 161,000 students, had “opened the door” for traditionally underserved Texans.

“I like this approach because it not only knocks down a barrier between hard working students and the success they desire, it also keeps our college classrooms supplied with students who are motivated and prepared to succeed,” Perry said.

State Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, author of the bill that set up the Texas Grant Program, has long complained that the program is being under-funded.

In his State of the State address, Perry also proposed freezing a student’s college tuition rates for four years at the level they pay as an entering freshman. “This will help Texas families plan while giving students another incentive to finish on time,” Perry said.

Paredes said he liked what he heard in the State of the State address.

“Higher education has to be among our highest priorities. Even in tough economic situations we have to invest in the higher education of our young people,” Paredes told the TAMACC audience. “The Coordinating Board has established as its highest priority increases in funding for financial aid programs for our universities and our community colleges.”

Paredes pointed out that 70 percent of Latino kids that go to university start off in community colleges. “So, we have to make sure that funding is available for students when they go to community colleges and to help them defer or pay for their expenses and help them finish a community college type education program or help them transfer to a university,” he said.

Paredes then made a heartfelt plea for TAMACC members and supporters to get behind legislative efforts to make college more accessible and affordable.

“We will have some tough discussions this session about how we allocate limited funds. I strongly urge all of you to support financial aid. The Governor said this morning that he would support substantial increases in financial aid for our youngsters in Texas. Please support higher levels of funding for the students. We cannot have a prosperous future in Texas unless we make that investment in all our needy students but particularly the large percentage that will be Latino students,” Paredes said.

Asked afterwards to elaborate on his thoughts about the state of higher education in Texas, Paredes told the Guardian how important community colleges are.

“It is very important that state leaders recognize that community colleges are the lynchpin of educational attainment in Texas. They serve as the most appropriate point of entry for students of all backgrounds, particularly poor students who don’t have the resources to attend university so we need to fund community colleges at higher levels,” Paredes said.

“Also, community colleges have done a wonderful job in Texas of holding down the costs and remaining accessible. I think they are at the breaking point. If we do not fund them at higher levels they are going to have to find resources somewhere and that likely will be in tuition and fees.”

Asked if he felt enough lawmakers and state leaders realize the importance of community colleges, Paredes said: “I do not know if people are as thoroughly informed as they need to be but I am noticing a shift. They are absolutely vital to the well being of Texas.”

Paredes also hammered home the point about investing in higher education even in tough economic times.

“Despite the fact that we live in a tough budgetary environment we still need to invest in the future of Texas and there is no more vital issue for the future of Texas than higher education. We need to improve educational attainment and make our young people competitive in a global economy,” Paredes said.

“When you consider the demographics of Texas, that 70 percent of the growth will be in the Latino community and most of the youngsters are poor we have to invest in them. We have to give them the resources they need to go to college.”

Paredes said that both the state and students have to live up to their commitments.

“We need to send a message to our young people that if we are going to invest money in you, you expect you to perform at high levels. There’s got to be accountability on both sides. The state needs to be accountable in investing in its young people and young people need to know that they have to work hard,” Paredes said.

The Higher Education Coordinating Board has achieved “dramatic improvements” in its Closing the Gaps goal, Paredes added. “College rates are going up, completion rates are going up. Among Latinos, we have seen a 50 percent increase in attendance and completion rates. We are making progress. We can go to the legislature and say, yes, we are asking for more money but we are getting better results with the money you provided us,” he said.


© Copyright of the Rio Grande Guardian, www.riograndeguardian.com, Melinda Barrera, Publisher. All rights reserved.

Labels: community colleges

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:26 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out the full report. Pay close attention to the language used on how to provide youth, especially minority, with academic preparation for college. Curious to what extent this is a race-conscious and equitable plan.

-Patricia

By Robin Chait, Andrea Venezia | Center for American Progress
January 27, 2009

Our society is moving toward a model of preparing all students for some kind of education and training after high school. That is what parents want for their children, what students say they want for themselves, and what analysts and policymakers at all levels believe is needed for success in a global economy. The benefits to the individual are clear—college graduates earn more money, have better career opportunities, engage in greater civic participation, and have a higher overall quality of life. The average annual income for a high school degree in 2006 was $30,072, an associate’s degree was $39,846, and a bachelor’s degree $56,897. Moreover, the advantages of college education compared to a high school degree have widened over the last 60 years, although they have leveled off more recently.

We know that students are getting the message that college pays off. In 2003-04, about 69 percent of high school seniors expected to attain a bachelor’s degree or higher, and another 18 percent expected to complete some postsecondary education. College enrollment rates increased from 49 percent in 1972 to 69 percent in 2005. Yet once students arrive in college, they are often not ready to take college-level classes. College remediation rates are high—estimates range from a little over a quarter to about a third for all freshmen, and from 42 percent to 60 percent for freshmen at two-year institutions.

College completion rates are also stagnant and students are taking longer to complete their degrees. About 83 percent of high school graduates enroll in some form of postsecondary education, but only about 52 percent of students complete their degrees. Further, a very small proportion of students complete a degree in four years—“among students starting at ‘four-year’ institutions, only 34 percent finish a B.A. in four years, 64 percent within six years, and 69 percent within eight and a half years.” Stagnant college completion rates and increasing time to complete college degrees are likely related, since students who are in school for long periods of time are less likely to graduate.

High rates of remediation, stagnant rates of college completion, and more time to degree completion suggest that many students are not fully ready to succeed academically in college. And weak academic preparation is a growing concern in the research and policy communities.

Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute has estimated that only 34 percent of all students who entered ninth grade in 2002 were prepared for college when they graduated high school. He defines college readiness as graduating with a regular diploma, having completed a minimum set of course requirements (four years of English, three years of math, and two years each of natural science, social science, and a foreign language), and being able to read at the basic level or above on the National Assessment of Education Progress reading assessment.

Rates of academic preparation are even lower for low-income students. Susan Goldberger of Jobs for the Future found in an analysis of data from the National Education Longitudinal Study that “only 21 percent of high school graduates from the lowest economic quintile are adequately prepared for college-level work (somewhat, very, or highly prepared), compared to 54 percent of graduates from the middle and upper levels.” Moreover, students with better academic preparation have higher rates of degree completion. Approximately 78 percent of students who are highly prepared for college complete their degree, compared with 31 percent of students who are not prepared and 46 percent who are minimally prepared.

While these numbers are of great concern, there is still a lack of consensus among researchers and policymakers about what it means to be prepared for college. Are strong academics enough? What role do financial and social capital play? How can federal and state policy help promote academic rigor and student preparation? In this report, we explore these questions in detail and look closely at what we know about postsecondary readiness and success; what is being done to prepare students for college at the federal, state, and local levels; and how well these efforts are working. This report draws on this analysis to outline a more expansive role for federal and state policy to improve preparation and readiness.

Federal policy could play an important role in communicating the need for all students to prepare for college and providing the public with information about what that means. It could also build states’ capacity to develop and measure students’ college readiness by supporting a pilot state program to develop and validate college readiness standards within the reauthorized NCLB/ESEA. Finally, the federal government should invest in research and development to support programs that align secondary and postsecondary education and improve students’ preparation for college; provide funding to improve academic preparation in struggling high schools; and improve data collection and analysis and require public reporting.

States could undertake a range of initiatives to ensure that their policies are translated into changes in curricula and instruction and better outcomes for students. States should develop better student support policies and align them with policies to increase academic rigor, support the development and evaluation of high school models that prepare all students for college, improve data systems to better assess where students are and where they need to be, and monitor and evaluate the implementation of all of these state policies to identify inconsistencies, implementation concerns, and needs for technical assistance.

There are many ways to think about postsecondary readiness. We define it as a student’s ability to complete a transfer-level course in core subject areas at a two- or four-year postsecondary institution with a C or better and move on to the next course in the sequence without remediation. We do not believe that one size fits all, but we do think that there are many academic pathways and instructional approaches that are compatible with postsecondary preparation, and that all students must have the opportunity to prepare for a two-year or four-year degree or credential. The terms postsecondary education, college, and higher education are used interchangeably in this paper to mean some kind of formal education or training after high school in a postsecondary institution that leads to a credential or degree.

This paper reviews the research and makes the case for a definition that includes academic rigor, grades, specific academic skills that students will need to be successful in a college-level course, and “college knowledge”—knowledge about how to apply, enroll, and succeed in a college environment. It may be difficult to come up with objective measures for all these aspects of college readiness, but it is important to consider them all in defining readiness and in helping students meet a threshold of it.

Labels: college readiness, pathways

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

Wow, this is extremely low. Less than 1 percent of transfers to on to the UC System and less than 3 percent of all transfers go on to four year institutions at all.

-Patricia

All three of the state's public college systems form a task force to help smooth the way for students seeking a bachelor's degree.

By Gale Holland
February 5, 2009

Leaders of California's public college and university systems announced Wednesday that they are launching a joint task force to boost the number of community college students who transfer to the state's four-year universities.

Only 14,000 of the 2.7 million students enrolled in the state's 110 community colleges transfer to University of California campuses, and 55,000 others move on to California State University campuses.

Although many community college students are seeking job skills or enrichment rather than a university degree, experts say the transfer path is riddled with procedural potholes even for those determined to use a two-year campus as a launching pad to further education. California ranks 39th among states in the percentage of bachelor's degrees awarded to high school graduates after six years, according to the public universities.

"Expanding the opportunity for a four-year education is a critical need for California," UC President Mark Yudof told a meeting of the Board of Regents in San Francisco. "I believe we need to be actively involved, working in the colleges themselves, and in partnership with the other institutions of higher education, to encourage students to pursue transfer options and understand that it is achievable and affordable."

All three of the state's public college systems will participate equally in the transfer task force.

Yudof, California State University Chancellor Charles Reed and California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott, in a joint statement, said improving transfer rates would reduce the costs of obtaining a four-year degree and thus expand opportunities for underrepresented and educationally disadvantaged students, who often prefer to begin their college education close to home.

Chancellor Mark Drummond of the Los Angeles Community College District said he welcomed the initiative but added that it is a complicated process, and that it will take major statewide policy shifts to attack the problem.

Recent efforts have improved transfer rates for California students, but the growth has been slow.

Morgan Lynn, executive vice chancellor of California Community Colleges, said the task force's efforts would include research "to see what works and doesn't work" in improving transfer rates.

"Our goal for students is to ensure that when they arrive at the CSU, they have the tools, information and support they need to be successful in achieving a baccalaureate degree," Reed said in a statement. "A plan developed by the three segments holds great promise."

Labels: California, community colleges

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:57 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out the full report.

-Patricia

By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: February 4, 2009

More than 15 percent of the three million students who graduated from public high schools last year passed at least one Advanced Placement exam, the College Board said Wednesday, but African-American students were still far less likely to have passed, or to even have taken, an A.P. exam than white, Hispanic or Asian students.

In its fifth annual report on its A.P. program, the College Board said the program was growing steadily. More than 460,000 students, or 15.2 percent, passed an A.P. exam last year, compared with 14.1 percent in 2007 and 12.2 percent five years ago.

But the program is not spreading evenly across the nation. In Mississippi and Louisiana, fewer than 4 percent of high school graduates passed an A.P. exam last year, and in 17 other states, fewer than 10 percent passed one.

At the other end of the spectrum, in Maryland and New York, the states with the most active Advanced Placement programs, more than 23 percent of high school graduates passed an exam. And California, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Virginia also had at least one in five graduates pass an A.P. exam last year.

The A.P. program offers high school students the chance to do college-level work in dozens of subjects and, if they pass the exams, to receive college credit at many universities. The exams are marked on a scale of one to five, with a three needed to pass.

But as in most aspects of American education, troubling ethnic gaps remain. African-Americans are seriously underrepresented in the A.P. program, and no state has yet closed that gap, said Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board.

While 14 percent of last year’s high school graduates were black, they made up only 8 percent of those taking A.P. exams — and only 4 percent of those with passing scores. White students, at 63 percent of graduates, and Hispanics, at 15 percent, were nearly proportionately represented in the A.P. population. Asian students were overrepresented, making up 5 percent of graduates, but 10 percent of those taking A.P. exams.

Low-income students made up 17 percent of those who took A.P. exams last year, up from 16.2 percent in 2007, the report said.

This year, given the recession, Mr. Caperton stressed the economic benefits of the program.

“In these times of economic distress, as family budgets are squeezed and financial aid resources are spread thin, rigorous courses like A.P. that prepare students for the demands of college and foster an increased likelihood of on-time graduation can be a very valuable resource for families,” he said.

With a minority graduating from college in four years, A.P. credits can cut college costs by bolstering on-time graduation. For an out-of-state student at a public four-year university, the extra cost of taking six years to complete an undergraduate degree averages more than $58,000, the College Board said, while even five years for an in-state student costs an extra $18,000.

Labels: Advanced Placement courses, race

posted by Patricia Lopez at 7:38 AM 0 comments Links to this post

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Mexican-American pediatric surgeon will become the nation's first Hispanic to preside over a major university system when Dr. Francisco Cigarroa takes the helm at the University of Texas System, which faces financial woes and complaints about diversity.

Cigarroa, a 51-year-old pediatric transplant surgeon from Laredo, looks at his new job as the system's new chancellor starting Monday as an opportunity to exceed expectations.

"Challenges really don't dissuade me from pursuing important opportunities," Cigarroa told The Associated Press. "If you're an optimist, you see opportunities, and that's the way I've been brought up."

Cigarroa, as the chief executive officer of the UT System, will help administer an $11.5 billion operating budget and preside over 15 campuses with more than 194,000 students.

He faces complaints about soaring tuition costs, a growing battle over admissions policies and a hurricane-ravaged medical school and health center in Galveston.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Dallas | Mexico | Utah | San Antonio | Hispanic | Hurricane Ike | Yale | Galveston | University of Texas Medical Branch | Nuevo Laredo | UT-Austin | University of Texas System | UT Southwestern Medical Center | UT System | D-Laredo | Dr. Francisco Cigarroa

To address those issues, the outgoing president of the UT Health Sciences Center in San Antonio will have to enter an arena far dicier than medicine: politics. The state Legislature granted school officials the power to raise tuition rates in 2003, but has been pressuring the school system to stop increases.

Cigarroa has refused to specify his views on tuition restraints but said school UT officials and legislators have to work together to resolve the issue.

He's more passionate about the prospect of changing admissions policies, which currently dictate automatic entry to state universities for students who graduate in the top 10% of their high school class.

UT wants the policy relaxed so it can have more say about who gets in the door. At UT-Austin, more than 80% of the Texas freshmen gained admission though the top 10% provision.

Cigarroa said the system could keep or even increase diversity in the student body even if the top 10% law is modified or eliminated.

"I think we can find an appropriate balance where universities not only look at the top 10%, but they also look at those wonderfully competitive students who may have not made the top 10% but have done something incredibly special," Cigarroa said.

Cigarroa also must deal with the future of University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, which suffered $1 billion in damage from Hurricane Ike.

Cigarroa said revitalizing the facility would be a top priority but he couldn't say what its "appropriate size" would be.

One of nine children born to a doctor and a disciplinarian mother in Laredo, Cigarroa recalls a childhood filled with trips to his grandparents across the border in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. He frequently visits his mother-in-law there.

The Yale graduate received his medical degree, with highest honors, from UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. His surgical prowess has earned him the nickname "manos de oro," or "golden hands."

State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, a longtime family friend, called Cigarroa a "true renaissance man" who represented the changing demographics of Texas.

"Imagine the kind of role model he'll be for young students," she said. "Imagine how many parents will look at him proudly."
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:44 AM 0 comments Links to this post

It's not just alleged terrorists who are suffering from our inhumane treatment of detainees. It's also children.

Courtney E. Martin | February 2, 2009 | web only

When President Barack Obama made it his first act in office to shut down Guantánamo Bay prison, he effectively ended one shameful chapter in our country's embarrassingly large book of human-rights abuses. It was not so much redemption as a reminder that this country has a long, long way to go when it comes to detention, due process, and the Geneva Convention. It's not just alleged terrorists that are suffering from our inhumane treatment. It's also children.

The United States is currently holding 30,000 immigrants in detention while they await hearings. The country operates three family immigrant detention centers, the most notorious of which is the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, a former prison currently under the private management of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). The 600-bed center detains families who are awaiting asylum or immigration hearings, a major departure from past federal policy. Pre-September 11, families charged with immigration violations (which are not criminal violations) or who came to the country asking for asylum were generally allowed to live independently as long as they agreed to attend a hearing.

The transition from "catch and release" to "catch and detain" has been riddled with controversy. Immigrant detention became a boom business under the Bush administration, which supplied the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency's (ICE) $1 billion-plus detention budget. Private contractors get $200 a head per day for family detention and lobbied hard for the policy shift: Mother Jones reports that "in 2004, when Congress passed legislation authorizing ICE to triple the number of immigrant detention beds, CCA's lobbying expenditures reached $3 million; since then, it has spent an additional $7 million on lobbyists."

The bottom line is not just economic, however. Children and families have suffered inexcusable indignities under this new policy, which treats them like convicted criminals instead of asylum-seekers and potential citizens. Despite the fact that myriad human rights and community groups -- such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Immigration Studies -- have condemned the practice of detaining children in prison-like environments, ICE is seeking to open three new family detention centers, doubling its capacity. As of this writing, ICE still hasn't released the names of the winning contractors and/or locations, but the announcement is expected to be made sometime this year with the new facilities scheduled to open in 2010.

Imagine this: 7- and 8-year-old children dressed in hospital scrubs, savoring the last few minutes of their one hour of recreation time a day before they are brought back to their family cells, the heavy metal door closing them in for another painfully boring stint. No toys allowed. This nightmare was a reality for too many children when Hutto first opened in 2006. The Women's Refugee Commission, a New York-based nonprofit that conducted a study in collaboration with the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, found that "immigration detention facilities for families in this country may be re-traumatizing families and their children, many of whom are seeking asylum from persecution in their home countries." The commission reports that on a visit to the facility, one child slipped a note into the hand of an outside visitor that said, "Help us and ask us questions."


Thanks to lawsuits against CCA, children can now wear pajamas, play, and attend classes during the day, and pregnant women are receiving some neonatal care, but the spirit of incarceration continues. Immigration officials claim that family detention is necessary in order to prevent immigrants and asylum-seekers from fleeing the country. However, even ICE admits that alternatives -- like its own pilot program in 2004 where specialists were assigned a limited caseload of detainees whom they monitored using home visits and telephone calls -- have a 94 percent appearance rate overall.

Family detention centers may provide a meager 6 percent reduction in flight risk, but this country pays a far bigger price in lost integrity. We lock up children and their families -- many of whom have suffered economic deprivation, exploitation, and oftentimes, domestic and sexual abuse -- before they've even had a hearing as to their immigration status.

Renee Feltz, a multimedia investigative journalist based in New York City who co-runs a project on the business of immigrant detention, reports that waiting in such unbearable conditions often brings immigrants -- especially women with children -- to their knees. "Many of the people we talked to are so miserable in these facilities that they will eventually agree to being deported even if they think they have a legitimate claim to asylum," Feltz says. "They just want to get out as fast as possible."

In this way, one of the first lessons we teach potential new citizens about America is one of cruel, Orwellian hypocrisy. You must earn your freedom, if at all, via imprisonment. Dignity comes only by bearing undignified conditions. The last administration's obsession with family values is glaringly absent from this Civics 101 course. We welcome children who have heard tall tales of the abundance and liberty of America with rehabbed cells and 10 minutes to wolf down an inadequate lunch of cheap starches on a prison tray.

First and foremost, immigrant family detention must stop. On Jan. 21, Grassroots Leadership, a Southern community organizing group, launched a campaign with this goal, calling it 100 Actions in 100 Days. Given the new administration, hope for immigration reform, and a renewed focus on addressing corporate corruption, it's an opportune time to reactivate the country around this issue.

But there's an even bigger picture here that we must not lose sight of. Immigrant detention, on the whole, is riddled with corruption, inefficiencies, and indignities. Comprehensive immigration reform is a vital component of our country's next few years of healing and reform.

And an even bigger picture still: We live in a society that has bought blindly into the privatization and proliferation of our prisons. It's not so surprising that we force immigrant children to live in cells and wear hospital garb when you consider the national tendency toward incarceration, racism, and xenophobia.

We've got a lot to heal. Let's start by abolishing family detention centers immediately.

Labels: detention centers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 12:07 AM 0 comments Links to this post

By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY
The poor economy is ratcheting up anxieties about college affordability at a time when more Americans than ever say a college degree is essential to success, a report says today.

Those findings, based on a survey of 1,009 Americans in late December, are hardly mind-boggling, but they represent dramatic shifts in public attitude in a short period of time:

•55% in 2008 said a college degree is necessary vs. 31% in 2000.

•43% in 2008 said there are many ways to succeed without college vs. 67% in 2000.

•67% in 2008 said most people who are qualified for college don't have the opportunity to attend vs. 47% in 2000.

"These changes are quick given what we usually see in public opinion (polling)," says John Immerwahr, senior research fellow for Public Agenda, a New York-based non-profit that has been tracking attitudes about higher education since 1993. It conducted this survey with the National Center on Public Policy and Higher Education, a non-profit in San Jose that promotes access.

National Center president Patrick Callan says the survey points to "a growing sense of unfairness" and anxiety about the economy and American society. "This is not just about higher education, but it's very important that higher education not be seen as (making) it worse."

Terry Hartle of the non-profit American Council on Education, an umbrella group for colleges and universities, says perceptions may or may not reflect reality, but they matter because they drive behavior.

"If any student fails to enroll because they fear college is unaffordable, it's a tragedy," he says.

Labels: college admissions

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:58 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out the full report

-Patricia

By Raegen Miller, Robin Chait | American Progress
December 2, 2008

In recent years education reformers have focused a great deal of attention on strategies for enhancing teacher quality. This attention makes sense, as a growing body of evidence points to the overriding importance of teachers in promoting student achievement. On average, students with a teacher in the top quartile of the talent pool achieve at levels corresponding to an additional two or three months of instruction per year, compared with peers who have a teacher in the bottom quartile.

Putting these numbers in context, this quality differential represents well over a third of the “achievement gap” between students from low-income families and those from families with higher incomes. Thus, consistent assignment to high-quality teachers can substantially lower the barriers to realizing academic success imposed by poverty. In contrast, class size reduction, a popular and expensive policy option, shows much less promise, if any, for addressing achievement gaps.

Because teacher quality is so critical to students’ success in school, gross inequity in the distribution of highly effective teachers should trouble policymakers. If students attending high-poverty schools are far less likely to be assigned effective teachers than students living in more affluent communities, then it would be a pressing matter to increase access to such teachers for economically disadvantaged students. Progress on this issue requires a careful look at the composition and dynamics of the teaching workforce.

A school’s teaching staff is not static. Teachers come and go, and the patterns of their movements between schools and into and out of the profession have undergone radical changes over the past 50 years. Researchers have begun to get a grip on these patterns and their relationship to teacher quality. This report focuses on three pieces of the puzzle: the distribution of teacher quality, teacher turnover, and tenure policies. In other words, who teaches where, who stays and who leaves, and how do tenure policies affect the decisions of teachers and the school districts that employ them?

The report is organized as follows. The first section explains how teacher quality can be measured. The very idea that teacher quality can be measured has its detractors. Some argue, on principle, that teaching is an art or a kind of sacred act that cannot be measured in any way that respects the scope or importance of the work. This point of view, however, does not hold much water in the globally competitive economy, where students need well-developed cognitive skills and where teachers, who are meant to help students develop these skills, absorb the majority of spending on public education. Historically, however, the business of measuring teacher quality has been problematic. The characteristics of teachers that are tracked most carefully are those traditionally important in hiring decisions and compensation systems (e.g., academic major, advanced degrees, years of experience). The term “qualifications” is adopted here to refer to these characteristics, which one estimate finds together explain only about 3 percent of the variation in student achievement. The rise of information technology and the recent boom in state-sponsored achievement tests, largely in response to accountability programs, have afforded researchers and policymakers access to better measures of teacher quality. These so-called “value-added” measures of teacher effectiveness have important limitations, but they hold promise for informing policies that address any inequitable distribution of effective teachers.

The second section explores the distribution of teacher quality. Although qualifications explain only a few percent of the variation observed in student achievement, they provide a reasonable basis for documenting systematic inequity in the distribution of teacher quality. Furthermore, qualifications will remain important in hiring decisions and compensation systems for the foreseeable future. An abundance of evidence suggests that the qualifications of teachers differ, on average, between high-poverty and low-poverty schools. These differences tilt in the expected direction. For example, students in high-poverty schools are less likely than students in low-poverty schools to be assigned a teacher deemed “highly qualified” under the provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act.

The third section examines teacher turnover. The term turnover encompasses mobility—teachers leaving one school for another—and attrition, which is defined as teachers leaving the classroom to take up other professional responsibilities, inside or outside of education, or to spend more time with their families. Mobility and attrition are con- founded by teachers returning to the classroom after several years away, a group that includes up to a fourth of newly hired teachers. Some turnover is inevitable; some is desirable. Chronically ineffective teachers should seek employment elsewhere. Instead of leaving the profession, however, such teachers may simply seek a school where their weak performance is less conspicuous. Attrition and mobility of effective teachers exacerbate inequity in the distribution of teacher quality.

The fourth section examines tenure, a term denoting the contractual or statutory job protections conferred on teachers who have completed a provisional phase of employment. Once tenured, a teacher’s employment may only be terminated for cause, and only after prescribed due process procedures have been followed. Tenure began as a countermeasure to various forms of employment discrimination, but successive waves of civil rights legislation have largely usurped this role. This section surveys what little is known about how tenure policies affect the distribution of teacher quality.

The last section concludes the paper by making the case that tenure embodies an important policy lever that ought to be explored. Right now, a good deal of evidence suggests that earning tenure is unrelated to what we value in teachers: their performance in the classroom. In particular, whether teachers can further student achievement is almost completely unrelated to the tenure decision. Given the interplay between teacher turnover, tenure policies, and the distribution of teacher quality, it is worth discussing what role changes in tenure policy could play in efforts to afford low-income students more access to effective teachers.

Labels: teacher shortage

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:54 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 4, 2009

In his grimmest State of Education address yet, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell pointed to a "precarious" school system all but collapsing under the weight of California's fiscal crisis.

Schools expect to lose $10 billion this year alone, resulting in teacher layoffs, soaring class sizes and fewer librarians and nurses, O'Connell said in his sixth annual overview of education.

"These cuts are nothing short of breathtaking," he said, singling out Hayward Unified School District, which plans to lay off 170 of its 1,100 teachers and raise elementary class sizes from 20 to 32 students.

Other districts around the state are making similar cuts, including Lake Elsinore Unified in Riverside County, where "schools are putting duct tape over light switches to save on electricity," he said.

To ease the burden, O'Connell said his Department of Education will end compliance visits to districts for at least a year. The visits try to ensure that tax money is properly spent on numerous state-mandated programs - from after-school classes to curriculum for gifted students.

The moratorium essentially gives districts a green light to spend scarce dollars as they wish.

"During these challenging times I want districts and schools to focus every ounce of energy they have on improving student achievement, not on preparing for program audits," O'Connell said.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed making such flexibility permanent and legal. While districts' officials applaud the move, education groups that benefit from the programs have criticized it.

Meanwhile, the fiscal crisis comes at a time when students are not only needier - the numbers of homeless students and those qualifying for subsidized lunch have soared - but when more is demanded of them academically, O'Connell said.

Nearly 6.3 million students are enrolled statewide, with about 45 percent scoring "proficient" on California's difficult English and math exams.

The proficiency rate must grow to about 55 percent this school year under the federal No Child Left Behind education act, or schools may face corrective action.

O'Connell also cited positive trends: 30 percent fewer students are scoring in the bottom tiers of achievement since 2002; 18 percent more schools hit test-score targets between 2007 and 2008; and more students are taking college entrance exams than ever.

But he warned that California is destined for a "two-tiered system of education" in which the students who need the most help will fall even further behind unless the state finds a way to better fund public education. As an example, he said that five years after Maryland increased spending by $2,500 per pupil, the state reading and math scores soared.

Schwarzenegger's newly appointed education adviser, Glen Thomas, responded with a rosier view of California's $41 billion state school budget.

"The governor has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect education from feeling the full effects of the state's $42 billion budget deficit," he said.

Thomas said the governor's proposal gives schools billions of dollars more than they are entitled to under Proposition 98, the law setting a minimum school-funding guarantee.

O'Connell and other education advocates say the opposite is true, and that Schwarzenegger is proposing a fiscal calculation that would rob the schools of billions of dollars they are entitled to.

The dispute mirrors the stalemate in Sacramento, as lawmakers and the governor continue negotiating over how to close the state's budget gap - estimated at $42 billion over the next 17 months.

In his address, O'Connell said he is hopeful that the federal stimulus package will bring billions of dollars to jump-start stalled school construction projects in California, and that he will sponsor legislation to place a large school construction bond on the next statewide ballot.

He said he also supports legislation to lower the threshold for passing local parcel taxes for schools, from two-thirds voter approval to 55 percent.

Such efforts have failed in the past.

E-mail Nanette Asimov at nasimov@sfchronicle.com.

Labels: budget cuts, California

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

Check out the full report

-Patricia

By ANGELA WARD
Thursday, January 08, 2009

A new report ranks Texas at or near the bottom in several key indicators of children's health.

However, Gregg County Health Department Director Dr. Lewis Browne said he believes local availability of health care services is generally high.

"We've got pretty good access to medical services here," Browne said. "There are clinics that offer prenatal services based on income and free vaccinations to all county residents."

Browne said he thinks one of the reasons Texas consistently rates so poorly in national children's health survey is primarily because of the conditions in the southernmost parts of the state. In that region, a shortage of physicians combines with language barriers and economic problems to cause a lack of access to necessary medical care.

"Some women are simply unaware of what services are available when they're pregnant," Browne said. "In other cases, they just don't put a priority on prenatal care."

One thing that has increased the access to health care in Gregg County within recent years has been the addition of public transportation within Longview, he said. Before the beginning of the bus system in 2003, lack of transportation caused many families to be unable to take advantage of available health care options.

The report, compiled by Texans Care for Children, said children in Texas are more likely than children in any other state to go without health insurance, become pregnant as teens and grow up to enter the correctional system.

Christine Sinatra, communications director for the organization, said she hopes the report leads to state lawmakers increasing their investment in services that benefit children. The report focuses on a large number of factors that affect the overall well-being of children; not just health care issues, but also education and poverty levels.

"We haven't invested in our children the way we should, and that shows up in a number of factors, from infant mortality to the high school drop out rate," Sinatra said.

Texas has slipped from ninth to 21st in infant survival rates in the past five years, she said. However, Texas has advanced from 50th to 22nd nationally in immunizations.

On the Net: See the full report at www.texanscareforchildren.org/

Labels: health care

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:27 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Check out the full report

-Patricia

February 4, 2009
Contact: Michelle Mittelstadt
202-266-1910
mmittelstadt@migrationpolicy.org

Report: ICE Fugitive Operations Program Billed as Having Explicit National Security Focus Is Missing its Enforcement Mark

WASHINGTON — The federal fugitive operations program established in 2003 to locate, apprehend and remove fugitive aliens who pose a threat to the community has instead focused chiefly on arresting unauthorized immigrants without criminal convictions, according to a Migration Policy Institute report issued today.

The report, Collateral Damage: An Examination of ICE’s Fugitive Operations Program, found that 73 percent of the nearly 97,000 people arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fugitive operations teams between the program’s inception in 2003 and early 2008 were unauthorized immigrants without criminal records.

Despite the National Fugitive Operations Program’s mandate to apprehend dangerous fugitives, arrests of fugitive aliens with criminal convictions have represented a steadily declining share of total arrests by the teams, accounting for just 9 percent of total arrests in 2007, down from 32 percent in 2003, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s own estimates.

The National Fugitive Operations Program has experienced greater growth than any other DHS immigration enforcement program — its budget rising from $9 million in 2003 to $218 million last year. In its first five years, the program has received more than $625 million. Yet ICE estimated last October that 557,762 fugitive aliens remain in the United States.

“The National Fugitive Operations Program has not delivered on its promise to find and remove dangerous fugitives. The evidence suggests that this is a case of ‘mission drift,’ in which the program has used public funding intended for one purpose for something entirely different: Apprehending non-violent non-fugitives — who constitute the easiest targets,” said MPI Non-resident Fellow Michael Wishnie, a Clinical Professor at Yale Law School and co-author of the report.

While the approximately 100 fugitive operations teams (up from eight in 2003) are supposed to arrest fugitive aliens — i.e. those with outstanding deportation, exclusion or removal orders, or those who have failed to report to the Department of Homeland Security as ordered — fully 40 percent of those arrested in 2007 had no outstanding removal order (known as ordinary status violators).

The arrests of ordinary status violators have increased since ICE in 2006 increased the quota for each seven-person fugitive operations teams from 125 arrests annually to 1,000.

Said Muzaffar Chishti, Director of MPI’s Office at New York University School of Law: “It is troubling that a program billed as having an explicit national security focus instead appears to be aimed mainly at arresting non-criminal unauthorized immigrants through the use of SWAT-like operations — typically in residential settings — that increase the risks to law enforcement personnel and civilians alike, alienate communities and misdirect scarce personnel resources."

A series of ICE memos obtained by the Immigration Justice Clinic at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, which were released today, illustrate the 2006 policy shift that de-emphasized the focus on high-priority targets in favor of increased arrests.

“ICE has created tremendous bureaucratic incentives for fugitive operation teams to abandon focus on high-priority targets in favor of a shotgun approach of undisciplined home raids. ICE’s home raids have primarily led to the arrests of individuals who posed no risk to society and have come at a significant cost to immigrant families and to ICE’s own enforcement priorities,” said Cardozo law professor Peter L. Markowitz, who directs the Immigration Justice Clinic and represented plaintiffs in the FOIA lawsuit.

The MPI report offers a series of recommendations, including:

* The 1,000-person annual arrest quota per team should be replaced with a system that prioritizes the arrest of dangerous fugitives over all other arrests. And the arrest priority system should be re-ordered to reflect that individuals with no criminal history or with in absentia removal orders should be designated the lowest priority.
* Fugitive operations teams should approach only targeted houses and persons.
* ICE should redeploy resources when the teams are unable to identify or pursue dangerous fugitives.
* ICE should develop a standard operating procedure addressing constitutional and humanitarian concerns that arise during fugitive operations team enforcement actions. All team agents should be required to undergo comprehensive training in accordance with this procedure, in addition to their basic law-enforcement training.
* Substantial National Fugitive Operations Team resources should be directed at improving the often error-ridden database from which information about fugitive aliens is drawn.

The report is available online at: www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/NFOP_Feb09.pdf

Labels: immigration

posted by Patricia Lopez at 11:17 PM 0 comments Links to this post

From the Los Angeles Times
L.A. teachers' union calls for boycott of testing

Axing 'periodic assessments' would save money, UTLA says. But district leaders want teachers to give the exams, which a Times analysis suggests are boosting scores in algebra and English.

By Howard Blume

January 28, 2009

The Los Angeles teachers union and the city's school district are battling over a district practice that, a Times' analysis suggests, contributes to higher scores on state tests.

The practice is "periodic assessments," a bureaucratic name for exams administered by the Los Angeles Unified School District. The goal is to give teachers insight into what students need to learn while there remains time in the current school year to adjust instruction.The union Tuesday directed teachers to refuse to give them to students on the grounds that the tests are costly and counterproductive.

But there could be a downside.

The local exams, given three or four times a year at secondary schools, appear to be boosting state scores in 10th-grade English and Algebra 1 -- the two subjects examined by The Times -- and therefore perhaps other subjects as well.

The district tests, which have gradually permeated most core academic subjects and most grade levels, have become central to a debate over the proliferation of testing, whether it interrupts instruction and can narrow the depth and breadth of what's taught. The philosophical dispute sharpened this week amid protracted, stalled negotiations over a teachers contract and the need to slash millions to address an ongoing budget crisis.

Axing these district assessments would spare jobs by saving millions of dollars -- and would improve instruction at the same time, said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles.

The union's call for a boycott of the tests has emerged as an early trial for new Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, who took over Jan. 1.

Cortines asserted that the assessments are part of teachers' assigned duties -- they are not optional. He also said he has and will amend aspects of the tests that need fixing. But he won't toss them out because, he said, they have contributed strongly to rising performance on the state's own annual tests.

He may be right, based on a Times' analysis of last year's improved state test scores in 10th-grade English and Algebra 1.

The Times found that greater participation in the district assessments was associated with better scores. In 10th-grade English, the correlation was fairly strong, accounting for nearly half the improvement.

The link was more moderate in Algebra 1, explaining about one-third of the gains for high school students in that subject.

The Times looked at these two subjects in part because the data were available -- it isn't for all subjects -- and also because of importance of these courses. Algebra 1, for example, is considered a "gateway" course to academic success.

The district has not produced its own analysis on the effect of increased participation but has collected less-conclusive data showing that students who do well on the district's tests also excel on the state's tests.

Duffy remains skeptical.

"The pig does not get fatter when you weigh it 10 times a day," Duffy said. "And if the test scores do go up, isn't it phony? Because what you are doing is teaching to the test, teaching a subject that has been narrowed down radically. We're not creating smarter kids. We're creating smarter test takers."

Duffy announced the boycott Tuesday at Emerson Middle School on the Westside, where teachers said the district tests were too burdensome on top of already mandated state and federal testing.

"We are supposed to be teaching, not testing," said Emerson English teacher Cecily Myart-Cruz. "We can come up with our own assessments in our classroom, and we do -- every day."

Top officials, however, had concluded that too many instructors failed to enforce high standards or didn't focus properly on teaching the specific skills and knowledge required by the state.

"This is not to be onerous for teachers and principals and schools," Cortines said. "It is to be helpful."

Unraveling the apparent benefit can be complex, said retired district official Roger Rasmussen, who long headed the district's analysis unit. Schools that are able to perform the assessments correctly, he said, may be those that have developed a cohesive staff, for example, which may be the real driver of improvement.

Cortines' predecessor, David L. Brewer, a retired Navy vice admiral, tackled inconsistent participation in the tests at high schools by ordering a 95% participation rate. He credited that directive with last year's rise in test scores, the biggest jump in five years.

But districtwide, the high school participation rate in English barely budged, and while the increase was greater in math, it still fell far short of Brewer's target.

Yet, the schools with increased participation generally reaped benefits. The lackluster overall response resulted in part from problems at schools. The assessments have occurred at the wrong time, for example, at some year-round campuses, where students start their school year at various times.

"My students would be tested on Mendelian genetics when we're just getting to how chromosomes separate," said Joseph Rowland, who taught science at Roosevelt High School for 22 years before moving to Franklin High this year. "It's ridiculous."

Rowland once found that his class' data had been combined with that of another teacher, rendering it pointless as a guide to future instruction. Like other teachers interviewed, he also complained about never getting data back or getting it late, though the current process is for teachers to go online and retrieve the data themselves.

Manual Arts High School English teacher Travis Miller said two rounds of his own class assessments did not count last year. Once, his tests weren't picked up on time, and once, he didn't receive all materials until the period for submitting them had closed.

Miller also knows teachers who simply refuse to give the assessments. Manual Arts' official participation rate last year was 61% in English and 14% in math.

Emerson's record on giving assessments is relatively strong, despite its prominence at the center of Tuesday's protest.

On state tests, Emerson ranks a little below average overall but well above average when compared with schools that serve a similar student population.

"This school is full of creative people and they need to have their hands untied to shine," said UCLA professor Allen F. Roberts, the parent of an Emerson 8th-grader.

The district puts the cost of the assessments at $3 million to $5 million per year. The teachers' union offers a so-far unsubstantiated figure of $150 million -- based on its interpretation of indirect costs, such as the related use of math and reading coaches to assist teachers.

howard.blume@latimes.com

Times staff writer Doug Smith provided data analysis.

If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

Copyright 2009 Los Angeles Times

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 10:17 PM 0 comments Links to this post

February 2, 2009

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in Tyler, Texas, has decided that Texas may wait to overhaul the state's programs for secondary English-language learners until the appeals court decides if a lower court was correct in ruling that the state's programs don't comply with federal law. (Click here for the court document granting the stay.)

See rest of post by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:33 PM

Labels: English language learners

posted by Dr. Angela Valenzuela at 9:56 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Axing 'periodic assessments' would save money, UTLA says. But district leaders want teachers to give the exams, which a Times analysis suggests are boosting scores in algebra and English.

By Howard Blume
January 28, 2009

The Los Angeles teachers union and the city's school district are battling over a district practice that, a Times' analysis suggests, contributes to higher scores on state tests.

The practice is "periodic assessments," a bureaucratic name for exams administered by the Los Angeles Unified School District. The goal is to give teachers insight into what students need to learn while there remains time in the current school year to adjust instruction.The union Tuesday directed teachers to refuse to give them to students on the grounds that the tests are costly and counterproductive.

But there could be a downside.

The local exams, given three or four times a year at secondary schools, appear to be boosting state scores in 10th-grade English and Algebra 1 -- the two subjects examined by The Times -- and therefore perhaps other subjects as well.

The district tests, which have gradually permeated most core academic subjects and most grade levels, have become central to a debate over the proliferation of testing, whether it interrupts instruction and can narrow the depth and breadth of what's taught. The philosophical dispute sharpened this week amid protracted, stalled negotiations over a teachers contract and the need to slash millions to address an ongoing budget crisis.

Axing these district assessments would spare jobs by saving millions of dollars -- and would improve instruction at the same time, said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles.

The union's call for a boycott of the tests has emerged as an early trial for new Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, who took over Jan. 1.

Cortines asserted that the assessments are part of teachers' assigned duties -- they are not optional. He also said he has and will amend aspects of the tests that need fixing. But he won't toss them out because, he said, they have contributed strongly to rising performance on the state's own annual tests.

He may be right, based on a Times' analysis of last year's improved state test scores in 10th-grade English and Algebra 1.

The Times found that greater participation in the district assessments was associated with better scores. In 10th-grade English, the correlation was fairly strong, accounting for nearly half the improvement.

The link was more moderate in Algebra 1, explaining about one-third of the gains for high school students in that subject.

The Times looked at these two subjects in part because the data were available -- it isn't for all subjects -- and also because of importance of these courses. Algebra 1, for example, is considered a "gateway" course to academic success.

The district has not produced its own analysis on the effect of increased participation but has collected less-conclusive data showing that students who do well on the district's tests also excel on the state's tests.

Duffy remains skeptical.

"The pig does not get fatter when you weigh it 10 times a day," Duffy said. "And if the test scores do go up, isn't it phony? Because what you are doing is teaching to the test, teaching a subject that has been narrowed down radically. We're not creating smarter kids. We're creating smarter test takers."

Duffy announced the boycott Tuesday at Emerson Middle School on the Westside, where teachers said the district tests were too burdensome on top of already mandated state and federal testing.

"We are supposed to be teaching, not testing," said Emerson English teacher Cecily Myart-Cruz. "We can come up with our own assessments in our classroom, and we do -- every day."

Top officials, however, had concluded that too many instructors failed to enforce high standards or didn't focus properly on teaching the specific skills and knowledge required by the state.

"This is not to be onerous for teachers and principals and schools," Cortines said. "It is to be helpful."

Unraveling the apparent benefit can be complex, said retired district official Roger Rasmussen, who long headed the district's analysis unit. Schools that are able to perform the assessments correctly, he said, may be those that have developed a cohesive staff, for example, which may be the real driver of improvement.

Cortines' predecessor, David L. Brewer, a retired Navy vice admiral, tackled inconsistent participation in the tests at high schools by ordering a 95% participation rate. He credited that directive with last year's rise in test scores, the biggest jump in five years.

But districtwide, the high school participation rate in English barely budged, and while the increase was greater in math, it still fell far short of Brewer's target.

Yet, the schools with increased participation generally reaped benefits. The lackluster overall response resulted in part from problems at schools. The assessments have occurred at the wrong time, for example, at some year-round campuses, where students start their school year at various times.

"My students would be tested on Mendelian genetics when we're just getting to how chromosomes separate," said Joseph Rowland, who taught science at Roosevelt High School for 22 years before moving to Franklin High this year. "It's ridiculous."

Rowland once found that his class' data had been combined with that of another teacher, rendering it pointless as a guide to future instruction. Like other teachers interviewed, he also complained about never getting data back or getting it late, though the current process is for teachers to go online and retrieve the data themselves.

Manual Arts High School English teacher Travis Miller said two rounds of his own class assessments did not count last year. Once, his tests weren't picked up on time, and once, he didn't receive all materials until the period for submitting them had closed.

Miller also knows teachers who simply refuse to give the assessments. Manual Arts' official participation rate last year was 61% in English and 14% in math.

Emerson's record on giving assessments is relatively strong, despite its prominence at the center of Tuesday's protest.

On state tests, Emerson ranks a little below average overall but well above average when compared with schools that serve a similar student population.

"This school is full of creative people and they need to have their hands untied to shine," said UCLA professor Allen F. Roberts, the parent of an Emerson 8th-grader.

The district puts the cost of the assessments at $3 million to $5 million per year. The teachers' union offers a so-far unsubstantiated figure of $150 million -- based on its interpretation of indirect costs, such as the related use of math and reading coaches to assist teachers.

Labels: California, teachers

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:33 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Wow, this is a strong and scary statement: ""if you're a religious school, you can discriminate on any basis you want."

-Patricia

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 28, 2009

A private religious high school can expel students it believes are lesbians because the school isn't covered by California civil rights laws, a state appeals court has ruled.

Relying on a 1998 state Supreme Court ruling that allowed the Boy Scouts to exclude gays and atheists, the Fourth District Court of Appeal in San Bernardino said California Lutheran High School is a social organization entitled to follow its own principles, not a business subject to state anti-discrimination laws.

"The whole purpose of sending one's child to a religious school is to ensure that he or she learns even secular subjects within a religious framework," Justice Betty Richli said in the 3-0 ruling, issued Monday.

As with the Boy Scouts, she said, the primary function of the school is to instill its values in young people, who are told of its policies when they enroll.

Kirk Hanson, a lawyer for the two girls, said he was disappointed and would talk to them about a possible appeal to the state Supreme Court.

According to the court, he said, "if you're a religious school, you can discriminate on any basis you want."

He also noted that all children must attend school, either public or private, and said schools serve different purposes from a voluntary organization like the Boy Scouts.

John McKay, a lawyer for California Lutheran, said he was pleased the court recognized that "a religious school is not a business, and the purpose of a religious school is to teach Christian values."

Any state law that required the school to admit gays or lesbians would violate the school's freedom of expression and religion, McKay said.

The ruling is the first to consider a religious school's status under California's Unruh Civil Rights Act, which forbids discrimination by businesses and was amended in 2005 to include discrimination based on sexual orientation. State education law also forbids anti-gay bias, but that law applies only to public schools.

The girls were juniors at the high school in Wildomar (Riverside County) when the principal, Gregory Bork, summoned them to his office in September 2005 and questioned them separately about their sexual orientation and whether they loved each other. The principal acted after another student reported postings on the girls' MySpace pages.

Bork suspended the girls based on their answers, and the school's directors expelled them a month later.

The girls, who later graduated from another high school, have not been identified and have not discussed their sexual orientation, Hanson said. Their suit said the school had no right to dismiss them because of its perception that they were lesbians.

The court acknowledged that past rulings have interpreted the Unruh Act's definition of businesses broadly, to include a Boys' Club, the Rotary Club and a private golf club that let the public use its facilities.

But the school differs from those institutions, the court said, because the main reason for its existence is the religious message it seeks to instill in its students.

Read the ruling

The ruling in Jane Doe vs. California Lutheran can be read at: links.sfgate.com/ZFZP

E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.

Labels: sexuality

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:26 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Unions and activists say Schwarzenegger's proposal would mean bigger classes in poor and minority schools. Administrators say adding a few more pupils per class could save the program.
By Seema Mehta
January 31, 2009
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget proposal to allow school districts to use state class-size reduction funding any way they choose is alarming teachers unions and community activists, who say it will inevitably lead to ballooning classrooms in the state's neediest communities.

"What's most offensive is that eliminating class-size reduction won't save the state one dime," said David A. Sanchez, president of the California Teachers Assn., which is launching a television ad blitz this weekend urging Californians to call Schwarzenegger and their legislators to oppose the proposal. "Districts will continue to receive that funding from the state, but won't have to spend that money on class-size reduction, or frankly, even in the classroom."

Activists say the proposal will take the greatest toll on minority and poor districts.

"I can assure you that the districts in poorer neighborhoods will be the first to increase classroom sizes, [which] means the achievement gap will widen," said Alicia Gaddis, board chairwoman of the Sacramento branch of the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now. "That is a tragedy."

The proposal is among many aimed at dealing with California's deep financial crisis. The state is facing a projected deficit of nearly $42 billion by the middle of next year. The 2009-10 budget is far from finalized, and it is unknown whether the class-size reduction proposal will survive negotiations in Sacramento. But education will probably face major cuts, because it makes up about 40% of the state budget.

A Schwarzenegger spokesman called the CTA's claims "misleading."

"If a school district believes class-size reduction is one of the highest priorities, nothing in the governor's proposal will prevent them from being able to carry it on," said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the state Department of Finance.

He said the suggestion for greater flexibility in how districts can spend nearly $15.7 billion next year in so-called categorical funds, including $1.3 billion for kindergarten through third grade class-size reduction, came last fall from district superintendents as a way to address the impending state-funding cuts.

"The governor is proposing basically to tear down the fences that restrict how these dollars can be spent in order to give local school districts the greatest flexibility possible to allocate these dollars where they are needed the most," Palmer said.

Class-size reduction, which became law in 1996, pays districts $1,071 yearly per student in kindergarten through third-grade classes with an average of 20 students or fewer per teacher. Several studies have shown that smaller class sizes lead to academic gains.

But several California district officials said that without greater flexibility, class-size reduction, which is subsidized with other district funds, will be on the chopping block as districts make tough decisions.

"Flexibility is always a good thing for a school district because we have a better and more intimate understanding of what our own district needs are," said Leslie Crunelle, assistant superintendent of educational services in the San Gabriel Unified School District.

Alice Petrossian, chief academic officer in the Pasadena Unified School District, said cutting class-size reduction could save the district hundreds of thousands of dollars, but allowing the district to add a couple of students to each class would help keep smaller classes intact.

"The flexibility in class-size reduction is crucial to saving class-size reduction," Petrossian said. "Here's what the option is: If we don't get some level of flexibility to move up to 22 or 23 [students], the next option for districts who are cutting it will be [class sizes of] 30 or 31."

She said school boards that try to summarily eliminate class-size reduction and spend the money on other costs, particularly if they are not in the classroom, will face parental revolt.

The governor's proposal could also ease a move being considered for next year by Los Angeles Unified to increase class sizes in kindergarten through third grade and decrease sizes in fourth- and fifth-grade classes to meet a ratio of 25 students per teacher across those grades.

But other educators, such as state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, who wrote the class-size reduction legislation in 1996 while a member of the state Senate, say the governor's proposal will lead to a dismantling of class-size reduction and an increase in the achievement gap.

"It's a sad day for all of California," he said. "This would be a major step backward. We know class-size reduction works. To address the dropout rate, we need more class-size reduction at more grade levels."

Labels: budget cuts, California, class sizes

posted by Patricia Lopez at 8:43 PM 0 comments Links to this post